The joy of cruising the movie margins is that one thing leads to another. So, a few years back, after I'd suffered through the 1952 Poverty Row comedy Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla for my bad-movie book, I couldn't help but get Googling to find out what happened to its leads, Duke Mitchell and Sammy Petrillo, whose comic act in the movie aped Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis to the very limits of copyright infringement. Turned out that Sammy did not much moviewise after that (he died last year), but Duke burned bright in the last years of his life. Mitchell's first film as writer-director was 1974's Massacre Mafia Style, aka The Executioner. While it didn't make him a household name or set the box office aflame, in 1975 Mitchell set about making a second flick, then called Kiss The Ring, later given the awesome title of Gone With The Pope. One viewing of the trailer on YouTube (embedded after the jump) had my jaw on the floor.
Yours should follow, but be warned, this is NSFW in every way:
I soon learned that Mitchell hadn't finished the film before his death in 1981 at age 55. Most tantalizing was that Grindhouse Releasing were undertaking a painstaking restoration. So began a correspondence with the company's co-owner, Bob Murawski, who next week finally gives Gone With The Pope its world premiere -- and does it the very same week that he's up for his first Oscar as editor of The Hurt Locker. We chatted this week about his labor of love.
Why the fascination with exploitation movies?
I'm more interested in the ideas in a movie than its production value. I think Hollywood can learn from them. A lot of times, the cheaper movies are a lot more pure -- they have more heart, as opposed to being corporate cookie-cutter pieces of garbage.
When did you get interested in the schlockier side of cinema?
When I was a little kid growing up in Michigan, in a tiny town north of Detroit that didn't even have a theater, we'd get the Detroit newspaper and I'd see all these ads for drive-in movies like The Toolbox Murders or Meatcleaver Massacre. I cut them out, and I had these whole scrapbooks full of them. It'd be years before I could see the actual movies. I became hooked on these kinda movies -- the ads, novelizations of Night of The Living Dead and Halloween that I'd read before I even saw the movies, and whatever I saw on TV, like Hammer or Roger Corman.
How did you hear about Duke Mitchell?
Like a lot of people, I came to him through Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla. I hadn't seen the movie then but I'd seen the trailer a bunch of times. But back in 1995, Bill Lustig [director of Maniac Cop, among other exploitation flicks] and I watched the Video Gems VHS of The Executioner, which I think he'd been given by Sage Stallone [now co-owner of Grindhouse Releasing], who I hadn't met at that stage. We both thought it was one of the funniest, most off-the-wall and entertaining movies we had ever seen.
What was it about the movie?
It was like Duke Mitchell had seen The Godfather and said, "Hey, I'm an Italian, I can do better than that." And I think in his mind, he really thought he had, even on just $50,000. The ads he did were like, "Our movie's got more guts, more action, more dynamite!" I love it when you see a movie that's just one person's vision, like Rudy Ray Moore or Ed Wood Jr. And Duke, when he's making these long speeches, the soliloquies about being Italian, they're like nothing you've ever heard. It's just dumbfounding, for minutes, but he's got so much passion.
An instant fanclub was born?
It was. We just said, "We gotta find this guy!" Bill rang around and found out he'd died back in 1981, which was sad. But a little while later, he tracked down his son, Jeff, and he was living just a few blocks from Bill. So Sage, Bill and I went over and said we were big fans and we'd really like to re-release The Executioner. Jeff didn't have any idea of what happened to that movie but he said he had another one his dad had shot but not finished. He said he didn't think it had even been edited, and if we wanted to try to do something with it then go ahead. Of course, we said "Absolutely!"
What did you find?
We pulled out this bunch of dusty old boxes from a storage closet in his parking garage. They'd been there since Duke passed away -- all the negative, sound tapes and work picture. There was no shooting script, just a lot of scenes written out in notebooks, on pieces of paper, and even on envelopes and cocktail napkins. There was a very crude, rough assembly of the movie. There were 17 reels, and reels nine to 13 were totally missing and never found. It was in such rough shape, we knew that finishing it would be a big job.
Where did you start?
We started by trying to do a fine cut of the movie from the assembly, then going back to the trims and outtakes when necessary to make the scenes and story flow more smoothly. For the missing reels, we went through the original negative to work out what we didn't have, and then did a fresh work print of that material. Then we -- that's Paul Hart and Jody Fedle, who worked with me on Army Of Darkness and Hard Target -- edited that from scratch. The whole thing was a giant jigsaw puzzle.
How much time did you put into it?
I worked on it whenever I had time between my real editing jobs over the past 15 years.
Were you still doing it during The Hurt Locker?
Not the picture. I finished the picture cut between Spider-Man 2 and 3. But then there was the sound, and that was just as tough. I got Paul Ottosson, who'd done the Spider-Man movies, dialogue editor Robert Troy and foley artist John Sanacore, who both did The Hurt Locker with me, and Marti Humphrey and Brad Semanoff, they'd done the sound mix on Drag Me To Hell. There were a lot of sound challenges, but we're talking top people using state-of-the-art technology, and we created a great sound mix last summer. The last thing to do was scanning all the original camera negatives and doing full restoration at Fotokem Lab in Burbank. We spent something like 1,000 hours cleaning up the picture, removing all the dirt and scratches. Then Alastor Arnold graded color and density and HTV/Illuminate restored as much sharpness as possible to a few out of focus shots. It was only about two weeks ago that we filmed out the negative and saw a complete 35mm print.
What can we expect?
For those who might've seen Massacre Mafia Style, it's even more low-budget, if you can believe that! I mean, Massacre has some production value; there's a big wedding scene, locations around Hollywood, a few genre names in there. Gone With The Pope is like he had no budget. He was using short ends, hired a camera for a weekend, got a few friends together. But it was still shot on 35mm and it has the same sensibility -- it's still unmistakably a Duke Mitchell picture. It's not as story driven -- I mean, these guys do go to Rome and kidnap the Pope, but from there it takes all sorts of twists and turns. It's a real product of its time, the mid-1970s, in that it's politically incorrect, there's racist dialogue, it's salacious. But it also has a lot of heart. And there's some real issues in there about being a Roman Catholic. So it's a mixture of religious struggle and sexploitation movie!
Who have you shown it to so far?
Well, there was this writer from the L.A. Weekly who saw it yesterday but she had to leave as the end credits came up and I haven't heard from her since. I've e-mailed her but [laughs]... I warned her it wasn't PC, so I hope she doesn't hate it. But I showed it to the original editors, Bob Leighton, who's gone on to edit most of Rob Reiner's movies, and Robert Florio, who's edited Lost and NCIS. It was their first movie -- one started it, the other continued, even though neither of them got to finish it. They hadn't seen the footage in over 30 years. I was worried they'd say "Hey, take our names off this!" but they loved it!
Where'd that trailer come from? It's indelible.
I cut that about eight or 10 years ago. That's because there was literally no awareness of the movie -- no one had ever seen it. It never came out, unlike a lot of "forgotten" movies people dimly remember having seen as kids.
And the music?
The instrumental music, that's Duke. But the rock and roll song, that's Jeffrey Mitchell. He's a virtuoso rock guitarist who played with people like Suzi Quatro. He's really talented, and he was sending songs to his dad, who'd transfer them to the movie's magnetic stripe soundtrack. That raunchy rock number, "Jacknife," has to be one of the great unknown songs of all time.
Do your colleagues in the mainstream movie business "get" your fascination with the likes of Gone With The Pope, and other Grindhouse releases like Cannibal Holocaust and The Beyond?
[Laughs] They kinda do, but they kinda don't. I work a lot with Sam Raimi, but even his tastes are pretty mainstream. He's not a huge horror fan; his favorite directors are Howard Hawks and Frank Capra, and he's not into the exploitation stuff. So everyone jokes about it. And sometimes it's used against me to discount my opinion. Working on Spider-Man 2, producer Laura Ziskin said to me, "Oh, what do you know about music? You probably think Cannibal Holocaust has good music." And I was like, "Well, Riz Ortolani is a great composer -- he's been nominated for two Oscars!" It's easy for people to try to pigeonhole me as an idiot, but to heck with them.
What are you more excited about: The Oscar nomination or Gone With The Pope finally getting a release?
It's cool that The Hurt Locker is such a cheap movie -- it's almost a borderline exploitation movie -- and it's getting nominated on its own terms. And I'm really honored to be nominated for that rather than one of the bigger movies, but I gotta say I'm more excited by the Gone With The Pope premiere. It's a movie that's 35 years in the making!
If you win the Oscar for The Hurt Locker, are you going to give a shout-out to Gone With The Pope?
Well, my wife was coeditor on Hurt Locker and she's trying to keep me on the straight and narrow. But someone said I should have a silk screen of the Gone With The Pope poster on the back of my tuxedo.
For information on Gone With The Pope's premiere at the Egyptian Theatre in Los Angeles on March 12, visit the film's Web site.