Peter Bergman (1939-2012)

At the risk of having this blog turn into an obituary page, I am sad to report that Peter Paul Bergman, co-founder of the Firesign Theater, succumbed to leukemia this morning at the age of 72.

Born in Cleveland, OH, Bergman's talents for political humor and satire came early with school newspaper columns and a single, "Attention Convention," parodying the 1956 Democratic convention and made in a cut-up style similar to that of Buchanan & Goodman's humorous sound collages, that was released under the name The Four Candidates. He also lost a job as announcer over his high school's PA system when he announced that Chinese Communists had taken over and that a "mandatory voluntary assembly" was to take place immediately. He pursued undergraduate and graduate studies at Yale, did six months in the Army, and toured Europe. He worked with Tom Stoppard, Spike Milligan, and the Living Theater, the latter two forming two poles of influence between which the art of the Firesign Theater was to take shape.

In 1966 he did a nightly free-form radio show in Los Angeles, Radio Free Oz, where he began to work with poet and broadcaster David Ossman and actors Philip Proctor and Philip Austin, and under the name The Firesign Theater (so-called because all four were, astrologically speaking, "fire signs") the four recorded their first album, Waiting For the Electrician or Someone Like Him, in 1968. In this and subsequent albums such as How Can You Be In Two Places At Once When You're Not Anywhere At All and Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers, the Firesign Theater explored a form of surreal, stream-of-consciousness audio comedy-drama that incorporated the techniques of old-time radio, a counterculture sensibility, puns and wordplay, full of recondite references and allusions to high culture and low, absurdity and dystopian science-fiction and utilized the resources of the multi-track recording studio.

I first heard the Firesign Theater in college when one of the local radio stations played a few of the albums (I believe I remember hearing excerpts from Don't Crush That Dwarf, I Think We're All Bozos On This Bus, and In The Next World You're On Your Own) all in a segued, free-form mix that was hilariously funny and terrifying at the same time. I wasn't high at the time, but I could have been. It was one of those transformative moments, but I didn't know who the artists were until a year or so later.

To many, The Firesigns' humor was "head humor" and a lot of people lumped them in with acts such as Cheech & Chong, but their albums were mostly full-length plays for the medium of the long-playing record. If radio drama was the "theater of the mind," the Firesigns made full-on avant-garde movies for the mind, with a cinematic sensibility exquisitely translated into audio that somehow never got garbled in the presentation and always rewarded repeat listening.

In addition to Firesign, Bergman worked widely in radio and embraced the creative possibilities of high-tech and the internet early. He also worked in film and television, co-writing and appearing in the cult film J-Men Forever, which incorporated a great deal of footage from old movie serials, and Americathon, a dark satirical comedy about a future America attempting to stave off complete bankruptcy by holding a telethon. In recent years he worked as a speaker and lecturer and revived his old Radio Free Oz as a podcast. A dyed-in-the-wool progressive, his opinions were as fiery as his sign and his wit caustic.

The First Nudie Musical (1976)

This bawdy cult comedy germinated in the mind of screenwriter/actor/director Bruce Kimmel during his first year in New York in 1969, where he took a day job waiting for his own break in show business. The job took him past the Times Square district, at the time a notorious tenderloin area full of adult theatres that showed "nudies" -- sexploitation films. He was amused by the titles of the films and their lack of sophistication amd conceived a musical done in the same style, and began to write songs for it, which at least -- at first, anyway -- entertained his friends. But the idea remained and after a few years he was able to write and, co-directing with Mark Haggard, shoot a film (with a distribution deal with Paramount) based on the original concept, but now about a down-at-heels Hollywood studio forced to crank out adult movies to stay afloat.

As the film begins, Harry Schecter (Stephen Nathan), the studio's producer, is meeting with his backers, who are sick of the lackluster business that the Schecter Studio's recent offerings (such as Stewardesses In Cages and Teenage Sex Mutants) are doing and who want to develop the studio lot into a shopping mall, when he has a brainstorm -- the first porno musical. The backers, half convinced, decide to let him go ahead, but give him two weeks to make the picture, or the studio's history. They also stipulate that John Smithee (played by Kimmel), a socially inept nerd who doesn't know how to make films and is not even comfortable around girls (and who is also the nephew of one of the backers), must direct the film. With almost certain disaster hanging over the project, Harry gets to work with the help of his secretary Rosie (Cindy Williams), and a cast of eccentrics including a ditzy Latina (Diana Canova), a confident, cocksure, and inept struggling actor (Alan Abelew), a corn-fed ingenue just in from Indiana (Leslie Ackerman), and the obligatory prima donna female lead (Alexandra Morgan).

The mid-seventies was probably just the right time for a project like The First Nudie Musical: while the nudies that originally inspired Kimmel had been around for years with hardly anyone in the mainstream noticing, everyone in the mid-seventies was talking about the recent advent of hardcore films such as Deep Throat and The Devil In Miss Jones, even to the point of speculating whether Hollywood might succumb to the lure of "porno-chic" and start going hardcore, so the film was timely. It was also a time of George Carlin and Richard Pryor, of the National Lampoon and also of the "midnight movies" such as Pink Flamingos and Kentucky Fried Movie, in short a time of increasingly explicit and adult humor which this film was a part of and which its success helped to encourage.

That success almost didn't happen, because as the film was being prepared for release, one of its stars, Cindy Williams, was hired to work on a new television series by none other than Paramount, the same company that was now contractually obligated to promote and distribute the film. The series, Laverne and Shirley, was a spinoff of the hit Paramount series Happy Days, and was intended to follow it on ABC's Tuesday evening "family hour" programming slate. Never mind that none of the principal actors removed their clothes for the film, or that the film was rated "R" by the MPAA and was intended for general release: Paramount determined to avoid embarrassment at any cost by not scheduling any press screenings or flashy east- or west-coast premieres and designing a one-sheet for the film that omitted the actors' names (the outraged Kimmel did finally get this last changed), and discreetly released the film to small theaters, usually without advance notice, hoping that the film would quietly die at the box office. Only it didn't. The film did very well, was sometimes held over as long as ten weeks, and influential reviewers such as Judith Crist and Newsday praised the film after actually having paid for tickets and seeing it in the theaters. Paramount finally decided to sell the distribution rights back to Kimmel and with a new New York-based distributor, the film did brisker business and became a cult favorite.

The seventies wave of adult humor of which Nudie Musical was a part might have ranged from frank and intelligent to crude and barely funny to borderline-pornographic, but the presiding spirit of this film seems to be Mel Brooks, who delighted in parodying the conventions of showbiz, and especially those of musicals. Brooks, born in a generation that didn't discuss sex openly, relies on suggestiveness and double-entendre, but the difference between his humor and that of baby-boomer Kimmel's is more a difference of degree than of kind. If Mel Brooks had been born in the era of Dr. Spock, sex education in schools, the Pill, gay liberation and the sexual revolution, it's possible that he might have come up with something like the "Dancing Dildos" number: a chorus of antebellum southern belles in see-through hoop skirts and sunhats singing the praises of "a girl's best friend" with four men dressed in vibrator costumes that make them look like missiles with feet as "director" Smithee causes havoc with a crane-mounted camera. It's a moment of inspired vulgarity in the same vein as The Producers' "Springtime For Hitler" number.

The film's pretentions to satirizing porn don't go very far, and don't really have to. In spite of numbers with titles like "Butch, Dyke, Lesbian," "Perversion," and "Orgasm," as well as the obligatory top-hat-and-tails number (about cunnilingus and called "Let Them Eat Cake"), the movie is a comedy about showbiz rather than about sex, and a showbiz comedy that's fairly old-fashioned in its humor to boot, with its "let's put on a show, kids!" storyline, likable, endearing characters and a sweet, uncynical attitude. There's a comfy, approachable feel to Stephen Nathan's harried-striver and Cindy Williams's girl-Friday relationship that's straight out of the old screwball comedies, and an impish, Harpo Marx charm to Bruce Kimmel's characterization. Critics singled out Cindy Williams for praise in this film, and rightly so: she is a remarkably subtle comic actress with an outwardly sweet, prim exterior and equal talents for verbal snark and Lucille Ball-esque physical comedy.

Further notes:

• Many of the cast, including Cindy Williams, Alan Abelew, Bruce Kimmel, and Diana Canova were friends and classmates at Los Angeles City College in the sixties.

• Ron Howard, who spent his boyhood playing Sheriff Andy Taylor's son Opie on the television comedy series The Andy Griffith Show, co-starred with Cindy Williams in George Lucas' American Graffiti, was currently star of the Happy Days television series, and at this time an aspiring director interested in any grassroots film project he happened to encounter, appears in a cameo in the audition sequence, talking with Lynne Marie Stewart, who also appeared with Howard and Williams in American Graffiti and went on to play the ultra-glamorous Miss Yvonne in Pee Wee's Playhouse.

• John Smithee's name derives from "Alan Smithee," a pseudonym used in the film industry by directors who do not wish to be credited on a film.

• A People magazine writer predicted a fabulous singing career for Leslie Ackerman on the strength of her "Lights And Smiles" number, not knowing that Annette O'Toole actually sang the song and that Ackerman couldn't sing a note: she practiced for three days in front of a mirror and came up with one of the best lip-synchs in film.

• "Dancing Dildos" was part of a sequence shot six months after the end of principal photography, on Paramount's insistence that the film sagged in the middle. The studio put up US$75,000 (about half the original cost of the film) for the shooting.

• For the week ending September 28, 1977, the industry paper Variety listed The First Nudie Musical as the fourth highest-grossing film after Star Wars, You Light Up My Life, and The Spy Who Loved Me.

• In the film, Harry advises John Smithee to bluff his way through the project by boning up on filmmaking terms and, since he's supposed to be a director of adult films, by peppering his speech with strong language, resulting in my favorite line, at the end of his first-day-of-production pep-talk: "Now, as Mr. Sheckler said, we don't have a lot of time. So I will of course expect hard work, cooperation, diligence, photography, sound and color. Shit, we could make a fucking good bitch of a bastard movie if we all pull together and work as a whore-loving cunt penis team. Thank you."

Filmed on an initial budget of about US$125,000, the film suffered from a number of technical inconsistencies (matting, different film stocks) that marred subsequent video releases, and the camera negative has been lost. The 2002 Image Entertainment DVD release, made from three prints, all rather aged, looks wonderful in all its color-corrected glory in spite of unavoidable artifacts. The film comes with commentaries by Kimmel, Williams and Nathan, an hour-long documentary with many of the cast members, deleted scenes, original trailers and a photo gallery.

A Chinese Torture Chamber Story (1994)

In the eighties, the government of the then-Crown Colony of Hong Kong reformed their film exhibition regulations and instituted three categories of certification: category I, for general audiences, category II, parental supervision, and category III, adults over 18 only. One motivation behind the new certifications was the desire to allow imported films such as The Last Temptation of Christ to be shown in the colony uncut, but be that as it may, the adult-only category also encouraged local film producers to push the envelope of sex and violence in their films and soon, "Category III" became a convenient handle for a particular type of HK film.

Category III films are almost always "spicy" variants of popular genres: there are category III period films, action films, crime dramas, comedies, horror films and romances, all modelled on popular trends with the addition of nudity, adult situations and graphic violence. As one might expect, Category III films are all over the map in terms of quality, tone, and mood, but like Japanese adult filmmaking, they do have a reputation for indulging cruel, even misogynistic fancies, so they can be offensive to some viewers. However, they can also offer unpredictable, weird film experiences unbound by conventional standards of taste.

And speaking of which, A Chinese Torture Chamber Story (original HK title: The Ten Tortures of the Qing) comes from executive producer Wong Jing, a man who has never let pedestrian notions of good taste stand in his way. I talked about Wong Jing a little some time back. Resolutely a commercial filmmaker, his films include relatively small, cheap productions with non-stars as well as large-budget vehicles for big stars such as Jackie Chan, but his penchant for salty, earthy humor remains consistent throughout. His passion for slapstick, absurdity, and vulgarity annoys critics and viewers who appreciate HK film for its style and its sophistication, but Hong Kongers appreciate zaniness, vulgarity, and nonsense in their entertainment to an extent that many of us overseas do not. It explains why Stephen Chow, who has been a top-billing star in HK for many years, has never really broken through in the Western mainstream with his cartoony action-comedies, and why the films to which Wong Jing gave his imprimatur divide overseas viewers.

In fact Bosco Lam, about whom I have no information, directed A Chinese Torture Chamber Story, from a screenplay by Tsui Tat-chor. The film begins with a brief overview of tortures used in Chinese history before opening on Little Cabbage (Yvonne Yung), discovered doused with blood beside the body of her husband Ge, and she is hauled before a Qing imperial magistrate accused of his murder, along with Yang (Lawrence Ng), a scholar and herbalist who had employed Little Cabbage as a maid, accused as an accessory. The magistrate insists that she and Yang were lovers who had conspired to kill her husband because Yang's wife, concerned about his attraction to her, had packed her off in marriage to Ge to avoid her seducing her husband, and compels her to confess with various tortures, but she insists that she was framed. The story unfolds in flashback as we learn how Little Cabbage came to work in Yang's house, discovers his wife's sexual insatiability, her adulterous affair with the magistrate's son and their plot to frame Little Cabbage for his murder.

The story is serviceable but is not really the point of the movie, merely offering the opportunity to linger on a sex scene here, a gag there, and various bits of shock elsewhere, substituting jaw-dropping set pieces of sex, violence, or humor for dramatic tension. Probably the most memorable moment, the moment where Wong's irreverent humor works best is Scholar Yang's encounter with a larger-than-life kung fu hero (Elvis Tsui) and his equally formidable wife who perform the marital act as though it were a kung fu battle, announcing their moves ("No-Shadow Lick from Fushan!!" being an obvious tip of the hat to the Wong Fei-hung mythos) and flying through the air in traditional sword film wirework style. This scene has apparently become a favorite clip on YouTube (can't seem to find the link... sorry!). Less brilliant but equally memorable is the night of the wedding of Little Cabbage and Ge, a parody of the potter's-wheel-and-Unchained-Melody sequence in Ghost, complete with the Righteous Brothers tune played on Chinese instruments.

Much mileage is gotten out of the size of Ge's masculine endowment, the Yang family nanny's anxiety about the size of her breasts, and the Four Lustful Instruments, the toys with which Yang enhances his wife's sexual enjoyment -- and of course exotic tortures involving contraptions of sticks and strings for crushing the fingers, beds of nails, and a stocks-like hanging cage in which the victim hangs by his skull until his neck breaks -- but like a family uncle who constantly makes tactless, tasteless remarks and passes loud, smelly farts at the table but who is still somehow tolerated, the film's constant scurrying around trying to get a reaction -- any reaction -- out of the viewer becomes somewhat trying, and taken as a whole Torture Chamber fails to quite satisfy as a whodunnit, a bit of sexy fluff or even as a good blood-and-guts gore film, going a little bit in one direction and then in another. It's more an a la carte mix of humor, violence and sex offered in little nibbles that might be tasty at times but might also leave you with a belly-ache at the end.

A Chinese Torture Chamber Story was made at a time when period films were especially popular subjects for the Category III treatment. Stars Lawrence Ng and Yvonne Yung were no strangers to this genre. Ng featured in the groundbreaking period-style erotica Sex and Zen, but he has been for the most part a versatile but middle-of-the-road actor, working extensively in television. Yung worked more extensively in category III films, and although she did diversify somewhat with more mainstream roles and a parallel career as a pop singer, she apparently never really left the category III ghetto. Neither one is a particularly charismatic presence, but Elvis Tsui plays his cameo as the kung fu/sex hero with a suitably lusty machismo, laughing heartily and drinking wine out of the jar like a real man. His character's wife is played by Julie Lee, and she's not bad either.

I first viewed A Chinese Torture Chamber Story several years ago on a VHS distributed by Tai Seng Video: it was released on DVD in 2007 in the US by Discotek Media. Part of the charm of the old VHS releases of Hong Kong films was their use of HK theatrical release prints which, by law (at least before the handover of the Colony to China) were subtitled in Chinese and English. The English subtitling of Hong Kong films often furnishes amusement by its frequently unidiomatic translation. The DVD features a fairly accurate and idiomatic translation but also has an optional "crazy Hong Kong" subtitling, taken from the original HK release, that can be selected.

(Keep in mind the following: A Chinese Torture Chamber Story is not really a date movie: it has full frontal female nudity, adult situations, and scenes of violence and torture that might induce some discomfort in sensitive viewers.)

Last Hero in China (1993)

After three installments of Tsui Hark's Once Upon a Time in China films, star Jet Li left the series, apparently due to disputes with Tsui and his production company Film Workshop, and promptly turned around and played the character he played in the OUATIC series, Wong Fei-hung, for Wong Jing's Workshop. This struck me a little as being like Christopher Reeve playing Superman for a lower-budget studio, but the parallel does not quite stick. Wong Fei-hung is not a proprietary fictional character, but a man who lived in the late Qing and early Republican eras in southern China, a practitioner of Chinese medicine and teacher of Hung Gar kung fu whose reputation as a nationalist folk-hero blossomed after his death in 1924, first through serialized novels and, starting in the late forties, on the silver screen. Wong is the most durable and beloved hero in Hong Kong martial arts cinema, and is also possibly world cinema's most filmed character: Kwan Tak-hing, the movies' first Wong, played him in nearly a hundred films during his career, though Western viewers probably are more familiar with Jackie Chan's revisionist take on the character in the Drunken Master series.

As the Spielberg of Hong Kong cinema, Tsui Hark brought Wong and the martial arts film into the age of big-budget blockbusters with the OUATIC series, showing Wong Fei-hung battling corrupt Qing dynasty officials, foreign profiteers and spies, and nativist fanatics while confronting the changes sweeping China at the time: Western influence, technology, manners, and ideals, and considering how these changes would affect the Chinese national character. Wong Jing is in many respects at the opposite end of the spectrum from Tsui, a screenwriter, producer and director whose taste for unabashed exploitation has earned him friends and enemies the world over, and 1993's Last Hero In China is not nearly as ambitious or as lavish as the films it apes. Jet Li played Wong Fei-hung for Tsui as a relatively youthful but serious man, full of Confucian gravity and sternness, and for Wong Jing he does essentially the same, while adapting the hero subtly to Wong's predilections for over-the-top humor and silliness.

As the film opens, Wong is looking for a new place for his clinic, Po Chi Lam, as students and patients fill the old place to bursting and a notice of a three-fold rent hike comes in. His two senior students, the doughty Foon (Leung Ka-yan) and buck-toothed So (Dicky Cheung), arrange for a spacious new building for the clinic with a man who happens to have the given name Wong Sifu, who admires Wong and would like to learn kung fu with him. Unfortunately, this admiring "Mass Tar Wong" is a brothel-keeper whose establishment, to Wong Fei-hung's embarrassment, is next door to the new Po Chi Lam. But this is the least of Wong Fei-hung's worries, as a heretical sect of monks, with the aid of a local Qing official (Chai Ngong-kau) who is actually a plant loyal to the rebellious nativist Boxer association, kidnap women and traffick them to Southeast Asia to benefit the Boxers, and children are being deafened by a poisonous patent medicine marketed by unscrupulous Westerners.

It isn't necessary to be familiar with the OUATIC series to enjoy this film, but it helps. As tongue in cheek as the OUATIC series was earnest, Last Hero In China, part knock-off, part parody, has fun with the corrupt Qing officials, profiteering Westerners, and nativist fanatics of the series, as well as Wong's upright, almost priggish character and the familiar Wong Fei-hung theme (originally a Cantonese traditional song, developed into a stirring anthem for the series), and especially Wong's famous mastery of the acrobatic spectacle, the Lion Dance: having been humiliated in a Lion Dance competition not by another lion, but by a group led by Qing Legate Officer Lui (played with Simon Legree-ish gusto by Chai Gnong-kau) dressed as a giant fire-breathing centipede and deafened by accidental ingestion of a poisonous Western patent medicine, he escapes to the country to regroup and attempt a cure for his deafness. Inspired by watching a chicken in a farmyard catching bugs, he returns for the most memorable set-piece of the film, defeating the centipede with his new Rooster Style of kung fu complete with wings, claws and beak (the Chinese title of the film is more or less literally "Wong Fei-hung's Iron Rooster Vs. Centipede").

Most of my initial exposure to Jet Li's work has been in his more or less straight-ahead action-hero roles (the OUATIC series, Bodyguard from Beijing, High Risk), roles which displayed his athletic talents but were often weak on characterization. He is capable of a boyish charm when he wants to display it, but he often comes across as being impatient with frivolity. Fortunately, I am beginning to discover the lighter side of Li, and the rooster scene, which segues into a final "drunken boxing" throwdown with Chai Ngong-kau, is a wonderful send-up which he plays to the hilt. As I go through my DVD collection, you can probably expect to read more about Li's lighter side here.

Last Hero in China does not pretend to have the resources available to Tsui in his series, and the film looks it, with the lack of lavish sets covered with that ubiquitous early-nineties style of lower-budget filmmaking consisting of wide-angle, fast-moving camerawork, saturated color and expressionistic lighting. The film does have a number of well-known names in the supporting roles: Anita Yuen plays one of Pimp Wong's girls, with Cheung Man as a young woman from the north who has come to Canton in search of her lost sister, and Gordon Liu Chia-hui as head of the monks. Action direction is provided by Yuen Woo-ping, whose penchant for wirework is given full rein here, giving the action scenes an over-the-top quality in keeping with the general madcap tenor of the film.