Opera Man

Part 2 of 3

When you live in a resort town, you get to meet lots of different people. And when you work for a newspaper in a resort town, you get to interview many of them.  Back in 1993 my friend Otis introduced me to Joe, an opera composer who was staying in town with his wife and daughter for the summer – maybe longer.  Opera composer?  How many of those do you get to meet, let alone interview?

What brought us together, however, wasn’t opera (I am not a big fan, sorry) or my need for a constant stream of interesting people to interview, but movies.  Bad movies.  Incredibly bad movies.

Joe, it turned out, was a connoisseur.    In comparison, Otis and I were rank amateurs.  Joe had even acted in a bad low-budget genre film made by a friend of his.  He invited Otis and I over to the cottage where he was staying one evening to sample some of the films in his collection.  That was the first time I saw a Russ Meyer movie (“Vixen”).  We watched a number of other films that night – “Mesa of Lost Women” is one I remember – but most of the details are lost to the haze of memory. 

It wasn’t just Joe’s videotape collection that was impressive.  His philosophy about these mostly abysmal movies struck me was entirely pragmatic.  You can’t really learn anything about filmmaking, he said, from watching good or even average movies.  To learn about making films, you had to be able to see how not to make films.  To appreciate great filmmaking, you had to appreciate the movies where mistakes were made, where the filmmakers just weren’t competent. 

That winter, I got the chance to truly appreciate great filmmaking.  Joe and his family went to St. Thomas and he left his movie collection behind.  With me.  Several boxes of videotapes, more than 100, each with containing two or three films.  I nearly OD’d on incredibly strange cinema that winter.

Now I could see many of those films I’d only heard about before, films by Ray Dennis Steckler, Ted V. Mikels (though I soon realized that I’d seen “Corpse Grinders” before, at a drive-in during high school, but I hadn’t made the connection at the time) and Doris Wishman (definitely a boob theme going on).  I became schooled in early nudie-cuties, early gore (Herschell Gordon Lewis), and other strange genre films.  Later filmmakers were also represented, the likes of Larry Cohen and Frank Henenlotter. 

But the Opera Man Collection, as it was dubbed, also contained quality movies – “Rashoman,” “Beauty and the Beast,”  “8 ½.” And lots of operas. But it was the not-so-good-quality films that attracted me, and pulling a few off the list I just dug out of my files, I watched  “She Demons,” “The Sadist,” “Horror of the Blood Monster,” “The Worm Eaters,” “Child Bride of the Ozarks,” “Teenage Frankenstein,” “Free, White, 21,” “Wild World of Batwoman” and “Avenging Disco Godfather.”

Most of these were second, even third or fourth generation copies, so the quality of the tapes ranged from OK to barely watchable.  But I didn’t care.  At the time, these were hard to find – available mostly from specialty video outlets at relatively high prices.  Now, most of these movies are easy to find. Many are available on Netflix or other online services and on cheap DVDs.  Some are still specialty products; Russ Meyers’ films are all owned by his estate and only available through them.  But at least they are available.

These films, together with my previous viewing experience and appreciation for enthusiastic though less than stellar filmmaking, created the groundwork for how my tastes have development.  In this, however, there is also one other major influence.

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