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About Oregon daily emerald. (Eugene, Or.) 1920-2012 | View Entire Issue (Sept. 29, 1982)
EATING RAOUL Unsolved Murders, Unlimited Laughs by P. Gregory Springer Paul and Mary Bland, just like Bonnie and Clyde before them, are (more or less) young and in love (although they sleep in separate beds). Also, they kill people Paul works in a liquor shop in a bad neighborhood until the connois seur in him obsessively orders a case of $500 a bottle wine, and he's fired. Mary works in a hospital, ever at the mercy of lecherous patients. When the weirdos of Los Angeles begin to invade the sanctity of Paul and Mary’s apartment, a scheme emerges. Why not entice these loathsome "per verts’’ with a want ad for swingers, hit them smartly over the head with a frying pan, and use the money in their pockets to finance a dream res taurant in the suburbs? Why not call it "Paul and Mary's Country Kitchen" and feature the Bland Enchilada? A tine plan for people who are fed up But, what to do with the bodies? That's where locksmith/burglar Raoul unpredictable enters director Paul Bartel’s new independent pic ture, Eating Raoul, a title which alone ensures originality to a film al ready sopping with sarcastic wit. When Eating Raoul is seen around the country this fall through Twentieth-Century Fox distribution, the delay and production headaches that went into its genesis should l>e quickly forgotten Eating Raoul makes Bartel's fourth excursion into mass murder, although the soft-shaped, balded and bearded 44-year-old from Brcxiklyn might be mistaken for a classical pianist or a sympathetic high school teacher. With a background of study in French and Italian, a cultural aes thetic which leans toward theater and opera, and a role on the selec tion committee of Filmex, Bartel’s role as a director of mayhem and a manic comic actor make him one of the most contradictory figures in Hollywood today In fact, Bartel’s most recognizable role as an actor has been Mr McGree, the music teacher, in Rock and Roll High School, a role he recalls with both fondness and agony. "Do you remember the scene where the paper airplane with a note from the principal landed in my ear?" Bartel comments from his Los Angeles home "It was an extremely painful experience. This cardboard airplane slid along a piece of mono filament anchored to a plug glued inside my ear, causing a terrible vacuum suction with a sort of Im plosion everytime the plane landed It would bounce back, ruining the take. ” In keeping with his elite ironic style, Bartel revealed that his favorite moments in film have all been por tions of films he had either directed or acted in. Unlike those of any other cult director, Bartel’s films all seem to inherit distinct and separate cults of followers, with very little overlap His name is not a household word. Private Parts (1972), his first fea lure, ^ passed through the first run circuil with record ra pidity, but still does a "fairly constant business" through its 16mtn distributor, UA Classics. “It’s about a young runaway girl from Ohio who takes refuge in her aunt's rundown hotel in downtown LA," Bartel struggles to synopsize. "My mind is drawing a complete blank today. Anyway, there she encounters a series of sinister eccentrics, one of whom becomes her secret atlmirer but is responsible for the horrible fate in store for her " Following Private Parts, Bartel went to work on Death Pace 2(XM) (1975) for Roger Corman, a fitnv which inspired drivers around the country to joke about a “point" sys tem for running down babies, nurses, and geriatric patients, the blackest of comic notions rooted in the reality of contemporary highway tactics. A then unknown Sylvester Stallone was one of the players. It was for the filming of Death Pace 2(MX) that Bartel enlisted the taletjfs of Mary Woronov, calling her from New York to star as tine of the race victims. The former Warhol ac tress (“She was in Chelsea Girls, of course, in the Dark Ages") came out to Hollywotxl, and stayed. Woronov made other pictures under the (airman umbrella, starring with Paul again in Pock and Poll High School as the wicked principal Miss Togar Her friendship with Bar tel and her statuesque proportions made her perfect for the part of Mary in hating Raoul, the majestically towering nurse with a rigid sense of propriety and a nose upturned at any hint of physical contact. Mary (the part, not the actress) sleeps only with her stuffed doll, just as her husband Paul sleeps with a large bottle-shaped pillow labeled l.afitte Rothschild 1961 Why use Paul and Mary's real names in the script? "We are not In life anything like the Blands," Paul explains "The reason I made the picture was that I wanted to work with Mary again, to see if we couldn't do something subtler and more sus tained and complicated " Eating Raoul begins with a gaudy pseudtvdocumentary montage of Los Angeles, resembling the newsreel style Paul originally worked with when he left the Army in the late Fif ties As the camera records a sign that reatls Piece O' Pizza HAD A PIECE LATELY? a voice-over laments that, in Los Angeles today, the dls tinctlon between footl anti sex has become blurred. Despite a subsequent record of successful films, Bartel's difficulties in financing Eating Raoul are neat ly legendary He broke every rule, from the necessity of filming in segments he could afford ten minutes here and ten there to eventually putting up the money of his friends and fam ily to get the picture finished, at a cost under $1,(X)0,000 Eating Raoul bears some re sem blances to other contempo rary lifestyle parodies, such as John Waters' Polyester or Haul Mor rissey's Trash. What differen tiates it, according to Bartel, is a more commercially attuned script. luttiiiy Raoul takes the hypocrisy of certain "moral" attitudes, draws it to a murderous conclusion of logic, and makes it all seem as easy as toasting marshmallows. Paul and Mary Bland take tips on their "business" from a homemaker, mother, anil part time sadist for hire, Doris the Domlnattlx (Susan Saiger) After an unplanned rehearsal elimi nates one drunken neighbor, Mary lures other sleazy victims with a va rlety of guises, dressing most un comfortably as a Nazi, a disciplinary mother, a cartoon mouse (ears and all), and a hippie earth goddess blinded by a rented strobe light Once the paying customers are in the proper mood, Paul clobbers them with cast iron cookware Raoul (Robert Beltran) carts otl the bodies tor mysterious purposes. Beltran, a bona fide Chicano whose specialty is Shakespeare, adds tre mendous (nice to the Him, discharg ing lines like, "Of course I'm era/v1 I'm crazy about you Chlquita! I'm an emotional, hot blooded Chicano!” After one windfall slaughter in a hot lull, Haul and Mary are able to retire quietly, happily cvct after The eon elusion for the rest of the cast, how ever, turns out to lie less satisfying One of the more delicious ironies of Tunny Raoul is that the actors, technicians, and friends (including Koget Gorman, co script writer Dick Blackburn, Hamilton Camp, ex-DJ the Real Don Steele, Buck Henry, and others) are a tight bunch of Hollywood peripherals. Blackburn, a sometime Ampersand contributor, spends much of his professional time in London, where he is in de mand for rewrites, radio serials and wiggy original screenplay's like the soon-to-be-shot Slayground. They all work and entertain together with a borderline incestuousness that Paul and Mary Bland's isolation would never allow. Bartel prizes working with his friends as the most impor tant element (a unique one for most of Hollywood) in filmmaking. Twen tieth-Century Fox, which eagerly agreed to distribute the indepen dently made feature after it scored well at several film festivals, is bet ting on the rapport of these mav ericks to gradually snowball Eating Raoul into a word-of-mouth hit. Mary Woronov and Bartel are cur rently preparing to co-star in Shake It Up, a film about the Fillmore East rock showroom in the Sixties, di rected by Alan Arkush, another in the clan of friends. “I’ll play a surgeon and Mary will play a lighting designer. 1 enjoy rock and roll, although it’s not my favorite music. 1 enjoyed singing and dancing in Alan Arkushs Rock and Roll High School. Both Maty and 1 were also in Alan's Hearthecps, a film destroyed by various studio executives who had just screened James Bond or Superman or something ami made it very, very different from Alan's ver sion. Somewhere, a cut does exist on his picture, which was scored with Mozart," Paul continues. Maybe it will be shown someday." As a member of the selection committee at Filmex, Bartel shows concern In getting film of all kinds seen "Filmex is one of my great pleasures in life, permitting me to see a lot of films that never get the atrically released. It gives me the feeling that I can Ik- instrumental In bringing films to the public that might not ordinarily get seen," Regarding the culture of Los Angeles, Bartel admits he would like to spend more time in New York. “1 like both coasts, but 1 hope 1 am able to film In New York some day." In the meantime, he's contenting himself knowing that Ealing Raoul has been invited to be screened in the New York Film Festival this fall, and he can take in some theater while he's there "I'm still singing the songs from Steven Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along, the nuvst interesting thing I’ve seen recently," stated the man who merrily leaves low budget bodies in his cinematic tracks for the enjoy ment of people who never remem her his name His next film? "The title is Scenes from the Class Struggle hi Heverly Hills ” Maybe it's a sequel.
