TAKING OFF AND CUCKOO'S NEST AT MOMA

Last Friday night, as previously mentioned, MOMA offered another of its simple but warm film tributes, this time to Milos Forman.

First up was Forman's satirical Taking Off (1971), which is scheduled to be screened again on Wednesday at 6:00 pm. Consider going.

Taking Off follows a pair of suburban parents who take off on an adventure after their daughter takes off to go on an audition. To invoke some old-fashioned lingo, it's a "counter-culture" film with a great pot-smoking sequence that I'm pretty sure I remember playing in the 1970s at "underground" or "head" or "midnight" movie theaters such as the Cine Capri in Old Bethpage and the Uniondale Mini Cinema. It probably played at one or both of New York City's Thalias, too.

Nowadays it seems that Taking Off has become something of a rarity. According to the introductory comments at MOMA, it isn't available on video. The very good print screened on Friday night was apparently retrieved from Forman's garage, prompting the MOMA curator to suggest that the garage would make a good alternative to the museum's state-of-the-art archive located somewhere far from New York City.

Taking Off was one of five low-budget films commissioned by Universal following the success of Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider. The idea was to give a set of promising directors free rein and a small budget and perhaps reap similar profits. Of that group, at least three have been showcased recently at prestigious New York City venues: Peter Fonda's The Hired Hand (IMDB 6.9), Taking Off (IMDB 7.5), and Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop (IMDB 7.3). The other two were Frank Perry's Diary of a Mad Housewife (IMDB 6.7) and Hopper's The Last Movie (IMDB 4.2).

A lot of talent went into the making of Taking Off. One of the writers was John Guare, who helped introduce the movie at MOMA (where I think the movie premiered). Also credited as writers are Forman, Jon Klein, and Jean-Claude Carrière, a collaborator with many directors including Luis Buñuel (who worked for a spell at MOMA). Anchored by Lynn Carlin and the terrifically droll Buck Henry with strong supporting performances from Audra Lindley, Georgia Engel, Tony Harvey, Paul Benedict, and frequent Forman collaborator Vincent Schiavelli, the cast also includes Allen Garfield, Kathy Bates, and Carly Simon, with a performance by Ike & Tina Turner—in The Catskills, I think!

Also screened at MOMA on Friday night: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which is scheduled to be shown again on Saturday at 4 pm. Producer Michael Douglas (who looks and sounds more and more like his dad Kirk) gave the intro, with Forman talking about how Kirk had vainly tried to send him the Ken Kesey book in the 1960s, only to have Michael approach him about the project years later.

It was weird to see Michael Douglas and Milos Forman talking about the movie and the book so soon after I'd seen them doing the same thing in TVTV Looks at the Oscars at Anthology Film Archives. And it was weird to see Cuckoo's Nest after many, many years, and recognize Danny DeVito and Christopher Lloyd in what would turn out to be very atypical roles. And Jack Nicholson really does a great acting job, creating a very layered character, who is familiar but with depth and surprises.

I learned from Anne that her friend Marla hated Cuckoo's Nest as a very misogynistic story. The movie can certainly be viewed that way, though Forman made it a point to say that (for him, at least) Nurse Ratched represented the Communist censors who had kept the book from getting to him in Czechoslovakia.

Here's a different interpretation of the story.



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BILL MURRAY AND THE SUPER BOWL

As noted last week, Bill Murray once appeared in a TVTV documentary/mockumentary about Super Bowl X, in which the Steelers took on the Cowboys in 1976.

You can see outtakes here. It's kind of funny to consider them in light of Murray's appearance just last year on The Late Show with David Letterman.



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TVTV GOES TO THE SUPER BOWL AND TVTV LOOKS AT THE OSCARS

In the 1970s, TVTV made an irreverent Super Bowl documentary with Bill "Billy" Murray and Christopher "Chris" Guest and an irreverent Oscar documentary with Lily Tomlin. Anthology Film Archives will screen both at 7:30 pm on Wednesday, January 30, 2008.

Here's a sampling of TVTV Goes to the Super Bowl. It looks like it could've been inspired by Robert Altman. Featured are Phyllis George, Pat Summerall, and Johnny Unitas. You can see the whole thing online courtesy of MediaBurn; the image just isn't very big.



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PLAYING AT ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES

Perhaps you noticed the WWW episode that mentioned Supervision, the very obscure TVTV excursion into surrealistic television history. I'm a big fan of it myself—perhaps the biggest fan of it in the world! Once upon a time I managed to find installments of Supervision at the Museum of Television and Radio, where they were scattered willy-nilly amidst recordings of PBS Visions episodes from the 1970s.

This stuff is so obscure that it wasn't even included in an MTR salute to TVTV, but it looks like Anthology Film Archives will screen one Harold Ramis-directed installment in a fascinating program scheduled for Friday night at 8 pm. (There's a chance that it isn't technically part of Supervision, but I'm sure it's close enough.) Here's the description, from Anthology's website:

ALL CIRCUITS ON: THE BIRTH OF AN INDUSTRY
What on earth did people do before there was TV? Tonight's sophomore installment of ALL CIRCUITS ON attempts to answer this burning question with a panoramic presentation of videos, performances and fun-filled facts. Engineer/Filmmaker/Philosopher Park Doing will be on hand to tell us the true story of early TV; how it was created, contested and co-opted. You may not know that in 1928 the first live drama broadcast, a three-camera production called THE QUEEN'S MESSENGER, was received on a General Electric Octagon set in Schenectady, New York. In 1931, the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) broadcast experimental signals from the Empire State Building, featuring a familiar cartoon character, Felix the Cat. Prof. Doing, whose forthcoming book from the MIT Press is titled VELVET REVOLUTION AT THE SYNCHROTRON, will shine a light on the story behind and technology involved in these nascent broadcasts. He will even have some of it on hand for a show-and-tell demonstration. You haven't seen anything till you've witnessed a functioning Mechanical TV, or the films that Doing has made with this odd and wonderful device. This talk will be presented alongside a staged re-telling of TV's origins by TVTV and, well, one of the best uses of the medium thus far, THE GONG SHOW.

ALL CIRCUITS ON is a new Anthology series produced in close collaboration with Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), one of the world's leading nonprofit resources for video and media art since 1971. Together we are revisiting our roots, combining forces and bringing our archives together to increase the potential for rarely-screened works from the early days of video exploration (which is to say pre-1979)....

Works to be screened include:

TVTV
BIRTH OF AN INDUSTRY
1977, 18 minutes, video. Directed by Harold Ramis; written by Frank Cavestany, Hudson Marquez, Harold Ramis, Michael Shamberg, and Willie Walker.
A fictional, at times satirical portrayal of the rise of television and the death of radio, rooting the story in a greater American mythology. The historic figures of Philo Farnsworth, Edward Armstrong, and David Sarnoff are reduced to archetypes in a stand-off between the little man and Big Media. By now, we know who wins.

Tony Labat & Bruce Pollack
BRUCE AND TONY ON "THE GONG SHOW"
1978, 28 minutes, video.
Tony Labat and his frequent collaborator Bruce Pollack created an appropriately absurd performance for their appearance on the popular American variety/talent show. In a line-up that includes a man singing "God Bless America" through his nostrils and a woman who bends herself into a pretzel, Bruce and Tony manage to present a performance so absurd it defies ridicule. See it to believe it.

Also at Anthology this month: Unamerican Activities: The Films of Abraham Polonsky and several days of ephemeral oddities (September 20-23), including Why We're Fat, a program of nutrition documentaries curated by Skip Elsheimer (September 21 at 8 pm).

Here's Eat for Health, one of the films on the nutrition program.



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WWW. "I am writing to find out whether you have any information pertaining to a kind of show I saw on public television in the late 1970s. Called Supervision, it sometimes aired after another show, called Visions. The series started off with skits covering the history of television but eventually turned into a kind of science fiction story in which terrorists commandeer a network. John Belushi was in it."—Carbon copy of a typewritten letter addressed to the Museum of Television and Radio, written by Gary Grayson of Newark, New Jersey, and dated July 14, 1984.

WWW is a weekly series on Blog About Town. Click here to see other episodes.

Photo: David Marc Fischer