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Slouching Toward Avenue A: The Underground Unchained
The early ’60s would witness the emergence of the underground film movement (aka "New American Cinema") on New York’s Lower East Side, centered around venues like the Charles, the Bleecker Street, and the Gramercy Arts theaters. For a while in 1963, informal screenings were also held at filmmaker Ken Jacobs’ Ferry Street loft located downtown between the Fulton Fish Market and the Brooklyn Bridge. At the suggestion of filmmaker Bob Cowan, an actor in the brothers’ movies whom Donna Kerness had brought into the scene, Mike and George took I Was a Teenage Rumpot (1960) and some of their other films down to Jacobs’ loft. That was the night the Underground met the Kuchar brothers.
The fey, decadent milieu of the Underground, populated by dilettantes, beatnik intellectuals, and gay artistes was spiritually a million miles away from the workaday tenement neighborhoods of the Bronx — not to mention well over an hour distant by subway. This first encounter was one of mutual incomprehension. As George recalls, "There were all these underground people. We came in suits and we showed these 8mm movies, and I guess I was kind of a bit square-looking but the movies took off. I wasn’t always liked at that time, I know, because I guess I appeared kind of snotty sometimes to those people. I was just ... callously irrelevant, maybe? But they were kind of snotty, too, some of those people." (In an article on experimental cinema in the April 1967 issue of Playboy, authors Knight and Albert wrote, "The Kuchars take neither themselves nor their movies too seriously. For the most part the Underground is a dreadfully intense bunch of people.")
Jacobs, also a tireless promoter and programmer of underground film, liked the movies and put them on the "circuit" — whenever there was an 8mm show, the Kuchar brothers were usually on the bill. Mentor and critic Jonas Mekas began to write regularly about them in the Village Voice and Film Culture magazine. Mike and George were now officially part of the Underground, a rising movement that had ideas, energy, and a following of righteous supporters. Perhaps most importantly, because so many of the films flaunted an in-your-face sexuality, the movement attracted publicity and created an audience far beyond its original borders.
The brothers were now exposed to a whole new world of independent filmmaking which they would influence and in turn be influenced by. They saw the films of Andy Warhol, Stan Brakhage, Kenneth Anger, and others. "I met Warhol a few times," recalls Mike. "‘Hello, how are ya?’, and I used to see him coming out of my shows. I would go to see his shows and sometimes he would bring his films into the booth where I’d be, ’cause at the time some of the projectionists were my friends — he had to give directions to the projectionists. And Kenneth Anger, we saw Scorpio Rising when it first came out ... met him a couple times. It was like ‘Oh — we finally meet!’ — ’cause we’d heard of him and he’d heard of us."
"That was kind of an exciting period," says George. "One foot in the lobby, one foot in the street. The street was full of people in business suits, and they’d be coming in, and there’d be more ... bohemians inside. A mixture."
The early 8mm films were shot on old Kodachrome stock that tended to bleach out, but by 1963 Kodak had changed their 8mm stock to Kodachrome-2, which gave a richer, finer image, and the brothers took advantage of it for one of their more lurid plots in Lust for Ecstasy, which premiered at New York’s New Bowery Theater (later named the Bridge) in the early spring of 1964.
"Lust for Ecstasy is my most ambitious attempt since my last film," George said to Jonas Mekas at the time. "The actors didn’t know what was going on. I wrote many of the pungent scenes on the D train, and then when I arrived on the set I ripped them up and let my emotional whims make chopped meat out of the performances and story. It’s more fun that way and then the story advances without any control until you’ve created a Frankenstein that destroys any subconscious barriers you’ve erected to protect yourself and your dime-store integrity. Yes, Lust for Ecstasy is my subconscious, my own naked lusts that sweep across the screen in 8mm and color with full fidelity sound."
The brothers playfully satirized the underground in their final production of 1963, Lovers of Eternity, an overcooked ode to bohemian decadence and artistic angst on the Lower East Side. The film starred several noted underground filmmakers, including Jack Smith and his neighbor Dov Lederberg. Lederberg was notorious for cooking his 8mm film in the oven until it assumed the texture of eggplant and then projecting it.
Lovers of Eternity was also the last 8mm film the brothers would make before switching to the 16mm format in response to the better detail and clarity they saw that other filmmakers were getting in that format, and the fact that you could put the sound right on the film. Ironically they had inspired other filmmakers to switch from 16mm down to 8mm (Super-8 wouldn’t arrive until the early ’70s). 8mm became more "underground" to filmmakers seeking the ultimate in a personal, anti-commercial form of expression. The home movie was suddenly cool, prompting from the more verbose members of the movement — Mike and George included — satirically pompous manifestos on the revolutionary purity of 8mm film. (Jack Smith changed from 16mm to 8mm, too — but only because his 16mm equipment had been stolen.)
 George Kuchar directing Floraine Connors in Corruption of the Damned  |
The brothers began work on their first 16mm production, a black-and-white noir action drama called Corruption of the Damned (1965). Mike starred, garbed in a trench coat and embroiled in long chase sequences. A marvelously filmed brawl in a flour factory recalls the plaster warehouse punch-up in Kubrick’s 1955 noir Killer’s Kiss. (The Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley recently undertook Corruption as a preservation project, assembling a compilation print from which they struck a new negative, salvaging the film for posterity.)
With their jump to 16mm, the brothers developed individual, if similar, styles, and would eventually go their separate ways — although they continued to assist on each others’ productions when needed. Corruption of the Damned began in the usual collaborative fashion of the 8mm films, but Mike abandoned it mid-production to embark on a color science fiction film, and George finished it. "That movie is 80% George’s," Mike estimates.
The color science fiction film, financed by paychecks from Mike’s day job as a photo retoucher, was Sins of the Fleshapoids (1965). Sins would stand as Mike’s best-known film and the single most significant, creatively realized example of ’60s camp cinema sensibility. Pulsating with excessive colors, Sins unfolds while the camera’s eye floats indulgently over bright flowing fabrics, jewelry, tropical plastic foliage, and platters of glowing fruit that evoke a corrupt paradise.
"My specific aim was to bombard and engulf the screen with vivid and voluptuous colors," said Mike of Sins in a 1967 Film Culture interview, "because Sins is a fantasy of science fiction. So I tried to boost the colors according to its category: ‘fantastic’ or ‘unreal.’ I intentionally used a color film that when reproduced in the final print becomes ‘unnatural’ and ‘souped up,’ especially in the reds."
Sins starred Gina Zuckerman, Maren Thomas, Donna Kerness, and Julius Middleman (who later became a cop). Bob Cowan, who narrated the film and chose the music, gives a jerky, deadpan performance as the lead male robot, and George steals the show as Gianbeano, evil prince from the future.
The story transpires a million years in the future, after "The Great War" has depopulated the earth and ravaged the landscape. Mankind, reduced to a debauched few, has forsaken science for greedy indulgence in all the carnal pleasures afforded by art, aesthetics, and lust, leaving work to be done by a race of enslaved robots. One rebellious male robot (Cowan) tires of pampering his lazy masters and murders a human woman after a failed rape attempt, then engages in successful robot sex — the touch of fingers — with a female android. Thus the Fleshapoids join their human masters in sin ... and in procreation, as the female android gives birth to a baby robot.
Although Sins is set in the future, there is a classical look to the costuming and set designs that foreshadows Mike’s fondness for an ancient, muscular, Roman sexuality that he would elaborate on in later films and in his published gay pornographic comics.
 Donna Kerness in Sins of the Fleshapoids |
Sins of the Fleshapoids played midnights for three weeks at an established theater in Greenwich Village and went on to become a staple of the underground. Mike was now able to quit his day job and live for six years off the income of his films, which included, among other things, sales of prints to museum archives worldwide and honorariums for presenting his work at university and film society screenings. (This was more a testament to Mike’s modest expenses than to any vast sums generated by the films.)
Along with Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1964) and Warhol’s The Chelsea Girls (1966), Sins of the Fleshapoids remains one of the three most influential works of the ’60s American Underground, if one of the least self-consciously scandalous. It was never busted like Scorpio Rising (for a snippet of frontal male nudity), nor did it have the aura of fashionable decadence that radiated from everything Warhol attached his name to and that propelled Chelsea Girls to heights of fame and financial success arguably greater than the film’s value. (At a sold-out 1991 screening of Warhol’s film in Boston, the entire audience left during the unannounced intermission.) That Sins achieved the influence and success it did without sexual scandal or the scenester celebrity that many other underground films exploited is notable.
Subway Auteur: The Sound and the Fury Signifying Something
Fresh from his performance in Sins and with Corruption behind him, George launched his first 16mm color production, Hold Me While I’m Naked (1966), a 10-minute piece that would become his signature film. An abstract meditation on the emotional and technical traumas of making a low-budget movie, Hold Me was a deft parody of Hollywood stylization. With its aura of personal frustration and loneliness it was also a direct read of George’s then-current mental state. In fact, while this and other of George’s mid-to-late-’60s films invariably provoke laughter from audiences, George never considered them comedies.
In 1988, he reflected on the paradox: "My movies were playing in New York City once, and this woman I know said ‘Let’s go to your show — they’re having a night of your movies at the Film Forum.’ And I said, ‘No, I don’t want to because I don’t want to relive all the pain.’ I realized my career has all been based on pain. Those movies, even the funniest ones, had this horrible pain behind them. And I know exactly why they were made. I didn’t want to go because I didn’t want to relive that — I didn’t want to relive the main motivations of those pictures. (But then I went and there were people laughing, and I was even laughing, having a good time. And I forgot about the pain.)"
At this point, George was financing his films with "paychecks from hell" that he earned as a messenger for Norcross Greeting Cards in Manhattan. George recalls the place was run mostly by women. They were "amazons ... large, frightening, terrifying amazons that walked the halls all made up and smelling of perfume. Madison Avenue type women, clacking down the halls. Frightening, terrifying figures. I don’t know what was wrong with those women, but ... I do know what was wrong with those women, they had ulcers, some of them were eaten up alive ... they were like men with wigs on. And in fact some of them looked like Glen Strange, the Frankenstein monster. Their faces were horrid …"
After Norcross, George got a job as a chart illustrationist for NBC’s weather show. His daily subway commutes to Manhattan sparked his writing, which resembled the style and vocabulary of his cinema as revealed in an excerpt from his 1988 essay "Early Role Models":
"It was thrilling to ride the jam-packed subway trains to work in the morning: discreet perverts would reach out for some sort of stabilizing support so as not to lurch over and fall in the rocking cars and they’d grab onto your private appendages. Full-figured senoritas would mash you against metal partitions using flesh of such abundance that no amount of latex rubber could suppress the meat into trim decency. Fights would suddenly break out with alarming ferocity but there could be no room for swinging fists and so the squeeze of the traveling mob would suffer further, violent escalations. In those subway train cars the hot, metallic-smelling air was supercharged with the most primitive of living emotions. We would all spill out of these cars (some of us being pushed or thrown out) and climb the stairs into the canyons of dark glass and gargoyled stone which housed the machinery of commerce and coffee breaks, industry and indigestion, finance and fiscal flatulence that smelled of syndicated corruption."
The 1966–67 period was a busy time for the brothers as they honed their individual styles and saw their films go into wider distribution, due to the continuing momentum of the Underground.
Of the three films George made in 1967, Eclipse of the Sun Virgin was probably the stand-out. Starring Larry and Francis Leibowitz, Eclipse was similar in pacing, length, and style to Hold Me While I’m Naked, but throws up more extreme imagery and ends with George and Larry watching found tracheotomy footage on George’s projector. On the surface it plays as a colorful, bawdy burlesque of life, love, and supper in the Bronx, with George caught between the many-headed hydra of lust and the bony grip of Catholic guilt.
John Waters’ oft-repeated statements that "Beauty is looks you can never forget" and that "A face should jolt, not soothe" were ideas George was already drawing on in Eclipse where he pays sincere homage to rotund Bronx babes and facially imperfect others.
Movies of the Moment: True Underground
Mike followed Sins of the Fleshapoids with The Secret of Wendel Samson (1966), casting famous avant-garde artist Red Grooms in the lead role. Secret is a personal story told in the vocabulary of expressionism and pop fantasy. Entrancing use of dreamlike musical collage merges with fluid hand-held camerawork to express the inner turmoil of Wendel, who is caught between his diminishing sexual interest in a current girlfriend and unfulfilling gay relationships. Set largely in a series of spare interiors and on a desolate, snowy plain — in contrast to the lavish sets and atmospherics of Sins — Secret is a surreal, troubled rumination on sexual need and the entanglements of relationships. It remains one of the most uniquely personal and overlooked works of the ’60s underground.
The Secret of Wendel Samson illustrates Mike’s philosophy that a film is the unchartable confluence of personal inspiration and all-important "chemistry" — a creation of the moment unrelated to what had come before or would come after.
In a 1988 interview, Mike reflects on his approach to filmmaking: "I can only do a film when I feel really inspired or when I really want to. What mood I’m in determines what I’m going to do. For every film, if the chemistry is just right, then I’m able to make it. It’s very hard to make a film like Sins of the Fleshapoids again because I don’t fall back into that chemistry — where everything comes together. You meet these kinds of people and they’re just right to fill the parts for this film that you’ve always had in mind. I have a few films that I want to do, and they’re not really related to each other, but then I’ll make them when I meet the right people or discover the right place to film it in. It’s a matter of chemistry. Then it works and stands on its own, unto itself. Then life goes on ... until something else brings out something that you’ve always wanted to make. You know when it’s right and then you go out and buy the film and make it."
Mike’s straightforward approach to filmmaking, obviously antithetical to commercial cinema or the "careerism" seemingly endemic to every form of human endeavor today, encapsulates the transitory nature of true underground. His refusal to work within an identifiable genre and produce films synonymous with audience expectations, or films that are predictable or "characteristic," precluded his achievement of the fame of many of his contemporaries, including George. This is also why he is one of the very few pure underground filmmakers.
In its truest sense, "underground" was not a genre but an anti-genre. Underground was an image-negative term that refuted, denied, and disowned definition rather than encouraged it. A thing underground was a thing unseen, something ominously "other" happening in the darkness. The underground film movement was never more than a collection of individuals who never quite collected. As with any creative cultural movement with claims to revolutionary purity, it was threatened most by its own success — the blacklisting of venues, censorship, and police harassment pale by comparison. Popularity breeds pressure. Public demands for follow-ups and remakes from the often more-than-happy-to-oblige stars of the movement suck it dry of any spark or spontaneity as it ossifies into paid entertainment, and the movement rolls over and dies in a cloud of financial squabbling and superficial notoriety. In a milieu rife with spotlight-hogging enfant terribles, prima donnas, and media-savvy mythmakers, Mike never "followed up" and never sought celebrity — he just made his movies.
Overexposed Personas: Hold Me While I’m Desperate
In Hold Me While I’m Naked, George framed certain scenes by turning the camera on his own face from low or straight-on angles, putting his personal stamp on a shot that might be called "house- of-mirrors close-up." Used occasionally in his ’60s 16mm shorts, George emerges via these intimate portraits as something of a graceless, overgrown goofus with mild acne and hair that "sticks up like a toilet brush," as he describes it.
There were other sides to George, however, and a radically different persona is captured in Michael Zuckerman’s lost 12-minute nugget from the psychedelic underground, Soul Trip Number Nine (1969). As Zuckerman describes it, Soul Trip is "a story of burned out love ... taking the viewer to the shadow world of dreams and yearnings that hover in the psychedelic twilight of the turned-on mind. Slowly, as the lovers sink deeper into a drugged state, their unconscious desires rise to the surface. In brilliant colors the images tumble across the screen to reveal the feelings evoked by this, their last trip together." George, smoothly done over in pancake make-up, a Beatles wig, and mod clothing, cuts an effectively dashing and soulful figure as leading man in his nonspeaking role. A bevy of topless young women cluster and swirl around him in kaleidoscopic fashion via masterful superimpositions and other hallucinatory effects.
Portrait of Ramona (1971) signaled a major turning point in his life and filmmaking. George recalls this, his last New York film, in an interview from January 1989.
"At that time Mike was friends with this deaf guy. He could speak fairly well but he knew this other guy who was also deaf, I think from birth, and he learned how to talk just by watching people’s mouths open or something. Listening to him speak was the most amazing thing, you couldn’t really understand it but it was an interesting combination of sounds. And I wanted him to narrate Portrait of Ramona. But some of my friends looked at me with shock, like, ‘How could you do such a thing?!!’ I actually thought it would be interesting to hear his voice on the soundtrack. It wouldn’t matter if the audience understood it or not because they would be hearing a narrator and they would know the thing is somehow being explained, even though they didn’t understand it, and so they’d accept the visual format of the film better.
George unfailingly refers to Portrait of Ramona as a "desperate scream for help." It was time to move on to new things, to start a new chapter — to get the fuck out.
It was time to leave the Bronx.
California (Wet) Dreamin’
In 1971 George attended a film festival in Cincinnati where he made the acquaintance of fellow filmmaker Larry Jordon, who was (and still is) teaching film at the San Francisco Art Institute. Jordon began in film as a compatriot and disciple of Stan Brakhage but would himself become a major figure in the underground for works that spanned a remarkably wide range of styles. He would become best known for a series of animated collages, most notably Duo Concertantes (1962—64).
Larry asked George if he wanted to teach film at the San Francisco Art Institute (S.A.I.) as a visiting artist for a one-year period. George accepted the offer and packed his bags. He moved out to San Francisco and never left.
 A painting by George Kuchar |
George remembers his first student on that opening day of school. The young man had actually beaten him to class and was sitting on a desk in cut-off jeans and sandals, swinging his feet, when George walked into the room that morning at 8:45. From first impressions, this bearded, sandy-haired kid seemed "like a nice, playful person."
The punctual student was Curt McDowell, and sitting on a desk in film class was one of the lesser dictates of cinema he would go on to break.
Born and raised in Indiana, Curt never lost his Midwest mannerisms. "He was a pumpkin-pie type of person," George recalls. "You know, cooking food, being social, a real Indiana transplant, sewing costumes and telling us stories about his mother … he was also a catalyst; he brought people together and got them involved in situations they normally wouldn’t have gotten involved in, sexual and otherwise. Well ... like, I never cared for bowling, but when you went out bowling with Curt it was fun. But he was also this kind of lewd, crazy person who went on binges."
Enrolled at the San Francisco Art Institute in the late ‘60s on a painting scholarship, Curt was turned on to movies by instructor Bob Nelson and switched to the film department. "And so," George remembers, "we began to share each other, first literally then on the screen. He would use me in his pictures, in musicals and stuff like that — which gave me an opportunity to sing even though I can’t hold a note."
Curt circulated a petition to get George hired on a permanent basis, arguing that the school needed new blood from outside, new influences. George was hired. Mike also began to spend time in San Francisco.
Starting out as a protégé of George’s, Curt quickly found his own style and began to incorporate a large circle of friends, artistic collaborators, and virtual strangers off the street into the more than 30 films he would make. "He made friends everywhere," recalled companion and lover Robert Evans in 1987, "and he eventually talked most of them into taking their clothes off and appearing in his movies." A host of his friends, including George, Mike, and his own sister Melinda, were featured in his poetic 1975 film Nudes: A Sketchbook. A stylistic departure from the grainy, rough-hewn pornographic look Curt often favored, Nudes is a gentle homage to the sensuousness and physicality of those close to him.
 Gorgeous George |
From the outset George would find San Francisco planets apart from the Bronx, especially when it came to the libido. "The City was considered an outdoor bordello at that particular time," he muses today as if looking back at another century. Indeed, San Francisco in the early ’70s was capital of the booming hardcore porno industry which native sons Alex DeRenzy and Jim and Artie Mitchell had pioneered in 1969, and the gay underground was pulsing with energy. A not-yet-famous Divine could be found holding court down at the Palace Theatre in North Beach, starring in stage productions like Vice Palace and Divine and Her Stimulating Studs, while across town the Castro was beginning to coalesce into a major gay enclave. In the Mission district, a dank, narrow 200-seat theatre showed non-stop porno flicks. (In 1976 Robert Evans took over this theater, the Roxie, and turned it into one of the most important indie rep venues in the country, still going strong today.) A hothouse atmosphere saturated the City, and the Art Institute served as a clearinghouse for the out-of-control libidos of the artistically inclined.
McDowell was not the only Art Institute student bent on exploring the limits of erotic cinema. In a 1988 essay called "California Concoctions," George describes a typical student film of the period and the effect that all of this was having on him:
"Young people in the City by the Bay were aiming their movie cameras at exposed chakras left and right as the Sexual Revolution was in full swing at that time. One female in my class was up on the silver screen being sodomized by a latex novelty while indulging in a coke of non-carbonated powder. The person on the other end of that rubberized intrusion was a female classmate of lesbian persuasion obeying the direction of a unisexed university urchin who looked like Hermaphroditos incarnated … Eventually I fell victim (happily) to this quagmire of humping and heaving viscosity and embarked on an orgy of flesh-debased delinquency that knew no bounds..."
Meanwhile Mike would continue back east through the ’70s with a slew of his own films: Aqua Circus (1971), Digeridoo (1972), Faraway Places (1972), Death Quest of the Ju-Ju Cults (1976), and Dwarf Star (1977) among them.
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