great_badir
Posts: 4205
Joined: 6/10/2005
From: A breaking rope bridge in the middle of the jungle
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Okay!
Well, I'm resurrecting this thread partly because I never really finished it and partly to keep my writing skills honed for the Thunderdome competition. So here goes..........
Skidoo, Otto Preminger (1968)
Budget - can't be sure (see further down below), but I'm gonna say between $6-7million
Worldwide Box Office - figures never published, but low, low, low
Subsequent takings (rentals etc) - safe to say nothing I think!
It takes two to skidoo. Apparently.
Take one of the most highly regarded directors of the forties and fifties (Otto Preminger), America's best loved TV comedian who was also a dab hand at "proper acting" (Jackie Gleason), the father (if not god) of modern day filmic wit (Groucho Marx), and a whole host of character actors (Mickey Rooney, Austin Pendleton, Peter Lawford, Slim Pickens, George Raft), Adam West era Batman colleagues (Cesar Romero, Frank Gorshin, Burgess Meredith) and two 60s musical icons (Frankie Avalon and Harry Nilsson). Add a dash of right-on counter-culture references and leave to simmer for about ninety minutes. Best served hot, with a side order of early Grateful Dead and the ramblings of flower-power casualties. And maybe one or two of those liquid lava lamps thrown in for good measure. Result? Preminger's "adventure comedy" - Skidoo, perhaps the most interesting entry in this thread so far.
Distilled, Skidoo is nothing more than a mob comedy - one time San Francisco hit-man Gleason has settled down and gone straight with a wife and daughter, busying himself with his car-wash business. As per, Gleason is called upon by God (Marx, not THE God, just a major drug baron nicknamed God) via two of Gleason's old mob colleagues, to infiltrate a futuristic high security prison (which appears to be Alcatraz, but whether it's SUPPOSED to be the rock is just one of Skidoo's many confusing mysteries) and take out his old friend 'Blue Chips' (Rooney), who's turned informer and is about to testify in court about the gang's nefarious past deeds. So far, so predictable. Here's where things get.......interesting. God lives on a yacht in international waters, far away from any chance of being collared by land-locked law. Meanwhile, Gleason's wife and daughter (involved with a no good drug addicted hippy played by John Phillip Law) attempt to make it to God's yacht so they can request that the hit be cancelled. Flip back to Alcatraz and Gleason and his trippy cell mate (Pendleton) make a balloon out of rubbish bags and manage to escape and somehow successfully navigate their way to God's yacht (meeting up with the wife, daughter and hippy cohorts). The Benny Hill Show on acid appears to take place, before God and Gleason's cell mate get all chummy and take the yacht's life raft to lead a happier life together, leaving the rest of the rabble tripping off their tits on LSD. Mix in typical 60s drug mythologising (animation, random shots of people dancing, choppy music etc etc - think Roger Corman's The Trip, only less serious) and that covers Skidoo fairly well. Oh, and the end credits are sung too, accompanied by to-camera Preminger asides like "I hope you en-choyed ze movie. Vas de popkorrrrn to your liking?"
Along with the original some three hour long Jerry Reed and Burt Reynolds free version of Bandit 3 (or Smokey IS The Bandit as it was then known, ironically also starring Gleason), Skidoo is the great lost cinematic disaster of post Studio Golden Age (TM) Hollywood. Thought to be locked safely out of harm's way (if you'll pardon the Preminger in-joke), deep in the director's estate's vaults, it has all the makings of a latter day cult rediscovery - a Preminger comedy in bold colour, Grouch Marx's final film performance (SEE!!!! - Groucho toke on a clearly authentic spliff), hippies, LSD, both a fear of and fascination with technology and a satirical look at upper-middle class comfort. But, being a "lost treasure" (an epithet which is, arguably, rather over generous) Skidoo has almost been forgotten as nearly four decades have passed, with only a few die hard collectors of cinematic rarities laying claim to a copy of it. These days a film with such an eyebrow-raising pedigree would be easy to access, regardless of the quality (just look at Burn, Hollywood, Burn!, AKA An Alan Smithee Film), but Skidoo's fate was very much a short, sharp, almost immediate shock -despite its initial quality leanings with cast and crew, it's very much a film of fallen heroes, broken dreams and empty pretensions. But what of its production? How much did it cost? How did it fair with the critics? What happened to it?
Working on a script from relative rookie writer Doran William Cannon, Preminger assembled his large cast of familiar faces with apparent ease, including a nearly 80 year old Marx who was overjoyed to be playing what was effectively a law breaking dirty old man. In interviews at the time, Marx had nothing but praise for Preminger (despite rumours that the director was treating Marx with less respect than a comedy legend of his stature commanded), the script and the experience of making the film. A sentiment ironically echoed by the majority of the film's cast, freely admitting they were basically getting paid to muck about like school kids in front of the camera. In fact, so involved with the film did many of them get (especially Marx and Preminger), Timothy Leary was drafted in to guide them through their first experience with modern drugs. Even the normally difficult Gleason seemed to enjoy the overall experience, Marx's belittling at the hands of Preminger notwithstanding. In fact, amongst the reams of history written about Skidoo (and there are a LOT), only two tales of on-set woe have ever cropped up - Faye Dunaway, at the time still under contract with Preminger, found quick fame with Bonnie & Clyde and refused to appear in the film fearing the drugs, far left political leanings and mockery of class types might damage her career, leading to something of a bitch-fest with Preminger that was eventually settled out of court (read - she probably paid him handsomely from her Bonnie earnings). The other bit of rough water concerned the script - Preminger had already lensed half of the film when he decided it needed more jokes and drafted in several new writers, all of whom mistakenly thought they were re-writing a film in trouble. Preminger, despotic as usual, forbade all of them to even attempt to alter the main story, plot and flow, instead demanding unrelated jokes and pratfalls be inserted into the main script - it's something of an achievement that the film didn't end up as a two plus hour failed epic! But it WAS failed - the director and most of his cast were too old, too out of touch and too full of themselves to make anything that could be taken as seriously as most of the films Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper were making (both together and separately) at the same time. The best way to describe Skidoo is to call it the American equivalent of that great British counter-culture disaster with similarly bizarre chasms of oddness for oddness sake - Joseph McGrath's Peter Sellers and Ringo Starr starring The Magic Christian.
Let's talk moolah - I've searched high and low for Skidoo's monetary figures, without much luck. Going by the talent, we have to assume a reasonably high pay out for cast alone. Then, if we factor in the budgets for Preminger's previous three films (around $4-5million), as well as the average costs of other films shot in Frisco around the same time, a possible budget of $6-7million seems possible, maybe even likely. So, it's safe to say that it was a reasonably A-list film and any sane thinking person would think that it was pimped around like nobody's business. Except evidence suggests Paramount (at that time Preminger's studio of choice) were hardly bothered with it and did little to promote the film - its soundtrack was released in advance and a Nilsson penned single was released, but both were quickly withdrawn when the single went nowhere, a vague poster was drawn up and some of the cast did some minor promotion in interviews. And that was about it. The film simpered quietly into cinemas and was an immediate turn off for both critics and audiences - the critics hated the complete and total uncontrolled mess they saw on screen, whilst a largely youth oriented audience took umbrage at the fact that their generation's new lease of life was being both aped and enjoyed by stuffy straights who had their time in the two decades previous. Again, I couldn't find any figures, but plenty of google searches turn up the fact that many cinemas stopped showing the film in less than a week. Showings outside the US sound as unlikely as the film itself, and it's never been granted a US video or DVD release (unusual considering Preminger's other lost classic - Bunny Lake Is Missing - was later released to great acclaim), with scant cable airings in the 80s and the odd unsolicited VHS release in other territories (France or Italy as the most likely) being the only lifeline to the film's latter-day existence.
Any good? ......................that's a hard question to answer. Firstly I've only seen an extremely poor quality VCD taken from a low generation VHS, which makes it hard to fully appreciate the "vision". Also, there's far too much going on - the normally low-key Preminger goes for an everything-including-the-kitchen-sink feel and subsequently turns in something which is still largely too way ahead of its time but at the same time painfully dated and stuck in 1968. But is it funny? No, not really. Is it entertaining? Marginally, sometimes. Could it be a cult success? I don't think so, no. But I can't explain why. It just hasn't got cult blood running through its mis-shaped veins. For those really curious, you can either catch the admittedly pretty snazzy trailer on Youtube, or download a (probably incomplete) version of the film from any number of torrent sites.
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