In the mythical city of Din, two garbagemen try to stop an evil despot from plaguing the citizenry with eternal nightmares.
Cast: Lorenzo Music (Ralph, the All Purpose Animal), Marshall Effron (Synonamess Botch), James Cranna (Rod Rescueman/Scuzzbopper/Frivoli Foreman/Street Preacher), Julie Payne (Flora Fauna), Hamilton Camp (Greensleeves), Paul Frees (Narrator/Chief of State/Judges/Bailiff), Judith Kahan (The Fairygodmother), J. E. Freeman (Pool Player), Nancy Fish (Woman Under Dryer). Directors: John Korty, Charles Swenson. Screenplay: John Korty, Charles Swenson, Suella Kennedy, Bill Couturie. Executive producer: George Lucas.
BW/Color – 75 min.
Showtime: Saturday, January 31 11:15pm PST/2:15am EST
In Peter Biskind’s “New Hollywood” chronicle Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock’n-Roll Generation Saved Hollywood, the name John Korty appears… zero times. And yet for one brief, shining moment (time approximate) back in 1969, Korty was the guy whom both Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas wanted to be. Brash young Hollywood hirelings with connections to Warner Brothers (Lucas was a lowly $200 a month intern but Coppola, who had honed his craft under the maniacal mentorship of Roger Corman, had by this time directed several studio features), the pair was disgusted with the politics, excesses, dictatorial grasp, and moral vacuum of the studio system and dreamed of establishing an alternative to Hollywood in the San Francisco area, an artistic commune modeled in part after Denmark’s cooperative Lanterna Films. They found their American role model in John Korty, an Academy Award-nominated former documentary filmmaker who had put his back to the establishment to go it alone in Marin County, Lucas’ home turf. Operating out of a converted barn on Stinson Beach off Highway 1, Korty had produced three feature films — THE CRAZY-QUILT (1966), FUNNYMAN (1967), and RIVERRUN (1970) — in four years, for a total payout of $250,000. Lucas and Coppola invited Korty to share their cause, along with Lucas’ USC School of Cinematic Arts friends John Milius, Walter Murch, Hal Barwood, Mathew Robbins, Gloria Katz and Willard Hyuck (among others).
Though Lucas had envisioned an idyllic countryside setting for their headquarters, the company made do with a warehouse on Folsom Street; while Lucas wanted to call the operation Transamerican Sprocket Works, Coppola favored American Zoetrope, both as a play on Lanterna Films, but also so that it would appear higher up on the list of companies before the American Stock Exchange. As was so often the case in those days, Coppola got his way. The hopeful filmmakers posed for a picture (above,with Korty far right) outside of the Folsom Street facility in that giddy interregnum before everything went straight to Hell.
Long story short, American Zoetrope went into bankruptcy before it had any lasting effect on Hollywood, largely due to Coppola’s lavish expenditures. The studio complex’s first tenant, Korty bolted when Coppola raised his monthly rent from $250 to $1,000 in a desperate bid to stave off his creditors. While the facility was rented out to other filmmakers, the artists scrambled. (To make money, Coppola took Lucas’ advice and agreed to direct a seedy little Warner Bros. gangster picture called THE GODFATHER.) Returning to the beach (albeit Port Reyes this time), Korty continued to march to the beat of his own drum, while taking the odd Hollywood assignment to pay his mortgage; among Korty’s highly regarded TV movies is THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MISS JANE PITMAN (1974), though I have to confess affection for two earlier projects: the charming fantasy THE PEOPLE (1972) starring William Shatner and GO ASK ALICE (1973), based on the famous anti-drug polemic (and also featuring Shatner with a craptacular stick-on mustache, but that’s a very small part of it). Korty’s return to narrative features with ALEX AND THE GYPSY (1976), a May-December romance starring Jack Lemon and Genvieve Bujold, and OLIVER’S STORY (1978), a sequel to LOVE STORY (1970) that nobody asked for, were write-offs but his 1977 documentary WHO ARE THE DEBOLTS? [AND WHERE DID THEY GET 19 KIDS?] won a 1978 Oscar and a Primetime Emmy following its 1979 television premiere.
While Korty quietly plied his trade, and returned to his roots in animation to produce short subjects for the PBS educational programs SESAME STREET and THE ELECTRIC COMPANY, Coppola and Lucas helped change the structure of Hollywood with the success of THE GODFATHER and STAR WARS (1977). (Korty turned down a number of big projects in order to stay small, among them THE LAST PICTURE SHOW and JAWS.) With his new-found industry clout, Lucas was able to help a number of up-and-coming filmmakers, among them Lawrence Kasdan, whose neo noir BODY HEAT (1980) he executive produced without credit. Between his producing Steven Spielberg’s RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK (1981) and the third film in his STAR WARS trilogy, RETURN OF THE JEDI (1983), Lucas threw some money Korty’s way, encouraging him to use the resources of Lucasfilm, The Ladd Company, and Warner Bros. to bring his animation skills to the big screen. (To be clear, Korty had spent several years and much of his own money developing the project in preproduction before Lucas came onboard.) The result was TWICE UPON A TIME (1983), a highly personal, very-different-for-1983 animated feature that Korty cowrote with documentarian Bill Couturie (DEAR AMERICA: LETTERS HOME FROM VIETNAM), visual effects specialist Suella Kennedy (WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT), and animator Charles Swensen (PUFF THE MAGIC DRAGON) and co-directed with Swensen.
The film utilized Korty’s Lumage technique, which rejected traditional cell animation to achieve something closer kin to stop motion, albeit with two-dimensional rather than three-dimensional models. The result was something characteristically individualist and years ahead of its time. Korty clashed with his collaborators over the tone of the piece, with co-director Swensen allowing the voice actors (specifically comic Marshall Effron, who brought to live the evil Synonamess Botch) to improvise and work a little blue. Uncomfortable with the use of profanity in what was regarded principally as a film pitched to children, Korty lobbied to have his original vision restored to the piece but it all came to naught when the Ladd Company began to founder under the weight of too many costly failures (Michael Crichton’s LOOKER, Dudley Moore’s ARTHUR follow-up LOVESICK, Fred Zinnemann’s FIVE DAYS ONE SUMMER starring Sean Connery as not James Bond, and of course Ridley Scott’s BLADE RUNNER). Lined up for release alongside the costly THE RIGHT STUFF (1983), directed by Korty’s North Bay comrade-in-film Philip Kaufman, TWICE UPON A TIME was given a limited roll-out and swiftly remaindered to cable TV.
Before it disappeared into the ether, TWICE UPON A TIME was seen in a number of different incarnations, among them Korty’s original version and the slightly more salacious variant in which Marshall Effron riffed scatalogically. People who saw the latter first on HBO and then came across the former shouted “Censorship!”, convinced that TWICE UPON A TIME had been watered down by corporate fiat rather than at the command of its creator. HBO eventually stopped showing the movie altogether and it vanished from the face of the earth, though cultists and collectors discussed TWICE UPON A TIME as a forgotten classic on par with Fred Wolf’s THE POINT (1971) while bootleggers and the blognoscenti hailed it as everything from a “ballsy anomaly” to a “towering feature-length achievement.” Never available on DVD (the film did have something of a shelf life on VHS) and rarely seen, TWICE UPON A TIME comes to your home this Saturday night, via the good, hard-working people at Turner Classic Movies Underground. Set your VCRs, your DVRs, your TiVos, your Wayback Machines, whatever it is, set it! And see for yourself.
Trivia: Among Korty’s animation crew were up-and-coming talents David Fincher (FIGHT CLUB, ZODIAC), Henry Sellick (THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS, CORALINE), and Harley Jessop (JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH, RATATOUILLE).
And you’ll want to set those VCRs to EP to also record the TCM “overnight” feature, THE 5000 FINGERS OF DR. T (1953), made a full generation before TWICE UPON A TIME and just as out there. Well, how could it not be — it was written by Dr. Seuss. Villain Hans Conried steals the picture (of course) but see if you can spot George Chakiris, a good many years before WEST SIDE STORY, as one of the dancers.