This week on TCM Underground, a double dose of essential 80s cinema — Rambo be damned — and street level American independent filmmaking at its most denatured and daring.
Philadelphia-born filmmaker Susan Seidelman was pointed to a career in fashion design when the notion of spending the rest of her life in front of a sewing machine prompted the 19 year-old to reassess her career goals and redirect her energies toward the study of cinema. Enrolling in a film appreciation class on a lark, Seidelman got her first look at the seminal titles of Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, and Ingmar Bergman. Following her 1973 graduation from Drexel University’s College of Arts and Sciences, she set her sights on New York City, underwriting the change of venue with work at a Philly UHF-TV station. Seidelman would find the competitive atmosphere of New York University’s graduate film program (then housed in an East Village tenement also occupied by the rock venue The Fillmore East) daunting, to say the least. “I was intimidated,” she told People magazine in 1985. “Everybody else had seen fifty billion German Expressionist movies, so I started going to five or six movies a week to catch up.”
Upon her graduation in 1979, and emboldened by an award from the Chicago International Film Festival for her student film AND YOU LOOK LIKE ONE TOO (1976), Seidelman began plotting her first feature. Having traded the Pennsylvania suburbs for Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Seidelman saw at first hand the burgeoning punk rock music movement, which formed the backdrop for SMITHEREENS (1982). In an interview with Filmmaker magazine in 2009, Seidelman recalled: “I had stayed in touch with my friends from NYU and we decided that if we pooled our resources… we could make a low budget feature film, shot on 16mm, for about $20,000. My grandmother had recently died and left me some money which was set aside for my future wedding – but since that wasn’t in the cards at that time, I decided to use it for camera equipment, film stock and lab expenses and make a feature film instead.” Seidelman helped fund the venture by work as a freelance editor and production assistant on TV spots for Jordache jeans and through the sale of limited shares of stock.
With a cast and crew of friends, classmates, local musicians, and starving artists, principal photography for SMITHEREENS began in the spring of 1979, four years into New York’s well-publicized financial crisis: a time of fear, uncertainty, destitution… and unparalleled artistic freedom. This downtown take on ALL ABOUT EVE (1950) focuses on the machinations of a talentless hanger-on who drifts from scene to scene and man to man as she follows the punk zeitgeist from New York to LA, only to be left nowhere and alone in the end. Due to the fits and starts of DIY film production (which included, among other calamities, leading lady Susan Berman breaking her leg in a fire escape fall), production stretched out over a year and a half while Seidelman’s budget quadrupled. Not all of the delays had an adverse effect; during a four month halt in filming, Seidelman replaced her original leading man with Richard Hell, founding member of Tom Verlaine’s Television and a fashion innovator whose preference for spiky hair and torn clothing is said to have had an immeasurable impact on the aesthetics of punk.
“Thinking back on it, there was something wonderfully naive about the way the film came together,” Seidelman said in 2009. “We never thought about how – or if — the film would get distributed, or how it would be marketed. This was just a film I wanted to make that attempted to capture the spirit of a certain time and place.” To the surprise of all involved, SMITHEREENS was accepted by the Cannes Film Festival and garnered recognition as a succs d’estime, winning a distribution deal from New Line Cinema. In her encouraging, but not uncritical review of SMITHEREENS in The New York Times in November 1982, Janet Maslin drew a parallel between Susan Berman’s plucky but purposeless punk protagonist Wren with “the French movie waifs of yesteryear,” a sentiment that surely vindicated Seidelman’s choice to become a filmmaker. Though not intended as an industry calling card, SMITHEREENS got Hollywood’s attention. Rejecting a pile of teenage girl scripts, Seidelman signed on to direct DESPERATELY SEEKING SUSAN (1985), the film that made a movie star of singer Madonna and a career move that brokered Susan Seidelman’s transition from DIY to A-list.
While film noir protagonists tend to be men, the plots are driven with near-exclusivity by women: Ann Savage in DETOUR (1945), Lana Turner in THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE (1946), Rita Hayworth in GILDA (1946), Peggy Cummins in GUN CRAZY (1950). This distaff custom is carried forward in the noir-inflected BORDER RADIO (1987) but the tradition is given a few unexpected twists. Conceived, written and directed by a trio of UCLA film students, the project began as a straight genre exercise but morphed over the course of three arduous, cash-strapped years of shooting into a showcase for musicians prominent in the So-Cal punk subculture. Despite the prominent casting of Flesheaters frontman Chris D. and John Doe (bassist/singer for the band X) as brooding rocker nogoodniks, BORDER RADIO‘s heart and soul is the good woman who has to clean up after the bad boys. As played by Luanna Anders (sister of co-writer/co-director Allison Anders), the hard-bitten, wary-eyed Lu is etched as a dreamer deferred, a proto riot grrrl biting back her anger to raise the lovechild from her union with Chris D.’s Jeff Bailey (the name cadged from Robert Mitchum’s character in OUT OF THE PAST, 1947) while her man hoofs it to Mexico with a thousand stolen dollars and a battered acoustic guitar.
Given that French codified film noir in the 1950s, it is only fitting that BORDER RADIO adopts an attitude toward its own plot of nouvelle vague insouciance. In Robert Siodmak’s noir classic THE KILLERS (1946), Burt Lancaster’s doomed Swede sweats out his karmic comeuppance alone in a darkened room but here Jeff Bailey chills on a stretch of Mexican beach, plopped down under a palapa. Likewise, Lu is far from a BREATHLESS (1960) style destroyer; having parked their kid (co-writer/director Allison Anders’ daughter Devon) with an ex-lover, Lu dutifully sets out to bring Jeff home to Los Angeles despite the likelihood that the journey is yet another lost cause.
Unlike the classic film noir titles, BORDER RADIO is less interested in issues of loyalty, seduction, deception and fate than in a consideration of the nature of art and theft, whether in the form of homage, influence or even vision-compromising studio remixes. A scene-bridging conversation between a trio of underworld goons (“Fuck the Clash, man…all those bands just ripped off everything from Iggy and the Stooges”) en route to mete out punishment anticipates the geek soliloquies of Quentin Tarantino, whose early successes changed the shape and substance of American independent cinema, making it harder for truly independent, homebrewed cinema to find an audience.
“In those days you gave a band a chance,” laments one of BORDER RADIO‘s minor characters. “These days all they want is professionalism. They’ll boo you offstage if you’re not slick enough.” The rare pastiche that preserves as much as it appropriates, BORDER RADIO provides contemporary viewers with fleeting glances of a number of long-gone Los Angeles landmarks, among them Atwater Village’s Hully Gully Studios, Chinatown’s Hong Kong Caf and the punk flophouse Disgraceland, then owned by Jayne Mansfield’s widower, bodybuilder Mickey Hargitay. Shot guerrilla style, without permits and on portable 16mm equipment “borrowed” from the UCLA film department (and smuggled into Mexico), the film suffers from occasional self consciousness on the part of the players but the narcissistic digressions of the dramatis personae suit the caprices of characters coasting on the downward arc of their youth.
Co-writers/directors Anders and Kurt Voss had interned on the set of Wim Wenders’ PARIS, TEXAS (1984), an obvious touchstone that shares with BORDER RADIO a sense of loss and ravening regret. During the post-production, the filmmakers drafted a number of 80s era A-list celebrities, including Wenders and Daryl Hannah (Luanna Anders was then dating the “manny” who minded the children of Hannah’s boyfriend, musician Jackson Browne) to lend support but seed money came from Hollywood character actor Vic Tayback, a family friend of Kurt Voss. Tayback had been one of the stars of the long-running CBS sitcom ALICE (1976-1985), a spinoff of Martin Scorsese’s ALICE DOESN’T LIVE HERE ANYMORE (1974). While Anders, Voss and Lent went on to further cinematic adventures (in writing, directing and cinematography, collectively and separately), and both Chris D. and John Doe enjoyed additional film roles (Doe turned in glowering cameos for Wayne Wang’s SLAMDANCE (1987) and Paul Thomas Anderson’s BOOGIE NIGHTS (1997) while Chris D. was ignominiously kicked in the nuts by Kevin Costner in Roger Donaldson’s NO WAY OUT [1987]),BORDER RADIO remains the star credit for leading lady Luanna Anders. (In an early draft of the script, the character of Lu was killed off but none of Anders’ male costars wanted to be the murderer.) Though acting classes and a string of agent meet-and-greets followed, Anders found the prospect of marketing herself in Hollywood unappealing after the communal effort of making her first film. When the production of GAS, FOOD, LODGING (1992), co-directed by Allison Anders and Kurt Voss and shot by Dean Lent, decamped to Los Angeles for a week of interior shooting, Luanna was drafted as a set dresser. An association with production designer Jane Ann Stewart got her work behind-the-scenes on Bernard Rose’s CANDYMAN (1992) and the HBO anthology series INSIDE OUT before motherhood and home life took Luanna Anders out of the industry until she made a belated but welcome return to acting in Anders’ and Voss’ STRUTTER in 2012.