FILMMAKER
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After years of searching in vain, SUBTERRANEAN CINEMA has finally located
three "underground" DVDs containing WILD 90, MAIDSTONE and BEYOND THE LAW,
a set of infamous films created by visionary writer NORMAN MAILER in the late 60s,
and starring the brilliantly gonzo character acter, RIP TORN. They have
been the top "holy grails" on my "most wanted" list for quite a while.
All three films are in English with French subtitles, with excellent A+ pic/sound quality!
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MAIDSTONE
In the summer of 1968, the elegant resort town of East Hampton, NY
witnessed a bizarre invasion of the celebrities and unknowns,
professional actors and amateurs, assembled by Norman Mailer
to make a movie in which he would be both director and star.
Mailer, who already had made two unconventional films, was
determined to give his revolutionary philosophy of cinema its first
full-scale test. His object was to rescue the screen from conformist
make-believe, to dissolve the line between fiction and actuality, to set
the stage for an explosion of human passions. What resulted was
MAIDSTONE, an extraordinary event, both on screen and off.
an excerpt from
THE LIVES OF NORMAN MAILER
a biography by
CARL ROLLYSON
(THE MAKING OF)
MAIDSTONE
Beverly embarrassed visitors like Willie Morris who witnessed
her tirades against her "evil" husband. At other times, she was
his sidekick. When the write Bruce Jay Friedman began messing
up Mailer's hair at a Brooklyn Heights party, Mailer gave him a
headbutt and said, "Let's go downstairs". Beverly yelled after
them: "Fuck 'em, let 'em fight, let that fucking bastard get killed by
Norman." In the meantime, Mailer threw punches at the windows
of Friedman's Jaguar. Friedman got out of the car. In the midst
of the face to face argument, Mailer lowered his head and drove it
into Friedman's chest. Friedman retaliated with a blow to Mailer's
body. Torres stepped in, fearing that the bigger Friedman would
beat up Mailer. Wjem Friedman got back into the car, Mailer
began punching the windows again, but Friedman drove off.
Later, Mailer apologized to Torres, for he knew that Torres as a
professional could lose his license for getting involved in a fight.
Beverly's love/hate relationship with Mailer -- so similar to his
marriage with Adele -- epitomized in his mind the fate of charisma-
tic figures. Robert Kennedy had been shot in June 1968, confirming
Mailer's conviction that heroes had the potential to excite both the
best and worst in societal forces. Anyone aspiring to public office
in order to command the imagination of the country had in store a
similar fate. Indeed, Mailer suspected that a future candidate for
president might well be a man in the movie business, someone used
to projecting himself through the stories he brought to the screen.
Having made himself into a character in THE ARMIES OF THE
NIGHT, and having been followed by a documentary film crew during
his participation in the march on the Pentagon, it was not much of a
stretch for Mailer to think of directing a film about Norman T. Kingsley,
a film director making a film even as he considers a campaign for the
presidency. Not only did Mailer give his director his own middle name,
Mailer also starred as Kingsley and employed former wives, friends,
and a few professional actors he had used in THE DEER PARK, WILD 90,
and BEYOND THE LAW. Once again there would be no script, and filming
would take place over five days, beginning on July 18, at several different
estates on Long Island. As for his previous films, Mailer contrived an
atmosphere from which the movie would take its mood -- in this case, one
of characters and plots at cross purposes, of actors not knowing what was
expected of them, of drinking and fucking, paranoid reactions, and fighting,
of a frenzied political intrigue in which members of Mailer's entourage were
in doubt as to his true motivations. At least one cast member was said
to be "packing a piece, a real piece with bullets," Mailer later admitted.
New York reporter Sally Beauman found a "shorter and fatter" Mailer
than she expected. Wearing a busman's cap out of which his gray curls
sprang, Mailer's best feature seemed to be his "brilliant, penetrating"
blue eyes and a "bare, impressively hairy chest and back", set to per-
fection by a leather motorcyclist's vest. "He's so magnetic," sighed
one of his actresses. "It's his eyes. They're beautiful. He seems to
know exactly what you're thinking," another answered. James Toback,
invited to play an Esquire reporter since he was covering the filming
for the magazine, noted Mailer's sun-tanned face and warm smile.
His face had "magic and power," reported Toback, but his "thin,
shapeless legs and swollen girth suggested weakness and age.
Look up and he is a hero; look down and he is a clown."
The director sauntered around the grounds, slapping his stomach,
clowning around, and reminding Beauman of a "big beery Scoutmaster ...
splitting his wide Toby-jug face with its protruding ears from side
to side in a colossal and endearing watermelon grin." As the long
days of shooting progressed, Beauman noticed that "the bounce
and snap had gone from his walk, yet he seemed taut with tension."
On one occasion there was an explosion. Taunted by an actor, Lane Smith,
who told Mailer he could take his crew, camera, and equipment and shove it
up his ass, Mailer retaliated with a punch to Smith's jaw that put him out for
five or six seconds. It had all happened so fast that when Smith recovered,
he asked who had hit him. Mailer said "I hit you". Smith countered: "You
didn't hit me, that was a nigger punch." One of the two black guys nearby
hit Smith, who then accused Torres of having knocked him out. Later,
Mailer paid for Smith's hospital expenses (his jaw had been broken) in
exchange for Smith's written agreement that he would not sue Torres.
The ambivalence about Mailer expressed itself in Tom Hickey's Mailer
impersonation. Imitating "Mailer's mafia-style walk and voice", Hickey
was pelted with paper cups and tin cans by a group of actors who jeered:
You're a little tyrant underneath.
You're like a man who's had too much love.
You couldn't make a President; you can't
even make movies. You make lousy movies.
You're a worn-out record, baby.
All you want to hear is how wonderful you are.
You never listen to anyone but yourself.
You're spoiled.
Of course, these attacks were ostensibly against Mailer's character, Kingsley, but as
Toback notes, they "struck at the softest part of Mailer's gut". The animosity seemed
to go beyond good performances in a movie, and Rip Torn, who helped stage the scene,
admitted as much, suggesting it would be more authentic to be candid about Mailer, and
it would enhance the movie. Torn confessed that Mailer had heard about the scene and
had been "very hurt", but Torn thought the director realized it had been "necessary"
There is no doubt that Mailer had a serious problem in creating an environment in
which assassinations occur, for Norman T. Kingsley announces: "I'm a catalyst.
I set loose forces. (the first of his strengths is candor.) If I'm not right, then
I'll set loose terrible forces." In experimenting with his own person and
friends, Mailer was trying to get at the overwrought temper of the times.
There was quite a different sort of tension, however, that Mailer has never
acknowledged -- at least not in print. Because there was no script, and
because several of the actors were not professionals, his cast found it
difficult to stay in character. He used ex-wife Lady Jeanne Campbell,
for instance, as an English journalist reporting on Kingsley's life -- a
splendid choice, yet on screen she wavers and loses conviction, appar-
ently amused by playing a character so close to herself. She almost
smirks. Similarly, other characters who describe Kingsley sound oddly
flat and unconvincing. There is a curious realism to these scenes, for they
are utterly devoid of the usual dramatic development given narrative
in Hollywood films, but there is little of the actor's skill or intense interest
in projecting a sense of character onto the screen. Rip Torn, a profoundly
dedicated actor who had appeared in THE DEER PARK and in BEYOND
THE LAW, was angered by what he took to be Mailer's sham movie.
The best scenes feature Mailer as Kingsley interviewing women for
roles in a movie about a male whorehouse. Kingsley is manipulative
and even sadistic, finding small flaws in these women and harping on
them. direction and perhaps misunderstood his desire to create a life
threatening scene for Kingsley and for himself, in which the divide be-
tween what is real and what is fictional, what constitutes a movie about
Norman T. Kingsley and about Norman Mailer, is not easy to separate.
Even before the filming ended, Mailer began to speak clearly in his
own voice, having himself filmed addressing the cast. Instead of
following the logic of a paranoid violent atmosphere, Mailer
shifted (when it seemed no one in the cast would attack Kingsley)
to a scene in which MAIDSTONE became, less interestingly, a film
about making a film that he could not quite bring off. The film
of NormanT. Kingsley had not succeeded -- as this exchange
between Mailer and Torn (playing Kingsley's half-brother) reveals:
MAILER: Rip, what were you, ah, what was your attitude toward me?
TORN: Well, I was in constant conflict between you, Norman,
as the man, and the character of Kingsley that you're playing.
One of the actresses admitted she was really "pissed off" when no one had
"bumped off" Kingsley, and Mailer's confessed that, in the end, he had not
really wanted the assassination to occur. He had scared people for nothing,
another actress observed, and the underlying tone of her remarks suggest
that many of them had been disappointed by the film's lack of resolution.
Mailer thought he had been in control, that even the irresolution of the
film had been planned. "You may have some surprises," Torn muttered at
what Mailer supposed was the last cinema verite scene in MAIDSTONE.
MAIDSTONE replicates the Mailer pattern of veering toward and then away
from violence. Having brought himself into proximity with an assassination
plot, Mailer retreated into an almost academic lecture on filmmaking.
Outraged by the way Mailer had tricked everyone into thinking a film of novel
significance was in the offing, Torn refused to accept the ending of MAIDSTONE
and attacked Mailer during the filming of him with his family the day after
the director had declared the movie over. (1) Charging Mailer in an open field,
Torn hit him three times with the flat side of a hammer, pulling his blows but
doing enough damage to draw blood. Four of Mailer's children -- Dandy, Betsy,
Michael, and Stephen -- were terrified, screaming after Torn's assault on their
father. Mailer was furious. Calling Torn a "crazy fool cocksucker", Mailer
wrestled him to the ground, biting & nearly tearing off Torn's ear. Calling Mailer
"brother" and insisting the film would make no sense without the assassination
attempt, Torn traded insults with Mailer and yet kept reminding him that this
was the story Mailer had planned, that Mailer had even seen him coming with
the hammer and had not tried to get away. When Mailer would not acknowledge
the justice of Torn's words, Torn called him a "fraud", a charge Mailer later had
to countenance, for in the editing room he found that he did not have a movie
without the dramatic explosion, the assault not only on Norman T. Kingsley
but on Norman Mailer, the half-sincere, half-bogus filmmaker and politician
who had to be called to account by a real actor who took his role seriously,
as though he were, in Mailer's words, his "true brother". The psychological
reality of MAIDSTONE was the actors' expectation that Mailer would be
attacked, and so Torn "attacked out of all the plots of other actors" and
became, Mailer realized, "the presence of the film, the psychological reality
that became a literal reality out of the pressure of all the ones which did not.
There is a peculiar integrity to MAIDSTONE that is like Mailer's own:
It pretends to more than it can deliver. It aspires to effect a whole
new way of filmmaking that it cannot bring off. But the film, like
so much of Mailer, acknowledges its faults and its incompleteness
and somehow makes us feel implicated, "anticipating the formation
of plots around us which do not quite form". The fascination
of following Mailer is in the anticipation of whether this time
he will, in fact, enact himself as we have been led to expect.
___________________________________________________________________________
an excerpt from
MAILER: HIS LIFE AND TIMES
a biography by
PETER MANSO
BARNEY ROSSET
I was terrified of the violence, which was so thick you could feel it. After
the first or second day these people had finished shooting, it was still light,
and they'd gone back to where they were staying, in Bridgehampton, five
miles away. My mother in law went outside, then came back into the house
screaming, "There's a midget in the swimming pool!" My wife and I go
outside, and sure enough, there he is, floating. Someone had thrown
(Herve) Villechaize into the pool, and he was drowning. I was able to
reach over the side and pull him out. My reaction was sheer rage, sort
of "what right do they have to put this thing in our pool and then go
home, just split?" Here we were in our house, this Quonset hut sunk in
the ground, with the swimming pool and a lot of trees; this place had
been vibrant with maniacs one minute, and suddenly they're all gone.
My poor mother in law hasn't been out all day, she's been barricaded
inside, then she comes back in screaming. What I said to my wife was,
"Goddamn it, we're gonna get Norman!" I wasn't worried whether
the midget was dead or alive. I didn't even call the rescue squad.
I got in my car and raced the five miles to the Bull's Head Inn, where they
were all staying. I went up to Norman's room and pounded on the door.
"Norman, you've gotta come back and get your midget!" And Norman?
He and Jose went back with us and scooped up the guy, and I was
told later that they took him to the hospital, where his stomach was
pumped. Whether he was suffering from booze or drowning, I don't
know, probably a mixture of both. The next day, though, to my utter
amazement, he was back playing the piano in the Lane Smith scene.
___________________________________________________________________________
THE SILENCES
OF AN AFTERNOON
NORMAN MAILER VS. RIP TORN
An excerpt from the original screenplay of an infamously
violent encounter on the set of the film, MAIDSTONE.
INCLUDES NUMEROUS SCREENSHOTS!
THE SILENCES OF AN AFTERNOON
NORMAN MAILER VS. RIP TORN
________________________________________________________________________
CAST OF
MAIDSTONE
PAUL AUSTIN
JOY BANG
ANN BARRY
BEVERLY BENTLEY
EDDIE BONETTI
STEVE BORTON
BOYS HARBOR BOYS
BOB BYRNE
JEAN CAMPBELL
PAUL CARROLL
LANG CLAY
HAROLD CONRAD
LEE COOK
BILLY COPLEY
TERRY CRAWFORD
JOHN DE MENIL
TONY DUKE
BUZZ FARBER
ROBERT GARDINER
LEO GAREN
LENNY GREEN
HERVE (VILLECHAIZE)
TIM HICKEY
RON HOBBS
KAHLIL
EVELYN LARSON
LUBA
ROBERT LUCID
MARA LYNN
DIANE MACKENZIE
NORMAN MAILER
JOHN MALOON
JOHN MANAZANET
MICHAEL MCCLURE
CAROLYN MCCULLOUGH
DAVID MCMULLIN
PENNY MILFORD
MITSOU
GLENNA MOORE
LENNY MORRIS
ADELINE NAIMAN
ULA NESS
ALFONSO OSSORIO
NOEL E. PARMENTAL JR
MAGGIE PEACH
ALICE RAINTREE
JOE RODDY
LEE ROSCOE
BIANCA ROSOFF
PETER ROSOFF
SHARI ROTHE
CLIFF SAGER
LUCY SAROYAN
BRENDA SMILEY
SALLY SORELL
GREER ST. JOHN
DANAE TORN
RIP TORN
JOSE TORRES
ULTRA VIOLET
JAN PIETER WELT
BUD WIRTSCHAFTER
HARRIS YULIN
_______________________________________________________________
MAIDSTONE
PRODUCTION CREDITS
PHOTOGRAPHED BY
JIM DESMOND
RICHARD LEACOCK
D.A. PENNEBAKER
NICK PROFERES
SHELDON AND DIANE ROCHLIN
JAN PIETER WELT
EDITED BY
JAN PIETER WELT
LANA JOKEL
WITH
NORMAN MAILER
ASSOCIATE EDITORS
HARVEY GREENSTEIN
LUCILLE RHODES
MARILYN FRAUENGLASS
SOUND BY
NELL COX
ROBERT LEACOCK
NINA SCHULMAN
KATE TAYLOR
MARK WOODCOCK
ASSOCIATE PRODUCER
LEO GAREN
PRODUCTION MANAGER
PAUL AUSTIN
ASSISTANT TO THE PRODUCER
CAROLYN MCCULLOUGH
FILMED IN
EAST HAMPTON
AT THE HOMES OF
MR. AND MRS. DAVID LION GARDINER
MR. ALFONSO OSSORIO
MR. AND MRS. BARNEY ROSSET
AND ON GARDINER'S ISLAND
THEME MUSIC
COMPOSED AND SUNG BY
CAROL STEVENS
PRODUCTION ASSISTANCE
PETER HASSEN
DAVID MCMULLIN
PRODUCED BY
BUZZ FARBER
and
NORMAN MAILER
for
SUPREME MIX, INC.
DIRECTED BY
NORMAN MAILER
_________________________________________________________________________________
BEYOND THE LAW
an excerpt from
THE LIVES OF NORMAN MAILER
a biography by
CARL ROLLYSON
(THE MAKING OF)
BEYOND THE LAW
Not waiting to see what reviewers would make of his first movie
(WILD 90), Mailer almost immediately began work on another,
BEYOND THE LAW, set in a police station where detectives are
grilling suspects. For the most part, he again used untrained actors,
believing that if he created a situation intense enough for people who
were able "to talk themselves in and out of trouble", they would produce
"extraordinary characterizations" that more studied professionals rarely
achieve. More ambitious than WILD 90, BEYOND THE LAW employed
three camera crews to film several interrogations going on in different
rooms at the same time and to capture the manic quality of a police sta-
tion. But the "first night's shooting was chaos, and promised disaster",
Mailer later recalled in THE ARMIES OF THE NIGHT. Personality
conflicts added to the confusion -- as did camera crews and sound
men who had trouble locating the focus of the action. In a way, how-
ever, this is what Mailer wanted: frenzied scenes in which both the
cops and the crooks generated comic and frightening confrontations.
At the center of the action is Francis X. Pope (Mailer), a New York
City cop and something of a poet, reflecting Mailer's love of the
Irish who, in his words, have "this great bravura, a style, an ele-
gance". It was this Irish bluff, this brash willingness to take on
the world that Mailer had so admired in STUDS LONIGAN. The Irish
had taught him what it means to be a character and to have visceral
reactions to life. The Irish were the counter example to his own up-
bringing, where Jews were trained like "intellectual machines",
learning to dominate every experience with the mind. BEYOND
THE LAW created a world where physical reflexes and gut reactions
ruled. Mailer wanted to capture on film how far he had removed
himself from the "modesty" of his Brooklyn boyhood and youth
and how much he cherished the "pride and arrogance and the
confidence and the egocentricity he had acquired over the years".
Far superior to WILD 90, BEYOND THE LAW probes the psychology of
the criminal mind and of the minds that must challenge it. The film is
obviously linked to Mailer's writings about hipsters and about himself
as a "psychic outlaw". Perhaps even more important, making films and
the staging of THE DEER PARK gave him a tangible feel for his relation-
ship to his characters. Indeed, as The Prince and Francis X. Pope,
he had to use his own person to become a kind of character he envied.
George Plimpton, who had a role in BEYOND THE LAW, thought of the
film as a "parlor game". Mailer had to act out, to play his characters
as he had done nearly twenty years earlier in Paris, where he and
Bea had reenacted scenes from THE NAKED AND THE DEAD.
D.A. Pennebaker, one of Mailer's cameramen, suggests, Mailer "has the idea
he can look at a camera and take it away from the person who's running it,
as if he's got the control and is photographing himself. It's like a dream,
his own dream". It almost did not matter that most critics would pan
both films. He resisted learning how to edit; he was not interested in
the technical details; and he was pleased that he had changed the rules
by which most films are made. He could watch himself and ask, quite
literally, whether he now had a performance that would hold together.
_______________________________________________________________________________________
WILD 90
an excerpt from
THE LIVES OF NORMAN MAILER
a biography by
CARL ROLLYSON
(THE MAKING OF)
WILD 90
Although the reviews of THE DEER PARK were mixed to negative, the play
became a modest hit when it moved from Provincetown to off-Broadway,
running for more than a hundred performances. It is hard to say why a play
reduced from four to three hours running time that "cuts away all dramatic
scaffolding, connective tissue, road signs, guides" should be a success,
except that it had, in Mailer's words, "thirteen wide open characters and
a set of one hundred blackouts or quick scenes I called changes, quick as
the cuts in a movie, for it seemed right to capture the dislocation of life
in Hollywood by a play which played like a movie". Of course, Mailer
recognized that the stage changes could not be accomplished as swiftly
as cuts in a movie, but he intended to move the theatre away from the
conceptof the well-made play to a sense of the actual grain of experience --
its disruptiveness and alogical qualities. Cinematic form intrigued
him; it seemed a good way to capture his open-ended existentialism.
Mailer had been drawn to underground movies, to Andy Warhol's casting
his own friends in roles, working without a script so that a story evolved
out of the director's suggestions and the personalities of the actors. Although
a Warhol flm like KITCHEN was almost impossible to watch because of its slow
scenes, Mailer admired the depiction of real time, the evolution of an aesthetic
that countered the speeded-up editing of conventional movies. Directing and
starring in a movie would give him an opportunity to work with a new form:
"I think I got back to the freshness of it as a kid. I felt the same sort of
interestI felt when I was eighteen and starting to write stories ... to be corny
about it, it was my first love," Mailer later commented to an interviewer.
The inspiration for Mailer's first movie, WILD 90, derived from late night carousing
in a Village bar with Buzz Farber and Mickey Knox, the good friends he had put into
his production of THE DEER PARK. All three favored the mannerisms of tough
Brooklyn hoods as they improvised comic dialogue that Mailer deemed good enough
to be filmed. Using his own money (at a cost of about ten dollars a minute), there
would be no retakes, no script, and no advance planning for the shoot. Filming
quickly on four consecutive nights in March 1967 was supposed to intensify his
characters' emotions, putting them in a loft where they have been holed up for
three weeks. The Prince (Mailer), Buzz Cameo (Buzz Farber), and Twenty Years
(Mickey Knox) trade insults and obscenities for an interminable 90 minutes,
with occasional interruptions by friends and families who visit them.
Mailer wanted to dislocate the predictable, scripted Hollywood plot
that lacked real spontaneity. His actors would have to take charge
of their roles and motivate each other by supplying their own lines.
Mailer recognized that this method meant an enormous amount of
repitition in the dialogue that might bore viewers used to well-crafted
scenarios, yet in compensation the film would be rooted in character,
in the "vanities, bluffs, ego-supports, and downright collapses of front".
As in his other work, in WILD 90 characters struggle to achieve identity,
clothing themselves in tough-guy accents and dirty words -- as thought
this is the only way to get at the root of the self. At the heart of the film
is Mailer himself, The Prince, who (in Laura Adams' words) is a "pug-
nacious, preening hoodlum, full of hot air and an inflated sense of self-
importance. His accents and his posturing are exaggeratedly self-conscious
and at times hilarious". As Mailer later said of his performance, it allowed
him to see himself as a "piece of material". In the editing room he had to
decide whether to "cut myself", a process akin to "getting a psychoanalysis".
As one reviewer puts it, Mailer "hogs the closeups". Pauline Kael called him:
a growling, grunting, waddling little star, a miniaturized
big-brawler, who looks and sounds surprisingly like
Victor McLaglen in THE INFORMER. It must have taken
a Harvard man many years of practice to achieve that
low-light effect; he didn't acquire it just for the movie.
And surely it isn't the Mafia man he pretends to play
but Mailer the fantasist who gets punch-drunk from
shadowboxing. And it's Mailer, the great lover who, in a
scene with his wife, rivals the Burtons at embarrassing us.
And it's Mailer the professional madman who must assert
himself even with a dog -- barking at it until it leaps at him.
Mailer knew WILD 90 was technically flawed: "In the first 45 minutes ...
you can't hear what they're saying ... it sounds as if everybody is talking
through a jock strap". The camera work was sometimes unsteady, back-
grounds were not evenly lighted, focus was a problem, and scene changes
were awkwardly handled. Yet the dynamic between the three men, the ex-
posure of how such men invent a way of relating to each other, had captured
Mailer's fascination with the "acting" that goes on all the time in the every
day ordering of personality that does not often appear on a movie screen.
______________________________________________________________________________________
NOW AVAILABLE ON DVD
FROM
MGM HOME ENTERTAINMENT
TOUGH GUYS DONT DANCE
Writer, ex-con and 40-something bottle-baby Tim Madden (Ryan O'Neal),
who is prone to black-outs, awakens from a two-week bender to discover a
pool of blood in his car, a blond woman's severed head in his marijuana stash,
and the new Provincetown police chief, Captain Luther Regency (Wings Hauser),
shacked up with his former girlfriend Madeleine. As his father Dougy helps
him try to unravel the mystery, he is dogged by the psychotic Capt. Regency,
who has it in for Tim as a car-crash that he was involved in with Madeline
has left her unable to have children. Flashing-back to the past, Tim remembers
the time when he encouraged Madeline to swing with a Li'l Abnerish couple from
down South, the fundamentalist preacher Big Stoop and his Daisy Mae-ish wife,
Patty Lareine, whose ad Tim had come across in 'Screw' magazine. It's on the trip back
that the car crash occurs, since Madeline is incensed that Tim has so enjoyed Patty
Lareine's charms. Except for his father Dougy, who is dying of cancer, Tim suspects
everyone, including his ex-wife Patty Lareine, multi-millionaire prep-school pal
Wardley Meeks III, - and himself - of murder. Patty Lareine had left Big Stoop, married
Wardley, left him in a messy divorce which netted her a rich cash settlement, and
in turn married Tim, whom she fancied. Patty Lareine disappears, and Tim goes on
his fatal bender that has left his memory in shards after receiving a letter from
Madeline informing him that her husband is having an affair with his wife. Tim
remembers his assignation in the local tavern's parking lot with the blond porn
star Jessica Pond, while her effete husband Lonnie Pangborn watched from the
sidelines, distraught. It was Jessica's head in the Hefty bag with his grass, but
soon, another head turns up in his marijuana stash, that of Patty Lareine. We
eventually learn that she and her ex- Wardley, a bisexual skewed towards the
gay side, had been involved in a massive marijuana deal, a deal that also involved
Jessica Pond and Lonnie Pangborn, who are also missing. Will Tim be able to get to
the bottom of the mystery and save himself from another stretch in stir? As his
father Dougy reminds him, "Tough guys don't dance," and Tim has been doing
everything but the Charlston in his attempt to keep ahead of the forces
closing in on him. Will he unravel the case and reclaim his lost manhood?
And what does an old witch trial and the unspeakably lumpen sleazoids
down at the garage at the outskirts of town have to do with all this?
_________________________________________________________________________________________
(1) This begs a question: if the fight between Mailer and Torn happened on the day
after the filming of MAIDSTONE was "over", then why were the camera crews still
hanging around, filming Mailer and his family, along with Torn and another actor,
only to catch the big assassination finale by "accident". And Mailer was still in
his leather vest "costume" (he was in fact removing it when Torn attacked him). It
would appear that the attack might not have been completely unexpected, though
the blood trickling from Mailer's scalp and Rip's torn ear are certainly very real.
__________________________________________________________________________________________
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