Original subtitles

A cult film to me is a film of a certain genre

that has a hard-core following of fans.

The more you see it, the more you see in it.

It becomes like a friend.

Even the bad parts of the movie,

they forgive it.

That movie is pretty rocking,

but, God, nobody knows about it.

My own criteria is just my own experience.

A movie that fell through the cracks.

It has to be an accident.

It's a genius, brilliant movie.

You think it's much, much better than it is.

We know it when we see it.

That's what makes it interesting.

Everybody's is different.

If people are able to look at the film

and you hear them say the lines.

It strikes a chord.

I think a cult film is something

that people think is something they've discovered

and they like.

It comes at you in so many different ways.

Usually it's an art film.

Profanity, murder, bullets, wounds.

It's just funny.

All these films are really good.

They're just misunderstood.

Some people would be like, well,

why don't you just let the movie speak for itself and shut up?

Fuck you.

Every movie is a cult film.

It is the greatest cult film of all time.

Sexually repressed couple murders swingers and eats them.

That'll make them go see it.

And then came the "Time Warp."

Why don't we talk about what's a cult film.

I think in L.A., it is a word

I would never say when I'm trying to get a deal.

Because to Hollywood executives, "cult film" means

that 20 people that were smarter than them liked it

and it lost a lot of money.

- That's right. - That's what a cult movie is.

- Never say that word. - That's very true,

And I don't think anybody starts out to make a cult film.

I was thinking of like cult movies

as you need fellow cultists

to introduce you to something.

Like you need to know about this.

Someone needs to turn you on to it.

And with those movies came out, there was no video.

A cult move... I guess a midnight movie

that was a hit was by definition...

that's sort of what started that in a way.

And then they showed them.

Then it got a whole new reputation

if it played at midnight.

"Rocky Horror Picture Show"

was obviously a movie that nobody got,

nobody understood when it was new.

And then all of a sudden, it became I guess

probably the most successful cult film.

- Yes, definitely. - In terms of midnight shows.

It got the people who were coming and dressing up

and talking to the screen and all that kind of stuff,

and that phenomenon is still going on.

I can't think of another movie that has audience participation.

Or where you were allowed to,

because before, the ushers would come, shut up, you know.

And I would complain.

Now there's audience participation,

people talking on their phone,

which makes me crazy when I go to movies, right?

But the audience participation is encouraged,

but when that movie was made,

they didn't know that was going to happen.

It came out as a regular Hollywood movie and failed.

And then this started. Amazingly it caught on.

And their parents take them to it.

That's the thing. It's safe.

It's a generational thing.

If your kid is in "Rocky Horror,"

you know where they are.

There with gay people. It's all right, you know?

It's a safe place to drop off your kids on Friday night.

Yes, I never knew what a cult film was

till we became one, because there wasn't one.

If I had to pick a film, that's the cult film.

It ran for maybe 20 years at TLA.

The plot of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show"

is that a lost All-American couple

ends up at the doorstep of a mad scientist.

I wonder if you might help us.

You see, our car broke down a few miles up the road.

And seek help.

Brad, I'm frightened.

What kind of a place is this?

He embraces them

and lets them watch him making his perfect man.

And there is this kind of shock,

especially when you first see it.

Just this transvestite with no fear, no shame.

It really is like a rock star.

The reason people think

it's the greatest cult movie of all time

is because it's their movie. They own it.

It's as if they make it every night they go to the theater.

It was the first film that the audience

started talking back to the screen.

How very dare they.

And then people started dressing up.

Because that's what people do,

I mean who were going to the movies at midnight on Friday.

And remember, it was 1975 or '76,

so most of them were chemically altered.

So we have now Patricia Quinn

teaching us how to do the Time Warp. Right.

It's just a jump to the left

and then a step to the ri-ah-ah-ah-ah-right

with your hands on your hips.

I say, would you get to it, give it a good thrust.

"Rocky Horror" paid our rent all the time.

We would have like 30 people in for a 9:30 screening,

415 people in for the midnight screening.

It was something... for years

we could always count on that money.

It has amazing music.

I mean, there are like nine songs in "Rocky Horror"

that are all standouts and catchy

and you want to sing them.

So my parents song is "Science Fiction"

because my dad used to sing it to me when I was a baby.

He got me into "Rocky" when I was three.

If I have one favorite song, probably "Dammit, Janet."

Jim Sharman, the director, deserves so much credit.

It was a very difficult shoot.

It was cold, it was wet.

Susan came home with pneumonia.

Look, I'm cold, I'm wet, and I'm just plain scared.

It seemed to go very smoothly to me.

There weren't any toilets on the set.

And that the most wonderful thing was Tim Curry,

to see him create that character.

And Tim Curry didn't get it till the first rehearsal

when he put on the high heels.

And the minute he put on the shoes, he...

It's hard to imagine anyone

other than Tim Curry in that role.

Tim appealed sexually to men and women.

That was a very key detail.

Come up to the lab and see what's on the slab.

Tim Curry is a friend,

and we went to see it at the height of all that.

He said, let's go down to the Waverly.

There was a whole line,

and he said, let's just go to the box office.

He went to the box office,

and he said, good evening, I'm Tim Curry.

And she turned and she said,

Morris, there's another Tim Curry.

She said, nah, he's not. Ignore him.

So to put his passport... gave her the passport.

Looks at the passport and said,

Morris, this one's got a passport.

So Morris finally came out from behind the cage

and looked and said, oh, shit, you're Tim Curry.

And meanwhile, there are like three Frank-N-Furters

in line behind going, it's Tim Curry.

So it was pre-selfies,

so, you know, nobody could do anything.

But we went in and they let us in for free

to watch the thing.

And he said, well, so much for my charisma.

With "Rocky Horror Picture Show,"

they would throw toast and especially rice

and all kinds of things in the theater.

And we would not clean the theater until the morning,

and during that time,

we developed a really bad mouse infestation

where they would come out

and have a feast in the middle of the night.

The beginning crowd was a little older and it was a little gayer,

and people started just to find the film.

Then it exploded

like no other cult film has exploded audience wise.

At one point there was maybe 170 screens

showing the film around the country at midnight

many times to sold-out houses.

- I adore the fans. - They've always been marvelous.

And it changed my life.

That was the very first time in my entire existence

that I felt like, wow,

this is like where I'm accepted for who I am.

I'm where I'm supposed to be.

And I think that's an experience

that a lot of people get from it.

That film has helped so many people through difficult times,

coming to terms with their sexuality.

That's been a really moving aspect of the whole thing.

And of course, that contributes enormously

to the fact that it is the cult that it is.

This movie gave you permission to be who you are.

You know, don't dream it, be it.

People say to me, what about "Gone With The Wind?"

I say it went.

We're the only film that never, ever left the cinema.

I think Richard O'Brien tapped into something

that already existed

and just gave it shape and gave it form

in a very theatrical way.

I always hope that Richard O'Brien

realizes the profound effect that his little musical

has had on so many people and continues.

And I honestly don't see it finishing anytime soon.

Shut the fuck up, Donny.

Where's the fucking money, you little brat?

What the fuck are you talking about?

What the fuck is with this guy?

Shut the fuck up, Donny.

Leave me the fuck alone!

Shut the fuck up, Donny.

Every "man, dude," every "fuck"

is right where it should be, you know.

And you don't want to mess with it.

Do you have to use so many cuss words?

What the fuck you talking about?

The plot of "The Big Lebowski."

Well, some guy named The Dude gets his rug peed on.

The Dude minds. This will not stand, you know.

This aggression will not stand, man.

And he goes about trying to find out who did it,

and that leads to all kinds of adventures for him.

It's down there somewhere. Let me take another look.

"The Big Lebowski" is basically

a satire of Raymond Chandler gumshoe movies.

I will compensate you to the tune of 10%.

- 100... - Thousand, yes.

Bones or clams or whatever you call them.

They decided to take the least likely detective figure,

in this case an asshole stoner.

Bummer.

Who bowls and drinks White Russians,

the least cool drink in the world,

and is somehow launched

on an odyssey to recover a kidnapped woman.

Where's Bunny?

Well, I thought you might know that, man.

He doesn't know what's going on.

He moves through it in a fog.

You're Bunny.

I'll suck your cock for $1,000.

"The Big Lebowski" needed to be seen and re-seen on cable.

It frankly needed to be seen high to really appreciate it.

Say what you will morally about marijuana use,

but there are ways in which

they really lend themselves to cult movies.

Aah! Aah! Oh!

The movie, you know, when it came out

I think it went over most people's heads.

I'll fuck you in the ass next Wednesday instead.

Whoo!

I didn't really get,

you know, all the nuances initially.

I was a big fan of the Coen Brothers.

I ran into them many years before I read the script.

They said, we're writing something for you.

I said, oh, great.

And then I read this script,

and it wasn't like anything I'd ever done before.

It seemed like they had, you know, been spying on me

in my early twenties or something, you know.

He's the man for his time and place.

Everyone wants to be a guy who never grows up.

So the kids see this,

but it's really men who are 25 years older than that,

and they... especially guys, I think...

you know, relate to that.

It's kind of like a whole philosophy

and a way of looking at life.

Okay, sir. You're a Lebowski, I'm a Lebowski.

That's terrific.

Why is it such a cult classic?

It's just a damn good film.

It's so well made.

I'd take "Big Lebowski" over "Kingpin" any day personally.

No, I really love "Big Lebowski."

And, you know, I love "Kingpin," too.

They're different. They shouldn't be compared

just because they're about bowling.

Because if you're going to talk about pure bowling,

we're the better bowling movie.

Talk about a better movie, they'll win I think.

The kind of acting I admire

looks like you don't see any effort.

There's just, oh, it's just spilling out.

And that's what this movie is.

But the spill, each thing

is such a beautiful little curly cue, you know.

And you just find more and more cool things

to dig as you watch it.

"The Big Lebowski" is a cult movie

because it's constantly surprising you.

There is not a scene you can predict.

There is not an element

that fits together with any other element.

You are always being thrown off track by it

even if you seen it 100 times.

You think I'm fucking around here? Mark it zero.

And it has some of the most quotable lines.

You see what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass?

It gets funnier as you see it.

And I've seen and people shout. They know the lines.

Nobody fucks with the Jesus.

And it really hit me

like the third time I saw it 10 years later.

I was like, this is hilarious, this movie.

I have a bumper sticker that says...

You know, that's just like your opinion, man.

I didn't get "The Big Lebowski."

And then I saw it again and I got it.

And it's one of those movies that every time you see it

it makes you laugh and there's things about it you love

and you repeat the dialogue lines.

The Dude abides.

The Dude abides, you know.

That's just your opinion, man. You know what I mean?

It don't matter to Jesus. You know what I mean?

- I am the walrus. - I am the walrus, you know.

It goes on and on and on, and it's really funny.

So favorite scenes, well,

you know, Turturro, I love watching his stuff.

I have to say, I've gotten a lot of sex mail

about "The Big Lebowski" from men and women.

So I don't know what that means.

It must have touched a nerve.

For my own stuff, I like that scene

with me in the back of the Big Lebowski's limo.

Hey, careful, man. There's a beverage here. Hey!

What in God's holy name are you blathering about?

Well, I'll tell you what I'm blathering about.

I've got information, man. New shit has come to light.

New shit has come to light, you know, that scene.

I like that scene.

My favorite scene in "The Big Lebowski"

has always been they're scattering somebody's ashes,

but they didn't check the forecast that day.

The wind was blowing in, as they say,

from Wrigley Field. Got a little messy.

And the... blows on The Dude

and The Dude gets pissed off at Walter

and Walter hugs him, you know.

There's a warmth. I almost feel...

like a little tear will come up, you know.

I get a little ferklempt, you know, when that happens.

It's a warm feeling, you know.

The movie has so many of those.

Jeffrey.

Maude?

Love me.

That's my robe.

Every once in a while, I like to invite my family

to come to the set and see what I've been up to.

And I thought, oh, well, this will be a good day.

The dream sequence, you know.

It's like a Busby Berkeley thing, and it'll be fun.

And then when the day came,

I think why the hell did I invite my wife and my daughters

to see me go through these girls legs

and look up at their vaginas, you know?

You know, what was I thinking?

I look up like that and I see this pubic bush,

these tufts of pubic hair coming out of this leotard,

and I go, oh, my God.

And the next lady has, you know, more incredible bush.

And they had gone to the makeup guy

and gotten crêpe hair and stuffed it in their leotards,

you know, so it gave everyone a good laugh except me.

I was kind of horrified.

But I was surprised when the movie first came out

that it wasn't a big hit,

because it made me laugh, you know.

I thought it was pretty great, but it didn't do much.

I think there is something about turning your friends on

to something that's rare, that not too many people know about

that's exciting for both parties, you know.

So I think "Lebowski" kind of cashes in on that.

Well, I'm always happy to hear somebody's a big fan of my films

for reasons that I don't always understand.

But, hey, go for it.

black and stacked.

When Foxy Brown comes to town, all the brothers gather round.

The assignment was a black woman revenge movie.

A good revenge story will always get the audience,

whether it's revenge in a spaghetti western,

a blaxploitation, biker film,

the good revenge story always gets the audience hooked.

- What do you want with me? - My name's Coffin.

Lubelle Coffin's is my little sister.

Lubelle?

She's a smack addict at 11,

and you gave it to her, you dirty shake!

Please!

And they coined blaxploitation,

because you get "Boxoffice," the exhibitor's magazine

to see what you want to license for your theater chain.

And so exploitation means for adult.

It means profanity.

White motherfucker.

- What are you doing? - Put that down.

You want to spit on me and make me crawl?

I'm going to piss on your grave tomorrow.

Murder, bullets, wounds, gore,

that's exploitation of, you know, people.

You're showing that.

And so they turned blaxploitation

to explain that it's for a black audience.

Marketing said a lot of black people go to the movies,

and they like to see themselves in the movies.

And so, of course, they made movies

about what they thought were the black people of the time,

and they were all criminals in dashikis

with huge Afro hairdos.

Now, I don't do no leather work, man.

No whips, ropes, chains, and none of those fetish freaks.

Just plain sex.

I think blaxploitation films

would be seen very differently by all of us

if no one had ever invented the term "blaxploitation."

It's really horrible word when you think about it.

It's kind of racist, and it really makes those movies

sound like they are the lowest of the low.

Even within the black community,

within respectable elements of the black community,

considered it to be, you know, demeaning somehow.

Where actually what they were

were pretty interesting low-budget action films

that were expressing something brand-new about society.

So you see, it's this vicious combination

of big business and government

which has kept our sisters prostitutes

and our brothers dope peddlers.

But the interesting thing

was there were these female heroines,

Cleopatra Jones and Foxy Brown,

and Pam Grier playing a lot of them,

and obviously they influenced Quentin Tarantino,

because, you know, he made movies in that image.

The "we" I see in you and me

got one motherfucking thing to talk about.

One thing, and that's what you are willing to do for me.

Those were like positive depictions.

She was cleaning up her own neighborhood.

Jesus! You saved my beautiful black ass.

- You really did. - Mm-hmm.

How it started was I had done four films for Roger Corman,

and then did "Black Mama, White Mama."

And then they said, oh, my God, her audience

is just, you know, packed with people

coming four or five times, buying a lot of concessions.

Oh, my, she's just...

And I'm like, I just wanted to do four or five for tuition.

I'm done.

She's sweet brown sugar with a touch of spice.

If you see a man anywhere, send him in,

because I do need a man.

So now you've got a very pro-feminist movie

and you've got a black film.

Okay, it's not just like Fred Williamson

we're looking at now, or Isaac Hayes.

We've got sexy looking Pam Grier.

So it's sort of two-for-one of those films.

Black exploitation was a terminology

that I never really understood.

Like, it means that somebody was being exploited.

Here now you have black actors

finally working and making a dollar,

a little more than they made before.

You have a black audience

that now the blacks in the film are the heroes.

So I never really quite understood

who was being exploited.

How much time do you have?

About Pam Grier, I could go on and on and on.

We all flocked to see her

because of the things that she brought to those movies.

And every one of those things,

whether it's Foxy Brown or Coffy,

there is a conviction.

And she's carried that conviction

in everything she does since then.

I'm told that you are a dangerous man, Arturo.

I like that.

When the studio first called me in and talked about this,

they said that the reason they wanted to shoot the picture

and get it done quickly

was because Warners was doing a picture called...

"Cleopatra Jones" starring Tamara Dobson.

Which was a black woman star doing an action movie.

The producer had originally brought the project to AIP,

and AIP has thought it was great.

They wanted to do it,

and then the producer went behind their back

and got a better deal with Warner Bros.,

and so AIP said we want to get our own out fast, you know.

The studio was asking me about other actresses,

and my position was I wrote this for Pam Grier.

She has demonstrated already her capabilities.

She's made about six or seven pictures already,

and she's the only one

who really can bring this character to life.

And the very next day Jack Hill called me

and said I'm doing a picture in the Philippines.

Want to come? I said, uh, yeah.

And he told me about this girl that he found

who was a receptionist at American International Films,

was absolutely gorgeous, dynamic, smart, funny.

He went on and on and on.

I said okay, okay, I get it, I get it.

All right, let's just do this.

Got to the Philippines, and I met Pam Grier.

And I went, oh, my God,

everything he said was absolutely true.

I mean, Pam and I did six films together.

That was kind of unheard of at the time.

You philandering fornicating bastard!

You went off with that skinny honky for two days

and gonna come back here and call me honey?

And the first director of that deal was Jack Hill for "Coffy."

And I was surprised, you know, because it was urban,

and he included me in the development process.

It wasn't just her personality and her authority,

but her knowledge.

I said, okay, Jack, have you been to the 'hood?

If you haven't, you need to go.

You need to see, feel, and hear.

For example, I worked with her very closely on the script.

Certain ideas like sharpening a bobby pin as a deadly weapon.

Who'd ever think of that?

Using wire coat hangers

to twist so that she got all these hooks.

Hey, what the hell are you doing?

Get away from there you...

Aah!

- And slicing it. - I'd never think of that.

And the greatest one was putting razor blades in her hair

so if she gets into a fight and somebody grabs her hair,

which women are liable to do...

- Aah! - Aah!

After all the other stuff, I mean, using a gun wrap, okay.

Easy. No problem.

Coffy was kind of clever that Pam Grier did

because she found unique ways to kill people with.

Kind of unique, you know.

It's not something you expect, you know.

So that kind of made it work.

But then you;re too busy looking at Pam.

You don't really care what Pam does.

My favorite scene

was Pam's great moment at the end

when Pam's boyfriend, her lover,

is trying to talk her out of what...

he's just ordered her to be killed, you know,

and she survived.

And he's trying to talk her out of it.

Power changed things for our people.

I want to get all that money

back into the hands of black people like you and me.

Bullshit. You're just selling out

to the white gangsters and businessmen.

You're worse than they are, and I loved you.

I loved you so much.

People in the audience are saying, don't listen to him.

Don't listen to him, you know.

So in a sense, what Pam did with that scene

was so great for her as an actress

that I really remember that.

However, more than once women have told me

that like their favorite scene was when she holds the shotgun.

This is the end of your rotten life,

you motherfucking dope pusher.

Pam Grier, that one chick hit squad

who creamed do you as Coffy

is back to do a job on the mob

as Foxy Brown.

Sounds like a public menace.

Sure do.

Aah!

The chick with drive who don't take no jive.

The studio had such a success with "Coffy."

When you have to rush out a sequel

because of a surprise hit, you know,

you tend to use the ideas that you rejected for the first one.

"Foxy Brown" is another revenge story where her boyfriend,

his murder is the result of a betrayal by her own brother.

Aah!

Now I only got so much control,

and I'm liable to put one of these right between your eyes

no matter what mama would say.

And so you have a real conflict.

And along the way, she has to pretend to be a hooker

and, you know, the usual things

in order to bring about what she wants to do.

The younger generations today,

which is like maybe three generations later,

is still really into it.

And in fact, the other day I saw on the Internet, eBay,

somebody's doing statuettes of Coffy and Foxy Brown.

You know, hand-painted and selling for hundreds of dollars.

You know, who could imagine such a thing?

Now, of course, you know,

they would probably give her an Image Award

because of her durability

and the fact that she has lasted for so long

and because now it's possible

for the generations who saw those movies

to appreciate that kind of credibility,

that kind of conviction.

It's just too bad that she didn't get enough of it

when she was really active and really doing those movies.

I am among other pioneers.

That for me is...

You know, I don't want to overuse the word awesome,

awesome sauce, or anything like that.

It is an honor.

Let me tell you of something

that happened right here in our own city.

You probably read about it in the papers.

However I'll give you the real facts behind the case.

The original "Reefer Madness" is an agitprop movie.

It was made to warn people off of smoking marijuana,

which was the devil's weed.

And it's so earnest and so stern that it's hilarious

because it's almost the definition of camp.

Failed seriousness.

Isn't it true that you have acquired a certain harmful habit

through association with certain undesirable people?

The basic plot of "Reefer Madness" is a woman and a man.

- Where do you put it? - You got a hollow leg?

Who are kind of pushing marijuana on to teenagers.

That's the one I was telling you about.

Very nice.

It's a propaganda film put out in the 1930s

to warn parents of the evils and danger, of peril

of your children succumbing to the reefer.

Come on, Bill.

It's one of the only movies

that you can see clear propaganda.

- Rape... - No, no!

Suicide...

Aah!

Reckless driving...

Attempted murder...

Aah!

So originally the propaganda came out of a church group

that paid for this film.

Good morning, Miss. We're from the police department.

So then after that, a producer purchased the film,

and re-cut it and then pushed it out

onto the exploitation film circuit into perpetuity.

Shut up! Shut up!

So that in the mid-seventies,

it sort of reemerged as a cult classic.

There was this whole group of people

that would go to midnight movies and smoke weed in the theater.

Buy me some reefers.

I think "Reefer Madness" became a cult classic

because it is so funny and so serious

and because everybody was smoking dope.

Wow. Like if the church group

that put this film out

knew what the film was being used for,

they're just rolling over in their graves.

Do I understand you wish to plead guilty

to a charge of fostering moral delinquency

in the case of William Harper?

Yes, yes, I'm guilty. I am.

If you're going to watch "Reefer Madness,"

I highly recommend you getting high.

That's how to watch it.

The next tragedy may be that of your daughter

or your son

or yours or yours or yours.

"Freaks." Something I've seen twice.

You don't see that around.

That is a real cult film for me.

It's primal. The fear is, oh, this could happen to me.

If somebody is going back

and looking through the history of cult cinema,

one of the earliest ones has to be Tod Browning's "Freaks."

There are a lot of great horror movies of the time,

but if you want one that is still really shocking,

you know, the first cult movie,

that's the one you go with and it's "Freaks."

To my mind, it's the scariest movie of all time

because it's made with real people.

The authenticity that's there

is at once fascinating, repulsive, exciting.

It's a dangerous film

where you as the audience don't quite know what to feel.

It was a film that touched me, you know,

because you saw something that was a little bit disturbing.

And then you saw beyond the disturbing figure

and you saw a person that was a human being.

I thought "Freaks" was a spectacular film.

"Freaks" is about a circus, sort of a PT Barnum-esque circus

of people who have deformities and maladies.

It was made in the early thirties,

so it became shocking and salacious

and it was kind of buried.

People didn't want to go see it.

A tragic love triangle

between a little couple and this larger woman.

She's the most beautiful big woman I have ever seen.

Who comes in, breaks up the couple to get the man's money.

Oh, it's so good to be rubbed.

A fortune, and I have him like that.

And everything goes wrong.

To me you're a man,

but to her you're only something to laugh at.

- Let them laugh. - They're swine.

The other freaks welcome her in

because, hey, you're nice to us. Thank you.

We'll make her one of us.

There's the marriage scene

where all of the people of the circus

are sitting around the wedding table.

They are welcoming this normal woman to their table

and saying you're now one of us.

We accept her, one of us.

Gooble-gobble, gooble-gobble.

And they start chanting "one of us."

One of us. One of us.

Gooble-gobble, gooble-gobble.

One of us, one of us.

We accept you, one of us.

- One of us. - One of us.

And I think that must be how it feels to be in the audience

watching a cult film with a bunch of other weirdos.

It's one of us. You have joined our club.

- Freaks! Freaks! - Get out of here!

Then they find out the plot,

and then they take their disgusting revenge on her

and make her a freak just like them,

and it's really upsetting.

My father had told me about "Freaks" when I was a kid,

and then one day it was playing at the Elgin.

And so I went to see it, and having certain expectations

because my father was like scared of it,

it freaked him out.

But when I saw it, I really identified with the freaks

and I liked them.

And I love the pinheads.

They were just like sweet children.

It just felt like what a great community.

And the fact that those horrible, horrible

what we're supposed to identify with

is the like regular human beings, you know,

the sexy woman and the strong man, you know,

I thought they got what they deserved.

It was like, yeah, get her.

Tod Browning was the director of this movie,

and he was coming off "Dracula,"

which was an enormous hit.

And so he sort of could kind of do whatever he wanted.

Browning was no slouch.

It is a genuinely terrifying, wonderfully made picture.

We're aghast because these nice people are turning deadly

because somebody has wronged them.

Believe it or not, there she is.

They take their revenge and make her one of them.

Tod Browning really is invested in his characters

and what their lives are like.

He's not inviting you to laugh at them.

Part of what's fascinating about "Freaks"

is the way he's like,

and here they are hanging up their laundry.

And here they are falling in love.

It's fascinating to me

how we've come this far since 1932,

and we still don't have movies

that treat people with, you know,

severe physical disabilities

with that same level of respect that you see in "Freaks."

- Come on, Venus. - The bigger lady's baby's born.

I mean, it's almost shocking

that this movie is still shocking.

"Freaks" ended up being

one of the first cult movies of all time

mostly through notoriety I believe.

Like individual censors of different counties and cities

didn't want to show it,

and so that just drove interest up through the roof.

And so people would go and seek it out.

And there would be kind of, you know, midnight screenings.

Midnight movies weren't a thing back then.

It's a movie that could have very easily become lost

or, you know, been destroyed.

It took the actual resiliency of people who liked the movie

and thought it was worth preserving

that it has continued the way it has today.

Aah!

Well, now you're talking my language, David Lynch land.

I visited it and it's something.

I mean, this did not look like anything you've ever seen,

and I've seen surrealistic movies all my life,

so it's like, oh, my God.

This is really from another place.

David Lynch has a cult following.

There's no doubt.

He might be the cultiest director for a lot of reasons.

There are people that will see anything that he does.

It's a very nightmarish movie,

and it definitely is one of the ultimate cult movies.

It's the kind of movie that you see with an audience at midnight

in a grind house or even an art house,

because a lot of critics, mainstream critics,

embraced the film because of its strangeness.

"Eraserhead" is about a man

who cannot come to terms with marriage and a child.

Period. End of story.

Now, how that is framed

is enough to send you to the mental ward.

How to describe "Eraserhead?"

Well, what does David Lynch tell us?

He tells us it's a dream of dark and disturbing things,

and I think that's good enough.

You know, Hollywood with the whole idea of stars and things,

I sure wasn't into, you know.

I didn't want big names.

I wanted people that were obscure

because if you're going into the netherworld,

you don't want to go in with Chuck Heston.

"Eraserhead" is about a guy courting a girl,

and her family's kind of weird.

- We've got chicken tonight. - Strangest damn things.

They're man-made. Little damn things.

Smaller than my fist, and they're new.

And they have this baby that's deformed.

And there's this pretty lady living at the end of the hall

that this guy would rather be with

than his wife and the sick baby.

But it's kind of creepier than that,

and some people really see deeper things in "Eraserhead,"

which will make it a cult movie forever.

Anything goes, you know.

Like if somebody sees it

and wants to make a political film out of it,

you know, they can do that, you know.

It's fine with me because it's not fair for me to say,

oh, you didn't get it, you know.

Because the film is so abstract.

I was in the middle of it

and I asked the kid working for me,

I said, you get David on the phone.

I want this film.

And he looked at me and said, you're crazy.

The cultural significance of "Eraserhead"

is it introduced this genius filmmaker to the world.

He was soon embraced by Hollywood

and producers like Dino de Laurentiis,

who gave him a shot at "Dune" and "Blue Velvet"

and of course Mel Brooks,

who gave him the keys to "The Elephant Man,"

which has a lot of "Eraserhead" in it, you know.

"Eraserhead" and "The Elephant Man"

are very good companion movies in some ways.

And in some ways,

"Eraserhead" is the last I think true cult film,

because I don't think David Lynch made it

trying to like cash into this audience

or this midnight movie circuit.

I think he made it as an expression of things

that were very important to him as an author

and as something he'd want to see.

It's got special effects.

I mean, the most amazing thing in "Eraserhead"

is the creation of that little monster baby,

which really was sort of as extraordinary

as the one in "Alien."

We came very close to a future

where "Eraserhead" didn't exist.

He premieres it at a film festival here in L.A.

24 people show up, and that's it.

It could have died, you know.

The next night, 25 people show up. Okay.

And then from there,

a local theater is convinced just put it on at midnight,

and it ran for a year.

"Eraserhead" played seven nights a week.

By the way, most of the other midnight movies

only played Friday and Saturday at midnight.

Weirdly I live in Philadelphia,

and David Lynch went to art school here

at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts,

and he used to live in North Philadelphia near the morgue.

And that neighborhood where he lived

is now called the Eraserhood.

So it's 40 years after "Eraserhead"

there's a neighborhood named after it.

Henry and Mary got caught in the past,

and there's not a whole lot happening that is normal.

Mary?

Mother.

There's this strange combination

that David Lynch does

of the most bizarre images and situations

with like regular reactions,

like this like baby thing that's like suffering.

And he goes, oh, you are sick.

Oh, you are sick.

That's what you would say

if your kid started coughing and complaining,

and you'd go, stop it.

But it's this monster.

I actually think it's one of the only cult movies

that really feels like a work of art.

It's so beautifully crafted.

It really is like a dream.

And then that lady singing in heaven, everything is fine,

and you just go, what am I watching and where am I?

I think we would appreciate "Eraserhead"

as an organic masterpiece,

as something that seems to have come

directly from the churning mind of a unique individual

who somehow has a pipeline from his id to the screen.

"Eraserhead" is this strange combination

of art house and universal and its emotions.

I think that's the combination

that's made it linger for so long

is there is something in there.

It's not just cold and inaccessible.

There's a heart in there that you can feel.

"Pink Flamingos" was definitely a midnight hit.

It played for 10 years in some theaters, the biggest ones.

But how that was marketed is completely different.

It never opened at once.

It took three years to open around the country.

We go to the city, we'd start, we do the press.

It would be one week, and then it would go to two weeks,

three weeks, four weeks.

And then we moved to the next city.

I saw "Pink Flamingos"

when it was at the height of his popularity at midnight

when the whole audience is roaring,

and then I'd see it in court

when I was charged with obscenity

at 10 A.M. with 12 jurors.

It was obscene.

It was obscene then at 10:00 in the morning.

It was like, oh, my God. I'm going to jail forever.

And I never won the case.

Even after the Museum of Modern Art bought a print,

I thought, well, here's proof we're art.

Uh-huh. We were guilty every single time.

So I just paid the fine. It was cheaper than the lawyer.

Because in a courtroom at 10 A.M., it is obscene.

"Pink Flamingos" is an object of modern art.

It transcends cinema.

It is cinema as object, as statue, as painting.

There are no other films like "Pink Flamingos."

Kill everyone now.

Condone first-degree murder.

Advocate cannibalism. Eat shit.

Filth are my politics. Filth is my life.

I mean, "Pink Flamingos"

has probably soared to the top of the cult list

because how many movies

have a fat drag queen eating poodle turds?

Well, I first saw "Pink Flamingos" when I was 15,

and it just scared the shit out of me.

And the next packet you bring me

is getting shoved right up your little ass.

Can you comprehend that?

It's then kind of rediscovered

in the day when there was a whole network

of repertory cinemas that they would program these films.

And there they would find a totally different audience

that appreciated the film many times on a very different level

than what was originally intended.

With "Pink Flamingos," you had a crowd coming in,

and they've been warned about it, they watch it,

and many times it's the only time they watch the film.

There grossed out, they leave,

they tell more people, those people come in.

Well, the plot of "Pink Flamingos"

is that there's two families in Baltimore

that are vying for the prize

of the filthiest people in the world.

And they go to different extremes.

You have the Connie and Raymond Marble crowd

that kidnaps women,

impregnates them with their butler.

How would you like to fuck my chauffeur?

He's got a real horse dick on him.

Fucking ball of shit!

- I said shut up! - Just shut up.

I'm talking when I come down here.

And then sells the babies off to lesbian couples.

But they're almost like a one-hit wonder.

They don't have much else in the way of filth.

Where Divine and her family,

they have all kinds of depravities

and a whole group of sickos.

And of course they win

by not only capturing and executing Raymond and Connie,

but they also at the end prove without a doubt

at the last scene that they are the filthiest people.

At least Divine is the filthiest person in the world.

When I got to know Divine, I asked him how he did it.

And he said, well, we fed the poodle prime steak

all week before we shot the scene.

So I guess it got to the point

where I thought anything that comes out of that dog is prime.

So it's the only way I could face it.

I think "Pink Flamingos"

is considered one of the great cult films of all time

because it continually tops itself.

It starts out pretty bat shit crazy

with people you don't see every day, especially in 1971.

They were not dying their pubic hair red in 1971.

And you have this sort of carnival,

and it's just, it's hypnotic.

In other words, we want to know

how we can play her the most.

How we can make her life as miserable as possible.

It's really her mother Edie the Egg Lady

that's probably the craziest one,

her in a pigpen craving eggs from her beloved Egg Man.

I'm in here. I hear The Egg Man.

In here. In here, Mr. Egg Man.

Eggs! Eggs! Oh, help! God! God!

He was using people like Edie and, you know, Mink Stole,

and Mary Vivian Pearce was so exotic.

Does murder make you happy?

Murder merely relieves tension, Mr. Curzan.

For murder to bring happiness one must already be happy.

What's not to like?

Well, I think John Waters

was definitely making movies for a cult audience,

and he knew it.

But there was nothing calculated about it.

I mean, I literally watch this movie not even as a comedy.

I couldn't believe I shared a planet

with the people in this movie.

Oh, my God. What a horrible photograph.

My first wanted poster and I have to look just awful.

And here you have a couple intersecting cults.

You have the cult of John Waters,

who is this brilliant comic satiric visionary,

and then you have the cult of Divine.

Why, I haven't fallen in love for three whole days.

I'm just itching to find somebody

with a little imagination.

John Waters is this weirdo kid

who wants to be a filmmaker, is passionate about it,

and gets all of his friends involved.

It becomes their neighborhood project.

He was making movies really for himself.

I mean, they expressed who he was, his vision.

He befriends a kid named Glenn,

who is going to grow up to become Divine.

And he sees in Glenn what Glenn doesn't even see it himself yet.

John Waters is able to elevate his friend,

this quiet guy that nobody knew, into a superstar.

I had no idea that Divine was really a man.

I just got caught up in the illusion of it,

and I thought it was kind of a horror movie, but mesmerizing.

So of course I had to go back and see it again and again.

To me, like, my foundational memory of "Pink Flamingos"

is dragging a bunch of my friends

to go see it in the movie theater

when I was in high school.

And when we left, they turned to me and they said,

you never get to pick the movie again.

The one scene that sticks out for me,

when they start licking the furniture and the staircase

of Connie and Raymond Marble's house.

That's to kind of put their filth into the house there,

and I was like, what the hell is this?

And you have these situations

which are increasingly ridiculous,

but logical into its own world.

So it's really a masterpiece of satiric writing.

He really made them feel like documentaries.

It's an encounter with the absurd.

And, of course, like all of John Waters movies,

it's people who think they're living in a Hollywood fantasy

and who are really living in a tract house in Baltimore.

That is what I think gives it its appeal

is the people realizing

they're trying to make a great big Hollywood epic,

but they're doing it for a dollar and a half.

It's a little bit of a different kind of cult film

because it wasn't a midnight cult film,

it was a mainstream cult film.

Harold was born with a silver spoon in his mouth.

He lives in the lap of luxury,

has a mother who is completely obsessed with status.

I had them take away that monstrous thing of yours

and send this one round instead.

He hates that. He's depressive.

And in an attempt to piss her off and get her attention,

he stages these elaborate phony suicides.

Harold, please!

That never quite piss her off enough.

I suppose you think that's very funny, Harold.

So he keeps doing them.

I can't stand much more of this.

And he goes to other people's funerals

just to be around death.

Yeah, it's a delightful movie

about the unlikely story

of an older lady and a younger fella.

Ah-choo!

And of course it appealed to me,

yes, that alienated, you know, kid

and, you know, feeling he had to find his own authentic way

outside of his family's bourgeois identity.

That's kind of up my alley a little bit.

It is time you settled down

and stopped flitting away your talents

on these little amateur theatrics,

these little divertissements.

no matter how psychologically purging they may be.

I mean, him trying to kill himself,

and then he meets this free spirit, you know,

who happens to be, you know, much older,

and like she helps him come into his own.

Like some licorice?

No, thank you.

Three reasons that "Harold and Maude"

Ruth Gordon, Ruth Gordon, Ruth Gordon.

You have in this film a character,

an actor so perfect you want to hang out with her.

You might want to date her.

Definitely Maude is the coolest person you've met.

I always get the sense

that she could maybe see where, you know,

where his life would go if he doesn't have this kind of,

you know, friendship or relationship

where he's able to express himself.

One of the most interesting things about his performance

is the way if you watch him reacting to Ruth Gordon,

there's such a kind of fascination he shows

just with his, you know, kind of silent reactions with her

that it really sells the relationship.

That he's genuinely really beguiled by this woman

and that she's really breaking through to him

in a way that other people haven't.

We were one of the few people to leave the theater

because the theater was completely empty.

And we were thinking right away,

oh, we've got to tell people about this movie.

This is a completely disarming film,

and there's nothing like it.

Did no business, and then sometime in the seventies,

people started playing it.

This is even before like video, I think.

Like I remember I was at college

and they played "Harold and Maude."

And it was like a two, three year old movie

and just a little masterpiece.

But at the time, I mean,

it had a devoted following of people.

But also its repeatability.

They would come to the film and they'd see it many times.

No interaction. They just loved the film.

It's interesting that "The Graduate"

came out a few years before and did very well.

It was a huge hit.

But you can see some connection between the two.

This is the sickest, most perverted thing

that ever happened to me.

And you do what you want, but I'm getting the hell out.

It's not as much of a generational statement

as "The Graduate,"

so it kind of got lost for a little while

before, you know, it's audience eventually found it.

And what's his name plays the song at the end, you know.

The music of Cat Stevens

I think had a lot to do with it also.

Cat Stevens is the third star of "Harold and Maude."

I love the whole movie, but my favorite scene

is a moment that's so subtle

I didn't even notice it the first time I saw the movie.

So Harold and Maude just had a long fun day,

and Harold says to Maude, you're beautiful.

And she says, oh, you make me feel like a schoolgirl.

And he takes her hand, and while she's talking, he looks down.

And for a second, he sees a tattoo of a number on her arm.

And in that moment, you realize

that she's been through something horrible

and that she's seen death and that she's experienced loss.

And this is why she now lives her life for love

and for experience and for the things that matter.

And I find it very moving. A very moving moment.

That's one of the movies

people will say I've seen 20, 30 times.

And if you see it 30 times, you bring 30 new people with it.

The cult movie that set the dial at 11, "Spinal Tap."

I've never been on a movie set

that people don't know a lot of lines from "Spinal Tap"

or met a musician who couldn't recite the whole movie.

I remember Steve Tyler,

the first time we were face-to-face with Steve Tyler,

he went, oh, too close, too close.

We are Spinal Tap from the UK. You must be the USA.

This movie was the first of its kind, a mockumentary.

You put a greased naked woman on all fours

with a dog collar around her neck and a leash

and a man's arm extended out up to here holding on to the leash

and pushing a black glove in her face to sniff it.

You don't find that offensive?

No. You should've seen the cover they wanted to do.

I think I was on a date when I saw it,

and I think the date at the end of the movie

said, so is that a real... are they a real group?

She didn't get the mock of the mentary.

People came up to me afterwards,

and they said, why would you make a movie

about a band that nobody's ever heard of

and a band that's so bad?

Why wouldn't you make a movie

about the Rolling Stones or the Beatles or something?

And I tried to explain it to them.

Yeah, you ever watch "Saturday Night Live?"

They do takeoffs.

And satire's strange.

It's one of those things where it takes a while

for people to really understand what's going on.

I understand, Nigel, you and David

originally started the band back in... when was it? 1964?

- So we became The Originals, - Right.

And we had to change our name, actually.

Well, there was another group in the East End

called The Originals.

I think that people who love the film loved it right away.

And I've had a lot of people tell me stories

about going to see it

in a half empty or completely empty theater.

It has to be the audience finding the film

rather than the film finding the audience.

Nobody even heard of that before.

This movie defined it.

It, you know, it started a whole stream of this style.

We want the parody

not just to be of the world that we're satirizing,

but we wanted to do a parody of the style,

of the handheld style.

And the best way to do that would be to improvise it.

The Boston gig has been canceled.

What? Yeah.

I wouldn't worry about it, though.

It's not a big college town.

So the script wasn't a script.

It was actually an outline.

And we actually tried to write the screenplay.

We spent about half a day.

We did shoot it like a documentary.

And documentaries, as you'll find out

as you put this together, you know,

90% of everything I'm saying is going to go away.

Who's in here? No one.

And then in here, there's a little guy. Look.

So it's a complete catastrophe. No, you're right.

The best thing obviously is it goes to 11.

Who's ever going to... We use that.

It's in our vernacular now. It's ridiculous.

So it's very, very special

because if you can see... Yeah.

The numbers all go to 11.

What we do is if we need that extra push over the cliff,

you know what we do?

Put it up to 11. 11. Exactly.

One louder.

Why don't you just make 10 louder

and make 10 to be the top number

and make that a little louder?

These go to 11.

I'm at this fundraiser and Elon Musk comes.

This is years and years ago.

And he's got this new car that he shows me.

He says, look at this car. It was the Tesla.

It was the first Tesla ever.

He says, look at this.

I said, oh, that's a really cool looking car.

He says, let me show you something.

He takes me in the car

and the volume on the radio goes to 11 in the Tesla.

And the air-conditioning goes to 11.

He says, I love "Spinal Tap." I just put that in there.

That was like the biggest kick of all.

There's something so potent

about the fantasy of wanting to be in a rock band,

wanting to be a rock star, wanting to command arenas,

that even this group of chuckleheads

with their petty rivalries

and their ridiculous star mannerisms,

somehow or other we find them so compelling as human beings,

we want to stay with them.

We don't want that Odyssey to end.

You had in director Rob Reiner someone who loved actors,

who loved performers, who wanted them to make him laugh,

who let them go on and on and find the characters

and the conflicts in front of your eyes.

I was casting for "Princess Bride."

You know, Sting came in to meet with me.

He says, I've seen "Spinal Tap" like 50 times.

He says, and every time I watch it,

I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

It's genius. I mean, it really is.

That is the most accurate music film ever made.

People said they wore out the, you know, the videotape

when they watched it on tour buses and stuff.

We got a lot of that kind of stuff.

Because we were close to the bone.

Even the ridiculous parts are exactly true life.

This is to me the epitome of why "Spinal Tap" is good.

Stonehenge.

Best production values we've ever had on stage.

But we haven't got the equipment.

So we had this idea for Stonehenge,

and were going to do the theme of it

and he writes it on the napkin

and it says 18 inches, it's supposed to be 18 feet.

And the little thing comes down from the ceiling

and the dwarf stands around it, duh, duh, duh.

And then Black Sabbath, they come out with a tour

and they have a Stonehenge theme.

And our movie comes out about a week or two later

after they start the tour.

And they get furious at us

like we stole the idea of Stonehenge from them.

I mean, it's moronic.

It took us three years to make this movie.

I mean, what do they think, we shot the movie, edited it,

put it together, and got it in the theater like in a minute?

I mean, that's the epitome of how dumb those people are,

and that's why I think

we were successful in capturing their true nature.

It's such a fine line between stupid and...

- And clever. - Yeah.

It's just that little turnabout.

My favorite scene, the one that makes me laugh consistently

is Nigel's solo stuff.

There's about a nine minute version of just that,

which is all funny, by the way.

They just kind of grabbed the middle of it.

The Fred Willard stuff at the Air Force Base kills me

because, you know, none of us knew what he was going to say.

Now let me explain a bit about what's going on.

This is our monthly At Ease weekend.

It gives us a chance to kind of let down our hair,

although I see you all have a head start on us.

These haircuts wouldn't pass military muster, believe me.

Although I shouldn't talk.

My hair is getting a little shaggy, too.

Better not get too close to you.

They'll think I'm part of the band.

It was a great experience.

I mean, it was just five weeks shooting,

but it was 2 1/2 years getting the script together

and writing the backstory

so that we'd be improvising from the same bank of memories.

And then another year and a half cutting the film.

So it wasn't like working with some other director, you know,

and it wasn't like working with Rob

in any other film I don't think.

We were all the first generation of rock 'n roll,

all of us.

We were about all around the same age.

And so we love rock 'n' roll,

but we're also satirists and we can also make fun of it.

And I think one of the things that kind of worked...

and somebody was saying, you know,

there are heavy metal bands that watch it

that, you know, they're being made fun of,

but they still enjoy it, you know.

Because there's a reverence to the music

at the same time that we're making fun of it.

I think that, plus the fact that it's just funny.

One thing cult movies can be is truly subversive.

That's probably part of the appeal of a lot of cult movies.

I mean, you knew Russ Meyer.

I knew Russ, but I have to say about "Faster, Pussycat,"

which is probably the biggest cult movie that he ever made,

when that movie came out, it was a bomb.

It did not work at all.

He had made all these other movies before

that were huge hits.

He started the nudie cutie, you know,

and then this one, there wasn't any really nudity in it

and it was about three lesbians.

So it was not a hit.

Ahead of its time.

But when I saw it at the drive-in, I went insane.

And we went and watched it every single night.

And the fact that in "Female Trouble"

Divine yells every line, that's because of Tura Santana.

And then later, I wrote about it in my book "Shock Value,"

and I said, not only is it the best film ever made,

it's the best film that will be made in the future.

Now, that's a good blurb, right? So he used it.

And I did help make that one a success

because it was not a hit when it first came out.

And today you watch that movie,

it is a brilliant, brilliant movie.

The dialogue, written by Jack Moran,

who wrote Russ's best movies,

it's so good, it's so good.

And that opening line when they're watching the go-go girls

and that man's going, go, baby, go! Go! Go!

There's nothing better.

Go, baby, go!

- Come on, let's go! - Go, baby!

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to violence.

I can put into basically one word

why "Faster, Pussycat, Kill! Kill!"

anarchy.

See Russ Meyer's "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!"

There's three exclamation marks in different places

in just the title.

faster.

pussycat.

Kill! Kill!

It's the sort of perfect title for an exploitation movie.

I can watch like the first half hour

of "Faster, Pussycat" over and over again.

It was probably the first women's kick ass movie.

But the fight, the way he directed it,

wasn't the least bit choreographed.

But you've got to be real.

But I don't want you to hurt each other.

You're not stunt women.

It's just weird.

It's a movie about these Amazon women,

and it's-it's-it's...

It's about three sexed up, violent women.

As they ride their hot rods around the desert

looking for ways to quench their insatiable lust for kicks.

And their adventures

as they run into this sort of defective family

out in the desert.

What's with the strong-armed bit,

or couldn't you tell I was a girl?

Ain't no doubt about your gender, girly.

They let 'em vote, smoke, and drive.

Even put 'em in pants.

You can't even tell brother from sister

unless you meet 'em head-on.

The movie, I think of it as a first run "Thelma & Louise."

Go get her.

So I got to get wet because Lady Godiva wants to swim?

It started to become popular on college campuses.

Around the same time, 1983,

a punk rock band called The Cramps

covered the main title song,

and that introduced the movie to yet a whole new audience.

It's such a strange little film

with such mean women in it.

- Yes, ma'am? - What can I do for you today?

- Just your job, squirrel. - Fill it up.

You know, that's what I believe in.

Seeing America first.

You won't find it down there, Columbus.

First of all, I made a picture called "Motorpsycho!"

and it had three bad boys.

It was successful. It was a drive-in type picture.

And then I said, well, why don't we do it with three girls?

And so Tura Santana was the only girl

who could possibly play Varla.

And not only possessing, you know, a capacious bosom,

she knew karate and judo.

You couldn't double this girl anyway with her figure.

Her mother was a Cherokee Indian

and her father was a Japanese chef in Chicago.

It's probably the closest thing that I've come

to doing a horror film, you know.

She's like the evil horrific person.

You know she's going to die.

A lot of the directors of today

cite that film as a great inspiration for their careers.

Russ Meyer, Federico Fellini,

they created their own genres and were their own genres.

It's weird to compare Fellini and Russ Meyer,

but in a way somehow I feel it makes sense.

I don't think I'm going out on a limb

when I tell you that Russ Meyer

had an obsession with big breasts.

Now's where you cut to a montage

of all the Russ Meyer films that show big breasts.

But merely to write Russ Meyer off

as merely a common exploitation filmmaker

is to do his legacy

and his contribution to the world of cinema

a dramatic disservice.

Because when you watch his movies,

they're just colorful and fun and pop and comic book,

and they're just great.

You know, serious filmmakers started to figure out

that Russ Meyer

was not just your average exploitation filmmaker.

There was something much more artful going on here.

Russ Meyer is the only filmmaker who wrote, directed, cast,

shot, edited, and distributed his own films.

So his singular voice is what you get

when you watch a Russ Meyer film.

- Easy, baby. - You're almost a fire hazard.

Give your hips a rest.

My motor never runs down, baby.

"Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!" is another one

that I remember seeing in the early days

of like right when I moved to New York City

because that's where you could see everything.

And I went to see it

and it was just phenomenal.

For a film like that

on that budget, $45,000?

You can't shoot my cat for $45,000.

But again, it's a director, Russ Meyer,

with intense vision that nobody else has.

And I think Russ Meyer, you know,

takes these very sort of extreme sexualized violence images

and he does them in a really slick way,

and I think that's, you know, alluring

and it's almost like a drug.

You just want more because you're so stimulated.

Me Jane, you Tarzan.

Now why don't you drop that tree you're holding

and let's grab a vine and swing a little, huh?

Because it's not just because it's chicks with big boobs.

Yeah, that's like everything. Who cares?

The cinematography is phenomenal.

I mean, the beautiful stark black and white imagery,

it looks as beautiful as any John Ford western.

Some of the dialogue, which isn't what you'd call elegant,

but when one of them says "like a velvet fist

wrapped in iron," or something like that...

In California, they're called accessories to the crime.

Oh, you're cute.

Like a velvet glove cast in iron

and like the gas chamber, Varla, a real fun gal.

I've never heard that anywhere else.

I've never read that anywhere else.

And I'm seeing it in a movie like this?

These women are villains,

but because they're so sexy,

it confuses the brain.

And the thing that Russ Meyer

was bringing into the world of cinema

really for the first time,

which is this, you know, not just feminism,

but this all out female fury

that just couldn't be contained.

That was way ahead of its time.

Are you trying to say something?

- I never try anything. - I just do it.

I am tied to this chair for life.

Better you should be nailed to it.

They all had this...

these personal idiosyncrasies.

Of directors I've worked with,

Russ would be way up at the top

because of his no-nonsense, his speed.

He was quick.

You had to pick up quick.

That title and that movie combined

is just cult movie gold.

It's better to be part of something than to be left out.

What Martin Scorsese did for The Band in "The Last Waltz"

is what Penelope Spheeris does

for X and Black Flag in those bands.

I always say I was born a punk and I'll die a punk.

1, 2, 3, 4!

A cult film is a film

that is profoundly special and informative

in a way that normal, mainstream, stupid,

common denominator idiots can't understand.

Can a documentary be a cult film? Absolutely.

Because the Penelope Spheeris movies were about cult music.

And we got arrested the other night at Blackie's

for playing punk rock music.

Well, I think what made "The Decline"

become such a lasting cult film is just the fact

that it was one of the very few documents of that era.

You know, everybody's got an iPhone today

and everybody can shoot everything,

so there ain't going to be nothing special about it,

you know what I mean?

Each teenage generation needs an identity.

They want to be different than the generations before them.

They need to carve out something that is special for them,

and punk rock did that for that generation of young people.

We were trying to change something.

The music industry, the way we live, you know,

to be accepted any way we want to, you know.

I think Penelope had an agenda,

and I understand it at this point.

At that point, seeing it, I didn't understand it.

The punk rock scene in L.A. was splitting,

and there was all this, you know, violent...

recent violent influx.

It was hurtful because we had

a pretty eclectic, cool scene going

for three years prior to that, from '77 to '80.

So seeing it just as this weird, violent,

dark, nihilistic scene is true at that point,

but it dismisses everything that came before it.

Not only music but, you know, clothing trends

and culture and morals and everything else.

And the timing of it is so crucial.

I mean, the punk scene almost died

by the time the movie came out, you know.

Darby Crash, one of her stars, literally died that same year.

And what she wound up filming was this time capsule

that showed people what was happening,

the madness that was happening.

The homemade tattoos

and the people moshing in the pits

and beating each other up.

It's almost like capturing a butterfly

and just imprisoning it in film

so we can all see what that was like.

When I go to concerts, it's like my friends

get beat up by my friends, you know.

Then it's like, fuck, you know.

Because like they're not beating up the right people.

They're not beating up the fucking posers.

They're beating up just like just my friends.

It's fucked, you know.

At the core of it, it was questioning everything.

And it started with music, yeah, okay,

no more guitar solos, no more love songs, you know.

No more being nice,

no more like posing for the camera. No.

It was all fuck the camera, you know.

I like making a spectacle of myself.

I'm a total rebel.

I rebel against everything.

I guess I'm an alcoholic.

It was so liberating for women back then

because all of a sudden you didn't have to be, you know,

a Barbie doll, you know.

Matter of fact, kind of the uglier and fatter

and bigger your combat boots were,

the better and cooler you were.

And then I would go to punk rock shows,

and I would go, you know what?

I'm going to document this,

because something feels important about this.

I didn't know that its effect would be as heavy as it is

and it would last this long,

but I did feel instinctively it was important.

It wasn't that difficult to get the first "Decline" financed

because my friend said he knew a guy

that wanted to do a porno movie,

and I said, well, I'm not going to do a porno movie,

but how about punk rock?

And so I took him to a Germs concert

and I told him it would be $12,000 on Super 8.

And it ended up costing 10 times that on 16.

Penelope's Spheeris's style of filmmaking,

you get the sense that she's just in the room.

She's making a documentary as punk as the people themselves.

In that film, we were presenting ourselves

as who we were, which were Bohemians.

Well, we're not rich.

We got enough money to pay our rent

and, you know,

we bought the ink and the pins.

We weren't wondering, is this going to be good for my image?

A lot of people do assume

that a lot of the bands might not have been happy

with their performance or their portrayal.

Too bad. Show me in the contract

where it says that the band member

has the right to tell me how I can cut the movie.

So we were all high and, you know, doing tattoos,

and we just thought it would be, you know, a weird environment,

but not completely out of the ordinary.

I might have brought over some beer,

but I not did bring over the heroin, okay?

So anybody that accuses me of getting 'em loaded

so I could film them and they would look stupid can fuck off.

Because, yeah, I brought a sixpack, I'll cop to that.

We could not get a theater to screen the film in

because the theater owners

said no one would come to the screening

because nobody cared about punk rock.

And so I actually was able to talk the guy

that ran the Hollywood Theater on Hollywood Boulevard

into letting us have just one midnight screening.

Yeah, it was a 1,200 seat theater

and 3,000 people showed up.

And honestly, it was almost 300 motorcycle cops

had been sent out,

and Chief Daryl Gates wrote us a letter

and said don't show this movie in Los Angeles again.

And almost the film itself

becomes like this punk totem, you know.

It was hard to see.

People are passing around VHS tapes from one to another.

You had to be cool and underground

to be able to see the film in the first place.

Even Dave Grohl said he was like handed "The Decline,"

the first "Decline" like contraband by his cousin.

It was like, don't tell our parents, but here, look at this.

I don't really see a movement that's happened since then

that has had such an impact

and made such a difference, you know.

Yeah, once you take a picture, the picture's there.

I didn't know when I made "The Decline"

that it was going to have such a lasting effect.

And I didn't set out to make history.

I didn't set out to have the film be inducted

into the Library of Congress National Film Registry,

which it was last year.

These kids identified with it, and it made them who they were,

and for that, they were grateful.

And for that, I'm grateful, you know, that I could help.

Precinct 13.

Cut off. Isolated in the middle of the city

as a human wave of street killers

turns the night into a nightmare.

The movie is about a young police officer

who has a desk job at the precinct.

And suddenly he's thrown out to the wolves.

Basically a modern cowboys and Indians movie.

It's a siege film in which a precinct is under attack

by a bunch of gang members.

He has to deal with the bad guys.

He has to shoot and kill people.

He doesn't know who he's killing.

He is being threatened. Maybe he's going to be killed.

If "Assault on Precinct 13" is considered a great cult movie,

it's because it delivers the goods.

A lot of movies promise things

from the trailer or from the poster.

I think the tagline in it

was "a white-hot night of hate" in the movie,

and this really delivers.

John Carpenter talked openly

about it being "Rio Bravo" as an inspiration.

"Assault on Precinct 13" is one of the great cult movies

because it still remains pretty shocking.

With that little girl, Kim Richards,

gets blown away eating her ice cream cone...

I wanted vanilla twist.

And it was a real shot to the solar plexus.

When we submitted it to the MPAA,

we thought it would get a PG rating.

There was no PG-13 at the time.

We were very surprised if not outright shocked

to hear it had gotten an X rating.

Basically, the MPAA demanded that scene be cut.

There was no coverage on that scene

in case there was a problem.

We had not anticipated this.

It was just shot the one way.

There was no way to cut around it.

What we did is we took one of the prints

and we cut about two little pieces of film

which added up to about a second and a half of footage,

and resubmitted that to the MPAA

and got the R rating on it.

Roger Corman does this all the time.

He takes the movie that the MPAA has demanded cuts

and it just puts it out the way it was originally edited.

The experience making this movie

was one that I hope I would have every time I work.

It's a goddamn siege.

When I got cast in that movie,

I knew nothing about who John Carpenter was.

He didn't know who I was. I didn't know who he was.

But we hit it off immediately.

I was not surprised

that John Carpenter would become successful.

I think what convinced the investors

was that he had sold a script to Barbra Streisand.

That's not a small thing for a guy just out of USC to do.

The toughest challenge for me

was the fact that my character was not really a soldier.

He was working in an office, a clerk wearing a uniform.

And now you're faced with a gang that's coming at you

with 19 guys with God knows what coming to kill you.

I got three shots. That's enough.

Can't argue with a confident man.

The precise calibration of comedy,

this very dry kind of comedy...

- You're not a psychopath. - You're not stupid.

I am an asshole.

And the suspense make for something that over time

appealed to audiences more and more,

and they really got it more and more as time went on.

It cost about $285,000.

It took a very long time to make money.

It just played around in grind houses,

and it did get into this one big theater in Los Angeles.

The first week

it played with Jack Hill's "Switchblade Sisters."

That's a great double feature, isn't it?

That's a terrific double feature.

So apparently it was gaining kind of momentum

with the home video,

and in the Los Angeles area, it played on Z Channel.

There was like a cinema tech

on the TV station that was phenomenal.

There's never been anything like it before or since.

It was treated as like a cult classic at that time.

You cannot intend to make a cult movie.

"Assault on Precinct 13."

We got a war going on down here,

and we can't find the damn thing.

Anybody trying to intentionally make a cult movie

is bound to fail.

It feels like it's kind of turned a corner to me,

that it's not just a cult film,

but it's really become like a classic film in some sense.

After 40 years, I am still so amazed

at this new generation of fans from everywhere

coming to see this movie and appreciating what I did.

That is something, I mean,

I can't tell you how much, how deeply I appreciate that.

I could never live it down.

I feel like I've done something that could never be repeated.

One of the cult directors that I knew personally

was Sam Fuller, who was quite a character, an ex-newspaperman.

He had a style that was a little primitive,

but he was a great filmmaker

and he had a great nose for tabloid stories.

The cult of his movies

is based entirely on who made them, on him.

"The Naked Kiss" is about

when you kiss someone the first time,

you can tell they're a child molester.

You can feel it from the one little kiss,

and that is what it's about.

Under the guise of a small town, very sentimental movie,

because it's got little crippled children in it.

It's still berserk-ish in parts.

Oh, when she's in love and those shots in Venice.

Oh, my God. It's jaw-dropping.

It is. It's kind of schizophrenic.

But it's a dark movie.

And also, the people in his movies

are not quite beautiful.

Like they fit his genre.

I think that's the added appeal.

And that opening credits scene, though,

is one of the best opening credits ever.

Because it's this hooker,

and he rips her wig off and then she's bald.

And then she beats him over the face with her pocketbook

and then picks up a fire extinguisher

and squirts it in his face.

It is great.

"The Naked Kiss" begins with a tall blonde prostitute

in the midst of beating up her pimp.

Well, I think a lot of Sammy's pictures became cult films

because they were really out there.

That opening sequence is pretty startling.

You parasite!

I'm taking only what's coming to me.

Hearing with the likes of Martin Scorsese

on "the Tonight Show," say the opening of "The Naked Kiss"

was the greatest opening I've ever seen.

"Naked Kiss" is an extremely low budget Samuel Fuller film.

It tells the story

of a prostitute that gets into trouble,

and she decides to start a new life for herself.

She flees and she ends up

in a town that doesn't know who she is,

and she gets a job working with handicapped kids

and she becomes kind of respectable,

although people seem to think

there's something strange about her.

A hooker moving in with the town virgin.

What an act!

I saw a broken down piece of machinery,

nothing but the buck, the bed, and the bottle

for the rest of my life.

She becomes the fiancée of this top guy in society.

And there's something weird about him.

And basically he's a child molester.

Well, Sammy's pictures could be very shocking,

and the subject matter is dark.

You are playing the first pedophile

in the history of our business.

And he said, that's why I want you.

You're just perfect.

He said, you won't get the recognition

for the job you did

and the guts you had to play this character

until 30, 40 years down the road.

Now you know why I could never marry a normal woman.

That's why I love you.

You understand my sickness.

And it's basically her, who has no credibility,

against the main guy in town.

I'm going to keep asking you the same question

until you tell me the truth.

Why did you kill him?

He was molesting a child.

Oh, I got the same taste the first time Grant kissed me.

It's what we call a naked kiss.

It's the sign of a pervert.

"Naked Kiss" became a cult classic

because it was a different side of the director Sam Fuller

that people weren't that familiar with.

Sam Fuller was a tough guy.

He was a former journalist, a tabloid writer.

And Sammy made pictures that were like newspaper headlines.

Hit you in the face.

And he made a lot of terrific film noirs

and a lot of war films.

I was in the hands of Sammy Fuller,

and his reputation preceded him.

This was the Sam Fuller that pushed the envelope,

that went places where the other Sam Fuller,

the studio Sam Fuller, did not go.

This was the independent Sam Fuller.

When I think about my love for Sammy

and appreciation of working with him

and he's gone and left us, but I'm so grateful

to have had the opportunity to work with him.

Sam Fuller made an art form out of the B Movie.

And he made films like "Shock Corridor."

Somebody do something about my head!

His masterpiece is "The Naked Kiss."

I consider "The Warriors"

the "Rocky Horror" of gang movies, you know.

Can you dig it?

Can you dig it?

Can you dig it?

The plot of "The Warriors"

actually is a pretty simple plot.

It's a movie about a meeting of all these gangs,

very colorful gangs in New York.

And during this meeting,

like the leader of one of the gangs is killed.

A gang is blamed for something that they didn't do.

It's the innocent falsely accused...

There he is! That's him!

After a tragedy occurs...

They think we shot Cyrus.

Every gang in the city must be looking for us.

Holy shit.

The Warriors has to get back

and take the subway across New York.

And an hour it is C-I, the big Coney.

They have to fight their way back to their home turf.

And everyone is out to destroy them.

So the Warriors encounter all of these gangs

throughout the movie.

For instance, the Gramercy Riffs,

who are the African-American gang.

In the Turnbull ACs, which are like a skinhead gang.

And the Baseball Furies,

who almost have makeup like the band KISS.

I'll shove that bat up your ass

and turn you into a popsicle.

And then they have encounters with The Lizzies,

who entrap some of the Warriors.

And we have a rollerskating gang

who they encounter in a subway station,

and they have an ultimate battle with them in a bathroom.

Aah!

And then they meet The Orphans,

who were like a low class,

way down on the totem pole gang.

You see what you get, Warriors?

You see what you get when you mess with The Orphans?

You know, it's funny.

My scenes in The Orphans is that it was a small part.

However, people remember that, especially my line.

"We're going to rain on you Warriors," you know.

I've said that maybe a million times since 1978.

"We're going to rain on you Warriors," you know.

We're going to rain on you, Warriors!

Let's go.

When that thing blew,

it was a real explosion, you know.

So the hood of the car wound up on the roof.

But they forgot to take the glass, the windshield out.

And I'm watching this glass rain down on these extras.

I do think that what unites the cult films that I like

is they have a quality of danger, you know.

Whether it's "Clockwork Orange"

or, you know, this quality of edge.

And I think clearly that's what people sort of like

about "The Warriors."

You know, I've gone to screenings of "The Warriors,"

a few with fans.

It's hilarious, because they're talking to the screen,

they're say the line before it comes out.

So they've been rediscovered by people, you know,

and it's easier to do now because you've got, you know,

all kinds of alternative means of finding it.

The best scene in "The Warriors"

is actually a very quiet scene.

Swan and Mercy on the subway when the prom couple comes in.

It's like really, really late at night

and they're dirty and they're tired and they're beaten up.

And then a group of four students get on the train.

Everything that needs to be said and expressed

is done without words.

Everybody's favorite moment in "The Warriors."

Warriors, come out to play.

David Patrick Kelly owns that movie.

Warriors, come out to play.

The Warriors chant

has been a blessing and a burden over the years.

And there was nothing in the script, of course,

and Walter wanted to up the ante.

And he just said we need something here.

And it was from a guy who lived next to me

who was a scary guy,

who I didn't know much about, but he would say to me...

I'd say, Rich, how you doing?

And he'd say, Dave...

Dave... Dave...

And that's all he'd say.

And I thought that was the creepiest thing I'd ever heard,

so I put that in.

We rehearsed it and then we did it.

I've never done it again.

Come out to play.

I go to the Coney Island Film Festival every year,

and at midnight they play "The Warriors."

And people come out dressed up as The Furies

and all the different gangs and even a few Orphans, too.

We did a cast reunion in Coney Island,

and 7,500, 8,000 people showed up.

It was humbling to me, I thought.

I get back home

and 10 minutes later the phone rings

and a gentleman on the other end said,

I'm President Reagan's press secretary

and he wanted you to know how much he enjoyed

a screening of "The Warriors" at Camp David.

People sort of claim that violence was connected to it.

But if you look at the film now

and compare it to what we see today,

it's really, really lightweight.

Paramount overreacted by pulling all the publicity,

and the movie just kind of died

after about three weeks to a month.

Had "The Warriors" had a successful run

and continued to do good box office

and become a successful first-run movie,

would it have become a cult classic movie?

I don't know that it would have.

For someone who hasn't seen "Point Break,"

the plot of the movie is this.

There's four renegade kids who love skydiving.

They skydive a lot.

When they're not skydiving,

they put on the masks of presidents and rob banks.

It's Keanu Reeves' mission to find them and arrest them.

He's being told that they might be surfers,

and the kind of finds these guys who teach him how to surf

and who are kind of Zen philosophers.

Hey, you're not going to start chanting or anything, are you?

I might.

He realizes these surfer dudes

are actually the presidents who are robbing everywhere.

And so the cop, the agent, the FBI agent

has to become them in order to arrest them.

It's very much a movie

about American masculinity seen from the outside.

You gotta go down.

You crossed the line and people trusted you and they died.

"Point Break" was always thought of

as like surfers robbing banks

to support their endless summer.

The tagline in our mind even as I was writing it

was 100% pure adrenaline.

Everybody freeze!

But when director Ridley Scott was going to helm of the film,

it was going to be James Garner, you know,

fresh off the "Rockford Files" to play Pappas

and it was going to be Charlie Sheen

I believe fresh off of "Platoon" to play Johnny Utah.

And that was locked and loaded.

But then the studio changed hands

and Ridley left picture.

So the film fell apart

and it was made four years later

by Jim Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow.

Jim Cameron rewrote me.

He did the final polish on "Point Break."

So a lot of kudos to Jim, who's the master.

He turbocharged a lot of the action.

Kathryn was determined that it was going to be Keanu Reeves,

and she is quite a force.

- You mad? - Yeah, I'm mad!

- Good and mad? - Yeah!

What you want to do about it?

Feels good, doesn't it?

- Like you're still alive, right? - Yeah!

They should release it again on the big screen,

because it'll work again and again and again

because it's that powerful.

I mean, when Kathryn shoots her arrow, whap,

100 yards away,

that arrow will go right smack dab in the center of the target.

And she did that with me, you know.

She did it with everybody.

She's strong.

I want to work with her again.

I'm going to call her.

Kathryn, just been talking about us.

When's the next gig? Edit.

The linear thrust was a story about these four kids.

He's a fucking federal agent.

I should have shot him when I had the chance.

I'll deal with that fucking cop.

And my little buddy Keanu.

Pappas.

Angelo Pappas.

- Punk. Quarterback punk. - Hmm.

Either you love to hate the bad guy,

they're deliciously evil

and you just can't get enough of their evilness.

Or they are like a Swayze in that you really relate.

You do care,

and because you care, it makes it fascinating.

Every scene I do is my favorite.

Every scene the people I'm working with are my favorite.

That's the way it goes.

You satisfy yourself before making a judgment,

and when you're satisfying yourself,

there is no judgment.

You just go.

"Point Break" has the best running scene

in the history of movies.

Look out!

Hey!

Aah!

It's brilliant stuff, man.

It's going tick, tick, tick, tick.

It's clipping, man.

Tick-tick-tick-tick-

tick-tick-tick-tick-tick.

Oh!

People remember the lines.

I'm so hungry I could eat the ass end out of a dead rhino.

I should've had you get me three of these things.

You gonna jump or jerk off?

I'm not a crook.

Caught my first tube this morning.

Sir.

Swayze did all his stunts for the most part.

He did the skydiving.

If you look, the shot that blows my mind

is the one when he jumps off the airplane at the end.

Adios, amigo.

Well, guess what? That's Swayze saying a line

and rolling backward and falling out of an airplane.

That takes a big pair of cojones.

He's the man.

There's a thing... I think it's all over the United States now.

It's called "Point Break Live."

And it's these actors, they're Shakespearean actors,

they're awesome actors.

and they re-create "Point Break" live.

They pull somebody out of the audience to play Keanu Reeves,

and it is hilarious.

Yeah, my knee got folded

about 90 degrees in the wrong way.

I'm so honored that you picked "Point Break"

as one of the greatest cult films of all time.

It sounds arrogant to say it doesn't surprise me,

because I just hear it from so many people.

I started getting letters from people all over the world,

sincere, heartfelt letters

that the film had changed their life.

"Point Break" is one of the greatest films made.

It's not a cult film,

it's not a dramady, a psychodrama.

It's not a farce or tragedy or vaudeville.

It's a movie of its own with its own identity,

and it moves in that direction all the way through it.

The beginning, the middle, the climax, the end, the resolution,

it's all the same.

I think "Point Break" was a game changer

not as much to cinema as it was to surfing.

It was a game mover.

You don't change the game in art.

And let me tell you this, buddy.

Art is only the search.

It is not the final form.

It is forever and unlimited,

and you can't beat that because it won't be beaten.

Hear that?