Quote of the Week

Posted by Marisa on July 26, 2015

The Brooklyn-born Carey was physically imposing—a strapping 6’4”—making him ideal for roles as brutish heavies, and he resembled a love child of Nicolas Cage and John Turturro. His penchant for improvisation—bizarre dancing, unscripted outbursts, mumbled nonsense—often got him into trouble with directors and other actors, but made lifelong fans of Jack Nicholson (who wrote Head and likely borrowed elements of Carey’s persona for his performance in The Shining [1980]); [John] Cassavetes (who claimed Carey had the “brilliance of Eisenstein”); and Quentin Tarantino, who considered Carey for the role of crime boss Joe Cabot in Reservoir Dogs (1992).

For mondo video devotees, Carey sealed his immortality with the self-written/produced/directed oddity The World’s Greatest Sinner (1962), which can be characterized as [Elia] Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd (1957) as directed by Ed Wood Jr. The film, which has some of the same proto–John Waters tackiness of The Honeymoon Killers (1970), tells the tale of a bored insurance salesman who becomes an early Elvis-style rockabilly sensation. Noting the frenzy he inspires in his audiences, he begins calling himself “God,” founds a religious cult, and runs for President. Carey and his singularly untalented “band” played their own detuned rock ‘n’ roll in the concert scenes, but the film was scored by a young, pre–Mothers of Invention Frank Zappa. Narrated by the devil and featuring the real God at the climax, Sinner was admired by Elvis himself (who asked Carey for a print) and remains one of Martin Scorsese’s favorite rock ‘n’ roll films.

– Andrew Hultkrans, “Carey On”; Art Forum, October 12, 2010

Quote of the Week

Posted by Marisa on April 5, 2015

Here’s one from the archives; I thought it appropriate for Easter Sunday. And hey, I’m back!

But I think, actually, Timothy Carey in his movie The World’s Greatest Sinner did that [dealt with the desecration of the Eucharist]. The film was never released, but it’s one of John Cassavetes‘s favorite films, directed by and starring Timothy Carey. He takes the Eucharist from the tabernacle, and – I never saw the picture but they tell me that as he’s running away, the Eucharist starts glowing and blood starts to follow him all through the streets, and over the hills as he’s running blood is following him. It’s a wonderful idea. He’s a folksinger-preacher type, plays guitar and has a snake around his neck. I know the film exists. One day, ten years ago, when we were doing New York, New York, I went to screen my rushes and somebody was looking at it in the next room. I walked in and I saw this guy stealing something from a tabernacle and I said, ‘That’s Timothy Carey!’ Listen, nobody believed me. It was like, ‘This film really exists, guys!’ and ‘Oh, come on, Marty, let’s go look at the rushes.’

– Martin Scorsese, from “In the Streets,” from Once a Catholic: Prominent Catholics and Ex-Catholics Reveal the Influence of the Church on Their Lives and Work, by Peter Occhiogrosso (Ballantine Books, 1987)

Quote of the Week

Posted by Marisa on October 27, 2013

[Martin] Scorsese was shaken. He went home, summoned his friends, [John] Milius, [Brian] DePalma, [Steven] Spielberg, to his house on Mulholland. “Can you come up here right away?”

“Why?” Spielberg asked.

“Well, it’s an emergency.” Spielberg jumped in his Mercedes and drove over from Laurel Canyon. “I had never seen Marty so upset,” he recalls. “Verging on tears, but leaning toward rage. He shattered a glass Sparkletts bottle all over the kitchen floor. We were holding his arms, trying to calm him down, find out why he was so upset. He finally came out with the fact that Columbia had seen his movie [Taxi Driver], had hated the ending, and wanted him to take out all the violence, the entire shoot-out, to cut away from the splintering fingers and the blood spouting and puddling. They felt the film was bound for an X rating, and he was being forced to Disney-ize it. Eventually he began to tell us the story of an actor, Timothy Carey, when he was auditioning for Harry Cohn in the early ’50s. In the middle of his audition, he broke down and said, ‘This is so humiliating standing up here and acting for you people who know nothing about actors, nothing about my art,’ and he pulled out a gun and fired at the executives, full-load blanks, and then had trouble getting a job for years after that. That was his [Scorsese’s] fantasy. He pointed a finger at Stanley Jaffe, and said, ‘He’s the head of the studio, he’s the guy I’m angry at, so I’m gonna get a gun and shoot him.’ He wasn’t serious about it, but he was relishing the rage, and he wanted us to share his anger.”

– Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and Rock ‘N’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (Simon and Schuster, 1998)

Scorsese directing Robert DeNiro in Taxi Driver (1976)

Quote of the Week

Posted by Marisa on February 3, 2013

For “God” Hilliard, rock music is the spark that wakes a slumbering, egotistical fascist within his sleepy-eyed insurance salesman facade. After his everyday existence as an unfulfilled white-collar dreamer is established, Hilliard is lightning-struck entranced and inspired by a flaxen-haired manchild rockabilly whatsit convulsing and strumming and shaking onstage at a predawn club gig while the frenzied teenie bop audience screams and lunges and wilts at his every hip thrust. But Carey’s obvious disdain for actually learning how to play an instrument results in Hilliard’s discordant abuse of guitars and pianos throughout the film. Hilliard is prone to frothy-mouthed soapbox rants full of delirious declarations, as when he seduces a rich widow with what will become his political faction’s central conceit: “When I become president, I’m gonna demand a medical science (that) makes every human being that’s in distress about living and dying just a fantasy. Age won’t exist anymore.” While spouting his Nietzsche-lite campaign rhetoric to evolve his followers into “superhuman beings” (the details of this process are conveniently detailed in his ubiquitous pamphlets that are, not surprisingly, kept off-screen for the duration), Hilliard throttles his tiny, cheap guitar without any effort to form recognizable chords or ignite pleasant melodies. The instrument is simply a punctuation mark. In a later, heated scene, Hilliard, bursting with emotion but unable to unleash it in words, slams his open hand onto a half dozen piano keys. The resulting mish-mash of musical notes eerily blurt out in sustained discord, the physical action of the scene supplying the soundtrack to the character’s emotional state. This action is paired with a Scorsese-worthy dolly in, floating closer and closer until Hilliard’s hand, forming the mangled chord, fills the entire world of the frame. In 1962, this image, projected onto the musty screen of some under-attended movie house, would have been a barn-sized slab of anti-music. And very punk rock.

– Christopher J. Ewing, “The Lonely Soul Rock Messiahs of Un-Music Cinema: The World’s Greatest Sinner and Christmas on Mars,” Paracinema magazine, February 2009, Issue 5

Quote of the Week

Posted by Marisa on August 5, 2012

Quote of the Week

Posted by Marisa on May 20, 2012

GL: I’m still trying to digest the fact that you passed up a role in The Godfather.

TC: I was offered a spot in both The Godfather and The Godfather Part II. To play Luca Brasi in the first one, and the Mafioso boss who gets killed on the stairs at the opening of the second one. But I didn’t do either show, because if I had, I woulda been just like any other actor – out for the money. Francis [Ford Coppola] wanted me on the show, but I kept saying no. To get out of going to New York, I kept saying I wanted more money, and they got tired of it, I guess…

GL: What kept you out of Godfather Part II?

TC: I went to talk to Francis at Paramount. I already had the part, but I still wanted to do a scene. Francis and his pals were sitting around his office and I brought a box of cannolis and Italian pastries as gifts. I said, “I brought you this gift to pay respect to my friends,” and I reached down into those dripping cannolis and pulled out a gun – boom boom! – and blew the hell out of all of them. And then I shot myself and staggered over and fell on [producer Fred] Roos’s desk – all the contracts went flying. And Coppola grabbed my blank gun and shot me back – bang bang! – like a kid. It was byootiful – I took ’em completely by surprise. Francis was stunned, “How much do you want?” But Roos didn’t like it, so he went to work and influenced Coppola against me.

One guy, a little guy, was sitting there watching everything. A young kid with a camera, but he wasn’t filming. He just sat there with a mean, kind of miserly . . . I could tell he was afraid by the lines on his face. Like he needed two inches of Chinese tonic. It was Martin Scorsese, somebody said.

– “Cracked Actor,” Film Comment Jan/Feb 2004; interview conducted in 1992 by Grover Lewis