Reflections on ... episodes 1-4 of Feud: Bette and Joan

Just some random thoughts, musings and reflections on re-visiting the first four episodes of the insanely enjoyable Feud: Bette and Joan (2017) -  Ryan Murphy’s deluxe eight-part TV mini-series covering the rivalry between veteran screen queens Bette Davis and Joan Crawford (above) during the making of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) - on BBC2. (I originally watched Feud when it was first broadcast by FX in Spring 2017).

/ Above: the real Bette Davis, Jack Warner and Joan Crawford at press conference announcing What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? /

/ Joan Crawford (Jessica Lange) and Bette Davis (Susan Sarandon) in Feud /

First two episodes: Sui Generis and The Other Woman

The costumes and set design (by Judy Becker, who also designed the mid-century look of Todd Haynes’ film Carol) are glorious. Any time one of the characters click-on a pair of severe vintage cat’s eye sunglasses, I involuntarily gasp. Even the food is immaculately retro: when Crawford and Davis dine at gossip columnist Hedda Hopper’s, Davis kvetches, “Fish Jell-o?” (Hopper corrects her: it’s salmon in aspic. Or “en gelée” as I prefer). As you can see from the photo above of Bette Davis, Jack Warner and Joan Crawford at the press conference announcing What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? some of the outfits have been meticulously recreated. I especially love Crawford’s palatial cream-and-turquoise Hollywood mansion with the cherry tree, the Chinese interior motifs and the white grand piano in the living room. Like any self-respecting diva, she has an ultra-flattering glamorous portrait of herself (complete with museum lighting) above the mantelpiece. 

Davis addresses Crawford as “Lucille”. (Crawford’s real name was Lucille Fay LeSueur). Was that true? In the Hollywood film community, did people routinely call Crawford “Lucille” – or was that Davis’ way of undermining her? On film sets, was Cary Grant referred to as "Archie" or Marilyn Monroe as "Norma Jean"?

Exemplary, stylish use of atmospheric period music on the soundtrack: Nat King Cole, Mel Torme, Perry Como, Sarah Vaughan, Brenda Lee, Paul Anka, “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini”, “Wives and Lovers” by Jack Jones.

Feud freely takes liberties with (or "streamlines") the facts or at least chronology for maximum dramatic impact and greater psychological truth. For example: in episode one we first encounter a drunken Crawford in 1961 at the Golden Globe awards silently seething with resentment as a gold lamé-clad Marilyn Monroe shimmies past her onto the stage to accept an award. (No one seethes with drunken resentment quite like Jessica Lange). This incident did happen, but much earlier – at the 1953 Photoplay Awards when red-hot newcomer Monroe won the Rising Star award and earned Crawford’s disapproval. But who can blame Ryan Murphy for shuffling the time frame around for his own narrative purposes? In episode one, this scene perfectly establishes how sidelined and embittered Crawford felt at the time. 

/ "Hebrews and Sodomites, greetings!” / 

In episode one we see a fleeting glimpse of director Robert Aldrich working on a tacky “sword-and-sandals” Biblical epic, which is meant to represent the mortifying nadir of his career. (Like Davis and Crawford, he is also desperate for a comeback pre-Baby Jane). This film was in fact 1962’s Sodom and Gomorrah (also known as The Last Days of Sodom and Gomorrah) – and as far as these things go, it’s not half bad! I enjoyed it when I watched it several years ago. (It used to be available on YouTube). I liked its camp value, but perhaps mainly because of the presence of exquisite, inscrutable French actress Anouk Aimee as the depraved villainess Bera, Queen of Sodom. For a film of its time, it’s surprisingly overt about Bera’s lesbianism (she is always surrounded by an all-female entourage and appreciatively ogles belly-dancers and pretty slave girls). When people write about the history of LGBTQ representation in Golden Age Hollywood films, how come Sodom and Gomorrah never rates a mention? Aimee spoke perfectly fine French-accented English but weirdly, Aldrich opted to have her dialogue dubbed by an American actress. And – as a coincidence – with her dark eyebrows and sculpted cheekbones, doesn’t Aimee slightly resemble a young Joan Crawford?

Susan Sarandon and Jessica Lange were justifiably praised for their performances as Davis and Crawford when Feud premiered on FX in March 2017, but watching it again so should be the supporting actresses Judy Davis (malevolent gossip columnist Hedda Hopper) and Jackie Hoffman (Crawford’s ultra-efficient German maid Mamacita). Watch Davis’ perfectly-judged split-second horrified reaction when Lange complains about the pressures of stardom and breezily tells her, “You’re so lucky you weren’t successful as an actress.” And Hoffman’s deadpan Teutonic line delivery: telling the gardeners impatient to get paid, “It’s an honour to trim Miss Crawford’s bush.”

/ The long-suffering Mamacita with Miss Joan /

Vanity Fair vividly describes Lange’s tremulous, frequently drunk, almost operatic Joan Crawford as “a booze-saturated, violently wilted flower” and “a volatile hurricane, an addled tragedy in a musty dress.” Someone else (I forget who) described Lange’s representation of Crawford as almost being like a Tennessee Williams character, which raises the intriguing question: imagine if Joan Crawford had ever played a Tennessee Williams role! What would Crawford have been like as Violet Venable in Suddenly Last Summer (1959) instead of Katharine Hepburn? Or as Karen Stone in The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone (1961) instead of Vivien Leigh? It’s also, of courses, fascinating to compare Lange’s Crawford with Faye Dunaway’s berserk Kabuki representation of her in Mommie Dearest (1981).

Sarandon’s portrayal of Davis is more dialed-down and lower-key. (In interviews Sarandon was insistent she deliberately avoided slipping into a Bette Davis impersonation). I happened to love Sarandon's interpretation of Davis - some found it underwhelming. She nicely captures Davis’ flat-footed waddling walk, low-slung bosom, gimlet-eyed stare, clipped speech patterns and innate blunt, emotionally direct toughness. Within Feud Davis is depicted as relatively sane, level-headed and stable in comparison to Crawford. In real terms, Davis was probably just as much of a frequently hard-drinking and temperamental holy terror as Crawford, just in a different way. For example: we see a glimpse of Davis onstage in 1961 as Maxine in a stage production of Tennessee Williams’ play Night of the Iguana (the role Ava Gardner would later play onscreen). Read any Tennessee Williams biography and it’s well-documented that Davis was an absolute nightmare to deal with, loathed by the cast and crew for her spoiled movie star antics. (This is the single best profile of Davis I've ever read. It gives a real sense of what a difficult, tormented woman she would have been off-screen).

/ Above: Bette Davis onstage in Night of the Iguana /

Davis was 53 during the making of Baby Jane. Sarandon was 71 when she played her. And yet Sarandon throughout looks considerably younger and more glamorous than the defiantly, unapologetically frumpy middle-aged Davis. (Even made up as Baby Jane Hudson with the ringleted little girl wig and chalky white powder, Sarandon never matches Davis’ grotesquery in the role). Who Sarandon really resembles is Tallulah Bankhead. (The makers of Feud seem to have decided that the Davis of 1961 should resemble Davis as Margo Channing in All About Eve (1950) – who was overtly based on Bankhead).

/ Above: the dissolute Tallulah Bankhead /

Episode 3: Mommie Dearest

/ Jessica Lange as Joan Crawford holding court at Perino's /

Feud repeatedly shows the luxe Art Deco cocktail lounge and restaurant Perino’s in Los Angeles (now long defunct) as one of Crawford’s frequent haunts. But would Crawford really have gone there accompanied by her housekeeper Mamacita to drink Martinis? (Perino’s also featured in the 1981 film Mommie Dearest. In one scene after Louis B Meyer takes her to dinner there, an enraged Crawford fumes, “Perino’s is my place!”). Interestingly, I don’t think Feud ever depicts Davis there, but in real life she was a habitué of Perino’s and maintained her own permanently-reserved personal booth. Perino’s closed in 1986, was razed in 2005 and is now the location of an apartment complex.

“I’ve always been a strict disciplinarian. Some people perhaps find I’ve been too strict, especially with my first two, Christina and Christopher …” There’s something ballsy about how Feud directly tackles the legacy of Mommie Dearest in this episode. Crawford’s adopted daughter Christina Crawford’s tell-all misery memoir came out in 1978. The notorious film adaptation starring Faye Dunaway followed in 1981. One of the most positive aspects of Feud is how Murphy and Lange rehabilitate and humanize Crawford as a complex, tragic and flawed figure. Mommie Dearest no longer has the last word.

The sequence where Davis and Crawford temporarily bury the hatchet long enough to have drinks alone together after work and really let their hair down is a high point of the entire series. This would never have happened in real life - these highly competitive sworn enemies confiding in each other about their relationships with their mothers and their children, their childhoods and their sex lives over cocktails? (Crawford shocks Davis by admitting she lost her virginity to her stepfather aged 11. Davis waited until she was 27 on her honeymoon). And yet who could quibble when the scene is so beautifully written, acted and directed, effortlessly cramming-in several biographies worth of info about the two women and their lives?

Kiernan Shipka (aka Sally Draper from Mad Men) co-stars as Davis’ teenage daughter BD Hyman. The inexperienced, non-professional Hyman wound up in a supporting role in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? as the neighbour’s adolescent daughter – and she was a notoriously inept actress. Re-watch Hyman in Baby Jane and Shipka only hints at just how outrageously sub-Edward D Wood Jr-level bad Hyman is in her few brief scenes. The constant eye-rolling! Aldrich actually compensates by cutting away from Hyman while she speaks! I loved Sarandon’s blankly horrified reaction as it dawns on her just how incompetent BD is, and her later motherly attempts to reassure her with tactful faint praise. “You spoke clearly. You hit your marks. You didn’t look into the lens once – not once!”

/ The real BD Hyman and Davis /

Davis and Crawford clash when Davis complains that she was “robbed” for not winning Best Actress in 1950 for All About Eve.  “It was Gloria Swanson who was robbed in 1950, not you, bitch!” Lange shrieks, her voice dramatically swooping on you. Sheila O’Malley in The New York Times: “Lange catapults her voice up into the stratosphere, with the final words elongated into a near-operatic screech. It’s such a bizarre and brilliant choice, the hugeness of expression matching the hugeness of the emotion.”

“That face right into camera. This really is a horror picture!” Crawford watching Davis film that famous Baby Jane shot of her applying lipstick straight into the the camera is if facing a mirror. Below: the genuine article. 

Davis showing maternal concern for gay Baby Jane co-star Victor Buono. “All the queens love me!” she proudly declares, acknowledging, “I only really knew I’d made it when the female impersonators started doing me in their acts.” It’s probably true that Davis was already a cult figure amongst queers by the early sixties alongside Judy Garland and Tallulah Bankhead. Buono asks her to do the “What a dump!” line from Beyond the Forest and she obliges. Buono to Davis: “I think it’s so admirable the way you’ve embraced my tribe.”

Insight beyond Davis’ hard-boiled veneer:  we witness her private guilt and anguish over her disabled daughter Margo, who lives in an institution. One of Davis’ pressures to keep working – even when the good roles have dried-up – is to continue paying the bills for Margo’s special school.

Crawford also has some wrenchingly sad moments. “The mad rush that was once my life … all you’re left with is yourself” she laments to Mamacita as she mourns her twin daughters leaving home for boarding school, the death of her husband (Pepsi magnate Alfred Steele) and the decline of her acting career. Later, we see Crawford attempting to adopt another baby. When the she is refused (“You’re simply too old”), Crawford responds like the words are a slap across the face. (Lange excels at wordless moments like these).

/ Below: might the design of Crawford's ultra-glamorous boudoir in Feud have been influenced by ...

... Joan Crawford in Queen Bee? (1955) /

“All those years of alcohol abuse have exacted a terrible price …” Crawford unkindly says to Hedda Hopper about her ravaged co-star Davis.

Funniest moment: Crawford and Mamacita are on location at the beach for Baby Jane’s climactic finale. “It’s warm, Mamacita. I’m going to need my water standing by.” By this point the alcoholic Crawford has been seen repeatedly availing herself of her secret flask of vodka. Mamacita warily asks, “Which water?”

Episode 4: More or Less

/ Lange recreating an iconic moment as Crawford in Baby Jane /

The episode mainly explores the indignities and vagaries of fame when stardom is on the wane. (Baby Jane was yet to be released; advance word anticipated it would flop). Feud is at its least engaging when it imposes its present-day feminist theme too heavy-handedly, overly eager to cast Davis and Crawford as casualties of Hollywood misogyny and ageism. (The other weakest aspect: the sequences with Joan Blondell and Olivia de Havilland reminiscing). In this episode, we see the fictional character of Aldrich’s assistant Pauline – an aspiring director – stymied by industry sexism.

Aldrich’s next film after Baby Jane was the 1963 rat-pack Western 4 for Texas. Feud captures what an arrogant prick that movie's prima donna leading man Frank Sinatra was. It gradually dawns on Aldrich that sure, Davis and Crawford were difficult, demanding and needy, but paragons of professionalism compared to Sinatra’s bullying man-child tantrums.

My personal highlights:  Crawford’s angry meeting with her agents at the William Morris agency deliberately echoes the scene in Mommie Dearest where Faye Dunaway rages at the Pepsi executives (“Don’t fuck with me, fellas!”). A nice touch.

Mamacita vacuuming the spectacular grand staircase to the strains of Gene Pitney’s “Town without Pity.”

When a distraught Crawford wails, “It’s just like 1937 all over again.” Mamacita replies, “When Hitler took Austria?” Crawford (ever the self-absorbed film diva): “No, when they labelled me box office poison.”

Davis on The Andy Williams show warbling her outrageously campy Chubby Checker-inspired novelty twist song in powder-blue pleated chiffon. What a bonanza of camp! No wonder the queers of 1962 had already embraced Davis as their queen! Watch how Sarandon lovingly recreates every swirling arm gesture and grimace.







/ Update! Read my analysis of episodes 5-7 of Feud here /

Lobotomy Room Goes to the Movies Film Club 2017: A Year in Review!

What with 2017 imminently drawing to a close, let’s take a wistful misty-eyed look back at what we screened this year at Lobotomy Room Goes to the Movies – the free monthly film club downstairs at Fontaine’s bar in Dalston devoted to Bad Movies We Love (our motto: Bad Movies for Bad People), specialising in the kitsch, the cult and the queer! 

Considering Lobotomy Room Goes to the Movies launched in November 2015, the film club is now two years old! If you've still never ventured downstairs into the Polynesian-style Tiki splendour of the Bamboo Lounge for one of our movie nights, what are you waiting for? Come explore the Wild, Wild World of Lobotomy Room! 

/ Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell: doomed girl band The Carrie Nations in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls /

/ “Men were toys for her amusement …” The truly glorious glamazonian Edy Williams as sexually voracious porn starlet Ashley St Ives in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (that’s Russ Meyer himself in the background) /

Beyond the Valley of the Dolls -  25 January 2017

Beyond bizarre! Beyond outrageous! Beyond any film you’ve ever seen before! Lobotomy Room presents the notorious Beyond the Valley of The Dolls! 

Most definitely not a sequel to the 1967 hit Valley of The Dolls (which we screened last year. An outraged Jacqueline Susann sued 20th Century Fox over the title and won), Beyond is entirely it’s its own animal. And what a frenzied animal it is! Co-author Roger Ebert himself called it “a camp sexploitation horror musical that ends in a quadruple ritual murder and a triple wedding.”

Like the original, however, Beyond – to quote the opening voice-over narration – “deals with the oft-times nightmare world of show business”, this time charting the progress of all-girl rock’n’roll trio The Carrie Nations in Hollywood’s ruthless and hedonistic glamour jungle. This is the Woodstock era but the bouffant-haired Carrie Nation are the girliest of girl bands. As John Waters says, “The Carrie Nations hardly looked like hippies. They looked like showgirls on LSD.” And for an emergent red-hot pop sensation, they only apparently have about three songs which we hear over and over and over again! (Members of The Carrie Nations neither sing or play their own instruments, which adds to the sense of artifice).

In any case, the rather vapid Carrie Nations are arguably overshadowed by sexually voracious porn starlet Ashley St Ives – a predatory glamazon in a crocheted bikini portrayed by the statuesque Edy Williams (whom Meyer would marry in 1970). Beyond concludes in a genuinely tasteless orgy of violence inspired by The Manson family murders. How many other films can you describe as “Jackie Susann-meets-Charles Manson”?

Rated “X” upon its release, Beyond represented b-movie sleaze maestro Meyer’s first time working at a big mainstream studio and the biggest budget he’d ever worked with. It shows onscreen: the costumes and decors are wildly baroque. Beyond is garish Pop Art, a comic strip come to life!

Decades later, Beyond still begs many questions: is it a parody of an exploitation film? Is it meant to be a satire? Are we supposed to take any of this seriously? Trying to work out Beyond is part of the fun! Certainly, its depiction of gay, lesbian and trans characters is what we would now call “problematic” to say the least. Commercially the film was successful, but the reviews were savage (Variety declared it “as funny as a burning orphanage”. Other assessments included “true pornography” and “utter garbage”). Judge for yourself on 25 January! The campy dialogue alone makes Beyond the Valley of the Dolls essential: “Hey! Don’t Bogart the joint!” “You’re a groovy boy. I’d like to strap you on sometime!” "This is my happening - and it freaks me out!" “Now you listen to me, hippie!” Kelly: “You’re turning me into a whore!” Lance: “You love it, you little freak!” “You will drink the black sperm of my vengeance!”

/ "I'll never look like Barbie. Barbie doesn't have bruises." Chloe Webb as Nancy Spungen in Sid and Nancy /

Sid and Nancy – 22 February 2017

Considering February is the month of Valentine’s, we’ll be embracing a romantic theme with … Sid and Nancy (1986)! Hey! It’s a love story! (Well, director Alex Cox himself describes the film as “a horrific love story”. Its original title was going to be Love Kills). It outlines the doomed tragicomic amour fou between punk’s Romeo and Juliet: Sex Pistols’ bassist Sid Vicious and his heroin-addicted groupie girlfriend Nancy Spungen … and let’s just say it all ends messily. 

So – why not throw on a black leather jacket, stick a safety pin through your nostril and join us on 22 February for a quiet night with Sid and Nancy?

Read more here.

/ Below: my favourite of all Faye Dunaway’s Joan Crawford “looks” in Mommie Dearest: the bizarre 1960s blue pant-suited image with the huge chestnut bouffant wiglet. It’s very Jacqueline Susann / Valley of the Dolls / 

Mommie Dearest – 22 March 2017

Attention, all you bad muthas! This month the Lobotomy Room film club presents … Mommie Dearest!

Screening this notorious unintended camp classic (adapted from Christina Crawford’s 1978 revenge memoir about her relationship with adopted mother Joan Crawford) right now is timely for several reasons. We’ve scheduled it a bit earlier in the month to embrace the spirit of Mother’s Day! Its leading lady – scary screen diva Faye Dunaway - is currently in the news for that very unfortunate mishap with the Best Film winner envelope at the Academy Awards. And finally: now that the much-anticipated TV series Feud: Bette and Joan is underway, you can contrast Jessica Lange’s interpretation of Joan Crawford with Dunaway’s.

Anyway, ANY time is a good time to watch Mommie Dearest. Sure, it’s widely ridiculed as an embarrassing fiasco - but it’s also wildly entertaining. As John Waters argues, "I don't think this is a campy movie. I don't think it's so bad it's good. I think it's so good it's perfect."

Female Trouble – 26 April 2017

Cinema’s Sleaze Maestro (and Patron Saint of Lobotomy Room) John Waters turns 71 in April. To celebrate, this month’s presentation is Waters’ definitive trash epic Female Trouble (1974) on Wednesday 26 April! See freaky 300-pound hog princess Divine in his greatest role as unrepentant bad girl and criminal Dawn Davenport! 

In his 1981 book Shock Value, Waters himself outlines Female Trouble as “the story of a headline-seeking criminal named Dawn Davenport (Divine). The film traces her life from teenage years as a suburban brat to her untimely death in the electric chair.” As Jack Stevenson eloquently argues in his essay on Female Trouble in issue number five of Little Joe Magazine: “Waters’ films have been called comedies but this one is full of horror … the chemistry of the cast sets this film apart and makes it Waters’ most collaborative and yes, spiritual work. It was the film they were all put on earth to make, the culmination of a collective vision. The unjustly more celebrated Pink Flamingos is lifeless in comparison and was really just a dress rehearsal for Female Trouble. For Female Trouble Waters functioned more as a psychic medium than a movie director, populating his all-American disaster story with a large movable feast of cast, crew, friends and oddball “discoveries”, tapping into the spirit of the times as well as the spirit of a specific rebel milieu in Baltimore. Then he spiked it with energy, attitude and weirdness, and zapped it to life.”

/ Diana Ross in full diva-gone-berserk mode in Mahogany /

Mahogany – 17 May 2017

“I can never stress enough the importance of Diana Ross as a gay icon and Mahogany perfectly explains why. Both impossibly fabulous and impossibly camp, Ms. Ross is throwing tantrums, slapping people, fucking shit up, wearing an endless array of kimonos as a matter of course and just generally living her life.” OUT Magazine

This month’s presentation is Mahogany (1975) starring pop diva Diana Ross. And boy does Ross seize the opportunity to emote! It’s an outrageous, unintended so-bad-it’s-GREAT camp classic in the tradition of Valley of the Dolls, Mommie Dearest and Showgirls particularly beloved by drag queens. Find out why on Wednesday 17 May!

Mahogany is a lurid rags-to-riches melodrama starring Ross as Tracy, a poor but determined girl from the gritty Chicago slums dreaming of becoming a fashion designer. Instead, she winds up transformed into international supermodel Mahogany. But is success - and her decadent Euro-trash existence in La Dolce Vita Rome - all it’s cracked up to be? Note: your enjoyment of Mahogany will depend how much you like the number one Diana Ross song “Do You Know Where You’re Going To?” (It’s played over and OVER again in the film).

/ Jayne Mansfield's frosted white-lipsticked smile in The Wild, Wild World of Jayne Mansfield /

/ "Roma! City of gladiators!" Jayne Mansfield embracing Rome's la dolce vita in The Wild, Wild World of Jayne Mansfield / 

The Wild, Wild World of Jayne Mansfield – 29 June 2017

29 June 2017 is a holy day! It represents the fiftieth anniversary of the fatal car crash that killed beloved Lobotomy Room patron saint Jayne Mansfield (19 April 1933 – 29 June 1967). Let’s commemorate Jayne’s memory in the boozy style she would have wanted with a FREE screening of The Wild, Wild World of Jayne Mansfield!

Rated “X” upon its release in 1968, the ultra-trashy faux documentary Wild, Wild World chronicles the kinky globe-trotting misadventures of Hollywood sex kitten-gone-berserk Jayne Mansfield. Watch agog as scantily-clad camp icon Mansfield - the punk Marilyn Monroe, revered by John Waters and Divine (and “the face” of Lobotomy Room) - visits the hedonistic “sin spots” of the world, encompassing topless go-go clubs, gay bars, drag queen beauty contests and nudist colonies, accompanied by her pet Chihuahua!

Let’s make the night a celebration of all things Jayne! Come dragged-up as Jayne Mansfield! Throw on a ratty blonde wig! Bring a Chihuahua! Giggle, squeal and cavort!

Not enough incentive? Drink a Jayne Mansfield-themed cocktail (light rum, raspberry liqueur and prosecco) for special offer price of £6.50! Free love heart candy, strawberry ice-cream and popcorn! Traditional white trash-style American hot dogs for £6!

/ See Marlene Dietrich wear a mini-dress - in 1931?! /

/ Marlene Dietrich in butch black leather as prostitute-turned-spy X-27 in the sublime 1931 film Dishonored /

Dishonored – 19 July 2017

Strictly speaking July is “Pride month”, so let’s seize the opportunity for a night of old-school diva worship on Wednesday 19 July! Dishonored (1931) stars sultry German glamour-puss (and perennial LGBTQ favourite) Marlene Dietrich as a World War I prostitute turned spy in a variation of the Mata Hara story. Filled with shimmering close-ups of Dietrich’s face and stylishly directed by Josef von Sternberg, Dishonored is strange, exotic, morbid and sexy – and the perfect film to watch over cocktails in the Art Deco surroundings of Fontaine’s!

/ The sensational Dorothy Malone in Written on the Wind /

/ The opulence! The fabulous Lauren Bacall, leading lady of Written on the Wind / 

Written on the Wind – 16 August 2017

On Wednesday 16 August, we present a night of sex and dying in high society – with a screening of Written on the Wind (1956)!

Director Douglas Sirk was the absolute maestro of lush, deluxe Techincolour fifties “women’s films” (think beautiful people with beautiful problems). Written on the Wind - praised by Roger Ebert as "a perverse and wickedly funny melodrama" – is one of his artistic pinnacles. It stars Rock Hudson and Lauren Bacall, but the film is well and truly stolen by Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone in supporting roles as the rich and wildly dysfunctional siblings Kyle and Marylee Hadley. He’s a tortured, self-loathing and insecure alcoholic with “weak sperm”; she’s a voracious hot-pool-of-woman-need nymphomaniac tormented by her unrequited love for Hudson. Both devour the screen! Throughout, Malone - who won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance - looks like one of the bullet bra’d bad girls from a trashy 1950s pulp novel come to pouting life. The scene where cat-on-a-hot tin roof Marylee dances to frantic mambo music in sexy lingerie in her bedroom … well, it just has to be seen to be believed! Watching Written on the Wind on the big screen over cocktails promises to be a lurid and head-spinning experience! 

/ Patty Duke and Susan Hayward in Valley of the Dolls /

Valley of the Dolls – 20 September 2017

Before Mommie Dearest ... before Showgirls ... the original “What the hell were they thinking?” Bad Movie We Love was show business cautionary tale Valley of the Dolls. A perennial favourite of drag queens and a cult classic for connoisseurs of kitsch, the unintentionally hilarious and wildly entertaining 1967 film adaptation of Jacqueline Susann’s scandalous 1966 bestseller took the already lurid source material – and went even trashier with it!

Throw on a bouffant wig, get yourself a stiff drink and strap yourselves in for a wild ride when Lobotomy Room Goes to the Movies presents Valley of The Dolls! 

Read more here

/ “Give this man satin undies, a dress, a sweater and a skirt or even the simple lounging outfit he has on – and he’s the happiest man in the world!” Legendarily inept "gutter auteur" Edward D Wood Jr in Glen or Glenda? /

Halloween Double Bill: Ed Wood / Glen or Glenda? 18 October 2017

Considering Halloween is “gay Christmas”, we’re embracing it big-style this October – with a themed double bill of Ed Wood (1994) and Glen or Glenda (1953)!

Yes! A Halloween tribute to Edward Wood Jr (1924 – 1978) and his frequent leading man, horror movie icon Bela Lugosi (1882 -1956)! Filmed in atmospheric black and white, Ed Wood is an affectionate biopic of the man widely hailed as the worst filmmaker of all time and the definitive collaboration between Tim Burton and Johnny Depp. Glen or Glenda? - also known as I Changed My Sex - is Wood’s own gloriously inept debut film, an autobiographical and mind-boggling cri de coeur as a transvestite and angora sweater fetishist. 

/ Ona Munson as Mother Gin Sling in The Shanghai Gesture / 

/ Ona Munson and Gene Tierney in The Shanghai Gesture / 

The Shanghai Gesture – 15 November 2017

Join us on 15 November for a descent into depravity with Josef von Sternberg’s The Shanghai Gesture (1941) – perhaps the wildest, weirdest film to come out of Golden Age Hollywood!

A torrid and baroque study in vengeance and corruption, the film sees Sir Guy Charteris (Walter Huston), a rich white industrialist with a murky past, seeking to gentrify Shanghai (he calls it "the cesspool of the Far East"). When gorgon-like dragon lady Mother Gin Sling (Ona Munson) learns he intends to close her gambling den she starts plotting her revenge. Meanwhile, slumming rich girl Poppy (the exquisite Gene Tierney) becomes ensnared by the toxic allure of the casino ("It smells so incredibly evil ..."), addicted both to gambling and the heavy-lidded charms of Dr Omar (a torpid Victor Mature in a burnoose and fez).

Filled with exotic locales, outrageous costumes, campy dialogue ("my plucked bird of paradise"; "Stop behaving like a disabled flamingo!") and featuring in the sinister Mother Gin Sling one of the all-time great screen villainesses, The Shanghai Gesture is the perfect film to watch over cocktails in the Tiki surroundings of The Bamboo Lounge! (Remember: the film is FREE so you can buy more cocktails!). Doors to the Bamboo Lounge open at 8 pm. Film starts at 8:30 prompt. Seating is limited - come early! Wearing a fez is highly encouraged!

Read more here

What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? 20 December 2017

As you may know, BBC2 finally begins screening the sublime seven-part TV series Feud: Bette and Joan (about the arch rivalry of Golden Age Hollywood bitch goddesses extraordinaire Bette Davis and Joan Crawford) from Saturday 16 December. Therefore, Lobotomy Room is jumping on the bandwagon (I mean, embracing the spirit!) with a themed mini-season of "hagsploitation" horror films starring Crawford and Davis. We start on 20 December with the original mutha of them all, Gothic camp classic What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)! Upcoming titles in the New Year will include Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte and Strait-jacket!

Who knows what other putrid delights the Lobotomy Room film club holds in store for you next year? Some hints: 2018 represents the thirtieth anniversaries of the deaths of Divine and heroin-ravaged Warhol Superstar Nico - and the release of John Waters' 1988 masterpiece Hairspray! 

Further reading:

Everything we screened in 2016

Read more about Lobotomy Room Goes to the Movies in Loverboy magazine

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Coming up … the last Lobotomy Room club night of 2017!

Feeling jaded? Didn’t get the cha-cha heels you wanted? Head-bang away your post-Christmas blues – at Lobotomy Room!

Yes! Revel in sleaze, voodoo and rock’n’roll - when incredibly strange dance party Lobotomy Room returns to the Polynesian-style basement Bamboo Lounge of Dalston’s most unique nite spot Fontaine’s! Friday 29 December 2017!

Lobotomy Room! Where sin lives! A punkabilly booze party! Sensual and depraved! A spectacle of decadence! Bad Music for Bad People! A Mondo Trasho evening of Beat, Beat Beatsville Beatnik Rock’n’Roll! Rockabilly Psychosis! Wailing Rhythm and Blues! Twisted Tittyshakers! Punk! White Trash Rockers! Kitsch! Exotica! Think John Waters soundtracks, or Songs the Cramps Taught Us, hosted by Graham Russell (of Dr Sketchy and Cockabilly notoriety).

Expect desperate stabs from the jukebox jungle! Savage rhythms to make you writhe and rock! Grainy black-and-white vintage erotica projected on the big screen all night for your adult viewing pleasure!

Admission: gratuit - that’s French for FREE!

Lobotomy Room: Faster. Further. Filthier.

It’s sleazy. It’s grubby. It’s trashy - you’ll love it!

Full rancid details on the Facebook event page

Reflections on … Ari and Mario (1966)

/ The ever-inscrutable Nico (1938 - 1988): Warhol Superstar, Velvet Underground chanteuse, heroin-ravaged diva and “possessor of the most haunting wraith cheekbones of the 20th century” (thank you, James Wolcott of Vanity Fair) /

What's a busy single mother and Warhol Superstar to do? Nico needs to go out so, naturally, calls on Puerto Rican drag queen / underground film starlet Mario Montez to baby-sit her young son Ari Boulogne at her cramped apartment in New York's louche Chelsea Hotel.

/ Ari and Nico: this is very much how they appear in Ari and Mario /

High jinks ensue: cherub-faced Ari is adorable but so hyperactive and wild he is virtually feral. Montez offers to read to him, sing to him and dance for him, but Ari is oblivious to her charms and more interested in alternately pretending to be a crocodile and a cowboy and shooting her with his toy gun (towards the end Montez finally snaps, "Can't you find something else to shoot at?"). Off-screen from behind the camera director Andy Warhol himself is frequently audible encouraging urging Ari to misbehave.

All the "action" takes place within the confined space of the tiny kitchen and there is no editing. The film feels like a home movie (it’s filmed in grainy Super 8 but in grunge-y bleached-out colour instead of black and white), albeit a home movie with an exceptionally hip and stylish bohemian cast.

/ Andy Warhol and Mario Montez during the making of The Chelsea Girls (1966) /

In lieu of narrative the film is primarily an affectionate character study of the unlikely duo of three-year-old boy and transvestite. Warhol's more famous Superstar transvestites Candy Darling, Jackie Curtis and Holly Woodlawn emerged later; the rather swarthy Mario Montez (1935-2013) can be seen as their precursor. Montez (real name: Rene Rivera from Brooklyn, with a day job at the post office) was the then-reigning drag queen of choice for underground filmmakers in the early sixties: she'd already worked with Jack Smith in the notorious Flaming Creatures (1963) and appeared in off-Broadway plays; Montez and Nico would both subsequently feature in Warhol's The Chelsea Girls (1966), also set at the Chelsea Hotel. For her baby-sitting assignment Montez chooses to wear an incongruous ensemble of long powder-blue taffeta evening gown, blonde bouffant wig, dangling earrings and heavily-layered clown-like make-up.

/ Pioneering Warhol drag queen superstar Mario Montez /

Ari (born 1962) was the son Nico claimed was fathered by the European art cinema heartthrob Alain Delon (to this day Delon denies paternity). Certainly, if Ari is the offspring of Nico and Delon he inherited their looks: he is an exceptionally beautiful child.

Montez, befitting an exhibitionistic, attention-seeking Warhol Superstar, is acutely conscious of being filmed and is eager to seize the opportunity to perform but when she offers to entertain Ari by singing for him, Ari shakes his head no. She sings "Ten Little Indians" anyway; Ari stonily ignores her. In keeping with the cowboys and Indians theme, when Montez improvises an interpretative Indian squaw dance, Ari hides his face behind a curtain rather than watch her. It's Montez's exasperated attempts to both try to relate to Ari and to maintain her sweet-voiced, lady-like demeanor that make Ari and Mario one of Warhol's funniest and most likable films.

Early in the film the actress, jazz singer and fellow Chelsea Hotel habitué Tally Brown (another veteran of both Warhol and Jack Smith films) makes a brief but vivid appearance. She drops by to use Nico's phone: hers has been cut off because hasn't paid the bill. A charismatic figure in a fur hat and suede go-go boots, she speaks to Ari in French with genuine warmth, asking if he knows any songs. When Ari answers No, Tally points out, “Your mother is a singer” but Ari doesn't reply.

/ Above: Tally Brown photographed by Billy Name at Max's Kansas City in the sixties /

When Nico returns from her outing she sits on the floor and talks casually in her whisper-soft German accent to Montez while Ari tears around, sometimes playing with the off-screen Warhol. The film captures a radiantly beautiful Nico with almost waist-length pale blonde hair, looking fashion model-elegant in a man's navy-blue pea coat over a turtleneck sweater and pinstriped hipster trousers.

Knowledge of Nico's biography foreshadows Ari and Mario with a tragic extra resonance. She has been routinely vilified in print for her parenting ability, with some justification. Not long after the film Nico would hand Ari over to Alain Delon's parents in France to raise and descend into heroin addiction. More damningly, the general consensus is that later in life when they were reunited Nico initiated the adult Ari into heroin use.

In Ari and Mario, though, we see only relaxed, unaffected affection between Nico and her young son. Pouring him orange juice, Nico teases, "Ari doesn't love me anymore." At one point Ari approaches and spontaneously plants a kiss on the side of Nico's face then goes back to careening around like a Tasmanian devil. The sight of Nico and Ari at this point in their lives when there would seemingly be so much potential and optimism ahead for them, you can't help but feel a wave of sadness for the despair, addiction and premature death that awaits them both in the future. (Nico died in 1988 aged 49).

Devoid of his usual cocktail of sadomasochism and amphetamines, Ari and Mario's emphasis on innocence and domesticity is a sweet exception in the Warhol canon.

I've blogged about "the Marlene Dietrich of Punk" Nico many times over the years: her contemporary Marianne Faithfull reflects on Nico here; the historic encounter When John Waters Met Nico; Nico’s 1960s modelling days; how the old jazz standard “My Funny Valentine” (and heroin) connects Nico with Chet Baker; When Patti Smith Met Nico and finally, the relationship between Leonard Cohen and Nico.

Lobotomy Room at Fontaine's DJ Set List 24 November 2017

From the Facebook events page:

Attention late night diversion seekers! Revel in sleaze, voodoo and rock’n’roll - when incredibly strange dance party Lobotomy Room returns to the Polynesian-style basement Bamboo Lounge of Dalston’s most unique nite spot Fontaine’s! Friday 24 November 2017!

Lobotomy Room! Where sin lives! A punkabilly booze party! Sensual and depraved! A spectacle of decadence! Bad Music for Bad People! A Mondo Trasho evening of Beat, Beat Beatsville Beatnik Rock’n’Roll! Rockabilly Psychosis! Wailing Rhythm and Blues! Twisted Tittyshakers! Punk! White Trash Rockers! Kitsch! Exotica! Think John Waters soundtracks, or Songs the Cramps Taught Us, hosted by Graham Russell (of Dr Sketchy and Cockabilly notoriety). Expect desperate stabs from the jukebox jungle! Savage rhythms to make you writhe and rock! Grainy black-and-white vintage erotica projected on the big screen all night for your adult viewing pleasure!

Admission: gratuit - that’s French for FREE!

Lobotomy Room: Faster. Further. Filthier.

It’s sleazy. It’s grubby. It’s trashy - you’ll love it!

A tawdry good time guaranteed!

Not that there's been a public outcry, but I’m trying to ease my way back into blogging regularly again after a lengthy hiatus. Stopping certainly wasn’t by choice! I’ve never stopped jotting-down my Lobotomy Room set lists from behind the Bamboo Lounge's DJ booth – I’ve just never got around to posting them. There have been a few calamities preventing me in recent months. At first the main issue was damned Photobucket. For the first several years of this blog (when I was at my most prolific), I used the photo-sharing website Photobucket to upload pics. If you’re a millennial or non-blogger, you might well have never even heard of Photobucket. They were an obligatory site in the Myspace era! Trust me, I now wish I'd never heard of Photobucket either. Plenty of people still use it for blogging or sharing photos on sites like Amazon and eBay. At first Photobucket was free to use. Later I used to pay an annual fee of something like $39.00 for the privilege. In summer 2017 Photobucket committed reputation-destroying corporate hara-kiri by abruptly notifying its users (it claims to have 100 million of them) by email that their online photo libraries would be held to ransom unless they signed-up for their new package of almost $400 a year! All over the internet, blogs suddenly had blank black squares where photos used to be. It led to a tsunami of negative press for Photobucket and was a PR disaster! Photobucket customer support confirmed to me my existing package was in place (and my blog posts would remain secure) until March 2018, which gave me a deadline to work toward. There was no way I was agreeing to the frankly ludicrous $399.99 a year package, so in the meantime my ambitious and time-consuming art project was to comb through several years’ worth of old blog posts and manually, painstakingly replace Photobucket html links with actual photos one by one. It took months – but I did it! Phew! But that meant for a long time, my priority was fixing old blog entries rather than posting new ones.

Hair hoppers are welcome – at Lobotomy Room!

More disastrously – on 17 November I was burgled! I’ve been living in the same building for about nine years now and the front door lock has always been an issue. For the lock to click shut you have to slam the door hard and most of the other tenants seemed blissfully unconcerned! (Living on the ground floor, I was always aware I was at greater risk of being burgled than them). I’ve complained about it to the landlord over the years. More recently the landlord has been undertaking repairs in the hallway to fix a damp problem and the walls had been stripped back to the exposed brick. In one corner close to my flat it was further stripped to just a panel of thin wood (where the original door used to be). It was a very opportunistic moment for burglars while that was going on. The robbers were able to gain entry to the building (probably because the front door hadn’t been shut properly) and then literally kick a hole in the hallway wall, push the wardrobe out of the way and crawl into my flat! When I got home from work that night there was a gaping hole in the wall, my door was wide open, the lights were on and the place had been completely ransacked.

/ Goodbye, every single hat I've ever owned /

The thieves took my laptop and iPad which is bad enough. I don’t have home insurance and my day job in the charity sector is - shall we say - modestly paid, so replacing these (especially so close to Christmas) is a totally unexpected drain on the finances. I’ve written off the iPad but I can’t function without a laptop so I have had to cough up well over £600 for that. I lost all the contents on the old laptop (documents, photos, music), but that’s not the end of the world. What’s most gutting is the robbers also stole a dark grey Muji weekend bag from the top of the wardrobe – that contained my entire collection of vintage and reproduction hats. I don’t even think they really intended to steal them: they probably just wanted something to stuff the iPad and the laptop into.  My vintage fez, my Scorpio Rising biker cap, my white leopard print fur flat cap … all gone! This is all American stuff I picked up over the years during trips to Las Vegas (for the Viva Las Vegas Rockabilly Weekender) and San Francisco. Even the reproduction items are now so old they're discontinued and every bit as irreplaceable as the genuine vintage pieces. (I immediately contacted My Baby Jo in California about replacing my biker cap. The company that used to manufacture them has gone bust! ). So at the moment I’m still waking up angry every day, alternating between rage and depression and genuinely grieving for my stolen stuff! Yes, it is "only stuff" but it does feel like a major loss. I had to DJ bare-headed at this Lobotomy Room, which just felt wrong! But yes - I feel pretty despairing at the moment. 

Yikes! What a downer. OK let’s change the subject. This Lobotomy Room was particularly tough in terms of competing events happening on the same night. Dirty Water Records presented King Salami and The Cumberland 3 with Los Coyote Men at The Lexington– an absolutely killer garage punk / surf instrumental double bill that even I would have been tempted to attend! How unlucky! More annoyingly (and a bit suspiciously), a Cramps tribute event called Bad Music for Bad People was held at Paper Dress Vintage (the venue where Lobotomy Room got its start in 2013). That was especially galling considering I’ve been doing Lobotomy Room at Fontaine’s every last Friday of the month now since summer 2015, regularly billing it as a night of “Bad Music for Bad People” and “Songs The Cramps Taught Us!” And they even projected “vintage b-movies”! It’s not even like 24 November represented something significant like the birth of Lux Interior or the anniversary of his death. And it did siphon-off some of my usual crowd! But having said that, some of the Paper Dress Vintage attendees did wind up at my night afterwards (they said it finished by about 11 pm. The reports I heard the next day made it sound fairly tepid). Luckily in the end enough people descended into the Bamboo Lounge to make doing this Lobotomy Room worthwhile – and most importantly, people danced!

/ “The violence that was normally only a promise (or threat) in rock'n’roll was realized in Esquerita’s sound.” Charles Gillett in his book The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock‘n’Roll  /

Some eternal Lobotomy Room favourites celebrated birthdays in November. Such as the flamboyant, pompadoured "kween" of outsider rhythm and blues Esquerita (aka Eskew Reeder Jr, born in Greenville, South Carolina on 20 November 1935. He died in 1986). Esquerita was such a beauty! I made a point of playing “Esquerita and The Voola” – which sounds like he’s shrieking a lunatic voodoo incantation. It's an invitation to human sacrifice!

Meanwhile, glorious Bold Soul Sister, blissed-out and fright-wigged Acid Queen and the absolute tigress of rhythm and blues Tina Turner (née Anna Mae Bullock) turned 78 on 26 November. (Above is the fabulous Tina ripping it up onstage with the Ike and Tina Turner Revue in the seventies). I can’t imagine not playing a frantic 1960s Ike and Tina Turner rave-up at Lobotomy Room, but I also threw in Tina’s solo 1975 cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Under My Thumb.” Does anyone not like Tina Turner? At one point a friendly and garrulous woman with a cocktail in her hand joined me behind the DJ booth and started flicking through my DJ bag. She asked, “Do you mind me doing this?” I smiled and said "No" but of course I did! That’s a real liberty! All DJs hate that, and she was getting in my way. My solution was to say, “I’m going to play some Tina Turner for you. You should dance to this!” And she did! Problem solved! Thank you, Ms Turner!

Anyway, here's what I played:

Tall Cool One - The Fabulous Wailers
Drumble - Dennis and The Menaces
Blockade - The Rumblers
Road Runner - The 5,6,7,8s
Jukebox Babe - Alan Vega
Atomic Bongos - Lydia Lunch
I Don't Need You No More - The Rumblers
Johnny Lee - Faye Adams
Commanche - The Revels
What Do You Think I Am? Ike and Tina Turner
I Need Your Lovin' - Don Gardner and Dee Dee Ford
Bombora - The Original Surfaris
Rock-A-Bop - Sparkle Moore
Wild Wild Party - Charlie Feathers
Let's Have a Party - Wanda Jackson
Esquerita and The Voola - Esquerita
Bop Pills - Macy "Skip" Skipper
Wiped-Out - The Escorts
Let's Go Baby - Billy Eldridge
Big Bounce - Shirley Caddell
No Good Lover - Mickey and Sylvia
Beat Party - Ritchie and The Squires
Adult Books - X
Intoxica - The Revels
Wipe Out - The Surfaris
Batman - Link Wray and His Raymen
Muleskinner Blues - The Fendermen
Shortnin' Bread - The Readymen
Surfin' Bird - The Trashmen
Pedro Pistolas Twist - Los Twisters
Peter Gunn Twist - The Jesters
Peter Gunn Locomotion - The Delmonas
Viens danser le twist - Johnny Hallyday
Ultra Twist - The Cramps
Twistin' the Night Away - Divine
Gostaria de Saber (River Deep, Mountain High) - Wanderlea
Under My Thumb - Tina Turner
Lucille - Masaaki Hirao
I Walk Like Jayne Mansfield - The 5,6,7,8s
That Makes It - Jayne Mansfield
These Boots Are Made for Walkin' - Mrs Miller
Last of the Secret Agents - Nancy Sinatra
Dance with Me Henry - Ann-Margret
Whistle Bait - Larry Collins
Somethin' Else - Sid Vicious
Ain't That Lovin' You, Baby - The Earls of Suave
Be Bop a Lula - Alan Vega
Margaya - The Fender Four
Blitzkrieg Bop - The Ramonetures
Boys Are Boys and Girls Are Choice - The Monks
Year 1 - X
Forming - The Germs
Tunnel of Love - Wanda Jackson
Aphrodisiac - Bow Wow Wow
Viva Las Vegas - Nina Hagen
Rock Around the Clock - The Sex Pistols
Fools Rush In - Ricky Nelson
Devil in Disguise - Elvis Presley
Surf Rat - The Rumblers
Love Me - The Phantom
Scorpio - The Carnations
Dragon Walk - The Noblemen
Vampira - The Misfits
Boss - The Rumblers

Further reading:

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Remember: Lobotomy Room the incredibly strange dance club is the last Friday of every accursed month! Therefore the next one is Friday 29 December (come head-bang away your post-Christmas blues!). The film club is third Wednesday of every month. BBC2 is finally screening the sublime series Feud: Bette and Joan as of Saturday 16 December. Therefore Lobotomy Room is jumping on the bandwagon (I mean, embracing the spirit!) with a themed mini-season of "hagsploitation" horror films starring Joan Crawford and Bette Davis - starting on 20 December with the mutha of them all, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Details to follow soon!