Peter Butterworth in Carry on Camping, 1969
The softcore sex comedy was one of the few surefire commercial bets for British cinema. Most were neither sexy nor funny.
Michael Brooke
https://www.bfi.org.uk/lists/10-great-erotic-british-films
Barbara Windsor in Carry On Camping, 1969
What do we mean by ‘British smut’? It was the 1960s and 70s when smut (“obscene or lascivious talk, writing or pictures”) in the form of softcore sex films increasingly dominated British cinemas – and dominated to such an extent that, throughout the financially tumultuous 1970s, the genre was one of the only surefire commercial prospects besides sitcom spin-offs. What’s more, they could be made for considerably less money.
Michael Brooke
https://www.bfi.org.uk/features/where-begin-british-smut
Robin Askwith and Linda Hayden in Confessions Of A Window Cleaner, 1974
A sexploitation film (or sex-exploitation film) is a class of independently produced, low-budget feature film that is generally associated with the 1960s and early 1970s, and that serves largely as a vehicle for the exhibition of non-explicit sexual situations and gratuitous nudity. The genre is a subgenre of exploitation films.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexploitation_film
Carry On England, 1976
British sex comedy films became mainstream with the release in 1976 of Carry On England, starring Judy Geeson, Patrick Mower, and Diane Langton, in which an experimental mixed-sex anti-aircraft battery in wartime is enjoying making love not war. However, the arrival of the new Captain S. Melly brings an end to their cosy life and causes terror in the ranks.
In Carry On Emmannuelle, the beautiful Emmannuelle Prevert just cannot get her own husband into bed. A spoof of Emmanuelle, the film revolves around the eponymous heroine (Suzanne Danielle) and her unsuccessful attempts to make love to her husband, Emile (Kenneth Williams), a French ambassador. Emile grants Emmannuelle permission to sleep with anyone she likes, and her promiscuity turns her into a celebrity and a frequent talk show guest. Meanwhile, Theodore Valentine is besotted by her and wants them to get married. But Emmannuelle is obsessed with arousing her husband’s sexual desire at almost any cost. This was the last of the original Carry On films.
Producer/director Kenneth F. Rowles made a copycat cash-in with his The Ups and Downs of a Handyman. His next movie, Take an Easy Ride, purports to be a public information film warning of the dangers of hitchhiking but is actually a sexploitation film showing young girls being sexually assaulted and murdered (although Rowles says he had to add those scenes on request of the movie’s distributor).
Films like Dreams of Thirteen, The Younger the Better, Mrs. Stone’s Thing, and Come Play With Me played in Soho and elsewhere, but with the arrival of the Margaret Thatcher government in 1979 the Eady Levy was abolished in 1985, killing off the genre.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_comedy
Hattie Jacques and Kenneth Williams in Carry on Camping, 1969
Carry On Camping is a 1969 British comedy film, the 17th release in the series of 31 Carry On films (1958–1992). The film was the most popular movie at the UK box office in 1969.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carry_On_Camping
A disparate group of campers band together to rid themselves of hippies planning an all-night rave next to their site.
Although seemingly anarchic on the outside, the Carry On films were always inherently conservative on the inside. This is amply demonstrated by Carry On Camping, which was filmed in the winter of 1968, shortly after the ‘Summer of Love’ and at the height of world-wide student unrest. Blessed with one of the most amusing of the Carry On titles, it rather surprisingly also serves as a comment by the filmmakers on young people, the new ‘permissive society’ and youth culture in general.
The film begins with a cinema audience of predominantly middle-aged men watching a ‘naturist’ film, introducing nudity to the series in such a way as to get past the censors and still be certified for viewing by all ages. This is partly achieved by having Sid James guffawing over the risqué images, while his girlfriend (played by Joan Sims) averts her eyes in embarrassment. James and Sims are ridiculously old for their roles as a courting couple still trying to get to first base (he was fifty-five, she thirty-eight), as is Barbara Windsor as a naughty schoolgirl (she was thirty-one!).
The dramatic contrast between the enclosed, static and make-believe logic of these films and the radical changes going on in the real world climaxes with the arrival of the young hippies at the end. Only then do the desultory plot strands and disparate characters come together to repel the ravers in the rather rushed finale. When the hippies leave, the schoolgirls join them, as does Charlie Muggins (Charles Hawtrey), who has been literally and figuratively an outsider throughout the narrative.
Betty Marsden, as Terry Scott’s hectoring wife, frequently steals the show with her bizarre laugh, although inevitably the film will always be remembered as the one in which Barbara Windsor’s bikini top flies off while she is exercising.
Sergio Angelini
http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/466118/index.html
Au Pair Girls, 1972
The “saucy” misadventures of four au pairs who arrive in London on the same day in the early 1970s. There’s a Swedish girl, a Danish, a German and a Chinese. The story contrives to get the clothes off all of them, involve them in some Carry On-type humour and couple them with various misfits from the British film and TV culture of the time, including Man About the House star Richard O’Sullivan, future Coronation Street rogue Johnny Briggs and horror film stalwart Ferdy Mayne (playing a sheik). There’s a pretty risqué amount of female nudity on display, for those who like that kind of thing (but obviously nothing hardcore).
Most of the film is pretty thin and inconsequential; the girls are stereotypes, and German Anita especially suffers from some kind of infantalising disorder – she’s a moron obsessed with colour TV who acts like a kind of uninhibited child & dresses to deliberately show her private parts; in another more serious film, she would be a psychiatric case. The most interesting section of the film involves the Swedish girl being taken to a club in London where some dodgy types are still trying to swing, being seduced by a middle-aged rocker, losing her virginity and realising that the scene is not for her. These sequences have some energy in them and point to a more intriguing film than we’ve ended up with, in which promiscuity and the dregs of the music business and upper classes live soulless and seedy lives (there’s a fine turn by John Standing as an impotent public school roué). The strangest of the stories has the Chinese girl (future cannibal film veteran Me Me Lay) getting off with her childish piano prodigy employer, falling mutually in love with and then leaving in the middle of the night for no good reason at all, except some orientalist notion that “Chinese birds are inscrutable, ain’t they?!” The film is pretty demeaning to its women characters and there’s a smattering of homophobia in the dialogue and one of the characterisations. The end is striking, as Mayne’s sheik for no earthly reason (except they have to end the film somehow) whisks all of the girls away to his Arab kingdom for what looks to all the world like a future in the white slave trade, which they are all delighted about.
Stuff and nonsense for the most part then, but directed with a fair amount of skill by veteran Val Guest, which puts it as a piece of film-making a notch above most of the 70s Brit sexploitation flicks.
jaibo
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068235/reviews
Confessions of a Window Cleaner is a 1974 British sex comedy film, directed by Val Guest.
The optimistic and inept Timothy Lea is freshly employed by his brother-in-law Sid as a window cleaner. With Sid an impending father to be, he looks to Timmy to fully ‘satisfy’ his customers, little realising that Timmy’s accident prone ways often stretch to his sex life with his clients. Timmy bed hops from unsatisfied housewives to even a lesbian love tryst, all the while with his main eye on successful police officer, Elizabeth Radlett, who will have none of Timmy’s sexual advances. He proposes as a result, much to his family’s upset, unaware that Timmy’s usual run of luck will affect the outcome.
Confessions was a low-budget film, with a budget of £100,000, but not really an independent film. Producer Michael Klinger tried to secure funding from independent investors, but most of the funding actually came from Columbia Pictures, a fact telling for its period. The condition of the economy of the United Kingdom in the early 1970s had left part of the British film industry dependent on American funds. Being also released through Columbia, the film was the beneficiary of a marketing campaign. It was promoted through advertisements in television and tie-ins in bookstores.
Guest says “we saw an awful lot of people for” the lead including Dennis Waterman before casting Robin Askwith. “We needed the cheeky chappie, simply because It had to be gossamer light, walking the tightrope all the time not going over into anything “icky” you know.”
The interior of the Lea house was depicted as brightly lit and filled with eccentric items of doubtful use, such as a moose head and a gorilla suit. The characters are confined to the “cramped” space of every depicted room, again reminiscent of the sets of a sitcom. The confinement itself suggests claustrophobia, and Sian Barber suggests a connection to another low-budget genre of the time with cramped locations and gaudy scenery: the British horror film.
In criticising the original novels, sociologist Simon Frith had argued that the books derived their unflattering depiction of the British working class from stereotypes. In particular, the stereotypes which the middle class associates for “the great unwashed”. Making the series an expression of class discrimination. Sian Barber argues that the films inherited the same attitude towards the working class by embracing negative stereotypes of it. Sidney Noggett and his promiscuity, Rosie and her hair rollers, and the kleptomaniac tendencies of Mr. Lea all derive from these stereotypes. Yet, the films actually tone down the criminal tendencies of the Lea family. In the books, Timmy himself is a former prison convict, having been arrested for stealing the lead off a church roof. In the films Timmy has no such history, probably in an effort to make him more sympathetic to the audience. Production notes reveal that a sequel called Confessions from the Clink was considered by the production team, but the idea was abandoned by February, 1974.
Part of the humour of the film derives from a situation based on class stratification in the United Kingdom. The Leas are positioned at the bottom of the working class, barely above the criminal underclass, while the Radletts are upper middle class. The romance of Timmy and Elizabeth across the wide class divide serves to showcase both positions, and contrasts the two families. But the Leas are those depicted as ridiculous in the scenes relating to the aborted wedding, while the Radletts remain respectable.
Katya Wyeth in Confessions Of A Window Cleaner, 1974
While the premise of the film would be suitable for a pornographic film, the film focuses less on sexual intercourse and more on associated problems and anxieties. Timmy at first fails to perform, and the film deals with his embarrassment over his sexual inexperience and ineptitude. His sexual encounters are either awkward grappling attempts, or the result of Timmy being seduced and/or dominated by women. This anxiety over the male performance in a sexual relationship is one aspect of the film’s humour. Another is a reliance on more traditional elements of a comedy, such as slapstick and characters seen naked by accidental spectators. The sexual acts themselves are typically depicted as “confusing, difficult, and troublesome” throughout the film. A running gag seems to be that Timmy, a cleaner by profession, gets dirtied in several scenes involving sexuality. The implication is that sex itself is a “dirty” activity.
Like the horror films of the 1970s, the film is set in the familiar urban landscape of Great Britain. Its contemporary horror films had largely abandoned the costume drama format of their predecessors and the “careful class distinctions” associated with earlier eras in favor of a contemporary setting. For example, Virgin Witch (1971) and House of Whipcord (1974) are partly set in a modeling agency, Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972) and Frightmare (1974) in nightclubs, Dracula A.D. 1972 and House of Whipcord in house parties, Frightmare in a travelling funfair, and House of Mortal Sin (1975) in an antique shop. The reason for the update in setting was that it allowed for depictions of socially mobile characters, rootless or transient. Adding variety to the social interactions and locations. A variety also embraced in Confessions. For similar reasons, other genres had started depicting people whose work required them to constantly travel, such as a salesman in O Lucky Man! (1973) and a truck driver in Alfie Darling (1975). Confessions manages this by placing Timmy in the fringes of the working world, and interacting with clients of varying backgrounds and eccentricities.
There is a contrast in the film between the character of Timmy and the women with which he interacts. His mannerisms indicate nervousness, hesitancy, clumsiness, and insecurity. While they tend to have a self-confidence which he lacks, they are forceful and proactive sexual partners. Yet these confident women tend to be accessible. The ease with which their clothes are removed underline their availability to Timmy. All but Elizabeth, the “nice girl” whom he cannot really touch. Her clothes are not less revealing, her short skirts showcase her legs and seem to invite his touch. She consequently functions much as a temptress. Yet she does not allow him to touch her beyond a certain point, setting the boundaries in their relationship. It is Timmy’s desire for this unobtainable young woman which serves as an important story arc for the film.
Sue Harper and Justin Smith argue that the film can be seen as the initiation of a young man into a world of lustful women and adult sexual pleasure. The entire series of Confessions can be understood as a showcase for a simple notion, the notion that sexual freedom can be achieved by people of all classes and genders.
It has been called, “perhaps the best known and most successful British sex film” of the era, and was the top-grossing British film of 1974. In 1988 Guest said ” the cheques which come from Columbia even now are unbelievable on the series, because it was sold to Home Box Office, sold all through America… the others [sequels] made money but Confessions of is the block buster, it made so much money when it came out here that Columbia for the first time anyone could remember here had to pay Corporation Tax.”
As well as its sequels in the Confessions series it spawned another unrelated series of films which began with Adventures of a Taxi Driver (1976). The film made Robin Askwith a star in the UK. When the films were originally released they were regarded as very risqué and essentially soft core pornography, owing to the amount of nudity involved – generally female, with Robin Askwith being the only male shown naked. However the sex scenes themselves are more suggestive than explicit, being essentially played for laughs. Nonetheless, it was not until 1997 that Channel 5 became the first British terrestrial channel to show the entire series of Confessions films.
The film was a popular hit for the British sexploitation genre, while film critics reportedly loathed it and decried it as a “tawdry” and vulgar spectacle. Sian Barber points at this contradiction between the popular taste and the critics’ notions of quality, and concludes that it offers significant insights on actual “audience preferences”. Preferences shaped by “the tastes, values and frustrated desires of ordinary filmgoers”. The film was a box office hit. In a cited example of a cinema in the West End of London, the film was screened for nine weeks, with 29 performances per week, and earning over £30,000. In January 1975, the Eady Levy tax fund estimated that it had raised £200,000 from this film alone. By 1979, profits had exceeded £800,000.
Alexander Stuart, writing for the magazine Films and Filming. claimed that the films are a real confession, a confession that the British people cannot properly create films, erotic images, comedy, or anything related to love. The films were unfavourably compared to the Carry On series, which the critics found harmless in comparison. David Robinson, writing for The Times, claimed that the commercial success of the films was based on the sexual infantilism of the viewers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_a_Window_Cleaner
The case against this movie hardly needs to be restated. Clunking, crass, monotonously unfunny, it’s the sort of film that gives sexism a bad name.
And yet, for those who grew up in England in the early 70s, Confessions of A Window Cleaner is horribly evocative. The endless shots of tacky, dismal streets; the unwelcoming, tawdry interiors; the overwhelming sense of an exhausted gene pool; yep, that’s what it was like. The film has some of the impact (though none of the accomplishment) of the photographs of Tony Ray-Jones, and promotes a similar melancholy.
Then there’s Robin Askwith, who despite the various old troupers is the best thing in the movie. Granted, he wasn’t everyone’s idea of a sex god, and here he’s at the mercy of a dire screenplay, but he gives it everything he’s got. Looking and acting younger than his years, and with a cocky animality that no amount of boxy denim can mask, he sums up one particular breed of 70s boy, spunky, clueless, candid, vital, uncrushable. He looks great in his nude scenes, taut and doggy – there are moments of real beauty which belong in a better film. His sheer physical presence makes this awful picture almost worth watching.
Pobedonostsev
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071357/reviews
Judy Matheson in Confessions Of A Window Cleaner, 1974
A British made tasteless sex-addled comedy. The Brit humor doesn’t transfer to a foreign audience. This is the first of four installments in this series. Despite being garbage, the films were popular.
Tim Lea (Robin Aswith) is a leery-eyed, bumbling, dweeb teen apprentice window washer working for his slick mentoring brother-in-law Sid Noggett (Anthony Booth), who looks at an assortment of undressed women on the job. The lad faints while cleaning a shop window, where he witnesses the workers have sex and meets an attractive woman concerned about him. She turns out to be a female cop (Linda Hayden), who he dates. Meanwhile the cleaner advances from just eye-balling nude women to several sexual encounters.
The sniggering slapstick humor is on a low-level, as this mediocre comedy seems to hit its targeted audience during the dark ages of the Brit film industry.
Please note: This crappy film was the highest grossing film at the U.K. box office in 1974.
Dennis Schwartz
https://dennisschwartzreviews.com/confessionsofawindowcleaner/
Adventures of a Taxi Driver is a 1976 British sex comedy film directed by Stanley Long and starring Barry Evans, Judy Geeson and Adrienne Posta.
The movie was a huge box office success. It was the 19th most successful film at the British box office in 1976.
Monthly Film Bulletin said “A crass, lobotomised production, with no discernible style, humour or purpose. Stanley Long draws irritatingly smug performances from Barry Evans, Judy Geeson and, particularly, Adrienne Posta; and his view of women and sex is more objectionable than that of the most passionless, clinical, primitively shot stag movie.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventures_of_a_Taxi_Driver
What’s Up Nurse! is a 1977 British sex comedy film. It tells the story of the adventures of a young doctor in a hospital.
Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: “A dishearteningly unfunny sex comedy which discloses a painful package of unfailing bad taste (the most offensive sequence concerning a homosexual who believes he has given birth to a chimpanzee), stupefyingly dull sex scenes, and a collection of double entendres so ancient that they almost constitute some kind of intriguing pre-history of blue comedy.”
Léon Hunt describes the film along with Ford’s What’s Up Superdoc! (1978) as a “return to the Carry On films’ favourite setting to explore slap-and-tickle amidst the bedpans.”
Sarah Street wrote that Ford’s films Commuter Husbands (1972), Keep It Up, Jack (1973), The Sexplorer (1975) and What’s Up Nurse (1977) were “films with salacious titles designed to titillate dwindling audiences with their suggestion of breaking taboos.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What%27s_Up_Nurse!
Come Play with Me is a 1977 British softcore pornographic film, starring Mary Millington and directed by George Harrison Marks. Its cast list contains many well-known British character actors who were not known for appearing in such films. The film is regarded by many as the most successful of the British sex comedies of the seventies. It ran continuously at the Moulin Cinema in Great Windmill Street, Soho, London for 201 weeks, from April 1977 to March 1981, which is listed in the Guinness Book Of World Records as the longest-running screening in Britain. A blue plaque on the former cinema’s site commemorates this.
Harrison Marks had written Come Play With Me’s script in 1970, not long after making The Nine Ages of Nakedness, but it was to remain on the shelf while in the ensuing years he was declared bankrupt, was the subject of an obscenity trial, and drank heavily. He made ends meet during this period by shooting short softcore sex films for the British 8 mm market, as well as hardcore, blue movie shorts for overseas.
In the mid-1970s Marks had begun selling explicit photo shoots to porn publisher David Sullivan’s top-shelf magazines, such as Latent Lesbian Fantasy featuring Cosey Fanni Tutti, which appeared in the first issue of Sullivan’s Ladybirds magazine in August 1976. Marks had, evidently, also sold Sullivan the rights to some of his 8 mm sex films; press adverts by Kelerfern (a Sullivan mail order company) carried Marks-directed sex shorts like Hole in One, Nymphomania, King Muff and Doctor Sex for sale around this period. In the 2005 documentary Oo-Err Missus, Sullivan remarks: “George was a great entertainer, he was a bit of a drunk really, but he was good fun … he said to me: ‘I’ve got this old script I’ve had for years’, I said: ‘give us a look George’ and within three weeks we were shooting it”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Come_Play_with_Me_(1977_film)
Mary Millington 1945 – 1979
Mary Millington was an English model and pornographic actress. Her appearance in the short softcore film Sex is My Business led to her meeting magazine publisher David Sullivan, who promoted her widely as a model and featured her in the 1977 softcore comedy Come Play With Me, which ran for a record-breaking four years at the same cinema.
In her later years, she faced depression and pressure from frequent police raids on her sex shop. After a downward spiral of drug addiction, shoplifting and debt, she died at home of an overdose of medicine and vodka, aged 33.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Millington
Further reading: Simon Sheridan – Keeping the British End Up: Four Decades of Saucy Cinema (Reynolds & Hearn, 2001)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4139087-keeping-the-british-end-up
Viewing: Saucy!: Secrets of the British Sex Comedy 2024 documentary
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p.s. Hey. This weekend the maestro of many mediums and info galore Ben _Black_Acrylic Robinson tours us through a wacky genre of British comedy that can be accumulated and tagged with the rubric Saucy! That exclamation point is important. I personally knew nothing about this realm until the post clued me in, but where do you stand exactly? Guarantee: wild fun, period charms, and enlightening information. Have at it, please, and thank you so much, Ben! ** _Black_Acrylic, And there you are ‘in person’. Thanks, Ben. Such a blast. I think ‘The Man …’ is a good place to start with her, yes. I’m naturally curious about ‘The Golden Glove’, and I will seek wherever it may be. I hope your Leeds-related sense of gloom proves to be unwarranted. Signed, the Near-Eternal Optimist. ** Billy, Hi, Billy! Thanks for the link. I like Tim Parks’ writing and brain, so naturally I’ll pore over that in a bit. Why Stead? Pure happenstance. I was thinking about her after not having read her in a long time. And I was simultaneously thinking I would like to do a book post that didn’t use the ‘Spotlight on …’ format. And I got the idea to try to write a high school-style book report. And those three things collided and … voila! Thanks. How are you? What’s going on? ** jay, Hey. Oh, I obviously don’t know what the general gay populous is into or rather not into, I guess. I think I’ve always hooked up with relative weirdos like me, so I’m thinking from the margins, I suspect. ** David Ehrenstein, Haha, nice, apt one. Van Dyke Parks looks to be consistently posting on instagram, so he seems to be fit. ** seb 🦠, Oh, hey. Sorry about the persnickety spam thing. Jun Togawa rules. I don’t think Amphetamine Sulphate does eBooks in my experience, and they’ve never mentioned any idea of doing one for ‘Flunker’, so I assume not? Thanks for wanting such a thing. ** Lucas, Hey. When we were shooting ‘Room Temperature’, the cast of the film were obsessed with ‘Succession’ and having group viewings at their AirBnb in their off hours, and they sure seemed excited about it. Very cool: the wordpress blog! Everyone, The mighty Lucas has set up a wordpress blog where he’ll be posting his new writings and other creative endeavours, and needless to say, I recommend you visit and bookmark it post-haste. Go here. Excellent!That cat does look kind of blind or awfully squinty. Thank you. Have fun at Phantasialand. And oh, course, unless you look at Taron and think, ‘I simply must ride that thing’, enjoy just looking at it. See you after and soon! ** Uday, My surveillance camera is well hidden. You’ll never find it, but have fun trying. Congrats on your grope-ability. That is no small thing. If I could, I would add a ‘grope’ emoji to the commenting possibilities so the blog could become a pick up place, but alas. Aw, I appreciate you too. And etc etc too. I hope your weekend is very weekend-like. ** Charalampos, That John Waters book is responsible for so many interesting people discovering so many interesting writers. Its nickname should be The Bible, and maybe it already is. Yes, I think ‘The Man …’ is a good starting place. No, I really don’t think about my past work until asked to. I don’t really see what the value would be in doing that. I’m not nostalgic at all. I see nostalgia as one of the big enemies of moving forward attentively and excitedly, if anything. I think I’m sort of romantic, but not about the past, I guess. Paris _> hi -> you. ** Måns BT, Hey. Gosh, I thought pretty everything about ‘The Beach Bum’ was disappointing. It just seemed like, after the success of ‘Spring Breakers’, he decided to try to go all the way and make a normal indie film and get even more success, and I’m very happy that he seems to have subsequently dropped that goal like a hot potato. Yeah, ‘Kids’ and ‘Ken Park’, the two Korine-penned Clark films, are by far his best for me. Some of the others have good things about them, but I still think Clark’s photos and collages are much better than his films. Wow, thank you for the fill-in about 60s Swedish films. That’s really interesting. I should try to make a post about them or something. I think my favorite Wong Kar Wai is ‘Fallen Angels’. Do you know that one? I feel like he kind of lost it after ‘Happy Together’, but that’s not a wildly popular opinion. Yesterday I had an amazing vegan dinner with really good friends, so that made the totality pretty good. Do you have weekend dreams that you hope to accomplish and perhaps did? xo, me. ** Steve, Everyone, Maybe I have your attention? Do I now have your attention? I hope so because here’s Steve: ‘I’ve dropped my new ep WHEN CONSUMERISM WAS FUN: Here. “Reign of the Elf” is a dose of nightmarish psychedelia, while the rest goes heavy on electric piano, marimba and vibraphone, using unusual scales.’ Nice weekend there. Uh, I’m plan-less so far, but something will come up. We’re between the two Olympics: the ‘classic’ one and the ‘para’ one, which I think starts in a day or so. The city is very deserted right now, very classically Paris in August empty. I actually really enjoyed having the Olympics around. So many perky people everywhere. It was really no hassle at all. ** Harper, Hi! Ah, cool. Compton-Burnett and Green are such dialogue geniuses, yeah. Super study-able. You were such a rebel! Yay! Me too. One time at my boys’ school we were assigned to do a book report on ‘Huckleberry Finn’, and my ‘book report’ was a big piece of cardboard scissored to look like a boy’s silhouette covered with a collage of magazine photos of boys I thought would be really good Huckleberry Finns. I only didn’t get an F because I was known at my school for being the weird creative kid, so let it slide. The Beach Boys doc isn’t really an apologia for Mike Love, but he’s prominent among the talking heads, and they let him say his peace. But it’s a fairly neutral doc in a good way. My impression is that Van Dyke Parks didn’t leave ‘Smile’, Brian Wilson just ended up having a nervous breakdown and shelving it, but not because of Parks’ lyrics. ** Dev, Wow. Or, you know, of course. A real cadaver. If schools have stopped using cadavers, what do they do? Do they, like, use robots or dummies with anatomically correct and authentically dead-like interiors? That might be a dumb question. When Halloween approaches, I make these big posts gathering what look to be the most interesting haunted houses that year, and I’ll specifically look for a N.O. one for you. I’ve been a vegetarian since I was 15. I was a hippie pacifist kid, so that was part of it. Plus I never really liked the taste and smell of meat and fish. And there was this boy who was a diehard vegetarian who I had a big crush on, and I’m pretty sure I joined the ranks hoping to impress him, but I didn’t. I ate at an amazing vegan restaurant last night that does vegan versions of French cuisine, and that’s a tough cuisine to successfully remove meat items from too. ** Thomas H, Hi to Seattle. And to you, of course. Thanks for listening to me jabber. I haven’t played video games in quite a while. I swore them off when we were making and editing the film because I had to really focus and concentrate on that, and I’m edging back towards my system. So I’m pretty behind right now. I don’t know the games of Kitty Horrorshow, but I will definitely go hunt for them today Sounds very yum. Thanks, pal! And you have a splendiferous weekend too! ** Darb7🐁, Wouldn’t shock me: his return. ‘Surf’s Up’ is one of their ultra-best, for sure. My first drafts are always shit nothing, gasps, or tangled sentences, so don’t sweat it. You can doctor them later. Well, I guess you could look worse than that caterpillar looks. Its emotion is pretty fetching. No, never wore a Mickey Mouse gas mask. I never even saw one, strangely. I don’t know … I was just think about book reports that schools made you write and wondered if they were more effective than I remembered them being, I guess. Thanks in advance if you spend some of your hard won cash on ‘Flunker’. I certainly remember your Halloween store job. How could I ever forget something as exciting to think about as that. But a car wash job sounds okay. Some places turn car washes into haunted car washes for Halloween. Maybe you can get hired by one of those. That drawing is really cool! What a face! And what hair! Everyone, the great Darby shares a new drawing, and it’s sight for the sorest eyes. See for yourselves. Lucas set up a wordpress site to host his art and writing. Maybe you could do that? ** Poecilia, Hi! ** Okay. You have been introduced to Ben’s entertaining shebang, so now you need merely go forth into it or go back into it if you already some spent time up there before you came down here. See you on Monday.
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