April 21: Gone Legitimate — A movie featuring an adult film actor in a mainstream role.

Producer Braxton Pope, writer Bret Easton Ellis and director Paul Schrader had the movie Bait get canceled due to money and then decided to make another one that was crowd funded. Paul Schrader. Making a crowd funded movie. They raised $159,015 which got the budget up to $250,00 and had American Apparel doing the clothing, Kanye West re-editing the trailer and creating music and Lindsay Lohan in the lead just as she was getting out of her sixth rehab and starring on a reality show on OWN.

While Lohan and James Deen were cast by the creators, the rest of the cast was handled through a website, Let It Cast. Shrader said, “We’re making art out of the remains of our empire. The junk that’s left over. And this idea of a film that was crowdfunded, cast online, with one actor from celebrity culture, one actor from adult-film culture, a writer and director who have gotten beat up in the past—felt like a post-Empire thing. And then everything I was afraid of with Lindsay and James started to become positive. I was afraid we wouldn’t be taken seriously and people would think it was a joke. My son and daughter didn’t want me to do it. That just shows you how conservative young kids are.”

Of course, everyone argued at the end, as the final cut wasn’t what Ellis had in mind, although he’s come around to enjoy the movie, saying everyone got what they wanted artistically and financially from the movie. He found Lohan to be good in it and the rest of the world judged it just because she was in the movie. It was that kind of time.

Christian (Deen) is a trust fund kid who makes low budget horror movies. We meet him at a dinner with his lover Tara (Lohan), his personal assistant Gina (Amanda Brooks) and her boyfriend — who will bin Christian’s next movie — Ryan (Nolan Funk). Christian loves to push people and keeps revealing how he and Tara use dating apps to have anonymous sex with other people. Also, while he may be sleeping with someone else in secret — Cynthia (Tenille Houston) — he controls Tara, who once dated Ryan and left him for the stability of dating wealthier men.

We soon learn that Christian is forced into therapy to keep the money coming in — Gus Van Sant is the therapist — and he needs the behavioral help, because he sends people after Ryan and attacks Tara. Yet they stay within the orbit of one another, even when she talks him into letting another man — an anonymous hookup — go down on him. This makes him feel controlled and that’s the one thing he can’t handle. By the end of the movie, there’s murder, a movie nearly ruined and Tara trying to escape with her sanity and life.

While Deen’s life ended up mirroring his character — he’s an adult star who has been accused of going too far in his scenes and in his personal life by several partners — he’s not bad in this. South by Southwest may have turned this movie down — they said it had technical issues, as well as “There’s a cold deadness to it.” — but I have no idea why. It’s fascinating, as a major Hollywood name is now making movies with sourced money, cast by a website and featuring people who at one point were so far away from each other fame wise that Lohan and Deen wouldn’t even be in the same reality and here she is, topless and engaging in simulated sex with the guy who put a lemon in Joanna Angel’s ass.

Also: Shrader got nude during this scene to make Lohan comfortable. His idea.

Also also: adult actor Danny Wilde appears and his scenes were edited because unlike everyone else, he was not simulating his masturbation.

This is the best IMDB gossip about the movie: “At one point, the stress of the hectic shoot was wearing on everyone and the crew was upset because they hadn’t been paid in a week. Producer Braxton Pope, hoping to buck up morale, suggested raffling off two Samsung tablets used in the film. Director Paul Schrader said no because he didn’t have a tablet at home and wanted one of them for himself.”

The auteur!

Also (third also): Lily LeBeau is in this, adding even more adult stars to the cast.

You know, maybe I cut Lohan a break, but I really liked this. It just feels so unlike every other movie out there, nearly feeling like the most high budget adult movie while also coming off like a cheap direct to streaming movie with some level of star power. It’s also the kind of movie that may have been more interesting if they just filmed the making of it, as Lohan has an understudy constantly ready to step in, she would stop partying — or so they say — at 5:30 AM for a 6 AM call time and Deen didn’t stop booking porn shoots while making this movie.

Again, let me say: Paul; Schrader wrote Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. Then again, he screwed the adult industry over once with Hardcore, so all bets are kind of even. He did make Cat People, though.

You can watch this on Tubi.

April 21: Gone Legitimate — A movie featuring an adult film actor in a mainstream role.

During his 42nd birthday party, composer George Webber (Dudley Moore) learns that he’s not aging well. Despite the love of his girlfriend Samantha Taylor (Julie Andrews), he’s more obsessed with youth and beauty, whether he sees it through a telescope or at the wedding he follows the whole way to the church.

The object of his affection is the impossibly beautiful — well, in his eyes — Jenny Hanley, played by Bo Derek. She’s just married David Hanley (Sam J. Jones) and they’ve gone on their honeymoon to Hawaii, where George follows. He beds an old friend Mary (Dee Wallace), but his heart isn’t into their fling. Again, all he can think of is the unobtainable perfection of Jenny, a woman who he doesn’t even know. Well, he does get to know her — near biblically — when he saves her husband from drowning and she rewards him with lovemaking. Yet in the middle of his fantasy reality, her husband calls and is casually fine with what’s happening. Their relationship, unlike the. one that George has with Samantha, means nothing.

Directed and written by Blake Edwards, 10 broke new ground and was quite a big deal when released in 1979. Bo Derek’s cornrow hairstyle was a major fashion happening and she turned this movie’s fame into, well, Bolero. The less said — pleasure! — the better.

It also led to Moore becoming a star as a solo act. But he almost wasn’t in this movie. George Segal was cast as George, but allegedly walked off the set shortly after filming began — he did shoot some scenes in Mexico — at the MGM Studios. Segal had learned that Blake Edwards had inserted a television musical commercial sequence for his wife Andrews so that she would have a chance to sing and dance. He was upset that Edwards was using his movie to revive her career. Moore would also replace Segal in Arthur, while Segal would replace him in The Mirror Has Two Faces.

As for the adult stars in this movie, during the orgy scene that George tries to be part of — and Samatha catches on the telescope — you can see Annette Haven, Serena, Jon Martin, David Morris, John Seeman, Phaedra Grant, Desiree West, Candida Royale, Constance Money, Bonnie Holiday, Jamie Gillis, Jesse Adams, Blair Harris, Milton Ingley and Dorothy LeMay amongst the party guests.

Of the scene, Julie Andrews told Ellen DeGeneres, “There was one party that was actually manufactured for the movie 10. I think my character in 10 had to look through a telescope and see that my boyfriend, the sweet Dudley Moore, was, in fact, invading a neighbor’s house where they were having an orgy. There was a day when Blake was shooting the orgy and he said, “Julie, you just got to come on over here. It is an unbelievable sight.” So I went dashing over, of course, I did. I walked in and everyone was stark naked and lying around, very happily and casually, treating it totally normally. And there was sweet Dudley in the middle of it all and he wasn’t very, very tall. Blake put him between two enormously statuesque ladies and so he was completely naked and these two ladies were naked, but their bums were up here and little Dudley‘s was down there. So sweet. It was more adorable than anything else because Dudley was so adorable.”

10 feels dated today — it was made in 1979 — and its gender politics are obviously skewed. Yet Brian Dennehy is great as the hotel bartender and it all ends well. I remember what a big deal this was when it was on HBO; even if I was only seven when it came out, it was still a naughty secret even in elementary school.

April 20: Screw the Medveds — Here’s a list of the movies that the Medveds had in their Golden Turkey Awards books. What do they know? Defend one of the movies they needlessly bashed.

In The Golden Turkey Awards, the Medveds claim that Arch Hall Jr.’s performance as Tommy is “one of the low points in the history of American cinema” and that he has “a face only a mother could love.” He was sixteen when he made this movie, so that feels like a lot of punching down.

Well, maybe they were mad that their dad never put them in a movie.

Well, Arch Hall Sr. thought his son was going to be a star — even if that son said that he couldn’t sing — and made an Elvis movie starring his boy.

Roxy Miller (Marilyn Manning) drives out and accidentally hits Eegah (Richard Kiel) with her car. When she tells her boyfriend Tom Nelson (Arch Hall Jr.) and her father Robert (Arch Hall Sr.), her dad runs out into the desert to try and get a picture. He disappears, she finds him and he’s learned how to speak to the creature and has learned how it has stayed alive all this time. Of course, Eegah wants to marry his daughter, so he says alright, hoping that they can escape.

When they do, Eegah runs after them and dies at a pool party, but not before Ray Dennis Steckler gets thrown into the water. He would go on to make the next Arch Hall Jr. movie, Wild Guitar.

This was shot in the same Bronson Canyon area that Robot Monster was filmed at. In fact, Ro-Man’s base is the same cave that Eegah makes his home.

My favorite thing in this movie was that the sound recorder screwed up his job, so when Robert yells, “Watch out for snakes!” his lips never move.

You can watch this on Tubi.

April 20: Screw the Medveds — Here’s a list of the movies that the Medveds had in their Golden Turkey Awards books. What do they know? Defend one of the movies they needlessly bashed.

Wild Bill Hickok (Charles Bronson) is so haunted by dreams of a giant white buffalo that he hunts the monster like he’s the Ahab to its Moby Dick, soon to be joined by Crazy Horse (Will Sampson), who also hunts the beast as it killed his daughter.

Director J. Lee Thompson and Bronson worked together quite a bit. This was written by Richard Sale, who would also write Assassination for Bronson.

For some reason, Wild Bill has a steampunk look to him*, but man, that opening gunfight is great. A lot of the crew came from King Kong, which was also produced by Dino De Laurentiis, including actors Ed Lauter and David Roya, composer John Barry and special effects magician Carlo Rambaldi, who created the animatronic life-sized bison for this movie.

In The Golden Turkey Awards, the Medveds said, “Another De Laurentiis epic about a giant buffalo that chews on Indians for bite-sized snacks. Charles Bronson manfully does his bit to sink this infamous White Elephant.”

With roles for Jack Warden, Kim Novak, Stuart Whitman, Clint Walker, John Carradine, Slim Pickens and Maryin Kove — did I cast this film? — I was always led to believe by this being in the Medveds book that it was horrible. Nope.

*Quentin Tarantino is also a fan of this movie, which explains the similar glasses that Django wears in Django Unchained.

You can watch this on Tubi.

April 20: Screw the Medveds — Here’s a list of the movies that the Medveds had in their Golden Turkey Awards books. What do they know? Defend one of the movies they needlessly bashed.

In The Golden Turkey Awards, the Medveds said of this movie: “Initially intended as a straightforward film biography of Aristotle Onassis, this project began life with the working title The Tycoon. The producer, a former Athens journalist named Bico Mastorakis, anticipated full cooperation from the Onassis family and even offered Jacqueline Kennedy $1 million to play herself. When Christina Onassis, Ari’s daughter and heiress, denied legal consent for the film to proceed, the ingenious Masorakis simply changed the names in his script and altered minor details to create a work of “fiction.” He also changed the title to The Greek Tycoon. “We’re not making a movie about Aristotle Onassis,” Mastronikas explained. “It’s a personification of all Greek tycoons.””

Directed by J. Lee Thompson and written by Morton S. Fine from a story by Fine, Wim Wells and Mastronikas, this has Theo Tomasis (Anthony Quinn, forever trying to be my least favorite actor) as a Greek businessman who went from rags to riches before marrying Liz Cassidy (Jacqueline Bisset), the wife of assassinated U.S. President James Cassidy (James Franciscus).

So, yeah. Just like any other Greek tycoon.

Speaking of Anthony Quinn, he met Onassis six months before the man who married Jackie O’s death and the tycoon gave his blessing to Quinn’s casting. Then, Jackie Kennedy asked him to not make the movie and he said that he wouldn’t, but then, you know, she acted like she didn’t know him in a restaurant, which is a hilarious reason to make a movie that is a total smear on someone’s two dead husbands.

Ebert gave it two stars, Siskel three and a half and audiences made it the top movie for a few weeks. Ebert said that it was like watching the National Enquirer, which is possibly why it did so well.