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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Posted Monday, December 19th, 2005 - Comments Off on Three Days to Live: 'Mormonsploitation!' at the Pioneer
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Three Days to Live: 'Mormonsploitation!' at the Pioneer


After a lengthy gestation in the gentle-yet-sick minds that run the Pioneer Theater, the week-long Mormonsploitation! film series is underway. Actually, it has been underway for a few days now, but you still have until Wednesday to catch some rarely screened Mormon-centric pictures like 1917’s A Mormon Maid and John Ford’s 1950 LDS-er Wagon Master. Each of the films precedes Ian Allen’s outlandish silent-film parody Trapped by the Mormons (right), and taken as a whole, they should effectively curb your appetite for Mormon cinema until the Rapture. At least.
In fact, the Pioneer’s resident horror and zombie film programmer, Dr. Reinhardt van Nostrand, helped out with the Mormonsploitation event by virtue (or lack thereof) of his knowledge of the occult. “Mormonsploitation! is the most important cultural program in New York City this year,” he told The Reeler in an e-mail last weekend. “This includes the commemmorations [sic] celebrating John Paul II. For too long, the LDS (so-called ‘Mormon’) community’s dangerous immorality and improprieties have polluted the world unchecked. In this program, the Pioneer brings together an extraordinary range of critical documents, revealing the LDS community’s viciousness and danger. From the polygamous zombie vampires in Trapped by the Mormons to the marauding LDS pioneers in Wagon Master, the range of devious ‘Mormons’ depicted here is enormous! Beware the pamphleteers! Prepare yourself, by attending Mormonsploitation!”
Right. Absolutely. Even if you are only half-prepared with three days of viewing, that is three days more than many New Yorkers will have once the streets run white with choir boys and cotton shirts. This is the only chance you are going to get.
Incidentally, if you are interested in a closer look at how folks at the Pioneer spent 2005 when they were not fomenting fake religious discord, the theater’s year-end blog entries tell the tale. Headmaster Ray Privett fell in love with Broken Flowers, while Jeffrey the Projectionist praises the feminist touchstone Chaos for, among other things, starring “Sylvester Stallone’s public toilet of a son … as a chubby weasel drug guy.”
Best thing I saw at the Pioneer this year? Easy: Douglas Buck’s brilliant, exhausting, horrifying Family Portraits. Granted, I have yet to drop in for the Mormon effect, but unless Wagon Master features a missionary losing his lips in a tragic bicycle/scissor accident, I do not think it can even be close.

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon