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Skidoo (film)
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Skidoo
Movie poster
Directed by
Otto Preminger
Produced by
Otto Preminger
Written by
Doran William Cannon
Starring
Jackie Gleason
Carol Channing
Frankie Avalon
Fred Clark
Michael Constantine
Frank Gorshin
John Phillip Law
Peter Lawford
Burgess Meredith
George Raft
Cesar Romero
Mickey Rooney
and Groucho Marx
Music by
Nilsson
Cinematography
Leon Shamroy
Editing by
George Rohrs
Distributed by
Paramount Pictures
Release date(s)
December 19, 1968 (USA)
Running time
97 min.
Country
U.S.A.
Language
English
Skidoo is an American comedy film directed by Otto Preminger, starring Jackie Gleason and Carol Channing, written by Doran William Cannon and released by Paramount Pictures on December 19, 1968. The screenplay satirizes late 1960s lifestyle and its creature comforts, technology, anti-technology, hippies, free love and then-prevalent use of the mind-altering drug LSD.
Along with top-billed Gleason and Channing, Skidoo also stars (alphabetically listed) Frankie Avalon, Fred Clark (who died on December 5, two weeks before the film's release), Michael Constantine, Frank Gorshin, John Phillip Law, Peter Lawford, Burgess Meredith, George Raft, Cesar Romero, Mickey Rooney and Groucho Marx playing "God" (making, at age 77, his final film appearance). Singer-songwriter Nilsson, who wrote the score and receives credit as a member of the cast, appears in a few brief scenes with Fred Clark, as both portray prison tower guards swaying to Nilsson's music while under the influence of LSD.[1]
Contents
1 Initial five minutes
2 Plot
3 Cast
4 Critical and public reception
5 Exhibition
6 Soundtrack
7 References
8 External links
[edit] Initial five minutes
As a cartoon character dressed in prison stripes (and holding a peace-logo flower which turns into a tiny parasol and then a helicopter blade) executes a few dance steps to the music of Nilsson's Skidoo theme, the words "Otto Preminger" appear below him. Additional words "presents SKIDOO starring" can also be seen as the camera pulls back to reveal that this image is on a TV screen, while Carol Channing's voice is heard exclaiming, "No, Harry, not that. No, I don't wanna see that", with the channel suddenly switching to show a US Senate hearing conducted by Senator Hummel, portrayed by Peter Lawford, who asks a series of organized crime figures various questions to which they invariably reply, "I refuse to answer on the grounds it may tend to incriminate me." Every few seconds, the channel showing the hearing switches to another channel which is screening Preminger's black-and-white 1965 feature, In Harm's Way, or still other channels which have one spurious commercial after another. The initial ad depicts an attractive blonde declaring, "now you too can be beautiful and sexually desirable like me instead of being that fat, disgusting, foul-breathed, slimy, wallowing sow that you are", the second has another intensely-smiling blonde stating that "maybe we blondes do have more fun" and the third ad depicts a drunken slob swilling beer and belching, interspersed with an image of a pig with beer foam around its snout, while an unseen announcer exclaims "feel big, drink pig".
After another switch to In Harm's Way, Channing's voice is again heard, complaining, "no, Harry, I don't like films on TV. They always cut them to pieces." Additional channel changes produce more images of the beer pig, then another scene from In Harm's Way, followed by an ad for "Fat Cola", with three generously-proportioned middle-aged women, wearing bathing suits, beach hats and carrying little parasols, gyrating to the jingle, "You'll never lose your man if you drink fat cola, you'll never have to worry about losing him", then an ad showing a boy and a girl, both about six years old, dressed like adults at a picnic setting, next to a dog resembling Our Gang's Pete the Pup (Pete's trademark circular ring around the eye is here drawn at a sharply oblique angle), with all three vigorously emitting smoke from long cigarettes held in their mouths, while happy young voices sing the jingle, "Puff, puff, puff, puff, puff, if you want to have a girly, you must puff, puff, puff." The following ad shows a family, including small children, standing in front of their house, all holding guns, with the father (shown in closeup to be the meek, bespectacled actor Wally Cox) declaring, "...get a gun for everyone in your family, remember, for family fun, get your gun", while the next ad, for "New Daisy Chain Deodorant", has a male voice followed a female voice singing ever more insistently, "I want my deodorant". Then a balding, mustachioed pitchman explains that if you're bothered by "dandruff, athlete's foot and the common cold, cancer, birth defects, mental illness, ringworm, poison ivy, tooth decay, acne, measles, brain tumor, smallpox, syphilis, plague, influenza, hepatitis and St. Vitus Dance, well, you're in luck, friend. Pick a pack of Peter's perfidious pink pacifying placebo pills..." At that point we see Jackie Gleason, Carol Channing and Arnold Stang sitting in front of the TV, with Gleason and Channing grabbing the remote control from each other and switching channels. Gleason and Stang subsequently go to the kitchen and, as they come out, the TV screen shows combative 1960s TV personality Joe Pyne commenting on the hearings: "...and, as one witness follows another, Senator Hummel is getting the same answer Senator Kefauver got in 1950 and 1951..."
[edit] Plot
Tony Banks (Jackie Gleason), a retired mob "torpedo" (hitman), now settled with wife Flo (Carol Channing) and daughter Darlene (Alexandra Hay), worries about his daughter's new hippie boyfriend Stash (John Phillip Law), and his own paternity of Darlene. Cesar Romero and Frankie Avalon appear as a father-and-son pair of mob bosses, Hechy and Angie, who bring Tony the news that top mobster "God" (Groucho Marx) wants him to carry out one last job  liquidating his old pal, "Blue Chips" Packard (Mickey Rooney), before Packard can testify before the US Senate's Crime Commission. Tony refuses, but upon discovering another old friend, Harry (Arnold Stang), shot through the head, goes along with God's wishes and, now wearing a convict's striped outfit, finds himself in the island prison of Alcatraz, a futuristically high-tech institution where Packard is held under top-level protection.
In Tony's absence, Stash and his friends, who have been charged with vagrancy, are invited by Flo to stay at their house. She visits Angie (as does Darlene, looking for her in turn) to persuade him to either cancel the job, or take her to God (who's living without a country, on a yacht in international waters) so she can ask personally. Angie won't take Flo, but he will take Darlene, who nonetheless insists on bringing Stash along. God takes a liking to Darlene, as does God's tall, supermodel-like black mistress (Luna) to Stash, but both are frustrated in their pursuit.
One of Tony's cellmates turns out to be a draft dodger called Fred the Professor (Austin Pendleton), an electronics wizard who has renounced technology, but makes an exception in rigging a television set to allow Banks the opportunity of cell-to-cell communication with Packard. Banks realizes he can't kill his old friend, and, as a result, will probably never leave the prison. He writes his wife with the news, on stationery borrowed from Fred, while ignoring Fred's admonition not to lick the envelope and discovering the hard way that all the stationery is soaked with LSD... enough to send the whole prison on a bad trip. One of the inmates, Leech (Michael Constantine who, a few months after Skidoo's release would be playing a high-school principal on ABC's 1969C74 comedy-drama, Room 222) says, "Hey, maybe if I take some of that stuff, I wouldn't have to rape anybody anymore." Fred guides Tony through the resulting acid experience, helping him come to terms with his worries about Darlene and his past while plotting their escape.
Darlene and Stash spend the night aboard God's yacht, with Stash getting word back to Flo and his friends about their location, and a coded plea for help. As the hippies mount a rescue, Tony and Fred build a makeshift balloon from discarded freezer bags and garbage cans, dump the whole supply of stationery into the prison's lunch, and fly out of the prison as everyone below begins to freak out.
As it happens, both the hippies (led by Flo, who sings the title number as they storm the yacht) and the balloon arrive on God's hideaway at the same time. Feeling trapped, God adopts the stooped Groucho posture, skulks into a clothes closet and closes the door. As the film ends, we last see Flo and Tony as she pulls him towards a bed in one of the yacht's empty side cabins, while in the main cabin, God's Skipper (George Raft), holding open a copy of Gabriel Vahanian's iconic 1961 book, The Death of God, performs a marriage ceremony between Angie and God's Mistress, who then proceeds to become overly affectionate with surprised best-man/father-figure Hechy, as the dismayed Angie tries to separate them. Behind them, another ceremony, performed by a hippie "minister" named Geronimo (Tom Law, brother of John Phillip Law), using the Skipper's Death of God book, joins "this brother and this sister" (Stash and Darlene) "in holy union". The scene cuts to a medium shot, in calm waters, of a small sailboat, with sails decorated in large psychedelic designs of the words "LOVE" and "PEACE", holding two occupants  Fred the Professor and God, both dressed in Hare Krishna/transcendental meditation garb. As Nilsson's voice is heard singing "I Will Take You There", they smile beatifically while sharing a lit joint and, after taking a puff, God/Groucho murmurs, "...mmm, pumpkin".
At this point, before members of the theatrical audience can rise from their seats, the words "Stop!, we are not through yet, and before you skidoo, we'd like to introduce our cast and crew", spoken in Otto Preminger's familiar German-accented voice, are heard from the soundtrack. The entire credit sequence (all cast, crew, and copyright information) is then sung by Nilsson, with various asides ("and Luna as 'God's' Mistress, well you know-oh what I mean"... "arranged and conducted by George Tipton, a very good friend"... "Visual consultant and titles by Sandy Dvore and, what's more, they were executed by Pacific... ahem, how's your popcorn?, copyright em, see, em, el, ex, vee, eye, eye, eye [MCMLXVIII] by Sigma Productions Incorporated, your seat's on fire").
[edit] Cast
Jackie Gleason as Tony Banks
Carol Channing as Flo
Frankie Avalon as Angie
Fred Clark as A Tower Guard
Michael Constantine as Leech
Frank Gorshin as The Man
John Phillip Law as Stash
Peter Lawford as The Senator
Burgess Meredith as The Warden
George Raft as The Skipper
Cesar Romero as Hechy
Mickey Rooney as "Blue Chips" Packard
and Groucho Marx played "God"
with Arnold Stang as Harry
Doro Merande as The Mayor
Phil Arnold as Her Husband
Slim Pickens as The Switchboard Operator
Robert Donner as Another Switchboard Operator
Richard Kiel as Beany
Tom Law as Geronimo
Jaik Rosenstein as "Eggs" Benedict
Stacy King as The Amazon
Renny Roker as A Prison Guard
Roman Gabriel as A Prison Guard
Nilsson as A Tower Guard
Stone Country as Themselves
and the Orange County Ramblers played the Green Bay Packers
and introducing Austin Pendleton as Fred (The Professor)
Alexandra Hay as Darlene
and Luna as "God's" Mistress
[edit] Critical and public reception
Skidoo missed the mark with both critics and audiences, and bombed at the box-office. A soundtrack album by Nilsson was issued, along with a single, "I Will Take You There", but neither became a hit. The movie received some belated attention in the late 1970s when it was shown at Roxie Cinema in San Francisco and in the 1980s when it was shown on cable television. The soundtrack was lauded when it was reissued on compact disc in 2000 (UK) and 2003 (US). There has been, however, no official home video release and the movie is presumed locked away in the Preminger archives, as was (for over a decade) Bunny Lake Is Missing. New York City's Museum of Modern Art periodically exhibits a 35mm print of the movie and it also had a 1997 screening at the USA Film Festival in Dallas and a 2007 screening in Los Angeles. On January 4C5 and July 11C12, 2008, paired with another counterculture-themed feature, 1967's The Love-Ins, Skidoo was seen as an installment of Turner Classic Movies' Friday nightCSaturday morning TCM Underground series. Each film features a brief appearance by then-famous/notorious chain-smoking, "tough-guy" syndicated TV talk show host Joe Pyne, who died of lung cancer in March 1970 at age 45.
Writer Paul Krassner published a story in the February 1981 issue of High Times magazine, relating how Groucho Marx "prepared" for his role in the LSD-related movie by taking a dose of the drug in Krassner's company, and had a moving, largely pleasant experience[2] (in his 1976 book, The Groucho Phile, Marx commented that both the movie and his performance in it were "God-awful!"). Most of the rest of the cast and crew, though, apparently had no familiarity with the drug; in a later interview, Nilsson recounted that he simply pretended to be drunk for his role (his own subsequent LSD experience inspired The Point!, a 1970 animated movie Nilsson wrote and scored).[3]
Pop culture buffs have noted that three cast members, Frank Gorshin (The Riddler), Burgess Meredith (The Penguin) and Cesar Romero (The Joker), played recurring villains in the 1966C68 Batman television series, which broadcast its final episode in March, nine months before Skidoo's release. The film's then-futuristic costume designer, Rudi Gernreich, also made an acting appearance on Batman and, in one 1966 two-part episode, Otto Preminger, himself, portrayed another of the show's recurring villains, Mr. Freeze (in the character's first appearance on the show, he was played by George Sanders and, when seen for the third time, by Eli Wallach).
After Preminger saw him perform with The Committee, an uncredited Rob Reiner was brought in to "write scenes for hippies". [4]
[edit] Exhibition
The movie received some belated attention in the late 1970s when it was screened at San Francisco's Roxie Cinema and in the 1980s when seen on cable TV. New York City's Museum of Modern Art periodically exhibits a 35mm print and it also screened at the USA Film Festival in Dallas in 1997 and had a Los Angeles showing in 2007 at the American Cinematheque. As of 2011, the film is in rotation on Showtime. Olive Films released the film on DVD in its original aspect ratio on July 19, 2011.[5]
[edit] Soundtrack
Although not a hit upon its original release, the Skidoo soundtrack was lauded when it was reissued on compact disc in 2000 (in the UK) and 2003 (in the US).
[edit] References
^ Ebert, Roger. "On the Skidoo set with Otto Preminger: 'Mr. von Stroheim, do you hear noise?'" (Chicago Sun-Times, June 16, 1968)
^ Krassner, Paul. "My Acid Trip with Groucho" (High Times, February 1981)
^ Jacobson, Alan. What's The Point? The Legendary 1971 Animated Feature on DVD in Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 44, May 2004
^ Rabin, Nathan. "Random Notes ROB REINER" (A.V. Club, April 13, 2011)
^ http://www.olivefilms.com/Cult_Classics.15/Olive_Films_Opus.38/Skidoo__DVD_.5320.html (when accessed on July 1, 2011, this link no longer contained pertinent data)
[edit] External links
Skidoo at the Internet Movie Database
Skidoo at the TCM Movie Database
Skidoo' at Moviephone
Skidoo at AllRovi
Ebert, Roger. "Skidoo" (Chicago Sun-Times, December 27, 1968)
"Skidoo" (Variety, January 1, 1969)
Canby, Vincent. "Screen: 'Skidoo', a Film for Preminger-Watchers" (The New York Times, March 6, 1969)
Puchalski, Steven. (Shock Cinema, 1994)
Renshaw, Jerry. "Skidoo". (The Austin Chronicle, August 17, 1998)
The Ultimate Dancing Machine. "Skidoesn't" (eFilmCritic.com, May 9, 2003)
Adams, Sam. "Screen Picks" (Philadelphia City Paper, March 3C9, 2005)
Hall, Phil. "The Bootleg Files: 'Skidoo' (FilmThreat.com, October 14, 2005)
Schwartz, Dennis. "A relic for the ages that puts a punctuation mark on the times" (Ozus' World Movie Reviews, January 5, 2008)
Von Busack, Richard. "Skidoo" (RvB's AfterImages, February 21, 2008)
You are a backwards step in the evolution of mankind! (FilmFanatic.org, January 27, 2011)
Saravia, Jerry. "Skidoo" ("Rec-arts-movies-reviews, undated)
v  d  eFilms directed by Otto Preminger
1930s
Die gro?e Liebe (1931)  Under Your Spell (1936)  Danger - Love at Work (1937)  Kidnapped (1938)
1940s
Margin for Error (1943)  In the Meantime, Darling (1944)  Laura (1944)  A Royal Scandal (1945)  Fallen Angel (1945)  Centennial Summer (1946)  Forever Amber (1947)  Daisy Kenyon (1947)  The Fan (1949)  Whirlpool (1949)
1950s
Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950)  The 13th Letter (1951)  Angel Face (1952)  The Moon Is Blue (1953) / Die Jungfrau auf dem Dach (1954)  River of No Return (1954)  Carmen Jones (1954)  The Man with the Golden Arm (1955)  The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell (1955)  Saint Joan (1957)  Bonjour Tristesse (1958)  Porgy and Bess (1959)  Anatomy of a Murder (1959)
1960s
Exodus (1960)  Advise & Consent (1962)  The Cardinal (1963)  In Harm's Way (1965)  Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965)  Hurry Sundown (1967)  Skidoo (1968)
1970s
Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon (1970)  Such Good Friends (1971)  Rosebud (1975)  The Human Factor (1979)
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Skidoo_(film)&oldid=451104282"
Categories:
1968 films
American comedy films
English-language films
1960s comedy films
1960s crime films
Criminal comedy films
Parody films
Hippie films
Drug-related films
Films directed by Otto Preminger
Paramount Pictures films
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