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.[3]
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 to Arnold Stang: "No, Harry, not that. No, I don't wanna see that," with the sound of a Zenith Space Command mechanical ultrasonic[4] TV remote[5] accompanying the channel suddenly switching to show a US Senate hearing conducted by (fictional) 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 screen showing the hearing switches through non-broadcasting channels to another broadcast channel which is screening Preminger's black-and-white 1965 feature, In Harm's Way, and through more non-broadcasting channels to 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 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, I want my deodorant..."
Next, a balding, mustachioed pitchman presents a fast-talking spiel 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 Jackie Gleason, Carol Channing and Arnold Stang are shown sitting in front of the TV, with Gleason and Channing at war, each with a Zenith Space Command mechanical ultrasonic remote control, switching the channel to and away from the Senate hearing. 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..."
Storyline
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. A father-and-son pair of mob bosses, Hechy (Cesar Romero) and Angie (Frankie Avalon), 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.[6] 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 Rock Island Federal Penitentiary, a futuristic, high-tech, Alcatraz-style 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, also seeking to find out what happened to her father) 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) 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 "Skidoo" as they storm the yacht) and the balloon arrive on God's hideaway at the same time. Feeling trapped, God adopts a stooped "Groucho posture", skulks into a closet in his cabin and closes the door. Flo and Tony are last seen as Flo pulls Tony toward 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 1961 book (widely read during counterculture era), 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, the 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." Next, in calm waters, a small sailboat, with sails decorated in large psychedelic designs of the words "LOVE" and "PEACE", holds two occupants – Fred the Professor and God, both dressed in Hare Krishna / transcendental meditation garb. Nilsson's voice is heard singing "I Will Take You There" as they smile beatifically while sharing a lit joint and, after taking a puff, God murmurs, "...mmm, pumpkin."
Epilogue
As the final scene becomes a freeze-frame shot, Otto Preminger's familiar accented voice is heard intoning, "Stop!, we are not through yet, and before you skidoo, we'd like to introduce our cast and crew..." 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").[7]
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.[8] In his 1976 book, The Groucho Phile, Marx – who, having abandoned his trademark greasepaint mustache twenty years prior for You Bet Your Life, returned to using greasepaint for this film – commented that both the movie and his performance as the mob boss God 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).[9][10]
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 1966–68 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.
After Preminger saw him perform with The Committee, an uncredited Rob Reiner was brought in to "write scenes for hippies".[11]
The scenes on God's yacht were shot on John Wayne's yacht, Wild Goose, the former US Navy minesweeper USS YMS-328.[12][13]Wild Goose was used extensively with scenes shot from the exterior and in the wheel house, cabins, engine room, upper and lower decks. Part of the movie was filmed at the South San Francisco City Hall.[14][15]
Release and reception
Critical reception
Skidoo was a notorious bomb, failing both with critics and at the box office.[16]Roger Ebert gave it two out of four stars. He praised almost everything about it except for its lack of spirit, explaining that Preminger "seems unable to invest his film with any lightness or spontaneity" and that his directing style was "more suited to weighty subject matter." Addressing one of the movie's deficiencies, Ebert added, "I have a feeling that it chills Preminger's very soul to imagine he might ever ask an actor to improvise."[17]Vincent Canby wrote that it was "something only for Preminger-watchers, or for people whose minds need pressing by a heavy, flat object." He was also highly critical of the casting of older stars, saying that "Preminger's use of disintegrating faces is more cruel than comic."[18]
In 1973, Jonathan Rosenbaum said he valued the film as an "endlessly fascinating aberration... [it] enlists a legion of Fifties TV corpses into an amalgamation of every conceivable Hollywood genre."[19] In his 2011 review of the DVD in his New York Times column, Dave Kehr framed the film as the product of Preminger being "politically aligned with the kids... but culturally bound to the grownups", which "allows his ambivalence to fester into an across-the-board caricature... The result is a finely controlled mess, one of the most uncomfortably evocative films of its time."[20][21][22][23]
The movie received some belated attention in the late 1970s when it was screened at San Francisco's Roxie Cinema and in the 1980s on cable TV. Skidoo has since enjoyed a cult following.[24] 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.
On January 4–5 and July 11–12, 2008, Skidoo was seen as an installment of Turner Classic Movies Friday night–Saturday morning TCM Underground series, paired with the similarly acid-soaked 1967 feature The Love-Ins.[25] 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.
Olive Films released the film on DVD in its original aspect ratio on July 19, 2011.[26]
Julius Henry "Groucho" Marx was an American comedian, actor, writer, and singer who performed in film and vaudeville and on television, radio, and the stage. He was a master of quick wit and is considered one of America's greatest comedians.
Otto Ludwig Preminger was an Austrian-American theatre and film director, film producer, and actor. He directed more than 35 feature films in a five-decade career after leaving the theatre. He first gained attention for film noir mysteries such as Laura (1944) and Fallen Angel (1945), while in the 1950s and 1960s, he directed high-profile adaptations of popular novels and stage works. Several of these later films pushed the boundaries of censorship by dealing with themes which were then taboo in Hollywood, such as drug addiction, rape and homosexuality. He was twice nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director. He also had several acting roles.
A hippie, also spelled hippy, especially in British English, is someone associated with the counterculture of the 1960s, originally a youth movement that began in the United States during or around 1964 and spread to different countries around the world. The word hippie came from hipster and was used to describe beatniks who moved into New York City's Greenwich Village, San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, and Chicago's Old Town community. The term hippie was used in print by San Francisco writer Michael Fallon, helping popularize use of the term in the media, although the tag was seen elsewhere earlier.
Laura is a 1944 American film noir produced and directed by Otto Preminger. It stars Gene Tierney, Dana Andrews, and Clifton Webb along with Vincent Price and Judith Anderson. The screenplay by Jay Dratler, Samuel Hoffenstein, and Betty Reinhardt is based on the 1943 novel Laura by Vera Caspary. Laura received five nominations for the Academy Awards, including for Best Director, winning for Best Black and White Cinematography. In 1999, Laura was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". The American Film Institute named it one of the 10 best mystery films of all time, and it also appears on Roger Ebert's "Great Movies" series.
John Herbert Gleason, known as Jackie Gleason, was an American actor, comedian, writer, and composer also known as "The Great One". He developed a style and characters from growing up in Brooklyn, New York, and was known for his brash visual and verbal comedy, exemplified by his city bus driver character Ralph Kramden in the television series The Honeymooners. He also developed The Jackie Gleason Show, which maintained high ratings from the mid-1950s through 1970. The series originated in New York City, but filming moved to Miami Beach, Florida, in 1964 after Gleason took up permanent residence there.
The Man with the Golden Arm is a 1955 American drama film noir directed by Otto Preminger, based on the novel of the same name by Nelson Algren. Starring Frank Sinatra, Eleanor Parker, Kim Novak, Arnold Stang and Darren McGavin, it recounts the story of a drug addict who gets clean while in prison, but struggles to stay that way in the outside world. Although the addictive drug is never identified in the film, according to the American Film Institute "most contemporary and modern sources assume that it is heroin", although in Algren's book it is morphine. The film's initial release was controversial for its treatment of the then-taboo subject of drug addiction.
Carol Elaine Channing was an American actress, comedian, singer and dancer who starred in Broadway and film musicals. Her characters usually had a fervent expressiveness and an easily identifiable voice, whether singing or for comedic effect.
A Day at the Races is a 1937 American comedy film, and the seventh film starring the Marx Brothers, with Allan Jones, Maureen O'Sullivan and Margaret Dumont. Like their previous Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer feature A Night at the Opera, this film was a major hit.
Skidoo is an album by Harry Nilsson. It is the original soundtrack recording for the 1968 Otto Preminger film Skidoo, arranged and conducted by George Tipton and released by RCA Records.
The Brotherhood of Eternal Love was an organization of drug users and distributors that operated from the mid-1960s through the late 1970s in Orange County, California. They were dubbed the Hippie Mafia by the police. They produced and distributed drugs in hopes of starting a "psychedelic revolution" in the United States.
John Phillip Law was an American film actor.
Wild in the Streets is a 1968 American dystopian comedy-drama film directed by Barry Shear and starring Christopher Jones, Hal Holbrook, and Shelley Winters. Based on the short story "The Day It All Happened, Baby!" by Robert Thom, it was distributed by American International Pictures. The film, described as both "ludicrous" and "cautionary", was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Film Editing and became a cult classic of the 1960s counterculture.
Hurry Sundown is a 1967 American drama film produced and directed by Otto Preminger, and starring Jane Fonda and Michael Caine. The screenplay by Horton Foote and Thomas C. Ryan is based on the 1965 novel of the same title by K.B. Gilden, a pseudonym for the married couple Katya and Bert Gilden. It marked Faye Dunaway's film debut. The film is considered a Southern Gothic work.
Skidoo may refer to:
Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon is a 1970 American comedy-drama film directed and produced by Otto Preminger. The film is based on the 1968 novel of the same name by Marjorie Kellogg.
USS YMS-328 is a decommissioned US Navy YMS-1-class Yard Mine Sweeper (YMS), built in Ballard, Washington at Ballard Marine & Railway in Ballard, Washington (Seattle). She was classified as a Mark II design and her hull is constructed completely out of 3" vertical grain Douglas fir. Sister ships include Jacques Cousteau's RV Calypso. After serving in the Navy in World War II the boat was converted to a private yacht.
Doran William Cannon (1937–2005) was an American writer and producer for film and television.
Rude Awakening is a 1989 comedy film directed by David Greenwalt and Aaron Russo.
The Orange County Ramblers were a professional football team that competed in the Continental Football League from 1967 to 1968. The Ramblers played their home games in Santa Ana, California and Anaheim, California. The team was coached both seasons by Homer Beatty, who had won a small college national title at Santa Ana College in 1962.
References
Notes
↑ Ebert, Roger. "On the". rogerebert.suntimes.com. Retrieved August 16, 2018.
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