Behind the Candelabra: Campy but Affecting

Article first published as TV Review: Steven Soderbergh's Behind the Candelabra on Blogcritics.

Notorious for being the movie that was too "gay" for mainstream Hollywood studios to tackle, Steven Soderbergh's take on the tempestous relationship between Liberace and his young protege Scott Thorson is actually a remarkable achievement that manages to work on several levels. As camp, it's an over-the-top hoot, but it's also surprisingly affecting and features fine performances by its two leads.

Walter "Lee" Liberace was one of the strangest phenomenons in a strange business. Eccentric and flamboyant, he nevertheless managed to charm the pants off of millions of mature women who clutched him to their bosoms for decades and refused to believe any reports that their beloved might be a little light in the loafers. Liberace, meanwhile, kept giving them what they wanted even as his persona and stage performances became gayer and gayer. Quoting Mae West, he'd say "Too much of a good thing is wonderful."

Behind the Candelabra opens with one such performance, at the showroom in the Las Vegas Hilton where Lee (Michael Douglas) held court for ages, even broadcasting two CBS specials from the room in the late 1970s. Choreographer Bob Black (Scott Bakula, in '70s gay porn star drag), brings his newest conquest, Scott Thorson (Matt Damon, convincingly made up to look twenty years younger), to one of the pianist's flamboyant spectaculars. Transfixed by the action on the stage as well as the fawning adulation of the audience, Scott remarks, "Don't they know he's gay?", earning angry glances from the blue-hairs nearby.


After the show, Bob takes Scott backstage to meet the legend himself. The sight of this young, blond god sends Lee into a tizzy, and he invites them over for brunch the next day. While giving Scott a tour of the house, he pours his heart out, admitting that he's profoundly lonely and distrustful of his staff. He feels that Scott is someone he can confide in, and he begs him to take a job as his personal assistant. Looking for a way out of his mundane life with his adoptive parents, Scott accept the offer.

Of course, it takes no time at all for the relationship to become sexual, and Liberace lavishes Scott with gifts and manipulates him emotionally. Cut to a few years later, and we find a pot-bellied Scott and an aging Lee watching an old move on television together. Liberace decides that it's time for a "makeover," so he calls in his trusted plastic surgeon, Jack Startz (Rob Lowe). Lee wants a complete regeneration and, as an added bonus, he wants Scott's face reconstructed to resemble his younger self, "so you can be my son," he declares.

Startz also puts Scott on a special diet, which consists of a cocktail of addictive amphetamines. Now the young man is truly hooked, both physically and emotionally. But Scott's drug-fueled bouts of anger force Lee to find solace in the arms of other young men, and the relationship begins to crumble.

Soderbergh and screenwriter Richard LaGravenese, working from Thorson's book, do a brilliant job of making us believe that there was an actual emotional relationship, and that Thorson was more than just a "kept boy." According to Emmy magazine, in an effort to maintain authenticity, costume designer Ellen Mirojnick painstakingly recreated Liberace's outrageous stage costumes and production designer Howard Cummings used or recreated locations, including tearing out the stadium seating in the actual Las Vegas Hilton showroom and replacing it with the leather-upholstered booths of the era.

Todd Kleitsch and Hiroshi Yada provided the effective makeup and prosthetics for Douglas and Damon, whose surgeries Soderbergh films like violent assaults. Cutting between one of Liberace's shows and the operating room, he gives us quick, brutal glimpses of bloody skin being peeled back and implants being jammed into chins.

Debbie Reynolds is almost unrecognizable as Lee's domineering mother, Frances. Dan Aykroyd does an effective, low-key job as Lee's loyal agent, Seymour Heller. In a film packed with bizarre sights, Lowe's Startz is easily the most bizarre creation. Wildly overlifted and perpetually underwhelmed, he camps it up for the camera with cat-eyed glee — and gets away with it. Lowe admitted to having migraines as a result of all the pulling, taping and spray painting, adding, "You know, Joan Crawford's whole career was this."

Douglas does an amusing impersonation of Liberace with a little Carol Channing thrown in, and he plays the piano convincingly. Though he's always "on" and flamboyant as hell, Douglas manages to gives us glimpses of a real, sensitive human being hiding behind the mink capes. Damon's role is even more challenging. He must make the transformation from sweet, naive young animal trainer to jealous, paranoid queen, and he does it very well. The fact that they're both so committed to their roles really puts the material across.

Behind the Candelabra premieres Sunday, May 26th, on HBO.

At the Stitches Premiere

Conor McMahon, Tommy Knight and moderator Simon Barrett

On April Fools night, I attended the American premiere of Stitches, an Irish horror spoof starring Ross Noble, an English comedian who has yet to be well-known in the States, but this film may help to start opening doors in America for him.

Noble wasn't present at the screening, but the film's director/co-writer, Conor McMahon (Dead Meat), and its young star, Tommy Knight, were. Also walking the red carpet at Cinespace in Hollywood were such genre notables as Danielle Harris (Halloween 4. Hatchet III), Bai Ling (The Crow) and — for you Angelenos out there — local broadcasting legend Shadoe Stevens. There were circus performers and malevolent clowns, in keeping with the film's theme, and they gave the affair a fun, twisted circus atmosphere.

Bai Ling

The attendees, jacked up on popcorn and cotton candy, were ready to get into some serious gore, and they were amply rewarded with McMahon's tribute to the halcyon days of the slasher movie.

The director knows his stuff when it comes to spoofing the genre. Stitches' characters are almost all two-dimensional and obnoxious. We get the stereotypical fat kid, the slut, the jock, the bully, and so on. The murders are extremely violent, hilariously drawn-out and lovingly rendered with the old-school techniques of latex and gallons of fake blood rather than CGI.

Danielle Harris

The plot is stripped to the basics. Noble's Stitches is a drunken, burned-out clown on his last leg. Dragging himself to yet another kid's birthday party, he wearily goes through his bag of tricks but the little bastards just jeer and throw things at him. One of them sneaks up behind him and ties his shoelaces together, causing him to trip, fall face first into a dishwasher and impale himself on a butcher knife. Result: dead clown.

Six years later, the birthday boy, Tommy (Knight), now a nerdy adolescent still traumatized by the memory of Stitches' death, is getting ready to celebrate his 16th birthday with a few friends, but word about the party gets out on the social networks and soon everyone, including the kids who attended the fatal fete six years before, are crashing.

An erstwhile invitation is carried by the wind to the grave where Stitches has been buried (in a cemetery conveniently located next to Tommy's house), and of course he considers himself invited, rising from the dead to wreak his revenge. And what a revenge! This film is all about the killings, and they're hilariously over-the-top and lingering.

A couple of examples: the fat kid, who'd been hiding in the pantry gorging himself on cans of fruit, gets his head opened with the can opener and his brains scooped out by Stitches. In a final shot, the kid's lifeless body is sprawled across him in a nasty recreation of Michelangelo's Pieta. Another kid, who'd insulted Stitches' balloon animal sculpting technique at the first party, gets his intestines yanked out by the killer clown who then proceeds to twist them into the shape of a doggie.

Noble's take on the character is refreshing. Unlike the manic Freddy Krueger, he's more fatigued than frightening, given to groaning "For fuck's sake" when he has to chase down a victim. And when Tommy and his girlfriend attempt to make their getaway on bikes, he frnatically pedals after them on a tiny tricycle. It's a riotous visual.

Stitches has Halloween-style pop-up scares and Nightmare on Elm Street-inspired wisecracks, but unlike the Elm Street series, which uneasily balanced camp and horror as the sequels droned on, this film is completely clear in its direction. This attitude, along with the extreme gore, makes it more reminiscent of Peter Jackson's early splatter comedies like Dead Alive.

McMahon makes the most of his modest budget, providing some nice atmopshere but of course saving the bulk of his resources for the all-important gore effects.

Stitches is rated R with a running time of 86 minutes. It's available on DVD and on demand on select cable services.

Harry Reems and the Death of the Sexual Revolution

NOTE: This post isn't particularly salacious, but the links may be, so click at your own discretion.


It may be difficult for today's generation, with its easy access to all manner of online pornography, to understand that there was a time when people had to get really creative when it came to their lustful cravings. Sears catalogues, National Geographic magazines and a glimpse of their second cousins all provided fantasy fodder.

Naturally, the birth of film gave birth to the pornographic film, and France, of course, was first to jump on the bandwagon. These films were made for brothels to help waiting customers pass the time, kind of like watching the video at the entrance of the old "Back to the Future" ride while waiting to get in.

The invention of the smaller and lighter 16mm format gave birth to "stag" films that became regular viewing at smoke-filled men's clubs and union lodges all around the country. And they became Americanized: by the 1930s, lookalikes of then-famous female stars were appearing in porno shorts, allowing lusty males to fantasize about what Jean Harlow would look like naked and in flagrante delicto. There were also "Tijuana bibles," crude comic books depicting the same.

Even though Hollywood was kind of naughty during the silent era and even for a couple of years in the '30s, it cleaned up its act after stories of scandals, addiction and the stars' dissolute lives spread across America. Fearing state-enforced censorship, the studio heads instituted the Hays Code, a forerunner to the MPAA film ratings of today, which assured that any film released by a major studio would provide wholesome (yawn) family entertainment.

As a result, "the 40 thieves," an opportunistic gang of theatrical showmen, many of whom started as carnival hucksters, sprang up and began traveling from town to town, setting up shop in individual (often abandoned) theaters and screening beat-up prints of films they'd acquired by legal and not-so-legal means, giving them such provocative titles as Sex Madness and She Shoulda Said No.

They promised graphic sex on the screen but instead delivered cheesy, low-budget VD tracts or puritanical warnings against sexual misbehavior. Instead of sex at 24 frames per second, audiences got a lot of blather. To keep the horny hayseeds in attendance from busting up the theaters, these slippery exhibitors would put on a "square-up" reel consisting of random footage of genitalia to quell the angry masses.

The '50s gave rise to American arthouse cinema, and I don't mean today's definition of highbrow imported or independent fare. I mean international films re-edited to emphasize the nudity and sex, however insignificant. Even the great Ingmar Bergman became fodder for exploitation when his early film, Summer with Monika, was re-edited for American drive-in theaters, cutting out most of the plot and emphasizing the frolicking.

And mainstream Hollywood took a couple of shots at freedom, too. Elia Kazan's Baby Doll, with a screenplay by Tennessee Williams, was denied a seal for its depiction of a child bride (Carroll Baker) romanced by a surly stranger (Eli Wallach). And Otto Preminger's The Moon is Blue dared to mention the word "virgin." Gasp!

By the 1960s, the Code was on its last legs. The changing times and the rise of the youth movement made the restrictive strictures ridiculously chaste for these new audiences. Frank Sinatra wanted to graphically depict heroin addiction in The Man with the Golden Arm. Walter Hill wanted to show Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway blasted to shit in Bonnie and Clyde. And, finally, old stalwart Harry Warner campaigned to allow Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor to play George and Martha in the 1966 film adaptation of Edward Albee's notorious Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with all of the salty language more or less intact.

Then of course there were those goddamn hippies. Always protesting the war, taking drugs, getting nekkid. Hell, they were even nekkid onstage in New York in Hair. And they were changing people's minds. No longer was sex something to be marginalized or hidden away; it was now something that should be celebrated — and preferably have a sunflower painted on it.

So we're poised in this world of instability and change. By 1972, the Vietnam war was a never-ending meat grinder. Nixon was in the White House. Suburbanites were indulging in key parties and started to dabble in the same drugs the hippies are doing. And then came Deep Throat.

"Babe, we've already done the swapping...let's go see that movie." My Dad and his wife even went to see it. They never talked about it to us kids, of course, but I can imagine what they saw: a bunch of white, middle-class couples sitting in a theater, shocked by the coarse images being beamed on the screen, or maybe the sounds of masturbation around them.


And, good God, it's no masterpiece. Made for $25,000, it's grainy, ugly and certainly more repulsive than titillating. But it eventually racked up $600 million and became a cause celebre, stirring up a national debate about obscenity. Police raided movie theaters and seized prints. Even projectionists were arrested. All this did what make it more of a must-see than ever for mainstream adult audiences, and they went in droves.

Now let's focus on the two unlikely stars of that film. Harry Reems, who passed away this past Monday at the relatively young age of 65, always looked like a creepy guidance counselor to me with his giant moustache. And Linda Lovelace, gone since 2002, didn't exactly possess movie star looks either. But Deep Throat hit at just the right time, when America was at its most permissive, and porno chic became the order of the day.

Reems originally signed on as lighting director, but when the man hired to portray the doctor didn't show, well...

Reems actually got arrested and indicted for his involvement in Throat, but it was subsequently overturned. Amazingly, he continued to work in porn until 1989. Then, he entered a 12-step program, got religion, moved to Utah and started selling real estate!

Lovelace made a couple more films (if you don't count the one she made before Deep Throat, a silent short with a dog), the R-rated Deep Throat Part II (what's the point?) and Linda Lovelace for President, but she became an anti-pornography activist, even testifying before congress. She died in a car accident in 2002 at age 53.

Anther big star of the era was Marilyn Chambers, who ironically started out as a model for Ivory Snow soap powder. Her big breakthrough was 1972's Behind the Green Door, in which she engages in a lengthy bout with well-endowed African-American boxer Johnny Keyes. The notorious Mitchell Brothers, who made the film, paid her a then-unheard of salary and percentage of the profits because they realized her wholesome good looks contrasted with all the extreme sexual acts she was performing would make the film a sensation. And it was.

Chambers tried to move into mainstream, even starring in David Cronenberg's Rabid, and she's not bad in it at all, but porno called and she carried on into the 2000s. Interestingly, she was married to Lovelace's ex, Chuck Traynor, for ten years. She died in 2009 at age 56.

Probably the most remembered — and notorious — porn star of the era was John Holmes. Skinny and not particularly attractive, he nevertheless possessed an enormous penis and was very...productive (hence the nickname "Johnny Wadd"). He was the first of the 70s superstars to go, and it's his story that really drew the curtain on the era.

He made hundreds and hundreds of features and "loops" (eight-to-10-minute films shot silent and sold in adult bookstores). I saw him in action in The Erotic Adventures of Candy (1977) at a theater in Mishawaka, Indiana.

It was kind of sad; the theater had obviously been the town's Radio City Music Hall at one time but had been reduced to porn films and live shows as the new mall multiplexes lured customers to the suburbs. The strippers were so skanky; one of them snatched the glasses off a guy's head, rubbed them on her crotch and gave them back. Instead of putting the specs back on, he held them out in front of him as if hoping for some disinfectant!

But I digress. Holmes hit superstardom with a series of Johnny Wadd action pornos. But in 1981 he was arrested for the Wonderland murders, a drug deal gone bad. Finally acquitted in 1982, he served 100 days for contempt of court.

Porn, meanwhile, began a transformation. Gone were the shot-on-film epics with attempts at actual storylines. Now it was manufactured quickly on videotape and plots were jettisoned in favor of churning out tons of product to feed the VCRs that had suddenly become part of America's entertainment centers. Gone too were the hippie types with natural breasts and prodigious public hair, replaced by shaved, plucked and implanted porn queens with the sexual attractiveness of blow-up dolls.

Holmes managed to flourish in this new world, often in cameos or below the line, but the onslaught of AIDS changed the face of porn and sexuality in general. People became fearful as their friends and neighbors were taken by the disease and the government ignored it. AIDS took Holmes, too, in 1988, but by that time the Sexual Revolution was already a fading memory.