Lights! Camera! Pittsburgh!

By RICHARD CORLISS

Here comes independent regional cinema

Camelot is alive and well, on motorcycles--in Pittsburgh. The redneck revenge movie has found a new hero--in Shelby, N.C. Teen-age actors play at deadly gang wars--in Boston. The radical political spirit of the northern frontier is put on film--in Crosby, N. Dak. A company of actors turn 30, and another young man makes a movie about it--in North Conway, N.H. Tab Hunter and a 300-lb. transvestite named Divine enact a suburban passion play--in Baltimore.

The directors who made these films didn't go "on location." Most of them live where they work: on their own, away from the Hollywood movie machine. They are evidence that independent regional cinema--the hope of every film maker with big ideas and a tiny budget--is beginning to achieve the vitality and clout of America's burgeoning regional theater. George A. Romero's Knightriders (Pittsburgh) opened last week to a flurry of critical raves. Earl Owensby (Shelby), who built himself the largest single film studio outside Los Angeles, announces in Variety that Living Legend, which he produced and starred in, has grossed $11,284,028. John Waters (Baltimore), who earned a cult reputation with the fecally funky Pink Flamingos, is going respectably R rated with Tab Hunter and Polyester. John Sayles' no-budget comedy, Return of the Secaucus 7 (North Conway), has earned $1.2 million in small theaters around the country. And a group of ornery independents have organized to show their films in a Manhattan art house. Viewers who might otherwise catch Caveman will discover 17 fiction features and documentaries, including John Hanson and Rob Nilsson's painterly Northern Lights (Crosby) and Jan Egleson's vivid The Dark of the Street (Boston), featuring a curly-haired charmer named Laura Harrington. Good, bad or just different, regional cinema may be here to stay.

In fact, the film makers share little more than the ambition to get their movies seen and a compulsion to do it their way, without the meeting-taking and compromises of the Hollywood scene. Most of the 17 films being distributed by First Run Features were financed, at least in part, by state or federal arts agencies. The government can hold the independent director in a grip as tight as any old-line studio chiefs, but without those grants the films might not be made. With the Reagan Administration planning to halve its funding of the arts and humanities endowments, these film makers must seek capital from private sources and from the public; hence the new theatrical showcases. Other artist-entrepreneurs raised money without feeding at the government teat. John Sayles wrote horror-movie scripts; Earl Owensby sold industrial supplies; George Romero shot sports profiles and TV commercials.

Romero also traveled the commercial route to independence, with low-budget scare shows that made his name and his fortune: Dawn of the Dead, the 1979 sequel to his cult classic, Night of the Living Dead, has earned $55 million worldwide. The audience reaction to Romero's perfervid shockers has always been poised between a scream and a giggle. Now, with Knightriders, Romero has taken a bigger risk: he blends Arthurian legend with modern-day bikers--Excalibur meets Easy Rider--and dares the audience to laugh at the noble exploits of working-class jousters. The Camelot caravan juggles lofty ideals and hand-to-mouth reality as it journeys from one small town to another, exhibiting swordsmanship in battles where fellowship precariously reigns and only feelings get hurt. They are the most benign of outlaws; they embody the spirit of regional cinema.

This makes for a splendid premise, and a dramatic dilemma. Except for a few oafishly drawn media sharpies, everyone in Romero's Paisley pageant is so nice that no true conflict arises. The movie begins in a splash of delirious lyricism--King William (Ed Harris), naked, birching himself clean in a sylvan lake before mounting his trusty motorsteed--then bogs down in 145 minutes of psychological verismo. The writer-director wants to present rounded, sympathetic characters but never allows them to develop beyond the caricatures in Reel 1. Romero, whose early films displayed the carnographic brio of the E.C. horror comic books of the '50s, has gone classic--or, at least, Classics Comics. Even his talent for visceral editing is restrained: the big tilts are flaccidly cut, and the final battle is confusingly anticlimactic. Romero has tried to fashion a post-industrial Camelot, and ended up putting a square peg in a Round Table.

In Polyester, Francine Fishpaw (Divine) presides over a bunch rowdier by far than any Dark Age cavalry. Her husband runs a movie house specializing in kiddie porn; her daughter trucks around with vicious punks; her son is a criminally insane foot fetishist. Only Todd Tomorrow (Tab Hunter), Francine's dream lover, offers any hope for spiritual regeneration, for he is everything her husband is not: handsome, slim, roughly debonair, and the owner of an art drive-in that shows Marguerite Duras triple bills. Best of all, he is in love with her . . . or so it seems. Francine should have known something would go wrong. She has, literally, a nose for trouble--and so has the film. Polyester is the first motion picture in Odorama, a wondrous screen gimmick that allows the movie audience to smell what Francine does. Discretion and good taste preclude revelation of the specific odors unleashed here, but be warned: this film isn't rated R for roses.

Tacky, tacky, tacky. That is the aim and the achievement of Writer-Director Waters. The decor in Francine's home looks to be straight out of Lesser Homes and Gargoyles; her husband breakfasts on Pepsi and Kix; the family dog leaves the message GOODBYE CRUEL WORLD and hangs itself from the refrigerator door. As with most farce, the movie sags when it runs out of middle-class icons to desecrate. But for any suitably depraved moviegoer, it offers as many honest laughs as Airplane! It's a vision of Baltimore that H.L. Mencken might have loved. As the polyester queen, Divine is woman enough for two--a fleshly-fantasy Miss Piggy. And in one sense, Waters' picture is unique: it's as if you'd never smelled a movie before.

In another sense, Polyester is like all independent films. Whether the director has reformist ideals or dreams of big bucks, whether his mogul is an arts council functionary or a local businessman looking for a tax write-off, the game of scrounging and scrambling must be played. Dawn of the Dead and The Dark End of the Street jump the same financial hurdles. Making movies and Making It may be, finally, the same thing. And sometimes It pays off. More than a few members of the New Hollywood elite--David Lynch (The Elephant Man), John Carpenter (Halloween), Martin Brest (Going in Style), Sean Cunningham (Friday the 13th), John Landis (The Blues Brothers)--got started in the business with pictures that cost $100,000 or less. It can be done. Just follow the advice of another ex-scrounger, Martin Scorsese: "You should just start working wherever you can! Get out, knock on every door, sneak into the studio. Drive counts. This is Hollywood." Scorsese might have added that, nowadays, Hollywood is wherever people with drive and dreams get together to make movies. So watch out, L.A. The next star-struck generation may just want to go Pittsburgh.

--By Richard Corliss

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