![]() ![]() Offering brief glimpses from the film, the ad promised a bounty of not-safe-for-TV images for those who made it to the theater. A 1982 TV spot better explains why audiences showed up: It wasn’t those elements that caught moviegoers’ attention, however, even if they didn’t go unnoticed. “It had signs on the beach ‘No Jews Allowed’ and the clubs and things. “Basically Fort Lauderdale was an anti-Semitic, racist place in the early ’50s,” he recalled. That largely takes the form of a subplot about one character rejecting his anti-Semitism by befriending a Jewish kid he’d previously tormented, another detail pulled from Clark’s memories of the past. Whatever its commercial prospects, he saw it as an attempt to recreate the early-’50s in a way that showed the less innocent side of the era, one that had become synonymous with squeaky clean suburbia.Ĭlark, who grew up poor among more privileged Florida teens, also saw it as a chance to layer in a little social commentary. Though it might sound odd to think of a movie most famous for a scene in which a character has his penis painfully pulled from the other side of a peephole as a passion project, Clark treated it as such. The studio began funding the project again only when Clark kept making it with his own money. On an audio commentary recorded for the film’s DVD release, Clark recalls Fox canceling the production shortly before filming was supposed to begin. It proved an irresistible combination for audiences, albeit one that almost never happened. What it lacked in name recognition it compensated for with the ample nudity the relaxed standards of the era allowed, a fixture of the era’s horror movies just waiting to be plucked and applied to a different sort of teen-appealing genre. Porky’s channeled the raunchy spirit of big-budget, star-packed comedies like Animal House and Caddyshack into a relatively low-budget film that counted Susan Clark and Alex Karras as its biggest stars. But he couldn’t have calculated a better combination of elements to succeed in the early ’80s. Clark drew from his past for Porky’s, which he’d had plans to make for 15 years and first attempted to script in the mid-’70s. Just one year later, the theaters flooded with teen-targeted sex comedies that would enjoy long afterlives on video store shelves and late-night cable. ![]() Modestly budgeted and frostily received by critics, Porky’s would nonetheless become one of the most influential films of the 1980s, one whose mark on the movie landscape would prove long and lasting. He knew exactly what sort of film he wanted to make next: Porky’s, a coming-of-age comedy inspired by his teen years in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Obviously, another, even more prestigious film seemed like the next logical leap. ![]() Success earned Clark some creative freedom. It’s not everyone who can go from making Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things to directing Jack Lemmon in an eight-year span. Tribute looked like the culmination of Clark’s long ascent to respectability, one earned the hard way by first making low-budget horror films in the States and then working within the Canadian film system. ![]() In 1980, director Bob Clark earned the greatest acclaim of his career with Tribute, a well-received drama that earned Jack Lemmon the Best Actor prize at the Berlin International Film Festival and Best Actor nominations at the Golden Globes and Academy Awards. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |