Word: writer-director
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Some movie genres will just not lie still under Lawrence Kasdan's knife. As screenwriter (Raiders of the Lost Ark) and writer-director (Body Heat), he has performed deft surgery on the Saturday-matinee serial and the film noir melodrama. But the western will not yield. Silverado sprays the buckshot of its four or five story lines across the screen with the abandon of a drunken galoot aiming at a barn door. Though the film interrupts its chases and shootouts to let some fine actors stare meaningfully or spit out a little sagebrush wisdom, it rarely allows them to build...
...title promises something wicked. But '60s sexploitation auteur Joseph W. Sarno (Moonlighting Wives, Sin in the Suburbs) was more interested in the grim wages of sin than in its appealing depiction; this New York writer-director was the Zola of the back streets. His first feature, which he directed in 1963 under the name Anthony Farrar, is a beguiling mix of no-nudity eroticism and supernatural baloney; an aging stripper (June Colbourne) uses an amulet to work her power on men. It doesn't matter that the actors are not especially attractive, because the movie is about people who, like...
...warrant the interest of reviewers. The opinion of many of them, including me, was that there might be a meeting of pornography, which had quickly established a kind of artistic pedigree, and Hollywood, which was striding toward explicit sexuality. That was also the belief of Deep Throat's writer-director, Gerard Damiano, who said in 1973: "If it's left alone, within a year sex will just blend itself into film. It's inevitable...
...step up from anonymity is pseudonymity. Paul Gerber, the writer-director of my own favorite among the early pornos, the 1971 School Girl, was listed as David Reberg on the credits. Damiano put the name Jerry Gerard on Deep Throat. That film's lead players, Linda Lovelace and Harry Reems, were really Linda Boreman and Herb Streicher. The star of Damiano's next film, Devil in Miss Jones, called herself Georgina Spelvin -George Spelvin being the all-purpose pseudonym for a stage actor doubling a role (and Georgette for an actress). Jamie Gillis, another star of proto-porn, says that...
...tempting to speculate, especially since writer-director Rebecca Miller is so quick to deflect the subject, that Jack could embody some aspect of her father Arthur. Tempting but fruitless, since the real kinship is with the work of another playwright, dead nearly 500 years. Jack is a blend of Prospero, lord of his fantasy island, and Lear, the mad king with a loving daughter. Rose is his Miranda, his Cordelia...