Nr 463: The First Nudie Musical (1976)

The First Nudie Musical (movie)
Screenplay, Music & Lyrics: Bruce Kimmel

Gotta sing, Gotta dance
While I’m Taking of my pants

The son of an almost famous studio owner is forced to make porno films to keep the bankrupt studio from being made into a shopping center. The films have titels like Teenage Sexmutants and Stewardesses in Cages. But lately these films have started to flop. In an attempt to get back on the high ground he decides to make a new kind of porno, a musical comedy porno. He makes a bet with the debtors who wish to take ownership of the studio, that if they finance the musical and he can’t complete it within two weeks, they can foreclose.
Ribald humor, bawdy songs and plenty of skin abounds in this sophomoric satire that while unabashedly trashy, has developed a bit of a cult following.

I found the films soundtrack album in a record store in Sweden when I was a teenager and I found it deliciously smutty. I loved going around town and with a loud voice sing the songs in the hope that I would shock people. But it was the seventies so people, at least in Sweden, weren’t that easily shocked about sexual stuff. I was a bit disappointed, I mean there I was singing about Dancing Dildos, cunnilingus and Orgasms and people just thought it cute or absolutely normal… Ah, the seventies…
I loved the songs then and I still do. But I didn’t actually get a chance to see the film itself until it came out on DVD in the early noughties. I have just revisited it so it would be fresh in my mind for this blog and I can tell you that it still holds up pretty well. Some of the physical comedy feels a little forced and dated, but the dialogue is still funny and had me laughing out loud quite a few times and some of the show numbers are pure delights. It’s pretty crude and has a low-budget feel with a ”musical-within-a-movie” theme, but with satirical sexual humor and if you like that kind of thing (and I do), it’s definitely worth seeking out!
They’ve added a very funny hour long retrospective documentary as a bonus on the DVD.

The budget for the picture was $125 000. It got picked up by Paramount Pictures for distribution. But when the studio saw the finished product they thought it dragged a bit in the middle and they asked Bruce to shoot some new scenes. So he came up with the Dancing Dildos number. The studio asked ”Are there nude girls in the number?” ”Yes”, he answered and they gave him $75 000 just to shoot that scene!

There are som great future stars in this movie:
Cindy Williams who already had a nice little movie career going on, got her big break through on tv the same year the film premiered in the tv-series Laverne & Shirley. She played Shirley for 8 seasons. Laverne & Shirley was a spin-off of the sitcom Happy Days (1974-84).
Future director Ron Howard was the star of Happy Days and he did a cameo in this movie.
Cindy and Ron also played girlfriend and boyfriend in the George Lucas film American Graffiti (1973).
Diana Canova went on to play Corinne Tate in the sitcom Soap (Lödder in Sweden).
And director, actor, author, composer and lyric writer Bruce Kimmel has starred in and directed a lot of films and tv-series. He has also written plays and musicals (among them The Brain from Planet X, which you can find on this blogg, it’s nr 200). From 1988 to 1993, Kimmel co-owned the specialty label, Bay Cities, releasing over 100 albums that included American classical music, cast albums, and soundtracks. In 1993, Kimmel became a full time record producer with his own division at Varese Sarabande, producing many cast albums (Broadway and off-Broadway), Broadway singers, and musical theater concept albums, first for the Varese Sarabande, and then for a company he founded, Fynsworth Alley. His current label Kritzerland has issued close to 400 albums including cast albums, singers, and a series of reissues of limited edition soundtracks.

The film actually got some great reviews and became a minor hit. The first week of its wide release, it was the fourth highest-grossing picture in the country, behind Star Wars, You Light Up My Life, and The Spy Who Loved Me.

The actual first nudie musical is considered to be the 1963 nudie-cutie Goldilocks and the Three Bares (1963)

Press:
Chockful of youthful talent, well spiced by outrageousness and sparked by invention. The three stars are simply irresistible. Cindy Williams is enchanting, Kimmel is the ultimate appealing schnook. Fresh and funny and funky. Made for about 1 percent of the budget of New York, New York, but a hundred times funnier and more perceptive. It’s the Star Wars of nudie musicals.
– Judith Crist, New York Post

More vitality, imagination, zany comedy and stellar performances than most movies. It’s one of the most memorable movies of this year. A raunchy delight. Cindy Williams is a marvel! Kimmel is a joy to watch!
– Joseph Gelmiş, Newsday

A Mel Brooksian salute to porno chic.
– Bruce Williamson, Playboy

Silly, sophomoric, at times downright inept, this little low-budget venture picked up by Paramount is more often than not hilarious, offering good, tonic laughter to those not offended by nudity and blunt language.
– Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times

Basically a one-joke idea that wears thin despite an air of amiability.
– Leonard Maltin’s Film Guide (two stars out of four)

A few clever bits are downed in a larger sea of silliness, forced gags and predictable cliche.
– Arthur D Murphy, Variety

Videos:
C’mon Honey
The Red Band Trailer
Audition scene
A ”naked” tv-review of the movie from 1976

Nr 382: Howard Crabtree’s When Pigs Fly!

Howard Crabtree’s When Pigs Fly! (1996)
– a musical revue in two acts conceived by Howard Crabtree and Mark Waldrop
Off-Broadway, 840 föreställningar
Music: Dick Gallagher
Lyrics and sketches: Mark Waldrop

Brother, you ain’t seen a thing
Till you’ve seen bacon taking wing!

This revue takes a hilarious look at gay life in the 1990s.
It’s a grab bag of songs, dances, sketches, and running gags — unified by a gay sensibility that combines a love of traditional musical theatre, a taste for outrageous visual humour, and a delight in shameless wordplay. These elements are strung upon the slenderest of plot threads.
The concept of the revue is that ”Howard” stages a musical. As he struggles to do so, dealing with the large egos of performers or scenery gone wrong, he hears the words of his high school counselor, ”Miss Roundhole”. She sarcastically said, ”When pigs fly!” in response to his ambitions. The characters in the revue are all played by men.
But the linking story is not where the focus lies.
The individual numbers are the meat of the show. In When Pigs Fly the empty stage becomes a kind of dreamscape populated by Howard’s fevered imagination. The audience never knows who or what it will see next. A bare-breasted mermaid? A Garden of Eden tableau? Bette Davis as Baby Jane slinging a life-size Joan Crawford rag doll around? They all get into the act.
Each freshly revealed character will have something to say, usually through song, that provides a skewed but revelatory reflection of what it is to be gay in the 1990s.
Though the spirit is gay — in both senses of the word — the tone is inclusive, and always the tilt is towards the universal. When Pigs Fly is completely accessible to anyone who can appreciate being smart and silly at the same time.
Welcome to Howard’s world….

The show’s a queer one, there’s no doubt
Just to be in it you have to be out!

Jag gillar verkligen det här. Kul musik med smarta och väääldigt kvicka sångtexter. Det här är en show som driver med det mesta, både ”gay” och ”straight” men mest ”gay”, och inte för en sekund tar den sig själv på allt för stort allvar.
Sånginsatserna är av varierande kvalité, några är rena Broadwayröster medan andra är mer åt glada amatörerhållet men det de saknar i sångkvalité fyller de istället med charm och grym komisk tajming. Så allt som allt så är det här en helgjuten liten show.

Några av sångerna är ännu roligare om man vet varför de sjungs och av vem, som Not All Man som sjungs av en förvirrad kentaur i omklädningsrummet på ett gym – därav alla ”häst” skämt.
Rekommenderas!

Favvisar:
When Pigs Fly, Not All Man, Sam and Me, You’ve Got To Stay In The Game, Light in the Loafers

Kuriosa:
Howard Crabtree (1954 – 1996), började sin showbizkarriär som dansare men började snart skapa hysteriska kostymer för olika off-Broadway shower.
Tillsammans med upphovsmännen till denna show skapade han 1993 revyn Howard Crabtree’s Whoop-Dee-Doo! Här skapade han inte bara kostymerna utan spelade även huvudrollen.
Han gick bort bara nån månad innan When Pigs Fly hade sin premiär.
Han dog i en AIDS relaterad sjukdom.

Press:
Some shows, you leave humming the scenery; others, the costumes. Howard Crabtree’s When Pigs Fly sends you out humming the sequins on the costumes.
The wigs alone in this exuberant eyeful of a revue … are like tone poems of camp: pillowy, cartoon-land creations, threatening to lift the men beneath them somewhere, fully aloft.
…
But if the revue is essentially fabulous window dressing–make that faaaaaaaabulous window dressing–its overall musical buoyancy serves as artful dressing for the dressing.
…
So many costume changes; so little time.
– Michael Phillips, Los Angeles Times

…an exceptionally cheerful, militantly gay new musical revue that comes close to living up to its own billing ”the side-splitting musical extravaganza”.  No sides are ever in serious danger of splitting. Yet there’s enough hilarity, wit and outre humor here to evoke that era, more than 40 years ago, when bright, irreverent revues were as commonplace on Broadway as today’s stately Cameron Mackintosh spectacles.
– Vincent Canby, The New York Times

This show is user-friendly for straights.
– Clive Brooks,  The New York Post 

A Hog-Heaven of silliness.
– Michael Sommers, The Star Ledger 

Videosar:
Color Out Of Colorado (A Patriotic Finale)
You’ve Got To Stay In The Game
Bigger is Better
Hawaiian Wedding Song
Last One Picked

You can’t take the color out of Colorado
You can’t take the Mary out of Mary-Land
As John Phillip Sousa said, ‘I can’t march
If I can’t hear the boys in the band.

Den förvirrade men glade kentauren.

We Wear Our Vanity with Pride