Some Nudity Required – Review

Some Nudity Required

with Edward Albert, Samuel Z. Arkoff, Lisa Boyle
Written and Directed by Odette Springer and Johanna Demetrakas  (Only Child Productions)
by William Ham

Exploitation films – the kind of churned-out, low-budget/low-rent/lowbrow fodder designed to cheaply, quickly, and efficiently jump the bones of the baser instincts of modern moviegoers (sometimes swiping the thin lustre from transient fads but more often – né, always – stewing in some overheated pot of sex and violence, with the twain ‘twixt the two intermittently – i.e., invariably – meeting on some undeniably lurid crossroads) – have in recent years attained a newfound respect they had never enjoyed, and perhaps never deserved. As we are reminded in the first few minutes of Odette Springer and Johanna Denetrakas’ documentary, Some Nudity Required (a Grand Jury Prize nominee at this year’s Sundance Film Festival), the simple requirements laid down by grindhouse foremen like Samuel Z. Arkoff and Roger Corman (regardless of the plot [whether you have one or not], make sure you toss in some action and sex into every reel) left enough room for some of today’s most revered talents (Scorsese, Coppola, Demme, Sayles, etc.) to squeeze in a little vision when the boss wasn’t looking. The same held true (to a lesser extent) for the talent in front of the camera and behind the scenes, as well. It’s a romantic notion to be sure – a cross between on-the-job training and boot camp for those with no other entrée into the glamorous world of Tinseltown, better than film or drama school with little chance of student-loan payments – but it’s an increasingly archaic and, as it turns out, dangerous one. The era of quick-buck drive-in double features is long gone, most of the elements of the cheapies of old have been appropriated by the majors, and the explo demo is therefore no longer bands of teens gathered together in sweaty-walled, sticky-floored theaters, but the solitary (chronological) adult looking for cheap thrills in the privacy of their cable-ready homes, universal remote in one hand, best-not-to-ask-what in the other. With a booming video marketplace comes the constant need for product, which seduces the masses of people in this society for whom fame and fortune are treated like a God-given right, resulting in a continual mass exodus to the killing fields of Los Angeles (with a stop at the plastic surgeon’s along the way), bolstered by desire, avarice, naïvete, and sometimes even talent. The carrot of distinction dangles before them, and as anyone who’s looked at some of the vidiotic output of these makeshift studios can tell, many of these people will subject themselves to debasement and humiliation of all stripes in their attempts to get it.

This is where Springer comes in. A classically-trained musician, she was drawn to Hollywood to score movies for companies with deceptively high-falutin’ names like the Motion Picture Corporation of America, providing music for over 25 pictures and eventually winning the title of Vice-President of Worldwide Music for Corman’s Concorde/New Horizons imprints. A willing pawn in the B-movie game at first, she slowly grew frustrated, then flat-out angry, at these films’ treatment of women and their equation of sex with violence – an unsurprising response – and yet, to her chagrined fascination, many of these transgressive and hostile images began to work their primal psycho-sexual sorcery on her. There is obviously a very large audience out there for whom it does the same – this is, after all, a multi-billion dollar industry – and it’s that fascination with perversity and interest in the effects of these films that forms the basis of SNR.

It must be said that, for a musician, Springer has yet to apply her compositional principles to the cinema – even with the assistance of a creative partner, the film jerks in many different directions, starting out as a history of the B-movie, loitering on the set of the occultist screw-a-thon thriller Sorceress for a spell, then spending the remainder of its running time switching between film clips and interviews with various figures in the industry and her own, highly personal journey of discovery which finally leads her out of the business. Even so, this structural awkwardness is appropriate to the subject – you come to feel like the novice detective Springer herself became, gathering piecemeal information and clues that result in a discovery that would be the stuff of a mawkish TV-movie if it weren’t so obviously real and painful. And along the way, you catch enthralling (and occasionally repellent) glimpses of the personalities that drift into exploitation’s orbit, who are presented with a refreshing lack of judgmentalism. Of the directors, Fred Olen Ray (Attack of the 60-Foot Centerfold) and Andy Sidaris (Hard Ticket to Hawaii) come off to scale, making no bones about the level of their work and defending it as good, escapist entertainment; Chuck Moore (Angel of Destruction) and Catherine Cryan (Slumber Party Massacre 3) betray a touch of embarrassment with the system, but remain honest about the workings of this milieu; and Sorcerer‘s Jim Wynorski is all crass, infuriatingly hilarious bluster as he orders his crew (and Springer) around as if he were the James Cameron of the sickie-quickie set. Most illustrative of all is the diametric opposition of the two actresses profiled here: Julie Strain, our current “Queen B,” who gleefully refuses to show the slightest qualm about her sojourn in the land of the unclothed; and Maria Ford, an educated woman with some genuine acting talent (and, even rarer in this business, her own breasts) who angrily denounces the unscrupulous and misogynistic operating procedure of the trade even as she submits to it for fear of being blackballed for being “difficult.”

Some Nudity Required has far too much on its plate to ultimately satisfy – Springer’s own story only goes so far in exploring her stated intent to “examine… the complexity of our sexuality, the impact of images on our society and our relationship to those images,” and at times, you wish she’d step aside so we can get a clearer view of a business that serves as a strange way-station for up-and-comers, has-beens, and innumerable never-will-bes alike. Still, her honesty is admirable, and enough is said and shown to amuse, provoke, and leave you pondering some troubling implications of how a cheap form of entertainment reflects and feeds our very American obsessions with money, violence, sex, and fame.