An independent horror comedy, made on the cheap with great ingenuity and comparable conviction, Rufus Butler Seder’s “Screamplay” is truly a movie about its own ambitions — not least because Seder, in his early 30s when the film was in production, plays the lead, a crazed would-be Hollywood screenwriter.
Having bounced around for decades, mainly on video, the movie shows for a week in a new digital restoration at Anthology Film Archives. Originally shot on 16-millimeter in noirish black and white, it looks great.
Seder’s homemade special effects, predicated on models, matte work and rear-screen projection, are impressive, and from the opening image of an electrical storm crackling over the Hollywood sign, the movie is steeped in German Expressionism. Clips from silent classics — “Nosferatu,” “The Golem” and “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” — appear throughout as the neophyte writer Edgar Allan (Seder) sits typing away at his latest scenario, oblivious to the menacing shadow reaching to clutch him.
The story is pure Hollywood. Moments after arriving via bus in Los Angeles, Edgar meets an agent in distress and, having made one dubious connection, secures another. He’s saved during a men’s room mugging by Martin, the slob manager of a seedy Hollywood motel played with bullying gusto by the underground filmmaker George Kuchar. Perhaps because the mugger’s demise attracts the police’s attention, Martin hires Edgar as the motel janitor.
The dive does not lack colorful types. There’s the aging sexpot Nina (Linda Robinson, later known as M. Lynda Robinson), who, greeting the new hire in her negligee, immediately asks, “Did you ever see ‘Bad Girls of Borneo’?” Her nemesis is a hirsute electric guitar-wielding prophet (Bob White), given to proclamations like “all is vanity” and worshiping “the gods of ganja.” The universal object of desire is the wannabe starlet Holly (Katy Bolger), taking acting lessons from Nina while being courted by “the next James Dean” (James M. Connor, who went on to have a TV career).
Kuchar aside, the cast is drawn largely from Seder’s colleagues at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The characterizations are broad. So is the premise, as Edgar’s imaginative scenarios regarding the motel denizens come to gruesome fruition. Another resident spots the connection and attempts a bit of blackmail as a means to “package” Edgar’s scripts, leading to further mayhem.
The movie’s penultimate scene involves a cosmic struggle between Edgar and Martin, where Martin appears to crash through the set. In fact, the scene documents a real accident. According to Seder, Kuchar slipped, fell and shattered his ankle: “As he did not have insurance, we raised more funds to cover his $20,000 hospital cost, effectively doubling our budget from $25,000 to $45,000.” Kuchar devotes a chapter to the injury and hospital stay in his memoir, jointly written with his twin brother, Mike: “Reflections From a Cinematic Cesspool.”
One such reflection, “Screamplay” enjoyed some success in West Germany after its festival screenings, sold to TV as a “Halloween special.” Still, it proved to be Seder’s last conventional movie. Known for his picture books, he developed a technology he calls “scanimation,” in which static images of animals appear to move, safe from catastrophic falls in seedy Hollywood motels.
Screamplay
Through Oct. 1 at Anthology Film Archives; anthologyfilmarchives.org.
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