Eileen Townsend in ‘Two Whole Days of Nothing But Uppercase F*CK!’
Indie Memphis’ salute to the Bluff City in May continues this week with two programs featuring strong women.
On Tuesday, May 21st, Indie Memphis’ venerable Microcinema series presents a selection of shorts by women directors from Memphis.
The program doubles as a who’s who of Memphis female filmmakers, including Rachel Taylor’s fantasy “Avarice,” Sarah Fleming’s whimsical travelog “Carbike,” Munirah Safiyah Jones’ savage comedy “Fuckboy Defense 101,” Aisha Raison’s “Girls Like Me: A Self Love Story,” McGehee Montieth’s Memphis Film Prize winner “He Could Have Gone Pro,” Melissa Anderson Sweazy’s childcare parable “John’s Farm,” Sissy Denkova’s “Sabine,” Nubia Yasin’s Youth-Fest sensation “Sensitive,” Kathy O. Lofton’s “Tether,” Laura Jean Hocking’s surreal mood piece “Two Whole Days Of Nothing But Uppercase Fuck,” and Deaara Lewis’ “What If?”
Then, on Wednesday at Studio on the Square, Memphis’ indie originator Mike McCarthy is celebrated with a screening of his 2000 magnum opus Superstarlet A.D. McCarthy’s career has been defined by taking high concept film, culture, and feminist theory and wrapping those ideas in the cinematic language of the low-budget, drive-in grindhouse. Nowhere is that more evident than in this post-apocalyptic romp.
Tickets are available at the Indie Memphis website, but don’t take the kids to this one.
One of the highlights of last year’s Gonerfest 15 was the screening of director Mike McCarthy’s The Sore Losers at Studio on the Square. Having received the full remastering treatment, it jumped off the screen as never before, combining the best of modern digital clarity with the richness of its original analog film stock. The film, first released in 1997, is an often hilarious Zippin’ Pippin ride through exploitation, low budget sci-fi, and B-movie tropes. But it also provided a portal into the (then) unheralded underground music scene of the era.
Last November, the soundtrack was released on vinyl via Goner Records and Portugal’s Chaputa! Records. It’s barely left the turntable since. For what this double LP offers is nothing less than a reanimated, full-strength Frankenstein’s monster of ’90s garage rock, retro rock, and lo-fi experimentalism.
If the movie itself is a brilliant hodge-podge of styles, so is the album. The tracks are not just lo-fi, they are different varieties of lo-fi, from the late Jack Taylor’s bashed-out title song, to the terrifying/thrilling onslaught of Guitar Wolf, to the quavering homespun charm of Poli Sci Clone. Satisfyingly snotty vocals and chugging/chopping guitars abound, as in contributions by the Makers, the Drags, Gasoline, and Los Diablos del Sol, but many artists you might think you have pegged defy formula altogether.
People were already nostalgic for the Gories by 1997, but Mick Collins avoids that familiar territory with a kind of minimalist crime jazz built on the prominent sax work of Jim Spake. Nick Diablo’s track is reminiscent of Can’s “Ethnographic Forgery” series, with Diablo channeling a lost field recording of some aged Delta harp player. Tracks from ’68 Comeback and Jack Oblivian are littered with wah-wah guitar, organ, and synth hiccups that are true to the flick’s sci-fi universe. Or, in the case of Jack Oblivian’s back-shed funk “Vice Party,” the flick’s soft porn universe.
Dan Ball
The Clears
One gem, highlighted at the film’s Gonerfest 15 premiere in the form of a 1997 music video that was never released, is “We Are a Rock & Roll Band” by synth pop trio the Clears. Also known as “Rock & Roll Band” to fans of the Clears’ standalone album, the different title may be appropriate, as either a remix or a remastering has given the soundtrack version considerably more snap and crackle. Jack O and Chris Clarity also mine that back corner of the garage where grandpa stores his synthesizers.
Mingled in with all these sonic adventures, we also hear some first rate songwriting. The closer, of course is the 1953 chestnut, “Look Me Over Closely,” (later popularized by the White Stripes), but we also hear the neo-classic swamp pop of the Royal Pendletons, whose “I’m a Sore Loser” is perhaps even more a definitive track than Taylor’s.
The Royal Pendletons
And finally, in stark contrast with so much clamor, side three closes with the simple, haunting “Bad Man” by Greg Oblivian/Greg Cartwright, all mellow guitar, toy piano, and disembodied, over-the-phone vocals. The recurrence of that track through the film anchors it in a seemingly incongruous mood of regret and heartache. Though it no doubt surprised many Oblivians fans at the time (for this was well before the Reigning Sound), it’s an especially fitting cornerstone for a film built on, and reveling in, incongruities.
Why would two doctors want to start a record label? Ask Dennis Black and Robert Wyatt of Black & Wyatt Records, and they’ll tell you it’s because they love Memphis music.
Black is a pediatric gastroenterologist, and Wyatt is a pediatric nephrologist. They met through their work at Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital and bonded over their love of music, particularly Memphis rock-and-roll.
Wyatt says even though he’s lived and practiced medicine in Memphis since the 1980s, for many years he was unaware of the city’s fertile underground music scene. “When I had a division to run, a research lab, and a family to raise, I missed out. My lab techs were going to the Antenna Club, but I never did.”
Dennis Black (left) and Robert Wyatt (right)
Black grew up in Covington and worked at the town’s radio station, WKBL, in high school, then for Memphis State’s WTGR “Music has kind of been my hobby all along,” he says. “Unfortunately, I can’t really play. But I like hearing live music, and I have a good record collection.”
“About the time $5 Cover came out, I started paying attention to Memphis bands and meeting Memphis musicians,” Wyatt says.
After he got to know several Memphis musicians through the cleaning company, Two Chicks and a Broom (“Valerie June cleaned our house for a fairly long period of time.”), he started hiring bands to play for yard parties at his home in 2012. The Harbert Avenue Porch Show has since attracted Jack Oblivian, the River City Tanlines, Snowglobe, and James and the Ultrasounds, to name a few.
“He’s his own little institution, with the porch shows,” says filmmaker Mike McCarthy, a Memphis punk pioneer whose daughter Hanna Star was also featured in a porch show.
“Mike approached me about wanting to put the Fingers Like Saturn album out,” says Wyatt. Fingers Like Saturn was a band McCarthy formed to feature Cori Dials (now Cori Mattice), a singer and actress he met while working at Sun Studios in 2006. He saw Mattice sing with her band the Splints. “They were good, but she looked like a Chrissie Hynde/Debbie Harry figure — lost in time, full of charisma.”
McCarthy wrote a bunch of songs and gathered keyboardist Shelby Bryant, sax player Suzi Hendrix, cellist Jonathan Kirkscey, and guitarist George Takeda. Then he put guitar wizard Steve Selvidge on drums, which, amazingly, works just fine.
Dan Ball
Fingers Like Saturn
“I introduced Cori to this group of talented eccentrics,” says McCarthy. “She jumped right into it.”
The band recorded at Sun Studios and at Selvidge’s home studio. “I’ve always played in punk bands, but I wanted this band to be a well-produced glam-rock band,” says McCarthy.
Filled with Memphis heavy hitters and held together with Mattice’s powerful alto, the glam influence is palpable, especially in songs like the Bowie-worshipping “Glam Lies.” But, since it’s Memphis, the sounds are more eccentric. “Satin (Pine Box Lullaby)” dabbles in Mexicalia by way of Johnny Cash. “Black Ray of Sunshine,” a ballad about the Black Dahlia, is an early example of the string-arranging skills that have made Kirkscey a sought-after soundtrack composer.
Before the eponymous record could find a label, Mattice’s career took her out of Memphis, and the band drifted apart. Ten years later, McCarthy played the recordings for Black and Wyatt. “We listened to the recordings, and they were really good!” says Black. “It was just a conspiracy of events that it didn’t get a wide release at the time. If we were going to do it, we decided to make it a really nice record.”
Fingers Like Saturn will reunite at DKDC on October 24th for Black &
Wyatt’s first record release party. But the label-mates are already looking forward to their next release: a single by the Heathens, a Memphis high school garage band that recorded at Sun Studios in 1956. Black and Wyatt plan to continue releasing a mixture of contemporary Memphis acts and lost gems from the 60-year history of Memphis rock.
“We’re not in it to become millionaires,” says Black. “We have our day jobs. We want to get the music out there.”
Artist Mike McCarthy contemplates sharing his Cash with the world.
Mark Lovell, who has partnered with Darrin Hillis in running the Delta Fair since it began in 2007, has a soft spot for Johnny Cash. This year, the fair will host a Johnny Cash Family Reunion. But that’s not the half of it: Lovell is also the current owner of the former Galloway United Methodist Church on Cooper and Walker. The fact that the building witnessed Cash’s first ever performance with band mates Marshall Grant and Luther Perkins, in 1954, is not lost on him.
Indeed, since early 2017, preparations have been made for a larger-than-life statue of Cash to be erected on or near the church grounds. Local auteur Mike McCarthy, who is as adept with clay as he is with paper, pen, and celluloid, has recently completed the work, which occupied a place of honor in his living room as he worked on it for over a year.
Leigh Wiener
Johnny Cash
“While I am no longer involved in the daily goings-on of Legacy Memphis (the non-profit I co-founded),” says McCarthy, “I believe there is an effort to unveil the statue, perhaps as early as November, in front of the new apartment building between Stone Soup and Galloway United Methodist Church.”
Most of Midtown has been abuzz about the work since McCarthy was contracted to create the work last June. Here, at long last, the Memphis Flyer presents an exclusive preview of McCarthy’s work: the clay form from which a bronze statue has already been cast by the local Lugar Foundry. The work is based on a period-appropriate photo of Cash, from early in his career. Of course, the bronze version won’t sport those red buttons, which McCarthy lovingly lifted from one of his late mother’s dresses.
Tonight at Malco Ridgeway, Indie Memphis presents Filmworker, the story of Leon Vitali. An actor who landed the part of Lord Bullingdon in Barry Lyndon, Vitali gave up a promising acting career to become Stanley Kubrick’s right hand man through the 1970s, 80s, and 1990s. The documentary is a story of creativity’s highs and lows, and a warts-and-all account of the making of some of the greatest films ever. Tickets are going fast for this one. They are available over on the Indie Memphis website.
This Week At The Cinema: Behind The Scenes With Kubrick and The Sandlot
Meanwhile, over at the Paradiso, there’s a 25th anniversary screening of The Sandlot, a cult coming-of-age film about a young boy who moves to Los Angeles and wants to learn to play baseball.
This Week At The Cinema: Behind The Scenes With Kubrick and The Sandlot (2)
On Thursday at the Paradiso, there’s a filmed version of a Broadway musical version of a film: Newsies.
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This week, the Orpheum Theatre’s Summer Movie Series hits a trio of high notes. First on Friday is the all-time classic The Wizard of Oz. If your kids have never seen it, they need to. If you haven’t seen it in a while, it richly rewards repeated viewings. If you don’t know anything about it, educate yourself with this trailer:
This Week At The Cinema: Behind The Scenes With Kubrick and The Sandlot (4)
Once you’ve gotten your fix of Judy Garland fighting witches, head on over to the Midnight at the Studio, where Mike McCarthy is presenting one of the most unlikely onscreen love stories ever made, Harold and Maude. The film about a May-December romance between a young pessimist and an old optimist plays at the witching hour on both Friday and Saturday.
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Saturday night, The Orpheum returns with a sorely needed double feature for our superhero-obsessed times. At 5 PM, it’s Superman. Richard Donner’s 1978 film is a tour de force of pre-CGI special effects. Even 40 years and literally hundred of superhero movies later, no actors have come close to either Christopher Reeve’s performance as Superman or the recently departed Margo Kidder’s turn as Lois Lane.
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Then, after you freshen your soda and popcorn, The Orpheum presents Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman. Often considered the first modern superhero movie, its success in 1989 was by no means a sure thing. That’s why Warner Brothers attached their biggest musical star to do the soundtrack. It doesn’t get much attention now, but “Batdance” was Prince’s fourth song to hit #1 on the Billboard pop charts, the R&B charts, and the dance charts all at the same time. Check out this batshit crazy video, directed by Purple Rain helmer Albert Magnoli.
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Tuesday night at Studio on the Square, Indie Memphis presents Little Pink House, a dramatization of a true story of a community in Connecticut who resisted destructive gentrification all the way to the Supreme Court. Catherine Keener plays Suzette Kelo, the plaintiff in Kelo vs New London, a case which resonates today. Showtime is 7 p.m. Here’s the trailer:
This Week At The Cinema: Gentrification and Good Grief
On Wednesday, the film which swept the Hometowner awards at last year’s Indie Memphis Film Festival, Good Grief, will play at Malco Studio On The Square. The screening is a fund-raiser for the Kemmons Wilson Center for Good Grief, the Memphis facility that is the subject of the film. Directors Melissa Anderson Sweazy and Laura Jean Hocking will be on hand, along with the grief center’s Executive Director Angela Hamblen Kelly, with Q&A hosted by Joann Self Selvidge.
This Week At The Cinema: Gentrification and Good Grief (2)
Over at Crosstown Arts on Wednesday night is this year’s Academy Award winner for Best Documentary Short, “Heaven Is A Traffic Jam On The 405,” presented by Indie Memphis.
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Then on Friday, Mike McCarthy’s Midnight at the Studio returns with one of the most infamous, but misunderstood, films of all times, Todd Browning’s 1932 Freaks. Browning had previously directed Bela Lugosi in Dracula, and for his follow up, he drew on experiences he had running away with the circus as a teenager. The results are like nothing before or since.
This Week At The Cinema: Gentrification and Good Grief (4)
With the World Cup and the Thai soccer team rescue in the headlines, it’s a good time for a soccer doc.
The Workers Cup
Migrant African workers in Qatar are currently building facilities for the 2022 World Cup. It’s a hellish existence that borders on slavery. The worker’s only outlet is a soccer tournament, held on the very fields they’re constructing. The Workers Cup is by director Adam Sobel and producers Ramsey Haddad and Rosie Garthwaithe, and it’s screening at Malco Ridgeway tonight at 7 PM. You can get tickets on the Indie Memphis website.
This Week At The Cinema: Soccer and Sundance
Tonight is also the 50th Anniversary screening of The Beatles’ only excursion into animation, Yellow Submarine at the Paradiso.
This Week At The Cinema: Soccer and Sundance (5)
On Wednesday, Indie Memphis Microcinema presents an encore of the 2018 Sundance short films at Crosstown Arts.
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Friday night will be busy, with two very different possibilities to fulfill your entertainment needs. At the Orpheum Theatre, the summer goes into small gear with Joe Johnston’s debut special-effects romp, Honey, I Shrunk The Kids.
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Then Mike McCarthy’s Midnight at the Studio continues with Alejandro Jodorowski’s groundbreaking psychedelic western El Topo.
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On Sunday at the Paradiso, Turner Classic Movies hosts the 30th anniversary of the film that made Tom Hanks a superstar, Big. Directed by Penny Marshall, it was the first film directed by a woman to gross more than $100 million.
“I illustrated VHS covers for Something Weird Video, and Mike Vraney paid me in movies, with eccentric gems like Mom & Dad and Sex Kittens Go To College,” says Memphis filmmaker Mike McCarthy “This led to me curating a [VHS] series of exploitation films called Cinema Augraten at a little hole-in-the-wall pub called Barristers, where I showed Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls in 1994 or ’95 to a drunken and cheering crowd. Now you can buy a beer at Studio on the Square and actually sit down in a comfy seat and watch it. Who says there’s no such thing as progress?”
This weekend at Studio on the Square, McCarthy’s Midnight at the Studio series continues with Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls. The film, produced and directed by legendary schlockmeister Russ Myer, has the distinction of being Roger Ebert’s sole screenwriting credit. Ebert was a much better critic than he was screenwriter, but this in-depth exploration of what the straight world thought was shocking in 1971 must be seen to be believed. They just don’t make trailers like this one any more:
Get Psychotronic With Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls Midnight at the Studio
Beyond The Valley of the Dolls screens at midnight on Friday and Saturday (or Saturday and Sunday, if you’re being technical) at Studio on the Square.
It’s gonna be stupid hot outside this week, so cool off with one of the many special film events hitting big screens in the 901.
Sordid Lives
Tonight, Tuesday, June 26th at Studio on the Square, Indie Memphis presents The King, a documentary by two-time Sundance winner Eugene Jarecki. The filmmaker takes Elvis’ Rolls Royce on an epic road trip through America, seeing sites and interviewing guests from Presley biographer Peter Guralnick to Chuck D. This one’s a don’t-miss. Tickets are available on the Indie Memphis website.
This Week At The Cinema: Sordid Lives and Reefer Madness! (2)
On Wednesday, June 27th, the Malco Kids Summer Film Fest presents the 1998 Dreamworks animated musical The Prince of Egypt at the Paradiso and various other theaters all over their network.
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That night (Wednesday), the final film of the Outflix Summer Series screens at Studio on the Square. Sordid Lives is a cult-classic, LBGTQ comedy of the culture clash that comes when the matriarch of a small-town Texas family unexpectedly dies in the midst of a tryst with a much younger man. This 2000 film by playwright turned filmmaker Del Shores stars Olivia Newton John and Delta Burke, and later spawned a TV series.
This Week At The Cinema: Sordid Lives and Reefer Madness!
Across town at Railgarten, Indie Memphis presents an encore performance of the 2017 Memphis music video bloc, featuring 28 works pairing Memphis filmmakers and musicians.
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Then, on Friday and Saturday, June 29th and 30th, a new screening series debuts. Curated by Memphis’ own master of psycho-tronic madness, Mike McCarthy, Midnight At The Studio sets the tone for late-night, cinematic mischief with the accidental 1936 classic Reefer Madness. As the laugh-a-minute trailer so seriously intones, “see this important film now, before it’s too late.”
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Thank you to everyone who voted in our Best of Indie Memphis poll! We had many different, varied responses going way back into Indie Memphis’ twenty year history. I had originally wanted to do a top ten list, but there were so many ties that I would have had 18 films in the Hometowner top ten, and five films tied for first place in the general category. So instead, I’ll be doing a chronological countdown of the poll’s top vote-getters, staring from the beginning of the festival and moving to the present day, in a series of blog posts called Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits. Let’s get this party started!
Superstarlet A.D. (1999)
In the beginning, before there was an Indie Memphis or a digital revolution, there was John Michael McCarthy. The renegade punk from Tupelo, Mississippi moved heaven and earth to bring his psychotronic vision to life on film—actual film, not digital video! Superstarlet A.D., which won the festival feature competition in 1999, its second year, is the apotheosis of McCarthy’s 90s filmography. It’s a heady brew of garage rock (Memphis punk goddess Alicja Trout is one of the stars), grindhouse exploitation, and The Feminine Mystique. McCarthy transformed late 90s urban blight into a post-apocalyptic hellscape populated by tribes of feral women dead set on taking revenge on the men who broke the world.
Today, McCarthy continues to make films and comics, and is a leading force for historical preservation in the Bluff City. His documentary Destroy Memphis depicts the years-long struggle to save the Zippin Pippin from destruction, and he is currently working on a full sized bronze statue of Johnny Cash.
Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits 1: Machine Gun Babes, The P&H, and Digital Rebels
The Poor And Hungry (2000)
Eric Tate, Seth Hagee, and Craig Brewer on the set of The Poor and Hungry.
In 2000, a Barnes & Noble bookstore clerk named Craig Brewer fired a shot heard round the world. Made with money left to him when his father unexpectedly passed away, Brewer’s The Poor and Hungry was named for the P&H Cafe, the midtown beer joint where Brewer wrote. It was not the first time he had tried to make a film, but thanks to the then cutting-edge digital video technology that allowed him to record DVD-quality video and edit on a desktop computer, it was the first time he succeeded. In the 1970s, Francis Ford Coppola had said that film would not be a truly democratic medium until a poor girl in Iowa could make one as easily as she could write a book. Brewer was the fulfillment of that prophecy, and his film went on to win awards at not only the Indie Memphis and Nashville Film Festivals, but also the Hollywood Film Festival. Five years later, Brewer brought home Oscar gold to Memphis with Hustle & Flow. Today, he is a writer and director for Empire, one of the most successful shows on television. You Look Like, the comedy game show he is producing, will premiere at Indie Memphis 2017. It was filmed on location at the P&H.
“I think what I’m most proud of, is that there were a lot of filmmakers in town who had their own identity, and their own desire to make films, and they would have probably done it anyway,” says Brewer. “But I do think that they watched The Poor and Hungry, and the swell of excitement around it, and realized that it was more doable than they thought. ‘I know actors just like that in town! I know those locations! I have a better camera than this movie had! I spent more money on lights than this movie had!’ But this movie did a lot with very few tools. At the time, filmmaking was very daunting because of the cost and how hard technically it was to pull off on film. There were a lot of local would-be filmmakers who saw it and thought, ‘It’s time.’”
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Blue Citrus Hearts (2002)
In the Memphis of the early twenty first century, the epicenter of the revolution was the Digital Media Co-Op. Located in the basement of the First Congregational Church on Cooper, the Co-Op was founded by Brandon Hutchinson and Morgan Jon Fox. Fox, a Memphis native and White Station High School grad, had done a stint at a film school in New Hampshire before dropping out and returning to Memphis to find his own way. Members of the Co-Op pooled their resources and shared their knowledge. They learned together, and their experimental short films dominated the Indie Memphis Hometowner category for years. Blue Citrus Hearts was Fox and the Co-Op’s first attempt at a feature film, and it paid off spectacularly. The largely improvised story of young gay and misfit kids trying to cope in a closeted and repressive South combined the unflinching neorealism of Antonioni with the austerity of the Dogma ’95 movement—call it Memphis, Open City. It’s an emotionally wrenching ride. But the big payoff came at the end, where Fox’s camera accidentally captured an actual shooting star above the heads of his characters sharing their first kiss on the roof of the Tennessee Brewery.
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Automusik Can Do No Wrong (2004)
Automusik at Sun Studios
One of the people inspired by Craig Brewer and the Media Co-Op was me. I had written my first feature film in 1994, but our attempts to produce it in the pre-digital era had failed. My friend and co-conspirator Steve Stanley, along with Chris Triko, Talbot Fields, and many others, discovered digital video tech and made two films around the turn of the century: Slick Lilly vs. The Grand Canyon and Six Days in the Life of Mims, both of which screened successfully at Indie Memphis. I had acted and crewed on both pictures, and caught the filmmaking bug bad. While Mims was in post production, I was eager to do my own thing. I was a fan of the synth pop parody band Automusik, which was baffling crowds all over Memphis. After one particularly crazed performance, I bought Automusik mastermind Scott Moss a drink at the bar and proposed doing a Spinal Tap-style mockumentary together. We enlisted Pritchard Smith, whose documentary short “$200 On eBay” had won at Indie Memphis the year before, and nine months later we won Best Hometowner Feature at Indie Memphis. Today, we’re still at it. Smith is a director/producer who helped found Vice’s video operation. His documentary The Invaders sold out opening night at Indie Memphis last year. I still believe what I told then-Memphis Flyer Film Editor Chris Herrington in a November, 2004 interview: “Half of the director’s job is to choose the people you want to work with and let them do their job.”
Here’s the most famous sequence from Automusik Can Do No Wrong, in which we recreated the climax of Purple Rain—in German.
Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits 1: Machine Gun Babes, The P&H, and Digital Rebels (5)
Cocaine Cowboys (2006)
As you can read in my Memphis Magazine article on the history of the festival, Indie Memphis was founded as a place for local filmmakers to show their work. In the early days, there was not much content from outside the Memphis metro area. But as the festival matured and expanded, that changed. By the middle of the 00’s, it was the place to go to see cutting-edge films that would never otherwise get a theatrical run in the Bluff City. One of the first films to screen at Indie Memphis that broke out and attracted a wider audience was Billy Corben’s Cocaine Cowboys. Corben’s film was ideal for Indie Memphis. It took a controversial subject matter and dove into it from a regional perspective. Corben is from Miami, and his intricate history of Florida drug smuggling puts heavy emphasis on both the price the city paid and the unexpected ways the era built contemporary Florida. Months after it screened at Indie Memphis, Cocaine Cowboys got a wide distribution and spawned two sequels. Today, it’s a staple on cable TV, and Corben has had a career making ESPN’s documentary series 30 for 30.
Indie Memphis’ Greatest Hits 1: Machine Gun Babes, The P&H, and Digital Rebels (3)
Tune in tomorrow for part 2. You can also check out the entire history of Indie Memphis as told through the collected programs in this slideshow set over at Memphis Magazine.
Dan Ball 
Dan Ball 
Dan Ball 
Leigh Wiener 
