12 Shirts for People Who Peaked in the Video Store
There was a shelf at the back. Past the new releases, past the two-for-one wall, where the covers were worse and the films were better and nobody working there could tell you why a particular one was in stock.
Twelve designs from that shelf, each with the production detail that explains why the film turned out strange.
1. Eraserhead
Shot over roughly five years, 1972 to 1977. The AFI grant ran out early, so Lynch paid for the rest delivering the Wall Street Journal and borrowing from friends. Jack Nance kept the vertical haircut for the entire production because filming kept stopping and restarting and continuity required it. Five years of that hair, in public, for a film nobody had asked for.
The Eraserhead tee.
2. Videodrome
Written and directed by Cronenberg, shot in Toronto, and made in the last days of Canada's tax-shelter film era, a stretch from 1974 to 1982 when the write-off rules made domestic production unusually attractive. A film about television rewriting the people watching it was itself the product of a tax incentive, which is either irony or just accurate.
The Videodrome tee.
3. Donnie Darko
Released October 2001, one month after a jet-engine plot became unmarketable in the United States. It made about $517,000 domestically against a $4.5 million budget and disappeared. Then the Pioneer Theater in New York ran it at midnight for twenty-eight consecutive months and the film got the second timeline its protagonist does not.
The Donnie Darko tee.
4. Frank-N-Furter
Tim Curry was going to play him German. Then he overheard a woman on a London bus asking whether someone had a house in town or in the country, and rebuilt the voice around that. The film flopped in 1975, moved to midnights at the Waverly in 1976, and has never been pulled from release since. It holds the record for the longest theatrical run in film history.
The Frank-N-Furter tee.
5. Nosferatu
A German court ordered every print destroyed in 1925 after Bram Stoker's widow won her copyright case. Copies abroad were outside the court's reach and survived, which is the only reason the film exists. There is a longer note on the burn order.
The Nosferatu tee.
6. Bela Lugosi
Five hundred dollars a week for Dracula, thirty-five hundred total, while the actor playing the forgettable romantic lead took two thousand a week. The picture saved Universal. Lugosi was buried in the cape in 1956, a decision his wife and son made for him.
The Bela Lugosi tee.
7. Three Mothers
Argento invented a mythology of three ancient witches, made Suspiria and Inferno, then took twenty-seven years to finish the trilogy. Suspiria got its colour from one of the last dye-transfer Technicolor machines still running in Rome. That look is unrepeatable now, not stylistically but literally.
The Three Mothers tee.
8. Masculin Féminin
Godard's 1966 portrait of French youth was banned in France to anyone under eighteen. He pointed out that the film had been taken away from the exact audience it was about, then used the complaint as publicity. The censors reviewed the sex and missed the sociology.
The Masculin Féminin tee.
9. Inglourious Basterds
Tarantino wrote Hans Landa and then could not cast him. After enough failed auditions he privately concluded the part was unplayable and considered shelving the film. Christoph Waltz read, and by Tarantino's own account handed the movie back to him. Waltz was fifty-two and unknown in Hollywood. He took Best Actor at Cannes and the Supporting Actor Oscar.
10. Mathilda
Léon was a stopgap. The Fifth Element hit delays, Besson wrote something fast to keep his crew employed, and the filler outlasted the film it was covering for. Natalie Portman was eleven when she auditioned.
The Mathilda tee.
11. Elvis Gratton
Pierre Falardeau, a committed Québécois sovereigntist, built the character in 1981 as an insult aimed at federalists after the lost referendum. Quebec adopted him affectionately instead. The short became features, the features became a cult, and Falardeau spent years publicly irritated that audiences loved the man he had made as an attack.
The Elvis Gratton tee.
12. Une Minorité
Godard painted the sentence on an apartment wall in La Chinoise in 1967. A minority with the correct revolutionary line is no longer a minority. Nine months later French students were in the streets and the film began being called prophetic, which it was not. He had simply been listening to students while everyone else filed them under fringe.
The Une Minorité tee.
Twelve films that were mostly failures on release and are now the only ones anybody rewatches. The back shelf was right.
More in Screen.
