Two documentaries shot on video about people as constructs, J. X. Williams L. A. and Exit Through the Gift Shop
It is probably just a matter of time before the Wikipedia entry for J. X. Williams is edited within an inch of its life. Being the pragmatic type, I’ve archived it at the bottom of this entry. It is an explosive amalgam of Hollywood Babylon style anecdotes too fantastic to be believed, a shorthand index of subversives in the film industry, with a few jokes here and there just to keep things humming.
J. X. Williams is most likely the invention of Noel Lawrence who manages the JXW archive. His biography is essentially that Williams worked on a (exceedingly large) number of exploitation films as a way to make his own experimental films, in between drug binges and fleeing the mob.
In J. X. Williams’ L.A. , his story is more or less told by Lawrence and Chris Manz wandering around to locations, discussing just how and when Williams was thrown out of said location, and then moving on to the next anecdote, with a lot of stock footage thrown in.
In its present form (presently unreleased), the documentary doesn’t work nearly as well as Lawrence’s presentations, which are incredibly dodgy tightrope acts. The Q&As can get a bit intense, particularly when a film student points out that the footage used could not have been found at the time credited. To which the official response is something like:
“Right, well, I now believe that this may be a forgery and have not certified it as an official J. X. Williams release.”
The upshot is that the Q&A and lecture portions of JXW viewings are more performance driven and incur more risk than the actual films and documentaries. And with the documentary so focused on the stories of JXW, and with so little evidence of the man himself, it’s hard to get involved with the movie, which is essentially the well-trod celebration of grindhouse, b-movies, pornography, etc.
At one point, there is a roundtable discussion of JXW, in which the panelists briefly mention of Wizard Videos’s oversized videocassette boxes, which were plastic and attracted grime (Supposedly, Wizard released one of Williams’ horror films). For me, this anecdote lends more credibility to the whole legend than all the drug-related escapades. Those boxes hold a certain mysticism, being packaged as one of the panelists notes, “as a collector’s item” and it seems like the kind of thing a JXW would be involved with, and something that cult cineastes should be be paying attention to.
But by that same token, once a JXW association is used to pay tribute to already over-established icons (such as when Lawrence states that Tarantino and Scorcese have borrowed or stolen ideas from JXW), things start to bloat very quickly.
These short films and excerpts themselves are sort of like Saturday Night Live sketches made with found footage – - they start off goofy and continue to get goofier: but the more seriously Lawrence takes them during the Q&A and the lectures, the better they work.
At some point, a documentary will have to be made about Noel Lawrence, and that will probably be much more engaging than J. X Williams’ L. A.
EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP
Exit Through the Gift Shop should probably come with a warning that audiences be prepared to be completely horrified by accurate depictions of the people who line up for graffiti exhibitions who probably should have left their gold chains in their well-furnished homes. In any case:
Once Shepherd Fairy’s Obama image became as ubiquitous as Disney, it became easy to forget that not particularly long ago, he was climbing walls, wheatpasting Andre the Giant images, and fleeing the police. Similarly, after Banksy had his art shows and strange pet store, his installations of phone booths and museum invasions seemed a faraway memory.
Exit Through the Gift Shop is the story of someone, the charismatic, likable, and funny Thierry Guetta who followed these artists when they were still young and far from ordinary vandals, videotaped them under the premise of making a documentary, and then did nothing with the footage for over ten years, before being compelled by Banksy to finally finish it – - instead, preferring to make a movie that had nothing to do with anybody but his own vision. (2)
This may not sound like such a betrayal, despite the fact that it means that many of us will never see Theirry’s footage of Borf, Kaws, Swoon, Neckface, and other notables - – despite the fact that these artists wanted it to be seen. But it doesn’t sit well with Banksy, who, like a serial villain, sits with his face obscured in darkness and his voice distorted. His telltale hands (which he seems to be quite conscious of) gesticulate occasionally as he relays his involvement with the movie and street art in a pleasantly self-disparaging tone.
Image is everything when it comes to Banksy’s activities – - nobody can know who is, but everyone has to know what he’s done – - and tellingly of who produced the movie, if you had to be one person in this documentary, you would want to be Banksy. The footage of Shepherd Fairy in Kinkos, cutting out a large Andre image with a knowing smile on his face is also a wonderful characterization, but it gives way to a muddled, confused person who doesn’t quite understand how things got to where they are. Banksy’s face remains completely unreadable, under a dark hood, and his “ums” and “uhs” are as calculated as the stencils that he assembles on his midnight runs.
As a documentary, the film is in a thoroughly gray area – - it is strongly titled against Guetta, the police, the public, and is in favor of Fairy and Banksy, which is how you would expect things to play out.
But in this case, I’m not sure that any of that matters. There’s so much blood on everyone’s hands that it’s really hard to take offense.
External Links:
New York Times on J. X. Williams
Wall Street Journal on Banksy and Mister Brainwash
(1) J. X. Williams, From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
J.X. Williams (193? – Present) Numerous critics have proclaimed J.X. Williams (birthname unknown) as one of the most influential figures in American avant-garde cinema (along with Stan Brakhage and Kenneth Anger) as well as an innovative cult director for several notorious exploitation films produced in the 1960s and 1970s. Tarantino, Scorsese, Waters and other directors acknowledge a huge creative debt to Mr. Williams yet his films are rarely exhibited today, due to legal issues and the poor condition of surviving prints.
Born in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, he was raised in a working-class Jewish family with strong ties to organized labor and the Communist Party. His father, a set designer for Warner Brothers, was a labor agitator and his activities clearly influenced Mr.Williams early leftist leanings. After dropping out of high school, he took a job in the mailroom in RKO studios and quickly rose through the ranks to become an assistant in the Writers’ Division. Though never credited on any production, he was known to have Dore Schary’s ear and would likely have been taken under contract if not for unforeseen events.
Like many screenwriters of his time, Mr. Williams had leftist sympathies and was known to frequent meetings of groups with ties to the Communist Party. After these activities were reported, he was subpoenaed to appear before HUAC during their 1947 hearings on Communist infiltration of the movie industry. Mr. Williams refused to testify and, although he did not serve time, the major studio subsequently blacklisted him.
Without means of support, he drifted into petty crime and fraternized with low-ranking members of the Los Angeles Mafia. These associations soon brought him in contact with notorious mobster Johnny Rosselli who took him under his wing. Recognizing Mr. Williams interest in film, Rosselli put him in charge of directing and distributing mob-funded nudie and pornographic films. Unfortunately, the vast bulk of these loops have been lost or destroyed so little is known of this early period of Mr. Williams’ career.
Over the next ten years, Mr. Williams amassed a small fortune as a smut impresario with the blessing of Johnny Rosselli. At the same time, he continued to operate in the shadows of legitimate Hollywood productions as a ghostwriter. Mr. Williams claims to have penned 72 screenplays that became major motion pictures. Although almost no one has been able to verify his claims, a consortium of studios quietly settled a copyright lawsuit filed by Mr. Williams for an undisclosed sum.
As the 1960s opened, Mr. Williams debauched years of hard drinking and reckless gambling caught up with him. He found himself in debt to the Mafia and his life was in danger. As a result, he fled to Europe in hopes of directing legitimate films without the stigma of the blacklist. After a few false starts, he produced his firstfeaturette PEEP SHOW (1965). Hailed by Henry Langlois as the harbinger of an American “Nouvelle Vague”, PEEP SHOW chronicled a mafia conspiracy against Frank Sinatra to addict him to heroin.
PEEP SHOW holds a significant place in cinematic history for a number of reasons. Most notoriously, the film’s use of pornographic imagery got it banned from several countries and even resulted in the director’s brief incarceration in Rome.
More importantly, however, the film tackled a multitude of subjects that did not come in vogue until the seventies. Nearly a decade before Coppola and Scorsese, PEEP SHOW offered an unrelentingly grim and realistic portrait of organized crime, undoubtedly influenced by Mr. Williams’ personal experiences as a onetime “gofer” to Johnny Rosselli and other mobsters in Los Angeles.
Released less than two years after the assassination of JFK, PEEP SHOW was also the first film to explore the dark side of Camelot. Besides tracing the tangled web of theories that may have led to the assassination, PEEP SHOW gives a blistering account of the fixing of the 1960 election and the unholy alliance between Joe Kennedy and La Cosa Nostra. Large portions of the film were made from appropriated footage, predating similar works by Craig Baldwin, Jay Rosenblatt, and other avant-garde directors by more than a decade.
Mr. Williams followed a year later with the tawdry I, JEZEBEL (1966). Reviews were mixed, however, and it may have prompted his return to the US. With the power of the blacklist finally diminishing in the late 1960s, Mr. Williams undertook a series of exploitation features that pushed the limits of taste and taboo. This period includes such gems as E.S.P. ORGY (1967), MONDO VIETNAM (1968), and THE PHANTOM OF THE CINEMA (1969).
During the next two years, he struggled with production for THE VIRGIN SACRIFICE (1970), a three-hour long Satanic horror epic. Reputedly, Sammy Davis Jr. was an early backer of the film and a contributor to the soundtrack before a falling out with Mr. Williams. After a short but promising stint on the festival circuit, the film was lost and the negative was destroyed in a fire in the lab where it was stored. A film maudite in every sense of the phrase, the film is infamous in the annals of film history for the rampant drug use and violence on the set. As Peter Bogdanovich later observed “Though most people have forgotten the film, few have forgotten its tortured origins. It immortalized Mr. Williams as perhaps the greatest enfant terrible since Von Stroheim.
Despite the disastrous undertaking, Mr. Williams continued to release films through his Cine-Vision Studios, including kaboom! (1973), L.A. DEATH TRIP (1975), and YOU AXED FOR IT! (1978). These low-budget exploitation pieces were panned by critics but proved commercially successful on the drive-in and grindhouse circuit. He spent an increasing amount of time making hardcore pornographic films to fund his productions but his last film, Nunf*cker (1979) is considered one of the best. Not surprisingly, the title, if not the film, also attracted a great deal of controversy, especially from Catholic groups who picketed the screenings.
J.X. Williams also became a director of early music videos for various punk and new wave groups in Los Angeles in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
After a legal settlement in 1981 with several major film studios over copyright disputes, Mr. Williams moved to Zurich, Switzerland and retired from filmmaking. He is infamous for his reclusiveness and distaste for the public eye.
(Redirected from J X Williams)
2) There’s a telltale shot of Guetta experimenting with his own graffiti exploits, pasting a giant image of himself underneath Shepherd Fairy’s Giant, which is incredibly awkward. I’ve heard that putting something up in the same space as another artist – - unless you’re specifically working together at the same time- - is generally considered a gaffe. And so Banksy including it in the movie is an indication of how he regards Guetta.
Over the weekend I managed to see two very different filmmakers host and interpret their own works.
