Before our feature presentation, ACME would like to start the evening with another Looney Tunes short, the 1940 You Ought to Be in Pictures starring Porky Pig and Daffy Duck , directed by Friz Freleng.
To keep the short on-budget, relatively few special effects were used to marry the animation and live action. Where possible, the crew simply took still pictures of the office background and had them enlarged and placed directly on the animation stand.
As faithful viewers of The ACME Eagle Hand Soap Radio Hour know, the staff really love mashups. Well we checked out Bill McClinton's site and found another great one. It makes so much sense that one is surprised that it wasn't created before - Roxanne and She Works Hard For The Money:
We now what she does to earn her money
We’ve selected another entry from the excellent reference book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, edited by Steven Jay Schneider. Today’s film is the 1991 surrealist sci-fi drama, Naked Lunch directed by David Cronenberg, adapted from the William S. Burroughs novel of the same name, and starring Peter Weller, Judy Davis, Ian Holm, Julian Sands, and Roy Scheider. Feeling the movie had very little commercial appeal, the Canadian and American distributors only gave it a very limited release, making it a box office bomb. The film went on to win several awards, including the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Director and seven Genie Awards, notably Best Motion Picture. Naked Lunch has since become a cult film, acclaimed for its surrealistic visual and thematic elements.
This was originally going to be the first David Cronenberg movie to be made outside of Toronto, until a panicked Ontario Film Board offered him unparalleled financial inducements and incentives. As it transpired, however, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait scuttled any plans to film in Tangier, Morocco, so the entire movie ended up being made in Toronto anyway. As a result of this, some trans-light panes were used to represent the exotic backgrounds seen through windows. Trans-light panes are large translucent enlargements of a photo. The desert was re-created on a Toronto sound-stage by pouring seven hundred tons of sand onto the floor of a former munitions factory.
The shooting of the author's wife is not a fictional incident. Source novelist William S. Burroughs did indeed accidentally shoot his wife Joan in the head in 1951 in Mexico in a "William Tell" stunt that went disastrously wrong. Mexican law at the time meant that Burroughs only served thirteen days in prison for killing his wife.
Please find a very comfortable chair, dim the lights, smoke 'em if you got 'em, and join us here at The ACME Eagle Hand Soap Radio Hour as we watch this head tripping film: Naked Lunch
The movie is packed with characters based on real people and events from the life of Burroughs. Like Bill Lee, William S. Burroughs was an exterminator and drug addict, who accidentally shot his wife during a drunken game of "William Tell". Joan Lee is based on Joan Vollmer, Burroughs' deceased wife. Hank and Martin, Bill's fellow writers, are Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Burroughs moved to a section of Tangier, Morocco, known as the "International Zone", hence "Interzone". Tom Frost is based on Paul Bowles, and Kiki was the name of a young man Burroughs had a same-sex affair with in Tangier, while writing Naked Lunch.
Demand Euphoria!
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