Secret Cinema
Forbidden Films From the Studio Vaults?
by Robin Simmons
March 31, 2010

Films that were made but never distributed for public consumption are part of Hollywood’s enduring lore -- kind of like the infamous alleged Cabot Lodge records of occult activity now in a safe at an unknown location. They exist in the mind and play on the screens of our imagination.

Last New Year’s Eve, I was invited to a party at a famous producer’s lavish home in Big Horn. I’ve known the producer since the 70s when he had a wildly successful TV series and then went on to produce one of the biggest blockbusters of the 80s. He’s an avid film collector of obscure and arcane titles that have never seen the light of day. After most of the guests wandered off, he invited my wife and me to his plush screening room where we watched some new acquisitions to his prized eclectic film collection. He lent me some of the publicity photos and tentative poster art on the condition that he remain anonymous.

THE GAY DIVORCE GUYS
This hilarious and very rude 8-minute film stars Cary Grant and Randolph Scott in a spoof of all the innuendo and raised eyebrows that surrounded their shared living quarters at a Santa Monica beach house.

Their sometime Malibu beach neighbor William Wyler allegedly directed the short film. Numerous cozy and very fey domestic scenes are interspersed with increasingly profane and bawdy arguments over such trivial matters like burned toast and badly ironed socks and then erupts into a full-blown war over the spa death of their pink poodle Noodle. Sounds silly, but to see these two huge stars in a constant state of ever-escalating hyper hissy-fits is very funny. Their domestic fights end in a legal battle with a judge (Charles Laughton)
deciding their mutual property dispersal. Expertly edited outtakes from Grant’s drag scenes in “I Was a Male War Bride” are perfectly cut into a dream sequence during the court proceedings. John Wayne is a gun-toting bailiff who, in annoyed exasperation, shoots them both. The tone of this short film reminded me of the yet-to-be released Jim Carrey film “I Love You Philip Morris” which was a hit at the last Palm Springs International Film Fest. The Grant-Scott film is a hipster parody of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire’s 1934 “Gay Divorcee.” Obviously these two charismatic men were confident enough in their (hetero) sexuality to so openly poke fun at themselves.

RECESS AT OXFORD
Who would have guessed that Albert Einstein was a big fan of Laurel and Hardy. On one of his visits to Los Angeles, he spent time in Culver City and visited his old friend Hal Roach, who was directing a Stan and Ollie in “A Chump at Oxford.” With a little coaxing, and several wine spritzers, Albert Einstein improvised some crazy bits of business as a ghost in a maze and also posed for some poster art.

The scenes were eventually edited out of the release print and it was thought the footage was lost, but our host had a pristine 24 minute print of all the Einstein footage edited into a preview print of “A Chump at Oxford.” It was as funny as any film I’ve seen.

EINSTEIN AT THE BEACH
A three-minute short, probably shot on 8-mm, was a nice bonus treat to Einstein’s comic outing. This sweet and poignant home movie was allegedly found among Einstein’s personal effects in a shoebox at his Princeton office after his death. There’s no sound, but there’s no mistaking these two iconic figures were quite taken with each other and were loving and gentle friends. There’s a moment where Albert writes his famous equation for energy equaling mass times the speed of light squared in the sand and Marilyn draws a heart around it. She nods and smiles as he says something when the waves wash it away. It looks like Marilyn wipes away a tear as she turns her head away from him. It is unknown who shot this very intimate moment of two minds meeting in time and space.

WHITE ZOMBIE
Michael Jackson’s last music video samples the final beat and images of “Thriller” and then burns off the screen and everything goes to black. Suddenly, sprockets of an old scratchy, spliced film fill frame and a heart-beat throbs and then stops. A laser flat line cuts the screen. Then, a few moments of the 1932 Bela Lugosi “White Zombie” movie flicker in a jittery, blurry motion as Lugosi morphs into Michael Jackson. A computer generated (?) baby gorilla accompanies Jackson’s every move as he sings “Zombie Man” with a few measures of “Morphine” resonating in an overdubbed chorus. This scathing music video was apparently a response to what I now assume was knowledge of his likely death and the global attention he knew it would generate. The message of this extraordinary 12-minute film is that Jackson was a prisoner of his fame and that he felt he sold his soul long ago but never got anything for it. At the end, I wept.

ARISTARCHUS
Since the late 1940s, strange lights have been seen in several craters on the moon. Governments and astronomers have logged tracked these luminous lunar anomalies. A man named Milton William Cooper, allegedly a former intelligence officer with the US Navy, has documented government accounts of an alien base on the far side of the moon.

In a 1989 press release, Cooper swears under oath that he was privy to information that the US government has knowledge of alien craft visiting Earth. “LUNA is the alien base on the far side of the Moon,” the release states. “It was seen and filmed by the Apollo Astronauts. A base, a mining operation using very large machines, and very large alien crafts exist there.”

Cooper wrote about his theories in books such as “Behold A Pale Horse.” Cooper was killed by officers of the Apache County Sheriff’s Office in 2001 during a raid on his Arizona house.

“Aristarchus” looks to me like authentic documentary footage of a secret moon landing. An 18-minute segment shows an armed lunar rover and eight “weaponized” astronauts in a battle with non-human forces in the crater Aristarchus and later on another location on the far side of the moon. We see obvious structures and creatures and the discovery of a very large skeleton of a humanoid.

This footage has long been rumored to exist and a heavily disguised spokesperson says it is the key to why president Kennedy made the promise to go to the moon in the first place and also why he was assassinated. When, in a previously unreleased interview at the Dallas Police Department, Lee Harvey Oswald says the killing of the president was “the work of the devil men – the God damn lunatics” he apparently knew what he was talking about. Did JFK make a deal with alien demons for new technology? That’s what this damaged and truncated 34 minute documentary implies. The footage includes nearly two minutes of audio recorded when a wounded alien dies in captivity. When it utters it’s last plaintive screech, its body evaporates in a rainbow mist.

ELDERLY X-ING or THE ELDER-CARE KILLER
The late Joseph Ehngier was a life-long transsexual who infiltrated the Palm Springs area lesbian community under the name Joy Angel.

“She” was a hulking figure who planted herself in a local church and set up business as a caregiver. Soon Joy was providing not only elder care but fiduciary accounting, trustee services and estate management to wealthy church-goers who had no immediate family and welcomed her services. As their money ran out, they died.

This 47 minute film is edited entirely from undercover, surveillance video and audio. It was compiled over a three year period by a federal officer who, unbeknownst to Joy, was also an adopted son of the lady. The film depicts the final confrontation between a seemingly frail 92 year-old woman and Joy Angel who comes to drain the old lady’s final bank balance and get her forced signature as executrix of her large estate. Joy does this and starts to smother the old woman with a pillow, but the determined and wise old lady has waited for this moment and -- through the hovering pillow -- shoots Joy in the head with a small, hidden, revolver. The old lady, first name Jasmine, now 103, was at the party in Big Horn. Several studios are bidding for the movie rights and every actress over 50 wants the part. But shouldn’t it really be played by a guy, not a woman playing a guy who pretends to be a lesbian (unless of course Cloris Leachman wants the part.)

HITCHCOCKED!
While Alfred Hitchcock was shooting “Psycho,” a second unit was making a secret grind-house thriller, tentatively titled “Voyeur.” It was ostensibly about Janet Leigh’s stand-in who is stalked by a maniac peeping tom. Sadly, when Grace Mandy, the actress playing the ambitious stand-in is accidentally killed on camera when a prop knife malfunctions, Hitch destroyed the negative and reportedly went into a deep depression. However, one crudely edited work print remained in an editor’s work bay. This film has the innovative, raw, stylistic power of “Citizen Kane” and says more about the seductive allure of Hollywood during the late 50s and the movie business in general than anything I’ve seen -- including “Sunset Boulevard.” I’m assuming this film was meant as a kind of sequel -- a film-without-a-film, if you will -- to follow “Psycho.” It would have been a wallop of a one-two punch for Hitch.

Today, it’s difficult to know just how much in this film is authentic, but there’s no denying the poignant, irony in the shadowy images of a pretty young stand-in who’s dying to be as famous as the big glamorous star who pretends to die in a seedy motel’s shower. I understand the original title was “The Stand In” and then “Voyeur.” But someone has inserted “HITCHCOCKED!” over the opening credits.

There is a visceral, gut-wrenching blow at the final fade-out when the last images of a dying actress dissolve to black and the off-screen applause of the crew -- who still assume she’s merely acting -- continues. The name of the actress has been erased from the records.

A few days ago, after an extensive internet search, I was relieved to meet the star of the film, now a youthful 72. Mandalya Garcia is the Grace Mandy of the film and she is a volunteer at the Patton Museum and lives alone in the desert near the museum.

THE THING FROM THE SALTON SEA
Sonny Bono wrote, directed and financed this 72 minute 3-D monster movie in an attempt to draw attention to the pollution of the Salton Sea and at the same time raise money for its renewal. Under the credits, ex-wife Cher sings an original song she wrote with her former husband and partner called “Thingamajig.” Tab Hunter, Troy Donahue and Yvette Mimieux play an artist, a birdwatcher and a BLM agent who end up trapped by a very realistic monster that crawls out of the polluted water and slithers into their camp.

Our party host of course had the miniature model for the monster. It was made from a boot, boar’s teeth and the tail of a dried carp. George Montgomery has a cameo as a prospector who passes through and gives some unexpected advice on how to fight the monster, where he came from and why he’s so mad. The 3-D was very sharp and the two-color cardboard glasses were kind of cool. I have them on as I write this.

YOUNG HITLER
When Dustin Hoffman was in his early 20s, he and an unknown friend made a little home movie. Shot in 8 and 16MM, Dustin plays young Adolf Hitler during the brief interval between the time Adolf was kicked out of art school in Vienna and when he went off to fight for Germany in WW I.

Shot in Glendale, Pasadena, Burbank and Catalina, the scenes are of Adolf joining an occult book reading club, his chance encounter with Sigmund Freud in Vienna and his trip to England to visit his brother Alois who managed a little hotel.

The clever film was made on real locations with natural light and no budget. It is hilarious and extremely disturbing . We see the glimmers of a man becoming a monster. (And a kid becoming an actor!) Even worse, we love and pity the Fuhrer to be. Hoffman makes him one of us.

Oh, one more thing. None of these films exist. That’s because the best movies are the ones that you anticipate, imagine or dream. The most vivid screen is the one that’s in your head. Thus, this first annual Secret Cinema column that coincidentally falls on April Fool’s Day. (Please know that no actors or celebrities were harmed in the manufacture of this column. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is accidental.)
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Comments? RobinESimmons@aol.com