George Kuchar on the set of Orphans Of The Cosmos (2008) Born. Portrait Of Ramona (1971) The Sunshine Sisters (1972). The Films of John Waters and George & Mike Kuchar (UK: Creation Books. Portrait George And Mike Kuchar, German, 1977 Film Bewertungen und Metacritic Score. Portrait George And Mike Kuchar, German, 1977 Film Bewertungen und Metacritic Score. Portrait George And Mike Kuchar, German, 1977. George Kuchar by Mary Pacios. Sunday, July 26, 2015 Queen Conga. George’s brother Mike Kuchar is here to talk “Kuchar” and screen his own recent series. Portrait of Ramona, 1971 (16mm). Buy It Came From Kuchar: Read 9 Movies & TV Reviews - Amazon.com Long before YouTube, there were the filmmaking twins George and Mike Kuchar. Long before YouTube, there were the filmmaking twins George and Mike Kuchar. George Kuchar (born August 31, 1942, New York City). It Came From Kuchar, a documentary film of the life of George and Mike Kuchar by Jennifer Kroot, premiered at the South by Southwest film festival on 14 March 2009. Search Results for 'portrait george and mike kuchar' Search on Bing. Portrait George and Mike Kuchar is not available now. See more MSN results on Bing Web Results. Portrait George and Mike Kuchar (1977) - IMDb. Search Results - Entertainment - msn.com. Search for 'Portrait George and Mike Kuchar' on Amazon.com. Connect with IMDb Getting Started. See more MSN results on Bing Web Results. Portrait George and Mike Kuchar (1977) Quotes on IMDb: Memorable quotes and exchanges from movies, TV series and more. The Day the Bronx Invaded Earth: The Life and Cinema of the Brothers Kuchar. Forget all those other boring indie brother teams . Bela Lugosi died in 1. Ed Wood. New York City independent filmmaker Amos Poe lost his male lead, John Lurie, well into the filming of Subway Riders (1. Lurie simply disappeared. Poe himself stepped into the lead role of the saxophone- playing serial killer, even though he looked nothing like Lurie. Instead of substituting a cape- draped face a la Wood, he substituted his own naked buttocks when the Puerto Rican lead actress refused to do a nude scene in his 1. Night of the Bomb. It would not be the last time an actress refused to shoot a provocative scene for George, but no roadblock erected by feminine modesty could impede the steamrolling progress of one of his scripts once a downhill momentum had been gained and the brakes had been greased by reams of florid dialogue. No setback was insurmountable. In fact, setbacks could be turned into successes, as George went about the black magic of low- budget filmmaking. In his 1. 98. 7 film Summer of No Return, George had to make the beautiful lead actress disappear, as he remembers, “because she didn. She thought I was trying to get too much flesh from her. So we had her character burned in a fire and put in a hospital, and that advanced the plot because now we knew that her beautiful young suitor was to struggle to become a plastic surgeon and fix up her from now on bandage- draped face. He had to get money so he delved into the underworld, became a hustler and a drug addict and then had to clean up his act . So, thanks to her, the plot advanced considerably.”In George. The scene was filmed and written into the movie to help add drama and direction. No art form demands as much spontaneous, imaginative improvisation as low- budget filmmaking, and no American low- budget filmmakers are as imaginative as George Kuchar and his twin brother Mike. Major figures in the American Underground film movement of the . That influence is still being felt. In the Beginning God Created the Bronx. Born in Manhattan in 1. Bronx at an early age. There the tenement blocks, TV- antenna- studded rooftops, bleak blue winters, and littered streets of New York City. A world that they, like most adolescents, wanted to escape. Failing that, they would remake it, colorize it, drape it in cheap tinsel and leopard skins. The nearby Bronx Park and the Bronx Botanical Gardens offered temporary refuge from the hostile city streets. George would take long, solitary walks in the wilder, more remote areas of the park, to discover idyllic waterfalls and fast- running streams splashing over rocks. Young George was also keen on violent storms. It was in the news and for some reason it excited me. The great storm smashing up towns and blowing into people. Debris- strewn blocks of abandoned buildings waiting for the wrecker. That inspired a lot of imagery in my head. I loved the kind of sordidness of what it was like, evidently, to be grown up. It was a turn- on for me, I. And also the comic books. I think they twisted me also. I remember I used to be real disturbed when the heroes were captured, and whipped . He had some pornographic books stuck away in his drawer, too, and when I was a little kid I used to find them, and look, and was amazed and would laugh . The world of adults.”George. In an excerpt from a 1. Schooling,” George relates: “Going to elementary school in the Bronx was a series of humiliations which featured Wagnerian women in an endless chorus of: . After school my twin brother and I would escape to the cinema, fleeing from our classmates; urban urchins who belched up egg creams and clouds of nicotine. In the safety of the theater we. At home, supper simmered on the stove, smoking, bubbling, and making plopping sounds as blisters of nutritious gruel burst just like the volcanic lava in those motion pictures. Oh how I wanted to grow up real fast and be one of the adults who sacrificed half- naked natives to Krakatoa or dripped hot wax on a nude body that resembled Marie Antoinette.”The brothers virtually lived in the theaters, seeing everything that came out, seeing the same movies over and over (“We saw Douglas Sirk. They immediately began to stage productions inspired by the epics they saw on the big screen. In a 1. 96. 4 interview with critic Jonas Mekas, George describes one of these first films. But that unfortunate incident did not end our big costume epics. One month later Mike and I filmed an Egyptian spectacle on the same roof with all the television antennas resembling a cast of skinny thousands. Our career in films had begun.”In a 1. Mike reflects on these earliest productions: “I forget what is actually the first one. Some of them we threw away. We did one, The Wet Destruction of the Atlantic Empire (1. We did matte paintings of the city and we stuck it in a fast- running stream and ran the camera in slow motion and it was like a flood. We had some friends dressed up in costumes which were really bed sheets.”These first films were largely improvised. Screwball (1. 95. The Thief and the Stripper (1. Kucharian penchant for peddle- to- the- floor melodrama: an artist murders his wife after falling in love with a stripper, while the stripper falls in love with a burglar. All die violently as it turns out that the stripper is actually the sister of the murdered wife. Meanwhile, “real life” occasionally intruded on the brothers. In an excerpt from the essay “Schooling,” George remembers his teenage years and the emergency brake his Catholic upbringing tried to apply to his sex drive: “Eventually I had to leave the Church as one warm, lonely afternoon I found myself kneeling in a pew praying for wild, disgusting sex. I was a teenager with a heavy inclination to explore my own groin, and the emissions threatened to put out the fire in the sacred heart of our Lord. I looked around me at the elderly ladies scattered here and there throughout the shadowed house of God and knew that they at least were in peace because they didn. I fled from that place of holiness that warm, lonely afternoon and God answered my prayers: a young, suffering Christian was granted wild, disgusting sex. Praise be the Lord!”Mike and George were both enrolled at the Manhattan School of Art and Design, which specialized in training for commercial art. Mike, who matured faster than George, eventually got his own apartment and adopted a “swinging lifestyle,” as George terms it. If George. It was my one connection with other people. I used to show my pictures at friends. A dancer and aspiring model, Donna had a way of moving and expressing herself. She had an indefinable resonance onscreen, but also other more definable attributes: “She had big bazooms,” recalls George, “and she had a very nice face. She had a style about her. So I put her in movies. All my Bronx buddies were excited about her . So I milked her: I went over to her house and we began to put her in bathtub scenes, where she wore a bathing suit, of course . We simulated the tawdry stuff that I used to see on the big screen.”Some of the topical scandals and phobias of the day found expression in the brothers. Their film Night of the Bomb, for example, plays as an 8mm take on the Cuban Missile Crisis that ends in an all- destroying explosion. We tried to make big spectacular endings.”“The bomb in Night of the Bomb,” adds Mike, “was a vehicle to use as a spectacular image . The music they chose reflected their love of . The original and sometimes defective soundtrack tapes were in the Bronx in his mom. Of the Hollywood directors, Douglas Sirk was a major inspiration, along with Otto Preminger, Howard Hawks, and Frank Tashlin, to name but a few. Special effects artists like Ray Harryhausen and Willis O. But just as important, if not more so, were the B and Z grade horror and sci- fi films of directors like Roger Corman, Albert Zugsmith, and Jack Arnold. Studios like Allied Artists, Astor, and especially American International Pictures (AIP) were key to this exploitation boom that would reach a peak in 1. AIP alone released 4. Voodoo Woman, The Astounding She Monster, Attack of the Puppet People, and The Screaming Skull. Mike and George saw most of them as their gray matter grew as polluted as the nearby Harlem River. The brothers. And the old ladies would get offended at my movies because they were . That was after the Thalidomide scare came out and ladies were giving birth to deformed babies, and I made a comedy out of that (A Woman Distressed, 1. For a while in 1. Ken Jacobs. At the suggestion of filmmaker Bob Cowan, an actor in the brothers. That was the night the Underground met the Kuchar brothers. The fey, decadent milieu of the Underground, populated by dilettantes, beatnik intellectuals, and gay artistes was spiritually a million miles away from the workaday tenement neighborhoods of the Bronx . This first encounter was one of mutual incomprehension. As George recalls, “There were all these underground people. We came in suits and we showed these 8mm movies, and I guess I was kind of a bit square- looking but the movies took off. But they were kind of snotty, too, some of those people.” (In an article on experimental cinema in the April 1. Playboy, authors Knight and Albert wrote, “The Kuchars take neither themselves nor their movies too seriously. For the most part the Underground is a dreadfully intense bunch of people.”)Jacobs, also a tireless promoter and programmer of underground film, liked the movies and put them on the “circuit” . Mentor and critic Jonas Mekas began to write regularly about them in the Village Voice and Film Culture magazine. Mike and George were now officially part of the Underground, a rising movement that had ideas, energy, and a following of righteous supporters. Perhaps most importantly, because so many of the films flaunted an in- your- face sexuality, the movement attracted publicity and created an audience far beyond its original borders.
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