Director: Norman Mailer
Year Released: 1970
Rating: 1.0
One of Mailer's failed directorial attempts (there were many) has the author playing a controversial filmmaker - known for crafting lascivious porn-type films and harassing and exploiting his actresses - who wants to run for President, although there's talk of potential assassination. Though not much of a 'movie' to be exact, this scrambled collection of ill-formed ideas and macho posturing is more notable for trying to capture the mood of the era (again, disillusioned America in a war with Vietnam) and for a scene at the end (which cinematographer D.A. Pennebaker insisted Mailer included) in which a wild-eyed Rip Torn (high on either drugs or The Method, or maybe even both) attacks Mailer with a hammer, resulting in a scuffle: this scene, so real and intense, washes over the entire movie, as Torn frantically explains it's what the movie 'needs' and goes so far as to call Mailer a fraud. It's almost, in its crazy way, the movie's (and, technically, Mailer's) form of self-criticism: finally, after so much posing and fraudulence and unfocused 'filmmaking,' reality emerges.
