This was the first VHS cover of Love Letter to Edie The film’s first release in 1975 was on 16mm film, when it only played in movie theaters and film festivals. Around 1985, VHS cassettes were in wide enough usage that small films like Love Letter could be distributed to individual collectors. They were duplicated…
Category: Film
Film Projects, Comments, Reviews
Conservative Star Columnist Rod Dreher Invokes Ghost of Edith Massey ?!?#$@%?!
It’s Easter, when eggs become an important subject across the country, and references to Edith Massey abound. Even a noted conservative pundit who regularly writes for such un-Edith right-wing publications like The American Conservative, The National Review, Weekly Standard, The Dallas Morning News, The Wall Street…
Searching for Royalty Checks from Low Budget Movies
The day I saw “Searching for Sugar Man,” I received my first-ever royalty check from MGM/United Artists for a union film I worked on back in the 80s. “Sugarman” won the 2012 Academy Award for best documentary. The movie is a mind-bending story from the 1970s that goes against the grain of typical show business success…
Outtakes of Jean-Michel Basquait in “New York Beat”-“Downtown 81”
Stumbled across this video today on one of my favorite websites. I was on these shoots on a cold, windy December day in Alphabet City in 1981. The shots look like 3rd generation copies of the 16mm workprint. No sound, because most of the sound was lost during the 15 year post-production odyssey when the…
Herzog Enters the Abyss, Again—Review of “Into the Abyss”
German filmmaker Werner Herzog is my favorite filmmaker of all time. Thanks to Netflix, you can watch many of the dozens of films he has made since the 1970s. Usually his works are character studies of real humans on the edge, and they are on edges that most people never knew existed in this world. …
“Prometheus” Reviewed – A Hunk of Baloney
I saw Prometheus recently in a large theater, something I rarely do anymore. It is such a crock, alternating between ridiculous to silly to patently unbelievable. First, this lame effort didn’t seem like it could be a Ridley Scott film. He is now at least 75 years old, and has about 12 films in “pre-production.” …
“In Darkness” on Netflix a Real Chiller
“In Darkness” was a Polish film nominated for an Oscar in 2011, but strangely rates only a 7.7 on IMdB. It is the true story of a group of Jews hiding from Nazis in the decrepit sewers of a large Polish city at the end of WWII. Many people complained because it’s (yawn) “just another”…
Liz Renay: The Star Who Would Replace Divine
John Waters’ 1977 movie, Desperate Living, was the follow-up of his most successful films to date, “Pink Flamingos” and “Female Trouble.” It’s $65,000 budget provided a larger and more professional crew than the earlier films, and a “marquee star” budget line that was ten times more than the last. Divine would have been the logical…
Jean-Michel Basquiat: Underground Artist and Six Million Dollar Man
I lived and worked in downtown New York City in the early 1980s when the arts were going through big changes. Andy Warhol was rich, but at a dip in his career. Hanging out with jet set celebrities at Studio 54 and doing their portraits based on Polaroid snapshots for $50,000, he had become a…
Video from “Love Letter to Edie, Director’s Cut DVD” – Robert Maier’s Additional Comments 25 Years Later
Love Letter to Edie was made in 1975 right after meeting John Waters and working on the crew of “Female Trouble.” I added a fifteen minute bonus commentary in 2001. This clip is an excerpt from that. The DVD of the original “Love Letter to Edie” and the commentary is only available on e-Bay. Click…