Plays Itself’s title and its non-porn segments are a core inspiration for Thom Andersen’s masterful, exhaustive Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003), an epic 169-minute survey of the roles the city plays in cinema.Īrguably the more expressively audacious of the two roughly hour-long featurettes, definitely the better-known, L.A. All three are partly defined by sequences that languidly cruise through parts of LA from a driver’s or passenger’s POV, and both Halsted’s and Tarantino’s movies refer to the Manson murders. It’s not a stretch to see both laying the roadwork for the hyper-referential Quentin Tarantino’s 2019 Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
Jones draws comparisons between Jacques Demy’s Model Shop (1969) and L.A. In the 2011 book-length collage portrait Halsted Plays Himself, William E. Laden with innuendo and bullshit philosophizing, its voiceover conversations between a naive young country yokel and a predatory older man evoke Warhol, while its fractured, edited bursts of suggestive commercial and pop imagery invoke the dark magic of Kenneth Anger. Plays Itself ventures beyond or outside of porn, to more experimental realms.
(Among many readings, the movie can be interpreted as an early protest against urban development.) Plays Itself isn’t far removed from the 1970 softcore gay porn Song of the Loon-until it is, when bulldozers invade the scenery.
Landscape to manscape, the pan flute pastoral Encinal Canyon idyll in the first half of 1972’s iconic L.A. A rare porn director who has movies in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Halsted draws from an array of influences, and is influential himself. (Ouch.)īut reducing Halsted’s early movies to sensationalist sex acts doesn’t do them or him justice-even though shock tactics were a primary part of his aesthetic and sales approach.
Instead of losing themselves in the trials of orphaned waifs, small-town Midwestern folk, and jaded bourgeois Europeans, the Embarcadero’s audience of weekend brunchers and nervous couples on first dates can sample a double-bill containing solo JO, at least two brutal couplings, and a two-fisted fearsome foursome making full use of the metal skeleton of a bunk bed. That accomplishment comes to us thanks to the distribution company Altered Innocence, which is bringing to San Francisco 4K restorations of a pair of singular movies by Fred Halsted, L.A. But this week at least one such screen will be scalded by hardcore gay porn. The screens of the Embarcadero Center Cinema usually host upscale art films, safe Sundance indies, and pre-calculated awards fodder.