When the whirring stops: the death of the VCR

The ancient top-loader. Pure steampunk.

The Funai Electric Company of Japan makes its last Video Cassette Recorder, and the last one for the foreseeable future, in August. It’s over.

The first videocassette recording of a film was released in 1967. Starting in 1977, the Video Home System consumer-level analog recording tape was the film-industry standard. In 1997, the DVD began encroaching on the VHS tape’s territory. The last major-market film (and future trivia answer), “Eragon,” was released on VHS in 2007, and a year later, tape manufacture ceased entirely.

 Now whatever is left out there on magnetic video tape that is playable will be stuck in a world that’s rejected its playback technology. Like the V-disc, the 8-track tape, the player piano roll, the filmstrip, and the LaserDisc, it has dead-ended, become a sport in the genetic sense of the word. It’s a now-pointless mutation.

VHS tapes were essential to a very particular kind of understanding of film. Not since the advent of art houses and repertory cinemas on the American coasts in the late 1950s had such a stretch on unseen films been found, easily accessible in the open market.

We viewers were previously subject to the imperatives of the market. In childhood, there were a few enthusiasts who wrangled 16-millimeter films, but these were few and far between, and well-off. We could find some of the output of the famous Blackhawk Films on 8-millimeter and Super 8 (Super 8!) at the local libraries, and we owned an old 8-millimeter job that played our family home movies, and Blackhawks of Chaplin, Abbott and Costello, and Tarzan.

Otherwise, first-run films came and went, and if they were good but not popular, you might never see them again. Broadcast television, the first great secondary market, was a yawning abyss of hours to be filled, and old movies filled them. “The Wizard of Oz” played every Easter, Christmas movies at Christmas, etc. We used to go through the pre-cable TV guides every Sunday and underline and/or circle (no highlighters yet) upcoming obscure gems, making late-night appointments to stare bloody-eyed at the boob tube, getting through a rare Douglas Sirk or Roy William Neill film, or “Alligator People,” or even some freakish stretches of quality such as Bondarchuk’s “War and Peace,” through the incessant interruptions of commercial blocks.

The bulky boxes of tapespool littered our weekend floors for decades, as we chucked them into the maw of the machine, which ground and gnawed at the boxes, straining to turn its gears and play that precious tape. (We had, and still have, a TOP-LOADER! Good times!) The revolution was us.

The VCR released us from time and space, and gave us ownership. We eagerly caught up with films we WANTED to see, WHEN we wanted to see them. We could now set timers and tape TV shows too, free our viewing schedule from the intentions and ends of the programmers. The power of the movie theaters faced its second serious challenge at this time, after the introduction of broadcast television and anti-monopoly action brought down the big studios after World War II.

All the films we’d read about that we’d never seen rained into our lives. It was now possible for the average person to self-educate about the length and breadth of cinema.

The primary downsides of the VCR were the laughably difficult programming problems the recording system always seemed to have, the clanky, cranky laboring of the devices, and the grainy, stretched, and stuttering quality of the image itself. (Anyone on the production side from the period will tell you about the hellish nightmare that was editing videotape.)

 As a legacy medium, the VHS tape still has cachet. Yale picked up 2,700 of them last year, mostly horror films. Stephanie Rogers’ story for the Yale News points out that the VHS and VCR spurred the rise of low-budget cinema, particularly in the cost-effective horror genre, and direct-to-rental market helps to undermine cinema-going. (Pornography was, as always, on the cutting edge of whatever technological development came along, and thrived as well.)

The DVD murdered the VHS tape. Its infinitely better image, searchability, and capacity made it the winner over the tape. DVDs gave every film freak far more than even they could digest in one sitting. The advent of multiple data channels on each disc gave birth to the commentary track, scads of now-expected “extras,” alternative edits, contextualizing content, gag and blooper reels, and films within films. (The damn things do scratch easily.)

Now what’s next? A few years ago, Oliver Stone held up a DVD and said, “You may be the last generation to own a movie.” The video (now DVD) rental stores are almost extinct themselves. Even the Redbox movie-dispensing kiosk service, which killed the Blockbuster video-rental chain, finds itself becoming a less profitable anachronism. Its DVD rentals were down a whopping 17 percent in the fourth quarter of 2015.

Now that we are streaming film, we are purchasing temporary access to a product that’s not material. Pay for play. Downloads are possible, but we’ve come to find that digital files are just as prone to disruption, damage, overwriting, and loss as all those playlists you made on GrooveShark.

And that’s disturbing. I have about 2,000 films on DVD, very consciously chosen to provide me with an index of great films (OK, and “The Attack of the Killer Tomatoes” and “Pootie Tang”) for reference and repeated viewings. I am hoping the kids get into them and are accidentally infected with the rewards of quality viewing. How long until I have to jury-rig some kind of playback system for this collection I have no desire to rebuild again, from scratch? We all seem to end up living primarily in the last medium we are comfortable with, the one we commit to financially and emotionally.

That being said, I am still hoarding the following, as hope springs eternal – 78 rpm records, 45s, and standard vinyl; first-generation audiotape, cassettes, V-discs, CDs, DVDs, and . . . somewhere on this dusty shelf I’m probing . . . my last VHS tapes.

There are 15 tapes here I deemed indispensable a decade ago. I wonder what’s on them? Can I see the content on them some other way?

Here’s a head cleaner. “A Rugrats Chanukah,” “A Rugrats Passover,” both available via Hulu. My friends Kathy and Robin Beck’s hilarious documentary, “Grandpa’s Still in the TUFF Shed.” Keeper. Three vintage Daffy Duck cartoon compilations, one of Bugs Bunny, one merely labeled “classic.” (You can see where my priorities lie.) Keep.

Of course, I have to hang on to the Mary Martin “Peter Pan” TV production. Priceless!

Homemade mixes: here’s a John Ford triple feature, “The Lost Patrol,” “The Informer,” and “Wagon Master.” All easily found via streaming.

Here are two I can’t find anywhere else: Jack Gold’s brilliant and underrated retelling of “Robin Crusoe,” 1975’s “Man Friday,” with Peter O’Toole and Richard Roundtree. And the PBS mini-series version of Joseph Conrad’s “Nostromo” from 1996. “Nostromo” was the last, great, unrealized project of David Lean’s, and this production lacks something vital but points the way toward a truly definitive adaptation of the novel.

The first and last “Star Trek: The Next Generation” episodes. Of course. Keep.

Another compilation: the documentary on Russell Scott, Denver’s TV clown Blinky (can stream it); “The Adventures of Robin Hood” (likewise) and “The Maltese Falcon” (I have the DVD). Goodbye!

A documentary on my hero, Steinbeck; a miscellany of Laurel and Hardy shorts, some vintage Dana Gould (a criminally under-regarded standup comedian and writer), and some of those delectable vintage Fleischer Brothers Superman cartoons. Keeper.

And the family home videos. Our father’s side of the family was ravenously to new technology, and the earliest home-movie footage we have dates back to the mid-1930s. Our dauntless cousin Elaine picked up dozens of these Super 8 and 8mm home-movie shorts and had them transferred to videotape. (A dissection of moving family images from before my father’s birth to my youngest sister’s babyhood deserves another essay, and some therapy.) There are hours there to be pored over by curious descendants, discussed, laughed at, explained, and used as a springboard of associations. “That’s Aunt Emma,” I say, and her clean, damp, kitchen-y smell, her scrollwork piano, a laundry chute, the cuckoo clock, the steeply raked back yard, all manifest themselves, instantly.

The VHS tape in this last case will serve as a link to a new technology, duped to DVD and then undoubtedly to whatever new forms of recording and transmission evolve. But it’s a fact of physics that there is loss of signal, a weakening of the resolution of the image, each time a duplication to another medium is made. Will these irreplaceable ghosts of me, my parents, grandparents, sisters, cousins, and friends fade away down the years like pen strokes on a palimpsest, until finally forgotten and lost? When a medium dies, that erosion, that slippage occurs, and I worry. 

AARRRR!!! Best pirate films, in honor of International Talk Like a Pirate Day

Last year, I wrote a lengthy three-part survey of the pirate-film subgenre for Dscriber.com. I found that I had never posted it here, and since International Talk Like a Pirate Day arrives on Sunday . . . well, here you go!

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

CULTURAMA: Filmed in Colorado

If you're from Denver, and you're willing to take a chance on the soon-to-be-released Eddie Murphy comedy, "Imagine That," you'll see a lot of familiar territory. If you were at the premiere of "Catch and Release," the 2006 romantic comedy starring Jennifer Garner, you'll remember Boulder residents cheering themselves as they appeared on the screen as extras, drowning out the principals' dialouge.

Jog your memory of recent films you’ve seen, either in the theater or on the tube. “About Schmidt”? “Nurse Betty”? “The Laramie Project”? “Bowling for Columbine”? If you’ve seen them, you’ve seen Colorado.

From the medium’s beginnings to the present day, Colorado can be seen in the cinema’s parade of images again and again. As backdrop, production base, and breeding ground, it has figured more prominently in film history than a casual observer might suspect. Since silent days, Colorado-based films and filmmakers have covered territory from classic Westerns to cutting-edge documentaries. They include work honored with Oscars and with places in the National Film Registry. These films are as varied as a musical about cannibal Alferd Packer and the seminal work of pioneering experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage.

It all began with the frenzy of film production that followed the first public projection of inventor Thomas Edison’s movies in New York City on April 3, 1896. Edison sent out photographers across the country from his plant in West Orange, New Jersey to record snippets of reality in fifty-foot, thirty-second snatches of film. These “actuality” films recorded persons, places, and events of interest to audiences of the day. Viewers were entranced early viewers with titles such as “Scene from the Elevator Ascending Eiffel Tower,” “Annie Oakley,” and even the vaudeville oddity “Professor Welton’s Boxing Cats.”

In this pursuit, in 1897 the head of the Edison Company’s Kinetograph Department, James H. White, and photographer Frederick Blechynden shot the first extant footage of Colorado, in sequences such as “Procession of Mounted Indians and Cowboys,” and the kinetic “Denver Fire Brigade,” in which horse-drawn engines, careening and chuffing smoke, dart obliquely toward and past the camera as an excited throng crowds both sides of a downtown Denver street.

Meanwhile, one of Edison’s rivals, a former stage magician and theatrical impresario from Chicago named William Selig, chose Colorado as a film site because of its mild climate and many days of sunshine, and the excellent quality of the light (essential in the age of primitive equipment and film stock). In addition, Selig’s film company, Selig-Polyscope, was among a host of competitors who pirated the Edison patents that were vital to filmmaking. In an effort to maintain his monopoly, Edison sued his rivals and enjoined them from making movies.

All this did was force them west, away from the powers of the court. Selig recruited pioneer Denver still photographer H. H. “Buck” Buckwalter as his cameraman. By 1902, Buckwalter had begun his work for Selig on dozens of short films. He took footage of local sights -- “Arrival on Summit of Pike’s Peak,” “Runaway Stage Coach,” and “Panorama of Denver from Balloon at Elitch’s.” In a promotional stunt, Buckwalter advertised the mild climate by filming Denverites strolling 17th Street in their shirtsleeves one January day in 1905 (after unexpected snow canceled a couple of earlier tries). “Denver in Winter” may rank as one of history’s first filmed commercials.

Hot on the heels of the smash success of the first Western, pioneering Edison director Edwin S. Porter’s 1903 “The Great Train Robbery,” Buckwalter photographed Colorado’s first narrative film, a tale of violence and mob retribution -- “Tracked by Bloodhounds; or, A Lynching at Cripple Creek”. The true Western hadn’t arrived out West yet, however. A man would shortly be arriving from Chicago who would change all that -- the creator of the cowboy hero, “Bronco Billy” Anderson.

Actor/writer/director/producer George M. Anderson was born with the decidedly un-Western moniker of Max Aronson in 1883. Changing his name early in his acting career to avoid anti-Semitic hindrances, he eventually joined Edison’s film company, playing three different roles in Porter’s “Robbery” (he’s the one falling off his horse in the chase scene). He continued to learn all he could about the film business, acting and directing for the Edison Company and the Vitagraph Company.

In 1907, the ambitious Anderson went to Selig and convinced him to lend him funds and Selig’s Denver filming crew in order to make authentic Westerns on location, working in the Golden/Morrison area. Displeased with the results, he split with Selig and formed Essanay Studios with George K. Spoor, proprietor of the National Film Renting Company in Chicago. Anderson returned to Denver in the fall of 1909 with money, equipment, and a small company of actors. Here the inventive, resourceful Anderson began rehearsing the ideas and techniques that would culminate in the wildly popular adventures of Bronco Billy.

For the first time, a moviemaker was telling stories of the West in the real West, a place still largely untouched by civilization. There was no need to costume the cowhands who rode and playacted for the camera -- the stories were silly, but the details were documentary. Anderson worked hurriedly, cranking out five films a week (in the next seven years, he would complete nearly 400).

The character he was developing in films shot in the Golden/Morrison area, like “Ranchman’s Rival” and “On the Warpath,” and was to christen “Bronco Billy” a year later, is that of a lively, violent, bluff and hearty good/bad cowpoke. Anderson discovered that establishing a central character with whom the audience could identify in film after film was vital to success, and these recurring appearances became a huge box office draw. Anderson’s persistence and entrepreneurial savvy paid off. With the aid of authentic experience in Colorado, the first Western star was born.

Anderson recruited extras and bit players from the cowboys whose ranches he filmed at, and in doing so sparked the career of Colorado’s only movie cowboy hero -- Pete Morrison.

Pete and his brothers Chick, Carl, and Bob were grandsons of the town of Morrison’s eponymous founder, George. They were called on to wrangle the Anderson’s rented stock, and were all eventually pressed into service in front of the camera. The Denver Post described the outfit’s activities during the making of “The Heart of a Cowboy” in 1909: “G.M. Anderson ... has been in Denver for six weeks, ‘making pictures’ ... ’Colorado is the finest place in the country for Wild West stuff’ (stated Anderson) ... the company reached Mt. Morrison at 9, where the train was met by a bunch of trained cow ponies and riders under the command of the Morrison brothers themselves.” Pete, Chick, and Carl took to the lucrative pay and the excitement of slapping pictures together.

Anderson ultimately moved his base out to Southern California, where the preponderance of film production was taking place. A few years later, the Morrison boys migrated to Los Angeles together to make careers of movie work. Chick would eventually move behind the camera to become one of Hollywood’s most highly regarded horse trainers, until he was tragically killed by an Arabian stallion he was taming in 1924. Pete caught on as a leading man and appeared in 204 silent Westerns for Universal between 1918 and 1926, only 3 of which survive today. Although his star had faded to the extent that he was reduced to driving mule trains in another film hero’s first Western and first starring role, “The Big Trail” (1930), he was to a have a lasting impact on that young actor’s career. Marion Morrison, concerned that people would confuse him with the popular Pete, changed his name -- to John Wayne.

Another great Western star served his apprenticeship in Colorado. Tom Mix, silent film’s “King of the Cowboys,” was a drifter who had turned his hand to just about every kind of job the West offered when he hooked up with Selig-Polyscope in 1910. A year later, he was part of a band of filmmakers that set up camp August 3, 1911, above Central City. Two weeks later, the Gilpin County Observer reported, “Central City was treated to a sensation today. A group of masked outlaws held up a bank on Main Street in broad day light and carried away with them a sackful of money. But not in dead earnest. The bank was a fake and the bold, bad men were actors of the Selig Polyscope Company of Chicago, who have made our city their temporary headquarters.” After churning out five films in three weeks, the company moved to Canon City. The locals were ecstatic to find glamorous movie folk in their midst, and welcomed the earnings from stock rental and pay as extras (children, $1.00 per day, adults $5.00). The Canon City Record proudly exclaimed, “There is some thought that Canon City may become the movie capital of the country.”

The Selig-Polyscope Company, with Mix, spent two summers in Canon City, renting out headquarters there in a two-story office building at 314 Main Street. The cast and crew made films like “Told in Colorado” and “Why the Sheriff Is a Bachelor,” and joined in the life of the town, attending church and putting on free shows for the inmates at the State Prison. The men whooped it up in the local saloons at night, one anecdote recalling Mix’s penchant for shooting lemons perched in empty shot glasses off the bar in nearby Hell’s Half Acre.

Here Mix began to form his flashy, stunt-oriented, broadly humorous style. Colorado became one of Mix’s favorite places, and he returned often after achieving stardom a few years later in California. In 1926, he filmed “The Great K & A Robbery” in Glenwood Springs, a film memorable for a stunt in which Mix slides down a cable from the top of Glenwood Canyon straight to the bottom, into the saddle of his wonder horse, Tony.

The Colorado Motion Picture Company was formed in 1913 by investors in Denver and Canon City. Production began in 1914, the company taking over Selig-Polyscope’s vacated headquarters in Canon City. The venture was doomed to be cut short by tragedy. On July 1, 1914, the last day of principal photography for “Across the Border,” leading lady Grace McHugh was crossing the Arkansas River when her horse shied and threw her, and she was swept away by the strong current. Cameraman Owen Carter leapt into the river and, grabbing her, struggled to the river’s bank. They almost made it. Both were caught again in the swift current, carried downstream, and drowned. Carter’s body was found a week later; McHugh’s, a week after that. Her family sued, and the judgment bankrupted the fledging company. With rare exceptions, it would be over 30 years before Hollywood visited Colorado again.

Historian Larry Jensen states that “Hollywood didn’t venture into the mountains of Colorado until after highways were improved in the late 1940’s.” These postwar improvements aided companies looking for Technicolor scenery and sweeping stories that would lure viewers away from their televisions. The jailbreak thriller “Canon City” broke the ice with location filming at the State Penitentiary in 1948. It inspired a young local photographer named Karol Smith to promote Colorado in Hollywood, and to eventually form what was to become the first state-legislated film commission in 1969.

In 1949, director Raoul Walsh filmed “Colorado Territory” in the San Juan Mountains, utilizing the old Silverton-to-Durango narrow gauge railroad for some scenes. In the next 15 years, over two dozen movies used the line and the surrounding area as a backdrop for Westerns, epics, and adventure tales such as “How the West Was Won,” “Viva Zapata!,” and “Around the World in Eighty Days.” Legendary American director John Ford added Colorado to his palette of Western locales for “The Searchers” and “Cheyenne Autumn.” The San Juans stood in for Leadville in the 1964 musical “The Unsinkable Molly Brown” -- Debbie Reynolds was so enchanted by the location that she settled her mother there shortly afterwards.

Gradually, filming spread across the state. In 1957, a standing Western set near Canon City named Buckskin Joe was constructed, and is still in use today. Much of “True Grit” was filmed in Ridgway in the southwest corner of the state, and some of the film’s additions to the town’s architecture still stand in place. John Wayne spent some time in local saloons; his Stetson hung for years in a hallowed place behind the bar of the Outlaw Restaurant on Ouray’s Main Street. Meanwhile, Colorado began to be seen as a setting for more than just Westerns. All kinds of movies shot some or all footage here, from the heavy drama of films such as “Scarecrow” and “Badlands” to the buffooneries of “Every Which Way But Loose” (those nostalgic for Sid King’s East Colfax strip club are advised to take a peek) and the National Lampoon “Vacation” series.

At the same time, Colorado blossomed as both a setting and home for documentaries and documentarists. David and Albert Maysles tracked the creation of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s monumental but short-lived environmental art piece that filled Rifle Gap in August, 1973, in their “Christo’s Valley Curtain.” Master documentarist Frederick Wiseman filmed “Meat,” his examination of the processing of animals into food products, in the stockyards and processing plants of Greeley. (Wiseman returned to Colorado in 1991 to film a portrait of “Aspen.”) Chris Beaver’s 1983 “Dark Circle” ruthlessly exposed the traumas inflicted on employees and neighbors of the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant. And in 1998, Coloradans Donna Dewey and Carol Pasternak took home an Oscar for Best Documentary Short Subject for their portrait of a deformed Vietnamese boy and his life-changing surgery in “A Story of Healing.”

Boulder served as home, workplace, and inspiration for experimental (“...called ‘experiment’ by those who don’t understand it”) filmmaker Stan Brakhage, who traveled the world as an honored theorist, lecturer and artist. After years of travel, contact with the avant-garde, a stint of commercial film work, and even a brief episode running a theater in Central City, he came to reject commercial cinema.
“There is virtually no art of the film to be found in any formalized motion picture producing system I know of and probably never will be, “ he stated in his document “Metaphors on Vision.” His 1964 epic vision “Dog Star Man,” made in and around Boulder on a shoestring budget, has been placed in the National Film Registry. In it and other early works, Brakhage postulates the camera/eye as first-person protagonist in a “lyrical cinema” that reflects his unique sensibilities. He returned to Boulder in the late ‘80s, where he served as Distinguished Professor at CU’s Department of Film Studies. (Two of Brakhage’s erstwhile students were Trey Parker and Matt Stone, who set their hit series in the mythical Colorado mountain town of “South Park.”)

The past twenty years featured sporadic bursts of industry growth in the state. Viacom’s choice of Denver for the production of its series of Perry Mason TV films (1985-1993) pumped millions into the local economy and involved a number of local talents, and has subsequently attracted similar outside film and television projects. Warren Miller Films, pioneer makers of snowsport films since 1947, relocated to Boulder from California in 1993 and, under the ownership of Miller’s son Kurt and Peter Speek, has stepped up and diversified its cinematic efforts.
Recent films that use the mountains and plains have ranged from determined independents such as documentarians the Beeck sisters (“Grandpa’s in the Tuff Shed,” “Free Boulder”) and CU’s Jerry Aronson (“The Life and Times of Allan Ginsberg”) through the bizarre and seedy noir of “Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead”) to unabashed schlock such as “The Dragon and the Hawk,” “Destroyer,” “Brain Creature,” “Even Hitler Had a Girlfriend,” “Atomic Train,” “Visions,” and the twin JonBenet Ramsey murder TV treatments -- “Perfect Murder, Perfect Town” and “Getting Away with Murder.”

The state will continue to host filmmakers and those who love them. Who knows? You might find me handling a clapboard slate up in the mountains this summer myself.

OLDFANGLED: CASSAVETES, YOU FASCINATING BASTARD

It doesn’t break any ground to recognize John Cassavetes as “the father of independent cinema” – a misleading title that shortchanges his real achievements. Like most geniuses, he got screwed over while he was alive and then was canonized and miscategorized after death.

Actually, independent cinema has been churned out since the medium was invented. At the beginning, it was ALL independent, wasn’t it? -- before the integration of production and distribution created the mainstream studios, which studiously crushed the competition. (A complete primer of off-center, innovative work can be found in Treasures from American Film Archives, More Treasures from American Film Archives, Treasures III and IV, Kino’s marvelous Avant-Garde and Avant-Garde 2 collections, and the dauntingly large 7-disc Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant Garde Film.)

Cassavetes entered the scene an as actor; for better or worse, under the influence of the Method. The quest to delve into the self for meaning, to find and project authentic content as a performer, transformed the profession.

It was an improvisation Cassavetes came across while teaching the Method that led to his inspiration to make his first film, Shadows. To show you how well-received it was, it couldn’t get any U.S. distribution – it had to win the Critics award at the Venice Film Festival in order for European distributors to grab and show in the States – as an import!

The bedrock of his approach is to strip away all the trappings of “quality cinema” – the production values and internalized code of taste that kept mainstream movies the safe, bland product it was sculpted to be. It’s just the script, the characters, the actors in focus and up front, and it lives or dies on those values.

You can see Cassavetes’ discomfort with the dominant Hollywood paradigm in his performances. He is typically cast as the wise guy, a smartass, an outsider who knows that the system is rigged – at the end of the scale a duplicitous, untrustworthy cynic. His Academy Award-nominated performance as Franko in The Dirty Dozen, his doomed Johnny North in the awful The Killers remake, even his Guy Woodhouse in Rosemary’s Baby are desperately tired, scratching at the walls, almost but not quite rolling their eyes at the gimcrackery around them.

When Cassavetes gets behind the camera, he relaxes. He wants something real, and by God he goes and gets it.

His cinema is one of obsessively curious observation. There are no pat answers, no denouements, no moments of cleansing catharsis in them. Cassavetes films are full of stutter-steps, blind alleys, agonizingly long takes. Watching takes patience, forbearance, but it pays off.

He only made 9 films the way he wanted: Shadows, Faces, Husbands, Minnie and Moskowitz, A Woman Under the Influence, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Opening Night, Gloria and Love Streams.

Of Cassavetes’ 9 “personal” films, "The Killing of a Chinese Bookie" is the most frustrating and revealing.

Its center, strip club owner Cosmo Vitelli, is in a way Cassavetes himself. He’s marvelously played by Ben Gazzara. He’s a little guy with big dreams. As the film opens, he pays off a loan shark the money he owes on his club, the Crazy Horse West, finally owning it outright.

It’s a shithole, frankly, a tawdry showplace that’s nominally enlivened by a stage show that’s a cruel parody of its namesake, the erotic Paris nightclub that features elaborate stage shows. Here, the handful of dancers trot out and intersperse flashes of breasts with jokes, punctuated by the damp, unenthused singing and musing of the show’s emcee, the portly, balding, top-hatted “Mr. Sophistication.”

But Cosmo loves it. It’s his dream, his love child, his creative offspring. He stands in the back of the room, everything fresh and alive in his eyes. Later that night, he takes out three of his dancers to celebrate – charmingly, bringing each a corsage like some smitten prom-goer.

But Cosmo blows it. He and the ladies go gambling. The same impulses that push him on undo him, and he finds himself in debt to the tune of $23,000 to some shady types. They have him by the balls, and the squeezing begins. Before you know it, they have pressured him into the title act.

Although the movie has the structure of a tight noir tragedy, this is Cassavetes, and the plot takes a back seat to the people involved. Digressive swoops give us insight into Cosmo, his workers, the “bad guys,” and any incidental characters that pop up along the way. Every character, no matter how brief his or her time on the screen, gets their moment, gets to define themselves.

Along the way, we keep seeing Cosmo in shifting perspective. Is he a competent businessman? A killer? A clown? Right away, the conventions of the genre break down. The stolen car given to Cosmo to take him to the hit blows a tire on the freeway. Cosmo flees, and calls a cab. While waiting, he calls his club and checks on the show, quizzing the staff and berating them when they don’t even know where in his scenario the action is.

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” says Cosmo’s victim, off camera before he pulls the trigger. “I’ve been a bad person.” It’s as if Cosmo’s killing himself, or at least the part he thought was safe, the part that would last. Later, when the killing’s contractors come after him to silence him, he seems unsurprised, resigned. Unimpressed by the danger. Indifferent.

Cosmo takes a bullet, but there’s no heroic end for him. Things slowly unravel, and he marches on, schmoozing with the help backstage, starting the show, lingering outside on the sidewalk waiting to greet the customers and hustle them inside, even as he quizzically dips his hand into his jacket to feel the blood dampening and spreading there.

There the filmmaker stands, too, seemingly unashamed of his rickety product, dying or not dying of his wounds, obdurate to anything that stands between himself and the fulfillment of his dreams, however crass and untidy.