Leonard Kastle died. He is best known for his only film, the truly original and excellent "The Honeymoon Killers" (1969). In some ways it's the ultimate cult classic - it crosses more boundaries in its fandom than most, from fans of low-budget gore to highbrow critics. The NY Times obit notes it was a favorite of Truffaut's. It's also notable as the first film Martin Scorsese was hired to direct and the first film Scorsese was fired from. Apparently he was taking too long on his camera set-ups for a movie with a skid row budget.
So Kastle, an opera composer who'd been hired to write the screenplay, ended up directing it. The result was, and remains, hovering between astonishing, disturbing and hideously beautiful.
Kastle never directed another film. He was, after all, a composer. His film career, never intended to materialize, ended right there, at least to some degree by choice, though it appears he wrote several unfilmed screenplays.
I was 11 years old when the film came out. I clearly remember seeing commercials for it on TV. As a kid I found myself repulsed and yet drawn to the grim, fleeting images in the promo. Aside from the subject matter (serial murders) and the weirdness of an obese woman being the love object and co-murderer, the black & white cinematography and the low-budget quality of what I saw gave it a sense of scary realism, of something that had been captured by a documentary film team. The actors and film crew who made this might as well have been real honeymoon killers. I knew it was just a movie with actors, but I can see now my eleven year old mind really wanted to be scared.
(I just witnessed this phenomenon again yesterday, May 21, 2011, the day the world was to come to an end. My son knew this was nonsense, yet he spent the whole day very nervous and was visibly relieved after the deadline passed).
I didn't see the film until many years later, probably around 1984 when it was revived at the Public Theatre in NYC. It was undeniably a powerhouse of a film on every level. At a time when you couldn't have paid me to see the then-current wave of slasher movies I was simultaneously jazzed and disturbed by the Kastle film; jazzed by its artfulness, disturbed by its ugliness. It lived up to every single sensation of fear and dread I'd felt seeing the TV promos in 1969. But it was better than I could ever have imagined.
That's all I've experienced of Kastle's work. I haven't heard any of his operas, nor any other scores he may have composed. A disciple of Gian Carlo Menotti, whose popular operas are, shall we say kindly, not among my favorites, I have doubts as to how much the aesthetic of "Honeymoon Killers" is apparent in his musical compositions. But I'd be glad to search them out. Perhaps there's something on Youtube, that great repository of every piece of film or music ever created.
One last thing, an aside, really. I found this part of Kastle's Times obit interesting:
From 1955 to 1959 he was the assistant musical director and conductor for NBC’s Opera Theater... His 15-minute opera for television, “The Swing,” about a young woman’s hopes and fears as her wedding approaches, was broadcast by NBC in 1956. With only two singers, one spoken part and one instrument —the piano, played by Mr. Kastle — it was the ultimate in operatic miniaturization. His three-act opera “Deseret,” about the Mormon leader Brigham Young, was broadcast on NBC in 1961.
(www.nytimes.com/2011/05/22/arts/leonard-kastle-a-composer-who-directed-the-honeymoon-killers-dies-at-82.html)
NBC's Opera Theatre? Operas appearing regularly by a major TV network? A 15 minute composition commissioned by NBC? Think about that. There was a time when crappy TV shows, of which there were tons, gave way at least SOME of the time to classical music, opera, live theatre, etc. A small segment of the week's schedule perhaps, but a segment dedicated to something a bit higher up the food chain than, say, "Queen for a Day".
In other words, at a time when there were only 3 networks there was more intelligent programming, or at least programming meant to expose some of the audience, however small, to something different, something they maybe didn't know existed, or knew it existed but had never really seen or heard before, than there is now with hundreds of channels, all of them running the same tits and ass "reality" crap that can produce nothing but mental deficiency and, eventually, atrophy.
Maybe Kastle's "The Swing" was a lousy 15 minutes of TV. But now almost everything on TV is lousy. What's the diff? Couldn't the current crop of TV executives set aside an hour a week - okay, 15 minutes a week - to perform works by current composers, poets, show contemporary plays presented by regional theater companies (Tonight - the Walla Walla Players present "The Dag Hammarskjold Story")? I mean, shit, why not? The cost of a commission for these pansy composer/playwrite/poet yutzes has to be even cheaper than the cost of one episode of "So Want to Be a Working Ho' " or "Scratch Donald Trump's Ass". I guarantee you 20,000 bucks will buy you 15 minutes of new art.
Isn't that the reason these dickheads keep programming "America's Most Voluptuous"? Because it's cheap to make and reaps big profits? Well, I guarantee you we can find another Leonard Kastle or two to compose a 15 minute opera about a girl trying on her first training bra and discovering she needs a double-A. We'll call it "Tiny 'taters" - one girl, one bra, a mirror, two oboes and a glockenspiel. How fucking much do you think THAT costs, assholes?
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