VA: The Best of Doris Wishman (Modern Harmonic)
I think I bought this new at The Attic
In the spirit of my previous post, I pulled this out. Doris Wishman, what a character. In a sense I think she's something of a feminist hero. The exploitation film world was highly dominated by men to put it mildly. But there was Doris, an independent operator, riding the trends as she was able from the early 60s into the 1970s and beyond. She started in nudist movies, moving into lurid roughies, and then...weirder territory. She's probably best know for her two features starring Chesty Morgan, Deadly Weapons and Double Agent 73. I guess Doris went where the work went and directed a few porn features under pseudonyms in the 70s. I'm not making excuses when I write that I've never seen any of those. The tracks collected here (conveniently) overlook those movies.
I almost had the chance to meet Doris. The Warhol Museum scheduled her movie Bad Girls Go To Hell, with Doris flying up from Florida to make a personal appearance. Unfortunately, there was a major hurricane that grounded her, and she couldn't come. I wrote a brief piece dedicated to her, recorded on the second Water Shed 5tet CD; I wanted to present her with a copy. I was later able to get copies to Doris' biographer Michael Bowen; in return, I got an autographed promotional still from that same film. nice! It hangs framed in a powder room in my basement, alongside autographs of Herschell Gordon Lewis, Ray Dennis Steckler, Mink Stole, and John Agar.
The Warhol showed the movie regardless. I took my wife, and told her one of Doris' techniques to keep her movies cheap. She'd film without sync sound, and voices were dubbed into reaction shots. In other words, you'd see the back of someone's head as he's speaking to someone who's facing the camera, and then it switches when the response is spoken. It gives Doris' movies an additional level of "wrongness." Pretty quickly there's an all-reaction shot conversation in the movie, and my wife started going into a serious giggle fit. She couldn't stop laughing, almost howling. I wouldn't have cared, were we not in a full theater with friends around. I eventually managed to help her calm down. It was funny though.
The better part of this LP are the audio from various Wishman film trailers. "You! You! You! Do you know that....bad girls go to HELL?" As fellow exploitationeer David Friedman would say, "Sell the sizzle, not the steak." Side one is taken up with her nudist pictures, the craziest one being Nude on the Moon. Astronauts land on the Moon to find it's inhabited by a race of alien nudists! And conveniently, they communicate telepathically! Do they return to Earth or decide to stay! Watch it and find out!
For as barebones cheap as Doris would go, there are original songs in some of these pictures. Five on are side one, all written by Judith Kushner (not a Wishman pseudonym, I looked) three sung by the syrupy-voiced Ralph Young. I know it's such faint praise to say the song aren't awful, maybe even not bad. It's some post-50s schmaltz to be sure. The small studio backup band is professional, slicker than some of the original music examples on side two. The music on the trailers is clearly library music, at least some of the time.
Side two is centered on her 1970s pictures. Selling the "healthiness" of the nudist lifestyle is replaced with grittier, nastier titles and themes. "Another day, another man!" The music starts to sound more rocking, more far out!
In some respects, we live in a pretty amazing time. You can make a feature film on an iPhone; someone made a feature using Zoom and it's supposed to be really good. The material costs of film have been potentially reduced to nearly nothing. The cost of a hard drive.
And yet, what a time Doris lived in. She was able to produce, direct, shoot, and edit her own feature films and get them into some sort of theater or another, and largely from Florida. The drive in circuit was a viable place to get your movie played, if it was fun or entertaining or shocking enough. yes, Doris' movies can be difficult to watch sometimes. But there's a great spirit to them, and she lived in a cinema world that no longer exists. For all of our advances, sometimes I think we've lost a lot too.
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