Wall Street Journal article on THE FOREIGNER

Try this link:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204740904577197370424845102.html

So sorry! Here's the piece in its entirety. No photos, alas...



A Foreigner at Home

By
Bruce Bennett
February 2, 2012

On a recent rainy weekday in Battery Park, Amos Poe, the seminal 1970s and '80s downtown Manhattan filmmaker, recalled raising the $5,000 budget for his 1978 film "The Foreigner." Conceived long before Kickstarter and far outside the arts grant mainstream of the time, the film owed its financial genesis instead to a car loan.

"There was this bank on Canal Street called the Merchants Bank of New York," Mr. Poe said. "Abe Rivkin was the vice president of the bank and he used to kind of break my b—. You know, 'Hey, how's the film business?' So I went in one day and told him I needed $5,000 to make a film. He said, 'We don't lend money for films. If you want to buy a house or buy a car...' I said, 'All right, I want to buy a car.' He said, 'What kind of car?' I said, 'A $5,000 car.' He gave me five grand and I had to pay it back $129 every month."

The finished film is a blithely plotted, briskly paced and substantially improvised black-and-white saga depicting German terrorist Max Menace (Eric Mitchell) visiting New York in search of asylum and further instructions. En route to an assassination in Battery Park, Menace encounters various marginal characters played by real-life downtown luminaries including Blondie's Deborah Harry, Fun Gallery co-founder Patti Astor, and punk band the Cramps.

The film will make a rare big-screen appearance this weekend at Anthology Film Archives, which is presenting four of Mr. Poe's films in a career tribute highlighting what it calls "key works of 1980s NYC underground cinema." Also on the bill—along with Mr. Poe himself—are his experimental glam-rock and punk-rock performance-film collages "Night Lunch" and "The Blank Generation" (made in collaboration with Ivan Král), and his 1976 debut feature, "Unmade Beds."

"We didn't have much film stock so we couldn't overshoot," the filmmaker said of the eight-day production on "The Foreigner."

Another obstacle was wardrobe-derived. "Eric only had one suit," Mr. Poe said of his star, whose character is imprisoned by a dominatrix, attacked in the CBGB's bathroom, and chased down Great Jones Street by a car. "There were few rules, but one of them was that as the suit gets dirty and ripped, we can't go back and re-shoot. We had to make the whole film in order."

Speaking on the phone from Paris, Mr. Mitchell laughed at the memory. "I guess in those days we didn't really think about costumes," he said.

But, Mr. Mitchell noted, commitment was more valuable than experience or money on Mr. Poe's set: "In that time frame, you'd be willing to do anything to get it right and get it real."

Indeed, dramatic reality came to a sharp point during Max Menace's assault in CBGB's at the hands of the Cramps, specifically the knifing by the group's lead singer, Lux Interior.

"[The Cramps] were the ones who came up with the switchblade," Mr. Mitchell said.

The ad-lib surprised even the director. "They didn't tell me," Mr. Poe remembered. "Lux really stabbed him. I was behind the camera yelling, 'Cut, cut, no, no!' And they kept going!"

"It looks really real," said the band's drummer, Miriam Linna (credited in the film as "punk thug'). "I watch it now and I'm kind of shocked myself. I guess that's what you call method acting or something."

Mr. Poe has accumulated multiple directing and screenwriting credits since making "The Foreigner." And though his current duties as a film instructor at NYU include history and criticism, he was ambivalent about his early work being classified more recently as part of a unified downtown scene known as "No Wave."

"The thing about making an experimental film is having enough stuff and then just going with the accident," he said. "You can look back and say it was all 'No Wave. We certainly didn't have a name for it at the time. We didn't feel part of anything."