Murawski on Gone with the pope
http://www.movieline.com/2010/03/revisiting-gone-with-the-pope-the-exp loitation-jewel-with-an-unlikely-oscar-twist.php
The joy of cruising the movie margins is that one thing leads to another. So, a few years back, after I’d suffered through the 1952 Poverty Row comedy Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla for my bad-movie book, I couldn’t help but get Googling to find out what happened to its leads, Duke Mitchell and Sammy Petrillo, whose comic act in the movie aped Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis to the very limits of copyright infringement. Turned out that Sammy did not much moviewise after that (he died last year), but Duke burned bright in the last years of his life. Mitchell’s first film as writer-director was 1974’s Massacre Mafia Style, aka The Executioner. While it didn’t make him a household name or set the box office aflame, in 1975 Mitchell set about making a second flick, then called Kiss The Ring, later given the awesome title of Gone With The Pope. One viewing of the trailer on YouTube (embedded after the jump) had my jaw on the floor.
I soon learned that Mitchell hadn’t finished the film before his death in 1981 at age 55. Most tantalizing was that Grindhouse Releasing were undertaking a painstaking restoration. So began a correspondence with the company’s co-owner, Bob Murawski, who next week finally gives Gone With The Pope its world premiere — and does it the very same week that he’s up for his first Oscar as editor of The Hurt Locker. We chatted this week about his labor of love.
Why the fascination with exploitation movies?
I’m more interested in the ideas in a movie than its production value. I think Hollywood can learn from them. A lot of times, the cheaper movies are a lot more pure — they have more heart, as opposed to being corporate cookie-cutter pieces of garbage.
When did you get interested in the schlockier side of cinema?
When I was a little kid growing up in Michigan, in a tiny town north of Detroit that didn’t even have a theater, we’d get the Detroit newspaper and I’d see all these ads for drive-in movies like The Toolbox Murders or Meatcleaver Massacre. I cut them out, and I had these whole scrapbooks full of them. It’d be years before I could see the actual movies. I became hooked on these kinda movies — the ads, novelizations of Night of The Living Dead and Halloween that I’d read before I even saw the movies, and whatever I saw on TV, like Hammer or Roger Corman.
How did you hear about Duke Mitchell?
Like a lot of people, I came to him through Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla. I hadn’t seen the movie then but I’d seen the trailer a bunch of times. But back in 1995, Bill Lustig [director of Maniac Cop, among other exploitation flicks] and I watched the Video Gems VHS of The Executioner, which I think he’d been given by Sage Stallone [now co-owner of Grindhouse Releasing], who I hadn’t met at that stage. We both thought it was one of the funniest, most off-the-wall and entertaining movies we had ever seen.
What was it about the movie?
It was like Duke Mitchell had seen The Godfather and said, “Hey, I’m an Italian, I can do better than that.” And I think in his mind, he really thought he had, even on just $50,000. The ads he did were like, “Our movie’s got more guts, more action, more dynamite!” I love it when you see a movie that’s just one person’s vision, like Rudy Ray Moore or Ed Wood Jr. And Duke, when he’s making these long speeches, the soliloquies about being Italian, they’re like nothing you’ve ever heard. It’s just dumbfounding, for minutes, but he’s got so much passion.
An instant fanclub was born?
It was. We just said, “We gotta find this guy!” Bill rang around and found out he’d died back in 1981, which was sad. But a little while later, he tracked down his son, Jeff, and he was living just a few blocks from Bill. So Sage, Bill and I went over and said we were big fans and we’d really like to re-release The Executioner. Jeff didn’t have any idea of what happened to that movie but he said he had another one his dad had shot but not finished. He said he didn’t think it had even been edited, and if we wanted to try to do something with it then go ahead. Of course, we said “Absolutely!”
What did you find?
We pulled out this bunch of dusty old boxes from a storage closet in his parking garage. They’d been there since Duke passed away — all the negative, sound tapes and work picture. There was no shooting script, just a lot of scenes written out in notebooks, on pieces of paper, and even on envelopes and cocktail napkins. There was a very crude, rough assembly of the movie. There were 17 reels, and reels nine to 13 were totally missing and never found. It was in such rough shape, we knew that finishing it would be a big job.
Where did you start?
We started by trying to do a fine cut of the movie from the assembly, then going back to the trims and outtakes when necessary to make the scenes and story flow more smoothly. For the missing reels, we went through the original negative to work out what we didn’t have, and then did a fresh work print of that material. Then we — that’s Paul Hart and Jody Fedle, who worked with me on Army Of Darkness and Hard Target — edited that from scratch. The whole thing was a giant jigsaw puzzle.
How much time did you put into it?
I worked on it whenever I had time between my real editing jobs over the past 15 years.
you still doing it during The Hurt Locker?
Not the picture. I finished the picture cut between Spider-Man 2 and 3. But then there was the sound, and that was just as tough. I got Paul Ottosson, who’d done the Spider-Man movies, dialogue editor Robert Troy and foley artist John Sanacore, who both did The Hurt Locker with me, and Marti Humphrey and Brad Semanoff, they’d done the sound mix on Drag Me To Hell. There were a lot of sound challenges, but we’re talking top people using state-of-the-art technology, and we created a great sound mix last summer. The last thing to do was scanning all the original camera negatives and doing full restoration at Fotokem Lab in Burbank. We spent something like 1,000 hours cleaning up the picture, removing all the dirt and scratches. Then Alastor Arnold graded color and density and HTV/Illuminate restored as much sharpness as possible to a few out of focus shots. It was only about two weeks ago that we filmed out the negative and saw a complete 35mm print.