On this episode, we talk about one of the most influential yet lesser known figures of the 1970s and 1980s independent cinema movement, and how he needs our help today. Please allow me to introduce you to Amos Poe, and explain to you why he needs our help today.
If you feel like helping Amos Poe after you listen to the episode, you can make a donation through the GoFundMe page set up by his friends.
If you’d like to read along with the episode, a full transcript can be found below.
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Thank you again.
Edward
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Transcript:
Hello, and welcome to The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today.
If you are a subscriber to this show, and you’re hearing this episode around the time of its release, you may be wondering what happened to the Brief History of the Nightmare on Elm Street episode that I promised last week. It’s still going to be released next.
But while I’ve been working on that episode and mapping out the remaining episodes for 2022, I couldn’t stop thinking about a recent post I saw on Twitter, asking for help for filmmaker Amos Poe, who was recently diagnosed with a rare, aggressive cancer that has left him too weak to continue working. I wanted to do more than just donate to the GoFundMe page set up to help him with his care. So I decided one other thing I could do was to do a quick episode to introduce you to Amos Poe, why he was an important part of 1970s and 1980s cinema, and hope once you learn about the man and his work, that you too might be willing to chip in a few dollars to help him live the best life possible for the remainder of his time on this plane of consciousness.
I’ve actually been considering a small series about the lesser known New York City filmmakers that came up in the 1980s and the films they were making, like Allan Moyle and his film Times Square with Trini Alvarado and Tim Curry, but now that I know what’s happening with Amos Poe, I want to get to him right now.
Born in Tel Aviv in 1949, Amos Poe would become one of the main figures of the No Wave Cinema movement which grew out of the bustling East Village music and art scene, a cinematic movies which paralleled the punk music explosion happening at the same time.
No Wave filmmakers employed a stripped-down style of guerrilla filmmaking which emphasized dark and edgy mood and unrehearsed immediacy above many other artistic concerns. Along with Poe, No Wave filmmakers like Jim Jarmusch, Abel Ferrara, Lizzie Borden, Beth B, Sara Driver, Susan Seidelman, and Charlie Ahearn, among others, would embrace B-movie genres, the avant-garde, and the French New Wave to create a fresh, vibrant American cinema art. In fact, of all the filmmakers who came out of the No Wave Cinema movement, it would be Amos Poe who be considered by many film historians and filmmakers of the day to be THE father of modern American independent cinema, the John Cassavetes of his time.
Poe’s first feature film, The Blank Generation, named after punk icon Richard Hell’s seminal song, would capture such musical artists as Blondie, The Ramones, Patti Smith, Talking Heads and Television, before they broke into the mainstream. Not only is the filmmaking and the music as raw as punk should be, the film is also an amazing encapsulation of mid-70s New York City and clubs like The Bottom Line, CBGB’s and Max’s Kansas City that someone like me would never get the chance to visit in its heyday.
To say the film wasn’t released so much as escaped would be an appropriate turn of phrase. After having its premiere at CBGB’s in 1976, the film would play mostly midnight shows in college towns.
It would never become a hit film in any sense of the word, and today, the film can be rather hard to find. And should you find it, viewing it can be maddening. Because filming was done mostly using 16mm camera without sound, and the sounds used were from cassettes and other recording devices that weren’t always in sync with what was being seen on screen, it can be discombobulating for some viewers. Poe has claimed that not trying to sync sound and picture was a deliberate artistic choice.
Shortly after completing The Blank Generation, Poe would start to make his first dramatic narrative, Unmade Beds, an homage to the French New Wave in general and Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless specifically. Duncan Hannah plays Rico, a photographer in New York City who is also living in Paris during the late 1950s. In Paris, Rico thinks he’s a gangster, and he uses his 16mm camera like a gun, which he loads with “bullets” of film in order to capture a reality that complements his fantasy. When Rico falls in love with Blondie, played by the lead singer of Blondie, Deborah Harry, his worlds starts to fall apart. Like The Blank Generation, it wouldn’t get much of a release in 1976, and remains pretty much a curiosity for Deborah Harry fans.
Duncan Hannah and Deborah Harry would also appear in small roles in Poe’s next film, 1978’s The Foreigner.
Fellow No Wave filmmaker Eric Mitchell stars as Max Menace, a secret agent from Europe who becomes involved with a number of oddball, only in New York characters while he awaits word of his next assignment, which never actually comes. Made for only $5,000, The Foreigner would be the No Wave Film equivalent of the debut album by The Ramones in 1976. Not a lot of people experienced it at the time, but it seems everyone who did decided that’s what they wanted to do.
As he was completing editing on The Foreigner, Poe would start directing a New York City public access cable channel show called Glenn O’Brien’s TV Party. O’Brien was the first editor for Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine in the early 1970s, and was a music critic for the magazine when punk rock broke into the mainstream. O’Brien would end up befriending many of the emerging musical artists, who would gladly and regularly appear on the show. Chris Stein, the guitarist and co-founder of Blondie, was O’Brien’s regular co-host, and for the four years the show ran, one could regularly see acts like Blondie, The Clash, Klaus Nomi and David Byrne from Talking Heads performing songs they were still working on before they would release them publicly. You can find a number of clips from the show on YouTube, and if you are a fan of first-wave punk and new wave bands, it’ll be a rabbit hole you will gladly fall down.
In 1979, Poe started to film his next movie, Subway Riders. Like many of the No Wave films of the day, Subway Riders would feature John Lurie, Cookie Mulder, Susan Tyrell and Amos Poe himself. His first film in color, what makes Subway Riders an important milestone is its being the film debut of Robbie Coltrane, the great British actor who passed away recently. He would make other films like Flash Gordon that would get released first, but it was Amos Poe who gave the actor best known as Hagrid from the Harry Potter movies his first break in the film industry.
At the start of the film, Poe’s character is seen rejecting an offer to sell a script of his to a Hollywood studio. By the way, this tidbit will be ironically important in a little bit. Poe’s character is a schizophrenic saxophone player who, after playing his horn on various subway lines, lures various characters to deserted spots in the city with his music, only to shoot them down. Oh, and from time to time, John Lurie becomes the saxophonist. It’s a little complicated to explain.
Coltrane played the New York City police detective trying to solve a bizarre series of murders.
Highly stylistic with heavy color tinting of the images in deep reds or cold blues to highlight the mood of specific characters at that moment in the film, Subway Riders would again hardly be seen outside of The Big Apple when it was released in 1981, but it would serve as his calling card for his first step outside his No Wave comfort zone.
Originally titled New York Avenue D, Alphabet City would be Amos Poe’s first movie to be shot in 35mm film. It would be his first movie produced by a distributor, in this case Atlantic Releasing. It would be his first film with recognizable name actors. And it would be his first film that he would hired to make for someone else.
Vincent Spano, who had already starred in John Sayles’ Baby It’s You in 1983, would be cast as Johnny, a working-class Italian-American from the neighborhood in the Lower East Side of Manhattan where the film takes its name from. Working for the mob, Johnny runs the organized crime operations and rackets in his neighborhood, including drug dealing, collection of protection money, debts, and street taxes and kick-ups from the other local gangsters. And Johnny is only 19 years old.
We follow Johnny over the course of one evening in his line of work. With his friend Lippy, one of his coke dealers, Johnny plans the arson of a local tenement building. But there’s one slight problem: the building he is expected to burn down is his childhood home, and his mom and sister still live there.
So Johnny has to decide: is he going to burn the building down and risk the lives of his mother and sister, or is he going to break off from the mob, who is holding his girlfriend and their newborn child as insurance to make sure he completes the job?
The great Michael Winslow plays Lippy, while Jami Gertz plays Johnny’s sister, and Kate Vernon, the daughter of Animal House’s Dean Wormer, John Vernon, makes her film debut as Johnny’s girlfriend.
Alphabet City would begin production in and around the titular neighborhood on October 10th, 1983, for three weeks of mostly night shooting.
For Spano, it was cool to not only be the lead on which the movie was built around, but also for the car Poe was able to get to be Johnny’s wheels. A 1983 Pontiac Trans Am 25th Anniversary Daytona 500 Edition, of which only 2500 were ever made.
One thing Poe wasn’t happy about at the time was the producers’ choice of Nile Rodgers to create the music for the movie. Rodgers, then as now, was the legendary guitarist, composer and producer who had created a number of the greatest songs of the 1970s and 1980s, first with his band Chic and then for artists like The B-52s, David Bowie, Duran Duran, and Madonna.
Rodgers had actually been hired to score the film before Poe was hired to rewrite the script and direct the film, and Rodgers’ disco and funk-tinged score bothered Poe for many years, although he would admit years later it worked for the film.
By 1984, Atlantic Releasing had been in the film industry for a decade, having released nearly 50 films, but they would not achieve anything resembling a hit film until 1983, when they would release Martha Coolidge’s Valley Girl, featuring Nicolas Cage in his first major role, into theatres. 1984 would be a very good year for Atlantic Releasing, their best to date, with films like Michael Radford’s timely version of George Orwell’s 1984 and the Thom Eberhardt zombie sci-fi horror comedy Night of the Comet.
Opening in 321 screens, Alphabet City would gross $1.17m, putting it in twelfth place on the weekend box office charts. It would be the lowest of the five new openers that weekend in terms of actual gross, but second only to Cannon Films’ Breakin’ in per screen average. It would actually do better per screen than fellow first week opener Sixteen Candles. But, also to be fair, the vast majority of that $1.17m gross came from the movie’s hometown audience. Although its 73 theatres would represent only 22.7% of houses playing the film, its $618k worth of ticket sales would be 53% of the overall ticket sales.
In its second weekend of release, the film would lose 10% of its first week theatres, and 43% of its ticket sales, finishing with just $667k.
These weren’t necessarily bad numbers, but for some reason, Atlantic didn’t report third weekend grosses. But they would report the fourth weekend grosses, which happened to be Memorial Day weekend, one of the busiest weekends of the year. It seemed everyone was going to the movies that weekend. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom would set a new first weekend record with a $42.3m gross over the four day holiday weekend, and numbers were vastly up for practically every movie in theatres that weekend, including Alphabet City, which would gross $1.26m from 313 theatres.
And then Atlantic stopped reporting on the film, giving a final gross of $7.04m. It would be the highlight of Amos Poe’s directing career.
It would also be the last Amos Poe movie of the decade. But it wasn’t for a lack of trying. While he worked on a number of screenplays, several of which would be sold to the likes of Columbia Pictures, Twentieth Century-Fox and The Weintraub Company, Poe would hire himself out as a director for music videos. He didn’t care who he worked for, being equally at ease with Animation, Anthrax, Bob Dylan, New Order, Juice Newton or Run-D.M.C.
In 1986, it looked like Poe would get the break of a lifetime.
David Puttnam, the Oscar-winning producer of Chariots of Fire, had been hired as the President of Columbia Pictures in the fall of 1986. I’m not going to get too detailed into Puttnam’s time at Columbia here, because I did a four-part series about Puttnam’s time at Columbia two years ago, and it’s still, to this date, the crowning glory of this podcast. Well worth a listen if you are into the behind the scenes machinations of a major studio.
Poe had written a screenplay called Rocket Gibraltar, about a retired Hollywood screenwriter who brings his entire family together to his estate on Long Island for his 77th birthday.
Poe had come up with the title in 1980, knowing that one day, he would write a screenplay using it as a title, even if he didn’t know at the time what the movie would be about. That would come to him in 1985, while on vacation in the Hamptons. The script would come together pretty quickly, and Puttnam was willing to give this cult director $3m to make his mark in the big leagues.
Poe would assemble an enviable cast for his movie, getting Burt Lancaster to play the family patriarch, Suzy Amis, Patricia Clarkson, Frances Conroy, and John Glover as his children, and Sinead Cusack, Bill Pullman and Kevin Spacey as the spouses.
During the celebrations, the writer’s health begins to fail, and he informs his family that it is his wish to be sent off to the next realm via a Viking Funeral. His kids are caught up in their own drama, so it will be up to the writer’s grandchildren, played by Macauley Culkin and Sara Rue in their film debuts, to carry out the old man’s wish.
Production on Rocket Gibraltar would begin on August 4th, 1987, but after three weeks of shooting, Puttnam would dismiss Poe from the production. At the time, it was chalked up to the old standby, “creative differences,” but at the time of the film’s release in September 1988, it would be revealed that Poe had gone too far over budget with less than half the film shot.
Lancaster would suggest director Daniel Petrie to take over the film, as the pair had almost worked together a couple years earlier on a project that ended up being cancelled due to financing difficulties. Petrie would pick shooting up on September 1st, and have the film completed, on time and on budget, at the end of the month.
However, the film would never get a proper release in theatres, for reasons far outside of Amos Poe’s control. While Petrie was shooting the film in Poe’s place, Puttnam was either fired or quit from his post at Columbia Pictures, and many of the smaller films greenlit by Puttnam like Rocket Gibraltar would be given token theatrical releases with very little advertising support. The film would never play in more than twelve theatres, and would only gross $187,349 after five weeks.
As the 80s became the 90s, Poe would continue to support himself mainly as a screenwriter, selling several scripts to major studios, while another script, La Pacifica, would be turned into a graphic novel by DC Comics. He would direct three movies in the 90s: 1992’s Triple Bogey on a Par 5 Hole featuring Robbie Coltrane and Philip Seymour Hoffman, 1995’s Dead Weekend with Stephen Baldwin and Bai Ling, and 1998’s Frogs for Snakes, which had a cast including Robbie Coltrane, Harry Hamlin, Barbara Hershey, Debbie Mazar, Ron Perlman, and Justin Theroux.
Triple Bogey would go direct to video, Dead Weekend would premiere on Showtime, and Frogs for Snakes would get an actual theatrical release from Artisan Entertainment, but it would disappear after two weeks playing in one theatre each in Los Angeles and New York City, earning $20,639.
It would be another eight years after Frogs for Snakes before Poe would make Empire II, a three hour rumination on life in Manhattan and the filmmaker’s interpretation of Andy Warhol’s landmark 1965 art film Empire, although there would be a documentary about the country singer Steve Earle in there too. And his final film to date, 2012’s A Walk in the Park, is not quite a documentary, not quite a dramatic narrative that mixes addiction, ambition, depression, family relations, retribution, truth, and violence and poetry, into a fugue state of wormhole logic.
Amos Poe will be leaving us with quite a legacy of cinematic art, and hopefully, he’s not done yet.
And this is where we come in.
Amos Poe has stage four colon cancer, and even though he teaches at NYU Film School, the insurance and coverage required to treat this kind of advanced cancer far outweighs the coverage he gets from the school. And being an outsider and iconoclast, he doesn’t have Spielbergian money to fight back.
If you go to this episode’s page on our website, the80smoviepodcast.com, we’ll include a link to the GoFundMe fundraiser that has been set up to help Amos. As I write and record this on Tuesday, October 25th, 2022, they have already raised $146,350 of their $150,000 goal. One organization, the Ryder Road Foundation founded by photographer Richard Prince, has donated $50,000 to help Amos, while more than 550 others have also contributed what they can.
The GoFundMe page has been keeping everyone up on what’s been going on, and just a few hours ago as I write this, they believe they have found the best doctor and hospital for Amos’s treatment.
So if you are a fan of underground cinema, of pop art, or of independent cinema of the 1980s, Amos Poe is your friend, and he needs your help.
Thank you for joining us.
We’ll talk again in a couple of days, when Episode 90, A Brief History of the Nightmare on Elm Street series, is released.
Remember to visit this episode’s page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about Amos Poe and his movies we covered this episode, as well as a link to the GoFundMe page where you can make a donation to help this iconic filmmaker in his time of need.
The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment.
Thank you again.
Good night.