Criterion Collection - Online Cinematheque

In 1981, it seemed to me that a new era of the fantastic cinema was upon us. With this in mind, I persuaded an editor at Heavy Metal to accept an essay I wanted to write about this new breed of horror specialists, which I planned to call “The Shape of Rage” (after a psychological manifesto that figures in the plot of David Cronenberg’s 1979 film The Brood). It was a housebound project––with me interviewing George A. Romero, John Carpenter, Joe Dante, and makeup artist Tom Savini, all by telephone––until fate intervened and sent David Cronenberg to Cincinnati on a promotional junket for his new film, Scanners.

This interview was a galvanizing experience for me. In my personal life, I had never met anyone who shared my seemingly irreconcilable interests in art and literature and horror movies. During our hour-long interview, Cronenberg and I talked not only about his own work, but also about Vladimir Nabokov, William S. Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, the structuralist theories of Claude Levi-Strauss, and movies from Don’t Look Now to Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS. He was delighted when I told him that I considered such Cronenbergian (had the term been coined yet?) concepts as The Brood and Scanners as avatars of what I called a “new mythology”––one which also included Carpenter’s The Shape and Romero’s Living Dead. Afterwards, he gave me his home telephone number, in case I needed to follow up.

The Heavy Metal article was published later that year, and that was that––until Videodrome was announced in the fall. I phoned Frederick S. Clarke, the editor of Cinefantastique (which had already published a feature story on Cronenberg’s career by Paul M. Sammon), to tell him about my inside track and was asked to get some quotes from Cronenberg for a news item. When I called him at his home in Toronto, David surprised me by inviting me up to observe the filming—because the producers wanted to keep the script details a secret, it would be a closed set and I would be the only film journalist present. (When I met Claude Héroux, the film’s producer, on the set he told me, “I knew you must be very important, because we turned away the biggest magazines in the world!”) It was my first set visit, my first trip out of the country, my first a-lot-of-things. I was accompanied by my wife, Donna (acting as my photographer), on my first visit, from 16 -19 December 1981 (supposedly the last week of filming), and by my friend Robert Uth during a return visit that lasted from March 7 - 13 (retakes and special effects insert photography)—nine days, in all.

The on-set observations presented below are excerpted from my unpublished book-length manuscript about the production, which carries the Burroughsian title The Image as Virus: The Making of Videodrome. Some of these pieces were presented in a different form in CFQ, at times in drastically revised and rewritten forms, but much of it is being published here for the first time.

The original draft of the screenplay

Perhaps understandably, David Cronenberg did not want to unveil any fragments of his rough draft––originally titled Network of Blood––publicly (to quote his literary mentor Vladimir Nabokov, to do so would have been like “passing around samples of one’s sputum”), but its nature reveals a great deal about his creative process, so integral to an understanding of his art. While writing his rough drafts, Cronenberg accepts as a given that they will resemble his final product in only the most basic way and allows his mind to move in any direction it desires, pushing at the limits of what is possible to render onscreen until those limits are broken; it is at this point that he feels truly in touch with his imagination. By granting his imaginative powers absolute free rein, they are able to explode, backfire, frighten him.

Some examples: In the first draft of Videodrome, Max Renn combats his hallucination by chopping his flesh-gun off at the wrist and, from the stump, there grows a fleshy, “potato-masher”-style hand grenade that explodes. There is a kissing scene in which Max and Nicki’s faces melt together into a single object that dribbles down, crawls across the floor and up the leg of an onlooker, and melts him. And the most horrible murder featured in the finished film—the erupting cancer death of Barry Convex—originally happened to five other characters, as well. “My early drafts tend to get extreme in all kinds of ways: sexually, violently, and just in terms of weirdness,” Cronenberg explains. “But I have to balance this weirdness against what an audience will accept as reality. Even in the sound mix, when we’re talking about what sort of sound effects we want for the hand moving around inside the stomach slit, for example; we could get really weird and use really loud, slurpy, gurgly effects, but I’m playing it realistically. That is to say, I’m giving it the sound it would really have, which is not much. I’m presenting something that is outrageous and impossible, but I’m trying to convey it realistically.”

This is something Cronenberg’s producers—Pierre David, Victor Solnicki, and Claude Héroux—apparently understood; Cronenberg’s creative eccentricities, after all, were the cornerstone of their empire, for which Scanners was the greatest success. “The way Videodrome really started,” Cronenberg remembered, “was Pierre saying that he wanted to do another picture with me, and reciprocating. I met with him in Montreal and told him, in just a few words, the basic plot; it was only the first part of the movie I described to him, and it sounded more like a thriller than anything in that limited description, and he liked what I said. But when I started writing it and all of these other things started to leap out at me, I really thought they would reject it. What I was writing was so much more extreme than my premise had suggested. To my surprise, all three of them loved it! I can’t tell you how surprised I was, because I thought I’d been going nuts all alone in my little room. Claude, in fact, said that he liked it best of anything I’d written, but if we shot it as it was written, it’d get a triple-x, for sure. I told him I had written it in a more extreme fashion than I would want to see it on the screen myself.”

The “wild” first draft of Videodrome was the script that acquired the production its major talent—actors James Woods and Deborah Harry, special makeup effects artist Rick Baker and his EFX Inc. crew, and many other essentials—but production began with a toned-down (and, in all honesty, unfinished) second draft in hand. Throughout the production schedule, Cronenberg wrote new scenes and rewrote old ones, and new sheets were distributed to crewmembers regularly. The writing of Videodrome continued up until the very last day of shooting, on December 19. Additional makeup effects photography was shot in the same makeshift studio housing in March 1982, the need to shoot a revised climax brought the crew back to Toronto for two days in May, and further changes were effected in the editing room. Rather miraculously, Videodrome doesn’t hint at any such instability in its final cut; it is Cronenberg’s most imaginative, stylized, satirical, and disturbing film to date.

Principal photography begins

Videodrome’s first week of shooting—beginning October 19, 1981—was completely devoted to the videotaping of a variety of monitor inserts. These were the monologues of Professor Brian O’Blivion (Jack Creley); a number of brutal torture sequences for the Videodrome program; and Samurai Dreams and Apollo & Dionysus, two soft-porn programs which are pitched by salespersons to Max Renn’s Civic TV, and were scripted to be shown in excerpt. Cronenberg had worked with video before, making “The Victim” and “The Lie Chair” in 1977 for the Canadian Broadcasting Company, but he felt some trepidation about working with it professionally again. “I wasn’t looking forward to those sessions, I must say,” he admits. “I’d done it before, but on two-inch tape and with multiple cameras, so we could edit as we were shooting by going from camera to camera. There wasn’t any of that on Videodrome. It’s very strange; I never really felt I got those scenes, this time, until we re-shot them off monitors. Both Mark [Irwin] and I are very fascinated by videotape; it has a whole other feel. But I was much happier when we were back to shooting film.”

Samurai Dreams was photographed in a rented corner of Toronto’s Global TV studios, on C-format one-inch tape, silent. Even without sound and on its own, outside Videodrome, it is a true curio: luxuriantly colorful and gracefully staged. “We shot it in half a day,” Irwin remembers, “and that’s where I came into the business—shooting porn [Ed Hunt’s Diary of a Sinner, 1975]—so I felt right at home. I told David that I hadn’t realized the Japanese were so raunchy, but he confessed that he’d made up all that oriental ritualism surrounding the dildo. He had it carved the night before. The atmosphere on the set was very loose, very funny. The girl, who was French and spoke very little English, was very open to the whole thing, and there wasn’t any tension around to scare her away.” Asked about his striking ambience, Irwin says, “Well, to see it on the set, it looked a lot flatter than it does on a monitor. Had I shot Samurai Dreams on film, I would have had about six lights turned off to create that scene.” Watching the short unreel on a handy VCR, Irwin refers to the misty exterior tracking camera move as “my Kurosawa shot.”

The Videodrome spots, which include whippings, electrocutions, strangulations, and other commercial highlights, all staged on Carol Spier’s unforgettably harsh-looking set—look as if they were grim work indeed, especially as their shooting involved a couple of ten to twelve-hour days. Video effects supervisor Michael Lennick reports that the basic extremity of the material left him feeling “disoriented” at day’s end, but Irwin offers a flip-side observation: “It was no different than anything else because, again, we were working with special effects. If you listen to the soundtrack on the tapes, you can hear David all the time, shouting, ‘OK, now put her up against the wall! OK, now shake around—you’re being electrocuted!! OK, now hang him up on that hook there! Let’s see some more energy in that whipping!’—it was more funny than sick. Nobody really felt bad, as far as I know. Those victims were stunt experts and two of the girls really got into it and wanted to do more!” The small amount of light, more “realistic” bloodletting that is glimpsed in the Videodrome footage was not contributed, as some might think, by Rick Baker, but rather by the film’s cosmetic makeup artist, Shonaugh Jabour.

A petite, intensely shy woman who moves about lightly in ballet slippers, Jabour is one of many crewmembers carried over from The Brood (Cronenberg’s last Toronto production). With only a few exceptions and additions, the two films’ crews are identical. “One of the maddening things about starting out with someone new is that everything’s possible––and that’s not necessarily good,” Cronenberg explains. “It’s the same with any relationship: you want to cut down the world of possibilities; you want the other person to know that you hate pizza, so don’t even think about pizza. When you work or live with anyone for a long time, you narrow your range of possibilities in a positive, creative way.”

The Cathode Ray Mission

The large building at the corner of Bathurst and Adeleide––dubbed the “Cathode Ray Mission” by art director Carol Spier’s deceptively religious-looking outdoor marquee––was formerly a nursery school and originally a piano school. Entering through a side door, where snow and slush splattered with week-old dilutions of fake blood function as a welcome mat, one sees children’s paintings still hanging immediately inside. As everyone regrouped for post-production, Rick Baker (devotee of all things simian) seized for his workshop the room bearing a mural of a happy, banana-gobbling, vine-swinging chimpanzee. During principal photography, it was the wardrobe room. Across the hall is Shonaugh Jabour’s makeup room. The down-going stairs led to the gratingly red Videodrome arena in November and December, and to the rusty interior of a derelict ship in March. The up-going stairwell led to sustenance: a food table, a coffee tank, and styrofoam cups. The next room, the building’s largest (a former auditorium, replete with proscenium that must have hosted a score of children’s recitals and plays), housed the Cathode Ray Mission cubicles, the Spec Op stage on which Barry Convex corrupts to a howling heap of cancer tissues, and frequently offered the space of its corners for such insert shots as the tendrilizing of Max Renn’s hand and gun, the grinding of Harlan’s hand in Max’s abdominal slit, Convex’s monologue (seen on the limo’s TV screen), and Max’s shooting by the weapon formed by the living screen of a Flesh TV. The same floor housed rooms for film stock and camera storage, wardrobe repair, and a couple of restrooms.

The second floor, made accessible by a number of stair flights, was comprised of a room used in November and December as the EFX workshop (seen in the film as the room where the videotaped remains of Prof. O Blivion are archived), another used by the video effects crew, a lounge area, and a long and narrow room with huge windows overlooking the action of the auditorium, which doubles in the film as Bianca O’Blivion’s office. There was no sound proofing; if a scene was being shot, Rick Baker’s crew was unable to work, no one could talk, and no toilets could flush. Other crucial sets—Max’s apartment, the offices of Civic TV, Harlan’s lab, and the abandoned ship interior (while the Videodrome set was still standing), for example—were built in a former underwear factory and Greek Orthodox church, found by location manager David Coatsworth on Crawford Street, just two blocks away from where David Cronenberg lived as a child, with his parents and older sister.

An evolving script

Since so few horror directors author their own scripts, and even fewer screenwriters specialize in the genre, watching David Cronenberg navigate his way through the filming of his concept is fascinating, to say the least. During the two visits I paid to the set in December and March, I observed as Cronenberg thought and rethought, wrote and rewrote several important scenes. (On the last day of filming, after a full working day that had collected only one useable take, Cronenberg announced to the crew that he had not yet written the film’s ending to his satisfaction, that to film it as it was tentatively scripted would not be right, and, calling it a wrap, he proceeded to open—with considerable, fearful wincing—a champagne bottle of Christmas cheer.) Among these was the scene of Max Renn stalking Bianca O’Blivion through the Cathode Ray Mission with his flesh-gun (which actor James Woods affectionately dubbed “the pooperoo”). Bianca rushes behind a paper screen partition of one of the monitor cubicles, which Max rips away. Over a six-month period, Cronenberg inserted many things behind that screen—from Nicki Brand to a video image of Nicki Brand. The first Nicki Brand sequence was the culmination of a visual trick Cronenberg had initiated and ultimately discarded, in which Max’s perceptions of Nicki and Bianca blur together into interchangeable women; the two women were revealed, in this first sequence, to be business partners of a sort. Max tears the screen and finds Nicki, seated authoritatively beside a computer board, wearing an outfit of O’Blivion conservatism. Nicki explains:

“We knew that you were Videodrome’s next target. We planned to intercept you, use you to dig deeper into Videodrome. I came to Brian O’Blivion five years ago. I studied with him. And I saw what Videodrome did to him. I also saw what it could be. In the right hands…your right hand, Max. I can see what it’s become. It may have started out as a hallucination, but now it’s real. You’re the new spring line. Isn’t that exciting?”

The scene, present as late as the script’s third draft, continues as Max discovers the Flesh TV broadcasting an image of Bianca O’Blivion, her tightly-bound hair now worn loose and languidly tumbling over her shoulders, wearing Nicki’s red dress (as seen on The Rena King Show) and baring one shoulder to reveal Nicki’s own Swiss Army–knife scars:

BIANCA (ON TV): “But we’ll have to go all the way through it, Max. All the way through it to the end. We can’t stop where you are now...stuck in the middle. Not us, not Bianca, Max, and Nicki. The road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom.”

As the words of William Blake faded from her lips, Bianca’s image was to cut to the fleshy version of the Flesh TV picture tube extending into a gun that fires and fells Max.

Asked about the symbiotic relationship between Bianca and Nicki in earlier drafts, Cronenberg says, “I was toying with that, yes, but it was not clear and not developed or anticipated enough to work. I don’t mind ambivalence or ambiguity in a film—in fact, I think it’s necessary—but confusion is never necessary.”

In post-production, Cronenberg rewrote the scene so that Max, tearing the screen, was confronted by the weeping tele-image of Masha; the videotaped footage was left over from a scrapped effects sequence in which the Flesh TV was to rise, with Masha’s image on it, out of the soapy waters of Max’s bathtub. The desired effect was that Max would turn against Convex and his Spec Op goons to avenge Masha’s death—“They killed me, Maxie,” she cries; “I wasn’t supposed to tell you about Brian O’Blivion”—but their relationship, in the final analysis, had not been developed beyond a casual business connection. It wasn’t until Cronenberg screened a preview print to an audience in Boston in April 1982 that he saw the absolute necessity of bringing Nicki Brand (and Deborah Harry!) back into the picture, of resolving her character, at the relatively negligible cost of resolving Masha’s. He photographed new video footage of Harry for the film’s last scene and refilmed this scene to show Max (actually James Woods’ stand-in, Art Austin) tearing the screen away from the Flesh TV, showing Nicki’s death on Videodrome. This explained her sudden disappearance after flying to Pittsburgh and elevated Max’s sense of outrage, aloneness, and spirituality in the subsequent scenes, which save his suicidal finale from feeling too defeatist. It was to Cronenberg’s puzzle an extraordinarily elegant solution. “It felt so right that it felt inevitable,” Cronenberg says, “but not so inevitable that I’d thought it before!”

As for the shipboard suicide that ends the film, it was Cronenberg’s original intention to continue the film briefly beyond it––into the “Next Phase,” as Nicki’s video image calls it. Before the decision was made to end the scene with the bang of Max’s gun, Cronenberg described his vision: “After the suicide, he ends up on the Videodrome set with Nicki, hugging and kissing and neat stuff like that. A happy ending? Well, it’s my version of a happy ending—boy meets girl on the Videodrome set, with the clay wall maybe covered in blood (but I’m not sure). Freudian rebirth imagery, pure and simple.” In anticipation of shooting it, Mark Irwin outlined his visual intentions thusly: “He’ll shoot himself in the head and go—boom!—out of frame, and we’ll cut to his head hitting the clay wall, and the camera will track back and there he is, happy in front of the fireplace with his pipe and slippers and Nicki hopping all over him! Another film for the whole family!”

These descriptions are euphemistic (to say the least) of a sexual crescendo the likes of which had not been seen in Cronenberg’s work since the joyously and venereally infected finale of Shivers. Cronenberg preferred us not to excerpt from the sequence in question, which depicted Max and Nicki (and, in a separate draft, Bianca) on the Videodrome set, nude and making love. However, to paraphrase: Nicki reveals to Max a new abdominal slit of her own and Bianca has one too, and the three of them probe one another’s slits with their hands, which slip out bearing strange, mutated sexual organs emitting even stranger fluids, ending the film on a note of moist, exploratory, sensual feasting. Mutated sex organ appliances—both male and female—were required and Rick Baker, too engulfed by other responsibilities to design and manufacture these, subcontracted the job to his friend Greg Cannom (The Sword & the Sorcerer). Cannom’s foam latex appliances arrived from Los Angeles in late December and, after viewing an impromptu test of making them breathe and spurt viscous fluids in the EFX workshop, Cronenberg vetoed the scene altogether. The quality of Cannom’s work wasn’t to blame; if anything was to blame, it was the accumulation of circumstances. Deborah Harry had contracted stomach flu from which the whole crew had suffered at one time or another during the shoot, the production was behind schedule and rapidly nearing its Christmas deadline, and Cronenberg felt he couldn’t execute the scene to his own standards.

The Cancer Gun

The cancer growths caused by Max’s flesh-gun—described in each draft of the script as being an external effect (“Moses is hit first, but not by bullets: Max’s handgun seems to fire little gobbets of flesh which stick to Moses’ face and throat, then immediately begin to grow until Moses’ face dissolves into an amorphous mass of veiny flesh within the space of a few seconds—like a cancerous growth seen to emerge in time lapse photography.”) It went through several tests before the right idea was struck upon. Baker had many different ideas about how to handle the effect and assigned each member of the group a different way of trying it.

Tom Hester tested a version in which he pumped various liquids and chemicals under the “skin” of a foam latex mask. Shawn McEnroe’s test involved tendrils that sprouted out from the cancered tissues like tiny roots, crisscrossing over the victim’s face in a network of disease (in retrospect, Baker thinks this was the “most interesting” of the vetoed experiments). The group also tried swelling foam latex heads with solvents, which distorted them beyond recognition but, upon learning that Dick Smith had recently used the same procedure in another Canadian production, Spasms (1983, directed by William Fruet), Baker chose not to intrude on his mentor’s current work. There was also a last-resort investment in some stop-motion footage of the spreading cancer which was “interesting, but it wasn’t the way the thing read in the script.”

Baker then reconceived the effect as an internal cancer that grew until it burst in a clustery explosion of bloody tissues through the victim’s body. “I explained to David that this was something we could do fairly simply: put people under a raised set who’d push the cancers up through a hollow dummy, and asked if we could arrange it so that whenever this stuff happened, the actor would be up against a wall or on the floor.”

By then, Cronenberg had cut the flesh-gun cancer casualties down from six to two: Max’s partner Moses (Rainer Schwartz) and Spectacular Optical impresario Barry Convex (Les Carlson). He agreed that Moses, whom Renn assassinates in the offices of Civic TV, could be slammed by the flesh-gun’s gobbets against the wall of the boardroom. Baker intended to fashion bubbly-looking cancers out of a pliant, translucent material called polyvinyl chloride (“PVC” for short), which would be worn on someone’s hand like a puppet and be forced manually through a foam rubber face and fiberglass inner skull. A life mask of actor Rainer Schwartz was taken by Baker and Steve Johnson. “We took it with an expression,” Baker reports, “because likenesses are so difficult and we wanted to do as little sculpting as possible. It turned out beautifully.” (On the other hand, when it came Les Carlson’s turn to have his head cast, the actor endured the messy casting process five times, as each mold proved unacceptable—till, finally, a resculpted version of the first was used!) During production, Cronenberg made the decision to reserve the horrible, subjective cancer imagery for the death of his sleazy villain Convex alone and that the killing of Moses, “since he’s really a good guy, would be shown as it really happens, on the reality plane, using ordinary blood bags and squib charges” (Cronenberg’s quote). As finally filmed, the spectacular death of Barry Convex was primarily a showcase for the talents of EFX wunderkind Steve Johnson.

A take of Moses’ death was filmed with Renn wearing the flesh-gun—a foam latex glove with zipper, lubricated with methocellulose (from a Baker design, molded and sculpted by Tom Hester)—but the final cut depicts the killing objectively, with Renn carrying an ordinary handgun. An unfinished mold of Moses’ head, cleft with a burden of cancer tissues, was on view in Baker’s workshop throughout the filming, but it was never finished or filmed.

The Flesh TV

Coincidental to the majority of these special effects is the mysterious, pervasive presence of the Flesh TV. In some ways, the Flesh TV is Cronenberg’s interpretation of William S. Burroughs’ concept of “The Soft Machine”: it represents the biomechanical extreme of Max’s dependency on fantasies projected by technology. Baker’s earliest designs for the TV bear little resemblance to the ominous, stately consoles on view in the finished film. “I did a preliminary painting of a fleshier version, which I tore up,” Baker confesses. “It was ridiculous: the corners were rounded and saggy, all the straight lines had weight to them, and the molding along the bottom bulged out like a stomach hanging over a belt. It looked like a joke, so I kept the traditional TV look and just changed the color from a woodgrain to a flesh tone.”

Bill Sturgeon and Kevin Brennan manufactured three different sets from Baker’s design, building/sculpting and systematizing them (with air bladders, veins, etc.) respectively. The three sets were the black TeleRanger model seen in Max’s apartment, the Flesh TV seen in the Cathode Ray Mission, and a much more simply designed Flesh TV model used in whipping scenes and intended for use in the aborted bathtub scene. Another, operable by remote radio control, was planned to be built for use on an outdoor street corner, but the scene was written out before work began on machining it. The rectangular dimensions of the TVs meant they could never be photographed in operation from all sides at once and, for this reason primarily, Baker considers the Flesh TVs the film’s “least successful” effect––“and the most difficult to make.”

The Breathing Television

Another effect in which the video and makeup effects teams worked side-by-side was “The Breathing Screen”, a mechanical effect in which the televised lips of Nicki Brand pucker and blow against the glass of Max Renn’s TeleRanger TV screen, making it billow forth from the console frame like a swelling breast, as her seductive voice invites Max to push himself into her waiting mouth. “Don’t keep me waiting.” Rick Baker’s initial conception of how to achieve the effect was reliant upon the use of a blue-screen process but, Baker explains, “David warned me that there was nobody up here who could do a really good job with it.” Michael Lennick agrees about the state of this branch of Canadian effects: “We have three optical houses up here and they do mostly TV commercials; they don’t have a great deal of experience doing film work—and, due to the fact that the majority of our needs were of a nature never tried before, the budget simply wouldn’t have allowed them the necessary time to experiment.” While Baker and his EFX team were still in Los Angeles, Lennick’s group devised their own blueprint for creating the effect, also later rejected. Lennick explains: “We were playing with the idea of pulling a matte off of a blue gelatin material, which was going to be in a tank that replaced the picture tube area of the set, which would then be backlighted. This would ultimately have involved a more complicated setup, in that it would have to be shot on a 90 degree angle, and the actor would be putting his face down into the gelatin. The other primary reason we didn’t do it was the problem of developing a material that wouldn’t adhere to the actor, who wasn’t too crazy about being blue for even a few minutes. But we were getting really interesting effects from our experiments—the gelatin dripped off the character’s face as he backed out of the gelatin, with flecks of video texture on each little drop.”

Back in California, Baker experimented with various approaches to doing the effect. “I knew we would need a flexible material, and we tested with a weather balloon first, stretching it over a frame the size of a TV screen, and pushed a hand through it to see how far it stretched, and then we rear-projected on it.” The balloon tests encouraged Baker, who sought a stretchier material, nevertheless. He eventually settled on dental dam—“a stronger, stretchier kind of rubber” used most commonly by dentists in the molding of bridgework—which worked ideally when painted over with a highly reflective white paint.

For the shot, the dental dam sheet was stretched over a frame attached to a box secreted inside the Flesh TV. The rear end of the box was sealed with Plexiglas, to which a hose and bellows (made by Doug Beswick) were attached, which was pumped off-camera to swell the screen with literal breathing. The plexiglas back enabled the video crew to rear-project 16mm footage of Deborah Harry’s lips onto the reverse side of the stretch screen. “We shot ten to twelve versions of her lips in various stages of degradation and video noise,” Lennick reports. “Our biggest problem—one we wouldn’t have encountered had we been pulling our matte—was a color temperature balance problem. We were struggling with matching video images already shot to what was now a light-source projection, and trying to get the 35mm camera to see the same tones.”

When I told James Woods, after seeing Videodrome, how amazingly sexy the scene was, he chuckled and said, “Really? I felt sort of stupid when I was doing it, to be honest with you.”

Black Tuesday and Unused EFX

An additional intended use of the TeleRanger, which never materialized in the film, was its “skinning” on the Videodrome set. Cronenberg had initially scripted the scene in which Max whips the Flesh TV so that the whip would peel the TeleRanger’s black veneer away from a throbbing underlayer of vulnerably exposed flesh. “I wanted the black to split open and show the skin underneath and, as he whips it, show big black flakes falling off,” Baker describes. Baker and Sturgeon prepared a test model of the effect by coating one of the Flesh TVs with a brittle-drying, black plastic paint. “We also had another one that we poured solvents on, to form blistering patterns that would fall away like an outer skin,” Baker adds, “but that was during principal photography, and they weren’t spending too much time on our stuff then. They had a lot of stuff to shoot and had to make a lot of compromises to save time.” Cronenberg eventually decided against this element of the whipping scene. Also for this unused sequence, Michael Lennick invented a device he called a “Videodromer,” which used very low-voltage, high-amp magnetic field coils wrapped around the picture tube to distort the image on command.

For a variety of reasons, aesthetic and financial, Lennick’s video crew was relieved of several pleasurably anticipated responsibilities two weeks prior to post-production shooting. “It was David, the producers, the post-production supervisor, and me at this outrageous meeting which I’ve come to remember as Black Tuesday,” Lennick says. “That’s when we sat around and red-pencilled everything.” Cronenberg even scratched the scene for which Lennick was initially contracted, for which he had had a television set thoroughly waterproofed (the director now felt the scene would “constitute a false turning point” for Max Renn):

Scene 50

At the sink in his bathroom, Max splashes cold water onto his face, studies his eyes. His pupils are dilated, open like portholes into some strange other world. As he studies his dripping face in the mirror, the mirror becomes a TV screen for a few seconds, his own image in it going static-flecked video.

Behind him in the TV screen mirror, Max seems to see the Videodrome set with some vaguely nasty things going on amongst a group of shadowy figures. Max whirls around. The room is back to normal...

...He decides to forget the bath and reaches into the water to pull the plug.

Max’s eyes suddenly go wide with fear, as though he has felt something alive in the tub. He pulls his hand out of the water and slams back against the sink. A metallic bubbling sound fills the room, echoes off the tiles.

As Max watches, disbelieving, the TV set rises up out of the water, out of the blue Algamarìne foam like an electronic Venus on the half-shell. The set is swelling, breathing and snorkeling as befits a marine creature of its substantial size. Masha’s face is on the screen, an anguished expression wracking her features, a leather strap around her neck...

MASHA:(on TV) They killed me, Maxie. They killed me. I wasn’t supposed to tell you about Brian O’Blivion.

...Finally Max collapses, sobbing wretchedly, his arms around the set, holding it tight, holding it desperately, as though he were adrift at sea, Ishmael clinging to the floating coffin.

Obviously, when this scene went, a lot went. Notably, the potentially astonishing moment when Max opens his mirrored medicine chest and, closing it, finds himself transported onto the Videodrome set. Lennick had shot video footage of the set’s two hooded torturers, so that Renn would see them standing directly behind him and moving threateningly in his direction. If shot as Cronenberg had written it and as Lennick planned it, it could have been the biggest jolt in the film.

Also scratched that day were some additional effects related to the Accumicon helmet, a moment in which Max shakes “video dandruff” from his head and shoulders at the close of an hallucination (Lennick planned to sprinkle flakes of Scotchlite material on the actor and fire a modulating laser off them), and a number of scenes in which Nicki Brand’s body and other objects would (in Cronenberg’s scripted words) “twitch video.” Lennick describes how the effect would have appeared: “In a flash, characters would be broken down from celluloid film’s 4000-line resolution to 525-line video resolution. Their body edges would become serrated, their coloring electric and almost neon-like.”

“One of the main changes in tone for me,” Cronenberg said, “was the decision to go almost nonexistent in terms of video twitches. They were present in every single draft of the script. But when we started to put the film together, I cut in some video things to give myself an idea of what they would look like, and I decided it looked too tricky.”

Lennick and his associate Lee Wilson prepared a reel of assorted video twitches and glitches for Cronenberg—“Everything from a basic white noise glitch to complex little flashes with flecks of subliminal material in them,” Lennick describes—which he did like. “It wasn’t the quality of their effects, per se,” Cronenberg explains, “but I didn’t have to see the actual twitches in context to know that they would have disrupted the film’s pacing. They didn’t gel with the surrounding footage, that’s the main reason they were cut. Michael was very disappointed, but it wouldn’t be true to portray this as him and me being destroyed by budget restrictions. I’ve not regretted their loss, either.”

All the way through it to the end

In revisiting these notes, it becomes very obvious to me that Videodrome was a film vastly ahead of its time, not only in terms of ideas, but in terms of envisioning special effects technologies some twenty years distant. In its scripted form, Videodrome is nothing less than a prophecy of the CGI era; concepts which it could not afford to realize onscreen in 1983 are now the stuff of rock videos and television commercials––the very wallpaper of 21st century living. In the same way, Cronenberg’s unique character writing has greatly extended the range and depth of dramatic possibilities available to actors; it is telling that, in accepting his “Best Actor” Academy Award for Reversal of Fortune (1990), Jeremy Irons thanked––in addition to director Barbet Schroeder––the director of Dead Ringers (1988). Sometimes called “prophetic” for the way his early “venereal horror” films prefigured the coming of AIDS, David Cronenberg is more than this: he is one of the few figures to emerge in cinema’s first century who are truly analogous to Leonardo da Vinci and Jules Verne, men whose fertile imaginations laid the foundations of our technological future and changed the way all people live and think. Likewise, in today’s post-Videodrome cinema, anything is possible. But cinema without David Cronenberg is unimaginable.

Videodrome

David Cronenberg

1983

87 min

Color

1.85:1

Categories: Film Essays