Reader Recommendation from James Auburn
AKA BJ Presents; B.J. Lang Presents
“…a motion picture so haunted… it will never be shown!” – B.J. Lang Presents trailer
DIRECTED BY: Yabo Yablonsky
FEATURING: Mickey Rooney, Luana Anders, Keenan Wynn
PLOT: The film takes place almost entirely on a dusty soundstage. B.J. Lang (Rooney) has kidnapped a woman he refers to as Carlotta (Luana Anders of “Easy Rider”) and has tied her to a wheelchair. Lang spends nearly 90 minutes tormenting Carlotta, screaming at her, forcing her to recite lines to an imaginary movie, and spooning baby food into her mouth, among other indignities.
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: This acid-damaged wannabe-arthouse film has stupefied even jaded psychotronic film freaks. Every “hip” avant-garde editing gimmick in the psychedelic-era toolbox is utilized: strobe lights, fish-eye lens, solarization, freeze-frames, quick-cut frames of random images, flashbacks/flash-forwards, slow-motion/fast-motion, etc. The viewing experience feels like a 90-minute long, 104-degree-fever hallucination that makes you question your own sanity. The uncomfortably cathartic performances from its two leads seem like a blend of acting-workshop exercises and heavy existential therapy put on film. Through extended monologues, the central character explores his own inner turmoil and waxes philosophical about life and show business, and as he wallows in his own insanity, the movie itself follows suit.
COMMENTS: Yes, one of the most demented movies you’ve ever seen starred Mickey Rooney—and he gives a psychotic tour-de-force performance that must be seen to be disbelieved.
In the opening scene, B.J. Lang enters the soundstage, as if to begin a routine day of work, passing cobwebbed props and backdrops; he sits down, and starts talking excitedly to thin air. Lang establishes himself as either a movie director who has gone insane, or an insane man who fancies himself a movie director; it’s never quite clear which. He runs a take of an imaginary movie scene while barking orders at mannequins and a film crew that exists only in his addled head. This opening segment culminates in a nightmarish two-minute freakout sequence with Lang screaming at two nude white-bodypainted figures (his parents? sure, why not) who cruelly laugh at him, over a screeching electronic racket. Suddenly: silence. Closeup: Lang is drenched in sweat, exhausted, as are our eardrums and sensibilities. What’s your threshold for cinematic insanity? You’ll know in the first ten minutes of The Manipulator.
We then discover Carlotta, tied to the wheelchair. Evidently she’s been there against her will for some time. For a long stretch, her only line is “I’m hungry, Mr. Lang!” She repeats it, again and again, with every different inflection she can muster (Lang spoon-feeds her a few dollops of baby food, for which she says she’ll “always be grateful.”) Her bondage and hunger set off frequent hallucinations of her own as she fantasizes about her own escape.
At one point, after a protracted silence, the camera cuts to a disturbing closeup of Mickey Rooney dolled up in blue eye-shadow, red lipstick, and rouge. He speaks to Carlotta in the effeminate tones of a mincing makeup artist. This is the moment that seems to have most scarred the psyches of those who have endured this movie.
After this astonishing scene, Lang is back to director-mode, forcing Carlotta to recite lines to a scene from his imaginary adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac as he runs a camera with no film in it. Lang has cast himself as the titular lead: Rooney spends the entire last hour of the movie in a long putty nose and plumed hat, and wielding a rapier that is apparently no prop—it has quite lethal power, as we will see.
A dreamlike hippie party scene appears seemingly out of nowhere, packed with flamboyantly-dressed freaks and free spirits, that breaks into a psychedelic orgy as B.J. yells “LOVE! LOVE! LOVE!”. He suddenly separates from the revelers to cradle a toddler who’s been waddling around the proceedings. Lang desperately whispers “my baby… my baby… my baby…” His longing for his own lost innocence? Sure, why not.
Carlotta eventually breaks free from her restraints and is chased all over the room, in an interminable sequence stretched to five minutes by tedious slow motion, with more overbearing electronic bleeps and burbles. Trudging through a thicket of costumes in the wardrobe room, as jungle sounds overlay the soundtrack, she runs into a homeless drunk (“Old Charlie”, played by Keenan Wynn) who pops up, says two lines over and over for four minutes, gets killed by B.J. Lang with the sword, and that’s that.
Witnessing Old Charlie’s murder, Carlotta simply imagines herself running away, through a meat locker past slabs of beef, and into a tuxedoed string quartet, as the film solarizes and the electronic score continues to doodle away. (Much of this movie’s symbolism is hamfistedly obvious – some of it, like this, I’ll leave to the philosophers among us.) Lang then allows her to actually escape the building, only to catch her and bring her right back up to the same soundstage.
In the end, after Lang demands that Carlotta give herself to him, she begins laughing at him, and the world around him joins her in doing so; Lang cannot bear the mockery and rejection, so, with as much florid prose as ever, he stabs himself with that same sword. As he dies, Carlotta starts hearing an invisible crowd’s applause and takes several bows as the camera slowly pans back. Has she inherited her captor’s showbiz-based mental delusions? Sure, why not. The credits roll – but wait: a high-speed clip of Rooney dancing a Chaplinesque jig is briefly repeated from earlier, as a final kiss-off to the beleaguered viewer.
Mickey Rooney does his damnedest here to obliterate any trace of his previous child-star image. He mugs, shouts, screams, sweats, whispers, dances, flies into stream-of-consciousness soliloquies, holds conversations with people that aren’t there, tunelessly bellows “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” several times, and embodies a mind’s feverish descent into madness quite convincingly and terrifyingly. Luana Anders handles her scant material in much the same manner; she and Rooney both seize every opportunity to summon demons from the depths of their guts and ids. It was as if the whole project was seen as a chance for Janovian primal scream therapy (or perhaps to follow the lead of… R.D. Laing?) by all involved.
Jazz legend Gil Mellé produced the score, which ranges from harsh, dissonant electronic cacophony to chamber-string ensemble underscores to flute-and-Fender Rhodes lounge jazz. Mellé did his classic electronic score for The Andromeda Strain the same year, and honestly, I prefer his work here, for the variety alone. (Here’s a clip of Melle demonstrating his self-invented electronic instrument, the “Percussotron”, which he used in both movies.)
But for all the arthouse ambition and acidhead zaniness, this movie is a tough slog. It’s pretentious and experimental, and even fascinating in its way, but in between the memorably gobsmacking WTF moments, the minutes drag like hours, mostly due to Rooney’s fevered monologues and forced motivations for Carlotta to channel her inner Roxane to his Cyrano. The psychedelic effects seem to come from a countercultural film student, steeped in the avant-garde but with no sense of pacing or narrative, merely used to paper over the staginess of the production. B.J. Lang Presents, AKA The Manipulator, is an endurance test that I would imagine more people fail than pass.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
IMDB LINK: The Manipulator (1971)
OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:
Nape Dropping: Yabo Yablonsky: A 2015 blog post from writer/poet/gadabout Richard Selinkoff, who claims (and why would he make it up?) to have worked, uncredited, as an art director’s assistant on The Manipulator. A very entertaining read – among other memorable tidbits:
- Yabo Yablonsky was the director’s actual name, and he was apparently quite the flamboyant character.
- The film’s wrap party on the set did indeed break into an orgy (Selinkoff doesn’t record whether that event is the one shown in the film).
- According to Selinkoff, “I borrowed the old-fashioned wheelchair that Mickey kept Luana tied to in the movie from Frank Zappa, who had used it after being thrown from a stage in Europe by a deranged fan”. (Slight problem: Zappa’s injury occurred on Dec. 10, 1971, and the film’s release date was only five days later, according to a contemporaneous issue of The New York Times.)
HOME VIDEO INFORMATION: Originally titled B.J. Lang Presents, the film was released on VHS in 1986 as The Manipulator, and was a ubiquitous offering on the online “rare weird movie” bootleg DVD circuit of the 2000s. In 2006, Mill Creek Entertainment released it as one of 50 movies in their “Drive In Movie Classics” box set (buy). In 2014, Alpha Home Entertainment released it on a standalone DVD, clearly taken from a faded VHS transfer (buy).
The AFI Catalog claims that “although the onscreen credits include a 1971 copyright statement for CoBurt Corp-American Media, Inc., the film was not registered for copyright“. The entire movie, in public domain or not, shows up frequently on YouTube and Dailymotion.
(This film was nominated for review by Steve Mobia, who said “t’s not a great film but it is certainly very weird with scene chewing star Micky Rooney’s psychotic hallucinations on full display… The sheer oddness of this 1970 picture should qualify it for the list.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here).
I have seven or eight of those Mill Creek sets and they are absolute gold. They were around $10 when they were released.