Frank Zappa’s 200 Motels
“I never set out to be weird. It was always other people who called me weird.”–Frank Zappa, Baltimore Sun, October 12, 1986
DIRECTED BY: Tony Palmer, Frank Zappa
FEATURING: Howard Kaylan, Mark Volman, Theodore Bikel, Ringo Starr, Keith Moon, Jimmy Carl Black, Frank Zappa
PLOT: A collection of absurd sketches about life on the road as a rock band, 200 Motels offers very little in the way of plot. Running bits include Ringo Starr playing a large dwarf enlisted to portray Zappa, Theodore Bikel as a Mephistophelean figure trying to get the band to sign documents in blood, and Keith Moon as a groupie dressed as a nun; amidst the chaos, the band members constantly try to either get laid, get high, or scheme to form spin-off bands. In between, Zappa and the band perform musical numbers like “Lonesome Cowboy Burt,” and Zappa conducts an orchestra playing his avant-garde classical compositions.
BACKGROUND:
- Frank Zappa thought up the idea for the film while on tour with the Mothers of Invention. He wrote much of the music in 200 Motels from motel rooms while on tour.
- The opening credits explain the split in the directorial duties, with Tony Palmer credited for “visuals” and Zappa for directing the “characterizations.”
- Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan (“Flo and Eddie”) formerly comprised the Turtles, who had a smash hit with “Happy Together.” They joined Zappa’s band, the Mothers of Invention, as featured vocalists in 1970, and stayed in the Mothers until 1972—just long enough to have featured roles in 200 Motels.
- Ringo Starr’s chauffeur played the band’s bass player: according to one anecdote, he was cast after the two bass players quit the band and a frustrated Zappa vowed to hire the next person who walked through the door.
- 200 Motels was one of the earliest films shot on video and transferred to film. Shooting on video allowed Tony Palmer to create visual effects that would have been too expensive to shoot on film.
- In his review of the soundtrack album, Palmer called 200 Motels “one of the worst films in the entire history of cinema, a criticism which I can confidently assert because I was in part responsible for its direction.“
- In 1988 Zappa made a documentary about the film called The True Story of Frank Zappa’s 200 Motels. That rarity is long out of print on VHS and has never had an authorized DVD or Blu-ray release.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: Tony Palmer overlaid trippy experimental video effects—the visual correlative of Frank Zappa’s oddball music—over almost every minute of the running time, making this a particularly difficult movie to choose a single image for. These tricks accumulate to build up a hazy impression of whirling psychedelia. Since we have to pick one image, however, we’ll go with our first view of Centerville, the small town enveloped in a wavering pattern of lysergic zebra stripes, which represents the hazy, melted-together vision of every two-bit town the band soldiers through.
THREE WEIRD THINGS: Hot Nun; towel smoking; penis oratorio
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: If anything sets 200 Motels apart from the other psychedelic cinematic noodlings of the hippie era, it’s Frank Zappa’s extraordinarily weird music—a unique mix of jazz-inflected blues/rock, avant-garde 12-tone classical music, and junior high school sex jokes. Mix concert footage (both of the Mothers of Invention and the orchestra Zappa retained for the shoot) with experimental videos, underground cartoons, oddball rock star cameos, and no plot whatsoever and you have a movie worthy of the production company’s name: “Bizarre Productions.” Zappa is a latter-day saint of pop-surrealism, and although he’ll always be best known for his music, this is the canonical record of his twisted sensibility on film.
Original trailer for 200 Motels
COMMENTS: The original tagline did not read “Ringo Starr IS Larry Continue reading 266. 200 MOTELS (1971)
“), a sympathetic treatment which cast the practice of witchcraft as a protest against the feudal system and the power of the Church.
I would begin by summarizing Atmo HorroX‘s plot, but, although I believe there is one, I’m not 100% sure I could find it. The movie focuses largely on the stalking activities of a monster (Lecompte) wearing pantyhose with sweetgum seeds stuck on it over his face and sporting a plume of phallic balloons jutting from his crotch. He conjures levitating sausages and kills people by placing ladies’ shoes on either side of their head. There are other, more traditional-looking horror monsters running around in the film as well; the face of one is battered into liquid during the film’s opening, only to rise as a rainbow snake. There’s also some kind of witch, a creature dressed in black latex with nine eyes, a man with remote controls taped to his bodies who communicates with the main monster by walkie talkie, a playboy wearing psychedelic goggles, and others. Often, scenes go on for too long with these characters simply posing on the screen, letting us drink in their oddness. Even the best parts can go on for too long: a doctor with a mutton chop goatee takes forever to write prescriptions (which are nothing but long, elaborate scribbles) for patients, then shakes his head, tears them up, and starts over. It’s funny, but the gag repeats too many times. The entire movie probably should have been at least twenty minutes shorter: it wears on you, and many scenes could have been trimmed or cut entirely. There is no comprehensible dialogue—it’s all garbled nonsense, sometimes distorted with feedback and cranked up to painful levels—and when there is music it is just as discordant as the dialogue. The color grading is garish, saturated oranges and pinks, making the monster appear to glow against the forest or street backgrounds as he roams.