I listen frequently to a podcast that follows directors’ filmographies called Blank Check. The idea is that directors have huge successes and then get “blank checks” to make whatever they want, and “sometimes those checks clear, and sometimes they bounce (baby).” For instance, right now they’re doing the films of Robert Zemeckis, whose Back to the Future allowed him to do whatever he wanted, and Forrest Gump even moreso. And even almost thirty years later, it doesn’t matter if he makes a critically reviled and commercially unsuccessful film. He’ll still get to make The Witches two years later.
With the passing of Sean Connery, it should be noted that the 1974 film Zardoz is the ultimate Blank Check. I’ll accept arguments (Apocalypse Now comes to mind), but I’ve thought this is an example of the way industry and artistry and the competing visions of the “director” come to a head into something weird, wonderful, and catastrophic all at the same time.
In the 1960s, John Boorman made a series of commercially and critically successful movies. Gets his start with Catch Us if You Can, a Dave Clark 5 knockoff of A Hard Day’s Night. Gets attached to a mid-budget Lee Marvin vehicle in Point Blank, which is a modest hit that shows his dazzling visual abilities and taste for fragmented narrative that was becoming more popular. Hell in the Pacific is a troubled production, well-received but not that financially successful. Leo the Last (which isn’t available and I’ve never seen) wins him Best Director at Cannes.
In 1972, Boorman is not quite 40 and gets attached to Deliverance, a hot property with hot stars who are just now popping in Jon Voight and Burt Reynolds. Comes out of a desire by Gov. Jimmy Carter to film in Georgia with tax credits, and yeah . .. this isn’t the movie he wanted. Boorman is not the first choice. Author and bombast James Dickey clashes with him constantly, as does Reynolds. And yet if not for The Godfather, Deliverance probably wins Best Picture. It’s an award-nominated movie that doesn’t feel like an Oscar movie at all. A big, culture-defining hit that splits the difference between people who like cornpone stuff like Walking Tall and the people who hate the people who like Walking Tall (that’s a stretch, I realize).
Then there’s Zardoz, which he apparently writes while he’s going to adapt Lord of the Rings. Here’s the Wikipedia:
Boorman says “Nobody wanted to do it. Warners didn’t want to do it, even though I’d made a shitload of money for them.” His then-agent David Begelman knew the head of 20th Century Fox wanted to make a film with the director. He said the executive could read the script but needed to make a decision within two hours. “It’s either yes or no,” Begelman told him. “You have no approvals, and it’s a million dollars negative pick-up”. Boorman says “The Fox guy came to London, and I was very nervous, so we went for lunch whilst he read the script. When he finally came out of the office his hand was shaking, clearly with no idea of what to make of it. Begelman went straight up to him and said, ‘Congratulations!’ He never gave the poor guy a chance.
At first it’s going to have Burt Reynolds, but Burt gets sick and is replaced by the biggest film star in England, Sean Connery, just two years off playing James Bond. Shot in Ireland under Boorman’s own production company. Boorman controls every aspect of the production.
And what results you can find no end of internet write-ups about: Connery in a diaper going to kill a guy in a floating head that spits out guns.and that’s just the beginning of the movie.
So yeah, that – to me – is the ultimate BC. If any of you have any pull with the show, it would be delightful to get the two friends to dedicate a special ep. to it in light of its lead’s passing.
I don’t have a lot to say about Zardoz the film itself., so I’ll just post lines here from some of the better retrospectives.
For Tor.Com:
And yet, despite being accidentally funny, visually preposterous, borderline offensive, and a host of other cinematic crimes, Zardoz is not intentionally kitsch or cheesy. Instead, it’s trying to be a very earnest, very arty science fiction movie, which on paper might have actually been okay. Except, of course, that it wasn’t. It’s not that Zardoz is simply a bad movie. It’s just hard to believe that it even exists.
From Den of Geek:
Then, as if the sight of hundreds of scantily-clad extras worshipping a floating stone head wasn’t an incongruous enough image, the head begins to bellow out a sermon. “Zardoz speaks to you, his chosen ones,” it rumbles ominously. “You have been raised to kill the Brutals. The gun is good. The penis is evil.”
If you’re into making things, it’s quite easy to make your own miniature Zardoz head using strips of newspaper soaked in wallpaper paste, and a photograph of Brian Blessed as a template.
From Timeout:
A bizarre futurist fantasy which seems to have substituted itself when Boorman’s plans to film Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings fell through. Zardoz (joke ref: Wizard of Oz) is a vast, Blakean bust of a bearded Zeus which roams the air spewing arms and ammunition to its Exterminators on earth so that they may enforce the law: ‘The gun is good, the penis is evil’. Liberated by the memory of a rape committed in the course of his liberties, one of these Exterminators (Connery) enters the godhead, kills the magician manipulating it, and finds he has penetrated the Vortex, a world of sterilised stasis established to preserve the sum of man’s knowledge. At which point, poised to take off from its make love not war springboard, perhaps to explore the dichotomy between physical and spiritual forces, the script gradually falls apart into a mess of philosophical pottage under the whimsically pretentious Tolkien influence. But visually the film remains a sparkling display of fireworks, brilliantly shot and directed.
From Roger Ebert:
Sean Connery wanders through all of this with a slightly bemused expression on his face. He begins as a barbarian given to distrust and childish impulses, but after he gathers all knowledge to himself (the movie is full of phrases like “gathers all knowledge to himself”), he turns into a sort of body-building Einstein who sees into the center of the Vortex, deciphers the wisdom of the crystal, stimulates the Apathetics (that’s another social class I forgot to mention), makes love with a good-looking Immortal dame (she regains the knack) and finally turns into a fossil while the sound track milks Beethoven’s 7th for all it’s worth . . .
Every once in a while, a movie like that comes along; a movie you’ve got to see so that you, too, can be in the dark about it. In the movie’s own terms, this much can be said for sure: It may not make you an Apathetic, but it will certainly age you by two hours.
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