They Came. They Sawed.
(Page 6 of 8)
Finally, by late summer 1974, Hooper had his finished film. Once again, Warren Skaaren waltzed into view, this time to help the Austin neophytes find a Hollywood distributor. Columbia Pictures offered a $25,000 advance, then rescinded the offer a week later when its board of directors in New York expressed shock that the august studio would consider distributing such a low-life film. Rejected by the rest of the majors, Skaaren forged ahead with screenings for the many independents that were around at that time. It wasn’t long before Skaaren called Henkel, Hooper, and Parsley with great news. An executive at New York–based Bryanston Distributors had watched the film and offered $100,000 on the spot. A few days later Skaaren called again. The print had been sent to Bryanston’s East Coast headquarters, and now the offer was $200,000. Parsley was especially pleased, knowing that he could recover his entire investment right away. The negotiations were swift, and on the day that Richard Nixon resigned the presidency, the deal closed at $225,000 and 35 percent of the box office.
The New York Intellectual Massacre
LEGEND HAS IT THAT, on a certain evening in October 1974, The TexasChainsawMassacre was sneak-previewed at a theater in San Francisco, where half the audience got sick and others pelted the screen, yelled obscenities, and demanded their money back. Fistfights broke out in the lobby, and the film became famous. The reality is probably less dramatic. The most credible version is that several San Francisco politicians, including city council members, had gone to a special screening of the movie The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, and it was a coincidence that Chainsaw was being sneaked as a second feature. The politicians were outraged by what they saw, and therefore the press heard about it. Knowing what we now know about Bryanston Distributors, few things involving Chainsaw were coincidental. There’s a good possibility that the whole thing was staged to create a controversy. At any rate, a myth was born that night—that there was not only a horrific new movie but a new kind of movie, a docudrama so nauseatingly and relentlessly gory that it tested the very limits of what the First Amendment allows.
Chainsaw was an overnight hit. Bryanston had done a masterful job of marketing and releasing the film, beginning with the classic poster, which today sells for $500 and up. “What happened is true,” it announced with classic exploitation-film showmanship. “Now the motion picture that’s just as real.” No one will ever know precisely how many people saw it, but in its first four days in Texas alone, the film grossed $602,133. Extrapolating from that, a national release would have earned anywhere from $5 million to $10 million in its opening week—enough to make it the number one release of that month and easily a top-five grossing movie even in year-2004 numbers.
But then it would ascend into a different stratosphere as the critical firestorm began. Johnny Carson made disapproving jokes about it. Rex Reed called it “the scariest movie I’ve ever seen, the Jaws of the midnight movie.” The Los Angeles Times called it “despicable . . . ugly and obscene . . . a degrading, senseless misuse of film and time.” But the bad reviews helped just as much as the rare good one. By the time it reached New York, it had become as notorious as Deep Throat, if somewhat less popular with the Hamptons set. Meanwhile, Bryanston pulled off the coup of getting the film accepted by the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival in May 1975. Cannes was not widely understood at the time, so many people thought Chainsaw was one of the 24 films actually accepted for competition. It was instead part of a two-week showcase of new directors, a showcase famous for highlighting the offbeat, if not the downright bizarre. Cannes organizers treated Chainsaw not unlike a Ugandan documentary on female circumcision—a sort of “Get a load of what we found” entry—but spin is everything in the world of movie promotion.
Noting how angry people became when the film was praised by intellectuals, Bryanston further stoked the fires by making a gift of a perfect print of Chainsaw to the film collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The gift was hardly noticed at the time, but when MOMA started turning up in Bryanston’s advertisements (“Part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art!”), reporters called the museum, where a spokesman confirmed that, yes, the film had recently been cataloged. Especially offended by this was Stephen Koch, a friend of Andy Warhol’s and the author of a book on Warhol’s films. He called Chainsaw“ a vile little piece of sick crap” and part of a growing “hard-core pornography of murder” that should best be compared to snuff films.
“It is a film with literally nothing to recommend it,” he wrote in Harper’s. “Nothing but a hysterically paced, slapdash, imbecile concoction of cannibalism, voodoo, astrology, sundry hippie-esque cults, and unrelenting sadistic violence as extreme and hideous as a complete lack of imagination can possibly make it. . . . We are here discussing something close to the absolute degradation of the artistic imagination. . . . André Breton said the simple surrealist act would be to take a revolver into a crowded street and fire at random. They seem to have read Breton down in Texas.”
Of course, with a major New York intellectual weighing in against the film, there was bound to be a backlash of support, especially since the phrase “pornography of violence” would become the operative term in the future debate. Roger Greenspun made a kind of backhanded defense of the film in Film Comment (the magazine of the Film Society of Lincoln Center!), and Lew Brighton, writing in Film Journal, curiously described it as “the Gone With the Wind of meat movies,” comparing it favorably to Night of the Living Dead, Cannibal Girls, I Drink Your Blood, I Eat Your Skin, and Soylent Green.
The problem with all this so-called debate is that every commentator made some kind of basic factual error about what is actually in the film. Koch thought the movie was made in the Panhandle. Brighton, strangely enough, thought the movie had something to do with trespassing on the property of country rubes. “As far as I know,” he wrote, apparently seriously, “Texas is the only state in the Union where it’s legal to shoot trespassers, merely for stepping on one’s lawn.” The idea that the story could take place only in Texas informed a lot of the more hysterical articles, ignoring the fact that the principal source material was from medieval German folklore and Wisconsin court archives. If you read enough of the reviews, in fact, you start to think that the scariest word in the title was neither “Chainsaw” nor “Massacre” but “Texas.”
“Texas itself,” wrote feminist critic Mary Mackey, “is the land of male violence par excellence. In American folk mythology, Texas, more than any other state, embodies the cowboy ideal of the lone male who carves out a place for himself with his trusty Colt .45. . . . For years Texas was famous for being the only state where a man who caught his wife in bed with her lover had an automatic right (you might even say duty) to shoot her, while a woman who shot her husband under similar circumstances could almost be sure of being convicted of murder. Women have never counted for very much in Texas, and in the lives of the slaughterhouse family they don’t count at all . . . One of the functions of violence against women in the cinema (and in real life, for that matter) is to reduce them to just such a state of total compliance. To the men in the audience this fantasy of having absolute power over a woman is no doubt sexually exciting, and one of the reasons for the popularity of the film.”
In fact, as Berkeley professor Carol Clover would later show in her book Men, Women, Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, the young males watching the film identified not with the cannibal family at all but with the remarkably resilient Sally. They did have fear and loathing of a female character, but that character was the longing-to-be-a-woman Leatherface, and this constant gender confusion is what has given the slasher film its peculiar power throughout its thirty-year history. Adolescent boys could feel vulnerable by identifying with the woman, while the fearsome forces in their real lives were transformed into psychotic, asexual dragons to be slain. In Friday the 13th, Halloween, and A Nightmare on Elm Street, the survivors were tomboyish girls and the predators were sexually confused males.
All this would come later, though. In the first few remarkable months after the film’s release, the cast and crew back in Austin were suddenly transformed into celebrities. Some cast members had seen the film at a private screening on Congress Avenue, and they were not too impressed. “Tobe Hooper asked me how I thought it could be improved,” recalls Allen Danziger, “so I told him, ‘Well, you could turn the chairs so that they’re facing away from the screen.’”
Teri McMinn, the actress who was impaled on the meat hook, was driving her Volkswagen bus from Austin to Houston when she and her girlfriend decided to pick up a hitchhiker. He turned out to be talkative and said he’d been to a drive-in the previous evening and that they “wouldn’t f—ing believe this movie I saw.” He then proceeded to tell the whole story of Chainsaw, until McMinn couldn’t wait any longer and said, “Do you recognize me?” “I thought he was going to have a coronary,” she says now, but it was the first time she realized the movie would have an actual life outside Austin.
