Hollywood brass had discovered bikers long before the hippies (see Brando in The Wild One, 1953) but they really got their motors runnin’ once everyone started ...
Chuck Statler started his long career in innovative and influential music video by collaborating with his classmates and fellow-pranksters at Kent State Univers...
Originally written in 1975, at the height of the so-called “Blaxploitation-era”, this New York Magazine piece was recently dusted off by Mark Jacobson for PKM. ...
Today (Dec. 21, the first official day of winter) would have been Frank Zappa’s 80th birthday. Given how his music continues to attract new generations and the ...
A new Netflix film, Mank, directed by David Fincher, focuses attention on the career of Herman J. Mankiewicz. Citizen Kane, for which he wrote the screenplay (a...
A former English teacher and mail-order salesman from Detroit named Herschell Gordon Lewis saw an exploitable niche in the film industry and, starting in 1963, ...
Florida cult-film director William Grefe’ ('Gruh-fay') turned low-budget filmmaking into a sort of folk art in the ‘60s and ‘70s, using man-eating gators, deadl...
Carlos De Maldonado-Bostock was identified as a “bohemian” in the credits of the documentary film Nico Icon (1995), directed by Susanne Ofteringer. A friend of ...
Richard Kern's Fingered (1988) is one of the masterpieces of the Cinema of Transgression movement. With bruising performances by Lydia Lunch, Marty Nation, and ...
Canadian-born, Native American actor Gary Farmer served as the moral conscience and spiritual center of Jim Jarmusch’s film Dead Man (1995), a cosmic reimaginin...
The acclaimed guitarist Gary Lucas (Captain Beefheart, Jeff Buckley, Gods and Monsters, Lou Reed, et al.) has long held a special flame for Brian Jones, the co-...
Jimmy McDonough is best-known for his exhaustive bios of Neil Young (Shakey), Tammy Wynette (Tragic Country Queen) and Russ Meyer (Big Bosoms and Square Jaws), ...
Jeff Krulik and John Heyn’s 1986 film Heavy Metal Parking Lot has become an unlikely cult classic. In less than 20 minutes, the film—culled from footage taken i...
The Oscar-winning cinematographer (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) Haskell Wexler turned his hand to film direction with Medium Cool, set during the ‘Police Ri...
