Hey good lookin '

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Movie
Original title Hey good lookin '
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 1982
length 77 minutes
Rod
Director Ralph Bakshi
script Ralph Bakshi
production Ralph Bakshi
music John Madara , Ric Sandler
cut Donald W. Ernst
synchronization

Hey Good Lookin ' (“Hey you Hübscher”) or Coonskin 2 is an animated film from 1982, in which Ralph Bakshi worked as a book author as well as a director and producer. The film is set in Brooklyn in the 1950s. The main characters are Vinnie, the leader of a gang called "the Stompers", his friend Crazy Shapiro and their friends, Rozzie and Eva.

Hey Good Lookin 'was first completed in 1975 as a real-life combo with animation, with only the main characters animated and the rest portrayed by live actors, but its release was delayed and later postponed indefinitely. Warner Bros. found this version of the film unsatisfactory, and there were controversial concerns as the film was a backlash to Coonskin .

In 1982 a completely different version of the film was released, in which the real film sequences were largely replaced by animated ones and the dialogues were heavily revised and reissued. This version was distributed in a limited version in the United States, but went largely unnoticed by the American public, but developed more in the foreign markets, where the film soon achieved cult status on cable television and video . The original version of the film was never released.

action

A middle-aged woman meets a strange man on the street at night, who shows her the remains of a leather jacket. The woman reacts hysterically, bursts into tears and kisses the piece of jacket. In flashback , the man then tells the story of the jacket and who it belonged to.

The act begins in Brooklyn in 1953, where Vinnie is the leader of the Stompers gang. He and his best friend Crazy Shapiro lead a nice, dissolute life there. Crazy's father, Solly, a police officer, hates his son for the way he lives and routinely tries to kill him. Meanwhile, Vinnie meets Rozzie on an old basketball court, but the meeting is abruptly interrupted by Rozzie's Jewish father, who doesn't want his daughter to "do anything" with Vinnie. When Vinnie waits for Rozzie to say goodbye the next day, because he wants to spend the night with Crazy in town, she does not appear; Rozzie had been chained to the bed by her father so that she would not be tempted to "do anything". Towards the end of the night, Vinnie and Crazy go to the beach to sleep. But when they wake up the next morning they realize that they are close to showering Sicilian women and their gangster husbands. As Crazy approaches the women inch by inch, Vinnie finds a body buried in the sand. Because of the screams from Vinnie and the women, they are noticed by the gangsters, who then beat Crazy.

Vinnie escapes, but, because he is crossing the border of the territory, meets Boogaloo and his gang, the "Black Chaplains", who challenge him to a fight between the gangs. The loser has to give his territory to the other gang. Vinnie later meets with Rozzie and Crazy's girlfriend, Eva, while Crazy has meanwhile killed all the gangsters alone on the beach. They go to a concert together, but on the way one of the stompers causes an accident and ends up with his car in the concert hall. This leads the gang to fight for Vinnie against the Chaplains when they really didn't want to. When two of the Chaplains drive through the Stompers' area, Vinnie, Crazy, Eva and Rozzie follow them. You can stop them and Crazy shoots them with his father's police officer’s service weapon. Vinnie tries to get out of town as he is the prime suspect in the Chaplains murder, but both the Stompers and Chaplains have expected it and are stopping him. Before the fight can start, Crazy's father arrives who is investigating the murder and wants to arrest Vinnie because he has received a tip from Boogaloo that he should look for the perpetrator with the Stompers. From the roof of a nearby house, Crazy starts shooting at random in all directions at the street, causing the two gangs to start shooting too. Vinnie tries to escape, but is shot by Solly. Crazy falls down from the roof, landing on Solly, killing himself and Solly at the same time. Vinnie leaves Brooklyn without saying goodbye to anyone, so Rozzie thinks he didn't survive the fight.

At the end of the film, you go back to the present, in the early 1980s in Long Island , and it turns out that the strange man and woman are Vinnie and Rozzie. Vinnie tries to explain to her why he left town, that he needed time to get over Crazy's death, but she angrily replies that he was lying, just wanted to leave her and save his own skin. But in the end they both decide to try again.

synchronization

production

After the production of Harlem Nights was completed, Bakshi wanted to embark on a new artistic direction in which real film and animation should coexist. Bakshi began writing Hey Good Lookin ' while working on Coonskin and the storyboard for a planned ABC series . For the characters Vinnie and Crazy, Bakshi used his high school friends Norman Darrer and Allen Schechterman as a basis. Warner Bros. had previously decided to release the film Fritz the Cat before starting funding another Bakshi project, but then gave production the go-ahead in 1973. Bakshi's studio hired some African American animators at a time when they weren't often employed by large animation studios. However, after the controversy over the film Coonskin , some of these animators left his studio, which got him into production difficulties for Hey Good Lookin ' .

Filming began in 1974 on a budget of $ 1.5 million. Pre-production, including auditions, lasted a week. Most of the scenes were shot directly in New York, some less important ones in the Warner Bros. studios in Los Angeles. Bakshi wanted the entire movie to be very surreal, with crazy guys played by real actors talking to animated characters in the movie. For example, Yaphet Kotto and the glam rock band New York Dolls were cast in the real-life scenes, with the New York Dolls playing homosexuals. Hexenkessel's actors Richard Romanus and David Proval were to take on the voices of Vinnie and Crazy. Many of the real-life scenes involved improvisations where Bakshi only gave the requirements and then let the actors create their own dialogues. For example, the actors of the chaplains built in popping and breakdance elements into the fight scenes , which was still atypical in the early 1970s.

music

Bakshi originally selected songs from his own record collection for the soundtrack, but they were not used due to the high cost of licensing. Originally the music for the 1974 production was from singer Daniel Hicks , but due to the delay in the movie release, Hicks' label released this material prematurely under the title It Happened One Bite . When the film was released in 1982, a new soundtrack was recorded by John Madara. In 2006 an album was released for the soundtrack.

filming

Most of the film was shot at night because Bakshi said that daylight would make the scenes less believable. Bakshi said that during the first day of shooting, the actors weren't able to play their roles in a natural-looking way, but once the cameras were turned off they began to behave as he expected them to. However, at the time there were no cameramen to record it, which is why Bakshi filmed it himself. When he told the cameraman William A. Fraker about it, he left the production and was replaced by a young cameraman who had never worked in a film production before.

Post production and publication

During the post-production of the film, Bakshi noticed that the cost of adding animated characters to the real-life scenes was higher than the budget of the film. In order to finish these scenes anyway, Bakshi and his cameraman Ted C. Bemiller acquired a 35mm camera to project the footage onto glass under the animation camera, which was reflected on where the animation was filmed. The same technique was used for the rotoscopic scenes in The Lord of the Rings by Bakshi. Bakshi himself says that they tried to make it look like a real live action movie, even if it had animated characters in it.

At the 1975 Cannes International Film Festival , a three-minute promotional version of the real-life film was shown, which is owned by the UCLA Film and Television Archives . The release of the film was originally planned for Christmas 1975, but it was postponed until the summer of 1976, then to the end of 1977, and finally indefinitely. Warner Bros. were concerned that the film would spark controversy as a repercussion of the controversies surrounding the Coonskin film , even though Hey Good Lookin ' did not contain any political element. The studio also said that the film would be "unreliable" due to the combination of real film and animation and therefore didn't want to invest any more money in it. Bakshi financed the completion of the film himself, from the fees he received as a director of other films between 1976 and 182, such as Wizards , The Lord of the Rings, and American Pop .

The then President of Warner Bros., Frank Wells , was of the opinion that Hey Good Lookin 'had to be completely revised before it was released, including reworking the dialogues and remaking a few scenes because they had not yet been included in market research would have been tested well. At the meetings during production, Wells Bakshi said he had missed his contractual obligations and processed more real-life elements than advertised, but Bakshi's lawyer was able to convince the studio not to sue him.

Most of the real-life footage was removed, but because Bakshi wanted to keep the breakdance scenes, he used rotoscopy to animate the footage. However, for financial reasons, he did not animate all of the material. Also only a small part of the dialogue was kept, but instead re-recorded by Proval, Romanus, and Philip Michael Thomas , who had also played in Coonskin .

After the success of heavy metal and American pop , Warner Bros. formed a special division for the release of the second version of Hey Good Lookin ' . It was finally released in New York on October 1, 1983 and in Los Angeles in January 1983. Although the film was barely noticed by the American public, it achieved decent sales abroad.

criticism

In a brief review, Vincent Canby wrote that the film "is not exactly incoherent, but it seems that the original meaning of the film has been lost". Leonard Maltin wrote that the film was "more interesting than Bakshi's other late films, [...] but as entertainment it was largely vulgar and pointless."

Animation historian Jerry Beck wrote that “the beginning of the film is very promising, with a trash can discussing life with trash, which is an example of what Bakshi did best - using animation as a medium for expressing society . Unfortunately, he doesn't use that enough in this film. At the climax of the film there is a very imaginative fantasy sequence when Crazy hallucinates during the shooting. This scene alone justifies almost the entire film. Otherwise the film ideas are better implemented in Coonskin , Heavy Traffic and Fritz the Cat ”.

Hey Good Lookin ' achieved cult status through its popularity, especially through cable TV and video. Quentin Tarantino stated that he preferred Hey Good Lookin ' to Martin Scorsese's cauldron . The 1974 version has remained unreleased to this day, although Warner Bros. owns the entire film.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p Best, Tony. Inner City Hues. in: Wax Poetics. (English) Last accessed 20 November 2011
  2. ^ Cohen, Karl F (1997). “Coonskin”. Forbidden Animation: Censored Cartoons and Blacklisted Animators in America. North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc. p. 88. ISBN 0-7864-0395-0
  3. ↑ Gibson, Jon M .; McDonnell, Chris (2008). "Brownsville". Unfiltered: The Complete Ralph Bakshi. Universe Publishing. P. 125f. ISBN 0-7893-1684-6
  4. ↑ a b c d e Gibson, Jon M .; McDonnell, Chris (2008). "Hey Good Lookin '" . Unfiltered: The Complete Ralph Bakshi. Universe Publishing. P. 180; 184. ISBN 0-7893-1684-6 .
  5. ↑ Planer, Lindsay (2003). "Dan Hicks". All Music Guide to Country. Backbeat Books. P. 343. ISBN 0-87930-760-9
  6. ↑ a b c Beck, Jerry (2005). "Hey Good Lookin '". The Animated Movie Guide. Chicago Review Press. P. 112. ISBN 978-1-55652-591-9 .
  7. ↑ Canby, Vincent: "Bakshi's 'Good Lookin'" in: New York Times, October 1, 1982.
  8. ^ Maltin, Leonard (2008). "H". Leonard Maltin's 2009 Movie Guide. Penguin Group. P. 606. ISBN 0-452-28978-5
  9. ^ Tarantino, Quentin (2008). "Foreword". Unfiltered: The Complete Ralph Bakshi. Universe Publishing. P. 11. ISBN 0-7893-1684-6