Joe Dante
Premio Urania d’argento alla carriera 2007
Celebrating Joe Dante in Trieste, “second home”, since the early Sixties, of his godfather Roger Corman – means redigging into the most fertile and unique spring of American cinema: the 70’s, and in particular the New World Pictures, –a new world indeed–, the company Corman managed and directed with success during those ten years. Among various proof evidences on that volcanic talent forge here is accounted, for example, what was written then by a French colleague at the American Film Festival in Deauville 1976: “Almost every time, New World films produced by Corman, breath an air of freedom, conditioned only by two commercial factors, sex and violence… The humour and spirit of Corman’s Factory are mocked by two debutant Cormanians, filmmakers Joe Dante and Allan Arkush with Hollywood Boulevard, a brilliant expose of today’s “King of the B’s”, and an endless mockery mixing homages (Bava, Corman, Fuller…), private jokes (the Stroheim-like director in the film is played by Paul Bartel, whose Death Race 2000 was another New World hit), stockshots, that all B movie fans will enjoy. With more care and rigour the film could have been the Sunset Boulevard of its subgenre: it still remains a lying selfportrait but at the same time revealing on a sector of an incredible vivacity. Long live Corman!” (L. Codelli, Positif, November 1976).
Some decades passed and Joe, deservedly, became famous for his virulent Gremlins, Explorers and Amazing Stories.
In August 1999 Locarno International Film Festival organised a memorable retrospective entitled Class of 1970: Joe Dante and Corman’s second Generation (the first generation, as we all know, includes filmmakers such as Coppola, Scorsese, Bogdanovich, Jack Nicholson, Robert Towne, etc, etc).Two are the catalogues of the event, similar but not identical, edited by Bill Krohn and Jonathan Rosenbaum: Hollywood Boulevard. Joe Dante and the Other Independent Cinema, published by Olivares, Milan, still available; Joe and Hollywood’s Gremlins, Cahiers du Cinéma, Paris.
Other than presenting shorts and features of Dante & Company, Marco Müller, director of the festival, invited Joe Dante, Allan Arkush, Monte Hellman, Roger and Julie Corman, Paul Bartel, Stephanie Rothman, the actors Mary Woronov, Kevin McCarthy, Dick Miller – Corman’s icon linking all his generations –, the producers Jon Davison and Michael Finnel.
Only John Sayles, Pino Donaggio and other “pupils” of the same lever were missing. That group of inseparables not only animated day by day the q&a’s, but also attended hilariously the screenings of their own “old” films at the Rex Cinema, with handy microphones switched on even during the screenings. We heard jokes, anecdotes, gags and fucks!, “the way we were”, attending, for example, the flood of crazy trailers that Joe Dante has edited for New World, with his own hyper-eisensteinian touch; or fragments of The Movie Orgy, the delirium of spots that Dante had started to conceive in 1966 at Philadelphia College of Art. And much more, reconfirming how Hollywood Boulevard bites (and flees) even more nowadays than his anarchic Piranha.
Recent Dantesque excursions for the series Masters of Horror, reconfirm so clearly his aggressive talent and his indestructible “vision of a New World”.
Lorenzo Codelli
