Cult is cult, regardless of the popularity of the object in question. Though it has growing competition in The Big Lebowski, for many the midnite experience supreme is Rocky Horror. It’s a haven for the otherwise shy to wear lingerie, throw crap at the screen, and warble at the top of their lungs. Maybe this description doesn’t do the movie justice, but when the audience can be hijacked by any strutting man in a bustier and fishnets, the movie ceases to matter.

Richard Elfman’s Forbidden Zone, on other hand, refuses to be upstaged.

It’s stranger, seedier, wilder than Rocky Horror, a burning shot of punked-and-funked quasi-euro jazz, German expressionism, twisted animation, and lust that runs a scant 75 minutes. It was also deservedly more controversial. Sexual (and transsexual) taboos collide politely on the surface of social mores, but heaven help the ones that dig up the black-faced history of what Americans once found entertaining, albeit via the sixth dimension. A dimension under the rule of a carnally voracious Herve Villachaize, no less.

Sprung from the infamous live performances of the Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo (and featuring Richard’s younger brother, famed composer Danny Elfman), Forbidden Zone was shunned on release. It cruised at an arctic depth for decades, surfacing in the odd bootleg and odder still in a glowing write up within Entertainment Weekly’s Guide to the Greatest Movies Ever Made. Richard Elfman was allegedly oblivious to the following until he started a website and was buried in fan mail.

Fast forward to last Wednesday night. The Egyptian is packed to the balcony for a one-time screening of Forbidden Zone in color, as originally intended. When I first learned the film had been enhanced, I feared a kind of three-color pastel nightmare straight out of the studio musical era, but longtime fans were blindsided by a vibrant digital remastering. Afterward the director was beaming, clearly overjoyed that his brain child now had a florid neon hue worthy of its leering spirit.

The Q&A that followed was appropriately informal.

Moderated by Michael Schlesinger (Lost Skeleton of Cadavra devotists better recognize, he’s bringing you the sequel ) the panel included animator John Muto, editor Marty Nicholson, and director Richard Elfman, but the loudest applause was reserved for Queen Doris herself, the legendary Susan Tyrrell. Illness has her in a wheelchair, but she nonetheless rolled regally to the center.

“At least I don’t need a chair,” she deadpanned, gesturing to her ride, ” I come with my own throne.” She spoke at length into Elfman’s ear before Schlesinger could sneak in his first question.

” What were you on, and where can I get some?”

Elfman’s response was ready, ” I’m not a puritan and I don’t put down what anyone else does, but I don’t take drugs.”

“It’s true, I can vouch for that.” Tyrrell interjected cryptically.

” Wine and women are more than one man can handle.” He added.

In between talking about the origins of the film (you can hear it from the man himself in cityzine’s forthcoming interview), the panel shared stories of how they were drawn into the vortex.

There was some confusion as to how Villechaize got onboard. Elfman recalled him rooming with writer and co-star Matthew Bright (credited in the film as Toshiro Baloney) but according to Tyrrell, the Fantasy Island icon was shacking up with her.

” Herve was living with me at the time, remember? I told you I had the midget’s midget ” says Tyrrell. Despite the confusion, they could all agree on his remarkable commitment to the project.

” He kicked back his SAG check back into the production,” praises Elfman, ” and he would come in nights and weekends to help paint sets.”

Editor Marty Nicholson had been bumming around New York prior to working on Forbidden Zone, ” [Richard and I] had a mutual friend, [director] Martin Brest. Richard hired me as an A.D. and I headed West. I was actually looking for a way to go West. It was quite a thing to walk into Rick’s world. If you loved New York and you came from New York, Venice was like the village. Bohemia. I don’t know if I should be revealing some of these things but Rick’s techniques for financing his films were where I first learned ”

“Okay, statute of limitations,” the director interrupted. ” How many of you have seen Mad Men? Picture one of those characters is a bank vice president who’s strung out on coke in the men’s room of the Playboy club. His deal is he gives me fifty, I give him back five under the table. That’s how we were paid.”

” Well that’s Um, more than I would There were many many unique things that took place, but very quickly I realized how much music was a part of Rick’s vision. It was inextricably linked. And initially I was put off by the paper sets. Then I met Marie (Elfman’s wife at the time) and the surrealism came into it. Her family background, the grande act du cirque and all this stuff in France, all that coming together and that’s when the vision got exciting.” says Nicholson.

Tyrrell is convinced the studio space, an old barn on Beverly, had bad vibes. ” It was this ghostly sickness. We all got it! We all got sick, remember?” she asked Elfman. “Remember you used to have all those masseuses come – well, that was for you, but do remember how old that place was?”

” I remember the ghosts,” teased Elfman.

“Don’t make it up, now!” Tyrrell shot back.

” No I’m not! The original guy who played Flash was a guy off the street who went crazy. And then there was some ancient vaudevillian in some kind of corner closet where he had his office and I said, ‘ you look like him’ and that’s how we [re]cast Flash.”

Tyrrell brightened “Oh! What about the big fat guy-?”

Elfman: “The Bim Bam Boom guy? This was just a character from the streets of Venice. He was vying for the pantomime parts, but when he had to open his mouth to sing ‘Bim Bam Boom’ he froze up. So we took Matthew Bright’s lips and superimposed them over his. I still use that as an admonishment to actors to do it my way. Do it or we’ll have Matthew fix it after the fact.”

Bridging most of the gaps in the movie was the job of animator John Muto, who went on to a successful career in production design and special effects. Mic in hand, Muto interrupted the proceedings for a brief moment.

“There’s something I’ve been waiting 30 years to do, and that’s meet Susan Tyrrell.” He walked over to get a hug and a kiss from a charmed Tyrrell. ” And I took your head off!” cracked Muto, referring to his work on her musical number in the film.

Muto continued: ” I came into this because I was up in San Francisco, dying on the vine. I taught myself to animate watching Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color. I was one of those kids who was always drawing comic books. What wound up happening is that I got a corporate job making educational films. So these guys came along when I was just about ready to flip out. They offered me the chance to come down here and as they described it, to work for nothing and live in a grungy place. Although I realized I actually made more money working for you guys.” Then Muto added, poker faced, ” That’s the way it was in the seventies. There was no money in education.”

Arriving in L.A. Elfman found Muto accommodations and put him to work. “They put me in this mansion on Dudley and then I was running wild, doing all these drawings. I had been directing [in San Francisco] but I hadn’t drawn in a long time, and I didn’t have the budget to hire anyone else. I had to draw everything. There was one guy, Jim Shaw, who now is a big gallery owner. I did have a future oscar-winner on my crew, John Nelson.” Muto was referring to the visual effects animator. Nelson’s touch was most recently applied to the blockbuster Iron Man. Muto credited Nelson for heavy lifting on Queen Doris’s showstopper “Witch’s Egg,” then he turned the spotlight to representatives of Legend Films, the group with the considerable task of ushering Forbidden Zone into color.

For those who have never seen the movie, you would never detect it was originally in black and white. The work is so carefully applied and unfailingly seamless, it’s a bit of a sharp rebuke for anti-digital purists. There is computer output in Hollywood with something akin to a soul, and even Muto, who groused a little about today’s reliance on CG (”the star wars movies looked like rubber”) was shocked at how much the process added to Forbidden Zone. Elfman implored Legend founder Dr. Barry Sandrew to stand up among the crowd. The picture is one of the latest to benefit from a technique Dr. Sandrew’s company is perfecting

” It must be hard not to flip out and go wild. Congratulations, it looks wonderful.” Muto gushed.

Elfman picked up his cell and dialed Matthew Bright AKA Toshiro Baloney, who was unable to attend due to a family emergency. It rang and rang.

“He’s probably masturbating,” Tyrrell quipped.

First, Bright spoke about joining the Elfman family circle: ” I knew Rick and Marie through Danny. I just kind of drifted into the craziness. [All of us] were just trying to make each other laugh and Rick put it together as a film.” (Elfman asserts that the story was secondary and the entire creative process was “ass-backwards”)

On his role as a writer: ” I came on as an actor, but I had to make a place for [Squeezit the Chicken Boy], give him a reason to be there. I can’t remember what I wrote or what [Rick] wrote.”

“He’s being modest, he contributed the best lines.” added Elfman.

Again, the discovery of Herve Villachaize became a point of debate.

” Herve was my roommate at the time. When I first saw him, two sisters were holding him down to get his pain pills out of his pocket against his will.” Bright claims (he was admittedly difficult to hear, so this should be taken with a grain of salt).

” You’re wrong dear, but that’s okay.” Tyrrell shot back. Schlesinger took a question from the crowd.

” Are you gay or Jewish or both?” a heckler, fan, or both shouted from the back.

” None of your fucking business!” Bright shouted happily before hanging up.

Things took a turn for the fiscal and technical, during which Susan announced she had to pee and wheeled off.

“Susan Tyrrell, everybody,” announced Elfman, realizing she probably wasn’t coming back. He was right.

The topic of the film’s initial reception was broached. ” Sam Goldwyn ran it as a midnite show in the summer of ‘82. We got kicked out of the University of Wisconsin. There were arson threats,” says Elfman, ” I’m serious! Then six or seven years ago I put up a website and I was surprised to find how many people had seen it. There are bootlegs floating around.”

On Tyrrell’s climactic catfight with Warhol’s former superstar Viva: ” The fight between Viva and Susan was real. They really hated each other. There were bloody necks and broken noses.” Elfman mentioned with a smile.

And what’s with the crap all over the floor of the ‘Zone? “Foam rubber crumbles.”

Inspiration behind the dapper frog-headed man? ” It was created by one of the Mystic Knights. I’m not sure what influenced him, but it was free prop.”

What’s with the Kipper Kids? ” One’s a German aristocrat and Bette Midler’s husband. The other’s in London. They will be in Forbidden Zone 2: The Forbidden Galaxy.”

” Have you thought of doing the sequel in 3-D?” a young, inked-up fella near the front asked.

In a word, no, he hasn’t.

But he seems to have everything else pretty well covered. On record Elfman would only confirm the sequel’s existence. His website, however, is bursting at the seams with details that will be tantalizing for die-hards and head-scratching for everyone else, but trust him. He knows exactly what he’s doing.

Thanks again to Jack Bruno, Richard Elfman, and the Egyptian Theatre.

Forbidden Zone can be purchased here.

photo courtesy of buzzine

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