Wild 90 is a 1968 experimental film directed and produced by U.S. novelist Norman Mailer, who also plays the starring role. The film is a creative collaboration based on three friends, Norman Mailer, Buzz Farbar, and Mickey Knox who were seen drinking, braying, and fighting in a run-down apartment in lower Manhattan. Pretending to be gangsters, the trio played with different props, such as pistols and machine guns. The film marks Mailer's first effort into film-making. It was filmed on a 16-millimeter camera and recorded on magnetic sound tape.
Plot
A trio of Mafia gangsters – The Prince, Cameo and Twenty Years —are hiding in a warehouse. They have surrounded themselves with guns and liquor, and they kill time by joking and bickering with scatological language. But as their isolation from the world progresses, their drinking and arguing intensify. They are briefly visited by a man with a barking dog—the canine is silenced when The Prince outbarks him — and by two women, one of whom gives The Prince a knife for committing suicide. The police arrive at the warehouse and the gangsters are taken away.
Analysis
Renata Adler argues that wild 90 relies heavily on "the assumption that lack of form liberates." Adler notes that Mailer's goal in the film leans towards yielding a breakthrough into something fresh. His inclusion of the improvised conversations between him and his friends stands out as a way of Mailer wanting to create interest by doing something that he thought would be groundbreaking. Adler points out Mailer's posture and mannerism throughout the film. "He is constantly watching for the effect of his own words on the other two friends, and he looked more guarded than the most courtly formalist." In contrast to Adler's analysis, Robert Singer's review notes that the unscripted dialogue contributes to the realism of the film. Wild 90 is a not a typical gangster film but rather a playful reassertion of gangsterism. He reveals that despite production limitations, Wild 90 should be read alongside other 1960s underground films as part of the "independent production tradition of the experimental American cinema."
Production
Wild 90 was the first attempt by Norman Mailer to create a motion picture. The concept for the film came when Mailer and several actors who were appearing in an Off-Broadway adaptation of his novel The Deer Park engaged in an acting game where they pretended they were gangsters. In Manso, Buzz Farbar recounts the genesis of the film: "During the run of The Deer Park Norman, Mickey, and I had been hanging out at the Charles IV restaurant on Thompson and Fourth Street, and that's where the idea for the film came from — Wild 90. We were all very funny, a lot funnier than in the movie. We'd start insulting each other, each of us coming back with more, and it was Norman who said we ought to film it, and I suggested Leacock and Pennebaker". The title Wild 90 is a reference to alleged Mafia slang term for being in deep trouble. Mailer spent $1,500 of his own money to finance Wild 90. D.A. Pennebaker, the documentary filmmaker, was the cinematographer and shot the film in black-and-white 16mm. The production took place over four consecutive nights and the entire film was improvised by Mailer and his cast. The resulting dialogue was unusually heavy with profanities and Mailer later claimed that Wild 90 "has the most repetitive, pervasive obscenity of any film ever made". The Puerto Rico-born boxer José Torres appeared as the man with the barking dog and Beverly Bentley played the woman with the knife. Mailer did not allow any retakes during the shoot. Mailer wound up with 150 minutes of film, which was edited down to 90 minutes. Due to a technical glitch during the production, roughly 25 percent of the film's soundtrack came out muffled. Mailer refused to redub the problem patches on the soundtrack and later joked the film "sounds like everybody is talking through a jockstrap".
Release
Pennebaker tried to convince Mailer not to put Wild 90 into theatrical release because of the problematic nature of its soundtrack. Mailer disregarded that suggestion and went forward by self-distributing the film. He also promoted the film extensively, which included writing a self-congratulatory essay on the film that appeared in Esquire.
Receptions
Reviews for Wild 90 were overwhelmingly negative. Renata Adler, writing in The New York Times, opined: "It relies also upon the indulgence of an audience that must be among the most fond, forgiving, ultimately patronizing and destructive of our time." Robert Hatch, reviewing the film for The Nation, stated that the film was "rambling, repetitious...incoherent and inept". Stanley Kauffmann, writing in The New Republic, said that "I cannot say that Mailer was drunk the whole time he was on camera. I can only hope he was drunk". Mailer responded to the bad reviews by including them in the original theatrical poster. Wild 90 was a commercial failure, but Mailer followed up the production with two additional improvised experimental films, Beyond the Law and Maidstone.
Adler's response
Adler argues that wild 90 relies heavily on "the assumption that lack of form liberates." Adler notes that Mailer's goal in the film leans towards yielding a breakthrough into something fresh. His inclusion of the improvised conversations between him and his friends stands out as a way of Mailer wanting to create interest by doing something that he thought would be groundbreaking. Adler points out Mailer's posture and mannerism throughout the film. "He is constantly watching for the effect of his own words on the other two friends, and he looked more guarded than the most courtly formalist." In contrast to Adler's analysis, Robert Singer's review notes that the unscripted dialogue contributes to the realism of the film. Wild 90 is a not a typical gangster film but rather a playful reassertion of gangsterism. He reveals that despite production limitations, Wild 90 should be read alongside other 1960s underground films as part of the "independent production tradition of the experimental American cinema."
