When I was a kid growing up in Hamilton, Ontario, I was a huge Groucho Marx groupie—there was a TV station in Buffalo, New York that used to broadcast Marx Brothers movies every Sunday afternoon. I was also a big fan of those books that Harry and Michael Medved used to write about terrible Hollywood movies—I must have read The 50 Worst Films of All Time and The Golden Turkey Awards dozens of times each. Taken together, that meant one of the movies I was most curious about was Skidoo, a 1968 Otto Preminger obscurity treasured by hardcore movie buffs not just for containing Groucho’s final big-screen role, as a gangland kingpin named “God,” but also its bizarre combination of middle-aged comic actors (Jackie Gleason, Carol Channing, Mickey Rooney, Frank Gorshin, Burgess Meredith, Slim Pickens) and Haight-Ashbury themes (hippies, LSD, Harry Nilsson music).
I’m no longer as fond of Groucho Marx as I used to be—his much-imitated comic delivery now strikes me as stilted and self-conscious—and the Medveds’ books now seem smug and mean-spirited. But I’ve always remained fascinated by Skidoo, which has remained as elusive as ever, even in this age of cable, videotape and DVD. (Supposedly Preminger’s daughter owns the negative and has steadfastly turned down all offers to release it in order to protect her father’s reputation.) Could this movie actually exist? It almost sounds like an urban legend: there’s no way Paramount Pictures would have invested in a big-budget comedy about Jackie Gleason dropping acid in a jail cell, right?
Wrong. Completely, horrifyingly wrong. I finally got my hands on a copy of Skidoo last week and to my astonishment, I discovered that the rumours didn’t tell half the story: the sight of Jackie Gleason dancing around his bunk, swatting at invisible mosquitoes and singing, “She’s got my ears, she’s got my ears, she’s got my ears!” is nothing compared to some of the other sights in this one-of-a-kind trainwreck, which manages to achieve the lunacy of Ed Wood’s Glen or Glenda?, but at a major studio and on several hundred times the budget.
At first, the film is merely odd and disjointed. Gleason plays a gangster who is asked to come out of suburban retirement to go to prison and kill off a former associate (Rooney) who’s about to turn state’s evidence. He agrees—less out of a sense of duty, it seems, than to escape his annoying, dimwitted wife (Channing) and his sexy daughter’s hippie boyfriend Stash. But once the LSD being brewed up by Gleason’s cellmate, a scientific genius played by an impossibly young-looking Austin Pendleton, gets loose, the film leaps off the rails and stays there for the remaining 50 minutes.
There’s a musical number involving a chorus line of dancing trash cans. There’s a tower guard’s LSD-inspired vision of the Green Bay Packers running around the prison yard... naked! There’s Carol Channing in a bra and yellow tights trying to seduce Frankie Avalon in his swinging, push-button bachelor pad. There’s Carol Channing again, dressed up in a 19th-century naval uniform invading Groucho Marx’s boat with an army of hippies while singing the title song. (Actually, there’s everything Carol Channing does, period. The woman is a walking hallucination. If Skidoo is Otto Preminger’s Glen or Glenda? then Channing is his Bela Lugosi.) And then there’s the end of the film, where Harry Nilsson sings the closing credits in their entirety—the cast, the crew, even the Roman numerals in the copyright date.
Critics usually pin most of the blame for Skidoo on Otto Preminger, but I’m convinced that the film’s true auteur is the screenwriter, a mysterious figure named Doran William Cannon who wrote a whole cluster of atrocious countercultural satires in the late ’60s and early ’70s, including the Robert Altman film Brewster McCloud and the 1973 film Hex, an “Edwardian-era supernatural biker Western” starring Keith Carradine, Gary Busey and Scott Glenn. I’d never heard of it until this week, when it was featured on a Slate podcast about “bad biker movies.” According to Slate, the film was so terrible it never got released and nowadays may be even harder to track down than Skidoo.
Damn—just when I knock one terrible movie off my must-see list, another one rises up to take its place. (August 10, 2006)
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