The pornocopia that is '52 Pick Up.'

The first question is, of course, what the heck am I doing revisiting 52 Pick Up, John Frankenheimer's Elmore Leonard-based thriller from 1986. Well, to better battle the mild (I guess it must be mild, as it hasn't compelled me to break anything or anything) seasonal affective disorder that pays me a visit during the winter season (imagine!) I schedule quasi-marathon viewing sessions for my quasi-downtime, because pleasurable mental work sometimes keeps these particular blues at bay. The viewing choices are pretty, but not entirely, random. So, the other day-and-a-half I watched the great Dragon Dynasty DVD of The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, one of the most purely enjoyable martial arts movies ever made. Then, the very good Sony DVD of Maurice Pialat's Van Gogh, this viewing inspired by rereading an essay on Manny Farber by Kent Jones, in which Farber and partner Patricia Patterson rhapsodize on the film. Pialat's penultimate picture is staggeringly good, but I was a little disturbed that it bears only a halting resemblance to the picture Farber and Patterson describe. But this isn't the place to get into that. I'm not sure what made me pick 52 Pick Up; I vaguely recall a recent blog post about it somewhere, but can't find it. (UPDATE: Found it, and it's a good one, by Vince Keenan. Here. Thanks for the reminder, Filmbrain!) This film (it could be interpreted as a Frankenheimer stab at a Friedkin picture), in which three adult-industry-related lowlifes blackmail industrialist Roy Scheider via a very ugly and explicit snuff video of his girlfriend (Kelly Preston, no less!), is a more convincing sleazefest than most pictures of its ilk. Maybe one reason it's so convincing in its squalor is that it features more porn stars than, well, most porn movies of the day.

Let's have a look.

Most of the, um, talent appears during a party scene early on. While Kelly Preston sulks with girlfriend Vanity in a nook away from the main action, uber-sleazoid John Glover has got the video camera going and he's checking out the hot tub. A pre-hedgehogish Ron Jeremy (with the moustache, here appearing as Ron Jeremy Hyatt, Hyatt being his birth name) has to pretend to be annoyed at being videographed in a hot tub.

When I found old Ron in Vegas right before the 1998 AVN Awards, almost two decades after we had worked together on a project I won't name here (I'm saving it for the memoir), I re-introduced myself. "Oh, yeah, that was a good picture," he shrugged. I then told him I was now a film journalist, at Premiere. His eyes lit up. "Let me tell you what I've been doing lately," he said. Apparently he and Frankenheimer became big buddies after making this picture. (As Coreys Haim and Feldman could tell you, being big buddies with Ron Jeremy invariably involves Ron Jeremy introducing you to female porn stars.) Apparently Frankenheimer also put Ron in Ronin. I'm ashamed to say I've never bothered looking for Ron in Ronin.

The blurry lady in the sorta macrame top on the left side of this shot is the lovely and talented Sharon Mitchell, retired from performing, got a medical degree—she's a doctor now!—and is a leader in the adult industries STD-awareness-and-prevention efforts. Wowsers.

Here's Tom Byron, onetime paramour of Traci Lords and still an active performer. Boy oh boy did he piss off David Foster Wallace. I'm not telling tales out of school by saying that; just read the passages concerning Byron in Wallace's "Big Red Son," the opening essay of his collection Consider the Lobster. (A version of "Son" first appeared, retitled, shortened, and bowdlerized, in the Septmber 1998 issue of Premiere. It's a long story. Saving that for the memoirs, too.) Here's just one of Wallace's observations on Byron and his ilk: "Yes, this is it: What's so unbelievable is not the extent or relentlessness of porn people's egotism (Jasmine St. Claire's way of greeting a journalist is to offer him a personally autographed photo; Tom Byron, who is 36 and has precisely one attribute, affects the air of a Mafia don at the Sands bar's nightly porn parties, extendung his hand knuckles-up as if for obeisance, etc., etc.). It's the obtuseness of it." I witnessed Byron's Godfather-esque posturings with Wallace (we got into Sands' party via the good graces of Scotty Schwartz, who hasn't spoken to me since the piece was printed...and I don't blame him, alas), and they were as puke-worthy as they sound.

And here's Amber Lynn, wearing that insouciant expression for which she was so well-loved. When I first moved to NYC in the mid-'80s, I and my roomie, a fellow Jersey emigre, used to watch Al Goldstein's Midnight Blue a lot. Partly to see if host Goldstein, then-publisher of Screw and all-around loose cannon, would bust a blood vessel during one of his tirades...but also because we still couldn't believe that in New York there was free (albeit censored) porn on cable. One of the ubiquitous phone-sex ads peppering Blue featured the above pictured Ms. Lynn in an even more aggressive mode, asking you, the viewer, "Do you want Amber Lynn to suck your cock?" To which my roommate would invariably respond, in a perfectly flat tone, "No. I want Amber Lynn to deliver my newspaper." That always cracked me up. Thanks, Stew!

Here's Mr. Jamie Gillis, emoting for John Glover. I'm pretty sure this is the only time Mr. Jamie Gillis and John Glover have ever been in the same room together. In the early '80s a pal of mine worked in the videotape duplication division of a porn production house, and every now and again he'd regale his comrades with accounts of the really filthy and disgusting things one Mr. Jamie Gillis was getting up to in this film or that. How filthy and disgusting were they? Put it this way: recently, at Lupa, one of my very favorite Manhattan restaurants, I recognized Mr. Jamie Gillis among my fellow diners. I thought long and hard about notifying the management of his presence on the premises and strongly requesting his ejection from said premises. By the time I'd made up my mind to do it, he was on his way out. You got lucky once, Gillis. I better not see you at Lupa again.

I can't say I'm sure that's Ginger Lynn, soon to try to make the leap to mainstream that the aforementioned Traci Lords had, um, thrust upon her. She looks like Lynn, whose mainstream career was on/off (and who I hear is now back in porn doing, um, MILF material. Ugh.). Unlike Jeremy and Mitchell and A. Lynn, though, she's not credited, and I'd imagine she would have wanted to be. I dunno. To tell you the truth, I'm a little relieved that I did not recognize every putative porn person in this film. But to wrap things up, here's a non-porn bonus shot:

Recognize the actor on the right? Here he plays the drug dealer who sells Glover (middle) the skag that he shoots up Scheider's wife Ann-Margret (left, blurry) with. (Told you this movie was a sleazefest. Also, Touch of Evil much?") If you do recognize him, you're Michael Weldon, I bet; if his face rings a bell and you can't place it, what you're seeing in it is the performer's kin, most likely. For this is Blackie Dammett, the roue actor dad of Red Hot Chili Peppers frontman Anthony Kiedis.

Comments

[Matt Miller]

Count me as one who will buy the memoir purely on the promise of the "Neither Adult Nor Entertainment" behind-the-scenes story.

[bill]

Yeah, I thought you were probably joking about your memoirs, but I'd read them.

[Chris Goldstein]

Yes, that's Ginger Lynn.
And Glover's running commentary as he forces Scheider to watch the surveillance footage of Scheider and Preston is one of the great oily monolgues of all time. Glover always struck me as Peter Weller's (who, by the way, is awesome in Ivanxtc) evil twin.
It's a shame DFW didn't write more for Premiere. His Lynch essay was wonderful, and even the heavily edited version of the porn essay was pretty great reading. Actually, it's a shame DFW doesn't write more, period. It's been almost 12 years since he published a novel. I don't know if he's planning on pulling a Pynchon, but I hope he doesn't. I feel like if anyone has a bead on what's going on in contemporary culture, or even marginal culture, it's him. And for those of you who think Southland Tales is some kind of sui generis piece of alterna sci-fi, it's not, because it's already been done before, when it was called Infinite Jest. I would say that Kelly has some cool ideas if he hadn't gotten them from other people without doing anything to make them his own.
Death to the Golden Globes! Death to the Oscars!

[don lewis]

Some friends and I were talking about big stars of yesteryear who make cool comebacks ala Jackie Earle Haley, Travolta and such. We decided it's Roy Scheiders turn. Dude does not deserve to end his career going straight to DVD...

[Griff]

It is interesting how the film so explores and embraces the seamy nature of LA. Frankenheimer had planned to shoot the picture elsewhere (Pittsburgh, I think; the Leonard novel is set in Detroit), and was quite insistent on this with Cannon until it became clear that the budget wouldn't accommodate it. Stuck in LA, he then decided to showcase the city in a way that's hard to forget. It's the best feature of the picture, other than John Glover's performance.

The movie is okay -- the Leonard novel is short but very good, and the plot is in a way surefire movie material. (Well, not completely surefire -- ever see Cannon's dull THE AMBASSADOR, a very free adaptation of the novel's basic story?) Scheider is all right, but he's miscast. I think it was Brian DePalma who reflected on Scheider's similar miscasting in STILL OF THE NIGHT, noting that it was hard to worry much about Scheider walking alone at night in Central Park -- this is the guy who killed Jaws. There's more than a little of that problem here. I never doubted that Scheider would take these guys.

The thing that makes the Leonard novel work is that his kinda ordinary guy caught-with-his-pants-down protagonist -- a basically unsophisticated and not terribly savvy businessman (not a movie star type; think a somewhat younger Charles Durning, say) -- is, of course, unlikely to prevail against such crafty scum. The guy knows this -- he's terrified. Leonard draws his characters well, and the writer makes you believe that the guy and his wife could find that they're more resourceful and brave than they ever thought possible. We already know that Scheider is all those things -- the story needs an unlikely sort of guy.

[Aaron Aradillas]

I'm a HUGE 52 Pick-Up fan. For me, it's Frankenheimer's last great movie. It certainly has more bite than his late-90s comback movies Ronin and George Wallace.

Glover and Scheider are great, but the movie has one of the best supporting casts for a sleaze thriller. Clarence Williams III is properly menacing as the guy who has the most experience of the thieves. Ann-Nargret has always been an underrated actress. (You do one Elvis movie...) Vanity leaves an impression in a remarkable short amount of screen time. The standout performance is by Robert Trebor as the sweaty, scared Leo. He's a classic Leonard character who is fully aware of the situation he's in.

How good a villian is John Glover's Alan Raimy? In any other year he would've been the villian of the year. In 1986 he had to settle for third place, coming behind Dennis Hopper's Frank Booth and Tom Nooonan's Francis Dollarhyde. Pretty good company.

Finally, 52 Pick-Up just might be the closest the movies have come to capturing the sweaty, frayed-nerves pulpiness of a Leonard novel. Yuma, Get Shorty, Out of Sight, and Jackie Brown all have their good points, but 52 Pick-Up gets at something more. It's the one film that doesn't shy away from the sleace. What's ironic is that this aspect of Leonard's writing is the one thing that turned off most critics when the film was releases.

[Aaron Hillis]

"it could be interpreted as a Frankenheimer stab at a Friedkin picture"

So it's like THE FRENCH CONNECTION II?

Strangely, 52 PICK UP was a topic of conversation among we film nerds just this past week. Netflix queue, here it comes.

[Steve-O]

OK... great job actually naming all the porn stars...

I did a Film Noir of the Week on the film a few weeks ago and watched it a few times.

Still like the movie a bunch. Great job, champ.

[Amber Lynn]

hi all
I just found this by happenstance while doing research on the internet. Thanks you for bringin back some fond memories and remindi8ng me to call Al Goldstein to find out where my outdated royalty checks are.
all my best,
Amber Lynn
myspace.com/xxxamber

[Publius187]

I'm so glad this mive can out in DVD. Got my copy! Loved Vanity's role as stripper.