The director Frank Zappa couldn’t stand watching: “So horribly disappointed”
If you’re ever on the hunt for a bold yet completely baffling opinion, simply read any interview Frank Zappa ever gave.
As the ultimate 1970s leader in the avant-garde rock world, Zappa took on a fascinating position. For a perfect example of his often hypocritical stance, you really only have to look towards his home. Known as the Cabin and situated amongst the hills of Laurel Canyon, it was a place where musicians would come and crash out while Pamela Des Barres and other belles of the scene would hang out. It was a place for comedowns and afters, acid-tinged jam sessions and ideas flowing, yet Zappa couldn’t have been more staunchly anti-drugs.
“Well, it’s not just that drugs kill you. It’s that when you take them, they turn you into a type of person that I don’t like to hang around with,” he said, despite his home being full of those people.
It was one of the many, many opinions he was loud about, including others like his passionate, burning hatred for Jim Morrison, Lou Reed and the Fab Four. By the 1980s, he’d confuse people even further by openly calling himself a conservative despite his role in counterculture, so it’s clear there was really never any hope in understanding him. But his opinions didn’t just stick in the world of music. No, Zappa wasn’t shy about saying how he felt about anything at all, including cinema.
In 1971, after the release of his surrealist film 200 Motels, Time Out published a strange interview in which Zappa seemed to be interviewing himself under a pseudonym, and he went on a rant about one icon: Federico Fellini.
He started out ripping into arthouse movies with bigger budgets, stating, “The cheaper the better, that was my idea of a good time”, admitting he’d never go way a Goddard flick or anything like that, but still being bold enough to criticise them.
“I don’t know what they’re like, but it doesn’t interest me because the way the other people talk about it, I wouldn’t go within ten miles of a theatre that had one of those artistic kind of movies on,” he said, taking aim at one legend in particular as he added, “I had a couple of bad experiences; I went to see a couple of Fellini movies and I was so horribly disappointed I couldn’t stand it.”
“I thought the production was crappy,” he said, strapping on his filmmaker hat to criticise the icons of the industry, “The editing was real bad, you could see the fucking glue on the splices going by, bad cuts, you know. I saw a couple of Bergman movies about six years ago. I thought they were boring. I have no motivation to go and take in those sort of things…cultural experiences.”
Much like his confusing stances on drugs and music, Zappa’s takes on films were equally muddled, in which he wanted to make them, but would never dare to sit down and engage with the so-called grossness of “cultural experiences”.
