I EDITED DILDO HEAVEN: THE MARK BOSWELL INTERVIEW"

(Interview was conducted by Brooklyn based musician and film programmer Mike Hunchback in winter 2013.)

So, youve told me that you were one of sort of a group of people in Florida. A small scene that included members of Harry Pussy and other Noise and Experimental artists; tell me a little about that. South Beach at that particular time (early nineties) had a vibrant underground film and music scene. The rents were cheap and there was an atmosphere of anything could happen. Most of the people involved in this scene were somehow connected to the Alliance Cinema. The Alliance Director was Bill Orcutt, who along with his wife at the time, Adris Hoyos, had just formed Harry Pussy. The Alliance Cinema received a grant from the City of Miami to start a non-profit media art center. Orcutt hired me to get, what was to become the Alliance Film/Video Cooperative, off the ground. Once the Coop got rolling, all kinds of people came out of the woodwork. Tom Smith, who was also forming a noise band (To Live and Shave In L.A.) with Rat Bastard and Ben Wolcott, approached us about starting a sexploitation screening series called Sick, Sick, Cinema. Meanwhile, along with running the CO-OP, I founded the Anti-Film Festival. Everybody helped each other to make films, attend concerts or film screenings; so there was a giant overlap between the film and music underground. Once a month it seemed like a Cuban artist or filmmaker would defect from the island and show up at the CO-OP door looking for action. And how did Doris Wishman end up crossing paths with you guys? Tom Smith had spotted her working in an adult sex shop in Coconut Grove. He said to her: are you Doris Wishman? She said yes, and he responded, You are a genius. She had moved to Miami from New York in the late 80s to live with her sister Pearl, because she lost all of her money on A Night to Dismember- when a disgruntled worker burnt down the film lab he was just fired from. Dismember, a 35mm feature, almost ready for release, went up in smoke with no insurance. Tom convinced Doris that she should be making films again, and rounded up some professional filmmakers to volunteer their services. She quickly came up with Dildo Heaven a campy, sort of sexy schlock piece about three secretaries who try to seduce their Boss. The cameramen were Syd Garon and Rodney Ascher, two prominent CO-OP members. After shooting, Doris borrowed money from her sister to edit. The editor got tired of dealing with her cantankerous personality. Syd and Rodney called me up and asked If I could help her finish Dildo Heaven. I had never seen her work, but was very familiar with her reputation, because of the research Magazine edition: Incredibly Strange Films. She would take the bus all the way from Coral Gables to South Beach every morning to start editing at 9:00. If I walked in anytime after nine she

would just scowl at me. She hated that bus ride. It took at least an hour. We would take turns driving her home. She was about 86 years old we found out later, We had no idea, she lead us to believe that she was somewhere around 70. Not that it mattered, but it gives you insight into her will and determination. Did Doris ever get sense of the Noise scene; that it was a kind of culture at the time? Or did she just think you were all just crazy kids? If you asked her, she would have told you its garbage. But frankly, she wasnt interested in anything else except her own films. During the second Anti Film Festival, we brought her up on stage, and presented her with the Golden Turkey award for life time achievement in the cinematic arts, but she refused it. We were always making fun of her and she would do the same with us. You didnt want to go to far with her, because she could get really upset, she was a fireball. I walked into the Alliance cinema one day, where she and Orcutt were sitting in his office arguing about the website he was building for her. For some reason or another, she told him he was a nobody and he responded: Doris, I dont know if anybody has told you, but since Ed Wood has died, there is a lot of talk that you are the worst filmmaker alive. She stormed out of there and fired Bill. She fired me about two or three times. She was almost impossible to work with and was deeply paranoid that people were trying to rip her off. Some of the people in her past obviously did that. After a fight, we would always make up and she would say to me in a kind of baby voice in her Long Island drawl Mawwk, do you wuv me? I would say yes, Doris of course I wuv you! Ultimately, she was a very sweet and emotional person. I hate to admit it, but all my potential sources for a bootleg of DILDO HEAVEN have fallen through, so I 've only seen the trailer - can you describe the films for us? It is what it is: a makeshift script, written on the spur of the moment, by a sexploitation filmmaker from another era using complete amateurs in totally homely and tawdry sex scenes shot on video tape. The only real interesting element in the film is a young kid named Billy who has two penises and likes to watch. Billy walks around the apartment complex where the secretaries live, peeping through keyholes. Each time he looks in a different apartment, he sees a scene from one of Doris older works. She had all of her old works on vhs and would arrive each morning with them in two giant plastic bags. She would not leave them in the Co-op, because she thought someone would steal them. Doris had a niece, that wrote the theme song for the movie. She loved the lyrics so much, that she would word them out to anybody that would listen when times are tough, and youve had enough, reach for your dildo, reach, reach, reach for your dildo. Shed grab you by the arm and say isnt that naughty? Doris had a great delivery because she studied to be an actress in New York City. Her early rival was Shelley Winters. The only problem with Shelley Winters she would tell everybody, was that she thought she was a better actress than me. She was very coy with everything she said,

sometimes you couldnt tell if she was bullshitting or truly believed it. After uttering some kind of braggadocio, and she often did, she would pucker up her lips and tilt her head as if say there, try and top that! She was very proud of her career. A career in which she would adamantly proclaim I never made porn!!! If you needled her too much at the wrong moment, she would ask you how many times have you been invited to Harvard to screen your films? If you really want to get an idea of her personality, get a dvd copy of A Night To Dismember and put the comment track on while watching the film. Its her and her D.P. from the film discussing each scene. It is totally hilarious and completely reveals her personality. It reminds me exactly of what it was like to work with her.

Speaking honestly about Doris Wishman, I guess Id have to mention that shes got a sort of Ed Wood factor" wherein people sort of relish in her work because they think its bad. I realize its not a common opinion, but I think certain films of hers are legitimately great like: Bad Girls Go To Hell. Sure it may be extremely low budget and perhaps less competent than other films, but I seriously think theres uniqueness in Wishmans work that makes her stuff very fun to watch. Not to mention Wishmans uncompromising cruelty streak, which is remarkable to see unleashed. Having worked with her, did you ever get the sense that she had the qualities of a more successful filmmaker but never really got the start that it wouldve required for her to go further than she did? There is a lot of stuff going on in Doris films that make them unique and interesting. Sometimes the stories are so outrageous, that it doesnt matter if the technique is not up to the Hollywood level. Take Nude on the Moon two guys in a space rocket head to the moon for research. They get there only to discover topless babes playing volleyball. So what makes them moon creatures versus exiles from a nudist colony? Cute little antennas sprouting from their heads! Another unique feature to her work is the constantly baffling array of weird cutaway shots. For example, a medium shot of a grisly baldheaded guy in a wife beater t-shirt whipping a sexy babe strapped to a chair, then cut to a close up of a plant, then back to a different angle of the wife beater. She would cut to close-ups of feet, wadded panties on the floor, ashtrays, squirrels, all kinds of stuff. She would shoot the backs of heads and then dub voices in later, sort of writing the script while she edited. You could compare Doris to John Waters early, preHollywood work. He was a big fan of her by the way. The difference is he made the leap to the big Hollywood budget, which means more

finesse, but less quirky outrageousness. She wasnt interested in that, because she didnt want to compromise. She was her own worst enemy in a way. She was convinced her films were minor masterpieces, so there was no need for Hollywood-she could do it all on her own. The two films in the 70s she made with Chesty Morgan are actually pretty interesting and a good reason why academics and feminist starting taking a new look at her work. Chesty Morgan was a porn actress with a 76-inch bosom. In Deadly Weapons she seduces a group of evil mobsters from a syndicate and then smothers them one by one, in her ample cleavage. In Double Agent 76 she works as a spy with a hidden camera implanted in her breast. After seducing the enemy into bed, she would photograph his pertinent documents, while he slept. I wrote an academic paper comparing her early work to JeanLuc Godards for an Italian film theory conference and it is surprising how much they have in common. In her last years, there were a lot of people trying to get her a real budget for some different scripts she had written. Fred Schneider of the B-52s was constantly calling her, he wanted her to direct a music video. She would say: Mawk, B-52 called, he wants me to make a video for him. Id say, Doris do it, theyre a huge band, youll get tons of attention. Shed say, Im not interested in attention, I want some loot. She loved attention by the way. She was a real diva in a certain way. What She really wanted was people like Fred Schnieder to call her up every week and tell her she was a genius. And whats your opinion of what DILDO HEAVEN ended up like versus her 60s stuff? Sadly, no comparison. Its like a film student trying to copy her style without a budget. It was a lot of fun working with her. Funny enough, she was slightly prudish. For example, there is a scene were a young women takes some of her clothes off before taking a shower. The way it was cut, you really couldnt see much. She said to Mawk, do you think its hot enough? I said do you mean should we see her boobs? Shed nod her head. One of the most hilarious things was the usage of the technology at that time. We had a cuts only video edit suite. This is before computer edit systems were affordable. Once you laid the cuts down, you could not go back and change the order without dubbing the entire tape down to another one while losing quality. So we would spend an entire day editing a particular scene and then she would come back the next and want to change the whole thing. She was used to cutting film, where you take anything apart, and replace it. We had dubbed so many generations down from the master, that the quality was horrible. Plus, the changes she was making were totally trivial. It got to the point, were myself and Abel Kleinbaum (another

CO-OP staff member) invented this machine we called the video defribulator overdub converter. The dub room was in a different room from the edit suite. So when Doris wanted to dub down to make changes, Id shout out to Abe Abe, is the video defribulator on? Hed say no, its not working today. We had a giant pile of old 3/4 inch decks and other redundant machines that people donated, because they couldnt bare to throw them out. We told Doris the defribulator was old and takes hours to warm up. We turned them all on at once for her. There were grinding noises, hisses, rumbling, dust flying up, lights flickering, it was like the Wizard of Oz. She came in one morning in a bad mood and said, That damn video refrigerator doohickey better be working today, because we got to make changes. Abe and I were nearly in tears. I think she knew it was a put on. It was pure vaudeville comedy with us three, all the time. Abe had a wicked since of humor. Whenever Doris and I started arguing too much, Abe would step in and say: Doris its time for your afternoon nap. I would buckle over and Doris would threaten violence on him. We had a wheelchair in the front office of the CO-OP that we used as a dolly. One day I was sitting in it, telling Doris about a feature film I was making called The Subversion Agency, and a CO-OP member walks in says jokingly whats wrong with him? Doris replies: Hes not feeling wellhe thinks hes a film director. She came in one morning slightly frantic Mawk, I got to write an important letter, do we have a real typewriter here? And I dont mean one of those stupid e-mail things. There was an outbreak of botulism or something that came out of McDonalds on South Beach, a few blocks down from the Co-op. Anybody that had eaten meat there during a specific time was requested to go to a downtown Miami health clinic on a certain day and get a shot. So her and Orcutt it turned out had wolfed down some cheeseburgers there during the outbreak. They had to wait in this line in the blaring heat for half a day with every other McDonald regular. I wish I had a picture of that. Abe and I didnt let up on that one either. I asked her if she had the kids meal, because she was tiny, barely five feet. When you laid a good joke down about her and she couldnt come back with something, shed hold her fist up and give you this mean grin and then she would laugh.

*I still wonder though, were the CO-OP members looking at her stuff as"lowly" compared to the more hardcore experimental stuff that they were doing, or was there more of a wide-open acceptance of all films strange and off-the-beaten-path? I

almost imagine that Doris might have almost been like an outsider amongst outsiders ...* The Incredibly Strange editions on film and music from San Francisco were extremely popular amongst Co-OP members. Those texts from V Vale and Andrea Juno were very influential on re-visiting that genre and looking at it from a different perspective. It wasn't a question of hi versus low, but just judging it on its own merits. The majority of us were into all kinds of cinema, from avant-garde to Bollywood. We had numerous screening programs. Tom Smith was of course really into all kinds of sexploitation. He had a giant vhs collection. He was also an eloquent defender of the genre as high art. There was also a recent resurgence of interest in that type of filmmaking from that particular period. Retrospectives of Russ Meyer, Dave Friedman, Joe Sarno, and others were popping up in international venues. Doris was invited to speak and screen works at Harvard and was also given a lifetime achievement award by the New York Underground festival. You could laugh at the poor technique and stilted dialogue of her films, but you could also marvel at the eccentric creativity and outlandish situations. In one of her first films, Hideout in the Sun, two Bank robbers pull a heist then drive their car to a supermarket parking lot to exchange it for a different one. The new car won't start, so they hijack a pretty young woman just getting into her convertible. At gun point, she drives away. They look in her wallet and notice she lives at some kind of private country club. They force her to take them there and when they arrive, it's a nudist camp-so there is some brilliance to her plots. Doris also had very good taste in music and the cinematography in general was pretty high quality. tell me more about Tom Smith and Sick, Sick Cinema: Tom Smith would screen variety of off-beat 60's sexploitation and horror in his Sick, Sick Cinema series. Armed with a massive vhs collection and my t.v. set, he would screen such classics as Satan in High Heels, The Wild and the Naked, House on Bare Mountain, The Naked Complex, and Devil in the Brain. The t.v. belonged to my wife Susanne and I. When he had a screening I would lug the huge t.v. set about 2 blocks down the street to a free space we were using that was formerly the seediest gay bar in Miami Beach called the Hamlet.

He loved the films so much, that even if nobody showed up, hed watch it all by himself in cruddy long play vhs. He was a parsimonious type, so he recorded everything in long play, so he could stick 3 features on a single tape. The audio quality was lousy, but Ill never forget the big ole shit eating grin on his face when he watched those things.