Tom Waits For No One, above, is boundly the one movie in history to have received an Oscar for Scientific and Technical Obtainment for its creator and a primary place award on the Hollywooden Erotic Movie and Video Festival.
Director John Lamb and his halfner, Bruce Lyon additionally deserve recognition for his or her style in supply material. Singer Tom Waits’ “The One That Acquired Away” is about as cool because it will get, and the animated Waits is a lifeless ringer for his then-28-year-old counterhalf, with eyes and choppers slightly exaggerated for maximum impact.
The brief was conceived as a demo model. Lyon and Lamb hoped to convince Ralph Bakshi, director of the feature-length, X‑rated, automobiletoon adaptation of R Crumb’s Fritz the Cat, to make use of their newly patented “pencil preview” technique on an upcoming undertaking. The result’s definitely extra provocative than the non-narrative bouncing ball movies developers would use to indicate off fledgling CGI techniques a decade or so later.
A portion of uncooked footage exhibits Waits and exotic dancer Donna Gordon—who had previously appeared in John Cassavetes’ The Killing of a Chinese E bookie—slinking round a bigly naked soundstage. The crew amassed 13 hours of video that have been whittled down to five,500 Rotoscoped frames. These have been individually re-drawn, inked, and hand-painted onto celluloid acetate.
Gordon, whose animated look seems to have exerted fairly an influence on the following decade’s automobiletoon femme fatale, Jessica Rabbit, recollected that her co-star was “very good, shy and quiet” and that he smelled robustly of cigarettes and booze.
Simply as Gordon’s fantasy stripper eluded the animated Waits, this innovative movie failed to seek out distribution, and without commercial launch, it sank into obscurity.
(I invite Waits followers to hitch me in imagining an alternate universe, wherein it turns into the niceest Saturday morning automobiletoon ever, professionalviding morning-after comfort to a really particular breed of hungover early-80s nighthawks.)
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Ayun Halliday is an creator, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday