Wild 90 (1968)

Wissenswertes

Wild 90 is a 1968 experimental film directed and produced by American novelist Norman Mailer, who also plays the starring role. The film is a creative collaboration based on three friends, The Prince (Mailer), Buzz Cameo and Twenty Years, who are seen drinking, braying, and fighting in a run-down apartment in Lower Manhattan. Pretending to be gangsters, the trio plays with props such as pistols and machine guns. Mailer's first effort into filmmaking, the film was shot on a 16-millimeter camera and recorded on magnetic sound tape.

Production

Wild 90 was Norman Mailer's first attempt by to create a motion picture. The concept for the film came when Mailer and several actors who were appearing in an Off-Broadway adaptation of his novel The Deer Park engaged in an acting game in which they pretended that they were gangsters.

The title Wild 90 is a reference to an alleged Mafia slang term for finding oneself in deep trouble.

Mailer spent $1,500 of his own money to finance Wild 90. Documentary filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker served as cinematographer and shot the film in black-and-white 16mm. The production took place over four consecutive nights and the entire film was improvised by Mailer and his cast. The resulting dialogue was unusually heavy with profanities; Mailer later claimed that Wild 90 "has the most repetitive, pervasive obscenity of any film ever made."

Puerto Rican boxer José Torres appears as the man with the barking dog and Beverly Bentley (Mailer's wife) plays Margie, the woman with the knife. Mailer did not allow any retakes during the shoot.

Mailer wound up with 150 minutes of film, which was edited down to 90 minutes. Because of a technical glitch during production, roughly 25% of the film's soundtrack is muffled. Mailer refused to redub the problem patches on the soundtrack and later joked that the film "sounds like everybody is talking through a jockstrap."

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