MIKE'S MURDER 1984

Spoiler Alert. This is a critical essay, not a review, so plot points are revealed for the purpose of discussion.

Falling into the category of favorite obscurities that fascinate as much as they frustrate is James Bridges’ distinctively internal neo-noir, Mike’s Murder. A thoroughly unique and obviously heartfelt project from one of the more underappreciated directors of the '70s. 

Mike's Murder fascinates because it’s one of those films that slipped through the cracks, released both too late—the ‘70s were over, small, hard-to-categorize movies were out, and ’80s blockbusters and high-concept franchises were in; and too soon—personal, quirky movies came back into fashion with the indie film boom of the ‘90s. Mike's Murder frustrates because, as much as I absolutely love this film, it nevertheless remains a movie that, much like its characters, is haunted by its past.

Living In Rear-View in Car-Centric L.A. 

Looking back is the only way she can move forward 

My own enthusiasm for Mike's Murder stems significantly, though only partially, from being a huge fan of Debra Winger, whose nuanced, almost delicate performance—arguably one of her best—is the glue holding this melancholy thriller together. But as one of those emotionally insular, urban-set, psychologically dark films of the sort that have always appealed to me (like Midnight Cowboy, Klute, Looking for Mr. Goodbar), it can also be said that Mike's Murder—figuratively speaking, anyway—already had my name all over it. 

The real mystery: Was it love or limerence? 

I first saw Mike’s Murder at the Vogue Theater on Hollywood Boulevard the week it opened in March of 1984. I sat in a theater that was less than half full and remember being surprised by the low turnout, especially considering how popular Winger was at the time. 

The romantic An Officer and a Gentleman (1982) had boosted Winger's visibility, with the Oscar nomination she received for it branded her a bona fide star-on-the-rise, plus, the recently released Terms of Endearment, for which she received her second Best Actress Oscar nomination just a few weeks earlier, was still in theaters, attracting large audiences.

However, part of me wasn't entirely surprised by the half-empty theater I occupied, for Mike’s Murder—a film completed and scheduled to be released before Terms of Endearment—had arrived at theaters under a cloud of poor word-of-mouth and almost a year’s worth of negative publicity related to its troubled production history: Its original release date kept being moved; it was nearly shelved; there was talk of rehoots and heavy rediting; and finally its distributing studio lost faith it, more or less dumping it into theaters in an effort to ride the crest of Winger's Terms of Endearment fame wave.

 The film's title sequence shows the making of a Big Tomy's chiliburger in such mouthwatering detail that, to this day, seeing just a few seconds of it can set off chiliburger cravings that can last a week. Big Tomy's opened in 1982 and, still in operation, has become an LA landmark.

An early Mike’s Murder casualty was the scrapping of much of the original score composed by ‘80s New Wave artist Joe Jackson and replacing it with a more traditional (and superb) score by Academy Award-winning James Bond composer John Barry.

But nobody weaned on the films of Robert Altman and Joseph Losey pays any attention to bad reviews, so I forged ahead, heedless of the critics calling Mike's Murder a complete waste of time and talent. And that it may well be true, for even after cable-TV and VHS exposure, Mike's Murder never really found an audience. But I fell in love with Mike's Murder from the word go. I was completely won over by everything about it. 

As yet another moody rumination on my time-honored, favorite movie theme: the innate human desire to find connection—Mike’s Murder resonated strongly as a lens held up to the urban “fear of being alone” phenomenon that leads people to settle for what's available rather than going without or asking for what they truly want. But for a movie with such an assertively '80s vibe, Mike’s Murder genuinely felt like a film made during my favorite, most experimentally exciting period in moviemaking—the New Hollywood Era of the late '60s- ’70s. 

Debra Winger as Betty Parrish

Mark Keyloun as Mike Chuhutsky

Paul Winfield as Phillip Greene

Darrell Larson as Steve

Conceived as a uniquely Los Angeles “Cherchez L’homme” crime-mystery and character study told from the tentative perspective of its female protagonist, bank teller Betty Parrish, Mike’s Murder uses the detached attachments of LA hookup culture and the irrevocable undertow of violence in the Beverly Hills-Brentwood drug scene of the coked-up '80s to explore themes of isolation, ambiguous loss, unresolved grief, and reconciled loneliness in The City of “Whatever.” (A character’s answer when pressed to define the status of a relationship -- “New lover, boyfriend, whatever…?” Also, the only appropriate response when a guy like Mike says, "I’ll call. I mean it." ).

When news of James Bridges making a film titled Mike’s Murder first started appearing in the trades, I wasn’t sure whether that possessive apostrophe referred to a murder Mike commits or one he falls victim to. 

Betty Parrish has her life well organized. She has a nice job, a cute house, a cool car (a helluva cool car), caring friends and family, she dates from time to time, and owns a baby grand piano. The only kink—literally and metaphorically—in her otherwise structured life is “The C-scale out of tune,” as she calls him: Mike Chuhutsky. A puppy-dog-cute Ohio-to-Los Angeles transplant and rootless ladies’ man who gets by on occasion. As in, occasionally giving tennis lessons, occasionally dealing drugs, occasionally telling the truth, and occasionally being the live-in, transactionally bisexual object of affection of a wealthy record producer named Phillip Greene.

A character describing Mike: “He had all kinds of stories that he used on different people. He was always preparing a face for the faces that he met.”

“On occasion” is also an apt description of Betty’s dickmatized, casual-to-the-point-of-impromptu relationship with the chameleonic Mike, whose freewheeling life—no phone, no car, no steady address, and disappearances lasting up to six months—leaves their hookups overly-reliant on chance encounters or the odd booty call. 

Although mutually attracted and sharing a strong sexual chemistry, Betty and Mike are very nearly complete strangers (perhaps explaining where all that great sexual chemistry comes from). So, when one of Mike’s characteristically flaky no-shows turns out to be due to his having been brutally murdered in a botched drug deal, Betty is thrown into an emotional tailspin. Confronted with the abrupt finality of her present—all unexplored and unresolved feelings now subsumed by grief—Betty grows increasingly, and ultimately dangerously, invested in piecing together the disturbing fragments of Mike’s shrouded past to get a better handle on why this guy has made such an indelible impression on her. 

Debra Winger on Betty being sexually fixated on Mike: “She was brought up well and has a great relationship with her mother. She has a good job and does it well. But she has this other side that people may not see at first. She needs that guy every three months. She and Mike don’t light candles. It's hot stuff. It’s sweaty, fast, and sometimes rough. She doesn’t introduce Mike to her mother. “

Atmospheric, tense, and one of those movies I knew I would return to again and again to pick up details of plot and character, I remember my first thoughts after seeing Mike’s Murder were: 1) Debra Winger is astonishingly good, and 2) this movie is gay as fuck.

The innate Queerness of Mike’s Murder leapt out at me years before I even knew its producer/writer/director was gay. Mike's Murder is a labor-of-love passion project by the late two-time Oscar-nominee James Bridges (The Baby Maker, The Paper Chase, The China Syndrome, Urban Cowboy) that was inspired by a tragic real-life event shared by Bridges, his life partner Jack Larson (who produced), and their friend Paul Winfield.

In fact, Winfield’s role has him cast essentially as himself—Winfield, a privately out gay man who was professionally closeted—was tasked with revisiting and reenacting what certainly must have been a very painful period in his life. James Bridges, who became somewhat of a mentor to Debra Winger after casting her in Urban Cowboy, wrote the role of Betty especially for her. 

“The Ephemeral is Eternal” 

Personal favorite Dan Shor (Wise Blood, Strange Behavior), as video performance artist Richard—he's Betty’s “whatever”—reinterprets Baudelaire’s “Extract the eternal from the ephemeral” to endorse his personal philosophy that the present is all that matters. In doing so, he inadvertently offers Betty a bit of cautionary insight: dwelling on the past and mourning the brevity of time spent with someone is futile. The duration of something's existence has no bearing on its significance, as even the most fleeting experiences have the potential to become a part of our lives forever. 

Mike's Murder's Queer aesthetic, I feel, is tethered to the film's unconventional spin on the mystery genre and on its on-the-fringes perspective. Though critics and audiences at the time were annoyed to distraction by it, I liked that Bridges used the titular murder as a catalyst for exploring themes of urban alienation rather than as the typical mystery device. 

Cinematographer Reynaldo Villalobos supports this by establishing a visual motif wherein much of Mike’s Murder is shot in confined, tightly framed close-ups that convey the sense of its characters—who speed past one other in cars, conduct business from their vehicles (Betty’s job is in one of those hermetically sealed-looking drive-in banks), communicate via phones and answering machines, and peer at one another through cameras and videotape recorders—rarely ever touch and always seem to be alone…even when they’re together. 

Barriers and Separation

The look of Mike’s Murder so fits the story at hand that it almost acts as the visual equivalent of those noir voice-over narrations, drawing attention to the fact that the lens through which Bridges sees the world of Mike’s Murder is so personal that it borders on cinéma vérité. Indeed, Mike’s Murder is easily the most recognizably lived-in, truthfully-realized vision of Los Angeles in the ‘80s I’ve ever seen (rare in movies, even the driving scenes are geographically accurate!) 

This personal touch stamp extends beyond the film’s appearance, as Mike’s Murder finds Bridges—who, like Winfield, was openly gay in his private life but professionally closeted—taking his boldest step forward in integrating his personal life into his professional work. While the homoerotic gaze has long been a hidden-in-plain-sight attribute of several of James Bridges’ movies, Mike’s Murder is the first film by the director to include an entirely out gay character.

September 30, 1955 (1977)

Dennis Christopher (right) played a queer-coded supporting character in Bridges’ semi-autobiographical September 30, 1955 (the date actor James Dean died). The character that Bridges based on himself—the James Dean-obsessed Jimmy J, played by Richard Thomas—is depicted as straight. (Though a case could be made that the character is, like perhaps Bridges at that age, questioning.) 

Of all the films in Bridges’ abbreviated filmography (he made only eight movies in his career), Mike’s Murder is my absolute, hands-down favorite. And I say this knowing that the version I fell in love with isn’t the director’s original vision, but one whose tonal shifts and inconsistent, alternating points of view betray the battle scars of a year’s worth of edits, reshoots, retooling, and tinkering following a legendarily disastrous preview screening. 

Initially slated for a spring 1983 release, Mike’s Murder was sneak-previewed in January 1983 at two Bay Area theaters. Audience response was overwhelmingly negative. Bridges spent a year making changes—much of it funded personally—to address the most frequently criticized elements: the explicit violence and the nonlinear narrative. The revised Mike’s Murder premiered in Los Angeles on Friday, March 16, 1984, at the Vogue Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. 

It always rang false to me when Bridges, in damage-control, PR-speak interviews about the revamped Mike’s Murder, claimed, “This is a better picture than it was.

Mainly because I grew up in the Bay Area and knew that the locations chosen to preview Mike's Murder were two of the most white-bread, conservative suburban enclaves you could find. In short: the audience comprised precisely the demographic least likely to be receptive to—especially in the homophobic, Reagan '80s—a movie as artistically unorthodox and sexually transgressive as Mike’s Murder.

If Bridges hoped to salvage Mike’s Murder by restructuring it to appeal to THIS demographic, you’ll never convince me that his edits made the film "better"—only that they made it less “upsetting” to the multiplex set. The extreme form of hostility expressed at the previews (accounts cite booing, yelling, laughter, walkouts) doesn’t describe the reactions of people bored or confused by a movie. It’s how people react when they’re affronted.

Being as passionate about this film as I am, it's kind of torture to watch the
 theatrical trailer because it’s made up almost entirely of scenes no longer in the film.
Link to the TRAILER 

“Date night” preview audiences expecting another standard thriller from the director of The China Syndrome, or hoping Winger—by now typed in the public’s eye as a romantic ingénue thanks to Urban Cowboy and An Officer and a Gentleman—to be swept off by the leading man in the final reel, must have gone into apoplexy when confronted with Mike’s Murder’s blunt Queerness (a line from the original cut had Winfield telling Winger about his first encounter with Mike, “Before I knew it, he was in my arms, and my cock was up his ass...”); unfiltered sexuality (the original version of the phone sex scene was said to have made audiences particularly uncomfortable); liberal politics (a critique of the hypocrisy of the Moral Majority); and explicit violence attached to the kind of racial “optics”  (Mike’s retribution murder is carried out by two Black men) apt to trigger both white fragility and claims of racism.

Brooke Anderson as Patty

It could be said that Mike's Murder is something of a casualty of James Bridges' fame. After The China Syndrome and Urban Cowboy, he was seen as a high-profile director of mainstream motion pictures.  Mike's Murder—which I always thought was too personal and niche a film to ever appeal to a broad audience—was a small film, an art film, if you will, that should have been pitched to that market.

Since the reedited version of Mike’s Murder ultimately flopped as resoundingly as the original was likely to do, it’s a shame that Bridges’ original vision, flaws and all, wasn’t what was released. 

In Mike's Murder, photographs serve as symbols of the attempt to hold onto that which is impermanent, so I have always had a soft spot for this striking, discarded poster artwork, which evokes a still from a photographer's contact sheet with a red greasepencil edit mark foreshadowing Mike's bloody erasure. Fortunately, composer Joe Jackson, compelled to release his album of songs written for the soundtrack early due to the film's changing release schedule, kept the image for his album cover.

William Ostander as Randy

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

One of the great things about Mike’s Murder is that it doesn’t neatly fit into any specific film genre or category. Except one.

Independent of what it was intended to be, meant to express, or how it came to be perceived, looking at it now, Mike’s Murder resonates with me most persuasively and forcefully as an underappreciated work of Queer Cinema. It’s a gay art film, with —if not inauthentically, then perhaps non-essentially—a centered heteronormative perspective. Kind of like a post-Gay-Lib/AIDS-Epidemic-Era throwback to the days when queer artists (Inge, Williams, Capote), prohibited from telling their stories honestly, had to resort to filtering their truths through heterosexual surrogates—most often female characters.

"(Mike) loved having his picture taken. He was impatient
and liked to see the results immediately."

From camera angles foregrounding Mark Keyloun’s rather splendiferous butt, to the introduction of Paul Winfield’s character in a semi-nude state, and the notably extended (and welcome) screen time allocated to the half-dressed muscular physique of wannabe Chippendales dancer Randy (William Ostrander, making a lot of a mysteriously-written role), the eroticized gay gaze in Mike’s Murder feels both thematically relevant and boldly subversive in a mainstream film.

"He talked about you all the time."

Each time I watch Mike’s Murder, I’m hit over the head with the conspicuous truth that, for me, the film’s real story, most interesting relationship, and most genuine narrative arc exploring the themes of love and loss in LA, is between Mike and Phillip, not Mike and Betty. 

Phillip’s entrance in the film arrives at a point when the viewer is desperately in need of a clear-eyed, unfiltered sense of who the mask-wearing Mike truly was, and the character of Phillip, middle-aged, sophisticated, and a little world-weary, provides that.

And thanks to the effortless gravitas of Paul Winfield’s performance, Betty's discovery that the one person who really knew Mike—who picked him up in Ohio and paid for his first-class flight to LA...who both knew and loved the sides of him she never saw—happens to be a man, elevates the film’s emotional depth and tension in a way I wanted to see more of. 

Robert Crosson as Sam Morris
A lonely photographer with a paternalistic streak
 whose affection for Mike is channeled into a voyeuristic preoccupation

When the Betty character isn’t coming across like a lone female tourist lost in an androcentric world of drug dealers, Sugar Daddies, father figures, and the opportunistically sexually-fluid young men who love and/or use them; from a strictly neo-noir angle, I do like that her character feels like a (intentional?)  genre callback to the Dana Andrews role in Otto Preminger’s 1944 film noir, Laura.

In that film, a detective falls in love with the dead woman whose murder he’s investigating, and I think something like that is what happens to Betty. 

It’s left up to individual interpretation whether one thinks Betty is in love with Mike at the start of the film (my take is that she only thinks she is). The tragedy is that she only ever “meets” the real Mike after his death. At the end, when she’s at her piano, and we hear that she has had that out-of-tune C-scale fixed, I think Betty has indeed fallen in love with Mike. And is slowly learning how to let him go.

No matter how many times I see it, Winger always wrings the waterworks out of me during this scene. She is SO, good. I can't imagine that the character of Betty, a completely average woman, looked like much of a role on the page, but Winger inhabits her and gives her an inner life we can see play across her face.

Even in those moments when I wish for a version of Mike's Murder that was less hetero-centric, I can never get past the personal reality that less of Debra Winger is anything is just simply not a good idea.

NO ONE IS INNOCENT

Comparative allusions to Preminger’s Laura and Mike’s Murder don’t stop with Winger’s role, but extend most pointedly to the way the titular characters in both are these dominant figures whose presences are felt throughout the entirety of the film. Influencing the action, whether or not they are onscreen, whether or not they are alive.  

As embodied by the ideally cast Mark Keyloun, Mike Chuhutsky (I love that name. As one reviewer observed, it stands out as the last remnant of his true self; the part of himself he hadn’t yet got around to changing), like all good hustlers, has that complacently nebulous, passive/assertive, all-things-to-all-people quality that makes him the perfect blank screen upon which others can project exactly what they want and need. He can look like an innocent, he can look like a criminal.

Hustler White

“A confused kid who sold a few drugs to pay his rent.” 

Themes related to privilege and the presumption of white innocence emerge provocatively and ambiguously—vacillating somewhere between critique and perpetuation—in the “reckless boys making bad decisions” tone of the scenes showing Mike and his twitchy friend Pete (an excellent Darrell Larson) engaging in criminal activity. 

Physical contrasts—sharky city boy Pete next to cherubic Midwest cornpone Mike—invite audiences to ascribe a naïve blamelessness to Mike. Yet simultaneously, there’s a well-observed undercurrent of personal accountability proffered in the (evenhandedly accurate) depiction of Mike and Pete as the type of guys who, despite untrustworthiness, bad faith, and a tendency to exploit an advantage being characteristic of so many of their interactions with others, are nevertheless entirely uncomprehending of the fact that their actions can have consequences. 

A darkly compelling (and often heartbreaking) look at love, loss, and loneliness in the city of missed connections, Mike's Murder is a more-than-worthy addition to the canon of Los Angeles neo-noirs. It's a film that deserves reevaluation. Better still, Mike's Murder is a film that needs to have its original cut restored. 

Life partners James Bridges (who started out as an actor) and Jack Larson (associate producer of Mike's Murder and, of course, TV's Jimmy Olsen of The Adventures of Superman) met when both appeared in the film Johnny Trouble (1957). Bridges passed away in 1993, Larson in 2015

I once described Albert Finney as a movie star with the heart of a character actor. I think James Bridges was a mainstream filmmaker with the heart of a Queer Cinema auteur. And the two worlds come together magnificently in Mike’s Murder, James Bridges' most authentically personal film. 

Clip from Mike's Murder (1984)

BONUS MATERIAL

When I mentioned earlier that Debra Winger’s character drives a cool car, it’s because the moment I saw her driving that silver VW Rabbit convertible in Mike's Murder, I went ga-ga over it. My first VW Rabbit, purchased in the '90s was red, but in 2000, I got the silver model that had always obsessed me.  

I actually had the opportunity to observe James Bridges and Jack Larson at work when, about five months after seeing Mike’s Murder, I got a job as a dance extra in Bridges’ next film, Perfect (1985). Filming took place over seven days at the end of summer at the Sports Connection fitness center in West Hollywood. True to the Hollywood axiom, nobody knows they're making a bomb until it detonates.

Debra Winger signed my Black Widow poster: 
"To Ken, my favorite guy to move with" 

In the mid-‘90s, I worked in Santa Monica as a dance instructor and fitness trainer, and for a brief time, I had the “Somebody pinch me!” thrill of having Debra Winger as a client. I couldn't believe my luck, and it took every ounce of professionalism I had not to go completely fanboy over her on our first meetup. She relayed to me that she selected my class because she couldn’t stand “perky” (my class demeanor was not dissimilar to that of Louis Gossett Jr. in An Officer and a Gentleman). She's such a sweetheart, and I had (have) such a crush. 

The real-life case that inspired Mike’s Murder was the stabbing death of Mark Bernolak in his apartment in Brentwood on October 12, 1980. Bernolak, a former lover of Paul Winfield and an acquaintance of Bridges and Larson, was a part-time tennis instructor who also dealt drugs while trying to get work behind the scenes in films. 

IMDB lists him as an assistant on the 1979 The Who documentary The Kids Are Alright, and a university archive has seven photos Bernolak took of author Christopher Isherwood and his partner, artist Don Bachardy (both friends of Larson and Bridges). The details surrounding the actual case are tragic and a bit dodgy, but far less sensational than what Mike’s Murder depicts (Those interested can Google: Mark Bernolak and UCLA football). 

Copyright © Ken Anderson     2009 - 2025

THE BABY MAKER 1970

In 1970--decades before the topic of surrogacy became a standby staple of Lifetime TV thrillers, mediocre comedy fodder (Paternity, Baby Mama), or a nightmare vision of a dystopian future (The Handmaid’s Tale)--it was considered a subject so unique and unusual that critics and audiences alike were at a bit of a loss as to how to respond to a movie proposing surrogacy as a legitimate alternative for a couple wanting a child but unable to conceive.  

Barbara Hershey as Patricia "Tish" Gray

Sam Groom as Jay Wilcox

Collin Wilcox as Suzanne Wilcox

Scott Glenn as Tad Jacks

The Baby Maker, the debut film of Oscar-nominated screenwriter James Bridges (The Paper Chase, The China Syndrome) tells the story of a Los Angles hippie (Barbara Hershey, the then go-to flower child of the movies) who, for a substantial amount of money and because she just loves being pregnant (“Proof of the reality of my own existence”), agrees to bear a child for a square-but-nice, well-to-do Brentwood couple (Sam Groom & Collin Wilcox). Combining as it does—with varying degrees of success—elements of the well-intentioned Generation Gap TV movie (Maybe I’ll Come Home in The Spring); the quickie cash-in counterculture youth flick (1969s natural childbirth gimmick comedy Generation); the racy and “with it” social exposé (The Christine Jorgensen Story); and the indie character drama (Five Easy Pieces), The Baby Maker proved a hard picture to categorize and an even tougher film to market.

"The kind of film that makes talk!" 
This ungrammatical tagline underscores the overall
please-don't-let-me-be-misunderstood tone of this newspaper ad (click to enlarge) 

Young audiences deemed The Baby Maker "too straight" and mainstream, just another example of a major studio depicting hippie counterculture inauthentically on the screen (a valid criticism considering The Baby Maker has a scene depicting Hershey's tree-hugger character literally hugging a tree). Meanwhile, mainstream critics labeled the film “bizarre”(The Miami News) and tripped over their words as they tried to frame the movie's then-daring themes in ways that didn't suggest simple exploitation and sensationalism. On that score, The Baby Maker's marketing campaign didn't help matters much.

 

Audiences titillated by the film’s teasingly salacious ad copy: “She’ll live with a couple. Share the husband. They get a baby that’s at least half theirs. She gets the joy of making it” (Time capsule note: the term "making it" was also '60s slang for having sex, so the ad engages in a bit of double entendre) were inevitably disappointed. 

Imagine expecting a movie about a hippy-dippy tie-dye three-way and instead find yourself watching a thoughtful, often clinical, nearly two-hour character drama contemplating the permanence of decisions in the era of "If it feels good, do it." 

Lili Valenty as Mrs. Culnick, the sweet little old lady go-between who
 facilitates the pairing of the childless couple with a willing surrogate

It also didn't help marketing matters much that America's love affair with the hippie was on the wane. A few months prior to the release of The Baby Maker, John G. Avildsen released a low-budget social melodrama titled Joe that climaxed in a vigilante massacre at a hippie commune by a pair of ultra-conservative working-class reactionaries. The film struck an odd, cathartic chord with a public still reeling from the hippie violence detailed in the ongoing Manson trials and became a controversial sleeper hit. In this social climate, The Baby Maker’s positive depiction of hippie culture and the idealism of youth started to look a tad dated and cliché.

All of which contributed to The Baby Maker enjoying only the briefest of theatrical runs before promptly disappearing from both movie screens and people's memories. This in spite of it having received a good share of favorable notices for its performances. Barbara Hershey attracted a lot of Best Actress Oscar nomination buzz in the trade papers, the film ultimately garnering an Academy Award nod for its original song score by composer Fred Karlin. (Karlin did win the Oscar that year, but in another category for a different film: Best Song “For All We Know” from Lovers and Other Strangers.)

"I was just looking at your records. You have an awful lot of Frank Sinatra."
The surrogate mother meets (and sizes up) the father

Although I recall when The Baby Maker was originally released, I don’t recall it ever appearing on television or even coming out on video. My reaction to the newspaper ads at the time was likely in line with how they appeared to most people: the film looked like cheap exploitation Drive-In fare. Not that that had ever proved a deterrent to my interest in a movie before. It's just that with both Myra Breckinridge and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls hitting the screens at the same time that year, my reasoning was that if I was going to see vulgar trash, it might as well be big-budget vulgar trash from a major studio.

The opportunity to see The Baby Maker came in 1975 when I was still in high school and working as an usher in San Francisco's Alhambra Theater. The Baby Maker played as the bottom half on a double bill with The Happy Hooker, of all things (although, as the guy who also set up the outdoor advertising, I have to say this was one of our more eye-catching marquees). By this time, Barbara Hershey had officially changed her name to Barbara Seagull (an ill-advised phase which lasted about two years), and hippies in movies were starting to look as quaint as beatniks. Nevertheless, for the week of the film's run, I saw it about three times. And absolutely loved it. 

Tad and Tish
One of the things I like about how the character of Tish is conceived is that she never thinks twice about treating her body as her own property to do with as she wishes. Although she is in an open relationship with her boyfriend Tad (for all of six months), when she decides to be a surrogate, she doesn't seek his permission or approval. The scene where she finally tells him is touching and beautifully played. It feels light-years away from how I imagine the scene would be written today. 

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS MOVIE

Before making his directing debut with The Baby Maker, James Bridges was a successful screenwriter who got his start working in television (Bridges wrote one of my all-time favorite episodes of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour: “The Unlocked Window”) and had a background of acting and directing for the theater. Dissatisfied with the quality of the films made from his scripts (The Appaloosa, Colossus: The Forbin Project), Bridges decided that he’d try his hand at directing direct his next screenplay  -“I can fuck ‘em up as good as they can!” The Baby Maker's lead character is based on a woman he and life-partner/business partner Jack Larson knew from a Venice Beach bar called The Carousel. A bohemian, free-spirit type who enjoyed the feeling of being pregnant and made extra money by serving as a surrogate mother for childless couples. 

It's Complicated

The Baby Maker is a twist on the classic triangle, the third party in this instance being recruited in a most impersonal way to participate in a most personal form of interrelation. In those pre-in vitro days, the fact that the surrogate is to be impregnated “the old-fashioned way” may have served as the film's principle gimmick and marketing hook, but The Baby Maker distinguishes itself in the manner in which its sensational premise actually serves as a springboard for a thoughtful examination of culture conflict. The film's humor and heart arise out of the clash of generations, personalities, backgrounds, and the unanticipated emotions arising out of what ostensibly is--in form and function--a business arrangement.

In all, Bridges set a heady task for himself in his first outing as director. And while he’s not always successful in balancing the film's varying shifts in tone or in sustaining the narrative thrust of the story over the length of the film’s running time (sometimes it feels up in the air as to which character's story the film is trying to tell); it does feel as though he's telling a story he believes in. 

 Collin Wilcox made her memorable film debut as Mayella in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962).

Wilcox and director James Bridges have an association that extends back to 1964, when she appeared in the Bridges-penned episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour titled "The Jar" (for which he won an Emmy nomination). In 1965, she had a role in his stage play Bachelor Furnished, and in 1977, Bridges cast her as the mother to his alter-ego character in Bridges' semi-autobiographical film, September 30, 1955.

PERFORMANCES

Critics were divided over The Baby Maker’s overall merits, but the quality of Barbara Hershey’s performance was undisputed. Without a doubt, her performance is the single most distinguished takeaway from the entire film. Barbara Hershey’s real-life hippie-dippy reputation may have blighted her early career (and indeed may have cost her a much-deserved Oscar nod for her role here), but it’s precisely her naturalness in the role that grounds the film. Though her character may have been written as an archetype, it's Hershey who comes across as the real thing. Hers is the film's defining voice and, ultimately, its saving grace.

Hershey, who just the year before gave a truly chilling performance as a sociopath in Frank Perry's shattering Last Summer (1969), gives another incredible performance in this, her 5th film. Always an underrated actress, she is The Baby Maker's Most Valuable Player. In scene after scene, whether it be some bit of dialogue that would sound hokey or laughable coming from someone else or a moment when the film feels to be veering into soapy waters, Hershey’s unselfconscious and nuanced performance moors potential contrivance to truth.

Making his film debut, actor Scott Glenn is very good as Tish's sweet but immature boyfriend. 
In 1980, Glenn would go on to have a featured role in James Bridges' Urban Cowboy

As the middle-class couple, Collin Wilcox and stolidly handsome Sam Groom supply more traditional performances that, by comparison, feel more generic, but both are quite good. (Groom's sizable head and chiseled features made him a natural for the close-up-heavy medium of television, where he found success in the 1970s as the star of the syndicated program Police Surgeon.) 

Wilcox is a standout as Suzanne, playing the character as a pragmatic but somewhat neurotic woman. 

The Baby Maker actually excels in making women the dominant players in the film by placing their unique bonds and relationships front and center, and having their actions move the narrative forward. A young Jeannie Berlin is wonderful as Tish’s outspoken, activist best friend.

Tish uses some of her money to help support her single mom (Phyllis Coates) and her grandmother (Madge Kennedy), who both live in a Venice trailer park. In a sea of post-Easy Rider male-centric buddy films, The Baby Maker is unique for its dominant female perspective. 

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

I’m a big believer in the tenet that the engagement of different voices can’t help but result in different stories. The subject matter of The Baby Maker couldn’t be more heterosexual, but as a story written and produced by two gay men, I feel it qualifies as a keen example of Queer Cinema.

For all its progressive ideas, the youth movement and hippie counterculture (at least as it has been depicted in films) has always been woefully male-centric, conventional, and in most cases, downright sexist in its attitudes towards women. For example: The Strawberry Statement, a 1970 film about campus protests, couldn't conceive of anything more important for its female activists to do beyond making Xerox copies of protest pamphlets and doing the marketing. To the best of my recollection, The Baby Maker is one of the few hippie-themed films to present the woman's point of view as the dominant perspective. A genuine woman's perspective, not a fetishized, free-love, heterosexual male gaze fantasy of the sort depicted in films like Chastity, Candy, or There's a Girl in My Soup.

The Baby Maker producer Jack Larson (l.) & director James Bridges met when both appeared as actors in the film Johnny Trouble (1957). Openly gay, they remained lovers/partners till Bridges' death in 1993. Larson passed away in 2015

For its time, The Baby Maker’s feminist perspective, non-sexualized heroine, and unorthodox domestic relationships were a subtle challenge to the heteronormative status quo; something I wholly attribute to the gay sensibilities of its creators. Like the works of playwrights Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee, I think what’s brilliant about Bridges’ screenplay is that it looks at heterosexuality through the projected outsider insights of Queer perception.

In a reversal of a common youth film trope, the male bodies are the
ones exposed and made the object of the female gaze in The Baby Maker

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Being that I was just a child when my family lived in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco in the late ‘60s, I tend not to be a very good judge of what passes for the authentic or inauthentic representation of hippie culture in movies. Largely shielded from the sex and drugs side of it all, my kid's-eye-view memory of the era consists largely of its pop-cultural trappings. My nostalgia buttons can be pushed by the most superficial signposts of the era, so even though The Baby Maker takes place in Los Angeles, one of its major perks for me is how often it triggers moments of "I remember that!" memory-jogging that take me back to my San Francisco roots.

Fringed suede/leather jackets were all the rage, and everyone seemed to know how to tie-dye but me.  My elder sister (who really caught the hippie bug) was a whiz, but I tended to use so much bleach that my garments actually disintegrated. Hitchhikers were visible all over San Francisco, but my family was so large (me & 4 sisters) that picking up thumb-trippers was never a practical option, even if my parents were open to it. Which they weren't. This suited me just fine, for The Doors' Riders on the Storm  was being played on the radio at the time, and I'd had the holy hell scared out of me by the lyric "There's a killer on the road..."

War Is Not Healthy For Children & Other Living Things
I remember the many protests and picket-sign slogans of the day, the above being so ubiquitous as to have been used as the poster graphic for the 1971 film Bless the Beasts and the Children. In this scene, Jeannie Berlin (daughter of writer/director Elaine May) leads a protest against a store selling toy guns.

Pop-Top Fashion
From roughly 1965 to 1975, beverage cans came with disposable pop-tops. Hippies, being ecology-minded and all, took to using these aluminum tabs to create fashion and "art." Everything from hats, dresses, and vests were made out of these things. I hope she'll forgive me for ratting on her, but my older sister (Yes, Ms. Tie-dye) made herself a pop-top headband just like this. 

Home Decor
The days of gigantic stereos, door-size coffee tables, and sofas that seat 20

Candles, Candles, Everywhere
Candle stores and vendors were like the Starbucks of the Sixties; you couldn't take two steps on Telegraph Avenue without bumping into one. I had a beloved star-shaped rainbow candle in my room (back when they were, y'know, just rainbows and not my way of coming out to my parents), and, of course, my sister made her own 

The Single Wing Turquoise Bird
How's that for a '60s name? Psychedelic light shows and avant-garde multimedia theater were all the rage. Not only did every youth-culture movie feature at least one sequence of freak-out visuals, but the phenomenon went mainstream with 2001: A Space Odyssey. In The Baby Maker, Tish and her friends attend a light show performance by The Single Wing Turquoise Bird, a real-life performance troupe that is still in existence.

Although it’s one of my favorites, I don't mean to paint The Baby Maker as some kind of undiscovered classic. It’s shot in the flat, undistinguished style of a TV movie, the hippie trappings and dialogue can be a bit distancing, and modern audiences may find the tempo a tad sluggish. But it's notable now for its "my body, my choice" attitude about a woman's personal freedom and pregnancy.

A consistent theme in many of my favorite films is the human need for contact, so I'm a sucker for movies about people who misguidedly assume that independence means the absence of emotional attachments. Lastly, anybody who knows me knows how much I love a good cry at the movies, and the ending of The Baby Maker never fails to get the ol' waterworks going.

 BONUS MATERIAL

The Superman Connection

The Baby Maker producer Jack Larson was best known as cub reporter Jimmy Olson on the TV series The Adventures of Superman from 1952 to 1958. That show's original Lois Lane (1st season only) was actress Phyllis Coates. Larson and Coates remained friends over the years, leading to her being cast in The Baby Maker in the role of Barbara Hersey's mother.

Phyllis Coates, Jack Larson, and Ann Doran in The Adventures of Superman

Phyllis Coates as Patricia's mother

Brenda Sykes (Cleopatra Jones) appears in an unbilled bit part as a woman
with whom Tad shares a joint and a flirtation

In 1985 I got a job as a dance/exercise extra in the virtually unwatchable James Bridges film Perfect, starring John Travolta & Jamie Lee Curtis. Although the aerobics class scenes were shot on location at the Sports Connection gym in West Hollywood, this particular scene was shot months later on a set designed to look exactly like the gym. These reshoots were necessitated by the feeling from the higher-ups that the previously shot aerobic class scenes weren't "sexy enough,"
Aside from having to do something like six hours of pelvic tucks, what's most memorable about this particular sequence is that, after filming had begun, shooting halted in order for the costume people to figure out a way to sew up the legs to Travolta's shorts in order to give him a more pronounced package. When Travolta returned a half-hour later with a more camera-ready crotch, it also appeared that a bit of filler had been added. Jack Larson served as producer on this film as well and was often present on what proved to be a very gay (and happy) set.

Scenes from "The Baby Maker" (1970)

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2017