What movie would you take to a desert island?

By Frank Zappa

Movies For A Desert Island, 1987

I've never seen a film that could hold my interest for repeated viewings. There are pieces of music that I can listen to over and over again, sure. That's art. Film can be art, but if you're asking me if there's a film in existence that I can think of in the same way as, say The Rite of Spring by Stravinsky, that I could stand to listen to over and over again, I can't think of any, which is not to denigrate anybody's efforts in the medium. It's just my personal taste. If I had to be entertained, I'd probably stick with The Rite of Spring. You get to use more of your own imagination when you listen to a piece of music. Movies tend to spell it out for you.

I made three films: 200 Motels, Baby Snakes, and another one called Uncle Meat, which is not finished. The basic idea behind 200 Motels was putting music and images together in a surrealistic way, but because of the budget of the film it wasn't possible to do the project the way it was supposed to have been done. There are a number of firsts in that film: It's the first feature-length major motion picture to be shot in video, so there were all the union problems that we had to work out between the people on the film side and the people on the video side. A stupid example would be when we were shooting at Pinewood Studios in England. The cameramen's union was there saying, "Okay, we need a focus puller on every one of these video cameras." So that left us with five guys who were hanging around eating sandwiches all the time. The picture was shot in seven eight-hour days, fifty-six hours, and they pulled the plug at the end of the last hour. At that point, only one-third of the actual script had been shot. There were one hundred and ten hours of video edit, after which the edited video master was transfered to 35-mm Technicolor, and then three months of film editing and laying in sound effects and dubbing and all that stuff. The total budget was $679,000. That was in 1971. We shot it on video tape because for one thing, the special effects – the optical effects – that were involved in the film didn't exist in any other kind of medium at that time. If you were paying for dissolves by the foot, the optical bill alone for that one film would have been out toward Venus. So I thought video was the right medium in which to do it. The other thing that was unusual about 200 Motels was that there was a symphony orchestra of some one hundred and twenty players and they were actually playing. They were really recording the soundtrack instead of doing it in playback as is usually done. It could have worked better if the attitude of the participants had been a little better. The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra was something less than cooperative. As a matter of fact, on the last day of shooting, some of these nice old gentlemen in the orchestra purposely destroyed the rented tuxedos they were wearing – like mongoloid vandalism, Finally, the way the film was cut together had more to do with the way you would organize a piece of music than the way you would organize a motion picture: where to cut in terms of rhythms, where you would go to from one scene to another, the types of pictorial modulations that would be included.

The film did have a story, but as I said, at the end of the more than fifty hours, we had only done one-third of the script, so I had to make up another, completely different story in the editing room. The biggest mistake that was made during the whole filming was that it was all shot in video tape – at that time it was two-inch video. I guess the cost of each reel was three or four hundred dollars for a ninety-minute reel. The producer of the film decided that since he was an independent working through United Artists, he would make United Artists happy by showing them he was a real tight-fisted, frugal, prudent producer, hoping to grease the chute for future activities. He had all of the master tapes erased and sold for stock. I don't think he's done another film with United Artists since then, but if he just could've looked down the road ten years, do you have any idea of what the outtakes of 200 Motels would be worth? I just did it because I had my own idea about what I wanted to do and tried to do, but there just wasn't enough money at the time to do it in the right way. I'm not that enthralled with 200 Motels as a finished product. I made the best of it. Baby Snakes is a little more successful in terms of what it sets out to do versus what it achieves, but that's also another low-budget film. I probably have $800,000 of my own money in that one.

Music videos could be an interesting medium, but the problem with music videos is the pictorial vocabulary that is allowed in broadcasting is so narrow that you get the same images over and over again. You could sum it up with "the door, the dove, the legs, the leather." It's the same little components over and over again. On the other hand, if you listen to what the lyrics say, it's still "the girl, the car, the love, the heartbreak," so I guess it goes together. There are people who make interesting videos, but I think for the most part they're in Europe. The only really amusing one that I've seen was a few years ago by Tom Tom Club called Genius in Love, with really nice animations, and there have been some other pieces done by a place called Motion Picker's Studio, who do really really interesting clay animation. Picker did the thing of Mayor Koch singing "I Love New York," and Jimmy Carter singing "Georgia." Those are the ones I've enjoyed – I just happen to like animation. There's some animation in 200 Motels and some clay animation in Baby Snakes, and I have quite a bit of it in the unfinished film done by a guy named Bruce Bickford.

I wrote and directed a music video in 1980 because at the time we had a contract with CBS and they wanted a music video to show overseas. I did a song called "You Are What You Is" – the title song from the album we had out. They hired a guy who looked like Ronald Reagan and gave him the electric chair, among other things. It did not get played a lot, especially in the United States.

I think Miami Vice is the missing link between detective pulp fiction and MTV videos: MTV videos plus the real sound effects of the gun. MTV is super violent, but you don't hear the violent sound effects. Miami Vice gives you the whole enchilada. The current trend today for composers in the business is that if you're a recording artist and you do rock 'n' roll, you get a call and somebody will offer you a license to use one of your songs on the soundtrack of the album. It doesn't necessarily mean that it fits in the movie, but they cram it in there so that when the film goes into release, they can put out a greatest hits album. They know they'll sell x number of copies of that based on the different artists who contributed, and the fee paid to the artist is not that exorbitant. The artist benefits because his song is connected to the movie, so he gets some kind of trickle-down effect from the motion picture advertising. But the net loss is to the viewer, who's been deprived of seeing a real movie with a real score about a real something, and all he's gotten is freezedried, mass-market doo-doo.

I did two soundtracks for films other than my own: a cowboy movie directed by Tim Sullivan called Run Home Slow and another movie called The World's Greatest Sinner, directed by Tim Carey. They were low-budget cheapies. In the case of Run Home Slow, I looked at the screenplay first, and in the case of The World's Greatest Sinner, I worked only with the print. These things were both done in the early sixties, before I even had a rock 'n' roll band, and if you think 200 Motels was low-budget, these things were micro. In the case of The World's Greatest Sinner, the guy who produced it didn't like one piece of music I'd written, so he took an album of the London Philharmonic doing The Planets by Gustav Holst, had it transferred to 35 mm, didn't even get a license, and stuck it in the movie in the place where he wanted it. He didn't give any credit in the film, so I've got my name on it as the composer on the picture. I got this big shock when I went to the premiere and suddenly there was "Mars, the Bringer of War, da-da-da-da" coming out in this one scene.

It's hard to describe the process of writing a soundtrack for a movie, but I'd say if I had to do one today, I'd do it in a completely different way because there's better equipment to do it with. I would do it on a computer. The computer actually plays the music; you link that up with a video tape, and you can play right along with it and edit it.

I did enjoy Eraserhead, I must say that. I like the texture of the sound in Eraserhead, not necessarily that it was music, but just the idea of the sound blended into strange things that you hear that create a mood for the scene. I don't think there's enough conscious thought put into the psycho-acoustic factor, where you make people experience things in a different way just by changing the quality of what the sound is through equalization or by using something else in the background that creates an attitude and a different kind of setting. Sound can be used as effectively as lighting to tell a story, but usually the film budgets don't have enough money to do it right.

Some of my other favorite films are Killer Shrews – I don't even remember who did it. It's one of those fifties black and white science fiction movies. Another stinger is the Brainiac, a Mexican science fiction movie with a really cheap mask, a rubber mask with a big rubber tongue sticking out – sheer cheese – and rubber mittens on the guy's hands that don't quite match up to the cuffs under his coat. That's the kind of film I can enjoy because it just makes me laugh. It's so inept, so overstated.

Music will make your life beautiful because you can participate in it, but film, I think, is much more in the realm of entertainment. In terms of the amount of time of participation, the way music is in the United States, it's a virtual wallpaper to the life-style of the people who consume it. The ones who are really into it are listening to it hours and hours a day whether they listen consciously or just for background. If they can choose to hear the things they like, it tends to make their lives more beautiful. With a film, you have to make a conscious decision to see a certain thing and you may or may not be enthralled with it. You've been hooked into the theater by the advertising. There are a lot of people who go to the movies and pay a lot of money for ninety minutes or so of entertainment, walk out, and say, "I was gypped." It's a rare occasion when they go and say, "I've uplifted."