Don't know about you all, but I’m hyped up for the upcoming screening of Otto Preminger’s Such Good Friends, as it will be a chance for those who’ve loved the retrospective to get a look at an example of the man’s notorious post-Bunny Lake output – from Hurry Sundown and Skidoo through to Rosebud and The Human Factor, surely no major filmmaker’s career plunged as sharply as Preminger’s did.

Oh, if only we had the chance to see Skidoo. This screening would have dovetailed nicely with both the Surrealism series (Jackie Gleason on LSD! Groucho Marx in his final film as a mob boss named God!) and the Nouvelle Vague series; here is the opening sequence of Skidoo, where Preminger mashes Saul Bass up with Godard (dig the movies on TV!). Skidoo is desperate and strange, a drug-soaked satire about the kids, made by the squares, for the squares… except most of the people who wanted to see it hadn’t been born yet (there have been unauthorized midnight screenings of the film in LA, and it must be interesting to consider a 40-year-old movie about a channel-flipping mobster named Tony who experiences a pharmaceutically-enhanced revelation about his line of work).

The other notorious Preminger flop I’ve always wanted to see in all its full-blooded Panavision glory is Such Good Friends, also known in cult cinema circles as “the film with the Burgess Meredith nude scene.”  Based on the 1970 best seller by Lois Gould, Preminger hired several writers to take a crack at the adaptation, including Joan Micklin Silver and Joan Didion, before settling with Elaine May, who ultimately declined screen credit for her work. “My enemies are saying it is because she doesn’t like the way it turned out”, said Preminger to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, “but that’s not true. She only wants screen credit on films she controls. I control this film. But, that was understood at the beginning.”

The production was apparently a non-stop screamfest, with Otto Preminger basically wrenching a performance out of Dyan Cannon. Actors on the film told tale of the director publicly busting a headvalve over costume choices, line readings, and actors being even inches off their marks. Cannon is supposed to be very good in the film, and was nominated for the Golden Globe as Best Actress. “Otto didn’t destroy her in the end.” said Preminger’s son Erik, who worked on the film. “He couldn’t destroy her, she was too strong. But he did destroy Jennifer O’Neill.”
 
Judging by the trailer, we are in for a time capsule of the swinging early seventies, with Preminger roaming up and down the Upper West Side, veering madly between melodrama and sex farce, and Elaine May’s surgical-strike dialogue zinging through the most garish interiors the beautiful people of the seventies could imagine.

Oh, and a nude Burgess Meredith.