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The Unkindest Cut: How a Hatchet-Man Critic Made His Own $7,000 Movie and Put It All on His Credit Card (1996)

    Mr. Queenan seems not to have grasped that satire is a weapon of the powerless against the powerful. When satire is aimed
    at powerless people, it is not only cruel but profoundly vulgar.
        -Molly Ivins, NY Times Book Review on Imperial Caddy by Joe Queenan

It's hard to imagine how Molly Ivins could be more wrong, though not the least bit surprising that she is. The natural target of satire is not power, but stupidity, and it is simply one of those brutal facts of life that the powerless are often so because they are stupid, while the powerful, though quite often stupid themselves, are usually less so. Satire is however an important weapon to use against the powerful, because their stupidity has a tendency to affect us all, whereas the stupidity of the powerless is generally fairly harmless. She is right though, that the satirist will often appear to be cruel and vulgar; after all, their profession basically consists of pointing out how stupid people are. But it is possible, perhaps even necessary, for them to leaven this effect by pointing out one other thing : their own stupidity. No humorist is more savage than Joe Queenan, but in recent years he's learned this lesson and taken to making himself the butt of his own humor.

When his job as a self described "hatchet man critic" found him watching the Robert Rodriguez film, El Mariachi, which was notoriously said to have been made for $7000, Joe Queenan decided that he was so sick of hearing these kinds of obviously confabulated stories about independent filmmakers that he would try it himself :

    [A]ll Rodriguez had proven was that someone could make a movie for $7,000. What would be
    really cool was proving that anyone could make a movie for $7,000. And that anyone was going to
    be me.

This book details his misadventures as he sets out to do just that--well, actually to make one for $6,998.

He quickly determined that in order to keep costs down, and headaches to a minimum, his movie, Twelve Steps to Death, would have to be made without professional help, or rather interference, because professionals wouldn't be willing to make the necessary compromises. So instead, he wrote, directed and acted in it himself; used friends, family and neighbors; and shot the whole thing in his hometown of Tarrytown, NY.. Much of the book is taken up by the script and by the very funny process of making the movie, which ends up costing twice the budgeted price even with all the corner cutting.

Then an interesting thing happens, Queenan finds himself getting caught up in the whole deal and starts to think in bigger terms than just showing it can't be done. He starts to think about having a finished product that people will actually pay for. The cynic starts to care. And so he begins blowing larger and larger sums of money to get the picture edited, add sound effects and music, and produce a quality print. He stages and of course wins his own film festival, where Twelve Steps is the only entry and the judges are friends, in-laws, and his mother. Then he takes the movie to a Dallas Film Festival...and the roof falls in on his dreams. In its review of the movie, the Dallas Observer compared it to "a flatulent snuffalupagus, pausing before each target and expelling noxious gases."

This is all very funny, but along the way something more profound is also revealed. Queenan discovers that it just isn't that easy, despite all his sniping over the years, to make a good movie. More important, he offers the reader a chance to see just how divorced from that reality he became. Queenan actually deceived himself into thinking that the movie was good, when it was manifestly, and virtually had to be, awful. And he's one of the most cynical guys on the planet; imagine how much easier it must be for artists, with their inherently dreamy temperaments, to trick themselves. No wonder most art isn't very good. The people who produce it are fundamentally incapable of maintaining the emotional distance that is required to judge it objectively. In the end the joke is on Joe Queenan as he learns this valuable lesson--that people don't set out to make crappy movies, they just turn out that way, despite their best intentions--in devastating, but very amusing, fashion.

(Reviewed:)

Grade: (B)

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The Unkindest Cut: How a Hatchet-Man Critic Made His Own $7,000 Movie and Put It All on His Credit Card (1996)

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