Guns on the Clackamas

Award-winning animator Bill Plympton's 1995 venture into live-action filmmaking is a poorly executed satire of the movie industry, vaguely inspired by the making of the 1937 MGM production Saratoga, when leading lady Jean Harlow's sudden death required the use of a double for unfinished scenes. This mockumentary finds the insufferable film scholar Nigel Nado (Keith Scales) attempting to make a documentary about the mysterious Western Guns on the Clackamas, which is being filmed in Oregon by elusive producer Holton P. Jeffers Jr. (Ed Townley). Jeffers is not interested in being interviewed, so Nado must fill his picture with anyone who is even vaguely connected to the project—hairdressers, flunkies, and others who can claim to be a witness to Jeffers' work. However, Jeffers has something more pressing to consider: most of his cast members suddenly die during production, requiring the imaginative posing of their corpses for the unfinished scenes. What could have been a perversely amusing comedy is wrecked by Plympton's sophomoric humor, with any attempt at genuine spoofs of Hollywood pretensions overruled by grossly violent jokes and obscure cinema history references, most notably an inexplicable riff on Clark Gable's alleged bad breath. Guns on the Clackamas—which was never theatrically released—lacks the anarchic free spirit that makes Plympton's animation so distinctive. Clearly a misfire in his otherwise illustrative career, this is not recommended. (P. Hall)