Paul Bartel, Director and Star of ┤Eating Raoul,┤ Dies at 61
By LAWRENCE VAN GELDER
Paul Bartel, a director, screenwriter and actor whose taste for farce, black humor and social satire was reflected in films like "Eating Raoul," "Death Race 2000" and "Scenes From the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills," died on Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was 61 and also had a home in Los Angeles.
The cause was not immediately determined, said his father, William, who added that Bartel had undergone eight hours of surgery two weeks ago for cancer of the liver ducts.
Bartel, whose love affair with movies began in his childhood, last appeared as Osric in the filmmaker Michael Almereyda's new corporate setting of "Hamlet," and at the time of his death was engaged in discussions with a British producing group about a new film and had also been asked to write episodes of a new television series.
"He was interested in theatrics from Day 1," his father said as he traced Bartel's life from childhood marionettes to theater and film studies and to a long career in directing, writing and acting, particularly in independent films.
Bartel, in later years a heavyset man with a white beard, achieved his greatest acclaim in 1982, when his "Eating Raoul" was chosen for the 20th New York Film Festival.
"One has to be careful not to overstate the case when praising 'Eating Raoul,"' Vincent Canby wrote in his review in The New York Times. "One mustn't blunt its pleasures by calling it a laff riot. It is full of smiles, punctuated here and there by marvelously unseemly guffaws, but most of the time it works its little wonders quietly. The comic style is purposely flat, plain and ordinary, like a piece of Pop art."
Bartel was not only the director and co-writer of "Eating Raoul." He was also its co-star, joining Mary Woronov in their portrayal of a married couple, Paul and Mary Bland, who like nice things, share a belief that sex is dirty and have the misfortune to live in a Los Angeles apartment house inhabited mostly by swingers.
The Blands also share a dream. In time, the prissy Paul, who fancies himself a wine connoisseur, will quit his job in a liquor store, and the sexually charged Mary will leave her job as a hospital dietitian and they will open their own restaurant in the country.
One day when a drunk swinger, looking for an orgy in the building, invades their apartment and attempts to rape Mary, Paul hits him over the head with a cast iron skillet and kills him. The Blands, who have fallen on hard economic times, empty his wallet and dispose of his body.
They quickly realize they have found a path to fortune: advertise in the underground press, lure swingers to their apartment, dispatch them with the skillet, rob them and toss the bodies in the garbage compactor, all with a clear conscience.
As Paul sees it, the victims are "horrible, sex-crazed perverts that nobody will miss anyway." But life grows complicated when Raoul, a young Chicano locksmith with a passion for Mary, attempts to share in their scheme.
As Bartel recalled afterward, "I was sitting on the terrace of the Carlton Hotel in Cannes, sipping a $7 coffee," when Richard Roud, then the director of the New York Film Festival and chairman of its program committee, "came strolling down the Croisette, casually glanced in my direction and turned thumbs up."
Roud was signaling that Bartel's $500,000 black comedy had been chosen for the festival, where it was to charm the critics and win their praise. "I felt enormous elation and relief." Bartel said.
"Eating Raoul" was not his first film at the festival. "The Secret Cinema," a 30-minute film about a New York secretary for whom everybody's paranoid fantasy becomes a reality, was shown in 1967. Canby called it "a very funny, completely lunatic experience."
Among the films Bartel directed -- and sometimes acted in or co-wrote -- were "Cannonball" (1976), "Not for Publication" (1984) and "Lust in the Dust" (1985). As an actor he appeared in everything from "Eat My Dust" (1976) and "Rock 'n' Roll High School" (1979) to "White Dog" (1982), "Heart Like a Wheel" (1983), "National Lampoon's European Vacation" (1985), "Shelf Life" (1993), "The Usual Suspects" (1995) and "Basquiat" (1996).
Bartel, the eldest of the two sons and two daughters of William and Jesse Bartel, who died five weeks ago, was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Manhattan and Montclair, N.J. William Bartel said Paul was 4 or 5 when "he started out with a marionette show, strung them and built himself a little stage. He really didn't worry too much about learning to articulate the marionettes, but he was great on the dialogue."
By the time he was a student at Montclair High School, he had persuaded his father to buy him a 16-millimeter German-made motion picture camera and, in the words of his father, "proceeded to con" a teacher into allowing him to devote a semester to making an animated cartoon, doing the main drawings himself and using the class to do the "in-betweens," which required 3,000 cels, the transparent sheets on which the original drawings are traced or transferred.
Bartel, who was fluent in French and Italian, studied theater and film at UCLA and won a Fulbright scholarship that took him to Rome and the Cinecitta studio. He fulfilled his military service by talking his way into the Army Signal Corps Pictorial Center in Queens and later made films for the U.S. Information Agency. By the early 1970s, he was making films in Hollywood.
Besides his father, of Delray Beach, Fla., and Bay Head, N.J., he is survived by two sisters, Lucy Kizirian of Tallahassee, Fla., and Wendy Bartel of Bay Head, N.J., and a brother, Peter of Floyd, Va.
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Date: Thu, 18 May 2000 08:04:42 -0700 (PDT)
From: chuck <chuckmk@yahoo.com>
Subject: (exotica) Going to Chicago - Trader Vics Still There?
I'm going to Chicago
Is there a trader vic's in chicago still????????
Any other exotic sites or Stores you can recommend?
Click on "restaurants" or "bars" and do a search for either place. It'll
give
you the addresses. Have fun!
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------------------------------
Date: Thu, 18 May 2000 11:51:55 -0400
From: nytab@pipeline.com
Subject: (exotica) kool places in Rochester
Don't laugh, but I have to go to Rochester, NY for a week.
Is anyone familiar with the current cultural goings-on in the Flower City? Drinks (other than places that serve only Genny Cream Ale), food (where to now that Smitty's Birdland is gone?), music, records? Where should I be going?
- -Lou Smith
lousmith@pipeline.com
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------------------------------
Date: Thu, 18 May 2000 11:14:44 -0500
From: dymaxia@ripco.com
Subject: Re: (exotica) Going to Chicago - Trader Vics Still There?
chuck wrote:
>
> I'm going to Chicago
>
> Is there a trader vic's in chicago still????????
>
> Any other exotic sites or Stores you can recommend?
Yeah, it's still there. There used to be a place
in Hyde Park called House of Tiki. I haven't been
there since college, but that was a great place.
Also, I think there's a tiki place on Wabash - I pass
it all the time. Pago Pago, I think it's called, but
again, I can't guarantee that it's still there.
- --
Kerry
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------------------------------
Date: Wed, 17 May 2000 19:53:42 +0200
From: Johan Dada Vis <Quiet@village.uunet.be>
Subject: (exotica) Re: Warren Barker
if you liked "Warren Barker Is In!" then i bet you'll alos like "77 Sunset
Strip"!
Johan
-----
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------------------------------
Date: Wed, 17 May 2000 19:39:33 +0200
From: Johan Dada Vis <Quiet@village.uunet.be>
Subject: (exotica) Re: Liquidator (was: Dick Hyman)
>From: Bruce Lenkei <lenkei@echonyc.com>
>But, The Liquidator is a fine, fine track.
check out the "Liquidator" soundtrack by Lalo Schifrin! last year
someone put it on lp, probably one of those ... errr... limited issues.
it's a beautiful and varied soundtrack: a strong big band theme
sung by Shirley Bassey that is as good as any Bond theme by John Barry;
Send instant messages & get email alerts with Yahoo! Messenger.
http://im.yahoo.com/
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------------------------------
Date: Fri, 19 May 2000 07:48:41 -0500
From: "Robert Blahut, Jr." <robertb@asapnet.net>
Subject: (exotica) Quiet Village
Say,
i've been meaning to ask this for a while. would anyone on the list be
able to tell me what the chords for Quiet village are? if not, how about
what key it is played in, i think that i could figure it out from there. i
will be trying to play it on an electric (digital) keyboard i have that has
,many good patches. if anyone can email me a lead sheet of the song that
would be the best but anything will be appreciated
thanks in advance,
tablah
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Date: Fri, 19 May 2000 09:32:34 -0400
From: Peter Gingerich <peter.gingerich@wcom.com>
Subject: (exotica) DJ Tanaka (Fantastic Plastic Machine) Live
Quite a treat last night to attend 'Tokyo Street 2000' an event put on
by a friend here in the big bad apple. A Japanese fashion and art show, the
hilight being DJ Tomoyuki Tanaka from Fantastic Plastic Machine doing his
thing for about two hours for a crowd of fashionistas, Japanese trendies,
random eastern european and brazilian models and the odd exoticat mostly
interested in the free Asahi and sake...
Checked out Mr Tanaka (all 200? lbs. of him) at work but can honestly
say I'm none the wiser how a dj works except that he slid around a slider
between the two turntables. What a constant job. I'll stick with something
obvious and easy, ie, keyboards.
Lights went back up at 11pm, we had to stop dancing, one of the
monkey-suit security guys practically reached over to forcibly remove the
tone arm from the turntable. A definite no-no in these circles, I imagine.
The only let down to the evening was seeing Cornelius, or someone who
looked like him, get on a tour bus outside on the street, but my girlfriend
couldn't reach him in time to ask if it was actually him. Call me a
starf***er.
Oddly enuff the event was held at the Pavilion where the 'FMU Record
Fair was last weekend. Besides seeing record nerds the best part of that was
the prices dealers were trying to hijack us with: $50 for the Yma Sumac
'Miracles' album that I was lucky to have rescued from a basement cleaning
gig once, $200 for Ananda Shanker vinyl but as my friend points out these
are just asking prices.....saved my $ for the dollar bins, picked up a
trashed copy of 'Round the World' by Les Baxter and a red vinyl 50th state
Hawaiin deal from'59 or so...
Now tonite its the Raymond Scott Orchestrette at MOMA!! Wow!! Gotta love
this town!!
thanx all,
pg in NYC
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------------------------------
Date: Fri, 19 May 2000 09:51:08 -0400
From: nytab@pipeline.com
Subject: (exotica) [obit] Michel Kazan
May 19, 2000
NYTimes
Michel Kazan, 92, Hairstylist Known for Bouffant Hairdos
By ENID NEMY
Michel Kazan, who gave society and entertainment figures the bouffant hairdo and created the coiffures for the models of several fashion designers, died May 13 at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center. He was 92 and lived in Manhattan.
Inspired by historical styles, Kazan brought several famous hairstyles to the modern world, not just the bouffant but the pageboy and the French twist. In the mid-1960s, he came up with the immensely popular idea of attaching little curls to hairpins, which allowed women to simulate widow's peaks, bangs and curl clusters at the crown of the head.
He remained active until well into his 80s, and the Manhattan salon at 16 E. 55th St. that he opened in 1961 still bears his name.
In the 1950s, '60s and '70s, Kazan created original hairstyles for well-known couturiers like Lanvin-Castillo, Chanel and Jean Desses in Paris and James Galanos in the United States. He adapted his designs to blend with their individual collections; one of his trademarks was the crisp, slicked-back, almost boyish styles used in several Galanos shows.
In the same period, he coiffed social figures and celebrities on both coasts, including Greta Garbo, Lee Radziwill, Natalie Wood, Raquel Welch and Doris Duke.
Kazan was born in Russia of French parentage and went to Paris as a young boy.
He opened his first salon in Paris in 1934; in 1940, during World War II, while France was occupied by the Germans, he left for New York, which he had visited briefly the year before. Several decades later, he still called his permanent entry to the United States "the best Christmas present in my life."
In his early years here, he joined Helena Rubinstein, the cosmetics empress, where he became chief stylist of the hairdressing salon. He quickly became a byword in both the fashion and social worlds. By the time that he left Rubinstein in 1961 to open his own luxurious salon, there were branches in a number of cities around the country, and he had become an international authority on hairstyling.
Later, he was associated with Bonwit Teller, leading to salons in both America and Europe and to several unusual assignments, including designing for theatrical productions and creating a new hairstyle for about 1,800 Eastern Airlines stewardesses.
Michel Kazan's New York salon served as a training ground for young stylists who later went on to their own international recognition. The best known is Kenneth, who became Jacqueline Kennedy's personal stylist and still has a salon in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.
Kazan is survived by his second wife, Maria; their two children, Roman and Zofia Kazan, both of Manhattan; three other children, Micheline Best of Delray Beach, Fla., Jacqueline Ganden of Boynton Beach, Fla., and Michel Kazan of Laguna Beach, Calif.; 9 grandchildren; and 23 great-grandchildren.
Kazan had originally hoped to become a plastic surgeon, but when lack of money made that impossible, he attended art school. Years later, he noted his satisfaction at being able to make women beautiful without cutting their faces.
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