Palmer seems bemused by the misconceptions


that have shadowed the film down the years, insisting that the atmosphere on set was good- humoured and, with the natural exception of Keith Moon, surprisingly disciplined. When asked what those most preposterous rumours were exactly, Palmer replies, “Oh, that I burnt the negative/wiped the tapes/walked out on the production. There’s a dreadful film, made partly at the time, by a Dutch crew that just tells lies. Mind you, Frank was involved in the subsequent editing of that particular film, and even ‘issued’ his own version of it. Well, fantasy always was his forte. I just think he couldn’t face up to the fact that film is a collaborative effort – even Welles knew that. Frank was often his own worst enemy.” What was the reaction from studio executives


WITHOUT RESERVATIONS


Newly restored, deftly handled and still as mad as a bag of stoned badgers, Frank Zappa’s 200 Motels has recently been given the restoration treatment. MARCO ROSSI talked to legendary director TONY PALMER about the making of his cult masterpiece


“Touring can make you crazy: that’s what it’s all about.” Voiceprint has just issued Tony Palmer’s


newly restored film of Frank Zappa’s 200 Motels on DVD. Shot in Pinewood Studios and originally released in 1971, the film is an unsettling, unhinged but visionary fantasia which sites the Just Another Band From LA-era Mothers Of Invention – plus old stagers Jimmy Carl Black and Jim ‘Motorhead’ Sherwood – in a febrile, hallucinatory netherworld. Throughout 200 Motels, a claustrophobic


internal logic prevails. The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra occupies a musical concentration camp. Ringo Starr appears in the guise of Frank Zappa/Larry The Dwarf, airily declaring, “He wants me to fuck the girl with the harp” – the girl in question being Keith Moon, appearing in the role of The Hot Nun. Groupies Janet Neville- Ferguson and Lucy Offerall provide a drily cynical commentary on the Mothers’ sexual desperation. Dick Barber – credited with “snorks” on Zappa’s ’68 masterpiece We’re Only In It For The Money – appears as Bif Debris, The Vacuum Cleaner, and Theodore Bikel is the disconcertingly congenial MC Rance Muhammitz. Touring can make you crazy, remember? Director Tony Palmer, hot from All My Loving


and Cream – Farewell Concert, was the man tasked with “constructing a coherent script


from… a trunk-load of (Zappa’s) papers.” Palmer, well used to the unruly whim of rock stars, stoically held his nerve. “Actually, it was fun,” he recalls. “It would have been good to have had more time to rehearse in the studio, but we had very little money and certainly very little time. I was shocked when I was told what the actual cost had been ($679,000); it certainly didn’t go on the filming or the ‘talent’. I think I was paid $2,000!” Palmer filmed using cutting-edge 2-inch


analogue videotape – “which you now find in museums”– in order to realise the scenes Zappa envisaged while attempting to keep within the film’s relatively parsimonious budget. “Every effect that you see, every edit, was done live,” he notes. As a result, some scenes look inimitably weird, notably one in which ex-Turtles and Shindig! heroes Howard Kaylan and Mark Volman shuffle through a strobing, solarised Centerville. “Yes, I do find some of the sequences achieved by video trickery quite extraordinary,” Palmer concurs. “I’m not sure anyone has done anything to match the best of them since. And, as with the Cream… film – also shot in one go without the benefit of any editing – the energy that the film(s) has/have is because of this enforced situation. It’s very lazy simply to rely on editing to get you out of any mess. Bit like football; it is as it is, and I like that.”


upon seeing the end result? “Horror, and they did their best to bury it,” says Palmer. Would he have done anything differently had the opportunity subsequently presented itself, one wonders? “I just watched the film in Sofia, Bulgaria,” Palmer muses. “A packed audience laughed at all the jokes, and applauded vigorously at the end – so it can’t be all that bad. It is, after all, almost 40 years since I made it. I’m not sure I’d know how to do it again…” Frank Zappa’s 200 Motels is available through voice print now. Visit www.voiceprint.co.uk for more details


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