‘The movies I like best usually have redeeming qualities. . . .’ : A Script Called ‘Janitor’

Two areas of light entertainment that attract audience interest almost without exception are sex and violence.

They aren’t for everyone, of course, but I have found over the years that slashing and moaning have come to represent important means of communicating visual concepts to the lumpen proletariat.

To paraphrase satirist Tom Lehrer, “Things vile make them smile.”

I mention this today not as a prelude for comment on “The Last Temptation of Christ” but as a lead-in to another effort at death and lust, which has become something of a cause celebre on a more temporal plane.

It’s an amateur video called simply “The Janitor.”

Those who have been following the brouhaha created by what the producer regards as “a clean little comedy horror” know that it evolves from a script written by a student at Glendale College.

I will omit the boy’s name in order to spare him further anguish over his debut into the real world of psychological violence that accompanies script writing.

Basically, the movie is about a killer janitor who wipes out half the home ec class of a suburban high school during abundant episodes of female nudity and sexual aerobics.

I realize that such brief descriptions are generally unfair since even “Death of a Salesman” could be similarly summarized as the story of a guy named Willie who gets canned and then gets caught in an extramarital affair and dies.

But in the case of “Janitor,” brevity may be its salvation because there is very little more to it than that.

I want to assure you at the outset I am not opposed to sex and violence in the arena of public entertainment.

By that I do not mean to suggest a return to the Roman games, however anxious America’s Christians might be for a chance to demonstrate their faith in God by being an entree for a lion.

I’m just saying that films characterized by murderous hatchet attacks and screaming fornication often represent the best of American culture, not to mention American commercial enterprise.

Like everyone else, I’m a voyeur. I fantasize over cinematic sexual conquest and sigh in relief that I am not the guy who gets done in at the end, however imaginative the doing-in might be.

The movies I like best usually have redeeming qualities, and I don’t mean a tacked-on moral assertion that bad guys suffer most. I mean, for instance, humor.

Which leads me back to “The Janitor.”

The video began as a project of Glendale College’s advanced television production class, which somehow came to involve a professional producer and a semi-professional cast.

Among the latter was one Lois Livingstone of Studio City who, she says, first got a hint of the trouble ahead when she was asked to bare her breasts in the casting office.

Lois refused but was given the part of Trudy anyhow on the basis, one presumes, of her potential. When, however, during actual taping she was asked once more to give us a look at her gazongas, she walked off the set.

Subsequently, her boyfriend managed to kick all hell loose by complaining that the video defamed womanhood, appealed to our basest sexual preferences and was blood-soaked in excessive violence. Also, it wasn’t funny.

The president of Glendale College, caught in a cross fire between those who like swill and those who do not, ordered production stopped and the college taping equipment returned.

I read the script and while lines like “Now give me more of those boobies” do not rank high in literary quality, they probably represent a contemporary view of life and sexuality on one specific level of script writing.

I mean that’s just college humor, dude.

However, what undergraduates consider funny has never been viewed from the same perspective by those who have evolved beyond panty raids, phone booth-stuffing and various other forms of physical delight.

Similarly, if “Janitor” was supposed to be fun, the script misses by a mile. What we are left with, therefore, is a tale of coupling and killing to a degree that only a sadist might find whimsical.

When I asked instructor Michael Petros how a script like that ever got approved, he replied that it was his job to judge only the technical aspects of production, not content.

He approved the script on that basis, but then changes were made without his knowledge and you know the rest.

The problem isn’t that a college kid sat down and wrote a script loaded with sex and violence or wrote a spoof that failed, but that he wasn’t encouraged in the first place to undertake a project of even a little higher quality.

Not “Bambi” exactly but not “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” either.

Petros should have said to the kid that we are already awash in effluence and maybe it’s time for a generation to come along that will save us from our own prurient obsessions.

Even if the generation fails it will be encouraging to know at least that someone was trying.