‘Uforia’ Unbound

Here’s a story about Bo and Peep and Hollywood. It’s not about the rush to make new movies of the suicides. This story begins more than 20 years ago and says something about how we’ve changed, bit by bit, over those years. And not for the good.

On a perfect beach day in 1975, John Binder sat in his Malibu house watching the waves and wondering where he was going to find an idea for his next movie. He had just finished working on “Marjoe,” the idiosyncratic documentary about a young evangelist who loots his congregations, but Binder was looking to get into features. Real movies.

He picked up the newspaper and saw an article on Bo and Peep. The two nursery rhymers had rolled into the little beach town of Waldpole, Ore., and announced the imminent arrival of flying saucers. The spaceships would carry the enlightened ones into space, Bo and Peep said, and about 20 townspeople had decided to go along for the ride.

Binder brightened up. This might make a movie, he thought. The story had a crazy, sweet quality to it.

“The townspeople were willing to pick up and leave their homes as an article of faith,” Binder says. “I remember thinking, it could be a funny movie but only if the spaceship really comes. I mean, Spielberg had not made ‘Close Encounters’ at that point.”

So Binder proceeded to make art out of life. He wrote a screenplay roughly based on the adventures of Bo and Peep, discreetly changing their names and moving the setting to a truck stop town in the Arizona desert.

And, sure enough, the script was light-hearted and funny. Binder met a first-time producer named Susan Spinks and eventually they made their movie, with Binder directing. They called it “Uforia.”

“Back in the ‘70s, you didn’t take UFO stuff seriously,” says Binder, “Bo and Peep looked like a hundred other prophets riding around in Volkswagen buses. They were nuts, fruitcakes, but they were American fruitcakes and basically harmless. You could relax and have fun with it.”

In “Uforia,” Cindy Williams plays a supermarket checker named Arlene--alias Peep--who obsessively reads UFO tracts and has visions of spaceships whisking her away to a better world. She deliciously mixes her New Age images with those from her evangelical past.

“There’s a spaceship coming and it’s gonna be like Noah’s Ark,” she tells a friend. “And I’m Noah. . . .”

Arlene soon meets a good-hearted drifter named Sheldon--alias Bo--played by Fred Ward at his scurviest best. Sheldon does not believe in Arlene’s visions but sees the possibilities for fame and fortune. Together they set out to convert the citizens of their one-road town to the new space religion.

They are aided and abetted by the wonderful Harry Dean Stanton, who portrays a touring evangelist with a surplus of good advice.

“You get people thinking they are going off on spaceships, they just might be willing to leave a lot of earthly possessions behind,” the evangelist tells Sheldon. “I’m talking houses and cars and savings accounts. . . .”

“What happens when ol’ doohicky don’t show up and ever’body wants their money back?” asks the wary Sheldon.

“Well, you’re in Mexico then. . . ,” croons the evangelist.

Suffice to say they don’t quite make it to Mexico. The movie pokes fun at victim and victimizer alike but the humor is gentle, seeming to contain the ‘70s notion that any search for salvation deserves sympathy. The final kicker comes when the spaceship appears exactly at the appointed hour, astounding everyone except Arlene, and carries the whole crowd away to deep, peaceful space. It’s a happy ending.

Of course, the real Bo and Peep did not have a happy ending. Somewhere, in the intervening 20 years, the fruitcake lark they represented got poisoned and was turned into a house of death. Whether this defines the difference in the ‘70s and ‘90s, I dunno. But it’s not a reassuring thought.

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Binder says that when he first heard the news of the suicides at Rancho Santa Fe, he did not make the association with his movie. Grisly death, even mass death, has become common enough that he never thought to connect it to his own past. Then his wife ran into the room, shouting about Bo and Peep on the TV.

“That’s when it hit me,” he says. Then he spent the next hour or so staring at the TV screen, half laughing at the insanity and half apologizing. For exactly what, he’s not sure.

As for “Uforia,” you may not recall seeing it. That’s because few have. Although critics praised it as one of the quirky, subterranean movies of its time, “Uforia” shared some of the curse of those who inspired it. Two studios bought it and then, despairing of its mass appeal, refused to distribute it. To this day, the original print remains locked in a vault at Universal.

But it has been released on video, where it has won--pardon the phrase--a cult following. So take it home for the evening. If for no other reason than to witness the distance between the decades.