‘Some Nudity’ Provided a Catharsis

Odette Springer is sitting in a bar after another contentious Sundance Film Festival screening of her documentary “Some Nudity Required.” A harried-looking woman at a nearby table gets up and says apologetically, “I should have been in it,” and then, wryly, “even though I haven’t seen it.”

After the woman has left, Springer says, “I showed her about four minutes of footage, but she chickened out.”

The woman is director Penelope Spheeris (“Wayne’s World”). The footage she didn’t want to be a part of documents the exploitation world of Roger Corman’s Concorde/New Horizons Pictures, where Spheeris and a lot of A-list directors (Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, Ron Howard) got their start.

At one time, these films were more or less innocuous, but now they cater to the lucrative direct-to-video market for what are euphemistically called “erotic thrillers.” (The exploitation scene is not to be confused with the hard-core porn world depicted in “Boogie Nights.”) Usually they involve semi-naked women being subjected to torture and murder. As Springer discovered in a startlingly personal way, these films operate on the little understood but very basic connection between fear and pleasure.

Springer knows the exploitation territory well. She worked as a music supervisor for Corman, overseeing the soundtracks that accompanied the sex and carnage as a way of breaking into the movie business. In some ways, she was no different than the directors, actors and especially the women who didn’t like what they were doing but saw it as a means to an end.

At first “Some Nudity Required” was going to be a straightforward record of this world. Springer shot some 50 hours of footage, including on-set material and interviews with participants (such as exploitation icons Julie Strain and Maria Ford), and secured permission to use clips from Concorde/New Horizons films. Their vast library includes such titles as “Attack of the Killer Nurses,” “Co-eds on Vacation” and “Sorority House Massacre.”

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Not everyone Springer interviewed is defensive or angry about being in the business. Director Jim Wynorski loves what he does and admits that he’s in it for the money and “the chicks.” The statuesque Strain, who often gives as good as she gets in these movies, usually with her top off, enjoys the attention and marketing possibilities: She sells her own posters, and has a fan club.

Corman shrewdly deflects criticism by describing the often brutalized female characters as heroines. On the other hand, director Catherine Cyran is clearly disgusted by what she’s doing, and Ford complains that her topless moments are preserved while her acting moments are cut. Some of these interviews, particularly with Ford, have the intimacy and intensity of a therapy session.

“The reason people were so open was that they knew me so well,” Springer says. “They were telling me things in public that they told me in private.”

And Springer? How could an elegant, seemingly self-possessed 36-year-old woman--she was born in New York City, graduated with honors from the Lycee Francais de New York, studied piano and voice, and is fluent in French, Spanish, and Dutch--continue to work in this environment? Ironically, it was while making the movie that she discovered what, for her, is the true nature of the business’ alarming fascination.

“Originally I was going to make a straight documentary,” she says, “but as I was watching these clips, I found myself getting turned on, and it horrified me.”

The clips, she says, awakened long-suppressed memories of being sexually molested as a child--the pleasure of being touched coupled with the fear of being controlled by adults. This connection is made clear in the movie by home movie footage of her as a young girl cavorting about naked.

As Springer talks about this, she is surrounded by some of her cast and crew, her support group, including Ford and co-director Johanna Demetrakas. Conversation trails off, even though these people know her story well. It was Demetrakas who helped her turn the documentary into an exploration of herself, complete with a startlingly candid voice-over and scenes of her obsessing over clips of women being sexually humiliated. There are also shots of her examining her own naked body and concluding that--by industry standards--it’s totally inadequate.

“This is a story about the power of images,” says Demetrakas, who is a filmmaker herself and cut “Caged Heat” for Jonathan Demme during his Corman days. “These images, for good and for bad, woke something up inside her.”

The film took nearly four years to make, primarily because funding was hard to come by. Springer says she’s broke. At one point she had $1,100 left in her bank account, with a son, who’s now 11, to support. The movie does not have a distribution deal, although she says there has been interest from other film festivals. Documentaries are a hard sell, and often the selling point is the documentarian himself. Springer says she’s prepared for the scrutiny.

“I went through a lot of angst,” she says evenly. “I’ve had four years to prepare for it.”

Response to the film is mixed. Those in the exploitation world who have seen it have found it both “funny” and objectionable. (Corman has yet to see it.) Springer had given a tape of the rough cut to one of her interview subjects. It was subsequently duplicated and made its way unauthorized through the community. Ford in particular felt their wrath.

“There are a lot of people in the ‘B’ world who hate my guts,” Ford says, holding hands with one of the film’s producers. Having burned those bridges, she’s now making “A” films. It will be interesting to see what effect, if any, “Nudity” will have on her new career.

As for Springer, she’s working on a feature film based on the exploitation scene. She says there was a lot she left out in order to protect people. Meanwhile, there’s the documentary to promote at Sundance, where there has been no end of surprises. When Julie Strain appeared at the festival, Springer was astounded at the attention she received from this supposedly high-brow crowd. Was this Sundance or a slasher movie fan convention?

Then there’s the question-and-answer period that follows every screening of a movie in competition. After one screening, she found herself debating with an exploitation director who insisted these films had “enlightened” her, which in a perverse way is true. At another, an audience member said belligerently, “I like T and A, and that’s why I came here. So who’s your audience?”

Springer replied, “You are.”