Who Is Invited To The Ultimate Screening Of Freaks?
Thursday, November 19th, 2009One movie. Five people, living or dead, at the screening. Who and why?
Today’s screening: “Freaks”
Todd Browning’s 1931 post-Dracula, pre-code film continues to generate excitement and controversy for its use of actual sideshow performers in telling a story of love, betrayal and a circus freak show, where the only law is the freaks’ code of loyalty.
• P.T. Barnum (1810-1891), Showman
Consummate entrepreneur P.T. Barnum combined his steely determination and incomparable marketing aplomb to create one of the world’s first – and most successful – touring sideshows. Barnum’s attraction, which started humbly in the 1940s with an ad hoc mermaid mummy and a performing dwarf, eventually grew to feature all manner of human anomalies, from a fat lady to a three-legged man. “Freaks” use of real circus performers, and its pro-freak message, would undoubtedly appeal to Barnum, but something tells me he’d be even more interested in examining the film’s out-sized promotional materials.
• Tod Robbins (1888-1949), Author
Robbins short story “Spurs,” about a woman of average height and her dwarf husband, who forces his wife to piggy-back him for a distance equaling the length of France, served as Browning’s primary inspiration for “Freaks.” Among the many differences, Robbins’ story features a scene in which a sword-brandishing dwarf rides a wolf. Who’s more angry at its exclusion from the film – me or Robbins? We’ll find out at the screening. (hint: it’s me.)
• Gretchen Wordon (1947-2004), Museum Director
Philadelphia, PA is home to the Mütter Museum, which contains a wide array of jarred medical specimens, human skulls, antiquated surgical equipment and other bizarre biological ephemera. As the museum’s director from 1988 until her death in 2004, Ms. Wordon used her advertising savvy and dark sense of humor to promote the strange collection; she appeared in numerous television documentaries, helped create a bizarre promotional museum calendar and even made several visits, grotesqueries in tow, to The Late Show. As someone intimately familiar with all nature of medical anomalies, Wordon would be a fun and interesting resource for all the gory physiological details of the freaks’/David Letterman’s various afflictions.
• Dee Dee Ramone (1951-2002), Musician
Always brilliantly proving that, through the chaotic chemistry of punk, even something as innately simple as pop music can be reduced down to a core structure and wailing energy, Dee Dee Ramone turned the freaks memorable initiation chant of “Gooble Gobble, Gooble Gobble, we accept her, one of us” into the terse, shouted rallying cry, “Gabba, Gabba, hey!” Subsequently, the topically named “Pinhead” became, along with “Blitzkrieg Bop,” the Ramone’s signature song. It’d be fun to convince Dee Dee that he was back from the dead because he was, in fact, buried in a pet cemetery.
• Alex Winter (1965- ), Actor
You probably know Alex Winter best as time-travelling slacker Bill Preston, Esq. Winter also starred in, co-wrote and co-directed the woefully underrated, and relentlessly strange, 1993 comedy “Freaked,” in which his character is kidnapped and chemically mutated into a deformed sideshow performer. The film also features Brooke Shields, Sam Raimi and Deep Roy in their only appearance together outside of the easiest “Marry, F***, Kill” question ever.
• A few 
