Apologies for the necro, but I've got a couple of pieces of unavailable media that I'd be interested in seeing.
Groupie (Marilyn Manson, Date Unknown)
Filmed on an unknown night between 1996 and 1998,
Groupie has only two extant sources for its contents. The first comes from a five minute discussion held between Manson and the comedian Andy Dick, and the second comes from an edited forty-second snippet which served as a disturbing closer for the 1998 documentary 'Dead to the World'.
According to the
Manson wiki, the plot of
Groupie centres on a parry who arrives at Manson's home which sees the arrival of a young groupie who is degraded, tied, and then tortured by Manson and his bandmates. During filming, many bandmates were not aware that the woman was - according to Manson - an actress.
From the transcript between Manson and Dick:
Dick: This girl shows up and he lures her in and she's excited to be there. She's like "I'm such a big fan, I'm really excited, then slowly, over time, he starts to get her to do certain things and those are the things that maybe we shouldn't discuss.
Manson: It gets really scary because not everyone in the room knew if it was a joke or not.
Dick: He tries to get her to drink Pogo's urine. He pees in the wine glass and she's like "You do it," and he drinks it, and then she finally does.
Manson: Then I introduce a gun into the situation and it becomes really scary.
Dick: I was disturbed. People started bleeding at some point and not good things are happening.
Manson: A fight breaks out.
Dick: That girl is tied up at the end and crying.
Manson: When I showed it to my manager he said "Please hide the masters. If anyone sees this you'll go to jail and your career will be over. It was called Groupie.
Manson is and was known for being transgressive and provocative, and has always sought to disturb both fans and the moral majority. All of this makes the pulling of
Groupie all the more interesting: if the woman in Groupie was an actress who fully consented and was in on it (as Manson seems to maintain), then why did Manson's manager see this as being such a fundamental risk? I can think of three reasons:
- The actress may have been unreliable or difficult to contact, with a risk of her not backing up the events of the night through either being impossible to contact or willing to contort the truth for publicity/lawsuit money.
- The actress may not have fully consented to what she was subject to, especially as the film escalated. Thus there is a risk of charges for what happened later on in the film.
- She wasn't an actress.
Game in the Sand (Werner Herzog, 1964)
One of Herzog's earlier films, the plot of
Game has not received much elaboration from Herzog. We only have scant mentions by Herzog of what the contents of the film were in interviews and biographical snippets: all boil down to effectively stating
the following:
His next short was a documentary called Spiel im Sand, about four children and a rooster in a cardboard box, but he has never publicly shown the film.
We have little more than what was pithily collated in a
Wikipedia article on the film:
The film has never been published or publicly exhibited, and Herzog has stated that he will never give it a release in his lifetime. Herzog says that the shooting "got out of hand," in a way which caused him to abandon the project. He has likened the shoot to controversial moments in his later film
Even Dwarfs Started Small, such as young piglets suckling on the corpse of a dead mother pig, and cannibalistic chickens, or when an actor was accidentally set on fire and run over by a truck. These moments were allowed a release in
Dwarfs, but Herzog decided that the footage of
Game in the Sand was not fit for release.
What happened? What got out of hand?
Did the rooster accidentally die on set from being crushed by being buried in the aforementioned sand, with the children left to react to it? Was there some sadism displayed by the children which would have been utterly transgressive? Was there an accident which was too disturbing for general release?
The only opportunity we will likely have to learn what happened in this 1964 film will come with Herzog's death. If so, I have the feeling we may have some of Herzog's most disturbing footage yet.
