Seeing a lot of Goncharov content but only real 70s movie heads will know that Spanish director Pere Portabella was meant to be making a behind-the-scenes documentary of the film which turned into a whole other thing. It’s called GOMORRA CALLS.
Scorsese is in it and so are his parents, for some reason. At first you’re just like oh this is cute, they’re bringing food to the set, taking an interest in what’s going on. But it becomes this quite… Creepy reality-bending thing? His mother keeps cryptically referring to weird telephone calls they’ve been getting at home, and his dad keeps moving things on the set, you can only see what he’s doing if you spend a lot of time watching him at the edge of the frame while someone else is talking. And sometimes they’ll get to the set in the morning and find things left in the wrong place, there’s a weird smear on a camera lenses, one of the actors has lost half the pages from the copy of the script they’ve been learning from.
I think the idea was meant to be that they’re being hounded by the realfe mafia for making the movie. But it almost seems like they’re being haunted by the ghosts of mafia members at times. Like, Scorsese’s hotel room will be freezing cold, and he’s being sent anonymous messages at the front desk in a way that just doesn’t make sense. He says, “I’m not sure if someone is trying to stop this movie… Or if they just want to be part of it. If they want to look at a prop in the wrong place and just say, hey, that was me.”
At the time of its limited run in the US, Scorsese said he didn’t really know what Portabella was making, fueling theories that the film was true documentary and not fictionalised. But it’s listed as fiction on Portabella’s Wikipedia page now, and the prevaing theory is that it must be made up. It’s not been included on any of the Goncharov DVD or Blu-Ray packages but it was supposed to be a Criterion Channel exclusive last year… It never showed up, and there are rumours it’s to do with audio licensing issues. But there’s a VHS rip floating around out there if you know where to look.
what I love about this scene is that it implies that everybody but Natasha and Sam seems to have forgotten Steve Rogers grew up poor in Brooklyn and with a dude who was clearly willing to be his enforcer. This is EXACTLY Steve’s style.
Tiktok SEEMS like it fills the same ecological niche as Tumblr circa 2014, but everything that happens on tiktok is the result of some multitrillion dollar conglomerate setting a Rube Goldberg machine I’m motion that makes people act insane , and this leads to an increase in profits for someone somehow. Tumblr was just good old fashioned mass hysteria.
“When someone on here stole human bones for a magic ritual it was because there was genuinely something wrong with them. If someone on tiktok did it it would be because they were trying to sell you shovels”
rereading my own writing is just a constant fluctuation between “damn, girl, you wrote this? (affectionate)” and “damn, girl, you wrote this? (derogatory)”
I am also “damn, girl, you wrote this? (forgetful)”
Okay, so, dumb but really cool thing, because I looked up exactly where R’lyeh is supposed to be geographically, and apparently that’s the oceanic pole of inaccessibility – a damn cool name all by itself, but it’s also a spacecraft cemetery now, I kid you not, because that’s apparently the safest place to aim obsolete craft for reentry if you don’t care about recovering it.
So like. If space creepy-crawlies latch onto a satellite or infiltrate the International Space Station. Guess where they’re coming down.
MOTHERFUCKING R’LYEH.
That is honestly the coolest thing I’ve heard all month! 😀
…some thoughts that occur to me:
1) This would make an excellent case for people literally throwing space ships at Cthulhu as weapons. Great Old One vs multiple incoming spacecraft used as ballistic weapons – who would win?
2) An easy solution to alien invasions! Feed ‘em to the local Eldritch Horror!
