God I hate these fucking floating monoliths. They always go, like, 10mph below the speed limit and if you try to pass them they just fucking distort reality around them until you’re back behind them again. One of them cut me off on the highway once and when I honked it banished me to a hoary netherworld where I wandered, lost and alone, for untold centuries, trapped in the liminal space between what could have been and what never was, black stars dotting the bright infinity yawning out around me as I drove out of thought and time, through endless ruined cities and blighted lands unmarked by the sun’s cold rays, and when I finally got out I was more than 20m late for my dentist appointment and they had to reschedule me.
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.
