No, Not That Bert Williams…
MIA on DVD!!!
This Week: Nest of the Cuckoo Bird (1965)
Off and on over the past year, I toyed with launching a new blog dedicated to writing up movies not on DVD. I talked about it with my computer guru Cat Garza, but we’ve barely seen one another in weeks, months it seems, I’m sad to say.
But there are so many movie blogs; there’s so little time; and so meager a revenue stream from any of this online activity that I finally scuttled the plan. I’ve known so many folks who schemed setting up blogs with ads to generate income, and frankly, almost none of those have generated anything but lost time.
So, amidst drawing, teaching, writing and working on various book projects, I did work up considerable content for the planned blog. I’ve offered that material to my friends Tim and Donna Lucas at Video Watchdog (no response yet), but thought some of you might enjoy getting a taste for what might-have-been, if I have 48 hours a day instead of just the 24 we’re given.
Back to the Sherlock Holmes’s War of the Worlds essay next post — this is just a breather…
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Who was Bert Williams, and what the hell was Nest of the Cuckoo Bird? Nobody seems to know, which naturally makes the existence of this mid-1960s southern gothic (shot in Florida) all the more enticing.
I have this 1965 Variety tear sheet in my files, and scanned it to share with you here. I’ve never seen this ad art reprinted anywhere, ever, and I’ve got a pretty extensive international collection of genre zines (newsstand and fanzines, including mimeozines, photocopy zines, etc.) that I’ve devoured cover-to-cover since age 12.
I first saw this ad when the local downtown Waterbury, VT radio station WDEV used to let me drop in once a month and pick up their discarded copies of Variety, which I scoured and clipped for tidbits and reviews of odd movies I knew I’d likely never get to see. I recall Rusty Parker and Ken Squire (sp?) finding it amusing that a scrawny crew-cut kid like me was even interested in Variety. They had no idea!
I recall I’d found a bit more about Nest of the Cuckoo Bird back then, but not much. By the time I went to Johnson State College (1974-76), I’d amassed a sizeable file of Variety ads, reviews and clippings on obscure genre films. When I left JSC at the end of tutoring the summer session in ’76, bound for my first semester at the Joe Kubert School, I had nowhere to store that file, and nobody I knew wanted or cared about it. I regretfully left it in my basement Governor‘s dorm room as I left JSC for the last time, knowing it was likely bound for the landfill once the custodians cleaned up the place.
This clipping was one of the few I saved, along with my Mario Bava files (which I turned over to Tim Lucas for his Bava book project back in the 1980s).
These crude, raw ads are still captivating. I love the duplicity of the one above — “Williams’ Nest of the Cuckoo Bird“ made it read like it might be a Tennessee Williams shocker, which the title also evoked.
Nope, it was Bert, not Tennessee, Williams — which leads one to ask, “who the hell was Bert Williams?”
Isn’t that an astonishing drawing? An eye-popping ad? Man oh man, you could not make up this shit. These ads are still among the loopiest I’ve ever seen for a movie, and I’ve seen (and collected) some doozies, as I shared with y’all last summer on this blog.
Bert Williams was not ‘the’ Bert Williams, the most successful black comedian of the early 20th Century (born 1874, died 1922). That Bert Williams was actually Egbert Austin “Bert” Williams — he was huge on the Vaudeville circuit in the late 19th and early 20th Century, the best-selling pre-1920 black recording artist, and even in those racist times, The New York Dramatic Mirror dubbed the man “one of the great comedians of the world” (in 1918). I’ve got a couple of books on Williams in my library, the best of them being Louis Chude-Sokei‘s excellent The Last ‘Darky’: Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora (2005, Duke University Press).
Here’s the only surviving bit of film of Williams performing, which he helmed and starred in for Biograph Studios in 1916:
OK, did you watch that? Again, that’s not our Bert Williams. But that is more than we have left of the 1960s Bert Williams — Nest of the Cuckoo Bird is apparently a lost film. An anonymous post on imdb.com offers this synopsis:
“Investigating Florida moonshiners, a detective is searching the Everglades when he discovers a remote inn managed by a demented showgirl, a taxidermist who stuffs humans for display in her grotesque Chapel Of The Dead.”
They also offer further ballyhoo copy:
“Actually filmed in the Florida Everglades…amidst snakes and gators!”
“Bloodthirsty! Raw! We defy you to guess THE KILLER!”
Nest of the Cuckoo Bird is the only credit I’ve ever found for this 1965 filmmaker; there’s nothing more about him online, not at imdb.com, not anywhere. Williams wrote, produced, directed and starred in this Everglades-set thriller, co-starring with Ann Long, Jackie Scelza and Chuck Frankle, and they apparently never appeared in a single other motion picture before or after, either.
However, Larry Wright of Cuckoo‘s cast did work on Brad F. Ginter‘s Dade Country, Florida-filmed biker mystery Devil Rider! (1970) and appeared in the immortal made-in-Florida Blood Freak (1972), Brad Ginter and Steve Hawkes‘s insane anti-drug-anti-FDA-pro-Christian-biker-splatter-turkey-monster-horror opus. Wright is also listed in the cast of the direct-to-video Electric Shades of Grey (2001), so Larry, if you’re still alive out there, please, tell us whatever you recall about Nest of the Cuckoo Bird. The world must know before you go!
The full Variety ad offers what little hard info we have on the producers and distributors of the feature back in the regional southern drive-in markets, so I offer it up to you all here in hopes somebody, somewhere can offer further insights and info — and maybe even uncover the last surviving print of this “Sadism Quack Love Horror… Primitive Art Film.”
Mike Vraney, Greg Luce, Code Red, Blue Underground — you know what you have to do!!
Wow! This is a great find (well, not really found…). Always loved to look thru old issues of VARIETY (which used to be on mirco film at the local college library) in the 70 and 80s and making lists of films that looked incredible. There was soooo much stuff released prior to 1994 (the year that marked, for me at least, the death knoll of film distribution in the U.S. — DVDs were becoming popular and a lot of local drive-in shut down and theaters closed up or where sold to conglomerates). Where is this stuff? Luckily Mike Vraney released some of the titles I wanted to see in the 1990s, but there is so much more!
I love the tagline at the top, “This picture is not great BUT…they stand in line to see it!” Nice to see the distributor being honest… It reminds me of a line I read in a Russ Meyer interview when he was asked about MONDO TOPLESS: “It’s a piece of shit but it sells like a m*therf*cker!”
I’m pretty sure I have a copy of Variety with this ad in it as well. It was an interesting time in filmmaking when an indie producer could slap together something with exploitable elements and like a traveling salesmen peddle his film across the country from one territory to another. Who knows if there was just a handful of prints for this thing and since it had a sexual theme apparently it would never have been intended for television sales. It may be long gone!
Cat’s busy being a Workin’ Man now! His own site has been neglected since May! Still, I’m glad he’s getting things together and is happy just pounding away at the day job. I’m sure he’ll come back to us in due time.