I just kept going back to his family maybe because I was going through this intense psychotherapy at the time. But things that led in different directions ultimately shaped the film. "When I started," Zwigoff told me, "I was doing a more conventional biography of what I thought was one of the great artists of our time. As we get to know him and meet his family, it becomes clear that this artistic process has somehow held him together, and perhaps spared him the sorts of existence that trapped his brothers. ![]() We also learn that many of the characters who occur frequently in his drawings and comic strips are based quite closely on people he hated or lusted after in high school, and that much of his work is an elaborate process of revenge. One of the few sources of pleasure for his male cartoon characters is riding piggy-back on callipygian girl friends after Crumb does the same thing at a gallery opening of his work, we understand that the practice is literally, and sincerely, autobiographical. ![]() We also meet Max, a San Francisco monk who sits on a bed of nails, drawing a long linen cloth through his intestinal tract to cleanse it, and is also an artist.Ĭrumb was obviously deeply wounded not only by his family, but by high school, where, deeply unpopular, he developed his fixation on women with hefty haunches. There is a visit to the family home, occupied by Crumb's mother and by his brother, Charles-who was the first cartoonist in the family, but withdrew to permanent seclusion an upstairs bedroom, never drawing again, or leaving the house. There is great unease about Crumb's father, who looks terrifyingly normal in family photographs but severely punished his sons. There is much more about the conditions that produced it, and as we watch "Crumb" the portrait of an bizarre, dysfunctional family emerges. There is a great deal about Crumb's art: his in-your-face caricatures of greedy, lustful, violent, scatological characters, flaunting their needs, perversions and desires. We do not meet his two sisters, who wanted nothing to do with the film (one of them, Zwigoff said, has demanded "reparations" of $400 a month from Crumb for his "crimes against women"). Crumb, his mother, his brothers Charles and Max, his wife, and various friends. He just wasn't interested he doesn't like publicity." It was very hard to talk him into doing it. You were making a film about Crumb's misery while you were in greater misery. The two of you must have made a great pair, I said. He spent nine years on his film while averaging an income of "about $200 a month," and "living with back pain so intense that I spent three years with a loaded gun on the pillow next to my bed, trying to get up the nerve to kill myself." ![]() He is small, intense, with worry lines chiseled between his eyes, and although "Crumb" is an enormous hit (and would win the Sundance prize as best documentary), he almost seems to wonder if it was worth the sacrifices he made to film it. Zwigoff looks like vast stretches of his own human condition need first-aid even as we speak. "Crumb" is one of those defining experiences, like "Hoop Dreams," like "Gates of Heaven," that shows you how documentary films can reach parts of the human condition that fiction films don't even know about. It is about the way Crumb has hung on by his fingernails to life and sanity, using art as his lifeline. The movie, now going into national release, is not about underground comics. (for Robert) Crumb, the San Francisco underground comix artist whose style straddled the 1960s like his famous "Keep on "Truckin'" panel. We had met at the lodge to discuss " Crumb," Zwigoff's great and astonishing new documentary about R.
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