Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #213 Playback (1996)
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career.
This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of the late Tawny Kitaen and troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart. I also recently began a series chronicling the films of bad boy auteur Oliver Stone.
Today, one of the weirdest, most obscure and just plain perverse projects I have ever taken on comes to an appropriately weird, obscure and just plain perverse conclusion.
For the last year and a half I have been writing about the television and film projects of the late Tawny Kitaen for one very appreciated, very generous patron. Now that part of Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 is ending with the 1996 erotic business thriller Playback, a Playboy production that casts the legendary video vixen as Sara, a sexually frustrated wife whose erotic awakening plays a central role in one of those elaborate, important cinematic business deals that are impossible to care about.
Sara is a sexy, sexy wife with certain needs involving her workaholic businessman husband and his penis and him putting inside her. Unfortunately, hubby David (Charles Grant) is too busy being all, “business, business, business!” and “merger, merger, merger!” to satisfy her womanly longing for regular trips to Pound Town and sweet, sweet marital lovemaking.
To spice things up in the bedroom, David decides to take a little walk on the wild side and visits an X-rated video store where a clerk with major Joe Pantoliano energy takes way too intense an interest in his sexual kinks.
After inundating the poor man with extensive questions about what kind of stuff he looks to look at while pleasuring himself to orgasm, the excessively helpful smut shop employee finally recommends a motion picture entitled Bodacious Brunettes on the basis that it received a “Five Dick Rating.”
That may be so, but how do we know that the porn reviewer who gave Bodacious Brunettes was reputable? What if it’s a Gamergate type situation and the guy could care less about ethics in porno movie journalism? How do we even know that five dicks is a good rating? Five Dicks out of Five is the best you can do, obviously, but Five Dicks out of a Hundred would actually be a pretty bad grade.
Bodacious Brunettes does the ticket. Sara is overjoyed that her husband is once again taking an interest in her luscious body, perfect face and wild mane of hair and they begin exploring the exciting, sensual world of pornographic videotapes.
Considering that Playback is itself a soft-core porn tape AND a Playboy production, there’s something weirdly meta as well as self-congratulatory about its conviction that all it takes to kick a married couple’s stale sex life into overdrive are smutty video-cassettes.
I was also struck by what a perversely big deal Playback makes out of its harried hero’s consumption of porn. For it seems that David has an arch-nemesis at work who will do anything to sabotage him and take over THE BIGGEST MERGER IN TELECOMMUNICATION HISTORY in the form of co-worker Karen (erotic thriller queen Shannon Whirry).
Karen is a glowering sociopath who looks like she is perpetually biting down on a pickle laced with arsenic. She’s a femme fatale who will do anything to get ahead, particularly if it involves seducing and/or destroying a rival she cannot control her sexual attraction towards.
So Sara hires Ernie, a sleazy private detective she previously paid handsomely to fake an Ivy League pedigree, to find dirt on her professional adversary.
Ernie is played by a WILDLY over-qualified Harry Dean Stanton. Stanton has the unenviable task of playing a grizzled, hard-boiled private detective who has seen it all yet is somehow scandalized by things like x-rated videocassettes and a married couple having phone sex.
When Satanic Sara is looking for dirt on David, Ernie leeringly asserts that the business-minded hunk is a “video connoisseur” of a randy cinematic sub-genre he calls “fuck films.”
Playback is itself a fuck film created primarily, if not exclusively, as a masturbatory aid, full of soft-core sex scenes involving the exceedingly game Kitaen and Whirry.
The married couple’s erotic games build to a naughty fling at a sex club where Karen has Ernie tape her rival. Everybody tries to seduce everyone else, for fun and profit, including Karen and David’s impressively, even iconically tanned boss.
The Repo Man cult icon isn’t the only show-business luminary picking up a paycheck for wading hip deep into some seriously scummy, polluted water.
George Hamilton is way too comfortable playing David’s cigar-chomping boss, an unrepentant horn dog who ogles his employee’s impossibly gorgeous wife in a way that does nothing to hide his palpable and understandable lust.
Yes, THE BIGGEST MERGER IN TELECOMMUNICATIONS HISTORY hangs in the balance as these desperate and extremely horny players square off against each other to take control of a deal worth a not so small fortune.
Playback may have a shockingly star-studded cast but it is otherwise barely a movie. For all of the talk of huge mergers and multi-billion dollar deals, all of the office scenes in Playback could have been filmed in a small town Holiday Inn.
Kitaen is far better than the material requires. She remained a world-class beauty with a magnetic presence that lights up the screen even in the scuzziest of contexts. She was a goddamn star and her warmth and personality make Whirry’s icy, robotic black widow seem even more lacking and lame by comparison.
It seems absurd to judge Playback as cinema when it only wants to be a Playboy magazine in sleazy video form, minus the interviews and short stories.
On that level it succeeds modestly. I enjoyed laughing at it and the presence of genuine stars like Kitaen, Stanton and Hamilton make it feel far more like a genuine motion picture than it actually is. So I am going to follow in the footsteps of the oversharing comic relief porn video store clerk and give it three out of five dicks. Not perfect, or even particularly good, but not terrible either.
That said, my favorite part of the Playback viewing experience had nothing to do with the film itself and everything to do with nostalgia.
For it seems I had a promotional copy of Playback meant for video stores so it opened with extended previews for Playback and Clueless pitched specifically at video store managers.
The Clueless pitch bizarrely claims that Alicia Silverstone’s “unforgettable” performance in The Crush and Aerosmith videos made her “one of the top actresses of the MTV crowd” even after Clueless grossed over fifty million dollars at the box-office and made her a huge star.
If Silverstone’s status as the young people’s fave wasn’t enough to convince video store owners, stores that ordered two copies of Clueless got a free promotional wall “mirror”, just as stores that bought multiple copies of Playback got a terrycloth robe with the Paramount logo on it.
This made me powerfully nostalgic for my days as a video store clerk and the glorious swag that came with it. I wish I could return to the giddy days of 1996, if only to collect that Clueless wall mirror and Paramount robe and to warn Kitaen about the direction her life was headed.
Be a part of the recently launched Indiegogo campaign for 7 Days in Ohio II: Return of the Juggalos over at https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/make-7-days-in-ohio-2-return-of-the-juggalo-happen--2/x/14797497#/ and help send Nathan back to the Gathering for the EIGHTH time for more literary magic, madness and miracles!
Pre-order The Joy of Trash, the Happy Place’s upcoming book about the very best of the very worst and get instant access to all of the original pieces I’m writing for them AS I write them (there are six so far, including Shasta McNasty and the first and second seasons of Baywatch Nights) AND, as a bonus, monthly write-ups of the first season Baywatch Nights you can’t get anywhere else (other than my Patreon feed) at https://the-joy-of-trash.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders
Help ensure a future for the Happy Place during an uncertain era AND get sweet merch by pledging to the site’s Patreon account at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace
Also, BUY the RIDICULOUSLY SELF-INDULGENT, ILL-ADVISED VANITY EDITION of THE WEIRD ACCORDION TO AL, the Happy Place’s first book. This 500 page extended edition features an introduction from Al himself (who I co-wrote 2012’s Weird Al: The Book with), who also copy-edited and fact-checked, as well as over 80 illustrations from Felipe Sobreiro on entries covering every facet of Al’s career, including his complete discography, The Compleat Al, UHF, the 2018 tour that gives the book its subtitle and EVERY episode of The Weird Al Show and Al’s season as the band-leader on Comedy Bang! Bang!
Only 23 dollars signed, tax and shipping included, at the https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop or for more, unsigned, from Amazon here