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Autumn
Born
(1979)
by Johnny Web (Uncle
Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)
If you have any interest, however faint and
fleeting, in celebrity nudity, you are probably aware of
Dorothy Stratten. She was the young Canadian girl who
became a Playmate, a budding movie star, and then the
victim of a brutal murder by her ex-boyfriend, who
immediately killed himself as well. Stratten was only 21
when she died. Bob Fosse turned her life story into a
film called Star 80, which featured Mariel Hemingway as
Stratten. Sweet Dorothy from small town British Columbia
thus contributed doubly to the celebrity nudity
universe: in life on her own, and in death as portrayed
by Mariel.
If you have seen Star 80, you realize that Dorothy once
played the title role in a sci-fi film called Galaxina
and then hooked up with Peter Bogdanovich when she was
featured in one of his films. (They All Laughed, a real
Hollywood film starring Audrey Hepburn.) Before those
two films, she had one other starring role, in a
ridiculously inept Canadian cheapie called Autumn Born
(for reasons not clear to me, it was called Wednesday's
Child in Star 80.) Autumn Born was the first directorial
effort from the future master of the Czechsploitation
genre, Lloyd Simandl. His future films would be
reasonably competent low budget features filled with
sexy scenes, but Autumn Born would not even get a
passing grade as a student film. It would not even seem
competent if it were compared to an average 1970s porn
film with the hardcore scenes removed. In fact, it would
not even be a good home movie. If you set out to make a
bad film, in the deliberate manner The Producers used to
make a bad play, you probably could not make one worse
than this. Let's assume that you use a home camcorder
with no professional lighting, and deliberately cast
only actors with absolutely no talent. And I mean none.
If they have previously appeared in so much as a high
school play, you would eliminate them from
consideration. If they can deliver even a single line
naturally, you would call out "next" and move on to
somebody worse. Then let's assume you refuse to use a
screenwriter, but simply sit at your kitchen table for a
half hour and construct a five minute movie which can be
filmed in your house. You can pad that out to 76 minutes
with assorted nonsense like whippings, baths, torture,
and long disco dancing scenes. Then overlay the entire
thing with a homemade musical score which consists
essentially of random notes. Finally, when you realize
that your film is incomprehensible, be sure to add a
cheesy first person voice-over from a minor character,
simply because he's the only cast member still available
to you. Voila! Although you would be following
essentially the same pattern that Autumn Born seems to
have employed, your movie would undoubtedly still be
better because the technology of 2012 would not allow
you to fail as miserably as this one did. Some of your
images would still be clear because even the cheapest of
today's HD cameras will deliver clearer, crisper action
than seen in Autumn Born. Furthermore, modern musical
composition software will allow you to string together a
fairly good background score even if you haven't the
foggiest idea how to create music.
"Is the movie really that bad," you ask?
It's worse. I'm actually being generous by not
belaboring the depths of the film's incompetence.
But Autumn Born has one thing you would not have in your
home movie. One of its completely incompetent performers
is also one of the most beautiful women you have ever
seen, and she would later become very famous for various
reasons, both joyful and tragic. And the filmmaker had
the good fortune or prescience to get Dorothy naked for
several minutes of the film's short running time.
Stratten stays dressed for about the first 25 minutes of
the film, but after that she's almost always either in
underwear or naked.
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