BY GENE TRIPLETT

The Turkish government held Billy Hayes prisoner for five long years and Oliver Stone wrote an Oscar-winning screenplay about Hayes’ hellish ordeal and eventual escape, but the convicted drug smuggler thinks the Eurasian nation took a bad rap from the 1978 film “Midnight Express.”

Hayes will finally get a chance to set the record straight when he tells his own story beginning at 8 p.m. central time Wednesday on the season premiere of the National Geographic Channel’s “Locked Up Abroad.”

“I mean when you look at ‘Midnight Express’ the film, you don’t see any good Turks at all,” Hayes said in a recent interview at The Oklahoman. “It creates this overall impression that Turkey is this horrific place. Well, that’s not fair to Turkey. I love Istanbul. I actually spent quite a bit of time in Istanbul before I was arrested.”

The film is based on Hayes’ autobiography, but Hayes said even his own book doesn’t tell the full story of his imprisonment in 1970 and his escape in 1975.

“When I first got back, to write this book I had legal restrictions,” he said. “There were things I really couldn’t say, in terms of what happened in the past with my life, now that I was back in the United States, due to the legal jeopardy that it might put me in. So I had to be a little circumspect in what I said in the book.”

Hayes, 63, has been working as a writer, actor, producer and director in theater and film ever since. He’s married to Wendy West, daughter of Jackie West, who was for many years a

Billy Hayes

 driving force in Oklahoma City’s theater community before her death on May 4. Hayes was in Oklahoma City recently for Jackie West’s memorial service.

“One of the reasons that I think Jackie accepted me as a son-in-law so readily was because she loved theater,” the New York native said. “When she first met me I was an escaped convict drug smuggler, and a Yankee no less … I actually met Wendy, of all places, at the Cannes Film Festival in 1978 when ‘Midnight Express’ was premiered there.”

Hayes was introduced to his future wife by her cousin, Don Chastain, an Oklahoma City-born writer-actor who also had a film, “The Mafu Cage,” premiering at Cannes that year.

“The rest is history because we’ve been together ever since,” Hayes said.

She even stuck by him when the release of “Midnight Express” caused an angry Turkish government to issue a warrant for Hayes’ arrest through Interpol.

“There’s an attitude in the film, as much as I love what they did and I think (director) Alan Parker is a brilliant filmmaker, and (actor) Brad Davis put his heart and soul into the part (of Hayes), he was wonderful in that,” Hayes said. “(But) there’s an overall effect that wasn’t true to Turkey and it wasn’t true to my story.”

For example, he never bit the tongue out of the mouth of a trusty/informant, as was depicted in one of the film’s most horrific scenes, although Hayes admits he did attack and try to kill the man.

Further, the accidental killing of a sadistic guard who was preparing to rape him never happened. There was such a guard, an exception to the rule as the guards went, but he was gunned down in an Istanbul cafe by a former prisoner long before Hayes’ escape.

And in fact, Hayes never escaped from the infamous Sagmalcilar prison, but was eventually transferred to an island prison, where he ultimately escaped by sea in a rowboat in the middle of a storm.

“The escape (in the film) is so totally different than my real escape,” he said. “It was almost like an afterthought in the film.”

In the film, Hayes (Davis) is shown donning a guard’s uniform and simply walking out through the gates. Hayes says there was much more to it than that, involving a lot of running and hiding through Turkey, dying his hair different colors, and swimming a river into Greece.

“I had an escape that was made for Hollywood, and they didn’t use it in the film,” he said.

When Hayes asked Parker about it, he said the director responded, “‘What 45 minutes of this film do you want to cut out to put in your escape?’

“Now that I’ve become a filmmaker and understand the logistics of Hollywood, shooting on the water is so expensive,” Hayes said. “Shooting at night in a storm on the water is so expensive. Running through Turkey and all that was involved with my real escape would have jacked the budget of the film up quite a bit.”

But Hayes feels now is the time to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, beginning with his arrest for trying to smuggle two kilos of hashish out of Turkey. In addition to tonight’s “Locked Up Abroad” episode, he’s also preparing a one-man theatrical production in Los Angeles called “Riding the Midnight Express” as another means of telling his story his way.

And a means of making amends with Turkey.

“Go to Istanbul,” he said. “I love Istanbul. I got along great with the Turks till I got arrested.”

At the opposite end of the blockbuster bloodsucker spectrum from the romantic, high-toned “Twilight” sagas is “Inbred Redneck Vampires,” a micro-budgeted, direct-to-DVD comedy set to hit video shelves on Tuesday.

Repackaged and reconfigured from a 2004 release titled “Bloodsucking Redneck Vampires,” this new version slightly ups the ante on gross-out gags (lots of PC boundary pushing and explosive baked beans jokes) and hitches a quick ride on the considerable “Twilight” coattails.

The ultra-lowbrow story focuses on Catherine (Felicia Pandolfi), a sexy vampire on the run who shows up in a redneck burg called Backwash and prepares to do battle with a relentless vampire hunter who has vowed to drive a stake through her heart.

As Catherine hatches a plan to turn local yokels into her army of vampire slaves, town matriarch Ma Poissier welcomes swishy interior designer Jean-Claude Les Eaux into her home after winning a complimentary room redecoration. While the fey Frenchman tries his best to fit in with crazy hillbillies like Lil’ Junior and his buddy Cletus, rowdy rounds of beer drinking, bean eating, tripe cooking, shower peeping, competitive farting and strip poker lead up to the town’s annual Tripe Days Festival and a showdown between Catherine and her pursuer.

As we said, a far cry from the classy, dewy doings of the “Twilight” vampires. But then, director Joe Sherlock clearly has a penchant for low-end horror, with a resume that includes titles such as “Monster in the Garage,” “Monster in My Car,” “ “Odd Noggins,” “Werewolf Tales” and “We Need Earth Women!”

“Inbred Redneck Vampires” is not rated and runs 108 minutes. It’s being released by SRS Cinema.

- Dennis King

Martin Scorsese’s film adaptation of ’Shutter Island’ pays homage to Gothics

BY GENE TRIPLETT

Dennis Lehane has learned how to describe “Shutter Island” to a potential reader or viewer without giving away any of the dark plot twists or clues to the shocking surprise ending of his chilling Gothic thriller.

“I’ve had a lot of practice, so don’t worry about it,” the author said in a recent phone interview. “The first thing you would say is, ‘You’ll never see where it’s going.’ The word you hear most about this book is, ‘It’s a trip.’ I mean, it’s taking you on a pretty wild ride.”

Published in 2003, the Boston-born writer’s eighth novel, set in the year 1954, tells the story of two U.S. marshals investigating the mysterious disappearance of a murderess from a federal hospital for the criminally insane on one of the remotest of the Boston Harbor Islands.

The book became a movie in 2010 under the direction of Martin Scorsese, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo as the investigators and Ben Kingsley as the institution’s inscrutable head psychiatrist. Now it’s out on DVD, and Lehane was doing a round of interviews in the hope of enticing a few more thriller lovers into taking a “trip” behind the walls of Ashecliffe Hospital, where nothing is remotely what it seems.

Rachel Solando, who murdered her children, is loose somewhere on the island, having inexplicably escaped a locked, guarded cell under constant surveillance. A killer hurricane is rolling down on the island as U.S. Marshals Teddy Daniels (DiCaprio) and Chuck Aule (Ruffalo) search for the missing inmate, and Daniels is beginning to suspect the existence of radical experimentations and surgeries being performed on the patients.

Or is something wholly other going on?

Lehane is the author of two other novels turned into well respected films: “Mystic River” and “Gone Baby Gone,” directed by Clint Eastwood and Ben Affleck, respectively.

Dennis Lehane

Unlike those stories, which took a lot of time to plan out, Lehane said the complete narrative of “Shutter Island” came to him in one night — in his sleep.

“Yeah, one night I had this bizarre, almost waking dream,” he said. “It’s hard to describe. I got up, scribbled everything down on a piece of paper, woke up the next morning, and there it was.”

He wishes every book could come to him so easily.

“Yeah, that would be nice,” he said. “That would be awesome actually.”

Lehane was on the set during the making of the film, and actor Ruffalo got to know him a bit.

“Yeah, I went out and had drinks with him,” Ruffalo recalled in a separate interview conducted Sunday in Beverly Hills. “I really liked him. He’s a great guy. A great writer, really down to earth. But, you know, using that book for the movie was fantastic for me because that did 90 percent of my work.”

And Ruffalo also praised Scorsese for skillfully translating Lehane’s complex and atmospheric novel to the screen.

Ben Kingsley, Mark Ruffalo, Leonardo DiCaprio, from left, in "Shutter Island."

“Scorsese, he shows you movies to inspire you,” Ruffalo said. “So we were steeped in ‘Out of the Past’ and ‘Laura’ and all of these films that were from that noir sort of period, which is Gothic. And so, basically I was trying to really do as best an impersonation as I could of Robert Mitchum. And so I think that translates really well. It’s hard to do that, especially with a book with that many turns and twists in it. It’s really hard. And so hats off to Marty again for that.”

Lehane agreed that his vision had been accurately captured on film by the director, who, surprisingly, was working from a screen adaptation written by Laeta Kalogridis.

(Lehane said he never attempts to turn his books into screenplays because “it’s just like operating on your own child if you’re a doctor. I don’t see how anybody can do it.”)

“I loved it,” the writer said. “I mean (Scorsese) got it. He got what I was playing with and what I was trying for. And he did cinematically what I did in the language of the novel. The language of the novel is heightened in such a way that you should be aware very early that you’re reading a novel, that this is an homage to Gothics, that this is basically a book about being a book in a lot of ways.

“And he made a movie about being a movie. The movie is in your face as a movie right from the beginning. You should realize very quickly you’re not in the real world, you’re in Oz.”

That Tom Cruise’s new big-boom summer action vehicle is a chop-shop contraption cobbled together from parts, premises and personalities of other movies is as obvious as, well, “Knight and Day.”

Summer hype aside, when producers of this derivative blockbuster boast that their movie springs from an original spec script – not one based on a comic book franchise or recycled from an old TV series or retrofitted from a previous summer juggernaut – you might naively expect some smidgeon of originality.

But “Knight and Day,” scripted by first-timer Patrick O’Neill and co-written and directed by jack-of-all-trades James Mangold (“Girl, Interrupted,” “Walk the Line”), seems to exist solely to give Cruise a summer project in which to flash his toothy grin, trot out his frat-boy swagger and romp around cutely with Cameron Diaz. It is a cut-and-paste enterprise in which originality doesn’t figure into the equation.

While the producers allow that they were aiming for a sophisticated mixture of action, intrigue and worldly romantic comedy of the “Charade” kind, they seem to have modeled their movie on much more than just the 1963 Audrey Hepburn-Cary Grant romp.

The story features Cruise as Roy Miller, a lethal, on-the-run spy, and Diaz as June Havens, an ordinary gal with a penchant for restoring vintage street rods. It plays around with a classic Hitchcock McGuffin – in this case a revolutionary perpetual energy battery capable of powering a nuclear submarine or a small city or a rabid army of Energizer bunnies.

Naturally, a sinister Spanish arms dealer (smug Jordi Molla) and a rogue FBI agent (a very bland Peter Sarsgaard) seek to obtain it for nefarious purposes. So Miller and June are thrown together in a globe-hopping adventure to safeguard the battery and its youthful inventor, bring the bad guys to justice, and, of course, fall in love.

More than “Charade,” “Knight and Day” seems a stylistic cousin to the Michael Douglas-Kathleen Turner gambol, “Romancing the Stone,” in which a naïve damsel is thrown together with a suave man of the world, whose motives are vaguely sinister, and sets off on a hair-raising, bullet-riddled, chase-filled duel with international villains.

There are also touches of “The Jewel of the Nile,” with a gifted innocent – in this case nerdy teenage physics prodigy Simon Fleck (Paul Dano) – who possesses a world-altering secret.

And there are in Cruise’s swift, muscular performance obvious flashes of Robert Ludlum’s hyper-kinetic Jason Bourne, a deep-cover operative with lightning quick, death-dealing skills whose All-American past has been erased by government spooks. (Miller’s quaint parents, thinking he died in combat, keep his Eagle Scout picture over their homey hearth.)

On top of all that, the frantic pacing, action mechanics and elaborate stunt sequences seem drawn straight from the “Mission: Impossible” playbook, with breakneck car chases, a revving motorcycle pursuit, and even a scene in which Cruise plays limbo with the hurtling steel hulk of a flying car.

“Knight and Day” is dumb summer fun, even though most of the fun is in counting all the other movies it mimics.

– Dennis King

MOVIE REVIEW

“Knight and Day”

PG-13

1:50

 2 stars

Starring: Tom Cruise, Cameron Diaz, Peter Sarsgaard, Jordi Molla.

(Sequences of action violence throughout, and brief strong language)

This week, the oddest DVD to appear on release lists is:

“Rock Slyde: Private Eye”

Joining a roster of bumbling movie gumshoes of the Frank Drebin kind is “Rock Slyde: Private Eye,” a crime spoof that goes straight to DVD on Tuesday.

Patrick Warburton (of “Seinfeld” fame) steps easily into the role of Slyde, a down-at-the-heels detective whose fortunes change when femme fatale Sara Lee (Rena Sofer) slinks into this office late one evening.

Along with this new case, Slyde has to contend with a neighboring nemesis named Bart (Andy Dick), the charismatic minister of the House of Bartology. It seems that Bart’s hired goons are scaring away all the tenants in the office complex in an effort to control the building. But Slyde has refused to move out.

But just as Slyde thinks he’s found a soulmate in Sara Lee (they share an affection for EBay and newspaper supermarket ads), things get sticky when it turns out the she just might be a closet Bartologist.

For a straight-to-video piece, this comedy features an unusual cast of such well-knowns as Jason Alexander, Eric Roberts, Lea Thompson and Tom Bergeron.

“Rock Slyde: Private Eye” is rated PG-13 for sexual material including language and runs 86 minutes. It’s being released by Monarch Entertainment. For information on ordering, go to www.rockslydethemovie.com.

- Dennis King

The parameters of film noir, as well as our knowledge of this most sinister movie genre, are greatly expanded with the recent release of “Film Noir: The Encyclopedia” (Overlook Press, $45), a revised and redesigned fourth edition of the classic pioneering text that movie lovers consider the final word on the cinematic world of fog and shadows.

Compiled and constructed by a quartet of respected film scholars (Alain Silver, Elizabeth Ward, James Ursini & Robert Porfirio), the 464-page hardcover reference work more than covers the waterfront when it comes to slinky femmes fatale, gun-toting mobsters, world-weary private eyes, seedy schemes and the seamy underbelly of the American dream.

The book’s concise introduction sums up the genre for the ages: “Film noir is literally ‘black film,’ not just in the sense of being full of physically dark images, nor of reflecting a dark mood in American society, but equally almost empirically as a black slate on which the culture could inscribe its ills and in the process produce a catharsis to help relieve them.”

All the classic film noir works are here (featuring mainstay actors such as Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, Peter Lorre, James Cagney, Joan Crawford and Bette Davis). And the brilliantly exhaustive text is supported by new film stills, rare posters, production notes and complete guides to movies, directors, stars, themes and motifs.

Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer, 'Out of the Past'

Divided into two sections – classic noir and neo noir – the text ranges from well-known classics such as “Sunset Boulevard” and “The Maltese Falcon” to lesser known B-movie noirs like “Nightmare Alley.”

The neo noir section charts the influence of classic noir films of the 1940s on contemporary filmmakers such as Brian De Palma (“Body Double”) and the Coen Brothers (“Blood Simple”). Stylistic elements of film noir have shown up in other contemporary movies such as “Blade Runner” and “The Silence of the Lambs.”

Perhaps most surprising is the inclusion of signature sci-fi films (“The Day the Earth Stood Still,” “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”) and classic Westerns (“The Ox-Bow Incident,” “Rancho Notorious,” “Naked Spur,” “I Shot Jesse James”), which apparently owe a great stylistic debt to film noir conventions.

Scholarly essays included throughout underscore progressions and influences that have expanded the genre well beyond its initial realm. Discussions of the importance of German Expressionism in shaping film noir design, development of lighting and camera placement in defining film noir style, and the emergence of the “fatal male” character are just a few of the unique, truly encyclopedic entries the book offers.

“Film Noir: The Encyclopedia” is an essential reference work for students of film and for movie fans who love plying cinema’s mean streets. It is indeed a beacon of light in an artful landscape of darkness.

- Dennis King

In a truly odd marriage of entomology and arthouse lyricism, “Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo” deftly explores Japan’s ages-old love affair with bugs of all stripes.

For the traditional culture that eventually gave us Mothra (vs. Godzilla), creepy-crawlies apparently span a crucial gap between Japan’s ancient, Zen-infused rural values and the hustle-bustle urbanization that pulses through the country today, especially in the alienating, high-tech buzz of Tokyo.

And so the American filmmaker Jessica Oreck, an insect-lover and animal keeper
at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, has constructed a meditative, impressionistic documentary that looks at this phenomenon and in the process loops in gentle references to Zen gardens, banzai trees, the art of haiku and Shinto Buddhist philosophy.

When, at the film’s opening, a young Tokyo boy pleads with his father to buy him a pet beetle (price tag: $57), we quickly see that something exotic, buggy and strangely beautiful is afoot in the land of the rising sun. In this place where insects of all ilk are kept as pets, sold in stores and vending machines, depicted in videogames and feted in festivals and art shows, man’s harmonious interaction with nature clearly rests on some delicate connections.

So, despite the monster-movie suggestions of its title, this documentary takes a high road and looks at the subject from a profoundly historical, philosophical and sociological perspective.

Harking back to ancient texts, as well as following the dashing feats of modern, professional beetle hunters, the film ranges far and wide in an effort to grasp the Japanese concept of mono no aware – the evanescence of life – that apparently underpins this national obsession. Along the way, we’re treated to startling and stunning up-close images of everything from simple crickets to popular silver beetles to exotic, giant rainbow-shelled beetles and more.

With all the oddball incarnations of obsession and the hypnotically lovely images at play here, Oreck seems at end uncertain of any concrete conclusions. Instead, she toys with sly visual compositions – images of night-lit construction workers reminiscent of buzzing fireflies, an overhead shot of a crowded Tokyo street filled with open umbrellas suggesting a stampede of beetles – that hint at primal connections between urbanites and insects. Ambiguous, at best.

But perhaps it’s enough that Oreck, in her debut film, provides us with an outsider’s perspective – respectful, fascinated and sympathetic – of this charming national idiosyncrasy. What “Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo” lacks in thrills and chills it more than makes up for in poetic inquiry and wide-eyed wonder.

- Dennis King

“Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo”

Not rated
1:30
3 stars
(Bugs)

This week, the most offbeat DVD to appear on release lists is:

“Gene Autry – 2 DVD Set in Embossed Tin Box”

Home video distributors are forever recycling, repackaging and reissuing old material in an effort to keep collectors happy and the wheels of commerce spinning. Oklahoma’s own singing cowboy understood the marriage of nostalgia and marketing better than most and would surely be pleased with the latest issue from his burgeoning library of classic horse operas due out on Tuesday – a two DVD set of his classic Westerns dressed up in a collectable embossed tin box.

Simply titled “Gene Autry,” this package features Autry, his sidekick Smiley Burnette and his trusty horse Champion as they gallop through eight Western adventures with a posse of up-and-coming actors, such as Jock Mahoney (“Rim of the Canyon”), George Montgomery (“Springtime in the Rockies”), Lon Chaney, Jr. (“The Old Corral”) and Roy Rogers (“The Old Barn Dance”). Well-known supporting players such as Alan Hale Jr., Denver Pyle and Iron Eyes Cody show up in small roles.

And, of course, throughout, Autry sings as he slings his six-shooters. All-in-all, America’s favorite singing cowboy starred in nearly 100 big-screen oaters and recorded about 600 songs.

“Gene Autry – 2 DVD Set in Embossed Tin Box” is not rated and is being released by Timeless Media Group. Running time for the two discs is 442 minutes.

- Dennis King

By Gene Triplett

OKLAHOMA CITY — deadCENTER Film Festival-goers will be afforded a rare look inside the sonic laboratory of Oklahoma City’s mad scientists of psychedelic songcraft when The

The Flaming Lips, from left: Wayne Coyne, Kliph Scurlock, Michael Ivins, Steven Drozd.

Flaming Lips’ “Blastula: The Making of ‘Embryonic’” takes its first big screen bow at 10 tonight (Friday, June 11) during the Mixtape film shorts program in the downtown Kerr Auditorium.

An encore screening is set for 5:30 p.m. Saturday at IAO Gallery.

The 21-minute film by George Salisbury and Lips leader Wayne Coyne documents the initial jam sessions that metamorphosed into the most experimental, over-the-edge album the band has recorded since 1997′s “Zaireeka,” which contained four separate discs designed to be played simultaneously on multiple stereos.

Thankfully, “Embryonic,” released in October, is a single-disc affair requiring only one player, but the free-form nature of the music — often lyrically dark and arrestingly noisy — can be challenging enough, particularly for fans of the more elegant avant-pop the band performed on “The Soft Bulletin” (1999) and “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots” (2002).

So for some, viewing “Blastula” might seem like witnessing a musical train wreck.

“We were filming some stuff while we were recording at Steven’s house,” Coyne said in a phone interview Monday, referring to Lips multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd. “I guess it’s off of the Belle Isle district over there off of Northwest Sixty-third, when he lived over there. And it shows us in the house, kind of just (fooling) around, jamming around, finding some little nuggets.

“And we tried to find all the little bits that we played while we were there that we actually ended up using on the record. So for anybody who thoroughly knows the record, you know, you’ll hear little bits that we’re playing right there …. And, you know, it’s got little interviews, and just things about what we were thinking about, and the triumphs and failures, and just kind of the different way we approached it.

“For all intents and purposes, when we began recording, we were just jamming around. We really didn’t know, we didn’t think we would just do these freaky kind of low-fi jams at Steven’s house, and that they would yield so much, I mean, you know, inspiration.”

The eventual yield was a sprawling 18-track exploration of new sounds and cryptic poetry that more than reaffirms The Flaming Lips’ reputation as fearless experimentalists — or freaks, as they prefer. But as far as we know, no drugs were abused during the making of “Embryonic.”

In fact, a good bit of Coyne’s inspiration for the album’s music and lyrics came from repeated viewings of Liliana Cavani’s “The Night Porter,” an artfully sleazy Italian film made in 1974 and set in 1957, about a sado-masochistic affair between an ex-Nazi (Dirk Bogarde) and a woman (Charlotte Rampling) he used to abuse sexually in Auschwitz.

“I was singing about the dimensions of this movie that kind of shocked me or were interesting or whatever, and I started to sing about the nature of evil and the nature of pleasure and the nature of submission and dominating and all these things that I thought the music was kind of hinting at,” Coyne told me at the time of the album’s release.

He also credited the adventurous nature of “Embryonic” to a lot of late-night listening to Miles Davis’ music from the jazz master’s electric fusion period.

But Coyne, Drozd, bassist Michael Ivins and drummer Kliph Scurlock weren’t sure how their producer, Cassadaga, N.Y.-based Dave Fridmann, would react to their brave new music/noise inventions.

“We had about six or seven tracks the first time we went up to Dave Fridmann’s studio,” Coyne told me in Monday’s interview. “And some of ‘em we knew were really these chaotic little riffs. But they had some real personality about them. And we thought, well, we’ll take these up to Dave, and we’ll see what Dave thinks, and if he thinks it’s too horrible or too badly played or somethin’, then we would reconvene and say, ‘Well, what do we want to do about that?’ … But the very first thing we took up there he thought was a disaster. But he thought it in the best way possible.”

And so the Lips set to work at Fridmann’s Tarbox Road Studios and at Dull Roar Studios back in Oklahoma City, shaping their new music into “efficient little pieces of entertainment.”

“So it was confusing and exhilarating and interesting,” Coyne said. “It’s a great way to record.”

Part of the experience will be revealed in “Blastula,” which he co-directed with Salisbury, the band’s resident computer-generated graphics and visuals wizard. But the film is still a work in progress, and a lengthier, completed version will be released sometime in the unforeseeable future.

This seems to be the modus operandi for making a Lips movie, as a shorter, unfinished version of Bradley Beesley’s 2005 documentary “The Fearless Freaks” was released in 2000 under the title “The Flaming Lips Have Landed.”

“George felt that, though it was unfinished, it told enough of a story and it was interesting enough that he submitted it to the deadCENTER people only simply because we’re here and we know them and stuff,” Coyne said.

The Lips won’t be in attendance at the deadCENTER screenings of their movie, as they’ll be performing tonight (June 11) at the Bonnaroo Music Festival in Manchester, Tenn.

Flaming Philharmonic

They’ll be back on Sunday to perform for the first time with members of the Oklahoma City Philharmonic in a special engagement for the 78th annual Conference of Mayors being held here. But you can’t see them then, either, unless you have an invitation, because the event is closed to the public.

“I think there’s quite a few strings, and I’m not sure what the whole ensemble is,” Coyne said. “But we’re only going to play a couple of songs. They’re going to do a version with us of ‘Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots,’ just a version of their own. And then we’re gonna do ‘Race for the Prize’ because that was what the mayor played at his reelection party a few months back. That will be me kind of singing to the mayor.”

There will also be a cover of Yo La Tengo’s “Blood From a Sugar Cube” to round out the brief performance.

But Coyne isn’t sure about the possibility of a public collaboration between the philharmonic and the Lips.

“I don’t know if people who have seen us do our New Year’s Eve show where there’s 10,000 balloons and I’m walking on people’s heads in a space bubble, if they really want to see just people playing music,” Coyne said.

“We are all about music, don’t get me wrong, we are about the music. But we’re The Flaming Lips, and we are this traveling show, this big entity that puts on this big show, so I don’t know.”

Anyway, for now, we have “Blastula” to keep us entertained.

“Blastula: The Making of ‘Embryonic’”

The screenings will be held at:

10 tonight (June11), Kerr Auditorium, 123 Robert S Kerr Ave.

5:30 p.m. Saturday, IAO Gallery, 706 W Sheridan Ave.

For more information, go to www.deadcenterfilm.org.

It was a feat of cinematic archaeology worthy of Indiana Jones.

The discovery in 2008 of an archival 16mm safety print of “Metropolis,” Fritz Lang’s 1927 futuristic masterwork, in a Buenos Aires museum has been hailed as the film buff’s holy grail, something one over-heated scholar said was “akin to recovering lost books of the Bible.”

In light of this stunning find, 25 minutes of formerly lost footage – including 96 sequences featuring several subplots and supporting players – has been lovingly, surgically edited into the whole to create the most complete and coherent version of the film since it premiered in Berlin 83 years ago (before it was butchered by distributors and its fragments cast to the winds). The new running time of 147 minutes still leaves five to six minutes of the original unaccounted for, but restorers have inserted explanatory notes to mark the narrative gaps.

The new scenes – bearing the unavoidable scratches and scars of time, yet also making new material easy to identify – more fully define certain plot dynamics, such as the animosity between Joh Fredersen, “Master of the Metropolis,” and the lunatic inventor Rotwang. The film’s musical structure now emerges more clearly and powerfully, and chapter headings are marked with titles, such as “Prelude” and “Furioso.”

All in all, this sterling new version brings “Metropolis” from a sketchy, incomplete and slightly campy film artifact to a full-blown, operatic masterpiece of ambition and excess. Lang and his brilliant collaborators – art director Otto Hunte, special-effects designer Erich Kettelhut and groundbreaking cinematographer Karl Freund – can now enjoy their full due.

“Metropolis” is set in a dystopian, Art Deco world of grand architecture and towering skyscrapers topping a grim subterranean netherworld of grinding gears and belching machines. It pits the elites above ground, led by city overlord Joh Fredersen (Alfred Abel), against drone-like worker-slaves who toil underground.

Blithely straddling the two worlds is Joh Fredersen’s son, Freder (Gustav Frohlich), a fey child of privilege who comes to a late revelation about the suffering of the poor. That’s when he falls in with Maria (Brigitte Helm), a Madonna-like waif urging workers on to a peaceful revolution. And then there’s Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge), the mad inventor who boils with dire schemes and has concocted a voluptuous robot in his basement that he makes over into a false Maria.

Among the joys of the new footage are fleshed-out storylines for Worker 11811 (Erwin Biswanger), the rescued laborer who repays Freder’s kindness by going on a nightclub spree with his patron’s money, and Josaphat (Theodor Loos), Joh Fredersen’s disgraced secretary who more clearly becomes Freder’s ally.

Another restored sequence clears up the source of Rotwang’s nutty obsessions, dealing with a long-lost love, a rivalry with Joh Fredersen and a massive stone bust the inventor keeps as a shrine.

One of the more compelling bonuses comes in additional footage of The Thin Man, Joh Fredersen’s sinister, Lurch-like henchman who is sent by his boss to stalk young Freder. He’s a truly creepy shark who provided the template for lethal thugs that skulked around the shadows of thrillers for generations afterward.

In fact, the restored “Metropolis” provides more than ample evidence of why Lang’s sci-fi classic so powerfully influenced future films ranging from “Bride of Frankenstein” to “Dr. Strangelove” and from “Blade Runner” to “Star Wars.” For sheer, dreamlike nuttiness and grandiose artistic vision, it surely ranks among the most daring, ambitious visions in cinema history.

The restored “Metropolis’ is just wrapping up a deliriously successful run at New York’s Film Forum and is now making appearances around the country (including an exclusive Oklahoma City showing at 5:30 p.m. Friday as part of the deadCENTER Film Festival). Kino International will soon be releasing the film on DVD and Blu-Ray, but no self-respecting film buff should miss a chance to see it on the big screen.

- Dennis King

“Metropolis”

Not rated
2:27
4 stars
Starring: Brigitte Helm, Alfred Abel, Gustav Frohlich, Rudolf Klein-Rogge
(Some disturbing imagery)