Wildside One-Sheet (Reimagined)

One of the great things about working with some of Rage's material is imagining what he would do with the same material, today. The marketing art for Wildside is a good example of what looks primitive, early desktop-publishing and cheaply produced. While the materials were simple photocopies of a pasteboard, the content was clearly thought through and each image chosen from the narative of the film.

In my reimagined form, I had few photographs to chose from but was able to match fairly closely the images Rage selected. With the exception of replacing Dick Mac with Bosch Wagner in the upper right-hand corner, all of the original models appear in the same slots. Generally, I would not select an image as different as that of Jesse Fairweather on the bottom right, going from him and an unidentified torso (probably George Bell), to just Fairweather looking directly at the camera, without Rage already having broken the fourth wall with two other images he chose.

  

The more I learn about Rage, and the more experience I gain working with his materials, the better I understand his process. While I often view what I do as craft, Rage saw it as art (maybe not Art with a capital "A" but art nevertheless). Rage notably used an artist's (Victor Obuchowski) portrait of himself in Outrage, both in the title seqeunce and then again in the end credits. The portrait appears in sequence with the other credits, handwritten on note cards and thumb-tacked to the wall, as though Rage was using the art to wink at the audience and let them know that he both took the subject seriously — the art — but only as seriously as appropriate for porn — hence, not framed, not mounted, just merely tacked to the wall.

Wildside's original name was going to be ANIMALS, but Rage's distributor encouraged him not to use that title for fear of drawing the wrath of PETA. There are animals including a snake, a tarantula spider, a rat, and not used in the film but shot and cut and left in the editing room, a frog. He also lists an animal wranger in the credits, and she (or at least her hands and voice) appear in the unedited footage, carfully positioning the spider on Fairweather's shoulder, as well as Rage's in another version of the how-did-we-go-so-far monologue, ultimately ending up as one of the versions to never see the light of the electrons firing against a video screen. But therein lays Rage's clever nature, juxtaposing the wild side of animals to that of fornicating men, and men that, according to the monologue, have gone too far.