On demand: "Hold Me While I'm Naked"

Imagine David Holzman's Diary as reshot by Vincente Minnelli. By 1966, the tropes and clichés of American independent and underground cinema had become manifest - and they were spoofed rotten in Hold Me While I'm Naked, a.k.a. Color Me Lurid, a fifteen-minute short about the shooting of a no-budget melodrama that's going for George Cukor (Technicolor flourishes within the frame, orchestral swells for a score) but for budgetary reasons has to settle for one George Kuchar, a prolific Bronx-based consumer of 8mm and 16mm stock caught edging towards something like artistic respectability after achieving early notoriety via such works as 1957's The Naked and the Nude and 1961's Pussy on a Hot Tin Roof. (I shit you not.) With his wonky smile and Ronnie Barker glasses, Kuchar is the image of a particular kind of film geek, spouting pretentious gobbledygook on the set and taking time out of his day to bathe in strips of celluloid. Yet the Kuchar overseeing the film-within-the-film has no real control over his comically horny actors, shown as too busy getting off with one another to take much in the way of sustained direction, while a final tug of the rug suggests his plaudits-gathering magnum opus may, in reality, be no more than humdrum showertime fantasy, possibly even literal masturbation. (Well, you shrug, movies have had far less salubrious origins.) If it now appears somewhat rough around the edges, even in digitally streaming form - its soundtrack a confounding mix of shoplifted pop songs and filmmakers' co-op dead air - it remains among the cinema's most colourful in-jokes, and good-natured in a way a lot of Sixties underground endeavours weren't; you can see why John Waters continues to cling to it. As self-deprecating as it is satirical, composed with far greater vibrancy than almost everything the arriviste Warhol was tinkering on for the movies at around the same time, and a guaranteed wow for both retro fashion and boob connoisseurs, it's a scene, and then some.

Hold Me While I'm Naked is now streaming via rarefilmm.com.