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David Cronenberg | page 1, 2, 3

More arty shockers followed -- "Rabid," "The Brood" and, in 1981, Cronenberg's first commercial breakthrough, "Scanners." The latter film's infamous exploding head scene briefly pushed it to the top of Variety's box office charts (a feat the filmmaker has yet to repeat, despite having since had bigger hits).

Cronenberg's first real dance with Hollywood came in 1983 with "Videodrome," the tangled tale of a sexually violent TV channel that begins to alter people physically (James Woods develops a huge vagina on his abdomen that accepts videocassettes). Universal provided some funding and distributed the picture, which meant focus groups. Or rather, one focus group, in Boston. After the screening, a lot of the response cards were retrieved from the floor. "I hated your fucking film," said one. It spoke for many.

Luckily, Cronenberg's next job was already lined up. It was by far his biggest stride toward the mainstream -- an adaptation of Stephen King's "The Dead Zone," starring Christopher Walken. For the first time Cronenberg was working from someone else's source material, and for the first time his own grotesque subconscious was not immediately evident on screen. Cronenberg became almost respectable. Fans were worried. (Despite this mainstream acceptance, "The Dead Zone," released in 1983, may contain Cronenberg's most outrageous scene ever. A gunman attempting to assassinate a presidential candidate is shot in front of a room full of reporters and falls to the floor, dying. All the reporters rush out of the room. It's Cronenberg's most bizarre vision yet.)

His next movie would demonstrate that, however briefly, his particular obsessions could dovetail with commercial filmmaking and produce a bona fide hit. After struggling with producer Dino De Laurentiis on 12 drafts of a "Total Recall" script, the two parted company and Cronenberg found himself desperate for work. He quickly snapped up "The Fly," a rethinking of the Vincent Price B-movie hit from 1958 about a scientific accident that blends a man with a house fly. Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis co-starred as the doomed scientist and his lover (Goldblum called it his favorite role).

Notwithstanding his left-field independent splash with "Scanners," Cronenberg now had his first solid hit (even producing a legitimate catch phrase in "Be afraid. Be very afraid."). And he accomplished it without moving away from his habitual obsessions. Here were the standard Cronenberg themes and images -- mutinous flesh, morbid sexuality, the blending of machines with living organisms, the nature of mind and body, bugs. But this time there was more. There was an honest-to-God love story with an emotional core -- not just (as with James Woods and Debbie Harry in "Videodrome") the healthy respect a man pays to any woman willing to burn her own breasts with cigarettes.

Whether he'd planned it or not, Cronenberg was an A-list director now. It's a career turning point at which busloads of promising filmmakers have taken that right turn into cozy hackdom. But Cronenberg was still based in Toronto, still willfully separate from the L.A. milieu. And while people's perceptions of him may have changed, his cinematic agenda had not, a fact that would quickly become clear.

"Dead Ringers," released in 1988, based on the real-life tale of the Marcus brothers, twin gynecologists who were found together in their New York apartment, dead from barbiturate withdrawal, had actually been in the works for years, delayed by various problems. If anything, Cronenberg's new success simply meant better actors were available for casting consideration. For a while, at least. "From Al Pacino to [James] Woods to William Hurt to Jeff Goldblum to Kevin Kline," Cronenberg told Saturday Night in 1996 (apparently the magazine had forgiven him for destroying Canada's moral fiber in the '70s), "they all turned it down. Pacino couldn't even get past the word 'gynecology,' that was it for him."

Eventually the dual role in "Dead Ringers" was played -- beautifully -- by Jeremy Irons. No one knows how many women dragged boyfriends to see the latest flick starring that dreamy English actor, only to suffer through the most uncomfortable date of their lives, complete with numerous gynecological exams and a grotesque set of medical tools designed for "mutant women."

Perhaps it was the new cinematographer (Peter Suschitzky, replacing longtime collaborator Mark Irwin) or perhaps just the director's own development, but "Dead Ringers" felt like the dawn of a new, more sophisticated, far more stylish era for Cronenberg. No squishy monsters here -- just psyches unraveling in an understated, terrifying, thoroughly compelling way.

Any doubts about Cronenberg's continued dedication to maverick filmmaking were dispelled by "Naked Lunch," his 1991 attempt to translate William Burroughs' novel for the screen -- sort of. "A literal translation wouldn't work," Cronenberg insisted in a widely reported remark. "It would cost $400 million to make and be banned in every country of the world."

"All that is carried over" in the movie, "Halliwell's" says, "is the title and lack of narrative coherence." True enough, but it's a fascinating cinematic experiment, Cronenberg's most fully realized alternative universe yet.Burroughs' (as played by Peter Weller) journey into the hallucinatory dimension called Interzone may even constitute a whole new genre -- the literate creature feature.

1993's "M. Butterfly" (with Irons again) was neither a commercial nor critical success. "I saw it as the story of two people composing the opera of their lives," Cronenberg said in an article by Denis Sequin. "Sexuality is an invention, it's a creative thing ... ['M. Butterfly'] is an extreme version of this inventing, but the extreme illuminates the ordinary version of what each of us does."

Then, in 1996, "Crash," based on J.G. Ballard's story of people turned on by accidents and their physical aftermath screeched into cineplexes. Many called the movie pornographic -- even more were busy trying to figure out why. The fabled link between sex and cars had never been spun quite this way before, and the toughest part for some viewers was figuring out whether they were outraged or just puzzled. Still, where cars are concerned sex is never far from the metallic surface, particularly for a man of Cronenberg's age. As he told Susie Bright in a 1997 interview, the '50s-era kid with a car was always possessed of very practical sexual power. "I was very envious," he recalled. "I took the streetcar. You could not have sex on a streetcar -- it was not allowed."

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