In The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?-shot in just 11 days-Steckler plays Jerry, a hoodie-wearing misfit who would rather bum around the boardwalk looking for fun than get a job. ‘Steckler’s next film represents a giant leap forward into the “psychotronic” realm. The sense that Steckler is making his film his way is palpable, and although Arch Hall Jr.’s subpar songs are shoehorned throughout, the director is doing what he would ultimately learn to do best: working with what he had. While filming, the director learned that actor Nancy Czar was a world-class skater, and took the shoot to an ice skating rink (years before Rocky) to create one of the film’s most memorable scenes. Just do it,” Steckler told Rice, and in Wild Guitar, Steckler’s openness to unexpected resources and improvisation pays off.
Formally, Wild Guitar might be Steckler’s most ostensibly “normal” film but the vision it conjures of exploitation in the entertainment industry, and the vapid, mesmeric power of pop, is vicious.
The naive ingenue is quickly taken in by a crooked record company owner, Mike McCauley (Arch Hall Sr.), and his gang of buffoonish hoods, including Steckler (using the screen name Cash Flagg) as McCauley’s enforcer, Steak. plays a would-be rockstar who comes to Hollywood from nowhere with an old guitar and a letter of introduction to no one in particular.
‘In the film, which plays suspiciously close to a teenbeat version of The World’s Greatest Sinner, Arch Hall Jr. Like many of the other films produced by Fairway Pictures, Wild Guitar was a vehicle for Hall’s son, Arch Hall Jr., who he hoped to make a star.
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‘After working as a cinematographer and occasional actor at Arch Hall Sr.’s Fairway Pictures (including a brief but memorable role as a frightened partygoer in the gloriously dumb caveman movie Eegah), Steckler directed his first feature film, Wild Guitar, for the company when he was only 23 years old. After leaving the Army, where he had been a photographer, Steckler came to Hollywood and found a job as an assistant cameraman on Timothy Carey’s cult masterpiece, The World’s Greatest Sinner (1962), eventually becoming the film’s cinematographer after the initial director of photography was fired. ‘Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, Steckler began making films as a boy using an 8 mm camera purchased by his father to create an amateur pirate movie with his friends. ‘In perhaps the definitive interview with the director (in the invaluable Incredibly Strange Films), Steckler told writer Boyd Rice, “I’m not saying I’m a great filmmaker or anything I try to just be different, not to be like everybody else. Indeed, Steckler’s work embodies, at first glance, a simple teenage dream of celebrity, violence, and goofy humor, but what lurks just below its campy, threadbare veneer is an underworld of cynicism, reflexivity, and rupture. The Hollywood strip appears again and again in the director’s films as a symbol of intoxicating fantasy and disillusionment. In these energetic early films, his characters-drifters, rock ‘n’ rollers, killers, dropouts, superheroes, and struggling actors-seem to be plucked from Hollywood Boulevard and set down in a pulp comic come to life.
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With Wild Guitar (1962), The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed Up Zombies!!? (1964), The Thrill Killers (1964), and Rat Pfink A Boo Boo (1966), Steckler, a self-acknowledged Hollywood outsider, crafted a series of idiosyncratic low budget features in the heart of Tinseltown before eventually decamping to Las Vegas in 1970 for a career in porn and to teach film classes at the University of Nevada. ‘The films of low budget director Ray Dennis Steckler present a unique balancing act between familiar B-movie tropes and the unexpected.
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