Luke McGarry

J.X. Williams the avant-garde film pioneer is an enigma wrapped in a riddle tucked under an exiled rock in Zurich. Communist? Mafioso? Living legend? Noel Lawrence, head archivist at the J.X. Williams Archive, takes a break in Chicago from his heavy screening schedule to speak with Nolan Knight.  

How did a filmmaker like J.X. Williams become ‘lost’?
Noel Lawrence (head archivist): The reason J.X. is lost is because there were powerful people in Hollywood who told him to get ‘lost’—a wire transfer was sent to Zurich and he was ordered to get the hell out of Dodge. I can’t give way all the gory details but all will come to light in my documentary The Big Footnote. Let’s just say his reasons for leaving Tinseltown involved a major studio, a mobster, a lawyer, and a Z-grade nunsploitation flick. J.X. has intentionally kept a low-profile which has made it hard to find his films as well as figure out what really happened.
Is that why you started the J.X. Williams archive?
The archive has a number of purposes. One of them is to exhibit the films of J.X. Williams but the main problem is that I’m waiting to get more films. There is a lot of out-of-print stuff he made that I haven’t had a chance to get access to. My understanding now is that it’s being restored, but I’m actually not involved in the restoration process. So, all I can do is sort of wait to get more stuff. I have heard that I’m probably gonna get bits and pieces of things soon ‘cause I’ve been showing Peepshow now for a few years. My other major concern right now is finding out whatever happened to The Virgin Sacrifice. The very few people who ever saw it claim it is a masterpiece and I won’t rest until the day I finally track that film down!
Have you actually had any contact with J.X. recently?
Oh yeah, but not often though. I did see him several years ago and he actually gave me a tour of Los Angeles to some of his old haunts. That was quite amazing. I would have loved to have taped it but he won’t let me. That’s a big point of frustration right now because I’m making the The Big Footnote, and one of my main obstacles is that he will not be on camera or even allow having his voice recorded. But I’m working around that.
Where were some of the places J.X. took you?
We went to this one restaurant where his car was blown up in the early seventies. Basically what happened was that his car blew up and the cops thought that he was dead inside. Apparently he walked away from it. They didn’t realize until later, after not finding a body in the wreck, that they got a report of this disoriented guy who was on a median trying to hitch a ride. By the time they got there he was gone.
What was the last communication you had with him?
I don’t think it could be printed in a family newspaper. But seriously, I’ve mostly been nagging him lately to send me more films and he’s been procrastinating on that. I do hope to present a couple more fragments of his work in the near future.
I read the note that J.X. wrote to the Hollywood community in regards to speaking with you for his documentary. Are people who were in his films coming to you or are they hesitant to speak?
I’ve had marginal success in the sense that people were willing to speak in deep background kind of. There is sort of this collective code of silence in Hollywood right now, where no one wants to be the first person to speak and they’re afraid of being ostracized. But I think sooner or later someone will say ‘Fuck it!’ and do it. Then everyone will go for it. The floodgates will break.
Is the hesitance coming from his supposed ties to the Communist party or from his involvement with the Mafia?
The Communist stuff is really old news now. From some testimony I’ve gotten from J.X. and other things that I’ve heard, he was never really a Communist. He basically—and I know this sounds ridiculous today—was using Communism as a networking tool; kind of the way that certain actors today use Scientology thinking that it will get them ahead in Hollywood. Here’s what it came down to, his father was a delegate for one of the studio unions—the Conference of Studio Unions. Of the two major labor unions that were in conflict in the 1940’s, the CSU was kind of pictured to be like the left-wing reformist union and the studios didn’t like them. So basically, they accused the CSU of being a Communist union. There was some truth to that though. J.X.’s dad did have some left-wing party affiliations. He grew up in Boyle Heights, which before it was a Hispanic neighborhood was a Jewish neighborhood that was a hotbed of left-wing socialist activism back in the 1940s. I think J.X. knew about the stuff but he wasn’t really serious about it. He knew how to walk the walk and talk the talk to get into meetings and stuff, all with the hopes that he was going to get into the good graces of someone like Dalton Trumbo or Edward Dmytryk or any other of the major Communist screenwriters of the time. I do to some extent think that he succeeded because he was able to insinuate his way into a writing department, although he has no screen credits that I can mention, but he was there for all of about six months before the Communist witch hunt. This good idea he had of networking the Communists turned into a whole other idea that got him blacklisted in Hollywood. And that’s why he got involved with the Mafia. Essentially what happened is that he couldn’t work anymore in Hollywood but he still loved the movies and wanted to do something with them. So, more or less, he ended up making stag movies for the Mafia.
He worked for Johnny Rosselli, right?
He got to direct porn for the Mob in the ‘50s and learned a little about their evil ways. There are a couple I have seen in private collections but they are not available for exhibition at this time. As far as I know, J.X. was the originator of the porn parody film years before Pulp Friction and The Bare Wench Project. I did enjoy A Streetwalker Named Desire but It’s a Wonderful Lay is the best one. There’s a scene where the porn stand-in for Mary Bailey has sex with Mr. Potter in a wheelchair.
I heard he claims to have ghost-written several major motion pictures.
That’s bullshit. Where did you read that? I probably wrote that down somewhere but I don’t believe that anymore.
I read that on the J.X. Williams Archives Myspace page.
Okay—see, one of the more difficult things about J.X. is that he’s somewhat getting senile. You have to be careful with what he says. He’d fucking tell me that he wrote Citizen Kane, you know.
Can you tell us a little about the current J.X. Williams exhibit at Show Cave that closes on the 17th?
Oh yeah. This is insane. I’ve been waiting forever for J.X. to send me some more stuff and I got him on the phone finally a few months ago. I said, ‘Hey are you gonna send me any more stuff? I’ve been showing Peepshow for four goddamn years now.’ He said, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah—I’ll send you something.’ What he did was send two frames of film! That was as much as I could get out of him. I have some notes as to what it was but I kind of made lemons out of lemonade because I had a copy made of the frame and decided to show it. It was a really interesting frame of film. It is this weird picture of the crucifixion done with all these butterflies around it. It was taken from this film he made called Black Messiah.
How did the recent screening of Peepshow at Cinefamily go?
It went well. We had a pretty good sized audience and I’m really excited with the work their doing at Cinefamily. Hadrian had known about J.X. for awhile because there was this film he made called You Axed For It back in ’78, kind of cashing in on the whole Halloween fever thing. It wasn’t done under the name J.X. Williams; it was under Jeep Williams or something. Hadrian got a copy of this tape when he was starting up Cinefile and going to all of these video stores that were going out of business, finding tons of super obscure VHS tapes that were going out-of-print. He got a copy of it and was very excited. It was like one of his favorite pieces in the collection but someone borrowed it [laughs] and didn’t leave a forwarding number or anything. So, yet another lost J.X. Williams film, at least for now. We’re trying to track down the copy. He still has the box actually.
I actually just saw parts of Satan Claus, and thought that was pretty surreal.
The story behind that film is that it nearly started a riot at an L.A. movie theater on Christmas Eve. This was from one of those periods where J.X. was really down and he ended up having to take a job as a projectionist in a movie theater. It was a total humiliation because the guy was a film director and he didn’t want to project other people’s movies. So, to make matters worse, he was working for some real asshole who owed him money. He hadn’t paid him for weeks. J.X. cornered this guy and said, ‘Where’s my money?’ The guy said, ‘Okay, this is your last week of work.’ I think from that moment on, he plotted his revenge. He made this film, Satan Claus, that he worked feverishly on for several days. It was made up of two films—a Mexican Christmas film and Dario Argento’s Deep Red. So at a matinee on Christmas Eve at this theater filled with a bunch of little kids and their parents, he basically put the reel on the projector and walked out of the theater. Of course, the parents were totally mortified when they saw it and were angry—it wasn’t whatever cheeseball Christmas film they came for.

CLOSING RECEPTION FOR PHOTO FICTIONS WITH J.X. WILLIAMS AND MORE ON SAT., MAY 17, AT SHOW CAVE, 1218 1⁄2 TEMPLE ST., LOS ANGELES. 7 PM / FREE / ALL AGES. SHOWCAVE.ORG. VISIT THE J.X. WILLIAMS ARCHIVES AT JXARCHIVE.ORG.