Jonathan Postal     Printer friendly version of this story Email Michael Yockel More stories by Michael Yockel Send a letter to the editor From the Week of Thursday, January 29, 2004   Metro Protest Too Much Tongues still wag over FTAA arrests, but does the Civilian Investigative Panel have teeth? Korten An Embarrassment of Audits Numbers never lie, as further examination of Public Health Trust bookkeeping reveals Letters Letters from the Issue of January 29, 2004

Cut to a lingering shot of the hospital's empty Lamaze classroom, once packed with beautiful pregnant women. Fade to black. What next for the beleaguered Dr. V? But before another sudsy crisis erupts, a trumpet fanfare startles the audience as the words "We Interrupt Our Picture to Present Mr. Carlton Howard" appear onscreen. Middle-age and bespectacled, his hair slicked back, Howard sits at a large desk, looking like a district attorney straight out of central casting. "Ladies and gentlemen," he begins, standing and briskly walking around the desk to address the audience, "I'm Carlton Howard. We are going to talk about the sexual side of marriage."

And off he goes, yammering at warp speed about "the eight erotic zones of passion ... placed about the woman's body by her Creator for the husband to find, to love, to fondle, caress, to properly arouse that woman so that she might enjoy the sexual act in the same manner her husband does." As Mastroianni and Wasted Lives recede from memory, Howard's rat-a-tat-tat jawboning persists, now effortlessly segueing into an infomercial for two booklets he holds up for the camera: "The Sexual Life of Woman" and "The Sexual Life of Man." Of the former, Howard notes: "There are two chapters for women who would like to improve an unhappy marriage. Read this information that tells about sex harmony in your marriage and making a success of married life." About the latter: "Here for the first time in any book is frank, intimate, step-by-step information for that all-important wedding night. Now, gentlemen, you owe it to your bride or bride-to-be to have the correct sex information."

By now fifteen minutes have passed, and Howard, barely pausing for breath, moves in for the kill: "We sell these books on a 100 percent, money-back guarantee. We couldn't possibly make an offer of this sort unless we were sure, unless we were positive, that you would find these books to be exactly as I have described them, and as hundreds of thousands of other people are finding them to be."

Turning up the hard-sell heat, he adds that the books are available, at one dollar each, from a "limited supply" at the refreshment stand "for the next twelve minutes only." And for the benefit of those watching Wasted Lives at drive-ins, he advises eager customers to "turn on the parking lights of your car right now. To speed the sale along, please have your money ready before the attendant reaches your car."

Finally relaxing his chokehold on viewers' wallets and purses, Howard sums up: "Every man should read the woman's book, and every woman should read the man's book. If you know your partner physically, you will know your partner sexually. You show me a happy sex life, and I will show you a happy marriage, which can only be obtained through the proper knowledge, and the proper knowledge can only be obtained through books like these. You have everything to gain, nothing to lose, by this very special offer. Thank you very much."

Abracadabra! The movie rematerializes, and the trials and tribs of Dr. Valeri and Nurse Morelli resume. But wait! As soon as another fifteen minutes pass, immediately after the successful delivery of a baby via the "painless" Lamaze method, moviegoers are whisked away on a second side trip.

Shifting gears, the screen changes from muted black-and-white to garish color, and viewers are greeted with a huge closeup of a woman's vagina. A six-minute "hygiene film" ensues, depicting first the "normal" birth of a single child, then twins by cesarean section, all of it narrated deliberately and analytically. Scalpels. Gloved hands. Bloody babies. Oozing afterbirth. Real squirm-in-your-seat stuff.

Then wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am, back to the main feature for the dash to the Wasted Lives finish line, with Dr. V. and Nurse M. reconciled and facing the future together. Roll the credits.

The man responsible for snagging and retitling Il momento piu bello, for producing Howard's "sexual-side-of-marriage" featurette, and for procuring (and narrating) the eye-popping childbirth footage -- in effect, the Man Behind the Curtain: former Midwestern carnival owner/exploitation film maven/salesman el supremo K. Gordon Murray.

For nearly two decades, from the late 1950s through the mid-1970s, K. Gordon Murray -- "Ken" to his family, friends, and colleagues -- established an outsized reputation as a one-man churning urn of burning entrepreneurial funk. At the apex of South Florida's early- to mid-1960s independent filmmaking hurly-burly, with the tag team of director Herschell Gordon Lewis/producer David Friedman cranking out gore-fests and Doris Wishman fashioning naughty nudies, Ken Murray, operating from a modest downtown office on Biscayne Boulevard, enjoyed a highly successful career as a motion-picture alchemist by inexpensively purchasing the U.S. rights to foreign films, meticulously dubbing them into English at a Coral Gables studio, and unleashing the finished products amid a blizzard of hype in American cinemas and on American TV.

"He was first and foremost a businessman," asserts attorney Royal Jonas, who represented Murray from 1960, when he plunged into the deep end of the movie business, until 1979, when he died at age 57 of a heart attack. "He smelled what the market needed, and that's what he bought or made."

Murray's unmistakable thumbprint can be found on nearly 70 films: from a clutch of endearingly kitschy Mexican horror flicks and children's fantasies to a peck of West German fairy tales, from a handful of previously released foreign and domestic potboilers that he retitled, repackaged, and regurgitated to finally, at the end of his career, a quartet of original exploitation pictures he shot in and around Florida. Taken together, these movies compose an onscreen universe that unabashedly embraces scowling bikers, howling werewolves, babelicious female wrestlers, lumbering mummies, hemoglobin-hankering vampires, come-hither B-girls, brain-sucking monsters, jolly live-action critters mincing hither and yon in ill-fitting costumes, scheming decapitated heads, and a donkey whose anterior cavity secretes diamonds.

In the process of presenting this pungent cinematic pot-au-feu, Murray transformed the film industry's business side, virtually inventing the weekend-only kiddie matinee, opening the U.S. floodgates for overseas product, and upping the ante in the already over-the-top world of film promotion and marketing.

And yet for all of these achievements, dubious and otherwise, you will not find K. Gordon Murray listed in Ephraim Katz's Film Encyclopedia, the ne plus ultra cinema bible, although the effort will yield the homonymous Ken Murray, renowned for his treasure trove of home movies of Hollywood's glitterati. Good luck locating one of KGM's films in the exhaustive Halliwell's 2003 Film and Video Guide. Mention Murray's name to any current industry player, and the response will be, at best, a quizzical, head-scratching stare.

But whisper "K. Gordon Murray" to a member of the psychotronic cognoscenti -- a tight-knit community that genuflects at the altar of "anything featuring vampires, bikers, female prison inmates, radioactive mutants, giant apes, or John Carradine, as long as the execution is outrageous and the end result leaves the audience bewildered but titillated," according to the online "All Movie Guide" -- and you're likely to elicit an eye-rolling nod, a sly grin, and just maybe a glance that signifies shared conspiracy before that person launches into a spirited championing of Murray's criminally unheralded legacy.

"K. Gordon Murray is, to me and others anyway, an important -- and forgotten -- historical figure in 1960s cinema and independent filmmaking who, for reasons unknown, is kind of a void and who deserves further attention," notes Rob Craig, speaking over the phone from his home in New Haven, Connecticut. As keeper of the Murray flame at his relentlessly entertaining and highly informative Website, www.kgordonmurray.com, the 50-year-old Craig, a production assistant and board operator at a Connecticut classical music radio station, has assumed the mantle of the world's foremost KGM expert. "Imagine a small-time producer canny and powerful enough to give the great Walt Disney headaches for an entire decade," Craig adds. "And yet he is not mentioned, even as a footnote, in the three or four Disney histories I've read. Now that, to me, is suppressed history."

And according to David Wilt, a film historian who has written extensively about Mexican cinema, including the forthcoming Mexican Filmography: 1916 to 2001, Murray functioned as a pioneer of sorts. "He certainly wasn't the first person to take foreign films, dub them into English, and release them to the United States," acknowledges the 48-year-old Wilt, a librarian at the University of Maryland in College Park. "But in terms of Mexican films, for many years K. Gordon Murray was the only person who systematically purchased large quantities of Mexican movies -- the horror films and the fairy tales -- and dubbed them into English for release in the United States. Nobody did what he did, in terms of popularizing Mexican cinema here."

"He was the Barnum of film," contends Murray contemporary Marge Nagel, now 74, who once provided the dubbed voices, and occasional piercing screams, for many of the women's and children's roles in Murray's imports. "When you think about how he earned his money, it sounds like he was sleazy, but he wasn't the least bit sleazy. What he did was innovative and profitable, and it was done in a very gentlemanly way."

"Shocking beyond description! Fearless! Bold! Breaking records from coast to coast! Many will faint! Don't come alone! Gorgeous girls who didn't know they never had a chance! See it first ... then tell others what we can't! No one under 16 admitted (without parents)! THE PRICE OF SIN!"

The son of a funeral home director, this "Barnum of film," Kenneth Gordon Murray, was appropriately born in Bloomington, Illinois -- the winter base and training center for several traveling circuses -- on January 8, 1922. While still in high school, he earned knock-around money by driving a hearse for his father and spent his spare time hanging out with circus performers and support staff. Show biz infected him. A precocious Murray demonstrated the initiative he later would hone to a precise craft by cashing in on his circus contacts to recruit dwarves to appear as Munchkins in the 1939 film classic The Wizard of Oz.

Not long after he graduated from high school, Murray married Irene Van De Warker. He also debuted as an entertainment entrepreneur, borrowing one of his dad's cemetery funeral tents to house a bingo parlor -- a "corn game" in sideshow parlance -- in nearby Normal, then running it as part of the roving West's World Wonder Shows, a Midwestern carnival. Gradually he added attractions -- a ride called "The Chair Plane," an ice cream concession -- before buying out West's and renaming it United Liberty Shows, declaring himself, at age 22, "The Youngest Owner in Show Business." Headquartered in Randolph, just south of Bloomington, United Liberty schlepped from town to town across the Midwest via fifteen decrepit flatbed railroad cars. When the carnival ceased operations during the winter, Murray, always wise to the main chance, used the downtime to establish a small slot-machine empire in Bloomington.

In the mid-1940s, he joined his father in a movie-theater construction venture. But eager for a larger canvas, he eventually abandoned the midways of the Midwest for the allure of Hollywood, where once again he put his circus knowledge to work, signing on for a gig as a promoter for 1952's epic (153 minutes), Oscar-winning (Best Motion Picture) The Greatest Show on Earth, directed by yet another Barnum of film, Cecil B. DeMille.

Lessons learned and apprenticeship served, Murray figured he was ready to solo as a movie impresario, and where better to set up shop than the wide-open, freewheeling, ground zero of 1950s American hucksterism -- South Florida? He and Irene plopped down in a building called the Parkleigh House in the 500 block of Biscayne Boulevard, renting its entire second floor as offices while living in the penthouse; together they entered the exploitation universe with K. Gordon Murray Productions. He kick-started the business by leasing and rereleasing low-budget "sex hygiene" melodramas, sometimes changing the film's title to give the impression that it was new.

"When the drive-ins were very popular, once or twice during the season they would play Naughty New York or Why Girls Leave Home," recalls long-time Miamian Leonard Simons, who knew Murray from the 1940s, when both worked as Midwestern carnies, and who eventually would do time as Murray's national advance man, promoting a slew of movies in the 1960s. "This wasn't porno. It was an excuse to sell books."

Now 83 and retired, Simons remembers that back in the 1950s drive-in owners would advertise that a "hygienist" would be on hand for a "lecture" as part of the screening of one of these overheated exploitation wonders. "They'd have an actor who was dressed up with the white coat and the stethoscope hung around his neck," Simons explains in his still-rich native New England accent (he says he settled in "My-am-a" after World War II). Halfway through the movie, he continues, the show would stop, and the "hygienist" would make a ten-minute presentation about, as Carlton Howard so gingerly put it during the break in Wasted Lives, "the sexual side of marriage," after which "the books" -- one for men, one for women -- were sold by peripatetic factotums.

According to Simons, Murray leased "exploitation films with catchy titles" -- in addition to Why Girls Leave Home and Naughty New York, he corralled the 1953 French soaper Les Enfants d'Amour, then released it as the straightforwardly translated Children of Love -- to draw an audience, bought the sex booklets in bulk, hired an actor hygienist, and toured the whole shebang on a national drive-in circuit. "Come spring," Simons remembers, "Ken would work his way north with the films" from his Miami base. Drive-in owners paid a royalty on each booklet sold, and Murray, in an effort to pack the house, trumpeted his productions with sensationalized promotion.

"Startling! Shocking!" shrieks a lobby card for Children of Love. "Rips the veil of secrecy from love's most shameful sin! An unwed mother dares to reveal her intimate true story!!"

Like Simons, Murray belonged to the Miami Showman's Club, a sort of fraternal organization for what Simons terms "circus people, carnival people, medicine-show people, amusement people," many of whom had relocated to South Florida. (Now based in Dania, the club continues to hold meetings.) At around six feet tall and nearly 200 pounds -- "tailor-made suits, good shoes, fingernails done, very natty," notes Simons -- Ken Murray stood out even in that brash and colorful crew. "He was a very warm person, sharp as a whistle."

Royal Jonas, who at 81 remains active as an attorney while splitting each year between Aventura and the western Massachusetts town of Dalton, concurs, characterizing Murray as "hail-fellow-well-met."

Sheldon Schermer, Murray's chief business associate from 1962 to 1972, recalls him being "a very religious man, went to church every Sunday, very active in his church. As a matter of fact, every year he rented a bus and took the kids from the church down to Key West. Gave them a day's treat there."

Never is heard a discouraging word. "He was extremely courtly, a very nice man," says Paul Nagel, Marge's husband, now age 78, who as "director" supervised the English-language dubbing of many of Murray's imports. "If a woman walked into the room, Ken was the first man on his feet, pulled out her chair, 'Yes, ma'am' -- a very polite man."

And when he wasn't kissing ladies' hands or playing Santa to church kids or fraternizing -- besides the Showman's Club, he belonged to the Knights of Columbus and a local Moose Lodge -- Murray imbibed football, often attending University of Miami Hurricanes games. Hard to imagine, then, this charming man being up to his discreet mustache in snake oil. Of course it was strictly business. In addition to scoring with the aforementioned mucho-mondo fare, Murray hit pay dirt in the mid-1950s by leasing and rereleasing The Prince of Peace, the 1949 film version of a Passion play staged annually by a huge church congregation in Lawton, Oklahoma; the movie originally was made as The Lawton Story by producer Howard "Kroger" Babb.

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