200 Motels
| 200 Motels | |
|---|---|
200 Motels
|
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| Directed by |
Frank Zappa Tony Palmer |
| Produced by |
Herb Cohen Jerry D. Good |
| Written by |
Frank Zappa Tony Palmer |
| Starring |
The Mothers of Invention Theodore Bikel Ringo Starr |
| Music by | Frank Zappa |
|
Production
company |
Murakami-Wolf-Swenson
Bizarre Productions |
| Distributed by | United Artists |
|
Release date
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Running time
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98 minutes |
| Country | United States United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $679,000 |
| Box office | Under $1 million |
200 Motels is a 1971 American-British musical surrealist film cowritten and directed by Frank Zappa and Tony Palmer and starring The Mothers of Invention, Theodore Bikel and Ringo Starr. A soundtrack album was released in the same year, with a slightly different selection of music. In 2009, 200 Motels was restored with an audio commentary by Tony Palmer and is currently available on an England-sourced for-retail DVD.
In 200 Motels, the film attempts to portray the craziness of life on the road as a rock musician, and as such consists of a series of unconnected nonsense vignettes interspersed with concert footage of the Mothers of Invention. Ostensibly, while on tour The Mothers of Invention go crazy in the small fictional town of Centerville ("a real nice place to raise your kids up"), wander around, and get beaten up in "Redneck Eats", a cowboy bar. In a long cartoon interlude bassist "Jeff", tired of playing what he refers to as "Zappa's comedy music", is persuaded by his bad conscience to quit the group, as did his real-life counterpart Jeff Simmons, who was fired for insubordination before the film began shooting. Simmons was replaced by Martin Lickert (who was Ringo's chauffeur) for the film. Almost every scene is drenched with video special effects (double and triple exposures, solarisation, false color, speed changes, etc.) which were innovative in 1971. The film has been dubbed a "surrealistic documentary".
In 1970, Frank Zappa formed a new version of The Mothers of Invention which included British drummer Aynsley Dunbar, jazz keyboardist George Duke, Ian Underwood, Jeff Simmons (bass, rhythm guitar), and three members of The Turtles--bass player Jim Pons, and singers Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan--who, due to persistent legal and contractual problems, adopted the stage name "The Phlorescent Leech and Eddie", or "Flo & Eddie."
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