45 years ago, director Abel Ferrara and composer Joe Delia collaborated on their third film together and made a classic: the exhilarating fusion of visual poetry, grindhouse violence, and poignant character study that was “Ms. 45.” On Thursday, Delia will perform his score live during a screening of the movie at the Southampton Playhouse, and then participate in a Q&A to discuss his work and his decades-long partnership with Ferrara.
The collaboration began with a mob-financed porno flick called “Nine Lives of a Wet Pussy,” a movie that nearly got Ferrara killed when it ran over schedule and budget (for hilarious stories about its making, check out Ferrara’s fantastic memoir, “Scene”). Like all of Ferrara’s films, “Nine Lives” shows a vision that belies its disreputable roots — it stands alongside Wes Craven’s “The Fireworks Woman” and Radley Metzger’s “The Opening of Misty Beethoven” as one of the few genuine works of art in its genre.
Related Stories
Ferrara and Delia followed “Nine Lives” with another down-and-dirty, non-union indie exploitation film, the 1979 slasher opus “The Driller Killer.” A movie about a struggling artist (played by Ferrara under a pseudonym) who goes insane under the stress of failing to sell his work and pay his bills and resorts to murder as a result, “The Driller Killer” felt more than a little autobiographical, a violent howl of anguish and rage whose low budget and technical rough edges only made it more powerful.
“Ms. 45” was ultimately made in reaction to those rough edges, after Ferrara was upset to overhear the distributor of “The Driller Killer” say the film didn’t look professional. “If anybody told me that now, I’d say, ‘Fuck you, it looks and sounds exactly the way it should,'” Ferrara told IndieWire. “But that attacked my ego in such a way that I said, ‘Fuck this. We’re gonna get rid of half the people we’re working with, we’re gonna get 35mm equipment, and we’re gonna do what everybody else does.”
Ferrara now seems to have some regrets about not sticking to his guns and continuing to make underground, guerrilla films — “We were turning our backs on something that maybe we shouldn’t have turned our backs on,” he said — but the newfound polish he applied to “Ms. 45” is a large part of its impact. The core story, of a mute seamstress who becomes a vigilante after she’s assaulted by two different men in the same day, is reminiscent of “Death Wish” and all its grindhouse ripoffs, but the film stands alone thanks to the beauty of Ferrara’s visual style, the authentic feminist rage of Zoë Lund’s all-time great lead performance, and Delia’s propulsive, haunting score.
Delia knew then that he and Ferrara were moving to another level, partly thanks to new technology they could employ. “The VCR came into being right at the same time that we were starting to work on that score,” Delia told IndieWire. “On the first film, we had no picture to work with. On ‘Driller Killer,’ we sat at the Steenbeck and were scoring to picture, but we were loading up 35mm mag strips. Suddenly, on ‘Ms. 45,’ we had the ability to put the film up and go back and forth and not have to deal with any of that.”
The result was Delia’s first truly great score of many for Ferrara (they would go on to collaborate on “King of New York,” “Bad Lieutenant,” and about a dozen other fantastic movies). Delia credits the film’s strengths not only to the fact that he and Ferrara were able to work more efficiently with the VCR (the arrival of which Ferrara describes as being “like the invention of the printing press”), but also to the fact that they had top-notch collaborators that came from Ferrara’s desire to prove that he and his partners could make a professional-looking and sounding film.
“We had [engineer and producer] Larry Alexander, who did all the early Springsteen records,” Delia said. Although “Ms. 45” was a low-budget film compared to studio thrillers of the time like “Marathon Man,” Ferrara’s determination and ability to call in favors made it feel almost equally well-resourced. “We had connections, so we reached out and got a union crew. We did the sound mix where Woody Allen did his mixes,” Ferrara said. “We had top-of-the-line studio musicians, and the same equipment the Beatles did ‘Sgt. Pepper’ with, you dig? Everything we had was state of the art.”
Ferrara’s ingenuity in piggybacking on larger productions even landed him his lead actress, whom Ferrara and Delia both credit with making “Ms. 45” the classic it has become. “Robert Stigwood was going to produce a movie called ’42nd Street’ after ‘Saturday Night Fever,'” Ferrara said. “They thought this was gonna be the greatest movie in the world.” Stigwood launched a highly publicized worldwide talent search to find his lead, echoing what David O. Selznick did when he made “Gone With the Wind.”
Lund was one of the thousands of actresses who auditioned. “These friends of mine were part of the casting, and they were basically doing a million-dollar casting search,” Ferrara said. “I called them up, and they said, ‘We got your girl, bro. They’re never gonna use her. We can’t give you her name now, we’ve got to wait for them to cast who they want, but wait until you see this chick.'” Once Lund was no longer a factor on the Stigwood project, Ferrara’s friends sent her to his office.
“She steps off the elevator, and the first second I saw her, I said, ‘Fuck yeah,'” Ferrara said. “I don’t care what she says, I don’t care how crazy she is.” Ferrara had his leading lady, and they would go on to co-write “Bad Lieutenant” together before Lund’s tragic death at 37 from heart failure related to her drug addiction. “She was a genius. She knew more than anyone about anything, any subject. What a find she was. She was exceptional at 17, she was still brilliant in her 30s even though she was junked out of her mind. What a fucking tragedy.”
Ferrara said Lund immediately understood the power and subtext of Nicholas St. John’s script, which arrived on Ferrara’s doorstep like a gift. “When Nicky wrote it, he didn’t talk about it,” Ferrara said. “He was superstitious. This was not a script that everyone worked on and gave notes on. It just arrived, and I read it and thought, ‘How the fuck does this cat do this?’ Because he was our bro. All I had to do was take it to the screen.”
Just as Ferrara knew what he had when he read St. John’s script, Delia knew what they had when he saw the first screening of the movie. “I had delivered all the music, and wasn’t around all that much for the mix,” Delia said. “I sat in that theater, and it was turned up loud, and it just sounded so fucking good. And the casting of Zoë…she was just a miraculous find.” Revisiting the film to prepare the live score, Delia was “knocked out all over again.”
For the live performance at the Southampton Playhouse, Delia plans to recreate the score with a few new twists, bringing in some additional musicians along with a rig of computers and samples from the original film. For all of the advanced technology he and Ferrara had when they stepped up from the underground of “Driller Killer” to go mainstream with “Ms. 45,” the filmmakers recall that they still went for some lo-fi approaches to the music and sound back when they made the film.
“Even with all these brilliant musicians and the four-track, we still used this sound effects record,” Ferrara said. “It was probably made in the 1960s. And it had this thing called ‘Monster Approaching.’ We must have used that on five movies, and it’s all over ‘Ms. 45.'” “It’s just a sting, something we could easily do electronically now,” Delia said. “But it was so perfect.”
Ferrara also came up with a simple but effective way of getting the best sound effect that he could for a gunshot. “There’s a moment in ‘Apocalypse Now’ with the scariest, perfect gunshot,” Ferrara said. After a sound mixer told Ferrara the story of how Coppola spent $50,000 and finally got the gunshot sound he wanted, Ferrara had an idea. “I told the sound guy, ‘Listen man, go see ‘Apocalypse Now’ in the middle of the afternoon when nobody’s there and wait for that moment. Record that .45.’ That gunshot cost $50,000 and we got it for nothing, because they’re never going to be able to track it.”
Years after the movie came out, Ferrara and Delia got the ultimate compliment when they learned that David Bowie had named “Ms. 45” one of the greatest film scores of all time. “David Bowie wrote down his 10 favorite scores, and this guy was a cineaste,” Ferrara said. “He saw everything. And ‘Ms. 45’ is on that list of 10.” When Delia saw his score was number three, he called Ferrara.
“I said, ‘Did you see this?’ And Abel said, ‘Yeah, that’s your fucking diploma. Hang it on the wall.'”
“Ms. 45” will screen at the Southampton Playhouse on October 22 with a live score and Q&A.