marilyn chambers Tagged Articles at Cinematical

You probably knew Marilyn Chambers best as the model who appeared on an Ivory detergent box in the early 1970s, or from her starring roles in Angel of H.E.A.T. and David Cronenberg's Rabid. Or perhaps you remember her as a 2004 vice presidential candidate, running with Charles Jay on the Personal Choice Party ticket and receiving almost a thousand votes.

I'm kidding, of course. You remember Marilyn Chambers as a porn star, titillating millions in such films as Behind the Green Door and Insatiable. She passed away over the weekend, in California, 10 days before her 57th birthday.

Chambers' career began wholesomely, with the Ivory gig and some other modeling jobs, as well as a few small-ish roles in movies, including the 1970 Barbra Streisand/George Segal comedy The Owl and the Pussycat, which sounds like porn but isn't. But it was gettin' naked and doin' it that made her a star, and though she found some mainstream work later on, it never approached the success she had in the porn biz. And besides, you might not consider Cronenberg's Rabid -- in which Chambers gets an emergency skin graft that mutates into a phallic stinger under her arm that turns people into zombies -- to be very "mainstream" anyway.

Her most recent work was in a yet-to-be-released indie film called Solitaire. She also did voice work for a spoof called Porndogs, joining several other legendary adult-film stars in providing voices for the animals who make up the bulk of the cast.

One would think that with a name like Wes Craven - his real name, by the way - that a life as a director of horror films would be the man's inescapable fate from the very start. While the 66-year-old Cleveland-born Renaissance man has created some of the most revered films of the modern genre like A Nightmare On Elm Street and the breakout Scream trilogy, there is more to him than that. He studied writing, psychology, philosophy and literature at Wheaton College and Johns Hopkins University, taught college, and did not even start working in the film industry until the age of 31 as a sound editor.

It was in 1971, though, when his path would intersect with that of another future horror legend - Friday the 13th creator Sean S. Cunningham. Their meeting first resulted in the largely forgotten Together, footnoted only because it starred a 19-year-old woman named Marilyn Briggs (who consequently met brothers Artie and Jim Mitchell, who rechristened her Marilyn Chambers and made her a porn icon in Behind The Green Door). However, the collaboration made fellow tyro Cunningham want to work with Craven again. The next year saw the release of the Cunningham-produced, Craven-directed The Last House On The Left, a remake of Swedish titan Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring, believe it or not, a raw and grimy low-budget effort about a pair of murdering rapists who unknowingly hole-up in the house of the parents of one of their victims. The film became a cult favorite and launched Craven's career in movies.

Craven's second film, the savage and effective 1977 survival tale, The Hills Have Eyes, was about a family who, while traversing the desert, encounters a group of inbred maniacs who prey on these seemingly helpless castaways. Nearly three decades later comes the first remake of Craven's own work, with the new version helmed by French it-director Alexandre Aja (High Tension), released in the U.S. on March 10. Craven, who produced the film for Fox's boutique arm Fox Searchlight, was cool enough to call me at home for an impromptu chat. After I insulted his parentage and suggested a scenario in which he couple with a Cheerio (thinking I was being pranked by my friend Eric), I apologized and basked in fanboy glory for the remaining 22 minutes of our phoner.