An intimate portrait of controversial cartoonist Robert Crumb and his traumatized family.An intimate portrait of controversial cartoonist Robert Crumb and his traumatized family.An intimate portrait of controversial cartoonist Robert Crumb and his traumatized family.
- Awards
- 18 wins & 6 nominations
- Self
- (as Aline Crumb)
- Self
- (as Dana Crumb)
Storyline
Did you know
- TriviaWhen he was trying to raise funds for the film, Terry Zwigoff encountered Terry Gilliam whom he knew had worked with Robert Crumb in the late 60s. Approaching Gilliam, Zwigoff asked for some help with the budget. Gilliam reached into his pocket, handed over a nickel and then walked away.
- Goofs"San Francisco" is misspelled in the closing titles. The caption reads: "Max Crumb still lives in San Francicsco".
- Quotes
Robert Crumb: Jesus. Fuckin' raging, epithet music comin' out of every car, every store, every person's head. They don't have noisy radios on, they got earphones; like, "motherfuckin', cocksuckin', son of a bitch. Lot of aggression. Lot of anger, lot of rage. Everybody walks around, they're walkin' advertisements. They've got advertisements on their clothes, you know? Walking around with "Adidas" written across their chests, '49'ers on their hats. Jesus. It's pathetic. It's pitiful. The whole cultures' one unified field of bought-sold-market researched everything, you know. It used to be that people fermented their own culture, you know? It took hundreds of years, and it evolved over time. And that's gone in America. People now don't even have any concept that there ever was a culture outside of this thing that's created to make money. Whatever's the biggest, latest thing, they're into it. You just get disgusted after a while with humanity for not having more, kind of like, intellectual curiosity about what's behind all this jive bullshit.
During childhood, Crumb and his brothers Charles and Maxon found solace from their tyrannical father in comic books and drawing cartoons. Crumb escaped the mental illness that ended both his brother's careers as artists (Charles was equally as talented), but otherwise had a perfectly miserable childhood and adolescence. Socially awkward, bullied at school and rejected by women, he decided in 1962 (at age 17) to take revenge upon society `by becoming a famous artist'.
In 1966, his chemically inspired `revelations of some seamy side of America's subconscious' caught the eye of a Haight Street publisher in San Francisco and Zap Comix was born. Zap was an outlet for his creative energy, which was rooted in his social difficulties. He was uninterested in money and once turned down a $100,000 contract a huge sum of money in those days. Although identified with the hippie crowd, he could not relate to their culture: `My main motivation [for drawing] was to get some of that free love action'.
After a few years of fame, he retired from Zap to express the darker side of his nature. His later work frequently contained sadistic and violent themes and was sometimes labeled as pornography by friends and critics alike. Even Crumb isn't sure of his intent: `Maybe I should be locked up and my pencils taken away from me'.
Critic Robert Hughes says that in Crumb's world there are no heroes and `even the victims are comic' ideas that don't jive with traditional American culture. But Crumb has always considered himself to be an outsider and enjoys the feeling of `being very removed or extremely separated from the rest of humanity and the world in general'. `Words fail me, pictures aren't much better' to describe his disgust with American consumerism. He now lives in France because its culture is `slightly less evil than the United States'.
The film is embarrassingly candid about unhappy details of Crumb's life, such as his brothers' mental illness, experiments with drugs and ambivalent attitudes towards women. Yet it is apparent that there is no misery or violence in this man it's all on paper. (Rating: A)
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Details
Box office
- Gross US & Canada
- $3,041,083
- Opening weekend US & Canada
- $19,859
- Apr 23, 1995
- Gross worldwide
- $3,041,083
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