PRESERVING PULCHRITUDE.

Beefcake 

by Thom Fitzgerald

Strand Releasing (1998)

AMG: The Fantasy Factory (videotape set, complete in four volumes) Campfire Video (1990-94)

During the years immediately following World War II there emerged in the United States a new subculture dedicated to physical fitness. The combination of dispensable capital and ample free time created an ideal environment for renewed interest in the pastime of bodybuilding--a trend originally popularized in the 1920s and '30s. Southern California's "Muscle Beach," a hot spot for "muscle men" exhibitionism, became as popular with tourists as any site Hollywood had to offer. The pumped-up image of the physical culturist quickly established itself as an ideal of American manhood and an identity that could, like the wide variety of consumer goods that were flooding the market, be purchased for a price.

The popularity of bodybuilding (and bodybuilders) did not go unnoticed by those in the media. This same time period witnessed an explosion of "physique" magazines with titles such as Young Adonis, Tomorrow's Man and American Manhood, all of which featured photographs of young athletes in skimpy posing gear. Of these magazines, none achieved the fame (or infamy) of Bob Mizer's Physique Pictorial, a digest-sized publication that introduced a cast of young talents and popularized drawings by the now-famous Art-Bob, Etienne, George Quaintance and Tom of Finland, and a publication that in recent years has become a highly valued collectible.

Filmmaker Thom Fitzgerald creatively restages Mizer's life story in his latest film, Beefcake (1998). Like his 1997 feature The Hanging Garden Fitzgerald's new film uses innovative visual and narrative techniques to create a cinematic work that is as artistically complex as it is narratively compelling. Beefcake weaves together dramatizations of real-life events and 'interviews with Mizer's friends and colleagues in a semi-fictionalized account of Mizer's life. The cinematography and dialogue even successfully approximate the tone and feel of a 1950s movie.

In 1945 Mizer and two business partners founded the Athletic Model Guild (AMG), a referral agency for bodybuilders interested in posing for artists and photographers. When one partner died and the other departed, Mizer was forced to assume full responsibility for running the agency. He moved the AMG offices into the home he shared with his mother and, with the help of his family and friends, managed to transform the small agency into a lucrative multimedia production studio.

Throughout AMG's more than 50-year history Mizer worked tirelessly to discover new talent among the servicemen, drifters and beachgoers in Los Angeles and the surrounding areas. As the AMG stable of talent grew, so did the number of collectors interested in photographs of its models. When Mizer finally realized that his true source of income was not booking models for sessions with artists, but selling photographs of the scantily clad men, he launched Physique Pictorial, a magazine of physical culture, which he published from 1952 until his death in 1994. In addition to the magazine, Mizer marketed sets of photographs and short films (originally shot in 8 and 16mm formats, and later produced on video) that further developed scenarios suggested by Physique Pictorial spreads. Mizer's artistic vision often extended far beyond his budgetary constraints, an incongruity that lends many of the works--especially the period pieces--an aura of camp humor perhaps not intended by their creator. Although the AMG films di d not feature full-frontal nudity until the 1970s, the homoeroticism apparent in their imagery, as in Mizer's photographs, proved to be too much for some.

Mizer faced several legal challenges during the magazine's long run--especially in the 1950s and '60s when films and photographs such as those produced by Mizer were looked upon by many as nothing short of pornography. In response, Mizer often sandwiched lengthy essays about beauty and physical fitness between photographs of oiled-up young men in posing straps to convey the sincerity and integrity of his artistic vision. Although Mizer's magazine was marketed as a wholesome celebration of the beauty of masculine health, many of its readers' interests were considerably less lofty. Physique Pictorial was, for some time, the only widely available publication to feature racy photographs of men, and became the Playgirl or Blueboy of its time. Mizer's sensitivity to this fact is evidenced in his tendency to construct his models as icons of gay male erotica. Sailors, bikers, soldiers and cops all figure prominently in Physique Pictorial's repertoire of images and in Mizer's films.

Fitzgerald picks up on this campy aspect of AMG and plays it to the hilt in Beefcake. In a pre-credits sequence, for example, he sets snippets from AMG films to the cheesy song "The Kind of Boy You Can't Forget" by the Raindrops. Pop culture references are scattered liberally throughout the film. These stylistic details provide important cues to the viewer; they highlight specific elements of the overall socio-cultural contexts of the film's action and provide the film with a nostalgic look and feel.

Beefcake presents Mizer's life through the eyes of Neil E. O'Hara, a fresh-faced teenager from Pugwash, Nova Scotia who travels to sunny California in search of fame and fortune. After a scenic bus ride across North America, O'Hara arrives at his destination with nowhere to stay and little more than his good looks on which to get by. As fate (and Hollywood) would have it, O'Hara literally bumps into Mizer in front of Grauman's Chinese Theatre while trying to fit his feet into the footprints of screen idol John Barrymore. O'Hara soon joins the AMG family and becomes one of the magazine's most popular models. His engaging personality, pretty face and impressive physique make him the envy of all the other models.

Beefcake's story of the good boy who makes it big in the movies reads as a kind of Eisenhowerera, gay version of Stage Door (1937, by Gregory LaCava) or 42nd Street (1933, by Lloyd Bacon). Although Fitzgerald's film tackles a decidedly more mature and "modern" subject matter than its cinematic predecessors, it still manages to retain some of their charm and naive optimism. The film's use of stock images and found footage adds to this quality by connoting another era when the computer imaging that has become a standard feature in today's blockbusters was the stuff of science fiction. O'Hara's journey from Canada to the U.S. is punctuated by a series of immediately recognizable landmarks, including Niagara Falls, the Grand Canyon and L.A.'s Brown Derby Restaurant. These locations are presented by way of 1940s- and '50s-era travelogue footage, and are clearly distinguishable from the dramatic footage into which they have been inserted. The result is an appealingly amateurish one that reveals the artifice and th e pleasure of cinema itself.

In one of the film's most stunningly cinematic moments, Fitzgerald uses the oft-maligned practice of rear projection--a favorite technique of Mizer's--to place Mizer and his new discovery on the walkway in front of Grauman's Chinese Theatre. The saturated red and blue colors immediately call to mind the rich palettes of Technicolor films of the period. The sequence illustrates the magic of the movies and the lure of the artificial that drive the interrelated quests of both Mizer and his young prot[acute{e}]g[acute{e}].

In Beefcake Fitzgerald skillfully translates a patchwork of histories into an impeccably structured film that faithfully captures a bygone era. He makes no attempt to smooth over the ragged edges of history that occasionally intrude into the film's highly stylized world, but instead focuses on these moments of revealed artifice as a means of playfully rejecting more conventional approaches to depicting the past.

Like Fitzgerald's film, Campfire Video's AMG: The Fantasy Factory video series (1990-94) is a nostalgic look back at a time when, as the cover of Volume I puts it, "'dirty' movies were good clean fun." The AMG series presents an impressive and representative selection from Mizer's collection of 8 and 16mm works, most of which were originally filmed in the 1950s and '60s. Although the collection is by no means complete, it does provide the viewer with an accurate overview of the types of work that Mizer made during this time period. As narrator Steve Malis points out during a running commentary on the soundtrack, although these films vary widely in terms of settings and specifics, their general storylines tend to be rather repetitive in nature. Each reel usually involves the meeting of two or more characters (e.g., two lonesome cowboys, an inexperienced burglar and his victim, a young dreamer and a wicked wizard) who become engaged in some sort of conflict that ends up with an impromptu wrestling match in whi ch both men's clothes are ripped away to reveal trademark AMG posing straps. After a healthy round of wrestling, the two stars of each film invariably shake hands, make up and walk off into the sunset together.

AMG: The Fantasy Factory demonstrates Mizer's talent for dreaming up engaging situations and settings for his mass-marketed fantasies. From conventional stories of ancient Rome and the old west, to one of the most bizarre (and hilarious) spoofs ever of The Wizard of Oz, these beguiling films are real treasures. Both Beefcake and AMG: The Fantasy Factory illustrate the importance of recording and preserving images of an often overlooked past that reveal volumes about the cultures in which they were created and consumed, and traced the development of postwar American masculinity, both gay and straight.

ROBERT L. CAGLE writes about film and popular culture.