The rest of her film roles consist of bit parts in the short films of George and Mike Kuchar, and small roles and cameos in a handful of commercial features, mostly produced by Dan Ireland, who was a fan of her work with McDowell. A chaste anomaly amongst McDowell’s better-known forays into experimentalism and unrepentant gay porn excess, it received spotty festival exposure and has become the very definition of obscure. Marion helped him get it off the ground in 1976, but it took nine years to complete and wasn’t totally finished until 1985. In Hollywood they write scripts by committee and hire script doctors, but that wasn’t Curt’s way - he penned this one while high on LSD camped in a tent in Yosemite National Park. Her most sustained film performance for Curt was in Sparkle’s Tavern, an autobiographical feature that mixed melodrama with fantasy elements. Yet, despite her stellar performance in Thundercrack!, this film, too, was fated to remain a dated artifact anathema to mainstream sensibilities. In Kuchar’s short from 1979, Blips, Marion is given the spotlight again, but here, playing a less exquisitely drawn character, her studied delivery doesn’t work and freezes the film in its tracks. It was simply one of the great performances in underground cinema history, darkly hilarious and truly tragic all at once. She infuses Gert with real pathos as well as genuine creepiness in a series of hauntingly photographed monologues that transcend the film’s threadbare conceits. The film channeled the rambunctious sexual anarchy coursing through the city’s underground milieu of the ’70s, but Marion’s character, the daft and delusional farm widow Gert Hammond, harkened back to a much more handcrafted Tennessee Williamsesque archetype. Marion’s theatrical delivery that she’d cultivated growing up in live theater set her apart from the rest of the cast, a spirited rabble of younger non-actors who had sex in various combinations and gamely spouted reams of Kuchar’s florid dialogue with a mix of endearing nonchalance and feverish overacting. A freaky mix of bisexual hardcore porn, classic haunted-house melodrama, and verbal comedy, it was tailor-made for the midnight-movie audience but doesn’t fit easily into any genre. This was her first encounter with Curt, who was directing, and George Kuchar, who was assisting in several capacities. Via a contact from Sip the Wine she was told about auditions in San Francisco for a role in Thundercrack!, tried out, and got the part. She was much more articulate and versed in discussing issues of onscreen erotica than either Marilyn Chambers or Linda Lovelace and was a genuine creative soul. Marion never managed to land a breakthrough role or to achieve any kind of wider platform as an actor or writer, and it’s a pity. She had approached the role as an actress, and it was “erotic realism” - playing characters who have sexual feelings, as people do in real life - that she and the other cast members had sought to explore, not porn. Nor did she consider herself a porn star, shunning the term. She was even interviewed together with Marilyn in an exhaustive piece for the summer ’76 issue of The North American Review, but she was cut from very different cloth, refusing to exploit herself by posing nude for the piece or even using her name in print. SF critic John Wasserman called Marion the best actress he had ever seen in a pornographic film. Upon its release it drew big crowds to the Mitchell Brothers’ three Bay Area adult theaters and was being appraised in the media as something different, a quality effort in the adult film genre. It was Marion’s first feature, the XXX-rated Sip the Wine, in 1975, that won her the most recognition and cast her as something of a contemporary of Marilyn Chambers. The fact that he has been erroneously typed as an exclusively gay filmmaker, or remembered primarily in connection with the San Francisco scene, has also tended to marginalize his legacy. Much of it was for her friend Curt McDowell, who made deeply personal films that were not easily accessible to a broad public. Her film work, from the mid-’70s on, has also been largely overlooked. Between 1945 (as the eight-year-old Marion Cramer) and 1984, she had major roles in at least 80 plays, produced mostly in the San Francisco Bay Area, but they were all essentially forgotten, as live theater will be. She infuses Gert with real pathos as well as genuine creepiness in a series of hauntingly photographed monologues that transcend the film’s threadbare conceits.”ĭespite her decades of being active on both stage and screen, the death of actress Marion Eaton on April 6th, 2011, at the age of 79, went virtually unnoticed in the acting and indie film communities. “Marion’s character in Thundercrack!, the daft and delusional farm widow Gert Hammond, harkened back to a much more handcrafted Tennessee Williamsesque archetype.
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