A Lost Movie and a Forgotten Sport in New Book Cockfight: A Fable of Failure

Cockfighter - (courtesy of AFS Cinema)

If you watch sweaty, gory 1974 exploitation flick Cockfighter, you’ll see the blood as roosters claw at each other. You’ll hear their squawking and the yelling of gamblers gathered around the fighting pit. Maybe you’ll even have a visceral response as you see metal spurs yanked from chicken flesh in the brutal, unsimulated fights to the death.

But what you won’t get is the stench. Kier-La Janisse knows what that’s like: “It’s a very, very strong acidic smell. It burns your nostrils.”

Such details proliferate in the author and former Alamo Drafthouse programmer’s new book, Cockfight: A Fable of Failure (Spectacular Optical, 292 pp., $50), recounting the making of Cockfighter. This Friday, she’ll be screening the original movie at AFS Cinema in celebration of its publication.

Much like her landmark 2012 volume House of Psychotic Women, in which she examined how cinema peddles the “crazy women” trope, Cockfight is as personal as it is academic: a mixture of rigorous research and earned insight. The instigating incident for its writing wasn’t really the first time she watched the movie in 2001, when she was working in Vancouver’s Black Dog Video, and Anchor Bay put it out on DVD. That undeniably triggered a fascination with Cockfighter and its depiction of a forgotten, now forbidden culture. But the path to the book came seven years later, when she finally went to a real cockfight in Louisiana – the last state where it was legal, mere months before a ban took hold.

However, that first trip could readily have been her last. She recalled entering the arena, which was basically a round pit with a Plexiglas wall, surrounded by bleachers. “I walked past the pit and this chicken just whacked into the Plexiglas next to my head,” Janisse said. “It left a blood splat on the Plexiglas, and I just thought, between the smell and what happened, I’m not going to last five minutes.”

Yet she stayed – and her perspective changed. Rather than seeing it as “some underground sport,” she explained, “It felt like some country pastime that people would go to after church.” Over time and multiple trips to other pits, she became as interested in the community and culture around cockfighting – and her own engagement with it – as she was in the film. Indeed, as someone who had been called a degenerate for loving horror films, the experience gave her even more empathy for the movie’s protagonist, professional cocker Frank Mansfield (played by Warren Oates) and “his desire to be the best at his craft, even if it’s a craft that people don’t take seriously or outright dismiss it.”

Yet the film and the sport were both rejected. Most of the cast and crew disowned the movie, and audiences stayed home. Producer Roger Corman even called it the only movie he lost money on, even after re-editing and re-releasing it as the less meditative, more drive-in-friendly Born to Kill. “They tried to save it by adding in clips from other movies of trucks exploding and chases,” said Janisse.

Moreover, both director Monte Hellman and writer Charles Willeford (who penned both the script and the novel it was based on) would later distance themselves from the sport, saying they simply used it to explore Frank’s obsessiveness. Yet that doesn’t pass muster with Janisse. Having spent time around the pits, “I feel like that the sport is much more intrinsic to that character study. It’s not just a backdrop.”

AFS Cinema presents Cockfighter with Kier-La Janisse in conversation

Friday 20, AFS Cinema

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