An infamous gem of Austinโs 1980s underground film scene gets a special screening this weekend, but thatโs not whatโs getting director Neil Ruttenberg excited. Itโs that the screening of โMask of Sarnathโ will see the world premiere of a lost recording by industrial pioneers Throbbing Gristle.
Well, โlostโ isnโt really the word. Ruttenberg had the music in his possession since he made the film in 1980. Back then, he used seven minutes out of the half-hour recording for the film: now, along with his nephew and editor, Zane Ruttenberg, he has completely dismantled the original Student Academy Award-nominated short into the Nightmare Cut, which Ruttenberg called โa visualizerโ for the whole piece by Throbbing Gristle โ a work previously unheard in its complete form. โThe Nightmare Cut is the first time I can put the soundtrack out,โ he said.
The Sunday show at Hotel Vegas will feature a rare screening of the original version of โMask of Sarnathโ as well the Nightmare Cutโs premiere, plus live music from Larry Seaman (Standing Waves), Steve Marsh (Terminal Mind), and Neil himself, as he prepares for a reunion of his old band, F-Systems. โWe havenโt played probably in 45 years,โ Neil said, โbut it wasnโt so hard picking up the bass again. You just get the muscle memory back.โ
The Path to Sarnath
Letโs go back to his band days. Like many Seventies artsy kids before him, San Antonio native Neil made his way to Austin, where he got a job at the now-legendary Inner Sanctum, “which was the pivotal record store in Austin. It was central to all the music scene.”
When he got the gig, he was heavily into prog โ until one day in 1976 when a co-worker turned up with a copy of the first single by some band out of New York called the Ramones, with a song called โBlitzkrieg Bop.โ Neil recalled, โThey played it in the store, and I looked at it and went, โHoly fuck, what is this?โโ
Then his musical horizons opened up further when he traveled to the UK and saw the Damned and the Stranglers โand I went, we have to import this shit.โ Neil became an evangelist for this kind of music, sourcing vinyl directly from London-based Caroline Records and shoving it at unsuspecting customers. โWe were terrible employees,โ he laughed. โWe were like High Fidelity. โYou donโt want that, you want to buy this.โโ
He was also playing that imported punk on KUT-FM, under his DJ guise of Reverend Neil X, and channeling it into noise band Radio Frฤ Europe, which he proudly noted had been banned from every punk club in Texas, even the legendary Raulโs. โWe played โIn-A-Gadda-Da-Vidaโ and left the club during the drum break, just left the club. [Guitarist Brian Hansen] had built a drum machine from Radio Shack, and we left the club with this little drum machine going doot-doot-bang-bang-bang. They went, โYou can never play here again!โ OK, fine. That was funny, but we were the only band banned from Raulโs. Thatโs our claim to fame.โ
But music wasnโt his real passion (โI didnโt want to sleep in vansโ) nor was his supposed actual reason for moving to Austin: studying entomology at UT. โI was too much of a weirdo for those people, and one of my favorite movies was Them! so I went to film school to make a giant ant movie.โ
At that time, he recalled, the UT Department of Radio-Television-Film โwas really primitive. Their equipment was garbage. They were Arriflexes from World War II, and they would willingly give you the equipment if it worked, and it only worked half the time.โ However, he didnโt end up making a giant ant movie. Instead, he made a very different kind of horror flick โ one that had been festering in him since childhood.
Late Night Double Feature
San Antonio isnโt exactly a movie capital, and when Neil was a kid there were only 10 cinemas in the city. However, for him there was really only one: the old Texas Theater, a Spanish Revival picture palace in the theatre district. Ruttenberg recalled, โI was 10 or 11, I would tell my mother I was going to play football, Iโd hop the bus and go downtown. And it was in the worst part of downtown, but Iโm a kid, so Iโm bulletproof, right? It was the worst kind of audience you could imagine. People were throwing shit off the balcony, there were fights in the aisles, but thatโs where I saw Horror of Dracula and all those other Hammer films. โฆ There was this movie called Mr. Sardonicus and they handed out these cards with phosphorus on them that would glow in the dark. But it was hot, so it oxidized the phosphorus so the whole theatre smelled like rotten eggs.โ
On days when he couldnโt sneak out, there was always late-night TV. โFirst there was the local news, which was all car wrecks. Then there was wrestling. And then there was something called Project Terror.โ That was where he got to watch flicks like The Creeping Unknown, Blood of Dracula, and one film that was a direct influence on โMask of Sarnath,โ 1961 Canadian 3D horror The Mask. Ruttenberg said, โI can clearly remember seeing it on my black-and-white television in my room, and when I was doing โMaskโ that was in the back of my mind.โ
However, not all his influences were cinematic. The name โMask of Sarnathโ is an homage to โThe Doom That Came to Sarnath,โ a short story by master of the arcane H.P. Lovecraft. Neil credited his old Hebrew teacher with introducing him to the Cthulhu mythos. โHe caught me with some comic books in my Torah, and he said, โHey, Neil, you like this kind of stuffโ and he handed me a book of short stories by H.P. Lovecraft. I stayed up all night reading it and it blew my mind. Cosmic evil? Yes! Iโm all in.โ
Filmmaking on a Budget
Having decided to make a horror movie, Neil took the last $800 from his bar mitzvah funds out of his bank in San Antonio and ploughed it into the production, calling in every favor possible. Luckily, everyone he knew through the punk and film scenes was happy to get involved. โIt was a crazy shoot, but we got it done.โ
However, even with UTโs equipment and plenty of friends to call on, that $800 wasnโt going to go far. So he had to get creative, especially when it came to locations. The house in the final scenes was actually his own home, which they nearly burned to the ground for one special effect. As for the other sequences, letโs just say that he got creative with the truth. โTo get the bus from the Austin Transit Authority I had to lie to them,โ he confessed. โI told them I was making a documentary about bus drivers at night, and they believed me and gave me a bus to shoot the death scene. I gave the driver a six-pack of beers and a burger, and he just sat there watching us.โ As for the pivotal opening museum heist, he got access to the Laguna Gloria Art Museum (now the Contemporary Austin โ Laguna Gloria) by telling the management he was making a documentary about art museums at night, โand they believed me. Of course, they were mad at me afterwards.โ
One location was completely out of his reach: re-creating the ancient city of Sarnath from whence the mask came. Instead, itโs seen through glimpses of strange illustrations which were actually the original storyboards by Rick Cruz. โI really was going to shoot that,โ said Neil, and that was when producer and future Austin Chronicle co-founder and editor Louis Black stepped in and reminded him that he didnโt have Cecil B. DeMille money. โHe goes, โNeil, youโve got $150.โ OK, weโre just going to shoot the story boards instead.โ
Black wasnโt the only future Chronicle figure involved with the film: his co-founder and future Chronicle publisher, Nick Barbaro, designed the title credits. Neil recalled, โI went to him and said, โI want you to do this sequence, and I want blood to fill the screen.โ He did it as a practical effect, and I asked him recently and he said, โI donโt remember.โโ (Barbaro confirms that he doesnโt remember what he did, but does confirm that he got the job because โI was the only one of us who knew how to use UT’s animation stand.โ)
Somehow, that $800 stretched to make the movie. Or rather, $750 of it did, as fifty bucks ended up going to create a piece of musical history.
The Sound of Sarnath
Among those shipments from Caroline Records was a 7-inch of “United/Zyklon B Zombie,” the debut single by a strange little band from Kingston-Upon-Hull called Throbbing Gristle. โI played it and went, โWow, this is out-there shit.โ
Their music was like nothing heโd ever heard before, a heavier, percussive, unnerving, and very punk re/deconstruction of the experimental works of avant-garde artists like John Cage. โThey challenge you,โ Ruttenberg said. โThey make you work to listen to them.โ
And they were also going to be perfect for his film. But how does a film student in Texas get a radical and enigmatic British band to score his debut film? He sent them a letter via their UK label, Industrial Records. Not really expecting anything, he was shocked when a month later he got a reply. โI got a letter from [founder and singer] Genesis P-Orridge and it said, โSure, send us $50.โ So I sent them a $50 bill in an envelope, and a month later the reel came in the mail. Just like that. It was like, what the fuck?โ
Years later, he would find out via an interview with the British music press that theyโd actually recorded it on Pink Floydโs studio equipment. What they sent him was what he called โthe most coherent piece of music they ever wrote. โฆ Itโs got this boom-boom-boom-boom and when I first heard it I went, โThatโs pretty good music.โ It was spectacular, and the theme was perfect for a horror movie.โ
The Return of Sarnath
โMask of Sarnathโ became the launching point for Ruttenbergโs career. After scoring a nomination in the 1980 Student Academy Awards for the film, he was able to move to Los Angeles and begin a career in Hollywood. His first gig was writing sword-and-sorcery sequel Deathstalker II for Roger Corman, which led to film and TV work, as well as unproduced scripts for early attempts to film both Spider-Man and Ant Man.
However, โMask of Sarnathโ developed an (after)life of its own. Jonathan Demme screened it in New York in 1981 as part of his Made in Texas series and then it returned to the public consciousness in 2015 when it and the other five films curated by Demme were screened at South by Southwest. The following year, it even got a Blu-ray release. A couple of years ago Ruttenberg even got to see the film projected for the first time since 1981 โand I was pleasantly surprised it looked pretty good.โ
But that complete score still bothered him. Thatโs when he remembered: He may not have the rights to release the score by itself, but according to the original agreement โI had absolute rights to release the music with film elements.โ So the obvious solution was to re-edit the original movie to fit the score.
Three years ago heโd had the original tape โ the only recording in existence โ transferred to digital, and this is where nephew Zane came in. He had grown up hearing about his uncleโs wild short, and when he heard about the Throbbing Gristle soundtrack, he was immediately on board. โThis thing is like musical history gold,โ Zane said, โand we wanted to find a way to release it as it lay.โ
The only problem is that the score was half again as long as the film, so this wasnโt going to be a simple re-edit. Instead, Zane said he was making โa psychedelic montage as a visual aid. โฆ Thereโs going to be a lot of repeating the same images, and really extreme color correction.โ
However, Zane wanted the new Nightmare Cut to be more than just an extended remix of random visuals. This is when he recalled a lesson from one of his documentary film class teachers: โYou have to give it a spine.โ He used repeated images of people waking up and falling asleep โto create almost a dream sequence. I used eyelines to blend two spaces together, and itโs just like in a dream โ you walk through a door in your house and thereโs an ocean on the other side.โ
Long Live Sarnath!
Now Ruttenberg gets to show both the original cut and the Nightmare cut, and get that full, lost Throbbing Gristle recording out to the masses. But thereโs still a twist in the tale.
โHereโs the punchline,โ he said. Heโd been promoting the upcoming show on Reddit, and out of the blue โtwo weeks ago, a guy sends me an interview with Genesis P-Orridge from 1981 where Genesis talks about how he recorded this soundtrack and gave it to me for nothing. It was mine. 100%. Iโve been worried about this since 1981, about having quasi-ownership, and I went through this entire cycle of burning it, cutting it, releasing it, when I could have released it all along? โฆ. I showed [the article] to my lawyer and he said, โWow. Slam dunk. Congratulations!โโ
However, there are no regrets. โPutting the movies out is a lot of fun.โ
โMask of Sarnathโ Nightmare Cut: Horror Fest & Punk Show is this Sunday, Nov. 9, at Hotel Vegas. Tickets at texashotelvegas.com.
