The Mouse that Roared:
Ron Mann on Tales of the Rat Fink

By Adam Nayman

Excluding pro wrestlers and mob bosses, there aren’t many men who could live up to a nickname like “Big Daddy.” It’s an alpha-male moniker if there ever was one, at once outsized and self-deprecating, knowingly cocky and warmly paternal. Happily, the guy it was attached to was built to shoulder such a burden. Burly and beet-faced behind a tousle of dark hair, with a satyr’s easy leer and a goatee to match, Ed Roth—the Beverly-Hills born hot-rod innovator and proto-kitsch impresario who emerged as one of the key figures of the ‘50s American counterculture—didn’t just live up to the “Big Daddy” gimmick: he lived it out.
 A self-styled visionary whose outlandish yet prescient automotive designs (he pioneered the use of fiberglass to re-shape staid assembly-line models) prefigured his gonzo comic-book creations (bulbous, bug-eyed monsters etched onto T-shirts or rendered in vivid plastic miniature), Roth energetically marketed his own canny carny persona alongside his products. His impact on the mainstream was a direct hit along the same spiky trajectory as rock n’ roll or Mad magazine. The more parents disapproved of Roth’s proudly dubious wares—dubious indeed in a milieu that held Leave It to Beaver as a design-for-life—the more rabidly their offspring endeavoured to collect them.
            It’s a mania that Ron Mann ably enshrines in his terrific, up-tempo documentary Tales of the Rat Fink. The title refers to Roth’s most famous creation, a drooling, degenerate, pea-green rodent who was, briefly but genuinely, the most successful anti-establishment cartoon character of all time. (He’s most commonly and succinctly described as the “Anti-Mickey Mouse”; Roth actually conceived the character as an antidote to Disney’s big-eared poster boy.) As brought to life by Mann and his ingenious, Sheridan College-bred animator Mike Roberts, Rat Fink is the film’s borderline-insane mascot, grunting and grasping his way through slapstick interludes that comprise the story’s connective tissue. The other tour guide is Roth himself, deftly re-animated out of existing photos and footage. His credible-sounding autobiographical patter comes courtesy of frequent Mann collaborator Solomon Vesta; his husky, hail-fellow-well-met voice is by John Goodman, an affable titan in his own right who was once informed—by Roth himself, no less—that he was destined to play “Big Daddy” in a movie.
            If Roth, who remained a reliably wacky presence on the comic-convention circuit well into his 60s, had been paying attention to the documentary film community, he might have added that Ron Mann would inevitably be behind the camera. (Roth met Mann and signed off on the doc before his death in 2001; hence a brief clip of a Rat Fink hot-rod convention shot in 2000). The Toronto-based director of the seminal 1988 geek-out Comic Book Confidential and the hemp-head classics Grass (1999) (a history of marijuana use in the 20th century) and Go Further (2003) (a brief history of marijuana use by Woody Harrelson) isn’t necessarily an underground filmmaker, but he could be our foremost chronicler of the North American subculture. Except that this is far too august a description for such a strenuously unpretentious filmmaker. Really, Mann is less a documentarian than an erector of humble—but sturdy—celluloid monuments. It’s fan-boy filmmaking, albeit of a stylish, confident, and restlessly intelligent stripe.
            Mann’s cinema is more playful than anything else. His movies don’t so much eschew standard-issue doc devices as reconfigure them in fun and yet functional ways. For most of Tales of the Rat Fink, Roth is reduced to a literal, disembodied, talking head. The film intersperses its galumphing history of Roth’s rise with interviews with Roth’s old associates (it ends, pointedly, in the mid-‘60s, before the fall, and before that tired trope of The End of American Innocence can rear its party-pooping head). The thing is, said associates happen to be custom cars. In an act of fetishism that his subject would surely endorse, Mann has tracked down the actual vehicles, including the bubble-domed Beatnik Bandit and the sporty, banana-colored Surfite, many of which now reside in private collections and museums, and charged them with revealing the juicy details behind their births. The celebrities he’s enlisted to provide them with their speaking voices are an appropriately eclectic bunch—so, anyway, Tom Wolfe, Brian Wilson, Ann-Margaret, and wrestler “Stone Cold” Steve Austin walk into a recording studio—but the segments are almost as moving as they are amusing. It’s the pop-art equivalent of the Mona Lisa dishing dirt in a tell-all about Da Vinci.
            In an interview conducted on the front stoop of his downtown Toronto office, Mann expressed concern that his film’s unapologetically buoyant tone and vibrant junk-shop aesthetic could prove alienating to the uninitiated. He’s got nothing to worry about. Tales of the Rat Fink energizes without enervating. It’s also possessed of surprising heft given its jokey construction and slender running time (the latter being one of its most salient virtues—at 70 minutes, it doesn’t wear out its welcome). Mann doesn’t belabour Roth’s subversive legacy, but he doesn’t take it for granted either. There’s a lovely, pause-giving vignette towards the end which traces the lineage between Big Daddy’s inventions and their present-day offspring, iPods included. In a year where cars have figured prominently onscreen—besides Pixar’s latest cash cow, there was also Chris Paine’s plangent eco-doc Who Killed the Electric Car?, and the NASCAR-baiting Will Ferrell comedy Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby—Mann’s film is unique in that it uses its souped-up stars as vehicles to drive at something larger. Ed “Big Daddy” Roth was a huckster and an artist: Mann shares with him not only a refined showman’s sensibility, but also a real and valuable genius for bending a cast-iron, mass-produced medium to his far-out whims.
           
CINEMA SCOPE: It’s kind of amazing to see how little it took to shock the mainstream in the late ‘50s. Ed Roth was a subversive guy, but his monsters seem totally benign in a modern context.

RON MANN: There was a shift in culture in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. Roth was like Wolfman Jack or Mad magazine; he was someone who put a message out into the culture. That message was that it was okay to be weird. That being weird was cool. I personally liked Roth’s shirts and graphics because my parents hated them—those Basil Wolverton-esque monsters were great. When you were a kid you wanted to wear a T-shirt with Rat Fink on it and build those models. This isn’t in the movie, but at that point the model car company Revell had never put out a hot rod. Roth’s cars were the first hot rods that model builders like myself bought. It was like the music of the Beach Boys, you know? It made you want to just move to California.

SCOPE: You mention the Beach Boys…it was amusing to see in the film how the mainstream culture—movies, music, and even the surf craze—eventually gave in and made an effort to incorporate Roth’s hot-rod, creature-feature aesthetic.

MANN: Well, before rock ‘n roll there were hot rods. The driving age was 14. Which is amazing to me, having a 15-year old kid. So what you did was, you worked on your car in your garage. And they were cheap—there were a lot of cars that were available after the war. Kids built jalopies by going to the junkyard and putting together fast machines. And you see that in movies like Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and The Blob (1958): street racing was the big thing, before video games or whatever. And then the law came down against street racing, and decorating the cars became the fad. It was part of a teenager’s identity. Later on, the Beach Boys fused it with surf culture.

SCOPE: It’s especially fascinating and perverse because at that time, the idea for cars was for them to be made uniformly—it was the golden age of mass-production. But Roth was totally anti-homogeneity.

MANN: Yeah. Roth’s cars were anything but square. He was the first person to use bubble tops, like on The Jetsons. It was like what was happening in the abstract-expressionist movement, or with the beat poets, or free jazz…it was all a shift. Now, the automobile was a uniquely American art form. It wasn’t an aesthetic, it was a kinesthetic: movement, momentum. There was a speed to the culture. Rock ‘n roll is all about velocity. What I try to do in my films is look at that period—like in Twist, how we moved from partner dancing to a dance about individual expression. The customized car, or customized T-shirt, is very much about that—about the inner self.

SCOPE: Another thing that struck me was that Roth was a multimedia artist well before anyone coined the term “multimedia.”

MANN: He was a Pop artist, without the irony of pop. He really wanted to be accessible. His real legacy is Rat Fink, that anti-Mickey Mouse character. Kids understood immediately that it was against the squeaky-clean image being forced down their throats in mass media.

SCOPE: You draw a parallel between Rat Fink and Bart Simpson…

MANN: Absolutely. For attitude, definitely. Matt Groening does one of the voices in the film—he’s the PT cruiser. He cites Roth as a major influence. Robert Williams, who is also in the film, is an underground cartoonist who went on to have his work sold in major galleries. He’s also the publisher of Juxtaposed magazine. He put Roth on the cover and called him “the greatest artist of the 20th century.” Roth’s influenced so many pop surrealists and lowbrow artists.

SCOPE: And he’s also been ripped off.

MANN: Totally ripped off. Right after his characters were put on a shirt they were copied. There was a TV show called “Bat Fink.” There was a series of models called the “Weird-Os.” Even last year, I saw these streetcar ads in Toronto for one of the Detroit car companies, maybe Chevrolet. They were trying to be hip, using Roth-like characters to sell cars. So I called the Roth estate and asked them if they knew what was going on. Now, that said, the Detroit designers [of the ‘50s and ‘60s] loved Roth. They called him to give his input into their designs. Because he was someone who basically lived in his garage. God knows how much fiberglass he inhaled over the years…maybe that contributed to what he did.

SCOPE: He was involved in the project before his death, correct?

MANN: Yes, he was. Ed was the sweetest guy. The first time I met him was at the Hot August Nights in Reno in 2000. It was when I filmed the Rat Fink reunion party. He drove up in his car and told me that he had slept under his car driving from Los Angeles to Reno. He never stayed in hotel rooms. I pored over the comic books where he was, himself, a character. And he adopted that persona as the leader of a sort of weirdo nation. There were people who felt like aliens in their culture and Roth gave them something to identify with. And as an independent filmmaker, what I like most is that he did it himself. I see Roth in the same way I see Jim Jarmusch or John Cassavetes: as someone who did it on his own terms.

SCOPE: And, Jay Leno aside, you’ve populated the film with some other similarly iconoclastic people.

MANN: Yeah, “Stone Cold” Steve Austin is awesome. He loves cars. John Goodman met Roth years ago, and Roth said, “Some day you’ll play me in a movie.” I had no idea. When I asked Goodman to play Roth, his agent phoned me back in ten minutes. That’s unheard of. So I asked Goodman at the studio why he did it—I thought maybe he’d seen Grass, or something—and he told me the story. He was a Roth freak. He had been at that car show to get his memorabilia signed. And Brian Wilson was a trip. We’re still blown away by the fact that he’s in the film as the Surfite. I thought of a sort of dream cast for these cars, and everyone said okay. The model for the movie is kind of My Mother the Car—not the most successful model, I might add. But after Ed died, I thought I should try to make the movie in his language. Who better to tell his story than the cars who spoke to him? I don’t even know if it’s a documentary. It’s more of an “animentary.” It’s a real collage of different styles. It’s irreverent.

SCOPE: Was it difficult for you and Solomon Vesta to put words not only in the mouths of the cars, but also Roth?

MANN: Well, I’ll tell you something. Solomon Vesta is Lenny Blum. Lenny is the screenwriter of Stripes (1981) and Private Parts (1997). He’s a dear friend I met when I was writing for Ivan Reitman. We’ve collaborated on a number of things, including Twist. He’s a brilliant, brilliant writer. We shot the cars before he wrote the dialogue. It was easy that way. As a documentary filmmaker, I’m always struggling to edit interviews—I wish that my subjects would say what I need them to. And they rarely do. So what could be more perfect than to put the words in their mouths? Roth’s dialogue was all based on interviews and his own book, Confessions of a Rat Fink, which is available only on eBay for like $200. It’s not in circulation any more. But Ed and I had discussed for hours what the film was going to be.

At this point a van drives by and somebody throws a half-full McDonald’s cup at the stairwell where we’re sitting.

MANN (calling after him as he gathers up the cup): Dude! What did you do? Fuck. He just threw that out the window. I learned something after doing Go Further: you’re either part of the solution or you’re part of the pollution. Jesus. Anyway…you know, all my films are very different. What I’m trying to do is Hollywoodize documentary form by making it entertaining. It’s very common now, this idea of “docu-tainment,” whether it’s Michael Moore or Morgan Spurlock…you don’t want to bore people. I have to admit I might have gone over the edge with this one.

SCOPE: Is it really possible that all the animation in the film is by one guy?

MANN: Mike Roberts is a car guy who just came out of Sheridan. He’s really brilliant. This is very different than Comic Book Confidential, which was very painstaking animation. After Ed died we had to think of another way to tell Ed’s story…there were photographs, but not a lot of footage. Mike was able to bring his story to life using those photographs. One of our influences here was Guy Maddin. Another one is Emile de Antonio, the first person to really use humour in documentary. Millhouse (1971) is just scathing. He was one of the first artists to make non-narrative documentaries. I’m constantly re-thinking the documentary form. Particularly against the television form, which is, you know, “talking-at-you, illustration, talking-at-you, illustration…”

SCOPE: Like what Peter Watkins calls the Monoform…

MANN: Yeah. Straightforward.

SCOPE: Did you premiere this film at a comic convention?

MANN: Yeah, Comic-Con. It was awesome. 100,000 people. It’s not so much about comic books anymore as it is about fandom. And I’m a huge fan of Firefly, so I went to the Serenity documentary. And Tales of the Rat Fink got a standing ovation there—I think because of Comic Book Confidential. I was fortunate to film those artists before they died: Jack Kirby, Will Eisner, Bill Gaines, Harvey Kurtzman. You know, I make films to meet my heroes, if you want to know the real truth. It’s post-graduate work: I get to learn about subjects and meet people who I grew up idolizing, who made a profound impact on the culture. I’m able to give them credit and acknowledge that they were tremendously important. I started off making films in the ‘80s when there was a rewriting of history from the ‘60s. I didn’t agree. I felt a responsibility to keep up a record of alternative culture. Our history is an audiovisual history. If it’s not on tape, it didn’t happen. Without this kind of filmmaking—and political filmmaking in general—all you would get is the status quo.

SCOPE: And yet as important as it is to look back, there’s something very forward-looking about Roth’s project.

MANN: Ed told me in Reno that a lot of today’s customizers were going back to cars of the ‘30s and ‘40s. What he wanted to see was people taking Hondas and remodeling them. That was his message: to keep it in drive, not reverse. Cars are all around us and they all look the same. And so do apartments. You know, I’d much rather drive to work in the Beatnik Bandit.

Rat FInk Hot Rod

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The Mouse that Roared: Ron Mann on Tales of the Rat Fink
By Adam Nayman

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