Your Thoughts: My first encounter with June Ormond was through a movie called The Monster and the Stripper, also known as The Exotic Ones. It’s a movie about a caveman who rips off a man’s arm and beats him to death with it. He then goes to New Orleans and ends up in a strip club, where we the audience have to watch pretty much every act. This strikes me as a template that more filmmakers should follow.
Anyway, one of the strip acts is a woman doing a fan dance, one of the all-time great striptease specialties. And the woman is June Ormond. I think she was in her 60s when this was made. She twirls around her fans, shakin’ her moneymaker, always making sure to cover herself strategically, until the last moment. She turns around and walks away, and you see that she’s wearing one of those flannel union suits with the flap over the bottom.
This is the entertainment tradition June represented. Sell the sizzle, not the steak was the old carny motto, and somehow the Ormonds’ movies always managed to give you both. I was thrilled, about 10 years ago, to find out that the Ormonds actually worked out of Nashville when they made movies like The Exotic Ones. June Ormond tied Nashville to this marvelous, wide-open, disreputable history of American movies that you never hear about.
When people today say “independent film,” they think they’re talking about the tradition of John Cassavetes and John Sayles, something nobler and purer than Hollywood movies. What they’re really talking about is June Ormond doing her fan dance, or June Ormond promoting a picture called Untamed Mistress by driving a guy through rural Georgia in a gorilla suit, with a straw stuck through its nose so he could drink. Filmmakers like June Ormond showed other people wanting to make their own movies how to beat the studio system, and they did it with a combination of vaudeville flair, good humor, a wink and a nudge, and a genuine desire to entertain.
I got to meet June when Dave Duncan and I did a story on her and Tim for the Scene, and it remains one of the most fun pieces I’ve ever worked on. And a large part of that was meeting June. Her stories about showbiz life were like my parents’ stories about growing up in Murfreesboro: the more she told them, the better they got. And she didn’t have to make anything up. Edward Wood Jr. Bob Hope, Minnie Pearl and Sleepy LaBeef are all one degree of separation removed, and that one degree is June.
I got to watch June work on the set of Blood, Friends and Money, and it was like watching the history of 20th-century show business distilled to a bouillon cube. She could not have been more professional or polished, and she made everyone on the set heirs to her tradition as a trouper. I got cast in a part tailored to my acting abilities: a mute called Ghost. Look for me someday on the DVD. From that day on, June called me Ghost every time she saw me, and it tickled me every time. I was delighted to be her Ghost. I cannot imagine someone better cast as a happy medium.
I remember watching the Ormond movies when Dave and I were writing the article, and I was struck that June had Tim’s whole life on film. He was a little boy in the early films, a growing kid in The Exotic Ones, and a young man in The Grim Reaper, and June once said that seeing Tim all grown up in that made her cry. Tim’s mother loved him dearly, and every parent should be loved so deeply in return.
So what we should all do tonight is: put our hands over our hearts and pledge to do something we put not only all of our spirit into, but also all of June’s. She traveled the country hoofing it up and making people laugh; she worked all her days with a family she adored; she made the world of moviemaking a lot less pretentious and a lot more fun. And she made everyone she encountered feel like brighter days were ahead. She was always looking forward to the next curtain. And now, June Ormond will be what she always was in life: an eternal optimist. |
