Criterion - The Making of Naked Lunch (1992)
A tale of terror beyond your wildest screams, Naked Lunch releases a new breed of fear as ex-writer turned exterminator William Lee (Peter 'Robocop' Weller) takes a nightmare ride into Interzone-a warped world of sinister spies and deadly addiction where evil Mugwumps and giant centipedes wallow in their drug-induced fantasy. Bill Lee finds himself following his wife into an addiction to the bug powder he uses. After accidentally killing her, he descends into a hallucinatory existence in which he imagines himself a secret agent answering to a series of bizarre creatures. He channels his energies into writing “reports” on his delusional mission, while trying to break his addiction. The story loosely reflects events in the life of author Burroughs as he wrote the novel. As he did in “The Fly,” David Cronenberg (“Dead Ringers,”Scanners“) uses an underground classic, “Naked Lunch ,” as raw material to build an unforgettable and shocking science fiction masterpiece. In this adaptation of William S. Burroughs's hallucinatory, once-thought-unfilmable novel, a pest-control man seeks escape from his troubled existence and flees to Interzone, a hallucinatory netherworld version of Tangiers, where reality and fantasy have merged. It's a strange, surreal landscape inhabited by mugwumps, half-alien, half-insect creatures, man-sized centipedes, carnivorous typewriters and bizarre humans. Alternately humorous and grotesque—and always surreal—the film mingles aspects of Burroughs's novel with incidents from the writer's own life, resulting in an evocative paranoid fantasy and a self-reflexive investigation into the mysteries of the creative process.
BONUS FEATURES OF SPECIAL EDITION DOUBLE-DISC SET
1. Naked Making Lunch, a 1991 documentary by Chris Rodley about the making of the film. Documentary filmmaker Rodley had extensive access to the set of Cronenberg's NAKED LUNCH. His 1991 documentary about the film originally aired on London Weekend Television's THE SOUTHBANK SHOW. (48 min) 2. Collection of original marketing materials A Study in marketing With the participation of David Cronenberg, Twentieth Century Fox devised an innovative marketing campaign for NAKED LUNCH. The campaign featured narration performed by an actor impersonating the voice of William S. Burroughs. Presented here are the original trailer and other materials from Fox's electronic press kit. Cronenberg recalls that the trailer was one of the most surprising trailers he has ever seen from a major studio, “audacious and intelligent.” # Trailer (1 min 38 sec) ; # Featurette (6 min) ; # B-Roll Montage (3 min) ; # TV Spot “Review” (31 sec)
Full Version Available Upon Request