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King interview with Chambers from 2004

By: Randall King

13/04/2009 3:27 PM | Comments: 0

In 2004, Winnipeg Free Press film reporter Randall King interviewed Marilyn Chambers (along with David Cronenberg) upon the DVD release of the 1977 film Rabid and encountered a 52 year old single mom who harboured some bitterness about her attempt to cross over into the mainstream. Here’s a link to that story.

In 1977, it would have been difficult to predict the existence of DVDs, and in particular, a respectable "special edition" DVD of a then-current movie titled Rabid.
A queasy blend of sex and violence, the Canadian horror film was written and directed by a young upstart named David Cronenberg and produced by future Hollywood player Ivan Reitman.
Though its $8-million box-office take qualified it as a hit, it was widely derided by critics and pundits because a) it was based on the preposterous notion of a modern-day, sexually generated plague; b) it starred notorious porn actress Marilyn Chambers in its lead role; and c) it was made with government money from the Canadian Film Development Corporation (now Telefilm Canada).
But Rabid’s 27th anniversary DVD edition by Montreal’s Somerville House Releasing, released in stores today, does indeed warrant the special-edition treatment.
Seen in the cold light of a new millennium, it offers a science fiction premise that could only be called prescient. It also demonstrates that Marilyn Chambers really could act.
Chambers plays Rose, the victim of a motorcycle accident who receives an experimental "neutral skin graft" (a Cronenberg concept anticipating stem cell research by two decades) at an exclusive plastic surgery clinic. The graft succeeds in preserving Rose’s beauty, but it also transforms her into a sexual predator who "feeds" off her victims through a pointy proboscis that emerges from her armpit. (The film’s original title was Mosquito.) Her victims are afflicted in turn with a rabies-like strain of virus that turns them into vicious, foaming-at-the-mouth killers besieging poor old Montreal.
If the movie shows Cronenberg at his least subtle, it also demonstrates the director had a canny sense of casting. Chambers possesses an unnerving quality that distinguished her from the average respectable straight actress. She could commit, perhaps, to the predatory sexuality of her character more than a mainstream actress, such as Cronenberg’s first choice, Sissy Spacek, might have done.
Cronenberg, on the phone from his Toronto home, says Chambers had a worldly quality that belied the wholesome image she boasted prior to starring in the landmark porn film Behind the Green Door in 1972. (Her notoriety, remember, sprang from the fact she was the young mom model on millions of boxes of Ivory Snow detergent.)
"Although she was always touted as the ‘girl next door’ there’s a kind of hard look that she has," Cronenberg says. "There’s a scariness there that really worked well for the role because she has to be kind of schizophrenic. She has to be gentle and sweet and then she has to be predatory."
Beyond embodying her character, Cronenberg acknowledges Chambers helped sell the film internationally in the era of "porno chic."
"When Ivan Reitman and I went to Cannes before the film, we saw that there were thousands of films, literally, that came from all over the world, screaming for attention, and we needed something that would get buyers and distributors to come in and see our film and then buy it.
"And Marilyn was that hook because she was world famous at that point," he says. "People knew her all over the world."
That said, Cronenberg affirms Chambers had to audition for the role like any other actress.
"I did have the option of not going with her if I thought she couldn’t act," he says. "But I was surprised. Of the local actresses that I auditioned, she was by far the best, so I had no qualms about going with her."
That is kind of bittersweet praise for Chambers, a divorced 52-year-old single mom who still resides in Los Angeles. She never did quite crack the mainstream movie market. The thing that made her marketable, she says, was also the thing that kept her excluded from the mainstream.
"(Rabid) was certainly an attempt to do other things," she says. "Unfortunately, the public has always perceived me as being in adult films and major movie studios in Hollywood basically blackballed me because of that.
"I would be almost there, ready to do a major film, and then the producer’s wife or someone like that would step in and say no.
"I try not to have bitterness about it," she says. "But that’s kind of hard. The stigma was definitely attached and it wasn’t going to be going away any time soon."
But Chambers remembers Cronenberg fondly, although she hasn’t spoken to him once in the 27 years since the film was released.
"I’m a great admirer of him," she says. "At the time, though, he was really a nobody and Ivan Reitman was a nobody and so they really intended to capitalize on my name to make them somebody and I think that worked," she says. "For them, it worked; for me, it didn’t."
Even now, Chambers expresses some resentment that she did not merit inclusion on the DVD’s commentary track.
"I felt a little miffed about that," she says. "Because I was the star of the film and I think I made it what it is, along with David and Ivan and everyone else."

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