Wild 90 - Production

Production

Wild 90 was the first attempt by Norman Mailer to create a motion picture. The concept for the film came when Mailer and several actors who were appearing in an Off-Broadway adaptation of his novel The Deer Park engaged in an acting game where they pretended they were gangsters. The title Wild 90 is a reference to alleged Mafia slang term for being in deep trouble.

Mailer spent $1,500 of his own money to finance Wild 90. D.A. Pennebaker, the documentary filmmaker, was the cinematographer and shot the film in black-and-white 16mm. The production took place over four consecutive nights and the entire film was improvised by Mailer and his cast. The resulting dialogue was unusually heavy with profanities and Mailer later claimed that Wild 90 "has the most repetitive, pervasive obscenity of any film ever made."

The Puerto Rico-born boxer José Torres appeared as the man with the barking dog and Beverley Bentley (Mailer’s wife) played the woman with the knife. Mailer did not allow any retakes during the shoot.

Mailer wound up with 150 minutes of film, which was edited down to 90 minutes. Due to a technical glitch during the production, roughly 25 percent of the film’s soundtrack came out muffled. Mailer refused to redub the problem patches on the soundtrack and later joked the film “sounds like everybody is talking through a jockstrap.”