I want you to know what sort of a nut you might be getting mixed up with.
Had another cult movie kind of a day. First up: Chilly Scenes of Winter, a winning film about and a hapless romantic that didn't do so hot when it was initially released in 1979 under the title Head Over Heels, but made out much better a few years later when it was re-released with the original title and downbeat ending of the Ann Beattie novel it was based on intact. (Goes to show that audiences don't always like a happy ending.) Written for the screen and directed by Joan Micklin Silver, the film has an Annie Hall-like quality, which isn't too surprising since both films are about a doomed romance that is being remembered by one of the participants after the fact. The one doing the remembering is civil servant John Heard, who is still pining for former co-worker Mary Beth Hurt one year after she left him to return to her husband. Heard's inability to move on leads to some stalkerish behavior on his part, but he only acts that way because he believes he'd be better for her than a husband who loves her too little. What ultimately drives her away, though, is the fact that Heard loves her too much. Now, is that really such a crime?
Watching from the sidelines are Heard's best friend (Peter Riegert), who crashes at his place after he loses his job, his sister (Tarah Nutter), who stays with him until it's time to go back to college, and his secretary (Nora Heflin), who has a hopeless crush on him. Meanwhile, Heard has to contend with his flaky mother (Gloria Grahame in one of her final roles), who's prone to suicide attempts, and his stepfather (Kenneth McMillan), who could be more of a steadying influence in her life. And Griffin Dunne, who was one of the producers on the film, makes a distinct impression in his one-scene cameo as Heflin's control-freak boyfriend. He comes along too late to be an object for Heard, though.
It's been more than a few years since I last saw Ken Russell's 1980 film Altered States, so I figured it wouldn't hurt (William Hurt?) to give it another look. Based on the novel by Paddy Chayefsky, who also penned the screenplay but declined a screen credit (the adaptation is credited to "Sidney Aaron," which are his first and middle names) because he didn't like the way Russell handled it, the film became a cult sensation because of its hallucinatory imagery, which I suspect is what attracted Russell to the project in the first place. It also marked the feature debut of William Hurt, who plays an academic researcher working with schizophrenics who becomes obsessed with finding mankind's "original self" and uses sensory deprivation tanks and strong hallucinogenics to tap into his own primordial past. Pretty heady stuff, especially when Hurt emerges from the tank one night in the form of a hairy primal man (played by Miguel Godreau with the help of makeup maestro Dick Smith) and wakes up the following morning stark naked in the zoo, having killed and partially eaten a sheep (shades of An American Werewolf in London).
In this film, the ones watching from the sidelines are Blair Brown as Hurt's wife, an anthropologist by profession, trusted colleague Bob Balaban, and skeptical endocrinologist Charles Haid, who gets sucked into observing the experiments against his better judgment. (Of the three of them, Balaban and Haid are the ones most prone to having violent arguments about whether the research should continue or not.) The film also features walk-ons by John Larroquette as an X-ray technician, George Gaynes as a radiologist, and Drew Barrymore (in her screen debut) as one of Hurt and Brown's adorable moppets. I should also mention John Corigliano's Academy Award-nominated score (he later won for 1998's The Red Violin) and Jordan Cronenweth's brilliant cinematography (he was later nominated for Peggy Sue Got Married and also shot the cult movies Cutter's Way and Blade Runner). As for Russell, he may have made the film his way but he wound up burning a lot of bridges in the process and hasn't worked for a Hollywood studio since. Knowing Russell, this probably doesn't trouble him too much.