The kaleidoscopic, surrealistic, avant-garde film (and soundtrack) 200 Motels was Frank Zappa's wildly ambitious directorial debut, an opus which was truncated, maligned, and mostly just ignored at the time. But it served as a jumping off point for a new musical relationship with mallet master Ruth Underwood, a collaboration which would last a decade, with her tuned percussion becoming a centerpiece of Zappa's complex creations.
Writer A. D. Amorosi speaks at length with the spotlight-shy Ruth Underwood about her musical marriage with Frank Zappa and working out complex rhythms with keyboard genius George Duke. The Simpsons creator Matt Groening also joins our discussion, explaining his own obsession with Zappa's music.
Frank Zappa’s avant-garde, autobiographical 200 Motels of 1971 will always be looked at, first, as a work of cinema whose smartly silly, Dada-esque humor and immersive color-saturated special effects (solarization, double exposure) made it a film at one with the post-psychedelic experience of its time while staying true to the Zappa oeuvre. It is as hyper-intellectual and socially critical as it is mega-juvenile and ever-so-slightly perverse in a man-childish manner. A movie where the Who’s manic drummer Keith Moon played a nun and one of The Beatles portrayed a vertically challenged person who would dress up as a turtlenecked “Frank Zappa” puts 200 Motels up there with other explosively bizarre films of that same year, be it Ken Russell’s The Devils, Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, or Woody Allen’s Bananas.
“The movie is a kind of magical mystery trip through all the motels, concert halls, cities, states and groupies of a road tour of [Zappa’s band] the Mothers of Invention,” wrote the late, great godfather of film criticism Roger Ebert following 200 Motels’ 1971 release. Considering that Ebert had a hand in writing one of the counterculture’s most inadvertently kitschiest films in 1970’s Russ Meyer–directed Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, the critic had his own bird’s-eye vision into all manner of the outlandish.
“No attempt is made at documentary accuracy (to make a thunderous understatement),” Ebert continued. “All of the cities are lumped together into Centerville, ‘a real nice place to raise your kids up,’ and the sanity of the film can be gauged by the fact that Ringo Starr plays Frank Zappa as ‘a very large dwarf.’”
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