Crumb

Crumb (1994)

This movie chronicles the life and times of R. Crumb. Robert Crumb is the cartoonist/artist who drew Keep On Truckin', Fritz the Cat, and played a major pioneering role in the genesis of underground comix. Through interviews with his mother, two brothers, wife, and ex-girlfriends, as well as selections from his vast quantity of graphic art, we are treated to a darkly comic ride through one man's subconscious mind. As stream-of-consciousness images incessantly flow forth from the tip of his pen, biting social satire is revealed, often along with a disturbing and haunting vision of Crumb's own betes noires and inadequacies. As his acid-trip induced images flicker across our own retinas, we gain a little insight into this complex and highly creative individual.

Keywords: 1970s, art, art-gallery, artist, bed-of-nails, brother-brother-relationship, california, cartoonist, character-name-in-title, comic-book

Genres

Taglines:

Quotes:

Robert Crumb: When I - what was it - about five or six? - I was sexually attracted to Bugs Bunny. And I - I cut out this Bugs Bunny off the cover of a comic book and carried it around with me. Carried it around in my pocket and took it out and looked at it periodically, and - and it got all wrinkled up from handling it so much that I asked my mother to iron it on the ironing board to flatten it out, and - and she did, and I was deeply disappointed 'cause it got all brown when she ironed it, and brittle, and crumbled apart. [laughs]

Robert Crumb: France isn't - you know - perfect, or anything, but - it's just - oh, slightly less evil than the United States.

Charles Crumb: How perfectly goddamned delightful it all is, to be sure.

Charles Crumb: [to his mother] You would always threaten to give us enemas if we didn't behave properly.

Dian Hanson: Robert doesn't exaggerate anything in his comics. The women are exactly the way he wants them, and he really accurately portrays himself as the skinny, bad posture, myopic man he is. Some people wonder if he doesn't exaggerate the size of his penis, which always appears awfully big in the comics. Robert does not exaggerate anything. He *is* endowed with one of the biggest penises in the world.

Peggy Orenstein: When I was about nine or ten, my brother used to collect Zapp comics. And when I saw those, they really, deeply, deeply terrified me. I was deeply upset. And I look at them, and thought, on some level, *this* is adulthood? This is what adult women are? This is what I grow up into? And it was horrifying.::Robert Crumb: Oh, my God!::Peggy Orenstein: And, I wonder if you think about the effect on people who read it, or what you're validating for boys...::Robert Crumb: I just hope that that, somehow, revealing that truth about myself is somehow helpful. I don't know, I just hope that it is, but I *have* to do it. Maybe I shouldn't be allowed. Maybe I should be locked up, and have my pencils taken away from me, I just don't know. I can't say, you know? I can't defend myself. It was like my daughter Sophie was watching "Goodfellas," we got a videotape of it, and the violent part horrified her so deeply that she started getting a stomach ache, and I shut it off and wouldn't let her watch it. Although I think it's a great movie, a truthful movie, and I got a lot out of seeing it. But it's obviously not for a kid. And certain harsh realities of life... you gotta, kinda, protect your kids a little bit from that. They don't understand a lot of things yet, you know? Not everything is for children, and not everything is for everybody.

Terry Zwigoff: What are you trying to get at in your work?::Robert Crumb: Jesus! I dunno. I don't work in terms of conscious messages. I can't do that. It has to be something that I'm revealing to myself while I'm doing it. It's hard to explain. Which means that, while I'm doing it, I don't know what it's about. You have to have the courage, or the... to take that chance, you know? What's gonna come out? What's coming out of this? I enjoy drawing. It's a deeply ingrained habit.

Robert Crumb: I'm drawing some portraits of girls that I had crushes on in high-school. Milford Delaware. This one I'm drawing now is Winona Newhouse, affectionally known among the boys as "The Shelf." She had a phenomenal rear shelf.

Robert Crumb: Jesus. Fuckin' raging, epithet music comin' out of every car, every store, every person's head. They don't have noisy radios on, they got earphones; like, "motherfuckin', cocksuckin', son of a bitch. Lot of aggression. Lot of anger, lot of rage. Everybody walks around, they're walkin' advertisements. They've got advertisements on their clothes, you know? Walking around with "Adidas" written across their chests, '49'ers on their hats. Jesus. It's pathetic. It's pitiful. The whole cultures' one unified field of bought-sold-market researched everything, you know. It used to be that people fermented their own culture, you know? It took hundreds of years, and it evolved over time. And that's gone in America. People now don't even have any concept that there ever was a culture outside of this thing that's created to make money. Whatever's the biggest, latest thing, they're into it. You just get disgusted after a while with humanity for not having more, kind of like, intellectual curiosity about what's behind all this jive bullshit.

'Crumb' is featured as a movie character in the following productions:

Crumb

Crumb