Accompanied by a whistle, slicked back hair, and enough cool to charm a cobra, “Hey, good lookin’!” was the ultimate pickup line of the ’50s. It worked every time for leather-clad rockers; chicks swooned.
But no brand of moxie, even Ralph’s, could sway Warner Bros. into releasing Hey Good Lookin’ in 1975. A film featuring a black gang running amok while live actors interacted with cartoons was way too hot — especially since the controversy over Coonskin continued to boil. Even American Graffiti, with its teenage rebellion and retro vibe, was dogged and almost buried by Universal until it was audience tested — but still Warner Bros. was too afraid to even screen it.
“This was long before Roger Rabbit proved that animation and live-action could make buckets of money for the studios,” Ralph explains. “I used those techniques all over my other pictures, but Lookin’ took it much farther.”
Ralph’s choice was sink or swim — part ways with Lookin’, or fix it on his own dime. Warner wouldn’t budge for even a penny more. Stubborn as hell, especially when told his film was “unreleaseable,” he decided his tribute to the ’50s would be a fine pet project for the next seven years. After hours, weekends, the few extra moments before his eyelids totally shut — those were for Lookin’.
The picture gradually lost a lot of its live-action scenes and morphed into a mostly animated feature on par with Coonskin. He continuously dipped deep into his own pockets, spending good chunks of his director’s fees from Wizards, Lord of the Rings, and American Pop on a small stable of artists dedicated to Lookin’.
“The story was important to me,” Ralph says. “Like Traffic, it had a lot of personal stuff mixed into the pot.” Vinnie, the film’s lead/leader of a greaser gang called The Stompers, was modeled after one of his grade
school pals, Norman Darrer, who had a “genuine gift of gab”; Crazy Shapiro, Vinnie’s best bud, was in the same class; and Rozzie, Vinnie’s sweetheart, was whipped up with quirks derived from Ralph’s first wife. It was about his idealized 50’s Brooklyn and the generation that ruled it — at least in their own heads.
In the beautifully delusional opening sequence, Vinnie conducts a symphony of zippers.
Every inch of his jacket is adorned with metal teeth, and it literally takes him minutes to slide them all into position.
“We were kids that lived by our own rules, even if they were stupid or illogical. We chewed gum with our mouths open, we took more time zipping our jackets than brushing our teeth because that’s what seemed important, and we chased the girls we wanted to fuck. Lookin’ grabs that general attitude and amplifies it — it takes it to a dangerous place.”
Visually, Ira Turek’s backgrounds represent Ralph’s twisted perspective of “cool” as much as the characters themselves. Inspired by Fritz, Turek bent the lens to make Lookin’s Brooklyn more brazen than any version of the city Ralph had ever put on screen before. “We’d be idiots not to take the drawings to places that live-action couldn’t go.”
Through time, the film’s constant re-cuts made Ralph realize some of his favorite bits weren’t quite relevant. A live-action sequence featuring glam punk rockers, The New York Dolls, was thrown out; and the film’s original soundtrack, which borrowed heavily from Ralph’s own vinyl collection, threatened to collapse the budget from licensing fees alone. In early 1982, album producer John Madara and writer/singer Ric Sandler swooped in to add original, “retro” tunes to the mix, the last missing element before Warner Bros. would finally put the film out into theaters.
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Hey Good Lookin’s October 1, 1982 debut went practically unnoticed by the public.
“You bust your ass as an artist, but sometimes you just end up with a busted ass,” Ralph says.
“I’m proud of Lookin’, even though no one saw it. But it sure as hell made me think twice about pouring my soul into something else.”
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UNFILTERED: THE COMPLETE RALPH BAKSHI