Baby Snakes is a movie which includes footage from Frank Zappa's 1977 Halloween concert at New York City's Palladium Theater, backstage antics from the crew, and stop motion clay animation from award-winning animator Bruce Bickford.
Initially, the film had particular difficulty finding a distributor. Frank Zappa tried to interest United Artists, the company that released 200 Motels, but they declined. Other studios followed United Artists' lead, ...
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Baby Snakes is a movie which includes footage from Frank Zappa's 1977 Halloween concert at New York City's Palladium Theater, backstage antics from the crew, and stop motion clay animation from award-winning animator Bruce Bickford.
Initially, the film had particular difficulty finding a distributor. Frank Zappa tried to interest United Artists, the company that released 200 Motels, but they declined. Other studios followed United Artists' lead, fearing that Zappa's trademark "cinematic style" had lost considerable appeal in post-'70s pop culture, and also declined to distribute the film.
Several European distributors told Zappa that there might be interest if the running time was cut from its original 168-minute length. The film was cut to 90 minutes, but still, there were no takers.
Even after Bruce Bickford's sequences won first prize at a French animated film competition, there was no interest. Eventually Zappa took it upon himself to distribute the film independently, via his own...
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