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Private Duty Nurses
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Wikipedia article
'Private Duty Nurses' is a 1971 American film written and directed by George Armitage. It is a sequel to 'The Student Nurses' (1970) for New World Pictures. Roger Corman says they got the idea for the title after being sent a letter of complaint about the first film from the Private Duty Nurses Association.
The film was followed by 'Night Call Nurses' (1972).
Plot
Nurse Spring takes care of grumpy Vietnam veteran Domino who has a plate in his head and is in need of surgery from Dr. McClintock. Nurse Lynn fights against water pollution, and gets involved with Dewey.
Cast
* Katherine Cannon as Spring
* Joyce Williams as Lola
* Pegi Boucher as Lynn
* Joseph Kaufmann as Dr. Selden
* Dennis Redfield as Domino
* Robert F. Simon as Dr. Sutton
* Morris Buchanan as Kirby
* Herbert Jefferson, Jr. as Dr. Elton
* Paul Hampton as Dewey
* Paul Gleason as Dr. McClintock
Production
George Armitage had made a few films for Roger Corman, acting in 'Von Richtofen and Brown' and writing and acting in 'Gas-s-s-s'. He wanted to direct. Armitage:
Peter Bogdanovich and Francis [Ford Coppola] had left working with Roger, so there was an opening there for directors, I asked him if I could direct, and he said sure. He said: "Would you like to do a nurse movie or a stewardess move?" I said I'd like to do a stewardess movie, and he said: "Okay, well then you can do the nurse movie." Okay! Anyways, I got into it, and I wrote the script, and I got Everett Chambers, from 'Peyton Place', a crew of some TV guys that I'd worked with, and some young commercial crew. This fellow called Fouad Said had invented this thing called 'Cinemobile' ... and I used it to film on location. I did everything on location ... I shot the whole movie in the South Bay, Manhattan Beachit's exactly the same place and time period that Paul Thomas Anderson used in 'Inherent Vice'.
Armitage was familiar with the Manhattan beach area having surfed there when he was younger.
Armitage said the film had to feature sex but he put in a let-down sex scene at the beginning.
I was talking to the girls and they said: "Hey, why don't you do a guy who's just a lousy lay. Sometimes you run into that." And I thought that'd be perfect for the South Bay, because it was a pretty crazy culture going on down there at the time, so that's what we did.
Armitage heard about the band Sky, went to see them perform at a high school, and cast them in the film.
Armitage says Corman left him alone for most of the film.
He wanted us to do whatever we felt, what we were thinking of poetically, socially, culturally at the time. So I tried to look at it from a woman's point-of-view, adding my own feelings about what was going on. Corman and I got along very well. I didn't like the way Hollywood treated himhe was kind of an underdog and I loved the fact that he would just say, "Here, go make the movie." He never came to the set, he totally allowed us to do what we were doing ... And 'Private Duty Nurses' was done in 15 days.
See also
* List of American films of 1971
References
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