Puppetry of the Genius

Marcel deJure and his Cinnamon Roll Gang are cut from a different cloth.
by Marjorie Kaye

Nestor and Lestor used to be Siamese twins until their porn debut went horribly wrong. Chubby, an ex-gang banger with huge fangs and a coat of grayish fur, woke up from a dead drunk outside an illegal Manila clinic, equipped with a brand-new pair of breasts. Zipgun has a shiny crimson head and a tremendous sex drive, but not much luck with the ladies, although he is due to date a cockroach later this spring. “As for the headless chickens,” explains Marcel deJure, “they argue, and they hump. And that is ALL they do.” The Cinnamon Roll Gang, his troupe of parole violating, weed toking, hot-pants sporting puppets played a show last month at The Scene bar that climaxed with a gaggle of Catholic school girls led by a nun swathed in black vinyl emerging from behind the curtain to chant: “My name is Sister Sledgehammer and I smoke holy smokes!”

DeJure has lived in Echo Park and Silver Lake all his life. Weaned on early punk and comics, he later started hanging around the old Onyx Café, drawing obsessively and getting to know many of his future collaborators. He went to a lot of underground performances. “Back then it was no big deal to open an illegal bar. Nobody worried about permits or getting busted. You just did it, and you had fun, and you did it some more.” He responded to the flamboyance and utter lack of restraint. “The costumes-people used to walk around dressed like Alice In Wonderland royalty.” It got him thinking about fabric, and he began ripping the backs off couches to make dolls. Then a local hat shop owner was robbed, no police artists were available, and deJure was somehow recruited to do the perp sketch. He ended up salvaging the shop’s scrap material and borrowing the sewing machine. Whimsically eschewing symmetry, his candy-colored grotesqueries soon found their way into galleries and boutiques around the country.

Now, with a web store (www.cinnamonrollgang.com) and an upcoming solo show that will include prints and various other mixed media (Excuse My French at Xin, May 13), his tiny apartment is overflowing with Ugly Dolls, some over 11-feet high. One has huge white go-go boots, a grossly protracted scarlet torso, pierced abdomen, raisiny black boobs and six arms. Another wears a beige faux-fur tube top, with ginormous, winsomely skewed pink vinyl lips. Pinheads, lobster claws, trapezoidal eyes and fragments of men’s neckties also adorn a line of purses and diaper bags. “I was experimenting with earth tones for that show, but I gravitate back to color all the time. At some point I just get all silly, and it’s three in the morning.” Then out comes the blue sharkskin.

Interesting, because deJure’s films have all been in black and white. Wig Rodeo, about the horrible life of a downtrodden coat hanger factory worker (Ghia Avesani), won prizes at alternative film festivals nationwide and toured Eastern Europe. To achieve a creepy go-motion effect, he instructed the actors to move at one-third speed as he staccato-shuttered a series of consumer grade super-8 cameras at them, in gleeful disregard for recommended operating procedures.

He went through a lot of cameras, easy thrift store pickings in those days. “I made it in my 20s, as I was beginning to realize that for a lot of people life was just ‘go to work, come home, make some food, watch TV,’ and that’s it. Some people knew exactly what it was and other people said that it was a bunch of old appliances wiggling and people wearing a lot of makeup. It’s about how much I hate work.” Lots of local performers showed up in the cast, including Kari French, Tom Bliss, and Steve Moramarco. Steven Gregoropoulos composed a marvelously abrasive score, and recorded it with his band WACO. They accompanied several screenings with a full, live orchestra. “He was great to work with, super flattering and super nice, and he let me do the music editing myself,” says Gregoropoulos. “He did ask for a couple of changes. He wanted the music when the main character died to be even more joyful and triumphant, like it was a happy ending.”

For his next film he wanted to work with someone else’s script, and try something a little more Hollywood. Of course, after Wig Rodeo he could be quite a bit more Hollywood without really being very Hollywood at all. Blow Me, written by and starring Christina Beck, is a noir-ish feminist tragi-comedy. Mark Sovel (music director at Indie 103.1) plays Beck’s reluctant, stoner paramour.

Two more films followed: …and, with Nora Keyes, and The Tooth with frequent musical collaborators Very Be Careful. The Tooth, which is in Spanish with some English subtitles, careens wildly from silly to harrowing-a social surrealist allegory of dirty politics, puppet fetishism and accordionist torture. “If I want reality, I’ll just walk down the street. I try to stay away from that. I try to create my own world.”

While deJure was making his films, he kept making dolls. Then “Steve Gregoropoulos hit me up to make a giant puppet for The Selfish Giant ballet” (which Gregoropoulos staged with choreographer Jane Paik). DeJure figured it was payback. “I’d never made one. Me and a friend had tried to make one, but we never worked it out totally. And I thought I was making it for someone else. I said, ‘Who’s going to be wearing it?’ and he said, ‘You are!’ It was freaky. And that made me start the Cinnamon Roll Gang.”

DeJure now has 15 giant puppets mounted on modified backpack frames, the tallest stretches 18-feet high. The puppets are a regular feature at Pasadena’s Doo-Dah parade. Recently, they were invited to the Lyon’s Club picnic at Barnsdale Park. Short on performers, deJure drafted some of the kids into donning the demented contraptions.

Orlando, who plays the Zipgun character, says the giant puppets can be a challenge. The best operators, he asserts, are the ones who don’t hesitate to “get in people’s faces and scare them.” Of the Cinnamon Roll Gang, he claims, “It’s not high art; it’s nonsensical goofy-assed shit.” He was pleased when they resumed performing after a year-long hiatus. “It’s fun to be offensive and loud and vulgar and not make sense sometimes. I like freaking people out and making them laugh.”

DeJure concurs. “Don’t come to see a puppet show to try and learn something, please! Just come here to escape.” LAA