Big Daddy Dearest

Artist/cartoonist/car builder Ed (Big Daddy) Roth with his mascot, Ratfink. (Sphinx Productions)

Picasso called sculpture the art of the intelligence. Ed (Big Daddy) Roth found art in the automobile, and expressed his genius by sculpting the grooviest hot rods in American history. The artist-cartoonist-car builder was a cult hero to the greasers, gearheads, lowriders and speed freaks of Kustom Kulture, the mid-20th-century, made-in-southern California hot-rod scene that was about expressing individuality through customized cars, fashions and hairstyles.

Roth (1932-2001) built one new hot rod per year during his prime, and gave them names like the Outlaw, Beatnik Bandit and the Surfite. In the late 1950s, he invented the message T-shirt by airbrushing club names and caricatures onto his fans’ tees. (Before Roth, everyone wore Jimmy Dean white.) And his Rat Fink character became the scene’s mascot, a foul, fly-eating foil to Disney’s too-square Mickey Mouse.

The man himself was similar. Roth never met a bathtub he couldn’t ignore, and was renowned for sleeping inside or underneath his cars when travelling to custom auto shows (where he collected appearance fees that could have rented entire hotel floors). He began wearing his trademark top hat and tails only after a young fan mailed Revell — maker of popular models of Roth’s hot rods — a photograph that showed Big Daddy sound asleep in a car in a cornfield, feet poking through a side window.

Ed Roth’s outstanding life and times are now the subject of Toronto filmmaker Ron Mann’s Tales of the Rat Fink, a feature documentary that delivers its story through a heady combination of archival photos, animated vignettes and talking hot rods. Mann’s cars are voice-acted by Ann-Margret (Heartbreaker), Brian Wilson (Surfite) and other big-name celebs, plus old Roth friends like lowbrow artist Robert Williams (Outlaw), who was the art director of Roth’s studio for a 10-year span during the 1950s and ’60s.

Mann premiered the “animentary” — his word — at this year’s South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas. It will be his 10th title to screen at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Ed Roth with his vehicular creation, Rotar. (Sphinx Productions)

The director of Go Further and Comic Book Confidential says he became inspired to make Tales several years ago on another trip to Texas. “I drifted over to a [Dallas] art gallery that was showing Roth’s work and a number of other lowbrow artists,” Mann says during a recent interview, while driving across Toronto’s Queen Elizabeth Way in a Mercedes SUV (as good as it gets without being Kustom). “I knew Roth through building his models when I was a kid. To see his art — and not his cars, it was just his paintings and drawings of monsters and hot rods — it all came back to me.”

Mann arranged to see Roth at a hot-rod show in Reno, during what would become Big Daddy’s last summer (he died of a heart attack the following spring). Roth turned up looking “really like a bum,” Mann tells me, but driving a custom car he’d built which was “incredibly awesome.”

The two men formed a fast bond, and a series of phone calls and e-mails followed. Mann helped to organize Roth’s vast collection of photographs, which later became vital to the telling of Tales. A posthumous search for archival film of Roth turned up only a few clips, so Mann hired Toronto animator Michael Roberts to create pixel-perfect mimics of Rat Fink and other Roth-isms. The result is splendid. Roberts’s transitions and scenes, which come fast and furious throughout the film, are the most stimulating elements to watch.

Screenwriter Solomon Vesta, a Mann collaborator since 1999’s Grass, assembled the Tales script by culling material from Mann’s interviews with Roth and several hot-rodders who knew him, plus Roth’s 1992 autobiography, Confessions of a Rat Fink. That process sometimes meant Vesta invented dialogue as he imagined it to be, rather than knew for fact. “We’re interpreting history,” is how Mann explains it to me. “That’s why it’s called ‘Tales.’”

When it was time for casting, Mann decided that John Goodman (Roseanne, The Big Lebowski) would make a perfect fit for the narrator, who speaks as Roth. He telephoned Goodman’s agent to gauge the actor’s interest.

“I got a call back in 10 minutes, which is unheard of, and he agreed to do it,” Mann says. As it turned out, Goodman is a die-hard Roth fan. “[John had] met Roth at a car show in New Orleans to sign his models and memorabilia. As John was leaving, Roth said to him, ‘One day, I want you to play me in a movie.’ So it seemed like destiny that John was going to play Ed,” Mann says, “and people who knew Ed say that John’s voice reminds them eerily of Ed.”

Tom Wolfe wrote about Roth in a landmark 1963 Esquire essay about Kustom Kulture (i.e., the article that invented New Journalism). “He’s the Salvador Dali of the movement — a surrealist in his designs, a showman by temperament, a prankster.” With Tales of the Rat Fink (which includes cameo appearances by Wolfe and his customized all-white Cadillac), Mann has given Roth an appropriately surreal eulogy. Rest in peace, Daddy-O.

Tales of the Rat Fink screens at TIFF on Sept. 15 and 16.

Matthew McKinnon writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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