Eating Raoul (1982): Paul Bartel’s Cult Film

[00:00:08] From the entertainment capital of the world, it's the 80s Movie Podcast. I'm your host Edward Havens, thank you for listening today. On today's episode, we're going to talk about one of my favorite movies from one of my favorite years in cinema history, from one of my favorite subversive satirist filmmakers, Paul Bartel. The year is 1982, and the film is Eating Raoul. But as always, before we get to the movie, let's talk about Paul Bartel.

[00:00:36] Paul Bartel had been making movies, in one form or another, for most of his life. Born in Brooklyn in 1938 and raised between Manhattan and Montclair, New Jersey, he became fascinated with movies and animation at an early age. By the time he was 11, he had already decided that he wanted to direct animated films. That ambition led him, at just 13 years old, to spend the summer of 1951 at United Productions of America, better known as UPA, in New York City.

[00:01:06] UPA was unlike the traditional animation studios of the era. Its artists were creating cartoons with bold, graphic designs, simplified shapes, flat areas of color, limited animation, and a visual sophistication that treated animation as more than children's entertainment.

[00:01:23] The studio was responsible for characters such as Mr. Magoo, as well as the films like Gerald McBoing Boing, which won an Academy Award for Animated Short Film in 1951, and Rudy Toot Toot, a highly stylized adaptation of the Frankie and Johnny story involving jealousy, murder, and betrayal. For a teenager already interested in filmmaking, UPA offered a glimpse of what animation could be when artists were given room to experiment.

[00:01:50] By the time Bartell graduated from high school, he had already begun making films of his own. He persuaded his father to buy him a 16mm camera, convinced a teacher to let him spend an entire semester making an animated movie, and produced a series of early experimental shorts including Cinema Experimental, Non-Objective Film, Margaret Whiting's The Money Tree, and Camel Rock.

[00:02:15] He went on to study film and theater at UCLA, then received a Fulbright scholarship that took him to Rome's Centro Experimentale di Cinemagrafica. While in Italy, he made Progetti, a 35mm short film in Italian that was presented at the 1962 Venice Film Festival. When Bartell returned to the United States, his career took a less conventional route.

[00:02:38] He worked on military and government films, including productions at the U.S. Army Signal Corps Pictorial Center, while continuing to pursue his own filmmaking. In 1966, he made two short films, The Secret Cinema and Naughty Nurse. Then-producer Gene Corman, younger brother of legendary film producer Roger Corman, gave him his first feature directing opportunity with private parts in 1972.

[00:03:03] Bartell subsequently entered the world of Roger Corman, working as a second unit director on Big Bad Mama, before directing Death Race 2000. Corman's low-budget filmmaking system taught Bartell an important lesson. Movies could be made outside the traditional Hollywood machinery if filmmakers were willing to improvise, work quickly, and make every resource count. That lesson would become essential when Bartell began developing Eating Raoul.

[00:03:32] Bartel had already worked with actress Mary Warnov, and he wanted to make another movie with her. The original idea was closer to The Thin Man, with Bartell and Warnov playing a contemporary version of Nick and Nora Charles. But that concept would change dramatically. In 1979, Bartell and writer Richard Blackburn were serving together on the jury at the Berlin Film Festival. During roughly two weeks in Berlin, they developed the screenplay that would become Eating Raoul.

[00:03:59] Instead of detectives, Bartell and Warnov would play murderers. The finished story centered on Paul and Mary Bland, a sexually repressed, socially conservative Los Angeles couple who dream of opening their own restaurant. Their problem is money. Their solution is horrifyingly simple. They begin killing swingers who answer their classified advertisements, then steal the victim's cash. But when Raoul Mendoza enters their life, the scheme becomes more complicated.

[00:04:28] He is young, confident, charming, openly sexual, and far more comfortable with the world the Blands are trying to suppress. He also recognizes an opportunity in their criminal enterprise. The comedy comes from the collision between the Blands' respectable self-image and the increasingly outrageous things they do to preserve it. Murder becomes a financial strategy. Sexual repression becomes a source of comedy. Greed becomes indistinguishable from middle-class aspiration.

[00:04:59] Bartel described Paul and Mary as two greedy, uptight people. And that contradiction became the engine of the entire movie. Getting the movie made proved considerably harder than writing it. Roger Corman would not finance Eating Raoul, and conventional investors had little interest in a strange black comedy about a married couple who murder swingers and use the money to open a restaurant. Bartell, therefore, began putting the production together himself.

[00:05:25] He raised money wherever he could, borrowed equipment, accepted help from friends and volunteers, and put in his own resources. His parents also helped finance the project, including selling their home in Montclair, New Jersey. The production was ultimately expected to cost around $500,000, considerably more than the figure that had sometimes been attached to the film. Bartell began shooting small pieces of the movie wherever he could. The first material amounted to roughly 10 minutes.

[00:05:55] Filmed over a single weekend using partially used rolls of film left over from other productions. The following weekend, another 10 minutes were shot at the City of Hope National Medical Center in Duarte, California. The production had to work around locations that were disappearing almost as quickly as the filmmakers could arrange to use them. One apartment building they needed was scheduled for demolition, forcing Bartell and his crew to move quickly.

[00:06:20] Principal photography eventually stretched across roughly a year, with only 22 shooting days, most of them on weekends, along with a couple of six-day weeks. Instead of proceeding like a conventional Hollywood production, eating raw wool grew in fragments, whenever Bartell had the money, equipment, location, and people necessary to keep it going. The look of the film was equally important. Production designer Robert Schulenberg turned the Bland's apartment into an extension of their personalities.

[00:06:49] Everything was old-fashioned, controlled, respectable, and almost frozen in another era. The apartment became a visual representation of the life that Paul and Mary believed they were supposed to have, even as the murders taking place inside it steadily destroyed that illusion. The 2012 Criterion Collection commentary with Richard Blackburn, Schulenberg, and editor Alan Tumayan provided much of the first-hand detail on how the production and its visual world came together.

[00:07:19] Casting Raul was another crucial piece of the puzzle. Robert Beltran was still early in his screen career when he came to the project. A graduate of Fresno State's theater program, he had recently appeared in Luis Valdez's Zoot Suit. Bartell saw something in him that the role needed. Beltran brought a youthful confidence and sexuality that sharply contrasted with the Bland's rigid behavior, while still allowing Raul to function as a believable person rather than simply a comic intruder.

[00:07:49] Beltran became Raul Mendoza, the character whose arrival transforms the Bland's awkward murder scheme into something resembling a business. The relationship between Raul and the Bland's also give the movie much of its sexual tension and comic friction. Beltran later discussed his experience making the film in Criterion's 2012 documentary Cooking Up Raul, alongside Mary Warnov and other members of the cast and production.

[00:08:14] The rest of the cast also helped establish the film's peculiar mixture of deadpan realism and absurdity. Ed Begley Jr., Buck Henry, Edie McClure, Susan Seiger, and others populated the world around the Bland's, while friends and fellow filmmakers such as John Landis and Jonathan Kaplan appeared in smaller roles. Bartell treated everything with the same matter-of-fact tone. Sex, murder, money, cannibalism, and domestic arguments could all exist in the same scene

[00:08:43] without the movie announcing when the audience was supposed to be shocked. That approach is established almost immediately by one of the film's most memorable comic devices, a frying pan. A mundane household object becomes a weapon, a recurring joke, and eventually a symbol of the movie's entire sensibility. Eating Raoul keeps taking things that should be horrifying and placing them inside the familiar routines of domestic life. Once the film was finished, Bartell still had to find a way to get it seen.

[00:09:14] The world premiere came on Wednesday, January 13, 1982 at the U.S. Film and Video Festival in Park City, Utah, the event that would later become the Sundance Film Festival. Eating Raoul screened immediately after the world premiere of Wayne Wang's Chan is Missing. For Bartell, the screening marked the first public presentation of a movie that had taken years of persistence and a production assembled almost entirely outside of the conventional studio system.

[00:09:41] The film quickly began moving through other festivals and independent screenings. On Saturday, March 6, it received a sneak preview at the Nickelodeon Theater in Boston following the prime show of Louis Maul's My Dinner with Andre. Just over two weeks later, on Tuesday, March 23, Eating Raul had its first Los Angeles screening at the Los Angeles International Film Exposition Festival, better known as FilmEx. It played immediately after Les Blanks' Burden of Dreams,

[00:10:08] the documentary about Werner Herzog's troubled production of Fitzgerald. The FilmEx screening gave the film its first significant Los Angeles festival exposure, bringing it to an audience in the city where Bartell had made it. By the spring, the film had also attracted the attention of a distributor. 20th Century Fox International Classics and Quartet Films arranged to share U.S. distribution rights with a theatrical release planned for later in the year.

[00:10:35] The arrangement gave Bartell something the production had lacked from the beginning, a distribution structure capable of taking the movie beyond the festival circuit. On Tuesday, March 18, Eating Raul screened at the Cannes Film Market in Cannes, France. This was a market screening rather than an official Cannes Film Festival competition or festival program screening, but it nevertheless gave the film another opportunity to reach international buyers and industry attention.

[00:11:03] The festival journey continued on Saturday, June 3, when Eating Raul screened at the Seattle International Film Festival, then held at the Egyptian Theater. By this point, the film was developing a reputation that depended largely on word of mouth. It was too strange to fit comfortably into conventional categories, yet audiences and critics continued to find something distinctive in Bartell's combination of sex, murder, satire, and domestic comedy. Then in September, Eating Raul reached Toronto.

[00:11:33] On September 17, the film screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, adding another major international festival appearance to its groaning list of screenings. The critical response was mixed, but the movie's particular style was difficult to ignore. Vincent Canby of the New York Times recognized Bartell's controlled comic approach, while Variety appreciated the way the film pushed its outrageous material into increasingly ridiculous territory without abandoning its sense of humor.

[00:12:02] Roger Ebert found plenty to enjoy, but felt the movie's laid-back style could become monotonous. While Rita Kempley of the Washington Post responded positively to the collision of sex, murder, and cannibalism, and singled out Mary Warnov and Robert Beltran. One thing was for certain, Eating Raul was not a movie that fit easily into the critical category surrounding it. Some reviewers saw carefully controlled satire. Others saw a low-budget oddity

[00:12:31] whose deliberately flat style limited its impact. What remained consistent was the recognition that Bartell was working in a voice that was distinctively his own. A few days after Toronto, Eating Raul reached New York City. The film was selected for the 20th New York Film Festival, where it received two screenings on Saturday, September 25th, and on Monday, September 27th. Just four days later, on October 1st, Eating Raoul opened at the

[00:13:02] 368th Street Playhouse in Midtown Manhattan, giving Bartell's homemade black comedy its first regular theatrical screening. After months of festival screenings and growing attention, the film was finally moving into commercial release. Audiences in New York City would, pardon the pun, eat the film up. In its first week, Eating Raul would gross $33,146. In its second week,

[00:13:28] the gross would grow to $34,909. And in the third week, it would still hold steady with another $32,292 in the film, and still another $29,600 in week four. Once that release began, Eating Raul started making its way into theaters around the country. On October 15th, it opened in Los Angeles at the 660-seat Plaza Theater in Westwood, with the hometown crown buying up

[00:13:54] $21,659 worth of tickets opening weekend. And the second week at the plaza would add another $17,547 to that. After four weeks, in only two theaters, Eating Raul had already grossed over $169,000. Two weeks later, on October 29th, it opened in Boston at the Nickelodeon Theater, the same theater where it had received its sneak preview back in March, and in San Francisco at The Bridge. By November,

[00:14:25] the release would expand further. On November 5th, it would open in Orange County, Seattle, and Washington, D.C., where Eating Raul was now being paired with a three-and-a-half-minute short film by Andy Aaron called Street Scene. The following week, on November 12th, the film opened in Berkeley at the Act One Theater and at the Los Gatos Theater in Los Gatos, and adding a screen at the Cineplex Beverly Center in Los Angeles. Then on November 24th, the release reached Philadelphia,

[00:14:54] while Canadian engagements opened in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver. And on November 26th, the film expanded its New York City run, opening at the Greenwich Twin. By December, Bartel's little independent film was turning up in markets far beyond the coasts. On December 15th, it would open at the Mabel Theater just outside of Detroit. Two days later, December 17th, brought the particularly broad wave of openings, including Atlanta, Baltimore, Houston, Louisville, Portland,

[00:15:24] Santa Cruz, and Toronto, all adding Eating Raul to their schedules. And the rollout continued through the final weeks of the year. On December 22nd, the film opened in Cleveland and Burlington, Vermont. On Christmas Day, it reached three more Southern California theaters in Cerritos, Manhattan Beach, and Santa Monica. And the film's journey would not slow down with the end of 1982. On January 8th, 1983, Eating Raul opened in St. Louis. A month later, on February 18th,

[00:15:54] it reached Chicago. And then on March 11th, it opened in Eugene, Oregon. And throughout the spring and summer, it would add more playdates all across America. Jacksonville and San Antonio, Reno and Grand Rapids, Fargo and Ann Arbor, Albuquerque and Spokane, Rockford and Charlotte, Portland, Oregon and Portland, Maine, Buffalo and Sioux City, Anchorage and Flint. And in July, while its regular playdates were winding down, the Waverly Twin

[00:16:24] in New York City would start screening it at midnight on Friday and Saturday nights, which other theaters in Los Angeles, Phoenix, and other major studies started to do as well. The film would continue to play in theaters into November when CBS Fox Home Video released the film on VHS and Betamax Tapes and into December when Eating Raul started playing on HBO. For a film that had begun with a group of collaborators piecing together financing and shooting whenever they could, the geographic spread

[00:16:53] of the theatrical release was becoming impressive. But how much the movie may have grossed is anyone's guess. The film does not appear on Box Office Mojo at all, while the numbers says the final gross was $1,114,825 while only listing two weekends of grosses in December 1982. However, in a March 4th, 1983 ad for the movie in The Hollywood Reporter for the just-opened 1983 American film market,

[00:17:24] it states that, quote, we've broken $3 million in limited release, and now watch us go. In a January 11th, 1984 edition of Variety magazine, which included a list of the theatrically released movies that reported at least $1 million worth of rentals earned in 1983, as Eating Raul bringing in $1.6 million worth of rentals for just 1983. Distributors, by and large, get about half the ticket sales

[00:17:52] back as film rentals, which hints that Eating Raul grossed around $3.2 million during 1983. And we know that the film grossed around $250,000 during 1982. So it's likely the film's final gross was closer to $3.5 million when all is said and done. The film's relative success also helped open the next chapter in Bartel's career. After waiting six years to make a film between Cannonball and Eating Raul, Bartel was in production

[00:18:22] on his next film, the $3 million screwball comedy Not For Publication featuring Nancy Allen and David Naughton in the fall of 1983. Not For Publication would hit theaters in the fall of 1984 and a lot of critics would find the sincere movie which included a musical number not enough from the director of Eating Raul. Audiences would ignore it and Bartel would find his next project to be the strangest of his career. Steven Spielberg was amongst the prominent filmmakers who admired

[00:18:52] Paul Bartel's earlier underground work particularly The Secret Cinema the satirical short film that Bartel had written and directed in 1966. When Spielberg created the NBC anthology series Amazing Stories in the mid-1980s he specifically offered Bartel the opportunity to remake that short film for television. Bartel wrote and directed the resulting 25-minute secret cinema adapting his earlier story for the series while also appearing on screen as Dr. Shrek.

[00:19:22] The episode aired during the first season in 1986 and Bartel's work on the series led to a second assignment the following season where he wrote and directed Gershwin's Trunk. The connection was significant. Spielberg's admiration for Bartel's earlier work had brought the filmmaker into a major network television series giving him the opportunity to revisit one of his own films on a much larger platform and available to the arguably biggest audience ever.

[00:19:51] After eating Raoul Bartel remained one of independent cinema's most distinctive film makers although he would never again have a film quite reach the same level of cultural recognition. He continued working in television and film including directing Lust in the Dust in 1985 a campy western spoof starring Divine and Tab Hunter and he continued to act becoming an increasingly recognizable character actor in films made by directors including Joe Dante

[00:20:20] Brian De Palma and John Landis. Bartel's next major feature as a director was Scenes from a Class Struggle in Beverly Hills released in 1989. The black comedy reunited him with Mary Warren and Robert Beltran and gave him another opportunity to satirize wealth sex social status and the particular behavior of people living inside privileged worlds. After that his directing became less frequent. He made Shelf Life in 1995 while increasingly

[00:20:49] concentrating on acting. During the 1990s he appeared in a remarkable range of films including The Usual Suspect, Basquiat, Billy's Hollywood Screen Kiss and Hamlet. By then Martel had become almost as recognizable for his performances as for the films he had directed. Martel's final years were still filled with acting work. His last release screen appearance was as Osric in Michael Amarada's 2000 adaptation of Hamlet starring Ethan Hawke.

[00:21:19] Behind the scenes however he was still thinking about eating Raul. According to the Los Angeles Times he was planning a sequel set 20 years after the original. Martel underwent surgery for liver cancer early in 2000 and died of a heart attack at his Manhattan home on May 13, 2000 at the age of 61. His death brought an end to a career that had stretched from experimental shorts and low-budget exploitation films to television, cult cinema and character acting but eating Raul

[00:21:49] remained the work most closely associated with him. Mary Warren continued building the kind of wonderfully unconventional career that had already taken her from Andy Warhol's factory to Roger Corman's Death Race 2000 and Rock and Roll High School. She followed eating Raul with appearances in such films as Get Crazy, Chopping Mall, Terror Vision, Black Widow, Scenes from a Glass Struggle in Beverly Hills and Dick Tracy while also becoming a familiar face on television through guest appearances on shows

[00:22:18] such as Murder She Wrote, Amazing Stories, St. Elsewhere and Babylon 5. She also continued writing and painting eventually publishing books including her memoir Swimming Underground, My Years in the Warhol Factory. Robert Beltran took a somewhat different path after playing Raul Mendoza. His next major role came opposite Chuck Norris and David Carradine in Lone Wolf McQuaid in 1983 followed the next year by Night of the Comet in which he played Hector Gomez, one of the survivors

[00:22:48] of the comet disaster. He then took the lead in Haskell Wexler's politically charged Latino in 1985 and continued working in film, television and theater, appearing in movies such as Slam Dance, Gabby A True Story, Bugsy and Nixon. His most prominent television role came years later when he was cast as Commander Chakotay on Star Trek Voyager which ran from 1995 through 2001. And two years after reading Raul,

[00:23:18] Warnov and Beltran found themselves together again in Tom Eberhardt's 1984 science fiction horror comedy Night of the Comet. This time they were playing completely different characters. Beltran was a truck driver survivor who teams up with a pair of sisters after a comet turns much of the population into dust or zombies while Warnov plays Audrey White, a scientist working with the survivors. The film became a cult favorite in its own right and the reunion is particularly nice footnote to Eating Raul because the two actors who had been brought together as part of

[00:23:47] Martel's bizarre little comedy were now appearing together in another distinctly offbeat genre film. In 2012, Eating Raoul received a major second life when the Criterion Collection released it on DVD and Blu-ray which included new restored digital transfer supervised by cinematographer Gary Theogis, Martel's 1966 short film The Secret Cinema and his 1969 follow-up short Naughty Nurse, as well as a brand new making of documentary, Cooking Up Raul,

[00:24:18] archival interviews with Paul Martel and Mary Warnov, a gag reel, the film's original theatrical release and an essay by esteemed film critic David Ehrenstein. At the end of October 2026, Eating Raul is still available from the Criterion Collection, but if you do not have access to the discs, you can stream the film on a wide variety of platforms including Amazon, Apple TV, the Criterion Channel, Fandango, and Plex. Thank you for joining us, we'll talk again soon.

[00:24:47] Remember to visit this episode's page on our website, the80smoviepodcast.com for extra materials about Paul Bartel, Eating Raul, and other movies we covered this episode. The 80s Movie Podcast has been researched, written, narrated, and edited by Edward Havens for idiosyncratic entertainment. Thank you again. Good night.