Wild 90 is a 1968 experimental film directed and produced by American novelist Norman Mailer, who also plays the starring role.
The film is a creative collaboration based on three friends, Norman Mailer, Buzz Farbar and Mickey Knox, who are seen drinking, braying, and fighting in a run-down apartment in lower Manhattan.
[2] A trio of Mafia gangsters – The Prince (Norman Mailer), Cameo (Buzz Farbar) and Twenty Years (Mickey Knox)—are hiding in a warehouse.
The concept for the film came when Mailer and several actors who were appearing in an Off-Broadway adaptation of his novel The Deer Park engaged in an acting game in which they pretended that they were gangsters.
The resulting dialogue was unusually heavy with profanities; Mailer later claimed that Wild 90 "has the most repetitive, pervasive obscenity of any film ever made.
"[3] Puerto Rican boxer José Torres appears as the man with the barking dog and Beverly Bentley (Mailer's wife) plays the woman with the knife.
Mailer refused to redub the problem patches on the soundtrack and later joked that the film "sounds like everybody is talking through a jockstrap.
[11] Wild 90 was a commercial failure, but Mailer followed up the production with two additional improvised experimental films, Beyond the Law (1968) and Maidstone (1970).