Written by El Fangorio

Okay, this is what happens to the discerning viewer within the first 20 minutes of watching 1979’s King of the Gypsies:

Ethnic music starts to play. Sounds Italian. You may even say to yourself, “Kind of sounds like The Godfather.” Credits start to roll. Sterling Hayden (“Love that guy. Can’t be playing a gypsy though”), Shelley Winters (“Fat and awesome”), Susan Sarandon (“She’ll make a good bug-eyed gypsy”), Judd Hirsch (“No shit? I wish he was my shrink!”), Brooke Shields (“Dude. Some major star power going on here”), Annette O’Toole (“Another natural beauty of the ‘70s. Keep ‘em coming”), Annie Potts (“Ghostbusters!”), and introducing Eric Roberts (“I thought Star80 was his first”).

Fade-in to a gypsy camp during the 1950s while Eric Roberts’ heavy Brooklyn-accented voice-over describes the life of the gypsy. He says it’s great being a gypsy. You’re immune to a lot of laws because you have no birth certificate, therefore you don’t exist in the system. The world is pretty much yours for the taking. You’ll never know an honest day’s work and still live a rich man’s life.

A car bursts into the camp, causing quite the commotion. Out steps the self-proclaimed ‘King and Queen of the Gypsies’ played by…Sterling Hayden and Shelley Winters. He’s got a spray-painted dark beard that resembles burnt cat hair, while she sports long black locks and smokes a Sherlock Holmes pipe. This lily-white Colonel Sanders type is supposed to be King of the Gypsies? Is that a red flag I see?

The leaders of this camp approach the couple. More familiar faces as he’s from Godfather II and his wife is that creepy subway lady from Jacob’s Ladder. The two leaders bicker over the arranged marriage of their two children. Sterling and Winters’ son, Groffo, is to marry this couple’s daughter, Rose, but she does not want to marry him. A promise is a promise though. They will let the elders decide.

Cut to a gypsy bash later that night where the elders decide that the children do not need to get married. They also demand that the King needs to stop calling himself as such and haul ass back to New York where he belongs. The King resents being “fucked like a three-dollar whore” and drives off but not before kidnapping their daughter and running over a few gypsies in the process. Probably not the best way to handle public relations with future in-laws but gypsies are crazy.

The rest of the credits roll: Music by David Grisman (“Never heard of him”), edited by Paul Hirsch (“De Palma’s boy. Very cool”), Director of Photography Sven Nykvist (“Hoorah! I know I’m happy”), produced by Dino De Laurentiis (“Uh-Oh”), and directed by Frank Pierson (“Who is he?”). Better check the IMDB.

It is at the IMDB that you will learn the track record of Mr. Frank Pierson. Let’s see, he makes his first feature film in 1969, The Looking Glass War. It must have bombed because he doesn’t make another film until 1976, the remake of A Star is Born starring Barbara Streisand’s wardrobe, which despite being one of the biggest turkeys known to man, still made a katrillion-jillion dollars thanks to her fanbase alone. The film gods give Pierson one more chance and send him Dino. It is here, with King of the Gypsies, that you will notice his filmography ends, not to pick up again for another seven years (kind of like bad credit), where it will be limited to only TV work. Needless to say, this is red flag #12 and it’s only the prologue.