Media Funhouse

The fabric of old Hollywood: the Rat Pack, Martin and Lewis, and Roddy McDowall’s home movies

2012-02-27T00:34:00.017-05:00

Show-business documentaries are often intended to serve as introductions for the uninitiated. They also drive diehard fans a little crazy, because, if made well, they introduce them to a wealth of footage that they would like to watch at full length, without a narrator or talking heads “situating” the action — or in the case of most horrific current-day talking-heads series, simply describing the very thing we’re seeing.

One pair of documentary filmmakers, a mother and son, have “laid bare” their archives to a fascinating extent on (where else?) YouTube. Carole Langer and Luke Sacher have made a number of independent documentary features, but what concerns us here is the series of show-business profiles they created for A&E’s Biography. In putting these shows together, they utilized a number of rarely seen clips (not the public-domain specialties that appear in just about every straight-to-DVD docu), as well as one-of-a-kind reels of film that came from the stars themselves.

Thus, we can now see “above ground” some extremely rare footage that we never would’ve laid eyes on before, as well as having access online to clips that I have indeed seen before, but only on “mail-order” cassettes and discs (I’m all for using polite terms for that nastiest of phrases, "bootleg").

The uploads that are the singular possessions of Langer and Sacher are her interviews with a host of aged celebrities for the show-biz docus. Their YouTube account features her talks with Juanita Moore, Lizabeth Scott (right), Jackie Cooper, Jane Wyman, and Ann Miller.

For information and anecdotes about acts that played Las Vegas in its heyday, they turned to Shecky Greene. This interview is particularly fascinating, as it finds Ms. Langer telling Mr. Greene nearly as many stories as he tells her (she also never seems to laugh at the many, many jokes and silly voices that Greene includes in his answers). It’s an informal and informative chat, but I was kinda taken aback by her mini-lectures to Shecky:

One of the seminal figures that Langer and Sacher interviewed for their documentaries was Roddy McDowall, who, as I discussed in my interview with Carol Lynley, seemed to know everyone who mattered in Hollywood from the Fifties to the Seventies and was obviously in possession of the secrets they carried around.

More on him below, but I will note that I was extremely impressed by his encyclopedic knowledge of Hollywood movies and players in this interview (and rather surprised by the instance in which Ms. Langer tells him “let me finish” when she’s giving him a mini-lecture). One only wishes he had written a memoir — but the keepers of secrets never do:

The most impressive “get” for the duo interview-wise was clearly Robert Mitchum who, even though he looked seriously ill when Ms. Langer talked to him, still had an incredibly macho deep voice and the same mixture of bravado and apathy that distinguished his best performances:

The Soapbox Productions YT account provides hours and hours of viewing material, including the indie docus that Langer and Sacher made, but most show-biz fans will be drawn in by the plethora of material about Las Vegas, like the promotional short “Las Vegas, Playground USA” from 1964; silent newsreel-style footage of the Ritz Brothers when they played Vegas, also Joe E. Lewis and Noel Coward at the Desert Inn (being visited backstage by various couples, including David Niven and Judy Garland, and Sinatra and Bacall).

In this same vein are Janet Leigh’s silent home movies, which were used for an A&E Biography ep that Sacher and Langer did on Leigh. Of course, Leigh was an uncommonly lovely actress, whose best-known relationship was with husband Tony Curtis. They were a “star couple” without question, and two of their best show-biz friends were a certain Dino Crocetti and Joseph Levitch, aka Martin and Lewis.

Langer and Sacher made a very good portrait of Jerry for Biography, called “The Last American Clown.” It is filled with tantalizingly rare footage they uncovered, and other items that surely came from Lewis’s own deep stash of home movies documenting his every move. The whole show, running 90 minutes, is up on YT:

If you’re curious about what was really special (and insane) about Martin and Lewis’s act, check out this footage of them guesting on the U.S. Olympic team telethon in 1952. They call hosts Bob Hope and Bing Crosby “old timers,” generally run amok, and wind up doing a bit of gay humor (Jerry’s stage character often slid from Yiddishisms to crazed-kid behavior and gay jokes):

The pair are a bit more serious in this interview with Edward R. Murrow for “Person to Person.” They’re sitting in a room that Jerry had constructed as a screening room and an archive for the duo — they’re on friendly terms on camera, but the most interesting note is when Jerry notes that Dean ditched an appearance in Jerry’s home-movie at the very last minute:

The Soapbox YT account has a load of Martin and Lewis rarities, including:
—a promotional short for The Stooge in which they wind up pretend-pummeling their producer Hal Wallis;
— a greeting to movie viewers in Detroit from the set of one of their pictures; and
— newsreel footage of the opening of Jerry’s camera store in L.A.(Dean did show up for that).

The lengthiest M&L rarity that they’ve uploaded is the best record of what the team looked like in a nightclub, the film of them playing the Copacabana in Feb 1954. The act is fast and loose and kinda dopey, but they certainly go at it with a fervor, and had some great moments:

The best M&L rarities show them ad-libbing their lines, and often tripping over them. As in this TV promo for The Colgate Comedy Hour, and this clip where they accept an award from Redbook magazine, along with Leslie Caron and some chick named Marilyn:

The solo Jerry rarities are just as eye-opening:

—a promo for his 1960 TV special;
— a behind-the-scenes short about The Nutty Professor (oh, Stella, Stella…); and
— character-based TV ads Jerry shot for The Big Mouth

Jerry clearly enjoyed having making-of theatrical shorts created to promote his films. Here’s one for his sex farce Three on a Couch:

This 1968 short film about the making of Hook, Line and Sinker, is called “The Total Filmmaker,” and it indicates that even though Jerry wasn’t directing the picture he did everything on it, to the extent of editing the sound during his lunch break. It’s an amazing short and will be appreciated by both those who love and those who hate Jer (since it supplies them both with more fodder):

The rarest thing Langer has put up is a film of Jerry teaching his filmmaking class at USC in 1967. I have no idea what he’s talking about, but it is pretty mindblowing to see him in front of a classroom:

******

Langer and Sacher’s four-part Biography documentary about the Rat Pack, which aired for four nights, is here:

The raw footage used to create that docu provide some fascinating slices of show-biz history. Here Frank, Dean, and Sammy crash Danny Thomas’s gig at the Sands (silent newsreel footage):

And the night that the Rat Pack consisted of Frank, Danny, and Jerry — this is only one of two times I know that Jerry got to be in a modified version of the Pack:

More than two decades after his death, Sammy Davis is still the biggest ass-kicker in show-biz — here he’s touring Vietnam in a short film created for the Army called “Peace, Togetherness & Sammy”:

As with the M&L Copacabana footage, there have been “mail-order” copies of the only footage that exists of the legendary “Summit at the Sands” gig with the full Rat Pack onstage goofing around at the same time; now the footage is on YT thanks to the Soapbox folks.

The secret of these gigs is that they were loose and not the group’s best — the best moments for Frank, Dean, and Sammy as a team were when they went out as a trio. But they still had a helluva a lot of fun, and the footage is truly historic and a must-see for fans. Here’s an EXTRMELY politically incorrect bit where Frank impersonates an Asian (Frank was far from the funniest guy in the Pack; he trailed Dean, Sammy, and even Joey):

The core trio do their thing. Sammy’s dancing is only at half-strength here, and he’s still pure dynamite:

******

The most extraordinary thing that Langer and Sacher share with us on their YT channel is a trove of home movies shot by Roddy McDowall from approximately May to September 1965 at his beachfront home in Malibu. Offering further proof that Roddy really was a personal friend of an incredible amount of stars, these silent home movies show the stars interacting at the beach, chatting, drinking, being bored, playing with the their kids — in other words, just hanging around and being normal folk (who look incredibly gorgeous and in several cases happen to be immaculately talented).

Among Roddy’s guests are those he worked with on the just-perfect Lord Love a Duck (Tuesday Weld, Ruth Gordon, George Axelord) and Inside Daisy Clover (Natalie Wood, Robert Redford, Christopher Plummer). Each time you think you recognize someone (from Jason Robards to Dennis Hopper to Judy Garland), it is who you think it is.

Among those glimpsed at Roddy’s beach parties are:

— a dancing, eyepatch-wearing Sal Mineo, Tuesday, Natalie Wood, Juliet Mills, and Jack Warden ;
— Lauren Bacall, James Fox, Merle Oberon, David McCallum;
— the sex-kittenish Jane Fonda and prim mum Julie Andrews ;
—Fonda and Andrew again, Natalie Wood, Mike Nichols, James Fox, Hope Lange, and Jennifer Jones
— Simone Signoret
—Ed Wynn, shoehorned amidst views of L.A. streets and Whisky a Go-go

At some times Roddy brought his camera to other people’s houses, including Jack Lemmon and Rock Hudson:

One beach gathering finds old-guard stars Kirk Douglas and Lauren Bacall hanging out with Lee Remick, Ben Gazzara, and a dinged-up Newman (had he been racing?):

An August ’65 gathering had Paul Newman and Natalie Wood on the guest list:

Roddy’s camera did wander over to the young and attractive ladies, as here with Tuesday Weld, Hayley and Juliet Mills, Lee Remick, and Suzanne Pleshette. The one and only Ricardo Montalban supplies the beefcake:

Those who watch the Funhouse TV show know I dearly love Tuesday Weld. Here is a sort of “solo study” of her at a time when she was the only guest:

And finally one of the busier star-studded beach bashes. It took place on May 31, 1965, and the guest list included Tuesday, her future Pretty Poison costar Tony Perkins, Jane Fonda, Natalie Wood, Lauren Bacall, Ben Gazzara, Suzanne Pleshette, Judy Garland, Dominick Dunne, and Lord Love a Duck auteur George Axelrod:

These snippets from Hollywood’s (and Las Vegas’s) glamorous past are kinda mind-warping. It’s one thing to see images from them embedded in a documentary, it’s quite another to see the entire source element. And for that I thank the Soapbox productions duo.

A "nurse" to the end: Deceased Artiste Zina Bethune

2012-02-18T15:11:00.010-05:00

A death was announced this week that was very sad in its particulars, yet quite invigorating as a story of survival and reinvention in show business. The death was that of dancer-actress Zina Bethune who, to most reading this blog, will be best remembered for being the female lead in Scorsese’s first feature Who’s That Knocking at My Door? (1967). She was a doe-eyed blonde actress (and that phrase was very appropriate for her) who was quite good in Knocking, but who had become, as far as many of us were concerned, a “whatever happened to…?” figure.

Her death was tragic enough to be reported on gossip blogs (by the likes of the annoying Perez Hilton) without any mention of her accomplishments, and important enough in show business to merit a New York Times obit that curiously didn’t mention her work for Scorsese. The details are this: she stopped her car on Forest Lawn Drive in L.A. to look after an animal that she thought was injured (one obit said it turned out to be a dead possum). She was struck by one car, and then hit by another, which ran over her and dragged her 600 feet. One driver stopped and reported the story; the other driver kept on moving.

To step beyond the sad essentials of this story (the fact that Ms. Bethune’s love of animals cost her her life — I know quite a few ladies who would go to the same lengths, and would sadly end up in the same situation), the obituaries revealed that, as both an actress and a dancer, she had had quite a rich career that saw her reinventing herself and having several personal triumphs.

The first of these triumphs was the fact that she went from having scoliosis as a child to studying at Balanchine’s School of American Ballet, and performing in his production of the Nutcracker. After having soloed at the New York City ballet, she went headfirst into an acting career that found her appearing on many dramatic TV series — I recently reviewed the Criterion release of The Fugitive Kind on the Funhouse TV show and was pleased to air a clip of one of the extras, a 1958 “Kraft Television Theater” presentation of short plays by Tennessee Williams (directed by Sidney Lumet, introduced by a higly uncomfortable Tennessee) that included “This Property Is Condemned” starring Bethune.

During this period she appeared as one of FDR’s kids in Sunrise at Campobello, had a regular role on The Guiding Light, and appeared on various dramatic series, including the wonderful Naked City, in which her mom takes credit for a murder she committed by mistake (in a switch on what was believed to be the “real” story of the Lana Turner/Johnny Stompanato case):

And this find, an episode of Cain’s Hundred (1961-62) called “The Swinger,” written by the show’s star Robert Culp, and guest starring none other than Sammy Davis Jr.:

Her biggest success on television was a starring role in the soap The Nurses (1962-65), which got her on the cover of TV Guide and found her being booked as a guest to sing, dance, and make silly small talk with the host on The Judy Garland Show in 1963. The cutesy opening (where Zina B. affirms that, yes, that is her real name and, no, she was not a real nurse). The intro is here. Judy and Zina do “Getting to Know You” here (with a booze joke from Judy!):

Judy, Zina, and Vic Damone do an “all-purpose holiday medley”:

After The Nurses went off the air, she was a regular on Love of Life from 1965-70. It was at this time that Scorsese cast her as the female lead in his first feature, which was initially called on “Bring Out the Dancing Girls” and “I Call First,” before it became “Who’s That Knocking…” with the addition of a sequence intended to get the picture a more “adult” audience (and provide the first big-screen visualization of the Doors’ “The End”). More on that below, though.

Her acting career continued with small roles on TV in the Seventies and Eighties, but her biggest success onstage in her later career was a role in the Broadway show Grand Hotel from 1989 to 1992:

Bethune kept moving in other directions as well. She became the founding director and choreographer of an L.A. dance company and also ran a dance/performance program for kids with disabilities called Infinite Dreams. She is seen here in a recent interview for a documentary called L.A. Woman (she’s at 1:07):

Since I was a devout Scorsese follower for many years, I will close out on the film that most of us knew Ms. Bethune (married name: Zina Feeley) from. Her scenes in Who’s That Knocking…? were shot in 1965, and it is noted in an interview with Mardik Martin that is online that she was an established TV actress, so they had to do her scenes all at once — the film’s lead, Harvey Keitel, was an unknown at this point, but Zina Bethune was a star and was getting the highest salary in the film.

She first appears in the film in the scene that basically put Scorsese on the map (since Ebert loved the picture when it was titled “I Call First”) as a visual innovator, the meet-cute moment where Harvey Keitel talks her up in the Staten Island Ferry terminal, discussing John Ford movies with her and being the first chatty, charismatic, and slightly dangerous Scorsese protagonist. The scene is most definitely inspired by Godard and the other New Wavers, but the visuals come from Scorsese’s own restlessness and invention:

A bit later on in the pic, Harvey and Zina walk to the insanely catchy “I’ve Had It”:

Her death was tragic, but it is indeed nice to know that she enjoyed not only a second act in her career, but also a third and fourth.

The most masculine voice in town: Deceased Artiste Ben Gazzara

2012-02-11T17:04:00.013-05:00

The last of Cassavetes' three “husbands” has now left us. Peter Falk may have been the crowd-pleaser of the trio, and Cassavetes the visionary, but Gazzara was the most intense, without question. His voice exuded machismo without seeming like a pose (John Wayne) or a threat (Eastwood). Put simply, he had the tones of a man who did not fuck around in his conversation. You could believe Ben Gazzara.

It’s interesting to consider that he had the spottiest movie career of the three gentlemen. JC appeared in crappy pictures and TV because he was financing his personal films; Falk made a bunch of meager choices in his later years, but would always “recover” with a better-chosen part (or just another Columbo TV-movie). Gazzara didn’t want to be pigeon-holed into any specific kind of role, and so he moved around from genre to genre. Thus, he was the kind of an actor who never gave a bad performance, but his reputation rests on a small handful of incredibly intense and charismatic roles.

He began as a stage actor, having attended the Actors Studio during the Fifties when that institution produced intense leading men like a well-oiled production line. His voice was the key to his performances — in the 2003 documentary Broadway: the Golden Age, Gena Rowlands reminisces about how Gazzara’s voice could reach the upper balcony clearly, even when he was whispering onstage.

We don’t have many traces of his stage work, except this wonderful clip of the 1955 Broadway production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, in which Ben originated the role of Brick. The clip is included in the aforementioned Golden Age documentary:

Prior to that play, he appeared in the play End as a Man, based on the bestselling Calder Willingham novel. The novel was eventually transformed into a film called The Strange One (1957), with a completely indelible finale. Here is the trailer:

Gazzara’s next scene-stealing big-screen role was in Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder (1959). Throughout the Fifties and Sixties he thrived on both the stage (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) and TV. Here’s a bit of the latter, Benny fooling around with Whitey Ford and Joe Louis on I’ve Got a Secret:

For a certain generation, Gazzara’s seminal role was on TV as a lawyer who has been told that he has no less than nine and no more than 18 months to live (what an imprecise medic), so he goes on the road searching for new experiences in the completely oddball dramatic series Run for Your Life (1965-68). Each new episode found Gazzara encountering a new group of people and making an impact on their lives (or they made an impact on him). Here is a confrontation with veteran tough-guy character actor Henry Silva:

An “ethnic” scene wherein Gazzara meets opinionated Sicilians Harry Guardino and Sal Mineo:

An encounter with a free-thinker and “pornographic” writer, played by Barbara Hershey:

It has been much discussed by fans and students of Cassavetes how the starring trio in Husbands behaved on-camera as if they had been friends for years. All three actors stated that they barely knew each other, except for having met at public events and parties. Gena Rowlands, though, did guest on Run For Your Life, and thus had some close encounters with Gazzara more than a decade before the two worked together in what I consider the only flawed film of Cassavetes’ personal work, Opening Night (1977). Here is a scene from that RFYL ep:

The stars of Husbands (1970) did seem like they were old friends. Perhaps Cassavetes’ intensive rehearsal period — wherein actors improvised their dialogue and “lived” in their roles — contributed to this, or maybe the three actors were just destined to be pals at some point in their lives. Whatever the case may be, it’s one of Cassavetes’ most emotional and unusual films, in that there are several sequences where the actors are clearly improvising on camera.

Perhaps because the film was funded by a large studio (Columbia), JC felt he could let loosen his rules for a bit, and thus the film has a very informal, and extremely real, aspect to it. An hour-long BBC documentary about the making of the film is available on YT here, and here is the trailer, narrated by the velvet-voiced William B. Williams:

Setting aside Opening Night, we wind up at the picture that has probably contributed the most to Gazzara’s cult status among indie filmgoers, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976). The film was a massive failure in its first release (hear Ben talk about that here) and was basically “hidden” by Cassavetes in his lifetime (at least in the U.S.; in the Eighties, I was finally able to see it in Paris, where it was playing at one theater once every weekday).

It has since acquired a great reputation, and its appeal is tied up completely with Gazzara’s charismatic lead performance. His strip-club owner isn’t even on the show-biz map, and yet he’s a man with a moral code and a sense of duty about pleasing his audience.

In that regard, the most interesting anecdote that Gazzara told about the film was that he had to take Cassavetes aside a few days into filming to tell him something was wrong. Cassavetes had no idea what the problem was, and Gazzara mentioned that the girls weren’t undressing on-camera, and that the film was about a strip club. Cassavetes was actually kind of a prude when it came to nudity or sex, but Gazzara, staying true to the code of his character Cosmo Vitelli, knew what the right move was.

The first 15 minutes of the film are here, but here is perhaps the film’s best sequence, with Cosmo talking to his performers in the dressing room:

Another great moment:

Outside of the Cassavetes films and The Strange One, one of the strongest lead roles Gazzara had in a film was Saint Jack (1979), a tough, nasty little character study that was quite a surprise from cineaste/filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich. The film has the feel of Chinese Bookie and has the added allure of having been shot in Singapore. It was produced by Roger Corman (as was Bogdanovich’s Targets), and supplies further evidence of Corman’s risk-tasking side. It received great reviews but generally tanked when it came out; now, of course, it’s seen as an absolutely terrific film:

Gazzara worked with Bogdanovich again on the romantic comedy They All Laughed (1981). The film is charming, but it has a sort of sadness hanging over it. The killing of Dorothy Stratten was the first sad incident associated with the film, but then one considers that the NYC it shows is long gone (something mentioned by Bogdanovich in the commentary track he did for the DVD), that happy-go-lucky costar John Ritter died at a younger age of heart trouble, and that Gazzara and costar Audrey Hepburn (who was not unwell during the film, but looks oddly tired throughout) were carrying on an affair that lasted for a short while. The real-life attraction between the two informed their love scenes:

Gazzara was so effortlessly macho that he could take a role that was sort of off-kilter and stabilize it. He does that with the lead role of the poet Charles Serking in the great Marco Ferreri’s Tales of Ordinary Madness (1981). Serking is based on Charles Bukowksi, who wrote the source novel for the film, and there’s no question that, while Mickey Rourke might have been truer to Bukowski’s speaking voice (Snagglepus on booze), Gazzara was the dream version of Charles Bukowski, a macho boozer and brawler who was also acutely sensitive. In short, he had a LOT of fucking style:

But what will the average cable-viewer remember Ben G. for? His villainous turn in the super-schlocky Patrick Swayze vehicle Road House (1989). The movie is fun trash from beginning to end, and Gazzara makes a terrific villain, especially when he is able to tell off Swayze and then “beat him up,” courtesy of a much younger stuntman. Here Benny is, singing my mom’s fave, the whitebread cover of “Sh-Boom” by the Crew Cuts. Ben could be cool, even in the trashiest of trash flicks:

Gazzara suffered health problems in the last decade, including throat cancer that decimated his strong and clear voice. He was still a superb actor, so he thrived in supporting roles in more Road House-like crap and ambitious films like Lars Von Trier’s impressively abstract Dogville (2003). He also continued to work in live theater, playing in off-Broadway shows and receiving wonderful reviews.

He was not above hyping his work in the media, and perhaps one of the odder things I heard him on was the WOR-AM “Joey Reynolds Show” on the hour of the show that Joey dubbed “the Italian hour.” Il Grande Gazzara, who had once partnered with John Cassavetes and Peter Falk, was on that occasion sitting with a character actor (mob specialist) named “Cha-cha” and Joe Piscopo. At first I thought of this as a mighty fall for a guy who dwelt in the top tier of actors, but then I realized that despite whatever health problems he was having, Gazzara remained a working actor, and to plug the gigs he got, he had to do interviews.

The memory of that moment in his career where his opinions on acting were considered (on one radio show, at least) equal to those of Cha-cha and Piscopo makes me yearn for the type of interviews the European press conducted with him. Check him out here being interviewed by a French woman journalist for the show Cinema Cinemas on 42nd Street near Ninth Avenue. He holds forth on his favorite kind of part (“men who don’t always win the war”) and his love of reality in acting.

I’ll close this out with two clips related to Husbands. First, the nightmare vision of what the film might’ve turned out to be, if Cassavetes' strong radar for fine acting had ever slipped — here are Cassavetes, Gazzara, and Marty Ingels (!) cast as three poker-playing buddies in the goofy comedy If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium (1969).

And there is no better way to feel the real-life vibe that the Husbands trio gave off than to watch this amazing Dick Cavett show from 1970 with the three men as his only guests. It’s been noted that these guys were “the Rat Pack of independent film.” That ain’t half wrong:

Digging the discs: my latest DVD reviews

2012-02-08T21:19:00.008-05:00

I present "consumer guide" round-ups (thanks to Christgau for that handy phrase) on the Funhouse TV show on a regular basis. Here are the latest DVD reviews I've done for the DiscDish site.

Jerry Lewis as the Jazz Singer

Beat Takeshi's Outrage: Way of the Yakuza

Isabelle Huppert stars in Special Treatment

The original — and only version worth watching — U.K. seriesThe Office

Godard's masterwork Histoire(s) du Cinema

Darren McGavin stars in Mike Hammer: the Complete Series

Claude Chabrol’s brilliant Les Cousins

Bergman’s Face to Face

The indispensableThe Complete Jean Vigo

David Holzman's Diary, a perfect NYC indie

Hidden in Plain Sight: complete arthouse films for free on YouTube (Russell, Altman, Kaurismaki)

2012-02-02T17:58:00.009-05:00

I don’t like watching movies on a computer, and will do so only when the film in question is extremely rare and can’t be found in another format. However, I am in the minority these days, because everyone loves to watch feature-length films on laptops or portable devices that can’t possibly do honor to the visuals of the greatest filmmakers (although the same devices are terrific for TV series, which are predominantly radio shows decked out with stylish-looking visuals that rarely, if ever, have a place in the storytelling).

I used to regularly chronicle on this blog favorite YouTube posters who have made available very rare material or entire films. Since in just about every case, these are fan-generated accounts and the notion of c*pyr*ght comes into play, I figure I should point these accounts out, before the files go down. In this entry I’ll discuss two such accounts, which I discovered while doing research into Ken Russell.

The first poster, lilacwine85, has put up a very nice selection of clips and features representing the “high” end of the artistic spectrum. Mikhail Kaufman (aka the “real Man with a Movie Camera” who shot his brother “Dziga Vertov”’s masterpieces) sumptuously visual In Spring (1931) can be found here:

Agnès Varda’s L’Opera Mouffe (1958) is here:

As for Unkle Ken, two of his early short TV documentaries are up in their entirety. His vibrant 1960 portrait of the Taste of Honey playwright Shelagh Delaney (who died in November of last year) for the series Monitor, “Shelagh Delaney’s Salford”:

And his 1960 telefilm about the inhabitants of a London house where he used to live, “A House in Bayswater”:

Poster lilacwine85 has put up some lovely things (check out the shorter clips too), but the person whose uploads surprised the hell out of me is KingRabbit. The surprise came not only from the fact that this person has great taste in movies and uploaded the films as one long file each, but also because his/her uploads have now been up now for months, meaning the Russell postings were uploaded before “Unkle Ken” departed this mortal coil.

Perhaps they have stayed up because the copies of the films posted have French subtitles. This is no problem, though, as the majority of King Rabbit’s uploaded films are in English, so the subtitles are just a function of where the poster lives (I’m going to take a rather obvious leap here and say either it’s France or Quebec).

I am not one to advocate the blatant disregard of copyright — I’ll allow our hero, ”Uncle Jean” to do that for me — but if you’re interested in saving files from YT, you should already be well aware of savevid.com and keepvid.com.

And so, with that helpful hint in mind, I introduce you to “le stash” of King Rabbit, beginning with Frank Zappa’s extremely trippy experiment in mindfucking a cinema audience with odd lyrics, surreal happenings, and state-of-the-art (circa 1971) video fx. Me, I prefer Baby Snakes because it was my lengthy intro to Zappa-dom, but many fans from the earlier days prefer 200 Motels:

I am a devoted disciple of the work of Robert Altman, and thus would say if you haven’t seen his landmark film Nashville (1975), you’ve missed out on one of his most intricate and entertaining creations. Please see it on a movie screen first, but if you need a refresher course, it’s here:

As for the aforementioned “Unkle Ken” (that being his own spelling of “uncle” for his Facebook account), one of his best-remembered classical composer portraits is Song of Summer: Frederick Delius (1968):

One of his more flamboyant and engrossing composer biopics is The Music Lovers (1970). In re-watching his work to assemble recent Funhouse episodes, I was interested that, while he is best known for his composer-bios, he only made three of these for theatrical release. Mahler is probably the most intense, but the most kaleidoscopic is this portrait of Tchaikovsky:

The film that followed Music Lovers is indeed his masterpiece, The Devils (1971). King Rabbit has posted the version that has been released in France on DVD, and will soon be out in the UK on disc. It is missing the recently discovered seminal scene (which runs for over five minutes) called “The Rape of the Christ,” but it is still a potent and pointed statement about religious hypocrisy, and one of his finest stylized works:

Russell’s own personal favorite of all of his films was Savage Messiah (1972), because he felt a great kinship with the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and made his biography of the man a paean to the dedicated work (and attendant creative genius) of an artist:

Currently out of print in the U.S., Russell’s Salome’s Last Dance (1988) is a wonderfully weird rendition (read: dream) on Oscar Wilde’s play. It is sexy, it is strange, and it does have something to say about sexual politics. Catch it here:

King Rabbit has also put up films at a different address. Among his postings is Mizoguchi’s 1929 short “Tokyo March”:

Readers of this blog will know of my undying fondness for Vincent Price. KR has also posted a wonderful TV special he did in 1972, wherein he recites the work of Edgar Allan Poe:

Paul Morrissey made the Warhol films watchable, and one of his first films that was independent of Andy (aside from its title) was Andy Warhol’s Flesh (1968):

I reviewed the new Criterion release The Films of Jean Vigo a few months ago on the Funhouse TV show. Vigo’s classic Zero for Conduct (1933) was the inspiration for Lindsay Anderson’s youth revolution classic If…. (1968):

Given the fact that YouTube is now the home of the music video (so much for “music television”…), it makes perfect sense that Yellow Submarine (1968) should be present. It was a Beatles side-project that the band itself gave little attention to (besides the creation of four songs, and a three-minute live-action sequence), but the animators involved, led by Heinz Edelmann, did some exquisite work:

I feel that if a “literary” film can draw you back to reading, it has achieved its goal. Paul Schrader’s brilliant Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985) covers a lot of ground, and caused me upon first viewing to get to the library and start reading Yukio Mishima’s gorgeous (and gorgeously tortured) prose. It is a brilliant film:

I like using Andrew Sarris’s phrase “a subject for further research,” and for me one of those subjects is the amazing Swedish filmmaker Roy Andersson. I have Songs from the Second Floor (2000) and have been meaning to watch it for months. I will do so soon, but in the meantime…. (Note: French, not English subs.)

To show the rapid nature of the sharing that goes on these days, as I was checking this piece to upload it, I found that King Rabbit has struck again, putting up several more movies in their entirety, including the critically-favored Thai film Citizen Dog (2006) (with French subs), the Jodie Foster/Martin Sheen thriller The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976), the terrific period piece Cooley High (1975), and the French thriller (note: without English subs) Mortelle Randonée (1983).

The new title that came to my attention instantly, due to my love for the work of Aki Kaurismaki, was La Vie de Bohème (1992). The film is Kaurismaki’s deadpan, non-musical adaptation of the novel Scènes de la vie de Bohème, starring the finest AK actor, the late Matti Pellonpää, and featuring a supporting turn by Jean-Pierre Leaud:

Rock 'n' roll, rhythm and blues, and funk: A trio of musical Deceased Artistes

2012-01-27T01:31:00.024-05:00

The old adage about celebrities “dying in threes” means that sometimes actors are jammed in with authors, singers with filmmakers, and TV stars with composers. In the past month, three musical legends died in short succession. Two of them knew each other well (in fact one discovered the other), and the third individual was connected to them in terms of musical stylings, and the fact that he too was a soulful, effortlessly funky musician. (Some might argue that he wasn’t up to the standard of the other two musically, but I’ll offer evidence to the contrary below.)

Etta James was the last chronologically to depart (she died on January 20th, the next two gents left on the 17th). She is remembered primarily for “At Last,” an incredibly romantic song that has indeed been played to death over the past few years. She had a number of big hits, but that was her signature song, and much was made of the fact that when it was sung at Pres. Obama’s inaugural ball, the singer chosen was the pretty but utterly soul-less Beyonce. (Anytime you stack her up against the true r&b singers of the past and present, you find she’s… really, really pretty. And dances well too!)

James had some big battles in her life — against the music business’s treatment of “girl singers,” against drugs, and finally against leukemia and dementia. Those battles informed her absolutely gorgeous ballad singing. But first there was rock ’n’ roll.

The above song was “dirty’ in its day, so dirty that its title had to be changed from “Roll With Me, Henry” to “The Wallflower” (which is some kinda brilliant joke on someone’s part). The song was an “answer song” to Hank Ballard’s “Work With Me, Annie,” and was cowritten by Etta and Johnny Otis — but more on him in a minute. First, another sample of Etta rocking it out back when it really mattered, with the terrific “Good Rockin’ Daddy” and “Shortnin’ Bread Rock.” Never has the phrase “you better see that I’m well-fed” had less to do with food.

There is a dearth of live footage of Etta in her prime online. This terrific clip, which appears to be from the mid-Sixties, gives an indication of how electric she was. This woman did not fuck around:

We do have an ample amount of clips from her later career, especially of her dueting with other artists. The weirdest one has to be The Grateful Dead, the most appropriate is Chuck Berry (whose competitive streak comes out throughout this performance — he can’t stop “responding” to Etta’s vocals, and even does the duck-walk to draw attention away from her):

One of her other killer rock/r&b tunes, “Tell Mama,” also eclipses the hell out of the gorgeous but way-too-slick “At Last” for me. Her other indelible signature song was the heartache standard “I’d Rather Go Blind”:

Etta knew true emotion in music — her only cover album was a tribute to Billie Holiday. Here is one of the prettiest of what Sinatra used to call “saloon songs”:

She had impeccable and interesting choices in covers over the years. She did a great version of Alice Cooper’s “Only Women Bleed,” and in the early Seventies delivered gorgeous versions of three Randy Newman songs — the sexy “You Can Leave Your Hat On,” the emotion-riddled “Sail Away,” and Randy’s incredible ode to an uncaring deity, “God’s Song (That’s Why I Love Mankind).” This is perhaps the most perfect version of this atheist’s ode, sung in beautiful gospel tones:

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Etta’s initial mentor in the biz also died this past month, on the 17th. Johnny Otis was a 100% r&b/rock ’n’ roll legend whose obits made much of his many identities: musician, bandleader, songwriter, mentor, and DJ (for four decades!). Later in his career he left show biz for a while and served as a minister. Throughout his life he remained an activist for political causes and also had a deep interest in organic farming (!).

So there was all that feverish activity in his life, but the most interesting item about Otis was that he considered himself black but was in fact born a Greek-American. Brought up in an African-American section of Berkeley, he felt more at home among blacks, and assumed that identity (from Ioannis Veliotes to Johnny Otis) for good when he became a musician. He started as a jazz drummer and quickly became a bandleader. His biggest hit during this period was the haunting “Harlem Nocturne”:

Take in the raunchy sounding “The Midnight Creeper” and you’ll hear where his head was at in the Fifties. He was part of the wave of r&b acts who created what we know of as rock ’n’ roll — please listen to this scratchy old recording of “Rock Me Baby,” and you’ll know (as with Etta and her “rolling” with Henry) that r’n’r wasn’t intended to be background music for fucking, it was ABOUT fucking.

But that was hard to sell on AM radio, so more polite metaphors were necessary. Hence Otis’ biggest hit, with a riff taken off of Bo Diddley, “Wille and the Hand Jive.” Here a troupe of Broadway dancers show us that rock is safe for white people (while Johnny produces an “earworm” hook like no other):

Johnny’s other identity in the early years of rock was as the man who discovered a raft of major talents, including Etta James, Little Richard, Hank Ballard, Big Mama Thornton, and Jackie Wilson. While he was doing that, he also found time to release killer singles like “the Hash”:

Otis was a versatile musician who picked up on a bunch of genres, including Latin music (which we’ll get back to with our third Deceased Artiste), as in his sequel to “Hand Jive,” “Willie did the Cha-Cha.” He didn’t remain stagnant as the years went by, and the music made by his band, wonderfully called “The Johnny Otis Show,” moved with the times. Check out this awesomely funky number that posits a dance that probably never existed outside of Johnny’s vivid musical imagination:

And drink in this bluesy jazz tune, named, well… just listen…. (Barbara Morrison supplies the terrific vocal):

The singer on the “Watts Breakaway” above, Delmar Evans, joined Johnny and his virtuoso rock guitarist son Shuggie Otis for an album credited to “Snatch and the Poontangs” that contained some wonderfully dirty novelty music, including this old chestnut performed by many other artists including “Dolemite" himself, Rudy Ray Moore:

Although Mr. Otis was a man of God, and by all accounts an extremely moral individual, there is no other word to use to accurately describe his brand of raw rock ‘n’ roll than “raunchy.” In closing, I pass you “Low Down Dirty Dog Blues”:

******

The third member of this troika didn’t ever work with the first two, but his music overlapped with theirs, especially Otis’s, in its emphasis on soul, Latin, and funk. Jimmy Castor was a NYC boy (who grew up, according to which obit you read, in either the Bronx or the Sugar Hill section of Harlem) who first established himself in a doo-wop group called Jimmy and the Juniors. He wrote a song, “I Promise to Remember,” that became a hit for his friend Frankie Lymon.

He continued on a saxophonist and percussionist until his first hit in 1966, the Latin-inflected “Hey Leroy, Your Mama’s Callin’ You” (you don’t get many excellent direct-address titles in music).

Castor’s percussion work drives tracks from that time like “Southern Fried Frijoles” and his cover of Joe Cuba’s fucking awesome “Bang Bang” (go away, Donna Summer witcha “bad girls”).

Castor’s lyrics were always, how shall I put it, silly, but sublimely silly. Here he is in 1973 performing a medley of “Hey Leroy” (watch him kick ass on the timbales!) and the sequel-tune — yes, this is the full title — “Say Leroy (the Creature from the Black Lagoon is your father).”

Castor’s music was terrific and his lyrics were, yeah, pretty bizarre. Being a fan of novelty records, I love them to pieces, though, particularly because of their mix of funky music and nonsense lyrics. In 1972, he had his biggest hit with “Troglodyte (Cave Man),” which introduced the immortal refrain, “Gotta find a woman, gotta find a woman…”

And the equally immortal sequel, the “Bertha Butt Boogie”

As the Seventies continued, disco eclipsed funk and Castor was right in line with the dance beats of the time, as in the trippy and relentless instrumental “Psych Out.” His music was heavily sampled in later years by rap artists, and he set a precedent for other recording artists by suing the Beastie Boys for using a sample out of his “Return of Leroy” without credit or remuneration (he made a settlement, and later claimed he had pursued it not for the dough, but for the principle of the thing). One of his most “utilized” tunes, funky as all hell (minus the novelty lyrics), was “It’s Just Begun”:

My favorite piece of odd trivia about Castor is that he filled his albums with renditions of songs you wouldn't figure he'd cover. During his Latin period he covered "Winchester Cathedral," later on (during the funky era) it was Elton John's "Daniel" (lounge-y!), on another LP it was "Stairway to Heaven," and on one of his later disco-funk recordings he for some damned reason had a cover of "You Light Up My Life."

Since I do really love novelty records, let me close out with two of Jimmy’s silliest, his ode to the one and only Dracula:

And my favorite of all his songs, a tune that burned itself into my brain a quarter of a century or so ago. All bow down before “King Kong!” Here Jimmy performs the song’s opening verse live:

But here is the full version of the song with my favorite verse: “He didn’t dance or party/he spoke at times but hardly/One woman heard his love call/but he was too big and too tall.” Jimmy, we’re gonna miss you, Kamasami!

Ken Russell on “the Richard Lester style” and Spike Milligan

2012-01-10T18:14:00.017-05:00

I’m editing the last half of my 2008 interview with the late Ken Russell for upcoming Deceased Artiste episodes of the Funhouse TV show, and thought I’d share the clip embedded below. By way of explanation, a program of Russell’s early homemade shorts and some of his later oddities (including a screen test he shot for Twiggy) played at the Thalia Soho in the late Eighties. (The theater, now known as the Soho Playhouse, was indeed where I was interviewing Russell, whose only theatrical production, Mindgame, was mounted there.)

Among the offerings was “Portrait of a Goon,” a short that Russell made in 1959 for the TV show Monitor. The film is currently locked away from public view on the academics-only BFI site.

Chronicling a day in the life of the mighty Spike Milligan, the short surprised me because it included quick cuts, odd camera angles, and other aspects of what we now call “the Richard Lester style.” Lester famously directed Milligan and Peter Sellers in “The Running Jumping and Standing Still Film” (1960). The story goes that, when Lester was hired to direct A Hard Day’s Night, Goon-fan John Lennon was very impressed with this prior credit of Lester’s.

Watching the Russell short I began to think that, while Russell was certainly using that style a year before Lester, that perhaps its true source was neither “Unkle Ken” nor Richard L., but Spike himself. Although he never directed a film, Milligan’s work on The Goon Show on radio and in plays like The Bed Sitting Room (later, of course, adapted for film by Lester) indicated his love of momentum and jumping from situation to situation.

Whatever the case may be, two things remain inarguable:
—Richard Lester is an incredibly talented filmmaker (as was Russell, who at his best was a visionary)
—he was basing his style in part on the rhythms of silent comedy and the jump cuts introduced by Godard in A Bout de Souffle.

But, when one sees Russell’s “Goon” short, one realizes that Spike was indeed the *other* auteur behind the style that, after A Hard Day’s Night, became the standard way to edit rock music on film — and in commercials, and music videos, and…..

NOTE: To see the style pass down to a bunch of folks who would *never* credit the Spike, check out the first season of Laugh-In, which included blatant visual rips from "The Running Jumping and Standing Still Film." (Hey, if they could rob from Ernie Kovacs, why not Lester/Milligan also?)

New York, “Nu Yawk”: Deceased Artiste Lynn Samuels

2012-01-10T14:05:00.059-05:00

The best radio personalities hold a very special place in our hearts, despite the fact that we have never met them in person and are very unlikely to do so (unless you’re plotting a Play Misty for Me stalking campaign). Lynn Samuels, who died this past Xmas Eve at 69, had an ultimate “Nu Yawk” voice and was one of the most unconventional presences ever in the world of talk radio.

Lynn had an incredibly unique trajectory as a radio call-in host. In a few short years, she moved from a no-pay position at the legendary local Pacifica station in NYC, WBAI-FM, to being on the central talk-radio station in the Tri-State area, WABC-AM. And she did so with a voice that was, to put it kindly, “untrained” — you either enjoyed its nasal, often shrill, tonality, or you had to turn the dial.

When I first heard Lynn on WBAI in the early Eighties, I thought she sounded like Julie Kavner in her Rhoda incarnation. I very quickly got used to her voice because I enjoyed the content of her show which, more often than not, consisted of interviews with local folkies and comedians, calls from people who were further-out neurosis-wise than she, and a copious amount of Lynn complaining about something or other for minutes on end.

Lynn was from my home borough of Queens (no obit stated which part), and she fucking LOVED to complain. These complaints could range from the political (bellicose foreign policy) to local (reporting the dismal state of MTA service in NYC) to extremely personal (petty accounts of being pissed off by someone she passed on the street).

The degree and depth of her complaining was nothing short of miraculous, and that is why I kept on listening. The true appeal of media curmudgeons is that they make listeners feel content about their own life — Lynn often seemed to be mad at the world and everyone in it.

She started out on radio as an ardent Leftist and developed into a Right-wing contrarian. Thus, she developed a hearty loathing for Obama during the 2008 elections, claiming he was an “empty suit” and wasn’t a true progressive. I’ll go with her on the latter, but how did Lynn choose to attack him once he became president? By contesting the status of his birth certificate, thus placing her firmly in the crackpot category and obscuring what might have been genuine objections to his policies and time-wasting quest for “bipartisanship.”

So how could I and many, many other listeners be so addicted to a radio show hosted by a person with an abrasive voice whose political opinions got more and more jaded as time went on? Well, as was the case with George Carlin, Lynn was a disappointed idealist who sounded incredibly bitter when discussing politics, but could still revel in the simple pleasures that delighted her no end. As much time as she spent complaining that “we’re all fucked!” (and I will give her that one), was as much time as she took to discuss things she really loved.

In her WBAI days, I remember her keeping us apprised of the activities of various local folk-rockers, including Mark Johnson and the Wild Alligators, who supplied the theme song for her show “Part of the Act” (“everything is the same old thing/it’s all part of the act/it’s analogous to the fact/that it all comes back/to the same thing…”).

In later years, she would spend entire segments (on NYC’s biggest talk-radio station!) discussing things she’d found on sale, or a trash TV show that she was addicted to (man, did she love crap TV), or just flashing back to one of her earlier obsessions. I remember fondly a fangirl-ish interview she conducted with Julius La Rosa, whom she had idealized as a teen.

She truly loved and hated in equal measures, and what you heard on the radio was the real Lynn, for better or worse. Her friends confirmed this on the radio tributes to her that aired after her death. They also talked about another aspect of her career that made her one of the most unique talk-radio hosts ever: the fact that she had “day jobs” not before but *during* her mainstream radio career.

I remember her announcing on WBAI that she hawked newspapers on the corner of 57th St. and Fifth Ave. At least twice I made sure, when going to the Doubleday’s on Fifth between 56th and 57th, to walk up a block and hear her very distinct “Nu Yawk” voice hollering out a headline about Reagan (the paper was The New York Post).

Walter Sabo (right) has posted a wonderful article about how he recruited Lynn for her first paying gig in radio on Saturday afternoons on WOR. Going from no-pay WBAI to a mainstream station in one of the biggest markets in the country was a quantum leap, and an incredibly rare one. (To illustrate: the latest “new talent” announced for local talk-radio is Geraldo Rivera, whose career in TV news and “shock” daytime TV-talk is now apparently over.)

The WOR slot on Saturdays didn’t vault Lynn into the spotlight, but it did help her score her next, seminal job at WABC-AM five mornings a week doing lead-in for “the new guy,” Rush Limbaugh. Lynn was an incredibly odd presence on mainstream radio, and especially at ABC, because the station was slanted to the right.

At that time, she held to her Lefty beliefs, which were always colored by her own odd take on the issues. Here is a great fan-made compilation of moments from Lynn’s first months on WABC. The clip stats out with a rare TV interview with Lynn and her then-colleagues Grant and Barry Farber:

Lynn rarely argued issues on hard facts or logic. She responded viscerally, and her voice rose to a wild shriek at times when she was outraged. This reached a crescendo in 1990 when she was memorably paired with Farber (pictured) for two days. I remember those shows fondly as the most fucking abrasive radio I’ve ever heard. My memory was that Lynn was incredibly shrill during that pair of shows, but the sole fragment that has surfaced indicates that Farber was equally obnoxious — this was a team made in Radio Hell. Lynn’s behavior got her fired from WABC for the first time (she was dismissed on three separate occasions).

After the Farber debacle, Lynn ended up making ends meet by taking a job at a laundromat, where she made change and assigned the dryers to the customers. The fact that she went from a five-day-a-week mainstream talk-radio job to an hourly-wage position, and then came back to mainstream radio (she was rehired at WABC by John Mainelli, the guy who had hired her in the first place, but had left in the interim), makes her very unusual indeed in the world of entertainment.

Lynn’s career got more unusual: after her third firing from WABC in 2002, her WOR patron, Walter Sabo, got her a five-day-a-week gig at the Sirirus satellite “Left channel” in 2003. In 2011, after her politics had taken a sharp turn to the Right, or Libertarianism (or whatever the hell it was), she lost her slot on the Left channel and was reduced to two weekend morning slots.

At that point, according to one of the tributes, she once again took up a job at a laundry (this time in the West Village); this is disputed by her webmaster, who said it was never mentioned by her on-air (and, again, it's not the kind of thing she would've hidden from her listeners), and she never mentioned it to him. From what I could discern from her final shows, she deferred taking Social Security until she was 70, so she could receive the maximum amount — that’s a bet the government always wins, because in many cases (as happened to Lynn), you kick off before you’re eligible.
*******

During her stints at WABC, she developed the habit of cultivating friendships with Right-wing hosts and alienating the Left-wing ones. She got along famously with the uber-right-wing and genuinely nasty talk-radio NYC legend Bob Grant, and also befriended Limbaugh — who, according to Lynn, did offer her some job leads when ABC fired her, so that was indeed a good enough reason for her to like him, even though he remains a foully pompous broadcaster.

I lost track of Lynn after she was booted from ABC in 2002 because, despite my love of radio, I can’t justify paying over 100 dollars a year for satellite (read: the stuff you used to hear for free, now “niched,” a la cable television). I did look at her website several times a week, because she created a valuable news round-up, providing click-throughs to a shitload of interesting articles from both mainstream and partisan (Left and Right) websites.

Upon her death, thanks to one very generous blogger, who posted a number of her last Sirirus shows, and her webmaster Billy Masters, who posted not just one but two terrific podcasts (the first-linked offers the best cross-section of Sirius clips), I was able to “catch up” with Lynn.

What I heard was by turns jaw-dropping and touching. Her voice had that same “Qweenz” combination of nasality and shrillness that I remembered from my youth. Her petty complaint segments now took up a quarter of the show, and were as delightful as ever. (Like every died-in-the-wool New Yorker, I like hearing someone who makes me seem like a contented optimist.)

Her political shift was depressing, though. She always enjoyed a good argument, but in her incarnation on Sirius, she had moved into the Right-wing, Libertarian (read: conservatism with a “cool” edge), anti-government mindset. This was best illustrated when she advocated in a straightforward manner that the solution to the illegal immigrant problem was that “illegals” should be shot and killed at the border as they try to enter America. (She took great pride in telling listeners that Sean Hannity had told her that was too extreme, “they are human beings…”).

However, as she discussed this ridiculous position with a viewer two weeks before her death, the caller then brought up capital punishment. Lynn made clear that she opposed executing death-row prisoners on principal, citing facts she had clearly learned in her Left days (“it actually costs more to execute an inmate than it does to keep him in prison for life”).

When the Right-wing caller noted that these two positions didn’t jibe, Lynn simply noted that, “I know it makes no sense — I’m very inconsistent.” This kind of illogic was one of many reasons it struck me as sad that Lynn wanted to be accepted by her Right-wing radio colleagues — her opinions were too emotional even for them, and she remained a weird mascot figure, a former member of “the loony Left” who was now more extreme than they were.

Her friend (and one of the few Left-wing hosts she hadn’t alienated entirely) Mike Feder noted on one of the two very touching tribute shows he dedicated to her that, in the early 2000s, she carried on a “Platonic” love affair with Matt Drudge, the Winchell-wannabe conservative web-hack for whom she worked as a call screener (and constantly, on WABC, defended as “not conservative”). Drudge, according to Feder, broke Lynn’s heart.

As she praised the Right-wing hosts (she looked forward eagerly to every broadcast by hate-speech specialist and thickly-accented ex-NYCer Michael Savage), Lynn seemingly went out of her way to openly insult Left-wing hosts. I remember hearing Randi Rhodes (pictured), another host who has kept her deep Brooklyn accent, saying that Lynn had been rude to her. WEVD/WWRL host Sam Greenfield (now of WVNJ) has noted on-air that Lynn made a disparaging remark about his daughter that he couldn’t forgive. In addition to these personal slights, she often expressed on Sirius her absolute loathing for Stephanie Miller, Thom Hartmann, Ed Schultz, and her "nemesis," Alex Bennett.

Thus, when she died, Feder, Mike Malloy, Richard Bey, and Alan Colmes had nice things to say about Lynn, but several Lefties avoided making any personal comments, positive or negative, in their death notices (as with Amy Goodman, whom one Samuels diehard fan said had been called “a cunt” by Lynn) or were brief and praiseworthy, but also totally honest (as with Lionel, who praised her unique on-air style but did note she was a “big pain in the ass”).

Setting Lynn’s simplistic (and often downright ridiculous) political opinions aside, I do think that she was a very good broadcaster and a top-notch entertainer. This became apparent to me again — and erased all the bile she had been unleashing — when I listened to a number of her final shows and heard segments where she just chatted calmly and amiably with her callers.

At its best, her program was a hipper sort of coffee klatch (listen to Lynn describing her experiences taking ketamine for an explanation of the “hipper” label), a 21st-century update of the friendly “personality” radio that existed in the Forties and Fifties, and continued on mostly with “women’s shows.” (In NYC, WOR has had the lock on this type of program for decades, from the heyday of Arlene Francis and Pegeen and Edward Fitzgerald, to the only program of that kind still on in this area, Joan Hamburg’s show.) When she was calm, Lynn was an engaging host who could transform her pop culture tastes, her preference in food and shopping, and show-biz gossip, into very engaging “appointment radio.”

The few full-length radio tributes indicated that she was a person whose heart had been broken both romantically and professionally several times, and who had virtually turned into an agoraphobic (she did her show from her Woodside apartment, and bragged at the end that she only left her home to shop).

She will be remembered for a long while by her listeners. I’m glad Billy Masters is uploading more “everyday” moments from her WABC and Sirius shows. I’d of course love to re-hear the “prehistory” WBAI hours and those stunning, shrieking pair of days with Barry Farber. There are a scant few clips of her on YouTube (just as there are very few photos of her online). Here is Lynn in her what was surely her only movie role (!), and here she banters with an ABC newscaster, exhibiting her sometimes sick sense of humor:

In the final analysis, Lynn was a one-of-a-kind personality who was never “professional” in the standard sense of that word. She was, again, an entertainer who possessed what was definitely the most "un-radio” voice ever heard on the radio….

"Hugo": a love letter to cinema (and respite from Leo!)

2011-12-31T00:44:00.016-05:00

I’ve already noted on this blog my great disappointment in the beautifully crafted but soulless work produced by Martin Scorsese in the years since Kundun. His latest film, Hugo, contains several elements that would seem to make it yet another venture into multiplex-land: a massive budget, a kid protagonist, a “heartwarming” promotional campaign, and 3D. Instead, the film is the best thing Scorsese has made in a decade and a half, and the first time his holy cinephilia has been “smuggled” (his phrase from Personal Journey) into a fictional narrative.

The film is a few minutes too long — Scorsese can't really answer his own question to young filmmakers, “is it as tough as Bresson?” (read: lean) — and is also incredibly sentimental. In this instance, though, the sticky-sweet sequences are evenly spaced out, and in the latter half they are hooked securely to the love of cinema in a way that makes them quite touching.

In the end, there are two key elements that make Hugo vastly different from the last decade of Scorsese “pictures”:

— it was made in England with a predominantly British cast, thus ensuring that no wildly miscast American star (Cameron Diaz, Gangs of New York), comatose lead (Nicolas Cage, Bringing Out the Dead), or preening wonder boy (Marky Mark, The Departed) shows up to utterly disrupt the narrative.
— no Leonardo DiCaprio (hosanna)!

The greatest joy of Hugo is that it seems to exist for an actual reason (was/is there any reason for The Departed to exist — and be 151 minutes long?), and that reason is for Scorsese to use state-of-the-art technology to conjure up the most primitive cinema there was, and the most magical: the works of Georges Méliès. It’s a perverse decision to be sure, but one that succeeds beautifully.

3D is a gimmick, one that was created in the Fifties to combat television and has been reintroduced into the marketplace to combat movie downloads. It has held no interest for me, as it has been used to gussy up the kid-centric fodder that occupies every multiplex everywhere. However, if this resurrected and improved technology is used with an experimental purpose in mind — as in Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams and Wenders’ Pina — the effects can be remarkable.

In Hugo Scorsese first creates a clockwork universe that seems derived in equal parts from Tati and Jeunet, and then takes us into the less intricate but more riveting world of magician-turned-filmmaker Méliès (right). Though chronologically “primitive,” Méliès’ films remain far more impressive than the computer-crafted flicks that currently flood into the multiplex.

So, as Herzog used the third dimension to convey the nuances of prehistoric cave paintings and Wenders spotlighted the spaces between dancers, Scorsese uses the current technology to underscore the hard work and surplus of imagination that went into Méliès’ handcrafted films. Hugo may have a young protagonist (two in fact), but it aims quite higher than the usual raft of anthropomorphic animal (or doll, or car) movies that are being presented in 3D (oh, and that nightmare of tedium that is “motion capture” — just make a fucking cartoon, guys, or a live-action feature!).

Here Scorsese draws on the tradition of French films about children leading independent lives (Forbidden Games, Truffaut’s work, and a healthy dash of Zazie dans le Metro). The constant succession of chases in Hugo does parallel what goes in most kid-centric H’wood pap, but here it evokes the races-against-time that distinguished silent cliffhangers from the likes of Feuillade and Griffith.

As noted, I detected the influence of Jean-Pierre Jeunet throughtout Hugo, and this is just as it should be, since, as I’ve noted on the Funhouse TV show, the most interesting uses of CGI effects in the past decade has occurred in French films (Rohmer’s The Lady and the Duke, Vidocq, every film in French by Jeunet), creating distinctive period pieces, but also fashioning interdependent universes in the Metro, a bar, an apartment building, and so forth (take a glance at Amelie, or Jeunet and Caro’s Delicatessen, and you’ll see the blueprint for Hugo).

Scorsese demonstrated his debt to the French New Wave in his sublimely rough-edged Seventies masterworks (think of the Alka Seltzer scene in Taxi Driver, evoking Godard’s Two or Three Things…). Here he openly pays tribute to Godard and Truffaut by having an “expert” (Méliès, played by Ben Kingsley, above) supply an entertaining lecture on the beginnings of cinema, looking straight at us. Kingsley’s Méliès is every expert Uncle Jean introduced to explain something in detail to a character, as well as every Truffaut character who spoke directly to us rather than another character, to tell a story from the past.

A few quibbles aside, Hugo is the film that older Scorsese acolytes of old have been waiting for — giving us a respite from the deadening central presence of Leo. It’s a film that reminds us exactly how expert a filmmaker Scorsese is, putting his technical proficiency at the service of a storyline that evokes genuine emotion and wonder.

I can only hope that Scorsese continues to make British or European-themed films, as it can reinvigorate him as it has reinvigorated Woody Allen. Never forget that European and British funding allowed Funhouse deity Robert Altman to survive when he was out of favor in Hollywood (which was quite often).

I’d love to see “le grand Marty” produce another picture that is “as tough as Bresson”; I’m not sure that’s ever going to happen again, now that he’s infatuated with big, large, massive, colossal budgets. I’ll settle in the meantime, though, for something he really cares about, that isn’t a star vehicle and is worth rewatching. Merci, MS.

*****
Méliès' work is available in profusion all over the Internet because (unless the film in question has been wildly tinkered with), it has fallen into public domain. Thus, you can see numerous copies of his most mind-warping films, but I would recommend these as a “starter kit.” First, the “greatest hit,” featured heavily in Hugo, “Voyage to the Moon”:

“The Man with the Rubber Head,” from 1901:

“The Merry Frolics of Satan,” from 1906:

“Fantastic Butterfly,” from 1909

Three Jewish comedians on the topic of Christmas presents

2011-12-23T00:05:00.009-05:00

So these three Jews walk into a department store… no, no, that’s very politically incorrect. However, since I want to salute the holiday without trotting out the same tunes you hear ALL the time, and I certainly don't want to go anywhere near the religious content of the occasion, which (let’s face it) has nothing at all to do with what goes on around this money-centric country anyway. The Yuletide is all about the gifts, and so there is no better subject to be tackled by comedians in search of an Xmas single. (When people did release singles, that is. I am old.)

In this spirit I offer three Jewish comics from different comedic backgrounds supplying their takes on Xmas. First, the rarest track of the three, one I personally uploaded to YT, Marty Feldman’s “A Joyous Time of the Year.”

This is included in a CD release called “I Feel a Song Going Off” that is made up of the contents of a 1971 Marty LP called The Strange World of Marty Feldman, plus extra tracks which may or may not have been singles. Marty was a true original who did Keaton-precise physical comedy (see his “Loneliness of the Long Distance Golfer”), but he was also extremely funny as a manic character comic (watch this sketch). Here is his Xmas ditty:

A few years later, Albert Brooks released this single written by him and Harry Shearer. Interestingly, Albert was not a dad when this came out, but had children later in life. It’s a nice and nasty piece of business that comes from the period when Albert was a wonderfully abrasive comic presence (see my article on his transformations as a comedian and filmmaker). From 1974, “A Daddy's Christmas”:

And finally, since we never heard from him this past Labor Day (or since), I’ll close out with the “unkillable Jerry” (French variant title of one of his comedies). Here he laments the crappiness of his gifts with a song that is a lot more listenable than “All I Want for Christmas is My Two Front Teeth” or “I Ain’t Getting’ Nuttin’ for Christmas (’Cause I Ain’t Been Nuttin’ But Bad).” Herewith Jerry’s “I Had a Very Merry Christmas” — whatever you think of it, it’s worth it just to hear his pronunciation of the name “Minnie the Mermaid” (and, yes, I uploaded this one too -- these things need to be heard!):

Thanks as always to Jim G. for his diligent work unearthing the rarest comedy LPs found on the Net. His hard work is invaluable.

Arrogance, Eloquence & Intelligence: Deceased Artiste Christopher Hitchens

2011-12-18T18:36:00.028-05:00

In terms of having read Hitchens’ writing, I am severely undernourished, so I will speak about his importance as a media personality and a public intellectual, which is a very rare and valuable commodity in the culture of idiocy (oh, sorry… oversimplification) that has ruled in America since the B-movie actor was Pres. Hitchens could be, and quite often was, a major pain in the ass to listen to or read, if you disagreed with him. As a Lefty who enjoyed his columns in The Nation, I found his later discussions of how the Iraq War was a just one (against “Islamofascism”) endlessly annoying — more than likely because I wanted one of the best media intellectuals on my “side” and not putting his impressive intelligence in the service of something that was so clearly wrong.

But Hitchens, like any good intellectual, argued on a higher plane than most individuals whom you encounter on a daily basis, so even his most stridently wrongheaded arguments had a grounding in facts and were presented with a force that is rarely encountered outside of academic settings.

Hitchens had personality, dammit, whether he was right or wrong, and his lectures, print interviews, and TV appearances exuded the kind of contentious brilliance that was de rigeur in the days of Norman Mailer, William F. Buckley, and Gore Vidal (thankfully we still have Vidal among us, an American national treasure and a rapier-sharp speaker), but has sadly disappeared from sight.

Hitchens was defined for many Americans by his English accent, incredible erudition, his linearity of thought, the reputation as a massive smoker and drinker, and yes, his obnoxiousness in interview and debate settings. Watch this wonderful clip from the fucking awful MSNBC show Scarborough Country and you’ll see him in fine form, telling off a representative of Jerry Falwell whom he’s supposed to be debating about the “war on Christmas.”

The fact that Hitchens didn’t suffer fools gladly made him a joy to watch, and this impatience made him invaluable when confronted with ridiculous belief systems like the “selfishness is good” Objectivism cult of Ayn Rand. His comments here decimate the whole Randian philosophy (plus her crappiness as a writer) in a scant few minutes:

He began as a socialist, a Trotskyite in fact, and was a heralded writer for Leftist publications until his “Islamofascist” period, which was followed by what seemed to be a move back to the Left (perception… and American politics!) with his decision to devote his attention to the dangers of organized religion and to explore his atheism.

Throughout his life, however, he remained a man of ideas who wrote books about authors and politicians he idolized (Orwell, Paine, Jefferson), while taking on people whose mythologies he felt concealed their hypocrisy (Kissinger, Clinton, Mother Theresa).

At times it seemed like he pursued conflict for its own sake. At one point he made a strident, Jerry Lewis-like, incorrect pronouncement in Vanity Fair about women comedians not being as funny as men — a topic that can be debated endlessly, but I think has much more to do with the audience reception (that audience including Hitchens), and the cult of personality that surrounds humorists and comedians. The question is, will straight men ever be cult followers for a woman comic as they would for a male? Will other women?

That debate truly felt like it was “Hitch” just honing his contrarian pain-in-the-ass image, although I have to fully agree with his savage attack on the inherent unfunniness of Bob Hope. Sure, Hitchens was ignoring the extremely entertaining movies Hope made in the Forties and early Fifties, but by the Sixties the Old Ski Nose was truly agonizing to watch (his specials from the Sixties through the Nineties remaining interesting more as cultural curios than classic comedy). Hitchens was one of the few to write about this after Hope died.

Hitchens was thus an invaluable voice even when he was being petty and bitchy about something that just popped into his head — his positions required that the listener/reader think in order to respond. He addressed the issue of whether his ire was fabricated in this very good C-SPAN interview:

I believe his decision to deconstruct “the Mother Theresa myth” was extremely important — so many people blindly worship the lady that Hitchens’ contention that her beliefs (among them, that suffering is “holy”) were wildly illogical and in fact detrimental to the people she “gave her life to” was something that needed to be said. He backed this up with facts about the way her missions operated, and how she moved among world leaders while espousing her message about the “biggest crime” (abortion).

A short-form version of his argument against her can be seen in this segment from Penn and Teller: Bullshit!, but a full thirty-minute documentary he made, Mother Theresa: Hell’s Angel, is available on YT:

Without question, what wound up being Hitchens’ legacy is his devotion to advocating and explaining atheism to those who are still tethered to the reassurances of religion. He lacked the scientific background and logical precision of Dawkins, but his lectures and interviews on the topic were never less than brilliant.

One YT poster put together an expert little montage of some of the best moments from his public debates and TV appearances. Herein you find him making some absolutely superb intellectual points, as well as a few moments where Hitch seems, like good old Norman Mailer, to be playing a “heel” wrestler to an antagonized audience:

What he shared with Dawkins was the ability to point out to the “faithful” that atheists could enjoy life with as much fervor as those who felt they had a safety net in the afterlife. Here both men speak at one of Hitchens’ last public appearances, at the Texas Freethought Convention two months ago. Dawkins gives a nicely sentimental tribute to his prickly debate partner and colleague in rationalism. It's a very moving clip, especially during the visibly weakened (physically, not mentally) Hitch's turn at the mic:

There are literally hundreds of Hitchens clips on YT and even a Hitchens channel. The best way to end this piece, though, is to spotlight his statements on death, first in an interview with Anderson Cooper talking about how the faithful were hoping for him to experience a “deathbed conversion”. Here are his comments about the key use of the afterlife as a come-on in religion:

Most of Hitchens’ fans were taking swigs of his favorite Johnnie Walker Black on the day of his death. I am not fond of the taste of whiskey, so I salute his memory as I can, with a clear thought and a rationalist’s admiration. Yes, he could be massively annoying, but we need many more people who can annoy the way that Hitch did.

British humor 8: Robin Ince

2011-12-09T01:54:00.050-05:00

I speak a lot about the thin line that separates high art and low trash in this blog and on the Funhouse TV show (and was glad to see our friend "Bava Tuesdays" pick up on a remark I have made frequently about the factor that unites them both). Robin Ince is a fellow traveler in the art/trash appreciation biz, and his comedy reflects his unbridled fascination with both the highest forms of literary endeavor and the most unimaginably silly schlock. And for that I salute him.

I became aware of Ince through import DVDs of Ricky Gervais’ standup. Robin is a personal friend of Gervais and was his opening act on two tours. Even in the short sets included on the DVDs it was evident that Ince had already refined his stage persona: a delightfully cranky, sarcastic middle-aged man who is very disturbed by stupidity:

Ince has refined his standup since working with Gervais (and he's no longer tormented by his prank-prone super-celeb friend). The next time I came across him was as a confederate of a few of the British comics whose work I’ve profiled here and covered in depth on the Funhouse TV show, including Stewart Lee and Richard Herring. In the last few years, Robin has carved out a niche for himself as a top-notch “compere” (the English — actually French — term for MC) and an excellent radio/podcast host.

To put it simply, Ince is an “egghead comedian,” and I say that not as an insult but as a compliment. He is an outspoken rationalist (the correct term for atheist) and now discusses public perceptions of science (good, bad, and indifferent) in his standup. The only comic in America who has similar concerns is Chris Rush, who comes from a slightly different place but shows an equal enthusiasm for supplying humorous layman’s explanations of scientific phenomena and natural oddities (curiously, his scientist hero, Rupert Sheldrake, is British, and Ince’s are Americans, Carl Sagan and Richard Feynman).

Ince currently cohosts two wonderful and different podcasts with a great degree of energy and quick wit. The free-form interview podcast Utter Shambles he cohosts with the exuberant and delightful comic Josie Long. The ‘cast finds the duo talking to the occasional author (including scientists and comics genius Alan Moore), but mostly the guests are their fellow comedians, including that Lee fellow, Mark Steel, Stephen Merchant, Tim Minchin, and “elder statesmen” Alexei Sayle and Terry Jones.

The other podcast, The Infinite Monkey Cage, originates as a Radio 4 show. Ince cohosts with physicist Brian Cox (whose documentaries are on American cable, if ya can find ‘em). Ince and Cox tackle a specific issue in each episode (“Is Philosophy Dead?” “Science and the Supernatural,” “The Origin of Life”) with guests from the scientific community (who get to show their humorous side) and at least one comedian (who gets to show his/her serious side).

Ince’s premiere achievement, however, has to be the annual live show “Nine Lessons and Carols for a Godless Christmas.” This rationalist celebration of the Yuletide season is something that Americans can only see thanks to YouTube postings and releases from the invaluable independent DVD label Go Faster Stripe. In addition to the Nine Lessons… events, GFS has released a full-length standup DVD, Robin Ince Is as Dumb as You, which has some wonderful material on it and a lot of extras (including outtakes and a spirited interview), all with an audio commentary from Ince (who can be quite a loquacious gentleman and is very fond of footnotes).

Dumb as You is a lot of fun, but if you’d like a more succinct intro to Robin and the world of talented and dauntingly brilliant folks he hangs around with, I’d recommend checking out the DVD of the 2009 Nine Lessons show (there is also a CD available of the 2010 show ). As the host, he offers some of his best routines in between the acts — including a gem about getting caught in a “YouTube loop,” which NEEDS to be on YT itself.

The Nine Lessons shows — which take place in two weeks in London and are already sold out for this year — boast an impressive roster of performers that is split between scientist-authors (Cox, Simon Singh, Bad Medicine writer Ben Goldacre, and the man who drives “the faithful” crazy in a wonderful way, Mr. Richard Dawkins) and comedians (Herring, Lee, Long, Peep Show's Issy Suttie, and the indescribably weird and wonderful character comic Waen Shepherd).

Here’s a nice slice of Robin talking about "boring science" at Nine Lessons:

*****
Ince’s melding of rational thought, fun scientific anecdotes, and cranky comedy is impressive, but the reason I’m writing this profile is to call attention to a concept I consider his premiere achievement — especially for folks like myself who both love and have copyedited some very bizarre vanity-press books. The concept is the “Bad Book Club,” and Robin provided the back story for it in the interview found on the Dumb as You DVD: how his precious collection of records was literally covered in shit (no joke) by a plumbing problem that found his neighbors’ waste entering his house and destroying his stuff (as a fellow collector, I cringe even recounting the tale). His efforts to recreate his record collection, with the help of Stewart Lee, were detailed on a radio special called “How Robin Got His Groove Back” (that was up online on the essential fistoffun.net, which is very sadly not online at the moment I write this).

This traumatic event jarred him into looking in a different direction for entertainment, and this is when the always relaxing and mind-warping pursuit of schlock came in. Ince haunted charity shops, looking for the most insane and outré titles he could find. He began to read excerpts from these books onstage, and set up entire shows around them, simply called “the Book Club,” in which the audience was encouraged to bring their own terrible tomes. There isn’t much footage of Robin doing his “book club” readings, but a few clips have surfaced. Here is the finest visual sample available, done for New Humanist magazine:

The best way to enjoy this wonderful concept is to read his book Robin Ince’s Bad Book Club, which finds him ruminating on the high weirdness he found on charity shop bookshelves. His rules were simple: he never paid over £3 for a book, and he even found some choice items left on trains and in waiting rooms. The fact that he wasn’t looking for a specific piece of crap-lit meant he discovered things that were so wildly marginal as to make his book-club tome a must for deep-fried kitsch enthusiasts. Among the oddities:

—guides to help women find husbands, and to aid men in “picking up sexy girls”
—UFO encounter screeds
—inappropriately lurid studies of the sex lives of animals
—awful, un-ghost-written, celebrity bios
—specialist poetry collections (including a book of Elvis poems and odes to TV news anchors)
—a two-fisted "men's novel" about a hardboiled cop who has to overcome his hatred of particle physics
—(the finest) a Christian gynecological romance called The Sign of the Speculum

Ince summarized his choicest finds in a best-of short list for The Guardian, but there are items in his book that are just too wonderful for words. Among them is Starlust, a Eighties collection of fans' sex fantasies about pop stars. He cites the book’s main pull quote — “If there was a nuclear war I’d be thinking, is Boy George safe?”— and tells us the heartbreaking story of a woman who cried herself to sleep at night because her husband wasn’t anything like Barry Manilow.

The one fantasy that is going to stay with me for some time is from a woman who confesses that she’s excited by pain, and thus wishes her favorite pop stars were in torment so she could be turned on by it. Her most complicated scenario involves Debbie Harry and Chris Stein suffering from fatal diseases, with the only cure being intercourse. The sex would be excruciatingly painful for both of them, but that would only serve to turn this fangirl on more…. Tales like these offer sufficient proof as to why Ince refers to these insane books as “printed heroin.”

I heartily recommend Robin Ince’s Bad Book Club, and only wish it had sold well enough to encourage him to write a follow-up. In the meantime, I can content myself with the knowledge that there is a kitsch-culture obsessive who is as taken with awful prose as myself and Funhouse viewers.

In Robin’s infrequently updated but very funny Wordpress blog he documents an experiment he attempted in 2010, to shed some of his thrift-shop book and DVD acquisitions by reading the first chapters of different books each night (ditto with watching the first chapters of DVDs) to see what he could easily give away to his standup audiences. The joy comes not only from his wry observations about these odd items, but also from the sheepish confessions he makes about keeping the bulk of the books/discs he looked at. One could expect no less from an obsessive collector.

*****
Two of the best Ince clips available online. First, a fine bit about TV news that is timely when I write this, as he addresses the fictitious "war against Christmas":

Log TV: News Log – Robin Ince Hates News

And perhaps his best routine, about “intelligent design” (I'm not sure who the accordionist is, but the geeky-looking fellow doing an interpretive rendition of Ince's words is Lee and Herring colleague Ben Moor):

Funhouse flashback: "The strange world of vanity publishing"

2011-12-08T00:44:00.012-05:00

I'm currently reading, and thoroughly enjoying, the obsessive and very funny bibliophile chronicle Robin Ince's Bad Book Club (more on Robin in a later blog entry), which includes in its front matter the following statement “He does not believe the books described within are bad books. They are just different.” This put me in mind of my own favorite “different” books, the vanity press titles I used to copyedit, proofread and write cover copy for (yes, I've had a few odd jobs in publishing).

I won't attempt to offer wry observations on these works, since they don't need them; they speak for themselves. I let them do so a few times a number of years ago on the Funhouse TV show.

I hereby present the pertinent two-thirds of the fourth (and best) early episode, from 1996, where I presented vanity-press books. Included are numerous unusual covers, several mind-boggling titles, and extremely ripe and bizarre prose. I repeatedly assert on-air that I'm not making fun of these books, because I do know that in many cases they are the fruit of many, many hours of labor by their utterly sincere authors. Plus, the writer of the above title lives in NYC and might've seen the show. I know how easily fetish-folk take offense and didn't want him running after me on a city street brandishing a wet rain slicker.

The first part of the presentation features a raft of eye-catching covers and unusual titles:

The second part finds me sifting through more covers and reading from two of the more memorable items, a book of “observations” and a very strange fictional narrative written by a woman who has a fiendish plan to stop her daughter from having premarital sex. You can't make this stuff up:

Where Taste Is Not an Issue: the wonders of Toronto's "Honest Ed's" discount store

2011-11-30T23:28:00.033-05:00

Jean Shepherd often speculated about what future civilizations would make of America — he maintained that our “slob art” (cat clocks, trash souvenirs, risqué trinkets) would outlive us and might well provide the only trace of our existence. Discount stores fascinate me for this very reason — while some of the stock moves quickly and is replenished, there are always shelves and shelves (and in many cases, even entire departments) of merchandise that you know will never sell.

The closer a discount store is to a museum, the more I love it. And thus I love Toronto’s “Honest Ed’s,” an emporium of cut-rate items, a department store of demented dreams, a church devoted to the theatrical profession and, yes, a mecca for both those who want a “good deal” and those invigorated by the palpable presence of the past in a “brick and mortar” setting.

Honest Ed’s is a sensory overload from its façade inwards. Giant, casino-like signs advertise the place, but what makes its exterior so singular (okay, downright crazy) are a number of signs sporting unattributed “reviews” of the store that are actually just bad jokes (corkers out of an antiquated joke book). Such as “Honest Ed’s no midwife — but the bargains he delivers are real babies!”

There is even a fake entrance (a non-functioning bank-safe door facing the street) that you are not allowed to enter unless you have “access.” In case you didn’t notice the intended playland-amusement aspect of the place from the exterior, when you enter you pass through revolving gates and are confronted with a funhouse mirror (a guy named Ed who created his own funhouse, how silly).

Various signs, all in the same handwriting (presumably created through a printing process — unless there is some old man with a magic marker chained in the store’s basement), welcome you, inform you that you shouldn’t steal, and also let you know about the store’s departments, which curiously include a dentist’s office and a beauty parlor. Honest Ed’s takes up a full block on Bloor Street and is virtually a self-contained city, lacking only a post office. (One YouTube store-tour video shows an immigration counselor on premises whom I must’ve missed on my visit.)

Once you’ve entered the place, two things strike you immediately: low-cost merchandise is spread out as far as the eye can see; and 8x10 stills, theater posters, and cardboard standees are mounted on every pillar and inch of wall space available. Think about how many pillars used to be in your local “5 and 10,” then consider anywhere from 20 to 40 photos adorning each one, and you have a small idea of how many headshots of theatrical notables are hanging in Honest Ed’s.

The first star you see is Robert Goulet, dining with “Honest Ed” Mirvish and his wife in the late Fifties (years before Camelot) and the last few autographed pics you see at the checkouts are, in giant poster-sized reproductions, Frank, Dino, and… Jack Carter? (Oddly I never spotted a single Sammy autograph — and you know he played Canada!). Also, pics of Mirvish meeting “the Queen Mum” and Prince Phillip (no shot with Queen Liz, sadly).

The rampant show-biz ephemera is the single element that differentiates Honest Ed’s from any other discount store or emporium du schlock. For Ed Mirvish was indeed a major entrepreneur in Canadian theater, who used the money he made from Honest Ed’s and his restaurants to buy and build Toronto theaters and to arrange for a steady flow of pre-B’way and West End shows to come into town (they were either “prior to a London run” or “straight from Broadway” — he caught the hits coming and going).

Now I have absolutely no interest in present-day Broadway theater (to quote Sondheim, “[Broadway] is never going to be what it was. You can't bring it back. It's gone. It's a tourist attraction”). Revivals, songbook shows, and extravaganzas don’t interest me in the slightest (and yet, as readers of this blog know, I love musicals — and yes, I’m straight).

Mirvish Productions, Ed’s company, has continued to flourish, bringing the latest hit musicals to Toronto for theatergoers and tourists who eat such things up with a spoon. Honest Ed’s offers a chronicle of North American (and British) theater during a more interesting time, though — the period from the Sixties to the Nineties that Ed booked shows into the Royal Alexandra Theater (his first acquisition, in 1962) and the Princess of Wales (built by him in 1993).

Thus, the store is simply plastered with autographed pics of actors, comedians, and singers who appeared at Ed’s theaters. Accompanying these are hundreds of even older headshots of luminaries like Helen Hayes, Katharine Cornell, and even John Barrymore. These are either from Ed’s own collection or they were stored in the theaters he acquired, since they definitely date back to the Thirties.

So the legends — Piaf (misspelled “Piaff” on the wall), Katharine Hepburn, Ingrid Bergman — are mixed in with the latter-day stars (Liza, Ann-Margret, Tony Bennett, Peter O’Toole) and the fellows who I’m sure Ed Mirvish envied, given his penchant for comedy (Henny Youngman, the aforementioned [poster-sized!] Jack Carter, Jackie Mason, etc).

Probably a couple of thousand show-biz 8 x 10s — and various Mirvish family photos and pics related to the store itself as well — are therefore layered on top of discount merchandise. But what exactly is on sale at Honest Ed’s? Basically everything from clothing to household appliances, food, and, yes, a blissful amount of “slob art.” Canadian moose key chains sit a few aisles over from glow-in-the-dark rosary beads and the astounding WALL of Elvis busts, nearly every one spray-painted in an inappropriate fashion — although the “space Elvis,” Ziggy Stardust-ish chrome/silver version somehow seems oddly right on.

Perhaps the most dazzlingly out-of-place area in the store is a section of the second floor where a number of giant sideboard-sized music boxes, organs, and large statues that adorned Ed’s theaters and restaurants are gathering dust and amazement in equal portions (although locals in search of a bargain walk right on by). Some pics of this section can be found here and here. Check out the steep price affixed to one of the items here. A short video tour of that area from the same intrepid YT poster:

This area of the store is strictly a museum and little more, since the statues and instruments are priced at tens of thousands of dollars. Perhaps some of the items are even worth that lofty amount — but if they are, what in hell are they doing alongside of the discount coats and underpants? Such questions cannot be asked at Honest Ed’s….

I was in the store for something like 90 minutes and experienced a range of emotions from amusement to sadness for a long-gone era, to something like a headache, giving way to a giddy, slightly high feeling — helped in no small part by a scary moosehead clock (right) and some mega-trippy 3D wall hangings that depicted, among other things, a Manhattan skyline composed of pink and baby blue skyscrapers. (One of my two purchases was wholly needed Funhouse reading matter, the Stations of the Cross Coloring Book.)

What struck me on the most basic level was how fascinating it was to see the “original business” upon which a small empire had been built. (The pic to the right shows the store after it opened in 1948.) Most families that carve out a lucrative and prestigious niche would’ve closed down or sold off the gaudy, tacky, and, yes, very useful store that provided the dough for their expansion into classier realms.

Not the Mirvishes. Ed, who claimed his first "encounter with show biz" was when Al Jolson's rabbi dad presided over his bris(!), obviously considered the store his starting point and one of his proudest achievements, even when he was doing far greater things — like being the owner of the Old Vic Theater in London for sixteen years! (1982-1998) Honest Ed’s was clearly his passion and, frustrated comedian that he seems to have been, his blank slate/performance space.

The store does contain a large empty area that can be rented out for business meetings or weddings. This only enhances the strange singularity of the place, which qualifies without question as one man’s museum to himself and his interests. Ed even joked about the place becoming his tomb:

"Someone once asked me what I would like on my tombstone and how I would like to be remembered," he told the Empire Club in 1989. "I said I would like to erect a huge throne in the centre of Honest Ed's.

"I would then like my body cremated and the ashes put in an hourglass. I would then like someone sitting on the throne to keep turning the hour glass up and down, up and down, and the employees would point to the hourglass and say, `There's Ed. He's still running!'"

*****
Because video is always the most powerful way to drive home a point, and the scenes from The Long Kiss Goodnight and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World shot inside Honest Ed's are not online, here is a tour of the store, scored by some very wacky music:

A photo montage of Ed Mirvish’s life can be found here, but the only way to end this piece is to offer Ed’s TV ads for the store. Probably the best of the bunch, from 1987:

And some talking sneakers (why not?):

Great thanks to the lovely Ms. Kayleigh for taking the top photo (I should’ve been smiling— but then again, we hadn’t gone inside yet!), and for introducing me to the splendid strangeness that is Honest Ed’s.

"Enfant terrible" forever: Deceased Artiste Ken Russell

2011-11-29T17:54:00.019-05:00

I want to craft a nicer, longer tribute to “Unkle Ken” (as he was known on his Facebook account) for the blog or the Funhouse TV show, but in the interim I’ll just reiterate what I said in the two episodes that aired in 2008 which were based on my interview with Mr. Russell. I have loved his work since it first seared itself onto my retina as a teen, but only recently was I reminded of just how incredibly talented he was, upon re-watching his BBC dramas about the lives of great artists.

He was a wonderfully indulgent and undeniably brilliant artist who was very generous with his time (I planned a half-hour interview with him that quickly extended into nearly an hour). He had sadly become “unbankable” in the last two decades, but that was no major problem to him — the ideas continued to pour forth, and he just had to shift his vibrant images into other media (opera, theater, shot-on-video/micro-budgeted features, cable productions, even self-published books!).

The biggest discovery I made coming back to his films as a middle-aged man was the emotion that bursts out of the best of them. Russell was dubbed an "enfant terrible" throughout his life and had a reputation for being wildly indulgent and slightly crazy. There was definitely some of that in his make-up (madness is always a part of genius), but he also was an artist who had a deep emotional involvement with his best films. His masterpiece The Devils was perceived as a loud, brash, blasphemous film, but it is actually a passionate cri de coeur against religious hypocrisy from a man who really did believe (Russell discussed with me how his beliefs swerved from Catholicism to a pantheistic form of nature-worship when he stayed for a time in the famous Lake District).

In an interview included with the recent box-set of his BBC work, he said that he came up with the images in his music films by sitting in a darkened room and simply listening to the music of the composer in question. This practice, which I have no doubt is true given the many lyrical moments in his films, runs counter to the “madman behind the camera” reputation he acquired, and I think it comes closest to giving us the best picture of the true Ken Russell.

It’s evident to me that the reason he was so nice to admirers and interviewers was because he was still a fanboy himself, paying tribute in his own way to those artists whose work had moved him and brought meaning to his life (he spoke of his favorite film, Savage Messiah, as fulfilling a promise he made to the memory of the sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska). He was larger than life, in every sense of that phrase, and I’m very proud to have spent some time in his presence. New, colorful filmmakers may emerge in the years to come, but “Unkle Ken” cannot be replaced.
*****

There are only two small fragments online from my far-ranging interview with Russell (with more to come in the future). First, him speaking about his off-Broadway (and American theater) debut, Mindgame:

And his approval of people putting his older, "MIA" films online (at the time we did the interview many of his films were on YT, including Savage Messiah and the uncut Devils):

It’s That Time of Year Again (turkey talk)

2011-11-24T16:26:00.000-05:00

Each year since the early Nineties I have hauled out this clip on either the Funhouse TV show or the blog. I caught it on VHS back in the late Eighties, and never fail to be amazed as its time-capsule quality. Jean Shepherd used to muse at length on what future civilizations might find as remnants of America (he was fascinated by what he called our “slob art”). Well, the clip below is what I think should be found.

To answer Sinatra’s musical question, that is America to me….

“Nothing Better on 42nd Street”: Deceased Artiste Andrea True

2011-11-24T16:03:00.011-05:00

There are few things more memorable than a musical hook, and Andrea True delivered a killer with her disco megahit “More, More, More.” True died last week at the age of 68, and thus made those “of a certain age” flash back not only to the disco era, but to the heyday of hardcore, the post-Deep Throat Seventies, when you actually could have an effortless transition from porn stardom to Top 40 celebrity.

True, born Andrea Truden in Nashville, was the product of a Catholic girls school, which explains a lot of her rebellious tendencies. She manifested those by ditching Nashville and journeying to New York in the late Sixties to be an actress and singer. Her obits noted that she was an extra in The Way We Were and Forty Carats, but evidently mainstream roles were hard to come by (inevitable pun), so she turned to porn in 1972 and continued to appear in hardcore flicks until “More, More, More” broke out in 1976.

She made three albums as “the Andrea True Connection” (a studio creation) but never had another major hit. Some obits reported that she returned to porn, but I could find no confirmation that the films released after ’76 weren’t just retreads of older work. The summing-up in The New York Times noted that she worked as an addiction counselor, telemarketer, and realtor in the decades since disco stardom.

It is indeed extremely rare for a porn star to make it to the mainstream, so it is interesting to consider True’s dual career in the Seventies. Let’s first explore the porn side, why don’t we? The only one of her forty-plus features that I’ve seen all the way through is S*M*A*S*H*D (1976), a micro-budgeted spoof of M*A*S*H that interestingly tried to mimic the Altman original rather than the sanitized Alan Alda sitcom. That’s not to say it’s a good movie (it’s awful), but at least it started from a strange place (being an Altman cult follower, I’d be hard-pressed — excuse the pun, again — to come up with another porn spoof of his work).

One helpful YT poster has put up an entire feature starring True, minus the hardcore sex. From what I watched of it, The Seduction of Lyn Carter (1974) is indeed a moody little affair from director Anthony Spinelli, which happens to costar the ubiquitous Jamie Gillis:

Given that there was a vehement response (check the Comments field) to my Deceased Artiste trib to Gillis from someone who knew several actresses who worked with him (and may or may not have been exploited by him), it’s interesting to note that he plays a sadistic creep here (check out the tagline on the poster to the right!). Lyn Carter is generally acknowledged to be True’s greatest performance in the porn world (don’t snicker — Seventies porn occasionally had some ambitions toward quality).

But, since True was also having hardcore sex on screen, I wanted to link to an example of that, and could only find this sole instance “aboveground.” It’s from Dance of Love (1974) and features True “getting it on” with Eric Edwards. Given that True herself was writing music at the time (she wrote her disco songs herself), it’s interesting to note that the film has a psychedelic-sounding theme that gives way to the usual cheesy jazz in this scene (and then back to the psych).

There is also a LOT of dialogue for a porn scene (I have no explanation why the dog story was thought to be sexy), the single best line being the one I've used for the headline of this obit. Watch it here (NFSW, obviously).

Now onto Andrea’s music career. The story goes that “More, More, More” began when she flew to Jamaica to do a porn flick and wasn’t allowed to bring her salary back into the U.S. due to an embargo on Jamaica at the time (their leader was sympathetic to Castro). She wisely figured she’d spend the dough in Jamaica, and hired a studio to record a demo for the song she wrote as an up-tempo reflection on the porn biz (“Get the cameras rollin’/Get the action going…”).

I was too young to really care about disco when the song came out — and thus was never one of the Irish and Italian kids I went to school with who chanted “disco sucks!” with a vehemence that indicated a *lot* more was going on with their supposedly music-based hatred. I always liked the tune, though, and in the late Eighties bought a secondhand copy of True’s first LP (which is really the length of an EP). The song does indeed grow on you, thanks to a hook that sounded even better in headphones (the hollower the knocks get, the more hypnotic the song gets).

In any case, the song was a massive hit in ’76, both in discos and on the music charts. It was covered in later years by Bananarama and Dannii Minogue, and also was cleverly sampled by the brother-sister-led Canadian group Len for their 1999 hit “Steal My Sunshine.” True’s obits wryly noted that the song, which was risqué in its inception, is now so mainstream as to have been used as the musical backing for a Post cereal commercial (with the scary tagline “Have a bowl of happy!!!”).

There are certainly a lot of visual representations of the song on YT, but I would have to point first to a dance version from the Aussie TV show “Bandstand.” Then there’s this video that uses the album version of the song (six minutes!) to accompany the poster’s personal photos of the Seventies (always fun to look into someone else’s closet of weird color schemes).

And then, of course, there is Andrea herself, performing a lip-synch version of the song that was apparently shown on both Top of the Pops in the U.K. and on Musicladen in Germany. Here is the British version:

Here’s True live on Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert performing “Party Line.” The clip was uploaded by a KISS fan because Bruce Kulick was her lead guitarist at this point:

The only follow-up to “More, More, More” that got some traction on the charts (at least in NYC) was “New York, You Got Me Dancing” in 1977:

I’ll close out with a track from the More, More, More LP, the wonderfully titled “Fill Me Up.” Yes, it’s long (ten minutes), and is exactly about what you think it’s about:

Richard Simmons’ Handicapped Workout Poetry (what?)

2011-11-11T01:06:00.006-05:00

We are fast approaching Thanksgiving, and I have to personally give thanks to “Charterstone,” a YT poster whose channel I discovered when I was doing my recent Dark Shadows post. He/she has put up a video that, as of this writing, only has 43 hits, but is a monumentally stunning piece of Eighties kitsch. From every angle it’s a disaster: you’ve got disabled children working out with sincerity-overdrive-sufferer Richard Simmons; you’ve got a wretched poem he’s reciting to ennoble these children; you’ve got a virtual cornucopia of mediocre Eighties stars (yeah, yeah, two or three are genuinely talented, but they are the rara avis here); and you’ve got cheap video halo effects around them, fer chrissake.

This clip — which apparently sprang from Simmons’ Reach for Fitness videotape — speaks for itself, so I embed it below, and again thank Charterstone for introducing me to it (or should I be cursing him/her?). And, once again, can we really put Eighties nostalgia in its proper perspective? Any decade in which the former star of Death Valley Days and Bedtime for Bonzo can run the fucking “free world” HAS to produce clips like this, kats and kitties….

A “Carrie Nation” departs: Deceased Artiste Cynthia Myers

2011-11-11T00:11:00.012-05:00

Russ Meyer’s accomplishment in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970) becomes more daunting with every year: he mocked an era as it going on, a common practice in the movies these days but extremely radical at the time he was doing it. And why does this come up now? Well, because there’s never a bad time to discuss BVD (as it is known by fans), but also because one of the “Carrie Nations,” Cynthia Myers, died last week at the age of 61.

Myers was best known for being a Playboy playmate, a distinction she earned in December of 1968. According to her obits, she was 17 when the pictures were taken, but the magazine didn’t print them until she was 18 (that is a fascinating line in the sand right there). She made her movie debut in an uncredited part in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, but got her first and most prominent role when Russ cast her as “Casey Anderson," the lesbian bass player for the Carrie Nations rock band.

She only appeared in one more prominent role, in a Western called Molly and Lawless John (1972) with Vera Miles and Sam Elliott. One fan of Cynthia's likes her in that film so much that he's made two little music videos, found here and here. After that picture, Myers continued as a model, but basically her movie days were over.

So we say farewell to Cynthia in the only way that seems appropriate, by spotlighting the musical sequences from BVD that are online. First a geekish note about the music in the film: the songs were initially sung by studio singers Lynn Carey (daughter of Macdonald Carey) and Barbara Robinson.

Carey was a particularly solid belter who can be heard on YT via the controversial album Mama Lion (which featured a pic of her bare-chested, nursing a lion cub). Here is a live clip of her on German TV doing a song that has the same title as a song in BVD, but sounds quite different.

I know the half-dozen songs in the film very well from repeated viewings of the picture, but also from hearing the soundtrack album half a million times. The voice on that LP was actually that of Ami Rushes (there’s a much younger Christian contempo artist with the same name, but she appears too young to be the woman who sang on the BVD record). Rushes’ voice was also excellent, but Carey has the bigger cult rep, and it was long lamented that her voice was replaced on the album, until in recent years a CD came out that featured both versions of every track.

You can check out different versions of the songs if you want to compare the belting styles of the respective singers, but let us now focus on the girls who mimed their way through the picture, including Cynthia. Here is her memorably melodramatic first lesbian kiss, with the great Erica Gavin:

There are some excellent Sixties spoofs from the time — including various novelty tracks and the Fugs’ brilliant “Crystal Liaison” — but perhaps the most enjoyably silly was “Come With the Gentle People”

This last clip should be seen in its widescreen incarnation (available on DVD), but the VHS version (which is what this person uploaded to YT) shows off Cynthia and the girls very well. The clip also begins with another bit of melodrama from Ms. Myers (and yes, the vocal is from the “throaty” Lynn Carey):

It was noted in some of Ms. Myers’ obits that her picture was taken into outer space by the astronauts on the Apollo 12 mission. Add that to the fact that she was reportedly a fave pin-up of the soldiers serving in Vietnam, and you have a quintessential Sixties model.

This blog is now indexed for your convenience

2011-11-09T19:30:00.005-05:00

Last weekend I decided it was high time that this blog became searchable — some of the older posts have become harder to find through Google, so I finally put labels (read: keywords) on the 500-plus entries on here. Thus, you can now look up Bye Bye Monkey and Spider Baby, Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Sammy Petrillo, and read what I’ve written about Chris Marker, Chris Morris, Chris Rock, and Chris Rush.

FYI, the most common entry is indeed “Deceased Artiste” (126), and the second is “YouTube finds/posters” (112). The problem with the latter is, of course, that the postings have in several cases gone down (but many are still up). I am not going to purge older entries at this time — nor am I going to make them fit the writing format I eventually hit on about two years ago. Those outdated posts stand as a kind of record as to what was on YT at one point… and has more than likely been reposted under another name (or banned by the “bots” that now run the site).

Check out the older posts, since they point the way to the mix of "high art and low trash" that I'm very happy to share here and on the Funhouse TV show. Bon appetit!

Herzog gets emotional in “Into the Abyss”

2011-11-04T17:45:00.011-04:00

Werner Herzog remains one of the true originals in world cinema, a filmmaker who began as a teller of bleak tales about madness and social alienation, and then became a busy documentarian crafting “ecstatic truth” (read: his slant on real events). He qualifies as one of the few arthouse filmmakers that the average plugged-in American viewer might have heard of, and in the last few years he has indeed traded quite often on the deadpan, eccentric persona he has fashioned in his documentaries.

His latest, Into the Abyss, is different from his recent work in that, while it depicts a colorful, dangerous environment, it is laden with raw emotion and finds Herzog stating his central message very early on, in an interview he conducts with one of the film’s central figures, Michael Perry, a young killer on death row in Texas.

The film has been likened to In Cold Blood, and the crime that serves as its pivot is even more trivial than the one in the Capote classic. In 2001, Perry and another young man broke into a house to steal a red Camaro and wound up killing the mother of an acquaintance in order to steal the car. They later encountered the acquaintance and his friend, and killed them in the woods, again to cover up their theft of the Camaro.

Though Herzog has ordinarily avoided assigning a specific message to his work — and of course there are several “messages” in this film — here he states at the outset in his first (and only interview) with the young man on death row, “I don’t think human beings should be executed.”

The film’s structure is thus contested by the fact that he introduces a message right at the outset, and then much later in the film cleverly elides the principal event in the narrative, namely the execution of the young man on death row. He accomplishes the latter by including a clip in the last third of the film in which the event is referred to in the past tense by one of his talking heads (one of the victims’ relatives who attended the execution), thus alerting the viewer to the jump in chronology.

These stylistic deviations from the norm ensure that Into the Abyss cannot be a thriller, and yet Herzog still toys with that form by using a foreboding musical score by Mark Degli Antoni (with David Byrne on guitar) and probing, handheld camerawork that seems to signal grisly discoveries (that, of course never come). Herzog uses the story of the murders to do several things, most successfully sketching a portrait of a community where life is cheap and crime is commonplace.

Most of the people he speaks to know people in prison, or have lost relatives or friends to violent crime — the most jarring instance has a murder victim’s daughter offering a laundry list of the sad and violent ways her family members have died in the preceding six years.

The film resembles the work of onetime Herzog student Errol Morris (Gates of Heaven, The Thin Blue Line), since it as much about America as it is about a specific crime. The Rashomon-like prism through which Herzog views the crime is intended to show that the matter of who committed the murders — both young men deny they pulled the trigger on any of the three victims — is secondary to the after-effects and the fact that several states in the U.S. feel that killing a murderer will somehow “compensate” the relatives of the victims and deter future criminals. (Herzog answers both arguments in the film.)

The striking thing about the film is that it is Herzog’s most touching picture in some time. He has never used Spielbergian devices to manipulate his audience — for the most part we have experienced wonder and fascination at the unusual locations and situations he has spotlighted in his documentaries, or studied the “mad” protagonists in his fictions, from a comfortable remove.

Into the Abyss removes those screens, and for the first time since select scenes in Grizzly Man (and mind you, he’s made six films since that arthouse hit), Herzog takes the time to study individuals feeling sorrow. I am the very last person who’d want to get into a discussion about the “race for the Oscars,” but the emotional component of this film is so strong that one wonders if it will net Herzog a Best Documentary award — if not, no harm done, because the Academy Awards rarely reflect true quality and are more often than not a popularity contest.

Not that Herzog hasn’t acquired that kind of popularity in the last few years. His eccentric onscreen persona has made him a crowd pleaser on both Conan and The Colbert Report. These “rollicking” appearances (where he plays along with the host’s image of him as a wild and crazy German filmmaker) put me in mind of the moment in Les Blank’s Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, in which he acknowledges that a filmmaker has to play a “clown” to attract the public to his film:

Herzog’s documentaries have all been works of quality and depth, but perhaps Into the Abyss resonates so deeply not only because it tells such a serious tale, but because it is the work of a very serious filmmaker.

*****

A few clips from the film are available online, but a key one, of Herzog discussing with Michael Perry the fact that only a healthy prisoner can be executed in the U.S., is available at Herzog’s site.

Here is the official trailer:

Remembering a classic TV horror series: "Dark Shadows"

2011-10-30T19:40:00.057-04:00

To celebrate Halloween and preserve my fondly held memories of the original 1966-’71 ABC TV series in the time before the Burton-Depp big screen reworking of the show comes out (and is either an absolute joy or a big-budget embarrassment), I hereby present an appreciation of the gothic soap opera Dark Shadows. The series scared the hell out of me as a child, but I still collected the trading cards, the comic books, and even the daily cartoon strips. As a young adult I was able to consume ample amounts of the show in reruns and found that it was both a really terrific horror TV show and a delightful piece of Sixties camp (that decade, as I note frequently on the Funhouse TV show, is the “gift that keeps on giving, and giving, and…”).

First, the horror: the series began in June 1966 as a classic Rebecca/Jane Eyre-style narrative about a governess, Victoria Winters (Alexandra Moltke), who comes to the town of Collinwood to mind a child in a creepy old New England mansion.

In its first few months, some ghosts appeared, but the most interesting supernatural plot twist involved a character who was a “phoenix” (Diana Millay) and wanted to bring her son (the boy being cared for by the governess) to immortal life. “Laura the Phoenix” was a pretty odd creation for a daytime soap, but was topped in March ’67 by the opening of a coffin that let loose vampire Barnabas Collins (Jonathan Frid).

At the end of ’67, the show introduced its first time-travel storyline, in which Vicky Winters was sent back (by a séance) to 1795, before Barnabas was a vampire. At that time he intended to marry his beloved Josette (Kathryn Leigh Scott), but was cursed for eternity by seductive witch Angelique (Lara Parker). After Barnabas' “origin story” ended, the show quickly went into horror-overdrive, introducing a Frankenstein plot, a werewolf saga, The Turn of the Screw, a gypsy curse, Druid-like figures, and a plague that wiped out the Collins family.

The time-travel got more and more frenzied as the show continued, but it all seemed to make sense, since DS was after all a soap and had five half-hours each week to delineate its plotline. The time periods covered after the original “origin story” was over went from ’68-’69 to 1897, to ’69-’70 and then “1970 parallel time,” to 1995 (!), back to 1970, and then to 1840 and “1841 parallel time.”

The last move occurred when Frid, now the series’ superstar, demanded that he didn’t want to play Barnabas any more, and thus was indulged with a Wuthering Heights-ish plotline in which he became “Bramwell Collins.” The show unfortunately was cancelled during that flashback — with only a TV Guide article by one of the scripters (Sam Hall, married to the show’s “Dr. Julia Hoffman,” Grayson Hall) to explain where it would’ve gone after that.

Dark Shadows was thus an incredibly ambitious series and its creator, Dan Curtis, was wisely aware of what pieces of literature (all safely in public domain!) he could pilfer from to juice up the storyline. The show was indeed scary as fuck for its time, since it was done live on videotape and thus to monster-movie-fan kids like me, it had a “reality” that the old Universal b&w films didn’t have.

It had extremely primitive special effects, but they were extremely disturbing for that era — the best example being a scene where Angelique was burned alive, with Lara Parker (right) emoting wildly as a fire effect was overlaid in front of her. (This isn’t the scene, but it’s another example of that effect.)

Today that scene would be taken as nothing by kids who’ve seen far more realistic fire effects in movies and TV, but back then this was traumatic viewing for young people, if only because of the screams of pain from the character — and the fact that this was also on in a “comfortable” afternoon timeslot, as afterschool viewing! Lara Parker attributed the show’s over-the-top acting style to its directors in an interesting comment made at one of the DS conventions.

Like every soap, the show was contingent upon secrets that would be revealed in seemingly endless two or three-character conversation scenes, but DS actually offered a payoff of sorts to these chat-filled encounters with the attacks by “cursed” characters and the weird incantations and rituals that became a part of the various storylines.

In the years since, various soaps have gone out on a ledge storywise — off the top of my head, I think of the “weather wizard” plot on General Hospital, an amazing exorcism plot on Days of Our Lives, and the very strange lengths to which the show Passions went with its witch character, played by Juliet Mills.

DS was comprised almost entirely of these sort of plot twists — the normal world of cheating spouses and nefarious schemes that has fueled the soaps since the Thirties on radio was nowhere in evidence on the show. It was a high-key endeavor that did require that you not miss any episodes, but also that you were willing to go with the weirdness as it cropped up.

At points, they went into places that flopped in my estimation (the whole “Adam and Eve” Frankenstein plot was just awful), and at others they introduced characters in one plotline (the heartthrob “Quentin” played by David Selby was originally a ghost in the Turn of the Screw story) and then threw them into another thread (he was also a werewolf!).

And yes, there was the campiness. The Sixties was a time when “gimmick” series ruled — flying nuns, spies who talked into their shoes, cars that had the souls of old ladies in ’em (not forgetting the uber-campy Batman, natch). Dark Shadows ran with this as well — even though the show was played straight, its sometimes-outlandish plot twists were of a piece with the “camp revolution” going on in pop culture at the time. This made the show even more of a weird creation — an over-the-top gothic horror soap with elements that could be laughed at and others that were genuinely kinda creepy, all underscored with the “what comes next?” mechanisms that drive the soap opera format.

The show has of course developed a massive cult and has the distinction of being the ONLY soap to come out on VHS and DVD in its entirety (of course, we’re only talking five years here, as opposed to the lifespan of Guiding Light, but still that is 1,225 episodes, all on disc!). It also was the first soap to widely be seen in reruns (a little research reveals that a Canadian show inspired by DS, called Strange Paradise got there first….)

The show’s producer and creator Dan Curtis, who was also behind the cult telefilms The Night Stalker and Trilogy of Terror, definitely had a knack for TV horror. He also definitely knew how to cast — one of the lingering joys of Dark Shadows is its cast, who continue to appear at the conventions that honor the show, and who have aged incredibly well (most of the cast members look as if maybe two decades or so have passed since the series bit the dust; instead it’s been exactly 40 years).

For evidence of that I need only point you to the websites of Lara Parker, David Selby, and Kathryn Leigh Scott (pictured), a Funhouse interview subject who has kept working as a performer, but is also an author and publisher.

Okay, enough with the reverie and on with the clips. I found it utterly fascinating in doing research for this blog entry that not only is the entire run of DS out on DVD, but the owners of the copyright have apparently had no problem with LOADS of episodes and special features from the DVDs being on YouTube.

I offer the cream of the crop below. For those who already are familiar with the original series (the 1991 “revival” is available on YT, but I didn’t find that particularly interesting, except for the casting of Barbara Steele as Julia Hoffman), you can watch the first episode of the show from 1966 here and the first 370 episodes are all up (really!) here.

The video label MPI put out some themed video compilations that come in handy for those who have never seen the show. The first one that deserves a spotlight is “The Scariest Moments of Dark Shadows”:

Another intriguing MPI vid-comp is here, called “Vampires and Ghosts”:

Another shows you the series’ trippiest moments. It is called “Nightmares and Dreams” (I’m telling you, DS was a VERY strange program for its era…):

Finally, since the bulk of the media attention concerning the new Burton film is devoted to Johnny Depp, not Burton, here are his feelings about Frid’s performance in the original series. And here, to refresh your memory as to what Frid did that made him so “iconic,” is another MPI vid-comp, this one called “The Best of Barnabas”:

It does seem like every extra from every DS DVD has been put up on YT, so here are a few of my faves, all vintage items featuring Frid when he was considered a “teen idol” (he was at this point a man in his mid-40s, much like Patrick Macnee when The Avengers hit). Here he is in 1970 on What’s My Line? in his full Barnabas regalia:

And here he is in 1969, doing a very sober-minded interview (about vampires, coffins, and teen adulation) on The Merv Griffin show (seated between Barbara Bouchet and Rocky Graziano!):

The helpful souls who comment on YT vids supply a lot of information. I had wondered at what point the “Dark Shadows Music Videos” (yet another MPI vid-comp that is not online in one piece) had been created. It turns out they were put together initially for the airing of DS here in NYC on the late, lamented WNYC-TV (Ch. 31) by Alan Matlick, a broadcast engineer, to make the reruns “longer.” Here is the first of the bunch, the super-melo “I Barnabas”:

In closing, I leave you with one of the most unique aspects of the show: the fact that its “bloopers” weren’t outtakes, they actually aired on the program. Dark Shadows, like most soaps, was produced on a shoestring budget, and so retakes were not allowed (unless someone cursed — but that’s a story for another time).

Thus, the actors’ line-flubs, scenery mishaps, and major screw-ups all aired on ABC, making it even more impressive that DS was still scary — since you could see its main vampire and matriarch regularly blowing their lines, supernatural fires going out at the worst possible minute, and doors opening and closing randomly during scenes.

The “blooper” reel for the show has been released on DVD and is not only amusing, it’s also an amazing record of a time when a major network show included fumbles, because the producers were pinchin’ pennies:

A final note about the upcoming Burton film: in the clip I linked to above, Depp had noted that they would stay close to the iconic look that Frid created for the role, but the one on-set photo released thus far shows Johnny in wacked-out mode again. That could be a great thing, if indeed Tim Burton is going to do something seriously creative in “re-imagining” the show.

Burton has also stated his admiration for the original series, which is reassuring to hear, because it was entirely evident that he wasn’t a fan of Batman comics from his Batman pictures, and he obviously wasn’t a fan of the Planet of the Apes movies from his big-budget effort to resurrect that franchise.

Truth be told — although I did really like his Sweeney Todd — Burton hasn’t made a film project that he originated (and thus has seemed “personal”) since Edward Scissorhands, and he’s now at the point of doing a feature version of one of his old short projects, the one-joke Frankenweenie.

Aside from fascinating, unconventional items like Ed Wood and Big Fish, he has been applying the “Tim Burton touch” to remakes and adaptations of very familiar works for two decades now. Let’s hope that his Dark Shadows brings back the sense of innovation and imagination he displayed in his early features. Although, with the kooky, crazy makeup, I’m sorta having my doubts. (I’d be happy to be proven wrong….)

Alice's predecessors: a trio of "shock rock" pioneers

2011-10-28T02:01:00.026-04:00

It’s that time of year again. My favorite holiday is upon us, and no, it ain't Xmas or even my birthday. It is All Hallows’ Eve, when monsters are celebrated and people don odd costumes to let their interiors surface on the exterior, for a few hours at least. One of the people I’ve returned to again and again on Halloween episodes of the Funhouse is “shock rock” god Alice Cooper.

Much as I love Alice, he was not the first to do what he did — he, of course, did it to perfection and with a band that was an absolute killer (album title ref, excuse the geekdom). After Alice came KISS (four Alices, acknowledged as such at the time), solo Ozzy, Rob Zombie, King Diamond (boo), Marilyn Manson, and stageshow specialists GWAR and Rammstein. (The shock-rock category frequently lists punk acts, but if we’re doing to do that, I’d rather rhapsodize about the Cramps than talk about GG Allin).

Before Alice, there were three gentlemen who pioneered “horror rock” while making some memorably catchy music. I’ll work my way backward and start with Arthur Brown, whose band The Crazy World of Arthur Brown delivered some wonderfully nightmarish theatrics. Thus, it makes sense to introduce him with the song “Nightmare,” as performed in the 1968 film The Committee. Dig that crazy headgear!

Brown’s Sixties stage show is preserved in this footage, which is punctuated by him being interviewed out of makeup:

Rare color footage of the group, intercut with animation by Gerald Scarfe (best known for Pink Floyd's "The Wall"):

And, of course, the biggest discovery for any Alice Cooper fan is that Brown’s makeup foreshadowed the design that Alice eventually settled on. Here he and the band (who were only together for one LP) do a full-blown TV presentation of their biggest hit, “Fire”:

Arthur is thankfully still with us, but a musician who preceded him in the shock-rock biz has departed the scene. Screaming Lord Sutch, “the 3rd Earl of Harrow” (a completely made-up title) took a few notes from the last of our three shock-rock pioneers (including coming out of a coffin onstage), but he also began in a very good place, working for master-producer Joe Meek.

Interestingly enough, he continually ran in Parliamentary elections, eventually founding his own political party, which he named the “Official Monster Raving Loony Party.” He was never elected to office (although he did get a respectable amount of votes in various elections), but he definitely left an imprint on the pop-rock world with a series of horror-themed hits, including “All Black and Hairy”:

and “She’s Fallen in Love with a Monster Man”:

His biggest hit was a classic horror tune about one of England’s greatest contributions to the world of nightmares, “Jack the Ripper.” Here is a publicity film made for the song:

And a now-quaint but then-transgressive live performance of the song with his group, the Savages:

Screaming Lord Sutch sadly committed suicide at the age of 59 in 1999, but his inspiration, and the man who qualifies as the very FIRST shock-rocker, the inimitable Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, lived to be 71 and was hailed as a crazed god of performance-rock stagecraft.

A Cleveland native, Hawkins served in the Air Force in WWII. He aspired to perform in the manner of his hero Paul Robeson, but one drunken night in a recording studio in 1956 gave him his biggest hit, the unforgettable “I Put a Spell on You” (see below). He started touring in the late Fifties with voodoo props and a bone in his nose, emerging from a coffin at the start of his show.

He sang catchy, creepy ditties like “Little Demon” and, much later, kept his "monstrous" reputation by singing tunes like Tom Waits' “Whistlin’ Past the Graveyard”

Screamin’ Jay was a “wildman,” as was proclaimed in a favorite scene from Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise. He also had an incredibly powerful and evocative voice, as is evident in his rendition of the very non-horrific “I Love Paris.” And speaking of Paris, it is the city that Screamin’ Jay died in, in 2000, but also was home to one of his biggest fans, himself a hellraiser, Serge Gainsbourg. The two dueted only once, but it is an incredibly memorable collaboration, on Hawkins’ “Constipation Blues” (it’s not much of a duet, Serge is actually too busy laughing):

It is noted in Screamin’ Jay’s online bios that he sired many children (anywhere from 55 to 75 — then again, after the first 10, who’s counting?). The song that will forever be associated with him, and has been covered by every shock rocker from Arthur Brown to Marilyn Manson, is indeed “I Put a Spell on You.”

Hawkins maintained that the song was intended to be sung as a tender ballad, but that he and the musicians got very drunk the night it was recorded and it came out the way it did. Here is amazing footage of Screamin’ Jay, bone in nose and voodoo props on display, performing it in his prime. If you just listen to the record it definitely registers as one of the great songs about romantic/sexual obsession. Performed this way, it’s undeniably “haunting”:

“Top American Humor Award” claimed by unfunny tall goof — and look at the names who were passed over

2011-10-27T23:38:00.017-04:00

It’s interesting to see the Mark Twain Prize, which went to Will Ferrell last week, referred to as the “top American humor award” on various news websites, since, as I’ve written before, the Prize has absolutely no value by this point. Especially since the nominating committee has clearly decided that they’ve made a winning connection to Lorne Michaels and Broadway Video. Thus, they’ll keep giving the award to amiable but WILDLY unfunny middle-aged comic actors from the SNL stable, and keep passing over the oldtimers who are still with us and have contributed a major amount to American comedy, but who haven’t had bad multiplex vehicles in the past few years, so… well forget about them, will ya?

I actually can’t forget about ’em, because mainstream American comedy generally is as shitty as it is because the crap-mill run by Lorne Michaels keeps cranking out these amiable types who can act goofy (Will Ferrell) or do the snark really well (Tina Fey), and thus get the admiration of millions of morons with unadventurous senses of humor. There are older comedy “black belt” performers whose work is much funnier and more imaginative, and who definitely deserve to be honored with the *supposedly* most prestigious humor award in America.

Read my piece on the people who've been passed over here. And on behalf of American comedy fans, I hereby apologize to Sid, Mel, Woody, Phyllis, Dick, Mort, and on and on. As for humor writers descended from the late, great Mr. Clemens, well, the Mark Twain Prize says fuck alla yez.

Aki Kaurismaki returns with "Le Havre" (review)

2011-10-21T14:45:00.017-04:00

Regular viewers of the Funhouse TV series will be familiar with my long-standing admiration for the work of filmmaker Aki Kaurismaki. His latest feature (and second in French), Le Havre, which opens today in NYC, is a welcome blast of deadpan humor from the Finnish master of quiet, sardonic cinema.

For those unfamiliar with Kaurismaki’s work, there are a few tenets common to every film he’s made:
— deadpan humor that often ventures into openly dark comedy
— a sense of quiet that is uncommon in modern film. Kaurismaki’s working-class characters betray their sense of kinship through merely being in each other’s presence, and not talking about their troubles.
— said troubles can only be held at bay in three ways: smoking, drinking, and rock ’n’ roll
— a definite love for his characters, no matter how petty (or criminal) their behavior

Though Kaurismaki has always focused on the working class (dividing his work between quiet melodramas and the occasional Finnish “hick comedy” — rock on, Leningrad Cowboys!), he has begun to integrate contemporary social issues into his work. And thus we reach Le Havre. The film tells the story of a French shoeshine man (André Wilms) helping out an African boy (Blondin Miguel) who’s a refugee in the titular French town.

The plot certainly sounds schmaltzy, and Kaurismaki is quick to play with that aspect throughout the picture while thankfully never venturing into Spielbergian sentimentality. (The only filmmaker who has been working the same side of the street is the equally deadpan Beat Takeshi; I think here of his man-saddled-with-a-kid movie Kikujiro.)

Although the film has been likened, most likely because of its location, to the work of Marcel Carne, Jacques Becker, Rene Clair, and other French masters of poetic realism, Le Havre strikes me as Kaurismaki’s riff on Italian Neo-Realism. From our hero’s profession (Shoeshine) to his little-boy sidekick (The Bicycle Thief) to the decisive transformation from a Kaurismaki-styled “problem drama” into an outright fairy tale (Miracle in Milan), the specter of Neo-Realism permeates the proceedings — until, that is, Fifties melodrama begin to creep in. As our hero’s troubles multiply, Kaurismaki liberally layers on orchestral music that sounds as if it was lifted from a golden-age “melo,” thereby allowing him to both spoof the genre and indulge in it at the same time.

One of the joys of following Kaurismaki’s work as he creates his “small movies” (a compliment not an insult, per Godard) is seeing how he has maintained a very particular tone in his work from decade to decade (his first fiction feature, a modern adaptation of Crime and Punishment, was released in 1983). He achieves this tone with the aforementioned de-emphasis of dialogue, spare visuals (with many primary-colored interiors to offset the bleakness of the exteriors), and superb casting, drawn from a small ensemble of actors he’s been using for decades, and other performers who know how to “act Kaurismaki.”

Newcomer Miguel does a wonderful job as the African boy, while Wilms (whose face can best be described as “lived-in”) is terrific as our humble everyman hero. Several other performers steal the spotlight with their bits, but none more so than Kati Outinen (seen above with a photo of her frequent Kaurismaki costar, the late Matti Pelonpää), who had featured roles in a number of Kaurismaki’s films. She had the starring role in one of his biggest “arthouse hits,” The Match Factory Girl (1990), and was the female lead in one of my favorite AK creations, Drifting Clouds (1996) (click the link to see the film with English subtitles).

Outinen plays Wilms’ stoic wife (named Arletty, no doubt in tribute to the star of Children of Paradise), who is struck with a fatal malady but asks her doctor not to let her husband know. Since she is the one thing that Wilms truly loves (even more than smoking, drinking, and listening to rock ’n’ roll), she becomes the emotional core of the film, and her health-crisis plotline is the cornerstone of the melodramatic aspect (and the fairy-tale places it goes to — not for nothing has Kaurismaki written of his appreciation for Douglas Sirk).

Outinen’s presence is a delight — her low-key acting has grown subtler and more effective over the years — but she is not the only surprise to be found here. The versatile Jean-Pierre Darroussin (The Taste of Others, Same Old Song) has a plum role as a soft-hearted police detective, and the powerful and always unpredictable Jean-Pierre Leaud (who, besides being an icon in his own right, starred in Kaurismaki’s I Hired a Contract Killer back in 1990) plays the “villain” of the piece .

The last wonderful casting “find” is an older French rock star known as “Little Bob” (seen right, with Aki on the left), who plays himself and helps our hero out in his time of need with what the characters refer to here as one of those “trendy charity concerts” that are so popular these days. Kaurismaki loves pure rock ’n’ roll, and has done great work with Joe Strummer and, of course, The Leningrad Cowboys (all three of his cinematic forays with that band of pointy-shoed rockers are now available in a low-priced box set from Eclipse), so his reverent mythologizing of Little Bob here is nothing short of delightful.

For those who’ve been following Kaurismaki since the days of his “Proleteriat Trilogy” (also available from Eclipse/Criterion as a set), it should come as no surprise that he definitely loves his characters. His deadpan humor disguises a soft heart and an open mind, and Le Havre is perhaps his most humane and charming work since the Nineties.

Here is the trailer for the film:

Probably the best “101” for English-speaking folk who want to know more about Aki, this episode of the Jonathan Ross-hosted series For One Week Only presented a full tribute to him in 1990:

And as a closer, here’s a touching bit of quiet affection from his film Take Care of Your Scarf, Tatiana (1994), which has remained unreleased in the U.S. Kati Outinen and Matti Pelonpää are featured:

Deceased Artiste Charles Napier, and the 18th anniversary of the first Media Funhouse episode

2011-10-14T00:30:00.022-04:00

The Manhattan cable show Media Funhouse went on the air 18 years ago this month, and so I thought it only right to upload the first-ever clip I showed on the program, especially because it featured an actor who left us just last week. First a note about the beginning of the show: in the first few weeks of the program I covered exploitation cinema ("auteurist" exploitation cinema) exclusively. A few weeks in, I was able to diversify the contents of the program when I did my first Deceased Artiste tributes (Fellini, Vincent Price, and Frank Zappa).

To “catch viewers’ attention,” I felt there was no better attraction than the work of Russ Meyer, and thus I presented what I consider the seminal clip from Russ’s work, a montage that is so compelling, so unrelenting, so brilliant, and yet so nuts that it can indoctrinate you instantly into the Meyer cult. And there was no better male lead in any of his films than Charles Napier, a square-jawed blond gent who often played villains, but whom Russ envisaged as a two-fisted hero in the wonderful Cherry, Harry & Raquel (1970) and as a psycho cop in the so-over-the-top-that-it-says-too-much-about-Russ’s-mindset Supervixens (1975), possibly my least-fave Meyer pic.

Napier’s obits explored how the Kentucky native had a number of jobs before he finally settled on acting as his vocation: among other things, he was a high school art teacher, a parking lot attendant, a typist, a truck driver, and (my favorite) a photographer for a trucking magazine.

He was a familiar face on TV, who appeared in Mannix, Kojak, The Rockford Files, Starsky and Hutch, Dallas, and The Incredible Hulk — to which he contributed some of the Hulk’s growls! One of his most memorable TV roles was as a “space hippie” in the Star Trek episode “The Way To Eden.” In recent years, he continued to appear not only in mainstream and “DVD premiere” movies, but also worked as a voice talent for cartoons like Squidbillies and The Critic.

Though he is best known by the general public for his supporting roles in Rambo: First Blood Part 2 and The Blues Brothers, he was indeed beloved by film buffs for his roles in four Russ Meyer movies, and his being a kind of “good luck charm” supporting performer in the films of Jonathan Demme (a casual look over his filmography reveals at least eight Demme films he had prominent small roles in, including such hits as Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia).

While the obit in Variety noted he played a general in four different films, it’s as a sheriff that I’ll always remember him. And speaking of that, below is the clip I spoke about, the scene from the end of Cherry, Harry & Raquel that will convert any neophyte filmgoer into a fan of Russ Meyer. The montage begins in earnest at 1:54 with the great line, "Now all of this didn't really have to happen...."

It’s a power-packed montage that includes virtually every scene in the film (including the odd “thematic” ones in which Uschi Digard is seen symbolically acting out the plot in a desert setting). My high school film teacher maintained that Meyer was the most Eisensteinian of modern filmmakers, and this was undoubtedly true — what he achieves here with his editing and characteristically overwrought narration is to nearly create an “altered state” for the viewer.

He also demonstrates his debt to Eisenstein in the lead-up to the killer montage, in which he intercuts a rather pedestrian showdown between Napier and the actor playing “Apache” with a rather pedestrian lesbian scene, thus creating something exciting out of two rather non-exciting scenes of people clearly pretending to do stuff. Meyer’s world was a ripe and lurid one, and he had no better alter ego than the tough (but oddly friendly-looking) Napier. Please enjoy the scene below — I know you will.

RIP CN/RM

The coolest old men in the world (2): Chris Marker

2011-10-06T00:32:00.047-04:00

While the first and second generations of “Old Master” filmmakers are now gone, we still have a few of the most important members of cinema’s third generation with us. That includes filmmakers from the French New Wave: Resnais is 89, Varda and Rivette are 83, and Uncle Jean (aka JLG) is a mere kid of 80 years old.

Now that Eric Rohmer has left us, the status of “oldest New Waver” has passed to a filmmaker who for me surpasses all superlatives, Chris Marker. Marker turned 90 in June, and you’d never know it, for two reasons: he and Rivette have been the “forgotten” men of the New Wave in the U.S., never achieving great notoriety over here (and thus free to just keep making great movies). Also, Marker continues to behave not like a nonagenarian, but like a kid fresh out of film school who is intoxicated by creating images and toying with the new technologies that surface on a near-weekly basis.

I have saluted Marker a few times on the Funhouse TV show and still heartily urge those who are unfamiliar with his work to first check out his short film masterwork La Jetée:

I have also posted updates on this blog concerning which of his film and video projects have shown up on the Net. My entry from 2008 has links to a bunch of Marker’s video-art clips that are still active; the 2009 entry finds a few broken links (most notably the only head-on footage I’ve ever seen of Marker behind the camera shooting something, and Les Astronautes, the sci-fi short he made with Walerian Borowczyk, which is now available here!). The link to his 2006 feature Chats Perchés (2004), the original un-narrated French version of his Case of the Grinning Cat, is surprisingly still active.

I wrote those entries when Marker’s work was impossible to find on DVD in the U.S., and he had no Web presence. Happily, that situation has changed in the time since, thanks to a number of his best recent-vintage works becoming available from Icarus Films, and Marker himself creating an official website with six projects (two of them massive!) available for free. He also appears to be sanctioning the very thorough website/blog chrismarker.org that keeps track of his activity.

Four of the six works on Marker’s Gorgomancy site are my focus here, as I belatedly celebrate the gent’s 90th birthday. The other two films available on the site are Marker’s portraits of his friends Yves Montand and Simone Signoret — and beware trying to go through the main door at gorgomancy.com, which produces only an “under construction” screen. Click the links I have provided to the site, which are working fine.
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The first major item on Gorgomancy is Immemory, his colossal CD-Rom, which has been in print twice in the U.S., but both editions were only viewable with a certain build of the Apple “octopus.” To watch the copy I bought (and I am a Mac user), I had to sit for a few hours in an office I worked in that had outdated iMacs with OS9 (since my home computer was too new to view it); the later edition of the disc is for the platform after the one I have.

Marker has solved all these problems by making the copious contents of the disc available online for free. Yes, the text is in French, and while the text is very important to understanding why he grouped the images the way he did, and what personal significance they have for him, Immemory is first and foremost a celebration of the possibilities of the image, and as such can be appreciated whether you comprendre la langue or not.

Immemory is constructed as a museum of Marker’s photos — he’s been working as a photographer since the Fifties, but obviously his fascination with images began a lot earlier than that (here he dates it to the movies he saw as a child in the Twenties and Thirties, including Dracula with Lugosi and Wings). The categories in Immemory include poetry, war, photos, cinema, voyages, and the most important one, memory. Here Marker returns to one of his favorite themes, exploring Proust’s “madeleine” and linking it to Kim Novaks’s Madeleine in Hitchcock’s Vertigo (his favorite film, and one he ably dissects in part of Sans Soleil).

Marker’s “museum” offers a deeper examination of the themes that distinguish his La Jetée (1962) and his brilliant, more complex works about politics, the media, and the power of imagery (Grin Without a Cat, The Last Bolshevik, Case of the Grinning Cat). One viewing tip (which is present on Gorgomancy, but is, of course, in French): when you want to move forward, run your cursor over the middle right-hand side of the screen to find a right arrow. If you want to go back to the menu, run your cursor over the middle-bottom of the screen to discover a down arrow.

I can’t think of another filmmaker who could’ve created such a huge, fascinating odyssey for his fans. Take the trip here.
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“Ouvroir” is a half-hour film that Marker made using the online virtual “world” Second Life. Here his cat cartoon alter-ego (and real life feline friend) Guillaume-en-Egypte leads us through a gallery of some of the works not found in Immemory. Thus, in this informal video, you journey through a virtual “museum” that includes parts of his photography exhibit Staring Back, excerpts from his “Silent Movie” and “Hollow Men” installations, and some of his “Xplugs” (photo collages).

This video doesn’t have the depth or overwhelming brilliance of Immemory, but “Ouvroir” is definitely fun for those who already know Marker’s work (and the intertitles are in English).
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Stopover in Dubai is a chillingly straightforward piece, with intertitles in English, that Marker made in 2010. It depicts the execution of a Hamas commander (himself a killer) in a Dubai hotel exclusively through security-camera footage. The piece plays like a thriller without the thrills, as Marker’s opening titles explain the killing and tell us that within 24 hours of the murder, the culprits’ identities were known (according to what I’ve read, none were ever caught). This is most likely because every motion they made was caught on camera (read: they were being observed, without being studied).

Marker’s use of the phrases “the victim,” “the surveillance team,” and “the execution team” lets us know that everything we’re watching is predetermined in a way. As has been stated by insightful political pundits (in this “post-9/11 world”), just because we can see the criminal’s every move doesn’t mean the crime will be prevented (in fact it rarely if ever is). No one watches the recordings made with these cameras until AFTER the crime has been perpetuated and the killers have gotten away. So much for the “deadly accuracy” of Big Brother….
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Immemory is definitely the “must-see” item on Gorgomancy, but the biggest discovery on the site for Marker fans is the unreleased-in-the-U.S. TV miniseries The Owl’s Legacy. The 13-part series is Marker’s exploration of ancient Greece’s influence on modern society and is present on his site in the original French version.

The series was produced, however, with an English-language variant, and that version can now be seen online, thanks to the terrific Seventh Art blog. The blogger has made all 13 episodes available, with the only caveat being that the last ten minutes of the last episode are missing — not as big a problem as it sounds, since the show’s episodes function independently, and you can catch up to the missing segment on Gorgomancy (yes, in French only, but hey, it’s all free).

The Owl’s Legacy is an unusual Marker production in that it seems fairly “normal” for his work — meaning less whimsical editing and many more talking heads. Perhaps the linearity of the series was due to the involvement of a corporate financial backer (the Onassis Foundation), or maybe it was a case of Marker waiting to underscore the points made by his talking heads.

In any case, the series is still terrific and finds brilliant minds discussing political, social, and cultural concepts — something that can rarely (if ever) be found on American TV. Marker conceived of the show as a “symposium” that would address big ideas an episode at a time: democracy, nostalgia, language, music, mythology, and tragedy, among others.

One of the most interesting things about the show is the open acknowledgment that while the Greeks did indeed create civilization as we know it, they also failed at honoring all of their citizens (discussed in the “Misogyny, or the Snares of Desire” episode, and a discussion of slavery), and the government eventually failed and died out.

The series blends the thoughts of Greek, French, British, American, and Japanese experts on Greek culture. The only instantly recognizable names are Elia Kazan (now he and Marker do indeed make a very odd couple), Theo Angelopoulos, and Vassilis Vassilikos (who wrote the novel Z, which was adapted by Marker's friend Costa-Gavras).

Since the episodes stand on their own, I will merely recommend two of them for those who are interested but are not sure if they want to make the time commitment. Episode 6, “Mathematics, or the Empire Counts Back,” discusses math and its connection to poetry, logic, and the eating habits of animals. (If there is any animal that fascinates Marker more than the cat, it has to be the owl).

The math episode is the single most entertaining entry in the series, but the single most important scene for movie buffs and Marker fans alike is the conclusion to episode 9, where Marker finds the modern corollary to “Plato’s Cave” is a movie theater. Seated in his “Cave,” among others, are actresses Arielle Dombasle, the late and wonderful Juliet Bierto, and Catherine Belkhodja, Marker’s real-life partner for a time and the mother of actress and filmmaker Isild Le Besco. The film? Well, why not his friend Alain's seminal work on memory, Hiroshima, Mon Amour.

Certain topics are Marker’s métier, and none more so than cinema — here he asserts that the movie theater as Cave (not, mind you, watching a movie on a TV, computer, laptop, phone, or iPod, you solo viewers!) has the power “to negate the Cave, disarm the Gorgon, to tie itself to the thread of human creation and, finally, to create its own myths.” Bravo.

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Other online morceaux d’Marker can be found on his Flickr photostream and his YouTube channel under the name “Kosinki” (not Kosinski). His latest short videos are thus going straight onto the Internet and the offerings run a wide range, beginning with charming (yet slightly strange) cute-animal stuff, like his cat Guillaume-en-Egypte in cartoon form and household-pet hijinks punctuated by his most succinct self-description, “Chris Marker, the best-known author of unknown movies”!

While he has turned back to his original love, photography, on the streets (and in the Metro) of Paris, he has also busied himself creating photo-montages about important international events like Obama’s election, the Egyptian revolution, the riots in London, and even the British royal wedding. As I wrote this blog entry, a new video (with a great image of Uncle Jean) appeared that leads you in one direction, and then (much like the martial art of aikido) sends you flying in another.

The two most creative uploads are his “Pictures from an Exhibition” (utilizing his “Xplugs”):

And a montage of his Metro photos, showing both his admiration for (and adoration of) women, and his keen eye for human expression:

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As one digs further down into Marker’s work, one is staggered by the imagination, profundity, and wit he has put in his films and videos, and yet he has never acquired an “arthouse” reputation in the U.S. This is primarily because of the layered quality to most of his works — and, of course, the sheer absence of curiosity in most Americans. He will most likely get his just due over here when he has left us. In the meantime, thanks to Gorgomancy and the DVDs, we now have the chance to discover his work while he is still among us, still crafting beautiful imagery and sublime commentary on a regular basis.

NOTE: Thanks to Zach for passing on the initial link to Gorgomancy and this tribute to Marker by his friend Agnes Varda, which features the few clear images of him that we have to date. (He's avoided being in public view for five decades now.)

"Memories Are Made of This": Deceased Artiste Rosel Zech

2011-09-25T21:40:00.014-04:00

Rosel Zech, who died a few weeks back at the age of 69, had a solid theatrical career and was a well-known TV actress in Germany, but will forever be known by film buffs outside Germany for playing the lead in Veronica Voss (1982), the second in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s “BRD Trilogy” (in the scheme of the trilogy it was second, but it was shot and released third).

Zech entered the theater in the early Sixties and continued to work steadily in plays until her death. She was mentored by the noted director Peter Zadel (who has a small role in Veronica Voss) and was best known in the last decade for her role as a nun in the German TV show For Heaven’s Sake. She had an extremely full career without Fassbinder, but her fateful meeting with him occurred when she appeared in A Tenderness of Wolves (1973; directed by Ulli Lommel, written by Kurt Raab, and produced by RWF).

He cast her in a supporting part in Lola (1981), and then gave her the starring role in Veronica Voss. He made one movie (Querelle) after that, and then died at the age of 37, leaving a body of work that will be enjoyed and analyzed for a long time to come. I talked to Ms. Zech for the briefest time at the 1997 MOMA Fassbinder gala performance, asking her to sign a book on RWF that contained pictures of all of his stars. I have a very strong and fond memory of where she sat in the first row because, by decision rather than by assignment, she and the other two “BRD” women sat in a row: Zech ("Veronica Voss"), Barbara Sukowa ("Lola"), and Hanna Schygulla ("Maria Braun").

All three women were riveted by a documentary that was shown at the gala, featuring a lengthy interview with RWF. The mood was strange but charming, since the three women seemed like schoolgirls, chuckling and whispering to each other while RWF was onscreen. Throughout that evening, I couldn’t stop thinking about how odd the seating had turned out to be, since for me (and a good deal of the male members of the audience, including a German diplomat who spoke at the event and talked about how important Ms. Schygulla had been to his youth), they were the “poster girls” for Fassbinder’s cinema.

The only sad note was that another MAJOR star of RWF’s work, the immensely talented Margit Carstensen (who was “Petra von Kant”!), was sitting across the aisle on her own, not in the schoolgirl circle of adoring Rainer fans. It was a strange and unforgettable evening….

Zech’s other notable U.S. arthouse release was Salmonberries (1991) by Percy Adlon. The film plays like a variant on his Bagdad Café, but is best known for the fact that it features the acting debut of k.d. lang (who does a quick and bizarre nude sequence) and featured her vocals on the soundtrack. I couldn’t find Zech featured in the trailer or promotional clips on YT, but she is present in this fan-made music-video (that doesn’t use a lang tune).

The last time I saw Zech onscreen was in Juliane Lorenz’s documentary Life, Love & Celluloid (1998). The docu includes a sort of fictional subplot in which a Fassbinder fan contacts MOMA and gets Zech’s address. He then flies to Germany and dances with her. The set-up for the situation is definitely odd — would a museum ever pass on an actress’s private contact information? — but the dance sequence is touching.

Zech’s website remains online and has been updated to include links to the nicest obits (the site is in German, and is mostly an online “portfolio”/resume of her work), but the ONLY way I can finish off this D.A. tribute is to embed Zech’s most memorable moment, her Dietrich-esque rendition of “Memories Are Made of This” from Veronica Voss.

The song was of course a No. 1 hit in America in 1956 for Dean Martin and was written by his backup singers, a trio called “the Easy Riders.” The song was also a massive hit in Germany, selling 8 million copies for singer Freddy Quinn as “Heimweh” (Homesickness).

Fassbinder chose to have Zech sing the Dean Martin original, though, in this indelible sequence that is Voss’s fantasy of the perfect “farewell” (the character is a drug-addicted, washed-up movie star that RWF modeled on the real-life actress Sybille Schmitz). It’s an incredibly good sequence with which to say farewell to her.

The coolest old men in the world (1): Leonard Cohen

2011-09-24T17:20:00.015-04:00

Leonard Cohen turned 77 years old this week. In celebration, it was announced that a CD box set is planned of all of his albums to date — with much previously released live material, but no rare studio tracks, none of the poetry readings from radio and onstage appearances, and none of the many songs he’s sung or spoken on tribute albums (and the poems recited for the Philip Glass Book of Longing song cycle).

So a birthday is celebrated with a CD box set. The truth is that Leonard’s entire discography (like that of all major musicians) is available online with a few magic clicks, but one can easily go beyond and beneath the 11 studio albums — seven or eight of which are immaculate, and the other three are pretty good as well. The joy of a sporadic recording artist like Leonard is that, in comparison to a more prolific singer-songwriter (say… Dylan), you’re left with a small, sublime body of work, instead of a canon that contains very many crappy albums in between the masterworks.

In celebration of Leonard’s remaining with us for another year, I wanted to present ten clips that represent my favorite aspects of Cohen’s work. In terms of aging, though, I should note that I thoroughly agree with the eternally sublime free-form radio DJ Vin Scelsa, who has maintained for the last few years that Cohen is the very model of growing old gracefully — he’s stylish, smart, and (something Dylan never has done, and never would do) knows well how to mock and deflate himself.

Although he is now a senior (as was shown unfortunately by the too-tight-close-ups in Lian Lunson’s docu I’m Your Man, where he wound up looking like Georgie Jessel), Leonard is the height of sophistication (as the wildly overpriced shirts and bags being sold on his last tour said, “It’s all about the hat… Leonard Cohen”). He’s also a supremely talented artist whose written works I hope will last as long as his recorded ones. But now on to the clips!

Like most movie buffs, my introduction to Cohen’s music (which was never played on the top 40-ish radio stations I listened to as a kid — “Suzanne” by Judy Collins excepted) was the soundtrack to McCabe and Mrs. Miller. Robert Altman — who remains for me the best modern American filmmaker, all naysayers be damned — used three songs from Leonard’s debut album Songs of Leonard Cohen in beautiful ways in the film.

Altman had gotten hooked on the album when he was in Canada shooting the long-out-of-print psychodrama That Cold Day in the Park with Sandy Dennis. Here is the officially released Warner Bros trailer for the film, available on the DVD. I have very fond memories, though, of a different trailer that I used to see at the old Thalia theater on the Upper West Side that concluded with a voiceover intoning the film’s tagline: “McCabe and Mrs. Miller — Name your poison” (one of the best taglines ever, especially when you’ve seen the film):

Here is a well-distributed documentary about Leonard before he went into music full-time, and was a noted Canadian poet and novelist. The film, Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen (1965) is enlightening, in that Cohen is about 30 years old at the time of filming, but still has a strikingly adolescent goofiness about him. He is assured when reciting his poetry or reading fragments from his first novel The Favorite Game, but otherwise he’s affecting the pose of the “unpretentious artist type” in this portrait, done while he was back visiting his homeland (he lived on the Greek island of Hydra for a few years in the Sixties).

The National Film Board of Canada has placed the whole film on YouTube, but there’s a clearer version of it on their website:

I wasn’t sure what kind of gigs he had in NYC while he was better known as an author than as a singer-songwriter. Well, here is audio from one, at the 92nd St. YMHA. He reads two poems and sings a rather jagged acoustic version of “The Stranger Song,” made famous in McCabe…:

Another bit of verbal wonderment, Leonard reading “How to speak poetry”:

I recently read both of Cohen’s novels, The Favorite Game and Beautiful Losers. They are incredibly evocative, well-written books (I wish he had written more) that have elements that link them to both the “black humor” movement of the Sixties and the Beat poets’ fuel-driven remodeling of fiction. It’s an absolute delight to read fiction written by a poet, as the sense of language is always immersive and oddly playful (as was the case with my utter fave Richard Brautigan). Cohen had his own voice as a writer, a very strong one, and you can hear it in this fragment he reads from Beautiful Losers:

I will avoid any links to Leonard’s original, or any cover versions, of “Hallelujah,” as that song has been done and redone to distraction in recent years — he himself noted in an interview that there should possibly be an embargo on the song for a while (especially, I guess, after it appeared in Shrek).

Instead, I will offer you one of his most pointed comments on politics, in a spoken rendition he did for the United States of Poetry project. “Democracy is coming/to the U.S.A.” indeed. But will it ever get here? (We’ll have to settle for the military-obsessed republic/oligarchy we have in the meantime.)

Leonard jokingly titled the album he did that was produced by Phil Spector (who, yes, pulled a gun on him!) Death of a Ladies Man. He has a major reputation avec les femmes, and can only offer the rest of us an object lesson in how to behave. Here he is performing his perfect poem “A Thousand Kisses Deep”:

A beautiful YouTube discovery, Leonard hanging out in a documentary about an old friend from Montreal, the troubled writer Philip Tétrault. The film is another Film Board of Canada production, made by Philip’s brother Pierre, called This Beggar’s Description (2006). Hanging out with Leonard on a park bench is every fan’s dream, and here it is:

I had to opt for just one or two songs to link to, and I will go first for a well-known one, but one that I think is just absolutely perfect lyrically and melodically. (I also love this seriously “unplugged” rendition by Concrete Blonde’s Johnette Napolitano .)

I will end on the song that Leonard himself has pointed to as one that he’s particularly proud of, called “Anthem.” First, some odd live variants that have surfaced on YT, then the best one I found:
—live at the Beacon in NYC, where Leonard lists all the anti-depressants he’s taken, and then says he turned to “a study of the religions and philosophies, but — cheerfulness kept breaking through…”;

—the second-oddest booking he’s ever had (the first was what looked to be a water-park, as seen on a YT vid from a few years back), at Caesar’s Palace in La Vegas, where he comments on the oddness of him being there; and

—in Israel, where he did a benefit for The Parents Circle, a joint Israeli-Palestinian organization (after several interested folks asked him not to play in Israel because of the Israelis' treatment of the Palestinians in Gaza).

Those are the most interesting, but badly video’d versions; here he is, back in his homeland (in Vancouver), in an uncommonly steady and good-sounding fan-vid, wherein he responds to a British critic who says he “is a boring old drone and should go the fuck back to Canada” (he’s cool with the old drone part — again, just imagine Dylan ever being that personable with an audience….). Then, on to the song, which contains the sublime chorus “There is a crack in everything/that’s where the light gets in…”

The talent and humanity are there in spades, but yes, Leonard, it is all about the hat….

A short lesson in filmmaking from George Kuchar

2011-09-18T21:30:00.011-04:00

To follow up on my last post, I thought I would offer up two pages from the way-out-of-print autobiography by the Kuchar brothers, Reflections from a Cinematic Cesspool (1997). I realized that my Deceased Artiste tribute didn’t mention George’s facility for language — his notes for the Kuchar screenings were always wonderfully, wildly written, in a kind of hyperventilating sleazy paperback prose that was a joy to read.

Thus, I offer only two pages from this OOP classic (if the copyright holders, whoever they be, wish them removed from the Net, all they need to do is contact me — it will be done). In the meantime, I picked these two pages because they are the close of a particularly useful chapter wherein George offers his rules for filmmaking. The passage I wanted to share starts with the italicized text on the first page.

He was both a lurid writer (”You will be beneath contempt and can therefore work unimpeded in the lower depths while the self-inflated egos of Eros and Ektachrome drift above the surface of mortal existence, dangling their poisonous tentacles in your direction.”) and one who taught well and simply (“Learn what wires go where and why!”). So take a lesson from a master on how to craft your own “gossamer garbage.” (Stating the obvious, instruction-wise: Click the image to enlarge it, save it, and then zoom in to read with whatever image viewer you use.)

Color Him Lurid: Deceased Artiste George Kuchar

2011-09-11T16:22:00.067-04:00

George Kuchar never, ever sold out. In fact, like any good and true underground filmmaker (and George and his twin brother Mike were making narrative 8mm movies before that term ever existed), George wouldn’t’ve known how to sell out, even if he’d been offered the additional dough. His films and videos were homemade productions from the first to the last, and they had more identity, authenticity, emotion, thought, and, yes, pure insanity, than anything the major studios would ever, and will ever, put out.

George died this week at the age of 69, and his death greatly saddened both those who knew him personally and those like myself who felt they knew him well from hours spent viewing his voluminous “diary” videos. I had one cordial encounter in person with the gentleman, at a gallery exhibit of his work last year, and, in response to my pitch for an interview for the Funhouse TV show, he not only wrote an extremely polite e-mail a day or two later, explaining he had no spare time during a short trip to NYC, but also left an equally polite and friendly voicemail saying he’d be back this way soon and we’d talk then, and “look me up if you ever get to Frisco — I’m in the book!”

George’s politeness surprised me, but it shouldn’t have. After I interviewed his brother Mike, I got the nicest single note I’ve ever received from a Funhouse guest. Meeting them confirmed that both brothers' films and videos were indeed 100% genuine. Given their friendliness, the newcomer might've thought that the brothers — yes, they are twins and have the same speaking voice, and fucking awesome Nu Yawk accent — are naïve, silly dreamers who just happened to acquire a reputation because their 8mm and 16mm films were liked by the right people at the right time.

Actually, after watching even a few of the brothers’ joint and solo works, one can easily see that while the gentlemen are extremely polite, they also knew exactly what they were after onscreen. I’ve been told of how George videotaped you while you videotaped him — much like I get the sense that Mike is constantly conjuring visions in his head as he’s talking to you (during our interview, his eyes were often closed when he was intent on making a point).

As young men, both brothers developed into addictive “imagists” (my phrase, not theirs) for whom everything they saw and experienced was grist for the mill; thus, the very personal nature of what they were doing. Sure, George’s projects with his students at the San Francisco Art Institute are completely “out there” (that’s an expression whose time has come and gone), and seem on first glance to be just fun filmmaking games for his classes.

However, those films and videos, while not being near his video diaries and his solo 16mm and mini-DV work in terms of brilliance, still have their moments, as can be seen in the video “Butterball.” The video can’t be embedded on this blog because, in the 2000s, George was still doing what he did with Mike back in the late Fifties and early Sixties — using “found music” for his soundtracks (read: breaking out CDs from his own collection or that of a friend). Included here are different versions of the old song “My Love Has Two Faces,” and instrumental versions of a song by the Police and what I *think* is “Can You Feel The Love Tonight?”

To salute George I want to move backwards in this post through the films of his that are online; those unfamiliar with George’s work should jump right down to the two modern classics linked to at the bottom, or check out the commercially available documentary It Came From Kuchar, made by one of George’s former students, Jennifer Kroot.

Since, for the most part, both brothers’ films and videos (Mike has made dozens and dozens; George easily made a few hundred in total) aren’t available anywhere online or on DVD, the documentary serves as a good “101” for those who want to be exposed to the wonderful world of Kuchar.

In terms of official releases of Kuchar pics, there have been only two in the 35 years that home-entertainment media have existed: the British VHS of four shorts by George called Color Me Lurid (the contents of which can be found in various places on the Net), and the DVD of three 16mm shorts by Mike entitled Sins of the Fleshopoids, which also keeps surfacing on YT.

New Yorkers have been very lucky, in that the chief curator of the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, David Schwartz, is an unabashed admirer of underground cinema and has programmed entire festivals of it (my first major dose of George and Mike’s work was ingested out at the MMI).

Also, the city’s most important repertory theater, the Anthology Film Archives, has presented new and vintage works by the Kuchars every few months, allowing NYC residents to be introduced to their work, as well as that of nearly every significant filmmaker from the silent era on, at the lowest prices in Manhattan (!). The AFA is the only NYC theater brave enough to show the uncut and still surprisingly shocking Thundercrack! (above), scripted by and starring George, since the heyday of rep back in the Seventies and Eighties.

The reasons that the Kuchars’ work hasn’t surfaced on DVD are many: lack of “consumer interest” (read: mainstream appeal for idiots); music clearance rights (particularly important for the early, jointly made 8mm films that are awash in cuts from old singles and LPs); and, perhaps most importantly, an evident lack of interest from the brothers themselves.

Let’s face it, to be an independent filmmaker these days requires an inordinate amount of self-promotion and the selling of one’s work, something the Kuchars have never done (to their own credit). One of the most notable fan/students of the Kuchar brothers’ work, John Waters, has turned himself into a very familiar brand, both as a filmmaker and as a media celebrity, lecturer/standup, and talk show guest. I was in fact introduced to the Kuchars’ style of filmmaking through my discovery of the wonderful early Waters features. Waters admirably is always very forthright about crediting the brothers for influencing his work — although (grumble!) his list of important indie filmmakers in Cecil B. Demented included such non-Kucharian, non-Kenneth Angered, folks as Otto Preminger and Spike Lee!

The thing that the Kuchars gave to Waters, Rosa von Praunheim, Guy Maddin, and a very LONG list of other micro-budgeted filmmakers, was a blissful sense of kitsch and camp that melded the melodrama of mainstream Hollywood with the “otherness” of low-budget sci-fi and thriller movies. What first strikes you upon watching the Kuchars' movies and videos is the insanely bright and eye-catching color schemes they used (drawn from both Technicolor melodramas and the comic books they read as kids).

In the last twenty years, as they both have edited their mini-DV productions using digital effects, they have duplicated that color scheme in an even trippier fashion. Some might see this as a “sell-out” of one kind or another, but the brothers’ works have still been made with nearly non-existent budgets (even the videos made for George’s classes were done on a very thin shoestring), and the effects that they’ve used are in fact from earlier generations of computer-editing programs (as well as completely offline digital editing boards) and, most importantly, are being used by older men with the same kind of joy and inventiveness with which they used 8mm back in the late Fifties.

Before I discuss the clips that are online, let me add one aspect: the fact that both gentlemen have resided in San Francisco now for years (George moved there in the mid-1970s), but retained their spectacular NYC accents. Born and raised in the Bronx, they have been celebrated all over the world, but when they talk, the cityspeak pours out of their mouths. I loved hearing Mike rhapsodize about the movies the brothers loved when they were young, and I never tire of George musing on literally everything and anything in his video diaries.

I myself don’t really care about the weather one way or the other (unless I’m caught without an umbrella). Listening to George go on and on about storms and natural catastrophes, as well as the “men in black” and Bigfoot and other paranormal phenomena, was riveting, though. Samples of George talking at length about his pictures can be found here and here.

And what are we left with then, from George’s prodigious output and groundbreaking work with NO goddamned budgets? A sense that anything is indeed possible on film and video, and the fact that the man possessed a very sharp, funny, and ridiculous sense of humor. George and Mike belong on any short list of great underground filmmakers — a Mount Rushmore containing Anger, Deren, Brakhage, Mekas, Jacobs, Markopoulos, Snow, and oh yeah, I guess that Warhol guy and his crew.

What distinguished them from their colleagues was that their movies were always so much fun to watch. The images were just as radical and jarring as those found in the work of the other pioneers, but their sense of humor— and brilliant ability to craft an alternate world out of household objects found in NYC and San Francisco apartments — was always a constant.

Watching a multiplex movie may give you that Spielbergian emotional “tug” or a quick laugh at a fart joke (and yes, in the Sixties the Kuchar brothers were the ones who delivered the very first bad-taste moments onscreen, inspiring young Waters). But the Kuchars’ movies and videos convince you that it can all be done with no budget, and done very beautifully at that.

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Moving backward in time through George’s work, I’ll first mention that you can watch one of the films made with his SF Art Institute students here. It is called “Dynasty of Depravity” — has it taken me this long to mention what an unmitigated delight the titles of the Kuchar movies are? When you start out with “I Was a Teenage Rumpot,” it’s hard get better, but they did, on an annual basis.

George also used to diarize his meetings with people he thought were interesting. Examples of that kind of video can be found here and also here (the latter starring Christopher Coppola in the home of his brother Nicholas Cage).

These are only recommended for those who’ve seen George’s best works, but if you need an idea of what that type of production looks like, here is a very joyful micro-budgeted (toys, Egyptian gods, Santa, and dinosaurs!) music video for a song by Andy Ditzler celebrating the winter solstice, directed by George (much like Kenneth Anger, the Kuchars were unintentionally designing “music videos” in their work from the very beginning):

The Kuchars had a beloved dog that figured heavily in their films when a pet was needed (he is the pooch taking a very scary crap in Mike’s The Craven Sluck; see below). George did a filmic ode to the dog with his The Mongreloid in 1978:

As noted above, George was obsessed by extreme weather and would travel to a small city in Oklahoma on an annual basis to record their rainy season. One of his “weather diaries” can be found on the Ubuweb site (they of the seemingly bottomless bandwidth — how DO they do it, and how can *I* do it?). For a nice impressionistic view of his obsession with weather, go no further than this pretty and strange piece called Wild Night in El Reno from 1977:

Certainly the strangest item from George that can be found online is I, An Actress (1977). Intended as a demo reel for an aspiring young actress, instead it becomes a chance to watch George coach her in how to overact for the camera (he was a master at assuming the melodramatic “mood” and stealing a scene). I’m assuming she never submitted it as her “reel” at auditions:

One of the Kuchar features I’ve never seen but would love to is The Devil’s Cleavage from 1975. Some generous poster has put up a party scene from the film. It demonstrates George’s facility with “found music,” especially odd items like a track from the late and "incredibly strange" Mrs. Miller:

The strangest-ever film that George was involved in was one he didn’t direct. Thundercrack! was directed by his friend and protégé Curt McDowell in 1975, and it is still a surprisingly “shocking” movie for many viewers, in that its mega-melodramatic action stops every so often for a graphic sexual interlude (guy/girl, girl/girl, guy/guy).

George wrote the wonderfully overwrought dialogue (it really provides a great lesson in how to mock the melodramatic dialogue found in old Hollywood films, and even in contemporary television dramas), and stars as the circus trainer of a gorilla who is getting far too close to his charge. A helpful YT poster has attempted to upload most of the movie’s non-sex sequences (which is more than half the film), but I’m tellin’ ya, it’s a far weirder picture with those scenes intact:

Although George produced video diaries on a regular basis in the last three decades, he rarely talked about his personal relationships on-camera; thus, there not many direct references to his being gay in the films and videos.

His film Pagan Rhapsody (1970) contains a gay seduction scene, though, and the wonderful inclusion of the Zombies’ “Care of Cell 44” on the soundtrack (go to 14:45; the film is already wonderful, but the Zombies tune, one of their best, BRIGHTENS the pic incredibly). The interesting thing about the way that George and Mike used pop music was that they used *snippets* of songs, rather than playing the whole thing, as with Kenneth Anger or John Waters. As a result you have that snippet bouncing around your head for days, and can’t forget the images attached to it:

Speaking of Mike, here’s one of his 16mm features, The Craven Sluck (1967). George gives a great performance as a seducer who lures away the married Floraine Connors:

George beautifully established his filmmaking style in the mid-Sixties, as did Mike — definitely a function of their splitting up as collaborators and each embarking on his own directorial path. Eclipse of the Sun Virgin (1967) is pure, undiluted George K: torrid melodrama, Catholic guilt, wonderfully over-the-top performances by Kuchar family friends, gay longing, amazing apartment-dweller kitsch, and sublime use of “found music” [RECOMMENDED]:

I close out with one of George’s first solo 16mm features, the utterly, utterly sublime Hold Me While I’m Naked (1966). There is too much I could write about this film, but suffice it to say it’s brilliant on several levels:
—as a record of a filmmaker salvaging a project that went into the crapper (his lead actress bailed during filming);
—as a beautiful combination of the overwrought and the touching in George’s work;
—as a wonderful bird’s-eye-view of apartment life in the NYC in the Sixties;
—as the film that in my mind has the series of cuts (go to 7:40!) that inspired the opening of the credit sequence in Scorsese’s Mean Streets. (Scorsese’s Film Foundation has restored the early 8mms made by George and Mike.) George may not have seemed in his diary videos like the kind of guy who could rock out, but check out his use of rock music in his films, and, I’m telling you, you’re seeing the blueprint for how it was used by those who followed. I could watch that Four Seasons moment in Hold Me… over and over again. And have. [HEAVILY RECOMMENDED]:

You should see as many of George’s movies and videos as you can, but his mid-Sixties work, particularly Hold Me… explains why, in fourteen quick and crazy minutes, he will never be forgotten.

"Whatever happened to the protest and the rage?": Deceased Artiste Gil-Scott Heron

2011-09-08T00:28:00.026-04:00

One of the most significant deaths in the arts community this summer was the poet-singer-songwriter-activist Gil-Scott Heron. Heron died several weeks ago at this point, but I wanted to wait to pay tribute to him until I could get it right.

Gil-Scott’s death was not unexpected — he had battled drug addiction and various other health crises (including, most recently, HIV) for several decades, but to make matters more poignant, he left us after having a low-key but triumphant comeback in 2010 with the haunting album I’m New Here. His talent as a writer and a musician can’t be overstated — he remained true to his principles and brought a searing intelligence and deep passion for his fellow man to the world of “popular music.”

What strikes one when listening to all of his recorded work in a short span of time is not only how radical his poems and lyrics were, but also how he clung to the small joys found in daily life. Those who know him only from works like “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” will be surprised to hear the pretty and extremely serene jazz ballads he wrote and performed during the same period.

In addition to his writing and musical talent, he also was an engaging performer, as is evidenced by the films and videos of his concerts, where he did both poems and comedy routines in between songs.
So GSH was a “militant” artist who could also be extremely funny; a polemicist who also crafted mellow music that is relaxing and refreshing; and a gifted, literary (that is a compliment, not an insult) writer who never lost the common touch in his “voice.”

His obits celebrated his achievements, but also naturally focused on the tragedy of his drug use. It’s clear that, like many artists, he saw all too clearly what the world is like and needed to dull his senses so that he wouldn’t be sucked in too deeply. The fact that he produced precise and unsparing accounts of addiction (“Home is Where the Hatred Is,” “The Bottle”) when he himself was presumably only beginning to fall victim to it reflects how deeply he understood the mindset of the addict and the allure of the “escape hatch.”

The other aspect of Gil-Scott’s legacy that was spoken about in every obit and tribute on the Internet was his status as one of the principal “godfathers of rap.” The quote of his that was most repeated was “don’t blame me for that," but the more important statement he made about contemporary hiphop in general was his reminder that he had worked on becoming a honed musician before he became a performer.

His main collaborator, Brian Jackson, is rightly given credit for the sound of Gil’s best albums, up to and including 1980; in many cases the records were credited to both of them. But Gil was himself a musician who knew his craft and took no easy ways out — thus the fact that he cultivated a dedicated following in America and was widely appreciated in Europe and the UK, where jazz is much more warmly received.

How did Heron differ from the mainstream rap stars of today, many of who claim him as an influence?
—His compositions were always his own original material. He covered songs by Marvin Gaye and Bill Withers, among others, but he didn’t lay his lyrics on the “bed” of another artist’s melody.
—His looks. He was a good looking guy when he was younger, but was never a heartthrob.
—He was a poet, first and foremost. His concentration as a writer was not strictly on the rhymes (although he produced some gems), but on the message being communicated and the tone of the words.
—He was, above all, a moralist (a streetsmart one) who wrote with a sense of purpose and was, in fact, very hard on himself in his writing. No self-aggrandizing “gangsta” behavior for him.
-And, yes, the musicianship. Though they contain some topical lyrics, his best albums are evocative and timeless jazz records.

In the British TV series All Back to Mine (see below), when asked to pick his favorite music he made certain to put Chuck D/Public Enemy and Michael Franti in the company of John Coltrane (his hero) and Marvin Gaye. He definitely knew the good stuff when he heard it.

The details of his life and the geographical moves that shaped his worldview were also quickly reviewed in his obits. Born in Chicago to a librarian and a Jamaican soccer star who was a key player for a Scottish team (!), he was cared for as a child by his grandmother in Tennessee. In adolescence he was moved to the Bronx. He interrupted his college undergrad studies to write and publish a novel (The Vulture), then wound up getting a master’s in literature from John Hopkins when he was already a recording artist in the early Seventies.

He described himself as a “bluesologist,” since he remained fascinated by the roots of African-American popular music throughout his life. The drug addiction that wrecked his health apparently kicked in badly in the mid-Eighties, as his productivity as a singer-songwriter pretty much ceased at that point, with only two studio albums and certain select tours after that.

His last 25 years were fallow in terms of work, but the concentration of genius he betrayed in his prolific period, plus the brilliance of the two “comeback” albums, qualify him as a major artist who, true to the American way of entertainment, was better known and more beloved overseas than he was over here….

On a related note, Gil-Scott did live through two years of the Obama presidency (the two years squandered on the quest for “bipartisanship”), but I haven’t seen or read any comments from him about the President. Since Obama has kept America’s military commitment ramped up (while the country is falling apart at home), one can only assume that the artist whose motto was “Work for Peace” (see below) would not be pleased with another U.S. President with unnecessary blood on his hands.

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I can rhapsodize about Heron’s work, but he should always have the last word. Let me start off the clips with the best GSH interviews, all done by British fans/journalists. First an interview done for the BBC when he was preparing his last album, and then a really terrific documentary, a GSH “101” called The Revolution Will Not Televised:

Then the British show All Back to Mine in 2000. Gil speaks about his musical influences and those who followed him [RECOMMENDED]:

Heron’s first album is a potent collection of spoken word pieces with musical backing called Small Talk at 125th and Lenox (he does sing “Who’ll Pay Reparations on My Soul?”). This piece was resurrected by Kanye West and inserted into a new piece he called “Who Will Survive in America?” (which is basically Gil’s vocal with a new musical backing).

A song that wound up having a lot of personal meaning to Gil-Scott was “Home is Where the Hatred Is,” off his second album Pieces of a Man (1971). The song talks about drug addiction, and he later reworked it for his first comeback album in 1994, after he had had been having drug problems for a while. It’s a no-nonsense song that isn’t preachy, it just provides a first-person perspective:

The thing that impresses me about the most about GSH is his versatility. Above you have a political poem and a “cry from the heart” as they call it. And here, from some intrepid YT poster, are three of his most beautiful vocals, with the first two being particular favorites of mine, “Save the Children” and “I Think I’ll Call It Morning” (from Pieces…). The third song is “Peace Go With You, Brother” from his album with Brian Jackson, Winter in America [HIGHLY RECOMMENDED]:

Yet another truly mellow tune that reflected GSH’s upbeat side is his ode to two of his greatest influences, “Lady Day and John Coltrane.” I also love his spoken word piece “The Ghetto Code (Dot Dot Dit Dit Dot Dot Dash)” that functions as both a cautionary tale and a standup routine; the most interesting thing is his note that “there’s something wrong with February,” which, of course, was later chosen to be Black History month, despite its being the shortest month in the year.

For a visual example of his comfortable stage presence, here is a great bit taken from the Robert Mugge’s terrific GSH documentary Black Wax (1983):

Three-quarters of Black Wax can be found on YT currently. The first section, in which Gil-Scott discusses his being a “bluesologist,” is here. A large, 40-minute chunk of the film, starting with Heron doing an awesome version of his poem “Whitey on the Moon,” is here [HIGHLY RECOMMENDED]:

A nod to Brian Jackson, Gil-Scott’s finest collaborator. Their albums together are among Heron’s best, and songs like “First Minute of a New Day” (1976) underscore Jackson’s terrific arranging and production. Their album Winter in America (1974) is considered the high point of their collaboration (along with their group, "the Midnight Band”):

Gil-Scott’s biggest hit on “the charts” was this awesome blend of a serious message and a very catchy melody, “The Bottle” [RECOMMENDED]:

The first time I saw Gil-Scott was on Saturday Night Live singing his anthemic "Johannesburg," which predated the whole Sun City by a decade. It’s still a killer song:

Heron was on the right side of a lot of issues in the Seventies and early Eighties. He opposed the use of nuclear energy with the unforgettable “We Almost Lost Detroit.” Here is a live version from 1990:

Gil-Scott’s satirical pieces on “the Great Communicator,” Ronald Raygun (as Heron called him), were nothing short of brilliant. Here is the first one, which serves as a great history lesson about what was really going on at the turn of the Eighties [RECOMMENDED]:

As if “B-Movie” wasn’t brutal enough, the funkified “Re-Ron” lays down the case for the danger and stupidity of Reagan in an even clearer fashion:

Gil’s personal problems consumed him after the early Eighties, but in 1994 he came back with his first dynamite “comeback” album, Spirits. He was profiled as “the godfather of rap” in interview segments like this one and crafted a brilliant “Message to the Messengers” to speak to the new generation of hiphop stars:

The Spirits album is terrific on the whole, but one of its spoken-word pieces still hits home today. “Work for Peace” is Gil-Scott’s recognition that the “military and the monetary” run America. Here he performs the piece on the MTV Unplugged poetry special. This piece, again, should be mandatory listening for the President. It probably wouldn’t change anything he’s currently thinking, but it would so sweet if it could [HIGHLY RECOMMENDED]:

Sadly, following Spirits, Gil-Scott’s drug problems increased. He did continue to do live gigs and expressed himself eloquently as always in interviews like this one. His second “comeback” occurred last year with the excellent album I’m New Here. The haunting and deeply menacing song “Me and the Devil” (which was perhaps his most deeply personal, most anguished composition) was illustrated by a suitably menacing menacing music video (check out the amazing spoken-word piece at the close).

The album has some great tunes, including the superb “New York Is Killing Me,” but the most valuable piece of video to emerge from the production was a live, acoustic version of the title tune. Here Gil-Scott finally did become a bluesman — he had spoken of his love for the blues since the early Seventies, but his music had never sounded as bluesy as here [RECOMMENDED]:

There is an undeniable majesty to Heron on the I’m New Here (his knowledge and experience seeps out of every track), but the song I have to close this entry out with is his most famous, the one that has been copied endlessly and still packs a punch 41 years after he first recorded it (as a spoken word piece on Small Talk…) and 40 years after he recorded this indelible musical version (the whole thing is perfect, but the flute has always made it for me).

Here is an interview in which Gil-Scott discusses the song. If you’re going to have one creation to be remembered by, this is one hell of an achievement. I wish all rap (and rock and even “fast folk”) sounded more like this, and betrayed this level of intelligence. Rest well, poet.

He’s still welcome here: MDA pitches from Jerry, 57 years apart

2011-09-04T16:12:00.006-04:00

My last post about Jerry Lewis’s ouster from the MDA telethon summarizes my feelings about the event quite clearly, but I thought I’d share two of the clips that I showed last night on the Funhouse TV show in my annual Labor Day Jerry tribute episode. The first clip is from the second telethon Martin and Lewis hosted, and the first that was entirely devoted to MDA, on Thanksgiving Eve in 1953. The second clip is from the 2010 telethon, the last Jerry was ever to host (which of course we, and he, never knew was to be his swan song).

The interesting thing about contrasting the clips is noting Jerry’s approach — in the first he is mellow, and 57 years later he is frenzied (to the point of anger it seems) and sincerely impassioned about the cause. I present these as a sort of testament to a loooong time spent working for one charity.

Also, notice his emphasis on finding a cure. It’s seemed to me in the past few years that he is the one who has pushed that aspect of the MDA fund drive — he has spoken about a cure now for 57 years (note that back in 1953 he gave an amount of time, three months, in which the disease could be cured if the funds came in). Whereas the other spokespeople for the MDA seem to stress research and aid for those who are afflicted by the neuromuscular diseases.

Whatever the case may be, he certainly has given the organization a lotta his time and energy (discussions about his motivations can take place elsewhere — and already have). Since we are denied his company this evening as a host (and thus denied the last functional old-fashioned TV variety show), I thought I would share just a little of my Funhouse tribute here:

The Wham of Sham: Deceased Artiste Shammi Kapoor

2011-08-29T00:14:00.027-04:00

I know very little about Bollywood cinema, but what I have seen I've loved. During the early years of the Funhouse TV show (which began in 1993 — comin’ up on 18 years, folks!) I showed and re-showed a small handful of B’wood musical numbers I taped off PBS, several of which involved the inimitable Mr. Shammi Kapoor, who died on Aug. 14 at the age of 79.

A four-part series about Indian cinema aired on PBS in the late 1980s, and the two episodes that melted my mind in wondrous ways were something called “Dance Invasion” and another that profiled Shammi. These programs have never been rerun since to my knowledge, but I believe “Dance Invasion” was seen by the folks who did Ghost World, as the Bye Bye Byrdie-ish rockin’ clip from the thriller Gumnaam (1965) that starts off that film also started off the “Dance Invasion” special (and was later reshown on a Manhattan access show, again from the DI special).

The carefully chosen B’wood clips in that series were a revelation to me, and the performer who simply blew me away was Kapoor. I was struck at first by how feverishly he danced around during the musical numbers.

In most of his best Sixties musicals he’s a somewhat chunky guy with a prominent pompadour, but he did dance moves that were, by turns, wildly funny and extremely cool. Without any ado, I give you the clip from Teesri Manzil (1966) that converted me to the cult of Kapoor. If you don’t smile when watching this, you’re officially dead. [HEAVILY RECOMMENDED]:

I watched and rewatched these clips with my friends on “video nights” back in the Eighties, and all of them were duly impressed by Shammi’s frenzied movements. The only possible way I can explain Kapoor’s dancing is to say he seemed like Dick Shawn’s long-lost Indian brother.

Shawn, of course, was a comedian-actor who danced wildly, and Kapoor was a leading man who played in dramas and comedies that were chockfull of musical numbers. Both men were far more uninhibited in their gyrations than Elvis — Kapoor in fact was dubbed “the Elvis of India” in the late Fifties. They both were also high-key performers who were unashamed of looking silly onscreen and were totally in control of the film frames they inhabited.

On this last point, it should be noted that Kapoor may have seemed like he was shakin’ out of control onscreen, but in that PBS profile I taped, he spoke at length about how he planned his wild, uninhibited dances. He discussed how he knew exactly when to quickly exit the frame on a beat and when to reappear in another set-up (thus putting him in the class of comedian-filmmakers from the silent era). This resulted in some kinetically edited musical sequences like this one (no I can’t explain why the schoolchildren get involved) or this playful number. This item, also from Teesri Manzil, is a delightful bit of song-seduction with a refrain that sounds like “peachy, peachy”:

For some seriously frenzied rockin’ out from Shammi, here is yet another scene from Teesri Manzil that seems modeled on the “What I Say” scene in Viva Las Vegas [RECOMMENDED]:

The most interesting thing to keep in mind when discussing the musical sequences in B’wood productions is that the actors rarely if ever sang their own songs, thus spawning an entire industry of Marni Nixon-like “playback singers.” Shammi’s primary playback singer was a legend in the annals of B’wood, Mohammed Rafi — who, according to various Internet sources, sang in 15 Indian languages and dialects, as well as English and several European languages, and recorded over 25,000 songs!

In his online vlog entry about Rafi, Kapoor maintained that he would talk to Rafi about what he was going to be doing physically during a given musical number. Rafi didn’t look like a rocker at all (see above), but he matched Shammi’s energy levels with his rockabilly-styled vocals.

Here is another of their collaborations, a low-key number from Kashmir Ki Kali (1964) that Shammi performs in an empty bar (Frank called ’em “saloon songs”) with a sax player in attendance:

Kapoor of course performed many low-key ballad-type songs in his movie career but, again, my focus here is on his upbeat moments. I still am blown away by his energy, particularly as he put on weight as the Sixties turned into the Seventies. I do occasionally laugh out loud at his dancing and gesticulations, but I think that would be okay with the man himself (especially given the impression of him one receives in his vlogs).

He was so into what he was doing onscreen that to laugh while watching him is to merely acknowledge that he was having a GREAT time performing a given number (and/or flirting with his delightfully pretty costars). Kapoor was unafraid of looking silly onscreen, which is a rare quality among film stars — unless they are comedians or actors who are known for musical-comedy performances (Zero Mostel, Bert Lahr).

Shammi was truly one of a kind and, although I know quite little about his personal life and the incredible cinematic legacy of his family (the Kapoors were/are indeed a “dynasty” that have been quite important in the history of Bollywood), I feel that I got to know him a little better by watching the aforementioned video blogs, called ”Shammi Kapoor Unplugged.” (He apparently came up with the name, as he says it on-camera proudly in each entry, further proving his Cool Old Guy status.)

Uploaded to YouTube by three separate posters, they constitute a very informal personal history of a performer’s career. Kapoor was a Net addict in his later years (he talks about it here), and he understood how to communicate with the average Net-surfer, who is not likely to read a bulky show-biz memoir, but will surely watch a superstar sharing his favorite anecdotes on camera. Here is one of my favorite entries, proving that Shammi definitely had a sense of humor about what he was doing:

You can see Shammi as a thin matinee idol in this 1962 clip. From the same film, Dil Tera Diwana, here is a classic Bollywood number in which both hero and heroine get soaking wet as they seduce/sing to each other:

Shammi does some more classic seduction with ebullient dance movements (in a boat, yet!), in Kashmir Ki Kali:

Perhaps the most energetic scene that Shammi took part in didn’t involve dancing — it was this number in which he hangs from a low-flying helicopter (in a bathrobe!) from the 1967 film An Evening in Paris.

The best part about rewatching these Kapoor musical numbers is being reminded of the catch-phrases that he had as wild choruses in his songs, as in this rockabilly number from China Town (1962) in which he repeatedly intones a phrase burnt into my brain, “Tally-ho!” [RECOMMENDED]:

A number that is blatantly comedic from Dil Tera Diwana, which includes the phrase “woof!” Yes, Shammi is singing to a man in drag:

One of the films that made him into a star was Junglee (1961). Here’s a killer number from that film in which the phrase “Yahoo!” is screamed (not by Shammi, or by the singer Rafi, according to Shammi, but by another actor who had a deeper voice). [RECOMMENDED]:

Another number in which Shammi is a bona fide wildman. I can’t tell what he’s screaming at the opening, but the song is another high-energy rouser. From Tumse Achha Kaun Hai (1969):

And a last unforgettable catchphrase, “Suku suku,” from Junglee again. This scene reflects the B’wood passion for Russian and Spanish dancing (I’m not sure why these two cultures fascinated the makers of B’wood pics, but they did). The female lead in the film, who gets more screen time here than Shammi does, is billed as “Shashi Kala”:

Next are two oddities: first, Shammi does an entire song/dance sequence holding two bags after having exited a store (they were just tryin’ ta slow him down, but the man could not be slowed down!). From Professor (1962):

And, yes, although he was called the “Elvis of India,” Shammi did do one Beatles number. It’s a Hindi version of “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” (!). The Nehru jacket comes home in this number, which was shot months before George discovered the sitar on the set of Help! From Janwar (1965); sung, of course, by Mohammed Rafi:

I have to close this tribute out with a another killer number. This one comes from Tumse Achha Kaun Hai. It has a Big Bopper-esque beginning, a heavily rockin’ sound, a sailor in blackface (or is it greenface — I can’t tell if this is racist or just insane), cute girls in brightly colored dresses, and Shammi providing a super-energetic performance of a hyperventilating vocal by Rafi. [HEAVILY RECOMMENDED]:

Thanks to Charles Frenkel for passing on the fact that Kapoor had died. One of the best comments I read about his passing was from one of his directors: “Don’t mourn Shammi, envy him!” The gent seemed to have had a very nice life, and continues to entertain his countrymen and those foreigners like myself who stumble across his work and are duly impressed. Mourning does seem beside the point. Tally-ho!!!

The MTA’s wet dream come true: the subway is shut down!

2011-08-27T13:08:00.029-04:00

As I write this, an unprecedented event is taking place in New York City: the entire mass-transit system is closing down, in order to better “deal with” (read: not deal with, extreme weather has clearly never been prepared for or even taken into consideration!) the onset of Hurricane Irene. It may sound to those outside the city like we’ve finally become the kind of urban dystopia depicted in “near future” novels and movies, like The Warriors and Streets of Fire. A city where the subway doesn’t run, where the leaders are ineffectual or aren’t even present, where the police have graphic closed-circuit camera footage of people committing violent crimes, and they still can’t catch ’em to save their life. Oh wait, that last actually reflects several real news events in NYC in the last few months….

The dirty secret of Bloomberg’s New York is that we already are that kind of city. Class distinctions are getting sharper than ever, and the billionaire mayor-who-flies-to-Bermuda-every-weekend (yes, it’s true, it’s very true) has two things on his mind: making the city safer and more amenable to his rich brethren, and bringing in millions more rich tourists to drop cash. Oh, and to smooth over that rough patch that occurred when he was in Bermuda during the big weekend snow storm a few months back, and he didn’t move fast enough to plough the boroughs at all (not enough rich people living there!). Mustn’t give that kind of impression again….

So there he is, on my TV set, on the 24-hour news nets, “Mayor Mike” telling people in various districts in the five boroughs that they have to vacate where they live. He’s only trying to help them, isn’t he? Well, the ones who were journeying out to the Hamptons and Connecticut on the news reports I saw are his kind of people. And they have somewhere to go to. The other people, those who only have a primary residence, a rented apartment that constitutes the parameters of their existence, those who are elderly, (gasp) poor, in massive debt, where should they go? Well, it’s no matter of the “Fun City” mayor, he’ll be back in Bermuda next weekend when this mess is all cleaned up. (Even if it isn't, most likely.)

But Bloomberg didn’t order the full MTA shutdown for the dreaded hurricane that is headed our way (I get images of The Wizard of Oz as well as The Warriors — “it’s a twister, it’s a twister!”). Governor Cuomo did. Because he doesn’t live here, and most likely isn’t tethered to the subway as most of us are, has more than likely not taken it on a daily basis in a few decades (Bloomberg’s daily “show” of taking it is a pathetic spectacle that speaks to how sad the man really is, and how stupid he really thinks we can be).

The subway is the lifeline, the bloodline of the city, and you’ve got to keep it functioning for as long as you can, no matter what the circumstances — if the circumstances are indeed too extreme, you systematically shut the thing down, “zone” by “zone” (NYC is being discussed that way on local cable news today). As it stands, it runs very well during the two rush-hour periods every day, and wanes and rumbles along at very odd, completely unpredictable times the rest of the day. Those who have to get to and from their job on the weekends or in the late evening hours must deal with the fact that they will stand on the platform for close to forever.

Thus, the joke can be made that how could one even TELL if the NYC subway and bus system is closed down on weekends? The way the MTA has run mass-transit here, they rule with an iron fist, are massively (and I do mean massively, and have detailed it in past blog entries) corrupt, and are not confronted at any pass by any government official. They are a fiefdom that can easily paralyze the city, and in fact do on a regular basis. But those who are not either the rich brethren of Bloomberg or a wealthy tourist *need* the buses and subways, and need them bad.

But, surely, you say, everyone will be hiding indoors today and tomorrow, sequestering themselves to avoid the storm that could indeed “hit us more powerfully than we’ve ever been hit before”? That is the plan, yes. But there are the poor and elderly, those who will still have to get to work, there is the matter of the city actually functioning on a weekend (life can’t, and won’t stop, no matter the doom-ridden weather predictions).

As I currently look out my window, it is 1:00 p.m. on Saturday, there isn’t a single drop of rain falling, but our PANIC-stricken officials (their determined calm doesn’t hide the panic and fear-mongering in their words) have okayed the closing down of the subway system. There will be rain later, there will be a hurricane, but right now the subways and buses are taking their last fares, and there is not a drop of rain comin’ down, folks…

So, in a nutshell:
-The shutdown, if it is indeed necessary (and no one knows yet whether it is, or isn’t), could’ve been done systematically over the weekend, as events dictated. You can tell me otherwise, but precautions for “extreme weather” should have been considered at every step of the game. The MTA *has* the money, no matter what they say publicly.

-Again, the measured words being used by Bloomberg, Cuomo, the MTA head, and various others betray utter PANIC. Foreign powers who are none too thrilled with the U.S. must take major delight in seeing the way New Yorkers scramble in fear like scalded puppies when extreme situations are proposed. The words of Little Lord Fauntleroy… er, “Mayor Mike” must please them no end. What was that some commentators said when the U.S. assassinated bin Laden? Oh yeah, “given the state of fear and civil-rights privacy breaches in this country currently — he already won….”

-If Emperor Bloomie is grounded in this city that he likes to fly away from every single weekend, you have to be grounded too. Stay in your room, and do your homework!

-Class distinctions are definitely being further defined and reinforced by many of the decisions made by our lovely mayor and, yes, even by our liberal governor. One can see Blade Runner in the city already, as the homeless try to take the seats left empty in the “Bloomberg beach” areas that clog up Times Square and Herald Square. They are chased by the cops. The police are there to protect us — aren’t they?

-The real, true reason given for the subway shutdown in The New York Times is that the tunnels needed to be shut down so the trains could be store “indoors” in the tunnels in which the trains normally run on. This, of course, indicates that the MTA has never taken measures to deal with “extreme weather” (this comes up every fucking time it snows these days).

The question arises: since they run on two sets of books, and are constantly and unwaveringly allowed to increase the fare price, WHERE DOES ALL THE MONEY GO? Oh, into the pockets of the crook leaders and the overpaid union members who work for them. I forgot. Sorry.

-The MTA hasn’t noted when it would turn back *on* the mass transit system if the hurricane dies back down sometime on Sunday. Direct quote from The New York Times : “[The MTA] declined to speculate about whether the shutdown would be canceled if the threat diminished.” They don’t have to — I’ve already noted countless times that they answer to no one at all in the city.

Since this is occurring on a weekend, I can’t help but feel that rush hour on Monday morning will be an absolute mess. When you render an incredibly complicated system utterly inactive on what is a time off for most employees (or double time, if we’re talking union), it will most likely not be possible to smoothly and easily get it back to functioning by a given hour. Thus, no time at all has been stated, and the MTA will do what it wants to. Just like it always does.

-The last point, but the most important, in my mind: this sets a precedent. In “extreme weather” conditions, subway and bus service in all five boroughs can now be shut down completely. It’s the first time this has EVER happened in the history of the NYC mass-transit system, but I guarantee it will not be the last. If you are tethered to them by your low financial status, they run roughshod over your life and will continue to do, with opposition from no one.

Although it may not sound like it from the above, I still love this city and want to stay here. That is why I'm so concerned and frustrated when extreme decisions are made that will set a precedent for future life in this burg.

“Warriors, come out to play….”

UPDATE: At the end of the next day, I can report that it rained a lot, rained heavily at times, and there were heavy winds. There was flooding in a few parts of the five boroughs, and a few thousand people lost their electricity, as happens when any extreme weather hits NYC — no preparation is done for extreme weather in this town, it’s just to be accepted you’re losin’ power if there’s a heavy fucking rain or snowfall (especially in the boroughs, which Bloomberg does not care about, not one little bit).

The storm didn’t hit until a good 7-8 hours after the subway and buses were shut down. The entire weather incident was over on Sunday afternoon, but the MTA didn’t quite know how to start the system up again — it was reported on local cable news that they’d have to reshuffle the trains they had secreted away in various tunnels (“the Brooklyn trains will have to be brought back to Brooklyn…”). It was done for our own good, and various drone-like locals were seen on the news saying that they were glad the subway had been shut down, because “I mean… you never know…”

It was a miserable precedent to set for a system that is run incompetently, apathetically, and most important, in a wildly corrupt fashion. But hey, you never know….

ANOTHER UPDATE: We really ain't too far from Warriors turf. First time I've ever read this. Nostalgia for the Seventies, or just disintegration?

“Silence is death”: Hangin’ out with John Cassavetes

2011-08-20T18:44:00.011-04:00

The clip below comes from a 1965 documentary included in the French TV series Cineastes de Notre Temps, since French and British critics were far more supportive of John Cassavetes’ filmmaking efforts than those here at home. It’s a wonderful little time capsule from the decade that truly qualifies as “the gift that keeps on giving” (and giving and giving….).

What comes across is that Cassavetes was one hell of a cool character. The contemporary idea of a “cool filmmaker” is someone like Quentin Tarantino who essays the part of the film geek and appears extremely enthusiastic and energetic. His hyper behavior contrasts completely with Cassavetes’ assuredness — what strikes you in watching interviews with him is that he was certain he was right about what he was doing, and the passage of time has indeed proven that he was creating groundbreaking and rough-edged, wholly original works.

Tarantino is a talented genre filmmaker who indulges the public’s (and his own) lust for crazy, imaginative violence. Cassavetes was pretty much a prude when it came to violence and sex on screen (he disliked Rosemary’s Baby and The Dirty Dozen, both of which he starred in for other directors). On a personal level, he appears to have had no indulgences but alcohol — how much he indulged in that is something that appears to be spoken of only in individual anecdotes (none of which are sanctioned by his family), but drink did bring about his premature death.

None of that diminishes what he accomplished during this lifetime, and what he was doing at the end of it (I am particularly fascinated by his last, “magical realist” works). He created a style that was then completely new and innovative, and wasn't the result of him stringing together citations from other pictures. (Of course, Godard and Scorsese strung together citations from other films in their groundbreaking works, but were creating something entirely new in cinema while doing so.)

Cassavetes also worked in commercial mainstream fodder to fund his independent films. He chose to make things the studios didn’t necessarily want (even with a then big-name star like Peter Falk) because he felt the films had to be made. On the way, he was slagged mercilessly by American critics and reviewers, while the critical establishment now prematurely hails as geniuses filmmakers like Tarantino, the Anderson guys (not related, but I always lump Wes and Paul Thomas in together), Sofia Coppola, whomever.

I believe that one of the many things that strengthened Cassavetes and Altman as filmmakers were the drubbings they received from the critics when many of their best works came out. It’s surely not a good thing for an artist to receive instant, unanimous praise for their early works and to have shrines built to them as they crank out solid but entirely un-exceptional work.

Cassavetes was indeed an extremely cool character, and watching him here one can only envy those who got to know and work with him. Take a little cruise in his car, and marvel at what comes on the AM radio:

The whole documentary can be found on YT here. Thanks to Rich Brown for leading me to this gem.

Dishin' it: DVD reviews

2011-08-19T01:08:00.008-04:00

I should probably connect the dots here and direct readers of this blog to some of my other recent writing. I’ve been reviewing DVDs for Disc Dish since its inception; the site is the brainchild of two of the editors I worked with at the sorely missed trade mag Video Business, Laurence Lerman and Samantha Clark.

My writing for DD is a bit more formal than it is in the entries here, but I’m proud of the reviews, as they include a little background, a little historical context, and a note or two on the supplements that appear on the discs, as well as any missing elements or special marketing maneuvers made by the DVD companies.

I know lots and lots of folks are doing the streaming thing these days — I can’t even imagine having another reason to be tethered to my computer — but the little silver discs are still being produced on a weekly basis, and there are some wonders to be found thereupon. For example:

The 1980 new wave music pic Breaking Glass

The Ernie Kovacs Collection

Phil Ochs: There But For Fortune

Francois Ozon’s Potiche

One word: Skidoo

The box set of the Seventies TV show Celebrity Bowling

Fassbinder’s I Only Want You To Love Me

Ozon’s Hideaway (Francois has been a busy guy!)

On Jerry Lewis being booted from "the Jerry Lewis telethon"

2011-08-06T03:24:00.033-04:00

Well, the expected event has occurred, but before we thought it would (a lousy month before): the MDA has announced that Jerry Lewis has “completed his run” (nice ex-employer wording!) as National Chairman and won’t be hosting this year’s Telethon. Clearly the crazy and idiosyncratic press conference Jerry held last week — recounted to best effect here — spelled the end of Jer’s tenure at the MDA.

He stated at that conference that he would explain his so-called “retirement” from the show at a press conference after the ’Thon was over, and inferred that this wouldn’t be his last year as the show’s host, by using a reference to what he referred to as the “The New York Times ‘Dewey Wins!’ headline” (that most likely went over the heads of the younger journalists in the room — and it was actually the Chicago Daily Tribune proclaiming “Dewey Beats Truman”).

Jerry has always been a loose cannon, and that’s been the delight of watching the telethon. In an era when nothing unpredictable ever happens on live television (even on the talking-head political shows that are theoretically “unpredictable”), watching Jerry be so blatantly arrogant, rude, giddy, sentimental, and emotionally overwhelmed provided one of the last pieces of genuine (and genuinely bizarre) TV entertainment to be found.

As I noted in my last post about Jerry’s leaving the telethon, it was pretty evident that he was being ousted by the MDA when the two press releases announcing the telethon being cut back to six hours and Jerry’s “retirement” as host of the show didn’t include a single quote from the man himself.

So, as I did in the last post, let me acknowledge that the MDA’s main goal is to raise money to pay for research and items to help those afflicted with the disease. (Jerry has always spoken about a cure, whereas I don’t know if the MDA ever goes near such a notion.) Jerry’s “pity-based” way of raising money is from another era, when it was okay to diminish those who suffer from the disease. The famous “half-a –person” quote comes into the argument here. Warning: this clip includes "Angry Jer":

But, then again, the central reason most folks have even heard of the MDA is because of Jerry’s work as the National Chairman for the past few decades. You can argue that he made the telethon the main focus of his career because his movie career died in the late Sixties (and his TV career never, ever took off after the breakup with Dean).

Still, as the National Chairman and host of the Telethon, he has raised millions (actually $2.6 billion cumulatively). Here is a great example of the aforementioned “pity-based” fundraising that I uploaded to YT several years ago. It seems very corny and clichéd these days, but it did raise big dough from the time that the Telethon became an annual occurence, back in 1966:

So should the MDA have ousted him so unceremoniously? On the pragmatic level, you can’t have the host of your annual telethon badmouthing the organization on national TV (or whatever remains of “the Love Network”). But when your official spokesman has been Jerry Lewis, you’ve already made a Faustian bargain (shades of Damn Yankees!) — since Jerry was never going to be a Danny Thomas-like, friendly “face of charity.”

The MDA has pitched Jerry out in order to “rebrand” the franchise, but it has made a perennially angry senior citizen FURIOUS. And, whatever they may’ve thought they were doing, they did indeed muddy the organization’s image (unless they go the limit and change the name from MDA), since those who have heard of it to this date would most likely identify it with “that all-night TV show with that old comedian” — who, as much as he may be hated by some, is respected, revered, and beloved by others.

Neither option benefits the MDA in the long run — for surely the Telethon will be gone in a year or two at most, as the very notion of a telethon is something that appeals only to older viewers. Younger viewers brought up on the Internet (and those clunky two-hour celeb-filled approximations of telethons) have no referent for it, nor should they — since, as Jerry pointed out in a far brusquer fashion at his press conference last week, “appointment television” no longer exists, except for sporting events, award shows, or the occasional news phenomenon (like the recent Casey Anthony trial).

Those who have followed Jerry’s career over the years (either as a function of worship or derision) are obviously waiting to see how long it takes him to address the situation publicly (he is not the kind of person who could be bribed to shut up). I expect that an “exclusive interview” (or two or three) will find him, if he’s wise, playing the injured senior whose pet charity (which he’s raised billions for!) has thrown him out with the trash. If he plays the role properly (and the “I raised billions for them” aspect is obviously true), Jerry could be viewed in the public eye in a way he’s rarely (if ever) been seen before: sympathetically.

******
Since the tradition of watching Jerry on Labor Day has now officially been killed by the forward-thinking types at the MDA (that tradition, by the way, *won’t* end on the Funhouse TV show), let’s take a little trip back to the earliest surviving record of a Martin and Lewis telethon-type show.

For trivia buffs, the very first M&L-hosted telethon occurred in March 1952 (they also guested on the very first telethon ever, for the Damon Runyon Foundation, hosted by Milton Berle). The 1952 show lasted from midnight until the afternoon of the following day, and the proceeds were split between a cardiac hospital and muscular dystrophy research.

The official start date for the telethon as we know it was 1966 — but Jerry apparently did local ones in between the early Fifties and then, if this piece of footage of a “1959 telethon” isn’t mislabeled. The first surviving footage we have of a TV show done by M&L to benefit muscular dystrophy comes, however, from a two-hour show that aired on November 25, 1953, and was called “The Television Party for Muscular Dystrophy” (!):

Labor Day just won’t be the same without ’im.

The urban neurotic Garbo: Barbara Harris

2011-08-05T00:51:00.058-04:00

While I always enjoy celebrating the careers of performers and artists who’ve left this mortal coil, I also do want to salute those who are still with us. And this week, on the occasion of a very nice discovery (two very nice discoveries) on YouTube, and apropos of nothing at all (fortunately not a demise), I am happy to salute the work of an actress who has been forgotten by most folks, but who gave us a handful of wonderfully indelible performances.

This fascination began when I first saw one of my favorite films, A Thousand Clowns (1965). It's possible to "fall" for that film in several ways: devotions can be developed to the super-charismatic Jason Robards, the gorgeously epigrammatic writer Herb Gardner, the manic Gene Saks, or the the wonderful BH. Harris was cast in the film instead of Sandy Dennis (whom I also love, but that’s a story for another post), who had played the female lead onstage. Harris's performance in the film causes one to wonder, “who is this adorable woman, who can be cute but not cloying and impish but not off-putting?”

If you climb with me on the relatively small bandwagon of diehard Barbara Harris fans (not to be confused with the bandwagon for the lead singer of the girl group the Toys, or any of the many other Barbara Harrises who’ve worked in show biz in the last half-century), you’ll discover a small number (18) of terrific performances in both landmark movies and ones that only the true aficionado of late-night TV (or, these days, obscure old VHS tapes and the occasional TCM airing) knows about.

At various points in the Sixties and Seventies, Harris was perched on the brink of superstardom, but didn’t have much interest in it (in that regard, she is a “legit” theater, less sex-kittenish version of the wonderfully hesitant Tuesday Weld). The only trace of a recent interview with her on the Net, from 2002, finds her saying she didn’t have an impulse to keep acting, and she has in fact been an acting teacher for the past few decades — before, during, and after the final flourish in the Eighties and Nineties where she played a few moms onscreen.

So who is this “mystery” performer who was marvelously endearing onscreen, but deliberately forsook fame and wealth at just about every turn? The basic facts of her life are available in the usual places online. She was born in Evanston, Illinois in 1935, and found her first great foothold as a performer in a troupe called the Playwrights Theatre; other members of the troupe included Ed Asner, and Nichols and May. She graduated from there to the Compass, which is best known for serving as a springboard for both the aforementioned comedy team (whose three LPs never, ever go outta date) and Shelley Berman (whose wonderfully paranoid visions also never, ever date). The group was run by her first husband, Paul Sills, one of the true legends of American improv comedy.

The Compass, in turn, grew into a troupe called “The Second City,” with Barbara being one of the two women in the initial ensemble (Mina Kolb was the other). The troupe brought its sketches to the Broadway stage in 1961 (in From the Second City), and Harris distinguished herself in a number of roles, including a housewife seduced by a beatnik (Alan Arkin) in a sketch called, simply enough, “Museum Piece.” A video exists of this sketch and appears in a CBC documentary about the history of the two Second City troupes (it is time for someone to get the full sketch online!).

The Second City's Broadway run was Barbara's ticket to fame in legit theater. She appeared in the off-Broadway hit Oh Dad, Poor Dad… in 1962, then costarred in Mother Courage on Broadway in ’63, and wound up having the distinction of Alan Jay Lerner and Burton Lane writing her a musical — On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (pictured) was written explicitly for her. Her big number later became an AM radio staple for singers like Eydie Gorme, “What Did I Have That I Don't Have?”

Barbara repeated her off-B'way role in Oh Dad, Poor Dad... in the wildly uneven 1967 film adaptation (her sole overtly sexy role, with even a bikini scene thrown in, to wake the audience up) and won a Tony for her next musical, the critically hailed three-part show The Apple Tree ('66-'67) with Alan Alda and Larry Blyden.

At this point, the story gets a little fuzzy — I distinctly remember looking her up in the Lincoln Center Library to find out where she “went” after the big films of the Seventies and discovering an article in a theater magazine that mentioned that she had scuttled her Broadway career by having a night where she went “dry” onstage and abruptly left a show in mid-run (I believe the show was Apple Tree). I’m told by many people that “everything you need to know is available on the Net,” but the name of that particular show is mentioned nowhere online, nor is her supposed “nervous breakdown” confirmed or denied anywhere.

Whatever troubles she had in the late Sixties were totally wiped away by her successes in the Seventies. She came back with a one-two punch, two roles in two very significant films, both of which feature finales that pivot entirely around her. The first is, of course, Robert Altman’s Nashville (1975), and the second is Alfred Hitchock’s Family Plot (1976). Hitch thought enough of Barbara to end the film (and thus, unwittingly, his career) with her winking at the camera. An adorable gesture in a very enjoyable but not perfect film.

It’s almost inconceivable that Harris didn’t go on to instant fame after those two films. Imagine — to have Altman’s critically-lauded tapestry end with a performer absolutely nailing a killer song by Keith Carradine (which pretty much sums up what Altman was trying to say about America and apathy in a few verses), and then for that same performer to be the very last person seen in the very last Hitchcock film, winking at the camera (Hitch himself winked at his audience in the Family Plot poster, meaning Barbara was most definitely his surrogate). And then the lady appears in one very popular film — the first (and much-too-copied) modern-era “body-switch” comedy Freaky Friday (1976). She follows this with a few more umemorable movies, withdraws to teach somewhere along the way, does a few more supporting "mom" roles (and a scene in the, again, wildly uneven, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988)), and is never heard from publicly again (unless you took her classes, of course).

Harris is indeed an enigma of sorts — the Garbo of adorable urban neurotic Sixties actresses. We don’t know anything about her private life, which is fine (I was intrigued, though, to see Robert Klein mention in his autobiography that he had a crush on her when they worked together in The Apple Tree). But we also don’t much about her as a performer, except for the work that was preserved onscreen.

The book The Nashville Chronicles by Jan Stuart reveals that, early on, she thought her performance in Altman's epic tapestry was terrible (she initially had another song in the film, one by Chicago friend Shel Silverstein). Altman told her she was wrong, but she begged him to let her buy and destroy the rushes of her initial scenes. He wouldn’t let her, and thus we still have her performance as Altman intended it — but the other song hit the cutting room floor, so that Altman could properly tease out the fact that her character indeed *could* sing….

So Harris is an actress who left us with some superb starring and supporting performances on film, some well-remembered but ephemeral theater and TV work (out of which only a jarringly disturbing and brilliant Naked City episode exists on DVD), and a bunch of unsubstantiated show-biz-style rumors (another one appears on the always-unreliable IMDB, but I will only refer to the ones I’ve actually read in print sources). Of course what it comes down to is that Harris’s personal reputation, whatever that may have been, has been washed away by the sands of time and what we’re left with are the performances, for which I am incredibly grateful.

Since A Thousand Clowns, Nashville, Family Plot, and Freaky Friday are all imminently available, let me just direct you to the nicest rarities that appear online. First, audio tracks of an ill-fated, off-B’way revival of Brecht’s Mahagonny starring Harris and Estelle Parsons. Then the underrated (okay, forgotten) Herb Gardner character masterwork Who is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me? (1971). Harris has a bravura scene in this chunk of the movie (starting at 5:50) that earned her an Oscar nomination. She is utterly sublime.

Jerry Schatzberg’s The Seduction of Joe Tynan (1979) is remembered primarily for its early starring performance by Meryl Streep, but Harris is equally wonderful. The whole film is available here

The only Harris film I’ve yet to see — and YouTube will of course allow me to rectify that — is Hal Ashby’s 1981 picture Second Hand Hearts (originally called “The Hamster of Happiness” — I’m not kidding!). It is available in its entirety here.

I close with the two clips that kicked off this whole musing on the wonderful Ms. Harris, two segments from her work in Broadway musicals, as captured for TV. I was surprised by these clips for two reasons: because I NEVER thought I’d see her work on Broadway on video; and because she worked in a quiet and nuanced fashion in the movies, but is definitely using what they call “heightened realism” in these clips (or, more apt, cartoonlike caricature for broadly cartoonish musicals).

She also played “split” characters in both shows, so she affects a very cute and somewhat silly voice for each introverted personality. Here she is on the Tony Awards performing a scene from The Apple Tree where she plays the Jules Feiffer character “Passionella,” who wants to be a “beautiful, glamorous, radiant, ravishing… movie star!” Check out the ultra-quick costume change:

And please let us not speak of forthcoming revivals with Harry Connick Jr., or overblown Minnelli movies with Streisand (was there a movie musical with Streisand that was not overblown?), Yves Montand, and a young (singing — yes, I’ve got the LP with the outtake) Jack Nicholson. Here are the original stars of On a Clear Day…, John Cullum and Barbara on The Bell Telephone Hour’s 1966 special “The Lyrics of Alan Jay Lerner.” On a Clear Day… is very much of its era (the lyrics get into very cutesy places, as when "bestir" is rhymed with "disinter"), and I have no idea how it will be packaged as a revival, and I don’t care, because I won’t see it. This is the real deal:

Wherever you are, Ms. Harris, thanks for the performances. You did turn out to be a very different sort of “radiant, ravishing movie star,” and are not forgotten.

One favorite Amy Winehouse video… well, two

2011-07-26T17:49:00.008-04:00

So much has been written in the last few days about Amy Winehouse’s premature but sadly unsurprising death at 27 that I can’t add anything new, except to note again, as I did in my Peter Falk entry, how downright jackal-like and ugly the tabloid press is when it comes to troubled celebs. (Of course, as disgusting as TMZ is, the British press has been expert for decades in digging up unnecessary dirt.)

The singing that is heavily vaunted these days in the American mainstream (where soulless pap reigns supreme) is the pitch-perfect kind of emotionless swill that wins on American Idol and fills Vegas arenas (Celine Dion). Winehouse, on the other hand (and her un-addicted — as far as we know — countrywomen Adele and Joss Stone), was definitely connected to the great soul and jazz vocalists who gave emotional performances of songs, rather than technically perfect renditions of them.

Her addictions clearly linked her to Billie and Janis, but she had much more money at her disposal than either of those songbirds ever had (thus the sheer volume of drugs she was taking). She was also covered by the press in a nonstop fashion; Holliday and Joplin never had paparazzi camping outside their houses. Thus, her disease was in the public view for as long as she had it — and, of course, the song that “broke” her in America was perhaps the anthem of contemporary addiction (“Rehab”).

You can find an enormous amount of detail about Amy on the Web (too much in fact — and, yes, a few of the commentaries since her death have been extremely mean). I’ll just direct you to two of my favorite clips of her in performance.

The first is a beautiful version of the evergreen “Teach Me Tonight” done for the Jools Holland show (where she also performed “I Heard It Through the Grapevine”):

And the second is a live performance at the Mercury Prize ceremony in 2007 of one of her own songs, one that she seemed to always perform with a great deal of emotion — the final complete concert she performed in Belgrade (which is available on YT, but I’m not going to link to it) contained a sad and uncomfortable version of the tune. Here she’s in fine shape and excellent voice (again, I don’t give a shit about pitch-perfection, it’s the emotion in the delivery) singing “Love is a Losing Game” (an alternate great live version is here):