Review: 'The George Kuchar Reader'

George Kuchar was a very funny writer. His movie scripts reflected this, as did his self-penned capsule descriptions of his films and videos. The book he wrote with his twin brother Mike, Reflections from a Cinematic Cesspool (now sadly out of print), is a “sideways” memoir that has some wonderful passages. The newly released book The George Kuchar Reader focuses squarely on his “lurid” writing and is loaded with wonderful diversions. Its last section also provides what may be our only insight into the real George that hid behind his outsized public persona.

Edited by Andrew Lampert and published by Primary Information, the Reader is a cornucopia of writings by George, including letters, diaries, articles, movie program notes, speeches, drawings, comics (from the period where his work was appearing in collections edited by his “Frisco” friend Art Spiegelman), syllabuses and, most importantly, very useful short essays he wrote on making films and videos on an extremely low budget.

The book is a great supplement to George’s film and video work, which is sadly not available at all on DVD — selected shorts can be found “underground” (the Torrents) and above-ground (YouTube) on the Net. When I wrote about George's death, I included a list of indispensable embeds of Kuchar films available at that time — the material goes up and it goes down, so different titles are available at different times.

The only feature film related to the work of George and his twin brother (and one-time collaborator) Mike is Jennifer Kroot’s delightful documentary It Came From Kuchar, which is now legally available on YT:

Back to the Reader: George’s prose style was intentionally torrid, since he clearly loved Hollywood fan magazines and the popular press. He loved describing his films in the most lewd and lurid terms imaginable and putting himself down (usually invoking gas — he was quite possibly the filmmaker most aware of his body functions).

He rhapsodizes in one piece about his “defining filmic moment” seeing Vera Hruba Ralston and David Brian in a terrible B-feature released by Republic. The cheapness of the film inspired him to believe that he could make films in a similar vein:

“Here were truly crazy people worth emulating because it made growing up seem like fun: you can be in your fifties and still play-act, have fake fist fights and tumble on the floor with robust Czechoslovakians. These were my kind of people from an exotic tribe that I wanted to infiltrate… The human imagination imagining the best way to make the worst look good. This became a defining film moment for me.”

As noted, a few of the most valuable pieces find George offering lighting tips for low-budget film- and videomakers. As opposed to, say, Jerry Lewis, whose book The Total Filmmaker tells a fledgling filmmaker how to make a big-budget production with a giant crew and studio backing, George and Mike Kuchar have always spoken in lectures and writings about the importance of bringing extension cords and gaffer tape (or duck tape) to a shoot, finding the right bulbs, the best places to place your lights, and the fact that a regular clamp-lamp found in a hardware store is as good as (and cheaper than) a lamp purchased in a photography store.

George’s tips are of course delivered with a humorous undertone, but you can tell they came from his own past mistakes: “You can also use a sheer, black cloth to soften the image, but be careful when you put it on the lens with a rubber band that the excess portion doesn’t rub against the microphone and create back-ground sounds that would suggest a potential skin chafing outbreak.”

George also wrote what could be called, for lack of a better term, “historical pieces.” One hand-written six-page entry (and may I say that George’s handwriting is totally legible — those nuns did a good job with him!) finds him describing the underground film scene of the Sixties. He of course punctuates the piece with a number of humorous observations, but he also is providing us with a glimpse into a long-gone world that he and Mike were an important part of. At one point he talks about the different kinds of films one could see at underground screenings.

“Long pictures were made with really lengthy, single takes. After a few minutes the audience would catch on to what was in store for them…. and sometime rebel in a violent manner. Other folks would sit back and flow with the experience… the aesthetic of boredom, kindling erotic fantasies involving other members of the audience sitting nearby.”

As put together by Lampert, the book emphasizes George’s opinions about his work, the shooting and editing processes (which he saw as both work and a leisure-time activity), and his reflections on the movies and popular culture. All of this material is incredibly funny, and yet one wonders what George was like when he wasn’t manifesting his George “persona,” as seen in his diary videos and in these writings.

The real George emerges in the final segment of the Reader, a touching sampling of excerpts from his letters and emails to his close friend — and one-time Kuchar brothers screen goddess! — Donna Kerness. This correspondence allows us access to George’s real thoughts and emotions in his final year, as he battled prostate cancer yet continued teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute and compulsively producing his charming and funny video diaries.

Although he loved to put himself down in his public work, these personal emails find George quite proud of his accomplishments as an underground and independent filmmaker (and teacher). He is also revealed here to be an incurable romantic, who pined heavily for a younger man with whom he had a nearly two-decade relationship; the relationship was a purely sexual one for the other man (with a dollop of friendship), while George awaited each call and communication from the gent with bated breath.

He notes at one point that “….I’ve always been in the shadows regarding this aspect of my life while others have openly flaunted and reveled in their couplings. I no longer feel like being this perceived wallflower or backseat passenger on the road to romance.” He prized his position as the man’s “fuck buddie” (as George spells it — Lampert has left his writing as is, so grammar and spelling mistakes aren’t corrected, to keep with the "lurid" flavor of George’s prose style).

At times the emails read just like any personal correspondence. At other times George does indeed ponder his mortality and the films and videos he feverishly made throughout his life: “So much [of the current situation] is trying to extinguish the magic with tricks of the mind and ticks of the clock. Mortality itself is attempting to blow out the blaze. Those are the culprits who have set my teeth chattering with these monologues of doom and gloom…. I don’t want the fire to die. I can die but not the flame. It has to keep dancing to create all those shadows on the wall moving. Those shadows are what my life has left others to view.”

The 65 pages of correspondence to Kerness (49 pages from his final year) serve as the memoir that George never wrote. Those of us who never knew the man personally but loved his films will find the “real George” as endearing (and libidinous!) as his public self. Those of us who have had health, romance, and/or artistic problems similar to the ones that he went through can’t help but think of him as a sort of “patron saint” (especially for ex-Catholics — although I notice his emails indicate that he still prayed nightly).

But of course, most of the Reader is filled not with George’s own deepest emotions, but with his love of cinema, as in this intro to a piece about making a very prone-to-nudity senior “actress,” Linda Martinez, into a “sex symbol” in his student films: “It is all fantasy. A world of illusion conjured up by concubines with cold sores that masquerade as beauty marks…. Pancake makeup replaces the naturally pancake-induced cellulite that ripples on the buttocks of non-actors and these powder-puffed butts that are no longer silent either. They utter digitally enhanced retorts to the dialogue that ricochets around the theatre in Dolby stereo. Technology has amplified the aural components of every vibrating orifice into a Jehovah-like commandment of withering import.

“We are a truly blessed congregation of cinephiles in nature.”

Any artist who called his work “gossamer garbage” surely knew that “high” and “low” culture are very integrally related. This fine book reminds us of how important George truly was, and is, to the film community. Now let’s get some of his films (and Mike’s too) on DVD soon! 

NOTE: Donna Kerness maintains a site for her art. It can be found here.

New, free (legal!) download of ‘The Dream World of Dion McGregor’

I noted in my last blog entry on the strange phenomenon that was, and is, Dion McGregor that it is surprising (and welcome) to find that there is new material available from the renowned “sleep talker.” Now the friendly folks at Torpor Vigil Records have made the long out-of-print 1964 LP by McGregor, The Dream World of Dion McGregor — yes, the one with the Edward Gorey cover — available as a high-quality, totally remastered, legal download. For free, even!

Many audio and video rereleases use the phrase “remastered,” but in this case the folks at TV went back to the original tapes of McGregor’s monologues made by his roommate Michael Barr back in the Sixties to obtain better-sounding versions of the material on the LP. So this isn’t just a digital rendering of the original record, this is a clearer version of the material (specific notes about the process are available at the download page).

McGregor, for those who are unaware, was a songwriter (now deceased) who has acquired a cult not for any of his music, but for the bizarre and dark monologues he delivered in his sleep. The situations he would craft are disturbing (the best example is the piece about people in a swimming pool that is slowly getting hotter and hotter) but his “concerned observer” narration is what sells the pieces.

I discussed in my last post how I had a problem with the notion that McGregor was fully asleep; arguments to shore up that position, provided by Torpor Vigil founder Steve Venright, are in that blog entry. In the time since, I came across a very interesting NPR discussion about McGregor’s monologues, in which two experts on sleep discussed what state he might have been in — one of the two maintains he was “sleep talking from a sort of atypical REM stage.”

Whatever the hell he was doing, McGregor produced surreal and grimly funny material that was not his forte in the waking world (it’s even more bizarre to consider the fact that he had this stuff locked up inside his mind and never became a humor writer of any kind). The first LP was a distillation of the “best” (at that point) of McGregor’s monologues, replete with the traffic sounds of midtown Manhattan in the background.

Dion in a 1972 de Rome film.

There definitely would seem to be a documentary in all this, and yet there may never be one, due to the fact that most people who knew McGregor have died. The most recent was his roommate before Barr, the pioneering experimental gay porn filmmaker Peter de Rome, who is the subject of the new documentary Peter de Rome: Grandfather of Gay Porn — which I can heartily recommend for those interested in experimental filmmaking, gay porn, portraits of eccentric and endearing artists, and those who love seeing vintage footage of NYC in the Sixties.

In any case, although I don’t think there is a McGregor monologue that directly concerns the Yuletide season, this free, vastly improved digital version is a very nice Xmas gift for the listener who likes strange and dark humor. There is ample information on the download page concerning the other McGregor albums, which are all available on CD. As for explaining what it was that McGregor was doing, nothing beats just sampling the monologues, which can be done directly on the page.

Sweet Dreams!

Too Jewish? The Allan Sherman bio ‘Overweight Sensation’

To close off my discussion of Allan Sherman, I need to review the book that set the Sherman “renaissance” in motion, Mark Cohen’s biography Overweight Sensation: the Life and Comedy of Allan Sherman. In my last entries on Sherman, I disagreed with Cohen’s verdict on Allan’s two books — his biography, however, is a fine one that addresses Sherman’s life and work from a number of different angles.

Cohen’s research is impeccable. In the first portion of the book, he successfully untangles Sherman’s quite tangled familial relationships, to the extent of charting where Allan’s family “disappeared” to when his criminal stepfather had to quickly flee Los Angeles for getting caught passing bad checks. He does a similarly excellent job conveying the relationships that fostered and cultivated Allan’s talent (most prominently, his unashamedly Jewish maternal grandparents) and those he struggled with even after the person was long dead (his mother, who did her best to assimilate, and sublimate her Jewishness).

The book clearly breaks down into three sections: Allan’s childhood and pre-fame adulthood; his sudden, massive stardom; and his sad “fall from grace” in show business. The most interesting aspect of the book is the way that Cohen analyzes Sherman’s lyrics with the sober-minded intensity of an academic, while he also displays a fanboy-like affection for this work, providing us diehard fans with a trove of previously unheard lyrics that qualify as some of Sherman’s funniest, silliest, and (not surprisingly) most Jewish songs. Cohen's unearthing of these lost gems resulted in the first “new” Sherman CD in years, There Is Nothing Like a Lox.

The childhood portion of the book finds Cohen taking on the role of storyteller, occasionally making jokes about the subject matter. When Allan becomes a sudden superstar, Cohen includes essays about Sherman’s most famous songs, discussing them in some depth as cultural artifacts and landmarks of American Jewish culture.

At these points he vaunts Sherman as perhaps the seminal Jewish humorist of the mid-20th century, studying his lyrics and designating them as important works of social satire. This could be seen as taking it a bit too far, were it not for the fact that Sherman’s lyrics (which Cohen delightfully quotes at length) were, and are, damned funny and clever.

Like any good fan, Cohen’s emotional proximity to his subject is communicated throughout the book. He seems positively outraged when he recounts the many times that Sherman showed his childish side in public. Allan declared to journalist Nora Ephron that “My parents divorced when I was 6 and I spent the rest of my life at Fred Astaire and Dick Powell movies. This caused me to lose my grip on reality.”

At times, Cohen sounds like a disappointed parent lamenting the puerile behavior of his beloved child. The thing that becomes clear, though, from a close reading of both Sherman’s autobio A Gift of Laughter and Overweight Sensation (and a close listening to his songs) is that his childish behavior was directly linked to his childlike sense of wonder at the insanity of the world. His corny pronouncements about the blissful nature of children’s innocence were the flip side of his ability to write through the eyes of a youngster (the fact that his biggest hit was “Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah” was not a surprise). Here Allen comments on the song (in a video posted by Cohen):

Allan’s childishly simple view of the world also seems to have allowed him to have the balls... er, chutzpah to write dozens of song parodies, perform them at parties, and then carve out a musical career, when he possessed neither a Greek physique nor a great singing voice. He was clearly a man driven by his instincts — his best albums were written in a matter of weeks before they were recorded.

Allen with the cast of I've Got a Secret.

Sherman, in fact, suffered from the classic performer’s dilemma: a mixture of self-loathing and rampant egomania. Cohen chronicles how he indulged in his addictions — gambling, smoking, and most especially eating — while he was a young man and then a producer of game shows in both NYC and LA (the most important one being I’ve Got a Secret, which he co-created).

Once he hit it big with his first LP, My Son the Folk Singer, he plunged even deeper into these addictions and was finally able to indulge in a fourth that had always been his main obsession growing up (as recounted in his autobiography A Gift of Laughter and his chronicle of the sexual revolution, The Rape of the A*P*E*), namely sex. Cohen was told by the classical pianist Leonid Hambro, a good friend of Sherman’s, about the orgies he and Allan attended (whose habituees also included George Plimpton — those lucky ladies!).

Like many comedians, Sherman was clearly a major depressive. Despite his chutzpah, he also suffered from severe self-loathing and a realistic viewpoint about the vagaries of fame. He never felt comfortable with his success, noting in Daily Variety “If you can get this lucky all of a sudden, you can get that unlucky, too.” He added to a reporter at the New York Journal-American in regard to his premonitions that his fame would go away, “I'm pledged not to get desperate.”

Much of the final portion of Overweight Sensation is given over to the ways in which Sherman undermined his own efforts in show business with self-destructive and exceptionally naïve behavior. Ultimately, though, he left us a legacy of brilliant, infernally catchy comedy songs, which Cohen celebrates throughout the book.

In the final chapter, Cohen goes past Allan’s death to discuss how Sherman’s music went out of and back into popular favor. Although at points Cohen seems to be giving Sherman credit for all modern Jewish-American comedy, it is very true that Allan’s albums remain masterworks of both wordplay and ethnic “belonging.” Allan once said to an interviewer, “everyone is part Jewish.” He wasn’t wrong.

*****

Cohen devotes several pages in the book to an ongoing set of songs that Allan called “Goldeneh Moments from Broadway.” Most of the tunes are available on the There Is Nothing Like a Lox CD, but Cohen also has uploaded several to YouTube. Sherman introduced the concept at the parties he performed at in this way: “It occurred to me, what if all of the great hit songs from all of the great Broadway shows had actually been written by Jewish people? Which they were.”

On occasional, though, of course, there was a song that was easily parodied that was written by a gentile. In this case, Meredith Wilson's “Seventy-six Trombones” from the smash musical The Music Man was transformed by Allan into “Seventy-six Sol Cohens” (all of the following postings are from Cohen's YT account):

“Over the Rainbow” becomes “Overweight People”:

A parody of “Summertime” from Sherman's Porgy and Bess rewrite “Solly and Shirl”:

Another song by a gentile, “You're the Top” by Cole Porter, gets the Sherman treatment:

“There Is Nothing Like a Lox” came from Sherman's Rodgers and Hammerstein variation, “South Passaic”:

His stirring and very silly “You'll Never Walk Alone” spoof “When You Walk Through the Bronx”:

Finally, one of the best songs from Sherman's first LP, one that Cohen talks about for a few pages, Allan's tongue-twisting rewrite of the already pretty tongue-twisted Irish tune “Dear Old Donegal,” “Shake Hands With Your Uncle Max”:

Note: Some of the pictures in this blog entry come from Mark Cohen's website about Overweight Sensation, which can be found at allanshermanbiography.com.