Recent articles on the Media Funhouse Substack.

Richard Nixon goes all Clockwork
Orange in the comedy Richard.

I don’t want to be one of those people who abandons their blog without explaining what happened. A simple perusal below reveals that I started a Substack a few months back; so far I’ve kept a somewhat regular schedule (at least one piece every other week, if not every week). 

The articles I’ve posted over there since I last wrote about it here are eight in number and do reflect the different types of items I’ve featured on the Funhouse TV show over the years. The main page of the Substack can be found here — and I would be remiss if I didn't mention at the very beginning here that the whole enterprise is free!

It’s appropriate to start with a piece I wrote about being “bootlegged” — a polite phrase for the experience of having the Tura Satana doc-makers use (lean on, actually, since there is apparently not much footage of Tura in her old age talking about her career) parts of my on-camera interview with Tura. 

My time with Tura, appropriated
by the doc-makers.

The filmmakers evidently felt that “public access=public domain,” so there was no reason for them to: a.) contact and license the footage from the person who owns it; b.) get a decent copy, instead of a low-rest copy one of the producers downloaded as a .mov file from a Mac blog I had around the turn of the century. The doc repeats its imagery over and over, and depends on talking heads to praise Tura endlessly (which is nice — she was lovely to me) but also to perpetuate some of her “legends,” which might be true, could be true, but are most likely nicely embroidered fabrications. 

The “bootlegged” piece can be found here. 

Next up is a short tribute to the great Alexander Kluge whom I interviewed on the show back in October 2016. He died in March of this year, and I wanted to acknowledge the wonderful chat I had with him — sure, it looks insanely dark (*now* I have the proper lighting rig, but I didn’t back then), but the content is top-notch. 

Along with clips from each of the three episodes I created using the interview with Kluge, I include an example of the short-short stories he produced a great number of in his final years. The guy was a polymath for whom filmmaking was only one creative outlet. 

The article on Kluge can be found here. 

I reviewed an off-Broadway play about Lenny Bruce’s NYC obscenity trial. Some aspects of the show were good, and others were decidedly off-kilter. 

The review can be found here. 

Sometimes you wait years to see a particular film and it turn out to be underwhelming. Such is the case with Richard, Harry Hurwitz’s Nixon comedy that interweaves actors playing out Tricky Dick’s life and newsreel footage of the real Nixon. A strange mixture that falls flat more often than it amuses. 

My notes on Richard can be found here.

Buffalo Bill and the Indians.

To celebrate the 250th birthday of the U.S.A., I chose to rewatch Robert Altman’s dissection of America, Buffalo Bill and the Indians (released less than two weeks before the Bicentennial). It’s a brilliant reflection on American history and celebrity, and how facts don’t matter when you’re telling a colorful (completely fake) story. 

The piece on Buffalo Bill is here. 

A short piece on the goofy mistakes that AI can make, spotlighting Gemini AI’s telling me that I don’t host/produce Media Funhouse and that George Carlin was Hispanic (!). 

AI makes dumb, sloppy mistakes.

I reviewed Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s The Samurai and the Prisoner, a period drama-mystery that has interesting ties to the undistributed-in-the-U.S. (but seen on the Funhouse TV show) Takeshi Kitano film Kubi. 

The prisoner (left) and the samurai.

The review of Samurai can be found here. 

Thoughts on the Fassbinder satire The Third Generation (1979), a densely layered film that reflects on how corporate chieftains love terrorists, because terrorist activity causes oligarchs to pressure their friends in government to crack down even more on the average citizen. (Plus, Hanna Schygulla and Udo Kier in carnival oufits!) 

The Third Generation piece is here.

Tagline: "I don't throw bombs.
I make films. --RWF"

For the centennial of Jerry Lewis’s birth, three vintage Funhouse episodes!

People might think I’m just fickle, jumping back to this blog after having started a Substack. Well, there are things this blog can do that Substack won’t — namely, allowing embeds of videos on sites other than those owned by Google. So, in honor of the centennial of Jerry’s 100th I offer three vintage episodes of the Funhouse that were done in tribute and aired (when else?) on Labor Day weekend.

The first one, from 2016, includes “news updates” about what Jerry had been up to in the preceding year (focusing on the revelation online of “Day The Clown Cried” clips). Then I sail into an assemblage of choice Telethon clips, including guests like Wayne Newton, Charlie Callas, Bobby Vinton, and Steve and Eydie.

 

The next show, from 2017, starts out with me reviewing the then-recent DVD release of Don’t Give Up the Ship (1959). I then move onto the topic of Jerry’s latest (last) interview on video. And I close out with more, extremely primo Telethon clips, this time featuring Kasey Kasem, Tony Orlando, Charlie Callas, and the late, irreplaceable Sammy Davis Jr.

 

The last of the trio for this upload session is one from 2018. In this instance, Jerry has indeed passed on, and I do an inspirational reading from a French book on Jerry’s life and career up until the mid-Sixties [translations my own]. Then I move onto a piece of history — images from the auction catalog of Jerry’s effects. (Somewhat quickly gotten rid of by his family, including items that couldn’t be legally sold and an immense assortment of Jerry-owned firearms!)

These are but three of the over 30 tributes I’ve done to the comedian, actor, filmmaker, and troublemaker whom everybody “loves to hate to love to hate to…” In other words, a mere drop in the bucket of Jerry-iana from the coffers of the Funhouse. And, to think, Jerry never got to do his proposed 100th b-day gig at a Vegas casino….

New Media Funhouse Substack is up and running

Filmmaker Yannick Bellon.

I have really enjoyed posting pieces here on the ol’ blogspot for the past 19 of years. One thing has been rather maddening, though — even though this entire platform (Blogger) is owned by Google, Google now refuses to index blogs like this one.

I went and hired an SEO expert to look into it, and he was able to give me some additional views on these pages, but he couldn’t get Google to list the blog. (He had certain conjectures as to why this was happening, but each one involved completely redoing the way I approach this blog and moving all the contents of it to my regular site.)

So, we have a problem: The first 15 years of the blog are searchable on Google, but the last four, in which I’ve done entries that I’m very proud of, including full-length surveys of the careers of political filmmakers like Ken Loach and Elio Petri, are just incapable of being “crawled” by the robots that run Google.

At some point in the near future I might available myself of the suggestions that the SEO contractor gave me, but in the meantime I decided to experiment with the Substack platform, which seems like the “place to be” for writers about politics and popular culture. So far I’ve posted five entries and wanted to promote them here, since I will be coming back here to post some items, because I’ve already discovered the limitations of Substack.

Currently, the Media Funhouse Substack is entirely FREE, and I aim to keep it that way for as long as I can. In the meantime, let me post links to the pieces that have appeared thus far. And they lead to yet another “survey” of an underappreciated filmmaker’s work — in this case French writer-director Yannick Bellon.

The first official post revisited my 1997 interview with the Uncle Floyd Show cast in the dressing room of the Bottom Line. Since Floyd’s passing on Jan. 22 of this year, I’ve been finally allowed to post the full interview on YouTube with Floyd’s name on it. The reason I had to take his name off was a miscalculation (okay, let’s just say it, a big error) that Floyd made and then passed on to his manager, in terms of the old clips being posted online. At some other point I will discuss how bizarre the rulings were in reference to posting clips from the Uncle Floyd Show, or simply even the cast being interviewed, as happened on the Funhouse. 

Suffice it to say, when COVID hit and Floyd couldn’t work at local venues as a mostly anonymous pianist, and then he was very sadly beset by the virus, and cancer, and then finally a crippling stroke, it was the clips that had been banned by Floyd for so long that brought in his final income. The show (which had last more than 25 years) was indeed his legacy and a potential money-earner, but there was no way to broach that topic when he was in “anonymous pianist in obscure locales in N.J.” mode…. 

The Uncle Floyd post can be found here on the Substack.

The next item up on the new platform (which is FULLY FREE, in case I didn’t emphasize that enough) was a litany of the times that Serge Gainsbourg’s music was translated into English, spawned by me hearing what is most likely the very first attempt to join a beautiful Serge melody with a (rather silly) English lyric, sung by none other than Pussy Galore. (The actress who played same, not the band.)

The “Serge en anglais” post is here.

The next post on the Substack was a matter of personal pride, since very little has been written in English about the work of French filmmaker Yannick Bellon. I attended all the screenings in a retrospective of her work at L'Alliance NYC that spanned a few months in 2025 and decided to do a “survey” piece on the films, which remain utterly unobtainable over here with English subs. Except for, that is, my favorite of the whole bunch, a great piece about memory and aging starring Bulle Ogier, which is currently on YT with subtitles available.

Bulle Ogier and Loleh Bellon.

The first piece on Bellon is here.

The second half of my piece about Bellon’s filmmaking career (focusing primarily on her fiction films, since she made two decades’ worth of documentaries and short films for different outlets, including French television) covers the last dozen years of her output, which ranges from two very strong character studies to two intriguing breaks from her traditional pattern. (With one definitely worthy of comparison to her earlier fiction films.) Plus, some capsules on documentaries shown in the NYC festival of her work. 

Yannick Bellon and Loleh Bellon.

The second piece on Bellon can be found here.

I will again note that the Substack for Media Funhouse is totally FREE and will have yet another piece up in a day or two. (Potential title: “How I Got Bootlegged.”)