'Lost' films found 5: Absurdist comedy on network TV — “Barney Kempinski” with Alan Arkin and Deceased Artiste Arlene Golonka

Arlene Golonka on
the set of 
HANG 'EM HIGH.

The death of the actress Arlene Golonka on Monday of this week — who radiated a cheerful, adorable, and slyly sexy presence and was ubiquitous on TV in my kidhood — led me to this particular discovery. While it might not be as laugh-out-loud funny as I had remembered it, it’s still a wonderful slice of Sixties absurdist comedy that boasts a great cast and some terrific NYC locations as its “sets.”

The first time I encountered this telefilm was with a friend at the then-Museum of Broadcasting (now the Paley Center) around the corner from the Doubleday bookstore on 53rd Street and Fifth Avenue (a store I worked in for a few months and which features in the Streisand-Segal Owl and the Pussycat).

At that point, early in the museum’s history, you sat in a cubicle and a staff member came over to put your chosen tape (not sure if it was Beta or VHS at this point) in a deck. You were allowed to rewind and fast-forward it at your leisure. For some reason I remember the Museum’s version as being in b&w, but the YouTube upload is in very faded color. (Although it contains the original ads, all for Burlington.)

“The Love Song of Barney Kempinski,” the debut episode of the series ABC Stage 67, looked intriguing from an entry in the mass-market paperback The Television Years by Shulman and Youman (yes, we’re talking heavy pre-Internet geekdom here). The names of Alan Arkin, Arlene Golonka, and Murray Schisgal were already known to me, so I was eager to see it when I visited the TV museum. (Everyone has always called the institution that, no matter which of its three names was in use at the time.)

Arlene Golonka.

It’s been more than four decades since that initial viewing and while the sum of its often-great parts does not make a perfect whole, it’s still very much worth watching.

First, some words about Schisgal, who died on Oct 1 of last year. Viewers of the Funhouse TV show will remember that I did a series of episodes saluting “Sixties comic playwrights who were not Neil Simon.” (The theme being that these folks were less gag-oriented than Simon and also wrote wonderfully poignant sequences.)

Among this number were Funhouse fave Herb Gardner, Renee Taylor and Joseph Bologna, and Schisgal. Schisgal eventually became a “house-rewriter” for Dustin Hoffman, polishing scenes in movies Hoffman starred in, but in the Sixties Schisgal was a force to be reckoned with, writing tight, smart one-acts (“The Typists,” “The Tiger”) and one classic full-length play (Luv).

Arkin and Schisgal (and Gielgud)
 on the set of "Barney Kempinski."

More than any of the others cited above — and quite like Bruce Jay Friedman, whose comic plays Scuba Duba and Steambath were both weirdly and brilliantly dark — Schisgal was clearly aware of the work of the modern European playwrights, most prominently those in the Theater of the Absurd. “Barney Kempinski” heavily exhibits this influence.

One more detour before I discuss the show itself — a bit about the amazing experiment that was ABC Stage 67. The series, which lasted only one season, was most certainly a precursor to later PBS programs like The Great American Dream Machine. One unique connection was the fact that Elinor Bunin designed the titles for both ABC Stage 67 and Dream Machine and later was the creative director for WNET Channel 13. Stage 67 jumped from genre to genre with 26 episodes (which would’ve been 27, but Dylan’s Eat the Document was rejected because it was incoherent — a very solid judgment).

Arkin at City Hall.

21 of the episodes are available at the Paley Center, with the never-seen-again titles being very fascinating: A John Le Carré thriller with James Mason; documentaries on JFK and Marilyn (separate ones, spaced far apart); an Earl Hamner Jr. drama with a crazy cast (Pearl Bailey, Phil Harris, Lee Grant, Mort Sahl, and Jackie Robinson!); a Bacharach-David-scored musical with Ricky Nelson; docs about WWII and sex in American in the Sixties; a Rodgers and Hart songbook show; short films about teen boys; David Frost hosting “A Night Out in London”; a Comden-Green-Styne musical with Dick Shawn; and a “Look at Negro Humor in America” with Dick Gregory, Godfrey Cambridge, Redd Foxx, Moms Mabley, and Richard Pryor.

The four episodes that did become available on VHS and DVD are: Sam Peckinpah’s adaptation of Katherine Anne Porter’s “Noon Wine”; Ingrid Bergman in a production of “The Human Voice”; the Emmy-winning “A Christmas Memory” by Truman Capote, working with Eleanor and Frank Perry; and “Evening Primrose,” an original Stephen Sondheim musical about a poet (Tony Perkins) who lives in a department store at night!

Before any of those episodes aired, “The Love Song of Barney Kempinski” was the premiere episode of the series (air date: Sept. 14, 1966). It is a thoroughly odd, often charming absurdist comedy that follows drifter Barney Kempinski (Alan Arkin) on the day of his wedding, as he moves from job to job. He talks to the audience about the wonders of NYC, yelling all the while as he “appropriates” a cab (he’s basically an opportunist and thief but a charming and clever one), then an ice cream cart, a butcher’s delivery truck, and a helicopter, among other vehicles.

An ad for the
"Barney Kempinski"
single!

It’s performed at a high pitch — Barney is prone to shouting (even when he’s happy) and he often bursts into a song of his own invention (which we hear under the end credits in its entirety and was apparently released as a single at the time). He shows us pictures of old NYC, as he wanders through the locations as they appeared in 1966 (the year the show was filmed): the Lower East Side, Chinatown, Little Italy, and the Village, all the way up to Lincoln Center.

On the way, his various “jobs” find him blundering into various situations — into the middle of an argument between a rich couple (Lee Grant, Alan King); a couple having sex (demurely depicted, of course); an Indian man meditating, on whose person Barney searches for money (as a tip for the package he’s delivered).

Since the film is made up of vignettes, it follows the fashion of episodic creations, with some of the scenes being very funny and some falling flat. The only semblance of a plot is that Barney is hoping to marry his sweetheart at 3:00 p.m. at City Hall and, as she evades him (going to the movies at 9:30 a.m.!), he falls in love with her sister (Arlene Golonka).

The “tour guide” aspect of Barney’s character (another job he “appropriates”) makes the film a true time capsule. Surely Schisgal predicated his script on this idea, but one can be pretty certain that the late, great, Ralph Rosenblum had a lot to do with how beautifully it is carried off. Rosenblum edited and was co-director (with Herb Gardner) of the exterior shots in A Thousand Clowns, which “opened up” what was otherwise a filmed play. (He also, of course edited perfect NYC films like The Pawnbroker and The Producers.)

The cast sell “Kempinski” wonderfully. The supporting players are NYC performers who worked in theater and TV: Lee Grant (who remembered here a stunt she had to do on the show), Alan King, Charlotte Rae, David Doyle, Jose Perez, Leonardo Cimino. And Barney’s cab fare is a drunken businessman, played by John Gielgud.

Golonka and Arkin.

Arkin is wonderful, mostly because his character, as written, is a pretty annoying guy and he makes him tolerable and quite charming.

And the lovely Golonka — yes, she who worked on dozens and dozens of TV shows and a select number of movies. She did indeed possess the ability to play both completely wholesome characters (as in Ernie Pintoff’s Harvey Middleman, Fireman) and also some “naughty” ladies. She will live on in reruns and will always seem just as cute. It’s no wonder that Barney Kempinski opts for her and not her absent sister, and the two ride off into the sunset (or at least mid-afternoon near Manhattan’s City Hall).

 

As an extra-special bonus, I offer up the super-obscure (but now “hidden in plain sight”) oddity that was Music for Rat Fink Lovers. The standup comedian Jackie Kannon, who performed slightly “blue” material, recorded several albums, had a best-selling book of naughty poems (Poems for the John), and also ran a nightclub called the “Rat Fink Room” in mid-Manhattan (located at 151 East 50th Street).

Kannon was stuck on the phrase “rat fink” and so he released a few albums with that phrase in the title. The oddest is Music for Rat Fink Lovers, an odd concoction that was comprised of regular Mantovani/Kostelanetz orchestral arrangements of then-popular tunes, with a sexy female coming on at the end of every track and saying the phrase “rat fink” in one mood or another (kittenish, delirious, angry, giddy, sexy). That voice was — Arlene Golonka!

It turns out that the entire album has been uploaded to YT and can be heard song by song or in a playlist that reverses the sides of the LP. For some inexplicable reason, someone took the album cover and identifies it in several separate uploads as a record by Dickie Goodman, but it definitely was a Kannon creation. (Although where he got the instrumental tracks from isn’t known — Arlene was lucky she got credited!)

The gimmick here is not only that Arlene says something sexy or “girly” at the end of every instrumental track, but that the record finishes up with Kannon’s own voice saying (in Yiddish-accented English) that he’s “the dirty rat fink.” First, a giggling delivery: 

 

Then a sexy, cooing Arlene:

'Lost' films found 4: Robert Altman and Garry Trudeau's 'Killer App'

As a diehard Robert Altman fan, I’ve been pleased to see that his “missing” theatrical features have all shown up in recent years on DVD/Blu-ray – all of them except Health. (Fox utterly refuses to release that 1980 film, but it is up on YT here). His TV work is another matter — Tanner ‘88 and its sequel Tanner on Tanner (2004) are must-sees; the theatrical films shot for TV are definitely worth watching, although all but one has “disappeared” since the VHS era (and arguably the best, 2 by South, never was on tape).

Altman’s career was, of course, tied up with TV throughout the Sixties, but those episodes were works for hire. Thus my fascination at finding (hiding in plain sight) one of his later (1998) TV projects that I wasn’t aware had even been shot — it rates no mention in Mitchell Zuckoff’s big oral biography of Altman. 
  

Trudeau, Michael Murphy, Altman.

Altman and his Tanner co-creator Garry Trudeau (yes, the cartoonist) collaborated on a TV pilot for a drama called Killer App, about the industry that had grown up around Web innovation and new devices and apps designed to catch the fickle tastes of American consumers. 

Trudeau spoke about it in a 2014 interview with Indiewire: "We were offered an opportunity to do that for Turner, and they were going to give us a whole season without a pilot…and genius Trudeau decided, 'No, I’d rather take my chances with a network, because I’ll just reach a bigger audience.' And Bob Altman just was not a good fit for network television." 

A Variety article names Fox as the network that was ready to air the show. In an interview with the Orlando Sentinel from May 1999, Altman reflected on the series (as he promoted his "kindler, gentler" comedy Cookie's Fortune): "But Altman has serious doubts about Killer App's future. 'I think it's been aborted,' he says. 'I don't have any hopes for it.' According to Altman, Fox wanted 'a lot of things changed [that) I didn't agree with.' Case closed, or at least stalled for now."

The pilot is a fascinating time capsule — it is not, unfortunately, as absorbing on an artistic level. It starts out as a satire but then quickly devolves into nighttime soap territory, with two of the lead characters having had a failed romance years before. The perfect Web-related satire was yet to come, with the debut of Charlie Brooker and Chris Morris’s Nathan Barley in 2005. (Brooker, of course, continues to offer up haunting stories related to “cutting-edge” technology on Black Mirror.)

The plot is simple: A married couple run a start-up in Seattle. Their staff have hit upon the “next big thing,” an app that will can turn any website into a “potential overnight broadcast network” (without a need for a computer, just a modem — substitute the phrase “Wi-Fi” here). The show thus predicts live streaming and YouTube, and also the recent creation of Alexa, with a female computer voice that answers questions and reminds its owner of things (voiced here by Sally Kellerman, because the creator professes his love for her in M*A*S*H!).

Their grim and greedy rival (Stephen Lang) is determined to get the couple’s app from them, by hell or high water. By way of explanation, he’s the kind of guy who declares he will publicly burn an authentic Gutenberg Bible he owns, just to show that money is no object to him (it’s no matter — he says he says he has a second one at home).

The single best scene in the show is a moment where Lang announces to his assembled workforce in a hockey arena (brought together for a company celebration) that his company is worth $12 billion in cash. He begins to chant, “12 billion cash!” and the workers join in. It’s another great piece of Americana from Altman — a horrific, greed-driven variation of “The whole world is watching!” chant that was taken up during the “police riots” at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago (and enshrined in cinephiles’ memories in Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool).

Unfortunately, that terrific scene is unique here. The slide from satire to nighttime soap is rather steep and sudden. For example, the big “reveal” in the pilot is that the woman running the start-up with her husband had an affair with Lang’s money-loving billionaire.

The show is still worth watching for its historical value and, as always with Altman, for the beauty of the camerawork. The copy of the show that was posted on YouTube has no credits so we don’t know who the d.p. was, but the camerawork is pure Altman, whomever was running the camera.

So forget all you know about the Internet and today’s mobile devices and apps, and journey back to 1998 for the never-shown-on-TV pilot Killer App.

           

'Lost' films found 3: Alan Rudolph's 'Return Engagement'

I avoid promoting free streams of copyrighted movies on this blog, but do spotlight the posting of films that are “MIA” (read: no DVD [or VHS] release in the U.S, and very little chance there will be one). Such is the case with Alan Rudolph's Return Engagement (1983).

It's Rudolph's only documentary and is not essential viewing – if you're unfamiliar with his work, check out his films Choose Me, Trouble in Mind, or Afterglow first. But if you already know his work, or you're interested in the lives and public personas of Timothy Leary and G. Gordon Liddy, the film is definitely worth a look.

It was shot when Leary and Liddy became a sort of “comedy team” on the lecture circuit, cordially “debating” each other in various cities during the early Eighties. What we see of their stage encounter in Return Engagement indicates that their speeches were learned by heart and their disagreements over various issues were most likely repeated verbatim on every stop on the tour.

Rudolph is a master of the “small film” and understated emotion, so it's fascinating to see him use a similarly personal approach for a documentary. The only problem here is that Leary and Liddy had honed their personas so well by the Eighties that they were close to being cartoon characters: the kooky, mellow-as-anything, Sixties acid guru and the equally kooky, hyper-macho, right-wing extremist.

“There is no there there” with either man. During a scene where Rudolph films the men with their wives, one gets the sense that, while the scene isn't exactly staged, the couples have still worked out their “roles” to an almost unnerving degree.

The positive aspect of the film is its time capsule quality. Liddy is filmed working out at the gym, while Leary – who declares himself a “futurist” above all – is seen typing away on a word processor, extolling the virtues of computers as he works on the manuscript of his latest book. To further situate where the American public was in '83, the film's opening scene has people on the street being asked what they know about the two men. Those interviewed seem to be “remembering” two figures from a somewhat distant (but actually somewhat recent) past.

Perhaps the film would've worked better if Rudolph or his surrogate, interviewer (and event moderator) Carole Hemingway, had challenged both men more about the depth of their beliefs; as it stands, she asks Leary about his “show-biz” aspect and Liddy about his fondness for talking about murder, but little is revealed in the process. Rudolph's assignment in this case was to film the debate and add some colorful moments around the event, so one can't expect very much.
 
According to a 2013 interview with Rudolph, he looks back at the film as a “strangely satisfying experience. It took a few days to film and a long time to edit and nothing was written other than necessary information.” He refers to the debate as a “dog-and-pony show” and notes that he made the film for producer Carolyn Pfeiffer to basically work his way toward making a fiction film with “complete independence” in the shooting and editing (the result was Choose Me).

He also reveals in the same interview that “At the ‘breakfast with spouses’ segment, Mrs. Liddy showed up with a fresh black eye under her sunglasses.” You can see the bruise in the film – some makeup was applied, but it's still visible.

A few moments in the “debate” are galvanizing, as when Liddy casually discusses how murder factors into the running of the U.S. government, and when Leary is confronted by an angry blind man who claims his disability was caused by Leary's advocacy of hallucinogens (as kids on LSD shot this gentleman, blinding him). For the most part, though, one gets the impression one is watching a fairly “scripted” bit of stagecraft – Leary in particular walks back and forth on the stage, while the more stolid Liddy stays planted where he is when it's his turn to stand and talk.

Rudolph wisely includes at the end of the picture long scenes from high school classroom sessions run individually by Liddy and Leary. Both men come off far better in these sequences than they do onstage. They situate themselves historically for the students and defend themselves against some very pointed questions – by comparison, the debate comes off as the publicity stunt it most surely was.

In closing, though, I must mention the film's most jarring scene, which is a cocktail party held in honor of the two men early on in the film. The attendees at the party include Geraldo Rivera, Marjoe Gortner, Maria Shriver, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Harry Nilsson, and Cheech Marin (!). At one point, Leary wonders where “Bob” is. When asked why he cares so much, the perpetually turned-on guru replies, “Bob got the cocaine.” One wonders if Rudolph has any outtakes from this blissfully tacky gathering….

The film can be found two places online. The first is on YouTube in three parts. The first part of the film is here at 8:52. In both this posting and the one on the archive.org site, the film follows two episodes that Leary did with Bob Costas (this is apparently because these items were on the first volume of a series of VHS tapes featuring Leary movie and TV appearances).



Full disclosure: I run the Alan Rudolph fan page on Facebook. "Like" the page if you're a fan of Rudolph's work. It is located at this link.

'Lost' films found 2: Harry Hurwitz's 'The Comeback Trail'

In the world of cinephiles Harry Hurwitz’s The Projectionist (1971) is regarded as a treasure, a beautifully rendered tribute to the joy of movie-loving, made at a time when Golden Age Hollywood icons were still widely known and revered. It’s an unmitigated delight and silly fun to boot.

The Projectionist was the first of three “nostalgia trip” comedies that Hurwitz made. The second and third of these films are nowhere near the first in terms of laughs and sentiment for a “lost era” of moviemaking, but both have their bright spots. The third and last was the very funny That’s Adequate (1989), a mock-doc about a fictional “poverty row” film studio hosted by the great Tony Randall; the second film, The Comeback Trail (shot 1971-’79; released ‘82) is the focus of this article.

But first, a word or two about Hurwitz himself. A NYC native who died at the young age of 57, he was a painter and filmmaker who made a series of low-budget genre flicks (for theaters and later “straight to video”) to pay the bills and to finance his nostalgia comedies. His art was acquired by Metropolitan Museum, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the NYU art collection. He taught film and drawing at NYU, Cooper Union, and the Parsons School of Design, among others.

The nostalgia comedies were “personal” pictures for Hurwitz, the type he was only able to make every decade or so. He talks about this in an interview in the Film Director’s Guide by Michael Singer:

“I made my first five features without even being in the industry. I worked out of New York. I was making my living as a college professor, so I didn’t even look to my art for financial sustenance…. And as a filmmaker, I began with the same spirit that I did as a painter. Then, I got to see that I could make more money by joining the industry rather than teaching. In other words, I realized that I’d rather make bad movies than do good teaching. The movies that I do for myself I manage to do once every five years. I write it, I direct it, I cut it, I produce it. And it’s not an ego thing. It’s just that I wouldn’t have anybody come in and paint the red in my painting. It’s a complete work, and good or bad, I stand behind it. Whereas to make a living, I am now a writer and director for hire, in which I’m perfectly prepared to compromise. I feel very comfortable joining a system which, by the way, I revere….” [p. 4]

Harry Hurwitz. Photo by B. Fentington.

It’s odd to consider The Comeback Trail a personal film. The Projectionist, on the other hand, has various moments at which one feels great sympathy for its lead character, a projectionist played by the much-loved comic actor Chuck McCann. This reaches its peak in a series of moments in which we see McCann wander Times Square as he gets off work. He eats dinner at a greasy spoon, buys some porn mags (possibly the most low-key, true-to-life depiction of the place that adult materials have in the life of the average male ever found in cinema), and then goes to home to watch movies on the late show.

Comeback is a much broader comedy, but it still is a valentine (albeit a pretty crazy one) to Golden Age Hollywod. The plot is quite similar to that of The Producers. It concerns two low-end movie producers, Enrico Kodac (McCann) and E. Eddie Eestman (Robert Staats), who need a quick influx of cash or their “studio,” such as it is, will be shut down. (By the way, the misspellings of the last names were intentional — Staats played “E. Eddie Eastman” in other Hurwitz films.)

They hit upon the idea to make a comeback film for a retired action star, whom they assume is out of shape. They plan to insure the old man to the hilt and tax his heart by having him do his own stunts, and then collect on the million-dollar insurance policy when he dies. What they don’t count on is that the star they picked, Duke Montana (Buster Crabbe), is in terrific shape, and so their attempts to kill him backfire in one way or another.

Buster Crabbe

The film’s three stars all deserve discussion. Firstly, Crabbe, who was indeed in great shape at 63 (not that surprising, considering he was a two-time Olympic swimmer when he was younger). He plays along quite well with the broadly comic humor, serving as a straight man to both producer characters. His character narrates the proceedings, recounting to close friend Hugh Hefner (playing himself) the story of the producers' ridiculous plan.

Buster is quite the gentleman in the film, but Hurwitz confederate and sometime scripter Roy Frumkes decided to tell the world Crabbe's little secret, in a piece published in Films in Review. He recounted in an article about Buster that, while making Comeback, he had asked the film's stunt coordinator how the legendary star was on-set. “… he replied matter-of-factly: 'His style was always the same. He was a perfect gentleman on the set until the last day of shooting. Then he'd get drunk and beat everyone up.'” Frumkes proceeds to recount how Crabbe was indeed a complete gentleman on the set, but did get drunk and beat a guy up toward the end.

Another piece from Films in Review about Crabbe finds him reflecting on the film as near-pornographic. This is ridiculous, since breasts are only seen in one musical number that appears in one of the early films-within-the-film; topless dancers back up Monti Rock III as he sings a tune called “These Raging Loins.” No sex is ever seen in the film, but the producers discuss the softcore films they made in the past.

Buster, in younger days.

Said Buster: “Few people saw it in theaters. Some scenes were pretty strong – too sexy for family viewing…. All the producer had to do was take out three scenes and it would have been a good B Western. But he was adamant about not cutting anything. Still is. They ran it in Atlanta and the thing only lasted two days. The families would go and then protest some of the scenes. Without that family viewing audience you're dead. But, honestly, I think that picture was the best thing I ever did. And it's the vault right now, just sitting there. I worried about it for a few years, but I don't worry about it any more. It'll never get out.”

The least-known of the movie’s stars is Robert Staats, who is something of a mystery man. He appeared in five of Hurwitz’s films, and had small roles in films directed by Hurwitz’s contemporaries Robert Downey Sr., Jonathan Kaplan (a former Hurwitz student), and Alan Abel, and then basically disappeared. He is wonderfully funny in the other Hurwitz pictures, especially as a late-night TV pitchman in The Projectionist:

He played a pitchman again, albeit in a much more bizarre context, in Hurwitz’s softcore pic Fairy Tales (1978).

While he makes a great partner for McCann in Comeback, he’s generally an odd presence in the film. When not engaging in comic cross-talk or doing his pitchman shtick, he purses his lips, skulks around in a long coat, and generally takes on the appearance of a cartoon villain. His schnook-ish posture here is a far cry from his confident pitchman persona.

There is no information as to when or where Staats might have left this mortal coil, so I’m not certain if he’s still with us or not. Anyone who knows what happened to him, drop a line.

Despite the presence of the heroic-at-any-age Buster, McCann is the actual star of the film. He is tremendously endearing in The Projectionist, but here he assumes the cartoonish persona of an Italian con man. The character is broadly drawn and odd-looking: wearing a white suit, Chuck has a fake putty nose and a clearly fake mustache (he donned this look formerly on his TV show for an escape artist character named “Bombo Dump,” who can be seen here). His Italian accent is half-Chico Marx, half-J. Carroll Naish on Life with Luigi.

Chuck does have some very funny moments bantering with Staats, but the broadly farcical nature of his character is one of the reasons that Comeback doesn’t work in the long run.

Oddly enough, Chuck reappeared in this persona in the R-rated slapstick comedy Linda Lovelace for President (1975), where he plays two roles, a racist mayor and a hitman who is indeed the same “Kodac”/”Bombo” character. He worked in the film under two pseudonyms: the film’s credits say that the Mayor character is played by “Alfredo Fettuchini” and the guy with the crazy mustache and Italian accent (no putty nose this time) was a certain “Fettuchini Alfredo.” 

One assumes Chuck chose a pseudonym for the Lovelace picture because he was appearing at that time on the Saturday morning kiddie show “Far Out Space Nuts” and didn’t want to be identified with the most famous porn star of the era (although the movie is incredibly tame and Chuck does nothing “adult” except curse).

*****

The Projectionist remains endlessly entertaining because Hurwitz inserted a number of tangents in between the plotted sequences. Hurwitz is quoted in the Film Directors Guide about the fragmenting of the film:

“And the nature of the film is really about the daily bombardment of ideas and ideologies and feelings and thoughts that we go through, so the whole picture is about fragmentation. Our lives are made up of little serials. You drop one thing, you go to another, you’re juggling 40 different parts of your life: the emotional part, the political part, the moral part. We’re constantly being tempted, we’re constantly being bombarded, so that’s why The Projectionist is full of commercials, superhero serials. It’s this fragmenting of time, which is what our days are like.” [p. 7]

Comeback has a few such diversions at the beginning to show us the movies that the characters made before their “great idea” came along. Later on we see a sequence from the film they’re making with Duke Montana, which is pure Western action, reminiscent of the “oaters” Crabbe made many years before (clearly a labor of love for movie buff Hurwitz). The rest of the movie sticks to the plotline, with Hurwitz seemingly allowing ample space in which to ad-lib. The result is a rather informal picture that viewers will either enjoy or tune out early on.

Thanks to uploader Kenny Hotz (star of the CBC/Comedy Central show “Kenny Vs. Spenny”), Comeback is now readily accessible to the public for the first time in decades, on the Vimeo website. Coincidentally, Hotz and his writing partner Spencer Rice codirected Robert Staats in his last film role to date, in the 1997 comedy Pitch, which is also currently online for free, on YT. Staats plays — can you guess? — a pitchman!

A later pic of Harry shot
by his wife, Joy Hurwitz.

There is much confusion as to when the film was officially finished — so now let’s try and “carbon-date” what has shown up in public view. Firstly, a friend and colleague, Donica O’Bradovich, has told me stories of being on the set in Santa Fe, New Mexico (the film-within-the-film was shot there) in 1971 with her father, award-winning makeup artist Bob O’Bradovich, who did a great job “aging” Crabbe in the early scenes, before he shows the producers he’s in kick-ass shape.

So Hurwitz began Comeback in ’71. The title credit on the version on Vimeo has a 1973 copyright, but another friend, Ben Fentington (a friend of Hurwitz’s), has told me about shoots in ’74-75 he was at, where Hurwitz shot material to “flesh out” the film. In this case, the scenes shot were things put at the film’s beginning, as examples of the films the producer characters made before they hit on their “great idea.”

Henny Youngman is seen as a comedy character named “Dumpo” who told one-liners in various gene-movie situations. This is followed by one of the film’s funniest scenes, a weirdo spoof of monster movies featuring standup comedian Lenny Schultz as a human chicken, and none other than Funhouse fave Professor Irwin Corey as a mad scientist (!).

Hurwitz and the Professor. Photo by B. Fentington.

The Comeback Trail wasn’t shown publicly until it premiered at the long-gone, much-missed Thalia in NYC in 1982 (here is the review that appeared in The New York Times). A Funhouse friend who has very pleasant memories of that engagement, actor Allen Lewis Rickman, can (much to my amazement) recite some of the film’s dialogue by heart, strictly from having seen the film that one time back in ’82. Suffice it to say that the film has never been released on VHS or DVD.

Here’s where things get even cloudier: I first saw the film on a VHS copy made by a fellow nostalgia buff who recorded it on Beta (!) when it aired on the famed Z Channel in Los Angeles. I broke out that version of the film — which is hard to watch because of constant video “rolls” — before writing this piece and discovered it’s a vastly different edit of the material. (Both cuts of the film include one of the odder ad-libbed scenes, an interview of the two producers and Duke Montana by the late, great Joe Franklin!)

Firstly, the title credit has a copyright date of 1979 and the narration by Buster Crabbe (told to Hugh Hefner) was replaced with Chuck McCann doing a sort of Lowell Thomas newsreel voice. The new narration emphasizes that the two producers run “Adequate Pictures” (the studio that is the focus of the later comedy That’s Adequate); Henny Youngman’s character is given a different name – he is now “Pimples” (a comic character reused in the later picture).

The approximately 15 minutes of newly shot footage includes other films produced by “Kodac” and “Eestman,” including another monster picture (a pizza-faced menace) and an action movie that takes place in Africa (but is shot by an L.A. swimming pool). We also see an Adequate Pictures awards ceremony (one winner is named “Tom Revolta,” thus dating the sequence), and the attempts on Duke Montana’s life are followed by a series of scenes in which McCann is in a hospital bed being visited by his incompetent partner.

And, in a scene that attempts to cover for a plot that Hurwitz had minimized to the point of near non-existence in the first version of the film, Crabbe goes back to his motel room with the producers’ loyal secretary, Julie (played by the leading lady of The Projectionist, Ina Balin). All this diligent re-editing clearly indicates that Hurwitz did indeed work on the film for close to a decade — and it *still* ran only 75 minutes!

For those who have waited decades to see Comeback, it may not be the “revelation” they’d hoped — then again, few comedies can measure up to The Projectionist. It contains some wonderfully funny moments and some bits where one wishes that Hurwitz had cut the routines a little sooner.

In an era when Lorne Michaels-produced crap-comedy is the norm at the movies, though, even a lopsided live-action cartoon like The Comeback Trail can be warmly welcomed for the broad farce and crazy movie buff daydream that it is.