The talk show as hallucination: "All Night With Joey Reynolds" (part one)

We’ve all experienced something like it. You’re up late, you catch something unusual on television, and the next morning you’re not sure whether what you saw was real or a hallucination. I’ve been having that feeling for the past two months, and the hallucination in question definitely exists, and it is definitely called All Night with Joey Reynolds.

First, some background for those who’ve started reading this blog in the last few weeks or months. In March 2010 I wrote a post lamenting the cancellation by local radio station WOR of Joey Reynolds’ all-night talk show. In that post I mentioned Reynolds’ background — that he has been in the radio business about close to five decades and that his show was essential to the late night radio “scene” in NYC, as it was the very last talk/variety program on a commercial station at that hour (or basically any hour). When the show went off the air, Joey promised us he’d be back with a TV show that would be on “all night,” that would feature the same eclectic (and sometimes bizarre) mix of guests, and that would air live in Times Square.

Well, aside from the live aspect (All Night is taped an evening ahead of time), Joey has made good on that promise. The result is the most invigoratingly eccentric talk show to be seen on NYC TV since the departure of Joe Franklin and of cable-access staples Beyond Vaudeville and The Coca Crystal Show.

I’ve been watching All Night since its third night on the air, and the show is incredibly difficult to describe without offering a vigorously assembled montage of the many kinds of acts that have been featured on it thus far, and the various moments in which Joey has conversationally “tangented” wildly off from whatever he’s supposed to be discussing (perhaps that will appear on a future episode of the Funhouse TV show — yes, I’ve been recording All Night….). In the meantime, since NO ONE on the Net is chronicling what’s taking place on the show, and the webmasters of Joey’s own sites have put nothing new up for weeks now, I hereby tender a review of, and commentary on, the proceedings.

The show airs only in the NY tristate metro area on NBC, Channel 4.2 (that’s on the digital-converter-box lineup that few people are aware exists) and on pretty much every cable system on the channel known as “NBC Nonstop” (it’s tucked away neatly on Ch. 161 on my Time Warner lineup). Thus, you have to really know the channel exists to catch Reynolds’ show.

All Night actually lasts from midnight-2 a.m. five nights a week, meaning Reynolds and company come up with TEN HOURS (!) of new programming every week, ensuring that one can never be sure what is coming up next, even if you’ve seen the opening guest roster, which has often been inaccurate in the past few weeks — and now the staff has taken to sending out two guests when Joey introduces one, so even the host is taken aback by who walks out onto the set (!).

Thus far, I, my dad — who is the target demo for the show, a senior who stays up late — and an artist friend are the only ones I know monitoring the show on a nightly basis, just to see what’s on next and also to assure ourselves we didn’t hallucinate the weirdness that went down the night before. (“Did you see that Disco-yogi act?”, “Did I dream that a man in an Octopus costume and a ‘scream queen’ were interviewed about their comedy-horror access program??”, “Did a guy really eat a light bulb on-air last night???”, “Did Joey really spend 10 full minutes telling us how his car got repossessed the other day????”). All Night could *definitely* become a cult favorite, a la The Joe Franklin Show, if only anyone knew it was on the air…..

*****
So what exactly happens on the show? Its first cornerstone is its eclectic, and again often bizarre, guest roster. NYC is filled with performers who never get a break on TV, and so it’s terrific to see Reynolds and his producers showcasing local cabaret performers, unsigned rock bands, standup comedians, authors, and various specialty acts you never see on TV anymore — and will most likely never see, now that the MDA Association is cutting back the Jerry Lewis telethon to a mere six hours.

The guests sometimes appear in odd succession — thus, my favorite nights have had bizarre juxtapositions, like the night that the “Jewish hour” (see below) was followed by a mixed-martial arts demonstration (punctuated by an inappropriate queer joke by Joey — he is prone to un-p.c. utterances that fall flat, very flat), only to be trumped by a country singer who brought Joey several gifts from local area merchants. Joey chose to dote on a gift basket of cheese and its aroma — “it smells like feet,” Joey complained, at length, to the gift-giver before actually munching on the damned cheese and finding out it tasted okay (you won’t get those moments on the network talk shows, I guarantee you).

Joey has noted that he’s taking a leaf from the old Ed Sullivan Show, but then again he’s also expressed an admiration for Funhouse deity Steve Allen, Jack Paar, Carson, and Dick Cavett. All Night is thus a combination of both variety and talk, to very strange effect. Two particularly crammed-to-capacity shows had the following line-ups:

-celebrity impressionist Marilyn Michaels
-a group of All Night investors signed a contract with Joey on-air to solidify their involvement in the show (huh?)
-impressionist Bob Greenberg, who specializes in vintage comedians
-an impersonator known as “Carole Channing,” who solely does Miss Carol (and who discussed Funhouse favorite Skidoo with Greenberg!)
-comedian “Shecky Beagleman” (see below)
-a young singer/songwriter woman
-a sleight-of-hand master who performed con-artist card tricks
-a musician-songwriter and singer who got crammed in as the credits rolled

-hangdog-looking standup Phil Selman
-a gent with an impressively weird hairdo who is a comedy writer and spoke about stuttering (in reference to The King’s Speech)
-his cohort, a young woman who makes Lady Gaga parody videos
-a pretty good pop-rock band performed live
-an off-Broadway revue belter, who did a parody of Christina Aguilera fucking up the National Anthem
-the owners of a French restaurant
-a rabbi, who discussed recent international tumult, including Libya
-a singer-songwriter who came on to promote both his music and his starring role in a serial-killer drama that more than likely will be going the “DVD Premiere” route

Making All Night seem even more like a late-night fever dream that couldn’t possibly be on commercial TV are the very serious topics that are occasionally tackled by Joey, including his favorite, the 12-step program and various rehab facilities and their approaches to sobriety. Reynolds openly speaks about his own struggles with past addictions, which I respect (although when he discusses the struggles of one family member, it’s cringeworthy TV — one can’t help but think that it’s her private dilemma and none of our damned business….). These and other self-help discussions clash wildly with the singers, comedians, magicians, sports figures, and authors who’ve written celebrity bios or history tomes. All Night works well when it’s light (providing the guests are allowed to steer the conversation — which does happen occasionally), but runs aground when serious topics are explored.

For sheer conversational “swerves,” there is also nothing as powerful on the Joey program as mentions of the Las Vegas electronics show that he attends on an annual basis. He has derailed really interesting conversations — as with the brilliant comedian Paul Mooney and road-warrior standup Bob Altman (aka “Uncle Dirty") — just to talk about an electronics show that few, if any, folks at home are interested in. I’ll probe Joey’s odd conversational swerves and unusual interview approach in the upcoming second part of this blog post.

Now that I’ve raised the specter of Joey’s unwelcome verbal disruptions, let me sing the praises of segments on All Night that I thought were exemplary. It will come as no shock to those who read this blog regularly or watch the Funhouse TV show, but I’d point to two very touching obituary segments, and one senior-birthday one, that Joey hosted. The first instance was part of the one “Jewish hour” that aired on the TV show. For those who were not familiar with Reynolds’ WOR radio show, each week he hosted hours of the show he good-naturedly called “the Italian hour,” “the Jewish hour,” “the gay hour,” etc., featuring groups of his friends.

He did two Italian hours and one Jewish hour on All Night, and then declared to his announcer that putting the Jewish hour on TV had been a “big mistake,” since it had only worked on radio. (Given that this has been the ONLY thing I’ve heard him refer to in two months as a “mistake,” that’s quite an admission — but regular viewers and listeners will know he’s often not the best arbiter of what works or doesn’t on his own show.) All Night is a local show that works best with an emphasis on all things NYC — and the ethnic and gay hours definitely lived up to that, in spades.

In any case, the first and only TV Jewish hour featured a heartfelt tribute to Mickey Freeman, the Borscht Belt comedian and Bilko cast member whom I first found out about on Reynolds’ radio show. The second, equally emotional and well-handled item was a farewell to Charlie Callas. In this segment, Joey interviewed Callas’ close friend Albert Wunsch about Charlie’s sad final year, in which he experienced the tragic death of his wife and then slowly succumbed to depression. As I write this blog post, he’s doing a very entertaining series of segments paying tribute to the work of songwriter Ervin Drake (“It Was a Very Good Year”), who turned 92 this week. Despite Joey's protestations that All Night has “cross-generational” appeal, it’s clear that all the best aspects of the program have to do with nostalgia of one kind or another.

******
The show’s other hallmark besides its guest roster is its location, the NASDAQ building on the Southeast corner of 43rd Street in Times Square. The studio doubles as a financial news center during the day, and for two months now it’s been apparent that the odd decision to shoot the show *towards * the window adds nothing to the proceedings, and in fact is distracting and entertaining as hell in all the wrong ways. For instance, a guest will be offering a very serious thought on the Holocaust, America’s military commitment in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, or their own health crisis, and suddenly your attention will be diverted by a teenage idiot doing jumping jacks in the window behind the person speaking.

This aspect has become something I wait for. When the show is simply being “radio on the TV” as it often is — with very little visual activity going on, except for the stray ventriloquist, magician, or dance acts — you instantly turn back to the TV the minute something deeply serious is introduced, because it’s absolutely certain that a passerby is going to be vaulting in the air, or pressing their face to the glass (it should be dynamite when summer hits the Square — can mooning be far behind?). Joey frequently tells his cameramen to get a shot of “our audience,” but as is usually the case with any local newscast, the idiots leaping up and down in the window don’t know, or care, what is actually happening in the TV studio in front of them.

Two weeks ago it appeared as if Joey and his producers had figured out the ultimate way to attract an audience of passersby to their street-level studio window: have sexy burlesque girls do dance numbers. In classic Joey-show fashion, though, in between the three burly-Q dancers, there was a performance by a local NYC Gilbert & Sullivan light operetta troupe, as well as a discussion with a self-help author. So a hula girl performed, then there was a discussion of the burlesque show, then a girl in a small sexy outfit twirled a baton (and kept dropping it — but who noticed?), and then a Gilbert & Sullivan song, some self-help talk (very heavy), and back to a chick in fishnets, dancing up a storm under the credits. To paraphrase Cindy Adams’ famous closing line: Only on Joey, kids, only on Joey!

The Times Square location has also spawned a rather awkward nightly man-in-the-street segment called “Reynolds’ Rap.” Teens and inebriated people can sometimes be seen chanting Joey’s name because a young, very exuberant comic named Frankie Hudak has gotten them to do so, but they have no idea who in the hell Joey is. But, hey, they’re on TV! During these segments, Joey corrals anyone walking by on Broadway to talk to him, resulting in one of two options: either he gets ridiculously frustrated because the people he’s speaking to don’t speak English (now, who exactly is walking through Times Square after 9 p.m. on a weekday work-night but tourists?). Or, Joey asks the interview subject to read the sign for his show in the window of the NASDAQ building, and tells them that he’s doing a TV show and they’ll be on it that very night (although, as noted, the show is currently being taped a day in advance).

In the second part of my review of Joey’s “incredibly strange” television show, I will probe how Joey’s runaway “talkaholism” makes the show even more hallucinatory and unlike anything you’ve ever seen on commercial TV. In the meantime, although he keeps mentioning that the show will be “triple-platformed” soon — on TV, the radio, and on the Internet — there are currently no updates being made to the show's website. A few (very few) clips from the first two weeks (primarily the first two shows) were put up on the show's YT channel, including this slice of Jackie “the Jokeman” Martling and local comic Dave Konig. Where else in the goddamned world will you hear Wheeler and Woolsey being namechecked?



The most interesting clips, however, have been put up by the guests themselves. Here is a musical performance by downtown NYC legend Phoebe Legere:



Russian entertainer Oleg Frisch puts his own spin on the evergreen “Goody Goody.” If you’ve taken the time read this far, oh, please do fast-forward to 8:00. Hey now!



Another, very special warbler, called the “singing CPA,” updated a Rolf Harris/Johnny Cash song “I’ve Been Everywhere,” to suit his chosen profession. Again, please take the time to fast-forward to 4:10 on this one:



Perhaps this one bit of comedy shtick best exemplifies many of the stranger guests that Joey has had on. Here, concept comedian “Shecky Beagleman” (it’s a she) guests as “Mrs. Bin Laden.” The lack of laughter in the studio (no audience!) makes this bit even more bizarre than it would be in another context. Sample this and know what it is like to hallucinate without the benefit of chemicals, chum:

“Boom” and bust: the flamboyant flops of Elizabeth Taylor

Elizabeth Taylor’s death was greeted by the media as the certain passing of old Hollywood, which isn’t really true, as there is still a small group of “A-listers” from the Golden Age who are among us — Olivia de Havilland, Joan Fontaine, Kirk Douglas, and the indomitable Micky Rooney among others. Taylor, though, was a star whose private life had been endlessly probed by the media since the mid-1950s, and so the American public felt a greater familiarity with “Liz” (as she hated to be called) rather than, say, Olivia or Joan.

Taylor also “acted up” in her private life to a degree that Americans love. The very public dumping of spouses and gathering of new ones; the wearing of turbans, auspicious jewelry, and dresses that were either uniquely revealing or simply tacky; the appearances in a series of major studio prestige releases based on famous novels and plays, followed by decades of making odd decisions about what to act in (see below). Movie buffs often speculate about what James Dean and Marilyn Monroe would’ve been like had they lived to a ripe old age — the likelihood is that they might’ve been Brando and Taylor, both exuding star presence and overpowering personalities as they acted more and more eccentric with age.

Some of Taylor’s obits spoke rightly of her incredible presence on camera as a young woman and her iconic roles in the Fifties; other tributes interestingly tried to paint her as one of Hollywood’s finest actresses, which is where I have to offer up a public exploration of the darker moments in her screen career. She was indeed an incomparably beautiful child and teen, and had a sexy and commanding presence in her best-remembered films of the Fifties. But come the Sixties, her private life seemed to get the best of her, and she began to look much older than her years. By the early Seventies when I was a kid, Elizabeth was already an older-looking lady who wore, again, giant jewels and turbans in public, and looked very little like the visibly sexy chick in the slip from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof — and she was only in her 40s at the time.

It was most certainly the l’amour fou she shared with Richard Burton that deeply affected her looks and her public behavior, and most likely created her eccentric, misguided, and sometimes downright awful choices of film projects to appear in (god knows the incomparably talented Burton would make six terrible movies for every great one after the mid-Sixties….). I’m not certain if her bouts with alcoholism truly began with her relationship with Burton, but it seems to follow. Her career certainly reached its acme with him — that being the indisputably finest performance she ever gave, in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? — but after that peak, it was mostly valleys, with many odd ones at that.

It could’ve been possible that Taylor and Burton could have made more great films after Virginia Woolf — perhaps they could’ve made inspired choices that would’ve put them in the Pantheon of artistic film couples, along with John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands. Instead, they picked dreary projects that somehow pointed up the despair and romantic longing that seems to have plagued their relationship even when they were happy together. In his introduction to Leonard Maltin’s The Great Movie Comedy Teams, the great character comic Billy Gilbert repeated an anecdote from the Sixties in which Burton told Taylor they should stop working together for a while.

He said, “We don’t want to become another Laurel and Hardy.” Whereupon Miss Taylor said, “Why? What’s so bad about Laurel and Hardy?” And I say, “What indeed?”

I’m with Elizabeth (and Billy) on that one, but yes, as a couple, they could’ve easily chosen better projects for both their solo performances and their “team-up” movies. There are a few exceptions: the film adaptation of Under Milk Wood (1972) has its small cult, and Hammersmith Is Out (1972) looks strangely inspired from the clips that are online. Perhaps this is the result of it having been directed by the multi-talented Peter Ustinov, or the fact that both Taylor and Burton were quite accomplished hams by the early Seventies, which certainly aids one in the playing of absurdist comedy. Taylor actually looks younger and more attractive in one clip found online (again, she was only 40 at the time), so perhaps a move to comedy might’ve been in order:



In the same year as those two “Liz and Dick” movies, Elizabeth appeared in X, Y and Zee, a film that has a cult following among the kinds of fans who, like a poster on YT, admit that they enjoyed her best when she was at her most obnoxious — and speaking of that, you MUST watch this piece of demented Michael Jackson-Elizabeth Taylor home-video footage loved by the same poster!

X, Y and Zee finds Taylor once again playing a bitchy character, which seems sadly to have been the main lesson she took from Virginia Woolf — not to find well-written scripts with memorable characters and indelible situations, but to simply star in movies where the maximum amount of bitchiness was possible. In this film, a bickering couple (Liz and Michael Caine) torture each other until the husband takes a lover (the late Susannah York), and Taylor’s character wants to win him back, or still have a part in his new relationship…. There’s a grim suicide-attempt scene here, but this sequence is far more indicative of the “mood of the moment,” the opening credits in which Taylor and Caine play ping-pong in slow, psychedelic motion:



One of the film’s more ridiculous scenes — in which Liz is tied up by hubby Caine and then seduces him while still bound — can be found here, but a handy little montage of her over-the-top moments in the picture is here:



As the Seventies went on, Taylor’s movie choices became more and more misguided and bizarre. It was apparent that she did not want to age into playing the mother of younger actresses — nor, as she got older, would she surrender to working in “holy senior” pictures like On Golden Pond and The Whales of August. She instead took a series of leading parts in films that are either just forgettably bad or wildly kitschy. The films were all flops, and thus, by the time she made a cameo in William Reichert’s stylish and smart conspiracy-theory thriller Winter Kills (1979), she was unbilled. I remember at the time the film was released (and failed, and was re-released and failed, and then quickly became a cult hit) that it was rumored that the omission of Taylor’s name from the credits was not her decision, but because her name on a marquee by that point was “box office poison.”

As the Seventies gave way to the Eighties and Nineties, Taylor involved herself with very important charitable work, so she moved away from acting. However, when she came back to it, she mostly starred in TV movies and did cartoon voice work. Her very last screen appearance was a cameo in the totally useless and godawful Flintstones movie with John Goodman. Although her last TV-movie was These Old Broads (2001), where she appeared in a role tailored for her by scripter (and onetime step-daughter) Carrie Fisher, the last real Elizabeth Taylor film was the Nicolas Roeg remake of Sweet Bird of Youth (1989), which was faithful to its source, but was instantly forgettable.

Taylor was indeed an icon, and I’m glad that various news outlets paid her reverent tribute. TCM will of course be showing her best films for years to come, so I feel no compunction in celebrating her worst films in this blog post. What’s say we start with the leaden Harold Prince adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music (1977), which found Liz doing what countless older stars did in the Sixties and Seventies, to no one’s pleasure: starring in a musical when they couldn’t sing! Here is the film’s opening number, with her original vocal restored:



She also delivered the best-remembered song in the score, “Send in the Clowns.” The song is a perfect Sondheim creation, and Taylor’s version is close to being one of the most lifeless versions of it, ever:



Another big-budget Seventies film starring Elizabeth was The Blue Bird (1976), an adaptation of the well-loved fairly tale (previously made with Shirley Temple) that showed that the great George Cukor was indeed “out of his era” in the Seventies (I enjoyed his subsequent Rich and Famous, but my memories of that one are far more wrapped up with its two stars than with the plot or the film itself). This incredibly overdone children’s movie was a U.S.-Soviet Union coproduction that suffers from the weirdness that afflicted most kiddie musicals in the Seventies (and might’ve benefited at least from an Newley-Bricusse score). Taylor stars as both the mother of the two lead children (Patsy Kensit is the little girl) and their guardian angel. The other stars include Ava Gardner (another stunning-looking actress whose career took a massive dip in the Sixties and the Seventies), Jane Fonda, Cicely Tyson, and Robert Morley. Watching scenes from it, one has the feeling they made The Blue Bird because they simply didn’t want to make yet another version of Alice in Wonderland….

The film is up in its entirety on YT, and here is the section that includes Taylor’s first appearance as the angel (singing yet again, but dubbed this time):



And the conclusion, with Liz in both her roles:



Now we move onto the fun stuff: There are two movies that are by far the most astoundingly campy endeavors that Taylor was involved in. The first has acquired a cult mostly because of recommendations from celebrity fans like John Waters; the second has yet to be fully rediscovered, but has its small cabal of appreciative kitsch-mongers, including myself. The first is Joseph Losey’s bizarrely overwrought (yet also strangely dour at times) film from a Tennessee Williams’ script, Boom (1968). The film stars Taylor, Burton, Noel Coward (as “the witch of Capri”), Joanna Shimkus, and the ever-fearsome tinyman Michael Dunn (“Miguelito Loveless,” to those who understand).

The film must be seen to be believed, but keep in mind that Williams was in his later, allegorical phase when this was written (he, like Burton, was also a massive talent drowning his genius in booze), and clearly the otherwise brilliant Losey decided to let the performers, sets, and insane costumes carry the piece (Taylor had previously starred in a far more suitably trippy Sixties film for Losey, called Secret Ceremony). Here is the overwrought trailer:



Elizabeth is mega-bitchy throughout the film, often with hilarious results:



I think the YT poster’s title for this clip, “Monkey off balcony!” does indeed say it all:



Coward’s “witch of Capri” talks about what Russ Meyer otherwise called “the Smell of Female”:



“La Liz” muses on memory and time. This notion later showed up in a George Carlin routine:



I found not one but three completely sincere music-videos paying tribute to this film (nothing kitschy or ironic intended). This is possibly the most serious of the three:



The other astoundingly bad-yet-unforgettable Elizabeth Taylor movie that deserves extended mention is the Italian English-language film The Driver’s Seat (1974). It is wildly artsy and overwrought, and she is unbelievably bad in it. From her appearance (wild hair, incredibly tacky psychedelic dress) to her bitchy delivery of the laughable dialogue (“When I diet, I diet. When I orgasm, I orgasm. I don’t believe in mixing the two cultures.”), she truly threw herself into the picture — to the extent of doing a sexy see-through bra scene and having two scenes in which men try to fuck her but she has to beat them off. You know you’re in odd territory when you’re seeing a goddess of “old Hollywood” trying to keep her head from being forced down into a young man’s lap so she doesn’t have to give him head. I’m not sure what Liz was thinking, but she gave us some happy memories in this wonderfully bad movie.

The poster who has uploaded the entire film onto YT doesn’t want bloggers to embed it. The poster has also put up a few dozen other films in their entirety, including some other Taylor flops (The Only Game in Town, Ash Wednesday, Night Watch), several Faye Dunaway titles, and at least two of my fave Seventies films (Who is Harry Kellerman….? and Play It As It Lays), as well as two Altman rarities (That Cold Day in the Park and HealtH). Oh, and Chu-chu and the Philly Flash, in case you were looking for it.

The Driver’s Seat can be found in its entirety here. Two other posters have thankfully excerpted some of the film’s finest moments, including Elizabeth’s opening tirade. How dare that woman show her a stainless dress!



All of the scenes she shares with Ian Bannen are collected here. Bannen is incredibly creepy and is one of the two men in the film who tries to get Liz to fuck him (but it’s only for his macrobiotic/one-orgasm-a-day diet).



In closing, I will point you toward a movie that is so bad it was never even released in America: Franco Zefferelli’s ridiculous Young Toscanini (1988), with C. Thomas Howell as Arturo Toscanini (you read that right). Elizabeth has a spotlighted supporting role as an opera diva who befriends the young Arturo — her opera scenes are of course dubbed by a real diva, and the film’s most memorable sight (besides Howell playing music while a rainstorm assails a tiny ship he’s on) is Elizabeth Taylor in blackface (chocolate face?) performing scenes from the opera (and lecturing the audience on equal rights, in the makeup). A colleague, Jerry Vermilye (author of The Films of Elizabeth Taylor) lent me a VHS copy of the film many years ago. The video was in Italian, but it was apparent even without subtitles or dubbing that Young Toscanini was yet another “interesting” (read: bizarre/wrongheaded) choice by the late, great Ms. Taylor….