Uncle Jean returns: portrait of the artist as an old comedian

Godard likes nothing better than to provoke. The filmmaker who is the cinema's finest visual poet can also be something of a ham. He has shown this side only sporadically, sometimes in other filmmakers' works but to best effect in his own films.

He created his comic alter-ego in one of the best, most entertaining, and entrancing films of his “comeback” period in the early Eighties, Prenom Carmen (aka First Name: Carmen, 1983). In that film he played the supporting role of “Uncle Jean,” an off-kilter version of himself that found him embracing and mocking the things that had been said about him over the years by critics who didn't like his work. It's a tight-wire act he pulls off very well (and in case you weren't clued in, his character carries around a coffee table book about Buster Keaton):

“Uncle Jean” showed up again, this time as the lead (called “the Prince,” taking a leaf from Dostoyevsky), in the episodic feature Soigne Ta Droite (Keep Up Your Right Up, 1987). Again, his character is a demented filmmaker who is prone to saying odd things at odd moments.

Godard has been far more serious in his onscreen appearances in recent years – in his epic Histoire(s) du Cinema, JLG by JLG, and Notre Musique. But Uncle Jean still lurks within the heart of Godard, and so his comic side emerges again in his latest video, a little number with the rather unwieldy title Prix Suisse, remerciements, mort ou vif (Prix suisse, my thanks, dead or alive).

Godard has made it a practice not to show up at any awards ceremonies or film festivals in the last few years. Instead he sends really wonderful short videos to serve as an acknowledgement and thank-you note. These videos will, of course, last a lot longer than any speech he might've made at the ceremonies.

It's important to remember in this instance that, although Godard is one of the greatest French filmmakers, he was raised in Switzerland and is half Swiss (on his father's side). The particulars of the award presentation are as follows (and I must thank Craig Keller for his English-language account on the Mubi site). The “Prix d’honneur du cinéma suisse” was given to Godard earlier this month for his body of work. The prize brought with it an award of 30,000 francs, which Godard reportedly divided in four parts between himself and three charities. His cinematographer Fabrice Aragno accepted the award on Godard's behalf.

The most notable thing about the short video he sent along to the award ceremony is that it represents the “return” of Godard's Uncle Jean character – one presumes that talking about his native land (where he has also lived and worked for several decades) brought back his eccentric comic side. Here he takes a fall — not exactly a common thing among 84-year-old filmmakers — and plays the role of the crazy intellectual old man.

Keller's piece about the award does much to “decode” the many references in Godard's recitation here. As with all of Godard's work, it's probably best to watch the video — which is quite short (under five minutes) — then read the explanations provided in Keller's piece (and the very informative comments below the piece) and watch it again.

Suffice it to say that the poetry-speak that Godard indulges in here finds him stitching together a verbal collage of Swiss references – place names, quotes from a famous Swiss novelist's text for Stravinsky's The Soldier's Tale, and references to a work he identifies with remembering one's childhood (a Pasolini poem).

As I have said before on the Funhouse TV show and in these pages, we are very lucky to live at a time when there are still new Godard creations coming out on a regular basis.

Thanks to friend Paul for supplying this subtitled copy of the video.

Shark jumped, better shows spawned: the “fake news” situation (Part 2 of two)

While the three major networks continue to program their late-night talk shows in the same lazy, overly predictable fashion — one part Johnny Carson promo-chats, one part bad SNL (read: anything from the mid-Eighties onward), and one part Jimmy Kimmel “building a show out of viral videos” — the cable networks have been trying to alter the formula for success in the late evening hours. E! had a hit with Chelsea Lately, and HBO has made Real Time with Bill Maher a Friday night ritual for many viewers.

Comedy Central has the best late-night comedy-talk franchise with its “fake news” duo of shows. I won't dwell on the recent decision by Jon Stewart to quit The Daily Show. Once before on this blog I discussed my feelings about him, and they haven't really changed much. I might be the only person not on the right side of the political spectrum who will publicly proclaim that I'm not heartbroken he's leaving. The shark, it jumped for me during the writer's strike several years back when I saw how limited Jon's comic repertoire is.

Granted, familiarity will breed contempt with almost any comedian. A friend of mine uses the expression “seen the dress...” when referring to Stewart and Colbert (he's left of center politically as well), and it's true that anyone appearing several times a week is going to run out of ideas and fall back on funny faces or voices. Two things that have distinguished The Daily Show, though, are the program's well-edited montages of hypocrisy on the 24-7 news channels, and their correspondents, many of whom have come from the groups that are shut out in the late-night talk “wars” (where you've gotta be white, middle-aged, straight, and male, and that's just about it....).

I noted my feelings about Colbert's comedy character in the first part of this blog entry, but following his lead there have been two other “spin-off” series from The Daily Show. One is good, the other great.

The good but still uncertain commodity is The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore. I've been watching it somewhat steadily since it went on, and it is a very pleasant program that works best if you think of it as a news panel show that happens to have a humorous component. Wilmore is a very engaging presence, and the show has been filling a void by having panels of women, people of color, and other communities that you will only see on the 24-7 news programs when their communities are undergoing a tragedy of some kind.

The show begins with a monologue made up of jokes about the news, then the panel, and then, for some wildly misguided reason, nearly every single show I've seen has ended with a segment called “Keeping it 100,” in which Larry asks an either/or question, the kind of thing people will quiz each other with when they're bored at work or at a bar.

It's a very simple comic idea, and the constant repetition of it (perhaps in an effort to carve out an SNL-style fan-favorite segment?) is puzzling. Is there no other notion the writers can think of to close the show with? Presumably, as the weeks move on, they will ditch this segment or just use it once every so often instead of on every episode.

Wilmore is talented enough that having him tied down to one piece of material is ridiculous. [UPDATE: Since I started writing this piece, Larry has presented varied “either/or” question bits to end the show, but tonight's episode, in which he discussed the Ferguson, MO, police force and gave up the “would you rather...?” segment entirely, was quite good.]

The other show that qualifies in a way as a Daily Show “spin-off” is the wonderful “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” on HBO. As a second banana to Stewart on TDS, Oliver did both brilliantly funny segments and goofy ones where he dressed up in silly costumes. Last Week offers extremely intelligent comedy and, more importantly (don't be scared!), there is an educational aspect to the show, as Oliver and his writers are tackling very serious issues in a satirical fashion – real facts are dispensed with jokes as punctuation (yes, this is possible on American TV!).

The first wonderful thing about Last Week is that the most grating aspects of The Daily Show formula are gone: no audience cheering the host's name; no private jokes for the studio audience; no interviews with movie stars pitching their latest film, or authors who get a nice plug but only six minutes to quickly describe their book; random cursing is indeed allowed on HBO, so it *makes sense* on Last Week. (I've never understood cursing that is going to be bleeped – we're supposed to laugh at the absence of a word?)

It's also important that the show is a weekly one — in this regard (despite the title) it's not a true accounting of what happened in the preceding week, nor is it pretending to be. The topics are more generic, but are very important ones that are part of today's social and political scene. The notion of a “daily” comedy news program is problematic from the get-go, in that The Daily Show has gone away for weeks on end, with no Internet updates whatsoever (Oliver and his team are indeed supplying new content during the “off season” — it really is the only way to maintain momentum and continuity).

Also, Stewart, Colbert, and now Wilmore, are often wildly out-of-synch with that day's politics – witness the recent night when *the* story of the evening was the State of the Union speech, which of course hadn't yet occurred when Stewart and Wilmore taped their shows. Thus the shows are constantly playing catch-up and having to ignore the only political events people are caring about on the nights they air (on the recent State of the Union evening, Wilmore's show offered a full episode about the Bill Cosby allegations).

The most important decision made by Oliver and co. was to avoid the latest “blow-ups” and instead cover issues that the average viewer is unaware of. The concept is outlined in fine (and funny) detail, while the phrase encapsulating it — for instance, “native advertising” or the slice of legalese that is “civil forfeiture” — is repeatedly used so that we can wrap our minds around the concept. 

Last Week can thus lay claim to being arguably the smartest political humor show on the air in the U.S. It’s not a surprise that Oliver is at the helm of the show, since he is a fan of the best that British humor has had to offer in the last decade and a half — in interviews he has cited his favorite standups to be Stewart Lee, Dylan Moran, and his friend Daniel Kitson (whom he evokes each time he gets into a “bam!” turnabout moment). He attended Cambridge with future comedy stars Richard Ayoade (The IT Crowd, The Double) and David Mitchell (Peep Show).

Oliver has hosted a podcast with political humorist Andy Zaltzman called “The Bugle” for years now (done with Oliver in NY and Zaltzman in London), and, among his other early credits, was a contributing writer for 2004: The Stupid Version, a special created by the sharpest TV comedy producer in England, Armando Iannucci. I also have it on good authority that he is a diehard fan of the original “fake news” shows created by the visionary Chris Morris.

Thus far, the gold standard for humorous news and media commentary has been the year-end and weekly “Wipe” shows on the BBC hosted by former TV critic turned social commentator Charlie Brooker. Brooker's programs are brilliant dissections of the 24/7 news channels, minus the whooping and hollering (and vaudevillian dick jokes) of The Daily Show. 

Last Week is very different from Brooker's programs, but it shares with them a concern for the way in which news is reported and the public is deceived – or, as in the case of a lot of the topics treated on Last Week, are unaware that these phenomena exist in the first place. The Daily Show is smart- and wise-assed, while Brooker's “Wipe” series and Last Week offer the kind of intelligent, adult news and media dissection that needs to be done on a wider basis but seems only to occur in a humorous context.

Oliver is no longer a comedy sidekick dressing up as Peter Pan or a chimney sweep. He is on premium cable and thus doesn't have to worry about time limitations — perhaps the single most important aspect of the show is that the main segments on Last Week sometimes run as long as 16-17 minutes, something that isn't possible on commercial TV. Jokes are dished out every few minutes, but time is taken to discuss the very serious ramifications of what is being talked about.

The program also comes from a left perspective and is not as Democratic Party-centric as The Daily Show. Last Week has been taking the high ground since it came on, and its newly begun second season has thus far operated on the same high plane.

One of the best jokes in a segment about the use of drones was taken from a “cute” remark that President Obama made warning the Jonas Brothers music group that if they approached his daughters he would use “predator drones... you will never see it comin'!” Seeing the president joke about how deadly the drones are does, of course, remind us that we deal death from the sky, and our Nobel Peace Prize-winning Prez thinks it's okay to joke about it. A similarly pointed segment about the wealth gap in America noted how Americans continue to vote against their own best interests, in the delusional belief that they will some day be very rich and can benefit from the tax breaks that now cripple this country.

The last valuable thing Last Week does is to often conclude segments by offering e-mail addresses or Twitter hashtags that could be used to communicate to the parties responsible for a given problem (as in the case of net neutrality or student debt), or simply to spread the word about the issues being discussed. This is not done with tongue in cheek – the show's attempts to involve the viewer puts it leagues ahead of Bill Maher's Real Time, which simply preaches to the choir and lets an abrasive host tell us what is “right” and “wrong.” (I'm in political and most certainly atheistic agreement with Maher, but goddamn if that guy ain't an arrogant bastard.) 

Last Week started off in an interesting fashion in spring of 2014 by not pandering and doing easy material about U.S. politics, but instead presenting an in-depth segment about the very significant election campaign going on in India at that moment. (Note: This upload is slightly sped up, as you'll notice from the audio; it is, however, the only occurrence of the full segment on YT.)

Another early segment that was brilliantly constructed found Oliver exploring the death penalty issue, while promising that he'd end the segment with a cute-animal video from YouTube. In this way, he would “reward” the viewers who'd watch the intelligent segment – for me, though, the show was making a sharp, funny statement about how Americans require sugar-coating for every fuckin' thing that they watch:

A similar moment in a great segment on nuclear weapons highlighted the biggest problem surrounding a similar issue: that the American public doesn't give a shit about truly dire parts of modern politics (they're evidently too busy dreaming of being rich....).

When Jon Stewart announced his decision to quite The Daily Show, the biggest concern became who will succeed him as host. John Oliver has been mentioned as a top candidate, but I hope he doesn't do it. It certainly pays a shitload of money — Stewart has been earning more than both Letterman and Leno — but it's LCD stuff (not Lorne Michaels brain-damaged LCD, but LCD nonetheless), and Oliver has graduated into creating his own niche of intelligent, in-depth political humor (without the Maher-like arrogance).

It would be a shame if John went from the kind of high-minded, sharp comedy that Last Week Tonight represents and returned to dispensing dick jokes and dressing up like Peter Pan or a chimney sweep.
*****

You can keep up with Last Week Tonight in a totally legal fashion even if you don't have HBO (full disclosure: I don't subscribe to HBO), since the producers of the show have allowed the lengthy segments to be officially posted on YouTube a day or so after they air on HBO.

Fans of British comedy have also been posting the shorter segments to YT, so you can see this incisive piece on how China is trying to erase the memory of Tiananmen Square, this funny segment on Greece's slick finance minister, and a bit that I could not resist including here: a segment noting that wretched rich arrogant bastard Mike Bloomberg has been buying up new “.nyc” URLs that mock him (like fuckbloomberg.nyc). Oliver and his staff came up with insulting URLs that “Mayor Mike” the billionaire forgot to purchase.

The longer piece are the meat of the program, though, so let me spotlight four excellent segments. First, one on “native advertising,” in which the notion of advertisements disguised to look like news (both online and in magazines and newspapers) is examined and mocked at length. I enjoyed this not only as someone who very much agrees with the point that Oliver is making, but as a viewer who never, ever enjoyed Stephen Colbert's “tongue-in-cheek” promotions of real products on the Report (a snarky series of real commercials isn't satire, it's just commerce):

A superb segment on “payday loans” — the predatory lending chains (championed on infomercials) that charge up to 500% (!) interest. This particular segment was the one where I realized that Last Week Tonight wasn't cutting any corners and is a *really* intelligent show that also happens to be very funny. This isn't “fake news” at all, it's very real and very scary in its specifics, but the jokes are all solid as well:

Another excellent full-length segment, this time about “civil forfeiture,” the process by which the police can seize your property — everything from your money or possessions to your car or house — if they feel it has a link to a crime (or, as is outlined in this piece, they simply need the cash or wanted it in the first place). The show stakes out new territory with pieces like this:

To show that the second season of Last Week is thus far just as good, here's a segment that examines how, while smoking has plummeted in the U.S., the tobacco companies have grown in power in third world countries, making cig-junkies out of entire populations. This piece ends with another LWT “campaign” — this one a bit sillier than the others, but the message is very laudable:

And just because this struck me the right way (read: I fuckin' loved it), here's a piece on how the slow death of Radio Shack has been mocked by the media. The chain is perceived as a ridiculous reminder of the past, but Oliver and co. remind us how important the store was to us in years past (and I got news for ya: I have built the Funhouse TV show on a foundation of Radio Shack cords!). Bravo for this kinda satiric sarcasm:

‘Restless’ hosts and the current state of late-night comedy (Part 1 of two)

The last year has seen several late-night hosts flee their shows and others fly into the slots. One can quickly see the result of the hundreds of staff meetings that were held to decide how the new shows should make a splash:

— Don't worry about the “flow” of a particular episode, just assemble the shows out of a series of “viral” segments. To put it simpler: book an A-list guest and make certain to get them to either tell a short tale that works well as a YouTube video, or involve them in a “stupid human trick” (the kind of thing your local bar might find too stupid even for a trivia or talent night).

The goofier the A-lister is willing to be (dress up, dance stupidly, sing badly, do a moronic physical stunt), the higher the recognition and the stronger the “brand” will become. (Conceiving of a show as a 30- or 60-minute entity is so 20th century — just forget it!) Getting an A-lister to act like an idiot = ratings gold.

— Make certain to repeat segments that the audience likes. In some cases, it's possible the audience can made to like anything, so just repeat the segment until the audience becomes so familiar with it that they begin to look forward to it.

Viewers like myself who dread segments that are run into the ground (Larry Wilmore, no more “Keepin' It 100” please!) are not the demographic these producers want — it's those who will devote time to something they don't quite enjoy; hey, people have been watching the walking corpse called SNL for decades after it last exhibited any originality or innovation.

— When a host exits, make sure to ramp up the sentiment as he prepares to say goodbye. Make certain the publicists issue lists of their “last-ever” guests, as if it actually means something. Evoke the specter of Johnny Carson's last shows (Bette Midler singing to him; Johnny alone on the stool; the low-key, homespun farewell). 

— Make sure you replace your white, middle-aged, straight male host with another white, middle-aged, straight male host. If somehow a woman or a person of color gets a show, kill it the instant the ratings dip – if a white guy's ratings start to slide, make certain to keep him on the air for-fuckin'-ever. He is an institution, he has some kind of fan-base, we can save his show.

The women hosts, the black/Latino/Asian hosts (oh right, there never was an Asian host) must hit the scrap heap if there's any question of stability. I know, I know — Chelsea Handler was doing wonderfully at the time she quit; what she did, brilliantly, to attract an audience was move daytime gossip-talk into the late-evening hours... and she got big ratings for a cable network. But not enough for CBS or NBC to want her....

— LCD, LCD, LCD. There is no such thing as too much LCD-thinking. And don't worry about the viewership suspecting this – they'll eventually come around and get used to the host and his (always his!) way of doing things. In fact most of them won't even know that LCD stands for lowest common denominator....

The late-night changes in the last few months have all revolved around three networks: NBC, CBS, and Comedy Central. In the case of NBC, the less said the better — I was never a big Leno fan, but his being edged out because of age was ugly, as was the handing over of all late-night slots to Comedy Criminal No. 1 (tm), Lorne Michaels.

Michaels has been single-handedly responsible for more bad comedy in the last three decades than any other individual, thus earning him that sobriquet. He's now the “realtor” issuing placement on the late-night NBC schedule. His encroachment into weeknights began, of course, with the plucking of Conan out of the writer's room. Conan is pretty self-effacing and did have comedy talent; he's also, natch, a middle-aged, straight white guy.

Jimmy Fallon, on the other hand, is a habitual giggler, and giggling is rrrrreally annoying in comedy (see: Skelton, Red). One can only hope we'll someday discover that he's either drunk or high on the show, because dammit, the shit he's laughing at isn't at all funny. (He's the Harvey Korman of the 21st century, splitting his sides over things that aren't amusing.)

Fallon's version of The Tonight Show took the Jimmy Kimmel formula of fabricating episodes out of “viral videos” (“celebs read their mean tweets – people will love that!”) and ran with it, so that it now can't be classified as a talk show. It is “stupid human tricks” with some sit-down promotional chatter. For his part, Kimmel is now fast on his way to becoming an eminence grise in the late-night world; he's the “guy who next door” whose standup skill has improved somewhat, but whose sketch-acting talent is non-existent.

The peacock network handing the keys to late-night to Comedy Criminal No. 1 (tm) has had nothing on the mess that is CBS late night. Letterman “decided” he would retire shortly after Leno was booted out (gray hair is a no-no in late night now; the latter-day Carson wouldn't last a day). Colbert was chosen as a replacement for him, which makes sense (and, again, adheres to the straight/white/middle-aged formula for late-night). I loved Colbert's character when it began and he was bold, obnoxious, and, on occasion, really mean. He was willing to not get laughs for a while in order to be funny, the true sign of a master comedian:

The interesting thing is that Colbert will be himself, not his beloved conservative blowhard character, on his CBS late-night show. Since the character had indeed jumped several sharks in the last few years (that good old Archie Bunker cuddliness is one of the central problems with American TV comedy), it will be a relief to see him not try to keep that persona up any longer — but will his new “real” persona be based entirely around snark?

The more interesting slot, though, is the one after Letterman, the one which Craig Ferguson recently abandoned (and which was carved out by the always erratic and very watchable Tom Snyder — a straight, white, middle-aged guy, but one who was very much off the conventional charts, as he still valued conversation above all).

The strangest thing about Ferguson was that he was, in my opinion, the most compulsively watchable of the half-dozen-plus late-night hosts (do we count the unkillable Carson Daly?), simply because he made it all look so easy. He also was able to do something none of the others can do: be serious without mawkishness:

He is a standup comic by trade, so his opening monologue flowed beautifully. Of course it was scripted, but he was one of the few late-night hosts who was able to make it look like he was just ad-libbing the whole thing. The ridiculously cheap nature of his talk show made it all the more endearing — no in-house band, a cohost robot (voiced by Josh Robert Thompson), goofy segments involving puppets, and the hoariest of all showbiz clichés: a pantomime horse.

The thing that Ferguson did not excel at was interviewing. He was loose and informal, but he also seemed competitive with his comedian guests — not for him the classic straight-man role inhabited so beautifully by Steve Allen and Carson. He did ask the guests about their current projects and recent activities, but it was pretty much all trite talk inspired by the Carson show-biz model; once Johnny had settled in L.A. and The Tonight Show needed to be “souped up” for the Seventies, the seeds had been planted for today’s “non-interview interviews” (thanks to Robert Klein's “no-news news”) on late-night talk shows.

The single oddest thing about Craig's very low-key last episode was that he had as his sole guest Jay Leno, and the two pretty much admitted they had never really enjoyed conducting interviews. It not only seemed as if they burned out on it, it clearly sounded like they hadn’t *ever* liked doing it. This kind of explained why Craig had been so off-the-cuff while talking to guests (he didn’t care much about what they were saying), but it also sadly undercut the wonderful experiments he had conducted on the show, which included taking it to other countries (something which had been generally avoided since the heyday of Jack Paar and his former writer, Dick Cavett).

He also took a chance at doing a one-guest show, something that been done brilliantly in the b&w days of the medium and later, again, by Cavett. Ferguson’s choice for a sole guest in a show that aired in May of 2013 was the incredibly eloquent and funny Stephen Fry:

Now that Craig has ditched his late-night show (to go back to standup, something he clearly does like to do and does beautifully, and to host a rrrrrreally bad syndicated game show), the Late Late Show slot remains one of the few really interesting things on late-night TV, simply because CBS clearly wants to dump their Ferguson reruns forever and instead is offering a succession of different hosts, from all of the categories that are constantly overlooked for permanent late-night slots: women, people of color, gay entertainers, etc etc.

As a result, you can never be certain what you’ll see in that slot these days: it could be the mundane sight of someone who is under CBS contract (as so many of these hosts are — either because they have an upcoming CBS series coming on, or their older series was cancelled) simply hyping their new show (as Thomas Lennon did), or it could be a more “unconventional” host (like Sean Hayes) interviewing a guest you might usually see only in passing on a late-night show (as with Marion Cotillard, whom he spoke to for two full segments; her film clip was also [gasp] in French with English subtitles!).

So currently the Late Late Show is worth a look-see, if only to see different kinds of hosts doing the late-night thing, and witness their interaction with an oddly unpredictable group of guests. For viewers like myself who prefer an “edge” to their comedy, the late-night shows will never have that ever again. It's too costly for the networks to do anything unpredictable in such valuable “real estate” — thus the involvement of Comedy Criminal No. 1 (tm).

Seeing a revolving group of hosts take on a low-budget late-night show is far more interesting, though, than watching someone who is bored with his job and/or just aiming for the LCD. (Is there any greater way to measure a host's disinterest or tendency towards both LCD-thinking *and* OCD-behavior than to count the giggle-breaks?)

The late-night talk show should serve as both an arena for guests of different stripes (but it never is), and it should also have longer segments that are not purely motivated by a new film/series/book/CD (but it never is). What we can know with the utmost certainty is that The Late Late Show will soon be where it has to be, given the tunnel-visioned network mindset: helmed by yet another straight, white guy who's nearly middle-aged (36), British comic actor James Corden.

Corden may be an unknown commodity here in the U.S., but it's for sure that nothing too radical will occur on his show. It can't — it's late-night network TV....

Joe Frankin’s Five Craziest Yarns

In his final years, Joe Franklin had a lot in common with the great American directors of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Like Howard Hawks, Edgar G. Ulmer, and especially Orson Welles, Joe wasn’t content to be saluted for his very real, very impressive, achievement in show business — the fact that he had a talk show on for 40 years in one of the biggest markets in America (his local station later becoming a “super station” on cable) and that he had been involved with the format before the concept was crystallized by Steve Allen on The Tonight Show in 1954.

No, for Joe that wasn’t enough. And so, like the aforementioned Hollywood giants (and others from their era), he began to “touch up” his legacy in nearly all of his later interviews to include new names in his roster of A-list guests (for the most part, Joe's guests were indeed nobodies — which is what made his show the odd viewing experience that it was). Some of these stars never appeared on TV on any talk show ever, others had their careers followed with eagle eyes by their fan communities, yet Joe decided that he would say he had them on his local NYC talk show. (And in most cases, he didn’t just have them on, he had them on “four or five times,” “he cohosted a week of shows”).

Thus there is a problem: who exactly did Joe have on his show? Since he stated that the first two decades of the program were wiped by the two stations he was on (WJZ/WABC and WOR), it becomes harder to track the recognizable names he did have on. As far as actual footage, the only name star for which there is a kinescope is Sessue Hayakawa:

Barring footage, the best source of verification are the on-set photos that Joe had taken of his major guests – he and his producers recognized that it was important to have shots of these guests for his archive (also, obviously, for newspaper articles), so we have some great pictures of Joe with A-listers. Many of them are contained in this opening credits sequence from 1977:

In his book Up Late with Joe Franklin (Scribner, 1995), the original source of a bunch of his “yarns,” you can also see pics of Joe with these celebs: Paul Newman, Sidney Poitier, Ethel Waters, Paul Whiteman, Mike Douglas, Guy Lombardo, Mitchell Parrish, Leopold Stokowski, Rodney Dangerfield, Georgie Jessel, Myrna Loy, John Houseman, Mickey Rooney, Phyllis Diller, Stiller and Meara, Dyan Cannon, Dick Shawn, Tony Curtis, Joan Rivers, Howard Stern, Tiny Tim, Shari Lewis, Joe Louis, Jerry Lewis, Bill Cosby, and Dan Aykroyd. So evidently Joe had a photographer on-set ready to document the guests on the show, except for the “many times” he had Chaplin on....

The question is: why the hell did Joe begin fabricating highly unlikely/utterly impossible guest stars as the years went on? It's a puzzle, but perhaps it's the same thing that motivated the directors I mentioned above. Director Edgar G. Ulmer's tendency to lie about his past is discussed in Michael Palm's great documentary Edgar G. Ulmer: The Man Off-Screen (2004).

It is posited that he simply wanted to be involved in all of the seminal moments of German cinema (as it was, he was involved in the production of a few Murnau classics and Menschen am Sonntag with Wilder, Zinneman, and Siodmak, which in itself should be enough). In this instance, one can see that his “disputed” credits (read: his tall tales and yarns) have made it into his IMDB filmography, but his Wikipedia entry notes that they are unsubstantiated.

The extremely thorough, nearly 800-page long, Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood by Todd McCarthy also faces this brick wall of old-guy lying: Hawks had an astounding life, in which he hunted with Hemingway, counted Faulkner as a close friend and colleague, and gave the first significant roles to many, many iconic actors and actresses. So why did he perpetually lie to interviewers in his dotage, claiming involvement in things that he had no hand in? Perhaps it was that he had “run out” of stories – his known stories (read: the true ones) had been revealed in prior interviews, and he was trying to supply “new copy” to the latest set of interviewers. McCarthy explores this in the book's lengthy foreword.

As for Welles, making up tall tales was part of his charm, and a big part of his legend. He was aware that people knew he was fabricating some stories and inflating the triumphs in others. He in fact made a cinematic essay that is one of the most profound statements on truth and lying ever. Orson was a proud liar, a man who was able to make art from his un-checkable yarns:



Perhaps a key element in Franklin's compulsion to make stuff up was the fact that the public's memory is extremely short, and never so much as in this lazy era when — as Chris Marker posited — your memory sits inside your computer. Thus, if you're going to impress today's viewers with your having encountered 1950s celebrities, it's not that news-making to mention Mineo, Mitchum, and the others. The current public perception of the Fifties is represented by a small group of icons who adorn tchotchkes in stores everywhere: Marilyn, James Dean, Brando, Sinatra, Gleason, Lucy, and of course Elvis. If you want to get in the news, saying you interviewed Tony Curtis is nowhere near as impressive as saying you fucked Marilyn, even if you barely had contact with her.

This has become the case with Jerry Lewis as well. Jerry *was* there, he did without doubt know and work with all these people, he is the last living A-list member of the extended Rat Pack “community,” and yet his stories about them change from telling to telling (and even autobiography to autobiography). Like Tony Curtis and Joe Franklin, he also put in a claim to having slept with Marilyn many decades on.

That's also a key to the old-guy yarn-spinning business: if someone died tragically and became a legend decades ago, why is it that only *now* that you're revealing your immortal meeting or sordid tryst with them? Tony Curtis spent years saying his time with Marilyn on the set of Some Like It Hot was hell on earth but then maintained late in his life that he fucked her; when Jerry makes this claim – along with a similar story about hunting for babes with JFK – he often evokes laughter, because it's coming out of a clear blue sky.

A similar case existed with Grandpa Al Lewis. He claimed to have encountered many great historical figures in both show-biz and politics, and to have been present at a lot of important events. The New York Times ended up doing a whole article discussing his“Zelig”-like claims, and how difficult it was to substantiate any of them. 

What it comes down to is that Joe took on the role of a modern-day Munchausen. People are entertained by seniors and like to hear their stories. If their stories involve people that the public is unaware of, you will only attract the fanboys, geeks, and true believers; if suddenly you fucked Marilyn Monroe, you are part of some kind of historic chain of important men — you join the Holy Trinity of guys who “passed around dames,” namely Sinatra, Sam Giancana, and JFK.

Thus, Joe began somewhere in the Nineties (a few years before his hoarding compulsion got really, really overwhelming in his office) to lie in every single interview. Big lies, small lies, odd lies, incredibly colorful lies, lies worthy of Mark Twain or Damon Runyon, and lies that just made you think “c'mon...”

Why is this important? Well, on a certain level it isn't. Joe was just an older gent, an incredibly fun character on the scene in Manhattan, a NYC show-biz institution (that he was, there is no denying or diminishing that). But I guess for someone like myself who really loves to research things about cultural history, Joe's pervasive lies moved beyond cute stories and became things that people quoted as being actual events.

The worst instance of this when he died was a sloppy Daily News obit that lifted the list of Franklin show guests from his Wikipedia entry, which contains a bunch of Joe's yarns, repeated as if they were truth. Thus the News obit contains a list of completely unsubstantiated celebrities, including two celebs who never did talk shows (Chaplin and “Gary Grant” — nice!).

There is also the kind of lie that is injurious. As I noted in my last blog entry on Joe, he frequently lied about the legal outcomes of his “character defamation” cases, saying he won cases he lost or never even filed. He also created wildly insulting lies about performers he was angry at. His book Up Late contains two paragraphs of slanderous lies about Uncle Floyd, all of them 100% untrue (see Floyd's response to Joe's bizarre, libelous storytelling at 1:15 here).

So, while it became part of Joe's charm to assume that everything he was saying was an adorable made-up lie, there were stories of his that are somehow being turned into entertainment fact via the unreliable institution that is Wikipedia. And there are others (like the lies about Floyd) that were simply petty and mean-spirited.

With that in mind, I hereby assemble a “listicle” (I don't do 'em often, but sometimes a topic cries out for the list formula) of Joe's most outlandish show-biz-related yarns: 

Bonus yarn: Joe claimed he slept with not one but two blonde bombshells of the Fifties. The lesser of the two (but still an amazing icon) was Jayne Mansfield. Joe writes in his book Up Late that she was on his show “twenty times” (no pics, not a one!). He had a drink with her once:

(p. 121) “She and I were having a drink alone together near my office when I felt her smoldering touch, sensed her eyes filling with longing. I let the alcoholic glow silence my resistance. What happened next is a blaze of Toscanini — as I say, Jayne Mansfield was a brilliant violinist. At about seven forty-five, at eight o'clock, there were frantic calls all over town from the theater [where she was acting in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?], from the stagehands, director, the producer, until Jayne showed up, a half hour late for her curtain. If someone asks, I didn't tell you this. You heard it from someone else.”

It's hard to top that torrid bit of trash prose, but here goes. If anyone does have evidence that any of these interviews took place on Joe's show, I will be happy to update, say I was wrong in that instance, and post the stated evidence. 

5. James Dean/Al Pacino. In one of his last interviews, possibly his last ever, Joe told Gilbert Gottfried and cohost Frank Santopadre on the “Amazing Colossal Podcast” that he had many amazing combinations of guests. He announced one of these interesting pairings for the first time ever on the 'cast (hear it here at 11:10). He noted that, back in the Fifties, he had James Dean on his show along with a newcomer named Al Pacino. Gilbert and Frank were quite polite listening to this odd revelation. 

“C'mon...” factor: He has no picture, never mentioned it before, and James Dean was famous for about a year, from '54-'55; at the time Al was 14-15 and not acting professionally.

4. John Lennon. This one is a tangled mess — Joe introduced this to my knowledge for the first time on Later with Bob Costas in the Nineties. He claimed that he had a deal with John: put Yoko on a few times and then John would appear on his TV show. He thus added that he had Yoko on many times on his TV show, but John was only on a few times. The only evidence that he interacted with Yoko is a photo of her guesting on his radio show, and his only interaction with John appears to have been a letter Lennon wrote to him “explaining” Yoko's music and oddly sorta asking Joe to give it a shot. (John namechecks avant-garde jazz musicians Joe would've had no knowledge of or interest in, given his musical preferences.) 

“C'mon...” factor: Here there is no greater “you shittin' me?” element than the fact that no photos exist. John had already been a Beatle, may not have been selling records as much as he used to, but remained an A-lister who was photographed in various locations when he moved to NYC. Presumably Joe's steadfast on-set photographer called in sick each time John was on the Joe show. Curiously, Joe also never mentioned these appearances when John was killed in 1980. There's also the fact that pretty much every single day in the Beatles existence has been chronicled in detailed books, none of which mention appearances on the Franklin show. 

3. Charlie Chaplin. Joe began to tout Chaplin's name as a frequent guest on his TV show in the last decade or so. If I remember correctly, Chaplin used to rank with Garbo as one of the people on his “wish list” (he had a story about a friend of Garbo calling him about his radio show but never did quite bother to lie about Greta being on his TV program — most likely because younger folk don't know/care who she was). Suddenly, though, Charlie had been on his program “four or five times.” 

“C'mon...” factor: Again, no on-set photo of Charlie Chaplin, one of the most famous performers on the planet. The only fact that needs repeating is that Chaplin left the U.S. for good in September 1952 because of political problems. Joe went on the air in Jan. 8, 1951, so there's a very small window for Charlie to have shown up on the show. And surely, if you're the biggest star on Earth, you're certainly going to make your TV debut on a local, no-budget talk show with a nostalgia theme, right?

2. Marilyn Monroe: Joe was irresistible to blonde bombshells, we've already seen that with Jayne (did Joe dally with Mamie as well? one wonders). Joe's story, as told in Up Late, the nexus for many of the Franklin yarns, is that Marilyn's press agent set up a meeting between she and Joe because he wanted her to get on the TV show Luncheon at Sardi's. The two struck it off immediately (of course), and Joe suggested to a publisher, Rudolph Field, that he write a book with Marilyn about her life (this is when, Joe claims, she had brunette hair, which does run counter to her chronology in the early Fifties when the story is taking place — Niagara made her a saleable commodity, and she was a blonde from that point on).

Joe did say in interviews he had her on his TV show many times. But the piece de resistance is his account of their having sex. They were working on her autobiography (which, incidentally, did get written in 1956 as an item called My Story, ghosted by none other than Ben Hecht!). He remembered:

(p. 119) “One night we were working late on the manuscript. I was astonished to feel her hand on my knee. I stammered a weak protest. The rest is a fog of Chinese food and Garry Moore [the two were presumably watching TV; Garry was not in the room]. She had a very severe biological need, a strong biological urge. I would characterize her as straight-ahead, unemotional, businesslike. Not kinky. Neither dominant nor submissive — neuter. A man could get her in the sack, and he would think that he was the conqueror when actually she made the conquest....” 

“C'mon...” factor: That damned on-set photographer, he kept calling in sick! Given the frequency with which Joe says he met her, there might've been one photograph of the two together, but none has surfaced (time will only tell if there is any pertinent documentation anywhere in his cluttered office or storage space). The book did materialize, but isn't touted as an autobiography (strange, given that the other ghost written book was touted as such). It is credited to Joe and writer Laurie Palmer. As with the Beatles, there have been countless tomes about Marilyn, none of which has seen fit to include l'affaire Franklin.

1. John F. Kennedy/Richard M. Nixon. There is nothing that approaches this story for its sheer levels of comic invention and/or insanity. I never heard Joe tell it in an interview, but there it is, tucked away in that same urtext of true stories and bizarrely fabricated fakes, Up Late. He's discussing how a local restaurateur had a heart attack on the show, live, and...

(pp. 106-107) “He slipped under the table, the camera got off him, and we called for help. We did have a doctor at ABC, but he was busy reading the racing form. Nixon and Kennedy were in the next room rehearsing for their debate, and they ran in to help revive the guy. I had no choice but to keep on going, to talk to another guest, the camera in close, while they worked on the restaurant owner. It was already too late; he was dead.”

This little inclusion from Joe, the fact that Tricky Dick and Jack the Zipper were there to help him out with a dead man, creates an image that deserves to be in a deranged short story or most certainly a cartoon (perhaps a missing panel from "The Joe Franklin Story" by Drew Friedman and Josh Alan Friedman?). It's not even surreal, it's something like a stroke of lying-genius. It's reaching out to grab any two celebrity names and slapping them into your story. After Joe's death, someone posted to the Net about their friend who did camerawork for Joe's daytime ABC show. He noted that someone did die on the air and the show kept going. No mention of Jack or Dick. 

“C'mon...” factor: C'mon.
****

The single best piece of writing about Joe appeared in the Village Voice at the time that his TV show left the airwaves. Nick Tosches wrote a sublime piece on the man he called “the Lorenzo de' Medici of divine mediocrity.” It can be found in its entirety here, as reprinted in the terrific collection The Nick Tosches Reader.

Nick declares (in a piece that was lovingly illustrated by expert Franklin caricaturist Drew Friedman), “I had seen Dracula rise from his coffin, I had seen the Wolfman howl, the Invisible Man unravel, the Mummy walk. But Joe and his baby hands and his shining forehead were a weirdness unto themselves.”

He notes he left off watching Joe at one point because he was unsettled by Joe’s “shoddy carnival of nihilism.” He returned years later, though, for while under the influence of Ronsonol, he began to understand Joe, “still living, still beaming, still shrinking, still talking with zero conviction about what he called, as if alluding to some dark Zoroastrian duality, ‘the good nostalgia.’ ” Nick proceeds to outline Joe’s career, supplying real, verified dates (one of many things Tosches does brilliantly is research his topics) for the many transitional moments in Joe’s TV show.

On to the video: Perhaps the best example of Joe’s show is this representative episode from 1976, which starts off in the middle of things with Joe errantly bringing up Lee J. Cobb out of the blue to his panel.

Another example of the oddness of the Joe show offers us in the first minute alone the topics of bounty hunting, ham radio, and vaudeville. This is followed by some trivia questions from Franklin “anchor man” Richie Ornstein (when Joe couldn’t answer, he'd just snap out “I don’t know,” indicating that Richie should move on). Joe prefigured a lot of current reality shows by probing all of the details of the bounty hunter’s life (and if you don’t care, as I don’t, you’ll be bored to tears — just imagine you’re up at 1:00 a.m. watching it with bleary eyes and nothing on the other channels….)

The most interesting moments were when Joe met up with old comedians. Here, from his 40th Anniversary special, is Joe hosting a panel of old Jewish comics: Joey Adams, Henny Youngman, Freddie Roman, Mickey Freeman, and Bob Melvin.