Departing in droves: Deceased Artistes of early 2012 (part one)

No, this isn’t an obituary blog. But I do like to pay tribute to those whose work I’ve enjoyed who receive a tiny bit of mainstream attention upon their death, and are then shuffled off onto the scrapheap of pop-culture history. Thus, I salute six folks who’ve kicked off in the last few weeks and deserve a final salute.

The first tip of the Funhouse skimmer goes to Barney Rosset, the legendary publisher and man behind Grove Press. A true free-speech hero, Rossset made a habit of introducing controversial authors to these shores. Some were from overseas and some were American originals who couldn’t get their best works into print in their native country.

Rosset’s biggest legal battles were over Tropic of Cancer, Lady Chatterly’s Lover, and the amazing Naked Lunch. I know his books were a rite of passage for me as a teen, and NOT just because they had “dirty” content (although that was not unwelcome).

The Barnes and Noble located downtown at 18th Street and Fifth Avenue was like a paradise to me as a kid and teen (books as far as the eye could see!). The store had its used paperbacks divided by publisher, and every time I went there I went straight over to the Grove Press bookshelf (with the City Lights stuff on the bottom). I never quite cottoned to Beckett (seen above, with Rosset) as a teen, but loved Ionesco to death (still do) and was constantly checking out what showed up used on the B&N Grove shelves.

Rosset made it his life’s work to showcase the works of great writers, and one of his foremost creations was Evergreen Review, an incredibly hip and progressive publication that featured during its initial run (1957-73) a literal who’s who of great authors: (from the U.S.) Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginbserg, Mailer, Bukowski, Sontag; (from overseas) Sartre, Nabokov, Duras, Genet, Oe, Borges, Pinter. There’s a paperback collection that I highly recommend called The Evergreen Review Reader.

Rosset made movie history in the U.S. by choosing to distribute I Am Curious (yellow), the controversial film by Swedish filmmaker Viljot Sjöman. The film was an uncommonly intelligent essay about contemporary culture that happened to have a few sex scenes in it. I’ve always felt that the most likely reason for it attracting so much disgust in conservative circles (besides the fact that folks in those circles are idiots who are horrified by the human body) was because the film's star Lena Nyman looked to be a minor (she wasn’t).

But why more than anything should I be eternally grateful to Barney Rosset? Because Evergreen Review gave us the genius-level of derangment that was displayed in the “The Adventuers of Phoebe Zeit-Geist,” the cartoon series drawn by Frank Springer and written by the inimitable Mr. Michael O’Donoghue.

Phoebe was a gorgeous, barely dressed nincompoop who got herself involved in a never-ending series of lethal odysseys. It’s a very special part of Sixties humor, the darker side of American comedy that surfaced right after Terry Southern graduated to Hollywood (Southern was one of O’Donoghue’s heroes, along with Burroughs), and of course saw full fruition with the heyday of The National Lampoon.

The Evergreen Review was revived in 1998 and is still publishing here. As for Barney, we say farewell with the only two salient clips on YT, which both come from the 2007 documentary Obscene directed by Daniel O’Connor and Neil Ortenberg. The first is the trailer:



And the other elaborates on why Rosset took great pains to publish erotic works. The reason? Because he liked ’em!


*****

We move from renegade publishing into mainstream show-biz, with two character actors whose faces were familiar, but whose names were only known to those who collect such important trivia.

I could find no interesting clips spotlighting the first gent, so I’ll just farewell to Leonardo Cimino, who died at 94 last week. He made a specialty of playing creepy villains and characters of all ethnicities. He appeared in NYC-shot TV series, from the sublime Naked City to Kojak to Law and Order, was memorably cast as an alien in the TV series V, and had supporting roles in many, many movies including Cotton Comes to Harlem, the wonderfully awful The Monsignor, and The Freshman. He made his last big-screen appearance in Sidney Lumet’s terrific Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead.

The second character actor to depart recently was Phillip Bruns (often billed as Phil Bruns), who was best known for his role as George Shumway, the blue-collar dad of Louise Lasser on the wonderfully sharp soap-opera parody Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, but he was constantly busy, being seen in small parts on both TV series and in the movies.

Bruns worked in NY productions for a time, and then moved to the West Coast and worked exclusively in L.A. I remember fondly his appearances in A Thousand Clowns (pitching a TV project to Jason Robards) and Midnight Cowboy (as a TV host asking about makeup for dogs as Joe Buck is flipping channels on TV), but he also was in Frank Perry’s The Swimmer, the ultimate NYC-is-hell Neil Simon comedy The Out of Towners, and the PBS Kurt Vonnegut adaptation (starring Bob and Ray and Cousin Brucie!) Between Time and Timbuktu.

As part of the letter-perfect ensemble on Mary Hartman, he was the brusque dad who never understood (or wanted to comprehend) the stuff going on around him. There was only one DVD collection of the series, which, instead of offering the best moments, provided only the first two-dozen episodes.

All of these are currently available on YT for free (THAT’s how much Sony does not want to release the series), and there is no hope of ever getting the later episodes on disc (or the amazing tie-in series Fernwood 2-Night with Martin Mull and Fred Willard). Here is episode one. Bruns shows up at the 8:05 minute mark discussing a coworker who turned out to be a murderer and Mary’s marital troubles with her husband (Greg Mullavey) and his coworker (Graham Jarvis):


*****

I move from two great character actors to a cult exploitation actress. Lina Romay died recently at the premature age of 57 and is much missed by the cult-movie community, including Tim Lucas of the wonderful zine Video Watchdog. His obit for her is here.

Lucas knows a lot more about her than I do, because he really loves the work of Jess Franco — who was Romay’s main director, personal mentor, and real-life husband — and I really don’t. I do find Romay an interesting screen presence in his films, and I can see what Franco saw in her as a lead for his genre pictures and porn — yes, the two made porn to make ends meet for a while; in fact Romay directed some of her own porn features.

What is my problem with Franco’s cinema? Well, just about every cult moviemaker who has a great reputation I feel has gotten that reputation because their films are either quality works of cinema (Corman, Metzger, Meyer, Sarno, Jose Mojica Marins), or because their work is bad but fun to watch (Herschell Gordon Lewis, Doris Wishman, Mike Findlay, and of course Ed Wood).

I have seen a handful of Franco’s films, and while I find that his soundtracks are often terrific, the films themselves are crashing bores — which is about the single worst thing that exploitation can be. To elaborate, I absolutely love women’s prison pictures and have seen most of them over the years. I have found it rather stunning that Franco’s WIP pictures are extremely dull, even compared to some of the cheesiest straight-to-video items that came out in the Nineties.

For example, here is the trailer for Barbed Wire Dolls, his chicks-in-chains outing that starred the very photogenic and sexy Ms. Romay. The trailer is pretty dreary, as is this rather blah scene that a fan uploaded (for what reason I don’t know, but it perfectly illustrates the tedium one can encounter in a Franco flick):



Ms. Romay is unique in movie history, in that she intentionally adopted the pseudonym of an earlier actress-singer who had several U.S. screen credits, the big-band singer Lina Romay, who died in 2010. The Lina Romay under discussion here made over 100 films, with many of the porn flicks done under other pseudonyms. She was together with Franco for 40 years, from the time she was 17; the pair married in 2008. Here they are being interviewed in a documentary:



Thus, we have an actress who was quite fun to watch in softcore and horror movies, working hand-in-glove with a director who is hailed as a major auteur, but I just don’t get it. If anyone wants to suggest the single-best Franco movies that can convert a nonbeliever who’s already seen a half dozen clunkers from different eras — including some supposed “masterworks” — please leave the titles in the Comments field below.

In the meantime, here’s another Franco scene that looks to be “psycho” and edgy, and is instead just goofy (and sadly enough, not very amusingly goofy). What one carries from this fragment is that he was more than willing to adopt kitschy elements (as with the other actress’s makeup), and then not really do anything interesting with them. Thus, I throw you into Lorna, the Exorcist (1974):



I’ll close out with a fan-made music-video tribute to Ms. Romay. Here the oddly chosen moods and tones of Mr. Franco are refreshingly absent:

“No need to get excited, man. It's because I'm short, I know….”: Deceased Artiste Davy Jones

The outpouring of emotion that accompanies the death of a teen idol is always fascinating to watch, as is the death of any media personality whom a good part of the populace considered a “friend.” In the case of Davy Jones’ death at 66 this week I was as surprised as most folks — because Peter Tork recently overcame the biggest health problems of any of the Monkees, and because watching the group grow old has been a sort of a bizarre spectator sport for those like myself who fucking LOVE their music and the TV show, and of course first encountered it as a child (in my case in the earlier stages of the reruns when they went from primetime to Saturday mornings and into daytime rotation).

Davy’s death has occasioned a few articles that have made the argument for the Monkees’ music. As for the TV show, it is already enshrined as a wonderful piece of pop culture that combined the frantic energy of the “Richard Lester style” — see my discussion of its derivation with Ken Russell — and seriously deranged psychedelia.

The truest argument for the Monkees’ music is always made by just consulting the songwriting credits, as the group was assigned, and later chose from, songs written by the very best of the last generation of “Brill Building” songwriters (Diamond, King, Sedaka and Carol Bayer Sager — pictured), and a bunch of West Coast folk who also wanted to record their own music but had “songs for sale” in the meantime (Boyce and Hart, Paul Williams, Nilsson, even Warren Zevon).

Back to Monkee-music in a second, but first Davy. He was not my favorite in the group — that jockeyed back and forth between Micky and Mike — but he was certainly (along with Micky) the “show-biz pro” since he had worked for a few years before the Monkees as a child and teen actor. He also was a jockey for time; he was 5’3”, making him one of the tiniest “heartthrobs” in pop history.

And, yes, his biggest claim to fame during that period — besides being a regular on the opening years of Coronation Street — was being on the same Ed Sullivan episode that provided Americans with their first look at the Beatles. Davy was on the show as part of the cast of Oliver!, performing as the Artful Dodger, and seeing two years into his own future with all those screaming girls….

Davy got some nicely written obits that cited his status as the hands-down teen-girl-fave in the group. Each of the write-ups recounted the history of the Monkees, with appropriate quotes from the band members or the show's creators Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider — who died just a few months ago, having been a very important producer in the golden “maverick” era of early Seventies Hollywood.

Of course, the obits reflected that wonderful contemporary tendency of publications not to fact-check (or proofread) their text. The USA Today official write-up of Davy’s death referred to Peter Tosh as being the fourth member of the group (with a hyperlink to stories about the reggae star) and cited Davy as being the singer of the mega-hits “Last Train to Clarksville” and “I’m a Believer.” These seriously dumb-ass errors were corrected in a few hours — no doubt when readers posted corrections and wrote e-mails.

Even though Davy was never my fave on the show or in the group’s recordings, I followed his career throughout the years. I remember seeing the nicely amusing pre-Monkees episode of Ben Casey that featured Davy as the young abusive boyfriend (husband?) of Yvonne Craig (yes, Davy was messing up Batgirl). I might’ve taped it on VHS (someday I’ll sift through the collection); in the meantime the show can be watched (but sadly not heard) in one fan’s recording of it on YT.

As could be expected, there are literally thousands of Monkees and Jones-related vids on YT, but I believe any good short list would include the items embedded below. The most intriguing Monkee interview, which surfaced for the first time on the recent BBS Criterion box, is this chat they did on local TV to promote the movie Head:



Davy appeared solo, singing a jazz-tinged version of "Together," a great Harry Nilsson tune (more on Harry below), on The Music Scene in 1969, hosted by David “Booga Booga” Steinberg (no one calls him that now that he’s a respected TV director):



Like many other stars of the era, Davy appeared on Love American Style, the show that had a theme song that was more memorable and entertaining than any of its comedy. Thankfully this poster included the theme (check out the actress in the roster after Davy):



The vast majority of Davy’s obits mentioned his guest appearance on The Brady Bunch, which probably was his best-remembered TV guest shot. But how many people knew (or, yes, cared) that the song “Girl” actually came from the movie Star Spangled Girl (1971). I saw the pic late one night on TV because it was based on a Neil Simon play (one of the least-remembered of his “golden period” — probably because it’s one of his only attempts to write about the youth culture of the late Sixties, not one of his strong suits). Charles Fox (composer of the Love American Style theme) wrote “Girl” with his partner Norman Gimbel, and the film was directed by Jerry Paris.



I was a massive Monkee fan as a kid and have kept loving the show and their music in the years since, and I thought I was the only fan of a post-Monkee project that involved Davy and Micky, the band “Dolenz, Jones, Boyce & Hart” (oh, what Crosby, Stills, and pals wrought in terms of unwieldy band names). It turns out that that short-lived ensemble is well-remembered by Monkees fans on the Web. Interestingly Davy sang almost no lead vocals on the one LP the group produced — the most interesting song showcasing him was this goofy version of the old Coasters’ hit “Along Came Jones.”

Here he is dipping back into the past for the Monkees song “I Wanna Be Free” for an appearance DJBH made on Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert:



The Monkees had been the first high-profile act to perform a Harry Nilsson song (see below), and Micky Dolenz became a good friend of Harry’s as the years went on. Here Micky and Davy are seen in 1977 on the British children’s talk/variety show Our Week on London Weekend Television to hype their upcoming appearance in a stage presentation of Nilsson’s The Point. (Davy sings “Me and My Arrow” here):



The Monkees (Dolenz, Jones, and Tork) reunited in 1986, in conjunction with MTV’s rerunning the original series. They continued to reunite and break up over the next 25 years, with a lot of the blame being laid by Dolenz and Tork at the feet of Davy (interestingly, they had little to no animosity against Mike, who ditched them in mid-tour during the one full-quartet reunion). It got to the point recently where Davy was doing solo gigs as the “voice of the Monkees,” which was a pretty ballsy bit of billing, given that Micky sang the lion’s share of the group’s hit songs.

Here is one of the few TV interviews done with the four reunited Monkees on the aborted late Nineties four-guy tour. They’re on Clive James Talks Back (where his next guests are Patsy Kensit and NYC cult access star Margarita Pracatan!):



Davy still did do acting gigs in his later years. Here he is camping it up as an annoying Englishman on the sitcom Boy Meets World, for which Micky directed various episodes:



One of the most-seen latter-day clips of Davy was his cameo on an episode of Spongebob Squarepants. One of the major guest star appearances on that cult kid cartoon was a certain David Bowie — who, as is known to most folks who love him and/or the Monkees, was born David Jones, but had to change his name because of Davy’s presence in show-biz at the time he was first making music.

Now, on to a quick survey of the twelve best Davy vocals for the Monkees. I tried in each case to find the original “Monkees run amok” music-vid visuals for these songs as seen on the series. Begging that, I tried to find interesting vocal versions. Here is a catchy tune with a lovely title, “This Just Doesn’t Seem to be My Day” from the first Monkees LP:



Micky and Davy mess around on the one of the few tunes the Monkees did that qualified as a purebred novelty tune, “Gonna Buy Me a Dog”:



One of the strengths of Davy as the “cute Monkee” was that he could sing songs with nasty or sleazy lyrics and make them sound endearing. Thus, we arrive at the first of three of his best Monkee songs, each containing a very sleazy lyric that he delivers with a light touch. "She Hangs Out" is a cheerful note to a friend informing the person that his/her sister is, as they used to put it, "easy." Sleaziness as pop cuteness!



The biggest Monkees hit with a Davy vocal was without a doubt “Daydream Believer.” Here is an extremely rare audio-version (you gotta love old audio tapes!) of the song, performed on The Tonight Show on a night in 1969 when Carson was hosting.

Johnny had a policy against rock bands on the show when he was hosting as a result of a “loud” performance by the Byrds in the mid-Sixties. There were a few exceptions to this policy — I remember seeing Bowie’s appearance in a James Dean red windbreaker performing “Ashes to Ashes” with Johnny as host — but for the most part it was no rock when Johnny was hosting:



The other big Davy hit as a Monkee was “Valleri.” Here is the non-single version, heard only on the show in the Sixties. The fuzzy, “Satisfaction”-sounding guitar was played by Louie Shelton of the band the Candy Store Prophets; they were the creation of Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, the Monkees’ songwriting pals:



A song that was brought up a lot online when Davy died was the theme to the brilliantly weird movie Head, “The Porpoise Song” by Carole King and Gerry Goffin. It’s a wonderful piece of psychedelia (King/Goffin’s previous piece of Monkee mindfuck music was “Take a Giant Step”) that features Davy plaintively singing “goodbye… goodbye…”:



Back to the trio of songs with sleazy lyrics that Davy’s chipper vocals made into family-friend pop tunes. Even as a kid, I understood that “Star Collector” was an odd ode to groupies with wild lyrics for a bubblegum tune — “She only aims to please the young celebrities…”:



A little-known but very catchy tune from the Monkees’ “Instant Replay” LP, one of the two that had only three Monkees — the band broke up for good after the one LP that featured only Micky and Davy. (Reportedly one person at the record company joked that the next album would be by “the Monkee.”) In any case, “You and I” is a good pop-rock song that has very honest lyrics about the disposable nature of pop stars:



I want to close out with two pairs of tunes that Davy sang that were without question the hookiest of any the Monkees ever recorded. Micky might’ve done the vocals for the super-hit “I’m a Believer,” but Davy sang the other two incredibly catchy Neil Diamond tunes that the group did. The one that was a pretty decent-sized hit was “A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You.” And yes, for those who remember, that is super-wholesome Bobby Sherman being a creepy pop star in this clip:



The other Diamond-penned tune is one of my two personal fave Davy tunes, “Look Out (Here Comes Tomorrow).” The word catchy barely describes it:



Finally, there are the two Nilsson tunes that Davy sang as a Monkee. He later did items like “Gotta Get Up” by Harry, but the real breakthrough for Nilsson was the Monkees’ cover of “Cuddly Toy.” An incredibly bouncy and upbeat song, it has an insidious vocal that makes it the third and most significantly happy/sleazy Davy tune.

Only Nilsson as transformed by the Monkees could get these lyrics onto TV in 1967 — “You’re not the only cuddly toy that was ever enjoyed by any boy/You’re not the only choo-choo train that was left out in the rain the day after Santa came/You’re not the kind of girl to tell your mother the kind of company you keep/I never told you that I loved no other — you must’ve dreamed it in your sleep…” These are nasty, punky lyrics delivered as pure bubblegum:



And the height of Davy’s talent as a showman, his delightfully upbeat and happy-sounding version of Nilsson’s incredibly sad, semi-autobiographical account of his dad’s leaving him as a kid, “Daddy’s Song,” from the movie Head. Dancing with Davy is choreographer-singer (“Hey Mickey”) Toni Basil, and wigging out on the editing board is director Bob Rafelson.

The comment at the end by Zappa puts the song down, but hey, this is what pop-music “smugglers” (to steal Scorsese’s phrase about filmmakers) did for years — tackling extremely serious subjects in a jaunty, hook-driven way. RIP to the heartthrob Monkee:



Many of the images used in this post came from a fan’s wildly comprehensive Tumblr photo blog.

The fabric of old Hollywood: the Rat Pack, Martin and Lewis, and Roddy McDowall’s home movies

Show-business documentaries are often intended to serve as introductions for the uninitiated. They also drive diehard fans a little crazy, because, if made well, they introduce them to a wealth of footage that they would like to watch at full length, without a narrator or talking heads “situating” the action — or in the case of most horrific current-day talking-heads series, simply describing the very thing we’re seeing.

One pair of documentary filmmakers, a mother and son, have “laid bare” their archives to a fascinating extent on (where else?) YouTube. Carole Langer and Luke Sacher have made a number of independent documentary features, but what concerns us here is the series of show-business profiles they created for A&E’s Biography. In putting these shows together, they utilized a number of rarely seen clips (not the public-domain specialties that appear in just about every straight-to-DVD docu), as well as one-of-a-kind reels of film that came from the stars themselves.

Thus, we can now see “above ground” some extremely rare footage that we never would’ve laid eyes on before, as well as having access online to clips that I have indeed seen before, but only on “mail-order” cassettes and discs (I’m all for using polite terms for that nastiest of phrases, "bootleg").

The uploads that are the singular possessions of Langer and Sacher are her interviews with a host of aged celebrities for the show-biz docus. Their YouTube account features her talks with Juanita Moore, Lizabeth Scott (right), Jackie Cooper, Jane Wyman, and Ann Miller.

For information and anecdotes about acts that played Las Vegas in its heyday, they turned to Shecky Greene. This interview is particularly fascinating, as it finds Ms. Langer telling Mr. Greene nearly as many stories as he tells her (she also never seems to laugh at the many, many jokes and silly voices that Greene includes in his answers). It’s an informal and informative chat, but I was kinda taken aback by her mini-lectures to Shecky:



One of the seminal figures that Langer and Sacher interviewed for their documentaries was Roddy McDowall, who, as I discussed in my interview with Carol Lynley, seemed to know everyone who mattered in Hollywood from the Fifties to the Seventies and was obviously in possession of the secrets they carried around.

More on him below, but I will note that I was extremely impressed by his encyclopedic knowledge of Hollywood movies and players in this interview (and rather surprised by the instance in which Ms. Langer tells him “let me finish” when she’s giving him a mini-lecture). One only wishes he had written a memoir — but the keepers of secrets never do:



The most impressive “get” for the duo interview-wise was clearly Robert Mitchum who, even though he looked seriously ill when Ms. Langer talked to him, still had an incredibly macho deep voice and the same mixture of bravado and apathy that distinguished his best performances:



The Soapbox Productions YT account provides hours and hours of viewing material, including the indie docus that Langer and Sacher made, but most show-biz fans will be drawn in by the plethora of material about Las Vegas, like the promotional short “Las Vegas, Playground USA” from 1964; silent newsreel-style footage of the Ritz Brothers when they played Vegas, also Joe E. Lewis and Noel Coward at the Desert Inn (being visited backstage by various couples, including David Niven and Judy Garland, and Sinatra and Bacall).

In this same vein are Janet Leigh’s silent home movies, which were used for an A&E Biography ep that Sacher and Langer did on Leigh. Of course, Leigh was an uncommonly lovely actress, whose best-known relationship was with husband Tony Curtis. They were a “star couple” without question, and two of their best show-biz friends were a certain Dino Crocetti and Joseph Levitch, aka Martin and Lewis.

Langer and Sacher made a very good portrait of Jerry for Biography, called “The Last American Clown.” It is filled with tantalizingly rare footage they uncovered, and other items that surely came from Lewis’s own deep stash of home movies documenting his every move. The whole show, running 90 minutes, is up on YT:



If you’re curious about what was really special (and insane) about Martin and Lewis’s act, check out this footage of them guesting on the U.S. Olympic team telethon in 1952. They call hosts Bob Hope and Bing Crosby “old timers,” generally run amok, and wind up doing a bit of gay humor (Jerry’s stage character often slid from Yiddishisms to crazed-kid behavior and gay jokes):



The pair are a bit more serious in this interview with Edward R. Murrow for “Person to Person.” They’re sitting in a room that Jerry had constructed as a screening room and an archive for the duo — they’re on friendly terms on camera, but the most interesting note is when Jerry notes that Dean ditched an appearance in Jerry’s home-movie at the very last minute:



The Soapbox YT account has a load of Martin and Lewis rarities, including:
—a promotional short for The Stooge in which they wind up pretend-pummeling their producer Hal Wallis;
— a greeting to movie viewers in Detroit from the set of one of their pictures; and
— newsreel footage of the opening of Jerry’s camera store in L.A.(Dean did show up for that).

The lengthiest M&L rarity that they’ve uploaded is the best record of what the team looked like in a nightclub, the film of them playing the Copacabana in Feb 1954. The act is fast and loose and kinda dopey, but they certainly go at it with a fervor, and had some great moments:



The best M&L rarities show them ad-libbing their lines, and often tripping over them. As in this TV promo for The Colgate Comedy Hour, and this clip where they accept an award from Redbook magazine, along with Leslie Caron and some chick named Marilyn:



The solo Jerry rarities are just as eye-opening:

—a promo for his 1960 TV special;
— a behind-the-scenes short about The Nutty Professor (oh, Stella, Stella…); and
— character-based TV ads Jerry shot for The Big Mouth

Jerry clearly enjoyed having making-of theatrical shorts created to promote his films. Here’s one for his sex farce Three on a Couch:



This 1968 short film about the making of Hook, Line and Sinker, is called “The Total Filmmaker,” and it indicates that even though Jerry wasn’t directing the picture he did everything on it, to the extent of editing the sound during his lunch break. It’s an amazing short and will be appreciated by both those who love and those who hate Jer (since it supplies them both with more fodder):



The rarest thing Langer has put up is a film of Jerry teaching his filmmaking class at USC in 1967. I have no idea what he’s talking about, but it is pretty mindblowing to see him in front of a classroom:



******

Langer and Sacher’s four-part Biography documentary about the Rat Pack, which aired for four nights, is here:



The raw footage used to create that docu provide some fascinating slices of show-biz history. Here Frank, Dean, and Sammy crash Danny Thomas’s gig at the Sands (silent newsreel footage):



And the night that the Rat Pack consisted of Frank, Danny, and Jerry — this is only one of two times I know that Jerry got to be in a modified version of the Pack:



More than two decades after his death, Sammy Davis is still the biggest ass-kicker in show-biz — here he’s touring Vietnam in a short film created for the Army called “Peace, Togetherness & Sammy”:



As with the M&L Copacabana footage, there have been “mail-order” copies of the only footage that exists of the legendary “Summit at the Sands” gig with the full Rat Pack onstage goofing around at the same time; now the footage is on YT thanks to the Soapbox folks.

The secret of these gigs is that they were loose and not the group’s best — the best moments for Frank, Dean, and Sammy as a team were when they went out as a trio. But they still had a helluva a lot of fun, and the footage is truly historic and a must-see for fans. Here’s an EXTRMELY politically incorrect bit where Frank impersonates an Asian (Frank was far from the funniest guy in the Pack; he trailed Dean, Sammy, and even Joey):



The core trio do their thing. Sammy’s dancing is only at half-strength here, and he’s still pure dynamite:



******

The most extraordinary thing that Langer and Sacher share with us on their YT channel is a trove of home movies shot by Roddy McDowall from approximately May to September 1965 at his beachfront home in Malibu. Offering further proof that Roddy really was a personal friend of an incredible amount of stars, these silent home movies show the stars interacting at the beach, chatting, drinking, being bored, playing with the their kids — in other words, just hanging around and being normal folk (who look incredibly gorgeous and in several cases happen to be immaculately talented).

Among Roddy’s guests are those he worked with on the just-perfect Lord Love a Duck (Tuesday Weld, Ruth Gordon, George Axelord) and Inside Daisy Clover (Natalie Wood, Robert Redford, Christopher Plummer). Each time you think you recognize someone (from Jason Robards to Dennis Hopper to Judy Garland), it is who you think it is.

Among those glimpsed at Roddy’s beach parties are:

— a dancing, eyepatch-wearing Sal Mineo, Tuesday, Natalie Wood, Juliet Mills, and Jack Warden ;
— Lauren Bacall, James Fox, Merle Oberon, David McCallum;
— the sex-kittenish Jane Fonda and prim mum Julie Andrews ;
—Fonda and Andrew again, Natalie Wood, Mike Nichols, James Fox, Hope Lange, and Jennifer Jones
— Simone Signoret
—Ed Wynn, shoehorned amidst views of L.A. streets and Whisky a Go-go

At some times Roddy brought his camera to other people’s houses, including Jack Lemmon and Rock Hudson:



One beach gathering finds old-guard stars Kirk Douglas and Lauren Bacall hanging out with Lee Remick, Ben Gazzara, and a dinged-up Newman (had he been racing?):



An August ’65 gathering had Paul Newman and Natalie Wood on the guest list:



Roddy’s camera did wander over to the young and attractive ladies, as here with Tuesday Weld, Hayley and Juliet Mills, Lee Remick, and Suzanne Pleshette. The one and only Ricardo Montalban supplies the beefcake:



Those who watch the Funhouse TV show know I dearly love Tuesday Weld. Here is a sort of “solo study” of her at a time when she was the only guest:



And finally one of the busier star-studded beach bashes. It took place on May 31, 1965, and the guest list included Tuesday, her future Pretty Poison costar Tony Perkins, Jane Fonda, Natalie Wood, Lauren Bacall, Ben Gazzara, Suzanne Pleshette, Judy Garland, Dominick Dunne, and Lord Love a Duck auteur George Axelrod:



These snippets from Hollywood’s (and Las Vegas’s) glamorous past are kinda mind-warping. It’s one thing to see images from them embedded in a documentary, it’s quite another to see the entire source element. And for that I thank the Soapbox productions duo.

A "nurse" to the end: Deceased Artiste Zina Bethune

A death was announced this week that was very sad in its particulars, yet quite invigorating as a story of survival and reinvention in show business. The death was that of dancer-actress Zina Bethune who, to most reading this blog, will be best remembered for being the female lead in Scorsese’s first feature Who’s That Knocking at My Door? (1967). She was a doe-eyed blonde actress (and that phrase was very appropriate for her) who was quite good in Knocking, but who had become, as far as many of us were concerned, a “whatever happened to…?” figure.

Her death was tragic enough to be reported on gossip blogs (by the likes of the annoying Perez Hilton) without any mention of her accomplishments, and important enough in show business to merit a New York Times obit that curiously didn’t mention her work for Scorsese. The details are this: she stopped her car on Forest Lawn Drive in L.A. to look after an animal that she thought was injured (one obit said it turned out to be a dead possum). She was struck by one car, and then hit by another, which ran over her and dragged her 600 feet. One driver stopped and reported the story; the other driver kept on moving.

To step beyond the sad essentials of this story (the fact that Ms. Bethune’s love of animals cost her her life — I know quite a few ladies who would go to the same lengths, and would sadly end up in the same situation), the obituaries revealed that, as both an actress and a dancer, she had had quite a rich career that saw her reinventing herself and having several personal triumphs.

The first of these triumphs was the fact that she went from having scoliosis as a child to studying at Balanchine’s School of American Ballet, and performing in his production of the Nutcracker. After having soloed at the New York City ballet, she went headfirst into an acting career that found her appearing on many dramatic TV series — I recently reviewed the Criterion release of The Fugitive Kind on the Funhouse TV show and was pleased to air a clip of one of the extras, a 1958 “Kraft Television Theater” presentation of short plays by Tennessee Williams (directed by Sidney Lumet, introduced by a higly uncomfortable Tennessee) that included “This Property Is Condemned” starring Bethune.

During this period she appeared as one of FDR’s kids in Sunrise at Campobello, had a regular role on The Guiding Light, and appeared on various dramatic series, including the wonderful Naked City, in which her mom takes credit for a murder she committed by mistake (in a switch on what was believed to be the “real” story of the Lana Turner/Johnny Stompanato case):



And this find, an episode of Cain’s Hundred (1961-62) called “The Swinger,” written by the show’s star Robert Culp, and guest starring none other than Sammy Davis Jr.:



Her biggest success on television was a starring role in the soap The Nurses (1962-65), which got her on the cover of TV Guide and found her being booked as a guest to sing, dance, and make silly small talk with the host on The Judy Garland Show in 1963. The cutesy opening (where Zina B. affirms that, yes, that is her real name and, no, she was not a real nurse). The intro is here. Judy and Zina do “Getting to Know You” here (with a booze joke from Judy!):



Judy, Zina, and Vic Damone do an “all-purpose holiday medley”:



After The Nurses went off the air, she was a regular on Love of Life from 1965-70. It was at this time that Scorsese cast her as the female lead in his first feature, which was initially called on “Bring Out the Dancing Girls” and “I Call First,” before it became “Who’s That Knocking…” with the addition of a sequence intended to get the picture a more “adult” audience (and provide the first big-screen visualization of the Doors’ “The End”). More on that below, though.

Her acting career continued with small roles on TV in the Seventies and Eighties, but her biggest success onstage in her later career was a role in the Broadway show Grand Hotel from 1989 to 1992:



Bethune kept moving in other directions as well. She became the founding director and choreographer of an L.A. dance company and also ran a dance/performance program for kids with disabilities called Infinite Dreams. She is seen here in a recent interview for a documentary called L.A. Woman (she’s at 1:07):



Since I was a devout Scorsese follower for many years, I will close out on the film that most of us knew Ms. Bethune (married name: Zina Feeley) from. Her scenes in Who’s That Knocking…? were shot in 1965, and it is noted in an interview with Mardik Martin that is online that she was an established TV actress, so they had to do her scenes all at once — the film’s lead, Harvey Keitel, was an unknown at this point, but Zina Bethune was a star and was getting the highest salary in the film.

She first appears in the film in the scene that basically put Scorsese on the map (since Ebert loved the picture when it was titled “I Call First”) as a visual innovator, the meet-cute moment where Harvey Keitel talks her up in the Staten Island Ferry terminal, discussing John Ford movies with her and being the first chatty, charismatic, and slightly dangerous Scorsese protagonist. The scene is most definitely inspired by Godard and the other New Wavers, but the visuals come from Scorsese’s own restlessness and invention:


A bit later on in the pic, Harvey and Zina walk to the insanely catchy “I’ve Had It”:



Her death was tragic, but it is indeed nice to know that she enjoyed not only a second act in her career, but also a third and fourth.

The most masculine voice in town: Deceased Artiste Ben Gazzara

The last of Cassavetes' three “husbands” has now left us. Peter Falk may have been the crowd-pleaser of the trio, and Cassavetes the visionary, but Gazzara was the most intense, without question. His voice exuded machismo without seeming like a pose (John Wayne) or a threat (Eastwood). Put simply, he had the tones of a man who did not fuck around in his conversation. You could believe Ben Gazzara.

It’s interesting to consider that he had the spottiest movie career of the three gentlemen. JC appeared in crappy pictures and TV because he was financing his personal films; Falk made a bunch of meager choices in his later years, but would always “recover” with a better-chosen part (or just another Columbo TV-movie). Gazzara didn’t want to be pigeon-holed into any specific kind of role, and so he moved around from genre to genre. Thus, he was the kind of an actor who never gave a bad performance, but his reputation rests on a small handful of incredibly intense and charismatic roles.

He began as a stage actor, having attended the Actors Studio during the Fifties when that institution produced intense leading men like a well-oiled production line. His voice was the key to his performances — in the 2003 documentary Broadway: the Golden Age, Gena Rowlands reminisces about how Gazzara’s voice could reach the upper balcony clearly, even when he was whispering onstage.

We don’t have many traces of his stage work, except this wonderful clip of the 1955 Broadway production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, in which Ben originated the role of Brick. The clip is included in the aforementioned Golden Age documentary:



Prior to that play, he appeared in the play End as a Man, based on the bestselling Calder Willingham novel. The novel was eventually transformed into a film called The Strange One (1957), with a completely indelible finale. Here is the trailer:



Gazzara’s next scene-stealing big-screen role was in Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder (1959). Throughout the Fifties and Sixties he thrived on both the stage (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) and TV. Here’s a bit of the latter, Benny fooling around with Whitey Ford and Joe Louis on I’ve Got a Secret:



For a certain generation, Gazzara’s seminal role was on TV as a lawyer who has been told that he has no less than nine and no more than 18 months to live (what an imprecise medic), so he goes on the road searching for new experiences in the completely oddball dramatic series Run for Your Life (1965-68). Each new episode found Gazzara encountering a new group of people and making an impact on their lives (or they made an impact on him). Here is a confrontation with veteran tough-guy character actor Henry Silva:



An “ethnic” scene wherein Gazzara meets opinionated Sicilians Harry Guardino and Sal Mineo:



An encounter with a free-thinker and “pornographic” writer, played by Barbara Hershey:



It has been much discussed by fans and students of Cassavetes how the starring trio in Husbands behaved on-camera as if they had been friends for years. All three actors stated that they barely knew each other, except for having met at public events and parties. Gena Rowlands, though, did guest on Run For Your Life, and thus had some close encounters with Gazzara more than a decade before the two worked together in what I consider the only flawed film of Cassavetes’ personal work, Opening Night (1977). Here is a scene from that RFYL ep:



The stars of Husbands (1970) did seem like they were old friends. Perhaps Cassavetes’ intensive rehearsal period — wherein actors improvised their dialogue and “lived” in their roles — contributed to this, or maybe the three actors were just destined to be pals at some point in their lives. Whatever the case may be, it’s one of Cassavetes’ most emotional and unusual films, in that there are several sequences where the actors are clearly improvising on camera.

Perhaps because the film was funded by a large studio (Columbia), JC felt he could let loosen his rules for a bit, and thus the film has a very informal, and extremely real, aspect to it. An hour-long BBC documentary about the making of the film is available on YT here, and here is the trailer, narrated by the velvet-voiced William B. Williams:



Setting aside Opening Night, we wind up at the picture that has probably contributed the most to Gazzara’s cult status among indie filmgoers, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976). The film was a massive failure in its first release (hear Ben talk about that here) and was basically “hidden” by Cassavetes in his lifetime (at least in the U.S.; in the Eighties, I was finally able to see it in Paris, where it was playing at one theater once every weekday).

It has since acquired a great reputation, and its appeal is tied up completely with Gazzara’s charismatic lead performance. His strip-club owner isn’t even on the show-biz map, and yet he’s a man with a moral code and a sense of duty about pleasing his audience.

In that regard, the most interesting anecdote that Gazzara told about the film was that he had to take Cassavetes aside a few days into filming to tell him something was wrong. Cassavetes had no idea what the problem was, and Gazzara mentioned that the girls weren’t undressing on-camera, and that the film was about a strip club. Cassavetes was actually kind of a prude when it came to nudity or sex, but Gazzara, staying true to the code of his character Cosmo Vitelli, knew what the right move was.

The first 15 minutes of the film are here, but here is perhaps the film’s best sequence, with Cosmo talking to his performers in the dressing room:



Another great moment:



Outside of the Cassavetes films and The Strange One, one of the strongest lead roles Gazzara had in a film was Saint Jack (1979), a tough, nasty little character study that was quite a surprise from cineaste/filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich. The film has the feel of Chinese Bookie and has the added allure of having been shot in Singapore. It was produced by Roger Corman (as was Bogdanovich’s Targets), and supplies further evidence of Corman’s risk-tasking side. It received great reviews but generally tanked when it came out; now, of course, it’s seen as an absolutely terrific film:



Gazzara worked with Bogdanovich again on the romantic comedy They All Laughed (1981). The film is charming, but it has a sort of sadness hanging over it. The killing of Dorothy Stratten was the first sad incident associated with the film, but then one considers that the NYC it shows is long gone (something mentioned by Bogdanovich in the commentary track he did for the DVD), that happy-go-lucky costar John Ritter died at a younger age of heart trouble, and that Gazzara and costar Audrey Hepburn (who was not unwell during the film, but looks oddly tired throughout) were carrying on an affair that lasted for a short while. The real-life attraction between the two informed their love scenes:



Gazzara was so effortlessly macho that he could take a role that was sort of off-kilter and stabilize it. He does that with the lead role of the poet Charles Serking in the great Marco Ferreri’s Tales of Ordinary Madness (1981). Serking is based on Charles Bukowksi, who wrote the source novel for the film, and there’s no question that, while Mickey Rourke might have been truer to Bukowski’s speaking voice (Snagglepus on booze), Gazzara was the dream version of Charles Bukowski, a macho boozer and brawler who was also acutely sensitive. In short, he had a LOT of fucking style:



But what will the average cable-viewer remember Ben G. for? His villainous turn in the super-schlocky Patrick Swayze vehicle Road House (1989). The movie is fun trash from beginning to end, and Gazzara makes a terrific villain, especially when he is able to tell off Swayze and then “beat him up,” courtesy of a much younger stuntman. Here Benny is, singing my mom’s fave, the whitebread cover of “Sh-Boom” by the Crew Cuts. Ben could be cool, even in the trashiest of trash flicks:



Gazzara suffered health problems in the last decade, including throat cancer that decimated his strong and clear voice. He was still a superb actor, so he thrived in supporting roles in more Road House-like crap and ambitious films like Lars Von Trier’s impressively abstract Dogville (2003). He also continued to work in live theater, playing in off-Broadway shows and receiving wonderful reviews.

He was not above hyping his work in the media, and perhaps one of the odder things I heard him on was the WOR-AM “Joey Reynolds Show” on the hour of the show that Joey dubbed “the Italian hour.” Il Grande Gazzara, who had once partnered with John Cassavetes and Peter Falk, was on that occasion sitting with a character actor (mob specialist) named “Cha-cha” and Joe Piscopo. At first I thought of this as a mighty fall for a guy who dwelt in the top tier of actors, but then I realized that despite whatever health problems he was having, Gazzara remained a working actor, and to plug the gigs he got, he had to do interviews.

The memory of that moment in his career where his opinions on acting were considered (on one radio show, at least) equal to those of Cha-cha and Piscopo makes me yearn for the type of interviews the European press conducted with him. Check him out here being interviewed by a French woman journalist for the show Cinema Cinemas on 42nd Street near Ninth Avenue. He holds forth on his favorite kind of part (“men who don’t always win the war”) and his love of reality in acting.



I’ll close this out with two clips related to Husbands. First, the nightmare vision of what the film might’ve turned out to be, if Cassavetes' strong radar for fine acting had ever slipped — here are Cassavetes, Gazzara, and Marty Ingels (!) cast as three poker-playing buddies in the goofy comedy If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium (1969).



And there is no better way to feel the real-life vibe that the Husbands trio gave off than to watch this amazing Dick Cavett show from 1970 with the three men as his only guests. It’s been noted that these guys were “the Rat Pack of independent film.” That ain’t half wrong: