He wasn't fond of them, but here they are: Robert Altman's Scopitones!

Ranking right up there with “Uncle Jean” in my personal Pantheon of filmmakers is the ultimate American maverick, Robert Altman. I only encountered the gentleman in person three times, all extremely brief. He was very, very sick (but nobody knew it) in the last instance, when he made his final public appearance in NYC with Garrison Keillor at the Museum of TV and Radio. Thus, he looked extremely cranky when ensconced in a chair in the “green room” area where he was supposed to meet and talk with press.

On the first occasion, however, at a book signing/promotional event for Short Cuts, he was in fine form, and I wound up asking him if he would ever think of releasing his short films, which included things he lent out to the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria for a comprehensive Altman retro (Pot au feu, The Katherine Reed Story, etc.). He said they weren’t very good and, no, he didn’t really want them to be released on a laser disc (this tells you how far back this was).

In the case of one of them, a Scopitone called “The Party” or “In Crowd,” he said he didn’t own the music (“Bittersweet Samba” by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass), so that one couldn’t be released. Well, it has now shown up in public, and is available for public perusal and saving as a download.

The Scopitone is a piece of vintage Sixties filmmaking that adheres to the “party principle” of Sixties pictures, whereby any comedy or music picture could be shaken up by a sudden party sequence, preferably with girls in bikinis in attendance. Here, Altman had to visualize a Herb Alpert track, and so the actual movie is gone, we’re left with just the party. Which is just fine with me:



And because the Internet is a source of constant wonder, here is another of the FOUR Scopitones made by Altman (you learn something new every day), “Girl Talk” by Bobby Troup (who later of course got the last line in M*A*S*H). Here again the “chick factor” is in full effect, and had to be, since Troup was a great musical talent as a songwriter, but as a singer and personality… well, he just wasn’t Buddy Greco!!!



The third Robert Altman Scopitone found on YouTube is Lili St. Cyr shaking her money maker to “Ebb Tide.” This leaves only one Altman Scopitone (“Speak Low”) unaccounted for, but I never thought, as a diehard fan of the man’s work, that I’ve even see these three in public view.



Thanks to M. Faust for pointing the way to "The Party." As I often say on the Funhouse TV show, the Sixties are the gift that keeps giving, and giving, and giving….

Godard's latest provocation, and a tribute to his "brother" in cinema

This week on the Funhouse I’m paying tribute to filmmakers whose work I love: the Kuchar brothers, Nicholas Ray, and Marco Ferreri. Thus, I thought it would be only fitting to pass along links to two new short works by a gent who dwells in the top of my personal Pantheon, Jean-Luc Godard, aka “Uncle Jean” for those who care.

Godard’s “older brother” Eric Rohmer died some weeks back, as I chronicled here. Well, there was a very special night Feb. 8th at the Cinematheque Francaise, where various friends and collaborators of Rohmer shared their memories of the man. The participants included Barbet Schroeder, Arielle Dombasle, and Claude Chabrol. Uncle Jean was present in the form of a short film that he and the Cinematheque have allowed to be shown on the Internet. The page containing Godard’s film and tributes by the other celebrities (in French, no subs) can be found here.

However, for those who don’t speak/read French, and would like to have the “in” references to Rohmer and Godard’s friendship decoded, I’d recommend visiting “The Auteurs” website to read the comments that were posted below the film, which basically translate Godard’s narration, and also explain what his references are about. The film is beautifully done (no surprise) and perhaps the grace note is JLG’s final citation of the last line of Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, “That was the happiest time we ever had.” Uncle Jean is getting sentimental in his old age, and it’s very touching. We’re very lucky to still have him around.

And because he is still primed and ready to make cinema, I should direct you to the weirdest “stunt” associated with any of his recent-vintage films. Various trailers have been posted online for his latest film, Socialisme, which is set to do the film festival circuit shortly. I linked to the original trailer for the film here.

Because he will always be a provocateur in addition to one of the premier cinema poets, though, he also has provided two other trailers that are wholly unique: their visuals comprise the *entire movie* played at very fast speed. Thus, you can “see” the whole film in its visual state, which means that Godard is either commenting on the nature of trailers “revealing” the heart of a movie — or he is possibly pissed at his producers or distributors. In any case, it’s a very weird experience to watch what is surely a 90-minute film flying by in four minutes, with onscreen titles explaining what one will encounter in the film (things, words, etc.).

Here is the four-minute version of the trailer:



And for those with real ADD, here is Godard’s one-and-a-half minute version:



And for those who’d just like to see the actual, “normal” trailer for the film, replete with English subtitles, here it is. The fact that “god” is part of the man’s name is not at all in accurate.

Few managers ever received as much attention: Deceased Artiste Malcolm McLaren

McLaren stands with Brian Epstein and Colonel Tom Parker as one of rock’s most famous managers, and what he did as the “mind” behind the Sex Pistols is indeed legendary (his work with Adam Ant was equally cool but too late in the game, and there’s no clear evidence that he helped the New York Dolls at all). Of course, it was charged that he ripped off the band like mad, and thus you have the eternal dilemma: they wouldn’t’ve been famous without him, and so he allegedly decided to nab the lion’s share of the cash.

McLaren was nothing if not unstoppable, and so he went from Situationist troublemaker to fashion designer to rock manager to musician to video artist to shameless participant in English reality shows. Here’s a full South Bank Show portrait from 1984 that outlines his career up to that point:



He helped thrust hiphop culture into the mainstream with his terminally catchy “Buffalo Gals” in 1983:



And he dabbled in “high art” as well, with his “Madame Butterfly,” Hey, if you’re going to try to sell opera to the multitudes, sweating supermodels is not a bad place to start:



Here’s his “duet” with Catherine Deneuve on “Paris Paris”:

Do not forget to honor the Sabbath day

Easter is once again upon us, so I feel compelled to re-tout clips I put on YouTube some years back. First, "Jesus Gets Nailed":



And then, the world of crazy Xtian entertainment I love to cover on the show (and will be doing so again this year, tomorrow night!). A few slices from the wonder that is the "Donut Hole"



Christ rap by the token black child:


One of the many insidious songs you won't be able to get out of yer noggin:



I was very sad to learn of the demise of the "Christian supermarket" in the Times Square area that had ample amounts of this insane stuff on its shelves. I will feast off its bumper crop of weirdness for years to come....

And thanks to comic writer-artist Bob Fingerman for the first look at "the Donut Man" (oh, Rob Evans, where have you gone?). Bob's latest graphic novel From the Ashes is out now in book form, info is here.

Atheists, Assemble! A stew of brilliant English and Irish comics for Easter

It’s all about the sharing of pop-culture obsessions in the Funhouse, and so I have to offer you one of my latest preoccupations, exploring the world of British standup comics. This particular excursion began when I encountered the work of a number of American standups who seem to be “children of Bill Hicks,” meaning they’re following in the path of the late cult comic who made some very great performance work of his own personal obsessions (that word again!) and insights.

I found a few really solid examples of standups over here who are following in Hicks’ footsteps, albeit with less of the poetic and whimsical touch (I tend to think of them as the “open wound” school of comedy). Their work is indeed funny and absorbing (especially when there is a “trainwreck” performance, as there seems to have been a few times with really hard-edged standups like Doug Stanhope). Since the extremely American Hicks became a cult figure in the U.K., though (his birthday was actually pitched to Parliament as a possibility for a holiday), I was curious to hear if there were similar comics over there.

And so I went back to (where else) YouTube and consulted the uploads of “Padraic 2001eire”, who is an Irish fan of Bill’s, and had put up some great (now unfortunately gone from YT for copyright reasons) compilations of how his work was stolen by Denis Leary and seemed to be “lifted” on occasion by George Carlin (whom I of course worship from way back — check this Deceased Artiste tribute, with many links now also sadly gone from the Net).

“Padraic2000Eire” clearly has a fine-tuned sense of comedy, and is also clearly inspired by intelligent arguments for atheism (but more on that below). His montage post ”My Top 10 Favourite Comedians” introduced me to the work of five English and Irish stand-ups whom I became instantly fascinated by (one other, David O’Doherty, I like, but he’s a bit “gentle” compared to the others in the list). And thus I provide below the fruits of my months-long excursion into the work of these gents, with many thanks of course to the posters on YT and blogger JimG, who continues to post some truly mind-warpingly rare old vinyl and CDs.

For those who are completely unaware of Bill Hicks’ work, I heartily, heavily recommend watching his best performance video here. Just to run down the aspects of his comedy I’ve seen in other standups of his age group and younger, I’ll note that the American comics who open their emotional closets on stage (Marc Maron, Doug Stanhope, Janeane Garafolo) owe a big debt to Hicks, as do those who analyze the process of standup comedy while performing their act (not the standard Johnny Carson/Borscht Belt acknowledgment that a gag has failed, but a literal deconstruction of their own standup set — as when the very funny Maria Bamford, a comedian who does dozens of voices in her act, has her “mother” chime in and summarize what she's doing: “we know what your act is: low voice/high voice. We’ve got it!”).

The other dominant characteristic of Hicks’ comedy besides its highly personal content (in this regard, he was preceded by the twin gods of Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor, no question) was his fierce Left-wing politics and devout atheism. The English and Irish comics below are all in the same camp politically and in religious (or should that be “superstitious”?) terms.

Always best to start out with a song, so I’ll first spotlight the work of Bill Bailey, who plays the keyboard and various guitars onstage while he does comedy. He also has done a touring “Essential Guide to the Orchestra” which cannot be sampled on YouTube, sadly. In fact, YT contains very little of his standup, favoring his appearances on talk shows and the famous Never Mind the Bullocks gameshow. But you can check out his playing of a theremin on The Jonathan Ross Show, his bit on hard rock and the city of Milton Keynes, and his mock Brel/Scott Walker love-has-left ballad .

Here is a chunk of his stand-up, including the nice insight that certain types of jazz horn playing sounds like a “surrealist car alarm”:



From England we move to Ireland, and comic Dylan Moran, who is very straightforward and wonderfully deadpan, and discusses the more pleasant (or is that deadening?) forms of hypocrisy as his main theme. Here he summarizes religion as “people talking about their imaginary friend”:



Some more standard standup, as with this discussion of the battle of the sexes. Moran’s pleasant demeanor lets him get away with acidic insights:



And actually, there is one other element that links these comedians to Bill Hicks: their razor-sharp takes on Americans (Hicks’ standard line on whether he was proud of being an American was to note that the U.S. “was the place where my parents fucked”).



Setting aside atheism for a moment (although I have the feeling this next comedian is pretty much on that page too), Padraic’s montage helped me discover the work of Robert Newman, who was part of a well-loved team with a comic named David Baddiel (and did impressions of British rockers like this one), but who has worked on refining (bad pun — you’ll see) one long and brilliant set of material on world history, and the U.S. and U.K.’s devotion to oil, into a really tight piece of television, called from “Caliban to the Taliban,” or “The History of Oil.” Some helpful soul has put the entire show on YouTube — the video and the audio are slightly unhooked (the video lags a few seconds behind), but the show is definitely worth your attention. Part one can be found here. Here’s part four of the “History of Oil” show, summing up Newman’s political take on politics in the 2000s:



And now, we hit the comedy team that was a major discovery for me, Lee and Herring. The team did some amazingly funny work for BBC Radio and TV — their “Inexplicable World of Lionel Nimrod” show is just excellent, and they co-scripted episodes of "On the Hour," the absolutely brilliant Chris Morris radio news send-up that spawned the Alan Partridge character.

Stewart Lee has become an utter obession for me in the past few weeks, but his ex-partner Richard Herring also does top-notch standup, and he qualifies as the U.K. comedian who seems the most interested in delving into joyously blasphemous waters (I have no idea what his upbringing was like, but the man is obsessed with puncturing Christianity, and for that I salute him). Herring’s onstage persona is that of a sort of chubby shlemiel, but as a result of that playful-dolt front, he can get away with some terrifically nasty humor. Here is a sample of his standard, non-atheist standup, on the ever-popular topics of the phys. ed teacher at school and sexuality:



Herring did an entire set of material about Jesus, called “Christ on a Bike,” that can be found at the “Fist of Fun” website,” which contains lots and lots of free downloads of audio material from Herring and Stewart Lee. The opening part of the “Christ on a Bike” show can be found (as audio with a still picture) on YT here:



Herring has professed his love of the genius comedy of Cook and Moore in their “Derek and Clive” guises, and the single most Derek and Clive-ish bit of material I’ve heard him do is this slice from his “Collings and Herrin” podcast with fellow comic Andrew Collins (their blogspot blog is here). UPDATE: Since I wrote this, I've discovered Herring's solo podcast, As It Occurs to Me, which is a fast-paced sketch series that he writes and gives away for free on the Net (I love these kinds of artists!). You can download that terrific show here. And now back to the regularly scheduled slice of blasphemy from the "Collings and Herrin" 'cast:



And an amazing piece of stand-up by Herring, where the title is only the beginning of the gorgeous blasphemy. This is some of his latest material, with you-know-it’s-2009-or-10 references to Susan Boyle and Tiger Woods. And Rich asking Christ, “wank me off with your stigmata”:



Finally, there is Herring’s ex-“straight man,” Stewart Lee. Lee is one of the most deadpan comics and one of the funniest I’ve seen in years. His comedy is smart, yes, but he also works a concept thoroughly, through wonderful repetition and a sublimely straightforward sense of the absurd.

One of his nastiest routines routines about the English (he’s also done some superb U.S.-bashing) is a longer piece on the commemoration of the death of Princess Diana. He also weighed in on the Harry Potter phenomenon. As for Lee’s own reading habits, he is indeed a fan of William Blake, and also loves comic books — one of his interview “scores” was Alan Moore, whom he’s talked to more than once. Audio of a radio interview of Moore by Lee is here .

His tale of meeting a homophobic taxi driver is a fine piece of post-Hicks storytelling that also has much resonance for Americans, if one thinks of the “party of no” and their crappy debate tactics:



Lee tackled the touchy subject of joke-stealing in this terrific routine. I’ve never heard of the comics involved (although a Michael Redmond clip on YouTube is worth a look), but I’ll forever know the name of Joe Pasquale now.




The Pasquale routine, like another one Lee does on a comic named Tom O’Connor, shows his superb way of driving home a comic point. Here he works in a similar vein, eviscerating the Celebrity Big Brother show, and the TV advertisers:



One of Stewart’s most durable routines, which he’s reused and even done a fourth-wall commentary on, is a bit called “Jesus is the Answer”:



Lee wrote and hosted a serious tele-docu meditation on religion in modern society, “Don’t Get Me Started,” that can be found in its entirety here. Lee goes on about his own connection to Jesus in this routine (audio only). The “not him, I’m not” stuff is just terrific:



The fullest comic flowering of Lee’s thoughts on religion is this episode of his show Stewart Lee’s Comic Vehicle:



And because I’m posting this two days before Easter Sunday, and yes, because I was raised Catholic and now really don’t want anything to do with the religion, I offer a link to the YouTube poster named “Atheist Reference”, who seems to have quite a large video collection, including much “heathen,” non-believer comedy.

The twilight of all-night radio: goodbye to "The Joey Reynolds Show"

An era in New York radio is about to end. The last refuge for old-fashioned entertainment on a commercial NYC station will disappear next Friday, April 2nd, when the Joey Reynolds Show is taken off WOR-AM, so we can have yet another outta town syndicated program running in the late evening hours.

Joey’s show is impossible to describe if you haven’t heard it, but let me make a vague attempt: it’s a four-hour talk show that runs from 1:00-5:00 a.m. (it was five hours long until recently) five nights a week, featuring an eclectic mix of guests (no phone calls!) that ranges from serious authors who’ve written tomes about dire subjects to, well, the “naked clown” depicted above. About two years ago I had some situations that had me down, and I can say without qualification that Joey’s presence on the radio dial late at night talking to cabaret singers, show-biz one-offs (like the clown or this “Miss Liberty” lady who wore her Statue of Liberty outfit, on the radio!), and, most importantly, old and classic comedians, was an instant pick-me-up. It was and is, simply, put old-fashioned entertainment that could be put down as corny (as was done in this snarky New York Times article). That it is sometimes, but this kind of unique, personality-driven radio needs to be preserved in this era of “telescoped,” scarily formulaic celebrity culture.

The Reynolds show is both a talk show and a radio variety program, where guests display their talents and occasionally wander off on glorious verbal tangents. Joey presides over it all with a chuckle in his voice that disappears only when the specter of politics comes up — the only time I haven’t enjoyed the program are when fringe Right-Wing authors speak in an uncontested fashion (whereas those on the Left usually are grilled summarily). That said, Joey has been surprisingly liberal on certain issues, especially in light of the fact that the station he’s on has gone from being a home of radio giants like Jean Shepherd and Bob and Ray to showcasing the hate speech of Glenn Beck and the now thankfully eclipsed bile-meister Michael Savage.

But, back to the variety: Joey presides over themed hours that range from the “Italian hour” (where one could hear master-actor Ben Gazzara in the company of Joe Piscopo and the hour’s staple, a Little Italy restaurateur and character actor nicknamed Cha-Cha) to the “gay hour” (where disco is played and quite a few penis jokes are made) to the gloriously shticky “Jewish hour,” wherein joke-machine Mickey Freeman holds forth, and the names of great entertainers (including Reynolds' friend, the recently departed Funhouse interview subject Soupy Sales) are mentioned with the reverence they deserve.

Sometimes, the singers are top-flight talents, sometimes they aren’t someone you’d pay to see — no matter, Joey moves the whole caravan onward, and who knows what the hell will be around the corner after the hourly newscast. It sometimes may seem like the radio cousin of the old Joe Franklin TV show, but there’s a greater intimacy about radio that Reynolds exploits to its fullest. He is indeed talking to the listener, not at him/her, and the eclectic guest roster is a joy in an era when the only, only, only radio talk shows worth hearing are on listener-sponsored NPR stations that strike me as oddly antiseptic. I doubt I would have ever rediscovered the fast and smart comedy of Chris Rush on Terry Gross' terrific but oh-so-very-staid "Fresh Air". (Great clips of Chris on Joey can be found here).

Reynolds’ five-decade career in radio has been pretty amazing — from his hometown in Buffalo, N.Y., to stints in numerous cities, including Syracuse, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Detroit, Miami, Albany, and Wheeling, W.V. And, oh yeah, he was brought to WNBC-AM in 1986 to replace Howard Stern when he was pitched off the station long, long ago. Here is a rare recording of Joey at his Top 40 radio frantic best, on WKBW in Buffalo way back in ’64. And here are some equally rare airchecks, including the full version of the Reynolds theme song done by the Four Seasons.

Not many of the videos on YouTube convey the conviviality of the Reynolds show, but a few give a vague impression of it. There’s this visual recording of the “gay hour”:



And this bit of behind-the-scenes footage for the “Jewish hour,” which will be sorely missed when the show leaves us on April 2nd:



Two of the greatest icons to appear on the Reynolds show died last year. One was, as previously noted, Soupy; the other was the legendary Les Paul, who holds forth on Joey here:



The best resource for hearing Joey’s brand of classic radio talk is on the WOR site for the next week, an extensive archive of hours from his show going back to 2006. The archive doesn’t include the themed hours, but it contains many of the interviews that define the show, including Les and Soupy, frequent guest (and 95-year-old stand-up icon) Professor Irwin Corey, Ronnie Spector, Tommy James, Keely Smith, Pat Cooper, Tommy Smothers, Frank Gorshin, Tommy Chong, Larry King, Joe Frankin, and Funhouse deity Steve Allen.

Visit here before it’s gone forever.

Happy Pesach: Bob Dylan performs "Hava Nagila"

You can never have too much Bob Dylan craziness, and man, as one digs into the Bob’s "back pages" of public appearances one finds a whole lot o’ craziness. Keeping in mind that Passover season is upon us, I offer the following clip some dedicated soul uploaded to YouTube featuring Dylan in his famed appearance on the 1988 Chabad telethon, which basically brought the telethon a whole lotta attention, and was the center revelation in Harry Shearer’s famous piece on the ’thon in Spy magazine.

Watch this one and preserve it via one of the keepvid sites (I recommend the Firefox download “helper”), because the authorized Chabad account has no trace of Bob and the folks from the telethon may remove this at any time they please.

The bonus for those of us who enjoy the work of a certain character actor who has recently been in public view as a patriarch on the HBO series Big Love is that while Dylan plays harmonica and his son-in-law Peter Himmelman sings, none other than Harry Dean Stanton plays guitar on this number. It’s a keeper:

A man with damned fine hair: Deceased Artiste Robert Culp

This week’s show-biz casualty, Robert Culp, was a great looking guy who, like Peter Graves, was a perfect TV personality. He had the good looks, the charisma, and did not melt into character parts all that well — he was always himself, and that is an advantage on a weekly TV series.

Of course, he’s best known for this work on I Spy and the far lesser but well-remembered The Greatest American Hero. From the beginning of his career to the end (he died this week at 79), he made more appearances on TV than in film, but he did make one really solid crime thriller as a film director, Hickey & Boggs (1972), costarring he and his old TV costar Bill Cosby. The film is not represented at all on YouTube, and I don’t have the time to digitize a piece of it (it used to run regularly on late night Ch. 7 here in NYC), but it is a surprisingly good crime pic.

So no Hickey and Boggs clips can be found on the Net, but you can view one of Culp’s more interesting TV movies in its entirety. Why? Because it was created by Gene Roddenberry, that’s why. And so, if you have the time I urge you to check out the pretty decent (and somewhat kinky — always knew the creator of the greenskinned dancing girl and the Girl with the Silver Bra was a little kinky) 1977 telefilm Spectre starring Culp, John Hurt, Gig Young, and Mrs. Roddenberry (Nurse Chapel to you), Majel Barrett:



And let us not forget the most notable theatrical film Culp starred in. He was the husband, and erstwhile “swapper” of the super-adorable Natalie Wood, in Paul Mazursky’s Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969). Here is the extremely Sixties finale of the film, right after the couples figure out you can’t swing with someone you’re friends with (I don’t believe in “spoiler alerts” for films everybody should’ve seen already). It is the kind of conclusion that Hollywood producers would’ve only allowed at the turn of the Sixties:

A special moment: Deceased Artiste Alex Chilton meets Zacherle, and several dancing chicks

I will leave it to other blogs to pay tribute to the totality of Alex Chilton’s career, as I will confess I only really know his work with Big Star and the Box Tops (which is timeless, timeless pop). I definitely say hail and farewell, though, and acknowledge his contribution as, among many other things, the first producer of the Cramps and this mind-bending appearance he and the Box Tops made on Zacherle’s “Disc-o-Teen” in 1967. The poster, “321Alucard” (who has no other similar videos up), should be thanked profusely:

This Deceased Ariste Tribute Will Self-Destruct in 5 Seconds: Peter Graves

Peter Graves was a constant presence in the movies and TV from the Fifties onward. Although he probably was very few people’s idea of a “favorite actor,” he kept himself employed and was a perfectly fine host for items like Biography on the network that useta actually have Arts and Entertainment on it.

Graves stolid deadpan-heroic presence was best sent up by the man himself in Airplane!, where he formed a sort of Holy Quartet of Sincere Old Movie Actors with Robert Stack, Lloyd Bridges, and Leslie Nielsen. However, of that group, Graves was more of a TV star than a movie deity — sure, he was in dozens of movies, including masterpieces like Night of the Hunter and (key role for him) Stalag 17, but he was and forever will be known as a TV star, thanks to Mission: Impossible, several earlier Westerns (like Fury (seen above right), and Biography.

I draw your attention to one of Graves’ cooler movie appearances, as the good-guy lead in the shitkicker that was known as Bayou (1957) and Poor White Trash. Here he’s forced to fight the villain of the piece, the ever-awesome Timothy Carey as an angry Cajun. These were the days when men fought with hatchets in graveyards.

Farewell, Mr. Phelps.

Goodbye, Love: Deceased Artiste Ron Lundy

Ron Lundy was a NYC "metro area" institution, having worked for years at WABC-AM and later WCBS-FM; he died this week on Monday at the age of 75. I was an intermittent listener to the former as a kid, and a devout lister to the latter (before its playlist shrank, omitted the Fifties, and began to dote on the less-likeable cheez that is the Eighties). Thus, I pay tribute to this perennially cheery voice, heard to best extent in John Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy. Joe Buck knows he's in New York when he hears Lundy's customary greeting, "Hello, love!" (or was that "luv" -- does it matter?). Here's a fan video saluting the film that starts off with this moment:



Lundy's voice comes in at the 3:42-minute mark to this wonderfully Seventies University of Iowa student film entitled "Statue of Liberation":



And, finally, the man himself, from a day on the air on WCBS-FM. I love that fuckin' echo (and the 1959 music)! What a great voice to have heard in the mornin'....

The Legends That the Oscars Didn't Care to Honor on TV: Bacall, Willis, and Corman

So another annual dose of TV tedium has come and gone. What I find most interesting about the Oscars, and I find the same with “theme articles” that talk about today’s most successful movies, is that the movie industry’s Prime Directive is to convince us as often as possible that (old saw) “movies are better than ever!” In fact, we’ve gotten back to the Fifties so much that the biggest, newest invention is 3D, which came in when television hit the scene for real, and the studios were panicked no one would ever go to the movies again.

Thus, last weekend we got another Oscarcast that tried its utmost to convince us that the handful of decent Hollywood productions last year were as good as the masterpieces of old, the classics made overseas, and those hundreds of films that never received Oscars but are now acknowledged as the finest movies ever made. To keep folks tuned in, the show was streamlined — but still ran over three and a half hours, because they introduced five new Best Picture nominees (talk about hubris — or is that chutzpah?).

Thus, we didn’t hear the nominated songs, and the obituary tribute was pretty much insulting to all involved — not only to those who weren’t included (I like how a brouhaha is made over Farrah Fawcett and Bea Arthur, as if they were major motion-picture talents — gimme some Maurice Jarre and Arnold Stang, fellas!). The fact that over five minutes of the show was devoted to a tribute to John Hughes (who, as I noted here, only made like three good movies) and no more than ten seconds — more like five in most cases — was given to the rest of the filmmakers, performers, and writers who died, was an insult in general. More than likely, the film clips from Hughes' pictures were considered good for the demographic watching the Oscars, and those that might be channel-surfing around on a Sunday night.

In any case, the show’s most shameful event was not snubbing Farrah (although, if you’re gonna mention her movie career, do you feature a scene from Myra Breckenridge?), but that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has decided that we no longer need to see the honorary Lifetime Achievement awards on the show proper. In this case, we were told about a ceremony at which studio executive John Calley, incredibly influential cinematographer Gordon Willis, Lauren Bacall, and an absolute god of low-budget moviemaking, Roger Corman, received Lifetime Achievement awards.

I could go on and on about how pathetic it is that the producers of the program try to make a connection between the “great” films of today and the classics of yesteryear... and then don’t honor those who receive Lifetime Achievement awards on air. But it’s pointless to go on at length, since the show is always badly timed, badly produced (mainly because they focus their attention on ridiculous stagebound stuff, which is not the forte of moviemakers), and remarkably unfunny (does anyone really think Bruce Vilanch is a scream, outside of the Oscar producers?).

I guess I wasn’t paying attention when the program was on (can you imagine that?), but the presentation to the four Lifetime honorees wasn’t made a day before the Oscars, a week, or even a month. It was made five fucking months before the program! Here is an L.A. Times article from a few days before it happened, which was, for the record, November 14, 2009.

It turns out that the missing presentations and acceptances are up on the official Oscars site, but they are not embeddable here. Instead, I link you to Jeff Bridges presenting to Gordon Willis, Anjelica Huston presenting to Lauren Bacall, and Jonathan Demme presenting to Roger Corman. The Oscar producers should be ashamed of themselves for “hiding” these honors.

Woody Allen Boxes a Kangaroo on a TV variety show

Yes, the title pretty much says it all. Woody hosted the TV show Hippodrome in 1966 (the show aired on CBS in the U.S. on July 19 and on ITV in the U.K. on October 13, 1966). His fancy footwork no doubt comes from a youth spent watching silent comedy. I thought some of the stunts he did on I’ve Got a Secret were goofy, but this one pretty much tops ’em all.



My thanks to friend Rich Brown, producer of AOL’s off-the-wall
“Asylum” video series for discovering this one. It’s not indexed under Woody’s name, so it ain’t exactly out there in the open (and the version that is indeed indexed under his name is a poor b&w copy).

No Limits: Deceased Artiste Jamie Gillis

In a week when people are getting ready to honor folks who make scarily formulaic films as a matter of course, it makes sense to salute those who will not be honored at the godawful Oscars. And I’d be positively stunned if they included the likes of Jamie Gillis in their dead-folk montage (which was presented in a tacky, awful fashion last year). Gillis died on February 19th at the age of 66 after having made (by someone’s count) 470 porn films, which includes features, loops, starring roles, and guest-starring appearances (I remember thinking he was the sleaziest MFer I’d ever seen in a one-off scene playing a handyman named “Mr. Luigi” who has a good time with schoolgirl Traci Lords).

Born Jamey Ira Gurman in 1943, Gillis graduated from Columbia University in 1970 and famously worked as both a mime and a cabbie while awaiting his big break in show business, which oddly came by way of The Village Voice. He answered an ad in the paper in ’71 and began appearing in loops. He was one of the few noted male porn stars of the very busy post-Deep Throat Seventies, and was game to try anything on screen — again, my own memories of Gillis movies seen included him engaging in golden showers in one of the so-called “couples” porn movies (I think it was Roommates).

He also was a bisexual (fun fact: he was in the first all-male 3D porn film, Manhole) who in interviews would fondly recall the Continental Baths and freaked out straight male moviegoers by getting blown by Zebedy Colt (now there’s a guy you can tell stories about) in the otherwise “couples”-friendly Story of Joanna by Gerard Damiano. According to one well-researched tribute, he also masterminded a series of videos called “Walking Toilet Seat” (oh yeah, it’s what you think). And since we’re on the weirder side of things, we can’t forget Shaun Costello’s damaged homage to Taxi Driver, called Water Power, about a man who rapes and gives forced enemas to his victims. It looks like it has awesome footage of Times Square, and has been praised by Quentin Tarantino (which is more than you needed to know about “QT,” ain’t it?). This blog has a clean sequence from it posted of Gillis walking down 42nd St. Here is a fan’s “DJ mix” montage from the film (all scenes clean, this is on Puritannical YouTube!) which shows Gillis in full Travis Bickle mode:



Gillis’ obits were certainly lively, with the most interesting story being that he would act in live sex shows in Times Square — one gets the impression that there wasn’t a lot he turned down — and would recite Shakespeare soliloquies he remembered to give the shows “socially redeeming value.” He is also commemorated on various porn-history sites for a video he did called On the Prowl which supposedly started the “gonzo porn” subgenre. Gillis found a game woman, and drove her around San Francisco’s North Beach, looking for guys from the public who were willing to fuck her. This was in 1989, so it was in the post-AIDS era, but as the Nineties “gangbang” events proved, people are always willing to be sexual adventurers, even if it’s ill-advised.

The strangest thing about Gillis is that he did the extreme fetish weirdness — and even continued appearing in porn when he was in his 50s — and yet he was in several of the most “prestigious” porn titles, including films made by Radley Metzger (under his “Henry Paris” hardcore pseudonym) and Joe Sarno. He exhibited acting ability at various times in his porn career, but then he also could be quite the ham and downright unpleasant to watch (which works in the scarier flicks like Costello’s niche enema biz, but mainstream porn doesn’t usually include a “dark” figure like Gillis — or at least hasn't since the Seventies). In any case, he was certainly an icon in the business of filmed pornography, which is now entirely dead, except to the aficionados who keep it alive via old VHS tapes and DVD reissues.

In closing, a few Gillis clips. Here he is being interviewed with Shauna Grant (Colleen Applegate), the tragic porn star who seems to be in a sleaze sandwich here, as she is interviewed by her then-manager, Bobby Hollander:



A scene from the aforementioned Story of Joanna (1975). Yes, it’s pretty corny stuff, but this stuff was a refreshing change in porn theaters — actors attempting to act! A plot! Dialogue even!



The opening of an edited (read: sexless) version of Anthony Spinelli’s The Seduction of Lyn Carter (1974)



For those who would like to see Jamie doing what he did best,
click here for a totally graphic hardcore clip (you've been warned!) of him getting blown by his onetime real-life lover Serena. The two were supposedly known as the “S&M couple” in porn circles, but this clip is straightforward sex.

And my own upload of a trailer showing Gillis in a classier porn flick, this one softcore. He is the male lead in Joe Sarno’s Abigail Leslie is Back in Town, and gets to utter the memorably campy line of dialogue that you hear here first:



An excellent tribute to Gillis can be found at the Penetrating Insights
blogspot. The tribute is okay for browsing at work or school, but the links are not!

Those Thrilling Days of Yesteryear: Deceased Artiste Jim Harmon

Back when my dad was trying to convey to me the vibrant and important nature of what is now called “the Golden Age of Radio,” there were only a few scattered rebroadcasts of Thirties and Forties shows in the NYC area. But there was Jim Harmon’s terrific 1967 book The Great Radio Heroes. Harmon died last week at 77, so I want to note his passing, and also salute his subsequent tomes, all of which opened up the world of nostalgia culture for those of us born after the Kennedy presidency.

They included The Great Movie Comedians (1970), The Great Movie Serials (1973), and one my dad particularly enjoyed, as it had images of the decoder badges, giveaway rings, and ice-cream lids with movie-star mugs on ’em, Jim Harmon’s Nostalgia Catalogue (1973). Harmon also contributed to the awesome (but not comic-filled, which pissed me off as a kid) history of comics All in Color for a Dime and edited the Marvel ripoff of Famous Monsters, called Monsters of the Movies.

Harmon’s bio notes that he was a pulpsmith in the Fifties and Sixties, which must’ve meant that he was writing when the pulps were dying out and being replaced by the digest-sized sci-fi, western, and crime mags (Ellery Queen, we bless you). He is pictured to the right at a screening of Donald Glut's films in 1962 with Bob Burns and the awesome "Rat Pfink" himself, Mr. Ron Haydock! Harmon is the middle.

One of Harmon's colleagues has put up a nice segment from his appearance on a panel at the Friends of Old Time Radio convention in Newark, N.J. last fall. I heard the audio of this talk on the utterly indispensable “Golden Age of Radio” program that originates on WBAI-FM in NYC on Sunday nights, but can be heard around the world via streaming on the Net. The show is hosted by Max Schmid, who is as invaluable for me as a radio historian in my middle-age as Harmon was when I was a kid. We need to celebrate these gentlemen while they’re around, since the “theater of the mind” that old-time radio represented needs to be kept alive.

Sassy sophistication: Deceased Artiste Sir John Dankworth

Catching up to another, vastly different, musical death, I should definitely salute Sir John Dankworth, British jazz legend, composer, and big-band leader. Dankworth had a very accomplished career in jazz, having worked with icons from Ellington and Parker to Herbie Hancock and my personal favorite-named musician Zoot Sims. He is best known to American audiences, though, for his work as arranger and bandleader for his wife, Dame Cleo Laine, and for his terrific Sixties movie soundtracks.

His music created moods and punctuated action in kitchen sink classics, timeless character studies, and truly camp creations. The titles include Darling, Morgan!, and Modesty Blaise, but two of the finest films he scored were Joseph Losey’s perfect Pinter visualizations, The Servant (1963) and Accident.

The trailer for The Servant shows off Dankworth’s score:



But let’s backtrack to Dankworth’s jazz career before going back to his scores. First, a 78 of a song called “Marmaduke”:



Then, a terrific tune called “African Waltz” that Dizzy Gillespie later had a hit with (with the same Dankworth arrangement):



A sample of the five-decade long collaboration between Dankworth and Laine, the song “Woman Talk”:



And, since I can’t resist, back to scores. A TV theme that we never heard over here, the music for the original 1961 Avengers before the female agents hit the scene, and it was simply Patrick Macnee and another guy, Ian Hendry:



The Modesty Blaise theme, highlighting the drum break. Great stuff:



A bossa nova number from the score for Fathom, largly known as “that Raquel Welch bikini movie”:



A TV theme from Britain, for Tomorrow’s World in 1978:



Definitely my personal favorite Dankworth score, as it is burnt into my brain from repeated viewings of the film as a teen. The jaunty yet resolute horns heard in the finest (my opinion) kitchen sink/"angry young man" film of the early Sixties, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning:



And just ’cause I can, you can hear the Dankworth score for the Sammy Davis-Peter Lawford hip-detective vehicle Salt and Pepper here in the trailer for the film, but you really need to see this scene wherein Sammy rocks the fuck out in Swinging Sixties London. I note on the Funhouse quite often that it doesn’t matter how long Sammy’s been dead, the dude can still kick my ass with some hitherto unknown all-out performance, and here’s another one:

A “Psycho” passes: Deceased Artiste Bingo Gazingo

I can’t quite calculate the amount of brilliantly twisted entertainers (or just downright eccentrics) that I became acquainted with through the legendary Manhattan access show Beyond Vaudeville (which later transformed into Oddville on MTV). The series featured some major stars of long ago, but perhaps the greatest revelations were the performers who were genuinely off the map in terms of what they did — I am not alone in my continued love for a man named “Tray man” (unfortunately no clips of his amazing act have reached YouTube), who sported a tray (in fact a variety of different nicely-colored trays) atop his dome and then sorta… well, he sorta walked around. As a friend of mine explained it to me when we saw him do his act live, “if he spun the tray or danced around, Ed, now that might be considered a talent…”

I won’t say that the now-departed Bingo Gazingo was akin to (the also departed) Tray man — Bingo was a poet/singer/wildman who pretty much knew that his audience expected him to be over the top. And that he was, providing a crazed version of Beat poetry that he deemed song lyrics, to the extent that he performed with various musicians who tried to “flesh out” his tunes. Here is a 1997 New York Times article, in which Bingo is on the verge of “discovery,” as the Oddville folks had him on their pilot for the MTV series.

The Times piece reveals his real name (Murray Wachs) and some background: he worked for BMI as a song-logger (listening for BMI songs on the radio) and then had a longstanding berth at the U.S. Post Office. Once he retired from the post office, he devoted himself to his poems/lyrics and would appear around NYC at open mic nights. He became a cult figure and a regular fixture at the Bowery Poetry Club on Monday evenings. Very sadly, he was hit by a cab traveling to the Bowery Poetry Club and died in late 2009, but his death didn’t reach the attention of those of us who had been blown away by his maniacal art until New Years Day of this year. No category can contain him, least of all the fabricated label “Outsider Music” which oddly mixes the primitive (Shags, Hasil Adkins) with the musical sophisticate (Captain Beefheart). Like so many true primitives, he was sui generis, and so the time has come to celebrate the special man who wanted to be known as Bingo Gazingo!

First, Bingo performing at the Astor Place station on my subway line, the 6. He’s singing his masterpiece “JLo.” He wrote many tributes to contemporary pop performers. I don’t think anyone has summed up her sex appeal with the kind of perception that Bingo did, as with “You smell like a kosher deli/I want to put a baby in your belly”:



Another ode to a contemporary mainstream musician, this time Kenny G. Bingo is backed here by the band My Robot Friend, who gives his maniacal lyrics a high-tech sheen. Again, who can argue with “I can relax and take my Ex-Lax… we can reach our climax with Kenny G.”?



More Kraftwerk Gazingo, as Bingo sings” You’re out of the Computer,” again with My Robot Friend:



Perhaps the craziest clip of Bingo to be found on the Net is this slice of him performing at an atmospherically lit Halloween show in Bushwick, Brooklyn. This show took place in Halloween of last year (yes, folks, he’s 85 here!!!), and his performance consists of a medley of his “greatest hits,” including a new song about Beyonce and Jay-Z that was news to me:



There is no other way to close any discussion of Bingo than to spotlight his chef d’oeuvre, his own “Howl”-like anthem of the disturbed mind, “Psycho.”:



The photos of Bingo used above come from the Life Just Bounces blog