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He was 4’7”, a child star, and we knew every twist and turn of his existence. At different times I was amused by, bored by, and felt bad for the little man who had been “Arnold” on Different Strokes. When a celebrity dies, you think back to something they did or said that made an impression on you — when the announcement of Coleman’s death came out this week, I remembered that he had revealed on a daytime talk show (I’m pretty sure it was Geraldo) that he had a condition whereby he hadn’t “sat down” on the toilet (somesuch delicate phrasing) for years, and instead voided himself in another manner (presumably a colostomy bag). That’s the point where you realize the colorful little person on TV isn’t leading such an amusing life in private.
So many of Gary’s public and private run-ins were recounted on tabloid TV, with probably one of the lower moments being his stint as a mall security guard, when he was accosted by an autograph seeker who got pissed off and he wound up punching her. He did have a temper, but then again if you were constantly in the public eye and your show biz fortunes found you starring in the mockumentary Midgets vs. Mascots, I think you’d be pissed off too.
But let us have some levity (please!). Here he is doing some shtick for the WWF with Jeff Jarrett, master of the “guitar shot”:
A much-circulated ad he did a for loan service that included an outtake of him laughing:
Along with the clip where he spoke to the camera excoriating “bone-headed idiots!”, this particular clip of him earlier this year cursing out someone on the panel of the horrific tabloid-TV crapfest The Insider is the most popular Coleman show of anger (actually he’s rather composed):
One of the best Seventies shows that has been out of distribution for a long time is Fernwood 2-Night. Here is a scene from the show’s second incarnation (America 2-Night) with Gary as “Little Wayne Coleman” (someone yells “Hey, Gary!” when he comes out, and Martin Mull ad-libs “isn’t it sad when cousins marry?”). Gary played a local California boy that Barth Gimble (Mull) was trying to adopt; he later hosted the “kids version” of the show (which appeared on the show proper) in Barth’s place.
And the two single best clips you’re gonna find. Italian TV host Sabrina Salerno journey to L.A. to talk to “Arnold.” The show is Matricole & Meteore, and included are scenes from Different Strokes dubbed in Italian, a Euro view of L.A. (which still seems to include disco), and Gary saying his tagline in Italian:
But the kitsch mother lode is this “career change” moment when Gary was making the talk show circuit with Michael Jackson impersonator Dion Mial to promote a single they’d released called “The Outlaw and the Indian.” It’s pretty special:
Usually I’m filled with a sort of reverent wistfulness when I write about a celebrity who has died, but I have to admit at the outset of this post that I always felt that Art Linkletter’s most prominent trait on TV was his sanctimoniousness. His interviews with kids were way cloying, his hosting benign, and his comedy… well, it wasn’t really comedy. He was involved in the creation of Groucho’s You Bet Your Life, so he somehow participated in something I really enjoyed. His own stuff? As the kids nowadays put it, “meh.”
Linkletter was openly conservative, and seemed like the very definition of the old guard, a narrow-minded gent in every way. He lived to 97, but spent the better part of his time in the media in the last 41 years preaching against drugs. He blamed the 1969 suicide of his daughter Diane on LSD, even though it wasn’t found in her system upon her death. He made it his personal mission to “save” America’s youth, and warn parents that their kids were indulging in dangerous, nay lethal, behavior. Throughout the crusade he never appeared to me to be dismayed by his daughter’s death, but rather seemed like an opportunist exploiting her demise to create a new identity for himself, one that allowed him to condemn the drug culture, and by extension the liberal “permissiveness” of the Sixties and Seventies. Perhaps there was grief behind his crusade, but in his TV appearances, you merely saw a hateful older man who had decided that the villain that killed his daughter was the demon “drugs” and not her own inner turmoil (or perhaps his own bad parenting?).
John Waters’ joyously dark short “The Diane Linkletter Story” is no longer on YouTube (ah, now there’s a piece of nasty-assed satire), but I can offer you an appearance by Art selling “Circus Nuts” on a TV ad with Diane:
The solid-gold shameless 45 that Linkletter put out after his daughter’s death, a melodramatic spoken-word recording (that subsequently won a Grammy) that he had recorded with Diane about a father’s anguish over his runaway daughter. Corny as fuck, startling kitsch, but only because Linkletter meant it to be heartwarming and sincere, and was in fact exploiting his kid’s personal trauma. This recording is used in the soundtrack of the Waters movie, and yes, it does seem to imply that any girl who’s forced to participate in the recording of a bummer like this would’ve wanted to off herself:
And to close out, a pretty amazing bit of early “ambush TV,” in which host Stanley Siegel (wherever did he go?) “sandbags” Dr. Timothy Leary with a call-in from an outraged Art Linkletter. I agree with Leary that the ever-pompous Linkletter made a living off his daughter’s death. Siegel allows Linkletter to tell off crazy ol’ Tim at length. Art also condemns the Jefferson Airplane, Allen Ginsberg, and the whole hippie culture — he truly was one of those folks who was outraged that the youth culture of the Sixties ever happened, and set out on this crusade to assuage his own guilt or emptiness, and to find a “cause” that could indeed prolong his long-dormant career.
UPDATE: Dick Cavett confirms that, despite hosting a show called People Are Funny, AL wasn't a funny guy at all. Here is his account.
[The pics used to accompany this blog post are meant to illustrate a point. A pretty obvious one.]
The American Film Institute’s Lifetime Achievement Award shows were really something to watch back in the 1970s and ’80s. The folks receiving the prize were bona fide A-list talents who were without question worthy to get a lifetime achievement award. Two-hour award presentations were made to performers and filmmakers on the order of Ford, Welles, Hitchcock, Capra, Huston, Astaire, Cagney, Gish, Davis, Stanwyck, and Fonda.
In the 1990s, as U.S. culture and entertainment took its precipitous slide toward the utter soulless crap that is extremely popular in today’s mainstream, the AFI Award began going to performers and filmmakers whose careers were still in full flourish, but who could guarantee a solid audience for the TV airing of the award show. What had been amazing about the AFI was that, even though the usual “mavericks” (Ray, Fuller, Sirk, and on and on) were going to be ignored, in the '70s and '80s you were treated to CBS (I believe that was the network) presenting a two-hour show saluting the work of Lillian Gish or John Ford or Orson or some Golden Age star who worked in the era of black and white that network television wants to stay far, far away from (the opening and closing moments of Wizard of Oz aside).
Then, with the sole exception of Robert Wise, the AFI turned to honoring only those who would attract TV ratings and a roster of current-day Hollywood names to salute him/her. Nicholson, Eastwood, Spielberg, Scorsese, Streep, and others whose careers were still moving along at a steady clip were then honored, and the result was similar to the many, many moments in the Oscar ceremony when Hollywood slaps itself on the back and reminds us all what wonderful movies used to be made, and how the pap that comes out these days is the obvious continuation of what came before. The most interesting thing about the list of winners that can be found here is that the recipients have gone from being in their 70s and 80s to 45 for the extremely charming but oh-SO-non-versatile Tom Hanks (45).
I bring up all this about the valuelessness of the AFI awards, and the shameless grab for TV ratings (or even a network to air the event — for a bit it was relegated to cable from its original network home), to bring up the subject of yet another valueless encomium, the Mark Twain Prize for Humor. The Kennedy Center presents this honor, and it has been sort of dubious since its inception — what makes the Kennedy Center board experts on humor in America? Whatever their qualifications are or aren’t, the award has followed the same trajectory as the AFI award, except it has been even more singularly pathetic in its choice of honorees, its ignoring comic legends who deserve appreciation, and its craving for viewers (especially since the show airs on PBS, and not a commercial network).
The prize jumped the shark when it made its first fourth honoree, and its first female, Whoopi Goldberg, in 2001. I’m not going to debate Goldberg’s comic pedigree — she did do great accents and voices back when she did standup, but that was a very long, long time ago. In any case, they leapfrogged over the first modern female standup, Phyllis Diller, the second, Joan Rivers, and the many women who populated variety television (never mind the women comedy writers) to move on to Whoopi, after having saluted two national treasures and comic innovators — Richard Pryor and Jonathan Winters — and one gent who had a good run in the Fifties and Sixties, Carl Reiner.
Probably the next horrific honoree was Lorne Michaels in 2004. Michaels spearheaded a show that was brave, bold, and innovative for five years, and has been a walking-dead example of everything that is dull, boring, and formulaic in TV sketch comedy since then (with the exception of the sterling 1984-85 season, which was cast almost entirely with “ringers,” meaning people who were already proven commodities as sketch/character comedians). There have been others whose contribution to American comedy is indisputable (Neil Simon, Bill Cosby, George Carlin, Lily Tomlin), but the obvious mandate is to interest TV viewers in the ceremony, and so this year the winner of the prize is none other than the pin-up of snarky sketch and fake-news comedy, Tina Fey.
I am not going to debate the merits of Tina Fey as a comedian here. I find her stuff pleasant but not memorable. The hubbub that surrounded her Sarah Palin imitation in 2008 was fascinating, in that there were other comic actresses on the Web doing equally good impressions of the Brainless One, and Fey’s “material” was essentially direct quotes from Palin’s own verbal missteps. Fey is a good-looking woman (never let that slip out of the equation), and she is currently a powerhouse to be reckoned with in terms of reputation, paycheck, and drawing power. But is she the 2000s equivalent of Dorothy Parker? Not on your life. Except, of course, to those who consume only contemporary mainstream culture, and are not familiar with anything old, foreign, or even slightly "alternative."
In any case, since the Mark Twain Prize has now irredeemably jumped the shark, I would like to submit for public view a list of the people they’ve forgotten to honor (in case you haven't been looking at the pics I've scattered throughout this post). Maybe they feel these people wouldn't be “ratings bait” — then again, on PBS you’d think an older name would be ratings bait, but PBS is as dull and lifeless as the rest of American broadcasting these days.
I’m leaving out the names of such folk as Professor Irwin Corey and Bob Elliott, as I think that, though they richly deserve the prize, a mainstream board like the Kennedy Center’s would never be that hip. I also leave out the solid gold name of Woody Allen (who was without doubt in the top rank of American humorists of the second half of the 20th century), since I have the feeling that he has already turned the honor down. I can’t help but feel that they’ve never asked Mel Brooks, though, since I don’t think he would turn it down (not a man who revisits an item like Spaceballs). I know that they’re probably already prepping the Twain Prizes for Adam Sandler, Will Ferrell, and Jack Black, so let me remind everyone who is still alive and deserves the Prize. If it really had any meaning.
SID CAESAR
Mort Sahl
Shelley Berman
Nichols and May
Dick Gregory
The Smothers Brothers
Mel Brooks
the aforementioned grandma of women standups, Phyllis Diller
And after all that, I’m not even going to mention that Mark Twain was a WRITER for fuck’s sake, and that breed of humorist hasn’t even been given a second thought. Then again, when your comedy prize is little more than a joke, well… it writes itself, doesn't it?
There is much “news” on the Internet these days about the privacy violations perpetrated by Facebook. I find it funny that people feel "violated" by the site, since it never says explicitly (c’mon, let’s be honest) that it will protect your information, your identity, or your creations — it exists simply to link people up, and to generate page views for itself.
Facebook is the hottest Internet “community” currently, but like YouTube and MySpace, it is an attempt to gather users together to create a hub of Internet activity. The site came into existence with classically American rules about “obscene” materials. To wit, nothing with any nudity on the site. Filthy language okay, unclad bodies never ever — the U.S. steadfastly refuses to grow up, it ain’t happening, no way no how. We like bein’ the all-powerful, church-going hypocrites we pretend to be.
I’m on all three sites mentioned above, as I am here on Blogspot — where I’ve found a lot of freedom, thus far. I’ve never been so delusional as to think that there is actual free speech on the sites, though, or that what I’m doing is not being “tabulated” for consumer demographic use. Although we pay nothing to use the sites’ storage capacities, we provide them with that most valuable of all commodities on the Internet, content.
I am still very amused by the abandonment of MySpace by most of its users (except musicians and other entertainers, who need the free storage space for audio). That can be most readily attributed to the laziness factor — which is as intrinsic to American life as the hypocritical prurience mentioned above. Middle-aged and senior users find Facebook easier to use since you don’t have to find a “wizard” to build a page, and there is a pretend “gate” around the “community,” so one can pretend one is really only in communication with the folks one chooses as “Friends.”
The gate is fake, the community is fake. Only the communications between users and, yes, the content is real, so let’s just focus on that and not pretend that a corporate-run site really gives even one-millionth of a shit about the safety of its users’ personal information. This is the Internet after all. It’s all a big farce, but a fun one, so let’s be honest and acknowledge the game we’re playing.
This is one of the numerous interviews done for the Funhouse before the "digital era" arrived. I spoke to Budd in September of 2000, and it was a delight. The man was a no-nonsense type who was happy to tell stories about his filmmaking (and bullfighting) past. He was an incredibly engaging individual, as charming as the heroes (and villains) in his pictures.
Here he speaks about his friend John Ford:
And answers a question about filming in CinemaScope:
The Internet is filled with misinformation, rumors, urban legends, and in-depth info about stuff of no meaning or consequence. On the other hand, it holds untold wonder, lots and lots (and lots) of quality free stuff, and, yes, it solves bar bets, arguments, debates, trivia contests, and that hunt for a specific dimly remembered song lyric. I was in the last-mentioned mode the other day, when I just had to sort out what song it was that included the lyric, “…sssssighed the snake…” Within a few clicks I had encountered this 1968 one-hit wonder by Al Wilson that is as catchy as hell:
Hadn’t heard it on the radio in a few decades now, but it was coursing around somewhere in the back of my mind. Of course, the song brought up a certain movie scene that also can’t be forgotten. The question arises, though: why is the same story told by Orson Welles in Mr. Arkadin about a frog and a scorpion? It appears that that is the more popular version of the story “often mis-attributed to Aesop” which has a variant known as “the farmer and the snake.” The songwriters obviously wanted to sex the tale up (a “tender woman” is a helluva lot more interesting than a farmer). As the frog and scorpion story (not to be confused with the “Frog and Peach” restaurant), it has had several dozen appearances in popular culture, the best of which has been and will forever be Orson’s telling in his very jumbled and uneven mystery pic Mr. Arkadin (aka Confidential Report,1955). Orson was god.
And totally off the topic of the fable and back onto the pop tune, turns out Al Wilson (who died back in 2008) was not a one-hit wonder by any means. He also gave us the indelible tune “Show and Tell”, and one I vividly remember from my childhood, “The La La Peace Song.” The song was also recorded around the same time by O.C. Smith, but the one I remember was the Wilson version. It’s gotta be the most upbeat song ever to mention racial injustice and skyjacking. Ah, the early Seventies…
FOOTNOTE: And who wrote "The Snake"? Oscar Brown, Jr., who had a very lively life as a singer, songwriter, playwright, poet, and civil rights activist. His Wiki bio can be found here. Nice pedigree for such a memorable tune.
Since I wrote the blog post below, there has been more new Godard-info on the Net. The New York Times has published a review of Film Socialisme that indicates it is indeed the dense and brilliant work we’ve all been expecting it to be. Of course, reading the review my mind went off onto a Godardian tangent, wondering if Manohla Dargis has finally moved to NYC, or whether she’s still telecommuting her reviews in from L.A. (Who would have ever thought that the “paper of record” in a major U.S. capital of culture would make its chief film critic someone who wouldn’t deign to live in the city in which the paper was published? Ah, but then again, I’m so old-fashioned and analog, and her insights are really so invaluable a bi-coastal hookup was totally necessary….)
Another, even more quotable, interview with the Master can be found in the pages of the current issue of Les Inrockuptibles. Craig has provided a translation of this talk too, and there are plenty of interesting statements from Godard. His latest film took four years to create, and thus he wishes it was distributed in a rather unique way (this odd scenario is offered to both the Inrockuptibles interviewer and Cohn-Bendit). He also voices his support for the Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi and (gasp) Roman Polanski. The wonderful phrase from Film Socialisme, “what’s different these days is that the bastards are sincere” is explored; he reaffirms his disinterest in Truffaut’s more conventional later films (they were “not what we were dreaming of”); and he was the one who proposed YouTube as the site for his infamous trailers (which consist of the whole feature sped up to different commercial-style lengths). Find out his view of posterity, ownership of art, intellectual property (take a guess), and the words that might well wind up on his gravestone here.
The legendary French film director Jean-Luc Godard, whose latest work, Film Socialisme, is showing at Cannes this week, has decided to run its subtitles in "Navajo English" as in old Westerns where the Native Americans spoke in choppy phrases. Because the drama takes place on a cruise ship where no one speaks the same language, Godard has fashioned his subtitles concisely to say the least. If a character is saying "give me your watch", the subtitle will read "You, me, watch."
The text above appeared on the site for the Independenthere. JLG continues to be the oldest enfant terrible around.
I am not personally a collector of the work of Frank Frazetta or Lena Horne, but I certainly admired and respected them. In lieu of obit tributes, I’ll simply link you to some clips and images.
Good galleries of Frazetta’s work can be found at two tributes sites, one put up by a fan and one put up by his family. His work on movie promotional materials is fascinating. Most movie buffs are aware of his self-referential poster for the Eastwood movie The Gauntlet:
But fewer knew he did this promotial image for What’s New Pussycat? (I didn’t, and I have the paperback with it on the cover somewhere):
And he also did this dramatic poster for Polanski’s Fearless Vampire Killers:
And when it comes to the beautiful and talented Ms. Horne, there is little I can say to add to the chorus of praise, so I will spotlight her 1953 appearance on the beloved What’s My Line?:
Her duet with Funhouse deity Sammy Davis Jr. (audio only — they apparently never appeared on TV together?):
And with another Rat Pack member. Lena guests on The Perry Como Show with Dean Martin:
One of her last appearances in a fiction film, in The Wiz, directed by her son-in-law Sidney Lumet (who is a superb director, but may not be the best choice to helm musicals):
And another flashback to that weird period when the “old” met the “new.” Lena covers McCartney’s “Maybe I’m Amazed,” and makes it her own. Why? Who knows?
And remembering her at her all-time prettiest, acting and singing in the two-reeler Boogie Woogie Dream from (1941)
By no means do I want this blog to simply be a collection of obits, but I’m happy to pay tribute to people whose work I’ve admired once they’ve shuffled off this mortal coil. Lynn Redgrave, who died only about a month after her brother Corin, had a busy career that combined both the very high and the extremely low. Impressive stage work alternated with pure crap TV series, but for me she will always be best remembered with two of the finest movies about "Swinging London" in the Sixties — yes, the decade that is the gift that keeps on giving.
First, let us run through the extremely low end of Ms. Redgrave’s resume (I have the utmost respect for her as a person and actress but, well… this is what I do in the Funhouse…). Perhaps the weirdest thing I found in her obits was a scandal I had forgotten about, whereby (try to chart this out) her son married a single mom whose kid, it was revealed, had previously been sired by Ms. Redgrave’s husband, John Clark. That qualifies for “I’m My Own Grandpa” status (with Mr. Clark being both the father and “grandfather” of the kid) but, as an add-on to that very unusual relationship, it was noted that Ms. Redgrave toured with Mr. Clark in the play Love Letters; they gave a special perf of said play to the jurors in the O.J. trial. I have no idea how/why they came up with that play being the proper entertainment for the jurors in a murder trial, but there you have it.
At least one theatrical endeavor that she attempted never saw the light of day, and not through any fault of hers: you can consult the Jerry Lewis biography King of Comedy by Shawn Levy to read why the Broadway-bound version of Hellzapoppin' starring Jerry and Ms. Redgrave died on the road in the mid-Seventies before it hit the Great White Way.
Back on TV, Ms. Redgrave became associated with the Weight Watchers brand for a time through numerous TV commercials, but her TV C.V. is pretty impressive in its schlockiness: The Love Boat, Fantasy Island, the series House Calls (from which she was famously fired for wanting to breastfeed on the set), and later on, Desperate Housewives and Ugly Betty — not forgetting a very odd turn in the Sherilyn Fenn dramedy Rude Awakening where she basically did a knockoff of Joanna Lumley’s character on Absolutely Fabulous. One of the other strange TV choices she made was to appear with her sister Vanessa in a very odd redo of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? in 1991 (seen above). It is one of the strangest double-acts in TV-movie history, and is eminently watchable, but as you're viewing it, the question "why?" will never leave your mind....
In looking for traces of her more memorably tepid TV work on YouTube, I came up with two shards, one from the completely forgotten sitcom Teachers Only
And the sitcom that paired her with Jackie Mason, the really, really bad Chicken Soup:
Her movie career was quite uneven also, due to the fact that she worked extensively in theater (where she received critical accolades for many performances, especially later in her career). Since I want to get all of the schlock out of the way, let me just spotlight perhaps her most renowned crap lead role, starring in The Happy Hooker (1975):
Thankfully, in the late Nineties, Ms. Redgrave’s movie roles went from fun crap like the above to things like Shine and Gods and Monsters, although she still did appear in some wonderfully campy items like The White Countess, which found Natasha Richardson supported by her mom Vanessa and auntie Lynn, both doing roadshow Chekhov Russian accents. I included a non-Redgrave-sisters scene from that incredibly corny flick in my tribute to Ms. Richardson. Of course, Ms. Redgrave’s greatest personal triumph was her very public struggle with breast cancer. She fought the disease for seven years and finally succumbed to it, but contributed some very inspirational materials (a book with her daughter, plays about her family, and some very personal interviews) while being the trooper she always was, and continuing to work as best she could on a regular basis.
But let’s flash back to the Sixties for my favorite part of Ms. Redgrave’s movie career. First, a little segment from I’ve Got a Secret in 1967, which finds host Steve Allen engaging her in one of the lamer set-ups (they gave up on the “secret” notion somewhere in the early Sixties). She is quite engaging, with her hair piled high upon her head:
She distinguished herself from her sleek, very serious sister Vanessa by playing two wonderful comedy roles in two of the best Swinging London movies ever. The first, Georgy Girl (1966), was a sort of epilogue (along with Alfie) to the “kitchen sink”/angry young man subgenre that required all young men to be rebels and their women to have “a bun in the oven.” Here, Lynn is centerstage and her character, though depicted as dowdy throughout the film (an impression furthered by the inclusion of a hot young “Charlie” Rampling as her friend), is not as helpless as the kitchen-sink girls like Rita Tushingham in A Taste of Honey. She may be the love interest of an energetic young man (Alan Bates) and fawned over by an rich older man (James Mason), but she ultimately chooses her own fate, even if it is a decidedly un-feminist one.
And what makes the film so great besides its three great lead performances and its views of 1966 London? Well, the fucking THEME SONG by the Seekers, for one. It is such an enchanting piece of pop, it literally sums up and adds to the film as a whole, remaining completely unforgettable:
Here is the sequence in which Georgy sings:
And the touching end of the picture, in which the song once more comments on the action while imprinting itself in our heads forever:
The other Swinging London pic Ms. Redgrave made is not as well known as Georgy. Smashing Time is a pastel-colored joy that is all about the impression that London (the fantasy London of the mind) was making on youth around England (and, by extension, around the world). The film is in the mode of referential musicals-with-people-who-can’t-sing, of the type made by Godard (Une Femme est Une Femme) and Rivette later on. The characters in this kind of musical are folks who’ve seen lots of musicals and then live one out in front of our eyes. The movie is charming, ineffably goofy, and a helluva tribute to London in the year it was made, 1967. Here is a trailer made for American viewers:
This is not one of Ms. Redgrave's scenes, but I couldn't overlook the visit to the “Too Much Boutique":
Lynn arrives on Carnaby Street, and there are photographers and models everywhere:
And, lastly, North Country girl Lynn being packaged as a pop superstar even though she's tonedeaf. She's so young! (that's the name of her hit tune, don't get ideas...)
Joe Sarno, who died earlier this week at 89, was one of the most unique figures in movie history, simply because he evidenced true talent in the pretty murky business of sexploitation, where having talent is something of a liability (and largely unnecessary). Sure, there was Radley Metzger, the king of artful Euro-chic soft- and hardcore, an incredibly talented (and yes, occasionally “incredibly strange”) filmmaker. There was Russ Meyer, who was one of the finest film editors there ever was, in any genre. Findlay was fascinating; Wishman unpredictable and mostly amusing; Friedman and H.G. Lewis thumbing their nose at the whole silly thing.
But Joseph W. Sarno, as he was often billed, was a guy who made dozens of softcore features in the Sixties and early Seventies, and he invested them with an identity. He had a very distinct look to these features (particularly the ones in b&w), and he wrote screenplays that included ample amounts of sex, but also contained an element that you just were not going to see in conventional adult cinema, which was guilt. Joe started making films in Sweden in the Sixties, and his films are very much in tune with Bergman and the Scandinavian cinema of the time (in fact there is very little chance you’d guess his biggest hit, Inga, was directed by an American).
I interviewed Joe three times, and sadly the one that aired on the Funhouse TV show was perhaps the weakest chat of the three, as his memory was very poor when it came to specific details about his films. Granted, the man made as many as a half-dozen films in certain years, and continued to toil in the sex industry on hardcore films/videos that had no personal content from the mid-Seventies to the late Eighties (a fact he concealed, and talked around, in our interview). When I later interviewed Joe, I knew to avoid trying to get specific details on specific films from him, and instead just discussed his memories of making films under severe budgetary constraints, and had him speak about his writing and crafting of images.
My last interview with him was in person at his apartment, when I was writing the DVD booklet notes for his “comeback” feature for the New Jersey mini-studio Seduction Cinema, Suburban Secrets. The film was quite a bizarre and welcome move from an old pro: a very low budget feature of the kind he was used to, but with an original script by Joe and “final cut” on a director’s version of the material. What the company wound up releasing was pretty much unprecedented: a two-disc set of the “hot cut” of the material (the cable 90-minute film that emphasized the sex sequences), and a two-and-a-half hour (you didn’t read that wrong, two-and-a-half hour!) “director’s cut.”
What resulted was a film that was intimately connected to what Joe had done in is Seventies “suburban” films, albeit with the limitations of today’s softcore market (which forbids a number of things that showed up in films before the rule books had truly been written) and some off-kilter performances. Joe’s dialogue was nothing if not emphatic and declarative, and two of the actresses — porn star Tina Tyler and Seduction starlet A.J. Khan — were the only performers who really truly nailed the “heightened” (and, yes again, “incredibly strange”) nature of what he was up to.
In any case, I don’t think I can further describe the tenets of Joe’s style better than I did in the booklet for Suburban Secrets, so I will excerpt here some of what I wrote there (noting that this was first published in 2006 in a Seduction Cinema release, and appears here with the written permission of the author and publication of first instance.) We start off at the point where I’m mentioning a major part of Joe’s appeal, as a filmmaker and as a person, his sincerity. Probably the key aspect here is that Joe was a genuinely nice person, who happened to have made some uniquely kinky movies. Which is never, ever a bad thing.
******* Revelations drive the storyline of Suburban Secrets, but the key “secret” here is that this feverish sex picture is the product of a genuinely sincere moviemaker who is 84 years of age as of this writing. Erotica is considered a young man’s game, although anyone familiar with Antonioni’s later works (Identification of a Woman, Eros) knows that an artist over 70 can still produce blissfully carnal works of art.
Sarno’s earnestness may cause some folks to be amused by his highly stylized approach, but the fact of the matter is that Secrets contains several object lessons for the younger directors who create “steamy” fodder for the delectation of late-night cable viewers and DVD renters with an eye out for “couples” erotica (those wanting to “get her in the mood” or, conversely, “wake him up”). So take a lesson, young pornographers, as Professor Sarno imparts his secrets:
Focus on women’s libidos. When asked about the central theme in his films, Sarno unhesitatingly answers, “strong women!” The ladies here aren’t shy at all about their desires — “I desperately want to be wrapped around him when I come,” proclaims Cynthia at one point. As a result, Sarno’s movies don’t alienate female viewers in the way that “money shot”-centric porn does… and it goes without saying that many men get turned on by the sight of a strong-willed female conquering all the men, and women, in her path.
Ditch the “mood music” and flashy editing. “I’ve had a number of producers who were embarrassed by the films I made, because the sex looked so real to them,” declares Sarno. Although his 1970s softcore work is notable because the actors were often having real sex onscreen (as in the Girl Meets Girl Trilogy, distributed by Retro-Seduction), Sarno emphasizes that he has no problem working with the present-day limitations of the softcore genre, the so-called “three Ps”: no penetration, no penises and no “pink” onscreen.
“Even in a film like Abigail Leslie…, the sex was really what I call ‘assumed contact.’ I work with my actors to regulate their breathing as it would be under a sexual situation. If you do that, work on the sounds and the breathing, you get the feeling that it’s real… that’s what I’m looking for.” Thus, Joe has no use for the faux-jazz and rock music used in standard sex movies. He also favors “long takes” which keep the action moving at a steady pace, and contribute what he calls “a certain truth” to a sex scene.
Vary the angles in sex scenes. The long-take sex scenes requires that the actors change position in the frame as they proceed to the nearest bedroom; at one point Laura and Aunt Cynthia move to the background of a shot as they grope each other towards a doorway. Unconventional framing like this brings home to the viewer the fact that the characters will literally stop at nothing to satisfy their lust.
When a character’s not having sex, they should be obsessing over it. Here the “expectation” factor that is a trademark of Sarno’s work kicks into high gear. His central characters often are so intent on getting into each other’s pants that they talk obsessively about their intended’s anatomy or just fixate on it while attending to daily tasks.
Ignore the prevailing attitudes about age and body types. Sarno has made a practice since his black-and-white “swingers” pics in the early 1960s of using older actresses, as well as thinner women and the occasional zoftig babe, as sex objects. Here Joe is ably aided by Seduction Cinema’s very appealing stable of “natural girls”: Suburban Secrets features curvy chicks, ultra-thin vixens, and an immaculately hot fiftysomething character whose passions rival those of her twentysomething niece.
Aspiring filmmakers can learn a lot from Sarno, but there are certain elements that are unique to his work. Chief among them is his stylized dialogue, which combines street sex talk, whimsical words (like the Yiddish shtup) and melodramatic declarations like Cythnia’s frank, “I’ve always worshipped at the altar of my own intense orgasms….” One sees echoes of great filmmakers like Bergman in Joe’s work, but his dialogue reminds us that his softcore was influenced more by the great playwrights — Ibsen, O’Neill, Williams – who created “hothouse” environments for their tormented, lusty characters. He explains that his dialogue is “intended to be a little above reality. What the audience hears is the tone of the words, and that’s what I want.”
The last, most important, element of Suburban Secrets is its controversial subject matter. Sarno has dealt with incestuous relationships in a few of his previous films — from his 1969 Swedish feature The Indelicate Balance (found on the Seduction of Inga release from Retro-Seduction) to Confessions of a Young American Housewife (1974) and Abigail Leslie… (1975). He included it in this film because “this situation happens more than you think. In high school, a friend of mine was involved in an incestuous relationship with his mother. I was with him so much it was obvious, I knew something was going on. I base the sexual situations in my films on things I’ve seen, things I’ve heard over the years….”
There is also the matter of the female characters’ frank discussion of their teenage, and even preteen, encounters with sex. Contemporary “indie” filmmakers like Todd Solondz (Palindromes) and Gregg Araki (Mysterious Skin) deal with this theme in honest, open ways in their works, but for a softcore director to introduce it in his dialogue is challenging and unusual.
“The hardest thing about that is to say to yourself, ‘am I willing to go into it, and should I?’ I always say to myself, yes I should. I’m not looking to titillate anybody as far as that’s concerned, but I think you can utilize this subject to make a good story….” Asked if he has considered the response this topic provokes in more conservative souls, Joe replies curtly, “I’m not afraid to terrify people. I utilize those little thoughts in the back of people’s minds, and bring them to the fore….”
From my interview with Joe:
From my interview with Joe, about one of his most intriguing creations, Young Playthings:
And a scene from the film (no good copy of the picture has of yet been found in the U.S.):
Most American film buffs know of the big troika of New German Cinema directors (Fassbinder, Herzog, and Wenders), and those who haunt the rep-theater circuit also know Schlondorff, Straub, and even Syberberg. Of that very loosely knit group of filmmakers, Werner Schroeter remains a mystery to American viewers.
Schroeter, who died of cancer this week at 65, was a busy “underground” filmmaker in the years 1967-1972, using the wonderfully named Magdalena Montezuma as one of his stars. He not only made films during this period, he also acted for Fassbinder, Wenders, and Rosa von Praunheim. During the period that the New German Cinema was getting much attention in America, we didn’t see Schroeter’s films so much as hear about them. His most noted film, The Rose King,was released in 1986, after the “new” German filmmakers had pretty much been absorbed into the mainstream of European film production. He only made five films after that one, and I thankfully was able to see at least two of these, because of the presence of Isabelle Huppert (who is one of the few European names that can still get films at least a cursory showing in the U.S.).
The only word that can encompass Schroeter’s filmmaking style is “operatic.” The narratives of the both of the Huppert films, Malina (1991) and Deux (2002), are multi-faceted and function as a Cubist painting or a novel from the nouveau roman school would. In other words, you are given the raw elements of a plotline, in fact several plotlines, and you can choose to assemble them yourself or just revel in the imagery and raw emotion. Unlike Straub, who strips storylines of all of their action, Schroeter only emphasizes the emotional and overpowering actions in these films.
Before I delve into the films too much, I should note that I am a devout fan of Huppert (seen right with Schroeter), for the mere fact that she is one of the most talented actresses on the planet these days, and is willing to not only submerge her ego in a character, but is also willing to be disliked as a lead character in a film (something very few American stars will do, even the ones who have loads of acting skill). She also happens to be the performer who melts down the most immaculately on film — she has played a number of characters who have emotional or psychological breakdowns in her films, and always sketches a beautiful downward spiral as she descends….
Malina finds Isabelle playing two sides of the same woman, or twins. One interpretation I read online noted that Schroeter had vamped off of the novel that supplied the source material for the film, and in fact both Isabelles and the two male lead characters were different sides of the same female character. Whatever the case may be, the film is overwhelming and, yes, extremely operatic. It ends in spectacular fashion with the apartment of “the Woman” (Isabelle’s character name in the credits) in flames. She and her lover continue to communicate rather calmly as their surroundings are becoming a very attractive — and oddly not all that menacing — funeral pyre. I offer two short clips from the finale:
The later film Deux is even more of a phantasmagoria plot-wise (and I assure you, I pretty much never use that phrase to describe a non-psychedelic film). Huppert plays twins whose mother is Bulle Ogier, who may or may not have been killed by a serial killer called “The Flower Killer.” One Isabelle is impetuous, the other solemn, but Schroeter seems to have made the film to simply showcase the brilliance of Huppert (to whom he dedicated the picture — rare for a filmmaker to dedicate a picture to someone who is in it who is still alive!).
Schroeter seems to have let his imagination run wild and summons up images, situations, and characters for Huppert to inhabit. In the process, she plays her characters as two little girls, inhabits her mother’s identity, is lesbian, becomes a heroin addict and a drunk, sings opera, dances ballet, wears giant wings, dresses as a WWI-era soldier, is a murder victim, is a murderer, becomes a human puppet, and is seen both as a well-lit, made-up screen goddess and as a plain (but beautiful) middle-aged nobody.
It’s hard to encapsulate the film in a sentence, but if you can imagine a feature that would counterpoint Isabelle romantically dancing with her woman lover (who says in English, “fuck me, fuck me, darling…”) with her mother Bulle Ogier watching two young Frenchman doing a recreation of a Civil War battle, in the woods, at night (and then later watching one whip it out and pleasure himself), then you can sort of imagine the visually gorgeous madness that is Deux. Here is one of the film’s many operatically scored scenes:
Thanks to superior cineaste Paul Gallagher for unearthing these rare subbed copies of these strange and great films.
Let me move backward chronologically through Dede Allen’s superb career as the first celebrated woman film editor. Yeah, she did a Spike Lee movie and Wonder Boys in recent years, but Ms. Allen, who died the other day at 86, also assembled that thoroughly entertaining but way too beloved hallmark of Eighties mainstream angst, The Breakfast Club. She also in 1981 co-edited Warren Beatty’s pretty damned good epic Reds, which of course would have its important concluding moment in full public view:
It was noted in her obits that not only was she the first critically lauded woman editor, but she was also “among the first” editors to share in a film’s profits (I wonder who the other first ones were). She edited two of Sidney Lumet’s absolutely perfect NYC films, Serpico and the indelible Dog Day Afternoon (1975). I link to a trailer here, with the proviso that Ms. Allen more than likely didn’t cut it, but it offers a good reminder of the film:
In 1972, she edited a film by the underrated director George Roy Hill that, although its lead is miscast, perfectly captures both the trippiness and the emotion of its sublime source material, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut:
Of course she was best known for having worked on a string of classic films with Arthur Penn when he was on his gorgeous streak of revisionist genre films. Looming extremely large in her legend was the last scene of Bonnie and Clyde:
A more sedate scene from the latterday noir Night Moves:
And let us end where she began (almost), by noting that she edited the perfect The Hustler by Robert Rossen, and a noir that ranks up among the very best, the film that Jean-Pierre Melville was wholly obsessed with (and rightly so), the extremely haunting Odds Against Tomorrow. The whole movie can be found here, but here is the trailer:
and a representative sequence that shows off the film’s gorgeous pacing:
This week I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Neil Innes, the terrifically talented singer-songwriter-humorist who co-founded the Bonzo Dog Band, has been dubbed “the Seventh Python,” and, most prominently, was (and is) the driving force behind the Rutles.
As a preview of our chat, which lasted over an hour, and yielded great anecdotes about the Bonzos, the Beatles, and the Pythons, I offer a trio of clips. First, Neil reminisces about the early days of the Bonzos:
Next, he holds forth on the current state of pitching television programs in England (and, one would assume, over here). He also sings the praises of YouTube, and slams b.s. in general:
And, last, he talks about his less-discussed serious side, and his latest "identity":
When I interviewed Neil Innes (more info above!), he brought up a British band that I had heard for what I think was the first time ever earlier that very day — the oddly organized site that is Pandora.com had supplied me with “music that is related to” the Bonzo Dog Band, and thus I was presented with the insane catchiness of the Scaffold. It turns out Innes wasn’t just personal friends with the members; his second post-Bonzo band was in fact GRIMMS, which was composed of the three members of the Scaffold, himself, a gent named Andy Roberts, and the one and only Viv Stanshall.
The Scaffold existed off and on for 11 years (1966-77), and was composed of a trio of Liverpudlian poet-songwriters who sang their own material but played no instruments. They were Mike McGear, Roger McGough, and John Gorman; McGear’s name was actually McCartney, and he was indeed the brother of that guy Paul. It is noted on the group’s Wikipedia entry that on their early records they were backed by, among many others, Graham Nash, Jack Bruce, Elton John (still named Reg Dwight at the time), and Jimi Hendrix.
All the above is merely trivia — what matters most is the insane catchiness of the band’s four best-remembered songs. Three of them function as drinking songs, and all of them have a chorus you can not forget. In the case of their first big hit, “Thank U Very Much” (spelled that way three decades before Prince and four before texting), I was familiar with the song, but as covered (and lyrically altered for American viewers) by the Smothers Brothers on their Sixties variety show.
The phrase “Aintree Iron” means nothing to Americans, and I found that most English folk can’t even agree on what it means: it is noted on various sites that the phrase could refer to a noted English footballer, an area in Liverpool, or Brian Epstein! In any case, the song’s chipper hookiness can’t be disputed. You do know you’re listening to something from the Sixties when the singer brings up both “the family circle” and the napalm bomb as things to be thankful for.
A Scaffold song that is both catchy as fuck and also has the simplicity of a kids tune is “Gin Gan Goolie.” And the band’s last chart hit was a sort of anthem for their hometown, “Liverpool Lou.”
The one that got me, though, was this totally bouncy ditty that pays tribute to Lydia Pinkham’s pills for women. It’s called “Lily the Pink” and a somewhat awkward live TV performance of it can be found here, but the recorded version is the one that will stick in yer head. Never has the phrase “medicinal compound” been used so musically (then again, this was the Sixties…).
He was 4’7”, a child star, and we knew every twist and turn of his existence. At different times I was amused by, bored by, and felt bad for the little man who had been “Arnold” on Different Strokes. When a celebrity dies, you think back to something they did or said that made an impression on you — when the announcement of Coleman’s death came out this week, I remembered that he had revealed on a daytime talk show (I’m pretty sure it was Geraldo) that he had a condition whereby he hadn’t “sat down” on the toilet (somesuch delicate phrasing) for years, and instead voided himself in another manner (presumably a colostomy bag). That’s the point where you realize the colorful little person on TV isn’t leading such an amusing life in private.
