The blog for the cult Manhattan cable-access TV show that offers viewers the best in "everything from high art to low trash... and back again!" Find links to rare footage, original reviews, and reflections on pop culture and arthouse cinema.
The Yuletide season weighs heavily upon us all — if depression didn’t exist, the holidays could singlehandedly create it. One cable network, however — which I had condemned last year for dropping their library of wonderfully entertaining b&w shows into oblivion — has decided to give nostalgia buffs a little present for Xmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa/whatever you choose to celebrate.
As of this past Monday, GSN has decided to throw those who’d like some representation of vintage TV a bone by restoring the channel’s “b&w hour” from 3 to 4:00 a.m. (midnight–1:00 a.m. West Coast). They’ve started out with the most entertaining (and awesomely guest-filled) shows, What’s My Line and I’ve Got a Secret. The former was the most silly-yet-sophisticated game show ever, and the latter was the most wittily pointless — the game never mattered, and if we thought it did, the gold-standard curmudgeon, radio humorist Henry Morgan, reminded us that it didn’t.
IGAS has been resumed in 1960, when its longstanding panel (Cullen, Myerson, Morgan, Palmer) was firmly in place. WML has been joined in the mid-’50s, when the sour-faced comedy god Fred Allen was on the panel (“new” sensation Jayne Mansfield was the Mystery Guest last eve, if that makes it easier to situate the period).
I still like to promote the notion that if the folks running TCM would like to bless us with a classic TV channel, there’d be brilliant b&w comedy, drama, and genre weirdness being seen again for the first time in decades, making the cable "choice" truly that — a choice. No more having to surf past mounds of awful sports programming, rancid, recent-vintage TV movies, and mind-destroying “reality TV.”
UPDATE: The eagle-eyed souls on the GSN message boards have noted that this is indeed a two-week “Xmas present” from the folks who run the network and want to push their most recent anodyne crap product and acquired garbage (every known iteration of Family Feud! The 2000-era game shows that no one wants to rewatch! The Newlywed Game retread with Carnie Wilson!). Enjoy while you can — classic, classy TV is about to be buried again….
As my second birthday honoree, I want to salute once more Funhouse deity Jean-Luc Godard, aka “Uncle Jean” (from his indelibly eccentric character in the perfect First Name: Carmen). He turned 80 years old on December 3rd and, thankfully for us, is still crafting provocative, brilliant, and gorgeously poetic films.
There are entire bookshelves’ worth of Godard studies out there, but nothing compares to just watching the films themselves. The most common entry point is, of course, his groundbreaking first feature A bout de souffle, which turned 50 this year, thus earning him an honorary Oscar that the Oscar folks don’t deem worthy of inclusion in the telecast for more than a few seconds. I would argue that any of the “classic 15” — his fifteen narrative features from 1960-68 — serve as a great introduction to his style, as do the first three “comeback” films of the early Eighties (Sauve qui peut, Passion, and First Name Carmen).
Godard’s recent films have shown he has lost none of his uncanny grasp of the medium, his perceptive view of the ways in which men and women communicate (and quite often fail to communicate), and his ability to beautifully articulate how the cinema entices/deceives the viewer.
What is impressive about Godard’s work from the last 30 years is its blend of conceptual thinking, intelligent dialogue, and absolutely beautiful imagery. The result is, and I’m not using this term as mere hype, filmic poetry. This was illustrated by the fact that when he made his scripts available to the French publisher P.O.L., they were published as books of poetry — no parenthetical notes, no set-ups, no identification of the characters speaking. Since Godard sometimes quotes numerous authors and filmmakers in his dialogue, there is always a list of sources in the back of every book.
It’s extremely rare that a filmmaker’s work can be so essentially cinematic and yet also function as literature. It also works musically, which is why the music label ECM has released CDs of the complete soundtracks to certain of his features and the epic video masterwork Histoire(s) du Cinema. There is a beautiful article contained in the booklet of the Nouvelle Vague CD set that finds a blind writer offering her experience of Godard's dense sound mix in the film.
As a measure of Godard’s cross-cultural fame and his fans' justified devotion, I refer you to these folks, who decided to create a new JLG font to celebrate Godard’s 80th birthday. (Thanks to RC for passing this on.) Here is the lowdown on it.
Now that I’ve made the case that the man is a fucking artistic genius, let us wallow in his most “accessible” moments, those involving music. Basically any of the Godard-cut trailers for any of the “golden 15” films functions like a music-vid. All of these trailers are on YT, so they merely need to be searched out by title. Here is my personal fave of longstanding, from 1966:
His “comeback” film Sauve Qui Peut (la vie) (aka Every Man for Himself, 1980) recently was re-released in America and will hopefully be out on DVD sometime soon. It has some fascinating moments in which Godard uses electronic music:
A unforgettable mixture of image and sound, as Tom Waits’ “Ruby’s Arms” is used to underscore a scene of impotence in Prenom Carmen (1983):
One of my all-time fave bands, the French duo Les Rita Mitsouko, were studied in Soigne Ta Droite (aka, Keep Up Your Right, 1987). I put this up on YT when Les Rita mastermind Fred Chichin died:
One of Godard’s 21st–century triumphs is the film Eloge de l’amour (aka In Praise of Love, 2001). Here, a gorgeous b&w scene is underscored by a song from Vigo’s timeless L’Atalante:
In closing I offer you the union of our two birthday-salute recipients: Woody Allen as directed by Godard in the wildly uneven King Lear (1987):
And the only onscreen meeting of both filmmakers, in the Godard interview video Meetin’ WA (1986), where a very reserved Uncle Jean meets a very reserved Woody. There are no English subs for Godard’s narration here, but you do have the actual interview between the two in English. This is must-see for anyone who likes either filmmaker (or both):
I regularly do Deceased Artiste tributes on this blog, but I also want to occasionally salute those artists and entertainers whose work I love who are still alive. In this spirit, I say happy 75th and 80th birthdays (respectively) to two great filmmakers, whose work has been important to me personally over the years.
The first is Woody Allen, who turned 75 last week. The party line on Woody is that he’s a great comedian and filmmaker who hit his stride with Annie Hall and Manhattan, and that his latter-day films aren’t “entertaining.” I would defend him based on several levels of fan and critical appreciation. First and foremost, what Woody has carried off in the past thirty years since those twin masterworks is nothing short of miraculous, especially as an American filmmaker, since, as we know, over here you’re only as good as your last picture’s box office. He has displayed a dogged determination similar to that of one of my utter filmmaking heroes, Robert Altman, who never stopped making fascinating work even when he was totally “disinvited” from filmmaking here in his home country.
Woody has maintained a steady output of features since the turn of the Eighties and, yes, a few of them were wildly underwhelming (if I had to vote, I’d say Hollywood Ending was the lowest ebb by far), but others have been resonant works that have shown him growing and transforming as an artist.
Woody's work is indeed a sort of "doorway" to arthouse fare: I grew up watching his films, seeing his absolutely perfect comedies as a child (the sex and death references I didn’t get, but what did that matter?). I came of age as he was making his most trendsetting pictures, and then saw every single one of the Mia Farrow-era pictures in theaters. For every two or three ambitious but bloodless missteps (September, Another Woman, Shadows and Fog) during that period, there was a film that was absolutely wonderful (the superb Hannah and Her Sisters, Radio Days, and the very underrated Husbands and Wives).
What is most important for me about his work on a personal level, though, is its quotability — not just in terms of the one-liners from his three terrific standup comedy LPs or his first few wildly funny movie comedies, but his humorous (yet pretty damned wistful) reflections on relationships. "We need the eggs..." indeed. All I can say is that work like that is never going to date.
The other party line about Allen is that he is “much more popular in Europe,” which is a major put-down in America, as it equates him with Jerry Lewis — a comedian he’s said very nice things about, but whom he’s worlds away from in terms of filmmaking. The fact that he has turned to producers in other countries to fund his films has once again shown that, no matter what they say at the Oscars, artistry really isn’t appreciated too much around Hollywood (and particularly not when the filmmaker has kept to the East Coast and not cast Leonard DiCaprio in a series of wildly commercial projects — Woody did use him in Celebrity but didn’t feel as compelled as Scorsese has to keep using him as star-bait to make exceedingly un-personal features).
The ties to Europe have also reinforced Woody’s devotion to the arthouse cinema of the Fifties, in particular Bergman and Fellini. It has often been noted that Woody’s visual style is inconsistent, largely the result of whichever cinematographer he’s working with at the time — this is indeed true, but as a screenwriter and director of actors he has proven himself to be a true auteur returning to the same themes over and over again, even as he moves from country to country to get his small-in-scope character pieces made. In recent years I’ve felt that a strong comparison can be made between his more serious works and the films of Eric Rohmer, although he is never cited as an influence by Woody.
When Bergman died, I remember that Woody was asked by an interviewer if he felt that he himself had influenced any contemporary filmmakers. He stated outright that he hadn’t, but I think he was thinking only about drama and forgetting (or perhaps wanting to forget) that his best films have become the models for most contemporary urban neurotic comedies and love stories in the movies and particularly on television. When he used Larry David as a lead in Whatever Works (2009), he was closing a circle, as Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm owe a massive debt to this work. On the other hand, Woody’s best work also has inspired Nora Ephron’s thoroughly meager imitations — but don’t blame him for that.
It’s hard to say what are the “funniest films of all time,” but one of Woody’s funniest (and smartest) comedies was Love and Death (1975):
Feeling down around the holidays? This scene from Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) reminds me what is important, and that the Marx Bros. can stop ya from throwing in the towel:
A left-field move that was very underrated, Sweet and Lowdown (1999):
Another reinvention that was very much welcome. Woody tackled the class-conscious British drama with a really attractive looking set of younger leads in Match Point (2005):
And finally, his most recent return to this city, which he still has the capacity to seem magical. Owing something to his life-affirming speech in Hannah… is the finale of Whatever Works (2009):
There’s been a dearth of foreign film distribution over here since the Reagan era (that is pretty much when the country closed in on itself), and this comes to the fore when you consider a career like Mario Monicelli’s. This legend of Italian movie comedy made almost 70 features and kept right on making them until 2006 (when he was 91), but we barely saw a solid dozen of his pictures throughout the years, and were certainly not gonna see ’em after the xenophobic Eighties kicked in.
Monicelli died on November 29th of this year when he leaped from the fifth-story window of a hospital where he was being treated for prostate cancer. He was 95 years old and, according to one obit I read, chose the method of suicide used by his father (that still needs verification, as Wikipedia likes to put it).
He began steadily directing features at the turn of the 1950s, and scored his first hits with the great Italian comedian Totò. Totò also starred in his best-remembered and most well-distributed comedy, the ultimate “gang that couldn’t shoot straight” caper film I Soliti Ignoti (1958), which translates as “The unknown thieves” (reportedly titled after the “usual suspects” line in Casablanca).
The film was better known over here as Big Deal on Madonna Street, and remains one of the greatest Italian comedy movies ever. Not a single scene can be found with English subs on YouTube (presumably because it is now out on Criterion — although at one time “public domain” videos of it were available over here), but I think this clip showing the would-be crooks figuring out how to bust through a wall is indicative of the film’s wonderful humor. Among the many leads were Vittorio Gassman and a young Marcello Mastroianni:
Monicelli was hailed critcally and popularly for the comedy The Great War (1959) with Gassman and Alberto Sordi, and the drama The Organizer (1963) (both unseeable in the U.S. these days). He also had an entry in the anthology film Boccaccio ’70 (1962), which featured short films by De Sica, Fellini, and Visconti. There is an English-language trailer (very Sixties, of course) on YouTube for this film, but I won’t link to it, as it was the Joseph E. Levine-trimmed version of the film that was missing the Monicelli segment (his short didn’t feature a “name” actress, so Levine decided to keep the segments that featured Loren, Romy Schneider, and Fellini’s uber-fetishy "Amazing Colossal" version of Anita Ekberg). Here is the Italian trailer that includes Monicelli’s segment:
If you’re getting the impression that we didn’t get to see a lot of Monicelli’s work, well, you’re right; currently only Big Deal is available on DVD in the U.S. Thus, we won’t be seeing what was hailed as one of his best films, My Friends (1975) with Tognazzi and Noiret, anytime soon, but we can at least troll YouTube for wonderful moments like this bit from Monicelli’s Casanova 70 (1965) with the one and only Marcello cuckolding none other than Funhouse fave Marco Ferreri. There are no subs on this scene, but you don’t need ’em. When a horny wife strays from the marital bed for a late-night tango with Marcello, what else do you really need to know?
I will close out by saying that I saw one of Monicelli’s meagerest comedies late one night on local Ch. 5 back in the Eighties. Shot mostly in English, La mortadella (1970), renamed Lady Liberty, is a dippy comedy that finds Sophia Loren not being allowed into the U.S. because she insists that she must carry an Italian sausage (the titular mortadella) into the country (don't ask). Along the way, as she is held in detention by immigration officials, she meets characters played by William Devane, David Doyle, a much younger Danny DeVito, and the gorgeous straight-outta-Joe Susan Sarandon. I don’t have the clearest memories of the film, except that it belabors its premise and it ain’t funny.
Monicelli appeared in a minor role as an actor in the Diane Lane film Under the Tuscan Sun (2003). Given the depressing circumstances of his death, I’ll refer you to the rousing quote utilized in his Variety obit, on the subject of the future of film: "Cinema will never die, it was born and cannot die. The cinema hall will die perhaps, but I definitely don't care [about] this."
I realize the vast majority of folks reading this blog haven’t seen or heard of the Manhattan cable program I’ve been doing for the past 17 years with the same title as the blog. I definitely recommend you check out the Media Funhouse channel on YouTube and the four complete episodes I put up as representative samples of the show.
I did want to put up a sample of the episode-length Deceased Artiste tributes I’ve done on the show, of which I’m very proud. Thus I’ve uploaded the entirety of my Ray Dennis Steckler episode, which aired a few weeks after the man who gave us Rat Pfink a Boo Boo and The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies hit the great divide on Jan. 7, 2009.
I’ve broken the show up into three parts, and uploaded it to Daily Motion, since YT does not tolerate the human body (no nudity please, we’re American and tryin’ ta pretend we’re moral…). The first part of the show includes my verbal overview of Ray’s career, plus some choice clips:
And the third and final part features a few more clips and my farewell, plus a bonus: a short tribute to two other Deceased Artistes who died around the time that Steckler did: Bettie Page and the sacred psycho-billy himself, Lux Interior of the Cramps:
I’m indeed proud of this show (and yes, I did actually sit through Ray’s demented and very unsexy pornography!). I am glad to offer it up to the fine, discerning viewers who like weird and inexplicable cinema.("Incredibly strange" indeed...)
Many times celebrities don’t “die in threes,” and often the folks in question have very different levels of celebrity. Leslie Nielsen had a long, productive career, in fact two careers as both a stoic leading man and then as a parody of that same stoic leading man character. Many TV and online commentators have done wonderful tributes to him already, so I will move past him to the uneven director Irvin Kershner, best known for The Empire Strikes Back.
Kershner’s career was filled with a lot of mediocre movies — although I’m still looking forward to catching up sometime soon to The Luck of Ginger Coffey (1964) and Loving (1970) (as I’m a sucker for anything made by the confused, depressed Hollywood of the early Seventies). One of the Kershners that is a lot of fun, and yet is pretty damned uneven, is A Fine Madness (1966), starring the one and only Sean Connery during his Bond-ian heyday:
Yes, Empire Strikes Back demonstrated Kershner’s grasp of Hollywood genre corniness. Another great, compulsively watchable example of this (more watchable for me than Empire — heresy!) is The Eyes of Laura Mars (1978). Here’s the first photo shoot sequence, framed to look like a Helmut Newton version of a fashion-model catfight:
And if that didn’t absolutely reek of the Seventies for ya, try on this unBELIEVEably campy bit of disco-bad filmmaking. Oh, the poses, the costumes, the lyrics, it’s just too perfectly fuckin’ awful.
Now let me turn to two other Deceased Artistes who would seem on first glance to have absolutely nothing in common, but in researching them I discovered that both were Polish immigrants, one to England, the other to America. The first was Ingoushka Petrov, better known as Ingrid Pitt or, more properly, “Countess Dracula” from the Hammer pic of the same name.
Pitt was born in 1937 to a German father and a Polish mother, and survived the concentration camps where, she later testified, she saw things that were much scarier than any horror flick she ever acted in. Her New York Times obit had a rather amazing and highly doubtful story about her appearing in Mother Courage in East Germany where she lived after the war. She evidently (yeah, right) fled the state police while wearing her "Mother Courage" costume, and jumped in the River Spree — only to be saved by an American serviceman whom she later married!
Now back to what really occurred in her life: she was indeed in an East German theater company, run by Brecht’s second wife, and did marry an American serviceman. In the Sixties she became a bit actress in the movies, and wound up making her reputation in two Hammer productions, The Vampire Lovers (1970) and Countess Dracula (1971). Both films were wonderfully stylish vampire-chick movies that proved that Hammer didn’t need Christopher Lee to make a successful horror picture:
Vampire Lovers can be seen in its entirety (I think — you know YouTube is American, so it ain’t gonna tolerate the undraped female form, it might stunt the kiddies) here. The two gents who have put up the Countress Dracula trailer have made it unembeddable (presumably to keep it up on YT longer), but you can just click the link supplied right here in the title.
Pitt was also in the wonderfully creepy House That Dripped Blood (1971) (which scared the shit out of me as a kid), and later had supporting roles on Doctor Who and in Smiley’s People, but she will forever be remembered as an extremely sexy vampire.
Far less sexy, and also far less well known, but beloved to New Yorkers who watched a lotta Joe Franklin back in the Eighties and early Nineties, was Morris Katz. He, too, was born in Poland, in his case in 1932. Katz was “the greatest painter in the world” by his own estimation, but certainly did have the distinction of being one of the fastest painters. (He never made it into the Guiness Book, but he did appear supposedly in Ripley’s Believe It Or Not!).
He called what he did “instant art,” and it is noted that the fastest he ever produced a painting was in 30 seconds. Now, mind you, these were not masterworks, but what I always found amusing about his work was his use of toilet paper to blot the image and put leaves on trees, heads on people in crowds, to generally add to the overall composition by using a little impressionist trick (although I don’t think Renoir and Monet used toilet paper to achieve the effect).
In any case, the finest thing he did besides the toilet paper business was that after he finished a fast-as-hell painting he actually assembled a frame with a staple gun! This man was nothing if not complete — he may not have been Picasso, but you had to go and get Picasso’s works framed, whereas Morris stapled you together a beaut.
I was surprised to find that none of Katz’s many, many, many local and national talk show appearances is on YouTube, and none of the many episodes of the show he did for Manhattan access for years and years. What we are left with are tiny slivers of footage which I offer you now. Morris painting at Kutshers:
A collage of Katzian paintings (toilet paper not included, but stapled frame? Probably, yes):
Okay, so Morris wasn’t as sexy or as intriguing onscreen as Ingrid Pitt. But, again, could she finish a full oil painting in under five minutes and also slap a frame on the sucker as well?
Every year around this time I start thinking about one clip that I caught by chance back in 1986 because I am an avid fan of star-filled pointlessness, like… the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade! The clip in question really does sum up the finer points of the U.S. in one neat little package. Formerly famous (you’ll never hear me saying “has-been”) TV actor gets the gig to read the U.S. Constitution to commemorate its 200th anniversary. Said actor doesn’t know the lines without cue cards — and then the clowns come over….
I have watched this clip countless times, and believe its effect intensifies the more you watch it in sequence. I can think of no better way to sum up what America means to me than to offer up Robert Vaughn being mocked by Macy’s employees dressed as clowns (watch them flock!) as he reads the Constitution to a befuddled and bored TV audience. The fact that host Pat Sajak tries to save his bacon by doing an impromptu intro to the segment (after Vaughn says on-mic, “you have the cards?"), and the fact that the director then tries to save Napoleon Solo once again by putting him in a little circle (in which you can still the bobbing clown heads) only makes this moment more of a patriotic godsend. I can offer no better treasure from my coffer of weird VHS moments to celebrate the “discovery” of this wonderful land.
I’m happy to share two more clips from my interview with founding Bonzo Dog Band member, king of the Rutles, "Seventh Python," and all-around brilliant humorist and musician Neil Innes. The first concerns George Harrison’s reaction to the idea of a second Rutles album:
The second involves a few memories of his friend and writing collaborator Graham Chapman. Right after he told this anecdote Mr. Innes confessed with a laugh, “We didn’t get much writing done!”
One of the last of the great over-the-top, impresario-style movie producers, Dino De Laurentiis died last week at the age of 91. He had his name on some brilliant masterworks of cinema and some absolute garbage, but he kept busy until just a few years ago, and always tried to create a “spectacle” around his productions, especially his more ridiculous American movies.
De Laurentiis is perhaps best known among movie fans over here for a phrase he may or may not have actually said — if anyone has confirmation that he uttered it, please do pass it on. The phrase in question, referring to the 1976 remake of King Kong that he produced, was, “When my monkey die, everybody gonna cry!” Now, it’s certain that John Belushi spoke a phrase similar to that one in a Saturday Night Live sketch in which he played Dino, but I can’t verify exactly where or when De Laurentiis himself made the original remark. In any case, it stuck and has become part of the legend surrounding the movie, which was somehow perceived as a flop, but actually made quite a lot of money at the box office. Here is the trailer:
Here is a bonus: Funhouse friend Akira Fitton’s home-movie footage from the night that some 30,000 folks showed up at the World Trade Center to watch the shooting of the “death of Kong” scene. Check out the monkey-face etched in office lights on the side of one of the buildings:
King Kong was just one of many, many movies Dino D. produced from 1946 to 2007. He started out selling spaghetti (no joke) but acquired an international reputation when his production Bitter Rice (1949) with the “buxotic” Silvana Mangano (whom he married) became a worldwide hit. The film is corny but still has a nice seething sexuality that is displayed when Ms. Mangano dances:
Or when its female cast wades in the water to perform their labors:
The film includes a muddy group catfight. This version of that scene demonstrates a rather annoying characteristic of films dubbed for the Russian market (I believe it’s Russian being spoken): instead of doing an actual dubbing job, they retain one gentleman to simply recite the dialogue in Russian *over* the original soundtrack!
De Laurentiis opened a studio a studio he called “Dinocitta” (after “Cinecitta”) as he produced a number of films that became critical and popular favorites around the world, with and without his producing partner Carlo Ponti. Among the biggest hits were Fellini’s La Strada and the Sophia Loren starrer Gold of Naples (both 1954). One of my personal faves (yes, even more than La Strada) was Nights of Cabiria (1957), which has one of the finest Fellini finales (and an excellent Nino Rota score):
Other Sixties De Laurentiis hits included the comedy Mafioso (1962) and the impressively flashy Mario Bava picture Danger: Diabolik (1968). Check out the Telly Savalas-narrated trailer (“He robs from the rich to give to the girls!”):
One of the most notable De Laurentiis pics during the Sixties was the campy-but-not-as-perfectly-kinky-or-funny-as-it-should-be Barbarella (1968):
In the Seventies, De Laurentiis produced a few “naturalistic” American dramas, among them the great Sidney Lumet film Serpico (1973):
Among other good Seventies De Laurenttiis productions was Crazy Joe (1974) with the always superb (and king of all Joes) Peter Boyle, and Altman’s very underrated box-office flop Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976). Here is an extremely short trailer for the latter:
The Seventies was also a time of pure schlock for De Laurentiis, with Mandingo (1975), Orca (1977), Flash Gordon (1980), and the wonderfully sleazy rape thriller Lipstick (1976) starring Margaux and Mariel Hemingway. The whole film is up on YouTube (or the majority of the film — the rape scene most obviously keeps being taken down):
One of the interesting latter-day “art” productions from De Laurentiis was the uneven but still very evocative The Serpent’s Egg (1978) from Bergman:
The Eighties and Nineties found De Laurentiis producing a bunch of big-budget, over-the-top pics, including Conan the Destroyer, David Lynch’s Dune (both 1984), Michael Cimino’s bombastic Year of the Dragon (1985) and pointless Desperate Hours (1990), as well as the Silence of the Lambs sequel and prequel Hannibal (2001) and Red Dragon (2002), as well as the pre-prequel Hannibal Rising (2007). The finest thing he was associated with in the latter part of his career was undoubtedly Blue Velvet (1986), which was shot at his DEG studios.
I will forego musing about whether or not “everybody cry” when Dino D. died.
NOTE: I wrote this piece a week ago, but decided not to post the second half of it since the story was still “developing.” Last Friday Rachel Maddow delivered the single most eloquent rebuttal to Jon Stewart and company's method of equating right-wing extremism in the media (read: Fox News) with left-wing “extremism” (read: MSNBC and certain activists in public settings). The result was Stewart reacting to Rachel’s editorial on The Daily Show and then appearing as a guest on her show for a full hour tonight. I include my reflections on the Maddow-Stewart interview below, after the piece I initially wrote.
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The next step in tying the “new” show business in with the “old” was taken at the Stewart/Colbert rally. Yes, there hasn’t been anything like it in American history — an exceedingly well-attended mock rally, endowed with a "real message," run by two comedians (one in character, one not) that actually qualified as a mildly political variety show done on location in Washington, D.C. — sort of a “Capitol Steps” show held on the capitol steps.
The event began as a swipe at the Glen Beck rally, which sounded like a great idea, but as it grew in proportion and journalists began to speculate on the “message” of restoring sanity, it was clear that something was slightly “off." Ordinarily rallies and protests are held to convey strong political messages — here was one that was asking everyone to just calm down and stop being so strident. The fact that the sentiment that goes along with that goal — again, “let me go back to bed,” the first-person variant of Bill Hicks’ “go back to bed, America!” — was just fine with everybody, since basically everyone is disappointed with the country the way it is (but the message of the rally, “let’s all be reasonable,” seemed to oddly parallel President Obama’s never-ending courting of the Republicans, who want nothing whatsoever to do with him — curious, huh?). And yet there is still a blind, unswerving patriotism in this country that causes the lunkheads among us (and Colbert audience members — but they’re “cheering ironically,” mind ya….) to shout out “U-S-A, NUMBER ONE!” when most of those cheering haven’t ever visited anywhere else in the world.
So, we have a rally that registers as not much more than a promotional stunt for two TV comedy shows, and yet journalists and attendees started taking it seriously as some sort of statement, although the politics behind that statement were murky, and almost dangerously naïve. I hope it was fun for the attendees — those I’ve spoken to or corresponded with said they had a great time, but couldn’t clearly see or hear the show.
Let’s talk about the comedy that was on display, though, since I want to return to my thesis that today’s cutting-edge comics will quickly reach back to the schmaltz and hokum of the past (with a dollop of snark on top); that hokum being best embodied by Bob Hope’s specials, barely watchable then, but now a source of camp and kitsch fascination for nostalgia buffs like myself (but, again, let me stress, they had the corniest comedy writing in existence — they were bad entertainment!).
The godawful “Chris Rock/Tracy Morgan do Simon and Garfunkel” bit that embodied the Bob Hope corniness of the “Night of Too Many Stars” had its equivalent at the “Rally to Restore Sanity” in a lengthy musical bit. For those who didn’t see the bit, it found Yusuf Islam, the former Cat Stevens, doing his anthemic “Peace Train,” only to be interrupted by Stephen Colbert, who brought out Ozzy Obsourne to perform “Crazy Train.” Jon Stewart became the proponent of Yusuf/Cat, and Stephen continued to want to hear Ozzy — until finally the whole issue was solved by having the O’Jays come out and sing “Love Train.”
Besides the fact that all three songs appeal primarily to people my age or older (not much acknowledgment of the youth demo in this “reasonable” political mock-movement), the bit is very much of a piece with sketches on the old Hope specials. It was friendly, cute, innocuous, and had nothing common with the satire that has made up the best of the Stewart and Colbert TV series (the laser-sharp montages showing politicians contradicting themselves on Stewart; “the Word” segments on Colbert).
It was, in short, pretty mild stuff that yielded only one surprise. That surprise occurred when Colbert interrupted Yusuf/Cat’s song and the audience booed him — and then realized it was Stephen doing the thing they disapproved of, and the boos stopped immediately (it was as if a noise of condemnation just suddenly disappeared).
At that point, it became pretty evident yet again that Americans need to love their wrong-headed comic characters, and that under no circumstances is the character to appear “villainous” or unpleasant — he or she must be cute and cuddly! The “Archie Bunker effect,” as I’ve called it, rules American comedy, and Colbert’s character is a perfect example. Consider this for a moment: what remains the single best moment for the character and Colbert himself as a comic performer? His genius turn in character before the Washington Correspondents’ Dinner several years back, with then-President Bush in attendance. There he was, not getting laughs, in “enemy territory,” and he stayed in the character, much like a “heel” wrestler or punk rocker would, taking his lumps and delivering the single best monologue of his career.
It would admittedly be hard to find as unsympathetic an audience for him as was found there, but provocative comedy, and certainly genuine political satire, needs that kind of friction to make it successful (and brilliant), and not just cute, cuddly mainstream entertainment (which admittedly will make you lots of money if your name is Ferrell or Sandler, but you’re not doing good work, you’re making absolute LCD crap comedy). Granted, a good portion of the American public might not be able to comprehend the notion of a character who can be booed and still laughed at (although that notion seems to work well enough in every wrestling arena in the country), but it’s contingent on the creators of comedy to sorta step out there on the edge, and not just surrender to “creeping Bob Hope-ism.” It’s just so much easier to chant ironically “U-S-A, NUMBER ONE!”
And I am aware that Colbert openly evoked Hope when he entertained the troops in the Middle East (golf club over the shoulder, big radio-style microphone). It was a wonderfully gracious gesture to entertain troops imbroiled in a totally futile political gesture intended to solidify America's hold over Middle East oil, but on an entertainment level, those live shows were schmaltz pure and simple, the sort of toothless “comedy” that I was sorta hoping had been eradicated by the smarter, sharper political humor that developed post-Lenny/National Lampoon/Carlin/Pryor/Klein/Hicks (and of course has been reduced to the impersonation-and-nothing-more formula by the rancid corpse that is SNL).
Colbert’s single best evocation of the past was indeed his tongue-in-cheek Xmas special, which was extra-good precisely because there was no audience to cheer it on — the jokes either worked or they didn’t, no “guide” for the home viewer was necessary (we’re adults, we can handle it — in fact, HBO and FX comedies have proven it’s possible).
Back to the rally: never has a politically-themed gathering been a “call to IN-action,” but that’s what this event was. The fact that the right-wing belief system is more emphatic, violent, and leans on emotion and opinion rather than facts, whereas left-wingers have to be (as my Marxist teacher at H.S. taught me years ago) literally steeped in factual information to be able to defend their positions, didn’t factor into the rally's hazy philosophy of "reasonableness" first and foremost.
Proving that Lefties are more susceptible to nudges than the Right, two days after the rally, Keith Olbermann suspended his “Worst Persons in the World” segment, in order to make an effort to be more “reasonable.” Keith seems genuinely thrilled to be mentioned on The Daily Show (and in fact makes segments from The Daily Show and SNL into news “stories”). Keith seems offended when they critique him, yet he hasn’t been on the Stewart show once as a guest in the years I’ve been watching him. On the other hand, Jon had a super-chummy (and lengthy) chat with Chris Wallace in the week after the rally, and has had on O’Reilly repeatedly to hawk his books (and appeared on the “Factor” as a guest). I may not be alone in finding it kinda cringe-inducing hearing Jon do the gigglelaugh at the Fox hosts’ bon mots.
As the close of the rally Stewart made a heartfelt speech as himself. The fact that this serious speech followed frivolous sketches made little sense (making it seem in certain ways like those “Final Thoughts” that Jerry Springer shares with his audience), but Jon’s tone did, yet again, bring the enlightened nostalgia buff back to the schmaltz of the variety show era — or the moments at the ends of Borscht Belt acts where a brassy comic like Buddy Hackettt or Jack Carter would suddenly turn serious and sing “Sunrise, Sunset.” The performer I was put in mind of was Red Skelton (who used to, in his final years, talk proudly and endlessly about the American flag in his live act, after playing “Clem Kadiddlehopper”). As I listened to Jon talk sincerely about how proud he was of America, I kept thinking that the event was going to end with him saying, “goodnight... and gawd bless!!!”
That sort of variety show fare makes for fascinating viewing a few decades on, as a time piece and a curio of an era now gone. As contemporary political satire, to paraphrase an old Jack Paar book title, its saber is bent.
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EPILOGUE: The Stewart appearance on Maddow was informative and enlightening, in terms of seeing the relative seriousness and knowledge both broadcasters bring to the table. Maddow is a razor-sharp commentator who has facts at her command, and is one of the brightest hosts on television at this moment. Jon Stewart is a standup comedian, a talented one, and an amiable host. He ain’t Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, or Marshall McLuhan — I personally don’t believe he has any profundities to convey to us, although he is a very pleasant comedic host. And, in his hour with Rachel, as in the serious moments during the rally, it did indeed seem like he now fully believes his own press and feels qualified to speak out on political issues and the media.
And since this blog frequently discusses Godard and his conceptual take on cinema, including the power of montage, I really have to take exception to the very lame defense Jon has offered, to the effect that his show and rally had an “inartful” presentation of the left-right equation. Apparently he can’t/won’t acknowledge the power of montage (Eisenstein's Film Form is on the way, Jon!), which is one of the key joys of his show. Montages do put equal signs between the images and sounds. It can’t be ignored, and to claim the messages of the Daily Show and rally montages were muddled is to acknowledge unwittingly that there’s no clear agenda behind the comedy. To be an effective political satirist, you have to paint heroes and villains — and then if one of the insulted parties says, “hey, you made me out to be the bad guy,” you can’t claim “inartful” editing. Especially when your show is immaculately edited.
The final part of the interview where Jon discussed humor was actually the only effective part of the conversation since, again, I would only turn to Jon for opinions on humor, not his personal take on politics or media. Interestingly, though, he informed Rachel that the “tea bag” label used by the Left to describe the tea party movement was “funny for a day” — this came, oddly, from a comedian who frequently punches his lines up with Adam Sandler-style high voices and dropping the f-bomb (not forgetting the “wiseguy” Jersey voice). We’re not talking Will Rogers, Mort Sahl, Groucho Marx, Steve Allen, or Bill Hicks (in fact Jon revealed his own comic model to be Jerry Seinfeld — anodyne observational comedy as the model for a political-satire show?); we’re talking a very amiable TV comic with an extremely talented writing staff and immaculate video editors.
The Rachel-Jon interview was extremely friendly (yes, it was truly "reasonable"), and provided further evidence that Maddow is a class act. As for Jon, it seems that his feelings are hurt that his rally has been subjected to some criticism. If the rally had indeed had any political message other than a call to inaction, I think I could’ve sympathized with him.
Jill Clayburgh, who died this week at 66 after a reported 21-year battle with leukemia, was one of the poster girls of Hollywood’s late-Seventies feminism. This period found several great films released in a a matter of a few years, all with superb female lead performances. Then, as it always has, the industry pretty much dispensed with those actresses (who were left to return to the stage, or play mothers and girlfriends again), unless of course they were critical super-darlings (Meryl Streep) or the kind of performer who could semi-retire every few years because she didn’t really need to work for a living (the aerobics instructor Ms. Fonda).
I was a young teen when Clayburgh had her string of starring roles and was such a familiar face she was called on to host Saturday Night Live. At that time, my allegiance was to the winsome brunettes who pretty much all got similar roles (Brooke Adams, Karen Allen, Jessica Harper, Kathleen Quinlan, to a lesser extent Amy Irving), but I did see pretty much all of Clayburgh’s starring features in a theater (ah, for the days of “bargain matinees”) and thought she had a compelling presence on screen. (As for my blog-entry header, she was married to playwright from 1979 until her death.)
What’s interesting to reflect upon is the fact that the argument about women not getting quality lead roles continues to this day. The sad truth is that Hollywood is not interested in performances by humans in general, so the gender divide isn’t as important as it once was. Great work is still being done by talented actresses young and old, but the films in question are rarely going to make a dent in the weekend box-office report. And that’s okay — because we know the films that do were all made with the 14–25 market in mind, so they ain’t the kinds of things to take seriously.
I’ll say farewell to Ms. Clayburgh with a mini-survey of her career up to the early Eighties. She made her film debut in Brian De Palma’s The Wedding Party (1968) (both she and De Palma had gone to Sarah Lawrence; costar Robert De Niro had not). I really love the extremely tacky big-screen adaptation of Portnoy’s Complaint (1972) that she appears in as the Israeli soldier-girl fucked by Richard Benjamin (although that film’s truly tackiest moments feature Mama Lee Grant).
Her first credited TV role was with then-boyfriend Al Pacino in the Jack Warden cop series (and damn, did it move quickly — a half-hour for a show that would run one hour minimum these days) NYPD (1968). Here is the opening:
Other memorable TV appearances include a supporting role on the super-silly old-lady detective show (“hey, if Miss Marple works, why not *two* of them?”), The Snoop Sisters, and the TV movie Griffin and Phoenix with the always wonderful Peter Falk:
The Michael Ritchie satire about football and various ridiculous oh-so-Seventies forms of therapy (EST, “rolfing,” etc.) Semi-Tough (1977) featured Jill Clayburgh with her future Starting Over costar Burt Reynolds (when he was seriously being hailed as a new-model Cary Grant, a few years before the Bandit films came along….). But her biggest success was Paul Mazursky’s time piece An Unmarried Woman (1978). This is a fondly remembered scene where she begins dancing in her apartment for no reason other than sheer joy:
She followed that film with Bertolucci’s incest saga Luna (1979). This is a very strange film, in that Fred Gwynne plays her hubby, who has to die to set the story in motion. Once it’s going, you find that she’s quite a hot young mom who decides to help her son through his heroin-withdrawal suffering by getting him off (did I forget to mention she’s also an opera diva?). I saw this on an “arthouse” incest double-bill with Malle’s Murmur of the Heart at the Cinema Village back around 1980. Ah, for the days when you could have themed double features that had bizarro themes….
After Starting Over — which got uniformly great reviews but didn’t seemingly transform Burt Reynolds into the “next Cary Grant” — she starred in what would now definitely be labeled a “chick flick,” the big-budget follow-up by director Claudia Weill to her terrific low-budget Girlfriends, called It’s My Turn (1980). It was cute and pleasant, but not as memorable as Unmarried Woman. I have no recollection of a single moment of the film but you can see the whole film here, uploaded by a poster who loves Ms. Clayburgh, and also digs Faye Dunaway, Glenda Jackson, and my faves Sandy Dennis and the utterly sublime Barbara Harris.
The same poster has put up a film I have not caught up to (despite having had a prerecord VHS of it now for about a decade), Costa-Gavras’ tale of an American Israeli lawyer defending a Palestinian, Hanna K. (1983), written by Battle of Algiers scripter Franco Solinas.
Another semi-pseudo arthouse release starring Ms. Clayburgh that I never caught up to is also available in its entirety on YT. It is Shy People (1987), co-scripted by the always awesome Gerard Brach, and directed and conscripted by Andrei Konchalovsky. It can be found here.
Jill Clayburgh kept working steadily until her death in both the movies and on TV, but will be best remembered as the “Unmarried Woman” who got to have an affair with the cool British artist guy (Alan Bates) and still remain independent. And able to dance around the apartment for absolutely no reason at all.
The “hidden” man of British comedy is hidden no more. I was very happy to speak yesterday with Chris Morris — whose career I surveyed on this blog here — in conjunction with the NYC opening of his debut as a feature filmmaker, Four Lions.
Morris has spent a hell of a lot of his career as a radio and TV humorist decimating the interview process, so I wasn’t sure what to expect when I interviewed him about Four Lions and some of his past work. I found that he was more than willing to discuss the different facets of his career, but as notions of process and approach arose, he laughed or made jokes that appeared to sidestep my questions — but then wound up answering them in beautifully eloquent detail.
Four Lions follows a group of dimwitted Islamic terrorists in England as they plan an attack on a charity marathon in London. Morris has taken great care in other interviews to discuss the fact that while the film is entirely fictitious, it was inspired by numerous accounts he had researched of moronic — yet obviously lethal — terrorists. I discussed the film’s characters with him and its distinctly dark comic tone. He noted that it wasn’t his intention to make a dark comedy, but that “the real elements in the data that’s out there undermines the metallic, cast-iron image of these people.” The tone didn’t guide the creation of the jokes, therefore, but rather the subject itself dictated the humor.
As for the characters, the film’s protagonist Omar (Riz Ahmed) is a family man whom the audience can relate to on certain levels, while marveling at his wrong-headed and dangerous philosophy — this split in the character is best exemplified by the pleasant-seeming conversations he has with his wife and son about how he intends to die for the cause. His counterpart is Barry (Nigel Lindsay), a temperamental working-class Englishman who follows his own Al-Qaeda-inspired values without question.
“Omar does have a conscience, he believes in right and wrong, while Barry just believes in wrong,” says Morris. “We had a sequence that was cut, in which the characters were playing their subtext cards too openly. Omar tries to argue that sometimes to do the right thing you have to do the wrong thing…. Barry laughs at him because Omar is tangled up in a confused conscience. Barry is happily doing the wrong thing.”
I found that Barry relates to many of Morris’ past comic creations, in that he speaks nonsense with an absolute air of certainty.
Four Lions benefits from a documentary-like visual style that, at points, reports the truth of a situation, and in some others slightly misleads the viewer for comic purposes. Discussing the use of documentary techniques to study a terrorist cell in a fiction film, Morris says: “It’s a long-established technique from at least Battle of Algiers, and probably before…. It’s sometimes good if the camera is left on the table and forgotten. In that way, the camera’s not quite seeing everything it should. When we shot, I worked out the orthodox camera positions and then banned them, and then used what was left.” The result, he says, is that “it’s as if you’re never quite in the right place,” in order to bring the viewer into the action.
Like Morris’ TV series Brass Eye and Nathan Barley, the film also includes wonderfully ridiculous scenes where its characters interact with new media, including chat rooms, handicams, and cellphone SIM cards. Reflecting on the characters’ repeated attempts to make video manifestos, Morris remarks on a court transcript he read that included MI-5 surveillance on would-be terrorists who argued with each other about whether a video camera should be used to record images, and whether Bin Laden did it.
“So they’re taking elements of Islamic law, and there’s this sort of confused conversation” that winds up with the one gent deciding that Bin Laden must shoot his videos in a mirror, because that would be okay.” Morris adds that he wouldn’t be surprised to find a real-life cell that was making its own video documentary, “because that would excite them, allow them to say, ‘yeah, that’s how we are.’ Unfortunately, I suspect it would show all to clearly that’s how they are….”
Until that particular “idiots’ manifesto” comes out, we can make do with Four Lions, which has Morris again finding the humor in an extremely taboo topic.
As a bonus in this entry, I will note that I also discussed Morris’ past work with him. Segments from that part of the interview will appear in this blog and on the Funhouse TV show in the weeks to come. One of his most direct and enlightening answers came to my question about his radio “feedback reports” (man on the street interviews) which, of course, were later modified to include show-biz celebrities and politicians on Brass Eye. As is indicated by his answer here, Morris’ humor is indeed well thought-out but, most importantly, it’s very, very funny.
The Yuletide season weighs heavily upon us all — if depression didn’t exist, the holidays could singlehandedly create it. One cable network, however — which I had condemned last year for dropping their library of wonderfully entertaining b&w shows into oblivion — has decided to give nostalgia buffs a little present for Xmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa/whatever you choose to celebrate.
IGAS has been resumed in 1960, when its longstanding panel (Cullen, Myerson, Morgan, Palmer) was firmly in place. WML has been joined in the mid-’50s, when the sour-faced comedy god Fred Allen was on the panel (“new” sensation Jayne Mansfield was the Mystery Guest last eve, if that makes it easier to situate the period).
