HOTSY-TOTSY'S OF THE BOOTLEG YEARS-MYRNA LOY: MAD SINGING VAMP?

Certain actors photograph 'smart.' They know what's coming, they've seen it before, they're well ahead of the plodding screenwriter who's providing them with the bon mots that they are about to toss off. I recall reading an interview with Jonathan Demme where he said that the main reason he wanted Anthony Hopkins to play Hannibal Lecter was because you knew, by watching Hopkins, that he was smart. And that would humanize Lecter and make him interesting to audiences.

So it was with Myrna "Mrs. Nick Charles" Loy. She had a natural, innate intelligence and humor--which, as the thirties and forties progressed, made her a perfect sort of swank, New Yorker magazine reading, Martini drinking, Cedric Gibbons set-inhabiting, MGM under contract to-ing kind of dame. And this makes it especially interesting that, in an earlier incarnation, she was, in fact, a hotsy-totsy girl of the bootleg years.

For years, (she started in silents--discovered by Rudolph Valentino, I've just learned), she played either "good time girls" (sluts) or Orientals. She posed for a statue at Venice High School while she was a student there and one of her early gigs was dancing in the chorus at the Grauman's Chinese Theater in the early twenties. (They had a chorus line of dancers? For real? Furthermore, I thought growing up in LA in the 1970's was weird. What must it have been like in 1917? Was there anything here at all?) In general, Myrna Loy paid a lot of dues before finding the screen persona that we associate with her--the ironic, refined and smart Myrna, the country-club Myrna, the wife who's still sexy Myrna. She was, in fact, a mad singing vamp of a girl--though as you will see below, the singing was clearly dubbed.

Anyway, below is quite a find. It's two numbers from a 1930 movie called "The Truth About Youth" which appears to have been a chestnut even when it was made--the play it was based on first played on Broadway in 1900. (Even then, Hollywood liked the idea of remakes--"Irving! They loved it back then! They'll love it now! What do we got to lose?") The movie starred Loretta Young (as the good girl of course) and Myrna Loy as the gold-digging nightclub-singing prostitu--er--good time girl.

The number is also of interest for fans of nightclub culture, in that it portrays a swank New York nightclub in a way that movies of the time generally didn't (and so this makes me think that they based it on a real one). If you read the theater and nightclub listings of New Yorker magazines from the twenties and thirties (as I do) you'll note that a number of clubs are listed under the sub-heading "Broadway Atmosphere". This has always puzzled and intrigued me--what did they do in these clubs differently than just ordinary nightclubs? Since absolutely nobody who went to these clubs is still walking the earth (although a few might be sitting in becalmed, passive states at various nursing homes) this mysterious distinction will likely remain unsolved. But the clip below gives us a possible window on the kind of nightclub setting and performance style that might have personified "Broadway Atmosphere."

HOTSY-TOTSY'S OF THE BOOTLEG YEARS-CLARA BOW!

How could we skip through this survey of yesteryear's male fantasy objects without a bow to (and perhaps a roll in the hay with) Clara Bow.

Poor Clara. Her personal morals were so bad that In a town where nobody thought twice about drinking and driving, playing musical beds and staying up for days on bennies, she managed to get herself ostracized by the movie colony! (Being labeled the town slut in Hollywood isn't, apparently, an acheivement to be proud of. Somewhat like Dorothy Parker's line about New York being a bad place to be the "town drunk" in.) Between taking on the entire USC football team (or was it only the offence?) and bedding every contract player at Paramount (and, who knows, probably RKO and Universal), Clara managed to get "a reputation". Although she was the "It" girl of the twenties, by the time sound arrived she was more or less on her way out. Typically the studio blamed her Brooklyn accented nasal-inflected voice on her decline, but I think they were simply embarrassed at the stuff the grips and electrics were writing on the walls of the Paramount men's room...(Billy Wilder once said that his favorite line scratched on the Paramount mens room wall was: "Edith Head Gives Great Costume.")

Take a look below, though, and give Clara Bow a chance. Her name may bring up lurid images of the twenties--vamps with panthers on leashes, Bela Lugosi (whom she of course slept with) and raccoon coats at Yale football games--but I find her quite charming and seriously adorable in the sailor suit. (Even the title of the song--"True To The Navy"--manages to play on her much publicized promiscuity.) From the looks of this, she could have moved into 30's era muscials and found a niche--maybe even grown into dotty-aunt character parts in the forties eventually winding up on episodes of Paul Henning-created TV shows. But it was not to be. Once Paramount canned her and it was all over, she married the actor Rex Bell, moved to Arizona, had kids and eventually a middle-aged meltdown which put her in the loony bin. After a great deal of therapy she recovered the memory that her father had raped her when she was a child. (Apparently her mother had also attempted to slit her throat as a child...what could she have done to have provoked so much hostility?)

She ended her days placing a once a year call at Christmas time to Hedda Hopper saying: "Remember me? I used to be the 'it' girl". This would result in a Christmas mention in Hedda's column which, I imagine, did more for Clara than her therapy sessions ever could hope too. She was truly America's first sex symbol and, of late, a number of scholars and buffs are working hard to restore her "reputation" to it's rightful place. Here's to you, Clara. It's the bad girls who make us smile to the end of our bittersweet days...

HOTSY-TOTSY'S OF THE BOOTLEG YEARS--NANCY CARROLL EDITION

Continuing our lecherous survey of long-dead hotties from the bathtub gin generation ("Oh, you kid!"), we come now to the majorly successful and now utterly forgotten Nancy Carroll. Though she was generally considered cute and adorable rather than dangerous and vampy, she was nevertheless quite a package--and a hell of a singer and dancer and a much better actress than many of her contemporaries.

So what happened to this top-flight early sound movie star to cause her star to dim so quickly? The answer: she was generally regarded as a complete bitch to work with. Difficult, hard to please, pissed off about the roles they made her play.(In those days, of course, actors were not in the drivers seat--studios assigned their stars, who were under contract, whatever they thought was appropriate. Oh, to have that system back in place!) Her star peaked early in the sound era and came abruptly to a halt when Paramount decided they'd had enough. A few years and a few movies later, she was washed up. She hasn't even the dim allure of, say, Clara Bow--who at least is remembered as having personified an era. She kept working on the stage, turned up on a few early television shows, and was dead by the early sixties.

In 1929 and 1930, all the studios put their stars in musical revues--"Show Of Shows" was Warners version, "Hollywood Revue of 1929" was Metro Goldwyn Mayers, Fox (not yet "20 Century") did the "Fox Movietone Follies" (love the decreptitude of that title!) These movies--and in some cases the surviving fragments of them--are pretty much extended vaudeville shows. Some of the numbers are fascinating, many boring, and the non-narrative nature of the enterprise pretty much gets the best of them, inducing yawning, eye-crossing boredom even among the most die-hard geek fans of this sort of material. At their best thought (and I consider the below clip in that category) they showed the stars of their day in lively settings matched with good material.

This clip, from Paramount's entry into the genre "Paramount On Parade", (about which you can learn far more than necessary thanks to the cool page on a Clara Bow website that I've given you the link to) is a song called "Dancing To Save Your Soul"--be patient with the first minute or so which is an interminable (but necessary) introduction by "Skeets" Gallagher. Unlike the previous handful of clips--which might as well have been directed by blind men--this number at least has the semblance of invention. The set, as you will see, is a brilliantly conceived "miniature"--with a huge, oversized pair of shoes to create the illusion of...oh, just watch it. And dig the "rubber legs" dance routine that closes it--the male dancer is Al Norman.

"TIS AUTUMN" OPENS IN LA

My film, "Tis Autumn: The Search For Jackie Paris", has officially opened in LA, for its one-week Oscar qualifying run. Anyone interested in seeing the film on the big screen, projected on 35mm (yes, even though its a digitally shot low-budget documentary, we've gone to the trouble of film-outing to satisfy the Academy's requirements) should high-tail it over to Laemmle's Regent Showcase at 614 N. La Brea Ave. (near Melrose) and catch one of the two daily showings--12:15 and 7:40 are the showtimes. For more information on the movie, go to the "for more information on the movie" part of this weblog. On the right hand side. Over there...up a little...you got it...

The film's official opening will be in New York City on December 7th of this year. In other words, that's when it will be reviewed, publicized, and hotly debated. By then, of course, anyone in the hep world whose interested in the movie will have illegally downloaded it and burned multiple copies, benefiting me not a whit. But who goes into the movie industry to make money?

HOTSY-TOTSY'S OF THE BOOTLEG YEARS PART TWO

Next on the list of HTILF's comes the adorable and very tiny (under five feet) and usually scantily clad dancer Ann Pennington.

Ann Pennington was another Florenz Ziegfeld star on Broadway, starting in the teens (actually her first Broadway chorus girl credit is in 1911!) and peaking in the late twenties when she was in her mid-thirites--considered quite old for those times, but as you will see in the marvelous clip below, still filled with vitality. Or as they might have said back then "pep!"

In addition to being a stage star and a wonderful dancer, she turned up in a number of silent films--unusual for a Broadway musical star at that time as the two worlds were, for the most part, snobbishly distinct and seperate--and during the sound transition she appeared in a number of significant early musicals. One of them, the lost "Gold-Diggers Of Broadway", continually threatens to turn up--currently only the last reel of this remarkable film is extant, though there might be larger portions of the soundtrack.

By the way, if this kind of thing fascinates you as it does me, learn about the Vitaphone Project. Well worth your time.

The number below, "Snake Hips", is from a movie shot in 1930 (or perhaps 1929, and released in 1930) called "Happy Days."
It was filmed in an early 70mm process called "Grandeur"--another early instance of wide screen about which I know nothing. (Anybody out there know? Hello???) It was directed by Ben Stoloff, whose most distinguished credit remains the Three Stooges first film "Soup To Nuts" (which is really quite strange...) He later directed a series of relentlessly worthless programmers at RKO and disappeared into b-movie producing before disappearing altogether.

Once again, we are in the land of pre-movies, wherin the camera's stare from fixed positions at a production number obviously designed for the stage proscenium. (There is one quasi-overhead angle that isn't quite yet in the land of Busby Berkeley--it occupies more the position of a drunk teetering over the edge of the third balcony.) Although aesthetically this is the cinematic stone-age, the pleasure once again lies in the ability to look at this number and pretend you're in the Wintergarden, or the Lyric Theater one night in the 1920's, watching Ann Pennington go to town...and thinking about which of your favorite speakeasy's you might drop in on after the show...and which of the chorus girls on stage might be your escort du jour...

HOTSY-TOTSY'S OF THE BOOTLEG YEARS

A reader (!) has complained that this weblog is light on the girlie-mag stuff that, it is assumed, attracts a real audience. So why not begin an investigation into some of the hottest, most salacious and oftentimes mysteriously tragic femmes that graced the entertainment world of the twenties and early thirties. First up is the delicious Mary Eaton--I mentioned her yesterday as she appears in the Eddie Cantor "Midnight Frolic" short for a second.

Here, if anyone cares, is a proper and compelling bio of Mary Eaton on Wikipedia. The long and the short of it is: early success with her singing and dancing brother and sisters; breakout success for Mary before the age of twenty on Broadway; big-time success dancing for Ziegfeld, co-starring with Cantor etc.; significant early talkie appearences (below is from the Marx Bros. first film, "The Cocoanuts"--she was also the star of the fascinating and exhausting "Glorifying The American Girl.") Then nada. Hard times. Hard liquor. In 1948 she's dead, aged 47, of something called "severe metamorphosis of the liver." Hmmm.

This number, "The Monkey Doodle Do", is a perfect example of the kind of uninflected recording of a stage show that makes these early musicals so fascinating. I count three cameras--maybe a fourth--all running simultaneously. 1) Eye level 2) First row balcony (which appears to be on a crane, thanks to that wonderfully shaky move back that they ambitiously try and fail to pull off early in the number) and 3) right orchestra pit, roughly where the drummer would be sitting. It is from this angle that we get our most tantalizing glimpses at the undergarments worn by a dancer in 1929. Drummers have always been the same. The music, by the way, was recorded live--a full orchestra was on the set. Playback had yet to be invented. From the looks of this, movies had yet to be invented.

As a Marx-brothers crazed kid, I was fascinated and appalled by "The Cocoanuts"--it was them, but it wasn't them. There was something so imperfect, so seemingly confused about the going ons that was missing even a year later in "Animal Crackers." And Oscar Shaw--the first in a long line of thankless romantic leading men in their movies--is certainly the worst of any of them. But I was always thrilled when this number came on, and the lithe blond woman started doing her nutty period jazz dance. The pirouettes were, apparently, her special thing. Here, from another world now utterly vanished except for this visual/aural archeological dig, is a woman who once knocked 'em dead (and apparently could also knock 'em back) on the great white way. God bless ya and keep ya, lassie. You were some dish...

IT'S 1929--LET'S PARTY

Occasionally a piece of film turns up that stands at the intersection of every single one of my peculiar set of obsessions--old showbiz history, New York City in the twenties and thirties, filmmaking, old music, nightclubs, dancing girls, etc. Such a piece of film is posted below.

The film is a short, shot in early 1929. Titled "A Ziegfeld Midnight Frolic " it stars Eddie Cantor and is, essentially, a filmed recording of what it was like to be sitting in a nightclub, all ginned-up on bootleg hooch, one long-forgotten evening in the 1920's. (The Ziegfield Midnight Frolics were, essentially, an "a-list" bonus event--after a Ziegfeld show, the celebrities of the day and the public who could pay the frieght were invited upstairs to a special cabaret atop Ziegfeld's theater to see an "intimate" nightclub revue. A very inside New York happening and one that this film preserves for us.)

In it, Cantor performs in blackface--for no apparent reason--a handful of songs and tells jokes. One of them is a fascinating reference to Henry Ford's anti-semitism, proving that topical humor existed in 1929--and not just about the Florida landboom. Though the opening shot crudely captures the actual New Amsterdam Theater on West 42nd street off of Broadway--where Cantor was starring at the time in Ziegfeld's production of "Whoppee"-- the rest of the film is set in a nightclub on top of the theater--though clearly it was photographed at Paramounts Astoria Studios in Queens. (The director is Joseph Santley, who co-directed the Marx Brothers "Cocoanuts" at the same time at Astoria. Even Oscar Shaw and Mary Eaton, the boring co-stars of "The Cocanuts"--turn up in this film. It has the feeling of everybody being on the lot and running back and forth between soundstages...)

In the last year or two of the 1920's, Broadway's biggest stars were doing Vaudeville at the Palace, performing in their own Broadway vehicles at night (and twice a week matinees) and being raced across the bridge to record their material in front of the new sound movie equipment that was, suddenly, invading the culture--internet-ishly--and changing everything for ever. (How the hell did they keep the schedules they kept? Answer: gin, cigarettes, coffee and "pep" pills. Also, nobody ate anything) The great thing about most of these early films is that they aren't really films as we think of them--they are recordings of stage acts. Whole features of Broadway shows (The Marx Brothers "The Cocoanuts" , Cantor's "Whopee") were "recorded"--and while they fail as conventional filmmaking, they succede in another, more ghostly and revealing way; they are genuinely voyeuristic journey's into the past. The uninflected filmmaking--the flat visuals, the stodgy pacing, the obvious groping in the dark that was going on technically--serve to keep the performances locked in the period, frozen in their time.

The film's in two parts and is courtesy (I guess-I didn't ask his permish) of someone who calls himself perfectjazz78 and posts some of the most interesting videos on youtube that you'll find.

"ROMAN SCANDALS"--AN EDDIE CANTOR SPLEEF

Continuing on the obsessive pursuit to map out a film geeks education in pre-cable, pre-VCR, pre-O.J. Simpson Los Angeles in the early 1970's:

The LA County Museam showed old movies on a regular basis and that's where I got my first taste of Eddie Cantor--in a 1933 movie called "Roman Scandals" which--if I'm not mistaken--never (or rarely) turned up on TV because of pre-Code naughtiness involving scantily clad chorus girls (one of whom was a twenty year old girl from Jamestown named Lucille McGillicuddy--sorry, Lucille Ball).

Eddie Cantor was one of the biggest names in show-business in the 1920's and early 1930's and as far as I can tell is completely forgotten today, except by people who really ought to get out of the house more. (So let that be a warning, Ben Stiller.) Cantor was a vaudeville headliner, a Broadway star and a successful early "talkie" star--his hit Bway show "Whopee" was filmed in 1930 (lousily) and started him on a brief career of starring in movies produced by Samuel Goldwyn. None of these films are ever shown anymore. I remember 1931's "Palmy Days" turning up on TV when I was a kid. But not Leo McCarey's "The Kid From Spain" (which Peter Bogdanovich says is Cantor's best film, but whose seen it? And why is it out of circulation?) Later he was a radio star and employed a very funny comic named Harry Einstein who played a character called "Parkyakarkus". In real life, Einstein fathered a son whom he mischeivously named Albert. Eventually, Albert Einstein decided to change his name to Albert Brooks and made "Defending Your Life". Aren't you sorry you asked?

"Roman Scandals" has much to recommend it--even though I haven't seen it in years, I remember finding the humor salacious, quasi-hip and suprising. Plus it was photographed by Gregg "Yeah, I shot other films besides Citizen Kane" Toland in masterful black&white hues.( I once asked an older cinematographer why old black and white looks so much better than new black and white. The answer was surprising in its simplicity; silver. They used more silver in nitrate stock than they can afford to use now. Hence the glistening quality of a properly restored 35mm print from the true golden age of black and white--the early to mid 1930's.) Gloria Stuart (late--well, a decade or so ago--of "Titanic") is in the film. So is Edward Arnold. The script was authored by, among other, the famous Broadway writer and wit George S. Kaufman. And the great (and seriously troubled--car crashes, booze, failed suicide attempts, vehicular manslaughter charges, late MGM Ann Miller material) Busby Berkeley staged the dances.

Below is the delightful opening number, "When We Build A Little Home". The seemingly simple beginning gives way to a wonderfully conceived and ever more complicated production number--it doesn't look like other Berkeley numbers (with the overhead gimmicks and whatnot) but certainly contains as much ingenuity as anything else he did, leading me to think this is his work, and not the credited director Frank Tuttle's. I've watched this number over and over and it never fails to make me smile...

THE GREAT RACE--A PETER FALK JOINT

The above picture is from a movie I directed a couple of years ago called "The Thing About My Folks." As you can tell, it stars Peter Falk and Paul Reiser (who also wrote the script) as a father and a son who bond on an improptu roadtrip. It's on HBO a lot these days. There. End of plug.

I mention it because my oldest friend, "Lawyer Fred", recently reminded me that one of the early highlights of our "movies on TV" educations was watching "The Great Race." Directed by Blake Edwards, and starring Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, Natalie Wood and Peter Falk among others, "The Great Race" was one of several movies that played on network prime-time television as big-event airings in the early 1970's. The others I recall were "Dr. Doolittle", "Born Free", and "It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World." Like the "Mad/World," "The Great Race" was conceived as a sort of high-budget homage to rollicking, old-fashioned comedy. Unlike "Mad/World," it's a period piece and filled with lovely gadgets, cars, planes, costumes and a monumental pie-fight. (I can't imagine that sequence is really all that funny anymore--or if it ever really was? Pie fights are to humor as military marches are to music. They just don't really provoke the responses that they once did...)

"The Great Race" was our favorite of these movies, so much so that we used to play it as a game. That is, we'd be different characters and race around the yard playing "The Great Race." Weirdly, the character I always played was Max Meen--the role inhabited by Peter Falk.

When I got the job directing "Folks" I remembered this and found the irony of directing the man who I used to imitate as a child too delicious not to mention. But--not mention it I did. (Or: mention it I did not.) Peter Falk is many things. But he is not a guy--at least when he's working--who would be interested in such a story. This isn't a criticism. His focus is so intense, his devotion to the task at hand so unwavering, that small talk isn't really his thing. I respected that. So for the twenty-five days we worked together, I never told him of my former role--playing Peter Falk playing Max Meen. Perhaps next time...

Why isn't "The Great Race" ever on TV? I can't imagine. It would seem ripe for a letter-boxed TCM Sunday afternoon slot. Or have I simply missed it? And I wonder how good the DVD is--commentary and extras-galored or basics? If anyone would like to buy me something for Christmas, may I suggest the DVD of "The Great Race"?

Below is Professor Fate's Airplane Stunt.

DUKE ELLINGTON MEETS CINERAMA?

Below I've posted an extraordinary piece of filmmaking from 1935. It runs just under ten minutes but is well worth your time.

"Symphony In Black" is a short film featuring Duke Ellington and his band, with guest appeareances by Billie Holiday and Scatman Crothers, believe it or not. (Holiday sounds like herself but is otherwise unrecognizable from her later self--here she's young, plump and healthy looking. Crothers, later to become famous for his recurring role on "Chico And The Man" is twenty-five years old here and quite the dude. He's not credited, but he plays Billie's two-timing boyfriend.) There is no dialogue--it is a purely visual representation of an early extended work by Ellington which is in five short parts. If you run out of patience (which I hope wont be the case) or have to abort due to a previously scheduled event, skip to the last two minutes, the section called "Harlem Rhythm." The specialty dancer in this sequence is the great Earl "Snake Hips" Tucker.
The elaborate super-impositions are still quite a thrill to watch--I wonder if there's a really proper, cleaned-up print of this film around? Being a Paramount release, one might suspect that the original negative might have been preserved.

What has this to do with Cinerama? Well: the film was directed (and I mean DIRECTED) by somebody named Fred Waller. IMDB research shows Mr. Waller to have been something of tech geek--in the twenties he was a cinematographer and designed miniatures and title sequences. In the thirties, he directed a series of musical short films for Paramount (of which this was one) all of which feature his trademark, high-style art moderne visual treatment. (I've seen two others--don't know about the rest but I'm catching up on them thanks to youtube). His real work, though, was in the development of a wide-screen projection process which led to his eleven-projector system "VITARAMA" which debuted at the 1939 New York Worlds Fair. Developed with Merian C. Cooper (another film scientist and co-creator of "King Kong"), this was the direct precursor of Cinerama, which finally premiered in 1953 at the above pictured theater on Sunset Blvd. in Hollywood, California. Fred Waller died one year later in 1954, aged sixty-eight. A fascinating and, as far as I can tell, largely forgotten figure.

HAPPY B'DAY EDDIE FISHER AGAIN/A FRANKIE VALLI MOMENT

My apologies to Eddie Fisher for hurrying along his journey by a year. He turned seventy-nine this past August 10, not 80 as I thought. I don't like getting birthday's incorrect. (Not that I'm particularly obsessed with my own birthday, agreeing with Gore Vidal who once wondered why anyone "would choose to celebrate time's ruthless one way passage"). Still, I was quick to assume that it was IMDB's fault, not mine. But alas, IMDB has Eddie Fisher's birthday correct--8/10/28. It's just that I've thought it was 2008 all year. Thanks to a reader (!) named Betty Anne for pointing this out. She also informs us that Eddie and Connie Stevens have recently been in touch. Oh, what I'd give for an MP3 of that conversation.

Moving from a mid-fifties icon to an early sixties icon:

Last Sunday I saw one of the best scripted musicals I've ever seen. "Jersey Boys", the story of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, is far more than the usual jukebox show ("Five Guys Named Mo", etc). Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice managed to create a script (not a "book"--I hate that term, it's leftover from paper-thin musical comedy confections of the teens and twenties where truly the unsung parts of the show were merely connctive tissue for the songs)--a real SCRIPT that weaves the complex and not always pleasant tale of the original Four Seasons around a full menu of their many hits (plus a few tunes that--not being a major FV/FS afficianado--I hadn't heard of). To be sure, Brickman and Elice had good stuff to work with--the true story is hardly lacking in drama. But their acheivement seems to me particularly satisfying because of several hard to pull off techniques that they deployed with aplomb.

For instance: the show is narrated--always a tiresomely controversial decision. But not by just one narrator. The four principals each take the reigns of the story at different times. (Having written scripts with narration myself, I know how frantic everybody gets about "the rules"--are you allowed to have more than one, shouldn't you cut any narration that tells what you're already showing, etc.) (By the way, the answer to the last question is no--watch "Double Indemnity", screenplay by Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler no less, which is filled with beautifully evocative narration of exactly what the camera is showing you). In the case of "Jersey Boys" the use of multiple narrators both deepens the emotional story of each man and also creates a unique bond with the audience; we come to feel simpatico with each of the main characters on an oddly personal level since each have taken turns telling us their side of the story "privately", as it were.

Additionally, Brickman and Elice wisely took stock of the standard tunes they were dealing with and seemed to recognize that, while the songs are still terrific, they needed to be (how to say this nicely)...given a little extra push...refreshed, perhaps...re-contextualized, you might say. In other words, who the hell really is going to hear "Can't Take My Eyes Off Of You" for the ten-billionth time and find themselves welling up with emotion? Thanks to the script, that song is--bizarrely--one of the most moving pieces of musical theater you're likely to ever see. I won't spoil it but anyone whose seen the show will know what I mean when I say that the sight of the "horn section" appearing on stage and the look between Valli and Bob Gaudio would make a stone cry (to borrow Orson Welles phrase on Leo McCarey's "Make Way For Tomorrow" as quoted by Peter Bogdanovich in "This Is Orson Welles." What a pile-up!)

I don't know what show this is from. Possibly Ed Sullivan. Quite something to see the real guys after seeing them brought to life on stage just a few days ago.

BUGS BUNNY--KWAZY JOOSH WABBIT?

Why bother being surprised anymore at what can be found on youtube? One of my favorite early childhood TV habits was Warner Brothers cartoons. (Never Disney, though. Never so much as a cartoon--and forget the boring, overlong features.) Loony Tunes/Merry Melodies cartoons were run every afternoon of KTTV, Channel 11. This was supplemented on the weekends (Sunday morning I think--and on CBS if I'm not mistaken) with the "Bugs Bunny Road Runner Hour" which had the advantage of containing the above "special material" opening. I've been singing this song to myself for the past thirty years without having seen it performed once in the intervening years. Now here it is, thanks to Al Gore...

Some questions arise from the above clip: 1) Who wrote "On With The Show This Is It!"? 2) Is that the title? Or is it "Overture, Curtain, Lights!" ? 3) Was it indeed written specially for this cartoon series, or was it originally written for a Dennis Morgan/Jack Carson Warner Brothers opus of the 40's ("Two Tickets To Taos") and rescued twenty some years later from obscurity by a cunning music supervisor at Warner Brothers (who presumably made sure to share to include his or her name in the copyrite info) ? 4) WHY IS THERE HEBREW LETTERING BURNED ON THIS VIDEO AND WHAT DOES IT SAY?

"Joosh", by the way, was a Walter Winchell-ism, his word for "professional Jews"--in other words, comics who trafficked in their Jewishness, back in the day when Jewish humor was a seperate genre, defined by a Yiddish accent--sometimes heavy (Smith and Dale, Mr. Kitzle of the Jack Benny Show) and sometimes merely inflected--Eddie Cantor, Groucho Marx etc. It's astonishing how popular this form of mildly offensive humor was in the 20's and 30's--a comic strip called "Nize Baby" by Milt Gross was the rage of its day, even putting out a special "yiddishe'dition" of "The Night Before Christmas". But humor can always, in my opinion, be given a pass for political in-correctness on the grounds that it's merely mocking a prevailing attitude of the time that might, in fact, have a darker reality to it. The real anti-semitism of the time--the casual, everyday kind--can be found in advertisments in the New Yorker Magazine, as late as 1938, for new hotels that proudly proclaim themselves "restricted"--in cold print, for all to see and admire. The word "Jewish" is never mentioned, but it didn't have to be.

MOVIES 'TIL DAWN--ELLINGTON EDITION PT.2

I'm closing out this weeks blogorreah as I began it, with the masterful Duke Ellington on film.

Below is one of the most interesting five minutes of film you'll ever see. (Unless, of course, you prefer action/adventure movies about pirates, comic book movies about men who are spiders, movies like "300" which I don't really know how to define, or paranoid thrillers about the number 23. In other words, unless you're normal.)

"Record Making With Duke Ellington" is a promotional short made for Irving Mills' (Duke's first manager, publisher and promoter) short-lived Master and Variety Labels in 1937. This little movie shows you the entire process of record making using the Ellington band in the real studio (as opposed to a set) and taking you through the whole process of creating a 78 RPM record. In some ways this merely points up, to me, how much more complex technology used to be -- the analogue brain that figured out the various machines required to mass-produce records seems infiniately more elegant than the digital alternative that sends music through my computer now...by why bother to compare things that I have absolutely no real knowledge of anyway.

Duke's career in Hollywood was spotty. There are a couple of fascinating early shorts (I'll post "Symphony In Black" next), his and the bands appearences (not nearly long enough) in the 1930 Amos&Andy movie "Check And Double Check", and the 1934 Mae West vehicle "Belle Of the Nineties." Come the forties and some more shorts (probably made in New York) are starting to turn up--not necessarily "soundies" but rather films of the band that were probably made, I would guess, for the all-black theater circuits. It wasn't until 1958 that somebody--in this case the visionary Otto Preminger--hired Duke to compose an original film score. The resulting score for "Anatomy Of A Murder" is such a singularly brilliant, strikingly original accompaniment to the movie that I can't believe Ellington wasn't hired again by others.

Or maybe Duke, who always presented an impenetrably courtly and modest front but who had to have been something of martinet, just didn't like his music taking a backseat to James Stewart, Lee Remick, George C. Scott...

Thanks to a man named Mark, who posted this, and who used to host a radio show called "When Swing Was King."

NICK TOSCHES AT MYSPACE

Having mentioned him yesterday, the breeze blew in his new myspace address where you can find an excellent interview and a number of his numbingly dark and funny poems

Nick appears in two of my movies: "Two Family House", where he plays a deeply unpleasant hotel clerk (possibly a narcotics abuser recently released from prison, given his haircut...) and "Tis Autumn", where as I noted yesterday he reads, in tones both dulcet and deapan, from Norman Bogner's 1968 novel "The Madonna Complex."

The opening pages of "Dino", his Dean Martin biography, are without a doubt the best and truest account of how what we now call show-biz came into being. But calling "Dino" a Dean Martin biography is a bit like calling "Othello" the "play about a hankercheif."

HOIST A JIGGER TO JOHN HUSTON

Another birthday (already past) this week. Legendary director, writer, painter, anecdotalist, "man's man" and smoker John Huston was born on August 5, 1906, and passed from this world on August 28, 1987.

I met John Huston one weekend in 1981, when I was sixteen. "Annie" (you should forgive the expression) was about to go into general release and the Directors Guild threw a "Weekend with John Huston" party aboard the Queen Mary in Long Beach, California. There were screenings of his films (all on 16mm) and q&a's with Huston himself. He wore a white jumpsuit, a white beard, and was so magnetic, charismatic and dangerous that--to my adolescent eye--most of the women on board (at least the ones that I was checking out) had eyes only for the seventy-five year old adventurer-director.

He told stories of his filmmaking past--but never in a self-aggrandizing way. Indeed, he was a curious mixture of self-love and lack of self-esteem. He was happy giving credit to everybody but himself and frequently (almost compulsively) interrupted any sort of praise by denying that he had anything to do with whatever was being praised. In particular I remember a lovely moment when a now-forgotten film he made (in the late seventies?) with Sly Stallone, "Victory", was being discussed. Somebody praised the soccer-match action sequences and began to discourse on Huston's skill, his staging, his editing...

And the great man held up a hand, silencing the speaker, and said: "That was allllllllll second unit."

One afternoon that weekend, he was coughing too heavily to continue speaking to the large audience (there was no amplification). He asked that anyone interested in continuing the q&a come to his stateroom for drinks. My parents felt that the invitation was simply a way for him to get off stage gracefully and decided not to go. But I did. To my surprise, there were only a few other people in the large suite. Huston insisted on ordering drinks before going on (probably the real reason for his stopping when he did.) I was seated next to him when the order was being taken. He asked for "a vodkatonic". I repeated
his order by rote. It was my first cocktail--and to this day I give John Huston credit for buying me my first drink.

Below is the original theatrical trailer for his first masterwork (and first film) "The Maltese Falcon". As if you didn't know.

RAISE A GLASS TO EDDIE FISHER

Yesterday my friend Nick Tosches (author of, among many other things, "Dino", the best book ever about show-biz) e-mailed me the following fact about this coming Friday.

"Eighty-seven years ago this coming Friday, on August 10, 1920, Mamie Smith stood before the microphone at the Okeh recording studio in New York City and sang real loud:

I’m gonna do like a Chinaman,
Go out and get some hop;
Get myself a gun
And shoot myself a cop."

Thanks, Nick. By the way, Nick appears in "Tis Autumn: The Search For Jackie Paris" reading from Norman Bogner's "The Madonna Complex." If for no other reason, one should see my movie for Nick's priceless rendering of an orgy scene, 60's style, where two women discuss how Jackie Paris' voice enters them and "has carnal knowlege" of them. But I digress...)

August 10 is important, music-wise, for also being the birthdate of Eddie Fisher, Elizabeth Taylor's fourth ex-husband, Debbie Reynolds first ex-husband and Carrie Fisher's future ex-father. This guy was once so well-known, so popular and so--ubiquitous, that it seems strange (and sad) to have to add that he's still alive and, as far as I can tell, almost completely forgotten. I can't say that I think a great deal of him as a singer--a pleasant tenor with an inoffensive personality is about as far as I can go. But he had a hell of a lot of hit records--something that the great Jackie Paris never acheived--and married a troika of interesting chicks. (Debbie Reynolds, Liz Taylor and Connie Stevens, in that order.) According to his Wikipedia entry:

"A pre-Rock and Roll vocalist, Fisher's strong and melodious tenor made him a teen idol and one of the most popular singers of the 1950s. He had seventeen songs in the Top 10 on the music charts between 1950 and 1956 and thirty-five in the Top 40. In 1956, Fisher costarred with then-wife Debbie Reynolds in the musical comedy Bundle of Joy. He played a serious role in the 1960 drama BUtterfield 8 with then-wife Elizabeth Taylor. His best friend was showman and producer Mike Todd, who died in a plane crash in 1958. Fisher's affair and subsequent marriage to Todd's famous widow caused a show business scandal because he and his first wife, also famous, had a very public divorce."

I don't know if anyone cares, but it always moves me when show-biz leaves somebody special behind. That's the story of Jackie Paris (much admired, much respected, completely blown-off). The story of Eddie Fisher is, it seems to me, the same but the opposite. Not a lot of respect but success, money, dames...and then nothing. Even his first two-ex wives, who once fought over his bones, were reconciled in a made-for-TV movie a few years ago (can't remember the title) and made jokes about how much they disliked him. Jesus. What an end.

So wherever you are, Eddie, happy 80th birthday. I hope the ride was good and the landing soft. And, truth be told, Jackie Paris probably would have exchanged all of his peers respect for a little of your success...not to mention a rumpus with Liz/Connie/Debbie and whomever else. The below clip is from Eddie's 1950's Coke Time series and is brought to you by Friscolobo, who seems to have some serious tentacles in the Eddie Fisher collector industry. The song is "Prisoner Of Love", first performed by Russ Columbo, later by Bing Crosby and still later by Perry Como.

MOVIES 'TIL DAWN--ELLINGTON EDITION

In the same year that "Stormy Weather" was made at Fox, another musical featuring a plethora of great black jazz entertainers was being shot over at MGM in Culver City. This was "Cabin In The Sky", which was, I believe, the film directorial debut of the great Vincent Minnelli--now, alas, remembered primarily as David Gest's posthumous ex-father-in-law. (Minnelli is credited the same year with directing a Red Skelton vehicle, "I Dood It", but I'm not sure which was shot first.)

"Cabin In The Sky" was another middle-of-the-night discovery in my television watching youth--I wonder if there was a reason that these mostly all-black films weren't being aired during daylight or prime-time hours? In any event, this one was a real find for me because it was the first footage I ever saw of Duke Ellington and his orchestra. In addition to Ellington, Lena Horne, the great (and mysteriously forgotten) Ethel Waters and Louis Armstrong all turn up in the film. The male lead is Eddie "Rochester" Andersen--very funny, for years, as Jack Benny's valet Rochester. A few years after I first saw "Cabin In the Sky" and "Stormy Weather" on local LA television, both became staples of LA revival house double bills. I rarely, if ever, missed them.

The filmmaking in the clip below is pure Minnelli--he's already in love with the expressive possibilities of the crane as well as feeling much more liberated in use of the dolly (often used laterally--against the movement of the dancers) in conjunction with dance. You can see this camera style brought to perfection in later Minnelli sequences-- "An American In Paris" and my favorite Minnelli muscial, "The Bandwagon" in particular. But even this early, the stage-trained Minnelli has developed the knack for finding a way for the camera angles to somehow swoon with the music.

I urge you to see both of these films on DVD--and to SKIP THE COMMENTARY, which is narrated by a pompous professor of African-American studies whose only purpose appears to be to drain the joy and accomplishments out of the work of a past generations artists and instead focus exclusively on "racial stereotypes"--at one low point he criticizes the dancers for "smiling too much."

MOVIES 'TIL DAWN--WALLER EDITION PT. 2

Shortly after "Stormy Weather" finally appeared on "Movies 'Til Dawn" (see previous post--if that's your idea of a good time), a movie called "King Of Burlesque" re-awakened, after a long slumber in the Fox vaults, on late-night local LA television. I knew of it because one of my Fats Waller LP's (not one of the RCA Vintage reissues but a strange, more obscure re-issue with a blank, cream-colored album cover which simply listed the songs in black bold-face type with no accompanying graphics) contained a long-ish cut of Fats singing "I've Got My Fingers Crossed." Now what was odd about this recording to my young ears was the sound of a thousand tap-dancing feet--the album notes indicated it was from the soundtrack of "King Of Burlesque" but gave no other information. Somehow, though, I tracked down the year--1936--and that the film starred Warner Baxter, Jack Oakie and Alice Faye (probably via Leonard Maltin's early edition of Movies On TV...how else, in those pre-internet days?) I used to listen to the recording and envision the accompanying movie in my head, never dreaming that it would soon appear--late at night--on our black and white Zenith. Above is the number as it appears in the film, in slightly truncated form. (Thanks, by the way, to kpjjazz--Jim--for posting this clip and the Louis Armstrong from a few days ago...)

Though the quality of the print is not great, there is much to admire in the filmmaking here. The director, Sidney Lanfield's covereage of the number is extensive, varied and inventive. (If indeed Lanfield shot this--the dance director was the great and forgotten Sammy Lee who choreographed many early musicals and later became a director--this could very well be his work as it was common, in the studio era, to use multiple directors on a movie, all charged with different tasks). Whoever is responsible, clearly much craft went into the creation of this particular production number. The dancer is Dixie Dunbar--later the dancing legs covered by the giant cigarette box in the early commercials for Old Gold And the year is 1936 (which means it could have been shot in '35) which makes the combined races on the same stage especially interesting--Benny Goodman had just started touring with Teddy Wilson that year and white people and black people performing together was by no means a sure thing. So how did Hollywood, never known for its chance-taking, wind up crossing the color-line so quickly?

The answer, alas, is probably hidden in the subtle distinction that, although whites and blacks are sharing the stage, they are not technically performing together. The band is all black, the dancers all white. Now of course they ARE all performing together--but, in a racists mind, it's possible that they didn't have to rehearse with each other. Believe it or not, this may have made all the difference in the sorry attitude of the time. Still, there they all are on stage together, Fats resplendent in his vast white suit...it was a start...

MOVIES 'TIL DAWN--WALLER EDITION

I wrote earlier this week about the film education one could get from watching local LA television, pre-cable, in the 1970's. But I neglected--on purpose--to mention my favorite secret memory of my television-centric youth. It was the discovery of an all night movie program--I forget which channel, but my guess is KTTV--called Movies 'Til Dawn. The lonely stillness of the logo --a picture of the lights of LA at night, sans music--that would suddenly interrupt a movie in mid-scene so spooked and moved me that the name of the program came to be synonomous in my young mind with a shadowy, secret and glamourously unknowable world (in black and white) that could only be contemplated properly at four AM. I named my first CD of original music after this program. And, of course, this weblog. "Movies 'Til Dawn" still conveys to me a sense of private nocturnal musings on secret obsessional pursuits. Like being nine years old and sneaking off to watch an old movie on TV by yourself.

Here is how I discovered the program. The combination of my early love of jazz and old film led me to a book called "Jazz In The Movies" by David Meeker. (Recently I was delighted to get a very friendly and complimentary e-mail from Mr. Meeker about our Jackie Paris documentary, which he seems to have enjoyed greatly.) This fine reference work provided me with loads of titles of films that contained my favorite performers--only which rarely seemed to play on TV. Duke Ellington in "Belle Of The Nineties" with Mae West would turn up on KTLA sometime, though with most of his numbers excised (I finally saw a complete print years later and realized this for the first time) and of course the 1956 "High Society'" with Sinatra and Crosby featured Louis Armstrong but somehow didn't really count--because it was in color? Because the big song was "Now You HAS Jazz"--which even then grated on my ears? Anway, those aside, nothing much else, jazz-wise, turned up. In particular I was desperate to see a film called "Stormy Weather", which not only featured Lena Horne, Cab Calloway and Bill 'Bojangles' Robinson, but my favorite jazz pianist and singer from early childhood Thomas 'Fats' Waller whose records I had been obsessed with since age five or six.

One night, the miracle happened. After months of assiduously searching the TV Guide, "Stormy Weather" turned up-at three am on a weeknight (school night, that is). I didn't bother discussing it with my parents--I simply set my alarm, padded into the den (furthest away from my parents room) and sat in ghostly light watching the great Fats Waller for the first time in live action. Below is the clip from the film that I remember seeing that long-forgotten dawn in the mid-1970's.

In it, Fats is thirty-nine years old (!) and death hides in plain sight--he is just months away from his untimely demise aboard a train heading east from Hollywood to New York, a victim of every kind of compulsive activity--work, fun, food, gin, gambling, girls, poverty, success...and the no doubt inescapable and poignant pressure to be both clown and artist, genius and jester.

LOUIS

Happy Birthday.

It's August 4th (this weekend), not July 4th as he claimed for so many years. The excellent Columbia University radio station, WKCR , will be playing hours of him this weekend.

fuhnnn

Learning HTML can be fun and exciting! Watch as I stumble my way through this...

To learn more about my soon to be released movie "Tis Autumn: The Search For Jackie Paris," click here

Here is the poster from my film, "Two Family House".