STUFF A TURKEY WITH CURLEY: A STOOGE HOLIDAY WEEKEND

A pleasant holiday weekend to any and all of you reading this (though do you have a Thanksgiving-style holiday this weekend in Greece, Marianna?) What better way to commemorate the ignoble founding of our noble country than by invoking the Three Stooges on this sacrosanct holiday. To my great pleasure, an enterprising youtuber who posts as "The Curtis Files" has taken the bold step of posting, in two parts, the very best--in my opinion--Stooge short featuring Curley, 1941's "An Ache In Every Stake"

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What has this film to do with Thanksgiving? Nothing in particular. Except in one hilarious scene (think it's at the beginning of part two as posted below) Curley is told to stuff a turkey...and after "shaving some ice" he performs the task with great panache and a literalness that will utterly revulse you.

Indeed, revulsion is a feeling that one must embrace in order to enjoy the Stooges. Why, as a kid, was I allowed to freely watch these orgies of violence--with eyes being poked out, ears being punctured, hot irons being applied to faces, open palm slaps to the face being routinely administered? Occcasionally a bit of violence occurred that was so ghastly that even my hardened nine-year-old soul could bear it no longer and I would hide my eyes. (I'll post one of those in the coming days--it has to do with Curley climbing a telephone pole with spiked shoes, which drive their way into Moe's...skip it, I'm cringing just writing it). I think the answer has to do with the fact that the violence-- to me as a child--had no reality; it never occurred to me that people would truly do such things. Which is why subsequently, in early adulthood, I fell out of love with watching the Stooges--by the time I'd come to know something of the world, I realized that barbarity along these lines was being committed in every corner of it...only to people who weren't as resilient as, say, Curley Howard. (Though how resilient was Curley? He died young, brain-damaged and addled by strokes. You can see his deterioration in his last handful of shorts from the mid-forties. Could being conked on the head non-stop for twenty years have had something to do with it? Or perhaps the question is: how could it not have?)

It was only in early middle-age that I found my way back to the Stooges--and it was precisely because I realized that the dreadfully violent nature of life as we know it needs to be...contextualized, I suppose would be the new-fangled, lit-crit word. It's just that thinking of violence in all its horror is a pretty bleak way to face something that can't be stopped. The Stooges provide a way to look at violence as something so horrific that it's comic. And SURVIVABLE. Thus the Stooge message is redemptive, forward looking and essentially American--everything bad happens for a reason and all you can do is march blindly and mind-numbingly ahead. Perhaps that's why so many of their films end with them running away from their current disaster and heading for the next, fresh catastrophe. Sounds like the history of our country.

"An Ache In Every Stake" was directed by Del Lord, a Mack Sennett veteran (and supposedly a former Keystone Cop) with as sure a slapstick hand as can be viewed. The film is tightly paced and very well executed--gags are set up and paid off handsomely and more happens in sixteen mintues than happened in many features made at the same time. Note the flight of steps that the Stooges have to climb with their blocks of ice--they're the same stairs used by Laurel and Hardy in "The Music Box" to deliver a piano (shot ten years earlier). The stairs are still there, by the way, located in the Silverlake area of Los Angeles (now, however, houses surround them, though they are still visible and open to the public). Aside from the stuffing the turkey scene, Curley also has a remarkable dance moment--a couch spring somehow gets hooked on his rear end and attached to Bud Jamison (the foil) causing Curley to skid backwards on the dance floor...

Thanks again, Curtisfiles, for posting this, even though it's abysmally colorized (by whom? for what reason?); I truly can't think of a better film than "An Ache In Every Stake" to watch on the same weekend in which Sarah Palin visited a turkey slaughterhouse and appeared on TV with an about to be executed bird in order to cheerfully support a local business and celebrate this bracingly strange holiday institution.

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THE "SECRETS" MONOLOGUES: MEET (AMONG OTHERS) MARSHALL EFRON

A large plot point in "City Island" (no spoiler, no worries) has to do with an acting class that Andy Garcia's character is attending and their assignment for the week, which is to think of their worst personal secret and turn it into a monologue for the class to hear. In due course, Andy does so. But so did the other acting students. So, in due course, I filmed monologues--mostly improvised by the actors--with the intention of showing bits of them strung together, leading up to Andy's big moment.

Guess what? IT ALL GOT CUT. All of it. I wonder if some of you reading this blog are starting to wonder if there is any of the movie left--or if, in a fit of self-censorship I simply erased my own movie. Fear not. There are still ninety-eight minutes of wonderful entertainment left. But the below edited "class monologues" sequence once again proves the futility of trying to anticipate what should be dropped from the script prior to shooting; I actually fought hard for all of the actors seen below to be hired, insisting that the sequence was of dire importance to the climax of the movie. Frankly, it didn't even make it past the first assembly--as soon as I saw it (and at that time the film was running well over two hours) I said goodbye, never to cast a backward glance.

Still, the actors involved all did lovely jobs. Matthew Arkin tells the wonderful story centering on the cross-dressing boy who's discovered by his farmhand father while in mid-Barbara Streisand impersonation. Louise Stratten in the blonde knockout who had an affair with her girlfriend. My sister, Eileen De Felitta, is the woman who finds herself without any secrets worth telling. And the great Marshall Efron is the man whose father shot his dog.

Marshall has been in every feature I've made, save for my documentary. A brilliant, versatile humorist/actor/writer/social observer/voice over artist/childrens book author, you may remember him from a wonderful PBS program of the 1970's, "The Great American Dream Machine", on which he wrote and performed in a variety of topical, satirical and sometimes plain nonsensical sketches. I remember this show from my youth--and thus was delighted to meet Marshall in the mid 1990's and cast him in my first feature, "Cafe Society". Since then, a movie isn't complete for me unless Marshall turns up in it. He turns up in my movies "Two Family House" and "The Thing About My Folks". Alas, in "City Island' his speech has been cut. But he's on view as one of the acting students and, thanks to YouTube, is now on-line giving his speech as well.

Additionally, a handful of other Marshall Efron video's seem to be popping up on YT, so I've taken the liberty of posting one that appears to be recently made--a typically Marshall-esque send-up of the Food Network in which he creates a truly vile sounding meal and teaches you how to make it. In the comments section, I was surprised to read an angry viewer's comment that they actually made the entire meal and tasted it before realizing that the whole thing was a joke. Have we stopped thinking and simply begun responding to any sort of input that comes our way on-line? The answer would seem to be yes, which was probably Marshall's point in making the video in the first place. N'joy...

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TIS AUTUMN OPENS IN THE UK

My documentary, "Tis Autumn: The Search For Jackie Paris", has--unbelievably--opened in London, at a fine theater which is also showing the Coen Brothers movie "Burn After Reading" (which I didn't much care for, but still it's rather nice to share a marquee with them). Click here to listen to a podcast I did the other day (via good old fashioned long distance telephone--no Skype, no I-chat, not even a cell phone, just a nice landline) with Jason Solomens of The Guardian.

Not one to be shy of shameless self-promotion, here's the four star Time Out London review. And below, courtesy
of my old friend Leopold Wurm, a few photos of the cinema in London where the film is playing.

Show me a proud filmmaker and I'll show you an internet whore. Or perhaps it's the other way around. I'll be back with more City Island news shortly. Meanwhile, dig the "Tis Autumn" trailer below.

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CITY ISLAND: DELETED SCENE PLUS BATHROOM HUMOR

We're back, with access once again to dear, darling youtube and another cut scene--which I mean in both ways: the scene is both edited and excised from the finished film. It features Andy Garcia and Emily Mortimer saying goodnight to each other at the Roosevelt Island tram station. This scene took an exceptional amount of urban planning--we had to secure the private use of the tram for the end of the scene, and use a Roosevelt Island Tram Operator to take us up and back at our will for the interior of the tram. All of this work and the damn thing gets cut. But that's the nature of the beast called cinema. If it doesn't work in the finished film, it has no business being there, no matter how hard the scene was to get or how good it is. As a wise man whose name I can't remember once said, "Any hack can cut a bad scene, but it takes an artist to cut a good one". Good line. Maybe I thought of it.

A funny thing happened on the evening of this shoot. I had to go to the bathroom. Now, I wouldn't normally blog an event of this low order but I'll make an exception in this case since this proves the power of the position of the director. I didn't have a trailer, you see. And the public bathrooms at Roosevelt Island were, to put it nicely, a catastrophe. So I waited for an interval when a new lighting set-up would be started -- in this case it was the tram station scene posted below--and asked my DP Vanja Cernjul how long it would take. "Close to an hour" was the answer. "Make it an hour fifteen", I replied. He was surprised. Usually the director is looking to spend less time lighting, not more. Then I found my Teamster--the driver who took me to set every morning and home every night--and told him that I had to be driven to my apartment in Manhattan, that we had just over an hour to get there and get back with a "short wait for something I have to do once we're there" factored into things. He didn't blink. Like the fine Teamster he is, he just said "Let's move".

And so I had the singular experience of commandeering a Teamster to take me to the bathroom in my apartment, which was a hell of a lot nicer than the wretched accommodations at Roosevelt Island. And nobody questioned it, because I was the director. Can you see know how too much of this sort of treatment could, potentially, turn the wrong sort of personality (somebody not as sweet and well balanced as yours truly) into a demanding, spoiled control freak who walks around commandeering any and all available to serve his/her personal whim? In other words, Oliver Stone.

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SUNDAY AT THE COLOR CORRECT: A PAUSE

I'm sitting, this Sunday in November, in a dark room at Post Works, the lab that's handling "City Island". The color correct is underway--the process by which the color elements are balanced for the finished print. Our cinematographer, Vanja Cernjul, is shooting a Showtime series by day, so the color correct has been proceeding at night, after he wraps, and on the weekend. He's sitting next to me as I write this, dozing off.

I have a deleted scene that I was going to post, but frigging' YouTube is telling me I'm not a member (untrue) and making it
hard for me to become one again. And after all I did for youtube! Stay tuned. I'll figure out a solution and be back, hopefully tomorrow, with more clips.

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CITY ISLAND: EZRA MILLER MEETS...MR. WHIPPLE?

Re: my recent television-centric memories: what do the following shows have in common (aside from being in perpetual re-runs on local syndicated television between 1970-1976)? "Get Smart", "The Partridge Family", "Nanny And the Professor", "Bewitched", "Hogan's Heroes", "I Dream Of Jeannie", "The Bill Cosby Show", "Petticoat Junction", "The Fugitive", "Gidget", and "The Flying Nun"?

The too-obscure-to-be-guessed-at answer is: Dick Wilson, a soft, mustachioed character actor who made at least one pit stop on most major network shows. A reliable, working character actor, he might never have expected to become well-known or super successful, but he did work an awful lot--not a bad place for a middle-aged actor to be.

And then along came the toilet paper company. Charmin cast Wilson as "Mr. Whipple", the fussy super-market manager who warned customers not to squeeze said brand of toilet paper. If Wilson didn't exactly become a household name, "Mr. Whipple" and his silly catchphrase certainly did. He achieved genuine television icon status for these commercials which I remember running throughout the mid to late seventies. Indeed I would occasionally see Wilson in one of the above-mentioned shows and suffer that strange spasm of confusion at seeing an actor I identified so strongly with a specific role "in the wrong place", playing somebody other than that character. (The most jarring example of this for me was William Frawley, aka Fred Mertz of "I Love Lucy" fame. Frawley turns up in dozens of movies beginning in the early thirties and I was always perplexed to see a younger Fred Mertz standing around playing something quite different than the passive, cheapskate landlord who I knew him to really be; generally Frawley's earlier roles were tough-talking gangsters or con artists).

Wilson and Mr. Whipple, as you'll see in the longish (two minute) commercial I've posted below, became so well known that they were actually able to base this particular commercial on the no-doubt false premise of a hidden camera talking to customers who then are "surprised" and delighted at the appearance of television folk-hero Whipple/Wilson. By the way, Wilson died a couple of years ago in his mid-nineties. Apparently he received complimentary shipments of Charmin from Proctor&Gamble until the end of his life.

But the real news is: I've posted a short edited scene from "City Island" featuring the soon to be too-famous-to-talk-with-me Ezra Miller (and it won't be for selling toilet paper). Previously I've avoided posting edited versions of scenes from the film for piracy concerns, but the meaning of this scene is so obscure, so difficult to connect anything to, that I feel confident in its ultimate uselessness to everyone. Can anyone say "Da Bronx"?

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TV PARTY TONIGHT!

To my amusement, I see that I touched a chord with a few readers by referencing my 70's era television viewing habits. Amazing how that decade's youth (like myself and a few of you who wrote in) can remember whole blocks of programming times--I somehow suspect the same isn't true of television addicts in later decades, once the seasons got less defined and shows started getting pulled early or rescheduled at the whim of panicked network executives.

Mr. Fisher's recitation of his no doubt beloved Friday night lineup brings back memories to me--I was never able to stay up to quite the finish of "The Odd Couple", however. Then there were Saturday night's on CBS--Mary Tyler Moore (8 to 8:30), Bob Newhart (8:30-9:00) capped by the one hour variety blast of Carol Burnett. Again, the final musical number usually got dozed through, but I remember always waking up for the last song, viz:



Once I got interested in movies, however, nightly network programming grew a lot less interesting to me. Various channels offered an Eight O'clock Movie and one could (and I did) get a real cinematic education in this way--albeit one slanted heavily toward the Crosby/Hope school of auteurism. For made-for-television programming, I turned instead to daytime reruns of old classics. This is what my television schedule looked like on a normal schoolday, circa 1975/76.

3PM-Ozzie and Harriet
3:30--Father Knows Best
4 to 5--quick rush through homework.
5-6--Three Stooges
6-7--Our Gang (while eating dinner)
7-7:30--I Love Lucy
7:30-8--quick rush through remaining homework, pajamas, tooth brushing
8-10--Eight O'Clock movie (KTLA Channel 5 or KHJ "Million Dollar Movie").

Generally I was passed out by half past nine. Only years later did I find out that Fred MacMurray shot Barbara Stanwyck at the end of "Double Indemnity". By the way, as I grew older (and my taste declined) I gave up "Our Gang" (or "The Little Rascals" as they had been re-baptized for television) for:

6PM--The Partridge Family
6:30--The Brady Bunch

But it was the movie shows that had, by then, claimed my heart and mind. And the introductions to these movie shows were quite as important to me as the movies themselves. This Channel 5 logo is immediately followed by the weirdly chilling MCA logo--which for many years I didn't understand the purpose of. Eventually I learned that Paramount had stupidly sold the television air rights to all their movies made pre-1945 (I believe that date's correct) to Universal. Thus MCA, which owned Universal, put their logo prior to the Paramount logo on these films for TV usage.



Next is "Screen Gems". I'm still not clear what business this company had with sticking their logo on so many old films of the past (they seemed to have bought the TV rights again to, among many others, all the Three Stooges movies). This logo will forever be associated with my impending dinner time, as the Stooges went off the air just as dinner was flying in...



And none of this frankly nostalgic and meaningless reminiscence would be complete without the" Gone With The Wind"
themed opening of the Million Dollar Movie.



Then there were the commercials. Unlike commercials now--which are so ear-splitting, confusingly edited or simply unfunny, the commericals of the day had repeat characters, charming concepts and sometimes even actors who you might have spotted in a movie made twenty years earlier. As a "taste" of things to come...



Youtube, it turns out, is packed with old commercials. Perfect for the shrinking attention span left to most of us who grew up, glazed and hypnotized, watching a cool six hours of TV a day. We'll get to more of them next time (this weekend?) Until then, I'll leave you with the inevitable...

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CITY ISLAND: PARTRIDGE DAY?

It's Obama Day--sorry, Election Day, and I'm proud to announce that instead of watching 24 hours of non-stop election coverage, I'm watching (mostly listening really) to a very charming movie called "Come On Get Happy", a dramatization of the backstage story involved in the making of the seminal 1970's hit TV show, "The Partridge Family". I became obsessed with the Partridge's when they first hit syndication--this must have been in the mid-seventies, just a few years after they began airing. Naturally, being a wise-ass ten year old, I was drawn to the wise-ass ten year old Danny Partridge (the ever-since doomed and self-destructive Danny Bonaduce). Oddly, I was also rather attracted--though I was too young to quite put words to it--to Shirley Jones who played the mother, Shirley Partridge. Somewhere around the same time I caught her Oscar winning turn in "Elmer Gantry" and was pleased and not necessarily shocked to discover that Mother Partridge was at heart the true hussy that I somehow felt her to be. In any event, the low-budget, low-aiming little biopic that plays behind me offers a number of witty touches--the guy playing Keith really chews it up, creating a convincing and obnoxious portrait of a twenty-year old rocker who is thrust into the spotlight playing and representing everything he despises. Also, they use what sound like actual music cues from the original show to underscore the dramatic scenes--a very deft little piece of musical period setting. By the way, the director of a great many episodes of the original Partridge Family was a man whose other work completely eludes me, but whose name I will never forget: E.W. Swackhammer.

Below I've posted a shot of the wonderful Carrie Baker Reynolds (who plays Denise in "City Island") walking upside down. That is, she is being viewed by Tony (Steven Strait) while he bends down to pick up some lumber--he sees her through his legs. When I described the shot, my DP said it wasn't necessary to turn the camera upside down, that it could be "flipped" later in the film lab. But I insisted that we do it for real. What the hell fun would the dailies have been the next day if we hadn't had this to look forward too? Also, for the hell of it, I've included the season two opening and closing credits of "The Partridge Family". Happy Patridge Day--make that Obama Day...

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