Herewith, the first of the stills from "City Island". And click here to read the allaboutjazz.com review of "Tis Autumn: The Search For Jackie Paris". The "Tis Autumn" DVD can now be ordered on Amazon, though technically it's a pre-order as the street date is 3/31. But why let that stop you?
I'll publish more stills from "City Island"...albeit erractically, so as to force you to keep coming back to check the site. Meanwhile, enjoy this portrait of an all-Amercian dysfunctional family...and don't forget to click to enlarge!
Apropos of Jerry Lewis's Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award given to him at the Oscar's last night, I thought I'd reflect (and frankly reprint from a very long time ago a quite interesting piece I wrote for this blog back when ABSOLUTELY NOBODY READ IT) upon the man who, one way or another, everybody loves to hate...and secretly (I believe) everyone actually quite likes and perhaps even adores.
Check yesterday's (2/22/09) New York Times Sunday arts section appreciation of Lewis. I believe it's his first American highbrow nod in God knows how long (if ever) and it comes, frankly, as something of a surprise. What a nice thing for the New York Times to reach across the divide and celebrate the fact that Jerry Lewis--our last link to true, old-fashioned, show-biz is alive and well and able to accept a long overdue award. Even so, the writer can't help but reference the eight-hundred pound elephant in the room--namely the fact that Jerry's tendency to go to very uncomfortable (and often unfunny) places makes him...dangerous. Well, yes. And for me it's always been that danger that I've cherished--his "little boy lost" thing is never the point for me in nearly the way that his "crazed ego-driven id-monster" thing" is. And unless you buy that about him, you'll have a hard time feeling good about yourself for loving Jerry. But love him lots of us do. And frankly, Jerry-hating (or pretend Jerry-aversion) is as boring as New Yorkers hating Los Angeles (yes yes, I've been guilty of that old saw)...or, if you will, of Republicans calling Democrats "socialists". Enough! Can't we admit that the world is a large place filled with interesting things that we should be open to? Can't we all be friends? Or at least the few of us who are worthwhile? Let's start by enjoying the brilliant "Typewriter" routine from one of more middling mid-sixties efforts, "Whose Minding The Mint?"
Great. Right? And not offensive, sentimental or too crazy. On the other hand:
Imagine a 70 year old getting pissed off at a kid doing an imitation of him...and after inviting him onto the stage. This is the stomach-churning Lewis, the Jerry who my mother loathed and couldn't abide my fandom of.
Upon reflection, I've been seriously fascinated by this gifted, paradoxical creature for many many years. The paradox in Lewis is, you might say, the classic comic's paradox: how can sombody so funny be such a repugnant shit? Lewis can be outwardly warm and expressive when he chooses to be--and can also be famously rude and cold. Years ago, a friend of mine--who was also a big Jerry fan-- worked as a P.A. on the "Today Show" and excitedly told me that Lewis was appearing as a guest. When the day came, my friend waited for Jerry's interview to be over and approached him. "Mr. Lewis, I just wanted to tell you what a big fan--" And this was as far as he got. Lewis spun on him and said, "How dare you bother me? Can't you see I'm busy?"
Awful though the story was (and lousy though my friend felt) something in me loved Lewis for his nutty star attitude. The monstrous egoist and the innocent boychick truly exist side by side in this man. Need I mention his comment on women comedians? ("That sets me back a bit...I think of them as baby-producing machines.") And a year or so ago, apparently at hour eighteen on his telethon, he called somebody's son a "fag." (GLAAD got on his ass immediately. To his credit, Jerry apologized immediately.) Still, I believe sincerely in his concern for and desire to help the sick and needy--I never bought the 'he's only doing it for his image' response. And I also believe he'd fire his own kid if he felt like it. (In fact I think he's estranged from more than one of his children). In Peter Bogdanovich's new book about actors, "Who The Hell Is In It", the Lewis section (which is for my money the most interesting section of this very interesting book) contains several rather...strange lines that one could only imagine Lewis saying. For instance, he talks openly about his womanzing in his early days (despite his famous "perfect marriage" to Patty that produced his first six kids) and off-handedly mentions having sex with a different woman every morning in his dressing room before getting down to work. "Just to get the poison out...", he adds. Whaaaat? This Jerry--bigshot-take no prisoners-it's all about me Jerry--is best reflected in this brilliant bit from "The Errand Boy".
And then there is the much contested "Buddy Love", his supposed send-up of former partner Dean Martin but in fact a rather naked portrayal of Jerry's dark side--his "King Of Show-Biz" manner circa 1969. Viz his brilliant entrance in "The Nutty Professor", directed, conceived and LIVED by Jerry:
Even if he won't cop to it, it's all here: the swagger, the slick (and slightly greasy) hair, the overwhelming desire to humiliate underlings. Do you still buy that Buddy Love is based on Dino? Buddy is Jerry. And Jerry knows it. Kind of.
Clearly the negative image drowned Lewis in the public opinion polls--by the late sixties he was finished as a movie star and his directing career never really took off. The telethon became his main gig. It took the Eddie Murphy remake of "Nutty Professor" to bring him back to the zeitgeist--and it apparently bailed him out financially. Lewis's deal with Paramount gave him the ownership of his old movies back after thirty years, which means that Paramount had to pay him a fortune to remake a film that they'd produced in the first place.
Lewis and his craziness can't really be seperated. With Sinatra, one must ignore the images of his thugs beating up his fans for looking at the Man the wrong way and just listen to the voice. But with Lewis, the ugliness is part of his charisma--danger is very much a part of his act. Or was. His appearance on the Oscars last night (see below clip) was tame, polite and perhaps apologetic; protestors were gathered outside the auditorium specifically to object to his being given a Humanitarian award (I'm unclear as to why and frankly don't care). Nonetheless, he gives the Oscar audience a "crazy kid" face at the end (the camera cuts away too quickly) just to show that the old Jerry is buried somewhere within. And I, for one, find it just a little sad that the best Hollywood can offer Jerry Lewis is a deserved but sanctimonious "Humanitarian Award". How about a good old fashioned "Lifetime Achievement" award for a comic, writer, actor, director, producer who life and work have spanned a vast amount of the show-biz experience and who has never truly been properly recognized...or, when he has, has had to endure unnecessary apologies from his supporters for loving him, warts and all.
Congrats on the Hersholt, Jerry. It's better than the "Don't Let The Door Hit You On The Ass..." award that most of us get. Maybe next will come the Buddy Love "Prick Award". And then, finally, perhaps the two faces of Jerry Lewis will finally meld into one and we can celebrate this complicated clown for who he is. Before it's too late...
Our week of cabaret interviews ended (last Friday already...oy vey, where have I been?) with the great Dixie Carter. Now most of you probably share my own ignorant view that Ms. Carter is nothing more than a legendary television star ("Designing Women", of course, but also "Different Strokes" for awhle and more recently her memorable turn on "Desperate Housewives"). But thanks to "Intimate Nights" author James Gavin, I'm now hip to the fact that Dixie Carter is, first and foremost, a singer of rare ability, a cabaret artist to the bone whose early work was in the small nightclubs that we're exploring in our documentary. (By the way, apropos of that "Desperate Housewives" mention: according to the above wikipedia link, Marc Cherry, DH's creator, began his career in Hollywood as Dixie's assistant during "Designing Women". There's a moral in there about not being a total dragon to your personal assistant who--it turns out--might well become your future meal ticket...)
Our interview revealed a number of interesting facts, including Dixie's first great ambition: to be a singer in the Metropolitan Opera. Indeed it was this dream that sent her to New York from her native Tennessee, though apparently her pipes weren't quite up to what the Met was looking for. Nonetheless, two men saw her potential and mentored her: the composer/pianist John Wallowitch and the great Richard Rodgers, who hired her to understudy a production of "Carousel". Rodgers noticed a quality in her that even she wasn't aware of; her humor. Indeed finding a woman as attractive as Dixie Carter who can also make you laugh is a casting bonanza and Rodgers quickly determined that her strength wasn't going to be in playing Julie Jordan (which is the role Carter said she considered "hers") but rather as Barbara Pettigrew.
Later in the sixties, she co-starred in several intimate reviews at the legendary Upstairs At The Downstairs in Greenwich Village with fellow "beginners" Lily Tomlin and Madeline Kahn. All three women of course went on to stardom. But Dixie's life took a curious turn; she married a businessman named Arthur Carter (no relation, though I wonder if she was tempted to bill herself as Dixie Carter and Carter). She had children and prematurely retired from show-business. In one section of our interview she remembered with melencholy sitting in her beautiful 5th Avenue apartment watching her former co-stars, now famous, on television...
Anyway, stardom was hers again in the eighties...and what did she do with it? Returned to cabaret, with a legendary show at the famous Cafe Carlyle (a show I never saw even though I live a block from the damn place), one that I believe Jim Gavin holds some kind of attendance record for (I think he said he went back 29 times one season). I find this particularly relevant since, in spite of finding her real success on television, Dixie clearly still feels the pull of the intimate nightclub--her true metier is, in fact, the cabaret environment she began in. This speaks to precisely the point that I'm hoping we make in this film; cabaret wasn't simply a "launching pad" (though it was a good one for many), but rather a way of life. Once tasted, the particular excitement of intimate performance couldn't be bested. By the way, Dixie's also very funny. The below picture of me, Dixie and our cinematographer Melissa Painter features us all cracking up. Why? Because right before Jim snapped the picture Dixie shouted out: "1...2...3...MONEY!"
One of the real pleasures of our interview was Dixie's extremely thoughtful reflections on her fellow performers. She clearly has thought deeply and analytically about performers she admires and what they do and how they do it. Thus her reflections on such cabaret icons as Felicia Saunders, Julie Wilson and the legendary Mabel Mercer transcended mere fandom ("Oh, she was wonderful!", "Ah, simply the greatest!") and instead led to real insight as to how these songstresses acted their on-stage personas--what their specific talents were and how this impacted their singing. Alas, Dixie's husband, acting GIANT Hal Holbrook, was out of town doing his famous Mark Twain show and so was unavailable to us. But that appears to be temporary; he's indicated a willingness to be interviewed for our film. What has Hal Holbrook to do with cabaret? Well, as few people know, Hal Holbrook's awesome acting career began as a cabaret perfomer in a downtown club called The Duplex...
Below is Dixie Carter camping up "Sweet Georgia Brown" from a 1990 episode of "Designing Women".
Forgive my disappearing act, but I had one hell of a week. We (myself, James Gavin and Melissa Painter) interviewed on-camera the first half-dozen subjects for the documentary "Intimate Nights" (see previous post if you don't know what I'm talking about). I already wrote about Shelley Berman, our first fascinating find. But it only got more interesting as we went on. On Monday, we met the great Orson Bean, who I knew mostly from game shows when I was growing up but who had a wonderful and extensive career in cabaret in the 50's as well as a big-time Broadway career ("Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter", "Never Too Late" etc.) Oh, you don't believe that I really met Orson Bean? Well...
There. Desdemona's hankie isn't in the same class of proof.
Next up was the wonderful French actor/comic/singer Robert Clary, who most people know from "Hogan's Heroes". A truly gentle-man, Clary had a horrific background which he somehow emerged from and triumphed over--he grew up in a concentration camp during the second world war and lost all or most of his family. Clary is also someone I knew largely from the TV game show circuit, but who did so much more and had many fascinating stories to share with us about his time at "The Blue Angel", the premiere swank/chic/ritz/pisselegant cabaret nightclub of 1950's New York. Ahem...
Yes, yes, I know this is just a picture of Robert Clary staring off at some unknown person or thing. But the photos of me and Mr. Clary simply aren't flattering enough for me to publish. Why did I wear that tight red sweater?
On Wednesday of this past week, we hopped in my SUV and drove to the desert--Rancho Mirage, to be precise--to meet one of the great treasures of the entertainment world, Kaye Ballard. I grew up watching her on TV--lots of Johnny Carson appearences of course, but also a wonderful show called "The Mothers-In-Law" in which she co-starred with Eve Arden. Her career began in New York in 1946 and broke some serious ground for all female comics--she was there even before Phyllis Diller--showing that women (attractive one's for that matter) could make audiences laugh. The young Kaye also seems to me to be a kind of spiritual godmother to Sandra Bernhard. Kaye gave us a great interview, then treated us to lunch at a superb local Indian restaurant. She paid with a hundred dollar bill that she proudly told us came from recent gambling winnings.
Kaye is not only a terrific comic but a wonderful singer who, it turns out, made the very first recordings of several hugely popular songs; "Fly Me To The Moon", "Lazy Afternoon" and "Maybe Next Time". The last, which of course shot to fame after Liza Minelli sang it in "Cabaret", was in fact written for Kaye several years earlier--and I can't say that she's all that pleased with the fact that Liza got the recognition for a song that should have "belonged" to her. Indeed, Kaye is somewhat ambivalent in general about how she's been treated by show-biz. On the one hand, she's a genuine fan--an enthusiast of the first order--of great performers; she never tires of praising to the skies those people she worked with who she admired. (That's not always the case with performers--many are too envious or self-regarding to admit to admiration of anyone). On the other hand, Kaye feels a little slighted--perhaps with reason--by the powers that be. She didn't get the hit TV show that Lucille Ball got and the fact is that she recorded a whole album of Fanny Brice material just a few years before Streisand shot to fame in "Funny Girl". "You know I never got nominated for anything?", she said to us at one point. "Not a Tony, not an Oscar, not an Emmy, not a Grammy!" I felt her pain. "Yes, but you've got something that almost nobody has". "What's that?" "You live on a street that they named after you."
And in fact her street in Rancho Mirage has been named "Kaye Ballard Lane". You can find it on google maps. Below is a very funny segment of a "Mothers-In-Law" episode. Why the hell isn't this popping up on Nick or Tvland? Or DVD for that matter?
Welcome to my new movie, a documentary based on a wonderful book by James Gavin called "Intimate Nights: The Golden Age Of New York Cabaret". Jim's book documents, in astonishing and wonderfully entertaining detail, the history of the small clubs--those chic and innovative nightspots where, once upon a time, people went too for an evening of sophisticated entertainment featuring singers, musicians, monologists, stand-up comics etc. Cabaret, in other words, in its most rarefied and exuberantly sophisticated form. I urge you to buy Jim's book if you're interested in this subject. And I urge you even more strongly to buy it if you're not--because it will make you into a convert. It's a fantastic cultural treasure trove that deserves more attention and is about to get it.
I met Jim last year through a mutual friend and, without knowing it, we were each other's admirers; I'd loved "Intimate Nights" since it's initial publication in the early 1990's (I used it--plundered it more accurately--for research for my first film "Cafe Society") and he, it turned out, had just seen my documentary "Tis Autumn". He mentioned that he'd always thought turning his first book into a documentary was a good idea and I instantly took to it; cabaret is a terrific subject and many of its stars and graduates are still with us (many more, sadly, have disappeared in the recent past-- Eartha Kitt, for instance). Why not make this film a la Ken Burns into a major documentation of the whole field, thought I? And so another reckless adventure began. One really ought to search for financing before making a movie, but the really important thing here was to capture as many interviews as possible as quickly as possible--just this morning, the New York Times carried the obituary of the terrific singer/pianist Blossom Dearie. Thus we've begun taping this past week in LA--our first interview subject was the legendary comedian/writer/actor/monologist Shelley Berman. My theory is that once we tape a pile of interviews with interesting people, the entire project will sound more viable to the big-time doc-funding doc lovers out there. And if not, screw them. We'll find some way to create this movie over the next couple of years.
Below I've posted a clip of Shelley Berman from the Dean Martin show, circa mid-60's I would say (based on the clothes and the progression of the bags under Dino's eyes--not as deep as the early seventies and hence less of that strange fake-tan make-up that he began lathering his face with). This clip doesn't do justice to Berman's real talent but its' not a bad start--actually the Berman stand-up records ("Inside Shelley Berman" etc.) were recently on youtube with accompanying still photos of the legend, but they now seem to have vanished--perhaps another victim of the misguided notion that everything ever created must be paid for over and over again even though none of the original creators stand to profit. Berman's career was famously "cut short" by a damning documentary made about him in the early 60's called "Comedian Backstage", which apparently featured Berman having a tantrum backstage because of noise during his act. I'm eager to find a copy of this movie--it's not up on youtube--and if anyone has any further information about it, you know where to find me.
Upcoming interviews include Orson Bean, Dixie Carter, Kaye Ballard, Robert Clary and "others too numerous to mention..."
We had two screenings of "City Island" last week--one in New York and one in LA--for prospective buyers of the film, as well as friends and recruited audience members. I was at the LA screening which--I'm unashamed to say--was a big fat hit. Lots of laughs and some genuine tears flowing toward the end. There is nothing more gratifying than hearing laughter at your work--providing of course that your intention was to make people laugh. By the way, we're premiering at a major film festival this coming spring--I'll name it when the appropriate time has come.
After the screening, Andy Garcia arrived in a marvelous looking blue pin-stripe suit. He greeted people outdoors and I complimented him on dressing so well for the occasion. He said that he'd come straight from a taping of the Jimmy Kimmel show to promote his new movie "Pink Panther 2" in which he stars with Steve Martin. Thus the real reason for the suit was revealed. Nonetheless, it was still a smashing suit. You can see the suit below as I've posted his interview with Kimmel. In it, he reveals that he and Martin worked together many years ago, when Andy was still an unknown, in a movie that Martin dislikes so much that he tells Andy not to mention its name ever, thus keeping it a secret. I hearby violate Steve Martin's wishes and name the movie--it's called "The Lonely Guy", written by Neil Simon and directed by Arthur Hiller. I seem to remember it being quite funny. I wonder what the hell's eating Steve Martin?
