Monthly Archives: June 2003

I have a little group of readers who catch whatever mistakes I make and send me corrections, often within moments of my making the error. Mark Thorson is one of them, and he notes the following: Ed Rosenthal, who stands convicted of growing and selling marijuana despite the fact that his government asked him to do so, was acting on behalf of the city of Oakland, as opposed to the state government. Here's a link to an article about this travesty of justice. And here's a link to my item which I am hereby correcting. Thanks, Mark.

We usually rave about TiVo here but this, we don't like.

If you're not reading a fine comic called Supernatural Law, you're missing out on one of the best books out there. Here's a link to its website. And what reminded me to tell you that is that I just received this message from that comic's creator, Batton Lash…

Regarding Jerry Lewis's story about one of his movies on a double bill with Deep Throat: I've heard this before, even from people other than Lewis. I agree with you; I don't believe it's a true story. However, I have a theory how it originated…

I recall that during the 60's, there was a chain of Jerry Lewis movie theaters (set up with Lewis's sanction, of course) specifically for movies that the whole family could enjoy. By the early 70's, some managers of the Jerry Lewis theater franchise were having a tough time attracting audiences and began moving away from family fare. This didn't seem to be a problem, until one manager booked a X-rated film. A photographer snapped a picture of the incongruous image of a "family theater", complete with the famous caricature of "Jerry the Kid" on a marquee, showcasing some triple "X" film. Newspapers — or maybe a magazine — ran the photo, which was quite embarrassing to Lewis.

I believe that over the years, this story morphed into an urban legend of a goofy Jerry Lewis movie on a double bill with a notorious porno flick as an example of how low the morals and good taste of modern life has sunk.

You know, not only are you probably right but I believe that thought had occurred to me once before when this was discussed. In the late sixties or early seventies, Jerry got involved in a plan to open a chain of movie theaters bearing his name across the land, mainly in malls and shopping centers. It was, as I recall, a franchise deal that was designed to attract the small investor. The parent company had invented a system of automated projection equipment, and they sold this to Jerry and then to investors as the new wave of film exhibition. One of the reasons I recall this is that Lewis went on Johnny Carson's show to plug the concept and he even brought on a scale model of a Jerry Lewis Theater. He used it to demonstrate how two people could run one and said something about how he hoped couples that believed in the concept of "family" movies would invest in setting these up in malls and running them.

I remember this because it was one of the few times I ever saw Carson really nail a guest who had pissed him off. I'm not sure if he was annoyed by Jerry trying to use his show for such a blatant sales pitch or what, but he turned to Jerry and said, "What happens if a couple invests their life savings in one of these and then it bombs?" Then, in his Aunt Blabby/old lady voice, Carson whined, "We got screwed out of your pension, Murray" or words to that effect. Lewis was stunned and unable to answer, the audience was hysterical, and I think it was the first time I ever heard "screwed" on a network TV show.

As it turned out, Johnny was prescient. The Jerry Lewis Mini-Cinema operation went belly-up. The accepted explanation I believe was that too many of them were opened by people with no expertise in the business of exhibiting movies — folks who often did not know what constituted a bad location. Often, they opened in malls that were too close to where one of the big theater chains operated, and the big chains would lock up most of the "hot" new releases on an exclusive-to-our-area deal. This made it difficult for the Jerry Lewis outlets to book movies that anyone wanted to see, especially since the contract with the Jerry Lewis Theater company specified only family films, which then weren't being made in great quantity. (Apparently, one of the appeals of the whole deal to Jerry — who was then not doing well in the movie business — was the notion that a whole network of such theaters would provide distribution for new Jerry Lewis movies. But the chain never became successful enough for that to happen.)

It was a pretty big disaster, money-wise. One night as Jerry came off-stage from a performance in Vegas, a man who appeared to be seeking an autograph slapped a subpoena in his hand — a lawsuit on behalf of many of the investors in the theaters. It was all finally settled, of course, but Jerry was pretty unhappy with the entire experience. And I believe it is true that near the end, some of those Jerry Lewis Theaters, straining desperately to stay in business, began booking films with more than a "PG" rating. I doubt any of them ever ran Deep Throat or any hardcore sex film, especially since most were in shopping malls. But perhaps they ran "R" films that outraged Jerry, or perhaps some were converted into the kind of theater that runs porn, and reports like that morphed into the Urban Legend of a double-bill of Deep Throat and a Jerry Lewis movie. But I don't believe there ever really was one.

By the way, (he said, slightly changing the subject) I miss double-features, if only because they gave us some wonderful marquee combos. My favorite was a theater in Santa Monica that offered Cold Turkey and Bananas, which is quite a tasty combo. And I always loved what a theater in Culver City called the Palms would come up with. I wrote a piece about the Palms and its double-features, and you can read it here. Thanks, Batton!

At long last, the sound films of Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy are making it to DVD. On August 19, Hallmark Entertainment will release what we hope is the first of what we hope will be a whole line. It will be a two-disk set which includes one of the boys' best features (Sons of the Desert), four shorts (The Music Box, Another Fine Mess, Busy Bodies, and County Hospital) and, as they say, "many special features" — all for twenty bucks. Very good news. The minute this is available for advance ordering, I'll post a link here.

Here's Tom Shales with an article about how the pending F.C.C. deregulation decision is a terrible, terrible idea. He's wrong. It's worse than that.

Inaugurating a new feature: Each day, I'll send you clicking to the website of another great stand up comedian. Let's start with the World's Foremost Authority, Professor Irwin Corey.

Mike Kaluta began drawing comics in the seventies, at a time when you could look at almost any new artist and say, "Kirby" or "Adams" or "Kirby mixed with a little Adams and some Wally Wood" or some permutation of existing styles. Many of those artists evolved to have unique (or at least, reasonably fresh) approaches but Kaluta didn't have to. From the start, he was his own man with his own outlook and technique, and he's only gotten better since. Check out his website.

If you can get past the endless teases in and out of commercials, the E! True Hollywood Story shows are sometimes interesting. And sometimes not. The "nots" are when the subject is of little importance and/or access to the subject is from afar. The folks of little importance are generally selected because their stories have a lot of celebrity embarrassment and tragedy attached to them. The episodes about superstars are more watchable but often, neither the star nor anyone close to them agrees to participate, so you get a lot of commentary from witnesses whose connection to the subject is questionable.

Neither of these is the case with the E! True Hollywood Story of Jerry Lewis, which I TiVoed the other day and just watched. Jerry not only gave it his full cooperation but he sat for what obviously amounted to hours of interviews…to the point where, though there's the usual E! announcer doing play-by-play, you have Jer providing color commentary.

Some of the details presented of Jerry's career are skipped over. If there was a mention of the legendary The Day the Clown Cried, I missed it. Some accounts of key moments in Jerry's life were, to put it nicely, at odds with what others have said. I'm not saying he's wrong and they're right because certainly, Jerry's occasional lapses of public ego have almost invited others to come forth and spin his life as a negative, perhaps distorting the truth a bit. He also sometimes tells stories that are impossible to believe. One that he recounts in the documentary and has said on other occasions is that he knew his main career as a Hollywood filmmaker was over, and that he didn't even want it to continue, when one day he drove by a theater "in the Valley" (meaning Los Angeles). There on the marquee, he claims, he saw his latest movie — Which Way to the Front? — double-billed with Deep Throat.

I don't believe that pairing ever existed. First off, Which Way to the Front? was released in July of 1970 and Deep Throat didn't come out until 1972. The latter played exclusively for years at the Pussycat Theater on Santa Monica Boulevard which is not in the Valley and which did not even double-bill another sex film, let alone a Jerry Lewis movie, for something like ten years. I can't even imagine a theater anywhere throwing together a pairing of that sort; of a movie that could only be shown to horny adults and another that couldn't possibly interest that crowd. (By the way, as one of those parenthetical notes of trivia for which this site is justly famous, one of the main producers of Deep Throat was a man named Lou Perry. Many years earlier, when Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis first teamed up, Lou Perry was Dean's manager, and ever after claimed to have been responsible for pairing the two men, only to get cheated out of representation. He also, legend has it, got cheated out of the millions and millions of dollars that Deep Throat brought in.)

All of that aside, the E! documentary — which runs again on Thursday (4 AM), Sunday (5 AM) and next Monday the ninth (10 AM) — is a very rich portrait of Lewis and, because of his frequent comments, almost a video autobiography. The show is sparse on clips of actual Jerry Lewis movies. (Like most TV documentaries, they grab scenes from public domain trailers, rather than pay for footage.) And Jerry's godhood overseas and tireless work for Muscular Dystrophy are oversold, plus I'm not sure I wanted to know quite that much about Jerry's medical problems. Still, there's a lot of insight and info, plus they ran the clip of Dean Martin walking out onto the telethon in 1976 and apparently surprising the hell out of his former partner. That alone is worth sitting through the two hours. There's also a rerun of a different profile of Lewis next week on the Biography Channel but, if I'm remembering it correctly, it didn't have nearly the access or data that E! did.

My DirecTV satellite dish gets CSpan and CSpan2. But their channel line-up doesn't include CSpan3, which seems to be airing the shows I most want to view.

Every so often, I drop an e-mail to the DirecTV people and ask about this. I find it hard to believe that it would cost them much, if anything, to add in that other channel. But all I get back is one of those form e-mails that says, "Thank you for your comments, we'll look into it, yadda yadda yadda…"

I don't know that I have the energy to get up a petition or a letter-writing campaign on this. But maybe I can encourage someone out there to do something.

The late Mort Meskin was an amazing artist — the kind who caused his colleagues to look at his work and ask, "How does he do that?" He was especially amazing in terms of his control of lighting and white areas on a page. Most comic artists work from white to black; that is, they draw their compositions and then figure out where to spot shadows and large black areas. Meskin, some said, worked the other way: He thought from dark to light and would design his pages by spotting the white areas. However he arrived at it, he did some arresting work over the years, mostly for DC and the Simon-Kirby Studio. His heirs have set up a website to remember this innovative man.