Monthly Archives: December 2011

The late Bob Clampett directed great cartoons and was later a great repository of cartoon history. In the early seventies when most of his old co-workers couldn't be bothered to answer questions about "the old days," he was accessible and friendly to all. More to the point, he had a good memory and an amazing stash of stuff he'd saved — much of it reportedly fished out of wastebaskets and not necessarily his — to supplement his recollections. From time to time, he'd invite local animation buffs up to his dwelling in the Hollywood Hills just to watch his old cartoons and talk about them. One of the times I was so privileged, he ran his 1944 Merry Melody Russian Rhapsody and one of the young animators present asked Bob how a certain bit of animation — an unusual effect — had been done. Bob excused himself, disappeared into an off-limits room in his home, then returned with the actual cels and animation drawings for that sequence and proceeded to explain.

Animation historian Michael Barrier was one of the folks who tapped into Clampett's grand memory and archives. That Bob was often inflating his own role was inarguable to the point where he eventually joked about it. One time when we were lunching, he asked me, "Did I ever tell you how I invented the grilled cheese sandwich?" He was hardly the only one of his contemporaries to spin history in his own direction…as many did once Bob's interviews prompted them to agree to their own. At times, it almost seemed like if you worked in the Warner Brothers cartoon studio within a year either way of the birth of Bugs Bunny, you had to claim fathership. No one's tale of how they'd created the wabbit was uniquely believable and Bob eventually had to walk his (and a few other such assertions) back a few blocks. But if you could get around that with most of those guys and apply a little skepticism, there was much to be learned. You also had to deal with the fact that some of them hated each other and it was not always easy to remain friends with both sides.

At one point, Clampett marked up a map of Los Angeles for Barrier and on it, he tried to pinpoint where certain moments in cartoon lore had occurred. Being a sucker for the history of both animation and old L.A., I was naturally fascinated. That map has now been scanned for posterity and the Internet and Michael is sharing it over at his website.

This is an add-on to the previous post. It occurs to me that the Mad, Mad, Mad Comedians special-pilot starts with and really features the Smothers Brothers…who at the time this aired (4/70) had been booted off CBS despite pretty good ratings. This leads me to suspect that the show was produced at least a year before it aired. I mean, if you were a TV producer, would you want to be shopping around a pilot starring two guys who'd just been kicked off network television because right-wing advertisers didn't want them on? The Brothers went off in September of '69 but their cancellation was final some time before that and looming in the previous months. Also, a year or so before, Flip Wilson was pretty hot and all the networks were courting him for a series. His NBC one went on the air in September of 1970.

Within the animation industry, there was a long, checkered history of proposed cartoon shows built around the Marx Brothers. For a time there, every time I turned around, a different producer either had the rights, thought he had the rights or was pitching the idea with the hope that he could secure the rights. My friend Earl Kress wrote an entire pilot for Filmation and not long after that failed to go anywhere, I was approached by another producer (not anyone you've ever heard of) who said he was "making a deal" with whoever you'd make a deal with for such things. He wanted me to write the pilot for his Marx Brothers cartoon series but there was a catch: No Groucho. He had the rights to use Chico and Harpo and he thought he could get Zeppo ("How expensive could he be?") if I thought Zeppo's inclusion would make up for the absence of the guy with the mustache. I told him it would be like hearing "I Heard It Through The Grapevine" performed by Pips only.

In the letter mentioned in the previous posting, Groucho Marx wrote to a Corporal Jerome G. Darrow who was stationed in Surinam in 1943.

A reader of this site, Brad Ferguson, was curious as to what became of Corporal Darrow and did a bit o' Googling. This would appear to be his gravesite, meaning that he survived the war, lived to the age of 73 and received a number of promotions along the way. I guess that's a happy ending. Nice detective work, Brad.

Groucho Marx writes a morale-boosting note to the troops in 1943. Thanks to Devlin Thompson for the link.

We often shill here for the Reprise! theater group which stages dandy, short-run productions of classic musicals up at UCLA. This year's season was supposed to consist of Cabaret followed by The Baker's Wife and then The Apple Tree.

Their Cabaret, which I reviewed here, was superb. But now they've announced that The Baker's Wife, which was to have run February 14 through 26 of '12, will not take place and there will be no replacement show in its place. Put simply, ticket sales and fundraising drives have been insufficient. Subscribers are being offered refunds with the hint that they could instead donate that money to Reprise! The Apple Tree is still scheduled to be produced in April.

This is very sad news for lovers of good theater in Los Angeles. I didn't think this year's choice of shows was as strong as some…but if Reprise! with its track record for delivering quality on stage isn't making it these days, that's a bad sign for all. Very bad.

I like Jerry Lewis. I like him enough that when he made his Broadway debut in Damn Yankees, my friend Paul Dini and I flew back just to be in the audience for opening night.

I like the guy but to be a Jerry Lewis fan is to cringe often at the man's excesses, ramblings, self-serving statements, angry lash-outs at those he thinks have wronged him, etc. On that great new boxed DVD set of Laurel and Hardy films (this one), he babbles on about their history, getting it all wrong, apparently unaware that there are in this world people who actually know the truth. If someone had made so many errors telling the story of Martin and Lewis, he'd have been furious…but he just goes on and on doing this stuff. Given that he's 85, you might excuse it because of age. Trouble is, he's been like this all his life.

Jerry Lewis: Method to the Madness is the new two-hour documentary that's now playing on the Encore channel. What's wrong with it is summarized in the second on-screen title card at the end — an Executive Producer credit for Jerry Lewis. I don't know how much he actually did on it or what kind of freedom filmmaker Gregg Barson had, but you wish someone could or would tell Jerry, "Uh, it isn't a great idea to announce you were the top guy in charge of an overexcessive tribute to yourself."

Not only that but it's a tribute that so deifies its subject that the mortal can't measure up to the hype. The clips of his work do not demonstrate the brilliance described by the talking heads that range from Jerry Seinfeld's to Carol Burnett's. There may be no clips in the world by anyone that would. I can well imagine younger folks, unfamiliar with Lewis's body of work, watching this, hearing of his comedic genius…and then wondering what's so spectacular about wedging the entire mouth of a drinking glass in your mouth for half a century. All the material of Lewis on-stage in his eighties is a little sad in that way.

The film is primarily about Jerry's work, as opposed to his off-stage life, though there are exceptions such as the looks at his relationship with his father. In both categories — personal and professional — the good parts are mentioned and the bad parts are hurried past or in most cases, omitted altogether. There's plenty about how Jerry's successful films were successful; almost nothing about how or why they eventually stopped being successful. The superstar days of Martin and Lewis are dwelled upon in depth; very little about how or why they ended. There's the great moment of the reunion on the Muscular Dystrophy Telethon; almost nothing about criticisms of the telethon and zero about Jerry's ouster from it. Lewis has had many hills and many valleys but in this overview of the man, it's nearly all hills. Nothing about The Day the Clown Cried. Nothing about Jerry's failed TV projects or the Jerry Lewis Cinemas. There's Carol Burnett talking about the greatness of Jerry; nothing about his occasional statements that female comedians, Carol Burnett included, are never funny.

Why in two hours of telling us what a legend he was and is, wasn't there time for that? Most viewers, even before they see Jerry's Exec Producer credit, will leap to a simple assumption. The filmmaker wouldn't have gotten his "unlimited access" (as it was called in the press releases) if he'd wanted to visit the valleys.

We've had a number of these "life of great comedian" documentaries lately. I thought the one about Don Rickles had some of the same problems of fawning that the Jerry Lewis one had, though not as many…and it fawned over Rickles as a guy who was great on a Vegas stage, as opposed to a guy who revolutionized comedy and filmmaking. The one about Joan Rivers made her out to be about the unfunniest, most unpleasant woman on the planet. The one about Phyllis Diller (also by Mr. Barson) was incisive and revelatory, and it really put her career in the proper context and perspective.

This time, I'm afraid Barson tackled a subject with skin so thin that it could not withstand his own reality. The resulting portrait, intended or not, is of a star in need of unrelenting bootlicking and praise, far exceeding his own considerable achievements. I'm not suggesting that's inaccurate. In fact, it may well be that in that sense, Barson did the perfect job of showing us the real Jerry Lewis.

Here's a short profile of a short cartoonist. Irwin Hasen drew the newspaper strip Dondi for a long time and was a top, underappreciated super-hero artist for DC Comics before that. He has long been one of my favorite creators from his generation to dine with or to interview at comic conventions. Since we seem to be losing the comic book creators of his generation, let's celebrate one who's still with us.