My first real rant/commentary of 2019 is kind of a companion piece to this essay that I placed here last August. Go read it if you like but basically, it was about how at the age of 66, I'm sick of people around my age acting like we're all just waiting for the Grim Reaper…and by the way, have you noticed how old some of our friends are getting to be? I think it's healthy to accept how old you are but there's no reason why you have to surrender to it and start acting like the on-screen Burt Mustin…
That's a photo of Burt Mustin, who for years played the Old Man in every TV show or movie where they needed an Old Man. He passed away in 1977 and I suspect in his will, he left all those roles to Charles Lane. I'm not sure who Mr. Lane left them to. Maybe Betty White.
But I met Mr. Mustin in 1971 over at NBC Burbank on the set of a TV show called The Funny Side. He was 86 but he had the energy of a man of…oh, around what I am now. And apart from my knee problems, I'd like to think I don't act my age, however someone my age is supposed to act.
I've always loved the story from when Jack Benny did his screen test for the film of The Sunshine Boys. I wrote about it here at least once before…
At one point during the filming, Herbert Ross (who was directing) stopped the action and told Benny he was moving with too much energy. He said, "Remember, Jack, you're playing a 70-year-old comedian." There was a pause and then Benny replied, "But I'm an 80-year-old comedian."
In other words, "Don't act like you are. Act like society thinks you ought to be." Benny didn't live to make the film but if he had, I would have loved to see a reviewer say, "Jack Benny struck me as too young to play a 70-year-old comedian." Over at NBC that day in '71, I pretty much saw Burt Mustin given the same direction to move slower and act more like the cliché. I think that too often in life, we give that same stupid direction to ourselves and to each other.
And this essay is also a follow-up to my piece the other day on why I didn't like the new movie, Stan & Ollie. How so? Because another thing people my age do to make themselves older is to complain, in some cases almost incessantly, about how These Kids Today don't love what we loved. My friends who loved Stan & Ollie are saying to me, "Hey, maybe it will cause These Kids Today to discover the wonders of Laurel and Hardy."
It might be nice if it did but I really don't care much if it doesn't. I'm certainly not going to get emotional about it. Too many of my contemporaries sound like parents after The Beatles did The Ed Sullivan Show, predicting or praying that These Kids Today (i.e., Those Kids Then) would outgrow that garbage, it would all disappear and T.K.T. would begin listening to "good music." You know, like Perry Como or Mantovani. No generation ever embraces everything or even most things that their folks liked.
What I do care about, vis-a-vis Laurel and Hardy, is that their films (a) exist in the best possible form and (b) are readily available. When I first became a true fan of Stan and Ollie, neither was the case. If you wanted to see their films — and I sure did — forget about seeing them in a theater with a live audience. You had to scour TV Guide. Their films were shown a lot on TV…but not all of them. The silents? Almost never. Lucky for me, we had the Silent Movie Theater in Los Angeles but if you lived elsewhere, too bad.
The sound shorts were on Los Angeles television a lot, usually programmed like the Three Stooges shorts, meaning for children. Some of the features ran often and some never aired.
The prints were terrible: Missing scenes, splices right in the middle of speeches, poor video, commercial breaks inserted (literally) between the set-up of a joke and the punch line. The local CBS affiliate had a print of The Big Noise which apparently had its canisters mismarked because every time they ran it, they ran reel 5 before reel 4. And of course, you had to watch it when they wanted you to watch it. When I was twelve or so, I stayed up one night until 4 AM to see for the first time, Pack Up Your Troubles. It wasn't that good at that hour. No film is that good at that hour.
I fantasized about owning a complete collection of Laurel and Hardy movies. By age fourteen, that was less likely to happen than my concurrent fantasy about sleeping with Mary Tyler Moore. The fantasy without Mary would have involved a then-nonexistent room in my home, a sixteen-millimeter projector — they were a bitch to thread and operate — and a mess of 16mm prints that were then very expensive if they were even available. Most were not.
Flash seriously forward. Today, I have that complete collection and it's on DVD. Doesn't require a projector, doesn't require a room full of film canisters. It probably cost me about $100 to amass and I can watch any one of 'em or all of 'em any time I like. Best of all, the films have been restored as much as humanly possible. Some of the prints are gorgeous. Some contain scenes I never saw when I saw these films on TV.
I transferred a couple of my favorites to my computer. Right now, I could close this file, open another and within twenty seconds be feasting on a pristine copy of Sons of the Desert or Our Relations. It is a wonderful time to be a fan of Laurel and Hardy and if you want to start building such a collection for yourself, buying this DVD set is a great start.
All of this, of course, also applies to the Marx Brothers and Buster Keaton and Chaplin and Harold Lloyd and all my favorite dramatic films. There is very little that I could ever want to watch that I can't obtain. Most of it has been fully restored or will be, and it ain't expensive. Between hundreds of TV networks, streaming services, DVDs, Blu Rays, videogames, multi-screen cineplexes, anyone today who has a very modest amount of money has access to way more media than they can ever consume.
So when someone says, "These Kids Today haven't watched all the great movies of the past," I think, "These Kids Today can't even watch all the good stuff on Netflix. I sure can't."
This is why it doesn't bother me if T.K.T. don't know all my favorites. I don't know a lot of theirs, either. One of these days if/when I have the time, I may get around to watching that great show that you know and I don't, just as T.K.T. may discover the joys of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. As long as the material is available, that's possible. And it's never been more available.