By now, I assume most of you have seen Defending My Life, the profile of Albert Brooks done by Rob Reiner. Either that or you don't care, in which case skip this item. I watched it a second time the other night, showing it to a friend…and noticing a few things I hadn't noticed the first time around. I liked the film but I kinda wish Mr. Reiner had had a lower budget.
When you're talking about someone like Albert Brooks, you don't need to keep cutting every minute to some other comedian telling us he's funny. You have videotape of Albert that proves that. Maybe a little more of that and a little less of Brian Williams and Neil DeGrasse Tyson?
And I had this thought: One of the reasons, I think, that awards shows like the Emmys and Oscars have declined so much in ratings is that America is getting tired of hearing famous multimillionaire performers talking about each others' greatness. There were a few moments in this film that reminded me of Sammy Davis Jr. talking about Frank Sinatra — the kind of thing they used to parody on The Sammy Maudlin Show on SCTV.
But I'm probably nitpicking here. It's a very good film — the kind where the worst thing you can say about it is that it should have been longer.
Someone wrote to ask me if there's a place to view the videotape of Albert's father, Harry "Parkyakarkus" Einstein performing at a Friars Club dinner and then dying right after. I'm pretty sure there is no videotape. There's a widely-circulated audiotape but the dinner was not filmed and all the visuals of the incident in the documentary were cobbled up using footage and stills, mostly from other events. (There's a quick still shot of Einstein sitting on a dais between Nat King Cole and Stan Freberg but it's not from the night of Mr. Einstein's final performance. It's from a dinner for the artists heard on Capitol Records.) Here's the audio of Harry Einstein's last monologue…
Someone else wrote to ask about the little menu jingle that Parkyakarkus performed often on his radio show. In a 1999 Playboy interview, Brooks recited it thusly…
We're going to have sirloin steak and tenderloin steak, good piece lamb chop, great big pork chop, nice fried onions, fresh peeled scallions, french-fried potatoes, lettuce and tomatoes, string beans, baked beans, hup beans, too; cookeral, hookeral, chicken stew; mackerel, pickerel, haddock, tripe; lobster, oyster, shrimp or pike; hot pies, cold pies, soft pie, mud pie, ickleberry, bermberry, stroomberry, too; stiff cream, whipped cream, plain cream, no cream; squashed-up apple, coconut, custard; mustard, ketchup, chili, salt and pepper and a pickalilly.
And lastly, regarding the video of locations used in the filming of Defending Your Life, my pal Douglass Abramson has an addition…
I can add one to the list. The transportation hub, where the souls are put onto the shuttles that will take them onto their next stop; where Brooks chased down Streep's tram, was filmed in the dead center of Mile Square Regional Park, in Fountain Valley, CA.
The filming didn't occur during the two years I lived a block away from the park, but all of my friends who did live in the area during filming, said that they had so many lights in the filming area, most of the rest of the park was fully illuminated all night long by what today would be classified as the production's light pollution. Unfortunately, it took place during a period of Southern California cold weather, so no one really got to take advantage of it.
And one other thought I had: I didn't recognize that the scene in the comedy club was filmed at The Comedy Store, even though I'm quite familiar with that building. It's interesting to me that they chose to do it there since it's not a complex set and it could probably have been built on a soundstage for very few dollars…and that way, they wouldn't had the hassle of renting and shutting down a business, going on location, bringing in all the equipment and extras and lights, etc.
I think they chose to do it there because the Comedy Store can be a really, really cold and depressing place with its black walls and stark decor. With the right person at the microphone, it can also be a very fun place to be in spite of the ambiance. But it does have the feel of a place you'd go after you died for real and not just on stage. I don't know if Albert Brooks ever performed there. He was famous for not "breaking in" his material before performing it on television. But he must have been there and a lot of his friends worked that stage and talked about it. I wonder if that's why they shot there.
Thanks, Douglass and everyone else.