Jerry Lewis: The Total Film-Maker

do you own a copy, strongo?

Would buy Coleman Francis: The Total Film-Maker for a dollar.

i own all the coleman francis movies, morbs. come on now.

including the supressed directors cut of the the skydivers.

The Day The Curly Killed

francis/truffaut

Well, anyway, the man's a stone cold genius. I prefer him to Chaplin, Keaton, Tati, who else ya got? At least seven of these are masterpieces but The Ladies Man stands as quite possibly the greatest film comedy of all-time. I grovel before him while dreaming of a 12-DVD box set of his greatest (which, as always with Jerry, also means his grossest) telethon moments.

Red Zone Nutty

I prefer him to Chaplin, Keaton, Tati, who else ya got?

we part company here

yeah i was gonna say. a lol is a lol but.

preferring Lewis to Keaton is like preferring Blackmore's Night to Deep Purple

preferring lewis to chaplin is like preferring getting punched in the nuts to eating a pizza

hahahaha

site for jerry lewis fans: http://www.ballbustingtube.com/

don't click that btw.

oh now you knew i was going to click on that

all the "I cannot tell a lie" GIS results had some extraneous bullshit :(

jerry lewis chopped down the cherry tree with his big fucking dick

i don't even know what i'm talking about now. i'm so tired.

Oh pish posh. He exploited the potential of cinema much more than either Chaplin or Keaton (both of whom, yes, exploited it exceedingly well and have many masterpieces under their belts). Tati may have surpassed Lewis on that level but he lacks Lewis' grotesque personality which is essential to his life-affirming effect. I'm reminded of something Richard Barrios's disdain for Al Jolson (a key Lewis progenitor) in The Singing Fool: "Charisma, when applied this relentlessly, becomes oppressive." But yo, Richard, that's precisely why we go to the movies (or listen to, I don't know, Morrissey): to witness a gargantuan, out of control ego as a way to measure the contours of our own steady paths. If I wanted an even-keeled experience, I'd knock on my neighbor's door and ask to borrow some sugar.

P.S. Pizza is stupid and boring.

delete "something"

You don't strike me as the type that needs more sugar.

I certainly don't need fuckin' pizza.

Bozelka, OTM itt.

Rosenbaum:

Why are the French so crazy about Jerry Lewis? Well, for one thing, some of them see him as being very much like America: infantile, hysterical, uncontrolled, giddy, uninhibited, tacky, energetic, inarticulate, obnoxious, sentimental, overbearing, socially and sexually maladjusted, and all over the place. (By contrast, at least on the surface, Allen is adolescent, neurotic, controlled, whiny, inhibited, preppy, lethargic, articulate, cynical, wormy, socially and sexually maladjusted, and confined.) It’s not so much a matter of necessarily loving all these qualities as it is envying or admiring or identifying with some of them, and being horrified by others — a sort of compressed model of the love-hate that many French people feel toward America as a fantasy object. I suspect that what many French people experience as the overcultivated constraints of their culture finds a welcome release in Lewis’s explosiveness and ungainliness, and their taste for freewheeling fantasy is partially met by Lewis’s remoteness from realism — the sheer wildness of his ideas as a writer-director, and the deconstructive habits such as the vulgar modernism that he shares with Mel Brooks, which periodically reminds us in various self-referential ways that we’re watching a film. (At one point in the mid-1960s, Godard described Lewis as “the only free man working in Hollywood.”)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRCsSrnz90s

This is probably racist.
dongmaster2 4 months ago

I seriously can't watch more than a minute or two of Jerry Lewis before my flesh starts to crawl. He's like the uncanny valley of human behavior.

dongmaster2 otm

dongmaster2 least favorite installment of the dongmaster cycle

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Thanks, bud.

judd apatow option doomed/saved this from the git-go

plus that photo choice

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/30/idUS77813458320110730

On fat ladies trying to lost weight: "Who cares?"

lose

I am going to miss Jerry's effortless pomposity about showbiz when he's gone; he may be the best ever at it. "I don't allow people in my family to use the term 'TV'" vs there's nothing good on. Real Sammy Maudlin stuff!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=141o_jwG7cA

http://www.gq.com/entertainment/humor/201108/jerry-lewis-interview-gq-august-2011?currentPage=all

oh, that Berle story. I was waiting for "And then Gracie Allen picked up a fork..."

Is it possible that MDA got tired of the chairman boasting about his cocksmanship in print, at his unseemly age?

I feel like I watch his movies and I don't understand them

They are personal and idiosyncratic for sure. I wish I didn't understand Apatow's.

Jerry live in NYC (w/ a documentary too) on his 86th birthday:

http://www.92y.org/tickets/production.aspx?pid=81040

Man, I wish I could go to that. But I'm glad I got to see him live once, in Damn Yankees. He killed.

well yeah, esp when he went offscript or did 10 minutes of his Vegas act in the middle of his big song.

moderator: Richard Belzer

so, here's what happened. Coulda called it The Old Man and the Shpritz.

http://www.slantmagazine.com/house/2012/03/the-indelicate-delinquent-in-manic-winter-an-evening-with-jerry-lewis/

Little wonder that, in a star-studded video of birthday wishes played near the tribute's end, '50s kids Werner Herzog (wishing Lewis a future "saturated with life") and Lou Reed materialized.

!!!

Thanks for posting, Morbs. What a wonderful tribute. Wish I could've been there.

anybody recall seeing Jerry in "Wiseguy" (the Ken Wahl tv show)?

Yep he was great, and even squeezed in "Very good, one in a row!"

would've been 94 today, and I bet he's glad he's not here

have Dean & Jerry in Pardners in the house, might watch that later

"You should only get COVID! I hope you get COVID."

https://assets.mubi.com/images/notebook/post_images/24936/images-w1400.jpg

<3

Pardners is unusual in that Dean Martin gets to be funny for a few bits, almost unique in their movies (vs clubs and TV). He also seems like he's auditioning for his solo career.

Agnes Moorehead (v briefly) plays Jerry's WIFE and MOTHER! JL and Dean have dual roles.

They also address the audience directly at the end to tamp down breakup rumors (utterly misleading).

https://www.thenationalnews.com/arts-culture/2024/01/05/jerry-lewis/

Were any ILXorz besides Morbius waiting for the donor restrictions on The Day the Clown Cried to expire? Rob Stone (LOC) on Facebook has been WTF? about this article, and as of now there are no plans for an open-to-the-public screening at LOC's Culpeper location.

Another LOC employee told me that starting at some point in 2024, the TDtCC material will be viewable by appointment at LOC premises in DC. If anyone is coming to DC to see this let me know.

I mean, I've been hoping to see it in my lifetime, yes

BTW, I know I fired this poll off in extreme bad faith against ILX, but zero votes for The Patsy is abominable

I think all of the 1960-1964 films are great in slightly different ways so The Patsy just kind of gets lost in the vote splitting among them.

True, tho I'd extend the streak to at least Three on a Couch

(If there's a weak one in there, it's The Family Jewels)

I think i slightly prefer The Family Jewels to Three on a Couch but I can definitely see how after 1964 it gets a bit more subjective. I actually kind of like The Big Mouth too but I’m not gonna run around recommending it.

Same with me with Hardly Working and Cracking Up

I was skimming around this thread and came across this, proffered seriously from an ilxor back in 2011:

that's precisely why we go to the movies (or listen to, I don't know, Morrissey): to witness a gargantuan, out of control ego as a way to measure the contours of our own steady paths.

Uh, no. That's a load of bollocks wrapped in high-flown rhetoric, trying to sound profound

Hardly Working is weirdly hard to see. I’ve only seen bits of it on TV and would like to see the whole thing, especially because it was filmed in the area I grew up in.

xp KJB does have his blind spots, but he knows more about movies than any current member of ILX in my book

OK, "as much"

I like KJB's post even if I think saying Lewis is greater than Tati is utter madness

We disagree on good Joan Crawford movies.

otoh I introduced him to the negroni and that's all we drink when I visit him.

Cold water continues to be thrown on the idea that there exists a complete print of TDTCC.

There seems to be a lot of buzz about that article on the unreleased Jerry Lewis film THE DAY THE CLOWN CRIED saying it's finally been screened, don't believe it! For what I heard all the LOC has is 13 cans (about 90') of unedited camera rushes without sound, that's all! Also: pic.twitter.com/umoxq6Yi9H

— Jon W. (@rarefilmm) January 8, 2024

So we're saying Harry Shearer is a liar?

Jolly "Fats" Weehawken Airlines is till an in-joke in my family

xp Yes. At the very least he exaggerated how much of it he saw.

that's what Lewis said: ""Harry Shearer is a liar. And I hate to say that but it's true. No one has ever seen that film except me, and I know because I have the only print of it." I can't find the orig. source for that but I followed the story when he said it, sometime early 00s I think. I think Lewis had a rough cut that he assembled when they had to cut production and leave Sweden. I think Shearer probably saw something like this. But I don't think there's an opening-to-closing-credits print in existence.

"Zack Snyder--Do your stuff!"

xp except Lewis didn’t have a “print” of it?