Jerry Lewis: The Total Film-Maker

I can believe it.

Also, Richard Brody:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2012/03/jerry-lewis-and-love.html

amazing story morbius

I do have a question though -- in that 'hardly working' clip upthread, why is the music a faux-oriental koto cover version of 'memories' from cats

why

via Mubi: a smorgasbord!

The centerpiece of the new issue of the multi-lingual film journal La Furia Umana is a walloping dossier on Jerry Lewis. Of the 24 pieces on Lewis, ten are in English: B Kite on the Little Clown in The Errand Boy (1961), Zach Campbell on Lewis's relation to his own image on screen, Murray Pomerance on that face, Peter Nellhaus on the extension of Lewis's auteurship into the films he didn't direct, David Phelps on Lewis's "Janus-faced comedy," R Emmet Sweeney on the September 18, 1955 broadcast of the Colgate Comedy Hour, Sudarshan Ramani on Scorsese's The King of Comedy (1982), John J Kern on The Day the Clown Cried (1972), Steven Shaviro on Smorgasbord (aka Cracking Up, 1983) — and Gina Telaroli's remarkable, extra-textual piece on Hardly Working (1979).

http://www.lafuriaumana.it/

B. Kite's is one of the great essays I've read on Lewis.

Smorgasbord/Cracking Up was brilliant. If it was his last film as a directory (as seems insanely likely), what a film to go out on.

Must read this.

I've always been intrigued with the idea of transcribing the wandering, rococo verbalizations of Jerry the Kid in the films, so here's a partial, inadequate start:

http://www.slantmagazine.com/dvd/review/its-only-money/2269

Nice!

I'd never seen It's Only Money before and was kind of shocked to hear him aaaaalmost doing the Kelp voice.

Dave Itzkoff, NYT:

Can you make an Alaskan Polar Bear Heater in Tennessee? A musical version of “The Nutty Professor,” the Jerry Lewis comedy that introduced that stiff alcoholic concoction – along with the Jekyll-and-Hyde-like characters of Julius Kelp and Buddy Love – will have its world premiere in Nashville before a planned Broadway run later this year, the Tennessee Performing Arts Center said on Wednesday.

The “Nutty Professor” musical will be performed at the center’s James K. Polk Theater from July 24 through August 19, the organization said. The production, which is adapted from Mr. Lewis’s hit 1963 film of the same title, is to star Michael Andrew as Kelp, and will feature music by Marvin Hamlisch (“A Chorus Line”) and a book and lyrics by Rupert Holmes (“Curtains,” “The Mystery of Edwin Drood”). Mr. Lewis – who didn’t need a fat suit to play his “Nutty Professor,” thank you very much – is directing.

With his trademark humility, Mr. Lewis said in a statement: “This musical will be spectacular for a couple of reasons. One, I’m directing it. Two, I have Michael Andrew, who is one of the best talents to come down the pike in 50 years. And I’m surrounding him with one-of-a-kind creative people, like Marvin Hamlisch, Rupert Holmes and me.” He added: “After it’s over, give me a call and let me know if everything I said was spot on.”

I'll definitely see this when it's within driving range, but ffs, Marvin Hamlisch? Lewis had Count fucking Basie in his films, and the best he can come up with for this is Hamlisch?

Everybody else he'd approve of is dead.

At the NYC birthday gala, the crowd went 'ooooh' at Hamlisch's name, to give you an idea of his most loyal demo.

this was on cable last night for some reason and just... wtf this film is so lol 90s in every way

Was it it the uncut 140-minute-something version? Pretty good, and maybe Vincent Gallo's best performance before Essential Killing.

I only caught the last half and admittedly was fascinated by the nutso casting. Gallo is pretty funny. The final scene with Depp and Lewis as icefishing eskimos (speaking Inuit?) and then the fish up and flies away.... o_0

my Friars Club friend ran into Jerry last week and told him that he smelled great. Jerry laughed.

Jerry and Me... Been looking forward to this since donna rouge's curator pal told me about it:

http://www.bam.org/view.aspx?pid=4395

So, unless it's a very elaborate ruse, Jerry appears to be directing the Nutty musical.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/theater/jerry-lewis-directing-a-musical-nutty-professor.html?pagewanted=all

I'm guessing no one here will be filing a report from Nashville.

up and running (RIP Marvin Hamlisch)

http://www.tennessean.com/article/20120806/ENTERTAINMENT03/308060072/Jerry-Lewis-thanks-Nutty-patrons

Jerry-directed episode of "Super Force"

http://thefilmsaurus.com/2012/10/31/jerry-lewis-directs/

Wow, never knew he'd done any tv work post-Cracking Up.

next, his episode of Showtime's "Brothers":

http://thefilmsaurus.com/2012/11/05/the-return-of-jerry-lewis-directs/

a recent AV Club primer.... I don't think Artists and Models is quite so great but it's a decent place to start w/ the Dean years.

http://www.avclub.com/articles/where-to-start-with-jerry-lewis-filmography,88748/

The Total Film-Maker

it is his book.

is it good

I have only seen a copy once. Scorsese swears by it apparently.

It's a how-to.

Shooting starts tomorrow on new Jerry movie.

(with Mort Sahl in the cast!)

that's a lotta chopped liver

p amazing tales of initial teaming w/ dean martin

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=iKNCm7hSgHo#!

Wow, that's great.

My dad saw them live at the Paramount in the early 50s, says he never laughed so hard before or since. After that, all other comedy fell just a little short.

At a trivia contest I was at a couple of weeks ago, one of the questions had to do with Jerola's 1956 hit cover of "Rock-A-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody." I've got a vinyl copy of the album, so I was able to come up with the answer for my team.

http://img0058.popscreencdn.com/131715651_amazoncom-just-sings-part-2-45-rpm-ep-jerry-lewis-music.jpg

Nice! I've got this hanging on my wall:
http://static.rateyourmusic.com/album_images/cae0d7851b64dd6778fca4523b763d69/726440.jpg

What fascinates me about Cracking Up—I should say one of the many things that fascinate me about Cracking Up—is the fact that, while “playing” the schmuck Warren Nefron, Lewis didn’t bother to foreswear his impeccably-tailored suits or his expensive watch or the gold chain on his other wrist.* It is a known fact that Jerry never wears the same socks more than once, and I believe that, through the course of Cracking Up, he wears at least a dozen Member’s Only jackets in different colors, usually jauntily hiked up to the elbow. You can almost imagine him flinging them about, like Gatsby’s shirts.

Jerry’s most noteworthy sartorial choice on Saturday were his vinyl-shiny shoes that, as he was seated and his pants began to cinch up, revealed themselves to be ankle-length Beatle boots. (He wears a low-gloss version of same in The Patsy.) It was the sort of thing you might expect Gary Glitter, if not Gary Lewis, to wear...

http://blog.sundancenow.com/weekly-columns/bombast-88

The Family Jewels, The Patsy, and The Big Mouth (zero votes altogether) are each on their own better than anything by Judd Apatow.

I read that Pinkerton piece... but I knew pretty much all of that. "That's Jerry," we fans say.

The whole "Buddy Love/Jerry Langford is the REAL Jerry" thing is well-worn territory; for Pinkerton to treat it as some kind of new insight is amateurish at best. And I swear I'd read the thing about Jerry's suits and jewelry somewhere else before, possibly in Rosenbaum's Hardly Working review.

The Family Jewels, The Patsy, and The Big Mouth (zero votes altogether) are each on their own better than anything by Judd Apatow.

While an exception might be made for The 40-Year-Old Virgin, this is OTM.

http://youtu.be/WCvTrrb4_R4

Wow, it's bizarre to see color videotape footage from the 1950s.

I find Schmaltzy Jerry pretty indigestible, but I should watch that sometime. Molly Picon AND Alan "Fred Flintstone" Reed...

According to David Crosthwait of DC Video, the company that restored this video tape, this specific episode of "Startime" was taped at the then-NBC studio in Brooklyn, NY and hand-edited. Color video tape was in its infancy; only about a year previous to this [1959] the first color videotapes were recorded at NBC. The copy was a dub found at NBC. The tapes used proprietary electronics unique to NBC, which is one reason why restoration took time. The tape was missing part of its audio. The Lewis family donated a kinescope film copy of the show, along with a 1/4" audio tape of much of the show's soundtrack to finish the restoration.

Max Rose at Cannes this week

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/sites/default/files/2013/02/_jerry_lewis_kerry_bishe_a_l.jpg

Looking forward to seeing that. I went to high school with the writer/director.

That was a quick edit.... they shot it in Jan/Feb.

some of that supporting cast... Claire Bloom, Dean Stockwell, Fred Willard, Joe Frank (that one)!

from the extracts of that 6-hour french doc i caught i learned that jerry's saved pretty much everything - all his original camera negs, workprints, outtakes, etc

That's why the Jazz Singer, upthread, looks so good. He has the (only?) original videotape, and was meticulous about archiving his stuff from the very beginning. All other copies of that were long-ago-destroyed kinescopes.

I'm sure he supplied the M&L Copacabana kine that I saw in Astoria in the late '80s, which was on-another-planet funny.