Jerry Lewis: The Total Film-Maker

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.

http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory/jerry-lewis-repeats-distaste-female-comics-19241932

Asked who his favorite female comics were Thursday at a Cannes Film Festival press conference, Jerry Lewis listed Cary Grant and Burt Reynolds. He then added: "I don't have any."

In 1998, Lewis famously said that watching women do comedy "sets me back a bit" and that he has trouble with the notion of would-be mothers as comedians.

Asked Thursday if he had changed his mind at all because of performers like Melissa McCarthy and Sarah Silverman, the 87-year-old Lewis said of women performing broad comedy: "I can't see women doing that. It bothers me."

"I cannot sit and watch a lady diminish her qualities to the lowest common denominator," he said. "I just can't do that."

I don't think ppl change much after 5 years old, and certainly not 85.

I don't think ppl change much after 5 years old

You know ...

http://www.tracyjonesonline.com/jerry_lewis.jpg

... you're not wrong about that.

you're inordinately fond of Puffy Medicated Jerry, long gone

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1GPs-P275I

Initial reviews are...not so good. And that clip isn't very encouraging.

he looks pretty good these days!

i'm sure this movie will be terrible, jerry hasn't made a good career choice for many decades

there's a new print of the bellboy circulating out there, try to catch it if you can

clip looks ok to me! Jerry's playing Jerry as usual but his presence is still pretty commanding

He got even richer letting Murphy redo Nutty Professor, that was a pretty good choice.

that's true

there's a new print of the bellboy circulating out there, try to catch it if you can

Man, would love to see that in a theater.

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-JeF5INdcEa0/UcDfQmWnCKI/AAAAAAAAH2k/jK-F9PB3_Bg/s1600/981421_558073160905035_24921363_o.jpg

http://www.fandor.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/vjerry.jpg

I saw The Trials of Muhammad Ali on the weekend, and there was a great clip of him being interviewed by Lewis circa 1964--maybe guest-hosting on The Tonight Show?--and Lewis tells him to shut up! Can't find the clip.

this one?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JK6Yoq3xhH8

That'd be it, thanks--I was searching Jerry Lewis/Muhammad Ali.

Hey, Morbs, if you want a signed first edition of Jerry Lewis In Person, my cousin has one up on eBay: http://www.ebay.com/itm/-/331046873396?roken=rzF8IT

I tried to make it through the doc last night (loads of talking heads - Seinfeld, Woody Harrelson, Eddie Murphy, Spielberg, Carol Burnett, etc. - all saying how if you don't "get" Lewis then you don't get comedy) and I couldn't make it. He's a fascinating figure in a lot of ways but his schtick, particularly the "classic" clips they played from his films just don't make me laugh. For me the funniest bit was a clip from his recent stage tour where he asked for a stool and someone from stage-left threw one at him.

I watch the typewriter bit or the falling vases-bit and I marvel at the coordination and skill that are abundantly in evidence but I don't actually laugh.

I always found the typewriter bit a lot more impressive than funny too. And the doc was really hit-or-miss. For whatever reason, the "classic" shit that's always trotted out for Jerry retrospectives is often either not his best shit, or yanked from the context that made it funny.

But if you want Solid Laffs, you can't go wrong with The Errand Boy.

just pretend I put that MO'D quote about getting laughs being the lowest form of comedy here.

srsly, Lewis's post-Dean films -- even the good ones -- are generally less ha-ha-funny than, say, their live TV appearances or the best moments of the M&L movies. You either get fascinated by being immersed in his world or you don't.

DOn't think I've ever seen a M&L movie. Did they ever get shown on TV in the UK?

Not very often, I don't think, whereas I grew up with The Disorderly Orderly, Nutty Professor et al. I'm a fan, shoot me.

... and Who's Minding the Store, I don't know how many times I saw that as a child

i saw a few m&l movies on uk tv back in the 90s. hollywood or bust and artists and models are the ones i remember.

I have the Deano e.p. for Hollywood or Bust.

JL's not on it.

(I was young enough to wonder where Bust was.)

This was the last film that Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin appeared in together. According to Lewis in his autobiography, he and Dean did not speak to each other off camera during the entire film shoot. In addition, Lewis claimed that this is the only one of his films that he has never seen, citing it as too painful to watch.

teaching at USC 1967

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZ6nlpZFzKo

needed work on the chalk drawings imho

Jonathan Rosenbaum's notes for the Viennale tribute to JL:

Indeed, the fact that the monster impact of Martin and Lewis on American society of the 1950s briefly preceded that of Elvis Presley suggests that, in their own manic fashion, Dean and Jerry helped to usher in the youth culture of the 1950s and its own liberating physical impulses (associated mainly with sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll) in which Lewis’s body spoke louder than his words (which often took the form of gibberish anyway) and seemed to have an erupting and convulsive will of its own, cutting through all the multiple restraints that characterized American society during this period. (See, in particular, the extraordinary and singular dances performed by Lewis in such films as Sailor Beware, Living It Up, You’re Never Too Young [1954], Cinderfella [1959], The Ladies Man [1961], and The Nutty Professor [1962].)Despite the fact that Lewis was saddled with a producer at Paramount, Hal B. Wallis, determined to keep his and Martin’s comedies as innocuous and as formulaic as possible — a service Wallis provided even more ruinously to Elvis Presley a little later by similarly and systematically de-radicalizing and dry-cleaning his star’s image and appeal in relation to sex, ethnicity, race, and politics — Lewis, unlike Presley, gradually acquired enough clout to exercise creative control as writer, producer, and director, even though he initially received no screen credit for this. Wallis fully succeeded, however, in depriving Lewis of any of the cultural prestige that he routinely assigned to his adaptations of Broadway dramas during the same period — many of these about frustrated middle-aged woman (e.g., Come Back, Little Sheba, The Rose Tattoo, The Rainmaker, Summer and Smoke) — and sometimes being rewarded for his good middlebrow taste with Oscars. For Wallis and his constituency, “art” usually meant the legitimate stage (especially Tennessee Williams), literature, and/or foreign actors such as Anna Magnani and Anthony Quinn — lessons that Woody Allen would benefit from (as would Arthur Penn, Francis Coppola, Martin Scorsese, among other culturally ambitious American directors) when he openly emulated European filmmakers and “serious” American playwrights, something Lewis has never done....

http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/2013/10/the-lewis-contradiction/

Fitting my theory that Jerry doesn't even believe what he's saying during some of his most quotable outbursts, in this case "Women aren't funny," here he goes on at great length to praise Carol Burnett as a great artist and clown. Bonuses of chomping on candy and the "garbage" (entertainment, presumably) America has endured since 1948:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtfOcO9vj0c#t=114

http://cinephilearchive.tumblr.com/post/72674722317/the-total-film-maker-jerry-lewis-book-on

88 today

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxguEW4yf_g

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLQybyaWt6s

one of my favorite scenes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQ0nhxCwxVU

Hoberman on the new Nutty Blu-ray set, which includes The Errand Boy, Cinderfella and "a facsimile of Instruction Book for Being a Person, the slim volume Mr. Lewis wrote, had bound and distributed to the movie’s cast and crew."

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/15/movies/homevideo/jerry-lewis-in-8216the-nutty-professor8217.html

Think I'll skip that one; I already have the "Legendary Jerry Collection" box. Now, if it had been packaged with a copy of The Total Filmmaker...

First Jerry thinkpiece I've seen where he's compared to Matthew Barney.

As the titles of his amateur films from the early 50s – Come Back Little Shiksa, A Spot in the Shade, Watch on the Lime, Fairfax Avenue (a play on Billy Wilder’s Sunset Blvd.) – suggest, Lewis was poking fun at ‘respectable’ classics, frequently giving a specifically Jewish twist to this mainstream fare. Judging from the handful of clips that have emerged from these productions, they wore their marginal status as a badge of honour, their lack of production values functioning as an implicit critique of Hollywood gloss (anticipating the approach of later independent directors such as Jim McBride and John Cassavetes). Lewis even mocked the self-importance and solipsism of Hollywood’s rituals, staging his own red-carpet premieres for these shorts at his own house, and hosting award ceremonies in which he and his collaborators took home every statuette.

Lewis is so widely regarded as part of the Hollywood elite that it is worth noting how strongly opposed to it his formal, aesthetic and ideological practices are, his craving for independence as a filmmaker being the external expression of a deeper radicalism. His persona as a performer involved a rejection of restraint, dignity and good taste, and it was clearly this which endeared him to both children and revolutionaries while attracting the opprobrium of those who believed Stanley Kramer and Fred Zinnemann to be great directors, and Laurence Olivier a great actor.

http://www.bfi.org.uk/…/comment/b…/jerry-lewis-where-respect

urrrgh

http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/comment/bradlands/jerry-lewis-where-respect

Anecdote from a friend on FB who went with his husband to this Joan Collins thing:

Joan Collins was actually very enjoyable. It was a One-Woman Show and she spent an hour and fifteen minutes showing slides and talking about her life, then spent another 20 minutes fielding questions from the audience. I wanted to ask her about the greatest movie she's ever done, "Empire of the Ants", but chickened out. Her stories were great though, especially her catty ones about the other actresses she worked with. And I loved when an audience member asked her if she was still friends with Linda Evans, and she answered, "I've never been friends with Linda Evans". Me-Ouch!
Sitting right across the isle from us was none other than Jerry Lewis, who made it very obvious that he didn't want anyone bothering him at all. (Skip sneaked a picture of both Joan and Jerry, although he was warned there were no pictures allowed of anyone. Jerry was looking a little ragged around the edges, but Joan looked amazing. It's hard to believe she's 81 years old!

Skip posted a blurry photo later -- nothing revelatory, Jerry looked like Jerry -- with this note:

And here's Jerry, trying to escape the few fans that wanted to shake his hand. ALL were assholes, actually, during the Jerry encounter at the end.

from the NYT Book Review's piece on Norman Lear's autobio:

"His memoir covers 92 extraordinary years of life in which, among other things, Lear flew 52 missions as a radio operator and gunner in World War II, wrote television scripts for the country singer Tennessee Ernie Ford and witnessed a naked Jerry Lewis blow out a birthday candle attached to his penis."

I was going to say the obvious question was "How many candles?"

NYT's Jennifer Schuessler:

The Nutty Professor has moved a few steps closer to academic respectability with the announcement that the Library of Congress has acquired the personal archives of Jerry Lewis.

The archive, acquired by a combination of donation and purchase, includes more than 10,000 moving-image materials and paper documents covering Mr. Lewis’s seven-decade career, from an early screen test before his movie debut to prints of hits like “The Errand Boy” and “The Bellboy” to various outtakes and bloopers.

The archive also contains the amateur movies Mr. Lewis directed at home, including “Fairfax Avenue” (a spoof of “Sunset Boulevard”) and “The Re-Enforcer” (starring Dean Martin).

Additionally, it contains copies from Mr. Lewis’s many television appearances on shows like “The Tonight Show” and the more obscure “Broadway Open House,” as well as footage of his nightclub act with Mr. Martin and his work with the Muscular Dystrophy Association Telethon.

To mark the acquisition Mr. Lewis, 89, will give a performance on Oct. 9 at the State Theater in Culpeper, Va., not far from the library’s Packard Campus for Audio-Visual Conservation, where his archive will be stored.

“For more than seven decades I’ve been dedicated to making people laugh,” Mr. Lewis said in a statement. “If I get more than three people in a room, I do a number. Knowing that the Library of Congress was interested in acquiring my life’s work was one of the biggest thrills of my life.”

The library also holds collections relating to a number of other comedians, including Bob Hope, Groucho Marx, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz.

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/09/14/jerry-lewis-archive-goes-to-library-of-congress/

My comedian friend went to this and said Scorsese was quoting The Total Film-Maker from memory.

http://www.showbiz411.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/scorsese-and-lewis-c2015-Showbiz411.jpg

“Comedy in visual terms is always preferable to verbal,” he offered. “The visual gets to the brain faster. The eyes are faster than the ears.”

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/oct/07/jerry-lewis-martin-scorsese-new-york-film-festival

http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/martin-scorsese-and-jerry-lewis-talk-comedy-filmmaking-and-more-at-museum-of-the-moving-image-20151007

http://www.showbiz411.com/2015/10/07/exclusive-jerry-lewis-listens-to-dean-martins-music-all-the-time-all-of-it-i-always-listen-to-my-partners-stuff

Oh man, thanks for posting those! Must've been amazing to be in that room.

feet

https://twitter.com/NickPinkerton/status/651791745215283200

Brody:

Scorsese called “The Bellboy,” Lewis’s first feature as a director, “a virtual dictionary of visual thought.” Speaking of one of Lewis’s most spectacular achievements, “The Ladies Man,” Scorsese (who was eighteen when it came out) said that the freely associative logic of the dance scene involving the “woman in black” suggested a new kind of movie grammar (what does Jerry think she’s going to do with that rope?), and that the movie over all presented them with new possibilities: “There’s a story, but is there a plot? It freed us up.”...

Lewis parodied Spencer Tracy’s scene of captivity in “Captains Courageous,” imitating him with a chain around his neck and crying out—with a rush of Yiddish, saying of the Catholic Tracy, “Really, he speaks better Jewish than I do.” But Lewis brought the discussion back to his craft, explaining that what he learned from Tracy was, “He had a wonderful time. I had to find the device so that when I made a film, I could have a wonderful time.”

That device turned out to be technical mastery. Lewis said, “In my first three days at Paramount, nobody could find me”—because he was wandering the studio, talking with and learning from technicians in every department, from camera and sound to lighting and editing (but, he said, not the contracts department—“not lawyers”).

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/jerry-lewis-the-auteur