Jerry Lewis: The Total Film-Maker

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

he did a thing at the Friars Club too

While a frantic Leroy Anderson orchestral composition played in the background, Mr. Lewis recreated a famous bit in which he appears to pound away at an invisible typewriter.

And he sang an a cappella rendition of “Somebody,” from his 1960 comedy “Cinderfella,” with lyrics that poignantly observe, “In a cabin or a castle, even though you rise or fall/ Without somebody, you’re nobody at all.”

A further test of Mr. Lewis’s endurance awaited when the show was over. For a half-hour, he remained seated onstage in his chair while he received the good wishes of his fans, gently mocking their inquiries (“What a dumb question”) and discouraging them from taking selfies with him.

“It’s going to turn into an Italian wedding if you do that,” he explained more than once. “It’ll never end.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/07/arts/jerry-lewis-holds-sway-at-the-friars-club.html

https://instagram.com/p/95JbisqbVF/

NYC MoMA 90TH BIRTHDAY RETRO, mostly w/ 35mm prints and outtakes plus... basically similar to the 1988 Astoria retro that opened the Moving Image Museum:

http://www.moma.org/calendar/film/1621?locale=en

Jerry recorded an intro of a minute-plus for the retro; gracious and uneventful (he thinks it's "terriFICK").

There were color home movies shot by a M&L associate of Dean and Jerry hobnobbing around Broadway in their first big "presentation house" bill at the Capitol Theater ('47?), ie they shared the marquee with the Tex Beneke orchestra and the hit movie Naked City in a 4600-seat house, doing 4 shows a day. Assorted showbiz luminaries ambled by or mugged for the camera, including a 26-year-old Jack Roy (Rodney Dangerfield)! Young Dean was crazy handsome, the movies really don't do him justice.

They also screened about 45 minutes of Dean & Jerry guest shots on Milton Berle's show -- VERY funny, cuz Berle was best at down n' dirty slapstick and rapid-fire insults, and Lewis was practically tossing him around the stage at a few points.

Then there was a preview cut of The Ladies Man (which I'd seen in Astoria in 1988); my God, I'd forgotten about that whole "Miss Cartilage" dominatrixish musical number, WTF.

http://www.festival-cannes.fr/assets/Image/2012/cannes_classics/Dean%20Martin_Jerry%20Lewis.JPG

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-NLDbHYFga28/U-ps8v-GfqI/AAAAAAAAGz0/91Jmifc3xNY/s1600/misscartilage.jpg

to be precise, Capitol engagement was spring '48

my God, I'd forgotten about that whole "Miss Cartilage" dominatrixish musical number, WTF.

Yeah, always thought that bit was completely fucking bizarre. Not unlike the little clown puppet in The Errand Boy, but at least the clown was trying to (clumsily) teach Jer something about himself.

i'd say Sylvia Lewis (the dancer who was Miss Cartilage) was too

lengthy excerpts of October's dialogue with Scorsese; great stuff

MS: The thing about The Ladies Man and The Bellboy and The Family Jewels and all these films is, we didn’t learn in the sense that we went to the theater to learn. What I was fascinated by was that the structure of the story was so loose that you can open a door and can get into an orchestra with Les Baxter. You can get the house cut in half. There’s Helen Traubel, she’s doing her routine. I mean, there’s a story, but is there a plot? I don’t know! And so, with these pictures, it opened out heads to say, you know, you don’t have to be stuck to a three-act structure in terms of narrative. You can make a film about a guy trying to get into a building. But this really freed us in terms of thinking about what cinema is. So in terms of the timing within the frame, he does that masterfully, of course. But then in terms of the editing, how does one deal with that, if you come in for a tighter shot? When, as you set the time in The Colgate Comedy Hour, you put your foot in the turkey dinner? You remember? I saw that live.

JL: “Take your filthy hands off that bird!”

MS: The timing was impeccable. And you told me there was a slave camera, another camera that picked it up immediately. Have you had some very interesting relationships to these kinds of situations in the editing room? In terms of pacing.

JL: Well, you know how many times you plan something for a wide shot with a lot of animation and then all of a sudden you come to it and it’s not what you really want to do. And you start trimming and taking a piece from here and a piece from there… And I’ll play that back when I sit in the editing room, and I’ll do what I used to call “death march” footage—you I going to get killed unless you fix this!—and you talk to yourself once in awhile.

MS: It’s true, because the pacing is like music. And you do music. You know, as a recording artist, you conduct an orchestra. Comedy is music that way. Cinema is music. That timing carries through. It’s impeccable. I’d seen some of the Chaplin films earlier, but they are not the way your stuff was presented at that time in the late ‘50s/early ‘60s. To be able to respond to a visual image that had such fluidity to it in terms of pacing and comic timing. We’d never really seen anything like it. And the scripted scenes and improvised scenes… The improvisation that you would do physically would fit within the scripted scene. That’s another issue, I think: you had more control of it because you were doing it.

JL: I had holes to fall in all over the set. No, really. You never know when I’m going to use one! [Laughter] I gave of myself completely. I’ve got so many more scars on my body, you’d think I’d played NFL football! I came out of a three-story window into cardboard boxes, which were supposed to save me, and I landed on the corner of them. I’ll show that to you later. [Laughter] No, I won’t.

http://www.filmcomment.com/blog/jerry-lewis-and-martin-scorsese/

tonight's post-screening fare of Hollywood or Bust promises footage of multiple Dean & Jerry reunions -- there's more than just the mid-'70s telethon, beats me.