Jerry Lewis: The Total Film-Maker

dude come on.

mine was in french for chrissakes.

yours does have a funny photo, though.

But mine has Judd Apatow!

zee pigs refuse to search for truffles until you remove ze final option

Yours, admittedly, does include the Curious George legacy.

this is the worst tragedy in the history of the ilx.

you might even say it was the day the clowns cried.

If mods want to delete this one, I'm cool.

we'll let dr. morbius decide.

one is obviously for his best directorial effort, the other his acting. considering his skill at both, i think both threads are valid.

"skill"

Seriously? Hating on Jerry is still a thing?

I've been a huge fan in the past and remain so currently, but recent re-watches have made me feel he's the directorial equivalent of asperger's. I could easily see myself falling out of love with this director.

Wait. How did two Jerry Lewis polls happen on the same day? He's not dead, is he??

Departed thread got off track

No, just a Morbs-related clusterfuck in The Departed thread.

(x-post)

i have to give it to eric though because "the total film-maker" has made me lol every time i've looked at it.

xpost

not sure what you mean by that. would that make tati full-on autistic ?

Paul Sorvino: The Total Film-Maker

Coleman Francis: 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.

some folx showed up on videotape AND in person, ie Jerry Stiller and Joe Piscopo.

De Niro, Bogdanovich, Letterman and the comedy team of Tom Hanks & Jonah Hill also sent regards.

It's always great to see Jer getting the respect he deserves.

Also,
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_8k7m4e2TYeU/ScMKqlC1SCI/AAAAAAAACmY/ETY0vSaTqwg/s400/glass.bmp

I'm really sorry we couldn't run a photo of him doing that from this event

lou reed's last record w/ Metallica is (unintentionally) funnier than anything jerry lewis has ever (intentionally) done for a laugh.

it was nice to hear the Ladies Man butterfly gag get a big laugh

"Thanks for the mail now baby let's wail."

nice piece Morbz, sounds like a fun night

I didn't include Jerry's claim that he was the first to use arclights on a Hollywood set. "I saw them at UFA!"

Hoberman catalogs some of the evening's weirder moments (so right about the tanned wiseguys), and btw calls JL "Hollywood's most cerebral funny man since Buster Keaton":

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/94492/hey-jer-ree/

After calling Jerry’s trademark “Hey lay-DEE!” the Beethoven’s Fifth of Comedy, Belzer...

Belzer OTM.

can't believe I never made the connection between that and Beasties "Hey Ladies" before

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.

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

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.

i def think Living It Up is the most underrated of the Dean & Jerry films i've seen

http://www.bkmag.com/2016/03/02/the-best-old-movies-on-a-big-screen-this-week-nyc-repertory-cinema-picks-march-2-8/4/

Never saw that one. Haven't seen a ton of D&J, for that matter...just Hollywood or Bust, Artists and Models (my favorite of these three), and You're Never Too Young. The latter was my introduction to Prime Jerry/Jerry The Genius, and it completely turned me around -- prior to seeing that, I was the typical anti-Jerry snob, only thinking of him as the telethon guy. As soon as he started to move, it was, "Ah, so THAT'S where Pee-Wee Herman got about 70% of his schtick!" (among other realizations)

Violet Lucca on work, wealth and self-made men in JL's films....

Being the utterly wonderful noveau riche narcissist he is, Lewis would always portray these man-children while wearing a large gold pinky ring, giant wedding ring, and, sometimes, a gold watch, giving more than a touch of cognitive dissonance to his performances. (As I have posited elsewhere, the wedding ring might’ve diffused any guilt he experienced about his rampant infidelities at the time.)...

Despite their anarchic goofiness, this cycle of films embody some readily identifiable long-standing myths about class and class mobility in America. In The Errand Boy (61) and The Patsy (64, which effectively blends The Errand Boy with The Bellboy), delivery boys achieve fame through their clumsiness, and rise to become comedians of Lewis’s stature—even though, in fact, pratfalls and rubber faces require greater-than-average muscular control. (Myth: exceptional talent alone will get you ahead; it’s only a matter of time before you’re noticed.) In It’s Only Money (62), Lewis’s idiot private eye turns out to be the long-lost nephew of a wealthy heiress; in The Family Jewels (65), Lewis’s lovable idiot chauffeur gets to be Donna Butterworth’s daddy and inherits the millions. (Myth: you only need that one dead relative you didn’t know existed to cash in. This one is pervasive judging from the number of inheritance scams and unclaimed money services.)

http://www.filmcomment.com/blog/jerry-lewis-wealth/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZbpYq2TA0U

rewatch of his (theatrical) directorial swan song tonight

pitless watermelon

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Klg0R9wQSaM

They had what I assume to be a 1st ed. hardcover copy of the book this thread took its name from in the collectibles case at my local Half-Price for $100.

I saw that book for cheap once and inexplicably didn't buy it. A new printing is rumored.

Jerry has a "pointless cameo" as Nic Cage's dad in a new thriller.

http://variety.com/2016/film/festivals/the-trust-review-nicolas-cage-elijah-wood-sxsw-1201729052/

90!

http://m.lasvegassun.com/blogs/kats-report/2016/mar/15/jerry-lewis-at-90-its-a-monster-number/

Happy birthday, Jerry!

not sure i've posted the 'turkey dinner' sketch, recently discussed by JL with Scorsese.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erLJdTPa2i4

Max Rose to be distributed this summer, finally

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/jerry-lewis-max-rose-lands-876217

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10208938637327723&set=a.1603159283429.2080924.1369518799&type=3

OK, so a documentary about The Day the Clown Cried has just come on my TV screen...

... ugh, Terry Wogan

Was just watching that too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbZIyXNRxos

We've got ten years to wait.

thx guys for staying on form

party time

http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory/friars-club-hosts-90th-birthday-tribute-jerry-lewis-38268340

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1UHm8DcRAo

Max Rose is nothing special, tho Old Jerry has a nice gravitas. (The most kinetic performance in the film is a one-scene climactic spin by Dean Stockwell.)

JL entered the packed MoMA theater (assisted by his people) for it, got a standing ovation, and loudly asked "When do we eat?" The he did his usual passive / aggressive japery in the postscreening interview and Q&A. Someone asked him what growing up in Newark was like in the '30s. "Do you want to know about my bris? Jesus Christ. NEXT!"

and here it is

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pm9v8yFrQic

the only thing that survives of Jerry's animated TV show from '70 (to which he did not actually contribute; Squiggy from LaVerne and Shirley played Jerry). looks like about 99% racial stereotype stuff

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0g6-vEDTLw

i vaaaaguely remember the existence of that

RIP Bill Richmond, co-writer on 7 Lewis films

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/bill-richmond-dead-jerry-lewis-904166

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

Mel (Brooks) and I only worked together on the script for THE LADIES' MAN for about two weeks. Mel and I would pitch ideas back and forth to each other. Once we had a good idea Mel would say, "Let's run it by Jerry and see if he likes it." So we'd call Jerry, and Jerry would say, "I can't talk right now, but let me get back to you." Now if anybody had a bigger ego than Jerry Lewis, it was Mel Brooks. Jerry did this to Mel about four times, so finally Mel literally just said, "Fuck this, I quit." So that left me to write the movie.

http://blog.tvstoreonline.com/2015/05/part-one-three-time-emmy-winner-and.html

Oh man, had totally forgotten about the animated show! I could still recall parts of that great bubblegummy theme song, but not a thing about the cartoon itself.

A pretty good Egyptian tomb sketch from JL's '67-69 NBC show, with a very game and funny Janet Leigh, with Jer as the nutty professor (who he recycled frequently in this series). There's a DVD if you'd like to see it w/out soup and subtitles.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ioy920ZAnj8

DECONSTRUCTING JERRY: LEWIS AS DIRECTOR
A special dossier to accompany the Jerry Lewis program of the Melbourne International Film Festival 2016.

The comedian went on to discuss the duality in his own mind between his screen personality and the man who plays him, he spoke of the person on the screen as “him”. “Sometimes I write a memo in the morning”, he explained, “and then later, on the set when it’s carried out, I rebel against it – I’ve forgotten that it was me that asked for it.”

The only trouble with my doing my own screen writing is that I get so involved with the character I play that the perspective gets distorted and I begin to send out messages which have nothing to do with what I started out to create.

http://sensesofcinema.com/2016/jerry-lewis/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GutZv_D7DKk

love the Ren & Stimpy style intro music. also fun to see him tear into his former employer, "A network that would fire a father of five 3 days before Christmas".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qv_4dIj5q_I

this full episode features a really cool Gary Lewis performance followed by silly Nazis followed by Lassi!

there u go LA

http://americancinemathequecalendar.com/content/jerry-lewis-to-the-max

The star explores unusually rich dramatic territory in the title role of soon-to-be-released MAX ROSE.

Wasn't this completed over two years ago? Did it finally find a distributor?

yes. apparently the cut that was shown in Cannes some years ago was rushed and premature. (it's still not good)

“So just being alive is love?”

“Of course it is,” he says. Then there is a beat....

“Just being alive?” he says. “Think about what you just said. Just being alive. If God heard you right now, Oliver, he’d smack you. He would smack you all over this joint.”

http://observer.com/2016/08/what-jerry-lewis-talks-about-when-he-talks-about-love/

So just why is Jerry Lewis known for being difficult?

“Because I am,” he said with firm declaration. “I expect people that come to the studio to work to come with the same energy I come with. If I see less than that, I get very strong about, if you want to do this, come with a sense of pride, come with eagerness and anxiety.

“And those people that think you’re difficult, respect you tremendously. Because the creative aspect of film will never change,” he added. “They may not like it, but they respect it.”

...A question about the notorious unreleased, unseen film “The Day the Clown Cried,” which writer-director Lewis made in Europe in the early 1970s and in which he starred as a Jewish clown who leads children to the Nazi gas chambers during WWII, invokes a third and final Jerry Lewis death stare.

“Can’t talk about it. I won’t,” Lewis said. “You can ask me anything you want, that doesn’t mean I’m going to answer you.”

It was reported in 2015 that Lewis’ archives were going to the Library of Congress and that “The Day the Clown Cried” may at last be available for public view in 10 years’ time. Lewis has other thoughts on the matter.

“Never,” he said as to whether the film would finally be shown publicly. “After I’m dead 30 years you won’t see it. I’ve got it worked out so there’s nothing to show.”

And with that, a wink. Playful, inviting and mischievous, it is the exact opposite of the door-slam death stare. ...

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-max-rose-jerry-lewis-profile-20160823-snap-story.html

I think Morbs would dig this:
http://www.wtfpod.com/podcast/wtf-uncovered-3-jerry-lewis

will try later

really is too bad it was cut short! seemed like it was going pretty well...

@NickPinkerton
It can at one and the same time be true that a) Jerry Lewis is a prick and a holy terror and b) That's great and hilarious, good for him.

Funny how Maron complained that he only got 30 minutes out of Jerry Lewis, not realizing that in fact he had rode the mechanical bull longer than anyone.

Strikes me that Jerry is like Lou, inasmuch as "Make your questions be about what they are doing now, and let *them* make reference to the past, and they more than likely will.

Jerry Lewis and the Gender of Work

During his mature solo period, Lewis plays a working-class character in eight out of nine of the films directed by himself or Tashlin, which makes it safe to say that this is the basic solo Lewis persona. It is interesting, however, that in his most famous and critically respected film, The Nutty Professor, he does not play that character. Critics have seemingly warmed more easily to The Nutty Professor in part because it has a plot and a conventional narrative structure, however glaringly odd that may appear in the era of late David Lynch. The Nutty Professor, The Patsy, and all of the Tashlin-directed Lewis films struggle to find a compromise between conventional narrative structure and a comedic style based on visual/conceptual gags and sketches, sometimes grouped together as themed montages. In what I’m calling a “work film,” the subject of the sketches and montages is work....

http://brightlightsfilm.com/jerry-lewis-work-gender-rock-a-bye-baby-disorderly-orderly/#

Lol just saw his Batman cameo

91 today

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ua4suRfdbWU

Now dead.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-40994864

Condolences to Morbz.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kS21T_p0pNA

Condolences to Morbz.

Lewis’ characters are not only accidental fools, but self-determined ones, never the victims of circumstance à la classic comedy, so the question is which self it is that determines. If we assume that the Lewis character is performing his act knowingly, we can marvel at his feats of silliness, comfily complicit with Jerry Lewis, the character, that his image is of his choosing; if we assume he acts unknowingly, we can be comfily complicit with Jerry Lewis, the author, who mocks this moron in a genteel world. Different audiences have probably done both with different Lewises.

http://www.lafuriaumana.it/index.php/archives/31-lfu-12/83-david-phelps-the-pisher-dada-menschs-fodder-division-of-the-soul-s-labor

RIP ya daffy bastard. Hopefully TV might show a few of his films for a change.

When I was a nipper seems they would only show one of the worst ones, Hook, Line and Sinker

I grew up with them, now the only one you might conceivably see is "The Nutty Professor".

Its the only one I've seen.

Oh, the one where he's a college student? "I don't need (these glasses) anymore"

Poster from my collection. Bought it in 1984 at Bleecker Street Cinema. One of my faves. #JerryLewis pic.twitter.com/4KS4T0LxBh

— Dennis Perrin (@DennisThePerrin) August 20, 2017

Oh, "Funny Bones", with Lee Evans. Flopped at the box office, but its a good film..

Has anyone other than Von Sternberg with Dietrich had such a magnificent and unified winning streak as Lewis did from The Bellboy through Three on a Couch?

Figured I'd check out a French obit

http://www.lemonde.fr/culture/article/2017/08/20/le-comedien-americain-jerry-lewis-est-mort_5174445_3246.html

And running it through Google Translate contains some wonders. Is this the actual title of the film in French?

Did this role anticipate the role he played in Scorsese's film, The Waltz of the Puppets in 1982, that of a television star, a popular comedic presenter but solitary and visibly depressed in the lives of all days ?

that clip Morbs posts is both so so good and is sort of everything confusing about Lewis to me. It's SUCH a good bit, so well done - so why on earth has he gotta cross his eyes the whole time? it adds nothing to the bit, it's just like...why?

Has anyone other than Von Sternberg with Dietrich had such a magnificent and unified winning streak as Lewis did from The Bellboy through Three on a Couch?

― Anne of the Thousand Gays (Eric H.), Sunday, August 20, 2017 3:38 PM

Sturges from The Great McGinty to Hail the Conquering Hero.

I just checked The Errand Boy out from Netflix.

The Errand Boy has some of his most self-glorifying schmaltz, esp at the end.

JCLC, nothing exceeds like excess!

(ie start with The Bellboy or The Ladies Man)

my favorite M&L sketch

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erLJdTPa2i4

an array of fans....

http://deadline.com/2017/08/hollywood-reaction-jerry-lewis-nutty-professor-patton-oswald-1202152593/

Errand Boy is as good a starting point as any (I actually prefer it -- slightly -- over The Bellboy). The schmaltz (and there isn't that much) doesn't/can't detract from some of the most hilarious moments ever committed to film.

Dean & Jerry's best was mostly in clubs and TV; this is an exception

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PicUbw-zVI

the title title

https://www.scribd.com/document/197257057/The-Total-Film-Maker-1971-out-of-print-for-educational-purposes-only

obit roundup, from JL biographer Shawn Levy to Marc Maron to The Forward

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/4845-the-daily-jerry-lewis-1926-2017

note thru from my sister's boyf that he is watching cinderfella w/my niece (9), and she is chuckling away

thus is the tradition passed down

Perrin on his Lewis "re-education" and watching him rehearse SNL.

https://dennisperrinblog.wordpress.com/2017/08/21/when-clowns-cry/

STOP WITH THE BRUSHING! https://t.co/CKH59ao8zX

— James Urbaniak (@JamesUrbaniak) August 20, 2017

hahah <3
HOLD IT

The lunch scene in The Errand Boy was somethin'.

watch the Miami one!

podcast

http://www.thecinephiliacs.net/2017/08/the-total-film-maker-jerry-lewis-1926.html

Interesting quote circa The Bellboy, after CC's political exile obviously:

"To compare me to Chaplin is ludicrous in a sense. Chaplin was a real master. I'd have to work fifty years to begin to touch what he did. But we work differently. I don't impose my thinking as a person on an audience. I don't think comedy has room for a political approach."

That next-to-last sentence is self-deception, of course.

Orson Welles:

“When he goes too far, he’s heaven; it’s just when he doesn’t go too far that he’s unendurable.”

Spot on, there.

the Genius inseparable from the Asshole

http://www.tiff.net/the-review/au-revoir-mr-lewis/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkVw32vafPE

i love that! this scene is in the theremin documentary

Marty's remembrance

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/sep/01/jerry-lewis-martin-scorsese-king-comedy-nutty-professor

TCM is showing some Jerry today: Nutty Professor @ 5pm pst, King of Comedy @7pst, The Stooge @9pm & Bell Boy @ 11pm

I hope the Carpenters saw the last 30 seconds of this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7j-oWaNUkc

Lazy impersonations of Lewis focus on the mania and miss those pauses the perfectionist, preternaturally gifted physical comedian would lace into his bits. A random limb swiftly raised then replaced just as quickly, the intention realized as useless almost the instant it’s conceived; the trailing-off sentence fragments and swallowed coughs, a need to articulate the dilemma strangled by the pointlessness (or impossibility?) of the effort; the childlike defensive stance, crouched so his butt sticks out and face juts forward, and cautious tread—more a single legged-pivot with, somehow, forward momentum—around the problem; the hand briefly cradling the brow beginning to seethe. It’s a magnificent collection of cancelled gestures and never-stated oaths, as if even Lewis’s frustration was being frustrated. And then—and only then, snarky shouters of nasal freundlavens should note—the explosion.

But it’s where these outbursts are embedded, particularly in Lewis’s self-directed films, that sets them above. Working hard on the Martin and Lewis pictures, developing his craft even as he began reaching for a relevancy and pathos beyond the gibbering of The Kid (a stagehand on their TV show once asked what bit of business Lewis was endlessly rehearsing; “Shakespeare shit,” snarled Dean), Lewis began second-guessing and bossing around such talented but uninspired directors as Norman Taurog; but Frank Tashlin he studied. From the former animator he learned the infinite possibilities of a cartoon world made flesh, and the visual advantages of a bright, modernist palette. To Tashlin’s anarchic satire of mid-century America, Lewis added the element that shall forever divide his followers from his detractors: an ego that was monstrous, to be sure, but also so self-aware of its own needs and limitations it couldn’t help but be tuned in to its fragility as well, and the permeability of what we like to think of as our immutable selves. “The Lewisian person is not merely inconsistent,” Chris Fujiwara has written, “he is discontinuous.”

http://parallax-view.org/2017/08/22/not-find-hilarious-celebrating-jerry-lewis/

Watched Who's Minding the Store? the other day. Taking note of the incredible number of brand name department store items constantly on display made me think about how these films, whether Tashlin or Jerry-directed, always give you so much to look at in the backgrounds and how often it's of a consumerist nature. There's also, for example, the supermarket-destruction scene in The Disorderly Orderly and all the modernistic hotel trappings in The Bellboy. Even as "satire of mid-century America" these films really revel in the most modern aspects of consumer culture. And Jerry's dork characters often sport cool, contemporary clothes (by Sy Devore?), which make them (him) seem that much more up-to-date.

Would have to say the out-of-control vacuum cleaner bit in Who's Minding the Store? has got to be one of Jerry's all-time best set pieces. Complete chaos, total madness.

Watched The Geisha Boy too and was somewhat disappointed that the Jerry character couldn't have found more time for the young Suzanne Pleshette in addition to all the time he devotes to the little Japanese boy. Couldn't quite understand his coolness to her.

I rewatched The Bellboy last night; both Jerrys undone by modernism.

I also noticed in my first watch of The Delicate Delinquent that, as a single 'juvenile' slumdweller, he was wearing his wedding ring.

I've noticed that Jerry wears his wedding ring in every one of his films (at least in the solo years)!

At least one of the obit thinkpieces also mentioned his expensive watch, jewelry etc in Hardly Working, to name one.

Wondering what Serge G and Jane B had to do The Day the Clown Cried. My skills aren't good enough to understand the Dutch voiceover.

please explain

There is a Dutch video discussing and showing the filming of The Day the Clown Cried and Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin are on set. Can't find right this second.

apparently they were just visiting

Still

Jerry made some home productions w/ his famous friends; there's scuttle butt about trying to get some shown publicly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAFNo_rq7rc

Watched Jerry's hourlong 1959 TV remake of The Jazz Singer, which is primarily a fascinating piece of psychohistory, and of course ends with him singing "Kol Nidre" in a tallis and clown nose.
(He also does a funny bit with a trumpet at the start.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBe0qy5k8vk

Watched that a few years ago; fascinating indeed. And it's the first appearance of Serious/Angry Jerry, right?

first? not sure

you all have been remiss

https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/tag/A%20MUBI%20Jerrython

my friend Steve wrote this about JL's 'record act' and subsequent mimicry

https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/jerry-lewis-satirical-impressions-in-pantomimicry

talking at U of C, 1971

The things that I do, of course, are terribly lowbrow. I’m not talking about reviews now. I’m talking about general consensus, that comedy is lowbrow. But you take someone like Stan Laurel, who had the greatest dignity and the most influence of any man I’ve ever know. And he was just chucked under the rug. I finally found out the reason for it: most people fear comedy. Because the truth of it is like a bone coming through the skin. Comedy is nothing more than a mirror we hold up to life. And people don’t want that.

I did an exhibition one night for my class, but they didn’t understand why I felt that way. I told them about a party that I went to in New York—the Jet Set. It was the only night I ever vomited for an hour straight. I never saw anything like it in my life. Just a breed of people that I just can’t begin to tell you about. I didn’t dislike them—I couldn't understand them. Someone would say, “Hello, and how are you,” and turn away, and walk, and you can’t say, “How are you” yet. “How are you”—and I’m about to say—I never got “fine” out. And they’re leaving and they’re shaking hands and leaving…but—I watched this one woman who had a dress on—and it looked like it was painted on her. And there was a terribly funny man there—Jonathan Winters, who’s truly a genius. Hysterical. And this woman fought the laughter back because it would in fact either split the dress—or it would have to bend. And she was getting convulsed. (Laughter.) Her face was still red. But she wasn’t going to budge in that goddamn dress. She was not about to enjoy. And that’s terribly sad. And I showed the students exactly how she stood.

https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/an-afternoon-with-jerry-lewis

I think CinemaScope and Panavision were made for a rabbi and 7,000 sheep in a desert.

1980 interview by Cahiers:

CAHIERS: We've wondered here if a clown character would work on television?

JERRY LEWIS: I don't believe so. Television... the simple view of television... Look at this box (he points out a sumptuous tv set in the room and opens it). To communicate, you need concentration. Listen, Absorb. Maintain a thought. Look at this set. It's off. Yet I see a table, a couch, a statue with bare breasts. My training was a darkened theater where there's concentration, larger than life. That (vengeful gesture towards tv), is smaller than life. Just this information, unconsciously and psychologically, makes you look at tiny characters, dwarves. Remember when you were a child and you tried to measure with your fingers the distance between two stars? It's la meme chose. For me. If I go to the cinema... WAW!, it takes me, and there is a place for me, for you and you and you. We can all communicate between each other; that's why when we're in a cinema and the movie is bad, it's really bad. For me it's, (hateful gesture), it's about news and sports. Because in sports there is nothing to communicate but who wins and who loses. If you watch a football match and a player scores a goal... (he applauds) The image of a little man is fine, it doesn't have to be larger than life. But if you want to touch people, their hearts and minds, you can't be distracted. You've all seen that in Hollywood (he holds his hand out while looking the other way): "Hello! Nice to see you..." Bullshit. Distraction. And I say let's take these people and put them in a dark empty room with just a little light on them and they will shake hands and yes, they will meet!

CAHIERS: On French television not long ago we saw A KING IN NEW YORK by Chaplin. It was surprising to see how, as he aged, Chaplin became bitter. Most comedians judge others and society more and more as they age, and are morally more and more demanding. Their films become tougher. Do you think this could apply to you?

JERRY LEWIS: If they do to me what they did to Chaplin, yes. I don't think it's as inevitable as all that. There is nothing that I should be bitter about. Chaplin had many reasons to be bitter. Sometimes this hardness is just the expression of a job less well done. The artist realizes it and tries to force things. But Chaplin, they broke his heart. They were unfair to him. Today, can anyone tell me if Chaplin was a communist? And if he had been, what does that have to do with his work? As long as his work makes people happy... There are certainly people doing good work today who may be communists, but I don't care, as long as it doesn't hurt anyone . The last time I was in Paris, I did a series of interviews and I didn't know that one of the journalists I was speaking to was a communist. So what? I was initially worried and then I wondered why: they were good people, they printed what I said, which is not always the case... Nobody comes and explains to me what a communist is. My children asked me this question, I answered: I'll tell you, I'm going to Europe to find out. But I agree with you about A KING IN NEW YORK. What a film!

CAHIERS: One last question: what do you think of the new generation of American filmmakers?

JERRY LEWIS: I like them. But you have to watch them. Spielberg is a good filmmaker. But we should've never let him make 1941 (1979). He's not a comic filmmaker. When you have success in a field, you mustn't change. The man who's very good at repairing the phone, should he also be a brain surgeon? No. If you don't watch the young filmmakers, they'll be eaten alive by the money-men. Spielberg, Lucas, Bogdanovich, Randy Kleiser, they were all my students. They risk disappearing either because they cannot master their success, or because the money-men will steal their talent, turn it on their heads, and not know what to do with it. It's like wine, if you open it too early, it's vinegar. We can't speed up the creative process. We don't do in a year what takes twenty-five years to grow. Hemingway did not begin by writing THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA. We learn from what we've done, not from what others tell us. And we are our best judges. Because we know what we did. When we're young we get our heads together, we figure out that what we do is good. But great works come from big mistakes, not great successes. I don't like it, but that's how it is. And the young American filmmakers you're talking about, they've learned their craft but haven't learned patience. We are all impatient in a way, but if you are too impatient, you won't last long. Then there are those who make mistakes, can't stand it and slink away.

https://kinoslang.blogspot.de/2018/02/maybe-we-can-get-it-weaved-no-2.html

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DctFAK4W4AcvB4b.jpg:large

i open bidding on Stan Laurel's studio pass, which I saw JL pull out of his wallet in 2012

i've only seen the episode of the Seinfeld Coffee series with Garry Shandling, but I'm going to have to catch the one in the new season with Lewis at some point. JL orders breakfast: “I’m gonna have three fried eggs up, and a large order of very very very stiff bacon.”

haha

That series is pretty hit-or-miss, but Jer will be reliably cantankerous and/or hilarious.

The @believermag has made its archive available for free online, include probably the most essential essay on Jerry Lewis, B. Kite's 2-part "The Jerriad": https://t.co/EAds0EZRWx + https://t.co/NYteyav5Hg pic.twitter.com/vLZ13amGvH

— Notebook (@NotebookMUBI) July 27, 2018

As good as writing on Lewis gets!

"I am THE dichotomy."

The Unknown Jerry: Home Movies
and More from the Jerry Lewis
Collection at the Library of Congress

https://www.moma.org/calendar/film/5019?locale=en

Maybe Jerry's last NYC public appearance, a Q&A after a screening of Max Rose in which he's by turns clownish, sentimental and testy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pm9v8yFrQic

MoMA is currently showing, along with the home movies, The Nutty Professor storyboards

https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5020?locale=en

You must see Jerry's screen test of Sophie Tucker at some point.

also Milton Berle, for JL's sadism

about those home movies...

Attempting to deliver a “Jewish Sunset Boulevard,” (itself helmed by German-Jewish émigré Billy Wilder and co-starring his countryman Erich von Stroheim), “Fairfax Avenue” boasts a sense of humor perhaps too overtly Jewish for Hollywood proper, with Tony Curtis playing a delicatessen delivery boy who finds himself acting as the factotum for an aging actress. Gamely played by Janet Leigh (Curtis’s wife at the time), the diva is a veteran of the Yiddish stage, known for her work at the Second Avenue Theatre and in the process of writing her memoirs for — who else? — the Jewish Daily Forward. The film boasts yet another unusually Jewish turn from a less-than-Semitic actor in the form of Dean Martin liberally peppering Yiddish into a musical number, smoothly crooning, “I can get it for you wholesale down on Fairfax Avenue.”

“The Re-inforcer” and “Fairfax Avenue” do show Lewis experimenting with the medium-specific formal humor that he would master with his later features. Both films trade on his signature self-reflexivity and overt artifice, wielding their own cheapness in the same manner that he later work would employ the nearly magical largesse of the studio system. “Fairfax Avenue” has a running bit in which Curtis leaves the frame by miming descending stairs where clearly none could exist. In “The Re-inforcer,” Lewis fashions an extended gag involving a flagrantly fake dummy, winning laughs by having the man-shaped-sack emit something resembling a Wilhelm scream. In the same film, Lewis uses the famed Kuleshov effect to set up a fake movie called “The Great Caruso” starring himself, framed from the neck up as an all-but-disembodied (and mustachioed) head, hammily lip syncing along to an operatic show-stopper.

Read more: https://forward.com/culture/411863/could-jerry-lewis-have-become-the-jewish-andy-warhol/

https://forward.com/culture/411863/could-jerry-lewis-have-become-the-jewish-andy-warhol/

Let’s commemorate the birthday of Jerry Lewis with a celebration of Jerry Lewis Cinema - not his motion pictures but his actual theaters. They popped up everywhere in the early 70s and disappeared about 2 years later. Here are a lot of optimistic Grand Openings: pic.twitter.com/tvtG7hlEjv

— Larry Karaszewski (@Karaszewski) March 16, 2019

From tweet thread:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Bysxs05IMAAXsG4.jpg

Alsao some interesting factoids from Glenn Kenny about what happened to some of those theatres.

I have an ad somewhere from an Esquire from when they were franchising.

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?