Jerry Lewis: The Total Film-Maker

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!

Not just comedy. Horror, too.

https://newrepublic.com/article/185434/watched-footage-jerry-lewis-unreleased-1972-holocaust-film

“The Day the Clown Cried” has a reputation for being the worst movie ever shot. When I saw it, I was surprised at what I found.

oh wow. five hours. that that's what there is does support lewis's claim that shearer's story is hokum, that there wasn't any final or even really rough cut to see.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/article/2024/aug/30/ashamed-embarrassed-jerry-lewis-infamous-holocaust-clown-film-that-never-was

this (mentioned in the TNR piece) sounds so much worse than The Clown Cried could ever be

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boy_in_the_Striped_Pyjamas_(film)

RIght

that that's what there is does support lewis's claim that shearer's story is hokum, that there wasn't any final or even really rough cut to see.

I've seen some commentary from someone other than Shearer that they saw what he saw, which was an assembly cut of the feature, which was still sans music and sound effects (and definitely not in a state for release). It's believed that this print either: (A) doesn't exist anymore, or (B) is still under lock and key somewhere and not (as previously speculated) part of what was handed over to the LoC.

It's Jerry's centennial today.

For NYers, the Anthology Film Archives is showing a bunch of his films March 19 - March 31, including his seldom seen final directorial work, Smorgasbord, aka Cracking Up (1983).