Jerry Lewis: The Total Film-Maker

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