Jerry Lewis: The Total Film-Maker

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.”