Jerry Lewis: The Total Film-Maker

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?