Indianapolis, IN–Born April 1, 1883, Lon Chaney was one of the greatest of silent film stars. Best remembered for his roles in Phantom of the Opera (1925) and Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), Chaney was known the world over for his chameleon-like ability to inhabit strange and different roles. One of his most famous was as a vampire in London After Midnight (1927), a film that has not been seen in public since at least 1970, and probably well before. The last known copy perished in a vault fire, and no copies were known to exist in private hands.
Until today.
Preservationist Eric Grayson, who independently seeks out rare films to preserve and share them, discovered a print in a private collection in October.
“Like so many silent film finds, it wasn’t where you’d expect to find it at all,” Grayson said in a telephone interview. “People have been searching for it for decades. There was a rumor that the film had been in San Francisco, in Sweden, or that a French 9.5mm print survived. This was in the basement of a collector in rural Illinois.”
The print, on 35mm safety stock, was a surprise to everyone. As far as anyone knew, no prints had been made since the 1920s.
“This guy was a bigwig in the local theater circuit, and he wanted a print, so he asked MGM, and they made him one. It was struck in 1956, so it’s in good shape and looks better than a lot of the other Lon Chaney pictures that have survived,” Grayson said.
Such things are unusual, but not unique. A 35mm print of Chaney’s West of Zanzibar (1928), printed under similar circumstances, has been bouncing from collector to collector for some years now. Also, Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman (1928), long thought to be lost, showed up in a near-mint 16mm print in a private collection a few years ago.
Grayson stated that the print required a little cleaning and special care, but is essentially projectable as-is. He quietly prepared a special high-definition digital transfer and then had a special card up his sleeve.
“London After Midnight will premiere on TCM,” said programming president Charlie Tabesh. “Eric basically blackmailed us to do what he wanted. We didn’t have a choice.”
Grayson, an ardent film preservationist, has been trying to sell an independently made television show for several years now. Entitled Dr. Film, the show promotes film preservation while also being a silly tribute to old-fashioned movie hosts.
“He said he’d sent us several copies of his pilot,” Tabesh said, “but frankly we’d never seen it. Then, when London After Midnight showed up, he called us and said that we weren’t getting it unless it became part of the first Dr. Film episode on TCM.”
Grayson wasn’t kidding. He has wanted to share other films from his collection for years, but runs into a lot of audience apathy. Having dealt with archives for many years, he knew about a special loophole that would cement his case.
“I told them if they didn’t green-light a few episodes of Dr. Film, then I would donate London After Midnight to an archive, with the stipulation that Warner Brothers, the copyright owner, couldn’t access it. There are a lot of films at archives with silly stipulations on them like that, and they have to be honored.”
“Eric is lucky,” said another film collector, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Frankly, his pilot for Dr. Film was awful. He’s so passionate about preserving oddball films that the ones he picked for the pilot episode were just appalling. Sure, they were rare, but who cares? TCM is so stodgy and stuck in its ways that something like his goofy take on Dr. Film would normally just leave them wondering what they were seeing.”
Instead, Grayson has a six-episode commitment from TCM for his new show, headlined by a Lon Chaney retrospective as the first installment. He promises to showcase films that others have ignored and abused over the years.
“London After Midnight won’t be the only lost film we show,” Grayson said. “It will just be the most famous one.”
And what of the timing of the announcement? Some might question the revelation on April Fools’ Day.
“Yes,” Grayson said, “but it’s also Lon Chaney’s 130th birthday, so we thought it was appropriate. I can’t show any of the film because of my contractual agreement with TCM, but I’ll put up a YouTube video that should quiet most of the doubts.”
London After Midnight debuts on December 17, the 86th anniversary of the film’s release.
Dr. Film will continue on the next 5 Friday nights afterward on TCM.
“If enough people watch, then TCM will have us do more. I’ve got more movies… we just have to see if people care enough to watch them.”
Naysayers: note this is an original 1950s paper reel band from MGM (below) and a 1920s, NO TRACK MGM Logo. This is exactly what is indicated in the press release.
OK, enough drama over this post! It was all an April Fool, guys! Come on! Did you really think that if I had this movie since October thatsomeone would have leaked info on it?
I’m frequently bombarded with ideas and new concepts. I try to incorporate them in my marketing approach for the Dr. Film show. Since we’ve not (yet) been successful in selling the show, I study people who are successful at marketing to see what they’re doing, and I learn a lot in the process. I thought I’d pass on some of it to you.
A couple of years ago, I was projecting a film festival, running a bunch of films that were not very interesting. I’m always a sucker for something different and unusual, but I wasn’t finding it on this day, so I had to keep reminding myself that this gig would pay for a big chunk of the month.
Official Sita Sings the Blues poster.
The last film I put on was called Sita Sings the Blues. It delighted me. You want something different and unusual? This was it. A beautiful animated film, using Indian-style art, with music by Annette Hanshaw, a long-forgotten singer from the 1920s and 30s. You wouldn’t think the styles would mesh, but they did, and really well. The art was great, the plot engaging. I loved the picture.
I filed it away in my brain and forgot about it. A while later, I read something that said Sita creator Nina Paley had had trouble licensing the rights to the music. The real soul of that movie is in the songs, and without them, it would ring pretty hollow. Some time later, I heard that a deal had been reached.
I looked on Nina’s website to see what the story was. What I read was quite fascinating. And now, we take a little diversion, but I promise I’ll come back to this.
The most frequent criticism I get about the Dr. Film show is that it should be free on the internet, that it should be a YouTube channel, because only there would it find an audience.
I always have had a problem with this reasoning. I love old films and I love to share them and to tell their stories. But I can’t go around putting stuff on YouTube for free.
As I’ve discussed before, I used to work with a video company, and they released obscure titles on video, films that didn’t survive in pristine form, or films that were a little out of the mainstream. The company did relatively well, well enough that expenses were paid and there was money left at the end of the year. Not much, but some.
Then a company called Alpha Video ordered one copy of everything in the catalog, making bad DVD masters that they sold for $1 at Wal-Mart, a price that no one could compete with.
This one move killed the video business, because there’s no room in the market for a middle-of-the-road distributor. It’s either top of the line, pristine prints (Criterion/Kino), or bargain basement (Alpha Video/archive.org). Releasing films from my collection cost me money, so I stopped. I still love to share movies and save them, but on a more modest level. I do in-person film shows, and they pay better than video releases ever did, if such a thing can be imagined.
But I still keep an eye and ear out for new trends in distribution. The world is changing and doing so at a really fast pace. I realize that the market for Dr. Film is not a large one, so it demands creative marketing, which ain’t my forté.
This is what fascinated me about what Nina was doing. After she reached a settlement with the people representing Annette Hanshaw, she posted Sita Sings the Blues, for free, without commercials. You can, if you choose to, donate money to her to support her new projects. It’s sort of like an online PBS.
The whole “everything is free” nature of the internet just seems to quash any way of making money, and making money is critical here. If Nina wants to make a new film, she has to cover costs and keep her lights on. The time she invests in it means time not being spent on something else that might keep the lights on, so it’s important.
This is a key point that I came to in making Dr. Film. It took me a solid month to edit the single episode we shot. I was lucky at the time because I had no other work going on. Today, I couldn’t do that. I have other work that would prohibit me taking the focused time it would take to cut an episode. This means I’d have to turn down work in order to make the show. Or I’d have to hire someone to help me… ack!
Basically, I can’t do the show for free. It simply costs too much. I either need a grant, or a donation stream, or a paying customer. If I put a 90-minute show up on YouTube, once a month, I’d literally go broke. I could cheapen it and use some of the bad production techniques that mar other YouTube productions, or stick to short clip shows, but I don’t want to do that. It would save editing time by eliminating Anamorphia, but that makes it a lot less fun, too. I want to make a good show, not just a cheap show.
I wondered whether this approach is working for Nina. (Whether it works for Dr. Film is a a different question.)She claims that the approach is working. I emailed her a bit about it, and she seems preoccupied with other work (which is great!), but the bottom line seems promising. It’s covering costs, and that means she’s still working, which is really what we want from an artist, right?
Nina’s page also points to a great site called QuestionCopyright.org. This site is wonderful food for thought… they are advocating for a rethinking of copyright law, which is a great idea. Many are talking about abolishing it, saying that content should be free and that containers (books, CDs, etc) cost money. It’s an interesting thought. Do I wholly endorse it?
No, not entirely. I love the idea, but I remain to be convinced that it’s viable. I live in a world where I’m struggling to keep the lights on and the heat bill paid. I’ve had people copy and freely distribute my work, and I got no credit or money for it.
I’m constantly having to fight against the perception that my work is worthless, so I’m pretty hesitant to set its worth at zero. Sita Sings the Blues is fundamentally different from Dr. Film anyway, because Nina gets to promote her work by showing it at film festivals and such, whereas there’s no real path for me to promote Dr. Film. I honestly think that a free Dr. Film would both get ripped off (the rare films inside it would be redistributed), and it would get almost no viewings because no one knows what it is. A double whammy.
But I’m still crazy. I love old movies. I still save them. I still share them on a more intimate basis. I’m going to go on doing it. You can credit Glory-June Greiff (my long-time co-conspirator and the actress who plays Anamorphia) for keeping the Dr. Film project on the table. She’s adamant that it deserves an audience. I’ve advocated giving up on it for years and she won’t hear of it.
Will Dr. Film be out there for free? You show me a way that I can make them and stay solvent, and I would love to do it. I’ve got a new distributor talking about the show (can’t discuss it yet), and a potential for a distribution deal over local TV if that doesn’t pan out, and a further possibility of some grant money that would allow me to shoot more episodes. The other criticism of the show is that people don’t like the films chosen in the pilot episode. Maybe having a variety of episodes in a package could help sell the idea.
On a different but similar topic.. Penny Dreadful’s Shilling Shockers is more like Dr. Film, and I’ve been studying its distribution system. It’s more of a classic “hosted horror movie” show, without the educational component or the variety of Dr. Film. I really like it. It’s got a lot of heart despite the fact it’s cheap. The only thing I don’t like about it is that they intercut their segments with awful garbage downloaded from archive.org. I’ve come to realize that the main advantage I have with Dr. Film is that I have actual film and a knowledge of what is or isn’t public domain. Penny is getting sponsors and selling DVDs of her shows. It’s not on YouTube, but on local terrestrial TV, a new small-station phenomenon that is growing, along with occasional live streaming episodes. (I would have put some Penny artwork here but there were no pictures on her site that didn’t come with nasty rights warnings, so that has an impact on the kind of plugola I can give her.)
Going forward, I intend to post a 10 Questions With… highlighting one of the people at QuestionCopyright.org. I’d love to get more of their ideas out there. It’s a cool concept, and, again, I advocate copyright reform with every fiber in my being. I may not go as far as they do, but that’s OK.
Will any of this affect Dr. Film? I have no idea. Dr. Film is the show that’s lying on the lab table with an erratic pulse, not quite dead, and not quite alive. These are just some random ideas on trying to jump-start it.
Dr. Film readers: I wrote this for another blog as a guest, but they didn’t use it. But I can’t just trash a useful blog posting, so you get to read it now!
People from Generation Y, often called Millennials, are being lumped into a group by our media. They are said to have a core belief that modern cinema began with Star Wars: Episode IV (1977), and that any movie older than that is culturally irrelevant. Under these conditions, it becomes difficult to make a case that 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)is still culturally relevant at all, since it is much older and depicts a future now 12 years past. Even though it may seem a distant relic, 2001 is still a stunning and fresh experience.
The city of Metropolis as envisioned by Fritz Lang.
The vast majority of films that try to depict the future, particularly anything with a science fiction slant, fail miserably both in dramatics and accuracy. Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) shows a bleak world of labor unrest and a severely divided culture. HG Wells’ Things to Come (1936) foretells a second World War that is stunningly accurate, but Wells’ war lasts for 30 years and degrades into global tribal conflict, a worldwide Afghanistan. The triumphant moon landing does not occur until 2036 and is technically incorrect in almost every way.
HG Wells’ goofy rocketship is literally a gun aimed into space
Fritz Lang’s more realistic moon rocket.
Learning from his mistakes in Metropolis, Fritz Lang tried again with Woman in the Moon (1929), which is amazingly accurate up until the rocket lands on the moon. This is, no doubt, largely because Lang hired advisors from the scientific community, many of whom went on to work on the German V-2 rockets and, later, the American Apollo program. Similarly, producer George Pal hired only top people for his Destination Moon (1950), which, despite some very hokey dramatics, holds up pretty well.
But 2001 is in a class by itself, and always has been. Novelist Arthur C. Clarke simply projected the American space program forward into the future, making the assumption that we would maintain a constant level of funding. That was his only major mistake, because the Apollo program was not the beginning of a slow ramp of progress, but a bubble of innovation in a sea of lethargy.
2001’s gleaming spaceships, rotating space stations, and moon colonies never came to pass, not because they were impossible or impractical, but because we did not care to pursue them. Where Lang and Wells had been overly pessimistic and lacked technical vision, Clarke and director Stanley Kubrick miss the mark only because America decided to cut back space exploration.
Kubrick employed groundbreaking techniques at every point in 2001. It was the first time in history that a movie based in space was truly convincing. George Pal’s 1950s epics had come close, as did Forbidden Planet (1956), but 2001 topped them all. It was the start of a career for Douglas Trumbull, who has continued as an innovator in the field of special effects.
Beautiful shot of the space station under construction.
After 2001’s triumphs, the movie industry went back to doing cheesy, unconvincing special effects, simply because it was too expensive to do them the way Kubrick had done. It was easier to invoke the spirit of Flash Gordon with ray guns and buzzing rockets than to do the stately effects that Kubrick produced. 2001 represents a gigantic step sideways, out of the mainstream of cinema. It was not until George Lucas made the process more economical with computer-controlled model work that the same degree of conviction came back to movies. Lucas managed to combine the fun of Flash Gordon with the more convincing feel of 2001, and he did it without being a budget buster.
From a dramatic standpoint, 2001 represents another giant step sideways, a step that has not been replicated. Kubrick strove to make his film visually engaging with a minimum of dialogue. At many points, Kubrick’s directorial technique recalls silent cinema. He challenges the viewer to keep up with the story. It is not brainless and transparent in the way that many comic-book movies are today. 2001 demands constant attention and participation from the viewer.
2001’s uniqueness in film history does not make it culturally irrelevant. The film depicts many key innovations that did come to pass. Scientist Heywood Floyd (William Sylvester) flies to the moon in a shuttle not dissimilar to the later space shuttle. He makes a video telephone call to his family. Astronauts Poole and Bowman (Gary Lockwood and Keir Dullea) use computerized tablets that parallel modern iPads. In fact, the similarity has been used as a complex legal defense in a lawsuit between Apple and Samsung (http://io9.com/5833739/samsung-uses-2001-a-space-odyssey-as-prior-art-in-apples-ipad-lawsuit)
We still have no modern computers that talk and interact like HAL, voiced by Douglas Rain. Rain’s creepy, emotionless delivery is one of the most memorable in the history of cinema. It was the inspiration for Anthony Hopkins’ eerie portrayal of Dr. Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs (1991). Apple’s new Siri functionality on the iPhones comes closest to HAL, but Siri hardly seems as threatening as a room-sized computer that controls all of the life-support systems in a gigantic spaceship. Siri also bumbles and misinterprets in a way that HAL never did.
Ironically, HAL has the greatest amount of dialogue and screen time of any of the characters in 2001. Many of the humans are denied closeups and establishing stories, making 2001 feel cool and distant toward most of its key characters. The storyis not about individual humans but about the larger class of humanity itself. It is HAL’s conflicted view of humanity that causes the plot to move forward. The mysterious monoliths seem to nurture and encourage humanity to go off and pursue new horizons.
Ultimately, 2001 is not outdated, but simply a story of a future that never occurred. Its use of sparse dialogue and deeply technological themes foretells a cinema that never occurred, or an alternate universe. After more than 40 years, there still is no other film quite like 2001.
If you didn’t read my last blog post, James Bond Meets King of the Kongo, then you won’t understand this post at all, so you’d be well-advised to go back and read that one first.
When we last left the saga, it looked as if our hero, the film preservationist, was in a dire predicament. The film looked as if it would not be saved, the Kickstarter grant was compromised at best.
In desperation, he stares at the ceiling of the cavernous room, hoping against hope that someone, anyone, can rush in and save him. The odds are overwhelming and he’s just one man. Then, against all the odds, through a shower of bullets, a group of gray-clad ninjas breaks through the roof, sliding down on thin ropes to rush in and give the hero the hope he so desperately needs.
It’s the end of You Only Live Twice (1967), and James Bond has been rescued by the ninjas. He goes on to defeat Blofeld, blow up a volcano, save the space program, and avert global thermonuclear war.
But that same description also fits the end of Brazil (1985), at which point our hero, Sam Lowry, has lost all grip on reality and fantasizes about a rescue that will not, and cannot come.
And me, well, I wasn’t sure quite which one I was.
My options had shrunken to one, and my funding was almost zero. I’d been criticized by a serial preservation group, and betrayed by a friend. Frankly, things looked pretty dire. I had fashioned a note apologizing to my grant donors explaining the situation and offering a partial refund.
My last hope seemed to be teetering on the edge… I’d had an intrepid envoy, who I’ll identify as Cinerama Jones, to the last remaining lab that could do the work I needed, and I got a call that he’d been admitted to the emergency room with a raging fever and an out-of-control white cell count.
I’d been pinning a lot of hope on this project, because I find it distressing that archives are only funded to do high-profile restorations. Well, King of the Kongo is about as low-profile as it gets. It’s historically significant, interesting for some of the cast that appears, but, honestly, it’s not a landmark piece of cinema, and we only have about 1/10 of the sound for the whole serial.
But that doesn’t make it any less cool. I was hoping to parlay this into doing more restorations of little niche films like this, but I knew there was no hope if I had to crawl out of this one.
I was really bummed and pretty cranky. Many of my friends will agree that I was cranky! Then, interesting things started to happen. It was very strange.
First, the gentleman I identified as Red Grant read the previous installment and recognized himself. He emailed me, and I ignored him, and then he called (I don’t have caller ID… I still have a LAND LINE!) so I picked up. He carefully explained that his demand for copying rare film in exchange for doing King of the Kongo was only a joke. He apologized profusely. I have to give him that.
He’s known for somewhat “edgy” jokes, but that one was over the edge. The bottom line was that he was serious about not being able to do the work, so the only real difference was that one way I was cheesed off and without a film, and the other way I was just without a film.
It’s actually more severe than that. Red’s failure to do what I’d asked him to do has cost Silent Cinema (see below) a lot of money and me a lot of headaches. Woody Allen has a rule, “90% of success is just showing up.” I’ve got a corollary: “The rest of success is doing what you said you would do.” Of course, Red’s counter to that was that he didn’t realize that I was on a tight deadline and that caused the whole problem. We can go around and around on that… but the deadline is clearly outlined in the Kickstarter proposal for all to see.
Should I forgive Red or not? I’m not sure. I do have another rule, “Never ascribe malice to anything that could be explained by stupidity.” And this, well, this is stupid. Maybe I will forgive him. I’ll have to cool off first, though.
Struggling valiantly against a fluctuating fever and accompanying weakness, Cinerama Jones managed to get a deal struck with the lab, and he also found some funding to get the film transfer done. Now, this all happened simultaneously with the deal in Italy failing because I couldn’t find a good way to get the files to him, a lab in Maryland outpricing me, and Red Grant’s calling. I have to say I wasn’t optimistic that anything could be worked out, but I had some good people on my side.
Cinerama Jones arranged for Silent Cinema Presentations, Inc, a great group that I’ve worked with many times, to donate the completion funds , as well as finding a kindly anonymous donor, who thought the project was cool, to kick in some cash at the last minute.
The whole thing meant I had to do an elaborate re-rendering of all the credits and some other technical bits, which seems always to take tons of time, but on Friday I sent off Kongo to Metropolis Film Labs, where it will be converted back to film. They haven’t received it yet, so I just have to hope what I sent them works well.
There’s still some talk about Kongo appearing on a major TV network, and whether that will happen or not is up in the air.
I’m also hoping to put the restored print in as part of an episode of Dr. Film. That still may happen. I’m working on a grant to make more Dr. Film episodes. Whether that will happen is also an open question; statistically it’s rather doubtful, but we got Kongo going… maybe this will go too.
So what goes from here? Well, Kongo should still premiere at the Syracuse Cinefest, thanks to Silent Cinema. We’re still looking at distribution channels forDr. Film, and Kongo should appear on that. Dr. Film may appear on an independent station, or it may yet make it to a major national network, or it may not appear at all. Right now, we just don’t know.
Stay tuned.
My buddy Carl at Fedex shot this picture of me with messy hair (as usual) as I sent off the files to Metropolis Film Labs.
I’ve always said that collecting and restoring film is like James Bond without the women. You have international intrigue, shady characters, plots and crossplots and unexpected villains. This is an idea that isn’t unique to me, however, since “Wild Bill” Everson came up with a movie serial parody that was actually produced as Captain Celluloid Vs. The Film Pirates (1965). There’s also a famous anonymously written USENET parody about film collectors that was surreptitiously posted several years ago on alt.movies.silent that is formatted as an actual James Bond film.
But once again, fantasy is outpaced by reality. Let me preface this, as I always do, by stating that I’m not making any of this up. I’ve changed the names to protect the innocent and the guilty, but I didn’t fabricate anything.
In August, I put up a Kickstarter campaign to restore one episode of King of the Kongo (1929). Many of you regular readers will remember that this is the first sound serial ever, and that I have a 16mm silent print of the entire serial, but only three reels of the sound are, well, accessible. These are on Vitaphone discs, which were carefully transferred by Ron Hutchinson at The Vitaphone project. I use Ron’s real name because he’s a good guy, and I have nothing bad or controversial to say about him whatsoever.
I’d been working with another fellow who shall, however, remain anonymous. I had advised him on setting up a computer-to-film conversion process and even did a considerable amount of help for him in getting some Cinemascope conversions done digitally. He quoted me a very nice price on getting the restoration printed to film. I knew this was important because I’d promised to premiere the restoration at the Syracuse Cinefest, and they need the film on 16mm. For the sake of this posting, we’ll refer to this gentleman as Red Grant, to use a Bond name… and it’s actually fitting.
As I was preparing the Kickstarter project, I posted a notice about it with a group that is dedicated to the preservation of serials. Let’s refer to them as SPECTRE. Now, innocent me, I thought if I was preserving a serial, then I was on the same side as SPECTRE. Not so, my friends. It seems that SPECTRE wants to do its own restoration of King of the Kongo and that they felt what I was doing was a waste of time and effort. Again, innocent me, I thought, gee, we’ll pool our resources and share what we’ve got to do the best job possible. It seems that the SPECTRE chief just wanted me to go away, because he “knew where a 35mm of Kongo was located,” and he “knew of the existence of several more discs.” He didn’t actually have any of this stuff, whereas I had all of my materials, but he knew where it was, you see. And I was competing with him, at least from his standpoint.
This aspect of collecting is one that still infuriates me. I guess SPECTRE didn’t really want to restore King of the Kongo, but they wanted the credit for restoring it. Knowing where something is and having it are two very different things. I know where more Kongo discs are, too, but they are in the hands of a reclusive collector who thinks he has something worth a lot of money. And that’s more money than it’s worth, more money than you could ever raise from selling copies, and basically pointless. The fact that SPECTRE was actually rallying cries against me and hoping for my failure in the face of their own inability to obtain materials is just confusing. I am reminded of Samuel Peeples’ line, which, in summation, says that this kind of reasoning is like “trying to bisect a sneeze.”
So, I got the grant (thank you again, donors), and I had a company do the scanning for me that did a bang-up job. The problem was that the print was banged-up, too. Actually, it was the pre-print that was banged up, the 35mm nitrate that my print was copied from. There were also a few sections that were printed out-of-frame, a Mascot Serials trademark that I hadn’t noticed in my quick-and-dirty transfer done on my home equipment. As archivist DJ Turner has said, “Sometimes [a high-resolution transfer] doesn’t do these old films any favors.”
This is an unretouched title frame from the scanThis is a frame from the restoration (Quicktime oopsie at bottom!)
I had to do a lot of surgery on Kongo to make it look halfway right. I could keep spending time on it, hand-tweaking it even more, but it actually looks fairly good now. I matted out the out-of-frame sections, rebalanced the black-and-white contrast on a shot-by-shot basis. I hadn’t counted on the huge slow-down such a thing would cause my computer, but it was a massive computing task. Red Grant had told me that he’d need the file by early December, so that was my goal.
I worked extensively with David Wood (a good guy, so I’ll use his name.) Dave is the equivalent of Q in this story. In fairness, I was the picture Q and Dave was the audio Q. Dave asked me a question I thought no one would ever ask me: “Was this transferred with an RIAA curve or a Vitaphone curve?” Well, I knew Ron had done the transfer work, but knowing curves was a pretty arcane thing that I wouldn’t expect most people to know. It turns out that the needle and transfer arm of a record player are calibrated to a certain equalization curve, much like you’d use on your stereo. Dave had discovered that there was an official Vitaphone curve (something I never knew). So he applied an inverse RIAA curve and then a Vitaphone curve, and the sound was vastly improved. He also matched the speed with the footage I had.
Now, if you understand what I just said, then you have some recording knowledge, and it will impress you. If you didn’t understand it, then please come away with a vague sense of awe for what Dave was able to accomplish.
I had to do a little minor surgery on the sound, but it basically fit, and I married track to picture and watched the results. Pretty good!
Then I sent a hard drive to Red Grant. Red took his time getting back to me. Before all else, he denied ever knowing about a time deadline, which I had clearly outlined in both the Kickstarter project and in emails to him. Then he said he was having problems with the soundtrack, and then he couldn’t do it. He promised to look into an alternate way of doing the soundtrack. Fine.
This made me panic. As part of the project, I’d promised to produce a film print. I started looking for other places. I posted on international film groups. I found a place in Norway, a place in Germany, a place in Italy, and a place in NY that sounded like they could do it.
I’d specified 16mm output, but most of the places I contacted were limited to 35mm output. Only two places, a guy in Italy (we’ll call him Largo) and a film lab in NY (we’ll call him Felix Leiter) could do the 16mm that I needed.
Meanwhile, back to Red Grant.
Just before Christmas, I heard from him. I’d asked him if he could do anything to expedite the process… anything. Then I got the answer.
Mr. Grant told me that he’d be happy to expedite the process. All I’d have to do would be to send him some rare footage that I’d promised not to let out of my hands. See, I have this problem… when I promise someone something, I keep the promise. If I treat someone shabbily, then I’m not likely to hear back from them in the future. I always figure the right way to treat people is on the straight and narrow. (And that way I get more film, which is what I want anyway!)
So Red Grant, knowing that I had some material I would not let him copy, and sensing that I was over a barrel, figured he could blackmail me into giving him some rare film. He also didn’t count on one thing: I’m a pretty easy guy to get along with, but when you try to screw me over, as Red Grant did, I’ll crawl through the depths of hell with infected knees before I’ll let you win. In short, he’s not getting anything from me… ever.
But the drama isn’t over. You see, Felix Leiter wants four times the money I had allotted to make the print, and Largo only speaks English through fractured Italian, so getting him a file as large as Kongo is a problem. Also, Largo only makes a color positive print, whereas I’d stipulated a black and white negative. Largo’s price is quite reasonable, but it’s not the product I need.
In the meantime, I sent a special envoy to talk to Felix Leiter, hoping that he could be talked down from the stratosphere of budget breaking. That’s not gone well, either, since my special envoy just had to go to the hospital emergency room.
(Deleted here is a long Bondian sub-plot involving TV network head George Kaplan and the possibility of showing Kongo and even the Dr. Film show on national TV. Trust me, it’s real… if you want to know about it, post a message in the comments or on the Dr. Film Facebook page.)
So how does this end? Who will make the print? Will it be Largo or Felix Leiter? Will the print be finished in time for the Syracuse Cinefest? Does George Kaplan exist? Will Kongo appear on his network or another one, and what of the fate of the mysterious Dr. Film? Will James Bond be able to rescue the secret formula from the clutches of… oh, wait.
I really have no idea how this will end. A lot of this is out of my hands. I can only tell you that if it follows the pattern we’ve had so far, it will be dramatic, twisty, and unpredictable. Welcome to my world.
Followup: Don’t miss continuing adventures as this plot continues to thicken. Here is the next article in the series: Welcome to Brazil, Mr. Bond!
The most annoying question I ever get asked in interviews is this one: “You love movies! What’s your favorite movie?” I don’t have a favorite movie. I really don’t. There are lots of movies that I love and think are great films.
But I think there’s one category for which I can absolutely say, “This is my favorite.” Christmas movies. There’s a problem with these. They can be a little too syrupy, like The Bishop’s Wife (1947). They can completely miss the boat, like Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964), or they can just not quite measure to what you feel about Christmas.
This is why I think that the most personal kind of movie is a Christmas movie. Since a lot of the Christmas experience reflects the way people feel about themselves and the world, then their choice of a movie will differ greatly too. I think that’s as it should be.
I know a lot of people who love musicals love White Christmas (1954). Well, I don’t. I wish I’d been the director so I could have told Danny Kaye to calm down a little. And the music in White Christmas is annoying because it doesn’t fit the story. It’s more like, “Oh, hey, it’s been five minutes since we have had a musical number. Open up the Irving Berlin Songbook and let’s throw a dart!” Hey, I love Irving Berlin as much as the next guy, but let’s make a little effort to make the songs fit, OK?
Still others love It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). I’ve got to say I have a soft spot for this movie. I really empathize with Jimmy Stewart’s character, who works pretty hard to get what he wants, never gets it, and seems to get a bad break every time breaks are handed out. I’ve often said my life is like this movie except it never gets to the last reel. It’s a Wonderful Life is still a great piece of filmmaking on every level.
I know that there are others of late who champion Remember the Night (1940). I’ve seen it, enjoyed it, but there’s something unsettling in it for me about Barbara Stanwyck’s character. She just seems to me like she could beat me up at any point in the movie. I like Stanwyck perfectly well in other movies, but there’s something about this one that sorta bothered me. Maybe I should give it another chance.
OK, so I’ve listed a bunch of Christmas movies that I didn’t pick, so what will I pick? Well, I’m a sucker for an experimental film, always have been. Give me a film that does something different and braves a new path and I’ll cut it a break like no one else. And the movie I’ve picked is just that, a movie that I still think is unique in all cinema.
Curse of the Cat People (1944).
I hear throngs (or a very small throng, in the case of this blog) of people saying, “WHAT? That’s not a Christmas movie! It’s a horror film, and it’s a sequel at that, and it’s some ghost story. No fair!”
Well, if you think that, then you haven’t seen the film.
See, Curse of the Cat People is maybe the least appropriately titled film ever made. Val Lewton had a deal with the studio, RKO. The deal was that he got fifty cents, a crew, some film, a title, and a few days of studio time. If he turned in a film on time, regardless of what it was, then he got to make another one on the same terms.
Curse of the Cat People really is the story of a lonely, socially awkward young girl who has trouble telling fantasy from reality. It just so happens that she’s the daughter of the surviving couple from Cat People (1942). Amy, the little girl, has a friend who comes to visit her, a ghost named Irena. Irena was the character killed in the first film, played by Simone Simon. The tie-ins to Cat People end there. Gone is all mention of cats and people who turn into them. Lewton had moved on to something else.
Is Irena really a ghost? Is she part of Amy’s imagination? We don’t know. Most of the film, as we see it, is from Amy’s point-of-view, so the things that are real to Amy are real to us, too. I can’t think of another film that does this so effectively. Fortunately, Lewton is not playing a trick on us by shoving a goofy plot twist down our throats. It is what it is, and we never know quite where Amy’s reality ends and objective reality starts. It works perfectly.
I’m also intrigued by the way this film handles the adult characters. Most of the time, the adults are the smart ones who carry the plot forward. In Curse of the Cat People, Amy’s father is a well-meaning boor, well played by Kent Smith. All of the other adults follow his lead. They utterly fail to understand Amy, just as she fails to understand them, and this conflict is what carries the plot along. As a kid, I remember feeling much the same way. Yes, I identify strongly with Amy’s character, which is why this film is so special to me.
The whole thing builds to mid-film segment that is one of my favorite scenes in any movie. Some Christmas carolers arrive at Amy’s house. Like all the other adults in the movie, they are boorish and tacky, even more so because these people are pretending to be spreading Christmas cheer when in reality they’re trying to one-up each other.
One of the older girls in the party snootily tells Amy that her Christmas traditions aren’t proper. Another caroler bellows false good cheer and reminds the other singers to begin con vivace… except she doesn’t really seem to know what that means. Amy is clearly rather put off by the whole experience. They begin to sing a carol, and Amy’s attention drifts (just as the image’s focus masterfully drifts just a bit…)
Outside, over the false carol taking place within, Irena is singing Il est né le divin enfant.It’s a beautiful French carol, sung with equal beauty by Simon. Amy peeps through the window, with just the right amount of winter frost on it, and sees Irena outside, clad in a flowing white gown. The whole thing is lit so wonderfully that it deserves special mention, which I’ll expound upon in a bit.
This scene brings tears to my eyes every time I see it. I don’t tear up at movies often, and this seems an odd scene, but this one is does it. Amy is so frustrated at the insensitive idiots who surround her that she turns to Irena, who perfectly understands, gives Amy a lovely Christmas present, and sends her back in the house.
It’s breathtakingly simple, but stunningly effective. It calls out the hypocrisy of the Christmas season while celebrating the simple joys we can still find in it.
Amy also befriends an older woman, a former actress, named Mrs. Farren. This is another wonderful element in the film. Mrs. Farren may, or may not, be slightly doddered with old age. And it doesn’t matter if she is, for Amy loves her regardless, unlike her daughter (Elizabeth Russell). Mrs. Farren says that this is not her daughter, but rather a caretaker. She is heartbroken but insists otherwise. Amy doesn’t know. She doesn’t particularly care, either.
The film builds to its plot climax in several ways: Amy’s father insists that she get a little more grounded in the “real world,” whatever that is. He punishes her for insisting that Irena’s ghost is real. Amy runs away to Mrs. Farren’s house, but gets lost and mistakes the sound of a car for the sound of the headless horseman. In one of her theatrical moods, Farren had told Amy the story, and, of course, Amy takes it as literal truth.
Will Amy’s parents wake up to the fact that they have a unique, sensitive child? Will Amy have to give up believing in her only friend, Irena? Will Mrs. Farren or her slinky daughter be a help or an hindrance? It all comes to a climax I still love but others criticize as sloppy and unfinished.
I prefer to see it as open-ended, because Amy will continue to be disheartened by people who don’t understand her, and Amy’s parents will have to do a much better job in trying to do just that.
I’m sure RKO must have hated this film. It’s a marketing nightmare. Despite the fact it shares several cast members from the first film, Curse has almost nothing to do with it. The posters from the original release are misleading at best and deceptive at worst.
Curse of the Cat People is director Robert Wise’s first film. He replaced Gunther Von Fritsch, who was running behind schedule. Of course, the whole tone of the film was shaped by producer and uncredited co-writer Val Lewton, who was always the main creative force behind his films. Wise had been an editor at RKO, and a very good one. He cut Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons. He learned a great deal from Welles and a great deal from Lewton.
There are a number of directors who have come to that job through being editors. These directors tend to be very technical people and often make sterile films with weak acting performances. This is because they’ve not been trained to work with actors, but they know how to set up a scene and shoot it. One person that leaps to mind here is James Cameron, who needs to have a cast of ace actors in order to overcome his technical orientation. George Lucas started as an editor and claims it was his favorite job. We know how good he is with actors! Peter R. Hunt, director of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969) was a top editor and cut all the early James Bond pictures. OHMSS still strikes me as a well-crafted film with a set of bloodless performances, Diana Rigg excepted.
Yet Wise does not fall into this trap. All of the performances in Curse of the Cat People are spot-on. One might argue that Kent Smith’s delivery is a little wooden, but then he always came off a bit that way. Overall, his performance is great. Of particular note is Ann Carter as Amy, who delivers one of the best performances by a child actress I have ever seen. It would be a tough role even for an adult, but this kid handles it like a pro. I know that Wise had to work with her extensively, because it shows.
And the most un-sung of all is Nicholas Musuraca, the director of photography. Why is it that we read reams of praise for photographers Gregg Toland, William Daniels, Joseph August and Joseph Valentine, but this guy is almost completely forgotten today? Musuraca was one of the top DPs for the film noir movement: he shot The Hitch-Hiker (1953), Clash by Night (1952), Out of the Past (1947), and The Spiral Staircase (1946) among others.
He also shot most of the Lewton pictures. I note that the lovely Simone Simon suddenly lost a lot of her beauty in Val Lewton’s Mademoiselle Fifi (1943), a beauty she regains in Curse of the Cat People. I wondered why this was, since the difference is so stark. I came to realize that Fifi is the only Lewton/Simon film that Musuraca didn’t shoot. It shows. Sadly, Musuraca ended up doing TV work, mostly because he needed the cash, not like Karl Freund, who had basically retired when he agreed to do I Love Lucy.
Every time I see Curse of the Cat People, I’m struck by just how right the lighting is. And it changes subtly when the mood changes. It’s actually a little starker when Amy is with Irena than in the interior scenes in the house. It’s as if Irena is more real to Amy than the rest of her life.
(A full disclosure side note: those who know me will say I’m incredibly biased towards Curse of the Cat People because of Simone Simon. I’ve always considered her to be one of the hottest women in movies. Yeah, OK, maybe it’s fair to point this out, but Simon isn’t especially sexy in Curse of the Cat People. She’s ghostly and ethereal, admittedly beautiful. If you want to see her in a sexy part, I recommend The Devil and Daniel Webster [1941]. Ohhhhhhh.)
I do have an ulterior motive here. Every year, someone asks me to do a Christmas movie, which is always a fun thing to schedule. But every year I suggest Curse of the Cat People and people look at me like I’ve just come from Mars. I tell them that, no, it isn’t what you think, but they never give it a chance anyway.
Now, at least, I can point them to this blog entry and give them my argument for why this is a great Christmas movie. Of course it is, but it’s a great movie as well. All Hail Val Lewton, a master indeed.
Josh Mills celebrates an early Christmas with mom Edie Adams.
Film fans probably don’t know the name of Josh Mills, but it’s a name I’ve known for a long time. His mother, Edie Adams, was a hero of mine. Edie was a preservationist when it wasn’t fashionable to be one. She saved film that people said was worthless. She testified to Congress about it. You can’t be more of a hero in my book than that.
Josh has done a lot to forward the film preservation that his mom started. Full disclosure: I did some work on both the Kovacs DVD sets that will be mentioned here, because I had some rare and unique footage. I’m not being paid in any way for this, however. What I contributed is minuscule in comparison to what Josh and Ben Model did on these sets. We have them to thank for a legacy of Kovacs… and Edie Adams, as you’ll see…
Edie Adams portrait from the 1950s (Ediad Productions)
Q1:
Your mom was singer/actress/preservationist Edie Adams. She’s known and loved for a lot of things she did. I know most guys of a certain age remember her for her commercials for Dutch Masters, but I’d like to talk about some of her preservation work. She was singlehandedly responsible for saving most of Ernie Kovacs’ work. I’ve often called her the patron saint of film preservation, because she went out on a limb to buy up film and tape of Kovacs to keep it from being destroyed. Can you talk a little about that aspect of your mom? Was this always a part of your discussions as you grew up?
A: If I was 14 and not 44, I might shy away from my mom’s ‘Why-dontcha-pick-one-up-and-smoke-it-sometime’ allure. As a teenager, I was at a baseball game where she sang the national anthem and the guys behind me didn’t know she was my mom and there was a lot of, ‘When I was a kid and she came on TV….’ hubba hubba…..but at 44, I am a little more comfortable talking about it. She was my mom, but she was a good looking woman – I get it.
As far as her preservation efforts are concerned, we can all look back and say in 2012 that indeed she was way ahead of her time in saving the Kovacs material from being destroyed by short sighted television executives. But really, my mom was more of the mind-set in 1964 of ‘Ernie was doing something unique. This just has to be saved.’ Frankly, I don’t know how she had the forethought. There was no VHS. There was no Ipad. There was no cable TV! Most shows barely had a life after they aired on the East and West Coast. They maybe got a repeat somewhere down the line but that was it. My mom just knew Kovacs was doing something genius and knew it had to be saved. She (now I) had been paying the bills to store this material for 50 years so she really knew it had to be special to take on that expense. Not to cheapen it by any means but – it ain’t cheap to store this material for half a century.
And might I just add my mom did not throw away ANYTHING. It’s amazing the scripts, photographs, contracts, memorabilia and more that still exist. It might be time to open a Kovacs museum in Trenton.
Marty Mills
Q2:
Your dad was the amazing photographer Marty Mills. I’ve seen a number of great photos he took on your Facebook page. Can you tell us a little about your dad? Some of our readers may not realize that you were born some years after Ernie died when your mom had remarried.
A: Ernie died in 1962 and I was born in 1968. Evidently, my mom had known my dad for years prior to Ernie’s passing because he was an agent at MCA who was best friends with her (and Ernie’s) agent, Marty Kummer. They knew each other socially and started dating in the early-sixties and married in 1964. My parents got along so well because they had a lot in common. They were both in show business and my mother knew all about classical and popular music which my dad did as well. My grandfather was Jack Mills who founded Mills Music which published some of the biggest hits of the first half of the century. My dad worked as a song plugger at Mills, trying to get DJs across the country to play the songs they published and was quite successful. Mills Music was the largest independent publisher in the world from about 1920 – 1960 when it was sold. They published Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, Hoagy Carmichael and tons of other great songwriters out of the Brill Building. In some ways my grandfather was Tin Pan Alley.
Sheet music from Mills Music
Anyway, my dad ran with a pretty hip crowd in his youth – he was great friends w/ Mel Torme, Buddy Rich, Patti Page, Sammy Davis Jr. It was the fifties in New York and my dad would tell me they would go see double and triple bills of movies in Times Square and would have squirt gun fights in the balcony and cause all sorts of mayhem. He once told me an insane story about having to hide out from the Chicago mob after a bender w/ Shecky Greene due to a bar fight that turned out to be mistaken identity. My dad became a photographer in about 1965 when my mom went to Rome to shoot, “The Honey Pot” (aka “Anyone for Venice”) w/ Rex Harrison and Cliff Robertson. They were on location shooting at Cinecitta studios when an outbreak of something terrible hit the set like Typhoid or meningitis which brought the shooting to a halt and suddenly they were in Rome with nothing to do. What’s more, they couldn’t leave because they might shoot anytime. So my parents moved out of the hotel the studio had them in and moved to an apartment on the Spanish Steps for 6 months. I ask you, who wouldn’t kill to be stuck in Rome in the mid-sixties for half a year. My dad learned how to cook Italian food and picked up the camera for the first time. He came home with a new skill and began to shoot for Look Magazine, Sports Illustrated, TV Guide and others.
Dean Martin sings! (Martin Mills Photography)
He was entirely self-taught but he had a great eye. And because he knew many celebrities socially, he was able to get some great shots. Dean Martin called him while shooting the film “Bandalero’ in Mexico and asked him to come down and hang out because he was bored on the set. So my dad brought his camera and took some amazing shots of Dean – on the set, golfing, making pasta. They are mind bogging. He ended up shooting 3 album covers for Dean as well. My dad lived a pretty cool life too if I may say so myself.
Q3:
When your mom passed away, the preservation baton was passed to you. Since I knew your mom, I knew she was working on a Kovacs DVD set for some time that never materialized, and you made it happen. Now, there’s a volume 2. You’ve released recordings and lot of other stuff. You seem to take preservation very seriously. What does all this mean to you? Most of this stuff was made before you were born, and Kovacs was a guy you never met.
A: My mom was fantastic in not only her preservation efforts but her instincts. However, my mom also missed some opportunities because she would say, “Kovacs always skips a generation,” meaning that he might not be hip in 1960’s but the 1970’s comedians rediscovered him. Same thing in the ‘80’s – not a lot of action until the 1990’s when another round of comedians popped up talking about Kovacs. Still, I could see that as we got to a digital age and black and white was a tough sell to anyone under 30, she was holding on too tight.
Ben Model (L) and Josh Mills (R)
When she passed away in 2008, I really wanted to make sure Kovacs was reinserted in the conversation. At about that time, the Conan/Leno The Tonight Show passing of the baton/debacle was going on and no one (!) even mentioned Kovacs as a regular guest host of The Tonight Show. It killed me. And shortly thereafter, PBS did a special on the history of comedy and Kovacs wasn’t in that either. Thankfully, at about that time, Jordan Fields at Shout! Factory approached us about working together on what eventually became “The Ernie Kovacs Collection” (Volume 1) and that was our vehicle to get Kovacs back into the conversation. Without Shout! Factory and Ben Model, who has been an invaluable archivist and curator of the Kovacs material these past 5 years, I don’t know where we’d be.
Q4:
I visited your mom in 1999, and she showed me a some material I’d never seen before. It was from her own show Here’s Edie, which was made immediately after Kovacs died. These shows are amazing, very different from Kovacs, much more arty and serious, but great material. Her guest stars included just about anyone who was famous and in the music business at the time. Even if those shows were boring, they would be an amazing historical record. But they’re not boring at all. They’re really wonderful. I chided her at the time that she was better at promoting Kovacs than she was at promoting her own work! Tell us a bit more about those shows and how you feel about them. Is there any chance that they will be released again?
A: I’m really happy you asked me about this. My mom was amazingly talented but because she was saddled with debt after Ernie’s passing, she literally just had to bring in the bucks to pay off the I.R.S., ABC Networks and Kovacs’ gambling debts. There was a guy at Consolidated Cigar (now Altadis) who ran Dutch Masters and got along famously with Ernie named Jack Mogulescu. Jack was responsible for getting Consolidated to get behind Ernie’s shows – and they paid off not so much in ratings but in sales. When Ernie passed, he came to my mom and asked her if she wanted to be the spokeswoman for Muriel Cigars. Muriel was a poor-selling brand and they thought my mom might be able to help sales. Everyone remembers her as ‘the Muriel girl’ because her commercials were so iconic but they also sponsored her shows, Here’s Edie and The Edie Adams Show which ran every other week opposite Sid Caesar’s show.
Like Kovacs shows, Consolidated didn’t care if my mom’s shows got ratings, as long as sales increased and she did promotion and publicity for the brand. So not only did the sales go through the roof (and got my mom a contract that paid her until 1992) but they let her produce her own show. That’s unheard of! Being a Julliard student, my mom approached her show like her stage act at the time. She wanted to bring ‘high art’ to the masses. That’s why you see Duke Ellington, Stan Getz, Count Basie alongside Sammy Davis Jr., Bobby Darin. That and she tried to tape on Sundays when crew and performers got double time and golden time so they were more than happy to be well-paid to come on her show. This she learned from Kovacs.
Look for a nice Edie Adams Show DVD package to come out in 2013 with more bells and whistles than my mom got walking past a construction site in midtown!
Q5:
I know you’re involved in the music business yourself. You work with a lot of bands and have your own publicity firm. Tell us about that, and explain a bit on how you got into it.
A: I do but I’m not that interesting. I manage a Cambodian/American band Dengue Fever (www.denguefevermusic.com) who are fantastic and unique and do PR for many bands and projects. I was hoping to be a screenwriter and went to college to get into film but when I got out and sat down to write something – I realized I had nothing to say at 22 years old. So I realized that I loved music and thought would look into that. Here I am 18 years later. Truth be told tho, I can see the Kovacs and Edie material becoming a full-time job down the line a bit.
Q6:
You’re doing a series of roadshows promoting the material you have in the Kovacs/Adams collection. Tell us about those shows and where they have been. Do you have any more coming up?
A: We are working on upcoming events in Los Angeles, New York (and perhaps) Indianapolis in 2013 but in the last two years, we have done events at the Paley Center and Museum of the Moving Image in New York, American Cinematheque in Los Angeles and AFI and the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. Essentially, the goal is to bring Kovacs and his admirers together for a live event. And the venues we have found most receptive have been amazing places to help get the word out. It’s been gratifying to help promote the Kovacs and Adams brands with panels including entertainers: Keith Olbermann, George & Jolene Brand Schlatter, Robert Klein, Hal Prince, Alan Zweibel, Harry Shearer Jeff Greenfield, Bob Odenkirk, Joel Hodgson and Merrill Markoe talk about their love of Ernie. I always loved comedy as a kid and to be in the same room with Robert Klein or Jeff Garlin, I become like a shy little kid. I can’t believe I helped bring them to these events. And I actually do become a little kid – I had Harry Shearer sign my Credibility Gap CD and Robert Klein sign his “Child of the Fifties” LP. I’m as much a fan as anyone.
Q7:
Are there any “holy grails” out there for you? By this I mean projects that Kovacs, or your mom or dad did that you know were produced, but that you can’t find?
A: Well we are always on the lookout for more material. Ben Model, our curator, always talks about hoping someone will find Kovacs Unlimited (CBS 1952-54) in an attic or someplace. It’s happened before. People approached my mom all the time to buy back her own shows! That infuriated her. In fact, she is on record at the Library of Congress talking about this very subject. She always talked about some guy who found something that ‘….fell out of the back of a truck’ when it came to Kovacs.
Finding the long lost Kovacs comedy record, “Percy Dovetonsils…Thpeaks” was cool and we have a fantastic partner in Omnivore Recordings who released that this year on CD & lavender vinyl. We are also plowing through some audio airchecks my mom had made of “Kovacs Unlimited”. So although no video exists, it’s a daily record of television in the 1950’s. We culled my mom’s CD “Edie Adams Christmas Album” from material she sang on the show.
So to paraphrase Kovacs in his Mr. Question Man, “It’s a common misconception. People are falling off all the time.” We’re coming up with new stuff all the time too.
Q8:
Your mom was an intense “force of nature” personality. I’ve told people that I’ve never known anyone who could talk so fast and so long without stopping. (I really did have to buy a new answering machine because she would call and fill up the one I had.) She was driven and focused on what she wanted to do. I also know that she was very proud of you, because she always spoke highly of what you were doing. I don’t want to get too personal, but can you tell us a little what it was like growing up in a whirlwind like that? Every once in a while I find articles about her buying and almond farm and such and I just think, wow… that must have been a roller coaster.
A: She was a force of nature. She made (and lost) lots of money but I think she had a pretty good time. She dated Eddie Fisher, Peter Sellers, comedy writers after Ernie passed – why not? She taped her shows in Las Vegas, New York and London. She knew everyone – I have a photo of myself, my best friend Josh Davis and his brother Tony dressed as the Marx Brothers WITH GROUCHO on Halloween. It blows my mind she could just call him up and we came over.
Left to Right: Josh Mills, Tony Davis, Groucho, Josh Davis.
But you know what? My mom was also a truly sweet, kind woman too who had her feet firmly planted on the ground. She was a great mom. She was away a lot doing musical shows when I was a kid and she felt a lot of guilt over that but it paid the bills. She had to do it. But she always worked the snack stand at my little league baseball games, came to all my school functions, made sure I was with her for at least a week when she was on the road working and worked her butt off to keep climbing back into the ring again and again. She lost Ernie to a car accident in ‘62, her daughter in a car accident in ‘82, lost a great friend to AIDS and yet she still could laugh. I mention this in my liner notes to her Christmas CD but she was a pretty terrible cook. And yet after college, she always had a huge Thanksgiving party at her house for all my friends and those friends still talk about how great those times were. That’s immensely satisfying. Above all, she was a funny, fantastic woman who happened to introduce me to Gore Vidal, spent Christmas nights at Jack Lemmon’s house every year but still was my biggest supporter (with my dad). They always told me they loved me and always told me how proud they were of me. What more couldn’t you want, really? I couldn’t have asked for better parents at the end of the day.
Q9:
You’re a well-known food connoisseur, and you’ve lived in a number of places. I love that stuff myself. Can you give us a short list of eateries that are “don’t miss” places?
My mom loved Frankie and Johnnies in New York from her theater days (http://frankieandjohnnies.com/steakhouses/frankieandjohnnies.html) and Patsy’s ( http://www.patsys.com/ ) is also a favorite. My dad and my grandfather were major foodies – both highbrow and low brow. Every year we’d visit my dad’s family on Long Island, it was a ritual – we had to get White Castle and Sabrett hot dogs. It wasn’t even a question – you just made it a point to go. I still do. My 2 and a half year old took down 2 Sabrett’s a year ago and I couldn’t have been more proud!
Q10:
I have done enough interviews that I get frustrated about people asking me the same old questions and missing important things. What question should I have asked you that I didn’t? How would you answer it?
A: If you could be any sandwich in the world, what would you be? A knuckle sandwich of course.
I’d like to thank Josh Mills and Ediad Productions for all the photos used in this post.
OK, I’m a movie fan and there are a lot of people who know I’m a Star Wars fan. Sort of. A former Star Wars fan. Well, a fan of Episodes 4, 5, and part of 6.
I remember when Star Wars came out in 1977, before it said A New Hope, before anyone knew anything about it. (And trust me, doubters, on the original release date, it did not say A New Hope. This is why Episode IV will always be called Star Wars to me, because that’s the way it was originally billed.)
And then Episode V came out, The Empire Strikes Back. I was not as impressed with that one initially, but this is a film that holds up very well on repeated viewings. There may be some slow spots in it here and there, but overall, this is a great film.
And then Episode VI came out. Half of it was great. The stuff with Luke and the Emperor. Good stuff. The stuff with Jabba the Hutt in the intro was pretty good. But the Ewoks. Oh, the Ewoks. They were obnoxiously cute, in a cloying 4-year-old way. That’s exactly what they were intended to be, because Lucas himself had sold out to the Dark Side. In this case, it’s not the Sith, but much darker: Merchandising.
(By the way, I’m going on 30+ years of reading about this franchise here. I’m not going to source this. It would take days, and I’m not being paid. I’ll stand by what I said. If you think I’m an idiot, then so be it! Hi, Tom!) The original plan for Return of the Jedi was to have a planet of the Wookiees instead of the Ewoks, which dramatically tied things together better. But Wookiees aren’t as cute as Ewoks: Ewoks look like little teddy bears. Ewoks sell better.
So Lucas made more money from merchandising than he would have otherwise. It was a calculated move. The movie suffers for it. Jedi reeks of cute for two full reels, and it stalls the story.
Then we have another problem. Like it or not, Star Wars is an epic. It’s structured like an epic. Epics have themes. The theme of Star Wars is “sometimes good people must die in order to forward a worthy cause.” This is why Ben Kenobi dies in Episode IV. No one major dies in Episode V, but Han’s death is up in the air.
Harrison Ford has said many times that he felt that Han Solo should have died in Return of the Jedi. From a dramatic and structural standpoint, he was right. Han Solo really has nothing to do in the story. Apparently, different drafts of the script had him dying either in the pit on Tattooine or the raid on the uncompleted Death Star. Lucas told Ford that there was no money in “dead Han” dolls, and that was the end of it.
The movie suffers for it. Here’s the problem: yes, it would have been sad to see Han go, just as it was sad to see Ben go, but for the sake of the story, and for the structure of the story, it was important. You might have been upset the first time you saw it, but it would make more sense to you as you thought about it.
So I had mixed feelings about Episode VI, until I saw Episode I.
I can’t tell you how much I hated The Phantom Menace. I really, really, really hated it. There was nothing good about it. When a great actor like Liam Neeson turns in a bad performance, you know that something is wrong. I also knew that when we had the climactic chariot race from Ben Hur in the middle of The Phantom Menace, that something was dead wrong. It’s just called the pod race in Phantom, but trust me, it’s the same thing. (As a side note, Phantom Menace was an early all-digital film, and I remember thinking that the trailers for it were out-of-focus. They weren’t. It just looked like that.)
Ultimately, I hated The Phantom Menace so much that I wouldn’t even see the next two entries in the series. I still haven’t seen them. As a kid, I’d loved the Star Wars films, but these were lousy. I wondered for years how George Lucas had changed so much over the years to make such horrible films. I read various things.
I came to one clear conclusion: George Lucas never changed. I hadn’t either.
I read an interview with Martin Scorsese in which he recounts a screening of New York, New York. Lucas told Scorsese that the movie would make a lot more money if Liza Minnelli and Robert DeNiro would end up together at the end. Scorsese countered that the movie wouldn’t make any sense if that happened, and Lucas said, “Yeah, but it would make more money.”
That sums it up. The entire history of movies has been the struggle of Art vs. Commerce. Repetition and sameness are deadly for art, but they are the heart and soul of commerce. We go to McDonald’s at midnight because we know that the Big Mac that we are buying is just the same as the one we had in Pittsburgh last week. They count on that. On the other hand, if you go to an art show and all the pictures are the same, you feel pretty cheated. Art is supposed to be unpredictable. The movies have always been about balancing those two forces.
Scorsese is about Art.
Lucas is about Commerce.
If we look very carefully, Star Wars (Episode IV) isn’t a very good film. It has moments that are classic, and it has two performances that elevate it into something it wouldn’t have been otherwise. Dramatically speaking, it’s not anything great, with creaky dialogue and several problems with pacing that should have been addressed.
(OK, don’t beat me up here. Star Wars Episode 4 changed the world of movies, and I know that. What I’m saying is that it doesn’t hold up on repeated viewings and has a lot of script problems, just like Lucas’ other productions. It’s got some good actors who put the script across and enough spectacle to help gloss over the problems that the script has.)
Most importantly, What Star Wars had going for it was that it was the first commercial film to capture the fun of the 1930s movie serials and combine it with the groundbreaking special effects that 2001 had started. The opening shot was mind-blowing for audiences in 1977. We’d never seen anything like that. We were used to sci-fi epics looking desperately fake, like Logan’s Run, which had come out the year before. This looked very convincing.
Harrison Ford had terrible troubles with the dialogue in the film. “George, you can type this s***, but you sure as hell can’t say it.” Mark Hamill remembers Ford making notes in his script, desperately trying to make sense of the lines, trying to find a context in them that would make the character work. He succeeded. Ford’s performance, paired with that of Alec Guinness, are the dramatic saving graces of the film. If we add in Peter Cushing, who makes great use of a brief part, and James Earl Jones, who is unseen as Vader but adds an immeasurable presence to the film, we have a movie that is pretty well acted.
Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher acquit themselves less admirably, but both have gone on to do other things well. I think this was simply a case of not being able to transcend the material. Perhaps Ford was only able to do so because his part was better written in the first place.
Alec Guinness was at the preview and complained that the last battle sequence at the Death Star was about five minutes too long. Bravo, Alec! He’s absolutely right. In reissues of the film. I often watch audiences during this scene and they get bored about halfway through. As spellbinding as this was in 1977, it doesn’t hold up today. Lucas is too in love with that cool shot of diving into the canyon in the Death Star. It’s overused; the whole thing is too long.
In addition, there’s a bit of the ending that’s too short! (Potential spoiler, although not much of one…) When Han decides at the last minute to join the battle and help rescue Luke, we don’t really know he’s going to do it. It’s a surprise and it’s cut in at the last second with no establishing shot at all. It’s jarring to first-time viewers. Where’s Han? Where did he come from? If we’d had a few more shots of Han thinking and one of him trying to get there at the last second, it would have been more dramatic but less surprising.
Lucas was grilled by many critics at the weakness of his script. To counter this, he brought in Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan for Empire Strikes Back. This makes the script immensely stronger, even though Empire is really the second part in a three-part epic, the part that’s always the least interesting. The first part has all the setup, the third part has all the resolution, and the second part just gets all the characters in trouble.
That said, Empire is full of suspense, action and great dialogue. Lucas hated it. He resolved to take over more the reins on Jedi, and we saw what that got us.
We note that Lucas made the Indiana Jones films, too. Well, except that Lawrence Kasdan wrote the first one, and Lucas is said not to have liked the script too much. His buddies Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz wrote the second one, more to his specifications, and it’s not very good. The third one was kind of a piecemeal effort and is largely saved by the brilliant performance of Sean Connery. The less said about the last one, the better.
We also note that when left entirely to his own devices, Lucas can’t really come up with a good epic… I submit Willow (1988) as evidence. It’s not a great film, and the last reel might as well be the last reel of Return of the Jedi with Jean Marsh substituting for the Emperor. Reliables like Val Kilmer and Marsh are wasted. Ron Howard, a variable but often talented director, doesn’t save it.
I can only come to the conclusion that Lucas is, as he has often said, a film cutter at heart. He does make a mean action sequence. They’re always cool, even if sometimes too long. He’s not much of a storyteller, and I say that with a big caveat.
Lucas is excellent at creating a story and a universe. He studied the art of epics and how to structure them. He doesn’t follow through on it, cuts corners, and can’t make the guts of it, the dialogue and character motivation, work.
And that brings us up to today. Disney has purchased Lucasfilm. What’s my reaction?
Well, initially, I had a bad feeling about it (hence the title and hence my quote from the films.) My initial reaction was that Disney would cute the series up even worse than Lucas had, and I made a video of it. (This was the first video that made it on YouTube as a response to the sale. Gotta be proud of that!)
Disney and Lucas have long had what I think are the same problems. Disney is often worse, though. Disney saw Star Wars and decided to make a movie with even cuter robots and then graft it on to a remake of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, add in some weird effects and a journey not unlike the end of 2001, and they released it as The Black Hole. It’s a tremendous misfire of a film.
But, unlike Lucas, Disney has changed since 1979.
Disney has grown and diversified. They’ve hired new and different people, and they’ve absorbed Pixar while revitalizing their animation unit.
In recent weeks, I heard that Harrison Ford may be interested in playing Han Solo again (something he said he’d never do), and that Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill may be on board too.
I find it even more interesting that Disney is talking to Lawrence Kasdan about writing scripts for the series. In my opinion, it was Kasdan who saved Jedi, helped save Empire, and made the Indiana Jones series what it was. He has often said that he didn’t want to work on these films again.
Again, I can only come to one conclusion. These people didn’t want to work with George Lucas again. I don’t think they hated him personally… in fact, I think they all regard him as a friend. Deep down, though, I think they all realize that George was his own worst enemy on the Star Wars films.
I’m not a big Disney fan. I admit it. They are big bullies and throw money and legal logistics around like a baker throws pizza dough. That said, can they save the Star Wars franchise?
I’m not sure. They’ve made some good first steps. Frankly, they couldn’t make films much worse than George did.
Do you recognize this woman? She was a fashion editor for Harper’s Bazaar, a famous singer at the Metropolitan Opera, and she had her jaw broken by Barbara Stanwyck.
And yet you probably don’t know her for any of those things.
The woman in this photo is Kathleen Howard (1884-1956), who is best remembered today as probably the most memorable in a string of “shrewish wives” depicted in WC Fields films. Like Fields regular Elise Cavanna, who I wrote about last year, Howard moved seamlessly between major careers. She was renowned in each one, but each was different enough that many people don’t realize that she was the same Kathleen Howard.
Howard’s performances in three of Fields’ films, You’re Telling Me (1934), It’s a Gift (1934), and The Man on the Flying Trapeze (1935) are nothing short of brilliant. It’s easy to descend into just a bitchy, clichéd performance as a Fields wife, but Howard transcends that. She’s given the characters a back story, and you can feel the frustrations in her life that have made her into the person she is. That said, she is also supremely awful to Fields, in ways that have him cringing in fear. Howard is human but still horrible.
Back in the pre-internet days, we’d look at Howard’s filmography and see that she seemed to burst on the scene in 1934 with a supporting performance in Death Takes a Holiday. But where was she before that? Most stage actors dabbled in silent film and had a few credits before gaining fame in talkies.
But Kathleen Howard never made a silent film. She was busy singing. As a child, she wanted to be a singer, but everyone told her that could never happen. That didn’t stop her. She worked her way to the top as a contralto at the Metropolitan Opera.
She even wrote a highly entertaining book about it. It’s called Confessions of an Opera Singer, and you can read it here. Interestingly, her story parallels Edie Adams’ story (which Adams also chronicled in a book). Both were told that they couldn’t make it as singers, that almost no one really did, that women couldn’t handle their own careers, etc. And both were determined to make it anyway, which they did.
Howard was popular enough outside the opera house to be a recording star, and it’s actually fairly easy to hear her singing in the late teens and early twenties. Here are some.
But the best parts are for young singers, and Howard got a little old for it by the mid-1920s, so she switched gears. She became the fashion editor for the magazine Harper’s Bazaar. This was no third-rate magazine; it was one of the best in the business, and Howard wrote many articles while managing the other contributors. (This also parallels Edie Adams somewhat, since Edie became her own fashion designer in the 1960s.) You can see the cover of one of her Harper’s issues here.
Then, abruptly, in 1934, she offered her talents to Hollywood. This may sound like a leap of faith, but as an opera performer, one is also doing a great deal of acting, so she was not without considerable experience.
Again, I don’t like to link to YouTube clips that violate copyright, and I didn’t post this one, but in this case, I really think you need to see Howard in action. This is the porch scene from It’s a Gift (1934), which is one of the funniest scenes in one of the funniest films ever made. If you don’t agree with me, then you’re wrong. I’m not even going to argue with you about it.
People like Howard fascinate me because they’ve had successful careers in varied fields. I tend to be unsuccessful at everything I attempt, and yet Kathleen Howard was at the top three different times. I love her blend of careers and the way she just seemed to move effortlessly among them. Sometimes performers are inactive for years at a stretch while they regroup and try something different. Not Howard. She was in there and working.
Howard was just another of the brilliant people who surrounded WC Fields. Contrary to his public image, I am more and more seeing Fields a loyal friend who helped out other actors. Howard and Elise Cavanna were both great performers who did multiple roles.
Another guy I keep spotting in Fields pictures, sometimes just in the briefest walk-on part, is Lew Kelly. I’d love to have a whole write-up on him, but I just don’t have enough information, so I’ll hijack this posting a little for him.
Kelly (1879-1944) was a vaudeville headliner who traveled the world as Professor Dope, a character that apparently made fun of drug addicts (this was very popular in the teens.) By the 1920s, his career had more or less dried up, but he became a popular utility player for many comedians in the 1930s.
Kelly appeared with Wheeler and Woolsey, multiple shorts with the Three Stooges, but he’s in seven films with WC Fields from 1932-35, often in uncredited bit parts. Kelly was one of those guys who could just be pointed into the scene and would give a good performance every time.
What does all this add up to? Not much, I suppose. It gives a little context to history. I see some of these films and wonder who some of those people were in their “real” life. I keep finding that the answers are really fascinating to me, and I hope they are to some of you, too.
FOLLOWUP:
I had some fascinating off-line chatter on this topic. Dr. Philip Carli sent a nice followup in a response that I’ll include in the text here. Also, David Heighway discovered a nice picture of Howard in Götterdämmerung that I just had to post. Here are both of these followups.
Carli:
It should be mentioned that Howard was the leading contralto at the Metropolitan Opera in the teens alongside the legendary Ernestine Schumann-Heink; both women were among the very few of their period to achieve popular celebrity in that voice, and indeed both singers had extremely wide ranges, reaching well up into the mezzo-soprano range as well as into the low alto register. Judging from her few Pathé and Edison recordings, she was one of the great ones, but her career was awkwardly placed on each side of WWI so her career was largely split between Germany and the US. Although contralto parts are often secondary and frequently “women of a certain age” parts, Howard’s vocal and acting range was wide enough that she sang the title roles in Saint-Saens’ Samson et Delilah and Bizet’s Carmen with great success in Europe, and she looked pretty sexy in both parts, judging from contemporary photographs. She also created at least one notable operatic role, that of the greedy and pompous aunt, Zita (originally named “La Vecchia”, or “the old lady”), in Puccini’s only outright comedy, the one-act GianniSchicci, which had its world premiere at the Met on 14 December 1918 with the celebrated baritone Giuseppe de Luca in the title part and American soprano Florence Easton as Lauretta (who sings “O mio babbino caro”, one of Puccini’s most famous arias); music critic James Huneker praised Howard’s comic performance as “the horrid hag” in his New York Times review the next day, unwittingly predicting the way her acting career would go with Fields.
