Will Sloan's Wonder Emporium

From Moon Over Harlem (1939), directed by Edgar G. Ulmer.

Fig. A: Will Sloan, in his new glasses

Fig. B: Noted coke-bottle-glasses wearer Peter Bogdanovich

WILL’S CINEMATIC HALL OF FAME

Jerry Lewis’ The Ladies Man (1961)

For his third and most formally ambitious directorial effort, Jerry Lewis set the action in one of the largest sets ever constructed for a film: a giant, dollhouse-like residence for girls. This is Lewis’ set…

Now here are two sets it influenced: Jean-Luc Godard’s Tout Va Bien (1972)…

…and Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic (2004)…

At their best, Lewis’ self-directed films (particularly the early ones) are riotously colorful, like live-action cartoons. As a filmmaker, Lewis was at his best when he had the full resources of a studio at his disposal to create elaborate, immersive comic worlds, the better to suit his own frantic, outsized performances. (By contrast, it’s morbidly amusing to watch a late-period independent effort like Hardly Working, where everyone is flailing around but the sets are pure low-budget minimalism. It’s like cognitive dissonance). From an interview in Contemporary Film Directors: Jerry Lewis (2009)…

Chris Fujiwara: I want to talk to you about the “movie” look of your films. That seems to have been very conscious with you from the beginning. Even The Bellboy, which is not a studio film, has…

Jerry Lewis: A lot of that. Almost taking people past the fourth wall. I love knocking down the fourth wall, all the time.

CJ: Which you do to great effect in The Ladies Man, when you pull the camera back so we see the doll’s house and the empty space in front of it, and you do that in the [George] Raft scene too, with the spotlight and the empty space.

JL: I sit on the camera, and I block the shot. I have to see what I want to see in the end result. In structuring a scene, I always kept foreground very important. Every aspect of the frame was important to me: I filled it, and marked it, and watched it, whereas a lot of directors will look at the focal point, the artist, the actor, the actress, the prop, dead center of the frame. If it’s a joke, it better be there. If it’s exposition, if you’re building, if you’re moving into a situation that you want clear to the audience, you gotta do it all, you just have to do it all. I didn’t learn that from anyone; it was instinctive with me right from the beginning. If you’re going to point the camera, point it at what you want the people to see. Don’t hide anything unless it shouldn’t be seen.

CF: What was important to you about this “movie” look? Why is that such a big element of your films?

JL: Because as I child, I was enthralled with thinking about who was watching. Spencer Tracy in Captains Courageous. Remember that film? Who was over here? Who was their fourth wall? The sea, the ship, Tracy in the water dying. It’s not real. He is not dying, he’s not going to die. So there’s people here watching this. God, would I love to be there with them. To watch it. I would have wanted to see it as I saw it first, and then, could I see it the other way? It was always my desire to peek behind the scenes. I was always behind-the-scenes-conscious and knew that moments of behind-the-scenes for an audience just uplifted them. Whether they thought about it or not, if you show it to them, they’re going to see it. They’re either going to like it or not understand it. Most people love it. Or maybe in the back of my mind I always felt it would be good to never take them so deeply that they forget it’s a movie. I think David Lean needed to do that, so that you’d forget it was a movie. [Fred] Zinnemann would do that. Great directors I think did it most of the time. They’re careful not to make the audience conscious that it’s a movie. Frank Tashlin had a fetish about green. Shrubbery placed in the scene by a shrubbery man. He hated it, he never could get the pure color of a grass lawn or bushes. So I said, “Frank, take it out of the studio, get what you want.” We would do that sometime, just because he needed to see that. He was obsessed with the ugly color of studio-prop green.

CF: Why did you want to remind the audience that it’s a movie?

JL: Well, I don’t know that I wanted to shake them up, “Hey, this is a movie!” But I was hoping there were kids out there that would feel about it as I did. That’s all that was. I never wanted it to be so far and away from reality that your audience would look at it as a distant faction.

The Ladies Man was also the film for which Lewis famously invented video-assist technology, mounting an early video camera on the side of a 35mm camera so that he could watch and evaluate his performance quickly without having to wait for the rushes. Video-assist soon became standard on all Hollywood sets.

Aside from the technical innovations, The Ladies Man is a typically ramshackle and episodic Lewis comedy, concerning the misadventures of Herbert M. Heebert (Lewis), a heartbroken woman-hater who suddenly finds himself surrounded by ladies. While hit-and-miss, it’s one of Lewis’ best vehicles, notable for possibly Lewis’ best sustained gag: the hat sequence. Here’s an excerpt from the interview book This is Orson Welles…

Peter Bogdanovich: What do you think of Jerry Lewis?

Orson Welles: When he goes too far, he’s heaven; it’s just when he doesn’t go too far that he’s unendurable. [Laughs] Now he wants to be a respected member of the community, and it shows in every move of his body. But, God, he can be funny! He did a scene in a movie I saw in Paris about eight years ago where he keeps trying to fix the hat on a gangster’s head -

PB: The Ladies Man

OW: And I got sick laughing, it was like in my childhood with [W.C.] Fields - I really had a kind of heart attack from laughing. It was one of the funniest things I’d ever seen in my life.

THE WONDER EMPORIUM DAWN-OF-CINEMA REVUE

Louis Lumière’s L’Arroseur Arrosé (aka The Waterer Watered, The Sprinkler Sprinkled, Watering the Gardener, Tables Turned on the Gardener) (1895)

Lube up your funnybones, gang, ‘cause it’s time to laugh along with Lumière for the earliest known film comedy. The laughs start pumping and just won’t stop once a mischievous boy steps on a gardener’s hose, and the gardener examines the hose closely to see what’s wrong. You’ll be out of breath as you feel the laughs exploding inside you.

Sylvester Stallone rides through the pre-cleanup 42nd Street in Rhinestone (1984). As best as I can determine, the theater showing Talk Dirty To Me (1980) is the New Victory Theater, where Robert DeNiro took Cybill Shepherd on their disastrous date in Taxi Driver. It’s now “New York’s theater for kids and families.”

It’s time for another visit with WONDER EMPORIUM COMEDIAN-IN-RESIDENCE ANDY KAUFMAN. Today, we revisit Kaufman’s 57-minute shot-on-video opus My Breakfast with Blassie (1983), a Dadaist goof on My Dinner With Andre. While Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory talked philosophy at the Cafe des Artistes, self-proclaimed “world famous TV star” Kaufman and surly wrestling personality Fred Blassie hang out at a skeezy L.A. diner. They engage in mindless chatter until catching the attention of other patrons, who they quickly alienate with their monstrous egos.

As an attack on My Dinner With Andre, Blassie is about as nuanced and effective as a spitball. But as a record of Kaufman’s astonishing eagerness to look like an ass in the name of comedy, it’s mildly diverting.

In Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons, the characters get their news from one of Charles Foster Kane’s Inquirer papers, featuring “Stage Views” by Jed Leland.

WILL’S CINEMATIC HALL OF FAME

Jerry Lewis in The Jazz Singer (1959)

This made-for-TV production, a remake of the legendary Al Jolson vehicle, was Jerry Lewis’ first attempt at an out-and-out dramatic performance. Jerry gives a capable performance as Joey Rabinowitz, a successful nightclub comic who nevertheless fails to win the approval of his orthodox Cantor father, who rails against the younger Rabinowitz’s show business career. In the unforgettable climax, Joey ditches his big TV appearance to fill in for his ailing father and sing Kol Nidre for Atonement Day - and delivers the song in full clownface (a sideways nod to Al Jolson’s blackface). I daresay that this fairly bathetic “tears of a clown” conclusion may well be the defining moment of Jerry’s career.

Critics were generally dismissive of the hour-long broadcast, treating it as a vanity project for a star who had always fancied himself something of an heir to Al Jolson. Embarrassed (“I was too young to play the role. A leading character who looks less than 30 years old wrestling with deep problems of life comes off looking silly,” said Lewis in 1995), Lewis kept the film out of circulation until earlier this year, when it received a long-belated home video debut (so who knows - maybe there’s hope for The Day the Clown Cried yet). Though not a major work, The Jazz Singer is essential viewing for Jerryologists for its autobiographical undertones. As Shawn Levy explained in his excellent biography King of Comedy: The Life and Art of Jerry Lewis (1996), the film echoes Jerry’s uneasy relationship with his unabashedly Jolson-esque vaudevillian father.

The Jazz Singer was one of Jerry’s most personal and heartfelt undertakings. He changed the name of the protagonist from Jack to Joey [Lewis’ birth name was Joseph Levitch] and further christened Joey’s sympathetic mother Sarah, after his beloved maternal grandmother. And while he atavistically retained the title of the project even though there was no jazz singing in it, he could have written from personal experience the story of the son eclipsing the father and then sentimentally capitulating to him.

Jerry admitted as much to Hal Humphrey of The Los Angeles Mirror News, harkening back to one of his deepest pains to explain the genesis of the project: “When I was thirteen, my parents couldn’t afford my bar mitzvah. Dad was on the road making twenty dollars a week in burlesque and I was living with my grandmother. I had to accept a charity bar mitzvah from the synagogue. You can’t imagine how badly my family felt about this. So The Jazz Singer, with its relationship between a Jewish father and his son, is kind of close to me.

Nevertheless, it was ironic material to work with. Danny [Lewis, Jerry’s father] had virtually retired, after all, and had long resigned himself to Jerry’s career choices. He lived primarily off his son’s largesse, though he still reserved himself the right to criticize Jerry’s material and colleagues. His bitter grumblings about his failed career, however, were hardly analogous to Cantor Rabinowitz’s pious grief over his son’s departure from religious traditions. For Jerry’s part, while he felt a filial bond with his father and sentimentally bragged about Danny’s show biz prowess, his hero worship for Danny had died, and he found himself increasingly uncomfortably in his presence.

It’s time for another exciting instalment of DAVID LYNCH REPORTS THE WEATHER, wherein the visionary director of Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, and Mulholland Drive will inform you of how things are doing in Los Angeles, temperature-wise.

Today’s report comes from 25/04/2007.

William Sasnal

Girl Smoking (Anka), 2001

Girl Smoking (Peaches), 2001

Girl Smoking (Dominika), 2001

It’s time for another exciting visit with WONDER EMPORIUM CELEBRITY-IN-RESIDENCE JACKIE CHAN, wherein the kung fu superstar will answer your questions about his action-packed life, and discuss the glitz and glamor of his fabulous celebrity lifestyle.

Today, Jackie reveals a preference for Pepsi over Coke. “That’s gonna leave a mark!” says Chan.