Some Came Running

Notes on Tobe Hooper (1943-2017)

1) I didn't see 1974's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre until 1977 or '78, when I was a projectionist at my college student center and had to screen it. I say "had to" but I had always wanted to see it. Particularly since having seen Johnny Rotten wear a "I Survived The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" t-shirt in some pictures of a Sex Pistols gig. The movie's lurid rep scared me a little so I, like a lot of people coming to the movie for the first time, was a little surprised at how not-gory it was. Although of course it was still entirely harrowing. And rather unexpectedly funny. I became obsessed with the movie right away and have seen it almost as many times as I have seen Psycho or Repulsion or any of the other romantic comedies I'm so steeped in. 

I was lucky to have friends who were equally obsessed, and we largely talked to each other in Massacre dialogue. If Ron was going down the the convenience store to get cigarettes, I'd say, in my Franklin voice, "I go witcha! I go witcha!." Peter came up with the very amusing idea of adapting the movie into a twelve-tone opera, and he would crack me up by dissonantly declaiming "Look what your brother did to the door" in German. Anything our crew approved of was "good barbecue." And so on. 

The movie was also in my mind inextricably tied up with punk rock, which I was also heavily into at the time. There was Johnny Rotten's t-shirt but there was also the fact that the Ramones had a Texas Chainsaw Massacre-inspired song on their first album. The Ramones' first two albums and Texas Chainsaw Massacre were to me standard-bearers of a certain kind of American art: cheaply made but not amateurish, fast, brash, loud, unsettling, pop but intellectual, intellectual but pop, and also in some not insignificant way, very free. 

2) In 1979 my buddies Ron and Steve went up to Toronto's Festival of Festivals (which is now the Toronto International Film Festival) to see the critic Robin Wood (with whom Steven had studied) head a multi-session symposium called "The American Nightmare" in which the films of Romero, Hooper, De Palma, Cronenberg, and other directors were discussed. Many of the filmmakers themselves attended, although sitting here right now when it's too early to call Ron or Steve, I don't recall if Hooper had been among them. I couldn't go, as I had zero money, but my pals very considerately brought me back the program, which contained essays by Wood and Richard Lippe. Reading these pieces validated a notion that was inchoate in my 20-year-old brain, which was that genre films were worth taking seriously. I began, in a small way, to explore on my own what made movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre tick.

3) The film Hooper made after Massacre, 1976's Eaten Alive, was a nasty funny grisly guignol which made the best use of Neville Brand since 1965's That Darn Cat. Nevertheless, it did not deliver quite the frisson that Massacre did. That's another thing Hooper's movie had in common with the Ramones; you come out with something that startling right off the bat (in the case of the Ramones I would say it was the first two albums, released with less than a year dividing them, that count here), it's hard to top. It's even harder I suppose when the artist has produced that something with a relative lack of self-consciousness. That Hooper did not necessarily want to be a genre director—there was a sense that Massacre sort of wanted to be at least in part a calling-card film, but busted through the boundaries of such a product in a way that even its creators weren't fully in control of—could have conceivably compounded the challenge. In any case, regardless of whoever "really" directed 1982's Poltergeist, my Massacre crew and I left our first screening of it trying to tell ourselves that our man Tobe had not been TOO thoroughly Spielbergized. 

4) Like so many, my boys and I were very confused by 1985's Lifeforce. We were of course very entertained but not quite willing to go so far as to say it was good. I can see that at this very blog, almost ten years ago, I remained non-committal. Well never mind that shit. It's great. Hooper's decision (it it was indeed his) to leapfrog back from Alien and make a full-on Hammer-style space vampire movie, complete with dribbling lasciviousness, was, if not revolutionary (ideologically it's irrefutably reactionary), hilariously transgressive on a kind of termite-art level. 

5) By the time I landed at Premiere magazine in the 1990s, Massacre had become at least semi-respectable, so much so that, in my short lived film-technique column in the back of the book, I was able to use Pam's fateful walk from the swing to the house as an example of a great tracking shot. It is indeed, because we have some inkling of what's going to happen to her when she gets to the porch (and what happens is actually way worse than what we might have been imagining; the guy who went in before her was pretty much done with a blow to the head). It's entirely worthy of Hitchcock's Psycho and also entirely its own thing. I can't find the piece itself. I remember I might have done a phone interview with cinematographer Daniel Pearl, who had by this time graduated to directing music videos (including at least one for Mariah Carey). He mentioned that the location itself suggested the shot, which was accomplished with a relatively small track and a simple tilt. The result is an enormity, doom embodied in the looming facade of a white house we know now is hardly innocent. It's a nice door, a shame that the oldest son had to ruin it...

Jerry Lewis, 1926-2017

In "The Ladies Man," 1961

In late 2008 or early 2009 I began writing for the MSN editorial website, specifically MSN Movies, and the first thing my editor asked me to draft was a Jerry Lewis obituary. Word on the street, or some street, was that Lewis' various ailments were about to bring him down for good. As MSN then aspired to a print-style editorial standard, it was thought that having an obit on file would be the good newspapery thing to do. 

I wrote the piece with that standard in mind, so it was newspapery, dry, factual , but it does have a thread of critical appreciation running through it. Since the great artist is now gone, having outlived the editorial website of MSN by more than five years, I thought I might offer the obit as I filed it, oddly undated, TKs left unfilled. 

 

Jerry Lewis obituary

For [REDACTED]  at MSN Movies

By Glenn Kenny

Date Filed: 

Date of death TK

Jerry Lewis, the comedian, comic actor, filmmaker, inventor and philanthropist who was a defining, contentious figure in both American show business and art, died at LOCATION TK, of CAUSE TK. He was AGE TK.

Born in Newark, New Jersey on March 16, 1926, Lewis (whose actual last name was Levitch) had show business in his blood; both of his parents were entertainers on the circuit known as the “Borscht Belt,” which included the resorts in the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York that attracted a largely urban, Jewish clientele. Lewis’ humor--boisterous, energetic, often sardonic and loud—derived from that heritage. Before he had even turned 20, he was a bizzer; the high-school dropout married band singer Patty Palmer in 1944, and developed a standup act in which he played recorded vocals of well-known performers and parodied/mimicked their actions. In 1946 he met the Ohio-born crooner Dean Martin, and they teamed up to concoct an anarchic nightclub act which shot a jolt of adrenaline, or maybe even amphetamine, into the ethos created by Bob Hope and Bing Crosby.

Martin and Lewis began making films together in 1949, and their pictures together helped define ‘50s culture. Not the bland, conformist, Eisenhower-defined culture of popular myth that, the myth continues, was upended by the swinging ‘60s, but the roiling, industrialist, somewhat ruthless culture of a post-war America that was redefining itself as a global power. As the film critic Andrew Sarris put it, “The great thing about them was their incomparable incompatibility, the persistent sexual hostility, the professional knowingness they shared about the cutthroat world they were conquering.” That knowingess translated on to celluloid in fascinating ways, particularly when the team was paired with the director Frank Tashlin, who had a background in animated shorts. The later Martin and Lewis films “Artists and Models” and “Hollywood or Bust” are replete with self-conscious, fourth-wall-breaking gags that would later influence not only sitcom humor but highbrow cinema as well. The tension of the Martin-Lewis act itself, with Dean the amiable, smooth, serious one and Jerry as the often remarkably obnoxious man-child who always gets the duo into another fine mess, increasingly bled into their off-screen relationship, and the team broke up in 1956, after which the two performers were personally estranged for some time.

After parting ways with Martin, Lewis threw himself into his solo film career with great ferocity, and began producing films right off the bat. He had ever been an apt pupil of the medium. In 2003 Lewis told the critic Chris Fujiwara, “The first year Dean and I were on the lot, they couldn’t find me. I was in the camera department, I was in editing, I was in miniatures, I was in wardrobe, in makeup, in post; they had to find me to get me on stage to do a scene.” Despite having been thrown off the set of “Hollywood or Bust” by Tashlin for bad behavior that was a by-product of the deterioration in his relationship with Martin, Lewis re-teamed with the director for such innovative pictures as “Cinderfella” and “It’s Only Money.” His debut as a director was 1960’s “The Bellboy,” starring himself in the title role. A lengthy series of situations and gags set in and filmed at the then hyper-modern Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach, Florida, it’s largely a homage to the clowns of silent cinema; Lewis’ bellboy character does not speak throughout, and the filmmaker consulted with the great golden age comic Stan Laurel on the script. It was on this film that Lewis pioneered the “video assist” that has since become a staple of filmmaking; a video system, with its camera mounted concurrent to the film camera, recorded the action so that director Lewis could instantly assess a take from performer Lewis.

Lewis also appeared as himself in “The Bellboy,” and the difference between the “self” he portrayed in that picture--a slick, arrogant, uncaring star surrounded by sycophants—was a stark contrast to the inept, silly, but at least ostensibly sweet and lovable overgrown child who was the title character here, a variation on whom made up the standard Lewis onscreen persona at the time. This dichotomy recalled the tension that animated the Martin-Lewis team-ups, and reached an apotheosis of sorts in 1963’s “The Nutty Professor,” in which Lewis played the good-hearted but clumsy and grotesque scientist Julius Kelp, who transformed, with the help of a potion of his own concoction, into the unctuous, mean-spirited, and multi-talented “lady killer” Buddy Love. This eye-popping update of “Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde” was seen by some as a commentary by Lewis on the relationship between himself and Martin. But Lewis himself more or less admitted that the cocksure Buddy Love was merely another version of himself. The various contradictions he embodied in his private self and his public personae were also reflected in his charity work. In March of 1952 Martin and Lewis co-hosted their first “telethon,” a midnight-to-nearly-5 p.m. televised variety show to which viewers could call in to donate funds for a cause; in this case, the construction of a cardiac hospital, and the charity chosen by Martin and Lewis themselves, the Muscular Dystrophy Foundation. Since 1966, Lewis has been the driving force behind a Labor Day Weekend telethon for the foundation, and the phrase “Jerry’s Kids” (Muscular Dystrophy is a disease that targets children) has entered the pop culture lingua franca. Lewis’s all-nighters hosting these telethons, during which he was by turns wheedling, dismissive, treacly, manic, and often genuinely flabbergasted and overwhelmed (as when a surprise on-air reunion with Dean Martin, engineered by their common friend Frank Sinatra, happened in 1976) are still the stuff of show business legend.

As is his reputation as a filmmaker. His solo pictures of the ‘60s were terrific moneymakers, but were largely critically reviled in his native land. In France, however, the intellectuals at publications such as “Cahiers du Cinema” and “Positif” took him quite seriously indeed. His work profoundly influenced the critic-turned-director Jean-Luc Godard, whose “cutaway” set of a sausage factory in his 1972 “Tout va bien” (co-directed with Jean-Pierre Gorin) was a direct reference to a similar piece of stagework in Lewis’s 1961 “The Ladies Man.” A joke among mainstream American middlebrows of a certain generations runs along the lines of “Well, what do the French know; they think Jerry Lewis is funny/an artist.” (Indeed, as for the latter designation, Lewis was officially inducted into the order of the Commandeurs of the Légion d’honneur in France in 1984.) There is also the matter of Lewis’s self-directed foray into “serious” drama, the notorious, much-speculated-upon but never-released 1972 picture “The Day The Clown Cried,” in which Lewis plays a once-celebrated clown in a Nazi death camp. “When Lewis decides he has something to say, it comes out conformist, sentimental and banal,” Andrew Sarris said of the filmmaker several years prior to the making of “Clown.” Never officially completed, it is unlikely that the picture will ever be seen.

For all that, Lewis acquitted himself brilliantly in a more-or-less straight dramatic role, playing comic and talk-show host Jerry Langford, who falls victim to seemingly goofy celeb stalker Rupert Pupkin (played by a here very uncool Robert DeNiro), in Martin Scorsese’s chilly, alienating 1983 showbiz parable “The King of Comedy.” In 1983 he also made his final feature as a director, “Cracking Up.” His film appearances began to dry up (he did a turn opposite Johnny Depp in the eccentric 1993 picture “Arizona Dream,” directed by the Serbian filmmaker Emir Kusturica), but he nonetheless continued to seem a tireless entertainer, particularly in light of the various health crises he has had since at least the mid-60s, when a spinal injury from a fall led to an addiction to painkillers that he conquered in the mid-70s. Heart attacks, diabetes, prostate cancer and other such troubles plagued him, and he nonetheless soldiered on like the trouper he always took pride in being. In the mid-1990s he played on Broadway and toured with a production of the musical “Damn Yankees.” In addition to continuing to host his telethon, he made scattered television appearances, and talked often of adapting his film “The Nutty Professor” into a Broadway show. Seemingly unable to help being a lightning rod for controversy, his unfortunate penchant for wisecracking concerning homosexuals caused some to protest his receiving a 2009 Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award from the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences. More recently, he raised some eyebrows with his suggestion that troubled starlet Lindsay Lohan might benefit from a spanking. Through a career that spanned more than half a century, he established, and retained, a remarkable figure that achieved solidity and grandeur almost entirely via its contradictions. “I know Jerry,” Lewis told Chris Fujiwara; “I sleep with him, remember? I know him, I know that son-of-a-bitch in and out. I know his needs, I know that without him I wouldn’t have food on the table. He works for me and very well. When I talk about him in the first person, people look at you askance. Are you f—kin’ schizophrenic? In the creative, yes.”

Lewis’s 1944 marriage to Patty Palmer endured to 1984; the couple had six children, including Gary Lewis, whose band The Playboys had a ‘60s hit with the Al-Kooper-penned “This Diamond Ring.” In 1983 Lewis married SanDee Pitnick. Lewis is survived by her and seven children and TK grandchildren.

There is not much emotion in the above so I will say now that Lewis is a subject near and very dear to both my heart and my aesthetic. The more you learn of his work, the more impressive he becomes. I do not believe I entirely agree with Andrew Sarris' estimation of Lewis' attempts at serious statement, although I can't say he was entirely wrong either. What remains true it that the one sure sign in film conversation that you are dealing with a near-irredeemable philistine is a "Well they love Jerry Lewis in France" remark. 

UPDATE: Thanks for reading this but my friend Dave Kehr's obit for the New York Times, which was also written a while ago as Dave is no longer with the paper, is the one. 

Encounters With Great Recording Of The 20th Century #4: Lou Reed, "The RCA And Arista Album Collection" (Released and acquired October 2016)

For Scott Lemieux and Brian Koppelman.

I was a very poorly socialized child. After my incredibly obese toddlerhood, I assumed the more or less regular dimensions of a boy. But I had issues. I had not started speaking in English until well after I turned three (up until that point I communicated with my mother in a made-up language) and once I began attending school, teachers noticed some problems, including a lack of physical coordination that suggested to them that I was “spastic.” My inability to connect with my peers led me to act out (not vandalism or anything, just spending entire schooldays speaking in a fake British accent) and I was submitted to a bunch of physical and psychological tests and assigned to a social worker. I mention all this not to elicit sympathy but to demonstrate why, as the early 1970s and my early teens rolled around, I was completely ready for Lou Reed. 

I’d been reading about him and his work in Creem and Rolling Stone for a little while when Berlin came out in 1973, when I was going on 14. I think it was the first Reed album I bought, and I got the relatively deluxe first pressing that came with that fancy libretto printed on very thick paper and illustrated with photographs depicting scenes in the album’s loose narrative. I was of course intrigued by the whole thing but also vaguely disappointed—where were those guitars I had heard so much about. Then I got Transformer, and there they were, and there they were too on White Light/White Heat, so shit started working out.

Lou Reed’s was the first rock show I saw by myself, early October 1974, at the luxurious Capitol Theater in Passaic, New Jersey. Up until this point my dad had been pretty generous with his time and disposable income, indulging my Teenage Lust For Rock by taking me to shows. We had seen Ten Wheel Drive at Creskill High School and then he offered to take me to a show in “the city.” I thought about Zeppelin at the Garden, but blanched at the thought of sitting through “The Lemon Song” with my dad (I imagine there would have been plenty more to blanche at), so I settled for Delaney and Bonnie at Carnegie Hall, which my dad dug because he liked King Curtis. (We had no idea at the time that the guitarist in that band was Duane Allman.) As far as Lou Reed was concerned, I was on my own. My folks dropped me off outside the venue and told me to be outside again at 11:30, no ifs ands or buts. 

It was an evening of discovery for me in many ways. On the line to get in, many dirty filthy hippie types chatted. “What do you think of the new album,” one asked a companion. “I don’t know. I haven’t gotten into it yet.” That was the first time I’d heard the phrase “gotten into it.” (The new album was Sally Can’t Dance, a record that vexed Lester Bangs mightily.) Inside the hall, I was distracted by the smell of pot and the sight of young braless women in diaphanous tops silhouetted in the entrance to the ladies’ room. I hated openers Hall and Oates, who were flogging their own “concept album,” War Babies and who, to my mind, WOULDN’T GET OFF THE STAGE. (Years later I experienced a similar irritation when R.E.M. opened for Gang of Four at the Ritz, and I have to admit that I never quite got over it.) Reed’s set was perfunctory, even the distasteful theatrical bits—this was the tour on which he simulated shooting up during “Heroin.” Near the end of the show some schmuck screamed “’Sister Ray’!!!” to which Lou replied, in the evening’s sole bit of stage patter, “Go fuck yourself.” I had to leave before the encore.

I remained a Reed devotee, to the extent that I actually became a professional rock critic. And as a professional rock critic, yea, even well before I achieved that status, I hewed to the standard critical line that John Cale was a better, more ambitious, more interesting overall solo artist than Lou Reed was. While all the time really just wanting Lou Reed to make great solo albums.

Eventually the rock critic paradigm broke down. Exhibit A, 1984 saw the release of Lou Reed’s New Sensations and John Cale’s Caribbean Sunset. But I’m not here to re-litigate an old and probably boring case that’s among other things unfair to both Cale and Reed. Rather, I’m here to offer a unified field theory of Lou Reed solo albums, which is that they are all great and that while one might contain better “material” or “songs” than another, each one is an incredibly valuable component in a life’s work that is in fact best considered as a life’s work.

 The thing that turned me around is not a 20^th century release but rather a 21^st century collection of 20^th century recordings, that is, the box set Lou Reed: The RCA and Arista Recordings. I sprung for it on release, in October of last year, and I went through the 17 discs in chronological order at home, but it was really through spinning its 148 songs with my iPod on shuffle and discovering, to my surprise, that I did not feel like skipping a single one. Even the songs I didn’t like were telling me something, something worth hearing, something worth weighing—about Reed, sure, but also about the city that we shared. The world we shared. And so on. I came upon songs that I had slept on—“High in the City” from New Sensations, “My Old Man” from Growing Up in Public—that suddenly struck me as no-qualifications great. I got out from under the influence of Peter Laughner with respect to Coney Island Baby. And more. And found each song was best experienced in the context of the other 147 songs in a way that I’ve never experienced with another artist. Good, bad, very bad, or indifferent, the work creates a world unto itself.

 Of course I am hardly the only person to perceive this. Alexis Petridis, in his very astute December 2016 review of the set, cites a Reed quote in which the artist likens his run of albums to a book: “Every record a chapter … Listen to it in order, there’s my great American novel.” Petridis then outlines the narrative, which sees Our Hero “crashing into frustrating dead ends.” Indeed, or maybe even driving into walls at full speed with eyes wide open. The only mistake Reed made in his self-assessment, and I can’t blame him, is saying “great American novel” rather than “great American autobiography.”

Reed’s greatest glory as an artist also happened to be his Achilles’ heel. To go back to Cale for a minute, Reed’s former Velvet Underground bandmate was, like so many rock artists, adept at pulling off personae, from the refined classically-trained artiste of Paris 1919 to the studio-rock renegade of Slow Dazzle. And, of course, in the many phases of Cale’s career his persona would at times directly reflect the perilous state in which he was himself living. But Lou Reed, no matter how many looks he tried on, no matter how many story-songs about other people he wrote, could ultimately never present as anybody but himself. (This comes out not just in the overt content of the songs but in the way he strains and shifts his vocalizations, his disinclination to follow strict rhyme schemes or adhere to meter, his phrasing either slack or micro-beat accurate.) And very often his self was of course his own worst enemy. When the work reflects this, as it has to, it reflects it in ways that can be mortifying, exasperated, embarrassing, but when you are fully committed to getting through these patches, you don’t feel these things in a way that’s detached from Reed, you feel that way with him. Dylan’s “I Threw it All Away” could be this set’s theme, except that for every willful perverse loss there follows some kind of corresponding gain. Without the tossed-off cynicism of Rock and Roll Heart you won’t get the buckled-down complexity of Side A of Street Hassle. Without all but giving up guitar completely for Growing up in Public (a bid for Bruce Springsteen/Billy Joel style credibility that Reed had to somehow know was the last thing he wanted or needed), you wouldn’t have the triumphant picking up of the guitar, alongside Robert Quine, on The Blue Mask. And in spite of all these contrasts there is, if you listen with a certain ear, no actual diffusion from the whole. Whether this makes Reed actually unique among rock artists I can’t say. But it certainly makes him massive, and always massively moving.