Guest Post: Ben Robinson Reviews the Marcel Perez Collection

[post 397]

The Return of Marcel Perez!
The DVD and Companion book
Ben Model / Steve Massa
reviewed by Ben Robinson
(Full Disclosure: I was one of the 150+ Kickstarter backers who contributed to the production of this work. The producers did not ask for my endorsement. —BR)

In 1968, the phone did not stop ringing at the New York City booking agency CTA. A twenty-year-old agent and co-founder of the booming business, Marty Hoberman (1949—1999) sat back completely satisfied. Many of his acts were touring nightclubs and performing in rock concerts. Each day the mail brought stacks of checks. Jim Morrison of The Doors had just been cited for contempt of court, and public indecency, and while The Doors management tore their hair out because of the recalcitrance of the lead singer, well-paying offers for The Doors did not slow down to Hoberman’s small agency. Hoberman had booked The Doors into the Miami concert where Morrison allegedly exposed himself to the audience.

Truth told, there were only three full-time employees that showed up for work around noon. Yet, the building foyer index noted at least ten different departments and as many as fifty agents in the company!

An act showed up in the later days of the agency complaining they’d not been paid for a date played six weeks earlier. Marty Hoberman tried to pay respect to the angry magician calling, listening politely as the act railed, “Why is it that I can book myself nationally, on TV, in films and you can’t even get me the lousy $400 you owe me for Westchester Community College?”

 When the breathless artist slowed his rant, the prescient agent offered:
“Sweetheart—yeah, you’re right. The check is in the process. No excuses. But, you don’t seem to realize one strong rule of show biz: If you worked under different names, offered different acts, you’d be working nightly instead of this weekend crap, and you wouldn’t be so hard up for the lousy four-hundred. You want to book yourself? Go ahead. But you better use a different name. No one who writes checks pays artists directly. It don’t happen.” Marcel Perez and his astonishingly prolific career is testament to what we might now call Marty’s Rule #1.

Perez disguising himself as garbage in Camouflage (1918)

Courtesy Undercrank Prods/Library of Congress

Marcel Perez, who author Steve Massa in his book Marcel Perez—The International Mirth Maker, calls “the greatest silent film clown you’ve never heard of,” worked under at least a half-dozen professional names:  Tweedledum, Marcel Fabre, Robinet, Fernando Perez, Tweedy, Bungels, and  Twede-Dan. He was an international star in the years between 1900 and his death in 1928.

In 1912 he made an astonishing 35 films that we know of. It is estimated by film historians Ben Model and Steve Massa, the producers of this wonderful DVD, that this great clown may have made over 200 movies, long and short. In 2015, Perez re-emerges as a force of nature largely because of Messrs. Model and Massa’s seeming archeological dig to find Perez’s films in France, Italy, the Netherlands and the massive 1.1 million films held by the Library of Congress. Both the Library of Congress and the EYE Filmmuseum of the Netherlands contributed 35mm and 16mm prints. Digitally remastered for global consumption, these charming short films are a spectacular follow-up to the Model–Massa 2014 release, The Mishaps of Musty Suffer (also available from Undercrank Productions on Amazon.com).

Perez attempts to be a good Samaritan in Sweet Daddy (1921)

Courtesy Undercrank Prods/Library of Congress

 So, what do you get when you lay down your $$ on Amazon for both book and DVD?

Undercrank Productions has provided another first-rate edition to their expanding catalog of lovingly restored silent clown series. Perez is featured in five films made in the US, and another five made in Torino, Italy. Working under so many different names probably led to his productivity, as the production schedules noted and the many companies he worked for are staggering. Yet, having shed one clown skin for another seems to have worked well for this man who spoke many languages —with the exception of English! No matter: the language of silent film comedy and title cards changed to what language was needed, which was all that mattered to audiences who reveled in his films released in the first quarter of the 20th century.

In this DVD he appears first in a 1911 short titled Robinet’s White Suit. Any clown aficionado will immediately know that when a clown wears a white suit what is likely to ensue. Nevertheless, the invention of the dirtying of the suit is hilarious and not sentimentally inspired. What struck this writer immediately were his physical moves. Given what we know of George M. Cohan and his pigeon-toed arched dance moves…we can now wonder who came first; Cohan or Perez. A later reference will take clown scholars by surprise. Whirls, kicks and spins reminiscent of the great George Carl.

A lovely time-capsule bonus of these ten shorts, with new scores played by maestro Model, is seeing Torino, Italy from 100 years ago. Other locations all over Europe and the U.S. (Jacksonville, FL for instance) are also seen, and this gives us a touch of what the Lumière brothers had intended with their invention — “to bring the world to the world.”

In our fast-changing internet-driven society, the expectant viewer rushing to the cinema to see the latest “whirl” by Musty Suffer or the hyper-kinetic chases and daring acrobatics of Marcel Perez are given a shot of worldly adrenalin; the action is non-stop, we see another time, another world, and delight in the fashions, and the unchanging simplicity of what makes us laugh. The DVD provides a solid 2 hours of truly “otherworldly” entertainment. Largely the film world of Perez pre-dates the first World War.

While Perez is the focus and locus of Mr. Massa and Mr. Model’s Sherlockian dig into film history, the detective story to uncover who Perez was, what his real name was, and the facts of his sad demise are equally fascinating to film students and physical comedy fans.

Just as it seems that every magician who has the money to advertise in public is eventually compared to Houdini, so are silent film clowns compared to Charlie Chaplin. This is natural that the best-known arbiters of stage and cinema (Houdini was also a movie star) should naturally inspire and cast a long shadow for moderns. Yet, Perez began in film about 14 years before Chaplin ever made a single frame; hardly any of the films made in France 1900-10 survive. The comparisons between the two are, as Shakespeare glowered, “odious.”

No comparisons needed. All one needs to do is plunk down their coin (to adopt a phrase of the Perez period) and enjoy.

The DVD is very well authored and attractively produced. The companion book is chock full of well-produced production stills that support the tragic story of this clown who was written about as dying in 1928, “alone and ignored.”

“Laughing on the outside, and crying on the inside” is the cliché applied to many who use stage theatrics to make us guffaw. In the case of this internationally loved clown who wrought impossibly amazing gags such as a car driving over him (with no discernible switch to a dummy), his birth (possibly) in 1885, and assuredly his death in 1928, is as close as we come to the poetic appellation of the clown’s inside driving force.  An amputated leg because of a cancerous tumor wrought the beginning of his end. He directed, he produced; he made audiences howl and swell with glee. Yet, today and shortly after his demise, with the rampaging advent of sound entering films in 1927, Perez and a great body of his work seems to have frittered away to the sands of time.

However, like a great phoenix rising, Perez is lovingly brought back to life by both the book and DVD offered by Undercrank Productions. It’s worth every penny, and more. Can a price be put on delightful surprise in the fragile 21st century?

LINKS
• The Marcel Perez Collection DVD available here from Amazon.
• The book Marcel Perez, The International Mirth Maker by Steve Massa available here from Amazon.
• A Perez web site
• An article about the date of his death

"Meet Musty Suffer" — Guest Post by Ben Robinson

[post 375]

THE MISHAPS OF MUSTY SUFFER
Starring Harry Watson Jr.

Produced for video by Ben Model
Films preserved by the Library of Congress
Released April 22, 2014 by Undercrank Productions
Ben Model & Steve Massa, curators
Piano scores written and played by Ben Model
Companion booklet by Steve Massa

Originally produced by George Kleine, March 1916 – June 1917
Eight short films from the twenty-four surviving films in the Library of Congress collection
117 min. 


Reviewed by Ben Robinson

“You know man, she’s grotty, as in gro-tesque.”
—George Harrison, from A HARD DAY’S NIGHT, 1964.

Full disclosure: I was one of the Kickstarter backers of this project. That means nothing more than I contributed the minimum to help launch this DVD. I had only seen one film in a private showing, and then followed the rollout of the proposed Kickstarter campaign. Amazingly, the minimum was quickly reached, and $1,000 more was contributed that made possible the additional well-produced printed booklet by Steve Massa that accompanies the DVD and the future YouYube-only release of additional films that did not fit on the DVD. It’s a most welcome addition because anyone who loves silent film comedy, clowns, circus, vaudeville, performance art, avant-garde film or surrealism will inhale this DVD and booklet.

There are mostly simple plots (with riveting action and comedy):

A man applies for job as a messenger; a man in Automat feeds the machines with food to be dispensed; the Outside Inn, a hotel where there is a “thin room” for one of the stock players of this company who is all but the skinny man from the circus. There is a cabinet just the width of his cane. His hat is pinched as if someone sat on it. He seems so thin a single bed is triple the size he needs. A man dreams of love. As a result, six maidens appear in striking lingerie—fun and mishaps ensue.

Musty happens along at the exact moment another man becomes perturbed with his bellhop, played by a boy. The man picks up the boy and throws him out of a door. At that exact moment, Musty catches the boy, looks him up and down, and then discards him too with gritty abandon as well.

In the world of Musty Suffer, anything can and does happen, and it’s not always pretty—to the cognoscenti, that is the beauty of these films: they are not pretty. An oversize rolling pin is saturated with powder. When Musty hits the thief in the Automat with this rolling pin, a cloud of powder arises when the pilferer is bonked. It’s broad, fast…grotesque, but also…clean. An auto accident is so dense with triple whirling acrobatics it is no wonder these films were subtitled “Another whirl.”


UNSEEN SINCE 1916

These films have not been seen since they appeared in 1916–1917, nearly one hundred years ago. Hence, this is not only a “find,” it is the painstakingly exact work of several film historians, lab technicians and the Library of Congress, which owns these films and generously allowed Messieurs Model and Massa to penetrate their massive archives and bring out these jewels for the world to see once more.  See Musty lay horizontal in space as he is picked up by a human size pair of ice tongs. He is carted about as if he were a wastebasket.

Jewels they are!  If you love a clown who carries a bundle of material that seems too wide for the doorway he seeks to pass through, and therefore engages a saw and cuts wide slots for his cargo (as opposed to just inverting the material, as in the so-called normal world), then you’ll dig this. The dance with the mannequin with the magical surprise ending is worth the price of admission.

The DVD of this whizz bang series brings us Harry Watson Jr., star of the Ziegfeld Follies playing the irrepressible MUSTY SUFFER, whose face contorts, squashes, and explodes much in the same way we have come to appreciate from Stan Laurel or Harpo Marx’s rubber faces. Musty Suffer definitely comes under the rubric of what 19th-century clowns were sometimes called: Grotesques. He  is joined by his vaudeville and circus partner George Bickel who plays a character named Willie Work. There are also characters Dippy Mary and Inna Hurry. (Historical note: Dippy Mary is played by Alma Hanlon, daughter of George Hanlon of the famous knockabout stage extravaganzas of the Hanlon Brothers.)

It would seem impossible to separate this clown from his face, one-armed athletics, or amazing feats of metamorphosis, such as his filmic magical changes of clothing, and then one continuous shot of Mr. Watson, as Musty, deftly engaging us with a genuine “quick-change” act done in almost real time (save for snip edits).  His dream sequence where he has dreamt of being hit in the head with an axe is frightening, deft and clever.

The opening shot gives us Musty drinking the drippings of a tail pipe in a tin cup. When he placed the tin cup beneath the parked car, I wondered silently, “What’s he’s going to do with that?” When he drank what the cup caught, I nearly fell out of my seat. Clearly the authors and curators of this DVD chose to introduce Musty to us with a sock right in the kisser of comedy. His other trademark —opposite his rough physicality—is his spritely magic. In one scene he changes clothing quickly and amazingly by having a barrel pass over him once.

Musty sometimes breaks into a small dance. In this tiny dance, where the legs cross and the arms flail with abandon, he only moves a mere two inches with all of the movement. It takes but a few seconds and he doesn’t really go anywhere. Yet the dance is expressive and funny. His little dance is currently seen in the repertoire of Bello Nock on B’way and in the huge avant-garde theatre extravaganza of RAOUL by James Thierree (as seen at The Brooklyn Academy of Music, NY).


HARRY WATSON JR. & MUSTY SUFFER 

Harry Watson Jr. was a major star in American vaudeville beginning in the early 1900s. He and his partner George Bickel led the laughs in the Ziegfeld Follies season after season. It was rough work by performers doing as many as fourteen shows a week of very precise physical comedy, because in their act one could get hit in the face easily during their laugh-filled boxing act, which is seen in the Extras of this retrospective.

Musty Suffer is a broad character. In press, he is referred to as a “clown.” Given the broad world of the clown (“An orangutan who can do the impossible” in one definition), the ensuing “clown logic” or flat-out chaos is the definition of “rough and tumble.” This is very rough slapstick, with a nod to 19th- century French cinema, where plates walk up walls like a row of ants seeking their nest. Stop-motion action is highly complemented by Musty chasing a car to hop a free ride, only to be violently dumped (and feeling still not a care in the world).


THE DVD EXTRAS

There are portraits of Harry Watson Jr. in his prime with Ziegfeld Follies, with George Bickel, and it ends with loving, color snapshots of Mr. Watson in retirement in Canada, 1960, five years before his death. He looks happy and rubber-faced as ever.

The Chicago Daily of January 1916 notes that Chaplin might have a rival in Musty Suffer. George Kleine produced a short “Capturing Chicago.” The film shows Musty winning big crowds with an outdoor serenade by him on a trombone as he is paraded through the streets in an open-air moving car. This turns out to have been during a major film exhibitor’s convention held in Chicago at the time.  Clowning can be very $eriou$ business. This was not advertising folly.

Courtesy of the good folks at The Library of Congress and the Billy Rose Theater Collection at the Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts (New York), we are provided a time capsule that roars forth with hard-clad evidence that while Chaplin was prodded and poked at by the press of these clowns, and businessmen, Chaplin was not to be rivaled in 1916. Even the skills of this team could not knock Chaplin off his box office pedestal. The Musty Suffer films were originally produced as a 5-reel movie that portrayed a “clown Job.” But George Kleine decided to cut them down and present them weekly as a “another whirl” with Musty.

That is fact and history. It is also now part of our collective history that those who took a shot at beating Chaplin were some mighty fine contenders. It was a skewed thought, but Harry Watson’s acrobatics, executed standing on one arm while the rest of his iron body laid on the floor made me think of Sylvester Stallone doing his one armed push ups as Rocky. It’s a valid comparison given the competitive business of film comedy in 1916.

Musty Suffer’s 30 short films were released once a week from early 1916 to the autumn of 1917. Demand was high. Crowds loved ‘em. They were shot in the Bronx, New York, in one of the boroughs of the City of New York, north of upper Manhattan (Harlem). Fortunately, the Library of Congress has preserved 24 of the Musty Suffer films, the best of which are represented on the DVD.

In 2014, humans are at the point of “saving” films, not necessarily making them look all shiny, new and clear as the Chaplin Archive (Bolonga, Italy) has so beautifully done with such a film as Chaplin’s PAYDAY (1923).

Buy on Amazon right here. And if you like it, give it a review and a whole bunch of stars!

Revenge of the Silents

Will The Artist and Hugo Compete for an Oscar?

[post 221]
Despite frequent tributes to the stars of the 1920s, despite all those beautifully remastered DVD sets, despite your enthusiasm and mine, our modern world has pretty much relegated silent film comedy to the nostalgia bin. Most of the younger generation has only vaguely heard of Chaplin or Keaton, much less seen any of their films, and names like Charley Chase, Harry Langdon, or Fatty Arbuckle mean nothing to them. I know; I teach college.

There are both good and bad reasons for this. Admittedly, the quality of these early films can vary drastically — not unlike television today. Many are formulaic, with minimal character or story development. Other than the action sequences, the pace must seem slow to a visual generation used to shots lasting only a couple of seconds. And did I mention — horrors! — they're in black and white?

But presentation is also a major problem. Before you'd plunk down cash to buy a silent film comedy on DVD, you're more likely to go to YouTube to watch one of the comedian's movies, or more likely just an out-of-context clip. You're going to be sitting at your desk, probably surfing the net at warp speed, seeking instant gratification. The video and audio quality is likely to be poor, depending on the source and the amount of compression for the web. Frustrated with the small size, you enlarge it to full screen, but now it's all blurry and pixelated. The sound track, coming out of your computer's sole speaker, is likely to be generic, just some ragtime tune slapped on top. If the clip doesn't grab you in twenty seconds or less, you're gone.

Ben Model

Contrast that with sitting in a crowded audience watching a restored print (film!) on a large screen. The music has been composed specifically for this movie and is being performed live by a talented and enthusiastic pianist, perhaps by an entire band. The audience is laughing loudly (they always do) and probably cheering and jeering as well. Soon you forget that it's not in color, you forget that you can't hear any dialogue. Instead you're marveling at all that creativity, wondering why they can't make movies like that any more. Silent film as a live performing art! But.... I'm guessing the number of people who've had this experience is way under 1%.

Is it at all possible, however, that the tide may be turning?

Not only are live performances of silent films growing in popularity, but two major commercial films about the silent era have just opened to rave reviews and serious talk of awards for best film of 2011. The first is The Artist, an actual black & white silent movie, which I previewed in this earlier post, when it almost won the Cannes Film Festival. The second is Martin Scorcese's Hugo, based on the novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret, a book I wrote about in this earlier post on Georges Mélies. Hugo's not silent, it's color, and it's even available in 3D, but much of it as a tribute to Mélies and the inventiveness of early cinema.

More on both of these shortly, but first honorable mentions to some of the silent film series that have paved the way. In New York, there are at least two ongoing series that you should know about, both of which have the imprint of Ben Model, silent film historian, composer, and pianist. The Silent Clowns Film Series, ongoing since 1997, presents about ten events a year, all free, and all featuring Ben on piano, with programming by Bruce Lawton and film notes by Steve Massa. Many of the films screened are not available anywhere else and are usually seen on newly restored prints. Always a fun time, full of revelations, and after the movies are over, Ben, Bruce, and Steve hold court, fielding questions from an audience of fellow fans.

Ben has also done a lot of similar work for the Museum of Modern Art, including the current film series Cruel and Unusual Comedy, focusing on social commentary in American slapstick, which he curates with Ron Magliozzi and Steve Massa. The most recent installment, however, focused on some marvelous rare early European comedy shorts from the Desmet Collection of the EYE Institute (Amsterdam). This was billed as "a sort of highlights reel of a complete 5-program series that will be presented at MoMA during 2012." Judging by what I saw in October, this collection is a significant find. And while I hope it eventually ends up on DVD, that won't be as cool as having seen the movies accompanied by a live band, with my Bloomfield College colleague Peter Gordon on saxophone!

Another place in NYC to learn more about the silent era is The Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, which houses exhibits on movie history, but also has a steady stream of screenings and lectures. If you're in town December 17th, don't miss master magician Ben Robinson's lecture, Magic and the Silent Clowns:   There is a strong link between some of cinema’s great comedians and magic. Performers such as Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, and Harpo Marx started out in the world of vaudeville; many of their finest gags grew directly out of their love of magic. Magician and author Ben Robinson will show scenes from such movies as Grandma’s Boy, Sherlock Jr., The Circus, and Duck Soup to examine this important connection between magic, comedy, and cinema.


Also in New York, the Film Forum provides another home for screenings of silent movies with live musical accompaniment. They are currently in the midst of a Monday night series, The Silent Roar, featuring MGM films from 1924 to 1929, with Steve Sterner on the piano. Buster Keaton's The Cameraman plays the day after Christmas.


Enough tooting the Big Apple's horn.... don't want to make all those New Yorkers blush! Back to our regularly scheduled programming...

Bérénice Bejo & Malcolm McDowell in The Artist

The Artist

This is a French film directed by Michel Hazanavicius, most recently known for his OSS 117 spy spoofs, and starring Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo (real-life wife of Hazanavicius). Other than its bland title, I was utterly won over by The Artist, whose story unfolds against the backdrop of the transition from silent films to sound. There are obvious parallels with Singing in the Rain, except The Artist actually is a silent movie, and a black and white one at that. It's also stylish and sweet, quite funny, and very well acted. Dujardin and Bejo are easy to fall in love with, and John Goodman as the cigar-chomping Hollywood mogul and Uggie as the dog Uggie are both hilarious.

Jean Dujardin as George Valentin

Although the male lead, one George Valentin, is dashing, athletic, and comic, very much in the style of Douglas Fairbanks, The Artist does not attempt to recapture the world of the great physical comedians. "It wasn't the slapstick that meant so much to me. It was the melodramas," explained Hazanavicius. "The point was to share that sensual experience I felt sitting in the cinema watching Murnau's Sunrise." Be that as it may, the style is sumptuously visual and the acting ultimately physical. And did I mention that it's very well done?

Bérénice Bejo as Pepe Miller

At the risk of sounding mushy and sentimental, I was also pleased to see characters that were not total jerks. Yes, self-serving jerks exist, but that can also be too easy of a writing choice. The George Valentin character could have been an arrogant womanizer and a bitter loser. Peppy Miller's stardom could have made her totally full of herself. Goodman's Al Zimmer could have been a ruthless producer. Instead, they all have their positive side, which (spoiler alert) makes a happy ending possible. Yes, you could argue that this is phony and manipulative. After all, Hollywood comes off very well in this French valentine to America, which is no doubt one reason The Artist is creating Academy Award buzz. But not the only reason. It's an exceptional film, and has already won Best Film of the Year from the San Francisco Film Critics Circle and the Boston Society of Film Critics, and has six Golden Globe nominations, including Best Comedy. 


Here's the trailer:

Better yet, here's a short scene from the movie with the director's commentary:

And here's the press kit:
The ARTIST Production Notes

Ben Kingsley as Georges Mélies

Hugo
Martin Scorcese's Hugo is another valentine to the movies, but in this case an American director returns the compliment, reminding us all of France's contribution to early film history, specifically the effects-laden work of magician-turned-director Georges Mélies.  Hugo is quite the contrast, a full-color, all-talking, big-budget Hollywood movie with major stars (Ben Kingsley, Jude Law, Sacha Baron Cohen) and serious technology, including a cool secret world concealed within Paris' Montparnasse train station, which for a price ($17.50 in Manhattan!) we get to explore in 3D. 

But what on earth does this have to do with silent film comedy?

A lot, as it turns out, because [spoiler alert] that crotchety old man winding down his life selling wind-up toys in the train station is — true story — none other than silent film pioneer Georges Mélies, long since forgotten by the public, his early special effects movies all thought to have been destroyed. Not to worry: it is his fate to be rediscovered by an orphaned boy who secretly lives in the station, following in his father's and uncle's footsteps by caring for the clocks, one of which he of course ends up hanging from in the climactic chase scene, à la Harold Lloyd in Safety Last.

Speaking of chase scenes, Sacha Baron Cohen of Borat fame plays a nasty Keystone Kop with a leg brace who is intent on nabbing vagrant kids and packing them off to the orphanage, and therefore much chasing ensues. Unfortunately, Cohen's comic genius does not get full rein here, and the potential for physical comedy is squandered. What is special, and to my mind well worth the price of admission, is the loving recreation of Mélies' Paris studio and working methods — with Scorcese as a cameraman! — which constitutes the final section of the movie. Very cool. Indeed, the whole movie can be seen as a tribute to film preservation, with the film archivist (played by my former student, Michael Stuhlbarg) clearly modeled on Henri Langlois, founder of the Cinémathèque Française.

Here's the official trailer:

A good movie, not necessarily perfect, but its heart is in the right place, and it has an important story to tell. Two weeks ago, when I first saw both of these, I would have thought American judges would be favoring Hugo over The Artist, but the opposite seems to be happening. We'll have to wait and see but, either way, silent film is the winner.

Some More Links:
Ben Model's website
Entertainment Weekly: The Awesomeness of Silent Movies
Wall St. Journal review; they like The Artist; Hugo, not so much
NY Times review of Hugo
NY Times review of The Artist
Silent Comedy Mafia (forum)
Films Muet, French silent film blog
Lobbying for an Oscar (NY Times)
New Yorker review of Hugo by David Denby
New Yorker review of Hugo by Richard Brody

DVD Report: The Ernie Kovacs Collection (Disc One — The Early Years)

[post 154]   

Clown friends come to my apartment, look at all my books and DVDs, and are impressed with how much I must know.  I do the same thing at my doctor’s office. All those thick volumes line the walls. Surely he’s read them all.  He does know what he's doing, right? Right??

Well, I’m hoping my doctor’s doing a helluva better job than me, because I know I can’t keep up.  I continue to collect, but finding the time to read or watch is another matter.  I’ve waited months or even years with great anticipation for a new DVD box set to appear, snatched it up on its release date, and then never watched more than a half hour of it. "I'll get around to it... one of these days."

Of course not every book makes for an engrossing read, nor is every multi-disc DVD collection a non-stop laff riot.  Yes, I’m a fan of silent film comedy, but much of it is formulaic and only sporadically entertaining, and when you’re tracing the early years of a famed comedian, you discover that they are human too and that it took them quite a while to reach their stride.  Their development process may be historically interesting, but you really have to be in the right mood for that. And if you're writing a physical comedy blogopedia, you feel obligated to take notes on it as well.  Hmm, maybe I’ll watch another episode of [fill in the blank] on Hulu tonight instead.

So, why this review? 

Well, they say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but I’m experimenting on myself nonetheless: instead of undertaking the daunting task of viewing all six volumes of the admirable new Ernie Kovacs Collection and posting some sort of comprehensive report — a homework assignment I might never finish — I decided that for the time being I’d limit myself to the first disc, and hopefully add on later.  So here goes……

Ernie Kovacs was an early pioneer of television comedy whose brilliant career was cut short when he died in a car accident in 1962, ten days shy of his 43rd birthday.  Here’s why you might find him interesting:

• His comedy was conceptual, improvisational, and often brilliant; he was an absurdist and post-modernist before his time

• He was a visual comedian, and has been described as the "Buster Keaton of television." Although not a physical performer in the knockabout sense of Keaton and Lloyd, he had an affinity for silent film and often used it as inspiration for his own work, especially his character Eugene.
• He wrote for Mad Magazine for a few years.
• He was a VFX innovator, what were known in those days as "camera tricks," and is credited with the invention of television's first form of "greenscreen" effect.
• He coined the sign-off line “It’s been real.”

For more of an overview, here's part of a Carl Reiner tribute to Kovacs:

Early Television

Although I still pass for 29 (or so), I can actually tell you a thing or two about early television. My first acting job, a baseball skit with Red Skelton and Jackie Gleason on the Red Skelton Show, went into rehearsal just before my seventh birthday in 1955, only four years after Kovacs' first shows in Philadelphia. Television was 100% live in those days, and if my family wanted to watch me perform, they had to go to a more prosperous neighbor's house, because like many people we did not yet own a TV. And the only reason we have recordings of any shows before 1957, when videotape came into use, was the kinescope: basically the results of a 16mm film camera being pointed at a television monitor.

Most of these "kinos" did not survive. Early episodes of the Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson were dumped in the Hudson River to save on storage costs. NBC was actually dubbing over Ernie Kovacs tapes to record game shows, and much of his work was lost forever. When Kovacs' widow Edie Adams caught wind of this, she had the smarts to buy up any and all kinescopes and videotapes of her husband's work that still survived, without which this DVD collection would not exist.

[ASIDE: One more old-man anecdote. In 1957, I had a small role in Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella, starring Julie Andrews, and with Edie Adams, wife of Ernie Kovacs, playing the fairy godmother. We were in rehearsal for a month at CBS Color Studio 72 on NYC's upper east side, and though I know I met Rodgers or Hammerstein (don't remember which), I'd like to think that Kovacs must have dropped by from time to time that month to visit his wife and that we were at least in the same room... and perhaps he even said "hi, kiddo" to me. And speaking of kinescopes (I told you this was an aside), the black-and-white kinescope recording of the live color telecast of Cinderella was re-broadcast on PBS in 2004 as part of its Great Performances series, and I actually got a royalty check for $285, a mere 47 years later; no residuals on the DVD, though.]

What I do remember about those days was that television was more like off-off-Broadway than the slick high-tech advertising machine we're so used to today. Smaller crews, less equipment, more chaos. Even Cinderella, the most lavish production of that era with 56 performers, 33 musicians and 80 stagehands, had only four cameras! I think what happens in the early days, where everyone's just learning the medium, is that there's both a rare chance to invent whatever you want but also a push towards "what works," towards a safe commercial product.  Somehow Kovacs managed to be a leading innovator while enjoying enough commercial success to stay on the air.


Disc One — The Early Years 
What we see on this first disc is Kovacs from 1951 and 1952, working in a small ramshackle studio, no laugh track, no audience except his crew — a preference he was to retain — and trying out all kinds of bits. There is no fourth wall, no pretense at naturalism.  He breaks character, chats with the cameraman, the other performers. You see his mind constantly working. Anything goes, no apologies.

Here are a few sample clips to whet your appetite, interspersed with some choice quotes from the excellent DVD booklet.

In this enduring bit, Kovacs teaches "you ladies" how to use the dials on your new-fangled television set.

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“Ernie Kovacs knew exactly what to do with television before television knew what to do with itself. It's sixty years later and we still haven't caught up.”— David Letterman

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A very short William Tell gag with a simple camera trick.

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"It's appropriate that television is considered a medium, because it's rare if it's ever well done."  — Ernie Kovacs

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A silly enough whipcracker gag.

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"How many recent geniuses... are so utterly erased from their right place in cultural memory? In Ernie Kovacs' case, literally erased.  Taped over, for crissakes. This goes beyond any artist's worst fears of being out-of-print, or of receding in mists of antiquity, or even of being a victim of the chemical time bomb of nitrate prints that have devoured century-old silent films.: this is more recent and irresponsible and lousy than that. They taped over his work, the fuckers. Here's Ernie Kovacs, the bridging figure, at the very least, between Groucho Marx and David Letterman; the immediate and proximate father, at the very least, of both Monty Python's Flying Circus and Nam June Paik; the uncle, at the very least, of Laugh-In and the Tonight Show and a thousand lesser television moments; the permissive next-door neighbor, at the very least, of Donald Barthelme and Frank Zappa. "  — Jonathan Lethem, novelist (Motherless Brooklyn; Chronic City)

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If you saw this mock commercial for Briefy cigarettes on Saturday Night Live, it would be 30 seconds long. Kovacs rambles on for almost four minutes — "When I flounder, I flounder" — but it was all part of his endearing persona.

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"The Ernie Kovacs Show knocked me sideways into a world where the bizarre and the daft and the preposterous all lived happily alongside wisdom, wit and perception. I had never experienced anything so visually absurd and inventive. It was sublime."  — Terry Gilliam, original Monty Python member; director (Time Bandits; Brazil)

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An opening to one of his shows from August, 1951, done partly in the style of silent film.

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I would say that there's more of the same on disc one, and there is, but there's even more variety: puppet shows, classical theatre parodies, eccentric music numbers à la Spike Jones, cooking routines, and more. Should you buy this box set based on what I've watched so far?  Yep!  The material's great and everything about the collection is quite well done, not surprising since it was curated by New York's own silent film historian and piano accompanist, Ben Model. You can get it here for under $40. As I've preached before, if fans like you and me don't buy this stuff, they're not going to keep making it. And it's so much better than watching crappy compressed 2-minute excerpts on YouTube.

Finally, if you want links, I'll give ya links. The Wikipedia article on Kovacs has some good information, but for more go to the source: Al Quagliata and Ben Model have three — count 'em, three — Kovacs web sites up there:

• erniekovacs.info

• erniekovacs.net
• erniekovacs.blogspot.com

To be continued?

Pierre Etaix's short film "Happy Anniversary"

[post 100]

Don't quote me, but it's a small world after all.

One day after posting my In Search of Pierre Etaix piece, I was at Jeff Seal's "Dead Herring" Williamsburgh loft, attending a fundraiser (image, right) for Jeff's own quite exciting silent film comedy project, A Day's Messing. The star attraction was Ben Model, the deservedly celebrated silent film accompanist, playing live piano to a nifty 1912 short, new to me, Robinet Cycliste, and to Chaplin's The Rink (1916) and Keaton's Neighbors (1920). (In my next life, I want to play piano like Ben does.)

While we waited for the sun to go down over the Williamsburgh Bridge, I had a chance to chat with Ben, and I was of course telling him the latest news on Etaix. It turns out that Ben had seen a 16mm copy of Etaix's short Happy Anniversary for sale and snatched it up. He has since digitized it and generously uploaded it to YouTube. Here it is, in two parts:






You can visit Ben's web site here and his blog here.

Postscript (pun intended):
So....... congratulations to me (he said modestly) on reaching post 100 on this blog. If nothing else, it justifies labeling my posts 023, 024, etc.; in fact, that served as inspiration to reach 100. Along the way, I sometimes wondered what post 100 would be, hoping it would somehow prove brilliant and marvelously repersentative of the blog. Forget the brilliant part, but I very much like that this one spans work from 1912, 1916, 1920, 1965, and 2010 — all linked by Ben's piano chops. Good enough!