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Scott Marks flies solo on KPBS Radio’s “These Days”

August 27th, 2008 by Scott Marks

It is not as though I have never done the Film Club before, but this morning’s ride to the station found me shaking harder than a Katherine Hepburn Jell-O mold. This was the first time since my days on The Lounge where I would be the sole guest

Beth Accomando and I make a good team, and the thought of not having her to bounce off of made me nervous. Very nervous. In the words of Daffy Duck, I was as black as a sheet. It’s not that the material was unfamiliar — if I can’t talk about the Marx Brothers and Jerry Lewis, who can? For some reason, I felt that the pressure was on to be brilliant. My producer, the indispensable Angela Carone, put a lot of work into today’s show and I didn’t want to let her down. Nor did I want to come off as the guy who hates everything. Truth be told, I love more movies than most people have seen, it’s just that the majority of them were made before 1975. Generally, my batting average on the show is 1 for 10. For every ten movies we review, I like one of them.

Instead of assuming my usual position on the opposite side of the console, I sat next to host Tom Fudge and we couldn’t have been more comfortable had we been sitting in a living room. As soon as the “On the Air” light was turned on, the 45 minutes flew by faster than Sherlock, Jr.

Some of the listeners threw me for a loop. This was a show about classic comedy and calling in to praise Soapdish is kind of like referencing The Apple Dumpling Gang during a discussion of John Ford, Anthony Mann and Budd Boetticher. And of all the directors, I never expected Ingmar Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night to be on a caller’s mind.

There were many discussion points that we didn’t have time for and I failed to mention that it was Ms. Accomando’s idea to give me an hour to myself. In the words of Ricky Riccardo, “Thanks, par’ner!”

Four badges of honor:

1) Tom sat and watched Sherlock, Jr. with his kids. Nothing makes me happier than exposing a new generation to Buster’s brilliance.

2) Lewisophobe Fudge was actually laughing his head off during The Nutty Professor clip. :P

3) I was able to mention Thomas Racz’s recent discovery of a longer print of A Night at the Opera. Hopefully someone in L.A. was listening.

4) And this is the big one — Angela actually took home my copy of The Nutty Professor to watch…actually. Can’t wait for her breathless phone call begging to borrow my copy of Cracking Up.

Listen to the show here.

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Exclusive Interview with “uncut” A NIGHT AT THE OPERA discoverer Thomas Racz

August 10th, 2008 by Scott Marks

I was in seventh grade when I first met the Marx Brothers proper. There were You Bet Your Life reruns and fuzzy memories of The Incredible Jewel Robbery, but it wasn’t until that fateful gathering of the Boone Booster Club that I first witnessed my first Marx Bros. feature.

The Booster Club was a perk for students attending Daniel Boone elementary school in Chicago’s West Rogers Park neighborhood. One Tuesday morning a month we were allowed to dispense with our studies and watch a real movie, not one of those crappy science documentaries, on school time.

The person responsible for curating the series should have been taken out and shot at sunrise. Instead of screening The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T or the original Babes in Toyland, they exposed impressionable minds to the insipid remake of the latter in addition to Blackbeard’s Ghost (another live-action Disney hellhole), the feature length version of Journey to the Beginning of Time (which worked better in 5 minute installments on Garfield Goose and Friends) and two episodes of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. spliced together to form a feature. There was a Martin and Lewis film, but the clueless booker chose Taurog over Tashlin.

Classrooms full of kids congregated in the school’s assembly hall where uniform focus was unheard of, the sound system was just slightly better than a subway train and the tattered window shades allowed more light to come in than the Sistine Chapel. In spite of all of the hardships cast upon this budding young cinephile, the 107 minutes spent watching A Day at the Races was the single greatest learning experience in eight years of public school education.

As if preordained, WBKB-TV scheduled a 1 am screening of Races later that weekend and I pleaded with my parents that since it wasn’t a “school night” to let me stay up way past my bedtime. My mother, generally the softer touch of the pair, wanted nothing to do with the idea. My father actually stepped up to the plate and, after hearing my appeal, uncharacteristically ruled in my favor. He assured my mother that “the kid will be asleep ten minutes after it starts and we’ll never hear about it again.”

Continue reading Exclusive Interview with “uncut” A NIGHT AT THE OPERA discoverer Thomas Racz

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Dig A Hole: Charles H. Joffe, Woody Allen’s loyal producer

July 15th, 2008 by Scott Marks

With Woody Allen off playing jazz, Jack Nicholson presents producers Charles H. Joffe (left) and Jack Rollins with their 1977 best pictures Oscar for Annie Hall.

Until today, I never knew what Charles H. Joffe looked like. His business partner Jack Rollins had a bit part in Broadway Danny Rose and frequent (hilarious) cutaways on Late Night with David Letterman, but until I stumbled across this photo on the LA Times website, Mr. Joffe’s face remained a mystery.

His name was anything but.

As with any good Hebrew student/retardate, repetition is the key to learning and I saw Mr. Joffe’s name appear on screen at least a hundred times. And that was just one movie!

That opening weekend screening of Woody Allen’s Take the Money and Run in the big Old Orchard Theatre was oxygen to my 14-year-old brain. It must have been a cheap rental for the film played on the bottom half of double-bills for years to come. No matter what theater, I was there and each one of my hundred-plus viewings came before home video.

Don’t ask how many times I saw Bananas.

More than Diane Keaton or Carlo Di Palma or Mia Farrow or even Jack Rollins, Charles H. Joffe’s name was synonymous with Woody Allen’s. Of the 44 films directed by Allen only four (two shorts, a made for TV feature and Tiger Lily) don’t include Charles H. Joffe’s name in the credits. He also produced two of Allen’s early non-directorial efforts, Play it Again, Sam and The Front.

I am saddened to report that Mr. Joffe died Wednesday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles after a long illness. He was 78.

Continue reading Dig A Hole: Charles H. Joffe, Woody Allen’s loyal producer

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Dig A Hole: Mr. George Carlin

June 23rd, 2008 by Scott Marks

$h[+! The last thing that I wanted to do tonight was bid farewell to the paladin of stand-up.

George Carlin, one of the most influential stand-up comic of this or any other generation, died of heart failure at a Los Angeles-area hospital on Sunday. He was 71.

George Denis Patrick Carlin was born in New York City on May 12, 1937. He was educated mostly in Catholic schools and he attended (but was expelled from) Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx, the same alma mater as Regis Philbin and (Timpani!) Martin Scorsese!

A stint as a radar technician in the Air Force brought him to Bossier City, Louisiana. Labeled an “unproductive airman” by his superiors, Carlin was discharged on July 29, 1957. He began working as a disc jockey on KJOE, a radio station based in the nearby city of Shreveport.

Late in 1959, Carlin partnered with Jack Burns as a short-lived comedy team. When the act broke up in 1962, Burns signed on with Chicago’s Second City while Carlin pursued a solo career in (and ultimately redefining) stand-up comedy.

His first television appearance was on The Mike Douglas Show in 1965. Soon Carlin began guesting on television variety shows, and I saw them all. He broke into television as a writer and performer on The Kraft Summer Music Hall (1966). The summer replacement series reunited George with Jack Burns who was making a name for himself as half of the comedy team Burns and (Avery) Schreiber.

This was around the time when I began channeling the art of “actor spotting.” I have forgotten the faces of countless former students that I spent weeks in a classroom with, but if you appeared in a 3 Stooges short and later pop up in the background of a Blondie comedy, I’ll spot you! It gives off an odd, triumphant feeling of personal satisfaction and after watching the Music Hall, I was delighted to see Carling pop up in a cameo on That Girl. Ditto for his brief appearance as a carhop in With Six You Get Eggroll.

After his many appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show, I broke down and bought a couple of his albums. I wore out the grooves, and learned so much about comedic timing, after countless playings of Al Sleet, the “hippie-dippie weatherman” on Wonderful WINO.

In the late 1960s, Carlin did a complete career overhaul. Gone was the slick-backed hair and clean shaven face. Carlin changed from a Newhart-esque monologist to America’s supreme hippie satirist. His often imitated observational approach to humor remains unrivaled. And unlike Sienfeld, his humor was about something:

“If someone loves you and they leave and don’t come back, it was never meant to be. If someone loves you and they leave and come back, set them on fire.”

“When evolution is outlawed, only outlaws will evolve.”

“The very existence of flamethrowers proves that sometime, somewhere, someone said to themselves, ‘You know, I want to set those people over there on fire, but I’m just not close enough to get the job done.’”

Creased pants and Arrow collars rapidly gave way to faded jeans and tie-dyed t-shirts. (His then unconventional attire cost him several TV bookings.) On July 21, 1972, Carlin made history after uttering the “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” at Milwaukee’s Summerfest. He was arrested for violating obscenity laws. The case, which Carlin referred to as “The Milwaukee Seven,” was dismissed after the judge cited some arcane clause written on a dated piece of paper concerning our constitutional rights to free speech.

Long before Howard Stern, Carlin was the first to wage war against the FCC. In 1973, some schmuck dropped a dime on Carlin after his son heard the same “filthy words” routine played on a New York radio station. it resulted in a 1978 Supreme Court ruling that upheld the government’s authority to sanction stations for broadcasting offensive language.

The controversy certainly didn’t hurt his career. On the contrary - It transformed him into a legend! He was the first-ever host of Saturday Night Live”(1975) on October 11, 1975, and coincidentally, the first-ever host of “Fridays” (1980), an ABC rip-off of SNL. In 1976, while at the top of his game, Carlin took a five year vacation from stand-up. He began his popular and very funny HBO specials in 1977, but for all intent and purpose disappeared from live performance venues. It was later revealed that the mysterious absence was due to a series of heart attacks he suffered during his layoff.

I have to admit that it’s right about here that I lost track of George Carlin. His HBO specials were a bonus for this late night Cablevision dispatcher, but with the exception of a few movie roles, I am embarrassed to say that I know little of his post 1985 output.

At the movies, it was pretty much uphill after Eggroll. After a twenty year absence from the big screen (give or take a Car Wash), Carlin returned to claim a modest late period crop of cinematic oddities.

He was wasted (in every way) in Outrageous Fortune and very funny in both Bill and Ted pictures. Streisand gave him work on Prince of Tides while towards the end Kevin Smith cast him in three movies. His last major appearance was as the voice of Filmore in Pixar’s Cars.

In December 2004, Carlin announced that he would be voluntarily entering a drug rehabilitation facility to receive treatment for his dependency on alcohol and painkillers. On Christmas Day 2005, after celebrating one year of sobriety, he experienced significant shortage of breath and other heart-related symptoms. During an eight-day stay at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Beverly Hills, he was treated for a lung infection and narrowed arteries.

Four days ago, it was announced that the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC would honor Carlin with its 2008 Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. Considering how brutally honest Carlin was, in his own way, he helped to humanize the hippies for middle America. How fitting that George Carlin be the recipient of the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. If Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the great American novel, surely George Carlin was the great American stand-up.

THE SEVEN WORDS YOU CAN NEVER SAY ON TELEVISION

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SCTV Cast Members Reunite for Charity Benefit in Toronto

May 2nd, 2008 by Scott Marks

sctv-logo.jpg

It’s been twenty-five years since SCTV left the airwaves and for many of us it remains the sharpest and funniest comedy show in the history of television.

Based on a fictional TV station located in the equally fictional Melonville, each week the show’s creators brought us a day’s worth of programming compacted into half-hour installments, later expanded to the SCTV Network 90 format. In Chicago, SCTV aired immediately following Saturday Night Live and not a week passed where comparisons weren’t invited. SCTV consistently won hands down.

Emulsion Compulsion loyalist Bushido John sent a note informing me of an SCTV reunion next week in Toronto that will bring together Joe Flaherty, Catherine O’Hara, Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, Martin Short and big shot Harold Ramis. After doing some of his finest work on the show, Ramis quit SCTV for a career in Hollywood. When last scene he was adding exceptional support to Knocked Up.

In an interview with the Canadian Press’ Lee-Anne Goodman spoke with Joe “Count Floyd” Flaherty about the series’ amazing following. “It’s tremendously uplifting and one of the greatest rewards, to hear your peers, and these really great comic minds, saying they look up to us,” the U.S.-born Joe Flaherty, 66, said Wednesday from his home in Toronto, where he’s lived since the early 1970s.

According to Flaherty, the gang will only have one rehearsal. “We’re doing some SCTV characters, we’re doing some stage stuff that we all did on stage at Second City, and we’re doing some improvisation. It should be interesting, that’s for sure, but the best thing is that it’s put us all in touch again.”

Links:

SCTV photos

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Dig A Hole: Sitcom writer (and Bob Hope gagman) Seaman Jacobs

April 19th, 2008 by Scott Marks

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I don’t have any pictures of Seaman, so you’ll have to settle for one of me doing my Bob Dole impression

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, this is Bob “Speaking from the Grave” Hope and I wanna’ tell you that Colonna and I were at the Pearly Gates on April 8 to welcome the arrival of Seaman Jacobs, right here. Hey, at first there was speculation that gun play was involved, but don’t worry folks, nobody shot Seaman.

Actually, he died of cardiac arrest in Los Angeles at the age of 96 and let me be the first to point out that I outlived him! Hell, I outlived all of you and I’m still more dangerous dead than I ever was alive, so watch your backs!

After serving in WWII, Sea began writing for Fred Allen and that crybaby liberal Jack Paar. He got his first break in 1949 scripting The Ed Wynn Show. Talk about perfect fools, those two nuts were made for each other. For more than fifty years this cat wrote for everyone from America’s favorite redhead to Hong Kong Phooey. Look at this list of shows he worked on folks: My Three Sons (they lost me after Bill Frawley croaked), Petticoat Junction (I dug those Hooterville hooters), The Addams Family (I never went in for that macabre stuff), Family Affair (it’s a shame what happened to little gal), I Dream of Jeannie (I’d like to spend some time in the garden of Eden, if you catch my drift), The Andy Griffith Show (his post-stroke Floyd the Barber material was killer), The Doris Day Show (that iceberg made Dolores look like Joey Heatherton), The Love Boat (I showed up at supermarket openings but drew the line when it came to being on the boarding list) and Different Strokes (that Gary Coleman was so cute when he was young, wadn’t he).

And, hey, it wasn’t just television. No sir. What about his movie credits, huh? Elvis never would have happened at the world’s fair without him and I don’t care what any of you say, Oh God! Book II was one sequel that far surpassed the original. (I outlived Burns, too!)

Yeah, but I wanna’ tell ya’ he saved his best work for yours truly. Jacobs was born in Kingston, NY, Jacobs attended Syracuse U. where he edited the campus humor magazine. I first met him after graduation when he became a Broadway press agent and I his #1 client.

I didn’t let him loose on any of my TV specials until he proved himself worthy of writing material that only canned laughter would love. After Temperature’s Rising, I knew he was ready and throughout the 80 and 90s he wrote some of the dullest, least though-provoking schtick this side of Max Alexander. Hey, who’ll ever forget Hope, Women and Song, Bob Hope’s All-Star Comedy Look at the Fall Season: It’s Still Free and Worth It!, that fantastic fascist foolishness All-Star Tribute to General Jimmy Doolittle (wadn’t Rex Harrison brilliant), Bob Hope’s Royal Command Performance from Sweden (Yeah, I knew two words in Swedish: Bjorn Borg and Vulva), Bob Hope’s Christmas Special from Waikoloa, Hawaii and who’ll ever forget Ooh-La-La: It’s Bob Hope’s Fun Birthday Spectacular from Paris’ Bicentennial? I banged me a boatload of bi-centenial beauties on that show.

Les!

Hey, it was fun talking to you all but I gotta’ go now. I’m lunching with Prescott Bush to discuss plans that will help secure John McCain a seat in the oval office. Great man that McCain. War is good for America and so are Easter Seals, ladies and gentlemen. They help crippled kids, and that’s a good thing. Drive safely. Good night.

Links:
Bob Hope interfered with the thought patterns of millions of Americans
Study Guide to BOB HOPE: THE VIETNAM YEARS (1964 – 1972) - Part 1
Bob Hope photos

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