Started this blog WAY back in 2006 primarily to promote screenings and a good one's coming right up in the San Francisco Bay Area at the Orinda Theater.
Much of the crew that produces the KFJC Psychotronix Film Festival returns to Orinda to present a Saturday matinee. OOZ-O-RAMA's essential criteria: does it ooze and, if the answer is yes, just how viscous is it. Would the 1958 version of The Blob, plus any trailers and promotional films related to it - as well as cheap Blob knockoffs - be viscous enough? Yes, definitely!
Before and after the ooze will be the usual suspects: trailers from B-movies, Soundies, well-meaning but now ridiculous 1950's educational films, cheesy "snack bar" ads, Scopitones, cartoon rarities, commercials, bizarro comedy shorts, "thunder lizards", kidvid, silent movie clips, serial chapters, puppet animation, and whatever not-exactly-cinematic drek we can dredge up for the occasion.
Psychotronix Film Festival presents Ooz-O-Rama Saturday September 23, 2023 at 3:00 p.m. PST Orinda Theater
2 Orinda Theatre Square
Orinda, CA 94563
Movieline: (925) 254-9060
Yours truly will not be there, and that means rest assured there will be no commercials for the 1956 Rambler in the show!
The Psychotronix bunch shall return to the Orinda Theatre on Saturday, October 14 for a Halloween show.
Does this blogger and co-founder of the KFJC Psychotronix Film Fest wishes he had a Star Trek teleportation device handy so it would be possible to attend these two Orinda Theatre shows? Heck, yeah!
There shall also be a Foothill College KFJC Psychotronix Film Festival, which this blogmeister will be involved in - do not know just yet if the playdate's in November or December 2023, or in January 2024. Awaiting that news!
Continuing happily in the silent film comedy world after spotlighting great movie comediennes for September 10th's post, today we tip a top hat worn by Ford Sterling to Ben Turpin, the wall-eyed star of Essanay, Vogue, Weiss Brothers/Artclass and Mack Sennett comedies, born in New Orleans, Louisiana, on September 19, 1869.
While there are lots of comedians and comediennes in silent films and early talkies who get this writer ROFL, one who sends this classic movie fan there easily, only every time. . . is the one, the only, the hilarious comic and acrobat Ben Turpin, the guy who reputedly had his crossed eyes insured with Lloyd's Of London to make sure that they would NOT uncross!
First and foremost, we at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog are big fans of both Ben and Steve Rydzewski's book For Art's Sake: The Biography And Filmography Of Ben Turpin. This book is the last word of the wonderful goofball comic's life and times, from vaudeville to his last film, Laurel & Hardy's feature Saps At Sea (1940).
What cracks me up about Ben is the same thing that gets me laughing out loud about Snub Pollard: that mixture of a bemused and nonplussed persona with unabashed over-the-top slapstick.
Today's corncucopia of comedy clips spotlights Ben Turpin, the janitor and jack-of-all-trades at the Essanay Studios in Chicago who became the first star of American comedy films in 1907. He plays quite the roustabout rake in Mr. Flip (1909) and deservedly receives a pie in the face for his behavior.
Contemporaneous with the European comics Andre "Foolshead" Deed, Max Linder and Marcel Perez, Ben preceded Vitagraph's John Bunny, as well as Keystone's Mack Sennett, Ford Sterling and Fred Mace as a U.S. movie comedy headliner.
The following compendium of clips featuring Ben Turpin look to this writer like a segment from The Golden Age Of Comedy, one of the Robert Youngson feature-length compilations of excerpts from Mack Sennett and Hal Roach comedies.
When Charlie Chaplin left Keystone and signed with Essanay as a "free agent," Ben teamed up with Charlie for two films, with delightful results.
It's fantastic to see these two great movie comedians together!
Ben is among the excellent comedy players in Essanay's successful Snakeville series, starring Augustus "Alkali Ike" Carney, Victor Potel, Margaret Joslin and Harry Todd - and produced by G.M. "Broncho Billy" Anderson. Silent film expert, historian and author Sam Gill elaborates:
VERSUS SLEDGE HAMMERS is one of the highly entertaining surviving entries of the Snakeville series.
After Essanay, Ben co-starred in short subjects for Vogue Comedies with his Keystone co-star, stock company member and former circus clown Rube Miller (1886-1927), who also directed the series. Rube is remembered today for directing and co-starring with Alice Howell and triple-jointed Al St. John in the wonderfully way-out 1914 Keystone Comedy SHOT IN THE EXCITEMENT.
In 1917, Turpin was hired by Mack Sennett, where he would star for just short of a decade. At Sennett, Turpin's character was gallant yet unorthodox and pixilated, likable, plucky, ever-nonplussed and weirdly endearing.
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In tribute, we're posting a bunch of Ben Turpin Sennett comedy classics, starting with this excerpt from A CLEVER DUMMY.
LOVE & DOUGHNUTS is one of our favorite Turpin comedies.
Here is an excerpt from one of the funnier Turpin Sennetts, TEN DOLLARS OR TEN DAYS.
Turpin, whose vaudeville career as Happy Hooligan began in the nineteeth century, did slapstick through the 1920's. Yes, Ben's starring role in classic The Stunt Man notwithstanding, there are stunt doubles - but not anywhere near as often as seen in the films of such contemporary comedy kings as Larry Semon.
In these Sennett films, a good number of the somersaults, pratfalls and other physical comedy bits were done by Ben, who was in his mid to late fifties at the time! Gotta love Ben Turpin the action star in Yukon Jake!
At the Mack Sennett Studio, Ben co-starred with several of the very good comediennes on the lot.
Madeline Hurlock and Thelma Hill are both in THE PRODIGAL BRIDEGROOM (1926).
Turpin's earnest sendups of silent movie mega-stars can be both highly absurd and oddly heroic. Particularly riotously funny: the series for Mack Sennett in which Ben played romantic mega-star Rodney St. Clair!
Would FOOLISH WIVES have been a better movie with Ben starring instead of Erich von Stroheim? Maybe. . .
In particular, those Sennett comedies starring Ben as "the great lover" are a scream!
Ben finished his stretch as a star of silent comedy films with a series of short subjects produced by the Weiss Brothers/Artclass, a studio that cranked out low budget comedies and westerns which were often surprisingly good. They can be seen on the Weiss O' Rama DVD. Ben, nearly 60 years of age, performs slapstick and somersaults as if he's 30 years younger.
Ben Turpin would continue into talkies, beginning with an appearance in one of Louis Lewyn's The Voice Of Hollywood series.
Ben has small roles and cameo appearances in a bunch of 1930's feature films, including Cracked Nuts (1931), a frequently uproarious Wheeler & Woolsey flick from RKO Radio Pictures.
Expanding his reach into westerns, Ben Turpin co-starred with none other than Rex, the King of the Wild Horses in the Mascot Pictures western serial The Law Of The Wild (1934).
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As comic relief, Ben transitioned into westerns quite well in The Law Of The Wild, and also continued appearing in comedy short subjects and features.
The 1930's included several attempts by short subject producers (including Sennett) to bring back the silent era slapstick approach of yore, with Jules White's Columbia Shorts Department proving by far the most successful.
Paramount Pictures distributed a series of 2-reelers produced by Phil L. Ryan in 1930-1932 and starring ex-Sennett and Chaplin players Chester Conklin and Mack Swain. In LIGHTHOUSE LOVE, Ben co-stars with fellow goofy comic Arthur Stone, early 1930's Mack Sennett stock company member and periodic star of Hal Roach Studio's Taxi Boys comedies Franklin Pangborn,and the patented "big dumb lug" from the 1931 Marx Brothers' classic MONKEY BUSINESS, Tom Kennedy.
Another is Ralph Staub's Vitaphone 2-reeler KEYSTONE HOTEL (1935), which constitutes something of a last hurrah for the 1920's Mack Sennett Comedies gang, including Ford Sterling, Ben Turpin and Marie Prevost, with Keystone Comedies and Charlie Chaplin Productions favorites Hank Mann and Chester Conklin. Billy Bevan and Al St John must have not been available!
Improbably, Ben works in the mythical land of Klopstokia as a spy!
At Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog, we especially love Turpin's cameo that closes the great Laurel & Hardy short Our Wife. It is a clever twist ending to a classic L&H 2-reeler which co-stars the talented and very funny Babe London as Ollie's fiancée.
Ben is among a slew of silent film comedians who appear in the 1939 Alice Faye vehicle Hollywood Cavalcade (1939), one of several features which attempts to look back nostalgically on the slapstick of 20 years earlier (note: very oddly, the one guy who actually didn't do slapstick per se, Buster Keaton, leads the plethora of comedians in this Fox movie). Ben has a cameo with the ubiquitous Chester Conklin. It's Ben's second-to-last film.
Alas, this number of clips is finite and must end - in this case with Ben's final silver screen appearance, in the 1940 L&H feature SAPS AT SEA.
There is no greater tribute to a comedian than to be caricatured in an animated cartoon. Ben is caricatured in a slew of classic cartoons, first in Otto Messmer's 1923 opus Felix In Hollywood.
Closing today's tribute to Ben Turpin, shall note his appearance - along with fellow Sennett stars Ford Sterling, Mack Swain, Harry Langdon and Chester Conklin, in the Hollywood star caricature-packed 1933 cartoon Mickey's Gala Premier (note: it is on Mickey Mouse In Black & White volume 1, used copies of which can still be found periodically on eBay).
In the Acknowledgements department, a big time assist for many of the video clips in this Ben Turpin tribute goes to the outstanding Reel Comedies YouTube channel, a treasure trove of silent comedy goodness; thanks a million to Dave Glass and the late silent movie historian David Wyatt).
The gang at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog loves the Cartoon Logic podcast by Thad Komorowski and Bob Jacques almost as much as we love weird, bad, odd B and C-studio cartoons and are thrilled to read great news about further vintage animation restorations.
If ridiculously rare "lost film" silent era comedies starring the likes of Lloyd Hamilton, Max Linder, Marcel Perez, "Musty Suffer" and Alice Howell can get a DVD release, so can early 1920's cartoon rarities! Behold, a Kickstarter for the first Cartoon Logic video release, Aesop's Fables, The 1920's volume 1. Before Walt Disney's crew (Ub Iwerks, Hugh Harman, Rudy Ising, Friz Freleng and Rollin Hamilton) began making cartoons, there were Paul Terry's Fables!
The Cartoon Logic podcast's resident animation historians Thad n' Bob, with musician/historian Charlie Judkins, are branching out into Blu-rays and DVDs. This, as well as the news that Steve, with animation experts David Gerstein and Tommy Stathes, have joined forces for upcoming Cartoons On Film releases on Blu-ray and DVD, is fantastic news for animation and silent movie aficionados! Is there a such thing as too much cartoon fun? No. Again, ladies and gentlemen, link to the Kickstarter here.
At the time when Fleischer Studio's Out Of The Inkwell and Otto Messmer's Felix were just getting going, before the two Walts (Disney and Lantz) starting making cartoons, the Aesop's Fables of Paul Terry were the rage.
While the Paul Terry studio’s Aesop’s Fables are not as sophisticated as the animation of Winsor McCay, Fleischer Studio and Otto Messmer, the cartoons are quite entertaining nonetheless, often extremely funny and quite bizarre. Don't knock Farmer Al Falfa until you've seen at least a few of his starring vehicles!
Unlike later cartoons and the work of Paul Terry's post-WW1 contemporaries, there's blood and gore aplenty in the 1920's Aesop's Fables; Mickey Rat characters brandish and shoot tiny but super-powerful pistols that would kill Clint Eastwood and patented Terry cats and rats even die, sometimes gruesomely!
Imaginative and unorthodox cartooning from the likes of Frank "fastest pencil in the east" Moser, Hugh "Jerry" Shields and Mannie Davis is, 100 years ago and now, fun to watch. 450+ silent Aesop's Fables cartoons were produced in the 1920's.
Read a Cartoon Research post that Jerry Beck penned earlier this month about his numerous efforts to secure some kind of distribution and releases on Blu-ray and DVD for the Terrytoons cartoons.
It is unfortunate that the owners of these cartoons have no interest whatsoever in making even a minimal buck off them; guess the big boys are too occupied by the need to screw actors, writers and directors out of residuals for work distributed on streaming video! Would all of us animation mavens at Way Too Lazy To Write A Blog love to see Terrytoons released on Blu-ray, or at least get included in MeTV’s Toon In With Me show along with the Lantz, Columbia and lesser-known WB cartoons? Heck, yeah. . . and no doubt Jerry will keep trying!
The Power of Thought with Heckle & Jeckle strikes me as an animated cartoon manifesto that still holds in 2023. Not even Tex Avery tried to explain the concept of cartoons to the moviegoing audience as the wiseguy magpies do here.
There are amazing one-shot Terrytoons that did not get airings on TV even way back when the New Rochelle studio's films were all over Saturday morning and weekday cartoon shows, as the Mighty Mouse, Heckle & Jeckle and later series (Tom Terrific, Deputy Dawg - alas, there's only one Terrytoon starring Flebus) did.
Many Terrytoons are up on YouTube and, just as they did way back when, feature the original, unfettered and highly inventive animation of Jim Tyer and Carlo Vinci.
Like the 1920's Aesop's Fables, the Terrytoons can be very funny and very dark. Speaking of the latter, HOW TO RELAX remains a favorite!
We're about to watch today's much-awaited edition of the Silent Comedy Watch Party - and, not surprisingly, thinking about the great comediennes of silent pictures
One of the funniest extant Wanda comedies, A Thrilling Romance, was featured on episode 16 of The Silent Comedy Watch Party.
How Wanda did not attract the attention of Universal head Carl Laemmle and continue her career into talkies, we'll never know. Her 1925 Century Comedy The Queen Of Aces is a hoot!
This brings to mind the question of how many of the LOTS and LOTS of silent film comediennes starred for Universal and who produced these fast-paced, sight gag-filled 2-reelers.
The answer to the former includes the aforementioned Wanda Wiley, Alice Howell, Fay Tincher, Baby Peggy Montgomery and Edna Marion. The answer to the latter is the Stern Brothers, who produced over 900 comedy short subjects. The intrepid cinema detective, author and film historian Thomas Reeder has focused two books on the comedy that emerged from Universal in the teens and 1920's - and the second one, Time is Money! The Century, Rainbow, and Stern Brothers Comedies of Julius and Abe Stern, covers their lives and movie career in detail.
Preceding Baby Peggy and Wanda Wiley as Century Comedies headliner was Alice Howell, whose work with Sennett, Lehrman, Reelcraft and Universal demonstrates her formidable comedy mojo. The excellent writers Tony Slide and Lea Stans have covered Alice Howell at length.
We're big fans of Fay Tincher at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog.
Fay, a super-talented actress of stage and screen, passed at age 99 in Brooklyn, NY in 1983. It appears she successfully eluded any efforts to be interviewed about her career making movies and kept a low profile after her retirement from show business at the age of 46.
Fay had a 15 year movie career that spanned stints with The American Eclair Company, Komic Komedies, Triangle, Christie, and Universal.
After beginning in movies as a big time vamp in D.W. Griffith's feature The Battle Of The Sexes, Fay's screen popularity took off in 1914 with her scene-stealing antics as Ethel, the outrageous stenographer in Komic Komedies' Bill The Office Boy series.
Alas, Fay wanted more than anything to produce, direct and write and have creative control over her own films, preferably dramas. Although she did have her own production company in 1918 and made several Fay Tincher comedies for World Pictures, for the most part, that scenario was not to be, with the shift from the wild and wooly days of early motion pictures to the studio system already well underway when she began working for Al Christie in 1919.
A few entries from Fay's Christie Comedies series survive, and, as much as she wanted to be a dramatic actress, these films - very likely much to her chagrin - are hilarious. One film that has made it to DVD and is especially memorable stars the indefatigable Fay as as the badass "Christie cowgirl," the personification of a "pistol packin' mama."
Fay was on record as finding the Christie Comedies too slapstick-oriented for her taste. This may be due to various injuries suffered doing stunts as rugged, take-no-prisoners Rowdy Ann in the western comedies series, as well as an impression on Fay's part that she would get to star in 5-reel featurettes at Christie Comedies and pursue storylines more along the lines of the genteel and sophisticated farces exemplified by Mr. And Mrs. Sidney Drew.
For the remainder of the silent era, Fay starred in various Universal comedies, most notably as Min Gump in "The Gumps" series. Her last silver screen appearance (and only talkie) was a supporting part in a Universal Syd Saylor 2-reeler released theatrically in March 1930.
In addition to the Topeka-born actress' talents in front of and behind the camera, she was an athlete and accomplished craftswoman/seamstress, devoted to needlework and creating artwork using vitreous enamel.
Today, we want to call our readers' attention to a GoFund Me for one of our colleagues and comrades in classic movies. That would be our friend and fellow curator of big screen fun Nelson Hughes, producer of That Slapstick Show! way back in the halcyon days before lockdown. He has presented many wonderful programs over the past decade.
Nelson has been hit over an extended stretch by a series of daunting health problems and the staggering costs they entail. The Go Fund Me has been ongoing, as medical, employment and housing issues have a way of snowballing rapidly.
Nelson curated terrific shows of rare and unseen for decades American silent comedies from the Library Of Congress, The Celebrity Roast Of Charley Chase at Brooklyn's City Reliquary and Astoria's Q.E.D.
These included a tribute to the favorite producer-director-writer-comic of Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog, the one, the only Charley Parrott a.k.a. Charley Chase. Nelson's work as a film historian has been among a group of silent movie experts key to the rediscovery of sprightly, winsome, athletic 1920's "daredevil comedienne" and comic actress Wanda Wiley.
Exemplifying plucky derring-do, Wanda was one of the best Slapstick Divas and a star of very funny films for Century Comedies.
Like the surviving family members of the ever-charming Ms. Wiley, the gang at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog, classic movie mavens, silent comedy aficionados, animation fans and my fellow curators of vintage cinema programs are pleased to enthusiastically support this GoFund Me.
