Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog pays tribute to Mack Sennett, a.k.a. The King Of Comedy, born on January 17, 1880.
The career of Sennett, a.k.a. King Of Comedy, has been chronicled very thoroughly and skillfully in Brent Walker's Mack Sennett's Fun Factory book.
As pretty much everyone who reads this blog knows darn well, the roster of comedians, comediennes and character actors who worked with Mack Sennett, then moved on to bigger projects, was longer than a telephone book and, thankfully, infinitely more entertaining.
Sennett began making 1-reel comedies for D.W. Griffith at Biograph, then started Keystone Studios in 1912. Ford Sterling, Fred Mace, "Madcap Mabel" Normand, Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle and The Keystone Cops were among the first Keystone stars in 1912-1913.
Submitted for your approval, Keystone's staggeringly inept police force, here in their glory, in Bangville Police.
The end of 1913 saw the arrival at Sennett's of the first 20th century "British Invasion" and still the biggest comedy star in movies, Charlie Chaplin.
The first four of Chaplin's thirty-five Keystone Comedies were released theatrically in February 1914.
In the historic comedy The New Janitor, we see two firsts, both from frantic Keystone and in Charlie's illustrious career: that first hint of pathos and a sense of where Chaplin's stories would be going just a couple of years down the road.
Besides Chaplin, the Sennett Studio headliners Mabel Normand, Roscoe Arbuckle and Harry Langdon would leave the Fun Factory and find big money and international stardom in feature films.
Of course, the biggest Fun Factory "free agent" of all was Chaplin, who signed with Essanay, headed by George K. Spoor and western star G.M. "Broncho Billy" Anderson, for a then un-heard of $1,250 a week in 1915.
Then again, other Sennett stars (Fred Mace) did about as well as Saturday Night Live graduates whose careers ended with the transition from TV to movies. Director Henry "Pathe" Lehrman, sometimes termed "Suicide" for his cavalier attitude towards the safety of actors, left Sennett to form his own studio, L-Ko (Lehrman Knock-Out) and later Fox Sunshine Comedies; both expressed an even more frenetic, surreal and iconoclastic variant on the Keystone style, if such a thing can be imagined.
Some comedy luminaries, as Harold Lloyd and Charley Chase did, began their careers at Sennett as supporting players. Here's a very young "pre-glasses" Harold Lloyd in the Roscoe Arbuckle comedy Miss Fatty's Seaside Lovers.
Both Harold and Charley Chase would leave and go on to great success in front of and behind the cameras, as producer-writer-director-stars.
"Madcap Mabel" Normand would star in feature films for both Goldwyn and Sennett.
Indeed, the Sennett roster from the studio's two decade history encompassed a veritable Who's Who of silent era moviemaking, with Bing Crosby and W.C. Fields joining the lengthy list in talkies.
Directors and writers Roy Del Ruth, Frank Capra and Del Lord would enjoy lengthy careers in screen comedy and successfully bring at least some measure of that signature Sennett frenzy well into the sound era.
Filmed 100 years ago, on January 12, 1914, the Mack Sennett Studio's Keystone Comedy Kid Auto Races At Venice. Funny, there's a vaguely familiar comic in there. . .
The roads that lead to George Pal, Ray Harryhausen, Jiri Trnka, Joop Geesink, Karel Zeman, Art Clokey and other stop-motion masters lead inevitably back to the still unsurpassed silent era geniuses Charley Bowers, Wladislaw Starewicz and Willis "King Kong" O'Brien.
Bowers in particular intrigues and delights Your Blogmeister no end for his unique blend of silent era comedy and imaginative stop-motion animation.
A fascinating 2-DVD retrospective of his work, The Rediscovery Of An American Comic Genius, originally released a few years back by Image Entertainment, is now, unfortunately, out-of-print, but well worth scouting around for a used copy on DVD (on anyplace but EBay or Amazon, where prices are now ridiculously, insanely high).
Before developing his stop-motion animation techniques and starring in his own series for Educational and FBO Pictures, the legendary Charley
Bowers produced Mutt and Jeff cartoons for Bud Fisher Film Corporation and Pathe-Freres.
Bowers became a comedy star in 1926, headlining 2-reelers that successfully blended silent film "sight gag" humor with way-out stop motion animation.
The 18 "Whirlwind Comedies" produced for FBO and Educational release in 1926-1928 by Bowers and collaborator Harold Muller were - with the exception of an intriguing article that veteran animator Dick Huemer wrote for Mike Barrier's Funnyworld magazine - largely forgotten until almost 40 years after Bowers' passing in 1946.
Louise Beaudet of the Cinemateque Francaise brought a devastatingly wonderful Charley Bowers retrospective to the United States, which was screened at Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive, among other venues, in 1984.
Fortunately, until the upcoming Charley Bowers Blu-ray is out, the Slapstick Encyclopedia DVD set is still in print, which includes the following wild and wooly Bowers masterpiece.
"Just below the level of seasickness, of nausea, is the peak of excitement" Art Clokey
Topping Mr. Blogmeister's list of stop-motion immortals: Ray Harryhausen, George Pal, Wladislaw Starewicz, Charley Bowers, Willis O' Brien, Karel Zeman, Jiri Trnka, Joop Geesink, Norman McLaren - and Art Clokey!
We left our clay-boy answer to Al Pacino after the first few Gumby cartoons, which began as an extra on The Pinky Lee Show. Gumby's Godfather, 20th Century Fox producer Sam Engel, saw Art's experimental film Gumbasia and gave the OK for a series of cartoons in 1956. The first season is full of marvelous films that tap into a childlike sensibility in a way no animator before or since has been able to pull off.
Clokey accomplished what Bobe Cannon at UPA wanted so much to do, with great success.
As popular as the clay-boy is around the world, his adventures are not for everybody. Once watched a Gumby cartoon with a knowledgeable classic film buff friend who found the clay animation technique amateurish and absolutely could not comprehend what I liked about it.
This missed the point. Gumby cartoons are not the equivalent of Rembrandt with oil paints, Isaac Stern with a Stradivarius, William Faulkner in print or John Coltrane with saxophones.
The objective is NOT to blow the viewer away with technique, but to suck 'em into Art Clokey's fantasy world, that place where green clay-boys walk into books and find just about anything.
In this blogger's opinion, it was when the Clokey Productions jettisoned the handmade look of the first two seasons of "Gumby Adventures", transitioning from making characters with cookie cutters to utilizing molds, that the clay-toons got substantially less unique and less fun. The handmade characters in the 1956-1958 Gumbys add so much to their genuine otherworldliness.
The fundraiser expires tomorrow. It is the hope of Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog that La Sirene will be just the first of many films by Stephanie and Doorstop Productions.
Europe, since the days when the visionary Ladislaw Starewicz was cranking out positively amazing work, before World War I, first in Russia, then later in France, has remained a veritable creamy center of stop-motion animation goodness. One of the art's very finest practitioners was Czechoslovakian puppet animation innovator Jiřà Trnka. Here's his WW2 classic, Springman Vs. The S.S.
Another stop-motion master from Czechoslovakia was the great Karel Zeman.
There's nothing like some gorgeous stop-motion wizardry to that pesky post-holiday letdown to a screeching halt! Zeman's classic feature, The Fabulous World Of Jules Verne exemplifies the 1950's stop-motion boom that also included Joop Geesink's Dollywood animation, the wondrous fantasy films (and Dynamation) of Ray Harryhausen and George Pal's science fiction features.
Intrepid composer, bandleader and multi-instrumentalist Ralph Carney has written a holiday ditty Mr. Blogmeister likes infinitely better than Santa Claus Is Coming To Town or that irritating Frosty The Snowman here, THE HAPPY SOLSTICE SONG! Take it, Ralph!
As far as Mr. Blogmeister goes, the shopping mega-malls, department stores and big box monstrosities can all go commit a physically impossible sexual act, since this 2013 Christmas season, The Raymond Scott Archives is offering SUCH-A-DEAL involving Scott's classic Manhattan Research, Inc. album.
The groundbreaking album features Mr. Scott playing electronic instruments he designed, with Dorothy Collins on vocals. Did Brian Eno and Pere Ubu's Allen Ravenstine hear this album?
I'll listen to Manhattan Research with pleasure, wonder if Ray had coffee with Morton Subotnick and/or Frank Zappa and extend a tip of the Jack Buchanan-Fred Astaire-Jimmie Hatlo top hat to Raymond Scott archivist and keeper of the Powerhouse flame Jeff E. Winner.
And I'll also watch this clip!
THIS AND ALL RAYMOND SCOTT ALBUMS, plus a few days to get away from it all with Madame Blogmeister (that means the inevitable mandatory viewings of Cockeyed Cavaliers Bogey and Eddie Robinson in Brother Orchid (puncuated by gratuitous Eddie G. Robinson impersonations), preceded by the Leo n' Charley comedy masterpiece Mighty Like A Moose, AND a chance for me personally to live another day reasonably healthy plus at least one moment in 2014 of Peace On Earth - is what Your Correspondent wants for Christmas.
The following production number from A Damsel In Distress pretty much encapsulates everything I love about 1930's musicals and movies in general. While the video transfer here is definitely a tad on the muddy side, this scene sends Mr. Blogmeister into sheer delight every time, Take it, Fred, George and Gracie!
As an antidote to syrupy, smarmy, cloying, unbearably heartwarming holiday "entertainment", the Noir City festival, Eddie Muller and the intrepid historians/archivists of the Film Noir Foundation present this hard-boiled holiday double bill, straight, no chaser, at San Francisco's iconic Castro Theatre.
Allen Baron, the writer-director-star of Blast Of Silence, will be there in person!
The Noir City festival returns with a wide-ranging international lineup, featuring pungent noir nuggets from Argentina, France, Germany, Great Britain, Japan, Mexico, Norway and Spain, from January 24 - February 1, 2014.
As music lovers around the world mourn the passing of guitar genius Jim Hall today, we also celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birthday of entertainer, ultra-swingin' multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Ray Nance, a.k.a. Mr. Floor Show.
For sold-out audiences around the world, Mr. Nance rocked the house with the mighty Duke Ellington Orchestra.
In the following classic clip of Duke and his killer big band playing "The Hawk Talks", Mr. Nance and his magic trumpet join in at 2:38 (after Louis Bellson's kick-ass drum solo).
Could Ray sing like Billy Eckstine or Nat King Cole? Absolutely - now listen to this!
Trumpet? Cornet? Flugelhorn? Got it!
Violin? Sure! Viola? "String Swing"? Natch!
Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog raises a toast to the great Ray Nance - we feel 100 years young just listening to him!
"There was nothing else like it being made in America for Americans." Henry Selick
On a very short list of films that instantaneously send Mr. Blogmeister straight to Happyland: the inventive clay animation of Art Clokey.
Art's very creative "let's see what we can do with clay, unfettered imagination and a hip soundtrack" film GUMBASIA and the earliest Gumby cartoons (from 1956-1957) rank, in this blogger's opinion, among the greatest stop-motion films ever made. Clokey had a unique and uncanny ability to combine the experimental and exploratory with pure entertainment.
The earliest Gumbys possess an expressive, beautiful and genuine quality akin to primitive art and offer a childlike sense of innocence and wonder. No film before or since has merged futurism, fantasy elements and a child's eye view of the universe quite like Clokey's Moon Trip and Gumby On The Moon.
Clokey taps into the creativity that exists in the heart and soul before, inevitably, the unimaginative, the well-meaning, the insensitive, the authority figures attempt (too often successfully) to beat it out of us.
Clokey's films, especially Gumbasia and the first series of Gumby cartoons, made in 1956-1958, express his vision and sense of wonder in a most direct and straightforward way.
In direct opposition with the gentle, good-natured ambiance that were a hallmark of the Gumby cartoons, Art Clokey's long life was filled with tragedy. Art's mother left his dad for a policeman who was renting a room from them, ran away and abandoned Art, only to reconcile decades later. Art's father died in a car accident soon afterwards. Much of this is covered in the late Robina Marchesi's documentary Gumby Dharma, which offers both a biography and a quick overview of Clokey's clay animation innovations.
In a curious stroke of luck and serendipity, Art was subsequently adopted by composer Joseph W. Clokey and his wife: both avid travelers, adventurers, endlessly curious and film nuts. When Art met Dr. Clokey's 16mm camera, a creative artist was born.
The world travels with the Clokeys were the cornerstones of Art's identity as a filmmaker.
