Another late summer has rolled around, so that means it's time for the ceremonial July-August KFJC Psychotronix Film Festival. Huh? The customary what?
The word "Psychotronix" is a variation on Michael Weldon's Psychotronic History Of Cinema, the encyclopedia of all varieties of under-the-radar B-films: monster movies, horror films, science fiction, cheap comedies, rock 'n' roll flicks, etc.
The KFJC Psychotronix Film Festival presents a unique and hallucinatory excursion through the irritated bowels of popular culture.
That delirious mix includes trailers from truly wretched movies, well-meaning 50's educational films, schlocky drive-in movies with guys in stupid-looking robot and gorilla suits, vintage TV commercials and theatre ads, cartoon rarities, Japanese monster epics, Scopitones, Soundies and other even more deservedly obscure musical shorts, silent film clips, kidvid, serial chapters, puppet animation, double-entendre packed pre-Code bits and more.
Robert Emmett, host of "The Norman Bates Memorial Soundtrack Show", presides over the festivities with panache, bon mots and a boatload of cheesy door prizes.
The festival is a reaction against all standard rules of film programming. Instead of devoting a screening to one director, one genre or one series, our celluloid concoctions throw a wide variety of films from different places, genres, techniques or time periods together.
As far as content goes, the more obscure, the lower the budget, the more under-the-radar, the better. If we can establish a subject link or a Monty Python-esque visual or verbal link between the segments, great, but this is not absolutely necessary. Or to make a further Monty Python reference, this could be called the "And Now For Something Completely Different" approach to film programming.
The shows are essentially improvised, with archivist-producers Bob Ekman, Scott Moon and Paul F. Etcheverry creating the program on the fly, responding to audience reaction and choosing films accordingly.
We consider the evening a smashing success when the audience starts heckling the entertainment before the projection lamp goes on.
The next KFJC Psychotronix Film Festival will occur on Saturday, July 27, from 7:00 PM to 11:00 PM, in room 5015 on the Foothill College campus in the lovely Los Altos Hills, El Monte exit off of Highway 280.
While 7:00 p.m. is showtime, get be there early, as the hall frequently sells out. The $5 admission benefits the fearless KFJC 89.7. Attendees will also need $3 for a parking permit.
Pabst, enduringly popular for his despair-drenched Weimar Republic melodramas (most starring the aforementioned Ms. Brooks), will also be represented by his stark forerunner of Rosselini-style neorealism The Joyless Street, starring Greta Garbo and Asta Nielson.
Highlights include a tribute to animation genius Winsor McCay, the wry Russian comedy The House On Trubnaya Square, the ever-swashbuckling Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. in Allan Dwan's 1916 box office hit The Half-Breed, a Kings Of Silent Comedy program which will include Chaplin, Keaton, an Otto Messmer Felix The Cat cartoon and the 1926 Leo McCarey-Charley Chase masterpiece Mighty Like A Moose, a documentary, Legong Dance Of The Virgins, filmed in Bali (in Technicolor) by Henri de la Falaise, the iconic director Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Chorus, and two hilarious comedy features: Marion Davies & Marie Dressler in The Patsy and Harold Lloyd's 1923 classic Safety Last.
The July 3 Lone Ranger posting, besides prompting some time well spent with the great comedy albums of Bill Cosby and Lenny Bruce, also recalled Second City Television's outrageous sendup of The Cisco Kid, featuring Martin Short as
Poncho.
Many moons before SCTV, Mystery Science Theatre 3K, Cinematic Titanic, Kung Pow - Enter The Fist! and Rifftrax, wiseguy Woody Allen dubbed a Japanese spy thriller and reinvented it as Phil Moskowitz' quest for the perfect egg salad recipe. It's still the last word in this kind of "dubbing" sendup almost 50 years later (and 35 years before Kung Pow). Allen's zinger-drenched dubbing triumph was released theatrically on November 2, 1966.
And then there was Fractured Flickers, a highly creative use of pre-1920 public domain "found footage" by Jay Ward Productions. There was one memorable episode that dubbed a Tarzan flick starring Elmo Lincoln into a scenario that involved the loin-clothed jungle hero going out for pizza. Hans Conried had hilarious bits as Fractured Flickers' very reluctant host, and, as was customary for Jay Ward Productions, the show featured inspired voice acting throughout by the stock company of Bill Scott, June Foray and Paul Frees.
The big budget blockbuster silver screen release "with a bullet" today, just in time for the Fourth Of July weekend will be a 2013 variation on The Lone Ranger, this time co-starring Johnny Depp and Armie Hammer.
It appears that the very first film of The Lone Ranger - the earliest and the crudest - was this cartoon produced by Roy Meredith on such a microscopic budget that it featured subtitles - yes, subtitles, five years after all the animation studios had been cranking out "All Singing, All Talking, All Dancing" adventures starring Mickey Mouse, Bosko, Bimbo, Betty Boop, Krazy Kat, Scrappy, Oswald The Lucky Rabbit, etc.
From the 1933 into the 1950's, the not-that-dynamic duo were a huge hit, first on radio in an impressive 23 year run, then in cliffhanger serials, comic books, and a 1949-1957 television show (starring Clayton Moore and Jay Silverheels) which led to two spinoff movies, The Lone Ranger and The Lone Ranger & The Lost City Of Gold.
The original Lone Ranger series, which premiered in 1933, however, was designed for radio, an entirely different medium from all the others, one in which the listener's imagination filled in the blanks. Frankly, TV's ascot-wearing Masked Man struck Your Blogmeister as more of a fashion statement than a western hero - but Tonto was cool.
Today's posting will be devoted to various Lone Ranger sendups. Some are riotously funny, others. . . just odd. First off, here's one of the greatest standup comedians and storytellers, Bill Cosby, from his 1965 album I Started Out As A Child.
Next, one of Your Blogmeister's many favorite sketches from Second City Television. With the proviso that the jokes here will be totally lost upon young people who never saw or heard of The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, as well as to much older individuals who never liked it and simply do not "get" the skewed, multi-layered pop culture parody that was SCTV's stock-in-trade, the concept is as follows: The Lone Ranger (Rick Moranis) hosts a late-night program very much along the lines of The Tonight Show, with Tonto (Joe Flaherty) in the Ed MacMahon boozed-up sidekick role.
Nobody, with the possible exceptions of Richard Pryor and Bill Hicks, could reduce sacred cows to steak tartare quite like satirist-standup philosopher-social commentator Lenny Bruce. Here's animator Jeff Hale's 1968 cartoon based on one of Lenny's signature take-no-prisoners monologues.
Looney Tunes' 2 cents on the subject, made in 1939 as a response to the popular Republic serial starring the macho masked man, is The Lone Stranger & Porky. In the Bob Clampett tradition, it makes you laugh loudly and repeatedly with gloriously bad jokes - some seriously off-color - and then think "geeeees - I laughed at that". PLEASE forgive Mr. Blogmeister for posting a cartoon that, although produced in beautiful black and white, has been given the dreaded computer color treatment (there is, unfortunately, no transfer from an original B&W 35mm or 16mm print on YouTube, Daily Motion, Vimeo, Hulu, etc.).
Not nearly as successful but even more politically incorrect, 1940 style, is this spoof by Hugh Harman.
Harman was an animation pioneer and very creative director who started out in the 1920's (pre-Mickey Mouse) Disney Studio, along with Rudolf Ising and Friz Freleng. Harman was not known for hilariously funny cartoons, but for attempting to blend lavish Disney-style animation with either unfettered Fleischer/Warner Bros. rowdiness (the "three good little monkeys" and raucous "jazz frogs" series), or more serious subject matter (the 1939 antiwar epic Peace On Earth). Although Harman's attempts at a Disney animation + cartoon insanity blend usually did not succeed, there were blazing, grotesquely imaginative, surreal and most un-Disneylike moments in such delirious MGM cartoons as Swing Wedding and Art Gallery
Hugh's masked man sendup, The Lonesome Stranger, doesn't succeed, especially in the laughs department, but at least tries the breaking of the 4th wall technique, notably used in Frank Tashlin's 1937 suspense cartoon The Case Of The Stuttering Pig and Tex Avery's 1939 lampoon of Warners gangster flicks, Thugs With Dirty Mugs - yes, the very same technique that Avery would soon personally bring to MGM cartoons and carry beyond the nth degree. And, funny, the voices throughout (including a "Rochester" horse) sure sound a lot like Mel Blanc. . . and make Your Blogmeister wish so much that the head bandit could have been played by Jack Benny!
Harman and Orson Welles wanted to collaborate on a live-action/animation film of The Little Prince, and it's too bad it never happened; film history was robbed of the fun spectacle of studio executives on the project jumping out 17th story windows like captains of industry in 1929.
And speaking of spectacles, rest assured that Your Blogmeister, against his better judgment, will see the new lumbering mess of an elephantine epic on the big screen and eat diabetic-unfriendly buttered popcorn throughout.
Silent movies rule yet again in the San Francisco Bay Area twice every summer, once at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum and a few weeks later at San Francisco's Castro Theatre.
This year's fest commemorates the centennial of filmmaking in Niles with, among other programs, an afternoon featuring the few still existing 1912-1913 westerns produced by none other than the legendary Gilbert M. "Broncho Billy" Anderson, a premiere of a western filmed recently in the same Niles Canyon locations, an all-animation show featuring Lotte Reineger's The Adventures Of Prince Achmed, a presentation on the Northern California's historic (and stunning) art deco movie palaces and an appearance by author, historian and silent movie star Diana Serra Cary (a.k.a. Baby Peggy).
Quoting the press release by the museum's Rena Azevedo Kiehn, and the article on the festival in The Tri-City Voice, "if you haven't seen a silent movie in awhile (or ever!) if you keep meaning to stop by, THIS IS THE WEEKEND to come to the movies in Niles! Really! There are classic comedy movies with Marion Davies and Buster Keaton! There are films on animation and stunts! There will be a walking tour and a presentation on classic Bay Area Theaters and one on locations of Sherlock, Jr. There are films made 100 years ago right here - and one made THIS YEAR!"
The 16th Annual Broncho Billy Silent Film Festival holds forth at the Edison Theater, 37417 Niles Boulevard, Fremont, CA 94536-2949.
So, Northern California and Bay Area classic movie buffs, do the right thing, take a break from Turner Classic Movies this weekend and head on down to Niles for a weekend of historic silent movie goodness.
One can check out the schedule, buy advance tickets and festival passes online here or purchase tickets the old-fashioned way, by bringing this order form in person to the museum.
Unquestionably, Peter Lorre, Frankie and The Wolfman got their kicks on Route 66 - even given that Alice Cooper, The Dead Boys and Electric Frankenstein were a few years (or decades) down the road.
And, frankly, I would have found Marty Milner's subsequent cop show, Adam-12, infinitely more entertaining had Karloff, Lorre and Chaney been in the regular cast!
"One Adam-12, gruesome green monster with bolts sticking out his neck wandering aimlessly on Sunset, near the Whisky A Go-Go. Said to have British accent and unkempt werewolf companion. Jim Morrison considering having werewolf sit in with the band."
Meanwhile, although Peter Lorre did not jam with The Doors or The Velvet Underground, he get to have an incredible amount of fun with his screen image on the following 1963 episode of The Jack Benny Program.
There have easily been 100 first-rate editorial cartoons over the past three weeks - and these two are the picks for this morning's post (note: Mr. Blogmeister, ever the history geek, is fascinated by brutally satiric political comics, going back to the days of Thomas Nast).
And, yes, realizing that editorial cartoons chase away all five readers of this blog, the Blogmeister notes that the delirious yet steadfast focus on the odd corners of 20th century pop culture will absolutely and most assuredly return - and stay there - starting with the next post.
Today, on the occasion of his 71st birthday, we pay tribute to composer/pianist/arranger Brian Wilson. Since this blog also designates the 20th of every month as Burt Bacharach Day, here's a tune Brian and Burt wrote together.
Too bad a "Beach Boys Sings Burt Bacharach" project didn't happen. This "Walk On By" cover shows great but unrealized potential. Bear in mind that such a move towards pure pop would not have been feasible in 1967-1968, since the band had, practically overnight, transitioned from the hottest thing in show business to, with the commercial dominance of guitar-driven psychedelic rock, such dreaded designations as "old hat", "last year's Trend Du Jour" or even worse, "Box Office Poison".
Invariably, either Mike Love, Capitol Records, Murray Wilson or all of the above would have shot such an idea down in short order. It was most fortuitous that The Beatles actually were not only allowed to grow creatively and supported by their millions of fans, but encouraged to do so - as Brian (and to a lesser degree his songwriting brothers Carl and Dennis) most assuredly were not. At least Brian survived, and with his stellar recording Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE and accompanying tour in 2003-2004, enjoyed some measure of vindication.
No, I am NOT referring to Smucker's delicious Dingleberry Preserves but - yet again - to silent film rarities. On the heels of the recent Mostly Lost gathering of international archivists, historians and celluloid sleuths at the Library Of Congress in Culpepper comes this latest collection of vintage Roaring 20's entertainment, Accidentally Preserved, volume 1, available via Amazon.
Here is the lineup, curated by Ben Model of the Silent Clowns and Cruel & Unusual Comedy film series. Formerly lost films are indicated with a ** and were transferred from the only known print:
The Lost Laugh** with Wallace Lupino (1928) - 9 minutes. It's a rough start to Mr. and Mrs. Lupino's day, but Wallace tries to keep a sense of humor about the washing-machine salesman and the worthless piece of junk he sells them.
Loose Change with Jack Duffy (1928) - 11 minutes. When filthy rich-but-dirt-cheap Scottish uncle "Sandy McDuff" visits, his nephew's wife vamps the old coot as a prank.
Wedding Slips** with Monte Collins (1928) - 9 minutes. The honeymoon takes a turn for the worse when the newlyweds are kidnapped by gypsies and a gorilla.
Shoot Straight with Paul Parrott(1923) - 10 minutes. A decade away from his exceptionally productive stint as director/writer of Laurel & Hardy comedies, early 1920's Roach Studio headliner James "Paul" Parrott goes a-hunting, and tangles with wascally wabbits, ducks, a bear and more.
The House Of Wonders**(ca. 1931) - 23 minutes. This genuine Depression-era industrial film tours the Elgin Watch Company and shows the assembly of an Elgin watch from start to finish.
The Misfit with Clyde Cook (1924) - 12 minutes. After helping wifey shop and paint the living room floor, henpecked Clyde flees and joins the Marines!
The Water Plug with Billy Franey (1920) - 12 minutes. An enterprising yet sleazy con-artist hatches a scheme to fleece automobile owners with a portable hydrant from a pawn-shop.
Mechanical Doll a.k.a. The Dresden Doll, an "Out Of the Inkwell" cartoon, directed by Dave Fleischer (1922) - 7 minutes. "Uncle Max" Fleischer messes with Koko The Clown even more than usual by drawing a life-size wind-up doll for him.
Cheer Up with Cliff Bowes (1924 - 10 minutes).
Cliff and Eddie Boland, longtime rivals for Virginia Vance's hand in marriage, find that the (not good-natured) rivalry does not end after Cliff and Virginia wed.
All films are available for viewing online, with introductions, via Ben Model's YouTube channel.
Today's posting brings the silent film comedy arc of the past three weeks to a close - well, at least until Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog starts yet another series covering the fun factories of Hal Roach, Mack Sennett, Henry Lehrman, Vitagraph, Jack White/Educational Pictures, Fox, Century, Universal and more.
Another movie legend who's rapidly becoming a favorite at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog is gonzo silent film comedienne Alice Howell.
Twenty years before Lucille Ball made her silver screen debut as a showgirl in delirious Busby Berkeley musicals, Alice Howell, the go-for-broke redhead with a Q-Tip hairdo and a flair for knockabout farce, was tearing it up in Mack Sennett's rip-roaring Keystone Comedies.
Here she is, co-starring with Al St. John in a typically slow-paced and genteel Keystone comedy produced in 1914, Shot In The Excitement.
Because only a handful of her 70+ starring vehicles exist - and none were available when Robert Youngson produced his influential series of silent comedy compilation features (The Golden Age Of Comedy, When Comedy Was King, Days Of Thrills & Laughter, 30 Years Of Fun among them) - L-KO, Century Comedies, Emerald Motion Picture Company, Bulls-Eye/Reelcraft and Universal Pictures star Alice Howell is only now starting to get some recognition as one of the frequently crowned Queens Of Slapstick.
While Alice's earliest starring vehicle available, from 1917, is pure knockabout, she delivers the goods with a combination of her trademark over-the-top outrageousness with more naturalistic underplaying.
Unlike many in the arts, Alice was not driven to be in showbiz and couldn't care less about recognition; she happily retired from movies in 1927, never looking back.
Alice's daughter, Yvonne Howell made a few screen appearances as a supporting comedienne and ingenue in silent films.
Yvonne subsequently married Oscar-winning filmmaker George Stevens, himself a former Hal Roach Studio cameraman and director who eventually helmed such ambitious big screen epics as Shane and Giant.
However, before graduating to big-budget "A" pictures at RKO, Stevens directed comedy shorts in both Edgar Kennedy's Mr. Average Man series and the very funny Blondes & The Redheads 2-reelers, featuring the hilarious comic actor (and frequent collaborator of W.C. Fields) Grady Sutton. After this, Stevens graduated to directing features starring the wacky team of Bert Wheeler & Robert Woolsey.
While there's not much from either Howell readily available on DVD, one can find a few of Alice's starring vehicles on scattered European releases and the Rare Film Classics blog.
Better yet, there's volume 1 of the splendid Dizzy Damsels & Crazy Janes DVD series by New Hampshire vintage comedy specialists Looser Than Loose Publishing.
