I, like most sensible modern peeps, lurv the internet. A little over a decade into its dominance, I already can't imagine a world without it. Yet I made it through the first couple of decades of my life not even wanting. Giving you, dear reader, some credit I will presume you are aware of just how vast, deep and wide the nebula of worthless/not-so-worthless information is within our beloved interwebs.
Therein, I can find more information than anyone in his/her right mind would ever want/need on what the members of Faust were up to in between 1975 and 1990. I can find legitimate discussions on the oeuvre of Jerry Lewis. Hell, I can even find stills from his abandoned, king of what-were-they-thinking movies, The Day the Clown Cried* with little trouble.
Alas, I cannot find what I really want at this precise moment: a certain picture of Scott Christian. Or at least I think that's his name, the microphone-haired reporter from The Simpsons early seasons. Perhaps it says too much about me that yesterday when I kept seeing the bozo soon to be ex-governor of Illinois all over, the Simpsons character was all I could think of. So apologies, this is not the picture I'm looking for and I realize the hair color is different, but you get the drift. Perhaps it's just me.
Forget all that hand wringing jibber-jabber about morals, ethics, politics. This scandal is about one thing: hair. Clearly, a man who's got the courage to walk into the barber, (or more accurately, out of) and order the Sam Malone is a man devoid of fear. See also, Hal Mumme. Yes, I know Tim Matheson will probably play him in the probably no-doubt-already-in-the- works-made-for-tv flick. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the former Eric 'Otter' Stratton isn't somehow related to all this hullabaloo becoming public. Fletch was a long time ago you know.
Apologies for making this entry one endless pop culture reference. Turn it into a game and see if you can figure them all out.
But first...
*The Day the Clown Cried is the holy grail of bad moviedom. Few, if any, outside of Jerry Lewis' inner circle have ever seen any of it and the man himself has all but disavowed any knowledge of it. Ask any obscuro, trash, exploito movie fan what movie they want to see more than any other and I guarantee you, this flick will be their immediate answer.
In it, our favorite Dean Martin sidekick, plays a Jewish clown in a concentration camp (you may already see where this one is going and why it shouldn't). Apparently, although that whole Final Solution plan was seemingly airtight, those absent-minded Nazis forgot about the bitch that is self-preservation, i.e. folks might not be too keen to just march into those waiting gas chambers on their own.
And you try shooting 6,000,000 people. One would presume any such attempt to be quite tedious. What's the point of world domination if you're too busy killing everybody one by one to enjoy it?
Enter the former Julius Kelp, Jerry Lewis. Self-preservation being no less important to him, the Nazis convince ol' Jer to befriend the kids of the camp and gain their trust or face his own extermination. Once the kids trust him, so goes the logic of the SS, they'll follow him anywhere. Even into those zany gas chambers, like some Auschwitz pied piper.
Presumably, there's some hi jinks mixed in with the inevitable soul searching. Perhaps Jerry does a cracking Hitler impression to the delight of camp kids and stormtroopers alike. Regardless, the movie ends with this new found pied piper burying what's left of his humanity and leading the kids into the gas chamber. Wah, wah, waaaaaaaaaa.
Somehow in the early '70s, (and I don't mean this as flip/sarcastic/anti-Semitic as it sounds) in a industry largely run by Jews, some having direct connections to the holocaust(!), this movie was proposed, scripted, green-lit, budgeted, cast and filmed. Apparently, Lewis thought this to be his meisterwerk, the film that would catapult him into the auteur stratosphere with the European greats like Truffaut, Fellini, Bergman, etc.
Honest.
Only after it was completed did he decide that this was, perhaps, THE WORST IDEA FOR A MOVIE EVER MADE. And yes, Chris, I'm including Robot Jox.
Various rumors have persisted since then regarding the film's survival, ranging from all prints being destroyed to a sole print being locked away in a vault in Jerry Lewis house, the combination to which he vows will die with him.
One more worthless pop culture factoid re: the above, Harry Shearer (genius humorist/satirist)is one of the few who has seen the finished movie. His comment: the movie was even worse than you would think it could possibly be.
1 comment:
If I have to reorder my life knowing that Robot Jocks isn't the absolute bottom... I might start liking country music.
Post a Comment