Wednesday, December 1, 2004

Keaton P.S.

Something I just found out: Three of the Buster Keaton MGM films that Turner Classic Movies is running in their Keatonfest next week (the best three, happily) are about to be released in a DVD set which also includes the documentary I mentioned and a bunch of other extras. So those of you who don't get TCM and/or love Buster Keaton can purchase them...and of course, I'll make it easy for you by supplying one of these neato links via which you buy it from Amazon and I get a tiny percentage of what you spend. The set is supposed to be out December 7, the same day Turner is running their Keaton tribute, so I guess there's some connection or cross-promotion there. (Thanks to the ever-vigilant Gary Sassaman for the tip.)

Also, I just noticed that TCM is running The General on Sunday evening, December 12. The General is not only the best movie Keaton made, it's one of the best movies anyone has ever made. If you haven't seen it, see it. If you have seen it, see it again. If you've seen it again...okay, you can go do something else.

• Posted at 10:09 PM · LINK

Haven't Done This Lately...

• Posted at 9:44 PM · LINK

Buster: The Good and the Bad

Tuesday, December 7, Turner Classic Movies is saluting Buster Keaton by airing seven of his films and a new documentary entitled So Funny It Hurt. Both the documentary and the films they've chosen to air direct our attention to Buster's years at MGM when he made the transition from silent pictures to sound, from having control over his movies to not having control, from being a working comedian to being an unemployable alcoholic and from being a top box office star to something very close to a charity case. They're running one film from the earlier period when he had his own studio — a very funny short called The Balloonatic. Then they have most of the early films he made for MGM after his studio was dissolved, starting with The Cameraman, which turned out to be the last Keaton movie up to his old standard. It starts the TCM presentation and then, since they're running the following in the order produced, you can watch the sad decline of perhaps America's greatest solo comedian: Spite Marriage is followed by Free and Easy, which is followed by Parlor, Bedroom and Bath, which is followed by The Passionate Plumber and What! No Beer? Then, for some reason, they're running The Balloonatic at the end, out of sequence, perhaps to remind you that the co-star of What! No Beer? was once a great clown. (Here's a page with the whole listing and some good facts, photos and even some brief video clips.)

It will be interesting to see to what extent the documentary — which airs twice during the above marathon — faults the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio for Keaton's quick decline into failure. The company was not wholly to blame, perhaps not even primarily to blame. Buster already had a self-destructive tendency to drink too much and sleep with all the wrong people, and a lot of folks who were very funny in silent films never quite mastered talkies. Still, the studio seems to have dealt with his problems by exerting controls that made things worse, and the films he was in went pretty much in that direction. (Oddly enough, TCM is skipping over Doughboys, the one Keaton movie in this period that briefly reversed the downslide.) Ultimately, the story of Keaton in the thirties is a sad one, and there's very little about it that's funny. The same could be said, by the way, of What! No Beer? You might want to give that one a pass.

• Posted at 1:25 PM · LINK

My Secret Love

This is kind of funny. Yesterday while I was out, UPS attempted to deliver a package to me. I wasn't here so they left one of those little, scrawled post-it notices that they'd reattempt delivery the next day. It said the parcel was from, "Love, Frances."

I was puzzled. I couldn't think of anyone named Frances I know well enough to sign her name that way. I do know one guy named Frances but I don't know him that well and he's pretty straight. I even asked my friend Carolyn, who sometimes uses my address when she has things delivered, if she knew anyone named Frances. She didn't.

Right after I posted the previous item, the doorbell rang and UPS delivered the package in question. It's a case of barbecue sauce I ordered and the return address is "Love's Franchises."

• Posted at 11:44 AM · LINK

Irwin Donenfeld, R.I.P.

Irwin Donenfeld has died. Irwin was the son of Harry Donenfeld, the founder of DC Comics, and he literally grew up in the comic business. He was twelve years old when the first issue of Action Comics was published and so was probably the first kid in the world to read the debut story of Superman. Later, in the tradition of nepotism that pervaded most early comic book companies, Irwin became a senior executive in the company. Harry was an alcoholic with a penchant for getting into trouble and an inability to run his own business. The financial decisions therefore fell to his former accountant, Jack Liebowitz, and the creative ones to the editorial division. Bridging the gap between them for a little more than twenty years was Irwin.

He held the title of "editorial director," which pretty much meant that he consulted with Liebowitz to decide what they'd publish, continuing in that position even after Harry passed away. The editors he "directed" liked him, though they sometimes didn't understand his deductions about how to maximize sales. Precise numbers about how many copies each book sold were generally kept from the editorial crew. Irwin would have the accountants enter that data in scrapbooks, each issue's sales figures accompanied by a photo of the book's cover. Then he'd spend long hours each week studying the trends, trying to decide what elements on each cover had caused sales of that issue to go up or down. (He was generally disinterested in the contents of the books, believing that good, intriguing covers were about all that mattered. He once said the only DC Comic he made a point of reading every issue was Sugar and Spike.) Every now and then, he'd tell the editors, "Sales went up when you put a dinosaur on the cover" or "Sales go down when you use a lot of brown on the cover." The books would promptly be readjusted to reflect Irwin's conclusions, which explained the unlikely appearance of prehistoric monsters in Batman, Blackhawk, Tomahawk, war comics and other books that seemed to posit a different, less fantastic reality.

He had good ideas and bad. In 1956, when DC was in desperate need of new comics but afraid that flops would injure a depressed marketplace, Irwin suggested a new book called Showcase, each issue to "test" a new concept. Most of the company's successes of the next ten years came out of such tryouts. On the other hand, in 1966 with DC sales dropping and Marvel's rising, Irwin came up with the idea of pasting a checkerboard pattern on the top of every DC cover to make their books stand out on the newsracks. They called them "go-go checks" and they were the ugliest thing anyone ever did to the front of a comic book...and a symbol of the company's inability to arrest its steady descent. Before things fell too far, Liebowitz and the Donenfeld family sold their company to a corporation called Kinney National Services which eventually morphed into Warner Communication and then into Time-Warner.

Liebowitz moved on to a seat on the Board of Directors of the parent company and Irwin had expected to remain in his post, co-managing DC with Carmine Infantino, an artist he had promoted into management. But everyone else decided that more of a shake-up was necessary and when the dust cleared, Irwin Donenfeld was cut out of the company his father had founded. He dabbled for a time in other kinds of magazine publishing but eventually retired on the not-inconsiderable fortune he had realized from the corporate buyout. Thereafter, he became a community leader in his home city of Westport, Connecticut. This obit in a Westport newspaper lists a few of his achievements in this area. (It will also tell you that he died Monday night at the age of 78, but awkward phrasing makes it sound like he didn't take over running DC until his father died in 1965. His responsibilities may have increased a bit then but he was involved in management there by the time he was out of his teens.)

Irwin, whom I had the pleasure of interviewing at the 2001 Comic-Con International, retained some amount of bitterness at having been squeezed out of the comic book industry. He was also quite defensive at the often-expressed belief that his father had cheated Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster out of Superman, or even that Harry was as irresponsible as others described. I enjoyed chatting with him during that panel and in several private conversations, though I came to the conclusion that he was not a source of unvarnished history. I also understood why the company felt the need to sever him in 1970, as his thinking was rooted firmly in marketing concepts that, by then, were simply not operative. He told me how amazed he was by the convention, seeing how big and important "comics" had become, and admitted a definite regret that he had been separated from the field. Still, he was glad that so many of us knew of his contributions and were interested to know as much as we could possibly extract from him. He had planned to be there again last year but illness made that impossible, and he phoned to tell me how he regretted not being able to be attend. And I seem to recall him saying in that call, "...and I still can't believe what's happened to the business we started."

• Posted at 10:04 AM · LINK

December 2, 2004 • Current • November 30, 2004