My favorite performers in the history of mankind are, as we all know, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. I've seen all their movies eighty quadrillion-zillion times...but did you know they almost got into radio? In 1944, they did a pilot for what was intended as a weekly series called The Laurel and Hardy Show.
It was performed and transcribed at NBC Studios on March 6 of that year but apparently never broadcast. The way it generally worked in radio was that a show would be done that way and then someone would take the disks around to advertising agencies and potential sponsors and if one was willing to buy, the program went onto the air. The Laurel and Hardy Show never did, presumably because a sponsor could not be found.
The premise of the show was that each week, The Boys would get a new job...and by the end of the half-hour, they would have botched things up and become unemployed again. The pilot episode was titled, "Mr. Slater's Poultry Market" and at the end of it, it's teased that next week, they'll be getting into the plumbing business. But of course, there was no next week.
The script is not wonderful...but this was '44 when Stan and Ollie were doing not-wonderful scripts for MGM and Fox, resulting in movies that were similarly not wonderful. As with the films, the radio script makes them somewhat stupider than they were in their best pictures and there's a lot of over-reacting to plot contrivances. Still, it's a shame their radio show didn't sell. Both men could have used the additional income...and maybe stardom there would have given them a little more clout in dealing with MGM and Fox. Alas, here's all that resulted from the endeavor...
Here's a follow-up to yesterday's blog post by Steve Benen about the crazies in our political discourse. And in there are more opinions from Bruce Bartlett about the situation.
I didn't know the guy but I wanted to note the passing of famed Jerry Lewis impersonator Sammy Petrillo, who died yesterday at the age of 75. As a kid, back when Lewis was teamed with Dean Martin, Petrillo so resembled Jerry that his first real job in show business was playing Jerry's baby son on the Colgate Comedy Hour. Thereafter, Lewis had Petrillo signed for a time to a personal contract that some have claimed was just to keep the look-alike off the market.
Eventually, Petrillo broke free of Jerry and went off with a succession of different partners, most of whom could mimic Dino. The main one was Duke Mitchell and in 1952, Mitchell and Petrillo replicated Dean and Jerry when they starred in a cinema classic...Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla. It was kind of the low point in Mr. Lugosi's career and the high point in Mr. Petrillo's.
A few years after that, the Mitchell-Petrillo team split up. They claimed their club act wasn't getting bookings because proprietors were afraid of pissing off Jerry. In any case, Sammy drifted through an array of small parts in small films...and I really don't know what else he did. I don't know if anyone does. We only know he looked and sounded amazingly like Jerry Lewis in this film...
As we watch the crazies out there turning town hall meetings into The Jerry Springer Show, we might note that nutcases are not a new species. Rick Perlstein reminds us that we've always had them around. My favorite paranoid delusion, I think, is that the President (whoever he is at the moment) has a secret plan to declare Martial Law in the country, seize absolute power, suspend elections and stay in office forever.
A company called Infinity Entertainment has announced and Amazon is taking advance orders for a DVD set of The Jerry Lewis Show...but don't click on this Amazon link yet. My question is: Which Jerry Lewis Show? There have been many...
There was The Jerry Lewis Show we recently discussed here...the two-hour live talk/variety show that debuted on ABC in 1963 with enormous fanfare only to disappear thirteen weeks later.
There was The Jerry Lewis Show, a one-hour weekly variety series on NBC from 1965-1967.
There was The Jerry Lewis Show, a syndicated one-week "pilot" talk show in 1984 that did not turn into a regular series.
There were also a number of pre-1963 specials called The Jerry Lewis Show and this set could be a collection of them.
So which is it? The announcements and Amazon page don't say and if there's a webpage for Infinity Entertainment, it's doing a good job of hiding from Google. We see that this the set is supposed to have a running time of 780 minutes so that would seem to eliminate the '84 talk show. It only ran one week of one-hour shows. The various specials Lewis did in the fifties would also probably not total 780 minutes.
There are two problems with it being the two-hour 1963 show. One is that Jerry reportedly wanted that buried forever and I think he controls the rights. The other is that 780 minutes is not divisible by 120 minutes.
That would lead us to suspect that the set contains a half season of the '65 variety show...and it may. Or it may also be a conglomeration of different Jerry Lewis appearances all being packaged together under the title. Or maybe the thing isn't actually 780 minutes or maybe it's one of those products that gets listed on Amazon but never actually comes out. It's also worth noting that a couple of sites that are taking orders for this DVD list Jerry Lee Lewis as its star. So maybe this is all a DVD of The Jerry Lee Lewis Show and someone left out a Lee.
I've exhausted my sleuthing abilities here. If someone gets some info on what this set is actually all about, lemme know.
How about a good Yiddish folk song as performed by two great song-and-dance men of the Yiddish Theater? Here are Mike Burstyn and the late Bruce Adler (Adler's the one on the left) with "Rumania, Rumania." Years ago in an aberration of my life known as Hebrew School, I actually knew most of what this song was about...
August 17, 2009
