Here's another of the 72 million reasons why I love the Internet. A few hours ago, I posted the piece below about Martin Bolger, a film editor who lived down the block from us when I was a kid. Bill Mullins just sent me a copy of an obit from the Los Angeles Times for January 12, 1966. It says, in part...
Funeral services for Martin W. Bolger, 72, one of Hollywood's first film editors, will be held at 1 p.m. today at Mt. Sinai Memorial Park Chapel.
Mr. Bolger died Monday at the 20th Century-Fox Western Ave. studio, where he was supervisor of the film negative editing department.
In the film industry 50 years, he edited the Keystone Kops comedies for Mack Sennett. He later was associated with Hal Roach and Warner Bros. and for many years with 20th Century-Fox.
1966 sounds about right to me. You'll see I said I met him when I was about 12 or 13 (which would have been 1964 or 1965) and that he passed away a few years later. I don't recall him mentioning work for Sennett, but he might have. I'm sorry I didn't take along a tape recorder for our conversation...or even really know what to ask the man. There was probably a lot of movie history I could have preserved there.
Something else I should have mentioned about this morn's clip of The Battle of the Century: I think I met someone who was in it.
When I was a kid, there was an elderly couple who lived just down the street from us...Mr. and Mrs. Martin Bolger. Mr. Bolger was a retired film editor who'd worked at many different studios but for a long time at Twentieth-Century Fox. Twentieth-Century Fox was also in our neighborhood, a few more blocks away, and Mr. Bolger had purchased that home in the late forties to be near work.
Anyway, when I started getting interested in old movies and especially in Laurel and Hardy, it was arranged for me to walk down there one day and spend about an hour talking with Mr. Bolger. He had worked at the Hal Roach Studios for a time...on Laurel and Hardy movies, among others. He was the first person I ever met who'd ever known the men who are still my two all-time, no-close-runner-up favorite performers. Among other things, he mentioned being an extra in The Battle of the Century and getting a couple of pies in the face and one on the seat of his pants.
Of Stan and Ollie, he said that Ollie was an absolute joy to be around, a dear and funny man, but he was less fond of Stan. By then, I'd devoured and memorized the John McCabe book on The Boys, Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy, and I told him what it said about how Laurel was always heavily involved in the editing of their films to the point of practically controlling it. Mr. Bolger's view was that Laurel had meddled a lot in an area about which he knew little, and that his suggestions had been routinely ignored.
I was about twelve or thirteen at the time. Needless to say, it was a little unsettling to hear someone speak ill of Stan Laurel. I later learned it was not a common view among those who'd worked with Stan, even though the opinion of Hardy seems to have been unanimous.
And I later learned almost nothing about Mr. Bolger. He passed away a few years later, followed closely by his wife. There is almost no record of his history in the motion picture business. IMDB, for example, has but one listing that might be him — this one, for a Martin Wall Bolger, who edited a 1927 feature called Their First Auto. I have occasionally asked Laurel and Hardy scholars about him and no one has ever heard of the man. From all he told me, I'm sure he worked there and he probably was in that pie-hurling orgy. But I'd love to find out a little more about him...
Here's a link to the Friday programming at the Comic-Con International. I was going to make some snippy remark about how there's nothing to see here, move along, since I'm not hosting any panels that day. But the truth is that there's some real interesting stuff and I may get to go play Audience for a change.
I'm getting e-mails from folks who are agonizing about the convention, fretting about parking and where to eat and whether they're going to get into the events they yearn to see. The main worry seems to be about the sheer size of it all; of being in a room with that many people and with so much to choose from. In a general policy that I admit I'm not always able to make work for myself, I try to embrace such situations; to appreciate the fun and the uniqueness and maybe even the challenge of such an environment. It's like any travel situation in that you need to organize and prepare, and also to pace yourself and have some realistic sense of what you can and cannot do. At Comic-Con, you cannot (for example) see everything you want to see, meet everyone you want to meet, buy everything you want to buy.
To go in presuming otherwise is to set yourself up for disappointment. So is failing to appreciate The Art of the Possible. The greatest disappointments probably happen unto those who — and I know people who do this every damn year — think they're going to make some grand career/employment contact that will change if not their lives forever than at least the next year or two of those lives. That does happen at the con. I've seen it happen at the con. But maybe the surest way to make sure it doesn't happen at the con is be too desperate to have it happen at the con.
The convention is like going to Disneyland or Las Vegas...which, by the way, is a strong reason why it should never move to or near either of them. I'm quite serious about this. You can't have one magical place in or around another magical place. (If there isn't a law against that, there should be.) And as in any magical place, there's way too much to see and do...and this is important to remember: It's bigger than you are and not going to change for you or even come to you. Stuff you will enjoy is in there and you have to find it. It's not hard if, as I say, you pace yourself and set some reasonable expectations and do a little planning. Every single year without fail, I get to be part of some wonderful panels and events...and every year without fail, people come to me afterwards and say, "Hey, I heard about that great panel. Sorry I didn't know about it." Well, whose fault is that?
Don't let the whole idea and scope of the convention overwhelm you. It's like being frightened by a banquet. You don't have to try everything. Just look at what's there, decide what you want and help yourself. And — oh, by the way — don't try to eat too much.
A lot of folks probably assume that Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, being slapstick comedians, threw a lot of pies in their movies. Not so. Whatever urges they had in that direction were pretty much satisfied in The Battle of the Century, one of their earliest two-reel silent comedies. This is the last four minutes...the biggest pie fight staged in movies for many years. I think the one in the 1965 movie The Great Race may have been the one that usurped the title. The only other strong contender is the meringue massacre in Half-Wits Holiday, a 1947 short with The Three Stooges. Footage from that pie fight was reused in several other Stooges films.
There's kind of an interesting story as to how the Laurel and Hardy brawl even manages to exist. In 1957, a man named Robert Youngson was assembling a compilation feature called The Golden Age of Comedy using clips of great silent movies. He got access to the negative of The Battle of the Century, duped the big fight at the end and used it in his film. What he didn't know was that in so doing, he was preserving that footage for all eternity. The negative was in bad shape and within a few years, it had completely decomposed. There was no other known copy of the film anywhere.
So for a few decades, The Battle of the Century was a "lost" movie. Only the last few minutes still existed in any form, thanks to Mr. Youngson. Finally in the seventies, a copy of the first reel turned up. It's an extended boxing match in which Mr. Hardy shoves Mr. Laurel into the ring, and it's most interesting because among the extras who played spectators, one can spot a very young Lou Costello.
No full copy of the second reel has ever been located so all we have of it are these four minutes. They're four pretty memorable minutes...
July 8, 2010
