You ever hear of the Guggenhead Museum of Awfully Modern Art? Probably not so let me tell you about it...
Around 1967, two folks named Paul and Lee Anthony in Scottsdale, Arizona decided to open a funny art gallery — a satire on recent trends in art and also in art galleries. I'm not sure if either Anthony created any or all of the works but they put together a bevy of very silly paintings with humorous commentaries on the little cards mounted next to them on display. The "collection" got a lot of press and before long — like, the next year, I think — it was touring the country, mostly turning up in little tents in shopping malls.
In Los Angeles, it "played" for a time at a bank complex at Sunset Boulevard and Crescent Heights — a big community center affixed to a branch of Lytton Savings, built on the site of the famous apartment complex, the Garden of Allah. There's now a strip mall there with a McDonald's and a Pollo Loco and places like that. Later as I recall, the Guggenhead show moved over to Century City for a few months, and it apparently went all over the country. (I would gather they had many duplicates of the paintings, not just the one set.)
Created in proper deadpan style, it was quite funny if you got the jokes and I'm not sure everyone did. It also made a pretty strong, clear statement about how a lot of what was being hailed as art was probably rubbish...but hey, if it spoke to you, fine. I may have gotten more in terms of lasting imagery and things to think about from the Guggenhead than I did out of a lot of so-called real art shows I attended.
The Guggenhead no longer exists in the real world but I was pleased to find that some of its works are online. Take a stroll through the gallery when you get a minute. It doesn't have quite the impact when you're not looking at the works (most of which were three-dimensional) in person but you may get a chuckle or three.
Okay, it's finally happened. They're bringing Skidoo out on an official DVD.
Don't know Skidoo? Well, understand this. This is not a good movie. It's also not really a bad movie. It transcends the concepts of "good" and "bad." It was directed by Otto Preminger in 1968 in a spectacularly-misguided attempt to capture some kind of youth audience and what makes it odder still is the cast: Jackie Gleason, Carol Channing, Mickey Rooney, Burgess Meredith, Peter Lawford, George Raft, Frankie Avalon, other folks like that...and in his final motion picture appearance, Groucho Marx in the role of God. Gleason called the picture "the greatest meatball of all time" and he didn't mean that as a compliment despite his apparent love of meatballs.
The DVD will be out in July and you can advance order it from Amazon by clicking here. If you've seen it, you probably want a copy just so you can show it to others who don't know the film and watch their reaction. They will have one. It may be shock, horror, hilarity, diphtheria or disgust but they will have one. I once experienced all those feelings and that was just during the opening titles.
That's Skidoo. It's more than just a movie. It's the reason so many people my age can't remember the sixties.
From a 1966 episode of Hollywood Palace: Carl Reiner interviews a man who is actually two thousand years old. Hey, they couldn't claim that if it wasn't true...
Madelyn Davis wrote an awful lot of things for television besides all the things she wrote (or co-wrote with partner Bob Carroll Jr.) for Lucille Ball. She wrote and sometimes produced Alice and The Mothers-in-Law and many, many other popular programs. But just the episodes she and Bob and (usually) Jess Oppenheimer wrote for I Love Lucy were enough to get her into anyone's Hall of Fame. People give Lucy all or most of the credit...but Lucy didn't ad-lib those shows. The writers knew how to make them funny and to give her what she needed to be funny.
I met Madelyn a few times and helped out in the writing room of one of her shows for a few days. She was gracious and modest and very good at what she did. And what she did was to help entertain an awful lot of people for an awfully long time.
April 21, 2011
