Category Archives: Movies

This first ran here back on June 5, 2011. It seemed like it was about time it was here again…

I'm sorry. I'm not the least bit nostalgic for drive-in movies, nor do I resent their near-extinction. Obviously, a part of their appeal was that a guy and a girl could go to one on a date, ignore the film on the screen and have a wee bit of privacy for purposes of necking…but not much. Apart from that, I never understood why anyone had any use for them except as a good place to park or hold a swap meet during daylight hours.

Ours was the Olympic Drive-In, which was located at the corner of Olympic and Bundy in West Los Angeles. The three times my parents took me there, the place was crawling with kids who were running around between parked cars and drivers were honking horns continuously and there always seemed to be some poor guy wandering around with a tray of sodas and popcorn, having forgotten where his car was located so he kept yelling, "Marge?" For some reason, it was always "Marge?" It all seemed about as conducive to romance as trying to make out in the middle of a Kmart during the Blue Light Special.

My folks took me to the Olympic to see the following movies: Gulliver's Travels (the Max Fleischer version), Onionhead (starring Andy Griffith), Alias Jesse James (Bob Hope) Visit to a Small Planet (Jerry Lewis), The Delicate Delinquent (Jerry again) and Once Upon a Horse (the film debut — and almost the demise — of Rowan and Martin). I remember the movies but not which was paired with which in double features. These spanned the years when I was six, seven and eight — 1958-1960.

I also remember the Olympic as a horrible place to watch a movie. You'd pull into a spot and take the speaker, on which you foolishly expected to hear the movie's soundtrack, from a little pole and hook it over your window…only the speakers rarely worked. If you found a good, vacant parking space it was probably vacant because its speaker didn't work…as my father would find out. He'd have to move the car again and again and sometimes even again…and then right in the middle of the movie, the speaker would conk out and he'd have to move us yet again. So there was yet another distraction. The cars next to you were always moving around. Even when you found a space with a dependable speaker, the odds were that one or both of the speakers next to you didn't work so other cars would be pulling in and out of those spaces throughout the evening.

So the sound was bad and occasionally non-existent. The image was also bad…projected on a screen miles away that was covered with bird dung and serious weather damage. The Olympic got prints that were on their last go-round and full of splices, and you could always count on each movie breaking once or twice. During Onionhead, it would just stop like clockwork every ten or so minutes and the screen would be blank for about three. I figured out later that they must have only had one working projector that night so every time they got to the end of a reel, the projectionist would have to take that one off and then mount the next reel on the projector.

Whenever there was no movie on the screen, everyone honked their horn and hooted until there was again. There was also a lot of honking when cars tried to leave and back out of their spots…

…and then there was the refreshment stand. Oh, Sweet God in Heaven…

It was located in front of the screen in a low building which also housed rest rooms which had not been cleaned since the marquee included the name of Lon Chaney…senior. There was also a little playground there with swings and teeter-totters. I have this indelible memory of my father taking me to the men's room right in the middle of one of the Jerry Lewis films and it was like a twenty-minute wait for the only working toilet. We were lined up outside and I was watching a grown-up woman who must have weighed 250 pounds, sitting on one side of the teeter-totter…and there were about six men pressing down on the other end, trying unsuccessfully to get her off the ground while she ate a meatball hero sandwich.

I laughed out loud. It was a lot funnier than the Jerry Lewis movie, not that that's usually a tough standard to beat.

Before we went back to the car, my father bought popcorn and sodas, which were the only thing in the refreshment stand that looked remotely edible. There were hot dogs there that looked radioactive…like they might actually get up and do the little dance that the animated hot dogs had done in the intermission cartoon. There was also a big tub of chili that, so help me, had something living in it.

We finally got the popcorn and drinks back to our car…which took a while because, of course, my father forgot where the car was. I think I suggested he try yelling "Marge?" even though my mother's name was Dorothy. Once we finally located the auto with her in it, I promptly spilled refreshments all over the back seat, which I later learned was pretty much expected when you took a kid to a drive-in movie. Or at least it should have been.

So I couldn't enjoy the movie and I couldn't eat. My mother had brought along my pajamas with the bizarre idea that if I got tired, they'd put me in them and I could doze off in the back seat. Like that was remotely possible. It was very awkward for her to change me into my jammies inside the car and between the sound of the movie and the car horns honking and people racing engines and the lost fathers wandering around the lot screaming "Marge?", I couldn't have gotten any shuteye if you'd administered a lethal injection. Add in the huge traffic snarl at the end and the long, long wait to get out of the lot and you can understand why I never had any use for drive-in movies.  How anyone ever did is as big a mystery to me as what was lurking in that chili.

Since everyone's talking these days about the Three Stooges, I think it's time I owned up to something. In over 45 years of blogging here, I have posted no more scandalous, controversial opinion than the one I'm about to confess to you: I like Shemp. Matter of fact, I think I like Shemp more than I like Curly.

Now, I have to qualify that. I generally like the shorts with Curly more than the shorts with Shemp. If I ever took the time to list my ten favorite Stooge shorts, most if not all would contain Curly…but that's judging the films, not the Third Stooges in them. The history of the Three Stooges shorts is pretty much an ongoing question of "How cheap can we make them for this year?" The Stooges starred in 190 short comedies for Columbia between 1934 and 1959. During those years, the popularity of two-reel short comedies declined to the point where most studios eventually abandoned the form completely. Laurel and Hardy, for example, stopped making shorts in 1935, getting out just as the Stooges got in.

As more and more studios gave up on two-reelers, the Columbia shorts department filled whatever marketplace remained, not just with the Stooges but with a lot of comedians whose careers were on the downside like Buster Keaton, Charley Chase, Andy Clyde and Harry Langdon. Eventually though, it was just Moe, Larry and the current Third Stooge. Their budgets got lower and lower with fewer (eventually, no) exteriors, less elaborate visual gags, smaller casts and — most of all — increasing reuse of old scripts and old footage. Some of the last Stooge shorts were actually shot in one day, filming a few minutes of new stuff to edit into an old film so they could pass it off as a new one.

When I first discovered the Stooges, it was on a local Los Angeles channel — KTTV, Channel 11. A man named Don Lamond, who happened to be Larry's son-in-law, hosted an afternoon show that fluctuated in length. Sometimes, it was an hour and they'd run three shorts in an hour. Sometimes, it was a half-hour and they'd cram in two, which required serious editing since most of those shorts were originally 16 minutes long.  By the time they hacked out room for the commercials and for Mr. Lamond, the 30-minute Three Stooges show was running two ten-minute episodes.  The films seemed to be selected at random and once in a while, I'd find myself watching a film that contained a long sequence that I'd just seen in the film before it. Once, back to back, they ran Corny Casanovas (with Shemp) and Rusty Romeos (with Joe Besser), which are basically the same film. They made it with Shemp in 1952 and then in 1957, they just reshot Shemp's scenes with Joe and issued it as a new film.

So there was this decline in budgets and shooting time and everything and that's one reason I think Shemp doesn't get his due though he was a better comedian than Curly. Matter of fact, I think Joe Besser was a better comedian, too. They both had to work with weaker material than Curly. They both had to work at a faster pace, shooting many more pages per day. But I think they elevated those films by having a wider range of reactions. Curly was fine in short doses but he had about three expressions and six noises and once he'd made all those expressions and noises, he was done for me. Part of the reason for his popularity I think is that he was the Third Stooge who got to appear in the shorts that weren't made for eleven dollars.

I watched the HBO movie Game Change last night. Oh. My. God.

I guess there are two ways to approach an effort like this — as a movie and as an alleged reflection of reality. As a movie, I found it quite well-made and entertaining. I usually don't find myself absorbed into performances where someone imitates a known person. When an actor plays Elvis, I sit there noting all the ways and moments when he doesn't look like Elvis, doesn't sound like Elvis, doesn't move like Elvis, etc. That's kind of how it was for me in this with Ed Harris playing John McCain but largely remaining Ed Harris.

But Julianne Moore as Sarah Palin? Bought every second of it. And of course I had no problem with Woody Harrelson and all the other folks playing "handlers" who had to deal with their frustrations and horror of what their Frankenstein Monster was becoming and how she was sinking the ticket. The moment Sarah Paulson (playing campaign advisor Nicole Wallace) admits she couldn't vote for the lady she tried to get elected is one of the most powerful statements I've seen about American politics.

So good job as a movie. And praise for screenwriter Danny Strong and director Jay Roach.

As a record of what really happened? I dunno. Ms. Wallace said in an interview, "Game Change is not a movie about Sarah Palin. And it's definitely not about staffers like me. It's a film about the vast, murky gray area in which the majority of politics takes place." No, I think it's about Palin and about staffers like her…about what Palin really was, as opposed to the image that her coaches tried and only sometimes succeeded in establishing for her. Many of those staffers, Wallace included, are now saying the film is a striking mirror of reality and I can understand why someone would say that. It's another way of proclaiming, "Hey, don't blame us for losing that election. Look at what we had to work with!" And of course, we can all understand why Ms. Palin and those who support her would insist it's lies, fiction, a false narrative, etc.

A project like this kind of demands that the viewer have some opinion as to how accurate it is. Here's mine and you have to remember that I think Semi-Governor Palin was unqualified, not because of her limited experience but just because of who she was and how ill-informed she has always been. I further believe that her mission in life is not the dangerous political agenda she spouts but the personal glory and financial gain of Sarah Palin, and that she's found that firing up her base is a great way to further that agenda. So she fires them up with nonsense, distortions, outright fibs and playing the victim card every time someone disagrees with her or she doesn't get what she wants. And she avoids any situation where a journalist might ask her a question with an intent other than to let her deliver a prepared answer.

So you could say I have a low opinion of the lady. And despite that, as I watched Game Change, I kind of felt sorry for her.

I know I shouldn't. As she goes around this country telling people that Barack Obama is a Socialist who's destroying America, I don't even think she doesn't deserve a lot of the insults hurled at her. People in glass houses, after all. But still, the depiction of her bothered me. I'd really like to think it's exaggerated; that no one that clueless could have gotten that close to such a high office.

Then again, during the campaign the real John McCain struck me as pretty confused and disingenuous (much more so than the way he's played by Harris in the film) and he got even closer to the presidency. The film felt to me like its makers, aware they'd be slammed for the way they depicted Palin, decided they might look fairer if they made McCain look heroic and wise. During that election, one of the reasons Senator McCain did not win was that he did not look heroic or wise. Here's a clip of one of many moments when he did not…

The John McCain we see there is everything Game Change makes Sarah Palin out to be. He's attacking an alleged aspect of the Obama health care proposal…but he obviously didn't read it or listen to anyone who did. Perhaps someone heard a talking point on Fox News and didn't bother to check the actual plan to see how Obama might answer McCain. The first thing I learned in debate class was that you never ask your opponent a question unless you have a good idea how he'll respond. What the hell happened here?

Game Change makes Palin out to be foolish and arrogant at times for refusing to study for public appearances. Why are they faulting her when McCain's out there making mistakes like this, throwing an accusation at Obama that Obama could so easily hit out of the park? And of course, Obama was sharp enough to mention that he'd explained this at a previous debate, thereby making the point that McCain wasn't paying attention or his memory was going…or something.

I don't accept the implied premise of Game Change that the Palin half of the McCain-Palin combo sank the ticket by coming across addled; not when the guy on top was making people wonder if he was just plain too old or confused to be Chief Exec. In the movie, Ed Harris comes across as strong and principled and in total grasp of the situation…and he has that leading man quality that makes you feel like he's ready to go be an astronaut. Can you recall McCain ever coming off like that during the campaign? Watch that debate clip again. Palin didn't do well in her one-on-one with Biden but McCain did more damage in his debates, if only because his mattered more.

So I feel bad for her that she's getting blamed for the loss. Even if she really is/was the uninformed narcissist that the HBO movie makes her out to be, she doesn't deserve all or even most of the blame for McCain losing. I'd say George W. Bush and Dick Cheney probably deserve more…and McCain certainly does. Bush and Cheney did what they did to this country — and McCain's the one who didn't really try to tell America that if they elected him, there'd be any kind of real Game Change.

Every time I express any sort of admiration for Jerry Lewis, even if it's only to salute his sheer longevity, I find myself in a debate with someone. Sometimes, it has to do with whether the things he says and does in real life diminish the merits of his movies. And sometimes, it's whether there are any merits in his movies.

I prefer almost all the films he made with the Italian fellow over those he made alone…but I like a lot of what he did alone and even the weakest efforts usually have their moments. What's interesting to me is that I find myself having these debates with folks who either haven't seen any of Jerry's movies lately or haven't seen many of Jerry's movies at all.

If you get the Encore Family channel, be advised that in the next few days, they're running The Ladies' Man, The Nutty Professor, The Errand Boy, The Bellboy and The Geisha Boy. The last of these was directed by Frank Tashlin but the rest were helmed by Jer and they're about as good as his work got when he was in charge. I might have swapped out The Errand Boy and swapped in The Family Jewels but otherwise, it's a pretty good list. If you watch and don't like 'em, there's no point in seeking out any of Jerry's other self-directed flicks.

Increasingly, movie theaters show movies without having someone around who goes by the job description of Projectionist. This article covers some of the history of this trend.

I love the notion of films being presented by someone who loves movies and brings a certain air of artistry to his craft but I fear the art went out of that job long ago in most venues. Automated projection may well be preferable to some of the inept, amateurish work I've endured the last few decades in movie theaters. It may be a new trend to not have a projectionist on the premises but it ain't a new trend not to have a skilled one running the movie.

I'd cite some examples of this but I'm sure you have plenty of your own. If the automated system can start the movie on time, have it in focus, have the volume set properly, etc., I don't quite see what we as moviegoers are losing but for a certain romantic notion that evaporated long ago in most theaters. It's a gain just that digital projection guarantees you won't have awkward breaks between reels and the occasional reversal of their running order.

Well, I will tell one horror story. Once upon a time, the Fairfax Theater up at Beverly and Fairfax, right across from CBS, was a true film palace. The Boris Karloff Frankenstein had its sneak preview in that building. I once took a date there to see one of the Rocky movies — the one where Burgess Meredith died; whichever one that was. Nineteen, I think. Anyway, the film started and the volume was so low, we couldn't hear it.

I guess everyone in the audience thought, "They'll notice and fix it." But if anyone noticed, no one had it fixed. Five minutes in, we were still watching a largely-silent movie. I went out to complain and the only person to complain to was a popcorn-seller who said, "You'll have to talk to the projectionist." I asked how I could get to the projection booth. She said, "I don't know. That's not my department." Obviously, this woman was vying for Employee of the Month.

I somehow found it on my own and knocked. No one answered and it couldn't have been because the soundtrack was drowning out my knocking. I knocked some more. After maybe five more minutes, the projectionist came rushing back from the men's room to handle a reel change. As he did it, I told him about the volume. "I'll get to it," he said. We argued a bit about how much this could wait but he said, "I can only do one thing at a time." It turned out, he couldn't even handle one. As I left the booth, he was saying, "See what you made me do? I just mounted the wrong reel."

I went downstairs, got my date and we left. Soon after, they carved the large Fairfax into three small mini-theaters and dropped prices to a buck. The one time I went there when it was in that configuration, we had the opposite problem: Too much soundtrack. You could hear the movie in Theater 1 in Theater 2. Billy Elliott was underscored with explosions and car chase sounds from whatever Schwarzenegger was in that week. No wonder the place went out of business…even though I enjoyed parts of Billy Elliott more because of that.