Yearly Archives: 2003

My pal Bill Wray is one of those guys who started out to do DC and Marvel type comics but eventually learned there was more to life than that…and more to himself than that. He's now among the more innovative, fresh stylists around. As you'll see when you hustle your little mouse over to his website.

I'm getting a lot of mail about the Jerry Lewis Mini-Cinema fiasco. I thought this message from Buzz Dixon was worth bringing to your attention…

The reason two people could run a Jerry Lewis Theater was because the films arrived preloaded in large cartridges like the way airlines used to show movies. They were pre-threaded and easy to rewind with little chance of jamming (if the Jerry Lewis Theaters had stayed in business and the equipment gotten more wear and tear, that might not have been the case). The plan was that Person A would handle the box office while Person B would run the concession stand, Person B would pop up into the booth to start the trailer cartridge then return to the concession stand, Person A would close the box office and go up to supervise the projectors and keep an eye on the audience from the booth (Person B would try to cover both the box office for late arrivals and keep an eye on the concession stand), Person A would come down to cover the box office while Person B went to keep an eye on the audience and cover the concession stand, etc. The cartridges, while large and bulky, could be handled by an average adult, and switching reels consisted of little more than lifting one catridge out and dropping the other in.

The scheme had a single company — the Jerry Lewis Theater franchise, whatever the actually name of the company was called — controlling both the means of distribution and the means of exhibition, but not the means of production, thus making it okay under the Paramount, et al, ruling back in the forties. Since they owned the projector/cartridge system, and since they were relying on Mom & Pop operators who had no real experience in running theaters or projectors, and since the whole pitch was that they would show only G or M rated films (I believe they went under before M morphed into GP then PG), I think it would be unlikely that they would schedule R or X rated films. Further, the projectors could not run regular film reels so the theaters could not be easily/cheaply converted to run conventional films, thus guaranteeing their white elephant status to their investors and franchisees.

The biggest technical problem was not jamming, as one might expect (the franchise owners were trained in making emergency splices) but in focusing the lenses. Arc projectors throw out an enormous amount of heat and the lenses literally expand, thus throwing their focal length off. Competent projectionists (i.e., union) are constantly adjusting/readjusting the focus so subtlely that the audience isn't aware of it (though we've all had our chances to shout, "Focus!" at those who get caught napping). This, a lack of adequate brand management (some of the theaters were allowed to get quite dirty and sloppy due to inattentive regional supervisors), and changing movie going habits among the American people (basically families stopped going to the movies together) pretty much put the kibosh on the Jerry Lewis Theaters.

Was it a bad idea? Well, even now on paper it looks workable, and maybe it could have worked if they had relied on trained personnel instead of Mom & Pop owner/operators and been more flexible in their scheduling. In a way, you might say it was the right idea but the wrong technology: By the late 70s/early 80s Mom & Pop were running video stores, which was another cartridge technology, and instead of bearing the cost of operating a theater they just let the customers take the tapes home for the evening.

So the mystery of the Which Way To The Front?/Deep Throat double-feature continues. Unless somebody can produce an ad or a photo confirming it, it remains speculation. To add to the confusion, there was an R-rated sequel — Deep Throat, Part II — starring the same cast that played in non-porn houses (this may have actually been the original Deep Throat with the hardcore footage removed and new bridging material…uh…inserted).

Well, I still don't think it's a mystery. I think Jerry was wrong or confused or something. The notion that a Jerry Lewis movie might be paired with Deep Throat II makes a tiny bit more sense but I still think it's unlikely. The Internet Movie Database has this to say about the R-rated sequel, which received extremely limited release in 1974…

Filmed as triple-X porn, Deep Throat Part II was released only in a heavily-edited, R-rated version in hopes of avoiding the legal troubles plaguing the original Deep Throat (1972). The hardcore footage was then stolen and never restored.

And can we think of a movie for which there would be less of a market than Deep Throat without the sex scenes? Anyway, a bit of research yields the fact that the Jerry Lewis movie theater business collapsed in 1973. In that year and the few immediately preceding it, there weren't very many movies out there that people wanted to see which would have met the requirement of being "G" or "PG." The top three movies of 1972, for example, were The Godfather, Cabaret and Deliverance — all "R-rated." I also seem to remember some sort of accusation at the time that Disney would not rent its movies to the Jerry Lewis chain because they were planning to launch a network of Disney Theaters using a similar business model. Either way, there wasn't a whole lot Jerry's franchisees could show. Add in the problems mentioned earlier about bad locations, and it's not difficult to see why the enterprise failed.

The movie ratings started in 1968 with "G," "M", "R" and "X." The "M" stood for "mature" and it was supposed to denote movies that were more adult than "G" but still suitable for young adults. Unfortunately, the Motion Picture Association of America (which set all this up) discovered that much of the public thought "M" meant an adults-only movie, so in 1969 it was changed to "GP" (General, but with Parental Guidance) and then almost immediately to "PG" (Parental Guidance). So at the time of the Jerry Lewis Theaters, "PG" had already been invented.

Say, while I'm rambling, here's something I bet a lot of people don't know. The M.P.A.A. no longer has an "X" rating. They had one initially and the idea was that it would denote adult films that weren't in the realm of sex and exploitation. Midnight Cowboy, for instance, was X-rated. But the M.P.A.A. couldn't control the application of the label. It passed rapidly into the vocabulary and sex filmmakers began gleefully dubbing their product "X-rated" or even "XXX." In 1990, the M.P.A.A. changed their "X" rating to "NC-17," which only they can bestow. (Another change was that in '84, they split "PG" into two levels — "PG" and "PG-13," the latter denoting a slightly higher chance of seeing nudity or bloodshed. They're currently mulling over a "PS" rating which will caution moviegoers that the film may contain Pauly Shore.)

The Winter Brothers have lost their lawsuit against DC Comics. They sued because they believed that some rather repulsive characters in a Jonah Hex comic were unflattering caricatures of themselves. This morning, the California State Supreme Court ruled (correctly, in my opinion) that it came under the category of parody and that was that. Here's a link to a fuller account.

Here's Spinsanity on the current status of whether or not the U.S. has located Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. (Quick summary: Officially, no — but Bush says we have.)

Here's an e-mail from a reader here named Lloyd Fein…

Your item about the Jerry Lewis mini cinema chain brought back painful memories. My uncle (with whom I was living at the time) pretty much blew the family fortune investing in one. Back at my other place, I think I still have some of the literature they sent out. As I recall, they promised a lot of guaranteed profit and you didn't have to know anything about running a movie theater because Jerry Lewis was behind the venture and he knew everything and his name was magic. A lot of the magic seemed to be that you and one other person could run your own movie theater all by yourself without unions. My uncle was very anti-union and that was part of the appeal for him. He was fearlessly confident that the projectionist union was going to bankrupt the traditional movie theater and the future of the business would be in little places like the one he opened. He wanted to get in on the ground floor.

The trouble was that he went into a mall in New Jersey that was itself in trouble. The only time it did any business was during the day. It was like a ghost town in the evening and you can't support a movie theater on matinees. Even when there were people at the mall, they didn't go to see movies. They went to the Montgomery Ward store, bought blankets and went home. I also thought the name hurt the business. The Jerry Lewis Theater wasn't showing Jerry Lewis movies but I don't think people realized that.

You're right that it's ridiculous that any theater would run a Jerry Lewis movie and Deep Throat. What's the audience for both those films? And I doubt any Jerry Lewis movie ran Deep Throat but a lot of people don't understand the difference. To them any movie with five seconds of bare tits in it is Deep Throat. So maybe some Jerry Lewis mini cinemas ran some of the popular R-rated movies from then like The Godfather and people got confused or maybe some Jerry Lewis mini cinema converted to X-rated movies and there was a week there when they didn't have Jerry's name off the marquee yet.

Thanks — and that's a good point about people not knowing the difference between adult movies and Adult Movies. At one point in the seventies, CBS acquired a package of Warner Brothers films to air in the late movie slot they had before acquiring Mr. Letterman. Now, as anyone who knows anything about the business is aware, movies are often sold in packages, and the purchaser doesn't always air everything in the package. In this particular package, WB included the TV rights to air the 1969 Luchino Visconti movie, The Damned. This film — a portrait of life in Nazi Germany between World Wars — was about as far from Deep Throat as a movie without Don Knotts in it could be, but in its initial release, it had received an "X" rating for some non-arousing kinkiness. By the time it got tossed into the TV package, it had been re-rated "R" and it probably didn't even deserve that. In any case, the mere fact that it was involved in that transaction prompted a nationwide rumor/alert that CBS was about to start running "X-rated movies" (i.e., stuff like Deep Throat) in that time slot.

This gets back to an item here not long ago about a current "family values group" that is drumming up alarm about porn stars at comic conventions, and how such groups seem to need an outrage against which to crusade. Back in the seventies, similar groups started spreading the alarm that CBS was planning to air porn and that to save mankind, that had to be stopped…and oh, by the way, that will require donations, people. Amazing quantities of cash were given in the cause of stopping CBS's supposed plan, and the network was deluged with form letters protesting their ungodly plot to make Americans watch filth. CBS issued press releases and sent back form letters that said, in pretty simple language, "No one here has ever considered airing X-rated movies," but for years, that did not end the protests. The folks drumming-up the letter-writing campaign kept right on drumming. A friend of mine who worked at CBS at the time told me she was amazed at the outpouring based on a false premise, and said that they debated internally at the network: Did the leaders of this campaign simply not believe the denials? Or had they gone so far out on a limb that they were incapable of admitting they'd been wrong? Or had it simply been so profitable for them, in terms of selling memberships and bringing in donations, that they wanted to run it as long as possible? The third option was the prevailing choice but none of them speak well of the kind of folks who run such campaigns.

CBS did finally run The Damned in its late night slot, by the way. By that time, the protests had died down and the innocuous movie was rendered even more innocuous by editing-for-television. So no one cared. But it's very true that some people who get outraged about things simply don't understand what it is they think is outraging them.

And I also agree that the Jerry Lewis chain was off to a bad start because of the name. If you didn't like Jerry Lewis, having his name and likeness out front was a negative, even if you realized that they weren't running Jerry Lewis movies inside — and some folks probably didn't. If you did like Jerry Lewis, it was like, "Huh? There's no Jerry Lewis movie playing at the Jerry Lewis Theater!" So the potential customers were moviegoers who had no opinion either way on the subject of Jerry Lewis. That's always been a pretty small group.

I have a little group of readers who catch whatever mistakes I make and send me corrections, often within moments of my making the error. Mark Thorson is one of them, and he notes the following: Ed Rosenthal, who stands convicted of growing and selling marijuana despite the fact that his government asked him to do so, was acting on behalf of the city of Oakland, as opposed to the state government. Here's a link to an article about this travesty of justice. And here's a link to my item which I am hereby correcting. Thanks, Mark.

We usually rave about TiVo here but this, we don't like.

If you're not reading a fine comic called Supernatural Law, you're missing out on one of the best books out there. Here's a link to its website. And what reminded me to tell you that is that I just received this message from that comic's creator, Batton Lash…

Regarding Jerry Lewis's story about one of his movies on a double bill with Deep Throat: I've heard this before, even from people other than Lewis. I agree with you; I don't believe it's a true story. However, I have a theory how it originated…

I recall that during the 60's, there was a chain of Jerry Lewis movie theaters (set up with Lewis's sanction, of course) specifically for movies that the whole family could enjoy. By the early 70's, some managers of the Jerry Lewis theater franchise were having a tough time attracting audiences and began moving away from family fare. This didn't seem to be a problem, until one manager booked a X-rated film. A photographer snapped a picture of the incongruous image of a "family theater", complete with the famous caricature of "Jerry the Kid" on a marquee, showcasing some triple "X" film. Newspapers — or maybe a magazine — ran the photo, which was quite embarrassing to Lewis.

I believe that over the years, this story morphed into an urban legend of a goofy Jerry Lewis movie on a double bill with a notorious porno flick as an example of how low the morals and good taste of modern life has sunk.

You know, not only are you probably right but I believe that thought had occurred to me once before when this was discussed. In the late sixties or early seventies, Jerry got involved in a plan to open a chain of movie theaters bearing his name across the land, mainly in malls and shopping centers. It was, as I recall, a franchise deal that was designed to attract the small investor. The parent company had invented a system of automated projection equipment, and they sold this to Jerry and then to investors as the new wave of film exhibition. One of the reasons I recall this is that Lewis went on Johnny Carson's show to plug the concept and he even brought on a scale model of a Jerry Lewis Theater. He used it to demonstrate how two people could run one and said something about how he hoped couples that believed in the concept of "family" movies would invest in setting these up in malls and running them.

I remember this because it was one of the few times I ever saw Carson really nail a guest who had pissed him off. I'm not sure if he was annoyed by Jerry trying to use his show for such a blatant sales pitch or what, but he turned to Jerry and said, "What happens if a couple invests their life savings in one of these and then it bombs?" Then, in his Aunt Blabby/old lady voice, Carson whined, "We got screwed out of your pension, Murray" or words to that effect. Lewis was stunned and unable to answer, the audience was hysterical, and I think it was the first time I ever heard "screwed" on a network TV show.

As it turned out, Johnny was prescient. The Jerry Lewis Mini-Cinema operation went belly-up. The accepted explanation I believe was that too many of them were opened by people with no expertise in the business of exhibiting movies — folks who often did not know what constituted a bad location. Often, they opened in malls that were too close to where one of the big theater chains operated, and the big chains would lock up most of the "hot" new releases on an exclusive-to-our-area deal. This made it difficult for the Jerry Lewis outlets to book movies that anyone wanted to see, especially since the contract with the Jerry Lewis Theater company specified only family films, which then weren't being made in great quantity. (Apparently, one of the appeals of the whole deal to Jerry — who was then not doing well in the movie business — was the notion that a whole network of such theaters would provide distribution for new Jerry Lewis movies. But the chain never became successful enough for that to happen.)

It was a pretty big disaster, money-wise. One night as Jerry came off-stage from a performance in Vegas, a man who appeared to be seeking an autograph slapped a subpoena in his hand — a lawsuit on behalf of many of the investors in the theaters. It was all finally settled, of course, but Jerry was pretty unhappy with the entire experience. And I believe it is true that near the end, some of those Jerry Lewis Theaters, straining desperately to stay in business, began booking films with more than a "PG" rating. I doubt any of them ever ran Deep Throat or any hardcore sex film, especially since most were in shopping malls. But perhaps they ran "R" films that outraged Jerry, or perhaps some were converted into the kind of theater that runs porn, and reports like that morphed into the Urban Legend of a double-bill of Deep Throat and a Jerry Lewis movie. But I don't believe there ever really was one.

By the way, (he said, slightly changing the subject) I miss double-features, if only because they gave us some wonderful marquee combos. My favorite was a theater in Santa Monica that offered Cold Turkey and Bananas, which is quite a tasty combo. And I always loved what a theater in Culver City called the Palms would come up with. I wrote a piece about the Palms and its double-features, and you can read it here. Thanks, Batton!

At long last, the sound films of Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy are making it to DVD. On August 19, Hallmark Entertainment will release what we hope is the first of what we hope will be a whole line. It will be a two-disk set which includes one of the boys' best features (Sons of the Desert), four shorts (The Music Box, Another Fine Mess, Busy Bodies, and County Hospital) and, as they say, "many special features" — all for twenty bucks. Very good news. The minute this is available for advance ordering, I'll post a link here.

Here's Tom Shales with an article about how the pending F.C.C. deregulation decision is a terrible, terrible idea. He's wrong. It's worse than that.

Inaugurating a new feature: Each day, I'll send you clicking to the website of another great stand up comedian. Let's start with the World's Foremost Authority, Professor Irwin Corey.

Mike Kaluta began drawing comics in the seventies, at a time when you could look at almost any new artist and say, "Kirby" or "Adams" or "Kirby mixed with a little Adams and some Wally Wood" or some permutation of existing styles. Many of those artists evolved to have unique (or at least, reasonably fresh) approaches but Kaluta didn't have to. From the start, he was his own man with his own outlook and technique, and he's only gotten better since. Check out his website.

If you can get past the endless teases in and out of commercials, the E! True Hollywood Story shows are sometimes interesting. And sometimes not. The "nots" are when the subject is of little importance and/or access to the subject is from afar. The folks of little importance are generally selected because their stories have a lot of celebrity embarrassment and tragedy attached to them. The episodes about superstars are more watchable but often, neither the star nor anyone close to them agrees to participate, so you get a lot of commentary from witnesses whose connection to the subject is questionable.

Neither of these is the case with the E! True Hollywood Story of Jerry Lewis, which I TiVoed the other day and just watched. Jerry not only gave it his full cooperation but he sat for what obviously amounted to hours of interviews…to the point where, though there's the usual E! announcer doing play-by-play, you have Jer providing color commentary.

Some of the details presented of Jerry's career are skipped over. If there was a mention of the legendary The Day the Clown Cried, I missed it. Some accounts of key moments in Jerry's life were, to put it nicely, at odds with what others have said. I'm not saying he's wrong and they're right because certainly, Jerry's occasional lapses of public ego have almost invited others to come forth and spin his life as a negative, perhaps distorting the truth a bit. He also sometimes tells stories that are impossible to believe. One that he recounts in the documentary and has said on other occasions is that he knew his main career as a Hollywood filmmaker was over, and that he didn't even want it to continue, when one day he drove by a theater "in the Valley" (meaning Los Angeles). There on the marquee, he claims, he saw his latest movie — Which Way to the Front? — double-billed with Deep Throat.

I don't believe that pairing ever existed. First off, Which Way to the Front? was released in July of 1970 and Deep Throat didn't come out until 1972. The latter played exclusively for years at the Pussycat Theater on Santa Monica Boulevard which is not in the Valley and which did not even double-bill another sex film, let alone a Jerry Lewis movie, for something like ten years. I can't even imagine a theater anywhere throwing together a pairing of that sort; of a movie that could only be shown to horny adults and another that couldn't possibly interest that crowd. (By the way, as one of those parenthetical notes of trivia for which this site is justly famous, one of the main producers of Deep Throat was a man named Lou Perry. Many years earlier, when Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis first teamed up, Lou Perry was Dean's manager, and ever after claimed to have been responsible for pairing the two men, only to get cheated out of representation. He also, legend has it, got cheated out of the millions and millions of dollars that Deep Throat brought in.)

All of that aside, the E! documentary — which runs again on Thursday (4 AM), Sunday (5 AM) and next Monday the ninth (10 AM) — is a very rich portrait of Lewis and, because of his frequent comments, almost a video autobiography. The show is sparse on clips of actual Jerry Lewis movies. (Like most TV documentaries, they grab scenes from public domain trailers, rather than pay for footage.) And Jerry's godhood overseas and tireless work for Muscular Dystrophy are oversold, plus I'm not sure I wanted to know quite that much about Jerry's medical problems. Still, there's a lot of insight and info, plus they ran the clip of Dean Martin walking out onto the telethon in 1976 and apparently surprising the hell out of his former partner. That alone is worth sitting through the two hours. There's also a rerun of a different profile of Lewis next week on the Biography Channel but, if I'm remembering it correctly, it didn't have nearly the access or data that E! did.

My DirecTV satellite dish gets CSpan and CSpan2. But their channel line-up doesn't include CSpan3, which seems to be airing the shows I most want to view.

Every so often, I drop an e-mail to the DirecTV people and ask about this. I find it hard to believe that it would cost them much, if anything, to add in that other channel. But all I get back is one of those form e-mails that says, "Thank you for your comments, we'll look into it, yadda yadda yadda…"

I don't know that I have the energy to get up a petition or a letter-writing campaign on this. But maybe I can encourage someone out there to do something.

The late Mort Meskin was an amazing artist — the kind who caused his colleagues to look at his work and ask, "How does he do that?" He was especially amazing in terms of his control of lighting and white areas on a page. Most comic artists work from white to black; that is, they draw their compositions and then figure out where to spot shadows and large black areas. Meskin, some said, worked the other way: He thought from dark to light and would design his pages by spotting the white areas. However he arrived at it, he did some arresting work over the years, mostly for DC and the Simon-Kirby Studio. His heirs have set up a website to remember this innovative man.