South 12th

Here is a great joke from Robert Towne’s 1982 film Personal Best. A pentathlete tells it to her friend in a steam room following a practice.

So this drunk guy hails a cab and gets in. He knocks on the plastic partition between himself and the cab driver. The cab driver opens it.

“Hey, driver,” says the drunk guy. “You got room up there for two pizzas and a six-pack?”

“Yeah, of course!” says the cab driver.

So the guy pukes through the partition.

That’s the end of joke. The character made a really nice retching gesture, as well.

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!

Sorry, I think that joke is really funny. I guess I like jokes about puking. The woman in the movie that told it liked it, too, although her friends were not as impressed.

I often wonder about jokes that are placed in screenplays. Not jokes written into screenplays, but jokes that are told by characters in a film. There’s a big difference. Where do they come from? Was Robert Towne holding on to that one for a few years, and just didn’t have an opportunity to use it in Shampoo or The Last Detail? Or did he hear it while writing the screenplay and figure it would be the perfect joke for women’s Olympic training locker room banter? Do screenwriters keep joke files and then match them to characters as needed?

What are your favorite jokes told onscreen?

“Mr. Simon was a forefather of situation comedy writers, and his scripts for stage and screen were embraced by actors like Robert Redford, Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. But sitcoms have given way to reality shows like “American Idol,” one-liners to the sardonic humor of “The Office,” and the heavily plotted comedy of Mr. Simon’s film “California Suite” to the animated wit of “Up” and the fratty banter of “The Hangover,” two of the summer’s biggest hits.”

From Sunday’s article in The New York Times about Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs closing on Broadway so quickly.

I realize it’s just a tossed-off line, not meant to be a serious diagnosis of the state of American comedy, but I still find it to be a strange statement nonetheless. I suppose I can see where ”sardonic humor” has replaced “one-liners” (though I’m not sure Jack Donaghy and Liz Lemon would agree), but I’m not sure how “animated wit” might have replaced “heavily plotted comedy”; I mean, wasn’t Up about as traditional a piece of heartstring-tugging comic narrative cinema as one could imagine? It even starred Ed Asner, who’s actually acted in a Neil Simon production! The road from The Goodbye Girl to Up is not a long one.

Comedy, like any form of popular art, is a continuum — there’s never clean breaks from the past. For example, can it be said that Woody Allen’s neurotic brand of sophisticated urban comedy made Bob Hope’s schtickier brand of self-deprecating comedy obsolete? I guess so, but that statement is negated by the fact that Woody Allen stole a ton from Bob Hope, a fact Allen happily admits. That doesn’t take anything away from Hope or Allen.

I think it’s too pat to say “audiences don’t like that scripted stuff anymore — they prefer fratty banter.” The reality is always more complex, and it’s a lot more interesting to poke and see where those fault lines have formed, and just how these changes in taste have manifested themselves. 

Questions for discussion:

1. Who are the transitional figures between Felix & Oscar and Harold & Kumar?  
2. If Walter Matthau were still alive, would he ever be cast as Will Ferrell’s father? Zach Galifinakis’s? Why does it make sense that he might have appeared in a cameo on 30 Rock, and not on The Office?
3. What does Chevy Chase’s presence in the new comedy show Community suggest?
4. Should Neil Simon begin writing videos for Funny or Die? Should Robert Redford start appearing in them?
5. What will future generations make of Cougartown’s slow, inevitable transformation into a Larry Gelbart sitcom?

A few weeks ago I went to Oak Street Cinema to see The Baader-Meinhof Complex. Since I work right in the neighborhood, I headed over to buy tickets early, even though the screening wasn’t for another hour or so. The front doors were still closed when I arrived at the theater. I stood outside a moment, trying to figure out if I should come back, when a person in the lobby saw me and walked over to open the door.

“Are you Bill?” she asked, poking her head out.

I must be honest. Whenever I am confronted with questions like this, where the answer is a very unambiguous “no, I am definitely not Bill,” I am always tempted to bite my lip, look around, and then say “why yes, I am Bill.” Just to see where things might go.

Of course I didn’t do this. “No,” I said. She told me to come back in an hour to buy a ticket.

Sitting in the theater an hour later before the movie began, the same person from the lobby walked to the front of the theater. “Thank you for coming out tonight,” she said. “Before we start the film, we’ve invited the head of the German Studies department at the U to say a few words about the Baader-Meinhoff gang. Please welcome Dr. Bill So-and-so.”

Ah ha! Bill! She thought I was the head of the German Studies department at the U! People are always mistaking me for a professor. I can’t imagine why.

I was a little sad I hadn’t gone along with her initially. The opportunity for mischief would have been great. As I listened to the professor talk, I wondered how much I could credibly bullshit about Baader-Meinhoff unprompted before a crowd. A little bit. Not a lot. What would have happened? Would I have been smoked out before the screening when the real Bill showed up? Who would they have believed? Would it have gotten far enough that there might have been a scene in the theater? Where he’d be introduced, and we both stood up?

“This man is an imposter!” the real Bill would have yelled, pointing out me.

“What an outrage!” I’d have yelled back. “That man is the imposter! He’s with the Stasi! He’s here to fill your kopfs mit lies!” Who would the crowd believe? Would they take a vote? Would they call die Polizei?

I am sure it is a scenario that would have ended badly for me. For many reasons other than that, I am glad that didn’t happen anyway, because Bill’s remarks about the Red Army Faction were very informative, and the film itself was enjoyable. I would have hated to miss it, and besides, it would have been rude to deprive filmgoers of a thorough background on the historic events they were about to see portrayed.

Just because you look like a professor of German studies does not give you the right to act like one — a lesson I have learned the hard way many, many times.

Here’s an excerpt from a piece of speculative journalism, entitled “Boob Tube Liberation Front Storms CBS, ABC, PBS & Quaking Independents from Coast to Coast”, written by Lester Bangs and published in Creem magazine in 1973. It’s an account of the freeform television programming offered after a supposed 1976 takeover of the airwaves by leftist radicals:

Largest viewer response, however, was gleaned by yet another L.A. station, which declared its aim, almost immediately after being seized by guerrillas, to the be the chronological broadcast of every motion picture in history. The began at 2:43 A.M. on May 11 with The Great Train Robbery, and continued without pause for commercials or announcements. Runners have been observed driving up to the back doors regularly in delivery trucks presumably carrying cans of film. At press time they had reached the year 1927, and viewer response was reportedly unprecedented, as vast numbers of California citizens rearranged their schedules and even quit their jobs to build their lives around the station’s output.

…Even if the rebels are not turned out of the studio by authorities (and the station’s owner is so pleased by viewer response that they might not be), the series can be expected, according to calculations on police computers, to conclude at some point in the year 1981, if at all.

The chronological broadcast of every film ever made! An astounding idea, and one that, as far as I know, has never been attempted. It’s probably impossible (almost half of the silent films ever made are lost forever), but it’s exciting enough an idea, anyway, to devote a few minutes to a little thought experiment.

First of all, those police computers are way off. Such an undertaking would take much longer than the five years Bangs allots. How much longer? We’ll get to that in a moment. Let’s first imagine we are ourselves the California guerillas in question.

We begin with The Great Train Robbery from 1903. This is not, of course, the first ever film ever made, but it’s a very important one, and it’s as good a starting place as anywhere.

We then have to set certain criteria: we will exclude TV series, made-for-TV movies and direct-to-video releases (sorry to fans of Brian’s Song and Berlin Alexanderplatz). We’ll open it to films of all countries, in all languages, in all genres — animation, documentary, whatever else. Ideally, we’d only include feature length films, but I can’t figure out how to narrow the search critera on IMDb to do that, so we’ll keep short films in there as well. That means a lot of what we’ll be showing are commercially released newsreels and nine-minute long educational films from the ’50s, but that’s OK. That’s all part of the rich tapestry of cinematic history.

So, using IMDb to search for films made between 1903 and 1976, the number of matches returned is 217,653. We will chronologically be broadcasting 217,653 films.

How long will it take? We can presume the average length is around an hour and a half, though stuff like LSD: Trip or Trap (19 minutes) will be much shorter, and stuff like Greed (four hours) and Burning of the Red Lotus Monastery (27 hours) will be much longer. Using that criteria, we’re probably looking at a little over 326,000 hours of broadcasting. That’s 13,604 days, or around 37 years. And that’s just all the films made up until 1976, when the takeover begins.

This year, in 2009, the broadcast would have reached roughly the year 1969. You could be watching the Indian college weeper Tears Have Become Flowers, followed by Leon Jervis and Lyn Logan in the Canadian “adult comedy” The Columbus of Sex. That’s what you could be watching right at this exact moment instead of sitting at work. If only, right?

Inspired by Elizabeth Wilcox’s recent-ish essay on Withnail & I, I have assembled here a comprehensive list of the greatest movies of the 1980s that end with a character reciting excerpts from Act II, Scene 2 of Hamlet. In each of these films, the “what a piece of work is a man” excerpts are the last lines of spoken dialogue before the credits roll.

• Withnail & I (1986): Here, beginning at 5:25. The lines are recited by the out-of-work actor Withnail (played by Richard E. Grant) in a rainstorm to a group of indifferent zoo animals. His best friend and partner-in-crime has abandoned him for a lifetime of responsibility, and Withnail is alone. This very hammy, but very moving recitation is as vulnerable as we’ve seen him throughout the whole film. 
• Britannia Hospital (1980): Here, beginning at 1:40. The lines are recited by a talking computer made from Malcolm McDowell’s brain, which was non-surgically removed from his body a few scenes earlier. Britannia Hospital is a violent, messy, absolutely furious film, a catalog of broad indictments of every aspect of British society (and also starring Mark Hamill!). This is the one scene where every character in the movie is gathered in one place, and they all get to witness together in mute horror the bleak future that the bureaucrats and technocrats have in store for ’em: a robotic perversion of Shakespeare and, by extension, the human sprirt!

Actually, I think those are the only two. Or I can’t think of any more. Are there more? But regardless, you really see the full range on the subtlety spectrum with which this monologue can be employed in wrapping up cult films of the 1980s.