Teenagers on sit-coms

You know how, on sit-coms, the kids get old, so they start bringing in new kids in vain hope of keeping the show alive? On The Brady Bunch, they brought in Cousin Oliver. They adopted a child on The Donna Reed Show, Leonardo DiCaprio moved in with the family on Growing Pains, they somehow adopted Ernie on My Three Sons even though it was the '60's and Fred MacMurray was a single father, and the list goes on and on.

I watched part of Modern Family yesterday and was horrified to realize that I was a typical viewer. I don't want to watch teenagers who aren't cute anymore. How can I be so callous?

Part of it is how the characters' personalities develop as they grow up. It seems like they all become successful, popular high schoolers, never social outcasts. Manny was coming home from a date and preparing for his prom when he should have been sitting around the house alone all the time or hanging around with friends even more socially isolated than him.

One final attack on Jerry Lewis

Am I wrong to hate Jerry Lewis? Should I identify with him? Defend and support him? He was abandoned by his parents who were on the road performing, held back a year in grade school. He dropped out of high school. I wouldn't believe it without evidence, but he claimed that he was kicked out of high school for punching his principal and sending him crashing through a plate glass window because he was an anti-Semite. I don't think it's that easy to crash through a plate glass window---if it were, people would do it all the time---Lewis wasn't that tough as an adult and I'm sure he was far less so at 15, and the guy couldn't have been very anti-Semitic if he passed up a chance to send a Jew who brutally assaulted him to reform school.

Lewis was even rejected by the Army---he stayed out of World War Two because he was 4F. He went for years talking about the "love" between him and Dean Martin, but Martin rejected him. Critics sneered at his moronic screen persona.

And it wasn't just his persona that was moronic. He was pretty much sub-verbal. He never said anything funny. His "comedy" consisted entirely of making faces and talking in a funny voice. He never said anything funny in interviews---he was like Gallagher and Dustin Diamond in this regard.

No wonder he abused his children.

Now, compare him to Woody Allen. Allen isn't educated but wants people to think he is. So he drops names. Throws in a few Kierkegaards and Shopenhauers. He shows no sign that he knows anything about them, but people assumed that he must be smart. Jerry Lewis, borderline verbal as he was, just told you straight out that he was a genius.

There's a video on You Tube of Lewis talking about Joan Rivers. He was glad she was dead simply because she once said that he was promoting his career with his telethons. Lewis said that he responded to Rivers' comment by writing her a note threatening to hire the mafia to go after her if she ever said anything about him or his career or telethons again.

There have been feuds between comedians before, but usually they weaponize their comedy to attack each other. Andy Kindler, for example, said that the difference between Bill Maher and Hitler was that Hitler didn't laugh every time he told a joke. I've never heard of comedians responding to each other with direct physical threats, although Buddy Hackett probably did at some point.

But Jerry Lewis's thing worked. He went for years crudely stating that he was a comic and cinematic genius and a great humanitarian, and apparently people went along with it, even those who had to have known better.

Jerry Lewis's alleged IQ

I turned on the radio. Fresh Air with Terry Gross happened to be on and they were playing an interview they once did with Jerry Lewis. At one point, he said he got his way in negotiations with studios because of his 168 IQ.

How would he know what his IQ was and how would that help in negotiations? I googled it when I got home.

It turns out that Lewis used to claim to have an IQ of 190. He's quoted on imdb.com as saying, "I'm a multi-faceted, talented, wealthy, internationally famous genius. I have an IQ of 190 -- that's supposed to be a genius. People don't like that. My answer to all my critics is simple: I like me. I like what I've become. I'm proud of what I've achieved, and I don't really believe I've scratched the surface yet."

He must have decided that 190 was too high to be plausible and was a suspiciously round number. So he decided it was 168. More recently, an interviewer asked if he really had a 190 IQ. He said no, it was 145.  

The other implausible claim in that quote was "I like me." If he did, he wouldn't have spewed that nonsense about his IQ.

Jerry Lewis RIP

"RIP to Jerry Lewis, a giant of comedy, film,

 and philanthropy" is what he'd want us all to say today.

 --J Elvis Weinstein

"He blatantly tells you on network TV that he is the epitome of 

the socially conscious man, a great humanitarian ... Actually,
he’s one of the most hostile and unpleasant guys I’ve ever seen."

--Elliot Gould

Jerry Lewis and his brutalized son, Gary.

In 1989, Jerry Lewis's son Joseph talked at length to the National Enquirer. One thing he said that stood out in my mind is that Lewis had a huge master bath in his house. He had back trouble and insisted that the bathroom floor was the only floor hard enough for him to lie on. The bathroom had a TV, an intercom, a mini refrigerator and maybe a kitchenette---I don't remember. He would stay in there for days. I wished I had a bathroom like that.

Lewis's son said that the house had an intercom system and they naturally assumed that they could turn it off in their rooms and have some privacy. But when Lewis moved out and abandoned his wife and children, they discovered that he could sit in his giant bathroom and listen in on them even when they had turned the thing off in their rooms.

Several things from the Enquirer article were confirmed here on a YouTube video of Lewis's 1968 appearance on what looks like a daytime talk show hosted by Joan Rivers. Lewis proudly tells about one time that he belt-whipped his fourteen year old son. He said that he "literally put a couple of welts on his bottom."

No one had the bad taste to ask how he KNEW the kid had welts on his bottom. Obviously, he whipped his son with the kid's pants down. And, again, the kid was fourteen.

In this case, Lewis, who didn't graduate from high school and was held back a year in elementary school, was punishing his son for bad grades.

In the video, Lewis says he sent his son to his room then went to the intercom because "I wanted to hear him cry." It confirms what the Enquirer said about him having the intercom set up so he could lock himself in the bathroom and listen in on his family. They should just be glad CCTV wasn't widely available back then.

I had heard that Lewis bragged to Tom Snyder on The Tomorrow Show that he would spank his sons at parties in front of guests. My impression was that he would have parties and make the kids come down in their pajamas and bathrobes and greet the guests before going to bed and he would become enraged if they didn't do this in exactly the way he wanted.

So. Jerry Lewis, dead at 91.

I think I was fairly nice in recent posts about him. I didn't mock The Day the Clown Cried. I expressed some sympathy for his feelings of inferiority and noted his artistic success. I didn't make fun of the French for taking him seriously.

I was going to write something nice here until I saw that YouTube clip.

The murdering Nazi James Alex Fields, Jr

In school, there were always a few kids who had a not-entirely-grudging admiration for the Nazi military in World War Two. The Brits had more attractive and perhaps better aircraft, but Messerschmitts looked so manly.

In the '70's, there was a report on a TV news magazine. A neo-Nazi explained that he first got into Nazism because he was into military stuff and the Nazis seemed so good at it. He was in the Army himself and got married in an Army uniform with a Nazi armband added (can't they be court martialed for that?)

And now we have this Nazi, James Alex Fields, Jr, who is charged with murder after he drove his car through a crowd of counter demonstrators. His high school teacher said he had written a long paper on the Nazi military. The teacher tried unsuccessfully to steer him away from Nazism. 

Fields joined the Army himself but got kicked out after four months for unknown reasons and he was once accused of beating his disabled mother and threatening her with a knife. He was on medication at the time to control his temper tantrums. In another incident, she told him to take a break from a videogame so he "smacked her in the head" and locked her in the bathroom.

In 2015, Fields went on a school trip to Europe. Fields hated the French and only wanted to visit "the Fatherland", Germany. 

A classmate, Keegan McGrath, told reporters, "He just really laid on about the French being lower than us and inferior to us." He argued with Fields. It became so heated that he went home after a few days because he couldn't stand being in a room with him.

Why did that Nazi bastard get to go to Europe? They never did that at my school.

Fields had taken high school German for two years. He made a Holocaust joke in class.

Well, let's all hope that his life is over and that he'll never see the light of day again.

He was from Kentucky. Defense attorneys have noted that people from out of state are often treated more harshly by courts. Let's hope they're right in this case.

Nolan Gould vs Shia LaBeouf

I saw this thing online. A photographer liked Nolan Gould from Modern Family who was about 12 at the time. He contacted Gould's agent and asked to photograph him. So they said okay. He took pictures of the young fellow on a beach wearing a tuxedo with no shoes. I thought they were pretty good.

See, THAT'S the way an artist should use a celebrity.

Much better than the lazy, stupid Shia LaBeouf performance art crap. They should try to make up for the lack of aesthetics in conceptual or performance art by being interesting or intelligent, but they haven't bothered.

I suppose chanting "He will not divide us" for four to eight years might be art, but it's stupid art. Seems like the intrusion of Nazis created a little interest, a little tension, something for them to triumph over with their refusal to be divided, but LaBeouf and the other "artists" thought their brilliant work was ruined.

It was somewhat less annoying than the paper-bag-on-his-head art.

Do the "artists" make any money off this stuff?

The Naked Witch (1961)

I'm apparently not the only one who does this. You can turn on the same movie night after night and it will put you to sleep. I've been watching The Naked Witch over and over. Directed by Larry Buchanan. It was bankrolled by a Texas drive-in theater owner who wanted as much nudity in it as possible. It was made in 1960, and apparently very little nudity was possible back then.

It was only an hour long. First there's several minutes of documentary narrated by Gary Owens about witchcraft through the ages with paintings as illustrations. Then there's several minutes of travelogue about central Texas which, it turns out, is full of Germans.

Then we get down to the story. A college boy studying the history of witchcraft arrives in Luckenbach, Texas. He inexplicably digs up a witch's grave with his bare hands and steals the stake that was stuck through her causing her to come back to life. Her clothes had disintegrated over the 120 years she had been buried requiring her to walk around bare naked as she seeks revenge.

It was pretty good. When your only purpose in making a movie is to show as much nakedness as possible, you don't think too hard about the storyline. Contrast this with Plan 9 From Outer Space with its four or five separate plots which all come together in the end.  I found myself mindlessly accepting the implausible digging up the grave thing. The story drifts along. A lot of it is silent with narration. The college boy feels guilty about bringing the witch back to life and feels he should help stop her.

I wondered about the children in this movie. The travelogue portion features a German Texan children's choir all dressed in traditional German costume. Did they know they were in a nudie film? They had a close-up of a little German girl cheerfully singing to the camera. Those poor kids couldn't go to their own movie because it was full of nudity. Although, come to think of it, it wasn't released until four years after it was made so some of the kids might have been 18 by then or may have looked old enough to bluff their way in.

Internet Nazis losing their anonymity

I heard that Peter Cvjetanovic, the Nazi pictured above, has his lederhosen in a bunch because he's been publicly identified by pictures published of him in Charlottesville. Cameras are everywhere. You can't publicly proclaim your devotion to Hitler without somebody taking a picture of it. One person recognized a face in the torchlight march as belonging to an anti-Semite who kept showing up at Shia LaBeouf's "He Shall Not Divide Us" "art" project.

Of course, Donald Trump himself is calling for unity. Unity with Nazis. Which is perhaps part of the problem with LaBeouf's meaningless "He Shall Not Divide Us" thing. What's wrong with division?

One guy was disowned by his family.

Pete Tefft, another man photographed at the rally, also had his identity shared by the Twitter account, and his actions have led him to be disowned by his family. “I, along with all of his siblings and his entire family, wish to loudly repudiate my son’s vile, hateful and racist rhetoric and actions,” Tefft’s father, Pearce Tefft, wrote in a letter published online by Inforum.com. “We do not know specifically where he learned these beliefs. He did not learn them at home,” the elder Tefft continued, adding: “I have shared my home and hearth with friends and acquaintances of every race, gender and creed. I have taught all of my children that all men and women are created equal. That we must love each other all the same.”

Imagine finding out your idiot son is a Nazi.

It's been suggested that the Nazis are cleverly getting people publicly identified as Nazis in order to burn their bridges behind them, alienate them from their friends and family and limit their job opportunities so that they can't quit Nazism. It might make perfect sense if you're a Nazi, but I don't know.

All in the Family is why Trump is president

 
I was watching Norm MacDonald's podcast on YouTube--his interview with Martin Mull. Mull appeared on Norman Lear's Mary Hartman, Mart Hartman, [sic] Fernwood Tonight and America Tonight, so they got on the subject of All in the Family. MacDonald noted that Archie Bunker was objectively more likable than Meathead. He said he had racist relatives who liked the show. I had racist grandparents who liked it, too.

It bothered me even as a kid how anti-working class the show was. Why were all the working class characters dumb racists? Why weren't Meathead and Gloria pro-union?

Meathead took a number of views that weren't exactly liberal. He opposed a group obviously based on the Jewish Defense League only on the grounds of non-violence, not because the JDL was openly racist. When a corporation mistakenly sent money to Edith, he and Gloria were anxious to return it.

This was what went wrong with the Democrats. They started seeing the working class as the enemy and went for corporate money. They became "social liberals" rather that actual liberals, not that they were ever all that socially liberal.

They got away with it for years. Workers still voted Democrat because the Republicans were always slightly worse. Trump showed how bad the Democrats had gotten by showing how little he had to offer working people to get their support.

Charles Schumer, meanwhile announced that "For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin."

A couple more Shia LaBeouf arrest details

LaBeouf looking more intelligent than usual.

I know I'm running this into the ground, but I sat and listened to a full half hour of Shia LaBeouf shouting racist abuse at police on YouTube. He said some stuff that I didn't see reported before----he talked about shooting the cop in the forehead and said he would like to confront the police while armed with the assault rifle he has at home.

He thinks that a league is a measure of time. A league is about three miles, so even if it were a measure of time, it wouldn't be that long. One of the cops quips that his body cam footage will be on TMZ in about four hours.

A cop says that LaBeouf ran into the hotel lobby. He had yelled at the cops that they were too lazy to chase him. In the lobby, he hid behind a partition. A cop said, "He's not here," so LaBeouf moronically thought the coast was clear and stepped into view at which point he was arrested.

Maybe he was in character. He wasn't speaking in a normal accent and for some reason he kept claiming to be in the National Guard. He kept addressing the cops as "sir". 

I can understand someone being terribly upset at being arrested---not him, because he gets arrested all the time. You'd think he'd have learned by now to stay away from cops instead of asking them for cigarettes. He apologized for being disrespectful to authority which I don't think is a problem, but he said nothing about his abject racism.

White Lies, New Zealand, 2013

 
So what should you do if you're a Communist and you live in a capitalist country? If it's not going to change any time soon. Should you become a capitalist yourself? Would you have much choice? There were some surprisingly wealthy Communists in the United States. I knew a former Communist from LA. There were older Communists there who owned a lot of rental properties. It could be that Communist Party members lived modestly enough---working class lifestyles with perhaps middle class incomes---that they had more money to invest. Communists were like Calvinists.

And what do you do if you're black in a country dominated by white racists? In what was perhaps an analogous situation, there was a 1949 movie, Lost Boundaries. It begins in the 1920s. A light-skinned African-American doctor and his wife decide to pass for white. They move to a New England town where he opens an office. Passing for white means they have to cut themselves off from all their family and friends. They can't have obviously black relatives coming to the house for Thanksgiving. The movie is public domain. You can find it on YouTube and elsewhere.

There's a moment of suspense in the film. The wife becomes pregnant. If the baby doesn't look as white as they do, they'll be exposed.

It reminded me of the Soviet TV mini-series, Seventeen Moments of Spring, about Soviet agents spying on the Nazis during World War Two. There's a Soviet couple. The wife is pregnant. They're worried she'll cry out in Russian while giving birth and expose them.

And there was the movie White Lies, (New Zealand, 2013) in which a Maori midwife is hired to induce an abortion in a rich obnoxious woman whose husband is away and will be terribly, terribly upset with her when he gets back if he finds out about the baby. The woman has an extremely loyal older Maori woman servant. Some twists to the story. A pretty good movie. Available on Fandor.

The Day the Clown Cried

 
I vaguely remember the Jerry Lewis Theaters. It was going to be a chain of movie theaters devoted to showing family films in the early '70's. I guess they were trying to get small investors---a proto-crowd source thing---and my mother may have momentarily considered it. I was about eight and thought it sounded great. I thought it meant we could produce our own movies and have them shown.

The business was doomed to failure in part because they didn't make family films in those days. The first movie they showed in one of those theaters was a western--I don't remember which one--in which John Wayne uses the term "son of a bitch".

Harry Shearer, one of the few people to have seen Jerry Lewis's Holocaust movie, The Day the Clown Cried, had theorized that he made the movie to be shown in his new theater chain. That didn't seem very likely. Pretty much any of his movies could have been shown there. Why do something radically different?

Shearer seems to have changed his view. He said something about it more recently. He noted that Lewis was teaching at USC, he had his book immodestly titled The Total Filmmaker, the French revered him. He wanted to make a movie to reflect his newfound gravitas.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the movie didn't turn out well and it was locked away.

Lewis refused to talk about it for years. He finally answered a question somewhere. He said, no, you'll never see it because it was "bad, bad, bad". He thought it could have been "wonderful", but he had failed because he didn't know why he was doing it.

It seemed to have wrecked his career. If you look on imdb.com, he had been working constantly directing movies and TV episodes. He said he was thankful that he had the power to hide The Day the Clown Cried from the world, but it was eight years before he directed another movie, and then it was Hardly Working which was a disaster. He started filming and had to stop immediately because they guy who said he was providing the money for it didn't have any. They finally got it going again.

I only had couple of glimpses of Hardly Working. I drove past a drive-in theater and saw Jerry Lewis on the screen in yellowface working in a Japanese restaurant. Made Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's seem rather sensitive by comparison.

The second thing I saw of it was when I went to a friend's apartment. He had HBO. We turned on the TV and there was Jerry Lewis dressed a clown delivering mail for the Post Office. He was walking along looking depressed, just delivering the mail, but a large crowd was following him apparently thinking it was incredibly funny.

It was just awful. And to think that The Day the Clown Cried was even worse.

The movie was handed over the Library of Congress with the provision that it not be screened for ten years. However, since they never got to rights to the book, they won't be able to show it even after that, I suppose until the copyright on the book expires.

Is Ronan Farrow a ticking time bomb?

Ronan Farrow

Ronan Farrow argued on the Today Show that alcoholism is hereditary. He's right, of course. And since his maternal grandparents were stereotypical Irish drunkards, he'll likely become one himself.

On top of of that, Farrow and his mother keep hinting that his real father was Frank Sinatra, a well-known alcoholic.

He'd better hope that a predisposition to pedophilia isn't genetic. His uncle on his mother's side is in prison for child molestation and he keeps claiming--I think wrongly--that Woody Allen is a pedophile which would mean that Ronan has terrible, terrible genes from both sides.

Ronan should stop attacking his father. Whatever genes he got from Woody Allen are his only hope for a normal life.

We'll see how it goes, but I'd stay away from that guy.

The Total Filmmaker by Jerry Lewis

Jerry Lewis's book, The Total Filmmaker, is available online. It's been out of print for years.

http://cinearchive.org/post/72674722317/the-total-film-maker-jerry-lewis-book-on

Jerry never graduated from high school. He was terribly hurt when he was held back a year in grade school. It was a great triumph for him when he became a professor at USC. His work was taken seriously by the French. The mix of intellectual and artistic achievement with deep seated feelings of inferiority probably led to the immodest title of this book which was a collection of lectures he gave in his class.

In John Baxter's biography of George Lucas, it was noted that Lewis's class was popular because it was hinted that he would get his students jobs in Hollywood. He would have friends from Hollywood sit in on his classes.

I read a little of the book years ago. They had a copy in the University library here. I don't think I got past the prologue.

Shia LaBeouf, Toronto Film Festival, Divorce

Think he'll win an award for his acting in this picture?

Shia LaBeouf's movie, Borg/McEnroe, will shamefully kick off the Toronto Film Festival this year. Will recidivist criminal LaBeouf even be allowed to enter Canada?

They were having trouble finding a distributor for the movie in North America, but it looks like they found one. A new distribution company called "Neon" will attempt to release the thing in 2018.

Marrying a violent racist wasn't such a good idea after all

Meanwhile, LaBeouf's "wife", Mia Goth, is ready to dump him.  According to Radar Online, one of her friends said that LaBeouf is "on this constant mission to cause drama and confrontation wherever he goes, which [Mia] finds tiresome and depressing. No matter how many times she asks him to chill, it’s the same old angry drunken story. She's fed up and seriously contemplating divorce."

They married in October, 2016.

Martin Shkreli comments on his conviction

 
“I’m one of the richest New Yorkers there is, and after today’s outcome it’s going to stay that way and, uh, it feels pretty good," Martin Shkreli told reporters.

He invited a reporter from the Daily News to his home and said he thought the odds of him receiving even a short prison sentence was 50%.

“If it’s a year, that’s four months at Club Fed. I’ll play basketball and tennis and X-Box, and be out on these streets in four months.”

Hopefully, the judge will take these comments into account when putting him away.

I wonder how freakish his Albanian and Croatian parents are. I wish they'd show pictures of any family or relatives he has, maybe going to back to their native land and finding all their weird-looking kin. He has two presumably weird-looking sisters and a brother who I assume is some sort of freak.

He went to Baruch "College", named after traitorous pro-Confederate Zionist Bernard M. Baruch. In May, some Baruch College boys were charged with third degree murder and plead guilty to voluntary manslaughter after killing a classmate for entertainment.

Shkreli is a Catholic and went to Sunday School as weird-looking child.

Psychologist on Shkreli

After his "testimony" before Congress, Shkreli tweeted: “Hard to accept that these imbeciles represent the people in our government.”

From NBC News:

“For him to tweet that for the world to see – wow – that seems to suggest, you know the rules don’t apply to me,” Thomas Plante, Santa Clara University professor of psychology, said after watching the hearing today.

“I was having this image of a middle school teacher scolding a young student for acting like a jerk in class,” Plante said, explaining it is diagnose from afar but says Shkreli may have personality issues.

“When you see egotistical behavior or narcissistic behavior sort of on steroids, it can be absolutely breathtaking,” Plante said, explaining this type of behavior he is displaying is a growing trend in society.

“Unfortunately we live in a time and a place where it’s all about ‘me’ and not about ‘we,’ Plante said, explaining Shkreli’s attitudes may have been reinforced each time he climbed in his career and his behavior is unlikely to change since he is over 30.

“It’s probably pretty late in the game to expect personality change, but people do sort of have what we call ‘Come to Jesus moment’ where they say, ‘oh my goodness what have I done?’” Plante said.

It's so unfair. Just because he's different.

Martin Shkreli's been convicted of a couple of counts of securities fraud one count of conspiracy to commit securities fraud. He can get up to 20 years for the first two and five years on the third.

I'm pleased but still a little disappointed. He was acquitted of five other charges. And I know I'll be disappointed when he's sentenced.

I'm afraid I'll start feeling sorry for him if he goes to prison for years.

Maybe the Fyre Festival wasn't so bad after all

The clean, wholesome Swedish town of Emmaboda.

What is WRONG with these people?

Four girls aged 15 to 17 reported being raped at a music festival in Sweden. Another eleven were sexually assaulted. This was at the Emmaboda Music Festival, which took place July 24-29.

There were also ten cases of drug dealing, 113 cases of drug possession and 251 cases of drug use.

A few weeks ago, the annual Bråvalla music festival cancelled their 2018 event after four girls were raped and more were sexually assaulted at this year's festival. There had also been four reported rapes at the 2016 festival.
 
A Swedish comedian suggested they do "man-free" music festivals and the idea has caught on.

Maybe the anti-porn Feminists were right, that pornography has turned Scandinavia into a freezing hell hole.

Sweden always seemed so perfect with it's social democracy, it's low poverty rate. They banned spanking children in the '70s and I assume they have same-sex marriage. I imagined that Swedish movies must be dramatically inert. How could they have any conflict?

But I read the introduction to a Swedish detective novel. It pointed out they have a high rate of rape, that the prime minster was murdered in the street and apparently the place is full of Nazis. Norway had that horrible mass murder at a summer camp.

Violent ex-convict with gun stalks movie set

On the set of Peanut Butter Falcon. I don't like his nipples.

He's a violent racist ex-convict with a long criminal history. Shia LaBeouf must be on probation for SOMETHING, and he's out on bail awaiting trial for obstruction, disorderly conduct and public drunkenness . He told police that "If I had my gun, I would blow your shit up!"

Even if it is for a movie, is it legal for him to be walking around with a gun?

Maybe he covered himself with tattoos so he wouldn't be asked to appear shirtless in anything. Even by tattoo standards those are ugly tattoos.

Grinning recidivist criminal on gun range.