Jerry Lewis Cinemas

I knew very little about the Jerry Lewis Cinema chain. I remembered my brother and sister enthusing over it, like there was some chance of my family going into it. My mother might have considered it for a minute or two before dismissing the idea.

At the time, I thought they were talking about us actually owning a theater. Thinking back to it later, I was sure I misunderstood and they were just talking about buying stock. But, no, from what I read now, they must have actually been talking about buying a franchise and opening a theater, throwing away everything we got from my father's life insurance.

I wasn't the smartest kid in the world. I thought it meant we would produce the movies we'd show.

I read a little about it later and knew that the theater chain failed in part because they would feature only family entertainment at a time when Hollywood wasn't producing any family films to speak of. There was already a theater in town that had that tiny market cornered anyway.

The first movie the Jerry Lewis Cinemas showed was a John Wayne movie where he used the phrase "son of a bitch". I can't remember where I read that.

Harry Shearer, one of the few people who has seen Lewis's The Day the Clown Cried, speculated that Lewis made that movie to be shown in his theaters, which didn't make sense. Lewis was directing a lot of movies back than and any of them could have been shown in his theaters. Shearer changed his mind and now thinks Lewis made the movie because he was then teaching a class at USC, the French took him seriously, he had written a book modestly titled The Total Filmmaker and he wanted to make something reflecting his newfound gravitas.

Poor Jerry Lewis was held back a grade in elementary school and never graduated from high school. He was terribly hurt by this and tried to compensate by absurdly claiming to have an IQ of 190. His inferiority complex drove him to stardom, but it ultimately destroyed him. Look at his filmography. He was directing one or two movies a year before The Day the Clown Cried. After that, his career ground to a halt. He had flown too close to the sun. It was ten years before he made Hardly Working which was just awful.

Anyway, here are some pictures of Jerry Lewis Cinemas and former Jerry Lewis Cinemas.

They told people how easy it would be. The theaters would practically run themselves with the push of a button!

Maybe that would work now with digital projectors. Maybe Jerry Lewis was forty years ahead of his time. Like if he opened a nickelodeon in 1860.

As it happened, people who invested tens of thousands of dollars in these things felt ripped off, like they had been misled. Running a movie theater wasn't as easy as they were led to believe, they got little support from the company and they were forced to show only family films that nobody liked.

My sister developed an intense dislike for Lewis after seeing him interviewed by Tom Snyder on The Tomorrow Show. Lewis was one of those guys who would brag about battering his children because he thought it showed what a good father he was. Specifically, he gloated about backhanding his son and knocking him to the floor during a party at his house.

Mel Brooks seemed to have admired him and Woody Allen wanted him to direct Take the Money and Run. And looking at other comedies from the 1950's I can see why Lewis appealed to people back then.

The Dana Carvey Show documentary on Hulu

There was a study done by the University of Virginia of the Cool Kids in middle school. They were the 13-year-olds who dated and drank beer and tried marijuana and so forth, who picked their friends according to looks. I'm sure they had some term for them other than "cool kids", but that's what they called them in the press when they reported on the study. They followed the kids through high school until they were in their 20's to see how they fared, and the poor devils didn't do well at all.

Then essentially did things in middle school that most kids didn't do until high school. When they got to high school, they found all their peers were doing the stuff they did. So to maintain what they imagined their status to be, they took it all several steps further. They drank heavily, used a lot of drugs, committed crimes and became more and more screwed up.

Which brings us to the Dana Carvey Show. He was so big on Saturday Night Live that they gave him his own comedy-variety show. But, sadly, he decided he needed take everything a couple of steps further. They hired people like Louis CK, Steven Colbert and Steve Carell. This was their chance to go beyond the things that people liked and made them popular in the first place. They thought it would make them really, REALLY big. And. No. It didn't.

The documentary about the show on Hulu focused on the first sketch they did on the show. Bill Clinton announces that Hillary has been locked up and he will now be father AND mother to the country. He says he's been taking estrogen and can now breast feed puppies and kittens which he then does.

I guess it had comedic potential, but they didn't achieve it. They came up with a potentially funny idea and thought their work was done.

The show just didn't look very good, but we can see for ourselves. The few episodes they broadcast are available on Hulu and they're reporting that you can see clips from it on YouTube. I probably should have watched some before writing this.


I guess I'm still bitter from my years of not seeing anything funny about Andy Kaufman. I had an older brother and sister who thought he was hilarious for some reason. Now some of his admirers are claiming Kaufman wasn't a comedian at all---he was a "performance artist". Which is a tacit admission that he wasn't funny.

I think of the pain of those years, sitting in front of the TV, wondering why I wasn't sophisticated enough to see the humor.

I started to realize that maybe I was right and they were wrong when my brother angrily insisted on watching a made-for-TV movie comedy called Combat High about a teen sent to military school.

Perhaps ironically, it was the years I spent watching SNL with him and my sister that made me unable trust my own sense of humor which made me look down on a made-for-TV movie comedy. I felt I had to look for other clues as to whether something was funny. I watched the movie, most of it, and I thought it was ultimately right-wing Reagan era propaganda.

Harvey Weinstein taken away in handcuffs

Convicted of third degree rape which, it sounds like, is a surprisingly minor crime in New York, and of something called Criminal Sex Act in the first degree which is five to twenty-five years.

So it's prison for him. He'll appeal, obviously.

Well, I'm pretty happy about that.

He's no Bill Cosby. Other inmates won't adore him. I don't like Bill Cosby and haven't in years, but I felt concerned for his well-being when he was convicted. I shouldn't have because he's thriving in prison. Probably giving him a new lease of life.

Like Michael Jackson. Prison would have been the best thing for him. He could have finished high school, maybe taken come college courses and come out of prison a mature adult.

With Weinstein, I'm concerned that things won't nearly be harsh enough.

The Naked Witch: I'm not the only one who liked it

I really liked the movie. I'm not sure why. While trying to examine my feelings, I read some snotty comments about it on imdb.com, but then came across this one:

I can understand why some people wouldn't like this movie. It's very low-budget and goofy, it has plot holes you could drive a truck through, and when it comes to the (not-so)Naked Witch herself even the unedited version is incredibly tame by today's standards. However, I LOVE this kind of regional, low-budget film-making. This early Larry Buchanon flick, was actually filmed entirely in Luchenbach, Texas, a small town founded by German settlers and later made famous by a Waylon Jennings/Willie Nelson country song. And it makes a GREAT setting for a low-budget horror movie. With the cheesy voice-over narration, Buchanon even manages to anticipate later 70's regional exploitation movies like "The Legend of Boggy Creek" and the whole bigfoot/ "In Search of" craze, and even many more modern-day films about local legends like "The Last Broadcast" or "The Blair Witch Project" (although don't hold the last one against him). 

A college student comes to modern-day (as of 1961) Luchenbach, Texas, to research the legend of the "Angry Widow", a widowed woman who was skewered by the superstitious 18th century German settlers of the town after being betrayed by her craven married lover. In a rather ridiculous plot twist, the college student decides to dig up the body of the widow for some reason and remove the stake from her heart. The "Naked Witch" then rises from the grave to take her revenge on several locals who are related to her original tormentors. But when she threatens the pretty daughter of the innkeeper, who our rather dimwitted hero has fallen for, it is up to him to find the mountain pond where the pretty young witch is skinny-dipping and drive his stake into her (and then he has to figure out a way to kill her!)

I'm not going to claim this is great film. If you want a big-budget, go see the latest "Transformers" sequel, or if you want sex, go rent a porno. But I found this quite entertaining despite some illogical plotting and a very perfunctory ending. And this is only the second best film to ever be shot in Luchenbach--even better is Larry Buchanon's later film "Strawberries Need Rain". These kind of films aren't for everybody, but you like this kind of low-budget, off-Hollywood, slice-of Americana film-making, you shouldn't miss this.

So I'm not the only one.

There was voice-over narration. The night scenes were shot day-for-night. Everything was clear.

The movie was bankrolled by a drive-in theater owner who wanted a movie with as much nudity as possible. It was like a musical with nudity instead of songs. And it was only an hour long.

Ballad of Lefty Brown (2017)

I thought the big improvement in westerns is that they're now anti-hanging. Lynching people is monstrous and old westerns were made at a time when it was still going on.

But I just watched a western on Netflix called The Ballad of Lefty Brown (2017) starring Bill Pullman who was then about 63 as an aging cowboy who goes after the man who murdered his partner. It was somewhat pro-hanging. There were three hangings or attempted hangings in the movie and two out of three were presented as not being entirely bad.

One big improvement over old westerns is that they let a young boy played by Diego Josef shoot a few people. I think he was about fourteen. I wasn't sure if he was a boy or a girl at first. It was refreshing after more than a century of westerns where kids and women never got to kill anyone.

Killing someone in a movie has to be a proud moment for any young boy. I remember when E.T. came out. They reported that Henry Thomas went into acting because he secretly wanted to be in a Star Wars movie. They reported this as if he should have been satisfied doing a movie where he cries and cries over a dead space alien.

Of course, in the old movies they didn't kill or seriously injure women or children, either. And I think Diego did cry a little, although it was because he got shot. 

I wrote a western story. A young boy was going out for an extended time on the range. I had him bring along some heroin. It was legal at the time and I wanted him to have some pain relief if he were horribly injured with no hope of getting help.

Couldn't find a picture of him killing anyone, but there he is.

Mike Carroll, Naked Filmmaking: How to Make a Feature-Length Film - Without a Crew - for $6,000 or Less.

Naked Filmmaking: How to Make a Feature-Length Film - Without a Crew - for $10,000  $6,000 or Less, Revised and Expanded for DSLR Filmmakers

Reading Mike Carroll's book, Naked Filmmaking. He takes the view that, with digital video, you can work without a crew. Which seems perfectly reasonable. He was and still is a news cameraman so that's his forte.

He has a few suggestions, like working short hours so you don't have to provide food to your cast and any crew you might have.

To recruit a cast, he says to just find a local actor, show him the script and offer him or her a role. Then the actor will suggest other actors to play the other parts.

Carroll is a much more serious person than I am. He suggests buying the latest prosumer camera to shoot the movie, then selling it as soon as you're done while it's still worth something and he discusses the importance of good quality sound recording.

He calls for relatively short features - 75 minutes. If you're making a movie without money, I would go even shorter. He says the shorter running time makes movies more attractive to film festivals.

For nude scenes, promise your actors they'll see the scene first and if they don't like it, you won't use it. I'm amazed you can get unpaid actors to do nude scenes.

Use actors who'll let you use their houses as locations. He tells how he got his first job as news cameraman by leaving the big city and finding a TV station in a smaller market, and how he then approached learning the job. TV stations had switched from film to video and he knew nothing about it. It sounded like he was the very last person they wanted at a TV station in Kansas. He got the job because no one else wanted to live there.

It seems more useful than other books of its type. It's serious but doesn't call for you to spend tens of thousands of dollars.

Available in paperback or on Kindle from Amazon.

Interview with Larry Buchanan on YouTube

I liked Buchanan's first movie, The Naked Witch, made for six or eight thousand dollars around 1960. I think that was about the price of a new Cadillac at the time. If you can figure out the cost of filmstock and lab costs and subtract that from the eight thousand, you can figure out what the budget might have been on digital video.

A couple of things I found interesting: Buchanan said that he would surprise audiences by having someone say something intelligent in his horror movies. And he said he would, no matter how short his schedule was, take one day to take his time so the film would have one scene that would be flawless. He said that he watched his own movies, he would just watch his flawless scene and turn it off. But I don't know if that changed audience reaction to the film.

Larry Buchanan died in 2004.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MUA6xwB5kw

I don't know how enviable his career was. I truly like The Naked Witch but disliked other movies of his I've seen. He talks in the interview about this a little, that even filmmakers who pretend they're in it only for the money regret not being able to make better movies.

There was an episode of Incredibly Strange Film Show about Ray Dennis Steckler. A couple of times in the show Steckler catches himself taking his films too seriously. It can be embarrassing, but you have to take your own work seriously even if other people don't.

Psycho A Go Go (Al Adamson, 1965)

The movie was in color. This is a picture off the internet.

A low budget crime film. A vicious criminal goes after the little girl who picked up a diamond necklace he dropped and hid it in her doll.

There were two things that stood out to me. During the opening credits, the criminals ride in one of those elevators that are on the outside of the building. Through the window they keep showing the Jerry Lewis Restaurant across the street.

The other is the scene where the father brings a present home for his daughter's birthday. The family is white and the doll he brings her is black. The movie was made in the '60's and I thought this might have been a half-hearted show of support for racial equality. But then he tells her it's a "Christy Minstrel Doll". He winds it up and it sings minstrel show songs. First it sings "Old Folks At Home" (Swanee River).

Still, the movie wasn't that bad.

Tattoo artist refuses to do face tattoos

So, came across this:

https://nypost.com/2020/02/15/tattoo-artists-feel-a-moral-obligation-to-stop-face-ink/

It is perhaps not surprising that the sort of person who would name her children Bash and Slash would tattoo their names on her face. Sooner or later Bash and Slash will be completely estranged from their idiot mother and she'll start regretting the tattoo.

At least they're not misspelled.

The Long Goodbye (1973)

I came across Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye on broadcast TV today. I've seen it a few times over the years and was inspired to read the Raymond Chandler novel, and the movie was a big improvement over the book. The movie had an infinitely better ending.

I've only read a couple of Raymond Chandler books. They were a bit racist in places, and I've heard it pointed out that Philip Marlowe has a tendency to leap to wild conclusions on very little information, which I kind of liked. Ross Macdonald complained that Chandler hated everyone but old men and boys and that his books didn't have a real plot.

The thing that stood out in my mind was one of the cops, a detective. He had a terrible comb-over. He wasn't the least bit cool-looking. Watching it again, he was less Dick Van Patten-like than I remembered. But he kept addressing people as "baby", and if anyone threatened him in any way, he would say, "Get in line, baby!"

With Jack Riley from The Bob Newhart Show in a small role, and Henry Gibson as a crooked doctor.

Oh, and Elliott Gould, Nina van Pallandt, Sterling Haden and Marc Rydell. With Arnold Schwarzenegger in a non-speaking role.

This would surprise you...

 
...if you could see me, but, long ago, I used to receive somewhere around 25 valentines every year. And I'd have an almost even mix of male and female admirers.

Fassbinder's In a Year of 13 Moons (1978) on YouTube

I haven't seen the movie but posted this morning by Jeffrery St.Clair on Counterpunch.com:

+ My friend Nicky Smith, who writes about film for Splice, has found that Fassbinder’s incredible 1978 film In a Year of 13 Moons is now up on Youtube, though who knows for how long. You should stop what you’re doing and watch it before the censors strip it off. As someone who’d rush around DC & NYC watching 2 or 3 films a day on Fri, Sat & Suns in the late 70s, I gradually lost interest in “cinema” after Fassbinder died. Few films (or film-makers) have seemed as fresh, as provoking, as confounding, as feverish, as alive, as relevant since….

In an unrelated note, St. Clair writes:

+ I know it’s uncouth to say so, but is any filmmaker more emblematic of the infantilization of high-brow American culture than Wes Anderson, the man who drained all of the toxic sting from Stefan Zweig and replaced it with a depoliticized dollhouse of twee jokes & personal fetishes?

Harvey Weinstein, closing arguments

Harvey Weinstein's attorney gave her closing argument today. Prosecution gives their rebuttal tomorrow and the jury starts deliberating next week.

I hope to heck he gets convicted assuming he's guilty.

If he's acquitted, he'll go to trial in California. He's been indicted for rape there, too.

As he left the courthouse, Weinstein was asked what he thought of his attorney's closing argument. He said it was the Queen's Speech, a reference to the movie The King's Speech that he had something to do with. 

It won't be long now.

Paulette (France, 2016)

Kind of a French Breaking Bad, except the old woman who turns marijuana dealer is already an awful person.

She a terrible racist. When her Black grandchild asks her why she hates him, she says, "Because you're Black." Her Black son-in-law is a cop on the trail of a minor drug kingpin in the area. When she hears how much money can be made selling marijuana, she wants in on it using her business skills from running a restaurant.

She has a number of triumphs. She also gets beaten up by neighborhood drug dealers. She almost gets caught by her son-in-law a couple of times. She's the opposite of Walter White in that gradually becomes a less horrible person.

Like almost every other French movie, it makes France look terrible.

Available on "Cohen Media" on Amazon Prime.

Natalie Portman

It's being pointed out in Twitter that Natalie Portman has her own production company. It has churned out eight movies each of which was directed by a man except for one she directed herself. She's done nothing for women directors.

Handsomecharlie Films, Natalie Portman's production company, has yet to produce a film by a female director other than Natalie's movie ' A Tale of Love and Darkness' and her short film ' Eve.'

https://twitter.com/lizzylynngarcia/status/1226666502327283714

Portman went to the Oscars wearing a gown embroidered with the names of women directors who she says were snubbed. For example, the Israeli who directed Shia LaBeouf's vanity project. On the hem, Portman should had the names of men who she thinks shouldn't have been nominated.

I don't know that women are being snubbed by the Oscars. Directing is dominated by men. Only 17% of members of the Directors Guild are women. 

State and Federal government should step in. Movie productions get tax subsidies, they get technical support from the military, the FBI, CIA and local police. They film in national parks and on public property. The government should demand more women directors. They can build up to it, but they should aim for 50%. It sure wouldn't hurt anything.

Natalie Portman snubs women directors

Well. The Oscars are over. I haven't seen a thing but I should watch this South Korean film, Parasite.

Natalie Portman wore a dress with the names of all the women directors who had been "snubbed" for Oscars. This seems extremely cruel. How did she decide which women to put on her dress? Because if you were a woman and you directed a pretty good movie which didn't get nominated, it'd be quite a slap in the face---a SECOND Oscar snub---to be left off the dress.

Principal forced to resign for being anti-teenage-rape

Is the crap I write really that objectionable?

A high school principal in Camas, Washington, was put on administrative leave for posting on Facebook that the death of wealthy Los Angeles rapist Kobe Bryant was "karma." She deleted the comment and apologized for some reason, but she was still suspended from her job for thinking that rapists are bad. She has since resigned.

Pro-rape basketball fans threatened her. Students at the school threatened to walk out but they didn't report why. Bryant raped a teenage girl. You'd think high school students would have sided with her against a middle-aged rapist millionaire.

I said pretty much the same thing she did on this blog. I didn't say anything about "karma" because, strictly speaking, karma is the belief that that girl deserved to be raped because of something she did in a past life.

Bryant raped a teenager. He was strangling her the whole time he was doing it. There was no misunderstanding as he later claimed. He got away with it because sports reporters and moronic basketball fans spent months trashing his victim.

To hell with that guy.

Orson Bean, Kirk Douglas, RIP

Orson Bean was struck by a car and killed at age 91. He must have been very healthy. He was still working.

He had been blacklisted in the '50's. His father was a founder of the ACLU and had raised money for the defense of the Scottsboro Boys. He had started out as a magician and went into stand-up, adopting the name Bean because it got a laugh from the audience. Which would have been terribly cruel if it had been his real name.

I knew who he was in the 1970's, but knew nothing about him. He was a celebrity, I saw him on talk shows and now I see he was a panelist on What's My Line. I could have recognized him and I knew his personality. But I never knew what he famous for. Was he an actor, a comedian? An intellectual?



Kirk Douglas, who broke the blacklist with the movie Spartacus, appropriately enough, passed away at 103.

He said he picked roles for the quality of the material, not because he thought the movie would be successful. A good strategy if you can do it. Kubrick's Paths of Glory didn't make a lot of money at the time. Years later, Douglas appeared in an episode of Tales From the Crypt, again as a World War One French Army officer. He gets his son executed for cowardice but thinks of a way to make him act bravely in front of the firing squad.

Don't walk through traffic staring at a smart phone

I found out what happened a couple of weeks later.

I was driving my mother home. We were on a four-lane divided boulevard with a bus stop in the island in the middle. There were police cars, fire trucks and ambulances blocking the street. It was night so we couldn't see what happened which was just as well. But I could guess what it was.

My mother heard from someone at the senior center. A young woman got off the bus and set off across the street staring at her smartphone. I don't know who was at fault in the accident. It might not have helped her if she'd been aware of her surroundings but it couldn't have hurt.

I live in the university area and it's amazing how students wander through traffic staring at these things.

At least they might be reading something useful or at least interesting.

In my day, college students were all riding bikes. They had ten-speeds that they could ride without their hands on the handlebars. They would sit back pedaling, often with their hands in their pockets so they couldn't brake if they had to, and they would ride through stop signs and red lights without slowing down or even looking.

Then there were the joggers. There are jogging trails now, but back then they'd run on the sidewalks and run through intersections without looking.

The author of a pro-jogging book appeared on a local radio talk show. Someone called in and asked about this. It seemed incredibly stupid. He explained that when you're running you have a lot of endorphins and you don't even think about that.

"Well don't you think you SHOULD?" the host asked.

And he repeated that when you're running you have a lot of endorphins and you don't even think about that. Like that was a perfectly reasonable.

Midsommar

So I watched Midsommar last night, a US-Swedish co-production filmed in Hungary.

To be honest, I fast forwarded through some of it and didn't pay very close attention to what I did watch. I saw warnings that the movie had a lot of sex and nudity, but I must have missed most of it. Did see some gore.

Americans go to Sweden to attend a festival that takes place every 90 years. It turns out to be a pagan thing. And paganism turns out to be a terrible religion.

It was like Poltergeist, or Shadows & Fog, or Plan 9 From Outer Space. It might have been terrifying if you were there, but it disappointed horror fans.

It's the opposite of the Exorcist. That movie was based loosely on a real case---a fourteen-year-old boy was supposedly possessed. Several years ago, a reporter tracked down the people involved. According to the kid's friends, he wasn't possessed, he was just a jerk. The reporter talked to the last surviving priest who took part in the exorcism who said he saw nothing scary about any of it. The kid sort of spoke Latin, but the priests thought he was making fun of them. Another priest wrote an account of the case at the time and said he laughed while some of the stuff was happening. The Exorcist was scary but you'd have laughed if you'd been there.

I saw horror fans complain about Midsommar not working as a horror movie, but it may have been like Dark Crimes (2016) which I took to be a morbid true crime art house film. Critics hated it because they were expecting a thriller.

With Bjorn Andreson in a supporting role. He's in his 70's. As far as I know, it's the only movie I've seen him in since since he played the teen love object in Death in Venice.

Success from failure

How many years ago was this? Over thirty years. I was at work. I was talking to a guy there who told me he was a film major in college. I asked him what kind of work he wanted to do. He said, "I'm going to go to Hollywood and direct movies."

I was stunned at his confidence. I tried to talk to him about low budget regional film and got a blank stare. Later, I asked if he was working on anything and he said that the university here wasn't production-oriented.

If he had focused more on the directing than on Hollywood he might have had more to show for it. On the other hand, that was in the years before digital video and he might have just squandered tens of thousands of dollars making a movie with no commercial value.

That was before the big film school boom. The economy was somewhat better and there were fields you could go into and make money. Not like now. I read a few years ago that bartending and waiting tables were the only areas with real job growth. You may as well go to film school. You won't be missing out on the economic boom.

Last time I checked, the guy was a news photographer in a town up the highway from here.

Now, if he made a movie there, he'd be the only one. It would be the town's only chance to see itself portrayed in cinema, although moving pictures aren't the novelty they once were.

I always thought, make a movie using as many high school kids as possible. In a small town, I would imagine that the kids would have an average of five family members--parents and grandparents--who would be obliged to see their movie. Of course, if you didn't pay anyone to be in your movie, you'd have to at least give the kids free tickets to let their families see it, and I think you'd have to give them a few DVD's.

Just try to bring in as much money as a high school play without it costing nearly as much.

We have a picture somewhere of my older brother at age five wearing a cowboy suit and sitting on a small horse. It was a photo taken in a different era----an era when strangers could walk into a neighborhood with a cowboy suit and a horse and take pictures of kids without their parents' knowledge or consent then get the parents to pay five dollars for a copy of the picture.

Making a movie using that business model, it would just be a really, really specialized niche audience. Just people who live in a particular town and are related to one of the people in the movie.

Someone in Portland, Oregon, got the same idea I had years ago. They filmed a zero budget movie about a video store employee. After he's fired, he goes from video store to video store applying for jobs. Every video store where they filmed a scene would HAVE to stock the movie!

Now, more recently, I read about a guy in England. He was in a big city. He hired local hooligans to appear in an extreme low budget action film. He sold the DVD's in local stores. They sold for five pounds each, cheap enough that people could buy them on impulse. And he made pretty good money, I think they said twenty or thirty thousand pounds.

In a small town, just film scenes anywhere that DVD's might reasonably be sold. Although you could glut the market pretty quickly.

Okay, I just googled the town where that guy lives. 53,000 people----it's a lot bigger than I thought.

It's like an old commercial they used to have for Alcoholics Anonymous. It noted the irony that people who drink out of loneliness have vast opportunities for friendship in AA.

For that guy I knew, living in a small city could be his best hope for success as a director.

Annie Oakley

I watched a couple more episodes of Annie Oakley, a 1950's children's western. It's public domain and available on YouTube or on a number of streaming video channels.

It was shockingly violent.

In one episode, a little girl watched her father being murdered by two men, then the horses pulling the wagon she's in panic and run until the wagon rolls over. She's blinded in the accident. Then the killers come to kill her because they think she can identify them,

In another episode, Alan Hale, Jr, who had long wavy hair, kidnaps and clearly intends to murder Annie'a little brother, Tagg.

It would have been a pretty good show except that Annie Oakley, the star of the show and expert marksman, never shoots anyone. She'll shoot guns out of their hands, she'll shoot light fixtures so they'll drop on people's heads, she'll shoot the dirt in front of them so they'll get some in their eyes, but she won't simply shoot them even when they're trying to kill her or her brother.

There was less extreme but completely gratuitous violence. A cowboy becomes enraged at Tagg for spilling lemonade on him. He berates him and threatens to spank him, so the sheriff step in and the two grown men start fighting. And this had nothing to do with the plot and didn't even affect the subplot.

In another, the kid is sitting in a wash tub. The soap slips out of his hand and slides across the floor. Annie Oakley picks it up and throws it at him and hits him in the face.