Being a web log for the observations of actor, author, cartoonist, comedian, critic, director, humorist, journalist, master of ceremonies, performance artist, playwright, producer, publicist, public speaker, songwriter, and variety booker Trav S.D.
The man whose name became synonymous with “swashbuckler” began his adult life in tame enough a fashion. After a brief stint at Harvard and a desultory early stab at the theatre he married Anna Beth Sully in 1907 and went work as an executive at her father’s soap factory. When that didn’t work out, he tried to make himself into a stock broker. Finally, when he just couldn’t stand it anymore, he plunged back into the theatre. He toured vaudeville in 1912 with the comic one-act A Regular Business Man (type-casting). After a role in the Broadway show He Comes Up Smiling, he returned to vaud in 1914 with a playlet called All at Sea. He broke into films in 1915, and worked steadily on celluloid for many years. (Interestingly, for the first 5 or so years of his movie career he made light comedies; there is a big section on him in my new book Chain of Fools).
He became a superstar with his swashbucking costume dramas of the 20s, such as The Mark of Zorro (1920), The Three Musketeers (1921) and The Thief of Bagdad (1924). In 1920 he married Mary Pickford, “America’s Sweetheart”. In 1933, Pickford did her own vaudeville time at the New York Paramount with a short play called The Church Mouse.
DISTINGUISHED PROGENY: Why, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr, of course.
And now here he is in one of the craziest comedies you will ever watch (co-scripted by none another than Tod Browning, The Mystery of the Leaping Fish (1916).
Today is the birthday of Jose Collins (Charlotte Josephine Collins, 1887-1958). The daughter of Lottie Collins, she was second generation English music hall royalty, which enabled her to make her onstage debut at age 13 in a routine with Sir Harry Lauder. When she was 17 she broke into the business in earnest, touring British and American music halls in a tour with Gaby Deslys. From 1911 through 1916 she was a star of American big time vaudeville and Broadway, appearing in such shows as Vera Violetta with Al Jolson (1911-1912), the Ziegfeld Follies of 1913 and the Passing Show of 1914. She returned to Britain in 1916, where she enjoyed another couple of decades of stage success, gradually going from musical comedy ingénue parts and music hall revue, to parts in straight dramas. She also appeared in about a dozen silent movies and one talkie. In England, her biggest stage success was The Maid of Mountains (1917) — the name became her professional nickname thereafter.
Now here she is in 1913 singing “Just You and I and the Moon”
Starting at 8pm tonight and going all the way into tomorrow at 6am, TCM will be showing Harold Lloyd films, including four features and 16 shorts. The menu will range from the well-known (such as Safety Last and The Freshman) to stuff that’s pretty rare. My DVR will be working overtime! For the full schedule and more info, go to tcm.com
One of the great actresses of the early twentieth century, Nazimova was also one of vaudeville’s great sensationalists.
She was born Mariam Edez Adelaida “Alla” Leventon in Yalta on this day in 1879. As a child she had studied the violin, but fear of her stern father prevented her from formal dramatic study until the age of 17. She was accepted to Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko’s Philharmonic School in Moscow, which merged with Stanislawski’s newborn Moscow Art Theatre in 1898. She struggled on in minor roles and as a stage manager with the theatre for a few years, and then split off the work with the Kostroma stock company. While acting there, she met met Pavel Orlenev, a friend of Chekhov and Gorky. The two became collaborators and lovers. From touring the Russian provinces, in 1904 they went on to success in Berlin and London. In 1905, they were a hit in New York, where the Shuberts were so impressed, they offered to produce her if she would stay in the U.S. and learn English. She did.
Her 1906 performance as Hedda Gabler was such a hit that she went on to star in most of Ibsen’s major plays over the next few years. She almost always did “important” realistic plays, usually with progressive political themes. A gorgeous woman, with enormous eyes and a sensuous mouth, she reinforced the sensationalism of her feminist forays by giving them sex appeal. This is what made her a hit in vaudeville.
In 1914 she debuted a one act at the Palace called An Unknown Woman which pleaded for more sensible divorce laws. A querulous Edward Albee cancelled the act at the urging of a Roman Catholic clergyman, although Nazimova was paid in full for her services. In 1915, she returned with the pacifist playlet War Brides, which was especially timely given the conflict overseas. This turn was such a hit she toured the Orpheum Circuit with it, and then turned it into a 1916 movie. The film version was a major success, resulting in Metro offering her a 5 year, $13,000 a week contract in 1917—a deal better than even Mary Pickford’s. For the next several years, she was a major movie star and the mansion she built “The Garden of Alla”, one of the center’s of the Hollywood social scene. Her contract her total creative control, and unfortunately, as time went on her use of it alienated both critics and audiences. Her exotic sexuality was often exploited, which critics found “lurid” and “preposterous.” She lost audiences by indulging her artistic impulses. She began to allow free reign to experimental set designer Natacha Rambova, who became her lover. Rambova became the wife of Rudolph Valentino, was Nazimova’s co-star in Camille (1921). Though Camille was a success Metro started becoming uncomfortable with all of this art, and cut Nazimova loose. She produced two films on her own in 1922, A Doll’s House and Salome which continued with the stylized sets and acting. They tanked at the box office unfortunately, and Nazimova was to play only small roles in Hollywood thereafter.
It is perhaps for this reason that she returned to the Palace for several vaudeville engagements through the 1920s. One of the playlets she introduced was a feminist drama called India, co-written by Edgar Allen Woolf. Major theatre roles of her late career included Christine in Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), O-lan in Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth (1932), and the leads in major revivals of Ghosts and Hedda Galbler which she directed in 1935 and 1936 respectively. She died in 1945.
Now, here’s her artistic take on the Dance of the Seven Veils from her 1923 version of Salome:
Today is the birthday of Richard Bennett (1870-1944). I quoted him in No Applause without really explaining who he was: a major New York stage star (and later film star) who sometimes deigned to play vaudeville. His daughters Constance and Joan also became movie stars; his other daughter Barbara married the singer Morton Downey (and thus was the mother of loathsome talk show host Morton Downey, Jr., and an infernal delivery it must have been).
Already a major star of the New York stage by the 1890s, the elder Bennett became known for his diatribes against the audience, critics and authorities delivered as curtain speeches at the end of performances (this was the context in which I quoted him in No Applause). His silent movie career began in 1914 and continued until the last year of his life. Bennett’s best known role today is probably his performance as Major Amberson in Orson Welles’The Magnificent Ambersons (1942).
Today is the birthday of one of America’s first female comedy stars, Alice Howell (Alice Clark, 1886-1961). A New York City native, she appeared in vaudeville and musical comedies until her husband’s ill health necessitated a move to a warmer climate. They moved to Los Angeles, where Howell was hired by Keystone in 1914. She (and, initially, her husband) immediately began appearing in small roles in comedies starring the likes of Charlie Chaplin and Mabel Normand.
Howell’s ludicrous appearance (she was 5’2″ , with a large matt of frizzy hair piled on top of her head) rapidly helped her gain attention; the fact that she was also a funny comedienne was not immaterial, either. At any rate, she stood out. Pathe Lehrman was the first producer to spot her potential and star her. Starting in 1915, she moved through a succession of situations at various studios, L-KO, Universal, Emerald (her own company), Reelcraft, and then freelancing. Her last film was 1927′s Society Architect for Fox. With her distinctive comedy walk and personality, she was often called such things as “the female Charlie Chaplin” but Chaplin’s degree of superstardom was not to be her portion. No matter — she had invested her money in real estate. By the time sound came in, she had amassed much property, and she was to spend the remainder of her working life managing her holdings.
Howell’s daughter Yvonne also got her start working for Mack Sennett as a Bathing Beauty. She was to marry George Stevens, then a cinematographer for Hal Roach, later a major film director. Yvonne Stevens passed away in 2010 at the age of 107.
Now, here’s Howell in one of her funniest extant comedies, One Wet Night (1924):
Steve Massa’s swell new book Lame Brains and Lunaticshas a whole chapter on Alice Howell. Look for a review here in a few days!
Today is the birthday of Frank Capra (1897-1991). While the films of his peak years of the 1930s and 40s are almost universally known, many don’t know that he began his career in silent pictures, and actually made a mark in them. After getting a degree in chemical engineering, serving in World War One, and riding the rails as a hobo awhile, the Sicilian born Capra broke into films in the San Francisco area, doing odd jobs and actually getting to direct a couple. His first Hollywood work was for Harry Cohn (prior to the establishment of Columbia, where Capra was later to make his mark).
His first serious creative work though was for Hal Roach starting in 1924, where Capra was a gag-writer for the Our Gang series. The following year he went over to Mack Sennett, where he contributed to such boffo outings as Super Hooper -Dyne Lizzies before becoming part of the creative team assigned to build up the character of star comedian Harry Langdon. When Harry Edwards walked away in 1926, Capra was bumped up to director and made his first feature The Strong Man, starring Langdon. The film was a critical and box office smash, voted one of the ten best of 1926. The film is a classic; one of the masterpieces of the silent era. Their follow up feature Long Pants (1927), did slightly less well but was still a hit. Unfortunately at this stage, Langdon fired the hot-headed, plain-spoken Capra and the two parted ways.
Capra directed one more silent feature For the Love of Mike (1927) starring Claudette Colbert and Ford Sterling, but it failed at the box office. Fortunately, Harry Cohn re-hired him at this stage to help him make talkie features at his newly formed Columbia Pictures studio. The two men were the making of each other, and the rest was history.
And now, without further ado, The Strong Man, directed by Frank Capra:
Today is the birthday of silent comedy actor and director Malcolm St. Clair (1898-1952). St. Clair was raised in a Laguna Beach artist colony founded by his father, a successful architect and watercolorist. He followed in his father’s footsteps by becoming a newspaper cartoonist, which led to his being hired at Mack Sennett’s Keystone in 1915 (the fact that he was 6’7″ tall and lean was certainly in his favor). He appeared in size appropriate roles (sometimes billed as “Slim”) in nearly 20 shorts there, as well as the feature Yankee Doodle in Berlin.
He had a brief stint at Roach in 1918 before returning to Sennett and various other studios for a while. By 1919 he was directing. He made several pictures at FBO including six starring Carter de Haven. Two notable early efforts include two Buster Keaton shorts, The Goat (1921)and The Blacksmith (1922), co-directed with the star. By the mid twenties, he was a top Hollywood director at paramount, turning out “sophisticated” comedies with the likes of Adolph Menjou, Pola Negri and Clara Bow. The most famous of these today is the original version of Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. In 1929, he directed the first (silent) version of Harold Lloyd’sWelcome Danger. He continued to direct mainstream but now-forgotten pictures straight through the talking era. His last most notable efforts were four of Laurel and Hardy’s late pictures at Fox: Jitterbugs (1943), The Dancing Masters (1943), The Big Noise (1944), The Bullfighters (1945).
Today is the birthday of actor Taylor Holmes (1878-1959). He started out by acting in one-act playlets in vaudeville. He started out in 1899 at Keith’s Theatre in Boston, and then spent a few months in English music hall. By 1900 he was starting to get roles on the legitimate stage, appearing in 3 dozen of them through 1946. During that time he continued to work in vaudeville occasionally; he was on the bill at the Palace during it’s opening week in 1913, for example. From 1917 until his death he also enjoyed a flourishing movie career, with prominent turns in such films as Nightmare Alley and Gentleman Prefer Blondes.
I risked the fate of Myrtle Wilson this morning as I walked down the street re-reading The Great Gatsby on the way to work. At 182 pages the paperback edition is an easy thing to re-read, and I periodically do so (in contrast with, say, the last novel I read, Dickens’ 900 some odd page Our Mutual Friend). We’ll return to the subject of the book’s compact spareness presently. At any rate, as I walked down the street reading the novel, I passed another man about my age, walking down the street in the opposite direction playing the ukulele. Something is in the air; has been for a long time now. People are nostalgic for the time of their great grandparents and their great-great grandparents. (At least the people I surround myself with are).
What’s remarkable I think is the extent to which Fitzgerald causes us to permanently identify decadence, glamour, wealth and so forth with the 1920s. In reality, what was notable about it in Fitzgerald’s time was that it was unprecedented. But aside from the years of the Great Depression, it’s not like the party ever really stopped. If you try to tell me there was more wealth or hedonism or senseless folly in the 1920s than there is in 2013, I’ll scream. America is a nation so rich that our poor have an obesity problem. There is a town in West Virginia (America’s fattest) in which fully 50% of the inhabitants are as large as Charles Laughton’s Nero. Here in New York, people walk down the street with the universe at their beck and call, looking at photo albums, listening to symphonies, chatting with friends on the telephone…and yes, reading novels and playing the ukulele. A fitting time then (as good or better than most others) For Baz Luhrmann to revive Gatsby. But before we get to his, let’s look at the road that leads to West Egg.
The original cinematic version of The Great Gatsby was released one year after the 1925 novel was published. It’s generally said that Fitzgerald died in 1940 feeling that Gatsby was a failure. On the other hand, it WAS turned into a Hollywood film almost immediately. And not a shabby one; it’s full of stars, stars we still know like Warner Baxter,William Powell,Georgia Hale (fresh off The Gold Rush) and Eric Blore.
Unfortunately, it is a lost film, and it’s a shame because I get the feeling that in some ways it might be the best version. Certainly the decor and atmosphere are right in a way that subsequent versions can hardly hope to compete with. But there’s also this. Fitzgerald’s novel is written in a vague, almost sketchy style. It’s fragmentary and poetic, gossamer. The 1974 and 2000 versions seem to miss the boat by being overly literal and realistic. Pantomime might be one way to get back to that quality of simplicity; another might be opera.
At any rate, here is the only known existing footage of that film, the original trailer:
23 years later came the 1949 version. This one still exists but is unavailable. The trailer below gives us clues. It seems to play up the gangster angle, even depicting Gatsby (Alan Ladd) participating in Al Capone style shoot-outs with a tommy gun. This was in keeping with the noir spirit of the movie’s own time. I think it’s hilarious that Shelly Winters played Myrtle — it’s virtually the same thankess, doomed working class “other woman” she played in A Place in the Sun a couple of years later. Since an entire generation had passed since 1925, the film also treats us to a history lesson on the Roaring Twenties, a technique Luhrmann would revive for the current version:
Then there is the best known version, the soporific, forgettable 1974 version, as sleepy as a summer day. It’s visually stunning. (A good chunk of it was shot in the mansions of Newport; one of the teachers from my high school is in it as a very prominent extra). Mostly the film suffers from gross miscasting. Robert Redford doesn’t have the depth for Gatsby. Mia Farrow doesn’t have the shallowness for Daisy. Bruce Dern is bad for Tom: though he is certainly capable of being boorish. But he doesn’t seem like an aristocrat. I’d sooner cast him as the car mechanic George Wilson (though Scott Wilson is already pretty perfect in the role). Sam Waterston is Nick and Karen Black is Myrtle, also pretty well cast.
At any rate, here’s the trailer for that one.
The 2000 A & E television version is a minor thing, as all such productions are, and completely forgettable (as in, I think I saw this, or some of it, and I struggle to remember much about it). Though this version is much better cast, at least in terms of type. Martin Donovan is an excellent Tom, with those brooding, blazing eyes, and Mira Sorvino with her frivolous prettiness is an apt Daisy. A very young Paul Rudd is a great choice for Nick (better in fact than the goofy-looking Tobey Maguire who plays him in the current version. The black hole in the middle of the tv version is Toby Stephens. An enigma? I’ll say! A phantom, who has left nothing behind! At any rate, the entirety of this version can be viewed online in chapters. Here’s the first part:
Catching wind of early criticisms, I promised the other day that I would cut Baz Luhrmann’s new Gatsby some slack. No can do! I saw what I saw and I calls ‘em like I sees ‘em. My pre-formed opinion going into it was, “Hey, updating the music is a valid idea. It worked great in Moulin Rouge” and also “Visual style is what he’s all about, surely that’s a good match for that glittering time period the Roaring Twenties.”
What I did not anticipate is that I would not take to even the visual style of the movie. If I were going to be doing a highly visual, CGI-drenched, subjectively-told version of The Great Gatsby I’d go right to that famous cover of the novel designed by Francis Cugat. The painting was finished before Gatsby’s last drafts; Fitzgerald was said to have loved the image so much, he wrote the book to match the COVER. Barring that…Cubism, Expressionism, Art Deco were in the air. I don’t feel like I saw any of that in the movie. Mysteriously, the sensibility reminded me like a sort of exhausted retread of ideas expended in Moulin Rouge. A fast pace, a blur of color, these are thematically appropriate. But somehow the whole thing comes off more like a Warner Brothers cartoon. This is The Great Gatsby as directed by Tex Avery.
To be fair, this may be a work for people who like Baz Luhrrman, but for lovers of Fitzgerald and his writing, not so much. Which is ironic because Luhrmann seems to love writers. He adapted Shakespeare. A writer was the hero of his last movie. And in this one, he makes Nick Carraway into a stand-in for Fitzgerald. But for someone who seems to love writers so much, he doesn’t seem to trust them or their craft a great deal. In Gatsby, he does everything in his power to undermine, drown, overwhelm, dump salad dressing on, and compete with Fitzgerald’s language. The experience is like sitting in an auditorium listening to Fitzgerald read aloud from his novel, while Luhrmann sits next to him playing a trombone solo. Luhrmann’s sensibility is graphic and aural, as though he were pre-lingual. So much so that he can’t resist the temptation to send graphic representations of Fitzgerald’s text crawling across the screen, much like musical notes in a cheesey bio-pic about a composer. I feel like I have seen something that was inspired by, is in dialogue with, is a noisy, adolescent love poem to, The Great Gatsby. But not quite an adaptation of the thing itself.
Futhermore, every moment in the film is dialed up to eleven. Yes, it is a movie about excess. Even so, he hits every note too hard, there is too much of everything. If you take scenes and characters and moments from the novel and inject it with steroids it is NOT the same story. A gentle summer breeze wafting in the window in Fitzgerald’s book becomes a virtual hurricane in Luhrmann’s hands. A forlorn stretch of road between West Egg and New York becomes a bizarre Martian landscape of smoldering mountains of coke and refuse, dotted with smokestacks as if we were in the coalfields of Western Pennsylvania. (Where the hell did he get that from?). Gatsby’s house looks like the Enchanted Castle at Disneyland. His big yellow car zooms through the streets of Gotham City like the Batmobile. The same with the people. Gatsby’s fake accent is too fake. Nervous upon seeing Daisy again, he is a Jerry Lewis level of nervous. And Tom, who ought to be sort of inscrutable (to the best he is able with his limited intelligence), becomes as obvious as a melodrama villain.
Luhrmann doesn’t understand the value of negative space, a pause, a rest. He can’t leave any moment alone. Gatsby and Daisy’s first kiss was ruined for me; I was distracted because it was staged in front of a green-screen tree. “What is this,” I thought to myself, “Bedknobs and Broomsticks? ” The climactic moment where Myrtle gets hit by Gatsby’s car is spoiled with cheesy pop music on the soundtrack. Just leave it alone! It’s mostly a shame because there are some fine performances buried underneath all the garbage and tinsel. If I were DiCaprio I would be beside myself with anger. He turns in a really great performance. He’s so well cast, and you can see it in his best scene, the best scene in the movie, because Luhrmann leaves it alone. The crucial scene in the Plaza where he and Tom (Joel Edgerton) have their climactic showdown. DiCaprio loses his shit and you see the murderer that Gatsby is capable of being. Some of the best acting he’s ever done. This contrasts with his apparent coolness throughout. He deserves an Oscar nomination, if anyone can find his performance under the gaudy curtain that obscures it. Also impressive was newcomer Elizabeth Debicki as the ice cool golf-pro Jordan Baker, the superficial spirit of the age.
As I said above, Tobey Maguire is wrong for Nick Carraway. Looking at the book this morning, it’s clear in the character’s voice that he is of the same class as Tom and Daisy, he shares a lot of the same attitudes and assumptions. He is man enough to take some interest in, to see some worth in, Gatsby, but that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t come off as privileged and glib and so forth. In fact, he absolutely MUST in order for his self-loathing to make any sense. And THIS is the quality that has been lacking in all of the existing adaptations of Gatsby I have seen so far. It is palpable in ALL of Fitzgerald’s writing, and I’ve never seen any director put it across. That is to say, the identity crisis such a non-stop party would cause to an essentially Puritan people. Few moderns perceive that psychic trauma because the big party in effect hasn’t stopped since then; we’re used to it. But in the twenties, this was a people just coming off Victorianism. Yes, there was an excitement, a release. But that was accompanied by constant doubt and guilt and turmoil, a feeling of sickness and corruption. Read The Rise of Silas Lapham. Conspicuous consumption was once thought to be un-American, even among the wealthy.
Thus, Luhrmann gets the crucial party scenes all wrong as well. He seems to be trying to recapture Moulin Rouge. But American decadence and excess was and is not the Parisian sort, although it attempted to emulate it in the early twentieth century. Jazz Age America was characterized by the wildness of an essentially conservative people, tempered by ancient Puritanical reservations and qualms, by such speed bumps as “taste” and “style” . Tuxedos, gowns, potted palms, yes. Drunkenness and adulterous sex in corners, yes. But the Limelight circa 1980s with a pulsing, throbbing techno beat–no. That’s the wrong vibe. So I think the haters in large part were right. This movie needs to drastically slow down, open up, take a breather, because though it does take place during modernism’s first heated flush, that era happened NINETY YEARS AGO. And if you say to me, like Nick Carraway, that you cannot re-live the past, my reply will be Gatsby’s: “Why, Old Sport! Of COURSE you can!”
July 20
Burlesque-a-pades
Burlesque Blitz
Kraine Theatre
July 27
Colonel Speck's 150th Birthday
Ithaca, NY
August 7
Trav S.D. & The Bathing Beauties
Coney Island USA
Sept 25
Talk on Vitagraph
Brooklyn Public Library
Who and What is TRAV S.D.
Trav S.D. n. 1. Travesty…parody, satire, burlesque and the grotesque. 2. A potent hallucinogen resembling LSD. 3. The alter ego of Donald Travis Stewart (born Westerly, Rhode Island, Nov. 8, 1965) * * * * * *
Performer, writer and producer Trav S.D. is the author of over 100 plays (for stage, screen and radio), 300 published articles, and the book "No Applause, Just Throw Money, The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous" (Faber & Faber, 2005). A frequent radio guest and public speaker, his voice has been heard on the Leonard Lopate Show (WNYC), The Sound of Young America (NPR), The Joey Reynolds Show (WOR), Cat Radio Café (WBAI), and a dozen others throughout the country. He interviewed over 200 artists on Indie Theatre Now, a regular podcast and tv show on nytheatre.com between 2007-2009. He has contributed to the New York Times, American Theater, the Village Voice, Time Out New York, the New York Sun, Reason, and many others, and now writes the downtown theatre column for The Villager/ Downtown Express/ Chelsea Now.
His plays include "The Fickle Mistress", recently workshopped at Dixon Place starring Molly Pope, Everett Quinton and Jan Leslie Harding, (with full production slated for 2014); "Willy Nilly" a musical about the Manson Family that was an extended hit of the 2009 NY Intl Fringe Festival and "House of Trash", published in Plays and Playwrights 2001. His works have been presented at Joe’s Pub (the Public Theatre), LaMama, Theater for the New City, NYMF, NYC Fringe, the Ohio Theatre (Soho Think Tank), HERE, Dixon Place, the Brick, Metropolitan Playhouse, and, regionally and internationally, in London, Portland, Minneapolis, Austin, Seattle, and Providence. He has also presented hundreds of New York's top variety acts through his American Vaudeville Theatre. His new book "Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy & Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube" will be released by Bear Manor Media in February 2014.
How's that prayer go? "God, grant me the serenity to charge on in there and start changing everything around so it suits me better!" Yeah... 6 hours ago
