Late risers, set thy DVRs. Tomorrow morning at 6am, TCM will be showing the 1930 Marilyn Miller vehicle Sunny, based on her 1925 Broadway hit of the same name. Miller only made a couple of movies before she died young in 1936, so I am eager to catch her in this for the first time.  In this story she plays a circus performer with a plethora of grooms.  Read more about Marilyn Miller in my full article here. 

To find out about  the history of vaudeville, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.

And check out my new book: Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube, just released by Bear Manor Media, also available from amazon.com etc etc etc

Filed under: Broadway, Circus, Hollywood (History), Movies, PLUGS, Television, Vaudeville etc. Tagged: Marilyn Miller, musicals, Sunny, TCM ]]> http://travsd.wordpress.com/2013/06/19/forecast-for-tomorrow-is-sunny/feed/ 0 travsd marilyn-sunny-blog1 safe_image chain%20of%20fools%20cvr%20front%20only-500x500 http://travsd.wordpress.com/2013/06/19/sorry-moe/ http://travsd.wordpress.com/2013/06/19/sorry-moe/#comments Wed, 19 Jun 2013 15:48:18 +0000 travsd http://travsd.wordpress.com/?p=29603 ]]>

Today is the birthday of Moe Howard (Moses Horwitz, 1897-1975). For the full skinny on Moe’s life as a performer and a stooge, see my full article here.

And to commemorate Moe’s birthday I thought it would be cool to share something people seldom see: clips of Moe in his dotage. Moe was still going strong in the early 1970s when he did this spot on The Mike Douglas Show. He still had high hopes of making another Stooges movie happen at this stage. Sadly, it wasn’t in the cards. But Moe demonstrated here that he still had the skillz.

To find out about  the history of vaudeville, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.

And check out my new book: Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube, just released by Bear Manor Media, also available from amazon.com etc etc etc

This is a story that contains much to make the amusement loving New Yorker blue on so many levels.

On this day in 1960, an amazing amusement park — larger than Disneyland – opened in the Bronx. Accurately billed as the “World’s Largest Outdoor Family Entertainment Center”, it was conceived and built by Cornelius Vanderbilt Wood (1920-1992), one of the early collaborators on Disneyland, which had opened in 1955. Fired by Disney executives in 1956, Wood took it on the chin and built this 205 acre park in Baychester.

The history themed park was built in the shape of the contiguous 48 states of the U.S. and broken into corresponding regions (usually representing those periods in the 19th century: Old New York; Old Chicago; the Great Plains (with a working stage coach line and a re-creation of the 1871 fire); Old San Francisco (with a re-creation of the 1906 earthquake); The Old Southwest (with wild west saloons and real steam trains); Old New Orleans; and a futuristic section called “Satellite City” with space rides. There was a tramway ride that could people over the “Rocky Mountains”. And, to boost attendance, in 1962, a bunch of conventional midway rides were added.

The project was apparently cursed. This is the Northeast. The park was partially built on buggy swampland. Bad weather kept it closed a good part of the year. These combined to make it difficult to make the park pay its costs back. Several of the exhibitions burned before the park opened. A stagecoach overturned, injuring ten people (snapping the spine of one of them) resulting in a costly lawsuit. When the park began to de-emphasize the history angle, some of the sponsors pulled out. Then in 1964, the New York World’s Fair opened in Flushing Meadows opened. That’s a lot of bad all in a row. Freedomland closed in 1964

What a bummer! It died right around the time Steeplechase in Coney Island closed and around the same time Astroland (with its similarity to Satellite City) opened. Was there just too much competition?  The hell of it is, I’m sure the failure of Freedomland convinced capitalists that investing in Coney Island was a bad idea for decades, and this is why the Disney people passed on the idea after careful consideration, and why Horace Bullard had a hard time getting backers or city support. So that’s one reason it’s unfortunate. But also…the Bronx could have USED such a tourist attraction. It has the Zoo and Yankee Stadium…something else must have been nice. By the way, I notice that the Zoo manages to make a go of it year ’round. How does it do that? A smart planner would have figured out to make the park pay during the winter months, as they have been trying to do with Coney Island right now. Live and learn. But I sure do wish I could have gone to to Freedomland.

There’s a cool photo spread at this web site: 
http://www.benros.com/images/Freedomland%20Images/freedomland.htm

And here are some cool home movies:

To find out about  the history of vaudeville, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.

And check out my new book: Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube, just released by Bear Manor Media, also available from amazon.com etc etc etc

Today is the birthday of the great Broadway playwright Philip Barry (1896-1949). Everyone knows his most famous creation The Philadelphia Story (1939), so I thought I’d share a few notes about a couple of his other scripts that have fallen by the wayside over the years. That is, if you feel like reading plays; people almost never do. I periodically make myself do so as a matter of professional necessity…

Holiday (1928), sparkling, witty and wise. A businessman is marrying into a rich family but throws a monkey wrench into the works by announcing that, having closed a big deal, that he wants to retire and “find himself”. In the end he hooks up with his fiance’s sister, who shares his nonconformist philosophy. Full of very funny lines and also poignant in parts. Was filmed for the screen twice, in 1930 and 1938.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1931) That classic melodramatic device, the ships that pass in the night. Bored wife of wealthy businessman in a rural location…a famous young doctor comes to stay with them while lecturing at a local college…a romance…an illicit child. Years later the doctor comes back when the child falls ill and learns the truth…will romantic love win out? No, she chooses the husband. This one is more of a drama but still full of Barry’s witty, sparkling dialogue, and even some philosophy reminiscent of Shaw…influence of Neitzsche and Bergson in a gobbledegook sort of way. He seems to have a fondness for the love triangle in most of his plays.

Today is the birthday of Jeanette MacDonald (1903-1965). The Philadelphia native took singing and dancing lessons as a child, sang in church and performed with a juvenile vaudeville act produced by her teacher Al White, called “The Six Little Song Birds” (or sometimes “The Six Sunny Song Birds.”)

In 1919 she got a job in the chorus of Ned Wayburn’s Demi-Tasse Revue . This led to another ten Broadway shows between 1921 and 1929 (the last was Boom Boom). Starting in 1929 her semi-operatic voice was put to good use in a number of popular musicals, many of them hearkening back to the early Broadway’s operetta days. Her first was the pathbreaking The Love Parade (1929) with Maurice Chevalier, Lupino Lane and Lillian Roth. Chevalier was to be a frequent co-star in her earliest films; later she was usually paired with Nelson Eddy. (When I was a kid they used to sell records of Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald on television, and we, being children, would be bewildered as to who would ever buy them. Why, old people of course. This was the 1970s, when there will still people around old enough to have enjoyed Eddy and MacDonald in their heyday). Other movies included The Vagabond King (1930), One Hour with You (1932), Love Me Tonight (1932), The Merry Widow (1934), Naughty Marietta (1935), San Francisco (1936), The Girl of the Golden West (1938), and Broadway Serenade (1939).

By the 40s her career was seriously slowing down; by the end of the 50s it had ground to a halt completely. Well, not completely — don’t forget, in the 1970s they were selling those records!

Here, from Naughty Marietta, perhaps the most famous song she was associated with, “Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life” by Victor Herbert:

To find out about  the history of vaudeville, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.

And check out my new book: Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube, just released by Bear Manor Media, also available from amazon.com etc etc etc

Today is the birthday of the great Mae Busch (1891-1946). It’s ironic that today she is best known for playing shrewish and unattractive wives in Laurel and Hardy movies; at the height of her career she was considered one of the legendary beauties and vamps.

A second generation vaudevillian from Melbourne Australia, Mae joined the family act “the Busch Devere Trio” in 1903, after the Busches had moved to the U.S. She left the act in 1912 to replace Lillian Loraine in the Broadway musical Over the River with Eddie Foy. In 1915 she started working at Keystone, where she became Mabel Normand’s best friend UNTIL the latter caught her red handed in bed with her fiance Mack Sennett. Busch is reported to have thrown a vase at Normand’s head, knocking her out of commission for several weeks.

Busch appeared in Sennett comedy shorts through 1916. After this she began to be cast in features where she gained her reputation as a vamp in such films as The Devil’s Pass Key (1920) and Foolish Wives (1923), both directed by Eric von Stroheim, and Tod Browning’s The Unholy Three (1925) with Lon Chaney. In 1926, after years of wild partying she had a nervous breakdown and broke her contract with MGM. Her star rapidly sank and she went broke. She want back into the comedy game in 1927, working with Hal Roach where she enjoyed her ten year association with Laurel and Hardy. After this she mostly played bit parts in films, sometimes unnamed or uncredited. Her last film was Ladies Man with Eddie Bracken in 1947. 

Here’s one of my favorite Mae Busch moments, which I talk about a bit in Chain of Fools as one of the clever ways sound could be used in a slapstick comedy. It’s from the 1929 short (their first talkie) Unaccustomed As We Are. She was the best, even if she did have a wicked streak:

And check out my new book: Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube, just released by Bear Manor Media, also available from amazon.com etc etc etc

To find out about  the history of vaudeville, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.

Originally posted in 2011. 

There was a long time there when the name “Paul McCartney” (born today in 1942) was to me like fingernails on a chalkboard. In my youth (and largely now), the Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear influenced John Lennon was the be-all-and-end-all. McCartney, in the words of George Harrison, was the “fruity” Beatle. You can hear it in the “Get Back” bootlegs — he sounds like a patronizing school teacher as he instructs his fellow Beatles in their parts. He’s not very cool. Actually, he’s not cool AT ALL. I mentioned him to Carla Rhodes (who knows from rock and roll) the other day, and a volcano’s worth of vitriol spewed forth. I heard my own voice at the age of 20 coming back at me.

Except…

The Beatles at their best, to me, were “an act”. In the sense of a show business, or vaudeville act. When they were under the disciplined management of Brian Epstein (one of the great impresarios, I think), they were to me, magical, perfection.  Epstein put them in suits, got them matching haircuts, codified their brand, set up worthy movie vehicles, booked them in old music halls and on tv variety shows. The instant Epstein died, they began to disintegrate as an act, and became (while frequently as creative) progressively more self-indulgent and occasionally quite bad. From that point, McCartney represented the only force for cohesion and a desire to maintain the act qua act. Admittedly, his is a conservative influence, but it is the easiest to reconcile with the larger show biz tradition we write about here. And while Harrison’s music blossomed in the post-Beatle era, I note that Lennon’s music, without McCartney’s countervailing  influence, became increasingly soporific as each year went by.

McCartney, whose father had been a piano player in a ragtime band, is a good example of someone who would have been just as happy making music in 1917 as 1967. The fact that he was in a rock and roll group was an accident of timing, not of temperament. Lennon was the rock and roller. When McCartney was still a teenager, he wrote “When I’m Sixty-Four”, which could easily have been written twenty years before he was born. Over the years, he revisited the style many times: “Your Mother Should Know” (1967); “Honey Pie” (1968); “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer (1969 — the song that Harrison called “fruity”); and “You Gave Me the Answer” (1974). It was at his instigation that the album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band be structured like a vaudeville show, and that, in Magical Mystery Tour , the band, dressed in white tie and tails, comes kick-stepping down a big Ziegfeld-style staircase (see above).

Yes, the latter image is repulsive and wrong — “Clams,” as Lennon once said in another context, “in a movie about frogs”. I’d much rather see them in the Sgt. Pepper get-ups. But the larger idea — that this act has some relationship to that which came before — is important. Even in their rock and roll days, they were doing songs by Fats Waller, and numbers from Broadway shows in their set. It is a good sign to me that children love the Beatles, as they universally seem to.  McCartney is the one with the driving ambition (even if his talents are largely superficial). It was he who brought in the great playwright Joe Orton to write their  third movie, one of the great unrealized projects of the sixties. It is he who wanted to make “Abbey Road” more than just another collection of songs. I love that in his later years he attempted classical music, and I love that he is now Sir Paul — a pillar of the nation that gave us Shakespeare, Dickens, and Chaplin. By contrast, Lennon’s return of his MBE over “Cold Turkey”s low ranking on the record charts seems puerile and unworthy. And this would seem to be the definitive difference between me and a me who’s half my age. I have an internal generation gap!

(For related posts, see Lennon, Ringo Starr, Vaudevillian, and George Harrison: Living in the Material World).

To find out about  the history of vaudeville, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.

And check out my new book: Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube, just released by Bear Manor Media, also available from amazon.com etc etc etc

Originally posted in 2011. 

Born on this day in 1896, Blanche Sweet was raised in a vaudeville and theatrical family, making her onstage debut at age 4. In 1909, she began working for Biograph Studios, becoming one of D.W. Griffith’s premier actresses. (She starred in scores of films for him through 1914. Today Judith of Bethulia would be the most famous). After this, she moved to Paramount, where she starred in numerous films for Cecil B. Demille. Sweet was one of the top actresses of the silent era, but when talkies came in, her career began to sputter. She had a flashy, melodramatic turn in the 1930 musical Show Girl in Hollywood which the Countess and I caught at the Film Forum a couple of months back. Here is the Countess’s astute review. After this, Sweet continued to act for a while on stage and on radio. Towards the end of her life she retired, passing away in 1986.

And now Judith of Bethulia:

To find out about  the history of vaudeville, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.

And check out my new book: Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube, just released by Bear Manor Media, also available from amazon.com etc etc etc