Book Review: Hollywood Obscura: Death, Murder, and the Paranormal Aftermath

Thrilling Days of Yesteryear goddess Thelma Todd had her motion picture career cut short by a mysterious death in 1935 that continues to mystify fans and provoke endless speculation even today.  Was the “Hot Toddy” murdered…or was her death merely a tragic accident?  There is no shortage of suspects for the murder theory (her ex-husband Pat DiCicco, business partner/lover Roland West…even mobster “Lucky” Luciano) but however you choose to explain Thel’s demise there’s certainly no argument that we lost a truly amazing talented actress-comedienne.

Thelma Todd with Charley Chase in
The Nickel Nurser (1932)

After Todd’s death, many witnesses have claimed to see her spirit floating around her old haunts (pardon the pun): the building that housed her restaurant, Thelma Todd’s Sidewalk Café, is the site of several sightings, in addition to the garage where her body was discovered, presumably after passing out from the deadly carbon monoxide resulting from her Lincoln Phaeton running inside.  (Not to mention a few bruises of unexplained origin.)  There are even reports that the yacht once owned by Roland West, the Joyita, has a rather cursed history—linked to Thelma’s demise (there are those that speculate that possible murderer West croaked Thelma on the boat before bringing her to the garage and setting it up to look like an accident).  If you have a strong interest in the supernatural, you’re going to enjoy reading Brian Clune’s Hollywood Obscura: Death, Murder, and the Paranormal Aftermath—a book due out this month that examines a handful of Tinsel Town deaths (George Reeves, Marilyn Monroe, Ramon Novarro, etc.) in page-turning detail and relates accounts of folks spotting these celebs still tooling around despite a change of address in The Great Beyond.

Author Brian Clune

Speaking for myself: I’m a tremendous skeptic when it comes to the paranormal.  To paraphrase Bert Lahr’s Cowardly Lion: “I don’t believe in spooks…I don’t believe in spooks…I don’t, I don’t, I don’t.”  So I was a little leery about the ghost aspect of the book…but even those who remained unconvinced about such phenomena will enjoy Hollywood Obscura, a refreshing read by an author whose other works include California’s Historic Haunts (co-written with Bob Davis) and who’s contributed to such TV shows as Dead Files and Ghost Hunters.  Brian Clune is also the co-founder and historian of Planet Paranormal Radio and Planet Paranormal Investigations, the website for which can be found here.  His book is well-documented, and I was particularly tickled by the fact that he drew on material from some of my fellow classic movie bloggers including fervent Shirley Temple disciple Page at My Love of Old Hollywood (where a lot of the Thelma Todd biography was borrowed—odd, in that I’d think Pagey would be a natural for Ramon Novarro) and the now-defunct The Silent Movie Blog, once owned and operated by Facebook compadre Christopher Snowden (now blogging at Television Diary).

The Los Feliz "Murder Mansion"

Hollywood Obscura isn’t all about celebrities.  It features chapters on would-be celebrities, like the legendary Black Dahlia, and some semi-celebs who achieved fifteen minutes of fame, as in the case of the notorious Manson family.  There’s even a section on the infamous Los Feliz “Murder Mansion,” a case whose particulars I was not familiar with, so it made for a pretty riveting read.  Rounding out the book are chapters on “Bugsy” Siegel, John Belushi, Tupac Shakur/Biggie Smalls, and recent TCM Star of the Month Natalie Wood.  (Since I’m one of those people convinced that Wood’s husband—Robert Wagner—introduced Nat to a deeper part of the ocean, I don’t mind telling you I was a little uncomfortable watching R.J. and daughter Natasha Gregson Wagner chat it up in between those Wood movies showcased on The Greatest Cable Channel Known to Mankind™.  But I digress, even though this theory of Wagner's possible complicity is touched upon in the book.)

Hollywood Obscura is a most diverting tome, one you’ll navigate it very quickly (I took it with me when my fadduh had to have some tests done at Athens Regional and had it finished by the time they were done poking and prodding him) while being thoroughly entertained all the same.  Published by Schiffer Books, a family-owned independent based out of Atglen, PA, Hollywood Obscura is also available from fine bookstores (Barnes & Noble) and those not so fine (you know the behemoth I’m talking about).  Many thanks to Meghan Schaffer for sending the review copy my way.

Book Review: Playboy Laughs: The Comedy, Comedians, and Cartoons of Playboy

“Since the launch of Playboy magazine in 1953, two elements have been remarkably consistent: the first is the celebration of nubile, female flesh and the second is Playboy’s involvement in the music scene.  The Playboy experience was never just about sex but about lifestyle, and music—particularly the finest jazz, a personal passion of Hefner’s—has always been an essential component of that lifestyle.”  So states the biography of author Patty Farmer, acknowledged to be the expert on the entertainment side (performers, television, etc.) of the legendary magazine that introduced the phrase “I only read it for the articles” into the American lexicon.  Farmer chronicled “the rise, history, and cultural impact of the Playboy empire, including the magazine, clubs, music festivals, and television shows” in her book Playboy Swings—published in 2015 after the success of The Persian Room Presents (2013), a history of the Plaza Hotel’s famed nightclub.

Lenny Bruce

Patty’s follow-up to Swings—which will be released August 3—is Playboy Laughs, a book that concentrates on the comedic side of Hefner’s empire.  (You don’t need to be familiar with the earlier book to enjoy Laughs, because there are some stories repeated here.)  I should be honest—when I requested a review copy (many thanks to my Facebook compadre Jeff Abraham at Jonas PR, who slipped me the freebie) of this book I thought it was going to be a little out of my wheelhouse at Thrilling Days of Yesteryear.  I’m pleased to admit that I was stupendously wrong, for Farmer’s exhaustive history of the funny men who entertained appreciative audiences since the first Playboy Club opened in Chicago in February of 1960 is crammed with wonderful anecdotes about such comedy greats like Joe E. Lewis and Lenny Bruce, and first-hand accounts from stand-up practitioners as Professor Irwin Corey, Phyllis Diller, Tom Dreesen, Jackie Gayle, Shecky Greene, Dick Gregory, Joan Rivers, and Larry Storch.  Laughs is one of the best books I’ve read on stand-up since devouring my pal Kliph Nesteroff’s amazing The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels and the History of American Comedy.

Milton Berle

Playboy Laughs is one of those books where you want to keep a notepad nearby while reading it so you can jot down anecdotes and relay them back to like-minded friends interested in the history of laughter.  One of the anecdotes that leapt out at me concerns “The Thief of Bad Gags” himself, Milton Berle—who had a bit of a reputation of being a putz where his contemporaries were concerned.  Comedian Lou Alexander relates that when he was just starting out in the business, “Uncle Miltie” took an interest in him and his act, telling him: “I’m going to come to your show once a week and I’m going to heckle you, but before the show I’ll go to your dressing room and tell you what I’m going to say.  This way you can think of things to say back to top me.”

That’s what this great man did for me.  He came in once a week and heckled me, and I’d have all the toppers—the comebacks—and I’d kill him.  He’d put on this act: “Look at this kid, he’s got me again.”  And after a while, maybe two months, it was all over town that there’s some schmucky kid killing Milton Berle at the Interlude.  I loved him.  I loved Berle.  We became very good friends. He was a great guy, a very kind, sweet man.

The Vagabonds

Another memorable passage from the book that has a tenuous connection to a recent post here at TDOY concerns the comedic vocal group known as The Vagabonds, who certainly made their presence known in the 1946 feature film People are Funny.  I’m not quite as enthusiastic as Farmer about the aggregation (she describes their People antics as “scene-stealing”—we’ll just have to agree to disagree on this one) but she did provide me with some information with which I was not aware, in that the quartet were favorites on the nightclub circuit (they even owned and operated nightspots in Frisco and Miami) and made quite a few appearances on shows telecast during the medium’s Golden Age (The Colgate Comedy Hour, Ed Sullivan, etc.).  “With the Vagabonds, even tempo was funny,” she writes.  “Sometimes they’d go so fast they left the audience breathless; other times, they’d drag out a song at such a snail’s pace that listeners would sweat with suspense.  It was as if they were comic masters, always carefully calibrating their punch lines.  And of course, that is exactly what they were.”

Jack Cole's famous comic book creation

Farmer’s wonderful stories about the people and personalities that either started their careers at the Playboy Clubs or benefited from those venues after already establishing themselves comprises a goodly portion of Playboy Laughs…but there are also chapters dedicated to those artists who created the cartoons that dotted the pages of the magazine.  One of particular interest to me was a nice little history on Jack Cole—which I’ll need to set up here.  I knew of Cole because I owned a copy of Jules Feiffer’s The Great Comic Book Heroes as a kid (coincidentally, Feiffer also contributed cartoons to the magazine and has some wonderful stories in Laughs) as a kid and knew Jack as the creator of Plastic Man.  My father, on the other hand, was more familiar with Cole’s post-Plastic Man career as—you guessed it—a prolific contributor to Playboy.  (I admit—my opinion of the old man gained a few points that day after finding out he used to read the mag.)  Other cartoonists discussed in the pages of Patty’s book include Doug Sneyd, Shel Silverstein, Dean Yeagle, Arnold Roth (whose work I knew from TV Guide—his stories about assisting Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder on Little Annie Fanny are priceless), and Al Jaffee (the legendary MAD artist was a contributor, too).

Hugh Hefner and author Patty Farmer

Farmer does a bit of a sidetracking with histories on Playboy artists like (Alberto) Vargas and Olivia (De Berardinis); a little beyond the scope of a book on both humor and cartoons, in my opinion…but it won’t detract from your enjoyment—and it’s always nice learning about something you didn’t previously know.  As someone who actually did read Playboy for the articles (I had a subscription while I was in college—born to be mild, baby) I enjoyed Patty’s concluding take on Hugh Hefner (an informative history on the man and his pajamas) because anyone who put as much time, money, and effort to restore the Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes films my mother loves to watch is aces in my book.  Classic movie fans might get a kick out of this observation of Hef in Playboy Laughs: “At ninety, he carries on the tradition he started decades ago of hosting weekly dinners followed by movies.  One night a week is set aside for a current film, another for a classic film noir, and sometimes a third is added for one of his favorite Chaplin movies.”  Gooble, gobble, one of us!

Don’t touch that dial!

If you were going to request that a “coffee table book” be written on old-time radio, I can’t think of a more suitable author than my fellow Radio Spirits contributor and nostalgia expert Martin Grams, Jr.  I’ve joked in the past that my pal Martin is “the Isaac Asimov of OTR books,” due to his prolific output of tomes on that subject.  Honest to my grandma, every time I’m in communication with the guy he seems to be in the middle of writing yet another invaluable pop culture reference contribution.  You’ll find many of his books—ranging on topics from radio’s Duffy’s Tavern to TV’s The Time Tunnel—for sale at his website…and this November 1, he’ll add another title to his overstuffed bookshelf with The Top 100 Classic Radio Shows, co-written with Radio Spirits founder Carl Amari.

The end papers for the book.  To paraphrase A Date With Judy's Oogie Pringle, "they look sna-a-zzy!"

(Someone once asked me to explain the Asimov reference—I got the idea from M*A*S*H actor Alan Alda, who, after encountering the science fiction legend at a social gathering, jokingly asked: “Shouldn’t you be writing a book somewhere?”)

When Ann Rutherford took over for Penny Singleton on
Blondie in March of 1949, she adopted Penny's bleached-blonde
tresses, too.  At left is Arthur "Dagwood" Lake and in the
middle is Jeffrey Silver (as son Alexander).

Coffee table books, as a rule, are rather simple in content (they serve mostly to show off photographs and/or illustrations), and serve as light reading for the occupants of the home or visitors to same—though they can be pressed into service to jump-start a little conversation at a party or get-together.  You’ll get much, much more with Top 100 Classic Radio Shows, however; it’s packed to the rafters with important history on a range of radio favorites from Abbott & Costello to X-Minus One, and includes loads of trivial ephemera to go along with its profuse presentation of photographs.

The book is split into six sections: Comedy, Drama, Mystery & Detective, Sci-Fi & Kids, Variety, and Western & Adventure.  For each show, the reader is provided with a cast list, airdates, and additional program background; many of the shows discussed also feature a “Did You Know?” section which offers up tantalizing trivia for those of us who eat that sort of thing up with a spoon.  Included with Top 100 Classic Radio Shows are three CDs with vintage old-time radio programming (not dissimilar to the bonus disc that accompanied Leonard Maltin’s The Great American Broadcast) and a website where you can download additional broadcasts (mentioned in “call-outs” in the sections of the shows listed) for additional hours of listening enjoyment. 

Martin was swell enough to send me a .pdf proof of the book (I don’t have a coffee table—just an ottoman) and what I saw in that digital copy convinced me that fans of old-time radio will not want to be left out when the big book hits the streets in November.  Simply put, it strikes the perfect balance between essential and informative OTR reference material and page-turning pictorial.  (And really—how many more nature books can you fit on your table anyway?)  Pre-order this one at an Amazon near you.

Book Review: Candyfreak: A Journey through the Chocolate Underbelly of America

We had a total of nine trick-or-treaters ring the doorbell at Rancho Yesteryear this year.  Nine.  We had enough candy for nine hundred, of course; my mother has this habit of looking at the amount of candy she’s purchased each Halloween, and saying ruefully: “I don’t think this is going to be enough.”  This October 31, she actually ventured out that afternoon to get more candy…just to be on the safe side.  Suffice it to say, we were safe.  Very safe.

Now, in past years—this glut of Halloween candy would not have been a problem…because I would have made certain it did not go to waste.  If you’re a regular member of the TDOY faithful, though, you know that any future trips to Candyland for yours truly were nipped in the bud back in July when my doctor motioned for me to come a little bit closer in order to say “Psst…just between you, me, and the lamppost—you’re diabetic.”  (Let me just take this moment to thank everyone who bestowed well-wishes and empathies upon me at that time…particularly those who refrained from remarking “No sh*t, Sherlock.”)  So, we had this ginormous basket of candy sitting around Castle Yesteryear, and two of its subjects unable to enjoy the basket’s contents.  (The other member of the household, mi madre, doesn’t have much of a sweet tooth…but when the fever does hit her, she now buys the kind of candy I don’t like.)

So, as I was tossing a bit o’trash into the kitchen receptacle last week…my eyes laid witness to the saddest sight I have ever seen.  Mom had thrown away all the leftover candy.  The M&M’s (peanut and plain), the Snickers (regular and the peanut butter ones), the Butterfingers…murdered.  I was devastated.  I wept quietly, and gathered up the trash bag to take out to the bin on the carport, where I presided over a small Mass.  I’m saddened to report that the turnout for the funeral was not what I was hoping for; a couple of the neighborhood dogs ambled by (attracted to the candy corpses, no doubt), and I saw one of the kids on our street pedaling a bicycle in the distance.  Requiems can be a bummer.

The untimely demise of the Halloween candy prompted me to sit down with an e-book (another $1.99 bargain from BookBub) I bought back in June of 2015.  It’s called Candyfreak: A Journey through the Chocolate Underbelly of America, and it was written by an appropriately-named gentleman named Steve Almond (his other books include My Life in Heavy Metal and Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life: A Book By and For the Fanatics Among Us), an author and rock music critic.  First published in 2002, Candyfreak is an ode to one man’s mania for candy.  Almond has eaten a piece of candy every single day of his entire life, and is so obsessed he hoards 3-7 lbs. of the sweet stuff in his domicile at all times.  I knew Steve wasn’t just exaggerating about this in the opening pages of the book, where he says a silent prayer for the Marathon bar, “which stormed the racks in 1974, enjoyed a meteoric rise, died young, and left a beautiful corpse.”

The Marathon: a rope of caramel covered in chocolate, not even a solid piece that is, half air holes, an obvious rip-off to anyone who has mastered the basic Piagetian stages, but we couldn’t resist the gimmick.  And then, as if we weren’t bamboozled enough, there was the sleek red package, which included a ruler on the back and thereby affirmed the First Rule of Male Adolescence:  If you give a teenage boy a candy bar with a ruler on the back of the package, he will measure his dick.”

There are not enough words in my admittedly longwinded vocabulary to describe how much I loved—and miss to this very day—Marathon bars.  (I’m told that Curly Wurlys are similar…but I’ll guess I’ll never know.)  In Candyfreak, Almond channels his inner Roald Dahl and makes arrangements to visit the factories of those candies still being produced locally: Valomilk Bars in Merriam, Kansas; Idaho Spuds in Boise; Twin Bings in Sioux City, Iowa (the Palmer Candies company); Lake Champlain candies in Vermont; and Goo Goo Clusters in Nashville.  (The only one of these I have sampled is the last one; I’ve been told that there are Cracker Barrels that carry Valomilks but I’ve not come across one yet.)  Almond also drops in at the Annabelle Candy Company in Hayward, CA (not far from Steve’s original stomping grounds), makers of Big Hunk and Abba-Zaba bars (you might be familiar with this last one if you’ve ever watched Half Baked). 

Did Almond get a tour of the Big Three (Nestlé, Hershey, Mars)?  No, because all that chocolate espionage you saw in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (the 1971 original, natch) wasn’t just a fictional plot device; candy makers really do keep closely-guarded secrets.  (He was denied a tour at Boston’s Cambridge Brands—makers of Junior Mints, Sugar Babies, and Charleston Chews [Mom’s favorite when she indulges]—because Tootsie Roll Industries, which owns Cambridge, said “nothin’ doin’.”)

I’m sure you’re asking yourself right now: why on Earth would a guy who’s had to eliminate his sweets intake read a book about such forbidden fruit?  Well, I never said I was sane (and I have witnesses to back this up).  Candyfreak is such a wonderful read, and it brought back a flood of memories of those halcyon days of indulging in chocolate and candy fantasies.  Remember those mammoth candy counters inside the Sears Department Stores?  The one my mother always patronized had that section planted right where you walked in the front door!

“At about age ten, during a late summer visit to Sears to buy school clothes, I became aware of the concept of candy by the pound.  This was revolutionary.  Here were entire stalls of candy, naked as the day they were born, piled up two feet high and God knows how deep, glittering behind glass windows.  You might have thought I was staring at tropical fish in an aquarium.  Or you might have been the poor clerk forced to sit inside the Sears candy stand on one of the many ensuing Saturdays, which meant you faced an odd decision: whether or not to call security on the little, bubble-eyed goon circling your station, which was me.”

“Candy is the Dow Jones of the kid economy,” Almond asserts, as he reminisces with a trip in the WABAC when the Bubble Yum craze took over in 1975.  And, since it was the death rattle of that Halloween candy Mom chucked out in le garbage that nudged me toward reading this book, I identified strongly with this passage:

“Now: I’m a great lover of visual art and I will happily discuss the color and texture of Van Gogh’s Starry Night, or the way in which the eye is led into Goya’s The Third of May 1808, and even though I don’t really know what I’m talking about, I can get myself awfully worked up, just as a fine sentence or paragraph (say, the opening salvo of Henderson the Rain King) can send me into shivery rapture.  But I can think of nothing on earth so beautiful as the final haul on Halloween night, which, for me, was ten to fifteen pounds of candy, a riot of colored wrappers and hopeful fonts, snub-nosed chocolate bars and SweeTARTS, the seductive rattle of Jujyfruits and Good & Plenty and lollipop sticks all akimbo, the foil ends of mini LifeSavers packs twinkling like dimes, and a thick sugary perfume rising up from the pillowcase.”

My sister Kat can’t stand red velvet cake.  Which is odd, because I don’t have a problem with it…but I have noticed that due to the current sugar smackdown (the only consolation I have made is strawberry preserves on an occasional PB&J…because that sugar-free jam is abominable) I’m not quite as discriminating as I once was.  Kat posted on Facebook that red velvet cake is the disappointment of the dessert world, which led to a lot of jokes along the lines of “Circus peanuts are the red velvet cake of the candy world.”  So I was tickled when I read Almond’s declarations about MWM (Mistakes Were Made) candy, the top two examples being Twizzlers (“Twizzlers bears roughly the same chemical relationship to strawberry as the Vienna Sausage does to filet mignon…which is to say: none”) and Jujubes (“if one were to set Jujubes beside pencil erasers in a blind taste test, it would be tough to make a distinction, except that pencil erasers have more natural fruit flavor”).  Here are some others:

Marshmallow Peeps: A candy that encourages the notion that it is acceptable to eat child offspring.  Composed of marshmallow dyed piss yellow and sprinkled with sugar.

Circus Peanuts: Again, a marshmallow pretending to be something else, this time a legume.  An affront to elephants everywhere.

Boston Baked Beans: If you are an actual peanut, why are you not covered in chocolate?  Why are you covered, instead, in some kind of burnt-tasting brick red shell?  Is the idea that you resemble a baked bean supposed to make you more alluring?

Jordan Almonds: Who chose the color scheme, Zsa Zsa Gabor?

Chuckles: A fruit jelly the consistency of cartilage.  Explain.

Sixlets: Those of us over the age of, say, three can usually differentiate between chocolate and brown wax.

White jelly beans: I defy you to tell me what flavor white is supposed to signify.  Pineapple?  Coconut?  Isopropyl?

Lime LifeSavers: The LifeSavers people haven’t figured out by now that no one likes this flavor?  (Ivan’s note: I like Lime LifeSavers.  Or I used to, anyway.)

Author Almond also confesses a prejudice towards coconut—which makes for some giggly moments whenever he must sample candy bars containing his bête noire during his factory journeys.  “Oddly, it isn’t the flavor of coconut that troubles me, but the texture, and specifically that stringy residue utterly impervious to the normal processes of digestion.  In short, I feel as if I’m chewing on a sweetened cuticle.  Anyone who’s eaten a Mounds knows what I’m talking about.”  (I didn’t care for coconut when I was a kid…but I gradually warmed up to it as I started marching toward my dotage.)  Steve’s not a white chocolate fan, either; “When I was eight or nine years old I flew from California to New York with my twin brother, Mike.  We were unchaperoned and therefore doted on by the stewardesses, who snuck us each a special dessert from first class: a white chocolate lollipop.  I wolfed mine down and, shortly thereafter, got violently ill.  This was mortifying at the time.  In retrospect, I’m sort of proud of myself.”

“A few years ago, my friends began urging me to write a book about candy,” Almond explains at the beginning of Candyfreak.  “Their reasoning ran as follows: Maybe if Steve writes about candy, he will shut up about candy.”  Me, I’m glad he wrote about candy—because even though my intake is now limited to nocturnal flights of fancy, I tremendously enjoyed reading a book about one man’s confectionery passion.

Book Review: A Year at the Movies: One Man's Filmgoing Odyssey

I will hold you in suspense no longer: the reason why I did a review of Frank Conniff’s Twenty Five Mystery Science Theater 3000 Films That Changed My Life In No Way Whatsoever last week was that I purchased the Kindle edition shortly after the e-book I’m reviewing this week—A Year at the Movies: One Man’s Filmgoing Odyssey.  A Year at the Movies was penned by Conniff’s MST3K colleague Kevin Murphy, an actor-writer who was chiefly responsible for breathing life into “Tom Servo,” one of the “bots” on that cult TV series.  Kev’s book was selling for $1.99 at Amazon (thank you, BookBub) and I figured it was worth a flutter (it’s regularly $12.99); after making that purchase I spotted the Conniff book and thought: “Why not make this a double feature?”

I think Murphy has written the better book, to be frank (see what I did there).  It’s quite funny at times, and chronicles in detail an experiment Kev decided to conduct: going to the movies once a day, every day, for an entire year.  It’s a task best undertaken by professionals, because Murphy had to sit through some pretty awful movies in 2001 (the year he decided to embark on this project).  His impressions on these bits of cinematic offal often make up the laugh-out-loud portions of his book; since Warren Beatty has a new movie out, let’s look back at the last time he presented moviegoers with an example of why he should seriously consider just resting on his laurels:

“For the love of all that is holy and decent, do not see Town & Country.  Not at a theater, not on video, not on cable, satellite, or broadcast television.  Do not glance at it as it spills out from someone’s portable DVD player.  Put on an eye mask and go to sleep if it winds up on your flight.  If you are invited to dinner at your friends’ trim suburban home, grope through their personal belongings while they’re putting the sea bass and Italian eggplant on the grill; if you happen across a copy of Town & Country in their video collection, run out to the little Mexican fireplace back near the hot tub and hurl the tape in, laughing in the glow of the flame as the acrid black smoke of burning plastic ascends into the neighborhood.”

“It’s a movie about the depraved, perverse, and twisted excuses for lives that rich people lead,” Murphy writes further.  “It’s about them endlessly boinking each other.  Maybe I’m just different, but I don’t give a good healthy damn about rich people.”  Mighty proletarian of you, Kev, and I concur wholeheartedly.  In one chapter of the book (the book is separated into 52 chapters, representing each week he spent at the nabes), he has another MST3K alumnus, Mike J. Nelson, accompany him to a showing of Corky Romano…for the simple purpose of witnessing the audience suffer from its sheer awfulness:

“And please say some prayers for Peter Falk.  Peter plays Corky’s dad, a vile, bigoted yet loving mobster on his deathbed.  Now here’s a guy with a bookshelf full of awards, who’s worked with Wim Wenders, David Mamet, John Cassavettes [sic], Walter Hill; once the highest paid actor in TV history, a legend whose multifaceted career spans over half a century.

Now, at seventy-four, he does Corky Romano.

You know the risk he’s running?  He could croak tomorrow, and his obituary would have to mention that his last film was Corky Romano.  Would you want that in your obit?  It’d be worse than dying of syphillis [sic].  Think of poor Peter Sellers, whose last film was The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu and he never got a chance to live it down.  The lesson is to be careful in your old age, and if you are over sixty, under no circumstances do a movie starring Chris Kattan.”

(Falk, who shuffled off this mortal coil in 2011, was spared this indignity in the obits I read.)

Now—before you get the impression this is yet another book poking riotous fun at films that, in a saner world, would never promenaded before a motion picture camera, I need to tell you right off that A Year at the Movies is no such tome.  (For that, you should check out Mike Nelson’s Movie Megacheese.  Or if you’d rather read a better book [sorry, Mike—facts are stubborn things], acquire a copy of Better Living Through Bad Movies—penned by my good friends Scott Clevenger and Sheri Zollinger.  It’s not only available in Kindle form—and, as Mike “Mr. Television” Doran would say, an actual book—but an audiobook has just been released as well!)  A Year at the Movies is all about the moviegoing experience; sure, Murphy sits in a darkened theater…but that theater can be anywhere from the world’s smallest (the Terrace Theater in Timonee, New South Wales) to one entirely constructed of ice (at the Hotel de Glace, Beauport, Quebec).  Kevin channels his inner Morgan Spurlock (the Fairmont, WV who directed Super Size Me) by deciding to subsist on nothing but movie theater fare for a week (spoiler alert: it does not go well) in one chapter, and in another takes six different women (only one being his wife) to the same movie (Serendipity).

Kevin Murphy’s book is markedly superior to the one written by Mr. Conniff because his insights on going to the movies will stay with you long after you’ve returned A Year at the Movies to the bookshelf.  You’ll also get pearls of wisdom like these:

Classic movie insights: “I don’t think there’s one of us who does not see Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s monster, or Bela Lugosi as Dracula, unless you grew up with film-school snobs for parents and you envision Max Shreck [sic] as Nosferatu/Dracula, or, if you’re still a snob, Willem Dafoe as Max Schreck as Nosferatu or if you’re simply a loser, giant-haired Gary Oldman.  And in spite of Arnold Vasloo, the Mummy still carries Karloff’s face for me.”

On IMAX: “IMAX lost a lot of dough last year, and they’ll probably lose more this year, and it may just be—not to insult anyone—because they have the coolest film format in the world and all we get to see are bears and stuff!  Even the new president of IMAX Filmed Entertainment admitted in an interview that IMAX has been famous for making three types of movies: ‘Bear movies, dolphin movies, and seal movies’.”

On Merchant-Ivory: “Which would explain why the Paris was packed with Merchant-Ivory groupies: women, alone, white, overread, educated, snobby.  The kind who own Robert Graves’s autograph and have had their picture taken with Peter O’Toole at a book signing for his latest memoir, Dear God, But When the Hell Will I Die?  I think it’s a good guess that the women who attend the Thursday matinee screening of a Merchant-Ivory film at a theater in the shadow of Trump Tower are not sneaking out of their office administrator jobs; rather, they have Constanza taking the kids to dance lessons, and they just nipped out for the hundred-dollar salad plate at Aqavit before Drummond dropped them off at the Paris for a show with the girls.”

On drive-ins: “I’m hard on summer films, because I forget that people watch them simply to be distracted and sort of entertained, and since I can do this watching a ceiling fan, I bristle at paying good money.  But the drive-in cures all that.  It’s an event, a common experience, a picnic with the television on.  The admission was only three bucks and I saw four movies, so I won’t complain.  And besides, the young woman at the ticket booth looked at me and said ‘cool car,’ so already I had won the night.”

On the puzzling popularity of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Ivan’s note: I’ve seen the movie twice.  I don’t plan on going further than that.): “I hate The Rocky Horror Picture Show.  I never, ever liked it.  I don’t like the songs—face facts, they are all essentially the same tune, over and over again.  I don’t like the characters, except for Barry Bost-wick [sic] as Brad, who, contrary to what the audience screams, is the only cast member who is not an asshole.  I can’t stand the story, what little there is of it, as it decays into the sort of high school musical dreamland one can find oneself in if one has sucked down too much amyl nitrate.”

“Movies should be neither a waste of time nor a waste of money; that’s what television’s for.”  If you’re an individual who habitually attends movies the way they were meant to be seen—be it a single-screen revival house or what Murphy (and I) call “googolplexes”—I think you’ll cherish this book.  It’s filled with perceptive observations from a guy who made a damn good living hoisting a puppet over his head for nearly a decade.  (And no…I haven’t forgotten Professor Bobo, either.)

Book Review: Twenty Five Mystery Science Theater 3000 Films That Changed My Life In No Way Whatsoever

In retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have plunked down $4.99 to purchase the Kindle version of Frank Conniff’s Twenty Five Mystery Science Theater 3000 Films That Changed My Life In No Way Whatsoever.  It’s not that it’s a terrible book, you understand; some of it is quite funny in parts.  But once you’ve finished, you come to the realization that you’ve just digested a tome with all the nutritional value of cotton candy.  (There is, however, a reason why I bought this book…but it won’t be revealed until next week’s review, so stay tuned to this space.)

Frank Conniff is a writer-comedian-erelybout next week.e might make you want to wait until BookBub offers it up at a sale price, like the book penned by anothe who was hired as a member of the writing staff on Mystery Science Theater 3000—the cult TV classic in which people made snarky comments during cheesy science-fiction and horror movies—in 1990, a year after the series had made the leap to national prominence on cable’s The Comedy Channel (later Comedy Central).  (MST3K had begun in 1988 as an offering on Minneapolis’ KTMA-TV.)  Conniff then demonstrated a flair for the buskin playing “TV’s Frank,” the bumbling assistant to mad scientist Dr. Clayton Forrester (Trace Beaulieu), and was eventually assigned the task of selecting the movies that would be riffed on the show.  (Conniff once stated that he would often have to sit through twenty godawful films in their entirety to find the perfect piece of odious cinematic fromage for the MST3K treatment.)

“I could try to remember all the celluloid water closets I viewed, but I don’t think my psyche could survive such a tortuous thought experiment,” Frank writes in the book’s foreword.  “So I have narrowed it down to twenty-five films.  I will talk about the effect they had on me and how those films changed my life in no way whatsoever.  I will mention a few other movies that we didn’t riff on MST3K and also talk about any other useless crap that happens to pop into my head.”  I think Conniff should have bolded and italicized that last part of the sentence; I was looking forward to reading a book where the author gives us a history on the nuts and bolts of an entertaining TV show…and instead, he seems to be addressing the audience at an open mike night.

Occasionally, Conniff offers up some entertaining anecdotes on some of MST3K’s most notorious efforts—take this section on one of the show’s legendary bad movie takedowns, Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966):

I am partly responsible for Manos: The Hands of Fate’s status as one of the most famous bad movies ever made.  Knowing this, would you feel bad if you saw a temperamental Italian guy beating me to within an inch of my life in the middle of an open fire hydrant on a New York City street during a hot summer day?  If you saw me kick my feet through a car window as I was being strangled to death, wouldn’t you feel worse for the window than you would for me, knowing that I was one of the main reasons you are aware of Manos: The Hands of Fate?

It happened one day at the Minnesota offices of MST3K in beautiful downtown Eden Prairie.  I pulled a VHS copy of Manos out of a box of screeners.  I watched it and I knew it was a film that Mystery Science Theater 3000 had to do.  My colleagues agreed with me, and the world as we know it was never the same.  In the world of cheesy movies, Manos: The Hands of Fate is my original sin, and there’s not a rosary bead long enough to atone for what I did.

Other chapters in Frank’s book included such delightful slices of Camembert as It Conquered the World (1956), The Amazing Colossal Man (1957), Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964), and yes, the ever-popular Mitchell! (1975).  In his section on Bride of the Monster (1955), Conniff observes of the notorious Edward D. Wood, Jr.: “Yes, his movies are what noted film theorist Sergei Eisenstein would call batshit.  They are poorly written, directed and acted.  Anything that might be taught in a school for the arts was never taught to Ed Wood.  All of his movies would get a failing grade in a film class.  Hell, they’d get a failing grade in shop class.”

The problem I had with the book is…I’m only a casual MST3K fan.  I watched the show, but at the risk of courting blasphemy, I wasn’t what you would call a dedicated disciple.  It would have been nice if Conniff had included a plot description in each of the entries (on some of them he does…but most of the time he’s depending on whether or not you remember the movie).  In one such chapter on The Girl in Lover’s Lane (1960), he decides to do an extended riff on teen sexuality—as in an observation on the squeaky-clean June Allyson: “A good actress and a delightfully wholesome screen presence, she sent a message to America that said, in essence, ‘Hey, kids, I’ll keep it sexless up here on the movie screen, so you guys can make things as sexual as possible in the theater seats’…It’s quite appropriate that The Stratton Story helped many kids get to first base.”

At the end of each chapter, there’s an amusing device known as the “F.B.I. Obscure Reference Task Force Report”—which explains to the reader what some of the pop culture references that went sailing over their heads mean.  “Did you know that The Stratton Story is a baseball film that starred Jimmy Stewart and June Allyson?  No?  Then you probably didn’t get the first base joke.”  Some of this is genuinely hysterical (like explaining who Grady Sutton was), but to be honest—if you didn’t have a working knowledge of pop culture, I question your commitment to watching MST3K in the first place.

This book will probably be best-received by the MST3K faithful—and even though I wasn’t as committed to the show like some folks I know, it did provide some hearty guffaws while I perused its chapters.  But its skimping on substance might make you want to wait until BookBub offers it up at a sale price, like the book penned by another MST3K alum which I’ll talk about next week.

Book Review: W.C. Fields for President

Godfrey Daniel!  If it seems rather coincidental that this week’s Thrilling Days of Yesteryear book review earned a berth on the blog post schedule due to last week’s essay on Sally of the Sawdust (1925) …well, you’re half-right.  I mostly timed this to coincide with Election Day tomorrow, when our long national nightmare will be over…and the serious drinking can begin.  (So it’s understandable that I would think of Fields.)

I’ve tried to be good and not rant about politics on the blog this year (if you follow me on Facebook or Twitter, however, those outlets honor no such rule—which has not endeared me to some of my social media colleagues) but whatever side of the fence you’re on, I think we can agree that our rotted-with-corruption political system has saddled us with two of the most unpalatable president candidates in the history of the republic.  As such, any respite from this horrible contest—be it baseball or the 50% off Criterion sale at Barnes & Noble—should be welcomed with more than just open arms…it should be invited into the house and bade sit a spell.  (There are a couple of Blu-rays calling my name at Kino-Lorber, where they’ve considerably marked down some noir titles.  Better luck next time, B&N.)

A month or so back, I got a heads-up from BookBub that the Kindle edition of W.C. Fields for President was on sale for $1.99.  So, I plopped down two wrinkly dollar bills for the privilege of reading musings from one of my comedy idols.  (Had I not already voted via absentee ballot, I might have written in The Great Man as my candidate of choice.)

William Claude wrote his presidential manifesto in 1940—the same year that his former movie nemesis Gracie Allen (from International House and Six of a Kind) also threw her chapeau into the ring as a candidate for the Surprise Party (insert gratuitous Radio Spirits plug here).  It’s been reprinted many times in the interim (in several editions as, if I may quote friend of the blog “Mr. Television,” an actual book), because its parody remains timeless.  “I am truly a candidate with both feet on the ground,” Fields writes in President.  “I take no fol-de-rol from any man, much less any fiddle-faddle.  And when, on next November fifth, I am elected chief executive of this fair land, amidst thunderous cheering and shouting and throwing babies out the window, I shall, my fellow citizens, offer no such empty panaceas as a New Deal, or an Old Deal, or even a Re-Deal.  No, my friends, the reliable old False Shuffle was good enough for my father and it’s good enough for me.”

What I have always revered about The Great Man is his love of the English language (I’m constantly using Fieldsian exclamations in real-life, like “Mother of pearl!” and “Suffering sciatica!”) and it’s this affection for words that makes W.C. Fields for President an entertaining read.  The book is divided up into several sections:

1. Marriage: Since approximately half the population of the United States is made up of the fairer sex, any President worthy of the name should be familiar with the intricacies of the matrimonial problem—unless he wants to change his residence from the White House to the château de la chien (doghouse).

2. Income Tax: The major responsibility of a President is to squeeze the last possible cent out of the taxpayer; thus he should be at least familiar with the intricacies of the ransom notes that the Internal Revenue Department sends out each spring.

3. Resolutions: If the chief executive is not an expert in the art of making resolutions, how can he hope to break his (Ivan’s note: Or her) campaign promises gracefully?

4. Etiquette: At a state dinner, should the Nazi ambassador be served Chateaubriand a la Marseillaise?  Failure to understand this delicate question might well plunge our nation into war.

5. Physical Fitness: There is no room in the White House for a man who is afflicted with barber’s itch, spots before the eyes, hang-nails or housemaid’s knee.  A President must now how to keep himself fit—else who would throw out the first ball at the Washington Senators’ opening game?

6. The Care of Babies: Shall didies be folded square or triangular?  This is the burning question of the day, and the better the candidate understands the little darlings, the more competently he can decide the issue.

7. Business Success: If he knows nothing else, a President should at least understand the secret of success in the business world.  For, after all, what is the Presidency but a glorified business—or, at least, a fine racket?

Topicality in comedy is always endangered by an expiration date…so some of the humor in the Fields book doesn’t wear well (the Nazi ambassador gag is a good example) and there are inarguably jokes that will sail over the heads of readers who took a lot of naps in their high school history classes.  But as Shakespeare wrote in King Lear: “Jesters do oft prove prophets.”  There is much truth in W.C.’s political humor, including one of my favorites: “At any rate, here is my best advice on the matter of deductions: just count off on all your fingers all the items you suspect might be deductible…and then forget them, because they aren’t.”

This latest edition of W.C. Fields for President was re-released in February of this year from Taylor Trade Publishing (Rowman & Littlefield) and features a foreword by the “Raconteur to the Stars,” Dick Cavett.  I have a lot of respect for Dick, but I’ll admit he doesn’t endear himself to me whenever a major celebrity passes on…because they usually collar Cavett for a TV program to remember the deceased and he has difficulty shutting the hell up when needed.  But this bit in Cavett’s introduction did produce a rather audible snicker: “The late Dorothy Kilgallen, best known for being the ‘What’s My Line?’ panelist who reportedly punched a tiny hole in her blindfold to more easily identify the ‘Mystery Guest’ before anyone else could…”  (I laughed at this—and I realize this is going to make me sound like Cavett—because it reminded me of an observation Fred Allen once made to a friend about Kilgallen and Arlene Francis on Line: “They really want to win this thing!”)  Dottie wasn’t a fan of Fields, remarking “Friends keep telling me how funny W.C. Fields is.  I looked at two of his movies.  He is not funny.”

I suspect Kilgallen would get on famously with my mother—as for me, I agree with Mr. Cavett that Dot’s observation vies for “Dumbest Remark Ever Made About A Comedian.”  (Though Dick’s memory is jogged by a letter received at The Jack Paar Show—where he toiled as a joke writer—from a viewer asking why Paar kept inviting Jonathan Winters on.)  My point—and I do have one—is that if you’re a fan of W.C. Fields, you will love this book.  If not…well, I can’t help you.  In the immortal words of our candidate: “Remember, folks, cast a vote for Fields and watch for the silver lining.  Cast several votes for Fields and watch for the police.”  I thank you.