Jerry Lewis receives French Legion of Honor on 80th birthday

That would understate it. (I've read the script.)

He did write and direct the most inventive Hollywood comedies of the early '60s. Then the Muse left and the Percodan didn't.

about six people alive have ever seen the rough cuts

http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/features/jerrylewis.asp

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/03/lewis.html

Godard liked him better than Chaplin and Keaton (well, I stop short).
If you can't get with his style, know he invented the video-assist (the monitor that let directors watch takes immediately), and the main set in The Ladies Man -- a cutaway, full-scale sorority house -- is the achievement Wes Anderson fumbled with the Life Aquatic sub.

Will check out the Ladies Man - I like cutaway sets...

Is it supposed to be some weird queen-y gay stereotype?

Eric H "gay nerd" theory to thread!... It was fairly common for many successful comics who preceded Lewis to mince or be femme at least part-time -- Bert Lahr, Eddie Cantor, Jack Benny. Don't have any queer theory articles on JL handy tho.

My one and only experience with a Jerry Lewis film is from my 7th or 8th birthday when my father took me to the movies with my sister, two brothers and older nephew. Of course, the idea was that I got to pick the movie because it was my birthday but when we got there and I said I wanted to see the Jerry Lewis movie everyone flat out refused and said that if I really wanted to see it I could go see it but theyd be in another theatre watching another movie.

My wife's a huge JL fan, me not so much, although I appreciate what he did as a writer/actor/director.

harry shearer's seen it and he described it as "indescribable."

phil you're not the only one... especially after reading this thread: Is indie/underground music any less looksist than chart pop?

You know what to do.

New DVDs: Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis

By DAVE KEHR
NY Times

Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis Collection
Volume 2

More than half a century has not proved sufficient to solve the mystery of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, nor to diminish their appeal. The mismatched pair — the smooth crooner and the squeaky kid — burst out of the smoky nightclub scene of the late 1940s and almost instantly became the dominant entertainers of postwar America. Martin and Lewis conquered movies, radio, the record industry and, not least, the emerging medium of television, the growth of which roughly paralleled their success.

Paramount Home Video has now released the second and presumably final volume of its “Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis Collection,” which consists of five films from the last years of their partnership: “Living It Up” (directed by Norman Taurog, 1954); “You’re Never Too Young” (Mr. Taurog, 1955); “Pardners” (Mr. Taurog, 1956); and the two films that Martin and Lewis made under the direction of Frank Tashlin, perhaps the most creative comic stylist of the 1950s, “Artists and Models” (1955) and “Hollywood or Bust” (1956).

(Missing in action are the team’s 3-D movie, George Marshall’s 1954 “Money From Home,” and Joseph Pevney’s 1954 “3 Ring Circus,” the first of their films in Paramount’s “Motion Picture Hi-Fidelity” process, VistaVision.)

It’s a remarkable collection, not least because Paramount has gone the extra mile and remastered “Artists and Models” and “Pardners” from original eight-perforation VistaVision elements, just as Paramount did with its magnificent reissue of Alfred Hitchcock’s “To Catch a Thief” a few weeks ago. The images are crystal clear, and the vivid Technicolor almost erupts from the screen. By contrast, the transfer of “Hollywood or Bust,” made from normal 35-millimeter elements only three years ago, looks soft and dusty, though still quite watchable.

The technical stats are important, because they reflect a time when the Hollywood studio predigital technology had achieved its highest level. Prodded by competition from television, the studios joined the great American parade of bigger, better and best, turning out widescreen color films with stereophonic sound that made the fuzzy black-and-white of television look like a Model T parked next to the gleaming, tomato-red Chrysler convertible that co-stars with Martin and Lewis in “Hollywood or Bust.”

The huge interior sets constructed for a film like “Living It Up” — a reworking of the 1953 Broadway musical “Hazel Flagg,” itself based on the 1937 screwball comedy “Nothing Sacred” — gave Hollywood filmmakers an unusual degree of control over color, lighting and the partitioning of space. Daniel L. Fapp’s cinematography, Edith Head’s costumes and the art direction credited to Albert Nozaki and Hal Pereira all come together in the service of highlighting the blue of Janet Leigh’s eyes — a shade echoed or complemented by every space she crosses, every dress she wears.

Paradoxically, it was the greater volume of visual information with the high-definition formats — VistaVision, CinemaScope, Todd AO — that eventually forced filmmakers out of the studios and into real-world locations. If location photography meant better-looking backgrounds than the painted flats or rear-projection screens of the studios, it also meant that filmmakers had to curtail their creative urges in the face of unmalleable reality. The next generation of directors — many of whom came out of television, like John Frankenheimer, Sidney Lumet and Arthur Penn — quickly learned to capitulate, embracing the new realism that emerged in the ’60s and ’70s.

No such barriers faced Frank Tashlin, a former newspaper cartoonist who received his directorial training at the Warner Brothers animation studio. A filmmaker accustomed to directing Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and Porky Pig was, of course, right at home with Martin and Lewis, who brought their own cartoon universe with them. Tashlin was happy to provide them with an appropriately stylized world.

The central section of “Hollywood or Bust” finds Martin and Lewis driving that red convertible, the approximate size of a Swift boat, from New York to California, passing through an imaginary Midwest in which the skies are always blue, the road (before superhighways) is empty and inviting, and the haystacks and swimming ponds are overflowing with full-bodied calendar girls, sporting strategically abbreviated overalls. Here in seductive detail is America the Beautiful, the fantasy of ease and plenty and unbridled pleasure that the bounteous ’50s made almost possible to believe.

Tashlin was the most generous of satirists, a man who loved what he lampooned. The America he depicted was gaudy and vulgar, but undeniably fun. As a cartoonist, he was closer to Mr. Lewis’s comic persona (“Artists and Models” has a startling sequence in which a masseuse ties Mr. Lewis’s legs in pretzels, just as if he were an animated figure), and he continued to work with Mr. Lewis after the partnership with Martin dissolved. But Martin is more than a straight man in Tashlin’s films; he’s part of a dialogue between two ideas of the American male.

The contrast between Martin and Lewis is usually described in sexual terms: the sleek womanizer versus the gawky adolescent — the original 25- (if not 40-) year-old virgin. But to borrow some terminology from Claude Levi-Strauss (one of the few French intellectuals, it seems, not known to have written about Mr. Lewis), their pairing reflects that cultural division Levi-Strauss hypothesized between the “raw” and the “cooked,” with Mr. Lewis representing natural man with all his animal instincts and complete lack of self-consciousness, and Martin representing the end product of civilization and socialization, polished and upholstered, distant and cool, self-possessed and vaguely duplicitous.

If Martin was what America wanted to be — the young country suddenly pushed to the world stage, matching the Europeans and the Soviets with a manner and cunning of its own, a John F. Kennedy before the fact — then Mr. Lewis was what ’50s America was afraid it was, still a klutzy naïf, an overgrown child playing with dangerous toys. (The threat of nuclear war surfaces both in “Living It Up” and “Artists and Models.”)

Martin and Lewis’s friendship never seems less than genuine in their films, even when, as in the case of “Hollywood or Bust,” their last movie together, they were barely speaking on the set. Perhaps it is that warmth, that sense of collaboration and complicity between two fundamentally different characters, that gives these comedies their enduring appeal. These opposites not only attract; they also triumph. (Paramount Home Video, $29.99, not rated.)

I asked my French neighbor yesterday if it was true all French people actually loved Jerry Lewis. She rolled her eyes hardcore and said, "Oh GOD fucking yes. I will never understand France. I want nothing to do with Jerry Lewis." Then I asked her if she liked Jerry Lee Lewis and she said she was proud he married his cousin.

I still want to see The Clown That Cried.

Gah, The Day The Clown Cried. Altho in above post I initially wrote What the Clown Could Cry.

The mismatched pair... almost instantly became the dominant entertainers of postwar America.

Hello, YOUR GRANDPARENTS loved Jerry Lewis!!! He & Martin were a gigantic fucking deal. It's the same with Judy Garland, ppl now think no heteros ever liked her.

no one will ever see The Day The Clown Cried

this is how you know there's no God

I have a wish that in 30-40 years after he dies it will be released, or that what exists of it will be released interspersed with talking heads being all WTF at the very least.

xpost

They can and should see Living It Up, Artists & Models, and Hollywood or Bust however.

Abbott, what Lewis films have you seen?

Zero.

I would wager that his will instructs his estate to destroy the prints he keeps in a safe in his office, and that they'll do exactly that

xpost

so yer amazed that the French allegedly love him on the basis of...?

really, you kids and yr "Clown" obsession make this world lousy.

I do not trust anybody who is not personally, relentlessly obsessed with The Day the Clown Cried

J0hn D OTM.

83!

http://media-2.web.britannica.com/eb-media/85/90585-004-20A517BA.jpg

great scene:

http://elusivelucidity.blogspot.com/2009/06/so-many-options.html

Genius scene!!!

Jerry Lewis to Direct Broadway’s ‘Nutty Professor’
By Dave Itzkoff, NY Times

Hey, ladies! (And, also, gentlemen.) Jerry Lewis is headed back to Broadway, this time in the director’s chair. The veteran comedian, last seen in 1995 on a Broadway stage as Applegate in the revival of “Damn Yankees,” will direct a musical adaptation of his hit 1963 comedy “The Nutty Professor” that is planned for the 2010-11 season, the show’s publicists said in a news release. That film starred Mr. Lewis as the nebbishy Julius Kelp, who invents a formula that transforms him into the debonair Buddy Love. (A 1996 remake starred Eddie Murphy as the overweight Sherman Klump and his suave alter ego.) The musical adaptation will feature music by Marvin Hamlisch (“A Chorus Line”) and lyrics and book by Rupert Holmes (“Curtains,” “The Mystery of Edwin Drood”). A cast has not yet been announced.

84 today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuVVvEig2ic

Morbz if ever you are in Cleveland again, you should hang w/my wife. She is a MAJOR Lewis stan.

Cleveland twice in one lifetime is asking a lot. A-hoy-HOY! One in a row!

Ha! Luckily for you we also try to get to NYC at least once a year.

For Jerrypalooza?

yeah, when the Nutty Professor musical opens (I'm not expecting that to ever happen).

^^^ actually...

(it might, I'm sayin')

Have you been brought in to doctor the "Wipe the Lipstick Off" lyrics?

I know people who know stuff is all I'm sayin

it'd take some top shelf scotch to get any more outta me

http://barney.files.wordpress.com/2006/02/Robert%20Burns.jpg

... The Musical???

from Michael Musto's column last week:

"Hey, lady!" was the cri de coeur two nights later, when Jerry Lewis accepted a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Friars Club, turning the assembled throng into the world's oldest version of Jerry's kids. Jerry is the guy that a new comedy book, Another Fine Mess, describes as someone 1950s critics found "a further sign of the apocalypse: a grinning, destructive man-child, mostly incapable of speech, charming undiscerning audiences into helpless laughter." And those are all the reasons I'm a fan—and I'm not even French or undiscerning, thank you.

At the Friars event, the grinning man-child said he loves it when people tell him, "I grew up with you." As he explained, "People want to make contact with someone that they remember advanced their childhood through humor." He said that inspires him to keep doing it, while also making him want to be a responsible adult ("I try not to bang ladies in Chicago"). In fact, Jerry Lewis is living so cleanly, he's planning to beat George Burns's record of living to 100.

While he was very much breathing, I cornered Jerry at his table—where he sat next to Quentin Tarantino, and I am not making that up—and asked who'll star in the Broadway version of Jerry's schizophrenia-comedy classic The Nutty Professor. "I've got Michael Andrew," he replied. "He's great." And how did he find him, pray tell? "He found me," Jerry said, "but that's another story. Can I get another drink?" While he was busy with the waiter, I went home and looked up Michael Andrew singing a smiley medley of casino-ready love tunes on Jerry's telethon. He can definitely play the slippery lounge-singer character.

85 today. Still gives great quote:

http://www.lasvegassun.com/blogs/kats-report/2011/mar/16/85-jerry-lewis-remains-true-las-vegan/

Did he only recently let himself go grey? Good look on him, should have done that a while back.

And damn if you're not right about the quotes:

“Want me to tell you what would make Al Jolson turn over in his grave? That’s to see a marquee outside of a hotel, a huge marquee, saying, ‘Prime Rib $9.’ That (bleeping) marquee was put there for Andy Williams, or Steve and Eydie, or Frank, or Dean and Jerry. Prime Rib? What are you doing? You’re using that to advertise a steak? … You’re charging people $200 night to come to a town that has a steak on the marquee? (Slams a fist on table). Let’s go see steak tonight! It just boils my ass!”

Steak will be here all week!

i found a copy of this mag @ a book sale the other day -
http://www.ebay.com/itm/FOCUS-Chicago-Film-Journal-Hitchcock-Tashlin-Hawks-/220510132382#vi-desc

theres a footnotes section on the second-to-last page abt various projects, etc and one reads:

Finally, despite extreme production difficulties, Jerry Lewis has finished his pet project of many years, THE DAY THE CLOWN CRIED

miss you Jerry

(not the telethon)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IP59ZQdQZak

Flipped past it last night, thought, "Woo-hoo! Jerry!" and just as quickly remembered he was out of the picture.

Also, I'm upset that I can't find the clip from the year when he introduced Lynyrd Skynyrd by pronouncing their name phonetically ("lie-neerd sky-neerd").

Did anybody listen to WBAI (FM 99.5) from New York City this morning at 11am? No? OK, I'll summarize it for you. Hosts Janet Coleman and David Dozer welcomed Judy Graubart (ex-cast member of the Electric Company!) and Joshua White, who claimed to be a former producer of the Jerry Lewis MDA Telethon, to speak on the topic of comedy and charity.

Joshua White stated unequivocally that the reason Jerry Lewis no longer hosts the Telethon is that the MDA administration, which had always been composed predominately of gay men, reached a point where they could no longer tolerate the homophobic nature of Lewis's comedy, and so they fired him.

Joshua White also claims to be one of the three people who have seen the unedited footage of The Day the Clown Cried, which he says is terrible and no amount of tweaking could make it good.

That could be part of it, but I doubt humorless f______ts is the whole story

Limp wrists and ice buckets are a deadly combination.

Jerry's said many fucked-up and indefensible things over the years, but iirc he issued a more-sincere-sounding-than-usual apology for a homophobic joke he told on the air a couple of years ago. For whatever that's worth.

which he says is terrible and no amount of tweaking could make it good.

tbf, Jerry himself has said that too, publicly and repeatedly.

his joke on on Julio Iglesias's name in that bit is "Julio English-Ass"

Julio English-Ass

that's what 58 years onstage (to that point) gets ya

punchline of woman-who-went-to-doc joke a fairly progressive twist tho

(for him)

also, do not play that at work or you might be euthanized

I was otherwise pretty impressed with his stand-up manner, it's not really even his field but he makes it work

his field

http://www.suprmchaos.com/jerry-lewis_061006.jpg

I'm always "impressed" by him. This much is true.

89 yesterday! he's playing Nic Cage's father in a corrupt-cop drama!

http://deadline.com/2015/02/jerry-lewis-the-trust-nicolas-cage-elijah-wood-1201375459/

"Nic, why did you do my voice in Peggy Sue Got Married? You couldn't have given me a call, first?"