Beverly Gray's Blog: Beverly in Movieland, page 72

Shatner Claus is Coming to Town

You’d better not shout, you’d better not cry, you’d better not pout, I’m telling you why—William Shatner is coming to town! Yes, Captain Kirk himself has just  released a new holiday recording, with the unlikely title of Shatner Claus:-- The Christmas Album. Though he was not exactly raised as a Christian, Shatner has gathered established folk and pop musicians to help him celebrate the Yule season by way of Christmas songs, among them both kitschy secular ditties and such religious classics as “The Little Drummer Boy” and “Silent Night.”  Of course, no one accepts William Shatner as a serious singer. But his spirit is fully committed to this enterprise. As he puts it, “Every song – good or bad – has my interpretation with the desire to bend it a little or fulfill more fully its original desire.”
I’ve been interested in Shatner for years, largely because of his longstanding Roger Corman connection. Roger was my boss for nearly a decade, and when scholars wrote to ask about his gutsy production of The Intruder (1962), I handled the correspondence. As spelled out in my biography, Roger Corman: Blood-Sucking Vampires, Flesh-Eating Cockroaches, and Driller Killers, Roger was disturbed enough by the issues surrounding the desegregation of schools in the Deep South that he veered away from his usual horror fare to film the story (based on actual fact) of a rabble-rouser who descends upon a small Southern town to rile up the citizenry for reasons of his own. To play the charismatic but nefarious Adam Cramer, he chose Shatner, then a young Canadian actor best known for his stage work. The production company ran a real risk by shooting on location in southern Missouri, close to the Arkansas border, where the emotions of the citizenry were already raw. For three weeks cast and crew dodged sheriffs, eluded threats of violence, and sidestepped accusations that they were communists. Crowd scenes were shot in such a way that Shatner made his most incendiary speeches after the majority of locally cast extras had gone home. Shatner, whose performance won high praise from critics, emailed me years later that as a director, Roger was “wonderfully quick and efficient. He knew exactly what he wanted.” He recalled the making of The Intruder as “harrowing, stimulating, enabling, and frustrating. Because we shot the film on location in the South, we weren’t able to do a lot of the controversial things contained in the script.”
Shatner enjoyed himself less in 1974 when he co-starred with Angie Dickinson in a Depression-era cops-and-robbers romp, Big Bad Mama. His role is that of a con artist bubbling over with Southern charm, one who wins Angie away from the younger and more obviously virile Tom Skerritt. Though Skerritt’s nude sex scenes with Dickinson are genuinely sexy, Shatner was clearly panicked by the thought of performing in the altogether. Director Steve Carver has told me the lengths to which Shatner went to protect his modesty. (He tried covering his privates with gaffer’s tape, looking like, in Steve’s words, “jungle boy.”) He was also vain about his toupee, which led Skerritt (with whom he feuded) to find creative ways of knocking it askew as the camera rolled. He also antagonized Angie and everyone else, partly by playing fast and loose with his scripted dialogue.
All this, of course, was after the first three seasons of Star Trek aired, but before the series became a true cult legend.  And it was also long before William Shatner decided to teach the world to sing, in perfect Shatnerian harmony. .

Fiddler on the Reel: Tevye Goes Hollywood

As the holiday season approaches, it’s high time to pay tribute to one of December’s favorite films. No, I‘m not talking about It’s a Wonderful Life or Elf or Home Alone. This post is devoted to a movie that’s been a star of many a holiday singalong: the 1971 screen adaptation of the musical theatre classic, Fiddler on the Roof.  
The whole history of this long-running Broadway hit is captured in a fascinating book by Alisa Solomon, first published in 2013.  It’s titled Miracle of Miracles: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof. Solomon begins with author Sholem-Aleichem and his creation of a lovable Old Country dairyman named Tevye, burdened with three marriageable and strong-willed daughters. Her book’s first section, and its driest, explains early attempts to put the Tevye stories on the American stage. Section Two bursts to life with an insider picture of exactly how the Broadway  hit came to be. Solomon has interviewed the still-surviving members of the Fiddler team and mined the archives to get a full picture of the joys and kvetches associated with the mounting of a Broadway blockbuster that at one time seemed the most desperate of gambles.
In section three, Solomon visits productions of Fiddler in places as far-flung as Israel, Poland, and Brownsville, Brooklyn, where ethnic divisions almost derail a heartfelt junior high production in which most of the young actors are Latino or African-American. But one chapter, “Anatevka in Technicolor,” is devoted to  the big-budget film. What’s striking is how, though the material remains the same, the aesthetics in play and film are so different. Under Jerome Robbins’ brilliant direction and choreography, the stage version avoided kitschy Borscht Belt stylistics to capture the flavor of a fragile community rent asunder both by outside enemies and by inner stresses. But there’s a fanciful folk spirit to the staging, enhanced by Zero Mostel’s larger-than-life portrayal of the leading character. Audiences around the globe quickly came to love the show’s universal qualities, to the point that book author Joseph Stein was asked, at the Tokyo opening of Fiddler, how the team had managed to understand so well the essence of Japanese family dynamics.
When Norman Jewison was invited to direct the film version, he was best known for the Oscar-winning In the Heat of the Night, which for its day was bold in addressing racial discrimination in a small Southern town. Jewison favors what might be called poetic realism on screen. He wanted to show audiences an Eastern European Jewish shtetl that was more real than charming. And he wanted at all costs to avoid turning his characters into outsized caricatures. That’s why he chose as his Tevye a sturdily handsome Israeli, Topol, who was younger and more macho than the various stage Tevyes had been. Filming in what was then Yugoslavia, Jewison captured the look of the fields and forests, the ramshackle homes, and especially the tiny synagogue, modeled after the few still-standing “shuls” that survived in the countryside of eastern Europe. The portrayal of Teyve as an attractive and appealing “mensch,” notes Solomon, made for a nice antidote to the on-screen portrayal of Jewish neurotics of the Woody Allen ilk who dominated the movies of that era.
Still, for all its Jewish authenticity, the film too has inspired those from many cultures to tell their own stories. One Bollywood director dreams of transplanting the basic story to strife-torn Kashmir . And Lin-Manuel Miranda admits that In the Heights, his pre-Hamilton musical about a changing New York Latino community, borrows from his admiration for Fiddler. Who knew?

And Here's to YOU, UC Berkeley . . .

I’m recently back from Berkeley, California, where (in the wake of the horrendous fires that destroyed the town of Paradise) students were walking around the famous University of California campus wearing surgical masks to protect themselves from breathing dirty air. How times have changed! When I was of college age, student-activist types didn’t seem to be worrying about the wear and tear on their bodies as they let themselves be dragged through the streets in anti-Vietnam protests. And I well remember one scruffy young woman boasting that she was newly able to stomp out cigarettes with her bare feet.
I’m by no means making fun of the Camp Fire and its victims (nor of student activists, for that matter). I’m just waxing philosophical about the thought that colleges and movies don’t always mix. Actually, I was in Berkeley at the invitation of Virginia Williams of the newly re-named  Graduate Hotel (formerly the Durant). Berkeley has a featured role in The Graduate (it’s where Dustin Hoffman’s Benjamin Braddock goes in pursuit of his dream girl, played by Katharine Ross). And so I was asked to speak on The Graduate in the comfy hotel lobby, after which the film would be screened. The best laid plans of mice and men . . . .  Because of the smoky skies, the Big Game between Cal and Stanford was cancelled, and expected hotel occupancy dropped from 80% to 30% for the weekend. So I delivered my talk to two bartenders and a small handful of attentive guests.
The production team of The Graduate was equally disappointed when they appealed to the university’s chancellor for permission to film on campus. Trying to be persuasive, they got a studio executive who was active in the Berkeley alumni organization to plead their case. He thought a reference to the bad publicity generated by the raucous campus Free Speech Movement of 1964-65 would do the trick, suggesting in his letter that “the intended beauty of color photography would place the University in a better light contrasted with the hours of newsreels recording only Sather Gate Plaza. Berkeley would appear as the stable, respectable, educational community it is.” This appeal didn’t work, and so the filmmakers were forced to get creative. That’s why (with one very small exception) the campus scenes in The Graduate were all shot at a rival school, the University of Southern California.
Which is not to say that Berkeley doesn’t appear in The Graduate. Hoffman was filmed roaming Berkeley’s famous Telegraph Avenue, spying Elaine emerging from the legendary Moe’s Books, and rushing up the steps of an ivy-covered Berkeley frat house. There was even a covert (or, in movie parlance, “stolen”) shot of Katharine Ross, as Elaine Robinson, sauntering across the campus’s Sproul Plaza.
Though The Graduate was filmed in the spring and summer of 1967, the film contains barely a single glimpse of the sartorial style—or the political angst—we associate with the late Sixties. Only a young couple emerging from a Telegraph Avenue jewelry store (he with bushy hair and sideburns, she in miniskirt, floppy hat, and carrying a small baby), seem part of the hang-loose generation I associate with college life circa 1967. Katharine Ross would later marvel at the ironic fact that, while filming a novel published in 1963, “we were still in the fifties mentality.” At the very time that cast and crew were shooting in Berkeley, said Ross, “the Summer of Love happened in San Francisco, and Vietnam was about to blow the country apart and change us all forever.”
              This post is for Virginia Williams of the Graduate Hotel as well as Bel McNeill, bookseller extraordinaire at Bel and Bunna’s of Lafayette, California. We sure had fun, didn't we?

Nicolas Roeg and William Goldman: Hail and Farewell

It’s sad how quickly we’re losing members of the greater Hollywood community.  We can’t call them men who died before their time: each lived to a ripe old age, and enjoyed honors and accolades galore. Still, the film industry will long feel their loss.
Nicolas Roeg, born in 1928, is said to have decided  on filmmaking as a career mostly because he lived across the road from a British movie studio. He started as a tea-boy (a job that doesn’t exactly exist in America), and moved up to be a clapper-loader, which is the lowliest of cinematography jobs. Eventually he was hired as second-unit cinematographer on David Lean’s classic Lawrence of Arabia, but the relationship with Lean went south when he was fired from Lean’s equally monumental follow-up, Dr. Zhivago. He served as cinematographer, though, on films by such greats as François Truffaut (Fahrenheit 451), John Schlesinger (Far From the Madding Crowd), and Richard Lester (Petulia).
But for me Roeg’s most meaningful cinematography credit was on Roger Corman’s The Masque of the Red Death. By the time my former boss shot Masque in 1964, he had already made a name for himself by way of several features based on the eerie tales of Edgar Allan Poe. Starting with House of Usher in 1960, Corman directed and produced such chillers as Pit and the Pendulum, Premature Burial, and The Tomb of Ligeia.. But I’m not the only Corman fan who’s convinced that Masque of the Red Death is the very best of Corman’s horror epics, and part of the reason is that Roeg’s camerawork perfectly captures the kaleidoscopic yet somber mood.
Roeg of course moved beyond cinematography to put his directorial stamp on a particular kind of  otherworldly feature. His films are bleak: even the one intended for children (an adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The Witches) has nightmarish implications. Roeg fully exploited the dark charisma of Mick Jagger in Performance as well as the unearthly quality of David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth. Don’t Look Now (1973) was once notorious for its fairly explicit sex scene between Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, but at its heart this is a film about vain hope, as played out by grieving parents.
William Goldman, who died on November 16 at the age of 87, left us a body of work that was less exotic and more down-to-earth. What stands out is his versatility: he was a novelist, a playwright, and a screenwriter, responsible for such major hits as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Princess Bride (a family favorite adapted from his own novel), Misery (based on the work of Stephen King), and the historically important All The President’s Men. (As a young writer, he bypassed a golden opportunity when he declined to work on the screen version of The Graduate.) Whole generations of screenwriters have learned from Goldman’s Adventures in the Screen Trade, with its sage insistence that in the film biz “nobody knows anything.”
Goldman sometimes went far afield from Hollywood, as when he published The Season (1969), a candid assessment of the state of Broadway in the years 1967-68. I personally treasure his 1990 memoir, Hype and Glory, about the year he judged both the Cannes Film Festival and the Miss America Pageant. Here’s one characteristically pragmatic except: “Narrative is only a piece of string and it’s where you choose to cut it that’s essential. Where you choose to cut it. I might pick a piece further along, or earlier. No one is right. There is no right way to tell a story, only yourway.”
Since I wrote this post, I’ve learned of the deaths of film director Bernardo Bertolucci and actor/magician Ricky Jay. And so it goes.

Babymaking for Royals and Commoners: “Private Life”

The big news out of Britain is that the Duchess of Sussex, better known as Meghan Markle, is with child. Ever since she wed Prince Harry on May 19. 2018, the adoring public (both in Britain and in the colonies) has been checking out her press photos for signs of a baby bump. Now, apparently, another royal baby is on its way.
The Royal House of Windsor seems never to have had any problems with fertility. When Prince Charles wed Lady Diana Spencer in 1981, she too was soon pregnant. (At age 20, she had the advantage of youth and good health when it came to producing a strapping young princeling.) That prince, William, grew up and took a bride, Kate Middleton: she was 31 when she produced the first of her three royal children. But Meghan is now 37, an age at which successful child-bearing can’t always be counted on.
Best wishes to her, needless to say. But I’ve just seen a film in which the gift of pregnancy is not to be taken for granted. Private Life (2018), from the increasingly adventuresome Netflix, was written and directed by Tamara Jenkins. She’s a gifted filmmaker, known for such well-observed family dramedies as Slums of Beverly Hills and The Savages. More important, she knows all too well what it’s like to try – and fail – to conceive a baby. After years of effort, she and husband Jim Taylor (the artistic partner of Alexander Payne) finally managed to become parents.
Parenthood is the desperate hope of Jenkins’ two main characters in Private Life. Vividly played by Kathryn Hahn (as Rachel) and Paul Giamatti (as Richard), they are New York artsy-types who probably waited too long to commit to the idea of childbearing. Now he’s 47 and she’s 41. Their union is strong, but they’re driving one another crazy as they explore the various increasingly unattractive options that lie before them. On the one hand, they’re looking into adoption, which means remaking their lives to appeal to some teenaged birth mother who may just be stringing them along. On the other hand, they’re going through an intrusive series of medical procedures that might seem hilarious if they weren’t so emotionally fraught. 
When they learn that basic biology has thrown them a curve ball, the idea of finding an egg donor first arises. And into their rent-controlled Lower Manhattan flat comes a niece-by-marriage, a spirited young college girl who may be the answer to Rachel’s anxieties about being removed from the genetic process. Sadie is sweet and eager to help, but also has a gift for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. Like, for instance, at the Thanksgiving dinner table. She also has parents who are not at all happy about her involvement in this adventure.
I won’t reveal how it all comes out, except to praise Private Life as a slice-of-life in the very best sense. Hahn (whose previous work I don’t know) and Giamatti (who has made the portrayal of middle-aged male disgruntlement into a fine art) are funny, touching, and above all real. And young Kayli Carter is a revelation as the big-hearted, big-mouthed Sadie. By the film’s end, you want nothing but the best for all these nice (but highly troubled) people.
Private Life left me feeling very grateful indeed. I hope the House of Windsor feels the same way.
And my gratitude, plus an imaginary slice of Thanksgiving pumpkin pie, to all Beverly in Movieland readers.

From Motown to Hollywood: I Heard It on the Grapevine . . .

 Detroit doesn’t seem like a go-to place for movie connections. But I’m just back from the Motor City, where I spent a joyful hour touring the Motown Museum, also known as Hitsville, U.S.A. “Hitsville” was the nickname given by Berry Gordy to the first headquarters of his recording empire. The two-story house, a former photography studio, was purchased by Berry in 1959. He and his young family lived in a modest apartment on the second floor, and on the tour you can still see their mid-century modern furnishings, featuring pointy area lamps and bright orange trim. Downstairs is the recording studio is where early Motown hits were born: indelible songs like “Please, Mr. Postman” and “My Girl.” The studio’s most prominent feature is a large piano , an 1877 Steinway Model D grand, that has been beautifully restored thanks to the generosity of a museum visitor, Sir Paul McCartney.

The museum is on West Grand Boulevard, in an area that features a busy funeral home, a large hospital complex, and some residences that are on the shabby side. (Not far away is the once- glorious Fisher Theater, a landmark art deco skyscraper from 1928: this is where Fiddler on the Roof had its first out-of-town tryouts almost 40 years later. But I digress.)  Once Motown Records was up and running, Gordy controlled the entire block, with various of the neighboring houses dedicated to different aspects of the company’s needs. One house, for instance, served as the financial hub of Motown, with another providing rehearsal space for the stable of singers under contract. Most of them, in the early days, had been Gordy’s childhood neighbors and pals. And he was indebted to Detroit, as well, for a job that started him on his path to fame and fortune.
At a young age, Gordy accepted a blue-collar job at a Ford assembly plant. While helping to put together automobiles, one piece at a time, he kept his mind busy by making up songs to the steady throb of the assembly line. Nor was it only a sense of rhythm that he took away from Ford. The job gave him the idea that he could manufacture, piece by piece, a cadre of recording artists. So when the Temptations, the Supremes, the Jackson Five, and Martha and the Vandellas came under his purview, he took it upon himself to mold them into superstars. Vocal coaching and choreography were part of their bootcamp. There was also a deportment coach who schooled them in manners, giving them a social polish that—as inner city kids—they hadn’t previously enjoyed. 
As always, fame presented new temptations—and new opportunities. In 1972 Gordy moved Motown’s headquarters to Los Angeles, perhaps losing the company’s soul in the process. But for him it was a logical move, one that allowed him to experiment with motion picture production. He became the executive producer of several much ballyhooed films, notably including Lady Sings the Blues. This tribute to the life of jazz legend Billie Holliday marked the Oscar-nominated film debut of Diana Ross, with whom Gordy had long had both a professional and a personal relationship. Ross was his star when he tried his hand at directing with 1975’s Mahogany, and she also played an unlikely Dorothy in The Wiz, for which he played a behind-the-scenes role.
Though Gordy left Detroit in his rearview mirror, his sister Esther Gordy Edwards insisted on staying put. I heard it on the grapevine: she’s the one who made the museum happen. I for one am very grateful.
The Motown Museum Today

Save the Cat: A Movie Tracks Lee Israel’s Move from Biography to Literary Forgery

In the fascinating Can You Ever Forgive Me?, based on Lee Israel’s own 2008 memoir, Lee is a once-successful biographer who has hit the skids. As played by a loud-mouthed but still somehow lovable Melissa McCarthy, she’s profane and alcoholic, bitter that her proposed biography of comedienne Fanny Brice remains unsold and that she’s reduced to a boring copy-editor job from which she’s quickly fired. Desperate for cash to take her ailing cat to the vet (she is quick to insist that she much prefers cats to people), she removes from her wall a framed thank-you note from Katharine Hepburn, a souvenir of the Hepburn profile she’d written years ago for a major magazine.
There is, it turns out, a real market for letters written by famous folk, a reflection of the fact that workaday citizens like to bask in the glow of their glamorous betters. When Lee happens to find, steal, and sell an actual piece of Fanny Brice correspondence, she comes to realize that the asking price will be far higher if the letter is marked by some characteristic wit. And so a master forger is born. Using a raft of vintage typewriters cadged from thrift shops, she discovers in herself an ability to impersonate on paper such celebrated humorists as Brice, Noel Coward, and Dorothy Parker. She proudly boasts to her one (sometime) friend: “I’m a better Dorothy Parker than Dorothy Parker.”
As a biographer myself, as well as a colleague of many talented members of Biographers International Organization, I understand a little something about the way biography works. You comb through the archives, gathering every scrap you can find about the true nature of your subject. Then, typically, you efface your own personality in order to present, as vividly as possible, your subject to your readers. In her prime, Lee Israel was apparently good at drawing readers in: her 1980 biography of popular media figure Dorothy Kilgallen appeared on the New York Times bestseller list.  And the field of biography seemed to suit her psyche as well as her talents: the film makes clear that, for all her outsized personality, she had a longtime reluctance to give people a glimpse of her own walled-off inner self.
While a master at role-playing on paper, Lee was never up to playing the part of the writer as public figure. Since I’m newly back from touring with my latest book, Seduced by Mrs. Robinson , I’m well aware that it’s useful for authors to know how to schmooze with their public. In the film, Lee sneers at the very successful Tom Clancy, who plays his authorial role to the hilt at cocktail parties and everywhere else. For this she’s scolded by her exasperated agent (a caustic Jane Curtin) who reminds her of the realities of the fame game: “Either become a nicer person or make a name for yourself. As an unknown you can’t be such a bitch.”
The funny thing is that Lee thrives on her forgeries, even after she is caught. To a stern-faced judge she blurts out, “In many ways this has been the best time of my life.” The wild and woolly experience apparently freed the real-life Lee to finally take on herself as a subject. It is her slim, cheeky memoir, not her self-effacing biographies, that literary enthusiasts now remember. In the film, a star-struck bookseller who’s a fan of her biographical works enthuses that in her writing Lee Israel will be able to live on after her death. Just so. Even if her best writing is done in someone else’s name.

Saluting the Very Super Stan Lee

It’s a sad day in the Marvel Universe. Spiderman is sobbing and the Hulk has tears running down his bright-green cheeks. Almost exactly nine months after the triumphant screen debut of his Black Panther character as a leading man, the great Stan Lee is no more. He passed away on November 12 at the ripe old age of 95.  I met Lee briefly while working on the infamous 1994 Roger Corman version of Fantastic Four. I can’t remember much except for Lee’s insistence that we remain faithful to his characters in every detail. (He seemed less concerned about the fact that, on Corman’s typically tight-fisted budgets, we couldn’t possibly come up with special effects to do justice to his characters’ complex superpowers.)
Though I never really knew Stan Lee, my former colleague Craig Nevius had the pleasure of considering him a mentor and a friend. Craig was one of the many eager young writers in the Corman stable. He wrote quickly and imaginatively, and had a special talent for wide-eyed phantasmagoria. (I well remember how he brought life to a script called Stepmonster, in which a nice young kid concludes that his dad’s new wife is a dangerous Tropopkin.) Fittingly, Craig—a longtime lover of superheroes—was assigned to turn the Fantastic Four comic books into a viable screenplay that could be shot fast and cheap.
Marvel fans know what happened next. Cast and crew turned the Corman Fantastic Four into a labor of love, only to be stymied when—just before the scheduled charity premiere—the film was sold and shelved, to make way for Fox Studios’ big-budget version released over a decade later. Craig Nevius, like everyone connected with the Corman film, was bitterly disappointed, but he managed to salvage a warm relationship with Lee. In 2001, years after the Fantastic Fourdebacle, the two met for lunch to discuss Craig’s idea for a cinematic version of Lee’s own life. Here’s how Craig has described the project: “A shy Jewish boy from NYC who didn't see the world as it was but rather saw it as it SHOULD be, with bright colors and heroes. Of course the story ultimately would become his creation of Spiderman, the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Iron Man and Marvel Comics. And his fight against censorship when comics were considered by certain advocacy groups to be ‘corrupting.’” Craig planned to call it SECRET IDENTITY: THE REAL AND NOT-SO-REAL LIVES OF STAN LEE.
When Craig finished spelling out his concept, Lee exclaimed, “Wow! I'm impressed! With me! I didn't know my life was so interesting!” But then, totally deadpan, “I want to make sure that we're on the same page in terms of casting. Obviously, Brad Pitt should play me." Craig responded in kind: “Stan, I'm sorry but I disagree. Brad Pitt is nowhere near good looking enough to play you!" They parted on friendly terms; the project was sold, but (like so much in Hollywood) was never made.
The later years of Stan Lee’s life weren’t pretty. Especially after the death of his wife of sixty-nine years in 2017, there were power struggles around him, as well as accusations of elder abuse. It’s pitiful to think of this ebullient man, the hit of so many comic book conventions, being isolated from fans and friends: Craig Nevius lost touch with him when an email bounced back, amid rumors that someone else was now controlling his social media accounts. Sad to say, even superheroes lose their powers over time.
But let’s remember all he accomplished. As Stan Lee would say, Excelsior

Mr. Smith Goes to Vegas

Las Vegas may be in Nevada, not California, but it’s an outpost of Hollywood in more ways than one. Hollywood mega-tycoons and mobsters have all had a part in its founding. Hollywood stars have traditionally gone to Vegas to both to play and to perform. (And, of course, to get married.) My parents used to love heading for Las Vegas not to gamble but to see celebrities on their own turf, frolicking in hotel swimming pools, displaying their talents live on-stage in showrooms. Back in the day, there was a kind of relaxed glamour about the place: if you went to see Frank Sinatra, you might find other members of the  Rat Pack casually invited up to the stage. And who knew what rising star you might discover in one of the free lounge shows.
And then there are all those Las Vegas movies. Some try to capture the raw exuberance of the place; see everything from Elvis’s Viva Las Vegas to Swingers to The Hangover. Some focus instead on the dark forces beneath the glittering service: Bugsy (about the life and death of one of Vegas’s founders) and Martin Scorsese’s take on the city’s corrupt side, Casino,
Martin J. Smith had Las Vegas on his itinerary when he set out to chronicle the oddities of daily life in a small, charming essay collection called Mr. Las Vegas Has a Bad Knee, and other Tales of the People, Places, and Peculiarities of the Modern American Southwest. Marty, with whom I’ve shared a panel on several delightful occasions, is an award-winning journalist and magazine editor who also moonlights as a writer of suspense fiction. He once wrote a book called The Wild Duck Chase, chronicling a group of artists competing to win the Federal Duck Stamp Contest.  (Yes, there is such a thing—see Marge Gunderson’s husband struggling with his entry in the Coen Brothers’ Fargo.) Smith’s 2012 exploration of the ins and outs of the contest became the source material for a 2016 documentary, Million Dollar Duck.
Marty’s Mr. Las Vegas Has a Bad Knee includes his interviews with fascinating real-life characters (both the famous and the unknown) from all over the Southwest. In Orange County, he catches up with Dick Dale, SoCal’s one-time King of the Surf Guitar, who accepts life’s ups and downs with admirable equanimity. Near Palm Springs, he interviews the man who erected giant dinosaur statues along the highway, then saw them eclipsed by modern construction. Also in the Palm Springs vicinity, he gets to know the folks standing vigil outside Liberace’s desert home, waiting reverently as the glitter god breathes his last
The title story, “Mr. Las Vegas Has a Bad Knee” (from 2006) zooms in on a hero of the Nevada oasis, crooner Wayne Newton. Here’s Marty’s unforgettable opening sentence: “Wayne Newton arrived in Las Vegas as a fresh-faced seventeen-year-old singing sensation, looking like the result of a science experiment involving Brylcreem and estrogen.” Ultimately Newton settled in the area, bought a 52-acre ranch, and continued to pack showrooms full of ageing “Wayniacs.” Old pleasure palaces like the Stardust and the Flamingo: he knew them all. Because Newton has been a local fixture—and booster—for so many years, Marty jumped at the opportunity to take an insider tour of his personal “Wayne’s World.” Marty’s hope was to learn the behind-the-scenes realities of a place that seems all façade. Only problem: the promised tour never materialized. Driving back to SoCal,  thinking about the lost secrets of imploding hotels, Marty realized that “it’s hard not to worry about the way Vegas treats its ageing legends.”

In Tribute to a Classic Character Actor: James Karen

The late James Karen (who left us on October 23 at age 94) was not a winner of major acting awards. But, especially in the post-Halloween season, he’s highly worthy of a salute. The Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films nominated him for a Best Actor honor in 1986 for his role in The Return of the Living Dead. (A decade later, the group bestowed upon him its Life Career Award.) In 1991, he was a nominee for Fangoria’s prestigious Chainsaw Award for playing the evil Dr. Richard Meyerling in The Unborn.
I worked on The Unborn, when I was Roger Corman’s story editor at Concorde-New Horizons Pictures. It’s a creepfest of which I have always been guiltily fond, because it takes women’s all-too-natural fears about pregnancy to their most extreme conclusions. Among other things, The Unborn launched the career of Rodman Flender, a busy Hollywood TV director who may be better known today as Timothée Chalamet’s uncle. It was written by screenwriters Mike Ferris and John Brancato, who in those days concealed their identities behind the pen name Henry Dominic. It did not destroy the career of Brooke Adams, in the leading role of a woman with a major problem pregnancy, nor that of Lisa Kudrow, who played a small role early in her pre-Friends days.
 What really made The Unborn a success, though, was the ultra-creepy James Karen as an obstetrician who has more on his mind than delivering healthy newborns. (Yes, shades of Rosemary’s Baby – originality was never a prime Concorde virtue.) Karen was adept at walking the line between avuncular and sinister, and I marveled at his skill, to the point where I was a bit nervous when meeting him in an office hallway. Afterwards, though, I was excited to talk about our little chat when I went home for the day. My children—fans of the Math Net segment of the terrific kids’ math program, Square One—vividly remembered him as a sneering prosecutor trying to pin good-guy George Frankly to a robbery at the Next to the Last National Bank. (See below, about 25 minutes in.)
Karen was also a Broadway presence, usually as a standby or understudy for leading roles in plays like Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Pinter’s The Birthday Party. Always a lively presence onscreen, he was featured as Jane Fonda’s TV producer boss in The China Syndrome and as a realtor in Poltergeist. His most unusual appearance came in Film, an almost totally silent short movie from 1965, written and directed by Samuel Beckett and starring Karen’s longtime friend, screen legend Buster Keaton.
Yet television watchers in the Northeast best remember Karen as a friendly supermarket pitchman in commercials for the Pathmark supermarket chain. He shilled for the company for 28 years, flying east every two weeks from his L.A. home to tape a batch of TV spots. His so-called Pathmark Man was a likable guy, but Karen ran into trouble when he appeared in the finale of the Little House on the Prairie series as a real estate tycoon who aims to take over the town of Walnut Grove. His scheming on that show so disturbed Pathmark customers that he found himself in trouble with Pathmark management.  It was only when he personally wrote to shoppers, reassuring them of his good intentions, that they accepted his continuing role as the store’s spokesman.
Jim Karen was a classic. His wife, my friend Alba Francesca, once told me he loved toys, the more intricate the better. I only know that audiences—and the camera—loved him. May he rest in peace.