Mark Evanier's Blog, page 183

Today's Video Link

Here's the trailer for what some people think is the best of the Marx Brothers movies…

The Ivar – Part 2

Two matters before we plunge into the second part of our tale of the Ivar Theater in Hollywood. One is this link to Part One just in case you didn't read it or need a brief refresher.

Secondly, a reader of this site wrote to ask if the man who built the theater, Yegishe Harout, was of Arabic extraction and if he named the theater in honor of someone named Ravi, spelling it backwards. Pretty much all I know about Mr. Harout is contained in this paragraph that I found online…

A stage actor in Armenia during the 1920s, Harout toured Russia, the Balkans, France, England, Belgium, Egypt and finally the U.S., ending up in Hollywood. He built the Ivar Theatre and Har-Omar Restaurant, located on Ivar Street and Sunset Blvd. in Hollywood, that he managed for twenty-seven years. Once a week, Harout would present a half hour of Armenian and Middle Eastern classical and Folk music on a local radio station.

So I'll take a wild stab and guess that he named his theater The Ivar because it was on Ivar Street. Exhaustive research (i.e., a little Googling) shows that Ivar Street was named Ivar Street many years earlier in recognition of a Danish immigrant named Ivar Weid who owned much real estate in the area.

I also found out that Mr. Harout died in 1974. The cause of death is not given but you may suspect it had something to do with what happened to his beloved theater.

What happened to it was that it around 1972, it became a porn-and-stripper place. I believe the last legit theatrical production there was Godspell, which had transferred from a successful run at the Mark Taper Forum, one of the more upscale theaters in town. Not log after that, the Ivar, for what I suppose were financial reasons, went over to the dark side.

This was a trend in Los Angeles theaters in the early seventies. Currently, a lot of prestigious shows play, usually for one night, at a theater on La Cienega Boulevard called the Largo at the Coronet. Marc Maron, Sarah Silverman and other name comedians play there regularly…and back in the sixties and before, it was just plain The Coronet…a movie theater that played classic motion pictures. Buster Keaton famously showed up there one night in the late fifties and bought a ticket to see The General, a film masterpiece he made in 1926.

But for a few years in the seventies, the place showed porno movies and in-between the films, women would come out onto its stage and remove their garments to music. Fortunately, the theater got better. By the close of that decade, it was back to clothed presentations. I went to some very good plays there and even worked on one.  Backstage, I came across an old advertising sign from its burlesque days.

Much the same thing happened on about the same timetable with the Beverly Cinema on Beverly Boulevard. In the sixties, my friend Steve Hopkins and I were obsessed with silent movies. You could find us most weekends at the Silent Movie Theater on Fairfax but one week, we went to the Beverly Cinema to take in a double-bill of Mr. Chaplin's masterpiece, The Gold Rush (1925) and Jacques Tati's more recent Mr. Hulot's Holiday (1953).

That was the kind of thing they showed in the sixties.  Then for a while in the early seventies, the Beverly was given over to porn-and-strippers.  Then it went back to classic cinema. It is now, as you may know, a revival film palace run by Quentin Tarantino.

The Ivar did not make such a speedy recovery. It turned into a pretty sleazy place — one that seemed somehow sleazier by comparison to what was next door: The Hollywood branch of the Los Angeles Public Library. Los Angeles then had several newspapers and I think every one of them sent a reporter to write about the Ivar, its new format and sometimes its headliner stripper for a while…a self-described "porn princess" named René Bond.

I can't give you an exact timetable but around 1975 — that's a guess — a bunch of my friends and I, instead of playing poker one night and talking about comic books, made a field trip to the Ivar. I'm saying '75 because that was the year the Barbra Streisand movie Funny Lady came out. Ms. Bond began her act by coming out in an evening gown with satin on her shoulder and kind of half-lip-syncing Barbra's recording of "How Lucky Can You Get?" from that film.

It was very bizarre.  Not sexy.  Bizarre.

I shall attempt to describe the whole experience and count how many times I feel the ideal word choice is some form of the word, "sleaze." It was applicable to everything — the sleazy signs outside (that's 1), the sleazy box office (2), my sleazy change (3), the sleazy lobby(4), the sleazy seats (5), every single one of the other sleazy patrons (6), the sleazy men's room — especially that sleazy men's room (7 and 8)…and of course, René's sleazy performance (9) even before she had removed a single garment.

I suspect my pals and I looked like we were auditioning to play the audience watching the opening number of Springtime for Hitler.  Some of the other patrons looked like they weren't there for the onstage presentation.  They looked like they just wanted to spend some time in a building with a roof on it.  There was even one guy who was sound asleep as René/Barbra  belted out, "How Lucky Can You Get?"

In case you're not familiar with the song, you can listen to it here . Ms. Bond did the whole thing including the part where the record gets stuck and Barbra sings the last part in a rage.  Weirdest lip-sync you ever saw.  And then they played another inappropriate song and René took off all her clothes.

And I'm sitting there thinking, "The last time I was here, they were doing You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown on that stage."

I don't think I'd have felt so uneasy if I hadn't "known" the Ivar before this. It was like finding out your old high school sweetheart was…well, dancing at the Ivar. Everything felt not only sleazy (10) but horribly wrong.

It's possible I have not conveyed how dirty and grungy and smelly and dilapidated and sleazy (11) the Ivar had become in just a few years. It looked like sometime since my prior visit, the owners had burned the place down for the insurance money, collected and then not spent a dime on restoration. It was just awful. And in that environment, neither René nor any of the other ladies who took the stage were the least bit sexy.  It was just sleazy, sleazy, sleazy (12, 13, 14).

Porn movies followed the live show and one member of our group wanted to stay for them, not so much because he wanted to watch them but because they were included in the admission price and he felt cheated to not receive everything for which he'd paid. The admission price, by the way, was $3.50. But the rest of us wanted to get the hell outta there and since he hadn't driven, he was forced to leave with us.

We did stop briefly in the lobby where Ms. Bond was selling autographed photos which we didn't buy. We also all declined her offer to join her in a bar next door for a drink before the next show. I think she was doing something like ten a day and had three more to go that evening.

The way she invited us made me suspect she was selling something more than photos over there. But we spoke with her for a few minutes and she seemed very happy and proud to be doing what she was doing there so I decided not to feel too sorry for her. I have not set foot in the Ivar since that night but every so often, I've driven by it. This is how it looked a few years later…

Click above to enlarge this photo.

The painting of the lady at upper right, accompanied by lettering by someone who didn't know how to spell "totally," is more or less of René Bond.  It stayed on the front of the Ivar long after she'd left its stage and even long after she'd passed away, which Wikipedia tells me was in 1996. The other painted lady is probably a later headliner who was in residence for a while there.

It made me sad to see the Ivar looking so sleazy (15) but I did enjoy that beneath the likeness of Ms. Bond, they left up a quote from the prominent New York drama critic Douglas Watt — "You'd be crazy to miss it!"  I suspect Mr. Watt said that about the original Broadway production of Godspell…not even the production of it that had preceded the strippers into the Ivar. And he certainly wasn't recommending the show that strippers were putting on there for many years.

That was how the Ivar was for a long time…even through news reports of one or more fires (real ones) and at least one murder on the premises. I had a few friends who went there and from their reports, the place kept trying to outsleaze itself (16). One of those friends was the fine artist Dave Stevens who made a joke about it for the cover of The Comics Journal…

The story of the Ivar finally had a happy ending — and not the kind René Bond once offered. It was closed for a long time and sold and revamped and remodeled and turned back into a place that puts on plays. These days, it looks like this…

…except that I've been told that it may have made a brief trip back in time a few years ago. When the above-mentioned Mr. Tarantino was shooting his movie Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, he re-created 1969 Hollywood by having his crew temporarily remodel a number of businesses into the way they looked back then. This is from Wikipedia…

To film at the Pussycat Theater, production designer Barbara Ling and her team covered the building's LED signage and reattached the theater's iconic logo, rebuilding the letters and neon. Ling said the lettering on every marquee in the film is historically accurate. To restore Larry Edmunds Bookshop, she reproduced the original storefront sign and tracked down period-appropriate merchandise, even recreating book covers. Her team restored the Bruin and Fox Village theaters, including their marquees, and the storefronts around them. Stan's Donuts, across the street from the Bruin, got a complete makeover.

Several people have told me that the Ivar was regressed to its "burlesk" days for a few shots but that the footage never made it into the movie. I have seen no evidence of this and it might not be so…and You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown was playing the Ivar at the time Tarantino's film takes place. If anyone knows for sure about this, let me know. I was pleased that a brief image of our local horror movie host from that period, Seymour, was seen in the film and I'm curious if an image of René Bond almost made it in…

And I'm also curious as to why if Tarantino did think of having a shot of a now-legit theater back in its sleazy (17) porn-and-stripper days, he didn't use his own place.

This Just In…

A high-speed chase just went by my house.  A black car driving so fast I couldn't tell the make or model from my window vantage point was followed by about five police cars, all blaring an unusual siren…not the same one I hear when one cop car is rushing past to get somewhere.  A minute later, I heard what sounded like one or more helicopters zooming overhead.  At the moment, most of the local stations have on 11 AM newscasts but none of them are covering it.

I see these things on TV and on YouTube all the time and you don't realize how noisy they are.

Today's New Years Day Video Link

This one's a bit of a mystery and here's everything I know about it: In 1962, a deal was made to produce a pilot for a Marx Brothers TV show. Screen Gems, which was the television arm of Columbia Pictures, put up the dough and the show was done in what we would now call "Claymation."

Some folks have said that the animation was the work of Louis Bunin, an artist and puppeteer who made a number of films not unlike this one. I have no idea how true that may be.

Some folks have also theorized that Groucho's voice was done by Groucho himself or Dayton Allen or Pat Harrington, Jr., the latter two being comedians who occasionally replicated Groucho's voice for commercials or cartoons. I don't think it sounds like any of the three and Chico's doesn't even sound to me like a professional actor.

"Don M. Yowp" — whoever it is who hides behind that name and runs this fine, well-researched blog on Hanna-Barbera history — dug up his item from Variety for October 18, 1961…

Chico Marx, the man who never really retired, in a sense will still be "in the show," despite his sudden passing Oct. 11 in his Beverly Hills home of a heart attack, The 70-year-old comedian, eldest of the Marx Bros, and known to millions as piano-playing, Italian-dialect member of the brothers act, will appear with Groucho and Harpo as a life-like figure in an animation comedy teleseries Screen Gems is prepping.

It was Chico's third attack in the last two years, and like the others it came almost on the eve of his getting back into his "Italian" character and making with the laughs again. The figure of Chico in a special tri-cinemation—and secret—process was completed only a few weeks ago. Series will be made up largely of earlier comedy routines when the Marxes appeared together, according to studio, which will bring the Marx Bros, to fresh audiences as well as those who followed them on the Broadway stage and later in motion pictures.

Here is the video which was restored by the folks at Thunderbean Animation. It apparently did not succeed in convincing anyone back in '62 that there should be more of this…and you now know at least as much about it as I do. If you know more, share it with me and I'll share it here…

Today's New Year's Eve Video Link #9

Here's where most of us are glad we weren't at Midnight East Coast Time: Times Square…

Today's New Year's Eve Video Link #8

From 12/30/94 (not New Year's Eve, please note), here's a bit from David Letterman's show for which they got Dick Clark to go up on a rooftop a day or two before his annual broadcast from Times Square. There's a joke in there about Jocelyn Elders and in case you don't remember who she was: She was briefly the Surgeon General of the United States. Not long before this video, she had been pressured into resigning because some folks didn't like her remarks — honest though they were — about topics like drug use or masturbation.

I worked for Dick Clark in the early eighties and could have been on that rooftop in New York with him one New Year's Eve to do the live inserts on that year's episode of Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve. Here's a repost of something I had up here in 2011…

There are a couple of job offers in my past I turned down or had to turn down and now sorta regret. One was to write on the Jerry Lewis Telethon. I was busy that year, figured it would probably be offered again…and it wasn't. Another was to go to Vegas on New Year's Eve and help produce a live telecast, competitive with Mr. Clark's, that would emanate from there. That particular setup just sounded like a nightmare of crowds and logistic problems…and when I later talked to the guy who accepted the job I passed on, I learned I was right. That one I don't regret skipping but one year, Dick (with whom I'd worked, both as a writer for his shows and as a producer on a show where we hired him) asked me to get involved with his New Year's broadcast.

It meant working on the music segments that were all pre-taped in October — when the acts were available and not charging what they charge to perform on New Year's Eve — with the hosts saying, "And now, let's cut to Dick Clark in Times Square and see what's happening there. Dick, what's the mood like in New York tonight?" And while this was being taped in L.A., Dick was just off-camera. Then 12/31, Dick and I would fly to New York at the last possible minute, do the live remote from the rooftop, then fly back almost immediately.

I remember being amazed at how close he cut it, given that he had to be on the air live at a specific time…and it was not a time when travel in and out of the Times Square area was likely to be a breeze. If I absolutely had to be on a rooftop there at the moment the new year commenced, I think I'd have flown to New York a few days before, checked into that hotel and not left it until the telecast…then flown home a few days later.

Dick's itinerary that year called for getting to his N.Y. hotel (a few blocks from where the chosen rooftop was located) around 4 PM on the last day of the year, making his way to the building somewhat later, then getting back to his hotel after the broadcast and flying home first thing the morning of January 1. I think it was like an 8 AM flight. Thinking back, it now sounds like it might have been a fun adventure but when it was offered, I somehow didn't imagine it that way.

Again, I was busy at the time and I figured (wrongly), "They'll ask me again some other year." No, sometimes they don't. Always a good thing to remember.

Here's Dave and Dick…

Today's New Year's Eve Video Link #7

Dubai always puts on a great firework show on New Year's Eve. Let's see what they did for this new year…

Today's New Year's Eve Video Link #6

Here's a nice segment from CBS News on some of the more famous folks we lost this year. You'd think that Shecky Greene — who like all great comedians had great timing — would have died a few days earlier so he could have been in this…

Today's New Year's Eve Video Link #5

Here's one of my favorite magicians, Daniel Roy. At the end of this video, he insists that he does all these feats without trick photography or editing and that you'd see the same thing if you saw him perform live. Well, I did — one time at the Magic Castle, sitting about three feet from the guy. Very impressive…

Today's New Year's Eve Video Link #4

I meant to include this on our Christmas countdown but, hey, Christmas lasts twelve days of servants and poultry, right? Here's Pentatonix with a holiday tune I always liked. If you don't want to think of this as six days late, just think of it as 357 days early…