George Carlin's American Dream

Year 14, Day 181 - 6/30/22 - Movie #4,186

BEFORE: George Carlin carries over from "Can We Take a Joke?" and I just realized I'm book-ending this holiday weekend with two films that have "American" in the title - really, I couldn't have planned this any better.  

I know what you're probably thinking - is this a MOVIE, though?  This is a documentary, sure, but it's on HBO - and it's in two parts, that makes it a TV series, doesn't it?  Well, yes but also no, I think those lines have been blurred already.  Yes, I refused to include that Beatles documentary "Get Back", because it's in three parts, so to me that's a series.  I've watched 2-part documentaries before, like "Leaving Neverland", which was also on HBO in 2 parts, and "Elvis Presley: The Searcher", so there's some precedent here. 

I'm hoping this isn't just a cash-grab on HBO's part, they financed and aired the last 15 years of George Carlin comedy specials, so I'm hoping this isn't just a bunch of those clips, recycled yet again, in the vein of "Robert Klein Still Can't Stop His Leg".  And this is over three and half hours long, I'm going to try to watch both parts together, which is A LOT, and then count it as one big movie, not two.  It's all in how you look at it - it's one documentary in two parts, so to me, that's one movie.  Bear with me, as I approach another century mark, now it's all about putting the "right" movie on July4, and also in slot #4,200.  

Here's the format breakdown for June, since the month ends tonight, and I'll post July's planned links tomorrow: 

9 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): Welcome to the Punch, Child 44, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, The Hummingbird Project, The Mauritanian, The Father, The One and Only Dick Gregory, Bitchin': The Sound and Fury of Rick James, New Wave: Dare to Be Different

6 Movies watched on cable (not saved): Judas and the Black Messiah, After the Sunset, Stuart: A Life Backwards, Magic, Freejack, George Carlin's American Dream

6 watched on Netflix: Windfall, Mank, The Lost Daughter, The Two Popes, Fatherhood, The Sparks Brothers

2 watched on Amazon Prime: The Courier, Can We Take a Joke?

1 watched on Hulu: The Amazing Johnathan Documentary
2 watched on YouTube: Dirty Pretty Things, Tiny Tim: King for a Day
3 watched on Disney+: Cruella, Eternals, Raya and the Last Dragon

1 watched on AppleTV: Swan Song
2 watched in theaters: The Bad Guys, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
32 TOTAL

Well, that was a full month, for sure - 32 films in 30 days, plus I worked MANY hours at the Tribeca Film Festival, and took two days off to go to Atlantic City (I did watch movies on my phone in the hotel room, otherwise this schedule would NOT have been possible.). I'm almost glad to have time off from one job in July, because the first order of business right now is catching up on sleep - then, maybe some videogames. 

THE PLOT: Interviews with George Carlin's family and friends, material from his stand-up specials and footage from his personal archive. 

AFTER: I got into George Carlin's stand-up act shortly after I got into Weird Al Yankovic - and the same way, by listening to the Dr. Demento syndicated radio show.  He played some of the more popular cuts from the "A Place for My Stuff" album, censored versions, obviously - but then I had one friend who I took summer tennis lessons with (before rejecting all sports activities in my life) who owned the whole album, and played it for me uncensored.  When you're a kid and the world of obscene language opens up for you, it's a wonderful thing, at least until you slip up and say one of the "bad words" in front of your parents. 

I didn't dive too deep into Mr. Carlin's history then, to me he was just a funny guy who said funny things, and made a few salient or ironic points along the way.  Later I learned that he was a staple of early 1960's TV variety shows, but then left a lucrative television career to be more of a "stoner" comic and tour college campuses.  Not everybody is cut-out for wearing a suit and being a sell-out on network TV, apparently.  I didn't stop to think that this meant an 80% pay cut for his annual salary - so there were some lean years for the Carlin family, but then between record sales, college tours and later the lucrative world of HBO comedy specials, he ended up doing OK, in terms of money, anyway.  

Like some of the other famous people appearing in my chain this week (Weird Al, Penn Jillette, Rick James) I met George Carlin once, it was a book signing at the big Chelsea Barnes & Noble (now it's a Trader Joe's) in Manhattan, after his book "Brain Droppings" got released.  I'd been a fan for a long while, but my father had recently discovered his work, so I think I bought my father a signed copy, plus one for myself, of course.  I kept giving my father George Carlin stuff for a couple years, but I think he lost interest pretty quickly, it was probably much too liberal for him. Like me, George Carlin was a Catholic who figured out fairly yougn that the religion is a bunch of B.S., he just was able to explain WHY much more eloquently than I ever could.  

That's just one of the many routines featured in clips here - as I feared, this film is mostly a rehash of every comedy special Carlin ever did for HBO, but at least they go into his whole history leading up to that point in Part 1 of this doc series.  Carlin wasn't a draft dodger like Rick James, he joined the military but worked for the Air Force as a radar technician, but moonlighted as a disc jockey in Shreveport.  This was all part of his secret plan to break into show business via radio, but before long he was court-martialed for sleeping on duty and was discharged. 

But along with another DJ from a radio station in Fort Worth, Jack Burns, Carlin headed out to California to get jobs in show biz for real.  The two had a morning radio show in Hollywood, playing lots of crazy characters in routines, and then they cut a comedy album together in 1960. When this comedy team broke up, Carlin began appearing on TV variety shows, playing some of those characters, the most famous being the "hippy dippy weatherman".  Any young people in the know got the joke that this character was probably stoned, but it was subtle enough that the old people wouldn't hate the routine.  

Yesterday's film detailed the arrest of Lenny Bruce for obscenity, and it turns out that George Carlin was in the audience that night, and refused to show his ID to the police, so he got arrested too.  He was taken to jail in the same vehicle as Lenny Bruce!  Then in the late 1960's Carlin changed his whole look, he gave up the suits, grew a beard, and wore t-shirts and blue jeans to fit in with the college crowd - this was the time of Woodstock, the flower children and such, but playing to this new audience meant that giant pay-cut and a new life of constant touring, rather than remaining at home with his wife, Brenda.  But Flip Wilson's independent record label started releasing his comedy albums, and by 1972 his touring started to pay off, and the publicity he got for saying those "seven dirty words" in concert didn't hurt.  

Eventually, he was welcomed back to television and hosted the premiere episode of "Saturday Night Live" in 1975. Gee, I wonder whatever happened to that show....  Carlin himself sort of disappeared from the public eye in 1976, and this documentary serves to fill in some of those missing years for us, to some extent.  It turns out his wife became an alcoholic while Carlin was on the road, he sort of demanded that she stay at home with their daughter instead of traveling with him, but that meant spending a lot of time apart, and while she was home drinking, he was out performing and doing a lot of cocaine.  They re-connected at some point, he stopped touring for a while and while most couples probably would have split, they found a way to come back together, which would seem very noble and positive if it also wasn't rooted in addiction and dysfunction - but, who am I to judge? 

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said there are no second acts in American lives, but he never met George Carlin - if his second act was being the hippie comic, his third act was acting, and in the late 80's he started appearing in films like "Outrageous Fortune" and "Bill & Ted's Great Adventure" as the cool, hip, time-traveling mentor.  Then the 90's brought him back to TV with "The George Carlin Show" (which, umm, didn't last very long) and then took over the role of "Mr. Conductor" on the kids show "Shining Time Station" after Ringo Starr left.  

Two big ramifications of his drug abuse, though - looming health problems and also there were a few years where Carlin neglected to pay taxes. Carlin was so in debt with the IRS that he says it took 18 to 20 years of further touring to clear his accounts.  He never complained about taxes, but it probably would have been much easier for him to have just paid them in the first place - but, the upside is that gave him the motivation to keep touring and keep developing new material. I've seen this situation before, in the documentaries about the Rolling Stones and the Grateful Dead, who created companies around their bands, hired their relatives and then had to keep constantly releasing albums and touring just to raise the money to keep the machine going.  I think it seems kind of rare for any celebrity to make ENOUGH money from a film or an album to just walk away, or maybe this does happen and you just don't hear people talk about it. 

The wheels sort of started to come off the proverbial wagon when he got into an altercation with Vegas audience members in 2004, then went to rehab for alcohol and painkiller addiction.  But after getting sober, his routines started to feature more material about bombings, beheadings, natural disasters and suicide - his wife Brenda had died a few years before, so I suppose you can try to explain away why his material got darker, but also he just seemed to get angrier when he got older.  Anyway, he'd gotten married again in 1998, so being in love didn't seem to help his on-stage mood any.  And then the heart problems finally caught up with him in 2008 - there's already been way too much talk of death here at the Movie Year this week - and the Summer Rock & Doc Block is just getting started - so tonight's take-away isn't that everybody dies, I'd rather focus on the fact that if you live long enough, you may get to re-invent yourself four or five times over, and that's OK. 

I'm still a fan - but I favor mid-career Carlin, when he was just kind of cranky, before he got super-cranky and seemed pissed off all the time.  Carlin gets quoted (and mis-quoted) all the time on the internet now, mostly by people on the left trying to point out the hypocrisy of the people on the right, but try to remember that Carlin himself got pissed off by both sides.  And he may not have said all, or even half of the things you see quoted.  Beware the last ten minutes of Part 2, though, because the editors have placed Carlin's routines over video of things that happened after he died - like footage of Matt Gaetz being an asshole, Colin Kaepernick taking a knee, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos being assholes.  This is all post-Carlin stuff, and it doesn't seem fair or right to juxtapose it with Carlin's words, what exactly was the agenda here?  Is someone saying that the world went to hell after Carlin died, or was this a failed attempt at irony?  Either way, it's dirty pool.

Also starring Jeff Abraham, W. Kamau Bell (last seen in "The One and Only Dick Gregory"), Chris Rock (ditto), Bill Burr (last seen in "Walk of Shame"), Kelly Carlin, Patrick Carlin, Stephen Colbert (also last seen in "Can We Take a Joke?"), Judy Gold (last seen in "The Amazing Johnathan Documentary"), Jerry Hamza, Sam Jay, Robert Klein (last seen in "Robert Klein Still Can't Stop His Leg"), Jerry Seinfeld (ditto), Jon Stewart (ditto), Bette Midler (last heard in "The Addams Family" (2019)), Alley Mills, Hasan Minhaj (last seen in "The Spy Who Dumped Me"), Kliph Nesteroff, Tony Orlando, Patton Oswalt (last seen in "The Sparks Brothers"), Paul Provenza (last seen in "Gilbert"), Paul Reiser (last seen in "Fatherhood"), Kevin Smith (last seen in "Catch and Release"), Rocco Urbisci, Sally Wade, Alex Winter (last seen in "Bill & Ted Face the Music"), Stephen Wright, with the voices of Gary Gulman (last seen in "Lucky Them"), Gillian Jacobs (last seen in "Walk of Shame")

with archive footage of Ben Affleck (last seen in "The Amazing Johnathan Documentary"), Ronald Reagan (ditto), Muhammad Ali (last seen in "The One and Only Dick Gregory"), Walter Cronkite (ditto), Arsenio Hall (ditto), Martin Luther King (ditto), Yoko Ono (ditto), Richard Pryor (ditto), Roseanne Barr (last seen in "Bad Reputation"), Jeff Bezos, Lenny Bruce (also last seen in "Can We Take a Joke?"), Donald Trump (ditto), Robin Williams (ditto), Jack Burns, George W. Bush (last seen in "Too Big to Fail"), Brenda Carlin, Johnny Carson (last seen in "Tiny Tim: King for a Day"), Dick Cavett (ditto), David Frost (ditto), Richard Nixon (ditto), Charlie Rose (ditto), Chevy Chase (last seen in "Windfall"), Steve Martin (ditto), Tommy Chong (last seen in "Jay and Silent Bob Reboot"), Bill Clinton (last seen in "Spielberg"), Dinah Shore (ditto), Tom Snyder (ditto), Ted Cruz (last seen in "Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump"), Mitch McConnell (ditto), Vladimir Putin (ditto), John Davidson, Doris Day (last seen in "The Sparks Brothers"), John Lennon (ditto), Mike Douglas (last seen in "Zappa"), Jerry Falwell (last seen in "The Eyes of Tammy Faye"), Bryant Gumbel (ditto), Sam Kinison (ditto), Linda Fiorentino, Matt Gaetz, Rudy Giuliani (last seen in "The Accidental President"), Nancy Pelosi (ditto), Ivanka Trump (ditto), Merv Griffin (last seen in "Bitchin': The Sound and Fury of Rick James"), Robert Hegyes, Laurence Hilton-Jacobs, Telma Hopkins, Andy Kaufman (last seen in "Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond"), Nick Nolte (ditto), Danny Kaye, Brian Keith, Jacqueline Kennedy (last seen in "No Direction Home: Bob Dylan"), John F. Kennedy (last seen in "Berlin, I Love You"), Alan King, Larry King (last seen in "I Am Divine"), Colin Kaepernick, Tommy Lasorda, Eugene Levy (last seen in "Cheaper by the Dozen 2"), Cheech Marin (last heard in "Coco"), Andrea Martin (last seen in "Little Italy"), Elaine May, Jason Mewes (last seen in "Scream 3"), Dennis Miller, Rick Moranis (last seen in "Streets of Fire"), Elon Musk, Mike Nichols (last seen in "Everything Is Copy"), Oliver North (last seen in "Straight Outta Compton"), Ron Palillo, Keanu Reeves (last seen in "The Whole Truth"), Mort Sahl, Soupy Sales, Chuck Schumer (last seen in "Too Big to Fail"), Doc Severinsen, Sam Simon, Barbra Streisand (also last seen in "Robert Klein Can't Stop His Leg"), Dave Thomas, John Travolta (last seen in "The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart"), Fernando Valenzuela, Flip Wilson, Mark Zuckerberg, 

RATING: 7 out of 10 appearances on "Tony Orlando and Dawn"