BEFORE: Another documentary today from the roster of the fallen - but this one requires a bit of an explanation. There used to be a comedian named Don Rickles, he died in 2017, but his whole shtick was making fun of people, he was known as an "insult comic" - everything was fair game, people's ethnicity, the way they looked, if they were too fat or too skinny or ugly, it was all a source of comedy, and it was so over-the-top that it was almost always funny. A comic couldn't do this today, one little complaint from somebody who was sensitive, and the comedian would be publicly shamed or "cancelled" or they'd lose their social media accounts, which is a fate worse than death, it seems. Rickles' career high came in the 1960's and 1970's, when the Celebrity Roasts were a big deal, and the comedy old guard and the Rat Pack were able to laugh at their own images, and they hoped America would laugh along too, while making fun of black people, Asian people, gay people, you name it. It was a different time, for sure.
Sidney Poitier carries over from "Becoming Mike Nichols", and if he found Don Rickles to be funny, why wouldn't everyone else? This film's going to wrap up my week of films about old people and dead people, but more are on the way - I've got a four-film tribute to the Rat Pack coming up, so we're going to see the same people again and again - Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and all the talk-show hosts of the day, so Johnny Carson could end up with the most appearances this year, or maybe Sinatra or Ronald Reagan, I haven't done the math yet, so we'll just have to see how it shakes out. There's a lot to keep track of when each doc has a cast of about 100 people in the clips.
If my order for these films seems weird, remember that I'm usually linking by the IMDB credits for each documentary, and those are often incomplete. Tomorrow's film was a tough one to link to, it's got a very small cast, so that required that it fit between two other films with a particular talk-show host, and so that's how I built the chain, by putting the tougher films to link into little 3-film blocks, and then stacking those blocks together. It's a process.
THE PLOT: This documentary reveals the background of one of the legends of comedy, Don Rickles, who's hailed by some of today's biggest comedians as one of the classics, who they aspire to emulate in their own comedy.
AFTER: So here's a weird thing, I put in an appearance myself on HBO last night - this new series called "The Rehearsal", which has deadpan comic/reality TV show host Nathan Fielder helping people fix their lives by rehearsing situations - in the first episode, a pub trivia player wants to reveal a secret about his education to a teammate, and I was on a trivia team with both people for several years, so I appear in the photograph of the team in question. My life is like that sometimes, very surreal in that I am often celebrity-adjacent, or I may pop up in a documentary myself, like "The People vs. George Lucas". I carry around in my brain a long list of movie & TV stars I've ended up talking to or in the same room with, in the same way a rock fan might have a mental list of all the concerts they've seen (I have that, too - but I need to start writing this all down before I start to forget things...)
Anything that's presented as a documentary is a manipulation by definition - with thousands of editing possibilities a narrative can be carefully crafted by a director, that's just called filmmaking, really, and the same thing goes for a "reality" show. Just knowing that scenes can be shot in any order and then presented in a completely different order puts a few different spins on "The Rehearsal", just asking what the host and the interview subject knew WHEN each scene was filmed allows for a number of possibilities, all of which are forms of manipulation - yet all of the reviews I've read so far just assume that things happened in the order they're presented in, which is probably a misunderstanding of how the show was made. Any documentary about someone's life is the same way - when you factor in what's left in, what's left out, and what order events are presented in, there are hundreds of different narratives that can be crafted, even in a non-fiction film. Just saying.
One could, for example, just include footage of Don Rickles doing his routine for a Vegas crowd, and then we'd get one impression of him, by today's standards he'd be seen as racist and sexist and homophobic, and the only thing preventing today's tightly wound Karens from getting on Twitter and cancelling him would be the fact that he's already dead. They may still try anyway. If a documentary instead chose to focus on his 41-year marriage, his children, the vacations he took with his wife and close friends Bob and Ginny Newhart, then we'd get an entirely different portrait of the man. Rickles could have easily been one type of person on stage, and a very different person in real life - I'm not saying he WAS, but he could have been. All of TV and film consists of manipulations, we're led to certain conclusions about people through what we're shown, and not shown.
He was a TV star, a movie star, an insult comic, a veteran, a husband, a father, a friend - he could be all those things, none of them negate the others - and his comedy frequently came from going too far, being so over-the-top that you'd think, "Oh, my God, did he really SAY that? Can you say that?" Different time, indeed. I like thinking that maybe if you spend enough time being celebrity-adjacent that you become some kind of celebrity yourself, it gives me some weird kind of hope, or at least validates some of my own stories. Not to brag, but after a year of working at the theater I've had brushes with Kenneth Branagh, Steve Buscemi, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Levar Burton, Peter Dinklage, Amy Schumer, Amy Poehler, Alex Winter, Ricki Lake, and half the chefs from the Food Network (more on that in a couple weeks). I'm not supposed to interact with them or take their pictures or get star-struck, but I end up with a few great little stories about asking them to keep their masks or directing them to the rest-room.
I guess my point is that the celebrities are just like the rest of us, only they got lucky and were able to turn their talents into a life in front of the camera, but there's the possibility that this always comes at a cost, namely that their private lives aren't very private any more, plus they need to keep entertaining, keep moving, keep climbing upward if they want to stay famous and employed. It's a bit exhausting just thinking about it - I'll spend a few hours updating IMDB credits or binge-watching a TV show and I fool myself into thinking I've accomplished something, when I really haven't. All I really have to show for my troubles is a 30-year career in independent film production, a blog that takes up too much of my time and a bunch of stories about random encounters with celebrities - is that anything?
I feel like maybe I've become too cynical - like I saw the footage of "Toy Story" director John Lasseter explaining how Don Rickles was the best candidate to voice Mr. Potato Head, but what would he have said if Rickles hadn't been available? He'd just say that about somebody else, wouldn't he? Rickles died in 2017 before he could record a voice for "Toy Story 4", but with permission from his estate, they used lines recorded from the other films and made it work, so they didn't have to hire a sound-alike or try to duplicate his voice with a computer or something. I think they did the same sort of thing for Paul Newman in "Cars 3". Again, I don't know if celebrities are dying faster these days, or if it just feels that way. When you factor in the recent deaths of Sidney Poitier, Bob Saget, Carl Reiner, and James Caan, mathematically more than half the cast of this film is deceased, and the film was released in 2007. Make of that what you will - but let's also appreciate the people still with us, like Bob Newhart, Doc Severinsen, Steve Lawrence, Shecky Greene and Frankie Avalon.
Also starring Don Rickles (last seen in "Robert Klein Still Can't Stop His Leg"), Richard Lewis (ditto), Dave Attell (last seen in "I Feel Pretty"), Frankie Avalon (last seen in "The Automat"), Debbie Reynolds (ditto), Roseanne Barr (last seen in "George Carlin's American Dream"), Chris Rock (ditto), Ernest Borgnine (last seen in "Hustle"), Jack Carter (ditto), James Caan (last seen in "Middle Men"), Mario Cantone (last seen in "Otherhood"), Roger Corman (last seen in "Scream 3"), Billy Crystal (last seen in "Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me"), Robert De Niro (last seen in "Freelancers"), Clint Eastwood (last seen in "The Mule"), Whoopi Goldberg (last seen in "How Stella Got Her Groove Back"), Kathy Griffin (last seen in "Hall Pass"), Christopher Guest (last seen in "Mascots"), Penn Jillette (last seen in "Can We Take a Joke?"), Robin Williams (ditto), Jimmy Kimmel (last seen in "Betty White: First Lady of Television"), Larry King (last seen in "Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road"), John Landis (last seen in "Eating Raoul"), Peter Lassally, John Lasseter (last seen in "Walt: The Man Behind the Myth"), Steve Lawrence, Jay Leno (last seen in "The Eyes of Tammy Faye"), George Lopez (last seen in "Richard Pryor: Omit the Logic"), Peggy March, Ed McMahon (last seen in "Tiny Tim: King for a Day"), Bob Newhart (last seen in "Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde"), Tony Oppedisano, Regis Philbin (last seen in "I Am Divine"), Carl Reiner (last seen in "Mel Brooks: Unwrapped"), Barbara Rickles, Joan Rivers (last seen in "Whitney"), Bob Saget (last seen in "Gilbert"), Martin Scorsese (last seen in "Spielberg"), Harry Shearer (last seen in "Father Figures"), Sarah Silverman (last seen in "Rent"), Bobby Slayton (last seen in "Wonder Wheel"), Keely Smith, Dick Smothers (last seen in "WBCN and the American Revolution"), Tom Smothers (ditto), John Stamos (last seen in "My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2"), Harry Dean Stanton (last seen in "Not Another Teen Movie"), George Wallace (last seen in "The Last Laugh" (2019))
with archive footage of Don Adams, John Astin, Jack Benny (last seen in "The Automat"), Annette Funicello (ditto), Jackie Gleason (ditto), Bob Hope (ditto), Burt Lancaster (ditto), Dean Martin (ditto), Frank Sinatra (ditto), Milton Berle (also last seen in "Robert Klein Still Can't Stop His Leg"), Pat Boone, Lenny Bruce (also last seen in "George Carlin's American Dream"), Johnny Carson (ditto), Ronald Reagan (ditto), Doc Severinsen (ditto), Red Buttons, Ted Cassidy, Bill Cosby (last seen in "The One and Only Dick Gregory"), Robert Culp, Tony Curtis (last seen in "Paris When It Sizzles"), Sammy Davis Jr. (last seen in "Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond"), Dick Van Dyke (ditto), Bob Denver, Clark Gable, Billy Graham (last seen in "Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story"), Shecky Greene, Andy Griffith (last seen in "Adrienne"), Estelle Harris (last heard in "Tarzan 2: The Legend Begins"), Buster Keaton (last seen in "The Love Letter"), Grace Kelly, Don Knotts, Burgess Meredith (last seen in "Magic"), Ray Milland, Elizabeth Montgomery, Mary Tyler Moore (also last seen in "Betty White: First Lady of Television"), Agnes Moorehead (last seen in "Show Boat"), Jim Nabors (last seen in "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas"), Ginny Newhart, Jack Oakie, Pope John Paul II (last seen in "New Wave: Dare to Be Different"), Louis Prima, Freddie Prinze, Nancy Reagan (last seen in "The Amazing Johnathan Documentary"), Jeffrey Ross (also last seen in "Gilbert"), Telly Savalas, Donald Sutherland (last seen in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"), Elizabeth Taylor (also carrying over from "Becoming Mike Nichols") and the voice of John Ratzenberger (last heard in "Soul")
RATING: 6 out of 10 "Hollywood Squares" appearances
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