Mr. Warmth - The Don Rickles Project

Year 14, Day 197 - 7/16/22 - Movie #4,203

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

Becoming Mike Nichols

Year 14, Day 196 - 7/15/22 - Movie #4,202

BEFORE: This is still the week for the old and dead celebrities - jeez, at this point it's almost easier to count how many of the celebrities from the 1960's are still alive, there don't seem to be too many.  Mel Brooks is still alive (at last reporting) and so is Elaine May - but Mike Nichols died in 2014.  This special's been airing on HBO Max for some time now, I couldn't work it in last year but thankfully it's still available, and I can cross it off the list. 

Anne Bancroft carries over from "Mel Brooks: Unwrapped". 

THE PLOT: Filmmaker Mike Nichols sits down with theater director Jack O'Brien to discuss his personal life and professional work. 

AFTER: Wow, you talk about lives LIVED, you have to talk about Mike Nichols, who started as an improv comic and ended up one of the top Hollywood directors of all time.  It's like learning that the Beatles started out as a skiffle cover band who only played garden parties before becoming the biggest band in the Free World - but everybody gots to start somehere, I guess. 

The early routines Nichols did with Elaine May were a hit, they were on every comedy show and they had a best-selling album and they even played Broadway - they may have had a basic framework for the premises but each night they never knew exactly where they were going to go with it. Apparently they tried to rehearse once, and it did not go well - nothing beat that feeling of being out on stage and letting the comedy develop, without a net, and I guess some things only come to you when you're in the moment.  

But Nichols was also a fan of theater, and his life was changed by watching Brando in "A Streetcar Named Desire", so when the run of the improv act was over, he got into directing plays, starting with "Barefoot in the Park", his first gig directing a Neil Simon play, which was followed by another, "The Odd Couple".  Other people directed these stories as movies later, but Nichols directed them as plays.  (Robert Redford was in both stage and screen versions of "Barefoot" and Walter Matthau in both versions of "The Odd Couple".). And Nichols got Tony Awards for both productions. 

Then Warner Brothers offered him the chance to direct another play, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf", written by Edward Albee, as a movie. Nichols leapt at the opportunity, because he already knew the whole stage-play, in and out.  He knew the timing, the story arcs, how long everything needed to be, he just had to learn to apply all that to a movie, with the film and the lenses and the editing and such. A lot of movies have been plays first, a lot of film directors have been stage directors, it doesn't seem that uncommon.  No actors carried over from the stage play, but Warner wanted Elizabeth Taylor to play Martha, despite being too young, and Nichols then felt it made sense for her husband, Richard Burton, to play George.  Those actors WERE the characters in real life, in many ways, and their marriage probably had just as many problems and issues that they could fight over, so it all seemed to make some kind of sense. 

This documentary was recorded in two parts - one intimate discussion of Nichols' early films with theater director Jack O'Brien, and another discussion of the same films in front of an audience.  The doc toggles between the two conversations, which is a bit jarring - the audience is not there, then they're there, then they're gone again - but this was apparently necessary to keep the best takes and the best anecdotes and present them in chronological order by film.  

The conversation(s) with Nichols then turn to "The Graduate", a classic film if ever there was one. Dustin Hoffman had no prior acting experience, but that worked for a depressed California character who didn't know what to do with his life, and thus settled into an affair with his girlfriend's mother.  It was satirical, but also deadpan and realistic, and all the Simon & Garfunkel music didn't hurt.  We learn that it was just happenstance that Nichols was listening to their first album while starting the filming of "The Graduate", and he put two and two together and realized their songs were perfect for the soundtrack. But he hated the first song that they proposed for "Mrs. Robinson", so the duo took another song they were working on, called "Mrs. Roosevelt" and just changed the title and a few other lyrics.  

The real shame here is that this special is only an hour long, and thus only covers his anecdotes about his first couple of films, made in the 1960's.  I wish there could be another hour focusing on his films of the 1970's ("Catch-22" and "Carnal Knowledge"), an hour for his films of the 80's ("Silkwood", "Heartburn" and "Working Girl") and an hour for the 1990's ("Postcards from the Edge", "Regarding Henry", "The Birdcage" and "Primary Colors").  Yes, I realize that would be four hours long, but I think his body of work merits that - the "Spielberg" movie was two and a half hours, and the recent George Carlin documentary was THREE and a half.  But Nichols died a few weeks after these two conversations were filmed, so we'll always be denied that. 

What do Mel Brooks and Mike Nichols have in common?  They're both on the list of EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony) winners, and there are only 17 if you don't count honorary awards. I've got one more documentary about another EGOT winner coming up in 10 days...

Also starring Mike Nichols (last seen in "George Carlin's American Dream"), Jack O'Brien

with archive footage of Julie Andrews (last seen in "Walt: The Man Behind the Myth"), Elizabeth Ashley, Carol Burnett (last seen in "Betty White: First Lady of Television"), Marlon Brando (last seen in "Spielberg"), Omar Sharif (ditto), Richard Burton (last seen in "The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart"), Art Carney (last seen in "The Late Show"), Leslie Caron (last seen in "The Last of the Blonde Bombshells"), Montgomery Clift (last seen in "Zeroville"), Sandy Dennis, Art Garfunkel (last seen in "Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind"), Paul Simon (ditto), Buck Henry (last seen in "Eating Raoul"), Dustin Hoffman (last seen in "Can We Take a Joke?"), Rock Hudson (last seen in "Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me"), Ann-Margret (last seen in "Magic"), Lee Marvin, Walter Matthau (last seen in "I.Q."), Elaine May (also last seen in "George Carlin's American Dream"), Robert Mitchum (last seen in "Promising Young Woman"), Mildred Natwick, Anthony Perkins (last seen in "They'll Love Me When I'm Dead"), Sidney Poitier, Robert Redford (last seen in "Havana"), Vanessa Redgrave (last seen in "The Gathering Storm"), Katharine Ross (last seen in "The Hero"), George Segal (last seen in "The Sparks Brothers"), Paul Sills, Neil Simon, Meryl Streep (last seen in "The Prom"), Jessica Tandy (last seen in "Best Friends"), Elizabeth Taylor (last seen in "The Automat"), Jack Warner

RATING: 5 out of 10 Broadway revivals

Mel Brooks: Unwrapped

Year 14, Day 195 - 7/14/22 - Movie #4,201

BEFORE: I think this film marks the halfway point of the Summer Rock & Doc Block - this is the 23rd film since I opened with "The One and Only Dick Gregory", and I've got 23 films to go after this, I think, unless another one pops up at the last second.  I've resisted all inclinations to tear the chain apart and re-assemble it in a "better" order, I just keep telling myself that I've got a clear path to the end if I just stick with the program, and after that I've got a clear path to watching "Thor: Love & Thunder" sometime in August.  It would be more helpful if I had a clear path to October 1 after that, but that's going to take some time for me to come up with one. 

I thought I'd have nothing but time, though, I've been sidelined due to roof repairs at the theater, but then between making a list of things to do around the house, plus helping an animator friend enter her new film into festivals, trying to catch up with "Moon Knight" and clearing my DVR of episodes of "Restaurant: Impossible" and "Bar Rescue" from the spring, and then trying to plan BBQ Crawl vacation #3 for October, I've been finding myself with less time than I thought.  I could stop watching movies, that would free up some time, but I'm anxious to get to the end of the doc chain and get back to fiction films, so instead I'm doubling up on Mel Brooks today.  Next week I've got 4 docs about members of "The Rat Pack" so I don't want to fall behind.

Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner carry over from "The Automat". 

THE PLOT: At the age of 91, Mel Brooks is unstoppable, with his musical "Young Frankenstein" opening to critical acclaim in London in late 2017. Alan Yentob visits Mel at home in Hollywood. 

AFTER: Well, I'm not really sure if this counts as a MOVIE, it seems to be some kind of TV special cobbled together from different interviews with Mel Brooks over the years, it seems he was visited by a guy from the BBC once every decade, three or four times in all.  The BBC interview show was called "Imagine" and this hour ran as an episode in season 31, but HBO Max is running it as if it's a stand-alone movie, so I guess it is?  Let's just say it is.  

The problem is, the format is very confusing, because Brooks and his friend from the BBC did something a little different every time they got together, and they decided to pretend to not understand the premise of being interviewed, which is a joke that wore thin probably the second time. But no, by all means, do it again ten years later. And ten years after that.  The topic of discussion each decade has a lot to do with what Mel Brooks was pimping at the time, which ranged from "The Producers" playing on Broadway to "Young Frankenstein" playing on stage in the West End.  Well, at least he was consistent.  

But all the bouncing around in time is very jarring - it's London in 1991, and then it's Hollywood California in 1981, and then it's 2017 and the young Mel Brooks is suddenly very old.  We know it's the same guy, but all this recycled footage ends up feeling like a flashback within a flashback, the interviews always referencing the previous interviews.  My guess is that none of the interviews produced a solid hour of workable material, so they all had to be mashed together or nested within each other.  It's also possible that Brooks told the same stories each time, so cutting out all the repetition from the four interviews created one usable hour, just one where the interview's subject just kept jumping around in age.

So there's probably a definitive documentary that will be made one day about Mel Brooks' life and career, but this sure isn't it, it's got its own agenda, which, sad to say, is promoting his current projects and then a lot of dicking around. But hey, if you want to watch Mel Brooks shopping at Whole Foods and buying chicken meatballs and thin spaghetti for a night at Carl Reiner's house, then you've come to the right place.  Brooks' marriage to Anne Bancroft is somehow summed up in just three still photos, and his career is reduced to one clip from "High Anxiety", another from "Young Frankenstein", and two from "The Producers" - the rest is anecdotes about old Jews vacationing in the Catskills, and I feel like I've heard those from him many times over the years. I'd love for Mel to live to be 100, but not 101 because that would mean another tiresome visit from Alan Yentob. 

Also starring Tom Jones (last seen in "Tina"), Sherry Lansing, Alan Yentob

with archive footage of Anne Bancroft (last seen in "The Elephant Man"), Peter Boyle (also carrying over from "The Automat"), Sid Caesar (ditto), Cary Grant (ditto), Madeline Kahn (ditto), Imogene Coca (last seen in "The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart"), Russell Crowe (last seen in "The Man With the Iron Fists"), Marty Feldman, Teri Garr (last seen in "Spielberg"), Zero Mostel (last seen in "The Front"), Buddy Rich (last seen in "Count Me In"), Dick Shawn (last seen in "Way...Way Out"), Gene Wilder (last seen in "Start the Revolution Without Me").

RATING: 4 out of 10 drum lessons from Buddy Rich

The Automat

Year 14, Day 195 - 7/14/22 - Movie #4,200

BEFORE: OK, that's 21 films in the Summer Rock & Doc Block so far, so let's take a break for lunch, now that I've reached another century mark.  A break from all the films about dead celebrities, to watch a documentary about a dead restaurant chain.  This is another film that I saw being screened at DocFest last November, and I made a mental note to get it on my list when it became available.  It's not streaming anywhere yet for free, so I had to pay $3.99 to watch it on YouTube, but based on the cast list, if I don't watch it NOW, when will I be able to fit it into the chain? 

Carl Reiner carries over from "Betty White: First Lady of Television". 

THE PLOT: Documentary centers on the vending machine-based culture popularized in the 20th century that offered fresh cooked meals in a commissary-style eatery. 

AFTER: Honestly, I was on the fence about including this one - Carl Reiner's in tomorrow's film, too, so I could have dropped this one and just continued on, but I'm glad I didn't.  The Automat MEANT something to American society, or at least in the two cities where it existed, which were New York and Philadelphia. I remember the last Automat restaurant, which was on the corner of 42nd St. and 3rd Ave., which closed in 1991.  I was working for a little production company downtown near the World Trade Center, but they always did their post-production - editing and FX - at Post Perfect, which was in the Daily News building on 42nd St. (seen in the 1977 "Superman" movie, subbing in for the Daily Planet) so I was in that neighborhood quite a lot whenever a project was being edited. I don't think I ever ate there, I was too scared of it for some reason, but now I wish that I had.  I was 21 or 22 and hadn't developed a taste for coffee yet, I think for lunch I ate mostly frozen pot pies or 50-cent hot dogs from Gray's Papaya.  

I remember thinking, "I know what a horn is, but what's a hardart?" It turns out the company was founded back in the day by two men, Joseph Horn and Frank Hardart.  Ah, a personal 34-year old mystery solved!  

The first automat in the U.S. opened in 1902 in Philadelphia, inspired by restaurants operating in Berlin, Germany, and then the first NYC Automat opened in 1912 in Times Square, then a 2nd in Union Square the same week.  By 1924 the Horn & Hardart Corporation also opened retail stores, using the advertising slogan "Less Work for Mother" - they were a hit, because not everyone possessed the skills to make apple pies at home. And then when the depression hit, these restaurants were enormously popular, because people could get a sandwich or a small bowl of macaroni & cheese or some baked beans for just a couple nickels.  Socially, this was the great equalizer, and people from all walks of life, from the rich to the poor (OK, probably from the middle-class to the poor) could get a decent meal in a clean environment as long as they could round up a few nickels. Large families and working people also depended on the Automats if they didn't have a lot of money or time to cook meals at home.  

By 1941 the company had over 150 restaurants and retail stores in NYC and Philly, serving 500,000 patrons per day, and while some of the food was prepared in each store, the baked goods were made in a central location and a fleet of trucks was delivering them to each store, where workers would slice the pies and re-stock the rotating drums that supplied the little windows opened by the knobs on the customer side.  Some foods came from hot steam tables, but mostly items came from those little windows, while kids wondered about the "magic" that refilled each dispenser, and coffee was dispensed by spouts covered by fancy dolphin-shaped sculpted ornaments.  People grew accustomed to the salisbury steaks, the beef pies, the fish cakes, and as a bonus the illusion created was that the food seemed untouched by human hands.  Meanwhile women in glass booths were busy changing dollars into nickels, always giving out the proper number, and people could eat their food on shiny tables in huge decorated halls.  

The Horn & Hardart company advertised heavily on radio and sponsored a variety show with talented children singing, during the 1940's on radio and then on TV starting in 1948. Jack Benny, who played a notorious cheapskate, launched his TV show with a party at the Automat in 1950, giving each guest a roll of nickels, and maybe you remember the restaurant being name-checked in the Marilyn Monroe song "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend".  "A kiss may be grand / but it won't pay the rental / On your humble flat / Or help you at the automat."  History now regards the success of the automats as a by-product of the Depression and Pre-World War II economy, where 20th Century American efficiency created a bustling operation that kept its prices low by removing most of the service frills, passed those savings along to the customer, and made up the difference by preparing food in bulk and serving in high volumes. 

Eventually, times changed and the cost of coffee had to be increased from 5 cents to 10 cents, which sent a shockwave through the NYC community.  The Automats stayed popular until the 1960's, when fast-food chains started to dominate, but also the culture changed and people started leaving urban areas for the suburbs, seeking less crime and better lives for their kids. Also, people started to prefer waitress service and items from specialized restaurants and bakery shops, so the business model for the Automat became less sustainable as time went by. The food from the Automat that kept people alive during the Depression was perceived as basic and antiquated.  The Horn & Hardart company tried to change with the times and turned many of their NYC operations into Burger Kings, Arby's and Bojangles' Chicken outlets.  The company also lost money by purchasing the Royal Inn in Las Vegas for $7.4 million, giving it a $3.5 million renovation, and then selling it three years later when it started to lose money.  (Talk about a curse, this Vegas property was also owned over the years by Debbie Reynolds and the World Wrestling Federation at various times, it was also called the Royal Americana, the Hollywood Hotel, the Greek Isles and the Clarion...did it ever turn a profit for anyone?)

Just like Betty White, Elaine Stritch, Gordon Lightfoot, the Automat had a good run for a long time...but there's that expiration date theory again. Life ain't nothing but a series of questionable decisions that all appeared to make some kind of sense at the time, and someday even Gooble and Amazon are going to go the way of the dinosaur. And now I'm starting to sound like an old fogey complaining about the price of iced coffee at Dunkin Donuts which seems very overpriced at $3.50 - I mean, come on, it's just coffee and ICE, for chrissakes.  It shouldn't cost me more than 50 cents.

Could this dining format come back into style?  We may be heading into another recession, or even another Great Depression (the first one wasn't really "great", can we have just an OK depression?) so imagine a new Automat 2.0 where every food item costs a dollar, and coffee is 50 cents, wouldn't that be great?  And you wouldn't have to deal with waiters who refuse to write your order down on that little pad because they say they can remember it just fine, and then they screw your order up and they still expect a 20% tip after that.  We've been to a couple restaurants lately that allow us to swipe our credit card at the table, so no need to bring your credit card up to the cash register, or entrust it to a server who might steal the number or make a cloned copy of the card.  Why not automate the whole damn restaurant, you just scan a QR code to see the whole menu on your phone, you use an app or a wi-fi connection to place your order directly to the kitchen, no need to flag down a waiter.  Then your phone gets a text message or an alert that the food is ready, and a robot or a drone is bringing it to your table, and if you need ketchup or another knife you just get one through your smartphone the same way. And then when the meal is over you swipe your card right at your table, just like you do when you buy an item in a store.  And the restaurant saves money by not hiring waiters and paying their FICA and their health insurance, and ideally they then pass the savings on to the customers in the form of lower prices. (Yeah, right... When do prices ever go DOWN these days?) 

Anyway, the reason I had to pay to watch this film on YouTube is that it's NOT on free streaming yet, but just watch, it will probably air on PBS next month, and I could have watched it for FREE...  I've been getting back to entering films in festivals lately, and this film is still playing in them - so if you want to see it live in person, you can catch it on July 18 at the Jewish Film Festival in Pittsfield, MA, on July 24 at the Kan-Kan Cinema in Indianapolis, July 31 at the Texas Theatre in Dallas, or July 31 at the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival in Australia. Just tell them I sent you - the song that Mel Brooks sings about Automat's coffee over the end credits is probably worth the price of admission by itself. 

Also starring Ron Barrett, Mel Brooks (last heard in "Leap!"), Lorraine Diehl, Ruth Bader Ginsburg (last seen in "Rigged: The Voter Suppression Playbook"), Wilson Goode, Elliott Gould (last seen in "Ocean's Eight"), Marianne Hardart, Paul Hardart, Norris Horn, Lisa Keller, Colin Powell (last seen in "Shock and Awe"), Apache Ramos, John W. Romas, Howard Schultz, Alec Shuldiner, Steve Stollman,

with archive footage of Bud Abbott (last seen in "The One and Only Dick Gregory"), Lou Costello (ditto), Frankie Avalon, Jack Benny (last seen in "Who Was That Lady?"), Peter Boyle (last seen in "Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed"), Eddie Bracken, Sid Caesar (last seen in "The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart"), Jimmy Carter (last seen in "Irresistible"), Rosemary Clooney, Tim Conway (also carrying over from "Betty White: First Lady of Television"), Doris Day (last seen in "George Carlin's American Dream"), James Dean (last seen in "No Direction Home: Bob Dylan"), Eddie Fisher, Annette Funicello, Max Gail (last seen in "I'll See You in My Dreams"), Jackie Gleason (last seen in "Tiny Tim: King for a Day"), Cary Grant (last seen in "Everything Is Copy"), Audrey Hepburn (last seen in "You, Me and Dupree"), Gregory Hines (last seen in "Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her"), Bob Hope (last seen in "Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond"), Madeline Kahn (last seen in "Paper Moon"), Burt Lancaster (last seen in "Atlantic City"), Peter Lawford, Janet Leigh (last seen in "A Single Man"), Hal Linden, Dean Martin (last seen in "Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood"), Victor Mature, Bernadette Peters (last seen in "Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me"), Donna Reed, Debbie Reynolds (last seen in "Connie and Carla") Jean Simmons (last seen in "The Robe"), Frank Sinatra (last seen in "Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind"), Arnold Stang, Elizabeth Taylor (last seen in "The Lost Daughter"), Leslie Uggams (last seen in "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks"), and the voices of Mel Blanc, Allen Funt, Ed Herlihy (last seen in "Malcolm X"), Alan Reed, 

RATING: 6 out of 10 slices of lemon meringue pie

Betty White: First Lady of Television

Year 14, Day 194 - 7/13/22 - Movie #4,199

BEFORE: WAY back on January 1, I had to decide who to dedicate the new Movie Year to, somebody from among the fallen, and there were a LOT of fallen.  I couldn't decide between Betty White and Fred Willard, so I split the vote.  And it took me THIS long, 198 films, to get to the documentary about Betty White that I knew I had in the hopper.  So yeah, I stacked the deck, whatchu gonna do about it?  I wasn't 100% sure that I could link to this one, but then I added so many docs to the line-up that there were probably a thousand different ways to link them all together, so I was able to choose the one that suited me best.  

So, umm, why not add one more film to the chain and put this documentary on the century mark, make it Big Movie #4,200?  Well, sure, I could, but Betty herself didn't make it to 100, she died a the age of 99, so I felt maybe it was appropriate to make sure this film's number ended in that "99".  SO close to 100, and yet not quite there. Hey, she had a good run, and we should all be so lucky as to have 99 good years, even if some of them aren't so good, and a career in TV.  Isn't that the American dream?

Tina Fey carries over from "Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me". Betty may not make the year-end countdown, because that takes three appearances in a calendar year, and right now she's only got two.  But who knows, she may turn up in another doc before the chain is done, there may be archive footage of her leaving Studio 54 some random Saturday night in the 1970's. 

THE PLOT: A look at Betty White's life and career features behind-the-scenes clips of her work on TV and comments from her friends and co-stars. 

AFTER: Again, who doesn't love Betty White?  All of her co-stars (the ones still living, anyway) turned up to be interviewed for this 2018 TV movie (?) tribute.  Hey, Netflix ran it and then it aired on PBS, plus it's a documentary, so I'm counting it as a movie.  I know, standards are really slipping here at the Movie Year, aren't they?  Just slap together a bunch of old TV footage from 1950's daytime talk shows, assemble the remaining cast of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show", plus the cast of "Hot in Cleveland" during their lunch breaks, and you've got a movie.  Sort of. 

Betty White was the last surviving cast member from TWO long-running sitcoms - "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" and "The Golden Girls", now THAT'S longevity.  Except for Ted Knight (who died in 1986), the vast majority of the MTM cast died in the last few years - Mary Tyler Moore in 2017, Valerie Harper and Georgia Engel in 2019, then Cloris Leachman, Gavin MacLeod and Ed Asner in 2021, and finally Betty on the LAST day of that year.  It might seem statistically unlikely, but given the relative ages of all the cast members, plus the passage of time, it kind of makes some odd sort of sense.  Everything has an expiration date - I'm surprised somebody didn't write an article about the show being "cursed" like they did for the movie "Poltergeist" or the bad things that seem to happen to actors who play Superman.  Hey, there's still one cast member of "Gilligan's Island" left, Tina Louise, and one cast member of "Hogan's Heroes", Robert Clary. 

How can Betty White pass away at age 99 and still have people think she left us far too soon?  That speaks volumes about her personality, I think - everybody loved her in the early days of TV, and then she got a whole second career out of playing against type, like saying raunchy things on Saturday Night Live or appearing in that Snickers commercial playing a rough game of football in the mud.  On "The Golden Girls" her character was always the clueless one, she didn't seem to understand much about the sexy humor, but it turns out you have to be in on the jokes to make them work, even if you're playing dumb.  But being on TV so much, and being allowed into so many American homes via the tube, people just started to think she was always going to be there, I guess. By comparison, when Elaine Stritch, who had the complete opposite personality (yet was also funny), died, some people probably said, "Thank God, I thought she'd never leave..." or maybe they just enjoyed a little peace and quiet for once. 

Things I didn't know but learned from this film - Betty White was one of the first female TV producers, out of necessity of being in the right place at the right time and needing to figure out how to get a sitcom ("Life With Elizabeth") made on a tight budget.  And she was a crusader for civil rights, when Southern TV viewers didn't like the fact that Arthur Duncan, a dancer on her show, was black, she vowed to keep him in place, because she felt it was important. She was also the first woman to get an emmy for hosting a game show, called "Just Men!" in addition to being a regular on SO many game shows in the 1950's through 70's - "Password", "Match Game", "To Tell the Truth", "The Hollywood Squares" and "The $25,000 Pyramid", to name just a few. 

Who said there are no third acts in American lives?  Betty's fourth act came from getting back into movies at the age of 87 in "The Proposal" in 2009, and then the fifth act came about from a Facebook campaign to have her host "SNL" in 2010, which earned her another Emmy.  And then she's got the Guinness World Record for longest TV career by a female entertainer.  And she only became an actress back in the day because women weren't allowed to serve as forest rangers, which was her first choice for a career.  Later in life she took up so much charitable work for animal-rights causes, essentially she became the ultimate forest ranger.  (The USDA Forest Service made her an honorary ranger in 2010, fulfilling her dream.)

During World War II she volunteered for the Women's Voluntary Services, and drove a truck if you can believe that, but also participated in events for troops being deployed.  A post-war tryout for the movies told her she wasn't photogenic enough, so she moved over to radio. Hey, it's gonna happen, just keep trying different ways to break in, right?  It worked this way for George Carlin, too.  That led to "Life with Elizabeth", which led to "The Betty White Show", a daily talk & variety show, and she had creative control. Then came all those game shows in the 1960's, where she met her third husband, Allen Ludden, the host of "Password", in 1961.  They got married in 1963, she turned him down for a year and a half of proposals, then finally gave in, but always regretted that lost year and a half.  

Then "Mama's Family", "Golden Girls", "Empty Nest" and "Hot in Cleveland" - there was a lot to cover in a documentary that was only an hour long, so really they could only focus on the big three.  Ultimately, this hour about Betty White's career was edited into "Betty White: A Celebration", which screened in theaters on what would have been her 100th birthday, January 17, 2022. 

Also starring Betty White (last seen in "You Again"), Valerie Bertinelli, Tyne Daly (last seen in "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs"), Arthur Duncan, Lisa Edelstein (last seen in "What Women Want"), Georgia Engel (last seen in "The Sweetest Thing"), Tony Fantozzi, Michelle Forbes (last seen in "The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2"), Sharon Gless, Valerie Harper (last seen in "My Future Boyfriend"), Jennifer Love Hewitt (last seen in "I Still Know What You Did Last Summer"), Linda Lavin (last seen in "Being the Ricardos"), Justina Machado (last heard in "Scoob!"), Gavin MacLeod, Millicent Martin (last seen in "The Last Word"), Mary Tyler Moore (last seen in "Walt: The Man Behind the Myth"), Jack Narz, Carl Reiner (last heard in "Toy Story 4"), Ryan Reynolds (last heard in "The Croods 2: A New Age"), Tom Sullivan, Alex Trebek (last seen in "Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could read My Mind"), Jeff Witjas

with archive footage of Jason Alexander (last seen in "For the Love of Spock"), Bea Arthur, Ed Asner (last seen in "Too Big to Fail"), Sandra Bullock (last seen in "All About Steve"), Carol Burnett (also last heard in "Toy Story 4"), Dick Clark (last seen in "Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road"), Tim Conway, Rachel Dratch (last seen in "Adrienne"), Nelson Eddy, Will Forte (also last heard in "Scoob!"), Ana Gasteyer (last seen in "Wine Country"), Estelle Getty, Merv Griffin (last seen in "George Carlin's American Dream"), Al Jarvis, Jimmy Kimmel (last seen in "Can We Take a Joke?"), Ted Knight, Cloris Leachman (also last heard in "The Croods 2: A New Age"), Jane Leeves (last seen in "Music of the Heart"), Allen Ludden, Jeanette MacDonald, Wendie Malick (last seen in "Waiting..."), Dick Martin (last seen in "Tiny Tim: King for a Day"), Richard Masur (last seen in "Everything Is Copy"), Rue McClanahan, Jack Paar (last seen in "The One and Only Dick Gregory"), Amy Poehler (last seen in "A.C.O.D."), Tony Randall (last seen in "Pavarotti"), Gene Rayburn, Maya Rudolph (last seen in "My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea"), Molly Shannon (last seen in "Promising Young Woman"), William Shatner (last seen in "Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project"), Mary Steenburgen (last seen in "Miss Firecracker")

RATING: 7 out of 10 Outstanding Lead or Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series Emmy nominations

Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me

Year 14, Day 193 - 7/12/22 - Movie #4,198

BEFORE: OK, if last week was about rock radio, rock song composition and production, drumming and then ended with Alanis Morissette and Neil Young going out on tour, this week is perhaps "old fogeys" week.  Neil Young's getting up there, Gordon Lightfoot is 83 and there are documentaries made about old people coming right up.  

Alec Baldwin carries over from "Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind".

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Always at the Carlyle" (Movie #3,349)

THE PLOT: The uncompromising Tony and Emmy Award-winner is showcased both on and off stage via rare archival footage and intimate cinema verité. 

AFTER: Elaine Stritch was 87 when this movie was made, as she was preparing for a series of shows where she performed Sondheim, "One Song at a Time".  That sorts of seems like it would go without saying, like a performer couldn't do ALL the Sondheim songs at the same time, or even two at once, that would be madness.  Perhaps it was just a catchy rhyming title.  Stritch had a couple of medical issues during the making of the film, related to her diabetes, but at one point she was in the hospital and clearly thought her time had come - maybe everybody in the hospital has to come to terms with that - but she was OK with it.  She'd lived a long life, fell in and out of love a few times, got married, got widowed, but never stopped performing and had some of her biggest stage successes in her 80's. But she did die at age 89, a little over a year after this film played at the Tribeca Film Festival in April 2013. 

It's sort of a Sondheim-centric Movie Year, the famous composer was played by Bradley Whitford in "Tick, Tick...Boom!" a couple months ago, and I've got the remake of "West Side Story" scheduled for August, shortly after the Doc Bloc is over. My wife's also got tickets for "Into the Woods" on Broadway, we're going to see that in the last week of July.  There are probably some documentaries out there focused on him, but they just weren't on my radar when I put this chain together - and the chain's already too long, I don't want to make it any longer right now.  (Yep, there's one, "Six by Sondheim", on HBO Max. It doesn't connect with my plans at the moment, but I'll consider it for the future...)

Stritch was featured prominently in that documentary about the Carlyle Hotel, where she lived from 2005 to 2013 - I'm still not sure how all that worked, if certain celebrities were able to buy condo or co-op spaces there, or if they just paid full hotel rates and were allowed to decorate their hotel rooms any way they wanted.  For sure it was full service treatment, just replace the normal NYC apartment building staff with hotel staff - and when she moved out they named the suite after her.  She moved back to Michigan, but I'm not sure what sort of real estate she bought or rented there, the film doesn't say.  But while she stayed at the Carlyle, she did a (semi-?) regular cabaret act in the Cafe Carlyle - it's a great gig if you live upstairs, no travel was involved. 

There's not much here about her life in London, she relocated there in the 1970's and starred in West End productions of some Neil Simon and Tennessee Williams plays, and when in London she lived at the Savoy Hotel (spotting a theme here...) with her husband, John Bay, from the family that owned the Bay's English Muffins company.  I guess if you're not a Thomas' English Muffins person, maybe you're a Bay's person, Elaine gave them out frequently as gifts.  But when her husband died in 1982, she moved back to the U.S. and tried for a movie career (Woody Allen's "September", "Cocoon: The Return" and "Out to Sea") but my favorite Elaine Stritch movie is the film "Screwed", co-starring Norm MacDonald.  

Then, of course, there was "30 Rock", in which she played the mother of Alec Baldwin's network executive character.  I know, I know, she was also on "Law & Order", but who hasn't been?  And also "Oz" and "3rd Rock from the Sun", but most people probably remember her as the irascible mother from "30 Rock". Still, after all that she was mostly known for her theater work, everything from "Pal Joey" to "Mame" to "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf", and then all the Sondheim stuff - "Follies" and "Company" and the revival of "A Little Night Music", which kind of explaines why she was so interested in doing all those Sondheim songs, solo cabaret-style.  

At the time of the documentary production, the Public Theater (home of her one-woman show, "Elaine Stritch at Liberty") was looking to turn one of its rehearsal rooms into some kind of Elaine Stritch archive, so this presented a great chance for her to go through all of her saved photographs, posters and show memorabilia, why not do all that in front of the camera?  This helps make this a fascinating look at a performer who was also a powerful force of nature, but still, there's a reminder that the strongest people can be laid low by things like alcoholism or diabetes, so once again,we see that everything has an expiration date. 

Also starring Elaine Stritch (last seen in "Romance & Cigarettes"), James Gandolfini (ditto), Ellen Adler, Bella Botier, Rob Bowman, Maeve Butler, Allen Davison, Tina Fey (last heard in "Free Guy"), Hunter Ryan Herdlicka, Paul Iacono, Cherry Jones (last seen in "The Eyes of Tammy Faye"), Julie Keyes, Nathan Lane (last seen in "Carrie Pilby"), Ramona Mallory, Josh Marquette, Marjorie McDonald, Tracy Morgan (last heard in "Scoob!"), Harold Prince, Piet Sinthuchai, John Turturro (last seen in "The Batman"), George C. Wolfe

with archive footage of Woody Allen (last seen in "Always at the Carlyle"), Billy Crystal (last seen in "Robert Klein Still Can't Stop His Leg"), Ellen DeGeneres (last seen in "The Love Letter"), Mia Farrow, Ben Gazzara (last seen in "Paris, Je t'Aime"), Rock Hudson, Bela Lugosi (last seen in "A Kiss Before Dying"), Bill Maher (last seen in "The Amazing Johnathan Documentary"), Sarah Jessica Parker (last seen in "Smart People"), Bernadette Peters (last seen in "Tick, Tick...BOOM!"), Donald Trump (last seen in "George Carlin's American Dream"), Melania Trump (last seen in "Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump"), Tracey Ullman (last seen in "The Prom")

RATING: 6 out of 10 blown auditions

Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind

Year 14, Day 192 - 7/11/22 - Movie #4,197

BEFORE: The Summer Rock & Doc Bloc rolls on, I'm not even at the halfway point yet, there are still 25 or 26 documentaries to go, after this one, and I've only been at it for 18 films!  Already I can't remember what it feels like to watch fictional films...

When I get halfway through, I should really take an attempt at closing the gap between the end of the Documentaries and the start of the Shocktober line-up - once I have that, then I'm pretty sure I can complete another Perfect Year.  So far I've only programmed 16 films after the docs, which should take me to about August 21, movie 4,239.  Then if there are 23 horror films in the October plan, that gets me to 262 movies for the year, just 38 slots left to allocate for September films, ideally closing that gap with October 1 - hopefully I can make the connection in less than 38 steps, to save some slots for November and December, and get to a Christmas movie or two if I can. Maybe if I can get to my first horror film in 18 steps, that leaves 10 slots for November and 10 for December? I'll see if I can make that work. 

Neil Young carries over from "Neil Young: Heart of Gold"

THE PLOT: The iconic Canadian musician Gordon Lightfoot reflects on his life and career. 

AFTER: This is another music artist that I don't know very much about, so instead of bemoaning that fact, I'm just going to take this as as opportunity to learn more about Gordon Lightfoot, OK?  Let's try to put a positive spin on my ignorance...

I know "Sundown", that's for sure.  And I think I know the track mentioned in the title of the film, that's two - and I'm semi-familiar with "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald", mostly through trivia questions though.  Gordon Lightfoot was one of the biggest music stars in Canadian history, he was on top of the charts and on top of the world - and then, one day, it all came crashing down...

I learned several things about Neil Young last night, what did I learn about Gordon Lightfoot in this comprehensive film?  First, that he's still alive, unlike many of this year's documentary subjects.  He's 83, and often called Canada's greatest songwriter.  He was kind of like the Bob Dylan of Canada, or he would have been if Neil Young hadn't applied for the job first.  Also, Bob Dylan kind of wanted to be the Bob Dylan of Canada, so the job was taken.  Still, Lightfoot did OK, his early songs "For Lovin' Me" and "Early Morning Rain" got covered by just about everybody, there's a great montage in this film off all the superstars that covered those songs on their records. 

As a boy he sang soprano in church choir, and as a teenager he taught himself to play piano and drums, then folk guitar. He played football and track and got scholarships to McGill University's School of Music, then University of Toronto - but after that he moved to California in 1958 to study jazz composition at a music college in Hollywood, then moved back to Toronto to be part of the burgeoning folk rock scene.  He had a job in a bank, but left that to appear on a Canadian TV show, "Country Hoedown", then played folk at coffee houses before joining up with Terry Whelan in a duo called the "Two-Tones".  But the group's manager, Whelan's father, pressured him to sign a contract to split all songwriting credits and rights with the other singer, so Lightfoot quit. 

In 1965 he signed with Albert Grossman, who managed Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, The Band, and Peter, Paul & Mary. This, plus the fact that his songs were being covered by all those other acts, was the big breakthrough. Then he got commissioned by the CBC to write the "Canadian Railroad Trilogy" as part of Canada's Centennial celebration in 1967. Touring and a few more singles paid the bills, but then came the international hit "If You Could Read My Mind", which was helped by an influential Seattle DJ who really dug the song, and it became Lightfoot's first gold record.  It was on an album called "Sit Down Young Stranger", but the record company insisted that the album be re-titled with the name of the hit single - Lightfoot flew to L.A. to argue with the record executives, however they turned out to know what they were doing, and the album became a big hit, just like the single. 

Other turning points in his career came with the 1974 song "Sundown" (written, it turns out, about one of his ex-lovers, who ended up later being the woman who did drugs with John Belushi the night he died) and then a year later, "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald", a folk song based on a ship that sank in Lake Superior in 1975.  Lightfoot just read a Newsweek article about the ship and wrote the whole song from that. If you're not familiar with the song, go have a listen or just read the lyrics online - it's very difficult to rhyme words like "Wisconsin" and "Fitzgerald", it turns out. Lightfoot made a valiant effort, but couldn't quite complete the rhymes, but in the end it didn't much matter. People could NOT get enough of this song in 1976

What's MISSING from this documentary, though?  Quite a bit, it turns out.  There's no mention of Lightfoot getting Bells palsy in 1972, which partially paralyzed his face.  But I guess when anyone makes it to 83 years old it's probably assumed that they've had SOME kind of health problems along the way, so maybe all in all there are just too many to mention. There's also nothing about the lawsuit over the song "The Greatest Love of All", which has almost the exact same tune as "If You Could Read My Mind".  The case was settled out of court, and the composer of the Whitney Houston song apologized - fair enough.  Then there was a series of tribute albums, comeback tours, more health problems, and another set of comeback tours in 2017 and 2018, pre-pandemic.  

He's been married three times, has six children with some of those women and various others, so I guess another thing is that if you're a musician and you make it to 83 years old there's probably a long road of failed relationships behind you.  Here I'm thinking back to those documentaries about Frank Zappa and Pavarotti that I watched last year, near the end of their lives both men wished that they'd been better husbands and better fathers, which left me wondering why they didn't do that in the first place. I guess it's not easy for rock stars, with the touring and the isolation needed to write songs, and then you throw money and fame and groupies into the mix, and fidelity becomes damn near impossible. Lightfoot is still going, more power to him, but as I've said several times this month, everything has an expiration date. 

Also starring Gordon Lightfoot (last seen in "Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story"), Randy Bachman, Alec Baldwin (last seen in "Elizabethtown"), Tom Cochrane, Burton Cummings (last seen in "Jagged"), Steve Earle, Bernie Fiedler, Bernie Finkelstein, Brian Good, Bruce Good, Larry Good, Greg Graffin, Ronnie Hawkins (last seen in "The Last Waltz"), Rick Haynes, Nicholas Jennings, Barry Keane, Carter Lancaster, Geddy Lee (also last seen in "Jagged"), Alex Lifeson (last seen in "Rush: Time Stand Still"), Kim Lightfoot, Sarah McLachlan, Murray McLauchlan, Anne Murray, Sylvia Tyson, Lenny Waronker

with archive footage of Herb Alpert, Harry Belafonte (last seen in "The One and Only Dick Gregory"), Billy Bragg, Glen Campbell (last seen in "Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice"), Roger McGuinn (ditto), Johnny Cash (last seen in "Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President"), Willie Nelson (ditto), Paul Simon (ditto), Petula Clark, Judy Collins, Bruce Dern (last seen in "The Peanut Butter Falcon"), Bob Dylan (last seen in "The Velvet Underground"), Nico (ditto), Jerry Garcia (last seen in "WBCN and the American Revolution"), Bette Midler (ditto), Art Garfunkel (last seen in "Muscle Shoals"), Albert Grossman, Richie Havens (last seen in "Woodstock: Three Days that Defined a Generation"), Waylon Jennings, Diana Krall, Kris Kristofferson (last seen in "Tina"), Spike Lee (last seen in "Pavarotti"), Donovan Leitch, Don McLean, Liza Minnelli (last seen in "Bad Reputation"), Joni Mitchell (last seen in "Bitchin': The Sound and Fury of Rick James"), Olivia Newton-John (last seen in "Under the Volcano"), James Taylor (ditto), Mo Ostin, Elvis Presley (last seen in "The Sparks Brothers") Kenny Rogers (last seen in "The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart"), Rick Rubin (last seen in "Sound City"), Red Shea, Frank Sinatra (last seen in "Tiny Tim: King for a Day"), Peter Yarrow (ditto), Cathy Evelyn Smith, Paul Stookey (last seen in "No Direction Home: Bob Dylan"), Mary Travers (ditto), Barbra Streisand (last seen in "George Carlin's American Dream"), Alex Trebek (last seen in "Free Guy"), Paul Weller, Terry Whelan, Andy Williams, Viola Wills, Dwight Yoakam (last seen in "Logan Lucky"), 

RATING: 6 out of 10 songs about trains

Neil Young: Heart of Gold

Year 14, Day 191 - 7/10/22 - Movie #4,196

BEFORE: This is one of only TWO concert films in this year's documentary chain - I know I call it the "Summer Music Concert" series sometimes, but that's a little joke, I don't really program many concert films at all.  It's a bit of a tricky thing, like when does a recording of a concert become a "concert film"?  If I really swung the door wide open on this sort of thing, then there would be no shortage of films to watch, so I think I really need to be careful about what concert recordings get to be called "movies".  Like there was a video released last week of a Paul McCartney concert at Glastonbury, but is that a MOVIE, or just a Paul McCartney concert?  I think just the latter, though I could have found a spot for it, if I had been so inclined.  

"Stop Making Sense" is obviously a concert MOVIE, and "The Last Waltz" is another obvious one, and I've counted Rolling Stones concerts before, like "Shine a Light" and "Havana Moon".  I have to sort of play this by ear, though, and make some tough decisions about the parameters here.  But since this one came from the same director as "Stop Making Sense" I'm inclined to treat this as more than just a concert, it seems to cross over into documentary territory.  Neil Young carries over from "Jagged", where there was footage of him playing a concert on the same bill as Alanis.  

THE PLOT: A film shot during a two-night performance by Neil Young at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium.  

AFTER: As with last night, I'm a little out of my element here - I'm not an ardent fan of Neil Young, but I do like some of his songs.  If you're not a hardcore fan, as I'm not, it takes a while here to get to some material that I recognized.  The first nine songs are called the "Prairie Wind" set, and they lean more into country than I realized.  That's not a bad thing if you're a country music fan, but I'm not that either.  The set is nice, but it's just not my thing.  It's obviously very personal for Neil, as he was born in Toronto but grew up mostly in rural Ontario, and was influenced by rockabilly and country in addition to rock when learning music.  

The set's a big hit with the Nashville audience, though - the Ryman Auditorium used to be the home of the Grand Ol' Opry before it moved out to a larger venue in 1974, though it returned for years during the winters, when the crowds tended to be smaller.  And during one song, "This Old Guitar", Young points out that he's playing a guitar that used to belong to Hank Williams, and that endears him to the audience as well.  (NITPICK POINT: Who even knows if this is true?  For all we know, it's just a beat-up old guitar...)

Things picked up for me during the second set, when they got to "Harvest Moon", a song that I knew (and instead of brushes on the drums, the percussionist appears to use an actual sweeping-type broom to create the rhythm!) and this is followed by three more songs that I knew, "Heart of Gold", "Old Man" and "The Needle and the Damage Done".  This is the real meat of the concert, the high point came in these four songs, and after that it was all downhill, unfortunately.  I was hoping for something similar to "Stop Making Sense", I guess, where each song added somebody to the band and then the whole concert built up to a tremendous climax.  By contrast, this one hits the crescendo with "Old Man" and then slows down again, but at that point there are still five songs to go, so it's a long, almost painful letdown.  

All of the songs are fine, though, it's great music, and the interviews with band members before the concert footage let us know that the concert occurred just after Neil Young's surgery to correct an aneurysm, and then Young himself reveals during a song intro that his father passed away just a few months before, so this is all intensely personal and intimate, and we can really feel where Young is coming from as a result. 

The director, Jonathan Demme, had a say in the second set, the Encore Set, which was a great idea.  Now this makes some sense, the band was made up of the musicians who worked on Young's 2005 album "Prairie Wind", and then the director requested the second set of older Neil Young songs so that he'd have enough material for a longer movie.  If the band had just played the songs from the recent album, the film would probably be less than an hour, and that's just not as marketable.  Plus, people want to hear the songs they KNOW, just not the stuff from the new album - this is pretty standard in the world of live concerts.  

Neil's second wife, Pegi Young appears on stage in the band, they met when she was a waitresss at a restaurant near Neil's ranch in northern California.  They got married in 1978 and were together for 36 more years, but got divorced in 2014, then she died five years later.  Again, we see there's an expiration date on everything, despite all the love songs they worked on together.  I just learned that Neil Young's married to Daryl Hannah now, that happened in 2018 but I must have missed the news.  I've got no right to judge another person's relationships or lifestyle, though - I think famous people have all different sorts of relationships, I don't know if money and fame helps or just gets in the way in the long run.  Neil himself sings, "If you follow every dream, you might get lost" and I think that says more about it than I could. 

Also starring Emmylou Harris (last seen in "Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice", Grant Boatwright, Larry Cragg, Anthony Crawford, Chad Cromwell, Diana DeWitt, Clinton Gregory, Karl Himmel, Wayne Jackson, Ben Keith, Tom McGinley, Spooner Oldham (last seen in "Muscle Shoals"), Gary W. Pigg, Rick Rosas (last seen in "Ricki and the Flash"), Jimmy Sharp, Pegi Young, 

RATING: 6 out of 10 changing backdrops