Becoming Cousteau

Year 14, Day 204 - 7/23/22 - Movie #4,209

BEFORE: OK, enough about Dean, Frank, Sammy and Jerry - they'll all be in my year-end wrap-up now, because mostly they all crossed over to each other's documentaries.  It turns out you can't tell any of their stories without footage of the others, so they've turned up in my Summer Rock and Doc Bloc about as often as the Beatles usually do, when I focus on the rock bios. But I'm bookending those four stories with docs about PBS stars, this creates a sort of symmetry for the week, with Bob Ross and Jacques Cousteau acting as the bookends. 

Louis Malle carries over from "Jerry Lewis: The Man Behind the Clown". 

THE PLOT: A look at the life, passions, achievements and tragedies surrounding the famous explorer and environmentalist Jacques Cousteau, featuring an archive of his newly restored footage. 

AFTER: Well, they say "Never meet your heroes".  In past years I'd be doing exactly that, because it's Comic-Con week in San Diego, and I spent over 15 years working that circuit, doing that San Diego run, leaving for the airport at 5 am on a Wednesday so I could be there to set up a booth at noon on Preview Day, working like a dog for five days straight and then either flying back on the red-eye or losing a Monday workday just to get some sleep before the flight back. It was fun and profitable for a while, but over time it became frustrating and so not worth it, the costs involved kept rising to the point where my boss was losing money, no matter how much we sold, so it was time to end it.  I still miss it, part of me wants to be there in the thick of things, but we got out a couple years before the pandemic, and that turned out to be a very smart move for a whole litany of reasons.  But I met so many famous people there over the years, either because they came to our booth or because I stood in line, I got my Star Wars autograph collection out of the deal, and a lot of great stories.  Now I just have to try to stop missing it, which isn't easy.  But after watching all of these documentaries about very human subjects, it makes me wonder what personal details I'll learn someday about all of those people I met, and will I still be able to admire them at that point?  

Take Cousteau, for example, though he's got nothing to do with Comic-Con, but in the later years he did become a celebrity and appeared at events like the "Cousteau Day of Motivation" in Houston and the U.N.'s International Conference on the environment way back in 1992, which was a lifetime ago.  But Cousteau was warning humanity about climate change way back then, before Al Gore made his movie, and before the U.S. became like Africa-hot for two weeks every summer.  Seriously, I have to go outside later today to work a screening, and I am NOT looking forward to it.  What's keeping me going during this time of (mostly) work inactivity is the fact that on my days off, I can stay home in an air-conditioned room.  Sure, money's going to be a little bit tight this month, but I've got some cash coming in from part-time festival work I'm doing from home, so I think I'm going to be OK.  

Right, sorry, Cousteau.  The man had a different sort of life, he got hooked on free diving when he was in his twenties, and played a key role in the development of the aqualung, or what came to be known as SCUBA, and so therefore he was an inventor and pioneer.  There was a time when humans didn't spend so much time underwater, and so there was a whole new world to explore, and he and his crew captured a lot of it on film.  At a time when astronauts were preparing themselves to venture into space, there were also aquanauts who were preparing to dive deeper and deeper, and the thought that humans were going to need to live underwater someday.  I don't think that's a logical progression, if I'm being honest, and Cousteau came to change his mind on this point, but hey, if the icecaps keep melting, it could still be necessary.  

"Explorer" isn't really the right title, that kind of was pitched by the editors who fabricated the storyline on the show "The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau", because that played well with audiences, it was better than "a guy with a boat who keeps spending time underwater for some reason".  And mistakes were made in those early days, in order to get funding to keep the Calypso operating, Cousteau's crew did a bunch of work for oil companies like BP, and finding out that there was oil off the coast of the Persian Gulf is the main reason why Abu Dhabi in the U.A.E. has so much of the world's wealth right now.  Also, in the early documentaries things would happen like the crew would see a bunch of sharks attacking a whale, and they'd pull the sharks out of the water and beat them until dead, just for the crime of being sharks.  Look, I don't really like sharks either, but it doesn't take a genius to realize that the best thing to do is to just leave them alone, or better yet, stay the hell out of the water.  I can't swim so this whole enterprise of deep-sea diving and underwater exploration is completely alien and ridiculous to me. 

Cousteau had some kind of arrangement with his first wife, Simone, she agreed to marry him and bear his children, provided she could then spend her life on the boat and diving whenever possible, that was her greatest love.  Even when Jacques was touring the world, attending screenings and environmental group meetings, Simone was back on Calypso, running things and taking care of the crew. So they spent a great deal of time apart, it turnes out. Much like Jerry Lewis, Jacques' great love turned out to be filmmaking, and sharing his love of the underwater creatures with the world via film, and then later television.  Maybe he and his wife had some kind of understanding, as they remained business partners after the romance cooled off, and it turns out Jacques had a second family on the side.  He met Francine Triplet at one of those environmental summits, and they had two children together while Simone was still alive, then Jacques married Francine the year after Simone died.  Hey, whatever works, I guess, he had instant second family in his golden years, and this time he spent more time with his kids. 

The first two sons spent most of their childhood years in boarding schools, but on their vacations they went out on the ocean with their parents, and then as adults Jean-Michel helped out the Cousteau Society with organizational matters, and Philippe was more of the explorer type, he was a producer and pilot for his father, but died in a plane crash in 1979, and after that his father was never quite the same.  Instead of seeing his mission to save the oceans as a calling, Jacques regarded it as a punishment, and stuck with it another 26 years, only his show got really dark and pessimistic about Earth's prospects.  I'm not saying he was wrong, but you do get more flies with sugar than with vinegar, just saying.  

Cousteau also believed that the world was overpopulated - and I'm thinking he was right on the money, even back then.  Do we need 8 billion people in the world?  No, we do not.  The best thing we can do for the environment is to stop having so many damn kids.  Keeping abortion legal is a great first step, because if everybody has 3 or more kids then the world's just going to run out of all resources faster, or we'll have to resort to cannibalism or worse.  Obviously you can't kill 350,000 people a day, that's barbaric, but if we don't take steps to stop population growth, then that's going to happen, one way or another, and the least painful solution is to stop making more people, or we're all going to end up underwater, and not in submersible cities. 

Oh, yeah, and Cousteau was right about dumping stuff in the oceans being a really bad idea.  For decades everyone felt that the ocean was a fine place to put everything you needed to get rid of, including barrels of radioactive waste.  I'm not saying there's a GOOD place to put that stuff, but the ocean certainly isn't one. Cousteau's publicity campaign got a large dump of waste postponed in 1960, and a company was forced to remove the barrels that they did dump, so more power to him.  But then, umm, NITPICK POINT, years later on when his son died, Jacques Cousteau was OK with a burial at sea?  How is that not ocean pollution, dumping a wooden coffin and a dead body?  Seems a bit hypocritical to me. 

Check out this documentary on the Disney+ service, it looks like not many people caught it when it was in theaters last November. 

Also starring the voices of Vincent Cassel (last seen in "Child 44"), Jocelyne de Pass, Frederic Dumas, Walter Cronkite (last seen in "Sammy Davis: I've Gotta Be Me"), Ronald Reagan (last seen in "Frank Sinatra: One More for the Road")

with archive footage of Jacques-Yves Cousteau, Jean-Michel Cousteau, Philippe Cousteau, Simone Cousteau, Carol Burnett (last seen in "Dean Martin: King of Cool"), George H.W. Bush (last seen in "Irresistible'), Fidel Castro (last seen in "Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project"), Dick Cavett (also carrying over from "Jerry Lewis: The Man Behind the Clown"), Jacques Chirac, Deborah Norville, Pablo Picasso, David Wolper, 

RATING: 6 out of 10 red beanie hats

Jerry Lewis: The Man Behind the Clown

Year 14, Day 203 - 7/22/22 - Movie #4,208

BEFORE: OK, I skipped yesterday, that's a big deal for me.  I'm only watching 6 movies this week, not 7 or 8. I have to slow down before I run out of slots for the year, or else I'll have to take the whole month of September off, and I don't think I can go that long without watching a new movie.  

Jerry Lewis, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis, Jr. carry over from "Sammy Davis Jr.: I've Gotta Be Me". 

THE PLOT: Chronicles the remarkable life and genius work of one of the most iconic and incomparable comic performers and filmmakers of our time. 

AFTER: As I mentioned the other day, it's been almost five years since Jerry Lewis died, and he lived the longest out of the group of entertainers I've been covering this week.  I know Jerry wasn't a member of the Rat Pack, but I've kind of circled back to Martin & Lewis here, so out of that group of comedians, he was kind of like the Betty White, he outlived the others. 

Jerry Lewis is one of those stars that you're probably not supposed to talk any trash about, because of all the charity work he did and all those Labor Day telethons he hosted, but it kind of seems that if you paint too rosy a picture of anyone, perhaps you're not telling the whole story.  Are we just going to assume, for example, that the break-up with Dean Martin was all Dean's fault?  Or are we just going to gloss over that, shrug our shoulders and say, "Oh, well, these things happen!"  

Of course, this film is only an hour long, so it's impossible to cover EVERYTHING in a man's life, but it's a bit odd that there's no mention of Jerry's wife, or wives, here.  I know he had kids, because Scotty Lewis appeared in "Dean Martin: King of Cool" and Jerry was also father to Gary Lewis, of Gary Lewis & The Playboys.  Ah, a little research tells me that Jerry was married to Patti Palmer in 1944, and they had six sons, one of which was adopted.  They were married for 36 years, but got divorced in 1980, it seems like Jerry Lewis openly pursued other women during that marriage, he claimed in an interview to have had affairs with Marlene Dietrich and Marilyn Monroe. Wait, what?  In his dreams, maybe... Then Jerry got married again in 1983 to Sandra Pitnick, and they were together until he died in 2017.  I wonder if he was more faithful the second time around...there were sexual assault allegations against him that took place in the 1960's, so I wonder if Jerry would have been cancelled if the #metoo movement had been around back then.  

There's plenty of material here about Jerry learning the craft of filmmaking by paying attention to how his first few films were directed by Frank Tashlin, and he mentions wanting to learn everything that every department in the production company did on each film, from costume and make-up to set-building and camera work.  Before long Jerry took over as a director on his films, starting with "The Bellboy", "The Ladies Man", "The Errand Boy" and the classic "The Nutty Professor". When I was a kid I was a big fan of "The Family Jewels", a film in which Jerry played six or seven different characters, a bunch of brothers, one of whom needed to take charge of their orphaned niece, and the chauffeur who brought her to see all of them. I couldn't believe one man could play all those different roles, but I was probably six years old and easily impressed - it's just make-up and different costumes and voices, after all.

I think I programmed this documentary after confusing it with "The Day the Clown Cried", which is a film Jerry Lewis directed in 1972 about a clown that got imprisoned in a German concentration camp during World War II. I've heard both good and terrible things about that film, but apparently Jerry Lewis had the only copy of the film locked in a private vault to keep it from ever being viewed again.  It's a shame, because years later the film "Life Is Beautiful" received great critical acclaim for a somewhat similar subject, and won three Oscars, it would be nice to compare and contrast, or wonder if the world just wasn't ready for that type of film in 1972. 

But this documentary doesn't even mention "The Day the Clown Cried", but there is a lot of attention given over to French critics and directors, and it's almost a passé stereotype now to bring up the fact that Jerry Lewis was generally perceived as a comic genius in France, but just a goofy comic in the U.S.  Why is that?  I guess the French are still in touch with the aspects of silent comedy, which included a lot of physical humor - Chaplin was similarly regarded as a genius in France, but eventually the U.S. audiences wanted to move on to war movies, Westerns and zombie pictures, leaving the French sensibilities far behind.  Or as a one-man writer/director/actor, he perfectly exemplifies the auteur theory of the French New Wave movement, take your pick.  Meanwhile, U.S. critics saw the one-man film production as being somewhat self-indulgent, as Orson Welles was.  

No matter what good you may do in the world, there are always going to be critics - some people even found fault with that MDA telethon Jerry hosted over the years, pointing out that the methods of the fund-raising techniques, by putting the children affected with muscular dystrophy on camera, seemed designed more to evoke pity than to empower the disabled.  Well, it was a different time - but how else are you going to inform people watching at home about the severity of the disease, without putting the affected front and center?  Activists, however, said that the telethons perpetuated stereotypes about the disabled, and perhaps did more harm than good in the long run.  OK, so you DON'T want somebody on TV raising money to fight the disease, then?  Jeez.  

Also not mentioned in the documentary - Jerry Lewis taught film directing at USC in L.A. for a number of years.  One of his most famous students was George Lucas, and sometimes Steven Spielberg sat in on classes, too.  Where are George and Steve when you need them, to sing the praises of Jerry Lewis as a film production teacher?  Instead we just get footage of Jerry as a teenager, working the clubs by making funny faces while pretending to sing along with a record, and act that he supposedly invented, but later got picked up by Andy Kaufman and others.  Jerry Lewis was perhaps the link between the early director/actors like Chaplin, and the later ones like Mel Brooks and Woody Allen.  

There's another story I like, which demonstrates the animosity between Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, in the years after they ended their on-stage partnership.  Dean bought a restaurant in Los Angeles in 1958, with a business partner, and re-named it Dino's Lodge.  It appeared prominently in the opening of the TV show "77 Sunset Strip".  It was a popular place that served Italian food, in wood-paneled rooms that looked like somebody's den, and outside there was a big neon sign with Dean's face. Dean frequented the place, of course, and sometimes brought Sinatra along, and they'd pose for photos with the diners.  As a swinging place, they served an early morning breakfast between 1 and 5 am.  

But in 1961, Jerry Lewis wooed Dean's business partner away, and opened up Jerry's, a copycat restaurant three blocks away.  Outside Jerry's was a big neon sign with Jerry's face on it, and Jerry lured away top chefs from Dino's, along with the maitre d' and half of the waiters. Jerry would frequent his restaurant, bring along his celebrity friends, and they'd pose for photos with the diners. Dean got fed up with this, and left the business, but the new owners of Dino's kept the name and his face on the sign, Dean sued to get his name off the place but lost.  Jerry's restaurant folded in the mid-1960's, but the new owners kept Dino's running until 1970 or so, but the two former friends were business rivals for a while, and this probably drove that wedge between them in even further.  If you're a restaurant owner, there's probably nobody you hate more than the person who owns the competing restaurant just down the street.  To be fair, Jerry could have opened up his namesake restaurant anywhere, but he chose the same street in the same part of town. Just saying.  And neither restaurant lasted very long as a result, so I guess there's a moral in there somewhere. 

Also starring Pierre Étaix, Sean Hayes (last heard in "The Emoji Movie"), Frank Krutnik, Rae Beth Gordon, Tony Lewis, Shaun Micallef, Ted Okuda, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Martin Scorsese (last seen in "Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project")

with archive footage of Robert Benayoun, Dick Cavett (last seen in "Dean Martin: King of Cool"), James Stewart (ditto), Charles Chaplin (last seen in "The Giant Mechanical Man"), Robert De Niro (also last seen in "Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project"), Brian Donlevy, Milton Frome, Jean-Luc Godard, Oliver Hardy, Irving Kaye, Mike Kellin, Stan Laurel, Danny Lewis, Louis Malle, Everett Sloane, Frank Tashlin. 

RATING: 5 out of 10 pratfalls

Sammy Davis Jr.: I've Gotta Be Me

Year 14, Day 201 - 7/20/22 - Movie #4,207

BEFORE: Another Rat Pack-based film tonight - for some reason I thought today was the 5-year anniversary of Jerry Lewis' death, and considering that he's the subject of tomorrow's film, I was bummed that I wasn't reviewing THAT film today. BUT, I just double-checked and he died on August 20, 2017 - so I would have been off by a month.  No harm, no foul.  Somehow I doubled up my movies last week and I still didn't end up where I thought I needed to be - but it's all good, and Sammy Davis Jr. carries over from "Frank Sinatra: One More for the Road". 

Perhaps this is a sign that I should slow down a bit, we're here in the Dog Days of Summer, and it's much too hot to work so hard.  Now that I know I have a path to the end of the year, I can relax a bit, there's no need to rush.  Let's see, 30 days has September, the others have 31, so it turns out there are 72 days until October 1, and I've got just 46 films to watch in those 72 days, so I either need to take three weeks off in September, or I need to cut back to 5 films a week, instead of 7.  Sure, I'm anxious to finish the Summer Rock & Doc Block, but let's get real, I don't want to have a big break later on, I'll go a bit nuts.  So maybe tomorrow I'll take the day off and watch those last 2 episodes of "Moon Knight", then maybe a movie, then I'll watch some of the new "Stranger Things" episodes - you know, find a way to balance this all out. I think if I split up the rest of the documentaries into shorter "theme weeks" I can spread the chain out longer. 

THE PLOT: A star-studded roster of interviewees pays tribute to the legendary, multi-talented song-and-dance man. 

AFTER: Wow, there was so much about Sammy Davis Jr. that I didn't know, and this documentary filled me in.  This is how it should be done, Mr. Entertainment here got better treatment than Sinatra did last night with that hack job "One More for the Road".  Now I'm really wishing that I watched that longer, probably better Alex Gibney doc about Frankie.  Oh, well, let's focus on Sammy, a man who earned 3/4 of the EGOT title (no Oscar, and one might argue that the Emmy was won by the program "Sammy Davis Jr.'s 60th Anniversary Celebration", not the man, but I'm willing to let that slide.)

Sammy Davis Jr. was born in Harlem in 1925, the son of entertainer Sammy Davis Sr. (duh) and tap dancer Elvera Sanchez, who Sammy always claimed was Puerto Rican, but she was actually the daughter of Cuban immigrants, and he feared anti-Cuban backlash.  I guess that's worse somehow than Puerto-Rican backlash or African-American backlash (black-lash? Sorry.). His parents separated when Sammy was three, so his father took him out on tour because he was afraid of losing custody, and as a result Sammy never got a formal education, and even as an adult he said he read at a fourth-grade level.  

But he joined the Will Mastin Trio as a child, and the trio was him, his father and his "uncle", or godfather, Will Mastin.  Since they worked the black entertainment venues (aka the "chitlin circuit"), he didn't really encounter racism until he was drafted into the Army in 1944, and was part of the first integrated army batallion, and was frequently abused by white soldiers from the South.  He got into so many fights that his nose was broken many times, and permanently flattened. Let that sink in a bit - his fellow soldiers chose to beat up someone ON THEIR SIDE rather than channel all that aggression and hate toward the enemy.  Sammy realized he couldn't punch racism away, but got reassigned to the Army's Special Services branch, which held performances for troops.  There he earned two medals and a discharge in 1945. 

Sammy rejoined the family act, and started doing his impressions of Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney, plus singing, dancing, playing instruments, you name it.  His father and "uncle" didn't approve of him doing impressions of white movie stars, but the crowd seemed to enjoy them. Davis gained some attention, and his career was helped by former movie star Eddie Cantor, who sang his praises on his TV variety show.  Then here's where we link up with the other docs from this week, in 1959 Sammy joined the Rat Pack, with Sinatra, Dean Martin, Joey Bishop and Peter Lawford, and they all performed together in Las Vegas, plus they made the movies "Ocean's 11" and "Robin and the 7 Hoods".  Sammy could perform at the casinos, but due to Jim Crow laws, he couldn't spend the night there.  Black people, even famous ones, had to stay in rooming houses west of the city, and not on the Strip.  Sammy couldn't dine in the hotel restaurants, or gamble in the casinos, and if he swam in the pool, someone would often demand that the pool be drained afterwards, which is just ridiculous. 

Still, Davis managed to break through some race-based barriers - he was part of the first inter-racial kiss/love scene on stage, also one of the first inter-racial kisses on TV (with Nancy Sinatra on a variety special) and then there was the 1973 kiss on the cheek of Archie Bunker on "All in the Family".  Does it seem like Sammy Davis liked kissing people?  But it was a hug that got him in some trouble, when he hugged Nixon on stage during the 1972 campaign. (Previously the Rat Pack had supported JFK's campaign in 1960, and look what that led to...). At JFK's inauguration  Sammy Davis got un-invited, because of his marriage to a white woman, May Britt, so some Rat Pack members boycotted the Washington gala as a result.  

Back to Nixon, once he hugged him on stage the black community felt betrayed, and Davis had to formally apologize on stage. Once again, Sammy was caught in the middle - at one point hated by the African-American community for supporting Nixon, and hated by the white community because, well, you know.  And people of both races didn't approve of his marriage to a white woman, remember that anti-mixed marriage laws weren't ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court until 1967. Sammy's marriage (which was actually his second, he'd paid a black woman to marry him in 1958 so he could avoid mob violence, that marriage didn't last long) ended in 1968, the doc doesn't mention it here, but Sammy had an affair with Lola Falana, that probably didn't help.  Nor does the documentary mention Sammy's third wife, Altovise Gore, who had been a dancer in his play "Golden Boy", and that marriage lasted 20 years, until he died in 1990. 

His musical career started to decline in the late 1960's, but he still scored an almost-Top Ten hit with the song "I Gotta Be Me", and then an unexpected #1 hit with "The Candy Man", the theme from the original "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" movie in 1972. Even that came with controversy, because Sammy didn't care for the song, then later found out that some people thought it was about drugs, not candy, and that sent the wrong image. Meanwhile Sammy had gone from stage acting to making TV appearances on everything from "The Rifleman" to "I Dream of Jeannie" to "Charlie's Angels", where he played himself AND a Sammy Davis Jr. impersonator, how very meta. 

The doc also covers the car accident in which Davis lost an eye, and how that time in the hospital led him to convert to Judaism, after Sammy realized that the African-American struggle was similar to that of the Jewish one over the last few hundred years.  How he went to entertain the troops in Vietnam, after learning that many soldiers had become addicted to drugs, though I'm not sure how his performances there were designed to change that.  Anyway, that led to Sammy and his third wife getting invited by Nixon to perform at the White House, and then The Davises were invited to spend the night in the Lincoln Bedroom, they became the first African-Americans to do that. 

There's little point in dwelling on the illness that took him out (throat cancer, damn those cigarettes) so instead the doc focuses on the 60th Anniversary TV special in his honor, with an all-star cast that included Eddie Murphy, Michael Jackson, Diahann Carroll, Ella Fitzgerald and Sinatra paying tribute.  They include the whole tap-dance routine with Davis and Gregory Hines, which is pure magic, and I don't even like tap-dancing. So I'm definitely going to be keeping one eye on the DVR listings for the PBS show "American Masters", they put out a quality project.  I can't really tell if they produce their own movies, or just license other companies' documentaries about movie stars and musicians, but who cares?  Even if this is a TV movie, that's still a movie. I just recorded their docs about Miles Davis ("Birth of the Cool"), Keith Haring ("Street Art Boy") and Buddy Guy ("The Blues Chase the Blues Away") and with luck, these films will be part of next year's Doc Block. 

Also starring Burt Boyar, Todd Boyd, Leslie Bricusse, Diahann Carroll, Billy Crystal (last seen in "Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project"), Whoopi Goldberg (ditto), Michael Dinwiddie, Gerald Early (last seen in "Dean Martin: King of Cool"), Will Friedwald (ditto), Norman Lear ditto), Jerry Lewis (ditto), George Schlatter (ditto), Margo Jefferson, Quincy Jones (last seen in "Frank Sinatra: One More for the Road"), Jason King (last seen in "Bitchin': The Sound and Fury of Rick James"), Buz Kohan, Baayork Lee, Kim Novak (last seen in "Pal Joey"), Emilie Raymond, Max Rudin, Donald Rumsfeld (last seen in "Shock and Awe"), Arthur Silber Jr., Michele Simms-Burton, David Steinberg, Charles Strouse, Paula Wayne,

with archive footage of Louis Armstrong (also carrying over from "Frank Sinatra: One More for the Road"), Tony Bennett (ditto), Joey Bishop (ditto), Peter Lawford (ditto), Dean Martin (ditto), Sidney Poitier (ditto), Elvis Presley (ditto), Frank Sinatra (ditto), Nancy Sinatra (ditto), Harry Belafonte (last seen in "Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind"), Glen Campbell (ditto), Humphrey Bogart, Bill Boggs (last seen in "Dean Martin: King of Cool"), Angie Dickinson (ditto), Jacqueline Kennedy (ditto), John F. Kennedy (ditto), Martin Luther King (ditto), Joe E. Lewis (ditto), May Britt, Cab Calloway, Eddie Cantor, Nat "King" Cole, Bill Cosby (last seen in "Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project"), Larry King (ditto), Walter Cronkite (last seen in "WBCN and the American Revolution"), Richard Nixon (ditto), Queen Elizabeth (last seen in "How to Talk to Girls at Parties"), Duke Ellington, Stepin Fetchit, David Frost (last seen in "George Carlin's American Dream"), Arsenio Hall (ditto), Richard Pryor (ditto), Dinah Shore (ditto), Judy Garland (last seen in "The One and Only Dick Gregory"), Isaac Hayes, Gregory Hines (last seen in "The Automat"), Whitney Houston (last seen in "Dolly Parton: Here I Am"), Michael Jackson (last seen in "Bitchin': The Sound and Fury of Rick James"), Eddie Murphy (ditto), David Letterman (last seen in "Jagged"), Shirley MacLaine (last seen in "The Last Word"), Rocky Marciano, Will Mastin, Marilyn Monroe (last seen in "Everything Is Copy"), Rob Reiner (ditto), Anthony Newley, Pat Nixon (last seen in "Steal This Movie"), Carroll O'Connor (last seen in "Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project"), Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, Will Rogers, Isabel Sanford, Jean Stapleton (last seen in "You've Got Mail"), Sally Struthers, Ethel Waters and the voice of Tony Curtis (last seen in "Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project")

RATING: 7 out of 10 "Laugh-In" skits as "The Judge"

Frank Sinatra: One More for the Road

Year 14, Day 200 - 7/19/22 - Movie #4,206

BEFORE: I'm facing down a dilemma here, because I've had a documentary titled "Sinatra: Being Frank" (which got re-titled at some point to "Sinatra: To Be Frank", or perhaps the other way around...) for a couple of years now, and I wasn't able to work it in to previous incarnations of the Rock & Doc Block.  I know that if I take to long to get to a film, it could scroll off Netflix or Hulu, but then if that happens, there's always iTunes, most everything is available there.  So after years of trying, I finally engineered a doc chain that most certainly would allow me to watch "Being Frank", only to find that it's not available anywhere, not on any streaming service and not even on iTunes.  What to do, should I just move ahead with documentaries about Dean, Jerry and Sammy and ignore the Chairman of the Board?  

Good news, there's no shortage of documentaries about Sinatra - bad news, there are perhaps too many documentaries about Sinatra, how do I choose from what's available?  "One More for the Road" had no cast listed on IMDB, which was a bad sign - like, I'm pretty sure Frank Sinatra's in it, but who else?  But according to my notes, I'd have to watch this film on YouTube or iTunes, and that's $3.99 just to watch a film that's a little over an hour long, is it worth it?  Sure, I can afford $3.99, but not for every film, I've got to start watching my movie rental budget, as I'm on forced leave from one job right now.  

That's when I found "All or Nothing at All", a 2-part docuseries on Netflix, which is about to scroll off that service as of July 22.  Geez, I'd better hurry, only I don't approve of this streaming blackmail-like system, where a deadline is given to me, act now, or you can't watch this film!  Not cool, all films should be available at all times, I believe.  But that 2-part show is a series, not a movie, right?  Or is it?  I watched the two-part doc about George Carlin, and that was three and a half hours long, do I want to watch a doc about Sinatra that's four hours?  Well, it was directed by Alex Gibney, king of the docs ("Enron", "Going Clear", "Client 9", "The Armstrong Lie", and those docs about James Brown and Steve Jobs).  But that's a double-edge sword, because Gibney has a habit of inserting himself into his films, either on camera or with voice-over, and I'm not sure I like that.  I can't watch BOTH films, because I don't have that kind of time - I just figured out how many slots until Christmas, and it turns out I don't have any to spare. 

Wait a sec, this hour-long one is available on Tubi for FREE (with ads) so that kind of decides it.  And I can keep track of who's in it and update the IMDB credits myself, that's always fun.  So that clinches it, I'll watch the short one and then move on. Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra carry over from "Dean Martin: King of Cool". 

THE PLOT: Through archival performances and interviews, journey through Frank Sinatra's remarkable life, from his troubled birth in 1915 to the day The Voice was sadly silenced. 

AFTER: Quick, name a Frank Sinatra song.  Maybe you said "My Way", or "That's Life" - either of those songs would have been great to include in a documentary about Sinatra, they both offer some insight to his personal philosophy - only neither song is included here.  There's no sign of "One for My Baby" either, which is strange because the title of the doc comes from that song, it's "one for my baby and one more for the road..."  Nope, that's absent too.  Look, I get it, song rights are expensive, sometimes it's the biggest cost involved in making a documentary, and you HAVE to license every song, and pay for each one twice, there's the music rights and the sync rights, the latter of which allows you to put any image you want over that song, if you don't pay that then the songwriter can potentially sue you for subverting the meaning of the song. 

Not to worry, Frank recorded hundreds of songs, there's "I've Got the World on a String", "Love and Marriage", "All the Way", "It Was a Very Good Year", "Summer Wind", "Strangers in the Night", "I've Got You Under My Skin", "Fly Me to the Moon" and I think maybe he once recorded a song about New York.  And those are just the A-sides, what about all the album cuts?  Surely any doc about Sinatra's going to be filled with tons of great music.  So what do we get here?  First off, "Ol' Man River" - yeah, that's not the first thing that leaps to mind when we think of Frank Sinatra. Plus I don't think you can show a white man singing that song any more, it's automatically tinged with racism now.  This is followed by "Saturday Night is the Loneliest Night of the Week" (with the Harry James orchestra), "Stardust" (another classic, possibly free use now), "If You Are But a Dream", "Last Night When We Were Young", "That Old Black Magic", "Too Marvelous for Words", and probably the biggest song here, "Luck Be a Lady".  There's even footage of Sinatra doing a duet with Elvis, but Frank sings "Love Me Tender" and Elvis does "Witchcraft", so they switch things up a bit - which is interesting, but it's not really why we came here. The closing song here is a duet with Dean Martin, on "The One I Love (Belongs to Somebody Else)" - it's OK, but this is really where the filmmakers should have tried to find a duet on "One for My Baby", a song about it being late in a bar, close to closing time at a quarter to three.  So many missed opportunities...

The rest of the film feels like a rushed hack job, so now I'm regretting not watching "All or Nothing at All" - four hours would have been a big time commitment, but I could have walked away from it knowing a bit more about the man, and not just the dates he married this woman or divorced that one, and what year he started hanging out with the Rat Pack in Vegas.  I can get that information anywhere.  Frank's childhood is similarly given short shrift, besides knowing that he was injured by a forceps during birth, apparently he did nothing but sing on street corners until he was 20 and formed a quartet called the Hoboken Four.  What's weird is that narration of Frank's early days is spoken to footage of a train, taken from a biplane.  WTF? 

This man lived 82 years, and he was in showbiz for 62 of those years - there should be a lot to cover, so clearly there's a lot missing here - like how he left Capitol Records in 1960 and formed his own record label, Reprise, later bought by Warner Bros. Reprise put out records by the Kinks, and later Jimi Hendrix, Joni Mitchell, Tiny Tim, John Sebastian, Frank Zappa, Emmylou Harris, Jethro Tull, T. Rex, Richard Pryor, Fleetwood Mac and our old pal Gordon Lightfoot.  There's a whole documentary's worth of material there, how all that music found its way to Frank Sinatra's label, and now Eric Clapton, Green Day, Josh Groban and Michael Bublé are on that label. 

Similarly, there are clips here from "From Here to Eternity", but not many - Frank had a whole second career in movies, largely ignored here. What about mentioning "The Man with the Golden Arm", "The Manchurian Candidate", "Guys and Dolls" and "Pal Joey"?  Those were huge films!  And why mention his perforated eardrum at birth, and not bring up the fact that it later kept him out of military service during World War II?  Umm, that's kind of important - why do I have to go on Wikipedia after the film and make these connections, isn't that the filmmakers job, to sort of tie everything together?  Of course Sinatra performed for the troops during World War II, doing USO tours and such, and also broadcast concerts on the Armed Forces Radio Services, that's another important thing that should have been mentioned. 

This doc also made it sound like Frank just sort of started hanging out with the Rat Pack in Vegas during the 1960's, like just for fun.  That's not the way it went down, the truth is that Sinatra had financial problems after a divorce and a slump in record sales, so he borrowed $200,000 from Columbia to pay his back taxes.  That's when he turned to Vegas as an income source and started performing at the Desert Inn in 1951, a full decade before "One More for the Road" gets him to Vegas. Sinatra moved over to the Sands Hotel in 1953, performed several times a year, and later acquired a share in that property (much later, in 1982, he moved his act once again, over to the Golden Nugget).

The Capitol years (1953-60) were Frank's second wind, and they probably got a whole hour's worth of coverage in that OTHER documentary.  Frank had quite a few comebacks and revivals over the years, even "Ocean's 11" represented a new era for his acting career, but that's not covered here, like it was in "King of Cool". And if you only mention Frank's marriages, I'm quite sure you're only telling half of the story - he had too many extramarital affairs to count, and what about all the broken engagements to Lauren Bacall, Juliet Prowse and others?  Mia Farrow's seen in this doc for about five seconds, but that marriage happened, you can't just sweep it under the rug.  I'm still Team Sinatra when it comes to the paternity of Ronan Farrow, just put a photo of the noted journalist side-by-side with one of a young Frank Sinatra and then tell me if you agree.  

Also notably absent are any drawn connections between Sinatra and organized crime, or the kidnapping of his son, Frank Jr., or how Frank's casino hotel, the Cal Neva, lost and regained its gambling license.  But perhaps this is all by design, maybe that documentary "Being Frank" stepped on somebody's toes and that's why it's no longer available anywhere.  So if you're looking for a complete, thorough documentary about the life and activities of Frank Sinatra, maybe check out that four-hour one on Netflix before it goes the way of the Automat. 

Oh, and here's an update on my IMDB update - I submitted credits for 34 people who appear in this film via archive footage, and about half of them have been approved, the rest are "pending".  I'm not sure what method the IMDB uses to confirm that certain people appear in a film, like if it were up to me, I'd watch the film to check, but I'm crazy like that.  They apparently use a robot or a computer to confirm appearances, but those things are unreliable - I like that one of the "pending" credits at the moment is for Frank Sinatra himself.  So IMDB is going to investigate whether Frank Sinatra appears in the documentary about Frank Sinatra - I can't wait to see what they figure out. 

Also starring the voice of Gerry Conway, with archive footage of Louis Armstrong (also carrying over from "Dean Martin: King of Cool"), Joey Bishop (ditto), Montgomery Clift (ditto), Bing Crosby (ditto), Sammy Davis Jr. (ditto), Tom Dreesen (ditto), Ella Fitzgerald (ditto), Bob Hope (ditto), Peter Lawford (ditto), Elvis Presley (ditto), Ronald Reagan (ditto), Frank Sinatra Jr. (ditto), Tina Sinatra (ditto), Roseanne Barr (last seen in "Mr Warmth: The Don Rickles Project"), Milton Berle (ditto), Burt Lancaster (ditto), Sidney Poitier (ditto), Debbie Reynolds (ditto), Tony Bennett (last seen in "Jagged"), Tommy Dorsey, Mia Farrow (last seen in "Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me"), Ava Gardner, Mitzi Gaynor, Julio Iglesias, Harry James, Quincy Jones (last seen in "Bitchin': The Sound and Fury of Rick James"), Deborah Kerr (last seen in "Everything Is Copy"), Joe Mantegna (last seen in "Eye for an Eye"), Wayne Newton (last seen in "Class Action Park") Tom Selleck (last seen in "The Love Letter"), Barbara Marx Sinatra, Nancy Sinatra, Nancy Barbato Sinatra, Robert Wagner (last seen in "What Happened to Monday")

RATING: 3 out of 10 Songs for Swingin' Lovers

Dean Martin: King of Cool

Year 14, Day 199 - 7/18/22 - Movie #4,205

BEFORE: It's a new week but the Summer Doc Fest rolls on - I've got my tribute to the ring-a-ding Rat Pack of the Swinging Sixties starting tonight. This film also aired at DocFest last year so I programmed it on faith, believing that one way or another I'd be able to view it the following summer - so far, all of my instincts have been spot on, with the exception of that documentary about Dionne Warwick that was scheduled to run on CNN+, then the CNN+ service folded, so I guess it can't air anywhere else for some reason?  Anyway, I've been really lucky that "Adrienne" and "Jagged" and "Becoming Mike Nichols" stuck around on HBO Max long enough for me to watch them, and that the Brian Wilson doc turned up on American Masters on PBS, and Showtime aired that Dick Gregory documentary - somehow, it all came together.  And I've only had to rent a few films, like the Elaine Stritch documentary that couldn't stay on Hulu for another month, and I had to pay to watch "Tiny Tim: King for a Day" and also "The Automat". Worth it. 

Regis Philbin carries over again from "Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal & Greed". 

Speaking of scheduling, I don't mean to alarm you but I maybe found a path, post-Docfest, that should take me to the end of the year.  First I closed the gap between the last documentary film in August and my first horror film in October - and that path goes through "Thor: Love & Thunder", "Jurassic World: Dominion" (I think you may see the linking potential there) and also "Minions: The Rise of Gru".  So I've got to get my ass to the movie theater in July and August, if I want to make this work.  (I'm kind of crossing my fingers that some channel or streaming service will run "Lightyear" and "Morbius" in time, here's hoping.)

That took 30 steps, to get to my first Shocktober film, I already had that chain mapped out. But then I was left with 24 slots for November and December, and I started playing around with some ideas, maybe some vague hope that I could include "Bob's Burgers" and "Don't Look Up" (I think you may also see the linking potential there...) and before long, I'd found a path to TWO Thanksgiving movies in just 14 steps.  That left 9 or maybe 10 slots for December, could I get to a Christmas movie of some kind in that short a time?  You'd better believe I can, because I did.  Or, I will. Maybe even TWO holiday films if I manage to drop something from the list between here and there.  

So there you go, I've got a plan for the rest of Movie Year 14 - I can't say I'm going to stick with it, but maybe I will and 95 movies from now, I'll put down my remote and celebrate the holiday with Movie #4,300, MERRY CHRISTMAS.  

THE PLOT: The story of Dean Martin. 

AFTER: I'm back at the movie theater tonight, for just one special screening of "Where the Crawdads Sing". The place was originally supposed to be closed for the summer due to roof repairs, but it seems those have been delayed until August, so I managed one screening tonight, with just nine people in the audience, as most of the school's students are away for the summer, so just a few faculty members showed up, probably on their way home or to get out of the rain for a couple hours. It felt a bit like hosting a pop-up dining experience in a restaurant that got shut down by the health department. 

Anyway, I'm hoping that by devoting four days of docs this week to Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr. and then Jerry Lewis, that I don't just end up watching the same film, essentially, four days in a row.  But it seems like the documentary makers these days will go very far out of their way to avoid the standard, chronological walk through a person's life, punctuated by comments from friends & family and celebrity admirers, known as the "talking head" format. But if you just use archive footage, then that feels weird, and if you just include people talking about that famous person, that feels too cold and distant, so ideally you want some kind of mix of testimony plus footage, and it doesn't even need to be completely chronological - some of these docs have started in the present, like with old Gordon Lightfoot, and then they go back to their subject as a child, or a teenager or whatever.  

There's usually also some kind of defying of expectations, like the way that Don Rickles is mostly known for insulting people and acting mean to them, so you just know that doc is going to drop in some material about him being a devoted husband and father, because we're not expecting it, at least on some level.  Betty White played a dumb older lady on "The Golden Girls", but surprise, she was actually a very savvy TV host and producer.  And George Carlin was known for being a guy who smoked a lot of grass, but surprise, it turns out he also snorted a ton of cocaine!  See, we're learning more about these celebrities every day!  

There's a lot of material like that here in the "King of Cool" documentary about Dean Martin - but how do you shed light on a man who was notoriously hard to figure out?  There's footage of him appearing with his family on the Christmas Special with Frank Sinatra, but that was his 2nd wife, and soon after he would leave her for the woman who would become his 3rd.  Right, he was such a devoted family man that he left a string of families all over Hollywood...  Then we've got the public image of the happy-go-lucky entertainer, but was he laughing on the outside while crying on the inside?  It's a fair bet.  Performer after performer talks about how great he was to work with on stage, but then they take a minute to mention that they didn't spend much time with Dean before and after the show, because he was by himself in his trailer. Bob Newhart relates a story about Dean calling the police and pretending to be a neighbor to phone in a noise complaint on his own house, just so the party would stop and he could finally get some sleep. 

Dino Paul Crocetti was born in Steubenville, Ohio to Italian immigrants, and he didn't learn to speak English until grammar school.  After dropping out of high school in tenth grade, he worked in a coal mine, a steel mill, tried his hand at boxing and also worked as a blackjack dealer in a illegal casino behind a tobacco shop, because Ohio.  Singing Italian songs was his way out of the Cleveland area, moving to New York in 1943, but then got drafted into World War II for 14 months, before a medical discharge. Meanwhile he had married wife #1 and had four kids in Cleveland, but they got left behind in 1949 when his showbiz career started to take off. Remember, he was the family man that just couldn't stop starting up new families...

Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis were working the same club circuit in New York, but doing very different acts - combining Dean's singing with Jerry's rude interruptions of Dean's act, along with some old vaudeville-style slapstick proved to be the magic recipe to make the audience laugh. The pair just ignored the audience and played off each other on stage, the show was a fake shambles but also a comedy hit.  After appearing on the Ed Sullivan Show, the pair hired Norman Lear and Ed Simmons to start writing their bits, which allowed them to move out of the clubs and into television and movies. Together they made 18 movies in four years, or some might say they made the same movie 18 times in four years....

Their act in clubs, movies and TV's Colgate Comedy Hour lasted for ten years, but the comedy team broke up in 1956, and Dean went on to a solo movie career in "The Young Lions", "Some Came Running" and "Rio Bravo", while I guess Jerry Lewis was filming "The Sad Sack", "The Geisha Boy", "The Bellboy" and "Cinderfella".  Then Dean countered with "Bells Are Ringing", "Who Was That Lady?" and the crime films "Ocean's 11" and "Robin and the 7 Hoods" with Sinatra. Meanwhile Dean also had a recording career, with hits like "Volare", and then came the TV career, with "The Dean Martin Show" running for nine years (264 episodes!) because NBC kept forgetting to cancel it.  By the ninth season in 1974 it had transformed from a variety show into just a series of celebrity roasts - it's probably just as well, based on how much footage there is of Dean forgetting the lyrics to songs after he adamantly refused to ever rehearse. 

The 1970's brought solo success in Vegas, but he broke up with the Riviera Hotel because they wanted him to perform 2 shows a night, and he moved over to the MGM Grand, who only demanded one show per night, as long as he also made a movie for MGM.  He filed for divorce from his second wife (who apparently also wanted him to perform twice a night) and moved on to wife #3, a hair salon receptionist from Beverly Hills, and they lasted until 1976.  Eventually he reconciled to some degree with all of his exes, even Jerry Lewis, after Frank Sinatra brought him out as a surprise guest during the MDA Labor Day Telethon in 1976. Martin and Lewis became friends again, but privately, and only performed together once after that, in 1989.  

The death of Dean's son in 1987 (his jet fighter crashed while he was flying for the California Air National Guard) left him depressed and demoralized, and a reclusive alcoholic for real, unlike the one he'd pretended to be for so many years in his act. But it was lung cancer that took him out on Christmas in 1995. Another distinguished career brought down by cigarettes in the end.  Just in music singles alone - "Volare", "That's Amore", "Ain't That a Kick in the Head?" and "Everybody Loves Somebody", that's a great track record, without even getting into his Christmas album.  But still, his discography pales in comparison to the member of the Rat Pack being profiled in tomorrow's film...

NITPICK POINT: It's one thing to be an executive producer of a documentary made about your own father. It's another thing to be interviewed for that very same documentary, that's all well and good. But to get yourself filmed with that special lens that makes you look extra skinny, and then to make sure that lens doesn't get used for footage of anybody else, well, that's another thing entirely. 

Also starring Frankie Avalon (last seen in "Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project"), Bob Newhart (ditto), Tony Oppedisano (ditto), Alec Baldwin (last seen in "Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me"), Jeanine Basinger, Jerry Blavat, Peter Bogdanovich (last seen in "It: Chapter Two"), Bill Boggs, Carol Burnett (last seen in "Becoming Mike Nichols"), Dick Cavett (last seen in "George Carlin's American Dream"), Neil Daniels, Angie Dickinson (last seen in Walt: The Man Behind the Myth"), Tom Dreesen (last seen in "Trouble with the Curve"), Gerald Early, Todd Fisher (last seen in "Bright Lights: Starring Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds"), Will Friedwald, Rosie Gitlin, Michael Gregory, Lee Hale, Jon Hamm (last seen in "Howl"), Florence Henderson (last seen in "The Brady Bunch Movie"), Billy Hinsche, Josh Homme (last seen in "ZZ Top: That Little Ol' Band from Texas"), Henry Jaglom (last seen in "They'll Love Me When I'm Dead"), James Kaplan, Lainie Kazan (last seen in "I Am Divine"), Norman Lear (last seen in "If You're Not in the Obit, Eat Breakfast"), Barry Levinson, Scott Lewis, Ron Marasco, Deana Martin, Kliph Nesteroff, Barbara Rush, RZA (last seen in "The Man With the Iron Fists"), George Schlatter (last seen in "Tiny Tim: King for a Day"), Al Schmitt, Tommy Tune, Steven Watts, Eliot Weisman, James Woods (last seen in "Too Big to Fail")

with archive footage of Dean Martin (also last seen in "Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project"), Jack Benny (ditto), Johnny Carson (ditto), Sammy Davis Jr. (ditto), Andy Griffith (ditto), Bob Hope (ditto), Ronald Reagan (ditto), Frank Sinatra (ditto), Louis Armstrong, Desi Arnaz Jr,, Lucille Ball (last seen in "Tina"), Ron Howard (ditto), Chuck Berry (last seen in "The Velvet Underground"), Joey Bishop, Marlon Brando (also last seen in "Becoming Mike Nichols"), Montgomery Clift (ditto), Tom Brokaw (last seen in "The Eyes of Tammy Faye"), Ray Charles (last seen in "Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President"), John Wayne (ditto), Bing Crosby (also last seen in "Tiny Tim: King for a Day"), Dom DeLuise, Jimmy Durante, Ella Fitzgerald, Aretha Franklin (last seen in "WBCN and the American Revolution"), Goldie Hawn (last seen in "Spielberg"), Audrey Hepburn (last seen in "The Automat"), Peter Lawford (ditto), Judy Holliday (last seen in "Bells Are Ringing"), Buddy Holly, Olivia Hussey, Gene Kelly, Jacqueline Kennedy (also last seen in "George Carlin's American Dream"), John F. Kennedy (ditto), Martin Luther King (ditto), Yoko Ono (ditto), Peggy Lee, John Lennon (last seen in "Count Me In"), Ed Sullivan (ditto), Jerry Lewis (last seen in "The Trust"), Joe E. Lewis, Dean Paul Martin, Ethel Merman, The Mills Brothers, Zero Mostel (last seen in "Mel Brooks: Unwrapped"), Ricky Nelson, Elvis Presley (last seen in "Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind"), Sugar Ray Robinson, Frank Sinatra Jr., Tina Sinatra, James Stewart (last seen in "Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde"), Lawrence Welk (last seen in "The Last Laugh" (2019)), Orson Welles (last seen in "The Other Side of the Wind"), Natalie Wood.

RATING: 6 out of 10 clips from "Citizen Kane" for some reason

Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal & Greed

Year 14, Day 198 - 7/17/22 - Movie #4,204

BEFORE: Regis Philbin carries over from "Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project" and I'm having flashbacks to one year ago, when Regis Philbin carried over from "Zappa" (Movie #3,901) to "I Am Divine" (Movie #3,902).  It wasn't exactly one year ago, because last year it took me longer to get to 200 films, I must have taken a break, but it was one year minus two weeks.  Back then I felt like I was in limbo because I was waiting to hear about a new movie theater job, better than the one I was working at - and now I feel like I'm in limbo again because I got that job, only the theater's basically closed for the summer for roof repairs.  I'm working tomorrow night, though, for a special one-off screening, then back into limbo, probably.  

This film was a big deal almost a year ago, it hit Netflix last August and everybody was talking about it at the time - I think everybody was just desperate for stuff to watch while still stuck at home or working from home, you could have put a test pattern on Netflix and called it "arty" and people would have watched it.  But it took me 11 months to find a place to schedule it....

THE PLOT: Bob Ross brought joy to millions as the world's most famous art instructor, but a battle for his business empire cast a shadow over his happy trees.

AFTER: My life changed when I was in junior high, I lived much closer to my secondary schools than I did to my grade schools, so I was able to walk home, and if I had a study hall at the end of the day, I tended to leave early and head home. I also started working a job nights and weekends during high school, and it was a very physical job in a warehouse, so between that and schoolwork, I was sometimes tired in the afternoons.  My grandmother lived with us at the time, and sometimes I'd come home from school and lay on the couch while she was watching TV - after her soap operas she'd switch over to PBS, and I would often fall asleep to the relaxing images and soothing voice of a painter on a show called "The Magic of Oil Painting" - that artist was not Bob Ross, it was Bill Alexander.  

Yes, the burly German guy with the loud voice, that used to relax me in the afternoons after a day at school.  That should tell you something about me, the fact that I'm of German descent and was partially raised by German grandparents meant that listening to a German man screaming at his in-progress oil painting helped me relax. Therefore I could probably take a nap at a Nazi rally, which is a bit concerning.  But that's how I learned about Prussian blue and Alizarin crimson, Cadmium yellow - though with his thick accent, it took a while for me to really understand the names.  Bill Alexander pioneered this technique of painting, wet-on-wet, where he'd add a layer of "Magic White" to the canvas first, and then he taught the technique to Bob Ross, who really made it famous.  

I'm still Team Alexander and not Team Ross, but the German guy's show ended in 1982 and Bob Ross's show "The Joy of Painting" started in 1983. At the time I thought one guy replaced the other on the same show, but that's not what happened, Bill Alexander's show was taped in Huntington Beach, CA and Bob Ross's show came out of Muncie, Indiana.  Bill Alexander had another show that ran from 1984 to 1992, and I guess it was up to each PBS station around the country to decide which one they wanted to run - but clearly it's a case where the student drove the teacher out of business, by putting out a quieter, gentler, more American and less German product that caught on with the public.  The Bob Ross show ran for 11 years, or 31 "seasons" and the weird thing here is that Bob Ross was younger than Bill Alexander, but died three years before him after becoming more successful. 

A whole enterprise sprung up around Bob Ross, because what else is there to do in Muncie, Indiana besides learn to paint?  The show format was always the same (copied from Bill Alexander) - sometimes the canvas would be pre-treated with the Magic White, and then Ross would start blending in the sky colors or denote his horizon line, and within a half-hour an oil painting would form - and the audience didn't get to see the sketch off to the side, where the painter had already planned out the design, so the creation did appear to be made with "magic",  There must have been some money generated by syndicating the show to the various PBS stations, but apparently that's chicken feed compared with the real money-maker, which was getting Bob Ross to tour the country and hold oil painting workshops, during which budding artists would be sold blank canvases, brushes, paints and so on.  And then each show generated three paintings for Bob Ross Inc. - the rough painting prepared before the show that he used as a guide, the one he painted during the show, and usually a more detailed one that he made later, which would appear in his instruction books (also for sale).  

I get it, I work for an animator and we also sell his art to collectors - we'll charge top dollar for a drawing or a cel that was included in a film, but I try to always make sure not to sell anyone a rough sketch or a drawing from a scene that got cut, not unless they specifically are made aware of that.  Most people only want the finished art anyway - but the cels are tricky because for a while we were photocopying the pencil art on to acetates, and then the customer's not getting something drawn by the artist's hand, it's really a copy.  But sometimes we can also include the pencil drawing, and an explanation about what, exactly, they're buying.  And while I might sign my boss's name on a letter, I would NEVER sign a piece of art with his name and try to pass that off as an autographed drawing.  Based on what some insiders say in this documentary, though, the handlers of Bob Ross drew that line in a different place.  

Many people refused to be interviewed for this documentary, because the producers of "Joy of Oil Painting" are quite litigious, and suggesting that the whole operation was a scam to sell paint, or that works created by others were sold as authentic Bob Ross paintings would just be an open invitation to get sued.  So the doc has to dance around a few things here, or suggest certain things without saying them directly.  The couple that ran Bob Ross Inc. is therefore portrayed as being a bit shady, supposedly the husband worked for the CIA or something, and maybe Bob Ross had an affair with the wife, it's all a bit nebulous.  Bob and his life lived in the same house with the other couple, who's to say really what was going on?  As another artist couple testifies here, "It was the 1970's and 1980's, everybody was sleeping around!"  Umm, OK, sure, it sounds like you guys have some stories to tell, also.

Before becoming the darling oil painter of the PBS world, Bob Ross was in the military, he served in the Air Force as a medical records technician at a base in Alaska, and years spent in Alaska may have influenced his appreciation for the beauty of nature, and also his love for animals.  An art class at the Anchorage USO club inspired him to start painting, and then while working as a part-time bartender he found that Bill Alexander show, "Magic of Oil Painting".  He studied the technique and then painted Alaskan landscapes on novelty gold pans, soon he was making more money from the paintings than he got from his military salary.  So he tracked down Bill Alexander in Florida, and became a traveling tutor and salesman for his program before branching out on his own.  That's just capitalism, American enterprise triumphs over German stubbornness.  

What happened in the months before and after Bob Ross's death created a legal and financial nightmare, but this documentary only tells one side of that story.  Yes, Bob Ross made a will that left the rights to his own image to his son, Steve Ross.  However, whether he could do that or not, the validity of that will would depend on the agreement he had with the Kowalskis, who were his business partners in Bob Ross Inc.  If the terms of that agreement stated that upon the death of a company partner, that person's stock would be equally divided among the remaining partners, then Bob's interest and likeness weren't his to bequeath.  The courts seemed to agree with the Kowalskis, who argued that everything Ross had painted was legally done as a work-for-hire, so after death his heirs had no rights to income from his paintings or the products he endorsed.  The fact that Bob Ross got married two months before his death also had no bearing, because the incorporation agreements didn't account for his interests to be transferred to a spouse, either.  It sucks but that's how business works sometimes, the party with the better contracts and the most lawyers wins.  

This is probably a lesson that my boss needs to learn, he absolutely HATES paying for lawyers and avoids hiring them - but he still signs contracts, sometimes without reading them thoroughly.  So there are sometimes questions about who "owns" the art that he makes, or whether he has the right to sell it later - he's pretty lucky that he's never been sued or never had to sue anyone, because one lawsuit could put an independent filmmaker with no legal representation right out of business.  I'm kind of on the fence here about who to root for, because you can't really copyright a painting technique, any more than you can copyright a recipe for a dish served in a restaurant.  And chefs, even famous ones, work at this restaurant or that one, move around a lot and probably carry a lot of recipes with them in their heads, and you never hear about a chef being sued because they stole a dish from another place they worked, it's all kind of fair game.

NITPICK POINT: One of Ross' artist friends proposes that his lymphoma might have been caused by prolonged exposure to paint thinner, Ross was known for cleaning the thinner out of his brush by "beating the devil out of it" (another technique and phrase he stole from Bill Alexander) but there's no mention of the fact that he was also a cigarette smoker for most of his adult life.  

Also starring Andrea Baxter, Doug Blandy, Ian Bourland, Bert Effing, Julia Friedman, Gary Jenkins, Kathwren Jenkins, Dana Jester, Laurence Kapp, Steve Ross, Vicky Ross, Sally Schenck, John Thamm

with archive footage of Bob Ross, Bill Alexander, Stephen Colbert (last seen in "George Carlin's American Dream"), James Corden (last heard in "Trolls World Tour"), Jimmie Cox, Phil Donahue (last seen in "Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project"), Kathie Lee Gifford (last seen in "Zappa"), Dennis Kapp, Taylor Kinney (last seen in "Rock the Kasbah"), Annette Kowalski, Walter Kowalski, Ryan Reynolds (last seen in "Betty White: First Lady of Television"), Joan Rivers (also carrying over from "Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project"), Sarah Silverman (ditto), Jane Ross, Sarah Strohl, Alicia Vikander (last seen in "Tulip Fever"). 

RATING: 6 out of 10 motivational affirmations