BEFORE: I'm recovering from the "Naked Gun" premiere - I was there until after midnight and then when everything from the outdoor set-up was taken away by the crew, and the porters were finished cleaning the theater, I could lock up. Even with a big crew from Paramount doing most of the hard work, we still had like 10 house managers working and 7 ushers, and I was the last man standing after everyone else tapped out. The closest subway was shut down so I had to walk 9 blocks down to 14th St. and it was still very hot outside - I was carrying a box with some donuts and I had to stop just because I was sweating so much, and sweat was in my eyes and I couldn't see anything. Got home at 1 am and typed up my last post and then I think I fell asleep at my desk. Woke up at 3 am and just went to bed with no blanket and the A/C running, it was the only way to be moderately comfortable.
Sam Kinison carries over from "Outstanding: A Comedy Revolution". I hate to allow someone quoted in that film as saying something very homophobic to carry over, but I'm afraid that's where I find the linking going today. Not my fault.
THE PLOT: Explores the life and legacy of shock comic Sam Kinison, a former Pentecostal preacher who repurposed his pulpit-honed chops for the brazen rock 'n roll world of MTV-era comedy.
AFTER: Just a couple days left in July right now, and I don't want to jinx things, but the chain has held up so far, I didn't have to make any changes because somebody didn't appear in a doc they were listed as being in. So that's good, and I can now block out August and think about my return to fiction films, I can't wait. I've also got "Superman" to look forward to, and if I can squeeze in "Fantastic Four: First Steps" some time before the summer is over, I think I could find a place for it somewhere in the horror chain, yes I know it's not a horror film, but I've been known to put comic-book films in there to help connect horror movies. We'll see, it's still a rough plan and I still have a couple weeks before I need to worry about how I'm going to get from September 1 to October 1. Let me just clear as many docs as I can before setting to work on that.
The Doc Block led me right to this one, sandwiched neatly between two other docs with Sam Kinison in them. It sounds a little crazy but to me the only "must watch" docs this year, at least when I was putting the chain together, were the one about Christopher Reeve, "Join or Die", the Billy Joel 100th MSG concert, the one about Blood, Sweat & Tears, "Yacht Rock" and "Casa Bonita Mi Amor!". OK, and the one about the Star Wars Holiday Special and tomorrow's film. Everything else this year so far was kind of dropped in as mortar, or connective tissue if you will, to make a chain with THOSE 8 films work. But then of course there were opportunities to clear so many other things off the list, and I think when all is said and done this summer, there will only be like FIVE docs left that I have on DVD or the DVR, everything else is available on streaming of course, but I try to prioritize the ones I have copies of, because that just clears up more slots for me to record more films. So I'll spend the next 10 months or so building the doc list back up again, just like I build the romance and horror and Christmas lists up ex post facto.
There's not much NEW here that I could learn about Sam Kinison, if there was it's probably facts about him that I probably could have guessed - he had a drinking problem, he had a drug problem, he had anger issues that he was working through that turned his comedy sets into bouts of scream therapy. And he was considered the "heavy metal" comic, not just because he screamed so much, but he also could play guitar and he hung out with rockers like Ted Nugent and Billy Idol and a guy from Quiet Riot. He rose to fame in the 1980's, like around the same time MTV popularized all those videos with scantily-clad women dancing in those factories that just make sparks all the time. But he didn't get there overnight, he started out as a preacher, and when you think about a sermon, it's kind of just like a stand-up act, just with fewer jokes. A preacher has to follow some of the same rules, like make it short but not too short, keep it clean and by all means, make sure it's entertaining, at least by church standards.
He came from a family of preachers, but you know, when your father is in the family business, sometimes the LAST thing you want to do for a living is that, whatever it is. I sure didn't want to take over my father's trucking business, and that was 100% the right call. And when you know what you DON'T want to do with your life, it's a great opportunity to look deep inside and think about what you DO want to do. So that's when Sam made it out to L.A. and tried out at the Comedy Store, but he didn't impress the owner, Mitzi Shore, enough so he took a job as the doorman and worked that for five years, and maybe that was a great opportunity to watch other comics and figure out what worked and what didn't work. She moved him to the Westwood branch of the club, and after he knocked out a mugger (or perhaps upset comedian) who was threatening her, he ascended to manager - this meant that he had to lock up every night, but when times were tough he would only pretend to do that and go home, actually he was sleeping in the club so he could spend his rent money on more drugs.
(Westwood is a suburb of L.A. that must be known for comedy, as a kid I listened to the Dr. Demento syndicated radio show that was broadcast from Westwood, CA and I happened to live in Westwood, MA. For a brief time I thought that the good doctor was broadcasting somewhere in my home town, then I figured out there was another town in the U.S. with the same name.)
Kinison hit big after Rodney Dangerfield came to visit the Comedy Store, and convinced him to appear on his HBO "Young Comedians" showcase for younger talent. This was right about the time that Kinison started to scream in his act, and touch on subjects that were maybe a little taboo, but they were things he pretended to be angry about, and the screaming just brought the point home. (He and Stephen Wright perhaps best exemplify the opposite ends of the high-energy/low-energy spectrum.) Everyone remembers the routine about him screaming at the poor people starving in Africa by yelling at them to move out of the desert and go WHERE THE FOOD IS! And if you never saw it, don't worry, nearly everyone being interviewed here did, and repeats it word for word. Jeez, guys, it's called editing, we don't need to hear the same joke eight times, do we?
Rodney also got Sam a role in his comedy "Back to School", as a professor who, you guessed it, yells at all of his students. But I guess the makers of this doc couldn't afford the rights to that footage - still, it was a big stepping stone in Kinison's career. He also did some TV work and appeared in a few music videos with Bon Jovi and Motley Crue, but as far as movies were concerned, he was really only in one. This doc reveals that he was cast in a movie called "Alta" and flew to the shoot without ever reading the script, even though all of his friends and his manager/brother had, and tried to convince him the film was a bomb. Sam figured that once he got to the shoot, he'd have some time to make some rewrites and suggestions and he did, after partying for a week in various NYC hotel rooms that all ejected him, however the filmmakers were not open to rewrites, especially since they hadn't even asked him to do that. So that was kind of the end of his film career, I guess. Sometimes we need to learn that the world doesn't work the way we think it does.
I'm not going to say Kinison didn't have a lot to be mad about - there was an accident when he was three years old, he was hit by a truck and suffered epilepsy after, due to brain damage. Then being raised in a very religious family, well, jeez, I'd scream about that too if I could, all those years my parents made sure I was fed the most ridiculous ideas about how the world works. When I was told that the communion wafer and the wine "become" the body and blood of Christ, I thought, "Wow, that's a very powerful metaphor!" but it's so much worse that they actually believe that the bread and wine actually turn into Jesus's actual body and actual blood, that's when I knew they were all actually nuts. Then there was his feelings about women after he got divorced, you know, very relatable, some people never recover from something like that.
But when someone with anger issues and an addictive personality suddenly makes it big and gets paid a ton of money for successful comedy albums and arena shows, well come on, it's recipe for disaster, we've seen that again and again here in the Doc Block. Plus remember it was the 1980's so the only people who got rich and stayed rich were the drug dealers. As Tommy Chong points out here, it was the time when cocaine took over the industry and ruined a lot of lives, like you can do a bunch of coke and feel like you can take over the world, but after just a few weeks it also starts taking a toll on your body. And for someone who screamed regularly as part of his routine, drugs plus screaming plus being overweight is a recipe for disaster, he was headed for either a heart attack or an embolism. Then he started stumbling his way through shows and forgetting his own jokes, so his brother/manager forced some kind of intervention.
Maybe it was his brother taking the hit for all the weed that Kinison had packed in his luggage when the DEA busted them at the airport, maybe that was the final straw. His brother went to rehab for him, and Bill didn't even drink - also that's not how rehab is supposed to work. Eventually Sam got himself clean and married a woman who appeared on stage with him often, however six days after the marriage he died in a car crash on his way to a gig in Laughlin, NV. A more cynical man would use this as evidence against getting married, and maybe this was a very ironic death, but in some way, aren't they all? Who's to say that if he'd stayed on the path of drinking and drugging that he would have lived any longer than he did? Nobody really knows. Let's not forget that at one point, his AA sponsor was the infamous Ozzy Osbourne. RIP Ozzy.
Really, the whole industry changed since Kinison died in 1992 - nobody could pull off the routines he did back then today, they'd be picketed and boycotted and eventually cancelled. Still, somehow he was considered a ground breaking comic, because he tended to say the quiet part out loud, very loud.
Directed by Adrian Buitenhuis (Director of "I Am Burt Reynolds")
Also starring Dan Barton, Bill Burr (last seen in "Old Dads"), Tommy Chong (last seen in "George Carlin's American Dream"), Lue Deck, Steve Epstein, Corey Feldman (last seen "The 'Burbs"), Joey Gaynor, Argus Hamilton, Ron Jeremy, Bill Kinison, Sherry Kinison, Jay Leno (last seen in "A Disturbance in the Force"), Felicia Michaels, Ted Nugent (last seen in "Tapeheads"), Kelly Coffield Park (last seen in "The Beaver"), Joe Rogan (last seen in "Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind"), Bob Saget (last seen in "I Am Chris Farley"), Rudy Sarzo (last seen in "God Bless Ozzy Osbourne"), Charlie Sheen (last seen in "A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III"), Jimmy Shubert, Judy Tenuta (last seen in "The Polka King")
with archive footage of George Carlin (last seen in "Albert Brooks: Defending My Life"), Eric Clapton (last seen in "Johnny Cash: The Redemption of an American Icon"), Larry King (ditto), Phil Collins (last seen in "Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary"), Rodney Dangerfield (last seen in "Robert Klein Still Can't Stop His Leg"), Billy Idol (last seen in "The Sparks Brothers"), Kevin Kinison, Tommy Lee (last seen in "The Dirt"), Heather Locklear (last seen in "Looney Tunes: Back in Action"), Marc Maron (last seen in "To Leslie"), Steve Martin (last seen in "Belushi"), Ozzy Osbourne (last heard in "Trolls World Tour"), Garry Shandling (last seen in "Luther: Never Too Much"), Brooke Shields (last seen in "Brats"), Mitzi Shore, Dee Snider (last seen in "Mr. Saturday Night"), Robin Williams (also carrying over from "Outstanding: A Comedy Revolution")
RATING: 5 out of 10 three-day parties with Charlie Sheen and Corey Feldman
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