Jim Henson: Idea Man

Year 16, Day 208 - 7/26/24 - Movie #4,797

BEFORE: Still recovering from my summer cold, but at least I went to work today.  Took a hot shower this morning, which seems counter-productive in the summer, but I just really needed to clear my stuffed-up head. Still not sleeping well, which is a problem because I need to go back to the theater early Saturday morning, so maybe no caffeine and no movie on Friday night.  If I make it through Saturday at the NY Asian Film Festival, then, OK, come home and watch a movie and have a couple beers maybe.  

So, this may count as the last documentary for the week - if that puts me behind, so be it, but I just have to get some sleep tonight. Morley Safer (and a couple others) carries over from "Mike Wallace Is Here". 

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street" (Movie #4,220)

THE PLOT: This documentary features interviews with family and co-workers of Jim Henson, interspersed with footage from his TV shows and movies, including commercials that were previously thought lost. 

AFTER: Looking back on it, I think I followed up Pride Week with Workaholics Week - what else do David Bowie, Charlie Chaplin, Stan Lee, Mike Wallace and Jim Henson have in common?  They all worked hard, sure, and they all seem to have put work ahead of family, as only one stayed married for a long time - and that was Stan Lee.  Jim Henson only had one marriage, but there was some kind of separation from his wife a few years before he died.  Bowie married twice and then I think for Chaplin and Mike Wallace it was four times each.  Well, I don't know exactly what to make of all that but it feels like they had their eyes on the prize and being famous and being married don't always go together.  

I had dinner tonight with a friend who bumped into Jim Henson on the streets of NYC years ago - which is only odd because I once bumped into Frank Oz on 40th St. (I did not get an autograph then, just a photo.  Got the autograph a few days later.)  My friend says Henson was with a girlfriend, obviously he never married again, that's how you hold on to your Muppet money, I guess.  It seems there was enough money to go around when Jim and Jane Henson split, but then again, it also seems that Jane's portion got split up among their kids, who all have jobs in the entertainment industry now, total Muppet Nepo Babies. I mean, come on, having somebody like Jim Henson or George Lucas as your dad is like being born on third base and just waiting to steal home, right?  I had dinner one time, years ago, with a group of people that included a Henson daughter, Heather, I think.

Anyway, this documentary details the early years before the Muppets really took off, when Jim and Jane Henson were doing late-night puppet shows on TV in the Washington, DC area. They seem very surreal, and surprisingly violent by today's standards, lots of explosions and puppets eating each other, maybe not so much for kids, but then again, it was a different time.  From there it was on to performing on the early episodes of "Saturday Night Live", again maintaining a sort of adult sensibility, but the scripts were being written by the SNL staff, and some of them resented working with puppets.  

But NBC's loss was PBS's gain when the Children's Television Workshop started to put "Sesame Street" together, and they called in Henson and his associates to make some puppet-based skits that were also educational - and JIm Henson also got the opportunity to make some experimental films for the same shows, because it turns out he was more than just a puppeteer, he also identified as a filmmaker.  Sure, why not - and his Muppets were only supposed to appear in pre-taped segments, however it turned out that the NYC street set seemed rather dull by comparison to the animated and puppeteered segments, so a few Muppets were cast to work in the live-action segments - thus the creation of Big Bird, Oscar, Bert and Ernie.  

Bert and Ernie had an apartment, and they were - what, roommates?  A take on the "Odd Couple", or was there a more romantic element to their relationship?  Meanwhile Big Bird lived in a nest on the Street and Oscar lived in a trash can. Well, to each his own.  Initially Jim Henson was going to be the puppeteer voicing Bert and Frank Oz was going to be Ernie, but they tried this out and it just didn't work.  Henson was clearly the fun-loving, joking Alpha in real life and Oz was the more prudent, worrisome Beta, so they soon switched puppets and well, it just felt right. We've seen this formula before, right?  Ernie is Mick Jagger to Bert's Brian Jones.  Ernie is Stan Lee to Bert's Jack Kirby. Ernie is, umm, George Michael to Bert's Andrew Ridgeley.  Too far? 

Anyway, "Sesame Street" was a big hit and a very useful creative use of puppets in education, but Jim Henson didn't just want to play to the preschool audience, he wanted the adult audience as well, that was his vision.  So with investment money from the U.K., the whole puppet show relocated to London to make the first season of what would become "The Muppet Show".  Suddenly Henson was in the U.K. for half the year, and NY the other half (this is part of what was non-conducive to being a present husband and father).  But it worked, darn it, the Muppet Show was a big hit, even if the guest hosts were mostly British actors and singers at first, like Twiggy, Peter Ustinov, Julie Andrews and Elton John.  You know, I never noticed that before - but there were also American hosts that were flown in to London, or maybe happened to be in London.

I also never realized before that "The Muppet Show" really stole the format from "SNL", with a cast of regulars with a new guest host each week, and hmm, the Muppets had been regulars on SNL just a couple years before. Very interesting.  And Gilda Radner was a host in season 3 - you know, I have not gone back and watched those "Muppet Show" episodes since I was a kid, it might be time for a re-watch, now that I have an adult's POV on the world, I may view them in a completely different way.  

The film sees the Muppets progress past their TV variety show and into their first movie, "The Muppet Movie", but then for some reason it kind of leaves the Muppets there and follows Henson's other projects - so nothing here about "The Great Muppet Caper" or "The Muppets Take Manhattan" - you know what, maybe it's for the best. I remember not being a big fan of "Dark Crystal" but then the opposite was true of "Labyrinth", I was really really into it, David Bowie was a big reason, he was so cool that he made up for how corny all the puppets were. 

But I never watched "Fraggle Rock", by then I was too old, and in fact I passed on many of the later Muppet movies like "Muppet Treasure Island" and "A Muppet Christmas Carol" until I started my blog in 2009 and began playing catch-up.  But I was out of college in 1990 when Jim Henson died, and around the same time I was working for a little company that was making music videos for Sesame Street, and once in a while there were Muppets on our set.  One video was called "Adventure" and starred En Vogue, with cameos from Super Grover and The Count. That shoot was a lot of fun because the whole video was designed to look like a comic book, and I remember loaning some of my comics to the director so she could zoom in close on them and steal their backgrounds. I got paid extra for renting out my comic books. 

Henson was in negotiations to sell his entire company to Disney, like George Lucas later did, but negotiations broke down when he made the terrible business move of dying from a cold. OK, lesson learned, no big cash pay-out when your chief creative officer kicks the bucket.  Frank Oz suggested that it was really the stress of negotiating with Disney that killed Jim Henson. So the Sesame Workshop and Jim Henson's Creature Shop had to find ways to survive, but Disney did eventually acquire what they wanted, the (non-Sesame St.) Muppets as an intellectual property, in 2004 for $75 million. I guess they finally saw some value or some opportunities for more Muppet movies and shows?  I say, Disney's going to own everything eventually, so why wait? Sell it all to them as soon as you can.  

Also starring Frank Oz (last seen in "Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street"), Fran Brill (ditto), Lisa Henson (ditto), Jennifer Connelly (last seen in "Top Gun: Maverick"), Bonnie Erickson, Michael Frith, Dave Goelz (last heard in "Muppets Haunted Mansion"), Brian Henson (ditto), Cheryl Henson, Heather Henson, Rita Moreno (last seen in "80 for Brady"), Alex Rockwell, 

with archive footage of Jim Henson, Jane Henson, Northern Calloway, Joan Ganz Cooney, Emilio Delgado, Richard Hunt, Jerry Juhl, Will Lee, Loretta Long, Sonia Manzano, Bob McGrath, Jerry Nelson, Matt Robinson, Caroll Spinney, Jon Stone (all last seen in "Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street"),

Julie Andrews (last seen in "Being Mary Tyler Moore"), Dan Aykroyd (last seen in "The Greatest Night in Pop"), Harry Belafonte (ditto), Diana Ross (ditto), Drew Barrymore (last seen in "Blended"), David Bowie (last seen in "Moonage Daydream"), Bernie Brillstein, Maury Brown, Johnny Carson (also carrying over from "Mike Wallace Is Here"), Dick Cavett (ditto), Richard Nixon (ditto), Alice Cooper (last seen in "The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart"), Jimmy Dean (last seen in "Diamonds Are Forever"), Michael Eisner (last seen in "Mr. Saturday Night"), James Frawley, Dave Garroway, Charles Gibson (last seen in "Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time"), Lew Grade, Arsenio Hall (last seen in "Little Richard: I Am Everything"), Mark Hamill (last seen in "If These Walls Could Sing), George Lucas (ditto), Betty Henson, John Henson, Paul Henson Sr., Paul Henson Jr., Bob Hope (last seen in "The Beach Boys"), Ed Sullivan (ditto), Elton John (last seen in "Wham!"), Stevie Wonder (ditto), Rollin Krewson, David Lazer, Liza Minnelli (last seen in "Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed"), Roger Moore (ditto), Dudley Moore (last seen in "Arthur 2: On the Rocks"), Mike Oznowicz, Queen Elizabeth II (last seen in "Weird; The Al Yankovic Story"), Gilda Radner (last seen in "Remembering Gene Wilder"), Norman Seeff, Raquel Welch (last seen in "Belfast"), Orson Welles (last seen in "Stan Lee"), 

John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Jane Curtin, Garrett Morris, Steve Martin, Laraine Newman, Michael O'Donoghue, Gene Shalit (all last seen in "Belushi"), 

RATING: 6 out of 10 commercials for Claussen's bread

Mike Wallace Is Here

Year 16, Day 207 - 7/25/24 - Movie #4,796

BEFORE: Well, I lost a day, it couldn't be helped - I thought I'd like to finish the Doc Block within July and not let it spill over into August, but now that's more unlikely.  What happened was, I worked a night at the New York Asian Film Festival, and I didn't realize the shift was going to go until midnight or later.  I'm OK with this, because time is money and if the event goes late, that means a bigger paycheck (eventually).  But going past midnight on a weeknight means that it's tougher to get home, part of my subway line was shut down so that meant at 1 am, after locking up the theater, I found out that I had to take a bus across 14th St. to catch my train, it wasn't going to where I usually catch it.  My phone said the bus was due in a mere 52 minutes, so I figured walking would be faster, but then I just KNEW that a bus was going to pass me along the walk, right?  Anyway I got to Union Square only to find the train would not be leaving for another 15-20 minutes, so I didn't get home until 2 am.

Well, I'm not going to watch a movie at 2 am if I need to be at work the next day at 10 am (or more likely, 11 am) so I just took a skip night - but somehow I got a cold in the middle of all that, so I called in sick on Wednesday anyway, and just worked a bit on e-mails from home.  I slept most of Wednesday to deal with the cold, and I was able to start this film on Wednesday night, but now it's Thursday and I'm still feeling sick so I hope another day on the sidelines will take care of it.  Soup and coffee and DayQuil, that's the best way to deal with a cold, maybe some Advils to deal with the achiness, but my sleeping schedule is now completely backwards, and it was bad to begin with.  I'm hoping I can restore normalcy in time to work on Friday and Saturday, but now if I don't watch a documentary every day, that's OK, I'll look for a way to line them up again with celebrity birthdays, but the order of the remaining docs is set in stone now, it's not a question of how I end the Doc Block, just when. There are enough extra days in the year (159) to watch the remaining movies (104) and not have to worry about this.  

Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew (among others) carry over from "Stan Lee". All docs set in the 1960's need to at least name-check Watergate. 

THE PLOT: A look at the career of "60 Minutes" newsman, Mike Wallace. 

AFTER: Mike Wallace was a bit before my time, but I figured I'd give this one a whirl anyway - like my grandmother used to watch "60 Minutes", as a kid I would just watch the end bit to see if Andy Rooney had anything funny to say.  This was before I glommed on to Letterman and Weird Al Yankovic, I think - like why as a kid did I think that some old man complaining about everything was funny?  Now I have no idea, but times change and people change. 

Mike Wallace spearheaded "60 Minutes" at its inception, and became famous for his hard-hitting "gotcha" questions and his ability to land interviews with some of the most brutal dictators in the world - Manuel Noriega, Vladimir Putin, Ayatollah Khomeini, and - Barbra Streisand?  No, wait, I'll stand by that one, it tracks.  So to put together clips from some of his most famous (and infamous) interviews, AND to give us the back-story of his career that most people didn't know about, well it should be a slam-dunk. And it is, more or less. 

Mike Wallace started out in broadcasting in much the same way Stan Lee started out in comic books - get your foot in the door, volunteer for everything, try to move up in the ranks when you can, and if you hang around long enough, you could end up running the place.  Wallace worked as a radio announcer, a commercial pitchman, and maybe also swept up the office after hours. The more you take on, the harder you are to fire, I get that. I've lived that myself - except for when I was working at the AMC in the summer of 2021, I was willing to sweep all 7 theaters and empty all 28 trash cans in the building, but when they wanted me to come in early and clean all 8 bathrooms, that's where I drew the line.  I did NOT go to film school to clean bathrooms, sorry, that's when I started planning my escape.  

Mike Wallace's entry into news came through a program called "Night Beat", one guest, one interviewer in a darkened room, under a spotlight, which looked a bit like a police interrogation - and sponsored by Parliament cigarettes, which back then, everybody was encouraged to smoke, on camera, guests and hosts.  This all seemed quite ironic if you've seen the movie "The Insider", which came out in 1999 and detailed the "60 Minutes" investigation into the tobacco industry, and their decades-long cover-up on the dangers of smoking.  This doc eventually gets there, but it could have drawn a more direct ironic correlation between Wallace working on one show that was sponsored by cigarettes, and later on another show that broke the story on how corrupt that industry was. Karma's involved somehow, like Wallace maybe made up for being part of the corporate machine by breaking the story, and now you can't smoke in restaurants or on planes or even walking down the street, really you're limited to your own home now.  But there's footage here of a tobacco industry spokesman suggesting that lung cancer is caused by "a virus" rather than from exposure to the toxins in ciggies. Umm, sure, if that helps you sleep at night. 

Anyway, the film kind of arrives a bit too late, because Mike Wallace is deceased now, as are the majority of the interviewed subjects seen here, but they live on through archive footage - Bette Davis, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Leona Helmsley, Salvador Dali, Johnny Carson, etc.  Sure, a few are still around, like Oprah Winfrey, Shirley MacLaine, Bill O'Reilly - and some of the other people who interviewed Wallace, like Dick Cavett and Letterman - but mostly this is a tribute to the fallen, like the "In Memoriam" segment at the Oscars each year.  These were the newsmakers of the 1960's and 1970's, and most of them we won't see again.  I'd love to see the whole "Night Beat" interview with Rod Serling, I was a big "Twilight Zone" fan as a kid and that may be where the OCD kicked in, I bought a book that listed all the episodes and I kept watching the reruns until I'd seen every last one. 

We also see the tables get turned on Mike Wallace a few times here, but when he went on a talk show as an interview subject, he seemed reluctant to answer questions about his own personal life - in a later interview with Morley Safer he opened up a bit more.  Like I guess everyone knew, or soon figured out, not to ask him on camera how many times he'd been married.  What's the big deal?  (It was four, by the way.). If you live long enough and love like a normal person does, then it's bound to happen once or twice, I figure.  But clearly there was a pattern with him of putting work first and family second, thus the three divorces.  And sure, there was other tragedy in his life, like when he flew to Greece to look for his 19-year old son, Peter, only to find that he'd fallen off a mountain, and that's why he hadn't called home in a while. 

There really isn't enough time in a 90-minute documentary (really, it should have been called "90 Minutes with Mike Wallace" but I guess CBS might have had a problem with that) so they really had to focus on the most important interviews - a couple seconds with JFK, a brief glimpse of Reagan and only a couple questions with younger Trump, but a deep-dive on Watergate, a lot of tense moments interviewing Khomeini during the Iran hostage crisis and another focus on the libel suit filed by Gen. Westmoreland concerning his reporting of manipulated intelligence estimates over the number of communists in Vietnam to make the false impression that the U.S. was winning the war there. (We weren't.)

I think I learned a lot about the news business tonight, which was kind of the point.  I learned it's not a very happy business, especially if you focus on things like wars and Communism and dead Civil Rights leaders. Also, Mike Wallace may have been indirectly responsible for the assassination of Anwar Sadat, because he pushed the point in his interview with Khomeini, which led to the Iranian leader calling Sadat "not a true Muslim" and he was shot a few weeks later. Oopsie?

 

With archive footage of Mike Wallace (last seen in "Little Richard: King and Queen of Rock 'n' Roll"), Jonathan Alter (last seen in "Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists"), Yasser Arafat, Menachem Begin (last seen in "Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President"), Anwar Sadat (ditto), Jack Benny (last seen in "Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed"), Kirk Douglas (ditto), Dan Rather (ditto), Ronald Reagan (ditto), Dinah Shore (ditto), Thomas Hart Benton, David Boies (last seen in "The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley"), Ben Bradlee (last seen in "Life Itself"), Ed Bradley (last seen in "Butterfly in the Sky"), Tom Brokaw (last seen in "The Greatest Night in Pop"), Johnny Carson (last seen in "Love to Love You, Donna Summer"), Barbra Streisand (dtto), Dick Cavett (last seen in "Moonage Daydream"), Mickey Cohen, Stephen Colbert (last seen in "Money Shot: The Pornhub Story"), Bob Costas (last seen in "Yogi Berra: It Ain't Over"), Walter Cronkite (ditto), Edward R. Murrow (ditto), Tim Russert (ditto), Salvador Dali (last seen in "Super Duper Alice Cooper"), Bette Davis (last seen in "Always at the Carlyle"), Diana Dors, Hugh Downs (last seen in "Spielberg"), Eldon Edwards, John Ehrlichman (last seen in "13th"), Oriana Fallaci, Tom Foreman, Barney Frank (last seen in "Capitalism: A Love Story"), Aladena "Jimmy" Fratianno, Jackie Gleason (last seen in "What's My Name: Muhammad Ali"), Merv Griffin (last seen in "The Real Charlie Chaplin"), Sean Hannity (last seen in "Shock and Awe"), David Hartman (last seen in "Framing John DeLorean"), Barbara Walters (ditto), Leona Helmsley (last seen in "Let's Go to Prison"), Don Hewitt (last seen in "Scandalous: The Untold Story of the National Enquirer"), Jacqueline Kennedy (last seen in "The Special Relationship"), Rpbert F. Kennedy (last seen in "Elvis"), John F. Kennedy (also carrying over from "Stan Lee"), Larry King (ditto), Martin Luther King (ditto), Ayatollah Khomeini (last seen in "Rosewater"), Robert Kirsch, Steve Kroft (last seen in "The Queen of Versailles"), David Letterman (last seen in "Little Richard: I Am Everything"), Shirley MacLaine (last seen in "I Am Burt Reynolds"), Malcolm X (last seen in "Attica"), Groucho Marx (last seen in "Albert Brooks: Defending My Life"), Jon Stewart (ditto), John McCain (last seen in "You've Been Trumped Too"), Bill O'Reilly (ditto), Paul Meadlo, Arthur Miller, Manuel Noriega (last seen in "Bad Reputation"), Drew Pearson, Thomas Pike, Maury Povich, Vladimir Putin (last seen in "George Carlin's American Dream"), Harry Reasoner (last seen in "Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time"), Morley Safer (ditto), Geraldo Rivera (last seen in "LennoNYC"), Eleanor Roosevelt (last seen in "Nixon"), Lillian Roth (last seen in "Animal Crackers"), Van Gordon Sauter, Jean Seberg (last seen in "Airport"), Rod Serling (last seen in "Not Fade Away"), Eric Sevareid (last seen in "Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood"), Beverly Sills, Lesley Stahl (last seen in "Marcel the Shell with Shoes On"), Frederick Taylor, Donald Trump (last seen in "The Strange Name Movie"), Chris Wallace (last seen in "Mayor Pete"), George Wallace (last seen in "MLK/FBI"), William C. Westmoreland, Jeffrey Wigand, Oprah Winfrey (last seen in "Being Mary Tyler Moore"), Frank Lloyd Wright

RATING: 5 out of 10 commercials for Fluffo shortening. (WTF is that?)

Stan Lee

Year 16, Day 205 - 7/23/24 - Movie #4,795

BEFORE: This is the reason I was so liberal with adding "extra" films to my Doc Block, other than trying to land films on celebrity birthdays, I was thinking about San Diego Comic-Con.  Sure, it officially starts this Thursday (Preview Night Wednesday), but for maybe 15 years in a row, I used to travel out there on Tuesday night so I could arrive on Wednesday morning, check in to my hotel and then have enough time to pack up a few boxes of merchandise and get down to the Convention Center in time to start selling. My first year there, I missed Preview Night and my boss was PISSED, I think I went to the San Diego Zoo or something, and boy, I got chewed out and learned the hard way to not do that again. So, there's still part of me that wants to be packing a bag tonight so I can catch my overnight flight.  Which always left on Tuesday, because who needs sleep when there's merch to be sold on Wednesday? 

I saw Stan Lee live in person at a number of S.D.C.C.'s and N.Y.C.C.'s over the years, I think at one point it was odd if I DIDN'T see Stan Lee at a convention. But I'd met him a few times before that, because I used to own stock in Marvel Comics, and if I wasn't working on the day of the annual shareholder's meeting in NYC I would learn the location and check it out. Each year they printed their annual stock report in the form of a comic book, and they would bring out Stan to autograph the stock report for anybody who wanted that, so I probably have 3 or 4 Marvel Stock Report Annuals signed by him.  He was always very friendly and gracious about spending his time doing that and talking with the fans.

My history with the stock did not work out well, because the company bought one company after another (Toy Biz, Topps, Panini stickers) with the goal of saving money - why license their characters to a toy company when they can own a toy company and make all the profits themselves?  That was a terrible idea, because Marvel spent so much money buying other companies that they went bankrupt, and the stock became worthless.  I sold all the shares I'd bought for $1,000 for a few dollars and then invested in some Disney stock instead - a few years down the road, of course Disney bought Marvel and I was back owning shares of that same company again. 

Charlie Chaplin carries over again from "The Real Charlie Chaplin". 

THE PLOT: Stan Lee was Marvel Comics' primary creative director for two decades, expanding it from a small publishing house division to a multimedia corporation that dominated the comics and film industries. 

AFTER: I haven't made much reference here to the latest twists and turns in the Presidential Race, because there just hasn't been a good opportunity to reference them. Sure, I finally watched "You've Been Trumped" Parts 1 and 2, because for some reason not everyone got the memo about what a Class A A-hole he really is.  Unfit to serve, convicted felon, I think I've made my position on this pretty clear.  Getting shot at by an unhinged Gen Z-er who can't quite seem to pick a party has not changed my opinion one bit, but some people who believe in mystical things like angels have taken this as a sign from above that this has somehow made him more worthy, which is a load of horse hooey. 

But let's talk about Biden's decision to not run for re-election for just a minute, because I see a parallel in the career of Stan Lee, who started at Timely Comics as a copy boy, then jumped in as a writer when needed, and kept volunteering for more and more comics to write that eventually he was running the place.  Similar career path (in a way) to Biden, who served as a Senator for a long time and then of course was picked by Obama as his vice-president, it's another case where if you just keep working long enough you might end up running the whole place, if you can stay alive and build up enough experience.  The biggest mistake Biden probably made was stepping aside for Hillary Clinton and then having four years of down time during which he stupidly grew four years older, and that resulted in him essentially aging out of the program.  Stan was similarly forced to retire when he hit - what was it, 90 years old? 

Stan Lee became editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics in the late 1960's, and then there was nowhere else to go but publisher, which meant a new editor-in-chief needed to be named.  But it's not like Stan was working on the production line when the comics were being printed, it just meant he was the man in charge of everything.  Then for some reason in 1981 he moved to California to oversee the production of Marvel's properties in movie and TV series forms, however all of the Marvel shows produced during this time period were quite terrible, at least compared to the high-budget movies made in the last 15 years. And at some point in the 1990's Stan retired, though he retained the title of Chairman Emeritus and still drew an annual salary of about $1 million, just for going from one comic convention to another.  Sweet gig.

What this documentary doesn't mention is that Stan started another company called Stan Lee Media, to develop some new superheroes for comics and movies that were NOT owned by Marvel.  But this was in 1998, and by 2000 the other creators were in trouble for illegal stock manipulation and the company filed for bankruptcy in 2001.  Stan tried again a couple years later with a new company, POW! Entertainment, but really, the next ten years were a complete blur of lawsuits, with Stan Lee suing Marvel after the X-Men movies took off, then Stan Lee Media sued POW! Entertainment, and then I think at one point Stan Lee accidentally sued himself, which was very embarrassing.  

But by 2006 it seemed that everyone figured out that Stan Lee would never be as successful as he was when he worked at Marvel, and Marvel was also missing some of the magic that Stan brought to the table as the public face of the company.  So he was eventually welcomed back, wrote a few minor comics for the company, but more importantly, he began making cameos in the new Marvel movies, and people kept going to see each one just to get a glimpse of Stan as part of each story, whether he played a museum security guard or a mailman or just a guy driving down a highway, people looked forward to seeing when and how Stan would pop up in each new film.  

This doc kind of glosses over the early years, like it shows Stan (or an action-figure version of him) getting the job at Timely Comics, but there's no mention of the publisher, Martin Goodman, being Lee's cousin's husband. So it's not like he was "destined" to work at a comic-book company, some nepotism was involved, but sure, also hard work and a volunteering spirit to take on more work, whether it was writing comics or sweeping up. When World War 2 came, Stan volunteered for service but never went overseas, he served in the signal corps in the U.S., repairing communications equipment, but later transferred to the Training Film Division, which also made training manuals, which started to look like comic books with Lee's influence, and that wasn't a bad thing, it made them easier to understand. Also serving in that division were director Frank Capra, cartoonist Charles Addams, and future children's book writer Theodor Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss).  

But the main thing that comic book fans want to know about is probably Stan's "marriage" - not the one to his wife Joan, but the creative partnership with Jack Kirby where Stan did the writing and Jack did the illustration and some of the greatest comic-book characters were created, like the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Iron Man and the X-Men.  Stan also partnered with Steve Ditko to create Spider-Man and Doctor Strange, and later BOTH Kirby and Ditko would leave the company because they felt that Stan was taking too much credit for the creation of these characters.  Stan's argument is that he thought up the characters, named them, figured out what made them tick, and then decided who they would fight, but Kirby and Ditko were responsible for the LOOK of those characters - I can see both sides here, maybe you just call that a 50-50 collaboration, give the artist the benefit of the doubt, but Lee clearly didn't DO that, because both Kirby and Ditko still had unresolved issues.  

This documentary plays a recording of Jack Kirby calling in to a radio show where Stan Lee is being interviewed, and yeah, the conversation may have started with "How are you, Stan?" and "How's your health, Jack?" but it wasn't before long before the knives came out and the two men just could not see eye to eye and were arguing over who "created" the X-Men.  This is Lennon-McCartney or Mick Jagger-Brian Jones all over again, there just can't be two Alphas in the company, it won't work for any period over five years.  Besides, even though Stan got most of the credit, turn-about was fair play when it turned out that Marvel owned the characters, because Stan was an employee of Marvel when he created Spider-Man, so guess who owns Spider-Man?  Hint: not Stan Lee.  And all attempts by Stan to create new characters that were as popular and also owned by Stan Lee failed miserably.  What does that tell you?  Lightning in a bottle, it's not going to happen twice. 

Stan Lee may have been part Biden, but he was also part Trump - in that he was his own best salesman. He was always happy to tell everyone about how great it was to be him, how he did every job in the company by himself and oh yeah, also the artists drew a little bit, but he wrote EVERY WORD and decided which villain each hero should fight and he thought up the idea of a teenager from Queens getting bitten by a spider and gaining the ability to climb walls, fight villains and screw up his own life at the same time.  I mean, I get it, everybody loves super-heroes now and Stan wrote some of the most classic stories in the entire genre, but he didn't exactly invent the medium, a lot of other people wrote comic books before he did, and a lot of other people wrote BETTER ones after he did.  Just saying, let's keep this in perspective. 

But a shout-out to Stan Lee for creating some of the first black superheroes (Black Panther, Falcon) and for writing stories that touched on civl rights, anti-bigotry and the dangers of drug abuse.  And of course, 55 years spent working for the same company is notable in ANY industry.  That goes for Stan Lee AND Joe Biden. Another take on Stan Lee, however, is that by creating likable characters and presenting them in a never-ending narrative form, he got millions of young kids addicted to comic books, which turned in to an older generation that never fully grew up and still reads them (myself included), and did you know that the average comic book now costs FIVE dollars? (OK, some are still $4). But jeez, I can remember when Marvel Comics increased their standard price from 35 cents to 50 cents, and the company APOLOGIZED to the fans for having to do that. There's inflation, and then there's just being greedy.

With archive footage of Stan Lee (last seen in "Jay and Silent Bob Reboot"), Joan Lee, Kevin Feige, Jack Kirby, Julius Schwartz, Joe Simon, Flo Steinberg, Roy Thomas, 

Spiro Agnew (last seen in "LennoNYC"), Chadwick Boseman (last seen in "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever"), Martin Freeman (ditto), Kenneth Branagh (last seen in "Oppenheimer"), George W. Bush (last seen in "Yogi Berra: It Ain't Over"), Larry King (ditto), Barack Obama (ditto), Bill Clinton (last seen in "The Strange Name Movie"), Hillary Clinton (last seen in "We Blew It"), John F. Kennedy (ditto), Benedict Cumberbatch (last seen in "The Electrical Life of Louis Wain"), Taika Waititi (ditto), Robert Downey Jr. (last seen in "Sr."), Chris Evans (last seen in "Street Kings"), Jon Favreau (last seen in "Term Life"), George Harrison (last seen in "Wham!"), John Lennon (ditto), Paul McCartney (ditto), Chris Hemsworth (last seen in "Extraction II"), Tom Holland (last seen in "Uncharted"), Scarlett Johansson (last seen in "Eight Legged Freaks"), Martin Luther King (last seen in "The Greatest Night in Pop"), Brie Larson (last seen in "The Marvels"), Marilyn Monroe (last seen in "Elton John Live: Farewell from Dodger Stadium"), Richard Nixon (last seen in "Keith Haring: Street Art Boy"), Elizabeth Olsen (last seen in "Kill Your Darlings"),  Jesse Owens (last seen in "Balls of Fury"), Jeremy Renner (last seen in "Wind River"), Franklin Roosevelt (also carrying over from "The Real Charlie Chaplin"), Orson Welles (ditto), Tom Snyder (last seen in "Little Richard: I Am Everything"), Ringo Starr (ditto), Vanilla Ice (last seen in "The Wrong Missy"), Billy Wilder,         

RATING: 6 out of 10 musings from "Stan's Soapbox"

The Real Charlie Chaplin

Year 16, Day 204 - 7/22/24 - Movie #4,794

BEFORE: That's 33 documentaries down, just 10 to go before tonight.  David Letterman is still in the lead with 10 appearances for the year, and in second place there's a three-way tie between Kevin Hart, Paul McCartney and John Lennon with 9 appearances each.  Those Beatles DO tend to turn up in just about every rock music doc.  Then tied for third with 8 appearances are George Harrison and Elton John.  I think we'll see Elton John at least one more time, maybe two, so we could have a very close race this year. 

Charlie Chaplin carries over from "Moonage Daydream".  

THE PLOT: A look at the life and work of Charlie Chaplin in his own words, featuring an in-depth interview he gave to Life magazine in 1966.

AFTER: Ugh, more mansplaining tonight, except the narrator is a woman, does that make it womansplaining?  Were they trying to avoid the stereotype?  You know, a woman telling me facts about the silent movie industry that everybody already knows is just as condescending.  Like, did you know that Charlie Chaplin was NOT the character that he played?  Yes, umm, it's called acting and we're all quite famliar with it.  Did you know that the character does not officially have a name?  Well, that just seems like a terrible idea - because rather than make the character seem timeless or eternal, it just seems confusing that we don't know what to call him.  The Little Man?  The Tramp?  See, this is why people fall back on calling the character "Chaplin" or by thinking of Chaplin AS his character. If the Little Tramp had a name, or an official nickname, then maybe we wouldn't all be so confused.  Poor planning on Chaplin's part, really.

I know its probably the fact that this film is butted right up against the David Bowie docs, but I can't help but draw a comparison to Bowie and Ziggy Stardust, which for the last two days everyone in the docs is reminding was just a CHARACTER that Bowie played, he was not Ziggy, except for the fact that he was, and part of the reason he had to STOP being Ziggy was he felt like maybe Ziggy was taking over and David had to come back.  There's a lesson in there somewhere, which is that if you play the same character in movies or TV for too long, you become the character and the character becomes me and then at some point you maybe don't know which is which.  SO, therefore the movie is wrong because Chaplin was his character and his character was Chaplin, because nobody else played the character but him.

Well, that's not exactly true.  There were imitators, knock-offs of Chaplin, low-rent actors who decided to dress like him or were paid to dress like him and appear in low-budget silent movies that just weren't as good as the real thing.  One aspiring actor took the too-fake stage name of C.H. Aplin, and well that led to a lawsuit and a cease-and-desist order.  Mr. Aplin's court testimoney was that he was not imitating Chaplin, but he was performing a tribute to Billy West, another actor who appeared in films and gave off a definite Chaplin-esque vibe.  OK, so first off, nice try, but this just wouldn't hold up in court these days.  But come on, if Chaplin just put his first Tramp outfit together by throwing together whatever random clothing items (like Fatty Arbuckle's pants) were lying around the costume department, how can you fault another actor for doing the same thing?  

Chaplin started in music halls in the U.K. at the age of 14, and when he was 19 he did stage acts for the Fred Karno company, which took him to the U.S. where he was scouted for movies being made at the Keystone Studios.  Mack Sennett had just had an actor quit, who played the captain of the Keystone Kops, and looked to Chaplin as a replacement.  After learning the ins and outs of silent movie stunts, before long Chaplin was both starring in and directing movies like "The Kid", "The Gold Rush" and "The Circus".  But when sound movies ("talkies") came along, he was resistant to change and kept making silents like "City Lights" and "Modern Times", he didn't talk in a movie until "The Great Dictator" in 1940. 

Did we also need the narrator to remind us that Chaplin and Hitler looked a lot alike, and were born in the same year, just four days apart?  No, we did not, because that was the whole POINT of "The Great Dictator", Chaplin was obviously poking fun at Hitler by playing the villain, Adenoid Hynkel, and also the hero, who was a Jewish barber and Hynkel's doppelganger.  Due to a comic mishap the two switch clothes and therefore trade places in the world, and the barber ends up giving a public speech that doesn't inflame the crowd, but instead calls for unity and brotherhood in the name of democracy.  Ah, if only.  We could use an update of this film for sure - oh, wait, never mind, Sacha Baron Cohen made one a few years ago. Nah, we're good. 

But before Chaplin's personal life shot his career in the foot, he was at one point the first real international movie star, and he was also the highest paid actor in the industry, at least for a while. Hell, he was one of the highest paid people in the world, which led to him having his own movie studio, but then formed a new distribution company, United Artsts in 1919.  Just in time for the Great Depression to hit and suddenly nobody could afford to do anything except go to the movies maybe once a week.  

Yeah, about that personal life, though - Chaplin married four times, and according to those wives, he was never really faithful, always looking for the next young girl, and he liked them young, sometimes a bit too young. OK, mo money mo problems, I guess, and divorce was costly even back then, but it doesn't seem like he ever went out of his way to change.  Ex-wife Lita Grey was probably the most vocal about how he pursued her when she was under-age, and then after they got married secretly in Mexico, but soon after she had their sons Lita split, most likely because of his infidelity.  But sure, just move on to the next teenage girl, that'll solve everything. Chaplin probably wasn't the first celebrity who felt that the general rules of relationships didn't apply to him, but who knows, maybe he was. 

Legal troubles continued after "The Great Dictator", with more affairs and a paternity suit, meanwhile J. Edgar Hoover was suspicious of Chaplin's political leanings, so he indicted him and charged him with violating the Mann Act, which prevented transporting young women across state lines for, well, you know.  He was acquitted, but the scandals plagued him, and not even marrying another teenager could help him feel better.  But he did stay with his fourth wife until he died, and they had 8 children together, so who's to say? 

Chaplin was also hounded by Sen. Joseph McCarthy and the HUAC, when the government started seeing communists everywhere in the late 1940's and started blacklisting Communist sympathizers.  After making "Limelight" Chaplin and his family boarded an ocean liner to go attend the movie's premiere in London, and the next day the U.S. Attorney General took steps to bar him from re-entering the country because of his political views and moral behavior. And so Chaplin lived in exile for many years, and he didn't come back to the U.S. until he got that honorary award from the Academy in 1972. 

Some of the methods here employed to make this film were a little unusual - like I could tell when they were using archive footage, but then also two actors are credited with playing Chaplin, in the years 1947 and 1966.  Huh?  Why isn't there footage already of Chaplin from those years?  My guess is that they only had audio interviews from some years, and rather than just play that audio over random footage that didn't match up, they decided to hire look-alike (or not) actors to lip-sync to those audio interviews - I can't be sure, however.  But if they used this technique, it reminds me just a bit too much of how they made that show "Drunk History". 

Also starring Jeff Rawle (last seen in "Rebecca"), Paul Ryan (last seen in "Cinderella Man"), Matthew Wolf (last heard in "Murder Mystery 2"), Dickie Beau (last seen in "Colette"), Anne Rosenfeld, Dominic Marsh, Paul Leonard (last seen in "The Witches"), Eben Young (last seen in "Doctor Strange"), Anthony Eden, Haley Flaherty, Charlie Carter (last seen in "Blithe Spirit"), David Olawale Ayinde and the voice of Pearl Mackie (last seen in "Greed").  

with archive footage of Geraldine Chaplin (last seen in "Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom"), Jane Chaplin, Michael Chaplin, Oona Chaplin, Virginia Cherrill, Jackie Coogan (last seen in "Marlowe"), Alistair Cooke, Walt Disney (last seen in "Lucy and Desi"), Douglas Fairbanks Jr. (last seen in "Ghost Story"), Mohandas Gandhi, Paulette Goddard (last seen in "Second Chorus"), Lita Grey, Merv Griffin (last seen in "Little Richard: I Am Everything"), Oliver Hardy (last seen in "Remembering Gene Wilder"), Stan Laurel (ditto), Mildred Harris, Adolf Hitler (last seen in "The Strange Name Movie"), J. Edgar Hoover (last seen in "LennoNYC"), Hedda Hopper (last seen in "Topper"), Al Jolson (last seen in "Babylon"), Buster Keaton (also carrying over from "Moonage Daydream"), Ring Lardner Jr., Harold Lloyd, Joseph McCarthy (last seen in "Where's My Roy Cohn?"), Edna Purviance, Paul Robeson, Franklin Roosevelt (last seen in "The Special Relationship"), Mack Sennett, Robert Taylor, Dalton Trumbo, Orson Welles (last seen in "De Palma"), Effie Wisdom, 

RATING: 5 out of 10 people standing in bread lines - or maybe they were lining up to see "The Gold Rush", it's tough to say.  Why didn't they just combine the lines, then, and let people eat while watching the movie?  That would have been way more efficient. 

Moonage Daydream

Year 16, Day 203 - 7/21/24 - Movie #4,793

BEFORE: David Bowie carries over from "David Bowie: Out of This World", and so you see my reasoning for including the shitty doc, to compare and contrast with the better (?) one.  Because I did the doc block early last year, "Moonage Daydream" has been taking up space on my DVR since last June, so it's way past time to clear it.  So this just HAD to be in the Block this year, the question just became, where does it fit in?  A solution presented itself when tomorrow's doc subject appeared in the archive footage in today's film, and so ending the rock section with this one was the only way to link to THAT one.  Got it? 

THE PLOT: A cinematic odyssey exploring David Bowie's creative and musical journey. 

AFTER: Let's face it, a straight documentary just isn't going to get it done when it comes to David Bowie - how do you cram everything important in a 50-year career into 90 minutes of facts, without leaving out half of the important stuff?  Which is the important stuff, anyway?  No matter what you do, clips of his best songs are going to take up half the time, and then which interviews do you use sound bites from?  The ones where he said he was gay or the ones where he said he was straight?  And then how do you even know if he was telling the truth, or just putting everyone on?  Then do you even get into his painting career, when most people don't even know that he painted?  Do you include the Tin Machine songs, when most people don't even listen to them?  Where do you start drawing the lines around someone who just refused to be contained by them?  

The perhaps unique approach here is to just ignore all facts, labels and lines and present the man's career as a journey, rather than a series of dates and things done.  Evolution is a constant process, we're all growing, aging, changing from the day we're born right up until we die, so maybe let's focus on the journey, not the stops along the way.  You can't look directly at the sun, especially during an eclipse, you need a filter or you need to look at an image of the thing, not the thing itself.  If we walk away with an impression of Bowie, or a number of interpretations of Bowie, we may learn more than by looking at the man himself. 

What tells us more about David Bowie's time spent living in West Berlin, for example - a timeline with dates of when he moved there and when he moved away, or hearing Bowie talk about living in a small apartment over a car repair shop, and then footage of German fans singing along with a performance of the song "Heroes"?  I'd go for the latter.  

Things are roughly arranged chronologically here, like the first few songs are from a concert where he was Ziggy Stardust, but then later in the film things got a bit more fractured, and they cut between the Bowie eras more liberally, I think sometimes within the same song.  So it ends up looking a bit like he's accessing the other Bowies from the multiverse, or some kind of "EveryBowie Everywhere All at Once".  

I always knew that "Ashes to Ashes" was a follow-up to "Space Oddity", because it gives us an update on what happened to Major Tom, but that came out in 1980, 11 years after "Space Oddity", and there were at least five Bowies in-between - eyepatch Bowie, Thin White Duke Bowie, Fascist Bowie, Berlin "Heroes" Bowie, and Lodger Bowie.  Then came "Under Pressure" Bowie and by that time most people either couldn't wait to see which Bowie they'd get next, or they'd given up trying to predict it.  

My entry point was probably "Labyrinth Bowie" but of course I was first aware of "Let's Dance" Bowie, (aka Serious Moonlight Bowie) but I didn't get to see him live until the Glass Spider Tour, and so I missed out on Blue Jean Bowie and Absolute Beginners Bowie, Glass Spider was after the 1987 album "Never Let Me Down", with the hits "Day-In-Day-Out" and "Time Will Crawl", which pretty much everyone seems to have forgotten about.  Those songs are conspicuously absent from the "Sound + Vision" greatest hits package. 

But I remember avoiding the Tin Machine music and then catching up with him again during the Freddie Mercury tribute concert, where Annie Lennox subbed in for Freddie in the duet with Bowie.  Powerful stuff - and I can make an argument for saying that maybe Bowie should have packed it in then, because I sure can't tell you any music he released after 1992, but there was apparently a lot of it. I had everything I needed, from "Space Oddity" to "Blue Jean" on my iTunes, and that included "Across the Universe", "Golden Years" and "Somebody Up There Likes Me", so I was set.  

But no, he kept at it for another two decades, more power to him, even though he was past the peak, I guess as a senior citizen you've got to keep active physically and keep your mind occupied, otherwise what's the point?  If there was a high point in his career for me after 2000, it would be his portrayal of Nikolai Tesla in the movie "The Prestige", the best acting he'd done since "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me".  

Anyway, "Moonage Daydream" is the first Bowie documentary/concert film to be authorized by his estate, which means this is how his family wants him to be remembered, in montage form.  You can't understand Bowie linearly, in other words, his ever-changing nature and constant cheekiness mixed with reclusiveness won't allow it.  You have to cycle through his "chapters" which may or may not be in chronological order, and you have to accept him as a painter, sculptor, actor, performer in addition to musician.  All art is art and you don't get to pick and choose and just listen to your favorite Bowie songs, you have to hear "Hallo Spaceboy" in addition to "Starman", "Rock N' Roll with Me" in addition to "All the Young Dudes" and "Moonage Daydream" in addition to "Jean Genie".  

Any only by admitting that you didn't really know David Bowie at all can you then come close to understanding him.  Umm, I think. 

With archive footage of Reeves Gabrels, Mick Ronson (both also carrying over from "David Bowie: Out of This World"), Zack Alford, Carlos Alomar, Gui Andrisano, Jeff Beck (last seen in "Under the Volcano"), Brian Eno (ditto), Luther Vandross (ditto), Adrian Belew (last seen in "Zappa"), Trevor Bolder, Ava Cherry, Robin Clark, Dennis Davis, Gail Ann Dorsey, Steve Elson, Greg Errico, Herbie Flowers, Ken Fordham, Mike Garson, Richard Grando, Stan Harrison, Russell Harty, Anthony Hinton, Simon House, John "Hutch" Hutchinson, Michael Kamen (last seen in "Concert for George"), Emir Ksasan, David Lebolt, Geoff MacCormack, Sean Mayes, George Murray, Tony Newman, Lenny Pickett, Roger Powell, Doug Rauch, Carmine Rojas, Pablo Rosario, David Sanborn, Peter Schwartz, Christopher Simms, Frank Simms, Earl Slick, Diane Sumler, Tony Thompson, Brian Wishaw, Mick Woodmansey

Fred Astaire (last seen in "Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind"), Dick Cavett (last seen in "LennoNYC"), Charlie Chaplin (last seen in "Remembering Gene Wilder), Bing Crosby (last seen in "Frank Sinatra: One More for the Road"), Bengt Ekerot (last seen in "Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain"), Max von Sydow (ditto), Iman (also last seen in "David Bowie: Out of This World"), Tina Turner (ditto), Tor Johnson, Buster Keaton (last seen in "Lucy and Desi"), Ginger Rogers (ditto), Little Richard (last seen in "Little Richard: I Am Everything"), Lou Reed (also last seen in "Under the Volcano"), Carl Sagan, Elizabeth Taylor (last seen in "Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed")

RATING: 5 out of 10 clips from classic sci-fi and horror films