SUPERMAN, ONE PIMP, TWO HOOKERS AND ME AT THE CINERAMA DOME

 

 

On Saturday night my wife and I attended a wonderful concert at the Hollywood Bowl, given by the great film score composer John Williams and the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra.   Highlights included music from many Steven Speilberg collaborations, including SCHINDLER’S LIST, AMISTAD, RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, and they even ran the final reel of E.T. with the orchestra playing the score live.  In acknowledgment of other great film composers, they played David Raksin’s theme from LAURA.  The highpoint for true believers was the music from the various STAR WARS movies, which brought forth a sea of light sabers to pierce the night. 

 

One of my favorite themes that evening was from SUPERMAN, the movie that made the late Christopher Reeve a star for his portrayal of the man of steel (although to me there will only be one true Superman: George Reeves in the TV series’ first season).

 

I well remember seeing the Christopher Reeve version on the immense curved screen of the Hollywood Cinerama Dome, now the Arclight Hollywood, back in early 1979.  I had sold a script my last year in college, which had become SPEEDTRAP, and my producer and co-story writer Fred Mintz had brought me out from Brooklyn to Los Angeles to write a disco-roller skating version of Guy De Maupassant’s BEL AMI.  It was while I was writing this never-to-be-filmed epic, and living at the Sunset Tower West in West Hollywood, that I got to know a fellow New Yorker who lived in the building, whom I shall call Eddie, since that was his name.  He had the name ‘Erwin’ tattooed on his arm, which I never understood, but I was too polite to ask about it.  I will not mention his last name because, even though it has been decades, the last I heard, he had three outstanding arrest warrants in Los Angeles.

 

Eddie was a security guard for the building, and a terrible one considering that he was also a pimp.  At least he considered himself a pimp, but I like to think he actually aspired to pimpdom.  What he did was rent the unrented apartments to the Sunset Boulevard hookers for five bucks a pop.  When he had rented five rooms – or the same room five times – and saved up $25, which was then the going rate, he would pay it all to one of the women, and be back where he started. 

 

One night Eddie told me that he was taking a pair of hookers to Hollywood to see SUPERMAN, and wanted to know if I would like to join them.  And drive them, as I was the only one with wheels, being the proud owner of a 1972 Pinto.  Needless to say, I jumped at the opportunity. 

 

If you’ve seen any LifeTime movies, or other gaudy fictional stories involving prostitutes, the descriptive term generally used is either ‘high class call-girl’ or ‘high-priced call-girl.’  I don’t mean to be indelicate, but these were not them.  They were nice young girls, I wince to think how young, but they were street-walkers and not at all glamorous.  But they were pleasant company, and pleased to be on a date where nothing but their company was expected of them.

 

If you haven’t seen the movie lately, it’s quite a charmer.  I loved the early scenes with Brando on Krypton. and with Glenn Ford as Pa Kent in Smallville, and got a huge kick out of seeing young Superman racing a train carrying Kirk Allyn and Noel Neill, the screen’s first Superman and Lois Lane.  The low point of the evening came when Eddie-the-wanna-be-pimp lit a cigarette in the auditorium, and threatened to knife a patron who quite rightly objected.  I got him to put out the cigarette by threatening to ditch him and the girls at the theatre, leaving them to walk home.

 

The high point for me came in the famous balcony scene.  Superman has saved Lois – I think he caught her when she was falling from a building – and he agrees to give her an interview.  He flies up to her penthouse (since when do reporters in Metropolis make that kind of money?), she takes out her little notebook (the paper kind), and they do a Q & A.  She quizzes him about his powers, and when he mentions X-ray vision, she says, “If you have X-ray vision, what color panties am I wearing?”   He glances at her, and tells her, “Pink.”  At this point, one of my dates leapt from her seat, furious, and shouted at the screen, “What?!  What did she say?  Lois Lane would NEVER ask Superman about her panties!  Not in a million years!  They’re makin’ a tramp out of Lois Lane!”  With that she stormed out of the auditorium, into the lobby, and it took a great deal of coaxing to get her back inside to see the rest of the movie.

 

I was fascinated, because I realized, though we may compromise our own standards and morals, we never want our heroes to.  It’s a moment I recall every time I’m asked to ‘modernize’ a character or a story in a way that cheapens them. 

 

 

WEIRDEST PITCH MEETING OF MY CAREER

I was recently wasting time on Facebook instead of doing my work, when I came upon a page called Vintage Sleaze, which in turn led me to a page called DAD MADE DIRTY MOVIES.  It’s a page to promote a documentary film of the same title, made by Jordan Torodov, about a filmmaker named Stephen Apostolof, a Bulgarian refugee who made a slew of films with Ed Wood Jr., and a bunch of ‘nude-cuties’ besides.  I hadn’t thought of Stephen Apostolof in decades, but my memories of our meeting came flooding back. 

When I commented on the page that I had the weirdest pitch-meeting of my career with Stephen Apostolof, Jordan e-mailed me to ask about it.  Here is the story.

Back in the early 1980s, I was a struggling screenwriter with one credit, SPEEDTRAP (1977), and I was working as a security guard at the Beverly Hills headquarters of Litton Industries, in what was originally the headquarters of the MCA Talent Agency, which later owned Universal Studios.  I’d gotten the job through the recommendation of LeOnce Litel Sampson, a recently retired career Marine, who managed my apartment building, and was a security sergeant at Litton. 

LeOnce was a great friend, the personification in look and voice and personality of Robert Duvall’s LONESOME DOVE character, Gus McCrea.  He’d worked on several movies as a Marine Corps technical advisor, among them THE SUICIDE’S WIFE with Angie Dickenson, and THE LATE SHOW, with Art Carney and Lily Tomlin.  He wanted to put together movies, and had several scripts he was taking around, one being a horror movie of mine called THE GINGERBREAD HOUSE. 

One afternoon I got a call from LeOnce that I had a pitch-meeting the next day, with a producer named Stephen Apostolof.  The way it came about was classic LeOnce.  He’d been going into Schwaab’s on Sunset Boulevard for breakfast, when he saw a man in the parking lot having trouble getting into his car.  The man was Stephan Apostolof, and he’d accidentally locked his keys in his Cadillac.  LeOnce went back to his own car, came back with a wire coast-hangar, bent it and opened the Caddy in about a minute.   Stephen was very grateful, and took LeOnce to lunch at the Brown Derby on Vine Street that afternoon.  LeOnce told Stephen a little about THE GINGERBREAD HOUSE, and LeOnce made an appointment for me to pitch it to him at his office the next day.

Well, I hadn’t heard of Stephen Apostolof before, but LeOnce assured me he’d produced lots of movies.  But LeOnce was not a detail guy, and didn’t remember any of the titles on the posters in Stephen’s office.  But he assured me that the man had his posters all over the walls, and diplomas, and framed letters from The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences! 

I spent the night polishing my pitch, then drove the next day to Stephen’s downtown address.  His office was above The Mayan Theatre, one of the most beautiful theatres in the world, though it was then used as a porno theatre (it’s now a night club).  I remember him having a pretty large, impressive suite, and his receptionist was a pleasant woman who told me Mr. Apostolof would be with me in a few minutes.  I’m standing in the waiting room, and I started checking out the framed lobby cards on the walls.  I remember one was for ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bares,’ and the still showed a man and two women on horseback, naked except for sunglasses.  I looked at several others, and they were all from nudie movies.  There were, as LeOnce had told me, several framed letters from the Academy, the Oscar prominent on the stationery.  I read one.  ‘Dear Mr. Apostolof, if you wish to submit your motion picture, LADY GODIVA RIDES, for Oscar consideration, please complete the enclosed forms, and return no later than…’  They were all form letters! 

There was a one-sheet poster on the wall from a Republic movie, but it was one I’d never heard of, and it didn’t look quite real.  When I got closer I realized that it was not a poster but a painting of one.  (In retrospect I realize that Republic did make a movie about his escape from Bulgaria, and this may well have been the original design for the poster.)  I am then ushered in to meet with Mr. Apostolof, who is very charming, and we talk about my friend LeOnce and how they met.  There is a diploma on the wall, and I see that it is from ‘State University’ and it is for the study of ‘Sexology.’  While Mr. Apostolof is a very nice guy, it is clear to me that he is in the sex-film business, not a maker of horror films, and probably would have no interest in my movie anyway.  I’d just recently had to track down an older actor who swiped one of my scripts from an agent’s office, then played producer, getting free meals by telling a bunch of young actor/waiters that they were going to have a part in it.  I was wary about where I left my scripts. 

So I started ‘un-pitching’ my script.  “It’s like everything you’ve already seen before, but I guess I can tell you about it if you like.”  It turned out to be unnecessary.  I got the feeling, though he was very polite about it, that he wasn’t really interested in it, and was meeting with me out of respect for LeOnce.  I managed to leave the meeting without leaving the script.  Of course, if I had it to do over again, knowing that he did make some non-nudie movies around this time, I would have tried hard to get him interested.  Maybe I would have gotten to meet Ed Wood.  I’ve still not gotten GINGERBREAD HOUSE made, even though LeOnce once had Amicus horror-director Gordon Hessler attached to the project, and Gordon had gotten a commitment from Trevor Howard (yes, that Trevor Howard) to play the crazy old man.  If you’re interested, I’ve got the pitch worked out pretty well now.

If you’d like to learn more about MY DAD MADE DIRTY MOVIES, the link to the Facebook page is HERE. 

MY BOSS, SAMMY PETRILLO

Once you've been in 'the industry' long enough, when you watch the Oscars, you pay particular attention to the 'in memoriam' section, to make sure that no one who you liked, who died, was slighted. Well, I don't expect that Sammy Petrillo will be featured, and considering how brief his film career was, I can't really complain. I think Sammy would have been astonished to see the huge obit in the New York Times.
Sammy made his one truly memorable movie when he was a teenager, costarring with his straight-man partner Duke Mitchell in 1952's Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla, a pretend Martin and Lewis comedy, and Sammy didn't merely imitate Jerry Lewis, he channeled him.

I met Sammy in the mid 1970s, when I was a film major at NYU, writing for Cold Duck, an NYU literary magazine. I was interviewing the cast of the Capital Burlesque Theatre in Passaic, New Jersey -- and irony of ironies, a night club in Passaic was the fictional locale where Duke and Sammy worked in Brooklyn Gorilla. This was a real throw-back burlesque show, with a full orchestra, dancing chorus, several comics, straight-men, and three strippers who never peeled past a g-string and pasties. Sammy still looked a lot like Jerry, although he looked much more like the Jerry of the Martin and Lewis days than the more mature version. Sammy and I hit it off, and I was surprised and delighted when he called me a few days later, and offered me a job as a general assistant on the four radio shows he was producing on WBHI, a station so high up on the FM dial that only dogs could hear it.

My main duty, he told me, would be apologizing for him. "Henry, I noticed when you were doing your interviews, you got along with everyone. I don't. I rub people the wrong way, I insult them without meaning to or knowing I've done it. I need someone who can call people up and say, 'Sammy's a nice guy, and he didn't mean that the way it sounded.'" Needless to say, I jumped at the opportunity to smooth ruffled feathers for $75 a week.

The more I got to know Sammy, the more I liked him, and the more I found it strange that he needed me to apologize to people -- I found him tactful and thoughtful. We worked out of the theatre, and I remember one time, backstage, I'd gone out and gotten a cup of tea for one of the elderly comics in the show who had a sore throat, and we almost came to blows over him wanting me to keep the change. Sammy stepped in. "Keep the twenty cents, Eddie! Henry got you the tea because he's your friend. If he keeps the twenty cents he's not your friend -- he's a kid running an errand." I don't think either Eddie or I had any idea what we were fighting about until Sammy explained it.

This was very small-time radio, and Sammy would buy time from the station, then sell it to other people to do their shows. So one of my other duties would be to stand in the doorway with my hand out, moments before show time, and say, "Your check bounced. I need $125 in cash, or they broadcast dead air for the next hour." One of the strangest shows Sammy produced was the Jerome Mackey - Protect Yourself Program, the first and possibly the only time anyone tried to teach martial arts on radio. The host of the show was a charming black belt from the deep south, who towered over me. He'd grin, and drawl, "Oh pu-lease, Henry, don't y'all beat me up! I'll git yo're money somehow!" I was very lucky that he had a sense of humor. Sammy and his girlfriend hosted one of the radio shows, called Out To Lunch, and I would occasionally be interviewed on the show myself -- and if guests didn't show up on time, I'd be interviewed impersonating whoever was supposed to be there.

Sammy was a wonderful story-teller, and loved to talk about making the movie, and working with Bela Lugosi. "Every day I'd come to the set, and Bela would say, 'Good morning Jerry.' It was our little joke. But after a while I started to realize that he wasn't kidding, that he thought I really was Jerry Lewis, and he was in a Martin and Lewis movie. He never learned to understand English well enough, and people took advantage of him."
"You notice Duke doesn't have a lot of close-ups in the film. He tried to play the big star in front of the crew, and they weren't impressed -- they'd worked on big movies. So they shot his close-ups just a little out of focus, so they couldn't use 'em."
Sammy had me tracking down 16mm prints of Brooklyn Gorilla and other Lugosi films, with the idea of doing a college tour talking about Bela. I never thought there was enough of an audience to warrant it.

Eventually the burlesque show closed, Sammy left town, and my job was over. Around 1979 or 1980,I'd had a movie made, and moved to Los Angeles. I was reading Variety, and spotted Sammy's name in an article about his management of a film distribution company. When I called him and identified myself, his first words were, "How much money do I owe you?"
"Not a dime."
"You're kidding! I'll buy you lunch!" We went to the Farmer's Market, where we had a nice Italian meal served to us by Dean Martin's aunt! While Jerry Lewis, who'd hired the very young Sammy to play his son on a TV sketch, felt threatened, and made life difficult for Duke and Sammy, Dean Martin had been a pal, and quietly got their act several bookings.
The film distribution company went under a little while later, and I never saw Sammy again. A few years passed, then I got an urgent call from my friend Karl Tiedemann, a writer on the David Letterman Show, who was desperate to get in touch with Sammy. That morning, Jerry Lewis had been on the Today Show, plugging something, and the lead-in was a series of clips from the black & white days, including a walk-on on the old Jack Benny Show. When they started the interview, Jerry was a mass of twitches. "That last clip was not me. That was a comedian named Sammy Petrillo, who I eventually had to sue to keep from imitating me." Jerry was going to be guesting on Letterman that very night, and they wanted to have Sammy Petrillo do a surprise walk-on in the middle of the interview. I tracked Sammy down to The Nut House in Pittsburgh, a comedy club he managed and often performed at. It was a great idea, but they couldn't talk Sammy into it: he was too bitter about Jerry to ever want to be on-stage with him again. I couldn't blame him, but I was disappointed. It would have been the biggest break Sammy'd had in forty years.

James Cameron and Me

As I have often noted, it is frequently my lot to work with the right people on the wrong projects. Case in point: James Cameron. I just saw Avatar yesterday, in 3D, at the Hollywood Bowl, and it was an absolute knockout. If you want to know what it looks like to have $500,000,000 on the screeen, see it. I've worked with Jim, but not on Avatar. No, not on Titanic either. Or The Abyss or any of the Terminator movies for that matter. I worked on Piranha Part Two: The Spawning. I don't remember how many sound effects editors there were on that picture, but I was the last one.

Whatever I was getting paid -- if I was paid -- wasn't enough for me to quit my daytime security-guard job, so I'd come in at about three in the afternoon every day, by which time everyone was horribly behind in their work, so I was treated as a hero for bringing in another pair of hands.

I was in charge of laying in screams and chewing sounds, of which there were plenty. Jim was a perfectionist even then, and not satisfied with the quality of recorded chewing noises, we made our own. We filled a big tub of mushy oatmeal, and slapped a wooden spoon in it. We took pinking shears -- those fabric scissors with lots of criss-cross teeth -- and cut through sheets of cardboard as quickly as we could. When we matched up the sloshing oatmeal and the chomping cardboard, the effect was sickeningly convincing.

Of course, the movie itself wasn't all that convincing. The premise was that somehow piranhas had been crossed with flying fish and grunions, so you now had piranhas that could fly, and spawn on land. Sure, see it. But see Avatar first.

I Get That Not

Happy Birthday to Paramount Pictures architect Adolph Zukor, 13th President Millard Fillmore, Nicholas Cage, and cartoonist Charles Addams!
Now, I promise that Stalling Tactics in not going to become a list of complaints about modern entertainment. But remember the old Candid Camera show? In every half-hour episode there would be three clever segments -- okay, two clever segements, and one with Allen Funt talking to little kids. Ashton Kutcher, who despite his carefully cultivated image as a moron is a very bright guy, 'borrowed' the idea with Punk'd, where his overly-elaborate practical jokes on celebs were often clever and funny. Now we get I Get That A Lot, where they take ONE gag -- having famous people do normal jobs and pretend that they are not who they are -- and play that one not-so-clever gag FOR AN ENTIRE SEASON! Does anyone seriously find this funny more than once?

Other Birthdays

It just struck me that I began my first post with congratulations to folks who can no longer read blogs! So let me say happy birthday to comedian Rowan Atkinson -- of Bean and Blackadder fame, and to a pair of music greats: Malcolm Young of AC/DC is 57, and Earl Scruggs is 86. I just saw Scruggs a few weeks ago on The Marty Stuart Show on RFD-TV, and he played Foggy Mountain Breakdown as beautifully as he and Lester Flatt played it forty years earlier, as the chase music in Bonnie and Clyde.

New Year, New Blog

Happy 251st wedding anniversary to George and Martha Washington! And happy birthday to Tom Mix, Carl Sandburg and George Reeves! When I was a kid growing up in Brooklyn, a staple of New Years Eve viewing was Jack Benny in The Horn Blows At Midnight, but I don't know if anyone shows it anymore on New Years Eve. Thanks to TCM I've got it on tape. AMC announced that they'd be running digitally remastered Three Stooges shorts on New Years Eve, so I DVR'd the last few and just watched 'em. The copies are wonderfully crisp, but they ran each of them in a half-hour time slot with two commercial breaks! Come on, these shorts only run 16 or 17 minutes! That's almost 50% commercials!

Worse, among other commercials were ads for penis-enlargement products! Aside from the World Series and Superbowl, are there any programs more sure to be watched by parents and kids together?