TWO VERSIONS OF "THE FOUR YORKSHIREMEN"

Here's a question for you: which of the two versions of this routine works best,
and why? If you're like me you'll prefer the top version with John Cleese and Graham Chapman, who also wrote it...but why is their performance better? No fair saying "Because they're geniuses," because that only begs the question. Of what does that genius consist?

Watch both videos and try to make an answer before you read what I've written below.





I'll be interested to see if anyone has a thought about this. I can't really answer my own question. Certainly the one on the bottom which, you have to admit, is still professional, lacks a musical sensibility. I always see ensembles of actors as a jazz combo with the sound of each voice being a separate and distinct musical instrument. There's no variety among these lesser actors.

Also you don't get the feeling that the guys on the bottom are really friends, or that any of them care what the others are saying. They all seem to be in a rush to start their dialogue right on the heels of the last guy. That, and their readings lack emphasis.

Last but not least, none of the bottom actors seem to realize the value of a good set-up. Why didn't they do what the top actors did and walk in as if they were tired from having eaten a big meal? They should have flopped down and spoken wistfully, as if they were in a rare philosophical mood. Of course I only know that because I saw Cleese and friends do it that way.

The problem is, that this isn't all. There's clearly a big difference that I'm not getting. What do you think?

GWEETINGTH, POETRY LOVERTH! (#5)

WARNING: THIS IS A READING OF POETRY BY JOHN MILTON BUT IT'S NOT FOR LITTLE KIDS, AND IT'S NOT EXACTLY OFFICE SAFE!




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OK, this is an experiment! To get the effect YOU HAVE TO PLAY BOTH VIDEOS AT THE SAME TIME! You also have to keep both clearly in the frame where you can see them!

Start the top video (the color one) first. Let it play for exactly 30 seconds, then turn on the bottom one (the black and white one). The top video should be louder than the other.

That's it! Boy, I hope this works!


BTW, many thanks to the inventer of this technique, Mike Fontanelli!

ONE MORE THOUGHT ABOUT "THE RINK"

There's more to say about "The Rink," if you're up for it! I thought it would be fun to talk about the story. I don't have much space, so I'll just talk about the first half.

You could almost have called the story "The Restaurant" because so much of the first half takes place there. Why the split locales? Shouldn't a story about a rink take place mostly in a rink? Maybe there was some practical reason. Anyway, I have a pragmatic view about it. Doing it this way resulted in a great film, end of argument.

The story in the restaurant sets up the conflict between Chaplin (the waiter) and Eric Cambell (the big, burly customer). Actually the conflict was Chaplin's fault because he tried to cheat Cambell out of his change, but it doesn't matter. We sympathize with Chaplin because he's cute. I guess the logic of the heart is what counts here, not the logic of the mind.

The writer could have written to heavily favor the main conflict between Chaplin and Cambell, instead there were constant digressions into funny subplots about secondary characters like the cook and the head waiter. In a way this sequence is about the zany life in the restaurant as much as it's about Chaplin. The action is fast and furious with people getting into fights, flirting, getting fired, etc. at a rapid pace. A modern writer would simplify the story to focus on the Chaplin/Cambell conflict...and he'd be wrong. Subtext means a lot.

The full name of the film is something like, "The Rink: The Story of an Amorous Waiter." That's odd because the first half of the story hardly ever puts Chaplin in a romantic situation. You get the feeling that Chaplin had trouble deciding what the film was about. The scene that starts the film sets up the girl in the story but it feels tacked on, as if it was added later as an afterthought. Amazingly, faults like this don't seem to harm the film at all. The pace, the acting, and the strong intuition of the director carries it.

SET DESIGN IN CHAPLIN's "THE RINK"

Hands down, my favorite silent comedy is Charlie Chaplin's "The RINK," It's not perfect; sometimes you can't follow what's happening and you could argue that it's a little longer than it needs to be, but I don't think the best comedies can ever be perfect. Drama can be perfect because it logically builds to a pre-determined climax. Comedy has to look spontaneous. You start out with a plan but if some deviation turns out to be funnier you do that instead. Some of the best comedies are all over the place.

There are so many things to say about this film! Just to isolate one, I love the way the restaurant is a long, narrow room like a boxcar that stretches away from camera. I like the idea that there's a big walking path that goes right down the middle. That way you get to see people do funny walks up to and away from camera. You also get to see people make their funny entrances into the room before they walk down to the tables.

I also like the way the center path divides the room in two. This suggests plenty of gags where people on one side of the path get mad because the waiter (Chaplin) is giving all his attention to the people on the other side. It gets a kind of rivalry going. And the line going crudely down the middle is just plain ignorant, a quality that all comedies should try to cultivate.

It seems to me that too many animation backgrounds lack this precious quality of ignorance. A good, ignorant background is more than just a backdrop. It suggests gags and even story ideas. A good background artist is a kind of co-writer.

AN ACTING THEORY PUT TO THE TEST

Have you ever heard actors say that all acting is reacting? I imagine what they mean is that everything you do or say on stage should come from your reaction to what someone else has said or done. Well, that's probably true. It must be helpful when an actor's trying to figure out what to do with his hands. Yeah, I can accept that.

The thing is, I can't help I can't help but interpret this more broadly. For me what's being said is that the reactor in a scene is more interesting than the actor. In other words, the person receiving the pie in the face is more interesting to watch than the person throwing the pie. If that's true then it says a lot about the way a scene should be written and set up, and what kind of actors you should use. With so much at stake I just had to test it.

That's what the five-minute video above is. I tried to make the actor and reactor equally interesting, and I gave them the same time on screen. I wanted to see whose role was innately more memorable, and who carried the weight of the scene. It's probably a silly experiment, with a predictable outcome, and everybody reading this is no doubt mystified about why I went to so much trouble, but it helped to clarify things for me, and now I share it with you.

The video is about 4 1/2 minutes. Sorry about the many, many flaws. I just didn't have time to fix them.

CROCKETT'S VICTORY GARDEN

I'm not a gardener, though I wouldn't be ashamed of it if I was.   My interest in gardening comes from my desire to reproduce the romantic Black Forest that you see in classic kids book illustrations: the mysterious and menacing home of witches, raptors and things that dwell in the shadows.  I like flowers but only as a counterpoint to set off the forest. They shouldn't look too civilized or fussed over. 

But I'm an appreciator of this sort of thing, not a participant. I'm always looking for the quick fix that'll provide the most stimulation for the least amount of work. Certainly an aromatic garden fits that description.  Some of the most fragrant plants are little more than weeds, and require almost no care once they get started. Lots of people have small herb gardens outside the kitchen door. They're easy to grow, smell great, and taste great...what's not to like?



Here's a book I just got from the library: "Crockett's Victory Garden," one of the bibles of backyard gardening.  I don't see much about herbs in there, but the book has an interesting structure. It's all about what you should do every month of the year to grow your own vegetable and flower garden. Crockett's not really interested in flowers but he figures that if you're going to go to all that trouble to grow vegetables, then you might as well throw in some flowers too.



According to Crockett it's already too late to get a lot of flowers and vegetables started. You start summer gardens in the late winter and early spring. Maybe you could start strawberries this late, but you'd better do it right away. According to Crockett you might get some fruit buds in just over a month, say in June, but you should resist the temptation to let them grow. Keep cutting off the buds until August and that'll force the plant to slow down and send out tendrils to make new plants. If you do this you should have batch of big, pluckable strawberries by the fall.



May is also a good time to plant pole beans.  You should grow these even if you don't like beans because the tendrils are beautiful. Books about weird geometric shapes in nature always include bean plants. I had some pole beans growing under my bedroom window and it was a treat to see the constantly-changing shapes they would take as they snaked up the screen.



I wish more people would plant shrub bushes (above) and ivy around their houses. They grow easily from cuttings, and require no effort to raise. You just have to cut them.



May is a good time to buy or plant geraniums. these are truly the lazy man's flower. They look great and only require light watering every other day in the summer. They bloom most of the year in warm climates like LA but the stems look gnarly after the first year. That's OK, just plant new ones from cuttings. Just put the cutting in a jar of water and it'll sprout roots.



Here's (above) a small Japanese garden that I found when looking for the other pictures. *Sigh*

BTW, the two paintings of plants in the middle of the post are by Christiana Kubrick, Stanley Kubrick's wife. I particularly like the one with tiny little bean and cucumber sprouts. Sprouts are a sheer joy to watch. You see the miracle of new life unfolding in front of your eyes. You find yourself asking,  "Are these delicate, fuzzy little things really alive? How can that be? They're so different than I am."  This time of year everybody should have sprouts growing out of old orange juice cans on their windowsills. That way you can witness the miraculous and profound while you scrub pots.

MY DINNER (LUNCH) WITH ANDRE (JOHN K) #9

It was pizza for lunch and, as we all know, pizza is the food of the gods! John got there before I did and immediately started drawing background ideas for The George Liquor show. I don't know why he's always saying that he's not good at backgrounds...the drawings were great!



I talked about a party I did caricatures for the previous night. I didn't bring a camera, so I have no pictures to put up, but it's just as well because the night didn't go as well as I'd hoped. On the way to the party I got it into my head to draw the guys very, very ugly, just for fun. As it turned out I drew them so ugly that I somehow crossed the line into insult. One guy was positively grief-stricken! I felt terrible for being such a jerk. I'm amazed that I didn't get slugged!

The frame grab above is from a Popeye cartoon that Bob Jacques put up. I include it here because the ugly Bluto is where I got the notion to draw people the way I did...not in drag, but just in really extreme poses. John commiserated. Caricature can be a dirty business!



We talked some about the Maxim "Hundred Hotties" party we got to go to the night before last. I've never been to the Playboy Mansion but I imagine that this is what the parties there must have been like. Girls were everywhere! Mike should have been there...he would have thought he'd died and gone to heaven. The problem was that the music was so loud that I couldn't hear what people were saying, even when they were standing right next to me.



I met what appeared to be some pretty creative advertising people. I'd love to tell you what they said but the music was such that I only saw their lips moving. One thing I managed to get out of it: advertising, at least the kind that's geared to young guys, is all about what's perceived to be hip. If you're thinking of making a career in advertising and you're not hip, then think again.



Somehow we drifted into a discussion of "Mandrake the Magician" and "The Phantom," two newspaper strips that had the distinction of being action strips without any action. I looked it up when I came home and sure enough, they were created by the same guy, a radio writer and announcer by the name of Falk. He didn't draw, he found somebody else to do it.




Then there was the Phantom ...I think the Phantom was the first hero to dress in tights. He was pre-Superman so he didn't have any super powers, just a gun like The Shadow used to have. John said that was perfectly respectable; even Mighty Mouse had a gun in the early days. He used to shoot cats.

My childhood recollection of The Phantom was that he started as a white slave in Arabia and somehow managed to escape from his cruel slave owners. He dedicated the rest of his life to being a nemesis to the slave trade. That's not the story that's on the net but I could swear that that's what I read. He found a cave and a horse who would live in the cave with him, and he just sat around all day on a skull throne waiting for the phone to ring with news of the next slave caravan.



While John and I were talking about the Phantom, an extremely old woman was slowly walked into the restaurant by her care-giver. I've never seen a person that old in a restaurant, especially one who was walking and not riding in a wheelchair. Could she have been there to get pizza? Anyway, bear with me, I have a reason for bringing this up.

The woman's method of walking was to slowly slide her feet across the rug. She never lifted her feet, she just slid, and her attendant held her with great difficulty around the waist. This worked OK until she came to a tiny, little, insignificant wrinkle in the rug. A normal person would have walked on it without noticing it, or have just stepped over it. Not this poor woman. When she reached the crease she had to stop, just as if she'd hit a brick wall. She tried and tried to get past but couldn't. She was like a Flatlander who could be stopped by a single line!

I'm ashamed to say that while this was going on I was just sitting dumbfounded, watching it all. I can't believe I was so dense as to watch without offering to help. Fortunately some other men leaped up and managed to smooth out the wrinkle in the rug. The woman was too frail to risk lifting her. I can't help repeating what I said before...imagine being so frail as to be stopped by a single line on a carpet!

Well, that's it...No, wait! I forgot to mention the picture above...I found it on the net when I was looking for a picture of Mandrake. It's the living room of the creator of the old newspaper strip, "Mark Trail." It's a nifty room, huh? He actually did live in the outback, just like his comic strip character!