WHAT MADE JOHNATHAN WINTERS SO GREAT?

Jonathan Winters (above) is an interesting guy. You can spend a lifetime in the entertainment business and never come up with an appealing character, and here's   Jonathan Winters who comes up with new ones by the cartload every time he speaks. What was his secret?

I'm not sure. Maybe it had something to do with Winters being mischievous.  People like that quality. Maybe that's why mischievous people make good joke tellers. They make you aware of the absurdity of the fact that you just dropped something important to listen to something that's going to be incredibly stupid.

I don't remember many jokes, and I'm not really good at telling them. What I do remember is the way they were told. I love the way joke tellers look both ways then grab your arm and lean in furtively. I love the whole ritual that's associated with joke telling. Mischievous people are experts at creating the atmosphere that precedes a joke.

In animation you know you've got a good character if you start laughing before he even talks. Good characters have ignorant charisma. Funny things happen just because they're in the room.  The air fills with electricity and potential just because a force of nature has arrived, and is checking out the room. For me the joke is of far less importance than the set up.

John achieved this with Ren and Stimpy. In his best period Winters achieved it every time he opened his mouth.

JONATHAN WINTERS IMPROV

All three of these YouTube videos are of Jonathan Winters, from the period when he first started to do improv on TV.

He was far and away the greatest hero of my childhood. Unfortunately he was only on late at night when I wasn't allowed to watch.  To see him I had to wait til my folks went to sleep, then sneak downstairs in the dark, taking care to avoid creaking floorboards and barking pets.  I'd feel around for the TV controls in the dark, then with infinite patience slowly turn on the set, with the brightness and sound almost as low as they could be.

The films you see here include some of the very same sketches that I watched in the dark. I never saw them with this clarity, though. The screen was always so black that I could barely make out the shapes as human, and I had to press my ear hard against the speaker to hear what was happening. My grandfather was a light sleeper and more than once he caught me and terrible yelling ensued.  Then there were the ghosts, but I won't go into that.  

I guess you appreciate what you have to make sacrifices for. All these videos have great meaning for me.
I read somewhere that the young Bach had to do something similar in order to get access to his dad's music library. His father was certain that his oldest son would be the musically gifted one, and didn't want Bach, the little kid, to get a taste for something that was so obviously beyond his meagre ability.

ROBERT CRUMB'S SURPRISING NEW BOOK

The book (above).....

....and the author (above), Robert Crumb.

He chose his subject well.  Genesis is a true masterpiece, arguably the best book of its kind ever written, regardless of the religious convictions of the reader. It's also pretty doggone weird.

The weird parts start with the old age of Noah.

Noah (above, click to enlarge)) has too much to drink and falls asleep naked in his tent. One of his sons, Ham,  happens to see his father  naked and tells his brothers about it, maybe (I'm not sure) in a humorous way.  The brothers are appalled and take pains to cover the father before he's seen by anyone else.  

When Noah awakens and sees what happened, he's outraged  and condemns  Ham's son to slavery.  Why Noah chose such an extreme punishment, and why he took it out on Ham's kid isn't clear. There's tons of Jewish and Christian commentary on this, but I'm not familiar with it. 

I don't think it's fair to say that God justifies slavery in this story. At this point in history the Jewish faith doesn't exist yet. Genesis is chronicling the prehistory of that religion, when Hebrews shared most of the beliefs and prejudices of the society around them. The writer has God take a special interest in them, but we don't yet know where that interest will lead. Even so...it's weird.

Afterwards, God is compelled to take sides in endless disputes among the Hebrews.  A deity who recently had been involved with the creation of the universe and was steeped in the mechanics of black holes and such, was forced to mediate zillions of oddball disputes among sheepherders.

Surprisingly we don't question it, maybe because the atmosphere in Genesis is alive with growing potential.  In the writer's view, these people are being nudged inch by inch toward a more sophisticated law and a higher destiny.  It's what Merlin tried to do to Arthur and his friends in the film "Excalibur."

Surprisingly Crumb tells this story with great understatement and empathy.  The book is worth having.


 

HAVE YOU HEARD OF THE "DANDIZETTE?"

The dandizette is a female English dandy. Their peek period coincided with that of the male dandy, roughly  from 1810 to 1820. 

Dandizettes hung out with male dandies.  Even though they were women, some of them adapted the speech and habits of male dandies.  That's bizarre when you remember that male dandies were imitating women.  It's a case of women imitating men who were imitating women.  Geez!

Wait a minute, let me backtrack.  I implied that all dandies were gays, and I didn't mean to say that.  I imagine that the great majority of dandies were heterosexual and completely masculine. Disraeli was a dandy. Dickens was something of a dandy in his youth. Even so, I feel justified in hazarding a guess that gay men had something to do with the founding of dandyism. They started it, but a big portion of it passed into the hands of heterosexuals. 
  

Dandizettes are with us even today, witness John Allison's "Fop Catcher" (above) (copyright John Allison 2009).  Some modern girls just like to hang out with dandies. I'm not talking about hetero girls who have gay men friends. That's different. I'm talking about hetero dandizettes who fall in love exclusively with male hetero dandies. 

Is anybody following what I'm saying here? I wrote it, and even I have trouble understanding it. 

Girls are strange. They seem to prefer men who are  either ultra-masculine, or who look and act like girls. No doubt the truth is more complicated, but I make no claim to possessing the truth. 

  

Were dandies of the Regency period really as over the top as they were portrayed in etchings?

I hope so. It makes the period much more interesting.

While we're on the subject of dandies, I think I'll take a shot at answering  Paul's comment about whether or not metrosexuals are todays dandies. It's an interesting topic.  

I do think that Regency dandies will be found to have had a greater intellectual impact on succeeding generations than metrosexuals, and that's because they were better versed in culture.  Go to iTunes and listen to  Stephen Fry's podcast on language.  Fry doesn't dress like a dandy, but he was influenced by that culture, and you'll hear for yourself how powerful dandyism is when its allied to a good classical education.

ABOUT ELMORE LEONARD

Who's your pick for the best living American novelist? Wait, just to be fair let me amend that to the best practicing living novelist. Don Delillo? Bret Easton Ellis? Tom Wolfe?  Let me weigh in with my own pick. So far as I'm able to tell, the best novels being written now are genre novels, and the best genre novelists are crime writers Elmore Leonard and James Ellroy. 

It's confusing because these guys write alike, look alike, and their names even sound alike.  Both believe in lean, dialogue driven prose with minimal third person narrative. 

I remember when books that were mostly dialogue began to make big sales. Everybody thought it was the end of civilization because we took it as a sign that  modern audiences were too dumb to appreciate good narrative. I used to think that too, but I've since changed my mind. The fact is that only a few writers of the 20th Century were ever any good at narrative. The ones that weren't plodded along in that vein, because they thought it was expected of them, and that produced some pretty bad books. Like Taylor Caldwell's, for example.  Try reading a couple of random lines from "Ceremony of the Innocent" (1976), reproduced below (click to enlarge)........

Do you see what I mean? Professional but boring is how I'd describe it (above). A real sleeping pill. Now sample (below) the leaner, more effective style used in Elmore Leonard's "Get Shorty" (1990).........

Nice, huh? Dialogue carries the scene, and it works beautifully. Leonard's a good practitioner of the new style. Shakespeare told his stories with dialogue, and so can we, provided the dialogue is good. 

My only criticism of this lean style is that in our time it's worked best in genre novels with flamboyant, over-the-top characters. Will it work for other types? Only time will tell. 

Leonard's a terrific stylist and amazingly he's willing to share how he does it.  Here, from the internet, is an abridged version of Leonard's top ten tips for writers. It starts with an admonition to avoid adverbs, then goes on to.........

1 Never open a book with weather. If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a charac ter's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways than an Eskimo to describe ice and snow in his bookArctic Dreams, you can do all the weather reporting you want.

2 Avoid prologues: they can be annoying, especially a prologue ­following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in non-fiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want. There is a prologue in John Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday, but it's OK because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: "I like a lot of talk in a book and I don't like to have nobody tell me what the guy that's talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks."

3 Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But "said" is far less intrusive than "grumbled", "gasped", "cautioned", "lied". I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with "she asseverated" and had to stop reading and go to the dictionary.

4 Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said" . . . he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances "full of rape and adverbs".

5 Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.

6 Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose". This rule doesn't require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use "suddenly" tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.

7 Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apos­trophes, you won't be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavour of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories Close Range.

8 Avoid detailed descriptions of characters, which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants", what do the "American and the girl with him" look like? "She had taken off her hat and put it on the table." That's the only reference to a physical description in the story.

9 Don't go into great detail describing places and things, unless you're Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language. You don't want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.

10 Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them.

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

BTW: I added something important to the Bette Davis post immediately below, to the part about Mankiewicz. Take a look!

MY LAST (AND BEST) BETTE DAVIS POST

This'll be my last Bette Davis post for a while. I hate to put an end to this, but I think I'm boring everybody. Well, I'll go out with a bang by putting up what has become my favorite Bette/Joan Crawford story.  


Here it is, as told by Bette's daughter in her book, "My Mother's Keeper." I think the daughter is about twelve years old here (below). The incident takes place on the set of "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?", which as you know, costarred Betty Davis and Joan Crawford, who both hated each other.  Both women took their children to the set with them (click the book pages to enlarge).  

Add caption

Great story, huh!? Geez, my admiration for Joan Crawford doubled when I read this.  I  tacked on a little of the next paragraph about Joan's boobs because Bette's reaction to them was so funny.




On a different topic: a lot of critics consider "All About Eve" (1950) to be the high point of Bette's career. It wasn't, not by a long shot. There are some terrific lines in it, but she doesn't deliver them right. Don't take my word for it, see for yourself. Here's (above) her most famous line: "Buckle your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy night." See what you think.

Did you watch it? Then you see what I mean. Bette's way too restrained. The line calls for style and she reads it almost straight, like it's just information. I don't entirely blame Bette. I also blame her director friend William Wyler, who someone on the net credited with talking her out of her over the top approach to everything. This is a story that requires over the top.

I also blame Joseph Mankiewicz who wrote and directed the film. Mankiewicz writes great dialogue but he was an inept director in this period. Look at the boring compositionh in the picture above. That's how Mankiewicz shoots the most memorable line in the film. Can you believe it? It's the lamp's scene, not Bette's. 


Sometimes it seems like everything and everybody in the film is more important than Bette. In other scenes (not shown in the clip) even the maid, Thelma Ritter, is allowed to upstage her. What was Mankiewicz thinking of? He inexplicably downplays the star and lets everybody else go over the top. 


And what's with the awkward dress and the super wide hair style that de-emphasizes her face? What's with the flat lighting? What's with the camera angles that make the star look short and dumpy? Did Mankiewicz even like Bette Davis?




BTW: The awkward paragraph spacing in this post and others comes courtesy of Beta Blogger, which has great potential if the bugs can be ironed out.

WAS BETTE DAVIS CRAZY?

The way I heard it, John Huston was so taken with Bette's over the top rage in "Of Human Bondage," that he was hot to do a film with her which would be one long mad scene.  With "In This Our Life" (1942) (above) he finally got his chance.

The expressions Betty makes in this film are not to be believed.  She must have spent a lot of time in front of mirrors at home, figuring it all out. 

You have to admire her for putting so much into a role that made her look evil and crazy.

Bette was a live action cartoon character. I can't believe that no modern animation studio except Spumco ever attempted to use poses like this.

Animation fans talk about Disney's Cruella de Vil as if she were the ultimate example of villainous cartoon acting. She's okay, but she can't hold a candle to Bette (above).  Disney should have pushed Cruella farther.

Here (above) Bette begs a dying old man to help her get out of a crime she committed.  He's only moments away from meeting his maker and can't force himself to pay attention to her.

She's outraged at his self-absorption (above) and gives him a piece of her mind. The last thing he sees on Earth is Bette screaming at him. What a scene!

Oooch! Big mistake (above)! Never slap a crazy person, not unless you want to find arsenic in your morning tea.
Look at the way Bette reacts to the slap.

Bette plays crazy so well, that it's hard to resist wondering if she was crazy in real life. I wish I knew. She certainly had a reputation for being hard to get along with.  Her daughter wrote a vitriolic "Mommy Dearest"-type biography, called "My Mother's Keeper" which I'm reading right now, but there's no way of telling if the book is reliable. 

That's Olivia de Havilland above. I digress to include her here just to call attention to the number of good manhandling scenes there are in the Huston film. We could do this easily in 2D animation, but you're not likely to see it in computer films. In 3D the polygons would interfere with each other and produce a hideous monster. 

Back to Bette acting crazy: Vincent Sherman, the director of my favorite Bette film, "Old Acquaintance," had an interesting story to tell about it.  He said Bette gave him a lot of trouble at the outset of the film but eventually became friendly. Even so he got the feeling that he was walking on eggs, and had to be very careful. 

One day, near the end of the project, Bette confided to him that she loved him, and he didn't know how to respond. Soon after her husband (or boyfriend...I can't remember) came to visit Sherman and advised him, for his own good, to be careful, that having an affair with Bette would be like taking a bull by the horns. The implication was that Bette was crazy. The affair never occurred, and Bette and Sherman parted amicably. 

Sherman looked forward to working with his old friend on their next film together, "Mr. Skeffington," and was shocked when, with no warning, Bette showed up on the set ready for war, and loudly refused to co-operate with Sherman on absolutely anything.  The entire shooting became a famous disaster.

So was Bette crazy? I don't know, but does it matter? If she was crazy we can be grateful that she channeled that craziness into her art, and by doing so redefined film acting.