Light My (Funeral) Pyre: Ray Manzarek’s Long, Strange Movie Trip

Some people are meant to die young. Jim Morrison, lead singer of The Doors, entered into myth when he died in Paris at age 27, having overdosed on drugs and fame. But I thought Ray Manzarek was capable of living forever. Ray, whose keyboard artistry dominated the great Doors hit, “Light My Fire,” seemed well and fit when we spoke at length in 2008. He was then living in Napa Valley with his wife of forty years, growing vegetables and regularly working out. He spoke candidly and with roaring enthusiasm about sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll, of how LSD had opened the doors of perception and helped him find his way. It was totally clear to me that his was a life well lived. Now, alas, he’s dead of cancer at the age of 74.

Though Manzarek made his mark in the world of music, I discovered that he’d been a movie buff all along. In fact, he first met Jim Morrison when both were students in UCLA’s graduate film program, which they favored because of its “European sensibilities,” at a time when Hollywood had dedicated itself to Rock Hudson’s on-screen flirtations with Doris Day. Actually, Ray rather liked Pillow Talk, which he described to me as a guilty pleasure. But by the time he entered film school, he had discovered The Virgin Spring and The Four Hundred Blows. For him, “Black Orpheus just totally sealed the deal. . . . You can have samba and an adaptation of a classical Greek story of Orpheus and Eurydice and Death and the underworld, and it all takes place at Carnaval in Brazil. And I said, fuck it, that’s it, that’s what I want to do.”

At UCLA, where instructor Josef von Sternberg of The Blue Angel fame praised his student film, Manzarek had no clear-cut career plan: “You know, I was a pothead. I was trying to do as little as possible.” He toyed with making documentaries, then joined with Morrison, Robby Krieger, and John Densmore to form a rock group that hit it big in 1967. But always he remained fascinated by the contrast between music and movies. For him, “Music is close-your-eyes-and-have-an-orgasm. . . . Cinema, on the other hand, is our contemporary church. You walk into the darkened auditorium, and there on a large screen the gods dance for you, tell a story.” Referring to the Javanese tradition of using shadow puppets to convey religious teachings, he noted that today’s moviegoers “are not watching the gods, but we make those people on the screen our gods. Those are our contemporary gods and goddesses.”   

Ray passionately described for me his favorite Sixties films, including Bonnie and Clyde, Blow-Up, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. (The Doors first watched 2001 while stoned, sitting in the very first row, mesmerized by Kubrick’s long, strange trip.) To him such films, edited like rock videos, struck a chord with America’s youth because they were “just going at the intensity that WE were going at. Everybody in America or all the young people in America, all the stoners in America, were operating at a high level of INTENSITY. And those movies were made at that level of intensity. And it was like TOO MUCH TOO MUCH TOO FAST TOO HARD TOO BRIGHT TOO COLORFUL. TOO LOUD, MAN, TOO LOUD. TOO VIOLENT. And that’s what we said – Yeahhhhh! That’s the way movies are supposed to be.”

Well, Ray, you’ve just swung open the doors of perception for the last time. I do hope you’re enjoying this chance to break on through to the other side.

 

New York Literati Go Hollywood: Parker, Kerouac, Mailer

It’s a fact of American life: every major literary figure ends up writing for the movies. Or at least fantasizes about making movies. For a conference sponsored by BIO (the Biographers International Organization), I’ve been exploring the lives of three very different American writers: Dorothy Parker, Jack Kerouac, and Norman Mailer. All three were New York City writers who went Hollywood, either literally or emotionally. So, at any rate, it seems to me.

 Dorothy Parker, known for her acerbic stories and light verse (“Men seldom make passes/

At girls who wear glasses”) was a mainstay of the Algonquin Round Table, that collection of Manhattan wits who lunched together in the 1920s, hoisting many a glass before lurching off to their desks to pen magazine pieces, novels, and plays we still remember. When I survey the list of Parker’s cronies, I realize how many of them made their mark on the movie industry. Edna Ferber’s big western novel, Cimarron, became a film that won a best picture Oscar in 1931. Other Ferber sagas, like Showboat, So Big, and Giant, also got the Hollywood treatment. Humorist Robert Benchley, who stumbled onto a new career while performing a goofy original monologue called “The Treasurer’s Report,” ended up writing more than fifty films (mostly comic shorts) and acting in almost twice that many. Playwright Charles MacArthur, who had a romantic fling with Parker before marrying theatrical grande dame Helen Hayes, wrote such brilliant film scripts as His Girl Friday. George S. Kaufman partnered with other playwrights to write enduring Broadway comedies, including You Can’t Take It With You, but he also collaborated on the screenplay for the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera. And Parker herself was nominated for an Oscar for the 1938 screenplay of A Star is Born.

By age five, Jack Kerouac was calling his childhood fantasies “movies,” and he never stopped thinking of his life as a movie with himself as the hero. His biographer, Joyce Johnson, explains how during high school he’d head for 42^nd Street, “to gorge himself on movies, going straight from a French classic like The Lower Depths with Jean Gabin at the Apollo Theater to an Alice Faye film at the Paramount.” An older Kerouac deeply admired Citizen Kane, but never lost his fondness for B-movies and melodrama. Before he became well known he did some scriptreading for the east coast offices of Columbia Pictures, and at one point pounded out a rather grim script called Christmas in New York.  Though he found no success as a screenwriter, out of his “mind movies” came On the Road, which sealed his literary reputation. (The 2012 film version didn’t have nearly the impact of the Kerouac novel, which galvanized young America in 1957.)

The multifaceted Norman Mailer found success as a novelist (The Naked and the Dead), a journalist (The Armies of the Night), and a biographer (Marilyn). That didn’t stop him from wanting to make movies too. He shot several experimental films, including Maidstone, in which he also played the central figure. (Because he urged his cast to immerse themselves fully in their roles, on the last day of filming he was brutally attacked by actor Rip Torn, who—playing an ominous character—struck him in the head with a hammer.) Mailer’s screenplay for Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America was ultimately rejected, but he credibly played architect Stanford White in Miloš Forman’s Ragtime. For a man of letters, he was a pretty good Hollywood actor. But an attempt to play King Lear under the direction of Jean-Luc Godard was an understandable flop.  

Ray Harryhausen: The King (Kong) of Stop Motion Animation

So we’ve lost Ray Harryhausen. The news probably came as a surprise to those of us who figured he was no longer alive. At 92, Harryhausen was something of a dinosaur, which was apt because it was on-screen dinosaurs that first inspired him to take a lifelong interest in filming exotic and impossible creatures. As a boy in Los Angeles, he was hooked by a 1925 silent fantasy "The Lost World," in whichWillis O'Brien used stop-motion to show a dinosaur tumbling off a South American cliff. Then came King Kong, which mesmerized him when he saw it in 1933 at Graumann’s Chinese Theater. O’Brien’s work on that film so impressed the thirteen-year-old Harryhausen that he borrowed a 16 mm camera, cut up his mother's fur coat to make a bear model, and shot a film about bear menacing himself and his dog. (Fortunately the fur coat was old, and his mother may have figured that wearing furs in L.A. weather was pretty pointless.)

During World War II, Harryhausen served in Frank Capra’s film unit. Afterwards he was lucky enough to be hired by his idol, Willis O’Brien, to help create the giant ape in the Oscar-winning Mighty Joe Young. This was the King Kong-like story of a gorilla’s life in captivity, which I saw multiple times on TV as a child. You might say that a fascination with jungle animals was in his blood: I’m told he was the great-grandson of African explorer David Livingstone (as in “Doctor Livingstone, I presume.”) But he was also a child of Los Angeles, and found inspiration not just at the movies but also at the Los Angeles County Museum (now the Museum of Natural History) where murals depicting the nearby La Brea Tar Pits and the sites of other primeval scenes caught his eye. His official website informs me that at age eighteen he entered a County Museum competition, presenting an elaborate prehistoric diorama that won first prize.

Harryhausen naturally gravitated toward two other Angelenos who loved imagining non-existent worlds: author Ray Bradbury and the inimitable Forrest J. Ackerman, publisher of Famous Monsters of Filmland. The three became lifelong friends. And he had a powerful impact on filmmakers who came after him. Harryhausen’s movie fantasy work (perhaps best typified by his dueling skeletons in 1963’s Jason and the Argonauts) has influenced everyone from George Lucas (Star Wars) to the wonderful British animator Nick Park, of Wallace and Gromit fame.

When I worked for Roger Corman, I don’t honestly remember Harryhausen’s name coming up, although Corman’s companies did spawn such effects specialists as Dennis and Robert Skotak, who both later won Oscars for their work on James Cameron extravaganzas.  Corman’s own early special effects – always done on the cheap – could be as cheesy as building a creature out of papier mâché and making it “move” with piano wires, or by having an actor crawl inside. (A famous Corman principle, learned while shooting It Conquered the World with Beverly Garland, was “Always make the monster bigger than your leading lady.”) Forry Ackerman once told me that back in 1955 Roger had phoned him while producing The Beast with a Million Eyes.  Naturally, he needed a monster.  When Ackerman suggested Ray Harryhausen, Roger exclaimed, “Omigod, no, I couldn’t afford him. He charges $1000 a tentacle.” So Ackerman contacted newcomer Paul Blaisdell, who with his wife spent a month creating an elaborate hand puppet. Roger forked over $50 bucks and the cost of materials, and the critter looked . . .  well, as though it had cost at least twice that much. 

Dance Moms: "Dance, My Darling Daughter!"

 
 With Mothers' Day fast approaching, I’m thinking of Lifetime’s hit reality series, Dance Moms, in which ambitious mothers of junior ballerinas struggle mightily to push their own little darlings into the spotlight. Not that I’ve ever watched the show. But in some ways I feel I’ve lived it.

At my gym the other day, on one of those big-screen TVs, I caught a glimpse of high school kids in Fifties garb marching across a high school lawn, singing their lungs out: “We love you, Conrad! Oh yes we do!” Leading the charge was a ponytailed blonde. Yes, it was 1963’s Bye Bye Birdie, the spoofy musical hit that parodied the fuss made in those innocent days when Elvis Presley was drafted into the U.S. Army. The movie version of the popular Broadway show launched the career of Ann-Margret by turning her role from that of a sweet ingénue into a sultry teenaged sex symbol. As a fan of the play, I disapproved of that change (though the boys I knew probably didn’t). And I also had mixed emotions about the film because several classmates I’d known forever had won roles in the chorus. (Hey, why not me?)

Then there was that ponytailed blonde, who was always in the front row, and actually had dialogue scenes as Ann-Margret’s BFF. She also got to cross her eyes and faint dead away when the film’s Elvis-clone, Conrad Birdie, handed her his guitar. Let’s call her Good Old Geri. Our paths had crisscrossed since I was a pre-teen, and it was hate at first sight.

Not that Good Old Geri was in any way a bad person. Frankly, it was her mother who sparked my resentment. I was ten, and had started taking dance lessons at a local community center. It was no big deal: certainly this class had no pipeline to Hollywood talent scouts. But from the first I couldn’t miss Good Old Geri, a blue ribbon tying back her blonde hair, practicing fancy pirouettes before her mirrored image. And I certainly couldn’t miss her mother, who attended every session, wearing (if memory serves) a somewhat shopworn fur coat. Geri’s mom watched the proceedings with an eagle eye, making sure her daughter was always placed in the front row. Though she generally remained aloof, she did speak to me on one occasion. It seems I could do (thanks to my earlier dance training elsewhere) a difficult and showy drop to the floor called a “hinge.” She commanded me to teach Geri to do it too. (I didn’t try very hard.)

My story pretty much ends here. According to IMDB, Good Old Geri has racked up no screen credits since 1968. But during her teen years, she worked fairly steadily, especially in amiable sitcoms like The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. She also managed to have a somewhat normal high school experience, and became a great pal of a good friend of mine. I gather she moved between her stage-named persona and her everyday identity with relative ease. And when I was a UCLA sophomore, she and I ended up in the same Shakespeare class. The prof wanted to present to the class a hilariously convoluted romantic scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and she and I both volunteered to participate. It was perfect casting: as the lines required, she was tall and blonde, I was short and dark. Two football-playing brothers were recruited to play our romantic partners, and a good time was had by all. No, I never did ask about her mother.

Here’s to Estelle Gray, who loves show biz and her daughters, but was never guilty of being a stage mom.   

Annette Full of Jello: Hail and Farewell

It’s been a month since we learned of the death of Annette Funicello. At that moment, I suspect every Baby Boomer (like me) started feeling just a wee bit older. It’s hard convincing younger generations what a huge role the Mickey Mouse Club once played in our lives. Starting in 1955, we sat in front of our TVs five days a week, watching youngsters who were something like ourselves, but much more special. They sang, they danced, they wore caps with mouse ears and their names emblazoned across the front of their turtlenecks. On Mondays they had Fun With Music; on Tuesdays they welcomed guest stars; on Wednesdays they celebrated Anything Can Happen Day. Thursdays were devoted to the circus, and on Fridays there was a Talent Round-Up, through which civilians like us could theoretically be invited to dip our toes into the wonderful world of Disney, provided we had some ability worth celebrating.

Everyone I knew watched the show. You could even subscribe to a Mickey Mouse Club magazine, full of photos of your favorites. And we all had favorites. I remember my sister and me divvying up the regulars. She got Karen and Cubby and Doreen. I took Darlene and Bobby and (lucky me) Annette. We didn’t know back then what would become of all these junior celebrities. I hardly suspected that perky, pigtailed Darlene Gillespie would eventually go to prison, convicted of financial fraud. Or that Bobby, still squeaky-clean, would spend much of his adult life dancing on the Lawrence Welk Show. Or that Annette would emerge in her teen years as American’s sweetheart, the bouffant-haired and modestly-attired star of six American International Pictures beach-party flicks.   

 When I say the Mouseketeers were “something like ourselves,” I’m speaking on behalf of the WASPs among us. It wasn’t until the short-lived revival of the Mickey Mouse Club in the late 1970s that ethnic diversity started creeping into the Mouse’s formerly lily-white domain. What’s fascinating is that among all the peppy Caucasians on the original show, the standout from the beginning was the most visibly ethnic among them. With her big dark eyes and dark curly hair, Annette Funicello was the one Mouseketeer who didn’t look as though she’d come to Hollywood straight from the Farm Belt. Walt Disney personally picked her to join the merry band, and she rewarded him by winning everyone’s heart. Result: she was featured on the show to an extent that her castmates must have found slightly maddening. Check out the ballet number below in which the other kids take a backseat while overgrown Mouseketeer Jimmy Dodd, wearing a weird “French” mustache, sings of her charms, and Bobby pops up as her unacknowledged dance partner. I especially like the lyric about how “there will come a day when they give Annette away to the world’s luckiest boy.”

 

There were certainly boys in Annette’s future. When Annette reached Mousekepuberty, the males of my acquaintance certainly noticed. Suggestive parodies of her name began making the rounds. Although she somehow retained her dignity while romancing Frankie Avalon in the beach-party movies, she definitely did not lack for a coy sort of sex appeal.  

Still, she always remained as wholesome as peanut butter. In fact, beginning in 1979, when she was both wife and mother, she did a series of commercials for Skippy Peanut Butter, promoting the brand while making sandwiches in a mock-up kitchen. Then in 1992 came the news she’d been stricken by Multiple Sclerosis. From all accounts, she endured this cruel degenerative disease with the grace we’ve always expected of her. Why? Because we liked her.  

Broadway Bound: Bob & Carol & Masha & Spike

Well, the A to Z Challenge is over, and I’ve stepped away from Cormanville to make a quick business trip to New York. You know, that high-rise place where they talk not about movies but about the theatah. But so many of today’s big Broadway productions are Hollywood-dependent. They’re either based on movies (Newsies, Kinky Boots, The Lion King) or rely for their box office appeal on movie stars in the flesh. This week’s announcement of the 2013 Tony Award nominees was accompanied by much head-scratching about why most Hollywood types got snubbed. Yes, Tom Hanks (making his Broadway debut) did nab a nom for his role in Nora Ephron’s Lucky Man. But journalists noted the non-nomination of such celebrity heavyweights as Al Pacino, Alec Baldwin, and Scarlett Johansson, all of whom have starred on the Great White Way in 2012-13.

Another oversight: the divine Bette Midler was overlooked for her portrayal of a real-life Hollywood superagent in I’ll Eat You Last: A Chat with Sue Mengers. So a show biz legend (whose Parental Guidance I watched on the plane flight home) failed to get Tony love for depicting another show biz legend. No matter. Fans are turning this one-woman show into a big fat hit.

I didn’t see I’ll Eat You Last. Instead  I got  half-price tickets to a play I knew only from its unlikely title (Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike) and from the fact that its two top stars were familiar Hollywood folk: Sigourney Weaver and David Hyde Pierce. The author, Christopher Durang, has an antic sensibility that often takes on the Catholic Church, as in his wickedly funny SisterMary Ignatius Explains It All for You. But he also happens to be fascinated by the motion picture industry: he’s written several unproduced screenplays, and one of his first big stage successes was called History of the American Film.  

Durang’s new play sounds like a nod to Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. But in fact it’s an homage to the late nineteenth-century family dramedies of the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov. Aside from the characters’ names, there are Chekhovian elements galore: a beautiful country estate that may need to be sold (see Uncle Vanya and The Cherry Orchard); the return home of a once-glamorous actress (The Seagull); siblings too caught up in their own ennui to do much of anything (The Three Sisters). Sounds somber, but Durang’s play is extremely funny, partly thanks to Sigourney Weaver’s Masha, who sweeps in and parodies her own Hollywood aura. Masha is the grande dame type, the show-biz superbitch who feels entitled to run everyone’s life because she’s a certified movie star. She arrives with her own pretty boy, Spike, in tow, and his knuckleheaded enactment of the audition that almost won him a role in Entourage 2 is worth the price of admission. (And if you want to see what Ripley looks like in Disney princess drag, now’s your chance.)

Meanwhile Masha’s stay-at-home siblings meekly put up with the indignities she heaps upon them. That is, until the wonderful David Hyde Pierce (as Vanya) explodes into a diatribe about what pop culture has lost since the Fifties. He misses Tommy Kirk in Old Yeller and Annette Funicello on the Mickey Mouse Club. Sure, Señor Wences – who made puppets out of his hands on the old Ed Sullivan Show – was boring, but everyone was bored TOGETHER: a whole lovely community of bored people. This in contrast to young Spike, caught up in his personal playlist. Community’s what theatre is all about, and part of why I love it.  

News flash: The $2.99 sale of the Kindle ebook version of my updated insider bio, Roger Corman: Blood-Sucking Vampires, Flesh-Eating Cockroaches, and Driller Killers,  absolutely must end on Sunday, Cinco de Mayo. Get yours while supplies last! (Huh?)