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?)