Sidney Lumet, who just died at the age of 86, was probably the most famous of the first generation of TV directors to move into film -- him or John Frankenheimer. In a Hollywood where movies had come to look stodgy and static, he was one of several young directors who helped bring a new vitality to visuals and performances in Hollywood film.
A lot of his early movies were based on stage or TV properties, didn't have a whole lot of money to work with, and featured long static speeches. Many directors, then and now, think the only way to make something like that "cinematic" is to open it up, take it outside, find something to break up the monotony. Coming from live TV, Lumet understood that one person standing in a room giving a speech can work extremely well on the screen, as long as the performance is right and the camera catches it in the right way.
So it is in this scene from The Pawnbroker, one of Lumet's most influential movies (not just for getting Production Code approval for nudity, and thus pushing the Code one more step further toward complete collapse). Lumet was rightly acclaimed for getting the very best out of Rod Steiger, an actor who could go over the top unless he was extremely well directed. But he also catches this speech in a long take that doesn't have any sense of show-offiness. It's a long take that's claustrophobic and, once it settles on the medium close-up of Steiger, increases the intensity of the scene by its refusal to let us take our eyes off him until the speech is over.
Saturday, April 09, 2011
Saturday, March 12, 2011
Until Then, We'll Have To Muddle Through Somehow
I couldn't say I'm surprised that Hugh Martin died; he was 96, after all, and the one time I was lucky enough to finally talk with him (late last year) he didn't sound well. He still remembered a lot and could talk for a long time under the right conditions; when I tried to cut the conversation short because I was worried about him, he said "it's because of the frog in my throat, isn't it?," got his second wind, and kept on answering my questions. He even answered some follow-up questions later in the day when I didn't have a couple of things I needed for a short article I was doing.
But I am sad that he's gone. As I've said many times, Martin was one of my favorite people in American popular music. I mean, quite apart from the fact that he was alive and still able to talk about that era in Broadway, Hollywood and pop; even if he hadn't been one of the last living representatives of that period, I'd still have considered him one of the greats.
He didn't achieve quite the level of success that his talent would have justified, partly because he so good at so many things that he didn't concentrate on just one (his career as a vocal arranger gave him less time for composing) and partly because he didn't always do his best work in the best circumstances. For Look Ma, I'm Dancin'!, his first Broadway score as sole composer lyricist, he did some outstanding work, including "Little Boy Blues," a comic/sad song full of tricky harmonies and rhymes. But he also did some work that wasn't quite up to his best, and as he recalled in his liner notes for a cast album reissue, "I got a false sense of security and instead of working hard, I relaxed a little. As a result, there are songs that are, well, OK, but not up to the standard of a George Abbott, Jerome Robbins, Nancy Walker musical. I wish I had tried harder."
Whereas some of his best songs were written for projects that had no real value other than his work: "An Occasional Man," which I've praised many times, was written for an awful movie where it received an awful staging.
And Athena has one of the best ballads in movie musicals of the '50s ("Love Can Change the Stars") stuck in one of those films that MGM made primarily to burn off people's contracts. The original songs for Meet Me In St. Louis are a rare case of Martin's best work meeting everyone else's best work -- also the stage version of Best Foot Forward, which really deserves a concert staging with the original Don Walker orchestrations.
And then there's the vocal arranging. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was the first cast album where the vocal arrangements simply blew me away; sometimes the choral sections (which often involved substatial original work from Martin, in music and lyrics) were more fun than the refrains. Obviously he was influenced by Kay Thompson, and as he said, she got annoyed at him because "she thought I imitated her, which I did." But he had his own take on her style, and his arrangements at MGM sometimes sounded more effective than hers in the mouths of studio choristers and fictional characters. And he was the first person to bring that sound to the Broadway theatre.
Before Martin, vocal arrangement on Broadway was almost nonexistent, except in operetta where there might be more classical-influenced arrangements going on. People would sing the refrain, then again, then again. Richard Rodgers, looking for a "girl group" sound for "Sing For Your Supper" in The Boys From Syracuse, let Martin arrange it. He had the singers do the refrain "straight" the first time, then embellish it with bits that sounded (but weren't) improvised, then really embellish it the third time around. And he had to do this, mind you, not for jazz singers but for Broadway singer/actors who didn't have experience with this kind of arranging, meaning it had to be simple enough for the performers to learn quickly. What he came up with launched his career on Broadway (Rodgers gave him more vocal work and eventually hired him and Ralph Blane to write the score for Best Foot Forward) and changed the sound of Broadway; it was such a successful arrangement that it was used more or less unchanged in every version of the show from then on -- the script was rewritten, the orchestrations changed (though this recording, from 1953 uses the originals), but the Martin version of refrains 2 and 3 was usually kept.
Monday, February 28, 2011
The Return of Elwy Yost
I've been hoping TV Ontario would put some of its old material online, and they recently created a site to do just that, a "Public Archive" with selected episodes of some of its older shows. In particular, they cleared the rights to some of the 16 mm filmed interviews conducted by Elwy Yost, host of "Talking Film" and "Saturday Night at the Movies," who built up one of North America's biggest libraries of interviews with actors, directors, writers and technicians from old Hollywood.
And most of the interviews were incorporated into the show in very large, long chunks without too much editing; it's a style that will be familiar to viewers of public television from the '70s and '80s (when a lot of these interviews were shot) but which I like better than the way such interviews are usually done nowadays -- either interspersed with a lot of clips and stills, so that we can't see the interviewee think before he or she talks, or cut up into really small snippets.
So for example, in this half-hour compilation of interviews about the (then) modern British film industry, the interview with Ken Adam, starting at around 11:30, goes on for more than 10 minutes. It's edited down, but it's edited down less than you'd get almost anywhere else.
Here for another example is the show with Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng; they don't say much that's new, but hearing the contours of their speech and seeing their expressions while they speak is the interesting part.
And for one final example, here's one of the videotaped in-studio interviews TVO periodically did, this one with John Huston. They have a couple of other in-studio segments, including a two-parter with the New Deal documentarian Pare Lorentz.
One of the in-studio interviews I most remember from Saturday Night at the Movies, though it's not on the site, is the one where Eddie Bracken claimed to have directed a scene from The Miracle Of Morgan's Creek while Preston Sturges was unavailable for the day. It was the scene where Trudy meets Norval again after her big night, and Bracken claimed that he panned down to the "JUST MARRIED" sign in imitation of Sturges' love for doing things in one shot. Was the story true? I have no idea; probably not. But I loved that someone could come into a studio in Canada and make that claim. There are all kinds of interviews I saw where people said things I may not have agreed with but were interesting; for example, writer Nat Perrin, who worked on Duck Soup, arguing at length that the movie didn't work. That's just something you won't see on most making-of documentaries.
And most of the interviews were incorporated into the show in very large, long chunks without too much editing; it's a style that will be familiar to viewers of public television from the '70s and '80s (when a lot of these interviews were shot) but which I like better than the way such interviews are usually done nowadays -- either interspersed with a lot of clips and stills, so that we can't see the interviewee think before he or she talks, or cut up into really small snippets.
So for example, in this half-hour compilation of interviews about the (then) modern British film industry, the interview with Ken Adam, starting at around 11:30, goes on for more than 10 minutes. It's edited down, but it's edited down less than you'd get almost anywhere else.
Here for another example is the show with Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng; they don't say much that's new, but hearing the contours of their speech and seeing their expressions while they speak is the interesting part.
And for one final example, here's one of the videotaped in-studio interviews TVO periodically did, this one with John Huston. They have a couple of other in-studio segments, including a two-parter with the New Deal documentarian Pare Lorentz.
One of the in-studio interviews I most remember from Saturday Night at the Movies, though it's not on the site, is the one where Eddie Bracken claimed to have directed a scene from The Miracle Of Morgan's Creek while Preston Sturges was unavailable for the day. It was the scene where Trudy meets Norval again after her big night, and Bracken claimed that he panned down to the "JUST MARRIED" sign in imitation of Sturges' love for doing things in one shot. Was the story true? I have no idea; probably not. But I loved that someone could come into a studio in Canada and make that claim. There are all kinds of interviews I saw where people said things I may not have agreed with but were interesting; for example, writer Nat Perrin, who worked on Duck Soup, arguing at length that the movie didn't work. That's just something you won't see on most making-of documentaries.
Thursday, February 10, 2011
A Response, Over Five Years Too Late
I was reading over Stephen Rowley's blog and came across a fine 2005 post that I remembered reading before (when his blog was "Cinephobia") but hadn't really thought to respond to: "Better Than Ever," a response to critics who pine for the good old days of movies. Rowley argues that recent movies have an advantage: the larger range of techniques available due to the innovators that came before it. So an older work might be notable due to the technique that it invented or developed, but a newer work can take that and build on it. He's not saying that older films (or older anything) are obsolete, just that each innovation adds to a medium and the works that follow are richer for having a greater range of options open to them:
I think it's a good argument, and a true one in some cases. I don't quite see eye-to-eye with it, as you might expect from someone who started a blog to write mostly about old stuff and who is constantly arguing for the validity of older works, older styles. While I think new works can be richer for the range of options available to them, I don't think they always are.
The easiest example to use here is not movies but music, because its new techniques are based on almost scientific principles (and therefore it's sort of possible to quantify innovations in music). As the history of Western music progresses, you can see that pattern of artistic development, at least broadly. Orchestras get bigger, there are more instruments and more sounds, harmonies get more complicated, and composers become open to more influences from around the world. There's no question that the history of music has benefited from all this.
But does that mean that the language of music matured or even got richer at any particular time? It depends on what you mean by richer. Sometimes Western music would become more advanced in one area, like harmony, while getting simpler and squarer in another area, like rhythm. Early music has a spikier sound than Romantic music that sometimes makes it sound more "advanced" in certain respects. Pop music is the same way, sometimes becoming simpler than what came before it and limiting, rather than expanding, the range of choices available to it. It's not about getting better or worse -- but while there's always a style that can be identified as contemporary and current, it's not always possible to say that it embraces all the historical possibilities of the form, or that it builds upon its predecessors to be more technically advanced in every area.
The same applies to movies. There are a lot of choices open to filmmakers thanks to the longer history of the medium -- in theory. In practice, most movies at a given time tend to share a common basic grammar, which means that certain choices will usually be made and others not made, almost instinctively. As I've said in the past, the two-shot, with two characters interacting and communicating in the same frame, was one of the basic units of film from the silent era and for decades after. Now putting two characters in the frame together without cutting between them is almost a special effect; it's still done, but it cuts against modern filmmaking instinct.
What I guess I'm saying is that, in a medium with any current popularity, the creator makes a lot of stylistic choices, but others are almost made for him or her, unconsciously. That's why the music or literature of a particular period tends to share certain stylistic traits in common, even as the great artists add their own voice to the prevailing style. Same with movies. Like the structure and sound of a popular song, the style of a movie is defined partly by the filmmaker but partly by the time period.
Which means that the range of choices open to the filmmaker is never quite as broad as it might seem, no matter how much history comes before it. A Coen Bros. movie is a Coen Bros. movie, but it's also a '80s or '90s or '00s or '10s movie, and if you break it down beat by beat and shot by shot you'll see a lot of choices that are similar to other movies of the time, just as even Citizen Kane has plenty of moments that mark it as an RKO movie from 1941.
And this is as it should be, because a) art has a large instinctive component, and instinct is shaped by the time one lives in, and b) an artist who actually wants to put his or her work before the public usually has to create something the public will recognize as contemporary. Most movies exclude certain choices that would be seen as belonging to the past. Unless it's a crazy stunt like The Good German, and even that has a ton of contemporary visual style in it. But anyway, many things an older film, even a recent older film might have done, can't really be done today. They belong to another time when a combination of instinct and intellect made those particular techniques possible.
Which is why I don't think we really build on the past to a great extent. We do sometimes, but so much of what artists do is set in stone by the prevailing style that a look back to the past seems instantly anachronistic -- like Mozart dipping into the Baroque style and quoting the "Hallelujah Chorus" in his Great Mass in C minor, or Altman in The Player parodying (or paying homage to, but mostly parodying, I think) the heavy-footed camera moves of Touch of Evil.
Artistic boundaries expand, but they also contract, and perhaps with the exception of the occasional visionary, particularly the Charles Ives or Emily Dickinson who doesn't feel a need to put his or her work in front of a broad public, any artist is a prisoner of his or her era. That's fine, but it means the choices aren't really broader except in an almost mechanical sense: quicker and smoother camera moves, less obvious rear projection. And even the mechanical improvements arguably have their disadvantages -- or at least you can't say that an earlier film, which found a perfect way to use the equipment available, would have done better if it had had the later equipment. It would have done the shot differently, not always better.
It means, as I see it, that we can't usually look at an older work and say that a later work is more advanced, even in raw technical terms. For it to be more advanced, the later work would have to do the same thing the earlier one does, only better or more complex. And the later work can never do that, just by virtue of belonging to a different time. The early work is not "better" in technical terms (unless we're comparing a great work to a not-great one), but it is precious because it can never truly be surpassed. The game has changed.
Look at this way: cinema is a young medium. It’s barely over one hundred years old, and cinema with sound is less than eighty. Many of the film classics we know are developmental works, famous because they were the first to utilise a particular technique. The technical capabilities of cinema continue to expand, and as they do so the artistic boundaries expand concurrently. Filmmakers are still exploring the limits of the medium, which is part of what makes filmgoing so fun. This means that more recent films are at least potentially able to draw on a richer heritage of filmmaking experience. Think of it like a language: as the language matures, the vocabulary available to its speakers increases.
Which is not to say that any older film is inferior to a more recent film: few films (old or new) make use of the full possibilities the medium presents, and the form was mature enough by about the forties that good filmmakers could achieve results that still look exceptional today. (Citizen Kane, for example, is still astonishing as both a technical and artistic achievement). Yet if you believe that something was added to cinema by the French New Wave, or the “New Hollywood” of the seventies, or the Hong Kong Cinema of the eighties and nineties, or any of the other important filmmaking movements of the last fifty years, then don’t you have to believe that the artistic possibilities open to a filmmaker today are richer?
I think it's a good argument, and a true one in some cases. I don't quite see eye-to-eye with it, as you might expect from someone who started a blog to write mostly about old stuff and who is constantly arguing for the validity of older works, older styles. While I think new works can be richer for the range of options available to them, I don't think they always are.
The easiest example to use here is not movies but music, because its new techniques are based on almost scientific principles (and therefore it's sort of possible to quantify innovations in music). As the history of Western music progresses, you can see that pattern of artistic development, at least broadly. Orchestras get bigger, there are more instruments and more sounds, harmonies get more complicated, and composers become open to more influences from around the world. There's no question that the history of music has benefited from all this.
But does that mean that the language of music matured or even got richer at any particular time? It depends on what you mean by richer. Sometimes Western music would become more advanced in one area, like harmony, while getting simpler and squarer in another area, like rhythm. Early music has a spikier sound than Romantic music that sometimes makes it sound more "advanced" in certain respects. Pop music is the same way, sometimes becoming simpler than what came before it and limiting, rather than expanding, the range of choices available to it. It's not about getting better or worse -- but while there's always a style that can be identified as contemporary and current, it's not always possible to say that it embraces all the historical possibilities of the form, or that it builds upon its predecessors to be more technically advanced in every area.
The same applies to movies. There are a lot of choices open to filmmakers thanks to the longer history of the medium -- in theory. In practice, most movies at a given time tend to share a common basic grammar, which means that certain choices will usually be made and others not made, almost instinctively. As I've said in the past, the two-shot, with two characters interacting and communicating in the same frame, was one of the basic units of film from the silent era and for decades after. Now putting two characters in the frame together without cutting between them is almost a special effect; it's still done, but it cuts against modern filmmaking instinct.
What I guess I'm saying is that, in a medium with any current popularity, the creator makes a lot of stylistic choices, but others are almost made for him or her, unconsciously. That's why the music or literature of a particular period tends to share certain stylistic traits in common, even as the great artists add their own voice to the prevailing style. Same with movies. Like the structure and sound of a popular song, the style of a movie is defined partly by the filmmaker but partly by the time period.
Which means that the range of choices open to the filmmaker is never quite as broad as it might seem, no matter how much history comes before it. A Coen Bros. movie is a Coen Bros. movie, but it's also a '80s or '90s or '00s or '10s movie, and if you break it down beat by beat and shot by shot you'll see a lot of choices that are similar to other movies of the time, just as even Citizen Kane has plenty of moments that mark it as an RKO movie from 1941.
And this is as it should be, because a) art has a large instinctive component, and instinct is shaped by the time one lives in, and b) an artist who actually wants to put his or her work before the public usually has to create something the public will recognize as contemporary. Most movies exclude certain choices that would be seen as belonging to the past. Unless it's a crazy stunt like The Good German, and even that has a ton of contemporary visual style in it. But anyway, many things an older film, even a recent older film might have done, can't really be done today. They belong to another time when a combination of instinct and intellect made those particular techniques possible.
Which is why I don't think we really build on the past to a great extent. We do sometimes, but so much of what artists do is set in stone by the prevailing style that a look back to the past seems instantly anachronistic -- like Mozart dipping into the Baroque style and quoting the "Hallelujah Chorus" in his Great Mass in C minor, or Altman in The Player parodying (or paying homage to, but mostly parodying, I think) the heavy-footed camera moves of Touch of Evil.
Artistic boundaries expand, but they also contract, and perhaps with the exception of the occasional visionary, particularly the Charles Ives or Emily Dickinson who doesn't feel a need to put his or her work in front of a broad public, any artist is a prisoner of his or her era. That's fine, but it means the choices aren't really broader except in an almost mechanical sense: quicker and smoother camera moves, less obvious rear projection. And even the mechanical improvements arguably have their disadvantages -- or at least you can't say that an earlier film, which found a perfect way to use the equipment available, would have done better if it had had the later equipment. It would have done the shot differently, not always better.
It means, as I see it, that we can't usually look at an older work and say that a later work is more advanced, even in raw technical terms. For it to be more advanced, the later work would have to do the same thing the earlier one does, only better or more complex. And the later work can never do that, just by virtue of belonging to a different time. The early work is not "better" in technical terms (unless we're comparing a great work to a not-great one), but it is precious because it can never truly be surpassed. The game has changed.
Wednesday, February 09, 2011
Mulling Over a Change
It's not a secret that I haven't posted here very often lately. (And I'm not exactly the first blogger who can make that claim.) That said, I don't want to stop posting. I was wondering if it would make sense to re-post some earlier material from the blog, perhaps revised a bit and outfitted with things like illustrative clips that weren't available when I started the blog in 2004. The nature of this blog is that almost none of the material is topical, so a post about an older movie, play or show isn't really dated unless I've changed my mind in the interim -- and if I have, maybe I can comment on why I changed my mind since then.
I don't know if that's what I'll do; I'm just thinking aloud here, and trying to figure out a good way to do some new(ish) posts.
Meanwhile, here's something I was thinking of incorporating into one of my earlier Archie-comics posts but didn't get around to using: when I wrote about Frank Doyle's writing, I was planning to do this little structural analysis of a five-page story I've always liked since childhood. It's not really a complete post, but I thought I'd put it here anyway.
Someday I'd like to do a fuller explanation of the structural strength of these stories compared to all the competitors -- even the best of them, like some of Stan Lee's humor titles. Lots of "teen" comics had simple or minimal plotting, but few of them did it with a feeling that the story was actually going somewhere, no matter how little was happening. Also, just the fact that lame jokes are acknowledged in-story as lame jokes gives this kind of story a slight sophistication boost over its competitors.
Art: Harry Lucey
Script: Frank Doyle
Inks: Terry Szenics
From Archie # 124
This is a surprisingly well-constructed story despite an almost total lack of plot (in common with many Frank Doyle scripts). It's based on a very simple premise, but in only five pages the premise is fully worked through and put through several variations:
Page 1: Doyle makes sure, as usual, to have the first joke on the first page, and not waste panel time as many humor comics writers do.
Page 2: The premise, introduced briefly on page 1, is fully elaborated on and even leads to a punchline (she was calling him just so he could pull that stupid joke on him). Note also the trademark Lucey reaction -- the circles of surprise coming out of the head. Then she leaves, and Jughead arrives, setting up the next variation.
Page 3: The variation is that whereas Betty was trying to set Archie up for the stupid joke, Jughead gets the idea right then and there. Then he goes on, doing his own verbose version of the reply. Then we get a bit of violence.
Page 4: Variation # 3: the old lady who doesn't even seem to be replying this way as a joke, but genuinely thinks he was calling her.
Page 5: Archie is finally driven 'round the bend by the rule of threes, leading to opportunities for the artist to draw running and hiding poses, so it's not just a static story. And then, in the last two panels, as always, we get the little twist ending and a great facial expression from Lucey.
(1)
(2) 
(3) 
(4)
(5) 
So it's a really basic and simple story but a lot of craftsmanship went into it, and that's the difference between the Archie comics of this era and their many failed competitors -- there is a really solid comedy foundation to the scripts and drawing, which even the best competitors (like Stan Lee's team on Millie the Model) often lacked.
Most importantly, the story is constructed to maximize the visual possibilities. Even though it's just people talking about not much, there are all kinds of chances for the artist to do different types of reactions, gestures, physical actions. Good comics writing is done with a view toward telling the story in pictures.
I don't know if that's what I'll do; I'm just thinking aloud here, and trying to figure out a good way to do some new(ish) posts.
Meanwhile, here's something I was thinking of incorporating into one of my earlier Archie-comics posts but didn't get around to using: when I wrote about Frank Doyle's writing, I was planning to do this little structural analysis of a five-page story I've always liked since childhood. It's not really a complete post, but I thought I'd put it here anyway.
Someday I'd like to do a fuller explanation of the structural strength of these stories compared to all the competitors -- even the best of them, like some of Stan Lee's humor titles. Lots of "teen" comics had simple or minimal plotting, but few of them did it with a feeling that the story was actually going somewhere, no matter how little was happening. Also, just the fact that lame jokes are acknowledged in-story as lame jokes gives this kind of story a slight sophistication boost over its competitors.
Art: Harry Lucey
Script: Frank Doyle
Inks: Terry Szenics
From Archie # 124
This is a surprisingly well-constructed story despite an almost total lack of plot (in common with many Frank Doyle scripts). It's based on a very simple premise, but in only five pages the premise is fully worked through and put through several variations:
Page 1: Doyle makes sure, as usual, to have the first joke on the first page, and not waste panel time as many humor comics writers do.
Page 2: The premise, introduced briefly on page 1, is fully elaborated on and even leads to a punchline (she was calling him just so he could pull that stupid joke on him). Note also the trademark Lucey reaction -- the circles of surprise coming out of the head. Then she leaves, and Jughead arrives, setting up the next variation.
Page 3: The variation is that whereas Betty was trying to set Archie up for the stupid joke, Jughead gets the idea right then and there. Then he goes on, doing his own verbose version of the reply. Then we get a bit of violence.
Page 4: Variation # 3: the old lady who doesn't even seem to be replying this way as a joke, but genuinely thinks he was calling her.
Page 5: Archie is finally driven 'round the bend by the rule of threes, leading to opportunities for the artist to draw running and hiding poses, so it's not just a static story. And then, in the last two panels, as always, we get the little twist ending and a great facial expression from Lucey.
(1)
(2) 
(3) 
(4)
(5) 
So it's a really basic and simple story but a lot of craftsmanship went into it, and that's the difference between the Archie comics of this era and their many failed competitors -- there is a really solid comedy foundation to the scripts and drawing, which even the best competitors (like Stan Lee's team on Millie the Model) often lacked.
Most importantly, the story is constructed to maximize the visual possibilities. Even though it's just people talking about not much, there are all kinds of chances for the artist to do different types of reactions, gestures, physical actions. Good comics writing is done with a view toward telling the story in pictures.
Monday, January 31, 2011
Is This By Dan Gordon?
Update: In comments it's suggested that this might be by a different comics great, Jack Bradbury.
----
There have been some good posts on cartoonist Dan Gordon lately, including this one from John Kricfalusi and this one from Thad K. Having seen those, I'm wondering if this could be another Dan Gordon story.
It's from Little Archie # 5, an issue that used a number of artists (including Bill Vigoda) to do the half of the stories that Bob Bolling wasn't doing himself, and there's this one four-page story that looks very different from the rest of the comic -- and is much more exuberant and cartoony than the Bolling or Vigoda material. Dan Gordon was very briefly at MLJ/Archie working on Super Duck -- also in a different style from anyone else. This might be his tryout on "Little Archie"; it might not be him, but adjusting for the difference in house style, it could have come from the guy who did "Cookie" and most famously "SuperKatt". Take a look:
Whoever it is, it might have been nice if he had stuck around on this title. I'm a big Bob Bolling fan, but pure comedy isn't really his thing; even his slapstick stories have a subdued, melancholy feel to them. Supplementing his work with a more laugh-out-loud funny cartoonist would have been an ideal arrangement. Instead the other artists (some of whom are very hard to identify) left the title by # 8 and it became entirely shared between Bolling and Dexter Taylor.
----
There have been some good posts on cartoonist Dan Gordon lately, including this one from John Kricfalusi and this one from Thad K. Having seen those, I'm wondering if this could be another Dan Gordon story.
It's from Little Archie # 5, an issue that used a number of artists (including Bill Vigoda) to do the half of the stories that Bob Bolling wasn't doing himself, and there's this one four-page story that looks very different from the rest of the comic -- and is much more exuberant and cartoony than the Bolling or Vigoda material. Dan Gordon was very briefly at MLJ/Archie working on Super Duck -- also in a different style from anyone else. This might be his tryout on "Little Archie"; it might not be him, but adjusting for the difference in house style, it could have come from the guy who did "Cookie" and most famously "SuperKatt". Take a look:
Whoever it is, it might have been nice if he had stuck around on this title. I'm a big Bob Bolling fan, but pure comedy isn't really his thing; even his slapstick stories have a subdued, melancholy feel to them. Supplementing his work with a more laugh-out-loud funny cartoonist would have been an ideal arrangement. Instead the other artists (some of whom are very hard to identify) left the title by # 8 and it became entirely shared between Bolling and Dexter Taylor.
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
How To Understand This Terrible New Road Runner Disc
I've sort of given up on Warner Bros. DVD releases of its cartoons: I accept that we're not going to get much of value until a) Blu-Ray becomes popular enough to spawn some Looney Tunes collections in that format, or b) That elusive Censored 11 set finally becomes a reality. (There's also online streaming, but frankly, while I want to see more older material in that format, I want to own good-quality copies, and always will. But that's another post.) But I had to say something about This Road Runner/Coyote DVD they're releasing, where the selection is so bad that it seems like a joke. And, who knows, maybe it'll turn out to be another list of cartoons that was prematurely leaked, except the corrected version almost always turns out to be worse than the leaked list.
Update: The list has been confirmed as real. Good lord.
Anyway, the list that TV Shows On DVD has consists entirely of Road Runner cartoons from after the original studio shut down, meaning: Rudy Larriva shorts, made-for-the-web cartoons (the "New 2010 Roadrunner" ones), Chuck Jones' two TV cartoons, Larry Doyle's Road Runner opus, and finally the two that I can actually enjoy watching again, "Chariots of Fur" and "Little Go Beep."
The conspiracy theorist in me wants to think that this is a way of making the upcoming "Looney Tunes Show" look good by comparison -- if kids are watching these cartoons, the CGI Road Runners Cartoon Network is preparing will look brilliant. I should add that I have no idea how good or bad "The Looney Tunes Show" will be, and wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to be all right. Point is, it would still look worse by comparison with a bigger-budget pre-1964 cartoon.
The sensible side of me just thinks that maybe they're still hoping to save the "real" cartoons for when the home video market comes back. Or that this batch of cartoons was put together before the home video department agreed to include fullscreen options for the cartoons, and that the Larrivas were considered more "expendable" when it comes to cutting off the top and bottom. I don't know. I just know it's not much of a list.
One thing: though the Larriva years are evidence to the contrary, later on it seems like Road Runner cartoons managed to achieve adequacy more often than other types of Looney Tunes revival cartoons. "Chariots of Fur," which kicked off the series of Chuck Jones Productions cartoons, isn't up to the pre-1964 cartoons but is one of Jones' better late films. "Little Go Beep" turned out to be perhaps the best of the Kathleen Helppie-Shipley productions, and even "Whizzard of Ow" is one of the more tolerable Larry Doyle shorts. Maybe because the formula is so simple, or because it's one of the few series that doesn't lose anything from Mel Blanc's death, Road Runners seem to be the easiest to make in an acceptable way.
Update: The list has been confirmed as real. Good lord.
Anyway, the list that TV Shows On DVD has consists entirely of Road Runner cartoons from after the original studio shut down, meaning: Rudy Larriva shorts, made-for-the-web cartoons (the "New 2010 Roadrunner" ones), Chuck Jones' two TV cartoons, Larry Doyle's Road Runner opus, and finally the two that I can actually enjoy watching again, "Chariots of Fur" and "Little Go Beep."
The conspiracy theorist in me wants to think that this is a way of making the upcoming "Looney Tunes Show" look good by comparison -- if kids are watching these cartoons, the CGI Road Runners Cartoon Network is preparing will look brilliant. I should add that I have no idea how good or bad "The Looney Tunes Show" will be, and wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to be all right. Point is, it would still look worse by comparison with a bigger-budget pre-1964 cartoon.
The sensible side of me just thinks that maybe they're still hoping to save the "real" cartoons for when the home video market comes back. Or that this batch of cartoons was put together before the home video department agreed to include fullscreen options for the cartoons, and that the Larrivas were considered more "expendable" when it comes to cutting off the top and bottom. I don't know. I just know it's not much of a list.
One thing: though the Larriva years are evidence to the contrary, later on it seems like Road Runner cartoons managed to achieve adequacy more often than other types of Looney Tunes revival cartoons. "Chariots of Fur," which kicked off the series of Chuck Jones Productions cartoons, isn't up to the pre-1964 cartoons but is one of Jones' better late films. "Little Go Beep" turned out to be perhaps the best of the Kathleen Helppie-Shipley productions, and even "Whizzard of Ow" is one of the more tolerable Larry Doyle shorts. Maybe because the formula is so simple, or because it's one of the few series that doesn't lose anything from Mel Blanc's death, Road Runners seem to be the easiest to make in an acceptable way.
Saturday, January 15, 2011
The Professionalization of Voice Acting
Well, time for another post full of probably incorrect assumptions, but a shorter one. I've always meant to mention this, but to my surprise I can't find an animation-related post where I brought this up: I've always wondered why Tedd Pierce and Michael Maltese, two Warner Brothers cartoon writers who also did voice acting, more or less stopped acting after about 1951. They continued to write cartoons for the studio, but Pierce's last known voice job at the studio -- maybe there's a later one I didn't notice and didn't make it onto IMDB -- was in 1951, and so was Maltese's. It's particularly surprising in the case of Pierce because he was a really good, versatile voice actor who performed in other people's cartoons (like the Babbit and Catsello cartoons), not just his own.
Thinking about this, I recalled that Tex Avery was another cartoonist/performer who didn't do much voice work after about 1950. So it may have been an actual trend at the time, toward a more professional approach to the art of voice acting. Thanks to Mel Blanc and others, voice acting had already become much more of a profession than it had been in the early days of sound cartoons, when voices were as likely to be performed by an animator or writer as by a full-time actor. In the late '40s into the '50s, it seems like the studios shifted even more strongly toward hiring professional actors for everything. So if there was a small male part at Warner Brothers that Mel Blanc wasn't doing, it might have gone to Pierce or Maltese in the '40s -- but in the '50s, it would have gone to Stan Freberg or, later, Daws Butler. Just as in Avery cartoons, the parts he once did himself probably went to Butler or Don Messick in the '50s.
This isn't a trend that lasted, since the non-professional voice actor actually came back -- mostly in TV animation. (Bill Scott didn't get to do much voice work at Warners or UPA, though he did get to do the funny-animal voices in the UPA cartoon sequence in the movie The Girl Next Door. But in television, he became as prolific an actor as he was a writer.) I just wanted to make a note that there does appear to have been an "actors act, writers write" idea in the later years of theatrical short cartoons.
Here's my favorite Mike Maltese voice job, in 1948's "A Feather in His Hare" (though the first sounds the character utters are not from Maltese but Mel Blanc, who was called upon to do the screaming).
Thinking about this, I recalled that Tex Avery was another cartoonist/performer who didn't do much voice work after about 1950. So it may have been an actual trend at the time, toward a more professional approach to the art of voice acting. Thanks to Mel Blanc and others, voice acting had already become much more of a profession than it had been in the early days of sound cartoons, when voices were as likely to be performed by an animator or writer as by a full-time actor. In the late '40s into the '50s, it seems like the studios shifted even more strongly toward hiring professional actors for everything. So if there was a small male part at Warner Brothers that Mel Blanc wasn't doing, it might have gone to Pierce or Maltese in the '40s -- but in the '50s, it would have gone to Stan Freberg or, later, Daws Butler. Just as in Avery cartoons, the parts he once did himself probably went to Butler or Don Messick in the '50s.
This isn't a trend that lasted, since the non-professional voice actor actually came back -- mostly in TV animation. (Bill Scott didn't get to do much voice work at Warners or UPA, though he did get to do the funny-animal voices in the UPA cartoon sequence in the movie The Girl Next Door. But in television, he became as prolific an actor as he was a writer.) I just wanted to make a note that there does appear to have been an "actors act, writers write" idea in the later years of theatrical short cartoons.
Here's my favorite Mike Maltese voice job, in 1948's "A Feather in His Hare" (though the first sounds the character utters are not from Maltese but Mel Blanc, who was called upon to do the screaming).
Friday, January 14, 2011
The Art of the Orchestrator
Update: This post is sort of an example of why one shouldn't post in too much of a hurry -- the post is likely to contain some assumptions that haven't really been thought through. Noel Katz explains in comments why the post below is probably based on incorrect assumptions.
----
Speaking of musicals, again: orchestration has always been one of the aspects of musical theatre that I've been most interested in. I always used to look at the cast album to see who the orchestrator was, and formed a very vague idea of what different orchestrators' "sounds" were. I later found out that the idea was even more vague than I knew, since nearly all orchestrators had to use uncredited help, sometimes just for incidental music, but sometimes for major numbers. Steven Suskin's recent book "The Sound of Broadway Music" was the first to give a comprehensive idea of who orchestrated what on each show, which finally made it possible to discuss individual styles with any accuracy.
What the book doesn't fully explain -- it spends some time on that, but maybe not as much as I hoped -- is how much actual composing an orchestrator does. If you listen to a song on a demo recording, before the orchestration is done, and then listen to the final version, there's often a lot of musical material that the composer didn't put into the melody or the accompaniment. Bits of orchestral commentary between the stanzas, countermelodies, even quotations from other composers (the orchestrator of A Little Night Music, Jonathan Tunick, threw in a quote from Rosenkavalier as an in-joke near the end of the first act). Some of the additional musical ideas in these arrangements probably come from others -- the dance arranger, or the composer's assistant, and maybe sometimes even the composer himself. (Sometimes it's the conductor: on Li'l Abner the conductor, Lehman Engel, got a credit for "musical continuity" for writing everything except the actual tunes.) But at least part of an orchestrator's job seems to be adding to the song, rather than just arranging it as it appears in the rough piano version.
Here's a random example, just because a piano demo happens to exist. This song from Stephen Sondheim's Anyone Can Whistle is supposed to be sung by an uptight nurse pretending, unconvincingly, to be a French seductress and trying to seduce a mental patient who's pretending to be a doctor. It was that kind of show. I don't think much of the song except for one line: "I like your, 'ow you say, imperturbable perspicacity." Though that one line is so good it makes the whole song worthwhile.
And here's the song in the orchestrated version by Don Walker. Walker is probably my favorite Broadway orchestrator, even though many songs he's credited with were actually ghosted by others. (He took on so many shows in the '50s that he adopted a "factory" system, hiring multiple assistants and farming multiple numbers out to them. By the '60s, his assistants were off doing their own shows, and he reduced his workload.) He started with a reputation as a jazzy orchestrator, and mostly did musical comedies in the '40s and '50s, but what he loved best was lush, romantic shows that allowed him to conjure up a unique sound-world: among his favorite jobs were Carousel, Most Happy Fella and She Loves Me.
Anyone Can Whistle was Walker's only show for Sondheim, and he apparently thought that the score was needlessly complicated. The former Walker assistants who orchestrated Funny Thing Happened On the Way To the Forum felt the same way: Irwin Kostal is quoted in The Sound of Broadway Music that Sondheim nearly ruined "Love, I Hear" by giving him a sketch with pointlessly complex accompaniment and insisting that all his accompaniment ideas be used in the orchestration. (Luckily, Leonard Bernstein heard the arrangement during previews and bawled Sondheim out for it, shaming him into changing it: "Who do you think you are? Me?") By the time Sondheim emerged as a successful composer with Company he had improved a lot as a composer, or at least figured out how to make his clever ideas feel organic to the song. His later success as a composer naturally reflects back on his early work, but I don't think Anyone Can Whistle is as good a score as many that were being written in the early '60s.
In the case of the Whistle number, anyway, Walker and the dance arranger (who I'm assuming is responsible for some of the ideas in the dance breaks at least) don't change much about the music. It's more a question of trying to liven it up and support two performers who aren't really singers (Lee Remick and Harry Guardino), finding different "fills" and decorations for each stanza, to give each repetition the feeling of being somehow different in color and tone from the one that came before it. The overall effect is to make Sondheim's music sound more conventionally Broadway, but that's what this number needs to make it work.
The other thing about Walker's work here is how he pulls off a very strange choice of instrumentation. Forum was one of a few shows without violins, but Walker here went his trainees one better and also cut out violas -- the string section consists of five cellos, plus a bass. He handles this so well that you hardly notice the absence of higher string instruments, but it gives a subconscious dark, creepy feel to the whole show.
----
Speaking of musicals, again: orchestration has always been one of the aspects of musical theatre that I've been most interested in. I always used to look at the cast album to see who the orchestrator was, and formed a very vague idea of what different orchestrators' "sounds" were. I later found out that the idea was even more vague than I knew, since nearly all orchestrators had to use uncredited help, sometimes just for incidental music, but sometimes for major numbers. Steven Suskin's recent book "The Sound of Broadway Music" was the first to give a comprehensive idea of who orchestrated what on each show, which finally made it possible to discuss individual styles with any accuracy.
What the book doesn't fully explain -- it spends some time on that, but maybe not as much as I hoped -- is how much actual composing an orchestrator does. If you listen to a song on a demo recording, before the orchestration is done, and then listen to the final version, there's often a lot of musical material that the composer didn't put into the melody or the accompaniment. Bits of orchestral commentary between the stanzas, countermelodies, even quotations from other composers (the orchestrator of A Little Night Music, Jonathan Tunick, threw in a quote from Rosenkavalier as an in-joke near the end of the first act). Some of the additional musical ideas in these arrangements probably come from others -- the dance arranger, or the composer's assistant, and maybe sometimes even the composer himself. (Sometimes it's the conductor: on Li'l Abner the conductor, Lehman Engel, got a credit for "musical continuity" for writing everything except the actual tunes.) But at least part of an orchestrator's job seems to be adding to the song, rather than just arranging it as it appears in the rough piano version.
Here's a random example, just because a piano demo happens to exist. This song from Stephen Sondheim's Anyone Can Whistle is supposed to be sung by an uptight nurse pretending, unconvincingly, to be a French seductress and trying to seduce a mental patient who's pretending to be a doctor. It was that kind of show. I don't think much of the song except for one line: "I like your, 'ow you say, imperturbable perspicacity." Though that one line is so good it makes the whole song worthwhile.
And here's the song in the orchestrated version by Don Walker. Walker is probably my favorite Broadway orchestrator, even though many songs he's credited with were actually ghosted by others. (He took on so many shows in the '50s that he adopted a "factory" system, hiring multiple assistants and farming multiple numbers out to them. By the '60s, his assistants were off doing their own shows, and he reduced his workload.) He started with a reputation as a jazzy orchestrator, and mostly did musical comedies in the '40s and '50s, but what he loved best was lush, romantic shows that allowed him to conjure up a unique sound-world: among his favorite jobs were Carousel, Most Happy Fella and She Loves Me.
Anyone Can Whistle was Walker's only show for Sondheim, and he apparently thought that the score was needlessly complicated. The former Walker assistants who orchestrated Funny Thing Happened On the Way To the Forum felt the same way: Irwin Kostal is quoted in The Sound of Broadway Music that Sondheim nearly ruined "Love, I Hear" by giving him a sketch with pointlessly complex accompaniment and insisting that all his accompaniment ideas be used in the orchestration. (Luckily, Leonard Bernstein heard the arrangement during previews and bawled Sondheim out for it, shaming him into changing it: "Who do you think you are? Me?") By the time Sondheim emerged as a successful composer with Company he had improved a lot as a composer, or at least figured out how to make his clever ideas feel organic to the song. His later success as a composer naturally reflects back on his early work, but I don't think Anyone Can Whistle is as good a score as many that were being written in the early '60s.
In the case of the Whistle number, anyway, Walker and the dance arranger (who I'm assuming is responsible for some of the ideas in the dance breaks at least) don't change much about the music. It's more a question of trying to liven it up and support two performers who aren't really singers (Lee Remick and Harry Guardino), finding different "fills" and decorations for each stanza, to give each repetition the feeling of being somehow different in color and tone from the one that came before it. The overall effect is to make Sondheim's music sound more conventionally Broadway, but that's what this number needs to make it work.
The other thing about Walker's work here is how he pulls off a very strange choice of instrumentation. Forum was one of a few shows without violins, but Walker here went his trainees one better and also cut out violas -- the string section consists of five cellos, plus a bass. He handles this so well that you hardly notice the absence of higher string instruments, but it gives a subconscious dark, creepy feel to the whole show.
Thursday, January 13, 2011
Liv Ullmann Sings!
The latest find at Bluegobo.com is from Richard Rodgers' last musical, I Remember Mama. This was a natural subject for a musical, and since Rodgers and Hammerstein actually produced the John Van Druten play, they must have at least considered doing it as a musical.
The show got poor reviews and ran into lots of trouble out of town (leading to the firing of Martin Charnin as both lyricist and director), and this Tony performance certainly suggests it was not a very good show. It's not just that it's old-fashioned, but it's rote old-fashioned, going through all the tricks of the Rodgers and Hammerstein style musical -- the chirpy line delivery, the broad gestures, the device of having a dialogue interlude that gives a new context to the song when it's repeated. (Mama sings that you can achieve anything by giving "a little bit more"; in dialogue, the family works out a way to get extra money by doing just that; in a reprise of the same song, they celebrate their success in giving a little bit more.) The style of the show appears to have been somewhere between Annie, which the lyricist and book writer had just done, and The Sound of Music.
Liv Ullmann was the star, and she doesn't seem as bad as the reviews suggested. There have been lots of non-singing movie stars who did musicals, and she's by no means the worst; she actually tries to sing the notes. And at least she's the one acting, instead of just gesturing.
The other redeeming feature is Rodgers' music. His work in the last decade of life shows a definite falling-off in inspiration (few people have ever written a great musical after the age of 70, unfortunately). This is not a melody to compare with anything he wrote from the '20s through the '60s, and it feels like the composer imitating himself. But the musical style is still so unmistakably Rodgers, so right for the situation, that I almost feel like it would work better as an instrumental, without the drab, imitation-Hammerstein lyrics. (These lyrics are by Ray Jessel, a TV writer and Broadway composer-lyricist who was brought in to write with Rodgers after Charnin was fired.) The lyrics try to lecture us on never giving up hope and striving, but the music sells the idea much better than the words do.
The show got poor reviews and ran into lots of trouble out of town (leading to the firing of Martin Charnin as both lyricist and director), and this Tony performance certainly suggests it was not a very good show. It's not just that it's old-fashioned, but it's rote old-fashioned, going through all the tricks of the Rodgers and Hammerstein style musical -- the chirpy line delivery, the broad gestures, the device of having a dialogue interlude that gives a new context to the song when it's repeated. (Mama sings that you can achieve anything by giving "a little bit more"; in dialogue, the family works out a way to get extra money by doing just that; in a reprise of the same song, they celebrate their success in giving a little bit more.) The style of the show appears to have been somewhere between Annie, which the lyricist and book writer had just done, and The Sound of Music.
Liv Ullmann was the star, and she doesn't seem as bad as the reviews suggested. There have been lots of non-singing movie stars who did musicals, and she's by no means the worst; she actually tries to sing the notes. And at least she's the one acting, instead of just gesturing.
The other redeeming feature is Rodgers' music. His work in the last decade of life shows a definite falling-off in inspiration (few people have ever written a great musical after the age of 70, unfortunately). This is not a melody to compare with anything he wrote from the '20s through the '60s, and it feels like the composer imitating himself. But the musical style is still so unmistakably Rodgers, so right for the situation, that I almost feel like it would work better as an instrumental, without the drab, imitation-Hammerstein lyrics. (These lyrics are by Ray Jessel, a TV writer and Broadway composer-lyricist who was brought in to write with Rodgers after Charnin was fired.) The lyrics try to lecture us on never giving up hope and striving, but the music sells the idea much better than the words do.
Sunday, December 26, 2010
Department of Things I Should Remember But Don't
Does anybody recall which Warner Brothers cartoons used the song "A Gal in Calico" on the soundtrack? I know at least one of them did -- I even remember the arrangement -- but the name of the cartoon I heard it in escapes me for the moment.
The song, by Arthur Schwartz (music) and Leo Robin (lyrics) was the biggest hit from Warners' 1946 musical The Time, the Place and the Girl (another successful song, "A Rainy Night In Rio," was famously sung by Bugs Bunny in "Long-Haired Hare"). Warner Brothers tended to have rather good original songs in its musicals -- think of Schwartz and Frank Loesser's terrific score for Thank Your Lucky Stars, or the batch of fine Jule Styne/Sammy Cahn songs in Doris Day's star-making Romance on the High Seas -- though they were weaker than most of the other studios when it came to staging musical numbers; after Busby Berkeley left, they rarely had directors and choreographers who could do more than just make the number look like a replica of a middling stage play that never existed.
The movie is also a reminder that Jack Carson and Dennis Morgan were the studio's big musical stars until Day came along. Which is another sign of a studio that doesn't quite have the roster it needs to put together top-flight musicals: Morgan and Carson were pleasant personalities, but not really above-the-title stars on the level of the people the other studios could offer. It seems that until they started investing heavily in stage musical adaptations (see below) Warners didn't really put a high premium on the production of musicals after Berkeley left (and with occasional exceptions like Yankee Doodle Dandy and the Gershwin and Porter biopics); stars who were good musical performers, like Ann Sheridan, Jane Wyman and James Cagney, were (mostly) kept away from musicals. (Carson and Morgan were in non-musicals too, but in non-musicals it was made clear that they were not major stars.) Things were different at Fox, which would star an actor in both musicals and non-musicals if he could sing (Don Ameche) and even if he couldn't (Tyrone Power).
Update: I guess posting this was what I needed to jog my memory, because now I remember the cartoon that used this song: "Slick Hare," which came out less than a year after the movie did. It might have been one of those cases where Stalling was tipped off about a potential hit song from a movie that hadn't actually been released (or maybe even finished) yet.
I'm sorry about the idiotic captions the uploader has inserted into the cartoon (just as "A Gal In Calico" starts to play, yet) but it was the only upload I could find on YouTube.
The song, by Arthur Schwartz (music) and Leo Robin (lyrics) was the biggest hit from Warners' 1946 musical The Time, the Place and the Girl (another successful song, "A Rainy Night In Rio," was famously sung by Bugs Bunny in "Long-Haired Hare"). Warner Brothers tended to have rather good original songs in its musicals -- think of Schwartz and Frank Loesser's terrific score for Thank Your Lucky Stars, or the batch of fine Jule Styne/Sammy Cahn songs in Doris Day's star-making Romance on the High Seas -- though they were weaker than most of the other studios when it came to staging musical numbers; after Busby Berkeley left, they rarely had directors and choreographers who could do more than just make the number look like a replica of a middling stage play that never existed.
The movie is also a reminder that Jack Carson and Dennis Morgan were the studio's big musical stars until Day came along. Which is another sign of a studio that doesn't quite have the roster it needs to put together top-flight musicals: Morgan and Carson were pleasant personalities, but not really above-the-title stars on the level of the people the other studios could offer. It seems that until they started investing heavily in stage musical adaptations (see below) Warners didn't really put a high premium on the production of musicals after Berkeley left (and with occasional exceptions like Yankee Doodle Dandy and the Gershwin and Porter biopics); stars who were good musical performers, like Ann Sheridan, Jane Wyman and James Cagney, were (mostly) kept away from musicals. (Carson and Morgan were in non-musicals too, but in non-musicals it was made clear that they were not major stars.) Things were different at Fox, which would star an actor in both musicals and non-musicals if he could sing (Don Ameche) and even if he couldn't (Tyrone Power).
Update: I guess posting this was what I needed to jog my memory, because now I remember the cartoon that used this song: "Slick Hare," which came out less than a year after the movie did. It might have been one of those cases where Stalling was tipped off about a potential hit song from a movie that hadn't actually been released (or maybe even finished) yet.
I'm sorry about the idiotic captions the uploader has inserted into the cartoon (just as "A Gal In Calico" starts to play, yet) but it was the only upload I could find on YouTube.
Friday, December 10, 2010
Jack Warner and Stage Adaptations
The Man Who Came to Dinner is on as I write, an adaptation of a stage play that sticks as close to the original as a movie can get away with: though it "opens up" the play by adding some outdoor scenes or moving some scenes to different rooms in the house, it carries over large chunks of the play unchanged, and doesn't try that hard to disguise the fact that the whole play (like most stage comedies of the era) took place on a single set.
I'm not saying this to criticize the movie, just to make an observation about stage adaptations from this studio, Warner Brothers: it seems to me like when Jack Warner bought a play, he preferred to adapt it for the screen with as few changes as possible. At WB in the '40s, '50s and '60s, Broadway-to-Hollywood adaptations often included a relative minimum of changes to the structure or story of the original play, and frequently used people from the original production.
The same year as Dinner, WB also adapted James Thurber and Elliott Nugent's play The Male Animal. While this adaptation was tinkered with more than most (the ending was changed to something more upbeat), a lot of it is very faithful, and Warner hired the play's original writer and star, Elliott Nugent, to direct the film. The Voice of the Turtle, also based on a play that starred Nugent, has to do some rewrites because of censorship, but is still pretty recognizably a filmed play.
Then you have the '50s Warner productions that are almost like co-productions with the original Broadway production. It started with A Streetcar Named Desire: same director as the original, much of the same cast, with one principal role (Blanche) re-cast with a movie star. This pattern was used in the two George Abbott adaptations, The Pajama Game and Damn Yankees: everybody from the Broadway show except one star. (I hate to say it, but Pajama Game might be better off if more of the Broadway cast had been replaced. John Raitt and Carol Haney don't come off well on the screen.) When director Mervyn LeRoy came back to Warner Brothers, most of his work was on extremely stagey stage adaptations like Gypsy and Mary, Mary.
There are some WB stage adaptations that take bigger liberties. Arsenic and Old Lace makes some real changes to the play, probably because the director, Frank Capra, had more say over the script. But on the other hand, when Alfred Hitchcock made Rope and Dial M For Murder for Warners he didn't even bother including the obligatory outdoor scenes.
Other studios had a range of attitudes about how to adapt a play. MGM tended to be pretty faithful to stage plays (especially if George Cukor was directing) and less faithful to musicals. While over at Fox, wholesale rewriting was often the rule -- look at Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which has almost nothing to do with the play. Compare Warner's My Fair Lady to Fox's The Sound of Music the following year. The former uses almost the same exact script as the original play, all of the same songs, and even similar sets and costumes. The Sound of Music, even before the director came onto the project, had been rewritten and re-shaped quite a bit.
That this was a Warner preference seems to be confirmed by his biggest project after he left his studio: He may have decided to re-cut 1776, but it was also his decision to do most of it on one set with most of the original Broadway cast.
I don't know if this preference for more-or-less faithful adaptations is addressed in any Warner biographies. It might just be part of his economy-mindedness: don't waste time adding things to a script that's already been successful, and don't build a lot of new sets or go outdoors more than necessary. When his lieutenant Hal Wallis went out on his own, he had an approach to stage adaptations that was a lot like Warner's (in Boeing Boeing and other such claustrophobic films based on successful plays), so it might be part of the whole studio's aesthetic.
Monday, December 06, 2010
Jon D'Agostino
As the local Archie buff I should say something about the death of artist, inker and letterer Jon D'Agostino. His best-known credit is probably lettering the first Spider-Man story. He also did a lot of work as a penciller, including Charlton's Archie rip-off "Freddy." But his most distinctive and interesting work came after he joined the exodus to Archie -- following Dan DeCarlo but preceding his Marvel trainee Stan Goldberg -- where he mostly worked as an inker.
D'Agostino's inking style is similar to, though just distinguishable from, that of his friend Joe Sinnott; in fact, Sinnott spent several years moonlighting at Archie, picking up some of D'Agostino's workload and inking some of D'Agostino's own pencils. I have trouble describing it technically, but it's distinguished by a very solid and slick look, a less cartoony approach than most humor-comics inkers took.
The artist D'Agostino inked most frequently was Goldberg, whose pencils can sometimes be unsteady or "swimmy" because he works so fast. (Al Hartley was the same way. Dan DeCarlo was the only one of the ex-Marvel guys who could produce consistently good-looking work while turning out that much material, and he's the only one of them whose work looked more or less the same no matter who was inking.) With D'Agostino, Goldberg's art never looked that way, because he polished it up and gave it a sense of weight.
D'Agostino was Goldberg's main inker on most of the crazy adventure stories in Life With Archie and Archie at Riverdale High did in the '70s and '80s. He also inked for Gene Colan on the equally bizarre Jughead's Time Police, and for Bob Bolling on a number of stories (making Bolling's pencils look astonishingly like Goldberg's).
Here is an excerpt from one of the stories from perhaps the weirdest of the many weird experiments at Archie in the '70s: the attempt to transform Betty and Me into a soap-opera parody in the style of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. Frank Doyle did the writing as usual (having characters repeat stuff we already read in the captions was a joke he got mileage out of for 45 years), Goldberg did all the pencils, and D'Agostino did all the inks.
D'Agostino's inking style is similar to, though just distinguishable from, that of his friend Joe Sinnott; in fact, Sinnott spent several years moonlighting at Archie, picking up some of D'Agostino's workload and inking some of D'Agostino's own pencils. I have trouble describing it technically, but it's distinguished by a very solid and slick look, a less cartoony approach than most humor-comics inkers took.
The artist D'Agostino inked most frequently was Goldberg, whose pencils can sometimes be unsteady or "swimmy" because he works so fast. (Al Hartley was the same way. Dan DeCarlo was the only one of the ex-Marvel guys who could produce consistently good-looking work while turning out that much material, and he's the only one of them whose work looked more or less the same no matter who was inking.) With D'Agostino, Goldberg's art never looked that way, because he polished it up and gave it a sense of weight.
D'Agostino was Goldberg's main inker on most of the crazy adventure stories in Life With Archie and Archie at Riverdale High did in the '70s and '80s. He also inked for Gene Colan on the equally bizarre Jughead's Time Police, and for Bob Bolling on a number of stories (making Bolling's pencils look astonishingly like Goldberg's).
Here is an excerpt from one of the stories from perhaps the weirdest of the many weird experiments at Archie in the '70s: the attempt to transform Betty and Me into a soap-opera parody in the style of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. Frank Doyle did the writing as usual (having characters repeat stuff we already read in the captions was a joke he got mileage out of for 45 years), Goldberg did all the pencils, and D'Agostino did all the inks.
Thursday, November 25, 2010
Happy Non-Canadian Thanksgiving
Generally, I like cynical or at least disatrous Thanksgiving stories better than sentimental ones, and I prefer present-day Thanksgiving stories to stories of the Pilgrims. So it's no wonder I've always liked Art Davis's "Holiday For Drumsticks." Like a number of his cartoons it gets by more on the wackiness of the animation than the actual gags or the way they're timed, but that's fine. And the casually violent old hillbilly couple (both voiced by Mel Blanc) are really funny.
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Rescued From the Trunk
I recently got to talk to Hugh Martin (Meet Me In St. Louis and much more) on the occasion of his autobiography, which was quite a thrill for me. In preparation, I listened or re-listened to a few of his scores, and came away impressed as always by how talented he was in every area -- though because he could do so many things, he never produced as large a body of work as he might have if he'd stuck to songwriting. And of course many of his best songs were written for projects that didn't do well, though that's a common problem. "An Occasional Man," a song I've written about several times, appeared in a movie called The Girl Rush that Martin calls the worst he was ever involved with.
Another fine Hugh Martin-Ralph Blane score (mostly Martin, it seems) was written for a not-terrible but not-exactly-good movie called Athena, a typical product of mid-'50s MGM when they were starting to ease up on the musical business and basically burning off contracts for musical performers they'd signed up. Esther Williams conceived the story, of a girl from a family of fitness fanatics, as a vehicle for herself, and was upset when the studio took the story away from her and gave it to Jane Powell instead. The rest of the cast was a mix of regular MGM contractees (Debbie Reynolds) and new signings who never really worked out for the studio (Vic Damone, Edmund Purdom). It's a mess, but the score has two of Martin's best songs, the ballad "Love Can Change the Stars" and the uptempo "I Never Felt Better."
Another song, "Faster Than Sound," was cut from the final print of the film, though it turned up as a bonus on a soundtrack CD in the '90s. It was written for Damone, and it was a song about the Jet Set and the way air travel was making the world smaller (with a wink, in the verse, to the new promise of space travel). If it had made it into the film, it would have ranked as one of the best Jet Set songs of the era; unlike "Come Fly With Me," which is about using air travel to lend some spice to monogamy, "Faster Than Sound" is about the hedonism of the Jet Set life, where you can go anywhere, do anything, and lead multiple lives with multiple sexual partners. It's a male version of "An Occasional Man" in that way. I find Damone's performance a bit somnolent, which may help explain why it was cut -- it's a long song and he makes it sound long.
Martin liked the song and didn't want to lose it, so ten years later, when he wrote the musical High Spirits, he re-worked the song so it could be sung by Tammy Grimes' character to describe the joys of being a ghost. Apart from some transpositions and adjustments to the melodic line, the lyrics are revised to eliminate references to jet travel, and to reflect the fact that it's being sung by a woman.
The original version has the better orchestration, the second version has the snappier tempo (plus a Martin choral arrangement, which helps). But I don't think it really works as a song about a ghost, because it sort of kills the point of the song, as well as being at odds with the point of the show -- when Elvira sings about doing physical things and enjoying the company of men, that conflicts with the fact that she's trying to kill off her living husband so she can be together with him. (In one of the songs actually written for the show, she sings that "I'm merely thin air/When we're sharing a kiss.") So it's an awkward fit. I asked Martin about it, briefly, and he agreed that the original version was better.
But that's how "trunk songs" -- written for one show and used in another -- often work: the lyrics can be adjusted to fit the new show, but the point often winds up being awkward or not quite relevant. Which is why trunk material, very common in the '30s, became less and less common as shows became more integrated (Leonard Bernstein re-used a lot of unused music in West Side Story, but always with new lyrics).
Another fine Hugh Martin-Ralph Blane score (mostly Martin, it seems) was written for a not-terrible but not-exactly-good movie called Athena, a typical product of mid-'50s MGM when they were starting to ease up on the musical business and basically burning off contracts for musical performers they'd signed up. Esther Williams conceived the story, of a girl from a family of fitness fanatics, as a vehicle for herself, and was upset when the studio took the story away from her and gave it to Jane Powell instead. The rest of the cast was a mix of regular MGM contractees (Debbie Reynolds) and new signings who never really worked out for the studio (Vic Damone, Edmund Purdom). It's a mess, but the score has two of Martin's best songs, the ballad "Love Can Change the Stars" and the uptempo "I Never Felt Better."
Another song, "Faster Than Sound," was cut from the final print of the film, though it turned up as a bonus on a soundtrack CD in the '90s. It was written for Damone, and it was a song about the Jet Set and the way air travel was making the world smaller (with a wink, in the verse, to the new promise of space travel). If it had made it into the film, it would have ranked as one of the best Jet Set songs of the era; unlike "Come Fly With Me," which is about using air travel to lend some spice to monogamy, "Faster Than Sound" is about the hedonism of the Jet Set life, where you can go anywhere, do anything, and lead multiple lives with multiple sexual partners. It's a male version of "An Occasional Man" in that way. I find Damone's performance a bit somnolent, which may help explain why it was cut -- it's a long song and he makes it sound long.
Martin liked the song and didn't want to lose it, so ten years later, when he wrote the musical High Spirits, he re-worked the song so it could be sung by Tammy Grimes' character to describe the joys of being a ghost. Apart from some transpositions and adjustments to the melodic line, the lyrics are revised to eliminate references to jet travel, and to reflect the fact that it's being sung by a woman.
The original version has the better orchestration, the second version has the snappier tempo (plus a Martin choral arrangement, which helps). But I don't think it really works as a song about a ghost, because it sort of kills the point of the song, as well as being at odds with the point of the show -- when Elvira sings about doing physical things and enjoying the company of men, that conflicts with the fact that she's trying to kill off her living husband so she can be together with him. (In one of the songs actually written for the show, she sings that "I'm merely thin air/When we're sharing a kiss.") So it's an awkward fit. I asked Martin about it, briefly, and he agreed that the original version was better.
But that's how "trunk songs" -- written for one show and used in another -- often work: the lyrics can be adjusted to fit the new show, but the point often winds up being awkward or not quite relevant. Which is why trunk material, very common in the '30s, became less and less common as shows became more integrated (Leonard Bernstein re-used a lot of unused music in West Side Story, but always with new lyrics).
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Staging an Animated Song
I was looking at "Gay Purr-ee" again the other day, a movie that is less than the sum of its parts but will always have a following because the parts are so interesting (Judy Garland fans, Harold Arlen fans, Chuck Jones fans, and UPA fans can all find something of value in it even though it's none of those people's best work). One thing that occurred to me this time is that staging a song for animation can be surprisingly tricky.
The temptation in a cartoon musical, and one that Abe Levitow and Chuck Jones and the rest of the team didn't really avoid here, is just to illustrate the lyrics. So in the "Money Cat" song, there's a physical image to match most of the images in the lyric, including "bottle poppers" and having your "heart set" on something. It's like a live-action musical number where the singer acts out everything he or she sings about, and much of it is redundant: if they're singing about it, we don't need to see every bit of it illustrated.
This is a particular problem with these songs, because Yip Harburg was known for packing his lyrics with images that are at once very specific and hard to translate into physical terms -- in fact, that's arguably a problem with the score, that unlike Arlen and Harburg's songs for The Wizard of Oz, these songs don't have deceptively simple images and can seem over-sophisticated for a movie about talking cats. (In that they reflect the tone of the movie, which is also trying to load on more sophistication than the story can handle.)
If you compare the staging of "When I See an Elephant Fly," a song with (by its nature) lots of specific physical images, the crows don't act out a lot of the images -- and when they do act them out, it's in a simple way, by gesticulating; they don't contort themselves into the shape of baseball bats. The staging works with the song rather than just mimicking it.
Of course, to stage a song that way you more or less have to have full animation -- if the characters can't act in an individualized way, then they can't do much that isn't in the lyrics. With Gay Purr-ee, a movie that emphasizes layout and design over animation, the option to concentrate on acting and characterization may not have been available; certainly "Roses Red, Violets Blue" (an Arlen/Harburg song so typical of their work that I'm kind of amazed it was newly written for this film) seems a little lost when it comes to patches in the lyrics that don't led themselves to illustration -- when that happens, it's just Mewsette standing there and singing, or long shots of the countryside.
The temptation in a cartoon musical, and one that Abe Levitow and Chuck Jones and the rest of the team didn't really avoid here, is just to illustrate the lyrics. So in the "Money Cat" song, there's a physical image to match most of the images in the lyric, including "bottle poppers" and having your "heart set" on something. It's like a live-action musical number where the singer acts out everything he or she sings about, and much of it is redundant: if they're singing about it, we don't need to see every bit of it illustrated.
This is a particular problem with these songs, because Yip Harburg was known for packing his lyrics with images that are at once very specific and hard to translate into physical terms -- in fact, that's arguably a problem with the score, that unlike Arlen and Harburg's songs for The Wizard of Oz, these songs don't have deceptively simple images and can seem over-sophisticated for a movie about talking cats. (In that they reflect the tone of the movie, which is also trying to load on more sophistication than the story can handle.)
If you compare the staging of "When I See an Elephant Fly," a song with (by its nature) lots of specific physical images, the crows don't act out a lot of the images -- and when they do act them out, it's in a simple way, by gesticulating; they don't contort themselves into the shape of baseball bats. The staging works with the song rather than just mimicking it.
Of course, to stage a song that way you more or less have to have full animation -- if the characters can't act in an individualized way, then they can't do much that isn't in the lyrics. With Gay Purr-ee, a movie that emphasizes layout and design over animation, the option to concentrate on acting and characterization may not have been available; certainly "Roses Red, Violets Blue" (an Arlen/Harburg song so typical of their work that I'm kind of amazed it was newly written for this film) seems a little lost when it comes to patches in the lyrics that don't led themselves to illustration -- when that happens, it's just Mewsette standing there and singing, or long shots of the countryside.
Monday, November 15, 2010
An Uninformative Trailer
Thad knows (as do most people within earshot) how much I love Artists and Models, so I thank him profusely for uploading the trailer after he bought a copy off ebay; here's his own post about it.
As he notes, and as you can see below, the trailer doesn't really tell you much about the film. Most trailers try to oversell the story, but this does the exact opposite, leaving out most of the satire and all the crazy Cold War spy stuff from the last third. It even soft-pedals the film's status as a cheesecake calendar come to life, which you'd think would be the absolute first thing a trailer would want to play up -- but to do that, they would have had to include Eva Gabor in there, and she only appears once the spy plot starts up.
It makes me wonder if the missing plot points from the spy section, which I've written about before, might be a sign that they weren't even sure about including that part in the movie at all. With a few reshoots it would actually have been possible to create a different ending for the picture (maybe right after the title number at the ball). Or maybe not.
But I do get the impression the studio -- or Wallis -- thought the movie's weaknesses were concentrated in that final section, which would explain why it was allowed to go with several sequences written but not shot, and why it doesn't appear in the trailer. Many people agree that the movie falls apart once the spies come in, so they wouldn't have been far out if they had believed this, but I personally feel like the "fever dream" aspect of the film is enhanced by the fact that it gets crazier as it goes on, until by the end it resembles one of the nonsensical comic books that have destroyed Jerry Lewis's mind. That steadily increasing lunacy, after starting like a sort-of-normal Martin and Lewis movie, is one of the things that made it so influential for the French New Wave.
The trailer doesn't include any "outtakes" either - none of Shirley MacLaine's "The Bat Lady" number, which was described in some of the publicity (she was supposed to do it while "flying" on wires) but never seen, and possibly never shot at all. As I said, it's a long movie and it was over budget, despite being part of a series that was supposed to turn a big profit on relatively small investments (like Wallis's later series of Elvis movies, though those were even cheaper). It might be that they just ran out of money or time and pulled the plug on that musical number, as well as various plot points.
As he notes, and as you can see below, the trailer doesn't really tell you much about the film. Most trailers try to oversell the story, but this does the exact opposite, leaving out most of the satire and all the crazy Cold War spy stuff from the last third. It even soft-pedals the film's status as a cheesecake calendar come to life, which you'd think would be the absolute first thing a trailer would want to play up -- but to do that, they would have had to include Eva Gabor in there, and she only appears once the spy plot starts up.
It makes me wonder if the missing plot points from the spy section, which I've written about before, might be a sign that they weren't even sure about including that part in the movie at all. With a few reshoots it would actually have been possible to create a different ending for the picture (maybe right after the title number at the ball). Or maybe not.
But I do get the impression the studio -- or Wallis -- thought the movie's weaknesses were concentrated in that final section, which would explain why it was allowed to go with several sequences written but not shot, and why it doesn't appear in the trailer. Many people agree that the movie falls apart once the spies come in, so they wouldn't have been far out if they had believed this, but I personally feel like the "fever dream" aspect of the film is enhanced by the fact that it gets crazier as it goes on, until by the end it resembles one of the nonsensical comic books that have destroyed Jerry Lewis's mind. That steadily increasing lunacy, after starting like a sort-of-normal Martin and Lewis movie, is one of the things that made it so influential for the French New Wave.
The trailer doesn't include any "outtakes" either - none of Shirley MacLaine's "The Bat Lady" number, which was described in some of the publicity (she was supposed to do it while "flying" on wires) but never seen, and possibly never shot at all. As I said, it's a long movie and it was over budget, despite being part of a series that was supposed to turn a big profit on relatively small investments (like Wallis's later series of Elvis movies, though those were even cheaper). It might be that they just ran out of money or time and pulled the plug on that musical number, as well as various plot points.
Saturday, November 06, 2010
What About Paul Mazursky?
Sad about the death of Jill Clayburgh, who I really liked in An Unmarried Woman. She was one of a number of unlikely female stars of the '70s; a notoriously bad time for female leads in movies, the women who got those few juicy parts were often not larger-than-life personalities or stunning beauties, but performers like Clayburgh and Diane Keaton who seemed as close as movies get to presenting average, cute, charming people.
Since Unmarried Woman was probably her best role, the news gets me to thinking: why isn't the film's writer-director, Paul Mazursky, mentioned more often as one of the great directors of the '70s? Not that he's exactly forgotten; the L.A. Critics' Association just announced that they're going to present him with a lifetime achievement award. But when people talk about the '70s generation, I don't hear Mazursky's name come up very often, even though in my opinion he's one of the most interesting directors of that era. Maybe he suffers from the fact that his debut, Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, is probably his best-known film and one that's obviously dated (though no more so than the other seminal films of that year, like Easy Rider and Midnight Cowboy and even Wild Bunch).
But his '70s films are often quite wonderful and rarely less than interesting; unlike Woody Allen he has the gift of examining characters who aren't exactly like him, and character studies like Harry and Tonto and Unmarried Woman still work very well for me. And of course he was a fine director of actors. Art Carney won an Oscar for Harry and Tonto, yet hardly anybody talks about the movie, which I really like.
His career took a more commercial turn in the '80s and flamed out in the '90s, but neither of these things -- going Hollywood and burning out -- are unusual for directors of the '70s generation. (Some of his '80s films are pretty good; they're just slicker and more studio-ish -- more '80s, in other words.) Maybe his rather pompous public persona has obscured his moviemaking, but that hasn't stopped Peter Bogdanovich's early films from being appreciated. And the fact that he's a familiar presence as an actor might also get in the way of his reputation as a director, though I don't think this is a situation like with Sydney Pollack, who was genuinely more distinctive as an actor than director.
It may be that except for Bob & Carol he doesn't really have a "signature" film the way Allen had Annie Hall -- he could direct actors to Oscars and nominations but never got nominated for Best Director. But I think Mazursky is an uneven but important New Hollywood director whose work is waiting for a second look.
A Stan Goldberg Request
A reader asked me if I had this comic story, and I do: Reggie and Me # 28 (March 1968), an issue-length story that probably represents some of Stan Goldberg's earliest work for Archie comics. With Archie having crushed most of its humor competitors and Marvel phasing out its humor titles after the short-lived attempt to convert them to romance comics, Goldberg followed the Dan DeCarlo path and started to move from Millie the Model to Archie. Though he would continue to contribute to Millie and other Marvel titles for several hears, he asked Marvel to credit the art to Sol Brodsky so he wouldn't officially be moonlighting with them; in effect, he was part of the Archie stable from 1968 onward and has continued to be there to this day.
Around the same time that Goldberg came over from Marvel, Al Hartley also moved from Marvel to Archie, and for the same reason: the non-superhero work was drying up at Marvel and he wasn't a superhero artist. (Stan Lee tried Hartley on one Thor story, and it was clear that superpowered action was not his thing any more than teen hijinks were Steve Ditko's.) And also around this time, Archie editor Richard Goldwater decided to change the system for assigning covers: whereas each artist had usually gotten to do a certain number of covers, starting about 1967 Dan DeCarlo became the main cover artist for nearly all the company's major titles, no matter who was drawing the contents of the book. After they added some new titles, Goldberg was given a lot of covers too, presumably because his style was the closest to DeCarlo's. Other artists would only get to do a cover when DeCarlo or Goldberg simply weren't available. In fact I don't know that Samm Schwartz, who had done many covers in the '50s and '60s, ever got to do a cover for a single issue of Jughead after he came back in 1970; it was always DeCarlo or Goldberg.
So it's this period, 1967-8, that really created what is now thought of as the "Archie House Style," defined as the DeCarlo style. By giving the covers to DeCarlo and bringing over two of his Marvel colleagues, the Goldwater family was obviously trying to standardize the comics and give them an overall look. (The prolific veteran artists, Harry Lucey and Samm Schwartz, were "grandfathered," allowed to keep working in their accustomed styles; but new artists were apparently told to draw like DeCarlo.) Hartley certainly DeCarlo-ized his style a bit when he went to Archie; his Marvel style, on Patsy Walker, was more realistic and less cartoony.
Goldberg, of course, is a chameleon, someone who can always adapt to whatever style his company needs. When DeCarlo left Millie to work full-time at Archie, Stan Lee put Goldberg on the title, and he turned out work that was... not DeCarlo, not even a DeCarlo imitation exactly, but something close enough to make the reader feel like there hadn't been a change in style. When Millie went soap opera, Goldberg completely changed his style, only to change back when it went back to comedy. Like I said, a chameleon.
Back to Archie, though, the DeCarlo-ization of the style had its good and bad points. The good was that with Goldberg and Hartley on board, two men almost as fast as DeCarlo himself, Archie was able to meet the new demand created by a) the collapse of its competitors and b) the success of Filmation's cartoon series. (The Archie regulars were not generally as fast as the Marvel people. Harry Lucey was not slow, but according to Victor Gorelick, he wasn't a workaholic: he would do as many pages as he needed to get the amount of money he needed. Bob Bolling was, by his own admission, a slow and methodical worker.)
The problem from a comics fan's standpoint is that standardization is just that, standardization, and a comic isn't as much fun to look at when everybody's trying to draw like the one head guy. (This is also one of my problems with Harvey Comics, where everything -- with the exception of some of Ernie Colón's wilder stuff -- either is Warren Kremer or looks like Warren Kremer.) This is a much bigger problem for me in humor comics, where much of the fun and variety is in the drawing styles, than in superhero comics.
Another thing about the Marvel infusion was that it seemed to point up the Goldwater family's weakness at developing talent. I may be too harsh, since many comics companies had trouble adding to their talent base. It's like animation, for that matter: Warner Brothers cartoons depended almost completely on the talent base that Leon Schlesinger assembled in the '30s. And at Archie Comics, the talent base was primarily Harry Shorten's; as editor of MLJ/Archie, he brought in most of the important artists and writers. It wasn't a talent pool put together all at once; first there was Bob Montana, Harry Lucey, Samm Schwartz, Joe Edwards and Bill Vigoda -- the young men who joined in the '40s and created or developed the humor titles. Shorten hired Frank Doyle as a writer in 1951 (on the recommendation of another writer, Ray Gill) and got Dan DeCarlo on a part-time basis the same year. Finally he signed up Bob Bolling, Bob White and Dexter Taylor just before quitting, reportedly because John Goldwater refused to make him a partner.
When Richard Goldwater took over as editor, he clearly had some good ideas; in fact, the quality of the monthly titles probably improved overall under Goldwater's editorship. (Shorten treated them more as grab-bag titles, while Goldwater moved more toward giving each title its own regular artist and its own distinct look and feel: Betty and Veronica became DeCarlo's title, Archie became mostly Lucey's, and so on.) He also expanded the brand by introducing adventure titles (Life With Archie) and oddball humor (Mad House). But in terms of bringing in new talent, he doesn't seem to have had Shorten's track record, except on Mad House where he hired George Gladir to write and the young Orlando Busino to do a lot of the art. This is partly because superhero comics were taking off again and young artists were more interested in doing those. (Neal Adams was an Archie discovery, but he'd come there to work with Simon and Kirby on The Fly and only did the regular Archie pages after Simon wouldn't hire him. As soon as superhero work became available elsewhere, he took it.) But a lot of the new artists and writers who did emerge at Archie in the '60s and '70s were either mediocre (Dick Malmgren, Gus LeMoine) or DeCarlo clones (DeCarlo's son Dan Jr.). And so the Archie company was dependent on two talent pools -- Shorten's and Stan Lee's -- but didn't have new people coming in to freshen things up.
Now, the Goldberg story itself. Goldberg started out working mostly on low-selling titles, of which Reggie and Me was undoubtedly one of the lowest. (Poor Reggie; he's never really had a successful title of his own. Even Veronica now has her own reasonably popular title, and he doesn't.) They tried several things to make the title work, never really settling on a style for it; with this issue, the idea apparently was to do a book-length story, though it's really more four separate stories that happen to be linked.
The uncredited script is clearly the company workhorse Frank Doyle, though it's neither one of the best nor worst of his 10,000 Archie scripts. It's pretty standard stuff, maybe a little more campy than usual, and a few more puns than usual from a writer who wasn't usually very inclined toward puns. (A lot of Doyle's stories around this time were trying to be more over-the-top wacky, to respond to the success of campier, wackier entertainment, particularly on television.) I do like the line about "the Jolly Green Clyde," whatever that means, but otherwise the main point of interest is the Goldberg art.
That art as you'd expect based on his Millie work -- it's like DeCarlo except a bit looser and less slick. Plus the women are a little less voluptuous than in DeCarlo's art, and the men tend to hunch over a lot, like they have bad backs. Goldberg also sometimes draws the characters in circle instead of square panels, which he later stopped doing but which I like, since it's sort of a '50s throwback.
Here, for comparison, is the issue's cover, by DeCarlo:
And here's the story, by Goldberg:
Around the same time that Goldberg came over from Marvel, Al Hartley also moved from Marvel to Archie, and for the same reason: the non-superhero work was drying up at Marvel and he wasn't a superhero artist. (Stan Lee tried Hartley on one Thor story, and it was clear that superpowered action was not his thing any more than teen hijinks were Steve Ditko's.) And also around this time, Archie editor Richard Goldwater decided to change the system for assigning covers: whereas each artist had usually gotten to do a certain number of covers, starting about 1967 Dan DeCarlo became the main cover artist for nearly all the company's major titles, no matter who was drawing the contents of the book. After they added some new titles, Goldberg was given a lot of covers too, presumably because his style was the closest to DeCarlo's. Other artists would only get to do a cover when DeCarlo or Goldberg simply weren't available. In fact I don't know that Samm Schwartz, who had done many covers in the '50s and '60s, ever got to do a cover for a single issue of Jughead after he came back in 1970; it was always DeCarlo or Goldberg.
So it's this period, 1967-8, that really created what is now thought of as the "Archie House Style," defined as the DeCarlo style. By giving the covers to DeCarlo and bringing over two of his Marvel colleagues, the Goldwater family was obviously trying to standardize the comics and give them an overall look. (The prolific veteran artists, Harry Lucey and Samm Schwartz, were "grandfathered," allowed to keep working in their accustomed styles; but new artists were apparently told to draw like DeCarlo.) Hartley certainly DeCarlo-ized his style a bit when he went to Archie; his Marvel style, on Patsy Walker, was more realistic and less cartoony.
Goldberg, of course, is a chameleon, someone who can always adapt to whatever style his company needs. When DeCarlo left Millie to work full-time at Archie, Stan Lee put Goldberg on the title, and he turned out work that was... not DeCarlo, not even a DeCarlo imitation exactly, but something close enough to make the reader feel like there hadn't been a change in style. When Millie went soap opera, Goldberg completely changed his style, only to change back when it went back to comedy. Like I said, a chameleon.
Back to Archie, though, the DeCarlo-ization of the style had its good and bad points. The good was that with Goldberg and Hartley on board, two men almost as fast as DeCarlo himself, Archie was able to meet the new demand created by a) the collapse of its competitors and b) the success of Filmation's cartoon series. (The Archie regulars were not generally as fast as the Marvel people. Harry Lucey was not slow, but according to Victor Gorelick, he wasn't a workaholic: he would do as many pages as he needed to get the amount of money he needed. Bob Bolling was, by his own admission, a slow and methodical worker.)
The problem from a comics fan's standpoint is that standardization is just that, standardization, and a comic isn't as much fun to look at when everybody's trying to draw like the one head guy. (This is also one of my problems with Harvey Comics, where everything -- with the exception of some of Ernie Colón's wilder stuff -- either is Warren Kremer or looks like Warren Kremer.) This is a much bigger problem for me in humor comics, where much of the fun and variety is in the drawing styles, than in superhero comics.
Another thing about the Marvel infusion was that it seemed to point up the Goldwater family's weakness at developing talent. I may be too harsh, since many comics companies had trouble adding to their talent base. It's like animation, for that matter: Warner Brothers cartoons depended almost completely on the talent base that Leon Schlesinger assembled in the '30s. And at Archie Comics, the talent base was primarily Harry Shorten's; as editor of MLJ/Archie, he brought in most of the important artists and writers. It wasn't a talent pool put together all at once; first there was Bob Montana, Harry Lucey, Samm Schwartz, Joe Edwards and Bill Vigoda -- the young men who joined in the '40s and created or developed the humor titles. Shorten hired Frank Doyle as a writer in 1951 (on the recommendation of another writer, Ray Gill) and got Dan DeCarlo on a part-time basis the same year. Finally he signed up Bob Bolling, Bob White and Dexter Taylor just before quitting, reportedly because John Goldwater refused to make him a partner.
When Richard Goldwater took over as editor, he clearly had some good ideas; in fact, the quality of the monthly titles probably improved overall under Goldwater's editorship. (Shorten treated them more as grab-bag titles, while Goldwater moved more toward giving each title its own regular artist and its own distinct look and feel: Betty and Veronica became DeCarlo's title, Archie became mostly Lucey's, and so on.) He also expanded the brand by introducing adventure titles (Life With Archie) and oddball humor (Mad House). But in terms of bringing in new talent, he doesn't seem to have had Shorten's track record, except on Mad House where he hired George Gladir to write and the young Orlando Busino to do a lot of the art. This is partly because superhero comics were taking off again and young artists were more interested in doing those. (Neal Adams was an Archie discovery, but he'd come there to work with Simon and Kirby on The Fly and only did the regular Archie pages after Simon wouldn't hire him. As soon as superhero work became available elsewhere, he took it.) But a lot of the new artists and writers who did emerge at Archie in the '60s and '70s were either mediocre (Dick Malmgren, Gus LeMoine) or DeCarlo clones (DeCarlo's son Dan Jr.). And so the Archie company was dependent on two talent pools -- Shorten's and Stan Lee's -- but didn't have new people coming in to freshen things up.
Now, the Goldberg story itself. Goldberg started out working mostly on low-selling titles, of which Reggie and Me was undoubtedly one of the lowest. (Poor Reggie; he's never really had a successful title of his own. Even Veronica now has her own reasonably popular title, and he doesn't.) They tried several things to make the title work, never really settling on a style for it; with this issue, the idea apparently was to do a book-length story, though it's really more four separate stories that happen to be linked.
The uncredited script is clearly the company workhorse Frank Doyle, though it's neither one of the best nor worst of his 10,000 Archie scripts. It's pretty standard stuff, maybe a little more campy than usual, and a few more puns than usual from a writer who wasn't usually very inclined toward puns. (A lot of Doyle's stories around this time were trying to be more over-the-top wacky, to respond to the success of campier, wackier entertainment, particularly on television.) I do like the line about "the Jolly Green Clyde," whatever that means, but otherwise the main point of interest is the Goldberg art.
That art as you'd expect based on his Millie work -- it's like DeCarlo except a bit looser and less slick. Plus the women are a little less voluptuous than in DeCarlo's art, and the men tend to hunch over a lot, like they have bad backs. Goldberg also sometimes draws the characters in circle instead of square panels, which he later stopped doing but which I like, since it's sort of a '50s throwback.
Here, for comparison, is the issue's cover, by DeCarlo:
And here's the story, by Goldberg:
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