We Are Movie Geeks

Review by Sam Moffitt

Jerry Lewis is a national treasure!  No, strike that, let me correct that…Jerry Lewis is a global treasure.  He belongs to the whole world and here is a documentary celebrating all things Jerry Lewis.  Tracing his career from the age of five when he first entered show business, (I am not kidding, he was raised in vaudeville and burlesque by his father and mother who were both performers!) to the present day.  Much time is devoted to his insane career with the late Dean Martin and his charity work for the Muscular Dystrophy Association.  We also see and hear a lot about his legendary run with Paramount Pictures in the 60s when he wrote, directed and starred in a series of box office hit comedies.

Be advised, this is not a warts and all portrait, Lewis himself is credited as the producer of this documentary!  Lewis haters will just nod and say “I told you so!”  Jerry Lewis is one of those divisive show business personalities that people either love or hate. For instance the addiction to percodan is mentioned only in passing, but we do hear the reason for the pain killers, he severely injured his back taking a fall when he was still working with Dean Martin.  There is no mention of the bizarre and often incoherent rants on the Labor Day telethons for muscular dystrophy and the many talk shows Lewis appeared on in the 60s and 70s.  There is no mention of the rumor, (not true, check snopes.com) that Lewis paid himself a good portion of the money taken in from the telethons.  No one connected with the Labor Day telethons got a penny, all of it went to charity.

We hear from a small army of current comics and actors, who all praise Jerry Lewis to the skies and rightfully so.  Lewis was the box office champ for most of the 50s and 60s.  He invented the video assist for shooting a movie, so he could see how a scene worked on a video monitor before deciding if a take should be printed. a system used now by all film directors.  I did not know that he taught film making at UCLA for 7 years!  Among his students who he mentored and helped get started in film making?  Steven Spielberg, Randall Kleiser, Martin Scorsese!

His 10 year, to the day, run with Dean Martin is especially amazing.  Eddie Murphy points out they were treated like rock stars, but rock and roll was not really happening yet!  Newsreel and television footage of their New York appearances show huge mobs of people in the street circling the hotel they stayed at while NYPD on horseback try to keep order.  Lewis points out their first week together, in 1946, the duo was paid 440.$, a little over 200$ apiece, which was not bad at all for 1946.  Eight weeks later (weeks) they were getting paid 40,000.$…..each!

We get a lot of coverage of his legendary run at Paramount in the 60s when he had creative control that Orson Welles could only dream of, the kind of control over content that Clint Eastwood and Steven Spielberg now take for granted, unheard of in the 60s!

Lewis kept his sound stage open!  Anyone who wanted to could come in and watch his films being shot, he had bleachers installed so people could be comfortable while they watched a genius at work.  Crafts and trades people at Paramount fought to get to work with Jerry Lewis. Character actors like Kathleen Freeman and Del Moore worked with him in picture after picture. The head of production at Paramount at that time, Barney Balaban told the press, “if Jerry wants to burn down the studio I’ll give him the match!”  His films brought in over 40 million dollars in one year alone, when the average ticket price was 50 cents!

This is simply an excellent documentary running almost 2 hours, loaded with people talking only good about Lewis, I will admit, but also loaded with clips, bloopers, deleted scenes, and behind the scenes footage of Lewis at work and performing.  I will be the first to admit that Jerry Lewis’ later films can be rough to watch, I’m thinking especially of Way, Way Out, Don’t Raise the Bridge, Lower the River, Hardly Working, and the movie almost nobody has seen, the notorious, unreleased, Day the Clown Cried. Jerry Lewis’ Holocaust comedy, which is never addressed in the documentary.  One comic missing is Martin Short who used to do a wicked impression of Jerry Lewis at his worst on Second City Network 90.

How do I feel about Jerry Lewis after watching this documentary?  I love him even more!  I can recall during the 70s there was a major back lash against Jerry Lewis.  I can recall hearing from a lot of people who hated him, with an insane rage that just didn’t make sense to me, then or now.  Partly it was the rumor about taking some of the charity money for MDA, some people never got over the break up with Dean Martin (we see the famous reconciliation on the 1976 telethon) and blamed Lewis for the break up.  Some people hate him because he is not only Jewish he talks about being Jewish, he is openly Jewish.  And some people just hate the level of success he had in the 60s, “let’s drag him down to our mediocre, mundane level!”

Just as an aside I never thought of Dean Martin as a “straight man”, he was a good comic in his own right.  I was happy that both of them had great careers after the infamous break up in 1956.  And as another aside, Lewis does talk about the very real fear that people had during his years with Dean Martin that there was something gay going on between them, which in itself is funny in my opinion!

I kept my mouth shut for years when the subject of Jerry Lewis came up and people would start to cut him down.  No more, to quote Woody Harrelson in this fine documentary, “if you don’t like Jerry Lewis we have nothing to talk about, you might as well leave the room!”   This is a terrific documentary about a wonderful, complicated, energetic, brilliant and sometimes troubled, (I will admit!) entertainer who never the less brought joy and laughter to millions of people, myself included.  And raised over 3 billion dollars, that’s 3,000,000,000.00$!!! for a worthwhile charity that does nothing but help people (and what have you done lately to help humanity?)  I feel good about myself if I hold the door open for somebody who has to walk with a cane or slow down so somebody can drive in front of my car to make a turn and not give them the finger, I cannot imagine having a 3 billion dollar impact on a disease!

This is a wonderful dvd, although it has no special features, technically this is a special feature all on its own, the next time you watch The Bellboy or the Nutty Professor watch this afterward, you’ll be glad you did!

And it doesn’t end there, for me this just got better and better!  My fiancé Radah and I watched the documentary Saturday night, January 12^th, 2014.  On Monday I saw in St. Petersburg’s newspaper that Jerry Lewis was appearing live in Sarasota, Florida, Tuesday the 14^th and in Lakeland, Florida, Thursday the 16^th.  The Lakeland show had the better price, Radah agreed to go with me, Lakeland is only about an hour’s drive from the Tampa Bay area…so we got to see Jerry Lewis, The Man himself, live and in person!  As Jerry says in his show, “it’s better than the alternative!”

Traffic was bad due to highway construction in Tampa but we got there ok and enjoyed about an hour and a half of Jerry Lewis live.  He has just turned 87 and so his show has no pratfalls, no dancing, a few jokes, but mostly he sits in a nice comfortable chair and just IS Jerry Lewis.  What we got was about 90 minutes of an elderly Jewish man reminiscing about a life time in show business.  Pure magic in other words!

I even got to speak with him!  Jerry Lewis does an audience q&a at all his performances.  I assumed he got the idea from Carol Burnett, no, Jerry Lewis first did audience q&a in 1955!  Carol Burnett got the idea from him!

When It came my turn to speak first I thanked him for all the work he has done, the movies, the tv shows, the telethons.  I admitted that his films, especially Cinderfella helped a lonely little kid, namely me, get through a rough child hood.  I called him by his real name, Mr. Levitch, the look on his face was priceless, I’ll always treasure that moment.

My question to him, after other people had asked him asinine things like, “I want to be a comedian, do you have any advice?”  Or “what’s your favorite movie of all of them that you’ve done?”

I told him I was not in show business but that I read a great deal about it, and that Carol Baker, the star of Harlow and Baby Doll, in her autobiography spoke very highly of Jerry Lewis when she also worked at Paramount.  I wasn’t able to tell Jerry everything Carol Baker said about him but I did mention she said he seemed to be everywhere at once, made the studio the happiest work place in the world and that one day, when she was taking a shower, at which point Jerry Lewis said “I don’t like where this is going!”  I told him, Carol Baker was taking a shower; Jerry Lewis jumped in with all his clothes on and mimed being a beautiful, naked woman taking a shower, which is what Carol Baker really was at that point in her career!  As another aside if you’re not familiar with Carol Baker, do a search, she really was a knockout and still works from time to time.

Jerry said “that sounds like something I would do back then!”  I had to ask “my question is, did that really happen and if so did you take advantage of the situation?”  He said that, no he did not take advantage of the situation, but that it was fun!   Before I left the microphone I told Jerry Lewis “God bless you sir!”  and he said “ bless you” to me as I walked away, Radah told me later I was the only person he said that to.

The real high point of that whole encounter?  I made Jerry Lewis laugh!  In fact he cracked up over my question more than anyone else’s, a priceless moment.

So I not only recommend the dvd, Madness to the Method of Jerry Lewis, but if Jerry Lewis should happen to come anywhere near where you live, go for God’s sake, it’ll be good for you!  He said he plans to be here until he’s 99, George Burns age when he left, but one never knows, with all the health problems he’s had it’s a miracle he still is doing what he does!

Now I have to go to the mall and scream “HEY LADY!!!!!!”