showbiz

STREET GANG: HOW WE GOT TO SESAME STREET: the origin story of an institution

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Caption: A scene from Marilyn Agrelo’s film STREET GANG: HOW WE GOT TO SESAME STREET. Courtesy of SFFILM

There’s a lot to like about Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street, a documentary as charming as the beloved TV series. As groundbreaking as it was, Sesame Street is now a 51-year-old institution, and its origin saga has not been well-known. Most of the key players survive, allowing director Marilyn Agrelo to present the first-hand back story.

We take the concept for granted today, based on the recognition that kids voraciously learn from commercial television – they learn to consume commercially marketed products. Sesame Street’s founders aimed to find out what kids like to watch and what is good for them to watch and put the two together.

Refreshingly. the pioneering producer Joan Ganz Cooney, the visionary Lloyd Morrisette of the Carnegie Foundation and the inventive director/head writer Jon Stone, each gives the credit to the others. If you add Mister Rogers to these folks, you have the Mount Rushmore of children’s television.

Everything in Sesame Street was intentional – like the street setting itself. Noting that most kid shows had fantasy settings, the creators chose a gritty urban neighborhood street to be relatable to disadvantaged urban kids. The same is true for the integrated cast.

Of course, Street Gang highlights the role of the Muppets. At first, the Muppets had their own set, but the creators learned that kids were so entertained by the Muppets that they found the street boring. So, they pivoted and brought the Muppets on to the street.

Jim Henson founded the Muppets as a late night satirical act and brought that adult sensibility to Sesame Street. The jokes embedded for adults encouraged parents to watch Sesame Street with their kids (which the educators thought was important).

There is also the astounding story of Sesame Street in Mississippi, where state government-controlled public television refused to air a show with an integrated cast. Those stations had to reverse themselves when private Mississippi stations put the show on the air.

This had not occurred to me, but Sesame Street requires creation of original music for 100 episodes per year – an enormous body of work. Street Gang takes us into the songwriting craft, with witty gems like Letter B (from Let It Be).

I screened Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street at SFFILM. It opens today in select San Francisco theaters and will release on VOD on May 6.

MAKING THE DAY: will anyone see his movie?

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Steven Randazzo (center) in MAKING THE DAY. Photo courtesy of MCM Creative.

In the showbiz comedy Making the Day, a no-longer-in-much-demand character actor (a brilliant Steven Randazzo) struggles to put together the financing for an independent film. Director and co-writer Michael Canzoniero, who is clearly familiar with this problem, begins with the titles “Much inspired by true events. The rest is improvised.”

Our sublimely earnest hero is trying to make a film about his beloved late wife. You just know that, not only is no one going to invest in this film, no one is going to want to see it. But he’s so driven to make his movie that he takes money from a very scary hood (whose primary cinematic interest is in laundering ill-gotten loot).

Things go awry and he needs even more money. A neurotic actress (Juliette Bennett) promises the money if she can star in the movie. Is she going to be ultimately more dangerous to the movie than the mobster? It’s a tossup.

The plot is kind of like an indie movie version of The Producers, only if Zero Mostel’s Max Bialystock were understated and sincere.

The core of Making the Day is the hangdog performance by Randazzo. His character’s sincerity and desperation are so genuine, that he’s the perfect counterpoint to all the screwballs surrounding him.

I screened Making the Day for its world premiere at Cinequest.

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN’S LETTER TO YOU: wiser and still vital

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The documentary Bruce Springsteen’s Letter to You, sometimes sage and sometimes exhilarating, is a companion movie to the latest studio album from Springsteen and the E Street Band.

This is an obvious MUST SEE for devoted Springsteen fans like The Wife. For everyone else, Bruce Springsteen’s Letter to You is worthwhile for Bruce’s comments (in narration and in song), the creative collaboration in the recording studio and the songs themselves.

Springsteen is now 71 and this film was shot a year-and-a-half-ago. He is frankly conscious of mortality, the explicit subject of two of the songs. I’ll See You in My Dreams is a heartbreaking call to friends who have passed. Last Man Standing came to Bruce when he found himself the sole survivor of his high school band, The Castiles. (BTW that’s a way cool band name for back when Ricardo Montalban was hawking “rich Corinthian leather”.)

Springsteen’s reflections bring poignancy without melancholy.

On the upbeat side, The Power of Prayer is about devotion and charismatic experience – but the kind we get from pop music. We recognize that this is from the songwriter of Girls in their Summer Clothes.

The best song IMO – and the hardest rocking – is Burnin’ Train. Turn up the volume and settle into Max Weinberg’s drumming and Garry Talent’s bass line. Sounds like an extremely tight band of 20-somethings.

In the studio, we get a glimpse into the collaborative aspect of songwriting and recording, where the musicians and producers get the charts and then start making suggestions about how to hone each song.

Writing rock music is usually a young person’s jam, with the best and the most productivity front-loaded in the earliest segments of songwriting careers. It’s remarkable that Springsteen still is imagining and forging such vital songs. And it’s remarkable that the E Street Band, almost all of them about 70, still can crush and shred.

Director Thom Zimny is Bruce’s personal filmmaker, and also made the fine HBO doc Elvis Presley: The Searcher. The quick cutting of the scenes in the recording studios allow us to miss the drudgery of repeated takes and highlight the sparks of creativity. The exterior shots of the winter-bare woods of rural New Jersey remind me of Alexander Payne’s Nebraska. This is a very handsome black-and-white film.

Bruce Springsteen’s Letter to You is streaming on AppleTV.

MANK: biting the hand

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Gary Oldman and Amanda Seyfried in MANK

David Fincher’s Mank is a black-and-white beauty of a film, a portrait of troubled talent in Classic Hollywood.

Mank is a character study of Herman J. Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman) as he pens his Oscar-winning screenplay for Citizen Kane. Mankiewicz was an Algonquin Round Table wit whose misfortune was that he despised the one thing that he excelled at. He was a master writer and fixer of Hollywood movie scripts, but he would rather have been in Manhattan trading bon mots with his peers in the intelligentsia. He particularly the industrial, ultra-commercial and course movie studio bosses and despised their politics.

It didn’t help that Mankiewicz was a raging alcoholic and compulsive gambler (although not a womanizer). He was so hard to handle that Orson Welles essentially imprisoned him at a remote California desert ranch to write Citizen Kane.

Mankiewicz had one unsurpassed idea for a script – the story of media mogul (and frustrated politician) William Randolph Hearst. Mankiewicz had been a frequent guest of Hearst and his companion Marion Davies at Hearst Castle. The problem is that telling this story would piss off the owner of the world’s biggest publicity machine and horrify the movie studio heads who employed screenwriters. And, most poignantly, it would betray Mankiewicz’s kind friend Marion Davies.

Mankiewicz had served as the court jester at Hearst Castle, and the term comes up repeatedly in Mank, most importantly in a cutting remark by Herman’s little brother Joseph Mankiewicz.

The Wife stayed with Mank and finished it, but she advised me that Mank is much more appealing to cinephiles who already know the “inside baseball” of the old movie studio system and the making of Citizen Kane. Indeed, when the likes of Louis B. Mayer, Ben Hecht, Joseph Mankiewicz, Irving Thalberg and John Houseman popped up, it instantly resonated with me.

The entire cast is excellent, but Amanda Seyfried is beyond great as Marion Davies. Charles Dance (coming off his Lord Mountbatten in The Crown) is perfect as William Randolph Hearst. Muckraker-turned-socialist-gubernatorial-candidate Upton Sinclair is played by…(wait for it)…Bill Nye the Science Guy.

David Fincher is one of our greatest directors (Se7en, Fight Club, Zodiac, The Social Network, Gone Girl). Fincher’s father Jack Fincher wrote the screnplay for Mank (and clearly shared Herman Mankiewicz’ acid view of the Hollywood hierarchy), so this is clearly a labor of love for David Fincher.

As a tribute to both Citizen Kane and the Golden Age of Hollywood, Mank is just gorgeous, as beautiful a black-and-white film as any directed by John Ford or shot by Sidney Toler, Nicholas Musuraca or John Alton. Mank’s cinematographer is Erik Messerschmidt (TV’s Mindhunter).

Mank is going on my list of Best Movies of 2020 – So Far. I see Oscar nominations coming for Fincher, Messerschmidt and Seyfried. Mank is streaming on Netflix.

STUNTWOMEN: THE UNTOLD HOLLYWOOD STORY – don’t wig a guy

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Michelle Rodriguez and Debbie Evans in StUNTWOMEN: THE UNTOLD HOLLYWOOD STORY. Photo Credit Shout! Factory

“Actresses play characters, but stuntwoman play actresses playing characters, while driving fast and kicking ass.”

That’s one of the professional movie stuntwomen summing up the business in the documentary Stuntwomen: The Untold Hollywood Story. Stunt performing and stunt coordinating are underappreciated by most of us – and certainly kept in the background by the industry (and the Oscars). It’s hard and dangerous enough to perform movie stunts, but females have also had to battle against persistent gender bias.

Stuntwomen: The Untold Hollywood Story takes us back to the first decade of silent films, when actresses did their own extreme stunts, until they became too valuable in box office terms to be expendable. At that point, women were frozen out of the stunt business for half a century. Michelle Rodriguez, who is currently our most kickass/badass actress, helps introduce us to today’s world of women who specialize in fighting, crashing cars, falling off great heights and getting set on fire.

We meet Jeannie Epper, who doubled Lynda Carter in Wonder Woman and Jadie David, who doubled Pam Grier in all those Blaxploitation action movies. (Epper fell backwards out of tall buildings, and then the film was reversed to create the effect of Wonder Woman zooming upwards.)

We also learn the meaning of “wigging a guy”. And we are reminded that stuntwomen often double actresses who are wearing high heels, and that skimpy outfits don’t allow for much protective padding.

This is solid women’s history and a great inside glimpse at the movie biz. Stuntwomen: The Untold Hollywood Story can be streamed from iTunes and Google Play.

GORDON LIGHTFOOT: IF YOU COULD READ MY MIND: no, I hadn’t though of him for decades, either

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Gordon Lightfoot in GORDON LIGHTFOOT: IF YOU COULD READ MY MIND

Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind is a surprisingly interesting documentary about a now genial singer-songwriter that I hadn’t thought of for decades.

The biodoc emphasizes Lightfoot’s talent as a songwriter and his importance to Canadian music scene. Just when it starts getting too reverential, the more lively tidbits from his career and personal life start rolling out.

Notably, the inspiration for the lyrics of Sundown is revealed:

I can see her lyin’ back in her satin dress

In a room where ya do what ya don’t confess

Sundown you better take care

If I find you been creepin’ ’round my back stairs

Amazingly, The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald was recorded not only on the first TAKE, but the on first time Lightfoot’s band had ever PLAYED the song.

Gordon Lightfoot in GORDON LIGHTFOOT: IF YOU COULD READ MY MIND

Physically unrecognizable from his hey day, the 81-year-old version of Lightfoot is pretty likeable. He is modest and irreverent about his own work (I hate that fuckin’ song). He is also grateful for his blessings, sober, open and regretful about the mistakes in his personal life.

Heck, I enjoyed spending an hour-and-a-half with the guy. Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind is available on Virtual Cinema; I watched it at the Laemmle.

THE GO-GO’S: five women doing what men do

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THE GO-GO’s. Photo courtesy of Showtime.

The infectious We Got the Beat by the Go-Go’s is fun itself, distilled into a song. The documentary The Go-Go’s tells the story of the all-female band.

There is a familiar arc to every documentary about a rock band. Scrappy and hungry musicians perform the music they love in obscurity, before being suddenly thrust into worldwide fame and more cash than they could have imagined. Then the bubble is burst by some combination of drug abuse, internal jealousy, creative differences, personality conflicts and fights over money. Usually the survivors look back with pride in the music, nostalgia about the good times and regrets that they didn’t handle it all with more maturity.

The Go-Go’s fits in that framework, to be sure, but it’s about women. The Go-Go’s have been the only all-female band to write their own music and play their own instruments ever to have a number one Billboard record. They achieved that in 1982, and it hasn’t been duplicated since.

All five Go-Go’s thankfully have survived and each shares her experiences in The Go-Go’s. They are an open, engaging and likeable lot.

There’s a tidbit about the gentlemanly class shown by The Police. And we learn why none of the Go-Go’s is proud of their appearance on Saturday Night Live.

This is a modest film about a singular moment in popular music. The Go-Go’s is available on Showtime.

MUCHO MUCHO AMOR: THE LEGEND OF WALTER MERCADO – gentleness and flamboyance

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Walter Mercado in MUCHO MUCHO AMOR: THE LEGEND OF WALTER MERCADO

Just about every Spanish speaker knows who Walter Mercado is – and almost no non-Spanish speaker has heard of him. To describe him as a TV astrologer is profoundly inadequate.

Decades ago, I was flipping through TV channels and happened upon Walter’s astrology show and found him mesmerizing. He was so UNUSUAL, that, late at night, I just couldn’t change the station. The documentary Mucho Mucho Amor: The Legend of Walter Mercado will explain the phenomenon better than I can describe it.

For one thing, 99% of the show’s production value must have been in costume cost. Walter just stood in front of the camera and recited horoscopes, but he was always clad in capes that Liberace and Elvis would have considered WAY over the top. And Walter, for all the machismo in traditional Latino culture, was what we call today non-binary; Walter emanated a singular combination of androgyny and asexuality.

In Mucho Mucho Amor: The Legend of Walter Mercado, we get to meet the elderly Mercado, and find out about his life before and after his 25-year reign as the Spanish language TV ratings king. And why he suddenly disappeared from television.

While often jaw-droppingly flamboyant, Walter possessed a serene gentleness and warm-hearted demeanor that makes this documentary a Feel Good experience. Mucho Mucho Amor: The Legend of Walter Mercado is streaming on Netflix.

BE NATURAL: THE UNTOLD STORY OF ALICE GUY-BLACHE: every cinephile should know this

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The documentary Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blache pulls us out of ignorance about one of the most important pioneers of cinema. Alice Guy was one of the first movie directors, one of the first producers and one of the first studio heads. She was one of the inventors of movie comedy, use of color, special effects and a host of other aspects of filmmaking that we take for granted today. She worked in all three centers of early filmmaking – Paris, Fort Lee, New Jersey and Hollywood. And she was a woman.

Alice Guy had been almost erased from history precisely because – and only because – she was a woman. But if we don’t know about Alice Guy, we are as ignorant as if we didn’t know about the Lumieres and D.W. Griffith. This is essential movie history.

Fortunately, more and more of her films are being rediscovered – found, properly credited and preserved. At the bottom of this post, you can watch one of her films, The Consequences of Feminism. I didn’t even know that the word “feminism” was extant 114 years ago, but the film still has #MeToo topicality. It’s a withering parody of gender roles and male entitlement. In the film, men and women have taken each others’ conventional gender roles. Men perform the thankless household drudgery while the women smoke, drink and play pool. Throughout, the women are outrageously sexually harassing the men, kind of like Mad Men in reverse. Of course, the men finally rebel at all the mistreatment.

Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blache is currently free on WATCH TCM and can be streamed from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

Here’s the entire seven minute film from 1906: The Consequences of Feminism:

https://youtu.be/nWrxSHnaUVU

Stream of the Week: SAMMY DAVIS, JR.: I’VE GOTTA BE ME – a needy talent through complicated times

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Still from SAMMY DAVIS JR.: I’VE GOTTA BE ME. Photo courtesy JFI.

Sammy Davis Jr.: I’ve Gotta Be Me is now available to stream (and free on Amazon Prime).  As a Baby Boomer who had dismissed Sammy Davis Jr. from the moment he publicly hugged Richard Nixon, I found this to be the most surprising doc (and my favorite) at last year’s San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. I learned that Sammy’s 61-year career as a professional entertainer began at age three (with his first movie credit at age 7), a working childhood that  left emotional needs  It turns out that Sammy was a very, very talented but needy artist,, an uncomplicated man navigating several very complicated times.

Sammy’s life of entertainment began at 3.  We get to see a clip of him in the 1933 Rufus Jones for President.  All that professional work took away his childhood and engraved upon him a need to please.  That and his generation produced the 50s showbiz style that seemed so insincere to us Baby Boomers.  And, of course that embrace of Nixon seemed to be the ultimate sell-out moment.

Sammy Davis Jr.: I’ve Gotta Be Me also poses whether he was demeaned by Rat Pack humor? Were Frank and Dino laughing at Sammy, or with him?

But this was  an immensely talented man, a masterful dancer with a remarkable crooner’s voice and a gift for mimicry.  He was the first American entertainer of color to do impersonations of white celebrities.   BTW there is some unbelievable dancing in Sammy Davis Jr.: I’ve Gotta Be Me.  We get to see Sammy’s 60th anniversary in showbiz celebrated among a host of celebrities – he still had his dancing chops.

Sammy Davis Jr.: I’ve Gotta Be Me is the story of a man whose success condemned him to a career that spanned generations – none of which fit him comfortably.  It’s a fine and insightful film. It can streamed on Amazon (included with Prime, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

[Random note: This film title may contain the most different punctuation marks of any movie title: a comma, a period, a colon and an apostrophe.]