From Jerry Lewis' The Total Filmmaker

What follows is pasted from a pdf readily and freely available on-line. It is for a book that is out of print, a well-respected publication of Jerry Lewis about movie-making, mostly transcribed from recordings of his classes. I THE HUMANITIES OF FILM I'll tell you what I did to become a film-maker. I had this drive and I was curious. Of course, I was already a Jewish movie star and that helped get me on the lot. But in front of the camera, acting like a movie star. Not behind it~ Then one day at Paramount, long ago, I was missing. They found me crawling around up on a catwalk over the sound stage. I had to know if the catwalks, where the electricians and grips do things and sleep, were made of two-by-fours. Were they built on a temporary basis? How did they hang them? Next day, when I had a nine-o'clock shooting call, I was in the miniature department at eight, watching thirteen inch submarines being photographed for a Cary Grant picture, Destination Tokyo. I had to understand why that submarine looked full size on the screen. They told me to go over and see Chuck Sutter in the camera department. I was friendly with all the technical guys. Chuck showed me a twelve-inch lens and then showed me how they utilize it in the tank. Well, I didn't understand how they got the right dimensions on the sky and sea backings around the tank. It made it all look so real. Chuck sent me over to the transparency department to look at the backings. "Well, where do these backings come from?" "Well," some guy says. "They soot ' em, Then I went upstairs to see the artwork. It was almost nine-thirty when the assistant director found me. He requested, politely, for my ass to get back in front of the camera. Before the day was over, I was looking at generators out behind the recording building. Yes, generators! I'd heard about them. "How do they work? Where do you plug that in? 'What does that do? Who turns it?" Then I found out there is such a thing as an electrician. I shook his hand and bought him cigarettes. "Tell me things!" When I found out that all he did was throw a switch, I took back the cigarettes. Day after that, I saw the assistant director on the phone. "Tomorrow's call is ..." And I saw the penciled sheets. "Well, who's he calling?" "Oh, he's calling down there, the production department." I spent weeks in the production department. They could never find me. Or I was by the camera. "Why does that turn? How does it turn to what? Where does he get the pictures they make? Why does it see people in that part, but when it turns over, I see no people? I see a black thing. What's moving? That part in front is what? It's a glass piece? A prism. Oh, I see. And why does that boom go off and I can't step off it unless they give me permission because it will swing up. Well, why does it do that?" "Well, it's counterbalanced." "With what?" "Mercury." "Oh, mercury. I see. Well, why does he push it? And why doesn't the other guy?" "He can't. He's not in that union." Laugh! Hollow! Lights? "You have got to have all those lights?" "Yes. " "Why?" "Because you have to have four hundred footcandle." "Footcandle? You have candles you bring in with your feet?" "No, that's a light measurement." He's serious and so am I. So in about three years of that kind of running around I learned a little. It is not unlike medicine. The mystery of medicine, trying to cure and fix and find out the why, must he to doctors what film is to film-makers. They cannot start working their mystery until they have much more technical information than they ever really need. But it's there to be called on. Then the intangibles! What are they? How many? Can I teach the intangibles of film-making? Not really. Maybe the only answer is: How do you touch another man's soul? It might develop from that. Sit down and say, You're dealing with lovely human beings. Each one of them is an individual. Each one of them in his own right a lovely, important- to-someone human heing. Some will behave like turds, but you must try to understand why. As a film-maker, you will find them influencing your actions. Perhaps the key to the intangibles is intuition. Old instinct. Rut the touch question when dealing with people is: How do I know when I'm human enough? I'm going to use a word wrong because that's the way I want to use it, letting the language purists make funny noises and feel superior. The word I'm talking about is humanities. There is a great deal of confusion between humanism, which means a cultural attitude, and humanity, which really means a kindly disposition toward your fellow man. Well, for me the word humanities refers to the last definition-that important thing, that feeling of warmth and love and kindly disposition toward your fellow man, the way you look at him, feel about him, treat him, respect him and relate to him. No matter how you slice it, the most critical aspect of making films is dealing with people. Whether you think he's a hero or an occasional creep, you must have a rooting interest for the next guy and his reason for being on that sound stage. He's the key to your technical instrument. He can help you to be very good, or he can sabotage you. There are many technical-minded people, some hrilliant, in the industry who can't get a job. The ones who function best seem to be very human. They might not he as well qualified as the super-technician but they bring a tremendous insight to the material and its projection. So I maintain we're dealing in a humanities area just as critical, in its way, as open-heart surgery. I don't care how much technical information you have stored away, you blow the picture when you hlow the human end. Everything is going for you-beautiful setup, marvelous cast, wonderful sets, crew, et cetera. And then someone says, "Good luck. It's your first day. It's nine o'clock. Make your first shot." "Wha-wha-wha-wha!" Here he comes now! Here is Ray Milland and there is Ann Sothern! "Ah, Miss Sothern, I saw you on television and you were pretty shitty. Now, here's your first shot ..." Forget it. It's over. Burn the set. Forget it. "Mr. Milland, you look a little old tor this part, but we'll see what we can do." Out! It's over. Actors will kill for you if you treat them like human beings. You have to let them know you want them and need them; pay them what they want, but don't overpay them; treat them kindly. Give an actress a clean dress and see that she gets fresh coffee in the mornings, and other little spoon-feedings. She will kill for you. I once worked for a director who had a personality like Eva Braun's. I was doing a scene, a fall, and told him to forget the stunt man. "I'Il fall downstage. You're in a close angle and you're low. It'll be a rough cut for you. I'll do the fall." "Okay, great!" I wasn't doing it for him, really. I wanted it to work. Although in the end I suppose I was doing it for him because he'd have to cut the film. So I did it. "Perfect," he said. "Cut! Print!" He proceeds to the next setup while I'm cocked down with one leg hanging. The son-of-a-bitch didn't say "Thank you," or even nod his head. Just "Perfect." He lost me with that one scene, and never got me back. I did my funny faces, and took the money; wished him good luck, and lied about that. I guess I hurt myself, because the comedian on the screen wasn't very funny when the film was released. Frank Tashlin, on the other hand, was great at handling Jerry Lewis the comic. He has a feeling for people. Very possibly I learned more about the humanities of making films from Frank than I did from everyone else combined. He was a caring director. I realize that I am basically a miserable bastard on the sound stage. It comes from trying to be a perfectionist. If the toilet seat is left up, I faint. It's like Queeg and "\%0 ate the strawberries?" "Who left the toilet seat up?" To work for this kind of maniac, you have got to be some kind of dingaling. Yet I get the good dingalings film after film, and the rewards are great. I consciously root for them, and that is what it is all about. The relations with crew are not much different from the relations with actors. A strong feeling, for good or bad, n1l1S through a crew. They are as adult as I am, and as childish. They like to be "made-over" a bit. You are going to walk by a grip or electrician? What the hell is wrong in recognizing him? I've always done it, not so much for their comfort, but selfishly for mine. I'm more comfortable not hVing to turn my head away. If I don't know his name, I'll say something: "What right do you have to be working here, you dirty, lousy old ..." It is a wild goddamn but very understandable thing. You take a guy who is yawning away, and then suddenly make him special by saying, "How's it going? The first day's tough, right?" And he answers, "Yeh, but what the hell?" All of a sudden he's a tiger. "Hey, can I give you a hand here?" If a grip walks past me and says "Hi," but doesn't add "Jerry," I act offended, and it's not all acting. "Hey, how come I know your name, but you don't know mine. I'm the movie star." It works. I want that personal relationship. For years I've had a thing in my operation that I call fear extraction. The first thing I try to do with a new member of the staff is extract the fear that insecurity, God and Saint Peter handed down. 1 try to do it simply-tell him that I care, that I don't want to hurt him, that I want him to excel, to be happy. Then I'll be happy making what I love best, film. It works, too. One night on The Ladies Man I had to wrap up a sequence or it would have cost an additional hundred thousand. The crew knocked off at eight o' dock, went to dinner, and then came back to work until three in the morning to finish it. Two days passed before the unit manager told me that the J 16 technicians had all punched out at eight o'clock, and had dinner on their own time. They contributed the time between nine P.M. and three the next morning. Had they stayed on the overtime dock, it would have cost something around $50,000. That's a pretty good example of rapport, and the humanities. It doesn't happen often in this town called Hollywood, hut in this new day of making films, it will probably happen more. Everyone will be the better for it. There are other examples, of course. Rossellini fell in love with casts and crews, and told them so. He took trite scripts and developed fine films out of love, and the labor of love. That love magic enters into it big. The funniest part of creative people, particularly people who love film, is that they get up in the morning and can't wait to run into somebody to hug. A hug does not have to be embracing a male, so that the cops pick you up. A hug is in the voice; a hug is in the spirit; a hug is in the attitude. Kibitz or tease someone to put him down for a second! It only takes another second to let him know it wasn't meant to be unkind. If there isn't rapport and communication, those love magics of film, then the technical information isn't worth a damn. Hugs, kisses and happy talk don't mean I favor playtime on any set. If there's someone I don't like, I have to let them know why; then see how well I can function with him on a human level. Otherwise, one of us will sabotage. There will be shmucks midst all the hugging. They take advantage. There is always one who doesn't understand honesty when it is laid on the line. He'll try to undermine. Get rid of him! Save some sabotage. But care must be taken not to let that experience start you off wrong with the replacement. The past screwing has to be forgotten; the humanities pulled in again. Part of what's wrong with the film industry in America is a couple of goddamn greedy unions and some crew types protected by the unions. But what film-makers, new and old, always have to remember is that there are usually I 16I men around who are willing to kill for them. They will gladly assassinate as long as there is rapport. Humanities go beyond cast and crew rapport. Those who are loving film-makers don't hope another producer's picture will go down the drain. Sam Goldwyn doesn't do that. Louis B. Mayer, who was the murderer of the world in business, didn't do it. Mr. Mayer once told me, "If you don't want that picture I make to be a smash, you're stupid. Your coming attractions might be playing with it." The people who don't root for another guy's film are the ones who are fearful their own product will bomb. If there can be thirty other film-makers in front of their own demise, it won't be such a bad fall. If they had confidence in their own work, the first thing they'd do is pray for the next guy's work, because he keeps the theaters open. I could be shooting on a sound stage on Vine Street when a film like Funny Girl opens in New York. Should I worry? Absolutely. That theater may fold if Funny Girl goes on its ass. Then where will I go with mine? That's healthy thinking. Additionally, I just happen to be a rooter. But Hollywood is a pretty strange place sometimes. For instance, I took out a full-page ad in a trade paper to congratulate a certain studio for making a certain film, simply because I could take my children to see it. I said, "Bravo for making a good film." But I didn't hear from the producer, didn't hear from the studio. Dead silence fur boosting their picture. I had rooted in vain. Now I take the trouble to call attention to what I do. It is no longer a nice thing, but rm spelling it out in the future. In contrast to that studio's behavior, I remember going into Abe Schneider's office at Columbia. He runs that studio and is a man of dignity and taste. Very excited, he said, "Look at what Funny Girl did!" He should have been excited at the box-office figures. It was a Columbia film. But then he added, "The business is churning. How the West Was Won, Metro. Warner-Seven Arts, Bonnie and Clyde. Did you ever see figures like that?" The film-maker who really has the ball park, with the bat and the ball and the ground rules, loses none of his strength or integrity by dealing in humanities on the set as well as throughout the industry. He doesn't have to. If he knows his job, he doesn't need to slam a fist down and yell, "Coddammit, this is the way .. ," It never gets to that, because he is honest with himself, with those around him, and he cares for the product. He'll lick the face of a man who can make an important production contribution. I suppose what I have been talking about is simple, decent human behavior. But it is the most complex thing around. Some of it can be cut through with a hug and a smile. It is that tangible, intangible basis of it all-the all-meaning relationships with actors, crews, executives and the public.

I don't know

That could be the new title of my blog, or my autobiography which I should write and keep on hand in case I get famous and someone asks for it. Because if I had to write it when famous I might be too busy having fun. I say I don't know because though they say write about what you know I think I fill more space by focusing on what I don't know.

I don't know about the word respect. Is it regard? Is it acknowledgement that a person or thing exists? Because I hear people "respect" each other many times who have not earned, say, admiration which is the main word I think respect means. I don't like to throw that word around. How can I "respect" an obstreperous A-hole and have my respect for Nelson Mandela not be devalued?

I don't know about homophobia. Who was the first to coin the term? If I'm writing a script that takes place in 1942, can a character say "homophobic"? I don't know where it comes from. I'm sure the break down has been done before. It doesn't mean fear of same, or fear of people or men fearing men. There are guys I might fear, but not because they are men. I've heard a guy called homophobic because his first fear about going to jail is being sodomized by another inmate. If a woman fears being raped I don't know if anyone would pipe up and call her heterophobic. They might regard the context - say walking alone down a dark street filled with thugs - and give her some credit. But a guy gets the third degree if he fears being raped? I don't know. I thought prejudice was unfairly painting people with a wide brush, and yet I see that go on a lot - by some gay people. Canadian playwright Brad Fraser deleted me from his Facebook because I defended Mel Gibson. When Edge of Darkness was released, Brad posted at least four status updates on his page that were slamming Mel. That's in one day, along with other random updates. I'm lucky if I update my facebook status once a day. But I understand in the case of a high profile playwright it is marketing - he must want everyone to know how brilliant his plays will be if we get around to actually seeing them. In this case, I don't know from brilliant. He didn't seem capable of engaging in reasonable debate. As far as he is concerned Mel is an alcoholic and anti-Semite and don't confuse him with the facts. And so I find Brad Fraser annoying, yet I don't fear him. So is it homoannoya? The folks who run Defamer or TMZ or Out Magazine (assuming that still exists) or even GLAAD seem very willing to disregard the rights and privacy of others, pulling celebrities out of a "closet" even if they are action stars. I don't know if Tom Cruise is gay, but in any case I still consider him cool and responsible as a businessmam. Jodie Foster was right to keep her personal life to herself all those years. It's none of her business, and she has NO obligation to show up at parades and be someone's role model. What if someone's personal kick is the secrecy if being "on the down low"? Who is to say they have a civic responsibility to pay lip service to GLAAD and or any other brand of gossip monger? Jerry Lewis attends a golf tournament in Australia and makes gay joke, so GLAAD asks him to. . .what? Recant what he said? To pretend he doesn't laugh at non-PC jokes. at fat jokes, at fart jokes, at gay jokes? And is a member of the Rat Pack really all that concerned with whether his rainbow stripes are in the right order? How many Dean Martin or Sinatra fans are supposed to give a rat's ass? Hypothetically, what would it serve a movie star with a business and a production company to run to suddenly faunt a love life that heartland America - a sizable market - has not granted equality let alone embraced? Or are they expected to make a mea culpa for all the years they dated the opposite gender? I sense that a lot of these people who claim to be all about personal freedom are quite nasty, rubbing someone's nose in shit, just loving it when Family Values icon Gibson falls off the wagon and sputters incoherent drunken rantings about his own media persecutors (in that case David Geffin and some anonymous rabi and random uninformed yahoos on Youtube). Neil Patrick Harris became cool in Harold and Kumar Go to Whitecastle, and frankly stayed cool after outing himself. Ellen DeGeneres is terrific. They're also not Brad Fraser. They're not annoying. But I don't know. Maybe they do the same thing he does and I just don't hear about it because I'm not paying attention. Maybe they do a variation of writing a letter to a theater who has rejected a play and trying to find out why it has been rejected. . .gradually trying to back the theater's aquisitions person into dismissing him for a non PC reason when frankly all they have to say is that his work is generally boring and pretty much peaked with the line "Honey, I'm Home - o!" 20 years ago. Now if, because of this, I am called homophobic, it will just be more laziness. It's an easy accusation because it's tough to refute. So it's over used and barely has meaning. There is a big difference between someone getting beaten up in Timmons for "being gay" and someone lingering and prancing in the health club shower hoping to cruise someone and causing some guys to wait it out frozen by the lockers until he leaves. The latter is actually a reasonable and healthy discomfort over someone being rude. As for how someone gets beaten up for being gay, I don't think that means he sand a Shania Twain song in front of the courthouse. I'm assuming it was unprovoked, and hateful prejudiced bullies descended and swarmed the poor little guy. He might have made fun of their plaid shirts or their low I.Q. (those involved in the attack, not the population of Timmons). But I don't know.

I don't know about pro-life and pro-choice on abortion. Some Family organization bought air time during the Superbown on CBS to run a carefully crafted spot promiting what was ostensibly a pro-life message, but I don't know if I get it. I had been told all along was that the pro-life position was "against abortion unless the mother's life is at risk." Notice I'm not even saying health, because that's a legal wording from back in the day. The pro-life position still put the mother's LIFE first. That's just common sense. A bird in the hand. . . But the main thrust of this Superbowl ad was that an NFL player would not have been born if his mother had listened to the doctors (plural) who told her not to go full term. And these presumably weren't abortion providers angling for a gig. So the ad throws out a significant pro-life point. What about the choice part? The mother CHOSE to ignore the doctors because it was her own life to risk. So it was a pro-choice ad, and I haven't seen anyone on the left give CBS credit for being so subversive. They helped write the ad. They were afraid of offending anyone. On the one hand you have the visual reinforcement that gestating fetuses can grow up to be mediocre football players. That has kind of a poor man's Save-Sarah-Connor-So-John-Connor-Can-Be-Born vibe, like the great pro-life movie The Terminator. But how many millions in contributions did that Family Values banner organization spend to promote the choice of the mother to ignore doctors and to under-value the pro-life message by turning ii into something other than a sane and relatable acknowledgement of gestating human beings AND their HOST organism? Was the message intended for any confused young women watching the football game that day? No, it was just for idiots to mark territory and piss off other idiots. Why? I don't know.

New Year Crap-Clear

So I'm sorting through the gym bag that usually keeps vital work-related materials I take to the workplace, pills, work shirt, body spray and random free newspapers I have read on the subway with articles I hadn't finished importing into my brain. Garbage in, garbage out.

I can understand keeping an issue that boasts one of my letters to the editor. Those may not be thrown out except by accident. Whether I should keep them or not. But since it is perfectly acceptable and thoughtful to leave a Metro or Eye Weekly on the subway seat, I have chosen to stuff the most worthless material in my gym bag. So as I throw these papers out it's a review of the year's news that isn't quite news.

Jerry Lewis went to Australia and when asked if he liked playing cricket he said, "That's a faggot game" and did some physical comedy miming use of a cricket bat. So there's an article about GLAAD slapping him on the sturdy wrist and asking him for an apology. Like millions of Rat Pack fans will abandon Jerry for using the "new F-word." It amazes me how lobby groups seem to be in the business of telling people to lie to them. I don't have to pathologize Jerry for being out of touch with the latest edition of Newspeak. But you can understand if he has lingering resentment for the 2002 TV movie Martin and Lewis that was made about him where a guy from Will and Grace - Sean Hayes - played him. I remember saying to a friend after seeing a clip, "I didn't know Jerry Lewis was gay."
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0318908/

That gives an idea the kind of time and thought wastage results from reading a newspaper.
Did I have to know about that? When Issiah Washington was fired from Grey's Anatomy for calling T.R. Knight the same derogatory term for homosexual, my first instinct was that this is an over-reaction and extremely political (read: cowardly). T.R. crying on Ellen's couch didn't help boost his preferred image as the stoic leading man he was destined to be. Somehow since those articles we have more recent useless information that his role has been reduced on the show since Mr. Washington went to the Bionic Woman (much to the glee of snarky, fey critics). I'll be honest, I thought the Bionic Woman pilot episode was okay and I like Katee Sackoff as a satirical antagonist. A can't comment on Gay's Anatomy, because I've never seen an episode.

Still the new Bionic Woman pales by comparison to the original Bionic Woman and The Six Million Dollar Man which have been mired in a legal dispute between Universal and I forget what company. I try to google it and the term "Million dollar" is pretty common and "Bionic Woman" tends to bring up reference to the new-fangled version.

I seem to be finding a lot of blurbs about the apparent comeback of Tom Cruise after having supposedly killed his career. Imagine Tom Cruise in the early days of Top Gun and Rainman, with Barbara Walters bringing in a psychic to tell him this: "You will be very popular for many years until what kills your career is that you are so happy that you jump on Oprah's couch - but of course that's not enough to REALLY kill your career; you also criticise Brooke Shields."
What else hurt him? Of course Sumner Redstone making a point of saying that his behaviour hurt the box office of Mission: Impossible III. I see in another trash blurb that they have since reconciled and had lunch, but only after Tom had to become head of MGA/UA. Old Redstone seemed to be administering the death blow, and he was motivated because his lovely wife had a head full of this disposable tabloid crap. The guy manages to survive as a top Box office draw with a name like Cruise and what almost sinks him is an old man's wife reading the kind of crap I'm now finally throwing out.

What I can't have the pleasure of physically trashing is the sort of "news" feed you get signing into certain websites for e-mail. How do they choose these columnists? It has never been more true that somebody got a job by giving a blow. Do I really want to see an idiot's list of the "forgettable movies of the year" or a rant against Mel Gibson and the gossip about his marriage? Just another distraction. I have to reign myself in or I'll spend all of my time e-mailing incompetant cyber-columnists. Those that actually have a talk-back e-mail provided. Even then, likely it only bolsters the impression that people are reading the shite.

I won't mention a local Toronto film community that has a pressence on the web and sends out shameless viral marketing. I like the people involved but I've had to withdraw from involvement or the loop of promotions. It's too much. You get double and tripple versions of the same link and it takes up space in your Facebook feed even if you sellect "less from" this friend. And again I've had to confront this mentality and I've been told point blank that their columnists deliberately take extreme and controversial positions - many of which are inarticulate and non-persuasive - to get people fired up and attract feedback. I just thought why make myself crazy. Throw it all out. Ignore, ignore.

Now I'll have to look at my mostly blank Day-timer from last year, with its pages used as a notebook for some random ideas and snippets of dialogue. Maybe I'll actually have more time to plan things to do this year if I'm not wasting a little bit at a time paying attention to the sickening void of pop culture.

I should add another note for the sake of the few knee-jerks who might happen upon this blog and take offence at my issues with GLAAD and groups like them: I'm all for gay marriage and gay adoption and all of those many bench marks of progress that won't have an impact on what I want or have to do in my own life. But we live in a climate where we don't know each other and few intelligent people dare say anything that isn't affirmative. I'm not surprised to see a full-page article about the return of Andrew "Dice" Clay to comedy. People may very well need to listen to something that is expressing a very valid feeling of discomfort. I don't think discomfort should be lumped in with fear and certainly not hated to the point where someone's disinterest or a market's disinterest in something is branded "non-inclusive." I think it's great that the net version of Star Trek has introduced Captain Kirk's gay nephew, but I'm not rushing to find out how that is illustrated. Live long and prosper, as long as I don't have to pretend T.R. Knight is cool. Roddenberry was bucking the system to deal with race and staff the Enterprise with a multi-racial crew, but these days to buck the system is to be politically incorrect and outrage lobby groups.

All of this cluttering my head as I haul fresh new garbage out the door.