#679) Hot Dogs for Gauguin (1972)

#679) Hot Dogs for Gauguin (1972)

OR “Blowup”
Directed & Written by Martin Brest

Class of 2009

One of the more elusive NFR entries in my seven years of doing this blog, the full original version of “Hot Dogs for Gauguin” has finally started showing up online. My thanks as always to filmregistry.net for helping me find this movie.

The Plot: Young photographer Adrian (Danny DeVito) is fed up with the “starving artist” lifestyle. He dreams of taking a once-in-a-lifetime photo that will financially set him for life, like Sam Shere’s famous photo of the Hindenburg crash. Adrian confides in his friend Fletcher (William Duff-Griffin) his plan to blow up the Statue of Liberty at noon the next day while capturing the moment with his camera. Fletcher tries to talk him out of it, and a chase to the ferry ensues. “Hot Dogs for Gauguin” is a comic film that highlights the burgeoning talent of its leading man, as well as its student director Martin Brest.

Why It Matters: The NFR gives a rundown of Martin Brest’s filmography and the plot of the movie, with its only film-specific superlative being “hilarious”.

But Does It Really?: I enjoyed watching “Hot Dogs for Gauguin”, but I was left with one burning question: Why is it on the NFR? I can’t stress enough that this is not a knock on the film itself, which clearly shows the promise that Martin Brest and Danny DeVito have delivered on in their respective filmographies, but it’s not what I would consider an essential or important American film. The NFR write-up is totally unhelpful in justifying its inclusion, so I’m left scratching my head. If they wanted to induct a film by Martin Brest, why not “Beverly Hills Cop” or “Midnight Run”? I’m glad that “Hot Dogs” is finally starting to pop up online, and I appreciated the opportunity to learn more about Martin Brest, but I still question this movie’s NFR standing.

Everybody Gets One: Martin Brest has lived an incredibly private life, so readily available information about him is scarce. Thankfully, Brest has made a few public appearances in recent years, and an in-depth interview about his filmography was published by Variety in 2023. As for his life before filmmaking, we know that Brest grew up in the Bronx, and attended NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in the early ’70s. “Hot Dogs for Gauguin” was his student thesis film.

Title Track: No one says the title within the film, though Adrian goes on a rant about how Paul Gauguin’s art was unappreciated in his lifetime and he died of starvation. While it’s true that Gauguin’s art didn’t receive widespread acclaim until after his death, how he died is still up for debate. Officially, Gauguin died of a heart attack, but there are theories that he died from the side effects of his untreated syphilis. As for the hot dogs…I dunno, because they’re in New York?

Seriously, Oscars?: It appears that “Hot Dogs for Gauguin” never played an Oscar qualifying run. For the record, 1972’s Live-Action Short Oscar winner was Robert Duebel’s “Norman Rockwell’s World…An American Dream”, which really should have been nominated in the Documentary Short category. Martin Brest would go on to receive Oscar nominations as the producer and director of 1992’s “Scent of a Woman”.

Other notes

  • Danny DeVito was just getting started as an actor when “Hot Dogs” came his way. Although this was his third film, DeVito was primarily an Off-Broadway actor, having recently played Martini in a revival of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, a role he would reprise for the film adaptation. It’s fun watching a young DeVito playing a character, rather than his later Louie De Palma persona. It’s also fun to see him with hair, although even at 28 he’s already prepping for one hell of a combover.
  • While never reaching the same levels of fame as his scene partner, William Duff-Griffin was a regular in the New York theater scene for over 25 years, and made brief appearances in such films as “Basic Instinct” and “The Hudsucker Proxy”. His life partner was fellow actor Robert Joy, represented on the NFR with “Atlantic City” and “Desperately Seeking Susan”.
  • Another bit of historical misinformation: Adrian mentions that the Hindenburg was destroyed by a small hydrogen leak. As I learned during my own research, we still don’t know what actually caused the Hindenburg to go up in flames, but a hydrogen leak is as good (and more plausible) a theory than anything else out there.
  • The idea of blowing up the Statue of Liberty really doesn’t sit well as a comic premise post – 9/11. That being said, I like that Adrian purposefully picks the statue’s annual maintenance day at lunch hour so that no tourists or employees would be around and get hurt. Very thoughtful for his act of terrorism.
  • That’s Martin Brest as the man sitting across from Fletcher on the ferry. The woman next to him is Rhea Perlman, DeVito’s then-girlfriend (now wife) who would go on to achieve fame as Carla the waitress on “Cheers”. It’s also fun to think that someone in this film would show up in “Barbie” 50 years later.
  • This film has excellent use of classical music throughout, as well as Irving Aaronson’s recording of Cole Porter’s “Let’s Misbehave”. Turns out public domain music can be fun!
  • Well I definitely didn’t see that ending coming, but then again I wasn’t expecting much given that this was a student film with presumably no budget. The last scene goes on a bit too long, but the final shot is a great punchline.

Legacy

  • A 3 ½ minute version of “Hot Dogs for Gauguin” played on “Saturday Night Live” on December 13th, 1980, with guest host Jamie Lee Curtis (and not, as I assumed, Danny DeVito, who wouldn’t host for the first time until May 1982). I have no idea how or why this film was selected to air, but I do know that SNL’s 1980-1981 season was the show’s notoriously awful first post-original cast season, and almost everyone involved would be fired three months after this episode aired. Interesting bit of trivia: the “Hot Dogs” episode was the debut episode for Eddie Murphy, one of the few spared from the show’s restructuring and future Martin Brest collaborator. 
  • Outside of its SNL airing, “Hot Dogs for Gauguin” has pretty much lingered in obscurity, even after its 2009 NFR induction, with only the abbreviated version available online. Thankfully the original uncut version has started to crop up online, which hopefully will lead to more visibility and a wider audience.
  • Martin Brest’s filmography is a small but impressive roster. His commercial film debut was the 1979 comedy “Going In Style”, and although he was fired from directing “WarGames” early in production, this allowed him to helm mega-hit “Beverly Hills Cop” with Eddie Murphy. This was followed by “Midnight Run” and “Scent of a Woman”, the latter getting Al Pacino his long overdue Oscar. “Meet Joe Black” was a critical and financial misstep, and 2003’s “Gigli” was completely re-shot and re-cut without Brest’s involvement (he called the final film a “ghastly cadaver”), and bombed so badly it essentially ended his career. Looking back on his filmography in 2023, Brest concluded that he “had a good run, and I enjoyed success and freedom, and that was fantastic.”

Bonus Clip: This is as good an excuse as I’ll ever get to play one of my favorite YouTube clips of all time: that time in 2006 when Danny DeVito showed up on “The View” to promote his movie “Deck the Halls” while still drunk from a night of partying with George Clooney. DeVito’s George W. Bush impression always makes me laugh.

#678) Bohulano Family Film Collection (c. 1958-c. 1979)

#678) Bohulano Family Film Collection (c. 1958-c. 1979)

OR “Thrilla in Little Manila”

Directed by The Bohulano Family

Class of 2023

My thanks to the Center for Asian American Media for preserving the Bohulano Family film collection, and presenting them on Internet Archive. The embedded video is an introduction to the collection by Dawn Bohulano Mabalon.

The Plot: Throughout the 20th century, Stockton, California was home to Little Manila, the largest Filipino community outside of the Philippines. The Bohulano family moved to Little Manila in 1955, and like countless other families, bought a camera and began filming their own home movies. The 15 reels of the Bohulano Family film collection span over 20 years (and 51/2 hours!), chronicling not only multiple generations of one family, but also the decline of Little Manila as it becomes a victim to Stockton’s ongoing gentrification, as well as the revival of Stockton’s Filipino community that rose from these ashes. These films also include family vacations, holiday celebrations, weddings, funerals, and a whole lot of dance recitals. Keep an eye out for Dawn, the Bohulano’s eldest grandchild, who will one day be key in getting these home movies preserved and celebrated.

Why It Matters: The NFR write-up is a general overview, highlighting that this film collection “documents the history of the Filipinix community (one of the largest in the country) during a period of significant immigration.”

But Does It Really?: This may be the most biased I have ever been in favor of a film’s NFR induction. Longtime readers know that Stockton is my hometown, so of course I will endorse anything that preserves Stockton’s history (especially in a positive light). I lived on the other side of Stockton from Little Manila and didn’t spend a lot of time in the neighborhood, so this viewing experience was simultaneously new and familiar. Overall, I found my viewing of these films surprisingly emotional; in part because of my own connection to Stockton, but also from watching this family grow through the decades. “Bohulano Family Film Collection” makes the NFR thanks to its detailed representation of a Filipino community, its preservation of Filipino history, and as a personal journey to a side of my hometown I never knew.

Shout Outs: Among the pop culture that crops up in these home movies are “The Wizard of Oz” and “Star Wars“. And thanks to the family trip to Disneyland, we get quick appearances by the Three Little Pigs, the Seven Dwarfs, and Dumbo.

Everybody Gets One: Delfin Bohulano immigrated to California in 1929, and met his wife Concepcion Moreno in the Philippines while stationed there during World War II. Delfin returned to California with his family in 1952, and bought a house in Stockton in 1955 through a veteran’s loan program. Over the years the Bohulanos raised their four children in their house on Jefferson Street, and frequently hosted their family – including an eventual seven grandchildren – at various gatherings. I should also note here that I cannot definitively determine who is actually behind the camera during these home movies, but I suspect it is multiple people, hence my directing credit to the Bohulano family.

Other notes 

  • The Filipino immigration boom of the early 1900s happened in part because the Philippines were colonized by the United States after the Spanish-American War in 1898 (this colonization continued until the Philippines’ independence in 1946). The Filipino were enticed to come to America to live out their own American dream, but found only racism and discrimination once they arrived. Many Filipino settled in Stockton, California due to the city’s ongoing need for migrant workers (Stockton was and still is an agricultural town). Stockton’s segregation laws forced the Filipino to live on the south side of town, with a Filipino neighborhood rising in the 1930s, dubbed Little Manila in the 1940s by journalist Frank Perez.
  • The 15 reels that make up the Bohulano Family film collection seem to be in no particular order, with each reel jumping through time. I’ve put my notes as close to chronological order as possible.
  • The earliest film in the collection is Delfin’s 50th birthday party in 1958. My main takeaway was how much everyone dressed up for a family gathering in the ’50s: Men in suits and ties, women in dresses and ridiculously puffy hair. I imagine this is what your resident grumpy old man is talking about when he says things were better back in the day.
  • Unsurprisingly, there is a lot of footage of the family’s trip to the Philippines in 1967, the first time many of them had been back in almost 15 years. The timing of this trip is noteworthy: the Philippines were in a bit of an economic upswing following the 1965 election of Ferdinand Marcos as President, a presidency that immediately went south once Marcos declared martial law in 1972 and ran the country as a dictatorship until 1986.
  • I hope you enjoy dancing, because there is a lot of it in these films. From impromptu dancing at the Bohulano house to the children’s dance recitals to demonstrations of both singkil and tinikling to a local production of “The Nutcracker”, there’s some kind of dancing in practically every reel. Heck, I bet there’s more dancing in this than in “That’s Dancing!“
  • Speaking of “The Nutcracker”, the Bohulano Family film collection is eligible for my Die Hard Not-Christmas List. We get several family Christmases, a few Nativity scenes, plus an appearance by Santa!
  • Hey, one of the teens at a family gathering flipped off the camera! Not only did the Bohulano family see that, but now thanks to its NFR designation, so did a bunch of random film historians and bloggers with way too much free time.
  • Among the community events covered here is the Barrio Fiesta, an annual event celebrating the anniversary of the Stockton Filipino Center’s opening in 1972. Held every August, the Barrio Fiesta includes cultural performances, dinner, dancing (of course), and demonstrations of escrima, a form of Filipino martial arts. The center, now known as Filipino Plaza, is still around, as is the Barrio Fiesta.
  • Another Stockton landmark featured is the Stockton Civic Auditorium, located close to Little Manila, and home to at least one wedding reception in this film. I had many a chorus and band recital at the Civic, as well as my senior prom.
  • There are of course a few comparison points between these films and the Solomon Sir Jones films. Both are amateur movies covering underrepresented groups and their segregated neighborhoods, but Bohulano’s emphasis on family gives this a more emotional feeling rather than just a collection of faces and places. Side note: Between the 7 1/2 hours of Solomon Sir Jones and 5 1/2 hours of Bohulano, I think I’ve spent more time watching other people’s home movies than my own family’s!
  • As a longtime Disneyland fanatic, it’s my duty to point out that this is the second NFR entry to include home movie footage of Disneyland. I can date the trip to 1975/1976 thanks to footage of “America on Parade”, Disney’s contribution to America’s bicentennial celebration. Also thanks to this parade, the NFR now has appearances by Bongo the Bear and the cast of “Song of the South”.
  • Another part of Stockton that brought up a lot of memories for me is the family’s 1978 trip to Pixie Woods, Stockton’s local children’s park. Pixie Woods looks here just like I remember it from my trips in the early ’90s: the playgrounds, the rides, and the plywood cutouts of fairy tale characters that look just different enough from their Disney counterparts to avoid copyright infringement.
  • 1978 also saw the family take a trip to New York City. Their sightseeing in Manhattan allows me to play another round of “What’s Playing on Broadway Back Now”: This time we get “A Chorus Line”, “The Wiz”, “Beatlemania”, and “I Love My Wife”, the latter of which the family sees and discreetly records a few moments of. Turns out the Bohulano were into slime tutorials long before the internet was.
  • Towards the end these home movies get something new: Sound! It’s fun finally being able to hear what these people actually sounded like, and they are clearly having a blast cracking each other up. We even hear little Dawn shyly squeak out a few words.

Legacy 

  • Most of Little Manila started to get demolished in the ’60s and ’70s to make way for the crosstown freeway. Today only three buildings from the original neighborhood are still standing. The good news: due to Stockton’s frequent financial problems, they don’t have enough money to fully erase what’s left of Little Manila. The bad news: they don’t have enough money to fully preserve it either. Only time will tell, I guess.
  • The Bohulano family’s home movies were preserved thanks to the tireless efforts of Dawn Bohulano Mabalon, one of Delfin and Concepcion’s grandchildren. Throughout her adulthood, Dawn raised awareness of California’s Filipino community as well as the historical significance of Little Manila. Her book “Little Manila Is In the Heart” helped shine a light on Little Manila’s perilous state. Fun Fact: Dawn taught Filipino history at San Francisco State University when I was a student there! Now I wish I had spent more time in the history department.
  • Although we lost Dawn Bohulano Mabalon in 2018, her legacy and achievements live on, particularly the Little Manila Foundation, which still exists today as Little Manila Rising, and is devoted to the preservation and growth of the South Stockton community. Learn more about them here.

Further Reading: As you can guess, I really enjoyed researching this post. Most of my information about Little Manila comes from two books written by Dawn Bohulano Mabalon: 2008’s “Filipinos in Stockton” and 2013’s “Little Manila Is In the Heart“. Both books contain a thorough history of the Stockton Filipino community way beyond the simplified scope of this post. I can’t recommend them enough.

#677) A Movie Trip Through Film Land (1921)

All screenshots is this post courtesy of Mike Champlin. Thank Mike!

#677) A Movie Trip Through Film Land (1921)

OR “A Kodak Moment”

Directed by Joseph de Frenes & Paul Felton

Class of 2023

Update: The original version of this post was a placeholder version pieced together from the 3 1/2 minute excerpt embedded above, a 21 minute version with French intertitles, and this copyright description from 1921 in the Library of Congress that gives a detailed overview of the film. But thanks to Mike Champlin of DeBergerac Productions, Inc., I was able to watch the full version of “Film Land”.

My immense thanks to Mike Champlin for getting me access to the original film, as well as for sharing his expansive film knowledge. Mike worked on a restoration of “Film Land” in 2004, and has informed me that DeBergerac Productions is working on a new restoration to celebrate its NFR induction, with a projected general release of later this year. Check out the DeBergerac Productions website to learn more about their other preservation work.

The Plot: An animated “international convention of movie fans” gather to watch “A Movie Trip Through Film Land”. The “Film Land” of the title is none other than Kodak Park in Rochester, New York: Home of Kodak film, the popular choice for both still photography and motion pictures! As we travel through Kodak Park, we get a very thorough explanation of how film nitrate is made. Produced by Bosworth, De Frenes and Felton of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

Why It Matters: The NFR calls the film “educational and highly informative”, and gives a shoutout to the George Eastman Museum, Eastman Kodak laboratory, and the Eastman Kodak Company for their parts in this film’s restoration.

But Does It Really?: This is certainly one of the NFR’s more meta selections: a film about how physical film is made. I had never heard of “Film Land” before it made the Registry, and it has been fascinating to research this film and learn more about how physical film was actually made at the early stages of this new medium. A historical pass for “Film Land”; and keep an eye out for that new restoration.

Everybody Gets One: Information regarding Bosworth, De Frenes and Felton is pretty scarce, but what we do know is that it was a film production company that existed from roughly 1917 to 1927 in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Among their major clients who commissioned films from them were Goodrich and, of course, Eastman Kodak. Paul M. Felton was an animator and musician, referred to in local papers as “that famous comic artist”. Felton drew the intertitle illustrations and animated opening of “Film Land”. Joseph De Frenes was a photographer and cinematographer, best known for his expeditions with fellow filmmaker Charles Urban, which resulted in some of the earliest travelogues in the film history. De Frenes is the only credited name in the opening “Film Land”, having shot the Kodak Park footage. C. R. Bosworth was a local businessman and producer, and that’s pretty much all we know about him.

Wow, That’s Dated: Nitrate film; that’s the big one. Film buffs (and longtime readers of this blog) know that nitrate film catches fire faster than a dried-up Christmas tree, which led to the loss of a majority of pre-1950 film, and the urgent need for film preservation. By 1952, film stock had finally made the switch to cellulose acetate (aka “safety film”), with polyester becoming the film base of choice by the 1990s.

Other notes 

  • Kodak Park was founded in 1890, two years after the Kodak camera was patented. The park was part of an expansion of Eastman Kodak as their camera and film stock became popular. Side note: George Eastman and his mother Maria made up the name Kodak from an Anagrams set; George wanted a name that was simple, easy to pronounce, and began with a K, which he felt was a strong letter.
  • The NFR write-up describes the film’s prologue as “a gathering of animated multi-national characters, which some may find problematic, but were of the times”. It’s all well-intentioned, a message about the universal appeal of the movies, but…yeah it’s real bad. Whichever offensive racial caricature you’re thinking of right now, they are in this opening. Ultimately I would compare the opening to an early COVID test: uncomfortable, but brief. That being said, some of these racist characters pop up in Felton’s intertitle illustrations throughout the film.
  • I appreciate that Kodak emphasizes the safety of its employees, especially with all these chemicals around. We’re a long way from “Westinghouse Works“.
  • An interesting difference between the English and French intertitles: the French ones are more or less the scientific process of how film is made, while the English ones add in explanations “In plain English”. Maybe it’s my own American comprehension skills, but I appreciate the dumbing-down. This is a pretty dry process without a little American pizzaz. Also of note is that the French intertitles omit almost every reference to Kodak, making the final film more of a general educational short than a hard-sell for Kodak products.
  • I never realized that the key ingredient of nitrate film was cotton. Kodak Park used over 8,000 bales (4 million pounds) of cotton every year. Just one of the many statistics this film is happy to provide.
  • Also appreciated: The red-tinted film during the “dark-room stage” of the process. Nice touch.
  • I’m going to reproduce the final intertitle here, just because it tickles me so.

“Each year, 147,000 miles of motion picture film, enough to girdle the earth six times, goes out from Kodak Park to tell you the news of the world, to make you laugh and cry, to teach you science and history, and to show you the uttermost parts of the earth.”

  • The last sequence is a mock-up of the Earth as the completed film “girdles” the circumference six-times over, passing over the world’s major landmarks. Once the film reaches California we zoom in on a movie studio, revealing a crew filming the model of the Earth we’re currently watching! This movie may have gotten too meta for its own good.

Legacy 

  • At one point Kodak Park was the largest photographic manufacturing facility in the world, but as the demand for physical film declined, so did the size of Kodak Park. The park still exists, now known as Eastman Business Park, but very little of the “Film Land” seen here survives.
  • Bosworth, De Frenes and Felton continued producing movies until 1927 with the sudden death of Bosworth and the advent of sound. Joseph de Frenes formed his own production company – De Frenes & Company – and continued making industrial films for the rest of his career. Paul Felton would go on to work with animation legend Max Fleischer, most notably in his iconic “Out of the Inkwell” films. When Paul Felton died in 1933 at age 47, one of the Wilkes-Barre papers memorialized him as “one of the pioneers in the motion picture field”.

#676) The Exploits of Elaine (1914)

#676) The Exploits of Elaine (1914)

OR “Clutch of Evil”

Directed by Louis J. Gasnier, George B. Seitz, Leopold Wharton, and Theodore Wharton

Written by Seitz, Charles W. Goddard, Basil Dickey, and Arthur B. Reeve. Based on the “Craig Kennedy” stories by Reeve.

Class of 1994

Today’s post is perhaps the biggest placeholder post I’ve ever written. Of this serial’s 14 episodes, I was only able to track down four online. As always, if and when the other 10 episodes show up, I’ll update this post.

The Plot: Elaine Dodge (Pearl White) is an amateur sleuth who teams up with scientific detective Craig Kennedy (Arnold Daly) to find out the real identity of The Clutching Hand, a mysterious masked man who killed her father. Both Kennedy and the Clutching Hand have state-of-the-art gadgetry at their disposal; Kennedy has such things as the Detectascope and the Telegraphone to help solve the case, while the Clutching Hand has things like the Death Ray for…death. Can Elaine solve the case without becoming the Clutching Hand’s next victim? I genuinely don’t know, because most of this serial is not readily available online.

Why It Matters: The NFR gives the usual rundown, and calls the serial “superior” to its predecessor “The Perils of Pauline”, citing its “sophisticated camera work and production values.” An essay by silent film expert Margaret Hennefeld gives a more thorough synopsis, which is very helpful in this case.

But Does It Really?: We have a rarity on the blog: my judgment on this film’s NFR standing is inconclusive. I do not have enough available footage for me to make the call. This is not helped by my decision to watch this so shortly after “The Perils of Pauline“, giving this serial a feeling of sameness. Befitting a placeholder post, I’ll give “Exploits of Elaine” a placeholder pass: I’m sure it has enough value to warrant its early spot on the NFR, but only watching the rest of this will tell me for sure.

Everybody Gets One: Although all but forgotten today, Arthur B. Reeve was a celebrated mystery writer in his day, with Craig Kennedy being hailed as “the American Sherlock Holmes”. Reeve wrote the Craig Kennedy short stories from 1910 to his death in 1936. “Elaine” was one of Reeve’s first film projects, and he concurrently wrote a book adaptation to coincide with the release of the serial. While filmmaking was on the move from New York to Hollywood, Reeve opted to stay behind in New Jersey, pivoting to anti-racketing campaigns and covering such news events as the murder of William Desmond Taylor.

Other notes

  • The four episodes I was able to track down for this viewing were “Chapter Two: The Twilight Sleep”, “Chapter Nine: The Death Ray”, “Chapter Ten: The Life Current”, and “Chapter Fourteen: The Reckoning”. This means that I wasn’t able to watch the first episode, so I don’t get any of the proper setup to fully enjoy this serial.
  • Also not helping is that three of these episodes are only available online via a French print, meaning that all intertitles and exposition are in a language I can only comprehend on a rudimentary level. It’s times like this I wish I had paid more attention in my high school French class. The one episode that was in English was in such poor quality that I couldn’t read much of those intertitles either. Given the lack of visual storytelling in early film, you can imagine how frustrating this whole experience was for me.
  • “Elaine” has at least one improvement over “Pauline” in that the cliffhangers are actual cliffhangers, with Elaine still in peril at the end of each episode. The final shot of every episode is a close-up of the Clutching Hand’s clutching hand; which looks remarkably like the hand on the “Greed” poster.
  • Chapter 10 is noteworthy because Elaine actually dies at the end! Though she is brought back to life in Chapter 11, or so I’m told.
  • I gotta say, from what I’m seeing, very few of these exploits are Elaine’s. I would argue they belong more to Craig, with Elaine being a passive “damsel-in-distress”. But then again, that is to be expected in a 1910s serial.
  • In Chapter 14 we at last learn the identity of the Clutching Hand when his mask is taken off and he is revealed to be…who is this guy? I assume it’s someone who was in an earlier episode, but without the right context I don’t know who this is or why he’s the bad guy.

Legacy

  • “Elaine” was a hit with audiences, prompting two sequel serials in 1915: “The New Exploits of Elaine” and “The Romance of Elaine”.
  • Will the missing episodes ever be uploaded online? And if so, will they be in English? Tune in next time for what I’m calling “The Lost Exploits of Elaine”!

For Your NFR Consideration: “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” and “Original Cast Album: Company”

It’s the copper anniversary! Why are these always so creepy looking?

Today marks the 7th anniversary of the Horse’s Head blog (or maybe it’s tomorrow, I genuinely don’t remember anymore). For seven years, I have not only chronicled my attempt to watch every movie on the National Film Registry, but I’ve also submitted my own nominations for films I believe should be on the list. So far, 36 films I have submitted have been inducted (23 of them inducted in the year I nominated them). Most of my selections are iconic films that I’m sure would have made it on without my help, but there are two that haven’t made the cut yet that I feel need a little extra endorsement. These two movies are far from the greatest movies of all time, but they are personal favorites that I feel are worthy of a place in the Registry. For your NFR consideration I give you “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” and “Original Cast Album: Company”.

By 1963, director Stanley Kramer was Hollywood’s king of the Important Movie, with “The Defiant Ones”, “Inherit the Wind”, and “Judgment at Nuremberg” under his belt (plus he produced “High Noon“). When New York Times critic Bosley Crowther challenged the serious-minded Kramer to make a comedy, Kramer accepted the challenge, and vowed to make the film comedy to end all film comedy. The result was “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World”, an epic in which an old man’s dying words about a hidden fortune spark a race across California to find $350,000. Everything about “Mad World” is big: the cast is packed with the most famous comedians of the 20th century (everyone from Buster Keaton to Jerry Lewis), the action contains some of the most impressive stunt work in movie history, and the film’s widescreen Ultra Panavision 70 was so wide Hollywood’s Cinerama Dome was built specifically to show the film. “Mad World” may not get as many laughs at it did 60 years ago, but it is still an impressive undertaking that deserves to be preserved and enjoyed.

By its very nature, theater is hard to document. No recording can replicate the feeling of watching a live performance, and while the NFR has plenty of film adaptations of plays and musicals on the list, it doesn’t have anything that documents the kinetic energy of American theater. That’s why I always push for 1970’s “Original Cast Album: Company”. Legendary documentarian D.A. Pennebaker takes his camera into New York’s Columbia 30th Street Studio to witness the cast album recording for Stephen Sondheim’s latest Broadway musical “Company”. Originally filmed as the pilot for a proposed TV series, “Original Cast Album: Company” chronicles the marathon 14-hour recording session of the entire album, complete with in-the-moment adjustments from Sondheim himself as well as record producer Thomas Z. Shepard. The climax of the movie is performer Elaine Stritch trying and failing to nail her signature song “Ladies Who Lunch” in one take. A cult classic among theater fans, “Original Cast Album: Company” is a rare glimpse into part of the creative process of putting on a Broadway musical, the kind of “lightning in a bottle” preservation that every documentary on this list strives for.

Both “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” and “Original Cast Album: Company” stand on their own singular piece of ground, and are therefore worthy of inclusion in the National Film Registry. I will keep pushing for these movies every year until that December morning when I read that the NFR finally made the right decision. As always, you the reader can nominate any American movie you want for NFR consideration. Just head over to the NFR’s official nomination page, and be sure to check out their list of movies not on the Registry for reference. And if I may, please also visit my own For Your Consideration page for the countless other movies and stars I have lobbied for over the years.

Happy Viewing and Happy Nominating,

Tony