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My bad. On my Clowns Making Films — Part Three post I identified a movie Steve Copeland sent me as having been made by Steve and his Kelly Miller circus partner, Ryan Combs.
I live in New York and have this thing called a job, otherwise the London International Mime Festival would be a good excuse to visit The Big Smoke for nineteen days this January (as if I needed an excuse). If you’re closer to London and less tied down, you’d be crazy to miss it.
Okay, so I exaggerate ever so slightly, but I do want you all to know about TOFT, the Theatre on Film & Tape Archive at the NY Public Library for the Performing Arts, which I mentioned in my previous post. Located at Lincoln Center, it is definitely something to be grateful for this Thanksgiving!
The only chance you or I will have to see Bill Irwin play the fool in King Lear (see previous post, below) would be a visit to the NY Public Library for the Performing arts, whose Theatre on Film & Tape Archive offers a second chance to see most of the major shows mounted in New York, as well as a few regional offerings. (Not guaranteeing they’ll have it, though.) Meanwhile you can have a lot of LOL fun by diving into the wacky antics of Christopher Moore’s 2009 novel, Fool, a loose and raunchy retelling of King Lear from the fool’s point of view.
Never content to rest on his clown laurels, nor to just stick with well-paying movie gigs, Bill Irwin has consistently returned to the stage to star in ingenious pieces of his own creation or to take on challenging works by Beckett, Brecht, Moliere, Fo, Feydeau, and Shakespeare.
Everyone makes movies these days so why not clowns? Recent efforts I’ve come across range from filmed clown gags to full-blown attempts to recreate silent film comedies. You saw several of these in this recent post; at least you did if you know what’s good for you! Those were all pieces presented this fall at the NY Clown-Theatre Festival. Here are some more that have come to my attention over the past couple of years, though I wouldn’t be surprised if this is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.
Pop Quiz: Name the famous Nobel-Prize winning author who wrote the following in his most celebrated work:
It hasn’t been hard to find something approaching the complete works of Keaton, Chaplin, Lloyd, and Langdon on DVD in recent years, but when I wanted to purchase the Laurel & Hardy opus, I had to order a 21-disc box set available only in the UK and deal with all the region and formatting conflicts. All that has now changed with the release of a 10-disc box set suitable for the region 1, NTSC market, Laurel & Hardy: The Essential Collection.True, this has only 32+ hours of footage, as opposed to 68+ on the British set, but then who’s counting?
Federico Fellini’s 1954 Academy-Award-winning, neo-realist film, La Strada, starring Anthony Quinn and Giulietta Masina (Fellini’s wife), is one of my all-time favorites. The brutal depiction of a marginal showman’s life, the stunning black & white cinematography, and the compelling acting of Quinn, Masina, and of Richard Basehart in the role of “the fool” all hold up very well indeed nearly a half century later. The clown’s power to satirize —and the limits of that power — struck a strong chord with me then that still rings true today. And according to our good friend Wikipedia, the movie was a source of inspiration for Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” and Kris Kristofferson’s “Me and Bobby McGee.”
This is an amazing split-screen comparison of Jerry Lewis in The Errand Boy (1961) — where Jerry the lackey is miming being the boss — and the “Brian & Stewie” episode of Family Guy (2010), put together by YouTuber MrEthernex. The music is Count Basie’s “Blues in Hoss Flat” and appears in both original versions in lieu of dialogue.
One of the things I like the most about Jackie Chan is his imaginative use of ordinary household items in his fight and chase scenes. In this clip he talks about it and shows a few examples.
Here’s an oddity, a Thomas Edison film from 1901 featuring an enthusiastically received striptease on the solo trapeze. True, she finishes with more skin still covered than most of today’s acts start with, but I suspect it was still pretty risqué at the time.
Last month I posted a preview of the Clowns on Film evening at the NYC Clown-Theatre Festival, perhaps a shameless piece of self-promotion since I was co-hosting the event with Audrey Crabtree. I wrote that the work that evening would be great, since Audrey (festival co-director ) had told me so and I believed her, though honestly I hadn’t seen most of the films before stepping on stage. Of course my hidden agenda was to try to fill the voluminous Brick Theater to the rafters. If you’ve never been there, think Radio City Music Hall. (Yes, that was sarcasm.)
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Workshops & Other Events
My first book (1976)
My book Clowns has long been out of print, but you can borrow it for two weeks at a time from the Internet Archive. More information is available here.
My second book (2015)
Visual and verbal humor for the cognitively and artistically curious! Available here.
“A book to treasure!”
—Bill Irwin