Tag: DVD Report
No, not the very modern film and music video director Spike Jonze, but comedy musician and television variety star Spike Jones (1911–1965). My first introduction to the loony imagination of this latter-day vaudevillian was via audio tapes in the 1970s. I could only guess what his antics looked like, but it was funny enough, and I seem to recall my partner Fred Yockers and I sometimes using it as pre-show music. It certainly got us in the mood, if not the audience. Some material made it to VHS by the 1980s, and eventually to DVD, but The Best of Spike Jones is the first remastered, fairly definitive sampling of his work. It actually came out a couple of years ago and I bought a copy right away, fully intending to write a blog post on it “next week.” Well, better late than never….
The rediscovery and remastering of silent film classics, reintroducing these artists to the public by way of annotated DVD box sets, has been a great gift to the physical comedy fan. First it was Chaplin and Keaton, then Lloyd and Langdon, followed by Charley Chase, Douglas Fairbanks and, most recently, that modern silent clown, Pierre Etaix. And now finally the father of silent film comedy, Max Linder, is being justly celebrated for his pioneering career that spanned over 400 films, about 130 of which have survived, in a handsome 6-disc DVD set complete with historical commentaries and new musical scores by New York’s own Ben Model.
Charley Bowers: The Rediscovery of an American Comic Genius
Co-produced by Image Entertainment (USA) and Lobster Films (France)
2-disc DVD; run time 149 mins.
2004
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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