Crum on Showbiz

This movie feature originally appeared in The Kansas City Kansan newspaper on March 23, 2002. My original artwork is included.

By Steve Crum

The rumors lie. The vulgar words have not been cut out of the 20th anniversary re-release of E. T. the Extra Terrestrial. So “penis breath” and a couple of other mildly off-color remarks made by the film’s children survive. It wasn’t a big deal in the first place, but there were publicity leaks that director Steven Spielberg, along with screenwriter Melissa Mathison, had cleaned up the language in what many consider his greatest motion picture work. 

Be that “breath” as it is, this new take on E. T. is barely changed from the original. The audios and visuals have been digitalized, although I could not discern a difference. Of course, I need to re-see the 1982 original to really compare. But there is a notable scene cut from the original release that IS noteworthy.

The restored gem occurs as Elliot (Henry Thomas) talks on the phone as the stumpy E. T. teeters on the edge of a bathtub in the background, and soon falls in. Elliot runs to rescue his friend, followed by E. T. wanting to remain submerged. It’s a cute, laughable scene. 

At this point, forgive me. In my haste to divulge the scoop on changes in E. T., I assumed that most of you readers have already seen the movie at least once over the past 20 years, either on screen or video. For those who are in the minority, let me fill you in. 

E. T. tells the story of a 10 year-old California boy, Elliot (Thomas), who one day befriends an outer space creature hiding in his backyard storage shed. The short and harmless visitor is stranded on earth after his fellow aliens take off in their space vehicle without him. It is established early on that the outer space botanists land on earth to collect plant specimens for storage in their ship’s greenhouse. 

After enticing the thing in the house and upstairs into his room (all by leaving a trail of Reece’s Pieces), Elliot soon confides with his older brother, Michael (Robert MacNaughton) and six year-old sister, Gertie (Drew Barrymore). Together, throughout most of the movie, they keep their house guest a secret from their mom (former Kansas City, Kansas resident Dee Wallace-Stone). 

As government scientists zero in on the whereabouts of E. T., Elliot find that he emotionally links with the creature—with both comedic and dramatic results. Still a jaded laugh after all these years is when E. T. gets into the home refrigerator while Elliot is at school in science class. As E. T. chugs beer after beer, becoming falling-down drunk, Elliot experiences like results. 

By the time astronaut-suited scientists surround Elliot’s house (reminiscent of the home invasion in Spielberg earlier Close Encounters of the Third Kind), E. T. has learned to talk: “Phone home!” Time for Elliot and family to get their new pal back to his own planet. 

There is a notable presence of the “Keys” character (Peter Coyote), who is shown waist down from the opening of the film, with a set of keys dangling off his belt. He is the leader of these government hunters, who are interestingly depicted as villains. Incidentally, Coyote’s character is shown full body and face at the end. 

The tear-wrenching, Oscar-winning score by John Williams is as effective as ever, and E. T.’s eventual departure still grabs. 

In its ending, which echoes sentiments similar to those in The Wizard of Oz, E. T. extolls the virtues of being home…and of loving one’s home. Elliot’s home has been torn by separated parents; and E. T. is separated from his own. Man’s humanity to his fellow man (or creature) is central to Spielberg’s best work—from Schindler’s List to A. I. to this genuine classic, his most popular film. 

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GRADE on an A-F Scale: A

By Steve Crum

After “Robinson Crusoe, Jr.” had its initial, New York, Winter Garden run, Feb. 17-June 10, 1916, the national run began. From Aug. 28, 1916 through Nov. 17, 1917, Jolson’s show was enjoyed in dozens of American towns and, en route, a couple of Canadian cities. Audiences heard Jolson’s newest songs, along with what had already become his classics. During “Robinson Crusoe, Jr.’s” run, Jolson sang “Where the Black-Eyed Susans Grow,” “Down Where the Swanee River Flows,” “Yaaka Hula Hickey Dula,” and–naturally–”Where Did Robinson Crusoe Go with Friday on Saturday Night?”

Kansas City audiences jammed the Shubert Theater throughout “Crusoe’s” May 6-13, 1917 run. They could not get enough of their Al. Except for brief advance stories about “Robinson Crusoe, Jr.” opening, there were no local reviews or interviews published.

However, a huge, Columbia Records display ad, which ran while the show was in town, depicts Jolson in his Gus Jackson/Friday character, in blackface, beside what appears to be the Robinson Crusoe character. The ad promotes “Al Jolson’s latest and biggest hit, sung by Al Jolson himself….” 

A display ad for the show itself has only a chorus girl pictured, but AL JOLSON is listed above the show’s title for the first time–at least in KC.  #

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Head and shoulders etching of Mabel Wotten, followed by advance blurb:

Mabel Wotten, the youthful prima donna of “Robinson Crusoe Jr.,” in which Al Jolson is starring at the Shubert.

By Steve Crum

Al Jolson was 29 years old when he played KC in Oct., 1915. The Shuberts’ touring show, “Dancing Around,” this time billed Jolson’s Gus character as “a man of many parts.” Jolson’s song repertoire included “When the Grown Up Ladies Act Like Babies,” “Sister Susie’s Sewing Shirts for Soldiers,” and “Everybody Rag With Me.”

After the 12-scene “musical spectacle” made its Broadway run, Oct. 10, 1914-Feb. 13, 1915, “Dancing Around” toured the USA (and Canada) from Feb. 15 to Dec. 4, 1915–pretty much the entire year. Traveling south after two days in Omaha, Jolson and troupers played to Kansas City audiences, Oct. 3-9, before heading to St. Louis. 

In a KC Star article published Oct. 6, “No Joke on the City Now,” Jolie laments the demise of Kansas City’s Union Depot (and what it means to comedians), and reminisces about playing in KC with Dockstader’s Minstrels. That is a rather stately looking pose of Jolson in the article’s engraving. A more typical Jolson pose, in blackface, is included within the display ad. Jolie is labeled, “The New York Winter Garden’s Surprise Achievement.” 

Oct. 6, 1915 [in town for DANCING AROUND]

Interview:

NO JOKE ON THE CITY NOW

Al Jolson deplores the passing of the old Union Depot

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Many an act has been saved by the local reference–comedian’s father at last admitted he must be good

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The old Union Station brings a pang of sorrow to Al Jolson every time he thinks of it. The old station meant bread and butter to many and many an actor.

“It was a shame to lose that one,” he says. “It used to set them wild. Every actor in the country knew it. It made Kansas City famous. Personally I never thought it was funny, but the people here would double up howl every time it was sprung. I used to tell it with Dockstader’s Minstrels when we played the Grand ten years ago. If an act was going flat, a reference to the Old Union Depot would save it. The poorest comedian in the world could bring them up out of their seats with it. It was a scream.

“I don’t know why people laugh at local jokes, but they do. My idea of fun is to get into a joshing frame of mind with the audience and work to win a group, if they warm up to you. I wish I had confidence in myself, but I haven’t. Really, I’m always afraid they’re not going to like me, and if I do flop at any performance I’m no good for three days.”

SHY ABOUT HIS OWN FACE

Jolson is a boyish chap of 29. He’s been married eight years and he got his start in burlesque and from there went on to minstrelry, vaudeville and musical comedy. In New York he frequently appears on stage in white face, but is timid about trying it in the West, where he is not so well acquainted. 

“Sometimes I think I must be fooling the public,” he remarks. “I can say without egotism that I usually keep them laughing, but I don’t understand it. When I was in vaudeville I showed my father my contracts, week by week, for each house. I was getting two or three hundred dollars a week then and it dazed him. After he’d looked them all over he looked me up and down from head to foot. ‘Al,’ he said, ‘you must be good, they can’t all be crazy.’ 

“You know, I think I’m developing a temperament. Honest I do. It used to be they could unload a ton of scrap iron back stage when I was working and I’d shout a little louder to drown the noise and never mind it. I thought I was good then. The other night a man came in late, and when I saw him coming down the aisle it sent me up in the air. I almost blew up. If that isn’t temperament, what is it?”

AUDIENCE MAKES HIM WORK

“Another thing, I’m against the movies. I had a big offer to go into the pictures but I turned it down. Imagine me up there trying to be funny with nothing in front of me but a man turning a crank. I wouldn’t do it. You can’t act without an audience. I like a friendly, human crowd out in front, and it’s no joke–I’ll work my head off. That applause stuff gets to me. They can all say they don’t like it and all that, but it sure puts the ginger in me. Another thing, I never pick out a funny looking man in the audience and try to kid him. The fresh actor makes more enemies than he does friends. Half the time I just make up things to say and it seems to please as much as the jokes I have prepared. Get ‘em laughing once and they’ll laugh at everything. It isn’t what you say but how you say it. That’s a bromide, but it’s gospel.”

Jolson has a touch of negro dialect off the stage. He attributes it to his early career as a newsboy in Washington. 

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By Steve Crum

Gus, Jolson’s black butler persona, continued the one-upmanship of his “superiors” in the Shuberts’ Winter Garden hit of 1913, “The Honeymoon Express.” Jolie sang “My Yellow Jacket Girl,” “The Spaniard That Blighted My Life,” “You Made Me Love You,” “He’d Have To Get Under–Get Out and Get Under,” and “Who Paid the Rent for Mrs. Rip Van Winkle,” among other popular tunes. 

After its initial New York run, Feb. 6-June 14, 1913, the show played a grueling, 40-city schedule cross country (and out of country), Sept. 18, 1913-March 30, 1914, from Atlantic City to Toronto to Los Angeles. It was truly a Valentine for Kansas City when Jolie and “The Honeymoon Express” company performed for two weeks, Feb. 1-14, 1914. 

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The caricature collage (by an unknown artist) of Jolson is particularly fascinating, since it depicts six impressions of the 1914 Al Jolson stage persona. The work is entitled: AL JOLSON, AS HIS AUDIENCES KNOW HIM. 

The February 4, 1914 Interview with Jolson (no byline); includes a great one panel comic art w/six caricatures of Jolson in blackface, captioned AL JOLSON AS HIS AUDIENCES KNOW HIM.

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Here, to make it much easier to read, is the entire transcribed, lengthy  interview with Jolie by a Kansas City Star reporter covering the theatrical event. It is fascinating.

AL JOLSON, WORKINGMAN

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The Comedian Says He’s The Laborer You Read About

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Some Day, He Is Going to Retire to a Farm Where He Will Only Have to Work Like a Horse

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He says himself that they are beginning to call him old Al Jolson. He’ll be 30 in a few more years.

But that’s the penalty of doing the black face in these musical comedy days when the fabled wealth of …lnd would not pay for the new kind of clothes a show must dress in. Black cork is so inexpensive that everybody associates it with the crude days of the past, before managers discovered that all a show needed was clothes and talcum powder. 

Hence, old Al Jolson, who’ll be 30 after awhile.

FARM WORK AS A REST CURE

Jolson’s smashing success in cork seems to call attention to a somewhat ancient truth that has been more or less lost sight of recently. Which is (it was in the old copy books) that all you have to do to succeed is to work at it. Jolson works at it. He works like a longshoreman. Prodigal of voice, of energy, of good nature, he meets every demand of applauding audience until the last curtain, and then while the people whom has kept laughing for two hours are discussing at after theater suppers the easy life he leads, he is writhing under the hands of an osteopath kneading the soreness out of his throat muscles.

“Six more years of it,” says Jolson, speaking out of the cloths wrapped round his throat, “then back to the farm, where I’ll only have to work as hard as the horses.” 

The farm–it’s a ranch really–is just outside Oakland and there Jolson and his wife plan to spend their declining days when Al gets to be 35. 

THE WORKINGMAN YOU READ ABOUT

“A farm and a million is supposed to be the ambition of everybody on the stage,” says Jolson. “I’ve got the farm and don’t intend to wait for the million. I quit at 35 without counting the roll. Meanwhile anybody who wants to know what work is like can come and watch me. I’m the workingman you read about in books.”

Jolson has been a workingman since back in ’98 when he began to do the blackface thing in a circus–or in the stay-for-the-concert-only-ten-cents that followed the show in the big top. He was 13 then. Previously he had been playing marbles on the streets of Washington with woolly headed negro boys and acquiring their dialect, and incidentally their marbles. From the circus to minstrelsy, thence to vaudeville and finally to stardom in musical comedy have been rapid steps. You see, he was working all the time. Merely that. Few people have tried that method before.

NO LOAFING BETWEEN VERSES

When Jolson isn’t singing or dancing, he’s making a speech. He doesn’t like to be idle. Frequently he has as much as a minute and a lot of seconds between songs, in which he has absolutely nothing to do. So he makes the audience a speech. Audiences, being foolish and liking nothing better than to laugh, got to look upon these speeches as part of the program. They got to demanding them. It just goes to show what a lot of work a man can make for himself when he is so simple as to go out and look for it.

But Jolson’s first speech wasn’t to an audience. It was to a manager. It was one of the most successful speeches he ever made. It was in the days when his novel plan of working all the time had just begun to get results. He was beginning to be known. A manager looked him up and offered him a contract. Jolson wasn’t sure at that time that he wanted to continue in blackface. He was feeling so independent about it that he made up his mind he wouldn’t take a contract except at a figure that would make it worth his while. He determined to name a price the manager would refuse. So he made his speech

AL THOUGHT TWICE–QUICKLY

He said he wasn’t stuck on the stage anyway. He said he rather thought he’d quit and go into business. He said it was a hard life, audiences were fickle, hotels were poor, Pullman berths were hot. He said he was a young man with many opportunities before him and felt he ought to think twice before taking a contract that probably would mean, in the end, that he would have to follow the stage all his life.

“So I’ll just make you this proposition,” said Jolson. “I’ll sign up at $1,000 a week. Take it or leave it.” 

“I’ll give you $75,” said the manager.

“Done,” said Jolson.

Thus, all unwillingly, was Al Jolson dragged into the career now his.

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Please note that below one of the display ads for “The Honeymoon Express,” “Ben-Hur” is again being presented, except this time it is following Jolson’s show at the Sam S. Shubert Theater. In 1908, when Dockstader’s Minstrels were in town, “Ben-Hur” was showing at another theater. Like Jolson, “Ben-Hur” obviously had proverbial legs. 

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NEXT: PART 6, “DANCING AROUND”….

By Steve Crum

Days after watching The Zone of Interest, one is affected by the thought of spending an hour and 42 minutes with the most depraved, lost souls who ever existed. It is a harrowing experience realized through a brilliant motion picture.

A huge accolade goes to Jonathan Glazer, who directed and wrote The Zone of Interest, based upon the Martin Amis book of the same name. The title references a designated killing center (ie concentration camp) among various European locations mapped out by Nazis during WWII.  

The historical drama is told in German with English subtitles. To add even more authenticity, it was filmed primarily around the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, where more than 900 thousand mainly Jewish civilian prisoners were tortured and massacred during WWII. Shockingly, Auschwitz was but one of over a thousand “zones of interest.”

Glazer’s film focuses on the site run by Commandant Rudolf Höss, played by Christian Friedel. Moreover, it is the saga of him, his wife and family, whose house and manicured property neighbors the adjoining tall prison wall. How convenient. 

The slice of life story, via the adept lens of cinematographer Lukasz Żal, is told from the point of view of Höss family members. By that I mean the focus is almost entirely upon the husband, wife, kids, and visiting friends. (And there is also a brief visit from wife Hedwig’s mother.) The “friends” are fellow Nazi officers and their families. Early on, Hedwig (Sandra Húller) models with braggadocio a full length ermine coat she has just received. We assume the coat has been taken from one of the new Jewish inmates. If that isn’t sickening enough, she later uses a tube of lipstick, procured from an inmate—without any sign of emotion whatsoever. It’s just another day of surprise gifts for her. She even dumps a load of shirts, pants and skirts on one of her kids’ beds, telling them to grab their choices! And they dive in without hesitation. Hey, it’s their way of life—made possible through death. 

Zone is filmed in near documentary technique reminiscent of the cinéma vérité style of seemingly hidden camera, non-narrated. There is no speaking to the camera. Using that technique, we observe family members watering and trimming plants in the nicely kept garden near the house. There’s an obviously dressed inmate delivering wrapped clothing from the camp next door. The family goes swimming at a nearby lake wherein a corpse floats nearby. 

Then there are those surreal scenes of dad Rudolf reading a literally grim fairy tale (Hansel and Gretel) to his daughter at bedtime. 

While no images of life inside Auschwitz are shown, we do see its chimney smoking. There is no graphic violence, but there are certainly threats of such. And throughout the film, periodic sounds of distant gunfire, babies crying, and adults screaming are heard. At other times, the chirping of birds is heard. 

At one point, Rudolf is reassigned to another station. This creates stress on his family since they have to move. They do not want to leave their idyllic life. (Interestingly, the Höss house is still standing. Due to its noticeable age, however, a duplicate was built nearby for filming.)

Noteworthy is Mica Levi’s guttural music tones, heard at the opening and closing.  

As The Zone of Interest reaches its powerful conclusion, we are left with such blatant, sad irony.

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GRADE on an A-F Scale: A