Different Folks

 

Time out for some old school DEI:

Sly Stone 1943-2025

Quips and Quotations (Counterculture Coiffure Edition)

 

1941-2023

I come from a school of people, folk singers, and the tradition there is troubadours, and you're carrying a message. Admittedly, our job is partly just to make you boogie, just make you want to dance. Part of our job is to take you on a little voyage, tell you a story. But part of our job is to communicate the way a town crier did: It's 12:00 and all is well, or it's 11:30 and the whole Congress is sold. It's part of the job.

--David Crosby

Establishment bitch!

Vital Viewing (As Primitive as Can Be Edition)

 

Actor Bob Denver was born on this day in 1935 (he died in 2005.) Though it's not his original claim to fame, Denver is by now best-known for the 1960s situation comedy Gilligan's Island.

If you've never seen the show--which at one time would have and may still put you in a distinct minority--it's about seven people shipwrecked on an uncharted South Pacific island, each person a "type": a sea captain, i.e., skipper, a millionaire (perhaps a billionaire in today's money), his society matron wife, a movie star, a science professor, a girl-next-door type, and a fuck-up. What I find particularly interesting is how six of these seven castaways clung to their individual stereotypes despite three years spent in an island setting that made such stereotypes increasingly irrelevant, if not completely ridiculous. The sea captain no longer has a ship but still sees himself in charge; the movie star has no red carpet to walk on but still dresses as if there's paparazzi snapping photos; the millionaire flaunts his money though there's no stores on the island and the coconuts and bananas are free for the taking; the society matron looks as though she's all set to attend some charity benefit luncheon though as a shipwreck survivor marooned on an island she could probably use some charity herself; the girl-next-door type has to share her hut with the movie star, technically making the latter a girl next door, too, thus rendering the whole concept superfluous; while the science professor, though he lacks a college campus, lecture hall, and laboratory, comes closest to equaling, at times even exceeding, his former life on the mainland as he basically runs the island behind the sea captain's back and solves all sorts of problems that crop up except for the number one problem of how to get off the island, as all his book learning turns out to be no match for...

 ...the fuck-up, i.e., Gilligan. Perhaps I'm being a bit harsh. After all, even though he has his own distinct personality, Gilligan is the one castaway lacking in any pretense. He clings to nothing, guilelessly taking each day as it comes, with little concern that he may be deviating from some self-assigned role. He's a free spirit as well as a fuck-up. He may even be a fuck-up because he's a free spirit. Or vice-versa. Neither trait gets you all that far in civilized society so it may be the island is the best place for him. Perhaps all those "mistakes" that lay waste to the Professor's carefully laid plans and dooms the castaways to yet another half hour without phones, lights, or motor cars as if they were tropical Amish, is just some unconscious sabotage on Gilligan's part. Whether the aforementioned Denver, who so memorably brought Gilligan to slapstick life would agree with that, I don't know, but he shares some thoughts on his character and the show in general with Rosie O'Donnell in this clip from 1997:

Bob and Rosie talked about the two versions of Gilligan's opening credits. We'll show you both, first the black-and-white segregated version, in which there's no Professor and Mary-Ann, both having been relegated to the back of the bus closing credits, and the multi-hued desegregated version, in which the two have finally attained their equal rights:

I definitely prefer the second opening. It's much more egalitarian.

Oh, that island wasn't egalitarian at all!

Following in the footsteps of such classic fat guy-skinny guy duos as seen above, we now present to you the comedy team of...

...Denver and Hale!

I like the fact that someone set the above video to polka music. It makes that island seem like Cleveland.

...because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and
everybody goes "Awww!”

--Jack Kerouac

Mr. Kerouac may not have had Maynard G. Krebs in mind when he wrote that sentence, but I'm sure Max Shulman, creator of the TV series (and author of the book in which it was based) The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis no doubt had Kerouac in mind when he dreamed up Krebs, television's first bohemian, and Dobie's best friend. Why they should be best friends is a bit puzzling. I remember the high school I went to as being rather clique-ridden: jocks hung around with jocks, cheerleaders hung around with cheerleaders, nerds hung around with nerds, stoners hung around with stoners, and so on. Had there been beatniks in my school--it was about fifteen years too late for any to attend--I'm sure they would have hung around other beatniks and not whatever clique Dobie belonged to (the lovestruck kids who mope around Rodan sculptures clique, maybe? Except he seemed to be the only member.) I guess there's just an unwritten law of comedy that states that laughs are best mined from two best friends with nothing in common. Dobie and Maynard merely paved the way for Oscar and Felix. Anyway, if you haven't figured it out by now, Maynard was played by Denver, shooting him to fame about five years before achieving even greater fame as Gilligan:    

Somehow, the Establishment always gets the upper hand.

Graphic Grandeur (Classified Expressionism Edition)

 

Comic book artist James Dean Jim Steranko was born on this day in 1938. The son of a stage magician, he did that himself for a while, but it's the feats of magic performed on the drawing board that's made him a legend in his field. At least it was his field, as his stint in comic books was mostly in the latter half of the 1960s. Since 1970 or so, he's run his own publishing company and done much work in Hollywood as a production designer, most notably working with George Lucas and Steven Spielberg on Raiders of the Lost Ark, helping them come up with the Indiana Jones "look" (though he didn't design Harrison Ford; that was God's doing.) The still-debonair Steranko hasn't completely abandoned the comics field, returning every now and then for a limited run on some book. And he can often be found at the many comic-cons, i.e., conventions, which is where we find him in this clip: 

 

Steranko mentioned Nick Fury, the director of S.H.I.E.L.D. (Supreme Headquarters International Espionage Law-Enforcement Division--even Stan Lee in his 1975 book Son of Origins of Marvel Comics couldn't tell you what it was a division of), who is his intelligence agency's own best agent, and seems to assign most of the missions to himself! Fury wasn't always a secret agent. Created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1963, he made his debut in Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos as an Army noncom fighting the Nazis during World War II. Two years later, inspired by the success of the James Bond movies and TV shows like The Man from U.N.C.L.E, Lee and Kirby turned Fury, now a WWII vet with an eyepatch, into a spy, and assigned his cloak-and-dagger (and often laser beam) missions to the comic book Strange Tales, where he shared space with Doctor Strange. Kirby left the feature at the end of 1966, and that's when Steranko took over, eventually getting a book all to himself to play with. Kirby had already revolutionized comic book art by giving it a touch of the avant-garde. Steranko went further, and farther out. He took his inspiration not so much from Milt Caniff and Alex Raymond but the latest Jimi Hendrix album cover and Grateful Dead concert flyer. These were tie-died spies, op art operatives. It was counterculture counterintelligence, espionage for acidheads. As much Peter Max as Maxwell Smart. Intrigued? I can't tell you anything more until you've given me your password...What's that? You're already logged into your computer? Well, yeah, I guess to do that you would have had to use a pass--OK, just draw down the shades and turn on the lava lamp. Here are some intriguing and arresting examples of Jim Steranko's national security state psychedelia:

 

When you're a spy, they'll send you anywhere. You don't even have to know Jeff Bezos.

I admit I always get carried away with myself with these comic book posts, but it all looks so purty on a computer screen, don't you think? Speaking of comic books, you'll notice on the above cover in the upper right hand corner, this bit of censorship:

Well, any good secret agent...

...knows how to break a code.

 

 

 

 

 

Quips and Quotations (Conquer the Conquerors with Words Edition)

 

I am waiting for the Great Divide to be crossed   

and I am anxiously waiting

for the secret of eternal life to be discovered   

by an obscure general practitioner

and I am waiting

for the storms of life

to be over

and I am waiting

to set sail for happiness

and I am waiting

for a reconstructed Mayflower

to reach America

with its picture story and tv rights

sold in advance to the natives

and I am waiting

for the lost music to sound again

in the Lost Continent

in a new rebirth of wonder

--Lawrence Ferlinghetti

1919-2021

In Memoriam: Peter Fonda 1940-2019

First Paul Krassner, then D.A. Pennebaker, and now Peter Fonda. It's not been a good summer for the 1960s Counterculture, has it? Of course, the three men I mentioned represented different aspects of it. Krassner was instrumental in creating the counterculture, whereas Pennebaker was mostly on the outside looking in. And Fonda? An enthusiastic participant who did his best to remain part of that counterculture long after most people, including his sister Jane, moved on.

The son of one of my favorite Turner Classic Movie actors, Fonda decided to follow in father Hank's footsteps not merely by becoming a thespian but by doing so in the same place his dad (as well as Marlon Brando) got his start, the Omaha Community Playhouse. He eventually moved to Manhattan and Broadway, appearing onstage in the service comedy Blood, Sweat and Stanley Poole, which earned him the New York Drama Critic's Circle Award. From there he went on to Hollywood where guest starred on various TV shows, but got a bigger break when producer Ross Hunter cast him opposite Sandra Dee in the 1963 big screen hillbilly comedy Tammy and the Doctor (one of several movies about a comely backwoods girl variously played by Dee and Debbie Reynolds.) The film was a minor hit though it didn't quite make Fonda a star. But it did get him noticed. Next up was a supporting part in the Carl Foreman-directed World War II drama The Victors, which earned him a Golden Globe. Then came another supporting role in Lilith in which he played a mentally disturbed man who falls in love with a mentally disturbed woman played by Jean Seberg but loses out to a mentally disturbed psychiatrist played by Warren Beatty. After that a starring role in The Young Lovers, about a woman who gets pregnant without first getting married, back when getting pregnant without first getting married was considered something of a novelty. I see no evidence that this movie was even a minor hit, and Fonda's career stalled.

Actually, it may have stalled for reasons other than box office receipts. The aforementioned counterculture was beginning to take hold, and Fonda took a liking to it. He became friends with the mid-1960s folk rock band The Byrds, and through them ended up at a party at house in LA's Benedict Canyon that the Beatles were renting and where LSD, perfectly legal at the time, was the drug of choice. It's hard to say what happened exactly but an acid high George Harrison was worried about dying. An acid high Fonda decided to comfort Harrison by telling him about the time he was 11-years-old and accidentally shot himself in the stomach and almost died. "I know what it's like to be dead," he said. Regardless of whether Harrison was comforted or not, it spooked an acid high John Lennon, who booted Fonda from the party. A short time later he used Fonda's reminiscence as a tagline in his song "She Said She Said," though, as the title indicated, he changed the gender from male to female. Take that for ruining my party!

Fonda's counterculture shenanigans (he was also arrested in the 1966 Sunset Strip riot) must have got him the notice of drive-in movie impresario Roger Corman, one of the first to realize that there's gold in them thar hippies. He cast Fonda as the motorcycle-traveling lead in the B-movie The Wild Angels, which also featured Nancy Sinatra, Bruce Dern, and Diane Ladd. The B-movie ended up making A-movie money, finally making Fonda a star. His next film for Corman was The Trip, screenplay by Jack Nicholson (the same.) Ostensibly an anti-LSD film, acidheads flocked to it in droves, making it another big hit. Among its cast members was an actor who once appeared in a movie with James Dean. No, not Sal Mineo, not even Jim Backus, but Dennis Hopper. Fonda and Hopper, with the help of novelist Terry Southern (Candy, The Magic Christian), decided to write a screenplay together.

The result was Easy Rider. Fonda tried to convince Corman to produced but not direct it, Hopper wanting the latter duty. Corman balked, thinking the neophyte Hopper would fall flat on his ass. I imagine Corman himself fell flat on his ass once saw all the box office receipts he passed up on, but I'm getting ahead of myself. Fonda and Hopper managed to get financing from Columbia Pictures for what eventually became the Citizen Kane of counterculture motorcycle movies. Now I've seen Easy Rider, in which Fonda and Hopper also star (as Captain America and Bucky, though not exactly the way Joe Simon and Jack Kirby had in mind) several times and must say it's a rather uneven film. For those familiar with his writing style, it's obvious what part of the movie Southern wrote: the middle section featuring supporting player Jack Nicholson in a star-making performance. Meanwhile the first section, mostly dealing with a desert commune, and the third section, dealing with a trip to New Orleans during Mardi Gras (featuring then-unknowns Karen Black and Toni Basil as prostitutes) is almost devoid of dialogue! But director Hopper makes up for it with some great imagery, particularly the trippy New Orleans part. The movie today is regarded as a classic, and I think it's a classic. An uneven classic, but a classic. But before it became regarded as a classic it was merely a hit, grossing over $40 million dollars. In today's dollars that would be...a lot.

Film historian Leonard Maltin once wrote that Easy Rider almost destroyed Hollywood when every movie studio in town tried to duplicate its success. I don't know that I'd go that far, but it did almost destroy Dennis Hopper. He was given a lot of money to direct and star in The Last Movie (also starring Fonda), about a violent Western shot in Peru that the natives take a little too seriously. A very experimental film (which big budget mainstream movies rarely are), it won an award at the Venice Film Festival but failed miserably during a two week run in New York City. For the rest of the 1970s, Dennis Hopper was a Hollywood bit player, in every sense of the phrase. Peter Fonda, though, fared much better, starring in (and occasionally directing) many films over the next decade, though I sometimes get the impression that he was offered roles that Burt Reynolds and Steve McQueen had already turned down. His biggest hit during this period was the Allstate Insurance road picture classic, Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry, in which he and Susan George played the title characters (it also featured Adam Roarke, who has almost as much screen time as Fonda and George, but, as he was not a star at the time, got left out of the above-the-title-credits.)
 

By the 1980s, Fonda was no longer a leading man in movies, but worked steadily nonetheless. he spoofed his own biker image in 1981's The Cannonball's Run. That was a hit. Split Image, in which he played the leader of a cult, should have been a hit but wasn't. He didn't make much of an impact in anything else until 1997's Ulee's Gold in which he indeed played lead as the reticent beekeeping head of a dysfunctional family. His performance (as well as the film as a whole) was highly praised by critics, and earned him an Academy Award nomination as well as a Golden Globe. How did the film do at the box office? Well, I've seen no evidence that it lost money. After that success, Fonda returned mostly to supporting parts, not unusual for an aging actor, no matter how big a star they once were.

Oh, those Fonda kids. I suppose in most people's minds Jane is the more radical of the two, thanks to the time she tried on a North Vietnamese helmet while on a visit to Hanoi, as well as for her 17-marriage to a radical, SDS co-founder and Chicago Seven co-defendant Tom Hayden. However, if you examine her life closely, it seems more a flirtation with the Radical Left that she may have lost interest in once the Radical Left lost its cache. It was Peter that was the true lifelong believer, and holding such a belief while trying to keep afloat in the notoriously choppy waters of show biz could produce some odd juxtapositions. Remember Circus of the Stars? It was a series of TV specials in the 1970s and '80s that featured celebrities performing circus stunts. Peter Fonda appeared twice, first riding--what else?--a motorcycle on a tightrope while former Miss America, substitute Catwoman, and Barnaby Jones costar Lee Meriwether dangled on a swing below. The second appearance he did a magic act in which he sliced up Italian actress Claudia Cardinale. The second time he appeared there was interview with him in the entertainment section of the newspaper promoting the show. In this interview he casually--or at least on the printed page it sounded casual--mentioned due to assaults on the environment he felt the world would come to an end in fifteen years, which would have been around 1993 or so. Or course, that didn't happen (though it could STILL happen, what with climate change and God-knows-what else.) The point, though, isn't whether Fonda was right or wrong, but that he said this in what was basically a puff piece for a cheesy-if-entertaining TV special run during sweeps week. The apocopolypse is upon, but first see what me and Claudia can do!

Here's another odd juxtaposition. During the 1996 presidential campaign, cable channel CNBC ran a series of public service announcements that had celebrities saying what they were do if they were president, and then ending with them saying that they weren't running for president but viewers should go and vote anyway. Wendy's founder said that if were elected, he would make it easier to adopt a child. Growing Pains mom Joanna Kerns said she would try to increase opportunities for young women. Ron Reagan Jr said that if he was elected he would immediately ask for a recount (I wish his father considered that.) Then there's Peter Fonda. What would he do if elected president? Abolish both houses of Congress, fire the federal judiciary, and lock the Supreme Court up in a room and not let them out until they came up with a new, improve Constitution. But, again, he wasn't running for president but you should go out and vote anyway. November came and went without either Bill Clinton or Bob Dole locking up the nine justices.

Peter Fonda had his Vietnamese helmet moment just last year. Upset, as were a lot of people, at President Trump decision to separate parents from their children on the Mexican border, he fired off this controversial tweet:

 Barron's older bother struck back:

Fonda eventually apologized.

Now, as much as I may like him as an actor, don't expect me to defend Peter Fonda. He's supposed to be this counterculture hero but then goes tweets something so nasty, so objectionable, so disgusting, so obnoxious, so terrible, so dreadful, so shocking, so appalling, so hideous, so ugly, so vile, so hateful, so horrible, so heinous, so sick, so unconscionable, so creepy, so vulgar, so cruel, so hateful, so reprehensible, and so evil that it might as well come from a member of what these days passes for the Establishment!

Now that I got that out of the way, let's go to the movies: