At Home with Jerry Lewis, It Takes a Lot to Laugh

Jerry Lewis (It Takes a Lot to Laugh) video. Featuring photos and film stills of Jerry Lewis and his co-stars and Hollywood friends Dean Martin, Stella Stevens, Connie Stevens, Janet Leigh, Marilyn Monroe, Lucille Ball, Lana Turner, Natalie Wood, etc. and his wives Patti Palmer and SanDee Pitnick. Soundtrack: "It Takes a Lot to Laugh" by Bob Dylan and "Laugh at me" by Sonny Bono.

Jerry Lewis beams towards his wife SanDee: “She is the love of my life,” he said, and there seemed no reason to doubt him. “Most people are embarrassed to admit there’s another human being that’s in control of them, that your heart beats three times as fast because you’ve given yourself to someone else.” His adventures on screen, once a source of pleasure, were, he said, right up there with the night he thought he was going to have sex with Marilyn Monroe. Mr. Lewis, who has boasted in the past of an affair with the legendary siren, went silent when pressed. “I could have been talking about Bette Davis,” he offered at last, opaquely. Although the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences never honored Mr. Lewis for his film work, he received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award for his charitable activity in 2009.

“I'd made 41 movies in thirty years; in the next seven years, I made only one. I wouldn't play the game. There weren't many people in the business who wanted me. I usually said what I believed. And there is no place in the corporate structure for a man with convictions, who also happens to be ruthlessly honest. The two archenemies of film corporate enterprises are 'conviction' and 'honesty'. If you have those qualities, you will labeled 'difficult,' 'egomaniacal,' and 'tough to get along with' but it's the people who have earned those reputations who know their craft and care about the films they are making.”

Mr. Lewis knows he can be slippery, his distrust of the interview process deep and abiding. “I almost always can tell when the interviewer is going to give me a spritz,” he said, punching the air by way of illustration. “For that, you’ve got to be prepared. You’ve got to be out in the world. And my tendency is to be alone.” Many critics interpreted his performance in Scorsese's The King of Comedy as a projection of his dark side. Mr. Lewis scoffs at it: "there is no darkness. I've got news for you. In comparison to the nerd, if the reverse of that is silence, it could be interpreted as dark." -"Jerry Lewis: In Person" (1982) and "At Home with Jerry Lewis" (2016) by Ruth La Ferla

Jerry Lewis, American Icon, on TCM Marathon

Turner Classic Movies pays tribute to Jerry Lewis on Monday, September 4 with the following festival of films. This program will replace the previously scheduled movies for that day so please take note. "The Nutty Professor" was named the Best Picture of 1963 by French critics. The schedule for the evening of Monday, September 4:

8:00 PM The Nutty Professor (1963)

10:00 PM The King of Comedy (1983)

12:00 AM The Stooge (1952)

2:00 AM The Bellboy (1960)

3:30 AM The Disorderly Orderly (1964)

Source: www.tcm.com

"I don't need other people's pain to make comedy. I just call on my own. I need only to call upon my sorrow to create laughter. Sorrow and laughter are so close, hand-in-glove." —Jerry Lewis 

Jerry Lewis was a pyrotechnic wonder, a font of gibberish, voices, and caterwauls, a living Gumby doll, a bouncing Super Ball. He was so fast and natural that he made it look elementary, but it wasn’t: In the 1990s the undeniably agile Jim Carrey wowed audiences and scooped up $20 million per film with a pale imitation of Lewis. Carrey's act had no taste, no soul, no center. Even at its crassest, Jerry Lewis’ comedy tried to be about the human spirit—the human spirit of a truly excitable boy. Many of the biggest comedy stars of the Seventies (Woody Allen, Richard Pryor, Robin Williams, Steve Martin, Andy Kaufman), Eighties (Martin Short, Eddie Murphy, Bill Murray, Pee Wee Herman), and Nineties (Jim Carrey, Pauly Shore, Ben Stiller, Adam Sandler) can trace their comic roots directly back to the Jerry Lewis of the Forties, Fifties, and Sixties. The only career like his, with its five-decade cycle of acmes, nadirs, rebirths, and reevaluations, is that of Richard Nixon. 

Frank Tashlin, Jerry claimed, let him “codirect” Rock-a-Bye Baby (1958) and The Geisha Boy (1958). Both films do, in fact, bear more resemblance to Jerry’s self-directed films of the 1960s than to Artists and Models and Hollywood or Bust, but it’s hard to say whether this is because Jerry Lewis produced them or because of some stylistic influence he exerted on Tashlin. It was unusual enough for a popular movie comedian to write and direct a film in 1960—mind-boggling under conditions like those of an independent film. Part of the reason Lewis succeeded was that he was willing to abuse his body to produce work. His history of collapses, ulcers, and cardiac emergencies was directly related to his tendency to overwork himself. 

The Nutty Professor (1963) was his undeniable, ineradicable masterpiece, the one piece of work that even his critical antagonists would concede had true merit. Upon its initial release, the film got moderately positive views in Variety and The Hollywood Reporter. In The New Yorker, which didn’t bother to review most of his films, physician and theatrical director Jonathan Miller, slumming as a critic, wrote, “This is a very funny movie, with some brilliant visual gags and a stunning parody by Lewis of a Hollywood Rat Pack cad.” The New York Times called it “his most painless romp in some time and probably the most curiously imaginative one of his screen career… less of a showcase for a clown than the revelation (and not for the first time) of a superb actor.” In 2004, The Nutty Professor was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."

At the time of the film’s release, a handful of viewers theorized a connection between Buddy Love and Dean Martin. In France, where the film was known as Docteur Jerry et Monsieur Love, critic Robert Benayoun saw the film as the acme of Jerry’s long obsession with doppelgangers and doubling. It’s easy to see the despicable Love as a rap at Dean, but it’s also facile and biographically unlikely. The film was written in 1962, more than a half-decade since the team’s acrimonious split. Relations between the two were nonexistent, but there was no cloud of animus, either. Jerry swore that the character wasn’t based on Dean. And in fact very little about Buddy Love is like Dean. The traditional Dean Martin character may have been a a cad with the ladies, a singer, and an occasional tippler, but he didn’t do any of it with the headstrong purposefulness of Buddy Love. In fact, looking at Buddy Love’s thick eyebrows, apparently mascaraed eyelashes, plump lips, and dripping-with-grease hair, one notes more of a resemblance to Tony Curtis than to Dean Martin.

Julius Kelp, the pathetic soul from within whom Buddy Love emerged, was nearer to the persona Jerry presented in movies—the well-meaning bungler—and nearer to Jerry’s own view of his deep-down inner self. Jerry saw himself as a bright man with strong empathetic feelings who suffered slights in childhood and desperately wanted to be loved. Like Kelp, he transformed himself into a performer to receive affection and attention; like Kelp, he suffered nagging doubts about whether the public loved the real man or the mask. The Nutty Professor is, in effect, a confessional about the perils of succeeding in the public arena. Kelp is a wonder: articulate and stammering, intelligent and utterly naïve, with a chipmunk’s voice and teeth, bullied but unvanquished, a zealous explorer of scientific puzzles, a hopeless klutz trying desperately to walk a tightrope of decorum and respectability. He's completely lost around a girl who arouses him. He blows up classrooms, he wrecks gymnasia, he myopically hurls his bowling ball at people instead of pins. Yet he’s utterly charming, all the same. 

Shot in warm but vivid color, expertly paced and edited, The Nutty Professor is rivaled only by Jerry’s best work with Frank Tashlin as an artistic achievement. There are moments of marvelous cinematic invention—the point-of-view shot of the newly emergent Buddy Love walking from a haberdashery into the Purple Pit nightclub (a shot ironically echoed by the famous Steadycam shot into the Copacabana in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas); a hilariously composed sequence showing Kelp’s reactions to sounds as he suffers a brutish hangover; the devolution of Love into Kelp in the final confessional scene. Inevitably, as in most of Jerry’s films, there’s a drive toward a homilistic finale. Kelp reveals, after putting his glasses on in a genuinely heart-touching moment, what the experience of being two different people has taught him: “You might as well like yourself. Just think about all the time you’re going to have to spend with you.” It’s an ironic message, coming from such a fragmentary figure as Jerry Lewis. 

In retrospect, The Patsy (1964) seems a calculated good-bye to the life of sycophants and the star-making apparatus on which he had thrived. A combination of a sequel to The Bellboy (it had even been called, early on, “Son of the Bellboy”) and a cynical remake of Pygmalion, it’s rather like Jerry’s version of The Circus or Limelight, a black comic exploration of the nature of comedy as constructed by the Hollywood flesh machine. To the French, who discovered Edgar Allan Poe, Sidney Bechet, Josephine Baker, and other indisputable giants who found no appreciative audiences on their native American soil, Jerry Lewis was yet another genius neglected in his myopic homeland. By the early ’60s, Lewis had long since passed from the American public’s consciousness as a hot item. “Jerry was never chic in America,” reflected Peter Bogdanovich, one of the few American writers who took the comedian seriously at this stage in his career. On the release of The Family Jewels in the summer of 1965, France-Soir declared the film’s sentimental ending proof that Jerry was “a true human being and not merely a marvelous laugh-making machine,” and Robert Benayoun, writing for Positif, described how it “deliberately severs space-time and leaves us a series of nearly interchangeable moments.”

When Lewis spoke about his distaste for new trends in the film industry with Earl Wilson, he explained it in economic terms, as if to disguise his personal antagonism. Sneering about the presence of sex and violence in films, he argued “it’s in the hands of the public, which is to blame. As long as the public wants to buy it, they’re going to make it. I’ve had a couple of dozen scripts submitted to me that I just wouldn’t go near. The funny part is, eventually, they get done! Some freaks are making an awful lot of money and an awful lot of noise in our business. I can’t understand some of it; it’s like going to a zoo.” It became a point of pride for him that he wouldn’t consent to the kind of projects the studios were asking him to make. However wild his exaggerations, there was no doubt he was fed up with Hollywood, maybe even with America itself. He had won over America with a comic character born of abandonment; now America was abandoning him.

When Merrill Schindler of Los Angeles magazine asked Jerry several times why he inspired hostility, he got a frightening glimpse of Jerry’s self-image: “I’m a multi-faceted, talented, wealthy, internationally famous genius. People don’t like that.” On October 2, 1973, his twenty-ninth wedding anniversary, the pain, the drugs, and the hopeless situation he felt himself to be in finally overwhelmed him. “I felt everything was finished,” he confessed years later. “I didn’t have the stamina to sustain one more sweep of that red hand on the clock.” He retreated to his bathroom, opened the padlock on a drawer, pulled out a .38 revolver, loaded it, and stuck it in his mouth: “I came as close as you could come,” he told a reporter. His workaholism had been neutered by his lack of career opportunities. His financial situation was precarious. But suicide? Even if the melodrama of that scene is exaggerated, the very notion that he would choose to share such an anecdote indicated how seriously wrong things had gone for him. 

In September 1980, thirty-six years after they first met in Detroit, Patti Palmer filed for divorce in California Superior Court, asking for $450,000 a year in alimony, custody of and support for sixteen-year-old Joseph, and half of their community property, which she judged to be worth in excess of $7 million. Martin Scorsese had gotten Jerry involved in The King of Comedy (1982), and one of the results of the improvising experiment was Jerry Langford’s heartfelt confession to his kidnappers that his life was unenviable—a scene that stood as one of the highlights of Jerry’s performance. “He really got into the dramatic stuff,” Scorsese said. “I think he’s a wonderful actor.” Time Out called the film "Creepiest movie of the year in every sense, and one of the best". Roger Ebert wrote, "The King of Comedy is one of the most arid, painful, wounded movies I've ever seen." Dave Kehr of the Chicago Reader gave the film a favorable review, calling The King of Comedy "clearly an extension of Taxi Driver." Whether or not he felt he had been manipulated into his performance by Scorsese and his costars, Jerry was extremely proud of his work. “He was very funny between takes,” said Scorsese. “Jerry is totally surreal. And when he started cracking jokes, I’d get asthma attacks from laughing. It got to the point of being maniacal, you had to shake him to stop it.”

Jerry Lewis never lost the hope that the people loved him again: “They have put me right where I am,” he declared, “giving me glowing affection and support. I’m an American icon.” And the cadences of this evolution echo our own history. No American entertainer embodied the fate of the nation since World War II more succinctly: the giddy surplus of the postwar years; the arrogant confidence of the Fifties; the incomprehensible unraveling of the Sixties and Seventies; and our subsequent struggle to place blame for the downfall. It’s no coincidence that the most triumphant moment of Jerry’s career came just weeks before the death of John Kennedy. Soon after, along with the dissolution of the national consensus, came his marginalization. 

Behind the clown, the showman, the director, and the philanthropist stood another person altogether—the “real” Jerry Lewis. Always introspective, a dabbler in psychology and an autodidact with a taste for aphorism, he relished the notion of presenting more than one persona to his public. Jerry Lewis maintained that conspiracy theories about the MDA telethons reflected not public awareness that his career had slowed but rather the mood of the nation after Watergate. “You cannot get by in this world, apparently, if you are a courageous, honest crusader or stand-up, straight-ahead man... There’s nothing wrong with a do-gooder,” he stated. “There’s nothing wrong with corny. I’ve lived an entire life on corn—crying, spreading my emotions through comedy and through seriousness. We need more people in this world to say what they feel from the heart rather than the head.” —"King of Comedy: The Life and Art of Jerry Lewis" (1997) by Shawn Levy

Remembering Jerry Lewis (The King of Comedy)

In The Errand Boy (1961) we are presented with one of those introspective, sentimental parentheses, which Jerry Lewis has openly claimed as something that was 100% his own. More pointedly, we have a sincere openness to magic (hence to the fascination of the early Hollywood era), which is merely the complementary flip-side of escapism, a word that excellently defines a cinema which, as is the case with Lewis, is conceived as an unending succession of vanishing acts. Lewis is perfectly aware that the thread that links rhetoric and the comic is the discrepancy between an action and its own symbolic inscription. The spectacle is not the unmasking of illusion so as to claw back the truth: it is an irreducible indeterminacy, and this is why it is an inexhaustible fount of wonders.

It is decisive that the dialogue scene with Magnolia (a stuffed ostrich with a Southern accent) arrives a few minutes after an analogous scene in which Morty, in the same storage closet, watches the sweetly surreal dance of a dressed-up finger on a counter-top which–as everything suggests despite nothing being explicitly said–belongs to Morty, who, although he is visible on the other side of the counter, appears to have placed his arm underneath it. As such, Lewis initially tells us that this magic could be an illusion (even if he never says this explicitly). Then, soon afterwards (with Magnolia) he surprises us by saying that, no, the puppet’s strings are not being pulled by Morty after all. Unveiling the mechanism is not an explanation in the service of the truth, but a hypothesis (which is preserved as a hypothesis and never transfigured into a “fact”) in the service of magic. Source: sensesofcinema.com

“Though it’s sometimes hard to remember, if not believe, Jerry Lewis was the most profoundly creative comedian of his generation and one of the two or three most influential comedians born anywhere in this century. As a comedian, Lewis single-handedly created a style of humor that was half anarchy, half excruciation. Even comics who never took a pratfall in their careers owe something to the self-deprecation Jerry Lewis introduced into American show business.” —"King of Comedy: The Life and Art of Jerry Lewis" (1997) by Shawn Levy

My movies would never drawn such big audiences without my wonderful leading ladies. There were so many, so talented in so many different ways—and so much better than the material they had to work with. Some of their names might surprise you: Did you know Dean and me appeared with Donna Reed? Agnes Moorehead? But the dozens of lesser-known actresses who acted in our films all added immeasurably to our work. However, to my vast regret, the one actress we never performed with was Marilyn Monroe—and how great she would have been in a Martin and Lewis picture. Dean and I first met her when we were receiving the Photoplay magazine award as Best Newcomers of the Year 1954 and Marilyn was the Best Female Newcomer. 

God, she was magnificent—perfect physically and in every other way. She was someone any man would just love to be with, not only for the obvious reasons but for her energy, perseverance and focus. She had the capacity to make you feel that she was totally engaged with whatever you were talking about. She was kind, she was beautiful, and the press took shots at her she didn’t deserve. In the late fall of 1954, Marilyn’s marriage to Joe DiMaggio had just ended, and she badly needed friends—and laughs. Dean and I had seen her here and there over the years since the Photoplay awards, and when we invited her out for an after-work snack at Nate’n Al’s (the best deli in Beverly Hills), she accepted instantly. She had a delicious sense of humor—an ability not only to appreciate what was funny but to see the absurdity of things in general. The three of us huddled in a booth in a far corner of the restaurant. We laughed for a couple of hours, and then we drove her home in Dean’s blue Cadillac convertible. Marilyn was living in the Voltaire Apartments in West Hollywood and asked us to have a drink with her. She hated to be alone, especially late at night, when she couldn’t sleep. She mentioned Joe a couple of times, but I think Dean and I both saw that there was a lot she couldn’t or didn’t want to talk about, so we tried to keep it light.

On the way out, I asked Marilyn if she would consider going to dinner with Dean and me one night that week. “How about tonight?” she said. “Tonight is perfect!” we said in unison. Dean and I spent most of that day trying to figure out where the hell to take Marilyn Monroe for dinner. “I know!” I finally yelled. “Let’s go to Perino’s!” It was the most elegant restaurant in L.A., on Wilshire Boulevard not too far from Slapsy Maxie’s. We set the time for 8:30. Dean and I left the set after work, and Christ, did we dress that night. I won’t even go into how much cologne was applied. We stepped into Perino’s precisely at 8:30—and there at the waiting bar was Marilyn. Alone, sitting on a stool, and looking drop-dead, as always. Dean asked, “How come you’re alone? Where’s Milton?” It was well known that she had started seeing Milton Greene, the photographer. But Marilyn told us he had a family and had to be with them. We were seated in the center of this very open restaurant, with all eyes on her! How amazing it is to think that it was only seven years after that night that Dean was cast as Marilyn’s love interest in Something’s Got to Give, for 20th Century Fox. By that time, poor Marilyn was falling apart. Christ, what a loss!

We might have passed on MGM, but we didn’t overlook two of that studio’s loveliest young stars, June Allyson and Gloria DeHaven. June was the same age as Dean, an established screen presence, a sweet woman who specialized in wholesome, girl-next-door parts. The beautiful Gloria was, like me, in her early twenties, and playing mainly ingenue roles. Dean and June found each other almost as soon as we arrived in L.A. There was no stopping women once they’d set eyes on Dean! And since June and Gloria were best pals, it made sense—by the peculiar rules of Hollywood, and of up-and-coming young performers—that Ms. DeHaven and I would get together. What made a little less sense was that all four players in this little roundelay were married . . . to other people. June’s husband was the movie star Dick Powell (42nd Street). They had a little boy and a young daughter. Gloria was married to the movie star John Payne (Miracle on 34th Street). They had a little girl and a baby boy. Dean and I, of course, were married to Betty and Patti, with four children between us. Dean and I booked two suites at the Hampshire House on Central Park South. June and Gloria had come to New York, without husbands, to go on a shopping spree. It was the kind of thing that young actresses did then—a chance to kick up their heels and get some publicity at the same time. The MGM publicity department underwrote the whole trip, even their shopping bills. June and Gloria were dressed to the nines in Lord & Taylor clothes and mink stoles. For the five days they were staying in New York, the girls had ten or fifteen changes of clothes: dresses, skirts, blouses, ball gowns, riding habits—all of it provided by the humongous Metro wardrobe department, approved by L. B. Mayer himself. Dean had a suite on the twenty-third floor, and mine was on the twenty-fourth floor, with but one flight of stairs between us. The girls were staying together in a suite on the twenty-fifth floor and extended their stay another week. I must have lost five pounds, and I was only 124 to start with. Dean just basked in it all, looking like a cat with a mouth full of canary. 

Then came the telephone call. It was—of course—Patti. Hours later, with the Manhattan sky turning gray, I was still trying to explain to my wife. “Listen, you schmuck,” she said. “If you have to get your rocks off, why do it in Madison Square Garden?” “What do you mean?” I asked innocently. “It’s all over the papers about you, Dean, and the two chippies you’re with,” she said. “Didn’t you know that what you were up to would have consequences?” I pacified her as best I could. After Patti and I made the agonizing decision to bring our long and difficult marriage to an end, Sandra (SanDee) Pitnick and I became husband and wife in February 1983. —"Dean & Me" (2005) by Jerry Lewis

The Nutty Professor (1963), is the one Jerry Lewis film that has attained something like classic status among critics and film historians, presenting a more solid narrative. In this takeoff on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the Jekyll figure, Dr. Julius Kelp, is a clumsy, shy chemistry professor with buck teeth, thick glasses, and a frog voice; the Hyde into whom he transforms himself, Buddy Love, is a slick, vain, boorish lounge lizard. Mostly Lewis is spoofing the kind of macho man sold by the advertising industry, exposing the thin line between arousing the opposite sex and becoming a total creep. The biggest joke of the movie is that the “monster” in Lewis’ Jekyll/Hyde story is a smarmy entertainer. Buddy is Kelp’s overreaction to being bullied, and Stella Purdy (Stella Stevens) sees something of the sweet, if befuddled, Kelp in Buddy. Stella is as Jekyll/Hyde as Kelp, prissy and pigtailed in class and vampish and dressed to kill at The Purple Pit.

"In an odd way I had trouble relating to control and to myself in The Nutty Professor. I had trouble coming out of the character of Buddy Love because I was playing a dirty, lousy bastard. I didn't like him. I didn't even like writing Buddy Love, the despicable, discourteous, uncouth rat, much less playing him. I asked myself: How do I know so well how to be a heel? Was I leaning to a side of me that really existed? Certainly I was. There was truth in him. It was also in me. So I hated him, and couldn't wait to play the alter-character, the nutty professor. Yet I had to relate to both of them and try to play them equally well."  —Jerry Lewis (The Total Film-Maker, 1971)

Lewis married his first wife Patti Palmer when he was only 18 and they had six sons. In the fall of 1963, when his wife was pregnant with their sixth child, Lewis was determined to have a daughter. Lewis met SanDee Pitnick, a 32-year-old dancer, while he performed in Las Vegas in the early 1980s, and, shortly after he got a divorce from Patti, the couple wed in Key Biscayne, Florida, on February 13, 1983. They adopted Danielle Sarah Lewis, who was born on March 23, 1992. “She’s the answer to my dreams,” Jerry told Joe Stabile: “I’m happier now than I’ve ever been in my life. I've cried before out of sheer happiness, but never out of ecstasy. I'd wanted her for so long.” Lewis gushed endlessly about Danielle, named after Lewis’ stern and often disapproving vaudevillian father Daniel Levitch. “She’s the air in my lungs,” Lewis told CNN’s Larry King in 1996 when he was starring in Damn Yankees. “She’s the reason I’m here with you today. She brings me the energy to go on at 8 o’clock and try to be as good as I possibly can so she hears about it.”

Lewis often referred to Sandee Pitnick glowingly, on one occasion saying that she’s “the greatest audience I have ever had.” "I'm really not thick-skinned—my wife will tell you that I take sunsets personally—but I know that I've got the belly for whatever comes down the pike. I think it's tenacity. I say to everybody, love is what wakes you up in the morning, love is what makes you walk and love is what makes you hope,” he told The Guardian in 2016: “Love is what makes you dream and love is what makes you want to get up in the morning, love is something that you want to be a part of, because it makes you better. We’ve had 38 years and she’s my right arm, left arm, both legs, head, lips and eyes.” On his health, Lewis said: "From 1936 on, I have taken more falls than any other 20 comedians put together. From the time I was 21, I've taken them on everything from clay courts to cement to wood floors, coming off pianos, going out a two-story window, landing on Dean, falling into the rough. You do that and you're gonna have problems. I've never had a day without pain since March 20, 1965."


Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin took their comedy double act into the movies, starting with My Friend Irma in 1949, and starred in 14 movies together. But the pair, once inseparable, fell into a bitter feud that lasted for decades and on only a few occasions did they see each other before Martin died of emphysema in 1995. Why didn’t they talk to each other for almost 20 years? “It was stupid,” Lewis said. “There was so much more that I wanted to do [in comedy]. And Dean wanted to sing more; and that was fine but when we got to that point we just didn’t talk. It was awful.” Lewis went his own way and made a string of highly successful solo films, beginning with The Delicate Delinquent and including The Sad Sack, The Geisha Boy, Cinderfella,  The Bellboy, The Ladies Man and The Errand Boy. The Nutty Professor in 1963 was one of his last big hits and his popularity waned.

Jerry Lewis was a dedicated artisan of the cinema, pioneering the process of video playback on set, without which directing a movie is now quite unthinkable. He taught a directing class at USC for some years, where his students included Spielberg and Lucas. Jerry Lewis' many inheritors in modern Hollywood comedy lack his streak of sentimentality and need to be loved. "Comedy comes out of pain, comedy comes out of uncertainty. When you ask a comedian if he ever would do anything dramatic—he’s done it from the day he decided to make people laugh! He’s far more dramatic than any dramatic actor," explained Jerry Lewis. "You have to look at things that are negative and figure out why they happened and make sure they don't happen again. I keep negative out of my life." Then he can't resist a last bad joke. "Except for film negative." Source: www.telegraph.co.uk

Doppelgängers and Multiple Personalities: Twin Peaks, Jerry Lewis, Ansel Elgort

David Foster Wallace defined the term Lynchian in 1997 as: "this weird confluence of very dark, surreal, violent stuff and absolute, almost Norman Rockwell, banal, American stuff, which is terrain he's been working for quite a while, at least since Blue Velvet." Lynch blurs the line between the fifties and the present in all his films since Blue Velvet and makes a botch of all the Southern accents and class distinctions; but one can reasonably argue that his only true subjects are inner landscapes. Yet insofar as inner landscapes are at least partially dependent on external realities, one should note that Lynch’s moral universe is made up of mutually exclusive categories: holy fools and scumbags. Was there ever a real Diane? Were her fashion choices intended to make her a counterpart to the White Lodge’s Naido? When Cooper woke and called the gold bead from Dougie a seed, did he mean Diane when he asked Mike for another? The innate goodness of Dale Cooper, which inspires trust even in those who are meeting him fully awake for the first time, is what Dark Coop abused in his meeting with Diane more than two decades ago. “No knock, no doorbell,” she says, “he just walked in.” Then he kissed her, and she felt how wrong he was, how far he was from the upright, forthright man of honor she’d worked with. “And he saw the fear in me. And he smiled… and he smiled.”

Audrey finally arrives at the Roadhouse and finds the dance floor clearing to “Audrey’s Dance.” Something’s wrong, and it’s not that she’s wearing heels instead of saddle shoes. Audrey isn’t at the Roadhouse but in a trembling, white room. Sherilyn Fenn swaying about with a self-assured smile on her face was lovely and tinged with melancholy. It also felt like our nostalgic hunger was being fed too richly until the rug was pulled out from under us and Audrey’s time in the Roadhouse was revealed to be an illusion. Like Cooper at the end of season two, she’s left looking at her reflection in the mirror. The rough white collar of her garment suggests a hospital; the stark brightness of her surroundings suggests something stranger. And the final shot of the roadhouse band playing Audrey’s theme in reverse suggests worst of all: that Audrey, like Cooper and Laura and Diane’s doppelgänger, is in some Other Place, some place out of time, some place out of our world. Source: www.avclub.com

"In an odd way I had trouble relating to control and to myself in The Nutty Professor. I had trouble coming out of the character of Buddy Love because I was playing a dirty, lousy bastard. I didn't like him. I didn't even like writing Buddy Love, the despicable, discourteous, uncouth rat, much less playing him. I asked myself: How do I know so well how to be a heel? Was I leaning to a side of me that really existed? Certainly I was. There was truth in him. It was also in me. So I hated him, and couldn't wait to play the alter-character, the nutty professor. Yet I had to relate to both of them and try to play them equally well." —Jerry Lewis (The Total Film-Maker, 1971)

Ansel Elgort: "My work life and my regular life are very different - I feel like it's two personalities. There's actor Ansel, where I have to play a role and be 'on'. I take photos with everybody who asks, and I try to be professional. But when I'm real-life Ansel, I'm not on all the time. When I'm home in New York, I feel like that same kid that went to high school here and nobody knew. I can still blend in, which is nice. You can't lose that, you know?"

And the 23-year-old actor loves that his girlfriend Violetta Komyshan isn't famous. He added to Women's Health magazine: "I've never been with somebody from Hollywood, so I don't know what it's like, but I like having my love be away from my work. It's nice that she knows me as me before I was influenced by success or the stress and responsibility of being an adult. I feel like everyone's at their purest when they're just a kid."

Ansel previously admitted he thinks he is a "few different people": "You know, it might be a weird actor thing, but I think of myself as a few different people. Like, I think of myself as Ansel--that's one person. And then I'm Ansel Elgort. That's another person. And then I'm DJ Ansolo. I was so excited when Steve Angello, my favourite DJ, played my song 'Totem' for the first time. I started crying. Then when I heard he was going to sign it to his label, I was freaking out." Source: www.msn.com

In independent film “Jonathan,” (2017), tagged as drama/sci-fi directed by Bill Oliver from a script he co-wrote with Peter Nickowitz, Ansel Elgort will portray Jonathan and his twin brother John, who have agreed to not have girlfriends for the moment. Jonathan is a successful architect while John sleeps all day and spends the night socializing and starting to fall in love with a woman, Elena (Suki Waterhouse). Jonathan forces John to end the relationship, and then starts a new relationship with Elena out of curiosity and jealousy. John ultimately catches wind of the affair, which puts his relationship with his brother at serious risk and forces Jonathan to seek the help of Dr. Mina Nariman (Patricia Clarkson).

Speaking of Elgort: Hot damn is he great as Baby. Best known as the kid with the funny name who dies in The Fault in Our Stars, the cherubic-looking 23-year-old doesn’t naturally spring to mind as the marquee name for a crime/action movie or a musical. But in Baby Driver, he’s perfect. The kid’s a walking charisma bomb, and Wright takes full advantage of that fact at every turn, whether it’s in a grin-inducing long take that follows a celebratory Baby grooving down the street to “Harlem Shuffle,” or in a heart-pumping foot chase that highlights Elgort’s towering frame, obvious athleticism, and aw-shucks charm all at the same time. Baby is naturally taciturn, but smart scripting, thoughtful musical choices, and Elgort’s natural magnetism keep the kid from being the sort of brooding bore he could easily become in less skilled hands. Elgort’s Baby is so compelling that other characters become more interesting simply from being in his orbit, particularly Debora. Source: www.vox.com

Ansel Elgort and Miles Teller: Romantic Coolness

Baby’s need to insulate himself at all times through music is given some narrative justification (he has tinnitus stemming from a car accident in childhood) but it’s also a metaphorical condition. Socially passive and perpetually plugged-in, he’s easily pegged as a Millennial stand-in; in a world of adult role models who are either corrupt (Doc), grotesque (Jon Hamm, Jamie Foxx, and Eiza Gonzalez as criminal confederates), or else benevolently helpless (CJ Jones as Baby’s foster father), Baby’s refusal to engage is akin to a state of grace.

The guiding formal conceit of Baby Driver is that its hero, Baby (Ansel Elgort), an ace getaway driver indebted to Doc, a vicious Atlanta crime boss (Kevin Spacey), uses pop music to insulate himself from the reality of his criminal activities. Each time he takes an assignment, he makes a new iPod playlist whose contents serve simultaneously as rhythmic inspiration and a means of moral and intellectual detachment—he puts himself in a trance. Baby marks the time between his crew entering the bank they plan to rob and their emergence with satchels full of money by rocking out to the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion’s “Bellbottoms;” even with the car in park, there’s a delirious sense of movement timed to the sweep of windshield wipers. The song’s stop-start propulsion carries Baby through the ensuing high-speed chase, beautifully assembled; working in bold, primary colors and cutting purposefully on movement—not only within the frame but also in time to the music—Wright mounts an action-cinema ballet. He then extends the conceit through a credit sequence that features Elgort traipsing blithely through downtown Atlanta, lost in a headphone reverie.

That the only person to really coax him out of his shell is pretty diner waitress Deborah (Lily James) is in keeping with the story’s fairy-tale arc, but it also means that Wright is swapping out one wish-fulfillment scenario for another. Baby’s dawning realization that he’s not only being exploited but also actively participating in terrible, violent crimes, cues us for an ambivalence that never quite arrives. Instead, the film buys fully into the male fantasy of an outcast inspired and finally redeemed by the love of a cute, steadfast girl whose defining trait is her interest and patience in his traumatic backstory.

Elgort's performance for the entire movie is a kind of slightly outré cuteness, as it was in Scott Pilgrim, which kidded indie-rock navel-gazing and managed to make it seem like its protagonist’s self-actualization came from somewhere inside him (expressed through the video-game image of Michael Cera pulling a sword out from his own chest cavity). The hyperbolic but totally bloodless carnage in Scott Pilgrim suited the low-stakes solipsism of its downtown Toronto milieu. Baby Driver’s gradual and unsettling drift into brutal urban violence gives the impression that Wright is, for the first time in his career, truly out of control, or else oblivious to the signals he’s giving off. And Baby’s dawning realization that his actions actually have consequences that can’t just be drowned out doesn’t mean much when the script doesn’t ever really have him get his hands dirty. A crime-doesn’t-pay coda on the way to total, unsullied redemption, embodied by a woman who’s just happy to ride shotgun. —Adam Nayman (Cineaste Magazine, Vol. XLII, No. 4)

Shailene Woodley, Ansel Elgort and Miles Teller are the best thing about the Divergent saga. The few scenes in which the trio appear are far and away the films’ best; they share a snappy chemistry that feels more authentic and intimate than Woodley’s scenes with Theo James, who plays her boyfriend, Four. Teller’s smarmily charming act works here, particularly because it’s diluted with some cutting humor. And Elgort's reaction shots, even when he’s in the background, show the work of a serious, studious actor. Shailene Woodley had quite a lot to say about her co-stars and how much Miles Teller and Ansel Elgort are actually like their Insurgent characters in real life in an interview with Cosmopolitan. While Ansel Elgort is not much like his character Caleb, Shailene said that Miles Teller "doesn't have that rude, misogynistic streak that Peter encompasses, but he does have the humor." Elgort and Teller coincided again working for the Prada’s New Men Fashion Campaign, shot by Craig McDean in 2015. Both were listed as part of the Most Underappreciated Movie Acting Performances in 2014 by Wesley Morris (Grantland): "Miles Teller is a persuasively charismatic actor—the chilling, exhilarating mix of enraged arrogance and naked want. What you get from Teller in Whiplash is that music isn’t a way of life for Andrew Neiman. It is life. Teller gives you all the lacerating shrapnel and scars... Elgort is doing apex work in other people’s nadirs. He’s got a gawky goodness in The Fault in Our Stars." Source: www.grantland.com

"Supposedly Shailene dominated the other guys in the audition, and I was the only guy able to dominate her a little bit," Elgort said: "the main reason I read the book is that I knew Shailene would ask me whether I read it. And there's no way I could lie to her face." Director Josh Boone says Elgort possesses an almost "magical purity," while author John Green puts it more plainly: "A lot of guys that came in knew how to play cool Gus," Green says, "but very few of them knew how to be fragile while still being Augustus Waters." Elgort admits that he wasn't entirely sure that he could bring alive the character's more desperate moments. But he succeeded, likening it to an out-of-body experience. "It was three hours of my life just losing it," Elgort says, tearing up a bit at the memory. "I felt like a little baby again. I couldn't stop crying, even in between takes. And it was so rewarding. At that point, it wasn't acting any more. It was just real." Source: www.latimes.com

Elgort remembering how wrong he was about finding Ms Right according to fixed preconceptions: “Someone once told me we have in our minds who we want, and often those aren’t the people we actually want. Like once there was a girl I thought was perfect for me — I had every box checked with her. But I just didn’t feel anything.” Elgort's idea of a fun date: "Going on a long walk in Central Park and then taking the subway downtown and going out to eat and ordering oysters. After that, you walk around again and talk. It’s like you’re living in a movie." In an interview with GQ magazine (December 2014), Elgort said bluntly: “I don't really care that some trashy girl, like, now all of the sudden wants to fuck me. That's not really that interesting to me.”

Finding Violetta Komyshan gave solace to his hectic lifestyle: "If you can find a girl who you can go to an EDM concert with, have a conversation with, who will sit on the couch and watch you play GTA for three hours and then you go to bed and have amazing sex? That should be your girlfriend." These kind of half-jokey, spontaneous remarks brought the ire of Jezebel, Buzzfeed and other predominantly female-dominated social networks, although not so harshly compared to what Miles Teller was inflicted by those fan communities after his infamous Esquire (2015) interview.

In a heated PC debate, many voices claimed offense for real or imagined sexism. Teller and Elgort's irony was apparently lost on some humorless readers. In an era where most young actors are taught not to label their sexual orientation as a gesture of respect towards the gay community, Teller and Elgort, however, happily identified themselves as heterosexual, inciting backlash in form of comments such as "they should form their own celebrity anti-gay group. Why is it so important that they announce to the world they aren't gay?" Other anonymous posters inadvertently objectified both actors, alluding about Elgort: "I know a girl he slept with a few times. She's a size queen, so I wouldn't be surprised if it's a big dick." Even Shailene Woodley was not beyond the limits. An ONTD member wrote, outraged: "Miles, Shailene, and now an Ansel post, all in a row? [They are] the unholy trinity."

Evidently, Elgort's comments were mostly tongue in cheek as in the GQ interview: “Girls love it when you have some weird nerdy thing in your room. It makes you look less threatening, even though I'm, like, very threatening. I'm the most threatening guy ever.” Elgort's nerdy sensibility and suave magnetism made his fanbase keep growing (reaching over 3 million Twitter followers). Elgort's dual passion for cinema/pop music has touched a nerve. In an interview for Details magazine, Elgort examined his copy of Pin Ups, David Bowie's 1973 album of covers, sizing up Ziggy Stardust: "This guy's eternal," Elgort said. "I wonder who from today will be eternal?"

After four years of dating, the “Whiplash” actor and his model girlfriend Keleigh Sperry are engaged. Teller popped the question over the weekend, while the two were vacationing in South Africa on safari. Sperry’s sister, Christie Sperry York, was the first to break the news, sharing a handful of photos from the couple’s travels on her Instagram page. You’ve got the standard ring shot, and another where Teller sweeps Sperry off her feet. "They stayed in the beautiful Metsi Presidential Suite," a source adds, noting that the couple "enjoyed delicious meals at their leisure and incredible game drives with the head ranger John D. Ditsele."

“Can’t believe the last Sperry girl is engaged! Love both of you guys to pieces and so incredibly happy for this new chapter in your love story!” York captioned the post. “Now come home so we can celebrate.” Keleigh's sister shared snaps of the duo posing together in Africa, including pictures of the ring as well as one shot of the beauty holding a rose with a small note. The paper had: 'KS & MT 5/11/13 - 8/20/2017' - which seemingly means May 11, 2013 is the first time they met or perhaps their first date. Based on the note, the lovebirds have been together for four years and three months. Source: www.dailymail.co.uk

In a time when many couples meet via dating apps, Miles Teller is proud to have met his fiancée in a more traditional manner. "I like human interaction. Tinder puts all of these girls in front of you, so you don't have to go to a bar and you don't have to have the balls to ask a girl for her number. Tinder expedites everything. Here's four pictures. If you want 'em, swipe to the right. Oh she said yes, too. Now you guys are texting each other and you could be hanging out within an hour...," The Spectacular Now star told ELLE. "But it's not something that I'm like, 'Oh god, they're having so much fun.'" Marriage is important to Teller, whose grandparents have been married for over 50 years. "Respect the person you're with. My philosophy is, if I'm not happier when I'm with you, then there's no reason for me to be with you," the actor told ELLE in 2014. Source: www.eonline.com