Interview: Adriana Trigiani of “Big Stone Gap”

Posted on October 6, 2015 at 3:31 pm

Adriana Trigiani really is from a coal mining town in Virginia called Big Stone Gap and the biggest movie star in the world did choke on a chicken bone there.

Now if that is not enough to inspire a book and a movie, I don’t know what is.

Elizabeth Taylor was married to then-Senate candidate John Warner when they came through Big Stone Gap on a campaign trip. And they offered her fried chicken and she choked on a bone. All of that happens in the film, Big Stone Gap but it is almost incidental as far more important issues and characters appear as well. Like Trigiana herself, Ashley Judd plays a resident of the town who is of Italian heritage, only in this case she does not find out the truth about her paternal side of the family until after her mother’s death. Her name is Ave Maria (like the hymn) Mulligan and she owns the local pharmacy and directs the annual outdoor musical, “Trail of the Lonesome Pine.” At age 40, she wonders if love has passed her by.

I spoke to Ms. Trigiana about Big Stone Gap, “Big Stone Gap,” and the challenges of finding an actress to play the iconic Elizabeth Taylor. She said to find the town of Big Stone Gap “you can get in your car and if you are in Eastern Virginia, you just keep driving and if you drive and you look on a map it looks west of Cincinnati. It is deep in the corner of the state, shaped like a boot, and it’s the toe of the boot where the five states meet; North Carolina, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia West Virginia, and it’s gorgeous! I call Virginia the England of America. It’s very elegant. It’s a state I know like the back of my hand because I grow up there and you’ve got Charleston, you’ve got the Piedmont, you’ve got the ocean and that gorgeous coastline round the hills of the Piedmont that gives way to the Blue Ridge and the Appalachians and the Coleman Gap. The artist Cy Twombly said that Virginia was the best preparation for Italy. And he is right. The light, the sky, for an artist it’s the most magnificent place to grow up.”

They really do put on a production of “The Trail of the Lonesome Pine” every year in an outdoor theater. “It has been up and running since 1965. It’s an outdoor drama. You know, there is a certain amount of those put on in towns around the country and there’s a consortium. It’s the local actors that come together and sometimes they get a professional director and semi-professional company and it runs throughout the summer. It’s a great community activity. The original is written by Errol Hodgson Smith based on the novel the Trail of the Lonesome Pine which was published in 1903 by John Fox Jr. and when you come to Big Stone Gap everything is named for him. The outdoor drama is named after his novel; we have the John Fox Jr. house where he spent his summers. We have the June Tolliver house named for the character who is the lead in the drama. So it is really part of our local culture and it’s kind of our showbiz thing. And then in the spring we do a musical. So it was a very fabulous community we grow up in.”

The movie is set in 1978. “As you know, Nell, every great novel has to have a historical backdrop. Some people choose a famine, some people choose the World War, some people choose Armageddon and I chose Elizabeth Taylor the greatest movie star choking on a chicken bone in 1978 in my hometown. It’s a real thing and so I thought, well, I love to write comedy so I am going to redeem my little town because everyone remembers the ‘Saturday Night Live’ skit with John Belushi. This mortified us. Well it turns out that pretty much everybody in the county was in that room when she choked on that chicken bone including my parents. This thing was seismic and it’s just a part of history, in the town it couldn’t have been worse. Elizabeth Taylor is like the dream goddess of everyone because she was a horsewoman and she did ‘National Velvet’ when she was a little girl. You just doesn’t get any bigger than Elizabeth Taylor and here she had married candidate John Warner who was running for office. She came to Big Stone Gap and she’s trying to be on a diet and you know the fried chicken is the greatest in the south and she grabbed the piece of chicken and ate it too quickly and it went down wrong rushed her to the hospital.”

She had two reasons for casting Polish actress Dagmara Dominczyk as Elizabeth Taylor. First, she is a beautiful brunette and a magnificent actress. (“She is also an incredible novelist.”) And she is married to the movie’s leading man, Patrick Wilson, whose family happens to be from Big Stone Gap as well. Their two sons also appear in the movie, along with some other members of the Wilson family. We don’t see Dominczyk’s face, but just with the set of her shoulders and the gesture of her hand, she evokes the star. You know I had big dreams for this movie and a lot of plans, big plans. Our cinematographer is Reynardo Villalobos. This is a lucky thing. He was scouting another film in Virginia. When I found out that film was not going to start until the next year, I really like hit the “Hail Mary” ready hard, please let him do it. He loved the script. I had written the scene of Elizabeth Taylor and what I wanted to do was recreate her entrance into Rome in the movie ‘Cleopatra.’ And I acted it out for Reynardo and I said tan-ta-tanna-nam-ta then I said okay, then the float, then this, then that, as it was in the novel. Okay because it’s fiction you can have a ball and then she was going to come in and almost fall off the convertible. So the scheduling you have 42 speaking parts, you have all these actors,you have people like Jane Krakowski who has limited availability. How am I going to get all these people to fly in and out? I am driving everyone crazy with this schedule. Well the filming of the choking of Elizabeth Taylor on the chicken bone falls on a Saturday and on Saturday in southwest Virginia is football day and there is no high school marching band, I had planned like marching band going through and all kinds of extra things happening. We scrapped it and what you see on that screen is very close to what actually happened. So I ended up with what really happened as opposed to my cinematic dream of what happened. It almost killed me. Now you might say, ‘But there is a band!’ Well, before I started crying that day I remembered when I was a kid in high school that they had a room for when kids forgot their instrument or you couldn’t afford an instrument in band. They had an instrument closet so like if you forget like your trumpet or your tuba or your sax. I said, ‘Just go and empty out the closet of practice instruments.’ So if you really study those scenes you going to see a bunch of people in the background blowing horns who don’t know how to blow horns but you see the brass and I told them to move like in a certain way.”

It took fifteen years to make a deal for the film, in part because Trigiani was determined to film it on location. “I think one of the reasons that the movie is so alive is because of this notion, like Frank Capra, that it is infused it with this very real element of the real people and different caliber probably different from everybody you usually see in movies. The smaller roles and some that aren’t so small were local cast and I had the Wilson family who actually had roots there playing alongside the local people who are from there. And Dagmara Dominczyk has the bone structure and the coloring of Elizabeth Taylor.

Trigiani was inspired by some of the women screenwriters and directors in the early days of Hollywood. “If one studies the history of movies, when movies began, the scenarios were written by women name Anita Loos, Francis Marion, the screenplay form was invented by a woman named June Mathis. People like Mary Pickford actually edited their own movies. Dorothy Arzner was a director. Women were front and center in storytelling of movies. The great stars like Mae Murray. Everything was geared toward getting women into the theater engaging women in telling the stories of women. The biggest star in the 1930s was Marie Dressler who was close to 60 years old. I am part of the living history and it is incumbent on me as an artist to make the movies that I believe should be made. I am going to make movies that I think the audience is craving and wants to see. So that’s why I made ‘Big Stone Gap’ and that’s why over 70 percent of the cast is women and that’s why the women are the ages they are because these are fascinating stories.”

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Interview: Giulio Ricciarelli of Holocaust Drama “Labyrinth of Lies”

Posted on October 1, 2015 at 3:43 pm

Giulio Ricciarelli co-wrote and directed the German film “Labyrinth of Lies,” based on the real-life story of the courageous post-WWII German prosecutors who insisted on investigating the atrocities of the concentration camps and prosecuting those responsible. Surrounded by former Axis and Allies officials who wanted to put the past behind them and move on to fighting the communists. He talked to me about the inspiration for the film, what really happens to the movie’s couple after the ambiguous ending, and why the owners of the vintage cars used in the film drove him crazy.

The movie’s opening takes us into a world almost impossible to imagine, where concentration camp survivors are living with the people who imprisoned and abused them and the world has almost no information about what would later come to be called the Holocaust. An artist is offered a light by a teacher watching some children in a school playground. When he bends over to reach the flame, he sees the teacher’s hand and recognizes him as a former Nazi. “That symbolized the theme of the movie, the tormented meeting the tormenter. And the second thing that was important that I wanted it to be a teacher because if you imagine him teaching children that is so horrible and that’s something that actually happened a lot. And so we had these two elements and I knew that as a filmmaker I needed a point of seeming harmony in perfect world, an innocent world. A school is like that. So it was important, the tree and the school and the children playing. And then the movie starts and you realize there is something very wrong there and so it was important to have this. There is a German word that means like a mix of sane and beautiful. It’s like an untouched world.”

The “big complex task” of the film was making what is very familiar to us unfamiliar, so we could feel the shock and horror of the young Germans who came of age after the war and did not know about the “Final Solution.” The movie’s main character is fictional, a young lawyer working as a prosecutor, though some of the other characters are based on historical figures. “That‘s why we choose this young naïve main character, hoping that we enter his world, we start looking through his eyes and the reaction I get is great. It seems to be working with go back in time and go with it. The other thing is esthetically of course; first of all you got to plot what you just mentioned.” The very pervasiveness of the portrayal of the Holocaust created a separate challenge as well. It is so well known that it is impossible to replicate in a persuasive way. The audience at some level always knows it is a re-creation. “The audience can almost hear the director say, ‘Okay lunch.’ And you see actors who are well fed. So I said, ‘Okay, we will not have any of that. We’ll not even have testimony like an actor acting as if he was in a camp and we will trust that these iconic images will come when we give them room to come and the audience.” And so, when the scene comes where a survivor provides testimony for the first time to the lawyers, we do not see or hear him. We just see the reaction of the woman taking dictation, and we feel we know what she heard and saw.

One reason for the film was to recognize the courage of the lawyers who insisted on the truth. But just as important was showing that the only way to move forward after unthinkable inhumanity is to completely honest about it. “In Germany, anything we do politically or culturally is seen through that lens, that’s the reality and if you are talking about refugees if you are talking about Greece, if we talking about anything it’s all we see in the frame of this. The country who did that now does this. The thing is, you cannot deny it, that’s not the way, and you can’t leave it behind.” One way to do that is what he did here, finding a new way to tell the story by looking at a part that has not been told.

“I think what is important with our film is that it’s a not told story. I think what is most important is the movie doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to the involvement of Germany as a whole because there is sometimes a tendency to show two evil Nazis and the rest of the population is confused. That’s not historical fact but at the same time not to sit on a moral high horse. That’s why the main character says, ‘I do not know what I would done.’ And if you look at the atrocities not just in Germany but all over the world the human beings are usually not heroes but they go along and they do the easy thing and they don’t risk their own lives and there are heroes but they are few and far between.” He described the continual presence of this history in Germany as an iceberg. “Under the waterline it’s still huge and it’s still usually influential in Germany, it’s certainly the biggest influence in German politics and culture today.” Everyone in Germany was supportive of the film and cooperative in helping to get it made, including Frankfort, where they filmed on location at the places where the events actually happened. One of the most striking images is the rows and rows of documents. The real archive no longer exists in that form, but they found another storage facility with old documents and used camera angles to make it look biggers.

But one challenge they faced was the vintage cars they needed for the shoot. “First of all they are very expensive, but you know what the biggest problem is? They are owned by collectors, so in the morning you always get that spit shine car and they would say, ‘Don’t dirty it up,’ but we have to spray dust over it and sprinkle it with dust and tell them to bring it back dirty but the next day it’s clean again.”

He has been very moved by the response to the film from people who still struggle with the truth of what happened. “And how much rawness there still is. Like a woman came to me and said, ‘We have a box from our grandfather and our family and it’s closed as we are all afraid to open it, because we don’t want to know how grandpa died in the war.’ Or the man who shook my hand and said, ‘Thank you for this film,’ and then he went five steps and he came back and he looked me straight in the eyes and he said very quietly, ‘My father was a bad man.'”

The movie ends on a positive note about the prosecution of those responsible for wartime atrocities, including cooperation with the Mossad agents who tracked down Adolf Eichmann. But it is ambiguous when it comes to the future of the couple in the film. I pressed Ricciarelli to tell me what he thought would happen to them after the movie. He told me he shot two endings but went with the one he thought was more realistic. Still, he smiled and admitted “there is a ray of hope.”

Interview: Writer-Director Carmen Marron of “Endgame”

Posted on September 23, 2015 at 3:18 pm

“Endgame” is a heartwarming family film inspired by the true story of a championship middle school chess team from a school in a poor Texas community. It stars “Modern Family’s” Rico Rodriguez and two actors from “Napoleon Dynamite,” Efran Ramirez and Jon Gries. Writer/director Carmen Marron talked to me about why it was important to her to tell this story.

How did you first hear about this chess team?

It was like three years ago actually I was working on another project and one of the producers on the other project was approached by the executive producer of “Endgame.” He knew her; they were both from Texas. He started writing a script about the story of what was going in Brownsville and he was like, “I would really like to make it into a movie and can you help me with that?” It was low-budget, they didn’t have much money. So she knew what I did with my first film, Go for It, that I basically put together myself. And she said, “Look, this is what you like to do, an inspirational movie, a movie that can help motivate youth and women in our society. This story might be up your alley. Would you be willing to jump on board and help make it happen?” I felt like it was going to be a lot of work and at the time it was not my priority. But then I researched it. I researched it online about the community, about Brownsville, about the teacher and the kids and everything and I was researching it all night and by the morning I was like, “I have to make this movie. I don’t care if I do it for free at this point.”

I grew up really poor in Chicago, one of 10 kids. My dad always raised me with the belief that one person can make a huge difference and so I felt like this is the perfect example of how this teacher in the third poorest community in the time in the US really turned it around and created so much faith and hope just for the love that he had and the belief that he had in these kids. He showed that you don’t need money, you don’t need the resources if you really have that hope and he turned it all around. It was amazing! And to see these kids, and how resilient they are. It reminded me of those kids that I worked with when I was a guidance counselor. These kids are put through so much at such a young age and you see what their potential is if they have adults around them who can make them believe that what they are going through is just going to make them stronger, it’s not going to ruin their future.

Why chess?

He said that he had it in his classroom and it didn’t cost any money. It’s very costly to put together a team and uniforms. And it’s about critical thinking and it helps keep the kids focused and in the classroom in their seats. That’s what these kids in detention weren’t able to do. And so he started doing that with them little by little and they were so perceptive. It just goes to show how resilient and so very resourceful they are. They are always thinking, they are always trying to figure out how they can survive really but he was just using it to make them analytical.

I liked the way you portrayed the culture of chess, shaking hands after every match, which you use to great dramatic effect in the film.

Yes, in addition to the analytic skill, it is important to teach them good sportsmanship and respect and to be able to look at the other kid in the eye regardless of who they are. And what he used to say is when he started the team, these were inner-city kids with no money. He put the uniforms together were just T-shirts and he said that when he first took them to Dallas the first year nobody even looked at them. They treated them like they were invisible, like they weren’t even contenders. So he wanted to teach the students that confidence. No matter who you play against, no matter how rich this kid is or what prep school he comes from you just look him in the eye and you wish him well and you have that sportsmanship which I thought was so beautiful.

It was great to see such strong female characters.

I think that’s my personal mission as a filmmaker. I did that with my first film and I am going to do that with every film. I really do believe and I think that what I learned as a guidance counselor that there really is such an imbalance of women role models or girl role models for these girls and so I really need to start creating stories that can show these young girls, older girls, older women as powerful role models and heroes and leaders in their own rights. It’s really important to me. That’s the mission that I have that I am going to continue to do because these young girls that I work with are just so hungry to try to identify with public figures. Unfortunately they are looking up to Kim Kardashian and Britney Spears and all of these women that really don’t care to be role models. And so I really want to create these characters that just have so much inner power, inner strength in them and intelligence and leadership. It is really like an obsession for me.

Now why was it important to you to include an undocumented character who was deported?

That was actually one of the requests of the executive producers because he is an attorney and he deals a lot with immigration law and also it was an issue that the coach said that he came across. Some of these kids on the team were undocumented. And so I really wanted to show that whether they are born here or not, they are living the American life just like the other kids and they are going through the journey together. You see the huge safety net that they don’t have under them that all the other kids have because all of this uncertainty with immigration laws and it shows the double burden that they are also dealing with as they are growing up but how they are also handling it with grace as much as possible.

Was it a challenge to work with so many young actors?

Well I completely understand is definitely, definitely a whole world onto itself working with kids I didn’t even know. But I have always worked with kids. I was a guidance counselor and I have a Masters in Educational Psychology so my goal is always to make a difference with kids through education. And so that was the easy part. The hard part is that dealing with the child labor laws because you have to treat them as employees in a way because you have this movie to make. I made the movie 19 days and these kids can only work six hour days and they have a teacher who has to spend time with them. When working with kids you have to be focused. You have to make sure that the kids are all on the same page before you even begin and that you just know. You have your vision and you know what it is because you really sometimes only have the one chance and you have to move on.

How do you go from being a guidance counselor to being a filmmaker?

That, I would say was divine intervention. I never wanted to be a filmmaker, to be honest with you. I always knew that I wanted to make a difference in society and that I was going to work with kids and with women but I didn’t know how. As a guidance counselor I loved what I did. I loved it, I loved it, I loved it. And then after about my second year, maybe after my first year I was thinking that I was making a difference with 600 kids. How can I reach much more? How can I reach the inner-city kids in Chicago? How can I reach them in LA and Texas? I was in Phoenix at the time and I didn’t know. I just knew that what I was doing at the school, I wanted to try to help more kids and so honestly I prayed a lot and it came to me when I was praying, when I was meditating and the answer was, “You have to tell what you’re trying to teach, how you are trying to inspire kids you have to make movies so that you can reach more.” And then from there I just followed my heart. Honestly I went to the library and I checked out a book on how to write a screenplay and then I just started writing, watching movies and then I just packed up my car and my dog and my laptop and moved to LA with a script.

“Bread and Roses,” I recommend that to everybody because when I saw the movie I moved to LA and for two years people basically laughed at me telling me that I had no idea what I was getting myself into, I didn’t know a thing about filmmaking. It’s like the worst industry to get into, to break into. Even when you are in it is even worse to try to move up. I remembered just feeling so dismayed and then I watched “Bread and Roses” and it just brought me back to life and I was like, “Those are the types of movies I want to make.” And then actually I reached out to Ken Loach, who directed it. I wrote him the longest letter on how I want to make this inspirational movie that revolves around inner-city girls and it deals with dance because I used to be a street dancer, blah blah blah and I wanted him to direct it and I wanted to be very raw and honest like “Bread and Roses.” And two weeks later his assistant calls me from London, wakes me up at seven in the morning and he says, “Ken and I read your email and he really wants me to tell you that you need to direct your movie.” And told him I don’t know how to direct a movie, I don’t know how to do anything like this, I just wrote it. And he said, “No, you really do. Your email spelled it all out and no one will have that passion like you. The hardest part is having the money and once you have the money everything is going to fall into place.” And so from there that’s when I just made the decision.

Interview: Director Khoa Le of “Walt Before Mickey”

Posted on September 20, 2015 at 10:52 am

“Walt Before Mickey” is the story of Walt Disney’s earliest years in animation, filled with passion and imagination but also plagued by failures and setbacks. “American Pie’s” Thomas Ian Nicholas and “Napoleon Dynamite’s” Jon Heder play brothers Walt and Roy Disney. The film was made on a micro-budget with a first-time director, Khoa Le. It was a pleasure to speak to Le about the challenges of coming to this very ambitious project at the last minute and bringing it all together in a very short time frame.

“I got the call on Christmas Eve in 2013 and my friend asked me if I wanted to make my first feature film and I go, ‘Yes, sure. What is it about?’ And he goes, ‘Well it’s about Walt Disney.’ And I said, ‘Wait this is a Disney film?’ and he goes, ‘No it’s a film about Walt Disney,’ and I said, ‘Is it a documentary?’ And he goes, ‘No it’s narrative feature film. It hasn’t been fully casted yet and they’ve been going through some trouble.’ and I said, ‘So that’s the catch to my opportunity.’ Just like anything else, any first-time opportunity, you’re going to have to make some sacrifices. And at the time I was growing my business and we were in the baby stages of the business. And I had to make a decision if this was something that was going to propel the career or hurt my career or risk the opportunity of losing my business at the same time because I knew I would have to step away at least for a few months to make this project work. Instead I stepped away for almost a year because we had to go into post production and all that type of stuff to make this movie work for almost no money at all. But I’m glad that we did it with blood, sweat and tears and with so many issues that were presented on the set. And I think as a first-time feature it couldn’t have been more perfect, even with all the mistakes that we had, seeing how the production was pretty much a disaster coming on board because of another director had left. I always believed that you only succeed from the failures, you always learn from the failures, so if we never went through those failures then I’d have to learn all of this in my next feature production. Instead I get to learn it from here. So during the film I wanted to kill myself, I got sick, I had pink eye, it was a mess but I think it comes to show that no matter what the budget is as long as you have a strong mind and a set of people that’s willing to pull this forward then you can make any project as successful as it can be.”

The challenges made Le appreciate even more the challenges his main character, Walt Disney, went through in life and was going through in the film.

“When I came on board I didn’t know how many crew I was going to be managing, I didn’t know I had a crew of over 100 people. I thought it was a much smaller team but we had an experienced crew. We had costume designers that worked on Pirates of the Caribbean and people that worked on Fast And Furious as well. I was really intimidated because I’m probably the most inexperienced one out of that group but what I was much more experienced about was running an organization and growing a business because I just came off from winning Small Business of the Year For Fastest-Growing Business in Hudson County New Jersey and we were becoming this 1/2 million dollar organization and continue to much further growth. So I knew that if I go in there telling them, ‘Okay guys this is what we’re going to do,’ we’re going to have a problem, but if I going there even to inspire the crew and get them to believe in what I’m capable of without having to question me and then I return the same thing obviously we would be able to create a more manageable team and a more structured organization when we are making this movie.”

With a tiny budget and short schedule, shooting a period film with several different locations meant enormous challenges in the sets, cars, props, and costumes. Though the story takes place in the Midwest and California, most of it was shot in Florida.

“To start with, it took me 18 hours to get to Florida because of a snowstorm. From a micro budget standpoint, everything had to be shot on the medium-size, I couldn’t shoot anything wide because if you go into anything wider you might see a light pole or might see a construction site. Sound was a problem because you hear modern cars flying by, effects really tough to work with. We shot one part in Kansas City which is more period, but the producers are from Florida so that’s where they wanted to shoot. It’s their home town, they knew everybody over there so I guess it makes the most sense. But from the directing standpoint it was a nightmare because I would say, “Can I have this?” “No you can’t do that, you can’t do it right here.” “Can we lock down the street?” “No we don’t have the budget for this.” “Can I get at least two picture cars in the scenes? And I wanted a crane for the farm scene, but that was too much, too. And of course the producers are very inexperienced as well so we were learning together. If you’re making small changes on the day of whether you’re having another actor in or you’re taking another actor out or you change the shot just a little bit, I learned that it affects all the other departments. Costume has to change, make up has to be fixed, and it creates this craziness on the set.”

When he arrived, the script was not even ready. “The producer gave me the book to read and also I had two scripts to look at. One was a script that was 150 pages which is nowhere close to a shooting script, it was more of a draft but it had a lot of ideas and good elements in it. The shooting script didn’t have the strong element but could fit within that budget to make it work. But it was tough because both of them were not ready to be shot so when I got down there and this is before I met Frank Licari, he is actually my film partner now but at the time I didn’t know him. He is also the co-producer on the movie and also the additional writer on the movie. This guy was a phenomenal writer and I knew right then and there this guy is going to be my right hand through this process because for two weeks while over there I didn’t even get to set up anything that was for directing purposes, everything was trying to fix the script. And so by the time we got to the last week we didn’t have an actor to play Walt Disney until the last week of production. We didn’t even stop looking for locations the week before we had the shoot.”

He turned over as much as he could to the experienced crew members, telling the costume and prop people that “I’m going to leave it up to you guys to be very creative and I want to trust you because we have no time to debate on these things so at the end of the day I kind of set them free on any restrictions, no micromanagement, you can’t and that’s how we collaboratively made this happen.” He regrets missing the chance to film some of the scenes they could not get to, “with the details that I wanted to shoot to make the transitions and the cast more interesting just didn’t have any time or opportunity for that.” But “I’m still proud of the movie for sure. I think people are going to be surprised. I look at Walt Disney as more of an entrepreneur than just a creator. Every entrepreneur has a reason why they exist in the world. What is their cause and their belief to pull through. He could just as easily create animation and call it a small business forever and just do that but he didn’t. He wanted to create something that could change the world. He created something that could be iconic, and could create a legacy not for himself but for people that experienced what he created. So it’s about happiness at the end of the day. If you could create a world where it’s just pure happiness and nobody’s fighting, nobody is jealous of anything else or a place where you could come back to and could rekindle a family or save a marriage or help you raise a child, that’s a life worth living. And I think that’s what Walt Disney did. That’s why when you watch the movie, you watch it not only for the educational piece, but you are watching it for yourself. Because everyone goes through adversity, everyone goes through challenges; everyone goes through all these obstacles in order for you to achieve your dream. It doesn’t get handed to you on a silver plate at all and Walt Disney just like you and me, he is just a normal person like just you and me with a reason why he wanted to create all of this with a passion. That is more than just watching it, if you could realize that someone iconic that created a world that you live in of knowing what he did, in my opinion, that’s breathtaking.”

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Directors Interview

Jerry Lewis Donates Archive to the Library of Congress

Posted on September 15, 2015 at 8:00 am

Jerry Lewis has donated a large collection of movies and memorabilia to the Library of Congress, where it will be available for researchers, historians, and critics.

“The Geisha Boy,” “The Bellboy,” “Cinderfella,” and “The Nutty Professor” are all among the many motion pictures that personify the comedic genius of Jerry Lewis. The Library of Congress announced today that it has acquired a trove of documents, films and other media that provide a unique window into the world of a man who has spent more than 70 years making people laugh.

In celebration of the materials arriving at the nation’s oldest federal cultural institution, Lewis will perform at 8 p.m., Friday, Oct. 9, at the historic State Theatre in Culpeper, Virginia in cooperation with the Library of Congress. “An Evening with Jerry Lewis” is a ticketed event. For more information, visit the State Theatre’s website (www.culpepertheatre.org) or call (540) 829-0292.

Before the concert, Lewis will tour the Library of Congress Packard Campus in Culpeper to see where his collection will be stored and preserved as part of the nation’s artistic and cultural patrimony. The collection will complement the Library’s existing collections of iconic humorists, including Bob Hope, Groucho Marx, Danny Kaye, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, Sid Caesar and Johnny Carson.

“Many of us know Jerry Lewis through his comedy, in film and onstage, or for his humanitarian work,” said Librarian of Congress James H. Billington. “Lewis is one of the few comic auteurs. This collection will give the world a more complete picture of his life as a performer, director, producer, writer, recording artist, author, educator and philanthropist. He is one of America’s funniest men, who has demonstrated that comedy as a medium for laughter is one of humanity’s greatest gifts.”

“For more than seven decades I’ve been dedicated to making people laugh. If I get more than three people in a room, I do a number,” Lewis joked. “Knowing that the Library of Congress was interested in acquiring my life’s work was one of the biggest thrills of my life. It is comforting to know that this small piece of the world of comedy will be preserved and available to future generations.” Lewis donated portions of the collection; the rest was acquired via purchase.

The Jerry Lewis Collection contains more than 1,000 moving image materials and paper documentation that cover the entire span of his remarkable career—from an early screen test made years before his movie debut to extensive amounts of test footage, outtakes and bloopers from his self-produced and often self-directed Hollywood productions.

The collection also chronicles his television career, including his appearances with his onetime partner Dean Martin on the “Colgate Comedy Hour” (NBC, 1950-1955), full runs of his various variety series and guest appearances on programs like “The Tonight Show.” Lewis received copies of virtually every television appearance he ever made, including “Tonight” show episodes, that don’t exist anywhere else. Other now-obscure programs such as “Broadway Open House” are also in the collection.

In addition, there are home movies, films given to Lewis as gifts (such as the 35 mm print of “Modern Times,” which was given to him by Charles Chaplin), videos of his lectures given while instructing at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts, filmed nightclub appearances both with and without Martin, and footage from his legendary work on the Muscular Dystrophy Association Telethon.

Collection highlights include:

35 mm prints and pre-prints of many of Lewis’ most popular films including “The Bellboy,” “The Errand Boy” and “The Family Jewels.”
A rare autographed picture of famous silent comedian Edgar Kennedy.
Test footage—of costumes, make-up, camera and actor screen tests—from some of Lewis’ leading films, including a complete one-reel silent comedy filmed on the set of “The Patsy.
Home movies of Lewis at work and play, featuring such notables as his rock-star son Gary Lewis, comedian Milton Berle at Disneyland in 1955 and Lewis and Dean Martin on the set of “Pardners.”
Fully scripted motion pictures produced by Lewis at home, which often starred Lewis’ neighbors Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh. Titles include “Fairfax Avenue” (spoofing “Sunset Boulevard”) “Come Back Little Shiksa” and “The Re-Enforcer,” starring Dean Martin.
Rare footage of Martin and Lewis doing their nightclub act.

The Jerry Lewis Collection will be available to qualified researchers in the Library’s Motion Picture and Television Reading Room in Washington, D.C. Processing of the collection continues, but much of it is currently available to researchers. A small portion of the collection, however, will be restricted for 10 years.

Lewis was born Joseph Levitch in Newark, New Jersey on March 16, 1926. Born into a vaudeville family, Lewis started performing at the age of five. In 1945, he met crooner Dean Martin and a year later, they formed the comedy team Martin and Lewis. The famous duo became an instant hit in nightclubs, film, radio and television. After performing with Martin for more than a decade, Lewis became a successful solo actor and director and Martin embarked on a singing-acting career.

Lewis also turned his talents toward teaching and charitable work. He received several lifetime achievement and humanitarian awards. He has been honored by The American Comedy Awards, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He received the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Board of Governors’ highest Emmy Award, was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1977 for his humanitarian efforts and received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at the 2009 Academy Awards.

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