8/18/22
Newsletter76
The Crack of Dawn
Who would suspect that it would still be dark at 4:00 AM?
My old buddy and writing partner, Scott Spiegel, was the biggest Three Stooges I ever met. And when my family got one of the first VHS machines (right after the Raimis), Scott had me record every single Stooges short, of which there are 195. One of the Three Stooges’ directors was Edward Bernds. Bernds started as a sound man at Columbia and worked on all of Frank Capra’s best films from 1930-1940. He then began directing short films for Columbia, including The Three Stooges. Ed Bernds worked his way into B-features and directed an enormous amount of films, like the Bowery Boys. So as soon as Scott moved to Hollywood in 1986 he contacted Ed Bernds, who was retired, and set up a lunch meeting. Scott and I met with Ed Bernds and his former boom man, Buster, at the Sportsman Lodge in Sherman Oaks. It just so happened that I had watched It Happened One Night (Best Picture 1934) on TV the night before. All Scott wanted to talk about was The Three Stooges, which was not the highlight of Bernds’ career as far as he was concerned, and it didn’t really interest him. I said, “I just watched It Happened One Night, and is that you playing the newsreel sound man in the opening wedding scene?” Ed Bernds’ face lit up, “Yes, that’s me. Capra even gave me a line, but I can’t remember it.” In the movie the rich groom arrives in an early version of a helicopter and the newsreel sound man points and says, “Look, it’s an auto-gyro,” which I said. Ed Bernds was ecstatic, “That was my line.” No matter how many times Scott tried to return the conversation to the Stooges, all Ed Bernds wanted to talk about were those Frank Capra films, like: Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), which was just fine with me.
The beatniks of the 1950s, led by Jack Kerouac and Ken Kesey, traveled all over the country in an old school bus painted with flowers and goofy pictures called the Freedom Bus. I saw a documentary about Ken Kesey and he still had all four of the Freedom Buses rotting on his farm. At some point in the ‘60s they set up the Freedom Bus as the cheapest way to get across the country. It cost $50 to travel from San Francisco to NYC, or back. In 1975, when I was 17, I rode on the Freedom Bus on one of its last cross-country trips. I had hitchhiked to California and took the Freedom Bus home. It was really ratty inside. The seats had been removed, it was covered with ugly, mildewed, burgundy shag carpeting, and there were wooden benches also covered with this awful carpeting, and a couple of wooden bunks. Everybody on the bus smoked cigarettes and weed the whole trip. I took advantage of the time to read Atlas Shrugged. I made it 500 pages into the book, then disgustedly threw it across the bus. Somebody else said, “Can I read it?” I said, “You can have it.” The bus dropped me off in Akron, Ohio, and I hitchhiked the rest of the way to Detroit.
This is an old British theatrical story that I’ve heard attributed to different actors. The first time I heard the story it was with Laurence Olivier and Cyril Cusack. Olivier and Cusack are old theater pals and run into each other on a London street. Cusack says to Olivier, “How would you like to see the greatest moment you’ve ever seen on stage?” Intrigued, Olivier says sure, and they go to a small theater. They watch the show for fifteen minutes and it’s terrible. Olivier says, “This is awful,” and Cusack says, “Wait. It’s coming.” A few minutes later all of the actors on stage stop talking and begin to uncomfortably look around. Everybody in the audience sits up straight. There is a palpable tension in the theater that’s almost electric. Olivier is amazed and asks Cusack, “What’s going on?” Cusack replies, “It’s my entrance.”
No dawn yet.