Why Indeed

I guess you've been wondering what McNeil has been doing during the pandemic. Mostly watching 60s movies. He writes of the set dressing, "I've seen what looks like an obelisk on almost every desk in almost every office. Why?" That's a great question, McNeil! The only evidence he provides is the single frame above ("behind Natalie Wood's head," he helpfully appends), but I trust him.

Jennifer Lawrence Admires a Conch

I guess you think I "blogged" an awful lot in May for somebody who stopped "blogging" in April. Shows how much you know! There was so much stuff I didn't "blog" about in May! You wouldn't even believe it. Here is some of it. 1. Stopped by Square Books and bought a notebook. Katelyn said, "Don't you like ______?" (She named another brand.) I said I found the binding inferior. "You should write a letter to the company!" said Katelyn. "I love writing letters to companies." I asked her, "What are you, a ninety-year-old man at heart?" "She does it after she eats her liver and onions," said Slade. Katelyn guilelessly confirmed that she loves liver and onions and wishes she knew how to cook it for herself. 2. Ace wasn't in his office, where I was supposed to meet him, so I sat in the anteroom (?) and looked at a magazine with this caption on the cover: "With a team of wildlife experts, Uma Thurman moves a white rhino threatened by poachers to safety." But you don't see any wildlife experts; you just see Uma Thurman hugging a rhinoceros's head. I like how scrupulous they are not to give us the false impression that Uma Thurman was out there wrangling rhinos by herself. 3. I started reading the new Don DeLillo novel, which is about cryogenics, I guess. That made me recall all of a sudden that McNeil and I tried writing a screenplay called BLUE PERIOD back when we were in our twenties. The plot was that two guys (?) got trapped in an industrial walk-in freezer and told each other stories while they waited and hoped for help to arrive. One story was about a war with Antarctica, maybe? All the stories were about being cold. I remember that McNeil invented a weapon called the ICBM (Icy Cold Banana Malted instead of Intercontinental Ballistic Missile). Another story was about a scam artist with a cryogenics lab. He froze celebrities and thawed them out on a desert island, where they were forced to act in a movie he had written. That's all I remember about the screenplay. McNeil, confirming that such an attempted screenplay existed, said it featured a character named Dean running for office with the slogan "Dean Is Clean." 4. I met with Julia via computer monitor. I thought she said, "You look great!" She actually said, "You look gray!" 5. My doctor's waiting room suddenly has all of Richard Howorth's old NEW YORKER magazines in it - with his home address on the mailing labels and everything! 6. Dr. Theresa went to lunch at Handy Andy and I had pangs of jealousy, traces of which I allowed to cross my face. I had been craving Handy Andy, having recently written about it for publication (details forthcoming, surely, though I am not "blogging" anymore): I feared I had misremembered the condiments with which the Handy Andy double cheeseburger is dressed! Fact checking! Dr. Theresa even offered to bring me one home to examine and consume, but then we remembered that I had a doctor's appointment shortly (different doctor; never mind why I have so many doctors!) and a double cheeseburger might not sit well at a doctor's appointment. 7. This other doctor had more standard waiting room fare: in PEOPLE I read about how Tennille of The Captain and Tennille was embarrassed by a damaged finger she suffered in a wheelbarrow accident as a child. That's why she always turned down movie offers! Meanwhile, "The Captain" wore his famous captain's hat even to bed, humiliated by a failed hair transplant. They struck me as... tragic? "Jennifer Lawrence admires a conch" was a phrase I read in US magazine. 8. In an ADVENTURE TIME meeting I was trying to say the title of the TV show THE BIG BANG THEORY but I accidentally said "8 1/2 MEN." Sadly, I was not trying to be esoteric or funny. My brain had simply fizzled out and died. A good laugh was had by most. 9. We drove past Tom Franklin's place and there was a chicken pecking in his yard. I don't think he owns chickens! (See also.) This was a fluffy chicken with black feathers, salted with white. 10. I realized that I didn't give you a truly complete picture of everything I learned from THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY. I kept a bunch of it off the "blog" and crammed it instead into a novel that will probably never be published, but here's the epigraph, anyway: "Bees indeed make neat and curious works, and many other creatures besides; but when they have done, they cannot judge of them." 11. McNeil's apple tree (below) is producing again. 12. Megan Abbott and I emailed back and forth about what Lady MacBeth meant by "spirits that tend on mortal thoughts" and I sent her a chapter about demonology in Shakespeare from some old book. Only afterward did I realize that the old book was by T.F. Thistelton Dyer, who provided the epigraph for my new book of short stories MOVIE STARS! Yes, that is just one more example of the meaningless junk I didn't "blog" about this month. "Posting" this a week early I do hereby vanquish May's tyranny over my troubled and searching mind.

Your Best Bet

I was really enjoying this movie GIRLFRIENDS on TCM just now, and you know how they have those little capsule descriptions of whatever you're watching and whenever you hit the "info" button on your remote control they appear? So I hit the "info" button to find out more about the movie and the capsule description informed me that this movie was about "a chubby photographer." I was taken aback! First of all, this is the month that TCM is featuring films by women directors, of which GIRLFRIENDS is one. Second of all, the supposed "chubbiness" of the protagonist is not even part of the movie. It's not an issue or a subject of discussion, save for one passing comment near the end that MIGHT be construed that way. If the movie were about a guy, I don't believe a comment on his body type would have been part of the capsule description. I don't know who writes these things, somebody at TCM or somebody at the satellite company, but somebody should be ashamed. And now I have three more things to say about GIRLFRIENDS. 1. Eli Wallach uses an imaginary lighter to light an imaginary cigarette in it. That's a scene I could have used in my cigarette lighter book! But it's too late. I guess that's going to happen all the time now. But I immediately thought of two sections where it would have come in handy. 2. If you want to see Christopher Guest and Bob Balaban in the nude, this movie is probably your best bet! 3. Everybody wore turtlenecks. I think I counted six turtlenecks.

Rickles Hunches

You know, sometimes I watch a TV show at night and the next morning I go to a "news" or "entertainment" "web" site and read a (by necessity) hastily written summary of the very same show I just watched myself, and that summary is called a "recap." Why do I read such things? It seems an unflattering thing to do to myself, psychologically. And I nearly always think, "Donald Barthelme invented this form!" And then I think, "Who cares?" And I also think, "Someone else has made this point, certainly." And then I think, "Is it really a point?" But the Donald Barthelme piece ("And Now Let's Hear it for The Ed Sullivan Show!") is hilarious. "Ed stands there. He looks great. Not unlike an older, heavier Paul Newman. Sways a little from side to side. Gary Lewis and the Playboys have just got off. Very strong act. Ed clasps hands together. He's introducing somebody in the audience. Who is it? Ed points with his left arm. 'Broken every house record at the Copa,' Ed says of the man he's introducing. Who is it? It's... Don Rickles! Rickles stands up. Eyes glint. Applause. 'I'm gonna make a big man out of you,' Ed says. Rickles hunches a shoulder combatively. Eyes glint. Applause." And then it goes on for about six pages, just a summary of the Ed Sullivan show ("Carlin is wearing a white turtleneck, dark sideburns"), including commercials, sometimes reflecting (like a "recap") the narrator's personal opinions ("Ed brings on Doodletown Pipers, singing group. Great-looking girls in tiny skirts. Great-looking legs on girls. They sing something about 'I hear the laughter' and 'the sound of the future.' Phrasing is excellent, attack excellent"), and ending (with an almost alarming, almost brutal detachment), "The Ed Sullivan Show is over. It has stopped." Can you believe I tried to teach this in a "humor class" once? I am sure the kids were like, "What is this?" They were like, "What's Ed Sullivan?" They were like, "So what?" They believed, "This is normal." And I was like, "Whatever." And I still am.

Dax Shepard: Took a Slice

Speaking of comedians you never heard of for the third time today, did you guys see the Oscars when they handed out pizza to the stars? There was an oddly formal newspaper list of who ate pizza and who didn't, formatted like so: "Dax Shepard: Took a slice" - and it made me think somehow of the old Red Buttons routine "Betsy Ross... never got a dinner," a fact which I lamely tweeted, and two very young persons on twitter astonished me by knowing what I was talking about! It was a first. Did it give me hope for the future? Of course not. Maybe it even depressed me! For some reason! I am pretty sure they are young because one of them keeps tweeting about her dad listening to Taylor Swift (I oversimplify the variety and majesty of her tweets!). This has nothing to do with that, but I just saw that the Twain biographer Justin Kaplan died. Please "click" on this old "post" in which I quote him on a crazy New Year's Eve party attended by Mark Twain. Which reminds me. Megan Abbott reminded me the other day that Billy Wilder once met Freud and tried to interview him, which reminded me that Freud once went to see Mark Twain give a reading, which means that there are two degrees of separation (or is it three? don't tell me; I don't care) between Marilyn Monroe and Mark Twain, and three between Marilyn and U.S. Grant, and four between Marilyn Monroe and Abraham Lincoln, and that is all of the garbage that came out of my brain today, goodbye.

Halloween Is Over

From John Ireland's lilac-tinted turtleneck in HOUSE OF THE SEVEN CORPSES to Keir Dullea's interestingly textured forest-green turtleneck in BLACK CHRISTMAS, which also contained seven corpses, more or less (the movie did, not the turtleneck), our annual Halloween Film Festival had so many turtlenecks - two of them, in fact, and - as any Halloween film festival must - so much John Carradine. Yes, the old Halloween Film Festival surely careened between some dramatic ups and downs this year. It concluded last night when Dr. Theresa and I went over to Megan Abbott's place to avoid the trick-or-treaters and watch DRACULA'S DAUGHTER in a double feature with Megan's pick, the aforementioned BLACK CHRISTMAS, which had a cat in it, one of those cats that make you say, when

watching a horror movie, "Oh no! Something is going to happen to that cat!" and I said it aloud, and something indeed seemed to happen to the cat, but not long afterward the cat was seen fondly nuzzling a corpse, whereupon Megan Abbott brightly chirped, "See? Nothing happened to the kitty." (See also.)

She First Laid Eyes on Jeffrey When He Burst Out of a Pie

It has been a busy few days! Many revelations. Just for example, we learned that Bill Griffith watches THE LAWRENCE WELK SHOW every week. He said of the midwest, from which he hails, "Polka was our blues," and we all laughed, but then he kept expanding his argument until we were all nodding thoughtfully. "We" included Laraine Newman and Ace Atkins and Megan Abbott. Bill was doing his usual amazing job of showing us around Rowan Oak. He got out Jill Faulkner's rarely-seen scrapbook in which she pasted pictures of her favorite stars, snipped from movie magazines. (Jill was Faulkner's daughter, of course.) There were quite a few photos of Lucille Ball from her pre-comedy pin-up days - a coincidence, as Laraine and I had just been talking about her (and would continue to do so during our panel the next night). In one of them, Lucy was "showing her bloomers," as Laraine put it. I guess it felt strange to stand in a girl's bedroom and nose through her private scrapbook, even though (or especially because?) she grew old and passed away years ago. Another revelation: Laraine once auditioned for Bob Hope! She said it was nightmarish and mortifying. She did her "Valley Girl" character for him, back when no one - especially Bob Hope - knew what a "valley girl" was. He stared at her with a look on his face that said they did not belong in the same room, the same building, the same universe. If I paraphrase, it is only slightly. What else? The revelations are only beginning. I read things in REPROBATES: THE CAVALIERS OF THE ENGLISH CIVIL WAR about which I neglected to inform you. I did make it to twitter - a poor substitute! - to quote Robert Herrick, who was quoted in the book: "Get up, sweet Slug-a-bed, and see/ The Dew-besprangling Herbe and Tree." When I got to "besprangling" I had to put down the book for the night, I really did, because nothing was going to top it. Besprangling! At the end of the chapter we found out how Queen Henrietta met her favorite dwarf: "She first laid eyes on Jeffrey Hudson at a banquet held in her honour by the duke, when he burst out of a pie and greeted her." What else? Megan and Bill had a good talk because - unbeknownst to one another - they had both been watching Lawrence Welk's Halloween special at the same time. Dr. Theresa and I missed it because we were watching HOUSE OF THE SEVEN CORPSES as part of our Halloween film festival. (Megan took the above photo of her TV screen during the Lawrence Welk Halloween special and tweeted it at me while I was watching HOUSE OF THE SEVEN CORPSES.) HOUSE OF THE SEVEN CORPSES does not linger in the memory. But I did write down three things on the back of an envelope to tell you about it: 1) John Ireland wears an ill-fitting lavender turtleneck. 2) It is one of those movies in which a cat appears at the beginning, and you think "Oh no! Something awful is going to happen to that cat!" And it does. 3) HOUSE OF THE SEVEN CORPSES concludes with a touching expression of gratitude to the Utah Historical Society! I wonder how the Utah Historical Society felt about that. I knew that Bill Griffith was a big horror fan, but I did not know that Megan Abbott and Laraine Newman were just as avid. So Bill and Megan bonded over pioneering camera techniques in BLACK CHRISTMAS (1974). At dinner last night Dr. Theresa and Laraine enthusiastically discussed THE STUFF (in which Laraine's friend Garrett Morris appeared) and other works of Larry Cohen. Megan and Laraine rhapsodized about THE BROOD and DEAD RINGERS, both by Cronenberg. Laraine brought up Kolchak: The Night Stalker. By coincidence, Dr. Theresa and I had just watched THE NIGHT STRANGLER, a TV movie starring that character, as part of our Halloween film festival. Hmm, what else? While Dr. Theresa and I were on the way to the airport to pick up Laraine, a song by Jim Ed Brown came on the radio, containing this rhetorical question: "Did you ever hear of a clown with teardrops streaming down his face?" To which I responded, "Yes! All the time." Yet somehow Jim Ed Brown seemed to think we'd be surprised.

Mopey Superheroes

Been thinking about the singer-songwriter Jackie DeShannon lately, I don't know why, yes I do, but you don't care, but I'm going to tell you anyway: I keep listening to this track on a box set of Los Angeles psychedelic pop... it's Jackie DeShannon, backed by the Byrds, doing a song called "Splendor in the Grass" that seems to be about the movie SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS - a movie from which I must always turn away my blushing face in deference to its raw, unhinged emotion that terrifies me with its honesty and threatens to kill me in my trembling heart. Well, there's another version DeShannon does of the same song, a little slower and with strings on it, but that's not the one I'm talking about. I like the rough and jangly version better. So I was thinking I'd go out to The End of All Music and see what they have by Jackie DeShannon. And so I did. (Side note: I see that Jackie DeShannon is on twitter, where she has a mere 300 or so followers - which is not the mark of a person! Not by a long shot! I notice that she tweets stuff like "No." Like, just the word "No.") Anyway, I picked up a pristine Jackie DeShannon LP, sold to me by Jimmy, who was working today. Also in the D section: Dino Desi & Billy. That's a group featuring the teen son of Dean Martin (the eponymous Dino) and the teen son of Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball (you may know him better now as Desi Arnaz, Jr.)... and their friend Billy. I was familiar with this group, or at least its existence, and thought - as I stubbornly and erroneously insisted to Jimmy - that Billy must be the son of famous people, too, but Jimmy looked it up on his computer, and Billy is just Billy, and that's good enough for me. But I wasn't going to buy their LP - Dino's and Desi's and Billy's, no. First of all, it was kind of scratched up. Jimmy offered to take it in the back and run it through this secret descratchifying machine they have back there. Even more troubling, however, is that Track One was "Memories Are Made of This," already a hit for Dino's dad. Seemed like a red flag! Like Dino and Desi and Billy planned on coasting to fame! But Jimmy put it on the turntable and here's what the arrangement said (not totally convincingly) to me: "Hey, Dad! I'm not going to stand in your shadows, you hear me? I'm putting my own mark on this number! This is how the kids of today will twist and stroll to the smooth modern beat of my fresh new interpretation!" And I noticed that Dino Desi & Billy cover a Jackie DeShannon-penned song on side two! "When You Walk in the Room," the same Jackie DeShannon song once covered by "Blog" Buddy Sally Timms. It was an omen. Plus the record is on Sinatra's label, Reprise, and was produced by Lee Hazelwood and arranged by Billy Strange, all of which made me think, for reasons I shan't bore you with, that it was VERY LIKELY RECORDED IN THE EXACT SAME ROOM where our dear one Kelly Hogan recorded her most recent solo album. Yes, Hogan has trod where Dino and Desi and Billy trod before her, and walked she did in those hallowed steps of yore. So, yes, I bought the Dino Desi & Billy LP after Jimmy cleaned it up for me in the back. "They look like mopey superheroes," Jimmy said approvingly of Dino Desi & Billy. And though I don't believe I heard him mention Dino's fawn-colored turtleneck, he did hold forth admiringly on the subject of Dino's flared nostrils. And then I heard him explaining to another customer why he hadn't "gone down to the creek" when recently invited... because just prior to the invitation Jimmy had dreamed he was in the creek "and there were snakes rolling all over me," he said. Speaking of people's relatives making art, Megan Abbott and I were in Square Books the day before yesterday and studied a very old mass-market paperback (original cover price twenty-five cents!) by John Faulkner, the other Faulkner's brother. It was called UNCLE GOOD'S WEEK-END PARTY, and on the cover we see a man we must assume is Uncle Good slyly drawing on his corncob pipe in tacit if stoic approval as a couple of young women in disarrayed nighties sit on a bed and comb each other's hair or something.

Jerry Takes the Heat

So I hear from my friend Ward that he lost his family Oscar pool to HIS DOG. One of Ward's kids put dog food on various pieces of paper representing Oscar nominees, and the dog chose with more accuracy. Ward also reminds me that Robert Shaw (pictured) co-hosted the Oscars in 1976 for some reason. Things were crazy back then! We were all insane and nobody knew what was going on. That reminded me of the Jerry Lewis bio where I read about Jerry hosting the Oscars. The broadcast ended 20 minutes early! The producers asked Jerry to stretch. He tried lots of different things and it went on and on. "Before long he'd picked up a trumpet and started to play off-key. NBC finally broke in with some archive material - a sports film about competitive pistol shooting." An Oscar show that ended early, what do you know. The timing mistake was the producer's fault but the press blamed Jerry, "referring to him as 'an egg-laying comedian' and deriding his 'ghastly evening shirt.'" Or as Jerry says in this video that Ward found for me, "I took all the heat."

Mannix vs. Literacy: Mannix Wins!

Hey! Remember when I told you about MANNIX and you didn't know what it was? Well, it was an old TV show, stupid. And one of these here channels we have was showing a marathon of MANNIX. I didn't even know it! I found out too late. Dr. Theresa happened to be watching MANNIX while we got dolled up to go to a benefit for literacy. LITERACY? Ha! Forget literacy and give me MANNIX. Right before we left Mannix was riding in a jeep down a dirt road and shooting at an airplane with a pistol and he winged the pilot who was wearing a black turtleneck and sunglasses and down came the airplane but then we had to go support "literacy" so I don't know what happened.

Did Megan Abbott Dream Rip Torn's Beatnik Turtleneck?

Megan Abbott intrigued and tormented me by saying that she "almost wrote" about Rip and Bob in CRITIC'S CHOICE. She asks whether I remember Rip's "beatnik turtleneck" in the film. "Or did I dream it?" she asks wistfully.

Turtleneck Correction

False alarm on the turtleneck, folks! It was, Kent reports, merely "a sweater with a high collar." But you probably already knew that because your eyes aren't old and weak and filled with misty tears like mine.

The Back of Kent's Head II: The Return of the Back of Kent's Head

Kent says I was right! That WAS the back of Kent's head! In this picture, you can get an even better look at the back of Kent's head. And is that a turtleneck? In my opinion it looks like Kent is doing his job and "staying in character" even with the back of his head!

The Award For Best Carpet

I have been flooded with telegrams demanding a full report on the 2nd Annual McNeil's Movie Korner Film Festival. Let me put your anxious minds at rest. The festival began as promised with THE VILLAIN, followed by THE ERRAND BOY, a screener of A SERIOUS MAN, THE ATOMIC SUBMARINE, HOME FROM THE HILL (filmed in part right here in Oxford, including a scene inside City Grocery when it was a grocery store), LET IT RIDE, and MONSIEUR BEAUCAIRE. (I think the occasion demands some new, non-random illustrations.) Well, THE VILLAIN got things off to an abominable start, even though it featured cameos by "blog" objects of curiosity Foster Brooks and Ruth Buzzi. The term "thankless role" was invented for Ann-Margret, whose job in the film is to try gamely, though with evident exhaustion and diminishing returns, to get some simulacrum of a human response from her main acting partner Arnold Schwarzenegger. On the plus side, if you still have any doubts that Jerry Lewis is a genius, watch THE VILLAIN and then watch THE ERRAND BOY. Both films become, at some point, a series of independent vignettes. THE VILLAIN will help you appreciate the imagination with which Jerry sets up and shoots each standalone gag in THE ERRAND BOY. Even the ones that don't quite work are eminently bizarre, ambitious, and personal, as opposed to the flat anonymity of the former film. While there was no pervasive theme to this year's festival, such as "Psychiatrists and Turtlenecks," you can already sense to your great delight that there were small connections from one film to the next, and you are so excited that I am about to tell you what they were. For example, THE ERRAND BOY and A SERIOUS MAN both included the word "tsuris" in their scripts. THE ATOMIC SUBMARINE and HOME FROM THE HILL, while the production values and levels of awareness could not have been more different, were heavy on the Freud. In the former, there's a (SPOILER ALERT) long, cylindrical, threatening (partially bulbous?) one-eyed creature who gets his eye shot out! Okay? In HOME FROM THE HILL, George Hamilton and George Peppard love walking around with their shirts unbuttoned almost to their navels, a fashion statement repeated three decades later in LET IT RIDE by David Johansen of the New York Dolls, who plays "Loony." A prominent bit player goes for a similar look. At one point in LET IT RIDE, Richard Dreyfuss breaks the fourth wall, looks straight into the camera, and says (I think) "Am I having a great day or what?" This, of course, is a technique pioneered by MONSIEUR BEAUCAIRE star Bob Hope, such utterances most often occurring under potentially salacious circumstances, as indeed is the case in LET IT RIDE. I can hear you asking, "But what about carpet? We know how much McNeil loves good carpet in his movies." Yes, we should start giving out an award for Best Carpet. We'll call it the Carpie. This year's Carpie goes to A SERIOUS MAN. "Love that carpet," McNeil said while watching the film. He had some exactly like it when he was a kid. "I used to roll marbles on the flat part," he reported.

All-Star Entertainment Wrap-Up

That's right! It's time once again for "All-Star Entertainment Wrap-Up." While "clicking" back through Jerry references recently, the staff came upon two nice pictures that were acquired by inadvertently "stealing bandwidth." We present them here properly unstolen, to make amends with the bandwidth community. One is Nancy Kwan. The other is Cleveland TV reporter Jenny Crimm (with Peter Lawford and Sammy Davis, Jr.). The "posts" where they were discovered also contained "links" to "web" sites about Ms. Kwan and Ms. Crimm, which, if you care to "click," you will find to be full of interesting entertainment information provided as a service to you in your one-stop "All-Star Entertainment Wrap-Up" environment. This has been your "All-Star Entertainment Wrap-Up." Until next time, keep "reaching" for the "stars"!

The McNeil's Movie Korner Film Festival Wrap-Up, Pt. 1

Film scholars from all over the world have been pestering me for details about the McNeil's Movie Korner Film Festival. After letting it all sink in, I must say the festival began and ended with disappointment. The first twenty minutes of SALT AND PEPPER were all we could stand, for example. Yes, we men who can watch anything - defeated. We did watch it long enough to see the canary yellow turtleneck pictured at this "link," and thus were able to note that the leading lady of DON'T RAISE THE BRIDGE, LOWER THE RIVER seemed to have borrowed a lot of Sammy Davis Jr.'s clothes. On the plus side, SALT AND PEPPER made its own sequel ONE MORE TIME seem like a masterpiece. Now please understand. I am not recommending that the amateur should just dive into ONE MORE TIME. It requires years of training, of knowing what to look for. Mr. McNeil remarked at one point, for example, "I can tell Jerry [Lewis, who directed] walked everybody through this scene step by step." Imagining that was more fun than the actual scene! McNeil was also highly appreciative of Peter Lawford's special bachelor room in the castle, though the carpet was not shaggy enough for his (McNeil's) liking. McNeil still contends that THE PATSY is the pinnacle of Lewis' talents as a decorator. "The colors are more subdued," he explained. Then he gave Theresa an interesting lecture on attractive lamps in the films of Jerry Lewis... the way they match the drapes, and so on. At some point during the presentation, Theresa disappeared, and we sorely missed her for the rest of the festival. As for the disappointment that ended the program, THE WRECKING CREW contains off-the-charts misogyny, even if one adjusts for the cultural norms of the time or endeavors to think of misogyny as a mere plot device that runs the engine of a certain kind of farce. They blew up Nancy Kwan AND Tina Louise, for example. Blew them up! And I don't even want to tell you what happened to poor Elke Sommer. What a downer. But the festival did have its unadulterated highlights, which will be addressed in coming days. (Pictured, Nancy Kwan, so wrongly mistreated in THE WRECKING CREW.)

Full Schedule

But the least we can do in the meantime is offer the full viewing schedule of the McNeil's Movie Korner Film Festival for your contemplation: Saturday - SALT AND PEPPER (first twenty minutes only); ONE MORE TIME (dir. Jerry Lewis); HIGHBALL; DON'T RAISE THE BRIDGE, LOWER THE RIVER. Sunday - LORD LOVE A DUCK; MR. JEALOUSY; CRACKING UP; THE WRECKING CREW. The theme of this year's festival was "Turtlenecks and Psychiatrists."

Announcing the McNeil's Movie Korner Film Festival

We are happy to announce the first annual McNeil's Movie Korner Film Festival, which will occur after the book tour and before the move to Mississippi. McNeil will make a rare personal appearance at the Pendarvis Building, where films will be screened and prizes awarded. The full schedule has not been determined, but we can say with some certainty that RIO BRAVO and SALT AND PEPPER (in a double feature with ONE MORE TIME, its Jerry Lewis-directed sequel) will be among the festival highlights. Also slated: the one where Jerry Lewis thinks he is dying but he is not, and the one where Bob Hope thinks he is dying but he is not. More announcements will be forthcoming as final decisions on the program are made. The event is not open to the public. (Pictured, Sammy Davis, Jr. and Peter Lawford, stars of SALT AND PEPPER and ONE MORE TIME, with Cleveland TV reporter Jenny Crimm.)