Smarter Than The Average!

"You start by being polite and lying"

It’s hard to remember a time when Robin Williams wasn’t considered a tiresome embarrassment.  At least he isn’t seemingly ubiquitous these days – after his cinematic breakthrough in 1987’s Good Morning, Vietnam he was a genuine superstar, and everyone seemed to think he was the bee’s knees. Within another five years the tide had turned, and he was no longer a selling point but an indicator of a movie predicated on unfunny ad-libbed jabbering (Mrs Doubtfire), queasy sentimentality (Jack, Bicentennial Man – which one of your slack STTA editors once sat through in its entirety, on their own at home, in the full knowledge that it would be 100% awful even before it started) or an ungainly mixture of the two (Patch Adams etc).

On closer examination, there’s been another thread throughout his career: solid roles (both comedic and dramatic) where the director has been able to take a steady hand and utilise Williams’s strengths, whilst being keenly aware of his limitations. There are more of these than you’d think: films such as The World According to Garp, Moscow On The Hudson, Dead Poets Society, Cadillac Man, The Fisher King, Deconstructing Harry, Insomnia and One Hour Photo. Off the top of our heads.

Popeye, his first feature (the smutty sketch film Can I Do It ‘Till I Need Glasses would have been his first, if he hadn’t been excised from the initial cut and later reinstated for a post-Popeye re-release) falls into the latter category, with his ad-libs encouraged by Robert Altman, and refined into a form befitting the character by Jules Feiffer. In retrospect, Williams can’t be seen as anything less than perfect casting; he was the vocal and physical fit for the character (allowing for bulgy limbs and an actual pop-eye), and his muttered ad-libs evoke Jack Mercer and Mae Questel’s similarly improvised dialogue for the early Fleischer shorts. There was never a better time for Williams to take the role, either: an overinflated belief in his own comedic skills was yet to develop, buoyed by the sycophancy of others (many a comic, good or bad, has fallen foul of this – Jerry Lewis, Jim Carrey, Will Ferrell, Chris Tucker, Peter Kay, Mike Myers, Ricky Gervais… although Gervais succumbed ridiculously early). He was still fully aware that overnight sitcom success could be fleeting, and if he wanted to make it in Hollywood (as the accepted career path demands) then there could be no laurel-resting.  Furthermore, he was to play the title role in an expected blockbuster about one of America’s beloved pop culture heroes (with a huge international following), established in the public consciousness for 50 years - surrounded by seasoned talent on both sides of the camera. He had to live up to expectations of who Popeye should be, raise his game to let his co-stars shine and sell the movie for everyone involved (Williams was the only element of the production that everyone, including the suits, instantly accepted and even insisted upon until its completion). All this, and he was well into his cocaine years!

Despite his warm, enthusiastic words about the film during promotion, Williams would soon condemn the film publicly in the subsequent 4^th season of Mork and Mindy. In the episode ‘Metamorphosisism’, Mork and his ‘adult’ son Mearth (played by the fantastic yet virtually forgotten hero of Williams, Jonathan Winters) have their minds switched, and at one point Mork declares “Yes, I’ve seen Popeye 14 times and if you run it backwards, it has an ending.”* He would later go so far as to disown it, claiming it had set his career back by years.

From The Times, 13/3/1981:

Robin Williams gets a tall order in Popeye

Popeye comes back to the screen at the beginning of next month in time for the Easter holidays. This time he is not in cartoon form, but a live actor in the shape of Robin Williams. Joan Goodman talked to Mr Williams, night-club entertainer and star of Mork and Mindy, in Los Angeles.

Two years ago the producer Robert Evans asked the comedian Robin Williams, familiar to British audiences from the Mork and Mindy television series, to play Popeye on film. “This idea terrified me when he first mentioned it”, Williams admits. “But he was so positive in his approach. He asked me ‘Haven’t you thought about it? Haven’t you ever wanted to play Popeye?’ You start by being polite and lying – ‘Well, yes, I guess now you mention it, I have’ – and come away convinced.”

Popeye’s reincarnation by a live actor comes half a century after the pugnaciously righteous sailor first appeared as one among many other characters in E. S. Segar’s (sic – STTA) “Thimble Theatre” comic strip. Popeye, his shrewish girlfriend Olive Oyl, the glutonous (sic again; not one of our fave Led Zep tunes – STTA) Wimpy and the villainous Bluto were an immediate hit with Depression-era readers in the United States. Later the sailor with a passion for spinach appeared in cartoon series made for cinema, then for television. As Popeye, Williams is required to sing, dance, do acrobatics and spend most of the film with his right eye firmly closed and a pipe clenched between his teeth – all the while remaining faithful to the image established by the strip and the cartoons. It is a tall order for any performer, let alone for somebody playing his first film role.

The 27-year-old Williams was actually Evan’s second choice for the part. The original Popeye, Dustin Hoffman, dropped out of the project after a dispute over the script (written by Jules Feiffer, himself a distinguished cartoonist). Evans has since admitted that  at the time he suggested Williams to Paramount Pictures, who financed the movie, he had no idea that Williams was already a star thanks to Mork and Mindy.

He knew him only as a promising young comic from the Los Angeles night-clubs.

However accidental, Williams turned out to be a lucky choice, For one thing, the comedian’s bent for improvisation meshed well with the informal, collaborative style of Popeye’s director, Robert Altman. For another, Williams has a striking gift for mimicry as striking as that of Peter Sellers (one of his idols). And mimicry rather than declamation or rendering subtle emotions turned out to be the key to playing Popeye.

“Popeye understands his own worth,” Williams says. “He’s a natural man, Like he says, ‘I yam what I yam and that’s all I yam’. We took that statement as our basis. I think we made a very gentle film, we kept the innocence in.”

Williams, whose offstage voice is surprisingly soft and shy, worked for a year to lower his speech into Popeye’s distinctive growl. At the same time, he honed his body for the strenuous, cartoon-type falls, fights and contortions the part involved. Exercising for three hours a night in the Paramount gym after spending the day on the Mork and Mindy stage, Williams trained with Lou Willis Jr, a veteran acrobatic dancer. “And after all that,” Williams says, “when Bluto threw his first punch at me on the set, I bent forward when I was supposed to bend back and came away with a bloody nose.”

The sort of working schedule Popeye demanded was nothing new to Williams, whose overnight stardom in Mork and Mindy has led to a succession of 16-hour and 18-hour days. Despite the reputed 30, 000 dollars a week he gets for the series and the dispensation – rare in American televisions – to ad lib his own lines in addition to the written script, Williams still finds his Mork role creatively stifling. That is not surprising once you have met him. Even when only two of you are present, a conversation with Williams regularly features a dozen or so extra “characters” Williams adopts, shrugs off then shuffles between at lightning speed. They include the Beverley Hills Blues Singer (“Woke up this morning… ran out of Perrier”), the children’s television hist who puts a hamster in a microwave oven to demonstrate the effects of radiation (“Pop goes the weasel”) and the elderly wino from the year 2000 (“Maybe you remember me. I used to play an alien on television. Wasn’t so funny after they landed.”).

Every Monday night, Williams can be found working incognito, as it were, with an improvisation troupe at The Comedy Store, a Los Angeles club. One of his favourite “bits”, as comics call their routines, is to ask the audience to shout out a topic: Williams will proceed to extemporize a Shakespeare play on the subject, in blank verse. Only the occasional cry of “give us Mork” halts the flow of comic invention. He comes to the edge of the stage and replies: “No, no, that’s what I come here to get away from.”

Williams is the son of a Detroit automobile executive, now retired. “The craziness comes from my mother. She’s from the South. My discipline comes from my dad.”

Although he has several half-brothers and half-sisters, he was raised as an only child. “I was this lonely little fat kid. When I was by myself, I would invent conversations with other people. I used to tape comedians off the television and study their voices. I also collected armies of toy soldiers and took them on manoeuvres. Kind of scary, huh?

“My parents didn’t mind when I said I wanted to be an actor. My father just asked me to learn a trade as well, so I’d have something to fall back on. It was a reasonable request. I went to welding school and lasted one week until the instructor said: ‘You can kill yourself if you don’t use this torch properly.’ I thought, ‘Oh, oh, I’m not willing to die.’”

Drama training at the Juilliard School in New York, and experience as a stand-up comic in San Francisco followed, before Williams moved to Los Angeles and broke into television.

“I’m still learning how to act for the camera,” he admits disarmingly. “Everything’s happened so fast – this is only the third season for Mork and Mindy. But doing Popeye was fun. It was like going back to the discipline of acting after the freedom of stand-up comedy. We filmed in Malta for six months between January and June. It was like a holiday for me – it was wonderful to get away from being recognised and asked for autographs. Valerie (Williams’s wife) and I even managed a couple of days off in London. We saw Nicholas Nickleby with the Royal Shakespeare Company, the most exciting piece of theatre I’ve ever seen.”

Williams says he wants to do theatre himself. But first there is a film script he is writing with a partner and will star in - “Going the Woody Allen route”, he laughs. Charles Joffe, who manages Williams, also manages Allen. And will he direct himself too?

“Oh no, maybe one day, but it’s years away. I saw what a director has to go through on Malta. Just getting the fake foreams I had to wear as Popeye right was a nightmare. The rubber wrinkled, they cut off circulation in my arms. Then the first costume they gave me was all wrong. So much of a film depends on thousands of details like that, all of which Altman had to oversee at once.

“About a week into rehearsals, I went to see Bob [Altman] and we talked about the character. We decided Popeye should evolve through the film. The other people were all cartoons to begin with but he starts out as a realistic sailor looking for his Pappy. Gradually he gets drawn into their world. Then Bob said that, besides saying the written lines in my Popeye voice, I could do a lot of mumbling under my breath. We figured Popeye was a lonely sailor who’d grown used to talking to himself. Bob said I could ad lib the mumbles – they’d be for me. On one or two occasions, when I went too far, they simply lowered the sound.”

Williams’s script still hasn’t been realised to this day. He did have a stab at directing however - ‘The Mork Report’, which was the final episode of Mork and Mindy to air. The show took the form of a news report about how to have a happy Earth marriage, which results in a ‘promotion’ from his superior Orkan, Orson. However, it was actually intended to air before the dramatic end-of-season three-parter, where Mork and Mindy use a faulty pair of magic shoes in order to flee a villainous Neptunian, and up in the company of prehistoric tribesman.

* - There is an alternate version of this quote: “If you watch it backwards, it has a plot.” This is often credited to Williams himself, rather than the character of Mork, so we wonder if it was a line later used in interviews to laugh off the film. Also, this version works better as a joke - although Popeye definitely does have both an ending and a plot, Altman movies are often criticised/praised for being meandering character studies. If any readers would care to clarify this, then… we’ll thank you.

We Don't Wish To Know That

As you can’t have failed to notice, we’ve been celebrating some failed catchphrases here at Smarter Than The Average - those phrases that worked their way deep into the population’s subconcious but never worked their way out via the mouth. Nigel Rees devoted a chapter (titled We Don’t Wish To Know That) to this non-phenomenon in his 1984 book The Nigel Rees Book Of Slogans And Catchphrases, and with no permission at all we reproduce it below.

A failed catchphrase is a contradiction in terms. If a phrase does not catch on it is not a catchphrase. However, here are some phrases which were contrived so that they might take off but lacked some essential ingredient to help them do so. The prominence of Bob Monkhouse in this section is not significant - he just had the courage to remember more than others!

He remembered (1979): ‘As a comedian in the early 1950s I had one unique aspect. I was without a catchphrase. Radio producers sympathized and made suggestions. Charlie Chester even offered to give me one. “Every time you score a big laugh,” he said, “just remember to dance a little jig and say: Now there’s a beaut if ever there was one!” I tried it out on a Variety Ahoy! down at Portsmouth. I got a big laugh which I killed by suddenly shuffling inexplicably and shouting this catchphrase at the audience who were understandably baffled. So they stopped laughing at once. I politely declined and Charlie, never a comic to waste material, repeated it in his next series until its consistent failure to please drove him to ad-lib another line, a plea for audience response - “Speak to Charlee-ee!” - which proved to be a genuine winner.’

Monkhouse also tried to launch I said a subtle when, for some reason, a joke failed. Another trick that Denis Goodwin and he both used if a gag really died, was to give a complicated explanation of the joke, ending with ‘That’s what the joke means, and I wish I was dead.’

Later, at the time of his Golden Shot appearances on TV: ‘I had the idea that a phrase like Hang on to your hollyhocks! would work. During the warm-ups I would tell a joke “I’d been told not to tell” - Lady Chatterley is in bed with a light cold. Through his French windows comes Mellors the gamekeeper, his hands full of hollyhocks, freshly-picked from the gardens, to present to her ladyship. She says, “Thank you for the hollyhocks. And I would appreciate your attention for I have never been bed-ridden before.” “Haven’t you?” says Mellors. “Hang on to your hollyhocks!” I could then place that phrase anywhere in the show with a hundred per cent certainty of getting a roar of laughter… and I waited and waited for the nation to be aware of this phrase. A year later I quietly dropped it…’

Ted Ray recalled two failed catchphrases from Ray’s A Laugh in about 1950: What about Rovers? - as in the exchange ‘Unlucky? - what about Rovers?’ ‘Unlucky? - you don’t know you’re born.’ Also: He’s one of Nature’s! - as in Martha about Albert: ‘Don’t you insult my husband, he’s one of Nature’s…’)

Peter Cook remembered (1979) that the exclamation Funny! - delivered in a strangulated Dud and Pete voice between himself and Dudley Moore on BBC 2 TV’s Not Only… But Also in the late 60s - caught on with the performers if not with the public at large. I think he may underestimate the extent to which the pronunciation of the word did catch on. Later, Fozzy Bear had something similar in The Muppet Show, pronouncing the word ‘fun-neee!’

Max Bygraves told me that in his 1979 series: ‘I had Geoff Love keep walking on. He’d get a big laugh and I’d turn to the audience and say You can’t help loving him, can you? It happened in the studio, but it didn’t happen with the public.’

On the Generation Game in the early 70s, Bruce Forsyth tried Tell me - who’s to know? while Larry Grayson unsuccessfully to follow Brucie’s ‘Didn’t he do well?’ with What a lot you’ve got!

Who The Hell's John Junkin?

From the ‘Bits’ section on page 5 of City Limits, 3rd to 9th of February 1984:

One of American comedian MEL BROOKS’ characters is the ‘2000-year-old man’, an old gent who knew everyone - ‘the great and the near-great’. Last year LWT organised an ‘Audience with Mel Brooks’ - to be broadcast this Saturday (see TV for times) - at which this fictional character could be questioned by ‘celebrities’. The only problem was that there seemed to be more of the near-greats than the greats there. Bryan Forbes, Nanette Newman and Lynsey de Paul - still flushed from having helped Mrs T to be elected - were on hand as well as Patrick Mower, Donald Sinden and Derek Nimmo. So Mr B had a bit of difficulty in identifying who was who - he called John Junkin ‘John Jenkins’ and got Helen Mirren’s name wrong. Ah well, some people are born near-great, some achieve near-greatness and some have near-greatness thrust upon them. There are some gems in the show so it’ll be worth watching for them as well as to see whether the fluffs have been cut out.

Popeye II

You would have thought that after Popeye Hollywood would be trying its utmost to keep Robin Williams away from any proposed big-screen adaptation of a daily newspaper strip, but no. From Leonard Klady’s Hollywood Cinefile column, page 10 of Screen International, Saturday the 9th of June 1990:

JOHN HUGHES has now come aboard as director of the film version of Johnny Hart’s The Wizard Of Id comic strip. The one-time Carolco project has shifted to Andrew Vajna’s Cinergi Productions with Robin Williams attached to play the title role. Production is targeted for early 1991 with Hughes planning to squeeze in his coming-of-age drama Reach The Rock for Universal this summer.

What I’d like to know is, who would have played the strip’s most famous character, the tyrannical pipsqueak King of Id? Surely it would have had to have been Danny DeVito.

Reach The Rock, incidentally, wasn’t completed until 1998.

Shelley Vision

Previously on this blog we have lamented the career of Shelley Duvall post-Popeye, how she fell into producing shows for television and never quite clawed her way back up to the big screen. Here follows press reports of the two films she had intended to appear in after Popeye but which never were produced.

A project close to Duvall’s heart was an adaptation of Tom Robbins’ novel Even Cowgirls Get The Blues. The fable had previously had a troubled time getting made into a feature when Robbins originally wrote the story as a low-budget screenplay in the mid-seventies - after failed to sell it to Hollywood he rewrote the script into a novel, which quickly became an underground favourite.

You have already read in the previously posted article that Duvall had bought the rights to the book in early 1981. One year on from that followed this news report from the pages of Rolling Stone, from Thursday the 18th of February 1982:

Duvall writes ‘Cowgirls’ script

“I feel this is Cuckoo’s Nest,” says Shelly Duvall of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, the Tom Robbins novel that the Texas-born actress owns the rights to. “It’s gonna surprise everybody and be a big hit.” Duvall’s penning the screenplay and plans to assay the lead role of Sissy Hankshaw, the daffy heroine who hitchhikes across the U.S. No other actors are set for the project - which, truth to tell, hasn’t been sold to a studio yet - but Duvall’s got big ideas for the soundtrack. “I’m gonna try and get Linda Ronstadt and possibly James Taylor. Ringo Starr loves the book, too, and said he’d do some road music; he also wants to play one of the guys who picks Sissy up.”

While shopping Cowgirls around, Duvall will serve as executive producer of a series of live-action fairy tales for television. One of the stories under way: The Frog Prince, for which Duvall hopes to get Teri Garr and Buck Henry.

No studio picked up Duvall’s version of Even Cowgirls Get The Blues. It was finally made into a feature in 1993, but with no involvment from Shelley Duvall - the film was written and directed by Gus Van Sant, with Uma Thurman taking the part of Sissy Hankshaw.

The Tale Of The Frog Prince, the first in the series of Faerie Tale Theatre, aired on Saturday the 11th of September 1982. A month later, this was reported on page 19 of the Saturday the 13th November 1982 edition of Screen International:

The making of a medieval movie

“BLONDEL - A Search For The King”, Gore Vidal’s medieval adventure story about King Richard the Lionheart and his loyal troubadour Blondel, is the subject of a new movie, scheduled to go into production next spring in Austria.

The film is to be directed by Robert Dornhelm,whose last film “She Dances Alone”, featuring Nijinsky’s daughter, was “Critic’s Choice” for 1981 in Cannes.

The screenplay is being written by Richard O’Brien, whose film “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” has become a phenomenon.

Shelley Duvall, Demis Roussos, Bill Wyman and Michael York are mooted to take part.

At this stage the film will be produced independently of the Austrian government.

This film, too, was never realised.

Shelley Duvall spent seven years producing Faerie Tale Theatre and, apart from a cameo in 1981’s Time Bandits, didn’t make another feature film after Popeye until 1987’s Roxanne, and even then she was only in a supporting ‘best friend’-type role to Daryl Hannah. One can only wonder what would have happened to Duvall’s career had the years following Popeye been filled with an award-worthy drama like Even Cowgirls Get The Blues and an eccentric epic like Blondel - A Search For The King.