ACME Eagle Hand Soap Radio Hour (463)

Thank you for joining us today

Before our feature presentation, ACME would like to start the evening with another Porky Pig Looney Tunes cartoon, the 1938 Porky's Spring Planting, directed by Frank Tashlin.



Porky Pig's menu is nailed to the fence by a Schlesinger-brand nail.


We here at The ACME Eagle Hand Soap Radio Hour love yacht rock. (Many of us are old enough to have hear these bands back in their prime). So we were quite have to hear that The Doobie Brothers have reformed and are on tour again. They recently appeared on NPR's Tiny Desk Concert, so we thought that we'd give it a listen. Let's all watch it together:



That Michael McDonald has a career ahead of him


We’ve selected another entry from the excellent reference book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, edited by Steven Jay Schneider. Today’s film is the underrated 1983 comedy The King of Comedy, directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Robert De Niro (in his fifth collaboration with Scorsese), Jerry Lewis, and Sandra Bernhard. With a budget of $19 million and strong critical reception, the film was nevertheless a huge flop at the box office. It earned only $2.5 million and played for less than two weeks in theaters. Since then, the film has gone on to become a cult classic.

The film has engendered a great deal of ambivalence among its participants. Martin Scorsese later said that making the movie was an “unsettling” experience, in part because of the embarrassing, bitter material in the script. He also said that he and Robert De Niro may not have worked together again for seven years because making The King of Comedy was so emotionally grueling. Scorsese has even stated that he “probably should not have made” the film. Robert De Niro wrote Scorsese a letter before filming to express his reluctance about casting Jerry Lewis as Jerry Langford, feeling Lewis might be tempted to ham it up and might not be able to deliver a believable dramatic performance. Scorsese argued that Lewis’s own experience as an old-school Borscht Belt and Catskills comedian - and the pathos beneath his manic film persona - would help him understand and portray the angst of Jerry Langford.

Paul Zimmerman wrote the screenplay in the 1970s, and Robert De Niro tried to get it made then, but he didn’t yet have the clout to push the project forward. Zimmerman - unlike many writers who despise seeing their work edited or altered for a screen adaptation - was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the finished film and even felt that it was better than what he had originally written. All this having been said, please find a comfy chair and join us here at The ACME Eagle Hand Soap Radio Hour as we watch this incredible film: The King of Comedy.



In the scene where Robert De Niro and Sandra Bernhard argue in the street, three of the “street scum” who mock Bernhard are Mick Jones, Joe Strummer, and Paul Simonon - members of the British punk rock band The Clash.



Demand Euphoria!