Lenny Bruce, Screenwriter

by Stephen J. Gertz

In 1953, the year that Samuel Beckett's Waiting For Godot made its first public stage debut, another holy scripture found its place in the pantheon of dramaturgy.

Sleaze! Sex! Trashy production values! Timothy Farrell is Umberto Scalli, a gangster operating a seedy dance hall. Up-and-coming screen sensation, Lenny Bruce, is Vincent, his sadistic bodyguard keeping the girls on edge and the customers in line. Curvaceous co-star Honey Harlowe is Rose, whose shapely charms launched a thousand quips. Sally Marr is the weary-wise hostess with the mostess. Bunny Parker and Joie Abrams are dance hall girls with moves not taught by Arthur Murray. And Bernie Jones is Punky the Swedish Sailor, who passed-out in a Bergman film and woke up in this sordid nightmare of cheap thrills, hot flesh, violence, and depraved desires!

Fast and furious action, suspense, drama, and sexploitation...It's  Dance Hall Racket!

It's the tender tale of a young performer on the make, his desperate dream of movie stardom and attempt to make it happen with a screenplay from hunger; a honey of a wife, an ecdysiast built to last; his mother, Sally, a former burlesque comedienne; a director who studied at the Ed Wood Jr. school of cinema; and Punky the Swedish Sailor, who pines for a smorgasbord of Nordic meatballs while drowning his sorrows in a Baltic sea of eau-de-vie.

And you, had it not sold instantly upon offering by Royal Books, could have owned an archive of this grade-Z movie from Screen Classics, the Poverty Row studio that tramped the  boulevard of broken dreams, put the hobo in Hollywood, and found lead in them thar golden hills. It was helmed by Phil Tucker, the director who soon afterward brought Robot Monster to the silver screen, a movie that gives Plan 9 From Outer Space a serious run for the money as the Worst Movie of All Time, and, it is reported, inspired the director's attempted suicide.

Set of 51 3 x 5 in. stills, incl. receipt signed in red ink
by Farrell: "Publicity pictures of me in Dance Hall Racket."
Los Angeles: Screen Classics, 1953

In 1951, Lenny Bruce met his future wife, Honey Harlowe, while she was working as a stripper at a club in Baltimore. Bruce was determined to improve their show business prospects, engaging in schemes legit and not-so to further their dreams. In 1953, the couple moved to Los Angeles from New York.

Set of 12 8 x 10 in. stills.
Los Angeles: Screen Classics, 1953

Upon arrival, they moved up the T&A ladder, finding work at The Cup and Saucer, later Strip City, and The Colony Club. 

The Colony Club was the classiest, best strip joint in L.A. and it was while working there that Lenny concocted the idea of a movie set in the world of burlesque, quoth the raven, "Dance Hall Racket."

The archive belonged to DHR star, Timothy Farrell (1922 - 1989). Farrell "worked as a bailiff in the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department while also working in the movies. One of his movies, Paris After Midnight,  was actually busted in a vice raid in the mid-50s, which caused him professional embarrassment. He went on to work 20 years as a L.A. Deputy Marshall and eventually was appointed County Marshall in 1971. He was convicted of felony charges after his appointment, however, for 'illegal use of Deputy Marshalls in political activities,' and was given a six month sentence, but received probation due to poor health. He was fired in 1975" (IMDB). 

In the same year he starred in Dance Hall Racket, Farrell appeared in Ed Wood Jr.'s adventures of a tranny, Glenn Or Glenda? But not before appearing in Racket Girls (gangsters n' female wrestlers, 1951), and, later, Ed Wood Jr.'s immortal Jail Bait (1954).

BRUCE, Lenny. How To Talk Dirty and Influence People.
Chicago: Playboy Press, [1965].
Advice from the Dale Carnegie of comedy.

Lenny Bruce's attempt at prose was more successful. How To Talk Dirty  and Influence People, the autobiography written after he'd attained stardom as a "sick" comedian whose satire laid waste to hypocrisy and forever changed the world of stand-up comedy, remains highly readable.

BRUCE, Honey with Dana Benenson. Honey.
The Life and Loves of Lenny's Shady Lady.
Chicago: Playboy Press, 1976.
Lenny's "shiksa-goddess" tells all.

Honey Harlowe, after Lenny's death, wrote "what is possibly the most shockingly intimate and most frankly erotic woman's story of even our liberated time" (jacket blurb). In comparison with today's even looser standards, it could have been written by Louisa May Alcott, Meg Comes Clean.

Of Dance Hall Racket, she wrote, "Lenny never made any real money writing, although he was paid $750 a week for rewriting the movie script The Kid From Outer Space [aka The Rocket Man]. None of the four movies he wrote [Dance Hall Racket, Dream Follies, The Rocket Man, and The Leather Jacket] got past the grade-B level. The most outrageous of his scripts was Dance Hall Racket. It was about a Italian gangster (Lenny) and his girl (me). The script was actually a rewrite and so corny it became funny. The best scene Lenny wrote for me was when I was be be presented to a big-time gangster as a welcome-home-from-prison present. I was dressed in a white bikini, high heels, and a white-fox stole, and upon cue I came crashing through a tremendous cake" (p. 222-223).

He who gets slapped.
"This is the worst screenplay I've ever read!"

From left.: Punky the Swedish Sailor; Honey Harlowe;
Timothy Farrell; Lenny Bruce.

Punky the Swedish Sailor cleans up the pastry, then gets plastered.



View all fifty-three minutes of Dance Hall Racket, above.
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Archive images courtesy of Royal Books, with our thanks.

Book images from the author's collection.

Dance Hall Racket is an orphan the public domain.
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Charlie Chaplin's MS Notes and Script for M. Verdoux Estimated $40,000-$50,000 at Auction

by Stephen J. Gertz

A duplicated typescript with autograph manuscript corrections, and manuscript notes and additions by legendary silent screen comedian, Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977), of his screenplay, A Comedy of Murders, which would be released as Monsieur Verdoux, Chaplin's dark comedy of 1947 and favorite of all his films, has surfaced and is being offered by Bloomsbury - London (now Dreweatt's) Auctions in their Important Books and Manuscript sale, November 29, 2011. It is estimated to sell for £25,000 - £30,000 ($39,745 - $47,367).

The forty total pages are comprised of eight pages of autograph manuscript that includes four pencil sketches by Chaplin, plus thirty-two pages of annotated and corrected typescript.The original blue wrapper to the screenplay bears the typed inscription, "Mr. Chaplin's Copy" in the upper right corner.

Written, directed , and starring Chaplin, the movie was based upon an idea by Orson Welles.

"It was Orson Welles who approached Charles Chaplin about a project based on the real-life French serial wife-killer, Henri Landru. Welles would direct and Chaplin would star. Rather than act in another director's movie, Chaplin bought the idea from Welles and made it his own vehicle, one that would forever banish the Little Tramp from Chaplin's new work. The result, 1947's Monsieur Verdoux, is Chaplin's anti-Tramp. Here in his most pessimistic film, there's not a jot of the sweetness and sentimentality that characterized his previous work. The intensely felt social criticism that audiences had seen growing in Modern Times and especially The Great Dictator is elevated to an astonishing level of sarcasm and subversive irony.

"Subtitled 'A Comedy of Murders,' this mordant satire features Chaplin, at 58, as Henri Verdoux, an urbane Parisian bank clerk who loses his career in the Great Depression. Verdoux devises another means to care for his dear wheelchair-bound wife and the young son he loves - using make-believe jobs as cover for his travels, he woos rich widows in other cities, marries them, then murders them for their money" (Mark Bourne, DVD Journal).

"Monsieur Verdoux featured Chaplin as a middle-aged Bluebeard who marries and murders wealthy widows for their money. Attacked as unseemly by some American critics, the film did better abroad. The black comedy of Monsieur Verdoux, the Joan Berry paternity suit, and the charges that Chaplin was a communist made the comedian a very controversial figure figure in 'McCarthyist' America.

"In 1952 Chaplin took his family to Britain... Prior to making his trip abroad the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) unexpectedly demanded that he pay $2 million in back taxes and the film-maker refused. Chaplin had never become an American citizen. While the family was sailing to Britain aboard the Queen Elizabeth, the United States attorney-general, James McGranery, announced that he was denying Chaplin a re-entry permit because the film-maker's association with communism made him an 'undesirable alien.'

Chaplin as Monsieur Verdoux.

 

 "It is ironic that Chaplin, who became one of the most successful capitalists of the twentieth century through his portrayal of a tramp, left America because of accusations that he was a communist." (Oxford DNB).

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CHAPLIN, Sir Charles Spencer, "Charlie", film actor and director, 1889-1977). Comedy of Murders [Monsieur Verdoux], duplicated typescript with autograph manuscript corrections and additions by Chaplin, February - April 1946. Quarto. 40 pp (8pp. autograph manuscript & 32pp. typescript), 4 pencil sketches by Chaplin,  on yellow paper. Original blue paper upper wrapper, with typed inscription: "Mr. Chaplin's Copy" in corner.  Bound in a modern red water silk lined full black morocco solander box.

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Images courtesy of Dreweatt's - Bloomsbury, with our thanks.
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Woody Allen Books and the High Cost of Irony

by Stephen J. Gertz

If you collect the works of Woody Allen and wish to possess Four Films of Woody Allen (New York: Random House, 1982) a near fine, super-association/presentation copy inscribed to his  now ex-wife, Mia Farrow, must surely be the sweetest, most desirable to own. Its ironic inscription is priceless.

But rare book dealers are not altruists.

Originally sold by Julien's Auctions in Beverly Hills, June 27, 2010, this copy is now being offered for $7,500 by Biblioctopus.

Only one other signed copy is currently on the market. It, too, is in near fine condition. It is being offered by James Pepper Rare Books for $1,500.

Premium for deeply ironic inscription: $6,000. And worth every penny. Events subsequent to the inscription provide a subtext to it that's a book in itself and could not be more rich, ripe, and, ultimately, poignant. In the absence of an Allen first edition annotated by him this has to be the collectible Woody Allen book.

Image from Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989).

It is not necessary to rehash the Allen-Farrow scandal here. Suffice it to say, at some point post-mishegas, Ms. Farrow bid goodbye, good riddance, and vamoose to her  collection of Woody Allen books. They must have seemed like scalpels on the shelf, this particular book with its inscription a stiletto twisting into her gut as the coup de grâce.
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Images courtesy of Biblioctopus, with our thanks.
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Apocalypse Now, and Then: Earliest Known Script Surfaces

by Stephen J. Gertz

A very early draft shooting script, the earliest known, dated December 5, 1969, of Francis Ford Coppola's Viet Nam epic, Apocalypse Now, has come to market.

The screenplay was the property of actor Lee Marvin, who Coppola  solicited to portray the role of "Colonel Karnage," a character that would be renamed "Colonel Kilgore" and ultimately played by Robert Duvall in the classic film that was eventually produced, and released in 1979 - a full ten years after this draft was written.

Accompanying the script, ultimately co-written by Coppola and John Milius, is Coppola's handwritten note to Marvin:

"Mr. Lee Marvin / We'd like you to play the part of Colonel Karnage in Apocalypse Now. We're an independant [sic] company in San Francisco financed by Warner Bros. It's a good script. / Sincerely / Francis Ford Coppola."

Coppola was working on the project before writing and/or producing or directing THX-1138, American Graffiti, Patton, The Godfather, Godfather II, and The Conversation; he conceived it in the founding year of American Zoetrope, his ambitious production company. Indeed, the script is bound in an American Zoetrope wrapper, possesses the corprorate logo on the title page, and the accompanying note was written on the company's embossed stationary. Milius is given sole credit here; he later  shared credit on the final script with Coppola, and Michael Herr would receive a separate credit for his narrative dialogue. Coppola loosely based the film upon Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, presumably tossing out Milius's original idea and title: The Psychedelic Soldier.

"If I say it's safe to surf this beach, then it's safe to surf this beach...
Charlie don't surf!"

While it is difficult to imagine anyone other than Duvall in the role of Kilgore - he wholly possessed it - it must be admitted that Lee Marvin, an ex-Marine wounded during the Battle of Saipan in WWII, would have been equally commanding in the role as the napalm- and surf-lovin' Lt. Col. Kilgore, though, granted, Marvin, in his mid-fifties at the time of the film's production, would have been a senior, silver-haired surfer.

The movie received eight Academy Award nominations, including Best, Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay.

The script is being offered at $15,000 by Royal Books of Baltimore, MD.
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[MILIUS, John]. Apocalypse Now. San Francisco: American Zoetrope, Dec. 5, 1969. Earliest known draft. Quarto. ALS is 11 x 8.5 inches on Zoetrope letterhead.

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Image courtesy of Royal Books, with our thanks.
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