Gilda Radner’s (almost) 1979 one-woman Broadway show “Gilda Radner: Live from New York” ran for 52 performances at the Winter Garden Theatre, the venue which would later host both Cats and Mama Mia. Don Novello (“Father Guido Sarducci”) and Paul Shaffer were also featured in the show.

Although Radner’s live show was a hit with New York audiences, Mike Nichols’ cinematic document of her performance, released as Gilda Live in theaters and on record didn’t fare as well. I had the album when I was a kid and to this day I think I still have most of it memorized. Here’s one of Gilda Live‘s highlights, “Let’s Talk Dirty to the Animals”:
 

Chris Burden, “Full Financial Disclosure”
 
If you were flipping through the TV channels (using your hand to adjust the dial on the set, most likely) in Los Angeles or New York in the mid-1970s, it’s possible that you caught some unusual commercials by an artist of the caliber of Michelangelo or Rembrandt. I refer to Chris Burden, and I know he belongs in the class of Michelangelo and Rembrandt because one of the commercials told me so—and commercials always tell the truth.

The New Museum in New York recently mounted “Extreme Measures,” an expansive retrospective of Burden’s work; it ended a week ago, but the exhibition is “partially on view through 1/26/14.” Burden is most famous for two artistic stunts: 1971’s “Shoot,” in which he enlisted a friend to shoot him in the arm, and 1974’s “Trans-Fixed,” in which he had himself nailed to a Volkswagen, Jesus-style. “Trans-Fixed” inspired a lyric in David Bowie’s “Joe the Lion” from his 1977 album Heroes: “Joe the lion / Went to the bar / A couple of drinks on the house an’ he said / ‘Tell you who you are if you nail me to my car.’”

A good deal of Burden’s work is conceptual and yet completely sticky: it’s not just dumb luck that he ended up inspiring a line in a Bowie song. In that way he reminds me a bit of Komar and Melamid. In the mid-1970s Burden got interested in television, specifically “the omnipotent stranglehold of the airwaves that broadcast television held.”
 

 
In “Poem for L.A.,” which aired in June 1975, Burden intones to the camera “Science has failed. Heat is Life. Time kills,” as the words appear on the screen. To fill the required 30 seconds, you just see the identical footage three times. My favorite is probably “Chris Burden Promo,” in which the six names “Leonardo Da Vinci / Michelangelo / Rembrandt / Vincent Van Gogh / Pablo Picasso / Chris Burden” blandly rocket towards the viewer in the manner of an aggressive movie title or a “Pow!!!” sound effect from the TV series Batman with Adam West. That one was shown during the first season of Saturday Night Live, in fact. According to the dates furnished by Burden (May 1976), the only shows it could have appeared on (should you be scraping your memory banks) were hosted by Madeline Kahn and Dyan Cannon. The other five names were chosen as the result of a nationwide survey establishing the most well-known artists to the American public.

Equally witty/conceptual was “Full Financial Disclosure,” which ran in the Los Angeles area in 1977; in this one Burden sits at a desk in front of the American flag and presents a summary of his 1976 earnings. The concept here wasn’t quite as random as the others; indeed, it could be seen as a legitimate commercial intended to promote a show he had at the Baum Silverman Gallery in which his own cancelled bank checks were part of the artworks.

Amusingly, in this YouTube clip, presumably generated by Burden, the content runs about three and a half minutes and then repeats a couple more times, similar to the commercials in which he was obliged to repeat the content to fill the time of a standard commercial.
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Chris Burden: Shot With His Own Gun
Chris Burden’s incredible Metropolis 2 coming soon to LACMA

 
Cinema’s “All American” auteur of the dark, surreal and inexplicable turns 68 today, yet he somehow remains boyish. Must be all that meditation?

David Lynch student film, ‘Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times)’ (1967)
If ‘Dirty Dancing’ were directed by David Lynch
‘Eraserhead Stories’: David Lynch looks back on his weirdest film
‘Hotel Room’: David Lynch’s oddball HBO mini-series, 1993
David Lynch’s guide to film-making
David Lynch sells coffee
‘The Pink Jack’ : AC/DC vs David Lynch vs. Dead Can Dance (NSFW)
David Lynch’s ‘Eraserhead’ in 60 seconds, done in clay
David Lynch’s hair compared to well-known paintings
Sean Young’s Super-8 film diary from David Lynch’s ‘Dune’ (1983)
David Lynch: ‘Ideas flow through like these beautiful little fish, and you catch them’
 
Below, a young David Lynch makes a brief appearance on New Wave Theatre sometime in the early 1980s.

 
Dangerous Minds pal Michael Backes writes:

Thomas Pynchon is the reclusive author of Gravity’s Rainbow, V, The Crying of Lot 49, Vineland and…  Forget that.  All the Pynchon stuff starts that way.  Cut to the good stuff.  Thomas Pynchon is a very, very smart and extremely funny writer and one of the greatest novelists of all time.  He values his privacy.  Pynchon loves history, women, science, song and weed.

His brilliant novel, Gravity’s Rainbow, is filled with song lyrics.  Very funny song lyrics.  Daniel Couch  organized the Thomas Pynchon Fake Book Project to embark upon setting Pynchon’s lyrics to music.  Thirty-seven people from four states helped the project become reality.

Have a listen here.

Aside from the fact that my uncle was the lawyer in The Crying of Lot 49 (just kidding) I actually know not one, not two, but in fact four people who have met Thomas Pynchon. One of them even made him a curry!

Below, the speculative (for what else could it be?) Pynchon documentary A Journey Into the Mind of P

 
Some NYC interviewer caught the Dead Boys in an expansive mood one day in 1977—the video below presents a well-executed montage of the session, complete with the straightforward charm and discernment specific to original punks from the Midwest. As a New Yorker recently moved to Cleveland, I really cannot get enough of their accents, not to mention the unpretentious exasperation with just about everything save Iggy Pop, Paul Revere and The Raiders, small venues, and women who know enough to get lost after the fucking ends. 

Jimmy Zero is by miles the most articulate of the bunch; his brief gloss about their song “Sonic Reducer” is as pithy and comprehensive a distillation of the punk ethic as I can recall hearing in quite some time:
 

That’s pretty much I think the feelings that all teenagers share, but in certain individuals they surface more, and in others they’re totally repressed. It’s just like, we weren’t out to write an anthem or anything like that, that’d be ridiculous. But it’s pretty much what I think, kids in all generations, to my knowledge, have always had on their minds—alienation, when you don’t know where the hell you’re gonna go or what you’re gonna do. You know you’re gonna end up with some kind of a job, which you might not want—you know, just alienation, total alienation. And that song is about saying, Well, all the people that are being stuffed down my throat, I’m not gonna take it anymore. I don’t want it.

 
The final frame of the video, fittingly enough, is of Stiv quaffing down a brewski.
 

 
Below, The Dead Boys captured at their peak at CBGB in October 1977 performing blistering versions of “Sonic Reducer,” “All This And More,” “Caught With The Meat In Your Mouth” and “High Tension Wire.”
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
TV anarchy: Stiv Bators and Brooke Shields together on Manhattan cable in the mid-70s
Stiv Bators interview from 1986: Confessions of a Catholic boy

 
Robert Shaw liked to drink. Indeed, the actor, author and playwright liked to drink a lot. And it often led to some disastrous consequences.

During the making of Jaws, Robert Shaw had an alcohol-induced blackout during the filming of that famous S.S. Indianapolis speech. Shaw had convinced director Steven Spielberg that as the three characters in the scene (played by Shaw, Roy Scheider, and Richard Dreyfuss) had been drinking, it might be an idea to have a wee chaser before filming, just to get him in the mood. Spielberg agreed. It was an unwise decision as Shaw drank so much he had to be carried back onto the set. Hardly any filming took place that day, and Spielberg wrapped the crew at eleven in the morning.

Later that night, in the wee small hours, a panicked Shaw ‘phoned Spielberg to ask if he had done anything embarrassing as he could not remember what had happened. And would the director let him film the scene again?

The next day, a sober and contrite Shaw turned up early for work and delivered one of cinema’s most memorable speeches.

“Drink?” Shaw once famously said in 1977, “Can you imagine being a movie star and having to take it seriously without a drink?”

“I agree with Richard Burton that drink gives poetry to life. Drink for actors is an occupational hazard born largely out of fear.”

The stories of Shaw’s alcoholic excesses, often abusive behavior, and on-set pranks can sometimes overshadow his quality as an actor and his talent as a writer. The academic John Sutherland has pointed out Shaw was a far better writer than many of the best-selling authors whose books inspired the films he starred in, particularly Pete Benchley (Jaws, The Deep) and Alistair MacLean (Force 10 From Navarone), though sadly none of Shaw’s five novels or his three plays are currently in print.

As we all (probably) know, Shaw himself was involved in the writing of the famous Indianapolis speech, as Spielberg has explained in 2011:

I owe three people a lot for this speech. You’ve heard all this, but you’ve probably never heard it from me. There’s a lot of apocryphal reporting about who did what on Jaws and I’ve heard it for the last three decades, but the fact is the speech was conceived by Howard Sackler, who was an uncredited writer, didn’t want a credit and didn’t arbitrate for one, but he’s the guy that broke the back of the script before we ever got to Martha’s Vineyard to shoot the movie.

I hired later Carl Gottlieb to come onto the island, who was a friend of mine, to punch up the script, but Howard conceived of the Indianapolis speech. I had never heard of the Indianapolis before Howard, who wrote the script at the Bel Air Hotel and I was with him a couple times a week reading pages and discussing them.

Howard one day said, “Quint needs some motivation to show all of us what made him the way he is and I think it’s this Indianapolis incident.” I said, “Howard, what’s that?” And he explained the whole incident of the Indianapolis and the Atomic Bomb being delivered and on its way back it was sunk by a submarine and sharks surrounded the helpless sailors who had been cast adrift and it was just a horrendous piece of World War II history. Howard didn’t write a long speech, he probably wrote about three-quarters of a page.

But then, when I showed the script to my friend John Milius, John said “Can I take a crack at this speech?” and John wrote a 10-page monologue, that was absolutely brilliant but out-sized for the Jaws I was making! (laughs) But it was brilliant and then Robert Shaw took the speech and Robert did the cut-down.

Robert himself was a fine writer, who had written the play The Man in the Glass Booth. Robert took a crack at the speech and he brought it down to five pages. So, that was sort of the evolution just of that speech.

 
More on Robert Shaw, after the jump…

 
One thing is for sure: Chris Marker’s cat Guillaume-en-Egypte (yes, that’s right, “William in Egypt”—whatevs) is no Maru, the wildly videogenic Japanese feline whose winsome antics catapulting himself in and out of cardboard boxes have made his owner a thousandaire many times over. In Marker’s 1990 short Chat écoutant la musique, Guillaume mostly snoozes atop an electronic keyboard as a lugubrious jazz piano theme by Federico Mompou emanates throughout the room. A couple times he looks around, and towards the end (drama!) he switches position. Hey, he’s a cat—mainly he snoozes.

Marker’s short film, one of five animal-related movies that comprised his Bestiaire, would probably fail as YouTube click bait, but it succeeds as a dreamy meditation by one of cinema’s most challenging experimental directors, best known for Sans Soleil and La Jétee, the latter of which Terry Gilliam (not Guillaume, not from Egypt) improbably transmogrified into the frenetic time-twisting thriller Twelve Monkeys.   
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Chris Marker: ‘Bestiaire’ from 1990

 
An amazing piece of 1950s oil industry propaganda called Destination Earth tells the story of Colonel Cosmic, a spy from Mars sent to Earth. Martian society, y’see, was one of lockstep conformity and oppression under the hyper-statist rule of authoritarian great leader Ogg, and couldn’t be more obviously an analogue for the Soviet Union. Ogg has sent Colonel Cosmic to Earth to learn how we solved the problem of friction in moving parts, but instead, he learns all about the utopian joys of free markets and the miracle of GASOLINE, THE MOST EFFICIENT MOBILE POWER SOURCE ON EARTH! Naturally, revolution ensues. The squeamish needn’t worry, it’s bloodless.
 

 
The short was directed by Carl Urbano, and DM readers of a certain age have seen plenty of his work. As a director for Hanna-Barbera, he worked on shows like Super Friends and Laff-A-Lympics among dozens of others. A collection of his Cold War propaganda is available on DVD, as is—to my surprise—a collection of his petroleum industry work going back as far as the 1930s, and the collection includes Destination Earth. But you can enjoy that one in its entirety right here.
 

 
Dead of Night is described (by the BFI, no less) as a “legendary BBC horror anthology series.” I’m not quite sure what qualifies a TV show to be legendary, perhaps it’s something to do with how a series is remembered—shocking, controversial, scary, disturbing—rather than any association with mythical status.

I recall when Dead of Night was first screened, I wasn’t allowed to sit up late to watch its first episode “The Exorcism,” as my superstitious father believed its occult subject matter might lead an impressionable mind into devil-worship. Personally, I never considered that an option for my god-fearing father, no matter how impressionable his mind.

If I had watched it, I would most likely have been a tad disappointed in my childish hope for some Hammer Horror/Dennis Wheatley thrills, as Don Taylor’s drama is not really about the occult, or even an exorcism, but rather it uses the supernatural as a metaphor reflecting the collective responsibility for poverty and social inequality.

Taylor was a political film-maker, who was best known for his early collaborative work with the playwright David Mercer, author of Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment, amongst others. Both men were dedicated socialists, who produced topical (and there’s the reason some of their work has not lasted) political plays that questioned the role of political action within everyday life.

Taylor was inexplicably placed on a “blacklist” for seven years by the BBC’s James MacTaggart, which stopped Taylor making plays for the BBC’s Drama Department. He moved to the Arts Department, where he wrote and directed documentaries on Sean O’Casey, Wordsworth, the Liverpool Poets, and Milton.

In 1972, Taylor returned to the BBC’s Drama Department to work on Dead of NIght. His contribution to the series was The Exorcism, which tells the story of two comfortable, middle class couples haunted by the ghosts of the past. It’s not exactly directed with any visual flair, Taylor has focused on the dialog and getting his point across in-between some chilling, supernatural horror, but it’s certainly effective and memorable.

The Exorcism proved so successful it was revived on London’s West End with the actress Mary Ure in the cast.

Ure was famed for her roles in the films The MInd Benders with Dirk Bogarde, and Where Eagles Dare, alongside Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood. Ure was married to the actor Robert Shaw. They had a passionate and tempestuous relationship, but its most damaging effect was that Ure had gradually become an alcoholic. Having taken time-off from film-making to raise a family, Ure returned to the theater in the early 1970s.

In 1975, Mary Ure was starring in The Exorcism, when she mysteriously died. It was claimed by the more sensationalist tabloids that Ms. Ure had committed suicide after being traumatized by the play’s occult subject matter (or worse, possessed by evil spirits). Good copy, but not true. Mary Ure had suffered from depression, and was on prescription dugs. It was the accidental mix of these drugs with alcohol that killed the actress known as the “Scottish Marilyn.”
 

 
Two more chilling episodes from ‘Dead of Night’ after the jump…

“I think of myself as somebody who is reporting from a world of dreams.”
-Clive Barker

Although primarily known as an author of dark fantasy, and as the creator of the “Hellraiser” and “Candyman” horror movie franchises, Clive Barker is also a prolific visual artist. Barker will often paint a character into existence before fleshing it out on the page:

“I’m painting these pictures in the expectation that… interesting, strange characters and landscapes will come into my mind and into my mind’s eye and appear on the canvas through the brush. There is something willfully strange about this process—that you stand back at the end of a night’s work and you look at something and you say, ‘Where did that come from?’ I mean, I’m not the only artist who does that - lots of artists do that, I know. And it’s been wonderful because if I had created Abarat from words—if I’d written Abarat and then illustrated it… it would not be anything like as rich or as complex or as contradictory a world as it is. Because this is a world which has been created from dream visions…  What I’m doing is finding stories that match the shape of my dreams.”

This weekend you can see the art of Clive Barker at LA Art at the Century Guild booth #1216 . You can pre-order the upcoming hardcover Clive Barker art book here.