signature films, de Seife is more illuminating when tackling the complex working relationship between Tashlin and Jerry Lewis, his idiot-savant son, heir apparent and, eventually, his own funhouse-mir- ror image. Lewis received on the job training with Tashlin, and their collaborations, from the explo- sive pop-cultural piñata of ARTISTS AND MOD- ELS to the grating sentimentality of CINDERFELLA to the sporadically inspired THE DISORDERLY OR- DERLY, are textbook examples of creative co-de- pendence. By the time their relationship ended, it was impossible to tell where Tashlin left off and Lewis began.
Lewis was capable of creating transcendently funny gag sequences, master classes in comedic set-up and pay-off but, unlike Tashlin, he was never able to establish and sustain a comic narrative through an entire picture (save for the dazzling THE NUTTY PROFESSOR). Still, there are sequences in Lewis’ early Paramount product, including THE LADIES MAN, THE BELLBOY and THE ERRAND BOY, that are among the best things Frank Tashlin never directed.
De Seife wraps his book with a look at two of the directors he considers most influenced by Tashlin: Jean-Luc Godard and Joe Dante. Godard’s Francophilic reverence for the American satirist is well-documented in a series of essays in CAHIERS
THE Z FILES TREASURES FROM ZACHERLEY’S ARCHIVES
By Richard Scrivani with Tom Weaver 2012, BearManor Media,
www.bearmanormedia.com PO Box 1129, Duncan OK 73534. 238 pp., Trade Paper Reviewed by Tim Lucas
A must for all devotées of Horror Host history, this book is Scrivani’s follow-up to GOOD NIGHT, WHATEVER YOU ARE!, his heart- felt 2006 memoir of growing up Zacherley. It’s a collection of clip- pings, scripts and mementos from the personal archives of John Zacherle. The material is not limited to Zacherle’s on-air stints as the clammy-complected Roland and Zacherley, reaching back to his earliest clippings from his regional theater experiences as a young actor in 1954. Local Philadelphia press sheets document his initial reign as Roland from January through September 1958, at which time a salary dispute propelled him into “Z Day” a couple of weeks later, when he hit the Big Time at New York’s WABC-TV and his presence turned an unspooling of Universal’s non-horror creaker THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD (1935) into one of televised horror’s most auspicious occasions. The book also covers his two-year stint (1965-67) as host of Newark, New Jersey’s DISC-O-TEEN dance party program. Informed as it is by journal and script pages (some of it in pencil and longhand!), internal and per- sonal correspondence and clippings quoting Zacherle at the time these things were happening, this manages to be authoritative, entertaining and archivally of immense value.
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DU CINÉMA (where, not coincidentally, the title for de Seife’s book was born: “...when you talk about a comedy, don’t say ‘It’s Chaplinesque’; say, loud and clear, ‘It’s Tashlinesque’”). Dante’s admiration for Tashlin’s anarchic worldview was apparent from the beginning of his career: from the found-footage blitzkreig of THE MOVIE ORGY to inviting the little green demons of GREMLINS 2: THE NEW BATCH to destroy the very film that contains them to the shiv-like satirical jabs flying left and right throughout LOONEY TUNES BACK IN ACTION, Dante’s entire raison d’etre has been cheeky, cheerful subversion. Like the equally impertinent Tashlin, he bites the hand that feeds him and then asks for more. Manny Farber brilliantly summed up Tashlin in one word: “termite.” Not merely a reference to “Termite Terrace,” the moniker bestowed on Tashlin’s animation unit at Warner Bros., but a tribute to Tashlin the Pest... an artist who digs deep and creates havoc. De Seife is to be congratu- lated for his painstaking analysis of Tashlin’s meth- ods but his dry and humorless tone betrays a pedant’s need to stick close to the safety of the classroom. A truly illuminating book about Frank Tashlin would bring together Farber’s lyrical in- sights and de Seife’s academic results in one neat package, with the ghost of Tashlin waiting in the wings to blow the whole thing up.
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