Author: Michael H. Price

“So how did I get to be a movie star, anyhow?” Gene Autry (1907–98) asked George E. Turner and me in 1985.

George and I were consulting with Old Hollywood’s preeminent make-believe cowboy about his donation of a large collection of motion-picture footage to the Southwest Film & Video Archive at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. (I had begun working with the SMU film library in 1983 in connection with the preservation of an extensive batch of black-ensemble movies from the 1920s –1950s that had been salvaged from an abandoned warehouse in East Texas. Hence the Tyler, Texas, Black Film Collection, which amounts to a story for another day.)

Anyhow, on this 1985 occasion, Autry had recognized George and me as the authors who had taken him to task a few years earlier – politely, of course – for his having usurped the greater celebrity that had belonged to an authentic cowboy-become-movie star named Ken Maynard.

Now, being admirers of Maynard, George and I had assumed a resentful attitude in a book called Forgotten Horrors. The movie that at once cinched Autry’s stardom and signaled Maynard’s decline is The Phantom Empire (1935). And yes, The Phantom Empire is a horror movie, with nuclear-age science-fictional foreshadowing. And a Western adventure. And a country-music showcase, on top of all that. Only in Hollywood. (more…)

Continued from last week:

Robert Crumb and I began early in 1985 to develop a musical accompaniment for the first stage production of R. Crumb Comix at Fort Worth, Texas’ Hip Pocket Theatre. We consulted by telephone between my digs in Fort Worth and his home near Winters, California, and Robert prepared numerous reference dubs from his collection of 78-R.P.M. phonograph records. These, I augmented with musical sources from my own library, plus scattered original compositions. I recruited an orchestra from within guitarist Slim Richey’s and my jazz trio, Diddy Wah Diddy, and from our affiliated string band, the Salt Lick Foundation, with which I had recently completed a string of record albums for Slim’s Ridge Runner/Tex Grass labels.

Band rehearsals commenced in May of 1985, with all concerned forewarned to buck up for a three-hour show scored with what Crumb wanted to be “constant music – just like in those ol’ Hal Roach comedy films.” Yes, and never mind that the Roach pictures (including the Depression years’ Laurel & Hardy and Our Gang series) ran to just 20 or 30 minutes apiece in length. Well, at least there would be an intermission.

So Robert reached Texas on schedule, got settled in, and found the progress agreeable. He warmed especially to the women (consistent with Crumb’s vision) whom director Johnny Simons had cast. Robert took issue with some of the music as sounding “too modernistic – that ’forties swing stuff” (no accounting for taste) but found the score workable overall, enjoying the sound well enough to commandeer a plectrum banjo from Salt Lick’s Lee Thomas and perform as a member of the orchestra on the opening weekend that June. Crumb’s banjo-playing fit right in, evoking memories of Eddie Peabody and the Light Crust Doughboys’ Marvin “Smokey” Montgomery. I had composed one of the show’s tunes, “Save Me a Slice of That,” as a Doughboys pastiche. (more…)

The life and times of R. Crumb, a mensch among men and one of the more steadfastly brilliant practitioners of American (resident or expatriate) cartooning, have been sufficiently well covered in Terry Zwigoff’s documentary film, Crumb (1994), and in Peter Poplaski’s The R. Crumb Handbook (M.Q. Publications; 2005) and innumerable column-inches of The Comics Journal, that I feel no particular need to pursue any generalized biographical tack here.

In a recent letter, Crumb brings things somewhat up to date: “I’m in the middle of a big project – comic-book version of the Book of Genesis, approx. 200 pages when finished.” This involvement had prevented his traveling to Texas in 2006 to take part in a new experimental-theatre staging of R. Crumb Comix with director Johnny Simons and Yrs. Trly. Simons’ Fort Worth-based Hip Pocket Theatre troupe has adapted Crumb’s stories on several occasions since 1985.

Robert Crumb’s larger career might reasonably find itself crystallized in two warring viewpoints: The authoritative critic Robert Hughes’ earnest likening of Crumb to Pieter Brueghel the Elder, greatest of the Sixteenth Century’s Flemish painters, vs. this published declaration from Crumb his ownself: ‘Broigul I ain’t… let’s face it.’ (more…)

I’ve been sorting through the newspaper-cartoon backlog lately, beefing up the digital-image archive while determining whether anything from a busy stretch at the drawing board during the 1990s might bear resurrecting for fresh publication. Much of this material involves a Hollywood-lampoon strip called Moviola, which originated as a weekly feature for the Star-Telegram of Fort Worth, Texas, during its last years as a higher-minded publication.

The first movie parody I ever encountered – and thus, a building-block of my long-stretch involvement in cartooning and film scholarship – came from my Uncle Grady L. Wilson, a theatre-chain manager. Grady could concoct the damnedest jolly nonsense from the flimsiest of material, and keep a straight face in the bargain. He announced to me one day in 1954 that he had booked a picture called "The Preacher from the Black Lagoon."

Now, I was six years old at the time and as impressionable as Silly Putty, and so I found it necessary to witness the arrival of Jack Arnold’s Creature from the Black Lagoon on the big screen before it dawned on me that my uncle had been just woofing.

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