The Rocky Varla Picture Show

(Or: Faster, Frankenfurt! Kill! Kill!)

Respectfully dedicated to all my friends at Sins o' the Flesh and Girlwerks Media

Sometimes, the unexpected pleasures of watching your favorite films more than, well, the average person revisits a favorite film, is that you begin to see wild symmetries and convergences among them that make you appreciate them even more.

If you watch THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW enough times, you'll notice that someone on the production was a Russ Meyer fan. After all, I don't think anyone at 20th Century-Fox was thinking about corporate synergy in such a fashion to pressure the art director into putting a BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS soundtrack album in Columbia's bedroom. This was intentional homage. For that matter, there's certainly a case to be made for kinship between the two counterculture musicals, what with both telling a tragicomic saga of nice kids in a wild new environment of sex and drugs being manipulated by a sociopath of fluid sexuality. At the very least, they're a dynamite double feature.

However, upon a recent viewing of Meyer's other stone classic, FASTER, PUSSYCAT! KILL! KILL!, I began to see connections that had eluded me before, little things that made me speculate as to whether just maybe, amidst all the direct allusions to monster movies and Old Dark House mysteries, there was also some buried homage being paid to this chronicle of go-go girls gone-gone amok, at a time when only seriously savage film lovers would have picked up on them...

"I would like, if I may, to take you...on a strange journey..."

"...two young, ordinary, healthy kids..."

"...there were dark storm clouds - heavy, black, and pendulous - towards which they were driving."

"It was a night out they were going to remember...for a very long time."

"Say, do any of you guys know how to Madison?"

"This isn't the Junior Chamber of Commerce..."

"How forceful you are...such a perfect specimen of manhood. So...dominant!"

"That's no way to behave on your first day out."

"Do you want her to see you, like this?"

"He had a certain naive charm, but no muscle."

"You better wise up..."

"Suddenly, you get a break."

"All the pieces seem to fit into place."

"And Paradise is to be mine."

"It's not often we receive visitors here, let alone offer them hospitality."

"I'm sure you're not spent yet."

"Such strenuous living I just don't understand..."

"This in itself was proof that their host was a man of little morals..."

"...and some persuasion."

"What further indignities were they to be subjected to?"

"How did it happen? I understood you were supposed to be watching!"

"Food has always played a vital role in life's rituals: The breaking of bread, the last meal of the condemned man... and now this meal ."

"However informal it might appear, you can be sure that there was to be little bonhomie."

"I loved you...and what did it get me? I'll tell you. A big Nothing!"

"Now the only thing that gives me hope is my love of a certain dope."

{"Rocky doesn't give a fuck, he's hungry!"}

"That's a rather tender subject."

"'Emotion: Agitation or disturbance of mind; vehement or excited mental state.'"

"It is also a powerful and irrational master."

"Oh come on...admit it, you liked it didn't you? There's no crime in giving yourself over to pleasure."

"If only we hadn't made this journey...If only we were among friends...or sane persons."

"Even smiling makes my face ache."

"Well, unfortunately for you all, the plans are to be changed."

"I ask for nothing..."

"And you shall receive it..."

"... in abundance!"

"You won't find [me] quite the easy mark you imagine."

"What a sucker you've been, what a fool. The answer was there all the time."

{"Chest of steel! Back of steel! Shoulder of steel!"}

"And now...your time has come. Say goodbye to all of...this..."

"...and hello...to oblivion!"

"I made you, and I can break you just as easily!"

"And then she cried out..."

"STOOOOOOP!!!"

"The game has been disbanded."

"You should leave now while it is still possible."

"And crawling...on the planet's face..."

"...some insects...called the human race..."

"...lost in time..."

"...lost in space..."

"...and meaning."

"Meeeean-iiiing..."

acknowledgements to blogger/Tweeter @jodamico who, independent of me, previously had a similar inkling, and to Al Ewing and Sarah Peploe at Freaky Trigger, where many of the best images for this essay came from

"Tell them they can laugh at me"

 

On this first anniversary of the passing of David Bowie, a loss still felt profoundly by all of us here at Night Flight, we’re taking an opportunity to reflect on his underappreciated capacity for self-deprecation and comedy.

David Bowie constantly tried new things, resisted coasting on familiar credits, and earned enormous respect that continues in his absence. He took his artistic process very seriously.

What he rarely took seriously was himself. In his music videos, in movie cameos, and in the media, he exercised comic gifts that delivered big laughs, often at his own expense.

In the formative years of his career, Bowie compensated for his intense shyness by disappearing into his stage personas and substance abuse. He spent a long sojourn in Berlin to kick his addictions and find perspective, and emerged in the ‘80s with a more positive demeanor.

A key incident that shaped this philosophical turn took place as he was making the video for “Ashes to Ashes” in 1980 with director David Mallet. Bowie recounted the story to technician Michael Dignum during a break in filming for the “Miracle Goodnight” video from Blackstar:

“[I] had quite the attitude as a young pop star, it’s easy to get caught up in the hype. It changes you. So I was on the set [of] ‘Ashes to Ashes’… I’m dressed from head to toe in a clown suit…I hear playback and the music starts. So off I go, I start singing and walking, but as soon as I do this old geezer with an old dog walks right between me and the camera…knowing this is gonna take a while I walked past the old guy and sat next to camera in my full costume waiting for him to pass. As he is walking by camera, the director said, ‘Excuse me, [sir] do you know who this is?’ The old guy looks at me from bottom to top and looks back to the director and said, ‘Of course I do! It’s some cunt in a clown suit.’ That was a huge moment for me, it put me back in my place and made me realize, yes, I’m just a cunt in a clown suit. I think about that old guy all the time.”

Bowie proceeded to engage in what the British call “taking the piss out” of himself for years thereafter.

With director Julien Temple, he conceived a twenty minute short, Jazzin’ for Blue Jean, where he played both a hapless pickup artist trying to woo a resistant girl, and her favorite rock star, “Screaming Lord Byron,” a stand-in for himself.

There are frequent jokes about Bowie’s real-life bad behavior, and in one instance, the would-be suitor insults Byron with, “Your record sleeves are better than your songs!” The video won a Grammy for Best Short Form Video in 1985.

That same year, Bowie played a sleazy hitman in John Landis’ comic mystery Into the Night. In the film, he has a knock-down fight with a bodyguard played by rockabilly pioneer Carl Perkins, a sequence that surely amused him since, as a teenager, he had been inspired to be a musician by listening to 45s by Perkins and his contemporaries.

Bowie’s aforementioned need for artistic freshness became a subject of his mordant humor.

During his 1990 “Sound+Vision” tour, he declared that he was retiring his previous hit catalog from then on, vowing only to do new material in future shows. After the disappointing reception for his band Tin Machine and the solo albums that followed, he began to walk back that promise.

In a promo spot for their joint appearance on the season premiere of “Saturday Night Live” on October 2, 1999, Bowie’s about-face was referenced in an exchange of barbs between himself and host Jerry Seinfeld on their mutual reliance on the tried-and-true.

It wouldn’t be the only time he fired his wit at another target.

In 2006, he played himself on Ricky Gervais’ “Extras,” where, after being annoyed by the self-aggrandizing behavior of Andy Millman, he composes a song on the spot to cut him down to size.

When making the talk show rounds, Bowie was always an urbane and gracious guest, and often participated in sketches.

Here he is sharing a bevy of ludicrous revelations for “Late Night with Conan O’Brien”:

And, in this clip from a 1999 interview on the French Canadian MusiquePlus channel, he shared his love of early internet celebrity Mahir “I Kiss You” Çağrı:

Just before the end of 2016, Bowie’s son Duncan Jones posted a screencap from this interview, calling it his favorite photo of his father.

Having a laugh was also important to Bowie in his private moments.

He released a list of his “Top 100 Reads” in 2013 as part of the touring exhibition “David Bowie Is,” which showcased cherished items from his life.

Amid highbrow fare such as political non-fiction and classics like In Cold Blood, he included the British humor periodical Viz, a Mad-magazine style parody of UK tabloid and music press with a punk rock bent.

While the creators were grateful for his fandom, Bowie himself was not immune from their scathing jokes, as shown in this full-page lampoon from the early ‘90s:

In one of his earliest compositions, “When I Live My Dream,” he wrote, “Tell them they can laugh at me / But don’t forget your date with me / When I live my dream.”

Over five decades after that song emerged, it can be said he lived his dream to the fullest and happiest, and we got to enjoy it with him.

So today, though we’re sad he’s not around, let’s put on one of his immortal songs, and have our own Zoolander & Hansel-style walk-off, and imagine that he’s watching us and smiling at it all.

Night Flight’s video profile of David Bowie from December 4th, 1987, features “Ashes to Ashes” and other dynamic videos from three decades of his career, and is available to watch as part of our special David Bowie collection at Night Flight Plus.

(This essay was originally written for Night Flight Plus. It has been recreated in the style it was presented in at the site, and matched to its original date of publication. Tremendous thanks to Stuart Shapiro and Bryan Thomas for the platform.)

The Fire of Adrianne Tolsch

Adrianne Tolsch, who succumbed to esophageal cancer on December 7, 2016, was a frequent presence on the “Comedy Cuts” segments of “Night Flight.” Many viewers laughing at home may have not been aware of the strides she made for female comedians that followed in her path.

Our Night Flight Plus channel currently has two episodes of “Comedy Cuts” featuring rare footage of prime Tolsch performances.

On our December 18, 1987, broadcast, she discusses the hazards of living alone and her delight in younger men.

And in an October 10, 1986 broadcast of “Comedy Cuts,” Tolsch muses on how men would brag about dealing with female health issues.

This episode also contains performances by Wayne Federman and the black sketch troupe Mary Wong, which featured future Chris Rock collaborator and Pootie Tang star Lance Crouther.

As stand-up comedy morphed from being a simple joke-delivery process into a personality-driven art form in the ‘70s, it was progressing in terms of the subject matter being addressed on stage, but it was still slow to embrace the notion of women discussing such subjects.

The climate was described by Rick Newman, the founder of one of those influential comedy clubs, Catch a Rising Star, in Phil Berger’s The Last Laugh: The World of Stand-Up Comics:

“Back in the mid-1970s when we first started seeing young female comics, a lot of agents and managers who came into the club, and even [television] network people, couldn’t accept them. In fact, sometimes I’d put on a female singer between comedians just to balance the show. And she would do humorous patter between her songs – it’s infectious, I guess, when you work in a comedy club. Well, some of these old-school managers and producers – the typical cigar-smoking characters – would holler from the audience rudely: ‘Just sing!’ Like that. And that was the kind of attitude there was – just no acceptance of a female doing comedy.”

This was the territory that Adrianne Tolsch ventured into and earned a place.

She described it in a 1981 New York Times article this way: “It’s a lot like being in a locker room – you have to fight harder to be accepted.”

As a youth, her father had smuggled her into Lenny Bruce performances, whetting her interest in comedy.

Much like the late Phil Hartman, she had studied graphic arts, and had been working drawing renderings and designing rock album covers, before making a career change to stand-up and improv comedy.

1970 Tommy James solo record, cover art by Tolsch

Tolsch’s first stamp on history came in an unassuming fashion. According to the book Comedy at the Edge by Richard Zoglin, frequent Catch emcee Kelly Rogers asked her to fill in for him one night at the club, so that he could work another show.

While owner Newman initially reprimanded him for not clearing the switch in advance, Tolsch’s positive reception led to her becoming the first regular female emcee at the club.

Tolsch soon became a manager and booker for Catch, and used the position to elevate other women performers.

She would frequently hold Sunday afternoon conclaves for them at her apartment, telling the Times, “There are so few of us that we need to get together. The camaraderie is essential and we are so all over the lot that we don’t get to talk together all that much.”

By the ‘80s, women expanded their presence in stand-up from a 1-to-100 to a 1-to-10 ratio, but there was still market resistance to overcome.

In a New York Times review of Yael Kohen’s We Killed: The Rise of Women in American Comedy, critic Julia M. Klein wrote:

“In the early 1980s, while I was reporting a story on female stand-ups for Ms. magazine, [Adrianne] agreed to arrange a special night of women comics at [Catch]. There was one caveat: She told me that she would be obliged to intersperse a male act between each two women. The clear implication was that no audience could be expected to tolerate a women-only night. Even so, the occasion was a rare enough feminist landmark that virtually the entire editorial staff of Ms., including Gloria Steinem, turned up for the show.”

Her reputation grew as she toured with headliners and opened for major pop stars, and drew worldwide respect.

In 1984, UK newspaper The Guardian cited her with Sandra Bernhard as an important female comic.

When stand-up became a lucrative industry in 1989, another New York Times article featured her insights.

And in 1991, when comedian and cartoonist Russel Harvey shot a pilot for a proposed comedy panel show called “But Seriously Folks,” she was recruited with Mark Cohen, Mike Ivy, and a young Sarah Silverman, to offer her opinions.

RUSSEL HARVEY'S "BUT SERIOUSLY, FOLKS..." (The pilot for "Politically Incorrect.") from Russel Harvey on Vimeo.

Harvey has maintained that talent manager Brad Grey, who had represented him at the time of production, plagiarized this concept in the creation of “Politically Incorrect” with Bill Maher. In one of those you-gotta-laugh convergences, Maher had been a house emcee at Catch during Tolsch’s tenure.

Furthermore, Maher’s successor at the club, Bill Scheft, was an early contributor to “Politically Incorrect” — the two conducted a weekly segment on the program called “Cleaning Out the Notebooks” — and married Tolsch in 1990.

Bill Scheft and Adrianne Tolsch

Scheft often joked about how in his early stand-up days, before their relationship began, he had to audition for her six times before she allowed him to perform at Catch.

In turn, Tolsch frequently made jokes about her two previous marriages and finding suitable partners. Their union lasted 26 years.

Scheft told the Hollywood Reporter, “I could never get enough of people being jealous of our marriage.”

Tolsch always took a mordantly modest view on her accolades.

In Merrill Markoe’s book Cool, Calm, and Contentious: Essays, in the chapter “In Praise of Crazy Mommies,” she described being humbled by her family:

“I called Mom, dizzyingly excited and proud. ‘Mom, Newsweek magazine called me one of the new queens of comedy!’ I said. ‘A two page spread, with a picture and everything!’, and Mom said, ‘You don’t say hello? You don’t say how are you? And we don’t get that magazine here.’ She lived in Los Angeles.”

In the ’90s, as stand-up saw another changing of sensibilities, she transitioned into creating one-woman shows for stage and cabarets, resuming her pre-comedy craft of painting and sculpture, hosting a radio program, and film production.

She and Scheft are producers on the just-completed documentary Take My Nose, Please: Women, Comedy, and Plastic Surgery.

A new solo show, Tolschinsky, had been planned for 2017.

Night Flight offers our condolences, and our laughs, to the Tolsch and Scheft families, and the greater comedy community, which she helped to expand and diversify. We are glad to help keep her memory and jokes alive on Night Flight Plus for future generations to enjoy.

(This essay was originally written for Night Flight Plus. It has been recreated in the style it was presented in at the site, and matched to its original date of publication. Tremendous thanks to Stuart Shapiro and Bryan Thomas for the platform.)