Cinephiliac :: NYFF RANT: Mr. Warmth, The Don Rickles Project (2007, d. John Landis)

Mr. Lukewarmth, The Press Conference Project

While the only New York Film Festival press conference this week that anyone's given two shakes about is the one where Brian De Palma* blames distributor Magnolia Pictures for redacting his Redacted ("Redact it more," I decry, "it's a lousy picture!"), I myself took serious umbrage with a different Q&A altogether, since I can't blame Mr. De Palma for telling a theater full of my friends and colleagues that I have a shitty sense of humor.

After the NYFF press screening earlier today of Mr. Warmth, The Don Rickles Project, director John Landis (yes, you know him well: Animal House, The Blues Brothers, An American Werewolf in London, and even a documentary I wrote the DVD box copy for, Slasher) apparently had the room eating out of his palm with a colorful volley of Rickles anecdotes and hilarious (if sometimes entirely unrelated) tangents. Unfortunately, I skipped the conference, having already seen the film three weeks earlier when Landis lent me a DVD screener, even taking his hand-written advice to "watch this with some friends -- funny is always funnier with more people." His producers didn't want me to borrow the disc at all, but the Film Society of Lincoln Center press office had vouched for my trustworthiness, and I really needed to see it before interviewing the director for a then-upcoming issue of the Village Voice. Landis secretly obliged.

Our phone chat went smashingly; we hit it off. Since my piece was to be fairly short, I probably only needed 15 minutes with him to seal the deal, but I was blessed instead with an hour-and-a-half of warm storytelling, friendly debate about his film, and personal touches about why he wanted to see Fish Kill Flea (which I took with a grain of salt, but it's nice to hear without prompting), how his outspokenness may have cost him high-profile jobs, and what happened to the super-long cut of The Blues Brothers featuring my Benten Films partner at a young age in the James Brown church-spiritual sequence. It was hard to reduce all of his yarn-spinning to 500-or-so words, and through the editorial process, a copy editor at the Voice took out six little words that changed the meaning of my final question, which ran as thus:

Were there any juicy anecdotes that didn't make the final cut? Joan Rivers tells a story about how she was performing with him in Miami. A very important Florida judge who was apparently a pompous ass came backstage, and said, "Mr. Rickles, why don't you come have lunch and play golf tomorrow." Joan would've said, "Oh, I'm so sorry. I have a prior family engagement and I can't get out of it, but thank you." But Don said, "Listen. One, I'm leaving town. Two, you're a putz. You're loud, obnoxious, incredibly boring, and I wouldn't play golf with you because I don't live here and you couldn't fix a ticket. No." All he did was tell him the truth.

HOWEVER! What I originally filed had transcribed the punchline as: "Joan said the guy started laughing. All he did was tell him the truth!" As four different friends pointed out after contacting me post-conference, Landis really laid into me for not getting the joke. Check out his public condescension for yourself around 2:12 in this clip (courtesy of IFC's Matt Singer). And all that on-record humiliation comes thanks to some humorless copy monkey that must have spotted a dangling orphan, and excised it for the sake of page aesthetics. Way to change my meaning completely, you hockey puck!

I emailed Landis this afternoon, politely but mildly bothered that he didn't give me the benefit of the doubt after such a cozy exchange (I ran late to Blade Runner because of him!). I wasn't expecting an apology, but hey, at least I got a return while he was busy in-town:

"Aaron - There must be some apt metaphor for your copy editor! But thanks for letting me know you got the joke! Onward and upward with the arts! - John"

Sigh... Onward and upward, indeed.

* Apropos of nothing: At the NYFF directors' party last Sunday, upon pointing out to my unremittingly charming friend Keith Bearden that the bald, bearded gentleman behind us was Brian De Palma, he approached the directorial legend with this line: "Mr. De Palma? You, sir, are going to Heaven for making Phantom of the Paradise. You could make shitty films from here on out, you could make dick, but you're going to Heaven for that one." A couple beats later, De Palma chased him down to ask what was in the back room of O'Neals where we both were heading -- and low and behold, there I was with Keith and our new friend (more at 1:38 of this clip) in the line for the free omelettes. De Palma may have redacted his mushrooms, I believe.