A few callbacks for the afternoon, from when Frank gets lasered 🫣 ⚡️ 💄

Are any of these familiar to you, or new callbacks?

“You’re sticky, he’s sticky, I’m sticky, we’re all STICKY!!!”

“Now turn around and say WOO!”

RUNNING GAG “master—“ // “—bating!”

“What do you say after blowing everyone at the party?” 🥳

“Don’t say it sing it, you’re in a musical!”

RUNNING GAG “Sue’s to blame!”

INSERT NAME OF LOCAL CITY

Any of these new callbacks for y’all?

Some more of my markups on the Unofficial Callback Script:

1️⃣ when Frank says

“I’ll remove the cause….”

AUDIENCE: “But what about the symptom??!”

FRANK: “but not the symptom!!”

2️⃣ running gag “Sue’s to blame!”

3️⃣ HORSE BRUTALITY 🐴 🪓

4️⃣ while he plays with RiffRaff’s hair:

“You call that a man?” / “You call that a tan?”

5️⃣ “or their left tit!”

6️⃣ INSERT NAME OF YOUR LOCAL CITY 🏙️

Those last ones are fun, makes it feel very localized!

Does anyone have especially memorable encounters with these callbacks, or “INSERT LOCAL JOKE” type jokes?

The script here doesn’t fully explain it, but on the highlit first page (of three here, with the full song) there’s the notation

“Now turn around and say WOO!”

This is one of those perfect matchups to the film, where Meat Loaf hops off his motorcycle, throws off his helmet 🪖, and turns around and says “WOO!”

So the few times I’ve heard this one work nicely from the audience, it is astonishing.

That being said, I hope this post will give a space for people to discuss this callback, others for “Hot Patootie”, and whatever else you delightful deviants may have on your minds :)

As for me, looking at this stuff in the Unofficial Script I’m marking up: it seems to be trying to cram as many callback-lines in as possible.

The motorcycle 🏍️ noise and just Meat Loaf singing is enough to keep me satisfied as a viewer, I don’t feel inclined to add my own shouts at this point.

Does anyone else have songs where you prefer to let other folks callback but you just wanna enjoy the opera of it all?

This letter from Carl Van Vechten to Langston Hughes emphasizes his dislike for the film, and that it doesn’t capture the essence of the stage play.

He also refers to the fact that the Hughes family struck up a friendship with James Cagney, so he is asking basically “can I get a selfie 🤳 with him if we are together at the same time?”

The second picture is Lovecraft’s comparative notes, which are obviously reprehensible but just as obviously serve a historically significant purpose.

Thoughts, friends & critics, and all who are reading or skimming this?

The first of these two photos is from a long Lovecraft letter to J. Vernon Shea (Feb 4, 1934)

It’s a moment where the rambling account of films seen leaps from LITTLE WOMEN to BERKELEY SQUARE, with a brief but memorable whistle stop at THE EMPEROR JONES.

I’m just piecing together Hughes’ opinion of the film from a handful of quotes in the LH index for both Gilpin and the play/film itself.

I need to see whether Hughes happens to mention the date/year that he saw the play.

If he and Lovecraft were in attendance at the same time (in segregated theaters, or whatever the situation was in their respective areas), that would be another marvelous point for comparison of literary figures reacting to similar media from radically different perspectives.

These two photos are from Langston Hughes’ writings on this play and its reception as a film.

Lovecraft put this adaptation on my radar because he enjoyed the stage play — but was told by friends that the film was a let-down, so it’s unclear whether he actually saw it or had an extant opinion on the picture.

Stay tuned :)

There’s a fuckton to unpack here, so I’m gonna start with the fact that this play-to-film adaptation was on my radar cuz of Lovecraft’s take on it.

People who came to this page thinking it would all be monster movies and trashy racism are mostly gonna be disappointed, but his precise words were that

“[The play] starred a real buck n——er named Charles Gilpin, now deceased.”

As horrific as that is, however you want to approach it, it tells us that he (HPL) regarded Gilpin as a robust performer in what (for me, still needing to see this film) seems like an intense premise.

So when his name and the associated “Gilpin Players” popped up, this …….. THIS alone, of the literally over 20 books 📚 I’ve brought back & forth from the library in the past few days, scanning the indices for relevant titles performers or studio-names

This connection is fucking NUCLEAR ☢️

Langston Hughes has a hot take about the film versus its stage version, and Lovecraft praised (in gross terminology) the show on stage.

However we don’t have the real gold: a direct statement from TWO entirely separate writers who weigh in on the same media.

This is SO goddamn close but golly-gee…..

Also, Cole Porter was approached to write a musical of the stage-play BERKELEY SQUARE (which he declined), a few years before it enchanted Lovecraft on film 🎞️ enough for him to watch it multiple times.

These connections ARE supremely random, and Chaplin is clearly the first and major link (mentioned in at least five or more 📚 index-listings) across multiple writers now.

Lovecraft wrote about silent-era Chaplin on a dozen or more occasions, but he (HPL) died in 1937.

So the last CC film he was able to see was MODERN TIMES (which a friend said was ‘so-so’, so idk if he actually saw it)

A few times I’ve been asked/mused to by readers here wondering what Lovecraft would have thought of THE GREAT DICTATOR.

Can’t help you there, but I think George Orwell’s four-page glowing review is a fair second place 🥈

I’ve developed the methodology for finding stuff like this over the course of eight-ish months, but mostly analyzing HPL and his close circle ⭕️

And for third place 🥉 we have Raymond Chandler’s commentary on MONSIEUR VERDOUX (one of Chaplin’s later films)

“Last night inveigled by the critics and the ballyhoo, although I should now know better, we went to see ‘A Place in the Sun.'

This morning, looking through the Variety anniversary number, I see it is listed as the number 8 top grosser for 1951, three and a half million dollars domestic gross, which is very high for these times.

So for once the New York critics and the public are agreed. My sister-in-law, who likes practically any kind of picture except slapstick, hated it.

And I despised it. It's as slick a piece of bogus self-importance as you'll ever see.

And to mention it in same breath with A Streetcar Named Desire seems to me an insult.

Streetcar is by no means a perfect picture, but it does have a lot of drive, a tremendous performance by Marlon Brando, and a skillful if occasionally rather wearisome one by Miss Vivien Leigh.

It does get under your skin, whereas A Place in the Sun never touches your emotions once.

Everything is held too long; every scene is milked ruthlessly. I got so sick of starry-eyed close-ups of Elizabeth Taylor that I could have gagged.

The chi-chi was laid-on not with a trowel, not even with a shovel, but with a dragline.

And the portrayal of how the lower classes think the upper classes live is about as ridiculous as could be imagined.

They ought to have called it "Speedboats for Breakfast."

And my God, that scene at the end where the girl visits him in the condemned cell a few hours before he gets the hot squat! My God, my God!

The whole thing is beautifully done technically, and it reeks of calculation and contrivance emotionally.

Mr. Montgomery Clift gives the performance of his career, which is not saying a great deal, since he had already demonstrated in The Heiress that he didn't belong on the same screen with first-class actors.

The picture was made by a guy who has seen everything and has never had a creative idea of his own.

Not once but twice in the picture he uses that great trick which Chaplin used in Monsieur Verdoux, where instead of a fadeout to close an act he shoots out of a window and watches the darkness turn to daylight.

But this slab of unreal hokum makes three and a half million dollars and Monsieur Verdoux was a flop.

My God, My God!

And let me say it just once more.

My God!

Yours ever,
Ray

Time and Tide, December 21, 1940

The Great Dictator;

Prince of Wales, Gaumont Haymarket, Marble Arch Pavilion

France, 1918, Charlie Chaplin, in field grey and German steel helmet, is pulling the string of Big Bertha, falling down every time she fires. A little later, losing his way in the smoke screen, he finds himself attacking in the middle of the American infantry.

Later he is in flight with a wounded staff officer, in an aeroplane which flies upside down for such lengths of time that Charlie is puzzled to know why his watch persists in standing up on the end of its chain.

Finally, falling out of the aeroplane into a mud-hole, he loses his memory and is shut up in a mental home for twenty years, completely ignorant of what is happening in the world outside.

At this point the film really begins.

Hynkel, Dictator of Tomania, who happens to be Charlie's double (Chaplin plays both parts) is directing an extra-special purge against the Jews at the moment when Charlie, his mind restored, escapes from the asylum and goes back to his little barber's shop in the Ghetto.

There are some glorious scenes of fights against Storm Troopers which are not less, perhaps actually more moving because the tragedy of wrecked Jewish households is mixed up with the kind of humour that depends on mishaps with pails of whitewash and blows on the head with a frying-pan.

But the best farcical interludes are those that take place in the Dictator's palace, especially in his scenes with his hated rival, Napaloni, Dictator of Bacteria.

Jack Oakie, in this part, has an even closer physical resemblance to Mussolini than Chaplin has to Hitler.

There is a lovely moment at the supper table when Hynkel is so intent on outwitting Napaloni that he does not notice that he is ladling mustard on to his strawberries by mistake for cream.

The invasion of Osterlich (Austria) is about to take place, and Charlie, who has been incarcerated for resisting the Storm Troopers, escapes from the concentration camp in a stolen uniform just at the moment when Hynkel is due to cross the frontier. He is mistaken for the Dictator and carried into the capital of the conquered country amid cheering crowds.

The little Jewish barber finds himself raised upon an enormous rostrum, with serried ranks of Nazi dignitaries behind him and thousands of troops below, all waiting to hear his triumphal speech.

And here occurs the big moment of the film.

Instead of making the speech that is expected of him, Charlie makes a powerful fighting speech in favour of democracy, tolerance, and common decency.

It is really a tremendous speech, a sort of version of Lincoln's Gettysburg address done into Hollywood English, one of the strongest pieces of propaganda I have heard for a long time.

It is, of course, understating the matter to say that it is out of tune with the rest of the film.

It has no connection with it whatever, except the sort of connection that exists in a dream—the kind of dream, for instance, in which you are Emperor of China at one moment and a dormouse the next.

So completely is the thread broken that after that the story can go no further, and the film simply fades out, leaving it uncertain whether the speech takes effect or whether the Nazis on the platform detect the impostor and shoot him dead on the spot.

How good a film is this, simply as a film?

I should be falsifying my own opinion if I did not admit that it has very great faults.

Although it is good at almost every level it exists at so many levels that it has no more unity than one finds, tor instance, in a pantomime.

Some of the early scenes are simply the old Chaplin of the two-reelers of thirty years ago, bowler hat, shuffling walk and all.

The Ghetto scenes are sentimental comedy with a tendency to break into farce, the scenes between Hynkel and Napaloni are the lowest kind of slapstick, and mixed up with all this is a quite serious political "message."

Chaplin never seems to have profited by certain modern advances of technique, so that all his films have a kind of jerkiness, an impression of being tied together with bits of string.

Yet this film gets away with it.

The hard-boiled audience of the press show to which I went laughed almost continuously and were visibly moved by the great speech at the end.

What is Chaplin's peculiar gift?

It is his power to stand for a sort of concentrated essence of the common man, for the ineradicable belief in decency that exists in the hearts of ordinary people, at any rate in the West.

We live in a period in which democracy is almost everywhere in retreat, supermen in control of three-quarters of the world, liberty explained away by sleek professors, Jew-baiting defended by pacifists.

And yet everywhere, under the surface, the common man sticks obstinately to the beliefs that he derives from the Christian culture.

The common man is wiser than the intellectuals, just as animals are wiser than men.

Any intellectual can make you out a splendid "case" for smashing the German Trade Unions and torturing the Jews. But the common man, who has no intellect, only instinct and tradition, knows that "it isn't right,"

Anyone who has not lost his moral sense — and an education in Marxism and similar creeds consists largely in destroying your moral sense — knows that "it isn't right" to march into the houses of harmless little Jewish shopkeepers and set fire to their furniture.

More than in any humorous trick, I believe, Chaplin's appeal lies in his power to reassert the fact, overlaid by Fascism and, ironically enough, by Socialism, that vox poli is vox Dei, and giants
are vermin.

No wonder that Hitler, from the moment he came to power, has banned Chaplin's films in Germany! The resemblance between the two men (almost twins, it is interesting to remember) is ludicrous, especially in the wooden movements of their arms.

And no wonder that pro-Fascist writers of the type of Wyndham Lewis and Roy Campbell have always pursued Chaplin with such a peculiar venomous hatred!

From the point of view of anyone who believes in supermen, it is a most disastrous accident that the greatest of all the supermen should be almost the double of an absurd little Jewish foundling with a tendency to fall into pails of whitewash.

It is the sort of fact that ought to be kept dark.

However, luckily, it can't be kept dark, and the allure of power politics will be a fraction weaker for every human being who sees this film.

If our Government had a little more imagination they would subsidize The Great Dictator heavily and would make every effort to get a few copies into Germany — a thing that ought not to be beyond human ingenuity.

At present it is opening at three West End picture houses whose seats the majority of people cannot afford.

But though it will probably get a mixed reception from the critics, I think it is safe to prophesy for it the nationwide success it deserves.

Apart from Chaplin himself, Jack Oakie, Henry Daniell (as Goebbels), Maurice Moscovitch and the exceptionally attractive Paulette Goddard supply the best of the acting.

These were clearly chosen because of the mutual celebrity of the folks writing to each other.

It’s not quite like having them in a film together, but they may reflect actual production notes and whatnot.

My goal with this project largely has been to look for informal audiences, but now we are getting a whole new constellation of industry insiders and on-camera individuals.