"from Buster To Marty"

“From Buster to Marty” from Sight and Sound magazine, July 1995 By David Weddle David Weddle, biographer and writer remembers working with the marvelous Marty Feldman in Hollywood on a never-made film script on the life of their mutual hero Buster Keaton My father taught me to love clowns. He hung paintings of them on almost every wall of our house. My earliest movie memories are of my father and I sitting on the sofa in that den, watching Laurel and Hardy on our black and white Zenith. It was my father who introduced me to Buster Keaton. “David! David! Come in here, quick! You’ve got to see this!” In my early teens I discovered movie books. My father brought the first ones into the house: Classics of the Silent Screen by Joe Franklin, and Kevin Brownlow’s The Parade’s Gone By. I pored over them for hours, particularly the chapters that dealt with the great clowns, Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, Lloyd…and Keaton. Then I began buying books of my own. Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy by John McCabe was my favorite, until I discovered Keaton by Rudi Blesh. For a decade after sitting down to read that book I had but one ruling passion in life: Buster Keaton. I fixated on Keaton’s head gag man, Clyde Bruckman. Bruckman co-directed Keaton’s masterpiece, The General, then went on to work with most of the other top comics of that era: Harold Lloyd, Laurel and Hardy, W.C. Fields, the Three Stooges, Abbott and Costello. But it was with Keaton that Bruckman really mated. I began to fantasize of myself as Bruckman: pulling up to the Keaton studio in my Pierce Arrow Roadster; sitting around the gag room with Jean Havez, Joe Mitchell and Buster, cooking up sight gags for deserted ocean liners, runaway locomotives and daydreaming projectionists. Early one evening that very summer, my father’s laughter erupted from the den again: “David! David! Come here! You’ve got to see this guy! Quick! You’re missing it!” I walked into the living room. On the Sony colour Trinitron was a silent movie. Not one from the 20s however, since the image was in colour. It opened with a superimposed title: The Loneliness of a Long Distance Golfer. A thin little man in an absurdly huge knit cap and knickers strode up to a golf tee with his caddy in tow. He was pop-eyed like a chameleon, his engorged pupils bulging in radically different directions so that you weren’t really sure where he was looking, or what he was feeling. He dropped a ball on the tee, performed a waddling little dance, then swung, hooking the shot wildly. The ball flew off the fairway and landed on top of a mound of sand in a dump truck parked adjacent to the course. Undaunted, the golfer strode to the truck, climbed on top of it with his loyal caddy right behind, and took a swing just as the truck rumbled off down the street. He missed the ball, fell into the sand, picked himself up and swung again. And so it progressed with the logic of a nightmare. Cut to a close-up of the ball on its latest resting place, a heap of soil. Pull back slowly to reveal the soil is in a gondola car on a moving freight train. Approaching from the other direction on parallel tracks is another train: on top of one of the boxcars a lone figure stands with his golf club

extended. As the two trains pass each other he swings the club, hits the ball, then raises his hand to shield his eyes from the sun as he follows its trajectory. The last gesture shot through me like a thunderbolt. It was Keaton’s signature: he used it in almost every one of his movies. This pop-eyed Englishman understood. He was chasing the same dream. “What’s his name?” I asked my dad. “Marty Feldman. Isn’t he a riot?” Years later I would discover that Feldman kept a portrait of Keaton in his dressing room, no matter where in the world he happened to be performing, and that he watched at least one Keaton film a day. “Just to remind me of my roots”, he would later explain. “Marty was obsessed with Keaton, most definitely,” says his wife Lauretta. I watched his show, The Comedy Machine, every week after that. It served as the summer replacement for The Dean Martin Show. It was Feldman’s third television series, preceded by At Last the 1948 Show (1967) and It’s Marty (1968). All of the series featured silent-movie segments. Like the great pantomime clowns of the 20s, Feldman demonstrated a remarkable facility for taking a simple situation or gag and extending it with variation after variation. There were also dialogue sketches and satires in the absurdist tradition of The Goon Show. Feldman was in fact an important transitional figure in the progression of British comedy from the Goons to Monty Python. Goon Show veterans Spike Milligan and director Denis Main Wilson worked on the Feldman shows, as did future Pythonites John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Michael Pain, Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam, who created the show’s animated opening titles. The shows sent my young mind spinning off on some Walter Mitty fantasies of my own. If only Marty Feldman would come to Hollywood and make feature films, I could go to work for him, become his gag man. Marty and me, sitting around the gag room, tossing out hair brained ideas. The fantasies became so palpable I began to believe they were pre-ordained. In 1974 Marty Feldman came to Hollywood to play Igor in Mel Brooks’ hit Young Frankenstein. He followed it with supporting roles in Gene Wilder’s The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother (1975) and Brooks’ Silent Movie (1976). He had become an international star and Universal Pictures offered him a deal to write and direct his own feature film. It was a fantastic opportunity, a ticket to the big time. Feldman knew that working for a major Hollywood studio was a treacherous proposition, as he was intimately familiar with how MGM had stripped Buster Keaton of his creative autonomy and left him a broken man. But if Marty could deliver a hit, Universal might give him more creative control over the next movie, and he desperately wanted to make his own features. Universal wanted another Mel Brooks spoof. So Marty wrote, directed and starred in The Last Remake of Beau Geste (1977). “I wrote it to order,” he later told journalist Richard Kleiner. “And I wasn’t very comfortable doing that.” He was even less comfortable when the executives in Universal’s Black Tower dictated who he could cast in the movie, and how scenes should be rewritten and shot. Beau Geste was taken away from Feldman in post production and re-edited before he could deliver his first cut – a direct violation of the DGA basic agreement. “I just hated the film,” Feldman told Kleiner.

It was, perhaps, an overstatement. The first half of Beau Geste was a sharp and often hilarious satire of British and French imperialism, and there were flashes of the brilliance that had permeated his television shows. In one sequence Feldman stumbles across the scalding white sand dunes of the Sahara, hallucinating in the shimmering heat. The world turns black and white and he finds himself in the middle of the 1939 version of Beau Geste, where he sits down to share a joint with Gary Cooper. This stunning effect was achieved by shooting new black and white footage of Marty and marrying it optically with the old shots of Cooper. A few years later, Carl Reiner and Steve Martin would build an entire feature, Dead Man Don’t Wear Plaid (1981), around this technique, and it was elaborated upon again in Zelig (1983) and Forrest Gump (1994). Beau Geste turned a healthy profit, so Universal offered Feldman a deal for another feature. He took it, believing that this time around the studio would grant him more freedom. That would prove to be a drastic miscalculation, though he didn’t yet know that when I snuck onto the Universal lot to meet him in the summer of 1978. I was a recent graduate of USC film school, and had spent the last year writing a screenplay. It was about Keaton, of course. My script had plenty of elaborate silent movie sequences, but it was essentially a drama that, like Blesh’s biography, explored the connections between Buster’s art and his private life as both began to disintegrate. It was easy to get onto the lot. All I did was pull up to the gate and tell the guard, “I have a delivery for Marty Feldman”. “What company are you with?” “Dino De Laurentiis.” It was true, I’d recently landed a job in the mailroom there, and was squeezing this stop in among my many other drops to various studios around town. Walking up the front path with the screenplay in a damp hand, my pulse hammered. A small polished brass name plate adorned the front door: “Marty Feldman”. This is it! Christ! I pulled the latch down and entered. A middle-aged blonde secretary looked up from her desk. “Uh, is Mr. Feldman in?” She didn’t shout, but instead smiled warmly and informed me that he was out. What I said next is a blur. I blabbered on about who I was and the fact that I had a screenplay that I wanted him to read, painfully conscious of the clumsiness of my voice. But the secretary continued to smile and nodded, and finally said, “Well, he won’t be in today, but I can tell him that you stopped by.” She explained that she was only a temporary secretary, assigned to him just a few days ago, and that she had no idea if Feldman would be willing to read an unsolicited screenplay. “But I’ll be happy to ask him for you and see what he says.” When I called back the next day, the secretary said, “Oh yes, I told him about you. He said he doesn’t have time right now to read any scripts, but that he’d be glad to talk to you if you called back when he was in.” “OK, that’d be great,” I said. “He’s in right now. Shall I put him on?” “Uh, sure, yes, please.” “Hold on.” I felt like someone was smashing my head with a ball-peen hammer. Would he really come on the line any second, would I really find myself - ? The line clicked. “Hello,” a voice purred with an English accent.

“Ah, hello,” I blurted, “Mr. Feldman?” “Call me Marty.” “My name is David Weddle and I’ve always admired your work – “ and on I went in a high and stammering voice, explaining how I’d first seen him on television, that I was a graduate of USC film school, and that I had a script about Keaton that I wanted him to read. “Well, I’m getting ready to shoot another film. I don’t have time to read anything right now. Besides, you know, they already made a movie about Keaton with Donald O’Connor. Did you ever see it?” A probe. I knew it and responded quickly. “Yes, but it was terrible, a complete white-wash, it had almost nothing to do with Keaton’s real life.” “There was another film that Carl Reiner made,” he probed again, “The Comic, starring Dick Van Dyke. It was a fictionalization of Keaton’s life.” “Yes, the last 45 minutes, which focus on him as an old man making television commercials are excellent, but the first two thirds of the movie is pretty weak. My script focuses on Keaton’s years at MGM, when it all started to fall apart.” “That’s an interesting angle,” he said, sounding intrigued now. I spieled off the plot in a breathless rush. He interrupted me here and there with pointed questions. “Is there an Arbuckle character? Do you deal with his relationship with his wife?” After listening to my answers, he finally said, “OK, why don’t you send me a copy. I’ll try to read it in my spare time.” I was doing chin-ups in my apartment a week later when he called. “I’ve always wanted to make a movie about a silent comedian,” he chuckled softly, “and now you’ve gone and done it. There are just a few rough passages that need to be worked on. I wonder if you might stop by the office sometime this week to talk about them.” “Sure! You bet!” That was how it began. Feldman might have thought my script was good but that didn’t mean it couldn’t be improved. He guided me through another five drafts; by the time I finished rewriting it, there was hardly a scene left from my original version. During this period he made In God We Tru$t (1980) and the unpleasant discovery that the success of Beau Geste had won him nothing. To be fair, its faults did not lie entirely with Universal. Feldman’s satire of American’s televangelists suffered from a contrived plot and underdeveloped characters. It opened to poor reviews and weak business, and Universal informed Feldman that they would need the bungalow back. He moved into a little office just off Hollywood Boulevard, and our script sessions continued. He tried to secure financing for our script, The Final Chase, but found no takers. Marty had played dramatic parts in the past, for the BBC. But by now most producers thought of him as a Mel Brooks comedian. They weren’t about to give him several million dollars to make a surreal tragedy about a silent movie star. “You know, David,” Marty said sadly one day, “if I was Dustin Hoffman, I could get this movie made tomorrow.” I knew he had to be disappointed with the turn his career had taken, but we never spoke about it; I didn’t know how to broach such a painful subject. In the interview with Richard Kleiner, Marty named Keaton, Laurel and Hardy and Harry Langdon as his idols, then admitted, “I’ve had to accept the fact that I will never be as good as those people have been. That’s been the hardest pill to swallow – that I’ll never be in the same league

as those I admire…You say, ‘Well, all I have is me, and I have to do the best I can with that.’” He knew his television work had some value, however. For in an interview shortly afterwards on Los Angeles radio, he was asked what he would most like to be remembered for. “The Loneliness of a Long Distance Golfer,” he replied. “If I’m remembered for anything, I hope it’s for that.” In September of 1982 Marty left for Mexico and a supporting role in Yellowbeard, co-scripted by Graham Chapman. In December, just before Yellowbeard finished principal photography, he was struck down by a massive heart attack. My sister called me with the news, she’d heard it on the radio. Lauretta buried him in Forest Lawn, just a stone’s throw away from the graves of Buster Keaton and Stan Laurel. I couldn’t face the funeral, but I went a day later and stood over the heap of flowers, sobbing. Crying for myself as much as him.