The best news I've heard in a while: John Waters' 'Kiddie Flamingos'

Child thespians imitate Mink Stole and David Lochary in John Waters' Kiddie Flamingos.

John Waters has not directed a movie in ten years. This is the biggest-ever gap in his filmography, eclipsing even the seven-year drought between Polyester and Hairspray in the 1980s. It hasn't been for lack of trying, however. Waters just hasn't been able to convince anyone to give him the money, especially since his last two efforts (Cecil B. Demented and A Dirty Shame) were not exactly box office bonanzas. In 2008, he seemed on the verge of finally making Fruitcake, his long-promised Christmas film about a boy who "runs away from home during the holidays after he and his parents are caught shoplifting meat, then meets up with a runaway girl raised by two gay men and searching for her birth mother." The cast was to have included Parker Posey and Dirty Shame veteran Johnny Knoxville. Once again, though, the financing fell through. Waters, however, has always had backup careers. He's spent much of the last decade as a busy public speaker, author (Role Models, Carsick), and multimedia artist with dozens of solo exhibitions. Strangely enough, John's still-vital art career has temporarily revived his moribund movie directing career. His current show, cheekily titled Beverly Hills John, is running at New York's Marianne Boesky Gallery until February 14 of this year. Along with his visual art, it includes a new film called Kiddie Flamingos: A John Waters Table Read, in which children read a more family-friendly version of the script for John's 1972 cult classic, Pink Flamingos. A wonderful teaser trailer can be seen here. The kids, dressed in pint-sized versions of the costumes and wigs from the original film, really get into the spirit of the old Dreamland Studios productions, yelling and snarling at each other in the grand Waters tradition. I could not be happier about this project.

I hate, envy, and fear morning people

I might have to punch this spoon.

"I never get enough sleep. I stay up late at night, 'cause I'm Night Guy. Night Guy wants to stay up late. What about getting up after five hours sleep? 'Oh, that's Morning Guy's problem. That's not my problem. I'm Night Guy. I stay up as late as I want.' So you get up in the morning. You're exhausted, groggy. 'Oooh, I hate that Night Guy!' See, Night Guy always screws Morning Guy. There's nothing Morning Guy can do. The only Morning Guy can do is try and oversleep often enough so that Day Guy loses his job and Night Guy has no money to go out anymore." 

-Jerry Seinfeld

Good old Æthelred

I get up at 5:00 every weekday morning. I also get up at 5:15, 5:30, and finally (for keeps) at 5:45.

I am the King of the Snooze Button, a modern-day Æthelred the Unready. Literally, the word "SNOOZE" is worn out on my alarm clock radio. It just says "S ZE" now. The radio is currently set to a point on the dial where it picks up two very staticky stations simultaneously (both in Spanish), and the volume is turned up all the way. Imagine two rival announcers yelling ads at each other in a language you don't speak. And yet I'll still remain in bed, listening to that grating, cacophonous noise for many consecutive minutes to avoid getting up.

I have a second, battery-powered alarm clock, which I refer to as my "fail safe." Occasionally, that faithful little device has been the only thing keeping me from missing my train to get to work on time. Usually, my morning routine involves staying in bed and negotiating with myself, as I decide which important, unskippable steps I'm going to skip before running to my car at the last possible minute.

Breakfast? Screw it. I'm not even that hungry. Maybe there'll be donuts at work. Shaving? Eh, I shaved yesterday. Besides, stubble is "in," right? Shower? Hmmm. Let me smell my armpits. Not too terrible. No one'll notice.

And finally, the last concession:

Brush my teeth? Hell with it. I've got wintergreen-flavored gum.

Are you starting to get the idea that maybe I'm not a morning person? I thought I would get used to waking up early after more than a decade at my current job. Nope. I'm still dazed, disoriented, and completely exhausted at the beginning of every workday. At that hour of the day, I can fall asleep standing up while resting my forehead on the towel rack in the bathroom. That's happened a couple of times. At 5:45, I might as well be Keith Richards in 1974 at the depth of a narcotics binge. I try to read on the train, and I inevitably doze off after a paragraph I've attempted to finish three times without success.

Despite all of this, I have no real desire to become a good "morning person," even if  that were possible. I'm a confirmed night owl by nature, and I'll be damned if I'm going to oppose nature. Left to my own devices, I would actually go to sleep at around 5:00 in the morning, i.e. the same time I'm supposed to be waking up. I find that my most productive, creative hours are between midnight and four. That's when most of the Ed Wood articles are written... only on Friday and Saturday nights.

On weeknights, I usually have to take Tylenol PMs to force myself to get some sleep, and even then I'm up until at least eleven or twelve. My self-imposed bedtime is 9:30, but I never make it. That's the time of day when I want to do stuff.

Writing during daylight hours feels "off" to me -- not impossible, but not totally comfortable either. Like milk a day past its expiration date. Sure, you can still pour it on your cereal, but it somehow isn't as fresh-tasting as it ought to be. I don't even know where I'm going with that analogy, and a big part of that is because I started writing this sentence when the sun was still out.

The point is, I've dealt with insomnia for virtually all my life, but maybe the problem is that I'm just wired the opposite of most people. For virtually my entire life, for instance, I've lived in suburbia, the natural habitat of the morning person. The 'burbs basically shut down at night. Everyone goes home and watches Dancing with the Stars or whatever. (By the way, did I ever tell you my idea for a cheap knockoff of that show called Prancing with Celebs? Well, I just did.)  Even in Chicago where I work, the financial district is pretty dead by six in the afternoon as the office workers head home.

Recently, however, I made a pilgrimage to Manhattan, and there I found a world that was like the Bizarro version of my normal reality. When I got there in the afternoon, I thought the neighborhood was deserted. Nothing was happening, and nobody was out except for the bums. The place didn't come to life until the nighttime. That's when the bars, restaurants, and other businesses really started hopping... and this was going on during the middle of the week! That's absolutely unheard of where I live. New Yorkers may find this to be all very commonplace and boring, but it blew my mind. I had no idea people lived like that.

Any thoughts you might have to share on this topic are welcome in the comments section. Night owls? Morning people? Make yourselves heard! Me, I'm going to drink some warm, just-expired milk.

Jesus, New York City, did you lose a war or something?

Thank you, James McAvoy and Jessica Chastain, for helping me kill two hours.Add caption

"Wow. That's a pretty big JCPenney. Not the biggest I've ever seen, but still... pretty big."

Those were among my thoughts, friends, when I got my first glimpse at the Big Apple in over a decade. I am here now, and the voyage was largely a nonevent, even a little dull. I chickened out at the last minute and decided to take a cab from my apartment to O'Hare rather than drive there and leave my car in overnight parking. This meant getting up at 4:30 a.m., but I must say I handled it like a champ. I arrived 90 minutes early, like you're supposed to do, but getting through security only took about four minutes for me. Hey, that's what your life is like when you're a part of the least-discriminated-against demographic in America.

So I waited at the Delta terminal in Chicago for a while before boarding. The airport was a lot like a very tidy, orderly shopping mall at that hour of the day. Everything is grey. Grey walls, grey carpet, grey-haired businessmen. It's just a functional, impersonal kind of place. I boarded the plane with no problem whatsoever, and the flight was equally uneventful.

This was my first voyage by airplane in a decade (at least), and it felt like a big nothing. It seemed like it was over before it even started. It takes much less time to travel from Chicago to New York by plane (one-third of the country) than it does to travel from Chicago to Indiana by train (one state over). One young lady behind me had a brief panic attack when we took off, and the flight crew had to give her an oxygen mask and assure her that everything was going to be juuuuuuuust fine. By the time we got to LaGuardia, which looked exactly like O'Hare, she was giddily taking pictures out the window of the plane and trying to spot the Statue of Liberty. Quick healer, that gal.

Click here for an article (on another website) about my previous trip to NYC. It was another cinema nerd pilgrimage. Back then, I headed East to see some of John Waters' rare movies and his art. Am I predictable or am I predictable, huh? For more about John's art career, visit this site.

Once I got to LaGuardia, it was surprisingly easy to get a cab. The cab ride, though, seemed to take a small eternity. Traffic was pretty darned heavy. I saw the same previews for Jeopardy!, Jimmy Kimmel, and something called Selfie (a new sitcom starring either Harold or Kumar) many times over on the little monitor in the back seat, along with a public service announcement urging us all to bump fists rather than shake hands because of the spread of germs and communicable diseases.

Once we finally got to the hotel, I realized I was staying in a pretty dumpy-looking neighborhood. Not post-apocalyptic or anything but nothing photogenic or memorable either. I mean, there are some gentrified-looking folks here with skinny pants and overpriced headphones. But there are also some lost souls wandering around outside: bedraggled folks who look like God just shat in their mouths.

When I got to the Comfort Inn on Ludlow, I was a little disappointed to see only two employees, a maintenance guy and a desk clerk, on duty in the cramped and dimly-lit lobby. Both looked supremely uninterested in whatever was going on around them, up to and including my arrival. I know that "good customer service" requires a level of completely counterfeit enthusiasm, but that fake cheeriness is kind of reassuring. The dead-eyed young lady behind the front desk, on the other hand, seemed to be doing a spot-on Kristen Stewart impression and just told me in an affectless voice to come back in a few hours. I tried asking her about the location of the Anthology Film Archives, but this was a total flop. After three unsuccessful attempts at spelling the word A-N-T-H-O-L-O-G-Y to her, we both agreed it was futile and gave up.

Starring Jessica Chastain's hair!

But what the hell was I going to do until the room became available? Here is where my inexperience as a traveler comes into play. I'm in (allegedly) one of the greatest cities in the world, and I have no idea what to do here. I just wandered aimlessly around the neighborhood (lower Manhattan), trying to get the lay of the land. In a way, this was comforting to a person who almost never travels.

You know what New York City has? The same exact stuff every place else has. People. Cars. Restaurants. Stores. Sidewalks. Hotels. More people, some on bikes. That's it. It just has a bunch of that stuff piled up in one place. That's all. In my travels today, I crossed at least two thoroughfares whose names I recognized from popular culture: Delancey and Bowery. And you know what these are? They're streets. Cars drive up and down 'em, and there are buildings on either side. Same as anywhere. Same as where you probably are now. "Oh, look, it's a different CVS! And a different Whole Foods!" Meh. Travel, I can take or leave. I don't genuinely feel like I'm "missing out" on much.

Anyway, to pass the time until my room became available, I did what any good movie geek would do. I went to the movies. The one theater within easy walking distance was a place called Sunshine Cinema. I decided to see whatever was playing closest to the time I showed up at the theater. That turned out to be something called The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them with Jessica Chastain and James McAvoy as a miserable married couple who spend two hours pouting and sulking, both separately and together. It's one of those "bad things happening to pretty people" movies, complete with wishy-washy ethereal music on the soundtrack and cinematography that makes everything look like a high-end mail-order catalog. Boilerplate indie stuff. (Highlight the next sentence for spoiler alert about the plot: After the couple's infant son dies, the wife attempts suicide and leaves her husband without further explanation. The movie is mostly about the aftermath of those events. Pretty wild stuff, huh?)

William Hurt is in it, if that helps. He has a beard this time and squints a lot. Nobody actually sings "Eleanor Rigby," but that song does come up in conversation a few times. There are apparently two more movies' worth of this material: a Him version and a Her version. Neither sounds too tempting, since both of these folks are kind of petulant, entitled twerps; but given a choice, I'd take Him, because James McAvoy's half of the movie has Bill Hader in it.

On the other hand, Her would have even more of Jessica Chastain's incredible red hair. With such fiery locks and such pale, pale skin, you might think she was in danger of looking like Ronald McDonald. But she pulls it off. So majestic is the Chastain mane that there's a poster for this movie that literally features nothing but her hair. Not even her eerily perfect face. Just her eerily perfect, shampoo ad hair.

In fairness, I suppose I should say that the movie is well-made or at least well-constructed. It certainly looks attractive, and the actors seem to be truly committed to the material, especially Chastain. But the entire affair felt stagy and scripted to me, as if the characters knew darned well that we were listening in on their conversations. That's a downside for what's supposed to be a slice-of-life drama.

And a lot of the characters, well-acted, though they may be, seemed cliched, e.g. Viola Davis as Chastain's "sassy black friend." Davis plays an accomplished and worldly college professor in this movie, but her relationship with Chastain is still a distant echo of the Vivian Leigh/Hattie McDaniel dynamic from 1939's Gone with the Wind. You know what this picture needed? Guidance from the ghost of Ingmar Bergman. Ingmar could have made something special out of these ingredients..

Okay, time to get serious. Tonight's the night -- the event I flew 800 miles for. Wednesday is Rudolph Grey's once-in-a-lifetime presentation of rare Ed Wood movies. If only I could find the darned place.

Mill Creek comedy classics #66: "The Stork Club" (1945)

Is Betty Hutton a "kept woman?" Don DeFore sure thinks so in 1945's The Stork Club.

The flick: The Stork Club (Paramount release of a B.G. DeSylva Productions Inc. film, 1945) [buy the set]

Current IMDb rating: 6.3

Director: Hal Walker (Road to Bali)

Famed author and wit Robert Benchley

Actors of note:

• Betty Hutton (The Perils of Pauline)

• Barry Fitzgerald (Oscar winner for Going My Way; appeared in The Quiet Man, Bringing Up Baby, How Green Was My Valley, etc.)

• Don DeFore (best known for roles on TV's Hazel and The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet; movies include Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo and Kid Galahad)

• Robert Benchley (famed newspaper columnist and humorist of the 1920s; member of the Algonquin Round Table; wrote for Vanity Fair and The New Yorker; movies include I Married a Witch and Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent; died the year this movie was released)

• Bill Goodwin (Hitchcock's Spellbound; better known as a TV and radio announcer)

• Iris Adrian (The Odd Couple; worked with Elvis, Bob Hope, Jerry Lewis, and Abbot & Costello; appeared in many, many Disney comedies including Freaky Friday, The Love Bug, Herbie Goes Bananas, The Apple Dumpling Gang, etc.)

• Mikhail Rasumny (For Whom the Bell Tolls, This Gun For Hire, Road to Morocco)

• Mary Young (Billy Wilder's The Seven Year Itch and The Lost Weekend; Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent; frequent TV guest star of the '50s and '60s)

• Andy Russell (popular baritone crooner of the 1940s; real name was Andres Rabago; credits include Disney's Make Mine Music)

• Grady Sutton (The Bank Dick, Rock 'n' Roll High School, much more; MST3K fans may remember him from Last of the Wild Horses)

Other notables: The film's costumes are by Edith Head. The soundtrack includes contributions by Hoagy Carmichael (best known for "Stardust," "Georgia on My Mind," etc.), Sammy Cahn ("High Hopes," "Call me Irresponsible," etc.), Jay Livingston ("Que Sera Sera," the theme from Bonanza, etc.), and Paul Francis Webster ("Love is a Many Splendored Thing," the Spider-Man theme, etc.), all Songwriters Hall of Fame inductees. Between them, these guys wrote a good-sized chunk of 20th century American popular music, including countless songs for film and television. For this movie, Carmichael and Webster wrote "Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief," which was a #1 hit for star Betty Hutton in March 1946. It was the biggest hit of her career.

Another poster for 1945's The Stork Club.

The gist of it: Sweet-natured hatcheck girl and aspiring singer Judy Peabody (Hutton) saves wealthy J.B. Bates (Fitzgerald) from drowning after he falls in the ocean while chasing his hat. She mistakes him for an old bum, affectionately nicknames him "Pops," and decides to take pity on him. He doesn't need her charity, but he's so touched by her kindness that he arranges to help her out financially. Bates' somewhat shifty lawyer, Tom Curtis (Benchley), sends Judy a letter telling her that she has an expense account and can buy whatever she needs to make her happy.

Judy first uses the money to help "Pops" (not knowing that it's his money to begin with) and even tries to get him a job at her place of employment, a ritzy night spot called the Stork Club. Then, to Bates' horror, Judy starts spending the money on herself, buying dresses and furs and renting an expensive apartment. To make matters worse, Judy's boyfriend, Danny (DeFore), returns home from WWII and is awfully suspicious about where Judy's money is coming from. He's sure she has a sugar daddy, and his two main suspects are Mr. Bates, who's been staying in Judy's apartment to keep an eye on her, and Judy's good-hearted boss at the Stork Club, Sherman Billingsley (Goodwin). Bates tries to tell Judy the truth about the money, but she won't believe him. Meanwhile, Danny's swing band is about to desert him unless they can score a paying gig in the very near future. It's up to Judy to convince Danny she's on the level, get his band a job at the Stork Club, and reunite Mr. Bates with his estranged wife (Young)—all in the span of 24 hours!

The real Stork Club in its heyday.

My take: The Stork Club is a very charming, if incredibly contrived, musical comedy that mainly serves as a vehicle for singer-actress-comedienne Betty Hutton, as determined as ever to bludgeon us to death with her talent. These highly artificial events could never—and I mean never—happen in the world you and I inhabit. It's one of those stories that require the characters to say all the wrong things at all the wrong times and withhold vital information from one another for no good reason other than to keep the plot going when the whole mess could be easily cleared up in about 40 seconds.

And yet, this very fanciful film is rooted in reality. Sort of. There really was a Stork Club in New York City (1929-1965), and it really was owned by a man named Sherman Billngsley! And Billingsley (whose nephew, Glenn, married Barbara Billingsley) really was a pal of influential newspaper columnist Walter Winchell, which explains why, in this film, Judy pretends to be Winchell in order to trick Billingsley into watching Danny's band perform. Sherman's not fooled by this ploy, but he's so nice that he goes along with the gag anyway.

In fact, the movie consistently goes out of its way to depict Billingsley as an all-around swell guy: a devoted family man and a generous employer who shows an incredible amount of patience with the irksome antics of Judy, Danny, and Pops. The real Billingsley was a convicted bootlegger who had done time in federal prison and who kept Ethel Merman as a mistress in the late 1930s, and his famed Stork Club attained infamy just a few years after this movie when it refused entrance to legendary African-American dancer Josephine Baker. In this film, the only thing banned from Billingsley's place is waltz music... and even that mild taboo is broken by the story's end.

Speaking of the film's soundtrack, these big band-style tunes seem quaint by today's standards but Barry Fitzgerald reacts to this music the way you probably did to dubstep a few years ago. "I"ll never understand it!" he mutters. (The Stork Club is such a deeply nice movie, though, that even this curmudgeonly character comes around eventually.)

Overall, The Stork Club is an ingratiating little flick I enjoyed more than I had expected. Betty Hutton is not a subtle performer, but she's more nuanced and less desperate than she seemed in The Perils of Pauline (1947). In that movie, she was operating at an 11 out of 10. Here, she's dialed it back to a 7 or 8, and that helps quite a bit. If I can remember correctly, The Stork Club has only one scene in which she's reduced to whimpering and blubbering when things don't go her way, and even that is brief.

Don DeFore, the wacky neighbor on Ozzie and Harriet and the standard-issue sitcom dad on Hazel, is a bit of a washout as her leading man, I'm sorry to report. His character, Danny, is paranoid and possessive and treats Judy pretty badly until the last five minutes or so. Yet this is a romantic comedy, so we have a vested interest in seeing Danny and Judy wind up together at the end of the movie. Again, though, Danny's less of a mean-spirited jerk than John Lund's Michael Farrington character in The Perils of Pauline, so The Stork Club still feels like a step up from that. This film had "inessential" stamped on its forehead at birth, but it's a pleasant enough diversion.

Is it funny: Yes, and I laughed out loud more than once, even though not too many individual jokes or scenes stuck with me after the end credits. Mikhail Rasumny gets some laughs as the long-suffering headwaiter Mr. Coretti, who maintains his equilibrium to an almost heroic extent in situations most of us would find intolerable. I also enjoyed the witty, half-soused repartee between Barry Fitzgerald and Robert Benchley, as well as Fitzgerald's scenes with Betty Hutton, who treats the old man like a stray puppy. Iris Adrian was a tad on-the-nose for me as blonde bombshell Judy's wisecracking brunette sidekick, Gwen, but the two gals have a fairly funny little sequence in which they insist on wearing their newly-purchased mink coats on a sweltering day and end up positively drenched in perspiration.

Perhaps in a subtle way, the film's funniest character is Sherman Billingsley himself, who demonstrates Herculean endurance when coping with the misguided, scatterbrained characters who surround him. As ridiculously as these people behave, Billingsley never loses his cool. Not that he's a pushover, mind you. He's firm but fair. Here, for instance, is how Billingsley deals with Danny's jealous nonsense.

Danny: (worriedly) Mr. Billingsley, what would you do if you were in my spot? 

Billingsley: (calmly) I'd stop bothering me.

I'll drink to that... which reminds me of another thing I liked about this movie: the near-constant drinking by most of the main characters. Ah, the '40s! By the way, I award this movie some bonus points for giving us a scene with the eternally blank, clueless Grady Sutton, a character actor whose presence is always welcome in stories of this nature.

My grade: B+

P.S.  - While not overtly racist or stereotypical (other than, I suppose, Fitzgerald's hard-drinking Irishman), The Stork Club has a few moments that now seem culturally insensitive. "Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief" is a terrifically catchy song, but the song's lyrics—and the choreography that goes with them—may offend Native Americans. And DeFore's character, a WWII vet, makes a disparaging reference to a "Jap" soldier he apparently killed in a cave.

(today's zomby) AND A JOKE ABOUT KARAOKE! THAT'S STILL RELEVANT, RIGHT?