By Dom Romeo

Chris Lewis knows a lot about Jerry Lewis: in addition to once being the now 90-year-old comedy legend’s road manager, stage manager, lighting director, sound director, and business partner, Chris also happens to be Jerry’s son. And as director of Jerry Lewis Comedy Classics, Chris oversaw the campaign that saw all of Jerry Lewis’s thirty-four Paramount films issued on DVD. FilmInk chatted to Chris Lewis in 2005 upon the release of the initial batch of seven titles from the collection, which he called either Jerry’s “most popular films” or “ones that were in the best condition that we could easily remaster to high definition” or “ones that we had the most value-added material in our own personal archives.” Amongst them was the 1963 masterpiece The Nutty Professor (which screens at The Melbourne International Film Festival) whose additional commentary, documentaries and outtakes show “just how far my dad would let it go on the set before he called ‘cut!’”

The Nutty Professor
The Nutty Professor

Also released in 2005 was 1957’s The Delicate Delinquent, a Rebel Without A Cause spoof whose comic bits are mostly set pieces that haven’t dated so well. Lewis produces as well as stars, and even though it may be the weakest of his solo comedies, it is in fact his first; as sad as it is to realise that the other lead role was intended for Dean Martin (with whom Jerry Lewis had famously joined with for a longtime comedy double act both on screen and on stage), who had only just severed the partnership, it at least proved that Jerry was still a box office draw on his own. “My dad had ideas of becoming the type of total filmmaker that Chaplin was,” says Chris. “He wanted to write, produce, direct, and really control things. That would have required a lot more work on Dean’s part. Dean wanted to play golf. He wanted to sing, and to record his albums. As my dad said, ‘If the tables had been turned, I would not have put up with what Dean put up with for ten years.’”

The real eye-opener of the 2005 releases was 1960’s The Bellboy (also screening at MIFF), the first film that Jerry Lewis co-wrote, directed, produced and starred in. The film was completed within a month in order to be released in time for Christmas. In the DVD commentary, Jerry Lewis tells us that he took a walk through the Miami Beach Fontainebleau Hotel and devised a series of “blackout” gags for each situation that the people or the space suggested to him. In order to pull the entire thing off, Lewis invented the “video assist” system of monitoring; since videotape hadn’t been invented yet, he couldn’t watch the rushes at the end of each day. Instead, he arranged a multitude of television screens in his line of vision so that he could monitor his performance as he was giving it. This system is now industry standard for film and television. “Francis Ford Coppola was most taken by it,” Chris Lewis told FilmInk. “He was on the set in 1961, watching him use it on The Ladies’ Man [also screening at MIFF]. He told me personally.”

The Bellboy
The Bellboy

Despite the release of his films on DVD, one project to which Jerry won’t return is the one that drove him throughout the ‘70s and early ‘80s, a kind of precursor to Roberto Benigni’s Holocaust film, Life Is Beautiful. It’s called The Day The Clown Cried, and it features Lewis as a Jewish clown in a concentration camp who leads the children to the gas chamber. Chris says that his dad won’t discuss the project because “it affected him so emotionally; it was something that he had poured so much of his heart and his soul and himself and his money and – you name it – into.” Although all of the film was shot, the negative resides in three different locations around the world. The production fell apart as a result of a series of suits and counter suits that were filed when the film’s producer failed to pay the writers and just about everyone else involved in the production. “It just ended up being a huge litigation nightmare,” Chris says. “That’s really the entire story.”

And despite his decidedly advanced years, Jerry Lewis is not retired. He took the lead role in 2013’s Max Rose, and appears in the recent DVD release, The Trust, playing Nicolas Cage’s father. “He gets offered roles all the time,” Chris told FilmInk in 2005, “but he won’t take something unless he believes in the director or if he believes in the project.”

The Jerry Lewis: The Total Filmmaker sidebar – which features twelve of the comic legend’s directorial efforts – screens at The Melbourne International Film Festival. For all film titles, venues, and tickets, head to the official website.

Shares:

Leave a Reply