Terry Teachout turned his biography of Louis Armstrong into a play, "Satchmo at the Waldorf" (pictured); a tour of the inventory for special effects and makeup master Rick Baker's auction of his monstrous creations; Film LA reports an increase in movie production in California in 2013 — even before the new tax incentives kicked in.
'Satchmo at the Waldorf' lets audiences decide if Louis Armstrong was a hero or held black artists back
One-man show "Satchmo at the Waldorf" stars John Douglas Thomas as jazz great Louis Armstrong, unwinding backstage and reflecting on his career just months before he died in 1971. Thomas also plays Armstrong's manager and Miles Davis.
The playwright, Terry Teachout, is the drama critic for the Wall Street Journal, and he’s also written extensively about jazz. His 2009 biography, “Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong,” led to the play, which had a successful off-Broadway run last year.
Teachout says Armstrong was the greatest jazz musician of the 20th century.
"He singlehandedly changed the sound of jazz," Teachout says. "And beyond that, Armstrong was also the man who essentially created the idea of the virtuoso jazz soloist. So between these two things, he becomes the musician that everybody wanted to play like, and of course, when he started singing, the one that everybody wanted to sing like as well."
Proving that Louis Armstrong shouldn't be seen as an Uncle Tom
In a New York Times review of Teachout's biography of Armstrong, it said that the book read like a brief in Armstrong's defense.
"I think all biographies are, to some degree, briefs for the defense. Armstrong, in the second half of his life, was quite widely misunderstood, because he was a man from an older time. He was a man, in chronological time, essentially almost from the minstrel show era."
Armstrong was seen as a hero in the black community in the '20s and '30s, but later black musicians like Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis saw him differently, Teachout says.
"They recognized that he was a great artist, but they were very uncomfortable with his ingratiating stage manner, which they saw as Uncle Tom-ish."
Teachout says the play doesn't take a position on that issue, but tries to get at it through the three characters Armstrong plays.
"[The play] really requires you, the viewer, to make up your own mind about how you feel about Armstrong."
Gillespie and Davis were wrong, Teachout says.
"I think they were viewing him from an achronological, ahistorical perspective. Dizzy lived long enough to understand that he'd been wrong, and to retract, in his own autobiography, what he'd said about Armstrong. Miles, I don't think he ever changed his mind. I think he respected Armstrong, and, I think, probably also loved him as a man, but was always uncomfortable with his stage manner."
Davis argued that Armstrong made it harder for the next generation of black artists to break out, but Teachout disagrees.
"It doesn't seem to me that they had any difficulty with that. Certainly, Miles Davis himself had no difficulty with it at all. Miles was as great a popular culture figure in his time, from the '50s on, as Louis Armstrong was in the '20s, '30s and '40s. He was simply seeing Armstrong through the prism of his own historical perspective."
Teachout sees the perception as a generational issue, with Armstrong continuing on as a traditionalist while other black jazz artists moved into a different kind of music.
"He was an older man. He died at the age of 71. He had been essentially doing what he was doing since the '30s. He had found what worked for him, and he stuck with it, as artists do."
What you can say on stage that you can't say in a biography
Moving from biography to the stage, Teachout says he was able to speculate in the new format more than the straight-ahead book allowed him to, getting at what he didn't have the historical evidence to put his finger on in print.
"What was the exact nature of the relationship between Armstrong and Joe Glaser, his manager? Why did Armstrong feel at the end of his life that Glaser had sold him out? What did Glaser do the things that led Armstrong to feel that he had been betrayed? Glaser was mobbed up, and mob guys don't keep diaries. It's unfortunate. The portrayal of Glaser in the play is more fictionalized either than Armstrong or Miles Davis. It has to be. We just don't have enough material to work with."
There was plenty of material from Armstrong — Teachout has 650 audio tapes of Armstrong recording his thoughts and sound from performances. But while the play allowed for freedom, Teachout says he didn't write it to prove a point.
"I wrote it because I got an email a couple of months after 'Pops' was published, from somebody whose name I didn't recognize, saying, 'I read your book, I liked it, I think there's a play in it. Have you thought about writing a play?' Which I never had."
Teachout says he googled the man who emailed him, and it turned out he was a theatrical producer.
"He had worked on 'Jelly's Last Jam,' he had worked on Elaine Stritch's show, and I thought, 'Well, gosh, if somebody like that thinks there's a play in my book, maybe I should try writing a play and see what happens.'"
Teachout also looked up his own reviews of the producer's work, which he says were quite good.
"I thought, 'OK, I'm game,'" Teachout says. "I'm a drama critic, that's what my day job is. And I was not a frustrated playwright. The cliche about drama critics sitting around, wishing they could write a play, is not true. But when he suggested it, I thought, why not? And then, when it was done, I looked back and I said, 'What have I done? What does this mean?' And I realized that, among other things, I had used the play to try to get at these questions about Armstrong and Glaser."
Glaser and Armstrong were the most significant relationships in each man's life, Teachout says. Another example of the play moving beyond strict facts — when Armstrong tells a story in the play about black musicians getting meals in whites-only restaurants by sneaking in the back and being served by black cooks, he notes in the play the irony of the widely respected Armstrong standing and eating in the kitchen.
"That line is me. He liked to tell this story, specifically about eating T-bone steaks back in the kitchen, and I thought to myself, 'Well, there's a great irony in this,' that he was doing this when he was a very famous man. And I knew from the tapes that Armstrong had very realistic views, a truly eye-opened understanding of what it meant to be a black man in America mid-century. And so I felt that, in putting those words in his mouth, I wasn't being false to his sense of self. I was just sharpening the focus in a way that a biographer cannot do."
The 2 things that drove Louis Armstrong
The play deals with what Glaser wanted from the relationship, but leaves open the question of what Armstrong wanted himself — fame, money, or just seeing an audience enjoy his music as he played 300 shows a year. Teachout says there were two things driving Armstrong.
"The lesser one is he was a person who had been deprived of the experience of having a father. His father walked out on him — he used to say — the day he was born, which may or may not be literally true, but it was figuratively true. And a person who loses the father figure that early in life always has a need for approval. Performers typically get it from an audience, and the approval of the audience."
Teachout says that, in a smaller way, Armstrong's drive came from a desire to feel he was giving people something they wanted.
"The bigger part of what drove Armstrong, I think, was that he knew what he was. He was somebody extraordinary who had come from nothing, from Storyville, from the worst part of the gutter, and had become a world famous, culture-changing artist. The bottom line is that his greatest pleasure in life was to get in front of an audience, and blow the horn, and sing the songs, and give happiness."
"Satchmo at the Waldorf" is at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills through June 7.
'Monster Maker' Rick Baker prepares to retire from film biz and auction off career-spanning creature collection
In the music video for "Thriller," Michael Jackson leads a group of 30 or so zombies in an epic choreographed dance in an industrial part of Los Angeles.
Jackson was a huge fan of the 1981 film "An American Werewolf in London," so he wanted his next video to be essentially a short film where he’d turn into a monster.
“I said I'd rather not turn him into a werewolf. I think it'd be cooler if we turned him into some kind of cat, feline kind of thing," said Rick Baker, the special effects artist hired to turn Jackson into a...were-cat of sorts. "I wanted to put whole bunch of monsters in it, but that turned into being a whole bunch of zombies and doing the dance.”
Baker worked with Thriller director John Landis on "An American Werewolf in London," and he was brought on to transform Jackson.
Seeing the Thriller dance live for the first time, it was amazing, Landis said you're going to be known more for this than anything you do, and I just said no you're crazy. But that is one thing when people say oh what do you do for a living, I'm a makeup artist have you done anything that I've seen? I know that if I say Thriller they've seen it.
But you’ve likely seen a lot more of Baker’s work, without even realizing it.
Since the early ‘70s, he’s been responsible for some of the most iconic creatures and special effects in Hollywood, from "The Gremlins" to the apes in the 2001 Tim Burton "Planet of the Apes" to an army of alien bug creatures for the "Men In Black" franchise. Not to mention his work in classics like "Star Wars: Episode IV" and the 1976 version of "King Kong" starring Jessica Lange and Jeff Bridges.
I was 25 years old and I actually played King Kong...I built the suit and played King Kong because they couldn't find anyone else stupid enough to wear the suit.
In total, Baker’s been nominated for 12 Academy Awards and has won seven. But despite considerable success, he is now retiring from show business.
I said the time is right, I am 64 years old, and the business is crazy right now. I like to do things right, and they wanted cheap and fast. That is not what I want to do, so I just decided it is basically time to get out. I would consider designing and consulting on something, but I don't think I will have a huge working studio anymore.
With long white hair pulled back into his trademark ponytail, Baker is soft spoken with a kind face and demeanor that belies the often ghastly creatures he creates.
But he’s also known for creating animatronic apes for films like "Mighty Joe Young" and "Gorillas in the Mist." For the latter film, Baker created incredibly lifelike gorilla suits that could be spliced in with real gorilla footage in the film. At the time, audiences had no idea they were puppets.
Until last year, Baker maintained a 60,000-square-foot facility in Glendale called Cinovation Studios, where he designed, molded and stored his designs. He employed a small team of likeminded makeup artists and designers.
Warning: The following video contains profanity
But as the industry began to increasingly favor computer effects over practical effects, like makeup, Baker found himself maintaining a space the industry no longer needed. He also had to lay off his staff.
The building was great when I was doing 'How the Grinch Stole Christmas', or 'Planet of the Apes', but the industry has changed. Big make-up films don't seem to exist anymore, and I was hoping that something would come along. I did 'Men in Black 3', which was good for that, but the last film I did was 'Maleficent' and I could've done that in a garage basically.
Baker sold the building in 2014, and started the long process of finding a home for the various masks, animatronic gorilla heads and puppets he’s amassed over the years. He recently hired a company called The Prop Store to help him auction off the majority of his collection. The auction will take place at the Universal City Hilton on May 29.
The Prop Store guys come from a background of being like fan boys, and they have an appreciation for what this stuff is, and it wasn't just about how much money they were going to get out of it. I liked that, and they seemed like really decent people.
Now, much of Baker’s life’s work is locked up in The Prop Store’s storage facility in Chatsworth, each piece waiting for its new home. The whole process seems bittersweet for the man commonly referred to as “Monster Maker.”
The people that bought the building are actually making a storage unit out of it, and they are totally tearing out all of the custom stuff that we did...It was weird because it was a big empty building when I bought it, then I made it my own, and it was pretty cool. It is sad that it isn't going to exist again. Nobody will be as stupid as I was to build this giant castle to make monsters in.
Baker says will continue to make monsters, only it will be on his terms this time (
).
I do all kind of crazy things. I paint, I sculpt, and I do digital models. This part of my life now I am basically retiring from the film industry and looking forward to just doing what I want to do.
View the whole Prop Store catalog:
Prop Store: Rick Baker Auction Catalog by scprweb