Gilbert Gottfried's Amazing Colossal Podcast - Mini-Ep #52: SKIDOO

Episode Date: March 24, 2016

Each week, comedian Gilbert Gottfried and comedy writer Frank Santopadre share their appreciation of lesser-known films, underrated TV shows and hopelessly obscure character actors -- discussing, dissecting and (occasionally) defending their handpicked guilty pleasures and buried treasures. This week: Carol Channing takes it all off! "Meathead" dodges the draft! And Groucho drops acid! (or does he?) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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I'm here with my co-host, Frank Santopadre, at Nutmeg Post with our engineer, Frank Ferdarosa. And this is Gilbert and Frank's Amazing Colossal Obsessions. Bravo, sir. Yes. It took you, what, 27, 29? We grade them on a curve. Yeah. It took them a while to get the title.

Good job. This is our little mini episode, and we're doing something we haven't done before. Gil and I always do these ourselves, and we decided to keep our guests over. Oh, yes. Cliff Nestor-Huyven. Nestor-Huyven title. Clifton-Huyven-Huy. What did I start?

And Nifton Clivenhoff. The author Cliff Nesteroff and our friend Drew Friedman, the renowned cartoonist, are here and they're going to sit in for our little mini episode. And I thought, I was looking around, I thought, well, we'll ask Drew and Cliff to sit in, but what is something that we can all share and we can all talk about? And I thought, what are Drew's obsessions? And I know on a are Drew's obsessions? And I know on a previous show, you've been on the show twice, you are obsessed, and not in a good way, with the movie Skidoo. Well, who wouldn't be?

It's like, you know, it was one of those films that you never saw until fairly recently, and now everybody's seen it. And yes, it is as horrible as you ever heard it was, but even worse. Worse. But it's fascinating, you know, every moment of it. Tell us the plot of Skidoo. Oh, God. Well, I think Gilbert might be better at this because, you know, I didn't even follow the plot.

I was just staring at it like a mental case, like a drooling mental case. Otto Preminger film from 1968. Yeah, well, it was like when, you know, all these directors were making big budget comedies or, you know, and Otto Preminger, who had never made a comedy. And they wanted to cash in on the 60s, but they were just out of it. Clueless, yeah. Yeah, and it was like, you know, they saw, like, Easy Rider and stuff like that becoming big hits. And what I remember hearing about Skidoo

is John Philip Law starred in it. He was a handsome blonde guy. And he was originally asked to be Joe Buck in Midnight Cowboy. And it's quite rational. You figure, okay, I could play like kind of a gay hooker in this movie, or I could be in a comedy with Groucho Marx and Jackie Gleason directed by Otto Preminger. It's got to be a hit. Yeah. Can't lose.

Oddly enough, Midnight Cowboy, Skidoo both feature music by Harry Nelson. Yeah. Oh, my God, that's right. And Harry's in Skidoo, of course. That's right. And Michael Sarazin was also up for Midnight Cowboy, too, and turned it down for some of maybe the Flim Flam Man or something. That's a good picture.

And oddly enough, Groucho Marx, who stars in Skidoo, hated Midnight Cowboy. And when he would do Cavett, it was one of his complaints. He would always complain about hair on Broadway as being obscene. And he would complain about Midnight Cowboy, probably one, because it was rated X. But I think he famously said in an interview with Roger Ebert, have you seen this movie called Midnight Cowboy? It's about a stud and a pimp. I wouldn't pay to go see this movie.

Like, he really hated it. And didn't Groucho also say, I think, he goes, I was going to see Hair on Broadway, but then I took off all of my clothes and stood in front of a full-length mirror. I had saved myself the money. I have a question for Groucho. Groucho, why did you appear in Skidoo?

Because Chico needed the money. We brought it back. Groucho died ten years before. He was a gambler. Well, apparently, though, Otto Preminger had done LSD with Timothy Leary prior to the film and prior to planning the film. And so he kind of was inspired by that. He wanted to do something, a movie that had something to do with LSD. And then Paul Krasner, who wrote The Realist, has this.

I found this on your website. This story, it's in Paul Krasner, who wrote The Realist, has this... Yeah, I found this on your website. This story, it's in Paul Krasner's memoir, and when I wrote my book, I tried to determine whether this was apocryphal, an urban legend that Paul Krasner created, or if it was true that Groucho Marx, in preparation for the movie Skidoo, wanted

to see what LSD was like and did an acid trip. And Paul Krasner claims that Phil Oakes, the singer, provided them with the LSD and that they went to some actress's home in Beverly Hills, an empty house, and that he and Paul Krasner did LSD together and that Krasner was Groucho's guide because Groucho had been a subscriber to The Realist and so had read about this sort of counterculture elements and was curious. He was contemptuous of it but still curious about it.

So Krasner claims that Groucho did acid once in preparation for the movie. You see promos for the film and Timothy Leary pops up in those promos. Oh, yes. And the strangest thing about the film is the actual cast they assembled, of course. Of course, it's star Jackie Gleason, who takes an acid trip in the film. Right. He's the hit man. And Arnold Stang is his buddy. And we had Frankie Avalon on the show.

And Carol Channing does a striptease, which is possibly the most disturbing thing ever filmed. Half the cast was also in the Batman series. Bridget Meredith is in it. Frank Gorshin is in it. And Preminger himself had played Mr. Freeze. Austin Pendleton is in it. It's like. Frank Gorshin is in it. Yeah. And Preminger himself had played Mr. Freeze. And Austin Pendleton

is in it. Austin Pendleton. It's like two separate casts. These young hippie types and then these old school and Jackie Gleason is great because he's so angry throughout.

Right. Because supposedly he hated Otto Preminger. They didn't get along. Well, there's also an episode of Playboy After Dark in which they go on

to promote Skidoo before it comes out. And Harry Nilsson plays songs from the soundtrack at the piano, and Preminger's there in a Nehru suit being interviewed by a Hefner. And I can't remember which actors from the film are there. Groucho

is not there, and Gleeson's not there. Peter Lawford, maybe? Peter Lawford, probably. Tell Gilbert it was Cesar Romero, just for real. Oh, yeah, Cesar Romero. Oh, oh, yes. You know about Otto Preminger. He shared the same passion that Danny Thomas did. I've heard this. Oh, of getting shit on with the glass coffee table?

But I don't think there was actually, with Preminger, I don't think there was a glass coffee table involved. He just got shit on directly? Basically, that's what I've heard, yeah. I've heard that. And by critics figuratively, when Scooby-Doo came out. And in case I've never told this story, Cesar Romero liked to have orange wedges flung in his naked ass.

You know that. You must know that. Wow, wow. Well, you're clearly not a regular listener. They're tangerines, right? And they had to be half ripe. Very specific. What would you think about it?

An orange would hurt. Yeah, they had to be like kind of half rotten tangerine wedges. And he'd have young boys throw them at his and then he would jerk off. Some people say they were Clementines. Yeah. Yeah. There is a YouTube. There's a footage on YouTube of Skip E. Lowe interviewing Cesar Romero in the early 80s.

Why don't you get Skip E. Lowe for the show? And there is a real serious weird gay subtext there where it's almost as if Skipippy Lowe is trying to get Caesar to come out of the closet on his show. And Caesar Romero is very – Butch Romero. Yeah. He's very nasty to Skippy Lowe, as I'm sure most people were, because he just feels like he's being salacious or in bad taste. Skippy Lowe is a beloved Facebook friend. How could you be nasty?

You are the person that turned me on to Skidoo. Oh, Skidoo. One thing I remember reading is that during the making of Skidoo, Carol Channing was sitting with Groucho Marx and she goes, you know, somebody should shoot Otto Framinger film in this movie. And he goes, Groucho goes, someone should shoot Otto Preminger, period. Wonderful.

And then I heard during his, when he was having a bad-ass intro, he said, I can see Lawrence Olivier fucking Danny Kaye in the ass. That was one of the odds of that. Frank, you mentioned I turned you on to Skidoo. You did. I had a cassette tape of it. I have one for you.

I think Gilbert and I watched it back at my apartment back in the 80s. But I kept sending it to people. Like, I was trying to get rid of it. You sent me a VHS. And it kept coming back to me. By the way, I still have it. The ScoreBet app here with trusted

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Me telling you what a schmuck you are. Go to Patreon.com slash Gilbert Gottfried. That's Patreon, P-A-T-R-E-O-N dot com slash Gilbert Gottfried. And thank you for your generosity. We had Frankie on the show. We had Frankie Avalon on the show,

and I got him to sign a DVD for you, which I have at home, and I keep forgetting to give it to you. A lot of those guys were convinced that was going to be

their career comeback, like Groucho, too. He thought he was going to be relevant again by appearing in Skidoo and Frankie Avalon. Preminger was sort of briefly blacklisted within the industry after that movie.

Robert Evans was head of Paramount at the time, and he felt that Preminger was intentionally making a bad movie to sabotage Paramount and make them go broke because he and Evans didn't get along. It's unlikely because every film Otto Preminger made, aside from Laura, was a bad movie. So for him to direct a comedy, of course it was going to be a disaster.

Well, he didn't direct anything again for another three years, I think. The film with John Lindsay, right? Rosebud? Rosebud. Well, Bunny Lake is Missing is okay. That has its moments. It's an interesting cast again.

You've got those great British actors. Right, and that's where the sidewalk ends. Yeah, he made some interesting films. He was married to Gypsy Rose Lee. And that's where the sidewalk ends. Yeah. He made some interesting films. He did. He was married to Gypsy Rose Lee. Right. But not a guy who directed comedy. He directed Arnold Stang before in The Man with the Golden Arm.

Right. Right. And Frank Sinatra actually worked well with him. He respected him. You know, for like two times. Once with John Frankenheimer in Manchurian Candidate and once with Ido Preminger. Frank actually would do a scene again. You know, those two times. I remember when Gypsy Rose Lee used to come on Merv Griffin all the time,

and she was like this disgusting old woman who had that snobbish attitude of, oh, well, we weren't strippers. That's what they have nowadays. We were artists. Performers. You know. I used to look at her and think, she looks nothing like Natalie Wood. Oh, my God.

No, no, wait a minute. She looked more like Celeste Holm or something like that. Like the ugly girl that Frank Sinatra used to get in the old movies. Nothing like young Natalie Wood. So Harry Nielsen sings the closing credits of Skidoo. And Carol Channing sings the opening. Yeah, and it's truly wretched. Skidoo, Skidoo.

It's like, you know, yeah. It goes on and on. It's a little post-Betty Davis, post-stroke Betty Davis thing. How she got into that, because she was a huge Broadway star, and this was possibly like her, you know, she had been in some movies in the 50s. There are existing rehearsal tapes of Harry Nilsson composing the soundtrack on an acoustic guitar, like trying to go through the melody. And when he's composing the opening song, he, Nilsson,

is doing a Carol Channing impression to see how it would sound with the music. And in the trailer, I don't even think he's in the movie, but in the trailer, Sammy Davis Jr. pops out. Well, they got Peter Lawford

was in the movie playing a senator, so I guess he just asked his friends to stop by. And Mickey Rooney's in it. We haven't even mentioned that. Right. It's an amazing cast.

George Raft, too? I think so. He must pop up in that. I think he does. Who's the young girl? Alexandra Raft, too? I think so. He must pop up. Yeah, I think he does. I think so, yeah. Who's the young girl? Alexandra Ray, I think. Yeah.

Austin Pendleton. Austin Pendleton. Yeah, who had long hair. Right. He had these long hair types. And I should add something Cliff pointed out when he came in. Punched up by Rob Reiner. Rob Reiner, Carl Gottlieb, and other members of sort of counterculture sketch comedy at that time.

The committee. Reiner was in a thing with Larry Bishop called – Joey Bishop's son. Yeah, I forget what the name of their short-lived sketch troupe was called. But at any rate, Preminger came to see the committee perform at the Tiffany Theater in Los Angeles and hired them because he didn't really know anything about how the counterculture spoke. So Gottlieb and Reiner came down to his office and he said, can you write some dialogue for hippies? And they wrote groovy randomly all throughout the script. And that was it. Rob Reiner played a hippie a year later

on Gomer Pyle, of course. Yes, and he played a draft dodging hippie in Where's Papa? That's right. And he played a hippie in two episodes of the Beverly Hillbillies, color episodes. Right, and I believe the Partridge family. Did you say that?

Yeah, he pops up in that. Is he in the one possibly with Richard Pryor? No, I don't think so. Who gossed him prior in that one? There was an actual murder case of this guy who was like a former Marine or something, and he murdered his wife, and he wanted to blame it because the Mansons had already done their stuff. So he wanted to blame it on like a bunch of crazed hippies. So he wrote all over the wall.

Like, and there's a guy who's a Marine. There's no hippies. So he wrote all over the wall at the murder scene, LSD is groovy. That's right. Skidoo was a genre. There was a genre of those big budget comedies, like relevant hip comedies, which were the opposite. But the other one was the one with Anthony Newley. And I can't even pronounce the title.

Oh, I was just... Yeah. Is this... Yeah, right, right. There was that other one. Forget Mercy Hump. Heronius Merkin. That's the one.

Mary Mercy Humpy. And that's the one that has Milton Berle and George Jessel pop up. And find true happiness. The only. And it's like, what were they thinking? The only X-rated film that stars Jessel and Berle. And there was a spread and playboy of it. That's what you think.

That's how it got its most attention at the time. There's also another Jackie Gleason comedy that has counterculture elements called How to Commit Marriage. That's what you think. That's how it got its most attention at the time. There's also another Jackie Gleason comedy that has counterculture elements called How to Commit Marriage which Professor Irwin Corey is in. There you go.

And they go to like a psychedelic nightclub and there's a fake hippie band on stage called The Comfortable Couch and there's these

long hairs. Yeah, and it's pretty dreadful. Watching him in the late 60s he just looked so angry. Gleason. Gleason, yeah. Because he wanted to be on the golf course. He just hated, like, at that point, yeah, seemed to hate the business, especially making movies.

Well, we've talked about it before, and we talked about it on the episode you were on, but it's worth revisiting Skidoo. Oh, yeah. And if you like bad movies, that's a great one to start with. Oh, yeah. You can't get worse. You can't get worse. It's truly w one to start with. You can't get worse. You can't get worse. It's truly wretched. You can't go wrong. Jackie Gleason,

tripping on LSD, has a vision of a disembodied Groucho head on the head of a screw coming towards him. And Groucho with the worst toupee he had ever worn. Oh, yes.

Jet black. Yeah. Toupee. Yeah. And he's on the micro, there's a scene of him on the boat where he's repeating the same line over and over

and you just feel sorry for the man you know it's just so you know like beneath him to be in this piece of shit

but there he is Skidoo that's our that's our negative colossal obsession for this week don't miss it the show has taken

a strange turn by the way people are writing us and they say you used to recommend good movies now you talk about wheezes of shit

every week I can't believe it's taken this long before you talked about this. Yeah, with you we did. But I thought it would be a good something we could all have in common. So, Groucho, you want to take us out? Well, this has been Gilbert and Frank's amazing, colossal obsession with Gilbert Gottfried and Frank Sanso Padre. And it was at Nutmeg Studios, at Nutmeg Post with Frank Vajarosa. We've had Drew Barrymore, who's an artist.

Drew Barrymore, who's an artist. And he was an author of a book called The Comedians by the name of Stephen Feusterman, Nechal Clasterhouse, Clifton Heidelberger. Clifton Hoffman, Stiven Hoff. Hoffman, Hoffman Cliffelman. Hoffman Cliffelman. That's my favorite.

We'll see you next week, guys. Thank you, Drew. Thank you, Cliff. Very nice. Fun. Thank you, Drew. Thank you, Cliff. Very nice. Fun. Thank you. Colossal Obsessions Give me that crack Colossal Obsessions Give me that crack

Colossal Obsessions