The return of the return of the West Seattle Grouchos

The West Seattle Grouchos are a phenomenon I've posted about before.

• Aug. 2, 2011: The return of the West Seattle woodland Grouchos
• July 13, 2010: Where are the West Seattle Grouchos?

To recap:

For three consecutive Aprils, 2007-2009, a curious sight popped up on my daily drive to and from my home. Soon after you'd hit the eastbound lane of the West Seattle Bridge connecting our neighborhood peninsula to mainland Seattle and downtown, and if you slowed down just enough to take a look into the woodsy area south of the bridge, there amidst the trees and the brush, you could spy — like a National Geographic photographer on a field assignment in wildest Freedonia — a guerrilla public art grouping of cutouts depicting Groucho Marx, each in full crouch as if foraging for wealthy widows among the greenery. (The spot is geo-marked at Wikimapia and wiki.worldflicks.)

But in 2010 they didn't show at all. We were left bereft of this anonymous urban art giggle-bombing. Where had they gone?

A year later, 2011 was shaping up to be another Groucho-less year. But then, as mysteriously as before, they re-appeared late in the summer. Hooray! Within a month or so they were gone again, slinking stealthily back to wherever they came from.

I've wondered when they'll show up again this year — or if they would at all. Today I was rewarded with an answer, and it came months earlier than expected. Plus, they've moved to a nearby spot more out in the open.

Two weeks after the big snow dump we now have blue skies and as far the senses can tell it might as well be April. Apparently the Grouchos think so too, because there they are, now off the westbound lane, integrated into the set of four bronze sculptures called "Walking on Logs."

"Walking on Logs" in its natural state.

I'm a fan of urban art, and "Walking on Logs" is a welcome adornment as you curve into the West Seattle gateway. It's not unusual to see the four bronze children outfitted with T-shirts or other accoutrements, usually promoting one cause or another. Lately they've been plugging the local Campfire Girls candy sale. And today I noticed that the unknown Marxists have struck again to lend a hand ... rather, a head. Five of them, in fact. To wit:

Clambering up the muddy hillside to take these shots, I'd never before been able to get this close to them. Only one was the full crouching figure, and it had blown over. As I set it upright again, I experienced the tingle of temptation to take it home and add it to my Movie Room decor. But the Harpo on my left shoulder yanked my ear something fierce. Besides, if I added one more Groucho Marx image up in our house Elizabeth would give me The Look. And who am I to deprive my fellow Seattleites of Rufus T. Firefly, Capt. Spaulding, Prof. Wagstaff, and Dr. Quackenbush?

"From the moment I opened your blog up until I closed it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend reading it." — Groucho Marx (revised)

Related posts:

"It's a gala day for you!"

Eugene O'Neill with a Groucho chaser; or, Hello, I must be blogging

Happy Father's Day from Groucho Marx

The return of the West Seattle woodland Grouchos

Via matthetube's Flickr. Thanks, Matt.

Last year in a post titled "Where Are the West Seattle Grouchos?" I lamented the mysterious absence of an urban guerrilla art giggle-bombing that, from 2007-2009, had manifested annually in a stretch of woods alongside a major thoroughfare near my neighborhood. They were the West Seattle Grouchos, and they never failed to lift my spirits as I drove past. Yet last year these drive-by non sequiturs didn't reappear, so I missed the whimsy that seemed aimed at me, a dedicated Grouchophile, on my daily drive into downtown Seattle.

Did the herd of crouching Grouchos migrate to greener Freedonias? Had the unknown artiste(s) moved on to bigger things — perhaps San Francisco and giant Harpos on the Golden Gate Bridge? If so, I wished that I could thank him, her, or them, and perhaps buy a round of a local ale followed by a showing of, say, Duck Soup on the big screen at my house. But alas, they'd vanished like Zeppo at MGM and to all appearances the era of the West Seattle Grouchos was over. (The spot is geo-marked at Wikimapia and wiki.worldflicks.)

So I'm pleased to report that they're back again. And they've multiplied. They're in the same location as before, although given the long, wet spring and nominal summer we've had this year, the underbrush is even more jungle-like than before and the Grouchos aren't quite as easy to spot. So, armed with a camera, yesterday I pulled off to the shoulder of the road and snapped this new herd in the wild before they vanish again for who knows how long.

For your consideration — "Postage due" edition

When I go to the site Letters of Note ("a blog-based archive of fascinating correspondence, complete with scans and transcripts of the original missives") and plug in various movies-related search terms (e.g., "movie"), what pops up are all sorts of interesting billets-doux from cinema history. The oldest I've found dates to 1916, written by Charlie Chaplin to a young admirer.

The site provides history and context for the letters. For instance, for a 1939 letter from David O. Selznick, the site preambles its contents thus:

As U.S. audiences continued to be wowed by Hedy Lamarr's glamorous turn in Algiers, Oscar-winning movie producer David O. Selznick was both blatant and determined in his efforts to capitalise on the natural beauty of Ingrid Bergman whilst filming her Hollywood debut - Intermezzo - in 1938; so much so that he wrote the following memo to the movie's director, editor and production manager towards the end of shooting and, whilst pointing out that 'every beautiful shot we get of her is a great deal of money added to the returns on the picture', demanded more close-ups of the Swedish actress.

And sure enough, there's a photo of the memo plus a transcription, with Selznick offering an accurate forecast of "increasing the possibility of our having a new star" as well as a more withering appraisal of Hedy's (not Hedley's) position in the stellar firmament.

Other pages I find there include:

Two letters from Groucho Marx, one being his famous expression of mock outrage addressed in 1945 to "Dear Warner Bros." stating "I had no idea that the City of Casablanca belonged exclusively to Warner Bros." (My own appraisal of the forthcoming Marx Brothers' sibling swansong, A Night in Casablanca, is here.) The second, from December 1957, comes titled A drunken evening with Grouch Marx. Audrey Hepburn, a fine lobster dinner, and "Jayne Mansfield's knockers" are no longer available for comment.

1957 was a good year for Hollywood mailrooms. To wit:

• "Come on now Marlon, put up your dukes and write" — Beat author Jack Kerouac's ardent letter to Marlon Brando, trying to get On the Road onto the screen.

• The birth of Roger Thornhill — Theater critic and arts editor Otis L. Guernsey hands Alfred Hitchcock the rights to a "fake masterspy" story idea, a plot we now recognize as North by Northwest. (When I was a very young and precocious theater jock, I would ride my bike to my hometown's sole library to check out Guernsey's long annual series of "Best Plays" compilations, two or more at a time. I had no idea until now that he also planted the seed for my favorite Hitchcock film.)

"Respectfully yours, Clint Eastwood" — October 26, 1954: He was just 24-year-old Universal contract player when Clint Eastwood wrote this humble, gracious letter to director Billy Wilder. Its subject: Eastwood's possible casting in the role of aviator Charles Lindbergh in The Spirit of St. Louis. The role ultimately went to James Stewart, so Eastwood went on to become ... Clint Eastwood.

"Men are climbing to the moon but they don't seem interested in the beating human heart" — March 1, 1961: Recently divorced, mentally exhausted Marilyn Monroe's six-page letter to her psychiatrist. A touching, unveiled peek into MM a year before she died.

"I expect to make the best movie ever made" — Stanley Kubrick's vast unfilmed bio-epic Napoleon is one of my alternate-universe Dream's Library movies. Audrey Hepburn, in a hand-written letter, gracefully turns down Kubrick's offer of playing Joséphine. (Wouldn't that have been interesting?) Next up is Kubrick's unfinished draft of a 1971 letter in which, undeterred by MGM pulling out in 1969 due to soaring costs, he lays out a revised proposal and states, "I expect to make the best movie ever made."

"Forget the impeachment of President Nixon" — Hollywood director King Vidor's 1974 letter to L.A. Times sportswriter Jim Murray about Dodger Stadium's "disgraceful" and "unbelievable" public toilets. Never mind his directorial prowess — when you can rank Dodger Stadium's facilities against those in "Moscow, Madrid, Zagreb Yugoslavia, Rome and Paris," that's one specialized area of international expertise.

"We will never get past Viet Nam if we sweep it under the carpet" — It's 1976 and Francis Ford Coppola apologizes to Marlon Brando for being "so elusive" during Apocalypse Now's notoriously troubled production. The Letters of Note site points out that this is "a truly insightful letter," one that shows Coppola's frustrations "as he first details the reasoning behind the evolution of Leighley/Kurtz; then speaks of the public's need to face the horror of Vietnam 'head on' ... so as to 'move people, and to help put this war in perspective'."

Salinger reviews Raiders of the Lost Ark — The reclusive author's 1981 letter to his friend and lover Janet Eagleson. He wasn't a fan. However, he and I are in accord when it comes to The Last Metro and Catherine Deneuve.

"I'll be waiting to see your names someday on the big screen" — Steven Spielberg congratulates the three young friends who remade their favorite movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark, shot-for-shot. What a mensch.

"It was a busy year and then it wasn't" — Christopher Walken writes to his online fan club. "I was supposed to portray Batman, but when Tim Burton learned of my hot dog cravings, he asked Michael Keaton to wear the cape. To this day, I am peeved about this." The man really, really likes his hot dogs. And yes, read this one out loud while doing a Christopher Walken impression.


At least three letters (here, here, and here) testify to the Pixar honchos being just darn nice folks.

The Birth of Steampunk — Only tangentially movie-related (the term is most often applied retroactively), this one I add largely because of a personal connection with the letter's author. Elizabeth and I became friends with science fiction author K.W. Jeter and his wife Geri when we all lived near each other in Portland, Oregon. We have since moved in opposite directions (we to Seattle, they to San Francisco), though the last time Elizabeth and I visited San Francisco we went out to dinner and drinks with K.W. and Geri, enjoying the chance to get caught up. Anyway, K.W. is well known as "the father of steampunk," and here's the April 1987 letter to Locus magazine wherein the label "steampunk" enters canonical writ. Steampunk's recent surge as its own pop subgenre ("the next big thing") owes a tip of the brass goggles to K.W.


I've just begun poring though the Letters of Note site. Feel welcome to let me know of others you find there.

"It's a gala day for you!"

October 2 already? Either it's Groucho Marx's birthday or my watch has stopped.

Eugene O'Neill with a Groucho chaser; or, Hello, I must be blogging

Elizabeth and I spent three days last weekend on a "working vacation" in Portland, OR. We visited old friends (some of whom I've written about here before), enjoyed the city's inherent lovely greenness, ate very well in excellent company, finally caught up with Me and Orson Welles (mostly loved it) and Kraken rum (I make a mean Dark & Stormy), and managed to catch William Hurt in the Artists Rep production of Eugene O'Neill's bleak autobiographical 1956 drama of addiction and family dysfunction, A Long Day's Journey Into Night.

Now, being a theater dude I went into Long Day's Journey aware that any company these days has a hard road to hoe in making that particular four-hour Pulitzer Prize-winner fresh and gripping for a modern audience, for whom O'Neill's once-searing and pioneering realism may have been diluted to homeopathic nullity by the intervening decades of "reality" media saturation. While I bear nothing at all against O'Neill's masterfulness — cf. my post about The Iceman Cometh — I predicted that this play in particular is now past its sell-by date and that only an extraordinary and bold production could undo that. This one was neither extraordinary nor bold, plus was riddled with artistic and directorial choices that left me wondering if everyone involved knew they were supposed to be working on the same play.

So, although actors William Hurt and especially Robyn Nevin were several kinds of terrific, I came away needing a palate cleanser and mood lifter. And for me the Marx Brothers have always been a reliable tonic when such needs arise. I reached for their second film, Animal Crackers, in which Groucho riffs on O'Neill's expressionistic play Strange Interlude by stepping forward to address the camera (that is, the audience) and soliloquizing thusly (the 2:20 mark):



Suddenly the world was brighter again.

Among the many things I love about 1930's Animal Crackers (and its 1929 predecessor, The Cocoanuts) is that they are just about our only records of what it was like to see the Marxes performing live on Broadway. The films, shot in Paramount's Astoria studios in Queens, NY, were adaptations of two of their Broadway shows. The Brothers shot The Cocoanuts at the studio during the day, then hot-footed back to Manhattan to perform Animal Crackers on stage in the evenings. It wasn't until their third (and first all-original) film, Monkey Business (1931) that they moved to Hollywood, where they spent the rest of their lives.

The original stage script was pared down for the screen, so as a film Animal Crackers is a rough approximation rather than a full-on reproduction. Still, as an historical document it benefits from unadorned point-and-shoot camerawork, a proscenium staginess, and lack of cinematic flair. A script credited to Bert Kalmar, Harry Ruby, and George S. Kaufman doesn't hurt either, even though showbiz legend has it that Kaufman, backstage during one of the shows he wrote for the notorious ad-libbers, once exclaimed, "Wait! I think I just heard one of my lines!" (I have more to say about the Marxes' Paramount films at DVD Journal.)

So when Groucho quips, "You're very fortunate the Theatre Guild isn't putting this on, and so is the Guild," it's a line that would deliver an extra layer of funny to a Broadway audience, especially since it was the Guild that had recently premiered Strange Interlude for the play's 1928-29 run. The Internet Broadway Database tells me that from Oct. 23, 1928 to February 1929, the Broadway runs of Animal Crackers and Strange Interlude overlapped as they played simultaneously at the Forty-Fourth Street Theatre and the John Golden Theatre respectively.

Oh, what it must have been like to catch both shows on consecutive nights.

www.marx-brothers.org has more about Animal Crackers on Broadway, including sections trimmed out for the film and pages from the program book.

In his current series on the Marx Brothers, Mythical Monkey's excellent blog takes a good look at the Brothers at this stage of their stage-to-film career.

Hello, I Must Be Going

 

Happy Father's Day from Groucho Marx

Where are the West Seattle Grouchos?

Ah, springtime, when the Grouchos bloom. Or at least they did for three springs prior to this one.

For three consecutive Aprils, 2007-2009, a curious sight popped up on my daily drive to and from my home. Soon after you'd hit the eastbound lane of the West Seattle Bridge connecting our neighborhood peninsula to mainland Seattle and downtown, and if you slowed down just enough to take a look into the woodsy area south of the bridge, there amidst the trees and the brush, you could spy — like a National Geographic photographer on a field assignment in wildest Freedonia — a guerrilla public art grouping of cutouts depicting Groucho Marx, each in full crouch as if foraging for wealthy widows among the greenery. (The spot is geo-marked at Wikimapia and wiki.worldflicks.)

They'd last about a month, then were gone as stealthily as they came. Who put them up every spring, and why, remains a mystery to us locals. But we loved them. Seattle generally has an out-there, quirk-heavy sense of humor, and it was gratifying to see that somebody in my own 'hood had a flair for the drive-by non sequitur — and possessed, evidently, a taste in movies similar to my own.

Fom matthetube's photostream on Flickr. Thanks, Matt.

What's the word for a herd of Northwest Forest Grouchos? (Latin: rufusis t. fireflyus.) Perhaps they're hunting for cocoanuts, animal crackers, horse feathers, duck soup, or just some monkey business. If you listen closely you might hear their mating coo: "Helloooo, I must be going...."

I remember one Friday after a particularly frustrating day at work. While driving home gnashing my teeth (seriously, there were sparks), seeing my friendly neighborhood Grouchos was just what I needed to start scraping the day off my skin. It's like that scene in Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters: Allen's character — suffering life's slings and arrows to the point of despondency and suicidal musings — takes refuge in a movie theater. It's a revival house showing Duck Soup, the Marx Brothers' wildly funny comedy from 1933. Sitting there in the dark, with the Brothers' masterpiece flickering before him, Allen receives an epiphany: Is existence really so awful as long as it has the Marx Brothers in it?

Five minutes later I was home. Without stopping to check the mail or listen to any phone messages, I poured a glass of good-enough wine, kicked off my shoes, and headed straight to the Movie Room. There I turned on the big screen and went to my DVD shelves. From the shelf span holding movies from the 1930s, I pulled out a fat boxed set, The Marx Brothers: Silver Screen Collection. I slid Animal Crackers into the player, slumped like a bag of sand on the couch with my wine, and hit the play button.

Within moments the whole day's crappitude was brushed away by Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and sometimes Zeppo. Okay, sure, the wine helped. Nonetheless, by the time Groucho had gotten to "One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas — how he got in my pajamas, I don't know," I was feeling good with a smile on my face. When he quips the line that, to me, is the funniest dirty joke in cinema history — "Signore Ravelli's first musical selection will be Somewhere My Love Lies Sleeping with a male chorus" — all was right with my world.

But not this year. It's well into June now and the Grouchos haven't returned. Damn. Did the guerrilla artiste move on? Did he or she or they tire of that hillside climb through jungle foliage? Did the figures decide that they didn't want to be part of any underbrush that would have them as members?

Looks like I'll just have to watch the movies without them. I'm sure I'll manage. Miss those guys, though.