Klarinet Archive - Posting 000174.txt from 1998/05

From: Kenneth Wolman <kwolman@-----.com>
Subj: Re: [kl] Re: The Benny Goodman Story, and an Artie Shaw
Date: Tue, 5 May 1998 18:21:06 -0400

>> But Steve Allen, who really used to play the
>> clarinet, played Goodman. He might have played the same make and model that
>> Goodman did, for authenticity.
>
>I think it's fair to say that "authenticity" was not a high priority for the
>producers of this film.
>
>I'm surprised Dan hasn't stepped in on this thread. It's one of his favorite
>movies.

I think Steve Allen was pretty good on the instrument, but Goodman HAS to
have dubbed the music himself.

I remember seeing some of those 1940s "The XXXX Story," as in Benny
Goodman, Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, etc., when I was a kid. Not to
mention Kirk Douglas doing a knockoff of Bix Beiderbecke in "Young Man With
A Horn." Miller and T. Dorsey, like Goodman, were also supposed to be
rat's asses in real life: I have heard people from that generation say that
the best thing that ever happened to Miller's reputation came from being on
that plane. Yet everyone got sanitized, beatified (at least), and
portrayed as a familiar of Saint Cecilia. And the films got too painfully
cute for words: even at 15 (I was precocious), I winced at the running gag
in the Benny Goodman film about how everyone said to him "Oh Benny, don't
be that way!" Gee, if that wasn't a cue for a song....

I wonder what Hollywood back in the 1940s would have done with the lives of
Charlie Parker and Miles Davis.

On the other hand, some day Ken Russell will make a movie portraying the
late Lawrence Welk as a pedophile with a weakness for prescription cough
medicine and doing strange things with Pete Fountain's clarinet....

Ken

Kenneth Wolman Information Technology Morgan Stanley Inc.
750 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 212-762-1685
My unpaid life: http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Gallery/1649
"I only wish I could write with both hands, so as not to forget
one thing while I am saying another." -- St. Teresa of Avila

---------------------------------------------------------------------
For additional commands, e-mail: klarinet-help@-----.org
For other problems, e-mail: klarinet-owner@-----.org