NYFF Dispatch. Mr Warmth.

Don Rickles has the face of a comedian, with a strange head extruding from his body like a turtle's head from a shell. He has the voice of a traffic cop, when there use to be traffic cops, and if you see his act, as you do in John Landis's Mr Warmth, The Don Rickles Project, he has people paying lots of money for the chance that he might notice them in the crowd and insult them personally. It's the comedy version of Let's Make a Deal.

Updated through 10/11.

Part of Landis's film is Rickles onstage - hunched like an aging penguin, tuxedo and all, he targets members of the audience for whatever they are - Chinese, Italian, Black, Filipino, etc. He also ranges into the crowd to insult whomever he can find. He tells Nazi jokes and goose-steps when he meets someone of German origin, and brings people in the crowd onstage to mimic Asian stereotypes, and he even sings, although not everyone would call it singing. In interviews, people who worked for him tell of offering "good seats" to obese and ethnically identifiable people so Rickles would be sure to have pigeons to shoot. The people who work with Don Rickles stay with him for a long time, whether they are his managers or his musicians. This is the nasty guy with the heart of gold.

Now he's at the New York Film Festival with "dummies" like Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, Todd Haynes and the Coen Brothers. What a fertile field for insults. I can just imagine Rickles's classic imitation of Hou Hsiao-hsien.

And Rickles has fans. We learn from Chris Rock that Black fans considered him the "first Black comic" for his in-your-face approach to comedy. Judging by the Vegas crowds, most of Middle America seems to agree.

Landis's documentary isn't so much a film about Rickles as it is a television salute to the comic destined for its TV date of December 2 on HBO. Besides the look at Rickles onstage, we have interviews with the musicians who are there with him every night - they truly seem to love him - and we hear from other comics, from to his friend Bob Newhart to his fan Sara Silverman. Naturally, Landis is also a fan, and he's nostalgic for the entertainment era that sustained Rickles for so long. People used to dress up to see this guy. That was the era before Vegas went corporate and down-market.

The film has the look of another recent low-budget doc about comedy, The Aristocrats, with interviews about comedians and comedy intercut with Rickles in Vegas, where he's still a star at 80. The punch line here is a huge kiss from Landis. You'll like the doc if you like Rickles as much as he does. Otherwise, you might feel that you're at a tepid version of a celebrity roast - although there is some great footage of Rickles roasting his peers. He could be funny, and it's astounding what he got away with, asking Ronald Reagan if he was "going too fast" for the President's impaired attention span. Reagan laughed, just as they all did.

Another film emerges here. It is a hymn to the old days of Los Vegas, when, as many of the comics interviewed explained, the mob ruled the town. As they see it, it was a more civilized place in those days, and the talent was treated better. I guess almost anything can look better in retrospect.

Landis does not view Rickles as a comedian, but as a performance artist. No one would be more surprised by that characterization than Rickles himself. When he started out in Vegas, performance artists usually performed on the trapeze. Now they are written about in Artforum and given genius grants and denied government money for things that are a lot tamer than what Rickles says in Vegas every night. But there's some truth to what Landis says. Onstage, Rickles doesn't tell a single joke. Most of his act is unscripted, although Rickles works from memory with a flexible vocabulary of insults and stock lines like, "You're English/Chinese/Italian? So how did you get these seats?" The audience roars when they hear it. The insulted parties seem to be enjoying it most. And Rickles is saying some of the same things that got Don Imus thrown off the air.

Although you can almost smell the mothballs when you watch Rickles perform, he sells out the big rooms in Vegas and packs them in at what his fellow comedians call "Indian casinos." The crowd seems to love him, although the median age seems to be about 60. Casino employees who speak to Landis tell him another reason for booking Mr Warmth: he brings out the high rollers when he's on the bill. Somehow, after hearing Don Rickles's routine, gamblers want to go right to the crap tables and the slots. Do insults make you feel that good? Mr Warmth might have a good line to explain this behavior, but we never hear it.

At the press conference after the film screened for media, Landis said Rickles wasn't eager to be the subject of a documentary, and certainly not for a concert film that would have shown his entire act. Why the reluctance? The trade secret which rarely gets out is that most comics do essentially one show, which they have assembled over time, sometimes over years. They perform that same show wherever they go. This helps explain why there have been relatively few concert films by comedians, with the exceptions being improvisers like Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy and Chris Rock. I'm sure there are others, but generally comics don't want to give away the store. Back in the 1950s, Jack Benny said, "Television is the great destroyer. They know your act." If it weren't for gambling, a lot more comedians would be waiting tables.

Though his act is unscripted, Rickles was still wary of putting it all on film and risking that his fans would rent that movie instead of coming to a casino to see him perform. When he finally agreed to cooperate with Landis, who has known him for years, Rickles passed the project to his son (credited as a co-producer on this project), who wanted to make a doc about his father in the style of The Fog of War. Rickles as Robert McNamara. I can just imagine the cabinet meetings.

No one wanted a film about Don Rickles the man, on the assumption that "no one gives a fuck about Don Rickles," although Landis says everyone wanted to back a concert movie. He ended up making the film by itself. Once Rickles decided to cooperate, besides the shooting of two Vegas shows, the real cost was archival footage from films in which Rickles acted and from his endless TV appearances. He was quite an actor, yet the evidence is in still images and film footage which carry huge licensing fees. There's a common perception that the threat of litigation is what keeps controversial footage out of documentaries. The truth is that it's the fear of the cost. We would know much more about Don Rickles the actor if the TV clips hadn't been so expensive to use. This is not the documentary that it could have been if Landis had twice his $500K budget, and Landis would be the first to say so. The real Mr Warmth is in cold storage at the studios.

-David D'Arcy

Aaron Hillis, who interviewed Landis for the Voice, recounts his adventures with the director - and a copy editor.

Updates: "Self-aggrandizing asshole or magnanimous, overgrown kid?" asks ST VanAirsdale at the Reeler. "It's hard to know exactly how to take director John Landis, particularly following yesterday's New York Film Festival press conference for his hilarious new documentary Mr Warmth: The Don Rickles Project. I lean toward the latter characterization; sure, he's namedroppy ('So I called Clint...') and condescending ('I'm sorry to disappoint you; I know you're a journalist'), but as a pure storyteller, Landis wields an acute magnetism similar to that of his poison-tongued subject. And Rickles, arguably in an eternal prime even at age 81, is that rare misanthrope you just can't help but exhort to more and more corrosive levels of acidity."

IFC has video from the press conference.

"Some real meat is provided during the too-brief history of Rickles' career, which is itself a chronicle of changing showbiz mores and practices," writes Glenn Kenny. "'Say what you will about the boys,' Bob Newhart - Bob Newhart! - notes of the days when the mob ruled Vegas - 'but they knew how to run a gambling joint.'"

Update, 10/11: "As Mr Warmth, and Rickles's still-thriving career, bears out, the message is often inextricably tied to the messenger, and Landis's depiction of the comedian as a universally beloved, loyal, and kindhearted figure helps explain how he continues to get away with doing such politically incorrect material," writes Nick Schager at Slant.

Posted by dwhudson at October 10, 2007 9:05 AM