stevie boy

both sketches(especially the latter) brilliant

Steve Crook

In the BBC4 programme about Marty the other night, someone (Dennis Norden?) said of Marty & Barry Took working together that when two people gel together the way they did, it's not Marty plus Barry but Marty multiplied by Barry

I liked that, it's a great way to describe a good collaboration

Steve

Marky B

I think it was Denis Norden who said,after being asked how does he and Frank Muir work together on a script:"We use a big pencil".
Ta Ta
Marky B

I once shot an elephant in my pyjamas - how he got in my pyjamas,I'll never know

Marky B

I am thinking of a sketch going back years ago,and I am not sure if it was marty Feldman sketch. There was a cricket game,and someone batted the ball so hard,it did a complete orbit of the Earth. Does anyone else remember this?
Ta Ta
Marky B

I once shot an elephant in my pyjamas - how he got in my pyjamas,I'll never know

stevie boy

Steve, I really have no idea what your favourite collaboration would be??

Steve Crook

I wonder ...
But it's a great way to describe the power of good collaboration, whoever it's between

Steve

Mr Cosmo

I always remember Arthur Askey mentioning him in THE GARNETT SAGA saying "Very nice fella - very courteous - always dipped one of his eyes so as not to dazzle oncoming pedestrians."

ShirlGirl

I like these two Feldman quotes...

"I won't eat anything that has intelligent life, but I'd gladly eat a network executive or a politician."


"Money can't buy poverty."

essaljay

I remember him being interviewed and was asked the question "how much do you smoke?" to which he replied "two a day". After a pause the other chap said "is that two cigarettes or two packets a day" to which Marty replied "two lighters".

Steve Crook

So that's (probably, possibly) where the late, great Bill Hicks got that line from
One of his lines in his rant against non-smokers, particularly reformed ex-smokers was "I'm not really a heavy smoker any more. I only get through two lighters a day now."

A sample of his work
Warning: Adult material

This one's also got his piece about the Tennesse Waffle House

Steve

Angela87

Yay Marty Feldman! Good to see some nice discussion about him. That recent BBC 4 documentary, "Six Degrees of Separation" was awesome, wasn't it?

Quote:

Not Marty's Autobiography....he was married for 23 years, until his death, to this very beautiful woman.... Marty's eye thing happened to him in adulthood, as a result of a thyroid operation....he hadn't always looked that way...and it obviously didn't bother Lauretta....

It's so true. Lauretta's beautiful and she and Marty seemed great together. I liked that the BBC 4 show showed some cute clips of them. We don't oft hear enough about Marty...the romantic. It seemed a sweet relationship.

And for the record, as a female fan of the comic, yeah...say what you want, but I think Marty had it going on. Nothing unattractive about the man as far as I'm concerned.

That's interesting about Marty writing a more pathos bit for "The Magnificent Seven Deadly Sins". I know I've read about a pilot he wrote, called "Here I Come Whoever I Am" or something, where he also attempted to be more tragicomic. It was a similar premise...this shy guy who wanted to find love.

I think Marty had an element of the melancholic, that sort of cliche that comics aren't often the most "wahoo yay life!" kind of people...but I wouldn't say it was as grand, or as big an issue as for some others. He just seemed to acknowledge his hang-ups, and insecurities and saw a bit of the oddness in how with comedy you're inviting people to laugh at you. He had hilarious, manic energy in many of his performances...with mischief. But many of them also had an obvious mark of sensitivity as well. I've always thought that he had an obvious vulnerability that couldn't be hidden.

That's a classic quote about the smoking. "two lighters" haha.

Marty was wonderful and as an aspiring writer, I've always wanted to put something together on him. Why, oh why, does he not have a biography?

If any are interested, I do have a MySpace page on him:

MySpace.com - Marty Feldman Tribute Page - 20 - Female - New York - www.myspace.com/feldmanmarty

penfold

The other thing that struck me, watching the Six Degrees film, was how old he looked in the interview conducted on the set of Yellowbeard. He wasn't fifty, and yet could have passed for seventy. How come no-one realised he was ill?? Very sad.
He did seem very different off-stage, very laid back, very calm....perhaps a result of the jazz tobacco, but a different view to his screen persona. He was a little older than the Python team, but he could easily still be with us now....what might we have missed out on??

Bit of a Bay Window, what??

christoph404

He certainly looks older than his 49 years in that interview, but was he ill though? Reports of the time say the heart attack was totally out of the blue and was brought on by a severe case of food poisoning. I guess all the ciggies and the reputed 20+ cups of coffee per day wouldn't have helped , though I think he was feeling quite stress free and happy to be an actor in a movie for a change without the pressure and responsibility of being a director as well which is what he had been doing the past few years in Hollywood. Maybe the stress of all that caught up with him but I would assume actors undergoe a medical for insurance purposes before location filming. Anyway, a sad loss and way too young.

Angela87

It's interesting that you should say that. I don't know, this may sound silly, but I think the clip they showed wasn't the best. I've watched the full "Group Madness" making of Yellowbeard movie where he's interviewed and he looks a lot better in that. But I get what you mean...I think "weathered" would be a good observation.... And it's ironically sad how he was just happy to be able to not have to deal with being "in charge" of everything...and not having to be as stressed about it all resting on him. He'd been through a rough time in Hollywood and I think it's sad that he died when he did, because he seemed to have finally sort of "weathered the storm" so to speak, and was ready to just kind of go back to doing things the way HE wanted to again....

Which brings me to my next point. I don't know if anyone else will agree with this or not, but being a huge John Lennon fan, I see such parallels between he and Feldman...in the bad timing, and bittersweet ironies of their deaths. Lennon had been going through some things, and then had just given up music completely for a bit, etc...but one of the things he said about "Double Fantasy" was how it was great to go back to his roots, and feel like he was 15 years old again...in that then he wrote and made music because he WANTED to, it was FUN...not because he had to or because such and such studio needs x number of albums a year and x number of singles, etc. He was really looking foward to having fun again, and doing things like he used to. I think Feldman was much the same way. He said in an interivew during "Yellowbeard" that he felt he got "caught up on the tail of the comet of success..." and how that made him "lose the qualities that initially made me a writer to begin with.", etc. I think he followed his dreams and accomplished some of them, which is wonderful, but he also found a want to go back to his roots, write more, be less "I have to have this...I have to have this...etc". So it's very sadly ironic with the two of them, how they seemed to have been through the rough stuff...and had plans for the future. Lennon seemed more blatantly happy and on a real high than Marty, but I think the parallel really exists. I always have found it interesting, being a fan of the two of them. I'm sure it's like that for many artists who die young though.

It is interesting to ponder what Marty could and would have done. I'd say plenty. The trouble was that when he died...he was sort of at a lull in terms of his career. But had he lived, he totally would have bounced back. It would have been great. He probably would be a kick ass old man too. When I watch those sketches where he plays the mischevious old guy (like with Tim Brooke Taylor in his show) who annoys other people for his own entertainment...I think yeah, I could see that being part of a daily routine haha. His whole outlook about old age could be very different depending on the interview - which, of course, just makes him like the rest of us...human. There was something I read where he said he didn't want to live to be old because, you know, you'd be too old to take pratfalls and stuff. But then there was another much more optimistic one where he talked about how he wanted to be a grand old man, who didn't shave, muttered, messed about in the garden, and sat on the park bench feeding the pigeons.

The circumstances with his death do seem to be cause for discussion. Sure, you could take the easy way out and be like "Yeah...he smoked, it was bad, etc", but I think the more realistic reason was where he was. I'm not knocking Mexico or anything like that, but I've heard and read several things that lead one to believe that it was just, how do we way this, "shotty prodcution" in terms of medical attention, etc. They asked for an ambulence, it took almost three hours to get there, etc. Also, people have mentioned how while he wasn't sick or anything, he did have a bad fall doing a stunt, which supposedly hurt pretty bad.

Marty's wonderful but there certainly are some tragic elements to the whole thing. The general consensus among people who were there when it happened seems to be that really more could have been done, and had he been somehwere else, he may have lived.

And he totally seemed very different off-screen. Gene Wilder has called him "the shyest man I've ever met"...and I think that seems a pretty good assessment.

Well, alas the topic is interesting...one could go on forever.

penfold

Well, they do say the secret of comedy is timing...but I think his death came at a particularly poor time (Is there a good one?) as he had the ability and track record to do as Peter Cook did, and become a father figure, patron saint almost, of the next generation of comics, the alternative bunch. His sixties work prefigured much of what became fashionable in the years after his death...he was ripe for rediscovery.

Bit of a Bay Window, what??