Macbeth, truly a barrel of laughs
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Especially the punch line at the end.
But no, I meant him personally. He was great behind the camera. Shouldāve been more specific.
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I thought he was supposed to cloud other menās mindsā¦
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It gets funnier every time I watch it, and then I watch the 2nd one with guitar accompaniment: my stomach hurts and I canāt breathe. (Just now, I can type.)
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OK, I hunted for this and discovered that it was a parody commercial poking fun at the other budget wine labels (Masson, Gallo, Blue Nun). It doesnāt seem to be on youtube, but I found it here: Historic Films Stock Footage Archive: COM-161 at the 1:02:45 mark.
So, repressed false memory.
(Added: if you keep playing the video, the next ad is a delightful KayPro computer ad from around the same period)
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i hope people remember my being inconveniently drunk and belligerent as fondly
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There is a chance that was being done at the old Hollywood Stage, at 6650 Santa Monica Boulevard. When I first moved to L.A. in 1980 Orson Welles was doing some wine commercials there. My friend Monte knew the manager of the small sound stage, who I think went by the name of Flash. (Seriously.)
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Do you have a great stentorian voice? Because it is the contrast that makes this so funny. Makes me want to see film of James Earl Jones drunkā¦
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ALL
Hail, King of Scotland!
Flourish
MALCOLM
We shall not spend a large expense of time
Before we reckon with ā THE ARISTOCRATS!
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Heās just rehashing Titus Andronicus there.
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They always made it sound like he had mystic powers, but really he just bought them all shots.
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I donāt remember this particular ad in its finished form, but I remember seeing other wine ads featuring Welles, and my parents always used to joke about how hammered he seemed in them. Maybe he really was, and that doesnāt surprise me one bit.
Remember how celebrated the drunk used to be in pop culture?
Foster Brooks was a standup comedy star thanks to his sloppy-drunk persona (edit: the āLovable Lushā). And this was prime-time stuff. I havenāt checked but nobody would have batted an eye if they saw him on shows like Laugh-In, Sonny & Cher or The Flip Wilson Show. Edit: curiosity won and I checked. Looks like he didnāt appear on those particular shows, but was a regular on Bill Cosbyās variety show in the early 70s. No further comment on that.
Dean Martinās drunkenness, whether real, faked or real and hammed-up, was also seen as funny and endearing. I suspect today if a comparable celebrity regularly appeared drunk in public heād be pitied, scorned and mocked, sometimes all in the same breath. (Remember Paula Abdulās questionable sobriety on many of her American Idol appearances?)
Funny how times change. At least we can still get a laugh out of soused Orson Welles, because the footage isā¦ ahemā¦ vintage.
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āMrs. Pells frozen peas are chock full of pea-nessā.
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That and seeing a man who is practically canonized by every film scholar over the age of 50, slumming it in a domestic wine commercial and biting the hand that is feeding him.
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Reminds me of the mobile commercials with James Earl Jones and Malcom McDowell reading off the facebook comments of teenage girls.
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In latter days, Welles didnāt have much shame about taking fat paychecks for commercial work so that he could pursue personal projects, since it was hard to get Hollywood funding. He used the money from making crappy commercials to help make F for Fake, and, well, his last role was voicing a planet in the Transformers movie.
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But that sort of thing probably made the Cahiers du Cinema crowd wince a little. They practically turned Welles into their saint (along with Jean Luc Goddard for reasons I cannot possibly fathom).
Plenty of directors do commercial work so they can finance their personal stuff. Martin Scorsese made a regular habit of such things. It was the only excuse Clint Eastwood gave for the film āThe Rookieā (it allowed him to film White Hunter, Black Heart)
He was a laughing stock over his ad work at the time, too. Neither of these John Candy parodies gives any hint of boozing, but they really skewer his pomposity in settings where itās rather inappropriate. I have a vague memory of straight-up parodies of the wine commercials but canāt find any onlineā¦
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My only memories of the original commercials was one with Orson in a vineyard with a bottle in his hand saying, āPaul Masson. We will sell no wine before its timeā.
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