Landis and Rickles

Posted by Peter Smith
Don Rickles and John Landis first worked together in the late 1960s, on the set of the World War II comedy-drama Kelly's Heroes. Actually, "working together" might be stretching it a little. Rickles, then a sometime movie actor but already a stand-up comedy legend, was one of the movie's stars; Landis, not yet the director of National Lampoon's Animal House, was a teenaged "gofer" — "I don't know if you know this," he tells reporter Bruce Bennett, "but production assistant is a relatively new term" — who was at one point pressed into service to appear briefly onscreen as a nun. Twenty-something years later, Landis cast Rickles as a mob lawyer in his 1992 horror comedy Innocent Blood, in which Rickles got his throat torn out by a vampirized Robert Loggia and loaded into an ambulance by an emergency worker played by a creepily solicitous Dario Argento. It took them a long time to figure out how to top that. The answer: a documentary, Mr. Warmth, which covers Rickles's life and career and features performance footage of the eighty-one-year-old comic in action. "It took a long time for him to agree to let me shoot his act," says Landis, because the old trouper, who apparently isn't planning on going anywhere, was afraid that having his material captured on celluloid would kill his career. In the end, though, he agreed, and when he examined the footage himself, Landis thought that he seemed oddly rapt. "Finally," says Landis, "I said, ‘What is so fascinating? You've done this for years.' He said, ‘I've never seen me from behind!'" — Phil Nugent
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Posted Oct 18 2007, 01:00 PM
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