movie memorabilia – Page 5 – Boy Outa Brooklyn

Stains on the Casting Couch

Cover of Picturegoer magazine July 14, 1956 — **It was an old story in Mary Pickford’s day!**

This is the seamy, sordid, demeaning crap they don’t teach in any Temple of the Dramatic Arts. And, actresses have it much harder than actors. There are more of them chasing fewer roles in fewer castable years. The casting-couch offers them a horizontal method of climbing up to stardom. As long ago as the silent film era, the saying among the liver-lipped movie-moguls was: “Don’t cast ’til you see the whites of their thighs.” And, that’s how so many of the ambitious, naïve, venal, vulnerable women who are drawn to show business become damaged goods. Many of them develop a carapace of iron. But, look closely and you can tell from the way they carry themselves and smoke their cigarettes that they are anguished creatures. You see them at movie premiers working as escorts for powerful industry trolls. You see written in the thought bubble above their expensively coiffured heads, “It wasn’t meant to be this way.” Tough broads. Walking wounded.

The Perils of Show Business - Picturegoer magazine July 14, 1956 — Every bus, plane and train heading for NYC and L.A.
was/is loaded with casting couch fodder.

One of Manhattan’s top socialites says to me as we look over a glittering crowd at a charity gala, “There’s a lot of midnight-money in this room.” The room teems with failed actress/model/beauty queens and their troglodyte husbands – their former tricks. Midnight-money. Great phrase.

Boy Outa Brooklyn a murder memoir by Jack Antonio
Image: The smiling face of Steeplechase Park in Coney Island, Brooklyn. — Available as a paperback and eBook amazon.com
amazon.co.uk
And as an eBook here
https://books2read.com/The-Boy-Outa-Brooklyn

What’s my motivation?

Rajneesh aka Osho — **“Please to be giving me a stack of $100 bills this high.”**

Method Acting teachers are seen as gurus and they embrace this mantle: “I am the great Father Figure, Witch-Doctor, Shrink, the Font of All Wisdom, the Repository of All Knowledge, the Giver of Pleasure and Pain.” No surprise their schools become personality cults. No surprise these cults are especially attractive to young women who have little self-esteem and big “Daddy” issues. The Guru demands that the student emotes at all times. The student is not having a successful scene if the student is not having a nervous breakdown – even if the scene is from Mary Poppins. Simply put – “If you ain’t crying, you ain’t acting.”

Julie Andrews as Mary Poppins — **Oh, daddy, take my money and then take me.**

One Guru held his entire class captive for two days because one student had not prepared a scene. Two days. No food. No phone calls. No talking. Limited toilet breaks. Very limited. Meanwhile, across town, a revered female Guru sent her students out to pick up strangers in bars and have sex with them – in the midst of the AIDS epidemic. And, people fought to get into these classes.

Boy Outa Brooklyn a murder memoir by Jack Antonio
Image: The smiling face of Steeplechase Park, Coney Island, Brooklyn — Available as a paperback and eBook
amazon.com
amazon.co.uk
And as an eBook here https://books2read.com/The-Boy-Outa-Brooklyn

The Russians Are Coming!

An Actor Prepares by Constantin Stanislavski — **The Bible of bad acting.**

Acting has always attracted the delightful but also the dim, the desperate and the deranged. ‘Twas ever thus. My parents were delightful, stage-struck, Italian kids from Brooklyn when they met in a Manhattan acting school in the 1930s. It was a time when the New York theater was crawling with Russian émigrés all of whom claimed to have been former members of Constantine Stanislavski’s renowned Moscow Art Theater. Stanislavski invented “Method Acting” and every one of the Russo-invaders claimed to have been his mentor – “And, I told Constantine he vas wrong about the emotive mimetic.” Manhattan sheltered more of these borscht bullshitters than the number of baby-boom bullshitters who claim to have seen Jimi at Woodstock.

And, every Boris and Svetlana ran an École de Théâtre in a drafty loft on Delancey Street or a Temple of the Dramatic Arts ensconced in a dank basement on Bleecker. One teacher would dampen the wooden floor of her studio with a garden hose then turn up the heat, thereby creating a steam-room. Her students disrobed and lay down on the floor to do esoteric Siberian breathing exercises. “It is imperative to open and breathe through all the orifices of the body at once.”

Racy stuff for then and total bullshit for always.

Russian actress and method acting teacher, Maria Ouspenskaya. — **Open your bodily orifices, or else!**

Boy Out Brooklyn a murder memoir by Jack Antonio
Image: The smiling face of Steeplechase Park in Coney Island, Brooklyn — Available as a paperback and eBook amazon.com
amazon.co.uk
And as an eBook here
https://books2read.com/The-Boy-Outa-Brooklyn

The Wild One

Tony Unbatz, the top punk on my block, is known to be, as his Italian nickname implies, crazy – “batz.” He’ll do anything on a dare and more without one. He’s a skinny kid with a nose bigger than he is. He weighs at most a hundred and ten pounds soaking wet and since he’s drenched in beer that’s what he weighs tonight. Tony dresses like Marlon Brando in The Wild One – motorcycle jacket, boots and garrison belt. And, like all the Juvenile Delinquents in 1950s America, he apes Brando’s schtick – “Don’t bug me coz I’m a sullen, sensitive, tough-but-tender, misunderstood punk-poet.” The juvenile delinquents of Brooklyn even try to mimic Brando’s Southern accent from The Wild One. When Beatlemania hits Brooklyn, the punk-poets of that era attempt a Liverpool accent, “Toydy toyd and toyd meets the Moysey.” Brooklyn rock bands have to pretend to be English to get gigs and so they name themselves – The Churchills, The Cuppa Tease and The Chamber Pots.

AD for a Beatles wig circa 1964 — **Just like the real thing…sort of**

The Brooklyn Boys vs. The Boy Scouts

Norman Rockwell painting of a nice Boy Scout — **Not in my troop**

We are a blue-collar Scout troop without a full uniform between us – more Bowery Boys than Baden Powell. We don’t buy our gear at the official Boy Scout store which is strictly for fagateers but at the Army surplus stores on Canal Street. Who cares if our canteens leak and our hatchets shatter? They are what General Patton’s soldiers used and that’s all that matters.

Only once is our tough-guy veneer pierced. It is when we encounter a disfigured boy who pitches his tent right next to ours at a Boy Scout Jamboree. The merit badge sash he wears across his torso contains more badges than our troop has won in its entire history. He is also an Eagle Scout and a member of the Order of The Arrow. This is like being a Green Beret and a Navy Seal. He is tall and well built. But, atop his perfectly formed body sits the most deformed head and face I have ever seen. His skull is squashed, elongated and lopsided. His features are randomly stuck onto the front of it like the plastic ears, mouth and nose of a Mr. Potato Head – a Mr. Potato Head who has been dropped from a great height. He has one misshapen ear on top of his skull and another down near his chin so that his glasses hang on his face in a vertical rather than horizontal line. His eyes, nose, and mouth are not much more than holes. Imagine the face of Charles Laughton in The Hunchback of Notre Dame drawn by Picasso then put through a wood chipper.

The Bowery Boys Meet the Monsters — **We weren’t as tough as we pretended to be.**

Attack of the Blessed Virgin Mary

“Catholics also believe that the Blessed Virgin appears to mere mortals in various times, places and languages. The most famous Marian apparitions, not counting her many miraculous appearances on moldy pizza, dried toast and wet cardboard, are –

Our Lady of Lourdes (France)
Our Lady of Guadalupe (Mexico)
Our Lady of Fatima (Portugal)
Our Lady of Bayside (Queens)

“Like the Little Green Men who pilot flying saucers, Mary appears only to illiterate, poverty-stricken, scrofula-ridden peasants who sleep with their livestock. Hence, her appearance in Queens. There is a theory that the BVM is, in fact, the occupant of a UFO misinterpreted by Catholic shepherds in the only way that makes sense to them – ‘Hey, Esteban, look, up in the sky! It’s a bird. It’s a plane. It’s the Virgin Mary.’

Movie poster of Invasion of the Saucer Men

BVM or BEM – coincidence? You decide.

Boy Outa Brooklyn a murder memoir by Jack Antonio — Available as a paperback and eBook
amazon.com
amazon.co.uk
And as an eBook here
https://books2read.com/The-Boy-Outa-Brooklyn

The Curse of Christine Keeler

Poster for Hammer horror film - The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) — Classic *monstah pitchah*

The Curse of Frankenstein jump started my interest in all things English, especially English knockers. Puerto Rican girls were sexy but I expected them to be since they wore hot socks and had hair on their cha-chas from birth. English girls were sexy coz they weren’t supposed to be but especially coz they talked good. The fact that a woman could speak like the Queen and fuck like a spic drove me and my friends crazy.

Our obsession reached fever pitch with the Christine Keeler scandal in 1963. We were still sitting on the stoop but were now sitting atop fully descended testicles. We loitered there at night waiting for the next day’s tabloids to be delivered to Rocco’s Candy Store. We smelled the headlines coming over the Brooklyn Bridge then raced each other down the block to get our hands on the photos of Christine and her sidekick Mandy Rice-Davies. These two young women – English women, actually DID IT and didn’t think it was matter for Confession. We punched each other black and blue in debates about which of the pair was sexier. Most of us chose Mandy coz she was a blonde. No lie – no movie or documentary ever came close to capturing the level of interest the Profumo affair held for the pubescent boys of Brooklyn.

Mandy Rice Davies and Christine Keeler — *Doity* English girls who DID IT

The Curse of Hammer Horror Honeydews

Yutte Stensgaard in Lust for a Vampire (1971) — **Hammer Horror Honeydews**

In 1957, the year I made my First Communion, the Devil popped up on my shoulder at the movies as I watched the English “monstha pitchah” The Curse of Frankenstein. He jabbed me and whispered, “Pssstt. Hey, kid, check out da bazooms on dat babe sittin’ next ta ya!” I turned my head and saw a teenage honey “making out” with her pimply boyfriend. He was rounding Second Base and heading for Third. She was squirming around inside a tight, low-cut blouse. She had long black hair all the way down her back. None on top of her head. Just all the way down her back. (Sorry – Brooklyn joke. I couldn’t resist.) Her lush black ringlets cascaded to her shoulders. She had gold hoop earrings and insolent, red lips. She might easily have been Puerto Rican. And, damn, I’d left the mozzarella at home! This torrid teen may have been spoken for but thanks to her heaving-honeydews and the heaving-Hammer-honeydews on the screen, I was one randy seven-year-old packing a pocket-rocket.

Possibly Lysette Anthony in Hammer horror film — **Another near occasion of *sinematic* sin.**

Tropic of Éclair

Parisian street walkers — **Parisian “Ladies of the Evening” and afternoon and morning and…**

1984. I’m in Paris for the first time and having coffee with an American ex-pat lawyer. I timidly begin to ask him if he knows how…

“Stop,” he says, pulling out his yellow legal pad. “You wanna know how to approach a French prostitute. You guys are all the same. Don’t tell me, you read Henry Miller.”

“Uh, yes, but I not only read him, I feel a deep and abiding…”

“Yeah, right, so here’s what you do…”

And, he writes down the appropriate phrases that will signal to a “working girl” that I’m not a diaper-wearing, ax-murderer. Great. With legal paper folded in my pocket, I set off for the Rue St. Denis. It’s where the girls hang out and I do mean, “hang out.” They have so few clothes on there’s nothin’ left to hang in. They drift about the Rue lounging in doorways and smoking in that French way that makes all other smokers look like sissies. If you can’t find what you want on the Rue St. Denis you must be blind. In fact, I see a blind hooker with her guide dog. Who knows? Maybe Rover turns tricks, too. The Rue is the set of Irma La Douce in Technicolor and Smell-O-Vision – more kinds of prostitutes than Heinz has beans. Black. White. Yellow. Red. Fat. Skinny. Short. Tall. Nurse. Nanny. Housewife. Harlot. Granny. Girl Scout. Honest to God, I see a Granny-Girl Scout in handcuffs! The variety makes me dizzy. The ambiance scares the merde out of me.

Sex workers in Paris — **Girls trying to earn an honest crust.**

I Escaped the Luciferian Lipstick-Lesbo of London

Maila Nurmi aka Vampira — **Vampira in full vampiric flow**

The Twisted Trifecta of sex, salvation and stoop traps me in a London basement where I narrowly escape being sacrificed in a Black Mass. And, as often happens with all things Satanic, it begins so innocently…

I’m browsing in an occult bookshop and fall into flirtatious conversation about Sex Magick with the shapely owner – “So, have I got this right, the High Priest penetrates the virgin anally from behind while intoning the Lord’s Prayer backward?” (I’m shameless sometimes.) Prunella, the proprietress, is an odd and oddly interesting broad – double-barrel name, double-D rack and a double degree from Oxford in Wolfsbane and the Early Films of George Zucco. Not a bad looking babe aside from classically bad English teeth. (This is actually not seen much anymore. The Brits now have very good teeth but very fat asses due to their uncanny ability to assimilate the worst of American culture.)

The great horror movie villain George Zucco. — **George Zucco in full mesmeric flow**