Entertainment Book / Memoir Memory Gaps (1)


I’ve written an

entertainment book

– a showbiz memoir really – and I have some confessions and apologies to make about people I accidentally left out or inadvertently misremembered. Actually there are three of these autobiographical volumes; a so called “celebrity book” (because of all the stars I worked with), a TV commercial/film production book and a love story of divorce and remarriage set within my third career as a video editor and director.

These tales span seventy-five years so as you might expect there are way too many corrections and apologies to be made for one blog posting so there will be more of these as we go along and I remember stuff or get reminders from readers who also happen to be among the cast of characters in my personal drama.

I’ll begin with apologizing to the fine performer and colleague, George Marcy. An accomplished dancer/singer in his youth, George developed into a fine actor and has the resume to prove it. We worked together in my first NYC Off-Broadway show, Hang Down Your Head and Die fifty-one years ago.

George Marcy in "Hang Down Your Head..."

George Marcy in “Hang Down Your Head…”

This the only pic we have of George (r) from HANG DOWN YOUR HEAD AND DIEIt is with Michael Berkson. I think it was scanned from a newspaper.

I wrote a blog post about that show almost exactly a year ago but in the book, I didn’t mention George by name. As you’ll see, I corrected the omission in the post. Here’s part of that excerpt:

“… Near the end of the show there was a scene where Ragni (as the condemned) was to be taken from his cell by four “warders” and marched to the scaffold to be hanged. This action was accompanied by the reading of a description of an actual hanging. The direction was that one warder was behind him, one each at his sides and the fourth (me) in front of him just inside the cell door. As the guy behind him took his hands to shackle them behind his back Ragni was to “go berserk” and try to escape. Fine, we could choreograph that. But no, [the director] Murray and Ragni wanted to “do it naturally”. They said that there were four of us and one of him so he should just do it and we should react.

“At that point I said, “Wait a minute. You want Jerry to go crazy, try to get away and then you want us to ‘naturalistically’ subdue him and carry him out. Is that what you want?” Both Ragni and Murray enthusiastically said, “Yes!” I replied, “Okay, I just wanted to be sure.”

“We got into position, the guy behind him [George Marcy] grabbed his hands and Jerry went nuts, flailing his arms and trying to run past me. I put my head in his gut and tackled him, as a linebacker would tackle a running back, slamming him to the hardwood floor and knocking him out cold. Now Murray, the stage manager and the other actors freaked out. As someone attended to the groggy Ragni I said to Murray, “Is that what you want eight times a week?” I had made my point. I received silent nods of approval from my fellow actors. After a short break for Jerry to recover we properly and carefully choreographed the escape attempt.”

So George, I’m sorry that your name escaped me when I was writing that story but here we are three years after publication and the correction has finally been made.

Get Three Stages & read more.

Tags: ,

Comments & Responses

Comments are closed.