Category: Film (Page 2 of 15)

The Cher Autobiography and Biography in Interviews

February 18, 2024 / Cher Scholar / 0 Comments

So I continue to think about Cher’s in-progress autobiography, in both its book and movie form.

Just to note: cherscholar.com does have a Cher biography reference page. There have been only a few good Cher books despite the span of seven decades. The best writers have been J. Randy Taraborrelli, Mark Bego and Josiah Howard, although there have been some really great fan-created books as well. Check out the full list: https://www.cherscholar.com/books-2/.

After we last left this topic, Cher scholar Toby recommended I watch the Bob Dylan biography I Am Not There. And I should have watched it sooner because I really loved Cate Blanchett in Manifesto (it was very literary). And experimental biography is what I most liked about Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life.

But I guess you can have too many experiments going on because then it’s hard to evaluate the results of any single one. It’s like the scientific maxim to keep your hypothesis simple. Maybe this is true of art as well.

And due to too many experiments working their way through I Am Not There, to coin a Gertrude Stein phrase, there becomes no there there. But they were all interesting experiments individually, so let’s discuss them one by one.

(Let me know if I’m missing any.)

Experiment 1:

Biopics of music artists often suffer from impersonations instead of interpretations. This was the great failure of the one biopic of Cher we have already seen, And the Beat Goes On: The Sonny & Cher Story. It would be difficult to put on the skin of any iconic performer, but nearly impossible for the inimitable ones.

Why not experiment with multiples? Christian Bale and Kate Blanchette were my favorite Bob Dylans in I’m Not There. The deployment of multiple Dylans seemed like a genius solution to the problem of finding one actor who can hit all the different eras. Cher has already borrowed on this idea with her Broadway show and three Chers co-habituating and communicating throughout the entire story, albeit those Chers without name-brand interpreters.

And collectively, maybe multiple actors gets to the same point that a really good deep-layer interpreter would get to anyway, something beyond the surface level of looks and mimicry, something that can live above and apart from the person described.

I think Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Evita is a good example of this. And as I’ve said, the Fanny Brice musicals. Another actor can come in and embody the spirit without our fretting about lookalike and soundalike-ness.

To me that all seems like a red-herring at the end of the day (or the end of the soul, as it were) and so it makes the idea of multiples a moot point. Yeah, we’re all comprised of separate people. But we’re all also one person too.

Experiment 2:

I love the idea of entangling the myth of a life with its facts, myths created by iconic images and I’m Not There did that really well. And like with multiple actorly embodiments, this experiment plays on the idea of there being no “I” there or “no there there” as Gertrude Stein would have it.

And I think this dilemma is baked into the whole Bob Dylan thing so this experiment was not only the most interesting to me but felt very pertinent to its subject.

I think the very same issues play similarly into the Cher story, (most ideas formed about Cher are based on a few iconic images), so this would be an interesting experiment to borrow from.

Experiment 3:

The different Bob Dylans were also embodying Dylan’s own iconic mentors in somewhat interesting mashups: Dylan with Woody Guthrie or Billy the Kid or Arthur Rimbaud and this was probably one of the least interesting experiments for me. How much of you is what you love and admire? Maybe that’s its own movie right there. Because this is one experiment that requires more finesse than there is time for as one experiment of many. It just came across as too surface-level for me. One of my favorite quotes is from Charles de Gualle, “Don’t ask me who’s influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he’s digested, and I’ve been reading all my life.” It’s so complicated.

We all put on uniforms to walk through the world and we often borrow the clothes of those we admire. But what then? There’s a lot more to explore there.

Experiment 4:

Time shifts, which are interesting in any other postmodern depiction, but here they just felt too tangled up in all the other experiments, different times interspersed with different Dylans.

Experiment 5:

Let’s make it a musical, but just barely.

That all said I actually liked the movie. All the competing experiments just made the film extremely self-conscious as a biopic. That’s not a crime though. There were beautiful and interesting shots (which could save any flawed Cher biopic, by the way).

On a related note, I’m making my way ever-so-slowly through a bathroom stack of New Yorkers. My friend Kalisha recently gave me a more modern issue from July of 2023 because there was a short story in it that reminded her of Haruki Murakami, a writer we both like. In the same issue there was an essay by Parul Sehgal, “Tell No Tales,” about how storytelling has pervaded areas where it shouldn’t, like politics, office PowerPoints, religious screeds.

But also biographies. Sehgal says,

“The American poet Maggie Smith, in her new book, ‘You Could Make This Place Beautiful,’ notes wryly, ‘It’s a mistake to think of my life as plot, but isn’t this what I’m tasked with now—making sense of what happened by telling it as a story?’ She goes on, ‘At any given moment, I wonder: Is this the rising action? Has the climax already happened or are we not even there yet?’ It’s not just the unruliness of life that is ill-served by story and its corrective resolution.”

Cher only had one long-form interview last year while promoting her Christmas album on the 60-minute BBC special “Cher Meets Rylan.” It’s the last interview we have to talk about from that blitzkrieg of publicity and it’s relevant to our topic today because Cher had a few new biographical stories to tell in it.

Ryland calls Cher a s diva, icon, goddess, a pioneer in fashion. The fact that Rylan is so young he came to Cher from the song “Believe” sill seems incredible to me. Therefore the majority of the retrospective Cher reels were from the 1980s and beyond.

They talk about how much she loves London and how some of her outfits are on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum. They talk about her Christmas album and Cher says that because the songs didn’t really go together, she worried people wouldn’t “get it.”

She tells a story about her mother Georgia getting up on the roof of her house and nailing her shingles back on as an example of how kick-ass she was. Cher also said Georgia was talented, hysterical and Cher said she died so she could be herself again.

They talk about the dyslexia, the Cher sayings (“If it doesn’t matter in five years,” borrowed from her mother, and “I am a rich man.”)

Cher has been wearing fingerless hand-gloves for all of these interviews for some reason.

She tells a new story about running away at nine-years old with her friend Anita, first on a horse and then on a train. This has to be in the biopic. And it’s eerily similar to Dylan’s young train mashup-moment in I’m Not There.

She talks about playing all the boy parts in a backyard-like production of Oklahoma when she was in grade school. She covers her jobs at Robinson’s department store and the candy store with the old ladies. She talks about meeting Sonny in the coffee shop below the popular radio station, Sonny’s smile and how he wanted to make her a singer but that she was just loose energy at the time, not focused and really shy.

She notes that Sonny & Cher had five songs in the top 40 at the same time, some songs which were prior-nonhits re-released when “I Got You Babe” became a summer phenomenon.

Steaming has confused statistics like these. My friend Christopher recently gave me a phone lecture on the way the charts worked before and after streaming and how Taylor Swift just scored 26 songs at once on the Top 100.

Cher talks about how she used to make clothes with her friends and how Sonny was so game to wear whatever she came up with. “We thought we were beautiful. People thought we were grungy.”

And then strangely, we skip to 1979 to talk about Studio 54. The new shocking story there is how Cher once took Al Pacino to Studio 54.

It was hard for me to wrap my head around the idea of Cher and Al Pacino on an outing together (just like it is for me to get my head around Sonny & Cher singing late 1970s rock ballads).

Al Pacino was working on a Broadway play. A quick scan of his Wikipedia page and knowing the span of Studio 54 was 1977-1986, the play was either “The Basic Training of Pavlo,” “Richard III” or “American Buffalo.”

Anyway, after Cher invited him, he brought the whole cast, Cher says, and everyone had a great time except for Al Pacino who looked uncomfortable the whole night. Oh dear. Not surprising but quite an embarrassing Cher-date-fail for Al Pacino.

Cher talks about her acting in “Jimmy Dean” and how the actresses were great. She talks about being pen pals with her idol Audrey Hepburn. She says she doesn’t work for the accolades, that “you do work for the work” and the awards are a bonus. She calls Meryl Streep Mary Louise.

She again says she was dropped from two record companies and that the song “Believe” took a lot of people because the verses were not good. Rylan reminds us that “Believe” is still the UK’s biggest selling single by a woman artist.

Cher talks about her former place in Wapping where she was living at the time of recording “Believe,” that it was an old rum warehouse. Ryland says the song was crucial for a gay boy to hear, how he believed “this is the world I’m gonna grow up in now.” (That was actually very moving.) He talks about the song’s impact on the music industry. Cher says AI pisses her off.

So the technology thing is complicated.

Cher talks about how for her 1970s-era variety shows, she would meet with Bob Mackie for three hours each Wednesday and how Mackie was making one amazing thing after another. She still goes out in jeans. She’s still a jeans person. But she also loves wigs.

She says she met Elton John the first time he came to America and she found him adorable. They were all friends: Elton, Diana Ross and Bette Midler and she tells of a time they all went shopping in New York.

She says she’s lived a thousand lives, (she calls herself “older than dirt”) and that this is a biography problem. Rylan asks her if she’s had a fav Chera. She says she’s been written off in so many eras and accused of reinventing herself. She says she wasn’t reinventing; she was just out of work.

Massive New Year Cher Wrap Up

January 4, 2024 / Cher Scholar / 0 Comments

New Dolls

By the way, the new, blonde Cher FunkoPop is out. Sweet!

Christmas is Over

It seems the end of last year got pulled into the vortex of Cher’s Christmas album. And I must say, the convergence of Cher and Christmas was so thrilling to me that I ended up buying something like 31 copies of the album and not just because I was encouraged to buy multiple copies by that cynical practice of an artist releasing multiple covers on the same day, which is not a modern practice, my friend Christopher reminds me but one going back to rock albums of years past, including The Police (Synchronicity), Led Zeppelin (In Through The Out Door which apparently had 6 variants), Genesis (Abacab) and The Rolling Stones (Some Girls). Hardly, crass pop-album ventures those.

But anyway, everyone at the chile-relleno-making party got a copy as did everyone at my family reunion as did all my family and friends who I exchange with.

But I have a pretty draconian rule that Christmas stops on New Years Day, not on Epiphany (6 January) like many people extend it. It starts on Thanksgiving weekend (this year was an exception) and ends on New Year’s Day. I was out of town this New Year’s Day. Otherwise the ornaments would have been re-boxed already. And we have a snow storm coming now so I probably won’t get everything down until January 6. D’oh!

Anyway, we do need to wrap up two Cher interviews from last year in major magazines, the UK’s You magazine and its U.S. cousin Parade. The covers are even similar.

In You, Joanne Hegarty does a great interview with Cher, remarking on her “vast entourage: PR teams, record-company executives, make-up artists [plural] — even assistants to put on her wigs [again plural].”

The attention to the ring Alexander Edwards purchased for Cher at Christmas in 2022 is getting so much attention, it reminds us of the sapphire ring Sonny gave Cher that she wore throughout the late 1960s.

Hegarty says at the beginning of her piece, “an unexpected exchange tells me straight aways that this will be no bland, cold Hollywood interview.” [They talk about pants.]

“The first thing to report is that, at 77, Cher doesn’t have a wrinkle on her face. She’s had that ‘good work’ done that very few, wealthy people manage to pull off.”

[This is a cryptic allusion to the plastic surgery but in truth it seems a lot of people who see Cher up close with makeup are fooled but how good the makeup is (compare these to paparazzi shots of Cher without makeup), which may explain the fleet of staff around to do makeup. Cher was honest about it years ago on The Today Show where she joked that at her age the makeup has to be “troweled on.”

Cher says a normal day sees her up at 6 or 7 am (which conflicts with our idea of her as a night-owl). She says she has coffee on the veranda with Alexander if he’s over. Then she works out and goes to see friends or invites them over. “Just regular stuff.”

She lists her friends as Laurie Lynn Stark (of Chrome Hearts), Loree Rodkin (the jewelry designer), her sister Georganne and their new Russian friend Masha Adonyeva, an art collector and philanthropist.

Cher says “I am a godmother–and a fairy godmother–to so many.” Truth.

The articles seems interested in her imbibing habits. She says her friends tease her for being a “stick-in-the-mud” for not drinking more than an occasional glass of champagne. “I smoked with I was young but gave it up after I got pregnant with my son [Elijah] and never picked it up again.”

She calls Edwards “intelligent, kind, funny and very talented.”

Her career highlights she lists as singing “I Got You Babe” every week on her variety show with Sonny, doing her solo variety show. Oddly this interview tends to conflate different time periods, or maybe Cher is doing this. The period of leaving Sonny in 1974 then skips to “Believe” as if nothing happens in between but a manager dropping her. Later it happens again, converging the yearlong slog up to the success of “I Got You Babe” with the hotel-circuit days before the Sonny & Cher comeback of the early 1970s.

Cher says after leaving Sonny she wasn’t “looking forward to going on the road by myself because I had always been a duo. To be Cher without Sonny seemed impossible….When I was putting my own show and songs together, only then did I begin to feel myself.”

[We’re about to talk about just this time period in our next review of Cher’s shows in the late 1970s for the Take Me Home tour, the Monte Carlo TV special and Cher at Caesars special in the early 1980s,]

“People used to make fun of how extravagant my performances were, but now everyone is doing it.” Truth.

“I had so many people telling me every year that I was finished. You just have to keep going. I always think of myself as a bumper car. I’ll hit a wall, but then I’ll back up and go in a different direction. You always have to be prepared to step out of your comfort zone, always, always.”

Cher talks about making movies and her friendship with Meryl Streep from Silkwood, Nicolas Cage from Moonstruck and Jack Nicholson from Witches of Eastwick (“Jack’s wonderful–we’ve been friends for so long and he is always hilarious.”)

She tells a story about how men are much nicer to blondes than brunettes.

She talks about being married to Sonny and how it was “rough” because it was integrated with work. “I’d always do as I was told.” She talks about how Sonny discovered her singing while she was making their beds [before they were sleeping together and he was letting her live with him if she would clean his apartment] and he thought he was hearing the radio. Cher says, “My whole family used to sing songs when we got together. I thought it was what every family did.”

Cher has been saying since the 1970s and she says it again here, “If I hadn’t met Sonny there never would have been a Cher. I was just a young chick with all this insane energy that wasn’t channeled in any direction.”

Cher says she’s been an outsider before. She knows what that feels like. But as a famous person she doesn’t “want to go that many places now. I don’t go to Hollywood parties any more. I’m not doing the red carpet. Now I just like hanging out with my friends.”

She talks about her mother’s tough upbringing without a mother and an alcoholic father who she lived with on Skid Row in Los Angeles. Cher says her mother told her she was special back when Cher felt like an ugly duckling. “You have to trust me on this,” Cher says Georgia would say. This quote made me a little verklempt. A parent telling a child to “trust me” is so moving because it’s such a difficult situation full of tension (and disbelief) and one that Cher is going through right now with her own son.

She says Sonny was a great father to not only Chaz but Elijah. She said parenthood taught her that “I’m not the only person in the world. I was the center of my universe, but when Chaz was born in 1969, it was so exciting….I always wanted to be a mother, but nothing prepares you for it….you always try to be a mother to them, even if they want you to stay out of it. But sometimes you just can’t. They’re your kids.”

There’s a break-out discussion about Christmas where Cher admits she doesn’t cook. “The food is on an island in the kitchen…” She talks about how loud and rowdy the occasion is and how she loves to give presents. She reminisces about family Christmases and how she was the tinsel putter-upper on their family tree (“my sister would just plonk it on.”)

The article also brings up the record of Sonny & Cher having five singles in the top 50 at the same time, “an achievement equaled only by Elvis Presley and the Beatles.” (Is this still true, post streaming and Taylor Swift?).

The article also states that The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour was watched by more than 30 million viewers across its three-year run” and that Cher was “the first female singer in the U.S. to have four number ones at the time of “Dark Lady” and that the song “Believe” went to number one in 23 countries.

I love that Hegarty takes a picture with Cher and the magazine publishes it. I wish more print interviews would do this. It’s nice.

Nicole Pajer interviews Cher for Parade. “There’s the music, the singing, the dancing, the acting–and then there’s the ice cream. Cher talks about Cherlato…with just as much enthusiasm as she does anything else…”

In fact, Cher has been talking about how at Christmas everyone loves her mother Georgia’s cheesecake recipe and even that flavor has made it into the Cherlato line of products with “renowned Gelato artisan Gianpaolo Grazioli….Cher is in the process of making it available for others to enjoy outside of SoCal.” [Good news, because my most recent LA-work-trip has been postponed. Boo.]

Again they talk about Cher’s Christmas traditions including getting out all the childhood ornaments, her collection of Christmas plates (that she jokes take up half her pantry), and the stockings for her kids she needlepointed during the making of Silkwood. She talks about the expensive dolls and cowboy jackets and boots she and her sister received even though her mother had no money. She also remembered a fuzzy kitten her mother found for her with her name on it. She also has memories of watching It’s a Wonderful Life with her mom.

She says along with the amazing diamond ring Edwards gave her last year, she also received some beautiful handmade books from him. She says she worked on her Christmas album night and day for months. She says her new album will have songs Edward’s has found for her, another P!nk track (there was on Closer to the Truth called “I Walk Alone“) and Cher is working again with Sarah Hudson.

She jokes she wants to do a compilation album of her “greatest bombs.”

Pajer says, “Love it or not, Cher has stayed authentic to herself, doing things unapologetically her own way.” Thank you.

When Cher says about her hair color that “sometimes, it’s just so boring,” Pajer quips “says the least boring person on earth.”

The article lists some music and movie stats as well, noting that Sonny & Cher were once nominated for a Best New Artist Grammy in 1966 but lost to Tom Jones. Seems fair.

And that Cher’s first acting appearance was probably her 1966 The Man from U.N.C.L.E. guest stint with Sonny.

The Believe 25th Anniversary

Speaking of “Believe,” there have been articles and reminders in interviews about its 25th anniversary, including another boxed-set release on CD and vinyl.

NRP did a short piece. The article talks about auto-tunes influence with rappers and pop-singers like T-Pain and Jennifer Lopez. NPR reminds us, via a quote from T-Pain, that auto-tune cannot turn a bad song into a good song, “No, you’ve still got to make good songs. You can’t throw on Michael Jordan’s shoes and think that you’re going to be the greatest basketball player of all time. It’s just not going to happen.” [And haven’t the slow renditions of “Believe” proven that, really.] NPR plays auto-tune songs by Bad Bunny, Drake, Lil Durk and Sza. NPR talks about how auto-tune was created in 1997 by Andy Hildebrand but that his original algorithm was developed for oil companies “to use seismic data to map subsurface strata to find oil.” He won a Grammy award in 2023 for his invention.

I did break down and purchase the LP boxed set (although the album was already previously released on vinyl). It’s another disappointing box-set “retrospective” without any actual retrospection happening in it. The box set for It’s a Man’s World last year at least had the distinction of never having been released before on vinyl.

But fun colored vinyl, corralled remixes and an additional “exclusive numbered lithograph” do not a retrospective make, especially something so career-defining and industry-changing as this album was, it deserved an essay and behind-the-scenes commentary, artifacts and photos. Huuuge missed opportunity.

I mean I do like the compilation box sets, as I’ve said. But the box sets need a big hefty think-tank of a booklet to go with it. These feel half-assed and I felt guilty for buying it. Comparatively, I did not feel guilty buying 31 copies of Cher Christmas.

The reverberations of Believe, however, continue unabated and this remake by Alexa Wildish from The Voice last year reminds us that we have a good song in “Believe” without any of the technology (thanks to Cher scholar Michael for sending).

Deep Dive Into Good Times

October 16, 2023 / Cher Scholar / 0 Comments

So I’m not technically finished with the 1970s TV shows yet. I have a little bit of cleanup to do with those, thanks to some audio files Cher scholar Jay sent me a while back (and some full episodes to revisit and refresh).

And then there are the TV specials I’ve just started to review. I’m up to Cher’s show in Monte Carlo in the very early 1980s now (watched it last night), a show which marks an important new chapter in Cher shows. I’ll have that up soon.

And in the middle of all this, I asked Robrt Pela if he would sit for a conversation about the Sonny & Cher 1967 movie Good Times since its director William Friedkin has just recently passed.

And so that led to a deep dive into the movie which produced not only the conversation with Robrt but a scene-by-scene guide to the movie, probably a bit too much explication but there’s a lot going on in that movie so…

…so….we’re doing movies now.

But anyway, the dive into the movie revealed a lot of Easter Eggs, as Robrt calls them, and lots of meta-moments and commentary on show business, all under the sharp direction of Friedkin and colorful, mid-60s stylings of teen-Batman-culture.

I remembered the movie as a kind of sentimental, silly romp from childhood. But I found much more in there as subtext when I went back in for a closer look.

Cher Scholar and Robrt Pela Discuss Good Times

Cher Scholar’s Guide to Good Times

Cher History

October 9, 2023 / Cher Scholar / 0 Comments

One of the crazy things happening in Cher-scholarship right now is that as Cher is producing new material and engaging in new activities (charities, appearances, romances, etc.), previous works are still being experienced and re-evaluated. Cher stuff is rolling up and over itself.

Cher Films

From “Why Mask is a Much Better Movie Than You Remember” by Adam Lowes in The HotCorn

“The trend for applauding actors who ‘go ugly’ for a film is a rather reductive form of praise. It’s the true embodiment and total immersion of a character beyond their physical appearance which deserves the plaudits.” Lowes cites Charlize Theron’s characterization of Aileen Wuornos as an example.

He calls Mask a “poignant biopic…very low-key and dramatically unfussy…very much mirroring the no-bullshit approach and grounded attitude of Rocky’s protective mother, Rusty (played to utter perfection by Cher).” The article mostly focuses on Eric Stoltz’s performance as Rocky Dennis and “the character’s day-to-day struggle in being accepted. The masterstroke here, however, is introducing him as a slightly older and confident teenager, at home in his skin and popular at school” yet also a teenager where “all-too relatable moments of teen longing and vulnerability occasionally creep in….Stotlz’s Rocky really is an inspiration.” Lowes talks about the “heart-rending” ending, saying “Mask remains a superior Hollywood weepie….a film which refuses to dwell on suffering and sentiment, and instead embraces optimism and hop in the face of pretty insurmountable odds.”

from “Almost There: Cher in Mask” by Claudio Alves in The Film Experience

“Over the years, [Cher] has amassed a small but impressive filmography.” Her “bullheaded no-nonsense attitude. …Cher embodies Rusty like a complicated hurricane of abrasive motherhood.”

“One of Mask’s greatest assets is its reluctance to paint the main characters with broad strokes…allowing the shadows of their imperfections to enter the picture….Cher extruding enough radiant movie star charisma to turn the night into day. With a cloud of curly hair that could be alternatively described as a lion’s mane or an oxidized halo, Cher’s Rusty dominates every moment she’s on-screen [that’s Cher pulling focus] while never breaking into the naturalistic spell of the proceedings. Her magnetism feels organic, so tightly woven into the character’s essence, that we can’t discern where movie magic ends and honest humanity begins.”

Alves describes Cher as “brassy and loud, but never strenuously so…Watching her maneuver through the comedic possibilities of the scenes with earthy dryness reminded me of Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich….Cher is careful with her maternal affections and affectations….Mask never indulges in simple one-dimensional emotional tones despite the schmaltzy possibilities inherent to this story of disability and young death. In reality, nobody’s entirely a hero or villain, so neither are Rusty or Rocky. She’s cool as hell and tough as nails. She’s also an addict, capable of neglect, cruelty too.” Alves talks about the mother-son relationship as a “…an undercurrent of perpetual irritation to bubble over.” He says Cher’s “sculptural features and big eyes make for a gorgeous movie mechanism, equally able to project compassion and steeliness, warmth and glacial coldness,” [occasional descriptions of Cher as well]. “Her fury has interesting dimensions as well.” Alves talks about her facial representations of regret, spite, aching vulnerability and adds that While she’s often thought of as a singer first and foremost, Cher’s astoundingly nimble when it comes to playing silent reaction shots. It’s difficult to forget the bittersweet awe” (of the funhouse scene).

“Because of Bagdanovich’s downplayed empathy…Mask rises above a tricky premise and delivers one hell of an emotional wallop…Cher’s asked to perform an overwhelming cocktail of despair and material perseverance…in one show-stopping sequence, Cher goes through the many stages of grief, allowing us to see how her character survives the loss of her son.”

In the comments below the piece, readers talk about the public feud between Cher and Bogdanovich, the March release date hurting the movie. On comment quotes a long Bagdonovich interview where he says Cher was the most difficult person he ever worked with because, her surmised, she doesn’t like men. He speculates this is why she dropped all her surnames. (Cher has always said this was for her kids). Bogdanovich said Cher couldn’t sustain a scene, (Suspect-era criticism as well), but was very good in close-ups. In fact, he shot closeups than in any other picture he made, he says, because “her eyes have the sadness of the world.” Bogdanovich admits he didn’t like her, “She was always looking like someone was cheating her.” After about seven weeks, he claims, they liked each other better. But then he got mad at her again when she sided with the studio over the scene cuts and the music replacements.

Another commenter then retorts that Bagdanovich’s comments say more about him than Cher. Another commentor says “Hmm. Bogdanovich says Cher can’t act? And he cast Cybill Shepherd repeatedly in everything? Methinks he means that Cher is strong minded and has her own opinions…”

Another comments says Bogdanovich “version of events are always interesting, but his blind spot where women are concerned is well documented.” Another comments say “that conversation captures the uphill climb for respect that Cher had to climb” and the person reminds us that “Robert Altman, Norman Jewison and Mike Nichols never had a problem with Cher or dissed her acting ability” Another comment astutely comments that Cher would not have won for Moonstruck without this Oscar snub for Mask. “It gave her momentum.” Another comment says of Witches of Eastwick that “her charisma is amazing—the camera just loves her. I just think actors who have that startling quality always make some people less able to acknowledge their talent.”

Interestingly, Mask was the only Cher-look I tried to emulate, down to creating shoelace necklaces.

“Moonstruck: Cher’s 1987 classic is bizarre, hopelessly romantic and yet somehow entirely plausible” by Helen Sullivan in The Guardian.

Sullivan notes the “unsettlingly charismatic Nicolas Cage” and calls the movie a “glorious contribution to the romantic comedy canon.” She mentions a New-York-history podcast called The Bowery Boys who dedicated an episode to the movie. I’d love to hear this. Whenever anyone is looking for movies that feel like New York City, I always mention After Hours and Moonstruck for me. My neighbors and landlords in Yonkers all had apartments like the Castorninis with the plastic couch covers and the hallway runners. My employers and many of my co-workers at Yonkers Contracting were also all Italian and I used to be able to tell the borough accents apart.

“Like an opera, [the] characters each have specific themes they return to. For Loretta it’s luck—she believes her’s is bad. For Rose Castorini, it’s her believe that men chase women because they fear death.”

Sullivan says the movie contains many tropes of romantic comedies including the makeover scene. She concludes, “what makes it a truly wonderful film is that the lines are so incredibly surprising. Bizarre, deranged even, and yet somehow entirely plausible.” She says the movie is “human, true, funny—and hopelessly, gloriously romantic.”

Cher Music

I came across this I Paralyze review in Ultimate Classic Rock which starts out with the theory that “Cher is one celebrity who seems too big to fail. But in the late 70s and early 80s, she faced a string of musical flops.”

This is a good reminder that the niche-popular Cher of the early 1980s is not the solid worldwide iconic Cher of today. The article lists Cher’s previous 1970s record labels MCA, Warner Bros and Casablanca and says, “all of whom pushed her towards disco material.” This is inaccurate. Only Casablanca did this, as they was primarily a disco label. Interestingly, this article sketches out the pedigree of the musicians and producers: Steve Lukather (Toto), Howie Epstein (Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers), Desmond Child penning a song, producers David Wolfert and John Farrarr of Olivia Newton John’s then-massive(ly annoying) hit “Physical.” There’s a story about how much I could not stand that “Physical” song that runs straight through a series of random events involving my former sister-in-law Maureen to my eventually finding a Babys record in my brother’s stack of records. Which is ironic because there’s no mention of the covers on this album, one of which is a Babys song.

But anyway, the author Courtney E. Smith speculates the album flopped due to lack of support from Columbia Records, her label of one album (never really a good fit). Smith notes that there was no push to radio, no music video produced and because the album was never pressed to CD officially, the album has become a rarity. She mentions Cher’s lip-sync appearances on Solid Gold and American Bandstand.

She quotes producer Wolfert to say didn’t support “I Paralyze” (US single) or “Rudy” (UK single) as the singles and wanted “Walk with Me” instead. None of those three songs really captured the tone of the times, though. ‘Smith quotes Cher in a 1999 Rolling Stone interview saying her favorite singles of all time were “I Paralyze” and “Save Up All Your Tears” but Cher also said she “hatred the [I Paralyze] album because she “didn’t have anything to contribute, had no control, and hated the whole experience.”

This may also be the biggest reason why the album failed. Smith notes that as the album was released she was already filming the movie Silkwood and wholly focused on her acting projects.

I dug out of a stack of online articles I printed off but never read from about 20 years ago. Some fan compiled the Black Rose reviews (which are no longer online):

from Rock-A-Rama: “If the idea of Cher and Les Dukek making music together has you scratching your head in wonder, then the product of this seemingly unmeldable alliance’ll have you scratching your vinyl to bits as you race to get it off your turntable and out of the house. The first track is the only one that works at all…and Dudek can actually go through an entire song without having the great god of excess willing him into another boring solo.”

Stereo Review calls the album “Not Bad” and says “Cher is a show biz pro, and to stay in business she must adapt to the times.” Her foray into disco is mentioned. Her one album of New Wave Rock is also mentioned. “Black Rose is an attempt to emulate Blondie” [it is??] and other outfits with feisty-mama lead singers. [wha??] Many of these groups are produced by Mike Chapman or his associates, and sure enough…” “How long will the fad for foxy-chick neo-punk commercial groups last? Can Cher—our Lady of the Charts [she is??] find true happiness and an occasional Las Vegas booking on this route? No one can say, but—much to my surprise—I find myself rooting for her. I suffered through Cher’s monotone braying during the sixties, but during the seventies she got a little better and today she is no longer awful but quite capable.”

From Billboard: “Guess who’s gotten punked out now?…Cher’s vocals are emotional and full of life on the entire disk. Master guitarist Dudek contributes some sterling guitar playing.”

From People Magazine: “Cher’s quivering, over-mannered vocals…need all the help they can get and she gets more than she deserves. [The players] make this a musically fine album, their finesse however, unwittingly focuses attention on Cher’s shallow talents…Cher sings mostly on pitch and is likably raunchy when she growls. But she indulges—regardless of mood or tempo—the same tendency to pronounce simple words like some Elvis imitator in drag: heavy becomes “hay-vee”; parting becomes “pawting”; temperature is mumbled as “temp’chuhh.” In the word “split” Cher even discovers several entirely new vowels….This album could be vastly improved, rerecorded by the “Group with No Singer.”

(In case anyone has forgotten what mercilessly bad reviews Cher once received on her records.)

“Recording Cher’s “Believe” (1999) from Sound on Sound: This is an early 1999 article on the technical aspects of “Believe,” remarks on the “bizarre vocal processing.”

“For most of last year, it looked as though Celine Dion’s track ‘My Heart Will Go On’ was going to be the best-selling single of 1998 — but this accolade was snatched from the Canadian Queen of AOR at the 11th hour…” The [“Believe”] single spent “seven weeks at the top of the UK charts and…achieved sales of 1.5 million and rising.

The article marks the collaboration of two producers (from Metro Productions from Kingston, Surrey), six songwriters…and talks extensively through the song’s many rewrites, what the “brain crunch of a dance record” is, how producer Mark kept starting over. “This was tricky, because dance music is very specific. To get what I was after I had to think about each sound very carefully…it was really a question of finding, say, a kick drum that didn’t sound like a typical TR909 dance kick drum….wasn’t so cliched…compressed to give them a weird, pumping, smacking sound.”

The author says, “Mark believes one doesn’t need expensive technology in order to make a hit record” but then there’s three long paragraphs explaining in detail all the technology they used.

“Basically it was the destruction of her voice, so I was really nervous about playing it to her.” Although the vocoder effect wat Marks’ idea, the other obvious vocal effect…the ‘telephoney’ quality of Cher’s vocal…came from the lady herself—she’d identified something similar on a Roachford record and asked Mark if he could reproduce it.”

The whole thing took ten days. “Looking back, Mark says the most satisfying part of the project was getting to know Cher who spent six weeks in the studio working on the album…’I thought she might think our setup was a bit small, and that she would turn out to be a bit Hollywood. But she was really great and easy to get on with.” (but Peter Bogdanovich said…??”)

“Cher: Closer to the Truth” review by Kevin Catchpole from PopMatters:

“Cher has always been a polarizing force in terms of musical taste: those who love her often love her unconditionally, and those who hate her, hate her with a passion. She deserves credit for being able to laugh at herself…Not every pop titan who employs this trick has managed to stay savvy using this approach as the years have gone by (see also: Madonna’s trying-too-hard MDNA). And while the stomping, layered “Take It Like a Man” joins a first half of solid made-for-the-club cuts, here she uses, and perhaps abuses, the Antares vocal manipulation… it just feels over-done and it distracts from what are, at the core, still solid disco-ball-spinners done Cher style.”

“Some have called her vocal talents limited, this is only half-true. Having the ability to push your voice all over the scale and indulge in excessive flights of variety is not a talent all by itself (the real talent there is taking that range and using it to create a vocal performance that has depth and expression.) What this means for Cher is she knows what she is capable of, and she makes it into something beautiful. It is a little ragged around the edges at times, but this is the sound of careworn experience, not of a performer too long in the tooth who ought to hang up the microphone.”

“Cher Predicted Her Comeback with the Underrated It’s a Man’s World” from PopMatters:

“A cultural and musical shapeshifter…Cher’s vocals which often can sound like Presley (or at least an impression of Presley) [has made]…a collection of covers (originally recorded by male singers) as well as original pop tunes. …For a singer who thrived on camp bombast and kitsch bravado, the arrangements and vocal performances on the album were surprisingly restrained and subtle. Cher’s strange voice—that androgynous instrument with the stuttering vibrato—is often relaxed and sweet on the album’s wistful ballads…The relative neutrality of Cher’s voice, as well as her adaptability as an artist, means that if the material is solid, she’s a sure fit. It’s that adaptability that has lent Cher that legendary longevity (but it’s also kept Cher from establishing a genuine musical sound or persona – it feels as if Cher ‘sounds’ like whatever current iteration she’s inhabiting at the moment). That is why It’s a Man’s World is such an important entry in her discography because rarely has there been so much attention paid to songcraft on a Cher album.”

Cher is Cookin’

September 20, 2023 / Cher Scholar / 0 Comments

Christmas is Coming Early This Year!

A lot has happened in the last few weeks. Cher set a release date of October 20 for her Christmas album and unveiled a series of covers. And those covers seem to just keep coming. I suppose everyone has to draw their own line on how many different covers they need of Cher’s Christmas album.

On October 28 I’m starting a road trip to get to a family reunion in Cleveland. I should have my copies by then because guess what’s going in every family swag bag! Whoo-hoo! (They’re all also getting pistachio wine from Las Cruses.)

Anyway, Cher has been keeping quiet on the track listing of Christmas songs and regarding names of any duet partners, but in all the kerfuffle of the pre-order announcements, Amazon’s special-cover (my clear favorite of the three, by the way) was leaked with the little sticker on it. So now we know: Stevie Wonder, Darlene Love, Michael Bublé, Tyga and Cyndi Lauper.

I actually keep those little stickers from my Cher albums and CDs. I once drove a friend to Las Vegas from LA and this person opened my CD case for Heart of Stone, the sticker fell out, we lost it and I’m still upset about it.

Last week on social media, we saw pictures and clips of Cher’s house all decked out with Christmas trees and poinsettias and Cher was sitting with Darlene Love.

This duet is pretty awesome for a few reasons. For one, Cher and Darlene Love are longtime friends. When Darlene Love was in financial trouble, Cher hired her for one of her concert tours.

Also, they both sang on the famous Phil Spector Christmas album back in 1963 (Darlene Love soloing and Cher as part of the backup crew) so they have Christmas history together.

And finally because Darlene Love has done some of my favorite Christmas songs, her Home Alone song and the fun one she did with Ronnie Spector.

Apparently the new clip is for an upcoming episode of The View but it seems too early to be shooting appearances for future talk shows. But maybe Cher will start promoting the album in October. Would it be hard to whip up a Christmas TV special like Mariah Carey does? Easy, right?

Darlene Love and Cher through the years:

We know the song “Silent Night” won’t be on the album. Cher has said that about a million times. She also likely won’t redo anything she’s already done (my 2021 breakdown of Cher Christmas moments).

To find all the formats and covers: https://cher.lnk.to/Christmas

Recent Interviews & News

A really good recent interview was in the Hollywood Reporter. They call her “the world’s most recognizable mononym.”

On Music and Movies:

The most common quote she gets from strangers is still, “Snap out of it.” She still gets that “over and over!”

Last week, people were reporting Cher’s name has shown up under the IMDb.com entry for a film called Hail Mary, a football movie staring Jennifer Aniston. Her character name is Roxy Fields. I’m getting a football franchise owner vibe on that.

We found out Cher just sold her music catalog to Irving Azoff. “Well, everybody’s doing it. (Laughs.) I get to keep everything from Believe on, so I’m fine with it.”

In captions on the article we find out October marks the 25th anniversary of “Believe” and April the 35th anniversary of Moonstruck.

About auto-tune, Cher says she had a hard time with the song and producer Mark Taylor kept asking her to sing the verses better until she finally said, “If you want it better, get somebody else” and stormed out. This is artistically preferrable to walking out over a broken manicured nail as would have happed in 1972.

She says, “the record company didn’t want to do it. They said, ‘You can’t tell who it is.’ I went, ‘Yes, I know, that’s the beauty of the whole thing!”

Let’s just sit with that for a minute. Imagine having a voice so identifiable that you feel disappearing from it to be beautiful. Just think about that for a minute.

On Elephants, Ukraine:

Cher is still working to save Billy, the LA Zoo elephant (and the elephant that started her captive animal advocacy). It’s so shocking that the zoo has been confronted with so many recommendations and that 40 other U.S. zoos are phasing out elephants but they refuse to budge. Cher says it took five years of legal work to save Kaavan from Islamabad. And Billy is still showing psychological distress so she’s not giving up on him. She’s asking people in Los Angeles to “bombard the [LA] city council” because “the citizens of LA essentially own the zoo but don’t have the authority to influence the decision making.”

She talks about saving six lions, a panther and a tiger from Ukraine right before the war broke out. “We left the bear, so we had to sneak back in with a big pickup truck and get him out during the war.”

On the war itself, she says, “We’re helping them fight the war so that Russia doesn’t go in and take all the NATO countries. I don’t think a lot of people in Congress understand or realize that, but [the Ukrainians] are doing us a service.”

She also talks about her first dog, Pansy, and her beloved cat Mr. Big who she rescued while on tour at a two-day stop in Detroit.

On Twitter:

She laments the changes on Twitter, the disabled Tweetbot that was helping her dyslexia. “I went to Threads, so I’m on both now. I used to love going on Twitter.”

Me too, Cher. Me too. I’m using Facebook now but there are many more ramifications. I even have much better feedback on Facebook but that’s not the point. I miss talking to strangers.

On Cherlato:

During the Hollywood Reporter interview the Cherlato truck was at the Taylor Swift concert. Cher says they have many flavors but the truck can only support about five at a time. Her favorite is chocolate. “I’m pedestrian,” she says. “When I saw the [edible] gold cones, I almost lost it. I wanted to wear them as earrings.”

On Her Life Stories:

The interviewer, Mikey O’Connell, asks her if she’s still amazed that a news story transpires whenever she leaves her house (my paraphrase). Cher talks about bad periods in her career, periods that would make anyone else give up. “I didn’t quit,” she says.

When asked about performers she likes, she refuses to use her position to single out anyone “because there are so many great people right now. When you single out one of them, it just diminishes everyone else that’s working.”

That’s a good answer.

She’s starting over with her bio-pic. That doesn’t sound good. I hope she’s not been firing a succession of directors. But in any case, she says “we’re going to have to wait [for after the strikes]. I’m not going to go against my people.”

She keeps saying “my people.” I don’t think she means that in the royal sense, but like in “my squad.”

Her autobiography is still not done. The big problem with these projects, she says, is how long her life has been and how hard it is to squish it down into a story. That is a challenge.

Her House:

She finally explained why she’s been trying to sell her beautiful Malibu house. “You can’t be flexible in this house — as much as I love it.” I think this means it stifles her decorating creativity.

Someone did a little article solely about Cher’s Malibu entryway: https://www.homesandgardens.com/celebrity-style/cher-entryway

There was also a Good Morning Britain interview where we find out that Mama Mia doesn’t even have a script yet. And Cher is not committed to it. On this interview she claims she’s never had duets on her albums. That might sound odd when she had a Peter Cetera duet on Heart of Stone and all of those with Gregg Allman and Sonny duets. I think she means she hasn’t made it a habit on every album or hasn’t done The Duets Album, like Tony Bennett.

Cher’s Tuna Pasta Salad

In other Cher cooking news, way back my sister-in-law Susan sent me an article online about Rock-and-Roll recipes that included Cher’s tuna pasta salad and wanted to know if it was any good. So I dug out my Cooking with Cher cookbook and found the same recipe there and made it.

So this was back when the fad was to make everything fat free. People aren’t doing this anymore. Michael Pollan has said in his book In Defense of Food that the fat-free craze just made us fatter. And we need some fats as it turns out.

The recipe tasted….well fat free.

I still hope we’ll get a Sonny cookbook someday and a maybe new more-fat-ful Cher cookbook.

Cher….and Other Fantasies

I’ve finished reviewing the final TV Special from the 1970s. It took a long time, was often hard to describe and this one had a lot of context:

https://www.cherscholar.com/cherand-other-fantasies/

Cher, The Partridge Family Album and The Great American Themes

July 11, 2022 / Cher Scholar / 1 Comment

As I started working on this post last Friday, I wasn't sure which blog it would end up in (the Cher blog or the poetry blog). I feel the topic is halfway between writing the great American story/novel/movie/song/poem and the Cher blog where I could start to talk about Cher’s major career themes. I decided on the later since I’m starting to work on a Cher book divided by categories which are much more generalized and less specific than the Great American Themes but that are worth looking at through the kaleidoscope that is Cher.

To date I’ve finished reading 61 books on pop culture topics. Which is nothing, by the way, a drop in the bucket in the proliferation of pop culture scholarship these days. Academic Pop Culture Studies have exploded in the last 30 years, ever since “the Madonna essay.” We can get degrees in this now? Indeed. Not when I was a kid.

But pop culture pontificating has basically borrowed the existing think-tanking apparatus from the study of literature, which I did get a degree in so… yes ma, my indulgent book-club degree may just be of use here.

Here is a small sampling of the Cher-book categories to give you a taste of what the book will cover:

Feminism
- Women on TV in the 1970s
- Cher as Drag
High vs. Lowbrow Culture
- Camp Culture
Appeal as Gay Icon
Movies & TV
- The Male Gaze, MTV and the Female Gaze Looking Back
Power Pop/Girl Music
The Diva/Icon/Unruly Woman
Fan Culture

As of now there are 17 major categories. From the beginning I realized my weak spot would be writing about music, a category I don’t feel particularly knowledgeable about or good at writing about; so two years ago I started reading books around that, which led to a few minor obsessions: a search for Lester Bangs' essays, Lester Bangs' reviews of Sonny & Cher, and women writing about rock music.

It also lead to three rock histories, Good Booty by Ann Powers (a history of popular American music through the lens of sex), How the Beatles Destroyed Rock and Roll by Elijah Wald (worst click-bait title of a book I’ve ever seen…but nonetheless good alternative history of American popular music from a perspective of changing technology) and finally Mystery Train, Images of America in Rock and Roll Music by Greil Marcus. I was dissatisfied with the last book, only because the notes take up half the book and the meat of the thing only covers about five American themes:

Stagger Lee and the myth of the African American man as gangster
Everyman and freedom in the songs of Randy Newman
Pilgrims like The Band
Rags to riches and the country glamour of Elvis

But the book title does say "images" and not "themes" so my bad there. Anyway, this all got me to thinking about my own bigger list of the Great American Themes. And while I was wide awake last Thursday night it occurred to me most of the big themes are all oddly covered in the 1971 The Partridge Family Album.

Before I launch into these themes and TPF Album, I want to say a few things:

This was not my Partridge Family album. This was one of my brother’s albums. This thing came out in 1971 when I was 1 year old. Today both of my brothers refuse to cop to owning this thing but I am a witness to the fact that it was worn out by the time I got to it sometime in 1975. The cover was falling apart and the vinyl was worn and scratched already (and not by my parents, to be sure). Maybe it was neighbor kid Leewee's album (yes, that was his real name and we tend to blame him for things in situations like this). In any case, this was the first non-Sonny & Cher/Sesame Street/Mr. Rogers/Disney Storyteller album I listened to.
For years I’ve been confused about why I still like it and looking at the back cover again today on the Googles, I can see why: it was essentially a Wrecking Crew album. The initial Partridge Family “sound” (and I would add, the initial very creepy sound) was based on the Ron Hicklin Singers and The Love Generation. But when everyone learned David Cassidy could sing, he was promoted to singer…for many obvious reasons. The album's non-Cassidy songs reflect the sickly-sweet foundational sound.
I was too young to be a fan of David Cassidy. He was old hat by the time later-day Gen X girls were crushing on singers and so Sean Cassidy was much preferred as was Kristy McNichol's brother Jimmy, which girls were losing their minds over as I recall. I've also never seen a single episode of The Partridge Family. It wasn't syndicated in St. Louis by the time I was watching copious hours of after-school TV. And these days, I can't look at that patchwork bus for very long before I start to get a headache.

So anyway, back to the themes. I made a table:

Theme	Partridge Family Album Song That Applies	Other Literature That Applies
The great American shoot-out, guns		Any western or gangster film
Reinvention, self-help (Subtopics: failure, alienation, outcasts)	"Brand New Me"	Great Gatsby Light in August
Upward mobility, rags to riches, class (Subtopic: justice)	"Bandela"	To Kill a Mockingbird
The party, altered states, bottoming out	"Point Me in the Direction of Albuquerque" and "I Can Feel Your Heartbeat"	Infinite Jest
Nostalgia, the passage of time, the party’s over, loss of innocence	"Only a Moment Ago"	Blood Meridian
Driving, cars, wheels and rivers	"On the Road"	The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
The religious, spiritual quest, cults	"Somebody Wants to Love You"	Moby Dick
Self-actualization, identity (may not necessarily include a reinvention), general Me-ness	"Singing My Song"	Invisible Man
Pragmatism	"I Think I Love You"	Pragmatism by William James, anything by Ben Franklin
Survival of the fittest, The American Dream		The Grapes of Wrath, The Jungle

Anyway, the Cher-text does not cover many of these American themes, at least not in song lyrics. Reinvention (and its root-cause of failure) is certainly a career theme, as is alienation, social mobility, and nostalgia (through remediation of old material). The shoot-out cowboy does make an appearance (via Sonny’s songwriting) as does coming-of-age and the loss of innocence (in both Sonny’s cowboy and teen pregnancy songs) and Cher does have a few songs about traveling on airplanes.

More to think about there.

Friends of Friends of Dorothy (and a Missing Swimming Pool)

June 28, 2022 / Cher Scholar / 0 Comments

Last weekend I spent time with two friends on a trip partially to visit the Georgia O'Keeffe house in Abiquiu, New Mexico, something we all had tried to do back in March of 2020 but the pandemic started that weekend and the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum closed (which resulted in the creation of this thing).

This time we stayed at a guest ranch in Pojoaque, a place my family has been visiting for many years. Because I had been there before I was excited about taking a swim as soon as I arrived.

Crossing the grassy lawn in my swimmies, with a towel under my arm and a big coke in my hand, I suddenly came upon this:

Missing pool. Alarmingly missing pool.

Ten minutes later, while I was taking a very angry shower, I kept thinking "what does this remind me of? This reminds me of something."

And that's when it occured to me the missing pool, among a few other things that had delapidated a bit at the guest ranch, (the trail to the river was blocked by an ominous barricade of tumbleweeds), were reminding me of Sonny & Cher's cartoon visit to their honeymoon hotel with Scooby Doo. You know, the scene where Sonny is listing off all the amenities of the place (pool, tennis courts) and the caretaker is telling them all those things no longer exist?

Anyway, the guest ranch was not that bad but it was also not as good as previous visits either. Nevertheless, the weekend was beautiful; it rained most of the time through the cottonwoods and we hung out with peacocks, bullfrogs, goats, rabbits, burros and some very grumpy sheep while we had some deep conversations about life. We tried to feed the goats the day we left and they stole my friend's bowl from her hands and we had to stage a bowl rescue involving hanging her over the fence while the goats weren't looking. Good times.

Glamour shots of one of the bowl thieves.

Anyway, it just so happens my two friends are a gay couple and so we talked about recent (and possible upcoming) developments of the U.S. Supreme Court.

As a Cher fan, I have many gay men friends (and lesbian friends who are Cher fans too, as a matter of fact). Fag-hags was the derogatory term for us in the 80s. And all sorts of ideas proliferated about why we hung out with gay men, affection and shared interests never being part of the imaginative equations.

I was on a TV show once with a friend and many people thought we were depicted there as a gay couple there so Julie and I took to introducing the show to our new friends as Who Gets the Lesbians. (Edgar did. Edgar got the lesbians.) And although neither of us are gay, this never bothered me because it was actually more exciting than what was really going on in my life at the time; and if we had been gay, we would have been a very fun and interesting gay couple.

So for a long time I've been thinking about straight people in close relationships with gay friends. It should go without saying that having gay friends doesn’t mean you’re gay or on your way to being gay or that gay people are trying to turn you gay. Unfortunately, there are still folks out there who believe this.

And this all came up again last week when Cher tweeted a birthday wish to Meryl Streep and recalled the swing scene from Silkwood.

Although Silkwood is a very dry movie, (albeit one with an amazing cast), it's an unheralded example of a sweet relationship between straight and gay people. It depicts a very intimate and close relationship (one sometimes fraught with conflict) between Cher, who plays Dolly Pellicker, and Meryl, who plays Karen Silkwood, culminating very movingly in the swing scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDP_4UqslnQ

While I was at the guest ranch, I also came across this news story about someone else I'm a fan of, "Barry Manilow pauses Newcastle concert after 'rude' reaction to lyric." Even though Barry Manilow is a gay man, most if not all of his fans are straight women, even ones like me who knew Barry was gay long before he came out.

According to the story, Barry Manilow was singing "Weekend in New England," and as he was singing "when will our eyes meet/when can I touch you" the girls in the audience started to holler.

The article states, "Looking slightly flustered, Barry was momentarily speechless, before letting out a little chuckle and commenting: 'My hands are busy now!'"

If you watch the video, the aforementioned pause is miniscule, the rudeness is questionable and the comeback is quick.

Barry is used to the sexual innuendos in his shows. The Concert at Blenheim Palace in 1983 is a good example of the Barry tease and screaming girls. I watched it recently in 'slight' amazement that it worked so well considering didn't half of us know he was gay? His repartee was full of double entendres and the girls sounded like they were losing their minds while their boyfriends sat there stoically trying to go to their happy places.

In "Weekend New England" most people miss the obvious sexuality and Barry performs the climax more lustfully than he gets credit for, which I assume is because he's become a performer most people assume has no sexuality. We love to rob people who are different or 'square' or a bit goofy of their sexuality.

“When will this strong yearning end…I feel brave and daring/I feel my blood flow."

Where did you think the blood was flowing?

It doesn’t matter that he’s now an outed gay man singing these lines to straight women. If Barry Manilow was caught off guard or flustered in Newcastle, (which I'm not convinced he was), maybe this was because he wasn't still expecting the straight reaction to his performance because it was occurring after he was outed; but the 'lewd' responses are still happening like clockwork.

And Barry Manilow is still responding with his old-school retorts. It's the very same thing, straight people in relationships with gay people and joking about sex and it gives me deep joy.

Cher in Andy Warhol’s Interview, December 1974

June 3, 2022 / Cher Scholar / 2 Comments

I'm not proud of it, but when I saw this come up on eBay a few weeks ago, after waiting decades for the issue to show up, I literally threw money at it with the dangerous Make an Offer feature.

And after reading it I wasn't very sorry I did. I think this is an important interview for 1974, albeit annoyingly gossipy to the point of catty and status obsessed, as Andy Warhol's Interview could often be. (Andy and Bob interviewed her once again for the March 1982 issue)

In 1974, Cher, David Geffen (who Cher was dating at the time), Andy Warhol, Bob Colacello and Andrea Portago all met at the Hotel Pierre and they all mostly talk about shopping.

Every column or so of text had a list of shorthand topics that were discussed but not transcribed. An example:

"Liza Minelli
the wedding
Jack Haley
coming to town this weekend
Halston's giving a party"

Another especially egregious example is this one:

"serious economic situation
very depressing
stuff by the yard
1940s jewelry
so cheap now
vulgar, but big
Cartier's in Paris
the best
pull out their old stuff. Ask them.
Erte's book
designers today
any master craftsmen?"

However, there are some unique conversational events in this interview.

Defending Sonny:
(a) Cher has just found out earlier in the year that Sonny had slyly screwed her out of all her earnings over the previous decade. She has just discovered she was a paid employee in a company Sonny and his lawyer created called Cher Enterprises and Cher was entitled to none of the profits but three weeks of paid vacation (so that's something…but which she never received, telling the Warhol gang the act Sonny & Cher never took a vacation in all of the last 12 years). Sonny's contract also stipulated Cher could not work on any solo projects without his permission. So Cher had been out of work for most of 1974 while David Geffen used his formidable gray cells to liberate Cher from Sonny's contractual clutches. Geffen as Cher's knight-in-shining-armor was not appreciated by Sonny, who despised David Geffen for years afterwards with the heat of a thousand suns.

Despite this drama, Cher refuses to trash talk Sonny in this interview. "I knew that we owned half of the show and I thought that Cher Enterprises was just a company you had to have because people are always forming companies–I really didn't even know why, you know. I just thought because we had a payroll, and the checks said Cher Enterprises…Now I get nothing….the judge gave me a certain amount of money each month to live on until I can have half of whatever it is…" (this never happened by the way; Cher ended up having to buy out her contract from Sonny which took her until 1977). When Andrea talks about how greedy that was of Sonny, Cher's response is "Well, it's a strange thing….Sonny was really angry. He said, 'You screwed up everything. I could have made all this money and…it's your fault so I should be the one who keeps the money and you should go out and work." I said, "That seems logical, but when I met you, you were a truck driver and I was doing nothing and we were nothing and now we have all this money and all these things, and you should take half and I should take half…"

The next question is Andy Warhol asking Cher if she does her own nails.

(b) Custody of Chastity: Sonny also fought Cher for full custody of Chastity "and then the judge ended up giving him less time to see her than I had always given him so he said, 'Well, I hope you're not going to stick to that' and I said, "No, you can see her whenever you feel like seeing her.' My goal in life is not to keep her from him."

(c) Sonny's flopped variety TV show: Andrea asks Cher if she saw Sonny's 1974 show, The Sonny Comedy Review. Cher says, "Yeah, I did." "Did you like it?" Andrea asks. For the record, this show was handed it's ass in 1974 but Cher says, "Well, there were a lot of things about it that I liked. You know?" Andrea says, "I thought you were sorely missing and Chastity, too." Cher says "Well, a lot of people think that, but I think that if you looked at the show and you didn't remember the Sonny and Cher show, that it was a pretty good show." Andrea retorts, "But it was the same format. How could you not remember it?" And Cher says, "It was, that's true. Well, that's the producer's fault because they just kind of do the same thing over and over again and they've done it like five times but the only time that it actually ever worked was with us but I don't think they know how to do anything else."

So kids…this was the apex of Sonny's assholery toward Cher (going for her share of a fortune and full custody of their child). So when in 1998 people ragged on Cher at Sonny's death for jumping on a grieving-widow-wagon because she had spent decades trashing him, this was just more of the same anti-Cher bullshit made up over nothing true. For all Cher's softball insults about Sonny over the years ("I traded one ugly man for another"), she defended him just as often and always came to his aid when summoned, like when he opened his LA restaurant and needed publicity, when he was running for mayor of Palm Springs and needed publicity which precipitated the David Letterman Show reunion. This interview is the sterling example of how hard, if not impossible, it really was to turn Cher against Sonny. Not even Sonny could do it.

Sonny & Cher outside of the Santa Monica Courthouse in 1974 where Sonny slipped Cher some tongue for the paparazzi:
Being a Slave to Fashion, Andy Warhol vs. Cher:
They're discussing people who wear whatever they see in Vogue Magazine. Cher defends people who need help figuring out complete looks with magazines. Andy Warhol then says, "And the fashion editors spend millions finding the right things, and they are right about what looks good; whatever they show is really right-looking, and they do work hard at it so people might as well take advantage of it."[Andy Warhol: Fashion Apologist!] Cher then says, "there will always be people who won't follow this. Sometimes I buy a 3-piece suit but then I just wear the pants because it makes me feel strange to go out in something that's pre-set already for me. I kind of like to screw around with it…I think there's really no such thing as what's 'right' in fashion now and I think that's good."

Another thing Cher gets no credit for: her risk taking 'looks' that say fuck-you to fashion more often than catering to it. Some 1974 Cher looks:
Laverne vs. Ernestine:
This is short but interesting, Cher's conception of her character. When Andrea says Cher's Laverne character "is a little bit reminiscent of Lily Tomlin's telephone operator," Ernestine. Cher says, "I guess they were both strange kind of ladies, but then Ernestine was so square and Laverne was so broad…she played around a lot."

Laverne and Ernestine never met in TVLand like Laverne and Geraldine did.

There's still time.
Meeting famous people:
It's always interesting to hear famous people talk about meeting other people they consider more famous than themselves. David Geffen says, "your fantasies are bound to be destroyed upon meeting almost anybody. I'm sure if we met Clark Gable we'd be very disappointed" and Cher says, "Yeah, because we all have an idea of what we think of Clark Gable, right? and we'd make him fit the mold of filling our insecurities, our neuroses or what we need of him as our star…" and then Andy Warhol says they just met Joan Crawford and she was great, "fit the bill" he says. Cher doesn't seem to buy it and tries to quote something about legends and men and David Geffen remembers the quote more accurately, "When the Legend is bigger than the Man, then print the Legend."

Cher's celebrity obsession was Audrey Hepburn, by the way, and I don't think she was disappointed. Speaking of which, this picture I just found on Pinterest is captioned, "Audrey with Cher Hair."
The Famous and the Famous:
Cher's recent Aspen trip proving celebrities sometimes really do hang out together: Cher is talking about having dinner plans that night with Ara Gallant and how Cher had just been to Aspen with Ara and "Angelica, Brit Ekland, Apollonia, Ingrid, myself….And David, Lou, and Jack. We had the most wonderful time. We had a ball. I mean we just blew it out. Skied all day and danced al night."

As you would expect. Then Bob tries to talk Cher into going shopping that Saturday for 1940s jewelry. (We gotta get in on this hanging out with Cher thing.)
Cher in Movies:
Andy Warhol tells her her movie was "so great. It was really good comedy." And Cher says, "What? Good Times?" She then acknowledges both Good Times and Chastity as being "much longer ago…let's see, I was 20, so that's eight years ago." (Ages!)

Andy, Bob and Andrea leave the Pierre and talk about how good Cher looked without makeup and how "she'd be fun to shop with–she loves all the jewelry."

Cher’s Performance in Jimmy Dean Gets a Deep Dive

May 10, 2022 / Cher Scholar / 0 Comments

When people ask me what my favorite Cher performance is I always say Sissy in Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. Her performances as Loretta in Moonstruck and Rusty in Mask are pretty great too, but just not as great.

The issue in saying this, however, is that Jimmy Dean is a much more difficult movie for people to watch than all the other Cher movies. Unless you're a fan of Robert Altman and even then, this is not a favorite film among even Altman fans.

For one thing, there's the convention of time-travel through the dime-store mirror that seems confusing for most people. Then there's the whole storyline of transgenering, which in 1982 was challenging for viewers and is still controversial for some people now.

So I was thrilled to find this dissection of Cher's performance by film critic Claudio Alves who has been watching the Criterion Channels Films of Endearment series. He calls this move "an underrated Robert Altman effort" and rightly credits Altman's role in handing Cher a serious film career. "If not for this flick, her ascendance to movie stardom might have never happened."

Alves concedes that of the three women, Cher's role is "the least showy part, though no less complex" compared to Karen Black's performance of a trans woman ("portrayed with a sensitivity that feels ahead of its time for 1982"), and Sandy Dennis' performance of "warped fandom" and a life of lies. Cher's role still contains plenty of "juicy monologues and shattered multidimensionality."

He breaks apart Cher's casual entrance and connects it to her on-stage persona. He talks about her "vocal cadence and the rhythm of gestures" that reveal "a deeper weariness" and he contrasts this to her portrayal of her younger, more jubilant self.

He takes apart her "humor and energy" in the role during periods of reaction to the dramas of other characters ("comedic frustration," "dipsomatic deadpan," "bored and slightly critical in that way one is when being presented with an oft-repeated lie") and her performance of

"exaggerating emotion in order to force herself into genuine feeling. It's a risky gambit on Cher's part, for the approach could read as over-deliberate, mayhap over-technical when compared to Dennis' externalized implosions and Black's sense of innate fragmentation. Thankfully, Cher thrives in making bold choices look instinctual, erasing any signs of forcefulness until everything she does on-screen looks effortless. Such powers aren't beneficial for winning awards, though, since so much value is put on the performer's self-conscious extenuations. Nevertheless, they're vital to the songstress' success as a dramatic actress. They also define her presence as that of an old-school movie star. She can walk into a movie, captivate the camera, and magnetize the audience's gaze without breaking a sweat."

Alves even has some rare praise for Altman's work here: "This film…works as a showcase for Altman's ability to collaborate with actors and shoot limited spaces, finding infinite strategies to capture and contrast the store and its women…using these famous performers in ways no other film ever tried, before or since.

Not only does Alves give Cher's performance due diligence, his screenshots are perfectly illustrative of key moments.

Read the piece here: http://thefilmexperience.net/blog/2022/5/3/almost-there-cher-in-come-back-to-the-5-dime-jimmy-dean-jimm.html

Christmas with Cher, 2021

December 14, 2021 / Cher Scholar / 7 Comments

It's baking time…so this will be the last Cher Scholar post for the year. I feel like 2021 was mostly getting my head back on track after the drama of last year. Hard to believe I've done not one single Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour recap (and I was so close to the end of that series). Well, hopefully next year.

The Cher Christmas tree is up this year with two more dolls. (Had to upgrade to a bigger tree this year). The nativity of boyfriends is back, as well.

It's Christmas so it's time for people wanting to watch Moonstruck again. Here's one last essay from this year's scholarly readings of Moonstruck-think-tanking, "An Honest Contrivance': Opera and Desire in Moonstruck" by Marcia J. Citron.

Citron talks about the movie's tone, "romantic idealism tethered to the magic of the moon" and how the movie's conceit balances so precariously by successfully between realism and maudlinism. She identifies each part of Puccini's La Bohème as a part of the movie's soundtrack, the actual opera scenes, and the ways in which each Puccini theme ties to a character, mostly Ronny. She concludes "the verismo idiom of Bohème…has a stunning impact on the film." She even provides us with a table listing each act, the DVD timestamp, the piece of the score, the location in the plot and whether the musical element is a soundtrack piece or a literal opera performance. "The visit to the Met to see Bohème occupies a central place in the story, and Bohème is foregrounded as ritual through signs, posters, and phonograph recordings…it's use of opera music…performs important meta-level functions for memory, conciousness, and desire."

Cher's character in the film is explored as well: "Loretta Castorini an uncomprehending novice…throughout the film she has been independent and functioned as an individual with her own mind. Film scholars see her as an unusually strong female character in a genre in which women have been subordinate to men…Loretta appears to have internalized the opera-desire connection and made it her own, even though Ronny instigated and controlled the music." (referring to the scene in his apartment when he put a Puccini record on his turntable and then later when he invites her to the opera).

You can check out the essay on JSTOR: https://www.jstor.org/stable/30162938

So recently my friend Natalie asked for a Christmas mix. My personal Christmas mix is on my iPod and quite a few of the songs included on it are not available on Spotify, including all of Cher's Christmas offerings. Searching for them today online reminds me how much Christmas material Cher performed on her various TV shows. Maybe this is why she's not in such a hurry to give us a Christmas album. We're insatiable, Chrismastly speaking.

Years ago I did a brief breakdown of all the Cher Christmas shows.

Here are the elements of those shows:

The 1969 Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour with Cher
Where they started singing "Jingle Bells" that tragically hip way. Look, he surprises her with misletoe. Adorable!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VT06CBkTkyM

You can now watch the entire show on Amazon Prime.

The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour (1972 and 1973) Shows

The ultimate Cher Christmas song is, of course, "O Holy Night." Unforgettable. So much so that there was once a yearly tradition to recreate it on David Letterman. Watch Paul Shaffer yearly rendition (as is tradition).

Sonny & Cher do "Jingle Bells" in 1972.

The 1973 show was a big production of festive.

Cher also did this one both years, I believe: "One Tin Soldier/It Came Upon a Midnight Clear"

You can now watch the 1972 show on Amazon Prime.

The 1973 show on Amazon Prime.

Cher, 1975

Cher's opening "White Christmas/We Need a Little Christmas" Medley"

The poinsettia-fest that is "Some Children See Him"

The full cast doing the big finale ("I Love the Winter Weather/ I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm/Let It Snow," "Santa Baby," "Santa Claus is Coming to Town," "Jingle Bells with a Steel Guitar," "Christmas Island," "Christmas in Trinidad," "Silent Night") with Foxx, The Lennon Sisters and The Hudson Brothers.

The full show, (the Redd Foxx as an elf is a funny sketch.)