Jerry Lewis

The business of controlled chaos

Jerry Lewis was born in Newark in 1926, and before turning twenty he was already the funniest guy in the nightclubs of New Jersey. His meeting with Dean Martin in Atlantic City brutally shifted the hierarchy of American comedy. Martin was the crooner leading man, while Lewis was the wild man with a physical energy nobody could explain.

That duo signed a contract with Paramount that kept them at the top for exactly ten years. They were money-making machines at the box office and on national television. But the partnership rotted under the clash of egos and the exhaustion of repeating the same formula night after night.

Ego is an expensive engine.

In 1956, the partnership blew up on stage at the Copacabana in New York. Lewis didn't sit around feeling sorry for himself. He decided that if he wanted to survive, he had to control every penny of his productions. So he began writing, directing and producing his own scripts with a discipline that bordered on tyranny.

The invention of video assist

While shooting The Bellboy in 1960, Lewis grew frustrated because he couldn't see himself while acting. He had to wait a full day for the lab to develop the film to find out whether a take was good. At that point, he decided to mount a small video camera alongside the film camera to monitor the action in real time.

And that invention changed the way films were shot all over the world.

What we know today as video assist was born from the impatience of a comedian who trusted no one's judgment but his own. In 1963, he premiered The Nutty Professor, his most polished work and a fierce critique of the duality of fame. The film earned $19 million at the time, on a budget that barely reached four million.

France understood him better than anyone.

While American critics treated him like a children's clown, the editors of Cahiers du Cinéma elevated him to the status of total auteur. For Jean-Luc Godard, Lewis's cinema was the ultimate expression of visual freedom. But that freedom became a dangerous obsession when he tried to shoot a drama about the Holocaust.

The silence of the cursed film

In 1972, he shot The Day the Clown Cried in Sweden, the story of a German clown who leads children toward the gas chambers in a concentration camp. The project was a financial and legal disaster that ended with the film canisters locked away in a safe. Lewis was so ashamed of the result that he vowed no one would ever see it while he was alive.

But audiences wanted more.

In 1982, Martin Scorsese pulled him out of his golden retirement to play a harassed television host in The King of Comedy. It was a dry, bitter performance that made it clear Lewis knew how to act without mugging. The shoot was tense because Lewis demanded military order on set while Scorsese preferred constant improvisation.

For decades, he raised funds for muscular dystrophy through his annual television telethons. In 2011, the association decided to let him go after he had raised more than $2,400 million over his lifetime. It was a cold dismissal that Lewis never fully forgave.

In 2013, he starred in his final film, Max Rose, in which he played a retired jazz pianist. The movie premiered at the Cannes Film Festival with little notice and had barely any commercial release outside specialty circuits. He died at his home in Las Vegas on August 20, 2017, from heart failure at the age of 91.