March 17, 1978 Gusto feature: American Hot Wax

My introduction to the wonderful world of all-expense-paid show biz media junkets, which the movie and TV reviewers had enjoyed for many a moon. It didn’t take long to discover and obey the first commandment for these affairs: Thou shalt charge everything to the room. 

March 17, 1978 

1950s: Rock ‘n Roll in the year 1959 

          A new mania has seized the motion picture industry – rock ‘n roll. Hot on the heels of “Saturday Night Fever” is a stampede of big beat movies that will boogie from here to Halloween. In varying stages of production are things like “Sgt. Pepper,” “Grease,” “FM” and “The Buddy Holly Story,” but there’s no need to wait. The first rock film is out already, opening tonight. It’s called “American Hot Wax.”

          “American Hot Wax” is a fictionalized account of the messiah of rock ‘n roll – disc jockey Alan Freed – and what turns out to be his last week on top of the world. The climax, fittingly enough, comes at a big rock show in the Brooklyn Paramount Theater in September 1959.

          As it condenses the thrills and tensions of that era into 90 minutes, the film generates such great fun that there’s little time to object to the way it plays fast and loose with the facts. It’s a mixture of fantasy and history, much like what Doonesbury’s Jimmy Thudpucker does with the late ‘60s.

          For instance, Freed is shown auditioning “new” singers LaVern Baker and Connie Francis, though Baker’s “Tweedlee Dee” came out in 1954 and Francis was a smash hit before 1958 was over. And then there’s a teenage songwriter – a Carole King character played by “Saturday Night Live’s” Laraine Newman – whose compositions actually belong to several different writers of the period.

          Those who grew up in the ‘50s will have a field day peeling the disguises off the various singers. Professor La Piano & the Planotones and the Del-Vikings. The Chesterfields are Frankie Lyman & the Teenagers crossed with Little Anthony & the Imperials. The two little girls who sing “Tonight You Belong to Me” to Freed represent a one-hit duo named Patience & Prudence.

          For the kids of the ‘70s, it should be an eye-opener. This wide-open, tumultuous scenario is the flip side of the fun-and-games ‘50s of “American Graffiti” and TV’s “Happy Days.” “American Hot Wax” steps into the gale of controversy that surrounded the birth of rock ‘n roll. It reminds us that there were rock ‘n roll riots. After all, the music was banned in Boston for fear that it would contaminate the younger generation.

          Alan Freed, in fact, gave his life for rock ‘n roll. Freed is credited with coining the term “rock ‘n roll.” He also is credited with bringing Black rhythm and blues to white radio – first in Cleveland, where his chief competitor was George “Hound Dog” Lorenz, then at New York City’s WINS, where he went in 1954. (Lorenz came to Buffalo’s WKBW.) Freed promoted the first nationwide touring rock shows. He got snagged in the payola scandal of 1959, was thrown off the air and died five years later, a penniless alcoholic.

          The makers of “American Hot Wax,” talking to the press after preview screenings in Hollywood last week, said their goal was not to recount history, but to recapture the feeling of the period. Some of the aspects of ‘50s consciousness, like payola and racial discrimination, were left unexamined. But the rock show at the Brooklyn Paramount was very much like the shows 20 years ago, according to writers who had been there.

          “Our objective was to picture a week in the life of rock ‘n roll,” bearded producer Art Linson remarked. “We couldn’t have done it without the Brooklyn Paramount and Alan Freed. Freed was the first rock ‘n roll promoter of any importance. He also was married three times and drank a lot, but it was never our intent to discuss these things.

          “I had no intention of making another ‘Lenny,’” Linson continued. “We kind of touch on all these things, but it wasn’t critical to what was going on. What we wanted to put across was that this was something that did not happen before. This is the foundation of everything that’s going on now.”

          By Hollywood standards, “American Hot Wax” was shot under severe physical and financial limitations. The filming took 36 days, which may account for the urgency of the scenes. Much of the dialogue was improvised (“disciplined confusion” is what director of photography William Fraker called it). Jay Leno, who plays Freed’s chauffeur, and Fran Drescher, who is Freed’s secretary, developed their parts by bickering with one another.

          Working on a $4.5 million budget meant that the movie was made in the Paramount Pictures back lot, not in Brooklyn. Laraine Newman flew in from New York to work Mondays and Tuesdays, then flew back to do “Saturday Night Live” rehearsals. Fats Domino was asked to appear, but wanted more money that Paramount wanted to pay. Elvis Presley was omitted because director Floyd Mutrux didn’t want to be accused of capitalizing on Elvis’ death.

          The biggest problem, aside from trying to eliminate the palm trees, was to get everyone, including the hundreds of extras in the concert crowd, to cut their hair, but that wasn’t all that was trimmed.

          Nils Lofgren is listed in the credits, but his scene was snipped out somewhere along the line. Fans of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins complained that his voodoo act was compressed to about a minute. Chuck Berry’s scene is reduced to a song and a duckwalk. Jerry Lee Lewis gets the same treatment. The concert is shrunken to 17 minutes.

          The stuff that was left out, however, only serves to sharpen the focus on what’s kept in. “American Hot Wax” tends to make the most of its limitations. Instead of a glut of detail, there’s only a taste. Of the 58 rock oldies that are crammed into it, not one is played to its conclusion. For that, there’s the soundtrack album. The album, incidentally, signs off the same way Alan Freed did – the Spaniels singing “Goodnite, Sweetheart.”

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SIDEBAR: They couldn’t make a movie about Alan Freed without Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. Hawkins, a Cleveland native, was a mainstay of Freed’s rock shows for years. It was Freed who talked the singer into making his famous stage entrance, climbing out of a coffin.

          “I didn’t want to get in,” Hawkins recalls, “and Freed, he kept peelin’ off $100 bills and layin’ them on the side of the coffin. When he got to $1,000, I said, ‘I’ll do it!’”

          Hawkins borrowed coffins from local mortuaries until the National Casket Association objected. By then, he was wealthy enough to buy one of his own. Through the years, he’s seen other acts borrow stage trickery that he pioneered. Dr. John the Night Tripper used capes, shrunken heads and voodoo. Funkadelic employs a coffin. And hundreds of groups work with smoke and flames.

          Hawkins emerged from the ‘50s in better shape that many early rock ‘n rollers. While many of them gave their hit tunes away for a pittance, Hawkins learned how to protect the rights to his songs, thanks to advice he got on an early tour with Fats Domino.

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IN THE PHOTO: The poster for “American Hot Wax.”

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FOOTNOTE: The Second Commandment of junkets: Thou shalt go home and give press to the people who paid for thine good times. Corollary to the Second Commandment: Thou art not obliged to write a story that casts things in a favorable light.

          Nevertheless, I got a kick out of “American Hot Wax” and so did other people. Critic Gene Siskel gave it three stars out of four. None other than the legendary Pauline Kael conceded that it was “a super B-movie” and “trashily enjoyable.” And, according to Wikipedia, then-Paramount Pictures head Michael Eisner, who we all know as longtime head of Disney, “loved the movie and saw it nearly a dozen times.”

Even so, Wikipedia says “American Hot Wax” was “a box office bomb.” It grossed a mere $11 million in the U.S.

Personally, the best thing about the junket was the chance to meet  Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. I loved his hit, “I Put a Spell on You,” when it came out in the ‘50s and my affinity deepened on this occasion 20 years later. It turns out that we share a birthday. His was July 18, 1929. He cast quite a spell before he died in 2000 – married six times and claimed to have fathered either 57 or 75 children.

         Unfortunately, the junket era did not last much longer. The editors of The News, like their counterparts at other papers, were stricken by a sense of Reagan Era rectitude and said that if we were to go on junkets, the company would pay for them, thereby eliminating the impression that we were being bought off. The company also would decide which ones to pay for. When that happened, no more junkets for me.