In a February 2011 riff about John Landis‘s Schlock (’73) I mentioned a piano-duet sequence shot in The Old Place, a storied restaurant in the hills above Malibu. This morning I found a YouTube clip of the scene. (It starts slowly but hang in there.) The blind virtuoso with a Zen attitude is played by Ian Kranitz. I’ve never understood why Landis, who directed, wrote and played the lead role, continues to refer to Schlock as “bad and appropriately named.” It’s cheaply made — shot in only 12 days for $60K — but it’s a lot funnier than The Blues Brothers and only sllightly less funny than National Lampoon’s Animal House. As noted four years ago, Schlock is “more than a genre spoof — it’s a combination of stoner humor and social satire in the vein of the old, occasionally surrealist Ernie Kovacs show of the ’50s and early ’60s.
Anchor Bay released a Schlock DVD in ’01, but today you have to pay over $200 bills for an unused copy. The original rights holder is low-rent schlockmeister Jack H. Harris, who is still with us at age 96. I only know that Schlock is unstreamable, which seems like a waste.