In a certain vague sense, I was “there” when this Arthur scene was shot on Fifth Avenue and 59th Street. It was the summer of ’80 and I was anxious and under-employed. I was standing across the street with several other onlookers, and I recall watching Liza Minnelli, Dudley Moore and John Gielgud performing this scene two or three times. I can still hear Minnelli yelling “get me a cop!”, over and over….the clapper, “cut”, etc.
I remember staring at Gielgud between takes, parked on a canvas chair, and wondering why he was sitting so stiffly…motionless, like a sphinx. Then I saw the film a year later, and Gielgud’s snooty putdown riffs were hilarious. He and Minnelli had the funniest lines.
Minnelli was 34, Moore was 45, Gielgud was 77.
Posted on 2.18.06, roughly six years before I embraced sobriety:
“Dudley Moore‘s drunken playboy was funny in 1981’s Arthur, but less so in 1988’s Arthur 2: On The Rocks. Arthur was a fresher film, of course, with a kind of champagne-fizz attitude. The sequel was boozier and more “real.” Moore was obviously older in ’88, his career wasn’t going quite as well, the performance felt desperate and the mood wasn’t the same.
“Drunks aren’t funny in real life unless you’re 19 and hanging with your drunken friends and as drunk as they are. You have to be fairly young and unsullied.
“True story: I was staying with some friends at a beach house on the Jersey shore when we were all 17 or thereabouts, and there was this big guy named Richard Harris who was half-sitting and half-lying on the living-room couch and about to throw up from too much vodka. I was coming down the stairs and Harris was suddenly on his feet and making for the bathroom (or at least the kitchen sink), but he wasn’t fast enough.
“He put his hand in front of his mouth in an obviously futile, almost touching attempt to prevent the inevitable, and I can still see that torrent of chicken-rice puke spewing out of his mouth and cascading off the palm of his right hand and splattering on the floor and into a black grated-iron floor heater. A loud hissss sound resulted as the vomit dripped into the coal-burning furnace and the smell of it filled the house.
“We all and moaned and groaned at the aroma and ran outside to escape it, going ‘aahh!’ and ‘oh, God!”’ I’ll remember that moment for the rest of my life, but…I don’t know what my point is except that now that I’m no longer 17 and not much of a drinker.
