3 Nuts in Search of a Bolt

There are more stories in Hollywood than in The Naked City, as the saying goes, this is three of them.

Nunnally Johnson is the basis of the telling, out of the hills onto a psychiatrist’s couch with triple schizophrenia, which is to say the one about the stripper who hates men and the male model who hates women and the car salesman with a bothersome conscience who share a posh house above L.A. (cf. Richardson’s The Loved One) to save money and all chip in for an out-of-work actor (the director as himself, Method, “aside from acting, which I do best of all, I do other things, I do imitations, I play the piano, the drums an-an’ spoons”) who takes the job of presenting their case histories to a Beverly Hills shrink at cut rates, twenty minutes per.

And that’s Hollywood, where unemployment happens “sooner or later”.

The angry bartender, after a closed-circuit TV hookup goes out across the country from Denver, “what the hell—the same thing on every CHANNEL!”

A jealous trick cyclist, “when I wanted to go to Hollywood, who was it that stopped me? Who? Who?”

“Don’t be greedy, darling, you still have the jet set—”

“Talk about exposure! Zow-IE!” Mamie Van Doren in her bath, “so meanwhile, I’m stuck with all this BEER!”

Katz the “exploitation” producer, “I wanna buy the picture rights. This’ll be bigger than The Three Faces of Eve!”

“Wow! Did you do that?”

“I’ll get Ingrid Bergman to play you... wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute—I’VE GOT IT!”

“You want a Bufferin?” Dr. Myra Von’s private secretary (T.C. Jones).

The stripper wedded fair. “Now, why should a thing like that make me so happy? Boy, do I need analysis.”

The purloining of randy dowager Mrs. Berkeley-Kent’s jewelry at the Club Intimate run tyrannically by British Mr. Blyth figures in Russ Meyer’s Finders keepers, Lovers weepers! as well, here perhaps from Dassin.

A drunk walks into the club, “well, I’ve heard of intimate bars, but this is ridiculous!” A certain tribute to Jerry Lewis is repaid in Cracking Up.