JD Shapiro’s life is so packed full of Hollywood names it is the stuff of a movie maven’s dreams. A shame then that his candid rags to pitches account of it fails to hit the dramatic sweet spot.
A writer, director and stand-up, raised with three sisters in a grim part of New Jersey and “Hell’s Kitchen” in Manhattan, he recalls how as a poor, young teenager from a broken home he supped with the Westies – an Irish-American organised crime gang – before making it to Los Angeles to work among Hollywood’s finest.
Mel Brooks, the actor, comedian and filmmaker, and the late Stan Lee – co-creator of the Marvel superheroes Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk and Iron Man – are among those name-checked, along with John Travolta, Kevin Bacon and the late Sir Sean Connery.
There are some cute story snaps to go with them, such as how Connery – or “Sir Sean” as he reverentially calls him – offered to play Queen Richard riding on horseback in Shapiro’s breakthrough 1993 adventure comedy film “Robin Hood: Men in Tights”, which he wrote on spec before delivering to Brooks via his well-connected dentist. And how the late Robin Williams encouraged him to do stand-up, rewarding him with a “big, smelly hug … but it was lovely”. While every so often an awkwardly limp accent, including one of Marlon Brando, pops up like a monster from the deep for a cameo appearance.
Shapiro, 53, now living in Madrid, illustrates it all with old photos, in one of which he jocularly juxtaposes him and his sisters and mother with one of the macabre Addams Family; others feature younger versions of him with Brooks, George Lucas and film stars of various hues, before he ends with a splurge of unannotated figures that mean a lot to him but little to the audience of seven.
The show would benefit from being more tightly scripted, with more heft given to fewer stories, while some of the movie details are a bit lost on those not too well versed in the film world while others don’t make the transatlantic journey too well. And the title, with its suggestion that its central character is a putz, does little to commend it – though as he’s self-effacing, maybe that’s the ironic point.
Kitted out in a navy blue corduroy morning coat, blue waistcoat and shirt with black trousers and trainers, he cuts an affable, if slightly awkward, sheepish figure, suggesting a courageous determination to stick with it, to savour his first Edinburgh Fringe (and very probably his last), albeit that he is well out of his comfort zone.
To his credit, Jake David Shapiro, to give him his full name, focuses equally on failures and successes. “Out of all the sucky movies, mine is the suckiest,” he wrote in the New York Post of the Scientology-inspired science fiction movie “Battlefield Earth”, starring John Travolta, which in 2010 scooped the Razzie award for worst film of the decade. And bookending it all is one of his heroes, the “fearless” Bugs Bunny, in whose pink ears he disappears off stage.
I’m with stupid Gilded Balloon Billiard Room, until 29 August.
