Your Time Is Now: The Sammy Petrillo Story (2026)

Hold your ears, folks. It's showtime. People pay good money to see this movie. When they go out to a theater, they want cold sodas, hot popcorn, and no monsters in the projection booth. Everyone pretend podcasting isn't boring.

Turn it off. Turn it off. Turn it off. Jerry Lewis, changing the songs every day of the week. You know I mean it.

I'm such an ugly bum. Hey folks, welcome to a special episode of The Projection Booth. I'm your host, Mike White. On this episode, I am talking with Dave Abramson. He is the author of Your Time Is Now, the Sammy Petrillo story.

Do you know who Sammy Petrillo is? Have you experienced Sammy Petrillo? Have you listened to our Bela Gosi meets a Brooklyn Gorilla episode? You hear a lot about Sammy in that one. You're going to hear a lot about Sammy here.

If you're unfamiliar with Sammy Petrillo, this is the book. to pick up to learn more about him, his career, just the strange life this guy led. Definitely pick up a copy of the book over at feralhouse.com. Thanks so much for listening, and I hope you enjoy this interview. Tell me a little bit about you and your career and how you came to write this book. And have you written before?

Just wrote short pieces for my radio station program guide, Elsie, the lowest common denominator. I've been on WFMU since 1987. It's a free-form, non-commercial, no one gets paid. And I had a magazine that was a lot of fun to write for, and I edited a couple of issues as well. So I guess, would you like the Sammy story from the beginning, when I first hear about Sammy Petrillo?

Yeah. I guess I'm not sure where to go. So I've been doing radio since 1982 in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and I was there until 1995, and that overlaps with doing radio at WFMU. which I love doing, do a weekly show on Thursday nights. And I've also been in punk rock bands over the years, most notably the Sea Monkeys, and we're the ones that cut a song and put out a record called Oh No, I'm Sammy Petrillo. I have a record coming out on Stand-Up Comedy Records, and it's the New Surf Siders doing a couple of Trashman songs.

And that's the New Surf Siders. We were on Norton Records years ago. We'd are a tribute to a fake act, and the fake act is an NLP called The Surf Siders to the Beach Boys songbook. And while the Beatles have hundreds of knockoffs, like Beatle Bugs and all that, little things to separate the little kids from their money, thinking that it's a real Beatles record, this is the only Beach Boys one. And it's really bizarre, and it sounds like it's from another planet.

For many years, we didn't know what planet exactly it was from. It turns out it was from the planet Pickwick Studios in Queens, and it's Lou Reed singing on a couple of the songs. Possibly John Cale is in the session, and this is pretty much the studio where The Velvet Underground were born. So it's these ridiculous versions of Beach Boys songs, and our concept, the new Surf Siders, is that we did later material, like Never Learn Not to Love and Kokomo and Till I Die, but we do it in that same ridiculous fashion. And so we went out, we flew out to... studios in Minneapolis and recorded with Tony Andreessen, the original singer and lead guitarist of the Trashmen, and we did new versions of Surf and Bird and King of the Surf, and that should be out next year.

Oh, that's wonderful. Yeah. And then there's Sammy Petrillo. So I guess that brings us up to Sammy Petrillo as far as stuff I've been working on. I want to know your name on WFMU is Dave Spaz, and I use that term.

There is a guy that I work with who is very much a spaz. I don't know if it's an acceptable term these days, but I'm very curious. What does a spaz mean to you? I've been preparing myself for this question for a long time. I hope I get it right because I knew one day I would have to account for it.

As a little kid, I had a lot of issues. I was pigeon-toed and I had to sleep with a bar between my legs for about a year or so. Very uncoordinated, pretty much blind as a bat. stammered and stuttered and couldn't pronounce L's or R's. And I was in speech therapy for six years. And I was pretty much called every name in the book, including names from my father.

Hey, bright eyes, that kind of thing. And I decided to just own it, to just say, hey, I'm Dave the Spaz. What are you going to do about it? Like, how can you make further fun of me? I have a friend, a DJ, and her name is DJ Shakey.

And she's about my age. And the difference between us is that she's a really successful DJ. She goes around the world and makes good dough and all. And she shakes. Her hand trembles when she puts the needle down.

And so she's DJ shaky. It's her way of saying, what are you going to do? What nickname do you have a better nickname for me? And I guess that's It was never meant to make fun of anyone else except me. It's all turned on me.

So this show, I'm Dave the Spaz, and the show is called Music to Spaz By. And when I was in the Sea Monkeys, one of our early songs was this idiotic song called Spaz by this band called The Elastic Band. That was on Pebbles No. 1, the knockoff of the Nuggets records. Seems like everything I do involves a knockoff.

But that's a whole other story. So it's not at all meant to be offensive, and I believe it's worse in Europe. then here. And that's what my friends call me. If they really like me, I'm spazzy. Just really, I guess that's the long and short of it.

Speaking of spazzes and knockoff artists, when was the first time you encountered Sammy Petrillo? I was 11 years old, and I was reading a book by Arthur Lennig, who, oddly enough, just passed away last week. It was called The Count, The Life and Times of Bela Lugosi. and a hardcover book. And I saw it in the bookstore and I was like, ah, I got to get that. It was expensive.

It was like $ 6. 95 or something. And I sat down and I read that book from start to finish. However, when I got towards the end of the book, he mentions Bela Lugosi meets a Brooklyn Gorilla starring a British comedy team that's a knockoff of Martin and Lewis called Mitchell and Petrillo. I had to put the book down and walk around and go, whoa, What have I done with my 11 years of life so far?

And it turns out he was wrong about the British part. And it's only one short paragraph where he spends pages on Mother Riley meets the vampire. So, OK, that's all right. It's 1974. So I start looking for it on TV because I guess you got to know at this point I'm a Bela Lugosi fan and I can't find it.

And it is in the book in that same paragraph that it was retitled for TV as The Boys from Brooklyn. But I guess my brain just shut off after reading it. after the word gorilla. So I can't find it. And my pal Andy, who's in the Sea Monkeys, we're actually still around. We just played last year.

He said to me, at the time, he said, later on, he said, I can't believe you couldn't find this movie. It was on every week. It's the boys from Brooklyn. I said, oh, Brooklyn Gorilla. So I waste 20 years of my life.

Now I'm in my 30. And someone else tapes it for me on VHS. And I take a look at it. And It's insane. I've never seen anything like this.

I've never seen anybody so committed to the bit. And it's got Lugosi, and he's good. He's really good. There's a lot of things written about this movie that say he's emaciated and drugged out and can't do his lines. He leans into it in a very good way.

But it's really Sammy Petrillo that blew my mind. And all I knew about Sammy Petrillo at that point, let's say this is like 1988, was that in those 73 minutes of Brooklyn Gorilla. So Andy says to me, let's write a song about him. I said, okay. So we write, oh no, I'm Sammy Petrillo.

We put out a record on it. The other side is called Nipseyland about our Nipsey Russell obsession because we would call him up. He was in the phone book or we would sometimes run into him in the weirdest places. There was a Korean, I knew where he lived and I lived around the corner and there were certain points when I would kind of stake him out in this coffee shop that was inside his building he lived on 57th street oddly enough in the same building where gig young killed his wife and then himself so knits that we have a song called nipsey land on the other side and we put out the record i send nipsey a copy he said yeah i like it okay that's good mission accomplished sammy we have no idea where he is then we're on the uncle floyd show a a 1992.

We say to, and it's the later version of Uncle Floyd, not the classic one with all the characters, is pretty much Floyd. And he has these hair metal bands come in and lip sync, right? Five bands a day. And we're not hair metal. We were stupid punk rock.

So he liked us because we did the Food Emporium theme song and all. So that was up his alley. So I introduced the song, Oh No, I'm Sammy Petrillo. And Floyd goes, I know him. So that was the moment.

That was the monolith in the apes moment. And so after the taping, I said, how can we find him? And Floyd said, no, this was very prescient. It was, I have no idea where he is. Good luck.

Because that really figured into the cracking the cold case of Sammy Petrillo. A few months later, I look in the Village Voice and I see that at the bottom line, there's an Abbott and Costello lookalike contest. And that's for that Shanakie videotape box set that if it fell on you, you'd get brain damage. It's this big. It was every Abbott and Costello to, I think, I don't know how many per videotape.

So it says that Sammy Petrillo is on the bill and I can't make it. So I go before the show and I see that the Joe Besser... stinky lookalikes are already lining up outside, so I know I'm missing something big. I go to the box office. I drop off the record. Oh, I was going to show you, but never mind.

And with a note for Sammy Petrillo. A few days later, Sammy calls me. First, he leaves an answering machine message. He goes, oh, no, I'm Dave Abramson. He goes, oh, no, I'm Sammy Petrillo.

How would you like it if I told people, oh, no, I'm Dave Abramson? And He said, hey, I got the record. I like it. I'd like to buy some copies. He wanted to buy copies to sell at chiller conventions and autograph conventions.

So I talked to him and I said, yeah, I could get it for a dollar each plus postage. Sell it to you at cost. The first record is orange vinyl. What color would you like this pressing? Because we have to repress it.

We were all out of the 500 copies, oddly enough. And he said, plaid. I said, OK, plaid. We'll do purple. Fine.

So we print. We press them up. And I never speak to him again. Let's go back a week. I do have him on my radio show on WFMU, and this is November of 92.

And I have him on for 45 minutes live on the air. And he's incredible. It is just mind-blowing, the stories he's telling me about him and Duke and Spade Cooley, a man who murdered his wife and getting really mad at Petrillo and Mitchell because they go over their lot at eight minutes. They go at 30 minutes or something. on a live TV show. And Sammy is completely unaware he's talking about a murderer.

Really upset at him. And then I never hear from him again. So I figure, okay, I'm going to, we had this magazine and this is again in like 92, 93. So I write an article called The Truth About Sammy Petrillo. And it comes out and that's a limited run.

And it really picks up steam when it hits the internet, probably in the early aughts. It goes online and That seems to be the place where people get all their Sammy Petrillo information. Of course, there was previously an article in Psychotronic, those fireballs of fun. And that is the article that, say, the New York Times looks at for their obituary for Sammy. Then, a few years later, Rick Sapphire, who is Ernest Gluckman's nephew.

Ernest Gluckman was Jerry Lewis's agent for eight years, including the time with Martin and Lewis. And his nephew, Rick Sapphire, runs a magic novelty shop in a strip mall in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. And he did represent, say, 30 years ago, whoever in the Little Rascals was still bouncing around. You go to Rick Sapphire. So Rick gets in touch with me.

He finds the article about Sammy Petrillo on the internet, and he gets in touch. And he asked me if I know where Sammy is. And I never heard from him again after the records. And I said, no. I have no idea, but I'll put out a feeler.

So at this point, FMU has a blog called Beware the Blog, and at times it was really popular. So I post something on there, and I said, hey, does anyone know where Sammy Petrillo is? This guy's looking for him. Three years go by. 2008.

In the comment section of this blog piece, I get an email alert saying that somebody left a comment. It's Sammy's son, Sean. And Sean and Sammy had a falling out, and The way Sean tells it when he was about 9, 10 years old in Dallas, Texas, Sammy went out for a pack of smokes and left his wife and four kids, never came back. And his brother Kurt say that he left them with a dollar. So Sean shows up and pretty much says that.

And then Sammy's brother shows up, Marvin, and he starts talking. And then Kirby Allen, who was friend of Sammy's from the late 50s, and he was famous in his own right for really popularizing exotica music and making this guy from Philadelphia, Chiano, a star, and reinventing him as somebody from the South Seas. So he gets on the comments board, and then Sammy Petrillo shows up. And Sammy and Sean go at it. Oh, boy.

And that was the moment when my wife, Nancy, turned to me and she said, you should write a book about this. So I blame her. I will always blame her for this because that was the moment. That's my Sammy story. Wow.

How do you write a book about Sammy Petrillo? Because from reading it, it's such a Rashomon story. I've talked with people, interviewed two people at the same time or separately, and if one says black, the other one says white. Maybe it's not as bad as that, but it gets pretty intense as far as the differing stories in your work. There were a lot of conflicting reports, practically about everything.

Because Sammy's life was such a mystery, his own son, Sean, didn't even know if his parents were married or not. It looks like Sammy was married maybe three or four times, but he says he was only married once, and it wasn't to Sean's mother. As far as just simple things like, say, where Brooklyn Gorilla was filmed, Duke Mitchell's son, Jeff Mitchell, who was kind enough to speak with me, he was positive that it was filmed on location in Silver Lake, California. I'm like, that's... crack that down. So it's whenever you get some sort of lead, you track it down and see what you get.

So there were a lot of stories like anecdotes. You had to see how these things occurred because nobody knew why Sammy ended up as a co-writer on the first Isley Brothers record. His connection to Ouija or Doris Wishman or stories like that, like how did these come about? And did he exactly sign a contract? Did Jerry Lewis give him a contract and then it kept him from working?

And there's a lot of different theories about that. And there are family members and friends who aren't crazy about each other. However, the one thing I noticed from talking to everybody across the board, they all love Sammy. They all think he's a genius. They think he's really funny.

And they all imitate him the exact same way with this raspy voice, like this. And they all pretty much have a story about him losing his teeth somewhere. So yeah, it was difficult to put together, but I did it in such a way that if Something was not a fact. I'm going to give you all these versions, and here you go. You figure it out.

Let's go on to the next page. I can't even imagine how you went about doing this. The investigation itself, how long did it take? It took a really long time. I was in a job where it was really difficult to...

I was up at five in the morning. I would get home at four in the afternoon without a lunch break, crash out, and then I'd just have a few hours in the evening. Meanwhile, I'm doing a three-hour... weekly radio show on Thursday evenings where I've come up with three hours of original content. And I'm also DJing at this place in Williamsburg, Union Pole, every Sunday night. So I'm trying to get as...

My priority when I started this, say around 2008, 2009, was to speak to as many of the oldest people possible as soon as possible. And I had a list of some 90-year-olds that I was talking to, like King Broder, who was Sammy's agent. When I spoke to him, he was still working at a strip mall in Long Island. Kirby Allen, who I mentioned before, he was in his 90s, and he gave me some great anecdotes. The very old, at the time, Will Jordan, the great Ed Sullivan impersonator.

Chuck McCann, not as old, but still Sammy's buddy. He had great stories there. Talking to friends and family, talking to Sammy's girlfriends. is the one that he was associated with most in the later years, Susie, who was his girlfriend and then mostly his partner and ex-girlfriend. And then he moved in with Susie and her husband. And then also this stripper, Lady Mary, who he went with while he was still married to the wife who had the four sons.

And Sammy probably had more kids, too, with other women. Yeah, so as far as how I started, it was basically get all of those down, Just approach it like a dragnet cold case and try to sort it out later. Talking to Susie in particular was three hours of nonstop disconnected thought. And sadly, she passed away, as many of these people did. And I did speak to Jerry Lewis, in addition to Sammy.

So that's a real primary source. Who would have thunk? And this is all thanks to the help of cover artist Drew Friedman, genius illustrator, and Scott Alexander, who wrote the foreword, who, with Larry Karaszewski, have written some of the best biopics ever. So it was really those guys. that made connections for me, opened up the Rolodexes, and in Drew's case, really went on the line with Jerry Lewis, because Jerry liked him, and it was very easy to fall out of favor with Mr. Lewis.

So there were things that you didn't discuss with Jerry, like the day the clown cried and Sammy Petrillo. But I spoke to him about Sammy Petrillo. I got his take. How much of Sammy Petrillo is Jerry Lewis knockoff? There's more to him than this.

When he started in the business as a kid, now his parents were in showbiz, and for a little while they were living in Arizona, and Sammy did some radio show kind of thing and skits, and there's a home movie of him at age 13 where he's playing Western, and he gets shot and clutches his chest and falls down in the exact same way he would four years later at the end of Bela Lugosi Meets the Brooklyn Gorilla. He was always interested in showbiz. And this predates really before Martin and Lewis were making a mark, especially before they started making movies, before my friend Irma. So I believe him when he said that he was doing this before Jerry Lewis. He's living in the Bronx at a certain point.

He's 16 years old. And he's wondering what he's doing with his life. So he goes to get a haircut. And the barber says to him, gives him a really short haircut. the type that jerry lewis is currently sporting and he says you look like that guy jerry lewis and apparently that's the first time that sammy says i never thought about that that guy goes and i can do that then he starts thinking about showbiz about how can he parlay this into something and he he basically crashes a milton burl rehearsal for the texaco star theater and jumps into milty's arms and milty carries him off and we have a jerry lewis career it that lasts another five decades. It's something that he ran towards and he would run away from at the same time because often he would not be doing Jerry Lewis.

There are some movies where he's not doing Jerry Lewis at all. Shangri-La and Keyholes are for Peeping. Some records where he doesn't do Jerry Lewis at all. My Son, the Phone Caller. And his act, he would, when he did that show at the bottom line at the Abbott and Costello lookalike contest, him and Susie to just a few disconnected acts that didn't reference Jerry Lewis at all.

However, if the audience was yelling for it, he would have to do it. It was like Freebird. It's like, it's your greatest hit. You gotta do it. You can't leave the stage without doing that.

So he would come back to that, the classic paradox, blessing, and a curse. And experience like for you when you get to see that first appearance of Petrillo, lewis on what is it the colgate comedy. Hour jaw-dropping uh-huh and it's something that if it could have only happened at that point in time there's there are certain things i have in the book about how technology plays in different things so when the talkies come in al jolson is king of the world because he's in the jazz singer but It's the singers that croon that put Al Jolson out of business, like Bing Cross, because they can use microphones. They don't have to belt it to the back of the rafter. So when it comes to the Colgate Comedy Hour, there is this gag that really can only work at that moment because it's a babysitter skit where Jerry, the dad, and Joyce Randolph, of all people, is the mother.

And I spoke to Joyce Randolph about this. And the gag is that they have a babysitter there, and then Dean Martin climbs in the window and tries to make time with the babysitter. But the gag is that when Jerry, the father, leaves, he does costume change, and he climbs from behind the curtain into a large crib where you can't see much of the crib. It's a big, tall crib. So now Sammy jumps out of the crib, and he's got a baby bonnet on, and he's got a big onesie.

And also, it's His wedding ring. Because he never takes off the wedding ring, even if he's playing a baby. So now he's playing the baby. And at a certain point, he jumps back in into the crib and then does a costume change. And Jerry Lewis, the adult, comes walking in.

And he has it out with Dean Martin because, what are you doing in my apartment? And then you hear the baby screaming. And it's really Jerry... on a sped-up audio tape, a sped-up reel-to-reel tape, which was fairly new technology at the time, and Jerry was a tech fiend. And so you hear this, like, hey! And they go over to the crib, and I don't know what the audience is expecting, because they already saw the costume change.

And you just see feet and hands, and those are Sammy's feet and hands, and he's throwing toys out of the crib. They do a little bit of shtick. Here comes the punchline. The camera zooms in, and Sammy pops his head out of the crib. And in a scene that they really carefully rehearsed, side by side, making identical ape-like moronic expressions.

It's the kind of thing that wouldn't have that kind of punch if you were seeing a movie, because you'd think, ah, it's just a double exposure or whatever. Trick photography. And if you saw it on a regular stage, say a burlesque vaudeville or even a fine theater... you're still too far away for it to read. The only way the gag really works is that you have a camera on a tight two-shot of those heads, and everybody that's at the theater, the international theater, that's where they're doing this live and being broadcast to half the country live, everyone in that theater sees this, and they go insane, and then the people at home are looking at it and thinking, this is 1950. So.

They're not expecting any special effects at all, probably pre-Kovacs. So that was when I finally saw that I realized what all the fuss was about. And it really lasts five seconds. And it was the five seconds that defined the rest of this guy's life. I so want to ask more about the Lewis and Petrello relationship, but I know I want people to buy this book as well.

So I think I will not talk about that, but I will ask a little bit about his later career. Working with Doris Wishman, that really blew me away when we came to that part of the story. Sammy always seemed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. For instance, he was producing cable TV shows at the Capitol Theater in Passaic, New Jersey in 1973, which was great. He was too far ahead of the curve.

Nobody had cable TV. If it had happened four or five years later, he would have been a millionaire. So, Almost the same with Doris Wishman. They had the same agent. She was brought in to help edit something.

She was offered a movie. I believe that this was done to Carlos. Said, hey, do you want to do something with Sammy Petrillo? And she said, yeah, this would be great. I have some...

Listen, I have this footage, this nudie footage. Before we do this real Sammy Petrillo movie, would you mind just coming to New York? I live in the United Nations, and we could do it in a weekend. You bring your own clothing, and we're going to film... which turned out to be Key Hulser for Peeping. There's this Key Hulser for Peeping movie with the promise that he's going to make a real movie with Doris Wishman.

However, Chesty Morgan really diverts her attention, and she is also handled by Don DeCarlo. So she goes with the thing that she thinks is going to be more successful, and her intuitions were right, because it's Chesty Morgan, and there's Agent What Double... 77 or something i think she makes these two movies with chesty so sammy sort of is once again in the wrong place he's so close like if there was a train to success he would get on in the wrong direction but he's his optimism is the thing that fuels the entire book basically every time he gets to some sort of something that could happen and it doesn't work out he's got a backup plan whether it's in showbiz or not showbiz the man is indomitable he just keeps working It's just amazing.

I mean, for me, it's like you climbed the mountain when it came to actually being able to talk to Jerry Lewis about this. But I'm curious, were there other interviews that you were able to do that were even more impactful for you? Speaking to Madeline Koppel. Madeline Koppel is Jack Broder's daughter. Jack Broder produced this movie for his company Real Art at General Studios Cinemas in 1952.

She was on set. She was 10 years old selling Girl Scout cookies and share her descriptions of, say, the dance sequence with the natives. And she'll say it was so colorful. And that's not the word you think when you see that sequence. And it's really, OK, great.

Got some great stories from her son, David Koppel, who met up with Sammy a few times in California. And he came to New York and met him in New York. And he had anecdotes about his grandfather and about Sammy. Sammy's cousin, Martin Jackow, was very important. Sammy frequently would stay with Martin's family, his cousin's family, when Sammy's parents would go out of town doing burlesque.

And also they were a little richer and they had a bigger apartment so that they were able to take Sammy for a while. So when Sammy came home from the Colgate Comedy Hour, It was described to me by his cousin as being something out of my favorite year, the Peter O'Toole movie about early TV. And Sammy is coming home, and he's the returning hero. And people are leaning out their windows in the Bronx and going, Sammy! Because they saw him on TV.

And not a lot of people had TVs in 1950. It was a real luxury item. Probably cost $ 1, 000 back then in that money, in 1950 money. And a lot of people would watch these things in storefront windows or bars because it was a really popular show. And it was the thing that everybody talked about around the water cooler the next day.

Speaking to Marco Joachim, who's Barbara Loden's son, the Barbara Loden connection is unbelievable. And I go into detail in the book. It does involve the creation of the Munsters. For those who might not know, she is an indie filmmaker, was an indie filmmaker who wrote, directed, and starred in an incredible movie in the late 60s called Wanda. And it's really, it has a real cult following now.

John Waters says, if you don't like Wanda, you're an asshole. It was very hard to sell when it came out. She went on the Mike Douglas show the week that John and Yoko hosted. She was one of their handpicked guests. And he was on Dick Cavett And you think of her as kind of highbrow because she also was on Broadway and after the fall playing a Marilyn Monroe type for Arthur Miller's play.

And of course, married to Ilya Kazan, and she's in Blender in the Grass and also had an earlier career with Gurney Kovacs doing comedy. So it was Will Jordan who mentioned to me that Barbara Loden was involved in the record All About Cleopatra. So I mentioned it to her son, and that was just beautiful because he didn't know about that. But he said, oh, I always wondered why we kept that record around here. Oh, and he listens to it.

He goes, yeah, that's my mom. So she is anonymously on all about Cleopatra. So that's a real... Anyway, I hope I didn't give away too much. There's so many...

If you think that's something, this book has something crazy so that I want you to dog-ear every page. Yeah. Because... Every time I turned around, I pulled a thread on a story, something else would unravel that would just be incredible. Some other crazy coincidence or something that just fed into the whole theme of everybody being someone else and all of Sammy's partners.

So he had a robot partner. Steppen Fetchit was his partner at one time. One of his partners co-wrote A Taste of Honey. So it's just the way that he figures in, he's into all these different corners of showbiz i guess one could say but he always was a journeyman comic first and foremost the kind of guy that would just lean be leaning against the wall speaking carny talk to one of his fellow performers which would not like pig latin it's more like every word ends with easy and it's where carnival people talk to each other it's what they say to each other when there's a mark with a rifle trying to blow up balloons out of a clown's mouth or something you're talking about that idiot right on the other side like how far can how much money can we get out of them so it's this really authentic slice of americana in the 20th century the burlesque circuit that sammy embodies and i could have written this about any of one of these obscure guys but why not do the guy who imitates jerry.

Lewis exactly You like layers. You've told me that multiple times. You like things that have layers to them. And writing about this guy who has many layers, but yeah, one of the first ones is that he's this Jerry Lewis impersonator. That's a great place to start.

And to pick Jerry Lewis, of all people, went away. Jerry kind of picked him because he was born genetically with that fate. And then he pushed it by getting himself on the show. And Jerry was... Here's Dr.

Frankenstein, because he worked with him and would hit Sammy on the head with a rattle when they were rehearsing. And so, no, not like this. Getting him perfect. And when the Reviews and Variety came out the following day, Sammy is mentioned four times. And for a five-second bit.

And he even says he does a great vocal imitation of Jerry. And Ferry got bit on the tuchus on that one. He was a little too clever with his technology. So, To spend your lifetime being stuck, let's say, imitating Jerry, is like, you just picked the most vengeful, insecure, heady, misanthrope egotist you could possibly find. This is the one guy you do not imitate.

And Rick Sapphire told me that when I was in conversation with him. He said that there was something that Jerry hated more than somebody imitating him. There are some clips where you see he puts up with Martin Short face-to-face or someone like that on the telethon. Because it's a bit. It's more like Lucy and Harpo on.

But he was not happy with this because he wasn't happy doing the moron character. And that was another interesting revelation. And it makes all the sense in the world is that by 1952, he's 25. He's made a few movies. They've been together with Dean for half of the time, and they're going to spend some more years together.

And he's probably thinking, I'm getting really tired. It's too much work being the moron. And I want to be like Chaplin and have pathos. And he gets at that with this movie, The Stooge, which is humorless. And it's also, coincidentally, Jerry's favorite movie because it makes him more of a Chaplin-esque all-around entertainer.

You laugh with him, you cry with him, that kind of thing. It'll make you fit, as Sammy would say in his promo for the catty. So even Jerry was done with the character. So in a way, when he would see Sammy pop up on other TV shows in the wake of his appearance initially on the Colgate Comedy Hour and being used as a punchline, and he's doing Jerry Lewis, and then especially when he shows up in this movie two years later, it must have been horrible times for Jerry because he would just have nightmares about all of this going away, vaporizing one day. What an unrealistic thought in showbiz when you've only been famous for a handful of years.

You can count on one hand and you think this could all disappear overnight. How many Joe Besser impersonators were there in 1950 as opposed to 1992? I'm always fascinated by unmade projects, unfinished things, or lost things. Your book is pretty rife with those as well. Of all of those projects that you talk about, what's the one that you wish a magic wand, you could just make this thing happen because you want it so bad.

Well, first of all, this book was almost a lost unfinished thing. It took long enough, but I never gave up on working on it. What would I want to see? It would either be, I guess, possibly Out to Lunch. I believe that was the Pittsburgh one that was supposed to have Buddy Rich and this guy who was murdered shortly thereafter, Zoran the magician, and the lead singer or the whole group the Jaggers, who had a hit song with the rapper.

That might be interesting. That might be a fun one to see, I think. And then there was something he filmed in Bay Ridge. They filmed it over a period of 20 years. With Sammy, everything was like Orson Welles filming Othello.

Filmed on five different continents with And that's what I think Sammy was doing with Out to Lunch. All these unfinished reels. And he would drive around with these reels and sometimes put them into storage and then not pay the storage fee. And that's the end of that. So who can say?

I can tell you there was at least one person who told me that they had a reel of film. And this was a long time ago, say around 2010, a roll of 16 film. And I tried. I tried to get it and I couldn't. And I had to work around it.

And it was one of those early stumbling blocks where I thought, I'm never going to write this book. I'm never going to be able to finish this. But I worked around it. And with the interest in Sammy, maybe this is drumming up. Maybe this movie might become available.

Yeah, I wouldn't mind seeing that, especially if it was filmed at the Crazy Country Club, which apparently was the first. I'm told everybody has their own legends. And the legend is that this is the first comedy club ever. It had air that blew up from the sidewalk like the Marilyn Monroe scene, but it had almost a funhouse kind of thing. It had toilet seats hanging from the ceiling.

Kooky. So this is where Sammy chose to film this movie. I would be happy to see any Sammy that I haven't seen yet. You talked about how the book is stirring some stuff up, and I'm very curious what the reaction has been, and have people come forward with new stories for you. A little.

Okay. It goes like this. I'm a big Robert Caro fan, and that really helped me with this, because I thought about what would he do. And he wrote a book called Working, his latest book, about how he's finishing the fourth or fifth book on LBJ and his work about Robert Moses, the power broker. He mentions how when he works, he has a note hanging above his desk and the note says, where's the desperation on the page?

So in tribute to Robert Caro, I put up a note above my desk that says, how many times did Sammy lose his dentures? And I did get a denture story. First of all, there were so many, I couldn't put them in the book. I really had to cut some out. One of the ones that I just heard for the first time a couple of weeks ago is he put them in a bag, an empty bag of potato chips, and they got thrown away.

And there's a happy ending because Sammy dug through the trash and he found this bag of potato chips. He got his teeth back. Of the other stories, he doesn't get his teeth back. Oh, that was a story. But as far as stirring things up, an incredible, I guess, because the whole zeitgeist of it all, the grandson, David Koppel, who was a big help with me with this book, he said, you know what, I'm going to track down my grandfather's films.

Real Art made maybe a dozen movies, and they all slipped into public domain. So I'm going to track some copies down. And the Academy in LA had a copy, which I've seen. I saw it. in 2019 at the Egyptian, introduced by Leonard Maltin. And it's a little dicey.

It's nothing that you can really make a new copy of. So through a lot of detective work, he located a negative in the Wade Williams estate in Kansas City. And the people down there also run a Blu-ray operation, and they said that they found the negative of Brooklyn Gorilla, along with the optical negative, and they're restoring it for Blu-ray footage. 4K release. And so that is something, really, who would have thought next year is 75 years Brooklyn Gorilla.

So to commemorate all this, I'm having a couple of book parties coming up. The first one is in Brooklyn, up the street from me, practically, at the Prospect Park Nighthawk. Thursday, November 12th at 7 o'clock will be the premiere of Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla, in restored 4K from the original negative. And I'll be up there signing books and apologizing and the whole thing. We're going to have a party afterwards.

Then I'm flying out to L.A. the next day for Sunday night, November 15th, at American Cinematheque in Los Feliz, the LF3. That will show the movie there, and that will be followed by an all-star panel moderated by Dana Gould and Scott and Larry and Cliff Nesterov. Because Cliff is on there because I told him we've seen this movie together twice already and he doesn't even like it. So I said, you got to come to this because it's been six months since we've seen this movie together. So he'll be on the panel too and a few other people.

So I'm really looking forward to both events. So this is one of these things where this book kind of stirred things up, Sammy. That's fantastic. Where's the best place if people can't remember that just offhand? Do you have a website or an Instagram or anything where people can keep up with that and with you and the book?

The only page worth going to on Facebook is the Sammy Petrillo International Appreciation Society. That's a good place for your Sammy Petrillo news. You could also go to feralhouse.com, F-E-R-A-L-H-O-U-S-E, H-O-U-S-E.com, and sign up for the newsletter. And Christina at Feral House will be sending out updates Those are the two best places. And also, tickets will be going, these shows will be announced in the coming days, next week or so.

I'm not sure when you're going to put this up. But a few weeks before these events, you'll be able to go to the Prospect Park Nighthawk or the American Cinema Tech pages and buy tickets. Because even though these are big theaters, they might sell out. From your mouth to God's ear, let's hope that they do. The Duke easier.

Don't get me! Dave, thank you so much for your time. This has been so nice talking with you. My pleasure. You're a great interviewer, and I listened to your other shows.

I enjoyed the one with Freddie Duke and Michael Barry, and those two were a big help to me as well. Keep doing what you're doing. You too. And congratulations on the book. This is right up my street, talking about somebody who has flown too close to the sun, under the radar sometimes.

I had this fascinating career. I love this kind of stuff. So thank you so much. We just. Done this once before.

Oh no, I'm standing for trial I need some help, I need an SOS A brand new detergent, get me out of this mess Give me a fine, give me a fill up. I'm not a dude. My name's not Tito. No, it's not dude. I want to be sick.

I want to be.