I met Mr. Sulu!
That's not exactly how I expected to start my post about tonight's screening of Goldfinger at the Orpheum, the third screening of the L.A. Conservancy's Last Remaining Seats series. Sure enough, though, George Takei was there, all decked out in a white tux to introduce the screening. If you don't know who I'm talking about, then I should point out that George is by far and away best known for playing Mr. Sulu in the original Star Trek show and movies. He's sort of become an iconic figure for Trekkies everywhere. He does a lot more, though. Being openly gay, he helps promote gay rights in California, where the whole marriage thing is a real hot potato right now. And because he's got such an awesome voice (personally I could listen to him talk forever), George dabbles in theater now and again. Among the recent plays he's done in L.A. is Equus. Oh, and since 2006 he's been the announcer on the Howard Stern Show of all friggin' things. Really, Mr. Sulu and Howard Stern. You ever think you'd hear those two names in the same sentence?
Before George came out, Conservancy head Linda Dishman gave a little pep talk on the Conservancy's recent happenings, and then stepped aside as the curtain went up. Not to start the movie, mind you, but to treat us to a performance of Her Majesty's Command Dancers. No, I'd never heard of 'em either. It was definitely different, I'll give 'em that. You had a bunch of cute young things clad in these sort of silver body-fitting outfits which, combined with the red lighting, looked like the gold paint that does in poor Jill Masterson in the movie. They spent about five or ten minutes doing all kinds of fancy dancing while studly young men in handsome tuxes had faux gunfights and what have you. While dancing, of course.
Then one of the guys drops dead, and out comes George Takei in his white tux with two hotties on his arms (ironic, I know). He looks at the corpse and goes, "Get rid of that." The two hotties drag the guy off stage while our host is like, "The name's Takei. George Takei." Wild applause! It does have his name in the program, but I hadn't looked in the program yet. I got there with only a few minutes to spare and spent that time taking photos of the joint. So suffice it to say that I was very pleasantly surprised by the appearance of Mr. Sulu.
A native of East L.A., George has very fond memories of his parents taking him to the Orpheum as a youngster. It was quite a treat after having spent a good chunk of his early years in a Japanese internment camp. He was four when Pearl Harbor was bombed. His family was sent to a camp until the war ended, by which time the poor little guy was eight. And talk about irony, he learned to recite the pledge of allegiance....while living in a camp. Soon after the Takeis moved back to their East. L.A. home, Papa Takei took little George to the Orpheum, which at the time was a vaudeville venue. Some of his earliest memories are in that internment camp, so that was the only world George really knew up to that point. And then he went to the Orpheum, this huge theater palace right smack in the middle of downtown Los Angeles. As he would do countless times in his life as Mr. Sulu, the young George felt like he was visiting another world. You could tell, by the way he recounted the experience, that he could remember it as if it were yesterday. More than once he talked about the theater's plush carpeting that they tread on their way to the top balcony seats. George said that on their first visit he and Dad had to sit literally in the last row of the top balcony, but who cared? He was on cloud nine. Almost literally at that height.
The second part of his introduction had to do with Harold Sakata, the guy who plays Oddjob. Whereas his character is Korean, ol' Harold was actually born and bred in Hawaii. As a teenager, according to George, Harold was quite the bike rail. He weighed barely a hundred pounds. He obviously turned a knew leaf at some point because at the 1948 Summer Olympics, at age 28, dude was a pro weight lifter representing the U.S. He won the silver. Between '48 and when Goldfinger came out in '64, he established a career in whatever the equivalent was back then of the WWE. Harold played one of the bad guy wrestlers, Tosh Togo. His shtick was to throw salt into the eyes of his opponents. He had no acting experience at all by the time the Bond producers came calling. Although, if you think about it, his wrestling career as Tosh Togo was kind of like acting. At any rate, based on his headshot alone, the producers thought he'd make a great Oddjob. The rest, as they say, is history. Indeed, Harold had such a great time making Goldfinger that he made Oddjob his middle name. He'd come such a long way from that skinny teenager. He was nearly 300 pounds of mostly muscle by the time he donned that awesome top hat.
And that was that for George's intro. Boy, it was really cool to see him, ya know? All the more so 'cause I didn't have a clue he'd be there until he stepped out on stage. It was kinda weird too, to have two of my passions colliding. I've been a Bond fan since I was 10. I've seen all the films many times over, Goldfinger especially so. Tonight was my third time seeing it on the big screen. And I've been a Star Trek fan for just as long. No, I don't wear the costumes or go to conventions or anything like that. But I watch the shows and see the flicks enough to know that Sulu's da man with a capital DA.
In addition to Sulu, another layer of gravy to tonight's event was that they had someone playing the 1928 Mighty Wurlitzer organ at the front of the theater before the show. Not just any someone, though. It was this elderly man named Bob Mitchell. Bob was actually around when the theater first opened. He landed the organ gig when he was, like, ten or something. No kidding.
Coincidentally I just got finished reading all fourteen of Ian Fleming's Bond books last month. He didn't write the first one, Casino Royale, until his mid forties. By the time he died at 56 (just one month before tonight's feature came out), he'd churned out twelve novels and two short story collections. While Goldfinger was the third movie, it was actually the seventh book (published in 1959). And that's not the only difference. In the book, Auric Goldfinger was from Latvia (at that time one of the Soviet states). And the goal of his whole smuggling operation was to generate cash flow for SMERSH, the branch of Russian intel devoted to tracking down rogue agents. By the time the movie came out, Kruschev had dissolved SMERSH, so for the movie Goldfinger was just his own independent operator. Also in the novel, Oddjob wasn't a big hulk, but a very limber guy who was quite adept at the ol' martial arts. You find out that Goldfinger discovered him as an illegal immigrant dockworker in Liverpool and recruited him and several other Korean illegals and made them sort of his bodyguard staff. Pussy Galore has jet-black hair, not blonde. And she's not a pilot. She's head of a Harlem-based lesbian gang. Yes, you read that right. A gang of lesbian criminals. Did I mention the book was kinda different?
Goldfinger was played by a German comedian named Gert Fröbe. His German accent was thick enough during filming that during post production they had all his dialogue dubbed by an English actor named Michael Collins. Here's another thing about Gert: He was a Nazi. Yes, during the Hitler years Gert was a member of the Nazi party. However! He was only a Nazi in the sense that Oskar Schindler was a Nazi. He used his party membership as cover to smuggle Jews out of Germany. When Goldfinger came out, Israel refused to show it. They didn't care that Gert was a hero. He wore the Schwastika pin on his lapel and that was bad enough. After a Jewish family publicly thanked him for saving their necks, though, Israel removed the ban. Goldfinger was sort of a reunion of sorts for Gert and Sean Connery. Two years earlier, around the time Sean did Dr. No, they co-starred together in The Longest Day.
The screenplay for Goldfinger was written by Richard Maibum. Talk about a plum gig, this cat wrote just about every Bond script from Dr. No through Licence to Kill. He only stopped 'cause he, ya know, died. He died at age 81, two years after Licence to Kill. The director was a chap called Hamilton, Guy Hamilton. Besides Goldfinger, he directed three Bond films in the seventies: Diamonds Are Forever, Live and Let Die, and The Man with the Golden Gun. He also did other cool stuff like Force 10 from Navarone and Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins. Guy's in his mid eighties now, still ticking.
And now for some photos of the Orpheum. I'd actually been here once before, for a rock concert back in April of '05, so I knew it would be a very photogenic joint. Oh yeah, and before the show, I stopped by for a couple drinks at the Seven Grand. I thought their selection of taps was attractive enough to warrant a photo op.
