As a veteran of the film industry for more than 30 years, Robert Davi has become one of the most iconic and instantly recognizable faces and voices of American cinema.  So if you haven’t heard him sing, you’ll probably be as surprised as I was to find that Mr. Davi is not quite so gravelly when he picks up a tune.  In fact, he’s an effortless crooner, classically trained and ready for the stage.

In 2010, he performed three sold-out concerts in New York, solo performances wherein he covered the works of Frank Sinatra.  Sinatra, and the works of the early 20th Century known as the “Great American Songbook,” are more than just a passing interest to Davi.  He feels that these are an essential piece of American history and culture that deserve a closer look in order to understand who we are.

Hearing a few snippets of his upcoming album of Sinatra covers, I truly marveled at the rich quality he was able to belt out of  these songs, exuding classy charm, freewheeling fun, and timeless romance.  But you don’t have to take my word for it.  Ervin Drake, one of the only surviving contributors to the Great American Songbook (among his other accomplishments, he wrote the Sinatra hit “It Was a Very Good Year”), attended Davi’s opening night in New York.  Aside from seeing the show again on closing night, Drake’s compliments included this personal message to Davi:

Robert Davi would make a worthy successor to the incomparable Frank Sinatra, whether in the fields of Stage, Screen or Television. And having been chosen years ago by the Master himself, to act in a film side by side with him, this is not a vain pronouncement.

Continuing his pursuits, Davi is wrapping up work on his album with famed producer Phil Ramone, who has worked with Sinatra himself, and on January 15th, Davi is performing a concert with expanded orchestral arrangements entitled “Davi Sings Sinatra: A Tribute to Frank Sinatra, the Great American Songbook, and America,” at the Thousand Oaks Performing Arts Center in Los Angeles.

Despite his rigorous rehearsal schedule, Mr. Davi was able to take some time to answer a few questions about the upcoming show.

Big Hollywood:  What about the world of musical performance appeals to you compared to the acting world?

Robert Davi:  In music, I’m able to express much more of myself.  While it’s fun doing films and playing different characters, one is limited by the part you are playing.  With singing, each song is like a 3-act play, and you use much more of yourself.  I think it was Schopenhauer who said, “The effect of music is so very much more powerful and penetrating than the other arts, for these others speak only of the shadow, but music of the essence.”

BH:  As you mentioned being limited in acting by the characters you play, have there been times in your career when you have felt typecast and frustrated by that?

RD:  Of course, and it is the nature of the beast.  When I did my first film at age 20 (which, ironically, starred Frank Sinatra), I was cast as a gangster.  From that, nobody gets the impression that I was classically trained, nobody thinks about the depth you may have as a person.  They see a film and judge you by it, and if you’re good at convincing them, that’s who they think you are.

I remember Stella Adler, one of my mentors, telling me, “They will typecast you, but always know who you are and fight against it ” I did that in my own way by trying not to repeat myself, taking on different parts.  Now, this has its own drawbacks, because people then may have difficulty identifying you.  They only know one or two particular things you may have done, but if they looked at the whole body of your work, that’s where a clearer picture emerges of who that performer is.  Perhaps I came out West a little early; had I stayed in New York and done more plays, I would have built up a different perception of myself, though the way I look tended to put me in a certain light regardless. Everyone has their own prejudices, and because I had a rugged complexion I was immediately profiled during casting. There have been fans over the years that didn’t just see me as a bad guy, and I proved them right when I did a TV series called The Profiler.  Being accepted as a leading man on network television– that show had a huge fan base, and I was voted 3 years in a row on the Internet as their favorite leading man by over 500,000 women– that sort of vindicated me.

BH:  By taking on the roles of singer and film director, do you feel a sense of greater control over your public persona?

RD:  Of course; it brings to mind the saying, “You cannot judge a book by its cover.”  By directing and now singing, it lets me open that book up to everyone and express much more of who I am.

BH:  What sets apart the music of Sinatra’s day, and specifically the man’s own work, from the music of today? What difference do you notice in the values expressed by it?

RD:  To me, The Great American Songbook is the Shakespeare of America.  Those beautiful lyrics are like sonnets put to music, like heartbreaking monologues from tremendous characters. These composers and lyricists were giants, and they were able, through poetry and music, to capture the essence of the human heart and soul.  Whether it was an upbeat swing or a heartbreaking ballad or even a saloon song, each one had a universal appeal, and I believe that made the world fall in love with America.

Frank Sinatra is the premiere interpreter of these songs.  Don’t get me wrong; there are many others who do it justice and are terrific– for instance, we are still lucky to have Tony Bennett, Nancy Wilson, Barbra Streisand, my friend Frank Sinatra Jr. who stays true to the tradition, as well as other great singers– but for me, Sinatra and his body of work is absolutely staggering.  He applied the bel canto principles of singing to popular music, and the depth of his sound is unparalleled.  He was the first “method singer,” so to speak.  He embodied a song with a total sense of self.  He started with his tremendous influences, and he took from them and worked tirelessly to come up with his sound.

The values expressed in the music was much more romantic than what we hear today.  These songs seduced with their eloquence; they were not crass.  They were designed to lift the human spirit, not denigrate it. I think a great resurgence of this music is about to happen.  The youth of today must be exposed to it, because when they are, they fall in love with it.  It’s something that should be taught in schools.  A course on Sinatra would be fascinating.

BH:  How did you first connect with Phil Ramone?  Which one of you initiated the collaboration that resulted in your upcoming album?

RD: Phil was at Capitol finishing an album he was working on.  I was also at Capitol Records at the time and was introduced to him by Paula Salvatore, who runs the label.  She told Phil what I was doing and she made the initial introduction.  Phil is someone I had always wanted to meet and work with.  He is a legend.  I am so grateful for how things have turned out; he is brilliant– has an amazing spirit and is a very deep and lovely human being. And I hope for a very long collaboration with him.  We had another legend, Al Schmitt, do the mix, and the great Dan Wallin was our engineer.

BH:  How did you feel going to rehearsals knowing that a full 30-piece orchestra was there exclusively for you?

RD:  That was actually for my first shows in New York and also for the recording sessions we did at Capitol.  It was absolutely mind-boggling and excitingly terrifying.  For the show in Thousand Oaks on January 15th, we will have 50 pieces.  I had the composer Nic Tenbroek make all new arrangements for the expanded orchestra (Nic was also the composer for my film The Dukes).

BH:  Which songs of Sinatra’s do you feel you perform with a noticeably different interpretation or tone?  If you’ve seen him live in concert, how did that experience affect the planning that went into your own concert?

RD:  I put my own mark on all the songs, as I am not doing an impression of Sinatra in any way.  But I am staying true to the principals of great singing that he is the benchmark for.  That is one of the reasons I refer to it as the Shakespeare of America. Seeing Sinatra live was an amazing experience.  What he was able to communicate through song directly to the audiences’ hearts was so exquisitely moving. It was transcendent; you were watching and listening to the greatest interpreter of music ever.  He performed for 6 decades, and looking over that entire time, it is impossible not to be affected by his work. He would continually put nuance and new interpretations to songs he had done as a young man throughout his life.  He would bring all that he lived through to each performance.

One of the things Phil Ramone told me was when he brought the idea for Duets to Sinatra, and Frank asked why should he do the album– he had sung these songs for years and years– and Phil said,  “But you are  singing them differently now, and people deserve to hear how you interpret them today.”  It’s like seeing Al Pacino in a play he had done years ago, and you see him do it with all that he’s since gone through.  Or, if you saw Clint Eastwood bring all his history to a part such as Walt in Gran Torino– it’s a fascinating journey that the artist takes over time.

BH:  What kinds of reactions have you received from friends, peers, and fans who have never seen this side of you as a performer?

RD:  They are mostly surprised and say, “Why haven’t you done this sooner?”   I only wish I could go back in time and tutor with the jazz and big band greats that Sinatra was able to work with, to learn and grow from them.  I fear this music is becoming a lost art form, and we as a society must not let this happen. We must give it a risorgimento.

BH:  Finally, if this venture is successful, will we no longer see Robert Davi on the screen but on the stage? Or will there be more projects, like The Dukes, that will integrate your two passions?

RD:  I will continue to act in film but will now make singing a major part of my career, while at the same time passionately pursuing my musical skills.  I work daily with Maestro Catona and his brilliant vocal technique; it is what I had been searching for for years. And yes, I will integrate the two.  I have written a new script that explores this era of music in a touching and exciting way, and I hope to film it later next year.

For those who live in Los Angeles (or are planning to travel), you can purchase tickets for the show by emailing boxoffice@toaks.org or calling (805) 449-2787, or from Ticketmaster online or by calling (800) 745-3000.  More information can be found at DaviSingsSinatra.com.

Davi’s peers have given considerable praise, such as esteemed vocal trainer Gary Catona:

“Unlike other singers who are doing the American songbook, Robert truly has ‘the voice,’ a rich, masculine tone and beauty, with a sensitive, artistic heart to match. In this sense, he resembles Sinatra, but does not sound like him. His uniquely colorful baritone voice has a flair for the dramatic that he expresses thoughtfully in his interpretation. All in all, Robert Davi could easily wrestle the Sinatra mantle away from all would-be contenders.”

Also, Shelly Berg, Dean of the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami, lauded Davi’s multi-generational appeal:

“Everyone knew Robert Davi would be great as Lucky Luciano in the new, Phil Ramone-produced musical Lanza, but what blew the crowd away was Robert singing Sinatra as the encore! In a performance for 600 college students, they leapt to their feet and screamed with delight. The same result was achieved the next night with the ‘adult’ audience. Very few people can sing Sinatra with the voice, authority and phrasing of Robert Davi.”

When the curtain went up, the 30-piece orchestra came alive. A man with his back to the audience stood at the top of the stairs. The stage was awash in light blue and a clear voice sang out:

I’ve got the world on a string,
Sittin’ on a rainbow
Got the string around my finger,
What a world, what a life, I’m in love!

His performance sounded beautiful and effortless. When veteran actor Robert Davi turned around to face the audience, I couldn’t help but smile. He was in his element and could have no greater inspiration than Frank Sinatra. The show, “Davi Sings Sinatra: A Tribute to Sinatra, the Great American Songbook and America” packed Hofstra’s famous John Cranford Adams Playhouse for two evening shows and one matinee. The opening act, Tommy Dressen, is a top-notch, “old school” comedian that toured with Sinatra for more than a decade and has made hundreds of television appearances. It was the perfect opening act for passing the torch from Sinatra to Davi.

The “Rat Pack Era” has been hot for a number of years. There are a couple young singers who put forth a good effort, but their voices don’t have Davi’s richness and depth. His voice was soulful, but in control. During the course of the show he sang audience favorites, as well as songs that may have been forgotten if not for Davi’s resurrection. By the end of the show, surely everyone in the audience felt like Davi was also their friend. Davi wove stories with songs and the stress of the day melted away. What a world, what a life, I’m in love!

I first talked to Davi when I wrote a review of his movie, The Dukes, in 2008. A friend suggested I write about the movie because his character’s name in the movie is Danny DePasquale. I’m not embarrassed to admit that I’ve mentioned that on more than one occasion and I’m still tickled by it.

I grew up in Tallahassee, Florida and there weren’t many others with “funny last names.” Every first day of school began something like this:

Adams…
Brown…
Cooper…
… Lisa…
Edwards…

For a 10 year-old, it was like a neon sign that said “You’re weird!” My last name is part of my identity. Sure, I’m a mix of this and that, but I look Italian and have always felt pride in having something in common with Elvis Presley (Italian and Irish) and Frank Sinatra (an Italian with blue eyes like me!).

As conservatives we’re not supposed to dwell on what makes us different. We’re all Americans. As Davi told stories about growing up in Long Island and Sinatra’s upbringing in Hoboken, it became clear to me that for many first generation Americans their heritage is important because it is a testament to how much this country has given to them (and vice versa). Our Italian heritage ties us to the greatness of America. And being Italian, ties us to Sinatra. For a boy growing up in an Italian family in New York, Davi said Sinatra was like the Pope. He was fortunate that his first role was with Sinatra in the movie, Contract on Cherry Street.

Davi’s show was not just a tribute to Sinatra, but also a tribute to America. He’s been an ardent supporter of the military and America. One of the poignant moments during the show was when he thanked all of those who served and asked former and current servicemen and women to stand up to be recognized.

My grandfather, like many first generation Americans, found equality in the military. Similarly, entertainment and sports were the first avenues in which non-whites were on an equal playing field (despite the laws that dictated otherwise at the time). Talent was talent.

Davi told the audience about the time Sinatra brought actress Lena Horne to the famous Stork Club. At that time the restaurant didn’t allow blacks. The manager flipped through the reservation book, claiming that he couldn’t find the reservation. Sinatra said, “Try Lincoln.”

Like Sinatra, Davi approaches life with humor and reverence for the important things. Later this fall Robert Davi will release a tribute album to Sinatra. As, Ol’ Blue Eyes would say, the best is yet to come.

Leonardo Di Caprio is still to set to play Frank Sinatra for Martin Scorsese. But he’s probably not going to sing.

“With those records?” Scorsese asked me, his voice rising, at the premiere last night for his new DiCaprio collaboration, “Shutter Island.” “Frank will do the singing. But we’re waiting for a finished script.”

So while he’s waiting, Scorsese’s next film will likely take a break from DiCaprio. “The Invention of Huge Cabret” is lighter fare for Scorsese, about a 12-year-old boy who lives in Paris and meets famous French silent film director and magician George Méliès.

“Hugo Cabret” is a family movie, unlike “Shutter Island,” which opens Friday and is a complex, disturbing thriller. Based on a novel by Dennis Lehane (”Mystic River”), “Shutter Island” was set for release last fall but pulled back at the last minute. That turns out to be a good thing, because although DiCaprio could have earned an Oscar nomination “Shutter Island” is a perfect winter film. “Silence of the Lambs” and “Fargo” were each winter movies that went on to big things at the end of the year.

“Shutter Island,” if you don’t know the book, is certainly a shocker. Beautifully shot and edited (of course by Thelma Schoonmaker) it also has a bunch of perfect “cameo” performances by Michelle Williams, Patricia Clarkson, Emily Mortimer, and Jackie Earle Haley. It’s partially an homage to Alfred Hitchcock, too, with a pulse-heightening score created by The Band’s Robbie Robertson from pieces of modern classical music.

Read full piece here.

Like anyone who lives to see his 82nd birthday, Sinatra the man is defined by more than just wherever some storyteller decides to point his soda straw focus. Sinatra the man was also a “man,” a virile, strong, fiercely independent, two-fisted scrapper who fought for everything he achieved. Regardless of his gifts as an actor, there is no way the eternal boy-faced DiCaprio can fill those shoes convincingly — especially if Scorsese wins the day and tells the story of the sixties, which began with the singer’s 45th birthday.

Tina Sinatra, the late star’s daughter, is said to be unhappy with the “dark direction” of the film’s script and wants a more “sanitized” version of her father’s life story. …

“Marty wants it to be hard-hitting and showcase the violent, sexually charged, hard-drinking Frank, but Tina wants to show the softer side of her dad and let the focus be on the music,” a source told the New York Post.

“The Sixties were a very swinging time for Frank – he was having sex with a garden variety of bimbos and cementing his Rat Pack status. It’s a really key time to his mythology. Tina really wants to make sure that a sanitized Frank comes through, and that it’s not overly negative.”

First off, the story of the Rat Pack has already been told in a pretty terrific 1998 HBO film, but what an absurd claim that this “swinging time” is anything close to “key” to the mythology of an individual who won two Oscars, will reign forever as the Beethoven of 20th Century music, openly fought for Civil Rights as early as the 1940s (!)  and quietly did more for charity than any entertainer before or since.

Frank Sinatra was a Great Man, a flawed man to be sure, but one no more defined by the 15% of his ring-a-ding period than Scorsese is by 20% of a post-”Casino” life spent directing one bloated, over-rated, disappointing chase for an Academy Award after another.

The article uses the word “sanitized” to describe what Tina Sinatra is after, but this is grossly unfair. A better word would be “context,” for their can be no truth, no “key” to the whole of a human being without context. The article also ignores the fact that the singer’s daughter was a producer on “Sinatra,” a 1992 television miniseries, which was not only produced while Frank was still alive but “sanitized” nothing in its unflinching look at her father’s life … far from it. 

Finally, from a pure movie-lovers point of view, using bad marriages, various addictions, mental illness and periods of bad behavior — the worst of the individual — as a three-act structure biopic crutch has been played out to the point that these films are becoming numbingly predictable. Will someone please sit Scorsese down and screen him “Malcolm X,” “Lawrence of Arabia,” “The Song of Bernadette,” “Patton,” “A Man for All Seasons,” “Schindler’s List,” and all of The Mighty Paul Muni’s work in this genre…?

The psychology behind an industry that takes so much obvious glee in tearing down and deconstructing greatness is for another post, but there’s no denying that Tina Sinatra’s approach would benefit everyone. As an artist Scorsese needs to surprise again and as a legend Ol’ Blue Eyes deserves better than “The Aviator” treatment.

During a recent interview on my radio program “The Andrea Shea King Show”, Hollywood conservative Burt Boyar, longtime friend and biographer of the late great Sammy Davis, Jr., said he’s concerned that the true story about the talented entertainer who fought and broke through racial barriers will never be seen on the silver screen. Two years ago, Boyar had negotiated a deal to sell his two biographies to filmmakers who were all set to tell the story on celluloid.

Reflection: Sammy Davis Jr. snaps a photo of himself and Jerry Lewis posing in the reflection of a mirror.

What entanglements are keeping the former member of the Rat Pack’s compelling life from being made into a movie?  A life studded with Tinseltown’s glittering constellation of stars whose orbits intersected his?   Luminaries like Sinatra, Peter Lawford, Joey Bishop, Dean Martin, Tony Curtis, Jerry Lewis, Liz and Burton, Paul Newman, Berle, Bacall, Bennett, Damone… when Hollywood was at its most glamorous?

Who is Burt Boyar? And why does he care?

The treasure hunt for answers begins on Broadway, circa 1954 when Burt and his wife Jane were moving within the inner circle of New York City’s theater district.  His daily column  “Burt Boyar’s Broadway,” a widely read ‘who’s who’ of the theatrical world, was prominently positioned on the front page of the Morning Telegraph.

The Boyars were hitting the hot spots — the El Morocco, the Copa, the Latin Quarter, the Stork Club — gleaning tantalizing tidbits to toss to ten million readers as they sipped their morning coffee over the morning news.  “Burt Boyar’s Broadway” was published in every Newhouse and Annenberg newspaper.  A mere mention in the column was gold, shining nuggets of priceless publicity coveted by actors and their press agents.   Manhattan’s most sought after couple were out every evening.  “Jane and I would go to every nightclub in town to see who was around and form the basis of what I was writing about. We went to virtually everything,” Boyar begins.

“In fact, we were on the ‘first night’ list, which was a wonderful thing and often a horrible thing at the same time.  Every show that opened, we automatically received tickets for opening night and we had our same seats, just like all the critics.  And you think, ‘My gosh, how glamorous can you be?  You go to every theater opening in New York!’  But if you think about it, there are some 200 shows every year. Of them, there are maybe five hits. And you have to sit through every one of the others.  You cannot imagine what it was like. You sit there wondering, ‘How did they ever pay for this?  Who would put up money to finance this?  How do we get out of here?’  But you couldn’t leave early, because then you’d be accused of writing about something you hadn’t seen,” he jokes.

Boyar also wrote a weekly column for TV Guide.  “I had a lot of audience and so naturally I got invited everywhere,” he says.

At about this time, Sammy Davis, Jr. was performing in “Mr. Wonderful,” a dog of a show that was getting lousy reviews — except for the last 40 minutes when Davis was onstage.  Critics loved his Vegas-Copa-Miami Beach nightclub act.  Boyar took note, and rang him up.

“When I called Sammy, he said, ‘What do you say we have dinner one night?’  So that very night we went out to dinner, Jane, Sammy and I, to Danny’s Hideaway, which was a theatrical steak house.  It’s closed now but it was a very hot spot in those days.  As dinner was coming to an end, he excused himself and said, ‘I’m sorry, I’ve gotta go do the show, but what do you say we have dinner…’ And he thought a second and then he said,  ‘how about having dinner five nights a week?’   And as it turned out, we had dinner seven nights a week!”  It would be the beginning of a long friendship.

Boyar does his best Jolson imitation for Sammy's camera while Jane Boyar enjoys the show.

“We were always together from then on.  It’s one of those wonderful things that happens occasionally in your life — you meet someone with whom you have an enormous chemistry — and it was just instantaneous best friends.  I admired his talent tremendously.  He was unquestionably the world’s greatest entertainer. And he was such a charming man offstage. He dressed beautifully and he conducted himself with such courtliness.  It’s hard, really, to believe he had never had any education whatsoever. His education was the theaters that he played since the age of three. So I guess that has very good value because when you consider that in vaudeville, he would play before six audiences a day.  You’d get a lot of touch with the public, and you’d learn a great deal from people.”

In Black and White

A white hot star onstage, black negro offstage, Sammy Davis, Jr. “wasn’t treated well because of his skin color, at least not until he was such a big star that they couldn’t keep him out.”  Boyar recalled the denigration Davis endured.  “I cannot describe the pain of seeing a friend receive standing ovations in those days when they had to be earned, then leave the theater and be called a ‘nigger.’

“He was not treated well by either the whites or the blacks.  I remember when he was playing New York City, he was playing the Copacabana and I got him a reservation at the hotel around the corner — the Sherry Netherland — and he was completely criticized, roundly criticized by both the white press and the negro press for not staying at the Hotel Teresa in uptown Harlem, which is what all black entertainers would do when they played the Copa.”  The Teresa Hotel, known as the ‘Waldorf of Harlem,’ was built in 1913 and wasn’t desegregated until 1940.  Frequented by local celebrities, it was a Harlem hot spot.  By comparison the Sherry Netherland, in the heart of midtown Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, was always considered five-star, world class.

“Sammy said, ‘Look. I’m going to go as first class as my fame and my money will allow. I want to live as well as anybody else in my position.’  So he stayed at the Sherry Netherland, which was wonderful.”

In his prologue to “Sammy, An Autobiography,” Burt wrote: “After an especially hurtful racist outrage, Sammy murmured ‘We really should let them know.  We really should tell them.’  We talked about how, and it evolved into a book…”

“I began writing ‘Yes I Can’ and the column at the same time.  I thought I could do both,” Boyar says.  “And we’d travel with Sammy.  We’d go to Las Vegas and Chicago, and Tahoe and Florida, wherever there was entertainment, wherever I might possibly write a column at the same time.  But it became impossible to serve the two masters.  You really couldn’t do justice to either of them.  So we took what we thought was a one year leave of absence on the column, and six years later we finished the book, and so the column was gone.  The only thing about it that made me feel badly was a man by the name of Bruce Horton who was the head of the Register and Tribune syndicate, and he was out there selling our column — he sold us to the Detroit Free Press and the Toronto Star, a lot of big papers — and here I was, about to take time off and tell him I can’t produce. I’m sure I embarrassed him and he had every right to be furious with me, although he never said a word.  But that was the only misgiving I had about it.”

The couple lived on the road with Sammy on and off for the next four years, running a tape recorder every night into which Sammy would reminisce and recount the gems and shards that made up the mosaic of his life.

“We did (hang out with Sammy) for the first couple of years,” Burt says.  “The rest of the time we were on our own, just writing and rewriting.  After “Yes I Can” came out in 1965, we had no column, and suddenly we were making a lot of money and it was ‘Wow! This is a great life!  We don’t have to be up until four or five in the morning, we get up when the sun comes out!’”

The Boyars later moved to Spain where they resided for 28 years.  There they wrote two more books, “World Class” about the world of tennis, and “Hitler Stopped By Franco,” a book that evolved from their friendship with Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s daughter Carmen and her family.  Over the years, they kept in touch with Sammy by mail and telephone.  Following Jane’s death in 1997, Boyar subsequently combined both biographies into a single edition titled “Sammy – An Autobiography.”  He eventually returned to America, settling in the Los Angeles area where he still makes his home today.

The present scene:  An empty theater, a darkened screen.  Somewhere in the distance, Sammy is dancing and singing on an ethereal stage, entertaining a roomful of heavenly hosts.

The movie version of ‘Yes I Can’ is mired in litigation and has been for some time.  Burt explains, “I often hear people say, ‘Such and such a movie took ten or fifteen years to make.’  I now know why.  It is the most extraordinary thing.  What happens is you have a property that looks like it could be a moneymaker.  People come out of the woodwork that claim to have rights, and no movie company wants to invest 60 or 70 million dollars and are unable to distribute it because of a lawsuit.  So they insist that everyone must sign off — every potential rights holder must sign off.   In our case, I own half of the copyright.  Sammy owned the other half, and when he died it was left to Altovise, his wife.”  Altovise Davis, Sammy’s wife of twenty years, died March 14, 2009, nine years after Sammy passed away from throat cancer.

“It was complicated before that, but she had a manager who had made some kind of a contract with her in which he wound up controlling more of Sammy’s life than she.  He had far more to say about it than she.  And we had a this fabulous deal through two wonderful producers, Craig Zaden and Neil Meron who produced Chicago and Hairspray and the last Jack Nicholson movie, “The Bucket List.”   They were really, really excited about it and they sold it to New Line and everybody was really ready to go, we’re ready to sign it.  And the deal that was negotiated after six or seven months of negotiating was really as good as it can get.  And then this manager suddenly appears on the scene — a man with whom I had gotten along with perfectly well earlier, and he suddenly said, ‘We have to quarterback this’.

“I guess he meant ‘We have to be in charge, we have to continue the negotiations’.  Well, I thought, this is ridiculous.  It’s already ready to sign, and he said, ‘No, we have to  quarterback it because it involves Sammy Davis Jr.’s life rights.  Which doesn’t exist — there’s no legal term such as ‘life rights’.

“Anyway, I thought, ‘Well all right, what harm can be done?’  So he brings in this lawyer from New York who was not a movie lawyer, and the man decides he’s going to teach Hollywood how to be Hollywood!  And he makes demands that are deal breakers.

“The first one was Altovise, who was originally a dancer, but had not danced in probably 30 years, and had never been a choreographer.”

Altovise, a trained actor and dancer, met Sammy in the mid-1960s when they were both appearing in Broadway musicals, he as the lead in “Golden Boy” and she in the chorus line of “High Spirits.”  She successfully auditioned for a London stage production of “Golden Boy” and, after its run, she joined his nightclub act as a dancer.

“The first demand was that Altovise had to be the choreographer of the movie.  Complete deal breaker.  There’s no way that you can take a major musical and have a novice attempt to choreograph it.  Nor did she want to, which I learned later.  At the time I wasn’t in touch with her and so I didn’t realize that it wasn’t she who had demanded it.  It was the manager.  He was just looking for more revenue.”

“Then he had to own the soundtrack.  That was another deal breaker.  Obviously, if you’re a studio and you invest 60 or 70 million dollars in a movie, you want every revenue source there can be, and you’re not going to give it to a man who has no track record as a record producer or anything.  It was all just a hustle.

“So we finally went to court to get rid of him, and we have been in court for 680 thousand dollars, which is one way of putting it – those are the legal fees we’ve run up on this project so far.  And more to come.  I could not imagine that these people would be so idiotic to hang on when they had absolutely no grounds for the thing that they were asking for.  They were killing a golden goose.”

“Also, according to the copyright law, at the time in 1965 when ‘Yes I Can’ was published, the law was that when a man dies, his copyrights go to his wife and to his children, without specifying in what percentages or what way – fifty-fifty?   It’s up to them to decide.  And Altovise had very generously agreed to split evenly with the children – there are four children, so that was no problem.

“The problem is not that I can’t go out and do the movie on my own, but no studio will take the risk of a major investment when there’s a potential of a lawsuit, even if they’re nuisance lawsuits.  If that potential exists, they don’t want to get involved.  This has happened before and they have wound up having to pay as much as 15 million dollars in blackmail, actually, to be able to release the film they’ve already shot.  So they don’t ever want to get involved in that again. And who can blame them?”

So the film project sits on a shelf, hamstrung through greed and avarice.  However, Boyar managed to salvage thousands of Sammy’s photos and negatives. “Everybody who was close to him knew he was taking pictures because he always carried a camera,” Boyar says.

“The photos were in a warehouse just stuffed away in boxes, not protected, not really taken care of the way you should take care of them.  Thousands of prints, thousands of negatives.  And probably within a few years, they would’ve been lost.  They’d be worthless.  They weren’t sorted, they weren’t in any particular order because Sammy never cared.”

He recalls Sammy’s obsession with the latest and best equipment. “Of course once I had a little education, Sammy once said, ‘I needed a new Nikon this and a Canon that, both with eighteen lenses and sixty-two filters.  In terms of addiction, I think there is nothing more powerful than men’s toys.  This may sound a little paranoid but I am positive that somewhere in Germany, in Japan, there are men awake in the middle of the night thinking, ‘Now Sammy Davis has an extra $50,000, let’s think of something he doesn’t have that we can sell him, the ultimate, the definitive… he’ll jump to be the first one to have it and we’ll get that $50,000.’ I am positive of that.’”

Burt knew Sammy didn’t have plans for his photography.  “He never thought, ‘Well, I’ll publish pictures of Frank and Peter and Dean.’  His pleasure in photography was to take pictures of people that he liked, and if he liked the picture, he would send it to you — an 11 by 14.  He had no future plans for his photography.  It was purely for pleasure.  So he never bothered keeping records carefully and keeping the negatives attached to the proof sheets.  So it was a tremendous job separating them, but we did it.”

In a labor of love that came close to matching the affection Davis had for his latest single lens reflex, Boyar selected hundreds of images that have been included in a coffee table book collection of Hollywood’s glory days, seen through the lens of Sammy’s myriad collection of Nikons, Canons, and Rollieflex cameras.  ‘Photo By Sammy Davis, Jr.’ went into print in 2007, the last book published by Judith Regan.

Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin preparing to go on stage.

“The book contains photos of Hollywood stars that no one else had access to.  For example, Frank Sinatra in his pajamas.  Now only someone like Sammy would be there to take that picture and Frank would only allow someone like Sammy to take it.

“There is a characteristic picture of Sinatra playing with his fingernails. When he was just about to go on, he was always very nervous and he would work out his nerves on his fingernails.  And so there’s a picture of him standing with Dean and he’s working on his nails.  These are things that only Sammy understood,” Boyar explains.  “The stories that accompany them are from taped conversations Sammy and I had over the course of our friendship. We used a handful of them in Sammy’s autobiographies.”

Sammy caught Peter Lawford the morning after a big one.

There are other pictures – Peter Lawford with a hangover.  “He looked like he was desperately in need of a steam room,” Boyar comments.

“There is a picture of me in the book.  It’s about three quarters of the way in.”  Sure enough, there’s Boyar captured in Sammy’s lens, vamping an Al Jolson routine as wife Jane laughs in delight. But the back-story wasn’t so funny.

“What happened is one night we were out, and somebody called Sidney Poitier a black, and in those days that was a very negative statement.  And it drove Sammy up the wall.  I’ve never seen him so upset.  He generally was very, very put together and he was very accustomed to racial epithets, so things didn’t bother him.   But I guess because he loved Sidney, it really did bother him and he was really, really angry, just really upset.  And we got back to his hotel room and he looked at me and he said, ‘Do that corny Jolson thing you do.’   Which was — I used to love Al Jolson, so I would do Jolson.  I knew all the songs. And so I started singing and I didn’t realize that Sammy was actually taking pictures of me at the time because I was so involved with my performance.  Imagine the audacity of singing to the world’s greatest entertainer!  Anyway I did it until finally he was laughing and the moment had passed and it was done.

“I didn’t know the pictures existed until Vanity Fair was doing a ten-page take-out for the magazine, a ten-page article on the book, and David Friend, who does special features for them, came here to look at the pictures and he says, ‘Hey, this is you!”  It was a negative and I would have never spotted it because I don’t have an eye for that sort of thing, but David had been a Life Magazine photo editor and as a photo editor he had a very, very sharp eye.  I was delighted to have it.  Sammy played the greatest role in my life.  Having the opportunity to write those books really made a whole life for Jane and myself.”

The legendary entertainer’s images, confined within the cover of a book, might not be moving pictures projected on the silver screen, but somehow there is sweet irony that Sammy himself created the montage of his life, directing and choreographing his story through his own camera lens, from beginning to end.

Books by Burt Boyar:

“PHOTO BY SAMMY DAVIS, JR.” Text by Burt Boyar

“YES I CAN” by Sammy Davis, Jr., and Jane and Burt Boyar

“WHY ME?” by Sammy Davis, Jr., and Jane and Burt Boyar

“SAMMY – An Autobiography” by Sammy Davis, Jr., and Jane and Burt Boyar

Other books by Burt Boyar:

“HITLER STOPPED BY FRANCO” by Jane and Burt Boyar

“WORLD CLASS” by Jane and Burt Boyar

 
Sinatra and Ava for Democrat Adlai Stevenson

Where classic Hollywood mostly held their activism to advocating for their causes, too many of today’s classless breed defines their activism through the hurling of invective at the other side - at 50% of the customers. They do it up on the screen and they do it while hiding behind a Hollywood media-machine owned and operated by sycophants who mostly agree. There’s nothing wrong with passion, humor, disagreement and debate, that’s what Big Hollywood is all about, but ad hominem that dehumanizes is the tactic of a new generation eager to fit in with the A-list.  

Today we have “Transformers” star Megan Fox, joining a growing club — spouting this hateful nonsense:

“Transformers” bombshell-cum-uninhibited philosophizer also contemplates — reluctantly — what she would say to Megatron to keep him from destroying the world. “I’d barter with him,” she muses to the July, issue Total Film UK, “and say instead of the entire planet, can you just take out all of the white trash, hillbilly, anti-gay, super bible-beating people in Middle America?”

Any consequence is predictable. Worse case, if it looks like her display of ignorance might become a distraction in the coming “Transformers” hype-machine, Fox will apologize/explain on some venue like the “Tonight Show.” But the bottom line is that there will be no consequence within a community that finds that kind of talk about “those kinds of people” all okey-dokey.

Just for giggles, compare Megan Fox trashing mainstream Middle America with, oh, say, this…

“Well, I think it’s great that Americans are able to choose one or the other. We live in a land where you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite marriage. And you know what, in my country, in my family, I think that I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman. No offense to anybody out there, but that’s how I was raised and that’s how I think it should be between a man and a woman. Thank you very much.”

Now, “Transformers” is going to make a ton of money no matter what Megan Fox says, but the fallout from this kind of star-behavior has already done irreparable damage. Today, the definition of what used to define a true movie star is all but dead.

People used to go to the movies to see stars, but with the possible exception of Will Smith, Denzel Washington and Adam Sandler (arguably there are a few others), those days are over. Most stars can’t even guarantee an opening weekend anymore.

 
The great (and very liberal) Paul Newman

George Clooney couldn’t open a supermarket without the word “Oceans” in the title; the combined firepower of Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey Jr. did “The Soloist” little good; “Duplicity” might have made more money without Julia Roberts, and Harrison Ford’s a flop away from competing with Steven Seagal in the direct-to-video bin. Walk the aisles at Blockbuster and marvel at the familiar faces starring in films no distributor would invest a theatrical release on.

The days of “names” putting butts in seats are over. Today, the star of the movie is the concept. No concept, no profit. Doesn’t matter who’s in it.

Not every actor’s behaved as poorly as the usual suspects, not all of them deserved to lose their firepower, but there have been too many like Megan Fox spoiling it for the rest. And so the movie star has managed to accomplish the one thing capable of causing their own extinction: they’ve deconstructed themselves.

The myth and aura has vanished, and without that all we’re left with is mortals, and way too many unpleasant ones…