A documentary film about an improv comedy pioneer from Manhattan with a turbulent personal life is screening in Kansas this summer.
“For Madmen Only” is making festival rounds right now and details the life of the late Del Close and his struggle to bring improvisational comedy into mainstream culture. The film includes interviews with comedians and actors Close trained. Close was born in Manhattan in 1934 and spent much of his life exploring the limits of long-form improvisation on stage and screen.
After graduating from Manhattan High in 1952 and briefly attending K-State, Close’s pursuit of comedy eventually led him to Chicago, his home base, in 1960. He’s credited with teaching dozens of comedic actors, including K-State alum Eric Stonestreet, Kansas City native Jason Sudeikis, Tina Fey, Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi and Chris Farley.
Close is a member of the Manhattan High School Wall of Fame; actor Bill Murray came to Manhattan to give an acceptance speech on Close’s behalf in 2008.
Heather Ross, the film’s writer and director, said the documentary just screened at a film festival in Cleveland, and next will be shown at a festival in North Carolina. She said a launch event will likely take place this summer in Los Angeles, where most of the comedians interviewed for the film reside. DC Comics is also assisting with the film’s premiere.
“The cool thing is the film sort of takes as its spine this anthology comic book Del wrote in the 1980s for DC (titled ‘Wasteland’),” Ross said. “So, DC is helping launch the film, and they’re going to re-release the comic book when they do.”
Ross hasn’t scheduled a Manhattan-area screening, but she said producers are planning to have one here this summer. Ross said the film will be released digitally on iTunes and potentially other streaming platforms this summer. Meanwhile, the Lied Center for the Performing Arts in Lawrence is holding a drive-in screening of “For Madmen Only” on June 25, and the Free State Film Festival is planning to show the film as part of its summer lineup.
Ross said she became inspired to make this film about five years ago while she was living in Chicago and making a documentary about the inmates of a female prison. She said the girls, while full of dark stories, were extremely funny and witty.
“They were really creative, and often the form that took was joking around, making cracks, or writing funny raps,” Ross said. “I’m a lifelong comedy fan; I’m always sort of gravitating toward darker humor or gallows humor, and I thought, ‘There’s a connection here.’”
Ross said for a lot of people comedy “is a sort of life raft,” or a way to deal with some of the horrible things people encounter in their lives.
“It was around this same time I started hearing about Del Close, who lived in a disgusting apartment, who had a needle hanging out of his arm, but trained everybody in comedy that I cared about,” Ross said. “I thought that was a curious figure, and I wanted to know what made people listen to him.”
She never had a chance to talk to the man; Close died from emphysema in 1999 at 64.
Ross said she dug up as much information on Close as she could find, and conducted interviews with several comedians and actors to learn more about this mysterious comedy figure.
“He sort of ended up being this comedy mystic who goes to the edges of what art and comedy can do,” Ross said. “He did a lot of dangerous and mean stuff, self-destructive stuff … and came back from those adventures with something to teach the rest of us, so we don’t have to go to hell and back.”
Ross said she learned Close was “not a super functional addict,” with heroin and cocaine among his drugs of choice. She said in her interviews with people who knew Close, they all had different things to say about him.
“Something I heard a lot from people was, ‘Don’t use this guy as a role model, use him as a cautionary tale,’” Ross said. “Someone argued that (his drug use) helped his creativity, and I think most would argue that it shut it down at times, and that he did the best work of his life after being relatively sober.”
Ross said a news clipping from an archived issue of The Mercury is used in the film to help explain Close’s backstory. She said Close and his father had a terrible relationship, and the story Close liked to tell people was that, at eight or nine years old, his father committed suicide in front of him.
“That was sort of his origin story he told everybody,” Ross said. “It turned out to be more complicated than that, but he clearly had an experience of deep betrayal by a father figure or felt that he did.”
Ross said that sense of betrayal followed Close all his life and may have been the source of his self-destructive tendencies. While the documentary focuses more on the family of comedians influenced by Close and not the man’s mental state, Ross said she tried to leave some breadcrumbs for the viewer to make up their own minds about Close.
“We’re not playing armchair psychology,” Ross said. “We’re going to follow this guy through how he told his own story and see what truths and myths we can find; the mysteries are there for the viewer to unravel themselves.”
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April 30, 2021 at 01:00AM
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Documentary on Manhattan native, improv pioneer Del Close premiering this summer - Manhattan Mercury
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