LEGACY
Ken Shapiro, a former child TV actor whose hit 1974 film The Groove Tube anticipated US TV comedy institution Saturday Night Live by a year with sketches that wickedly satirised TV, has died at his home in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Daughter Rosy Rosenkrantz said the cause was cancer.
Shapiro’s film, with a cast that included Chevy Chase, a future SNL star, and comedian Richard Belzer was simultaneously inspired by Sid Caesar and Ernie Kovacs’ TV comedy shows of the 1950s and invigorated by the nudity, profanity and raunchiness commonplace in 1970s movies.
In one sketch a clown played by Shapiro reads passages from Fanny Hill, the 18th-century erotic novel, to children after they’ve shooed the adults from their rooms; in another, a West German couple’s sexual coupling is described by announcers as if they were competing in a World of Sport wrestling segment. A public service announcement about venereal disease is narrated by a puppet whose face is a set of male genitalia.
In her review in New York magazine, Judith Crist wrote that Shapiro “has a very nice gift for taking a squint at television’s triteness and seeing any number of oddball possibilities with a bit of a leer and a lot of laughter”.
And in the New York Post, Archer Winsten said that the film “marks the emergence of a comedy group that, given time and opportunity, could brighten, sharpen and broaden American comedy of the next decade or so”.
The Groove Tube began as a project with Shapiro’s childhood friend and college classmate Lane Sarasohn. In 1967 they began showing sketches they had videotaped on closed-circuit TV screens in a small cinema in the East Village in Manhattan.
Interviewed by the New York Times in 1969, Shapiro tried to describe what the sketches and parodies added up to.
“But this isn’t television,” he said about what he and Sarasohn called Channel One. “Well, all right, it is television. No – it’s what television could 0 Ken Shapiro, right, with co-star Chevy Chase be, without sponsors and censors. And with freedom.” He shrugged and added, “Frankly, I don’t know what it is.”
Shapiro and Sarasohn found additional cinemas and colleges where they could show the sketches. When they decided to adapt the sketches for a film, they used $150,000 in Shapiro’s trust fund from his days as a child performer and borrowed $50,000 from his father.
For a beer ad that ended in a bar brawl, extras were offered $20 a day and all the beer they could drink. “By the time we got the lights and camera all set up, it was almost afternoon and those guys needed no direction,” Sarasohn, who acted in the film as well as helping write it, told the Inquirer.
A deal with Paramount to make a sequel to The Groove Tube fell though when Robert Evans left as the studio’s production chief, Arthur Sellers, a screenwriter and a friend of Shapiro’s, said.
Shapiro’s next movie was Modern Problems (1981), about an air traffic controller (played by Chase) who gains telekinetic powers from being soaked with radioactive soapsuds. But it would be Shapiro’s final film. Unhappy with Hollywood, he retired from showbusiness before his 40th birthday.hewascomfortablefinancially from The Groove Tube, which had grossed $20 million as an independent film: Shapiro owned and distributed it. “He liked being his own boss, and he had this singular view of how things should be done,” Sellers said. “He didn’t like studios with so many layers to get things OK’D.”
In retirement, Shapiro travelled, went camping, made home movies and wrote music. “After all that hard work since he was a kid,” said his wife, Kelly, “he wanted to enjoy life.”
Kenneth Roy Shapiro was born in Newark, New Jersey. His father, Frank, was a manufacturer of novelty hats who capitalised on the popularity of the Davy Crockett craze in the mid-1950s by marketing coonskin caps. His mother, Leona, was intent on getting her son into showbusiness, and by the time he was two months old he was appearing in print advertisements.
He worked in television under the stage name Kenny Sharpe and had a recurring role on Milton Berle’s popular show, Texaco Star Theater, as “the kid”.
Shapiro appeared on numerous other TV shows, but he was unhappy as a child performer. “He had fond memories of Milton Berle as a mentor,” Rosenkrantz said in an interview, “but he really wanted to get away from show business and be a kid.”
In addition to his wife and daughter Rosenkrantz, Shapiro is survived by another daughter, Emily, a stepdaughter, Danielle, and other family members. His marriages to Karen Ann Rosenkrantz, Christine Nazareth and Giselle Green ended in divorce.
Shapiro’s decision to satirise TV might be the most enduring impact of The Groove Tube. “Television didn’t refer to itself much back in 1974, and neither did film,” Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Pop Culture at Syracuse University, said. “The Groove Tube’s legacy was that it established a structure, an attitude and a style of burlesque that wouldbecomefamiliarinlater shows like SNL.” But, Thompson cautioned, the influence of The Groove Tube should not be overstated. It did not invent sketch comedy, he noted. “It just did it in a way that seemed new and naughty.” © New York Times 2017. Distributed by NYT Syndication Service
“The Groove Tube did not invent sketch comedy; it just did it in a way that seemed new and naughty”