Life

Oasis in the Desert

Published: Sunday, May 31, 2009

By ROBERT MITCHELL, Correspondent

Oliver Hardy died in 1957 and Stan Laurel in 1965, but the comedy team of Laurel and Hardy lives on through “The Sons of the Desert,” an international group with 15,000 members dedicated to preserving and perpetuating the duo’s films.

One of the newer “tents,” as the 284 local groups are called, is in Ellenville. The “Them Thar Hills” tent (each one is named after a Laurel and Hardy film) put down stakes in January and already has some 30 members.

“The real aim of the Sons of the Desert is to perpetuate the love of Laurel and Hardy and to keep the films being shown basically all over the world,” said Ray Faiola, the group’s founder and “Grand Sheik.”

Faiola said the international group was founded in 1965 with a goal of “scholarly overtones and heavily social undertones.” It holds a semi-annual convention, which is scheduled for Sacramento, Calif., in 2010.

Among the counties with active tents are England, Luxembourg, Belgium, Norway, the Netherlands, Germany, France, Italy and Switzerland. Over the past 44 years, there have even been “Pardon Us” and “Second Hundred Years” tents in state and federal prisons.

Locally, Laurel and Hardy fans gather at Faiola’s Ellenville home and meet in a large renovated building that sits on the property. Faiola said the meetings feature a half hour or so of socializing and toasting Laurel and Hardy and supporting cast members such as Mae Busch, Charlie Hall, James Finlayson and Daphne Pollard

“We don’t take ourselves too seriously,” said Faiola, a 30-year-executive with CBS-TV in New York City.

The group then adjourns to the downstairs theater, which includes a large screen, camera room and real theater seats, to watch 16mm films of the comedy team that made some of America’s most beloved silent and sound features from 1926 to 1945, They include “Way Out West,” “Towed in a Hole” and “Music Box,” which won an Oscar.

“It’s a good family-type event to do because it’s clean comedy,” said Joe Bevilacqua, a radio performer from Napanoch and the group’s “Vice Sheik.”

“It’s comedy that’s based in characters and situations, not in being mean or double entendre. It’s pre-National Lampoon, pre-Saturday Night Live.” Continued...

Laurel and Hardy made 101 films together for the Hal Roach Studios, and Faiola has nearly all of them on 16mm film.

“I think I have 97,” he said. “I’m missing four of the features they made near the end of their careers with 20th Century Fox.”

“Sons of the Desert,” the 1933 film that inspired the international Laurel and Hardy organization, will be shown today from 5-7 p.m. in Ellenville at the group’s meetng. Also on the bill is a cartoon, “Popeye the Sailor (Meets Sindbad the Sailor), along with a classic Harold Lloyd silent short, “High and Dizzy.”

“You really get to see these films as they were intended,” Bevilacqua said. “There’s also this communal aspect with everyone laughing at the same places.”

Faiola agreed and noted that the club’s other purpose, besides perpetuating Laurel and Hardy films, is “making people laugh.”

“There’s really nothing that beats seeing comedy in a communal, kinetic setting because laughter is contagious,” Faiola said. “I’m from the Norman Cousins school of laughter being the very best medicine.”

Norman Cousins, a prominent journalist and author, claimed to have cured himself of a life-threatening tissue disease by laughing at movies by the Marx Brothers and Laurel and Hardy.

“There is a certain therapeutic aspect of laughing,” Bevilacqua said. “It does create endorphins in the brain. and it sets off all kinds of mechanisms in the body to help heal.

“In a light way, we’re curing the world with Laurel and Hardy,” he said with a laugh.

Faiola himself has been laughing at such comedies since age 5, when he got his first 8 mm film, a 10-minute abridgement of the 1948 movie “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein,” which remains his favorite film. He had several Laurel and Hardy films on 8mm in the 1970s. Continued...

“I grew up being interested in comedy and seeing Laurel and Hardy on television,” he said.

A friend took him to his first Sons of the Desert meeting in New York City when he was 16. They became the group’s youngest members. Faiola says what drew him to Laurel and Hardy is that they “had a real relationship.”

“First of all, they were very distinct characters and there definitely is a lot going on under the surface,” he said. “They had a real connection to one another. It wasn’t just a lot of word games like Abbott and Costello, it wasn’t just a lot of silly satire like the Marx Brothers, or total lunacy with a little dancing thrown in like the Ritz Brothers.

“All of the things that they got into to, it was as much borne out of their character as it was out of the situation. I think Laurel and Hardy comedies, more any other comedy team, had a very secure foundation to them.”

That relationship even comes across in the duo’s silent films, Faiola said.

“That’s one reason why their transition to sound was so easy because they were both, first of all, good and trained stage actors, but also their characters were so clearly established it was just a matter of adding the spoken dialogues and planting the camera for a while,” he said.

Bevilacqua discovered Laurel and Hardy while growing up in New York City and watching comedies on WPIX-TV and WNEW-TV.

“To me, it was like a living cartoon,” he said.

However, Bevilacqua said while some people may think Laurel and Hardy a bit buffoonish with the gestures and voices, they are in for a treat if they see their work in a theater as past generations did.

“If they come and watch a film — and especially if they see it with an audience — they’ll begin to see how rich a world they created,” he said. Continued...

Ellenville’s Steve Krulick, a member of the tent, agreed that the times call for Laurel and Hardy.

“At a time when there’s so much to be depressed about, why not get together with some like-minded persons who enjoy classic comedy that isn’t mean-spirited or vulgar?” he said.

Krulick noted that Laurel and Hardy were at their peak during the Great Depression when people were looking for a way to get their minds off the bad news all around them.

“So, again, the times are ripe for gentle humor and clever gags, particularly that address issues of employment, the aspirations of the working class, and poking fun at the rich, powerful and arrogant, and bringing the pompous down a peg or two,” he said.

Bevilacqua’s wife, Lorie Kellogg, said she was looking around for a local club to join, and the “Sons of the Desert” was a dream come true.

“I wanted a group that liked to laugh, sit in the dark and eat popcorn,” she said.

Faiola said the group goes out to eat after each showing to support local businesses and may reach out to the community more in the future by showing the films in nursing homes, public libraries and to veterans groups.

The group also plans to march in Ellenville’s Fourth of July parade and wear red lodge hats like Laurel and Hardy did in “Sons of the Desert.”

“Again, we don’t take ourselves too seriously,” Faiola said.

Faiola, who moved to Ellenville three years ago from New York City, met Bevilacqua when he discovered his Web site (Joebev.com) and its focus on old-time radio. They also would see each other around town.

“We just kept running into each other,” Bevilacqua said. “Ray and I are both do-a-holics. We’re always looking for something to do.”

They two were cast in a “War of the Worlds” recreation at the Shadowland Theater, and they both act and direct in local productions.

“I think I learned my comic timing from watching Laurel and Hardy,” said Bevilacqua, whose work appears on National Public Radio and XM Satellite Radio.

Faiola said he ended up in Ellenville because he fell in love with the building that would house what is essentially a shrine to old movies. “I bought this property basically for the building,” he said.

The building, decorated with movie posters and other memorabilia, cost $70,000 to renovate and is full of classic and rare films, including cartoons, from the 1930s and’40s.

“Everything from ‘Birth of a Nation’ to ‘Bad Santa,’” Faiola said.

Faiola said he tries to get all of his favorite movies, even modern ones, on film because “there’s something special about light projected through a piece of celluloid.”

“It plays on a different part of your brain when you’re watching an actual projected celluloid image than watching an electronic recreation of that image on a video screen,” he said. “It’s just not the same. There is nothing like taking a piece of film and holding it up to the light. You can’t hold a video up to the light.”

Faiola says his favorite actor is Claude Raines and Frank Capra his most beloved director, but there’s no doubt when it comes to comedy.

“When it comes to a comedy team you can’t beat Laurel and Hardy,” he said.

Those interested in joining the Sons of the Desert can visit www.themtharhills.org, where they will find an online membership application (memberships are $20 a person and $35 for families). By e-mail, Faiola can be contacted at ray@themtharhills.org and Bevilacqua at joebev@joebev.com.