{"id":9323,"date":"2018-05-10T05:00:02","date_gmt":"2018-05-10T09:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=9323"},"modified":"2019-01-12T14:47:19","modified_gmt":"2019-01-12T19:47:19","slug":"doctor-detroit-dan-aykroyds-strangely-bland-first-solo-act","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/doctor-detroit-dan-aykroyds-strangely-bland-first-solo-act\/","title":{"rendered":"<i>Doctor Detroit<\/i>: Dan Aykroyd&#8217;s Strangely Bland First Solo Act"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"> My brother and I like to bother each other and those around us with a game of soundtracks: When a deep, dark cut from a movie comes on the radio, one of us will turn to the other, smile like an executioner looking for a fresh neck, and ask:<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"> \u201cWhat\u2019s it from?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"> The song could be \u201cA Letter To Both Sides,\u201d which plays on a radio for five seconds in <i>Fletch <\/i>(1985),<i> <\/i>or \u201cOnce In A Lifetime Groove,\u201d which plays on a radio for eight seconds in <i>Running Scared <\/i>(1986). We have a better batting average than anyone should have at such a game, but there\u2019s one song I can bring up that stumps him almost every time.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"> And the name of the movie is right there in the lyrics.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"> Devo\u2019s \u201cDoctor Detroit\u201d manages a feat long thought impossible \u2014 a Devo song, as distinct as that is by default, that leaves no impression at all. <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"> This is a metaphor.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Devo - Dr Detroit\" width=\"760\" height=\"570\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/9_A8Xe9M0NY?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"> For a comedy about a comparative literature professor posing as a proto-Beetlejuice pimp to protect a gang of lovable prostitutes, it\u2019s blandly strange. For Dan Aykroyd\u2019s first solo act, it\u2019s strangely bland.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"> By the dawn of 1983, the former <i>Saturday Night Live <\/i>star and soon-to-be Ghostbuster wasn\u2019t exactly box-office gold. Few actors have the good fortune to make their (American) big-screen debut in a Spielberg movie. Fewer have the bad luck of that movie being <i>1941.<\/i> <i>The Blues Brothers <\/i>(1980)<i> <\/i>turned his fortunes around, but not by much. The legendarily troubled production hobbled to a modest success despite an unusual handicap: <i>Blues Brothers <\/i>reached less than half of the usual theaters because <a href=\"https:\/\/www.vanityfair.com\/hollywood\/2013\/01\/making-of-blues-brothers-budget-for-cocaine\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><span class=\"s2\">exhibitors<\/span><\/a> didn\u2019t think white people would see it and certainly didn\u2019t want black people seeing it in white neighborhoods. <a href=\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/neighbors-john-g-avildsens-uncomfortable-journey-into-suburban-hell\/\"><span class=\"s2\">Neighbors<\/span><\/a><i> <\/i>(1981), a deranged sitcom of a movie in which Aykroyd plays a bleach-blond, blue-eyed implied-Nazi-next-door, earned less on twice as many screens.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"> <i>Doctor Detroit<\/i> was Aykroyd\u2019s first movie after John Belushi\u2019s death, and his own shot at leading-man status. But unlike Belushi\u2019s <i>Continental Divide<\/i>, the quaint romantic comedy tailor-made to play him against his mythic life-of-the-party type, the <i>Doctor <\/i>leans right into the quirky passions of its star.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"> Aykroyd plays Clifford Skridlow, a medieval lit study guide with legs. Very nice legs, as the movie reminds us multiple times. We meet Cliff power-walking the length of Chicago to the zipper-synth sound of Devo\u2019s somehow-forgettable title song. In red short shorts, watching sweatband-mounted rearview mirrors, with a technique like a flamingo still learning to walk, Aykroyd is his own special effect. The stunning display catches eyes from a passing limo and its occupants: a pimp named Smooth Walker (Howard Hesseman) and the four prostitutes who work for him.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"> It\u2019s the first coincidence in a plot constructed of almost nothing but, held together by complication and force.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"> See, Smooth is in deep with Mom, the Godmother of Chicago with an army of bald chauffeurs at her command. An off-handed reference to them as \u201cYul Brynner clones\u201d is both accurate and one of <i>Doctor Detroit<\/i>\u2019s best jokes, so adjust your expectations accordingly. When Smooth is boxed-in on the highway by four of these limo-driving goons, he\u2019s forced to answer for a whole lot of money he owes Mom. So he does what anyone would do and pulls a <i>Usual Suspects <\/i>on her, creating a fictional super-pimp out of the junk hanging on her wall, like an enormous calendar that says DETROIT and a picture that happens to have a doctor in it. The newly christened Doctor Detroit has her money, see? Only he doesn\u2019t exist. But when Smooth and the ladies happen to choose the same Indian restaurant as Cliff, it\u2019s only too obvious: Smooth will take him out for a night on the town, let him have his na\u00efve fun with the ladies, drug him into the next plane of existence, tell the ladies he\u2019s a new business partner, then run away to Hawaii so Cliff can clean up the mess.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"> A tale as old as time. At least as old as a year prior, when Ron Howard\u2019s <i>Night Shift <\/i>told the same story. And it would be told again a few months later in <i>Risky Business. <\/i>Considerate Pimp was a valid career choice in the early 1980s. Life was easier then. Zanier, even.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"> Ol\u2019 Cliff, explicitly credited as an \u201cexpert in honor,\u201d steps up to protect the prostitutes by becoming the infamous Doctor Detroit. With a white fright wig, borrowed from a suit of armor and wardrobe dyed in dripping Technicolor, the bad (in a good way but also a bad way) Doctor looks like one of the middle shots of a Trying On Goofy Costumes montage. He\u2019s equal parts shock jock, pirate, and second-string <i>SNL <\/i>character. And he only shows up in about three scenes.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"> I remember seeing the TV edit of <i>Doctor Detroit <\/i>as a kid. Until I watched it again, as one of those faded afternoon movies on HBO, it garnered the same vague warmth I hold for discontinued gummy snacks and lost squirt guns; I think it was great, but not as great as I think.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Doctor Detroit (1983) - Official Trailer (HD)\" width=\"760\" height=\"428\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/KNf9gCzJrbw?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"> Now, as a grown Aykroyd acolyte who worked on a live comedy show in college mostly because of his influence, I understand how the R-rated <i>Doctor Detroit <\/i>plays just fine with a network butchering \u2014 it is the coyest movie about prostitution I\u2019ve ever seen. The harshest language is saved for ADR as someone talks away from the camera. One shot, a sex-romp staple, opens on a TV playing generic porn. But whereas this usually means two naked people shot from the waist up, twitching and grunting, <i>Doctor Detroit <\/i>shows some full-frontal. There is nothing else like it in the rest of the movie. Cut that out, dub some swears, and it\u2019s an easy PG. As it is, the movie has the uneven aftertaste of a failed sitcom pilot fleshed out with all the words it wasn\u2019t allowed to use at CBS. The raciest part of the four-on-one orgy that sets Cliff on the path to Doctor Detroit is when he strips down to his boxers and cannonballs a jacuzzi in Benny Hill fast-forward.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"> <i>Doctor Detroit <\/i>is too self-conscious to work as a sex comedy, not risky enough to work as an R-rated comedy, and so scattershot it barely works as any kind of comedy. Without hesitation or prior inclination toward theatrics, the meek Clifford adopts a complete Kentucky-fried persona to convince a similarly Southern judge to let off one of the prostitutes. And because it is any kind of comedy from the early 1980s, it gets unnecessarily racial. When the judge realizes the prostitute he just let off is black, he demands Cliff be charged with \u201cimpersonating a cracker.\u201d An awards show for pimps is openly held in the ballroom of a posh hotel, across the hall from a banquet for academics, and you best believe our hero is expected at both. There\u2019s also a scene, only one, where Cliff explains exactly what he\u2019s thinking to himself while lying in bed alone. <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"> Yet you can still see exactly why Dan Aykroyd jumped on it. Clifford Skridlow is a dry run for the stiff-collar yuppies and pure-hearted nerds in his immediate future. He rattles off lines with the precision and speed of a laser printer. It was an Aykroyd trademark even on <i>SNL<\/i>, but this is where he first weaponized it. Cliff is Aykroyd at his most calculator-brained obsessive, what drove him to deliver a first draft of <i>The Blues Brothers<\/i> at well over 300 pages with descriptions of everything from car engines to Catholicism. The Doctor, a figure so immediately legendary that James Brown devotes a song to him on the spot, is Aykroyd\u2019s impossible alter ego. The blues fan who became a blues act who played with blues icons. The ghoulish spirit whose only <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Nothing_but_Trouble_(1991_film)\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><span class=\"s2\">directorial effort<\/span><\/a> would be a <i>Texas Chain Saw Massacre <\/i>riff with room for an extended Digital Underground cameo.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"> Rosie Shuster, an original <i>Saturday Night Live <\/i>writer and one-time girlfriend of Aykroyd, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.vanityfair.com\/news\/2002\/09\/snl200209\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><span class=\"s2\">laid him out<\/span><\/a> better than anybody: \u201cDanny\u2019s epiphany would be to commit a crime and arrest himself.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"> <i>Doctor Detroit<\/i>, if nothing else, is an imperfect showcase of that split. Cop and criminal. Professor and pimp. And it makes a convincing case as to why he never quite headlined a movie on his own again. His contemporaries, Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, occupied that vast middle ground. Every role was more reflection than invention, and that led to some of the greatest Smug-Bastards-You-Still-Kind-Of-Like ever put to celluloid. But how do you reflect Dan Aykroyd, a man who studied seminary at the same time he was taking improv classes?<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"> His next movie, hitting audiences only a month later, would provide a clue. In <i>Trading Places<\/i>, Eddie Murphy would play the reflection, and Dan Aykroyd would play the invention, an ignorant cartoon of upper-crust privilege.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"> And he\u2019d give it his impressive all. Just like the Doctor.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"> It\u2019s currently fading on the constant afternoon of HBO GO, but it\u2019s already been fading for 35 years. Besides Aykroyd\u2019s infectious conviction, there\u2019s little reason to watch a comedy so dated it ends on a joke about a crusty old man marrying a prostitute and getting into Republican politics.<\/span><\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<div><em>Join our <a href=\"http:\/\/crookedmarquee.us16.list-manage.com\/subscribe?u=dc6679cd997ec610eeaf50562&amp;id=db71dbf4c3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">mailing list<\/a>! Follow us on <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/CrookedMarquee\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Twitter<\/a>! 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