John Scheinfeld has put together intimate looks at numerous famous figures during his lengthy career as a documentary filmmaker, including the Marx Brothers, The Bee Gees, Jonathan Winters, Bette Midler, Peter Sellers and John Coltrane. One of his most recent productions, American Masters: This is Bob Hope …, is set to be broadcast at 9 p.m. Friday on public television stations. The film is a “thanks for the memories” to a comedian who provided laughter to audiences around the world for eight decades.
It wasn’t a gift of a camera or a passion for film that provided the spark for Scheinfeld to devote his life to making such visual histories. It all began with a comic book.
As a 12-year-old growing up in Milwaukee, Scheinfeld was an avid collector of comic books. An advertisement in one offered recordings of two old radio shows, The Shadow and The Lone Ranger, for a dollar. He got the tape and became fascinated with radio dramas.
“I started to collect recordings of old radio shows, all kinds. Dramas. Comedies. You name it,” Scheinfeld says. “It not only gave me a real appreciation of storytelling and performance and writing and pacing. All of the elements of what I do now.
“Also, I will embarrass myself and my mother by saying there is a photograph of me when I was 7 or 8, sitting on the toilet reading a volume of the World Book. I was always fascinated by history. What happened. Why it happened.”
His collection of old radio shows included a tape of Hope radio broadcasts. Scheinfeld vividly recalls how impressed he was that Hope was ad libbing so many funny lines that Bing Crosby laughed too hard to deliver his dialogue. Scheinfeld’s appreciation of Hope continued to grow through the comic’s movies and TV shows.
All that background went into the proposal Scheinfeld gave to American Masters. His plan was to spotlight Hope both as a massively successful global entertainer and as the comic icon who continued to work years beyond after his comedy career began to fade. That approach got him the OK and production started a year ago.
Scheinfeld had to make two versions of his documentary. An abridged version of the film aired on public television as part of the programming for pledge breaks in November. The director’s full cut of This is Bob Hope …, which includes 35 additional minutes of material, is what is being telecast in late December.
Both films cover Hope’s career from vaudeville to Broadway to film and television. There’s also plenty of time spent examining Hope’s charity work and his commitment to entertaining troops through his USO tours, even when it meant going to dangerous locations. What Scheinfeld was able to do with his director’s cut is take more time to examine the highs and lows of Hope’s career. Scheinfeld laughs and adds that Hope was so successful that there was so much more he could have included even with an extended version.
“Alongside an examination of Bob Hope’s extraordinary career achievements is a portrait of a gifted man with enormous personal contradictions,” Scheinfeld said. “Even in the longer cut, I barely scratched the surface of his huge impact and influence.”