The Madison-Felix Awards- Guess Who's Coming to the Madisons?

The Madison-Felix Awards was an awards show in Buffalo New York, which ran from 1995-2005. It was put together by my friend Big Brian and I. In reality it was a parody of an awards show mixed with an open bar drinking contest. Still it was fun and irreverent and some of the best parties I've ever had. But like all good times, they eventually drifted off to the land of nostalgia. The next four blogs are dedicated to their memory.

     An ordinary evening, or was it?

     Big Brian called me up excited, “Rex get over here. You’re not going to believe this shit!”

     Getting ready not to believe this shit, I sped on over to Brian’s. I had no idea what to expect, but I was sure it would be hilarious. All I knew was that it had something to do with the Madison-Felixes.

     It had always been our practice with the Madisons to send invitations to anyone that was going to receive our award. Those whom we could locate. I mean how do you find Alan Ormsby from “Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things,” or Eric Stern from “The Love Butcher?” For the first couple of years we actually held out hope that someone might condescend to reply, but by the 10^th year all of those ideas were gone. We only sent them out as a joke, and sat around snickering when the “I regret to inform you that we cannot attend” letter (when they even bothered to do so) rolled in.

     This was the end of the Madison-Felixes. The last show. I actually lived in North Carolina, so most of the burden was on Brian, and he was getting tired of handling everything himself.

     The old days of it being just fun fun fun were over, and now it was more of a hassle. We worked harder at it, and the shows improved, while our enjoyment waned.  Gone were the days of creating our master tape, by hooking two VCRs together, the night before the show. I asked Brian how this happened, and we remembered back in time we would show up drunk to the show and go from there. Remember when I inaugurated the 3^rd Madisons by drinking a 21 shot salute. The last being a flaming shot of Rumple Mintz? I kind of do.

     When we first started the show, our intentions were to pay tribute to the less known and forgotten masterpieces with a few jokes tossed in. That lasted a year. We quickly followed suit and descended into clips of llama fucking, Divine eating dog shit, unspeakable horrors from Salo, men getting their dicks chopped off, old women playing Russian roulette, boy in the Nazi uniform getting a blow job from his sister, an accident clip were a man gets hit by a car and flying 20 feet (met with uproarious applause) and the unforgettable girl-masturbating-with a-severed-arm clip from “Entrails of a Virgin.”

Classics like this!

     Our normal stable consisted of films like: Night of the Bloody Apes, Make ‘Em Die Slowly, I Spit on Your Grave, Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things, Brutes and Savages, and our ultimate award winner (7 Madison-Felixes) The Love Butcher. A film I could see win over and over and over again with out getting tired of it.

        One thing we always had each year, was our Lifetime Achievement Award, with accompanying song. It was called the Mike Horner award, after the first winner, a porno star that we enjoyed watching. Other noteworthy recipients were Don Knotts, George Peppard, Jabba the Hutt, Christopher Reeve, Alan Hale Jr., Bob Newhart etc. The purpose was to give an award to a person that everyone knew, but that was never honored. No one ever honored us back by showing up. Except for now.

     I arrived at Brian’s and bounded up to his apartment “WHAT‘S UP?” I yelled. He stood there massively, smoking a cigarette, and handed me a piece of paper.

    “Remember who we're giving the Lifetime Achievement Award to this year?” He asked with nervous excitement. Somewhere between hysterical laughter and panic.

    “Yeah, Charles Bronson.”

    “Well read the letter.”

     I looked at it. “Dear sir, I am delighted to inform you that Mr. Bronson will be honored to accept your very prestigious award…”

    I glanced over at the “prestigious” award, sitting on a dusty shelf above Brian’s TV, wedged in between his Bob and Doug MacKenzie Action Figures, and some George Orwell books. A plastic tape glued to a fake marble base. I looked at Brian.

    “What the hell are we gonna do?”

     The only other time something like this had happened was when we received a threatening letter from Faye Dunaway’s lawyers. It stated that criminal prosecution would take place if we did not cease and desist our correspondence. I say “our” correspondence, but it was really Brian’s last letter that had spawned this response. I never read it, but it went along the line of him getting upset with her ignoring us, how it wasn’t nice of her, and if she needed a place to stay then she could stay at his. Brian states that this was a joke, like when he sent out Christmas Cards full of Bible-beating “Praise Jesus” material to every Jewish name he could find in the phone book, and I believe him. Everyone who knows Brian could believe this. Still, he always had a thing for redheads.

     Charles Bronson coming to the show? THE Charles Bronson, of The Dirty Dozen and Death Wish fame. Christ? What’s he expecting? I supposed a lot of fancy big star treatment, like a place to stay or food. How cheap were the Motel 6 rates again? I suppose we could pick him up in my Mom’s Honda Civic hatchback. Does he like Cheetos? Because I could get a lot of them cheap from the corner gas station. Oh God. I’ve seen his movies. If he doesn’t like the show, he might machine-gun our entire families.

     Now it might be pointed out that he had been deceptive in offering him the award in the first place. It was a Lifetime Achievement Award, and may be flattering for someone who hadn’t received attention for some time. I believe his last film had been Death Wish 4, and for a man who had a lot of staring roles in good films, it might be a bit of disappointment to have been almost forgotten. If indeed he was. Still in your declining years and all that comes along is a pack of lunatics from Buffalo, putting on a mockery of a show, simply to have a good laugh. Is it better than nothing? Perhaps.

     Then I thought of the collection of clips we had prepared in Mr. Bronson’s honor. It consisted of lots of scenes with him killing, stabbing, shooting and garroting people, all to the tune of The Partridge Family’s “I Think I Love You.” What was he going to make of that? 

     We’ll never know. Those who attended the final outing of the Madison-Felix Award will note that there was no celebrity present. We went out as we went in. Completely ignored by the film industry at large. Bastards. While it might have been a disaster, we would have at least tried to handle it, but Charles Bronson did something to make the entire potential-fiasco go away. He died.

Hopefully doing what he loved!

     Perhaps it was the knowledge that at least someone somewhere remembered his work and that felt it was deserving of recognition, and at last he could die in peace, content that he was not forgotten. Perhaps it was the heart attack. It will be a mystery lost to the ages.

      Still to the end the Madison-Felix Awards always remained a place where those of dubious credentials and past glory could, for one night, remain among the stars.

Charles Bronson 1921 - 2003. RIP!

The Madison- Felix Awards: The Categories of Oddity

The Madison-Felix Awards was an awards show in Buffalo New York, which ran from 1995-2005. It was put together by my friend Big Brian and I. In reality it was a parody of an awards show mixed with an open bar drinking contest. Still it was fun and irreverent and some of the best parties I've ever had. But like all good times, they eventually drifted off to the land of nostalgia. The next several blogs are dedicated to their memory.

         The categories of the Madisons-Felix’s varied over the years, but they were what set the show apart. It was the one aspect I always loved working on. Now several of them were your standard lot- Best Director, Best Cinematography, Best Actress, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actress and Actor, Best Makeup/Special Effects, Best Musical Score, Best Animation, Best Dialogue, and Best Picture .

          But we never filled them with nominees one would consider to be conventionally Oscar material or which even made much sense in the context of the category. Such as one year we gave Best Makeup/Special Effects to My Dinner with Andre. Another time we gave Best Dialogue to The Wild Bunch and showed the blood soaked finale where the only discernable dialogue was William Holden yelling, “Bitch!” at a woman before shooting her in the face. And, of course, Best Picture was always reserved for the foulest clip that we had scrounged up that year. Ones that a person would need a few drinks to laugh at.

          But, to us, these were minor categories. The ones which were expected from a fake/real awards show. Our true joy was all the others we came up with.

          Traditionally we started the show with three non-categories. Ones that didn’t mean anything to most people. Best Best Boy, Best Gaffer, and Best Key Grip- later to be replaced with Best Executive Producer. These were the slots where we decided to show great bits and pieces of films. They were the final hold-overs from the high minded notions with which Big Brian and I started the Madison-Felix’s. Great scenes from good films. 

          The categories which most interested Big Brian and I were the ones that are never seen in an awards show, not even The Razzies or Golden Turkey Awards, and perhaps with good reason.

          Awards such as:

Best Unintentional Cameo (small parts played by actors before they became famous, such as Denzel Washington in Death Wish, a fat Richard Simmons in Satyricon or John Ratzenberger in Ghandi)

Most Predictable Plot (Usually went to something obvious like Titanic or JFK or La Bamba)

The Overacting Achievement Award (Take your pick on this one)

Most Stilted Performance of a Rock Star in a Film (The whole band in Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park, Madonna in Who’s that Girl, Paul McCartney in Eat the Rich)

 Worst Sequel (I’m sure everyone can fill in the blank here. It’s actually more valid now than when we first came up with it)

  Most Annoying Person in a Film Award (Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump, Franklin in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre- everyone clapped when he got skewered.)

The William Shatner Award for Acting Excellence (where William Shatner was nominated for every category. We did this for a few years before the joke wore thin. He first won it for Judgement at Nuremburg)

Most Annoying Use of a Child in a Film (Why were we the first to come up with this? It’s something everyone complains about!)

Most Embarrassing Skeleton in the Closet for An Established Actor (Some shit stain of a movie that an actor took to pay the bills. Ala Russ Tamblin in Cabin Boy or Henry Fonda in Tentacles. We later shortened this to the less cumbersome Most Respected Actor in a Bad Film)

 Most Smoking in a Film (The novelty of this one wore off quickly and it only lasted two years.)

Best One-liner (Bits and pieces which struck us as funny, but we canned this one after four years as the lack of context would yield little more than a chuckle.)

Pretty Boy Actor You’d Most Like to Whack (Whatever talentless collection of duckface-posing nonentities where cluttering up Tiger Beat that year)

Ditzy Actress You’d Most Like to Strangle (The sister of the previous category. Same criteria, just switch genders)

          Looking over this list fills me with such schadenfreude. The last of the regular categories were our favorite and the ones which Brain and I had the most evil joy. Most Deceiving Title might sound innocuous, but when we nominate The Greatest Story Ever Told or It’s Good to be Alive: The Roy Campenella Story you can see the cynicism bubbling over.

          Same for the next one, Best Comedic Performance in a Non-Comedic Role and we showed such wonders as Patty Duke in The Miracle Worker, Christopher Reeves in Superman, Daniel Day Lewis in My Left Foot and so on. We perhaps got too much joy from coming up with the nominations.

          The next category requires a bit of explanation. In the third year we can up with the Best Plot of a ____ award. The blank would change each year and represented a genre of film (or sub-genre, or whatever) which were pretty much exactly the same. For example the first year was Best Plot for a Zombie Film (of which at the time there was only a limited selection the Romero trilogy and Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things).

After that it was Best Plot for a Mind Transfer Film which is always the exact same movie over and over again (Freaky Friday, Vice Versa, 18 Again- refried crap shoveled in a new package). We then moved onto Best Plot for an Ernest Film (which really dates us a lot). It was given away by our good friend Frank, who delivered a heartfelt non-ironic speech on what the Ernest franchise meant to him and how it brought joy into his life. The next two years we did a few obvious ones Best Plot for a Police Academy Film and Best Plot for a Friday the 13^th Film.

This is the one Rob hated, which is why I'm showing it.

Next was a flash of genius from Rob Leftwich- Best Plot for a Talking Pig Movie (there was a plethora of them at the time), in which he delivered a heartfelt speech on the wonders of Babe: Pig in the City. We began running out of ideas for this and it wasn’t until two weeks before the show, in a fit of adrenaline fueled inspiration, I came up with Best Plot for a Pregnant Man Film. There were exactly four at the time- The Pregnant Man, Rabbit Test, Junior, and Enemy Mine. The last one won.

The last year, completely out of concepts, we came up with Best Plot for an Awards Show- We nominated Academy Awards, Golden Globes, Grammy Awards, and The Madison-Felix Awards. Guess who won?

          Finally we come to the Lifetime Achievement Award. Initially Brian and I floundered with this, not really knowing what we wanted to do with it. Hence the first three winners: Mike Horner a proliferant porn actor from the 80s and 90s, who always played his roles with a comedic bent. If there is a comedy porn niche, he should be considered its Charlie Chaplin. And Monkeyhead, Brian’s brother. For his clips scene- every winner got a montage footage bit with a song playing in the background- we showed a bunch of monkey’s doing horrible things to each other, of one sort or another, to the tune of I’m an Ape Man by The Kinks. And then Marlon Brando where we showed clips of him interspersed with those of Jabba the Hut, with the Mr. Yuck song. I must say here that these three were all chosen by Big Brian. He thought they were a laugh riot, while I, and everyone watching, got only the mildest of chuckles.

So for the next year I put my foot down. We would only give the Lifetime Achievement Award to someone who was well known, having had a long career, but who you would never think to give an award to. Boom, we had our criteria and I must say that the audience received the award with much more applause and enjoyment as it went on.

 For the fourth year we gave it to Don Knotts to the tune of He’s Got the Look by Roxette. The fifth it was George Peppard to the tune of Duke of Earl by Gene Chandler. The sixth was Bob Newhart to He’s Got Personality by Lloyd Price. 7^th was Alan Hale Jr. (The Skipper from Gilligan’s Island) to I’m Too Sexy for my Shirt by Right Said Fred. 8^th, our most evil year, Christopher Reeve to the tune of Walk Like a Man by Frankie Vallie and the Four Seasons. And last, but not least, Charles Bronson to the tune of I Think I Love You by David Cassidy and the Partridge Family.

          We spent a lot of time putting these together. And reading them over on paper, it scans as just kind of cute. A novel idea, but the execution always made the crowd roar. As in a lot of these things about the show, you had to be there.