On a Deck with Winters

 

Nora Dunn and brother Kevin Dunn with Jonathan

Jim Pasternak and Richard Marshall’s film, Certifiably Jonathan is a funny, dark, and mad fantasy.  Winter’s himself comes at you as if fired from a sling-shot.  He is a prolific painter, a sharp as a whip comic mind, a paranoid icon, a bitter son, a tender husband, a kindly grandpa.   Not necessarily in that order, and sometimes all at once.  I feared meeting him, and feared improvising with him even more, but instead of being intimidated, I found him as vulnerably needy as all truly great performers are.  And at seventy-nine, he was as nimble as ever.

Saturday Night Live handed me the opportunity to work with many of the greats in comedy, including Robin Williams and Mary Tyler Moore.  But the illusive Jonathan Winters not only was never booked, he was never mentioned.  It wasn’t until years later and I got a fax from my manger that Jim Pasternak and Richard Marshall were making a film about him and were asking me to be a part of it, that I was finally offered the chance that I never thought I’d get.  I certainly did not merit it.  He was my hero.  And so it was that I spent a summer’s day with Winters on a deck overlooking the sea in Montecito, California.  It was a place more suited for hummingbirds and bougainvillea then a sharp-tongued master of one-liners, a serene garden where you would ordinarily speak in hushed tones.   He didn’t seem to belong.  But Jonathan, with a malady that makes it impossible for his imagination to rest, probably never fit in anywhere. 

Winters is the genius who spun character driven improvisational vignettes out of thin air, and became the reigning wizard of improvisational comedy back in the 60’s, went on to have his own show, and to steal the show in It’s A Mad Mad Mad Mad World.  Eventually, he aptly played Robin Williams’ father on Mork and Mindy.  Pasternak and Marshall created an alternate, bi-polar world in their documentary-style film, centered on the premise that Jonathan, holed up in his fortress of a home in Montecito, forty or so miles north of Los Angeles and light years away from his infamous appearances on The Jack Paar Show, believes he has lost his sense of humor.  Hardly.  Jonathan Winters, as this movie chronicles, is his sense of humor, and as we started our scene and a bird chirped wildly, he picked up a stone.  He looked at me with the goofy expression of a six-year-old boy and said, “One less stone, one less bird.”  I cracked up, and never stopped laughing.

Nora Dunn

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Tags: Mary Tyler Moore, Mork & Mindy, Santa Barbara, Saturday Night Live