MORE GHOULARDI

Heroes. Glory. Greatness.

Cleveland always remembers. We look back, see better times and wish things could've stayed that way.

Call it nostalgia. Call it a city conflicted about the present, finding comfort in the past.

Those great Browns teams. The Rock 'n' Roll Capital, when it was more a reality than a catchphrase. Those old black-and-white photos of smokestack lightning in a boomtown.

Yet our most glorious hero was an anti-hero. A devious ghoul who rose up in the middle of the night -- tipsy, no less -- to cast a spell over the city.

He ruled through mayhem and mockery. He turned followers into zombies. And he altered the gene pool, leaving a legion of freaky followers to continue in his wake.

Hey, groop, blow off some boom-booms for the 50th anniversary of the arrival of Ghoulardi.

The late-night horror host hit the airwaves in January 1963. For three wild and woolly years, he notched unprecedented ratings, spawned a Ghoulardi-mania and warped the minds of generations of musicians, filmmakers and trash-culture enthusiasts.

He also caused a lotta trouble, ovah dey.

Teary lookbacks? Are you kidding?

We shall honor the legendary late-night horror host in the spirit he would've wanted.

We will "stay sick and turn blue."

Blow up the script, ovah dey



Ernie Anderson seemed like the last guy in the world to don a lab coat, fright wig and weird beard to play some B-movie horror host.

Yes, the 39-year-old radio and TV voice-over announcer for WJW Channel 8 and spokesman for Ohio Bell Telephone Co. dreamed of being an actor. But not that kind of actor.

He didn't even like those kind of movies. "It's a Wonderful Life," yes. But "Attack of the Crab Monsters"?

Egads.

"The station had Ernie under contract, and they had to pay him anyway," says "Big Chuck" Schodowski, who got his start working on Ghoulardi's show, which ran from 1963 to 1966 on WJW. "So they said, 'You gotta do this.' "

Anderson had worked at the station as a movie host with Tim Conway. The show, "Ernie's Place," ended when Conway left for Hollywood to pursue acting.

"Basically, Ernie would play the host, and I would come on as a different guest every show -- because we couldn't get any real guests," says Conway by phone from Los Angeles. "One day, I was matador, a boxer, a Cleveland Indian. We had skits and I'd try to have lines, but Ernie didn't work like that. He couldn't remember lines. He was too freewheeling of a guy."

Anderson tried to stick to the script when Ghoulardi's "Shock Theater" hit the airwaves on a cold Friday night -- 11:20 p.m. Jan. 11, 1963.

"That lasted about two weeks," says Schodowski. "Then he started pushing and pushing it further and further."

It started with the show's opening sequence.

Anderson, who liked to get his drink on, would watch it while nursing a martini in a bar next door called Seagram's. He'd tear out at the last second, often slapping on his fake beard as he ran down the hallway of the station.

"He did whatever he wanted," says Schodowski. "He didn't just play movies like the other hosts of his day."

Indeed. Ghoulardi often appeared in them, thanks to a camera trick that superimposed him over the film.

He interrupted them with sound effects and firecrackers. And he punctuated them with off-kilter tunes such as "Desert Rat" and "Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow."

Anderson developed his own spiel, a lexicon of Beatnik babble that included phrases like "purple knif" or "cool it with da boom-booms."

But more than that, he unleashed that attitude.

"He thought the movies were awful," says Schodowski. "So he'd tell viewers 'Hey, groop, these movies are so bad, don't waste your time. Turn off the channel and go to bed."

Ghoulardi at 50 8 Gallery: Ghoulardi at 50

A huge following in late night

In 1965, Mick Jagger turned the music world on its head when he railed against product pitchmen promising "satisfaction."

Ghoulardi said it more than two years earlier -- and he was the pitchman.

"No one in their right mind would go on the air and tell you to turn off the TV," says Schodowski. "The program manager at the station couldn't stand him and openly worked against him so he wouldn't be successful."

Fat chance.

In three months, "Shock Theater" tripled ratings for the time slot, according to Tom Feran, co-author of "Ghoulardi: Inside Cleveland TV's Wildest Ride" and a reporter at The Plain Dealer.

At the show's peak, Ghoulardi scored 70 percent of the late-night audience. Yes, this was pre-cable-niche America, but it remains an unheard-of feat in TV.

The Cleveland Police Department even attributed a 35 percent decline in juvenile crime to the show.

"Ghoulardi hit at the right time in every sense," says Feran. "Culturally, it was a year before the Beatles and the British Invasion, and there was a lull in music."

Ghoulardi hit in the middle of a snowstorm.

"The show premiered amid the coldest winter we'd experienced," says Feran. "So you had people trapped in their homes watching Ghoulardi."

(Of course, the always-irreverent Anderson saw that as the real reason for the drop in crime outside: "Nobody likes to steal the car in a blizzard," he said.)

They saw the 1950s coming to an end before their eyes -- in a blaze of boom-booms, adds Feran.

"Ghoulardi came before all the things we identify with the 1960s: the Kennedy assassination, the Beatles, Vietnam, civil unrest," says Feran. "Ghoulardi was the last Beatnik from the '50s and had this wisecracking irreverent attitude that was very Cleveland."

Anarchy in the TV



Jim Jarmusch was not a juvenile delinquent. The Cuyahoga Falls-born filmmaker was too busy watching Ghoulardi to commit crimes.

But that doesn't mean Ghoulardi didn't inspire visions of anarchy.

"He was this great influence on me," says the director of "Stranger Than Paradise," "Ghost Dog" and "Broken Flowers," via phone from Manhattan. "There was this anarchism and wildness about him, this outsider hipster, this anti-authoritarian, blowing things up with explosives that affected me as a little kid."

Then there was the visual verve of it all.

"He'd come on with this weird circle of light around him, and then they'd reverse polarity to create these wild flashes of color," says Jarmusch, referring to the show's weirdo camera tricks. "Then he'd insert himself in the movies and warn the viewer, 'Look out, kids, the crabs are coming.' It blew my mind."

Jarmusch also points to the soundtrack.

"He opened me up to all kinds of weird-ass music," adds Jarmusch, whose "Stranger Than Paradise" focuses on a Ghoulardi staple, "I Put a Spell on You." "His whole anti-hierarchical appreciation of culture definitely influenced me."

Jarmusch tried to look like Ghoulardi once -- when he grew a goatee.

"It was black and white, like Ghoulardi's," Jarmusch says. "I shaved it off when I ran into a kid in a grocery store, and he then ran screaming to his mom that he'd seen Satan."

'We were all Ghoulardi Kids'

Jarmusch is one of many disciples of Ghoulardi to take his irreverent teachings out into the world.

The area's 1970s music revolution would not have been the same without his guiding hand. Pere Ubu, the Dead Boys, Easter Monkeys, Devo, Rocket From the Tombs, Chrissie Hynde, Electric Eels, Tin Huey, Pagans and the Cramps all cite Ghoulardi as their spiritual guru.

"We were all Ghoulardi Kids," asserts Pere Ubu and Rocket From the Tombs singer David Thomas.

"The B-movie was for Ghoulardi a canvas: an open invitation to spread mayhem, and generally engage in ransacking any sense of good taste, worthiness or respectability," says Thomas in a treatise on the influence of Ghoulardi on Cleveland rock 'n' roll.

The goal, says Ron "The Ghoul" Sweed, was to tear down hypocrisy.

"He was like John Lennon," says Sweed. "They had a unique lens to see what was happening around them and used humor to expose [expletive]."

Sweed was 14 when he befriended Anderson during an appearance at the old Euclid Beach Park.

"I was dressed in a gorilla suit," says Sweed. "And he invited me up on this stage, then we started horsing around, and he pushed me off the stage. He goes, 'You OK there, lil' gorilla, ova dey?'"

From then on, Sweed would pal around with Anderson, working as a gorilla and a gofer.

"I felt like I was on top of the world," says Sweed.

If not the top, then Ghoulardi was at least as high as the "50-Foot Woman."

When he wasn't showing flicks, he was doing skits that skewered every kind of sacred cow, from local celebrities to suburban living.

"Ernie hated suburbia," says Schodowski. "So one day, I show up to work and tell him I bought a house in Parma."

"He goes on the air and says, 'Can you believe, Chuck bought a house in Parma?' So off-camera I tell him that the next time he starts making fun of Parma, I'm going to cut off his microphone.

"Well, knowing Ernie, I knew he wasn't going to listen to me -- so when I cut him off, I inserted this polka music. Man, the people loved it."

Ghoulardi's gone but not forgotten

Anderson loved the fame -- especially hosting softball games and charity events, which would draw thousands of fans.

But like Jim Brown, he left it all behind when he was at the top of his game to pursue acting. Conway, who had found success as a TV actor, wanted Anderson to join him in Hollywood for a new show called "Rango"

"My dad was looking for a change in career and a change in life," says Anderson's son, Paul Thomas Anderson, by phone from Los Angeles. "He always wanted to be an actor, but it didn't work out, so he took a different path."

Anderson went on to become the world's most famous and highest-paid announcer -- earning as much as $2 million a year as the smooth, baritone voice of ABC-TV through the 1970s and '80s.

Cleveland seemed like a past life. He turned down requests by Sweed to reprise Ghoulardi -- instead leaving the fright wig, lab coat and routine to his protege to use as "The Ghoul."

"He talked about his time in Cleveland, but it was more of a distant, confusing thing," says Paul Thomas Anderson, director of such acclaimed films as "The Master," "There Will Be Blood" and "Boogie Nights."

"I saw some of the clips he did, but I didn't latch onto it until I took a trip back to Cleveland with my dad.

"Three steps after getting off the plane, he already had people coming up to him," adds the younger Anderson. "He wasn't exaggerating -- it was madness how many people loved him."

Yet, Ernie Anderson, who passed away in 1997 at the age of 73, never waxed nostalgic about his reign here.

"He would talk from time to time that he wished he had been successful as an actor," says Paul Thomas Anderson. "But not much about Ghoulardi."

That's not to say the son wasn't influenced by Ghoulardi.

"People might identify his humor or irreverence with Ghoulardi, but that was my dad -- whether he was putting himself in the old movies he showed or just at home with his irreverent sense of humor," Anderson says. "He was always Ernie Anderson."

To Cleveland, he will always be the cool ghoul that mesmerized a city, warped the minds of many and lives on from beyond the grave as the ultimate anti-hero.

Cool it ovah dey.