Enhanced Lenny Bruce CD Scheduled for 11/09 Release

Scheduled for release 11/9 is an enhanced CD of “Thank You Masked Man" by LENNY BRUCE -- a collection of early bits by the comic that was first released posthumously by Fantasy in 1973, plus John Magnuson's 1968 animated cult-fave film “Thank You Mask Man." The seven-minute color short was voiced entirely by Bruce, who also wrote and co-directed.

Magnuson first saw Lenny Bruce perform in 1963. “He really wasn't doing comedy bits by the time I stopped by to see him, and he just knocked me out," the San Francisco filmmaker told CD annotator Derk Richardson. “He was talking about his [S.F.] obscenity case."

After the show Magnuson met Bruce and broached the subject of doing a film with him; the comic agreed. But in April '64 Lenny was busted in New York on obscenity charges, and convicted in November of that year “of giving an indecent performance," and “the film became a project basically to get him out of bankruptcy." (New York governor George Pataki piously pardoned Bruce 39 years later, in December 2003.)

During the four months that Magnuson and crew spent preparing for the performance documentary, he got his head animator Jeff Hale “interested in doing something with Lenny's Lone Ranger bit. At the time, Lenny was not really interested in doing it. He said, 'I have enough trouble with adults. I don't want to have trouble with children.'"

Bruce, who died in 1966 at the age of 40, never saw the animation. “I really wish he had lived to see the pencil tests," said Magnuson, “because he would have gotten a real kick out of it. If he had lived, I think he would have found animation to be a great metier for him."

(The reason for the film's slightly different title derived from Bruce's pronunciation of “masked." “The animator and I liked the way that Lenny never really enunciated the 'ed,'" Magnuson explained to Richardson, “and proper grammar aside, we wanted something a little different.")