Talk:Enrico Banducci

Enrico Banducci and Ira Blue

In the early sixties, Ira Blue, broadcasting from the Hungry i, often referred on-the-air to Banducci as he walked into the club, sometimes actually allowing Banducci to say a few words. Blue usually described whom he was with, his appearance or some social event connected with Banducci. The Bay Area became familiar with Banducci, in other words, through Ira Blue. Perhaps a few words on this inter-connectedness wouldn't be entirely out of place. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 61.92.8.220 (talk) 15:47, 24 August 2017 (UTC)

Banducci and I were close friends and I have a huge stack of xeroxes of Banducci's press clippings gathered through the years by his family, starting when he was a young bartender in Manhattan when he was lauded by locals as a formidable raconteur (which he was). The amount of publicity he accrued in San Francisco, both locally in newspapers and nationally in papers and magazines, is rather amazing. Columnist Herb Caen in particular would routinely chronicle Banducci's colorful misadventures; I think Banducci was Caen's version of Damon Runyon's Bat Masterson. I will say that Ira Blue probably had to coax Banducci to the microphone since there was so much going on there most of the time. I visited SF with him and several of his friends told me about various stewadesses and other women esconced in rooms upstairs and he'd shuttle from room to room during the course of the night. Trocadero Thunder (talk) 14:35, 6 July 2018 (UTC)

I also vividly recall Banducci's sorrow when his close friend Herb Caen died back in the '90s. Trocadero Thunder (talk) 15:08, 6 July 2018 (UTC)

I just put a reference to Ira Blue's radio KGO radio show into the article. The hungry i article also mentions him. Thanks for the heads up; I didn't know about that myself. Trocadero Thunder (talk) 20:27, 6 July 2018 (UTC)

Banducci

Banducci was such a larger than life character that he's one of those people whom you have to know in order to believe any accurate description. Mort Sahl said that Banducci was "the greatest man" he'd ever known. Banducci spoke with a deep and cultured voice worthy of Orson Welles, out of which routinely came delightfully entertaining streams of the coarsest profanity known to man. He knew practically everyone in show business in his day and could mimic most of them. When he'd tell the story of how the Kennedys forced him to sell his farm to pay almost $400,000 in 1962 dollars in back taxes, that he actually didn't actually owe prior to the hungry i being abruptly redefined for tax purposes because he wouldn't order Mort Sahl to stop telling a joke about President Kennedy's women at the hungry i, he would imitate Jack, Bobby and Joe Sr's voices discussing it over dinner (a mutual friend who was present had told him what was said), which is something you don't hear every day (Joe Sr's voice was arguably closer in timbre to Bobby's than Jack's). Banducci was kind and generous but was also capable of enraged tantrums for no apparent good reason, which sometimes led to many of his friends regretfully not seeing him for very extended periods of time. (If you never had a falling-out with him, chances are you didn't know him very well.) He was a blazingly funny storyteller to the point that it's absolutely worth tracking down any audio of him being interviewed prior to the late '90s, when his memory finally began faltering. Trocadero Thunder (talk) 15:52, 6 July 2018 (UTC)

Actually I've only seen him seem senile once, in an interview during the hungry i museum exhibit approximately a year before he kicked the bucket in 2007. I was probably pessimistic to go all the way back to the late '90s for rampant senility. Trocadero Thunder (talk) 20:34, 6 July 2018 (UTC)

Big Eyes

Despite being otherwise a virtually flawless film, Jon Polito didn't capture any of Banducci's charisma or his fantastic voice in Tim Burton's Big Eyes. This is a crying shame because Banducci's unique personality was riotously amusing to the point of adding an enormous amount of humor to the film. Instead the character comes across as practically a regular guy with nothing particularly unusual about him except that he wears a noustache and beret. Burton's depiction of the hungry i itself, though, was absolutely electric! Trocadero Thunder (talk) 16:09, 6 July 2018 (UTC)

Banducci would fairly often want to talk about Waltz' character in the film (long before there was a film) but I'd change the subject each time because I didn't know exactly who he was talking about. (Of course I'd grown up with one of those creepily intriguing Big Eyes prints in the family basement, like everyone else, but I didn't know the connection.) Evidently Banducci continued to believe his friend even after the trial, and assumed he painted the pictures himself. I guess he didn't follow the trial closely enough about it to know the truth, plus the husband, his close friend, was by definition one of the greatest salesmen in American history. P.T. Barnum was a piker compared to that guy. Trocadero Thunder (talk) 16:23, 6 July 2018 (UTC)