Stills and clips from some of John Sawoski’s appearances on camera on film and TV.
John Sawoski has played on camera on LA Confidential, Lucifer, Frasier, Man on the Moon, HBO’s Live From Baghdad, The Goldbergs, Walk Hard, Rumor Has It, Las Vegas, Will & Grace, Veronica’s Closet, Big Shots, and more.
John Sawoski appears in several scenes of Sony Pictures’ 2008 release of “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story,” contracted by the late Rick Fleishman of Visual Music. Click above to watch a scene in which John Sawoski appears momentarily in a scene with “Elvis Presley,” played by Jack White of The White Stripes.
For more videos from this film featuring John Sawoski prominently on keyboards as part of Dewey Cox’s band, click here: https://photos.app.goo.gl/KUHiyGTKMnoLCJMeA
John Sawoski played keyboards in this scene from the popular film “The Wedding Singer.”
Here’s John Sawoski playing piano on camera with Jim Carrey, along with some of his long-time colleagues.
But, for John, the most fun part of filming that scene was not actually filmed. Here’s a description from http://www.jimcarreyonline.com/movies/motm.html?p=6
“Jim was talking to the piano player trying to find out what songs he knew. The guy starts to play ‘Come Sail Away,’ the old Styx tune, and Jim goes into full rock concert mode. He didn’t get all the lyrics right, but when he started hitting the high notes, the crowd went wild. Courtney Love, who was sitting in the front row, went even wilder, jumping out of her seat and screaming . He also did Billy Joel’s ‘Piano Man’ which had the crowd cheering. There was a bongo routine that ‘Andy’ performs where he does a call-and-response vocal thing similar to the ‘hi-dee, hi-dee, hi-dee, ho’ part in ‘Minnie the Moocher.’ The only difference was that he was speaking in Latka Gravas-type gibberish! The crowd tried its best to keep up, but he had us tongue-tied in the end. In between shots, some folks in the crowd start to yell, ‘Day Oh, Day-ay-ay Oh’ to see if ‘Andy’ would respond. He obliged with a fine version of ‘The Banana Boat Song.’
“People wanted a bit more of the Latka voice, so they kept calling for it. After loosening up his vocal cords for about 30 seconds, Jim turns into Latka. He spoke in that same, halting manner that Andy used including the wide-eyed look where he seems to be searching for the correct English words. He ended it by saying, ‘I’m glad you all came here today to be in my movie. When you see how this scene looks in the movie, I hope you think it — how do you say? — kick ass! Tank you, veddy much.’
“I think my favorite moment was when the calls for Elvis went up. First, Jim did the classic line, ‘You can all just watch me while I catch my breath.’ Then he took grabbed the mike stand, sneered, motioned to the band, and went into ‘Jailhouse Rock’ – straight up. No hamming around. Dead on. It could have been the excitement of being there, but I don’t know that Andy ever did it better. He had all the arm, hip, leg, and head movements down to a tee. The Elvis studio version fades outs, but this was live, so Jim was directing the band to do a slow, big finish ending. When he was done, everyone in the theater was on his feet cheering.”
John says: “We had time for all that fun because it took so long to reset the scene after each take. If you watch the clip you will understand why.”
For more video clips, including soundtracks with music played or composed by John Sawoski, please click: https://lapianist.com/video-gallery/
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