And it wasn't, he insisted in a phone interview this week, a case of Lewis handing him a list of people to call.
"It was all on my own," Barson said. "I researched Jerry, obviously, and I knew certain things about certain people that would apply and those are the kind of people I went after," and sometimes those people pointed him toward others. It was being unafraid to ask that led Barson to his first film, "Goodnight, We Love You," which centered on Phyllis Diller's final Las Vegas appearance.
He was an executive at Carsey-Werner Television when he read in the paper that Diller was retiring, he said, and wondered "who even knows who Phyllis Diller is these days?"
His next thought: "Maybe if I take this idea to Phyllis Diller about shooting her final show and making a documentary out of it, maybe she'd bite."
Through his wife, casting director Julie Ashton, who'd met Diller years before (and who is an executive producer on both his films), he was able to get to the comic and make his pitch. He told her he was interested in taking the project to film festivals.
"I literally was riffing. I just figured, you know what? I'm just going to do this. That's how I do things. I envision something and I do it. In the middle of it, you wonder why you said it. It's brave, I guess, or ignorant. But I just did it, and it ended up being in like 10 or 12 film festivals and winning awards. So it all happened like I kind of dreamt it would," he said.
"At her final show, in Las Vegas, Jerry Lewis happened to be one of the guests . . . I was so excited," he said. "So through that first movie, I met Jerry. Which became my second. So it's like all kismet."
