For five seconds of live television, Sammy Petrillo popped out of a crib beside Jerry Lewis on The Colgate Comedy Hour, the two pulling the same moronic face, and those five seconds shaped the rest of his life. WFMU's Dave "the Spazz" Abramson spent nearly two decades chasing the man behind the face for Your Time Is Now: The Sammy Petrillo Story, his new biography from Feral House. He tells Mike how it started: an 11-year-old reading one paragraph about Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla (1952), with Petrillo and Duke Mitchell as a knockoff Martin and Lewis; a punk single by his band The Sea Monkeys; a 1992 radio interview; and a blog comment war between Sammy and the son who says his father went out for cigarettes and never came back. Abramson worked it like a cold case, racing to reach sources in their 90s, and with help from cover artist Drew Friedman and foreword writer Scott Alexander got Jerry Lewis himself on the record. They dig into a Rashomon life: Doris Wishman's Keyholes Are for Peeping (1972), cable TV shows years before anyone had cable, film reels lost to unpaid storage bills, Barbara Loden's anonymous turn on the record All About Cleopatra, and why imitating Lewis, of all people, was a blessing and a curse. Plus: the original negative of Brooklyn Gorilla has resurfaced, and the 4K restoration screens at Nitehawk Prospect Park on November 12 and at the American Cinematheque's Los Feliz 3 on November 15.

Get the book, and sign up for news of the screenings, at Feral House.

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The Projection Booth is part of the Weirding Way Media podcast network. Explore more of our shows at http://weirdingwaymedia.com.