Sunday, April 27, 2003

Alan Brady Presents

Real good interview with Carl Reiner over at Harris Online. It's a little more than a half hour but well worth your RealPlaying.

Mr. Reiner is out making the rounds, promoting his autobiography, My Anecdotal Life. You can purchase a copy from Amazon by clicking on that name. I haven't read it yet but I find it hard to believe it won't be a joy.

• Posted at 6:04 PM · LINK

Configuration Stuff

I spent an hour or so this afternoon fiddling with the design of this page, changing the main type font and making it adjustable for your browser, and doing other little alterations. If you logged in here during that time, you may have seen some odd layouts. It wasn't your screen. It was just me not being quite finished. I think I am quite finished now. If anyone has any serious issues with readability, please let me know.

• Posted at 6:01 PM · LINK

Peter Stone, R.I.P.

Peter Stone, the Tony Award-winning librettist who wrote the books of the Broadway musicals Titanic, Sugar, My One and Only, The Will Rogers Follies and 1776 (and a few others) passed away April 26 at a hospital in Manhattan.

There's a saying in the theater that there can be no great "book" writers in a musical; that the songs and dances are of such paramount importance that the person who writes the story and the spoken dialogue must continually subordinate his craft to that of the lyrist and composer. The songs carry the peak emotional moments, not the stuff in-between.

With all his shows, but especially with 1776, Stone sure proved that adage wrong. Here's an obit.

• Posted at 3:54 PM · LINK

The Battle for 3400 Cahuenga

Here's a link to an article over at BBC News about Joe Barbera's letter to the City Council to try and save his old studio building. And here's a clarification by me: It's incomplete and maybe misleading to say that Hanna-Barbera was sold to Warner Brothers in 1996. That, coupled with the almost-true statement that Bill Hanna worked every day up until his death, makes it sound like Bill and Joe kept the place going on their own until '96. The history is that they sold out to a company called Taft Broadcasting in 1966, though they continued to run most aspects of the firm. Taft was acquired and reorganized as Great American Broadcasting in 1989 and that company was acquired by Ted Turner in 1992. What happened in '96 was that Turner merged his company into Time-Warner. So all that time, you have H-B (and therefore the building at issue) being handed around from company to company with no one saying, "Hey, we have to preserve the place where Wacky Races was produced!"

It's also misleading to say, as the above-linked article does, that the City Council wants to tear the place down and put up apartment buildings. I don't think the city owns the property, nor does the council make that kind of decision. More likely, the building is owned by some private company which is going curiously unmentioned in these reports. That company is considering several development proposals for its investment, some of which would raze the old H-B building, so Barbera and others are asking the City Council to step in and designate it as some sort of historical marker and/or configure the zoning of the land to encourage a plan that would maintain the building. Perhaps city funds will need to be coughed up to compensate the present owner for what it would lose by not replacing the birthplace of Peter Potamus with condos.

Not that my support matters one iota but I think, before I got behind any such move, I'd want to know who owns the property and what kind of taxpayer dollars might be spent to keep this building intact. And someone ought to ask the question of why, if it's so important to the history of the Hollywood cartoon, Time-Warner (which owns so many of them) isn't footing the bill to put a museum or something in there.

Thanks to "Destiny" (master of this weblog) for the link.

• Posted at 11:22 AM · LINK

Harold Lloyd Alert

As mentioned on my old weblog, Turner Movie Classics is running an awful lot of Harold Lloyd movies this month. If you're ever going to watch, tonight would be a good time since they're offering Harold Lloyd's World of Comedy, a 1962 compilation that features highlights from a number of Lloyd's movies. For years before its release, Lloyd's work was generally unavailable to the public. Actually, silent movies have never been all that available but even the limited venues that showed them back then couldn't get their mitts on Lloyd's best. He controlled them and told all who inquired that he was waiting for the "right moment" to rerelease them.

He was also waiting for what some said was an unrealistically high price. Financial expectations were scaled back as he watched film festivals and college courses praise Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, ignoring the man whose comedies had outgrossed the both of them. Lloyd's business strategy was backfiring on his reputation. When one of his films did get shown, it was the early, unimpressive ones he didn't control. So in '62, he dropped his financial dreams and personally selected the contents of a film that was designed to remind the world who he was and why he was important. The showcase was a bit heavy on wild action scenes from his silent films and some curious choices from his talkies, the latter reportedly included because he was angry at books and articles that had suggested his career had ended with the coming of sound. Still, it did well at the box office and, coupled with the attendant p.r. campaign, did a lot to restore Lloyd's fame. A follow-up called Harold Lloyd's Funny Side of Life received scant distribution in the U.S. and did most of its business overseas.

In any case, Harold Lloyd's World of Comedy is a great time-saver: If you watch it and don't enjoy yourself, there's really no point in watching any other Harold Lloyd movie. If you do like it, Turner is running a batch of good shorts afterwards, followed by two of Lloyd's best features — Grandma's Boy and Dr. Jack. As you'll see, he did a lot more than hang off clock faces.

• Posted at 3:16 AM · LINK