Thursday, May 22, 2003

Stop the Presses!

The Rockies have crumbled, Gibraltar just tumbled and William Safire is right about something.

Take note of this. It could be the last time.

• Posted at 8:53 PM · LINK

Happy Cartoon News

My often-hard-to-please pal Jerry Beck is raving over the work that is being done to restore the pre-1948 Warner Brothers cartoons. And he's positively ecstatic over a restoration of the oft-seen-but-not-like-this Popeye the Sailor Meets Sinbad the Sailor. Here's a link to his comments, and my assurance that Jerry would not be saying such things if he did not really mean them.

• Posted at 4:53 PM · LINK

Microsoft Acquires Doonesbury

Well, not exactly. Garry Trudeau is taking the operation which has existed at www.doonesbury.com and moving it under the umbrella of Slate — which in turn is under the umbrella of MSN. Here, he tells us why that is and how nothing really will change.

• Posted at 3:58 PM · LINK

More Pooh

Disney loses another round in the Pooh Wars. Have these guys won one battle yet? Here's the latest.

• Posted at 3:51 PM · LINK

Misleading Headline?

Here's the kind of thing that makes you wonder about the press these days. Makes me wonder, anyway. This AP news story is headlined, "Poll shows Sen. Santorum's popularity not hurt by remarks about gays." From that, a reasonable person would assume that his popularity rating is right about where it was before he made his controversial remarks.

But in the third paragraph of the report comes this revelation about the poll...

However, Santorum's remarks may have turned some undecided voters against him. His disapproval rating rose from 20 percent in April to 33 percent in May while the proportion of undecided voters fell by a similar amount, from 24 percent to 12 percent.

In other words, his disapproval rating has risen from 20 percent to 33 percent...but his popularity has not been hurt.

• Posted at 2:31 PM · LINK

A Joke Making the Rounds...

At Heathrow Airport today, an individual later discovered to be a public school teacher was arrested trying to board a flight while in possession of a compass, a protractor, and a graphical calculator. Authorities believe he is a member of the notorious al-Gebra movement. He is being charged with carrying weapons of math instruction.

• Posted at 12:04 PM · LINK

Opening Nights

Once in a while, it's interesting to fact-check anecdotes. Last evening at the tribute to him, Red Buttons told the tale of what was to have been his first Broadway show. Here's how that story is told in what I guess is Red's official bio...

In 1941, Jose Ferrer plucked Red out of burlesque for his first Broadway show, The Admiral Had A Wife. The show was supposed to open on December 8, 1941, but it never did. The show was a farce comedy about Pearl Harbor — great timing!

Kurt Bodden writes me to note that 12/8/41 was a Monday and asks, "Is it plausible that a Broadway show would open on a Monday?" Well, yes, it is. A play called Golden Wings starring Fay Wray and dealing with soldiers actually did open in New York on 12/8/41. It closed after a big six performances.

But Kurt's query led me to do a little skulking-about on the Internet and I found this article about the Wilmington Playhouse in Wilmington, Delaware. Here's the relevant paragraph...

The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. As luck would have it, the Playhouse was scheduled to present the farce The Admiral Had A Wife on December 8. The premise: The wives of Pearl Harbor admirals were really running the Navy. Though the show was probably meant to offer comic relief, 30,000 Delaware men and women were braced for war, and they weren't laughing. The show was canceled.

So it sounds to me like the anecdote is true but that one teensy detail has been fudged a bit. The story as told in Red's bio does not actually say the show was supposed to open on Broadway on that date but that's implied. Of course, it's a better tale if we're led to believe that it was an opening on Broadway that was killed by the bombing of Pearl Harbor, as opposed to an opening in Wilmington that might have led to Broadway. Not a big point, really, and it's nice to see the essential part of the story confirmed from another source.

While we're on the topic of Broadway opening dates, here's another slight possible fact-check. The Marx Brothers made their Broadway debut with a revue called I'll Say She Is, which opened at the Casino Theater on May 19, 1924. The way the story has always been told is as follows: The show, which extensively toured the U.S. for its pre-Broadway shakedown, was a hodge-podge of vaudeville — the kind of thing that even the Marxes knew had no place on Broadway. They were more interested in the employment of the tour than in playing New York, and tried to put N.Y. off as long as possible. They figured if they opened there, the critics would murder them, the show would close, and they'd be unemployed. But the show's backer insisted, as did their mother, who longed to see her boys on the Great White Way, and who refused to believe that the town would not adore them.

Hoping to minimize the inevitable critical burial, the brothers arranged for their opening to coincide with that of a serious drama. The idea was that the first-string drama critics would go cover the other show and that the second-string critics would be dispatched to review the Marx opening. The assistants, it was hoped, would be kinder or at least less outraged to see a vaudeville show passed off as a Broadway musical. Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Zeppo especially hoped to avoid the withering condemnation of Alexander Woolcott, who was then the Drama Critic for the New York World and known for shredding that which offended his snobbish sensibilities.

Well, as the story is told, at the last minute the other play postponed its opening and the first-string critics, who were already in their tuxedos and primed for serious drama, found themselves at the Marx show instead. They were therefore even more annoyed than they might have been to attend I'll Say She Is, and most spent the first act planning how they would pan the proceedings. What stopped many of them was that Woolcott was not only present but madly in love with what he saw on stage, Harpo especially. He spent intermission gushing to his colleagues about how wonderful the show was, which influenced many to not write the expected "this show has no business being on Broadway" notices. He also wrote a famous rave review, almost wholly about Harpo, which helped make the show a hit.

That's more or less how history tells it. But as I looked up the opening dates relating to the other play above, I chanced onto the wrong page and noticed that not only did I'll Say She Is open on 5/19/24 but so did a pretty famous show called Blossom Time. This was a Shubert production which ran 592 performances and featured an all-star cast and the music of Franz Schubert. It was by any measure a much more important opening than that of the Marx Brothers. So is it really true about the first-string critics all winding up at the Marx show because they had nowhere else to go? And why was Woolcott there and not down the street at Blossom Time?

• Posted at 11:49 AM · LINK

Comic Artist Website of the Day

His name's Paul Chadwick. His most famous work is Concrete, a solid strip about a pretty solid guy. He doesn't seem to have an official website displaying that and his other wonderful work but there is this unofficial site where you can get a little Chadwick. Which is better than no Chadwick at all, I suppose.

• Posted at 10:48 AM · LINK

Seein' Red

The Museum of TV and Radio over in Beverly Hills honors various folks for various reasons of achievement and excellence. Wednesday evening, they saluted Red Buttons for more than a half-century of fine comedy. Actually, on that basis, they could have honored about half the folks in the first two rows of the auditorium. Among the many joys of the evening was watching Mr. Buttons (still sharp at age 84) not only entertain the crowd but also his friends and co-workers like screenwriter Larry Gelbart and fellow comedy legend Sid Caesar who were in the house. Gelbart, who was an especially good audience, was the head writer on Red's 1952 TV series, which was a short-lived smash.

A big hit at first, it went off in '55 and Red Buttons, having worked his way up from Catskills hotels and the last burlesque house in Manhattan, found himself unable to get any kind of job. It was the low point of his career — lower even, he said, than when the show in which he was to make his Broadway debut was aborted the day before it was to open. (The comedy, which was set in Pearl Harbor, was supposed to begin performances December 8, 1941. You can figure out the rest.) In '56, it seemed like his career was over but an agent named Marty Baum — who was also present for the tribute last night — took a personal interest. He waged a relentless campaign to get Josh Logan, who didn't want to know from Red Buttons, to cast the comedian in a showy role in the 1957 Marlon Brando movie, Sayonara. Baum's crusade got him the job which in turn got him an Academy Award...which in turn revived his fortunes.

Since then, he's appeared in an odd array of dramatic roles and comedy jobs, the latter often at roasts and benefits. I've seen him a half-dozen times at local events, usually doing either his "didn't get a dinner" routine or some variation, and I've never seen him not get the whole room to laughing. Each time, the happiest one in the room was Mr. Buttons. Several times during the interview last evening, he said he considered himself "one of the luckiest people in the world" and spoke of how he does what he does because he loves it so. There are performers who are motivated by money and others who have some desperate need for recognition to prove they belong on the planet. But there are also some who just really, really enjoy seeing an audience enjoy itself. Last night, we all had a good time — but Red Buttons had the best time of all.

• Posted at 12:54 AM · LINK