Friday, November 7, 2003

Cliff Norton

While researching something else this evening on the Internet, I stumbled across the fact that Cliff Norton died in January of this year. It's odd how that one got past me because Norton was my favorite kind of actor: The guy who appeared in everything but most folks never knew his name. Stop and take a look at his listing in the Internet Movie Database...and I'm guessing this is about 25% of all he did in his long career. For one thing, it doesn't mention a couple of shows that Mr. Norton did on KTLA, a local station in Los Angeles around '63. One which I recall vividly was a five minute program he did weeknights at 11:15 PM for a time. The KTLA local news was on from 11:00 to 11:15 and the syndicated Steve Allen Show started at 11:20. In-between, Norton did a weather forecast show that packed in more laughs than many hour programs...and told you if it was going to rain tomorrow, as well. He also had a daytime series in the style of Dave Garroway, for whom he once worked as second banana and comedy relief.

Norton was also a songwriter of sorts. His most wonderful composition was a very funny song called "No Shit" that he recorded with a full chorus and the Joseph Galicchio orchestra primarily as a Christmas gift for his friends. The tune had a long, healthy life of being performed at parties and in nightclub acts, and even made it onto a few "party" records. Just a few years ago, I went to see Jack Jones in Las Vegas and he sang it...magnificently, I might add. (If anyone reading this has Norton's version on MP3, drop me a line. I have it on an LP but I have no idea where.)

For the most part, Norton was just a familiar face that popped up in practically every TV show of the sixties and a whole mess of movies. (He's in the cast list of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World where he supposedly played a reporter. But as many times as I've seen the film, I've never spotted him.) The last time I saw him, a few years ago, was when I attended a live reading of a radio-style drama. True to form, he had a small part but he did as much with it as humanly possible. That was how Cliff Norton functioned throughout his entire career. No shit.

• Posted at 11:51 PM · LINK

The Reagans Script

In all the discussions of the CBS mini-series, The Reagans, it struck me that both sides were bluffing to a great extent. Some claimed to have seen excerpts and/or read the entire script, and I have a hunch this was a fib by folks who didn't really care that much what was really in it. In any case, you can now read the script for yourself. Salon has posted it as an Acrobat PDF file, so I imagine it'll be all over the Internet by nightfall.

Reading a script and knowing what you're reading is not an exact science, and even some very experienced, highly-paid execs have okayed a screenplay and been quite surprised at the tone and message of the film that was then made from it. Years ago, I recall reading the screenplay for The Right Stuff before I saw the film and expecting a movie that was largely contemptuous of the original astronauts. The finished product was not that, even though it was directed by the same person who'd authored that screenplay. So you can imagine the variance possible when, as in the Reagans mini-series, the director is working from a script he didn't write.

Nevertheless, this release of the script will give the film's detractors a chance to be more specific as to what they felt is factually inaccurate. I expect they will, though it will mean holding this one mini-series to a standard that has rarely been applied to other works.

• Posted at 1:49 PM · LINK

Sad Story

Bill Mantlo was a prolific writer for Marvel Comics from 1974 until the mid-eighties. During those years, he wrote for an awful lot of different comics but is probably best-remembered for long runs on The Hulk, Iron Man, The Micronauts, The Champions, The Human Fly, Cloak and Dagger, Rom and many others. I never really knew the guy but I admired his versatility and dedication.

When his work fell out of favor with the then-current editors, Bill turned his attention back into a planned career that had been interrupted to write Spider-Man, which was to be a lawyer. Alas, in 1992, that career was again interrupted, this time by a tragic accident. Bill was roller-blading (one of those things I will never do and here's why) when he was struck by a car and severely injured. He had what his family describes as a "closed-head, traumatic brain injury" which has left him severely diminished.

My friend Tony Isabella provides an update on Bill's condition (still not good) as well as an address to which his friends and fans can send good thoughts.

• Posted at 1:36 PM · LINK

Toy Story

A lot of folks are writing to ask how I like my new Pioneer DVR-810H — the unit that combines a TiVo with a DVD burner. I've been burning DVDs for a day and a half...and so far, I'm very glad I bought the thing. Still, it is not without its downsides. Here are some thoughts...

• You record shows on the TiVo and then you burn them to blank DVDs. You can put multiple programs on a DVD up to the capacity of the disk, and the machine will build a little menu on the DVD for you. The main way to get a show onto the TiVo is to record it off the air. Last night, I set my new TiVo to record a movie off cable. Then this morning, after it was recorded, I had the machine copy it to a DVD. Then, I erased the movie from the TiVo to free up space.
• The other way to get something onto the TiVo is to input it through the analog connection. I have a lot of things on old 3/4" videotapes so I hooked the output of my 3/4" player to the TiVo input, copied the shows over and then used the TiVo to copy them onto DVD. The resultant DVD has a picture quality only a teensy fraction below the original tape. You could input the signal from a Betamax, a VCR, a video camera or even another DVD player as long as it wasn't playing a copy-protected DVD.
• A home DVD burner like this one can only burn so much info to a DVD. If you want the top video quality, that means an hour. The next quality level down (a slower speed) will give you two hours. The next level down is three and so on, down to six hours. If you record a two-hour show at the top quality, you have to save it to two disks, and the machine will prompt you when to insert the second one. The speed at which you record a show onto the TiVo is the speed at which you have to burn the DVD. For instance, the movie this morning was 1:47 so I recorded it at the second level speed, the one that gets two hours onto a blank DVD. I could not have changed my mind and burned the DVD at a different speed.
• Obviously, we like the top quality. This makes it frustrating when a show is 62 minutes long. You either have to put the last two minutes on a second DVD or do the entire show at the second level speed.
• As we've mentioned here before, networks have gotten very sloppy about starting shows on time. Some start early, some start late. Ordinarily, if something's on that you simply must record, you pad the beginning and the end to make sure you get it. But this TiVo/DVD unit has no editing capability so if you start your recording five minutes early, what you burn to the DVD will have all that extra stuff at the beginning. If you record a film from Turner Classic Movies, you can't cut off the Robert Osborne intro. Eventually, I'm sure I'll get the software and hardware to do editing on my computer but for now, what you TiVo is what you get.
• Some folks have asked about getting a standalone DVD recorder without TiVo capability and linking it to TiVo when necessary. The advantage of the Pioneer DVR-810H is that its TiVo capability records a show off the air in digital format so it remains digital as it's transferred to the DVD. If you record on a separate TiVo and feed the output into a separate DVD burner, you're going from digital to analog and back to digital, and there will be some loss of quality in there. The TiVo also lets you build little libraries of stuff to burn to DVD as many times as you like. Mine holds 80 hours but that's at the lowest-quality speed. At the best speed, that's about 14 hours.
• I've also been asked about the price. The DVR-810H lists for $1,199 but can be purchased for $750 to $800 if you shop around the Internet. (By the way, here's a link to Pioneer's website about the machine. As you'll see, there's also a higher-end model.) You will also need to pay for the TiVo service. The machine comes with what they call "TiVo Basic," which is a stripped-down, bare bones version that is so simple as to be near-useless. They also give you a free 45-day trial of what they call "TiVo Plus," which is the next level up of TiVo service. I don't see how you can really use this machine without it. This will cost you $12.95 a month or $299 for "lifetime service." This refers to the life of the machine and cannot be transferred to the next TiVo you purchase. If you want to hook your TiVo (or TiVos) into a home network and make use of even more features, that's another $99. The TiVo website will tell you more. Blank DVDs run from a buck to about three bucks each, depending on whether you buy in bulk.

That's about everything that comes to mind so far. I'm going to do some experimenting with different speeds and with dubbing Beta and VHS tapes, and I'll report here after I do. I ordered 100 blank DVDs but I have a feeling I'm going to go through that many in a week. I've got a lot of old tapes, and there a number of good movies on TV in the next week or two.

• Posted at 12:23 AM · LINK