Saturday, January 31, 2004

May The Schwartz Be With You

Since I set up a special e-mail address for folks to send Get Well messages to Julius Schwartz, I've been swamped. And a pretty impressive number of what I've received has not been about Get Rich schemes and genitalia enhancement. Most of the messages have been lovely expressions of good wishes for the man who was a founding father of fandom (say that fast five times) and one of the all-time great editors of comic books.

The address is schwartz@newsfromme.com and I'm announcing a deadline. Tuesday morning at 10 AM Pacific Time, I'm sending off everything I've received and shutting down the address. So send your message before then. And please, no attachments and no expectations of a reply.

• Posted at 11:58 PM · LINK

In the Times

One of the joys of the Internet is getting to read The New York Times every day not only for free but without leaving my chair. There are a lot of articles I think are myopic or pointlessly sensationalized, but less so than most papers. Their coverage of Wen Ho Lee was so embarrassingly wrong that they conducted an internal investigation and ran a partial apology. Their coverage of Whitewater was worse. It made one suspect that, trying to prove they were not the liberal-slanted newspaper so many make them out to be, they decided to stick it to a Democratic President. A rather staggering number of charges that were later proven bogus gained great credibility by being plastered across the first page of the Times, often above the fold.

Still, there are always a few articles in each issue that I find interesting. Today, I'd like to link to...

A front page article that discusses, one year after the fact, Colin Powell's major report that there was absolutely no doubt Saddam Hussein was sitting there with Weapons of Mass Destruction by the truckload. So wha' happened?
An article on lip-synching at live musical events and how it ticks some people off.
Frank Rich on what's harming marriage in this country. It ain't gays, says Rich...and I think he's right.
A report by top scientists that says that even if existing air pollution laws are enforced, they won't be enough to keep our atmosphere breatheable.

Some of you may not visit the Times site because it requires you to register. I do not think this leads to Spam. At least, I've never received an e-mail ad that appeared to come because I registered at a site like this. But if you're uneasy about leaving your address laying around the Internet, there's an easy solution: Get a separate e-mail address for that purpose. Go to Hotmail or Yahoo Mail or any of thousands of sites that will give you a free e-mail address and mailbox. Sign up for an address that you only use when you have to sign up for something. Very handy.

• Posted at 10:41 PM · LINK

Breaking Gorilla Suit News

Here's great news. May 4, you'll able to purchase The Marx Brothers Collection, a 5-DVD set featuring seven whole Marx Brothers movies...A Night at the Opera, A Day at the Races, At The Circus, Go West, Room Service, The Big Store and A Night in Casablanca. There are new "Making of..." documentaries for the first two, plus trailers and classic cartoons and shorts from the same year as each movie. List price will be sixty bucks, so you'll probably be able to pick it up for less than fifty...and I'm told these are new, wonderful transfers. Opera, Races and Casablanca will also be offered as individual releases. I'll post a link on this site when it's possible to order this.

For those of you scoring at home: This will mean that Love Happy is the only Marx Brothers movie that has never been released on DVD. This is not a huge loss since Love Happy is a Marx Brothers movie the way Sbarro's is an Italian restaurant.

The first five Marx movies (Cocoanuts, Animal Crackers, Monkey Business, Horse Feathers and Duck Soup) are controlled by Universal Home Video which released them some time ago but has allowed them to go outta-print. If you look around, you may still be able to find them...but you may not want to try too hard. Though Universal says they have no current plans for a reissue, they're doing a lot of boxed sets of old comedy series these days and since the Marx films are already transferred and popular, it's likely we will soon see them out in a collection. In the meantime, if you crave more Marx humor, I would like to again recommend the recently-released collection of You Bet Your Life: The Lost Episodes. It really is a marvelous package of eighteen episodes plus enough Groucho extras to make anyone's eyebrows go up and down. Click right here to order a copy if you don't have one. There are certain DVDs you love because someone did a decent transfer of a great piece of film and others that go beyond that, adding in wonderful bonuses and digging up rare material. This one's the latter and it sounds like the 5-DVD set will be, as well.

You will especially want the 5-DVD set because it includes At The Circus, which has Charlie Gemora in not one but two different gorilla suits. They had to change costumes in mid-shooting so the gorilla's appearance changes but it's reportedly Charlie in both skins. Name me an actor today who can perform so effectively in a gorilla costume. (Okay, besides Robert Duvall...)

• Posted at 1:03 PM · LINK

A Pale Paley Fest

Every year, the Museum of Television and Radio in Los Angeles has its annual William S. Paley Television Festival. These used to be wonderful: They'd salute great old shows and bring in everyone they could find who'd been a part of them for a big panel discussion. If you ever go to the Museum (and they have these tapes at the one in New York too, I understand) watch the videos of the seminars devoted to classic moments in television.

Alas, the festivals are no longer as wonderful. The last few years, they've had fewer events and they've increasingly been about current shows. I don't think it's posted anywhere on the 'net so here's this year's line-up of seminars...

March 3 — Creating Characters with J.J. Abrams
March 4 — Trading Spaces
March 5 — An Evening With Angela Lansbury
March 6 — Joan of Arcadia
March 9 — The O.C.
March 10 — An Evening With William Shatner
March 11 — Arrested Development
March 12 — A Salute to Sherwood Schwartz
March 13 — The Wire
March 15 — Smallville
March 16 — Carnivale

And that's it. Some of the shows being saluted are fine shows and may in the future be viewed as important, classic television programming. But have they yet? Here's an excerpt from the museum's press release for a Paley Fest of a few years back...

The Paley Festival, named for William S. Paley, founder of both the Museum and CBS, offers the public an appreciation of the medium's commitment to quality. During these evenings, the audience views episodes or highlights of the featured work and has the opportunity to ask questions of the cast and creative teams or the individual involved in its production. Since the first festival in 1984, the Museum has honored more than 200 programs, including Cheers, Friends, Gunsmoke, The Honeymooners, Marty, M*A*S*H, Roots, Route 66, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, All in the Family, Will & Grace, Friends, The Untouchables, thirtysomething, Seinfeld, The Simpsons, South Park, The Untouchables, The West Wing and The X-Files, along with such personalities as Lucille Ball, Milton Berle, Alfred Hitchcock, Sid Caesar, Cher, Jim Henson, Bob Hope, Jane Fonda, John Frankenheimer, Jack Lemmon, Mary Martin, Carl Reiner, Gene Roddenberry, Garry Shandling, Flip Wilson, Milton Berle, Barbara Walters, Jonathan Winters, and many more.

I suppose one could argue that Angela Lansbury and William Shatner are in the same class as the folks named above. The salute to Sherwood Schwartz will mainly be a salute to Gilligan's Island and The Brady Bunch. Sherwood is a nice man and I love hearing him tell stories about writing for Red Skelton and other such experiences...but the Museum didn't do a salute to Gilligan's Island twenty years ago when more of the cast was alive. What's changed? And have they really run out of shows more than a year or two old...i.e., old enough for there to actually be an overview? This is a very disappointing schedule.

• Posted at 2:34 AM · LINK

Theater Review

The Reprise! theater group stages several classic musicals a year in short run, no-scenery productions up at Freud Hall at U.C.L.A. Tomorrow and Sunday are the last performances of their revival of Kismet, the 1953 musical which had a book by Charles Lederer and Luther Davis, and songs by Robert Wright and George Forrest. Lederer and Davis were adapting a non-musical play by Edward Knoblock, while Wright and Forrest borrowed copious amounts of melody from Alexander Borodin. The reviews of this production said the book was stale and contrived and on one level, they're right...but we had a great time, nonetheless. The reviews also said the score was wonderful and on all levels, they're right...and it isn't just the known hits like "Baubles, Bangles and Beads" and "Stranger in Paradise." There's a lot of wonderful music in this show and it's great that Reprise! gives us the chance to discover or maybe rediscover it.

What really made this production work for me were strong performances by Len Cariou as the Poet, Caryn E. Kaplan as his daughter, Jennifer Leigh Warren as Lalume, Anthony Crivello as The Caliph and just about everyone. And of course, the whole shebang was stolen by my pal Jason Graae, who got every laugh it was possible to get as The Wazir...and then some. Jason has upcoming concert performances in Utah, Palm Springs, Palm Beach, Costa Mesa and Northern California. If you live in any of those places, consult his website for details and go. A wonderful performer.

Not much more to say about Kismet, especially since they only have three more performances and it's doubtful you can rush to any of them. As I always am with these "limited engagement" productions, I am amazed that they can mount an entire show and learn lines, staging and choreography in so little rehearsal time. The whole show is about magic and trickery but the most impressive trick is that they can do it at all. And so well at that.

• Posted at 12:03 AM · LINK

February 1, 2004 • Current • January 30, 2004