Sunday, August 8, 2004

A Ringing Endorsement

You may see this elsewhere but I can't resist. I have to quote it. House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert appeared today on Meet the Press and discussed the decision (in which he played a major role) to recruit Alan Keyes to run for the Senate in Illinois. Here's what he said...

I talked to Mike Ditka, and I decided maybe he made a good decision. I talked to a guy name Gary Fencik, who was a great star, Harvard-Yale, star for the Chicago Bears. He couldn't. And the problem in Illinois, you've got to have $10 million to run; $6 million or $7 million of that has to be done for name I.D. I got down last week to interviewing a 70-year-old guy, who was a great farm broadcaster in Illinois. He decided since his health problems — he couldn't do it. You know, we were down — we needed to find somebody to run, somebody who wanted to run. And, you know, Alan Keyes wants to run, and I hope he's a good candidate.

Rough translation: "We were so desperate, we had to pick Alan Keyes, and I have no faith at all in him." If I were Barack Obama, the guy Keyes is running against, I'd just use the clip of Hastert as my commercial.

• Posted at 11:15 PM · LINK

Life Upon the Wicked Stage

Broadway: The Golden Age is a theatrical documentary on a couple of decades of shows that played the Great White Way with an emphasis on the folks who starred in them. Filmmaker Rick McKay spent many years hauling his camera around the world interviewing enough theater legends to fill 250 hours and he also acquired a lot of rare performance footage. All of that has been edited into a film of just under two hours which is currently playing around the country. You get to hear Stephen Sondheim, Angela Lansbury, Carol Burnett, Gwen Verdon, John Raitt, Carol Channing and countless others discuss their lives and craft. In fact, there are so many worthy interviewees in this film that a lot of important theatrical figures are confined to the briefest of clips.

Over at the film's website, you can view the incredible cast list and see a couple of trailers. You can also read about the many awards the movie has received and study some of the rave reviews. Rex Reed (who is among those interviewed in it) never wrote a more positive notice than this one in a recent current New York Observer and just about everyone else who has appraised it has called it a must-see. Since I love Broadway and the people who work there and the anecdotes they tell, you can just about bet the farm that I'd love this movie, right?

Well, you'd lose the farm, but it's okay. I'd have made that bet, too. I can't recall ever coming out of a movie more amazed that I didn't have a great time. I admire the effort and I respect the hell out of the filmmaker's intentions...but I was unmoved and, at times, bored by a movie that I think reaches to cover too much in its limited time, especially when so much time is allotted to trivia. And I say that as a guy who ordinarily loves trivia...but we hear more about where the actors went to hang out after the show than about how those shows were created or even what any of them meant to their era.

I agree that the period of the American theater that the film chronicles was a "golden age" of great memories. I'd have liked to see more examples of that instead of a lot of actors telling us it was great, but I don't have to be convinced on that count. What puzzles me is that McKay starts with the premise that this great era has passed and then, if we are to believe Rex Reed's write-up, "...asks all the right questions [about why it ended] and gets fantastic answers from a cast of 100 people who were actually there." That's not the movie I saw this afternoon. We get some nice tales about beginning actors living in poverty, about understudies getting to go on and being discovered, and about going to Sardi's to hear the reviews. But perhaps because the movie is primarily about actors talking about acting, the question of why Broadway has changed goes largely unasked and unanswered. Why there are now shows with people in cat suits and scores made up of recorded music is a topic that is probably best addressed by directors, writers and (primarily) producers, and there are very few of them represented in Broadway: The Golden Age and none is asked that question.

Late in the film, Elaine Stritch assures us the theater is in great shape. Is this the filmmaker's view, too? I really don't know. I also don't know what the proper audience is for this movie. If you know little about theater, I think you'd be baffled. The clips are selected more for their rarity than for any real demonstration of the magic of the stage, and a lot of the references will be lost on theatrical novices. There's some great footage of Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon working together, for example, but no real explanation of who Fosse was, where he came from, what impact he had on the theater, etc. On the other hand, if you know a lot about theater, I think you'd want a lot more depth than is offered here. Then again, given how many of my friends love this film, maybe I'm wrong, and the sheer celebration of these folks is enough.

As I said, I really wanted to love this movie. I still want to love this movie, which is why I'm hoping the DVD release, whenever it happens, will include 20 or 30 hours of additional footage from those interviews. I'm also anticipating McKay's announced sequel, which will deal with present-day Broadway. Maybe it will address the question of what's changed and, taken together, the two films will form a far-reaching overview of a topic in dire need of more consideration. If so, I'll be thrilled because, as you can tell, I don't feel good about not liking what I saw today.

• Posted at 9:04 PM · LINK

We Have Nixon to Kick Around Again

Back when Richard Nixon was fighting to keep his tapes private, there was a wide, understandable assumption that he wasn't just afraid of Watergate-related revelations. Even a lot of Nixon's friends assumed there were "other matters" on those tapes; that somewhere on them, we'd hear him allude to some murder or other crime he'd ordered. I remember one "talking head" on TV — and I don't think it even belonged to one of Nixon's more outspoken critics — saying, "Once those tapes are in the hands of investigators, we'll have a dozen more scandals on our hands."

That did not happen. As I understand it, not every single one of the infamous White House tapes has been examined, even at this late date, but those that have been examined have yielded a lot less dirt than anyone probably expected. There's a lot of coarse language and one can reportedly hear Nixon trashing a lot of folks he praised in public...but at no point does he say anything like, "Let's just hope the press never finds out about the guy in New Orleans we had pay off Oswald." (In the late seventies, when I briefly delved into the world of Kennedy Assassination Conspiracy Buffs, that was a very active fantasy; that a Nixon tape would prove he'd been involved and would serve as the Rosetta Stone to unlock a vast plot.)

Those who are disappointed can perhaps derive some comfort from this new revelation that just before the '72 election, Nixon decided that South Vietnam was likely to fall. In a newly-transcribed tape, one can apparently hear him discussing with Henry Kissinger how the timing of that would affect him politically.

This is not a huge surprise. Tapes that have already made it to public scrutiny already have Nixon discussing how to time the bringing-home of troops to help him in the election. (You can hear part of one over on this page.) Still, it is significant if as reported, Nixon in mid-'72 is saying, "South Vietnam probably can never even survive anyway." If you'd suggested at the time that was possible, Nixon and his pals would have called you a spineless, America-hating Commie and defeatist. If you'd suggested Nixon was letting election concerns impact his conduct of the war, they would have said that was a horrible thing to suggest about an occupant of the Oval Office. Some folks still say that except that now they pretend they never said it about Bill Clinton.

In the meantime, today is the 30th anniversary of Nixon's resignation, which my father thought was the best thing he ever saw on television. In fact, he wondered why the networks couldn't make a weekly series out of it...you know, bring Nixon out every Tuesday night at 8:30 and have him quit again. Maybe put him in a dunk tank or dress him as Mae West or something like that. I never felt Nixon was quite as bad as my father did but I did think there was a good object lesson in the downfall of the 37th President of the United States. Not everything his enemies said about him was warranted but almost nothing his partisans said in his defense turned out to be true. And an awful lot of things we all thought no American President would ever do, he did.

So to mark the day, how about if we all enjoy my father's favorite TV show?

• Posted at 12:08 PM · LINK