Tuesday, April 5, 2005

Mystery Solved?

This morning at breakfast, I ran into veteran comedy writer Arnie Kogen, who worked for a time on The Dean Martin Show. Arnie left before they got to the roast episodes I mentioned here but I figured he'd probably know who the writer was whose initials, "GB," appeared on that script excerpt I posted. He thought it was George Bloom. Sounds right to me.

• Posted at 12:58 PM · LINK

Tit for Tat

Several of you have written me to express disappointment in the recent Laurel & Hardy fest on Turner Classic Movies. Films started at odd times and some of the prints were not up to the usual TCM standards. I am told that the folks there are well aware of the problems and they're already working to rectify matters when the films are repeated in a few months.

TCM reminds me of those "repertory revival cinemas" that a lot of us used to go to in the days before home video...the ones that would show a different double feature every evening. A friend of mine who managed one explained the big problem to me. You advertise that six weeks from now, you'll be showing Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon. A day or so before, the prints arrive from the distributor and they're terrible: Scratches, faded scenes, pops on the soundtrack, missing footage, etc. And there's not a damn thing you can do about it except rehearse your apologies to irate film buffs. I asked him if he could just not deal with the suppliers who sent the bad prints but he said, "I'd have nothing to show besides home movies of my vacation in Phoenix."

The problem should be less in the era of digital video, and it is. But there are a lot of movies that have yet to be properly mastered for broadcast and home video, and I'm afraid a lot of the Laurel & Hardy movies fall into that category. If you live in England or some other Region 2 DVD country, you can buy what I'm told is a wonderful boxed set of films...and, yes, I know it's possible to get a PAL DVD player and TV monitor in this country, and I may wind up doing that. But these great movies oughta be available in this country and be watchable by all. The Hallmark company owns most of 'em and reportedly has the idea that there's not much market for these films. The way they've been putting them out in occasional DVDs made from mediocre prints makes you feel someone there is trying hard to prove that.

Despite the flaws in the TCM presentation, I've enjoyed having a quantity of Stan and Ollie on my TiVo and I played each film at least twice over the weekend. I forgot how much I just like watching Laurel and Hardy, no matter what they're doing. I don't even care that much about the slapstick in the movies. There's something so pleasant and fascinating about the way those two guys walk down the street or carry suitcases or move a piano. I'd rather have good prints and high-quality DVDs...but I just like watching them, the way you like looking at a favorite painting or listening to a favorite tune. I have more thoughts on The Boys over in this section.

• Posted at 1:37 AM · LINK

Another Greg Garrison Tale

The Dean Martin Show, debuted on September 16, 1965 and had its last regular broadcast on May 24, 1974, followed by almost six years of occasional specials. A run like that is no small feat, especially with a star who doesn't want to rehearse, and it can probably be attributed mainly to the ingenuity of producer-director Greg Garrison. He had a good creative team, and they kept finding ways to freshen it with new supporting players, recurring segments and good-looking women. For the last season or so of weekly shows and most of the specials, they went largely to a "roast" format. They took the money they'd been spending on musical arrangements, dancers and choreography and put it into more joke writers and guest stars. Each week, some celebrity would be the "Man [or Woman] of the Hour," and they'd trot out other celebs, some of whom even knew the honoree, to insult/praise them.

There was something rather "in-groupish" about the shows. It was like one week, you'd have Don Rickles roasting Telly Savalas and the next week, you'd have Telly Savalas roasting Don Rickles, and you'd wonder if maybe they hadn't taped both roasts at the same time and divided the cue cards up at random. Okay, so it wasn't quite so bad, but it seemed like that. There was an awful lot of cut-and-pasting done, and Garrison did a pretty decent job of shooting and editing. You almost didn't notice that in some of the roasts, especially the later ones, some of the stars who spoke weren't even there, and some weren't there for long.

My friends and I used to watch and try to figure out all the editing tricks. Sometimes, Dean would introduce a speaker — say, Bob Hope — and skillful cutting would make it hard to notice that you never saw Hope in the same shot as Dean or the guest of honor. That meant Hope was taped at another time, possibly on another stage using just a small part of Dean's set.

Or you'd see something like this: Foster Brooks would tell a joke about a fish. Then they'd cut to a shot of Dom DeLuise, seated on the dais, convulsed in laughter. Then they'd cut back to Brooks at the rostrum and he'd tell a joke about a dog. Deduction: They cut out at least one joke between Foster's fish joke and his dog joke...and the footage of Dom was of him laughing at something else altogether. (It may have just been that Garrison told him to act like someone had said something hysterically funny.)

In addition to Garrison's skills, you had the legendary Harry Crane as head writer. (I assume those are his initials up there on the script excerpt. I'm not sure who "GB" is. I thought it was Gary Belkin but he was doing The Carol Burnett Show at the time. And I think George Burditt was writing Three's Company.) Crane, who died in 1999, was a longtime jokesmith who wrote for all the biggies: Dean, Frank, Gleason, Abbott & Costello, even Laurel & Hardy. The roast format required tons of material — more than it seemed because almost everyone's speech was taped at two or three times the length and then pared down in editing. For a time, the crunch was so bad that Harry was buying jokes "under the table" from outside writers, one of whom was Yours Truly. I think I sold him around a dozen, three of which made it to air. He told me that was a good batting average.

Crane was the perfect man for the job because he wrote the way Garrison directed: Cut-and-paste. While I was visiting Harry one day, someone poked a head in and told him that Lorne Greene had dropped out as a speaker on the roast they were taping later that week. The replacement was Ted Knight. Without even interrupting the anecdote he was telling me, Harry ruffled through a pile of pages on his desk, found the Lorne Greene material and went through it, crossing out "Lorne" everywhere and writing in "Ted." The only rewriting necessary was to change one reference from Bonanza to The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

He told me he liked working for Garrison because of Garrison's deal with Dean. Dean would just show up on tape day and read whatever was on the cards. Years earlier, Harry said, he'd practically had a stroke arguing with Jackie Gleason over what was funny. (Harry had a long explanation, which I didn't necessarily accept in toto, of how everything that worked on The Honeymooners was his idea and Gleason had to be talked into it all.) He liked the fact that Greg, in turn, let the writers write what they thought was funny. He also had a great respect for the fact that Garrison could get the show down at all under a time crunch that would have crushed a lesser man.

At the time, I was probably a bit too critical of Garrison's patchwork editing, and I asked Harry if it bothered him. He pointed to a still photo that was up on the wall over his desk. It was from a recent show and it featured Dean, Johnny Carson, Bette Davis, Jack Benny, George Burns and about a dozen other celebs of that stature. "You can't get a line-up like that to come in and put on tuxedos if you're going to take all day to tape a show," Harry said. "Greg does it every week."

• Posted at 12:20 AM · LINK