Rumor has it that those of us who have DirecTV satellites are about to find the Sleuth Network on Channel 308...like in the next day or so. This would excite me if I had any interest in watching old episodes of The A-Team, Simon and Simon and The Equalizer.
NBC reruns an old Saturday Night Live episode in the wee small hours of every Sunday morning. These are uncut, as opposed to the hour-long versions that rerun on the E! Network. For a while, they were choosing recent episodes which didn't much interest me but they're now going back a little farther.
This weekend, the featured episode is the one from 5/24/86 with guest host Anjelica Huston, musical guest George Clinton and former Yankees manager Billy Martin somehow appearing in a number of sketches. This was the last episode of that season and it ends with a scene that has all the cast members (playing themselves) trapped in a fire with a cliff-hanger ending: Who will survive? (Which is to say, which cast members will return next season?) You see Lorne Michaels saving Jon Lovitz with the implication that he'll be the only one. Two others did return the following September — Dennis Miller and Nora Dunn — but the rest, including Randy Quaid, Anthony Michael Hall and Terry Sweeney "perished," in that they did not return to the show. Some folks involved with the show felt it was not the nicest way to say goodbye to the performers who were being dismissed.
The following weekend, the episode is the one that originally aired on 2/13/88 with host Justine Bateman and musical guest Terence Trent D'Arby. Not a great show, as I recall. Neither is the one this weekend but at least they're digging up some that haven't been rerun to death.
Here's a brief economics lesson from Ben Stein. I don't agree with all of it but am fascinated by his seeming break from a lot of the bromides that folks in his political camp have long touted.
The folks at the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive Project have dug up more treasures for us. Here are several of the Chiquita Banana animated commercials that were done to be shown in motion picture houses in the late forties.
Not a lot is known about these commercials except that they were produced, beginning around 1947, by a company called John Sutherland Productions that did mostly industrial films and commercial spots. They seem to have farmed the animation work out to the Famous Studios operation in New York — the company that was doing the post-Fleischer Popeye cartoons and things like Herman & Katnip and Little Lulu.
A singer named Monica Lewis may have done the voice of Ms. Banana in these. She definitely was the voice of Chiquita when the character appeared in TV commercials in the fifties but sources differ on whether she sang for the theatricals. And now you know as much about these films as I do.
You can view or download the material here on the ASIFA site.
[UPDATE: I originally had an embedded link here but Steve Worth, who's doing such fine work for ASIFA finding and archiving treasures, asked me to remove it and direct you to their site. I am glad to do this.]
Much of my e-mail is wishing me a speedy recovery and a number of people seem to think I'm still in the hospital. I appreciate the well wishes but I want to assure everyone that I consider myself (amazingly) largely recovered. I got out of the hospital on Sunday afternoon, almost exactly 48 hours after the surgery. I'm avoiding heavy lifting and overtaxing myself...but I always avoid stuff like that. Which is one of the reasons I needed the Gastric Bypass operation. Today, I was out of the house most of the day, pursuing a more-or-less normal routine, minus the eating part. Haven't had solid food since last Tuesday night — a two-day liquid diet is part of the pre-op routine — and haven't missed it. I'm dining on Canter's chicken broth and protein shakes...and probably not enough of either. But I feel fine.
No pain from the incisions. No pain at all, at least since early Saturday. One hundred hours after the surgery, I did not feel any different than I had before except perhaps a bit lighter. There could well be aches and nausea and complications ahead as my system adjusts further and as I eventually reintroduce it to solid foods...but right now, I'm jes' fine.
I'm trying not to "sell" this surgery to anyone because I'm sure others have a rougher time of it. In fact, I saw others at the hospital who did. I'm just telling my friends not to be concerned about me. In fact, I'd like to think that the time to be worried about my health has now been pre-empted for a couple of decades.
As you've probably seen, cars that are driven in other countries sometimes sport little international license plates. On each, one, two or three letters denotes some code that indicates the country of origin for the vehicle. In the above three examples, "S" indicates a car from Sweden, "MC" indicates a car from Monaco and if you see "GBZ" on the back of an auto, you're following a car from Gibraltar. The codes are not always obvious, at least to those of us who speak English. For instance, "ROU" is Uruguay, "CH" is Switzerland and "CL" is Sri Lanka. I don't know those by heart. I got them off this list.
This afternoon, my friend Sergio and I were driving along and we were behind a car with one of those oval license plates on the rear. It said "DMB."
Now, Sergio has travelled the world over and speaks many languages including, on occasion, English. I have a pretty good memory. But try as we might, we couldn't figure out what country was denoted by "DMB." I kept thinking it was something like "Dominican of Milton Bradley" and that sure wasn't it. So finally, Sergio pulled up alongside the driver, rolled down the window and yelled to the guy to ask him...and the guy told us.
A number of fans of Alex Toth's comic book art seem to be a little puzzled about his vast body of work in the animation field. Most of it was done for Hanna-Barbera Studios, which was not far from his home and where his wife Guyla worked as a secretary to Joe Barbera. (And I hasten to add that that job description does not do her justice. She was a lovely and extraordinary woman who did a lot to keep that chaotic studio running.)
Alex had several functions for Hanna-Barbera. One was in the designing and selling of shows. H-B was basically in the business of getting networks to buy new programs and, once sold, the production of a given show was almost an afterthought. Alex was brought into meetings with writers and network execs where his skill for rapid drawing was given a workout. He'd sketch what they pitched and shape the melange of ideas into something visual, tossing in ideas of his own. Some people aren't sure if he created shows like Space Ghost, Herculoids, Mightor, Birdman, etc., and the answer is that he usually created the visuals and occasionally contributed ideas to the concepts. So I don't know that the word "created" really applies.
Then Alex would prepare large boards of color artwork — sometimes colored by him, often colored or otherwise embellished by others in the studio — that would be used as further selling tools in meetings. A cartoon show must often be pitched, re-pitched and re-re-pitched, meaning that Joe Barbera (or someone) would pitch it to network guys and then the network guys would pitch it to higher-ranked network guys and somewhere along the way, someone might have to re-re-pitch it to ad agencies. Having good art boards as visual aids can be an enormous aid for any pitcher, and Toth's were among the best.
After a show was sold and they began making episodes, Alex would usually do model sheets to design the characters — both the regulars and the "incidentals." Incidentals are new characters that appear in only one episode...and there would also be model sheets for vehicles, major props, key pieces of scenery, etc. He produced hundreds of these, perhaps thousands, and they are avidly collected by appreciators of fine comic-style illustration. They were a bit more controversial within the studio where some felt that Toth was the wrong guy to have setting the parameters of what everyone else would then have to draw. Everyone admired his drawing ability but there were those who argued that he was either too good or too special.
In most cases, the artists who would have to then draw the characters based on Alex's models had nowhere near his skills, or at least nowhere near the skills for that kind of illustration. H-B did adventure shows but they also continued to produce shows in what one might call the Yogi Bear style. Depending on what kinds of shows were sold each year and how many, it sometimes happened that a "Yogi Bear" artist would get assigned to an adventure show and many of these otherwise skilled artists struggled to replicate the kind of thing Toth was doing on the model sheets. Even a few artists who were solid in adventure-style art found his work too angular at times. Some Toth model sheets were worked over by others — traced and simplified (some would say, "watered-down") — before they went into production. But many artists were also stimulated by the challenge they presented and found that the designs were solid and, as is necessary with animation, designed with an absolute economy of line.
As I mentioned, animators still hoard and trade copies of them. It is not uncommon that an artist assigned to do up a model sheet of a policeman for some new show will haul out a Toth model sheet of a policeman and trace it, making just enough changes to pass it off as new...or not. I have seen Toth-designed characters appear without modification in shows he had nothing to do with, and I expect we always will. It's just part of the grand legacy that the man leaves us.
Several folks inform me — as I guess I should have realized from the lettering style at the beginning — that the Tom Noddy clip is from The Tracey Ullman Show.
And it's now been 91 hours since they wheeled me into surgery and I'm doing fine.
Jonathan Chait on why Al Gore's prospects to be the next Democratic nominee for prez are rising and Hillary Clinton's are collapsing.
For what it's worth, I've never felt that Ms. Clinton was going to be the Democratic nominee, at least at the top of the ticket. I think she's a bright woman and one who has been seriously demonized and wronged by a campaign of lies and false charges. That is not enough to qualify one to be president. She's also not a very dynamic speaker and her positions lately have seemed fuzzy and lacking in leadership.
I also think it's way too early to assume Gore will run or is the only alternative. We're still in that stage where what the pundits say, if you ask them who's going to be the nominee, is something like, "It's much too premature for a prediction to have any value...and now, here's my prediction..."
Here's a great act..."great," in part because he's the only guy who does it. His name is Tom Noddy and he invented what he calls Bubble Magic. He comes out and blows soap bubbles.
His first appearance on TV with his Bubble Magic may have been on a show I wrote in the early eighties. I recall that we had a lot of tech problems figuring out how to light him so that his handiwork was visible on camera...and it was also necessary to rearrange the studio air conditioning so that none of it blew onto the stage. The crew rigged little panels to funnel the air towards the studio audience and away from the performance area. Shortly after, The Tonight Show booked Tom — because they'd seen him on our show, I think — and their director called our director to find out how we'd handled it. This clip may be that Tonight Show appearance.
In any case, it's just a sampler of a much longer act that Tom still performs all around the world. I need to drop the guy a line and find out when he's blowing this way because I'd love to see it again and, of course, see how he's built on it in the last quarter-century. And now, we are proud to present a little more than two minutes of Tom Noddy and his Bubble Magic...
Right now, a lot of the Conservative blogosphere is getting worked up over what they see as some discrepancy in a statement by Al Gore. As near as I can figure out, Gore said something about spending a week in France when he was fifteen and his detractors say (a) this couldn't have happened and (b) this proves the guy is a pathological liar or something of the sort. I've received several e-mails from people who are dead certain that there's no such thing as Global Warming and their "proof" doesn't extend far beyond their view that Gore can't be trusted so if he says it's so, it isn't. I suppose if Gore were to say it's currently 2006, they'd take that as evidence that it was some other year.
This is a political tactic that annoys the hell out of me. A lot of politicians lie and when they lie, they oughta be called on it. But all of them — without exception — say things that seem to contradict the record and which can be spun as lies if you try hard enough. It cheapens the whole concept of The Truth to label every seeming discrepancy as a bald-faced lie. Bill Clinton saying "I did not have sex with that woman" was a lie. Bill Clinton saying he read about black churches being burned in Arkansas when he was a kid (when there's no record any were) is not a lie, any more than you're lying when you misremember someone's birthday.
Here's a video clip of George W. Bush caught in what sure looks like a lie about something pretty important. In fact, it's so important that I'm inclined to believe it's not a lie...just real sloppy storytelling. However, if the Democrats had someone like Karl Rove running plays for them, you can bet this would get sold hard as rock-solid proof that not only is Bush a liar but that he has some severe emotional disturbance that makes him incapable of telling the truth.
Here are some things I've learned since I had my surgery last Friday...
I've learned my bathroom scale doesn't work. I stepped on it this morning and it gave me a weight six pounds higher than my pre-surgery weight. Five minutes later, I stepped on it again and I was eight pounds under. Just for fun, I've stepped on it about ten times today and gotten more random numbers. So I have no idea how much I've lost so far.
I've learned that a lot of my expectations of pain were for naught. I've had very little. Today, I hurt about as much as I generally do when I have a cold and some of my joints swell a bit, and that isn't much. They gave me a medicine to take for pain and I don't think I'll be opening the bottle.
I've learned how good the clear chicken broth from Canter's Delicatessen tastes. Especially when that's the only thing you've eaten all day that even remotely resembles food. And no, I'm not the least bit hungry.
I've learned how odd it feels to shower when someone has shaved your stomach.
Lastly, I've learned that I have a lot of good friends out there — some of whom I never heard of or from before — who wrote with good wishes and words of encouragement. I also learned that there are a couple (just a couple) of folks who couldn't resist telling me of their friend who had a similar operation and suffered and/or died. Gee, thanks. You're so helpful. But most of you have been very nice and I'll try to answer all your notes.
Well, I've had an interesting couple of days. Friday morning, I checked into Cedars-Sinai Hospital and had a world reknown surgeon reduce the size of my stomach. It's called Roux en y gastric bypass surgery, though most people seem to refer to it as "that thing Al Roker had done to lose all that weight."
I'll write more about it when I can sit here at the computer longer without discomfort...though I must admit, I have surprisingly little discomfort. It was done via laparoscopic surgery, meaning they make six tiny incisions, then go in with special tools rather than to just filet you open lengthwise. The procedure was performed Friday afternoon around 2:00, I was out of surgery by 3:30 or so, then spent a few hours somewhat incoherent in a recovery room where, they later told me, my first words were, "Can we send out for pizza?" Got to my room by 9 PM and spent an uncomfortable but not intolerable night thanks to a few injections of an anti-nausea drug. Saturday morning was rough but by late in the day, I could tell I was getting better...and they took out my staples and sent me home this afternoon around 3:00. My chest feels tight but my biggest problem right now is the sore neck I got from sleeping in one position on an uncomfortable hospital bed.
For those of you who want to know more about the technical end of the process, this page tells you more than I ever could.
As I said, I'll tell you more about my experience when I can, though I have no intention of recommending it to anyone. I don't think it's for everyone and the folks who do elect it have to really, really make up their own minds. I suspect it's in the category of things that if you can be talked out of doing it, you shouldn't do it. One should especially beware of websites that are trying to sell you the procedure. As a general rule of thumb, those who do the process well seem to have all the customers they can handle and don't need to solicit. I spent a year or more studying the pros and cons, and finally chose to go ahead only because I believed I had the right personal physician and the right surgeon. I'm sure with the wrong guys in either role, it could already have been a disaster. I also underwent extensive medical tests that showed I was a good candidate for the surgery because so little was wrong with me apart from my weight.
I'm going to go lie down for a bit in a real bed. It's good to be home. And it'll be good to be skinnier. My thanks to several friends who supported me and encouraged me, and a big thank you to the lovely Carolyn Kelly who did all that and more.
For reasons I'll explain in the next post, I'm a day behind the comic blogosphere in noting the passing of Alex Toth, who died yesterday morning. Alex was easily one of the most admired artists to ever work in comics and animation, envied by his peers for his ability to capture action and human gesture like no one else. Like a great photographer who can sense the split-second to hit the shutter, Alex had a knack for drawing exactly the right second in any sequence of events. His people moved and acted like people and when he drew a car or airplane, you could sense its speed right on the page.
That he designed many popular Saturday morning shows was the least of it. He invented much of the shorthand necessary to do adventure cartoons for television. Other animation artists hoarded and traded his model sheets and swiped off them. You could see Toth designs, slightly changed, on shows he never worked on. You could see other artists strain for the Toth simplicity.
Simplicity was a constant goal of Toth's. He was known to draw an entire comic book page — I saw him do this — decide it was too cluttered and then rip it to shreds and do it over with fewer lines. There was nothing wrong with the first version other than that Alex thought he could do it better. He usually could.
To be around Alex was to be with the ultimate fan. No one loved great comics like Alex. He collected them, studied them, wrote long essays (usually crammed onto postcards) to friends about them. We spent some long evenings on the phone or in his living room talking about the handiwork of Roy Crane or Frank Robbins. It was always fascinating to hear a Toth analysis because he understood other artists from the inside. I'm not sure he ever understood what he did so well but he could talk for hours about what Milton Caniff did.
He leaves behind a legacy of fine work but you always got the feeling with Alex there could have been more. He worked too often for companies that never seemed to know what to do with him and he got into the habit of quitting when he was wronged...and sometimes even when he wasn't. Tonight, I want to think about how much excellence came off his drawing table...but it's hard to not consider how much more he had to give us, to teach us and to leave us. He really was that good.
For the first time in over a year, I'm posting a picture of a can of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup. This, as anyone with an I.Q. higher than that of a cocker spaniel can tell you, is an ancient Internet tradition that few besides me carry on. The pic means that the proprietor of the website is too busy to post much of anything for a little while. In this case, it may be a few days and I may not be able to answer a lot of e-mail, either. If you look hard, somewhere on the Internet you may be able to find something else worth reading in my absence.
For some reason, people with no conceivable financial stake in the answers are fascinated with the box office grosses of new motion pictures. I was once in a sports bar near the airport in Hartford, Connecticut — don't ask why I was there; I don't even drink — and one of the lady bartenders asked me what I did for a living. When I said I was a TV writer, she said, "So, how do you think the new Bruce Willis pic will do this weekend?" Though I said I had no idea and that I didn't even know there was a new Bruce Willis movie opening, she persisted in discussing it with an interest that probably exceeded Bruce's.
So in case she's reading this: Here's an article about how the early grosses are tallied for press releases. The process is sloppy but most people accept it as accurate. It's kind of like the way we choose our presidents.
Today, we have an unembedded video clip and an embedded one. First, the unembedded clip. Someone posted it to YouTube with this description...
In 1969, the U.S. Senate had a hearing on funding the newly developed Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The proposed endowment was $20 million but President Nixon wanted it cut in half because of the spending going on in the Vietnam War. This is an video clip of the exchange between Mr. Rogers and Senator Pastore, head of the hearing. Senator Pastore starts out very abrasive and by the time Mr. Rogers is done talking, Senator Pastore's inner child has heard Mr. Rogers and agreed with him. Enjoy.
I can attest that Fred Rogers had that effect on people I met him once (described here) and he had a way of just draining all hostility and irate feelings from people around him. Here's the clip, which runs a little under seven minutes and is well worth the time.
Which brings us to our embedded clip. Okay, here's the premise: Let's take the movie The Ten Commandments and make up a movie trailer as if we're trying to market it as a teen comedy. Got it? Go...
We are proud to make the following announcement...
Schwartz, Kurtzman to Receive Second Bill Finger Award
Alvin Schwartz and Harvey Kurtzman have been selected to receive the 2006 Bill Finger Award for Excellence in Comic Book Writing. The choice was made unanimously by a blue-ribbon committee chaired by writer and historian Mark Evanier.
The Bill Finger Award was instituted last year under the supervision of comic book legend Jerry Robinson. The first Finger Awards were presented to veteran writer Arnold Drake, who accepted in person at the 2005 Comic-Con International in San Diego, and to Jerry Siegel, co-creator of Superman; Siegel's widow Joanne accepted for her late husband.
"There are many fine writers deserving of wider recognition," Evanier notes. "But this year's judges zeroed in on two men whose bodies of work deserve a special salute, just as Bill Finger and his contribution deserve wider recognition.”
Alvin Schwartz authored his first comic book script (for Fairy Tale Parade) in 1939 and just three years later began writing Batman, an assignment on which he continued until 1958. In 1944 he also began a long association with Superman as the writer of both the Man of Steel's newspaper strip and many of his comic book appearances. Among Schwartz's many enduring contributions to the Superman mythology, he wrote the first tale of Bizarro, a character who became a part of popular culture, quite apart from comics. Schwartz also worked on Aquaman, Wonder Woman, Flash, Green Lantern and many more DC properties before departing the field of comics in 1958. He was since written novels, an autobiography. and motion pictures.
Harvey Kurtzman also began in comics in 1939 and soon became known for his surreal and brilliant work as both writer and artist of humorous fillers and short stories. It was after he joined EC Comics in 1949 that he especially distinguished himself with both humor work, as the editor-creator of Mad and author of its classic early issues, and with war comics as the editor/writer of Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat. Mad soon became not only the best-selling American humor periodical of all time but the keystone of an entire style of humor for several generations, while the war titles have been hailed by many as among the best depictions of war and historical material in comics. Kurtzman later worked on other humor magazines, did a long stint on "Little Annie Fanny" for Playboy, and authored several books before his death in 1993.
The Bill Finger Award remembers William Finger (1914-1974), who was the first and, some say, most important writer of Batman. Many have called him the "unsung hero" of the character and have hailed his work not only on that character but on dozens of others, primarily for DC Comics.
In addition to Evanier, this year's blue-ribbon selection committee included award-winning cartoonist Jerry Robinson, writer/historian (and author of Men of Tomorrow) Gerard Jones, acclaimed writer Marv Wolfman, and Charles Kochman, a senior editor with Abrams Books.
The 2006 awards are being underwritten by DC Comics (the major sponsor), this year joined by Comics Buyer's Guide (CBG), Heritage Auctions, and TwoMorrows Publishing (supporting sponsors).
"Though the focus in comics collecting is usually artwork, it is the stories told with that artwork that have captivated generations of fans," says CBG's Maggie Thompson. "Despite that, the writers in the field's earliest decades often worked in anonymity and even today are frequently overlooked. Comics Buyer's Guide is honored to help pay tribute to giants of the past and present — giants who have provided the words for unforgettable tales of imagination."
And Jim Halperin of Heritage Auction Galleries notes that his company "is proud to support this award, named for one of the foremost pioneers in comics literature. Without the efforts of Bill Finger and his contemporaries, our world would be duller and much less colorful than it is."
Similar sentiments are expressed by John Morrow: "TwoMorrows Publishing is honored to be associated with the Bill Finger Award. A main purpose of all our publications is to document the achievements of great creators throughout comics history. Sadly, Bill Finger's contributions to the medium remained largely uncredited during his lifetime. So an award that recognizes deserving writers — particularly those who are still with us, so we can all express our appreciation to them — is a long time coming, and a natural choice for us to sponsor."
The Finger Award falls under the auspices of Comic-Con International: San Diego and is administered by Jackie Estrada. The awards will be presented during the Eisner Awards ceremony at this summer's Comic-Con on Friday, July 21.
Pat Robertson is selling a protein shake that, he claims, is what has enabled him to be able to leg press 2,000 pounds of weight. People are mocking this but I think it's wonderful that a 76-year-old guy can easily top all the records set by much younger men. Why are people so cynical about such things? If he says he can do it, he can do it.
My pal Earl Kress is putting up a series of interesting posts over on his weblog. They're about the making of "Little Go Beep," which he wrote and which is probably the best Looney Tunes short made in a couple of decades. It's also one which almost no one saw. Start with this post and then read forward.
Earlier today in this report, ABC News announced that Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert was involved in the Congressional bribery investigation. Hastert's people have denied that he is a target of the investigation and they are demanding a retraction. The Department of Justice has issued a statement stating flatly that "Speaker Hastert is not under investigation by the Justice Department." ABC has since issued this item which in essence stands by its story but suggests that people are reading more into it than is there.
In other maybe-it's-true news, Truthout (an online left-wing news journal) is standing by its story that Karl Rove has already been indicted...this, despite the fact that the timetable in the original story has already been proven wrong, that no one else seems to have any information to this effect, and that it has been categorically denied by Rove's lawyers.
I have no idea what truth (if any) there is to either story. Perhaps there is none, perhaps they're essentially true but wrong in some technicality that allows them to be honestly denied. As usual for this kind of questionable report, people who want to see Rove frog-marched and Hastert hopping along beside him are cautiously hoping it's so...and folks whose politics would be set back a few yards if those things happened are sure they're not so. The latter group may be right but I think most of them are wrong about one thing. Most of them are saying these are deliberate, politically-motivated lies on the parts of the reporters and/or their news agencies.
That's a ridiculous assumption. They may be politically-motivated lies on the part of whoever leaked the stories to the media, but the media — even a fringe outfit like Truthout — doesn't make such things up out of the whole cloth. Somebody told them these accounts and it was probably someone they had reason to believe, albeit by a low or flawed standard of faith. If the stories are wrong, the crime is bad journalism, not intentional lying. One reason there's so much inept reporting out there is that it so rarely gets called what it is, which is incompetence.
Senator Lloyd Bentsen died the other day so we might as well take another look at the only thing most people remember him for — his putdown of Dan Quayle in the 1988 presidential debate. I'm not sure many people even remember that Bentsen was the running mate to Michael Dukakis that year. They just recall the public slapping.
I watched the debate that night with some folks over at Harlan Ellison's while Harlan ignored his guests and (quite properly) devoted himself to a rabid and frothing deadline. Mothra could have descended on the block and it would not have pried the man away from his manual typewriter and the paper whizzing through it. Still, when Bentsen delivered that line, we gave out a whoop — not necessarily in approval — and Harlan poked his head out of his office to ask what the heck had happened. Someone told him, "Bentsen just made Quayle look like an idiot" and he muttered, "This is news?" and went back to work.
Of course, it was mainly Quayle who made Quayle look bad that night. The reporters kept asking him what he'd do if the president was killed or disabled and it became necessary for him to assume the office. He kept responding like you or I would if we were asked how one goes about performing a large bowel resection. He just looked clueless and tried to ad-lib a response to a topic about which he seemed to have no idea, even though it's the most important thing (and darn near the only thing) a Vice-President of the United States of America might have to do.
He especially looked bad when he had no real answer to Bentsen's unclassy remark. I always thought he wouldn't have become quite the laughingstock he became if he'd fired back with something like, "People underestimated Jack Kennedy when he was in the Senate. I hope someday to have you say the same of me, Senator." Instead, his deer-in-the-headlights response may not have cost his ticket any states but it and a few public gaffes sure cost him any political future after his one term as veep.
Here's the clip. Bentsen, for whom I had little respect, actually made some very good points in that debate and would easily have been hailed as the winner without this line. It was a moment that made me feel both guys deserved to lose.
William T. Bradley, a physician in Texas, adds the following to our discussion of emergency room care...
To expand slightly on the response you already got, the answer is, of course, money: Hospitals are not traditional businesses. The problem with your analogy is that Starbucks expands to bring in more customers who'll pay 5-10 bucks for 39 cents worth of coffee in a paper cup. In the ER, it's often the reverse. The hospital will be paid little or nothing for most of the people who show up, and will spend lots of money treating them. If Starbucks were forced to provide lattes to anyone who showed up, regardless of their ability to pay, they'd obviously have much less impetus for expansion.
There are theoretically supposed to be mechanisms to pay for some of the care of the indigent, but these often require extensive administrative efforts on the part of the hospitals and patients to access, and the reimbursements are quite small. Exacerbating the problem is that much of what the ER sees are not emergencies, but people who don't have or can't afford a doctor, coming in for minor problems, or sometimes just to get medical refills or a doctor's excuse.
The result is that, from a business standpoint, the ER is a hugely money-losing proposition. Many hospitals maintain them only because they are required to. The waiting times are horrendous, but the hospital simply has no financial incentive to shorten them. Even the most altruistic facility would find it hard to keep the doors open if they expand more than is absolutely necessary.
Your best course of action, as a patient, is to have a physician you can call for help, and who can, if necessary, admit you to the hospital without going through the ER. Assuming your mother is on Medicare, that may be easier said than done. Here in Texas, primary care physicians who can afford to take new Medicare patients are extremely difficult to find, and I imagine it's worse in California. Political pressure on your congresspeople to stop cutting Medicare payments to physicians would of course be beneficial, but that leads us into another complex topic.
I'm sure everything you say is right. The Starbuck analogy was one of those comparisons that's good for about a sentence and a half before it collapses under its own weight.
However, let me add a few anecdotal nuggets into this. When I was hospitalized briefly last February, I was admitted (sort of) by my doctor. Though he works with Cedars-Sinai — his primary office is elsewhere — even he couldn't get me directly into a room. He had to send me to the Emergency Department where I spent four hours in the waiting area...and the time is only part of it. Those are awful places to be, surrounded by people in pain, people with coughs and little germ clouds you can almost see hovering about them, people agonizing over what the hospital costs will do to their lives, etc. During my wait, my doctor came over to the hospital to see patients and stopped off in the E.R. where he arranged for me to bypass much of the admissions process and then explained my medical situation to the appropriate people. He also located and briefed the specialist who was going to be supervising my treatment. He and the specialist then came out to find me in the waiting room and we discussed my case there...and it still took many hours after that for me to get to the moment where someone finally began treating my swollen, crimson calves.
I understand the money part of this. But I took up around six minutes of actual attention in that Emergency Room and they billed about eight thousand dollars to my health insurance for that part of my little stay. It would seem to me there's got to be a way the finance part of this can be made to work. That's worse than the markup on the Starbuck Decaf Komodo Dragon Blend®.
I should add to all this that I've had several trips to hospital emergency rooms with my mother when the problem was not agonizing pain in her foot but something that might have turned out to be a heart attack. Some of these times, I drove her there — I also drove my father in twice when he had what turned out to really be heart attacks — and a couple of times, my mother went in via ambulance. In the ambulance cases, she received immediate treatment at the hospital expanding on what the paramedics had already begun. In the non-ambulance visits, we got in relatively fast, though that may have been in part because I'm rather large and when my mother's health is on the line, quite loud. (Remind me some day to tell the story about how when my father had his first heart attack, he got in quickly because one of the physicians in the E.R. turned out to be a friend of mine from high school — someone I didn't even know had become a doctor.)
In those cases, the Emergency Rooms could not have performed much better. I just don't think they work well for people who aren't experiencing chest pains. There are a lot of things that can kill you and/or yield great agony that aren't chest pains. I saw too many of them last night at that hospital.
This is the Betty Boop version of "Snow White," which is famous for its performance by the great Cab Calloway. It was released on March 31, 1933 and in addition to Mr. Calloway, one hears the voice of Mae Questel.
Animation historians have been known to debate whether audiences of the day (or even the folks who made this cartoon) quite understood the lyrics and meaning of the song Calloway sings, "St. James Infirmary." The tune was said to have been about a girl who died from an overdose of Cocaine...and when you put it in a cartoon called "Snow White," well, it gets people to wondering.
The film runs around seven minutes and you have two choices — three, if you include not watching it at all. You can just click below and see an okay version of it. Or if you have a lot of downloading time, you can go over to this page and get a fairly large Quick Time file of a nicely restored version. The original opening (but not the closing) titles have been returned to the film and as explained on the page I just linked to, the aspect ratio has been considerably improved. This is some of the fine work being done in conjunction with the ASIFA Hollywood Animation Archive Project, an endeavor that we applaud.
Fred Kaplan discusses the plans for a new missile defense program. This is in spite of the fact that every year we pour another ten billion or so dollars into the old missile defense program with close to zero evidence that it can ever work properly. But it sure sounds cool so I guess that's worth the money.
One of the many companies through which e-mail passes on its way to me is experiencing server problems. If you sent me something earlier today, it may have bounced. If you sent me something since about 1 PM my time, it's jammed up in a computer waiting to get to me. All will be straightened out soon.
From someone who works in a hospital emergency room...
The reason there's a 4-5 hour wait in our emergency room is simple. There's a 4-5 hour wait everywhere. People know they have nowhere else to go where there won't be a 4-5 hour wait so they sit there and put up with it. They have no choice. If there was a hospital down the street that got people in and out right away, we'd lose a lot of business and the management of the hospital where I work would make changes.
It often breaks my heart to see people sitting there hour after hour, moaning in pain and crying. I am proud of how many people we help but frustrated that we cannot do better for them. We could if we had more room and more facilities and more staff. More doctors would also help but I think we could cut the wait times in half with the same number of doctors if we had more examining rooms and nurses. Unfortunately then, there might be occasional hours when we weren't working to capacity (wouldn't that be nice?) and someone would say "Why did we build all these extra examining rooms and hire these extra people if they're not in use?"
People ask me what they can do to deal with the long wait times. I tell them the only thing is to only get sick when you know you can get an appointment with your physician. I wish I had a better answer.
It has been my experience — and I think I've said this before here — that the doctors and nurses I've encountered in hospitals have been generally wonderful. There have been exceptions but not many. My problems have all come from the overall bureaucracy and the paper shufflers and the setup, which includes crippling financial burdens. Within a very inefficient framework, dedicated medical professionals perform well. But that framework and the sheer cost of health care are killing a lot of people...and I use the word "killing" in its literal definition.
My mother is home now and doing better but I spent all of last evening in a hospital emergency room with her, appalled as I usually am about what you have to do to get medical care in this world. We got there before 8 PM and though we made it clear my mother was in great pain (a wound on her foot), we still didn't see a doctor until after Midnight — and that was only because I started in with threats to call this or that hospital official. A nurse told me that four hour waits are not at all unusual. In fact, they're pretty much the norm these days everywhere.
We don't wait four hours for any other business. We don't have to because when other kinds of businesses have people waiting, they expand and build new facilities and train more employees to meet the demand. Obviously, it's not as easy to build a hospital as it is to erect a new Starbucks, and it takes a lot less time to train the employees in the latter. But we have pretty accurate projections of the population in the future and a pretty fair idea of what percentage will need medical treatment. Why have hospitals, at least in terms of facilities, fallen so far behind the expected demand? In the emergency room I was in last night, it was Standing Room Only, even though some of the people there were there because they couldn't stand...and there isn't even an epidemic or natural disaster sending excess patients to the E.R. This is business as usual. A doctor shortage, I can almost understand. What I don't get is why they don't even have enough chairs in the waiting room.
I'll write more about this when I wake up. Right now, I just wanted to vent that much and apologize that posting may be light here the next few days. I was behind already and now this had to happen. Good night.
One should not judge a book by its cover nor a movie by its previews. Still, some covers and coming attractions make you not want to plunk down your bucks and the trailer for the new Oliver Stone film, World Trade Center, sure doesn't send me logging over to Fandango to reserve tickets.
Almost everyone praised United 93 for not "exploiting" its subject matter. In fact, I think some folks went overboard with that notion. The movie was made to generate a profit, after all. I don't think that's ignoble, especially if it's as honest a film as some say it is...but a production of that size and scope does not get made without someone figuring it'll wind up in the black.
Based largely on the trailer — and a little on Stone's track record — I'll predict that World Trade Center will be scorned as everything they said United 93 wasn't: Exploitive, sensational and manipulative in a non-organic way. If you watch the preview, see if you don't have the same reaction I did. As soon as I saw Nicolas Cage in the mustache playing what looks like a police officer (actually, a Port Authority Officer), I thought: The focus is on a star. That's wrong. Cage is a pretty good actor but 9/11 was not about one guy at the center of things, and that's how they're selling it.
I gather the film is about Cage's character and one other man getting trapped under rubble and fighting to survive. Not to cast any negatives at all on the real-life men who were in that predicament...but as a movie, there's a basic problem with depicting something like that. The advance publicity and simple history tell us in advance that the two men eventually got out alive. Okay, so how is an audience supposed to react to that? We watch them fight to survive for two hours knowing that they'll turn out to have been luckier than most? We cheer at the end when they're rescued because, though thousands died, thank God Nicholas Cage made it out? Might it not somehow trivialize the deaths of 9/11 to zero in on one story of survival when the real story was how many did not?
As you'll see if you click to watch, near the end of the trailer, it says "The world saw evil that day." I can already hear TV reviewers cite that and add, "But it won't see World Trade Center." Not unless this is a very different movie than its advertising suggests.
By the way, larger and higher-resolution clips of this trailer may be viewed at this website. You can also skip it altogether and go watch this footage of a monkey washing a cat.
What a surprise. I enjoyed the new version of The Producers in a theater-type screening room last December. I was well aware of its many shortcomings but I so enjoyed watching Nathan Lane's performance that I could mentally write off the negatives and walk out of there happy. Maybe it's just because it was my second time through but watching the newly-released DVD, the weaknesses won out over Nathan. He's still amazing, wringing every possible laugh out of every gesture and syllable, but the film still fails to come to life. (Maybe it was also the lack of an audience.)
I've seen the material twice on stage — once with Nathan and Matthew Broderick, once with Jason Alexander and Martin Short. I've also seen the movie. This was the first time I really missed Zero and Gene and Ken Mars and the less-hysterical (but still over-the-top) pacing. The previous viewings, the musical felt like a new work made out of the framework of the original. Suddenly now, it really strikes me as a remake of something that didn't need to be remade. Broadway-to-film conversions usually fail because they change too much. This one fails because what worked on the stage just isn't as good on the screen.
The DVD includes a mess of outtakes and deleted scenes, including the whole "King of Broadway" number and a shorter song called "Rio." Also cut was a short scene with Max Bialystock (Nathan) wooing a little old lady played by Andrea Martin. They apparently got to improvising as there are several versions on the DVD and they're all funnier than a lot of material that did get in. Director Susan Stroman also recorded a commentary track that sounds like she's reading a script...and not a particularly enlightening one. I wouldn't expect any director to air dirty linen and might not think much of them if they did. But you shouldn't do a commentary track unless you have something more to say than how much fun every scene was to shoot, how terrific everyone was to work with and how brilliant they are in the scene we're watching.
Here's a link to order the DVD in regular or widescreen versions. Obviously, this is not a glowing recommendation. It's a sigh of disappointment from someone who still retains an affection for the material. Just not this presentation of it.
Next Friday, Saturday and Sunday, folks in the Southern California area will have a splendid opportunity to see great magic, live before their eyes. The lovely Misty Lee and the completely-out-of-his-mind Sylvester the Jester will be performing three shows only at the Colony Theater in Burbank. We mentioned this before here and we're mentioning it again because we think it'll be wonderful and now is the time to buy those tickets. Misty does classic magic with a contemporary, dazzling twist while Sylvester is...well, twisted. And as an extra added attraction, the very funny Mr. Woody Pittman will be joining them with his witty feats. What more do you need to hear? Go to this page to order your seats.
Some days ago here, I cited a Jack Anderson statement that most of the things stamped Top Secret in Washington were classified not out of security concerns but because someone thought the information in question would embarrass them or expose wrongdoing. Tom Blanton elaborates on this in an article that includes this nugget...
Erwin Griswold, who as U.S. solicitor general prosecuted the New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case in 1971, once explained the real motivation behind government secrecy — but only years later, when he recanted his prosecutorial passion. Griswold persuaded three Supreme Court justices to vote for a prior restraint on the Times in the case. But in 1989, he confessed in a Washington Post Op-Ed article that there was no actual national security damage from the publication of the papers. "It quickly becomes apparent to any person who has considerable experience with classified material that there is massive overclassification and that the principal concern of the classifiers is not with national security, but with governmental embarrassment of one sort or another," he wrote.
I think there's an awful lot wrong with the press in this country, including a lack of accuracy — for reasons of competence, quite apart from any ulterior motives. And certainly there are legitimate government secrets that should not be splashed across Page One. But I'm unconvinced that any cries we've heard to prosecute reporters for National Security Leaks are anything more than desperate ploys by folks with a vested interest in not seeing government screw-ups and corruption exposed. And that's not just a criticism of the Bush administration and its supporters. It's more common than not in Washington and politics.
You might not want to watch it in its entirety — this one runs a little under 27 minutes — but I thought someone would appreciate the link to "Dogs of War," a 1923 silent Our Gang comedy produced by the Hal Roach Studio...and also starring the Hal Roach Studio. It begins with the kids staging war games on a vacant lot and segues to them visiting the Roach lot, though it's called something else. There, they get mixed up in the movie-making of the day and there are some nice views of the process. There's also an almost surreal (at least by 1923 standards) ending where the youngsters have made their own movie and it's full of odd visual effects. Harold Lloyd, who was then about the biggest name in film comedy, has a nice cameo about two-thirds of the way into the proceedings.
This was one of the better Our Gang comedies of the period and this copy has a serviceable musical score on it — one that is probably a lot like those ad-libbed at the time by organ accompanists in theaters around the world. There were a lot of "kid" comedies being made by film studios then but the cleverness of this one demonstrates why the Our Gang series was the most popular and the only one that has really endured.
And before someone asks: For reasons I never understood, not even after putting the question once to Mr. Roach himself, the series had a couple of different names, sometimes using "Our Gang" and sometimes not, and wasn't too picky about what it called itself until around 1932. That's when "Our Gang" became pretty much official. The films changed ownership a few times after that and there were other names and maybe someday if I can muster the courage, I'll attempt to explain the back-and-forth. Or maybe I'll take the easy way out and refer you to the definitive book on the subject, which was written by Leonard Maltin and Richard Bann, and which itself changed its name from Our Gang to The Little Rascals: The Life and Times of Our Gang. Very confusing stuff.
It's interesting that in a city known for its high crime rate, this is what they've got the police working on. I wonder who was behind the initiative to arrest the video pirates.
The problem is, where does it stop? A friend of mine produces faux Aurora model kit boxes, often featuring characters who never had a kit. He was quizzed last year by Paul Levitz about them and told he was violating DC's copyright. He didn't say anything to the dealer next to my friend, who was selling drawings of DC characters and stained-glass replicas of DC character logos, for which DC receives nothing. I guess I'm asking if you want to stop the DVD bootleggers, do you also stop everyone else, even artists doing sketches? Convention operators always seem to get a pass when this debate comes up. Do you think this is something they should be policing, since they're benefiting from these dealers of unauthorized material?
To the first point: My guess would be that this was not a matter of the Detroit Police suddenly deciding they had nothing better to do than to go out and bust people selling unauthorized DVDs. My guess is that the M.P.A.A. (the producers' association) has put pressure on law enforcement agencies around the nation, starting with the F.B.I., and that senior agencies have passed the buck to lower agencies. And now that I think of it, the officers were probably less interested in the kind of bootleg I was describing — people selling shows they recorded off TV — than they were in pirated copies of current releases. No one pressures the law to take action against people pirating old episodes of Tennessee Tuxedo, though that may be an ancillary concern.
Of course, it's more important for the police to be arresting violent criminals but I don't think this is an either/or choice. It's also more important for them to be tracking down murderers than to be ticketing people who run stop signs but they have to occasionally ticket someone who runs a stop sign or else everyone would run stop signs.
Anyone who's in charge of protecting a copyright has a not-dissimilar problem deciding when to take action. There are egregious violations for which you have to summon the gendarmes (or pay legal fees) and those you decide not to pursue, either because they seem so trivial or because you're not sure some judge won't think they fall under the heading of "fair use." With the exception of a few known instances involving Disney, I've never heard of a copyright holder objecting to an artist selling a sketch or two. So my answer to the question "if you want to stop the DVD bootleggers, do you also stop everyone else, even artists doing sketches?" is "No, DC knows about it and they have the wherewithal to take action if they so elect. So if they're not bothered by people selling Superman sketches then I'm not going to let it bother me."
There are violations that even the violators would not argue were wrong and there are uses of others' copyrighted material that are considered acceptable. In between, there's an area that's extremely gray and arguable, and which often must be argued on a case-by-case basis. Its parameters get loosely defined by how proprietors object or give tacit approval...but selling a DVD of someone else's copyrighted material reproduced in full is well into the "violation" standard.
One other thing I should point out: When someone has a property and they sell licenses to other companies to exploit that property, they enter into business arrangements that are usually based on exclusivity. For example, if you go to Disney and pay them for the right to make Mickey Mouse cuspidors, the standard contract will stipulate (a) that Disney grants you the exclusive rights to make 'em, (b) that Disney has the legal right to grant you that exclusive license and (c) that Disney will defend your exclusive right. If I then go out and start bootlegging Mickey cuspidors and Disney doesn't stop me, they're in breach of their contract with you. Which is why they'd probably be more aggressive in stopping the counterfeit spittoons than they might be over some other infractions. I take a pretty liberal view of what constitutes "fair use" but I also recognize that some uses of others' property are not fair and need to be stopped.
It's the opening of an episode of Puppet Playhouse, the show that came to be better known as Howdy Doody. I don't know the date but this is an early clip so that's probably Bob Keeshan in the clown costume.
The obits for Lew Anderson, who died last week, said that he was the third and final actor to play Clarabell the Clown on the original Howdy Doody program. I believe there were at least four. Bob Keeshan, as we all know, was the first and the character was largely an accident. Keeshan, who then worked as an assistant and go-fer for host "Buffalo" Bob Smith, was assigned to herd around the kids who sat in the show's famous Peanut Gallery and to get them to shut up while Smith told stories, sang and fraternized with the show's puppet players. He kept getting on camera and someone suggested that the drab-looking guy in the sport coat didn't fit in with the program's circus theme. "Put that guy in a clown suit," they said...and that's how Clarabell was born. Keeshan researched clown makeups and devised one for himself — a pretty good one, as it turned out. Clarabell never spoke, in part because the show didn't want to pay Keeshan extra and in part because he really couldn't.
Years later — to make a living in children's television — Bob Keeshan learned how to talk on camera, and this made possible his legendary character, Captain Kangaroo. But back in his Howdy Doody days, he couldn't deliver lines and couldn't do much of anything. To the ongoing frustration of "Buffalo" Bob, who liked music on the show, Clarabell couldn't play an instrument...couldn't even master the triangle, despite repeated attempts to teach him. At least once, they let Keeshan go and put the clown suit on a professional musician who didn't work out. The replacement could accompany Smith but he flopped at replicating the Clarabell personality and when viewers (and more critically, licensors) complained, Bob Keeshan was hired back and Clarabell went back to being non-musical. Later, when Keeshan was fired for the last time, he was replaced by Bob Nicholson and then Anderson, both of whom were musicians.
The one time I met and talked with Bob Keeshan, he told me that his successors had pleased Smith and had also "nicened" the clown a touch, which he did not think was a bad thing. At times, Clarabell was a pretty nasty clown, less interested in making anyone laugh than in just spraying seltzer on other cast members out of sheer meanness. Keeshan mused that his first creation probably appealed to the worst in children, whereas his greatest (Cap'n Kangaroo) probably brought out their best.
I never met Lew Anderson but he was the Clarabell I knew as a viewer. I was never a very steady one because Howdy Doody was on the downslope by the time I was old enough to know what I was watching on TV. Much of the show's appeal was lost on me, at least when the clown was not on screen. When I watched at all, I watched for him...and I do remember viewing live that sad day when they aired the final episode and Clarabell broke his silence and said, "Goodbye." Goodbye, Lew Anderson. I hope someone at the funeral had the guts to get up and talk about "A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down my pants..."
The Motor City Comic Convention got underway yesterday in Novi, Michigan, which is just outside of Detroit. I haven't seen any online news reports yet but two attendees have e-mailed me that the convention was "swarming" (both used that word) with police. No, they weren't looking for Jimmy Hoffa. My correspondents say the authorities were arresting (even handcuffing) dealers who were selling bootleg videotapes. There have been busts like this at other cons but if the accounts e-mailed to me are accurate, this one was scary in its scope and seriousness — enough to perhaps finally end the selling of pirated videos at conventions.
For those of you who don't get to cons: There's a thriving industry out there in video piracy...people who mass-produce videotapes and DVDs of copyrighted material in which they do not hold any copyright. Sometimes, it's a matter of just replicating commercial video releases and selling them cheaper...or selling copies of tapes and DVDs that are now out of print. There are also those who have pirated copies of new movies not yet available on video but more often lately, the bootleggers are producing videos of old TV shows or movies taped off the air or transferred from 16mm prints. While they sometimes find and offer very rare material, the fact remains that the material is still stolen.
I've had a few conversations at cons with folks who traffic in this area and have been amazed at the rationales for theft. Sometimes, the defense is just that they're not making a lot of money off these videos...which may be true but, you know, stealing small is still stealing. Sometimes, one hears the notion that it's not ignoble to rip off Time-Warner or Disney because, let's face it, those companies make skillions and perhaps are not always 100% honest in their pursuit of profits. Above and beyond the obvious flaw in that argument is the fact that the video pirates rarely spare the small producer or filmmaker...and that even a Disney bootleg cheats "little guys" like writers and voice actors who don't receive their contracted residuals.
The most frequent alibi is that the sellers aren't really doing it for the money...or at least, doing it just for the money. They're doing it as a public service since the folks who own the material in question are selfishly or thoughtlessly withholding it from the public. This is another way of saying the rights holders haven't gotten around yet to issuing the show or movie on home video but still, it almost sounds like a valid point. Doesn't change the fact that we're talking here about copyright violations but it sounds good.
I'll tell you how low some video buccaneers have sunk: They're even bootlegging stuff I wrote. The three DVD covers above are from complete collections of shows I worked on. People have taped these shows off Cartoon Network and The Disney Channel, and edited DVDs of them which they sell quite openly. I got all three cover images off eBay. (An authorized, legal collection of the Dungeons and Dragons animated series will be issued later this year, by the way. I'm guessing the others will follow within a year or two.)
I guess in a very small way, I feel sorry for some of the guys who got busted yesterday. They all seem to think they're creating product, not filching someone else's — or if they're stealing, they're stealing from someone else's bootlegs. Some of them have even put a lot of work into their editing and art direction and take great pride in their handiwork. But I don't feel sorry enough to not think they should have known this was going to happen...and that it's about time it was stopped.
This is great. The L.A.P.D. has had a man named Stephen Albert Briller on its "Ten Most Wanted" list since November of 2004. They can't seem to find him but a blogger has.
Dan DeCarlo was a lovely man who drew lovely women. Many of them were for Archie where, though he didn't invent the house art style, he still managed to become the guy everyone else looked at to see how to do it. And beyond the staggering quantity of work he did for that company, he also managed to do a staggering quantity for other publishers and even for men's magazines and other venues.
A bountiful sampling of his work is on display in the just-released volume, The Art of Dan DeCarlo, written by my friend (and more importantly, Dan's friend) Bill Morrison. A lot of books about great comic artists are labors of love and this one sure qualifies. Bill had unlimited access to Dan's widow and personal collection...and Bill already had a great collection of DeCarlo work from which to draw. Beyond the art, he tells the story of Dan's life — triumphs and tragedies, both — with passion and accuracy. This one has our highest recommendation so here's an Amazon link to get one.
You're probably familiar with the work of Peter S. Beagle. If you're not, you owe it to yourself to discover this fine writer of fantasy and to treat yourself to one of his books. Peter will be a Guest of Honor at this year's Comic-Con International and I hope I get the chance to meet him.
One of his most acclaimed works was a book called The Last Unicorn, which was made into a popular animated feature. A couple tonweights of DVDs have reportedly been sold so you'd figure, hey, that Peter S. Beagle is probably raking in the bucks, right? Not so. I get a lot of e-mails asking me how movie deals work and how you can protect your interests when you make one. There's no easy answer beyond the obvious, which is to get a good lawyer and be wary...and even that doesn't work some of the time. It may help to note certain cautionary tales like the one recounted on this website which claims that Beagle is getting shafted.
I'm not taking sides on the contract dispute. There are always two sides and we have here but one. Still, it feels very wrong that the author of The Last Unicorn apparently hasn't shared in the proceeds from his creation, and I refer you to this as a cautionary note. I also refer you to this page where you can help him out by purchasing a Peter S. Beagle book. You won't be disappointed.
Some time in the eighties, Liza Minnelli became one of those performers defined by impressionists. When people think of Ed Sullivan these days, a lot of them think of Will Jordan doing Ed or some other comic doing Will Jordan doing Ed. When they think of Tom Snyder, many folks think of Dan Aykroyd's savage mimicking. When they think of Elvis, they often think of any of the 87,461 people currently making a living imitating The King and replicating his excesses. And Liza? They probably think of any number of drag queens out there who exaggerate her mannerisms to Mad Magazine scale. Ms. Minnelli's tendency to live up to the caricature and to engage in tabloid fodder marriages have not helped us to keep the genuine article in focus. It's easy to forget she was a great musical comedy performer.
The newly-reissued Liza With a Z is one good reminder. Another is our link today — a six minute number that Liza did at a 1992 Carnegie Hall celebration of Stephen Sondheim. Abetted by the great pianist Billy Stritch and a bevy of comely dancers, Ms. Minnelli offered a nice but slightly unorthodox rendition of "Back in Business," a number Sondheim wrote for the 1990 Dick Tracy movie starring Warren Beatty. Here it is. Let the good times roll...
For what it's worth: About two weeks ago, a friend asked me if I'd like to get into a "When will Karl Rove be indicted?" pool. Well, actually I think it's about guessing when an indictment will be formally announced, assuming one ever is.
I have no idea if Rove will be indicted or if so, how that process is progressing. In fact, I'm not even sure what (if anything) I'd win for being right. Nevertheless, just on a whim, I said, "May 19." That's tomorrow.
Michael Kinsley on John McCain, the man who has a reputation for "straight talk," no matter how he bobs and weaves.
Kinsley's article reminds me of something, which is the extent to which some supporters are willing to accept that their chosen candidate is hiding his true views in order to perhaps get elected. Years ago on the old Lou Gordon TV show — and am I the only one who remembers Lou Gordon? — I once saw a man make an interesting presentation. His thesis was that a number of then-current candidates, mostly from the South, were using code words in their speeches.
They couldn't come right out and say they were for rolling back Civil Rights for minorities because then they'd lose. So they'd developed certain phrases that when uttered, would convey their true agendas to voters of like sentiment. A sentence like, "We must protect the sanctity of state governments" sounded reasonable but it really meant, "We must stop Federal Troops from coming in and insisting we let blacks in white classrooms." The gent on Lou Gordon's show ran several clips that, he said, were examples of this. He called them "winks." They were a way of saying one thing and then winking at a certain segment of the electorate to let them know you didn't really mean it; that your heart was with them and they should just accept that you had to say such things to get into office and give them what they want. Whether those particular examples were valid or not, I do think politicians do that a lot. They also bait-and-switch the other way, hinting they'll do the opposite when they really won't. Wish I knew which kind McCain was. Maybe both.
I just revised the text of the previous item. When I wrote it at 2:30 this morning, I could've sworn that the film version of Cabaret won the Best Picture Oscar that year and said so. As teeming multitudes are now reminding me, that is not so.
A number of you have suggested that I just stamp Top Secret on my screw-up and claim some sort of National Security Privilege to cover it up. Not a bad idea. If I can tap enough reporters' phones, I might even get away with it.
That's a photo of Stubby Kaye stopping the show in the original Broadway production of Guys and Dolls, produced by Cy Feuer and Ernie Martin. The two men were also responsible for Where's Charley?, Can Can, The Boy Friend, Silk Stockings, Little Me, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying and a batch of other Broadway shows and even a few movies, including the much-acclaimed 1972 Cabaret.
Mr. Feuer died today at the age of 95. He needs no greater testimonial to his success than to just list those shows. A lot of men have been heralded as major Broadway producers with just two like that. For the rest of time, actors will be performing and audiences will be enjoying works made possible by the producing savvy of Feuer and Martin.
You all know Barbara Feldon as the comely spy "99" on Get Smart. Before that, some of us knew her as the sultry-voiced seductress who writhed about on a tiger rug and sold Top Brass hair dressing in one of those commercials that was better than most shows it was in. (Well, it was if you were my age when it aired. I was around twelve at the time.)
Odd how your memory can overrate something. I just saw this clip, the one I'm sharing with you today, for the first time in around forty years. I remember it as being much sexier and filled with horny innuendo than it is, and I don't think it's because she did other Top Brass ads that were. I think this is what passed for randy in 1964. See if you don't agree...
Several folks have written to inform me that Honey Smacks have already been renamed just Smacks. I didn't see that on the shelf or on the Kellogg's website but I'll take your word for it. On that site, by the way, you can see a page devoted to Pops (formerly Sugar Pops, Sugar Corn Pops and Corn Pops). They're trying quite hard to make a connection between hip-hop music and sugar-frosted puffed corn...and of course, I can see how those two things go together like cheap car insurance and talking reptiles, but I wonder how many people can.
It has also been suggested by some correspondents that the word "sugar" disappeared from a lot of boxes because of the shift from that sweetener to high fructose corn syrup. I suppose that could be part of it but sugar is still the second ingredient listed in Frosted Flakes, right after milled corn, so I'll bet they could still use it in the name if they wanted to. They don't. The only place you'll find the "s" word prominently displayed on the box or in advertising is when they tout the new versions of Frosted Flakes and Froot Loops that have "1/3 less sugar." Absence of sugar is a selling point these days.
Since we're talking about cereal, I'll mention that the only one I eat these days is Barbara's Shredded Oats. It used to only be available in Southern California at Whole Foods Markets, Trader Joe's and health food emporiums but lately, they have it at Ralph's and Gelson's and maybe other grocers. As you can see here, it contains zero sugar, using molasses for its slight sweetness. It tastes pretty darn good, I think.
On another topic: People send me a lot of links they think I might want to put up on this site. An awful lot of them lately have been for sites where you get to punch George W. Bush in the face or hit him with pies or watch him morph into a gibbon. I love political humor and not just when it reinforces my views...but there's a certain humorless level of nastiness that just leaves me cold or worse. I think Bush is a pretty bad president but I don't derive any jollies from seeing him Photoshopped into a clown suit or a sex scene with Dick Cheney and Hillary Clinton. My belief in Free Speech accepts that such things have a right to exist but nothing says I have to link to them.
Lastly, my pal Gordon Kent makes another good point about this argument of, "If you're not doing anything you shouldn't be doing, you should have no problem with having your calls monitored." If Dick Cheney wasn't doing anything he shouldn't have been doing with that Energy Task Force of his, he should have had no problem dilvulging the names of its members, right? This is the most secretive administration ever and I don't buy that it's all about National Security. As Jack Anderson once said (approximately), "In Washington, you don't bury your failures. You stamp Top Secret on them."
Steven Marsh makes a good point that I originally included in the previous post then deleted...
To those who argue, "If you're not doing anything you shouldn't be doing, you should have no problem with having your calls monitored," I note that "wrong" is in the eye of the beholder. One of the most telling examples from recent history were from McCarthyism, where people who had associated with others legally (either because it was before the 1940 passage of the Smith Act or because the people they had associated with weren't part of the Communist party until years later) were still forced to testify and account for those actions years later; lives were destroyed.
As a more nuts-and-bolts example, I suspect many of these people saying, "If you're not doing anything wrong..." still wouldn't want to be, say, audited on their taxes every year for the rest of their lives. Yet, why should they object? After all, if they're filing their taxes correctly, then they shouldn't have a problem having to disrupt their lives for a week or so every year, getting files together, making sure everything is documented so that another person can pore over it, etc. And, of course, they should be willing to pay whatever fees or penalties for filing incorrectly on the off chance that they have made a mistake within their half-inch of papers; after all, they obviously did something wrong in that case, right?
Yeah, I should have left in that I don't necessarily agree with the first part of that statement; that if you haven't done anything wrong, you shouldn't be worried about having your calls monitored. Plenty of people in this country have their lives nuked by unfounded investigations that never prove wrongdoing or prove it only on the slimmest of technicalities. This is the reason we have that "probable cause" phrase in the Bill of Rights and so many laws. Authorities should not be able to go on fishing expeditions, prowling through your life in search of something they can twist into an indictment.
My father, as I've probably mentioned here, worked most of his life for the Internal Revenue Service, a job he hated to pieces. He was not involved with audits but he dealt often with people in his office who were. Much of the time, he thought they were fair and benevolent but there were periods — especially during the Nixon administration but only with regard to selected targets — that an auditor was told, in effect: "Nail this guy."
If you were that guy, there was no such thing as filing your taxes correctly. They would keep calling you in and demanding paperwork you couldn't possibly have and threatening to audit your friends and business associates the same way because of your association with them. They'd just scare the hell out of you until you gave in and accepted a plea bargain, paying a fine and maybe even admitting criminal guilt just to end the nightmare. The atmosphere in the department did not allow the auditor to go back to his superior and say, "I couldn't nail that guy. He's clean." So he'd keep you on the hook until you yelled "Uncle!" Of course, at the same time (this is still during the pre-Watergate Nixon era) they were letting their friends make millions a year, lie like hell on their taxes and get away with paying eleven dollars. That's the kind of thing that too often goes on in government departments that can operate without oversight and which assert a sole right to decide what's legal.
I can understand that some people are so fearful of another 9/11 that they're willing to let government officials do any damn thing they say they need to keep us safer. I think they're wrong — I think we'll be safer if those officials are a lot more accountable for any possible abuse of the system — but I understand the fear. What I don't understand is why when you say you want the spying programs to be subject to judicial review, they act like you're saying, "We must stop all intelligence gathering because my privacy is more important than stopping the next terrorist attack."
Years ago, there was a State Senator in California — I forget his name — who was accused of a gross impropriety and conflict of interest because he'd voted for some bill that enriched a certain corporation while he was a major stockholder in that corporation. He promptly called a press conference and issued a denial in the clearest and most outraged terms. He did not own stock in that company, he said...and it turned out that was technically true. Some time later, reporters discovered that the stock was registered to his five-year-old daughter. I suspect that some or all of the statements the Bush Administration is making about the NSA situation are "true" in that sense.
A number of commentators seem to also think that and they're likening the hair-splitting to when Bill Clinton said, "That depends on the meaning of the word, 'is.'" I don't know that that's a fair comparison. Clinton may have been trying to weasel on the truth there but at least he was doing it under oath in a deposition where his interrogators could ask him the question again and again, rephrasing it to narrow in on specifics. If you've ever been deposed, you know that's what they do. Unlike a statement to the press, you don't get to give your evasive answer just once with your calculated phrasing because they get to pose follow-ups and you have to respond to them.
That's what I think is missing here. When George W. Bush says, "...we do not listen to domestic phone calls without court approval," I think I'd like a sharp reporter to be able to ask a couple of follow-ups like, "Who is 'we' in that sentence? Does anyone in the government listen to domestic phone calls without court approval?" And given some of the ways in which our Attorney General has attempted to define the powers of the presidency as virtually unlimited, I'd like someone to ask, "Do you believe a president has the right to authorize eavesdropping on domestic phone calls without court approval?"
My objection to the NSA program may have less to do with what they're doing than it does with the fact that they assert their power to do it without oversight. I don't trust anyone in government to wield power without oversight and I certainly don't trust the band of guys who are now going around claiming, "Well, we never actually said there was a link between Saddam and Al Qaeda...we never actually said we were sure there were Weapons of Mass Destruction..."
People keep e-mailing me to say, "If you're not doing anything you shouldn't be doing, you should have no problem with having your calls monitored." I think a fair response to that is: "If the Bush administration isn't doing anything they shouldn't be doing, they should have no problem with letting an independent entity such as the FISA court monitor what they're doing."
The diamond-encrusted cell phone. Prices start at $25,600 and go up to a million. If only I'd known about this before I got Marv Wolfman his birthday present.
Saw something shocking today in the market. Once upon a time, Kellogg's had a cereal called Sugar Pops...puffed corn with a sweet coating. They weren't my favorite but when I got a Variety Pak, the Sugar Pops (unlike the Shredded Wheat) did not go uneaten.
Then one day, the word "sugar" began to fall out of favor with parents and maybe even with some kids, too. Sugar Pops became Sugar Corn Pops and then a few years later, they were just plain Corn Pops. I'm not sure if this was part of a long-range plan or not. Maybe someone at Kellogg's thought that if they made the change from Sugar Pops to Corn Pops in steps, loyal buyers would understand it was the same product. (I assume it was the same product. If they'd modified the cereal itself, I think they'd have completely changed the name.)
And now it's come to this: The corn is gone...from the outside of the box, not from the inside. Inside, I believe it's the same puffed corn with the sweet coating I ate when I was five. But the exterior of its container — and I'm sorry I couldn't find a photo to prove this to you but take my word for it. I wouldn't make something like this up. The exterior of the container just says Pops on it. Nothing about sugar, nothing about corn. It's just a box of Pops.
I stood there stunned, blocking the aisle as other shoppers attempted to get by before their DiGiorno's Frozen Pizzas thawed. They had to squeeze past me, staring at the shelf, realizing where this is all heading. I've seen Sugar Frosted Flakes become just Frosted Flakes and Sugar Smacks become Honey Smacks. Next time I go in, they'll probably be just Flakes and Smacks.
It's not a great trend. If people are going to eat sugar, let them be well aware it's sugar. Don't help them pretend it's something else. Why they're doing this, I don't know. If I were running the Kellogg's company, I don't think I'd want to disabuse people of the notion that my product relates in any way to food.
When Johnny Carson announced his retirement, we were saddened but there were consolation prizes. His last few months of shows were wonderful as performer after performer came by and made a little extra effort for his or her farewell appearance with Johnny. For Steve Martin's last turn, which was on May 6, 1992, Johnny prevailed upon him to do The Great Flydini. This was a routine Martin had developed years earlier and performed here and there, mostly for personal appearances and charity affairs. As I understand it, he hadn't done it in years, in part because of the long prep time involved and in part because he'd pretty much quit performing in front of live audiences. (He did the routine again at least once. A year later, there was a big charity concert at the Dorothy Chandler Pavillion in downtown L.A. where Neil Young and The Great Flydini opened for Simon and Garfunkel. Bet that was an evening.)
If you'd like to see another Steve Martin appearance with the once and future King of Late Night, there's one from 1976 up on the Johnny Carson website. If you prowl that site, you'll find a lot of fine video clips. You'll also find a history of The Tonight Show containing a couple of errors.
And now, without further ado — The Great Flydini...
Back in this item, we talked about a new category that was being added to the Tony Awards — Best Performance by an Actor or Actress in a Recreated Role. The idea here is to honor someone who steps into a role that they did not do on opening night but who does outstanding work. It would or could go to someone who played Max Bialystock in The Producers after Nathan Lane or The Phantom in The Phantom of the Opera after Michael Crawford.
The Tony nominations were announced the other day and you may be wondering who was nominated in this new category. Answer: No one. They decided not to give out the award this year.
Because there are so few Broadway shows — compared, say, to the number of TV shows eligible each year for Emmys or motion pictures that could garner an Oscar — the Tony rules allow for this. Some years in some categories, they decide there just aren't enough contenders so they skip it. This past season, there seemed to be only two possible entries for Special Theatrical Event, an award which usually goes to a one-man or one-woman show. The possibles were Bridge and Tunnel, which stars Sarah Jones and is a critical and maybe a financial success...and The Blonde in the Thunderbird, an autobiographical presentation by Suzanne Somers that opened to withering reviews and closed a week later. Rather than give Ms. Somers a Tony nomination, they're dropping the category and awarding a special Tony to Sarah Jones.
They're not even doing that with the "Recreated Role" award. There were a couple of actors who might have qualified...Jonathan Pryce in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and (if the judges bent the rules on the dates a bit) Harvey Fierstein in Fiddler on the Roof. But it turns out there's a loophole in the rule book. Tony regulations require that all 24 members of the award's Administration Committee see a performance and that 16 of them vote it worthy of a nomination. While all or most of the committee members see shows when they first open, many do not get around to seeing the replacements...so it's hard to muster 16 votes. Someone needs to work on this idea.
Just pulled the above box off the new Yahoo front page. They're probably right about Peter Luger's, which serves the best steak I've ever had. But let's be accurate here, people. Prime rib is not steak. The prime rib at Lawry's is quite wonderful but it's wonderful prime rib. It's not steak. Steak is one thing. Prime rib is another. If the guy who made up this chart ordered steak in a restaurant and they brought him prime rib, he'd say, "Hey, this isn't what I asked for."
Has he been to some of the more acclaimed restaurants in L.A. that actually serve steak? Mastro's? Arnie Morton's? The Palm? Taylor's? Porterhouse Bistro? Did he actually sample these and decide that Lawry's The Prime Rib (that's the full name of the establishment) was a better steakhouse in spite of the fact that the word "steak" appears nowhere on its menu? This matters. If I issued a list of the best places to eat in each city in Ohio and put down Burger King for Cleveland, it might be relevant for you to know that I've only eaten one meal ever in Cleveland and that was at a Burger King. Which also, by the way, is not a steakhouse despite the fact that they serve broiled beef.
I expect weasely steakhouse ratings in those in-flight magazines. The ones listed pay to be on those lists. I also notice that are about eleven hundred "Top 10" and "Top 20" steakhouse lists on the Internet. You'd have to serve a pretty lousy steak to not get on someone's "best" list. But you'd still have to serve steak. It would be nice if it was good steak but based on some of the places I've seen on those lists, that's not mandatory.
As we've mentioned here, NBC did something a bit odd (to me) with last night's Deal or No Deal. Coverage of the speech by George W. Bush took up a bit less than 25 minutes of the show's time on the East Coast so the producers and/or network edited two separate versions of the show. The full, two-hour version which aired in other time zones included the last part of one game (a waitress from New York), a complete and very long game (a woman whose husband is stationed in Iraq and who participated via a live satellite feed) and the first part of a third game (a Blackjack dealer from Hawaii). There were also a few "behind the scenes" segments showing cash being awarded to past winners.
For the East Coast version, they edited out the "behind the scenes" stuff and cut out the gent from Hawaii. Presumably, the next episode will begin with the end of his game and the folks in the East will go, "Hey, where'd he come from?" For them, last night's show ended with the lady whose hubby is in Iraq. (Someone did some quick-and-dirty edits there. As the show concluded out here, Howie Mandel thanked everyone who'd arranged the live feed from Iraq...and the Blackjack dealer was in some of those shots. For the East Coast version, they substituted some tape of the military wife and her family, and laid Howie's lines over those visuals. The end credits on the East also had to be laid over different footage since the Blackjack dealer was in them, too.)
An interesting way of handling a problem. I guess I like it more than delaying all the shows' start times...and it sure beats just joining a show in progress and missing the opening. Still, I think it's kind of an admission that on Deal or No Deal, the first half of every game is pretty missable.
The Internet is lousy with homemade video parodies — someone putting funny Flash animation to a piece of music. One of the few I've seen that I've liked was done by someone named Paul Heriot. I don't know anything about Mr. Heriot other than that he's a gutsy guy. You see, to make one of these work, you have to come up with imagery that's sillier than the source material...and the source material here is William Shatner's rendition of "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds." Not easy to top that one but I think he succeeded...
The folks at DirecTV do more than just send me e-mails about pay-per-view specials I'm not buying. They bring me great movie channels, some of which run great movies. To promote them, they've engaged a great movie critic — my longtime amigo, Leonard Maltin — to host little one minute previews/reviews they call "Maltin Minutes." You can view some of them over on this page...and by the way, there's nothing wrong with your computer. Leonard really does talk out of sync at times. That's what comes from watching too many foreign films.
About two blocks from where I used to live, there's an apartment complex that looks like something transplanted from New Mexico. The buildings are painted in shades of brown and orange, and where you'd expect to find a lawn, there are volcanic rock chips and cactus plants. It all looks very nice — a bit out of place but very nice. Several of my friends will know exactly the location I'm describing and they might be interested in this article about it.
I have no firm opinion of George W. Bush's plans to seal our borders from invading aliens. My suspicion — and this has little to do with Bush or the present administration — is that it's one of those problems that cannot be effectively eliminated. You can put on a show and make it look like you're making a dent in the situation. You can force the violators to take the long way around and not be so visible once they're here. You can even make a few busts, publicize the hell out of them and juggle statistics to argue you're making real progress. That's how "The Drug Problem" has been fought at times, appeasing political constituencies without actually doing much.
I guess I have the feeling that if the Gonzales family in El Salvador wants to live in America badly enough to pick grapes for six bucks an hour — and if some grape growers in the San Joaquin Valley want to pay no more than that to get their crops harvested — a little thing like the National Guard won't keep them apart. Especially since the National Guard is already being strained to the breaking point and this administration ain't so great on the follow-through.
Johnny Carson's home in Malibu. A 7,100 square-foot mansion (with a 2,700 square-foot guesthouse plus a tennis court and God knows what else) on four acres of very expensive land.
Asking price? $42 million and that doesn't include Ed or Doc.
My occasional employers Sid and Marty Krofft will be honored as part of the Makor "Televisionaries" series in New York on Monday, May 22. They'll be present to answer your questions and those of moderator Craig Shemin, plus there'll be clips from Krofft shows like H.R. Pufnstuf and Land of the Lost and The Bugaloos. The festivities start at 7:30 and Craig (a fellow Krofft scribe and Mad World enthusiast) says that if you use the discount code "PCM" when you order, you can save five bucks a ticket. Such a deal. I'm sure it'll be fascinating, as everything about the Kroffts is. I think this link will get you there.
The Boardwalk Casino in Las Vegas is no more. It has ceased to be. We told you here of its impending demise and last Tuesday morning, it blowed up real good. On this page, you can see video of the roof and walls being collapsed by explosives. And if you look real hard through the dust and debris, you may be able to see the buffet, relatively unchanged.
I don't know much (anything, really) about the person or persons responsible for this...and the bit reminds me a lot of one done a few years ago on Conan O'Brien's show. Still, I laughed out loud at this 2-minute spoof of David Copperfield. I'm putting it up here in the hope that you will enjoy it, too.
Many a reader of this site has suggested I mention the following. In the "Weird Al" Yankovic video to which I linked early this morn, the guy in the car at the end is Greg Kihn, who wrote and performed the original song being parodied. It was called "(Our Love's In) Jeopardy." Curt Alliaume suggests this may have been the first time a musician appeared in a video that parodied his song.
Just looked at the other networks. Fox is carrying the Presidential Address live at 8:00 PM (Eastern Time) and has allotted twenty minutes for it. My TiVo guide for the New York Fox affiliate, WNYW, has Prison Break starting at 8:20, 24 starting at 9:20, Fox 5 News at 10 starting at 10:20, a Seinfeld rerun at 11:20...then they have a very odd thing listed: A Simpsons episode starting at 11:50 PM. What's odd about that? It's listed as a ten-minute episode. Reruns of That '70s Show follow at Midnight and 12:30 AM.
Then we go over to KTTV, which is the Los Angeles Fox outlet. They have the Presidential Address from 5:00 to 5:20, followed by a ten-minute episode of King of the Hill. Then everything else after runs its usual length and starts on the hour or half-hour.
Are they really chopping an old Simpsons episode and a rerun of King of the Hill down to ten minutes apiece? Or do they just figure to join them in progress? Bizarre either way.
ABC's Monday night schedule, at least on my TiVo, shows no sign of including Bush's speech.
Neither does CBS's. The oddity here is that Two and a Half Men runs 31 minutes and then the show that follows — The New Adventures of Old Christine — is a 29-minute show starting at 9:31. I wish they'd stop doing this.
My TiVo schedule has been updated to reflect the odd running times of Deal or No Deal tomorrow night. Thanks to my satellite, I get both the East Coast and West Coast feeds. The East Coast feed of the show starts at 5:25 PM (Pacific Time) and runs one hour and 35 minutes. The West Coast feed starts at 8:00 PM and runs for two hours. Just to compare, I've set up to record both.
This may seem like a trivial matter to some of you but I really think the future of television will have a lot to do with the accurate delivery of programming to our video recorders or home media centers, including the ability to adjust for breaking news, live shows that run long, etc. With Internet connectivity, this should be quite possible and the folks who deliver our shows to us are going to have to have a quick response time to changes. Nice to see us moving in that direction.
Tuesday morning in the wee small hours, Fox Movie Channel is airing the 1970 movie, Myra Breckenridge, starring Raquel Welch and Rex Reed as each other, and John Houston and Mae West trying to see which of them can do a better job of making you forget the good things they were once involved with. It's not Skidoo...but it's close.
The film is a fascinating relic of a period in the movie industry when the folks in charge were largely clueless about what they should be making in order to compete with television. A few years earlier, the consensus in some quarters had been that the only thing movies could offer than you couldn't get on the small screen was the big screen. Some predicted that soon, every film would be on the grand scale of Ben-Hur or Cleopatra and that instead of making a lot of small-to-medium budget movies each year, the majors would collectively produce perhaps a dozen huge-budget flicks. As some of those huge-budget flicks flopped, execs learned the danger of putting all of one's eggs in a lone basket and began pondering how else they might draw viewers from their homes and into theaters.
The other obvious thing movies could offer than TV couldn't was more adult fare but the major studios were too conservative to follow that line of thinking to its logical conclusion. As a result, we had this period when they were making half-assed, clumsy attempts to be adult without offending the masses. At the same time, Newsweek told them there was this "youth movement" on in the country — it may have had something to do with some war in Asia at the time — and since teens and young adults go on dates (i.e., buy movie tickets), there was this massive attempt to pander to them, mostly made by people who hadn't a clue how to do that. That's how we got things like Skidoo and The Strawberry Statement and Vanishing Point and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Some were good, some weren't but they all gave off these odd pheromones of someone clumsily trying to appeal to an audience they didn't understand.
I dunno what they thought the audience was for Myra Breckenridge but it turned out to be people who wanted to go laugh at how awful a movie could be. The reviews were dreadful and it didn't help matters that Rex Reed wrote a lengthy article for Playboy that soundly trashed the writer-director as incompetent and unable to even shoot the movie he'd set out to make. (As opposed to Skidoo where, I gather, Otto Preminger made exactly the movie he envisioned and it still didn't make a lick of sense.)
To see Myra Breckenridge is to feel sorry for everyone involved. Mae West sure didn't deserve that as her next-to-last movie (didn't deserve her last one, Sextette, either but there she mostly had herself to blame). I am not suggesting you watch this and I'm not even including a link to buy the DVD because you definitely don't want to do that. But you should know that it's there, if only so you can step gingerly around it.
I discovered Dr. Demento's radio show around 1972, shortly after he first began broadcasting in that identity. It was a regular Sunday night ritual for a long time and I even rigged up a device to tape him when I couldn't listen live. His show then was a cornucopia (that's the first time I've used that word on this weblog) of rare and funny "novelty records" by the likes of Spike Jones, Stan Freberg, Allan Sherman and a lot of folks I hadn't previously heard of. Later on, my interest petered out as he began playing what I felt were too many homemade and garage recordings by amateurs. It was great that he was giving these folks some exposure but, well, you know...not one of them was Spike, Stan or Allan. Still later, the Good Doctor seems to have come to his senses and the pendulum swung back to a nice mix of new and old and I now give a listen whenever I can.
What prompted so many musicians to create songs for Dr. Demento to play was that he made a star out of one guy who submitted a tape — "Weird Al" Yankovic. He first played one of Al's homemade efforts around '76 and then a few years later, "My Bologna" (a parody of The Knack's "My Sharona") became a frequent entry on the Demento Funny Five. "Weird Al" became a genuine recording artist/star and the guy deserves it. His records are well-produced, his parodies work and he's often very funny. These three things are not true of most of the folks out there who think they can be "Weird Al." But they're true of "Weird Al."
Our feature presentation is one of his earlier efforts — the music video for "I Lost on Jeopardy," complete with appearances by Art Fleming and Don Pardo, who hosted and announced the show in its first incarnation. And Dr. Demento's in there, too.
Very nice birthday celebration last evening for Marv Wolfman. His charming spouse Noel arranged it all at an outlet of a chain I'd never heard of before — Dave and Buster's. Here's their website if you're interested. They're kind of like Chuck E. Cheese for a slightly older audience. They have video games and non-video games and pool tables and private rooms for parties and apart from the fact that it meant driving to Arcadia, it was a great experience.
After grub (but before cake and present-opening), we all fanned out through the place for some serious gaming. My longtime friend Alan Brennert claimed he'd never played any of these games before...then went up to a claw machine and, first time out, snagged a very nice wristwatch. In the background, one could almost hear the manager yelling at someone, "What's wrong with that claw machine out there? Somebody actually won something!" I did great at Skee Ball. In fact, I'm seriously considering quitting this silly writing business and seeing what kind of living I can make hustling Skee Ball.
Carolyn and I almost didn't make it there because we did something extremely foolish out in the parking lot. We tried to follow the signs. Please note that if you ever go out to the Westfield Mall in Arcadia and want to find the Dave and Buster's, it's easy. Just do the opposite of what the signs tell you. If they have an arrow pointing left, turn right and vice-versa. It'll get you right there.
Frank Rich has a good piece on the recent revelations of White House spying without proper warrants and secret torture programs. Here are two key paragraphs...
President Bush, himself a sometime leaker of intelligence, called the leaking of the N.S.A. surveillance program a "shameful act" that is "helping the enemy." Porter Goss, who was then still C.I.A. director, piled on in February with a Times Op-Ed piece denouncing leakers for potentially risking American lives and compromising national security. When reporters at both papers [The New York Times and The Washington Post] were awarded Pulitzer Prizes last month, administration surrogates, led by bloviator in chief William Bennett, called for them to be charged under the 1917 Espionage Act.
We can see this charade for what it is: a Hail Mary pass by the leaders who bungled a war and want to change the subject to the journalists who caught them in the act. What really angers the White House and its defenders about both the Post and Times scoops are not the legal questions the stories raise about unregulated gulags and unconstitutional domestic snooping, but the unmasking of yet more administration failures in a war effort riddled with ineptitude. It's the recklessness at the top of our government, not the press's exposure of it, that has truly aided the enemy, put American lives at risk and potentially sabotaged national security. That's where the buck stops, and if there's to be a witch hunt for traitors, that's where it should begin.
I never understood how it hurt anything, aside from the White House's reputation, to reveal that our government was not following the rules about warrants when wiretapping terrorism suspects. Is there a terrorist anywhere who didn't suspect his calls might be monitored? Especially with John Ashcroft announcing, every time he upped the terrorism alert level, that they'd picked up "chatter" of something in the works.
My TiVo recorded (without being asked) A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum from some cable channel the other day. This is the little description in the TiVo listing...
Comedy, Musical. Zero Mostel, Phil Silvers, Jack Gilford. A con-man slave and his sidekick fake a courtesan's funeral to fool a pimp in ancient Rome.
"Pimp?" Forget for the moment that in the film, they actually fake the funeral to fool a Roman Captain. The character to which they are presumably referring, Marcus Lycus, is described as a buyer and seller of the flesh of beautiful women. I suppose the word "pimp" can be applied to him but come on. I suppose that when they run The Ten Commandments, the listing will refer to Moses leading his people out of the 'hood.
Everyone seems to be talking about the new revelations about the NSA phone-monitoring project...and I must say that my initial reaction was that it was an egregious violation of civil liberties.
But I admit that, like you, I don't know everything about the program and that to some extent, I'm working backwards from my growing distrust of this administration. I am not alone in this attitude and we are not necessarily wrong. Almost everyone in America is getting suspicious to some extent of the White House claims as to what's legal. Especially since it often seems to go no deeper than, "Whatever Bush wants done."
So here's what I would like to know. As we've all heard, most telecom companies went along with the program but Qwest did not. This may not have been, as some are suggesting, because they were certain it was illegal. It seems more like Qwest wanted more proof than the Bush administration's say-so that it was Kosher. Here's a snippet from The New York Times...
The telecommunications company Qwest turned down requests by the National Security Agency for private telephone records because it concluded that doing so would violate federal privacy laws, a lawyer for the telephone company's former chief executive said today. In a statement released this morning, the lawyer said that the former chief executive, Joseph N. Nacchio, made the decision after asking whether "a warrant or other legal process had been secured in support of that request." Mr. Nacchio learned that no warrant had been granted and that there was a "disinclination on the part of the authorities to use any legal process," said the lawyer, Herbert J. Stern. As a result, the statement said, Mr. Nacchio concluded that "the requests violated the privacy requirements of the Telecommunications Act."
Sounds to me like Qwest would have cooperated if some court, like the FISA court, had merely signed off on the program. The firm's stance may have been a courageous defense of its customers' freedom but it could also have been a cover-yer-ass fear of finding itself in a massive class action lawsuit. You know...the kind people are now vowing to file against Verizon, BellSouth, etc. I'm big on civil liberties but if I was running a big telecommunications company and the President of the United States (or his reps) came to me and asked for what they've asked for, I'm not sure my response wouldn't have been, "Fine. Just give me a written guarantee that this is legal. I don't want to say yes and then a year from now, some court rules it's unconstitutional and people sue and I have to go before my stockholders and explain why I didn't get more assurance."
Which brings me to the part I'm wondering about. The Bush administration makes the claim that this program is absolutely, unquestionably legal and absolutely, unquestionably necessary. But as with many of their approaches to surveillance, they would rather cripple the program than go in and have a judge sign off on it. They decided to do without monitoring QWest's 15-18 million subscribers. So what happens if they're tracking the phone calls of Al Qaeda Member #1, who has Verizon, and he keeps phoning Al Qaeda Member #2, who has Qwest? Doesn't the trail of information end there? Wouldn't it have been better to get the warrant so Qwest would get with the program and tell them who Al Qaeda Member #2 had called?
The position of the Bush administration with regard to spying on people seems to be that there's no doubt it's necessary and no doubt it's legal. In fact, it's so necessary that they don't want to take a chance some judge will think it's illegal and stop it. But of course, there's no doubt it's legal.
Here at newsfromme, we always like to note the birthday of the real veterans of the comic book industry...the guys who were in it at the start and who are (happily) still around to remind us of our great and glorious heritage. Respecting one's elders is important, which is why we've noted the birthdays and honor of men like George Tuska (age 90), Paul Norris (age 91) and Creig Flessel (age 94).
In that tradition, we note the birthday of Golden Age Great Marv Wolfman who reaches the big six-oh today. When I was a small boy, barely able to read, I discovered his work on...oh, was it Tomb of Dracula? Or Nova? Or Blade? It was Daredevil, I think. It's hard to remember back that far. He was also Marvel's Editor-in-Chief for a time, back when they used to hand out that job like some kind of deluxe No-Prize. Later, he went on to DC and did The New Teen Titans and Crisis on Infinite Earths and Superman and he also killed Supergirl, for which some of us will never forgive him. In spite of this, we wish him a happy birthday and will be present this evening for a quiet, low-key celebration.
On a more personal note: I began corresponding with Marv around 1968 and first met him in person in the DC offices in 1970. He was standing outside an office that was then shared by two editors — Julius Schwartz and Dick Giordano — and was being yelled at by a writer named Robert Kanigher. Mr. Kanigher wrote some fine comics in his day but he was given to rambling, incoherent tirades and I rescued Marv from one. He has been forever in my debt since and we became...well, I'm not sure if "friends" is the proper word since he is so many years my senior. Mostly, he envied my youth and skills, whereas I respected his age and endurance. I still do, so I am pleased to wish him a happy birthday and to hope there will be more in the future. Even if he did kill Supergirl.
Here's the text of the speech John McCain gave today at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University. There are a number of eloquent, intelligent portions and if this speech had been given somewhere else ten years ago, I'd probably suggest you read it and appreciate the speaker's reasonable approach and seeming respect for differing viewpoints. But since around half past the Monica Lewinsky brouhaha, McCain has disappointed me time and again in this regard. The "maverick" stance looks more and more like a calculated marketing scheme.
Returning from my local 24-hour Sav-On drug store — where if you go at 2 AM, you can pick up a prescription without waiting in line — I found this fellow on my back porch, partaking of food left out for the stray cats. He interrupted his dining briefly to watch me walk into the house then returned to the Friskies. When I got my camera, he shrugged as if to say, "This is the price I pay for free food." Or maybe it was, "Hey, if I'm going to have to model for you, you could at least provide dessert."
This is the first raccoon I've actually seen in quite a while but I know they've been around. Lately, I get up in the morning and find that plastic dish halfway across the yard. I think after he licks it clean, he uses it for a frisbee.
Here's a possible entry in the list of network time slots being juggled to annoy us. NBC has been advertising a two-hour special edition of Deal or No Deal for next Monday night at 8 PM. It includes "surprise" appearances (surprises to anyone who hasn't seen the promos) of Regis Philbin and Jay Leno. It's followed at 10 PM by a special, heavily-promoted episode of The Apprentice.
But now, George W. Bush has announced he will address the nation Monday evening at 8 PM Eastern time, which is 5 PM Pacific. Standard operating procedure would be for the network to just bump everything later on the schedule. Bush's remarks (plus whatever additional coverage is done) are expected to consume 25 minutes. Ordinarily, that would mean that Deal would start at 8:25, Apprentice at 10:25, the late local news at 11:25, Leno at Midnight instead of 11:35, etc. Somewhere in the wee, small hours of the AM, they'd make up the missing time.
That's how it would work on the east coast. On the west, they'd just cover the speech as part of the 5 PM News and then all the prime-time shows would run as scheduled.
NBC is now announcing on its website and elsewhere that Bush will speak at 8 PM, Deal will start at 8:25 and Apprentice will still start at 10 sharp. The person at NBC who told me this (someone not in the programming department, I should emphasize) says they're editing Deal or No Deal down to 95 minutes...but only for the East Coast.
I'm not sure I believe this. It's not unprecedented for breaking news to cause one time zone to miss a hunk of a show but it usually isn't planned this way. I can't recall any network actually cutting a different version of a program to air on one side of the country. Let's see if that's actually what they're doing...and if so, if TiVo finds out about it in time to update.
Here's another one of what people always refer to as the Max Fleischer Superman cartoons. Actually, the Fleischer Brothers (Max and Dave) were ousted from their own studio before this one — "The Mummy Strikes" — was made in 1943. The history of early theatrical animation was filled with tales of animation producers losing their own studios or their star characters to their distributors and no tale was sadder than that of the Fleischers. Their operation was renamed Famous Studios and it went on producing cartoons without them. You'll notice the names of Max and Dave Fleischer appear nowhere on this cartoon.
One name you will see is that of Jay Morton, who's listed as writer. He has sometimes been credited with having devised the famous Superman tagline, "Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive," etc. This was probably one of the last cartoons he worked on as about this time, the studio moved from Florida to New York and he elected to not move with it. I wrote about him here a few years ago in conjunction with his obituary.
Okay, here's something I'm trying to figure out and I'll bet someone reading this can help me...
John is Jerry's uncle. Marsha is Tom's sister. John marries Marsha. What relationship then is Tom to Jerry? He's not his uncle. Is there such a thing as an uncle-in-law? Or does this make him some kind of cousin? Is there any tidy term to describe this relationship? I'm an unmarried only-child so this stuff is alien to me.
Some of you will probably recognize the real-life people I'm writing about but that's not important. I've asked about a dozen people and gotten several different answers, many of them accompanied by "Well, I'm not sure but..." So please only write and tell me if you're reasonably certain. And thank you in advance.
Do you know how to bone a turkey breast? How to temper eggs? How to peel pearl onions? You can learn how to do all these things and more thanks to some nifty online how-to videos offered up by Cuisine at Home magazine. They're on this page.
Wanna get a lot of e-mail? Just make a vaguely disparaging comment on your weblog about Macs. You should see what I'm getting...and some of them are reacting like I made a vicious racial slur about them and their mothers.
There's nothing wrong with owning a Mac. Just as there was nothing wrong with owning a Betamax until, of course, they stopped making them. In the technological age though, we commit to formats and accept their limitations. You stay with videotapes and you can't get certain films because they're only available on DVD. You buy a car with a stick-shift, you have to put up with valets and car wash attendants who can't drive a stick. My friends who own Macs are all pretty happy with them except when they see a great Windows program with no Mac equivalent.
This is why there are new Macs that run dual-format and software to run Windows programs on Macs. They're probably great machines but I'm not ready to junk my three PCs and plunge into a new system just because I don't like one piece of Windows-based virus protection software.
I'm on a deadline this weekend so I can't respond individually to you all. But most of you are reading a lot more into that comment than was there.
I've just about had it with Norton Anti-Virus. I've been a Norton customer since...well, somewhere here I still have a 5" floppy of The Norton Utilities with a photo of Peter Norton printed on it. That's how long. I don't think Mr. Norton has anything to do with the current software products that bear his name, which may be part of the problem.
Norton Anti-Virus probably does a decent job of protecting me from dread computer viruses...although it's failed me a few times, once because I contracted a virus so new that no one in the anti-virus community had heard of it yet. If I'd gotten it a week later, I would have been fine...but some things are beyond our control. My big problems have to do with the fact that it doesn't play well with other programs. Four times now on my three computers, I've installed or uninstalled something else and Norton A-V has gone kablooey. Each time, the solution has been the same. I wait 15-20 minutes for someone I'm pretty sure is not on this continent to come online for a "live chat" and they tell me to do a complete uninstall, including running a program to cleanse my system of all Norton and Symantec products, and then do a reinstall. This takes around an hour each time...and I can think of so many other things I could do with that hour. For instance, I could wait on hold for the people who handle tech support for Microsoft Money. I think they have two guys and they each work an hour a month.
My computer guru Bill Goldstein recommends that I try AVG instead, and I intend to give it a try. I'm also instituting a new policy. I can't do anything about Microsoft products but otherwise, I ain't installing anything that has a fee-based Tech Support phone number. I never called the one for Norton but every time I saw they had one, it made me think they're not all that unhappy when their product doesn't work properly. In any case, the next uninstall I do of Norton shall be my last.
(And don't write me and tell me I should buy a Mac. People who have Macs remind me of myself when I had Beta and I kept seeing movies I wanted to own come out on VHS only.)
Preston Blair was one of the great animators. He was responsible for the Red Hot Riding Hood animation in several Tex Avery cartoons, for the hippos and other memorable characters in Fantasia, and many more classic examples of making drawings move. But his most lasting contribution to the art may rest with a couple of books he authored for the Walter Foster art book series. They were repackaged a few times under different names — Cartoon Animation, Advanced Animation, How to Animate Film Cartoons, Animation: Learn How to Draw Animated Cartoons and others.
It is difficult to overestimate the importance of the Blair books to animation. Darn near every kid who ever thought it might be neat to learn how to do that started to learn how to do that from these volumes. Many who took expensive courses in art schools reported that it was more educational just to page through the Preston Blair books and copy his work. (And speaking of copying: Blair's drawings have been ripped-off countless times for advertising and other purposes. I believe this current edition contains all or most of both volumes and if you buy it, you'll recognize a lot of duck and pig drawings.)
What many did not know until recently was that Blair had to redo his first book after its initial publication in 1947. He'd used drawings he'd done for MGM and a few from Disney, which caused legal problems. That edition was redrawn and he refashioned all the images of Tom & Jerry and Screwy Squirrel and Droopy and other established characters into generic versions. The drawing below shows how one rabbit received a makeover.
Copies of the first version are rare and prized. My pal Jerry Beck scored one from another great animator, Dave Tendlar, and now you can experience it. ASIFA-Hollywood is archiving and sharing rare treasures of animation and they've scanned Jerry's copy and posted it here and here. This is a valuable resource for wanna-be animators, and I'm sure seasoned professionals can learn from it, as well. A lot of those who do cannot teach but Blair was that rare talent who could so something and explain clearly how he did it.
This sounds like something the writers of Mad Magazine would come up with: O.J. Simpson is doing a pay-per-view hidden camera show called Juiced. In one segment, he tries to sell his infamous white Ford Bronco, touting it as a good getaway vehicle. (Don't believe me? Read this.)
I'm trying to think of a TV show I am less likely to ever watch and I can't. I don't like hidden camera shows at all and I think Simpson belongs in a small room with bars on the windows and door. I've never even sprung for pay-per-view on anything, and I ain't starting with this.
The only thing that interests me here — though not enough to watch and try to figure it out — is this: Is Simpson doing this program because he thinks it will rehabilitate his image...and if so, why does he think that? Or has he given up all hope of widespread public acceptance and is just doing it because he figures it doesn't matter what he does? I suppose there's a third possibility, which is that he figures that if he goes around doing hidden camera stunts, he just might catch The Real Killers on tape. But that seems like an outside possibility...
Some time ago here, I hooked you all up with a video of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello performing their famous "Who's on First?" routine on some fifties TV show. Today, we have a clip of them performing it on radio in the early forties when it was a little fresher for them and for audiences. It's interesting to compare the two performances. I like the radio one better even though — for obvious reasons — it isn't as physical and based around Costello's facial reactions. But the timing's better and there's more sense of the two guys playing off each other.
Also note that on radio, Lou made a conscious attempt to keep his voice higher so it would be easier to differentiate him from Bud and that when they did this routine during the war, the Shortstop's name changed from I Don't Give a Darn to I Don't Give a Damn. The logic, as I understand it, was that these shows were being broadcast to Our Boys Overseas and those who were offended stateside would have to accept that our fighting men deserved a little earthier entertainment. Frankly, I think the soldiers would have preferred a couple of strippers but they had to settle for the naughtiness of Lou Costello saying "damn" instead of "darn."
This clip runs three minutes. It goes way outta-sync near the end and when it does, you might want to just listen and not look.
You know, when George W. Bush told us he'd be "a uniter, not a divider," I didn't realize he meant he'd unite us by convincing everyone in America he's a terrible president.
And this poll was taken before the latest revelation of massive phone surveillance. That oughta get him down to 28.
Odds are good that I won't get back there to see it but the Goodspeed Opera House in Connecticut is staging a big, splashy revival (with some revisions) of the Li'l Abner musical. That show is a frequent topic of this website so I should mention that I'm hearing good things about it. Here's one review and here's another. From the former, we learn that though the show is set in the fifties, its Washington scenes include references to Jack Abramoff and John McCain, and that the gent who plays the evil General Bullmoose looks not unlike Dick Cheney. I have no idea how I feel about this. Back when I was briefly in talks to revise/update the book for a possible Broadway resurrection, the idea was to remove obscure references (like the line about Drew Pearson) but to avoid all anachronisms. I'm not saying that's the only way to do it, nor would I criticize their show without seeing it. Then again, in the show, Bullmoose does claim that "Progress is the Root of All Evil."
The Goodspeed website offers some goodies: A two-and-a-half minute video clip of scenes from the show, a five minute chat with director Scott Schwartz and a nice article on the property. You can also listen to two numbers from the original Broadway production.
Thanks to Mark J. Roy for reminding me about this. Wish I could get back there before July 2 to catch a performance. (I'd also love to get back to New York to see Billy Connolly's one-man show. If anyone who reads this site goes, send in a report.)
Among our many and varied interests is the history of the city some call Los Angeles. We especially like to track how certain areas evolve and how one building can morph from a restaurant to a church and then become a hardware store and then a florist shop, all before becoming — as every structure eventually has or will — a Starbucks.
I can't embed it here but you might enjoy this video of around eight minutes of footage shot on the Sunset Strip in the sixties. Near the beginning, they give you a quick pan of a strip joint called the Classic Cat. That was located at the corner of Sunset and Larrabee, and before it was a strip joint, it was a restaurant owned by Jerry Lewis (bearing his name and caricature on the outside) and then it was an eatery fronted by L.A. radio personality Dick Whittinghill. Today, it's Tower Video. I also like that in the video, they show the rioting that occurred on the Strip around 1967 and in the midst of it, they have some brief shots of the Bullwinkle statue outside Jay Ward's office.
I can, however, embed this. A website called 1947project is attempting to document the city's history, amassing whatever info and pics they can find. They've assembled a 23 (!) minute video of still shots of old Los Angeles set to music. They also, on this page of their site, have a high-resolution version of the video below but they caution it'll only play on the latest versions of Windows. If you can play the high-res version, do. Some of the photos are quite wonderful.
HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson now says that the story he told at that speech — the one about how he killed someone's contract because the guy said he didn't like George W. Bush — falls under the category of "anecdotal remarks." I think he thinks that's another way of saying the whole thing was a fib — in which case someone needs to buy this man a dictionary. The one I keep near my computer gives the following as synonyms for "anecdotal"...
Nothing in there about "not true." An anecdotal account can be casual or unverified but it can also be absolutely accurate.
It also seems to me this statement completely misses one of the main charges. Okay, maybe the story was apocryphal. But Jackson still told it to an auditorium full of folks who wanted government contracts from his department. The tale was a clear warning that if you wanted the deals, you'd better not get caught speaking against George W. Bush. That's disgraceful.
On tonight's Daily Show, Jon Stewart discusses a minor dust-up with the folks who run a TV station in Terre Haute. This article in the Terre Haute Tribune-Star covers the argument which stems from Stewart mocking some TV spots a station did promoting its weather forecasters. I don't think it's humanly possible to win an argument with a comedian who's ridiculing your commercials. Maybe if he was making fun of your wife's appearance, you could convince people he was rude and unfunny. But if there was ever a category that's wide open for ridicule in this world, it's commercials.
Our friends at Fantagraphics are already putting out a fine reprint set of Mr. Schulz's Peanuts and it's about to be joined by one of Elzie Segar's Thimble Theatre, the strip more commonly known as Popeye. These have been reprinted before but the new series — six hardcovers, Sundays in color, one volume every six months commencing this September — promises to be must-purchase even for those of us who bought the earlier collections.
And if you didn't...well, you may be in for a delightful surprise, especially if you think of Popeye only from his animated appearances. In Segar's newspaper strips, the sailor did a lot more than take six minutes to haul out his spinach and then thrash Bluto. There was a wonderful mix of silliness and solid adventure there, along with some truly memorable (and occasionally, downright odd) characters.
Some history. Elzie Crisler Segar began drawing Thimble Theatre in 1919, featuring a large cast of players but especially a guy named Castor Oyl and his pal, Ham Gravy. They encountered many weird characters and in 1929, one of 'em — a squinty sailor — just plain stayed around a while. In fact, he eventually kicked Castor Oyl out of his own strip and began romancing the guy's sister, Olive.
Segar drew the strip until his death in 1938 producing superb work that has been too often overlooked. When scholars start rattling off the names of the all-time great newspaper comics, they tend to skip over the ones that were continued, even quite ably, by others...so Thimble Theatre gets forgotten. Glad that Fantagraphics has remembered and will be favoring us with some nice "keeper" volumes. You can advanced order the first one here if you're eager.
The other day, it was reported that the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Alphonso Jackson, had told an audience of minority real estate entrepreneurs that he had cancelled a contract to one firm because its owner said he didn't like George W. Bush. Many folks are objecting to this and rightfully so.
So what's the latest? Well, his official spokesperson confirmed that Jackson had indeed yanked someone's contract because they said they didn't like George W. Bush. Then his official spokesperson said he hadn't and that the whole story was just "anecdotal" and made up. Now, his official spokesperson has gone on a "scheduled leave."
So either Jackson told an audience a bogus story to try and scare them into not criticizing Bush...or he told them a true story for that purpose. You get the feeling Mr. Jackson may wind up going on an unscheduled leave?
My buddy Lee Goldberg links to the piece on memorable final episodes of TV shows and makes the point that a lot of these are unnecessary stunts. Not every show's continuity cries out for some sort of lasting resolution. Maybe the network's need for ratings in a sweeps period do but the nature of the series often does not. Sometimes, I suspect, viewers would be happier to think that their favorite characters were still doing what they did when we enjoyed watching them.
Meanwhile, Johnny Achziger writes...
I watched The Fugitive when it originally ran, and anxiously awaited the finale. But when I watched it, it really outraged me and I thought the whole thing was stupid (and I was maybe 12 years old). I haven't seen it since, but this is what I remember. Dr. Kimble returned to his home town (I believe) and somehow confronted his brother-in-law (I think the one armed man was there at the time), and it turned out that said brother-in-law was present and watching while Mrs. Kimble (his sister) was being murdered, but did nothing because he was too afraid. So he saw the one-armed man, but not only did he not report the facts (out of fear his cowardice would become known), but he let Dr. Kimble take the rap.
I've never seen it since, and like I said, I was about 12 then, and it came across to me as a really lame ending. Maybe it was more dramatic to adults, but it me it was really disappointing.
The way I recall it, there was a neighbor (not the brother-in-law) who witnessed the murder but who kept silent because he was being blackmailed by the one-armed man, Fred Johnson. When the neighbor and Johnson meet at an amusement park, Richard Kimble confronts him, chases him up a water tower and then, just when it looks like Johnson will kill Kimble, Police Lieutenant Gerard shoots and kills Johnson. By this point, because of what he's overheard, Gerard fully believes Kimble is innocent...and since the neighbor is no longer being blackmailed, he can testify to that effect. So Dr. Richard Kimble is a free man.
I thought that was a satisfying ending. In fact, I suspect regular viewers would have felt cheated if it had turned out almost any other way. Kimble had to be proven right about the one-armed man; that it was that guy who'd killed Mrs. Kimble. There was speculation before the episode aired that it might turn out that the one-armed man was actually a witness who could finger the guy (not Kimble) who'd killed the wife. Naw. That would mean our hero was not completely right all those seasons he went around saying a one-armed man had offed his wife. Audiences also craved to see the bad guy pay for his crime...and not after a long trial where Johnson could argue his innocence. We don't like lingering questions or non-immediate gratification in our TV justice. That's why when Perry Mason would figure out who the real killer was, the real killer always confessed, thereby dispensing with any doubt.
So that's why the one-armed man had to confess, then die, plus there had to be someone around who could swear that Kimble was innocent...say, a heretofore-undisclosed eyewitness to the crime. Plus, we wouldn't necessarily like Kimble if he'd been the one to kill the one-armed gent...and he'd have been foolish to do so since it would just have clouded his legal situation at a time when we were aching to see him become a free man. By having Gerard kill him, that kept Kimble's hands clean and it also redeemed Gerard. He'd spent years pursuing an innocent man and now he'd saved that innocent man's life. All very neat and tidy.
But here's what I wonder about. The finale of The Fugitive got one of the highest ratings ever recorded for a TV show. Still, when the shows went into syndicated reruns soon after, they didn't do so well. Was it because the show had had that real, finite ending? Was the problem that America now considered the matter of Dr. Richard Kimble a closed book and there was no point in reopening it? We'll never know but it wouldn't surprise me. It also wouldn't surprise me if on some shows since, when it's proposed they do a "last episode," someone at the studio says to someone else, "Hold on. Don't we want to make money in syndication with these shows? Remember what happened with The Fugitive."
Here's yet another reason to be sorry Johnny Carson isn't still with us and hosting his TV show. It's the field day he'd have with the fact that his sidekick, Ed McMahon, now has his own brand of vodka.
This one only runs thirty seconds but it's a good thirty seconds. It's a commercial for Cocoa Puffs cereal starring everyone's favorites, Rocket J. Squirrel and Bullwinkle J. Moose. I always thought it was odd to see those characters with decent animation. Their episodes were done on the cheap with most of the work done in Mexico but every so often, something would be animated in L.A. with a real budget. This ad was one such effort.
Recently, a high school in The Bronx decided to put on a production of the musical, Chicago. When the folks who control the rights to that show heard about it, the school received a cease-'n'-desist letter and a brief controversy erupted. This article in The New York Times summarizes the problem the outcome and the new controversy about the resolution. Some of the other press coverage played this story like the evil lords of Broadway were trying to stifle the enthusiasm and spirit of some fresh-faced high school kids but it seems to me that the school was wholly in the wrong on this one. The Times article is a little more realistic but it still raises some questions...like why a person who's teaching drama didn't know that if you want to stage a copyrighted show, you have to obtain the permission of the copyright holders.
Here's a news story that may mushroom into a major controversy...and probably should. U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson bragged to a gathering of folks from minority-owned real estate companies that one of their own lost a lucrative contract just because he uttered the words, "I don't like President Bush." And the contractor didn't even say that in public. He said it on the phone to Jackson.
So follow this: They decide some real estate company is worthy of a contract. Then they take it away from him just because the guy there said he didn't like Bush. Then they tell this story to people from other real estate companies as a warning.
There are many reasons Bush is around a 31% approval rating. One of them is the perception that this administration cannot deal — rationally or even ethically — with anything short of blind loyalty and agreement.
Sorry to report that I failed to break my previous record of Watching a David Blaine Special, which was 52 minutes and 10 seconds. This time, I only lasted 47 minutes and 31 seconds before I felt myself gasping for air and my support team had to come in and get me out. And I have to admit that I cheated: Half an hour in, I couldn't stand the repetitive hype any longer and I fast-forwarded to the end to watch the finale as Blaine attempted and failed to break the world's record of holding one's breath underwater. (I suspect he did it the hard way: As I understand it, the record he was trying to shatter was for just holding one's breath. Blaine was trying to hold his breath and get out of eight pairs of handcuffs — which you'd kinda figure would make the breath-holding part a little more difficult.)
I admire the guy's physical stamina and to a certain extent, his showmanship. No one else these days — not Copperfield, not Lance Burton — is able to come up with a gimmick that will make a network buy a prime-time magic special. Blaine does, even though it means putting himself through physical hell and risking his life. I'm not sure that's entertainment and I'm not sure America does, either. Despite all the publicity and the opportunity to tune in and maybe see someone die on live TV, the ratings were only a slight improvement over whatever usually hovers in that time period. You'd think he'd do better than that, especially since a show like this would seem to have a two-pronged, foolproof appeal. Those who like David Blaine would tune in because they like him. Those who don't like David Blaine would tune in hoping to see him kill himself.
I'm not sure which of those groups I fall into, though I know I wouldn't want to see him kill himself. In fact, there's something very tasteless and irresponsible about all those doctors standing around, saying he shouldn't be doing this and that his life is in danger...but of course, they're there to support him. I think if I were a doctor and I was really concerned that the guy might off himself or do major damage to his body, I'd refuse to participate. There's a sense in which my presence would be enabling him to go on and attempt it. On the other hand, if I thought it was relatively safe, I don't think I'd be out there suggesting otherwise in order to ratchet up the drama.
As a magician, Blaine is quite skilled...though I've never quite understood the concept of Street Magic. He's always spoken of it like it's an old tradition but to the extent it is, it's also an outmoded one. Magicians may have done a lot of that before there were TV or Las Vegas showrooms or The Magic Castle but nowadays, Street Magic doesn't make a lot of sense. For one thing, there's no money in it. I don't think Mr. Blaine would be walking up to strangers on the boulevard and asking them to take a card, any card, unless he had a camera crew and a contract.
It's a nice gimmick — "taking magic to the people" — but it's also one that enables him to cheat a little. If you do magic before a legitimate audience — even taping for later editing and broadcast — and your trick fails, a lot of folks are going to see that failure. If you do tricks on a street corner for two people and a trick doesn't work, so what? Just toss that footage and do it again for someone else. Some of Blaine's on-the-street tricks depend on a little luck so he can tape one of them ten times with ten different "victims" and throw out the nine times it didn't work. Also, some of his tricks depend on the live audience not noticing some pretty simple gimmicks. If that audience is two people, that's a lot easier than if there are hundreds there...and of course, his camera crew and editors can control what we see or even if we see the trick at all.
In a way, Blaine redeems himself by going to the opposite extreme with the "live" part of his shows — the deadly feat performed in front of the whole world with no edits or camera tricks possible. If you find that kind of daredevil thing entertaining, I guess he does it well. I also guess I don't find it all that entertaining. I find it rather curious and odd, which is why I'm surprised I watched as much as I did.
Over and over, they kept telling us "don't try this at home," which always sounded to me like an odd way to phrase such a warning, even though I used to write that into the dialogue on a show that featured a lot of dangerous stunts. What they didn't want you to try at home because of the Blaine special was something Blaine himself wasn't trying it at home. He was in Lincoln Center surrounded by doctors and a rescue team with oxygen tanks. Frankly, there's zero chance of me trying something like that in my home...and only a slightly better chance of me watching the next David Blaine special there.
I am now about to attempt something dangerous. Last night, my TiVo recorded the entire two-hour special, David Blaine: Drowned Alive, and I am now going to risk my life by attempting to view it. I have a team of doctors standing by as well as a rescue unit that is prepared to go in and get me before any possible brain damage can occur. I pray that I will not need them.
My longtime pal Gary Brown sends along this link to an article in the Palm Beach Post. Its TV critic, Kevin Thompson, picked what he considered the five top TV series finales. Gary also writes...
I pretty much agree with his choices, but not the order. I must admit, I forgot about The Fugitive's ending, since it's been so long ago, but that created quite a stir and was handled well. I think I'd put the Newhart Show ending as No. 1, since it was such a surprise and so very clever. But it's hard to argue with any of these. In fact, I've been trying to think of other finales and there aren't many of them — Seinfeld was funny and wacky, but probably too long of a goodbye. Of course, most shows get cancelled and never get the chance to wrap things up.
And some of them don't want to for fear it closes off any chance of a revival. But yes, I'd put Newhart at the top of the list with The Fugitive not far behind. Matter of fact, I recently ran into Mark Solomon, who was one of the folks responsible for that last Newhart and I gushed to him about how brilliant I still think it was. I also told him (and it wasn't the first time he'd heard this) that I knew someone who had been out that evening, set a VCR to tape the episode...and missed part of the ending. That Newhart, as it was originally broadcast, ran thirty seconds longer than expected — a fact that also caught at least one CBS affiliate unaware. On at least one station, they cut to local news before the show was over, enraging local viewers.
Here's a page where another TV critic picked the top finales and somehow didn't include The Fugitive.
Hey, how about another song from Kristin Chenoweth? We like her a lot even though she's very short. I met her one time and I think she's around nine inches tall. But she's enormously talented as you'll see in today's clip, which is from an old episode of Rosie O'Donnell's talk show in, I'm guessing, 2001. She sings "The Girl in 14G," which was written for her by Dick Scanlan and Jeanine Tesori, two fine composers who worked on the Broadway musical of Thoroughly Modern Millie. The number runs a little under five minutes...
About once a week lately, some person feels compelled to park a car so as to block part of my driveway. They see about half a legal parking space there and I guess they figure half-a-space is better than nothing...so they pull into it even though it means the rear 50% of the vehicle is situated across my driveway, right in front of my garage door.
I don't quite understand why they do this. Even if they don't care about causing inconvenience to the homeowner, even if they're willing to risk a ticket, you'd think they might worry about someone denting or scraping their auto in order to get out of that garage they're half-blocking. I guess it's some sort of calculated gamble...and so far, they seem to be getting away with it. Four times now, counting yesterday afternoon, I've phoned the police and asked them to have someone come by and issue a violation. Four times now, the person has returned to their car and departed before the law arrived.
Yesterday, I was leaving on some errands when I found a beige Hyundai where a beige Hyundai shouldn't have been. I went back inside, called the gendarmes, then went out to my car and executed a very awkward, difficult manuever to back out of my garage. I had just cleared the offending Hyundai when a scowling looking woman walked up and got into it. I pulled up beside her, rolled down my passenger window and called to her. "Please don't ever park like that again" is what I said. What I got back was a torrent of anger and language that would offend a Tourette's patient. I couldn't make all of it out but the gist seemed to be that a lot of sick, evil people had done a lot of sick, evil things to her over the years so she had every right to park wherever she wanted.
There didn't seem to be a lot of value to continuing the discussion...and since I was starting to block traffic, I wished her good luck with her Anger Management courses and drove off.
I don't have a punch line to this story. It's tempting to make one up ("...and then I realized that woman was Condoleezza Rice!") but there was nothing funny about the woman's rage. She was livid about something — too livid to take the time to find a whole parking space, too livid to apologize for blocking my driveway. I don't know what she'd have done if she'd come back twenty minutes later and found a citation on her car. Probably shot someone.
I've decided I like the new version of I've Got a Secret airing on GSN. Well, let me clarify that: I like the show. I don't like the schedule.
I don't like that they run the same episodes over and over without telling us which ones are reruns. My TiVo has no way of differentiating so it keeps recording episodes I watched the day before. I also don't like the fact that GSN took off the black-and-white reruns of the original Garry Moore version so they could air the same episodes of the new version an extra time. Come on, GSN. In some parts of the country, it's 3 AM in the friggin' morning. You don't need to stick an extra run of one of your new shows there. Give us back our classic Secret.
But I like the show. In case you haven't seen it, Bil Dwyer is the host and the panel consists, for reasons I won't pretend to understand, of four openly-gay performers. All I can imagine is that someone said to someone else, "Hey, you know why Hollywood Squares worked? Because Paul Lynde was gay. Let's get four gay people." As it happens, they got some pretty funny gay people, especially Frank DeCaro and Suzanne Westenhoefer, and they're all good game players.
There are celebrity guests — my TiVo's getting sick of the one with Adam West — and unlike the old show, they actually come on with actual secrets. At least one guest per episode demonstrates an unusual skill or physical feat, and Dwyer keeps things moving nicely. So it's a worthy successor to the original series, and it's refreshing that no one felt the need to completely reinvent and modernize the wheel. They kept what worked and wrapped it in a nice, new package.
One of the producers is Burt DuBrow, a gent I've enjoyed chatting with on several occasions, usually about Howdy Doody. Burt is the world's foremost authority on that classic series, having been a close friend of Buffalo Bob's. At the end of I've Got a Secret, when they show the producers' production company logos, you can see an item from his collection...the little box that Clarabelle Clown wore on his belt. If I owned something that neat, I'd show it off, too.
What's Mark found for us today? Well, how about Kristin Chenoweth singing a great song with the Boston Pops? It's "If," also known as "If You Hadn't But You Did." This is a song Betty Comden, Adolph Green and Jule Style wrote for the 1951 Broadway revue, Two on the Aisle, which starred Bert Lahr. Mr. Lahr did not sing this song. The clip has some introductory material and goes in and out of sync but it's worth five minutes of your time.
I spent some time this evening mucking around with the design of this website. If you logged in here between around 9 PM and 11:00, things may have looked a bit weird but I think I'm finished for the time being. There will be more changes but not for a while.
A number of blogs are discussing that exchange that General Michael Hayden had with a reporter last January. Depending on which news source you read, Hayden may or may not be about to replace Porter Goss as head of the C.I.A. so his concept of governmental power could matter even more than it already does.
In fairness, there is a way to interpret Hayden's remarks that isn't quite as clueless as he may have seemed that day. The reporter, Jonathan Landay, suggested that the government has to have probable cause to execute a search that does not violate an American's right against unlawful searches and seizures. That's not exactly right, either. The Fourth Amendment says there can be no unreasonable searches and seizures, period. That's probably the point Hayden was trying to make.
As a reader of this site, Robert Cosgrove, wrote to me, "The fourth amendment requires that searches be 'reasonable.' Where a search requires a warrant, the warrant must be based on probable cause. However, many searches do not require a warrant, including searches of lockers by school authorities, searches incident to arrest, protective sweeps and weapons pat-downs, and others."
This may be splitting hair strands right down to the scalp. We agree that searches must be "reasonable." Beyond that, you can interpret the part about "probable cause" to say that is the standard required to obtain a warrant where one is necessary. Or you can interpret it to say that "probable cause" is the quality that makes any search, with or without a warrant, "reasonable." Both interpretations get you to pretty much the same place.
If you buy the distinction, the General's error came when the reporter asked, "Does it not say 'probable cause?'" Hayden said no, which left him wide open to the charge that he really didn't know those words were in the Fourth Amendment. But he may have meant, "No, it does not say that in quite the way you're presenting it." In which case, his mistake was not in also saying something like, "Yes, I know the words 'probable cause' are in the Fourth Amendment," and explaining the precious distinction he was trying to make.
Below, we have a link to a video of the exchange as it was presented at the time on Countdown With Keith Olbermann, so you can judge for yourself. Thanks to Roy Sorenson for suggesting I post it.
For some reason, I'm still getting e-mails from folks asking where they can view the infamous Stephen Colbert speech from last week. C-Span seems to have forced its removal from about three of the eighty thousand websites that have posted it. Guess it's getting tough to find.
Google Video has it, apparently put there by C-Span. In fact, you have your choice. This link will take you to a video of the whole dinner. That runs a little more than an hour and a half and includes arrivals, some highlights from past White House Correspondent's Dinners, Bush's routine with the impersonator, and then Colbert. Or this link will show you just Bush's segment. Or this link will show you just Colbert's 24 minutes. They've configured these so you can't download, even with KeepVid...but you can watch online.
My longtime pal, the great Disney historian Jim Korkis, writes...
I was on The Gong Show with my brother as "The Quasimodo Belairs" (singing, dancing hunchbacks) and we won. Also as a member of AFTRA, I got paid scale which is why I went on in the first place. What made Chuck Barris amazing is that he would come into the green room waiting area before taping and talk to each contestant telling them sincerely how great they were and making them feel like stars. I think that is one of the reasons people went on and were willing to behave as idiots. I later did The Dating Game with my two brothers and Camouflage. I have fond memories of Barris.
Most of the folks I've met who worked for Chuck Barris felt he was a wee bit too eager to wring every possible dollar from every show even to the point of harming the product...but they also thought he was a nice, sincere guy who was good to people in every non-monetary way. And The Gong Show, for all its inanity, did help an awful lot of performers (young and old) get their S.A.G. cards or keep their health insurance current. I'm surprised the folks who own the show now — Sony, I think — haven't edited some DVDs of the better acts that appeared on the program. There were more than people recall, and some of those folks went on to have real careers. (Though come to think of it, a DVD of the worst acts would probably sell better.)
Does everyone know the story of how Barris came to host The Gong Show? The original host of the daytime version was John Barbour, who later gained fame on Real People. Barbour was then a rather acerbic movie critic on the local NBC news in L.A. and they taped the entire first week of Gong Shows with him as master of ceremonies. He and Barris did not get along. As I understand it, the Barris version is that Barbour didn't "get" the premise and thought it was going to be a real talent show with him discovering The Stars of Tomorrow. The Barbour version was that he was bringing some order to the chaos because Barris didn't know what the hell he was doing.
After the first taping, Barris went to NBC and said he wanted to junk the shows and start over with a different host. As he later told the tale, NBC agreed on the condition that since it was his concept and he'd shown a flair for it while running the run-throughs, he would be the host. Barris said he reluctantly agreed...though some suggested that was his idea all along. Either way, the Barbour shows never aired, Barris took over and the show was a modest hit for a while. Gary Owens hosted the first season of the prime-time syndicated version but then Chuckie took that over, too.
There have been a couple of attempts to revive the show but they haven't worked...I think because the format wasn't the star. It was the chemistry of Barris and the kind of panelists he selected. They created the context that the real bad acts were there to be enjoyed on whatever level one could enjoy them...and of course, the bad acts made the good acts look better.
There was one segment I'd love to see again. One day, I got a call from a performer friend of mine, Charlie Brill, who sometimes appeared on the show as a judge. Charlie said, "Are you watching The Gong Show?" I said no. He said, "Turn it on." I said, "Why?" He said, "Don't ask why. Just turn it on. You'll see."
So I did what Charlie said, just in time to see Barris introduce a number by the show's director, John Dorsey. You heard Dorsey's voice say, "Camera three, pan right to the door...ready three, take three..." and the image on the screen cut to the door out of the booth from which Dorsey directed the show. You saw Dorsey tap dance out of the booth, tap his way onto stage, do an entire number (not bad) and tap his way back to the booth, all the time calling out camera directions and shots. He was saying, "Camera two, two-shot on Charlie and Mitzi...ready three, take three...camera one, pan left, waist-shot of Chuck..." Throughout, his routine was perfectly covered with rapid-fire cutting right on the beats. There's a skill to directing a show like that and even people who loathed the content of The Gong Show admired the way Dorsey was able to cover it and do a live camera-cut...which means that camera shots were chosen as on a live show with no after-the-fact selection of shots. And it was even more impressive that he was able to do it while tap-dancing.
A number of folks have written me about the narcotic effects of one restaurant's barbecued beef, many of them mentioning the words, "Monosodium glutamate." I don't think it was that particular additive but I'm betting it was something in that vein.
I called the restaurant and asked if they put MSG in their food. They don't put anything of the sort on the meat but the sauce is "mixed by the owner who won't tell anyone, even us, what's in it."
I asked, "Will he at least tell a customer if there's MSG in there?"
The voice on the phone replied, "I don't think so." I'll bet there's some law that says they have to divulge that information...but since I won't be going back there no matter what the answer is, I don't think I'll be pursuing it. Though I'm almost tempted to go down there, buy one container of their sauce and bring it home to freeze it. Just in case there's some night when I can't fall asleep.
You may remember news clips from last January when a reporter got into a debate over the Fourth Amendment with General Michael Hayden, our nation's Deputy Director of National Intelligence. Basically, the reporter kept saying that the amendment called for a standard of "probable cause" for search and seizure...and General Hayden kept arguing as if it didn't say "probable cause" in the amendment, as of course it does.
Hayden is the guy they're now saying will replace Porter Goss as the head of the C.I.A.
In 1976, a very odd program appeared on NBC's daytime schedule...and also in prime-time syndication. It was called The Gong Show, and I was never able to dislike it quite as much as my critical faculties told me I should. There was plenty to make one cringe, and I sometimes did...but I still tuned in from time to time with ambiguous feelings I never had with the other shows produced by the Chuck Barris Company. I thought the others — The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game, The New Treasure Hunt, et al — showed an underlying contempt for anyone willing to appear on them...and maybe even anyone who tuned in to watch. At times, that seemed true of The Gong Show, as well. But not always, which I guess is what was so intriguing: The occasional joyous moments in the midst of such a shoddy program.
There was a bizarre feeling of fun about the original Gong Show especially since Barris, functioning as host, was willing to be part of the chaos. On Truth or Consequences, which had gone off not long before, contestants were dressed in funny costumes and hit with pies...but Bob Barker, who was the emcee, was always perfectly dressed and coiffed and it was understood that his dignity was not to be punctured in any way. I thought that was tackier than what Barris did on The Gong Show and The Gong Show could get pretty danged tacky.
Still, one time, I accepted an invitation from Gong Show director, John Dorsey, to hang around on tape day. I watched one episode from the booth, marvelling at John's ability to call shots faster and more skillfully than any other director I've ever seen. Then I went down to the floor to watch the next episode being taped...and something happened during it which I still remember with a tiny tingle. It was a regular bit they did involving a stagehand named Gene Patton who'd come on and dance under the name, "Gene Gene the Dancing Machine."
The minute they started playing his music — "Jumpin' at the Woodside," I think the tune's called — the studio positively erupted. Barris started dancing and the panelists jumped up and started dancing...and you could feel how much Gene Gene enjoyed what he was doing. Okay, fine, they're performers. It's part of the act. But the crew also started dancing — people not on screen. The guy operating Camera 1 was operating Camera 1 and dancing at the same time. Grips were dancing, lighting guys were dancing, the members of the band were dancing as much as they could and still play their instruments. And of course, the audience — an odd mix of younger Gong Show fans intermingled with old ladies who couldn't get in to the Hollywood Squares taping down the hall — simply had to leap up and boogie. Some of the show's performers and staffers were a little (shall we say) under the influence of something...but the crew wasn't and the audience wasn't. It was just an honest "high" of excitement.
I've been on many TV stages in my life. I've seen big stars, huge stars — Johnny, Frank, Sammy, Dino, Bob, you name 'em. I've seen great acts and great joy, and if you asked me to name the most thrilling moment I've witnessed in person, I might just opt for the Gong Show electrifying Stage 3 for all of 120 seconds. Maybe it was because it came so totally out of nowhere that it stunned me but everyone, including the stone-cold sober people, was suddenly just so...happy. There was something very, very invigorating and enjoyable about being in the midst of all that sudden happiness, however frivolous it may have been.
Here's a clip from The Gong Show showing Gene Gene doing his dance on another episode. The thing I find funny in it is that you can see everyone getting into the spirit of the moment — Barris, two of the three celebrity panelists (Arte Johnson and Jaye P. Morgan), the band...everyone except the third panelist, a new comic named David Letterman. You can see him decidedly not getting into it...though you can't see much of him because Dorsey seems to have tried to cut around him. I'll bet you the crew and audience were dancing, too...but Dave's just standing there, clapping along to not look like a bad sport, probably wondering how long it would be before he got his own show and didn't have to put himself in any situation he couldn't control. Watch.
This is kind of a "Note to Self," just to remind myself of something. About two months ago, my friend Sergio and I stopped at a little barbecue stand for lunch. The place had been recommended to me as proving the old maxim that I recently made up: The crummier the decor, the better the barbecue. If that was true, this place had to have the best food on the planet. You've never seen a more dilapidated, rundown place to dine. The aroma of burning wood, detectable from blocks away, also promised good eats.
Turned out, the cuisine was excellent. I had a beef sandwich and a side of potato salad. Sergio had either the same thing or a pork sandwich, plus we split a side of beans. Wonderful food. I was delighted to have found such a great "dive," though dismayed that the ambiance being what it was, I probably couldn't bring certain people there.
We then went back to my house and an odd thing happened: We both fell asleep. About forty minutes after we'd finished our lunches, Sergio and I were both getting so drowsy that naps seemed mandatory. He stretched out on the floor of my office and I staggered into the bedroom and went directly to dreamland for about an hour. Sergio's siesta lasted a little longer than that even.
It was very odd. I rarely sleep during the day. I sometimes don't even sleep at night, as some have deduced from the posting times on this weblog. And for Sergio and I to both feel the same way at the same time made us wonder: What was in that food? It made me a little reticent to go back to the little barbecue place...and no, I didn't have a beer or wine. Never touch the stuff.
This afternoon, I was in that area around 3:30 when my stomach suddenly reminded me I hadn't eaten since the night before. I decided maybe the little unexpected slumber was a fluke and that one shouldn't abandon a great barbecue restaurant without more proof. I stopped at the barbecue stand and ate the same thing I had the first time — beef sandwich and potato salad, plus I got a whole chicken "to go." The same thing happened. I was sitting here writing around 4:10 when I suddenly had a desperate need to be asleep. I went into the bedroom and dozed 'til around 5:30. When I awoke, I went downstairs and threw out the chicken.
I don't get it. I've enjoyed barbecue for years from dozens of different eateries. Never had this happen with any kind of food anywhere. I know some people claim that the tryptophane in turkey makes them sluggish but I eat turkey twice a week and it has never had that effect on me. (I've also read that that's a myth; that tryptophane doesn't really cause sleepiness. Whether it does in others, it doesn't affect me.) I don't know if it's the barbecue sauce or the wood-smoking that did it to me here. It could even, I suppose, be the potato salad, though I doubt it.
There's no real end to this story except that it's the end of my visits to that barbecue stand. One more and I could wind up an honorary Kennedy.
I don't know what happened with that traffic accident involving Congressman Patrick Kennedy and neither do you. But I do know that "I was taking a medication that made me drowsy" isn't any better than "I was drinking." If you get behind the wheel of a car in any condition that impairs your ability to drive, you're being dangerously irresponsible and oughta be prosecuted.
What's the deal with the economy? If it's so good, how come so many people think it's so bad? Ezra Klein tries to explain and basically, his answer is that it's only good if you were already rich.
I just found this over on YouTube. Someone took the opening and closing from the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon series and dubbed them over with the theme song from the TV series, Falcon Crest. I think it works rather nicely. And if you look real fast, you'll see my name in there somewhere.
No word yet on when these are coming out on DVD but a fair amount of cash has been spent producing "extras" for the set so I assume it won't be long.
Michael Kinsley sorta/kinda defends George W. Bush on the whole matter of "signing statements" — you know, where he signs a law and then quietly issues a memo that says he can violate any part of it he doesn't like. Generally speaking, those who have defended this practice have said, in effect, "He's president...he can do what he likes." This is a position I don't buy and I suspect they won't either, the next time we have a Democratic president. I don't know that I buy Kinsley's argument either, but at least it's based on principle rather than partisan loyalty.
A little while ago at a speech, Donald Rumsfeld got into a verbal bout with an audience member. Here's the video and here's a transcript.
I'm pleased when any public official — even the ones I grudgingly support — are called out for inconsistent statements or apparent lies but I think this kind of thing misses the point. Rumsfeld and others said they knew where Saddam had his chemical weapons. There were no chemical weapons to be found at those locations. The question to them should not be, "Why did you lie?" The question should be, "Why should anyone who was so wrong about something so important still be calling the shots?"
There was much ancillary damage on 9/11. Apart from the people who were killed or injured and the buildings that were destroyed, there were lesser but significant losses such as impacted many businesses. One was Broadway where attendance immediately plunged to a ghastly low. Five shows posted closing notices and there were many others that were in imminent danger because the cash flow dropped to a trickle.
To remind people that they were still performing, the stars of every show then playing got together and made an amazing commercial — amazing because of the logistics involved. Pulling it all together at all was impressive. Doing it so soon after September 11, in a city still in shock and at its busiest intersection, was close to impossible...but it was done. The audio was pre-recorded on September 27 and the scene in Times Square was shot the following day with an amazing cast. Just in the front row in the photo above, we see Bebe Neuwirth, Susan Lucci, Joel Grey, Michele Lee, Valerie Harper, Bernadette Peters, Betty Buckley, Elaine Stritch, Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick. Elsewhere in the spot, visible in quick flashes, are Alan Alda, Harvey Fierstein, Brooke Shields, Adolph Green, Glenn Close, Brian Stokes Mitchell and quite a few other stars. (Dick Cavett's in there somewhere but I don't see him.)
Today's featured video is the 30 second version of that commercial. There was also a longer one — 60 seconds, I assume. And there was a little 3-4 minute featurette that was kind of a "making of" video. It used to run often on the Trio network and I somehow failed to save a copy of it. If you have it (or the minute-long version), please drop me a line.
Someone at a watch-making company sat down, I'm convinced, and said, "You know what's wrong with our watches? It's too easy to tell what time it is. How can we make it somewhat difficult?" Here's what they came up with.
Some of you may be sick of hearing about the Stephen Colbert speech by now but I find the various reactions kinda fascinating. And so is this, in a way.
The C-Span people have been apparently going around the Internet getting sites to take down online videos that use the C-Span coverage. They, of course, have every right to do this but I hope they'll realize that one of the reasons so many sites have posted it is that the online video feature on the C-Span site is awful. For one thing, it uses Real Player, which ain't as good as some other things. For another, their links only work about 25% of the time. Most of all, they only offer full events...so if you want to watch just Colbert, you have to deal with a three hour online video just to see the last twenty-four minutes.
I posted two sets of links to Colbert's speech earlier here, one of which no longer works. But these seem to. And in the meantime, ABC News has posted what they shot that evening. This is different coverage with no cutaway shots for audience reactions and, it seemed to me, a little more laughter in some places.
At the end, Colbert runs a video skit of how he'd fill the job of Bush's press secretary. ABC's coverage does not show this tape, though you hear its audio. Instead, the ABC camera (they seem to only have had one there) was trained on George W. Bush throughout the video and you see his reactions. He chuckles in some odd places and seems pretty uncomfortable when Helen Thomas is asking her eternal question about why we invaded Iraq. Here's that video. (An ad may or may not precede your viewing of it.)
I'm having trouble with e-mail today. About two dozen that I sent earlier do not seem to have arrived and I now cannot receive or send out at all. I can access the Internet and update this website and play Sudoku online...I just can't transmit or read e-mail. I assume the Comcast people will get this fixed soon...though if it's in the hands of the technician I spoke to earlier, I may have to abandon the 'net and resort to carrier pigeons.
Over on Salon, where you have to watch a lot of ads if you're not a subscriber, there's an except from Lapdogs, which is a new book by one of my favorite political writers, Eric Boehlert. His thesis, with which I agree, is that the press in this country was so afraid of being accused of being anti-American or pro-terrorist that they misreported the Iraq War (and certain other matters), bending over every which way to not challenge the Bush administration. Here's one paragraph from the article...
It's not fair to suggest the MSM [Main Stream Media] alone convinced Americans to send some sons and daughter to fight. But the press went out of its way to tell a pleasing, administration-friendly tale about the pending war. In truth, Bush never could have ordered the invasion of Iraq — never could have sold the idea at home — if it weren't for the help he received from the MSM, and particularly the stamp of approval he received from so-called liberal media institutions such as the Washington Post, which in February of 2003 alone, editorialized in favor of war nine times. (Between September 2002 and February 2003, the paper editorialized twenty-six times in favor of the war.) The Post had plenty of company from the liberal East Coast media cabal, with high-profile columnists and editors — the newfound liberal hawks — at the New Yorker, Newsweek, Time, the New York Times, the New Republic and elsewhere all signing on for a war of preemption. By the time the invasion began, the de facto position among the Beltway chattering class was clearly one that backed Bush and favored war. Years later the New York Times Magazine wrote that most "journalists in Washington found it almost inconceivable, even during the period before a fiercely contested midterm election [in 2002], that the intelligence used to justify the war might simply be invented." Hollywood peace activists could conceive it, but serious Beltway journalists could not? That's hard to believe. More likely journalists could conceive it but, understanding the MSM unspoken guidelines — both social and political — were too timid to express it at the time of war.
If you want to believe that coverage unfavorable to Bush's worldview is bias or that reporters sit around all day figuring how to subvert him, don't bother reading the piece. Some right-wingers will never turn loose of that way of denying bad news, just as some left-wingers will forever cling to the conspiracy theories they use to insulate themselves from reality. But if you're open to the idea that Bush's plunge in popularity is at least in part due to us now knowing things we should have known years ago, you might want to sit through the ads or, better still, buy a Salon subscription.
Early this AM, I was reminiscing about the original Pee-wee Herman Show at the Groundlings. That brought this message from my old pal Dawna Kaufmann...and I'm not sure if I'd forgotten that Dawna was involved with the show or if I just plain never knew. Here's some of what she remembers...
All the early meetings were in my Hollywood apartment, as we brought in John Paragon, Edie McClurg, John Moody, Lynne Marie Stewart, Ivan Flores, Tito Larriva and "musical maniacs" Brian Seff and Monica Ganas, aka Rick and Ruby. Gary Panter designed the colorful look of the production and its poster, his then-wife Nicole was cast as an actor, and their pal Jay Condom (nee Cotton) composed the wacky music and theme song. Rounding out the team were brilliantly inventive puppet makers, set builders and techies. At some point near the premiere, Bill Steinkellner was brought in as another pair of eyes and served well as director. The line producers were Betsy Heimann and Chuck Minsky, who then and now have huge careers in the film biz, respectively as a costume designer and a cinematographer.
The script was written by the performers; I didn't take a writing credit, although I should have; my credit was variously Executive Producer and Executive in Charge of Production. We would rehearse at the theater, and I would audio tape each rehearsal, then Paul and I would spend hours honing the script. It was tough editing out some very funny bits but I insisted it had to be done. I brought in and edited the 1950s training film about school cleanliness, as well as the Mr. Pincushion Man cartoon and a Gumby adventure. An elderly opera singer named Dora Romani, whom we found at Sarno's restaurant, was our opening act. She would work in the audience and flirt with all the men.
The Groundlings let us have the theatre for weekend midnight shows, and we opened on Feb. 7, 1981. I had designed a media campaign to promote the show, calling it "a late-night kiddie show for kids of all ages." I controlled the guest list, making sure that anyone who could help get out the word would be rewarded with free tickets. The Groundlings Theatre was a 99-seat venue and by opening night we had 2,000 people begging for seats.
Throughout our run the most amazing folks would be in the audience, including Robin Williams, Steve Martin, Marty Scorcese, Robert DeNiro, Cindy Williams, Cheech Marin and others. It became such a cultural touchstone that Melrose Avenue, which at that time was a dead zone at midnight, suddenly took on a hip appeal. In the months we played there, we watched that area become the technicolor place to be. Eventually, it became necessary to move to the Roxy Theater, where we could expand the show and play more nights, at earlier times. We transferred our set, cast and crew to Sunset Boulevard, and clicked there too. During the day, Paul and I would meet with TV networks as we saw our dream of turning the project into a series take shape.
Paul's agents brought in a music video director and the show was sold to HBO's just-beginning On Location series. We taped our last night at the Roxy as the show you still see running on HBO, which is what the DVD on Image Entertainment will consist of when released in July. The major difference in the Groundlings vs. Roxy productions is that Ivan Flores, who was a school kid, was replaced by Joan Leizman, another Groundling, who plays the hypnotized woman in the audience on the HBO show. For the HBO version, we also had to drop the Gumby cartoon when we couldn't make a deal with Art Clokey. We also didn't include Dora Romani on the HBO program, but I understand a rough tape of her will be on the DVD.
Mostly my memories are terrific, knowing I helped put into the world one of the greatest comedy collaborations ever.
Thanks, Dawna...and I know you won't mind my observation that the version at the Roxy, though quite wonderful, wasn't as wonderful as what I saw down on Melrose the first time. And come to think of it, the version that aired on HBO wasn't as wonderful as what I saw live at the Roxy. Which is not to say people shouldn't buy and enjoy it.
The one time I worked with Paul Reubens, he struck me as a very canny guy with a good sense of how far Pee-wee could go...which was far from infinite. On ye olde Internet, one often finds the myth that his CBS Saturday morning show was cancelled because of that silly legal mess he got into down in Florida. In fact, he had retired both the show and the identity long before that, which is why the infamous booking photo of him had long hair. He hadn't played Pee-wee in quite some time figuring — I assume — that the character had run its course...and maybe that it wasn't going to play as well as he got older.
But while it lasted, it was quite enjoyable — the show at the Groundlings and the Roxy, the TV series and at least the first movie. I always thought Pee-wee was funny and that that first show was one of the most memorable nights I ever spent in a theater. I wish someone had captured that on tape...but then again, a lot of what made it great was that sense of audience involvement. So I guess you had to be there.
Fred Kaplan reads the Barry McCaffrey memo so we don't have to. General McCaffrey's conclusions are that everything the hawks want to achieve in Iraq is probably possible but it's going to take a lot more time, money and American lives than we're probably willing to expend.
This morning, we have a lesson on "Lunchroom Manners." Some of you may recall this film from the original Pee-wee Herman Show, especially when it was performed on the stage of the Groundlings Theater over on Melrose Avenue. Others may even recall seeing the film in school. It runs nine and a half minutes and we can all learn much from it.
I am reminded of that first, live Pee-wee Herman Show in 1981 at the Groundlings. It was directed by a fine writer-director named Bill Steinkellner, who I later got to know and who I always assumed added a certain innocence and sweetness that was missing from many subsequent appearances of the Pee-wee character. Paul Reubens was amazing in the role, so totally consumed by it that it was hard to remember that he was an actor playing a part and the guy really wasn't like that. There was also a wonderful back-up cast that included Phil Hartmann (he later dropped the last "n"), Edie McClurg, John Paragon and Lynne Stewart. Even the art direction of the set was memorable. I think but am not sure it was done by cartoonist Gary Panter, who later designed the Pee-wee's Playhouse show for CBS Saturday morning.
Pee-wee lobbed Tootsie Rolls into the audience (one got me in the eye), showed cartoons (and the public service film of today's video link), chatted with people and puppets...and at the end of the show, he actually learned how to fly. You kind of had to see it but the mood in the room was just magical enough to believe it.
The night I saw it, there were delays so though the festivities were supposed to commence at Midnight, the show didn't begin until around 12:30. It was also a night when clocks were turned ahead so we got out around two hours later at what was technically 3:30 AM...and it still wasn't over. The show didn't end so much as it adjourned to Canter's Delicatessen down on Fairfax. Much of the audience went there as did most of the actors, some of whom remained in character. My date and I got back to my place after 5 AM, feeling not like we'd seen a show but that we'd spent the night in a parallel universe. (There was a thick fog that night which added to the Twilight Zone feel of it all.)
The show later moved to the Roxy Theater on Sunset where it was shorter, done at a respectable hour and nowhere near as special. For one thing, it became a show...whereas on Melrose, there had been that sense of having entered a different world. The Roxy engagement was taped for an HBO Special which is coming out on DVD in July and I guess it's okay if you never saw any other version...but I thought it caught about 25% of the wonderment of what I'd seen at the Groundings.
At one point in the show, Pee-wee shared the following film with us. Take notes. You wouldn't want to be a Mr. Bungle.
Yesterday, I posted this video link to a Don Rickles performance and speculated it was from the early days of Showtime. Not so. Michael Kilgore informs me it's from Rickles, a 1975 CBS special with guests Jack Klugman, Don Adams, Michele Lee, James Caan, Michael Caine, Jack Palance, Elliott Gould, Bobby Riggs, Larry Linville and Loretta Swit. I vaguely remember that show. It had some excerpts from Rickles' Vegas act but it also had musical numbers of him dancing with a line of showgirls. It was very...odd.
Greg Mitchell makes an interesting point on Stephen Colbert's speech at the White House Correspondents' Dinner: Yeah, maybe it was tasteless...but not as tasteless as Bush's speech at the 2004 event when he joked about not finding Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq.
Couple of folks wrote to ask what I thought of George W. Bush's speech/skit that preceded Stephen Colbert's the other night. I thought it was actually a clever idea. I suspect that it came about because someone at the White House said to someone else, "You know, Bush is at his worst when he's trying to be funny. If only we could bring in a stunt double for him to handle the comedy..."
Bush impersonator Steve Bridges did a good job. My mother, who has vision problems, said she couldn't tell looking at the TV which Bush was the real one. George W. probably deserves some credit for going along with the bit and doing some pretty self-deprecating material. I wouldn't have thought he had it in him.
It's tempting to read some subtext into a few of the lines. Bush has pretty well demonstrated that he doesn't think much of reporters, even the ones who report things his way, and I don't think it was untrue that he would rather have been somewhere else that evening. (Later, after Colbert, that seemed even more likely.) But as Freud should have said, sometimes a joke is just a joke.
Here's the video of the routine, which runs a little under eleven minutes...
Three years ago today, George W. Bush stood on the deck of an aircraft carrier and proclaimed "Major combat operations have ended" in Iraq. Since then, an additional 2,261 U.S. soldiers have been killed and another 16,927 have been wounded.
This one's too good to wait for tomorrow. I'm not sure where it's from...probably some early Showtime special. It's Don Rickles from Las Vegas with a very odd bunch of guest stars. The song is something Rickles did in his act for years (minus the cameo guests) especially during a period when he seemed to think audiences just wanted to see him sing and dance. The first time I saw him in Vegas, that's pretty much what he did and the talking portions of his stage time were taken up not by insults but by long discourses on how we should all get down on our knees every morning and thank God that he gave us Frank Sinatra. Don later got back more to the kind of thing that had made him famous, like calling people hockey pucks and saying they suck sap out of rubber trees.
You should recognize all of the cameo guests except maybe the guy with the tennis racket. It's Bobby Riggs, the famous tennis hustler who battled (and lost to) Billie Jean King in a vastly overhyped "battle of the sexes" match in 1973. This appearance was probably his sixteenth minute of fame.
The clip runs a little under four and a half minutes. You'll want to play it over and over and over...
This morning, we have another video of a great magician at work but before I get to it, I want to mention that Billy McComb passed away this afternoon following a long hospitalization. Everyone around the Magic Castle is saddened by the news since Billy was a great, wicked presence at the Castle as a performer, as a member of the Board, and as an endless fount of great stories. If you ever got to chat with the guy or see his act, you're probably saddened by the news, too.
Actually, I think I was sitting near Billy at the Castle the first time I saw Lance Burton perform. If I had to pick the best magician working today, I'd pick Mr. Burton. His show at the Monte Carlo hotel in Las Vegas is state-of-the-art magic, though I must admit I liked him even better when he was at the Hacienda. For five years, he did a low-budget, low-priced magic show there that substituted ingenuity, talent and plain ol' hard work for expensive spectacle. I saw it many times and it never failed to delight everyone in the house, including me.
That show opened as his current show opens: With Burton's championship "in one" routine, producing doves and lit candles from God-knows-where. He did at the Castle the first time I saw him there...and it's one thing to see non-magicians stare in awe at tricks; quite another to see some of the world's top magicians with their jaws hanging open. Someone called it the most perfect bit of stand-up magic ever done and if you saw the whole thing — which I recall as running around twelve minutes — you might well agree. I'm sorry he's trimmed it down but even the two and a half minute version in our clip today is pretty astounding work. Take a look and see if you can figure out where the birds come from. I mean, besides from eggs.
June 1, 2006
