Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Dying To Be On The Emmy Awards

I may have said this last year but I'm glad I don't have the job of preparing the "In Memoriam" montage that runs on the Emmy Awards, especially this year. Someone has to go over a list of who in the history of television has passed on in the preceding twelve months and then decide who to leave out...knowing full well the family of the omitted will be sitting there, disappointed at the slight. Some loved ones have even been known to send in formal protests describing their hurt and/or anger.

Someone also has to decide who's the "biggie" that they'll use to close the montage. Another tough decision.

Want to play? Here's a partial list of folks in the TV business who've died in the last twelve months. I've left out between 20 and 30 people who might have made the rundown in a lean year. I skipped over movie people like Shelley Winters and recording artists like Gene Pitney and just left in those I think have a shot at it because they did a lot of television. There are 38 names here. Tell me which ones you'd leave out.

Don Adams, June Allyson, Lloyd Bochner, Red Buttons, Jean Byron, Hamilton Camp, Franklin Cover, Bob Denver, Robert Donner, Mike Douglas, Ralph Edwards, Tony Franciosa, Curt Gowdy, Skitch Henderson, Barnard Hughes, Don Knotts, Al Lewis, Pat McCormick, Darren McGavin, Pat Morita, Jan Murray, Sheree North, Louis Nye, Buck Owens, Richard Pryor, Lou Rawls, Charles Rocket, Nipsey Russell, Vincent Schiavelli, Wendie Jo Sperber, Maureen Stapleton, Robert Sterling, Harold J. Stone, Amzie Strickland, Jack Warden, Dennis Weaver, Lennie Weinrib and Jack Wild.

Difficult to pick, right? Ah, wait. It gets worse...because I was only listing performers there. The Academy has been making an attempt to also acknowledge the behind-the-scenes people. The list they had to pick from also included producers, directors, writers, composers and many others. There are potentially fifty more contenders in these categories but I'll be nice and only give you 13 more names to consider. You probably have to get at least a few of these in so as to not slight their professions...

Harvey Bullock, Dan Curtis, Marty Farrell, Bud Freeman, Bruce Johnson, Douglas Hines, Jerry Juhl, Gloria Monty, Michael Piller, Rick Rhodes, Richard Snell, Aaron Spelling and Mickey Spillane.

Now, some of those folks aren't all that well known but the Academy would be demeaning itself and its awards to skip over them. Rick Rhodes, for instance, was a composer who received 27 Emmy nominations and six awards. Are you going to not mention his passing on the Emmy telecast? How about Jerry Juhl, who received seven nominations and one statuette for his work with the Muppets? Make-Up Expert Richard Snell, editor Douglas Hines and game show producer Anne-Marie Schmitt all received multiple nominations and awards. Gonna leave them out? (Irony Alert: One of the names that probably will not be included is Marty Farrell...and the irony here is that Marty often wrote the Emmy Awards and in some years, may have had a hand in this decision.)

I am told that Aaron Spelling will be the subject of a separate tribute. The rest will all go into one montage and while I don't know how many people will be in it, there won't be 50. I'm guessing 20...25, tops. Beyond that, I have no predictions other than that I probably left out someone important...and the segment will probably end with Don Knotts. Everyone loved Don and he took home a load of them Emmy thingies (five!) in his career.

So study the list. You still have time to place a small wager.

• Posted at 6:58 PM · LINK

More on Sid 'n' Ernie

Want to listen to another interview with Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón talking about their graphic novel journalism version of The 9/11 Report? There's an audio segment with them over on the National Public Radio website at this link. The segment runs a little under eight minutes. Thank you, Quinton Buckley, for telling me about it.

• Posted at 4:18 PM · LINK

Recommended Reading

Bob Harris offers another bit of insight on Bush's press conference the other day. Harris peeks at the man's notes.

• Posted at 11:10 AM · LINK

The Burning Bush

As I mentioned here, I was appalled by George W. Bush's August 21 press conference. I don't think the guy's a very good president and I think almost every policy he's pursuing is exacerbating, not easing, the problems it was intended to solve. But this time, I was really stunned by his demeanor, his inability to defend his positions via coherent sentences and above all, his leaden attempts to josh with the press corps and to avoid serious answers via lighthearted faux friendliness. I kept waiting for at least one reporter to get up and say, "I don't mind the folksy banter, Mr. President, but I would like a real response to my question."

I think the Democrats are missing a bet (and there's a clause that's about as rare on the Internet as porn) by not opening up a website and just posting, without comment, videos of everything this man says and does. Let me show you what I mean.

Here's a link to the White House record of that press conference. There's a written transcript but it doesn't capture the panic in Bush's eyes or the desperation with which he tries to sell the Same Old Lines to a nation that has long since decided it ain't buying. You'll have to watch the video, which is also available on that page.

And while I'm at it: Am I the only one who can't get the videos on the C-Span site to play? I'm pretty good at navigating websites and I even understand the technologies involved in embedded and streaming video clips. I've now learned how to capture just about any clip and download it to my hard disk for posterity...but I can't even get the C-Span videos to open, and I've attacked them with three different browsers. I know C-Span operates on a budget of about eleven dollars a week, and that's including gas and electricity. But you'd think they could do better than to hire the guy who ran Joe Lieberman's website. Yeesh.

• Posted at 9:37 AM · LINK

Sid and Ernie

Here's a follow-up on this item about the new graphic novel interpretation of The 9/11 Report. Yesterday, Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón appeared on a five-minute Today Show segment, interviewed by NBC newsman David Gregory. Gregory introduced them as having created Casper the Friendly Ghost and Richie Rich (which they didn't) and challenged them a little with the notion that their depiction of what happened on 9/11 is offensive to some who lost loved ones on that day. I thought Sid and Ernie did a good job of rebutting that idea. (By the way, I haven't seen Ernie in a while. When did he turn into Christopher Walken?) A shorter version of the segment also ran last night on NBC Nightly News.

What's that? You want a link to the online video of The Today Show? Well, let's see if we can do this for you. I think this will connect you to it, at least for a day or two. I don't know how long they keep these up.

• Posted at 8:40 AM · LINK

Today's Video Link

We pause now for a commercial interruption. The Flintstones, who you'd think would know better, are still selling Winston cigarettes. Alan Reed is the voice of Fred, Mel Blanc is Barney Rubble and the little bird, and the voice on the record is Paul Frees in what I suspect is the first time he was ever connected with a Hanna-Barbera product. We'll be right back after this message...

• Posted at 12:22 AM · LINK

Smoking Hot Topic

The issue at hand (again) is the plan by Cartoon Network's British wing to cut many (not all) scenes of tobacco use out of classic cartoons. Over on Cartoon Brew, Amid Amidi asks the musical question, "If somebody tried to censor parts of a Picasso painting or a James Joyce story, there would be an uproar beyond belief. Animation, however, still doesn't merit similar consideration as Art, which is why the works of animation masters can be freely tinkered with and destroyed. When, if ever, will that change?"

My heart is in the same place as Amid's but my head — which I pray does not function like George W. Bush's "gut" — has some unfortunate answers. One biggie is that respect for art has to begin with the artist himself demanding (or at least, expecting) some level of respect. Years ago, when word got out that MGM planned to reanimate and redub parts of many Tom & Jerry cartoons to replace the black maid character, a lot of animation buffs were outraged. "Where's the respect?" they howled, and I recall talk of picket lines where we'd all put on the same kind of grotesque stockings that the black maid wore and we'd parade up and down in front of...

Well, I don't know where we'd have paraded. The plan never got that far, which was a shame because I'd have looked damned cute in those stockings. But then we heard that Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera had enthusiastically endorsed the changes and it seemed kind of inane to be picketing Hanna and Barbera for harming the work of Hanna and Barbera. A few years later, I arranged a night of Tex Avery cartoons up at U.C.L.A. with Tex present to answer questions. Several audience members tried to get him to say that he abhored the laundering of cartoons (his or anyone's) for present-day exhibition but Tex simply wouldn't say that. At one point, he suggested that if his cartoons were being shown to young kids — which had not been his intended audience when he made them — maybe they ought to have some of the more "violent" gags excised.

I remember the moment well. It's not every day you hear a hall full of Tex Avery worshippers actually boo Tex Avery.

Now, let me stop and defend those men for a moment: Their point-of-view might not have been mine but it was logical, especially to kids who'd grown up in the Depression era. Their goal was to keep the store open; to have the cartoons on the air and not withering in obscurity. It was important that the films continue to be exhibited and to make money. Maybe Tex's cartoons no longer made money for Tex but it reflected well on him that they made money for someone. He wasn't happy that certain, inexplicable edits were made in some cartoons but given the choice of being unedited and less commercial...or being cleansed and more commercial, Tex would have opted for the latter. Hanna and Barbera weren't proud of all the shows that were produced in their building, but doing Wheelie and the Chopper Bunch was preferable to closing the doors, laying people off and (by the way...) making fewer bucks.

Let me also point out that one aspect of this whole issue has gotten a lot better. I think it's a shame for great cartoons to be exhibited in edited, incomplete form...but back in the eighties and before, that's often all we had. Today, we can go out and buy uncut (usually) and nicely-restored (often) DVDs of what will probably soon be all the major theatrical cartoons ever produced in this country and most of the best done for television. Couldn't do that in 1977. The only version most folks could see of the 1951 Chuck Jones cartoon, Cheese Chasers, was the one CBS ran on Saturday morning. It was missing more than a minute, including its ending, and we worried then that the absent footage was lost and gone forever. That's no longer a concern; not with so many complete copies around on DVD.

So I have a little trouble getting too worked up over Cartoon Network UK cutting smoking scenes. I think it's dumb, especially because there's so little reason to do it at this time. There may never be even a solid financial reason to do it. But the cartoons are or will be around, unexpurgated, on home video...and besides, you don't see Joe Barbera objecting. He made the films now being edited and he's always had the clout to call the biggies at Time-Warner (or whoever owned his old films that week) and say, "Please don't do that to my work." But he never has. I love Joe. I worked with him for years and respect the hell outta him for many, many things...but even when he co-owned the whole studio and his word was the word of God, preserving the basic integrity of that work always took a back seat to marketing considerations. If they could have sold a new Jetsons show by making the characters Mexican, George and Jane would have been sporting sombreros in two seconds. I can't think of too many places in the mainstream American animation industry where that wouldn't have happened.

So to answer Amid's pained and admirable query: The reason the works of the animation masters can be tampered with so freely is that the animation masters never objected. Some of them even helped. That the situation is marginally better in live-action movies is because powerful directors, writers and actors and their unions have occasionally insisted on creative rights and creative controls, even if it means foregoing some sources of revenue.

Which brings us to the one thing that will change the practice of chopping up cartoons for new purposes and sensibilities. It will cease when consumers begin demanding the work be treated with more respect. Along the food chain, the only folks with more juice than the people who make the product is the ones who make it profitable. It will stop when customers become more demanding of better restorations and no cleansing of cartoons, ethnic or otherwise. I'm fantasizing of a day when someone high up in Time-Warner turns to someone else at Time-Warner and says, "Ratings [or sales] are way down because of that tampering we did. Have the guys in the vault haul out the negatives and restore everything."

That will happen if the marketplace demands it. Because even the most mercenary, insensitive ruiner of cartoons will give up the practice if there's no money in it.

Okay...enough chit-chat. Let's watch Fred and Barney pushing more cancer sticks on the children of America...

• Posted at 12:22 AM · LINK