Monday, September 4, 2006

Jerry Blogging, Jerry Blogging...

I think I'm on Hour 15 now. Ed McMahon is back as announcer and Larry King is back to host, not in a tux and not even wearing a funny hat.

We seem to be in a crying hour...people tearing up as they talk of how Muscular Dystrophy or some allied affliction devastated someone's life. I feel better fast-forwarding through these segments since I made my pledge.

A corporate head just handed Larry King a check for $3,000,000. Larry asked the guy tougher questions than he's asked George W. Bush in six years. I also note that Larry's better than Jerry Lewis when it comes to sounding enthusiastic as you introduce a performer you never heard of before.

The Drifters/Coasters/Platters act returns and this time, someone actually manages to mention that they're appearing at the Sahara. These performers are not only good but they've been up all night. They deserve at least a bit of a plug. Looks like they even have a relatively full audience out there to play to, as well. They sing all different songs except for the finale which is, again, "Shout." Ever since National Lampoon's Animal House, it's a felony to not close any R&B oldies performance with that number. Matter of fact, I hear that Kitty Carlisle Hart — who just turned 96 and is still performing — closes her act with that. And then for an encore, she brings out a sledge hammer and smashes a watermelon.

43 minutes into what my clumsy math says is Hour 17, Jerry returns, tanned and rested. He kids around with the producer about the fact that apparently the dancers from the Folies Bergeres at the Tropicana are a no-show. Then he brings out Dean's daughter, Deana Martin, and they sing a duet: The return of Martin and Lewis. Over $37 million now.

The guys from Pittsburgh in the funny hats are back, this time with Jerry. Jerry asks them how long they've been with him on his telethons. One of them replies, "Fifty-one years, Jer," which means they go back with him to when the telethons were local in New York. Jerry says, "And for fifty-one years, you guys have never chosen to fix those damned hats." They give him a check for $425,000 anyway.

18 and a half hours into the telethon, Jerry bring on my pal, Ronn Lucas, who is only the best ventriloquist working today. Ronn gets a decent time slot and a good, personalized introduction. It's a good spot. David Letterman is about to do a week of ventriloquists on his show, probably not because he likes that kind of act but because he thinks they'll be easy to make fun of. I hope they'll book Ronn and I hope Dave lets him just do what does so well.

• Posted at 10:12 PM · LINK

Union News

The Writers Guild isn't making much/any progress gaining coverage of folks who write "reality shows" like America's Top Model...but they have managed to secure representation of writers on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart. Here are a few (but only a few) more details. This is quite an achievement, given how elusive Comedy Central has been on this issue. One assumes The Colbert Report can't be far behind.

AFTRA, the union that represents on-air performers, is also about to announce a pact with Comedy Central and The Daily Show.

• Posted at 6:58 PM · LINK

Back to Jerryless Jerry Blogging

Jerry's still asleep so Tom Bergeron has the com, as they used to say on Star Trek. (Keep in mind that I'm commenting on what's on my TiVo, which is many hours behind what's on live TV. Actually, I think the telethon is over by now but us TiVo owners no longer live in the cruel world where shows start and finish when the stations broadcast them.)

From Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the heads of the Tall Cedars, a group connected somehow with Cedars of Lebanon, have sent representatives. The Supreme Tall Cedar (that's how he's introduced) and an associate have come on to wear funny hats and present Jerry (Tom, actually) with their first check for $300,000. I now see the fashion faux pas I've been making every time I've put on a tuxedo. I've been neglecting to also wear a funny hat. You won't catch me making that mistake again.

Whoa! We're well into Hour 12, I think it is, and suddenly an act is being introduced by Larry King. Where did he come from? No one introduced him. It's just like, all of a sudden, Larry King out of nowhere. He's wearing a tux but no funny hat. He introduces one small-name act and disappears. It's up to Bergeron to introduce a man billed, probably justifiably, as the World's Fastest Balloon Sculptor.

It's kinda like Host Roulette up there. Sometimes, it's Bergeron, Kelly Monaco and/or Bob Zany. Sometimes, it's a pre-tape with Jerry. A fellow named Billy Gilman is shouldering some of the heavy lifting/introducing, while Norm Crosby just popped up again to bring out Robert Goulet. I still don't understand what the hell Larry King was doing there as emcee for all of six minutes. Goulet, in a segment obviously taped earlier, sings a very Vegas version of "On the Street Where You Live" and a less Vegasy "The Impossible Dream." The guy looks pretty good, especially considering he's wearing a tux and no funny hat.

• Posted at 6:32 PM · LINK

Still More Jerry Blogging

They're losing the narrative thread. Top of Hour 9, Tom Bergeron engages in banter with two Muppet-style puppets, then the latter perform their version of "Bohemian Rhapsody." It's a nice act but I went back and forth on the TiVo and couldn't find any mention of who the puppets were or where they appear or anything of the sort.

They're followed by Barry Manilow singing "I Write the Songs" with voiceover intro by Jerry and cutaways to him waving one of those glowing wands that Manilow audiences wave. It's a clip from a previous telethon but you have to figure that out. Then, fifteen minutes into Hour 9, Ed McMahon announces they're live from Las Vegas...and there's Jerry. Is he back from his nap? No, this is what I saw earlier, when I was up in the middle of the night. They're rerunning material from earlier in the telethon. Interestingly, I don't see any shots of the tote board and I think they've edited out the moments when Jerry and Ed go to check how much they've collected so far.

Shortly after the top of Hour 10, Jerry mysteriously disappears and we're back with Tom Bergeron, Kelly Monaco and Bob Zany...and I guess it's live because we're again seeing the tote board, which is up over 15 million. Still, it must be a snooze for the live audience in Vegas. Half the acts being shown are pre-tapes and between them, there are long stretches of pitches for MDA that are also pre-taped. Bergeron finally brings on Teri Ralston, a wonderful Broadway performer who was in the original production of Company. She offers up a nice preview of a new Broadway-bound show she's doing, Hats. Good performance, terrible time slot.

She's followed (after some plugs) by the ladies of "Fantasy," a show at the Luxor. Usually, I think they have their tops off when they do this number.

If you're going to record any part of this show next year, try to snag the wee small hours of the morning. It's an odd lineup of acts, mostly from Vegas, some of them quite good. I'm watching the performers who drew that coveted 4 AM time slot. Their intro was a bit fuzzy but I think it's the show from the big room at the Sahara in Las Vegas, which is called "The Platters, Beary Hobb's Drifters and Cornell Gunter's Coasters." I'm guessing lawyers worked that out because none of these folks were in the original Drifters or Coasters, and maybe one sang at one time with the Platters. By any name, it's a band of very talented black singers who get the crowd up and dancing to hits of the fifties...

...or at least, the crowd that's there. The audience is pretty enthusiastic — what there is of one. The performers sing "Shout" and try to get everyone up and dancing...but there's only so much you can do with empty seats.

Tom Bergeron is showing us scenes from Las Vegas, explaining how many streets are named for the great entertainers who've played the town. One throughfare was recently named (or maybe renamed) Jerry Lewis Way and the nice thing, he notes, is that it intersects with Dean Martin Boulevard. There's gotta be a joke there: Yeah, and then they split off and don't come together for the next thirty-five years. By the way, Dean Martin Boulevard is the only street in the world where you can get arrested for not driving drunk.

More reruns from earlier in the evening when Jerry was there live. I have to go do stuff so I may not get back to the Love Network for a while. I hope it doesn't read like I'm putting the telethon down because I'm really enjoying it, especially with fast-forwarding. I'll write more about it later.

• Posted at 12:51 PM · LINK

Today's Political Comment

Kevin Drum, one of my favorite political bloggers, brings us this chart of how median incomes have dropped across the U.S. in the last six years. It's a wonderful answer for those Bush backers who wonder why, with the economy doing "so well," more Americans don't give the administration credit for a great recovery. Maybe it's because it isn't reaching most of them.

I dunno why the Democrats don't build the second tier of their '06 campaign around this issue. The first tier, of course, would be Iraq and whatever other countries we're about to invade. But I can sure imagine a commercial that flashes photos of those execs (especially at oil companies) who are taking home a million bucks a day. Precede it with a quick soundbite of Bush saying how great the economy's doing, then show the execs as a voiceover intones, "It is...but only for Bush's billionaire cronies." Then tick off the list of states from that chart: Down 11.3 in North Carolina, down 12 in Michigan, down 10.4 in Oregon, etc.

It used to be the economy, stupid. Now, it's the war, stupid...and by the way, the economy, too. I'm going back to watching the telethon.

• Posted at 12:03 PM · LINK

Monday Morning Jerry Blogging

Actually, I seem to be Norm Crosby Blogging right now as I catch up with my TiVoed recording of the telethon. Jerry seems to have gone away halfway through Hour 4 and Norm is hosting. The corporate donors can't be that thrilled to be making their appearances to donate million dollar checks to Crosby instead of to Jerry...and in the middle of the night, no less. I'm guessing it's a trade-off deal: "Okay, I'll do 3 AM with Norm but you have to give me prime-time with Jerry for my next two checks."

If anyone ever sets up a Wikipedia page to define "tough room," they could link to a clip of Bob Zany's performance.

The local telethon segment is hosting a stunt they do each year that always struck me as a tacky context for fund-raising. Over the last few weeks, we are told, criminally big-hearted folks were arrested by MDA deputies and locked up in hoosegows throughout Southern California. They were given cell phones — I think that's supposed to be a pun — to call out and raise bail to earn their release. They fought the law but MDA was the winner. That's right: It's the MDA Telethon Executive Lock-Up and we see mug shots (most behind bars and in prison garb) of business folks who agreed to be prisoners until they could get their associates to donate some undetermined amount of cash to the cause. The background music for the mug shots is "I Fought the Law and the Law Won." I can sure understand why people want to raise money for MDA; just not why someone thought it would be cute to cast them in the role of crooks trying to save their own skins.

Speech after speech urges us to feel compassion and concern for people — children, especially — afflicted with Muscular Dystrophy...and I do. But there are some TelePrompter readings that also make me concerned for the health of Ed McMahon and, on the local segments in Los Angeles, Casey Kasem.

Six and a half hours in and much of the hosting job passes, without fanfare, over to Bob Zany and Tom Bergeron. They're announcing the telethon has topped the eleven million dollar mark. I'm not sure if my donation, made online at the MDA website, will be counted in there.

I think we need a new telethon to find a cure for Louie Anderson's tie.

Louie's performance, along with Bob Zany's, redirects my compassion to comedians who have to work a cold audience that's heavily distracted and sitting way too far from the microphones. Given the house, he does pretty well but it's sharper material than the laughs we're hearing at home would indicate. A writer friend of mine, the late Gary Belkin, used to point to comedians on TV and say, "Lost eyes," meaning that they were getting no sense of audience response and didn't know where to look, who to play to. We could send out a search party for Louie's eyes...that is, assuming they weren't distracted by the tie.

When Bob Zany (who's lost a ton of weight) comes over to thank Louie, it looks like the after-and-before in one of those Leptopril commercials.

I'm TiVoing rapidly through the charity pitches and watching the acts. There are some pretty good ones even if the live audience doesn't seem to know it. There's nothing deader than a Las Vegas audience that didn't pay to get in. I'll report back later.

• Posted at 10:45 AM · LINK

Middle of the Night Jerry Blogging

And I just peeked at what's going on...and what's going on is that they're rerunning earlier hours of the telethon. Is this something new? It's been a few years since I tried to watch the whole thing and back then, they did twenty hours to fill a twenty hour telethon even though it meant others sitting in the host chair while Jerry got his beauty sleep. Is this how they do it now? They do some hours and then they rerun them? Even though the tote board is far, far behind reality?

Okay, good night again. This time, for real.

• Posted at 3:06 AM · LINK

Note to Self

When you get up in the morning, phone your friend of 35+ years, cartoonist Scott Shaw! Discuss the comic book story the two of you have agreed to do together for an upcoming special anthology and for God's sake, wish the guy a happy birthday! In fact, maybe you can post something cute on your site saying it's Happy Scott Shaw Day...that is, if you can figure out where the exclamation point goes in that phrase. And while you're at it, plug his website, Oddball Comics, and tell people it's full of the zaniest, wackiest comic book covers ever and that they'll have a great time if they click on over and read some of his Oddball Comics Commentaries.

I can't believe I actually got out of bed to post the above. Good night again.

• Posted at 3:00 AM · LINK

More Jerry Blogging

Okay, Mark is confused again. It's the top of Hour 4 where I am and Jerry's getting emotional. He's paying tribute to a woman who used to work for him...Lil Mattis. He describes her as "one of the best lyricists that I had ever heard in our business." It's not clear if she passed away or just left his employ, though his manner would suggest the former. To honor her, he sings "Even Now," a song made famous by Barry Manilow. At the end, he shouts, "Lil Mattis...she wrote that!"

Did she? Really?

I mean absolutely no disrespect to Ms. Mattis but the official songwriter credits for "Even Now," as listed on the sheet music and in the BMI Database, say it was written by Marty Panzer and Barry Manilow. Ms. Mattis was a member of ASCAP and a search of their listing for Lillian Mattis lists only eight songs, including a couple of Jerry Lewis movies and TV shows, along with the lyrics to the title song of the Jack Lemmon movie, How to Murder Your Wife. "Even Now" is not listed among her credits.

So what's the deal here? Did Jerry just pay tribute to Lil Mattis by singing a tune she had nothing to do with and giving her credit for it? Or did he just reveal that she ghost wrote that song and others took credit for it?

Changing subjects slightly: It's hard not to notice that Jerry Lewis has two modes for introducing performers. When he's introducing a pal, he's smiling and loose and urging everyone to go see them and obviously not paying a lot of attention to what's on the TelePrompter. But then along comes an act that's just an act to him, if that. He introduces The Village People with an unenthusiastic reading of the prepared text with no personal Lewis recommendation or plug...and then at the end of a performance pre-taped elsewhere, he doesn't thank them, doesn't say anything at all about them. It's off to the tote board.

Then again, the guys in the once-outrageous costumes who just sang "Macho Man" and "Y.M.C.A." are The Village People in the same sense that Steve Martin is Inspector Clouseau. I'm guessing one original member...two at most.

Okay, here comes Lance Burton. I'm going to watch one of the best magicians in the world, then go to bed. TiVo's getting it all down and I'll resume Jerry watching/blogging tomorrow. Nighty-night.

• Posted at 2:23 AM · LINK

Today's Video Link

Did you ever wonder what the toys are doing when no one is watching? Yeah, me neither. But if you're my age or thereabouts (I'm 54 physically, 6 emotionally), you might recall this commercial. Or have had your very own Popeye jack-in-the-box.

(Quick aside: This is my second link to a new video site called Veoh. They offer a program which you can download to your computer and then it will download videos to your hard drive for you. There are some slightly suspicious things about this downloading software. On my system, it kept loading itself into memory and running in the background even when I didn't want it there, so I deleted it. I don't know if it's unsafe or if it was just some anomaly with my computer. Until such time as folks who know more about this kind of thing than I do weigh in, you might want to proceed with caution regarding the Veoh software...but the watching of online videos should be safe.)

• Posted at 12:31 AM · LINK

Jerry Blogging

Jerry keeps saying it's his fortieth MDA telethon but the website says it's the 41st. My pal Earl Kress phoned to explain why Lewis said it was his 56th telethon. It started as a local event in New York and later went national. So it's his 56th (or so) telethon but his 40th national telecast, give or take a couple. Before Earl called, I was further confused as Jer welcomed some firefighters by saying, "These guys have been with me on the telethon for 52 years." These were New York City firefighters so they started with him on the local broadcasts.

I don't know why I care about this, either.

Jerry just introduced the next musical act...Gary Lewis and the Playboys. How'd they arrange that booking?

• Posted at 12:30 AM · LINK