Saturday, September 30, 2006

Another Pendragon Miracle

The other day here, I linked to a video clip of Jonathan and Charlotte Pendragon performing an amazing feat of magic. Jonathan would seem to have done the impossible again, surviving what would usually have been a fatal injury.

According to a message that Charlotte just posted to a magician's discussion forum, Jonathan was attempting to hang a light fixture when he fell onto the non-sharp end of an arrow from his archery set. The arrow pierced his stomach, his liver, an artery and went several inches in his heart. He underwent several hours of surgery, some of it of the open-heart variety, and is now recovering. Charlotte credits his survival to "speed of hospitalization, modern surgical techniques and Jonathan's will to live."

I'm happy to hear he's going to be around for a while. I've had the pleasure of spending time with Jonathan and he's one of the real gems in the field of magic — dedicated to his craft, brilliant at inventing new illusions and generous with his time and talents. Let's all send good thoughts in his direction. As soon as he's back on a stage somewhere, try and go see him.

• Posted at 9:55 PM · LINK

Saturday Evening Musing

Okay, so Bob Woodward wrote a book a few years ago that made George W. Bush out to be a decisive leader. The White House even recommended that people read the book in order to know the "real" Bush.

Now, Woodward's written a book that makes Bush out to be a pretty bad leader...one who ignored or isolated himself from good advice and who now presides over a military situation that's in chaos. (The book is entitled State of Denial: Bush at War, Part Three and that's an Amazon link to buy it, hint hint.)

So what happened here? Was Woodward accurate in the previous book and he's got it all wrong now? Was he wrong then and now he's wised up? Is there any way both portraits could be correct? I imagine both could be wrong but that's quite a contortion. Does Woodward suggest that George W. has undergone a massive change of personality and integrity in the last few years? Somebody help me here.

The book is just now getting out, just now being read. The last few days, we've seen people debating it on the basis of a few excerpts that have hit the Internet. Last night on The Tonight Show, Jay Leno and Bill O'Reilly discussed it and I don't think either had even read the excerpts, let alone the whole book.

So far, without benefit of actually knowing what Woodward wrote, the pro-Bush camp has tried suggesting that Woodward's earlier book was a work of integrity and that now that Bush-bashing is in vogue, he's gone that route because there's money in it. The anti-Bush crowd is throwing out the idea that Woodward was conned by Bush and hypnotized by Karl Rove before, but that he's finally snapped out of it and wised up. I don't know about you but I don't buy any of these explanations.

Mr. Woodward is making a promotional tour for the book. In the next week or so, he'll be on more shows than Brad Garrett...which makes sense because Woodward is funnier. Presumably, someone will ask him to reconcile his two versions of the current White House occupant. I'm curious to hear what he has to say.

• Posted at 8:07 PM · LINK

Today's Video Link

I've decided to extend our "Festival of Great Moments in Sitcom Humor" a few more days so this is not the end of it. Today's clip is from one of the funniest half-hours ever done for TV, and you really need to see the whole half-hour. It's available on this DVD which I highly recommend.

It's an episode of a show known at various times as You'll Never Get Rich, The Phil Silvers Show and Sgt. Bilko. By any name, it was Phil Silvers giving a glorious performance as M/Sgt. Ernest T. Bilko, flim-flamming all who could be flim-flammed. This installment was called either (depending on what you read) "The Court-Martial" or "The Trial of Harry Speakup" or "The Case of Harry Speakup" or "The Court-Martial of Harry Speakup." I've seen it every which way. It first aired on March 6, 1956 and the writing was credited to Nat Hiken (creator of the series and its main director and head writer), Arnie Rosen and Coleman Jacoby. I actually worked with Arnie Rosen on one of my first TV writing jobs and was somehow then unaware that he'd worked on Sgt. Bilko. Wish I'd known because I'd have asked him about it. Then again, he was more interested in pressing matters like writing the show we were doing and having me fired.

The premise of the episode is that Bilko's Army Base is trying out some new techniques to speed up the process by which new inductees receive their physicals, take their written tests and get sworn in as soldiers. Via a plot twist you'll learn about when you see the whole show, a chimpanzee gets into the assembly line and before anyone notices, he is inducted. He also somehow gets a name. When someone tells him to "Hurry! Speak up!", another person thinks the recruit has said his name is Harry Speakup.

This will be humiliating to the officers if it isn't hushed up fast. The trouble is that due to red tape, the only way to get rid of the Harry Speakup problem is to court-martial the chimp and throw him out of the Army. Bilko is appointed to serve as Private Speakup's counsel in the trial that you're about to see.

One of the many interesting things about the Bilko program was that even though it was done on film, they tried to treat it as much as possible like a live performance. They barely stopped filming between scenes and often, if someone bobbled a line or things went wrong, they left it in. There are a number of instances when actors — most notably Paul Ford, who was otherwise so good as Colonel Hall — forgot important lines and someone else — usually Silvers, who had a fast mind and a great memory — would ad-lib around the problem. Silvers often improvised during the show and he had to ad-lib a lot in this scene because the trained chimp didn't always do what he was supposed to. At one point, Mr. Speakup ran over to grab a prop telephone and Phil came up with a terrific explanation right on the spot. (His quick wit caused a few of the actors to almost break up. At several points in the scene, you can see some of them trying to stifle or hide laughter. Especially watch the kid at left playing a guard.)

If you're interested in understanding how much the actors ad-libbed and paraphrased, we have a link for you. Many of the scripts, including this one, were published in paperback form in 1957. One website has scanned the relevant pages of that paperback and posted them here. You'll need something that can read an Adobe PDF file but you probably have just such a program on your computer already.

Okay...so the Army inducted a monkey and now they're trying to have a trial so they can kick the monkey out of the Army, and Bilko is the monkey's lawyer. Perfectly logical. Here's the scene...

• Posted at 1:45 AM · LINK