So the O.J. Simpson "If I Did It (nudge nudge, wink wink)" specials and book are cancelled. Not surprising. I am curious, of course, to know if the same kind of money is still going to him or his kids or wherever it was going. Also, is the book cancelled or is Harper-Collins merely washing its hands of it? One assumes that there'll be some publisher out there eager to publish...or that at the very least, copies of the text will leak onto Ye Olde Internet.
Assuming the money is still being paid, I don't know that this is "good news" or (at least) as good as it would have been for the shows and book to appear and then be shunned and ignored. But there is something nice in the fact that it'll be quite some time before any respectable company thinks of getting into business with Simpson.
And was there really a "confession" involved in any of this? Did Simpson confess or was that something Judith Regan and her associates exaggerated in order to hype an ambiguous, highly speculative account of the murders? You have to wonder if the reason they cancelled the whole, sordid ball of wax was that someone in Rupert Murdoch's office looked over the shows and read the book and said, "We're selling this as Simpson's confession. If it was that, we'd go ahead with it...but it isn't enough of a confession to get us off the moral hook."
The Cartoon Network folks have set up a nice little webpage called Saturday Morning Forever which features classic Hanna-Barbera cartoons, most of which (I can't help but point out) never — or almost never — ran on Saturday morning. But there are some real goodies over there from the early days of H-B. This link will take you directly to a classic Quick Draw McGraw cartoon where you can thrill to the exploits of El Kabong as written by the great Michael Maltese and voiced by the incomparable Daws Butler and Don Messick.
The page loads slowly and you may have to sit through an ad or two. But hey, it's a free cartoon. How often do you get that these days? I mean, besides on my webpage. Thanks to Robert Spina for the tip.
Jerome Robbins was one of the great directors in the history of musical theater. Even people who had good and sufficient reason to detest him as a human being admired his prowess as a director. In 1989, as one of his final contributions to his art, he supervised the creation of Jerome Robbins' Broadway, a show comprised of scenes from his many shows.
It made for quite a wonderful evening in the theater and I always wondered why it didn't have a longer run — only 633 performances in New York, plus a touring company that I saw in L.A. At the time, Las Vegas was experimenting with the importation of Broadway hits and I thought it would be an ideal show for that town. It was full of familiar material — some of it a bit sexy — and it could be cut to almost any length by dropping this or that number. Perhaps there was a large nut involved in obtaining all the rights. In his autobiography, Arthur Laurents — who wrote the books for Gypsy and West Side Story — told of Robbins, with whom he did not get along when those shows were produced, having to come to him years later and humbly ask for permission to include scenes from them in the compilation. No doubt some of the authors took the opportunity to settle old personal issues with Robbins, but some probably demanded hefty sums.
Our clip today is a five minute sampler from Jerome Robbins' Broadway, which had a pretty good cast. If you look fast, you'll see Jason Alexander playing Pseudolus in the "Comedy Tonight" number from A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum and I think that's Charlotte D'Amboise as Peter Pan. I'm not sure why this little montage was assembled but I'm glad someone put it together.
November 21, 2006
