Thursday, December 7, 2006

me on the radio

This is the third of at least three, maybe four plugs for my appearance this very day on Shokus Internet Radio. I'll be grilled unmercifully by your digitial deejay, Stuart Shostak, on Stu's Show, which airs live from 7 PM to 9 PM on the East Coast and from 4 PM to 6 PM on the West Coast. We'll talk about working on TV shows and writing comic books and cartoons and all those things I pass off as a career. I'll probably make some really embarrassing, scandalous confession like about how I got Dick Cheney's daughter pregnant or something. Maybe I'll even tell the story — and this is a real one — about how Jack LaLanne took a swing at me one night in Musso-Frank's. I lead such a colorful life.

Here's how you listen to Shokus Internet Radio. Click over to this page and select one of the audio browsers. Once you get there, you can minimize the Live365 window and use your computer to do other things — write, surf for porn, play Sudoku, whatever — while you listen. Knowing you, you'll probably do all of those while you listen. Well, you can. In fact, you can do all those things and listen to Shokus Internet Radio 24 hours a day, not just when I'm on the air. Give it a whirl. Won't cost you anything.

• Posted at 3:08 AM · LINK

Today's Video Link

Six minutes more of cereal commercials. These all feature George Reeves as Clark Kent...but not as Superman. (It was decided that Clark could do commercials but not The Man of Steel.) Here we see him wandering around, walking into strange kids' homes and eating breakfast. We also hear the guy who was the voice of Tony the Tiger before Thurl Ravenscroft. Enjoy.

• Posted at 1:24 AM · LINK

Grammer Lesson

TV scribe Ken Levine has a very fine blog in which he discusses his experiences working on shows like Cheers and M*A*S*H. He's currently on vacation and he's turned the floor over to another TV writer, Peter Casey, who's relating his version of how the Frasier series came about. Here's the first part of his recollections and here's the second.

• Posted at 1:23 AM · LINK

About Peter Leeds...

See that man? That's Peter Leeds, a wonderful character actor who passed away a little more than ten years ago. He was in a lot of things you saw. Matter of fact, someone told me — I can't swear this is true but it sure wouldn't surprise me if it is — that there were several years when he worked more days than any other member of the Screen Actors Guild. His listing in the Internet Movie Database has more than 170 movies and TV roles and I'd bet that's less than a tenth of them, plus it doesn't list commercials, radio shows, records and cartoon voiceovers.

Peter worked constantly...and yet, if you didn't know him by name, there's no way I could describe to you who he was. I could mention Roger C. Carmel (another character actor who worked constantly) and if you didn't know him by name, I could say, "He played the character Mudd on two episodes of Star Trek" and a lot of you would go, "Oh yeah, that guy." But for all the hundreds, even thousands of roles Peter Leeds played, he never had one that defined him that way. He played agents, cops, con men, gangsters...almost any kind of part you can imagine. But he never played anything that was so colorful and memorable that it defined him thereafter.

Mostly, he was a straight man...maybe the best of his era. Lucille Ball was always telling her producers to hire him for her shows. Bob Hope hired Peter constantly, not only to play interviewers or official-type people on his specials but he took Peter along on military tours to play opposite him in sketches. (At Peter's memorial service, a lady who'd gone on one of those tours choked up as she told a story of Peter taking charge and getting her and other performers get out of a particularly nasty situation when their troupe got too near enemy fire.) Stan Freberg used Peter on his radio show and many of his records. He was the bongo-drumming beatnik on Stan's recording of The Banana Boat Song, for instance.

And Carson loved him. People forget how many comedy sketches Johnny Carson did on The Tonight Show but he did a lot of 'em and Peter was often the serious guy in them. The above screen grab is from a skit where Johnny played a Mafia type who was interviewing for a position in some other line of work. Peter played the man interviewing him for a job.

I got that image from an episode of Carson's Comedy Classics, which is a syndicated show that Carson's company packaged in 1983 and which they're running now on a small UHF channel in Los Angeles. The programs contain sketches and comedy highlights from The Tonight Show so they contain a lot of Peter Leeds. At the beginning of each show, they billboard the guest stars who appear in the segments and the other night, they ran one that gave star billing to Peter. Here's a screen grab of it...

Sometimes, odd things make me smile and that made me smile. Peter was a working actor for well over fifty years and that's one of the few times, maybe the only time anyone gave him the same kind of billing they'd give Bob Hope or Lucy or other stars he supported. I rolled back the TiVo and froze it on Peter's name for a few seconds, just looking at it and thinking, "Look at that...Peter Leeds being treated like a star." He was a star, of course...he did great work and everyone who hired him knew that because they hired him again and again and again. But they never gave him star billing and when I saw one time they did, I thought, "That's great. I'm going to put that on the weblog." Why? Because I liked seeing it and it's my weblog. And also because I wanted there to be some page on the Internet that would tell the world how good Peter Leeds was. If you Googled his name and got this page, now you know.

• Posted at 12:37 AM · LINK