Monday, January 1, 2007

Conversations

You have a wonderful resource available to you on Google Video. The Archive of American Television is uploading oral history interviews with dozens of important people in the history of broadcasting. You could waste spend hundreds of hours watching these and I'll suggest a good use of two. They've just put up an interview with everyone's favorite actor, Jack Lemmon. It's almost two hours in four parts and this link will take you a page where you can access each part. Excellent material, well worth your attention. And after you get done with that, check out some of the others they have up there. A number of people have asked me to write more about what Joe Barbera was like. There's three and a half hours over there of Joe Barbera discussing his career and it'll tell you so much more tha I ever could. Here's the link to that.

I should also mention that full episodes of The Charlie Rose Show are now available for free viewing on Google Video. They used to cost five bucks each to watch and now they're free. Here's a link that will search the library and show you what they have. It seems to take a few weeks to get shows up there. They don't have Rose's recent (and quite excellent) chat with Stephen Colbert, for instance. But you should find plenty there to watch.

• Posted at 11:41 PM · LINK

Robert Schaefer, R.I.P.

The prolific writer Robert Schaefer died December 14 at the age of 80 in his home in Laguna Woods, California. The cause of death is being reported as emphysema.

Schaefer was born in Salt Lake City, Utah but his family soon migrated to Hollywood, which is where he grew up. Initially, he wanted to be an engineer but a friendly English teacher encouraged him to pursue writing and, when he got out of the Navy, he did. He enrolled in a school for would-be professional writers and that's where he met Freiwald. Both men had uncles in the movie business. Scheafer's was producing TV shows and movies for Gene Autry while Freiwald's was directing for 20th Century Fox. Soon, via those connections, they began selling scripts and gaining a reputation for swift delivery of good, filmable material.

Their first sale was a teleplay for The Gene Autry Show and they soon followed it up with sales to The Adventures of Kit Carson, Tales of the Texas Rangers, Maverick, Whirlybirds, Texas John Slaughter, Zorro, 77 Sunset Strip, The Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok, Buffalo Bill Jr and many more. It was through their Gene Autry connection that Schaefer and Freiwald hooked up with Western Publishing Company and began writing at first the Gene Autry comic books, then comics of all kinds, including the Dell Comics versions of most of the TV shows on which they were concurrently working.

Between 1957 and 1965, they wrote approximately a comic book per week for Western, including many issues of Rawhide, Gunsmoke, Maverick, Zorro, Laramie, Lassie, The Real McCoys, The Restless Gun, Roy Rogers, Sea Hunt, Sugarfoot, Spin and Marty, Wagon Train, Ricky Nelson, Rin Tin Tin, Wyatt Earp and many more. They authored many of the comic book adaptations of Disney movies (The Parent Trap, The Shaggy Dog, The Absent-Minded Professor, etc.) and even dabbled occasionally in scripts for Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. Several of the early issues of the classic Magnus, Robot Fighter comic book were authored by Schaefer and Freiwald.

Obviously, they were particular favorites of the editors at Western Publishing. The senior editor there, Chase Craig, told me they were his most valuable writers, able to instantly grasp the essence of a new TV show that had to be turned into a comic book. In a 1979 interview, Craig said, "It was always difficult to get the people who produced a TV show to approve our scripts because, you know, we were outsiders and they couldn't believe we could write their characters. But they always loved what those guys did because, well, for one thing, Schaefer and Freiwald were probably writing the TV show, as well. And if they weren't already, the producers would read the comic book scripts and hire them to write the TV show."

Around 1964, Schaefer and Freiwald got too busy with the Lassie program to write many more scripts for Western. (They wrote 188 episodes of Lassie and Schaefer even had one of Lassie's pups as a housepet.) Schaefer retired from professional writing in 1984 after he and Freiwald completed a script for the Michael Landon show, Highway to Heaven. Freiwald continues to write for television, currently for the daytime drama, The Young and the Restless.

• Posted at 11:05 AM · LINK

Today's Video Link

As I wrote in this article, one of my heroes was the great ventriloquist, Paul Winchell. I watched every show he was on and I never saw him not be entertaining. When people write of the pioneers of television, they always mention Berle and Caesar and Steve Allen and forget about Winch, who was just as important as any of them.

Our link today is a whole half hour of The Paul Winchell-Jerry Mahoney Variety Show. I must admit I'm not sure which of his many shows this was. He had quite a few in the fifties and they were always changing names and switching back and forth between daytime and evening hours. I'm not even sure what year this is but I'll take a stab at late 1955 or early 1956.

I don't remember watching this particular episode when I was three or four...but I bet I did.

• Posted at 1:20 AM · LINK