Okay, I've sent you towards enough bad movies lately. Let me make it up to you by recommending a great one. Wednesday evening, Turner Classic Movies is running Billy Wilder's rarely-seen masterpiece, The Big Carnival. When Wilder made it, it was called Ace in the Hole but the studio didn't like that title. They apparently didn't like the movie, either, and it was released under a couple of other names, as well.
You're going to have to get yourself in the right frame of mind for this one because it brings on-screen cynicism to a new peak. Almost everyone in the film is slime, especially Kirk Douglas in the lead. He plays a rotten-to-the-core reporter who doesn't believe in letting minor things like truth or other folks' lives get in the way of a hot, career-advancing story. His tactics got him booted out of mainstream journalism and exiled to a small-time newspaper in New Mexico. While there, he happens upon a mining accident and decides to hype it into the news story of the year. Given what's happened with cable news the last few years, with the exploitation of O.J. and Jon Benet and Condit and all the rest, it's amazing no one thought to remake or even rerun Wilder's prescient movie.
But no. It's been hard to find. There have been a few home video releases, not necessarily legal. If it's run on TV in the last decade or so, I managed to miss it. The tape I have is from a broadcast so long ago that it's full of commercials for defunct products.
The one time I met Wilder, I asked him about the film but he didn't want to discuss it. It was a painful memory, a failed project, a movie for which he'd received undeserved grief. He'd talk at length about The Apartment but not about The Big Carnival (or, as he called it, Ace in the Hole). He didn't even want to hear me tell him that it would someday be hailed as a classic. The only real thing he did say was that the studio wanted him to put a happy ending on it, which proved they didn't understand it one bit. It's one of those films where the only conceivable happy ending is that you walk out when it's over and think, "Thank God that didn't happen to me." And then you go home and take a couple of showers to try and wash off the general smarminess.
This article by Bruce Bennett will give you more background on the film and the real-life tragedy that inspired it. But if you've never seen the film, maybe you'd be wise to wait and read nothing more about it before you do. And for God's sake, don't watch it when you're in a good mood you don't want to spoil.
Political blogger Ezra Klein makes an important point about the current flurry of polls adjudging Hillary's chances versus Barack's versus Joe's, et al. At this point in the '04 race, Joe Lieberman was the front-runner for the Democratic nomination, followed by Gephardt and Edwards. And a commenter notes that in February of '91, the eventual nominee (Bill Clinton) was in eleventh place.
The current polling may be equally meaningless...which is kind of an exciting prospect. I think the person currently in eleventh place for the Democratic presidential nomination is me.
I live a few miles from a portion of Los Angeles known as Culver City. Although it's presently going through a heavy influx of new businesses and structural upgrades, there are still a lot of old buildings in Culver City, which makes it a delight for us Laurel and Hardy buffs. The Hal Roach Studio was located there and though it's long gone, you can still spot a lot of the street locations where Stan and Ollie filmed. Several are strikingly identifiable from their old films even 70-80 years later.
Piet Schreuders is a designer and pop culture historian. Not long ago, he did extensive research of the area, as you'll see in this clip. You'll also see a little of what he did with it, which was to create a computer model of the main streets of Culver City, regressed to the era when Laurel and Hardy filmed there. This runs a little less than five minutes and some of it is in Dutch but you'll get the idea. Thanks to Don Brockway for sharing this with us.
More on the booking of Rich Little for that Correspondents' dinner. He disavows remarks in the earlier article to which I linked, and the guy who booked him says that he was turned down by David Letterman, Jay Leno, Martin Short and Billy Crystal. Some interesting comments in there from Lewis Black, as well. Here's the article.
I enjoy reading your blog as often as I can. As a high school film and television teacher, it is nice to get an inside perspective on some of the industry goings-on and the people within the business. I learn as much, often, as my students do.
One question I have been pondering for the last few months...what are your thoughts on Bob Barker, his career, his retirement, and the future
of The Price is Right? (I have noticed that you have referenced Barker only a handful of times in your entries the last few years, and
none of those times have you been overly flattering toward him.) Just curious.
Well, my thoughts on Bob Barker are that he deserves a mass quantity of kudos for sheer endurance but I haven't been able to enjoy the show in years. At some point, the focus changed from Bob playing pricing games with the audience to Bob encouraging the audience to slobber over him. I never liked the guy or Truth or Consequences back when he hosted that program because both exuded a condescending approach towards the contestants. I liked him when he started on The Price is Right because that manner was not in evidence. And then at some point, it crept back in and I stopped watching. The program also lost a lot of its nice family "feel" because of announcers dying and models being replaced.
CBS is still trying to pick a replacement. This coming Thursday, they're taping a couple of "audition" shows which will not be broadcast, testing out three potential hosts — Doug Davidson, Todd Newton and John O'Hurley. I'm not sure why they're auditioning Davidson, who hosted a 1994 syndicated version of The Price is Right that didn't make it — presumably, they know how he'd handle the job — but they are. Mr. O'Hurley has just been announced for the role of King Arthur in the Las Vegas company of Spamalot that opens March 31. Presumably, he has an out clause in his contract there in case he gets Price and can't juggle both gigs.
I have no idea who they'll get but I suspect the show won't last in its present daytime slot. I think it's long since run its course and that a lot of viewers who've been watching from force of habit will take the departure of Barker as an appropriate point to hop off. However, it's been such a money-maker that CBS will do everything possible to keep it afloat and if they give up, its owners will keep throwing it at us in new venues and new formats much the way Hollywood Squares and Family Feud never seem to go away. It also wouldn't surprise me if someone is working on a way to retool The Price is Right as a prime-time entry with the look and feel (and payoffs) of Deal or No Deal.
Hey, did I ever post my one Bob Barker anecdote here? It occurred at a car wash on Highland, just south of Sunset in Hollywood. One day in the mid-eighties, I was getting my auto debugged there and found myself standing next to Mr. Barker, who was waiting for the guys with the blue rags to finishing swabbing down his car. His was a big Lincoln Continental, as I recall. Anyway, I motioned towards the men drying our vehicles and told him, "They don't like it when you tip them in Plinko chips."
I thought that was a pretty funny line but Barker looked at me like I'd just made Number One on his shoes. The incident didn't sour me on him and his show but it was indicative of the attitude that did. I'll bet we could have had a nice chat if I'd just told him he was the greatest thing to happen to television since the invention of the remote control.
January 22, 2007
