This is another one of those "If I Ran the Oscars" posts. I've already said I'd get rid of the backstage antics and the little trivia facts as the winners head for the stage. Another thing I'd do is get more movie stars there. There may be one or two exceptions to this but it seems to me that every celeb in the place last night was either a presenter or a nominee. In years past, if I remember my Oscars accurately, the audience shots showed a nice cross section of Hollywood, including many folks who were not there to get up on the stage at some point. They were there because it was the Academy Awards and that gave a certain importance to the proceedings.
I would also not announce all the presenters in advance and I'd try to get some big surprises in that area. It was nice that Jack Nicholson presented Best Picture with Diane Keaton but by that point, I think we'd seen Mr. Nicholson about eighty times during the broadcast. They kept cutting to him in the audience and people were chatting with him from the stage. I'd have kept him backstage until he made his entrance to present, the better to make that an arresting moment. I also would have tried to find at least one or two presenters who represented "Old Hollywood," whatever that is today. (I think it's the eighties but maybe we could go back a little farther than that.)
So now I have a challenge for the readers of this site: Let's say you're producing the Academy Awards. Let's say you have the power to phone anyone and invite them to come in and present an award. Who would you have asked? What surprise appearance would have been exciting? A few years ago, Woody Allen shocked everyone by showing up. Give me some other names that would have been a big deal last night.
You have to pick people who are alive and who actually might be able to show up. And let's consider them in two categories: New Hollywood and Old Hollywood. The latter would be folks who, though they might still be performing, would connect the ceremony with its heritage. In both cases, we want names of presenters who, when the host introduced them, the whole audience would make that wonderful sound of delighted surprise, clap their hands off and maybe even rise for a standing o. I'll post the best answers here in a couple days.
Earlier, at the suggestion of my friend Buzz Dixon, I linked to an article by Joe Lieberman about how things ain't so hopeless in Iraq. Now, at the suggestion of my friend Gordon Kent, I link to an article by Glenn Greenwald about how things ain't so honest with Joe Lieberman. The latter is less about Iraq than it is about the ongoing disingenuousness of the Senator from Connecticut but it's not a bad rebuttal.
What I'd love to find, and I mean this, is a solid "how we'll win in Iraq" article by someone who hasn't changed their rationales more often than their boxer shorts or panty-liners. My problem with a lot of the pro-war advocates is that they keep futzing with the rules, moving the goalposts each time they fail to complete a pass. It's like when Cheney said that the British troop withdrawal was a marker of success. You know that if Great Britain had pledged not to withdraw those troops, he would have said that was a marker of success. No matter what happens, they say that it's what's supposed to happen. The claim is made that everyone needs to be quiet and not question the strategy for six months. And then when things are worse in six months, they'll be saying everyone needs to be quiet and not question the strategy for another six months, followed by another six months and then another and another.
If the advocates of the Bush plan want Americans to believe that success is attainable in Iraq and thereabouts, they need to offer a direct, example-filled definition of what will constitute success. But they don't seem to want to do that because that would create a firm definition of failure and they can't have that. It's too hard to wriggle out of those when they come to pass.
Seriously: If anyone can point me to an article that says that defines success in Iraq without saying something like, "Success is when we win and they lose," please do. What turned me against this war was that I've never understood what it was supposed to accomplish and that its advocates have been so deliberately vague about how we'd know when that was or wasn't happening.
Above, courtesy of our dear friends over at OldTVTickets.com, we have a ticket for a local, Los Angeles show called Bill Stulla's Parlor Party. The date on this ticket, as you can see, is September 9. I believe the year was 1952.
Bill Stulla was a fixture for years of L.A. broadcasting. His Parlor Party started life on radio and segued to TV...in what year, I do not know. The premise of the show was that it was an on-air birthday party. It was done live, of course, and each day they'd have on a batch of individuals who'd been born on that day. They'd entertain them and play games with them and interview them and serve cake and award prizes. I have a vague idea that at one point in the program's existence, the birthday celebrants covered a wide range of ages. But on the day I made my television debut on the program, the premise was that it was all kids, aged ten or younger. In my case, it was much younger.
I am describing to you one of my earliest memories. I remember being taken to the TV studio — I don't recall where but it was probably Sunset and Vine like the ticket says. KNBH was then the local NBC television affiliate. (In 1954, it became KRCA and in 1960, it was renamed KNBC.) I remember being dressed up, which I never liked. I remember being backstage and my mother furiously combing my hair (which I also never liked) and dealing with the fact that I didn't want to be there and do whatever I was supposed to do. I remember being told that my relatives and neighbors were all watching so I had to go through with it.
I had seen the show. Mr. Stulla, a genial man with glasses, welcomed his young guests as they came in through the door of a little storybook-type house on the stage. I remember being backstage without my mother, waiting on the other side of that door for someone to tell me to go through it and onto live television. Back there, it didn't look like a storybook house. It was all fake and that seemed odd and scary. Everything backstage was odd and scary.
Then someone shoved me out onto the stage. I remember blinding lights and Mr. Stulla sticking a microphone in my face and asking me my name. If he had waited for an answer, we'd still be there today.
I was absolutely terrified. I'm not sure of what but I was absolutely terrified. I mumbled something. I don't know what it was but it wasn't my name. Someone off-camera told it to him. Mr. Stulla, who'd done this before, attempted gamely to get me to speak up and answer his questions: How old was I? Did I have any brothers and sisters? Did I have any pets? (There's not a lot you can ask a kid that age.) But it didn't matter what he asked. I wasn't answering. In a very short span of time, he decided I was just one of those children who wasn't going to cooperate and he passed me over to the party area and brought the next toddler out through the phony door.
In the party area, I sat with complete strangers, awaiting cake that would celebrate our mutual birthday. I didn't see the point of that, either. There was a cake waiting for me at home. As I sat there, I went from really, really not wanting to be there to really, really, really not wanting to be there. Well before it was time to bring out the cake and have about a dozen of us make a group effort to blow out the candles, I wandered off the stage, found my parents in the audience and made them get me the hell out of there.
So what year was I on that show? That's what I'm trying to figure out. (In case it's not clear, the above ticket has nothing to do with my being on the program. It's just the only visual evidence I've ever come across that the series even existed.)
I was born in March of 1952. I once thought I was three or four when I made my inauspicious television debut. My mother doesn't remember but one time when I asked her about it, she did recall that my going on the show was at the urging of my Aunt Dot, who thought it would be the greatest thing in the world to see her adorable nephew on the television machine. Parents apparently wrote away in advance and if their kid was selected, they were told to bring him or her down to the studio on the day in question at such-and-such a time. They were also sent some number of tickets to dispense to friends and relatives to come down and watch the festivities.
Research suggests that Bill Stulla's Parlor Party was off the air before my third birthday. All the history I've seen says that in 1954, Mr. Stulla went to work on KHJ, Channel 9 here in Los Angeles, hosting what always seemed like the worst cartoons available. He was the guy who ran Colonel Bleep, for God's sake. He adopted a train motif for his show, called it Cartoon Express and became Engineer Bill. I'll bet a lot of people reading this who grew up in L.A. remember Engineer Bill. He did that series, Monday through Friday, until 1964.
If he stopped Parlor Partying on Channel 4 when he began Engineer Billing on Channel 9, that would mean I must have been two when I made my traumatic appearance. That seems too young to me. A few years ago when I met Mr. Stulla (he's still around, by the way), I asked him what year Bill Stulla's Parlor Party ended and if there was an overlap with his KHJ job. He told me it was probably '52. I told him it couldn't possibly have been '52 because I was on the show on my birthday and I was born in '52. He said in that case, he didn't remember the year but was sure it was "long" before he became Engineer Bill. It couldn't have been too long.
I'll be 55 years old this Friday. Up until I was around 40, I hated being in front of a TV camera. Twice in my earlier career, I was asked to play on-camera roles in shows I was writing. Once on Welcome Back, Kotter, they needed a tall guy to hover over Arnold Horshack and threaten to beat the crap out of him. I was asked to be that guy and I refused. I was willing to beat the crap out of Arnold Horshack but not to go on camera. Later on Pink Lady, they used the whole writing staff as extras (dancing, no less) in a sketch and I couldn't get out of that one. I did it but disliked every second of the experience. In fact, if my parents had been there, I think I would have walked off the stage, found them and forced them to take me home for cake.
I still don't love being on the business end of a lens but I can do it now without fleeing in terror. I do not think, by the way, that when I recoiled from it in my adult life, it was because it reminded me of my bad experience on Bill Stulla's Parlor Party. I think I was born hating to be on television and that like acne, my Snagglepuss t-shirt and thinking fart jokes were funny, I eventually outgrew it.
This has been the first in a series of my Horrible Childhood Memories. This will not be a long series because I had a great childhood and don't have many horrible memories. But one of these days, I'll post another one. (I still can't believe I was two when this one happened...)
My buddy Buzz Dixon suggests I link to this article by Joe Lieberman which puts forth the argument that things in Iraq aren't as hopeless as they might seem and that "success" (which I wish he and those campaigning for it would define clearer) is still attainable.
As you may recall, I wasn't a fan of Mr. Lieberman, even back when he was a Democrat. Lately, a lot of his public statements urging his colleagues to withhold criticisms of the war and "support the troops" sound to me like pleadings to stop reminding everyone how spectacularly wrong he and those on his side of this issue have repeatedly been. But hope springs eternal, I guess. I'd genuinely like to believe there is some light at the end of that tunnel and I sure would like to understand better why some people think that. If you do, give it a read.
I have no idea who made this short cartoon or who's singing or anything other than you'll be able to deduce on your own. I just know it will make my friend Paul Dini very happy. This one's for you, Paul...
In Las Vegas, the closing odds on last night's Academy Awards had Eddie Murphy favored to win Best Supporting Actor, Jennifer Hudson for Best Supporting Actress, Forest Whitaker for Best Actor, Helen Mirren for Best Actress and The Departed for Best Picture. So they got four out of five right. I'm not sure too many of the critics did that well.
February 25, 2007
