GSN will salute the life of Kitty Carlisle Hart with two reruns of To Tell the Truth that will air late Sunday night, April 22. More correctly, they're on Monday morning — at 3 AM and 3:30 AM East Coast time. I'll get them here on the West Coast at Midnight and 12:30 AM via my satellite dish.
The first is the episode from March 5, 1957 which featured her first appearance as a panelist on that show. One of the segments involved the panel guessing which of three men was the real Alan Freed. That's the disc jockey Alan Freed, who was famous for bringing rock 'n' roll to the masses, as immortalized in the movie, American Hot Wax.
The other episode they're going to air is the one I mentioned in the previous item and it's from 1973, with her son Christopher in disguise. I don't know if they got the idea from what I posted here — probably not — but either way, I'm glad they're running that one.
A classy lady, Kitty Carlisle Hart, is dead at the age of 96. She did a lot of fine movies but when you're in A Night at the Opera with the Marx Brothers (as she was), it's understandable that people forget all the others.
She was Kitty Carlisle then. She became Kitty Carlisle Hart when she married playwright-director Moss Hart and became his partner in every sense, even to the extent of aiding him when he directed shows like My Fair Lady. After his death, she became the guardian of his legacy, making sure that the plays and his autobiography, Act One, were kept available and treated with the proper respect.
Many people probably know her best from the game show, To Tell the Truth, where she was a longtime panelist. She had a refreshing honesty and seemed to really enjoy what she did. If anyone from GSN (aka The Game Show Network) is reading this and thinking of running some episodes as a tribute, there was one — it was on the daytime version during, I believe, the Garry Moore era — where the impostors were all under heavy make-up. When they unmasked at the end, the first one turned out to be the son of her fellow panelist, Joe Garagiola. Kitty chided him lovingly for not recognizing his own son. Then the next panelist turned out to be her son, Christopher, and she practically fell off her chair. If GSN can dig that one out of the vaults, I think people would love to see her wonderful reaction.
The last few years, despite being in her nineties, she performed occasionally in both New York and L.A. with a one-woman show where she sang songs and told anecdotes about her incredible life. Somehow, maddeningly, I never got the chance to see her, nor was I able to accept an invite to go have a meal with her in Manhattan. We did exchange notes once. She made a brief appearance in Woody Allen's Radio Days and I wrote her a note to let her know that at the Writers Guild screening, a roar of recognition and applause had greeted her appearance on the screen. She wrote back a cordial letter that said something like, "I would rather be applauded by a roomful of writers than all the other people on the planet." Indeed.
Here's a link to one of several obits on the 'net today.
Among the dozen-or-so political websites I hit every day are those in Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo empire. He has several and he's expanding not only in the number of sites but in what they do. Recently, he has begun producing little online webcast segments such as the one I thought you might like to watch.
It runs seven minutes and it's in two parts, both taped the other day when John Kerry went in to appear on The Colbert Report and Marshall and his cameraman got to ride along. The first part, recorded in the back of the limousine, is a fairly unremarkable interview with the senator about his new book on the environment. The most interesting thing about it is a "blogger" getting this kind of access to someone like Kerry. The interview is, of course, entirely benevolent...but I like the potential. Bloggers roaming about with video cameras and the ability to post their reports to the Internet could do a lot to make up for "real" journalists who don't ask hard questions.
The second part is backstage at The Colbert Report as Stephen C. greets Kerry and briefs him on how the interview will go. If you watch Mr. Colbert, you may be fascinated by what he tells his guest, which I'm guessing is pretty much what he tells all of them.
The New Yorker has posted online a number of articles that appeared in that publication and discussed the works of Kurt Vonnegut. Here's John Updike on Vonnegut, James Atlas on Vonnegut, and Susan Lardner on Vonnegut.
The Mann National Theater in Westwood Village is closing this week. It opened March 27, 1970 and one of the first movies it offered — and the first I saw there — was the Mike Nichols movie of Catch 22. A bunch of my friends went to a matinee and I would describe our reaction to the movie as mixed, leaning towards the negative. But there was one scene we liked a lot. It was the one early in the film with Paula Prentiss removing her clothing. We all agreed that was filmmaking at its finest, and that we had to stay for enough of the next showing to see it again.
So we stayed...and after our favorite scene was over, we all got up to leave. So did about eighty other males in the theater, all of whom had remained in their seats after the previous showing for the same reason. If Mike Nichols had had the presence of mind to make that scene last ninety minutes, I think we'd all still be there.
I feel a certain sense of personal loss hearing that the National is closing. I spent a lot of my life back then in Westwood Village and watched them build the place. Westwood was a great "date" community back then with plenty of restaurants, movie theaters and stores to browse. Often, we'd dine at the Hamburger Hamlet and then walk over to the National. After the movie, it was one block to Wil Wright's Ice Cream Parlor or two to a shop called Golden Star that served great made-on-the-premises sorbets and ices. Those were, as we nostalgists call them, the days.
It's probably not surprising though that the National's closing. At 1,100 seats, it was just too big and probably too unprofitable to occupy so large a plot of prime, expensive real estate. The last time I was in it was for the world premiere of Sin City two years ago. It didn't dawn on me then that its management was considering closing the theater but now that it's been announced, I'm thinking, "Oh, yeah...it did seem a bit shabby." It was probably a matter of either shutting down or spending a few million to refurbish and maybe carve the National into a bunch of smaller theaters.
It's not old enough to mourn as one of those great old movie palaces that are works of art, themselves. Truth to tell, the National always struck me as an ugly, uncomfortable house in which to see a movie. But I did have many a great evening that included a visit there...and I'm sorry to see a reminder of those evenings going away.
Since the lawyers have been slow at getting the Garfield cartoons removed from YouTube, I can link to another one I wrote. This is called "Mistakes Will Happen" and if you're ever writing a cartoon show and you want to get the animators pissed at you, just decide it would be fun to do a cartoon that's intentionally full of errors.
Actually, I just made a mistake in the previous sentence. I don't know how the animators felt about this one since they were in Taiwan. But the people at the American studio who had to concern themselves with budgetary matters had a lot of problems, and I believe the line producer had to keep going back and having the animation crew insert mistakes they'd accidentally left out. People got very confused over which mistakes were mistakes and which mistakes were supposed to be there and when he said, "This is wrong," it sometimes meant "this is right," which of course meant it was wrong but not in the way it was supposed to be wrong. I kinda like it when the production process gets to be as silly as the cartoons.
In addition to the usual voice people (Lorenzo Music, Gregg Berger and Thom Huge), this one features a line by Garfield's creator, Jim Davis. He does the voice on the police radio. I also have a line. That's me saying, "Garfield cartoon, take two." Hope you enjoy what you're about to see as soon as you click. If not, it was a mistake to post this.
April 19, 2007
