A quick recommendation. Not long ago, comedian Jeffrey Ross visited Iraq as part of a troupe of comedians headed by Drew Carey. Ross took along a video camera and shot footage which he edited into a diary/documentary called Patriot Act. It runs incessantly this month on Showtime and it's well worth watching. The narrative nicely eschews the attitude of "Look at the wonderful thing I'm doing" which is too often present when Show Biz folks do something like this, and Ross seems to have a nice, honest perspective on the people he's entertaining and what a tour like that means to both the audiences and the performers.
And a quick non-recommendation. Mr. Ross is also part of this year's Comedy Central Roast, which this time is of rapper Flavor Flav. I'd never heard of him before and one suspects that at least a third of the roasters hadn't, either. I have to learn to stop watching these things. (If you haven't, it airs again tonight and tomorrow night.) For some reason, the dais always includes one rather clueless non-comedian who everyone decides to dump on relentlessly...to the point where it bypasses Funny and gets into the realm of picking on someone because they can't fight back. In this one, it's actress Brigitte Nielsen who's sitting there, forcing a grin as she's called an untalented whore. She appears to not understand all the insults hurled her way — that's the real embarrassing part — but she also seems to get enough of them to be very uncomfortable.
The most interesting thing about this roast — and obviously, this isn't a lot — is that someone at Comedy Central has apparently decided that the "s" word no longer has to be bleeped but the "f" word still does. No one will object. One or two of Mr. Carlin's other verboten words have already made it and the rest will soon follow. And almost no one will object.
Alan Light's photo album of the 1982 San Diego Con has been a hit on the web with tens of thousands of hits. Here's a link to another, shorter album of pics he took in 1990 at Forrest J Ackerman's Ackermansion in Los Feliz.
For those who don't know who or what this is: Forry Ackerman is a noted personality in the worlds of science-fiction and horror movies. He was a fan, an agent, a writer, an editor, a historian and a rabid collector. He edited the magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland and is also generally credited with coining the phrase, "sci-fi." That's him on the left in the photo above, posing with Alan.
Until a few years ago when he sold off his collection and moved into smaller digs, Ackerman housed an incredible collection of s-f and horror books and artifacts in a home he nicknamed "The Ackermansion." Actually, it was two homes. The first, which I visited first in 1968, was on Sherbourne Drive in Beverly Hills. A few years later, he moved — and what a move it must have been — into a larger home on Glendower Avenue in Los Feliz.
He often welcomed fans, tourists, celebrities, strangers, werewolves and just about anybody into his home, which was kind of a museum of its subject matter. I found the place somewhat creepy in a couple of ways above and beyond the subject matter...but then, I was never as much a fan of horror movies as some of my friends. It sure made them happy to be there.
As I said, Ackerman no longer lives in such a manner. In recent years, he's alternated between a more modest bungalow and an array of nursing homes and hospital rooms. He'll turn 91 later this year and for much of the last decade, rumors have swirled that Forry is only weeks from hanging out with Bela and Boris. The rumors will eventually be true but I long ago stopped giving them any credence.
Here, from the 1957 Emmy Awards ceremony, we have Phil Silvers presenting the Best Writing award...to the writers of his own show. So we get a fast glimpse of the legendary Nat Hiken, who created the Sgt. Bilko series, produced it and directed it.
August 17, 2007
