Monday, December 31, 2007

Quick Posting

In case you're keeping score, Letterman's producers have moved Donald Trump from the Wednesday show to Friday, displacing Tracy Morgan. (Friday's show, by the way, will be taped on Wednesday.) I should also mention that Thursday night's show will have a musical number from Young Frankenstein.

• Posted at 6:15 PM · LINK

Font Festival!

We love most of the comic book style fonts that our friends over at Comicraft make and offer to the public, and you'll even see a few of them in evidence on this site. If you've been thinking of ordering any of them, tomorrow is the day. In honor of the New Year, all fonts are $20.08 — including some that ordinarily sell for $19.00. Forget those and buy the more expensive ones cheap by clicking on this link tomorrow. We don't make a buck off this. We just like to tell you about bargains.

• Posted at 2:44 PM · LINK

Today's Political Musing

Mike Huckabee had a press conference this morning that has even his devout supporters scratching their heads, wondering what the hell he was thinking. It's like the guy had just decided to remake Skidoo, only odder.

Basically, he announced that his reps had prepared an attack ad slamming Mitt Romney but that he [Huckabee] wasn't going to use it. And then, just to show that he'd made something he didn't want America to see, he then ran it for reporters.

The commercial accuses Romney of being dishonest, a comment that Huckabee and his crew have made in other ways in other venues. So he said it and he stands by it and he clearly wants that message out there...but he's electing not to use the ad because he doesn't want that kind of commercial (the kind he made, the one that's all over the Internet by now) to represent him. Or something like that.

I'm tempted to write out the question that I'd like to see Jay Leno put to the man when he has him in the guest chair on Wednesday. But I can't. There's a strike on.

• Posted at 2:36 PM · LINK

Monday Afternoon

So...is Bill Maher going back to work without his writers? The HBO site says that all new episodes of Real Time begin on January 11, and Maher is listed on the CBS site as David Letterman's first guest this Thursday, which suggests the man has something to plug.

Robin Williams is Dave's first guest on the Wednesday night return. He may or may not be followed by Donald Trump, who wanted to appear because he has a new show to plug and also because a week ago when he was booked for that night, he thought he'd be able to cross a picket line on the way in. He always enjoys that. Anyway, the CBS website says Williams and Trump will be the guests, followed by musical guest Shooter Jennings. A piece in the N.Y. Times said that Trump will move to another night.

Letterman's first guest on Friday night is listed as Tracy Morgan. Maher and Morgan are both entertaining guys but I would have expected bigger names for this "return" week. Leno, meanwhile, has Mike Huckabee on Wednesday night. Which I guess means Huckabee is writing off the union vote.

No word yet on who else Leno will have on or who'll be crossing picket lines to guest with O'Brien and Kimmel. The shows are keeping the names secret as long as possible to prevent the guests from being pressured and perhaps backing out. Massive protests are planned for outside the studios. If you ever really wanted to hobnob with stars, you might want to go to NBC Burbank on Wednesday and join the picketing.

• Posted at 1:44 PM · LINK

Today's Bonus Video Link

Tom Lehrer stopped performing long ago...but in 1998, he sat down at the piano again as part of a gala tribute to producer Cameron Mackintosh. Here is a video of his performance and if you like it, thank Robert Spina. He told me about it...

• Posted at 2:01 AM · LINK

It's Coming!

One of the weirdest movies ever made will be on your TV shortly...that is, if you get Turner Classic Movies. I do want to make clear that though I write a lot about this film, I am not (repeat: NOT) telling you that Skidoo is a great movie and that you will admire the brilliant filmmaking skills on display. This is a movie to make your jaw hang open in astonishment and to cause you to mumble, "What the hell were they thinking?" Or maybe "What the hell were they smoking?"

There are a lot of such movies around but it's rare that you see one with so many familiar faces, including those of Jackie Gleason, half the cast of the Batman TV show, and Groucho Marx in his final screen appearance. I guess Groucho figured that after you've played God, anything else is anti-climactic.

I will suggest that this film has redeeming features, above and beyond its sheer camp value. Friends and I have had some spirited, enlightening discussions about what the movie business was going through in 1968, with studios and filmmakers floundering about, trying to grab onto a youth market that wasn't warming to the same old, same old. It also says something — the "what" is highly arguable but there's something — about the way the country was changing and leaving some people (Otto Preminger, obviously among them) behind.

Anyway, I suggest you watch or tape or TiVo. But I have to warn you that this is not Gone with the Wind. Then again, it also isn't The Gong Show Movie, either. (It has long amused me that those two movies appear, one after the other, in Leonard Maltin's movie guide.)

• Posted at 12:25 AM · LINK

Today's Video Link

From a 1984 episode of Entertainment Tonight, here's Leonard Maltin reporting on the enduring popularity of Rocky and Bullwinkle, complete with interviews with Bill Scott and June Foray, and them staging a mock recording session for the camera.

Bill was, of course, more than the voice of Bullwinkle and other key characters in the Jay Ward cartoons. He was Jay's co-producer and head writer...and much of the wonderful humorous style of those shows was Bill's humor. At the time this Entertainment Tonight segment was done, Bill was a little frustrated that plans for more projects of the Moose and Squirrel kept falling through...which was due more to business problems than the network interference he complains about. Not that the then-current pressure to launder cartoons and make them "socially redeeming" was not a formidable obstacle.

Still, he had hopes. Shortly after the time this was taped, Bill and I and a brilliant actor named Frank Welker began working on a Dudley Do-Right project. It was humming along nicely until late '85 when Bill passed away.

Happily, June is still around to bask in the love that so many of us have for those films. Her autobiography, which Earl Kress and I are assisting her with, should be out in '08.

Here's a few minutes of Bill and June from 1984...

• Posted at 12:10 AM · LINK