I haven't posted one of these in a long time. Then again, it's been a long time since I bought as many stupid things off eBay as I did this morning. If you're enjoying this website, it would be very nice if you'd donate some cash so that I can pay for my eBay purchases that way. Thank you.
Unless you count all the stuff about the presidential election, I haven't posted anything really, appallingly trivial for a little while. This would qualify.
The other day, I finally got around to watching With Six You Get Eggroll, a 1968 movie starring Doris Day and Brian Keith, directed by one of my favorite people, the late Howard Morris. Howie did some wonderful things as a director — if you ever get the chance to see Who's Minding the Mint?, don't miss it — and I have the feeling I'd have enjoyed this one more if I'd seen it in '68. It is — shall we say? — rough going today.
But I'd never seen it and Howie told me many, many stories about the making of it. He seems to have been the only person in Hollywood, except maybe Doris, who didn't detest Ms. Day's then-husband, Marty Melcher. He was also very proud to have directed the film debut of a clean-shaven kid named George Carlin. George sometimes cited this as the experience that convinced him he didn't have much future as a full-time actor and that he ought to make his stand-up act his primary line of endeavor...but he's really no worse than anyone else in this movie and better than some seasoned pros.
Overall, I didn't care for the film (sorry, Howie) but I enjoyed seeing scenes he'd told me about and it's always good to see Brian Keith, who I always thought was a terrific actor. He and Howie were close friends and I once saw them doing The Sunshine Boys, with Keith in the Jack Albertson/Walter Matthau role and Howie directing and playing the Sam Levene/George Burns part. Mr. Keith did things with the script that I've never seen any other actor do. This was partly due to his basic uniqueness as a performer, partly due to the fact that he wasn't Jewish, and partly due to the fact that he forgot about every third line. It was quite an interesting evening...and I mean "interesting" in every sense, positive and negative.
He was good in With Six Your Get Eggroll, too. Just about everyone was but the sum of its parts was somewhat tedious. It's a fine movie for trivia, though...like in a scene where Doris Day runs into two "hippie" types. I did a frame grab of them and that's it up above. The actor on the left is easily recognizable. That's Jamie Farr, who was in dozens of movies and TV shows (including many directed by Howie) before the M*A*S*H TV show, which came along a few years later. But you see that guy next to him, playing the other Hollywood-style hippie? That's William Christopher, who played Father Mulcahy on M*A*S*H.
It's just one of those little movieland coincidences, the two of them being "teamed" in this movie a few years before they wound up in the same classic TV show...and their association didn't end there. For a long time after M*A*S*H, Farr and Christopher toured America with a bus-and-truck production of The Odd Couple, with Farr as Oscar, Christopher as Felix. It wouldn't surprise me if they went out with The Sunshine Boys, too. Neither one of them's Jewish either, but they couldn't do an odder interpretation of that play than Brian Keith.
Joseph D. Tydings is a lawyer with mucho experience in Death Penalty cases. He thinks our court system is too fallible and that innocent people do get executed. This possibility doesn't seem to matter to some people but it should.
A lot of readers of this site have thanked or cursed me for telling them about the Archive of American Television website where one can watch online oral histories of the teevee business. The cursers were angry because I've cost them dozens and dozens of hours, directing them to a trove of goodies they now must watch.
I'll be cursed for the same reason by mentioning authors@google, a library of interviews — most of them, around an hour in length — with authors who've appeared for interviews 'n' speeches at one of the Google buildings. They range from best-selling writers and presidential candidates to folks you've never heard of. They will even, in about five weeks, include me.
Check the list and you're sure to find plenty that will interest you. I could embed any of a hundred here but here's a recent chat with Stan Lee. Most of it's about his recent book of funny captions on political photos but, hey, it's Stan Lee. He talks more about comics near the end.
August 24, 2008
