Saturday, January 10, 2009

Recommended Reading

Frank Rich on the national apathy about some of the more sordid scandals of the Bush administration. A lot of us apparently don't care if billions of our tax dollars just wound up in someone's pocket.

• Posted at 11:35 PM · LINK

Recommended Reading

Dick Cavett on the art of the insult. I always liked the famous line attributed to George S. Kaufman from back when he was a drama critic. A playwright who disliked Kaufman had a new play opening and was obligated to invite G.S.K. to Opening Night. He sent two tickets with a note that said, "You can bring a friend if you have one." Kaufman sent back the tix with a polite note that he was busy that evening but "I shall attend the second performance if there is one."

• Posted at 5:32 PM · LINK

Go Read It!

Here's a portrait of Jeff Sotzing, who is the guy in charge of the video legacy of Johnny Carson...or as Sotzing calls him, "Uncle John." Thanks for the link, Jeff Abraham.

• Posted at 2:24 PM · LINK

Candid Ricardos

In the spirit of the Laurel and Hardy clip I linked to the other day: Someone snuck a 16mm camera in to a filming of the I Love Lucy show and got a few amazing seconds of color (!) footage. They have the whole story and video links over at this posting on the TV Series Finale site. If you're a fan of old TV shows, you could spend a lot of your life on that site.

• Posted at 9:57 AM · LINK

Today's Video Link

Talk about rare Tonight Show clips. Shelly Goldstein sent me this link to maybe the rarest one of all.

On May 14, 1968, Paul McCartney and John Lennon held a press conference in New York to announce the formation of their new company, Apple. Later that same day, they then did two TV interviews — one on a local educational program and the other on The Tonight Show. As (bad) luck would have it, it was on a night that Johnny Carson was off and his program was being hosted by Joe Garagiola. Mr. Garagiola was a good sportscaster and a fine game show personality but he proved that night to be woefully deficient in the art of interviewing Beatles. Among other problems, he seemed to think they were still the four mop-tops who'd made such a hit on The Ed Sullivan Show and was unaware they'd evolved and gone on to other, less flighty things.

Prior to their appearance, John and Paul did a brief pre-interview with Jim McCawley, who was then a Talent Coordinator for The Tonight Show. That interview, McCawley always told people, went quite well. In fact, it went too well. At the close of it, he was stunned when John and Paul said to him, "We want you to interview us on the show." McCawley had to convince them that this was not possible; that the Tonight Show didn't bring on staff members to displace the host, even a guest host.

On the air with the guest host, John and Paul both seemed a little high and their dislike for Garagiola became increasingly obvious. Another guest, Tallulah Bankhead, threw in a few questions and she wasn't much help. Here's a transcript of the entire conversation. During the commercial breaks, Garagiola was counselled to pay a little more attention to McCawley's notes from the pre-interview but he kept departing from them and it all made for an evening of great discomfort.

Most of tapes of The Tonight Show from that era were lost and the first ones to go were those with guest hosts. (The episodes with Johnny were kept around for a few years for possible rerunning before erasure.) As a result, there is no decent video of the Lennon-McCartney appearance. However, one ardent Beatles fan pointed a silent 8mm movie camera at the screen and got a Zapruder-like record of a few minutes of the event. Another recorded the audio on a reel-to-reel tape recorder...and the two sources have been married together to create the fuzzy, hard-to-see image that is linked below. It's less than two hundred seconds long and it's bad video but it's all we've got.

Tomorrow, I'll bring you a later appearance that Paul (alone) made on The Tonight Show, thankfully with Mr. Carson. In the meantime, here's John, Paul and Joe...

• Posted at 12:56 AM · LINK

Boys' Club

Let's imagine it's 1938 and if you're a male, let's imagine you're female. Let us imagine you have considerable artistic ability and you think it might be put to good use working for Mr. Walt Disney on his animated features as, say, an animator. So let us imagine you inquire of Disney Studios, asking about possible job openings. And you know what would have happened? You would have received this form letter in response.

[UPDATE: Thanks to a reader who didn't give his name, I have now upgraded the link to a better quality image.]

• Posted at 12:51 AM · LINK