Sunday, June 7, 2009

Tony Night

Audio problems aside, I thought the Tony Awards were terrific...this, despite the fact that I saw none of the nominated shows and didn't have any rooting interest whatsoever in any of the nominees. As mentioned, I felt the opening was quite spectacular. The special material that Neil Patrick Harris (a fine host) performed under the end credits was also quite wonderful...so they had me coming and going.

To a certain extent, these telecasts have an infomercial component: Will the brief presentations from the musicals sell tickets? I suspect Hair and Billy Elliott moved some seats in their mezzanines...and so did Jersey Boys (which wasn't even one of this year's nominees) and to a lesser extent, the one from Next to Normal. The excerpt from Shrek didn't arouse any yearning within me to rush the box office, nor did the numbers from Pal Joey, Rock of Ages or West Side Story. The segment from Guys and Dolls made me not want to buy a ticket, especially when I mentally compare it to the same song as performed on the Tony Awards the last time that show was revived.

It was nice to see Jerry Herman receive a Lifetime Achievement Award but I always wonder about the timing of these things. Earlier this year at the Oscars, Jerry Lewis got the Humanitarian Award for raising two billion dollars for charity and making all those popular movies. Why didn't they give it to him twenty years ago when he'd raised one billion dollars and made all those same movies? Why was he suddenly deserving of it this year? Jerry Herman did Milk and Honey in 1961, Hello, Dolly! in 1964, Mame in 1966, Dear World in 1969, The Grand Tour in 1979, La Cage aux Folles in 1983 and darn near nothing since then. What happened that made someone decide he finally warranted a Lifetime Achievement Award?

Oh, well. Good show. I'm glad someone made the decision a few years ago to stop confining it to two hours...and rigidly timing it so it couldn't slip over even a few minutes into the local news. This year, it ran about five minutes over and the world, amazingly, did not end. Remember how they used to act like it would?

• Posted at 11:01 PM · LINK

Sunday Evening

Just started watching the Tony Awards on my TiVo. What an opening number. There's no reason to watch the rest of the show.

• Posted at 6:49 PM · LINK

Catching Up On Conan

Given the preceding item posted here, I was tempted to start this one, "Speaking of disasters occurring on soundstages at Universal Studios..." But truth has to trump funny segues and the truth is that I don't think Conan O'Brien's first week hosting The Tonight Show was a disaster...but I also don't think it was all that wonderful. I guess I was disappointed that he and his crew felt that they could (or should) do pretty much the same show they've been doing for years, except an hour earlier and on the opposite coast.

I've always liked Conan O'Brien, even back in his earliest days when much of the industry was proclaiming him a flop as Letterman's successor and predicting his hasty return to Simpsons writing. I thought he was better than that, and it was nice to see him stick with it and refine his act, sanding off the rough edges until he began to project the notion that he might belong in the job. He and his crew had the wise sense not to panic and begin changing everything around. They didn't start fiddling with the set and format, didn't bring in new sidekicks or anything of the sort. They just kept doing what was essentially the same show, only doing it better and better, until it was good enough for sufficent viewership to accept.

The last few years though, I've felt like he's been doing the same show a little too long. I can't think of a new segment or running gag or new character introduced in quite a while. I thought to a large degree, he'd settled into generating response from the live audience by trotting out catch phrases and acting goofy and playing to them instead of the cameras. If you and I were in the studio, we'd probably laugh out of recognition but we wouldn't laugh, watching the same antics at home. Mr. Carson endured as long as he did because he knew that the job description involved entertaining the people not in your studio audience. I'm not sure any pretenders to his throne appreciate the distinction, the possible exception being David Letterman. (I get the feeling Dave does understand the difference and would simply rather entertain the folks in his theater.)

So I guess I was let down that after all those months of planning, the only real change in Conan's act is that he's doing it from a larger, fancier building. I don't see that that adds a thing to the proceedings and it may even diminish them. Like Norma Desmond famously taught us, when the sets get bigger, the actors get smaller.

I think the set's too big and I think Andy Richter's in the wrong section of it. He's a funny guy, not Ed McMahon, and the best thing I saw all week on the show involved the only non-awkward exchange he and Conan had...Andy sitting next to the host doing "In the Year 2000." Perhaps symbolic of how the show has changed (and not changed), they made it fancier and more expensive and made the cosmetic change to the Year 3000...but it's still the same bit they've been doing since the Year 2000 was actually in the future. And the fun in it is that the two of them are working together. I like Conan better when he's not out there all alone.

We're not budging off our prediction that his ratings will be fine, at least for a while...or that there'll be a week or two when it won't look that way. We're also still hoping that what we saw this past week was Mr. O'Brien and his producers leading with what they knew worked and that they'll soon be introducing new elements into the mix. But nothing I've seen so far made me think, "I've got to make sure I don't miss an episode of this." It's just another talk show that I'll TiVo every night and then watch until it goes déjà vu on me...or not watch at all if the guests don't seem all that exciting. It took Leno a couple years to get me to that point but with Conan, it happened around half past Wednesday night's program.

• Posted at 1:27 PM · LINK

Special FX

Jim Van Hise reminded me that back in this post, I mentioned that I was on the set of the new movie, Land of the Lost, based on the old TV series produced by Sid and Marty Krofft, and that there was a story I wanted to tell after it was released. Okay, it's been released...and I don't imagine I need a Spoiler Alert for what follows...

Marty Krofft invited me to be there for the big finale scene on their last day of shooting at Universal Studios. (The following week, they went to New York and filmed scenes with Matt Lauer.) On two conjoined Universal soundstages, they had built an enormous set...one Marty said cost more than the entire combined budgets for the two seasons of Land of the Lost produced for ABC Saturday morn in the seventies. It was the Sleestak Crematorium, which was not unlike a temple for that reptilian race and it was huge...with cavernous walls and many levels and stairways, and giant Sleestak statuary that weighed many tons. As the last shot of the day, they were going to blow it up.

Hey, how do you turn down being there for that?

So I spent the day with Marty and occasionally with Sid, who has this uncanny way of being around when something interesting is happening and disappearing when there's no reason for him to be around. No human being has ever seen Sid Krofft arrive anywhere or leave. He's just there when he should be and gone when things are dull.

It was pretty dull for the hour or three that the crew spent rigging the set with blasting caps and wires and all sorts of gimmicks that would, on cue, destroy the entire Sleestak shrine. It took a long time because, obviously, there couldn't be a second take so it had to be done right. And it took a longer time because the Lakers were in a big playoff game that day and everyone was working with at least one eye on a TV set.

But finally, it came time for the big shot. The stage managers herded everyone into certain areas that would be safe for the viewing. I took up a position right between Marty Krofft and the Fire Marshall, figuring those were the last two guys who were likely to be injured by falling boulders or collapsing walls. And after a lot of checking and double-checking and triple-checking, someone finally yelled "Action!"

Explosions went off. Wires were pulled. Much of the set had been booby-trapped in the preceding hours so that yanking out certain pieces would cause it all to topple like a big game of Jenga. A giant statue fell and walls crumbled. The whole damn crematorium just imploded before our very eyes...and while I haven't seen the movie yet, I can tell you that in person, it was utterly stunning.

When the Stage Manager yelled, "Cut," everyone whooped and clapped and cheered the mind-boggling spectacle we had just witnessed. I turned to find I was next to one of the Special Effects guys I'd met earlier — one of the fellows who had engineered the spectacle we had just witnessed. I said to him, "That may have been the most incredible thing I've ever seen in my life!"

The man had a glum look on his face. With a clear and present note of bitterness, he said, "Yeah...and you know what they'll say when they see this in the movie theaters? 'Good CGI.' We did it for real and nobody will ever know."

• Posted at 12:47 PM · LINK