Speaking of creepy things...we have here a nice three-and-a-half minute montage of horror movie hosts from around the country, more or less in the late-seventies or early-eighties, I believe. There are some nice bits in there with Elvira and Zacherle, two of the best, and some stuff from folks I'd never heard of.
Before you go looking for it: There's nothing in there of Larry "Seymour" Vincent, who had that job description in Los Angeles from 1969 to 1974 on KHJ and then KTLA. He was enormously funny and clever...and though he was on TV an awful lot, there doesn't seem to be any tape anywhere of the guy in action. Because of this article I wrote about him, I get an inquiry or two a month, sometimes from fans who are dying to see him again, sometimes from folks doing documentaries or retrospectives. I always tell them, "I don't know of any. If you come across footage of Seymour, please let me know." I've been saying that for eight years here and apparently no footage has ever turned up. Or at least, no one's let me know.
There aren't even many photos of him. The above pic is one I took on his set around 1971. What a shame such a fine body of work has been lost. Here are some of his fellow horror hosts in action...
Everyone seems fascinated with the public demonstrations relating to Michael Jackson's death...and by the way, aren't we about due for a serious round of rumors that he faked his death and is really living on a ranch somewhere with Elvis, Andy Kaufman and several people who owe me money?
David K. M. Klaus just sent out an e-mail to a couple of us that read...
With regard to the death of pop superstar Michael Jackson, the New York Times reported: "In Los Angeles, hundreds of fans — some chanting Mr. Jackson's name, some doing the 'Thriller' dance — descended on the hospital and on the hillside house where he was staying."
So, outside the house in which he was stricken, and the hospital where he was pronounced dead, his fans were dancing the dance he created for his role as a zombie, an undead creature come back to a shambling semblance of life, which had climbed out of its grave. Even setting aside the poor taste, that's way too creepy for me.
And me...although in fairness, it's not like Michael never creeped anyone out. Meanwhile, as many have e-mailed me, fans of Michael Jackson are holding candlelight vigils and placing flowers on a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame that bears his name. The problem is they're worshipping at the star of the wrong Michael Jackson.
As I've mentioned, I didn't get to see the recent revival of Guys and Dolls that just closed on Broadway. I wanted to, because I really liked Craig Bierko in the 2000 version of The Music Man, and also because it's been interesting to compare and contrast the ninety thousand different interpretations of Guys and Dolls I've seen. I've probably averaged one version per year since I became a theater-goer...and yes, I already have tix for the open-air staging they'll be doing this summer at the Hollywood Bowl.
It's always seemed to me a bulletproof show, in part because of its simplicity. There aren't a lot of choices possible to some aspects of it. One production of Guys and Dolls tends to resemble all other productions of Guys and Dolls in a way that is not true of most oft-mounted shows. So I've been intrigued about this one that reportedly did a lot of unconventional things...and closed a lot faster than revivals of Guys and Dolls usually close. What, I wondered, went wrong?
Well, like I said, I didn't see it. But my pal Bob Ingersoll did and he filed this report...
The show got off on the wrong foot immediately. Guys and Dolls, which is how I will, hereinafter, refer to the original version and every version of the show I've seen until the revival I'm analyzing, opens with a pantomime ballet played out over the overture called Runyonland. In Guys and Dolls, Runyonland is a fairy tale representation of seedy side of Times Square in a kind of timeless time that's supposed to represent Broadway during Prohibition and the Depression, but isn't quite. (After all, the title song has a line about someone watching a "television set.") Runyonland is populated by grifters, pickpockets, gamblers, and other small-time crooks and conmen. In the production I was in where I played Hymie Banjo Eyes (our director gave everyone, even chorus members, actual names pulled from actual characters of Damon Runyon stories and because of my bright blue eyes, I became Hymie Banjo Eyes) my Runyonland con was to pretend to be a photographer who would take pictures of tourists and collect money from them with the promise that I would send them their pictures as soon as I developed them. I, of course, discarded their contact information on stage as soon as they weren't looking.
In other words, Runyonland is seedy but not really dangerous. Yes, Sky Masterson is quick with his fists, but he's not violent. The only character who is supposed to represent any real danger of real violence is Big Jule, a Chicago gangster who is in town to participate in Nathan Detroit's floating crap game. At one point in Guys and Dolls, he even tries to pull out a gun. But Sky Masterson dispatches Big Jule with one punch and does so with such speed that even the East Cicero, Illinois gangster isn't truly a menace.
The revival, which is how I will, hereinafter, refer to the version of the show that I saw this year, starts with Damon Runyon, himself, sitting at a typewriter banging out a the start of a story and then crumpling it in disgust. Runyon then goes out into the city and wanders around it observing. This wandering is played out in the revival's version of Runyonland.
We are, of course, to believe that what he sees inspires the stories for which he will be known later, as we are shown at the end of the revival, when Runyon is shown writing a story and quite happy with the result. The trouble is, what Runyon sees isn't the kind of idealized, fairy tale seedy New York that he would write about, and which was incorporated into Guys and Dolls. He sees a tougher world with hints of actual violence. One of the cons he observes, for example, involves a poker game in which one player accuses another of cheating. They get into a fight and one of the players shoots another of the players. All of the other players then scatter, leaving their money in the middle of table. Then the "dead" player gets up and splits the money with the player who "shot him."
Okay, there wasn't any actual violence, but the hint of a more violent world than Guys and Dolls ever showed definitely exists. And it sets the wrong tone for the show.
This more-violent world is shown even more dramatically later, in the scene when Nathan Detroit is talking with Joey Biltmore about using his garage for the crap game. While the conversation goes on, Biltmore also supervises two of his henchmen, who take a bound-and-gagged man, put him in the trunk of a car, and drive it away.
That, of course, means that this poor man is about to be "hit," killed. This is more than a suggestion of violence. It is real and true, life-and-death violence. Oh, the violence may not happen on-stage, but everyone knows what's going to happen. That sequence makes it impossible to believe that Runyonland is set in the charmingly seedy but non-threatening New York that Runyon wrote about or which Guys and Dolls needs in order for its characters to be likable.
Second problem with the revival is the dialog. Runyon wrote a very specific kind of dialog. A combination of formal speech and slang, always spoken in the present tense. Here's an example from Tobias the Terrible in the story "More than Somewhat," an example which was nicely copied onto Wikipedia, so that I could cut-and-paste it here easily. "If I have all the tears that are shed on Broadway by guys in love, I will have enough salt water to start an opposition ocean to the Atlantic and Pacific, with enough left over to run the Great Salt Lake out of business. But I wish to say I never shed any of these tears personally, because I am never in love, and furthermore, barring a bad break, I never expect to be in love, for the way I look at it love is strictly the old phedinkus, and I tell the little guy as much."
Such dialog requires a certain cadence. If spoken with the proper cadence, Runyon's dialog is bright and distinctive. When it's not spoken with the proper cadence, Runyon's dialog sounds strange and stilted. The revival was full of people who sounded like they were trying to speak with the Runyon cadence rather than actually speaking with it. They were trying too hard to speak Runyonese properly. As a result, the dialog never sounded proper. It sounded forced.
This was nowhere more apparent than with Oliver Platt, who played Nathan Detroit. He never really captured the Runyon cadence and, as a result, almost everything that came out of his mouth sounded painful.
The other problem with Platt is that he was literally and physically big for the role of Nathan Detroit. Detroit is a little man, one who is physically intimidated by the imposing size and bulk of Big Jule.
Oliver Platt is 6' 3½"
Platt was actually taller than Kearran Giovanni, the actor who played Big Jule. The whole dynamic of Nathan's character never worked with the very tall Platt in the role. It worked when in the movie where 5'7" Frank Sinatra played Nathan Detroit or on Broadway when the even shorter 5'5" Nathan Lane played Detroit.
That's, anyway, where I think the revival failed. The way it handled the setting of Runyonland didn't work. The way the actors delivered Runyonese didn't work. Oliver Platt and Nathan Detroit didn't work on any level. All of those things made it difficult for me to buy into the concept that I was in Runyonland as opposed to seeing a bunch of people trying to make me believe I was in Runyonland. As a result, the show never pulled me in. I felt distant and detached from it and, ultimately, dissatisfied. I suspect other people who watched the show felt the same. And I suspect their detached dissatisfaction was communicated to others, either in reviews or by word-of-mouth. So, as a result, people didn't go to the show, because who wants to spend the hundreds of dollars a night out on Broadway costs nowadays to be dissatisfied?
I saw Nathan Lane in the role and he was quite wonderful. So was that entire production, especially Faith Prince as Miss Adelaide. I suspect from afar that it hasn't been long enough since that version to mount a new Guys and Dolls unless you're going to do something quite different with it...and if you do something quite different with it, it ain't Guys and Dolls. A lot of old shows can stand some rethinking but this one is just too familiar. Everyone knows where it's going and how to get there so deviations are distracting.
The only really awful production I ever saw was a 1980 touring company in which Milton Berle played Nathan Detroit and did everything in his power to turn the evening into The Milton Berle Show. Mr. Detroit has but one song in Guys and Dolls — the result of that role having been originated by the non-singing Sam Levene. When Sinatra played the role in the movie, they added a couple of new tunes for him — not very good ones — and stuck him in the "Guys and Dolls" number even though its theme is completely contrary to Nathan Detroit's attitude at that point in the story. Berle didn't get the extra songs but his Nathan not only sang in "Guys and Dolls" but darn near turned it into a solo.
It was that way the whole evening. Sounds like what you saw could challenge it in the category of Getting It Wrong.
A week or two ago on his show, Bill Maher startled some by saying that he wished Barack Obama would take a little more after George W. Bush in one regard: That attitude of "I won the election so I'm going to ram through my agenda and if the losers don't like it...well, screw them." The Bush administration always had that annoying view that since they'd ostensibly won a hair more than 50% of the vote, they were entitled to their way 100% of the time. Maher said he wished Obama would be more aggressive in the same way about pushing his own legislation and policies.
I'm drifting ever-so-cautiously towards the same viewpoint. I still have the hope, naive as it may someday feel, that what Obama's doing is being pragmatic about working with the opposition, horse-trading his way to a more effective coalition. If he wants a second term, we'll have to be able to see that he delivered most of what he promised and made it really work this way. Elected officials always on some level disappoint those who put them in office and there's something about Obama that makes me feel that the folks who voted for him will be less forgiving than the ones who voted for Bush were for the guy they picked.
For now, I look at what seem like reversals of rhetoric — hedging on eliminating "Don't ask, don't tell," suppressing torture pics, allowing infinite detention and (now) using signing statements to overrule Congress — and I have to wonder. And content myself that even if the worst is true, he's still a lot better than the guy he replaced.
The last few days, I've been learning a new piece of software — new to me, anyway. It's Adobe InDesign CS4, and it's something you'd use to create a book or magazine or pamphlet. You lay out pages with text and graphics, and it does a lot that Microsoft Word or any word processor just can't handle. Since there are eight thousand books in print about how to use Adobe InDesign and a thriving industry selling video tutorials, I feared it would like trying to learn how to trisect angles or something...but I was able to format a simple publication my first day. And since I'm not that bright, you should be able to pick it up in a snap if you're of a mind to master and use such a thing.
I'm using the 30-day free trial, which I downloaded from this site and I think I'm going to want to use it past the thirty days. The program retails for seven hundred smackers and I, of course, am not going to pay that. If you pay retail more than twice in one year, you lose the right to say you're Jewish. There are discounters who can get it down to around $400 but I'm wondering if anyone knows of a cheaper source...maybe a free copy that's sitting around your office unused? I am, as you may have observed, about as subtle as the end of Gallagher's act.
And before anyone offers: Thanks but I don't want a torrent bootleg or "warez" or whatever cute name they're giving lately to copyright infringement. A few years ago, I briefly (I confess) used a few of those, mainly to test out software that didn't offer a trial version. I decided that that didn't work for me ethically...just as the programs usually didn't work for me at all. They were just too much trouble...in accord with my oft-stated maxim that few things are as expensive in life as those that are free.
June 26, 2009
