Saturday, February 13, 2010

Jack Paar, P.S.

Just fixed a whopper of a typo in my piece on Paar. Thanks to all nine million of you who noticed it...and how come no one ever corrects Sarah Palin the way you folks correct me?

One other point. You'll notice in the audio of Paar's resignation, he says, "I'm leaving the Tonight show." Well, two points, actually. The show in question was called Tonight when Steve Allen hosted it, not The Tonight Show, though I'm sure folks casually referred to it as such. When Paar took it over, it went through a number of names like Tonight Starring Jack Paar and Jack Paar Tonight. In TV Guide and similar listings, it usually just said Jack Paar. Eventually, it became The Jack Paar Show until near the end when NBC decided they needed to re-establish the name, Tonight.

It formally became The Tonight Show after Paar left. As you may know, his successor (that Carson guy) didn't start for six months after that due to a contractual problem so there were guest hosts. If you were ever asked to name the first person who hosted a program called The Tonight Show on NBC, I believe the correct answer is Art Linkletter. He was the first guest host. When Johnny showed up, it was The Tonight Show and Ed McMahon's opening voiceover would say, "The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson." At some point — I don't know when — the official title of the show became The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. As far as I know, no one ever suggested changing it to The Johnny Carson Show.

I believe Paar said on several occasions that he never referred to it as The Jack Paar Show and the audio of his walk-off is consistent with that. He later did do a weekly prime-time program called The Jack Paar Show. Jay Leno made it The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and I assume that won't change. Conan O'Brien had The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien. In Mr. Carson's honor, they seem to have retired the word, "Starring."

• Posted at 4:29 PM · LINK

Go Read It!

A nice profile of Craig Ferguson. I find myself enjoying Ferguson's show more than any of the others...though I could do with about eight less fart jokes per hour. I also cannot get out of my head something I once heard a producer friend of mine say: "There's something wrong with a talk show host who isn't satisfied to enjoy all the advantages of controlling the show and owning the audience...he also has to make sure his chair is higher than the one his guests sit in."

• Posted at 12:58 PM · LINK

Paar for the Course

Back when Jack Paar was hosting what we now call The Tonight Show, he was forever getting into feuds and on-air controversies. The biggest — the one that actually caused him to walk off the show in protest — came when he told a mildly scatological joke one night about a "W.C." The abbreviation has fallen out of common usage and wasn't even all that current in 1960 when the incident occurred...but it stood for Water Closet, which was then another way of saying "toilet." NBC decided to edit the joke out of the taped telecast and did. Here, in case you want to hear it, is audio of the joke as Paar delivered it that night...

Paar was upset that they cut the joke without consulting him. Mostly, he was upset that it got around that NBC had cut a "dirty joke" and that someone thought he told something truly raunchy and filth-laden. Paar felt that the press was always looking for excuses to attack him — never mind that he often attacked the press — and that the deletion would provide fodder for this attackers. He convinced the network that they'd been wrong to cut the W.C. joke but couldn't convince them to let him play it so America could hear for themselves how mild the joke was. They refused and he gave an on-air resignation. Here's audio of that broadcast...

Shortly after delivering the above, Paar exited and his announcer Hugh Downs hosted the rest of the program. It was a major story that was on the front page of every newspaper in the country the next morning. Here's Page One of the L.A. Times with a report that was continued onto this page.

As an aside: Note that the newspaper article does not say Jack Paar walked off The Tonight Show. It says he quit The Jack Paar Show. When Paar signed aboard in 1957, the word "Tonight" was still part of the show's title, though the form changed from time to time. For an extended period, it was Tonight Starring Jack Paar. By 1960 and the W.C. incident, it was just The Jack Paar Show. When he announced his final departure in 1962, they began to ease the word "Tonight" back into the name, though a lot of newspapers never picked up on that. Most TV listings just listed the name of the regular host as the name of the program.

Getting back to his first walk-off: Maybe it's just me but as I look at this whole story, I'm not sure who behaved worse — the network or Paar. They were wrong to excise the joke but he was wrong, I think, not to just come on the air and say, "It wasn't as bad as you think and the network guys were lunkheads." Paar was right that he was often getting attacked. He was wrong to think he was always an injured innocent in those attacks. The man was enormously thin-skinned for a guy who did what he did for a living.

Anyway, he disappeared for a while and finally went back to the show on March 29, 1960, having been gone since February 11. The show had guest hosts and reruns in his absence...and of course, when he returned, he got a massive tune-in. He later denied it was all a publicity stunt but it does raise the question: Why quit the way he did — on the air, a few minutes into one night's show — if all he wanted was out? I've always had the feeling that while it might not have been a calculated publicity stunt, there was some sort of neurotic need for attention that drove the whole episode.

Here's a video clip from an interview Paar gave on shipboard (!) in the early nineties. It takes a while to get started but you might enjoy hearing his summary of the incident, plus they show footage of his return to the program. I think it's significant that in the thirty years Johnny Carson did that show after Paar, Johnny had plenty of arguments with NBC, mostly over money but occasionally over control of the program...but he never found the need to walk off in the middle of a taping.

• Posted at 12:47 PM · LINK

Plagiarism Watch

Gerald Posner has long been one of those investigative reporters whose work I enjoyed and followed. He authored a book on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Case Closed, that made what I thought was a near-airtight case that Lee Harvey Oswald did it and acted alone. (No, it was not airtight but you have to consider that in the context that the books that argue for conspiracies all, without exception, leak at every corner.) I don't trust any journalist 100% but I've found Posner to be as trustworthy as I'm ever likely to find.

It is therefore distressing to see the man enmeshed and shamed by a mini-scandal. Others noted that several sentences in recent Internet articles by Posner were lifted from articles by others. The particular material was factual stuff — the accuracy of Posner's reports was not compromised — but he had not gone to the trouble of rephrasing those lines, putting them into his own words. This is not excusable but it's also not robbing liquor stores at gunpoint.

Posner apologized on his blog, accepted full responsibility, promised to not let it happen again. He was suspended from his position with The Daily Beast, an online magazine, and then resigned. This all seems appropriate, if not a bit excessive, but it's not enough for some of Posner's colleagues/peers. A number of them (like this one) are demanding more mea culpa...or something. And there seems to be a thought out there that suggesting the punishment does not fit the crime is to argue there was no crime.

Posner's sin — and I'm not saying it wasn't a sin — was in crossing that easy line from getting info from others and getting their phrasing. If you write on the web and do research on the web, there's much to be learned from this episode. I could articulate it better but I think I'll just wait until someone else does and copy whatever they say.

• Posted at 11:07 AM · LINK

Happy Frank Buxton Day!

My good friend Frank Buxton is telling gullible people that he's hitting the big eight-oh today. Those who know him know what a crock that is. I'm not sure how old he is...but eighty? Not in this world possible.

I guess he's older than me. When I was a lad, I first saw him as the host of a great TV show on ABC called Discovery, which was that rare example of a show for young folks that managed to be both entertaining and educational at the same time. The only other show I can think of that ever accomplished that was a 1970-1971 Saturday morn series on NBC called Hot Dog. By an amazing coincidence, Hot Dog was produced by Frank Buxton.

Frank has also been an actor, a game show host, a musical comedy performer, and cartoon voice actor (Batfink!). He wrote, produced and/or directed situation comedies like The Odd Couple, Mork & Mindy and Happy Days. He's authored books. He and his pal Woody Allen created the movie, What's Up, Tiger Lily? I could probably save a lot of bandwidth here by just listing things he hasn't done. As far as I know, he has never been a hula dancer, a trapeze artist or one of Larry King's wives. But that's about it.

I admire him in every way except for this stupid lie he's spreading about being eighty years old. If he'll just knock it off, I'll wish him a Happy Birthday. I don't know why he's saying it but I do know that I ain't buying it.

• Posted at 1:49 AM · LINK

February 12, 2010 • Current • February 14, 2010