You see The Daily Show last night? It wasn't as blatant in the version that ran on Comedy Central but on their website, they have the full, non-truncated interview Jon Stewart did with a gent named Ken Blackwell...and I can't recall ever seeing a guest on a quasi-news show ever fail so totally to defend and support his own position. If this had been a prize fight, the ref would have stepped in, stopped the proceedings and told Blackwell to pick up his teeth and get out.
Blackwell is a Republican advocate who's written a book called The Blueprint: Obama's Plan to Subvert the Constitution and Build an Imperial Presidency. Stewart kept asking him to give an example of how Obama is doing that and the replies pretty much came down to this: He's going against the Republican agenda. This is apparently the new definition of tyranny.
I'm not sure if Mr. Blackwell wrote his book because there's a lot of money to be harvested these days from books that paint Barack Obama as the herald of Ragnarok, or if we're just getting a preview of the next few elections. Is the G.O.P. really planning on running on the notion that a Chief Exec is Hitler if he doesn't appoint judges that Sean Hannity would approve of? But it was amazing to see Blackwell, who is by no means a stupid man, sit there and boot every wide-open opportunity that Jon Stewart gave him to make his case. You could almost tell that Stewart liked the guy and didn't want to win the match on a forfeit.
Talking Points Memo has embedded the full interview so I don't have to. If you only have time to watch one part, watch the last one.
We seem to be on a Neil Simon kick here lately. Jeff Abraham sent me this link to another article about Mr. Simon, which comes complete with the usual mistake of claiming that Woody Allen wrote for Your Show of Shows.
The article is mainly about shock that the recent Broadway revival of Simon's Brighton Beach Memoirs was a fast failure. I don't think it's that huge a shock. Only three years earlier, a revival of one of his biggest hits, Barefoot in the Park, barely lasted a hundred performances and the Christina Applegate resurrection of Sweet Charity didn't do all that much better. His last original play, 45 Seconds From Broadway, closed after 73 performances and his last new musical, The Goodbye Girl, was also not a success despite the marquee value of Martin Short and Bernadette Peters. There have been some hits — the most recent Odd Couple revival lasted as long as Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick were willing to do it; a revival of The Sunshine Boys ran as long as Jack Klugman and Tony Randall wanted it to run — but it's been a while since the odds favored anything with Neil Simon's name on it. His last real hit was Lost in Yonkers and that was 17 years ago.
I'm a big fan of Simon's best work, and I even find his (relative) failures interesting. I'm just not surprised that audiences are not automatically flocking to anything he writes these days, at least on and around Broadway.
One other interesting point in that article: Mr. Simon says something about his old colleague Mel Brooks that suggests some hostility — something about wanting to kill him. In Simon's autobiography, he makes almost no mention of his days on Your Show of Shows, which you'd think would have yielded several anecdote-rich chapters. It struck me as quite odd. How many writers pen their memoirs and skip over their first major success?
I have a suspicion. It's that Simon has either written or is planning to write a separate book about those years but doesn't want it published until certain people — not necessarily including Mel — pass away. Wonder if I'm right...
The White House Correspondents' Dinner is Saturday. It airs on C-Span 1 at 8 PM Eastern, 5 PM Pacific for an alleged ninety minutes. Jay Leno is this year's comedian.
We wrote here and here recently about a new deal that the Harrah's chain is offering in its Vegas casinos. You can buy a pass to their "Buffet of Buffets" promotion and for 24 hours, you can eat as much as you want, as often as you want, at any of eight separate buffets they have in town. Reports are that it has been a smashing success...with huge lines, which probably limit how much some people get to eat on the plan.
The price was $29.99 for a day of dining. It has been raised to $34.99 for folks who hold a Harrah's Total Rewards card and to $39.99 for those who don't. Since the Total Rewards card is free, I'm guessing not a lot of people are paying the higher price...but even if you do, it's still a bargain. That is, if you don't have to wait an hour or two to get into your buffet of choice. Apparently, at peak hours, you might.
This is a 1963 sales film for Ideal Toys — something they threw together to show toy stores the products they'd be hawking in the coming year, I suppose. I don't think these are all final versions of the commercials for those toys but rather temporary versions thrown together for this presentation. There are two spots in here for Dick Tracy merchandise and they feature better animation than was then being done for the Dick Tracy cartoon series. (That's Everett Sloane as the voice of Dick Tracy, Benny Rubin as Joe Jitsu and Paul Frees as Go-Go Gomez. On the series, Señor Gomez was sometimes voiced by Frees, sometimes by Mel Blanc.)
What strikes me about all these commercials — this runs a little under eight minutes, by the way — is that I don't want any of these toys and didn't when I was 11, as I was when this film was made. The Mouse Trap Game looks like it might have been fun to play...once. Other than that, there's something kinda condescending about the toys and the way they're being sold...
April 28, 2010
