While the battle over the deliberately-misnamed "Ground Zero Mosque" rages on, another (quieter) debate is transpiring about another proposed new building in Manhattan. Developers want to build something called 15 Penn Plaza, which would be a towering skyscraper opposite Penn Station. The controversy is that it would be 1,216 feet high. A few blocks away, there's this thing called the Empire State Building, which is 1,250 feet high. Ergo, it would make for a major change in the New York skyline, rendering all scenic postcards obsolete...or something. Anyway, you can read about the debate here.
What's of special note to us is that 15 Penn Plaza would rise on the site of what is now the Hotel Pennsylvania, a venerable enterprise that for about twenty years now has looked like it was about to be demolished. I've stayed there a few times and you got the idea that if a doorknob was broken, the owners didn't want to go to the expense of fixing it because, you know, the hotel may get torn down any day. Or maybe just collapse on its own accord. The place has a lot of history, including being the site of (perhaps) more comic book conventions than any other building in the world...and certainly my first.
I have no opinion on whether that structure should come down and 15 Penn Plaza should go up...and up and up. I just wanted to mention it and add this...
The Empire State Building is not the tallest building in the world or even the country, though most folks probably think it is. (What is: The Willis Tower and the Trump International in Chicago are both taller, as are more than a dozen others worldwide.) The Empire State was the tallest in New York until the North Tower of the World Trade Center was completed, whereupon the E.S.B. fell to second place. When the W.T.C. fell to nothingness, the Empire State reclaimed the title...a pretty crummy way to become #1 but not its fault. Anyway, because of its height, that place King Kong scaled is Numero Uno in its own turf and enjoys a certain fame and stature because of it.
If you were putting up a building that was going to be 1,216 feet high, wouldn't you go the extra distance and seize the title? It would only take another 35 feet. What is that? Three more stories? How much extra could that cost? Maybe you could even do part of it with a smaller section of tower or something, the point being it's a shame to come that close to skyline dominance and fall short. I don't know the developers at all but they have to have either the healthiest egos in the world (because they feel no need to show off) or the sickest (because they so easily concede defeat). I mean, how many men look down at their own genitalia and say, "Oh, that's plenty big enough?" I mean, besides you and me?
This is a "pitch" video from back when Jim Henson and George Schlatter were trying to sell The Muppet Show to CBS. It stars a character named Leo (voiced by Henson) who'd previously appeared in projects Henson's company did like sales training films, and though it's very funny, it did not result in CBS buying the program. Neither did any other network and later, sans Schlatter, it wound up in syndication where it was a tremendous success.
Granted, this is hindsight but I don't think it's surprising that this reel failed to sell the product. The network execs to whom it was addressed already knew the credits of Mssrs. Henson and Schlatter and didn't doubt that those two, individually or collectively, could produce three minutes of funny stuff. What the suits probably wanted to know was what The Muppet Show would be: What's the format? Who'll be on it? What would a typical episode be like? This pitch told them none of that. Presumably, Henson and Schlatter submitted other material, verbal and written, that would convey all that...but this pitch just sounds like empty hype for an undefined product.
Years ago, I worked with a gentleman named Kim LeMasters who had been for a few years, the guy at CBS you pitched your show to if you wanted to sell a prime-time show to that network. He was out of that job by the time I worked with him but willing to discuss it. I asked him how often someone had walked in, pitched him something and he knew on the spot he wanted to buy it. He said it had happened twice. He'd purchased many shows but only two had been first-round knockouts.
One was when Barry Kemp walked in with Newhart — the series set at the inn in Vermont. Kim said, appoximately, "He had Bob Newhart and he had the perfect format with everything all worked-out." The other show was Magnum, P.I. and I'm not sure if Tom Selleck was attached at that point but Kim said the pitch was very complete with all the regular characters clearly defined and a good handle on the kind of stories that would be done. Obviously, there was also a lot of confidence in those who'd be producing and writing...but one of the things that had impressed Kim was a lack of hard sell. The pitchers had not come in and said, "This is going to be a huge hit." Almost everyone says that and if you hear pitches all day, as network execs do, you tend to get sick of that and to just tune it out.
I suspect Henson and Schlatter intended the following as a parody of the kind of thing they knew their target audience (i.e., the CBS brass) heard ad nauseam. But maybe it didn't come off that way. Fortunately, the idea refused to die, moving way past material like this...
Edward Kean, the writer behind the legendary TV show Howdy Doody, has died at the age of 85.
Mr. Kean made an amazing contribution to early television, almost single-handedly writing the popular series (including authoring many of its songs) and doing it on a daily basis. This obit will tell you all about his life but I wanted to append that Kean scripted many of the Howdy Doody comic books, as well as other kinds of Howdy Doody books for Western Publishing. In the late fifties, after Kean made the transition from Doody-writing to stockbrokering, he occasionally wrote for Western's New York office — more kids' books of a non-Doody bent, along with intermittent comics. They were the least of his accomplishments but they should be mentioned.
August 23, 2010
