Monthly Archives: July 2008

If you want to know how to decorate a room, just follow The Pottery Barn Rule: Put a copy of my book on a shelf in it.

It's been a while since I've mentioned the black-and-white game show reruns on GSN. Each night, they run two of them. At Midnight (my time), they air an old What's My Line? in chronological order. The one last night was from February 27, 1955 and the Mystery Guest was Portland Hoffa, spouse of panelist Fred Allen. If my notes are right, the Mystery Guest tonight should be Lily Pons, then tomorrow night is Sammy Davis Jr.

Following that, they'd been airing I've Got a Secret but they reached the end of that show's run and now they've replaced it with The Name's the Same, a Goodson-Todman panel show that ran from December 5, 1951 until October 7, 1955 without ever being as successful as the other Goodson-Todman show it was imitating, What's My Line? If you watch the reruns, you'll see its producers trying desperately to save it with a fruitless litany of rule changes, panel changes and host changes. In four years, its stewardship changed four times (Robert Q. Lewis to Dennis James to the team of Bob & Ray to Clifton Fadiman) with several "fill-in" hosts on a try-out basis).

But the big way they tried to make it work was with the increasing use of "gambits." What the heck are those?, I hear you cry. Well, you haven't been studying old bloggings on this site because I explained it long ago. Here…I'll save you the trouble of searching for the explanation. In April of '02, I wrote here…

…the panel shows — like What's My Line?, To Tell the Truth and I've Got A Secret — were never rigged in that way. There was no point to it. The appeal of those shows was in the panel's interplay, and no great sums of cash were at stake. (The most you could win on Line was something like $50 and, at times, they paid each contestant the full amount so that nobody would whine that they'd been swindled out of cash by the frequent anomalies in the gameplay.) In fact, not only did the producers not give the players the right answers, they frequently gave them the wrong ones.

The practice was called "gambitting" and it was based on the premise that a lot of the fun on such a show was in the panelists naïvely asking questions that had great, unintentional meaning. For example, questioning a man she didn't know sold beds for a living, Dorothy Kilgallen might ask, "Could Bennett Cerf and I use one of these together?" Of course, the audience would get hysterical. Those funny situations occurred naturally but, to make sure they occurred a little more often, the producers would often go to the panelists and suggest an area of errant questioning. Dorothy Kilgallen, actually, would rarely engage in it. She wasn't a comedian and was more interested in winning the game than in getting laughs. But most of the panelists — the comics, especially — would dutifully ask the lady who made girdles, "Could I use your product?" Or they'd ask a man who sold elephants, "Might I have one of these in my living room?" They didn't know what the contestant's secret was but they knew that the questioning they'd been told to pursue would get big boffs.

Once you're aware of the practice, it becomes very obvious. That's especially true on a lesser-known Goodson-Todman show that Game Show Network runs on occasion called, The Name's The Same. As this one plunged in the ratings, its staff ratcheted up the use of gambits to the point where the show really came off as phony and its panelists look almost stupid at times.

If you start watching the reruns on GSN now, you'll see it get worse and worse to the point of absurdity. They had some witty panelists on the show — at times, Abe Burrows, Meredith Willson, Bill Cullen, Carl Reiner and others who could be pretty funny. But the producers didn't want to take that chance so they increasingly planted the panelists with naïve questions that would yield outrageous juxtapositions. Something similar infests today's so-called "reality" shows. They don't trust reality to be interesting so they have to massage it a bit, creating phony situations with folks who go along with the manipulation. It's a small transgression on The Name's The Same but it gets worse and worse as the ratings go down…and I suspect it made them worse.

One of the most-read articles on my site is my Christmas story about Mel Tormé. Recently, it inspired an artist named Josh Pincus to do an illustration. Here it is…and it looks almost exactly like Mel did that day.

I know three people on the web named Steven (or Steve) Thompson. One of them runs a blog full of interesting artifacts. On it, he recently posted a photo of actors Steve Holland and Chris Noel, both of whom often posed for photos that artists used as reference for the painting of movie posters or paperback book covers or pieces of that sort. (Mr. Holland was the guy James Bama used as model for those Doc Savage paperback covers where his shirt was always torn. Did you ever notice that Doc was always wearing the same torn shirt? Holland only had one.)

Anyway, Br'er Thompson is trying to help someone identify what this photo was used for: What movie poster? What paperback cover? Go over there and see if you can help him.

I've bragged that readers of my site can always come up with an answer to any mystery. Don't let me down. Our honor (yours and mine) is at stake. And while you're there, check out some of the other neat stuff he has posted.

Okay, I just posted my list. Click on the above banner (or here) to see a handy-dandy schedule of the primo events of the Comic-Con International in San Diego. You really don't need to be anyplace else.

The schedules are up for Comic-Con programming on Friday and Saturday. Go…see which panels you want to see are opposite other panels you want to see.

I'll have the full list of mine up later today. Maybe.

Back at the computer after a refreshing three hours of sleep, I find myself reading articles like this one about the "status of forces" negotiations between the U.S. and Iraq. Looks like Bush supporters are going to have to start arguing that setting up a "time horizon for troop withdrawal" (which is wanted) is not the same thing as setting timetables to bring U.S. forces home (which Bush and McCain have always equated with craven surrender). Hey, whatever gets us outta there is fine with me.

Another stumbing block seems to be — and I quote from the above-linked article — "the legal immunity of U.S. troops and Defense Department personnel from Iraqi prosecution for any alleged crime." Isn't this how the FISA law was handled? You do what you want and then you ram through retroactive immunity? After they leave office, Bush and Cheney are planning to begin robbing liquor stores and then having that made legal.

Remember the good ol' days when our government was either so virtuous or so competent at not getting caught that it didn't need retroactive immunity for anything it had done?

I'm up at another ungodly hour, working on something. On my TiVo as I write, I'm watching a lecture by Vincent Bugliosi, who has a new book out called The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder. In it, he calls for some courageous prosecutor to come forth — or better still, for Vince Bugliosi to be appointed a Special Prosecutor — and to put Bush on trial. The lecture was on CSPAN2 earlier this morning and it reruns today (Sunday) at 3 PM Eastern, which is Noon on my coast.

I have no idea what to make of this. Bugliosi (who I've met and spoken with, mostly about his book on the Kennedy assassination) can be a very annoying man. He sweats profusely and rarely strays too far from the topic of what a superb prosecutor and smart person he believes himself to be. This is not to say he's wrong. I thought his writings on the JFK case, the O.J. Simpson case, the Clinton-Lewinsky matter and the Bush-Gore Supreme Court were generally on-target and occasionally brilliant. This time out, he seems to be pursuing his case from an utterly impractical angle…one that's unlikely to accomplish anything more than sell a lot of books. I usually purchase whatever Bugliosi publishes but this time, I think I'm taking a pass.

An interesting aside. One of the folks who asks a question of Bugliosi in the Q-and-A section is Steve Rohde, an attorney who's been a major champion of the First Amendment. He's a courageous man who has done much good for Freedom of Speech in this country…and he was the main lawyer who represented Jack Kirby in his famous dispute with Marvel Comics over the ownership of his original artwork.

Dick Cavett, a guy I've always admired in any number of ways, has been a chronic sufferer of capital-D Depression for some time. As he got the problem under some control, he went public with his story in a series of fascinating, touching talk show appearances that I'm sure helped a lot of people…including many who had much tinier, manageable versions of the ailment he had in spades. One interview I recall — on Larry King Live, I believe — included a caller who practically begged Cavett to give the names of the medications that had helped him. Cavett wisely refused and then respectfully lectured the caller that he (she?) had to find a doctor caring and learned enough to prescribe what could be effective in his (her?) specific case. He said something to the effect of, "What worked for me might not work for you. In fact, it might make things worse. What you need to do is address the problem on a basic level. Asking what I took so that you might find some way to get your hands on it shows that you're missing the whole point."

Recently, Mr. Cavett wrote this column for The New York Times in which he talked a little about his problem, then followed it with this column in which he said more. They're a little self-congratulatory and he does manage to name-drop three of his Big Four — Olivier, Brando and Woody Allen — in them. (Apparently, Kate Hepburn said nothing even vaguely relevant on the topic.) But I think Cavett's so bright and useful that I forgive him his occasional excesses and I suggest you give his pieces a quick read…or a deeper one if the topic looms large in your life. And don't skip over the comments from his readers which are very much a part of his little lecture.

When I see some of the amateurs and inept provocateurs who manage to get an hour of cable time, at least for a few ratings periods, I wonder why no one has offered Dick Cavett one of those time slots. Maybe he wouldn't want it but nothing the man ever did on television was not worth watching. The last time he had such a show, much of his old roster of guests was still available and he did shows with them that were interesting…but pale, anticlimactic versions of earlier, better conversations. Now, almost all of those folks are gone and I think it would be interesting to drop the guy into a new world of talking heads and see what happened. It might be exciting but even if it wasn't, he couldn't get lower numbers than Tucker Carlson or Glenn Beck.