I have a half-dozen messages this morning telling me that the most memorable line from Blazing Saddles is: "'scuse me while I whip this out." If you say so. Someone else asks if it's true that Mel Brooks wanted Richard Pryor to play the lead but the studio refused. That's what I always heard and […]
Time to face reality: I have fallen hopelessly behind in answering e-mail. I just spent two hours, which is all I can spare tonight, responding…and I still have over 200 unanswered recent messages. I have a major deadline this week, plus I have to get my income tax data collected and over to my Business […]
Peter Sanderson reports on the recent memorial service in New York for Julius Schwartz. I'm sorry I couldn't get back there for it. […]
We were talking here the other day about seeing Blazing Saddles when it first came out. That brought this message from Ben Herndon… I am 50 years old now, but back in 1974 I was attending U.C.L.A. Warner Brothers scheduled a free midnight sneak preview of Blazing Saddles on a weekend night and the Avco […]
Eric Boehlert discusses the way the Bush administration has rammed through funding for both the Iraq war and its Medicare program by floating incorrect figures and only later revealing the true costs. This is a Salon.Com story, which means that if you're not a member, you'll have to watch some advertising. […]
A reader of my websites, Ray Barrington, calls the following to my attention. In this post on my other weblog, written back in December of '02, I was talking about how some companies like to change what their initials stand for. I predicted that the KFC company would begin denying that their initials stood for […]
Over on one of the theater chatboards, there was recently a discussion of cell phones going off in the middle of a performance. There is no disagreement that this is a bad thing. I am still embarrassed over one time when mine did. It was in New York while my friend Carolyn and I were […]
Sir Sean Connery has a website…and a very handsome one, I might add. […]
Here's a long but important article in the New York Times magazine section about the Bush administration's attempts and occasional successes to roll back environmental protection laws. Pretty scary stuff. […]
Bill Carter, who reports on TV for the New York Times and especially on late night, files this long piece on Conan O'Brien. The quick summary of it is that Conan wants to move up to a show at 11:30 and since Jay Leno ain't going anywhere, O'Brien may be going elsewhere. Like several of […]
While working this afternoon, I have some DVDs on the player, including the movie version of A Chorus Line. The best thing about this DVD is that it has a special feature, an interview with Marvin Hamlisch in which he discusses how the Broadway show came to be and says not one single word about […]
HBO and Showtime have this strange way of rotating shows where, for example, Real Time With Bill Maher does a batch of shows and then it goes off for a while and On the Record With Bob Costas returns for a spell. Showtime has just brought back the Penn & Teller program which I liked […]
William Saletan nails what I suspect is a key element in the debate over George W. Bush's leadership capabilities or the lack, thereof. An awful lot of folks, both Democrats and Republicans, have sided with Bush and come to regret it. Unfortunately for sane discourse, when they change their minds, the immediate accusation is that […]
Things seem to be stablilizing in the Writers Guild. We haven't changed Presidents for two whole weeks. My pal Carl Gottlieb has stepped in as Vice-President. Carl is a very intelligent man who knows more about negotiations and the Guild than any man alive. But I'm still skeptical that the current drive to increase writers' […]