The other day, I linked you to a great site about CBS Television City in Hollywood, a wonderful complex that is arguably in Hollywood. During my career in television — and before it, back when I found ways to roam the halls of big TV studios — I got to extensively prowl NBC in Burbank and ABC over in Los Feliz. But even though it was the one closest to my home, I never got enough time at CBS. I wrote a lot of shows for CBS but all but one either taped elsewhere or were animated…so I never quite learned my way around the place and often got lost.
Here's a 10 minute history/tour and I'm not sure where it's from but I can guess. The host is a lovely gent named George Kirgo who had a wonderful career as a writer-producer of films and TV shows, a stint as President of the Writers Guild of America, West during its nasty 1988 strike, and an occasional career as a TV panelist or critic. He reviewed films and covered TV for a while for The CBS Morning Program and I'm guessing this is from that…or some related endeavor. Here's a piece I wrote about him after we lost him in 2004 and here he is showing us around that big building at Beverly and Fairfax…
Interesting thing about the Neil Simon interview. It was published in 1992 (James Lipton was the interviewer) and in it, Simon talks about being stuck on a play he was trying to write about his days working for Sid Caesar. Maybe this conversation spurred him on to finish it because that play — Laughter on the 23rd Floor — debuted on Broadway in November of 1993.
Also: As you may know, one of our recurring points of correction here is when people say that Larry Gelbart, Woody Allen and certain other folks who never worked on Your Show of Shows worked on Your Show of Shows. The late Mr. Gelbart spent much of his life, it seemed, correcting people who thought he'd worked on Your Show of Shows and occasionally suggesting that anyone who thought that didn't know the first thing about Your Show of Shows. And now here's Neil Simon, who did work on Your Show of Shows, talking about working with Gelbart on it and making it sound like Woody and the others who didn't were there, too.
Here are two articles about the debate last night. Over in Esquire, Charles P. Pierce tells you what a miserable human being Paul Ryan is.
And at Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi says much the same and emphasizes that the Romney-Ryan plan is basically to promise everything to everyone, get elected, then worry about how they're going to pay for it then, if ever.
You can kinda tell Republicans got clobbered last night. All they can talk about this morning is how Joe Biden was cranky and he laughed a lot. At worst, that makes Biden rude. It doesn't make him wrong.
I could only spare a small amount of time to watch the Vice-Presidential debate. I thought Joe Biden, at least in the parts I saw, mopped the linoleum with Paul Ryan and made him look like an amateur who couldn't even explain his own proposals. Then again, I'm sure out there are at least a couple of Romney-Ryan boosters reading this who thought Ryan did the mopping. So let's just wait a few days and see if the polls budge enough to assume the debate was the cause. That's really all that matters in these things.
The parts I saw dovetailed with Fred Kaplan has to say about Ryan's view of foreign policy. I sure don't get that the Republican ticket connects a lot with reality…or that the folks who desperately want Obama out really care what Romney and Ryan say they'll do as long as it at least sounds like expunging the current administration.
My pal Ken Levine has written a book with a title — The ME Generation by ME — that I wish I'd used first. I haven't read all of it but I've read enough to know it's good and just as witty as Ken is. Here's a link to order a copy and here's Ken himself to tell you what it's all about…
Michael Kinsley wonders aloud how bad it would be if Mitt Romney got elected president.
Me? I think it depends on which Romney. He's been on both sides of every important issue and his economic proposals are so bald on details that I can't see how anyone can know what they're going to get.
Okay, I know I'm supposed to be working but this is too good to wait. An e-mail from Suzanne Stone sent me to this new (I guess) website for CBS Television City in Hollywood. That's the big complex at the corner of Beverly and Fairfax from which countless TV programs have emanated.
You might like to see blueprints of the studios over there. You might enjoy a terrific gallery of old photos of the place. And you'll really enjoy this list of shows that have been shot there over the years. It will tell you which studio each show was in and when. If you're into TV history, you can spend a lot of time over there. I would if I didn't have this dratted deadline.
Mark is very, very busy catching up with deadlines and certain other responsibilities not unrelated to the passing of my mother. I may be back here over the next few days but not with my usual consistency. I may also not be answering e-mails very efficiently.
On Saturday, I will make one last plea for you to go to this Kickstarter page and back the proposed album by Big Daddy, one of the most inventive musical groups I've ever encountered. They have four more days to raise 35 grand and at this moment, they're only slightly more than half the way home. They're very funny guys and there will be great joy coming through your speakers and elsewhere if they reach their goal and make their album. Sign up there and feel proud of yourself for encouraging great artists. It may be all we'll have once the Republicans destroy PBS.
Kliph Nesteroff posted this to my Facebook page and I decided it was too good not to share here with you. It's a 25 minute radio tribute broadcast on NBC on December 26, 1974. It's about a very funny man who died that day, Jack Benny…
One day in 1992, completely out of nowhere, my mother made the oddest request. She asked, "Do you think you could get me a job as an extra on a TV show?"
I wouldn't have been more surprised if she'd asked me, "Do you think you could arrange for me to be shot out of a cannon?" She was 70 years old, widowed and retired, and she seemed well adjusted to that life. At no point had she ever expressed the slightest interest in show business or working again, nor did she need money. She had my father's pension and if that had been insufficient — which it never was; not with a good health insurance plan as well — she had me. This was more like a whim. When she'd worked at the grocery store, she'd worked with a couple of folks who'd done extra work and it sounded…well, maybe not so much fun as interesting.
I warned her. There were extra jobs and there were extra jobs. Some required walking back and forth hundreds of times in shots or running or moving about. She could walk then but being 70, she had her limits. She said, "I was thinking…maybe in the jury in a courtroom scene. There are a lot of shows on these days that do scenes in courtrooms and they need older people because older people sit on juries." That made a fair amount of sense. Not a lot of walking for extras who play jurors. I asked her if she had a show in mind. She said, "Well, the one I really love is L.A. Law."
She couldn't have picked an easier show for me. One of my best friends, Alan Brennert, was one of the Supervising Producers on L.A. Law. I phoned him up and twenty minutes later, my mother had a job. I told her I'd take the customary 10%.
It was also a good pick for geographic reasons. L.A. Law shot at the Twentieth-Century Fox Studio which was about five blocks from where she lived. When I resided in that house and had meetings at Fox, I sometimes walked to them. That is, by the way, a really good way to upset the guards at the gate. They always had a drive-on pass ready for me but there were no walk-on passes and they didn't know what the heck to do.
She was quite excited about her job. One of the things she said to me was "I wish I'd thought of this a few years ago before Jimmy Smits left the series. I love him. I'd love to have watched him work." I avoided telling her something Alan had told me; that the Special Guest Star on this particular episode was, as luck would have it, Jimmy Smits.
The day before the gig, she got her first inkling that maybe extra work wasn't something she would love. An assistant phoned and gave her a call time of 6 AM. She briefly considered retiring then and there but decided to soldier on. She was to bring several changes of clothes and report to a certain gate at that ungodliest of hours. Which she did. She drove over that morning and they told her where to park. It was on the opposite end of the lot from where L.A. Law filmed and getting from her car to the stage, she got quite lost. By the time she found where she was supposed to go, she was exhausted from hiking the length and breadth of a pretty big studio.
She was put in a room with the other extras, all of whom were seasoned veterans at this kind of work. They were cordial to her but not particularly welcoming, especially when they found out she hadn't gone through the usual extra casting process. Extras take great pride in their art or craft — whichever they see it as. The notion that someone could just waltz in and do it via an "in" seemed to annoy some of them. It was like, "Hey, we had to work to get here." But no one was rude to her. Not openly, that is.
An hour or so later, the director came into the Extras Room and looked them over. He made a few suggestions about wardrobe and makeup…and designated my mother to be the foreperson.
Now, understand: That just meant she'd be in a certain chair on the set. Other than that, nothing about her participation on the show had changed. But many of the other extras quietly (and later, audibly) objected. It is the dream of almost every extra in almost every job to be upgraded; to have the director or producer suddenly decide to give them a line or two to utter. It makes the money they're being paid go way up and it magically transforms them from Warm Bodies into Actors. They tell tales of it happening, just to reassure each other that it can — "Didja hear? Last week on that Clint Eastwood movie, Jody was upgraded to an Under Five." That is a very big deal.
My mother didn't want an upgrade. She never thought she was an actress. She was a little old lady who could look like a juror sitting there. That was the extent of her ability and she knew it and if they'd tried to give her a line, she would have said, "I can't do that. Give it to someone else."
Still, the other extras were worried. Picking her to be foreperson increased the chance she'd be given a line from…oh, about one chance in ten thousand to one chance in five thousand. Maybe not quite that much. But she heard one of the other extras go up to the Associate Director soon after and tell him, "Listen, that woman is not a professional. If they decide they need a juror to speak, it really should go to one of us." As it turned out, they never needed a juror to speak.
An hour or so later, they were herded onto the set. My mother just sat there in the jury box, delighted to be watching Jimmy Smits addressing the jury. They filmed for about an hour, then the extras were told to return to the Extras Room for a while. Mr. Smits had to rehearse his big, six-page scene before filming would resume.
They all settled back in for a while and my mother listened in on the conversation. It had turned to the topic of Recent Jobs From Hell. One extra told about having to work all night in a scene where rain was being simulated so they were hosed down every two minutes. Another told of a director making them run back and forth for hours in 100° weather, inhaling smoke from smoldering smudgepots. Yet another had a tale of bad food and no toilets on location. As my mother listened, extra work began to sound less and less appealing.
Just then, the Associate Director came in and said, "Mr. Smits would like you in the jury box while he's rehearsing." All the extras started to get up but the A.D. said, "No, just the foreperson," meaning my mother. Smits just wanted her there. As she made her way out to the set, she heard one of the extras muttering, "They'd better not give her a line."
She sat in the jury box for about 40 minutes as Jimmy Smits practiced his long, long speech, pleading his case to her. In the finished show, it wouldn't look that way at all. In fact, you'd never even know she was the foreperson. But on the set that day, Smits argued his view of the matter on hand as if his life depended on convincing Dorothy Evanier. She later told me, "If it had been up to me, he would have won the minute he opened his mouth."
When he was properly rehearsed, the rest of the extras were brought in and the cameras moved into position. Unnoticed by my mother, Mr. Smits went and changed his footwear.
The floor on the set was wood and in the earlier scene, his shoes had made a bit too much noise for the microphones. For just such an occasion, they had special socks that looked like dress shoes and the actors would often wear them to cut down on footstep sounds. Smits was wearing a pair of these as he launched into his big, impassioned, just-rehearsed scene with the cameras rolling. There was a shot of him approaching the jury box and my mother. It never got into the finished show but no one knew at the time it wouldn't. It would have been a shot of Jimmy Smits and my mother with him unburdening his soul to her. Imagine that if you will.
Just as he was reaching his emotional peak, my mother suddenly looked down and made a face as if to say, "What the hell is that on his feet?"
Someone screamed, "Cut!"
Someone else scurried over and told my mother she should be looking at Jimmy Smits, not at his feet. She was embarrassed. A few of the other extras grinned a bit and my mother later reported she could hear them thinking, "See what happens when they hire a non-professional?" But Smits himself told her it was fine; that they were shooting the scene a couple different ways and would be cutting from one take to another. She hadn't ruined anything…or so he assured her.
The rest of the shooting went without incident. They were in and out of the Extras Room a few times, sometimes waiting in there for hours unsure if they'd be needed again at all. But there was good food available and my mother had brought along a few books…so all in all, not a horrible day.
From L.A. Law. That's my mother in the red blouse.
Around 6:30 PM, more than twelve hours after she'd reported for duty, the A.D. came in and released the extras, meaning it was time to go home. My mother was gathering up her things when Jimmy Smits walked in, handed her a rose and thanked her for helping his performance. I have never met Jimmy Smits but as far as I'm concerned, he is the most wonderful human being ever in show business…and that includes me. My mother called his gesture the best moment of her acting career.
It was also the last moment of that career. It was dark when she got out and she was exhausted and it took forever to make it back to the car. The next day, she told me, "If a nice man hadn't come by in a golf cart and taken pity on me and given me a lift, I'd still be there."
All the time, she recalled something one of the friendlier extras had said to her at one point. He'd said, "This show treats us better than any other show in town." Taken in concert with the horror stories she'd heard, that seemed to be true. When I asked her when she wanted me to get her her next job, she said, "Never. I figure if that's as good as it can be, I'm going to quit while I'm ahead."
When the show aired, she got a call from a friend back east who recognized her. That was probably the second-best moment of her time trodding the boards. She also liked a VHS tape I made for her of the episode. I don't think she ever watched it because she kept forgetting how to use her VCR but she really liked the special label I printed up for it. It said, "L.A. Law starring Jimmy Smits and Dorothy Evanier." She looked at that often and occasionally would complain to me about the order of the names. I found that cassette the other day when I was cleaning out a shelf at her house and I thought I ought to tell this story here.
Fred Kaplan says that if you think Mitt Romney's distorting and contradicting the truth about domestic matters, you should hear him talk about foreign affairs.
June Foray, Judy Landers and Judy's dog Photo by Dave Nimitz
Last Saturday, I went out to Burbank to attend the Collectors Show at the Burbank Marriott. This is more-or-less the same function that was once known as the Hollywood Collectors Show which a gent named Ray Courts began and staged from time to time at the Beverly Garland Hotel in North Hollywood. I believe it was Ray who moved the show to the hotel in Burbank across the street from Bob Hope Airport which keeps changing names but is presently a Marriott. Then Ray sold it to others who have operated it since. This was the last one in the Burbank location. Beginning with the January 12-13 show, they'll be at the Westin out by Los Angeles International Airport. Throughout the hall, one could hear attendees saying, "That's too far to travel" as they predicted failure in the new location. Then again, these were the people who could get to Burbank (since that's where they were) and we weren't hearing from people who think Burbank is too great a shlep but who live near LAX. So we'll see.
A moderate crowd filled the Marriott Ballroom on Saturday afternoon. The longest line was for Jonathan Winters and seated near him were two of his co-stars from It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, Marvin Kaplan and Barrie Chase. I had a nice chat with each of them but Jonathan seemed too swamped with signature-seekers to interrupt. Marvin reminded me that it originally wasn't supposed to be him and Arnold Stang as the gas station attendants in the film. At one point, Jackie Mason was penciled in for the role Arnold ended up playing and Marvin's part was to have been filled by Joe Besser. Besser was unable to get a leave of absence from his then-current role on The Joey Bishop Show (the sitcom) and no one seems to know what happened to Jackie. Maybe he gave someone the finger.
I saw two old friends of mine who were also mobbed: Audrey and Judy Landers. In 1978, I was an uncredited consultant on an ABC live-action pilot of Archie and I pushed for the casting of Audrey as Betty. She was quite wonderful in the part and in everything she did after that. She and sis Judy still look stunning and so does Judy's daughter (one of them who was there) who I almost mistook for Audrey. There's something kinda scary in that family's genes as they keep outputting beautiful blondes who don't seem to age much.
June Foray was there, also with a long line and I also got to speak with Michele Lee…and now that I think of it, really no one else on the guest roster. But John Amos was there. And Lou Gossett and Mariel Hemingway and John Saxon and Dawn Wells and Tanya Roberts and Andy Dick and Connie Stevens and Murray Langton (aka The Unknown Comic) and James Darren and Edd "Kookie" Burns and a whole lot of other stars. As usual, the patrons who paid admission and roamed the aisles were in many cases as interesting and/or famous as the stars behind the tables.
I don't know how this show will do in its new location. I hope the answer's "well" as I enjoy them and at every one, I see some fans getting to meet someone they've always loved from afar. And I get to see the person loved from afar realize that maybe they have more fans than they thought. I wouldn't want to see that stop.
Between e-mail, Facebook and Twitter, I've probably received over 700 notes of condolence on the passing of my mother…so individual "thank you" notes are not possible. I appreciate them all but a number of them did seem written on the erroneous assumption that I was grief-stricken and in need of comforting. (I did appreciate the "If there's anything I can do to help" offers, even the one from a stranger in Sweden. I'm still trying to think of anything the guy in Sweden can do to help me…)
Really, the point I was trying to make in telling you what I told you is that the loss of a loved one doesn't have to be a point of emotional devastation and personal collapse. I had an absolutely perfect relationship with my mother. We were as fond of each other as any mother/son parlay in history. Increasingly over the last few years, she was unable to do anything for herself so managing her life fell to me and that meant vast amounts of guilt on her part about how much of my time and money she was consuming. It didn't bother me. It bothered her. I was directing a recording session when she had her final heart assault and pretty much the last thing she said before losing consciousness was that I should be notified but that I should be told not to leave anything important I was doing and rush to her side. (That was what she always said. Before I'm done with Tales of My Mother, I'll relate at least two anecdotes about that, including the time I was told that on my way to the stage to accept an Eisner Award.)
For about the last decade or more, she had been irreparably sick and understandably depressed. She made it to the age of 90 and a half. If at any time after about 78, a magic genie had made her this proposition — you'll be able to walk and travel and eat anything you like for the next week, then you die — she would have been on the plane to Vegas before he'd reached the end of the offer. Her life came to be divided into two activities…
Being in a hospital or nursing facility, eating mediocre food (except when I or the caregiver I hired brought something better), undergoing unpleasant tests and wishing she was back in the home where she'd lived since 1953 or…
Being in the home where she'd lived since 1953, waiting for the next illness or attack that would put her back in a hospital or nursing facility.
Oh, and there were also endless visits to doctors but all in all, it was No Way To Live. When the attending physician told me she was gone, I was not — to tell the truth — all that unhappy. Because she was so unhappy and she had literally nothing to look forward to in life but sadness. She had about 10% of her vision left and her ophthamologists said she could lose even that at any minute and surely would within a year. She also had Assisted Living — either leaving forever that home of 59 years or having full-time live-in caregiving there — in her dank future. She dreaded either version. Every time I mentioned maybe having to move her into an Assisted Living facility, she said "That's where people go to die." And the way she said it made me decide she'd do just that before she allowed that to happen.
Which she did. I really regret losing my mother but I'd been losing her for years on the installment plan. Every time she got out of the hospital, there was a little less of her.
I had her in a nursing facility the last few weeks. It was a good one — a 90 minute drive from my home but worth the commute. I'd had her there before and when I first picked it out, I hadn't realized until I'd signed her up that it happened to be a few blocks from where her caregiver lived. A happy coincidence. I put the caregiver on retainer to be available when I couldn't get down there to do things for her so my mother not only had round-the-clock nurses, she had her own private caregiver on call. The place was perfect, being only two blocks from a big hospital. It was also friendly and caring and they had a great physical therapy department that actually helped her a microscopic amount with her mobility problems. When she'd been there before, it was for rehab but when I put her into it this time, it was with the strong awareness that I was choosing the best of all available places for her to die.
When I speak to wanna-be writers and actors, I always tell them that one secret to show business is to find that sweet spot between Optimism and Pragmatism. I believe the number one reason for career-type failure is too much of one, not enough of the other. You have to be rooted in your dreams but at the same time in reality, and you have to constantly balance one against the other. In the case of my mother, I had to weigh what I wanted to happen for her against what could. And at one point, I had to make the transition from "What can we do to heal this woman?" to "What can we do to make her last days less painful?" That was a difficult pivot and I'd like to think I made it at about the right time. I do know that if I'd made it way too soon or way too late, I would have caused her a lot of harm and done her no favor. I would also have done myself a certain amount of harm.
If you have an elderly parent or other loved one in similar condition, you will not help this person by pretending a miracle cure is possible…or that all that what matters above all is that their heart continues to beat. Quality of life matters. Dignity matters. Happiness matters. Your job — your responsibility — is to be there for them when they can no longer be there for themselves and to just plain take care of every damn thing. There may be a lot of them so just accept that and do the work.
My mother and I did a lot of things together in sixty years. What was good for her always seemed to be good for me and vice-versa. The last thing we did together was to jointly and without a lot of discussion, time her exit. You may not believe this but I think I will always include that in my little trove of fond memories. As a mother, she was always there for me and she did just about everything right. That included knowing when it was the right time for both of us that she not be there anymore.
