June Foray's hometown newspaper celebrates her first-ever Emmy nomination at age 94.
The Daytime Emmys are announced in two separate ceremonies — one that favors the technical and backstage awards and one that favors the on-camera stars. June's category will be presented at the tech/backstage one which they call the Daytime Creative Arts Emmy Awards gala. It's on Sunday, June 17th, 2012 and as far as I know, it will not be televised…but you'll hear all about it since I'm June's date for the evening. Hope we both get lucky.
This isn't the best video but it's a piece of TV history. You're probably a fan (as am I) of the great situation comedy known variously as You'll Never Get Rich, The Phil Silvers Show and Sgt. Bilko. I'm a little fuzzy on when each title was used but the names were at times interchangeable. I believe for a long period, TV Guide called it Sgt. Bilko or Phil Silvers, regardless of what name was on the screen. (They also referred to The Tonight Show by its host's name. It would say "Jack Paar" or "Johnny Carson" as if that was the name of the program.)
If you were a fan of the show on which Silvers played Bilko, you probably think that it's opening looked like the above image. That was a title created, I believe, when the series went into afternoon syndication. The original show had main titles that plugged the hell out of its sponsor, Camel Cigarettes. When it went into syndication, Camel was no longer its sponsor so the opening had to be changed.
Here's a look at the way the show began if you were watching it during its original prime-time incarnation. It's followed by a very brief Camel commercial with Brian Keith…
Sam Weller, who knows more about Ray Bradbury than any man alive, cites a seminal anecdote from Ray's life. This is one of the tales I got Ray to tell the first time I interviewed him in San Diego and it was a very memorable moment…for the audience and for me. It had a lot more power when you heard Ray tell it than it does in print, and I will long remember sitting there, hearing him speak of the moment when a man up on a stage changed his life by opening his imagination a few notches. And there's an audience of thousands, some of them surprisingly young, sitting there having their imaginations pried open a few notches by a man on stage named Ray Bradbury.
I just saw a list on one of Kliph Nesteroff's many fine sites and decided to just steal it. Don Bendetto supplied a rundown of the folks who hosted The Tonight Show between the time Jack Paar left and Johnny Carson took over.
In case you don't know the history: When Johnny agreed to take over the program, he still had six months left on his contract hosting Who Do You Trust?, the afternoon game show on ABC. It was commonly reported that the network refused to let him out early but as I understand it, it never really got to the point of ABC saying yes or no. Don Fedderson, who produced Who Do You Trust?, didn't want to let Johnny go before he had to…so that was that. By some accounts, ABC then told Johnny, "If it were up to us, we'd be glad to let you go," which of course doesn't mean they really would have.
NBC filled in with guest hosts for six months. Some of them reportedly regarded the gig as their audition to take over the show if and when Johnny failed to match Mr. Paar's ratings. Even if he succeeded, there was then the feeling that no one could host a show like Tonight for very long; that even if Carson did well, that meant he'd do four or five years and they'd then be shopping for his successor. As it turned out, a couple of them did profit from the gig, though not in the way they'd hoped. Jerry Lewis was reportedly so good as a host that he got offers to do that kind of show elsewhere, leading to his infamous, short-lived live, prime-time two-hour talk/variety show in ABC the following year.
Merv Griffin, who'd been more or less next-in-line if Johnny had said no, got himself a daytime talk show on NBC. It debuted the same day Johnny finally assumed the Tonight Show position and was obviously NBC's way of keeping Merv on deck in case Carson flopped. Actually, Merv probably wound up doing better from his deal than Johnny did. Merv's contract gave his production company some commitments to do game shows for NBC and that arrangement led to Jeopardy! and later, Wheel of Fortune. And of course, Merv wound up with his own long-running syndicated variation on The Tonight Show.
It's interesting to me to wonder which of these hosts someone at NBC thought could actually host the show after Johnny. Jerry Lewis was still wildly popular making movies in Hollywood so he was probably not an option. Art Linkletter had a successful daytime show on CBS which he might or might not have been willing to abandon if his contract permitted. Groucho had finished You Bet Your Life and was unemployed. He later said in some interview he wished he'd been considered when they were considering Carson and wished he'd gotten the gig. Some of the others seem like possibles to me, though some seem like "trade-off" bookings. Back then, they were a lot more common than they are today. That's when a big agency represents Sinatra and Herman Shmendrik, and if you want Frank to do a movie for you, you have to find Shmendrik a juicy role in that film or one of your others.
So anyway, here's the list. I remember my parents letting me stay up late so I could watch Soupy Sales one night. And I remember my disappointment that he did it in a suit without pies or puppets or big dogs or any of the things he did that I loved. I also remember Carson saying in some interviews that he couldn't watch some of those who hosted during this period because they turned the show into an hour and 45 minutes (that's how long it was then) of solid plugging. Those shows are almost certainly lost forever so we'll probably never know what they were like.
Neil Gaiman (again!) with a fresh, just-written appreciation of Ray Bradbury. In it, Neil says…
Last week, at dinner, a friend told me that when he was a boy of 11 or 12 he met Ray Bradbury. When Bradbury found out that he wanted to be a writer, he invited him to his office and spent half a day telling him the important stuff: if you want to be a writer, you have to write. Every day. Whether you feel like it or not. That you can't write one book and stop. That it's work, but the best kind of work. My friend grew up to be a writer, the kind who writes and supports himself through writing.
That's me. I was actually more like 14 or 15 when I first met him but otherwise, that's what I told Neil over dinner last week. That thing about writing every day whether you feel like it or not…that's one of the most important things I learned from Ray. A few years later I learned it again from Jack Kirby. I've been fortunate to know a lot of brilliant writers and artists (Neil is yet another) and while some work harder than others, they all work hard.
You and I may never be as brilliant as a Ray Bradbury or a Jack Kirby…but it is possible to work just as hard as Ray Bradbury or Jack Kirby.
I'm reading all sorts of post-mortems on yesterday's recall election in Wisconsin and what it means for organized labor in this country, what it means for Republicans versus Democrats, what it means for the fall election, etc. Seems to me that it may mean nothing other than that (a) Republicans way outspent Democrats and (b) Democrats failed to come up with a candidate who seemed like a major improvement over the guy in office. You can't beat something with nothing.
As I mentioned, it helped me tremendously in my life/career (I do not separate those things) to have spent time listening to Ray Bradbury talk about writing. I did not take his word as Gospel and indeed found that some of it did not apply to me and some didn't apply to anyone starting out when I started out. But it can help to understand how a very smart person views the world and it can even lead you to your own, competing view.
This is an hour of Bradbury addressing (mostly) new writers at the Sixth Annual Writer's Symposium by the Sea in February of 2001. Some of what he told me when I was fifteen and older is in this video. He starts out by advising new writers to write short stories instead of novels. That's probably good advice but it's not as good as it was when he was a new writer, selling to a marketplace that bought and published tons of short stories per year.
Back then, you could get your work into print if you wrote short stories and now…well, now the opportunity to get them into print is limited. That's bad not just for monetary reasons but because you learn from having your work published. You get reactions, you get distance and you're forced to apply professional standards to your work because by the sheer act of getting into print, those are the standards that now apply. When Ray was starting out, he published a lot of short stories. Tons of them. And as the market for that form declined, he still published the few he wrote because he was Ray Bradbury. For a new writer, it's still good advice but maybe not as easy to apply.
Still, everything he says is worth hearing. And some of it will make you want to stop watching videos and instead use that computer for more constructive purposes. Like, say, writing…
Neil Gaiman on Ray Bradbury. I have a feeling there are or will be a lot of great essays out there about Ray in the next few days. He inspired an awful lot of people who now write for a living.
Ray Bradbury only ever wrote two pieces for The New Yorker. The magazine has them in their for-pay archives but has made them available to all for, presumably, a limited time. Here's the link.
When I was about fifteen, a group of my friends and I went up to Ray Bradbury's office to interview him for a fanzine. This was the office in a big building at the corner of Wilshire and Beverly in Beverly Hills. Ray famously did not drive a car and he could often be seen walking to and from that office, frequently in tennis shorts, waving to people and chatting with them on the street. As I would later understand, he was well aware of the power of his celebrity and name, and had consciously decided to apply that power for the greater good. He knew the value of a word from Ray Bradbury and would dispense them generously and with a certain glee on those he encountered, be they longtime friend or passing stranger.
He made time to talk to a bunch of us teenagers that day and the interview went way longer than necessary. He kept saying things like, "Your youth…your enthusiasm…you remind me so much of myself at your age." When he found out that I had set my life's goal on the mantle of Professional Writer, he took a special interest in me, especially when I made clear that I could conceive of no alternate life and that I saw it as a life, not a job. Before we left, he quietly took me aside and invited me to come back without my friends. They were nice kids and all but they didn't have my commitment to writing so he had "a couple of things" he wanted to say to me and me alone.
Me and me alone went back a week later and he must have spent three hours slathering me with advice. Absolutely none of it was about story content. He didn't talk about plot or character motivation or structure. He talked about being a writer…about living like one, working like one, thinking like one. A lot of it was very pragmatic, about how to not fantasize the profession into something it was not. It was not, for example, a profession where visions pop into your genius brain and you just type them up, send them in and get hailed as brilliant. He had worked damn hard to become Ray Bradbury and every day, he worked damn harder to stay Ray Bradbury.
He did not make me want to become a writer. I was already there. What he did, I suppose, was make me think as follows: Ray Bradbury gave me all that time and encouragement. I can't waste that. In the years that followed, I did not find all of his advice applicable or even accurate but he sure helped me clarify my thinking on where I was going and what was happening to me along the way. Shortly after that day, I read most of the Bradbury works I'd not read before and re-read the biggies like The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451 and Something Wicked This Way Comes. I enjoyed them all the more because now it was my friend Ray telling them to me as a person, not as an anonymous omnipotent narrator. He was still omnipotent. He just wasn't anonymous any longer.
Thereafter, I somehow encountered Ray an average of once a year. I always seemed to run into him somewhere and a few times, it was at some event from which he needed a ride home. I'd drive him back to Cheviot Hills and he'd invite me in and we'd sit and talk for an hour or two. For the most part, he'd sit and talk for an hour or two and I'd sit and listen for an hour or two, which was fine with us both. Often, say when he got to talking about civic planning and of the utopian public transit system he envisioned for Los Angeles, I thought he was charmingly daffy. He spoke of how if the job had more power (it has very little), he would love to be mayor of L.A. and ram through all his ideas of how the place oughta work. Since he wasn't probably ever going to be mayor, it would take a little while longer for all those things to happen…but of course, they would, probably by the year 2000. There was certainly no doubt in his mind or that of anyone with a dram of sanity. I think of it every time I ride the monorail which replaced all those silly, useless freeways in Southern California.
At some point, my annual Ray Bradbury encounter began taking place at the Comic-Con in San Diego. Ray was one of the earliest supporters of the convention…and one of the reasons it became a non-profit organization. They wanted him there as a guest. He wanted to attend and deliver a talk but he either wanted a speaker's fee (which they couldn't/wouldn't pay) or to be able to make that speech as a charitable donation and to deduct accordingly from his taxes. So a non-profit organization it became.
He was there every year after that if his schedule allowed though I don't believe he ever spent the night. He'd have someone drive him down Saturday morning and he'd make an appearance on stage about 3 PM and head home around nightfall. Before and after his talk, he'd browse the dealer's room, buy a few things and make himself available to those who yearned to meet Ray Bradbury or get a book signed. He was very friendly and usually quite approachable, and I'm sure meeting him even for mere moments changed a lot of lives just as he changed mine.
Also at some point, he decided that rather than give a speech, he wanted to be interviewed. I did the honors for several years and at first, it was exciting and easy. I just had to recall (or later, research) anecdotes he'd told in the past and cue him to tell them again. When I did, I could sit there as he told one and watch three thousand — one year, more like five thousand — faces of utterly captivated, enraptured listeners. He was spellbinding and I could hear young people in the audience — there were more than I expected — thinking, "Jeez, I've gotta get some of this guy's books." Indeed they did.
That was if I triggered an old tale. If I asked him something new, the interview went nowhere. He had no new stories of any interest. He did have some political views he wanted to express but his daughter and others close to him asked me to, for God's sake, do what I could to steer him away from those topics.
They were…odd. And obviously the result of advanced age, medical problems and emotional responses to some personal tragedies. I suppose they would be called right-wing viewpoints, though every smart Conservative I know would race to distance themselves from Ray's views on, for example, how a woman should feel honored if a strange man came up and pinched her ass. There were others that were well into Glenn Beck territory…though Ray not only clearly believed what he said, he believed the mere fact that Ray Bradbury said it meant it had to be so. I took to telling friends, "If you wrote The Martian Chronicles, you may be a redneck." It was one of those jokes you say to try and wring a smile out of a situation you find troubling. I finally had to beg off the interviewing job. I admired the man so much and felt such gratitude for past kindnesses that I couldn't bear to be around him in that condition. It was for the same reason that I won't attend a funeral with an open coffin.
His influence on writing — not just science-fiction but all writing — is incalculable. I stand before you as a minuscule fraction of those who were inspired by the words on the paper…and a fortunate member of an even smaller group who got to spend time with their author. If you could erase the last decade or so from the record, as I suppose time will eventually do, he would be the perfect example of what a person should be when that person decides to write for a living. The work speaks for itself and always will but he was much more than a shelf-full of important books. He was, and sadly no one will ever be this again, Ray Bradbury.
