Category Archives: To Be Filed

• Attention, David Copperfield: Okay, we're impressed. Now, would you please put it back? Thank you.

• Remember not to look directly at the eclipse or Steve Bannon.

• Watching live coverage on the Science Channel. Apparently, a side effect of the eclipse is that it makes everyone talk out of sync.

• Okay, so what's Trump going to do to try and upstage the eclipse?

In 1994, a revival of Damn Yankees opened on Broadway. It had a number of changes from the original, mostly for the better. I saw it four times over three separate trips to New York. I was then dating a young lady back there who had a "thing" for Victor Garber, the gentleman playing Applegate when it opened. She just wanted to see him live and then she wanted me to get us backstage so she could meet him.

I'd seen it before but I got tickets and at the last minute, she had an emergency and had to cancel on me. As it turned out, my friend Jerry Beck was not only working in New York then, he was working in the building right across the street from the Marriott Marquis hotel. Damn Yankees was playing in the Marquis Theater in the Marriott Marquis. So I called Jerry, who was just about to knock off work and head home…and instead of heading home, he went with me to see Damn Yankees — him for the first time, me for the second.

Later that night, the lady and I spoke and she apologized profusely and told me that if I was willing to get tickets again for the next night, she would not only show up but she'd reimburse me for the tickets. I am a forgiving type so I said okay, she showed up this time and we went to see it and got backstage so she could meet Victor Garber. I also got to meet someone else and one of these days, I'll tell you about him.

Around Christmas, a friend of mine who was in another Broadway show called me with a tip. She said, "Word on the street is that business over at Damn Yankees has been slipping and the producers were thinking of closing it." I asked how that was possible. I alone was responsible for enough ticket sales to keep it running longer than Hello, Dolly.

She ignored that and said, "Victor Garber was leaving anyway so they've decided to try and boost sales by bringing in Jerry Lewis to play the Devil." That was interesting. She also said the show was going into a brief hiatus and it would reopen with Mr. Lewis on March 12, 1995. Tickets for that date were on sale but they hadn't yet announced that Jerry was stepping into the part then. "So if you act now," she said, "you can see Jerry Lewis make his Broadway debut."

I mentioned this to my friend Paul Dini and on an impulse, we decided to call up and buy tickets, then fly back and see Jerry's debut on the Great White Way.

That was in December. By the end of January, we were kind of regretting the impulse. Neither of us had any other reason to go back to New York and it seemed like an awful lot of money to spend just to see Jerry. We started talking about finding someone else to buy the tickets from us.

Then I got a call from someone who was running a comic book convention in New York on the same weekend as Jerry's first performance. He wanted to know if Sergio Aragonés and I would come back and be guests at the con. He'd pay for our flights and lodging and various other perks. I said, "I'll check with Sergio but I'll do it." Then I added, "Hey, you know who'd be a great guest for you? Paul Dini!" The convention organizer said, "He would be great. Do you think you can get him?"

I called Paul and said, "How'd you like an all-expenses-paid trip back to see Jerry in Damn Yankees?" Paul, as you might imagine, loved the idea. So did Sergio, who not only flew back with us but also bought a ticket so he could see the show that night.

A great coincidence, right? Well, here's the kicker: The convention not only paid for our flight and put us up in a nice hotel but of all the hotels in Manhattan, the one they happened to choose was the Marriott Marquis. We just had to step out of our rooms and take the elevator down to where Damn Yankees was playing. Jerry was quite wonderful that night before a house full of Jerry Lewis fans. He got about a three minute cheering ovation when he made his first entrance.

The show was changed a bit for him and if this had been Sweeney Todd, that might have been sacrilege…but come on. This was Damn Yankees and as I said, the revival had already altered a number of things. The curtain call was quite memorable with Jerry making a surprisingly humble speech and members of the audience singing out, "We love you, Jerry!" That night, I kinda did.

Here's a video someone posted of two musical numbers from the show. If this is from New York, the lady is probably Charlotte d'Amboise, who replaced Bebe Neuwirth as Lola. But I can't recognize Ms. d'Amboise for certain and Jerry did the show in other cities with other Lolas and even for a time in London. Jerry performs "The Good Old Days," interpolating part of an old routine of his. Then he and whoever is playing Lola — and looking at it again, I think it is d'Amboise — do "Two Lost Souls." In the original, this was a number for Lola and Joe Hardy but from the start, even before Lewis was hired, this revival switched it over to Lola and Applegate.

I hope you enjoy it. Right now, I'm struggling to rid my mind of the image of Jerry Lewis as Sweeney Todd, yelling "Hey, LAY-dee" to Mrs. Lovett. Oh, why did I have to think of that? Why?

With the passing of Jerry Lewis, three people have written me today to ask this question that David Goehner sent in…

Are we now down to just two of the zillion-member It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World cast members who are still with us? Only Barrie Chase and Carl Reiner?

There are a few extras still alive but as far as I know, there are only three folks alive who had speaking parts — the two you mention plus Nick Georgiade. Nick played the police detective who accompanied Norman Fell down to the crash site early in the picture.

Hey, if you're in L.A. and you've always wanted to meet the lovely Barrie Chase, she's among the guests at the next Hollywood Show, which takes place October 21 and 22 at the Westin Los Angeles Airport Hotel. Among the other celebs who'll be there one or both days hawking their autographs are Diahann Carroll, Barbara Eden, Ed Asner, James Darren, Lee Meriwether, Loni Anderson, Shirley Jones, my old pal Eddie Deezen and, yes, Jerry Mathers as The Beaver.

A top comedy writer just e-mailed me the following message: "When I saw the headline, I actually sighed to myself, out loud: 'Finally!' Does that make me a bad person?"

No. In fact, the few times I was around Jerry, I witnessed the great anger and death wishes he had for others he felt had somehow wronged him. He was a volatile, oft-furious man and that doesn't make him a bad person, either. To discuss him, it's necessary to hold two distinct thoughts in mind…

1. He was often paranoid, controversial, almost criminally self-indulgent, and "mad" in several senses of that word. That was his way for most, maybe all of his professional life, though it was easier to ignore or rationalize when he was also making funny movies or was truly funny on stage or screen or his loyalists could blame it on the Percodan.
2. Few people in the field of entertainment have ever made so many human beings laugh, and also raised so much money for people in need. He is also justly hailed as an important filmmaker in many technical senses and as a teacher of same.

The better films and the stage act — especially with Dean — lost their sparkle for some of us a long time ago and Jerry became two things. One was that he was one of the few remaining relics of a certain era of show business and/or a fond memory of our childhoods. Neither of those is a small matter. For the last few decades, one of his true pleasures was to make appearances around the country where he'd so some bits of his old act (especially the Typewriter Song) and answer questions from the audience. The shows were nearly always packed with folks over 40 and the questions were nearly always, "I just want to say how much we love you and you're a genius, Jerry!"

If you're under 40, I can't imagine why you'd think this person was so beloved by some. Most of the movies don't stand up all that well, either. The one that gets singled out — The Nutty Professor — strikes me as a masterpiece only in comparison to the other 50-60, depending on how you count. In today's New York Times in a pretty good obit, Dave Kehr writes…

The Nutty Professor, a study in split personality that is as disturbing as it is hilarious, is probably the most honored and analyzed of Mr. Lewis's films. (It was also his personal favorite.) For some critics, the opposition between the helpless, infantile Professor Julius Kelp and the coldly manipulative lounge singer Buddy Love represented a spiteful revision of the old Martin-and-Lewis dynamic. But Buddy seems more pertinently a projection of Mr. Lewis's darkest fears about himself: a version of the distant, unloving father whom Mr. Lewis had never managed to please as a child, and whom he both despised and desperately wanted to be.

I buy the latter interpretation and I would make it even simpler. Every time I was around Jerry, including the one time I worked with him, I saw a distinct Jekyll/Hyde dynamic. Every time, he would be very nice and human and compassionate to someone…and then, almost like someone had thrown a switch, he would be yelling and furious about some minor or even imaginary slight. You could not have predicted what would set him off but something always would.

Eventually, his fame was not as a brilliant comedian but as someone some said had been a brilliant comedian, though without a lot of evidence to back that up. Instead, he was famous for the outbursts, the intemperate quotes (Did you know no woman was ever truly funny?), the feuds and the tirades. So many tuned in his Muscular Dystrophy Telethons not for the entertainment but to wait for those moments when a sleep-deprived Jerry would devolve into self-pity and/or rage at his critics, the dollar figure on the tote board, the lack of appreciation of his friends and show people in general, etc.

The film his fans talk about the most is the one they've never seen, The Day the Clown Cried and they don't crave to see it because it's unavailable. Hundreds of movies are unavailable and no one cares about them. They aren't yearning to view it because they expect a masterpiece. They want to see it because they expect it to stink in a highly entertaining way.

Just before Christmas last year, I wrote a piece here about how Jerry's angry statements and odder philosophical ramblings had stopped being funny to me. I ended it by saying…

I always wanted to like Jerry Lewis but he's made it too difficult. Too difficult. I'm going to stop trying to convince myself or anyone that he was a great comedian and that his tirades are anything other than the ramblings of a bitter, angry man. If you want to continue to see him as someone to be admired, don't let me stop you…because he needs all the love he can get.

But you know what? No matter how much there has been — and he's been loved more than most people on this planet get to be loved — it has never been enough.

This is one time I really mean the "Rest in Peace" part of "R.I.P." He deserves a lot of peace and all the accolades he ever truly earned. I just was never able to be a real fan, no matter how hard I tried.

So I'm sitting here getting ready to write about comedian Dick Gregory, who died yesterday at the age of 84…and I'm thinking, "Well, he'll finally get some attention and recognition for his pioneering work." And then the news pops up on my iPhone that Jerry Lewis has died…

I don't have a great quip about this but I bet Dick Gregory would have. It would have been something about how the white guys can't let a brother have the spotlight for two minutes unless the cops have him in handcuffs or something.

I put up a picture of one of his records because I knew Dick Gregory primarily as a record comedian. He was also as a man who said things that were often quoted by others, often to the extent that no one knew who'd said them first. He was the one who said the line about how it wasn't true that NASA had selected no black astronauts…"They're just saving them for the first trip to the sun!"

He was important not only because he was one of the first prominent black stand-up comedians but because he didn't primarily play to black audiences the way Redd Foxx and "Moms" Mabley then did. He was also topical and politically astute at a time when the punch line to about half of Foxx's jokes was something like "You gotta wash your ass better." Another pioneer in black guys talking to mixed-race audiences about racial matters was Godfrey Cambridge but Gregory got there first.

I never saw him perform but his records were all funny and clever and very, very brave and they're a great record of what was going on at the time in this country with regards to segregation and the resistance to accepting all races — not just his — as equals. I was just talking on this blog about the death of Elvis Presley pulling focus away from the death of Groucho Marx. Let's make a little noise about Dick Gregory and remind everyone that his black life mattered as much as anyone's.

A baby Chihuahua that wants to be a baby goat…

• Trump says he won't attend the Kennedy Center honors. He probably won't attend anything that honors someone who is not him.

A reader who asked me not to mention his name wrote…

I have a question about the Tonight Show reruns they have been airing on Antenna TV. Thanks to your heads up, I've been watching them regularly for some time now, and I know, as you've been pointing out, that they have to be edited somewhat because of certain music rights. But why is Ed McMahon's naming of the guests during the opening credits always edited out? We only hear him saying "Heeeere's Johnny" after the guests are silently introduced via onscreen titles.

For a while, I though they were doing this to more easily splice a few episodes together, but that doesn't seem to be the case and the episodes appear to be intact, apart from the edits in the musical numbers. Have the heirs of Ed McMahon somehow prevented his original voiceover introductions from being included in these reruns? Additionally, the opening montage that plays during these Antenna TV openings seems to be different from what I remember during the original airings.

I don't know anyone at Antenna TV but I'm sure it has nothing to do with Ed McMahon's family and probably everything to do with the fact that (a) they wanted to standardize the openings and (b) this show, rerunning old episodes of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson is not called The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. It's called simply Johnny Carson and they don't have clean audio of Ed saying the name of this program in a manner that sounds like he's announcing the name of the program. Also, a lot of the openings were done by Doc Severinsen or even other substitutes when Ed was off selling Budweiser or doing Star Search.

Doing it the way they do means they always have the same opening with the same performance of the theme music (which is probably a lot easier and cheaper for clearances) and they don't have the awkwardness of Ed or someone billboarding the guests but not saying the name of the program. I believe that when they started these reruns of Antenna TV, some of the 90 minute shows on the weekend had the original titles that called it The Tonight Show but that they then switched over to the newly-made opening that doesn't.

Thanks for your question, Reader Who Asked Me Not To Mention His Name. Your identity is safe with me.

Forty years ago today, Julius "Groucho" Marx died at the age of 86. His passing got way less notice than the death of Elvis Presley, who'd passed three days earlier — a source of great frustration to those of us who were way more influenced by Mr. Marx than we ever were by Mr. Presley. Then again, maybe it's understandable that Elvis's death at the age of 42 was far more unexpected and shocking and therefore newsworthy. Groucho, at more than double that age, had been in poor health for some time and was sadly past his performing years.

I met him three times and saw him perform (sort of) on stage once. I wrote about these brushes in this column and the one that follows it. A few years ago, I realized that I got the dates and sequence wrong and I've finally revised the columns so they're right.

The last encounter took place at Groucho's home on Hillcrest Road in the Trousdale section of Los Angeles. The visit was short — a friend and I were there about a half-hour — and Groucho didn't say much. It occurred a month or two after he showed up on the set of Welcome Back, Kotter when I was working on that show so it was around Christmas of '76. He was in such poor shape that I'm still amazed he lasted another eight months.

The friend who took me there had me along because he thought Groucho would enjoy being with a relatively young person (I was 24) who knew everything about his films and career. This seemed to be true. Groucho wasn't able to muster much in the way of answers to the questions I asked him but he liked that I knew all the names and all the films.

The most interesting thing I recall of that afternoon was that I got to see Erin Fleming in her native environment. She was the controversial actress (largely of the aspiring variety) who kept company with Groucho in his last years, doing some good for him and some bad as she attempted to do a lot of good for herself. She'd accompanied Mr. Marx to the set of Kotter where he was supposed to tape a cameo appearance but was too ill to do more than pose listlessly for some photographs. It was pretty obvious that the show's invite to appear was accepted not by Groucho, who couldn't have cared much less, but by Erin, who thought it might somehow lead to her making an appearance on a (then) hit TV show.

In Groucho's home, she stage-managed a series of celebrity drop-ins, getting stars (including Groucho) to get up and perform. At least during the thirty minutes or so I was at one of them, Groucho looked like he'd rather be in his bedroom, sound asleep. I suppose though there were times when he appreciated the company and attention.

That day, I did not meet a young man who worked in the house as a kind of secretary-archivist. His name was Steve Stoliar and if he was there, no one introduced us. A few decades later, we encountered one another and became good friends. If you're curious about what went on in The Last Days of Groucho, I recommend an utterly-accurate and quite entertaining book by Steve called Raised Eyebrows — My Years Inside Groucho's House. And if you're the kind of person who follows my recommendations — God help you — here's an Amazon link for it.

In a way, I wish my memories of Groucho stopped with the first time I met him. He was still lucid then, still able to stand on his own, still able to say witty things in a way that reminded you of the smartass in the movies and on the game show. That smartass was highly influential in a lot of our lives. He emboldened us. He inspired us. And he made us laugh to an extent that would make him a legend even if he hadn't emboldened and inspired us. He sure mattered a lot more to me than Elvis ever did.

Stephen Colbert's show for tonight was recorded last night but he recorded a new monologue for it today.

[UPDATE, LATER: I'm told he did record a new monologue for tonight's show — a show otherwise cobbled together from segments earlier in the week. But the new monologue was recorded last night so no mention of Steve Bannon's ouster or other developments from today's news.]

The Drudge Report and The New York Times are both saying Steve Bannon is out at the White House. When you get it from both of those sources, that's all the proof you could ask for. Stephen Colbert is probably upset that they recorded tonight's show yesterday and it wouldn't surprise me if they're scrambling to do something new and insert it. Bill Maher, on the other hand, is probably delighted with the timing. (Tonight, his guests include Al Franken, Penn Jillette and Gavin Newsom. If you're outside California and you don't know our lieutenant governor Gavin Newsom, you might want to get familiar with him. That man is going to be a serious contender for president some day.)

In light of Bannon's ouster, it is worth re-reading (or just plain reading) the Matt Taibbi column I linked to yesterday.

We have a busy day here so I'll be back later with…something. It'll probably be about why I still don't think Trump is a racist but it's getting harder and harder to believe that. Then I'm going to shoot for a Trump-free weekend on this site but it's getting harder and harder to aim the part of my brain that blogs at anything else.

The theme from The Bugs Bunny Show — as performed by a player piano…