The current issue of Written By, the Writers Guild magazine, is filled with goodies. I already linked you to this interview with Woody Allen and now I call your attention to a chat with Mel Brooks, in which he talks a lot about his own genius and reveals some things I don't think I've ever heard before about The Producers.
I'm a little puzzled about the timeline Mr. Brooks presents. He talks about being broke after making The Twelve Chairs and his life being saved by getting the job to do the film that was ultimately called Blazing Saddles. Then he places his work on Get Smart during the period that he and a team were writing Blazing Saddles. Uh, Get Smart was created in early 1965, The Producers was made in 1966, The Twelve Chairs was made in 1969 and Blazing Saddles was made in 1973, several years after Get Smart had completed its five season run and left the air. He also doesn't mention that Buck Henry co-created Get Smart.
But maybe I shouldn't quibble. Any Mel Brooks interview is worth reading.
Kevin Drum writes why he's for Hillary over Bernie and in so doing, writes a good summary of why I can't generate much of a preference there. Basically, he notes that what each of them wants to do doesn't matter as much as what each of them would be able to do as Chief Exec. That doesn't seem like a huge difference to me. A huge difference would be like the gap between either of them and whoever gets the G.O.P. nod.
As Drum notes, Sanders and Clinton are now reduced to fighting over who's more anti-gun. Really? When the N.R.A. gives Hillary an F and they give Bernie a D-minus? Is there any voter whose view on guns is so nuanced that they would support one but not the other because of that variable?
I am well aware that my vote doesn't matter much. One vote never does but it means even less when you live in a state that went 59% to 38% for Barack Obama. The Democratic nominee is going to carry California regardless of how I vote or whether I vote at all. If that person doesn't carry California by a decent margin, the Republican will have won the presidency long before the polls close here.
I suspect that right this minute, Clinton is more "electable" than Sanders. By Election Day, who knows? Much will happen before then.
Assuming Martin O'Malley doesn't suddenly gain 48 points and grab the nomination, I will vote for one of them without holding my nose or even thinking we could do a lot better. But I will not delude myself or anyone else, the way some people like to, into thinking I'm voting for a perfect, flawless candidate. I'm uncomfy with a lot of Hillary's foreign policy stances and decisions. I'm uncomfy with Bernie's tendency to frame everything in life as a battle of the rich versus the poor. (Jonathan Chait has a good piece up about that.)
In this election, I don't think a lot of voters are going to cast their ballots for the person so much as for the party. If you hate everything (or almost everything) Obama has done, you're almost certainly going to vote for the Republican, whoever it is. If you don't want all or most of that undone, you're almost certainly going to vote for the Democrat. That maybe all this election is about: Build on it or tear it down and start over. I'm for building, though I draw the line at a wall along the Mexican border.
Remember Gene Rayburn? If you do, you probably recall him as the host of the quiz show, The Match Game, but he did a lot more than that. He was Steve Allen's announcer on the original Tonight (later known as The Tonight Show) and he was an actor. Neil Simon's first play was Come Blow Your Horn and you know who the first actor was who starred in that play? Gene Rayburn. His career has now been chronicled in a book called The Matchless Gene Rayburn (that's an Amazon link, hint hint) by Adam Nedeff. And Adam Nedeff is Stu's Shostak's guest on today's Stu's Show. You'll hear all about Mr. Rayburn and you'll be surprised at all the other things he did besides ask questions to which Charles Nelson Reilly could answer, "Buns."
Stu's Show can be heard live (almost) every Wednesday at the Stu's Show website and you can listen for free there. Webcasts start at 4 PM Pacific Time, 7 PM Eastern and other times in other climes. They run a minimum of two hours and sometimes go to three or beyond. Shortly after a show ends, it's available for downloading from the Archives on that site. Downloads are a paltry 99 cents each and you can get four for the price of three. By the way: Dumb Dora is so dumb (How dumb is she?) that she thinks Stu's Show is a program where you learn all about ______.
Abe Vigoda, best known for his roles in The Godfather and on Barney Miller, has died at the age of 94. We haven't done it lately but we'd been monitoring his alive/dead status at this website which now has the sad news.
I don't have a lot to say about Mr. Vigoda. When I was working on Welcome Back, Kotter back in the seventies, we shared studio space for a time with Fish, the spin-off series from Barney Miller, so I saw him a lot. The first time we were introduced, I thought he'd be impressed or interested that I knew he had a brother, Bill Vigoda, who'd drawn Archie comic books. I was wrong. Abe didn't care. I'm not sure if he didn't care about his brother or he didn't care that I knew that but he didn't care.
I didn't talk to him much after that.
Not long before that, I sat next to him at an industry screening of the movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. This was before it was released to the general public and many folks involved in the making of the film were present including Mr. Spielberg. Mr. Vigoda did not like or understand the movie and throughout, he kept muttering aloud — in that crotchety, expressive voice of his — little things like, "What the hell is that?" and "Why is he doing that?" It was very much like the Mel Brooks short, The Critic, and it had me and everyone around us laughing out loud. I wondered how Spielberg reacted to this little pocket of the audience that was guffawing during non-humorous scenes.
I think the last time I spoke with Abe was because of my friend, Howard Morris. Abe and Howie occasionally toured in The Sunshine Boys, with Abe playing the Jack Albertson/Walter Matthau role and Howie as the other guy, plus Howie directed. They were booked for another tour and then Abe changed his mind and bowed out. Howie took me along to a lunch with Abe (and other actors in the same age group) and while the lunch was purely social, he did hope to persuade Vigoda to change his mind. Howie needed the work and if Abe didn't reconsider, Howie would either lose the job or have to do it with an actor he utterly despised but who was liked by the tour organizers.
He was unable to persuade Abe to rescind his decision. Howie made his case and then Abe folded his arms and said with great finality, "I'm too old to do something I don't want to do." And that, by God, was that. This occurred at least twenty years ago so I'm guessing that thereafter, Abe did absolutely nothing he didn't want to do, except maybe leave us.
Stephen Colbert had Donald Rumsfeld — of all people — on as his lead guest. This was counter to every notion of what kind of guest attracts viewers but I suppose Colbert and his producers don't care on some level about that. Rumsfeld came on to promote a new app he's marketing. Colbert had him on to grill him a tiny bit (there wasn't enough time for more than a tiny bit) about the justification for the Iraq War. He got Rumsfeld to go farther than he ever has in admitting that the decision to go to war was based on faulty intelligence.
I am of two minds about this. I think the Iraq War was one of the greatest mistakes ever made in this country — greatest in terms of human destruction, financial waste and making the world a more dangerous place. I don't think Donald Rumsfeld should be treated like an okay guy who just has a few different ideas about things. On the other hand, Colbert did chip away a bit at a false version of What Really Happened and that has some value. And going back to the first hand, doesn't that kind of civility and joking about with Rumsfeld contribute to a false narrative itself? It suggests that causing all that death and devastation is something we can set aside and trivialize as if it was all an innocent error.
Not long ago, I spent some time with an Iraq War veteran who lost most of the use of his left arm while he was Over There. He considered himself fortunate because he hadn't suffered the same fate as several buddies who didn't come back at all. He expressed an even harsher condemnation of that war than I have — and of course, he has every right to and lot more street cred on that topic. I wonder what he thought if he saw Colbert having Rumsfeld on and treating him as he did.
The new Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee is up. In it, Jerry Seinfeld drives around with Garry Shandling and they go to the Comedy Store and to the lot where they used to shoot their respective sitcoms and to Dupar's Restaurant at Laurel Canyon and Ventura. It's well worth the 22 minutes you'll spend watching it.
A minor point about these shows — and about those Carpool Karaoke segments that James Corden does. These videos are done by mounting small video cameras on suction cups to the windshield and windows of the vehicle in use, plus there are camera crews in cars that follow, precede or parallel the car with the stars in it. They also shoot some footage of the outside of the cars without the cameras in place, then edit it all together.
Quite often — usually, in fact — no one cares if the geography matches up. It's like on the old TV show Vega$ with Robert Urich. He'd be at the Sahara Hotel and someone would tell him, "Detective So-and-So wants to see you at the Tropicana!" So he'd get in his T-Bird and drive off — and then there'd be all this footage of him in the car and the backgrounds would be rear-screen projections shot on the Vegas strip but with no attempt to put landmarks in sequence. If you paid attention — and they assumed you wouldn't — you'd see him drive by the MGM Grand, then the Stardust, then the Sahara again. Then there's be a long shot of the car driving past the MGM Grand. Then they'd cut back to him and the rear-screen projections and he'd be passing the Boardwalk, then the Desert Inn — all hotels that are not actually placed in that order on the way to the Trop. I think one time he was heading for Caesars Palace and he drove by it three times before finally reaching Caesars Palace.
You'd think that when someone shoots on the actual streets, actually driving to someplace, the backgrounds would relate to reality…but these new videos are so edited that the scenery is almost random. Corden does a lot of his driving videos in my area and I'll see him start saying something as he's passing the bank at the corner of Fairfax and Beverly across from CBS. Then they cut to a different angle of him and he's finishing the sentence while passing a market two miles away. Then when the guest says something in reply, they're back at Fairfax and Beverly again. Seinfeld, when he drives his guests to get coffee, often passes the same building over and over, goes in circles and cruises streets that are nowhere near a direct route between the guest's home and the restaurant.
This doesn't bother me a lot. But I do find myself noticing it.
My friend Tom Galloway responded quickly to the previous post and told me that McDonald's has a new program called Create Your Taste in which selected locations will make you a hamburger exactly the way you want it — and they seem to have a pretty good array of options and toppings. This page tells you about the concept which is available in selected countries, as well as certain locations in the United States, none of them near me. Here's a blog post by someone who went to one of them. It sounds like a pretty good idea if you're going to dine-in. I doubt it works as well at the drive-thru. Thanks, Tom. Hadn't heard of it.
The McDonald's chain has been struggling with falling sales for some time and everyone seems to have a theory as to why. Mine is a combo of new and better places to get a burger plus the notion that the whole concept of a McDonald's makes a customer feel like they're going into a childish place to buy toy food — and not particularly healthy toy food.
Once upon a time, one of the appeals of the chain was that dining there was utterly predictable and dependable. No matter where you travelled, you could find a McDonald's and you knew what you were going to eat and that the quality would be consistent and the price would not be outrageous and the restrooms would be clean and they wouldn't waste your time, etc. Back in the seventies and eighties when I was in strange towns, I usually would go to Breakfast at a McDonald's. My stomach isn't wild about unfamiliar food…and since Lunch and Dinner were (usually) at unfamiliar places, it seemed to make the ol' tummy happy to start the day with a Sausage Biscuit with Egg.
But these days, wherever there's a McDonald's, there's probably a Burger King or an Arby's or some other fast food place that provides the same safety…if that's what you want. And more and more people don't want that because fast food is more and more becoming what you eat when you care about cheap but don't care about good. It's no longer Your Kind of Place.
According to this article though, there is some good news for Ronald McDonald: Sales are up significantly since McDonald's finally bowed to consumer requests and began offering All-Day Breakfast. (Hey, how about that? Listening to customers! Why didn't anybody think of that years ago?)
Apparently, this complicates the food preparation process at your local McDonald's but it's turning out to be worth the trouble. If you ask me — and of course, no one ever does — what they need to do is complicate it a little more: Make it possible to go in and get a substantial hamburger — say, a third of a pounder — made to order and dressed the way the customer wants it. As it is, to get what you want, you have to select from the pre-fab menu and tell them to leave off the cheese or add more onion or some other alteration that seems to throw the counterperson and the cash register into a frenzy of confusion. I usually ask for a quarter-pounder-with-cheese without the cheese and they seem to think that runs contrary to some law of physics.
Or at least they did. I've pretty much given up Mickey D's because I felt bad creating a problem for those underpaid employees…and then creating another one when they give me the burger and I have to tell them it's wrong.
From the 1998 Emmy Awards: Ignore the first few seconds of this clip. It will soon switch to Jay Leno introducing a salute to classic TV comedians and a "bow" by Milton Berle, Bob Hope and Sid Caesar. Whoever edited this clip also stuck in a few seconds of Johnny Carson at the end.
I remember seeing the Berle/Hope/Caesar spot when it aired and thinking we might be seeing Hope's last appearance — and indeed, within days the tabloids had him on death's door. But this aired 9/13/1998 and he lived until 7/27/03 — almost five years. He was rarely seen on TV though during those years and when he was, he barely spoke. So you can view this as a sad clip in that it sort of represents the end of Hope's career…or a happy clip in that he, Sid and Uncle Miltie got that wonderful ovation from their industry…
Jeffrey Martin, a reader of this site, informs me that It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World is being run in Chicago a little more than a month from now at the Music Box Theater. There are three showings — February 26, February 27 and March 2. Sounds like another opportunity to view this film as nature intended it: On a big screen with a big audience. Tickets are on sale now here. I'd be there but I only go to Mad World screenings within two thousand miles of my home and this one is 2,032 miles.
Willa Paskin discusses why The Daily Show with Trevor Noah is not must-see TV the way The Daily Show with Jon Stewart was for some of us. I don't really disagree with any of her observations, especially the one about how Noah is being judged not against how Stewart was after he was there four months but how he was after he was there sixteen years.
I think some of what's happened on that show post-Stewart has been quite good but Noah lacks a certain connectivity with the viewers that Noah hasn't mastered…and that in fact, most people who have a TV show where they speak mainly to the camera haven't mastered. The new guy also has a weaker bench of correspondents and the show has a tendency to take on topics not the instant they happen but a few days later. When something outrageous happened in the news, Stewart was the guy you went to to see what he had to say. Noah is the guy you go to to see what he has to say that others haven't.
Some of that is, I think, because the current slate of candidates is so outrageous that everyone with their own TV show, blog or Twitter account can now do their own little Daily Show. Another is what Ms. Parkin says about Noah's version being too civil. And some of it is that Noah comes at American politics and customs more like an outsider — and is constantly reminding us of that. He doesn't have the street cred to criticize this country that a guy who grew up in New Jersey had.
I still like him. I'm still Tivoing every episode. I'm not in as much of a rush to watch them as I was when J.S. was in command…but it's still a good show and I won't be the least bit surprised if it gets a whole lot better.
When you hear people say, "Bernie Sanders can't possibly be elected president" or "There's no way Donald Trump will be the G.O.P. nominee," it might be a good idea to remember all the people who said it was impossible for Barack Obama to ever get that job.
The original network What's My Line? TV series debuted on Thursday, February 2, 1950, then moved to Wednesday, then back to Thursday and then on October 1 of that year, it moved to Sunday nights and stayed there until September 3, 1967. A total of 876 episodes were aired but not all of them still exist.
Most of those that survived were aired regularly for years on Game Show Network and in its new incarnation at GSN, they occasionally air a week or two of them around the end of each year. They also turn up on Buzzr, a new "all vintage game shows" cable channel that I can't get from my cable company.
Recently, a "lost" episode turned up on eBay — and not just any "lost" episode but the first Sunday night one from October 1, 1950. Some devout What's My Line? fans including W. Gary Wetstein, Stan Taffel and our friend Stu Shostak mobilized. It was arranged to purchase the 16mm print, get it transferred to video and to upload the video to YouTube. This is it.
John Daly is, of course, the host. Dorothy Kilgallen and Arlene Francis are on the panel as they were ever after — Ms. Francis for the rest of the CBS run, Ms. Kilgallen until her untimely death in 1965. The two male panelists are Louis Untermeyer and Hal Block. Mr. Untermeyer was an author and poet who was a panelist on What's My Line? until 1951 when he was fingered as a Communist during the hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. His presence on television was protested by various groups and though Untermeyer was probably not a Communist, the game show's sponsor eventually gave in and ordered his removal. He was replaced by Bennett Cerf.
Hal Block was a top comedy writer who'd worked for Milton Berle, Abbott and Costello, Bob Hope and others of that prominence. As an on-air personality, he was given to sometimes ad-libbing crude and tasteless jokes, especially if the contestant was an attractive woman. This created a problem since the show was broadcast live and there was no way to edit or bleep, nor would he stop doing it. As What's My Line? became a classier show — everyone in formal wear, more famous Mystery Guests — he fit in less and less. He was finally removed in early '53 and Steve Allen, who was then sitting in for the vacationing Bennett Cerf, remained on the panel when Cerf returned. Steve Allen was eventually replaced by Fred Allen and after Fred passed away in '56, that seat on the panel was filled by a visiting male celebrity.
Here is the lost episode — and I must warn you that the end is missing. The film ends abruptly just after the last contestant is introduced. The next-to-last contestant is the Mystery Guest, who was Kathleen Winsor, the author of the best-selling novel, Forever Amber. As you will see, the staging of the show is crude, the set is cheap, the boom mike shadow is seen as much as any of the guests — but it is a fascinating look at early television…
Our pal James H. Burns regrets that it's very, very difficult to see George Pal's Puppetoons these days…and the reason he regrets that (as do a lot of us) is that they were very, very imaginative and entertaining. There's a lot of good stuff that isn't readily exhibited because of racial jokes and imagery that could (would?) be taken the wrong way today. I wish we could get past all that but it feels like we're moving in the wrong direction for that to happen.
