Category Archives: To Be Filed

From a couple years ago: Steve Martin and Conan O'Brien with a funny bit about David Letterman's Top Ten lists…

Jonathan Chait on why some Republicans are praying the Supreme Court will wound Obamacare and some are praying it won't.

David Letterman can't complain his last show is going without notice. The tributes, the articles…amazing. Reporters are tracking down people who were in a running bit on Dave's old show in 1987 for comment. It's probably a lot more press than Johnny's departure got…though in fairness, Johnny left when we didn't have eight zillion online magazines and websites all vying for a piece of the story.

I can't be the only person who notices that most of the pieces that talk about the brilliance that is Letterman cite examples from the last century and the previous network. What they mention from this century and this network are not the moments that he and his writing staff came up with but when circumstances beyond their control created a special event: Dave coming back from his heart attack, Dave coming back from shingles, Dave announcing the birth of his son or his marriage, Dave getting blackmailed…and many more, including his post-9/11 broadcast. He handled most of them with skill and integrity but then the next night, it would be a pretty conventional talk show again.

One of the sharpest pieces I've come across about Dave's legacy is this one by Josef Adalian. Some of the non-sharpest ones act like Dave has still been donning suits of Velcro® and sending Larry "Bud" Melman to the Port Authority Bus Terminal for the last decade or two.

These days, most of America regards Johnny Carson as a sacred figure who practically owned the hour of our lives during which he was on the air. My recollection is that this view of Johnny was not widely-held until the nation realized he was going away. You will find few critical appraisals of his greatness while he could still be taken for granted. He was to many a boring, slightly smutty comic whose monologue jokes and Mighty Carson Art Player sketches all bombed and who sat behind a desk asking smirking questions of starlets and making faces to the camera.

Of course, that was before he went away. Once he announced his retirement, he started to become a demi-god and it accelerated from there.

America this week is appreciating Letterman anew. Folks who haven't watched him for years (save for those "event" nights) are hailing him…and I'm not saying he doesn't deserve plenty of hailing. Most talk shows of the last few decades have tried to "do" Dave's show on NBC to some extent, the one notable exception at times being Dave's show on CBS. In the grand tradition of his idol Mr. Carson, Dave is being appreciated because we can't have him anymore. Ain't it like that with so many things in this world?

Stu Shostak has a great guest this week on Stu's Show. It's Howard Storm, who's had one of the most amazing careers in show business as an actor, a writer, a stand-up comedian and most recently, a director. Anyone who could direct Robin Williams on Mork & Mindy for several seasons has to be a helluva director and that's just one of Howard's many credits. He's directed at least fifty different situation comedies including Everybody Loves Raymond, Major Dad, Laverne & Shirley, Rhoda and Too Close for Comfort. His acting credits go back to The Untouchables and he was seen in a couple of Woody Allen movies. (He was Woody's assistant on several.) Frankly, I think Stu could fill the show with Howard's tales of working as a comedian in mob-controlled night clubs, not that he didn't also work the cleaner joints. He's one of the best storytellers and I know and there's no way Stu's getting even half this man's career into the show today.

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 measly 99 cents each and you can get four for the price of three…and no, there's no extra discount for the ones that have me on them.

Frank Rich on how racially-charged riots don't vary that much from one to another. And they won't as long as we keep allowing the same explosive situations to exist.

Fred Kaplan on how all the scenarios to defeat ISIS are bad ones and which ones are the least bad.

Jill Lepore writes of how maybe the Supreme Court has it wrong when it rules that things like abortion and a right to contraception are issues of privacy. Maybe instead they're issues of discrimination.

One day back when John McCain was the G.O.P. nominee for president, he was scheduled to appear on David Letterman's show but canceled at very close to the last minute, claiming he had to rush back to Washington on vital gov't biz. In what was no doubt a panic, the producers scrambled to find another guest and they called in Keith Olbermann for reasons Keith Olbermann enumerates in the article to which I'm about to link you. Olbermann scurried over and filled Dave's guest chair.

In the midst of the taping, Dave learned that the Senator from Arizona was not on a plane back to Washington at that moment. He was a number of blocks away, getting ready to tape an interview with Katie Couric for the CBS Evening News. It was even possible for the crew in the Ed Sullivan Theater to use the CBS in-house feed to view what was going on at that moment in Ms. Couric's studio and there, chatting aimiably with her before the interview, was John McCain.

As Olbermann notes in this nice tribute to Dave, Letterman made the quick decision to address this matter then and there on his show, including putting some of that in-house network feed on his show. From his desk, he showed America the scene of McCain with Couric and delivered a very funny, spontaneous rant.

I believe though Mr. Olbermann is omitting one detail. For a show to do that — to put another show's feed on the air — is a major breach of protocol and probably corporate policy. I mean, if CBS News just grabbed the feed of Dave taping and used it in their telecast, he would have gone through several roofs with outrage. So what Dave did (I heard from someone on his show) was to quickly call Les Moonves, the head of CBS, during a break and say in effect, "I want to do this…is it okay?" And Moonves, who probably had about ten seconds to decide about this unprecedented, sure-to-piss-some-people-off move, said "Go ahead."

I'm not sure if Dave himself made that call — I think he did — or if one of his producers did but Moonves said yes because it was Dave…and probably only because it was Dave. And then he probably protected Dave from any anger from the news folks who might have felt violated. I do not know if Moonves called and told them before or as it happened. The point is that CBS wouldn't have let anyone else do that.

Anyway, read the Olbermann piece. It's pretty good — broadcaster saluting broadcaster — and watch his appearance with Dave that night. It's in two parts (slightly outta sync) that should play one after the other in the box I'm embedding below. I like it because it's two smart men talking with no pre-interview, no arranged questions, no planned anecdotes or anything. I wish all talk shows were this unscripted…

The Gallup Poll says that a record 60% of Americans support Same-Sex Marriage as opposed to just 37% who oppose it. So I guess the way this works is that if you want the G.O.P. nomination for president, you have to convince Republicans that you'll do something to stop or roll back Gay Wedlock and then if you get that nomination, you have to then convince the rest of America that you won't.

Here's a good, current interview with Woody Allen. He talks about his filmmaking process, how he casts actors in under a minute, how he's going to shoot his next movie in digital, why he never watches his films again after they're done and many other topics.

If you're interested in Woody, you will very much enjoy the forthcoming book on him by the other writing Evanier, my cousin David. I haven't read all of the manuscript but I've read enough to see that it's a very good, important work and that it does not merely go over ground that others have covered but instead says new things about the man, both in terms of new information and analysis of his role in the entertainment world. It's due out in November and can be advance-ordered here.

A lot of folks are now debating the question of whether the mess that was the Iraq War should be blamed on faulty intelligence or on the Bush administration manipulating the truth and selling us false info and premises. Jonathan Chait believes that the problem with that debate is that it presumes it was one or the other. He believes both were true.

Shelly Goldstein suggested I embed this one. It has pretty bad video but it's too good to not share with you here…and anyway, the audio is the important part. Ladies and gentlemen — a medley of songs from Fiddler on the Roof as performed Motown style by the Temptations. No, I am not making that up…

In the last few weeks, most of America seems to have finally admitted out loud that the Iraq War was a colossal, spectacular mistake. The debate is no longer if it was a screw-up but if it was an understandable screw-up, one that anyone could and did make, given what was supposedly the best intelligence at the time. In other words, was it anyone's mistake or everyone's mistake? — the implication being that if it was everyone's, then no one in particular is to blame.

Personally, I think it was someone's mistake, starting with the guy whose desk should have still had Harry Truman's little plaque about how "The buck stops here." And I think it was the mistake of most of the guys around him, all of whom should be deemed too incompetent to ever be allowed near our foreign policy again. Alas, many of them are now advising his brother in his quest to sit behind that desk.

There are a lot of articles around about how disingenuous and weasely it all is but the best I've seen is this one by Matt Taibbi. He reminds us not only how full of manure our "leaders" were about it all but how eager the press and the alleged Opposition Party were to help spread said manure.

Are there still ice cream trucks? Apparently, so…but when I came across the above photo, it suddenly occurred to me that I've never heard one in my neighborhood. In the last 35+ years, I've spent a lot of time at this computer next to a window that faces the street and I don't think I've either heard or seen an ice cream truck.

They were a daily presence in my childhood even when I didn't flag one down to make a purchase. There was something comforting about knowing they were there; that there were people in this world who drove around with delicious treats. The cute little jingle would remind you that it was there if you wanted it. I seem to recall that there were times when some friend was over and we did want it…so we'd wish real hard and like a genie with slow response time, the Ice Cream Truck — not always the same one, of course — would appear before too long.

Today, if I made up a list of Jobs I'm Glad I Don't Have, driving a truck around like that would be very near the top, just below Cole Slaw Taster and handling public relations for Bill Cosby. Back then, there was something magical about it. I can't imagine how low the pay must have been and how mentally non-stimulating the job must still be…but everyone was so very glad to see you. That must have been the appeal of that profession for some people.

I rarely bought ice cream from the Ice Cream Man. I was more often interested in procuring one of these:

That's right: It's the dictionary definition of empty calories — the orange popsicle. I liked the way they looked. I liked the way they tasted. I liked that nothing bad ever happened to you while eating an orange popsicle and I regretted that that time period lasted such a brief time. Sadly, you couldn't draw it out and make the "safe" feeling last because the popsicle would melt at a rapidly-accelerating pace and drip all over you and become more of a problem than a joy. Still, it was great while it lasted.

This feeling, by the way, only applied to orange popsicles. A grape popsicle or a red one was just a hunk of frozen flavored water. I was never sure what the red ones were. I think they were whatever you wanted them to be. If you asked for strawberry, they gave you a red one. If you asked for cherry, they gave you the same red one. Or raspberry. Or one time, even apple. I'm sure that if I'd asked for a tomato popsicle, they would have handed me one of those red ones. It tasted as much like tomato as it did any of those other flavors.

As wonderful as they were, there was another downside to orange popsicles: The two sticks. I could rarely get the one-stick variety in my area. which was silly. Think how many trees they could have saved by only inserting one…but they gave you two on the faulty premise that some folks might want to split the popsicle in half and share it with a friend.

First thing wrong with that concept: Share it with a friend? Never. Let my cheapo friend get his own orange popsicle. Even if you were eight, it wasn't a significant expenditure.

Second problem: Splitting one of those things in half was about as easy as splitting the atom and almost as dangerous. I certainly never successfully accomplished either.

Usually, attempting it would send one entire half of your beloved orange popsicle plunging to the pavement. Or one stick would come out, making the popsicle impossible to share and awkward to eat. In the TV commercials, some trained ninja popsicle-divider would grasp the two sticks, give an artful twist and bisect the popsicle perfectly. They should have put up a little disclaimer: DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME — because it never worked like that in reality.

So you'd just eat the popsicle with two sticks, which would put you perpetually off-balance. Whichever one you held was the wrong one. But I still loved them…up until about the age of twelve or thirteen.

When you're in that age range, much changes in your world. Certain toys you own seem childish and you toss them out as a rite of passage. You have to start seriously thinking about a career or at least a way of start making spending money. If you're a boy, girls suddenly seem a lot less yucchy. And orange popsicles lose a large chunk of their magic.

At least, that was my experience. I gave up all sweet edibles a few years ago but I gave up orange popsicles about the time I started sneaking peeks at Playboy. I believe there was a connection. Miss August looked a lot more tempting than an orange popsicle…and that's about as far as I want to go with that analogy. Keep your snide remarks about licking or being frigid to yourself.

One day when I was about twenty-eight or so, I was over visiting my parents and as I left, I heard the familiar song of The Ice Cream Man. There was one rolling down the street in my direction.

On a whim, I flagged him down and asked if he had any orange popsicles. He did. I bought one and, sure enough, two sticks. Right on the spot, for they don't travel well, I began consuming the orange popsicle.

The first lick was like heaven. The second was about half as good. The third? Eh. Even before it showed the first sign of melting, my interest in it was starting to drip. By the eighth or ninth slurp, I was just doing it because I'd paid for the thing. That was when I decided to try the ninja twist. I wouldn't have chanced it if I'd cared about finishing the popsicle but I had nothing to lose.

I grasped the sticks just as I'd recalled the hands did in those commercials. I pulled up with one hand, down with the other and attempted to wrench the popsicle into two equal pieces. Instead, the stick burst out of the left side, the popsicle split and the enough of the right-hand side ruptured to open a gap around the right stick. So both halves of it fell to the street.

Once upon a time, that would have made me very sad. Now, I was relieved that my fruitless (and given the ingredients in one, I mean fruitless) attempt to revisit my childhood was over. Thomas Wolfe was right: You can't go back to your home and eat an orange popsicle again.

Well, at least he said something like that.

And here's a good interview with Merrill Markoe, a very smart person indeed. There's some very good advice in there for writers.

I had a piece here the other day about Merrill Markoe. Steve O'Donnell is another person who was once David Letterman's head writer…another person who thought up jokes and ideas for bits that prompted people to say, "Isn't Dave brilliant?" For this article, he was interviewed about the creation and making of the Top Ten lists.

In the piece, O'Donnell makes mention of a Top Ten list that had to be written in just a few minutes due to a sudden emergency. It was "Top 10 Numbers Between One and Ten" and I thought it was one of the funniest ones they ever did. They must have too because they later repeated the premise — with different numbers and with Casey Kasem handling the countdown…

The first version aired on NBC on September 22, 1989. The one with Mr. Kasem was on CBS on September 3, 1993.

Speaking of the Top Ten list: Its invention has been credited to several different folks on the staff at the time and I have no reason to favor one account over another. But I wonder if whoever came up with it was influenced — even subconsciously — by an unsold pilot that ran on NBC five years before — on July 10, 1980. It was called Top Ten and it was like Solid Gold, counting down the current hits, interspersed with both serious and funny Top Ten lists. The funny ones were very much like the ones featured for years on Mr. Letterman's shows from 1985 on.

On Top Ten, they used the lists as premises for sketches and comedy blackouts but sometimes, someone just stood there and read a list. The show had a troop of comic actors that included Bill Saluga, Rick Dees, Julie McWhirter, Marcie Barkin, Mark Holden, Joyce Jillson, Edie McClurg, Chris King, Diane Steinberg, Paul Ryan, Ted Zeigler, Willie Curtis, Mike Fullington and a very young Phil Hartman. It was produced by Chris Bearde and written by Monty Aidem, Jeffrey Barron and others. Here's a photo of most of the cast members…

I haven't seen it since 7/10/80 but I remember it as being quite funny and musical. I knew Jeffrey Barron and I phoned him after it aired and asked, "Why didn't that become a series?" He said he didn't know. Jeffrey has passed away since then but yesterday, I e-mailed some other folks involved with it who I knew then or have met since and asked them for their recollections. Chris Bearde — one of the best comedy producers I ever worked with — wrote me back and said…

It was a precursor to MTV. Jim Aubrey and i were execs. I just took a bunch of promotional videos at that time…put Rick Dees as the D.J., got the Village People live and did all the hits of the day. It was also before Dave's Top Ten. I hired a fresh young Dave as writer on a Bob Hope Show I produced before he was big time Dave!! It was a first TV appearance for Phil Hartman also…Lotsa firsts…Bruce Jenner and Graham Chapman were guests. Graham did "The top ten people you think are dead!"

Monty Aidem wrote back…

You know, I don't remember much about the Top Ten special. A few things, though: There was another writer named Mara Lideks. And the director was a British guy named John Robins, who had directed Benny Hill, I believe. Bill Saluga added a lot as his character Raymond J. Johnson who was apparently hot at the time. All in all, it was a more memorable cast than George Schlatter's Laugh-In revival of the time.

And then I wrote Marcie Barkin, who I met when I was writing and she was guesting on Welcome Back, Kotter. Marcie's the adorable lady in the leopard-print outfit in the photo above — a wonderful comic actress…

It was an NBC pilot — skits, etc. Comedy ensemble format. It didn't have anything to do with Letterman's Top 10 though…

Okay, so Marcie doesn't see a connection to Letterman's lists and I'm not saying I do…but I wonder. Hey, does anyone have a copy of this special?

Once upon a time, TV networks kept trying to find a weekly series to star Don Rickles. Johnny Carson said, "Don's had his finger in more pilots than an Air Force proctologist." Some projects never made it onto the air. Others were on but not for long. His longest run was as the title character of C.P.O. Sharkey, which was producer Aaron Ruben's brainstorm. Ruben had worked on Sgt. Bilko and Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. (among others) so I guess he thought military sitcoms were lucky for him or something.

I was a big fan of Mr. Rickles but the first few episodes of C.P.O. Sharkey did not inspire me to watch more and I don't think it was the show. I think it was putting Rickles into any scripted format where he played someone other than Don Rickles. It was not him doing what he did best. Still, I'm glad they're putting the series out on DVD and I'll probably get around to purchasing it after I work my way through about seven other sets of other shows I have sitting here. If you want it now, here's an Amazon link.

The set includes the video from The Tonight Show — the famous moment when Johnny Carson went across the hallway at NBC with his camera and barged in on a C.P.O. Sharkey taping. I've written about it there a few times, most recently here. I'm pretty sure it was planned in advance but Mr. Rickles did not know. He says that in today's New York Times in this brief interview about the new DVD release.

Later this week, I'm going to write about my favorite TV show that has never been released on DVD. And no, I was not among its writers.