A blast from Broadway past. Ray Walston originated the role of Applegate (aka Satan) in the show Damn Yankees in 1955. Mr. Walston was a fine actor and he had appeared in musicals before, most notably as Luther in the touring company and London production of South Pacific. People think he originated the role on Broadway but he didn't. He did however play it in the movie.
Still, the folks behind Damn Yankees felt he had a limited capacity as a vocalist so Applegate only got one song in the show, and it was written for a performer of limited singing capacity. Nevertheless, he turned it into quite a star turn. In either 1982 or 1985 — reports differ — he re-created the number on stage for a TV special called That's Singing: Best of Broadway, which does not seem to have made it yet to DVD…
Our pal James H. Burns informs me that film historian John Cocchi is missing. He wandered off on April 16 and his family members have not heard a word from him since then. If you have any information on his whereabouts, there's a link on this page to let someone know.
Randy West is a great announcer of game shows…or just about anything. He sent me the following…
Enjoyed the kudos for Dave Barry. When I worked for Wayne Newton, 1978-1981, I often saw Wayne's show in Vegas. Something like 50 times total. That means I also saw Dave Barry about 30 times. The other 20 I only heard Dave because I was backstage with Wayne.
"I almost didn't make it out to the stage tonight. I was putting on toilet water, and the seat fell on my head." I loved his stuff, but I didn't fully understand why Wayne had Dave as his opening act for so many years.
I came to believe it was, in part, because Dave was a solid performer. Good, but never "too good" to steal any starshine from Wayne. When I asked Wayne's bodyguard/assistant why Wayne liked Dave, the answer was something like, "Because when Wayne cues the booth to turn on the red light, Dave is off the stage in less than 5 seconds."
It was probably that plus a few other things. Dave had the rep of being 100% dependable and cooperative — always there on time, always able to stretch if he had to or get off the stage early with no issues of ego. He had genuine TV credits so he was a minor celebrity but he probably wasn't beastly expensive.
Someone once said of another comedian who opened for headliners in Vegas, "He's good enough to keep the audience in a good mood but not very famous. So if the show sells out, the star would get 100% of the credit for that and if the show didn't sell out, the star and his people can blame the opening act."
I only spoke to Mr. Barry two times but I got a pretty solid feel that he was the kind of performer whose main goal was to keep working and make a steady living. I'm sure he would have liked his own series, his own talk show, to star in movies, etc., but the primary goal was to avoid unemployment. He seems to have done that pretty well for something like forty years without ever becoming that well known or having a role on a sitcom or anything. He had a few acting roles but what kept him going really was stand-up and occasional voiceover gigs, mostly the former.
Years ago, a wizened acting coach (someone way older than me) told me that she had two kinds of wanna-bes in her classes. One was the kind that really, really wanted to be Very Famous and make millions per movie even if that meant they'd burn out in 5-10 years. The other kind was the one who would be very content to just make a decent living until they were ready to retire. She said that with each passing year, a higher percentage of her new students were in the first group.
Some of that, I'm sure, is because a top star today does make a lot more moola than they used to, even when you adjust the amounts for inflation. Jerry Lewis got rich but not Adam Sandler rich. Some of that is because we're far, far from The Great Depression when guys like Dave Barry grew up. The same divide can be seen in the comic book business. The guys who got into it in the forties and fifties didn't care about being famous — most didn't even sign their work — and there was really no way to get rich in the business then. All you could hope for was to always have steady work on something…anything. Not a lot of guys who get into comics these days would be happy, like the first generation was, to stay in one place for the rest of their careers.
Barry probably opened for Wayne Newton for ten years…and since Wayne always worked, Dave also worked. Today, there are comedians who if you offered them a steady ten-year gig like that would run from it in horror. Opening for a Wayne Newton like that would be a great way to freeze your career. No one ever gets "discovered" for a TV series that way. No one ever parlays it into their own stardom. Gary Mule Deer, who's pretty darn funny, has spent most of the last twenty years opening for Johnny Mathis. It takes him almost completely off the radar for most TV networks and keeps him on the road a lot…but I'll bet he's got a nice home and bank account. There's something to be said for that.
Today, your enthusiastic host Stu Shostak welcomes Warner Brothers studio publicist Gary Miereanu to his show. What does a studio publicist do? Well, the first rule is not to publicize yourself, the second is to publicize whatever your studio is selling and the third rule is that there is no third rule. So you may not have heard of Gary but you've heard of many of the projects he's promoted which means he's good at his job. He'll be telling you more about that job when Stu interrogates him. And as an added bonus, comedian-actor Ronnie Sperling will be co-hosting and joining in.
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. The ones where I guest should be cheaper but they aren't.
Hey, you all remember the great number in the movie Royal Wedding where Fred Astaire literally danced on the ceiling. Let's refresh our memories and watch it again, shall we?
Now then. A fellow named Galen Fott, who I believe I first met when he was working as a puppeteer for Jim Henson, took it upon himself to "unskew" this number. Obviously, what Mr. Astaire was doing when they filmed it was dancing in a room that rotated on some sort of axle. The camera was locked-down to the room so it rotated in sync with it, making the room seem stationary. Well, Galen decided to create a video of…well, you'll understand what he did when you watch it. Here's a page on how he did it and some observations he had…
One thing that briefly confused me: On the unskewed video, you'll see a lot of traveling matte dissolves and wipes. Those were not there in the original. They're things that Galen had to do to re-create the entire room for each shot since the camera shooting Astaire was not showing the entire room. Ignore them and just focus on the skillful dancing by Fred and the technical wizardry of the folks at M.G.M. who made this all work in a day before C.G.I.
Also, credit should go to Alan Jay Lerner, who wrote the movie and who claimed the idea for the dance came to him in an actual dream. He said he saw Fred dancing on the walls and ceiling while asleep, woke up remembering it and went to the producers and said, "Can you do that?" They could and did — and here's how they did it. Take this full screen on your monitor…
Frank Rich asks the question, "Can Conservatives be funny?" I'm not sure he answers it.
I suspect the reason there aren't any great right-wing comedians does have to do with the comedy-killing premise of siding with the wealthy against the poor. I think it also has to do with the talent pool just not breeding that kind of person just as it doesn't seem to breed successful left-wing talk radio hosts. What I don't think is the reason is that Conservative comedians don't have the same opportunities. If anything, the marketplace would love a right-wing Jon Stewart but that person just plain hasn't come along. Yet.
Kevin Drum notes that wildfires are becoming larger and more frequent in this country but that Congress is not allocating sufficient funds to deal with the increase. Why? Because Republicans do not want to acknowledge that Global Warming is having this effect on our country. They'd rather underfund the fire-fighting and pretend that the increase is not happening.
Y'know, up until a few years ago, I kinda fought the idea that Climate Change was happening. I wanted to believe that the naysayers were saying nay correctly because…well, wouldn't life be better on this planet if they were? But I've given up that childish hope and one reason is that the arguments against Global Warming are just so lame and they seem to come from folks who make their living telling Conservatives what they want to hear.
Moreover, they are almost all political arguments, not scientific ones. A few years ago, a right-wing friend of mine — I'm using a loose definition of the word "friend" here — told me what to him was the convincing argument that the world was not getting hotter. It pretty much came down to: "Al Gore says it is and Al Gore is an asshole."
Well, that is a whole lot easier than studying and understanding the science.
I have decided to declare a Mushroom Soup Monday here at newsfromme. I've been working way too hard and have too much to do so blogging today will be confined to matters that just won't keep 'til tomorrow. Until I return, I leave you with the immortal words of the great comedian Jackie Vernon who once said, "Never spit in a man's face unless his mustache is on fire." Words to live by.
Buster Keaton's career as a great movie comedian collapsed around the time silent pictures ceased and talkies began. But sound was not the main thing that ruined him. He made some bad career decisions, mainly involving the move from having his own small, independent movie company to becoming a contract player at M.G.M. where there were many, many people to tell him what to do. He was also drinking to excess and screwing up his private life at the same time.
He made what some feel was his last great feature, The Cameraman, in 1928. That was for M.G.M. before they began exercising real control over him. It was done with a large budget and "star" money for its star. By 1934, he was making short comedies — not even features — for Educational Pictures, a low-rent, low-run operation. It was like Rembrandt had taken a job painting designs on the backs of turtles.
This is Grand Slam Opera (1936), the best of the sixteen shorts he made for Educational. If you watch, don't compare it to Keaton's best. That's a terrible thing to do to any comedian, even Buster Keaton. But it's funnier than most of what others were doing on comparable budgets for comparable operations and it's certainly a lot better than most of what Keaton did the rest of his career to earn a paycheck. Even Educational Pictures couldn't completely squash one of the world's greatest comic talents…
This afternoon, I was over near the Beverly Center, a very large indoor mall here in Los Angeles. The Beverly Center is eight stories high so it's a pretty big building. One side faces La Cienega Boulevard and they had much of that busy street blocked off for construction. I couldn't tell exactly what they were doing but it looked like they were blocking off one half of it to begin digging it up to put in a new sewer line or storm drain…or something. They're digging up a lot of major L.A. streets to extend subway lines but I don't recall any plan that had a subway going north and south on La Cienega.
Anyway, as I walked by, I saw the most amazing machine. It was a crane — a very big crane that reached way, way into the sky. It reached up taller than the Beverly Center by at least three or four stories. The top 20-30 feet of it looked not unlike the fire ladder in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World but I didn't see Spencer Tracy — or anyone — dangling from it.
That was my first thought: The Mad World recollection. My second, because the thing didn't look that sturdy, was that if that thing came crashing down, it would destroy quite a few buildings, cars and human beings. (A smaller but still formidable crane did crash down on that street two years ago injuring two workers.)
And my third thought — and the one I'm hoping some reader of this can help me with — is why do they need a crane that tall to dig up the street? (I tried to take a picture of it, by the way, but it was just too big. I couldn't find an angle that would give you any sense of scale.)
One metal cable came down from the peak of the crane. It was connected to, and seemed to be lifting up or placing, a large flat piece of metal. It was the kind that they put down over holes in the street so cars can drive over them. Clearly, they hadn't brought in this huge crane — the "truck" part of it was half a block long — just to move around steel plates and pipes.
Other people were staring at it the way you'd look up at Godzilla if you weren't worried about him stepping on you. We started asking each other, "What are they doing here that they need a crane that can reach up to (at least) the height of an eleven story building?"
Right across from the eight-story Beverly Center is a five-story mall called the Beverly Connection. You could use that crane to put the Beverly Connection on top of the Beverly Center…but I don't think that's what they're doing. I think they're digging up the street and for the life of me, I can't figure out why they need a crane that big. Does anyone reading this know what they're doing there? (I looked online and couldn't find anything.) Does anyone know why a crane that size would be needed to excavate a boulevard…or even for construction amidst already-built buildings? I'm mystified.
Another artist from comics' "Golden Age" has left us. Morris Weiss passed away this afternoon at the age of 99.
Weiss worked over the years on many newspaper strips, including The Katzenjammer Kids and Mutt & Jeff. He frequently assisted on and later took over completely the Mickey Finn strip, and also wrote Joe Palooka for many years. He worked in comic books, mostly for Holyoke, beginning around 1943. His comic book career was interrupted by military service and in 1946, he began drawing and sometimes writing for Timely Publications, the company now known as Marvel. He was a favorite of editor Stan Lee, who used him on comics including Patsy Walker, Tessie the Typist and a popular comic that Weiss created, wrote and drew called Margie. I have a special fondness for his work on the Pinky Lee comic book.
In the late fifties with many comic book companies downsizing or even closing, Weiss did his last work for Stan Lee, picked up some jobs for Western Publishing (their Nancy comic book, among others) and soon transitioned full-time into syndicated newspaper strips. He was active in the National Cartoonists Society and is said to have proposed the idea that became the Milt Gross Fund, an N.C.S. charity to aid cartoonists in financial trouble.
I never had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Weiss but his colleagues spoke well of him as both a creative talent and as a gentleman. He certainly had a long and happy life and career.
When you're a kid — we're talking under ten here — adults are always asking you the same questions…
When's your birthday? My parents were married March 3, 1951 and I was born on March 2, 1952 so I'd answer, "I was born on March 2nd. My parents were married on March 3rd." It always got a laugh. I didn't know quite why it got a laugh but it did so I left it in. It was usually followed by a hurried explanation from my mother.
What do you want to be when you grow up? From about age six on, that was an easy one: "I want to be a writer." I really did and I've never wanted to be anything else even though this response seemed to disappoint most of those who asked. They'd say, "Are you sure you don't want to be a fireman or a movie star or the President of the United States?" I'd reply, "Nope…a writer." They'd usually shrug and you could see them think, "Well, he's young. He has time to decide on a real career." I'm now 62 and I haven't come up with one yet.
What's your favorite color? Now, that was an odd one but I got it a lot. My parents would introduce me to some adult and within moments, the adult would be asking me what my favorite color was. I'd think, "Why? Are you going to paint me that color or something?" But I'd tell them it was orange and they'd react like I'd said something world-shattering…or at least interesting. Orange, huh?
Orange.
Orange is my favorite color but it's not a vast preference. I don't go out and throw rocks at green or spread vicious slander about yellow or anything. I like lots of stuff that's not orange, a fact that my Uncle Aaron never seemed to grasp. I wasn't present whenever he and Aunt Dot were picking out a present to buy me but I just know it went like this…
AUNT: Oh, there's that game Mark wants so badly. Let's get him that. He'll love it.
UNCLE: We can't get him that. It's not orange and the boy loves orange. Hey, instead of the game, let's get him a couple of traffic cones.
When Uncle Aaron and Aunt Dot gave me a gift, I never knew what it would be except that it would be orange. One time, they bought me an orange shirt that was a size too small…and they knew it was a size too small for me when they bought it but all the shirts that were the right size were not orange. I guess the logic was: Better it should not fit him than it should not be orange. If they were around today, I'd probably get John Boehner for Hanukkah.
My Aunt Dot was my father's sister and she had married this man named Aaron who had a sister named Emma. Emma was a sweet, befuddled little lady who was very old. How old? No one, including Aaron, knew. The last twenty or so years of her life, she worked as a salesperson in a variety of department stores and places that sold women's clothing. It was not a mystery why she kept losing jobs. The mystery was why it sometimes took a whole three or four months for her to lose one of them. A more confused woman you never met.
Every few months, she'd be fired and go looking for another job. To get one, she felt it necessary to conceal her true age so she'd just make up a new date of birth, shaving a decade or two off her life. At some point, she seems to have lost track of the truth and literally didn't know how old she was. About me, she retained three facts: (1) My name was Mark, (2) I was just wonderful and adorable and (3) I loved orange. She too was forever giving me gifts that were allegedly the color we now call The New Black.
That was another problem with having orange as my favorite color. Some people have very odd definitions of orange. For reference, my idea of the perfect orange is the color of Baskin-Robbins orange sherbet…or maybe one shade darker. But it's not red with a little yellow in it or yellow with a little red in it. Orange is orange is orange. Aunt Emma — she insisted I call her that — once gave me a jacket that I suspect she fished out of the trash at the last place that had fired her. It was about the color of steer manure mixed with Chinese mustard. She said, "I knew Mark would like this. It's orange."
It wasn't. But almost every time I went someplace where I was going to see her, I had to wear this hideous thing. "Oh," she'd say with glee. "I see you're wearing your orange jacket!"
One evening, we got a call: Emma had collapsed in her apartment and been rushed to a hospital. We decided to go see her the next day and I made a mental note to bring the coat along.
The next morning before we left, the mail came and in it was a mystery: An envelope addressed to me from the Beverly Hills branch of Home Savings and Loan, which was then a big financial institution in Southern California. In it was a bankbook in my name showing a deposit of five hundred dollars. That's was a lot of money in 1966 when I was fourteen.
Home Savings, Beverly Hills
I had never set foot in a Home Savings and Loan and we — my father, my mother and myself — could not for the life of us figure out where this money came from or who'd deposited it or why. Home Savings wouldn't tell us over the phone so we decided to stop there on our way to see Emma and find out. I went in, showed the bankbook and what little I.D. I had at that age and they told me. The account had been opened in my name four days before by Aunt Emma.
No other name could have been as startling. We didn't think she even had five hundred dollars, nor did it make a lot of sense that she would give it to me. Might she not need that money for medical expenses? Or to live on when she got out of the hospital? She had reached the stage where she probably was never going to get another job.
Twenty minutes later, we were in her hospital room. I, of course, was wearing the non-orange orange jacket.
She was surprised but not upset that we knew she'd opened the account for me. I expressed my thanks but told her I didn't think I should accept it. "You might need it," I said. She said she wouldn't need it for medical expenses because her insurance was covering every penny of that stay…and she also wouldn't need it when she left the hospital because she wasn't going to be leaving that hospital. Then she added in a joking manner, "Not alive, anyway."
She wanted me to have the money so her daughter, of whom she was seriously not fond, wouldn't get her hands on it. She sounded fairly lucid and serious about it so I said, "Okay, I'll hold onto it for you…but when you need it back, you're taking it back." She replied, clearly at peace and without the slightest trace of despair, "I won't be needing it back." Then just as we were about to leave, she said something else I'll tell you in a moment.
As it turned out, she died a few days later. She had prepaid for her funeral but it somehow fell to me to make some of the arrangements. When the mortuary called, one of the things they said was, "We're having trouble verifying her date of birth. We've checked hospital and government records and found several different ones that don't match the death certificate. Can you tell us when she was born?" I couldn't but I figured Emma would appreciate me lying about her age so I just made up a year. I don't remember now what I said but it's on her tombstone. I'm sure it was one she gave out at some point. She was somewhere between 91 and 100.
I left the five hundred dollars in the Home Savings account and eventually added to it. So did Home Savings. This was back in the era when banks paid real interest on the money they held for you.
Around 1975, I decided to start saving for a house so that became the purpose of that account. Any money I didn't need to live on went into the account Emma had opened for me. A good deal of that dough came from writing variety shows hosted by people who didn't speak English very well, including the infamous Pink Lady and Jeff. (Jeff's English was fine but his co-stars…well, that's a long story. Or probably a lot of long blog posts someday…)
In 1980 after an exhaustive search, I found a house that I wanted to purchase and a price was agreed-upon. The seller had one special condition of the sale: She was still paying off her loan on the place and under the terms of that loan, she could save a hefty fee if the person she sold to obtained their loan from the same outfit. So I had to either qualify for my loan there or if I couldn't, get a loan somewhere else and pay the hefty fee along with the purchase price. Fortunately, her loan was with Home Savings and Loan. In fact, it was at the same branch where Emma had opened the account…and there was yet another nice coincidence I'll get to, paragraph after next.
I made an appointment with the gent in charge of approving loans, dressed up nicely and went in to see him. He said, "Ah, I see you've been banking with us here for fourteen years." I said, "Yes, and I have most of my down payment money in your bank here." That helped me a lot to qualify for the loan and that account was there because of Emma. The gent then said, "Well, all I need now is to see your income tax forms for the last several years. Can you arrange to get me copies?"
I said, "If you'll let me use your phone, I can have them here in ten minutes." The office of my Business Manager was directly across the street from that Home Savings. That was the other coincidence.
I made the call, my Business Manager himself ran across Wilshire Boulevard with the necessary papers and I qualified for the loan right then and there. I'm sorry Emma never knew she started my home-buying fund…and that she started it in exactly the right place. She did me a much bigger favor than either of us knew at the time.
I'll never forget her for that but what I'll really remember is the last thing she said to me. Let's roll the tape back to that scene in her hospital room, a day or three before she passed. As we were about to leave, I thanked her one last time for the cash in the mystery account and I told her it was maybe the nicest thing anyone had ever done for me. Fortunately at that age, I had enough sense to not add, "And it sure makes up for this ugly coat."
She was lying in that bed, grinning with almost no teeth and she said, "I wanted you to have the money, Mark. I'm just sorry I couldn't figure out a way to make it orange."
I've long had an interest in a stand-up comedian named Dave Barry, not to be confused with the current funny columnist by that name. My Dave Barry had a long career doing occasional acting jobs — he was in Some Like It Hot, among other films — and a lot of cartoon voiceovers. He was they guy who did most of the celebrity impressions — especially Humphrey Bogart — in the classic Warner Brothers cartoons of the late forties and fifties. Here's a link to an obit I wrote about him in 2001.
As I said in that piece, his main line of work was doing stand-up and he worked constantly for about thirty years, mainly in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, New York and Miami Beach. Most of his visits to New York also involved an appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. This is one he made in 1964 and I'm afraid it's not one of his best. The audience is pretty cold and he doesn't bother to wait for laughs and massage them and work the material. He just rushes on to the next line. And the next line and the next line.
Also, it sure looks to me like he's working off cue cards. You can tell by his eye movements and even see what may be the cards reflected in his glasses. I don't recall noticing that often on the Sullivan program. Since this is undoubtedly material he'd been doing in clubs then, probably to greater effect, my guess is that Ed picked which jokes he wanted out of Barry's act and told him to do every one of them in six minutes…so he needed the cards to remember which jokes and to get them all in within the allotted time. Barry was a much better comic than this.
I wish I had a video to show you of when I saw him in Las Vegas in one of his last engagements there around 1992. He got more laughs in his first minutes than he did in the entirety of the clip below. In fact, if you watch the piece below — which I offer as a good example of what most stand-ups were doing in 1964 — watch a little of him in the clip I linked here from a 1991 appearance. I thought he was really good on stage — usually — and really good at adapting his act to changing times. Here he is doing what a stand-up was supposed to do in '64 before guys like Carlin and Klein changed the game forever…
David S. Cohen has just found the worst-ever argument against Gay Marriage…and as he notes, there are plenty of contenders for that honor.
I sure get the sense that even the folks fighting Same Sex Wedlock these days don't have their hearts in it…or any expectation that they can turn things around. I think most of 'em are just aware that there are enough people out there mad about this that one can make a very nice living, and perhaps advance one's political aspirations, by being a prominent soldier in this losing battle. Max Bialystock stood to make a lot of money if he really did put on the worst play ever. Pat Buchanan did make a lot of money running repeatedly for president without ever coming close to carrying one state. Lost causes can be profitable, especially when you can stoke the flames and keep people angry enough about something.
