Category Archives: Uncategorized

I'm not watching this year, either.

Tonight on the late night GSN rerun of What's My Line?, one of the guests is Ingemar Johansson, who was then the Heavyweight Boxing Champion of Europe. Mr. Johansson passed away the other day but this is not a tribute airing. It's just a coincidence that it comes up now in the rotation. The Mystery Guest, by the way, is Burl Ives.

Then right after that on the To Tell the Truth rerun, one of the segments features Shirley Dinsdale, a ventriloquist and kid show host in the earliest days of television. Ms. Dinsdale worked with a dummy named Judy Splinters and was truly one of the superstars of her day. In 1948, she won the very first Emmy Award ever presented.

And you might want to set your VCR or TiVo for (or maybe just watch) the episode of To Tell the Truth they're rerunning on Tuesday night/Wednesday morning. It's from May 6, 1958 and in one of the games, the panel has to identify which of three men is the real Dr. Seuss.

Last night on his show, David Letterman aired the "lost" stand-up spot by comedian Bill Hicks…the one that was censored from the program on October 1, 1993. And by the way, that's the correct date. I had it wrong in this posting. Letterman took full responsibility/blame for the decision to edit Hicks from the tape that night and apologized excessively to the late comedian's mother, who was a guest on last night's broadcast. They ran the deleted routine and I have to say: Though I'm glad they did, and I think it was a mistake to cut it in the first place, it wasn't much of a spot. Many folks I respect think Hicks was one of the most brilliant comics to ever grace a stage…and while I've seen a lot of him and liked some of it, I've never really seen whatever it is they see in him.

I should also add that Dave probably gladdened the hearts of a lot of people in network jobs, particularly Broadcast Standards departments, with his admission that he, not the show's censor people, was responsible for the decision. It is very (emphasize: very) common for the network to take the heat when a show's star or producers make possibly-unpopular choices. I worked once with a star-producer who was always doing that kind of thing, blaming "the idiots at the network" for his decrees and demands, and it's not fair. The folks who work at TV networks make enough stupid, pernicious decisions without taking the heat for those made by others.

The Pacific Pioneer Broadcasters, a local group that honors veterans in the field of TV and radio, yesterday threw a nice luncheon in honor of a nice man named Robert Wagner. The word "classy" was uttered a lot and so was the word "mensch," and none of the speakers — who included Loretta Swit, Norm Crosby, Mike Connors, Bud Yorkin and James Bacon — had anything but praise for Mr. Wagner as an actor or a human being. (Those two categories are not always mutually exclusive but sometimes they are.) I think the worst thing that was said about "R.J." all afternoon was that he'd slept with an awful lot of beautiful women. One would assume he's deeply ashamed of that.

I don't have a lot to report about the event. For me, the most interesting thing was that it was not held at the Sportsmen's Lodge in Studio City, scene of all recent P.P.B. luncheons. For those of you outside L.A., the Sportsmen's Lodge is this huge complex of a hotel, a restaurant or two and a sprawling banquet facility located on prime real estate on Ventura Boulevard. Until recently, it was the venue for an infinite number of meetings, weddings, receptions, luncheons, parties, etc., not so much because it was good but because it was there. If you had to book an event for a large gathering of people, you'd be hard-pressed to not wind up at the Sportsmen's Lodge. I know people who loathed the place but wound up using it because the alternatives were inconveniently located and even more expensive. The management often functioned as if they knew they had you by the [fill in euphemism of your choice for "testicles"] and you couldn't go elsewhere.

Well, now you have to. The Sportsmen's Lodge has been closed by its new owners for some sort of renovation of indeterminate length or breadth. I'm kinda surprised…not that it didn't need a makeover but that they're doing it. If I were in their position — and this may explain why I'll never be a real estate mogul — I wouldn't close the place down for a second; not when the main thing it has always had going for it is that customers don't know where else to have their Bar Mitzvah receptions. The Pacific Pioneer Broadcasters were forced to find a new place and they did — a very nice restaurant high on a hill overlooking Burbank.

Okay, so it wasn't quite as perfectly situated. But the food was better, the ambiance was better, the parking was better, the service was better, the room was better, etc. Even the air up on the top of that mountain was better than what you breathe around the corner of Coldwater and Ventura. Everyone seemed so happy with the new location, I doubt they'll ever return to the Sportsmen's Lodge, no matter what is done to it. Which is fine with me.

The Illinois state legislature has voted unanimously to remove Rod Blagojevich from office. So it's like I told you. He wouldn't have done any worse dressed as Ethel Merman.

I just watched Rod Blagojevich address the Illinois state legislature, which is about to vote on his fate. Mr. Blagojevich is the governor of Illinois at the moment but that may not be the case by nightfall. For weeks now, this man has been saying he was dying to refute the many allegations of wrongdoing against him. He just spent an hour trying to knock down a few of them. Apparently, he couldn't address the biggies because he doesn't want to lock himself into one version of events before he goes to trial. This is not a good position to be in when you're trying to prove your innocence.

Before the speech, I was trying to think what the man should do. I decided he should dress up as Ethel Merman and then come out and sing all the hits from Gypsy. It wouldn't have made his removal from office any less likely and he might have launched a new career for when he gets out of prison.

What he did say was rambling and repetitive and far removed from reality. He would have done just as well with "Rose's Turn." It might have even helped him with the insanity defense which is looking more and more like his only option.

Well, I came back from a great evening to find that my Internet connection is now working properly so I'm going to let you in on where I was. Carolyn and I went to an industry screening/party for the new movie, Coraline, based on the book by our pal Neil Gaiman.

Coraline is the story of a young girl who runs away (actually, crawls away) from home, entering a mysterious little door that she finds in her house. Inside it, she discovers…

No, I'm not going to tell you. Instead, I'm going to suggest you go see this movie as soon as you can and put a paper bag over your head until you can. It opens February 6 and you'll do yourself an enormous favor by not seeing the trailer, not watching excerpts, not reading reviews, not listening to others who have seen it tell you what happens in it. Let me put this in all caps: THE LESS YOU KNOW ABOUT THIS MOVIE GOING IN, THE MORE YOU WILL ENJOY IT. The film keeps your off balance throughout — every time you're sure it's about to turn left, it hangs a right — and the most refreshing thing about it is that you never know quite where it's headed or how it's going to get there.

So if friends are discussing it in your presence, clamp your hands over your ears and go "La la la" real loud so you can't hear them. I'm sick of going to movies that I've already seen half of, but some suffer more than others for advance familiarity. This is one that will suffer.

Coraline is a brilliant, wicked, stunning fantasy, filled with images you will carry home in your veins. It's done with stop-motion animation and the sets and props alone are reason enough to see it. They could have been done with computer graphics but not like this. Not with this credibility and believability. What the artisans and animators have constructed is impossible to believe, let alone describe. So see this one in a theater because it'll also suffer on the small screen.

But you might not want to see it in 3-D, which is how we viewed it and how it's being shown in some venues. 3-D puts me to sleep. One of the world's most famous hypnotists once tried to put me under and concluded I was "unhypnotizable." That's probably so but I've drifted off at some point in every 3-D movie I've ever seen and not out of boredom. I missed about ten minutes of Coraline and would have missed more except I kept mentally yelling at myself, "Wake up! You're missing this great movie!" I regret every moment through which I slept.

That's the only negative I have to report here. When it was over, Carolyn turned to me and said, "If we just sit here, will they show it again?" The answer turned out to be no so we filed out, which was good because Neil introduced us to the film's writer-director Henry Selick. We told him, like he didn't know it, that he'd created an amazing thing that spans the gamut of possible reactions. It's funny, it's chilling, it's sad, it's horrifying, it's reassuring.

I know I haven't told you a lot about the content of this movie but that's the point. If you really want that stuff, there are many websites that offer clips and trailers and plot summaries. If you know what's good for you, you'll stay the hell away from them. And go see Coraline at the early show on 2/6/09.

Today's dearth of postings is brought to you by the brilliant folks at Road Runner Cable. In case you've forgotten, let me tell you how this works.

You notice your Internet Connection is plodding along at about the speed of a tortoise on Valium. You call Road Runner Cable and ask if the problem is on your end or their end. A person there assures you they've had zero complaints from others so it must be on your end. This person suggests all sorts of things to remedy the problem and, like Charlie Brown taking a running start at that football Lucy's holding, you start trying to fix it. This means crawling under desks to rehook cables, then getting up to check (if at all) they've affected your computer's connectivity. They usually have no effect at all so you have to crawl back under the desk to rehook, then crawl back out to check, then crawl back under the desk to rehook…

And so it goes for hours, up and down, back and forth, with your knees feeling like they belong on that hooker who hangs outside the 99-Cent Store and charges accordingly. You do this, knowing damn well that nothing you do is going to fix the problem…and it's almost comforting when, after you do everything you can do, it doesn't fix the problem. At various points throughout this process, you call back the Time-Warner tech support people on the special phone number they gave you…and that's a waste of time too because their phones are broken. Honest to God, the number I was given by the service folks at the company that supplies my Internet and my telephone service gets you to a voice that says "Press 1 to speak to a service representative" and then when you press 1, you get that jarring phone-off-the-hook alarm sound that means you've connected to nothing.

Finally, you call back the regular tech support line and you do manage to reach someone there. That's the person who tells you, "Oh, we've had many reports of that. The problem is on our end and our technicians have been working on it all day. They expect to have it fixed sometime between this evening and the 25th century." Which means that all your hooking and rehooking and rebooting and crawling under desks has been an utter waste of time.

So that's why my website is slow and my e-mail is slower. And the worst part is not that I feel for this at all but that six months from now, I'll fall for it again.

I'll be back when things speed up around here.

A lot of people list Bill Hicks among the great stand-up comedians of all time…and if that name isn't familiar to you, it's probably because he died way too young — in 1994 at the age of 33. It may also be because he didn't get a lot of television exposure when he was around.

One place he wasn't seen was on Late Show with David Letterman on October 9, 1993. Hicks taped what would have been his twelfth appearance with Dave for that telecast…a rambling rant on topics including Easter, pro-lifers, smoking and some celebrities he wanted to kill. You didn't see it, even if you were watching that night. The entire routine was edited out of the show before broadcast and replaced with a routine by another comedian. The whole incident from Hicks's point of view was summarized in this article by John Lahr. As you'll note, there was some question as to whether the decision to clip the spot was made by CBS Standards and Practices or if it was decided by the folks running the Letterman show…which would basically mean Dave.

Like I said, you didn't see it…but you can on Friday. Already taped (Letterman tapes his Friday shows on Monday) is an episode with Mary Hicks, Bill's mother, as a guest…and they run the once-excised routine. Perhaps we'll hear more about who made the decision to cut it.

Last night, I hosted my friends Wendy and Richard Pini at the Magic Castle in Hollywood. You all know them as the gifted folks who've given the world Elfquest and other fine creations. I've known Wendy forever — since before she met and married Richard, in fact, and I've taken her — sometimes with him, sometimes without — to the Magic Castle a number of times.

I don't have to tell any fans of her work how creative Wendy is…or tell anyone who's met her how lovely she is. But I'll tell you something you may not know about the lady. She's the world class champ at getting picked to be the magician's "volunteer" from the audience. Take her into any room where any magician is performing and inside of ninety seconds, she'll be up on stage picking a card. It's happened every time I've taken her to the Castle and it happened again last evening.

Before that, we had a fine dinner. I've been a member of the Magic Castle for 25+ years, which means I've endured 25+ years of squabbles, financial troubles, closure rumors, emergency dues assessments and the like. Some of that might have driven me away but the place is so much fun that I always ride out the current crisis. At the moment, things seem to be stable. The Magic Castle is not about to disappear or be sawed in half or anything. The land on which it resides has been sold but everyone seems confident that will not affect our club. An outside group which had been managing the restaurant part of the club was ejected on New Year's Day and I think the food is somewhat better for it.

Then we headed over to the big showroom for a "special event" magic performance — Mac King was in from Vegas for two nights to do much the same show he does at Harrah's on the strip. I've seen him there and he's quite amusing and quite amazing. Dressed in a suit that Spike Jones would have found garish, Mac strides out on stage and just takes over the place. He's one of those performers who's so personable and charming, you'll just follow him anywhere.

Showing uncommon restraint, Mr. King waited until his second trick before he got Wendy up on stage to pick a card and sign her name on it, whereupon he made it disappear and reappear and reappear and reappear. Sometimes, it was in his pocket. Sometimes, it was inside his fly. He only made Wendy fish it out when it was in his pocket. Eventually, it turned up sealed inside a box of Kellogg's Frosted Flakes. Later, not realizing Richard and Wendy were a couple, Mac picked Richard to come up assist him in another trick. I thought the same thing you'd have thought: "Boy, I'm glad it was them and not me."

Anyway, I just wanted to jot down a reminder of a lovely evening, for myself if not for you, and to tell you the following: If you're in Vegas, clear the time one afternoon to go see Mac King at Harrah's. He's really good.

As I've mentioned here, I'm feeding an awful lot of feral cats in my backyard lately. Two of the most interesting — because they're so deeply in love — are Max and Sylvia. Max is also known as Max the Bulimic Cat because he spends most of the day binging and purging, binging and purging. Sylvia is also known as The Stranger Stranger Cat because she's stranger than (and apparently the daughter of) another cat who comes around who we call The Stranger Cat. The Stranger Cat is friendly and trusting. Sylvia spends most of her time scowling at those who give her food and staying far from them. For no visible reason, about once a month she makes herself available for petting. At all other times, she flees from people.

That's Sylvia scowling in the above photo…but the more interesting thing is where the two of them are. That's Max and Sylvia in their nest. They have a nest. Max found a little area between some bushes and he began sleeping in there…and soon, Sylvia began joining them. They sleep in there, one practically on top of the other. They nuzzle and cuddle and lick each other's faces. They seem very happy to be in there, and they're in there an awful lot.

I had to sneak up on them to get the above photo. When he knows I'm around, Max springs from the nest and hurries to demand food, while Sylvia often flees the yard. This time though, my camera and I were far enough away that I didn't disrupt the serenity of the cat nest. Max, by the way, will share his food with Sylvia but not with anyone else. He may be all stomach but he's also all heart.

The Screen Actors Guild board today took steps to oust its executive director and head negotiator, Doug Allen. No one will be surprised that he's going away but the all-around expectation was that he'd get the message (or the severance package) and resign with one of those "For the good of the union…" speeches that would go some distance towards healing. That he's being kicked out this way will probably make things somewhat worse before they can begin to get better.

By the way: I erred back in this message when I said SAG needs a 70% agreement of its members to call a strike. It actually needs 75%, which is of course even less attainable. I'd be surprised it they could get 50% right now.

A pretty amazing photo of the scene as Barack Obama delivered his inaugural address. Zoom in deep and look around.

A couple of folks wrote to ask what else I remembered about going to the audience testing for I Dream of Jeannie and Camp Runamuck. As I recall, it was early in 1965, several weeks before either was announced as a series, so our reaction may have been a factor in them landing on the NBC fall schedule. I'm pretty sure both pilots that were shown to us that afternoon were longer than what aired the following September and different in a number of ways.

The venue for the testing was a place called Preview House up on Sunset Boulevard, a few blocks east of Fairfax. I went with a friend of mine named Steve Hopkins and we had to wait in line for quite a bit. Through some confusion, we were actually a bit too old to be there — the testing was of kids 12 and under, and we were thirteen, but they let us in. We were shown to seats equipped with little handheld dials on cords. You could turn the dial all the way to the left to indicate you didn't like what you were seeing or rotate it to the right to show approval. Steve and I took our assignments seriously but a lot of boys and girls around us seemed to be just randomly spinning the thing because it was fun. As I recall, the place held around 200 of us.

A gentleman came out and talked a while, making it sound like the entire future of commercial broadcast television was in our hot little hands. Then he taught us how to use our dials and showed us a Mr. Magoo cartoon. I'm not sure if the man said this or if I read it somewhere later but the idea was that the Magoo film was the "control." It was shown at every Preview House screening and our responses to it would be measured against the responses of other test audiences to see how we weighed in against them. When we were asked if we had any questions, Steve wanted to know if our responses were individually recorded. Did they register that the person in Seat A-7 liked this or that? Or did they just record the responses of the audience as a whole? The host said he couldn't get into technical things like that and so we never found out. I might have felt a lot less self-conscious if I'd known.

Questionnaires were then passed out. We'd been promised that there'd be a drawing later for prizes and we were now asked to decide which items we'd select if we were the lucky ones. For instance, someone was going to win a case of cookies. In the booklet were photos of about ten popular brands of cookies and you had to check off which kind you'd like if you won. You then had to pick which candy bar you'd want if you won the case of candy bars and which kind of cereal you'd want if you won the case of cereal and so on. It seemed rather odd to me to have everyone fill out their choices this way. Why couldn't they do the drawing and then ask just the winner which brand of soft drink he or she wanted? Hmm…

After we all filled out the forms and passed them in, we were shown the Camp Runamuck pilot, which we kinda liked. It took place at a summer camp where the counselors were more childish than the youthful campers, and there was a lot of physical comedy and food fighting. I remember thinking that it was copied from the Disney movie, The Parent Trap, even to the point of having the same actor (Frank DeVol) play the camp supervisor. As I later learned, self-plagiarism was at work. The Parent Trap was written and directed by a man named David Swift…and David Swift was also the creator of Camp Runamuck. (Frank DeVol, by the way, was replaced when the series debuted the following fall. I hope my clumsy dialing wasn't the reason.)

We filled out some forms about how we liked what we'd seen, then it came time for the second pilot, which was preceded by several commercials — one for cookies, one for candy bars, one for cereal and so on. Then came the I Dream of Jeannie pilot, which we liked a lot. I darn near broke the dial, whirling it clockwise every time Barbara Eden was on the screen. Forms were passed out for our comments on Jeannie, and if there'd been a place I could have written something in, I'd have been the first person to ever demand they show Barbara Eden's navel.

As these packets were collected, someone called our host away and informed him of some dire news which he then passed on to us. Apparently, there was a problem with those questionnaires we'd filled out earlier — the ones where we picked the kind of cookie we'd want if we won the case of cookies, the kind of candy bar we'd want if we won the case of candy bars, etc. "We accidentally gave some of you the wrong questionnaire so just to be fair, we're going to ask you all to fill them out again!" New forms were passed out and Steve and I both noted that in each category, one possible selection was a product which had been in one of those commercials we'd seen and…

Hey, you don't suppose it was all a test to see if those commercials had caused us to change our minds, do you? Naah, they couldn't have been that sneaky.

That was about it. We were told that if we won the prizes, we'd be notified…and of course, we weren't. Given how sneaky these people were about getting us to fill out the prize form a second time, I'm skeptical that anyone got a case of anything. The host thanked us for coming and out we went. I suppose we should have felt somewhat exploited but it was kind of cool. The next week at school, we could tell our classmates that NBC had tested its new shows on us…and of course, we made it sound like the Head of Programming had called us into his offices and said, "Mark…Steve…I value your judgment so much that I'm going to let you program Friday night at 7:30!" Soon after, when Camp Runamuck and I Dream of Jeannie were announced, we could flaunt that we'd seen them, whereas the commoners had to wait 'til September. (Runamuck was a quick flop but managed to last all of one season. Jeannie was a hit for five years.)

Whatever "specialness" we'd felt at being a part of a select testing audience pretty much evaporated over the next year or so. Preview House got very active, I guess, because everywhere you went in L.A., there were teenagers handing out passes to go there and watch pilots and win valuable prizes. I declined at least one a week.

A friend of mine went once and reported back that he'd seen the pilot for a Batman TV show starring someone named Adam West. He'd also seen the same Mr. Magoo cartoon plus some pilot that never made it to series, and they'd done the same stunt about redoing the questionnaires that told them which prizes you wanted if you won the drawing, which I still don't think anyone ever did. I don't know how much the networks paid them to run this operation but I'll bet it was enough that they could have afforded to send someone a case of cereal once in a while. If anyone who was ever involved with Preview House reads this, I still want Cheerios.

People today are getting upset about this…

Impeached Gov. Blagojevich, on the first leg of his media blitz timed to the start of his impeachment trial, in an NBC interview broadcast on The Today Show Sunday compared himself to human rights heroes Nelson Mandela, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gahdhi.

I think it's a perfectly apt comparison. None of those other people are going to be the Governor of Illinois next month, either.