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Boy, we hate doing this. A lovely man named Tom Poston is dead at the age of 85. You may have known him from his many appearances in Steve Allen's little stock company of great comedians. You may have known him from his many game show appearances, particularly on To Tell the Truth. (GSN has been running episodes of that in memory of his fellow panelist, Kitty Carlisle. They can keep it going for Tom.) You may have known him from his work on The Bob Newhart Show and Newhart. Or you may have known him from the many other things he did in front of a camera or on-stage. He had a helluva career.

Obits like this one will tell you all you need to know about that career. I can only add two things. One is to mention that every time I was around Tom Poston, I found him to be a charming and very funny man, exactly as you'd expect him to be from his TV appearances. He was one of those comedians — too few in number — who seemed genuinely unthreatened by others so when his friends said something funny, he'd laugh…out loud, even. He just gave off an easy-going air of being nice.

And the other thing I'll mention is what I'm sure Tom would have wanted me and everyone to mention. It's that he and his wife Suzanne Pleshette really loved each other…and were not shy about making sure everyone knew it.

I have to run out now but if I think of any good Tom Poston anecdotes, I'll post them here later.

Jerry Beck and Pat O'Neill both wrote to remind me that Dabbs Greer was in several episodes of the old George Reeves Superman show. In fact, in the "origin" episode, he played the first person Superman rescued in Metropolis — an airport worker who was dangling from the tie-line to a dirigible.

Trevor Kimball informs me — I'm not a big enough Dabbs Greer expert to know such things — that he played the priest or Justice of the Peace (or whatever he was) who married Florence Henderson and Robert Reed in the pilot of The Brady Bunch…and then, twenty-one years later, he did the same job when Bobby Brady was wed on The Bradys. A nice touch, Trevor notes.

What's more, Curtis Burga tells me that in the 1958 movie, I Want To Live, Greer played one of the Death Row guards who escorted Susan Hayward to her execution. And then in the 1999 film of The Green Mile, he played Tom Hanks' character as an old man, working as a Death Row guard at a prison.

Boy, that guy got around.

Many years ago, to the amazement of film buffs everywhere, the folks at Castle Films used to take 90 minute (or longer) feature motion pictures and abridge them down to four minutes to be sold as 8mm movies. It was astounding that they even attempted this and even more astounding that, once in a while, the films were reasonably coherent at that length.

Well, let's see if Sony Pictures can cut episodes of Charlie's Angels, T.J. Hooker and Starsky & Hutch down to between three and a half minutes and five. According to this article in The New York Times, that's on its way. Just another point of contention to add to the coming Writers Guild strike talks.

Cutting a Charlie's Angels down to length should be a breeze. Just keep the bikini scenes and throw the rest away. That's all anyone cared about in those shows. But on T.J. Hooker, William Shatner used to take eight minutes just to wonder about the murderer's soul. That may present problems.

You're probably familiar with the 1960 motion picture, Inherit the Wind. Adapted from the play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, it starred Spencer Tracy as maverick lawyer Henry Drummond and Fredric March as his courtroom opponent, Matthew Harrison Brady. It was about the trial of a Tennessee schoolteacher for teaching evolution and everyone knew it was a fictionalized (somewhat) version of the 1925 trial of teacher John Thomas Scopes for daring to do such a thing. The character of Drummond was obviously based to some extent on Scopes' lawyer, Clarence Darrow, and Brady was not unlike William Jennings Bryan.

What you may not have known is that there have been four filmed versions of the play. The 1960 one directed by Stanley Kramer was the first. Then came the 1965 TV Movie version which cast Melvyn Douglas as Drummond and Ed Begley (Senior) as Brady. Begley had originated the role of Brady on Broadway (opposite Paul Muni as Drummond) and this filming, which I've never seen, was hailed for preserving his historic performance. This one also featured Dick York, who played the teacher in the 1960 version, in the same role.

Then came a 1988 TV Movie of Inherit the Wind with Jason Robards in the Drummond role and Kirk Douglas as Brady. This one turns up often on cable and although it won a couple of Emmys, I didn't think much of it. Robards seemed to me to be on auto-pilot and Douglas sounded like the Frank Gorshin impression. I like both actors a lot but didn't care for them in this match-up.

Which brings us to the 1999 TV Movie version which had Jack Lemmon as Drummond and George C. Scott as Brady. I only saw a little of this one a few years ago but I thought what I saw was outstanding. I've just set my TiVo to snare the whole thing. It's on Showtime tomorrow (Wednesday) morning. That's what I wanted to alert you about.

Scott seemed born to play the role…but he also could have played Drummond. In fact, he did — in a 1996 Broadway revival produced at Tony Randall's National Actors Theater, with Charles Durning as Brady. I wanted very much to see that so when I planned a New York trip during its run, I ordered tickets. Before I even went east though, it hit the press that Scott was missing performances and that Mr. Randall (!) had stepped into the role, playing it with script in hand. I couldn't imagine what that would be like…and still can't. The night I went to see it, the performance was cancelled. I'm still not sure if that was a lucky break or not.

Anyway, you might want to see Lemmon and Scott have at it. It's a great play…and sadly, one that remains relevant.

Four years ago today, George W. Bush stood beneath that infamous banner and proclaimed that "Major combat operations have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed."

Take a look at this chart.

I know I put too many obits on this site but I had to note the passing of Dabbs Greer, a fine character actor who worked with an amazing frequency for more than fifty years. Few TV shows were filmed in Hollywood during that time without at least one appearance by Dabbs Greer, and the producers must have appreciated his skill and dependability because most brought him back several times. He was on seven episodes of Bonanza, ten of The FBI, thirty-five (!) episodes of Gunsmoke, six of The Fugitive, etc. He played guest roles eight times in the Raymond Burr version of Perry Mason. Three of those times, he turned out to be the murderer.

Mr. Greer's listing over at the Internet Movie Database tells the story better than I can. They have 253 entries for him which seems like a lot, but I'll bet it's less than a fourth of what he did. To the extent people know him at all, it was probably via recurring roles on Little House on the Prairie and Picket Fences. In both cases, he played priests, which was how he was frequently cast. (Remember the episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show with the flashback to how Rob and Laura got married? The scene where Rob couldn't hear so he kept saying "I do" at the wrong moment? That was Dabbs Greer playing the priest who conducted the ceremony.) More often, he played "every man" roles.

Here's the L.A. Times obit for Dabbs Greer. It's not only a shame to lose him but also to see that kind of prolific character actor fade from the scene. We don't have people like that anymore. And come to think of it, you don't meet a lot of guys named Dabbs, either.

We're featuring obscure film clips of my all-time favorite performers, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. The one we have for you today is probably the last time the two of them ever appeared in front of a camera together. It's a home movie camera and the footage is silent…but it's also in color, which is a treat.
It's nice to see them and their families socializing off the set but it's also sad. Laurel was recovering from a stroke…though one might note he's still smoking. This was 1956. Hardy's doctor had ordered him to lose weight and as you can see, he'd lost around a hundred pounds. At the time of this filming, they were planning some television projects — a series of fairy tales with their characters inserted into the storylines — but then Hardy suffered a stroke from which he never recovered.
Beyond that, it pretty much speaks for itself. Here's one last look at the two men I consider the most glorious entertainers of the previous century. I'm skeptical that anyone will top them in this one, either.

There are days when America feels like a nation in the grip of Civil War. There are days, months, even years when it feels like we can agree on nothing and that we, as a people, are incapable of viewing anything with a sense of unanimity and common ground. And then there are those rare moments when we feel as one…when everyone is on the same page and of the same mind, and truly there is widespread agreement on something.

I have just browsed political websites that run the gamut from Ultra-Liberal and Ultra-Conservative. And I am here to tell you that our great nation is united in its disgust of George Tenet.

I have a section on this website called Great Los Angeles Restaurants That Ain't There No More.* An amazing number of folks have failed to grasp the concept that this is all about restaurants that I went to and about which I have fond or at least interesting memories. They write to me as if I have committed some grievous factual error by omitting some eatery that they went to in 1958 and which I never heard of. Wrong. The section is about places I've eaten. Me. Not you. Me. You want a page on the web about your favorite restaurants? Hey, no one's stopping you.

When I get the time, I will be adding to mine the somewhat-famous outlet of Trader Vic's in Beverly Hills, which closed forever either today or yesterday. It's part of the Beverly Hilton which is part of a big hotel/shopping center which is part of a forthcoming development of super-luxury condos. The Hilton's staying but undergoing massive renovations that involve the ousting of the notorious Polynesian bar-restaurant.

Trader Vic's was one of those establishments I really wanted to enjoy but rarely could. It felt like a great place to hang out, eat and/or drink something slightly exotic and take in an atmosphere of what we wish Hollywood nightlife was like but too often is not. But the times I wound up there — usually because someone I needed to eat with wanted to dine within — I found the service to be smothering and the food to be largely inedible and way overpriced. I've had expensive meals where I could understand the pricetag and others where I felt I'd just paid $24.95 for the exact same thing the Sizzler sells for eight bucks. Put enough Teriyaki Sauce on that Malibu Chicken, have it served by an overly obsequious waiter…and you have a Trader Vic's entree.

My last evening on the premises would have been in October of '05 when we had a bachelor party in one of the private rooms for my pal, Paul Dini. We had a great time in spite of the cuisine. We had exotic beverages. (I chug-a-lugged a 7-Up with a flowered swizzle stick in it.) We had festive decorations. We had several lovely young ladies who'd been hired to artfully disrobe to music. Mostly, we had friends around and you can enjoy being anywhere if you have that. I was wise enough to leave that as my final visit to Trader Vic's so I have fond memories of the place. I'm sure a lot of people do and are mourning its demise.

[*Update, years later: That section of my weblog has been converted to a separate blog: Old L.A. Restaurants]

One hopes the obits for saxophonist Tommy Newsom, who died Saturday at the age of 78, will all remember what a fine musician he was and not just focus on his alleged boring personality. Newsom was a member of The Tonight Show Band beginning in 1962, even before Johnny Carson took over as host, and he stayed on 'til the night Johnny had departed. Not only was his playing valuable to that wonderful orchestra but his skill as an arranger was put to good use. Everyone else in the music business seemed to know this. Newsom was in constant demand for outside jazz gigs, both for his musicianship and for his charts.

The job of Musical Director on The Tonight Show went through a scuffling period before Doc Severinsen nailed it down on a permanent basis. Newsom became his second-in-command, stepping into the position when Doc was away. For a while, when Ed McMahon was off, they'd bring in an outside announcer to handle his job but in the early seventies, Carson decided he didn't want a "stranger" as his sidekick, even for an evening. So when Ed wasn't there, Doc would move over to function as announcer and that increased the number of nights when Tommy moved from playing his sax to leading the band. (There were even nights when Doc and Ed were both off. When that happened, Tommy would be the announcer and someone else from the orchestra — usually Shelley Cohen — would conduct.)

Johnny was already getting good monologue mileage off Severinsen's outrageous wardrobe. The writers went the other way with Tommy, penning jokes about how bland and unexciting he could be. Newsom was a brilliant musician but his awkwardness speaking on camera often yielded comedy gold. It certainly paved the way for David Letterman's practice of putting non-professionals on his show. A lot of the seemingly spontaneous banter between Johnny and Tommy was carefully scripted but there were nights when Newsom would come up with something so clumsy (or just odd) that it was hilarious.

At some point around the late eighties, Johnny more or less retired the "Tommy Newsom is so boring that…" franchise and only rarely went for such jokes. He also stopped using Tommy in sketches, as he'd occasionally done, and almost completely eliminated Newsom's role as Doc's replacement. The story is that Johnny decided he wanted Ed and Doc there any night he was hosting so the two men were asked/ordered to schedule their extracurricular projects for guest host nights so they'd be there for Johnny. And then on guest host nights when Ed was off, Doc would serve as both announcer and musical director…so Tommy rarely got to front the band. The official word around the Tonight Show set was that Johnny simply thought the lines about Newsom's lack of charisma had gone on too long, but many suspected a personal falling-out.

Whatever the cause, Newsom continued to contribute his playing and arrangement to what was truly an outstanding band. Whenever I was in the NBC studios and they were rehearsing, I'd race for Studio 1 just to listen. The sound was amazing and Tommy Newsom was a major reason.

Continuing with our festival of obscure Laurel and Hardy film clips: Our next installment is a little less than three minutes of a British Pathé newsreel from 1947. The first part is an interview with Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Taylor. Then comes a brief chat with Stan and Ollie, who were then about to begin touring the British Isles with what turned out to be a highly successful stage show.

You'll hear Hardy talk about an upcoming film version of Robin Hood that, alas, was never made. The storyline would have cast Oliver as Friar Hardy and Stan as Little John Laurel, the two main Merry Men of Robin Hood's band. It is unknown why the project never made it to the business side of a camera. Instead, they wound up making no movies for several years, which was our loss. Here's the newsreel…

I finally got around to watching the recent Bill Moyers special, Buying the War, which is about how the Iraq War was "sold" to the American people, how the press went along with it and how even a lot of prominent Democrats fell right in line with the narrative.

A lot of pro-Bush folks are quite upset at this show…and I suppose that if one is still clinging to the idea that our leaders did everything right, I understand that. I can also understand why newsfolks and pundits whose faulty predictions and disproven "facts" are reaired would be upset. (Nothing seems to upset Bill O'Reilly more than having someone haul out his old words.) I'm not sure though why anyone who can get past the "our team" mentality is bothered by anything other than the long, sad litany of how our leaders — Republican and Democrat, in the press and out — screwed up. Interestingly enough, a friend of mine who's still gung ho and supportive of the Iraq War urged me to watch Buying the War. He thinks the U.S. did the right thing to take out Hussein but is mad that it was justified with fibs and incompetent reporting.

You can decide for yourself since the whole thing can be watched online at this site. You can also watch Moyers' weekly show online on this page. He has a nice interview up with Jon Stewart, which includes the host of The Daily Show reflecting on his recent, contentious interview with John McCain. You might also enjoy Moyers' interview with Joshua Micah Marshall, the Master Blogger I quoted here the other day. I don't know how long these videos will be up but last night here, I told you about a program called Orbit Downloader which can be used to capture the video clip to your harddisk for later viewing.

Nothing above, by the way, should be taken to infer that I've changed my view that public money should not be used for television programming. I watch a lot of things on PBS but I still don't agree with the idea of government funding of the arts.

I don't think this link will work for very long but while it's operative, you might want to read the 2001 profile of late Jack Valenti that ran in The New Yorker. Mr. Valenti had an amazing life and during the decades that he worked for the Motion Picture Association of America, he served that organization well. This is not to say I liked all or even most of what he did, which included consolidating the majors in ways that would suppress the minors and step on unions. Before that, he served a flawed Chief Executive who did a lot of damage. Jack Valenti is the man who said in 1965, "I sleep each night a little better, a little more confidently because Lyndon Johnson is my President." A lot of us were glad someone did.

I'm sorry that I have no great Jack Valenti anecdotes to report here. I met him twice for a grand total of about three minutes and the only thing I recall is that I asked him which was tougher — working for the studio heads he then served or working for Lyndon Johnson. His precise response has long since escaped my memory but I recall noting it was a very measured, political answer. He was just talking to a jerky kid, not a reporter, but he still wanted to make sure he didn't say the wrong thing. I guess that's why he lasted as long as he did in both those jobs.

A great old Disney tradition fades away. The corporation is getting rid of the name "Buena Vista" wherever it was used on business enterprises.

A childhood memory. During the early sixties, my family (Mother + Father + me) used to drive down to San Diego every summer to visit my Uncle Henry and Aunt Tillie, and to go to the zoo. Nowadays, I drive down to San Diego every summer to attend a big mother of a comic convention which is also kind of a zoo but that's another matter. Back then, we made those trips…and my Father drove at a leisurely pace, stopping off a half-dozen times along the way so it took all day. I was in the back seat with a pile of comic books I'd acquired but refrained from reading so I could enjoy them on the trip.

One year, we stopped off at a little lunch place in Long Beach and then went into a nearby drugstore to get a few items we needed. There, I saw a large, well-filled display of Comicpacs — a whole rack of plastic bags of DC Comics. In each, you got four comics which then sold individually for twelve cents each, and you got them for the amazing discounted price of forty-seven cents. Only it really wasn't a bargain because the store there charged sales tax, which they didn't do at newsstands where comics were sold without the plastic bags. There was also the obvious drawback that you could only see one of the four comics you were buying. What if the other three were books you didn't like? Or worse, books you already owned?

I had so many comics, the odds were I'd wind up with dupes but I still decided to gamble. I bought one package where the visible comic was one I didn't have — a recent issue of Superman I'd somehow missed. As luck would have it, two of the other three were comics I not only owned, they were in my pile to read on that trip.

That was why Comicpacs did not work for me. Insofar as I could tell, they didn't work for anyone. Several companies in the sixties tried selling comics in packs of three or four and every attempt was a failure.

I now understand why the companies tried it. Their regular comic offerings were on a returnable basis. Newsstands got them, in effect, on consignment. If they sold, the newsstand made a few pennies. If they didn't sell, the stand shipped them back and the publisher ate the cost of printing…but it was worse than that because if the comic got damaged or frayed on the rack, it could get shipped back and the publisher was out the cost of printing it. Or if the newsstand got cluttered and the dealers just decided to return books a few days after they went on sale — or not to even put them out at all — the publisher was out. At one point, DC considered an acceptable sale of a comic to be a 50% sale, meaning that they'd print 400,000 and sell 200,000. Not an efficient way to do business.

That whole system pretty much crashed and burned during the seventies. Some comics are still distributed that way but not many. Most go through an alternate system of non-returnable distribution that replaced it and saved the industry…but that came later. The bagged comics were the sixties' attempt to sell comics on a non-returnable basis. A store got a shipment and the bags stayed on the racks until they sold, whether it was one month or six or longer. Often it was longer.

It never worked for most publishers, though Western Publishing (aka Gold Key Comics) had better luck than most because Western was a giant in selling activity books, puzzle books, jigsaw puzzles and books for kids. That gave them momentum with many kinds of stores and national chains, and they were able to sell their bagged comics at the same time. The problem was, as I learned in the seventies when I worked for Western, that they were sometimes too successful selling the books…which meant that they were not successful enough. That sentence obviously needs a heap of explaining so let me try to do so by example…

You have a store and I'm a salesguy for Western Publishing. I do a great job of convincing you to buy bagged comics from me to sell in your shop. Let's say we consummate this deal in January. In March, we deliver to you a crate of 300 units, each unit being a plastic bag containing the March issues of Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig and Daffy Duck, with the Bugs Bunny in the front and therefore visible to consumers. I've made a tidy profit but I've also trapped myself out from selling you more. It may take you six months or a year to sell enough of those 300 bags so that you'll want to order additional bags containing other books. All that time, kids who might buy those other packs are looking at your display and saying, "Oh, I have that issue of Bugs Bunny." And they don't buy.

And if by some chance, I do get you to order more bagged comics before you're out of the previous shipment, we find that the two selections work against each other. You get in a crate of units that contain the July issues of Woody Woodpecker, Scooby Doo, Pink Panther and Yosemite Sam with the Yosemite Sam in the front and you put them on display alongside all the bags you still have from the earlier shipment. What we then find (what Western found) is that consumers would look at the two bags and worry that they contained the same comics in a different order. And when they thought that way, research found, they tended to view the whole product with suspicion and not buy anything.

In the seventies, Western's newsstand distribution was dying. They were selling so poorly in some states that they simply pulled their wares off the racks in those regions because they were getting so many returns. (So were DC and Marvel but unlike Western, DC and Marvel received revenues when their characters were merchandised. They owned Superman and Spider-Man, whereas Western did not own most of the characters in their comics. So there was no point in putting out books that were, in essence, loss leaders for licensing.) Western tried hard to make the plastic bags work. They built special displays and they tried putting stickers on the bags that told you what was inside. They even had their salespeople talk stores out of ordering too many of one bag and they experimented with limited returnability. Still, the distribution method never succeeded and when they finally gave up on it, they gave up publishing comic books at all.

I could have told them it wouldn't work. I could have told them that back when I was ten and going to San Diego with my parents. I didn't want to buy my comics in plastic bags and as it turned out, neither did almost anyone else. We want to buy our comics on an individual basis. And then we take them home and put them into plastic bags. That's how it's done.