Category Archives: Uncategorized

Leonard Maltin on meeting and interviewing Elizabeth Taylor. If you think he was nervous then, you should have seen the first time he met me.

Drew Grant finds some good words for Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. Ousting Julie Taymor and postponing again for rewrites don't seem to have driven folks away from the box office. Last week, the show was at 96.9% capacity. Then again, maybe most of those tickets were purchased before the shake-up.

We are hearing naught but raves for the new musical from the folks who brought us South Park. It's called The Book of Mormon and everyone I know who's seen it says it will run forever and deserves to.

My longtime pal Craig Miller, who also grew up in this area, notes that Google Maps also shows the Carthay Circle Theater (or "Theatre," as they spell it) still situated where it used to be. In fact, I note the Wunderground map I saw apparently is the Google Map.

Where it gets even curiouser is when you zoom in and out on the Google Map. At a distance, it shows the Carthay Circle where it was pre-1969. As you get closer, the theater disappears and is no longer on the map. You should be able to do this on the inset map below…

A couple of my correspondents have already suggested one thought. Map-makers sometimes include phony names and places on maps in order to identify when someone plagiarizes their work. Maybe someone left the Carthay Circle Theater on a map deliberately just to see if someone else would pick up on the error…not that it would be actionable but it may have been left in as an identifier.

Yesterday, I was checking the weather — we've been having weather lately in Los Angeles for a change — and I noticed something odd on a map over at Wunderground, which is my weather source of choice. This is a hunk of a map they have that includes my area and as you can see, they note certain areas and landmarks…like the Beverly Center and the Pan Pacific Park. Prominently noted there also is the Carthay Circle Theater and it struck me as odd for two reasons that someone would select that, of all the identifiers they could select…

1. True, there's a lot of history associated with the Carthay Circle. It was built in 1926 and housed a number of important movies. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs had its world premiere at the Carthay Circle Theatre on December 21, 1937 and it was at one point regarded as one of the great architectural achievements of Southern California. But there are a lot of theaters in Los Angeles and most of them had some great premiere or presentation…why single out the Carthay Circle? And there's another reason it's odd that it's on this map…
2. It isn't there anymore. It was torn down in 1969.

There is no Carthay Circle Theater…there. There's a small replica at Disney World in Florida but the one the map is pinpointing is long gone. There's an office building where it used to be. As I wrote back here, my parents took me there maybe a half-dozen times in the sixties. I have a vague memory that we saw Around the World in Eighty Days there not when it first premiered at the Carthay Circle — in '56 when I was four years old — but a few years later in some kind of return engagement. I think we also saw West Side Story there…and others I cannot identify.

It was a great place but I'm curious why it's still a landmark, four decades after it stopped being there. I guess it has something to do with cartographers constantly taking information off old maps as they make new ones…and sometimes, something doesn't get updated. Or maybe there's some mapmaker who always loved the place. He first kissed a girl in the balcony (I think the place had a balcony) or while sitting alone in the loge, he first fell in love with Hayley Mills. I think that's where I did.

They took a wrecking ball to his beloved movie shrine but they cannot erase it from his heart and memory. So every time he whips up a map of that area, he puts it in. It's his way of screaming to the world, "No! You will not deny what I know in my heart! You say there is no more Carthay Circle Theater! I say there is and there shall forever be!"

Or something like that. The thing is, it probably doesn't still exist only on this map on the weather site. They didn't design this map. They got it from somewhere and as you can see, it does have Pan Pacific Park and the Beverly Center, both of which were built in the eighties. So it's a map someone was maintaining and using and it wouldn't surprise me if there are others that have the Carthay Circle Theater on them.

Almost all the restaurant guides and address search engines like Yelp! and Superpages still list a restaurant called Andre's of Beverly Hills at 8635 Wilshire Blvd. in Beverly Hills despite the fact that it went out of business in the late seventies. 8635 Wilshire is not far from where the Carthay Circle Theater was. A lot of people probably used to dine at Andre's and then go catch a movie at the Carthay Circle. Apparently, in some database somewhere, they still can.

Last night, I accidentally posted the wrong message here. Instead of posting a new one I'd intended, I put up another copy of one I'd posted a month ago. This is what is technically known in Internet Parlance as a "mistake." Say it with me: "Mistake."

I have deleted the first appearance of the message in question. My thanks to the dozens of you who wrote to tell me and to ask if I was going into reruns here. No, I only reuse old stuff for paying work.

Jody Bernstein writes…

Love the blog but I'm curious about the time stamps and the life of a writer. I often see you post messages that say 4:30 in the morning on them. Are those sent by a timer or does it mean you were really up and blogging at that hour? How many hours a night do you sleep? Do you really write all night? How can you do that?

Sometimes, I really write all night. I get a lot of calls during the day and while my brain can sometimes shift and back and forth, it isn't always possible to keep jumping from script to phone call then back to script then to another phone call and so on. Nighttime, I can write for long stretches without having my attention jerked away from a story every ten minutes.

Years ago, I slept eight hours a night. Then I was diagnosed with Sleep Apnea and I started sleeping with a CPAP unit. I began sleeping six hours a night and getting up more refreshed than when I'd slept eight without the machine. Since I lost all that weight a few years ago, I'm usually fine with five and I sometimes get by with four…though when I go a couple of nights on four hours sleep, I pay for it one way or another. In any case, I'm up and at the computer when the time stamp on a message says I'm here…

…and usually not unhappy to be here. I love writing. Always have. I don't like every assignment but in the main, this is something I enjoy very much and that's the answer to your "How can you do that?" question. I got into a line of work I liked doing…which of course makes it never feel like work. If I drove a cab, that would be work and then I'd go home and write all night for pleasure. I don't make any real money writing this blog but you can see how much writing I do for it.

The number one piece of advice I give to aspiring writers or anyone considering the profession is to either enjoy doing it or go find something else to do that you do enjoy. When I'm with another writer and he or she starts bemoaning the hours and effort they have to put in…well, I guess it's justified if you were trapped into working for rotten money on something. Or on something you really, really don't want to write. Both have happened to me on occasion. But I always remind them that at its worst, it's still not a bad way to live…at least for those of us who never thought of doing anything else.

Roger Ebert eulogizes Elizabeth Taylor.

A lot of folks have quoted (or stolen) my line about the whole premise of home video is for the industry to see how many times they can get me to buy Goldfinger. I haven't done an actual tally but I suspect the number of times it's been reissued in new formats or deluxe editions is nothing compared to the marketing of Fawlty Towers collections.

A collection of that wonderful sitcom shouldn't be that big a deal. I mean, there were only the twelve episodes, eight or nine of which are among the funniest TV shows ever produced. Anyway, Amazon has a nice sale going on the latest release, which is remastered and chock-full of special features and done so well, it will lull you into a false sense of security. Buy it and you'll think you'll never have to purchase another set of Fawlty Towers episodes ever again…you poor, deluded ninny. This one however should last you for a long time…weeks, perhaps.

Here's the link. It's currently $23.99 and since you get free shipping if your purchases total $25 or more, you'll probably want to buy something else at the same time. Knowing you, you can find something.

You know how on the Internet, you sometimes find yourself on a page that says "The page you're looking for could not be found"? Well, this is the best one of those I've seen.

One performer of many who always interested me is/was the late Dick Shawn. Shawn was in two of my favorite movies — It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and The Producers — and almost starred in the original Broadway production of one of my favorite musicals, Li'l Abner. He was actually cast in the role of Abner, not because the show's creators thought he was ideal for the part but because they were set to start rehearsals and they couldn't find anyone who was. Then they found Peter Palmer. A not-dissimilar attitude seems to have accompanied his hiring for Mad World. Because of its size, the role of Sylvester Marcus should have been played by a major, established comedian…which Shawn was not at the time. He was nowhere near big enough to share a screen and billing with Sid Caesar, Milton Berle and Phil Silvers. Fortunately for Shawn, neither was anyone else who was the right age, a bit muscular and convincing when playing a maniac. So he got the job and in this case, they didn't find anyone preferable.

Even his participation in The Producers is a bit odd. He played a hippie named L.S.D. who was essential to the plot of the film but easily and effectively jettisoned later for the musical version. "The character never quite fit in," writer-director Mel Brooks said when asked about the deletion…and I get the feeling that Dick Shawn, in shaping that character, contributed mightily to that disconnect. Mel was right: L.S.D. doesn't really blend seamlessly with the rest of his wonderful movie. It almost feels like he was filmed for some other picture and then edited into this one. That may in part be because there isn't one shot where you see Shawn in the same frame with the stars, Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder. I once asked Brooks if he was even on the set at the same time as the two leads and he said "Sure" and seemed surprised when I mentioned that you never see them together. You don't. I don't think I've ever even seen a still of Shawn with either of them.

Since Shawn died spontaneously in 1987, he's probably been best-remembered for how he died. It happened on stage during a performance of a one-man show he wrote for himself called The Second Greatest Entertainer in the Whole Wide World. As I'll explain in a moment, the vehicle was just the kind of thing that might have ended with the star faking his death on-stage and indeed, many audience members that night left wondering if they actually had seen Dick Shawn drop dead or if it was all an elaborate, unfunny joke. Andy Kaufman was probably very jealous.

All of that upstages something that is too often unsaid about that show. At least when I saw it (twice) and its star didn't croak, it was truly one of the most brilliant, memorable evenings you could ever spend in a theater. It was the kind of show you cheered and gave a couple of rousing standing ovations, then went outside and gasped for air, aware you'd witnessed something you'd never forget.

My first was in 1978, I believe, at what was then called the Solari Theater. A well-respected acting teacher named Rudy Solari had taken over a theater in Beverly Hills and renamed it, he said, in memory of his father. I recall he took a fair amount of criticism for that…people feeling he'd named it to honor himself and was using the old man as a shield. He didn't deserve any such grief because he ran a fine operation which took in a lot of wonderful, often-experimental shows and gave them a place to live — and not in some converted welding shop in a bad neighborhood but in a wonderful, comfortable room in a classy area.

When we arrived that night, the house was closed and the audience was all crammed into the lobby, waiting awkwardly to be let into the theater. We finally were, just minutes before showtime and we would soon learn the reason for the delay, which I guess occurred at every performance.

There was no curtain. The stage was a replica of a seedy apartment — a flophouse wherein a derelict with a few bucks might dwell — and the floor was covered with hundreds of pieces of crumpled newspaper. We did not know that Dick Shawn was under all that newspaper and the delay in seating us was to minimize the amount of time he would have to be there.

The show began with a recording of a female chorus singing a little song called "Hail to the Audience." They then played it again. And again. And I think again. At some point, Shawn emerged from under the debris. He'd been on stage all that time and would not leave it until the conclusion of the show.

He then began a stream of consciousness monologue/rant about his life. He was playing a drunk, has-been/never-was entertainer whose life was in ruins because his genius had never been recognized. Everything he did was either over the heads of the audience or under their crotches — too high or too low, never just right. Had that ever been said about Dick Shawn? I'll bet it had. The topics covered ran the field…some about show business; others about life and relationships and how so little in the world made sense to him. It was, probably deliberately, hard to tell if it was Dick Shawn or the character talking…or if either one of them utterly craved or totally rejected our sympathy.

I don't know if this show was ever properly videotaped or otherwise recorded. I hope it was, not only because I'd love to see it again but because there's no way anyone could adequately explain it to anyone who didn't see it. I'm not even sure you could explain it to someone who did see it and I'm not the only one who felt that way. Charles Champlin, the roving critic of the L.A. Times wrote…

What Shawn did was not easy to describe. It was a seemingly free-associative skein of bits, thoughts and actions. It was a comedy about comedy, a performance about performance and the performer's peculiar relationship with his audiences. And it was, finally, a kind of acted-out speculation on the reality of the absurd and the absurdity of much of what we think of as reality.

See? He couldn't tell you, either.

Act One ended with Shawn (or maybe his alter-ego) collapsing on the floor…and during intermission, that's where he remained. He was just lying there while the crew cleared the stage around him of all that crumpled newspaper. I think the premise was that the character was stricken with a heart attack or something of the sort, and that Act Two was all a fantasy that raced through his mind in its final minutes. What I know for sure is that in the second half, we saw the character's fully-realized nightclub-type act and I also know that the transition to it was one of the most stunning, I-can't-believe-he-just-did-that moments I ever witnessed in a theater.

Okay now, picture this. The stage still looked like a crappy apartment. Dick Shawn was lying on the floor in shabby clothes. The whole visual screamed failure, failure, failure. Then suddenly there was recorded music (all the music in the show, and there was a lot of it, was on tape) and there was a timpani drum roll as the Big Star was introduced…

…and then the stage went black…

…and then, after what seemed like only three or so seconds, the lights came back in full-force and everything was different. Dick Shawn was on his feet wearing a glittery tux, singing into a microphone and looking for all the world like a stellar Vegas headliner. The filthy apartment was gone and all around were curtains and sequins and sparkles, and behind him was a full orchestra — of mannequins, similarly attired.

All of us in the audience had a brief moment of whiplash. It even surprised me the second time I saw it when I knew what was coming. A friend of mine described it as the best example he'd ever seen of live theater achieving an impact you could never in a million years replicate on movies or television. In film, professorial folks sometimes speak of something called a "smash cut," in which you leap from one locale or action to another in a manner that is so jarring that you are conscious of the editing, utterly aware they just went from something shot in one place at one time to something shot somewhere else at another time. Dick Shawn did a "smash cut" live before our eyes.

He then performed the entertainer's act — Mr. Fabulously Fantastic Jr., singing and dancing and juggling oranges and expanding on topics covered in the first act. It probably lasted thirty to forty minutes and you simply could not take your eyes off that incredible person up there with so much energy and so much unpredictability. There was never a moment when you knew what he was going to do next. He must have in some way because of the intricate light and music cues but he never let you think you knew where he was heading. I gather the stage crew was aware he would hit certain marks and give certain cues but only he knew, and I'll bet it changed from night to night, how he was going to get to them and in what order.

At the end of Mr. Fantastic Jr.'s performance, there was some sort of audio explosion and he collapsed again. You blinked and he was somehow back in the bad apartment with crumpled newspaper raining down on him from above. There were also bananas on wires dangling over the audience. (Bananas were a recurring theme throughout the show as some sort of link between apes and comedians.) I do not recall how he closed after that but I remember endless standing ovations, and Shawn coming fully out of character to give a long post-show speech, mainly introducing friends of his in the audience. The second time I went, my friend Bridget and I were seated next to Merv Griffin and Eva Gabor. Introducing Merv turned into a hilarious ten-minute conversation between the two men, utterly unplanned and as funny, at least on Shawn's end, as the play that had preceded it.

That second time was in 1985 in the same building, which was now the Canon Theater — named not after anyone's father but after the street on which it was located. Shawn's first stay had been a short-run tryout. A full seven years later, he brought it back for what turned out to be a long, smash run. I'll bet a lot of those who rushed to buy tickets were, like me, folks who'd seen it the first time and were eager to see it again and to treat a friend to the same experience. Bridget raved about it for years after and thanked me not only for taking her but for not telling her anything in advance about what we were going to see.

It was two years later that Shawn passed away during a performance of Second Greatest Entertainer in San Diego. I have read or heard several different accounts but they all say that he collapsed on stage, apparently at the end of Act One where the script called for him to collapse…and then he just plain never got up.

After the intermission, he continued to lie there and the audience, which had returned to its seats, eventually began to giggle. After a longer while, the stage crew began to realize the pause was running much, much longer than it ever had. Defying Shawn's instructions to never interfere no matter what occurred on stage, someone went out to check on the star (some reports say it was his son) and the audience thought it was part of the script. When he asked for a doctor, they thought that was part of the show, too. And when an ambulance was called and the audience was asked to leave, some of the playgoers still thought that was all part of the show, as well. Forty-five minutes later in a nearby hospital, Dick Shawn was pronounced dead from a heart attack at the age of 63. Maybe then they all believed it was true.

Boy, I wish you could have seen this show…and never mind you. I wish I could see it again. More than a quarter-century later, I still think about it.

Michael Barrier has just posted a must-read for anyone interested in the history of animation. For most of his career, Roger Armstrong was a comic book and strip artist — and a darn good one — but he made one brief detour into working in animation. Many moons ago, he tape recorded his recollections of working at the Walter Lantz studio in the mid-forties and Barrier has transcribed and annotated these recollections.

Roger was a sharp guy so apart from some confusion about dates, I think what he remembered is probably the way it was.

Charlie Bassett just wrote me and asked…

While watching It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World on PBS, I noticed that they cropped Joe DeRita out of the shot of the Three Stooges. Do you know why?

Well, I can think of three possible reasons…

1. Bad panning-and scanning to convert super-widescreen movie to TV format
2. Republican-backed cutbacks on funding forced elimination of one Stooge
3. Folks in public television are notorious fans of Shemp

Take your pick. Me, I'm leaning towards the last of these.

The programming schedule is now online for this year's WonderCon, which takes place in San Francisco from April 1 to April 3. You can wade through the entire thing and pick out the exciting events you wish to attend…or you can make it easy on yourself and just consult the list of panels that I'm hosting. Either way, you'll have a great time at the convention. I know I always do.

Ed O'Toole sent me this and I thought it ought to be posted here…

Mark, I can remember that somehow, even though I was only nine years old, I discovered that there would be no Shari Lewis Show anymore. I refused to believe this and resolutely turned on the TV at the regular time, convinced that Shari would appear. She didn't, and life went on, but I was changed, and life was very different.

Every Saturday since I could remember, she had charmed, enchanted, engaged, and delighted me. Looking back, I must have had a crush on her a mile wide…and who wouldn't? Shari Lewis was one of a small company of performers who respected and valued kids and knew what made them tick. (The wonderful Chuck McCann was another.) She's one of the few entertainers I wish I could have had a moment with to tell her, however feebly, how much richer she made my young life. Seeing that bit of video only makes me miss her more.

She was a very nice lady and when I worked with her, nothing about her disappointed me. The same is true of Chuck McCann, by the way. And in his own way, he's kinda cute.

Quite a few people have written in with theories about the live/tape/kinescope question regarding The Shari Lewis Show. A number reminded me that by the time the show debuted, NBC did have videotape capability. Shari's program replaced Howdy Doody and the last episode of that series exists on tape — a tape that was saved because of its historic nature.

The Shari Lewis Show may have been done live but probably wasn't. They probably did the show whenever it was convenient — though with very little editing — and taped it. The thing was that videotape was expensive back then and once a show didn't seem to have immediate rerun value, the tapes were erased and used for something else. So once Shari's series was cancelled, someone at NBC made the decision that they wouldn't need those episodes again and the tapes were wiped. They may have then transferred the material to kinescopes just in case they needed it…or they may have been making kinescopes all along to service markets that weren't equipped to run videotape — overseas, especially. Only a handful of Tonight Show episodes exist from the fifties and sixties and around half of them are kinescopes that were made so the programs could be shown to U.S. troops stationed in other lands.

Johnny Carson, of course, used to complain often that so much of his work had been erased to save a few dimes on tape, and others who worked in TV then have had similar complaints. One night on his show, Carson got visibly angry on the topic, speaking of the "idiots" in the business affairs department. The next afternoon, I had lunch with one of the heads of that division and someone (not I) brought up Johnny's remarks. The Biz Affairs guy readily admitted that his predecessors had been foolish, both in terms of heritage and profit. But then he added another view of the situation by quoting a speech that he wanted to make to Mr. Carson but didn't dare. He said, approximately…

You're right, Johnny. People here were stupid to throw your old shows out. Why didn't you ever ask for them? Every time we make a new deal with you, you hold us up for more money and you demand more promotion for the show and a higher budget and more parking spaces for your staff and fresh basil in the NBC commissary and every other thing you can think of. Why, in all those negotiations over the years, did you never say, "I want custody of the old tapes" or even "I want you to make sure you're preserving all my old shows"? Yeah, the guys here were short-sighted and it was mainly their responsibility…but how come you let them erase all those tapes and you never stopped them?

An interesting point and I wonder what Johnny would have said. I mean, after he had the guy who said that to him fired.