This time up, it's an amazing short film by Adam Berg…a commercial for Philips Carousel, which is a new, wider-than-widescreen TV set. In this film about a police shootout, nothing moves except the camera. I have no idea how they did it, either.
Watch it below and/or go to this site to view it in a fancier version.
From Sesame Street: It's Nathan Lane and the Oinker Sisters with one of our faves…
Five minutes of Monty Python. Nobody funnier.
Before he was on late night, Dick Cavett had a morning show on ABC. It went on the air on March 4, 1968 under the title, This Morning. Later, they changed the name to The Dick Cavett Show but it didn't make a lot of difference. Nobody watched under either name and it left the air as of January 24, 1969. It was a great program in absolutely the wrong time slot. (In 1980, NBC made the exact same mistake with a kid they'd found named David Letterman.)
Cavett went from the AM show to a brief summer replacement series in prime time…and then on to a late night slot that he inhabited for three years of steady telecasts and two more in a rotating format with other shows. Before he left the morning slot, he did a prime-time special replaying some of his most interesting segments. Our video embed today consists of excerpts from that special — about twenty-five minutes of it with a few abrupt edits. In it, you'll see Groucho Marx, Jack Burns, Bob Hope, Woody Allen, Pat McCormick and a few other folks. I wish someone would just rerun these shows intact.
What is it with Craig Ferguson? Every time I watch his show, I enjoy it. I think he's funny and clever and a lot less "phony" than most people who sit behind desks on that kind of program. But I rarely think, "Hey, I oughta watch Craig Ferguson." For a while, I was TiVoing him every night and I never got around to watching them. I must have deleted fifty unviewed episodes before I took him off my Season Pass list. He reminds me of certain restaurants. Every time I go there, I have a great meal but I almost never think to go there.
Here's how Mr. Ferguson opened his show a few night ago…
My pal Aaron Barnhart found this online so I thought I'd embed it, as well. It's the entirety of Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project, the Emmy-winning documentary by John Landis. I raved about it here and now you can watch it here — all ninety-some-odd minutes of it…with "limited commercial interruption." I'm so thrilled, I might drop my pants and fire a rocket.
Just got a DVD that I'm enjoying a lot. Back in the late sixties and early-to-mid seventies, my father was a big fan of a man named Lou Gordon — a Detroit-based newspaper columnist who hosted a weekly syndicated hour of political talk. The show was not widely seen — in Los Angeles, it ran in a late slot on a remote UHF channel — but it often made news and was extremely interesting.
Gordon was an unabashed Liberal but he was reasonable and respected by folks of other stripes. Everyone, sooner or later, turned up in his guest chair — from George Wallace to Jimmy Carter (and his brother Billy) to Ralph Nader and Bob Hope. Hope, in fact, appeared several times to explain his political worldview and to engage, as all guests did, in debate with Lou. My father thought Lou Gordon was the smartest man on television and even though I was rather Conservative back then — yes, I know; hard to believe — I always found Gordon interesting and hard to deny. There were a number of reasons why my politics migrated from their right-wing vantage point, and watching The Lou Gordon Program was a biggie.
He was a smart interviewer of a kind we don't see these days. Actually, I don't think today's interviewers have much opportunity to be all that smart. Interviews are short and the good interviewees rarely go on with anyone who's likely to challenge them. Gordon held long, penetrating chats and he challenged everyone, even guests who seemed to be on his side. Often, they said things they probably regretted. It was on Lou Gordon's show that George Romney, who was at the time a strong candidate for the 1968 Republican presidential nomination, announced that he had changed his mind about supporting U.S. involvement in Vietnam, and that his previous stance was the result of "…the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get." The remark, widely reported, ended Romney's presidential chances. An excerpt from that show is included in the video link below.
The Lou Gordon Program was on from 1965 until the host's passing in 1977. When he died, Tom Snyder hosted a 90-minute retrospective filled with clips. Gordon's family has recently made a copy of that broadcast available on DVD (ordering info on this page) and that's the DVD I've been enjoying today. It's a great portrait of the arguments that framed the eras of Vietnam and Watergate and I'm glad I have it. Here's five minutes from it…
We all have favorite Monty Python lines. My single favorite, I think, is in this scene from The Life of Brian…and oddly enough, it's one of the few memorable Python lines not uttered by John Cleese, Terry Jones, Eric Idle, Michael Palin, Graham Chapman or even Terry Gilliam, for God's sake. It's spoken by an actor named Terence Bayler, who played multiple supporting roles in the film.
What's more, the line wasn't even written by Cleese, Jones, Idle, Palin, Chapman or Gilliam. It was the inspired idea of Mr. Bayler, himself. My pal Kim "Howard" Johnson is the world's foremost authority on All Things Python and he was there when it was filmed. I asked him in an e-mail last night if I had the story straight and he sent this…
As I remember, everyone was in place and we'd started rehearsing the scene, Terry J coaching the crowd to speak in unison. I wasn't quite close enough to John and Terry B to be certain of precisely what happened (and it's been a few years now!) — but it seems to me that Terry B made the comment, just talking loudly enough for John to hear. John liked it and mentioned it to Terry J and the others, and it was in. Simple as that.
Everyone who works on a film as an extra or bit player has a fantasy about coming up with something like this…something that gives you a speaking part or a more prominent speaking part. Here it is actually happening…Terence Bayler inventing and getting to deliver what is to me the funniest line in one of the funniest movies ever made.
This is a 44 second excerpt that ends with Mr. Bayler's brilliant line. That line, by the way, is "I'm not."
If you don't think music can change the mood of a TV show or movie, take a look at this. It's the opening titles of the series Diff'rent Strokes with a diff'rent score…
The pilot for the TV series Get Smart was directed by my old friend, the late Howard Morris. Howie was best known as an on-camera actor — for his work with Sid Caesar and for playing Ernest T. Bass on The Andy Griffith Show, among other roles — and he also did lots and lots of cartoon voices. But he also directed TV shows, movies and tons of commercials, and he helmed the Get Smart pilot.
One of his many contributions was to suggest Ed Platt for the role of The Chief. Not long before, Howie had directed an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show. Actually, he directed several (and appeared in one) but the one we need to mention here is the one where Rob accidentally used a deck of marked cards in a friendly game of poker. Mr. Platt was in that episode and when the time came to cast The Chief, Howie remembered how good the actor had been in it.
A week or two before the Get Smart pilot was to be filmed, the producers decided to shoot one scene. Once in a while, the programming needs of a network time out such that they really don't want to wait for an entire pilot to be filmed and edited before they commit to a new series…so they buy from a "demo" of one or two scenes. The agents handling Get Smart thought there was a chance NBC would do that this time so a scene was hurriedly filmed, edited and shipped off to New York. It was so well received that the network tenatively bought the project based on this. The rest of the pilot was filmed a few weeks later.
Here's some (not all) of the scene in question. The voice you'll hear on the intercom is that of Mr. Howard Morris. Gee, I miss that little guy.
Let's flashback to the ABC prime time schedule from 1978…a year when that network was doing pretty good. This promo, narrated by the late Ernie Anderson, runs nine and a half minutes. If you're not going to watch the whole thing, zip ahead to the last minute or so when they gathered together as many ABC stars as were willing to show up to mouth the words to the network's promotional theme for that year. Ricardo Montalban and a few of the others don't look all that happy about it…
We have a two-fer for you, today. You've probably seen one or both of these by now but just in case you haven't…
This looks a little like Grand Central Station in New York but it's actually Antwerpen's Centraal Station in Belgium. The whole thing was staged for a reality show over there, which probably means it's not particularly real in any way. (Judging from the number of camera angles, it was done several times and they were edited together.) But it sure is fun…
Then this is from Britain's Got Talent, which is the British version of…well, you know what it's the British version of. I've never really gotten into the American edition because it seems so fake and so manipulative and because it doesn't have a lot to do with real talent.
That said, even I had to smile at this moment from a recent show involving a lady named Susan Boyle. So will you…
Here's Woody Allen on The Jack Paar Show. I don't think this is from The Tonight Show. I think it's from the show Paar hosted after he left the late night slot. He had a prime-time show on NBC for a while which was basically the same program but shorter, earlier and once a week.
Merv Griffin used to tell people that Allen owed his career to him. The way Merv told it, Paar had Woody on once or twice, didn't like him and told the producers not to book him again. Then one night, Merv guest-hosted for Paar and the producers told him he could have any guests he wanted as long as they weren't folks that Paar considered "his" regulars. One of the people Griffin asked for was Woody Allen…who came on and did so well that his spot drew raves from a couple of TV critics. Those reviews, in turn, prompted Paar to give the comedian another chance and he caught on big after that. Griffin was annoyed that thereafter, Paar took a great deal of credit for Woody Allen's success and no mention was made of the role Merv had played.
I don't know if that's true or not. I think Woody does credit Paar…but he also appeared often with Merv and seemed to have a loyalty to him, as well. Anyway, here's this appearance with Paar, which is said to be from 1964…
Irving Berlin was one of America's great composers but from all reports, he wasn't much of a piano player or a singer. Everyone sounded great performing an Irving Berlin song except Irving Berlin.
In 1933, he was working on a revue called As Thousands Cheer. Moss Hart was the director and they'd been having trouble finding the right tune for the Act One finale. Berlin had written several that hadn't worked…but one day, he ran into a rehearsal with great enthusiasm. "I've got it," he yelled. "I came up with a new song and it's perfect." And with that, he sat down at a piano and began to play and sing his latest composition.
It sounded terrible. Hart didn't know what to do since Berlin was so excited. Finally, after the terrible tune was over and he'd had a chance to think about it, Hart said, "Irving…do me a favor and play 'Blue Skies!'"
Irving was puzzled. "Blue Skies" was (then) his biggest hit but what did it have to do with this song in this show? "Just humor me," Hart said. Play 'Blue Skies!'"
So he played "Blue Skies" and it sounded terrible, too.
When he was done, Hart said, "Irving…the new song is terrific!"
That it was. Audiences loved it and a few years later, MGM used it as the title song in a movie with Judy Garland and Fred Astaire. Here's that movie, very appropriate for today…
Two brief excerpts from The David Frost Show, which ran on American TV around 1970, give or take a few years. Two old Jew comics with cigars tell funny stories.