Well, the Original Pantry restaurant has closed and no one seems to know if or when it will open or if anyone wants to buy the place. I would guess that if someone did and could make it more like it was in the seventies, it would be back to having lines out the door like it did back then. Then again, the emphasis then was on big, thick hunks of broiled beef and maybe that ain't as commercial as it used to be.
We don't have the ratings yet for last night's Oscar Telecast and I can't think of any way in which they might matter much. I watched a smidgen more of it and I thought the opening infomercial for Wicked was pretty good. I also caught a particular cringe moment: They brought out representatives of the various agencies that fought the big L.A. fires for a well-deserved ovation, then turned it into a bit by having a couple of them read not-very-good jokes about the disaster. Remind me not to watch even that much next year.
John Oliver devoted most of his show to problems involving Tipping. I'm sure most everything he said about it was valid but a big change I would make is to let folks who are expected to tip have a better understanding of where the money goes. Does that great person who served you expertly keep all of what you leave? Do they share it with other service workers on the premises? Do they share it with Management? I sometimes feel I have overtipped or undertipped because I didn't know what became of a gratuity I paid…or maybe should have paid in cash.
Lastly for now: I'm prepping for WonderCon later this month. I'll be hosting six panels and appearing on one other. One that may interest some folks will involve Mark Waid and myself answering questions about the world of comic books, the premise being that if neither of us knows the answer, it's likely that no one does. Another will involve me (who wrote the most-read book about Jack Kirby) sitting down with my pal Danny Fingeroth (who wrote the most-read book about Stan Lee) and trying to clear up some of the misconceptions about both men. And there'll be a Cartoon Voices panel and some others. Full details to follow. Tickets for WonderCon are still available.
Lists are already popping up on the 'net of folks who were "snubbed" by being omitted from the "In Memoriam" reel at tonight's Oscars…and of course, those who are upset are only upset about performers not being remembered in the broadcast. I decline to get involved in such squabbles.
I will though call your attention to this page on the Academy website where they've listed — by my quick count — 232 people who died in whatever they define as the year they're covering. I think they post this to slightly appease those who can be slightly appeased by certain omissions but also to make this point: If they put all these people on-screen for just ten seconds each, that's like a 38-39 minute segment. So someone who's gone has got to go.
I always like to look at this page because I invariably see some folks I knew but didn't know had passed. And I see friends like Mike Schlesinger and Susan Buckner who would have been pleased to know they at least made this page. Mike will be remembered a lot on April 6 when we hold what's looking to be a wonderful Celebration of His Life.
I usually don't quote a lot from other people on this blog but I decided to make an exception. My pal Vince Waldron, author of the highly-recommended-by-me The Official Dick Van Dyke Show Book, wrote and posted this piece on Facebook. It's about a great…well, I was going to call the man "a great unsung comedy writer" but he has been sung…just not enough. It's all about Aaron Ruben, a gent I was pleased to know casually and to admire from afar.
Here is what Vince wrote about Aaron and I'll follow it up tomorrow here with my own Aaron Ruben story…
Today, we pay tribute to Aaron Ruben, the late writer, producer and all-around good guy who was born on this date, March 1, in 1914. Although Aaron would earn the undying gratitude of classic TV fans the world over for his stint as head writer, story editor and producer of the first five seasons of The Andy Griffith Show, fans of this page may be surprised to learn that the producer also played a significant role in boosting the career of a young Dick Van Dyke.
That's Aaron pictured with Dick in the photo below, which was taken in late 1957, at the filming of the Phil Silvers sitcom Sgt. Bilko, a series that Aaron often directed (although he didn't direct either of the two episodes of Bilko in which Dick guest starred.) Aaron obviously saw a great deal of promise in the lanky young actor.
Dick Van Dyke and Aaron Ruben
In 1958, Aaron Ruben served as sketch comedy director of The Girls Against the Boys, the Broadway revue that first brought Dick to the attention of New York's theatre world. Of even more significance to fans of The Dick Van Dyke Show, that revue also put the talented young performer on the radar of Aaron Ruben's good friend, Sheldon Leonard, who would remember the comic mastery that Dick displayed in that show three years later, when Sheldon was looking for an actor to play a writer named Robert Petrie in a new sitcom he was developing with Carl Reiner.
But in 1957 — four years before Dick made his television breakthrough with Carl Reiner and Sheldon Leonard on The Dick Van Dyke Show in 1961 — Aaron wrote and produced a variety show pilot for Dick that was to be called — wait for it! — The Dick Van Dyke Show. Although that first attempt at a Dick Van Dyke Show never made it to prime time, Aaron Ruben's faith in Dick's gifts was not easily shaken.
A couple of years later, he wrote The Trouble With Richard, a sitcom pilot for Dick in which the actor played a luckless bank teller. Like Dick's earlier pilot, The Trouble With Richard failed to find a buyer, and it wound up airing just once, as a standalone entry on The Comedy Spot, a summer anthology series that basically served as a dumping ground for unsold TV sitcom pilots.
Of course, the failure of Dick's second attempt at TV stardom turned out to be a lucky break, since it left his calendar open when Sheldon Leonard finally came calling a few months later to offer Dick the starring role in a new series that would also be titled The Dick Van Dyke Show. This second Dick Van Dyke Show did get picked up, and actually worked out quite well for the actor.
Don Knotts, Aaron Ruben, Andy Griffith
Aaron Ruben didn't fare too badly, either. Not long after The Trouble with Richard fizzled, Sheldon Leonard once more came to the rescue when he tapped Aaron to serve as head writer and producer of a new series Sheldon was assembling to showcase a stage, film and recording star named Andy Griffith. And so, as fate would have it, Dick Van Dyke and Aaron Ruben spent the next five years working on neighboring stages on the Desilu Cahuenga lot, where Dick filmed The Dick Van Dyke Show a few hundred feet from the soundstage where Aaron was bringing Mayberry to life each week on The Andy Griffith Show.
At the end of a brilliant five-year run writing and producing The Andy Griffith Show, Aaron proved that his sense of timing was as sharp as ever when he left that series at about the same time Don Knotts moved on. Aaron spent the next few years producing Gomer Pyle, USMC, an Andy Griffith Show spin-off that he masterminded as a vehicle for Jim Nabors, a popular supporting player on Andy's show.
Aaron Ruben would be reunited with Dick Van Dyke for one final venture in 1969, when the writer teamed with Carl Reiner to craft the script for an ambitious feature film about an aging silent movie comedian that Carl would direct. Although The Comic failed to catch fire at the box office, the film is warmly remembered by all involved, not least because it afforded Dick Van Dyke one of his strongest big screen roles.
After The Comic, Aaron returned to television, where he distinguished himself as the producer of the first two and half seasons of "Sanford and Son, followed by a stint as writer and producer of the Don Rickles service comedy, CPO Sharkey. He would later serve as a creative consultant on Matlock, which reunited the scribe with Andy Griffith, who played the show's title character.
By the early ‘90s, Aaron began to taper off his television commitments and ease away from a career that spanned more than five decades. But he was by no means ready to retire. In fact, Aaron would undoubtedly have agreed that he did some of his most important work after he stopped collecting weekly paychecks for writing TV shows.
In his final decades, the enormously successful Beverly Hills comedy writer and TV producer devoted much of his time toiling in the farthest reaches of Los Angeles' family services system, where his long history of volunteer work with troubled kids eventually earned him a position as a court-appointed special advocate for abused and abandoned children in Los Angeles County's Juvenile Court.
But despite the seriousness of his work on behalf of the city's least powerful citizens, Aaron maintained a healthy comic perspective on his efforts. "I have this fantasy," he told Daily Variety in 2003, "that once a year, St. Peter appears before God and they go over the list of people that they're ready to take and my name comes up. God says, 'Is he still doing that work with the kids? Ah, let him stick around a little longer.'"
Aaron Ruben passed away on January 30, 2010, just a few weeks shy of his 96th birthday. The television legend is fondly remembered by fans the world over, who treasure the writer for giving voice to the sheriff of a small town where nothing bad ever seemed to happen. But Aaron will be equally remembered by the countless young people who were able to navigate places far more challenging than Mayberry, thanks to the efforts of a gifted writer who volunteered to speak a few well-chosen words on their behalf.
Thanks to Vince Waldron for permission to quote the above here. And like I said, I'll share with you tomorrow, the story of my own encounters with the quiet-but-very-impressive Aaron Ruben.
Steve Benen further debunks the claims of our vice-president that Volodymyr Zelensky was not expressing thanks for all the U.S. has done for his country. I have a hunch that on tomorrow night's Daily Show, Jon Stewart will show a montage of Zelensky expressing gratitude…that is if John Oliver doesn't do it tonight.
By the way: If you didn't see the cold opening on Saturday Night Live last night, it addressed this matter and they did a good job. Here's a link to it…with Mike Myers playing Elon.
As has been my custom for many a year now, I won't be watching The Oscars tomorrow night…and neither will the sizeable audiences that used to tune in for such events. Many reasons have been bandied about for America's mounting disinterest in award shows but I think it comes down to two…
REASON #1: Today, there are so damn many movies released and so many TV shows, that very few people have seen a majority of the nominees and therefore don't particularly care who wins.
REASON #2: We're kinda sick and getting sicker of all these world-famous rich people taking turns praising each other and acting like being in Show Business is the pinnacle of human existence. Too much of it sounds to me like the old Sammy Maudlin Show on SCTV where "stars" sat around trying to outdo one another in describing each others' greatness.
I don't think the host matters much…though they're always blamed if the ceremony underperforms in the ratings. I think seeing what the women are wearing matters a little bit to some viewers. I think it matters to some that it's a live event and there's the chance of something unpredictable happening. And there are always a few great acceptance speeches or presenter remarks…but you can catch them all on YouTube before the telecast runs its closing credits. (If I did a REASON #3, it would probably be that the show's just too blamed long.)
I have no predictions on who or what'll win, by the way. I saw two-and-a-half movies in the past year: Saturday Night, Wicked and half of Anora, all viewed not in a proper theater but on my home TCL screen. Saturday Night, I liked with reservations but I don't think it was Oscar-worthy and apparently neither did the nominators.
Wicked, I liked but because of its serialized format, it didn't feel like a complete movie to me. I also believe I made a mistake even watching it on a 40" screen. A film like that needs something way bigger and I'm thinking that when Part Two comes out — assuming Part One is available again in theaters then — I'll go see both in the proper sequence, maybe over two nights. And while I know a lot of people loved Anora, a lady friend and I gave it up halfway through and I've felt no compulsion to see the rest…so I really didn't see it. Maybe it's wonderful in toto.
So I'll just make this two-part prediction: That the Academy has hustled to make sure Gene Hackman is in or around the "In Memoriam" segment…and that Monday morning, there will be voluminous web posts from folks outraged at certain performers not being included and therefore being "snubbed." (Those who get outraged about such things only complain about omitting performers; never directors or writers or cinematographers or studio execs, etc.)
As you know, Conan O'Brien is hosting. I used to say that it felt wrong to me if the host was not (a) a big movie star or (b) Johnny Carson but a friend convinced me that nowadays, no big movie star would agree to host, lest a bad performance tar the career they really care about. I also hear that Johnny's hard to book lately, what with him being dead and all. Conan is a host I really liked during the first decade or so of his Late Night program but I expect he'll do fine, especially if he doesn't try to turn it into The Conan O'Brien Show. Like I said, the host doesn't matter much. Then again, neither do The Oscars.
I see that Donald What's-his-name told reporters that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is too "negative" about Vladimir Putin. There might be something to that from a negotiating standpoint but I dunno…I think I'd have a hard time thinking good thoughts about someone who launched an invasion of my country leading to a million estimated casualties, wholesale destruction and a possible loss of all freedoms.
Glenn Kessler explains how Trump is simply wrong about who's giving financial assistance to Ukraine and how they might be paid back, at least in part.
Meanwhile, some of Trump's aides are complaining that Zelensky doesn't say "thank you" enough. Daniel Dale lists 33 times that the gentleman from Ukraine has thanked the U.S. and its leaders. That's more than I thanked the first woman who slept with me….but not many more.
Today would have been Gilbert Gottfried's 70th birthday so the folks at Cracked rounded up a whole mess o' folks to tell seventy Gilbert Gottfried stories.
I only knew the guy a little. Met him once. Did his podcast once. But I thought he was very funny in a way that no other comedian was ever funny. You just looked at him and started laughing even before he said anything because you knew that what he would say was going to be (a) funny and (b) outrageous. There are a lot of guys who can do one but not both and, of course, there's nothing sadder than a comedian being outrageous without being funny. That was never a problem with Gilbert. He always delivered on both counts.
Like (I'm sure) most of you, I'm aghast or appalled or asomething about what happened today between that guy who occupies the White House, his next-in-the-line-of-succession and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The whole thing with Ukraine has been a bad, bad situation from Day One and today, it got even worse.
Kevin Drum thinks today's brouhaha was engineered by Trump in a desire for revenge against Zelensky for not digging up dirt on Joe Biden when then-President-for-the-first-time Donald demanded that as a quid pro quo for U.S. aid to Ukraine. Everyone else who's shocked — and both views could be right about this — think it's all about Trump trying to deliver Zelensky's country to Big Daddy Putin.
I dunno what to think except that it's bad, real bad. Fred Kaplan may have the best take on it. Don't write me about this, folks. I don't want to think too much about it.
The new head of the Department of Health and Human Services seems to know about as much about health and human services as I do about…well, you have a lot of things to pick from there. But he seems especially clueless about measles — which is a real disease with a real history of being controlled by real vaccinations. One of the things that frightens me about the current government-slashing that's going on is this concept that you really don't have to know about an important matter in order to oversee it and to decide how to downsize that division.
It's horrible what they're doing to the National Weather Service which is one of the most efficient things that our government does for us. This is one of those "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" things…but various Republicans keep looking at it and saying, "Wow, think how much money someone could make off this if we privatize it!"
I've received a few questions about the Celebration of Life for Mike Schlesinger on April 6 — the one I announced here. Here are the answers and you can figure out the questions from them. It's kind of like Jeopardy!
No, we will not be able to stream it live but we're talking to various folks about bringing in video equipment and recording the Celebration and putting it online. This would include the speeches and the clips we show but — obviously — not the feature film.
I will be the emcee. The other folks organizing the Celebration are Saratoga Ballantine, Jerry Beck, Joe Dante, Catherine Dickerson, Howard Green and Steve Stoliar.
We have loads of people who wish to speak but — as I've learned you have to do with events like this — we're selecting a small number and giving them limited amounts of time. (I was the host for a June Foray Memorial in 2017. If we'd let everyone who wanted to speak have a turn at the microphone, we'd still be there.)
The version of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World we're showing is the general release version with the intermission. It is not the version with the footage that was cut a few weeks after the movie's initial release in 1963. I'm pretty sure there is no 70mm print in existence that includes those scenes.
You don't have to have been a close friend of Mike's to attend. You will not be interrogated at the door about your relationship. But if you respected his accomplishments (which were many) and wish to pay some of those respects forward, you are welcome.
We're receiving a steady stream of reservations but I can't tell you how long you might have to decide if you're coming. There's a good chance we'll "sell out." The event takes place in 38 days but don't take all that time to decide.
If you wanna be there, here's the e-mail address. Tell us how many seats you want and if you're staying for the movie. You will receive an e-mail in a few days confirming things and telling you a bit more about the event.
And just in case my remark about about a possible "sell out" confuses you, there is no charge to attend. Thank you.
