First off: Thank you all for the lovely birthday wishes that were sent my way yesterday on social media and even some antisocial media. I do not feel 71 years old except sometimes around the knees. And I certainly do not fit the image I had of being 71 back when I was much younger. I would thank you all individually but that would take me until I'm 72 and then I'd have to start sending out thank you notes about that birthday and that would take until I was 73…
Second off: I have a very busy day ahead so this may be the extent of the posting here day. For those of you who don't know, that's what it means when I post a picture of a can of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup. This is a well-known ancient custom that began in the year 1412 A.D. in The Ming Dynasty except that they used sesame cakes instead of mushroom soup and they posted on Gingko Trees instead of on the Internet. Otherwise, it's exactly the same tradition.
I've been talking a lot about Phil Silvers here and a reader of this site named Robert Atendido suggested that I link you to a piece I wrote about him here. I'm going to save your mouse a click and quote it below.
Before I do, I think I should explain a little about what's the big deal with Phil Silvers? Simple: I thought he was of the greatest comic actors who ever lived. I also have a personal "thing" about him. Two life-changing moments for me were when I first saw the movie, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World in 1963 and when I saw a live production of the musical, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum in 1970.
Phil Silvers was the star of the second one and he was in and stole much of the first one.
And I think the show in which he played Sgt. Ernest T. Bilko was one of the five-or-so best comedy shows ever on TV. It was a show that had (usually) great writing and a superb supporting cast, but it was about about Phil Silvers in a way that no other TV series ever was about its lead performer. Here's an excerpt from the time I spent with him…
One of the more thrilling afternoons of my life came about when I had a brunch-interview with the great Phil Silvers. It took place at Nate 'n Al's delicatessen in Beverly Hills in 1982, a little less than three years before he passed away.
Expecting it to last an hour, I only brought along about 90 minutes of tape, but Mr. Silvers was in a talkative mood. This was in spite of the lingering effects of a stroke that had thickened his speech and created odd holes in his memory. He could recall the name of the landlady at a hotel he'd lived in for two weeks while touring in burlesque, but not his current phone number. He could (and did) rattle off whole pages of dialogue from plays he'd done on Broadway decades earlier but had no memory whatsoever of The Chicken Chronicles, a movie he'd made five years before our chat.
My recorder ran out of tape long before Silvers ran out of anecdotes. Fortunately, I captured this remembrance about the "Make Way for Tomorrow" dance sequence in the 1944 film classic, Cover Girl. (I did not have to edit any questions from me out of what follows. Charmingly, Silvers did not require questions. He jumped from one topic to the next without prompting. And I just sat there and listened.)
Cover Girl was another Blinky role for me. I played the same character in every movie…Blinky. The guy who ran in in the next to last reel and said, "I got the stuff in the car." I never found out in all those movies what the stuff in the car was. Cover Girl was my first good movie. In this one, Blinky was named Genius but I was still Blinky. I was Blinky in every movie I made until I did Bilko. After that, I was Bilko in everything I did, which was fine. Bilko paid a lot better than Blinky.
We made Cover Girl at Columbia. At the time, Harry Cohn was God there. There was a different God at every studio. When you worked for M.G.M., Louis B. Mayer was God. At Columbia, it was Harry Cohn. I got along with him but no one else did. He liked me because I was a gambler. I gave him tips on horses. They always lost but he didn't blame me because to a gambler, a bad tip is better than no tip at all.
A man named Charles Vidor directed Cover Girl but from where I sat, Gene Kelly was the man in charge. He and his assistant Stanley Donen took over the choreography from the man they hired to do it. I don't remember his name but he choreographed the scenes with the chorus girls and then Kelly did everything else. Stanley Donen did some of it but it was mainly Gene. There was this song, "Make Way for Tomorrow." It was supposed to be a six minute dance down the street with Rita Hayworth and Gene dancing and leaping over trash cans and doing cartwheels. I watched them rehearse it for three days and I thought, "Thank God I don't have to do that."
The fourth day, Gene came over to me and said, "I think it would strengthen the story if you were in the number." There was a drunk who had a tiny part in it. I think it was Jack Norton, who was the drunk in any movie that had a drunk in it. I thought Gene meant I'd do a little bit like that in the number so I said, "Yes, sure, I'll do whatever you want." The next thing I know, Gene and Stanley had redesigned the whole number for three people and I was one of those three people.
He did not design it for a non-dancer, which is what I was. It was designed for Gene and Rita, who were the two best dancers in the business. I had to come up to their standard. They danced up and down stairs. I had to dance up and down stairs. They leaped over boxes. I had to leap over boxes. All the time, I'm thinking, "I'm dancing next to Gene Kelly, doing the same steps. Everybody's going to be comparing us. If we're out of step, no one's going to assume Gene's the one who's wrong." Gene was still a newcomer on screen but everyone knew he was the best dancer to come along.
It was rough. They were going to shoot it in pieces but Gene insisted we rehearse it straight through, start to end. I don't remember how long it took to learn. Rita, I think, required four weeks. It must have been longer with me but I did it. Whatever Gene and Rita did, I did, and I did it as well as they did. And Gene was right. It did strengthen the story. It was a surprise for me to be in that number and to dance it like that. When we were done shooting, I ached all over. Every muscle in my body hurt. But I felt like I could do anything.
In later years, every time I had something to do in a film or a TV show that I thought I couldn't do, I thought back to that number. And I said to myself, "If you can do that, you can do anything."
This is me again. Later, after the tape recorder was no longer running, he lamented the physical problems from his stroke and said, "If I could do that number in Cover Girl, I ought to be able to walk across the street on my own, don't you think?"
Robert Atendido also suggested that I show you the dance number under discussion. Mr. Silvers recalled it as a six-minute number but it was actually more like three. If I'd had to dance that, I'd probably think it lasted a couple of hours…but give it a watch. He really did dance it as well as Gene Kelly and Rita Hayworth…
My old pal, the fine cartoonist Fred Hembeck, sent in this question…
The other day, I stumbled across a recording on the internet of "Tip Toe Through The Tulips" by Tiny Tim (aka Herbert Khaury), and it brought back vivid memories of the strange fascination folks, myself included, had with him in the late sixties. I can't say I was actually a fan — I didn't buy his LP, for instance — but there was nothing like him in popular culture at the time, and it was difficult to look away.
My question to you regards his appearances on The Tonight Show — what did Johnny, Ed, Doc, Fred, and other folks behind the scenes really think of him? Were they taking him seriously or were they exploiting him — or did it fall somewhere in between? I know I stayed up late to watch his wedding to Miss Vicky — were you in the audience that night? Or did you meet Mr. Tim another time? Just wondering.
I never met Mr. Khaury or Mr. Tim or whatever you'd call him. I did see him in operation once when I was poaching on the set of Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In and he was there taping some short blackouts. I think I saw enough of him that day to conclude that his "strangeness" (if we can call it that) was not an act. He really was like that except that the falsetto voice that some knew him for was something he put on just for certain musical performances.
For those who don't know: He was an eccentric performer who liked to strum his ukulele and sing very old songs. He played a circuit of night clubs that featured unusual acts and gained a modest fame in some circles. A lot of people thought his career began when he first appeared on Laugh-In but he actually had something of a cult following before then and some sources say his first record album was recorded before his first time on Laugh-In. Laugh-In certainly had a lot to do though with surprisingly high sales of that album, the cover of which looked like this…
The TV shows that booked him weren't particularly interested in his music…just his freakishness. Laugh-In brought him out to perform and they put co-host Dick Martin, who apparently had never seen him before, onstage to laugh at (not with) him during that performance. Johnny Carson had him on for much the same reason and here's his first appearance with Johnny from April 4, 1968. As you can see, the host went through his entire catalog of facial takes to camera playing off how odd his guest was…
On a later appearance, Tiny Tim mentioned that he was engaged to be married and Johnny, apparently spontaneously, invited T.T. to have the ceremony on The Tonight Show. The invite was immediately accepted and on December 17, 1969, the wedding of Tiny Tim to 17-year-old Victoria Budinger got Johnny one of the highest-rated TV broadcasts of all time. Here is that ceremony — and no, Fred, I was not in the audience but I was watching along with most of the country…
What did the people on The Tonight Show think of Tiny Tim? They thought he was great for the ratings, though obviously not for long. Yes, they were exploiting him but from what I heard from one gent who employed him, T.T. was fine with that. He absolutely loved the fame and fortune he was now achieving…and with an act that absolutely no one ever thought was commercial. When asked about it, he said it was fine that people laughed at him because they also paid attention when he talked about the old songs he loved and when he voiced his disappointment with current music which he felt lacked strong melodies.
The sad part of it was that none of it lasted very long. His marriage to "Miss Vicki" (as he called his first wife) was over three years later and she was followed in his life by a "Miss Jan" and a "Miss Sue." He had one child — a daughter with Miss Vicki. He wound up playing smaller and smaller clubs. One reason his career faded was that he had several heart attacks, at least one while performing on stage. That will cause people to not book you.
The gent I mentioned above who hired him was the Entertainment Director at a hotel in Laughlin, Nevada. I do not remember the man's name but he booked "oldies" acts into the casino showroom and I met him — this would have been around 1993 or so — not long after he'd had Tiny Tim there for a multi-week stand. T.T. had cut his onstage performance short one evening, staggered into the wings and collapsed.
If you absolutely have to have a heart attack and can't do it in a hospital, a gambling casino is not a bad place to have it. Most of them have emergency medical equipment on the premises and someone who knows how to use it. T.T. was treated there until the ambulance arrived and took him to a hospital in nearby Bullhead City, Arizona. The E.D. told me, approximately: "We heard he pulled through but that on doctor's orders, he would never perform again. And then four weeks later, his manager or someone was calling to see if we wanted to have him back. I decided I didn't."
Herbert Khaury, better known as Tiny Tim, died in September of 1996. He was onstage at a benefit performing his signature number, "Tiptoe Through the Tulips" when he suffered yet another of his many heart attacks and died later that night.
The Entertainment Director told me that T.T. loved performing, loved signing autographs, loved his celebrity. It's hard to believe that most of that would have happened if he hadn't been willing to let Laugh-In, Carson and others treat him as a human oddity, mocking his appearance, his voice, his manners, his effeminate gestures and laugh and so on. I don't think anyone took him that seriously…not even himself. Thanks, Fred, for prompting me to write this.
A lot of folks who guest on Stephen Colbert's show get persuaded to record an extra segment of some sort. Some of them get put on the Internet. Some of them which involve the host are collected into an episode that's aired when the show wants to take a night off. Here's a nice little one that John Oliver did recently for Internet usage…
I mentioned in a previous item here that a portable battery charger for your cellphone is a good investment. Here's a recommendation. Amazon is currently selling a two-pack of the Miady 0000mAh Dual USB Portable Charger for under twenty bucks. You get two of these for that price and I bought a bunch of them for myself and for friends. I keep one around the house for when the power goes out (which it likes to do around here) and another in my car or travel case.
They're lightweight and they've served me well. You can read the specs, see if they'll work with your phone and even order the two-pack via this Amazon link. They also have a version that holds 50% more power and a two-pack of them costs 50% more.
If you buy a set, I have something else to recommend to you. The Miady chargers come with a USB cable which you use to connect the charger to a power source for charging purposes. But once it's charged, you need a different cable to connect it to the phone or device that needs charging. I suggest using one of these SDBAUX Multi USB Retractable Charger Cables. They look like this…
One end plugs into a USB port. The other end has three different connectors. Again, check the Amazon page and make sure but it's likely that whatever you're going to want to charge — an iPhone or an Android or something else — can be connected with one of those connectors. I've used one of these and a Miady to charge my phone, my iPad, some friends' phones, my wireless headset, my camera and a couple other gizmos.
You can even throw away the cable that comes with the Miady and use this to charge it. It's easier than having separate charging cables for each device. And the cable extends to over three feet in length when you need it to.
A two-pack of SDBAUXs is presently nine bucks. You might also like to add one of these to your little travel kit…
That's a USB wall charger for when you have to plug into an outlet because there's no powered USB port available. There are about eight thousand offerings of these on Amazon and you should be able to find a two-pack of them for under seven bucks. I gave several friends who seemed to need portable charging a little combo of a Miady, a SDBAUX and a wall charger. The combo ran me about $23 a set.
Remember before you buy to check that the SDBAUX is compatible with what you'll need it to be compatible with. Also remember that this setup is for charging, not for data transfers. Also remember that I don't make these things so if they don't work for you, complain to Amazon, not me. And lastly, in the interest of Full Disclosure, I remind you that if you buy through my Amazon links, I get a teensy share of what you spend there. So while you're at it, order something else that's real expensive. I hear the new 2024 Mercedes-Benz E-class sedans are nice.
Have you folks been watching Seth Meyers lately? And especially his "A Closer Look" segments? I think they're some of the sharpest, funniest bits of topical comedy ever done on television. Here's the one on tonight's show which is all about the revelation that the folks at Fox News don't even believe a lot of their own bullshit. I'm not shocked that they don't. I just wouldn't have imagined we'd ever have such clear evidence of it…
People always complain about the "In Memoriam" reels at awards shows…and I'm sure someone will be outraged at someone being left out of this one. This is the presentation from last night's Screen Actors Guild Awards. I think it was pretty good for what it was…which was, of course, one that excludes Producers, Writers, Cinematographers, Directors, Costume Designers, Composers…even Stunt People.
And it really oughta please most of the people who are furious about the videos at the Oscars or the Emmy Awards. Those folks never complain about omitting a Producer, a Writer, a Director, etc. They just care about on-screen personalities.
This can't be the first one of these to be set to a song performed by one of the departed folks, can it? It was a nice touch and so much better than doing it to a live, in-person musical performance by someone irrelevant to the montage. That removes the need to cut away from the names and faces to show that performer…
As a search of this blog would confirm, I used to like Scott Adams' newspaper strip, Dilbert and I remember defending it at some long ago party of the National Cartoonists Society. A member who drew much, much better than Adams — in fact, better than maybe half of the N.C.S. — was lambasting it as garbage.
None of this had anything to do with politics or race or anything controversial. I liked it then because I'd seen some strips that made me laugh. The lambasting gent didn't like it because the cartooning looked (to him) amateurish. Like any grouping of professionals in any field, there is some resentment of someone who comes out of seemingly nowhere, doesn't seem to have learned their craft but then is making oodles of cash, more than arguably more accomplished competitors.
And I defended Dilbert because, like I said, it had made me laugh. A lot of very well-drawn, classically-styled strips never have.
But about 1.8 decades ago, Dilbert somehow slipped off my radar. I more or less gave up newspapers for online sources and the online sources did not show me Dilbert. Outta my sight and outta my mind, it apparently became more right-wing political…or, of perhaps of more relevance to this discussion, its maker did. I've never met Scott Adams and that might be fine. I don't get along with real successful rich guys who are constantly playing the victim card, complaining how everyone conspires against them.
Because of some recent comments of his, newspapers left and right (but mostly left) are dropping Dilbert. He's lost more client papers than most syndicated strips ever have.
I don't see this as a Free Speech issue. Nothing in the First Amendment guarantees a Free Speaker an audience. An occasional annoyance to me is something too often done by comedians and other folks who express viewpoints to the public. It's when they claim that their rights under that amendment are being trampled if someone makes the individual choice not to hire them or the individual choice not to listen to them.
Without directly mentioning Scott Adams, the N.C.S. just issued a statement condemning racism. So has his syndicate though they mentioned him. So have a lot of newspapers that have given him a great platform and vast amounts of money over the years.
You wonder if he's stopped to wonder if maybe he's looking at things all wrong but probably not. He's probably too happy to have a whole new deck of those "I'm being discriminated against" cards to play with.
After reading some Vegas tips I posted, Robert Forman sent me the following…
I've been to Las Vegas a couple of times but never saw a show there. I have seen a couple of shows in Tahoe at Harrah's which I assume is kind of the same thing. This was in the mid-eighties. I saw separately Sammy Davis Jr. and Boz Scaggs. Both shows had ticket prices that were very high for the time. Both shows required a 3 drink minimum like your Golden Goose story, and like that story, the drinks came at the same time.
Both times, I ordered Bloody Marys and both times, I received pink water. They had to serve the drinks at the same time because the "shows" lasted 30-35 minutes. So my question here is is that what a person going to an expensive show in Las Vegas should expect? Was I just unlucky?
Well, if you only got a 30-35 minute show for your money, I'd say yes. Even Dean Martin, who was infamous for doing the shortest shows of any major headliner in Vegas, used to do 40 minutes. By contrast, Red Skelton stopped performing in places that restricted how long he could be on stage and it was not uncommon for him to go over two hours. I suspect the shows you saw were really longer than you recall.
Serving drinks at shows is much rarer now. I can't remember the last show I went to where drinks were included or mandatory. A lot of showrooms in Vegas — and I'm sure elsewhere — don't even have servers. Some have a bar where you can purchase a beverage and carry it to your seat. But if they do build two or three drinks into the admission, they serve them all at once. The most popular headliners insist on no cocktail or food service during a performance.
Quick story. One time back at the old MGM Grand in Vegas — not to be confused with the current MGM Grand in Vegas — some friends and I were seeing Jubilee!, a show that included two drinks. Mine were ginger ales. Seated next to our party were two elderly ladies who seemed upset. They had to order their two drinks apiece and while each wanted one alcoholic beverage, neither of them wanted two. They asked me if the two drinks both had to be the same thing.
I told them that they probably did…but pointed out that one of them could order two alcoholic drinks and the other could get two 7-Ups or ginger ale or something and then they could do a swap. Somehow, this had not occurred to them but they did it and they were very happy with whatever cocktails they chose. In fact, they were so happy that they offered me their ginger ales.
I'll stop with the Bilko shows soon but here's another one. This aired first on October 16, 1956 and it should be noted that that is before they stopped having a live audience in the studio for the filming. It was called "The Face on the Recruiting Poster" and it has a great punchline at the end which that audience loved.
As was not uncommon for this show, there are a lot of actors with speaking parts who later became famous. One of them is a young Tom Poston. At the time, he was hosting a local TV show in New York and he had the lead role in the Broadway play, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, replacing its original star, Orson Bean. This was before Poston joined the company of comedians on Steve Allen's TV show and before Poston became a panelist on the game show, To Tell the Truth along with Orson Bean.
Poston though was not really involved in that great punchline, nor was actor Eric Fleming, who you may spot in a bit part. He later became well known in the TV western, Rawhide.
Phil Silvers told me a story about this episode but it will kill that punchline if I repeat it here. I posted it on this blog back in the Stone Age of the Internet, all the way back in May of 2001. So if you're inclined to watch the episode, watch it and then click this link to go read that story…
I've received a number of e-mails asking me if I think there's going to be a Writers Guild strike this year and if so, what the heck is it about this time? What it's about is pretty much summed up in this article in Variety. Many studios are making a lot of money off content on streaming services and more of it needs to go to the folks who create that content.
This is not just an issue for writers but the way things usually work in this town is that the writers wind up being the first one into battle on matters that affect all the labor organizations. Anyway, that article is a good summary of the issues involved.
How likely is a strike? I'm not as involved with the Writers Guild as I used to be. I just pay my dues and support the leadership, which I believe is currently very good and very smart and very realistic…but even given that, I would tend to think a strike is very likely.
I love the Sgt. Bilko episodes you've been linking to. Every word and gesture from Phil Silvers is funny. He's really a great example of a TV star who carries every scene he's in, not that the writing needs that kind of help. I don't recall laughing out loud at many situation comedies the way I laugh at Bilko and the audience sure seems to love it. Is that a live audience? It sure sounds like one. They did this with a three-camera set-up, right?
I don't know how many cameras they used and given how complex some episodes were, it's possible it varied. "Three-camera" became kind of a generic term in the industry for any show filmed with multiple cameras at the same time. There were shows that used four cameras that were referred to as "three camera" shows the same way that if two people opened a show talking to the audience, à la The Smothers Brothers or Sonny & Cher, it was sometimes still called a "monologue."
You're mostly hearing a live audience on these shows. Even shows that boast as to being "filmed in front of a live studio audience" sometimes have to dub in canned laughter here and there for editing purposes. But the audience for The Phil Silvers Show (aka Sgt. Bilko, aka You'll Never Get Rich) was sometimes not present in the studio when they were laughing. I explained this once before here on the blog so here's some of it again. For the first season and most of the second, they filmed each episode in sequence in front of a live audience. Then…
In the middle of their second season, show #60 of 143 was called "Bilko Goes Around the World." It was inspired by the then-current movie, Around the World in 80 Days and it featured scenes with that film's well-known producer, Mike Todd. In the midst of rehearsal, Mr. Todd suddenly announced that he couldn't stay until the scheduled filming night; that pressing business elsewhere beckoned and he had to go. The producers made the decision to just film the show a few days earlier, sans audience. It was still done multi-camera but with no one in the bleachers…and it turned out fine.
I'm not sure if it was immediately after Show #61 or if it happened a little later but the Todd episode convinced them that a live audience was a needless expense. Phil Silvers thought it even made the show better. Without one, they could do retakes easier so it wasn't necessary to rehearse every line and move in every scene to within an inch of its life. Silvers felt free to improvise more and to do each scene a few times, plus they could film when he and the director thought they were ready, not when the audience was scheduled. They could film scenes out of sequence if that seemed appropriate. The writers could write scripts with scene and wardrobe changes without worrying about how fast they could be accomplished. The mood on the set got looser because the actors could cuss and ad-lib and screw up without an audience there.
They could also edit out mistakes or reshoot more easily. If you watch the first season and a half of Bilko, you'll see a lot of them left in. There are places where actors (especially Paul Ford) forget what they're supposed to say and Silvers ad-libs around this or prompts them. Because so much of TV then was broadcast live and those moments happened so often on those programs, there was a tendency to not do much editing on film done in front of an audience.
When an audience-free episode had been cut to time, it would be taken and shown to warm bodies…often at some sort of military facility. A cast member — one of the supporting players — would go along to welcome and "warm up" the house before it was shown. Legendary was the one time they sent Joe E. Ross, who played Sgt. Rupert Ritzik. Ross was a burlesque comic with a very raunchy act and virtually no sense of judgment about what was appropriate to say before a given audience. He got up in front of a room full of elderly women and even a few nuns and launched into jokes about hookers and rapists. Enough people walked out that it was necessary to schedule another "sweetening" screening of the episode he was hosting…and they did not send Ross out with it or any other one.
Anyway, the recorded laughs of those audiences were layered onto the shows and according to Mr. Silvers, "Nobody could ever tell the difference." If you watch them, you probably won't. Once in a while, a laugh continues over someone's line and it's obvious the actor speaking that line wasn't hearing that laugh so you may figure it out. Interestingly, the performer in such a situation is almost never Silvers, even though he had close to half the dialogue in some episodes. He just had such a good sense of timing that he knew how long the pauses for laughter should be. I'm not sure you could do that with most situation comedy actors today.
That's what I wrote before but as I read it over now, there are a few things I can add. First, I thought of a reason why Michael Todd might have had to leave town and not stay for the schedule filming date. Around this time, Mr. Todd participated in the popular fad of marrying Elizabeth Taylor so that may have had something to do with it.
Mr. and Mrs. Michael Todd
Also worth mentioning is that Larry Gelbart told me there was a discussion about doing M*A*S*H, filming without an audience and then showing the edited episode to one to record laughter. They didn't because the studio decided it was just easier and maybe cheaper to go with normal canned laughter. He also said that when you're putting all the laughs in in post-production, there's just too much temptation to add in laughs that didn't come from a live audience so you might as well go all-canned.
The Crazy Russian Hacker tests devices to cut bagels in half. I think his problem here is that his bagels are too big and too soft. In my kitchen, I have the third device he tests — a gift from Howie Morris many years ago. Mine works fine.
