I doubt he has the necessary web access to read this but I wanted to send out good thoughts in the direction of veteran character actor Charles Lane. He is seen above in his recurring role of Homer Bedloe, the mean old man who wanted to scrap the Hooterville Cannonball on the TV series Petticoat Junction. It was just one more of his eight million screen roles, most of which cast him as a similarly-mean old man.
Mr. Lane is 101 years old today. It's a Wonderful Life, indeed.
As I've mentioned here before, there's a wonderful show every Wednesday night at a theater in Hollywood — a live re-creation of the classic game show, What's My Line? You can find out all about it here after you read this message I just received from Tom Michael…
Tonight I attended What's My Line? at the Acme Comedy Theater. I want to thank you for mentioning this event on your web site, and especially for plugging the current run. As I live in Montgomery, Alabama, this would otherwise have been totally off the radar to me. It's a delightful show in an intimate setting.
The panel went 0-4, missing the professions of a nice woman who sold cemetery plots, and a gentleman who balanced a ladder on his face for a living. Julie Newmar was the Mystery Guest, in honor of her appearance on the original show 45 years ago this week. (My God, she is tall! Even in flat shoes, she towered over everyone.)
Thank you for your wonderful website, and thank you again for plugging this show. If I get back in town during the current run, I will be trying to catch it again.
It's a great show and since it's different every week, you can go back again and again. I went last week when the Mystery Guest was Alan Rachins from L.A. Law. I wanted to get there last night because the producer, Jim Newman, tipped me off about the salute to our favorite holiday…a fact I couldn't mention here since at least one of the panelists reads this blog.
Ms. Newmar is quite tall — a little under six feet, I believe. If you're in the L.A. area this Friday or Saturday and would like to meet her and buy an autographed pic, she'll be among the many celebrity guests at the Hollywood Collectors Show out in Burbank. In fact, much of the cast of the Batman TV show — Adam West, Burt Ward, Yvonne Craig, Lee Meriwether and Julie — will be there. So will Richard Chamberlain, Jayne Meadows, Tab Hunter and many more.
Here's a photo from a party I attended the day after Christmas of 2004. Let me identify the folks in it. The man at the far left is master satirist Stan Freberg. To the right of Stan is actor Robert Forster. The guy in the center at the top is Chuck McCann and to the right of Chuck is me. The woman at the far right is Alice Maltin (spouse of Leonard Maltin) and to the left of her is Betty McCann, wife of Chuck.
The gentleman in the center of the picture — the one wearing the magenta turtleneck — is Fayard Nicholas who, sad to say, just became the late Fayard Nicholas. He died Tuesday at the age of 91. Here's a link to the U.S.A. Today obit.
Fayard was, of course, one of the Nicholas Brothers. And the Nicholas Brothers were, of course, the greatest tap dancing act of all time. Has someone ever compiled a DVD of all the times those gentlemen danced on film? Someone should. They were electrifying and many a movie came to a standing stop after their performance because nothing could follow it.
You never saw the Nicholas Brothers dance? Well then, you haven't seen tap dancing.
It was a thrill to meet him at that party. We talked for maybe a half hour with person after person coming by to tell him how much they loved his work, not just as a dancer but also as a choreographer. He seemed genuinely humbled by the attention, though I can't imagine he hadn't been hearing praise like that for…oh, maybe sixty or seventy years.
There was one moment I have to tell you about. Also in attendance at the party was a fine, fine musican named Ian Whitcomb, who specializes in ragtime and "tin pan alley" music. Someone else had brought a ukulele and at one point, Ian picked it up and strummed and sang a few tunes with everyone joining in where appropriate. We all sang a couple of Sherman Brothers songs in honor of composer Richard Sherman, who was present. And then Ian began playing…gee, I'm not sure of the number now. I'm thinking it was "Ain't She Sweet?" but maybe it was "Sweet Georgia Brown." What I do recall — what I'll never forget — was that Fayard Nicholas started dancing to it.
Of course, he was a much younger man at the time. He was 90.
His feet barely moved and most of the tapping was with his cane. But the man was dancing, no doubt about it. His whole body was vibrating in perfect time with the tune and you could sense the connect of man and music. He had a big smile on his face, much like he sports in the photo above, and that was half the magic right there. That smile. It was a performer's smile. It was the smile of a man who was proud that he could do whatever he could do at that age to delight the people around him. The applause when he finished was thunderous.
I love people who can do something, whatever it is, about as well as it can possibly be done. In his youth, Fayard Nicholas danced about as well as anyone ever has or maybe ever will. And even in his ninetieth year, he could still remind you of just how damn good he was.
The WB Network and UPN are merging. The goal is to create one network full of shows I won't watch instead of two.
Here's a link to a frightening exchange today between a reporter and General Michael Hayden, who is the principal deputy director of National Intelligence with the Office of National Intelligence. Basically, the general — with regard to the Bush administration's warrantless wiretaps — has either decided to ignore the part of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution about "probable cause" or feels that it doesn't apply to what George W. Bush wants to do.
Yesterday afternoon, I attended a memorial service for a wonderful creature named Hamilton Camp who passed away recently. The speeches, turnout and a nice clip montage (edited by Vince Waldron) reminded us all of how many things Hamilton did well. He was an actor, a singer, a composer, an acting teacher, a voiceover specialist, et cetera, et cetera…
Just the singing part of his life got him into several Halls of Fame. I have a friend who, once a year, hosts a party at his home for some folk-singing organization. A couple hundred members, amateur and professional, descend on his place for a big Pot Luck supper and after that's done with, most of them haul out guitars and entertain each other, as well as any folks like me who are in attendance. I missed this year's and wish I'd been there because Hamilton was an invited guest. My friend told me that when Mr. Camp walked in, it was like someone was hosting a rock 'n' roll party and Elvis put in an appearance. Hamilton was mobbed by people telling him that they'd taken up folk singing because of the work of Gibson and Camp, the folk-singing duo that he had with Bob Gibson in the sixties. And then everyone was eager to play for him and to get some words of approval from The Master. My friend said that Hamilton was genuinely amazed and moved by the reception.
This was about three weeks before he died.
If he was somehow able to listen in on the tributes yesterday afternoon at the Improv in Hollywood, he has a further idea of how much he meant to so many. The place was packed with most of the legends of the world of improv comedy. The speakers included Paul Sills, Chuck McCann, Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss, Howard Hesseman, Alan Myerson, Mina Kolb, Carl Gottlieb, Paul Willson, Larry Hankin and many more. Some wonderful stories there. Some wonderful memories of Hamilton.
Now, I probably shouldn't write what follows because it may offend some folks, but I think it would offend me more if I didn't. The memorial for Hamilton ran over three hours, close to three and a half. If you'd cut out all the self-promotion and rambling tales that had little to do with the dead guy, it would have been a terrific ninety minutes.
I go to a fair number of memorial services. There's always at least one speaker who seizes on the opportunity of a microphone and a semi-captive audience. Sometimes, they talk endlessly about themselves and drop in token mentions of the departed. Other times, they actually mention the deceased but it's primarily to say how much the deceased loved them and their work, how much they did for the deceased…even how much their upcoming projects will be impacted by the loss of the deceased. There were several this afternoon and at two or three points, I had to resist the urge to leap to my feet and shout, "It's not about you!"
Perhaps this bugs me more than it should…but collectively, these people have made some memorial services quite uncomfortable for those who wish to honor the departed and not walk out on his wake. You'd like to stay 'til the end and perhaps say something to the family…but the long, self-serving speeches make that impossible. I went to one memorial service last year where a gent who barely knew the deceased went on and on, mostly about his own life and career, making the afternoon so long that many attendees had to leave in mid-memorial. Several of those who followed him had personal, real things to say about the fellow who'd died…and by the time they reached the rostrum, they felt the room was growing restless and that they had to rush their remarks. It was especially sad because the deceased's son and widow were the final speakers and when they finally got up there, half the audience had gone and those of us who toughed it out were squirming in our seats.
Hamilton Camp would have been deeply moved by about 85% of what was said yesterday in remembrance of him. About the balance, I suspect he'd have yelled what I almost yelled. One of the things that made him so exceptional as a performer was his impeccable sense of timing. He never bored you and his songs always had something appropriate to say. I wish a couple of his acquaintances had learned more from him than they apparently did.
One of the twenty-or-so political blogs I visit on a regular basis is Joshua Micah Marshall's Talking Points Memo. Very smart guy, that Joshua Micah. And today, he has up this post that I think is right on target. I'm going to quote two paragraphs…
So much of the imbalance and shallowness of press coverage today stems from a simple fact: reporters know they'll catch hell from the right if they say or write anything that can even remotely be construed as representing 'liberal bias'. (Often even that's not required.) Indeed, when you actually watch — from the inside — how mainstream newsrooms work, it is really not too much to say that they operate on two guiding principles: reporting the facts and avoiding impressions of 'liberal bias'.
On the left or center-left, until very recently, there's simply never been an organized chorus of people ready to take the Howells of the press biz to task and mau-mau them when they get a key fact wrong. Without that, the world of political news was like an NBA game where one side played the refs hard and had roaring seats of fans while the other never made a peep. With that sort of structural imbalance, shoddy scorekeeping and cowed, and eventually compliant, refs are inevitable.
Like many of our problems today, we may have Richard Nixon to thank for this. He and his aides responded to every negative news story, not by dealing with the substance of the item, but by attacking the motives and integrity of those reporting it. I believe history has shown that most of those reports were accurate — remember Spiro Agnew denouncing reports of his legal problems as "a hoax by The Washington Post?" — and that when they weren't, it was more likely a matter of reporter error, as opposed to deliberate fabrication.
These days, I think reporters know that if they write a story with any kind of significant political impact, the injured side is going to attack them for bias…and they may even get attacked by the non-injured side for not making the story stronger. So what they do is to decide which side they're more afraid of offending and lately, that's been the right-wing. Which is why much more fuss was made about Clinton maybe breaking the law by fudging his answers in a deposition about sex than we now see about Bush maybe breaking the law by authorizing spying that violates the Fourth Amendment. (Also, of course, sex stories are more fun.)
I wonder how many people these days have a source of news they respect even when it tells them what they don't want to hear. I have a friend who follows baseball but never believes his team loses fair and square. They can lose 10-0 but he'll always find some way to claim the idiot umpires made a bad call or that the winning pitcher was hurling spitters or something. There seem to be a lot of such people around so it's fortunate the umps don't seem to modify how they call a game based on who's calling them names. Wish the news business worked like that.
Molly Ivins explains why she cannot support Hillary Clinton for president. I believe Senator Clinton is a lady who has been badly wronged by lies and false accusations, and I believe the Hillary who is hated by many in the right wing is their own fantasy creation, not the real person. However, I also am not enthused about seeing her run for the White House, for most of the same reasons cited by Ms. Ivins.
Yesterday afternoon, my friend Earl Kress and I attended another luncheon staged by the Pacific Pioneer Broadcasters to honor a veteran of the industry. This time, the honoree was Bill Dana, who is probably best known to everyone for his role as Jose Jiminez, the famous Hispanic played by a man of Jewish and Hungarian ancestry. Most of the talk, however, was about Bill's extensive career as a writer and producer of comedy, much of it non-Jose. On the dais were Jayne Meadows, Gary Owens, Betty White, Tom Poston, Howard Storm, Jack Riley, Hal Kanter and Shelley Berman. Shelley Berman is still one of the funniest, crankiest human beings to ever appear before a microphone.
The luncheon was emceed by the great announcer John Harlan, and began with a video montage of Dana's TV appearances. There were several clips of Jose that prompted an observation by Earl and me and, I suspect, others in the room. It's that Andy Kaufman's "foreign man" character (aka Latka Gravas) was an awful lot like Jose Jiminez with an unreal accent. There was also a very funny clip from the 1963-1965 sitcom, The Bill Dana Show, which co-starred the late Don Adams. Dana wrote most of Don's early comedy material, including many of the catch phrases and stock jokes that later became a part of Get Smart.
Funniest moment of the afternoon: Bill's colleague from many a Steve Allen Show, Tom Poston, was introduced. He got up and said, "They asked me to be here today to say something nice about Bill Dana." And that was it for Mr. Poston's speech. He sat down and never said another thing for the remainder of the event. Later, when Dana was thanking everyone, he finished the joke. He went down the dais talking about each guest but made a point of skipping Poston.
Most touching moment of the afternoon: Jayne Meadows talking about how much her late hubby loved Bill and how crucial Dana's contribution was to Steve's work. She mentioned that Bill had written the best joke ever for Steve's Question Man character. (The Question Man later morphed, without permission, into Johnny Carson's Carnac the Magnificent.) But Jayne was afraid she'd botch up the telling so she left it to Bill to quote the line. The answer was "chicken teriyaki." The question was "Name the world's oldest kamikaze pilot."
Bill Dana has not been in the spotlight much lately. One speaker said that they'd made a movie about the last twenty years of his life: Without a Trace. So it was nice to have this luncheon and remember what a funny, creative man he was and still is. Also, they served poached salmon and it was pretty good.
Norm McCabe has passed away at the age of 94. McCabe was born in Great Britain but raised in America. In the mid-thirties, he became one of the most respected animators at the Warner Brothers cartoon studio. In 1941, when director Tex Avery left the studio and moved to M.G.M., that left an opening for a new director and McCabe — who had previously co-directed some cartoons with Bob Clampett — got the job.
The cartoons McCabe directed are all professional but not as funny as those made by his peers. Many of them were "wartime" films such as The Ducktator and Tokio Jokio that dated quickly and so were not re-released or (later) given much TV airplay. In any case, McCabe's time as a director was limited. In 1943, he went into the military and when he returned to civilian life, he moved into commercial work and the production of educational films. In the sixties, he drifted back to his old line of work to animate for Filmation, DePatie-Freleng, WB and other studios. He was one of the animators on the 1972 movie, Fritz the Cat.
In 2000, ASIFA presented him with the Winsor McCay Award. He also received the Golden Award from the Motion Picture Screen Cartoonists in recognition of fifty years in the animation field.
Obviously, it is not a huge shock that a 94 year old man should leave us. But Norm McCabe was the last living director from the "golden age" of Warner Brothers animation and one of the few animators from that period who was still around. So along with condolences to his friends and families, we also have condolences to ourselves. We've just about the lost The Greatest Generation of cartoon creators.
The Miss America pageant — booted off network TV and out of Atlantic City — is being telecast tomorrow on the CMT cable channel. It'll be coming to us from the Aladdin Hotel in the city of Las Vegas, Nevada.
The gent in charge of the pageant recently told a newspaper, "We have asked them [the contestants] to respect the values of Miss America and not to be seen gambling."
Got that? It's against the values of Miss America to be seen gambling. But it's not against the values of the pageant operators to hold the event in a casino located in a town built on gambling. One might well assume that the Aladdin gave them a good deal because it was thought that the pageant would promote the Aladdin and lure people to come in and gamble.
(Yeah, I know they have gambling in Atlantic City. But the town isn't only about that, and the Miss America festivities were held at the convention center, some distance from the slot machines. At the Aladdin, they'll never be far from Video Poker.)
So if gambling is contrary to the values of Miss America, why surround yourself with it and promote it? And how come the ladies are only being asked to not be seen gambling? Why aren't they being asked to not gamble? Could it be that the values of Miss America are only about appearance and not about what you actually do?
Naw. Couldn't be that.
Yes, I know: I'm mentioned today in the Cecil Adams Straight Dope column.
In a day or three, I'll be posting the list of panels I'll be hosting at the WonderCon in San Francisco, which takes place February 10 through 12. WonderCon is a great convention. It's run by the same expert folks who bring you the annual Comic-Con International in San Diego…but WonderCon is smaller, more intimate, more manageable and in many ways, more fun. I don't go to a lot of conventions these days. I've been to too many and experienced too much déjà vu. But I try not to miss WonderCon and you shouldn't, either.
If you're going to be in S.F. for it, you might be interested to know that the annual Chinese New Year's Parade is that Saturday night and its route takes it not far from where the convention is being held. This could be good or bad news. It could be good because it's a colorful, fun event and you might want to hike over to the parade route and enjoy the festivities. On the other hand…well, last year it coincided with Wondercon also and a batch of us tried to go to Chinatown for dinner that night. You have no idea how delightful it is to try to get a cab in San Francisco right after the parade, especially when it's pouring rain and the police have half the streets blocked-off.
Also: We'll be doing our famous Quick Draw! game at the WonderCon with Sergio Aragonés, Scott Shaw! and other fine cartoonists. But we'll also be doing a different version of it in Santa Cruz on the evening of February 9. Joe Ferrara, who runs the Atlantis Fantasyworld comic shop in that fine city is celebrating his 30th year in business so Sergio, Scott and I will be doing it there as well, along with Batton Lash, who draws the acclaimed Supernatural Law comic, and Bill Morrison, who's responsible for the comic books of The Simpsons. If you're interested in attending, here's the info.
A little while ago here, we discussed rumors that the famous hot dog stand, Tail o' the Pup, would either be moved or demolished. Here's the latest. (Thanks to David Feldman for the link.)
Michael Kinsley on why you can never believe anything a lawyer says. Especially when he's up for a seat on the Supreme Court.