I'm curious as to why you have not mentioned the passing of Sidney Poitier on your blog. I was actually looking forward to reading your opinion of his legacy.
While it's quite possible that you've never met the man, I've noticed that hasn't stopped you from offering your thoughts on other significant industry deaths. I am and will continue to be a daily fan of your writings, but this was an absence I was moved to comment on.
My opinion on his legacy is the same as everyone else's: Good actor…in a great many fine films…did a lot to break though racial barriers. But I think one of the first rules of doing a blog like this is to never forget that anyone reading your site is probably reading dozens of others before and after they get to yours.
When anyone important passes, I ask myself the question, "Do I have anything to say about the person that dozens of others aren't saying?" In this case, the answer was no. I never met the man. I haven't seen that many of his movies and I'm no authority on any of them or his career. There were hundreds of articles and tributes all over the 'net before I could have posted one. If I had, I would have just been repeating what you read elsewhere.
It's official. It was a rumor when we reported it back here but now it's been announced that a Peter Luger Steak House will open at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas around the end of 2022. That's fine for me because I doubt I'll be in Las Vegas before then. The Peter Luger in Brooklyn is probably my favorite restaurant…though I must admit I haven't been to it in a long time.
Why? Because it's in Brooklyn…and even when I'm in New York, it's a difficult place to get to. First off, you have to make reservations way in advance. Secondly, to get out there, have dinner and get back to Manhattan means giving up the idea of going to a Broadway show that evening. So it comes down to: Do I want to have dinner at my favorite restaurant? Or do I want to have dinner at a really good restaurant closer to the theater district and see a show? I usually opt for the latter.
Here's an excerpt from the press release…
Operating for nearly 135 years, Peter Luger is New York's top-rated steak house and a favorite among locals and tourists alike. The iconic German beer-hall setting has become a world-famous choice for family gatherings, deal-making, and special occasion celebrations. With its notoriously gruff, bow-tied waitstaff, old-world charm, and on-site dry-aging of legendary USDA-Prime steaks, dining at Peter Luger has become a culinary rite of passage.
A Peter Luger in Vegas will be so much more convenient. I'm just hoping they can properly replicate what makes it special. The meat shouldn't be a problem but where are they going to find sufficiently-gruff waiters?
The archives of The Ed Sullivan Show are a great record of comedians who are mostly forgotten. Not only did Ed secure the services of just about every major comedian then working the hotel and night club circuits, he also booked comedy teams. In light of the monumental success of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, there were an awful lot of them…for a while.
It seemed like every comedian who didn't have enough work was hooking up with some male vocalist who didn't have enough work, thereby creating a duo that didn't have enough work. Many of those pairings literally lasted for one engagement but a few stuck around for a while. The two most successful in the fifties and sixties would probably be Rowan & Martin and then Allen & Rossi.
Rowan & Martin were a rare exception because neither of them were singers and when they hooked up, they tried it with Rowan being the funny one and Martin being the straight man. When they swapped roles, it worked better and they caught the fancy of Walter Winchell, who promoted them in his column. That made all the difference.
In next place might be the team of Pepper Davis and Tony Reese. Davis was the big goofy one whose delivery was sometimes compared to Joe E. Ross. Reese was the little one who sang and played straight. Reportedly, they met when both were booked into a night club in Wildwood, New Jersey. It must have seemed like a natural for them to team-up and have some agent sell them as "The new Martin & Lewis!"
Soon, Davis & Reese were everywhere, including around a dozen appearances on Ed's show and about the same number on Merv Griffin's. They struck me as one of those acts — there were many — that weren't so hot on TV but if you were seeing them in a night club after a few drinks, they were probably hilarious…enough. They even made a record album.
The most interesting thing I recall about them is that around the time the Batman TV show (the one with Adam West) was all the rage, Davis and Reese made a pilot-of-sorts parodying it. This is all from memory and I may be a bit off but I remember it being a five-episode, shot-on-video, low-low budget serial that ran once, Monday-thru-Friday in Los Angeles on Channel 9. I think Davis played the Robin-like character and Reese played the Batman-type guy and that's all I remember about it other than that it wasn't very funny. Does anyone else recall this thing? I don't know if it was local or national or what.
At some point, they split up and did some solo acting jobs. Davis settled in Las Vegas and played a lot of clubs and hotel rooms there. He was on the TV show Vega$ a lot, usually playing one of those dumb-but-dangerous henchmen that the master villains always seemed to employ. He died in 1990 and Reese passed in 2013.
Here's one of their appearances with Ed in their glory days. This one is from March 25, 1956 and it presents a little mystery to me. They close with Davis singing a list of all the states to the tune of the David Rose song, "Holiday for Strings." In 1964 on his album Allan in Wonderland, Allan Sherman had a song called "Holiday for States," sung to the same tune and featuring the same states in roughly the same order. Sherman was credited as its writer and I don't know if he wrote it for Davis & Reese or bought it or stole it or if someone else wrote it and everyone just helped themselves. But it's pretty much the same parody…
Those who wish to remove Joe Biden (or any Democrat) from the White House will never stop insisting that the U.S. economy has never been worse and that it will soon destroy everything we hold dear and we must all save our homes and lives and children by electing Republicans. In point of fact, the economy's doing pretty well…as Kevin Drum points out.
And while you're over there, check out his chart on how vaccinated folks are doing in New York compared to unvaccinated folks.
Here's some good (I suppose) news. The Golden Globe Awards are not on television this year. That's right: The awards that everyone knows are a meaningless joke but they pretend otherwise are not being televised. Here's why.
If Bob Saget was here now and you told him that Bob Saget had been found dead in a Florida hotel room, he would instantly have come up with a joke in the worst possible taste about it.
I never met the man but I know how liked and respected he was by other comedians who had every reason to be jealous of his success. I did see him perform live a few times and I know that if you didn't find him hilarious, it was probably because you never saw him perform live.
He was one of those guys who needed your undivided attention for more than five minutes and your tolerance for jokes that would have never made it past Broadcast and Standards on ABC, NBC or CBS. Hell, some of them wouldn't have made it past Larry Flynt. This is not a good time for us to be losing so many funny people.
The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, which was on CBS from 1959 to 1963 was one of my all-time favorite situation comedies — and as recent viewings have shown, one that holds up pretty well decades later. It had sharp writing with lots of clever, rapid-fire dialogue. A lot of actors couldn't have handled it but a lot of actors aren't Dwayne Hickman. He was, like Silvers as Bilko or Gleason as Kramden, perfect for the role.
Sadly, he just died at the age of 87. The cause is given as complications related to Parkinson's disease. I'd heard he was battling the disease for some time but it still comes as a bit of a shock. I first met him in 1978 and to partially quote an earlier post on this blog…
My then-employer Jimmie Komack got the job of producing Whatever Happened to Dobie Gillis?, which was a pilot intended to revive the old series. The show's creator, Max Shulman, had written a very funny script in tandem with Eric Cohen and on the strength of it, most of the old cast committed.
I had nothing to do with the pilot other than to be around and watch in horror as Komack decided he was going to "reinvent" the show, and that he was eminently qualified to do this because he had never been a fan of the old series. He got rid of Shulman and that script, commissioned a new one that contained none of the old charm, and produced a revamp that absolutely no one liked. Hickman was rightly furious that Dobie had been devalued.
The revival went nowhere, nor did a later attempt which Komack had nothing to do with. But I got to meet Dwayne and to commiserate with him. He seemed like a nice, smart guy who knew more about doing a comedy series than anyone else on the premises. The next time I met him, he was putting that end of his skill set to work as a development executive in the comedy department at CBS. I worked on a pilot (unrelated to Dobie) that he and everyone in his division loved.
We came as close to taping the thing as you can get — it was even cast — when folks above his tier killed the whole thing. Dwayne was nice enough to call me — and he really didn't have to do this — and tell me that he'd fought for it and that its demise was not because of the writing. Basically, the exec at CBS who had to give the go-ahead to make the pilot saw who the producer was and killed the project without ever reading the script. That's not the only time I've heard of that happening.
The last few times I saw Dwayne, he was signing pictures and his very-good autobiography at autograph shows. He liked that I could endorse his account of what had happened with that '78 pilot, which he was still sore about. In spite of that, he was a classy, clever guy. That has not been true of everyone I admired on TV and then met in real life. But it was true of Dwayne Hickman.
This is a prime time episode of the game show Password and it was broadcast on May 24th of 1965. What's unusual about it? Well, it's got Betty White on it but that was true of most TV shows. But in this one, she and Arlene Francis have as their partners, syndicated newspaper cartoonists. Playing, two at a time, are Al Capp (Li'l Abner), Alfred Andriola (Kerry Drake), Allen Saunders (Mary Worth), Lee Falk (The Phantom and Mandrake the Magician), Mort Walker (Beetle Bailey) and Leonard Starr (On Stage).
Actually, Saunders and Falk were more writers than cartoonists. Saunders did rough sketches for the strips he wrote but the artwork in the published material was always that of someone else. Saunders also was anonymous on some of his strips. He wrote Kerry Drake for decades but the byline was just Andriola. Falk reportedly drew his two strips only for their first few weeks before bringing in someone else to do the drawing.
Thanks to Craig Robin for alerting me that this was on YouTube…
Here's some serious advice to upgrade your face masks to N95 or KN95 models. You don't have to order the kind I recommend — there are lots of good ones out there — but the cloth ones, no matter how stylish, just aren't enough.
The Southern Nevada Health District is reporting a record-high 6,110 new COVID-19 cases in the Las Vegas area. The more than 6,000 cases nearly doubles the record 3,508 positive results from Friday. The health district also today reported 15 deaths.
I was a big fan of the master song parody performer of the sixties, Allan Sherman…this, despite the fact that when I was in junior high school, he once kinda/sorta threatened a lawsuit over something I wrote. I told that story back here so I needn't tell it again.
Sherman had his biggest hit in August of 1963 with a record called "Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh." It was one of the last times a comedy single (as opposed to an album) topped the charts. Here he is, performing it on some TV show of the day…
Less well known is that Sherman later recorded a sequel to that hit. It was called "Return to Camp Grenada" and it came and went with little notice in 1966. Here he is performing it on The Ed Sullivan Show for April 24, 1966. This version was so forgettable that as you'll see, Mr. Sherman is unable to remember his own lyrics on live TV…
You'll notice Sherman's appearance had changed by '66. Before then, he'd been fat, he'd worn glasses and he'd had a not-too-stylish crewcut. Suddenly, he ditched all that along with his wife of 21 years. He slimmed down, let his hair grow, went to contact lenses and revised his act to include serious love songs a la Sinatra. It was a somewhat public middle age crisis and I can't begin to speculate what, if anything, it had to do with the serious downturn in his career.
He put out his last album in 1967. He spent most of 1968 writing the book and lyrics for a Broadway musical called "The Fig Leaves Are Falling." It opened in New York on January 2, 1969 and closed four days later. He spent a lot of time poaching at the Playboy Mansion and in '73, wrote an awful (and unsuccessful) book for Playboy Press about the sexual revolution and died later that year at the age of 48. His only real success of the period — and it was a small one — was doing the voice of The Cat in the Hat in two animated specials. A very sad ending for a very funny man.
One of our great comic actors is 99 years old today. I dunno when Larry Storch began doing stand-up comedy but I saw him do it a few years ago. Of course, he was a much younger man then. He was 91…still working and still funny. They say he's semi-retired now…which as close to retirement as most performers ever get. Whatever he's doing, I hope he has a great day and keeps on having them.
I wish Stephen Colbert's show — and most of the late night shows that attempt song parodies — would invest in a rhyming dictionary and a lyricist who knows how to use it. But this one's pretty good in spite of the awkward meters…
Two things that continue to baffle me have kind of converged. One of them is why people who buy from Amazon do not apparently comparison shop…on Amazon. Half the time when I go to buy something there, I find it…then I do two minutes or less of searching and I find what seems to be the exact same thing for a cheaper price…on Amazon. But sometimes, it isn't the exact same thing.
The other thing has to do with my favorite movie, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. It's a favorite movie of a lot of people and I get a lot of questions about it in my e-mail and on Internet forums. Most of those questions are answered on the commentary track of the Criterion Blu-ray and/or DVD release of the movie. Each contains two versions of the film — a reconstruction of (most of) the original release version plus a copy of the shorter, trimmed (and arguably better) general release version.
It also has many, many extras on the making of the film, interviews with people who made it or were in it, and the longer version of the film has that 3+ hour commentary track done by three experts on the movie — Mike Schlesinger, Paul Scrabo and myself. I do not understand why anyone who has the slightest love for this movie has not purchased and played every bit of the Criterion release. [FULL DISCLOSURE: I was paid in full for my contribution to it. Criterion isn't paying me another cent if you purchase a copy so this is not a post designed to up my income.] [FULLER DISCLOSURE: However, if you order it or anything through an Amazon link on this site, I get a very tiny commission.]
So why don't professed fans of this film buy it, enjoy it and stop asking if it's true that Ernie Kovacs was signed to play the dentist but when he was killed in an auto accident, the part went to Sid Caesar? No, it isn't. Kovacs was never signed, Caesar had the part from Day One and we covered this on the commentary track.
Can it be that this video is too expensive? Hardly. I think it's because Amazon ain't making it easy to get it at the lowest price and to make sure you get the Criterion version instead of one of the earlier releases from other companies that lack the special features and extended version and commentary track. The following pricing will probably fluctuate and everything may be different by the time you read this but here's what happens right this minute if you go to Amazon and do a search for "MAD WORLD CRITERION."
Criterion Versions
Criterion originally released it as a multi-format set that contained everything twice — on two Blu-ray discs and again on three DVDs. The package contained both. Then later, they put out a version that was just the Blu-ray discs and another that was just the DVDs. The one-format releases were originally cheaper than the multi-format version but at the moment, each of them costs more in most Amazon listings.
On one page, you can buy a Blu-ray version for $19.99, the DVD version for $15.38 and the multi-format version for $9.97.
On another page, you can buy the Blu-ray version for $42.99, the DVD version for $5.99 ("Only 16 left in stock – order soon") and the multi-format version for $9.97.
On another page, you can buy the Blu-ray version for $19.99, the DVD version for $5.99 and the multi-format version for $9.97.
On another page, you can buy the Blu-ray version for $19.99, the DVD version for $5.99 and the multi-format version for $36.54 ("Only 1 left in stock – order soon").
I don't know for sure but I suspect those $5.99 versions of the DVD are not the Criterion version but a "just OK" version put out years ago by another company. It lacks the special features including the commentary track and the extended version. Also, the one version of the film it includes is not as fine a transfer as the Criterion version. I don't know for a fact this is what they're offering for $5.99 but that's what I suspect.
Non-Criterion Versions
And if you try to order the cheapo multi-format version they're offering, the image on the page is of an earlier non-Criterion release that is Blu-ray only. It too lacks the special features and the two versions…if it's the product currently being illustrated.
As I post this, the cheapest way to buy what I think is the Criterion Blu-ray version on Amazon is to get it at this link for $19.99. The cheapest way to get the DVD that is almost certainly the Criterion DVD is at this link for $15.38. If you order either and what you receive is not the Criterion version, send it back. It's not as good and you overpaid for it anyway.
Assuming you own a player to play it on, owning the movie is so much better than waiting until some TV channel shows it. You can watch it whenever you want and you get to see all those special features. Best of all, you can listen to the commentary track and find out , for example, why certain great comedians were not in the movie instead of asking on Facebook or sending me e-mail questions about why Stan Freberg didn't have a single line of dialogue. He did…and we explain that and other vital facts on the commentary track.
