This is another great movie that's currently free on YouTube but it may not be there, free or free of ads for long. It's Irma La Douce, the 1963 Billy Wilder movie that reunited Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine after The Apartment. It's a bit long but well worth the trip if you've never seen it. Just about anything Billy Wilder did before his last few films is worth watching, especially if it has Jack Lemmon in it. The one time I got to speak with Mr. Wilder, we got to talking about Lemmon and he said, approximately, "I wish I had a nickel for every actor whose agent tried to sell him to me as The New Jack Lemmon. But there's only been one and I got him…several times."
Amidst the opening titles, Shirley MacLaine sells her services to a man with a mustache. That's Lou Krugman, one of those always-working-but-you-never-knew-his-name actors I've mentioned here before. The guy was in everything…even an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show in which Rob Petrie tried to buy a fur coat from him for Laura. I'm more interested in this kind of actor than I am in Big Stars…and I'll bet his agent never tried selling him as The New Jack Lemmon.
Here's the link to watch Irma La Douce. Hope it's still there and ad-free.
Step right up and order your badges for WonderCon 2025, taking place at the Anaheim Convention Center from March 28 to March 30. You can order three-day badges at this link right now at a special reduced price. Single-day badges will be available on January 16 and thereafter. I always have a great time at these and I expect to have a great time at this one.
Dick Van Dyke will be 99 years old on December 13th…and the way he looks and moves, that might turn out to be "middle age" on him. To celebrate this milestone, the Catchy Comedy channel is running a binge of 84 of the 158 episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show starting this Saturday at 12 PM with "Empress Carlotta's Necklace" and ending Monday at 5:30 AM with "You Oughta Be in Pictures." There's probably a very good reason why they aren't running 99 episodes the actual weekend of Dick's 99th birthday but I don't know what it is.
Many, many years ago when home video was mainly about VHS cassettes, a Los Angeles station did a marathon of all 158 episodes on some holiday weekend and I — lacking any vision of a future where I could buy them all on uncut, high quality image DVDs without commercials — decided to record them all. After all, it was my favorite TV show and when would I ever have another chance to get copies of every single episode?
I was not dumb enough to record them at Standard Speed, which gave you two hours on a cassette. That would have meant 40 cassettes and changing tapes every two hours. I was however dumb enough to record them at Extended Play Speed which gave you six hours on a cassette…so 27 tapes and changing them every six hours. I actually set alarms to wake me up in the middle of the night and arranged my days so I wouldn't be out when it was time to take out one tape and slide in another.
But I did it. Got all 158 of 'em on 27 tapes and I printed up labels for them. Okay, so they had mediocre video quality, commercial breaks and many bad edits to allow time for the commercials. The point was that I had all 158 episodes and could watch them any time I liked. And of course, I never got around to watching a single one of those tapes. The show was on often enough that I never felt the urge and so those VHS tapes still sit on a shelf in my closet…where they shall remain until I get around to tossing them out.
(There is, of course, no reason for me to watch them now and a decent chance that I couldn't if I wanted to. I haven't used my VHS tape deck in enough years to be certain it even works. I also have two other VHS machines and a couple of Betamaxes and my old Laserdisc player in the garage and I'm not sure which of them, if any, work.)
On a website many years ago — it might even have been CompuServe, that's how long ago it was — I wrote a line which was much quoted by others. It was that the entire premise of the evolving home video market was that someone somewhere was trying to see how many times they could get me to buy Goldfinger. I think I bought it on Beta, VHS, Laserdisc, DVD and Blu-ray and I didn't just buy it once in each format. Sometimes, there were new, more complete versions with better imaging and special features.
The quip would have worked just as well with The Dick Van Dyke Show. I don't think there was ever a Laserdisc release and the Beta and VHS ones weren't of the whole run of the series. But I've purchased the complete run of The Dick Van Dyke Show three or four times on various formats…
…and I really didn't need to do that either because, first of all, it's now streaming — in some cases, 24/7 — on various streaming channels I can receive. At least one of those 24/7 channels on my Roku TV is video on demand, meaning that I can request a specific episode I want to watch again and ten seconds later, there's Rob Petrie on my screen, perhaps about to trip over the ottoman with the requested episode to follow. The whole run is also available on YouTube…
…and I don't even have to watch it via either of those platforms because I downloaded the whole run to my hard disk. Right this second, you can name an episode and I can find and be watching it in about twenty seconds on my computer. I have an interface so I can play my computer screen on my TV screen so if you were here with me, we could watch it together. So why haven't I thrown away those VHS tapes? Considering all the effort I put into filling them, I don't have the heart.
In case all I've written here has made you eager to see an episode, here's one of my favorites. From the beginning, Carl Reiner played Alan Brady either as an off-camera voice or if he was on camera, you saw the back of his head or his face was covered with a towel or a fake beard or something. They finally decided they needed him on-camera and this was the first time you saw his face…
As I've written here before, I used to spend a lot of my time in Las Vegas but now it's gotten so expensive and tourist-trappy (if that isn't a word, it should be) that I have zero desire to set foot in that town. The message of the city used to be "Come here and play" and now it's more like "Come here and empty your wallet, max out your credit cards, lose your kids' college money…"
As of today, the MGM group of hotels is raising parking fees and, even worse, resort fees. The latter are these mandatory charges added to the bill for your room. They advertise it'll cost you a reasonable $50 or $100 a night to stay there but now at the MGM hotels, there's this resort fee of $45 to $55 dollars, ostensibly for things like access to the gym or other services you don't want and won't use. Almost all the hotels have resort fees and the ones that aren't that high will probably be that high shortly.
It's a shame. That used to be such a fun place to go. I think I still have some comps for free rooms there but no desire to use them.
Speaking of things that may be going away: As you may have heard, the Muppetvision 3D attraction at Disney's Hollywood Studios in Walt Disney World is soon to close. The Disney folks have something more in the way of current product to erect on that piece of land and that was the only place one could see that show. The version they had of it for a time out here at Disney California Adventure closed in 2014.
I only saw it once — in 1994 in Orlando when the park that housed it there was called the Disney–MGM Studios Theme Park. That was the one time I "did" Walt Disney World. I was in Florida with a lady friend named Carolyn, not to be confused with the lady friend I later had named Carolyn — the one whose father created Pogo. The previous Carolyn and I did one theme park a day for three days there in Florida, deliberately skipping anything that was duplicated out here at Disneyland because…well, you can figure out why. We spent the evenings at a small theme park/mall there called Pleasure Island, an aggregation of restaurants and night clubs that too has closed.
We liked Muppetvision 3D a lot. After we saw it, we went to a nearby restaurant called Mama Melrose's Ristorante Italiano, which I remember thinking was basically Olive Garden with mouse ears. There, we thought about going back and taking in Muppetvision a second time. But we didn't because I thought, fallible prophet that I am, "Oh, we can see it again some other time." In thirty years, that hasn't happened and now it surely won't; not unless the Disney organization which owns vast parcels of real estate, finds some other place for it. I'm sorry my back yard isn't bigger.
I hope they will and not just because it was reportedly the last thing Jim Henson worked on. It was also a lot of fun and we shouldn't be losing things that are a lot of fun. In any case, it will at least continue to exist (barely) in the dozens of fan-made videos that captured the show, if not for posterity then at least for YouTube. Here's one and if you don't like it, you have many others to pick from. None of them are immersive and even if you squint a lot, they're not in 3D. Still, some of that magnificent Muppet Magic comes through…
My former writing partner and forever friend Dennis Palumbo is writing a series of articles about writing for the journal, Psychiatric Times. Dennis is a wise human being especially about his part-time profession (he writes but he's also a licensed psychotherapist) and my full-time one. You might want to check out his first article in this series, his second article in this series or his third article in this series.
I actually haven't read the second one yet. It's about procrastination and I keep putting it off…but I'll get around to it one of these days.
…to my longtime pal — and one of the funniest comedians I've ever seen — Bill Kirchenbauer. At this moment, Bill's in a hospital in Thailand because some lady hit him with her car as he was walking down the street. It does not appear his injuries are lasting but we'll wish him a speedy recovery anyway. It's just about the only thing Bill ever did that didn't make me laugh.
If you enjoyed the Caesar's Writers program, you will certainly enjoy a kind of semi-sequel that was done in the same place — the Writers Guild Theater — soon after with some of the same participants. This is a tribute to Larry Gelbart and in addition to Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner and Larry, there are folks in here like Alan Alda, Gary Burghoff, Jeffrey Tambor, Howard Morris and Red Buttons. Bill Maher served as emcee. I'm somewhere in the audience having a very good time, as did everyone.
This is another YouTube video that I cannot embed here and it may disappear, require payment or suddenly have commercials but as I write this, it's there, free and free from ads. So if you wanna watch it, you might wanna watch it soon. Here's the link.
Norms is the name of a small chain of family restaurants in Southern California…and they just opened one in Las Vegas. They're friendly places that serve a lot of cheap food. You can get a half-pound New York Steak with six fried shrimp and it includes gumbo soup, a salad, your choice of potato and the "daily vegetable," which is usually one I can't eat. But that all costs $27.97 and even if you threw away everything other than the steak and potato…well, I've paid three times that in a seemingly-classier steakhouse for worse meat. They also have very cheap breakfasts and a lot of folks love them for that…and the fact that they're open 24 hours.
Over the years, I've eaten at maybe a half-dozen of them but the best one and the one we're concerned with here is the one on La Cienega Boulevard between Beverly Boulevard and Melrose. It's the oldest Norms still in existence — Norm Roybark opened it in 1957 — and the reason we're concerned is that it may be going away soon.
This is not the first time its demise has been announced. In 2015, the Roybark family sold the chain to an investment group and the new owners quickly secured a permit for its demolition. Various forms of public outcry prompted them to change their minds…but now it's been announced that the company that owns the Raising Cane's chain owns the property. When Norms' current lease is up in December of next year, they say, the place will stop being a Norms and will become a Raising Cane's.
If that happens, a lot of us will sure miss it. Here's a photo of my lovely friend Amber and Yours Truly eating there a few years ago…
I offered to take her to a fancier eatery (I swear) but she said, "Let's go to Norms" so we went to Norms. She really likes their variety of lemonades. They have four or five variations and you can not only get free refills but you can switch flavors with each refill.
I'm not one of those folks who is horrified at the prospect of My World changing and something that was there when I was a kid not being there anymore….but this is Norms. It has character and a friendly atmosphere and history and a wide selection of decent food at decent prices.
Though Norms would depart the premises, the premises themselves seem to be safe. The building has earned a historic landmark designation by the Los Angeles Conservancy. So if Raising Cane's moves in, they have to leave the building and its Googie architecture reasonably intact. But of course, that architecture is a small part of why people love Norms. I assume the major reasons will be aired later this week at a meeting of the city's Cultural Heritage Commission.
If I had to guess, I'd guess that at least two of three things would have to happen to save the La Cienega Norms. One would be for the Raising Cane's people to realize that the ill will generated by ousting Norms would harm their potential business at that address. The second would be for them to be able to find some other nearby business to displace — one that the public wouldn't mind seeing go away. (I have suggestions aplenty.)
And the third and probably unlikeliest thing would be for Norms to buy the land…which presumably they would have done before it came to this if they could have. Or maybe someone else would buy it and become Norms' new landlord.
I'll make my contribution to the first of these bullet points by vowing never to patronize that Raising Cane's if it replaces that Norms…unless, of course, Amber wants to eat there. She likes Raising Cane's and if they offer endless refills of the same four or five variations of lemonade and let you change flavors on each refill, that could make the place irresistible.
Here's another documentary about comedy that is, as I post this, available to watch for free, sans advertising. Either the "free" part or the "free from ads" part could change at any time so don't dawdle if you want to see it.
This is Wait For Your Laugh, a career retrospective of the great comedienne, Rose Marie. Those of you who think all she did was The Dick Van Dyke Show and Hollywood Squares have much to learn about her. There are clips and photos and reenactments by actors of many of the stories she tells…and there's a lot of Rose, who was thrilled to have this film made, telling those stories.
This was made in 2017 and it covers her amazing life right up until her last performance, which was for an episode of The Garfield Show that I voice-directed. That was in 2012. The documentary had its world premiere (Amber and I were there for it) in August of 2017 and Rose died just after Christmas of that year.
At the premiere, it ended with the caption "She is still looking for her next job" but after she died, the filmmakers added in a caption before it that says, "After the release of this film, Rose Marie decided to join Bobby," Bobby being her husband who passed away in 1964.
For some reason, YouTube has declared it "Age Restricted" which means I can't embed it and you have to watch it on their site. Here's the link. If it costs money to watch or you have to sit through ads, it's still worth it.
In 1979, Robert Klein and Lucie Arnaz starred in a musical called They're Playing Our Song — Book by Neil Simon, lyrics by Carole Bayer Sager and music by Marvin Hamlisch. It opened on Broadway on February 11 of that year and closed (with a different cast) on September 6th of '81 after 1,082 performances. That's a pretty good run especially when you consider that the original production of The Odd Couple only ran 964 performances. They're Playing Our Song was produced and produced and produced all over America after it closed in New York.
I'm not sure but I think it was the first time one of Mr. Simon's plays did outta-town tryouts in Los Angeles. I saw it downtown at the Music Center before it went to New York and what I saw was at least somewhat different. Throughout the play, there is constant talk about a never-seen ex-boyfriend of Lucie Arnaz's character named Leon. In the version I saw, Leon died at the end. In the version that opened in Manhattan, he survived.
Anyway, what I saw was, to me, a real lightweight and predictable romantic comedy that was made somewhat enjoyable by Neil Simon's one-liners, Lucie Arnaz's great performance and Robert Klein being absolutely incredible. I had many opportunities to see other productions of it but no interest. Then in 2010, the now-defunct Reprise Theater Company, which was definitely funct at the time, put on a pretty good, improved rendition of it with Jason Alexander and Stephanie J. Block. I wrote about that here.
But getting back to that original production: The show, the book, the direction and Klein were all nominated for Tony Awards but they were beaten out that year by Sweeney Todd, Sweeney Todd, Sweeney Todd and Len Cariou, who played Sweeney Todd. All of the characters who died in Sweeney Todd, by the way, stayed dead.
Klein and Arnaz performed the title song on the Tony Awards telecast that year. A long time later — in 2010, apparently — they performed it again somewhere. I know not where…but someone took a video of the Tony Awards performance and a video of the 2010 performance and merged them together. This is a little spooky but kind of fun to watch…
I'm still very busy so I'm going to refer you to some other folks…
I'm not writing political stuff these days because I'm not reading as much political stuff as I usually do because the political stuff I do see is running madly off in all directions. However, if I wrote a post about Joe Biden pardoning his son, it would say pretty much the same things that Kevin Drum says here. And while you're there, Kevin's remembrances about what was said about COVID match mine.
I never knew (or knew much) about screenwriter Marshall Brickman, who just left us. So I'll send you over to what my pal Paul Harris had to say ahout him.
And folks keep asking me I know what Laraine Newman felt about the Saturday Night movie. I haven't spoken to her lately but I did read this article and so can you.
I shall return…and by that, I mean I shall return to posting more on this blog, not that I shall return some of the odder things I've bought on Amazon lately, though I'll probably do that too.
The great Broadway director-producer Hal Prince died in 2019. The last show he directed for Broadway was a retrospective of his work called Prince of Broadway featuring scenes from previous shows of his including Fiddler on the Roof, Company, Phantom of the Opera, Sweeney Todd and many others.
Despite a terrific cast and (of course) terrific material, Prince of Broadway only ran for 76 performances. It was a show that had great trouble being properly funded and it looked…well, cheap. That was the main problem with it. But my lovely friend Amber and I saw one of those performances and we both liked it a lot.
One thing I liked a lot but didn't mention in the above-linked diary entry was a song that was not from one of Mr. Prince's past successes but was written for Prince of Broadway by the fine Broadway composer Jason Robert Brown. It was called "Do the Work" and it was made up of directives from Hal Prince…advice he'd given over the years to (mostly) writers. I liked it as a song and I liked its message. It's somewhat inspirational to people who do what I do for a living. If you're a writer and you find yourself losing the urge to write, give it a listen.
Below are not one but two videos of it, neither from the cast of Prince of Broadway. If you'd like to hear how it sounded in that show, you can hear the number from the cast album here. I'm giving you three versions of it because if you're a writer or you want to be a writer, it's something you ought to hear many times. It's something I sometimes hear in my head when I'm sitting down to tackle or even re-tackle a script…
So it's like a game on YouTube now. They upload full, uncut movies and specials (like the Caesar's Writers) video and they're free to view…and then suddenly, it costs money or they have ads…and then they're free again…and I'm sure they'll switch back. The last few days, Caesar's Writers went from without ads to with ads and at this moment — maybe not three minutes from now but now — it's without ads, at least on my feed. So watch it when you can and you can decide for yourself if you want to pay or sit through commercials.
Here — on the same basis, I assume — is the 1971 movie version of Fiddler on the Roof, a very good adaptation of what may be the most often produced stage musical in history. That was quite an achievement for a show which, when first announced, everyone said of it, "It'll only appeal to Jews." And then when it opened, they said, "It'll only attract an audience while Zero Mostel is starring in it." One of the folks who reportedly said that second thing was Zero Mostel and to add to all the things he was outraged about in his world is that after he left, it went on and on and on without him. It also defied predictions that it would never mean anything in other countries.
This is a good (though a bit too lonnnnnngggg) movie and it probably would have been even better with Mr. Mostel playing Tevye…but Chaim Topol only suffers from that comparison. Otherwise, he and everyone else in it are quite fine. The whole magilla was produced and directed by Norman Jewison, who was not Jewish, and I think it's funny that he also gave us The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming, which could have been an alternate title for this film…
