Monthly Archives: August 2002

Here's a link to an article in the Wall Street Journal by Jeffrey Zaslow about guests on late night TV shows.  I think this thing really misses the mark, in part due to faulty examples.  Zaslow's premise is that the folks who book guests on talk shows are unfairly ignoring older, veteran performers.  Here's a quote in case you don't feel like clicking over…

Such is the fate for scores of performers who once entertained America in 10-minute bursts on late-night TV. They're still alive. They still have fans who see their acts in Branson, Mo., or on cruise ships. But today's talk-show bookers often want nothing to do with them.  As David Letterman and Jay Leno fight for the same parade of young actors, the old guard yearns for a return to the couches of their youth.

There's some validity to that but, first of all, the examples are bad ones: Charles Nelson Reilly, Phyllis Diller, Soupy Sales, Buddy Hackett, Yakov Smirnoff and The Amazing Kreskin.  With the possible exception of Hackett, those are all guests that even Carson stopped booking long before he went off the air or never booked in the first place.  A check of the guest database at www.johnnycarson.com shows that though Reilly was a frequent guest with Johnny for years, The Tonight Show last booked him in 1986, and Phyllis Diller in 1985.  Johnny left the air in 1992.

Soupy Sales was never a regular guest on any of the late night shows, even when he had the hottest kid show in the country.  He did afternoon shows once in a while but even that was a long time ago.  And I'll say this delicately but I'll say it: He's not in the kind of health that would allow him to go on one of those shows today and delight his fans.  He did Rosie O'Donnell's program a few months ago and it was a short, uncomfortable interview.

As for the other folks, I suspect that Yakov Smirnoff's absence from the tube has more to do with the fact that the end of the Cold War rendered his act moot.  Mr. Kreskin long ago turned into a parody of himself.  (Carson stopped booking him in 1980.)  Buddy Hackett is turning up regularly with Craig Kilborn on The Late, Late Show.

The article's thesis is almost right.  Talk shows often ignore older guests in favor of young ones.  But the cases cited are mainly folks who burned out long ago and, besides — and here's what Zaslow misses completely — that's how show business works.  Jerry Lewis and Mickey Rooney are not starring in movies and Wayne Newton does not have a record on the charts.  Some performers endure and some do not.

The late night shows often find room for Rodney Dangerfield, Bob Newhart, Don Rickles and Tony Bennett.  They never found much room for Smirnoff and even if they did once, some performers simply cannot sustain careers.  Carson stayed on as long as he did, in part because he'd decide — rightly or wrongly — that certain stars simply had worn out their welcome and it was time to stop inviting them to his couch.  If there was evidence that the mass public still loved Yakov and Kreskin and would flock to see them elsewhere, they might be right that Leno and Letterman are unfairly ignoring them.  But those guys are playing Branson and Laughlin because they can't even fill a room in Vegas.

The talk shows are just booking the folks who seem to be popular.  Maybe they're wrong at times.  Hell, I'm sure they're wrong at times.  But it's nothing new.  That's how the game has always been played.

Ben Varkentine reviews my new book, Comic Books and Other Necessities of Life over on this website.  I always knew Ben was a bright guy but I didn't know he was this smart.

I'm watching the Chabad Telethon as I chip away at that deadline.  They have radio talk show host Dennis Prager hosting this year and he's awful — stiff, humorless and often unprepared.  Does the world really have such a shortage of old Jewish comedians that we had to get stuck with this guy?

A quick note, taking time away from that deadline I should be working on:  A reader of this site named Mary Grider just wrote to help clarify the situation with the death toll of 9/11.  At the moment, it stands at 2,807 in the World Trade Center though, as this article notes, it is expected that this total will be revised downward.  Also killed that day were 125 employees of the Pentagon plus a number of airline employees and passengers plus 10 hijackers.  The count currently stands at 3,031…tragic, of course, but far below the estimates of that day which said "more than 5000" and sometimes even "more than 6000."

As I said here the other day, I think this country had spent way too much effort mourning its dead and not nearly enough solving the problems that were created or revealed on 9/11.

Thank you, Mary.  Back to work…

As mentioned earlier here, TV Land is rerunning my unfavorite episode of The Adventures of Superman early tomorrow (Saturday) morning.  It's probably on at 12:30 AM or 3:30 AM in your area, depending on which time zone you're in or maybe which time zone your cable company thinks it's in.  The episode is "The Mysterious Cube" and the reasons I think it's so silly are spelled out in two columns, the first of which you can read by clicking here.  But read fast.  These columns are only available here until Monday morning.

My TV news channels seem to be filled with New York City fire fighters and policemen who are condemning Bush and mayor Mike Bloomberg for refusing them a pay increase and, some claim, expecting them to put in more hours for the same, pitiful salaries.  I can't wait to see the attempt to portray New York City firemen as greedy and unworthy.  Yeah, America will certainly buy that notion, especially with all the 9/11 retrospectives we'll be watching the next few weeks.  The nerve of those selfish New York fire fighters…

Someone (Leno, I think) once said that Politics was Show Business for ugly people.  Lately, it's become Show Biz for people who are neither pretty nor smart.

I really like Bubbie's Pure Kosher Dill pickles.  My great friend Carolyn Kelly told me about them and I'll admit to having had a bit of skepticism.  I was buying Vlasic pickles or Claussen pickles and settling for adequate.  This seemed to be a matter of realistic expectations.  I mean, how can pickles sold in a jar in the supermarket deli case measure up to real delicatessen pickles?  Well, Bubbie's do.  I don't own stock in the company.  I just like their pickles and felt I oughta recommend them to you, if not for great pickles than as proof that you don't have to settle for adequate.  A lesson for us all.

I have the Deadline From Hell staring me in the kisser so I probably won't be updating this page or answering much e-mail until it's vanquished.  See you again on the other side.

Most (not all) NBC affiliates run a "classic" episode of Saturday Night Live early on Sunday morning around 3:00 AM.  As per usual for the teevee business the term "classic episode" refers to any episode they have on the shelf…though whoever's programming this slot has generally avoided shows from the years when Executive Producer Lorne Michaels was in absentia.  (Apropos of nothing, I recently heard a former SNL cast member say that the three most unlikely events that could happen in this world were an invasion from another planet, the discovery that Hitler and Elvis were both alive, and Lorne Michaels hiring a cast member who was losing his hair.)

Anyway, for the rerun scheduled for this coming Saturday night or Sunday morn, they're reaching back to 1982 and the Ebersol/Eddie Murphy years .  It's the episode hosted by Drew Barrymore during which viewers were asked to call in — at fifty cents a call — and vote whether Andy Kaufman should be banned from the program.  Kaufman had been wrestling women on the show and being generally obnoxious and that led to this phone-in poll, which A.K. expected to win.  And if he didn't win, he expected to return to SNL in his Tony Clifton identity.  Neither of these occurred and he was reportedly quite upset at losing that outlet for his performing.  Kaufman did not appear live on the episode, by the way.

The Saturday PM/Sunday AM SNL reruns are sometimes worth catching because they run the full, as-broadcast 90-minute episodes, as opposed to the hour-long cutdowns that turn up on Comedy Central and E!.  Generally, chopping a Saturday Night Live to an hour improves things by excising a couple of misfire sketches.  But every so often, a treasure gets lost and it's nice to see the shows in their full length.

I used to have an article on this site about "The Mysterious Cube," an episode of the old George Reeves Adventures of Superman show.  The piece was removed from here because it's included in my new book, Comic Books and Other Necessities of Life and I figured you were less likely to spring for a copy if I was giving most of it away here.  Anyway, if you recall, I pointed out how gloriously inane and illogical the episode was.

If you want to check it out for yourself, TV Land is rerunning that episode early Saturday morning.  Their website says 3:30 AM Eastern and Pacific time but some cable companies time-shift a bit so you might want to consult your listings.  In honor of this airing, I will repost the article just for this coming weekend.

Also this weekend, I'll be setting my TiVo for the annual Chabad Telethon.  I don't think it runs in every city but it's on in Los Angeles and New York.  It runs Sunday from late afternoon into the evening and it's one of the most entertaining shows of the year, what with great guests, dancing Jews, good Israeli musical performers and the charismatic, energetic Rabbi Kunin.  It's also a very worthy charity.

Beginning September 4th, Comedy Central will begin rerunning each episode of Late Night With Conan O'Brien the day after it first airs on NBC.  Matter of fact, the announced schedule calls for them to run an episode each day Monday-Friday at 7:00 PM and then to rerun that episode the following weekday at 1:00 in the afternoon.  The press release also says two episodes will air yet again on Saturday and one on Sunday.

No word if NBC is going to stop airing a week-old Conan rerun early every morning as part of their "Late Night Overnight" block but if they do, they'll be running episodes that Comedy Central aired two or three times the previous week.  It would also mean that every week, Conan and his crew produce four new episodes but between the two networks, viewers can watch 23 airings of five episodes of Late Night, most of them less than one week old.

I love the program but in an era where most people own video tape recorders, do we really need that many opportunities to see the Masturbating Bear and Preparation "H" Raymond?

Here's a link to a website that's right up our alley.  Peter Muldavin bills himself as "The Kiddie Rekord King."  He collects and catalogues records made for tots, primarily those old, theoretically-unbreakable 78 RPM treasures that don't play on most current turntables.  His domain, which features some wonderful images of record jackets, is well worth a visit if only so you can say, "Hey, I used to own that record."  (By the way: It was my experience as a lad that, if you wanted to see that a phonograph record was broken, the surest way was to print the word "unbreakable" on the label.  My friends never could resist a direct challenge.)

I spoke today to a friend of mine who was involved in the now-cancelled game show, Win Ben Stein's Money.  So why does he think it was cancelled?

Three reasons.  One was that it was getting repetitive.  No matter how much we tried to wring variations on the format, every episode felt like you'd seen it before.  The second reason was that we never found a sidekick who provided the chemistry that Ben had with Jimmy Kimmel.  And the third reason and, for me, the biggest one was that Ben was winning too much.  People tuned in to see the wealthy, snotty guy get topped by the guy off the street and that wasn't happening often enough.

Then my friend adds a fourth reason: "Actually, the main reason Comedy Central bailed was that they simply figure they've got enough of them.  If the show has any ongoing rerun value, it won't matter if they more than they presently have.  They'd rather put their 'new programming' money into building a library of something else."

The New York Times has an obit today for Doris Wishman.  (Thanks to Charles Kuffner for calling my attention to it.)  Here's the link.

Also there is an obit for Peter Matz, the terrific arranger and composer.  The Times doesn't mention this but for the last few years, he had been the main musical director for the Reprise! musical series in Los Angeles.  Those of you who attended these shows up at the Freud Playhouse at U.C.L.A. saw him conduct the orchestra and heard him pull together some amazing feats of musicianship with scant rehearsal time.

I will be a guest at the Victoria Comic, Movie & VideoFest 2002, being held in Victoria, British Columbia on October 5 and 6.  Those interested in attending can obtain more info by clicking here.

Few of them are visible but many changes have been made to this website.  They're mostly of a tech nature, enabling me to maintain things more efficiently here.  If anything looks weird or illegible to you, please heed the following steps…

If you have a very old browser — some antique version of Microsoft Explorer you've had since childhood — then upgrade your browser.  Don't do this for me.  Do it because the language of websites is evolving and, any day now, there will be plenty of sites that your passé software will be unable to parse.  So you might as well upgrade now. If you have a relatively-new browser and something still looks odd, do us a favor and drop an e-mail to our demon webmaster.

Thank you, as always, for your support.  We've been busy with some deadlines lately so this site has not been updated as often as we like.  We're still busy with those deadlines but several of you have donated via the PayPal button lately and we're feeling guilty about not putting anything new up here.  However, we're not too guilty to resist plugging our new book.  (Speaking of which, here's a link to a nice review we got…)

Filmmaker Doris Wishman was sort of the female Russ Meyer, cranking out low-budget films featuring ladies with gargantuan, oft-exposed breasts.  The main difference was that her films — like Deadly Weapons and Double Agent 73 — were less well known and a lot grimier.  (The title of the latter refers to its star, secret agent Chesty Morgan and her bust measurement.)  I made it through about half of two Wishman films back in my teen years and for a teenage boy to walk out on movies that feature naked women…well, those had to be pretty crummy movies.  They were…but I still admired her tenacity, banging out bad movies on a shoestring for more than a quarter-century.  Matter of fact, I find the details of her career more interesting than anything she committed to film.

I haven't seen it hit the wire services anywhere but Ms. Wishman passed away August 10 at the age of…well, she never told anyone how old she was but 85 is a good guess.  An episode of Late Night with Conan O'Brien on which she guested is scheduled for a rerun on August 23.