Monthly Archives: April 2005

This morning at breakfast, I ran into veteran comedy writer Arnie Kogen, who worked for a time on The Dean Martin Show. Arnie left before they got to the roast episodes I mentioned here but I figured he'd probably know who the writer was whose initials, "GB," appeared on that script excerpt I posted. He thought it was George Bloom. Sounds right to me.

Several of you have written me to express disappointment in the recent Laurel & Hardy fest on Turner Classic Movies. Films started at odd times and some of the prints were not up to the usual TCM standards. I am told that the folks there are well aware of the problems and they're already working to rectify matters when the films are repeated in a few months.

TCM reminds me of those "repertory revival cinemas" that a lot of us used to go to in the days before home video…the ones that would show a different double feature every evening. A friend of mine who managed one explained the big problem to me. You advertise that six weeks from now, you'll be showing Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon. A day or so before, the prints arrive from the distributor and they're terrible: Scratches, faded scenes, pops on the soundtrack, missing footage, etc. And there's not a damn thing you can do about it except rehearse your apologies to irate film buffs. I asked him if he could just not deal with the suppliers who sent the bad prints but he said, "I'd have nothing to show besides home movies of my vacation in Phoenix."

The problem should be less in the era of digital video, and it is. But there are a lot of movies that have yet to be properly mastered for broadcast and home video, and I'm afraid a lot of the Laurel & Hardy movies fall into that category. If you live in England or some other Region 2 DVD country, you can buy what I'm told is a wonderful boxed set of films…and, yes, I know it's possible to get a PAL DVD player and TV monitor in this country, and I may wind up doing that. But these great movies oughta be available in this country and be watchable by all. The Hallmark company owns most of 'em and reportedly has the idea that there's not much market for these films. The way they've been putting them out in occasional DVDs made from mediocre prints makes you feel someone there is trying hard to prove that.

Despite the flaws in the TCM presentation, I've enjoyed having a quantity of Stan and Ollie on my TiVo and I played each film at least twice over the weekend. I forgot how much I just like watching Laurel and Hardy, no matter what they're doing. I don't even care that much about the slapstick in the movies. There's something so pleasant and fascinating about the way those two guys walk down the street or carry suitcases or move a piano. I'd rather have good prints and high-quality DVDs…but I just like watching them, the way you like looking at a favorite painting or listening to a favorite tune.

The Dean Martin Show, debuted on September 16, 1965 and had its last regular broadcast on May 24, 1974, followed by almost six years of occasional specials. A run like that is no small feat, especially with a star who doesn't want to rehearse, and it can probably be attributed mainly to the ingenuity of producer-director Greg Garrison. He had a good creative team, and they kept finding ways to freshen it with new supporting players, recurring segments and good-looking women. For the last season or so of weekly shows and most of the specials, they went largely to a "roast" format. They took the money they'd been spending on musical arrangements, dancers and choreography and put it into more joke writers and guest stars. Each week, some celebrity would be the "Man [or Woman] of the Hour," and they'd trot out other celebs, some of whom even knew the honoree, to insult/praise them.

There was something rather "in-groupish" about the shows. It was like one week, you'd have Don Rickles roasting Telly Savalas and the next week, you'd have Telly Savalas roasting Don Rickles, and you'd wonder if maybe they hadn't taped both roasts at the same time and divided the cue cards up at random. Okay, so it wasn't quite so bad, but it seemed like that. There was an awful lot of cut-and-pasting done, and Garrison did a pretty decent job of shooting and editing. You almost didn't notice that in some of the roasts, especially the later ones, some of the stars who spoke weren't even there, and some weren't there for long.

My friends and I used to watch and try to figure out all the editing tricks. Sometimes, Dean would introduce a speaker — say, Bob Hope — and skillful cutting would make it hard to notice that you never saw Hope in the same shot as Dean or the guest of honor. That meant Hope was taped at another time, possibly on another stage using just a small part of Dean's set.

Or you'd see something like this: Foster Brooks would tell a joke about a fish. Then they'd cut to a shot of Dom DeLuise, seated on the dais, convulsed in laughter. Then they'd cut back to Brooks at the rostrum and he'd tell a joke about a dog. Deduction: They cut out at least one joke between Foster's fish joke and his dog joke…and the footage of Dom was of him laughing at something else altogether. (It may have just been that Garrison told him to act like someone had said something hysterically funny.)

In addition to Garrison's skills, you had the legendary Harry Crane as head writer. (I assume those are his initials up there on the script excerpt. I'm not sure who "GB" is. I thought it was Gary Belkin but he was doing The Carol Burnett Show at the time. And I think George Burditt was writing Three's Company.) Crane, who died in 1999, was a longtime jokesmith who wrote for all the biggies: Dean, Frank, Gleason, Abbott & Costello, even Laurel & Hardy. The roast format required tons of material — more than it seemed because almost everyone's speech was taped at two or three times the length and then pared down in editing. For a time, the crunch was so bad that Harry was buying jokes "under the table" from outside writers, one of whom was Yours Truly. I think I sold him around a dozen, three of which made it to air. He told me that was a good batting average.

Crane was the perfect man for the job because he wrote the way Garrison directed: Cut-and-paste. While I was visiting Harry one day, someone poked a head in and told him that Lorne Greene had dropped out as a speaker on the roast they were taping later that week. The replacement was Ted Knight. Without even interrupting the anecdote he was telling me, Harry ruffled through a pile of pages on his desk, found the Lorne Greene material and went through it, crossing out "Lorne" everywhere and writing in "Ted." The only rewriting necessary was to change one reference from Bonanza to The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

He told me he liked working for Garrison because of Garrison's deal with Dean. Dean would just show up on tape day and read whatever was on the cards. Years earlier, Harry said, he'd practically had a stroke arguing with Jackie Gleason over what was funny. (Harry had a long explanation, which I didn't necessarily accept in toto, of how everything that worked on The Honeymooners was his idea and Gleason had to be talked into it all.) He liked the fact that Greg, in turn, let the writers write what they thought was funny. He also had a great respect for the fact that Garrison could get the show done at all under a time crunch that would have crushed a lesser man.

At the time, I was probably a bit too critical of Garrison's patchwork editing, and I asked Harry if it bothered him. He pointed to a still photo that was up on the wall over his desk. It was from a recent show and it featured Dean, Johnny Carson, Bette Davis, Jack Benny, George Burns and about a dozen other celebs of that stature. "You can't get a line-up like that to come in and put on tuxedos if you're going to take all day to tape a show," Harry said. "Greg does it every week."

Teller, partner of Penn, comes to a conclusion (with which I happen to agree) regarding the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Another chapter in the saga of a great cartoon character. [Los Angeles Times, registration may be required]

Michael Kinsley says that the economic goals of Republicans are more often realized under Democratic presidents. I suspect he's oversimplifying but no more than a lot of Republicans are when they argue that Democrats raise taxes and debt. [Washington Post, might demand you register]

Those of you watching GSN's reruns of The Name's the Same have probably noticed that they went through their entire supply of episodes hosted by Bob & Ray and are now into ones hosted by Clifton Fadiman. Mr. Fadiman was a scholarly game show host, more suited to his previous stint on Information Please and somewhat out of place on this one. The most interesting thing about the episode they ran the other night was that one of the panelists was the great playwright, Marc Connelly. I always admired his work, especially his collaborations with George S. Kaufman, but I don't believe I'd ever seen him on camera before. That's one of the joys of these hoary game show reruns — the history you get to see.

GSN has about two weeks of The Name's the Same hosted by Fadiman, and then that brings us to the end of that series. They'll replace it beginning April 18 with a string of old, short-term game shows. One is What's Going On?, which was on briefly in 1954. This was kind of a cute idea. There were six celebrity panelists each week. Three were in the studio and three were in various remote locations, doing something like ice skating or flicking a chicken or whatever. The three in the studio had to guess where each of the other panelists was and what that panelist was doing. A gent named Lee Bowman was the host.

Another is Choose Up Sides, which was an awful program on which Gene Rayburn presided over competing teams of kids doing the kind of silly stunts by which adults were humiliating themselves on Beat the Clock. Fortunately, the show only lasted a little less than three months in 1956 so GSN can't have that many episodes, and something else will soon follow…maybe Two for the Money, which was hosted by Herb Shriner.

In the meantime, they're currently airing episodes of What's My Line? from late 1955 with Fred Allen on the panel. We have less than three weeks before we hit the 3/11/56 show, which was his last. Either tonight or tomorrow night, they should run the one from 11/20/55, on which one of the contestants was George Petty, the famed illustrator of beautiful women. Like I said, there's history there.

I was going to post another story here about Greg Garrison tonight but my lovely friend Carolyn is here, and she's more important than updating my weblog. That's a high compliment since updating one's weblog is pretty darn important. Anyway, I'm going to be busy tomorrow so I may not get to the Garrison tales then, and I have jury duty this coming week. But I will get around to them. Promise.

(Hey, I wonder if the willingness of professionals to serve on juries would improve if they equipped those waiting rooms with wi-if access…)

As my comrade Jerry Beck notes, the Dudley Do-Right Emporium is going away. It closed some time last year or maybe the year before, and will soon be razed…though parts of it may be preserved for historical purposes. Jay Ward built the place in '71, around the time his last real series, George of the Jungle, ended production. Jay had an oddly-shaped parcel of land up on Sunset Boulevard and part of it was occupied by his studio. He put the gift shop up on a corner of it and stocked the place with Rocky and Bullwinkle merchandise, some of it made especially for the store.

It was always fun to drop into the Emporium. For one thing, you might be waited on by some employee of Jay's studio, some member of his family…or even Jay, himself. A lot of tourists bought Bullwinkle cels and Rocky dolls there, unaware the guy with the handlebar mustache who was taking their money was Jay Ward. Depending on his mood, he might or might not tell them. Once, the story goes, someone asked him if it would be possible to get Mr. Ward's autograph in their book. Jay said, "Well, I'll check but he's usually passed out drunk by this time in the afternoon." Jay took the autograph book into the studio building on the other side, signed the page…then took it back to its owner, explaining, "You're lucky. I caught him before he got to the heavy stuff." On request, he might also procure the signature of his shows' mythical executive producer, Ponsonby Britt.

Most of the time when I went up there, the person behind the counter was Jay's wife, Ramona. Well, actually, most of the time there was no one there and the place was closed. I forget what they claimed their hours were but the truth was that it was open whenever someone there felt like opening it. For the last decade or so of his life, Jay pretty much ran the animation part of his business with the same "if I feel like it" attitude. I worked with him on an unrealized project that, had it gone forward, would have been one of the biggest, most lucrative things to happen to him in years. His partner, Bill Scott, was excited about it. Jay's attitude was kind of like, "Well, if you want to…okay…"

Actually, I'm surprised the Emporium stayed around as long as it did. When it opened, there was a lot of tourist foot traffic in the area, owing to a bank across the street that was always staging events and exhibits. (Does anyone here remember the Guggenhead Traveling Exhibition of Awfully Modern Art? It was a touring show of art parodies and it was at that bank, whatever it was called then, for months at a time. People used to visit it and then hike over to the Dudley Do-Right shoppe to buy Boris Badenov t-shirts.) Nowadays though, no one walks on that part of Sunset, it's darn near impossible to park, and that piece of land has to be worth a fort-yoon. Or at least, it's worth too much to hold a store that's almost never open and which probably didn't make much money when it was. I think Jay did it the same way he did his cartoons: As much for fun as for the income. Sorry that Jay, his store and that attitude are no longer with us.

Above, we see George W. Bush awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom to former C.I.A. Director George John Tenet. According to a press release that accompanied the presentation, "The Presidential Medal of Freedom is the Nation's highest civil award. It was established by President Truman and later re-established by President Kennedy. It is awarded by the President of the United States to persons who have made especially meritorious contributions to the security or national interests of the United States, to world peace, or to cultural or other significant public or private endeavors."

Last week, a presidential commission reported, "We conclude that the intelligence community was dead wrong in almost all of its pre-war judgments about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction." Bush says he accepts the conclusions of this report.

So, uh, what's the spin here? Tenet was in no way responsible for the fact that his agency got everything wrong so he shouldn't be denied the nation's highest honor? Getting everything wrong when the U.S. goes to war isn't that big a screw-up? Bush gave the medal when he thought Tenet had done a great job and now doesn't want to embarrass the guy now by saying it was a mistake? Help me out here, someone.

Just to remind you: The weekend late night rerun of Saturday Night Live is the Show #4 (11/8/75), which was the one hosted by Candice Bergen. It includes a great film bit by Albert Brooks, the first "Land Shark" sketch, and Andy Kaufman doing his bit where Foreign Man does inept impressions. Next week in that slot, they have Show #13 (2/14/76) which is the one where John Belushi and guest host Peter Boyle did "Dueling Brandos."

Speaking of Mr. Kaufman: A major turning point in his career, some said, was a phone survey on the 11/20/82 edition of Saturday Night Live. Viewers during the live broadcast were invited to call in and vote on whether or not to ban Andy Kaufman forever from the show. Depending on which account one believes, Kaufman either suggested the stunt or just went along with it because he expected to either win or to come back on the show thereafter in the guise of Tony Clifton. Neither of these happened. Kaufman lost the vote 195,544 to 169,186 and was never invited back again in any identity, thereby losing an important showcase for his comedy. An hour-long version of this episode, including all the Kaufman-related material, airs this Tuesday on the E! Channel. In the East, it runs at 4 PM and again at 1 AM the following morning. It's the one with host Drew Barrymore and musical guest Squeeze.

The always-wise Peter Sanderson reports on the New York premiere of Sin City and certain other related topics.

It's still April Fool's Day, at least where I am. So I can still post that today is the 5th anniversary of the Oddball Comics page written and curated by my longtime buddy, Scott Shaw! Every week, Scott plucks from his bizarre collection, some comic book that makes you go, "What the hell were they thinking?" It's always worth a click, a chuckle and a glassy-eyed stare.

Went up to the Magic Castle (of which I am a member) for lunch with a fabulous actress friend named Judy Strangis. Most folks remember Judy for her role on a great, oughta-be-rerun sitcom called Room 222, and also for playing Dynagirl on Sid and Marty Krofft's ElectraWoman and DynaGirl series. There was also a time when the F.C.C. seemed to have a rule that she had to be in every fourth or fifth commercial aired, and she's still adorable. [ATTENTION, JUDY: To read that earlier item I posted about you, click here. Actually, anyone who wants to read that story can click there. You don't have to be Judy Strangis to click there.]

Then I went to what I once called here The Best Car Wash in the Universe, and you'll have to click that link to see why. Alas, I must now rescind that designation because today, they refused to fill my tank.

Premium unleaded petrol, the kind I put in my auto, is $2.71 — a number I feel I should emphasize to a certain longtime (but Republican) friend of mine who seriously thought Jimmy Carter should be impeached over rising gas prices. With a fill-up and wash, which is what I was getting, it's $2.61. My tank was darn close to empty when I rolled in, so a fill-up should have been close to 18 gallons. The pump's nozzle clicked off around eight and I told the attendant, "It can take more." The sensors on the nozzle clicked off again and he said, "That's it," and turned off the pump, wrote up my ticket and gave the signal to move my car on to the place where they vacuum it out and pry all the little parking lot stubs out from the ledge under the windshield wipers.

"It's not full," I said. It wasn't just that I wanted to save a buck or so by filling it to the brim at the gas+wash price. I wanted a full tank so I wouldn't have to stop for gas again in a few days. But the attendant informed me that station policy was that the second time the sensor clicks off, the tank is considered full, end of discussion. We argued over this and the Manager came over to explain the policy to me in terms you'd use with a very stupid person who'd just overdosed on Valium. I made salient, irrefutable points but by this time, my car was on the conveyor belt being slathered with suds so it all seemed pointless. I went on in to browse the greeting cards, check out the display of cellphone accessories, buy a Pepsi and pay for my wash and half a tank of gas.

Ten minutes later, my car was done. When I got in and fired 'er up, the needle went to about half-empty…or half-full for you optimists out there. The Manager was walking by so I called him over and pointed it out. I suggested that maybe there was something wrong with the sensors on their pump nozzles and he said, "Yeah, you may be right. I'll have the guy come out and check 'em." I asked if, in the meantime, I could drive over to the pump and they could put in another eight-or-so gallons. He said, "Sure, but I'll have to charge you the $2.71 price. You only get one fill-up at the discount price with each wash." It was another of their policies, he said.

I said, "That doesn't make any sense. I only want one fill-up. We're only having this discussion because I didn't get a fill-up. 'Fill-up' means you can't put any more in, so you can't get more than one flll-up per visit, no matter how hard you try."

He gave me a snarl and said, "You'd be surprised what some people try," and walked off. Guess which car wash I'm not going back to for a while. And by the way, the Manager's name was Phillip.