Monthly Archives: February 2006

…though it may only mean something to folks who watched TV in Los Angeles in the sixties and seventies. It's for Edward Nalbandian. Now, who the heck is Edward Nalbandian?

He was the proprietor of the huge discount men's clothing store down on Wilshire, Zachary All. In fact, he was Zachary All, which was a made-up name. Eddie turned up constantly on L.A. TV doing his own commercial spots and in one, which only ran eight times an hour for about five years, he said, of his store's prices on the new double-knit suits, "My friends all ask me, 'Eddie, are you kidding?' And I tell them no, my friend, I am not kidding." This line prompted rocker Frank Zappa to write and record a very funny, successful (at least in L.A.) record, "Eddie, Are You Kidding?"

I had one personal encounter with Eddie. I wrote about it in this article though I didn't use his name. But read down to the last part and you'll recognize he's the guy I was talking about. And if you'd like to know more about Eddie and Zachary All, here's a link to an article from The Los Angeles Business Journal that tells about him.

Here's a great photo of Don Knotts holding one of his five Emmy Awards and posing with Carl Reiner and Peter Falk. And I can't help but note that we have here three people who were in the movie, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.

A couple other thoughts. Barney Fife was one of the all-time great TV characters and we have Andy Griffith to thank for that, and not just for casting Don. There have been a lot of stars who simply would not have allowed someone else to walk off with their program the way Andy let Don Knotts dominate The Andy Griffith Show. Oh, they'd let the producers hire someone funnier than them…but they sure wouldn't let him be funnier in that many episodes. Andy was wise enough to let Don be Don and it sure didn't hurt either man's career.

At the end of five years of Griffith shows, Don left. CBS offered very large dollars to keep him on their network and there was brief talk of a spin-off show that would have moved Barney Fife to a bigger city as a detective. Knotts wasn't interested. He'd signed with Universal to do movies and he did several…to sadly diminishing returns. It was mostly a matter of bad timing. The film industry was changing then and he was a few years late to be doing non-Disney family comedies. Even Jerry Lewis was no longer packing them in with that kind of material.

I don't know what Don's best movie was from this period — maybe The Ghost and Mr. Chicken — but the most interesting is probably The Love God?, which was a halting attempt to do something a tad more adult. The film was written and directed by Nat Hiken, the gent who'd brought us Sgt. Bilko and Car 54, Where Are You? I've always wanted to find a copy of the original screenplay for The Love God? — not the version Hiken directed but an earlier draft that was, legend has it, quite unlike the finished film and absolutely hysterical. It was to have co-starred Phil Silvers but Silvers was undergoing emotional problems at the time and declined. For reasons unknown, Hiken then despoiled his own script and made, as the last thing he did before he died, a not very good movie. I once got to ask Don about all this and he just shook his head and said, yes, Hiken had written a wonderful script and somehow — Don didn't know how — they wound up not making it.

There's actually a bit of irony to The Love God? Don's character was a meek little guy who was transformed into quite the ladies' man. In real life, Don was probably closer to that persona — or at least to would-be swinger Ralph Furley on Three's Company — than he was to Barney Fife.

When that film crashed and burned, Knotts decided to return to television and that's when he had some more bad luck. CBS still wanted him and he might have been a better fit in their schedule. But he couldn't do TV without a release from his movie deal with Universal…and Universal was mainly in business then with NBC, which wanted Don, if only to keep him off CBS. A deal was finally brokered which went something like this: NBC agreed to pick up a faltering Universal series, The Virginian, for another season in exchange for which the studio released Knotts to do TV…but only for NBC. Don reluctantly accepted the deal and soon regretted it.

NBC initially scheduled The Don Knotts Show for a great time slot on Thursday nights and pencilled in their other new variety series for the fall of 1970, The Flip Wilson Show, for a less-promising period on Tuesday. Then someone noticed a problem. On Tuesday, Flip Wilson would follow Julia, a sitcom with Diahann Carroll. That would put the only two shows on the network with black stars back-to-back, creating what some might criticize as a ghetto or some kind of schedule segregation. To escape this, they flipped Flip, giving Mr. Wilson the better berth on Thursday and consigning Don's program to a less-than-ideal day and hour. It was a pretty good show but it didn't get much of a chance. Wilson's show, on the other hand, thrived. A close friend of Don's once told me it was one of only two professional matters about which Don had lingering bitterness, the other being how little money he made off Andy Griffith Show reruns.

He was never out of work, of course. He still did movies and constant TV guest appearances before he joined Three's Company. But he never had that big hit he wanted as the one and only star of something. He was always teamed with someone like Tim Conway or cast in what was clearly a supporting role. Still, no one was ever more loved by audiences…and the times I saw Don in person and out in public, I got the feeling that he was aware of that but some part of him still could not believe it. When you told him how wonderful he was, he still blushed a bit and acted like you'd done him a tremendous favor, even though you were at least the eightieth person to tell him that in the past hour. But he was wonderful…in everything he ever did. If you don't believe me, ask anyone. They'll tell you.

Comic book retailer Brian Hibbs writes on his weblog about a just-completed trip to New York to see the new restaging/rethinking of Sweeney Todd.

Brian also writes about massive lines at the big New York Comic Convention that's going on this weekend. I'm hearing that the con is closing its doors to people who didn't secure advance tickets. That is, you can't just show up there tomorrow and buy a ticket to go in. I'm not sure how much of this is due to the Javits Center (which is pretty big) not being able to hold the crowds and how much is due to problems processing admissions. Probably both.

The "authorized" website of actor Darren McGavin is announcing he passed away this morning at age 83. I always enjoyed his work on screen but I'm afraid I have no anecdotes or personal experiences to put up here about him. I mention this because when some famous performer or creative talent dies and I don't post something like I just posted for Don Knotts, I often hear from some fan who wonders why I ignored their death. Did I have a grudge against the person? Did I not think they were important? No, the answer is that I just didn't have anything to say I thought was worth saying.

And yes, I know that a lot of what I do think is worth saying is probably not worth saying. But that's how these things work.

There's a group I may have mentioned here called Yarmy's Army — a social club for veteran comedians and actors that convenes once a month. I have been privileged to be an invited guest for several of their meetings and at almost every one, I found myself seated next to Don Knotts.

It's tough to get a word in edgewise in a roomful of comedians and I sure didn't try. At one meeting, I recall sitting there as Pat Harrington, Tom Poston, Shelley Berman, Howie Morris, Chuck McCann, Gary Owens, Pat McCormick, Harvey Korman, Jack Riley, Jerry Van Dyke and about a dozen other funny men swapped anecdotes and insults at a pace that made the Daytona 500 seem lethargic. People talked over one another, interrupted one another, topped one another and kept the conversation relentless for about two hours.

Of all the members, only one hardly said a thing. Don just sat there and enjoyed the show.

Which is not to say he remained absolutely silent. At one point in each meeting I attended — and I'm told this was typical — Don would think of something he wanted to say. He'd raise a finger, gesturing to indicate this and someone would notice and yell, "Hold it! Don wants to say something!" Suddenly, miraculously, everyone else would shut up and let him say his one thing, which would always get the loudest laugh of the night.

They wouldn't shut up for anyone else. But they shut up for Don.

Because they loved him. Everyone loved him. In a business where even your best friend can have some small resentment at your success, Don was utterly undespised. No one didn't like him, either as a performer or as a person.

When Yarmy's Army did benefits, as it has done for many worthy causes, many of its members would get up and perform. Don was not up to performing much. He hasn't been well for many years and — I don't know how many people know this about him — his eyes have been bad for quite some time. When he has acted in the last decade or two, someone has had to read the script to him and help him memorize and prompt him when he couldn't. That's how we did it when we had him as a guest on the Garfield cartoon show. I had another actor read each line to him and then Don would repeat the line, giving it that wonderful Don Knotts inflection.

So Don couldn't perform at these benefits but he could sure do his part to raise money. After the performance, it would be arranged to have him just sit in the lobby. There'd be a photographer, and you could have your picture taken with Don Knotts for ten or twenty dollars. I don't recall what they charged but there was always a line around the block. When he showed up at those Hollywood Collectors Shows, it was the same way. The line of people who wanted a picture or wanted an autograph — or just wanted to be able to say "I met Barney Fife" — was out the door and well into the parking lot.

I don't have to review his career and his many awards for you. There are many fine obits up, including this one over at the Los Angeles Times site, where you may have to register. I also don't have to tell you how good he was because you've seen The Andy Griffith Show and Three's Company and The Incredible Mr. Limpet and all those appearances with Steve Allen. I just wanted to get on here and tell you that the most beloved person in all of show business has died. Because that's what he was: The most beloved person in all of show business.

Here's an interesting news story about proposed legislation that would demand "truth in labelling" for musical groups. There are many bands playing around the U.S. now which claim to be The Drifters or The Platters or The Supremes but actually have no one participating who was a part of the original group that became famous under that name. Under this law, an act couldn't call itself The Coasters unless at least one performer on stage had been a part of the original Coasters.

In principle, this sounds fair and logical, and I assume it would stop a lot of phony advertising. On the other hand, some of the groups around that do still have one original member are engaging in a bit of a sham to act like they're the original group. Suppose you paid good money to see an act that billed itself as The Beatles and out came three new guys with guitars plus Ringo on the drums. Or suppose it was Pete Best on drums (he was an original member of The Beatles, albeit briefly) plus three new guys. Wouldn't there be some amount of fraud being perpetrated there?

Several years ago, I spent an hour with a gent who was booking "oldies" acts for a casino showroom. During our conversation, he was interrupted by a call from an agent offering him a group that had been very hot in the sixties. I don't recall the name of the group but let's say it was The Electric Lemon. The agent said he could deliver them to play all their hits…and the talent booker said, "But I had The Electric Lemon here playing all their hits, two months ago."

I heard the agent on the speakerphone reply, "No, let me tell you what you had. That was one of several drummers who played with the original Electric Lemon, plus three impostors. He didn't even sing on their records. The Electric Lemon I represent has a guy who played the guitar and actually sang on all their records…plus three impostors."

If you haven't been watching Countdown With Keith Olbermann on MSNBC, you've missed some pretty good news reporting. You've also missed some very funny feuding with Bill O'Reilly, who's the competition over on Fox. Olbermann often points up O'Reilly errors or quotes some of the sillier things that Bill has had to say lately. O'Reilly, who routinely insults his political opponents while lecturing them about decorum, has fired back with some pretty pompous replies. His latest is to post a petition — this one, over on his website — which urges MSNBC to bring the back the previous occupant of Olbermann's time slot, Phil Donahue, and to get rid of what's there now (i.e., Countdown).

On his show yesterday, Olbermann devoted a whole segment to O'Reilly's petition and did a little montage of a fraction of the times Countdown has slammed the Fox News host. Here's a link to an online video.

Two weeks after he passed away, an obituary for Rickie Layne finally turns up in the Los Angeles Times. [Registration might be required.]

Happy 85th birthday to Abe Vigoda who, according to his website, is still alive.

China has passed a law against films that combine live-action footage with animation. You read that right. Here are the details.

William F. Buckley writes, "One can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed." I'm sure a lot of people do doubt that, but it's interesting that he thinks so.

A number of people have written to try and convince me that "Portgate" (can't have a scandal without a "gate" nickname) is a much greater outrage than I think. Among my correspondents are several folks whose opinions I respect and their arguments, plus some of the latest revelations in the matter, have me thinking they may be right. Note that I wrote "may be."

As you might imagine, I also got a couple of insulting messages. I don't think, these days, you can type the name of an elected official on the Internet without getting one of those. And I had a nice Bizarro World exchange with someone who has previously accused me of not giving Bush the benefit of the doubt, but thinks the White House is braindead on this one.

Here's a news story about the deal that I found remarkable. Note that this is from the Washington Times, a newspaper that routinely twists itself in knots to portray the current administration as flawless…

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff was not aware a Dubai-owned company was seeking to operate terminals in six U.S. ports and that his agency was leading the review until after the deal's approval, an administration official said yesterday. Mr. Chertoff's spokesman, Russ Knocke, told The Washington Times the issue rose no higher than the department's assistant secretary for policy, Stewart Baker. "[Chertoff] was not briefed up to this until after this story started appearing in the newspapers," Mr. Knocke said. Mr. Chertoff is the third Cabinet official to acknowledge he did not know his agency had signed off on the plan as a member of the interagency Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States (CFIUS). Both Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Treasury Secretary John W. Snow have publicly said they were unaware of the deal. But Mr. Chertoff's exclusion is more noteworthy because his department headed the CFIUS review and is in charge of security at all U.S. ports.

My first thought on reading this was, "So what? It's Michael Chertoff, the man who didn't know New Orleans was underwater." But it looks like everyone in the Cabinet was blindsided by this one. Even if the port deal was uncontroversial, this is not how we want our government to work, especially in the not-unimportant area of Homeland Security.

Michael Kinsley makes a good point on the new prescription drug program. I'll quote one paragraph here but go read the whole thing…

Thus Bush's only major domestic accomplishment in six years as president has not achieved its intended purpose of cementing the affection of senior citizens for the Republican Party. Many Republicans are sobbing with frustration, too. It is one thing to put aside your principles and spend hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars on the largest expansion of the welfare state since the Great Society if it is going to help you to win elections (so you can pursue your dream of smaller government). It is another to sell your soul and not get anything for it. No one looks more foolish than a failed cynic.

Health care costs in this country are insane. The bill for my four days in the hospital recently came to $30,251.68 and that doesn't yet include doctor fees. I did not have surgery or a lot of special equipment. That was the price tag for just laying in a hospital bed for four days, eating the fabulous cuisine and having intravenous antibiotics pumped into my system. My insurance will cover most of the tab but even my out-of-pocket costs could wreck the lifestyle of some family living near the edge, just barely able to make routine expenses. (I've heard from a number of people who had what I had but who were in a hospital for three or four weeks with it. Imagine what that cost. By the way, I consider myself fully recovered and my doctor seems to concur.)

During the Terri Schiavo controversy last year, there were a lot of folks who were deeply concerned about prolonging the breathing of a total stranger whose life was probably, in any meaningful sense of thinking or communicating, already over. I wonder how many of those people are concerned that every day, out-of-control medical costs are killing people who are much more "alive" than Ms. Schiavo was by the time any of us heard of her.

I think you still have to watch advertising to read articles on Salon if you're not a subscriber. But you might find it worth it to read this piece by political cartoonist Doug Marlette. He writes about the Danish cartoonist flap and death threats and things like that.

I was e-mailed by a reporter the other day who wanted me to answer the question, "How do you feel about cartoonists being threatened with death for drawing cartoons?" I don't think he understood my answer, which was that I'm opposed to human beings being threatened with death for anything they do, short of inflicting death or physical harm on another human being. It's not just cartooning that shouldn't result in death threats. Death threats are a bad thing in almost every situation except maybe cutting ahead of me in the checkout line at the market.

Anyway, the reporter thought I was unwilling to take a stand against censorship so I wrote a more formal statement of the obvious, about how it is inhuman for anyone to be harmed or punished for expressing an opinion, however offensive it may be to some. I actually think most people in the world believe that. Some just believe there are exceptions for certain things they hold dear.

You have to wonder what they're so afraid of. When I was attending U.C.L.A. many moons ago, there was a gentleman who showed up outside the Student Union every Friday around the lunch hour. He was an aspiring derelict who'd deliver a semi-coherent discourse about what was wrong with the world. I heard a little of it once and I couldn't figure out what the hell he was talking about…something about false prophets and bold men on horseback dressed in rags. This all led up to his big finish, which was always the burning of a Bible. He had a seemingly-endless supply of them and I don't recall if he told someone or if I imagined the reason, which was that he'd spent the previous twenty years as a travelling salesman. In every town, he said or I theorized, he'd swipe the volume the Gideons had placed in the top drawer of the bedside table and take it home for, I guess, possible future burning.

The Bible-burner was around for months, generally ignored. If he drew an audience at all, it was of students who wanted to laugh at his hysterical manner and wild-eyed fanaticism. But then someone took umbrage at the guy's finales and for a few weeks, there were petitions out and articles in the school newspaper about some proposal to ban the burning of sacred religious symbols or books or I don't know what the exact wording was. All I know is that it got the Bible-burner a lot of undeserved attention and that the folks who wanted to make him arrestible made even less sense than he did. One who harangued me to sign his petition seemed to have a genuine fear that the sacred tome was in some kind of actual jeopardy and had to be defended against one drunk with a Zippo lighter. I feel that way when people want to make it a crime to burn an American flag…or when it actually is a crime to deny the Holocaust.

In Austria, a British author was just sentenced to three years in prison for doing that. While one can understand why some countries are sensitive about the subject, I don't think the evidence of gas chambers at Auschwitz is so flimsy that it can't withstand a few people arguing against it. Using violence or imprisonment to stop an idea from being questioned or ridiculed is to demean the power of that idea. If something really is an eternal truth, it shouldn't matter if someone argues against it or draws an insulting cartoon about it or burns a copy of it. Instead, let's make it a crime, punishable by death, to mock or burn my work. That's the kind of stuff that needs protection.

Back when ABC, CBS and NBC had cartoons in their God-given spot on Saturday morning, those shows were occasionally truncated or otherwise abbreviated for "educational content." The FCC mandated that certain quotas of pro-social material be broadcast along with the Hanna-Barbera madness and the commercials for foods with high sugar content. A lot of half-hour shows became 25-minute shows so we could get little short segments that lectured kids on good nutrition or history. For a brief time, ABC had little consumer tips and I seem to recall writing a few of them that were vetoed because they would have rebutted certain commercials that were then being broadcast.

I only recall two kinds of spots that I thought were at all worthwhile, let alone entertaining. One was the Schoolhouse Rock segments that popped up on ABC, usually in the fringe time slots. They were cleverly written and well-animated and to this day, I'll bet a lot of folks my age can still sing, "Lolly, Lolly, Lolly, Get Your Adverbs Here." Last year, I attended a party where the great jazz musician Jack Sheldon performed with his combo. The number one request, and the number which caused all the adults present to flock around and applaud with glee, was when he sang "I'm Just a Bill," a number he performed for Schoolhouse Rock.

The other segments I liked then — and remember, I was more or less an adult in the seventies; I was writing some of the shows these spots appeared in — was a series on CBS called In the News. They were short summaries, ranging one to two minutes in length, of what was going on in the world, illustrated with news footage. I thought I was pretty well informed from my reading of newspapers and my viewing of adult newscasts, but the In the News segments often outlined a story with such clarity and lack of sensationalism that I'd find myself going, "Oh, so that's what that's all about."

The In the News segments were narrated by the gent whose photo I've posted above right…Christopher Glenn, a reporter that CBS usually had assigned to radio projects. I believe he also wrote — or at least, supervised the writing of — the spots which ran from 1971 to 1986. What prompted this posting is that I see that Mr. Glenn is retiring after more than 50 years in broadcasting, the last 35 of which he spent at CBS. Obviously, he did a lot of other things for the network but every time I hear his measured, authoritative voice on one of them, I'm reminded of what a fine job he did with In the News, and how it was one of the few things I didn't mind interrupting my viewing of Road Runner cartoons. A lot of those who today are doing more elaborate, allegedly "in depth" news reporting for an older audience could learn a lot from what he did for kids.