Monthly Archives: November 2006

Here's a short flashback to the days when I wrote variety shows for people who didn't speak English very well. The Bay City Rollers Show was actually on NBC for quite a number of years, stuck away in an early Saturday morning time slot that only existed in some cities and didn't count in the ratings. It was a case of "We have to put something on at that hour so we might as well stick this thing there."

The show was actually a condensed version of a show called The Krofft Superstar Hour, which was produced for NBC's Saturday morning schedule in 1978. The whole A.M. line-up was a disaster that year. Even before all 13 hours we'd taped had aired, NBC was juggling around shows and replacing some of them. The 13 hours of The Krofft Superstar Hour were cut down to 13 half-hours of The Bay City Rollers Show and, like I said, it was on for quite some time. They reran those suckers for four years, I think.

It was actually a fun show to do if you could get past the fact that the most of the Rollers had such natural thick Scottish accents that American audiences could never have understood them. A dialogue coach named Jonathan Lucas worked wonders with the lads but by their own admission, they weren't equipped to host a show of this sort. It was kind of like: Forget about comedic delivery. Let's be happy if they just get the words out clean. This was the first of many shows I wrote where we had to settle for intelligibility.

When I signed on to do the series, it was going to star ABBA and I never did find out how that deal fell apart. We wound up with the Rollers who were then in the process of disbanding the group but they reassembled for one last gig. They were all great guys individually but one of them was at war — personal and legal — with the others so there was a lot of tension on the set and every so often, rehearsals would stop while they all went in the back and threats of bodily harm were exchanged. During one taping, I was doing the audience warmup. Someone came over to me and whispered, "You'll have to stall" and told me that backstage, one of the Rollers had one of his bandmates in a headlock. Amazingly, ten minutes later they were all on stage, miming to their record of "Saturday Night."

This clip someone assembled contains the opening title and the closing credits, plus some bits in between that I don't think I wrote. The voiceover you'll hear is by our pal, Lennie Weinrib, whose memorial service was recently the subject of many bytes of weblog posting here.

Last evening, the new Comic Relief special aired "live" from Las Vegas on HBO and simultaneously on TBS. I'm not sure if it was live on HBO but it was on a delay of ten seconds (or thereabouts) on TBS so someone there could bleep out the dirty words. I feel sorry for the guy who had to do that. With some acts, it meant cutting out every fifth word or so. I didn't see Dane Cook's routine on TBS but it must have sounded like one of those 16mm movies we saw in high school…the ones with so many splices that the narrator was leaping from sentence to sentence without verbs or adjectives or sometimes even nouns.

Is there any point to bleeping something like this? I understand there are people who hear a naughty word and are shocked, outraged, offended, etc. Were any of those people watching the expurgated version? Were they enjoying it? Was there any reason to watch it there except that you aren't spending the money for HBO?

I don't plan on writing much more about the O.J. Simpson book and TV interviews but I thought I ought to link to this. It's the article Judith Regan, the publisher-producer of this spectacle, wrote about why she did it. I'm afraid I don't buy the suggestion that her own past victimhood justifies anything or is even relevant to what she does now.

I'm also skeptical about the part where she says that she didn't pay Simpson; that she contracted through a third party and was told the money would go to his children. The dollar figure involved would have to be substantial. (If it wasn't, she would have said that in order to deflect criticism.) The amount has been rumored as 3.5 million but let's say it's only a third of that. You don't pay a million dollars for anything without making sure the money is going to buy you what you want, which in this case would mean that Simpson — the guy whose services you're buying — agrees that it's compensation.

Here's what I wonder. I wonder if there's any substantial number of people in this country who really believe Simpson didn't commit the murders. A poll in 2004 found that 77% of us thought he was guilty, but I've always suspected that some people said he was innocent simply because their distrust of police (the Los Angeles ones, in particular) was greater or more relevant to their lives than any suspicion of O.J. Simpson. I'll bet it's more like 85% that thinks he did it…and the 15% includes folks who didn't follow the trial and/or are the kind of person who's naturally drawn to the unpopular opinion in any controversy. I have one friend who, if you told him 98% of America believes something, would immediately throw in with the 2%…before he even heard what the topic was. How many of those who think he didn't do it are in that category?

The above photo is the entire voice cast of Cool McCool (a series that, many of my correspondents assure me, is just as good as I remember it was). Left to right, that's Bob McFadden, Chuck McCann and Carol Corbett. James H. Burns sent me the following message about Ms. Corbett and I thought it oughta be posted here…

You gave short shrift — no make that no shrift! — to the lady voice artist, on Cool McCool, Carol Corbett. For those of who grew up in New York in the sixties, Carol was one of the great practitioners of local kids' television.

Corbett hosted a lunchtime program in the mid-sixties on the former WPIX/Channel 11, presenting Hercules and then other cartoons. Wearing an artist's smock, she would draw at an easel, present other crafts, and also do skits with puppets.

Corbett was part of that last great infusion of New York childrens' show hosts, most of whom disappeared from the airwaves, with no explanation, by 1968. Working in the studios at the Daily News building, Corbett joined the incredible WPIX afternoon roster of Chuck McCann, Officer Joe Bolton, Beachcomber Bill Biery, and Captain Jack McCarthy in the era when Sandy Becker, Soupy Sales and Paul Winchell (the last, in national syndication), were being seen on Metromedia Channel 5. There were episodes of Corbett's series when Office Joe (who hosted The Three Stooges) and I believe McCann, would pop over, to Carol's show…

What made Corbett memorable was her genuine winsomeness, a charm that has made her audience recall the twinkle in hey eyes, and her smile, forty years later. For many kids, outside of their immediate family, she was the first good looking woman, they came into contact with, on a daily basis. What makes Corbett's background even more interesting is that she was featured on a couple of the comedy albums of the era, including, I believe, one of the Vaughn Meader efforts. Nor did she just disappear into that void where so many local performers seemed to vanish. In 1968, she had a role in the Steve McQueen/Faye Dunaway thriller, The Thomas Crown Affair.

Corbett also made the unusual crossover from cartoon show-host to "educational TV" when the local CBS flagship hired her, in 1971, for The Patchwork Family. Another generation of New Yorkers remembers Carol hanging out with a puppet named Rags (operated by Carey Antebi, who had been with Jim Henson's Muppet crew), and in some segments — remarkably! — film historian, John Canemaker. (In another strange bit of trivia, one of the kids on the show was a young actress named Joanna Pang, who, five years later, would be a student sidekick for Filmation's The Mighty Isis.)

When WPIX produced a fortieth anniversary special some years back — worth catching alone, if possible, for some terrific material by Chuck McCann — Corbett still looked like a million bucks. And, happily, hadn't lost the smile that had once joined so many of us.

Carol Corbett and Bob McFadden were on a number of the Bob Booker-George Foster comedy albums produced in the sixties and seventies, including one of my favorites — Jack E. Leonard's Scream On Someone You Love Today! (It's out on CD. Here's an Amazon link if you want to buy a copy.) But other than that, I didn't know much about Carol Corbett…so thanks, James, for cluing me in. It's amazing the affection some of us still retain for the kids' show hosts of our youth, and sad that the generation after us has no one comparable to remember.

Here's a short article in Salon (which means you may have to watch an ad in order to read it and it may not be worth your time) that theorizes on O.J. Simpson's psychological reasons for the forthcoming "if I did it" shows and book. As I mentioned here with regard to analyzing Presidents of these United States, I have a very limited belief in the building of psychiatric profiles on total strangers based on a few of their public utterances or deeds. It's interesting to read of the possible motives someone might have to be doing what Simpson is doing but they're still just hunches by some doctor-types who never met the guy and are guessing, largely so some reporter can build a story. O.J. himself may not even know why he's doing it.

Since I'm as unqualified to judge this as anyone else, I will. I think you have a guy here who based his entire post-football life on celebrity. His line of work was being O.J. and you don't even have to make the distinction as to whether he needed the fame to feed his ego or because it paid well. He needed compensation in both areas. The trial cost him his riches and the subsequent shunning cost him his fans and, therefore, the only way he knows to replenish his personal fortune. As one project after another fell apart or bombed, it proved that there's just no market out there for O.J. Simpson. So he figures he's got nothing to lose…might as well try this.

In his line of work, after all, you kind of need to be making money to make money. No one went for his book and movie proposals because it didn't seem that there were any significant sums of currency to be made by being in business with O.J. Simpson…certainly not enough to compensate a financier for the condemnation they'd endure for it. Whether or not Simpson personally makes a lot of cash from this new semi-confession, someone might do quite well and that might prompt others to be more willing to help him get the O.J. business going again. At the very least, he oughta make something off it.

I am reminded of something I was once told by Vince McMahon, the wrestling entrepreneur. I was producing a show on which he had an Exec Producer title and we got to talking about his empire and the performers who worked for him. At the time, Mr. T was still something of a TV superstar but was occasionally popping up in the ring, teaming up with Hulk Hogan to thrash bad guys who were still bad guys. If only to make conversation, I asked McMahon how he was able to persuade Mr. T, who then seemed to have a real acting career of sorts, to get into the wrestling biz. Vince looked at me like I'd just asked him the stupidest question in the history of Mankind (an accomplishment of which I am more than capable) and said the following very calmly, the way you'd talk to a child with a severe learning disability. He said, "In the history of Professional Wrestling, no one has ever done anything for any reason except money."

In other words, forget about deep emotional justifications and personal guilts and desires to please dead relatives and all that. People sometimes do something just because they think there's a buck in it. Maybe that's all that's happening with Simpson.

I've always loved Phil Silvers. Loved him in everything he ever did, even that one episode of Gilligan's Island he was in. (Did you know Mr. Silvers was one of the owners of that show? He was. A few years after Bilko went off, he returned to CBS in a new sitcom — The New Phil Silvers Show — and it was a flop. But because he was a big star when he signed on for it, he got ownership of the show and his production company, Gladasya Productions, got a commitment from the network for financial participation in a series that didn't star him. That series turned out to be Gilligan's Island and I think Silvers told me he'd made more money off that than he did off playing Sgt. Bilko.)

Anyway, I was fortunate to have a very long interview/brunch with Mr. Silvers around three years before he left us for that big Off Track Betting parlor in the sky. Our chat took place at Nate 'n Al's Delicatessen in Beverly Hills and it was quite thrilling and even included a cameo appearance by Milton Berle. Mr. Berle came in, saw that Phil was being questioned by some clown with a tape recorder and rushed over to horn in on the interview. Oddly enough, he appeared just as we were discussing how Silvers had turned down the lead in the original production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and was replaced by…Milton Berle. (Berle later dropped out and was replaced by Zero Mostel.)

Some time ago, I posted two excerpts from that chat on this site. This one is about It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and this one is about the big dance number from the movie, Cover Girl. You'll want to read the latter in conjunction with today's clip…preferably before. Silvers was enormously proud of his participation in that number, dancing alongside Gene Kelly and Rita Hayworth and matching them step for step. This was quite a feat for a guy who was not, unlike Mr. Kelly and Ms. Hayworth, a trained dancer.

One thing I hadn't realized until now is that in the interview, Silvers described it as a six-minute dance number. It isn't. They dance for a little over three minutes. But I'll bet if you had to do it, it felt like six…or a lot more. Anyway, go read the interview then come back here and watch the performance. And now I'm going to bed because just watching the performance again made me tired. Also, it's four o'clock in the friggin' morning. Good night.

Several folks have sent me a link to an online petition, apparently instigated by the Goldman family, protesting the forthcoming O.J. Simpson broadcasts. It's called Don't Pay O.J., but the text is a little muddy as to whether they're more bothered by Simpson getting the public forum or Simpson getting the chance to make money. Perhaps the distinction doesn't matter in this case.

I must admit I'm a little uncomfortable with the idea of bringing pressure against booksellers not to carry his book. Bookstores, of course, have the right to not carry anything they find tasteless but they shouldn't be put in the position of evaluating and judging content. As contemptible as Simpson is, he still has his First Amendment rights…and I like the idea of a book dealer who carries everything and lets the buying public decide what they will and will not buy.

Forgot to mention: Among the people I ran into at the P.P.B. luncheon was Chuck McCann, who mentioned that a crew is currently prepping a little documentary on him that will be included on the forthcoming DVD release of all the Cool McCool cartoons. Also ran into voice actor supreme Wally Wingert, who is heading up that crew. (Wally is responsible for the extras on the new DVD of The Groovy Goolies.)

Cool McCool was a very silly animated series that ran on NBC for 20 episodes, the first of which aired in September of '66. McCool was a suave but occasionally inept detective who looked like Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau but acted more like Maxwell Smart, whose series had been the big prime-time hit of the previous season.

The show also had enormous overtones of Batman in it, presumably because Bob Kane was one of its two creators. That's right: Two. Kane is almost always referred to as the sole creator but the on-screen credits said the series was the concoction of Kane and Al Brodax, who was the producer of most of the King Features animated efforts of the sixties such as the Beatles cartoons. Cool McCool was one of the methods by which Kane cashed in on the success of the Batman TV show, the one with Adam West. It went on the air in January of '66 and was an immediate hit. He and Brodax must have whipped up Cool McCool and sold it right away in order for it to debut on NBC when it did. Most of the villains McCool chased down were thinly-veiled knock-offs of Batman villains. The Penguin was turned into The Owl. The Joker was turned into The Jack-in-the Box. The Riddler became the Rattler and so on.

The late Bob McFadden was the voice of Cool McCool. That's Mr. McFadden in the photo above. He was a New York-based stand-up comedian, actor and voice performer who did thousands of commercials in his time and an awful lot of cartoons. He was heard on the Linus the Lionhearted show and Milton the Monster and umpteen others. He even did the Karloff-type voice of Frankenberry in that cereal's commercials. (He had a long association with monsters. In addition to Milton and Frankenberry, McFadden had a hit novelty record — "The Mummy," which he performed with Rod McKuen. Dr. Demento still plays it several times a year.) McFadden passed away in 2000.

The female voices on the show were provided by Carol Corbett and the male voices not done by McFadden — which included all the villains — came out of Chuck McCann. I'm afraid I don't know much more than that about the show. One of the reasons I'm eager to get this forthcoming DVD whenever it comes out — I don't think there's a release date yet — is to read the credits and find out who was responsible. By the way: The DVD pictured above is not the DVD that Wally's assembling. That's the cover of an old British release. It's hard finding visual material on this show.

Another reason I want to get The Complete Cool McCool (or whatever they call it) is to see if, like the Peter Falk show I just mentioned, it's still good. Not everything I liked when I was younger is. Every time The Man From U.N.C.L.E. pops up on a channel I get on my satellite dish, I try an episode and find myself wondering what I ever liked about that show. Same with the Raymond Burr Perry Mason shows and about 80% of all the Woody Woodpecker cartoons that were ever made. Matter of fact, I think some of those shows have been quietly remade to lower their production values and quality. They couldn't have looked that bad when I was a kid. We'll see if Cool McCool is still cool.

This afternoon, I attended a luncheon of the Pacific Pioneer Broadcasters, an L.A.-based group of folks who've been involving in radio or TV for a couple of decades or more. Several times a year, they have these ceremonies that honor a great in the field of entertainment and today, the Guest of Honor was Peter Falk. Is there a more respected, beloved actor out there than Peter Falk? I sure can't think of one.

This was an unusual P.P.B. luncheon. Usually, the dais is packed with everyone they can get who ever worked with the honoree, and everyone talks so long that the proceedings threaten to become a dinner in their honor. This time, there were only a few speakers and they all kept it short. "They," in this case, were Joe Mantegna, Robert Culp, Ed Begley Jr., Dabney Coleman, Paul Reiser, Hal Kanter and Shera Danese. Ms. Danese is also known as Mrs. Peter Falk.

All of the speeches were warm and wonderful. Dabney Coleman was properly acerbic, Robert Culp told a funny story about being upstaged by Falk in one of the latter's first stage role, and Ed Begley surprised everyone by doing the best Peter Falk impression most of us had ever heard. As a matter of fact, when Falk finally got up to thank everyone, he sounded less like Peter Falk than Ed Begley did. After the festivities, Falk signed copies of his new autobiography, Just One More Thing: Stories from My Life, for those of us willing to buy a copy and wait in line. I, of course, was. Flipping through it, which is all I've had time to do, it seems like a nice, anecdote-filled overview of a stellar career.

As I think of it, one of the things missing from this afternoon was a full sense of how stellar that career was been. While we ate, they ran a montage of highlights from Falk's film work. (In his acceptance speech, he said his favorite part of the afternoon was when all his actor friends who were present were forced to watch his clips.) It was an amazing reel, not because of what was in it but because of what wasn't: No clip from Pocketful of Miracles or The Princess Bride or Murder, Inc. or Murder By Death or any of his TV work except for Columbo. They didn't even have time for It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. How many actors have so much fine work to their credit that you have to omit stuff like that? No one even mentioned a 1966 TV series Falk did called The Trials of O'Brien, which I'd love to view again, just to see if they were all as good as I remember. I know he was. He's always good. He's Peter Falk.

For no particular reason, I seem to post any news I come across about the musical version of The Producers. The latest headline in that area is that Mel Brooks has confirmed that the Vegas production, which opens 1/31/7 at the Paris Hotel there, will clock in at 88 minutes and that there will be one act with no intermission. I have no desire to see the show truncated like that but I'm fascinated to see what they're cutting and, I suppose, to know how well it works.

Also, the New York production is in talks with a new star to step into the lead. Can you say, "Tony Danza is…Max Bialystock?" I can't, either. But that's what they're saying.

This is about the upcoming specials on Fox in which O.J. Simpson will tell us that he didn't savagely murder two people but if he had savagely murdered them, here's how he would have done it…maybe.

A lot of folks are outraged about this and they should be…although as outrages go, it doesn't sound as bad to me as some of the things that are still causing human beings to die and will cause a lot more to perish in the future. I mean, O.J.'s killing spree seems to have stopped at two, whereas the Iraq War is getting people killed every day. So far, 2,850 have died and that's only counting American soldiers, which is all a lot of Americans count anyway. The rate of death is increasing and it will probably continue to increase as long as George W. Bush equates changing plans with losing. And Global Warming may well kill more people per second than Simpson has killed in his entire life. Even if it doesn't turn out to be quite the threat some make it out to be, the suppression of facts about the problem — and reluctance to deal with it honestly — should spark plenty of outrage.

But maybe some of us only have the capacity for outrage over lesser issues, and O.J. Simpson is one of the greater lesser issues. The other night on The Tonight Show, Jay Leno paused in mid-monologue to suggest a nationwide boycott of the companies that sponsor the broadcasts. And Bill O'Reilly told his audience that he will personally boycott the products of those who advertise during the shows. (Actually, since advertisers often buy blocks of commercial time without regard to specific programs, it would be more correct to say he's going to boycott the wares of anyone who doesn't specifically pull their ads from the Simpson shows.) Here are his exact words…

So here's what I'm going to do as a citizen. I'm not going to watch the Simpson show or even look at the book. I'm not even going to look at it. If any company sponsors the TV program, I will not buy anything that company sells — ever.

So here's my question: This is the stand of someone who wants companies to be financially discouraged from supporting things like the Simpson programs. But the corporation that stands to benefit most from those shows is Fox Broadcasting, owner of both the network airing the O.J. programs and the news channel that airs O'Reilly's series. Does it make a lot of sense to boycott Harry's Cheese Doodles because they bought a package of advertising on Fox and didn't demand that none of their spots air during the O.J. shows…but not boycott Fox for airing the shows at all? For that matter, those Simpson hours will contain commercials for other Fox programming. There'll be a lot of Fox promos if most advertisers pull their commercials. If there's an ad in there for Fox News, does that mean that O'Reilly will have to boycott his own channel? That he can appear on it but not watch it?

This could be interesting.

I've been a member of the Magic Castle in Hollywood for around a quarter of a century, which means I've seen a lot of great magicians. One of the best — and that isn't just my opinion, it's everyone's in the world of magic — is Whit Haydn. He's an amazing manipulator of cards and a historian of cheats and swindles. (He's also a fine teacher. I took a class from him once at the Castle and learned to do a couple of his tricks about one ten-thousandth as well as he does them…which is still not too terrible.) Anyway, in our clip today, you'll see Whit performing a trick called "The Ambitious Card." A number of magicians do their versions of this feat but no one does it better.

Over on the Wizard site, there's a brief interview with Howard Chaykin about his work with master comic book illustrator Gil Kane. It's worth a read for anyone interested in Gil's work but I was amused by this line…

I was never a big fan of Joe Giella's inking on him, but I loved what his green did on him, as well as Murphy Anderson's.

Obviously, that sentence doesn't make any sense. It would have, however, if the editor/transcriber had been aware that the person who replaced Joe Giella as Gil's inker was named Sid Greene. I have a hunch that's what Howard actually said.

Ellen Knickmeyer on how things are going in Iraq. In case you don't have time to read the whole thing, I'll summarize: They're bad. People are dying at an alarming rate. And no matter what we do, it's not going to get better. There. I just saved you five minutes of depressing reading.

Where were you on New Year's Eve, 1996? I was on Las Vegas Boulevard, crammed in among seventy-seven trillion people who gathered to watch the Hacienda Hotel get blown up and brought down. With me was a lady friend of mine who'd danced in the Lance Burton show when it was in the Hacienda's showroom. She hated the place and wanted to be present for its demise.

It took us a long time to make our way through the crowds to get to our vantage point for the implosion. It took even longer to make our way back down The Strip…and in between, we experienced the awesome pleasure of inhaling about four tons of dust from the demolition. Still, it was almost worth it for the fireworks display that preceded the nuking of the Hacienda. (Very typical of Las Vegas. On New Year's Eve, that street is naturally packed with folks partying and celebrating and even — you may be shocked to hear of this going on that night in that city — drinking. No "added attractions" were needed to draw a mob…but someone decided too much was not enough so they wanted to also blow up a hotel…plus, they set off something like a half million bucks worth of fireworks. If you like excess, Vegas is your place.)

I wrote about that evening in this article which you can read elsewhere on this site. And then you can come back here and play today's clip, which is six minutes of someone's home movies from that night. You won't experience the thrill of the fireworks display, which had to be seen live to be believed and appreciated. But you also won't have to breathe powdered hotel or have drunks melt your windbreaker with their breath.