Monthly Archives: April 2007

A number of folks have sent me info and discussion of this matter of baseball announcers being on a short delay. For the best explanation, we turn to the wise and all-knowing Paul Harris, whose talk fest is heard Monday through Friday on KMOX radio in St. Louis.

The Life was an original Broadway musical that ran for a little over a year beginning in 1997. Reviews were mixed and when it closed, it disappeared. There have been very few productions of it since. I saw it in New York and liked parts of it but not the whole, which was all about pimps and prostitution and the rise of one lady in that very old profession to Hollywood stardom. It struck me as a show filled with people I didn't care about and one that took a phony, sanitized look at a tawdry world.

Still, some of the songs were quite good. Cy Coleman wrote the music and the lyrics were by Ira Gasman. Our clip today is a promotional video that was made of the show's hooker chorus singing "My Body," which was supposed to be some sort of whores' anthem. It's a perfectly fine theatre number but I think it also demonstrates what was wrong with the show.

You may remember that last year around this time, Stephen Colbert caused something of a ruckus with his performance at the White House Correspondents Dinner. I meant to alert you but forgot that this year's was this evening, with Rich Little performing what everyone expected (correctly, it would seem) would be less controversial material.

I haven't watched it yet. I have my TiVo set up to record a rebroadcast in a few hours on C-Span. You can find the schedule and the video can also be watched online at the C-Span website, which doesn't work for me insofar as video clips are concerned but may for you. I imagine the clip will show up on YouTube or Google Video in the next day or so. If this report is correct though, you may not want to take the time to watch. Bush, they say, made no attempt at humor, apparently out of respect for the Virginia Tech shootings. Rich Little, they say, didn't do so well. I'll let you know if I disagree.

I believe Hollywood is heading, much in the manner of a runaway train, towards a big, crippling strike over how residuals will be paid and revenue streams divided for the new marketplace of DVD, digital delivery, Internet podcasts, etc. There are many possible scenarios over when the strike could come…and even which labor organization(s) will lead the way, though the smart money is on the Writers Guild with the Screen Actors Guild tagging along if it can get its leadership squabbles in check. In any case, the issue is out there and it seems unlikely that it can be resolved by the producers being reasonable.

Strikes have not been settled or prevented through sheer reasonableness for a long time in this town. Some of the labor actions of the fifties and sixties were but that was before the main entertainment companies were international conglomerates. The legendary Lew Wasserman, the super-agent who used to run MCA and Universal, ended or headed off several strikes by getting on the phone to the heads of MGM, Disney, Warner Brothers, Paramount and others and working out a deal. But there is no more Lew Wasserman, nor do Time-Warner, Sony, the current Disney and the rest operate on that kind of personal level nowadays.

I hope I'm wrong but the only way I can imagine there not being a major conflagration is if the Writers Guild and SAG both experience internal collapses and their memberships decide not to fight for a fair share in these new revenues. That doesn't seem likely. In fact, if it does happen, we will probably see all-out war, anyway. We'll just see the members of those unions firing at one another, rather than at Management.

The other day, a group of studio and network heads announced a proposal that their side and the unions jointly fund — and I quote — "a showbiz version of the report from the Iraq Study Group" to study and propose new formulas. I suspect this will be about as effective as the real report from the Iraq Study Group and I wonder why they would liken their idea to that. Here are some details on the proposed report.

Ordinarily, I'm wary of the "everything you know is wrong" article. Almost any time anything happens in our world and a conventional, obvious wisdom emerges, you're never more than two clicks away from an article on the Internet telling you why the opposite is true. If some candidate makes a horrific gaffe and plunges in the polls, someone will pen a piece that will explain that while this may look bad for that candidate, it is actually a bit of brilliant strategizing that has guaranteed his/her election in a landslide. I'm all for examining all possibilities but most of these articles seem forced and contrived and usually intended as attention-getting, separate-yourself-from-the-herd exercises.

That said, it is worth considering this article by Dahlia Lithwick, whose premise is that Alberto Gonzales did a great job with his testimony the other day.

Boy, you people are fast. I just posted the question in the previous item and here comes Dave Sikula with the answer, which we can all find in this article. Basically, it's that stations all over the country have put in delays on live broadcasts for fear of F.C.C. fines if a naughty word gets on the air. Seems silly to me. Vin Scully has been broadcasting Dodgers games since 1950. How many obscenities have snuck in during that time?

My impression is that when there is outrage over naughty words or content on TV or radio, it's either over prepared content or cases like the Janet Jackson breast incident where someone felt the broadcasters could and should have pre-screened what was going to happen. Almost every week it seems, some forbidden word slips onto a news program or other live show somewhere and if it's clearly an accident, even the people who go way out of their way to get outraged about obscenity on TV or radio don't get outraged. I'm more offended by the delay than I would be about anything it could prevent.

Speaking of "out of sync," I have a question which will probably have to be answered by a baseball fan in Los Angeles.

When I was a kid and occasionally following the L.A. Dodgers, one of the big appeals was Vin Scully, who called the play-by-play. He's still the most important person in the stadium whenever that team plays. My father, who followed baseball more than I did, wouldn't dream of watching a game without Scully in his ear. Whenever we went to a game, he took along a transistor radio so he could listen to Vinnie describe what we were seeing…and even if he hadn't brought the radio along, so many other Dodger fans did that you could often hear Scully throughout the bleachers.

Even watching the Dodgers on TV, he had to have Vin Scully. For a time, Scully's co-anchor was a guy named Jerry Doggett, who was probably a decent-enough sportscaster but he wasn't the Ol' Redhead. Scully and Doggett would switch off. One would call a few innings on the TV broadcast while the other did the radio narration, then they'd swap. Whenever Scully was on the radio, my father would mute the sound on the television and haul out his radio so he could hear Vin.

The other day, I was discussing this with a friend who, unlike me, follows the Dodgers these days. She said that you can't do this now. According to her, they have the radio transmission of Vin Scully on a five second delay. So if you listen to him, he's not describing what you're seeing live or on your TV screen. He's a few seconds behind and it doesn't work.

I guess this is a multi-part question, then. Is this true? And if so, is it being done intentionally to discourage people from listening to Vin Scully on the radio while they watch the game at the stadium or on TV? I can't imagine why Vin Scully would need to be broadcast on a delay, nor can I fathom why anyone would care if you listened to him this way. Can anyone clear this up for me?

Congressguy Barney Frank (D-Mass.) was the chief sponsor of the Executive Compensation Act, which passed in the House yesterday by a vote of 269 to 134. The bill gives shareholders of public companies the right to cast an advisory ballot on the compensation awarded to the company's executives. Here, in case you're interested, are the details.

Before it passed, there was a last minute attempt by some Republicans to insert a provision that Frank felt was ill-timed. Here we see him objecting to it. It's about four minutes, it's rather entertaining, and it's a bit out of sync. For some reason, most of the clips on YouTube of Barney Frank have him speaking out of sync. This is apparently a side effect of being gay.

Take the old Hanna-Barbera Super Friends cartoon show. Recast with Democrats as the super-heroes and Republicans as the super-villains and what do you have? You have The Challenge of the Super-Duper Friends.

Reader Bill Sinkins writes…

Thanks for sharing the e-mail from Dick DeBartolo. It reminded me of the 60 Minutes feature on MAD that aired many years ago. At that time, the parent company that owned MAD (I forget who it was) had a policy that required all senior management to get an annual physical. Supposedly, Gaines hated going to the doctor, so he sent a much younger staffer as a body double. They also related the story of Gaines flying to some remote place (Guam, perhaps?) along with several senior staff members to personally entreat their one subscriber there to renew his subscription. I haven't picked up MAD in years, maybe I should, for old time's sake…

It wasn't Guam. It was Haiti. And Gaines didn't fly there to get the one subscriber to renew. He'd decided to take the entire staff on a vacation — it was the first of the legendary MAD trips — and out of curiosity, he had someone look and see if MAD had any subscribers there. When it turned out they had one and his subscription had just expired, Gaines decided to pay the guy a visit. He loaded his entourage in five jeeps, drove over to the address and presented the fellow with a renewal card.

The funniest part of the story is probably that in spite of that, the reader didn't want to renew. But he agreed to accept a free subscription.

Gaines was a colorful guy. I think though that MAD has actually survived the loss of him. In my opinion as a MAD completist, the magazine is now better than it's been in a long time. It's gone up and down over the years but I think it's clearly on an "up" and you oughta pick up a copy, not for old time's sake — you won't recognize a lot of the credits — but because it's a pretty funny publication.

The Silent Movie Theatre over on Fairfax was an important part of my childhood. As I explained here, I spent many a Friday evening in its hard seats watching Laurel and Hardy or Chaplin or Douglas Fairbanks or some other star of legendary status, and I developed a casual friendship with the man who ran the place.

Recently, I was interviewed for a forthcoming documentary on the Silent Movie Theatre. A gentleman named Iain Kennedy just sent me the following brief summary of his project…

The documentary will look at the history of the theater through the personal recollections of those people who have worked there or who went there as members of the audience. Particular focus will be given to the owners of theater who made it an L.A. landmark and kept silent films running for audiences to re-discover and enjoy. We're very interested in hearing from people who went to the theater during the John and Dorothy Hampton "era" (approximately 1942 to 1979) and Lawrence Austin's tenure (1991 to 1997), as well as more recent years (Charlie Lustman's revival of the theater, 1999-2006).

If you are such a person, drop me a note and I'll forward it to Iain.

Ah, what has Mark found for us this morning on YouTube? Mark has found the title number of one of his favorite musicals, On the Twentieth Century, a show which had book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, and music by Cy Coleman. The show opened in early 1978 and the original cast was toplined by John Cullum, Madeline Kahn, Imogene Coca, and Kevin Kline. Ms. Kahn left after just a few months, allegedly due to illness and with lots of other reasons rumored. Many years later when I worked with Ms. Coca, I asked her about the reason for Kahn's sudden departure and she just shook her head and said, "Poor girl…so talented and so many problems." Make of that what you will.

This number is from that year's Tony Awards broadcast in May, by which time Madeline Kahn was long gone and Judy Kaye, who you'll see in the clip, was in her place and being hailed as a major find. The show — briefly — is about a train ride from Chicago to New York, during which many things happen but most of them center around the attempts of an unscrupulous producer (the part played by Cullum) to woo back his greatest discovery, Lily Garland, who has gone on to stardom since she left him. Lily Garland is the role originated by Ms. Kahn and handed off to Ms. Kaye. And of course, you'll see Coca and Kline in there, as well. Apparently, you weren't allowed to be in this show unless your last name started with a "K" sound.

Here's that number, which includes a lot of lyrics that somehow didn't make it onto the cast album…

Scalping tickets to Broadway shows is illegal in New York…but it may not be for long. Read all about it.

Dahlia Lithwick on today's testimony by Alberto Gonzales. I think we're reaching the stage where the only thing keeping this guy in his job is his seeming ability to defy the law of inertia. It's like, "Yeah, he should quit. But he should have quit a month ago and he's still there. So maybe 'should quit' doesn't apply to him."

Dick DeBartolo, who's been writing funny stuff for MAD Magazine for centuries, worked for almost as long at the Goodson-Todman game show factory. He sends in the following…

I wrote The Match Game, but also worked on To Tell The Truth. One week, I got Gaines on as a central subject. (Gaines as in William M. Gaines, for those who might not know.) I'll never forget Bill's joy when it was Kitty Carlisle's turn to pick who she thought was the real publisher of MAD Magazine. She said it obviously wasn't #3 (Gaines.) When the host (can't remember if it was Garry or Joe G.) said "why not?" Kitty said: "Well, the publisher of MAD, a very successful magazine, must be an executive and…and…well, just look at #3. It can't be him!"

Gaines was thrilled not to look like an executive. God bless him. And Kitty, too. I hope they meet up there.

If they do, she'll probably think, "What would the guy who published Tales from the Crypt be doing up here?" But it's a nice thought.