Monthly Archives: June 2008

I spent a few hours yesterday over on two soundstages at Universal Studios that were far from the recent fire. I was watching people there film portions of the finale to Land of the Lost, a forthcoming movie starring Will Ferrell in a remake/update of the classic Sid and Marty Krofft Saturday morn series of the same name. It'll be a big (maybe the big) Summer release next year ('09) and while I'm not supposed to divulge what I saw, I don't think they'll be too upset if I tell you it looked terrific. Remind me, when we get closer to the release and things aren't so hush-hush, to tell a great story about something one of the special effects guys told me.

A few hours earlier, I was in Beverly Hills for a meeting and I ducked into one of my favorite pizza places (this one) for a quick slice. This was before I realized that when I got to the set, they'd be serving pizza for dinner. Anyway, I'm in the pizza place in Beverly Hills and the fellow ahead of me looks at a wall of celebrity photos, points to one of Christopher Walken and asks, "Does he come in here?" The guy behind the counter says, "Occasionally." The customer says, "Then I want a slice of pizza with more cow bell!"

The guy behind the counter — who apparently had never seen this sketch (with Will Ferrell, oddly enough) — turns to the guy making the pizzas and says, "Hey, we got cowbell?" The guy making pizzas answers, "No."

The customer — not one to give up on a lame joke just because nobody gets it — announces, "Guys, I gotta have more cowbell." The man behind the counter gives him a look and says, "I told you…we don't have cowbell. We have pepperoni. We have sausage. We have pineapple…"

"All right, all right," the customer says. Then he points to a picture on the wall of Jack Nicholson and says, "I'll have a chicken salad sandwich…"

He didn't get a laugh with that, either. When I left with my order, he was still working the wall…

If you're going to keep track of possible electoral vote scenarios this fall, you'll want to bookmark this site which does a great job of following polls and showing you how everyone's doing. The caution is that they take even a one-point lead (in a poll with a margin of error greater than that) as significant.

For instance, at this moment (it could change within the hour), they have Obama at 317 and McCain at 221. Since you need 270 to win, that sounds like a landslide for Obama…but take a closer look. They have Virginia as "barely Democratic" and they award Obama its 13 electoral votes. Why? Because the Rasmussen Poll has Obama at 45% and McCain at 44%. The margin of error in this poll is 4.5% so a one point lead is meaningless. (Then again, Rasmussen is the poll most Republicans love. When all others have Democrats ahead, Rasmussen often favors the G.O.P., at least when it's far enough from election day that they won't be proven instantly wrong.)

Or take Nevada. The site gives its 5 electoral votes to McCain since McCain is at 44% and Obama's at 42% in a Mason-Dixon poll with a 3 point margin o' error. Obama gets Missouri's 11 and Ohio's 20 though he's one point ahead there while McCain gets North Carolina's 15 due to being two points ahead. And all of this is going by only one poll per state…the most recent one, even if one the day before said something very different.

Bottom line: Use it but click through on the swing states and look at all the polls for a given state and at the trends. In much of the country, it is already over: McCain ain't gonna win California or New York. Obama ain't gonna win Texas or Utah. And an awful lot of states could go either way.

Many throughout the blogosphere are speculating on who'll be the new host of Meet the Press, replacing the late Tim Russert. My impression is that most folks are expecting it to be David Gregory and wishing it would be Chuck Todd. Jonah Goldberg endorses Todd but also has this to throw into the discussion…

All of that said, I think the show should return to a panel, at least for the time being. What's wrong with bringing three or four hard-hitting journalists to ask questions the way they used to?

Well, for one thing, a lot of politicians today think they can have very successful careers as long as they never sit down opposite three or four hard-hitting journalists. How often have you see the kind of folks who should be interrogated that way put themselves in that position? One of the things Mr. Russert brought to the job was that he had a lot of good will in Washington and newsmakers weren't that afraid of facing him. Take a look at all the leaked memos and such where folks in the Bush administration suggested Meet the Press as a great place to get their message out. Once in a while, Russert did manage to hold someone's feet to the flames but those instances were the rare exceptions…and they probably surprised the heck out of the person who got nailed.

By the time this election is over, Barack Obama will have gone on Fox News just often enough to say he wasn't afraid to do so…and John McCain probably won't venture within six blocks of Keith Olbermann. I think it would be great to have a show where a group of take-no-prisoners reporters asked the hard questions. I just don't think there'd be anyone there to answer them.

In an e-mail, Jon Delfin pointed out something I hadn't noticed about last night's Tony Awards telecast: No Obit Montage. Plenty o' theatrical figures have passed away since the last Tonys, including Kitty Carlisle Hart, Alvin Colt, Paul Scofield, Beverly Sills, Deborah Kerr, Robert Goulet, Michael Kidd, Gretchen Wyler, Alice Ghostley, Myoshi Umeki, Tom Poston and the guy in the banana suit, Charles Nelson Reilly. Still, someone made the decision not to bring the proceedings to the usual grim halt by playing sad music and rattling off the list of the departed.

Ratings-wise, it didn't help a lot. The telecast averaged a 4.9 rating and an 8 share, which was down a bit from last year. Still, that's not terrible. CBS has renewed series that get numbers like that…and which sponsors are less eager to buy time in. The audience for the Tonys may be small but it has a nice "buying" profile and demographic so it's probably not in any danger of not being on CBS for years to come.

The folks behind the Tonys are probably satisfied that the audience is sufficiently large…and comprised of folks who are likely to buy tickets to Broadway productions. That is, after all, the main goal of the broadcast — to serve as an infomercial for shows in New York. It will be interesting to see what shows announce their closings in the next few days. There are usually a few marginal ones who hang around long enough to see what, if anything, the Tony show will do for their ticket sales.

Here, for the record, is the speech Mark Rylance gave at the Tony Awards when he won for his performance in the current revival of Boeing-Boeing. This is from the writings of a poet named Lewis Jenkins…

When you are in town, wearing some kind of uniform is helpful, policeman, priest, etc. Driving a tank is very impressive or a car with official lettering on the side. If that isn't to your taste, you could join the revolution, wear an armband, carry a homemade flag tied to a broom handle, or a placard bearing an incendiary slogan. At the very least, you should wear a suit and carry a briefcase and a cell phone, or wear a team jacket and a baseball cap and carry a cell phone. If you go into the woods, the back country, someplace past all human habitation, it is a good idea to wear orange and carry a gun, or depending on the season, carry a fishing pole, or a camera with a big lens. Otherwise, it might appear that you have no idea what you are doing, that you are merely wandering the earth, no particular reason for being here, no particular place to go.

That was the man's acceptance speech. No mention of the play or his co-stars or director or his family or his agent or anything. He just performed that. And the audience loved it.

Every month, the folks at Turner Classic Movies, slap some old film up on their website which you can watch online if you're of a mind to. This month, it's One Man's Journey, a 1933 melodrama starring Lionel Barrymore, Joel McCrea, May Robson and Dorothy Jordan. Barrymore plays a small town country doctor who is so devoted to his practice and to healing the sick in his town that he neglects his own needs. It's a nice little film with a good score by Max Steiner. You can watch it by clicking…oh, how about clicking right here? It runs about seventy minutes.

And the eleven o'clock news led with the headline that same-sex marriage is only hours from commencing in California. They're going to start issuing licenses tomorrow at 5:01 PM. That's quite a follow-up to the Tony Awards…which, by the way, struck me as the least-gay Tony telecast in many years.

The Tony Awards actually went two or three minutes over this evening. That's interesting because a couple years ago, CBS was telling the producers that overage would not be tolerated; that even if it meant cutting off the final award before the winner was announced, the 11:00 local news would not start even five seconds late.

That was back when the show was crammed into a two-hour time slot, sometimes with an extra hour preceding it on PBS. The telecasts have gotten so much better since someone at CBS had the good sense to say, "Hey, if we're going to broadcast the Tony Awards, let's really broadcast the Tony Awards." So it went to three hours and now, they seem to have also given them a few minutes of a grace period at the end, which this year was necessary. (Wish I'd known that. My TiVo recording ended before the show did.)

I thought it was a pretty good show. I know for some, half the fun is bitching about the clothes and the speeches and the ghastly production numbers, and I suppose some people are now having a wonderful time, complaining about the little segments with Whoopi Goldberg performing in scenes from long-running musicals. But the show kept moving and apart from the necessity of giving out a lot of awards to people America doesn't care about, I thought it was about as good as the Tonys are likely to be. I was actually disappointed that things moved at such a rapid clip that Whoopi didn't get to say much.

Some of the shows looked pretty inviting. I have a feeling Xanadu and Little Mermaid sold a lot of tickets tonight while Young Frankenstein and Grease didn't. The number from Grease looked like the new stage version was adapted from the movie by someone who didn't know there'd ever been an old stage version.

Oh, excuse me. I made a mistake in the above paragraph. The show is not called Young Frankenstein. It's actually The New Mel Brooks Musical, Young Frankenstein. If you want to know one of the reasons it didn't get much in the way of Tony nominations (it won none of the few it got), there's a big hint in that official title. True, reviews weren't wonderful but the show was also known within the Broadway community for a certain air of arrogance in its advance publicity, ticket prices, refusal to report grosses and other little ways. I suspect someone will also be peeved at that commercial they ran during the East Coast feed and which I caught via my satellite dish. It touted the show as "Winner! Best Musical 2008!" — which would make many think it had won the Tony in that category. Actually, in type that could not possibly be read on any TV screen, it presumably admitted that this was the Outer Critics Circle Award.

Best acceptance speech? Mark Rylance, winner of Best Actor in a Play for Boeing-Boeing. He did a rambling monologue that had nothing to do with the event or the show or the award. From press coverage, I gather that it was an excerpt from The Back Country, an essay by the poet, Lewis Jenkins. It sure got the crowd's attention and in a good way.

Nice tribute to Rent. I'm sorry Mr. Sondheim was a no-show but his acceptance note, read by Mandy Patinkin, was classy. The medley from South Pacific looked especially good…almost enough to make me want to see this production of a show I've never much liked.

That's all I have. Good job, whoever did the show this year. I'm sorry my TiVo cut off the credits so I don't know who you are.

Oh, wait. I just realized the West Coast telecast is concluding as I'm typing this so I just turned the set on. Executive Producers Ricky Kirshner and Glenn Weiss…Weiss directed…Dave Boone was the writer. Fine job. And the late news started at 11:01:30 so they only went a minute and a half over.