Monthly Archives: February 2009

I'm receiving a lot of questions and comments about those CBS Anniversary clips I featured yesterday morning. Obviously, we don't know why certain people weren't there but I suspect most of the obvious absences were just because someone was not in or around L.A. at the time it was done. In some cases, they may have decided not to bring in everyone from a show with a large cast like M*A*S*H. They also, understandably, favored folks who were on the shows the network was then promoting heavily.

I assume you're all seeing how many in the first clip you can name. If you want to play a game with the second one, try to figure out which stars were shot separately and edited in. I'm pretty sure Bill Cosby's walk-in was an insert. And no, I don't understand why certain people were designated as Wednesday people and others were Thursday and so on. Some of those folks scored their greatest success on a series that was always (or almost always) on one day but the newsmen could have been on any day and so could some of the others.

Maybe I'm reading too much into this but do you get the feeling that most of these performers were really, really proud to be a part of this? Almost all of them have that "I just won an Oscar" look, like this was an important moment of personal validation. The Red Skeltons and the James Arnesses were happy that their place in history was remembered while the Sandy Duncans and the Jamie Farrs were thrilled that they were included in a group with the Red Skeltons and the James Arnesses.

As others have noted, of course, it's also a sad reminder of how many of these people are no longer with us…and how many are but don't work much. There's also a sense of "era" passing. You could do a special like this today and gather an equal number of performers who'd been on a CBS series…but I don't think it would have a smidgen of the impact of seeing Danny Kaye and Phil Silvers and Art Carney and Lucille Ball and so many others.

Back in this post, we linked to a video commercial for the short-lived revival of You Bet Your Life with Buddy Hackett trying to fill the stool of Groucho Marx. It recently brought this message from Eric Burns-White…

I'm a bit out of date — I've been ill — and so I'm making up several weeks on your blog. And I just reached the December 12 link to the Buddy Hackett You Bet Your Life incarnation from 1980. You asked if we knew about it.

Well, for me, Buddy Hackett's You Bet Your Life is the definitive, because it's the one I saw. And it harkens back to another illness. See, in 1980, I was 12 years old. Just old enough to have a nasty bout of — I think — tonsillitis. Not so nasty that I had to have them out, but nasty enough that for a couple of weeks I was desperately ill and stayed in bed. At the foot of that bed was a television, and we were in the odd situation of having really good cable (I grew up in Fort Kent, Maine. As we only received one American commercial station, plus one English Canadian one, two French Canadian stations and PBS, we got cable significantly before markets with lots of overlapping signals.) And every morning, around 11 am, You Bet Your Life with Buddy Hackett came on the television, on WVII TV out of Bangor, if I recall correctly.

This was a new kind of Buddy Hackett for me. I was young enough that I only rarely saw Buddy Hackett on Carson or the like, and I think I managed to miss his appearances on Merv or Mike Douglas or John Davidson. So for me, Buddy Hackett was the guy from the Disney movies — the one who acted a bit like an Idiot Savant and blowtorched bits of Herbie while Dean Jones tried to win the race. And here Hackett was, funny and as dirty as syndicated television would let him be, making jokes and mocking the duck and taking on the contestants.

I was enthralled. A lifelong love of the nightclub humor of Buddy Hackett was born of that illness — to the point that I was kind of stunned as an adult and saw Hackett was sometimes in the Disney films I had originally associated with him. How someone could take four letter words and double-entendres away from Hackett was beyond me.

Seeing that bit of Youtube, still recovering from an illness in my 40's, puts me right back in the person of that sick 12 year old boy who had his understanding of comedy expanded by the irrepressible Buddy Hackett all those years back. As I got older and fell in love with what's now called vintage or classic radio and television, I got to know the original Groucho Marx YBYL and I'd seen (and not been terribly impressed with) the Bill Cosby version, and there were days I wondered if I were the only one to remember Buddy Hackett's turn with the secret word. Thanks for letting me know I'm not.

Buddy Hackett was an interesting guy…in some ways, the last of a breed. He was darn near the last guy who would just get on a stage in Vegas and tell funny stories of the "Two Jews walk into a bar…" variety. But he was also a pretty good comic actor and a good enough ad-libber that his game show should have worked. I suspect it was done in by bad time slots and clearances. There was a period there where syndicators were all trying to establish a game show hit in the 11 PM time slot as an alternative to the local news. None of them ever caught on, and the Hackett You Bet Your Life was largely pushed for that slot, as I recall.

Turning to other matters: The other day, I linked to an odd video clip of The McLean Stevenson Show. I didn't know why someone had made an edited version of it with the opening, closing and commercials but without the episode itself. Brad Ferguson figured it out…

It's most likely an aircheck from WNBC-TV in New York. The station was making a record of the commercials it ran during the Stevenson show. It shows agencies that all their ads had been run as scheduled and without glitches, so pay the bill already. There was no reason to archive the program content. The reason your credit is there is because they'd run just enough of the opening of an episode of something to be able to identify it, which in effect would time-stamp it. That was most easily done by letting the credits roll.

Stations usually didn't keep airchecks for very long. Somebody out there must really be into McLean Stevenson.

Thanks, Brad. And it turns out that a reader of this site actually has a recording of the entirety of that episode so he's making me a copy. I'll get to find out what it was about.

A couple of folks wrote me messages like this one from G. Hallaran…

Since you worked on the show McLean Stevenson did after leaving M*A*S*H, maybe you can answer this question I've always wondered about. What the hell was he thinking? He left the best sitcom in history for a steady stream of the worst. Was the money that good for playing Hello Larry?

I only met McLean Stevenson on a few occasions (and not at all while Dennis and I wrote that episode) but I think I can give you an answer. It came down to a number of things, not the least of which was a feeling that he was sinking forever into the Supporting Actor category on M*A*S*H and that if he was ever going to move up to full stardom, that was the time. He also had some ugly battles with "the suits" (I think that's what he called them) at Twentieth-Century Fox, producers of M*A*S*H. Fox was a pretty cheap outfit and they really didn't like it when the show was a hit and Alan Alda and Wayne Rogers renegotiated for a lot more money. They seem to have taken their frustration out on McLean, treating him as a lot more expendable that he probably was.

At the time, Stevenson was having some problems of anger and temperament, and he got to really dislike the studio and vice-versa. He had a particularly nasty fight with them one morning when the show was going on location to shoot exteriors. It was a cold morning, the crew and craft services truck were late, and Stevenson blew up at the shoddy way he and the cast were being treated and, he said, practically walked off the show then and there.

At that point, one thing was going quite right in Stevenson's life. He was occasionally guest-hosting The Tonight Show and doing a darn good job of it. At the time, there seemed to be a very good chance that Johnny Carson was about to step down. In fact, there are those who claim Carson actually did quit and meant it but that he was persuaded to re-up before the news got out. NBC was talking about McLean as a possible replacement, and that had a lot to do with him deciding to jump networks and sign that NBC contract. If he'd wound up replacing Carson on The Tonight Show, leaving M*A*S*H wouldn't look like such a foolish move now, would it?

Since he didn't get Johnny's job, it was back to the sitcoms…and from there on, I think it was just a matter of the wrong shows or maybe the right shows done wrong. Good actors sometimes make bad movies or TV shows and it isn't always their fault. The trick is to keep the ratio under control and he obviously wasn't able to do that. I suspect there was a wonderful sitcom he could have done after M*A*S*H that would have capped his career in a different, more positive way. He just never managed to find it.

A good profile of one of our favorite cartoonist-people…Al Jaffee.

Someone once said that the way to understand the Screen Actors Guild was to note that its membership could be divided into two groups…

1. The crazed militants and…
2. The really crazed militants.

That's a joke but it's not without its truth. In past years, both kinds of crazed militants have managed to find common ground, link arms and behave like a union. In fact, at times it's been a very effective union that did right by its members and also by the entire industry. This year is not one of those times.

Actor Mike Farrell (a sane, smart man) wrote an overview of the problems and a report on a recent board meeting that should give you an idea of the situation.

It's starting to look like this thing will be resolved in our lifetime. The union's new TV-Theatrical Task Force will probably negotiate a deal with the AMPTP that will provide terms a wee bit better than what was previously on the table. This will not be a great contract and actors in the "Membership First" contingent will rightly say it's not good enough. But enough members will think it's time to end this thing and start rebuilding a shattered guild so it can fight again another day…and I'm guessing the offer will pass, though not in a landslide.

The M.F. group was not wrong about where they should go but they were probably wrong about how to get there. In the end, everyone has lost. If they can all manage to be good losers, they may be able to become a union again by the time the next contract has to be negotiated.

One of the many surprises of Election Night was that the Obama-Biden ticket won North Carolina. They didn't win it by much. The McCain-Palin ticket got 2,128,462 votes in that state while the Democratic slate received 2,142,625. By contrast, in 2004, Bush got 56% of the vote to Kerry's 44%, almost the same margin by which Bush beat Gore there in 2000. Before that, Bill Clinton lost the state twice in narrower contests.

So how is it that Barack Obama won this time there? We could probably name many reasons having to do with the economy and the war…and those reasons would all be valid. But I'd like to suggest one other that may have contributed to that 14K vote margin. That reason is Andy Griffith.

Andy Griffith is a sainted figure to some in North Carolina. I don't know if it's still the case — the shows are out on DVD and there could be some oversaturation — but not long ago, The Andy Griffith Show was rerunning eighty thousand times a day in that state. You could tune in at any hour and catch the one were Gomer places Barney under citizen arrest or the one where Aunt Bea entered the pickle-making contest or some other classic. Actors who were on that series, even once or twice, have literally made their retirement incomes by appearing at events in North Carolina to sell autographed photos. That's how revered Mayberry is to the folks down there.

Andy's been a longtime Democrat but the video he did with Ron Howard was one of the few times he's gone public over something like this. A friend of mine in that state says it was big news that may not have swayed any of the die-hards but carried considerable weight with many on the fence. If Sheriff Andy said it was jes' fine to vote for that Barack Obama fella, it was jes' fine. And of course in landing the valuable endorsement of Sheriff Andy Taylor, Obama also got the support of Ben Matlock.

We'll never know how much impact that little video had. I'm not even sure how many people ever saw it or heard about it. But I'll bet it got Obama some votes in that state that he otherwise wouldn't have gotten…maybe even 14,000 of 'em.

This weblog has included frequent mentions of a friend of mine named Frank Buxton…and I still can't quite wrap my brain around the fact that I am friends with the guy who hosted the TV show Discovery when I was ten. Discovery was one of the few truly entertaining "educational" programs ever done…like another, a decade later, called Hot Dog. Frank was also responsible for Hot Dog.

I wasn't sure if Hot Dog was by the same Frank Buxton because there was also the Frank Buxton who wrote, directed and produced shows for Garry Marshall's company like Happy Days and Mork & Mindy. And one of them, I guessed, was the guy who with Woody Allen created the movie, What's Up, Tiger Lily? Since Woody was involved in Hot Dog, I assumed the Frank Buxton who produced that show was also the Frank Buxton from Tiger Lily but then there was also the Frank Buxton who voiced cartoon shows like Batfink and I wasn't sure if that was the Frank Buxton who wrote the definitive book on old radio. (It's called Big Broadcast, 1920-1950: A New, Revised, and Greatly Expanded Edition of Radio's Golden Age, the Complete Reference Work and it's currently out of print but well worth tracking down.)

So I was confused about all these different Frank Buxtons. That's before I found out that they were all the same guy.

Amazingly, I haven't fully described the length and breadth of this man's accomplishments and expertise. He covers a few more of them — and offers video clips of many — over on his new website. When you click your way over to www.frankbuxton.com, as you will if you have a lick of sense, make sure you catch them all, especially his appearance on The Tonight Show with that Carson guy and the clips from Discovery and Hot Dog.

I know a lot of brilliant people. Frank is about eight of them. Go visit his site and see why I'm so impressed.

There are Republican Senators on my TV screen explaining that building new power plants and housing projects will not create jobs but giving huge bonuses to CEOs will.

Concluding my diary from yesterday…

A few minutes before Noon, we're dismissed for lunch and told to report back at 1:30. As we file out, a video extols the glories of many nearby eateries…and I'd been thinking of hiking down to the Grand Central Market, where wondrous foodsellers abound. But it's semi-rainy and it takes forever to get an elevator down, which means it'll take forever-and-a-half to get an elevator back up to the 11th floor. It also dawns on me that if I come back early, I can probably claim one of the few seats where I can work on my laptop. So I decide to just duck down to the in-house cafeteria, come back up and begin writing.

On the way out of the waiting room, I bend over to pick up something and hear the sound of trouser-fabric tearing. This is not a good sound to hear, especially out in public.

A hasty sprint to a Men's Room stall later, I check and discover that I have somehow — don't ask me how, I have no idea — engineered a seven-inch tear in the front of my jeans. It starts just to the left of the fly about halfway down and continues on into my inseam. I figure that if I hold my laptop case in the proper position, no one will notice it. Later, I discover that depending on how I sit in any chair, I am subject to some interesting breezes.

In the cafeteria, I eat a very good hot turkey sandwich and some very bad mashed potatoes. How is it, I wonder, that there are bad mashed potatoes in this world? It's not like this is a complicated recipe. I'm not sure if they're instant or not…but if they're not, they should be. The basic Betty Crocker mix yields a better result.

And now it's 1:15 and I'm back at the same little desk in Room 302, waiting to hear if I have to report somewhere. The place is packed — barely enough chairs for the number of bodies. The Van Nuys courthouse, where Scott and I had our little mini-con, offered a room that looked like a shabby bus terminal but it was a lot more comfy than this one.

The potential jurors seem like a nice mix of Angelenos, weighted a bit heavy on minorities, especially Hispanic and Asian. It's hard to guess what all these people do for a living but I'd guess more blue collar than white collar and not a lot in managerial positions. One gent — the one who was using this workspace before he was called to a courtroom and I commandeered the desk — was obviously a lawyer or the next best thing. He spent his whole time here on his laptop and cellphone, talking about depositions and filing paperwork with some judge. What are the odds another attorney will want this man on a jury he has to convince?

As I eye the others in the room, I ask myself, "If I were on trial for a murder I hadn't committed, would I worry if these people would be the ones passing judgment?" There are a few I'd insist my lawyers exclude but all in all, they look like a smart crowd. Then again, I think the first O.J. jury came out of this room.

We wait. And wait. And wait some more. Two more long trials are announced and on these, we have the option of opting out. This time, most people do, perhaps because the folks who could serve on a long case are still elsewhere in the building, being considered for that 90-day one. There are also two more trials where we can't demur, where we have to go to the courtroom and be considered for service…but as ever, my name is not called.

So I sit here, alternately working on this and on an article that's due, congratulating myself on the wisdom of bringing the laptop and getting back from lunch early enough to grab this little desk. Every so often, I shift in the chair and feel something that reminds me I'm now wearing split-crotch jeans. No one calls my name.

Around 4:15, they announce that there are no more trials so we'll be dismissed. Our names will be called and as they are, we're to yell "Here!" to prove we haven't snuck out prematurely, then we're to come up, turn in our badges and receive a certificate that we've completed our service. I wait and wait as perhaps 200 people are called…until my name is finally heard, about three from the end. I head up and out, keeping my laptop case strategically in front of me. The paper I receive will excuse me if I am summoned again for jury duty within the next year.

All done. There's a long uphill hike to where I parked, made more awkward by the need to walk with my computer held over my zipper, but that's all that stands between me and the resumption of life. I march with several of my fellow jurors, none of whom got anywhere near a jury box, either. A lady who lives out in Marina Del Rey tells me this is the fifth time she's served in eight years and her experience has been like mine. She never gets called, either.

She doesn't think it's Luck of the Draw. She thinks some higher power has just decided that folks like us will never be on a jury. I tell her I'm convinced that even if I was picked to be questioned, one attorney or the other would bump me. "That's what I mean," she says. "Some higher force has decided you'll never get seated on a jury so there's no point calling your name."

I ask, "Couldn't this higher force prevent me from getting picked for jury duty in the first place?"

She says, "Higher forces can't do everything. By the way, why are you walking like that?"

Interesting Muppet facts.