Monthly Archives: June 2010

If you live in or around Los Angeles and you have plumbing, you need the contact info for my plumber, Bobby the Plumber, who happens to be The Greatest Plumber in the World. This is not only my opinion. It's the opinion of several of you who hired him based on this item I posted and later wrote to thank me. If you don't have his number, go to that item and get it. Sooner or later, you'll need it. And you'll thank me.

An interview with David Boies, one of the attorneys fighting to overturn California's homophobic Proposition 8.

Actress Barbara Billingsley gets mentioned not once but twice in the Arts section of today's New York Times. She's in an article about a new boxed set of the complete Leave it to Beaver that's about to come out. And she's mentioned in an article about the thirtieth anniversary of the movie, Airplane, in which she speaks jive.

I'm told the Leave it to Beaver DVD set is quite wonderful. Of course, I'm told this by our pal Stu Shostak, proprietor of the oft-plugged-here Shokus Internet Radio, and he produced the special features for this set. It contains all 233 episodes of the series which, I'm afraid, is about 228 more than I was ever able to watch. This is not a case of a show I liked as a kid that now seems dated. I didn't even like the show when I was the Beave's age. Nevertheless, an awful lot of people do and if you're one and you want to sit through a 37 disc set of it, you'll want to click on this link and order yourself one.

And while we're at it, here's a link to get a copy of Airplane on DVD in case you need one. If you haven't seen it lately, you need one. It really is a laugh-out-loud funny movie and I remember that wonderful sense of "discovery" we all had in the audience when I first saw it. The film was new and there was no real buzz or word-of-mouth about it yet. Everyone in the Village Theater that night ran right home and told their friends to go see it. And none of us can use the word "surely" in a sentence now without referencing that movie. Really? Has it been thirty years?

Matt Taibbi is now blogging over at Rolling Stone. He started with some overstated (to some extent, I thought) hosannas to his paper's recent scoop/article about General McChrystal. Then he read this column by New York Times semi-Conservative David Brooks and that set Mr. Taibbi off to produce this piece. He's right. A lot of what passes these days for "investigative reporting" is just Enquirer-style gossip-mongering…though I think that's also a lot of what the Rolling Stone piece on McChrystal was, too. Or at least, that was the part of it that got all the attention…and got David Petraeus a new gig.

I never regret going off to Comic-Con in San Diego but each year, there always seems to be one event back in Los Angeles during those dates that I deeply regret having to miss. Last year, it was the big evening at the Motion Picture Academy when they honored and interviewed Mel Brooks. This year, it also involves Mel. The American Cinematheque project is having a Mel Brooks/Carl Reiner festival at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood. They're showing films by both men and at one screening, Mel will speak. At one, Carl will speak. And at one, both will speak. There's also one evening when they're running My Favorite Year and Richard Benjamin will speak. Just in case you're not down in San Diego with all the fun people that weekend, here's the schedule.

Here's a great blog post (and video clip) from Dick Cavett about broadcasting legend Arthur Godfrey. I'm just barely old enough to remember the time when Godfrey was on TV two or three times a week. My memory of the guy is almost exclusively of him doing commercials in his ingratiating, ad-lib manner. The only other thing I can recall are a couple of mini-controversies involving the man. He had "discovered" and promoted on his program a popular singer named Julius LaRosa. When LaRosa became a pretty big star, Godfrey impetuously decided not only to fire him but to announce it on the air, much to America's (and Mr. LaRosa's) surprise. I didn't hear that morning on Godfrey's radio show — it was in '53, when I was one year old — but a decade later, people were still talking about it. When Godfrey came on her TV screen, my Aunt Dot would always say, "There's the man who fired Julius LaRosa during a show." Later, Godfrey got into some trouble when, as a pilot who flew his own plane, he "buzzed" an airport tower and was reprimanded and had his license suspended.

There were a number of little incidents like this that suggested Mr. Godfrey was not the nicest man and yet America loved him. When he told them to smoke Chesterfields, they all went out and smoked Chesterfields. The only other performer who had quite that kind of impact (and who also appeared on two or three different shows at a time) was Garry Moore. And like Godfrey, Moore also later died of emphysema and in his last years, regretted all the time he'd spent on TV and radio urging Americans to smoke.

Our old pal Jack Kirby thought performers like Arthur Godfrey were dangerous. When I worked with Jack around 1970, televangelist Billy Graham was particularly influential with much of this country and Jack thought Graham was out there selling an ominous, narrow-minded misinterpretation of Scripture. "Biblical Fascism," Jack called it and he created a villain in one of his comics named Glorious Godfrey, who could get his followers to do darn near anything. It was Jack's answer to his self-asked question, "What if a Billy Graham had the selling power of an Arthur Godfrey?" You can look at certain public figures since then and decide for yourself how prescient Jack was.

Anyway, read Cavett's article and watch the little clip…and take note of what Cavett says about the Nixon Administration forcing him to have on a guest and of using the Internal Revenue Service to screw over its perceived political enemies. You might also want to imagine what folks would say if the Obama Administration ordered some show to have on a government spokesperson…or used the I.R.S. that way. My father, as some of you may know, worked for the I.R.S. back when Nixon was in office and he saw a lot of that kind of thing; of leading G.O.P. campaign donors having huge delinquent tax bills torn up and of extra heat being put on Democrats. A lot of that was exposed and documented during the Watergate investigations but it didn't get as much attention as some of the more colorful revelations of Nixonian wrongdoing.

Okay, my pal Bob Elisberg watched the clip I linked to a little while ago and wrote me to note that the male singer is Sergio Franchi. Bob also thinks the second of the two women who sings is Rini Willson, spouse of Meredith. I went and Googled "Meredith Willson" and "Sergio Franchi" and found this listing in Time for what to watch on TV the first week of June, 1964…

Thursday, June 4

MEREDITH WILLSON VARIETY SHOW (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). The first of three specials produced by the Music Man himself, this one features Caterina Valente, Sergio Franchi, Willson and his wife.

That's gotta be it, which means the first woman who sings is Caterina Valente. I didn't recognize her but I sure recognize the geography. The opening shot is looking northwest at the corner of Fairfax Avenue and Beverly Boulevard. If you look real, real hard, you can see the probably-about-to-be-demolished Fairfax Theater in the background. Later, when the marchers are hiking around the south side of CBS Television City, you can see the parking lot of the world-famous Farmers Market and several people standing there, watching the performance.

And since I started writing this, I received this from Franklin Ruetz…

As a student at Harvard (now Harvard Westlake) we occasionally had industry folks show us odd gems, and this one was of them. About 1972 a man, name long forgotten, brought the Film/Video Workshop & Appreciation course a 16mm sound film. He explained CBS needed to make a case for their video production capabilities, and he got that assignment. He conceptualized the production and reported that CBS was delighted with the finished product.

When asked why marching bands, he said they gave him opportunities for shots with very long sight lines to better show their video cameras zoom lens capability. He also pointed out the high quality audio & balancing through the video chain. Getting several sections of instruments and featured vocals audio mixed well for TV was hard he assured us. Shure shotgun mics captured featured singers.

I'm not sure we're talking about the same film here. For one thing, I'm pretty sure the band is not playing and the marchers are just miming to a pre-recorded track. Still, it does raise the question for me of just what it is we're looking at. Castle Films would have needed film to release this, not tape. In '64, if I'm not mistaken, the only way to convert tape to film was via kinescope and this doesn' look like a kinnie to me. But would someone have hauled in 35mm cameras to film at (then) the nation's most modern videotape facility? Any video engineers want to hazard a guess?

Matthew Yglesias on what General Petraeus accomplished in Iraq and what he might be able to accomplish in Afghanistan.

Number six in a series…

As millions of you have written me, I was wrong to say Steve Martin hasn't toured in years. As a stand-up comedian, no…but he sometimes tours with his banjo along with other pickers. So sue me.

A popular feature of The Smoking Gun is a library of "riders" — those special contracts in which big (and not-so-big) stars make eccentric demands of any venue in which they perform. Recently, another site uncovered the shocking demands of Steve Martin…especially shocking since he hasn't toured in something like twenty years.

While you're at it, you might like to see how Mr. Martin has been known to handle his mail.