Monthly Archives: November 2013

Here's a video with a story behind it. It's about a lovely lady who used to be part of my life. Her name was Bridget Holloman and she died way too soon. Way too soon.

Bridget was a dancer and an actress and she did other things, as well. One week, she went to audition for a role in a Diet Pepsi commercial that was scheduled to shoot the following weekend in San Francisco. It went well but when she didn't hear anything for days after, she figured she didn't get it — not at all unusual. Most actresses don't get 96+% of what they audition for. Her batting average was around one in eight. That's high.

So Friday evening around 6 PM, she came over to my place. Being an actress, first thing she did was to call home and check to see if there were any messages on her answering machine. There was one and it went roughly like this: "Hi, Bridget! This is Isabel. I'm the wardrobe person on the shoot tomorrow. You have to be on the set at 9 AM so come to my room at eight and we'll get you all fitted. I'm in room 720 at the Fairmont. Bye!"

Bridget knew the Fairmont was a hotel in San Francisco but no one had called about her being in that city or being on any set there. She called her agent and her agent hadn't heard a thing. She called the ad agency where she'd done the Diet Pepsi audition. Someone there told her, "There's no one from that department here. They all left this morning for San Francisco." She turned to me, told me what they'd said and asked, "What do I do?"

We called the Fairmont and checked. They had a reservation in her name and the clerk said it was charged to that ad agency. I said, "I think you go to San Francisco" and then I called Western Airlines — this was before I personally put them out of business due to their lousy service — and I bought her a ticket, then drove her to the airport. I would have gone with her on the trip but I had script deadlines that had to be met.

Bridget flew to S.F., checked into the room at the Fairmont and went to bed. The next morning, she reported to Isabel's room at 8 AM and they fitted her for an outfit. There was already another lady there — a stuntwoman who'd been cast because she looked enough like Bridget. The stuntwoman was dressed the same way they dressed Bridget. At 9 AM, both of them reported where Isabel told them to report and they spent the day shooting the commercial. Once she was dismissed, Bridget checked out of the Fairmont, took a cab to the airport, flew back to L.A. and I picked her up. She was more than a little stunned at the whole whirlwind experience.

Monday morning, her agent called the advertising agency and asked, "How was Bridget?" They said she was great. The agent said, "Fine. Now, let's discuss what you're going to pay her."

The agency guy said, puzzled, "Just what we agreed to pay her." That was when they learned that no one there had ever called to book her. Apparently, everyone thought someone else had taken care of that minor detail.

On the set, they'd had her sign a contract that specified union scale. Her agent argued that he, as her lawful dealmaker, had not had the opportunity to negotiate or at least approve the compensation. That was a breach of ethics if not law and the agency agreed to pay her a lot more. They probably could have stood their ground, sent her scale and said "Sue us" but they wanted to thank her for finding out and showing up anyway. If they'd all gotten to the shoot that morning and there was no Bridget, it would have been a very costly disaster. As soon as she got the check, she reimbursed me for the cost of the airline tickets.

A few weeks later, almost the exact same thing happened with a commercial for Aplets & Cotlets, a sweet confection that I'd never heard of and which Bridget said she'd never seen anywhere except on the set of that commercial. Again, no one called and told her she'd booked the job. Again, she found out about it by accident and went in and did it. And from then on, whenever she did an audition, I'd ask her, "Did you hear anything?" and she'd say, "No…that's a good sign."

This is the Diet Pepsi commercial she did in San Francisco. In most shots, the blonde lady is Bridget but in one or two, it's the stuntlady. She said she wished her double had done the hardest part: The 109 takes of the shot of her drinking the Diet Pepsi…

I would like to point out that it has been more than five years since I linked to a column by Richard Cohen.

When I started my first website back in the Mesozoic Era, it was located at the address, www.evanier.com. After a few months, I decided that was too egotistical…and maybe unfair to the few other folks in the world who share my surname. So what I did was to set up www.POVonline.com, naming it after a weekly column (POV) I was then writing for the Comics Buyers Guide. I set up my first primitive blog there, commencing with a posting on December 18, 2000.

A few years later, as blogs became more sophisticated, I set up a more elaborate one at this address, www.newsfromme.com, and the way it worked was that the old blog and all my articles and special features were at POVonline.com and the new blog was here. It got confusing for some and the software for the old blog became antiquated and…well, here's what I've now done…

www.POVonline is gone. That address now forwards to this site. (So for that matter does www.evanier.com) If anywhere on your site or blog, you're currently sending people to POVonline.com, you should probably change it to this address.

About 70% of the articles and special features on POVonline.com have been moved over to this site. The blog listings from that site are now incorporated into this one. A gent named Lou Mougin, who many of you know, helped me with that Herculean task.

I may or may not get around to moving all of the other 30% over here. I may or may not get around to fixing all the non-working links that this move has created. In the long run, I think this will be neater for everyone but it may lead to a few dead ends. So does everything in life.

The good thing about being a baby panda: You're the most adorable creature on the planet.

The bad thing about being a baby panda: Everyone wants to watch you sleep.

• Alec Baldwin suspended from MSNBC for doing good impression of Alec Baldwin.

• After Bob Filner and Rob Ford, who'll be the next clueless corrupt mayor with daily scandals? Anthony Weiner would've been so good.

Dean Baker makes the case that Barack Obama did not lie when he said, "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor." It's not a bad case and I wonder why it's taken so long for someone to make it. I don't completely buy it but it makes some good points. I mean, no one thought it was meant literally, as in "Nothing in the world will prevent your current doctor from being available to you." Doctors die, they retire, they relocate…I lost a great doctor once when my insurance company simply said they would no longer pay for him or any physician at the firm where he practices.

I did not take the Obama "promise" to mean my doctor would never change or that my private insurer couldn't cancel or change my policy. Maybe the president should have made that clear; that absent an actual government takeover of the Health Care system, private insurers and doctors were still going to do an awful lot of whatever they wanted to do.

Christmas Day of 1963, a new TV show debuted on CBS. It was produced by Allen Funt, whose Candid Camera was then riding high in the ratings for that network. It's not so much the practice any more but it used to be kind of understood that if you had a hit on a network, that network would buy another show from you. Mr. Funt came up with Tell It To The Camera, which reversed the principle of his other series. Instead of catching ordinary people on a hidden camera, the new show put ordinary people in front of a non-hidden camera and invited them to say anything they wanted. They could recite a poem, sing a song, tell a joke, express an opinion…anything. Crews were dispatched across America to film people on the street in different cities.

Does that sound like a great idea for a show to you? It doesn't sound like a great idea for a show to me. And after I saw one episode, I couldn't fathom how it sounded like a great idea for a show to anyone. It was one of the most boring things I ever saw on television and America agreed with me. CBS yanked it after thirteen weeks, by which time there were probably more people on an episode than were watching it.  I wonder if before it went on, anyone at CBS said, "You know, this is the perfect time for a series like this, so soon after the President was assassinated.  The people of America feel a crying need to express themselves and to speak out."  And like we need more proof that TV doesn't learn from its mistakes: In 1980, producer George Schlatter used his clout from Real People to sell NBC on Speak Up, America…same premise as Tell It To The Camera, same short run.

Mr. Funt's show was pretty obscure. As far as I can tell, there's no mention of it over in the Internet Movie Database. If you do a Google search for "Tell It To The Camera Funt," all you'll find are a lot of articles in newspaper libraries like the one above. Mostly, you'll find terrible reviews.

I remember the series for an interesting reason.  When I was in high school, I had this friend named Mike. He called me one day and had me help him on a secret mission. A friend of his had tipped him off that CBS was cleaning out its library. If one went at a certain time to a certain set of dumpsters in a public alley alongside CBS Television City, one could fish lots of 16mm prints of old TV shows out of said dumpster. This we did, taking home about, I'd guess, 100-150 cans of Amos & Andy, General Electric Theater, The Jack Benny Program and many others. There were several episodes of Tell It To Groucho, the short-lived series Groucho Marx did as a follow-up to You Bet Your Life. There was also an amazing film — an hour of You Bet Your Life from when it was on radio. They hauled cameras into the studio and filmed a broadcast, apparently as a test to gauge how the show would look or should look when it was transferred to television.

Mike and I showed some of these films around our school and at local groups and then at some point, Mike sold them all to a collector. A lot of these shows are available in the home video market and I wonder how many, if any, are transfers from the prints we rescued from the garbage.

One thing we picked up — and I'm not sure why — was all thirteen episodes of Tell It To The Camera. We had to act fast to get the films because there were studio guards to shoo us away. I think we quickly sorted film cans into "take" and "leave" piles, put the Funt shows into a "leave" pile, then accidentally took one of those stacks. Later, we watched about half of one episode. It was a great print but a terrible show…but still, we couldn't bring ourselves to throw them away.

I cannot explain why but a thought came to me: Maybe Allen Funt would want these. I don't know why but I found the number of his production company in New York and made a phone call to his office. This was back when "long distance" phone calls were not inexpensive. I explained to the receptionist that I had some of their films they might want and she put me through to an officious gent who didn't give me his name but I'm pretty sure was not Allen Funt. I got as far as explaining to him what I had when he interrupted, half-yelling, "How did you get those? Those are our copyrighted property!"

I explained that a friend of mine and I had fished them out of a trash dumpster. He half-yelled, "What were they doing in a trash dumpster?"

I said I didn't know but we'd saved them from being burned or dumped in the ocean or whatever would have happened to them. I then told him, "I'd be glad to ship them back to you if you'll pay for postage." I thought that was damned nice of me but instead, he began full-out yelling, "WHAT? YOU WANT US TO PAY RANSOM FOR OUR OWN PROPERTY?"

I said it wasn't ransom. I was going to go to a lot of trouble to get them to him and I wouldn't make a dime on the deal. He shouted back in all caps, "YOU WILL HAVE THOSE FILMS IN MY OFFICE IN 24 HOURS OR I WILL CALL MY FRIENDS AT THE FBI AND HAVE YOU ARRESTED!!!"

Since I hadn't given anyone there my name and since I didn't figure he had the capacity to trace the call, I hung up on him. Later, I gave the films back to Mike and I think he finally threw them away or gave them away or something. A few years ago, I met Allen Funt's son Bill and I told him the story. He sighed and told me their company didn't have any copies of those shows. Well, that's why.

It's Johnny from 11/22/79. The guests are Tony Bennett, Arlene Golonka, comedian George Wallace and Bartine Zane, an actress whose career dated back to making silent films with Buster Keaton. This was from back when the show was 90 minutes and Tony Bennett sings three songs. When was the last time a guest performer on a talk show even did two songs?

Johnny does jokes about Jerry Brown being governor of California. The more things change…

It turns out my favorite columnist, Fred Kaplan, has the same view I have: That Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin who murdered John F. Kennedy.

One area where I might disagree slightly with Fred is this: Everyone always asks about Oswald's motives, just why he did it if he did it. I've heard people who were otherwise convinced of his guilt actually say, "I won't believe he did it until we know why." I don't have that problem. I can believe he did it just because he was a little, ineffectual man who wanted to make his mark on the world by killing the most important man alive. I could even believe he had a less coherent reason than that. We see a lot of people in the news who take a gun or build a bomb to try and kill as many people as they can. A lot of them don't have a motive much more explainable than that they're out of their friggin' minds. I can understand not wanting to believe that the President of the United States could be murdered without a meaningful reason…but it's absolutely possible. Why did Sara Jane Moore take a shot at Gerald Ford? No significant reason other than she just wanted to kill someone important.

That 60 Minutes story about Benghazi that has been kinda/sorta retracted is still being fact-checked and it keeps looking worse and worse. CBS is going to have to throw some bodies out in order to prove their standards are higher than this.

People are saying that CBS got in trouble because they were too eager to run a story that the Fox News crowd would like, and which might make more of them more disposed to watch CBS. I don't believe that. The folks I know who think CBS is solid Liberal Propaganda wouldn't change their view if 60 Minutes tracked down incontrovertible evidence of 50 impeachable offenses by Barack Obama. They'd probably just accuse CBS of doing it to cover up hundreds of others. The New York Times smeared Bill Clinton with bogus Whitewater stories and others that should have delighted Clinton's enemies but those folks didn't trust the Times one iota more. I think CBS just did some bad reporting, possibly driven by a reporter with an agenda. And the outrage over it isn't going to die until that reporter and several other employees do the full Dan Rather Walk of Shame.

There's a restaurant I like downtown near the train station in Los Angeles. It's called Philippe the Original and you go there for the French Dip sandwiches. They have other things on the menu but you go there for the French Dip sandwiches. They have various flavors and while the turkey and lamb are quite wonderful, the beef is the key play.

Philippe's, as most folks call it, claims to be where the French Dip sandwich was invented, more than a century ago. Another downtown L.A. restaurant called Cole's Pacific Electric Buffet also makes the same claim and I do not take sides on this most vital issue. What I do know is that I prefer the sandwiches at Philippe's, and the ambiance and accoutrements at Cole's, and that the parking at Philippe's is so much easier there, that that's where I go. (One other distinction: If you like hot mustard — and I don't — Philippe's has a homemade one that will cauterize your nose hairs.)

Philippe's is part of a grand American tradition: Restaurants that claim to have invented something iconic. If you watch the Food Network, you see such stories all the time and they all seem to have the same two components…

1. The great, legendary food item must have been invented by accident. In this case, no one sat down one day and said, "Hey, you know the best part of a beef sandwich is the juice that oozes out of the meat. What if we dipped the bread in that juice?" That kind of thing never happens. The French Dip had to be invented because someone accidentally dropped the bread into the pan of juices.
2. Then you have to have the customer who happens to be there at the time who says, "Hey, I'll eat that!" He loves it and comes back the next day to ask that the accident be repeated. Then he returns with a bunch of friends and they all like it so much that each of them returns with a bunch of friends and it grows exponentially.

That's how all these stories seem to go. Someone accidentally spilled sauteed garlic on a roll and garlic bread was invented. Someone accidentally dropped dough into boiling oil and doughnuts were invented. Someone accidentally mixed old wood shavings, confetti, lawn cuttings and rancid mayonnaise…and cole slaw was invented. Actually, I have a hard time believing any customer ever looked at cole slaw and said, "Hey, I'll eat that!" but I've actually seen people do it.  Go figure.

In this article on Philippe's, they tell the tale of the accidental dropping of the bread into the pan of juices…and incorporate the theory that the name "French Dip" came about because the customer who said, "Hey, I'll eat that!" was named French. But they also allude to a new theory which is probably closer to reality: The alleged inventor was "…looking for a way to soften day-old French bread because customers found it too hard to chew." Isn't that a more credible explanation? I think so.

Anyway, read the piece if you want to know how to make a really good French Dip Sandwich. Or better still, if you're anywhere near Union Station downtown, pop over to Philippe the Original and let some skilled, experienced hands make one for you. Just watch out for the mustard.

Oh, my God! Andy Kaufman is still alive!

Oops. Never mind.

Yet another Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, this time from 11/21/79. The guests are Tony Randall, Buddy Rich, comedian Kelly Monteith and author Thomas Thompson…but the best moment is the Act II desk spot as Johnny chats with Doc Severinsen. Johnny and Doc discuss their plans for Thanksgiving and Doc seems to be a tad high on something…and it made for a very silly conversation that was occasionally excerpted for anniversary shows…

This was just on the wires…

Four Marines were killed Wednesday while performing maintenance on an artillery range at Camp Pendleton, the Marine Corps said. No details of the incident were released. Names will be announced 24 hours after families are notified, the Marines said.

I understand that it would be more painful for four families to read online or hear on TV that a loved one had been killed in accident. I don't know why they have to announce something like this before those notifications, thereby panicking the families and friends of every single Marine stationed at that base. Thousands of Marines are stationed there.

The public has a right to know that this happened but what is the harm if they wait until (a) the families have been notified and the names can be released and (b) they can tell us something about the incident other than that four Marines are dead? The information we're getting today is pretty useless for anything except for causing a lot of people to worry needlessly.