Monthly Archives: September 2014

CBS head guy Les Moonves says that overnight ratings are "virtually irrelevant" now. His argument makes total sense but I'll bet there isn't a producer or network exec who doesn't walk into work each morning and ask, "How'd we do in the overnights?"

George Packer on the Fall of Saigon. Henry Kissinger is the guest on The Colbert Report tonight and I have the feeling Stephen will not be asking him about any of this.

We've been on and offline a few times this morning for techy reasons. Things will all become stable here soon.

I'm in one of my periodic spells of not paying a whole lot of attention to the news so that's why I'm not writing about ISIS, Ebola, Ray Rice or the new iPhones. As a general rule of thumb, I'm opposed to killing people, hitting people or larger smartphones.

The Warner Archive Collection is bringing out a complete DVD set of Loopy DeLoop cartoons. As I wrote here, I'm a huge fan of the Hanna-Barbera cartoons produced in the studio's early days…with the exception of this series. Loopy's cartoons were done for theatrical exhibition and when I heard about them, I felt deprived. I loved the H-B cartoons on TV…and here they were doing a series that I couldn't see on Channel 11! When I finally did manage to lay eyes on a couple, I couldn't believe that the same folks making those great Yogi Bear and Quick Draw McGraw cartoons were responsible for these.

H-B did some very poor cartoons later on but those didn't have good writers and good animators and Daws Butler doing the lead voice. These did so they somehow bothered me more.

I should have mentioned that along with A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum coming out on Blu-ray yesterday, so did The Great Race, which I think is a better movie. I wrote about that film here. You can order a copy here. Again, there do not seem to be any extras on the disc.

By the way: Over the years, a number of folks have written to me to complain that I was typing "Blu-Ray" instead of "Blu-ray." This never seemed significant enough for me to take the time to change it but a couple of recent messages convinced me. So I've changed it everywhere it has appeared on this site. I refuse though to, as many have demanded, remove the hyphen from "e-mail."

Today is the release date for the new Blu-ray edition of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, the 1966 film adaptation of the musical written by Burt Shevelove, Larry Gelbart and Stephen Sondheim. If you don't have time to read this whole review of the movie, I can give you a quick summary…

• If you never saw a good production of the stage play, you'll probably love it. It has Zero Mostel, Jack Gilford, Phil Silvers, Buster Keaton and other talented people. It has low comedy and lots of sexy women wearing very little clothing. It has action and broad comedy and a frenetic pace.
• If you have seen a good production of the stage play, you'll probably dislike it. Zero Mostel, Jack Gilford, Burt Shevelove, Larry Gelbart and Stephen Sondheim certainly did. Mr. Gelbart described his first viewing thusly: "It was like being run over by a truck that stopped and backed up so it could run over you again." Phil Silvers thought it was a good film but not as good as it would have been if they'd followed the play more closely. Mr. Keaton died before this, his final film was released so we can only guess what he would have thought of it…though given that he'd just come off Beach Blanket Bingo and How to Stuff a Wild Bikini, he probably would still have regarded it as a step up.

So what do some of us think is wrong with it? Well, it's not the casting…though some problems were created by putting Phil Silvers in the role of Lycus. That's a small role in the original play and Silvers was at the time, probably the biggest star in the movie. He was especially big in the international market so his part had to be enlarged. That's not as easy as it sounds.

The plot of Forum is like a Rubik's Cube. You move one piece and everything else moves with it. I've seen some productions where they tried to hack it down by a half-hour or so and that's not easy. Something in one scene affects something in another. When they expanded the role of Lycus (somewhat pointlessly in a story sense) and added a big, pointless chariot race at the end, a lot of other stuff had to be cut. Among the cuts were quite a few of Stephen Sondheim's songs.

So one problem is that they took the storyline — this wonderful, intricate farce — and chopped out an awful lot of it and rejuggled what was left to try and have it still make sense. It does…but the stage version made more sense and was funnier. Another problem is that…well, any time you're throwing away Sondheim tunes, something is wrong.

Mostel complained about Too Much Spectacle. On the stage, it was a simple production with a complex plot. On stage, it was one set and pretty much one set of costumes. He thought too much of the comedy got lost in the movie by trying to re-create Ancient Rome with gladiators and chariots and lavish sets and big crowd scenes.

My complaints mostly have to do with the plot reconfigurations, the jettisoned songs and — most of all — the editing. Director Richard Lester had a unique style of constructing jokes via the editing — something that was considered a modern, hip approach at the time. I question whether a very classic, old-style comedy combining Roman farce and 1930's burlesque set in an ancient era was best served by a modern, hip approach. To me, it makes the film one continual, distracting anachronism.

Worse, it cedes control of the comedy from the comedians to the editor. The timing on the screen is not that of Zero Mostel, Phil Silvers, Jack Gilford, Buster Keaton and a fine comic actor named Michael Hordern (and a young, just-starting-out juvenile named Michael Crawford). It's the timing of Richard Lester, reconstructing their performances (and rewriting the Shevelove-Gelbart dialogue) by cutting between lines and words and forever calling more attention to the cutting than to what the actors are saying. In a way, it reminds me of what Russ Meyer did on some of his films, casting untalented actors because of their physical appearance, then creating their performances in the editing room with cutting tricks. Lester did not have untalented actors whose delivery needed tricks.

So do I dislike this movie? I'm in Group 2 above…but still, there are moments. I can sometimes put myself in the frame of mind of Group 1 and forget about what the movie should have been and enjoy some of it for what it is. Mostel, Silvers, Gilford and Keaton are four of the most gifted comic actors who ever lived and it's hard to resist a movie with them in it…so I'm ordering the Blu-ray. You can, too.

It apparently has no special features but the box does display the little-seen Jack Davis poster art. Like so many comedy movies of the era, someone hired Jack and asked for something like It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and he delivered. He always did.

Here's a triple feature for you. Here's a clip with Cookie Monster visiting John Oliver's show…

And here we have the two of them doing a Special Report on words…

And after you watch that, you might want to watch some outtakes…

Forty years ago today, President Gerald R. Ford granted "a full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 20 through August 9, 1974." Ford said it was for the good of the country; that the nation had to put the Watergate scandals behind it. Others suggested Ford was trying to save the Republican Party further damage and to spare himself an awkward situation. It would have been tougher to issue a pardon and shut things down if the investigation went forward, more Nixon wrongdoing was unearthed and actual criminal charges were being readied.

Rick Perlstein believes that regardless of his motives, what Ford achieved was to end presidential accountability in this country. The impeachment of Bill Clinton looks even more ludicrous and partisan when you look at what Reagan and both Bushes got away with.

CBS has finally made it official: British comic actor James Corden will replace Craig Ferguson as host of The Late, Late Show. This was reported several weeks ago on some websites but it's not real until it's formally announced and Bill Carter reports it. Betcha the delay was because it wasn't firm and contracts were still being hammered out.

As I'm not familiar with Mr. Corden, I have no opinion on the selection. I would guess though that the deciders at CBS had to be really impressed with the guy. They had loads of applicants and some pressure to not pick a white guy. Still, they decided this white guy was their guy.

We still have no firm announcement of when Mr. Letterman will do his last show and what he'll do after that. I'm hearing the end of May is likely and that when the network announces that, they'd like to be able to also announce a continuing relationship with David Letterman to remain as part of the CBS family. Just what he'd do is a good question.

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Two very smart dogs…

Jason Czeskleba wrote me to ask…

A couple of the Joan Rivers obituaries I've read have made note of the fact that she did not appear on the Tonight Show for some 28 years, after her rift with Johnny Carson. They have said that Carson banned her from the show, and that Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien continued the ban to respect Carson's wishes. That latter assertion doesn't seem plausible to me, that Leno would refrain from booking a guest because simply Johnny was angry at her. Since I know you know several people who worked on Leno's show, I'm wondering if you know whether there's any truth to that claim, and if not, what is the real reason Leno never booked her on his show?

As I understand it, there were several reasons, one being that Jay seems to have not thought she was all that funny…and reportedly, that feeling was mutual.

This whole thing about someone being "banned" is kind of a silly way to look at the booking process on a show like that. I would imagine the talent coordinators could make up a list of several thousand people who wanted to be on The Tonight Show and never got on, including a lot of folks who were regulars with Carson. Was Milton Berle "banned" because he never appeared with Leno? (I'm told he had his agents calling constantly…)

For the cartoon show I voice-direct, I am pitched hundreds of actors for work on the series — submitted by their agents or themselves. Simple math tells you that if there are four openings and 300 submissions, most folks are going to go unhired. After two or three submissions without employment, one or two have gone around claiming that I "banned" them from my show. To me, that's a way of playing the Victim Card, trying to assert that you lost work because of some conspiracy against you personally. I seem to have been banned from winning the California State Lottery.

In Jay's case, there were probably other reasons to not have her on. They'd pretty much have to have talked about why he was host of The Tonight Show and she wasn't — a topic which could have been awkward and too "inside." I don't think Jay would have wanted to say, "Thank you for making some bad career decisions which opened doors for me."

She probably would have engaged in some passive/aggressive Carson-bashing, and some might have interpreted the booking as Jay flipping the bird to Johnny, which he surely did not want to do. I seem to recall Howard Stern, back when he was friendly with Leno, urging Jay to book her as a big F.U. to Carson. If I were Jay, I don't think I would have wanted to open that can of nightcrawlers.

Speaking of which…

Verne Gay over on Newsday recently set out to decide who was in the right in the Johnny Carson-Joan Rivers feud…and he did this without being in a position to know a lot about what was going on between them. Clearly, this was both a business and a personal spat.

Joan was losing ratings and favor as Johnny's regular guest host and would probably not have stayed there for very long. This is something that happens all the time in television. Joan was hired to guest host not forever but for as long as they felt she was doing the job…and I've never heard anyone say she had a promise — verbal or on paper — that she would succeed Johnny. At that point, I don't think Johnny wanted NBC to even be thinking about that…and let's remember: That job did not come open for another six years. And if Johnny was even thinking about who'd succeed him, he was likely thinking Letterman.

I've heard people who were around Johnny cite a number of reasons he was mad at her: He was already unhappy with how she was doing his show. She didn't call to tell him about the new show until it was common knowledge. She tried to hire a lot of his key people away to work on her show. After her show debuted, the set and camerawork looked way too much like his show. She was giving too many interviews trying to portray Johnny as the Bad Guy who was afraid of her and had been rude to her. He felt she was trying to bait him into a big public feud that might attract viewers to her show. And so on.

This "feud" always struck me as pretty one-sided, meaning Joan ran around crying that she was the injured party. She was injured the way anyone involved in any TV show is injured when The Folks Upstairs decide they can put someone or something better in your slot. And she wasn't even injured that much because once she realized she wasn't going to guest host for Johnny indefinitely and then get his job, she made a very lucrative deal with Fox.

I don't think there was anything wrong or unusual about Joan taking that offer. I don't think there was anything wrong or unusual about Carson and/or NBC beginning to talk about replacing her as guest host. And once they found out she'd be competing, I don't think there was anything wrong with NBC yanking her immediately off The Tonight Show, lest she use it to promote her new venture. (If she'd had her way, she would have been hosting The Tonight Show the same week it was announced that she would soon be competing with it.)

As for the personal stuff — why Johnny never spoke to her again, why he allegedly hung up on her — I suspect that was about…personal stuff. Things between them that we don't know about.

Mr. Carson could be a very cold bastard and I gather he attributed his long, long run on TV to sometimes being one. He was pretty ruthless with a lot of people who were at times probably close to him, perhaps closer than Joan Rivers ever was. Not all of those stories make total sense to an outsider, either.

I don't think we'll ever know more than we know now. And what we know now is that she got an offer, she took it and Johnny was pissed about some aspect of that.

• Bernadette Peters wore a purple dress to Joan Rivers' funeral. She looked like a Q-Tip dipped in Manischewitz! Oh, oh! Grow up!

• If God had wanted me to finish this script, he wouldn't have invented Sudoku.

The musical Bye Bye Birdie debuted on Broadway on April 14, 1960. It was a hit but not a huge one, lasting 607 performances and closing October 7, 1961. It originally starred Dick Van Dyke but he'd left well before the last performance to do The Dick Van Dyke Show on CBS. In fact, The Dick Van Dyke Show debuted on October 4, 1961.

Others in the cast whose names you might know include Paul Lynde, Chita Rivera, Dick Gautier (as the Elvis clone) and Charles Nelson Reilly. Mr. Reilly had an interesting run on the show. He was not in the original cast but was hired soon after to play one small role and, more importantly, to understudy Van Dyke and Lynde. Paul Lynde was then a regular on The Perry Como Show so the night that show was on each week, Reilly played Lynde's part in Bye Bye Birdie and eventually took it over as a full-time gig.

I, of course, never saw the original show but I get the feeling it was a lot of great performances and great songs and dances carrying a rather weak story. When the movie was made, its producers didn't hesitate to jettison most of that weak story for a slightly stronger and sillier one. You'll notice in the clip below, Mr. Van Dyke sings "Put on a Happy Face" to a sad teenage Conrad Birdie fan, a show-stopping number that occurred on stage in the first act. In the movie, he sang it to his girl friend (the Chita Rivera role, played in the film by Janet Leigh) late in the proceedings. Other songs were changed or omitted for the movie and a new title song was added.

The video presents two numbers performed on separate episodes of The Ed Sullivan Show. The first is from June 12, 1960, two months after the show opened. Sullivan always claimed to have been embarrassed when he went to see the show and discovered there was a song in it about him with Paul Lynde declaring, "I love you, Ed." Apparently, Ed wasn't too embarrassed to put that number on his national TV program and later to play himself in the movie.

The other number — "Put on a Happy Face" — is from November 13, 1960. It's probably a safe assumption that they did the first number on the Sullivan show because Ed insisted on it and they did the second because business was falling off and to remind the ticket-buying public that they'd just moved from the Martin Beck Theater on W. 45th St. to the 54th Street Theater located Guess Where.

At the end of the second, Ed plugs Dick's Thanksgiving special, which I'm assuming is No Place Like Home, a show with Carol Burnett, Rosemary Clooney and Jose Ferrer which ran November 23, 1960. Mr. Van Dyke has been under contract to CBS for some time but they'd never found quite the place to put him. That would change shortly…

Vauhini Vara tells us why CVS Pharmacies stopped selling cigarettes and details a bit of the history of that now-ubiquitous chain. If nothing else, this piece will tell you what "CVS" stands for, which I hadn't known 'til I read this piece.

Personally, I think all the reasons CVS had for dumping cigarettes would apply if they also got rid of the homeopathic "medicines" they sell. There's a lot of medical advice on the CVS website and if you look up homeopathy there, you'll find an awful lot of evidence presented that the stuff doesn't work…but they still sell it.

I actually have a great suggestion for the CVS people on how to improve their business…

Yesterday, I spent a lot of time on the phone waiting on hold to talk to people who might be able to solve problems I have. About half that time was spent with Time-Warner's Tier 3 Tech Support where no one can solve my ongoing e-mail problems and now no one can solve a problem I'm having with my phones. The rest was spent waiting to talk to someone at my insurance company.

Briefly: I take this medicine which costs about $350 a month. That's without insurance. Since I have insurance, it costs me $25, which means it probably costs the company that makes it about two bucks for a month's supply. The CVS website told me the prescription was ready for renewal so I renewed it online, then later walked over to pick it up.

They told me it wasn't ready and wouldn't be because my insurance had rejected the claim. In my presence, the CVS Pharmacist phoned this insurance company to find out why…and I had a slight satisfaction that they kept her waiting on hold as long as I'm kept waiting on hold when I call CVS to speak to someone like her. She was finally told that I need a Prior Authorization for the prescription.

(I've never quite understood the premise of the Prior Authorization. My doctor says I need to take a certain medication. I go to the pharmacy and they check with the insurance company and they tell the pharmacy and then the pharmacy tells me I need a Prior Authorization so I go back to my doctor and he fills out a different form that says I need to take that medication and he faxes it in and then eventually, I get the same medication he wanted me to have in the first place and there's got to be an easier way to do that…easier for everyone.)

Anyway, in this case, I already had a Prior Authorization. I got it last month in order to get my August supply of this drug. The Pharmacist said I needed another, different Prior Authorization and gave me the number to call the insurance company to find out more.

It took me 45 minutes last night to connect with someone at my insurance company…and what she told me was that I didn't need any new Prior Authorization. The problem was that CVS had put through my automatic refill request a day early. For some reason, instead of responding that the request was about 12 hours premature, the insurance firm's computer kicked back a rejection and some nonsense about a new Prior Authorization.

So I waited until after Midnight, put through an online refill request, then went over to the pharmacy at 1:30 AM and got my pills for $25.

I don't think I've ever gotten this particular medicine in one trip to the pharmacy. I go there thinking to myself, "Well, let's see what the reason is this month that I'm going to have to make a bunch of phone calls and at least one more trip here." I'm about ready to switch to the insurance company's online mail order service on the grounds that I'm going to have to call them anyway each month about this.

This will cost CVS a lot of business…and not just because they'll lose whatever profit they make selling me my medication. They'll also lose the revenue from everything else I buy while I'm there. As in most drugstores, the pharmacy counter is in the back of the store and I can't seem to make it from the back to the front without spending at least forty bucks.

Before Obamacare was instituted, its opponents predicted massive rate hikes. Well, the latest study from the Kaiser Family Foundation surveyed sixteen major U.S. cities and found otherwise.

Rates used to go up 10% or more each year. In the sixteen cities, there was one (Nashville) with an 8.7% increase, two more in the 6% range and six more at 3% or below. The rest went down a little or in a few cases, a lot. The average was a drop of 0.8%. In many cases, that's people paying less for better insurance.

No, it's not better everywhere and I'm sure the plan's foes will find examples to point to. But I think we see the reason why so many Republican candidates are dialing back on their vows to repeal every word of the Affordable Care Act. In Colorado, there's a tight race between Democratic incumbent senator Mark Udall and his Republican opponent, congressguy Cory Gardner. Gardner is a staunch "get rid of Obamacare" guy…and now the Kaiser survey is saying that insurance premimums are down 15.6% in Denver. How's that going to play out?