Monthly Archives: December 2021

So now Hugh Jackman has tested positive for COVID and The Music Man has shut down until such time as he's ready to perform again.

When I saw his statement announcing it on Twitter, the next message was a reply to him that said, "Hugh, I love your work,your awesome as Logan, but please, covid isn't real,it's just your basic common cold. Take some cold medicine,eat some hot soup and rest for a few days, you'll feel better after that. I just got over my cold,and I feel great."

Yes, there are still people who believe COVID is just the common cold.

Hopefully…presumably…Mr. Jackman has a mild case and he could be back Music Manning in a week or two. It would be nice if every case was like that.

I mentioned here that with the passing of actor Nicholas Georgiade, Barrie Chase becomes the last surviving cast member of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World who had a speaking part. A couple of folks wrote me to say that Ms. Chase did not have any lines in the picture and they're just plain wrong…and probably unaware how many times I've seen my favorite movie. She answers a phone call in Dick Shawn's "pad" when Ethel Merman calls and passes the phone over to Shawn.

Another reader who apparently has never heard of things like Google and The Internet Movie Database wrote to ask me what else she'd done. Barrie Chase had a very long career as both an actress and a dancer. On TV, she gained much attention as Fred Astaire's dance partner in several acclaimed specials.

She was in dozens of movies. The picture of her above is from a memorable bit part in the Bing Crosby-Danny Kaye film, White Christmas. She had a pretty large role in Cape Fear with Gregory Peck, which was in release at the time Mad World was being filmed. In fact, near the end of Mad World when the two cabs full o' comedians are chasing Spencer Tracy's car through the streets of Long Beach, they pass the State Theater and Cape Fear is on the marquee. You need to look real fast to see it but it's there.

Finally, a reader named "Brian12" asks, "Do you know if there is any significance to the character name "Mrs. Halliburton?" That's what her character is named in Mad World and he asks if she and Sylvester Marcus (Dick Shawn's character) are married. No, they're not.

Script material that never made it into the film tells us that Mrs. Halliburton is the wife of an undertaker named Calvin Halliburton. It is inferred that she is at Sylvester's place because she is cheating on her hubby, who is never seen. When Sylvester gets the call from his momma and decides to rush to her aid, he leaps (literally) into the convertible that Mrs. Halliburton drove to his pad and races off in it.

That scene where Sylvester drives off in her husband's car and she screams for him to come back was in the original version of the movie when it was first released but it went away when the film was trimmed down a few weeks later. It is now "lost" but in the highly-recommended Criterion DVD (or Blu-ray) edition of the movie, there are two versions of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World — the general release version and a reconstruction of most (not all) of the original release version.

The brief car-stealing scene is represented in the reconstruction by the audio track heard over some production stills of the scene. And if you're listening to the commentary track — as you should — the voice you'll hear describing the scene is mine. Listen to the whole thing and you'll also learn an awful lot more about this movie. Experts Mike Schlesinger and Paul Scrabo join me on the commentary track.

• Alex Jones has been suggesting that Donald Trump is being "blackmailed" into endorsing COVID vaccinations. How do you blackmail a man who's convinced he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and not lose a single supporter?

Back in the sixties, "home video" for most of us consisted of silent 8mm (and occasionally 16mm) movies. They were all old films, many of them in the public domain, and they were usually dupes from not-the-greatest source material, often edited via meat cleaver. Still, the idea of owning a movie and showing it on your home projector was very tempting. I had a bunch of Castle Films as I explained way back in this post.

I also had a lot of Blackhawk Films, many of them starring my faves, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. Blackhawk — based in Davenport, Iowa — was the class act for those of us who cared about film history and preservation. They put out a lot of very old films that no one else would have issued and they usually secured very good source material and treated the movies well. I no longer have an 8mm movie projector but I have a box of Blackhawk Films in a closet here. Some things mean so much to you that you can't bear to throw them away.

One thing they put out was an excerpt of the 1927 Laurel & Hardy film — one of their earliest — The Battle of the Century. This is the one which was held up as containing the biggest pie fight ever in movie history until the 1965 film, The Great Race. The latter cost a helluva lot more money and time to shoot and involved a helluva lot more pies…but didn't yield anywhere near the same laughs.

For a long time — while Blackhawk Films was around and for years after — Battle of the Century was a "lost" film. There were no known prints anywhere of the complete two-reel short. The only known footage was the end pie fight scene and I believe the reason that much was available went something like this…

Robert Youngson was a man who produced films featuring highlights from other films. For instance, his 1957 feature, The Golden Age of Comedy, gave us moments from some of the great silent films of Will Rogers, Harry Langdon, Ben Turpin and others, including Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy. Among the clips of Stan and Ollie he included was the famed pie fight scene…and in duping that scene from the negative in some studio vault, he was unaware he was saving that footage. A few years later, that negative had rotted away…but the scene was still there in Mr. Youngson's film.

That's presumably where Blackhawk Films got it. Here is their release of the what they had — the last few minutes, silent and with no music. (By the way: Ignore the opening cards which say that Hal Roach wrote, produced and co-directed the film. The official credits said it was "Directed by Clyde Bruckman" and "Supervised by Leo McCarey." "Supervised by" meant a number of different things back in the days when movie credits were not such formal titles. It sometimes meant "Directed by" but more often meant "Produced by.")

Decades later, some of the rest of the movie was found and later, all or most of it was located. There are a couple of different restored, "complete" versions around with newly-added music and here's one of them. If you look real carefully in the prizefight scene, you might spot a very young Lou Costello working as an extra…

One of my favorite Sondheim moments is in the show Merrily We Roll Along. Longtime best friends Charley Kringas and Franklin Shepard have become a very successful lyricist/composer team writing Broadway shows and movies…but with success has come tension. They're growing apart as you'll see in this scene when they agree to appear on a live TV interview show.

This is from a production done in 2013 in a theater called the Menier Chocolate Factory in London. The actor doing most of the talking and singing is Damian Humbley…

Boy, I hope the headlines the next few days don't read "Holiday Gatherings Cause Massive COVID Spike." Like a lot of you, I don't get why some people aren't taking this thing more cautiously. I don't think some folks have grasped the concept that the more we vaccinate and isolate, the sooner we won't have to isolate. A third shot is not a license to go back to doing everything you did pre-COVID.

A former lady friend of mine is on Instagram and every day, she posts a video of her out with friends at some party or night club or restaurant — somewhere that's packed with people, masked or not — acting like coronavirus never existed. She may avoid the virus. I hope she avoids the virus. But I also hope she isn't spreading and therefore prolonging the virus. When we spoke the other day, I tried to…well, I was reminded of the old expression that I quote too often: "You see that chair? Tell it to dance. See if it listens."

And I see an awful lot of people on the 'net who believe that if someone is triple-vaxxed and still gets the virus, that's prima facie proof that there was no point in getting vaccinated in the first place. Because if something isn't 100% effective, what the hell good is it?

I'm dreading the thought of people crammed into New Year's Eve celebrations this week. It may not be their best New Year's Eve ever but for some of them, it will be their last.

This is an upgraded rerun of a video link I posted here in December of 2014. Someone has taken the video and greatly enhanced its picture quality, plus they've added a fake (but convincing) soundtrack to it. Enjoy…

The legendary Time for Beany puppet show went on the air in 1949 and ended in 1955. My mother told me she watched it when she was pregnant with me — I was born in '52 — which led me to a strange theory. You know those stories of how an expectant mother will listen to great music hoping it will somehow seep into her womb and inspire the fetus to become the next Mozart? Well, if there's anything to that theory, I figure that listening to that show — which on and before my birthday starred Daws Butler and Stan Freberg — put me on the course of my silly career.

My mother says I watched the show every day after I was born but I have no memories of it. So maybe I didn't watch it. Maybe it was just on and I was in the room where it was on.

I do however have a very vivid memory of being taken to a fast food restaurant themed around the show. There were several and the one we went to was not the one in the film embedded below. We went to one on Washington Boulevard in Culver City next to a large automotive dealership where my father was pricing used cars. He priced and then he, my mother and I went over to Beany's and dined. That, I remember.

When I met Bob Clampett, who'd produced the TV show, I asked him about the restaurants. He couldn't place for me the precise year the last one closed but he recalled that a couple of them outlived the series by a year or two. He told me they were a rotten deal from his end. He'd gotten involved with some people he wished he'd turned down…and though he said the places were gorgeous and had pretty decent chow, they never made money, at least for him.

This is an eight-minute home movie taken at one that was located in Long Beach, California. From the video, we can see it was next door to the Circle Drive-In Movie and further research tells us the Circle was located at 1633 Ximeno. If you click this link, Google Maps will gladly show you what's there today. The drive-in opened in April of 1951 and closed in January of 1985. The marquee in the video tells us it was showing Assignment: Paris (which opened in September of '52) and Golden Hawk (released in October).

I don't think anyone in this film is anyone famous but the architecture is great and you might enjoy just looking at the cars — and at the 1952 price of a burger, fries and a shake…

Speaking of The Music Man, as I seem to often be doing here lately: If you ever read Meredith Willson's autobiographical account of the birth of that show, you know that it went though many changes. In the final show, Marion the Librarian had a younger brother who was ashamed of his lisp. In earlier drafts, the brother was confined to a wheelchair, referred to (indelicately) by Willson in his book as "the spastic boy." In this article, Amanda Morris examines early drafts and writes about what Willson planned at one point and why he changed his mind.

Here's a Christmas memory which for some reason first ran on this blog on June 4, 2015…

Arthur W. Upfield (1890–1964) was an Australian writer of mystery and suspense novels, best known for books featuring his creation, Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte of the Queensland Police Force. His works were highly acclaimed and popular, but nothing in this article should be taken as my personal recommendation of them since I've never read one. My mother though read several and enjoyed them greatly…which brings us to a tale from Christmas of 1963.

At the time, I was avidly collecting comic books, primarily from two sources. One was just buying them new. Comics then came out on Tuesdays and Thursdays and were sold in drug stores, supermarkets and dedicated newsstands. It was an absolute "must" of my life to hit such establishments on those days, preferably at about the time the employees were unbundling that day's shipment and putting them in the rack.

The other source was used bookstores, of which there were then many. I believe at some point it was an "easy entry" business, meaning it didn't cost much to start one. You just needed a rented store, a lot of shelves and a ton of old books. I'd hit these establishments up often and buy old comic books, which were then a nickel each and, in most shops, six for a quarter. There are comics I bought that way and still own that are now worth mucho dinero.

My father usually drove me to these stores and every once in a while, my mother would come along and buy herself an Upfield novel. They usually had a lot of them and she'd buy one or two to read.

My mother was different from me in many ways and this was one. I would have bought them all. That is, I would have bought copies of every Upfield book I saw but did not yet own and then I would have just read them at my leisure. I'm not sure I can explain why she didn't do that. It wasn't the money. Used, the books only sold for one or two dimes each.

Sometimes when I was heading off to prowl old book shops, she'd say, "Hey, if you see any Upfield books I don't have, please buy one for me." She gave me a list of those she owned, which was about eight of the books the man had published. That gave me an idea for her Christmas present that year. I decided I would get her The Complete Arthur W. Upfield Library, meaning one copy of every one of his books she didn't have. These are all paperbacks we're talking about so they weren't expensive but there was the challenge of getting them all…and I had about three weeks.

I walked up to my favorite bookstore up on Pico Boulevard which sold used books but could also order new ones for you. The proprietor had a reference volume that showed me the names of all the books Mr. Upfield had published. Some were on his shelves. Some others were still in print so I had him place orders for those. When I left, I had ten of those books either in my mitts or on their way to me. Over the next few days, I hit three other shops I frequented and found six more of them. Then a sweep of three stores downtown near MacArthur Park yielded only one more.

I had let my father in on my mission, of which he highly approved, and swore him to secrecy. He drove me to some of those stores where I bought old comics and then I got him to drive me to two stores I never visited because they didn't carry comics. Fortunately, each of those deprived bookstores did have some Upfield books.

Christmas Day that year fell on a Wednesday. I remembered that and I just looked it up to check and I was right. So my deadline was Tuesday and when I awoke Tuesday morning, I had procured all but one of the books. I suppose my mother would have been just as delighted by a Christmas gift of The Complete Arthur W. Upfield Library (minus one) with an I.O.U. but I was determined to find the last one that day. Oddly enough, it was one of the more recent ones. Earlier Upfield books were still in print but not this one, the name of which I do not now recall.

I had one last store to search — a place called Yesterday's Books down on Western Avenue. It was a big, frightening place with books filling three floors of a structure that should have been condemned long before I or Mr. Upfield were born. Their inventory was largely unsorted and as I entered, I had the feeling that the book I needed was definitely in there somewhere. The formidable challenge was to find it.

I had given myself an arbitrary time limit there of 45 minutes. That was how long it would be before my father came back to pick me up. I asked the proprietor where books by Arthur W. Upfield might be and was disheartened by his reply: "Almost anywhere." I could search all I wanted but he was not going to be of any help whatsoever.

So I searched and I searched and I did find numerous Upfield books but not the one I needed. Fifteen minutes went by…thirty…I could hear the seconds ticking away on me. Every time I came across the wrong Upfield book, it bolstered my certainty that the right one was hiding somewhere on the premises. But could I find it in time?

Forty-two minutes after I began searching, I moved a stack of dusty volumes and there under it, deliberately hiding from me, I saw what I saw: The missing Upfield book. Feelings of triumph and joy overwhelmed me as I grabbed it up —

— only to find it was not the book. Just the cover. The insides had come loose and were nowhere to be found. Damn.

I was about to admit defeat when it suddenly dawned on me that I didn't have to do that. Why surrender when you can lie?

Well, maybe not lie but buy myself some time. I remembered where in the store I'd last come across an Upfield book that I already had. I took it and the loose cover to the cash register and asked the guy how much for the both of them. He just charged me for the complete book and threw the cover in for nothing. In the car, I proudly informed my father I had found the last book in my quest. No point in letting him in on the fraud I was about to perpetrate.

Once home, I got some glue and a knife and performed surgery. I removed the cover from the whole book and glued the loose cover onto it. What I wound up with looked just like a real copy of the last book I needed to complete The Complete Arthur W. Upfield Library…as long as you didn't open it.

Then I gift-wrapped the entire pile and stuck it under the tree. Every so often that evening, I'd catch a glimpse of the present and I'd have an ominous flash-forward: My mother would open it up, love the present I'd so ambitiously assembled for her…but say, "Hey, there's something odd about this one book…"

The next morning, she was thrilled with what I'd gotten her. Beaming with joy, she went over to a bookcase in the living room, rearranged a few things so as to clear space and placed her Upfield collection there, spines out, all lined up and looking very official.

Since the stand-in book was one of the later ones, I said to her, "If I were you, I'd start at the beginning and read them all in sequence, including the ones I already read." She said that sounded like a peachy idea and I breathed a sigh of relief. That meant I had several months before she got to it — several months to find a real copy and make the switch. Three or four weeks later, on a hunt for comic books I didn't have in a store in Santa Monica, I found a real copy and swapped it in. "She'll never know," I thought to myself.

Forty or forty-five years later, we were having dinner one night. My father was gone by then and my mother and I didn't talk too much about the past because it sometimes caused her to miss him a little too much. But that evening, she started remembering fond moments from past holidays and I decided it was time to unburden my secret and to confess my little bit of chicanery involving her Upfield books.

"I had found all but one," I explained to her, "and time was running out…"

She finished my sentence: "…so you somehow made a fake book with the right cover but the wrong insides. Then later, you found a copy of the real book and secretly switched them on the shelf."

I was startled…truly startled. I asked her "How did you know?" but all she'd do was smile and tell me, "I knew."

I never could lie to my mother.

Here's another video of Hugh Jackman's curtain speech at last Thursday night's performance of The Music Man on Broadway…

In the cast of most Broadway shows, there are people who work as understudies, standbys and swings. The precise distinctions between those job descriptions are a bit arguable but basically, they're folks who go on when some cast member is ill or otherwise unavailable. Often, they go on and play large roles with very little prep and rehearsal. And obviously, in The Time of COVID, they are sometimes very necessary.

Recently, a lady high up in the Broadway community made some unfortunate remarks in an interview in Hollywood Reporter that seemed disparaging to the folks who fill those vital positions. She quickly issued a full and apologetic retraction. And then last Thursday night, there was a stunning example of how brave and heroic those who work as swings can be.

As you may know, a revival of The Music Man starring Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster is now in previews at the Winter Garden Theater in New York. Delayed 'til now by you-know-what, it's probably the show that has the most excitement and attention around it. Thursday evening, they had their fourth preview performance…without Sutton Foster, who tested positive for that thing that way too many people are testing positive for.

Her role as Marion Paroo — the female lead in the show with many songs and many dances — is being covered by a swing named Kathy Voytko, who also covers seven other smaller roles in the production. They're in previews so there hasn't been time to give her proper rehearsals but nevertheless, she went on that evening. As part of the curtain calls at the end of the performance, Hugh Jackman made this speech. This is a cell phone video shot from the audience so you might want to enlarge it as much as you can and turn up the volume a notch…

The Music Man canceled its performance for today and its matinee for tomorrow. At the moment, they plan to resume with the 8 PM show tomorrow evening but we'll see if that happens and, if so, who's playing Marion the Librarian.

This kind of thing is happening all over Broadway and no one has any idea how bad it will get or if it will lead to another total shutdown. But I thought you'd like to hear about this and see the video…and isn't Hugh Jackman one of the classiest human beings to ever have a star on his dressing room door? He's probably humble enough to not have a star on that door.

And here's our favorite video to post each Christmas…

My three favorite animated Christmas specials are — in no particular order — Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol, How the Grinch Stole Christmas (Chuck Jones version, natch) and A Charlie Brown Christmas.  They're in no particular order because I don't have a favorite among them. Each year, I try to peek in on all of them.

It's not a necessity. Christmas is still Christmas without any or all of them but I like to re-watch them from time to time and this time of year seems like the appropriate time. My fondness for them probably has as much to do with when I first saw them as it does with their actual content. I know I watched each one the first time it ever ran on network television and many years thereafter.

This year, I see a lot of folks online complaining that they were hard to find on TV. They weren't on CBS, NBC or ABC. One or two were on Peacock, one or two were on Apple TV, one or two were on TBS, one or two were on Amazon Prime and I think Charlie Brown was also on some PBS stations. You had to look around but if you did, they weren't hard to find. So here's what I don't get…

If they're that important to you, why don't you own them? I have DVDs of all three. Why don't you?

They aren't expensive. Right this minute, a DVD of Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol is $7.99 and a Blu-ray is $19.39. A DVD of How the Grinch Stole Christmas is $13.99 and a Blu-ray is $8.99. And a DVD of A Charlie Brown Christmas is $12.81 and a Blu-ray is $11.99.  So you can pick them all up on DVD for $35 or on Blu-ray for a bit over $40.  You can probably find them for less without using my Amazon links…and more power to you if you can.  I can live without the commissions.

Now, you might be saying, "Why should I pay that much when I can stream them for a couple of bucks or occasionally watch them for free?"  Easy answer: So you have them.  I'm assuming you still have a DVD player or a Blu-ray machine.  You probably have lots of movies you love on discs that play on them.  Just because streaming is the future doesn't mean it has to be your future.

I mean, streaming's great when you want to watch something once and be done with it but you have things you want to watch again and again…films that are precious to you the way certain books are precious to you.  Why not own them?  This way, you'll never be at the mercy of what network is streaming what and how much they're charging and whether you need to sign up for an eleventh new service you won't watch very often to see something you want to see again.

Owning things.  It could catch on big some day.  Why not consider it?

I don't know of any Christmas tunes ever written by Stephen Sondheim but this one always kind of reminds me of the Whos down in Whoville clasping hands and singing without any presents at all…

This is from "AvengerGuy" and it's the last time I will answer or maybe even read an e-mail without something that resembles a real name attached…

I liked and generally agreed with your review of Being the Ricardos but you didn't answer either of two questions that came to mind. Are or were you a fan of I Love Lucy? And did you ever meet Lucille Ball and if so, did she strike you as being like the person depicted in the movie? I guess that's three questions.

I saw every episode (I think) of I Love Lucy and I liked but did not love the show. Truth to tell, I think the onscreen contributions of Desi Arnaz are frequently underpraised. As I got older and rewatched episodes for the umpteenth time, I found myself getting more annoyed than amused when Lucy Ricardo would come up with some nutty scheme to get rich or get on TV or get Ricky a raise and it would screw up everyone's life.

I thought the show was quite well-written and well-acted but it isn't among My Top Ten Favorite Sitcoms of all time…a list that would include The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Larry Sanders Show, The Honeymooners, The Phil Silvers Show (aka Bilko), The Bob Newhart Show, The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Car 54, Where Are You?

And I found Lucy's three subsequent shows — The Lucy Show, Here's Lucy and Life With Lucy, all mostly unwatchable and unworthy of someone hailed as TV's greatest comedienne. I absolutely respect her career and contributions, and she did do some wonderful things now and then. I'm just not the biggest Lucy fan, which is sometimes awkward because I have several good friends who are.

I met Lucy once briefly, a story I told here. I would not venture an opinion about what she was like based on that brief encounter, especially since I was meeting the 1983 (or so) Lucy in public and you're asking about the 1952 Lucy in private.

It's dangerous and wrong to judge people based on short contacts. I once heard Paul McCartney tell a story about some guy who delivered a pizza (or something) to a place where he and John Lennon were arguing. He said something like, "That delivery guy was in our presence for twenty seconds and the argument was over a minute after he left. But for the rest of his life, he's going to be telling people about how he knows the real Lennon and McCartney and they're constantly yelling at each other."

Lucy was fine and nice during our quick exchanges. During the entire time she was sitting two seats away from me in the theater, I never saw her slap anyone or mistreat a helpless puppy. As I said, some friends of mine adored her, both personally and professionally. That counts for something.