Monthly Archives: March 2006

My pal Ken Plume does a really good (and long) interview with Dom DeLuise.

Catching up with shows my beloved TiVo has recently grabbed for me, I just watched an episode of The Colbert Report from a few nights ago. It was the one on which the Lord of Truthiness talked with the departed and disgraced FEMA director, Michael Brown. Mr. Brown has been on kind of a redemption tour lately, coasting on some revelations that perhaps he wasn't quite as incompetent and unqualified as was once reported. He's trying to turn that into the belief that he was competent and qualified…and I don't think we're ready to go quite that far with it. Still, the idea that he was the scapegoat for a lot of folks' screw-ups is not without merit.

The great thing about Colbert's interviews is that it's impossible for a guest to be prepared for them. (It's also impossible for the interviewee to be the funny one, as some haven't seemed to realize.) If you had a cause to advance and you went on with Wolf Blitzer or Larry King or Joe Scarborough or just about anyone this side of Keith Olbermann, you could write out a list of 25 questions in advance, prepare responses for each and you'd be pretty well covered. Most interrogators wouldn't get past the five most obvious. Colbert knocks everyone off-script and the more they try to get back on, the worse they do. In the process, some real answers sometimes slip through the cracks.

Here's a link to an online video of Colbert interviewing Michael Brown. It's funny but it's also a more substantive interview than I've seen anyone else do with the guy. Around seven minutes.

Anthony Tollin, who authored Dragnet on Radio, just sent me an e-mail with some more facts about Jack Webb…

Interestingly, Webb didn't want to star in the original 1950's Dragnet TV series. He wanted to work behind the camera as producer/director, and intended to cast Lloyd Nolan as the TV Joe Friday. NBC insisted that Webb had to star in the 1950s TV series in the role he'd created and embodied on radio.

Did you know that the 1950s Dragnet scripts were approved by a young L.A.P.D. police officer named Gene Roddenberry, who was Chief Parker's head researcher and scriptwriter? Roddenberry learned how to write television shows by borrowing Dragnet scripts from Webb's production company and comparing them to the actual telecasts, acquiring the technical terminology so he could later write his own scripts. In 1953, he was assigned as technical advisor to Ziv's Mr. District Attorney syndicated TV show, and launched his scriptwriting career moonlighting on that series.

Jack Webb was intensely loyal to police organizations, and the L.A.P.D. was equally grateful to Webb for providing the best possible P.R. for the department. When Webb died of a heart attack on Thursday, December 23, 1982, Chief of Police Darryl F. Gates eulogized the actor/producer as "a member of the Los Angeles Police Department family" and the man whose image "we all wished we could project." Chief Gates ordered all departmental flags flown at half-mast, restored Joe Friday's promotion to lieutenant and permanently retired badge #714 (which remained on permanent display at L.A.P.D. Headquarters). Webb became the first civilian to be buried with full L.A.P.D. departmental honors usually reserved for hero cops killed in the line of duty — including a Highland piper performing "Amazing Grace," a bugler playing "Taps," a memorial gunshot volley from the Police Color Guard and a missing-man helicopter formation.

If Mr. Webb boosted the rep of the L.A.P.D. — and I have no doubt he did in many ways — it's frightening to think how bad it would have been without him. No matter how good most of them are (and my perception is that most L.A. police officers are very honest and efficient), there are always a couple to remind you that they aren't all Joe Friday. After the incident in 1992 where a bunch of L.A.'s finest used Rodney King for a piñata, Darryl Gates — who was still Chief but not for long — should have projected the image of a Jack Webb. Instead, he made a bad situation worse and did nothing to debunk the notion that cops protect cops, no matter what.

I seem to remember, around the time of Webb's passing, an essay in one of the L.A. papers by a senior police officer. His thesis was that Dragnet actually damaged the image of his profession, in particular when Joe Friday would start lecturing people, berating them with what the author of the article called "one-sided police propaganda." But he also felt that Webb's other shows — Adam-12 and to a lesser extent, Emergency — had more than undone the damage by reminding all that the people who take those jobs are human beings. I forget the specific anecdotes and stats he cited but at the time, it seemed like a logical conclusion to me.

Anyway, thanks for the info, Tony but I have two questions. Did Joe Friday ever solve the case of the Clean Copper Clappers that were kept in the closet until they were copped by Claude Cooper, the kleptomaniac from Cleveland? And would that sketch have been the least bit funny if Jack Webb had been the least bit funny?

Michael Kinsley writes about objectivity in journalism. Personally, I am less concerned about individual reporters developing opinions than I am about their employers (networks, newspapers, etc.) developing marketing and demographic strategies and arranging the news to fit.

Here's one more place to get discounted tickets for a few Las Vegas shows…and they have some for shows on Broadway, as well. It's my favorite store in the world for everything from peanuts to Picassos…Costco!

Murray Waas writes what seems like a good overview of the Valerie Plame scandal and explains why it matters.

As reported here and elsewhere, columnist Art Buchwald is in a hospice where he is expected to die before much more time has passed. He seems to be going with enormous courage and good humor, which I guess is how we all want to go as we approach the end credits of our lives. Last night, there was a nice little interview with him on Newshour With Jim Lehrer and you can view it on the 'net by going to this page. If you have the eleven minutes, you might find it somewhat inspiring.

I've taken down my Las Vegas Guide section so I oughta recommend The Las Vegas Advisor site as a source of tips and info on that fair city. The best part of the site is subscription-only but there's plenty of valuable info in the free portions, including a guide to every hotel and casino and its website, plus reader ratings of much of what they offer. The Advisor is just about the only entity that reports on what's happening in Vegas without accepting advertising revenue from the businesses on which they're reporting. They're totally impartial and honest, and if a show or hotel stinks, they'll tell you. They also have a strong sense of overview, taking a wide picture of how the business there is evolving.

In the "pay" section right now is an item of some interest. Each year, they track the increases in the ticket prices of Vegas shows, which have been going up and up at alarming rates. Currently, there are 77 different shows in town and the average admission fee is $62.02, which is a 15.58% increase from last year. That's 62 bucks per person. In July of '92 when they began this annual survey, the average price of a show was $27.05. What's more, there are now ten shows with a top ticket price of $100 or more — in many cases, the bottom ticket price is that much — plus two more that are only a buck or two under a hundred. Not figured into the survey is that there are also a number of headliners (Celine Dion, Barry Manilow, Elton John and Reba McEntire, to name four) for whom premium seating will run $200-$225 a seat.

There are probably — this is me talking now, not The Advisor — several reasons for the increase. One is that a number of the seedier hotels in Vegas have closed down to be replaced by fancier ones. This has meant many of the seedier shows have closed, as well, skewing the average upwards. Another is that there's been a trend towards four-walling, as discussed here. This means that the producers of a show are independent from the hotel and not as interested in using entertainment as a loss-leader to get you in to gamble. But the biggest reason is simply that people are willing to pay the new, higher prices. A number of shows simply decided, "Let's start inching ticket prices up and see how it affects business." The answer is that it hasn't affected it much. I'm told that one show went from around $50 a ticket to around $70 with no noticeable impact in the number of seats they were selling. If your business could get away with that, they would.

Fortunately, there are discounts available. There are two outlets in Vegas — Tix4Tonight and Tickets2Nite — which have what are usually half-price tickets for whatever isn't selling out. Once in a while (though not on Friday or Saturday nights), they even have a few ducats for the mega-shows. You cannot purchase tickets or even find out what they have by phone or on the web. You have to go to one of their outlets in the afternoon and see what they have for that evening. Another company, Goldstar Events, does do business online and in advance, and sometimes has nice discounts for Vegas shows and also for events in many other cities.

Going to the ticket outlets — which, depending on where you're staying, may not be conveniently located and which will probably always involve waiting in a line — is a pain and a waste of your vacation time. I suspect that we will soon see more discount outlets springing up across the city plus, to the extent the shows will allow it, services that will go get you half-price tickets for a small fee. In the meantime, it's a far cry from the day, not so long ago, when a bunch of my friends and I flew to Vegas one morning, saw three shows in one evening and caught a 1 AM flight home. Roundtrip airfare from LAX, which hasn't gone up that much since then, was $99 and the three shows plus cabfare and two meals (one of which was all-you-can-eat) collectively cost about another hundred per person. In fact, I won enough in twenty minutes of Blackjack to more than cover my expenses. Hard to do that these days.

Hey, is that Barry Newman — best known as the star of the TV series Petrocelli and for a recurring role on the current hit, O.C. — in the Adams Sour Gum commercial of today's Video Link? It doesn't look like him to me but six of you so far have written in to either ask if it's him or say you're certain. I don't suppose there's any easy way to verify this, nor is it that important. I think Mr. Newman used to live in my area as I used to see him around often. But I haven't spotted him in years and even if I did, I don't think I'd approach the guy to ask him that.

Let me direct you to a short but nice article on Howie Mandel in The Canadian Jewish News. Howie's one of the good guys in the business and if you've never seen him do stand-up, you're missing something. He improvises on stage more than any other comedian I've ever seen. What he does up there is not for kids and now that he has a hit with Deal or No Deal, he'll probably have the problem Redd Foxx had, which was people who came to see him, thinking he was going to be as clean and lovable as ol' Fred Sanford. Still, it's a small price to pay for fame and fortune.

I like Ben Stein on TV and in movies, dislike what he writes for the more rabid right-wing market, and once witnessed him be egregiously and pointlessly rude to a salesperson in the Good Guys store over on La Cienega. But this article makes me like him again, at least for a little while.

Richard Cohen used to write columns that argued against the premise that George W. Bush lied us into a war. Mr. Cohen has changed his mind.

Quite a few folks wrote today to say that they remember Otto Preminger's Skidoo and that it's even weirder than I said. Several more wrote to say they're dying to see it and one said, "I don't care if you did show us a trailer for the film. I refuse to believe a movie like that was ever made." I've seen the film and I'm inclined to agree with that last guy.

Several wrote to point out that Harry Nilsson (who was then just "Nilsson") is in the film and also that he performed on the soundtrack and in that trailer. Yes, he is and did — he even sang the credits — but we respect him, anyway. And Jerry Beck noticed something I hadn't: The cast includes Burgess Meredith, Frank Gorshin and Cesar Romero, the three main male villains from the Batman TV show. Mr. Preminger was also the villain in one episode of that series and George Raft, who's also in Skidoo, did one cameo. I don't know why that's significant but I just know it is.

I have it from two sources that Paramount Pictures has no rights to Skidoo and couldn't put it out on DVD if they wanted. The rights have reverted to the Preminger Estate, and apparently it was one of the movies Otto didn't want shown, lest it cost him his reputation. Easy to understand why.

One person wrote me that they hoped someone would put it out on DVD while a few of the cast members are still around to be interviewed for commentary tracks. Frankly, I'd be surprised if you could get those people to even admit they were in it.

The thing I'd love to find are the radio commercials that Mr. Preminger recorded for the film. They sounded like he knew he'd made a gobbler and was trying to order people into the theaters. His tone was angry and his accent was more Germanic than usual as he yelled, "GO SEE SKIDOO!" And he listed the cast members: "JACKIE GLEASON IN SKIDOO! GROUCHO MARX IN SKIDOO! PETER LAWFORD IN SKIDOO!" My friends and I used to do impressions of him and add remarks like, "GO SEE SKIDOO! YOU STILL HAVE FAMILY IN EUROPE!" Or "WE HAVE WAYS OF MAKING YOU SEE SKIDOO!"

Every website needs a cause and this one has three…

1. Get the Souplantation to add their Creamy Tomato Soup to their regular line-up.
2. Get the Cadbury Adams Gum Company to bring back Adams Sour Orange Gum. (We'll be discussing this with tomorrow morning's video link.)
3. Get Skidoo released on DVD.

I was thinking of adding something about stopping the War in Iraq or dealing with Global Warming but I prefer to avoid the easy, unimportant goals.