Catching on game shows on the TiVo, I enjoyed a couple of old episodes of What's My Line? that ran recently on Game Show Network. One featured, as a contestant, Bud Sagendorf, who was then the writer-artist of the Popeye newspaper strip. Another had Alan Jay Lerner, who wrote the book and lyrics for My Fair Lady, Camelot, Paint Your Wagon and many others. It's probably silly to form an impression of someone based on a five minute game show appearance but Lerner certainly seemed like the brooding, troubled soul that biographies (and his own autobiography) paint him to have been. Somewhere in storage, I have two or three letters I received from Mr. Lerner in the early seventies and even then — before any of the books — I could sense a certain joylessness in his rhetoric.
Another thing that's interesting about these old shows are all the plugs and mentions of projects that never came to pass. The other day, they ran a Hollywood Squares on which Mel Brooks was a celeb, plugging (seriously) a movie he said he was about to start — a remake of She Stoops to Conquer. No such movie was ever made. I don't know the original air date of this episode but it was prior to Blazing Saddles. Wally Cox was on it and he died early in '73. Blazing Saddles was made the following year, so it's likely that this Hollywood Squares was made at one of those times Brooks has spoken of when he couldn't get arrested in the movie business…ergo, the project that never came to fruition.