A Revolution In Movie Writing Credits

Update: In comments, Marty McKee writes: "This has been the case for more than a decade now. It's the result of negotiations between the Writers Guild and Hollywood studios." I could have sworn I was still seeing writing credits before the producer credits in movies made in the first part of this decade, but I could be wrong, and anyway that's pretty much gone now, for the reason he mentions.

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This is not something anybody ought to be noticing, but it seems like in the last few years, we've seen the first major shift in almost half a century in a truly vital issue: where to put the writing credits in a movie?

Seriously. Up until the '50s or even early '60s, the writing credit always came in the middle of the credits, usually just before the director of photography -- implying, I guess, that the credited writer was more like a technician than a key creative component of the movie. (I think, when it comes to most movies, that's not inaccurate.) Then there was a change, and the writer started getting the third-last credit in most movies, followed by the producer and finally the director.

And now a lot of movies have the writing credit as the next-to-last credit, after the producing credits. Look at the fourth Indiana Jones movie (if you can stand it after that damn CGI gopher pops up): the writing and story credits are before Spielberg's credit and after the credit for Spielberg's longime producer Frank Marshall.

I don't know why this has happened exactly, though it might be that the term "producer" is sort of meaningless now -- every movie has a ton of producers, executive producers, double-super-secret producers -- and it makes more sense to put all the different producing credits one after the other, followed by the easier-to-allocate writing credit. So congratulations, Hollywood screenwriters; according to the credits, you're # 2.

I could talk about the tectonic shift in the '30s from putting the director's credit in the middle to putting it at the end, but that may be too important and deep a subject to deal with in such a short post.

The Essential Garry Marshall Bomb

Over at mon autre blog I have an episode of Blansky's Beauties, the bomb Garry Marshall created for ABC in 1977 to get in on the "jiggle" craze, and one of the worst shows ever created by someone who had two top-ten hits on the air (granted, there aren't many people who have had two top-ten hits at once).

One reason I'm kind of fascinated by Marshall's shows is, as I said before, that no TV producer has ever been more open and unabashed about doing whatever it took to cash in on current trends and appeal to whatever he thinks the audience will go for at a particular moment in time. Every TV producer does it, of course, but they usually try to disguise it a bit. With Garry there's no disguise, and after 1975 or so, no attempt to give any show a consistent style or tone; any joke, story, stunt or actor who will boost the show's demographic profile is in. Combine that with his tendency to create multiple roles on multiple shows for actors he liked for one reason or another -- Eddie Mekka, Scott Baio, Lynda Goodfriend -- and his staffing of every show with his siblings and other relatives, and you've got one of the strangest TV mini-empires of the '70s, but one that in its way sums up pop culture in that era. Plus it shows Marshall's penchant for never wasting an idea, however bad, because after this was rightly cancelled, he re-tooled the same idea -- Las Vegas showgirls living in a house with Scott Baio -- into Who's Watching the Kids? a family-friendly show for NBC, starring Baio, Goodfriend and Caren Kaye as the same characters under different names.

But the kitchen-sink approach didn't work for Blansky's Beauties. For one thing, the pandering was just too obvious even by his standards. For another thing, the re-tooled Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley were both run by the writing team of Mark Rothman and Lowell Ganz; they were probably the best writers on Marshall's team, and they ensured that the first multi-camera season of Happy Days was really funny and Laverne worked right out of the gate. They were not involved with Blansky's Beauties. (Ganz later came back to run Happy Days and brought it back to a certain level of respectability after the low point of the post-shark-jump seasons; he's the main reason why the show wasn't that bad after Ron Howard left, and Howard was impressed enough that he made Ganz and his new writing partner, "Babaloo" Mandel, his regular writing team.) The level of the writing is like a bad '60s sitcom crossed with a bad '70s sitcom.

Here as an extra is the opening of the Blansky's Beauties pilot episode, which Marshall directed himself. Shades of Happy Days, the pilot was one-camera, the series switched to multi-camera with an audience.



You'll notice that every episode of this thing began with a different pre-credits joke. Here's one where, as on L&S, Marshall and ABC inexplicably try to convince us that Eddie Mekka is a sex symbol.

WKRP Episode: "The Contest Nobody Could Win"

Another request, for a season 1 episode that is so heavily cut on Hulu as to be almost unwatchable in spots: the episode where Johnny mistakenly announces a prize as $5,000, and the station tries to come up with an unwinnable name-that-song contest. The Hulu/DVD version changes the song snippets and redubs the dialogue of the callers with new, fake group names; it is also missing both the opening (with "Suction Prints" by Captain Beefheart) and the closing (with "Lotta Love" by Nicolette Larson) plus some bits of music in between.

(To be honest, I can see how licensing six songs for one chord each would be a bit of a problem, and if Fox had made an effort to keep other music, I could have forgiven them for changing this sequence. But...)

This was the first episode produced after the show came back from hiatus, though it was probably written earlier. It is clearly an "early" episode because it's the last episode that uses the original premise of the show, which Hugh Wilson pitched to the network as "The suits vs. the dungarees" (a phrase that he actually wrote into this episode in a memorable scene). The idea that the station consisted of two factions, Mr. Carlson/Herb/Les vs Andy/Johnny/Venus, was a theme of some of the early episodes like "Turkeys Away," but was abandoned soon after this episode was produced. The credited writer is Casey Piotrowski, a real-life disc jockey.

Cold Open and Act One:

Act Two:

TOUCH OF EVIL vs. WRITTEN ON THE WIND

In a previous post, I noted that the opening of Touch of Evil in its original version -- before the 1998 version removed the credits and the musical scoring -- has some similarities to the opening of Douglas Sirk's Written On the Wind, another Universal film produced by exploitation-meister Albert Zugsmith. I thought I would illustrate that by posting both openings.

Now, of course these openings are clearly the work of two very different directors making two very different films (and both are brilliantly and differently photographed by Russell Metty). What's similar is the way the openings are structured:

- Before the credits begin, we see someone who appears to be up to no good -- a drunk driver, a bomber. We also get to see some visual motifs that will recur throughout the film: the phallic oil machinery in Written, the moving shadows in Touch.

- Once the guy does what he was trying to do in the opening shot -- the drunk driver arrives at his destination, the bomber plants the bomb in the car -- the credits begin and the theme music kicks in.

- During the credits, we meet the lead characters; we know something bad is about to happen, but we don't yet know exactly what's going on or who these people are.

- Soon after the credits are over, the bad thing happens: in Written someone gets shot; in Touch of Evil the bomb explodes.

So while Touch of Evil is very much an Orson Welles film, it's also very clearly a Universal picture of the late '50s, and Zugsmith very clearly applied the same ideas to the opening of Touch that he'd already used in the opening of Written On the Wind. It's one of the reasons I object to the idea behind the 1998 version; by taking Welles's memo as gospel, it robs the picture of its identity as a late '50s Universal production. (I know that the producers of that version have said that they didn't intend it to supplant other versions, but the fact is, it did for many years; that became the only version available on DVD until now, and many viewers mistakenly think that the 1998 version is a "director's cut," when it's nothing of the kind.)

So, Written On the Wind opening:



Touch of Evil opening:

Favorite NIGHT COURT Cast Members?

It's welcome news that the second season of Night Court will finally arrive on DVD (please, let them at least get as far as bringing out the third season with the Hurricane episodes). But that's the season where there's the most fan controversy over this show's many, many casting issues.

There was no real controversy about the first season, because everybody knew that two characters just didn't work: Lana (Karen Austin) and Liz (Paula Kelly, a great performer who had nothing to do here). Austin was actually dropped before the first season was even over, and they tried out a number of people in her place, including D.D. Howard, a tall blonde who appeared on almost every NBC show of the era -- I guess Brandon Tartikoff was looking for a place to put her.

So, needing to fill two slots for season 2, the producers found one by drawing from NBC's reject pile: Charles Robinson had been a regular on Buffalo Bill, and moved very successfully to Night Court. But they needed a female lead, and their choice was Shelley Hack, aka "the only Charlie's Angel worse than Tanya Roberts." But Hack did not work out -- who'd have thought adding Shelley Hack wouldn't work out for a show? -- and showrunner/writer Reinhold Weege borrowed Markie Post from The Fall Guy for the episode. But he couldn't use Post on a regular basis, because she was still a regular on The Fall Guy. So in the next episode, the show introduced its new full-time leading lady, singer/actress Ellen Foley. Foley was on the show for the rest of the season, but when the next season began, she was dropped and replaced by Markie Post, who had gotten out of her contract with Fall Guy. Scuttlebutt at the time was that when Post became available, the producers simply fired Foley, who didn't object because she thought she could do better with a singing career; a newspaper report from the time said that Foley "is departing partly because she wants to pursue a singing career and partly because the producers didn't think she was sexy enough."

As a kid watching the reruns, I actually liked Foley better than Post, because Foley's character seemed pleasantly spunky by comparison. (Post was hotter, but I wasn't really watching the show for that.) But now when I watch the second season episodes, it seems like the writers never came up with a funny persona for her; that was the same season where Dan developed into a pervert and Bull developed into an idiot savant, but Foley's character never really got funny. When they added Markie Post they were able to make a joke out of her character's innocence and prudishness, so she was funny, while Foley really wasn't. I don't know if that can be blamed on the actor, really, but it does seem like they couldn't write for her. (And while mostly the Token Hot Chick on action shows, Post had already done well in an episode of Cheers as Diane's trampy friend.)

Then you have the dead bailiff curse. My preference among Night Court bailiffs would be: 1) Selma Diamond; 2) Marsha Warfield; 3) Florence Halop. Diamond was by far the best; Halop's character was too clearly a carbon copy of Selma, though the resemblance finally turned tragic rather than funny.

Which means my ideal Night Court cast would be: Harry, Dan, Christine, Mac, Bull, Selma. There's only one episode that actually has this "ideal" cast and it's that one episode Post guest-starred in in the second season.

Cartoon Censorship in 1937

I found (maybe someone else has found it before) this Associated Press article from May 18, 1937 where Leon Schlesinger talks about censorship of his cartoons, both Hays Office censorship and self-censorship brought on by viewer complaints.

One odd thing is that the article says that Schlesinger stopped using scary characters "because, in one picture, he had a monster that was the heavy. The monster frightened the children -- as well as Porky the Pig -- and the letter of protest looked like a star's fan mail." I assumed he was referring to "The Case of the Stuttering Pig", with its memorably scary transformation of Lawyer Goodwill into a toothy monster, but that cartoon hadn't been released to theatres yet at the time the article was written. So either the writer of the article misunderstood, or there's another cartoon that was already in theatres and getting complaints, though I'm not sure which cartoon that would be. (If only because, before "Scaredy Cat" in 1948, there's no WB cartoon that's as scary as "Stuttering Pig.")

Brisk, Lively, Merry and Bright

I didn't see this when it was originally announced, but the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization has made a complete recording of the score of Allegro, Rodgers and Hammerstein's third musical and by far their most ambitious. The recording will be released by Sony/BMG sometime later this year.

A synopsis of the show can be found here, but a synopsis can't do justice to how fascinating, if flawed, Allegro is. They'd completely revolutionized the musical theatre with Oklahoma! and Carousel, changing the definition of a musical from a loosely-constructed show based around performers to a carefully-assembled work of theatre where the writing and production were more important than any single performer. (And they proved that this was a sound business decision as well as an artistic decision: the reason Oklahoma! ran so long is that it could survive multiple cast changes, whereas most musicals were over as soon as the stars left.) With Allegro, their first original story, they tried to take this one step further and make a musical that was a 100% integrated theatrical experience: not just integrating the songs into the story, but having staging, sets, writing, acting and lighting all working toward the same overarching concept.

Oklahoma! and Carousel had been brilliantly directed by Rouben Mamoulian (film fans sometimes wonder what happened to his talent after the '30s; the answer is, he took it back to Broadway), but they still had relatively conventional sets and followed a conventional division into scenes. Allegro mostly did away with representational sets. In this it was influenced by Our Town and other set-less plays, but Allegro was actually more expensive to design and operate than other musicals, because in place of regular sets, there was an elaborate system of machines, sliding props, projections, and complicated lighting, all intended to make each scene flow into the next without breaks. The chorus sometimes sang, but more often talked to the audience and the characters like a Greek chorus.

And just as the scenes flowed one into the other, the score had fewer stand-alone songs than any musical in years; bits and pieces of song popped up here and there like leitmotifs (especially the opening number, "Joseph Taylor, Junior," repeated over and over at key points). Even when there were full-fledged numbers, they were assigned in unusual ways. The most beautiful ballad in the score, "(We Have Nothing to Remember) So Far," is given to a character who never appears in the show again after that one scene. (Stephen Sondheim, who was a production assistant on Allegro and has been trying to re-make it in one form or another for most of his career -- there's a party scene in Merrily We Roll Along that is almost a carbon copy of a similar scene in Allegro -- is the only other songwriter who really tried to revive this idea, and even he gave up on it eventually; since the late '70s he's gone back to giving all the big numbers to the big characters.) The choreography, too, mostly did without the big ballet set-pieces of the last two shows; there was lots of dancing, but in bits and pieces, with minor characters dancing to suggest what the major characters might be thinking. Agnes DeMille, who choreographed R&H's first two shows, became the first choreographer to be put in charge of directing an entire show; the task was too big for DeMille, who wasn't really cut out to be a director (she couldn't get away with treating everyone in the cast the way she treated some of her dancers), and Hammerstein wound up directing a lot of the scenes, but it was still the ancestor of the approach taken by Jerome Robbins or Bob Fosse, the idea that the direction and choreography needed to reflect the same approach.

Hammerstein's script has a reputation for being preachy and lecture-y. And it is that. But it is an interesting script for all that. The theme that "success" often means giving up something essential in ourselves was a timely one for the post-war era, and the second act is basically a long attack on for-profit medicine and the way it screws up what should be a doctor's priorities. The show is also, as Hammerstein himself said, autobiographical; I can't help thinking that the story of Joe, the man with noble ambitions, and Jenny, his bitchy wife who talks him into selling out, shows Hammerstein's worry about the partnership he'd formed with Rodgers. Hammerstein was Joe, the dreamy, impractical type who's always ambitious but not always successful (before he teamed with Rodgers, he'd had nothing but flops for ten years). Rodgers was practical, hard-headed and a little cold, like Jenny. Was Hammerstein worried about where Rodgers was taking him?

If so, maybe he was right to be worried. The relative failure of Allegro meant that they never did anything remotely that ambitious again. South Pacific and The King and I were big hits, but less experimental in writing or staging. All their shows after The King and I were essentially play-it-safe musical comedies. Some of those shows were better than Allegro; I don't think it's anywhere near as satisfying as South Pacific or King and I, let alone Oklahoma! and Carousel, and the public had a point in not wanting to be preached at for two and a half hours -- particularly when it ends with a blatant, dishonest cop-out. But Allegro has within it the essence of the "concept" musical, the musical that aims to be a complete and overwhelming theatrical experience. The last 60 years of musical theatre can be seen as a series of attempts to do what Allegro tried to do.

WKRP Episode: "The Consultant"

By request, an episode from the fourth season, written by Hugh Wilson, where a radio consultant (David "Thirtysomething" Clennon) comes to the station intending to give it a bad report. Like some of the scripts Hugh Wilson would do for Frank's Place, this has a rather odd structure and some abrupt shifts in tone (the very subdued, almost downbeat scene with Andy and the consultant).

This episode is also the one that really makes it clear that WKRP is an anachronism in 1981; the consultant correctly points out that no one was letting the DJs program their own music or working with only one salesman. But the parts of this episode people remember most are a) the scenes with Ian Wolfe as Hirsch, who gets his biggest role among the four episodes he appeared in, and b) The performances of characters when they pretend to be the opposite of what they usually are. Apparently part of the inspiration for that scene was that Loni Anderson had used a squeaky bubblehead voice in the mid-'70s when she appeared as dumb blondes on some shows (I think I recall her using it on The Love Boat, though it might have been somebody else talking like that), and Wilson apparently thought it would be funny to let her use that voice on the show.

Teaser and Act 1:

Act 2:

Why did MY LITTLE DUCKAROO Turn Out So Bad?

I haven't done a cartoon-by-cartoon analysis of the contents of the next Looney Tunes DVD set yet, but I recently re-watched one of the cartoons that will be on the set, My Little Duckaroo (Chuck Jones, 1954), and found myself wondering once again why this cartoon turned out so poorly. It's one of those cartoons that just doesn't seem to work -- not for kids, not for adults. The problem is not that it borrows gags from "Drip-Along Daffy"; Jones and others did lots of great cartoons that were sequels to previous cartoons. But whereas the earlier cartoon is unstoppably hilarious, "Duckaroo" feels slow, static (most of the action takes place in one cabin) too weakly-written compared to Maltese's usual standard. The animation is a little stiff, with Daffy very slowly moving from pose to pose, and the ending is cruel and kind of depressing. Throw in Maurice Noble's over-stylized, distracting designs, like the magazine pages on Canasta's walls, and the whole cartoon is like a parody of a Chuck Jones cartoon, and not an affectionate parody.

There are a couple of other Jones cartoons from 1954-5 that are a bit like this; "Rabbit Rampage" is the obvious example -- another cartoon that's too slow, too talky, and has weak writing compared to the brilliant cartoon it's following up on. I guess you can see these cartoons as transitional works, Jones and his team moving toward the slower, less brash style they would use in the late '50s. But even with his new style, Jones would not sink as low as "Duckaroo" until the early '60s at least; "Deduce You Say" (1956) is another Daffy-Porky cartoon that's set mostly in one place and features Daffy unsuccessfully trying to capture a huge brute, but it's much, much funnier and better-written than "Duckaroo." Maybe "Duckaroo" just has the characteristics of a film made by people who knew they might be out of a job soon; that probably never produces anyone's best work.

Oh, Dear, MY PET MONSTER Is Back

The news that a Canadian company is putting out the My Pet Monster cartoon series on DVD doesn't mean much to most people -- another bad '80s cartoon based on a forgotten toy -- but it dredges up somewhat painful memories for me, because this was one of those cartoons I saw all the time even though a) I didn't like it much and b) There were hardly any episodes.

Global seemed to show it all the time in Canada on the weekends, and in time slots where there were no other cartoons for kids to watch, long after ABC had canceled it. I guess because it was produced by Nelvana, it counted as CanCon. So I became familiar with Monster's garbage-eating, and the scary evil giant monster, Beastur, who was constantly trying to capture Monster and bring him back to his own dimension. Also there was this Dr. Bellows-type guy who always suspected that something was going on with the three kids who knew about the Monster, but could never... oh, to hell with it, I can't even talk about it without a certain level of pain. And when you hear the theme song, you'll know why.

Paul Newman = Good.

I really don't know what else to say. I never met anyone who didn't like Paul Newman.

Looking at his filmography, I get the odd impression that he was one of those stars who did his best work for directors who weren't quite in the first rank. (Robert Rossen may be an exception, though he made so few films that it's hard to say where he ranks.) His collaborations with superstar directors -- Hitchcock, Scorsese, Altman, Huston -- were rarely his or their best, even if he did win an Oscar for the Scorsese picture. But with solid middle-of-the-pack, non-superstar directors like Stuart Rosenberg (Cool Hand Luke) or George Roy Hill (Butch Cassidy, The Sting, Slap Shot) or Martin Ritt (who made a lot of successful movies but was never really a star director) he made his best-loved movies. I think he may have been most comfortable with a director who was his equal, not his boss, on a project that was his as much as the director's. An exception: he should have worked less often with Jack Smight, whose hackiness made the fine script and cast of Harper count for surprisingly little.

Why Do You Suppose Ricardo Montalban is Such a Good Pitchman?

When it comes to commercials, most people know Ricardo Montalban from this:



But because that was a little before my time, I actually knew him first from this '80s commercial, which aired during that Disneyland I watched as a kid. (That was the one with "For Whom the Bulls Toil," "The Brave Little Tailor," and "Ben and Me"; I had it on a VHS tape and watched it over and over.) Now I know that this was basically a ripoff of his Cordoba commercial, but it was new to me:



I'm trying to figure out what made the Cordoba commercial so effective -- as entertainment, anyway; I have no idea how many cars it sold. Obviously the commercial is meant to play up the "exotic" appeal, what with the guitar music and Montalban slightly exaggerating his own accent. But I think that's what makes it work. Most celebrities try to act like everyday people when they do commercials, so as to appeal more to the average customer. Or they play the character they play in movies or TV. Montalban is sort of playing himself, but a hammed-up version of himself.

WKRP Episode: "Daydreams"

By request, an episode from season 3 where each of the regulars has a daydream while Mr. Carlson delivers a dull speech.

For some reason, whenever WKRP does an episode without an audience (this one has a pretty obvious laugh track) it reminds me a bit of SCTV, and this episode, written by Peter Torokvei, reminds me a lot of SCTV, with its low-key, deadpan parody skits done without an audience. I think some of these skits could benefit from more "hard" jokes. Venus as a white-bread Vegas standup comic is a great idea, though, because instead of contradicting his character it fits him so perfectly (it's part of the ongoing running gag that Venus, off the air, is incredibly un-hip). Bailey's dream sequence was cut in most syndication versions; I edited it in from another source.

Grudge Match: Laverne and Shirley vs. Mary and Rhoda

The two most beloved girl-girl buddy teams of the '70s pitted in a brutal battle for ratings supremacy. Will the Minneapolis (and sometimes New York) team make it home alive after all, or will the Milwaukee (and sometimes Los Angeles) girls prove that this time, there's no stopping them?

Both teams have one clear weak link: Shirley got her ass kicked by Laverne the very first time they appeared on Happy Days, and Mary is fundamentally useless (unlike Laura Petrie, who was trained in judo). But I think I would personally be inclined to give this to L&S, because Laverne seems to be tougher than Rhoda and Shirley is somewhat less useless in a fight than Mary. But I could be wrong; after all, Laverne and Shirley usually cause more harm to themselves than others, and Mary and Rhoda might not even have to do anything for L&S to fall over and take themselves out of the fight.

That Cartoon That Traumatized You When You Were a Kid

As Thad says, there's been a lot of Irv Spector talk going on lately, and that reminded me that I've been meaning to talk about another cartoon that Spector wrote, "Chew Chew Baby." (Not to be confused with the Woody Woodpecker cartoon of the same name.) This is not a good cartoon, at least as far as I can remember; I'm almost relieved that it's not online anymore (it used to be, but I guess it was pulled before I could see it), because I saw it once, as a young child, and absolutely never wanted to see it again. Probably some of you also remember being traumatized by the sight of a little cannibal who can, and does, devour people whole. You don't see any blood or anything, but you see his teeth get really, really big and then he swallows them whole, snap! It's like Tex Avery's Billy Boy if Billy went around eating innocent people, and also with all the jokes replaced by scary unpleasantness.

When I saw this on TV -- it hasn't been shown on TV for some time, as I understand -- I was young enough that this was actually the first I'd ever heard of cannibalism; and I assumed that this cartoon's definition of the term was accurate, and that there actually were people who have the ability to swallow other people whole.

I was sort of lucky in that I was able to find out the name of the cartoon (by Googling "cannibal" and "cartoon"; there are other cartoons about cannibals, but not that many, and certainly none whose description is anything like this); other people were traumatized by cartoons whose names will forever be a mystery to them. Other people have told me that they had a similar experience, not with this cartoon, but a cartoon -- something they saw on TV in one of those "filler" time slots that used to be filled by cheaply-purchased cartoons (Famous, Terrytoons, and so on) that really creeped them out and stayed with them, not because they liked it, but because they didn't. For many people, the ending of "There's Good Boos Tonight" was the formative WTF experience, though at least that one had a familiar main character.

So did anybody else out there see an old cartoon, in their childhood years, that really freaked/creeped/grossed/[fill in something]ed you out? It's not necessary to recall the titles; the whole point is that we don't remember the titles, and probably would never know them without the internet.

Oh, and if anybody out there has a pristine copy of "Chew Chew Baby" -- I don't want to see it. Not even for curiosity's sake. I've worked long and hard to re-integrate into society after seeing that cartoon on my grandparents' TV in Montreal all those years ago (yes, I remember where I saw it; that's how much it scared me).

Update: Sigh. It is online, and in a very nice print. It was all I could do to watch a few seconds and find that it's even more disturbing than I remembered it. Brrr.

I Don't Like Rhyming Subtitles

In the "things I complain about that normal people don't and shouldn't care about" category: why is it that most English subtitle translations render song lyrics (and rhyming dialogue, like in Cyrano De Bergerac) in rhyme? Watching foreign-made musicals with the subtitles is, for me, extremely annoying because instead of just giving us a literal translation of what they're singing, the subtitles always twist the meaning around in order to make it rhyme. Les Demoiselles De Rochefort is almost unwatchable with the subtitles for that very reason. Same with the Gerard Depardieu version of Cyrano De Bergerac, with the rhyming subtitles by Anthony Burgess.

It would be one thing if the subtitles were "singing" translations that we could sing along with, but for the most part, they don't fit the music, either (or in the case of Cyrano, the scansion of the original French verse); they just rhyme because the subtitle translator decided we had to know that the song/dialogue is in rhyme. But we can hear that the thing rhymes; we're looking at the subtitles just to get a clear idea of what they're saying. It doesn't help to look at the rhyming subtitles and try to figure out the difference between what's being sung and what the subtitler came up with in order to create these lame rhymes. (Though I admit it has helped my French, because it forces me to listen more closely to the lyrics, since I can't depend on the subtitles to tell me anything.) Just give us the translations and forget about trying to make it rhyme, please.

WKRP Episodes: "Pilot" and "The Creation of Venus"

This week was the 30th anniversary of the debut of WKRP in Cincinnati (it premiered on Monday, September 18, 1978). So the appropriate thing is to post the pilot, with the original music, "Queen of the Forest" by Ted Nugent.

And after that, I'm going to post one of the last episodes of the series, "The Creation of Venus," a flashback episode that ret-cons the pilot in light of what we've learned about the characters since then. The writer of "Creation," Blake Hunter, who later created "Who's the Boss?," was a continuity obsessive, and he was bothered at the fact that Venus in the pilot had a different personality and a different backstory than later, so he wrote this episode to reconcile the two. (Though it's been pointed out that in trying to fix all the continuity gaps in the show, he may have created a continuity error by saying that Andy knew Venus's real name; in the first season, it was implied that he didn't.) All the scenes from the pilot are newly-taped -- they had to be, because they had a different Mama Carlson -- but more importantly, the pilot's story is re-interpreted so we see what was going on behind-the-scenes.

So, here's the pilot, act 1 (unfortunately I didn't have room to upload the main title).

Pilot, Act 2:

And here's "The Creation of Venus," teaser and Act 1:

The Creation of Venus, Act 2:

Is THE OPPOSITE SEX worse than THE WOMEN (2008)?

Sorry for the lack of postings recently.

I was recently asked whether I remembered a '50s remake of The Women, before the current flop, I mean. Yes, I do remember it, unfortunately; it was The Opposite Sex (1956), a semi-musical remake of The Women, but with men in the cast (including Leslie Nielsen as the husband). I haven't seen the new version, and don't want to, but I find it hard to believe that it could be as bad as The Opposite Sex.

Not that the original version of The Women is any masterpiece, or even a very entertaining movie, in my opinion. (TCM recently showed The Women followed by Stage Door, and seeing The Women back-to-back with that masterpiece not only shows up how anti-woman The Women is, but why I don't care much for Cukor; I just don't care for his habit of encouraging his actors to be caricatures of themselves, and he doesn't only do that here, but in a whole bunch of his films.) But it's a professionally-done movie, obviously, by a studio at the top of its game. The Opposite Sex was by MGM at its nadir, produced by its most tasteless filmmaker, Joe Pasternak, with a cast consisting mostly of people who had been signed to contracts and had nothing to do now that MGM was cutting back on musicals; it's a contract-burnoff movie. June Allyson, Dolores Gray, Ann Miller and others seem to know that their options aren't going to be picked up, and look accordingly miserable. Everyone's terrible in it except Joan Collins, on loan from Fox; she's not exactly good, but Crystal is such an easy and appropriate role for her that she really couldn't miss with it altogether.

Throw in terrible dialogue ("You've been seeing my daughter!" is the most-quoted line), terrible songs, and that '50s MGM CinemaScope look -- MGM probably had the worst-looking widescreen movies, with lumpy camerawork, poor editing and unpleasant color -- and I don't see how much worse the new version could be

You Learn Something New Every Day, September 16 Edition

In comments on an earlier post, Cristiane asked if I'd seen the 1949 film version of Gigi. I hadn't, until I got the new DVD, where it's included as a supplement. (Unfortunately in a poor print with old subtitles that become unreadable at many points -- white subtitles on black-and-white film don't work once they've become faded.) Given the crappy print, it's hard to know how good it is, but Danièle Delorme is a wonderful Gigi. The director, Jacqueline Audry, was one of the first female directors of studio feature films in France (or, really, anywhere).

And having seen it, I now have the answer to a question I've had for a while: how did Alan Lerner manage to turn out a solid script for Gigi when so many of his other scripts had serious structure problems? The answer is that the script for the 1958 Gigi follows the 1949 version almost scene-for-scene. The character of Honoré appears to originate in this film (he's not in the Colette story), and many, many lines are taken by Lerner directly from the 1949 film script. Minnelli must have seen the 1949 movie too, because some of the camera setups and shots are pretty similar; even bits of business like Honoré's voice becoming nasal when his valet pinches his nose while shaving him.

Lerner did, in other words, what he did what he did with the 1938 Pygmalion movie: take an old movie script and lean on it for dear life. A smart move, because when he tried to write a script without that kind of support, he usually made a mess. (His script for the stage version of Brigadoon is good, but after that...)

There's nothing wrong with basing a musical on a non-musical movie script, of course; the unfortunate thing is that whereas Shaw got credit for My Fair Lady, the writer of the 1949 Gigi movie, Pierre Laroche, didn't get any credit on the musical remake. Not that this is Lerner's fault per se; it was standard policy on remakes to deny credit to everybody but the writer of the original source material, no matter how many scenes were taken from an intermediate version. So The King and I, stage and screen, is heavily based on the script of the 1946 film version, but the screenwriters got no credit (and presumably, no royalties) despite the use of some of their scenes and dialogue.

Update: Speaking of bad prints, this version of the 1958 Gigi is hardly a prize either -- it looks like some scenes are faded and washed-out. I guess it looks better than the previous DVD, but this movie obviously needs a lot of work done on it, and it hasn't been done here.

WKRP Episode: "A Mile In My Shoes"

Sixth episode of season 3: when Herb gets Jury Duty, Andy, the competent radio professional, takes over sales and discovers why a station like WKRP needs someone like Herb, not a competent radio professional. Meanwhile, Les decides he wants to do a radio version of Black Like Me.

The old juror is played by Walter Janowitz, TV's most beloved Eastern European stereotype (you'll remember him as the Polish actor in the "Hash" episode of Barney Miller.)

Music: "Get Off Of My Cloud" by the Rolling Stones and "Another One Bites the Dust" by Queen.

Teaser and Act 1:

Act 2:

Fun With Writing Credits

I picked up Criterion's new DVD of one of my favorite movies, almost literally since I first got interested in old movies, Max Ophuls' Madame De....

One of the extras is an interview with one of the writers of the film, Annette Wademant, and that reminded me about a difference between writing credits in American films and writing credits in the films of many other countries. Basically, the American system is set up to give credit to as few people as possible; it takes a lot of wheeling and dealing and sometimes full-on arbitration to get a writing credit on a U.S. film.

The rules in some other countries seem to have been less strict, and in France, where Madame De... was made, movies would have separate credits for "Scenario" (working out the story) and "dialogue" (the written script). On Madame De..., Ophuls and Wademant share scenario credit with playwright Marcel Achard, but Achard is credited as the sole dialogue writer. If this had been an American film, Achard would almost certainly have gotten sole credit and there is certainly no way Ophuls would have gotten a writing credit on the film; from Wademant's description of the working methods, he led the story conferences and mainly did what every strong director does to work on the script, whether or not he gets credit.

There's no conclusion here, just that the different systems for writing credits tend to give the impression that almost no American directors worked on their own scripts, whereas most non-American directors did work on their own scripts (or in the case of Ophuls, that he was a writer-director in France but not in America), and that's probably an over-simplification.

(Also, why does every release of the film refer to it as The Earrings of Madame De... when that is not the title that appears onscreen? I understand why they added "The Earrings" on posters, to make it clearer to foreign audiences what the movie was about; but I don't know why the mis-titling is still perpetuated.)

MGM's Desperation

Next week we're getting "special edition" DVDs of the only Arthur Freed musicals to win Best Picture Oscars: An American in Paris and Gigi. (Blu-Ray versions will follow next year, just to piss off everybody who has a Blu-Ray player and bought the SD versions this year.) Apart from winning Oscars, the two movies have a lot of things in common: they're both directed by Vincente Minnelli, they both have Leslie Caron, they are both set in Paris, they're both written by Alan Jay Lerner, they're both kind of downbeat and dour in spots (Andrew Sarris called them "oddly depressing") and they've both come to be considered a little over-rated compared to the very best of the Freed/Minnelli musicals -- I think it's fair to say that Meet Me In St. Louis and The Band Wagon have higher reputations these days, and if they don't, they should.

Paris is a musical I've never had a lot of time for. I remember as a kid I was given VHS copies of both Paris and Singin' In the Rain; I watched Rain over and over, but I could barely get through Paris. It's not a bad movie, of course, but seems to have an uncanny ability to capture all the things that bug me about Freed's films: the over-orchestrated music (Conrad Salinger was the most bombastic, noisy orchestrator in Hollywood, and he nearly kills Gershwin's music), the slightly pretentious air, the casting of inexplicable Freed favorites like Oscar Levant (he's better here than in The Band Wagon, but he had a smaller role in Band Wagon and couldn't really hurt it much), the slow pacing and lack of fun. (One Freed musical that holds up better than most is Good News, because it's so fun and unpretentious that it hardly seems like a Freed production at all.) I'm making it sound worse than it is, but a movie with this much talent and prestige should have been better than it is.

Gigi, on the other hand, I liked as a kid and still do. Of course it's a film born out of desperation; MGM had cut its budgets, fired most of the people it signed up to do musicals, and this was Freed's last-ditch attempt to keep his unit alive. It didn't really work, either, since he only got to produce one more musical (Bells Are Ringing), but at least he came up with an award-winning film. But though it has a lot of flaws -- almost no dancing, uncertainty about how far to go with its sleazy story, too many characters dubbed by Paul Frees, the song "Say a Prayer" is a literal My Fair Lady reject that has no business being in this picture -- a lot of the jokes land (it's a lot funnier than Paris) and the score is great, hardly a given with Freed movies; Lerner had a lot of problems as a scriptwriter, but when he was working with Loewe, he really didn't seem capable of turning out a bad song. Also it's one of the few Minnelli CinemaScope movies where he really seems at ease with the wide screen; maybe because the film is kind of stagy-looking, the proscenium shape of the screen actually works and leads to great effects like the three-person shot that opens "Thank Heaven For Little Girls."

Big Techniques For Little Scenes

Don't have time for a long post on this subject, but I was watching Grand Illusion again yesterday, and I noticed that while Jean Renoir pulls off some great technical feats in this movie, he doesn't always save his big camera flourishes for the biggest scenes. Many of the "big" scenes -- the escape, the death of Boildieu -- are shot fairly simply; they're not technically weak, but the camera setups seem pretty traditional. But when the characters first gather for a meal in the POW camp, the camera goes wild, circling around the table, constantly in motion. Renoir called attention to the unique way he shot and edited this simple dinner scene. There are some big camera swoops in the "La Marseillaise" scene which Michael Curtiz, when he did virtually the same scene in Casablanca, staged in a more conventional way.

It's interesting because today, I think there's a default assumption that the biggest technical challenges should be saved for the biggest scenes, and that small-scale scenes, like meals or simple conversations, are shot more simply and economically. But first, doesn't it make more sense to try something technically unusual to liven up what could otherwise be a static scene, instead of saving them for the scenes that are inherently exciting? And second, since unusual techniques are expensive and time-consuming to get right, doesn't it make more sense to try them out in a scene that doesn't cost a lot to shoot in the first place, and shoot some of the more expensive scenes in a more "classical" manner?

Rita Moreno Monroe

To follow up on My post about The Lieutenant Wore Skirts, here's an excerpt from that very strange but memorable scene I mentioned, a parody of The Seven Year Itch with Rita Moreno as the most improbable Marilyn Monroe impersonator of the decade.

Well, it's actually half of an excerpt from that scene, since this is an early CinemaScope movie and the print is pan-n'-scan, but until a letterboxed version turns up, it's better than nothing.

WKRP Episode: "Bah, Humbug"

This is the season 3 Christmas episode, accurately described within the episode itself as "Another one of those Charles Dickens' Christmas Carol things." (Hugh Wilson did virtually the same episode on The Famous Teddy Z, where Alex Rocco's character said that the best part of this kind of dream is "You get to rip off the story for nothing!") This was actually the only episode that won an Emmy for anything; Andy Ackerman, who later became director of Seinfeld, won for best editing.

One thing I realized upon watching it again is that this episode is actually about three different stages in the radio business. The WKRP of Christmas past is an old-fashioned family-run radio station. The WKRP of Christmas present shows the family atmosphere being threatened by bottom-line considerations. And the WKRP of Christmas future is basically what radio stations are now and what they were already becoming in 1980 -- fully-automated and run by the sales department.

The music over the end credits is a vocal version of "Sleigh Ride"; there's another song playing in the Christmas past scene but I don't recognize it.

Cold Opening and Act 1

Act 2

I Dunno About This One

I'm not a reflexive basher of Stuff White People Like, but I don't know about this latest entry, "Appearing to Enjoy Classical Music." Not that some of it isn't accurate, it's just that, as a commenter pointed out, appearing to enjoy jazz is probably more common among the people that SWPL is about. You find a lot more yuppies at jazz festivals than classical concerts, which skew old.

But okay, Philip Glass is the ultimate SWPL composer in any genre (beating out Stephen Sondheim because he has some reach beyond the SWPL community):

The first, of course, is Philip Glass. Not only does he have one of the best last names a white person can have, but he writes music used in smart documentaries. Thus combining multiple white passions into a single artist.

Grudge Match: The Leone-Off

As electric guitar music plays on the soundtrack, two men stand at opposite ends of a dusty field, each watching the other to figure out when to draw their guns.

An extreme close-up of one man, with a stubble of beard and a sardonic stare. It's Blondie (Clint Eastwood), aka The Man With No Name, from The Good, The Bad and the Ugly.

Cut to an even more extreme close-up of the other guy, with cold, expressionless eyes. Yes, it's Harmonica (Charles Bronson) from Once Upon a Time In the West.

It's the final shoot-out between two indestructible, nearly superhuman Sergio Leone leads. What will be the final outcome, after the 10 minutes of close-ups?

(Note: Since Eastwood really didn't play the same exact character in his three Leone movies -- except insofar as all Leone's characters are pretty much the same -- let's restrict this discussion to his character from TGTBATU.)

After All

You've probably seen this since TV Shows on DVD linked to it, but the New York Times reports that the last three seasons of Mary Tyler Moore will be coming out on DVD, thanks to the recent plug by Oprah.

I think daytime TV clearly has an effect on which non-current shows get released; shows where the cast frequently reunites on these shows. The semi-frequent Happy Days cast reunions probably have helped that show get up to its fourth season on DVD even though the first season didn't sell all that well.

Now the question is whether Fox will release the Mary Tyler Moore spinoffs after they finish with the parent show. Probably not, which may be just as well; there'll be no Oprah plug to help get those back on the schedule.

I'm Up To Here With All This Bring-Down!

Following up my highlight reel from The Swarm, I've compiled a highlight reel from the worst movie of the '60s, The Oscar, focusing mostly on the overacting, the insane dialogue, plus one of the worst stunt doublings ever (Ernest Borgnine being replaced by someone who doesn't look anything like him just so he can fall over a desk). The sad thing about the film is that the producer-writer-director team, Clarence Greene and Russell Rouse, had a decent reputation before Oscar; they hadn't done anything great, but they'd made some interesting independent films like the dialogueless The Thief with Ray Milland, and they created the Mike Connors TV show Tightrope. This film, though, pretty much ended their careers.

In a way, The Oscar demonstrates that the difference between a good line and a terrible line doesn't have a whole lot to do with the screenwriter. Harlan Ellison's dialogue is pretty overbaked and ridiculous, and the rewrites seem if anything to have toned down his weird metaphors and syntax (in comments on another blog, he complained that Greene and Rouse changed "I need you like an extra set of elbows" to the more traditional "I need you like a hole in the head"). But there are lots of good movies that have dialogue like that. When the movie is good, the dialogue becomes classic. If Sweet Smell of Success had been poorly made, Clifford Odets' dialogue would be mocked to this day; because it's good -- and that includes, of course, that the actors make this dialogue sound as natural as it can possibly sound -- the dialogue is famous in a good way. But when the movie is The Oscar and the writer is Harlan Ellison, you get this:



Speaking of Ellison, it's not in this compilation, but one line in The Oscar is lifted from an episode he wrote for, of all things, Burke's Law. "No one changes anyone else, they merely open the doors," Milton Berle says to Eleanor Parker, which is exactly what Gene Barry said to the murderer-of-the-week on Ellison's first episode of Burke's Law. But that episode had a better script.

What makes The Oscar the most absurd Hollywood a clef film ever made -- and boy, is that ever saying something -- is that its concept is basically this: Hollywood is a perfect, wonderful place where most people are great and honorable, and mean, selfish people just don't fit in. The studio boss (Joseph Cotten) is a fine, upstanding man whose only fault is that he sometimes hires actors he doesn't like to appease his employees. The agent (Milton Berle) is shocked when Boyd wants him to engage in hardball negotiation tactics and take advantage of legal loopholes in the contract. The Oscar is the symbol of the nobility of the people who vote for it; "The Oscars mean a lot to us," Cotten explains; "we don't like to see them tarnished." And sure enough, the ending shows all the non-Boyd characters applauding for the fact that Boyd didn't win the Oscar: in Hollywood, we're meant to see, bad people never prosper. This movie is like that Simpsons episode where the sweet, innocent Hollywood film crew is preyed upon by the cynical small-town people; except that that was a joke, and this is serious. Or thinks it is.

WKRP Episode: "Hoodlum Rock"

By request, here's the other season 1 episode that is usually only seen in a cut syndicated version: the fourth episode produced and the fourth to air, "Hoodlum Rock," written by Hugh Wilson, where the station sponsors a concert by the band Scum of the Earth. The (bland) music of the band is provided by the group Detective, and one of Detective's members, actor/musician Michael Des Barres, appears as "Dog" (real name, Sir Charles Weatherbee).

The premiere of WKRP was accompanied by a Wall Street Journal article that examined the show as a test case of how a promising show makes it from pitch to pilot to air, and this was the episode that the reporter was on the set to watch. The article explained that this episode was going nowhere for most of the week of rehearsals. Finally Hugh Wilson and co. realized that the problem with doing an episode about punk rock is that "punk rock is already a put-on"; the punk rockers weren't funny because it was impossible to parody punk rock. So the actors' wardrobe was changed to tasteful suits, and they were "instructed to speak with Etonian accents," and the joke of the episode became that they were insane, destructive punk rockers with impeccably upper-class appearance and manners. This finally made the episode work, and the taping went well. The article also noted that Wilson was very unsure about the pie gag that closes the first scene, lamenting "the whole damn show's a sight gag." Ironically, given Wilson's discomfort with slapstick comedy, the most successful project he ever did was the first Police Academy (he had nothing to do with the sequels).

Act 1:



Act 2:




On a semi-related note, I recently looked at some episodes of "The New WKRP in Cincinnati" for the first time in a while, and I realized that one of the reasons "The New WKRP" didn't work was that it essentially used this and some of the other early episodes (like "Turkeys Away") as a template for the whole series: every other episode of the "New WKRP" was about the station getting involved in a promotion that goes wrong. The original series abandoned that kind of story pretty early, precisely because they'd exhausted the possibilities of it.

Nip It In the Budd

This has been mentioned a lot on other sites, but why can't I do it too? So: prodded by Martin Scorsese, Sony/Columbia is finally releasing their Budd Boetticher/Randolph Scott Westerns, with special features contributed by Scorsese and some of his Boetticher-loving pals like Taylor Hackford and Clint Eastwood.

The Boetticher cult -- a very well-deserved cult following, I might add -- was a little slower to develop than some of the other auteur cults; when I first got interested in old films, you heard about him, but not as much as some other makers of Westerns like Ford and Anthony Mann. Partly because he was most associated with Randolph Scott, who was not as legendary as John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart or Clint Eastwood. Also, I think, because his films occupy a middle ground between the old-fashioned Western and the "revisionist" Western that questions the assumptions of the genre; in the late '50s, revisionist Westerns were becoming more common, but Boetticher and Scott's films really aren't like that. They're improved versions of the old B Western formula where the stoic hero rides in, defeats the bad guys, does his duty and rides out. They pared down that type of Western to its essentials and raised them to the level of myth.

Monroe Clone # 2a

Thanks to Thad for sending me a copy of one of the few Frank Tashlin films I hadn't seen (at least not all the way through), The Lieutenant Wore Skirts starring Tom Ewell and Sheree North. It's a pan-and-scan copy, and it's not anywhere near as good as The Girl Can't Help It or Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, but it's an interesting movie, not so much for Tashlin or cartoon buffs -- it's one of his less cartoony movies, all told -- but for being representative of the kind of stuff Fox was doing in the mid-'50s and its search for a new Marilyn Monroe.

Sheree North was a good-looking, talented dancer who'd made a big splash doing a jazzy dance in the Broadway musical Hazel Flagg and the movie version (where the title character was re-cast as Jerry Lewis) Living It Up. When Marilyn Monroe turned down the movie How To Be Very, Very Popular, Fox signed North to be in the film, with a view to making North into their "backup" Monroe -- a buxom blonde who could do the films that the unreliable Monroe couldn't or wouldn't do. North considered herself a dancer, not an actress -- Popular was her first big non-dancing part, and she thought she was terrible in it -- and she said later that it was against her better judgment that her agent persuaded her to do another film for Fox. This was The Lieutenant Wore Skirts. North, of course, did not work out as the next Monroe; she had no star quality and always looked rather short on film, even though she was only an inch shorter than Monroe. But she was talented, and by the time her Fox contract had expired, she had become a very good, solid character actress, and would remain so until her death in 2005. (You remember her as Kramer's mother on Seinfeld among others.)

Anyway, The Lieutenant Wore Skirts was produced by Buddy Adler, who was just about to be promoted to take over from Darryl Zanuck as head of production at Fox. Adler was most famous as the producer of From Here To Eternity, and when he moved to Fox, he embarked on a strange mix of projects: half the movies he produced were big soapy stories like Love is a Many-Splendored Thing, Anastasia and South Pacific, and the other half were odd ducks like Sam Fuller's House of Bamboo, the bizarre Jane Russell flop The Revolt of Mamie Stover, and Monroe's highly successful serio-comedy Bus Stop. But most of the movies he produced were very successful at the box office, which is presumably why he got the job to take over from Zanuck; he was not popular in that job, but I actually think he did some interesting things, making Fox's CinemaScope productions a little sexier, funnier and harder-edged than they'd been under Zanuck. And one of the things he did to facilitate that was sign Frank Tashlin for Fox.

Adler knew Tashlin from when they'd been working at Columbia in the late '40s and early '50s; he signed Tashlin, produced Skirts and set up Tashlin's next two projects for the studio, The Girl Can't Help It and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (Sheree North was originally going to be in The Girl Can't Help It, but Adler and Tashlin jointly decided, rightly, that Jayne Mansfield would make a far better Monroe clone, and Adler bought the rights to the Rock Hunter play just to get Mansfield under contract.) Tashlin told Peter Bogdanovich that Adler gave him complete freedom on Rock Hunter. If you're wondering why the quality of Tashlin's live-action movies went downhill so quickly in the '60s, part of the reason may be traced to Adler's sudden death in early 1960; without his biggest supporter at Fox, Tashlin was left with only one producer who liked to work with him, and that was of course Jerry Lewis. His post-Adler career was a long succession of projects that stalled in development, plus the occasional Lewis project.

Skirts stars Ewell as a TV writer (cue many of Tashlin's usual bitter jokes about the evils of TV) and WWII hero whose air force reserve unit calls him up. His wife, North, also used to be in the Service during the Korean war, so she decides to re-enlist to be near her husband. Except he flunks his physical due to a psychosomatic knee problem, meaning that he has to stay behind while she is sent for a two-year stretch in Hawaii. Fearing that North will be tempted into infidelity in a military base where there are "forty men for every woman," Ewell goes to Hawaii after her, and winds up tricking her into letting him stay in her quarters; as the only civilian husband on the base, the army wives ask him to be a fourth for their bridge game, and so on; then he tries to get her discharged by Gaslighting her into thinking she's crazy. It's pretty much halfway between Tashlin's early romantic comedies and the cynical style of his Mansfield comedies, which is the problem with it: because the sex role-reversal story is told with such a cynical edge, it becomes more mean-spirited than funny. That's an accusation that can be leveled at a lot of Tashlin's live-action comedies; I don't agree with it a lot of the time (Susan Slept Here and Artists and Models have some heart mixed in with the laughs, and even The Girl Can't Help It makes you genuinely like the characters), but it's definitely true here.

Still, you can watch it and tick off the Tashlin trademarks: you've got the boob jokes -- North tries to put on a uniform and finds she can't quite get it around her chest -- and you've got the scene where the wife dumps food on her husband, which is a direct self-plagiarism from The First Time. You've got the double entendres that the censors, even the more lax censors of the mid-'50s, really must have been asleep at the wheel to let through, especially this line when Ewell sees North in a sexy negligee:

"Why, Lieutenant. This is the first time I've felt like saluting you."

Then there's the opening sequence, which in just one minute features slightly arch narration (by North), Hollywood insider jokes, nasty jokes about television, and, of course, an entirely gratuitous leg shot -- which, even panned-and-scanned, gives an idea of what Tish Tash thought CinemaScope was good for. (Update: found a letterboxed version)



But the main point of the movie is to try and test out North as a possible Monroe substitute, and the weird thing about it is that neither she nor the director seem to be trying at all. Although the film is Ewell's follow-up to The Seven Year Itch, the only Monroe substitute in the picture is not North, who basically just plays the sweet-but-sexy young wife, but, of all people, Rita Moreno, whose scenes are a direct, directly acknowledged parody of Seven Year Itch. ("I didn't see that movie," Ewell remarks.) Moreno's scene is the weirdest and best in the movie because it's completely absurd: she's talking like Monroe, acting like Monroe, but she isn't changing her appearance at all, except for wearing the most obvious padded bra ever seen. The sight of a totally un-Monroe-ish woman trying to be Monroe makes for the best joke in the film, and one that would be carried over into Girl Can't Help It and Rock Hunter: in the '50s, every woman is under pressure to act like Marilyn Monroe, who is herself doing an act. The movie comes to life in this scene, which it doesn't in any of North's scenes, because while she's very attractive and clearly has a lot of potential as an actress (though not as a star), neither she nor Tashlin nor Buddy Adler seem to have any real interest in trying to make her the next Monroe. It was a non-starter.

I'll try to upload the Moreno scene later, but this page has screen captures

One more item in what is a very long post on a very flawed movie (but between my ongoing attempt to study Tashlin's work, my fascination with the Adler era at Fox, and the whole Monroe-clone issue, there's a lot to talk about): Sylvia Lewis, who plays the sexy burlesque dancer in the film -- and had been one of Jane Russell's backup dancers in Son of Paleface -- has this to say on her official site:

Frank Tashlin was a joy to work for. He was good natured, patient, very positive and encouraging to be around. He made it easy to try things and he laughed out loud when he thought something funny. He used to embarrass me a little by asking me to walk away from him. He'd say, "look at that... there goes the greatest walk any woman ever had..." Some men saying that would have been insulting, but coming from Frank, it was cute. He was a big jovial teddy bear.

Mike Maltese Speaks in 1960

Here's an article I found a while back on Newspaperarchive.com; it was originally printed by the New York Herald-Tribune in 1960, and re-printed by a few local papers. By this time Michael Maltese was working at Hanna-Barbera, and the article provides a reminder that H-B's corner-cutting was seen as something of a blessing at the time; while the people who worked on their shows would of course have preferred to have more time and money (and in Maltese's case, not to burn through all available story ideas in one season), H-B provided an outlet for slick professional cartoon-making at a time when everybody knew theatrical cartoons were on the way out.

And when Maltese talks about the influence of silent films on his work, he really seems to light up. Notice also that the author doesn't even mention -- unless it was cut out of this reprinted version -- Maltese's association with Warner Brothers. It wasn't considered as important a credit in 1960 as it would be 10 years later when those cartoons had become TV legends.

---

Cartoonist Makes Transition From Movies To Television

By John Crosby

Mike Maltese is a cartoonist who started in animation in Hollywood about 20 years ago. He's never heard of Feiffer and probably never heard of Low or Mauldin either. He's a West Coast boy who can mimic almost any voice he's ever heard, can actually make a line drawing of himself by sheer will power and native acting talent and is now a very successful cartoonist for television.

He draws three frames simultaneously for his cartoon strip Quick Draw McGraw which my kids rarely miss. This is a kiddie strip but it's satiric and adult enough to make me laugh. Quick Draw McGraw is also fairly significant in that it is typical of cartoons that are drawn entirely for television. Most of the cartoons on television originally were drawn years and years ago for theater audiences which, of course, are largely comprised of adults.

Maltese explains: "The reason so many cartoonists are now working for television is that that is where the money is from. Movie exhibitors couldn't afford to pay enough for cartoons because of the double feature and all. But working for theatrical cartoons I worked much less. I wrote eight cartoon features a year. Since I've been working for television, I've done in seven months about eight years' worth of stories. This medium eats the stuff up."

According to Maltese, animated cartoons began originally as picturized nursery rhymes for the movie houses. When they came on, the adults would excuse themselves and go out for a smoke. In order to keep the adults in their seats, the cartoonists started doing their own stories including satire, which would be over the kids' heads without losing them.

"I've been in the cartoon business for 25 years and I've been in every department. Animated cartoons arrived with Walt Disney and they've come a long way since that. Until recently the only cartoons on television were old ones done for the movie theaters. I used to watch some I had done about 15 years ago. Hanna and Barbera, the outfit I'm with, were the first to come out with products which have all the crispness and technical finess you'd find in theatrical cartoons despite the handicap of supplying so much more than theater use.

"In filling the schedule, they were forced to work out a technique of animation that would be faster, actually faster than that used in theatrical cartoons. In TV animation we have to do about 300 feet of animation a week, as opposed to about 25 feet for theatrical cartoons. Some are a little jerky but, on the whole, they're expert jobs.

"The gags that Red Skelton throws away, we would never throw away. We're footage misers. As a boy I was a great fan of the silent pictures. In 1913 I saw Chaplin and I came alive." It still shows in his work. "I went home and I made up as Chaplin. There isn't a film of his I haven't seen over and over. He showed me how close humor is to tragedy. And the original Mark of Zorro with Douglas Fairbanks, with its chases and its humor, depended very much on the sort of action and pace cartoons have now. I'm going to draw Quick Draw as Zorro one day."

Many of the cartoons in Maltese's cartoons sound like the voices of stars. Baba Looie sounds like an exaggerated Desi Arnaz, Yogi Bear like an overblown Art Carney. It's easier for Maltese to do it this way than to originate a new voice for each character.

"In the cartoon business," says Maltese, "no one can take the credit for the finished product. One hand washes the other. The beautiful part of animated cartoons is that, even though we may all hate each other, everyone is working for the same thing. You can't tell where one animator leaves off and the other begins. No, I don't mind the anonymity. We animators are a sort of exclusive club and none of us would want to do anything else."

Then he sighs and adds: "Except -- I might have been a comedian in pictures."
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(Update: Turns out that this was already transcribed at GAC forums a while back. If I'd known that I could have saved myself the work of transcribing it, but on the other hand, it's fun to transcribe old articles, so everybody wins.)

WKRP Episode: "Changes"

Tim Reid and Tom Dreesen have a new book out, "Tim and Tom", about their years as America's first and only black-white comedy team. So here's the WKRP episode that was sort of a reunion for them, since Dreesen is one of the guest stars. He doesn't have much of a part, and he and Reid only get one moment where they get to really do anything funny together (the bit where they fire questions at each other and then sit down in unison), but it's good to see them together again, if only briefly.

This episode, which I've always liked, is basically just another variation on the old TV theme of "just be yourself," but done in a slightly off-kilter way that's typical of the writer, Peter Torokvei. His sense of humor is always a little bent, and that manifests itself in a lot of the jokes in this episode, whether it's Les speculating on why Russian women look like men, Herb's new suit turning him into a Reagan Republican, or the offhand revelation that there's an alternate-universe, race-reversed version of WKRP somewhere out there.

Music: "Magnolia" by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers; "Real Situation" by Bob Marley; a song by Peabo Bryson; and one more song (?) playing in the record library (the only time we ever see this room in the whole series).

Cold Opening and Act 1:

Act 2:

Miss Novak

TCM recently devoted a day to the films of Kim Novak, and Stanley Fish wrote this New York Times piece called "Giving Kim Novak Her Due" (with a lot of enthusiastic reader comments).

You can see why Novak continues to fascinate a lot of people. Everybody in the '50s was trying to develop overdeveloped bombshells to compete with Marilyn Monroe -- even Fox was trying, and they already had Monroe -- and Novak was the most manufactured of these new stars, someone who hadn't even had a speaking part before Columbia signed her and decided to turn her into an instant sex goddess. (The buildup for Novak in Pushover was huge; rarely has so much publicity been devoted to a fairly small noir.) Even Jayne Mansfield had been a success on Broadway before she came to Hollywood; Novak was entirely a creation of Harry Cohn. Yet her own discomfort with the sex-kitten image was always visible; unlike the other Marilyn Monroe knockoffs, and unlike Monroe herself, she wasn't doing much to sell the image, and instead seemed to be working against it. And because she wound up getting loaned out to Paramount for Vertigo, where her part eerily mirrors her own life and her transformation into a synthetic, artificial sex symbol at the hands of a powerful man (coincidentally, since the part wasn't intended for her), it makes the fascination even greater; her most famous movie happens to be the one that almost seems like it's about her.

That said, I always found the idea of Novak more fascinating than the actual onscreen Novak. Too often I watch a movie with her and find myself wishing that someone else were playing the part; Bell, Book and Candle needs a charming light comedienne (the original playwas written for Lili Palmer and Rex Harrison), and instead Novak weighs it down with her dour attitude; Kiss Me, Stupid proves that Novak couldn't play a parody of Marilyn Monroe -- since that's what the character is, like most of Billy Wilder's post-Some Like It Hot characters -- any more than she could be Monroe.

I think the director who worked best with her was George Sidney, who had a great eye for beautiful women and was able to get some energy out of her. But even in Pal Joey, she's still overshadowed by Rita Hayworth.

Here's Novak in Sidney's over-the-top but fun Jeanne Eagels.



Interestingly, when the James Wong Howe, who photographed Picnic, was asked about Novak, he said that she was beautiful "from the waist up. Below, she was very hippy." Having read that, I'll have to go back and check whether or not directors/cinematographers actually tried to photograph her with that idea in mind. (Obviously that wouldn't say anything bad about her; many if not most movie actors are photograph to emphasize their strong points and de-emphasize their less strong points. That's what the glamour factory's all about, making it seem like people have no flaws.)

Great Movie Musical Numbers of the '60s?

Bob Fosse's Sweet Charity is probably my favorite movie musical of the '60s, which doesn't say a lot for the '60s. The movie has a lot of problems: Shirley MacLaine is merely a good dancer instead of the really spectacular dancer the lead role requires (though in fairness I don't know which established movie star would have been better, and Gwen Verdon just wasn't a big enough movie name to do the film), Fosse never settles on a consistent tone for the movie version, most of the characters are unlikable and the ending -- either version -- is terrible. (The original ending of the stage version is in keeping with the whole show, a whimsical, fairy-tale take on what is admittedly a dark and depressing story. That ending wouldn't have worked for the movie, but Fosse never came up with one that worked; actually, I think the "happy" ending he rejected is better than the one he wound up using, but neither one really plays.) What it has that most other '60s movie musicals don't have is a handful of really superb numbers. Not functional numbers that move the thing along; not numbers where you're supposed to be impressed at how much money they cost; and not numbers that come off as filmed stage plays (which is how a lot of good '60s musicals, like The Music Man, come off to me).

They're numbers that do what a great movie musical number must do: blow you away with the combined impact of music, choreography, performance and camerawork. Even though they're similar to the way they were done onstage, Fosse makes them cinematic, not so much with the flashy cutting and temporal tricks, but the more old-fashioned virtues of putting the camera in the right place and staging the numbers with the camera in mind. A great cinematic moment in the "Rhythm of Life" number, below, comes near the end at about 3:53 when Sammy Davis Jr. dances Shirley MacLaine across the Panavision frame; Davis runs out of frame, and then he and his two buddies pop up again from below the frame. That's staging a musical number with the boundaries of the frame in mind -- and that's genuinely cinematic because the staging is based on the fact that we can't see anything outside of the frame, instead of just seeing the frame as a way of zeroing in on bits of a stage picture. The best number in the film, "The Rich Man's Frug," is the same way.

By contrast, most movie musicals of the '60s, even the good ones, had numbers that didn't really stand out as brilliant self-contained conceptions where all the elements come together, like the best numbers of Fred Astaire, or the Trolley Song, or the "Isn't It Romantic?" sequence from Love Me Tonight (those last two aren't dance numbers; a great musical number doesn't have to have dancing). They're nice approximations of the stage versions, or they're big bloated overdone monsters like the Hello, Dolly! numbers, or they're numbers that do their job in moving the story along and don't -- and aren't meant to -- stop the show, like most of the numbers in The Sound of Music.

As I said, this applies even to the good or great movie musicals of the '60s. Oliver! is a very fine, cinematic musical, and a very good candidate for best musical of the '60s (it deserved the Oscar, in my opinion) but the numbers strike me more as very good versions of the typical '60s movie musical number: big, splashy numbers that depend more on size and scope than on the actual choreography or concept of the number -- they're much better than the numbers in Hello, Dolly!, but they're of the same type.

Whereas a small number, quickly-shot, can be a knockout moment if the director, choreographer and performers all share a really interesting, coherent concept for the number and execute it well. Take the "My Rival" number from Viva Las Vegas. That number shouldn't be anything and, by the standards of the big musicals of the time, it isn't anything; it's a not-great song and the number is confined to one room. But George Sidney, the director, shot the whole thing in one take, worked in precisely-timed and funny gags related to the fact that Ann-Margret is making lunch while doing the song, and came up with a number that is a little gem in the great tradition of '30s, '40s and '50s musicals -- and not at all in the tradition of big bloated '60s musicals.



What are some '60s movie musical numbers that work that way for you -- not necessarily the biggest, or the most expensive, or the ones that reveal plot and character the most efficiently, but just numbers that are truly effective, coherent, cinematic numbers that make you feel that you just have to rewind and watch that again?

Here are some others that come to mind for me:. Several of these numbers involve Ann-Margret, and that's not a coincidence; of all the '60s stars she's the one who was best suited to the old-school musical numbers favored by the old-school director George Sidney, and she was almost completely unsuited to the big-budget high-class '60s musical. (She was considered for the second lead of Mrs. Molloy in Hello, Dolly!, but she didn't get the part; there are persistent rumors that Barbra Streisand didn't want a second lead who might overshadow her. But A-M wouldn't have been right for such a bland part anyway.) She was basically a '40s musical star in the wrong era.

- "A Lot of Livin' To Do" from Bye Bye Birdie, which may be the single best number in any '60s movie musical; it's tasteless and garish, from a tasteless and garish movie, but everything, choreography, lighting, performance, composition and color, is working brilliantly and working toward the same goal. Also the opening and closing title song; just A-M and a wind machine and a treadmill, and that's all you need for a good number.

- "Cool" and "America" from West Side Story (two of the ones Jerome Robbins actually got to work on before he was fired).

- "C'mon Everybody," also from Viva Las Vegas, and you could also make a case for "What'd I Say" even though the choreography looks like it was done at the last minute (which it was).

Even though it's not well-directed at all, I might add "Mr Booze" from Robin and the Seven Hoods, the last of Bing Crosby's long line of "clowning around" numbers, where he actually manages to make the Rat Pack funny (they usually weren't when they did numbers like these). A fun '50s throwback, and much more fun than anything in the average '60s musical.

I love Les Demoiselles De Rochefort and I would really like to choose something from it... but the choreography just wasn't that good, and while many of the numbers are adorable, most of them feel like that last bit of brilliant execution is missing.