Random Thoughts on Follies

Some thoughts after seeing the Encores! concert of Follies by Stephen Sondheim and James Goldman:

- It's often noted that this show was originally anti-nostalgia (an antidote and contrast to the straightforward nostalgic pieces that were playing all around New York at the time, like a revised version of No, No, Nanette that was if anything toned down from the original) and now it's a nostalgia piece, appealing to the same age group that hated it at the time. This is not surprising, though. For one thing, the people who go to Follies now are people who more or less grew up with it. For another thing, Follies upset people because it was announcing that the conventions of the musical -- the boy-meets-girl, optimistic, feel-good musical -- had run their course. This was upsetting at the time. Now we all know that this is true, that the musical no longer occupies the central place in the culture that it did until the '60s, so instead of being an announcement of a hard-to-swallow fact, it's a nostalgic tribute to a type of musical that no longer exists.

- The ending doesn't work, never worked, never will work. James Goldman, the writer of the show, was rewriting it up to the end of his life, and the original version (which was used here) is still the best of the bunch even though it doesn't work. The problem is that the climax of Follies is sort of anti-climactic in itself. The plot, such as it is, comes to a conclusion when the two couples confront each other and their past selves, and they finally have to face up to their illusions about themselves. Then we get a long "Follies" sequence where each of the characters sings a pastiche number where they face the truth about their problem. But while this is a great theatre moment, it's anti-climactic because they're just admitting to us what we have known about them the whole evening. And so there's a sense that we spent the night waiting for something to happen, and all that happened was that these four not-terribly-appealing people finally admitted the obvious. No matter what happens after that -- and the final scene, where they stay together and go off to try and work things out, is a plausible enough ending -- there's never going to be much of an ending to a story that is exclusively about forcing people to admit what we all knew the first time we met them.

- I would say that Christine Baranski's rendition of "I'm Still Here" was disappointing, except I never expected her to be right for this song. But a lot of people are vaguely unsatisfying in this number. What it needs is not a great voice -- Yvonne De Carlo introduced it, her version is still the definitive one, and she wasn't a great singer. What it needs is a) A sense that the performer herself has some connection with what the song is about (De Carlo, obviously, did, and a lot of people felt she was really singing about herself, whether or not she was) and b) A willingness to sing it in rhythm, on the beat (a lot of people think that because it's kind of jazzy, they can sing it in free rhythm, and it never works that way).

- My favorite song in the show has always been "Could I Leave You?" and Donna Murphy's performance got a huge hand (as it apparently did at earlier performances. It's an amazing number and has even more of an impact because it comes from a character, Phyllis, who has done hardly anything up to that point except deliver bitchy one-liners. In the original, people might have been wondering why Alexis Smith was in it, or whether she was going to have a number at all, until she stopped the show with this one.

- The original co-director and choreographer, Michael Bennett, went on to do a show with a similar concept -- gathering a bunch of people in a theatre and focusing everything on them. That was A Chorus Line which was more successful though I think it sucks. On the other hand, though A Chorus Line sucks (more specifically, the score sucks, the script sucks and I hate most of the characters), it does have something that Follies doesn't: it's actually leading up to something -- it has that reality-show tension that you get from wondering who will and won't make the cut -- and therefore keeps the audience guessing, whereas as I've said, Follies tells us what's wrong with these people and then lets us wait while they figure it out. The strange thing about show like Follies, where everyone is in one place with occasional fragmented flashbacks, is that even though it's a huge lavish musical, nobody really does anything -- we don't even get complete scenes from their past.

- James Goldman, who was probably a bigger name than Sondheim at the time (because of his play The Lion in Winter and the successful movie version he wrote), got a bad rap for his script, because, well, for one thing there's not much dialogue in the piece, and for another thing, there's not much story and not much of an ending. Sondheim rightly took offence at the idea that the show was good in spite of the book; I don't have the exact quote, but he pointed out that the whole show is built around the book -- songs are written for the writer's story points and characters, staging ideas are built out of the script -- so you can't say that the book is bad and then turn around and praise the songs it inspired.

- There are two ways to cast the four main roles. One is to just cast good performers, which is the approach that was taken at Encores! The other is to cast them similarly to the roles of the old troupers: that is, find people with some kind of nostalgia connection, so the audience will react not just to the character but to their memories of the performer. The original cast went for that approach, mostly -- I say "mostly" because John McMartin, a relatively young performer at the time, was brought in to play Ben (replacing Jon Cypher, who had more nostalgia value because he was the Prince in Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella). The audience sort of remembered Alexis Smith from '40s movies, Gene Nelson from the movie of Oklahoma! and Dorothy Collins from the radio. That added an extra dimension, because most of the main characters had that "are they still around?" quality to them -- and the added joy the audience experiences when they find that not only is Alexis Smith still around, but she's even better than she ever could be in the movies.

- In many ways Follies is the ideal Encores! show. The way these concerts work is that the book is cut down as far as it can go, to streamline the evening and make sure there's not too much dialogue between songs. But with Follies, though there was some trimming of the book, the show is almost written that way to begin with: a few stray lines of dialogue here and there followed by another number. It's a very long score, and almost every dialogue scene is basically a lead-in to another song. On Broadway, this was somewhat unsatisfying, but it works in a concert, where the audience is mostly there to hear the songs anyway.

- The original production of Follies had no intermission. The Encores! concert, like many revivals, inserted an intermission after "Too Many Mornings." This is always a mistake, because it's a very awkward act break. Follies really doesn't have a good place for an act break -- that's why they didn't have one originally -- and trying to fit one in just kills the show's momentum, hurting the buildup to the Loveland sequence.

- If you doubt that Broadway has lost something due to the shrinking size of the orchestra, you have only to hear the excellent Encores! orchestra, under conductor Eric Stern, playing the original orchestrations of Follies (Jonathan Tunick's finest work). In "The Right Girl," there's no substitute for the sound of a full violin section in the dance section, or for the sound of a real, rough brass interjection (which is built into the song).

- Has anybody asked Sondheim or Hal Prince or somebody why Buddy and Sally have the same first names as characters on The Dick Van Dyke Show? I have to admit, if I had been at the performance with a Q&A session, that would have been the question I'd have asked. So maybe it's just as well I wasn't there.

The Jerry Lewis Age of Comics

This isn't really related to anything, but since I've been talking rather too much about Frank Tashlin lately, I might as well post a couple more Tashlin scenes. These are from Artists and Models, and the topic du film is the '50s obsession with comic books. In the first series of excerpts, Jerry Lewis dreams up a garish '50s comic called "Vincent the Vulture," which Dean Martin turns into a best-selling comic -- only to find that Lewis has somehow been putting atomic secrets into his plot descriptions.



In the second excerpt, which may be the most famous part of the film, Lewis goes on TV to explain why reading comic books has left him "A little retarded."



Not included here is my own favorite comics-related exchange in the movie, a rant by a comic book publisher (Eddie Mayehoff) about the lack of violence in Dorothy Malone's comics: "What do you call this? A Murdock book for kiddies and no blood? Not even an itsy-bitsy nosebleed? No stranglings? No decapitations? Where are they?"

Paudcah

The one thing that holds The Gang's All Here back from being a perfect Busby Berkeley musical is that the songs are not up to the standard of his WB movies. As at WB, he had one of America's greatest melodists, the inexhaustible Harry Warren. Warren had broken up with his WB lyricist, Al Dubin, but his partner on The Gang's All Here was one of the best lyricists in Hollywood, Leo Robin. But somehow neither man came up with his best work in this movie; there are some good songs, including one hit ("No Love, No Nothin'," a ballad about women on the homefront whose men have gone off to fight).

But the score contains a lot more duds than usual for either of these songwriters; the songs for Carmen Miranda aren't as good as the ones Warren had written for her in previous movies, the "Polka Dot Polka" is kind of dumb, and the two songs for Benny Goodman's band aren't very good, though admittedly they aren't helped any by the fact that Goodman sings them himself. In fact, "Paducah" may be Robin's worst lyric, and for that reason it's often cited as one of the worst songs in any musical (I don't agree, because Warren's tune is pretty catchy).

Paducah, Paducah,
If you wanna, you can rhyme it with bazooka,
Bu you can't pooh-pooh Paducah,
That's another name for Paradise.
Paducah, Paducah,
Kust a pretty little city in Kentucky,
But to me it rhymes with lucky,
When I'm lookin' into two blue eyes.
Tulip time,
They get excited over tulip time,
But I'm delighted over julep time,
Because I happen to love
A resident of
Paducah, Paducah,
If you wanna, you can rhyme it with bazooka,
But you can't pooh-pooh Paducah,
That's another name for Paradise.

The Plaid Rainbow Era

The WKRP DVD art is available. Very simple, but very '70s.

By the way, in watching reruns of The Bob Newhart Show (from the same production company), one thing you notice is that the clothes Bob wore on that show -- the plaid pants, the loud coats -- were very much like the ones Herb Tarlek wore. Except when Bob wore them, it wasn't supposed to be funny (though he certainly makes fun of them now). I guess that was part of what made Herb fun, that he came off as a parody of the worst '70s fashion trends.

I Love This Dirty Town

Enjoy an excerpt from one of the ultimate New York movies (made, naturally, by a Scottish director who mostly worked in England, Alexander Mackendrick).

Get Over Yourself, Andy

You know that post I wrote defending The Facts of Life? Well, part of what inspired that was reading the first essay in a book called Tales of the Canned, Canceled, Downsized, and Dismissed, where people (most of whom are now wealthy and successful) recall the first time they got fired. The opening essay is by Andy Borowitz, and it's about his one unhappy season writing for The Facts of Life.

You can read Borowitz's essay here. It's a pretty funny piece, but when I read it, I found that it came off very differently than the author presumably intended. He obviously thinks he's writing a story about how depressing it is to be a funny guy working on a show you despise, and how pathetic the showrunners were for taking this crummy show so seriously and trying to pump it full of moral lessons.

Instead, to me, Borowitz comes off as kind of a jerk (in the story, the way he tells it, I mean; I have no judgment on what he's like in actual life). The way he tells the story, he takes a job on a show and then doesn't bother to learn how to write it, how to differentiate among the characters. While the two middle-aged women running the show (their names were Linda Marsh and Margie Peters, by the way) come off as sympathetic because they clearly care about the show and have a vision for what they want to accomplish, and are dealing with this young writer who doesn't care about fitting his work to the showrunner's vision (even though that's exactly what a TV writer is expected to do).

I'm not saying The Facts of Life was great or that the morals weren't heavy-handed. But it did have a certain integrity and the people running it obviously cared about it. And so, in reading about it, I side with the heavy-handed moralists running the show rather than the snarky young wise-ass who thinks he's above it all.

Why We Love Be Somebody Or Be Somebody's Fool

You know what I think people love about Be Somebody Or Be Somebody's Fool, and more generally about Mr. T? It's the fact that everything he's saying -- everything -- is utterly reasonable and a good message for kids. He's telling us to work hard, stay in school, be proud of who you are, don't blow your allowance on clothes with designer labels, don't give in to peer pressure, recover when you make a mistake, treat your mother right. You can't argue with any of that, unlike many '80s pop-culture works that carry messages that seem dubious today.

So when we watch Mr. T, we're torn: on the one hand, we like the messages he's trying to convey, and on the other hand, we find it totally insane that this violent psychopath with a mohawk and gold chains is being held up as a role model for the children. That's what's funny: not that Mr. T isn't being a good role model, but that he is being a good role model even though he really shouldn't be. Or as Seanbaby put it: " Mr. T makes it very clear during the opening song that if you don't start feeling good about yourself, he is going to kick your ass."

Here's another classic Be Somebody moment: the opening sequence, with a montage of memorable moments to come (including the amazing dancing of Jeff!) and Mr. T's first ever rap. Plus my favorite line in the video: "Do you know me? Of course you do! That's because I'm famous." Again, you can't argue with the message: Mr. T is famous, and he goes on to tell the kids that you don't have to be famous to Be Somebody. It's a good message. But it's Mr. T, and the fact that he's saying it makes it funny.

"I Make You Read Every Article In That Magazine, Including Norman Mailer's Latest Claptrap About His Waning Libido."

Jon Zobenica's article on Playboy in the current Atlantic Monthly is getting a lot of attention. And it is a very entertaining examination of the differences between girlie magazines then (Playboy, encouraging its readers to think of themselves as urbane pipe-smokin' sophisticates) and now (Maxim, for the pathetic lonely college boy in all of us).

As to whether the original Playboy was really better than what came after, I don't know. I don't buy the idea that either kind of magazine is less sexist -- sexism is hard-wired into the concept of the girlie magazine, and we're kidding ourselves if we pretend that there's a big difference. If anything, the way women are presented in Maxim -- as vaguely threatening and possibly possessing cooties -- makes them a wee bit more powerful than the "women are there to serve" aesthetic of Playboy. The lad mags carry a message that women are scary, but maybe there's some power in being scary, who knows.

I do think it was good that Hugh Hefner actually tried to include some quality articles and reporting; obviously nobody really reads Playboy for the articles, but if you're going to spend money on a magazine, it should at least have something you can enjoy after you're finished looking at the pictures. At least Playboy fostered the image that people who liked to look at naked pictures could be cool and intellectual; Maxim openly declares that its purchasers are people who can't read and don't have the nerve to buy actual pornography.

Ultimately, though, these magazines are geared to the aspirations of the audience, and aspirations have changed. In 1953, the dream was to prove that being a single man was not a sign of a pathetic, unfulfilled life (why aren't you settling down and contributing to the baby boom, you slacker?), but a sign of sophistication and swingin' coolness. Playboy attempted to convince its readers that they were really grown-ups. Now the dream is to exist in a state of perpetual adolescence, so you've got magazines that feed the dream of being a college frat-boy forever.

You Discover You're In New York

I have procured a copy of Busby Berkeley's The Gang's All Here; it'll be released on February 20, both individually and as part of an Alice Faye collection.

From a preliminary viewing, I think this DVD is pretty much what I'd hoped for; having only seen beaten-up TV versions, I'm no expert on how the film should look, but the transfer seems to be true to the gloriously garish Fox Technicolor and the work of one of Fox's best cinematographers, Edward Cronjager. (Cronjager's uncle, brother and son were also cinematographers -- his son shot the Hill Street Blues TV series. They were kind of the photographic answer to Alfred Newman's musical family, which was also Fox-affiliated.) The extras are about as good as I could have expected: a commentary; a featurette on Berkeley; radio excerpts with Faye (who gave up movie musicals after this film) and her husband Phil Harris; a deleted scene. Also somebody dug up a promotional film Alice Faye made for Pfizer, including clips from her past movies, which is billed here as her "last film."

In fact, now that Warner Brothers' treatment of its back catalogue isn't as good as it once was -- their classic-film releases have fewer and fewer special features and the transfers aren't always what they could be -- I think Fox may be ahead of them when it comes to handling classic film. The one thing holding them back is that they need to get around to the hidden gems in their catalogue (Cluny Brown, let's say, or Bachelor Flat, or many other movies they didn't release on VHS). But they're improving, which is more than I can say for most studios when it comes to old movies.

Very Meta

I don't usually write a Bleg™, but: I'm going to be in New York next week and I'm still trying to pencil in stuff to do that's related to my entertainmental obsessions. (Apart from the usual stuff like the Museum of Television and Radio, stage plays, etc.)

This sounds really silly and presumptuous, but if you have anything to recommend, please drop me an email and let me know. It's so easy to miss stuff when you're in town for a short time, and when it comes to figuring out what to do, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers (maybe that also requires a "™").

Dark Fun

Ivan Shreve has some insightful comments on the show Titus and the limits of how dark it could get within the American TV network world. He compares it to the British comedy How Do You Want Me?, which is somewhat similar -- a stand-up comedian living out his dysfunctional life in the sitcom format -- but less compromised in its ability to go nasty.

On the other hand, I do think that what Ivan calls "Christopher Titus’ philosophy of 'Sure-my-dad-was-a-rat-bastard-and-made-my-life-a-living-hell-but-it-toughened-me-up-and-made-me-a-better-person'" is something that comes from him rather than a network imposition; it was part of his act. If anything, the show's serious and earnest moments probably spooked out the network more than the straightforward dysfunctional-father jokes (this was, after all, the network that had only recently cancelled Married: With Children and was just about to give us the obnoxious parents on Malcolm in the Middle).

Some Of You Are Overjoyed At This News. You Know Who You Are

CHiPs: The Complete First Season.

With audio commentaries by Erik Estrada.

Who will fail to answer the most important question: Could CHiPs catch the Duke Boys? Especially after The Bandit outraced them?

These Gold Changes

All right. Somebody's uploaded another part of Be Somebody Or Be Somebody's Fool -- it's the "Roots" segment, where Mr. T tries to teach us to get in touch with our roots. The highlight, by far, is this line from a wide-eyed girl who responds to Mr. T's story about how his ancestors were brought over as slaves:

MR. T: You see? We all have different roots.

GIRL: Yeah! My dad was born in L.A.! And my dad's dad was born here too! But his dad wasn't born here -- he was born in Sacramento.

MR. T: That's what I'm saying!

Tash Crash

Fox has done a really good job with the DVD of Frank Tashlin's Doris Day vehicle Caprice -- better, perhaps, than the movie deserves. There's a commentary, several featurettes about Day and about the movie, and original promotional materials like radio interviews. All this for a flop movie that hastened Tashlin's decision to give up movie-making (he would make only one more movie, the Bob Hope flop The Private Navy of Sergeant O'Farrell).

This review at a Doris Day fansite sums up the movie's main problem: it doesn't make any sense, and it doesn't know whether it wants to be a mod spy thriller or a slapstick comedy. The inspiration was obviously Charade -- even the title gives that away -- but making that kind of movie requires the thriller parts, the non-comic stuff, to be played relatively straight, and neither Tashlin nor Day could really get into that. So Tashlin kind of dozes through a lot of the picture and then perks up when it's time for some slapstick, but even the broad comedy isn't much fun when it isn't connected to anything. The best Tashlin movies integrate the cartoony jokes into a larger satirical canvas, but the only thing for Tashlin to make fun of in Caprice is the spy thriller genre itself. Except that every time Tashlin tries to make fun of the genre, he's effectively telling the audience that the "serious" parts of the movie were worthless. And that's a recipe for a flop.

I think one problem Tashlin had by this point is that his type of comedy -- involving bright colors, slapstick, and artificiality -- was by this time almost exclusively the province of what might be called "Mom and Dad" movies. That is, movies that appealed to an older audience. (Among "A" pictures, anyway; loud, bright, artificial movies were also being made for the drive-in set.) So Tashlin wound up working a lot with stars like Danny Kaye, Doris Day and Bob Hope, whose audiences tended to be older and more conservative in their tastes. But in making movies for that audience, he couldn't get as wild or as viciously satirical as he had been in his '50s prime. So a lot of his movies from this period are basically Mom n' Dad comedies -- typical Doris Day or Bob Hope vehicles -- with a few Tashlin touches at the edges.

In Caprice, the most Tashlin-esque scene is probably this one, which features several things Tashlin held dear: beautiful women in wacky costumes, satirical shots at advertising, and an in-jokey cameo -- the distinguished-looking old gentleman Richard Harris addresses as "Shamroy" is Leon Shamroy, the great veteran cinematographer who shot this film (and who earlier had done amazing work on Tashlin's The Girl Can't Help It).

More Music Issues

So here I was all set to watch season 1 of Family Ties, and then This Sitcoms Online Review kinda kills my buzz:

On the back of the case, it says in very small text: Music has been changed for this home entertainment version. That is partially correct. I saw a few scenes where the original music had been replaced with either instrumental music or another song. I did notice at least 2 scenes that were omitted entirely on the DVD....

In the "Pilot" episode, there is a 30 second scene (accounting for the 23:31 running time on the DVD vs. 24:01 on the tape) that was cut entirely. The scene has Steven and Elyse relaxing in the family room, and Alex comes in and says the ambience is all wrong and he turns off the stereo, which was playing the folk song "Days of Decision" by Phil Ochs. It seems like they could have just replaced this song instead of editing the scene entirely out.

In the third episode, "I Know Jennifer's Boyfriend," there is one scene that was entirely cut out and at least 3 songs that were replaced. A 30 second scene of Steven and Elyse singing "Eddie, My Love" by The Teen Queens was cut out entirely. If they couldn't get the music licensing rights for this song, I could understand why it had to be cut.

Three songs at the 1950s themed party were replaced. There were tiny clips of "Wake Up Little Susie" by The Everly Brothers and "Earth Angel" by Chuck Berry that were replaced. Elvis Presley's "The Twelth of Never" was originally used for the closing dance scene, but it was replaced on the DVD with some modern sounding song that really didn't fit the 1950s party theme or the scene nearly as well.

I can understand replacing some songs if they're too expensive, but it sounds like Paramount just replaced anything music-related and, if the scene didn't work without music, they just cut the scene. This does not bode well for future seasons (the "A, My Name is Alex" episode used "Light My Fire" by The Doors"), and it seems kind of shabby.

Of course, every show that turns up on DVD now makes you worry a bit as to what music made the cut and what didn't. But you kind of expect that they'll leave something in there.

Biggest Laugh at a Screening of The Girl Can't Help It

Whenever I see a great comedy on the big screen for the first time (after years of viewing it alone or with just one or two other people), I always like to see which moment will get the biggest laugh from an audience. With The Girl Can't Help It -- and this shouldn't be too surprising -- by far the biggest laugh was for:

Tom Ewell: She's just a girl.
Paperboy: If she's a girl, then I don't know what my sister is!

The Strange Love of Hal B. Wallis

After World War II, when the Hollywood studio system first showed signs of crumbling, there was a lot of shuffling of behind-the-scenes talent. For the first time in years, directors or producers associated with one studio were routinely moving to other studios, or setting up quasi-independent operations. One high-profile example was the producer Hal B. Wallis. He'd spent years as Warner Brothers' executive in charge of production, doing for WB's "A" pictures what Darryl Zanuck did at Fox, namely supervising every aspect of the picture and firing off memos about what to fix and how to fix it. In the early '40s, he cut back on his administrative duties and concentrated on producing; in this period his projects included Casablanca, which won Best Picture. There was some talk that one of the reasons behind his decision to leave WB was his resentment over the fact that Jack Warner went up to accept the award, even though it was Wallis's award.

Anyway, in 1945, Wallis departed Warner Brothers and set up shop at Paramount, where he would remain for over 20 years. His arrangement with Paramount allowed him a fair amount of autonomy: he owned a share of the pictures he made, and could put stars under contract to appear in his films and his alone. Martin and Lewis appeared in only four pictures that weren't produced by Wallis. As at WB, he was good at attracting and nurturing talent; he signed Martin and Lewis and brought them along intelligently, starting them in supporting roles (My Friend Irma) graduating them to movie-star status. He was also good at figuring out what a star could do and then finding ways for him to do it over again. Elvis Presley had made several movies before he signed with Wallis, but -- for better or for worse -- it was Wallis, in Blue Hawaii, who came up with the Elvis Formula that would turn him into a dependable moneymaker.

But the surprising thing about Wallis's post-WB career is how few good movies there are in there. It used to be said, reasonably enough, that the money Paramount made on series movies -- first with Martin & Lewis, then with Elvis -- allowed him to produce more serious pictures. But the non-Elvis, non-M&L movies are in many ways much less entertaining and even less interesting (given that some of the Martin & Lewis movies hold up quite well). And nearly all of them fall into the same category: static, stagey adaptations of stage plays. You've got Come Back, Little Sheba, The Rose Tattoo, Summer and Smoke, and the super-worthy movie Wallis apparently considered his biggest Oscar contender, Becket. Apart from those, you have some very stagey-looking Westerns like Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (which was dull enough that the director, John Sturges, wound up returning to the Wyatt Earp story ten years later to make a better movie, Hour of the Gun).

Paramount movies of the '50s were very drab-looking -- the studio reacted to budget cuts by using cheap sets, avoiding location shooting, and generally making it look like everything was shot in a warehouse, which it probably was. But even by this standard, most of Wallis's movies of this period are without any visual interest at all: they're slow, talky, with static camerawork and with a depressing tendency to use boring directors like Daniel Mann (or directors imported from the stage without much notion of how to shoot a movie, like Peter Glenville).

There are a few good serious movies from Wallis's Paramount period, mostly from the late '40s after he'd just joined the studio. Love Letters with Jennifer Jones and some noir-ish movies with Barbara Stanwyck (especially The Strange Love of Martha Ivers) still work. He also got a bit of a second wind in the late '60s when he started working with the veterans John Wayne and (director) Henry Hathaway, leading to some entertaining pictures like True Grit and The Sons of Katie Elder. But apart from that, what we see in Wallis's Paramount career is a guy who used to make Casablanca and Yankee Doodle Dandy, now making A Girl Named Tamiko and Boeing Boeing.

In part this may be a case of Independence Syndrome, the tendency of some directors and producers to get more cautious once they have more of a financial stake in the success of their movies (not that I'm arguing against that). With a certain degree of independence, Wallis didn't like to take chances on casting or subject matter, so he would cast the same people over and over and rely on Broadway successes for his source material (instead of doing something nutty like adapting an unproduced play, which is what he did with Casablanca). But there's another factor here that I don't quite get. Wallis's WB memos, which are frequently read out on DVD commentaries, show someone who's very aware of the necessity to keep a scene moving, to keep it visually interesting, to keep it from getting static. He warned the crew of The Maltese Falcon that the long climactic scene in Sam Spade's apartment couldn't lapse into staginess. Did he just forget all this when he went to Paramount, and started making movies where the camera was in lockdown and the whole thing felt like a filmed stage play (and not a good one either)? Or was it just that he was better able to give advice on a production when it was less completely his own?

Update: Commenter Griff makes the good point that the above post suffers from "the essayist's curse of trying to make a rigid conclusion from random circumstances." He continues:

Wallis made oodles of bad and cheap movies at Warners in his first decade there, and even in the period when he was more carefully claiming a producer credit at the studio he was making less than masterful works like Passage to Marseilles and The Affairs of Susie.

I might agree with you that those Broadway adaptations now seem pompous and drab, but Wallis here was following the enthusiasms of the time and these plays were considered high marks of adult entertainment, strong and artful drama, and he produced them with a degree of seriousness and integrity.

You reference Blue Hawaii in regards to Wallis's Elvis series, but in fact Wallis was responsible for the early and highly credible Elvis vehicles King Creole and the "autobiographical" Loving You. Wallis had good and bad pictures in all his periods of producing. If you cherry pick his post Warner period it includes a mixed bag, including popcorn hits, carriage trade successes, and Oscar winners, and a best of list in that 25 years could include--Martha Ivers, Dark City, Sorry Wrong Number, The Furies, the two Tashlin Martin and Lewis' Artists and MOdels and Hollywood or Bust, Creole, Last Train from Gun Hill, Katie Elder, True Grit, Anne of the Thousand Days, Becket.

The Next TV Mega-Set?

Looks like Sony is working on special features for a mega-complete set of Bewitched. So you might want to hold off on buying the individual releases of the Dick Sargent years -- hard though they might be to resist.

In other old-TV news, Rockford Files releases seem to be coming along nicely.

Why Are Armenians Eating Lasagna?

WKRP in Cincinnati: The Complete First Season is up for pre-order now, if you're into pre-ordering stuff.

While we're waiting for the set (and to find out what the music situation will be), here's a collection of highlights of my favorite character on the series, Les Nessman (Richard Sanders). That character had a tough challenge because he was, at least potentially, very similar to Ted Baxter; if the whole show was supposed to be MTM's successor to the recently-ended Mary Tyler Moore, Les was obviously the successor to Ted's Inept Newscaster mantle. Sanders, and the writers -- sometimes one in the same, because he wrote several scripts -- managed to sidestep comparisons by turning Les into a person who thought, at all times, that he was the world's greatest journalist and that everything he talked about was incredibly serious and important. So if Ted was a satire of journalists who don't know anything and are only hired for their voice and "distinguished" looks, Les was a satire of the unquenchable belief of journalists in their own importance, no matter how idiotic they are.

Even when he appeared on Solid Gold, a CBS show where B-list celebrities sometimes appeared to cross-promote other CBS shows, he stays 100% in character and delivers an introduction that is, believably, something Les Nessman would say if he were introducing Nicolette Larson.



(Note: All available Solid Gold clips can be found here, for those of you who can't get enough of everything that was wrong with TV and music in the early '80s.)

An Introduction or a Mislead?

Over at Cartoon Brew, Amid Amidi and Steve Worth have differing opinions of a recent Family Guy segment that inserted Stewie (the poor man's The Brain) into the Anchors Aweigh sequence with Gene Kelly. Worth doesn't think much of what they did:

How much "thought to animation and choreography" does it take to rotoscope someone else's animation and slap your own character over the top of it? If this was a parody, it would have added some sort of comment through additional humor. If it was a tribute, they would have had the respect not to obliterate the great animation by Ken Muse and Ray Patterson by pasting their own poorly traced drawings over the top of it. To my eyes, this looks like the Family Guy crew took the hard work of these legendary artists and copped it for themselves without adding a single thing to it. They can get away with it, because the viewers probably have never heard of Gene Kelly, much less have seen the clip of him dancing with Jerry Mouse.

You can see the clip for yourself here. As Worth says, it is the original Anchors Aweigh clip, with Stewie simply placed over Jerry.

I'm of two minds about this, and neither of them have anything to do with my feelings about Family Guy (you may not realize this because I've been so reticent about saying it, but I don't like that show). In an age when fewer and fewer young people are being exposed to classic animation and classic movies -- mostly because they're no longer shown on regular broadcast TV and most kids aren't going to be watching Turner Classic Movies -- it's something of a public service for Family Guy to be introducing its predominantly under-30 audience to the classics of both animation and live-action.

On the other hand, Worth is right that by simply re-tracing the original animation, the Family Guy crew is basically ripping off the hard work of Muse and Patterson. Look at the blog posts about the sequence: several of them pay tribute to the beautiful animation, without a real understanding that the animation has nothing to do with anything the Family Guy people did.

I suspect the segment was well-intentioned. But the way they did it, it does seem awfully like taking credit for other people's work. Creating new animation and/or live-action would obviously have not looked as good, but at least it would have been their own work.

I Consider You the Greatest Idiot in the Diplomatic Service

I was hoping to have a post ready about the producer Hal B. Wallis and why his work declined so badly after he left Warner Brothers (where he produced or executive-produced some of the best films ever made). But some annoying thing called "time" got in the way. Hopefully I'll have it, or some other post, ready tomorrow.

In the meantime, as placeholders, here are two great movie comedy scenes featuring the same obscure actor, Herman Bing. He was a German actor who emigrated to America and, before S.Z. Sakall, was Hollywood's go-to guy for heavily-accented bit parts. As you can see from his IMDb listing, he didn't do a lot that was memorable, maybe because his accent was so distinctly German that it made him hard to cast (unlike Sakall or Sig Rumann, whose accents were just a little bit more generic-sounding). Once the U.S. went to war with Germany, he hardly got any parts at all, because you couldn't have funny German characters any more.

But in 1934, Bing managed to get memorable scenes in two memorable movies. In Lubitsch's The Merry Widow, he gets the single funniest scene in the film, where he becomes incongruously passionate and involved while reading out the King's angry missive to Edward Everett Horton. I still quote "I consider you the greatest idiot in the diplomatic service" at odd times.



And in Howard Hawks' Twentieth Century, Bing is one of the bearded actors from the German Passion Play, who gives John Barrymore the idea of turning the Passion into a vehicle for Carole Lombard.



This is also the scene with the wonderful shot I wrote about a couple of years ago, wonderful because it feels so spontaneous:

n a single take, Walter Connolly pushes them out of the stateroom, turns back to Barrymore, pushes him into his seat, and pours out his heart: "O.J., listen, I know you won't believe this, but I'm more than an employee -- I'm the best friend you've got... I'm not gonna let you get mixed up with any phony art." What I love about the shot is that the composition is, in film-school terms, totally wrong: Connolly and Barrymore wind up bunched together in the left-hand corner of the frame, with empty space in the rest of the frame. What clearly happened, as with many of the shots in the film, is that Howard Hawks liked the spontaneous quality of the acting in that take, and left it as was, with no "coverage," no editing. No studio would let a shot like that get by today; they'd have sensible compositions, lots of cutting back and forth between characters, and they'd drain all the life out of the scene.

Martin & Lewis vs. Crosby & Hope

Yes, another homage to WWWF Grudge Match, but a very obvious one:

Paramount Pictures' two top "crooner and comic" teams face off against each other in a brutal tag-team battle. In this corner, Bing Crosby and Bob Hope from the Road movies. In the other corner, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. Which playful pair will prevail, and who will partake of a pathetic pummeling?

I would lean slightly toward Dean and Jerry, with some misgivings. Especially early on, they're both extremely skinny. But as the conclusion of Artists and Models proves, Jerry has the strength of twenty men when he gets really worked up, and Dean, with his rampant gangland connections (really, he's in trouble with gangsters in every other movie) may know a few tricks. I don't think they'll fall for the "pat-a-cake" routine, which strips Bing and Bob of their greatest asset. Finally, Jerry and Dean usually seem to get along better than Bing and Bob, who always spend half the movie selling each other out. The teamwork advantage will give Jerry and Dean the edge they nead to win.

Bob Carroll Jr., RIP

Bob Carroll, one of the creators and writers of I Love Lucy, died at the age of 87. He and his writing partner Madelyn Pugh Davis were on the writing staff of I Love Lucy from beginning to end. For the first four seasons they and the third creator (Jess Oppenheimer) wrote every episode, while in the fifth season the writing staff expanded to a staggering five writers.

The TV Week obituary mentions some of their other credits. As you can see from this list, they were mostly associated with Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, both together and separately (after Ball and Arnaz split up, they wrote for Ball's shows but they also worked on shows that Arnaz created, like "The Mothers-in-Law").

Something About Borat I Hadn't Heard Before

Bright Lights Film Journal makes the unusual -- but plausible -- case that the Borat movie is influenced by the Dean Martin/Jerry Lewis/Frank Tashlin film Hollywood or Bust:

The fish out of water is a television journalist from Kazakhstan - impersonated by English comedian Sacha Baron Cohen - who travels across America, nominally to make a documentary educating himself and his Kazakhstan viewers concerning the ways of Americans, actually to hook up with his dream woman, Pamela Anderson. (Speaking of screenwriting tropes, this one is borrowed from Frank Tashlin’s classic 1956 comedy, Hollywood or Bust, where Jerry Lewis, accompanied by Dean Martin, travels cross-country to meet his dream gal, Anita Ekberg. Borat successfully homages both Lewis and Laurel & Hardy.)

Grudge Matches I'd Like To See: Hamburglar vs. Cookie Crook

Battle of two characters who taught us, as children, that it's okay to turn to a life of crime:

The Hamburglar (McDonald's) vs. The Cookie Crook (Cookie Crisp). Which masked bandit will prevail?

To refresh your memory, here's a vintage commercial for Cookie Crisp, which may hold some kind of record as the most unhealthy concept for a cereal. The only thing worse would be a cereal consisting entirely of sugar cubes.

Torontobloggin': The Girl Can't Help It

For people in Toronto, next week there's a chance to see the work of one of the directors I'm always babbling about.

On Saturday, February 3 at 2:00 p.m., the Toronto Cinematheque will have a screening of the Frank Tashlin film The Girl Can't Help It at Jackman Hall.

Terry Teachout recently wrote about seeing this movie for the first time:

I also watched Frank Tashlin’s The Girl Can’t Help It, the movie that made Jayne Mansfield a star. Not only had I never seen it, but I’d never seen any of Mansfield’s other movies—she was only a name to me—and I found her unexpectedly charming.

This inspired me to take a look at the BBC documentary on Mansfield that airs on Ovation from time to time. To my astonishment, it included a snippet of a Fifties kinescope in which Mansfield can be seen playing the first movement of Vivaldi’s A Minor Violin Concerto, Op. 3, No. 6. (You can view a poor-quality transfer of the same snippet by going here.) This concerto is often played by students—I played it in high school—and though her performance isn’t very good, it isn’t hopelessly bad, either.

How strange that so touchingly earnest a creature should have gone to Hollywood and become a big-chested blonde bombshell! Only in America…

One bit of trivia about this movie that I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere: when this project was originally announced in the trades, it was as an adaptation of Garson Kanin's novel Do Re Mi, a satire of the music industry and specifically the jukebox business. The star was to be Bing Crosby. By the time it started filming, Crosby had pulled out and Kanin's story had been completely dumped (he's not even credited in the film); the only thing they kept was the idea of gangsters getting involved in the jukebox racket. A few years later, Kanin adapted Do Re Mi as a Broadway musical, starring Phil Silvers.

Update: Speaking of Silvers, I've heard several people (including the guy on the DVD commentary) insist that he plays the milkman in this scene, but it sure doesn't look like him to me. Maybe a big-screen viewing will settle that.

We Don't ____ Here!

The new DVD set of Get Smart may be the best set ever created for a non-current television series. And this in spite of the fact that it was done too late for Don Adams to participate in it. I hope to write a bit more about it later, but it's one of those DVD releases that actually improves my opinion of the show. I always liked Get Smart, but I thought it was a bit overrated or at least limited, because every episode was the same and it was hard to care much about the characters. But, even while acknowledging that these limitations are still there, I liked the show better when I was finished watching the extras. I got a better sense of how difficult it is to do what this show did, which is to do parody and satire in the form of a show with continuing characters. Most shows that tried to do the same thing have failed because no one could stand to watch a parody (something where we know the story can't be taken seriously) every week; the producers of Get Smart! were the only ones who managed to give a parody series enough story and character strength to sustain it for five years.

A lot of that, I think -- and creator Buck Henry implies this at several points -- comes from the show's executive producer, veteran writer Leonard Stern. The pilot, written by Buck Henry and Mel Brooks, was very funny and included most of the show's best catchphrases and gags ("Would You Belive," lifted from Adams' work on the Bill Dana Show; the Cone of Silence; "And loving it"), but the story didn't make much sense and important plot points were disposed of in a very perfunctory way. As the first season went on, Stern helped add some solidity to the stories; they didn't have to be taken seriously, but they did have to work as effective action/mystery stories no matter how ridiculous they were, meaning there had to be a good hook to the story and it had to be resolved in a plausible way.

The DVD Beaver has a review and screen shots from the set, which is currently only available from Time-Life but should be in stores sometime later this year. One thing that struck me again is that long on-camera interviews with one cast or crew member (in this case, Buck Henry, Leonard Stern and Barbara Feldon among others) are far preferable to making-of documentaries with clips from a lot of different people. Same with the Criterion Collection, which usually does the long one-on-one video interview instead of breaking it up into little clips for a so-called "documentary."

Oh, and for people who are wondering if Agent 99's real name was ever revealed (there was an episode where she used the name "Susan" but it turned out to be another alias), here's definitive proof that it never was. This is from the fifth and final season, when she and Max had been married for a year:

It's Charles Lane Day

A budding tradition in the entertainment blogosphere is celebrating the birthday of actor Charles Lane. He's 102 today.

Brent McKee has a good piece on Hollywood's "oldest living actor."

There have been some discussions on message boards dealing with the question of whether Mr. Lane ever played a nice guy. In his twenties, he was already playing crusty, testy people like Max Jacobs (originally Max Mandelbaum) in Howard Hawks' Twentieth Century.

Have you ever seen Charles Lane playing a good guy? It must have happened somewhere.

Favorite Road Runner Gag?

Thad has a clip of one of the most famous gags in any Road Runner cartoon, a Ken Harris-animated scene from Whoa, Be-Gone!, where the Coyote tries to... well, just click the link and see for yourself.

Many people consider this the best gag in any Road Runner cartoon. It follows the pattern of a lot of the best gags Mike Maltese wrote for the series, which is to have the Coyote try something really absurd, do a long build-up while he tries to get it to work, and then have it fail for the most obvious reason imaginable. It goes all the way back to a gag in the first cartoon in the series, Fast and Furry-ous. The Coyote gets an ACME Super Suit, apparently expecting that it will let him fly like Superman. He strikes a Super pose, gets a long running start, jumps off the cliff... and instantly falls (he didn't even have to look down first). It's funny because the result was so obvious. It's like Maltese's cartoon-comedy version of Occam's Razor: the simplest result of the Coyote's stupid plan is usually the funniest one.

I think my favorite Road Runner gag is another one in this category, from Zoom and Bored. You get a long, drawn-out shot of a very complicated and elaborate system the Coyote has come up with for rolling a bomb down a mountain. And then he lights the fuse and the bomb immediately blows up on him.

Other favorite Road Runner/Coyote gags?

We Did It Before And We Can Do It Again

Ken Levine recalls a M*A*S*H episode which had the same plot as an earlier episode. The staff realized this only after the episode had already started filming. I join with many of Ken's readers in thinking that the unintentional remake was actually a better episode.

TV shows unintentionally recycle their own plots all the time. Of course they also intentionally recycle plots. And sometimes it's hard to tell which is which. I knew about the similarity between those two M*A*S*H episodes, but until I saw Ken's post I had no idea if this was intentional, unintentional, or somewhere in between, because these things fall into three categories:

a) The show does an episode with an unintentional similarity to another episode. See above. See also Pinky and the Brain, which did a half-hour episode around a story that had already been done as an Animaniacs short, but the people involved with the episode claimed they hadn't seen the original short.

b) The show intentionally recycles another episode, figuring that most people won't remember it (obviously this was much more common before everything started getting syndicated). Bewitched was the king of this tactic; as early as their third season, they were re-making episodes from the first season.

c) The show independently comes up with something similar to an earlier episode, someone on the staff recognizes this, but it's decided that the new story is sufficiently different from the old one (The Simpsons is always doing episodes that are sort of, but not quite, like the old ones).

Then there are all the shows that recycle episodes done by other shows. Again, it's hard to tell, without knowing for sure, which of the three above categories these things fall into, especially when the two shows are from the same production company. For example, I remember that Just Shoot Me, an NBC show produced by Brillstein-Grey, did an episode where Elliott (Enrico Colantoni) coaches Nina (Wendie Malick) for a radio interview by teaching her some big words she can use to make herself sound intelligent; the words are all ridiculous fake words, and when she uses them on the air, she sounds like an idiot. This was the exact plot that had already been an episode of NewsRadio, which was an NBC show produced by Brillstein-Grey. But did the writers of Just Shoot Me actually knock off NewsRadio, or was it just an idea that was floating around (it is something that two people could come up with independently, after all)? We'll never know.

And yeah, I bring that up in part as an excuse to direct your attention to the funniest NewsRadio ever.

Movies That Work Better On YouTube

Well, no movie actually works better with the picture and sound quality of YouTube, so of course I don't mean that subject line literally. But I was re-watching Jacques Demy's Les Demoiselles De Rochefort, and it occurred to me that this is one of those movies that works better in short clips than as a whole.

Every time I see an excerpt from this movie -- any excerpt -- it blows me away; I'm enthralled by the candy-store color, Michel Legrand's music (and Demy's excellent lyrics), the gorgeous locations and the gorgeous people and Demy's elaborate tributes to Vincente Minnelli and the M-G-M musical. But when I see it all the way through, I'm less impressed, because the plot has a ton of problems: apparently Demy, in his zeal to pay tribute to the Hollywood musical, didn't remember that the best musicals have simple, emotionally-involving plots (like his own The Umbrellas of Cherbourg). Another flaw that becomes apparent in a full viewing is that the choreography isn't very good; this is a common problem when auteur directors do musicals, because they can't do what the director of a musical needs to do, which is step back and let the choreographer essentially plan an entire scene. (Ernst Lubitsch is another director whose musicals have either no dancing or bad dancing, because he usually couldn't bring himself to turn a scene over to the choreographer.) And finally, it becomes clear that Demy and Legrand just put too many songs in the picture: a musical needs a breather between numbers or they all start to feel like they're the same.

And so, as I said, Les Demoiselles De Rochefort is a movie made for the YouTube format: a short clip highlighting a particular scene or musical number. You get the best qualities of the movie, without the repetition and plot problems that make the whole thing wear out its welcome.

Are there other movies -- musicals or otherwise -- that you think work better in bits and pieces than as a whole?

Here are two clips from Les Demoiselles that I think sum up what's right with the film (or bits and pieces of it). The first song, "Chanson Des Jumelles" (Song of the Twins) for the very beautiful and very dubbed sisters Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac. I like the way Demy has the girls make small talk and then suddenly burst into song. Instead of finding ways to set up or justify a song, he's just saying: this is a musical, people will sing at random, get used to it. I also like how he includes little clichés that hardcore MGM musical buffs will recognize, like having the characters laugh after the number is over.



And "De Delphine à Lancien", a scene which starts with an elaborate, very Minnelli-esque crane shot following Deneuve around a street full of dancing people. The ensuing scene shows off Demy's carefully-planned color schematics, compositions (Deneuve flanked by a black-and-white art piece on one side and a painting of her -- sort of -- on the other), and those lines of dialogue that would be clunky and pretentious in another film but are somehow charming in a Demy movie ("When you say 'my soul,' it's my body you're thinking of").

Directorial Credits

Of all the insignificant things I've ever become interested in, the most insignificant thing was something I started noticing when I was a kid: the different places the director's name appears in the credits of a movie.

What I mean is that different eras of movies seemed to put the director's name in different places. Before the mid-'30s, the director's credit usually appeared early in the credits sequence, usually the first thing after the title and acting credits. By the end of that decade, all studios had switched over to the "modern" practice of making the director's name the last one to appear. (Or, if the credits ran at the end of the film, the first.) Then in the '80s and early '90s, they started having this odd thing where the director's name would be delayed until after the credits sequence was essentially over -- that is, they'd wait until the music had stopped and the next scene had begun, and only then would they flash the director's name. I got the impression that they wanted the director's name to co-incide with the beginning of a scene that actually mattered, rather than the pointless scenes that usually accompanied the opening credits in that era.

Of course, if a film wants to call attention to the director's credit, they can always do it like the famous moment in The Wild Bunch, where William Holden's line "If they move, kill 'em!" is instantly followed by "Directed by Sam Peckinpah." It's the best credit ever and one of the few instances where a credit gets a laugh from the audience (whether it was intended this way or not, the juxtaposition of that credit with that line comes off as a little in-joke about Peckinpah's worldview).

Link to clip from The Wild Bunch removed for the heinous crime of not working

Round-Up of Recent Showbiz Deaths

1. Amid Amidi's tribute to Hanna-Barbera mainstay Iwao Takamoto, including a 1999 interview for Animation Blast.

2. The French Ambassador writes a letter to the editor about Art Buchwald. Buchwald was as much a fixture in France as in America, perhaps more; his work in France in the '40s and '50s was so well-known that in Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief, he's the author of a gossip item that Cary Grant reads. And Jacques Tati's Playtime, for which Buchwald wrote the English-language dialogue, just came out in an excellent Criterion two-disc edition.

3. One more thing about Mike Evans, Lionel Jefferson on All in the Family. Here's his first appearance in the pilot (the 1971 pilot, not the two unsold pilots Norman Lear had already made of the same material). The character and his relationship with Archie were nailed right from the beginning; the only thing that's different is that Archie finally realizes -- at the end -- that Lionel is putting him on, whereas in the series he never seemed to catch on.

Bond Girls Gone Wild

I recently re-watched the movie Deadlier Than the Male, one of the oddest and most entertaining of the many James Bond imitations of the late '60s. Producer Betty Box and director Ralph Thomas had mostly done comedies -- they did all the "Doctor" movies with Dirk Bogarde -- but they had the idea of taking the old-favorite hero Bulldog Drummond and retrofitting him for the James Bond era. Richard Johnson was cast in the part, which was appropriate because director Terence Young had wanted him to play Bond in Dr. No. (I don't know if he would have been all that much better than Connery, and he probably wouldn't have signed on for as many films, but he would have been very good as Bond.) They also cast Elke Sommer and Sylva Koscina, two of the hottest EuroBabes of a cinema decade dominated by EuroBabes who worked in movies on every continent.

The movie isn't all that good; the plot isn't very interesting, the lead character is ill-defined (not surprisingly given that he's an amalgam of the very different characters of Bulldog Drummond and James Bond), Sommer and Koscina don't appear enough in the second half of the movie. And they didn't have enough of a budget for what they were trying to do, hence a lot of drab sets and bad back projection.

But what makes the movie enjoyable, and gives it its special kick, is that it includes something the Bond movies hardly ever did: truly bad-ass, even murderous women. The Bond movies could never really bring themselves to let women do anything really untoward, maybe because they were rooted in Ian Fleming's men-are-men and women-are-women sensibility. Even when they added a beautiful villainous woman like Fiona in Thunderball (a character who doesn't exist in the book), she really doesn't get to do all that much evil and usually lets men do the actual shooting and killing.

Deadlier Than the Male takes it upon itself to do the one thing that the Bond movies wouldn't do, by conflating the standard gorgeous-women and henchmen-assassin characters into one (or, rather, two). Sommer and Koscina spend the first half of the movie bumping off various men in gruesome, sadistic ways, doing all the killing and torturing that a guy would usually do in movies like these. They're like Domino and Oddjob combined.

Here are three examples of why this is movie represents '60s sadism at its best.

1. Sommer and Koscina rise from the sea like Ursula Andress in Dr. No -- and then fire a spear-gun into a man.



2. Sommer uses a drug to paralyze a man and then she and Koscina throw him out of the window to make it look like suicide. "Well, I have had men fall for me before, but never like this."



3. Koscina ties up and tortures Drummond's idiot nephew.



That's the one thing Bond movies needed -- more female villainy. It's fun to see Sommer and Koscina, who easily could have been Bond girls, instead having some actual fun being evil.

Grudge Matches I'd Like To See: Diff'rent Strokes vs. Facts of LIfe (+ stray FoL thoughts)

The four family members from Diff'rent Strokes, Mr. Drummond, Arnold, Willis, Kimberly, vs. the four girls from their spinoff The Facts of Life, Blair, Jo, Natalie, Tootie. Mrs. Garrett cannot participate because she was on both shows, so she'll be the referee. Who wins this battle of the non-prestigious Norman Lear productions?

I'm going to go with the Facts of Life girls. Most of the Drummonds are essentially useless in a fight, which will allow Jo and Blair -- both of whom have ample reserves of RAGE (tm) -- to unleash destruction on other people rather than each other.

----

I recently watched the third season of The Facts of Life, never mind why. Okay, here's why: I loved it as a child and wanted to see if I remembered any of it. I was actually kind of surprised at how much I enjoyed it. Is it heretical to say that it holds up quite a bit better than most of the better-known shows from Norman Lear's company? Less yelling and screaming, somewhat better scripts, and a director (the Rhoda and Phyllis-trained Asaad Kelada) who knows that you do not in fact have to shoot the entire show in extreme close-ups.

Not that I think The Facts of Life is a masterpiece or anything. It's cheesy and all. And judging from a fifth-season episode I saw on a local channel, it burned out pretty quickly. (We won't even get into the whole George Clooney or Mackenzie Astin thing -- the very act of adding a male cast member was kind of a betrayal anyway). Still, it's pretty solid entertainment, which in today's sitcom-starved environment is good enough. Anyway, as with all situation comedies, the test is not whether it's too preachy (it is) or whether it has some idiotic plots (Tootie meets Jermaine Jackson?). It's all about characters. Most situation comedies today struggle to come up with one distinctive character; FoL had five. (And speaking of characters, I like -- and totally forgot -- that after several regulars from the first season were dropped in the Big Implausible Re-Tool, they would still have those girls on in guest appearances.) Most situation comedies today can't come up with a really funny relationship that can provide the basis for the comedy; FoL could always go back to Blair vs. Jo when they needed a laugh. Simple, basic things, but as with any bad sitcom with good writing, the simple, basic things aren't always easy to come by.



(The preceding clip was from an episode written by Peter Noah, who later produced The West Wing for a while.)

Quelle Avanie

Apropos of nothing, except the fact that I watched the movie again recently: the best bit in the movie Shoot the Piano Player is Truffaut's gimmick of flashing the lyrics on the screen as Boby LaPointe sings his song "Framboise."



There is, or was, a story that Truffaut came up with the idea because he couldn't hear what LaPointe was singing and feared that the audience wouldn't either. The sound recording is indeed a little odd and sometimes indistinct in this song, and strangely enough it appears to be one of the few parts of the movie that uses direct sound, since almost all the dialogue was post-synchronized. If so, it's an exact reversal of the way things are usually done: usually musical numbers are post-synched and dialogue recorded directly.

I also like the joke -- even if it wasn't intentionally done as a joke -- of having a famous singer, Charles Aznavour, and keeping him in the background at the piano while a long song is sung by someone most of the audience hasn't heard of. It's sort of the more exalted predecessor of the movie Tony Rome where Frank Sinatra is the star, but the only person singing in the movie is his daughter Nancy.

(Note: I am not comparing Shoot the Piano Player, a terrific movie, to Tony Rome, a movie shot so Frank Sinatra could get a trip to Florida. I'm just saying that they, and other movies, play a basic joke on the audience by casting a singer and then giving the singing to somebody else.)

Good Tex Avery News, Maybe?

From The Digital Bits:

Tex Avery's Droopy: The Complete Theatrical Collection (May 15)

Given Warner's track record with previous releases of MGM cartoons, this raises more questions than it answers, like:

1. Will they be presenting the cut-for-content TV prints of cartoons like "Droopy's Good Deed?"

2. Have they remastered these cartoons from good prints or are they using the same faded versions we see on TV?

3. What's going to happen with Avery's non-Droopy cartoons?

Tentatively, this sounds like good news, but I've been burned once too often on these cartoon releases to be very enthusiastic -- at least until I actually see what condition these cartoons are in.

Stealth Spinoffs

What was the last show to do a "stealth pilot" episode? You know what I'm talking about: an episode that, while disguised as a regular-run episode of a successful series, is actually a pilot for a potential new series. They used to be very common from the '60s through the early '90s, but they don't seem to happen any more.

There was always a very practical reason for trying to launch a spinoff this way: by producing the pilot as part of a show that was already running, you guaranteed that the pilot would air and thereby defrayed the costs of making it, even if it didn't get picked up. But there's also a very practical reason why this is hardly ever done now: there's no good time to create or air a stealth spinoff.

Most of these types of episodes used to be produced towards the end of a season, often as the very last episode to air. The last episode of All in the Family's second season is the pilot for Maude. The last episode of the first season of Diff'rent Strokes is the pilot of The Facts of Life. That made sense in a time when there was no hype around the last episode of the season, and the last few episodes of the season aired outside of the sweeps period. Now there's a lot of hype around the "season finale" and even the few episodes leading up to it (networks will put out press releases about the fantastically amazing last four episodes of a season), so it's obviously not possible to use these episodes as the springboard for a possible new show.

While it's interesting to watch an episode a popular series and realize you're seeing the pilot for a show that got picked up (e.g. the episodes mentioned above, or the Andy Griffith Show episode that spun off Gomer Pyle), the fun thing is to realize you're watching a pilot that didn't get picked up, meaning that the episode revolves entirely around characters no one will ever see again. Unsold pilots aren't easy to find, so watching these unsold stealth pilots are the only opportunity we've got, most of the time, to get an idea of why a pilot doesn't sell.

The unsold stealth pilot most people sort of remember is the one from Star Trek, with Robert Lansing and Teri Garr as time-travellers. I remember The Facts of Life used to do a stealth pilot every year, sometimes two: Richard Dean Anderson as one half of an interracial couple; Megan Follows and Soap's Donnelly Rhodes in a projected spinoff about a blue-collar family vaguely related to Jo; Jimmy Baio (also from Soap -- boy, they were really trying to help out those Soap veterans) in a stealth pilot about a military academy. In the final season they did two stealth spinoffs with existing characters from the show, trying to figure out a way to keep at least one of the characters going after the series ended. I don't think they ever did a pilot that got picked up. Then there was that Matlock episode that was a spinoff for George Peppard (looking in very poor health; he died not long after). Or that awful episode from the first season of The Cosby Show that appeared to be an attempted launching pad for the wacky heartwarming adventures of a multi-lingual community center.

The only other question about a stealth pilot, besides "did it get picked up or not?" Is "how do they pretend it's an episode of the show we're watching?" There are two basic ways of doing this. Either you have a little prologue with the lead characters, after which they mostly disappear and leave the whole episode to the spinoff characters. Or you take one regular character and have him or her involved in the plot, at the margins. So the stealth pilot of Gomer Pyle is pretty much all Gomer and Sergeant Carter, but Andy does get to solve Gomer's problem as we'd expect him to.

But I ask again, in conclusion: what was the last show to do a stealth pilot? Have there been any recent shows at all that tried to do something like this?

A Challenge For Jazz Experts...

...Identify all the musicians in this clip from the movie A Song is Born. I'm ashamed to say that I'm having trouble identifying a lot of them other than the obvious ones, like Benny Goodman and Louis Armstrong. And a commentor at YouTube says that the drummer is the young Louie Bellson.



A Song is Born is probably one of the most pointless movies ever made. Only seven years after his successful production Ball of Fire, Samuel Goldwyn brought back the same director (Howard Hawks) and cinematographer (Gregg Toland, in one of his last films before his untimely death) to film almost the exact same script. The only differences were the cast, the use of Technicolor, and the fact that the subject of linguistics was changed to that of musicology -- allowing for a lot of cameos by jazz musicians. (Benny Goodman even got to play one of the professors.)

Hawks did the movie strictly for the money and objected to being forced to use Goldwyn's then-favorite leading lady, Virginia Mayo (it's too bad they didn't get along, because Mayo later proved herself to be good at playing slightly trampy characters; she seems kind of lost here, probably because Hawks isn't giving her much help). Danny Kaye was very badly miscast in the part originally played by Gary Cooper, and there was no opportunity for him to do any musical numbers. The movie mostly has value for having so many jazz musicians in it in glorious Technicolor, which obviously doesn't come through very strongly in this faded-looking clip.

Only Ten Zillion More Episodes To Go

The good news: Sony will release volume 1 of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, containing the first 25 episodes.

The bad news: since this serialized daytime show had 307 episodes, and since Sony often waits a long time between volumes of the shows it releases, we may not see that series completed until 2032.

Wolfgang!

Even if you don't like Mozart symphonies, there's a new recording that I think will change your mind, or at least somebody's mind: Mozart's symphonies # 38 ("Prague") and # 41 ("Jupiter") with the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra conducted by René Jacobs.

I hope to write more about this later, but Jacobs, the countertenor-turned-conductor, has somewhat unexpectedly become today's classical recording superstar. In a time when most record companies won't record big operas and choral works, he makes at least two recordings every year, and they're always great. Last year it was Mozart's La Clemenza Di Tito and Handel's Messiah. Later this year he's doing Mozart's Don Giovanni, and an article in a Philadelphia newspaper indicated that his next recording will be Rossini's Tancredi. (Don't laugh: Rossini is one of the few 19th-century composers whose music sounds really terrific on period instruments.) Because he started as a singer, he mostly conducts and records opera, but two years ago he started getting into symphonic works; he recorded a disc of Haydn symphonies, and now there's this recording of Mozart's best symphony, 38, and his last symphony, 41.

"Extroverted" is the word for Jacobs' conducting: he's not out for subtlety, or for gracefulness. As befits an opera conductor, he treats a symphony like a mini-opera, and is always trying to bring out the dramatic contrasts and sudden surprises. The opening of # 41 has a brusque, loud three-note motif followed by a quieter, less gruff phrase for the strings. This music is all about contrasts -- the contrast between the first phrase and the second -- but many conductors, trying to make Mozart sound as charming and pretty as possible, try to smooth over the contrasts, play them down. Jacobs plays them up, making the opening phrase so big that it almost knocks you out of your seat, and then slowing down as much as he reasonably can for the answering phrase. Mozart writes a symphony as if it's an opera with different sections of the orchestra; that's what Jacobs brings out. Warning: if you don't like conductors who over-emphasize the drums, prepare to be really irritated by this disc, because Jacobs lets the timpani player blast away whenever he enters. I love that, though; Mozart didn't always write a timpani part in symphonies, so when he did, I assume he wanted it to make enough noise so the audience would notice it.

The other thing I like about Jacobs' work as a symphonic conductor is his approach to repeats. Like many conductors today, he takes all the repeats (Mozart asked for the conductor to repeat the exposition and also the second half of the movement; traditionally conductors took only the first repeat, or even none at all). But while he and the orchestra mostly have no choice but to play and phrase the repeats the same as the first time around, they occasionally take the opportunity to add in little touches we didn't hear before -- so in the finale of 38, the fiddles add little unobtrusive ornaments when they play the exposition repeat, to make the music funnier the second time around. You can't embellish a symphonic repeat the way you embellish a repeat in opera, but I like that the conductor and orchestra are doing what they can to make sure a repeat isn't boring.

The sound is good, and the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra is probably the best period-instrument group in Germany (and most of the best period-instrument orchestras have, for some reason, been German or Austrian). Their first-chair soloists actually formed a string quartet back in the early '90s and made one of the best-ever recordings of Haydn Quartets; I wish Harmonia Mundi, which records this orchestra almost exclusively, would make some recordings with the quartet.

Addendum: If you want a Mozart symphony recording with a similar spirit but on modern instruments, I see that there's been a reissue of a 1959 recording of # 38, with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Peter Maag. Maag was a young Swiss conductor -- who probably got to record for Decca because the guy who financed its classical recordings, Maurice Rosengarten, was Swiss -- and while he never hit it big, he deserved to. His 1950s Mozart recordings were very unusual in a time when most conductors handled Mozart symphonies like the veteran Bruno Walter: Walter made the symphonies sound pretty, charming, warm and insignificant, and his recordings were considered the alpha and omega of Mozart style. Maag's version of # 38 is fast, nervous and exciting, with loud brass and drums and a general feeling that this music is violent and brilliant rather than charming. That's the way I feel about Mozart, and Haydn for that matter, so that's the kind of performance I prefer.

Ugly But Organic

Mark Mayerson links to that King of the Hill pitch reel, and he and his readers correctly point out that the artwork on that show is not very pleasant to look at. Or, for that matter, to draw.

The thing is, though, that I don't think King of the Hill would be better if it were better-drawn. The look of the show is kind of ugly because that's the way Mike Judge draws. But I don't think there is any way the show would have been as good or as successful as it is if Judge had hired somebody else to design the show for him.

One of the reasons a TV show depends on a strong showrunner is that television episodes, which depend on a large committee of people to write, direct and produce them, need to have a guiding hand, a set style that makes every episode feel like it is part of the same overall "voice." (Even if episode 1 and episode 2 have different writers, the characters need to be written similarly in each episode.) In an animated show, the need to keep everyone on the same page is even greater because you've got complete separation between several different components: On The Simpsons or King of the Hill, you've got the writers at Fox, the U.S. artists at Film Roman, and the actual finished animation is done in Korea. If the writing and the animation seem to clash with each other -- if the show doesn't look the way it's written -- then there's no way that an animated show can achieve the organic feel, the one voice, that it needs.

You see how this applies to King of the Hill: Mike Judge doesn't draw pretty, but he draws the way he writes. The concept of the show started not with a script but with a sketch, of the four guys in the alley saying "Yep." That's organic: the writing and the drawing work together to create the joke. And while Hank Hill isn't the best-drawn of characters, his design fits with Mike Judge's voice and Mike Judge's writing ideas.

If you look at the prime-time animated shows that have succeeded, they all involve a writing and drawing style that meshes well, even if the drawings aren't pleasant to look at. Lord knows I don't like Family Guy, but Seth MacFarlane is another guy who draws the way he writes: the show looks like it sounds, and everything fits together to produce an organic piece of crap (what could be more organic than that, come to think of it?).

The prime-time animated shows that fail, on the other hand, are often those where the design style is not created by the person or people who came up with the show. That's not the only reason they fail, of course, but it doesn't help. Look at The Critic. Al Jean and Mike Reiss, the very funny and talented Simpsons producers, created the show and the characters; not being cartoonists, they left it to the very funny and talented Simpsons director Rich Moore to design the show. But though the creators unquestionably had input into how the show would look, there was always a certain non-specificity to the design style (you didn't really know why the characters should look this way) and maybe even a certain tension between the lush, colorful backgrounds and the rapid-fire cutaways and movie parodies the writers were coming up with. The show was, by most standards, better-drawn than King of the Hill but the drawing just wasn't inseparable from the writing. On King of the Hill, it is, and rightly or wrongly, that's more important than the drawing actually being good.

One more thing to add is that the characters on King of the Hill are less ugly now than they were when the show started; sometime in the second season, Wes Archer, the supervising director (whose short "Jac Mac and Rad Boy Go!" was a big influence on Beavis and Butt-Head) re-designed all the characters to simplify them and make them easier to draw and look at. Season 2 Hank looks better than season 1 Hank, who in turn looks better than his inspiration, Mr. Anderson on Beavis and Butt-Head.

Pencil-Vania

A reader points out that today (January 13) is the tenth anniversary of the series premiere of King of the Hill. In honor of this occasion, here's the original series pitch for the show. An animated series can't afford to do a full-length pilot, so (unless it's spun off from an existing cartoon, like The Simpsons), there's usually a short presentation reel created for the network. King of the Hill, instead of doing a scene from the pilot, did a pencil-test reel where Hank Hill pitches the show directly to Fox executives.

Note that most of the other characters, except for Mike Judge's two characters, have different voices (is that Tress MacNeille as Bobby?), since they hadn't been cast yet.

Bondtroduction

When Casino Royale was announced, I wrote on this blog that I'd be interested to see if the filmmakers went to any particular trouble to introduce him. Overall, I think the answer was yes and no: the opening sequence didn't spend a lot of time trying to convince us that Daniel Craig was a credible James Bond (he was, but the movie didn't use any special tricks to convince us of that), but it did spend a lot of time and effort on showing us that this was a different approach to James Bond. The way the sequence was shot, and everything that happened in the sequence, was calculated to announce to us what the film's approach was.

This made me think back to On Her Majesty's Secret Service. In that movie, even though it also was a different kind of James Bond movie, the opening sequence works in the opposite way to that of Casino Royale. The whole point of almost everything in that sequence is to convince us that this is the same James Bond, to reassure us that even though there's a new actor playing Bond, it's still the series we know and love. The most famous examples of that in the film are the use of clips from the five previous movies in the title sequence, and, in the scene where Bond clears out his desk, the trinkets and soundtrack clips from the Connery movies. But look at the first four minutes of the movie, and consider how many tactics the filmmakers are using to get us used to the new Bond:



In that short time frame, we've got:

- The producers' credits at the very beginning (instead of the beginning of the titles, as in all the other movies) so we know it's an official Bond movie.

- The movie starts with M, Q and Moneypenny, to start us off with familiar faces from the earlier movies. Note also the self-parody in Q's line about "radioactive lint," a joke about how outlandish and stupid the gadgets had become in the last couple of movies (and an indication that this movie will have less of that).

- Moneypenny has a line about all the exotic locations she's contacted in looking for 007, reminding us that Bond is still a globe-trotter.

- When we cut to Bond's car, we immediately hear the James Bond theme.

- As in the first movie, Dr. No, we don't see Bond's face until he says "Bond, James Bond," which increases the impact of that line and makes it easier to accept that this is in fact James Bond.

- Also as in Dr. No, before we see Bond's face, we get close-ups of his hands, his fancy cigarette case, his smoking -- indicating that this is still the same guy from Dr. No even if the actor has changed.

- The first bad guy to appear in the movie says "Don't move, Mr. Bond" -- now that we know he's James Bond, we need to know that the bad guys have the same attitude to him as they had to the last Bond.

Really, everything in that pre-credits sequence is calculated to tell us that the formula hasn't changed, right up to the one thing that does change: the girl Bond has saved drives away without thanking him. That, along with the famous line "This never happened to the other fellow," is the first clue that the formula won't be quite the same; but the producers and the director, Peter Hunt (who appears in a cameo in the first shot of the film), obviously didn't want to get around to that until they'd established all the ways in which this movie was going to follow the rules.