Squaw No Dance! Squaw Get-Um Firewood!

Thad Komorowski has a mini-tribute to the Disney animator Ward Kimball, with this post and also this one.

Thad writes that Kimball was Disney's "most original animator" and I think that's definitely true, though I don't think it's always a compliment. Kimball had a unique style; he did the cartooniest animation of any of Disney's "Nine Old Men". And whereas the other animators toned down as they went on, Kimball actually got broader, so by the '50s his scenes and characters (like Lucifer in Cinderella) are all goofy moves and rounded shapes.

The result is that some of Kimball's scenes seem to belong in a different movie -- though I hasten to add I'm not talking about the crow scene in Dumbo. But the stuff he handled in Cinderella, all the stuff with the cat and the mice, really doesn't seem like a full-fledged part of the movie. Though, of course, it probably would seem that way no matter who animated it: the cat/mice stuff is the weakest part of the film, not because of Kimball but because it's what you see when you look up the word "padding" in the dictionary.

Amid Amidi's piece on Kimball makes it clear that his work didn't completely fit in with the way Disney's features were developing, and other films utilized his talents better:

While Kimball brought to life many of the now-classic characters and moments from the Disney features, it became increasingly apparent by the late-Forties that Kimball's talents were not being utilized to their fullest extent as an animator. It wasn't until the Fifties, when he made the switch over to directing and producing films, that his sophisticated graphic sensibility and humorous and intellectual tendencies found a receptive home.

I should add here that I have a lot of admiration for the less cartoony animation in Disney's early-'50s features -- a lot of people seem to think it was just a matter of duplicating the live-action reference, but I think there's more to it than that, and there are many touching and beautiful moments in the animation of the human, drawn-from-life characters. I think some of these characters, because they are based on live-action acting, are a bit underrated today.

Addendum: I just found Kimball's "What Makes the Red Man Red" sequence from Peter Pan -- dubbed in Arabic.



I find it odd, by the way, that the Disney company doesn't feel obliged to include some kind of disclaimer before Peter Pan on account of this sequence. Not that I want a disclaimer, mind you (and I was horrified when I heard someone argue that Disney should have cut this scene out to make the movie less "offensive"), but it's weird that the company includes all kinds of disclaimers for any other racial stereotypes, and still doesn't have the guts to release Song of the South, and yet this particular set of stereotypes doesn't seem to worry them at all.

Oh, and one other thing: is this the first time someone had used the gimmick (later to become an animation cliché) of the tracking shot into a character's mouth?
Update: It wasn't the first time, as Thad explains in comments. But Kimball sure seemed to like that particular gag.

Gilligan's Island: The Food Runs Out

Let writer-director David Mirkin (Get a Life, The Simpsons) teach you about what a network executive does in this episode of Newhart, where Michael (Peter Scolari) dreams he's running all the networks.

This isn't at the wrong speed; Mirkin intentionally had this segment speeded-up (sped-up?) to make it sillier.

Attacking the Film that Attacked Boston

Jerry Beck doesn't like the Aqua Teen Hunger Force Movie.

Hopefully this will supplant my "Why I Hate Family Guy" post as the animation post that inspires the most angry comments.

I don't have strong feelings either way about Aqua Teen Hunger Force the series (I haven't seen the movie). I think that like a lot of Cartoon Network's stuff, it has that Family Guy problem of thinking that a comedy show needs to have something weird or wacky every ten seconds. (Remember, Cartoon Network is where Family Guy first became a breakout hit, and a lot of its original material is aimed at a similar audience.) Instead of creating non-stop hilarity, it's actually less funny because the funniest jokes -- even in nonsensical, absurdist comedy -- are often the ones you take time to set up, and there's no time for that here.

But as Comedy For Stoners (tm Spike Feresten) goes, it's not bad. And at least it's not smug and annoying (like Robot Chicken). And it didn't start out with a good premise and then decline into pointless absurdism (like Harvey Birdman, which started as a great deadpan Hanna-Barbera parody in the vein of Robert Smigel's TV Funhouse cartoons, but has more or less forgotten its original premise). It is what it is.

The Most Important Creative Question in Animation History

Which Harlem Globetrotters cartoon by Hanna-Barbera is the greater creative achievement?

Is it the first venture into Saturday morning cartoons by the Harlem Globetrotters, called "Harlem Globe Trotters?"



Or do you prefer the second show, where somewhat younger-looking Globetrotters got super powers and became the Super Globetrotters?



This isn't like saying that Josie and the Pussycats were better than Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space. This is serious stuff. It requires thought.

Kidding aside, the first one is better because a) The theme song is cooler and b) The Hanna-Barbera rule up until the mid-'80s or so is that the earlier a show is, the better it is (H-B shows from 1969 are superior to H-B shows from 1970; a nine-year gap is almost unfathomably large in this context).

Good Neighbor

Enjoy Carmen Miranda and Don Ameche in the opening number of That Night in Rio, one of roughly 978 early '40s Fox musicals set in South America. The number goes on too long, but the Harry Warren tune is a good one.

One thing to watch for is the shot around the middle of the number, just after the singing ends and we cut to the band members, all dressed in red. Of course you can't get the full impact online (or even on the less-than-spectacular DVD transfers), but it's a great example of how Fox's cinematographers used Technicolor: cutting to a screen full of red, after a sequence without very much red in it, has a nearly physical impact. People have said that a Fox Technicolor movie is almost like 3-D; the colors leap off the screen, and one reason for that is that photographers like Leon Shamroy and Ray Rennahan (the two credited cinematographers on this film, though I don't know which one did this scene -- that bathed-in-red shot looks like Shamroy, though) knew how to save certain colors for maximum effect.

Another observation: I sometimes wonder what Don Ameche could have done if he'd been given a real movie musical to star in, in his prime. He made a lot of films that were technically musicals, but Fox's musicals (as I've written in an earlier post) had very little singing or dancing that was even marginally related to the story; usually the films are about entertainers, and Ameche or Grable or Faye or whoever sings a song on a stage, playing a nightclub performer. Ameche did very well in the '50s when he went to Broadway to do musicals -- like Cole Porter's Silk Stockings. But in Hollywood, a popular leading man who could act and sing would have been a real asset to an actual "book" musical if the studio had given him one.

Kirk Duplicitous

The Criterion Collection newsletter came out today, and as usual contains a hint about an upcoming release. Actually, this one isn't exactly a hint, more like a straightforward announcement, probably because this news was already mentioned in the press. The "hint" is:

Extra! Extra! Billy Wilder finally caves! Chuck Tatum's got the scoop!

This refers, of course, to Chuck Tatum, the venal reporter played by Kirk Douglas in Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole. The Criterion DVD will likely be out in July; as a warm-up, TCM is running it this Saturday at noon (eastern time).

This film is as good a candidate for the Criterion special-edition treatment as any as-yet-unreleased movie; it's a genuine cult classic, its targets are timeless, it's based on a true story (cue the inevitable "the real Floyd Collins" special feature) and it was a major turning point in the director's career.

Not a good turning point, though. It was the first film Wilder produced himself -- all his other movies as a director except Double Indemnity had been produced by his writing partner, Charles Brackett -- and after two straight movies that were very dark and sardonic (A Foreign Affair and Sunset Blvd.), this was even darker and meaner, draining out any trace of redemption or suggestion that there is good in mankind. As Self-Styled Siren wrote in her essay on the film, Wilder used to try to have one major character who was basically good, but not here:

As scalding as he is, Wilder doesn't leave audiences utterly without hope. A Wilder picture almost always has at least one character who acts as moral grounding--Edward G. Robinson in Double Indemnity, Arlene Francis in One, Two, Three, Nancy Olson in Sunset Boulevard. You can measure the movie's cynicism by the amount of respect and exposure that character gets. The Apartment, often called bitter, is one of Wilder's most optimistic films, in that the character whose essential decency anchors the movie turns out also to be the protagonist, Jack Lemmon.

In Ace in the Hole, the last good man is the editor Boot. He has about four brief scenes. He may believe in truth, so much so he has his secretary cross-stitch "Tell the Truth" on a sampler, but he is badly outnumbered.

After the movie bombed, Wilder had to regroup; his next few movies were all based on successful stage plays -- a sure-fire way of making sure he wasn't handling material that the public would reject (since the public had already accepted Stalag 17 or The Seven Year Itch in another form). With one or two exceptions, he would stick almost exclusively to comedies and happy endings from that point on. I'm not saying the rest of his career has no value; obviously he did a lot of fine things. But I think it's fair to say that this was one movie, and one failure, that made its creator a bit more cautious from that point on.

A Motion Picture Simul-Cast

Some YouTuber has dug up something interesting: the last part of this clip (around the mid-point of the embedded clip) is an excerpt from the French version of The Merry Widow (1934). Early in the talkie era, before it became easy to dub movies into other languages, studios sometimes experimented with shooting two or more versions simultaneously, in different languages. With The Merry Widow, they brought in a separate French cast to support the two stars, Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald.

The clip presents three versions of this scene: one in the censored post-Code print (see here for details), one in the uncensored print used on Turner Classic Movies and elsewhere, and finally the scene from the French version, with a French actor replacing Edward Everett Horton.

Jeanette MacDonald's French isn't great, but it's no worse than a lot of actors who try to speak English.

Fields of Honey

Paul Dini has some good comments about Geena Davis's recent speech about the lack of female characters in cartoons.

It seems while selectively ignoring or alternately dwelling on the past, Ms. Davis has also ignored current female characters like Kim Possible, Juniper Lee, the girls on THE PROUD FAMILY, many more from contemporary children's anime (TOTORO, anyone?) and even Sandy the squirrel on SPONGEBOB. Are they favorite characters of mine? Not really (well, except for TOTORO) but they certainly seem to fit the roles that Ms. Davis says TV and animated movies are currently lacking. And they are an encouraging sign to show that attitudes toward female characters, especially lead heroines, are changing. In feature films, Elastigirl AKA Mrs. Incredible is smart, funny, caring and tough, one of the best heroines in live action or animated films, period.

I also found it both amusing and depressing that not one word was mentioned about the deluge of contemporary negative sterotyping aimed directly toward young girls, such as those freakish poster girls for baseless entitlement The Bratz or the grotesquely overmerchandised Disney Princesses. Today's girls sure live in a schizoid society -- prodded by their parents to be proactive doers and thinkers like Dora and Kim, yet encouraged to act like spoiled celebrities and princesses and magically "have it all!"

I just find it weird that Davis, or whoever wrote the speech, didn't seem to have any specific references to recent cartoons, anything more recent than The Smurfs. (Okay, she cites Dora the Explorer, but doesn't say anything about it beyond the fact that the title indicates that there's a female with a cool job.) Yes, she cites some data about the percentage of female characters in "family entertainment," and obviously that could be a lot better -- but as the above examples show, there are more good female characters in cartoons than there were in the Smurfs era. It doesn't make sense to talk about cartoons today without addressing that, if only because you'd think she would be naming some characters as positive examples, examples that should be emulated. Instead there's a lot of talk about the way things used to be, and very little talk about where we go from here.

So it's true that Looney Tunes cartoons characters were all male and that no one seemed to think of creating a female cartoon star. Paul Dini knows this, because when he was working on Tiny Toons he story-edited an episode that directly addressed the lack of female characters in old cartoons. But that was the '30s, '40s, and '50s. What should we be looking for now? This speech doesn't tell us -- and by giving no specific examples of modern cartoons (good or bad), it suggests that the speaker isn't really all that interested in the issue.

Could You See It as a Betty Hutton?

Betty Hutton, the unbelievably energetic star whose energy and commitment were almost too big for the screen, has died at the age of 86.

Here she is singing her trademark song, "Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief."



And here she is in one of the linking scenes from the '40s all-star revue Star Spangled Rhythm. In these bits (bookending a Harold Arlen song performed by Mary Martin and Dick Powell), she meets up with her future Miracle of Morgan's Creek director, Preston Sturges.

Joe MacDonald

The Art of Memory has a tribute to one of my favorite cinematographers, Joe MacDonald.

MacDonald, who worked mostly at Fox, shot films like My Darling Clementine (John Ford), Pickup On South Street (Sam Fuller), Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (Frank Tashlin) and Viva Zapata! (Elia Kazan). Clementine, which looks great even for a Ford Western and includes some interesting applications of noir techniques and lighting to the Western genre. He was also one of the few cinematographers who could bring some visual imagination to movie comedy; even a silly comedy like A Guide For the Married Man looks better than it should because MacDonald didn't make it look flat and over-bright like the typical '60s comedy.

This Is Just Sad, Yet Instructive

So you remember how I wrote about how good Happy Days was in its first couple of seasons (the single-camera years), and then posted a clip from the fifth season (the Mork From Ork episode) to show how far the show had fallen by then? Well, one additional thing I didn't really remember was that the show fell even further the year after that.

The thing about the Mork episode was that even though it was stupid and aimed entirely at kids, it was funny. Not good, but funny. But someone has posted a clip from the show's big sweeps stunt episode from the following year -- where Fonzie apparently fakes his own death and the Laverne and Shirley characters attend his funeral -- and it is stupid and aimed entirely at really dumb kids and is not at all funny. It gets especially bad after the L&S characters leave and the plot kicks in: Everybody's overacting, especially the guest villain, and the music, jokes and characters are all right out of a bad Saturday morning cartoon. If Saturday morning cartoons had a studio audience with screaming kids.



And yet it's always interesting to chart the downward slide of Happy Days, for this reason: with a Garry Marshall show, every decision, every change, was driven by what the network wanted and/or what Marshall thought the public wanted. Marshall's a fine comedy writer and a true comedy professional -- listen to his commentary on an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show, where he even evaluates the impact that clothing choices have on the delivery of a joke -- but he was always willing to make changes to his shows, either to keep the network happy or to fit in with prevailing trends. Every comedy pro is primarily concerned with audience response, but Marshall would go out jogging and shout out ideas for character names to passers-by, just to see if the man on the street (literally) responded well to the name "Fonzarelli."

Because of Marshall's eagerness to adapt to whatever was "in," Happy Days is like a television lab where Marshall and his cohorts test out every trend of the '70s. The unsold pilot (which aired as an episode of Love, American Style) is in the mold of Summer of '42, because that movie had just made a splash. When the show was revived, it was because of the success of American Graffiti, so the first season is heavily influenced by that movie in look, feel and tone. In the second season (which was still one-camera), the network wanted more "hard" comedy -- meaning big laughs instead of observational chuckles -- so there was suddenly much less exterior shooting and broader comedy. Then came the third season and the famous re-tool.

But Marshall kept on adapting the show to the needs of the times. He told an interviewer that he tried to have a quota of episodes each year aimed at different tastes (some Howard-Marion episodes for the parents, some "lesson" episodes, some episodes for people who liked '50s nostalgia, an episode with singing, and so on). The "family hour" came in, with Happy Days' 8 p.m. slot becoming specifically aimed at kids -- so Marshall made the show more kid-friendly. Jaws was a huge hit that changed the entertainment industry, and that's why Fonzie jumped over a shark. Mork appeared on the show because Star Wars was the biggest hit in the world and Marshall's kid suggested that they should do an episode about somebody from outer space. Whatever you're seeing on an episode of Happy Days is based on an attempt to cash in on some trend, somewhere.

So by the 1978-9 season, which is the season of the clip featured above, the biggest hits on TV tended to be broad farces like Three's Company and Marshall's own freshman hit Mork and Mindy. So Happy Days went even broader and became an out-and-out cartoon farce, at least during an important sweeps episode like this one. By the time Ron Howard left, the wacky trend had burnt itself out, so the show gradually became a little more down-to-earth. The new characters weren't only introduced to replace the ones who left, but to reflect changing tastes in entertainment (movies like Grease had shown that kids and teenagers liked slightly less wholesome entertainment, so some mildly non-wholesome jokes were introduced through new featured players like Cathy Silvers). When Marshall thought that the old Arnold's set looked too uncool for the current generation of kids, he did an episode where the place burnt down and was rebuilt as a more grown-up looking place. Whether Happy Days was good or bad, and it was pretty bad for large portions of its run, Marshall was always adapting it to whatever he thought the audience wanted to see.

I kind of like that about him. Even if the results are often embarrassing.

La Cava Arcana

Here's another scene from Greg La Cava's Primrose Path, which I wrote about earlier. The thing most people remember about the film -- of the relatively few who have seen it -- is the way La Cava managed to get away with things that you wouldn't expect in a 1940 movie: portrayal of prostitution as a business like any other, a heroine (Ginger Rogers) whose mother was a prostitute and who chooses to go into that business herself (though she is of course saved from actually having to go through with it), and a sympathetic portrayal of her client (Charles Lane). Another thing about the film is its mixture of comedy and melodrama, a La Cava staple from Stage Door onward.

But the best scene in the movie is probably one of the simplest: Rogers and Joel McCrea, after they're married but before he's found out what her mother was, tease each other and wind up rolling around on the ground (while he playfully threatens to dab paint on her nose). La Cava was one of two directors of this era who preferred to work without finished scripts and encouraged his actors to improvise; Leo McCarey was the other. And like McCarey (or Jean Renoir, an admirer of McCarey), La Cava coaxed unusually natural performances out of his actors; people don't seem like they're "acting" in a La Cava picture, even usually studied and stilted performers like Katharine Hepburn. Ginger Rogers, one of the most natural and direct of Hollywood actresses, was a perfect fit with La Cava's style. Look at the way she says "It's all right with me, whatever he said" at the midpoint of the clip: whether or not she's making it up on the spot, it feels like she is making a spontaneous comment. (It also sounds like members of the crew might be laughing offscreen along with the actors who are supposed to laugh; the guy who plays the cook seems to be looking toward someone off-camera.)

The Original Version

You may think this is odd, but I actually enjoy finding out that TV shows I grew up with were ripped off from another source. Most television shows lean heavily on something else for inspiration (Arrested Development would not have existed without The Royal Tenenbaums, for example), so it's not really an indictment of a show to say that its premise is borrowed from something else. But it had escaped my notice where Remington Steele came from: Theodore Tinsley's "Carrie Cashin":

A former department store detective, Carrie now runs the Cash and Carry Detective Agency, whose standard fee is a whopping $1000. Mind you, she gets the job done, never letting little things like the law get in the way. Breaking and entering, lieing to the police, even a little armed robbery or kidnapping, if that's what it took. Posing as her boss, and fronting the agency is Carrie's partner, muscular Aleck Burton, a tough, but easy-going guy... but it's Carrie's show all the way.

Robert Butler, the veteran director who came up with the idea for Remington Steele, was obviously trying to re-do Carrie Cashin, but without actually calling it that.

Babs Bunniwalski OverSmith

Here's a nice piece of animation from a source where you don't always expect to see good animation: early '90s TV.

This is from the Tiny Toon Adventures episode "Thirteensomething," animated by the now-defunct StarToons in Chicago; Startoons' founder, Jon McClenahan, directed the episode and animated this sequence (which includes a very long uninterrupted shot of Babs Bunny), with clean-up and inbetweening by Mary Hanley. On a TV budget and schedule, of course, it's not "classic" animation, but it has a lot of character and precise, funny acting, like all McClenahan's stuff for his own studio and, earlier, for Kennedy Cartoons. It does a good job of referencing a movie (When Harry Met Sally without ripping it off.

The set-up for the scene is that Babs has become a success on a prime-time TV show by pretending to be a human; feeling lonesome, she calls up Buster, who is going to pieces without her.



I just like calling attention to this scene because it is a strong piece of TV animation and it's not often that we can single out the animator in a television cartoon (I think some of the animators at overseas studios do surprisingly good work on short notice, but they don't really get credit for it).

McGarrett vs. Hippies

The first season of Hawaii 5-0 came out this week. This show is not really my thing, but the DVD set is very well done: good quality prints and transfers, and, as a bonus feature, a long making-of documentary originally made for Hawaiian TV.

The impression I get from watching Hawaii 5-0 is that CBS is airing very similar shows today; the network hasn't changed much. It's a Dad type of show, where a stern and grim hero battles against all the annoying people in the world. Like CSI, it's very violent -- the first season has plenty of blood and beatings, people expiring in extreme close-up, that sort of thing. And while it has lots of violence, it has very little sex; it doesn't even have many women in bikinis (unlike the show that took over its Hawaii crew, Magnum P.I.). It's a show for people who want to see justice done as brutally and efficiently as possible. That's not my kind of show, as I said, but it's a decent example of the type.

Here's a scene of McGarrett (Jack Lord) telling off a bunch of hippies and thereby competing with Joe Friday (from the Dragnet revival) for '60s TV's greatest hippie-teller-offer.

Good News And Bad News

Earl Kress says there will be a third Tom and Jerry Spotlight Collection.

Considering all the problems with the first two collections -- inadequate prints, cut and re-dubbed cartoons included by mistake -- that's both the good news and the bad news. As Earl puts it:

Personally, I advised against this. I thought it would be better to first put out a Complete Tom and Jerry, in chronological order, with all the mistakes of the first two sets corrected. But the powers that be, and they don’t be me, decided to go ahead with Volume 3.

Oh, Yeah

June 5 brings us The Fall Guy: The Complete First Season. Does life get any better?

Well, probably. But I think The Fall Guy may well be the ultimate, definitive cheesy '80s action show. More than The A-Team, even. This show had:

- Non-stop chases and crashes
- Heather Thomas (and starting in season 2, Markie Post)
- Lee Majors singing the theme song himself
- Scowling, growling, glowering villains
- Scowling, growling, glowering henchmen
- Lots of re-tooling and cast changes
- Actors, including regulars like Thomas, who are clearly on coke
- Plots like (from the first season episode guide): "Colt is sent to the Mohave Desert to bring back a biker wanted for drug dealing, rape and assault. He infiltrates the biker club and competes with them in difficult stunts." Or "A pretty jewel thief hops off to Mexico with Colt and his friends, joined by insurance investigator Kay Faulkner, hot on her trail."

Oh, and a writer for the show once said that he agreed with Jumptheshark.com commenters that The Fall Guy jumped when they stopped putting Heather Thomas in bikinis in every episode. He claimed that this was Lee Majors' idea, because he'd gotten it into his head that he'd get more women if he became a sensitive guy. Oh, the '80s.



Update: And on the same day, we get an announcement (via TVshowsondvd.com's new masters at TV Guide) for a key work of '70s TV cheese: Banacek: the Complete First Season.

I don't know if you remember when A&E used to show all the old NBC Mystery Movie shows, but I do, and it seemed like Banacek was on all the goddamn time. And here's the thing: Banacek may have been the least likable hero in television history. I like George Peppard, but I hated the smug, arrogant, smirking Banacek and the I'm-better-than-everyone attitude with which he solved mysteries that eluded the police and rival insurance investigators.

Maybe it's just that it's hard to sympathize with a guy whose job it is to save money for the insurance companies -- Edward G. Robinson pulled it off in Double Indemnity, but only by comparison with a couple of murderers.

I'm Not Gonna Hurt Him

Rio Bravo is finally getting a special edition DVD, and I like who's doing the commentary:

Commentary by John Carpenter and Richard Schickel (Renowned director Carpenter and film critic Schickel explore how this legendary Western was an extension of Hawks’ own personality and why it’s considered such an influential classic today).

Okay, Schickel's kind of a boring commentator, but John Carpenter does great commentaries on some of his own films, and he is a huge Hawks fan who has re-made Hawks films (The Thing) or paid tribute to them (Assault on Precinct 13 pays tribute to Rio Bravo). I'm glad it's not Peter Bogdanovich.

Simpsons Guest Cameo, Standard Version

Here's the Stephen Sondheim guest-voice spot from tonight's episode of The Simpsons.




The way they incorporate celebrities playing themselves has, sad to say, become kind of tiresomely predictable. It always seems to involve several of these jokes:

- Regular Simpsons character hasn't heard of guest
- Regular character thinks guest is famous for something someone else did
- Guest acts like a total suck-up
- Guest, if he's highbrow, does something lowbrow (or vice-versa)
- Guest turns out to be a total sell-out

In fairness, a lot of these things were fresh and different at the time The Simpsons -- and a few other shows -- started doing them. When famous people guest-starred as themselves, it was traditional for them to be treated very respectfully. Look at all the guests on Lucille Ball's various shows: they poked mild fun at themselves, but basically they were shown to be as wonderful as we'd expect them to be, and Lucy would freak out with glee at every celebrity appearance. Or look at Sammy Davis Jr. on All in the Family: that's a great episode, but Sammy is never the butt of the joke at any moment; Archie is always the butt of the joke.

So in the late '80s and early '90s, in a sort of backlash, guest stars started being asked to play themselves as mean, or selfish, or miserly, or stupid. Instead of being sucked up to by the regular characters, the guests would suck up to them. Instead of being happy to see the stars, the regulars would find them annoying or claim they'd never heard of them. And that's how you get Leonard Nimoy as a crazy freak on The Simpsons, or Homer threatening to punch out Dick Cavett for being so boring. But what used to be a reversal of the standard prime-time guest star appearance is now, in itself, the standard prime-time guest star appearance. Maybe if a show went back to doing Here's Lucy-style guest shots, that would be considered fresh and different now.

The Fuller Brush Man

This isn't really an analytical post, but I'm surprised that the movie The Fuller Brush Man and its follow-up, The Fuller Brush Girl, aren't better-known. I know that Red Skelton, the star of the first film, isn't all that well-remembered today, but Girl stars Lucille Ball (Skelton has a cameo), who is well-remembered, and yet it's not even on DVD.

The two movies were both scripted by Frank Tashlin (he co-wrote the first film and then wrote Girl himself), and even though he didn't direct them, they come off as embryonic Tashlin films, whether it's Skelton's encounter with the statuesque and skimpily-dressed Adele Jergens or the borrowings from cartoon, silent, and radio comedy or the combination of comedy with gangsters and murder.

The long climax of Fuller Brush Man is half live-action cartoon, half silent slapstick homage. It also has some great "cutaway" gags where Skelton is accidentally broadcasting over people's radios, and we keep cutting to different people's reactions to what he's saying. Here's the sequence in two parts:

Part 1




Part 2

Wow, They're Getting Faster

So here's the timeline:

At midnight last night, Mark Evanier highlights a YouTube video of an interview with Charles Schulz.

This morning, a few hours later, the video can't be accessed because it has been taken down "due to terms of use violation."

Pretty soon YouTube will be able to take things down within thirty seconds of anybody finding out about them.

Actually, there are quite a few things remaining on YouTube that would, normally, be yanked by the copyright holder. What the uploaders do is make sure not to include certain key words in the description or the title -- words that the copyright owners use when searching for stuff to yank. What that means, ultimately, is that YouTube and other services are still useful as a way for people to upload stuff and then send them to friends, or embed them on their websites. But if you want to upload things so other people can find them in the search engine, remember that that means that The Man can find them too.

Kip, Kip, Kipelangelo

The first season of Bosom Buddies looks okay on DVD, though it really should have been a lot better: there's no excuse for not getting the surviving cast members in for special features. (I feel confident that Tom Hanks would do it if they asked him; he's quite rightly proud of the show.) But the episodes are uncut and look okay.

The theme song used on the DVDs is not Billy Joel's "My Life" but the theme that replaced it in most syndication versions: "Shake Me Loose," a vocal version of the closing-credits theme. "Shake Me Loose" actually was written by the series creator, Chris Thompson, and it appears to have been the song he wanted there in the first place (to get royalties, if nothing else). But I realize many people strongly associate "My Life" with this show and may be disappointed that it's not there.

As always, the best parts of the show are the ones that have the least to do with the ostensible premise of two guys dressing in drag. As the season goes on, the drag element was de-emphasized, and by the second (and better) of the two seasons, they would go whole episodes without donning the dresses. It's not just that Hanks and Scolari were funnier in their own clothes, with the freedom to ad-lib and make up physical business -- the women's clothes restricted their feedom to move around. But as this mini-history of the show mentions, the elaborate costume changes slowed the show down and killed the spontaneous feel that made it fun:

"They made up a lot of business," says [staff writer Leonard] Ripps about the duo's repartee. "They were very active in suggesting ideas because they're very creative guys. The drag was the most difficult part of the show. They tolerated it for a season. It's just a problem doing a half hour of drag every week. It took a long time getting them in and out of wardrobe, which meant it was tough maintaining any kind of momentum in front of a live audience."

The thing about the very loose, free style of Bosom Buddies, which allowed even so-so scripts to be elevated by the cast's energy and improvised bits, is that it's a kind of style you don't see in multi-camera sitcoms today. A lot of them tend to be stop-start affairs where the actors do a lot of takes, hit their marks robotically, and don't get the filming done until late at night. Which may be part of the reason why multi-camera, live-audience shows are dying out: what's the point of doing them if not to let talented comic actors cut loose in front of an audience?

I hope the first season sells well enough to justify the other season coming out; that's the season that has the real gems, like the flashback episode to the characters' high school days ("You're a fascist!") or the episode where the characters drop a water balloon on Richard Nixon's car. But the first season has some fine moments too, like anything with Ruth Dunbar (Holland Taylor) or Scolari's date with a punk rocker ("Cecily is dead -- my new name is Andrea Pus").

Or this art show, which is a pretty standard sitcom bit in terms of writing (pretentious art critics, wacky conceptual artists, blah blah blah) but which builds up to one of those Bosom Buddies lines that makes no sense out of context and is hilarious in context: "It's the flag of Japan!"

Errol Flynn Sings!

Just another reason why I wish someone would reissue Thank Your Lucky Stars, the weirdest and most enjoyable of the all-star wartime movies. The song, by Arthur Schwartz and Frank Loesser, is a pretty funny and cheeky application of an old stereotype -- the guy in the bar telling ridiculous tall tales about his supposed war experiences -- to the war that was going on at the time. It's like an amalgamation of a Victorian scene with '40s details. And it's kind of cool both that Schwartz and Loesser could get away with gentle ribbing of the home-front experience (in a movie that was all about how big a contribution we're making on the home-front) and that Flynn would lampoon his own non-serving status.

Cried the Scout From Universal: "What a Juicy Little Mersel!"

The Digital Bits' Rumor Mill has some news on upcoming DVD releases from Universal, including several movies that you shouldn't buy on DVD now because a special edition is coming soon:

- Serenity special edition (July)
- Flash Gordon (the Sam J. Jones version) special edition (August)
- Psycho special edition (September)
- The Birds special edition (September)

Also a bunch of current shows with their first (and hopefully not last) seasons coming to DVD in August-September, like 30 Rock and Friday Night Lights.

And, just to show you that no show is ever permanently off the DVD schedule, the second season of Stephen J. Cannell's Baa Baa Black Sheep (aka Black Sheep Squadron) comes out in July.

The subject line is from a Cole Porter song, "Pretty Little Mrs. Bell," that was cut from a bad Broadway show and that nobody has ever heard of.

You Can't Write a Drawing

Lately the question of whether writers can write animated cartoons -- always a hot and heated topic online -- has been coming up for discussion again. See Mike Barrier and Mark Mayerson for two examples.

One of the better posts taking the anti-script position is this Eddie Fitzgerald post. He points out what is true not only of animated cartoon scripts but all scripts: they tend to emphasize dialogue over everything else because dialogue is easier to read. As an example, he presents a couple of pages from an unproduced Animaniacs script he wrote.

Stage directions just aren't fun to read; they're flat descriptions of stuff that might happen in the show, whereas the dialogue is, literally, what's going to happen in the show. There's no doubt that there's an advantage to presenting the story in pictures instead of just words: you can actually give a real idea of what is going to happen onscreen, and make it enjoyable.

Incidentally, this is probably the reason why most of the writers who did get a lot of material accepted for Animaniacs were improv comics from the Groundlings and such. (On one of the DVDs, Tom Minton, one of the few writers on that show with an actual animation background, takes a sardonic dig at the invasion of the improv people: referring to himself and other animation people, he says: "We weren't hip, you see. We weren't the hip people.") Being a performer gives you an advantage in pitching a story because you can act out the visual stuff and make it sound funny. Artists are supposed to be able to do that by sketching out the story and presenting it that way, but that's not an option that's available to them in much TV animation, where you just submit a script to read.

Fitzgerald's comments section also includes the inevitable contributions from John Kricfalusi, who as always seems to assume that all animation writers are hacks and frauds because he worked on some bad shows at Filmation and Hanna-Barbera. He also seems convinced that because Fitzgerald is a cartoonist, his Animaniacs script is better than any of the regular writers' scripts, which, frankly, I don't see.

Favorite Rockford Phone Message?

Speaking of The Rockford Files, here is a list of most of the answering machine messages used on the series.

Does anybody have a favorite Rockford answering machine joke? I think the one below, from part one of "The Trees, The Bees And T.T. Flowers," is my pick. It's quick, it's simple, it's obvious, and it involves a character from the show itself (though not from this particular episode).

I'm the One Called Larry

Take it with the usual granular salt element, but I've read in a couple of places that the third volumes of Animaniacs and Pinky and the Brain will be out this summer (originally it appeared that they might not come out until the winter, if then). Hopefully that's true.


Meanwhile, here is the "Pinky and the Brain... and Larry" cartoon, which I wrote about in an earlier post. This is a great example of how to make a cartoon that works on three different levels: one level for kids, one level for adults, and one for people who get what the cartoon is actually about. For kids, there's a lot of slapstick action with Pinky, Brain and a new character. For adults (or older kids) it's a Three Stooges tribute.

But what it's really about is how disastrous it is when a new character is shoehorned into an established show: Larry, who has apparently been added to Pinky and the Brain by the network -- though the reason for his presence is never explained, because the characters aren't aware that they're on TV -- screws up the timing and forces Pinky and the Brain to go out of the way to include him in their conversations ("And Larry") even though he adds nothing.

This was written as a response to the WB network's demands that Pinky and the Brain add a third regular character and change its format. This eventually did happen when the network added Elmyra. But it also probably had additional resonance for the writers of the episode, Gordon Bressack and Charlie Howell, because they'd started in Saturday morning cartoons in the '80s, when new, useless characters were constantly being forced into the shows. So you'd get a cute animal sidekick added to the animated version of Flash Gordon, or a constant parade of Scooby-Doo additives (when Scrappy wasn't enough, the network added a cute ethnic kid), or a seemingly endless series of new Smurfs. So that's what this cartoon is about; it's not exactly insider humor, but it does mean that the cartoon is more than just a Three Stooges takeoff.

Mr. Smith

I asked before if Charles Lane ever played a nice guy. Here's one film where he does: Primrose Path a 1940 RKO production directed, produced and co-written by the great Gregory La Cava.

The film -- loosely based on an old stage play, and a strange hybrid of comedy and melodrama like La Cava's Stage Door -- stars Ginger Rogers as a young woman from the Wrong Side of the Tracks whose father is a drunk and whose mother is a prostitute. Rogers marries a character played by Joel McCrea, but they have a falling-out when he discovers her family background. Rogers goes back to live with her family, and after her mother's accidental death, Rogers has to support the family by going into her mother's old business of prostitution.

But Rogers' virtue, and her marriage, are saved by an unexpected source: her first client, played by Charles Lane. Yes, Charles Lane saves the day and brings the leading players together. Good for him.

Corbett Your Life

One thing I was reminded of once again, in watching The Rockford Files season 3, is how good Gretchen Corbett was as Jim's lawyer Beth Davenport. She was, indeed, one of the few really good women characters on hour-long TV in the testosterone-laden '70s: smart, attractive, funny, a real match for James Garner in every scene they had together, and always believable. In her scenes in the episode "So Help Me God," she's not your typical TV super-lawyer who knows everything about everything; she admits (in the scene before this one) that she doesn't know a lot about the grand jury process, has to bone up on the subject before Jim testifies, and just generally seems like one of the few TV lawyers who has to look something up before she cites it.

Corbett's Wikipedia entry is quite good. She was, as the entry says, one of the last people signed by Universal in the old studio-system style. Universal was the last studio to try and maintain that type of operation; they had a big film operation and an even bigger TV production operation, and they would sign actors, directors and technicians who could be used for all their TV projects and then moved into feature films. That's how Steven Spielberg got started (first episodic TV, then TV movies, then features, all for Universal). But maintaining the system depended on having lots of shows on the air, and by the mid-'70s networks were buying fewer of the kind of L.A.-based action and mystery shows that Universal specialized in. So the Universal studio system collapsed like all the others.

I'm not sure exactly why Corbett left The Rockford Files after the fourth season; it's usually written that she left over a salary dispute, while others have written that it was simply that her contract with Universal had expired. I'm inclined to put the two explanations together and speculate that once her contract ran out, she demanded to be paid not as a studio contract player on assignment but as a semi-regular on a hit show. The difference between the two salary levels was probably pretty big.

She did do a few guest roles after that, but she was never a regular on a series again. I'm assuming that she probably mostly went back to stage work. (She now lives in her native Portland, Oregon, where she runs a non-profit theatre organization for underprivileged children.) But you would have thought Universal or NBC or somebody would have thought of her as a candidate for the lead in a series; in fact, Beth is one of the few characters who I really thought would have made a viable spin-off character.

Final note: Corbett got the part on Rockford soon after doing a major guest role on an episode of Columbo (the one with Robert Conrad as a murderous health guru). Universal may have given her the role of Beth based on that Columbo, though the thing you wonder in that scene is why she's wearing a bikini on what doesn't appear to be a particularly pleasant day. But that's the joy of '70s Universal shows -- they shot all around L.A., in good, bad and mediocre weather, and the shows may not look beautiful but they're like a guided tour of the city.



Oh, and speaking of Beth, there's an episode of Hunter written by Stephen J. Cannell (the only episode of that show he wrote himself) that features Hunter's lawyer, who is a blatant knock-off of Beth -- she has all the Beth lines, talks to Hunter's boss the way Beth talked to Dennis Becker, and she gets Hunter off by citing a bunch of precedents that she later admits she made up on the spot. The character never appeared again, but either it was an attempt to come up with a new Beth character for the '80s, or Cannell just rewrote an old Beth-Jim-Dennis scene out of time constraints. (Adding to the retro-Rockford feel, Joe Santos is in that Hunter episode basically playing Dennis Becker under a different name.)

Sky

I was watching "Quickie Nirvana," the fourth-season episode included as a bonus/preview with season 3 of The Rockford Files (the complete season 4 will be out later this year). It's a David Chase script about Rockford working for an aging New Age cultist played by Jane Curtin's cousin Valerie Curtin; as always, the job leads to a big stash of money turning up unexpectedly, and Rockford getting into more trouble than he anticipated when he took the case -- the usual.

But one thing that struck me as interesting was the ending, where Rockford meets the Curtin character again and finds that she's now given up all the sensory-deprivation-tank lifestyle and turned to handing out leaflets for a Christian preacher. The scene openly -- and, let's face it, kind of heavy-handedly -- posits that there's no real difference between Christianity (or at least some varieties thereof) and cultism.

The interesting thing was that nobody involved seemed to think this was a problem, or potentially controversial. Nowadays, you couldn't get this scene on the air without a lot of controversy (Aaron Sorkin's whole misbegotten Studio 60 made a whole arc out of the fact that you can't put a "Crazy Christians" sketch on the air). And even five years later, you couldn't have done it without controversy, because within five years TV producers would become obsessed -- I mean literally, unambigously obsessed -- with fear of the so-called Moral Majority. So the scene is, unwittingly, a sort of cultural time capsule from 1977.

Dance to the Music of the Oscarina

The Oscars always remind me of something Bill James wrote about the Baseball Hall of Fame. He wrote something to the effect that because the standards of the Hall of Fame have been so low -- with dozens of players getting in who weren't great players, let alone all-time greats -- the HoF can't truly honor a great player by letting him in; it can only insult him by leaving him out. If a really great player feels honored to be admitted, he wrote, "it can only be because he doesn't understand how many players have been there before him, players who didn't have half of his credentials."

I feel this way about the Academy Awards. You've heard the old line: someone is told not to worry about not winning an Oscar, because Oscars don't mean anything since they gave two of them to Luise Rainer. But it's not just that the Academy has often had bizarre standards; it's that, collectively, the awards over the years present a picture of Hollywood that is much worse, artistically, than Hollywood actually is.

That's what Joe Queenan misses in his article about the difference between the movies that get nominated, and the movies that people actually go to see. That wasn't always a problem. What was always a problem is that the Academy Awards usually go to worthy, middlebrow, thought-provoking dramas. And my biggest problem with that is that that's never been what Hollywood does best. For various reasons ranging from fewer censorship restrictions to fewer commercial pressures, other countries have always beat Hollywood when it comes to message dramas, serious historical drama (as opposed to swashbuckling pseudo-historical stories, which Hollywood is great at) and social problem pictures. Plenty of filmmakers around the world could make a better version of Crash than Crash was.

But there are genres that Hollywood does better, or used to do better, than anybody else, and yet those are the genres that get shafted as not being "serious." You're probably aware that comedies, films noir, Westerns, musicals (particularly musicals that aren't bloated stage adaptations), swashbucklers and much else -- in other words, the best that Hollywood has to offer -- have never gotten much respect from the Academy. Today, the nominations reflect the obvious fact that Academy members are embarrassed about what Hollywood is currently producing: the comic-book blockbusters, the frat-guy comedies. And I'll admit that this is not a great time for Hollywood movies. But it seems to me that the best stuff Hollywood does is still to be found in the genres has always been best at -- adventure stories, comedies, and so on -- and the solution to that is not to turn up one's nose at those genres, but to try and identify and honor the best Hollywood-style movies.

I'm not saying every movie nominated has to be Casino Royale -- which wasn't actually made in Hollywood, but you know what I mean -- or (to go back to a previous year) The 40 Year-Old Virgin. But it would be nice to see one movie like that in there in place of the clunkiest of the five (coughLettersfromIwoJimacough). Because, let's face it, when we look back on the award recipients from this period, we're not going to think that they represent the best American cinema had to offer at this time. It would be like looking back on A Man For All Seasons and concluding that Fred Zinnemann was one of the great directors. Which he was not.

(My apologies to Fred Zinnemann fans out there. I was just in a bad mood after suffering through A Man For All Seasons and then re-visiting the boring hash he made of Oklahoma! It just seems that this guy could always find the maximum boredom in any material he handled. He was, of course, a multiple Oscar nominee and two-time winner.)

A Complaint About the Complaint Box. Delicious.

P-E-P-E

TCM* recently showed a very strange movie called Pepe. In the wake of Around the World in 80 Days, there were a number of light-hearted films with all-star casts; the most famous of those is It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, but Pepe has to be the weirdest. It's a vehicle for the Mexican superstar Cantinflas, who was Passepartout in 80 Days and here graduates to his first starring role in a U.S. film. He plays a lovable idiot who has adopted a horse as his son, and who spends most of the movie trying to get his horse back and/or pining after Shirley Jones, who just thinks of him as a friend. (She winds up marrying the alcoholic washed-up Hollywood director played by Dan Dailey, because this is Hollywood, where white chicks marry white dudes, even if they're old and drunk white dudes.) Cantinflas is nowhere near his best here, uncomfortable with the language -- even in scenes with direct sound recording, he frequently has to re-dub his own dialogue to make it more intelligible -- and playing a character who's so dumb and childlike as to be infuriating; the characters he played in his Mexican films, while often innocent, were nowhere near this stupid.

It was produced and directed by the MGM musicals veteran George Sidney, who recruited some key MGM people like Andre Previn and Roger Edens to work on the film, and drew mostly on people he'd worked with before to create the pool of guest stars: Kim Novak, Janet Leigh, Tony Curtis and Frank Sinatra are among those who had made films with Sidney before and turn up in cameos here. Other stars, like Jack Lemmon, Maurice Chevalier and Bobby Darin, turned up out of a combination of respect for Cantinflas and, some speculated, an attempt to improve their box-office standing in Mexico (much as European stars would try to improve their U.S. standing by appearing with U.S. superstars).

The movie looks quite good, maybe better than average for a Hollywood production from 1960; Sidney was among the few directors left who knew how to stage a musical number, and he had the services of the great cinematographer Joe MacDonald (My Darling Clementine, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter) shooting in 'Scope. But the picture doesn't even have the basic spine of plot that 80 Days or Mad Mad World had. It's basically just Cantinflas wandering around pining after his horse and/or Shirley Jones, mangling the English language (he buys a ring and confuses "carats" with "carrots," hilarity ensues) and smiling while the guest stars do their thing. And it's really, really long: the original version was 195 minutes. 195 minutes devoted to almost nothing. This was a strange period in Hollywood movies, where excess -- huge budgets, huge star casts -- was more important than an actual story.

Like many of these mega-extravaganzas, Pepe was cut down for a non-roadshow version, which runs about 150 minutes. TCM tried to get the complete version, but the distributor, Sony, sent them the short version instead; it has a bunch of awkward and abrupt fade-outs, but it's hard to know whether the cut scenes would cause the picture to make more sense than it does.

And yet, for all that, I kind of enjoy the picture. I'll go further than that: I actually enjoy it more than Mad Mad World or a lot of these other all-star films. In many of those films, the guest stars are regimented, forced into costumes or unsatisfactory roles or generally forced to conform to the demands of the plot. Here, because there is no plot, the guests mostly just play themselves (often literally), and they don't seem to have rehearsed much, so there's a certain charm in seeing them act natural and unforced. Kim Novak comes off especially well this way.

Here's one of the film's many musical numbers, where Maurice Chevalier (as himself) performs his trademark song "Mimi" (from Love Me Tonight) with Cantinflas and Dan Dailey.



*It's amazing how the availability of TCM -- it only recently came to Canada -- changes your TV viewing patterns. You keep checking the schedule until you realized that you've started planning your whole life around what's on TCM on a given day.

Thank You, Mr. Wardcraft

I (and others who were more knowledgeable about him) wrote a lot about the great comedy writer Jerry Belson after he died last year. As a postscript to that, here's a short clip I found: it's Belson making a cameo appearance on Laverne and Shirley, produced by his ex-partner Garry Marshall. Marshall himself is also in the scene, as the bored-looking drummer.



I don't know why, but before he started working regularly as an actor, Marshall would often appear as a drummer on his shows -- he also turned up as a non-speaking drummer in episodes of Happy Days and The Odd Couple.

Same Actor, Different Character

One of the movies that will be in the next Martin & Lewis collection is You're Never Too Young. Like several of the team's movies, this was a remake of an earlier Paramount hit: Billy Wilder's The Major and the Minor, with Jerry pretending to be a little boy instead of Ginger Rogers pretending to be a little girl.

But this movie is more than just an entertaining musical comedy; it's also the answer to a trivia question. Or at least one of the answers. Because it's one of the few remakes that features an actor from the original -- in a different part. The lovely Diana Lynn, who played a wisecracking schoolgirl in The Major and the Minor, here plays a teacher, and Dean Martin's love interest.

Are there any other remakes where an important part is played by an actor from the original movie -- in a different role than he or she played originally? (I say "important" part because there are a number of remakes featuring people from the original in small or cameo roles, but that's not what I'm talking about here.)

Update: I thought of another one -- George Tobias, whom most of you know as Mr. Kravitz on Bewitched, was in Ninotchka as a guy who won't give Melvyn Douglas a visa to enter Russia; in the musical remake, Silk Stockings, he played the Commissar of Arts.

Exposition Competition

You know what struck me in watching the first season of Family Ties? How incredibly clunky the exposition is. I never noticed it at the time, but now I’m aware of the fact that the characters are constantly telling each other things that they already know, or talking about things that they really should have talked about earlier, just so we can know what the episode is about. So at the beginning of one episode, Alex and Jennifer walk into the hall of an apartment building, and in thirty seconds they’re talking about what they’re doing there, why Alex brought Jennifer along, how much she’s getting paid for this. Now, why would two people discuss this stuff out loud when they already know it? And why would they wait until they’re on a potential customer’s doorstep to start having this conversation? They wouldn’t, but the writers had to get the exposition out of the way.

But in defense of Family Ties, it’s very hard to do exposition in a show about a family. Families, by their nature, spend a lot of time together. So it’s very hard to find a moment when family members can plausibly be telling each other something for the first time; no matter when you start the scene, it’s usually going to seem like they should know this stuff already. And exposition can’t be plausible unless there are satisfactory reasons for the audience to believe two things: one, that the character delivering the exposition would actually be saying this stuff, and two, that the other character would actually want to hear it. Family shows are okay on point two, but they have a lot of problems with point one. Which is how you get all those scenes of characters getting out of a car, talking about where they are and why they’re there. Or one-sided phone conversations where the character repeats everything the unheard party is supposedly saying (“Are you telling me that there’s a big party tonight?”).

Shows that have a workplace element in them usually have it easier, because co-workers don’t spend all their time together, so you can do a scene where the hero tells his co-workers what’s going on in his home life. And it sort of makes sense that they might not know about it already, though it doesn’t always make sense that they’d want to listen.

If you watch an episode of a show that shuttles back and forth between work and home, like The Dick Van Dyke Show or The Bob Newhart Show, you’ll notice that the exposition is often delivered in the place that is not directly related to the plot that week. If this week’s episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show is about Rob’s home life, then he’ll often deliver a lot of the exposition at work, telling Buddy and Sally what’s going on at home. Whereas if it’s a work plot, the home scenes allow Rob to bounce exposition off Laura.

Another way of doing exposition is to bring in a guest character who doesn’t know what’s going on, and have the hero explain it to him. (“You’re new in school? Well, the prom is tomorrow night…”) Or you can have a regular character who’s somewhat cut off from the rest of the cast, so that they have to tell him what’s new in their lives. Giles on Buffy the Vampire Slayer was there to deliver all the exposition about the scary monsters, but he was also there to receive exposition: because he was leading a hermetic existence in the library, Buffy could come in and tell him – and us – what was up with her life.

It also helps if you have a really clueless character, particularly an absent-minded one. Henry Blake on M*A*S*H is a great exposition machine because he tends to forget things, which means that Radar can tell him (and us) what the situation is. It wouldn’t be plausible to have Radar explain these things to someone with more on the ball – which meant that the exposition got clunkier after Colonel Potter came in – but it is plausible that he would tell Blake, because we know that Blake would in fact forget this stuff.

And then, of course, there’s the narrator, the voice-over exposition machine. Having Captain Kirk say “Captain’s Log…” and explain that week’s mission saved the writers a lot of expository dialogue. And today, narrators are everywhere, partly because of the ridiculously short running times (since lots of scenes have to be cut to get a show down to 20 minutes, a narrator allows the producers to cut those scenes while still letting the audience know what we would have seen happen if there’d been more time), but partly because it cuts down on the necessity to find ways to deliver the exposition. Actually, I think those two things – short running times and narrators – are related in some ways: it’s not just that expository dialogue is clunky and hard to write, it’s that there’s just no time for it. So you have Earl or Older Ted tell us where the characters are and why they’re there, which saves a minute or two of figuring out how they’re going to tell us.

There are other solutions that are a bit like voice-over narration, but less hackneyed. One advantage of the mock-documentary format of The Office (both versions) is that instead of the characters telling each other what’s going on, they can tell us directly, by talking to the unseen documentary filmmaker. In every episode, some of the “talking head” segments are basically straightforward exposition: this week we’re doing X, or Y is coming to visit.

Finally, if all else fails in finding ways to do the exposition, you can always do what Family Ties eventually did: bring in a little kid who can draw out the exposition by asking a lot of pointless questions.

ANDY: What's a funeral?
JENNIFER: Well, a funeral is where you go to show respect for someone who died.
ANDY: Who died?
JENNIFER: Greg, Alex's friend.
ANDY: I would like to meet him.
JENNIFER: That's gonna be tough. You see, when someone dies you never see them again.
ANDY: Why?
JENNIFER: Because they're dead.
ANDY: Why?
JENNIFER: Because their life's over, that's all.
ANDY: But why?
JENNIFER: Because!
ANDY: ...Where do babies come from?

Oh, Bat Lady!

The Martin & Lewis Collection Volume 2 is coming out on June 5. I would have thought it would have included all their color films (the first volume had all their black and white films except for At War With the Army, which is public domain), but according to the listing, and the total time length given, there are only five films in the set. Why Paramount is leaving Money From Home and Three Ring Circus in limbo, I have no idea.

The good news is that the set will be the first DVD release -- and, I think, the first wide-screen home video release -- for Frank Tashlin's two films with the team, Artists and Models and Hollywood or Bust (in which, Tashlin claimed, they didn't speak to each other through the entire shoot). You've heard me yammer on about how much I love these two movies, where Tashlin got to indulge his love-hate relationship with pop culture and his uncomplicated love for cartoony jokes, beautiful women and splashy colors. Nobody had ever made anything quite like these two movies before. The VHS releases didn't do justice to the VistaVision photography, so I'm hoping for the best from the DVDs, since Paramount usually does a pretty good job on transfering old movies (it's just that they hardly ever bother to release old movies).

Ann-Margret Says: "Come Fill My Glass"

What's the best way to sell Canada Dry ginger ale? If it's 1968, the answer is to have Ann-Margret do a two-and-a-half minute singing commercial about Canada Dry. After all, as she tells us herself, she's the Soft Drink Expert.




(Cross-posted to TV Guidance.)

Update: I originally heard the above line as "Come feel my glass." Thanks to Christopher Mills, in comments, for the correction.

Fox Musicals

Just another reminder that tomorrow is the DVD release date of Busby Berkeley's The Gang's All Here. The New York Post has a nice review.

One reason I like The Gang's All Here so much is that it's one of the few Twentieth Century-Fox musicals where the imagination of the director is really worthy of the work of Fox's cinematographers. Starting in 1940, Fox used Technicolor for nearly all its musicals, and by the middle of the decade it had stopped making black-and-white musicals altogether; it was the first studio, as far as I know, to do that. And not just any Technicolor; Fox's use of Technicolor was so distinctive that it was almost a separate brand in itself. Fox had some of the best color cinematographers in the world, including the master of cinematic color, Leon Shamroy; and Fox Technicolor movies abounded in lush, vibrant colors. Fox stars like Gene Tierney looked so beautiful in Technicolor that it could take your breath away; I've said this before, but when I saw a screening of Lubitsch's Heaven Can Wait (a Fox Technicolor film), there were actual audible gasps in the theatre when Tierney first appeared.

But the photography was rarely matched up with a director who had any imagination of his own. Fox didn't have a Vincente Minnelli or a Stanley Donen (and when it had a great director of musicals under contract, Rouben Mamoulian, the studio didn't give him any musicals to direct). It assigned most of its musicals to guys like Walter Lang or Irving Cummings, whose idea of how to stage a musical number was mostly just to plant the camera down in front of the performers and let something happen. Other studios had performers like Fred Astaire, who had strong creative personalities and would give their numbers some kind of imagination and shape, but at Fox, even the biggest musical stars didn't have that kind of clout in shaping their own numbers, so you'd get Betty Grable being handed virtually the same numbers in movie after movie.

This problem was compounded by the kind of musicals Darryl Zanuck liked to make. Fox musicals rarely had people actually breaking into song or expressing their emotions through dance. Instead, most of the musical numbers are diategic: they're performed on a stage, or in a nightclub. There are many Fox musicals where there are no "plot" songs at all (and in a sense, that means they're not real musicals at all, just non-musical comedies about people who happen to be stage performers). And that created the temptation for the director to just photograph the number the way TV cameras would later cover a stage performance: from a respectful distance. Berkeley, with his relentlessly moving camera, total insanity, and refusal to create numbers that could realistically be done on a stage, was one of the few directors to break that mold, but unfortunately The Gang's All Here was his only picture for Fox.

Still, despite the lack of visual imagination, typical Fox musicals do have their own pleasures. Here's one of the best moments from That Night In Rio (also included in the Faye) collection, Carmen Miranda singing the excellent Harry Warren song "I Yi Yi Yi Yi (I Like You Very Much)." As it's a night-time scene and a fairly drab one at that, it doesn't quite do justice to Shamroy's use of Technicolor (for that you have to go to the samba sequence in the opening number, "Chica Chica Boom Chic").

I Don't Know Why I'm Posting This

I just like this bit from NewsRadio, that's all.



If I had to add a comment to it, I'll say that I think I love this joke because of the way it takes a silly idea and then takes the silliness one step further. The basic idea is that Bill (Phil Hartman) is recounting a banal TV plot as if it were a bedtime story. That's silly and funny. What makes it sillier and funnier is that it's a very specific TV plot, for a real TV show, with specific details that would only be familiar to someone who has watched that show (you'd have to watch Family Matters to know what the "Urkel-Bot" is). So it's funny not only because of the idea, but because of the character element: it's amusing that Bill is apparently so familiar with Family Matters.

Series Abandonment Syndrome

In watching the DVDs of Get Smart, I noticed that -- to me, anyway -- the series took a pronounced dip in quality in the third season. The first two seasons were about as good as they could be, but a lot of the episodes in season 3 seem to have less solid comedy writing and a less solid grasp of the characters and the style. There are a lot fewer good funny spy stories and a lot more of a reliance on parodies of other then-hot shows (The Fugitive) and movies. It's not bad, but it's definitely not as good as the first two seasons. And I think the audiences sensed that, because the show's viewership started to have some trouble around this time (which led, in season 4, to the producers marrying Max and 99 off in order to try and win back the audience).

Initially I chalked this up to the departure of series creator Buck Henry, who was head writer for the first two years (billed as "story editor," back when that title meant something). But it turns out he actually left part of the way through season 2, leaving to create Captain Nice, a superhero equivalent of Get Smart, and there was no noticeable drop-off in the writing of Get Smart.

What actually seems to have happened in season 3 of Get Smart is that the people who ran it were busy with a new project. That was the season when Leonard Stern, the executive producer of Get Smart, created He and She, starring Paula Prentiss and Richard Benjamin. It was, as anyone who's seen it can tell you, one of the best shows of its time, influenced by The Dick Van Dyke Show but with somewhat more sophisticated writing, presaging The Mary Tyler Moore Show (which had several key people who had worked on He and She). It was a terrible shame that it was canceled after only one season.

But the point that's relevant to this post is that Stern was busy with He and She, and he put a lot of his best Get Smart people on He and She as well. That left Get Smart with what seemed like Stern's "B" team, and the show went through a lot of different writers and producers that year (Jess Oppenheimer, of I Love Lucy, produced the show for about five episodes that season, then left). Almost nobody writing for Get Smart that season had written for the show in the previous two seasons, because the best writers from seasons 1 and 2 were on He and She. The fourth season of Get Smart -- again, in my opinion -- has better writing than the third, because the He and She people all came back to try and save Get Smart.

This is a pretty common dilemma when TV writers and creators do more than one show. From an artistic standpoint, you can't object to someone wanting to do a different kind of show, especially when the result is as good as He and She. But from a business standpoint, it sometimes hurts, because the flagship production -- the one that enabled the production people to do the new shows -- is left in inexperienced hands, and the danger is that within a couple of years they'll be left with no shows at all, as the flagship property fizzles out and the new shows don't succeed with the public.

I suspect that, as I describe this scenario, many of you are thinking of the words Marti Noxon. It's a similar thing, yes.

And why the hell isn't He and She on DVD anyway? Who owns it? Paul Brownstein or somebody needs to be given the DVD rights to this show while all the major participants are still alive.

What's Really Important

When I did all those posts on Yvonne DeCarlo and Follies, I should have checked to see if this was available online: DeCarlo on The David Frost Show, talking about how she got into the show (she originally auditioned for the part Alexis Smith got), and performing "I'm Still Here."

DeCarlo forgets the lyrics at one point (in her defence, the references to "Five Dionne babies" and "Beebe's Bathysphere" aren't easy to remember, and that's the weakest part of the song anyway), but she owns this song, and as I've said repeatedly: while she may sing behind the beat occasionally for effect, she mostly sings it straightforwardly, without talking her way through the song, shouting lines, jazzing it up, or any of the other things people think they have to do to make it work.

Peter Ellenshaw

With the death of Disney's great matte painter Peter Ellenshaw, I can only return to what I wrote about him a couple of years ago:

I think the main thing you remember about The Love Bug, though, is Peter Ellenshaw's matte work. His stylized paintings of San Francisco are so gorgeous that the scenes actually shot in San Francisco suffer by comparison; why bother with the drabness of the real thing when you can get Peter Ellenshaw to create a beautiful, imaginative new version of it?

The Complete Pogo Coming From Fantagraphics

Awesome.

Or in my bad approximation of Pogo-speak: I gone buy this ol' book, son. You is advised to do the same. If they's unable to bring out more, that would be horribobble.

P.S. - Has anyone ever tried to explain the differences between Pogo dialect and Li'l Abner dialect? They're awfully similar, but there are instantly-identifiable differences, like the way Capp uses "ah" instead of "I" and "yo'" instead of "you." Kelly's dialect is a little less heavy on the phonetic spelling.

Pa-two-cah

So, as I said before, "Paducah" from The Gang's All Here is a really stupid song and Benny Goodman shouldn't be singing. But it's all worth it, somehow, to see the two-minute extended take that begins the number. Busby Berkeley, like many great directors of musicals, liked long takes and camera movement, but at Warner Brothers he didn't always have the budget or the resources to do really long, fluid takes. At M-G-M, he could do long takes (that was the house style when it came to musicals), but he couldn't express his own creative personality. The Gang's All Here shows Berkeley finally working with the budget he dreamed of and the creative freedom he needed, and the result is something like this: two minutes in which, without a cut, the camera swoops in, up and around, individualizing every member of Benny Goodman's band before circling back and returning to Goodman for the song.

Further Thoughts on Follies

1. I think too much is sometimes made of the idea that Follies is supposed to be exposing the lies in show tunes, or even making fun of the naivete of show tunes. Very few of the pastiche songs in Follies work that way. The only pastiche numbers that are flat-out wrong, and flat-out parodies, are the early numbers in the "Loveland" sequence (the Loveland song and the songs for the younger versions of the two couples). And even those songs don't represent deliberate lies, but rather the things we really do believe when we're younger: the show has already told us that when the characters were young, "everything was possible," so they sing songs about what a wonderful future they expect.

Remember, too, that even seemingly naive ballads and charm songs are not fantasies, not exactly. They resonate because they're saying things that are widely believed. Most love songs have messages that make perfect sense to us when we're young: possibilities are endless, love happens at first sight and lasts forever, there's an ideal mate for every person and someday he'll come along (someone to watch over you). These messages may have been somewhat cynically peddled by middle-aged chain-smoking pop songwriters who didn't believe a word of them any more, but they are not phony messages: from the perspective of youth, they make sense. What Follies is about is the contrast between youth, when everything is going to be great, and middle age, when things haven't worked out the way you expected (and the only way to be happy is to stop bitching about the fact that things didn't work out the way you expected). That applies specifically to the two main couples and more broadly to the "middle-aged" America that the show is really about. But I don't read that as a condemnation of traditional love songs, just an acknowledgement that they're songs for tbe hopeful young person in all of us, and they don't have much resonance for our depressed middle-aged side.

But most of the other pastiche numbers are basically "middle-aged" show tunes -- songs that are written in a '20s or '30s style but have resonance for the world of 1971. "Who's That Woman?" is supposed to be a number the women performed in the Weismann Follies. And when the four main characters take the stage in the finale, they face the truth about themselves and arrive at a moment of real honesty, and how do they do that? By singing a show tune in a very traditional, old-fashioned style. Sally's big solo earlier in the evening, "In Buddy's Eyes," was more modern, nervous, has a rambling structure, is very recognizably Sondheimian, and it's a song of denial, of (mostly) lying to herself and the person she's talking to. Her solo in the finale, "Losing My Mind," is an old-fashioned torch song with a simple A-A-B-A structure, and it's her first big moment of honesty (yes, Sally, it is like you're losing your mind). The only one of the four climactic numbers that's a "denial" song is Ben's, and even that is giving plausible advice that, we're meant to infer, he ought to be taking, since it's the lesson he takes away with him after the number collapses on itself: he should, in fact, stop obsessing over superficial things and "learn how to love."

So what Follies is building up to is a climax where we find that a show tune -- a traditional, simply-structured show tune, fitting into a clear genre and with all the staging bells and whistles that go with it -- is a great way to express honest emotions and face up to the truth about yourself. That's hardly what you'd expect to find if Follies were as anti-show-tune as it's often made out to be.

2. In my earlier post I said that Christine Baranski was wrong, vocally and as a matter of casting, for Carlotta (the ex-sex-symbol who doesn't do much in the show but toss off some one-liners and sing "I'm Still Here"). Carol Burnett, at the 1985 Lincoln Center concert, could sing the song better, but wasn't right for the part. Polly Bergen, in the Roundabout revival, was closer but not quite right (and she had that problem of trying to sing the song with more rhythmic freedom than it can withstand). So who is right for it?

Well, I think the part, and the song, demands someone who was once famous for her looks. That's built into the character's dialogue, and also into the song, which is full of references to the fact that the character wasn't really a trained actress but got by on her great looks and her "sincere" acting. The character's triumph, and it's a small triumph but a real one, is that instead of becoming a pathetic figure as former sex symbols sometimes do, she is still working -- not a lot, but enough (the original draft of the song says she's recently been doing commercials; this was changed to "I'm almost through my memoirs"), still confident, still attractive, in short, still here.

Obviously, Yvonne De Carlo embodied this character. And I think, in casting the role and the song, it would still help to seek out a former sex symbol who has had her career ups and downs but, like De Carlo, has kept working successfully. I thought, and still think, that Raquel Welch would be very good in this -- I saw someone else suggest this on another blog somewhere, but can't remember who. And while they probably couldn't get her for a stage performance, Ann-Margret would be an excellent Carlotta if they did a Follies movie.

3. Finally, speaking of "I'm Still Here," you might notice that it violates what is otherwise a rule of the show: only the four main characters get "character" numbers. All the other characters sing songs that are supposedly numbers they performed in the Follies. All, that is, except Carlotta, because "I'm Still Here" -- though it has pastiche elements -- isn't a song she sang in a show, it's a song about her life.

The reason for this is that the song originally written for this spot was cut out of town. It was "Can That Boy F...oxtrot," a take-off on suggestive comic songs (Cole Porter et al). The song didn't work, so during the tryout "I'm Still Here" was written and inserted into the show.

Addendum: Broadway.com has some brief excerpts from the concert mixed in with cast interviews.

And Michael Riedel writes about various options for what happens to Follies next. Note, though, that stuff like this is often written after Encores! concerts, and nothing usually comes of it; there's special reason for skepticism because Follies, unlike Chicago, is just too damned big and expensive to ever make back its cost. And as for movie versions, there have been plans for a Follies movie ever since the early '70s and, again, nothing's ever come of it (though it's been written in several places that M-G-M got the idea to do That's Entertainment after a failed attempt to develop Follies as a film).