Page to Screen

I know I've posted this scene before, but I wanted to try posting a movie scene after quoting the same scene from the novel it's based on.

The scene is the book shop scene from The Big Sleep, or as it's called in the movie, the ACME Book Shop (it's a Warner Brothers picture; ACME had to be in there somewhere) where Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart in the movie) asks for some help from a bookstore clerk (played by Dorothy Malone in the movie).

Howard Hawks claimed that most of this scene was made up on the set, and like a lot of Hawks's stories, it's not quite true but not quite a lie either -- half true, let's say. As you can see, the first part of the scene in the movie is almost exactly the same as the book, right down to the fact that the clerk is wearing glasses (though she's obviously supposed to be more genuinely nerdy in the book, whereas Malone wearing glasses is more a joke on the "beautiful woman with glasses and her hair up" stereotype). But the second half of the scene, where Marlowe and the clerk take their flirtation one step further, is all original to the film, and a lot of it may have indeed been made up as they went along; Malone said it was her idea to pull down the window shade, for example. It's kind of a running theme throughout the movie: adding more sex to Chandler's original scenes -- in particular, making Chandler's rather chaste Marlowe into a flirting, womanizing chick magnet.

I shoved on back into the store, passed through a partition and found a small dark woman reading a law book at a desk.

I flipped my wallet open on her desk and let her look at the buzzer pinned to the flap. She looked at it, took her glasses off and leaned back in her chair. I put the wallet away. She had the fine-drawn face of an intelligent Jewess. She stared at me and said nothing.

I said: "Would you do me a favor, a very small favor?"

"I don't know. What is it?" She had a smoothly husky voice.

"You know Geiger's store across the street, two blocks west?"

"I think I may have passed it."

"It's a bookstore," I said. "Not your kind of a bookstore. You know darn well."

She curled her lip slightly and said nothing. "You know Geiger by sight?" I asked.

"I'm sorry. I don't know Mr. Geiger."

"Then you couldn't tell me what he looks like?"

Her lip curled some more. "Why should I?"

"No reason at all. If you don't want to, I can't make you."

She looked out through the partition door and leaned back again. "That was a sheriff's star, wasn't it?"

"Honorary deputy. Doesn't mean a thing. It's worth a dime cigar."

"I see." She reached for a pack of cigarettes and shook one loose and reached for it with her lips. I held a match for her. She thanked me, leaned back again and regarded me through smoke. She said carefully:

"You wish to know what he looks like and you don't want to interview him?"

"He's not there," I said.

"I presume he will be. After all, it's his store."

"I don't want to interview him just yet," I said.

She looked out through the open doorway again. I said: "Know anything about rare books?"

"You could try me."

"Would you have a Ben Hur, 1860, Third Edition, the one with the duplicated line on page 116?"

She pushed her yellow law book to one side and reached a fat volume up on the desk, leafed it through, found her page, and studied it. "Nobody would," she said without looking up. "There isn't one."

"Right."

"What in the world are you driving at?"

"The girl in Geiger's store didn't know that."

She looked up. "I see. You interest me. Rather vaguely."

"I'm a private dick on a case. Perhaps I ask too much. It didn't seem much to me somehow."

She blew a soft gray smoke ring and poked her finger through. It came to pieces in frail wisps. She spoke smoothly, indifferently. "In his early forties, I should judge. Medium height, fattish. Would weigh about a hundred and sixty pounds. Fat face, Charlie Chan moustache, thick soft neck. Soft all over. Well dressed, goes without a hat, affects a knowledge of antiques and hasn't any. Oh yes. His left eye is glass."

"You'd make a good cop," I said.

She put the reference book back on an open shelf at the end of her desk, and opened the law book in front of her again. "I hope not," she said. She put her glasses on.

I thanked her and left. The rain had started. I ran for it, with the wrapped book under my arm.

Power-Ful

I can highly recommend the new Tyrone Power DVD box set, containing a bunch of his costume adventure films (though not Zorro and The Black Swan, which have already been released separately). As the above review says, all the transfers are good except maybe the first couple of reels of Captain From Castile, and all the movies are good except the last of the bunch, The Black Rose (an example of the kind of product Fox was turning out as the studio system was just starting to crumble: it was made in England to save money, and it has a heroine who looks cross-eyed a lot of the time). Fox tends to produce more elaborate special features for classic films than most studios; the featurettes here include interviews with living actresses who worked with Power (Colleen Grey, Terry Moore, Jayne Meadows), making-ofs on some of the movies and commentaries on others.

Fox's costume adventures had less of a sense of humor than Warners'; in fact, they're often quite po-faced and take these absurd stories very seriously indeed. They seem to stick closer to the style and tone of the potboiler novels they're based on: the episodic structure, the faint pretensions to historical accuracy. But they look beautiful and they've always got something going on: Darryl Zanuck always wanted to excite moviegoers with something they hadn't seen before, and part of that was choosing a new and different place to shoot every time: Son of Fury has some underwater footage, Prince of Foxes is shot on location in Italy and Captain From Castile in Mexico.

I think my favorite of this bunch is Son of Fury, from 1942, which is pure hokum in every way. It's got Power as a dude who's the real heir to the fortune and title of his evil boxer uncle (George Sanders, natch). It's got some point to make about the wickedness of the class system. It has Sanders beating Power with a whip. It's got a masked ball. It's got Frances Farmer, in one of her last roles before being lobotomized, looking spectacular as Sanders' haughty daughter who looks down on Power but really pants after him. It takes Power to a mysterious South Sea island where he spends years with his shirt off and meets the ridiculously gorgeous young Gene Tierney, who wears a sarong and mostly speaks in a fake native dialect. It's got a courtroom scene where the judge allows last-minute evidence that no judge in any legal system anywhere would allow. Produced by Zanuck himself and directed by John Cromwell (Caged, The Prisoner of Zenda), it's an absolute blast. The other highlight of the set is Rouben Mamoulian's Technicolor bullfighting spectacular Blood and Sand, an amazing-looking movie, and not just because it features two more of the most beautiful women in movie history (Linda Darnell and Rita Hayworth).

Several of the movies have music-only tracks for Alfred Newman's scores, including his imitation Korngold score for Son of Fury (the main title theme is a blatant Korngold imitation). Newman was one of the busiest musicians in Hollywood; not only did he compose the scores for most of Fox's big-budget pictures, but he usually did the arrangements and background scores for their musicals, he conducted the orchestra (one of the best in Hollywood), and he brought other composers to the studio and supervised their work (he brought David Raksin to Fox and gave frequent freelance assignments to his friend Bernard Herrmann).

But, all in all, he was a better musician than he was a composer. Being a superb musician, he knew all the nuts and bolts of scoring a picture, and he knew exactly how to pick the right notes or the right style to get the effect a scene needed. But his music is rarely inspired. He wasn't a distinguished composer in his own right like Korngold, Franz Waxman, or Miklos Rozsa; he was more of a good all-purpose film musician like Max Steiner. But Steiner was a far better melodist; his tunes (like the themes from Now, Voyager or A Summer Place) just have a distinctiveness that Newman's themes don't. Also, Newman was too inclined to fall back on stale gimmicks like a chorus singing "ah" or singing in a foreign language. He was a wonderful musician, as I said, but the Fox scores that were written by other composers -- like Hermann and Raksin -- showed the individuality, the inspiration, that was missing in his own
work.

Rostropovich

The great cellist Mstislav Rostropovich died yesterday. John Culshaw's autobiography, Putting the Record Straight, had some material about working with Rostropovich (on some recordings with Benjamin Britten), so I thought I'd transcribe that here. The "distinguished elderly British composer" whose concerto Rostropovich reluctantly premiered was Arthur Bliss.

He turned out to be a warm, dedicated man with an endearing -- if occasionally bruising -- habit of greeting anyone he liked with a massive bear-hug. In Kingsway Hall he worked as I had never, in all the years, seen an artist work before: he could hear, and wanted to correct, imperfections which were not always apparent to me or, I think, even to Britten. The orchestra observed all this with something like awe -- yet he was not beyond turning to the first cellist and asking how he would bow or finger a particular passage. It was just a question of music-making, and nothing else (but nothing else) mattered. At that stage conversation was somewhat limited, for although he knew more English than Vishnevskaya, who was his wife, it was still very primitive. He and Britten had therefore invented something they called Aldeburgh Deutsch, since both of them spoke a little German; its first principle was the abolition of any rules applying to the definite article -- die, der, and das were interchangeable at random. The familiar du replaced Sie except when you specifically wanted to say "they." Somehow, it worked.

Between sessions we used to eat at the pub called the Nag's Head, across the stage door at Covent Garden, and it was during one of those meals that I said (in simple words) how penetrating I had found his performance of Elgar's Cello Concerto. To my amazement, he pulled a face: he didn't, he said, think very much of the work. I was left to ponder how it could be that someone open enough to admit such an opinion could still give a performance of such perception and beauty as he had done during that series of concerts. Fanciful theories did not appeal to me, but since I had no doubt that he meant what he had said it seemed impossible to avoid the conclusion that somehow, during the performance, he had become possessed by an insight which overruled his conscious intellectual judgement.

Although there were no signs of it then, I suppose it was inevitable that sooner or later he and his wife would defect to the West and be stripped of their Soviet citizenship in the process. That was not to happen for another ten years or so, but he already paid scant attention to officialdom of any kind, irrespective of nationality. He could not pay lip-service. When, a few years later, the directors of the Aldeburgh Festival commissioned a distinguished elderly British composer to write a new work for them, he turned in a piece for cello and orchestra with the request that it might have its first performance by Rostropovich. It was not very good. Slava -- as we all called him by then -- gave it a close examination and then, in his much improved English, said to Britten, "When I am in Russia I am obliged to play Russian shit, which is no reason why I should play British shit when I come to England." Then he added, "But if you want me to play it, I will." And he did.

On another occasion he bought a Land-Rover and stuffed it full of consumer goods unobtainable in Russia. He then set off to drive from Aldeburgh to Moscow, although the rest of us were at pains to point out how many customs posts he would have to cross and that, if he was obliged to unpack the Land-Rover for inspection, he would never in a thousand years get everything back inside again, if only because he moved himself and other objects rather like a bulldozer. He waved all such observations aside, and several days later rang from Moscow to say that he and his goods had arrived intact. We asked him how. "If there was no queue, I stopped," he said, "and they were always very understanding. But if there was a queue I drove straight on. Is the best, no?" Only he could have got away with that.

Much the same applied some five years later, when he was appearing as a conductor with the Bolshoi Opera in East Berlin and I was a member of the jury in a conductors' competition organized by Herbert Von Karajan in West Berlin. It happened to be a time when feelings at Checkpoint Charlie were at their most sensitive, and the guards on both sides were operating strictly according to the rules. Yet every day Slava used to drive over to West Berlin and buy goods for members of the company, which he then quite openly trundled back in the Land-Rover. "What if they won't let you through?" I asked him one day. "What if I tell them I'm not going to conduct tonight?" he replied.

Good Fanfic?

Denis McGrath has an entertaining rant against fanfic.

Unlike most anti-fanfic posts, which are based on the dubious premise that fanfic violates the rights of the creator (so why doesn't a spec script violate the rights of the creator?), Denis's argument is that fanfic is badly written and stupid, which is a more legitimate argument.

I certainly don't think most fanfic -- including my own occasional attempts -- is very good, though I will say that I have seen plenty of fanfic that is no worse than the average spec script for the same show.

But here's a question: can you name any actual good fanfic? That is, fan fiction you think qualifies as good storytelling in and of itself?

I sometimes think that could apply to some of the stories at the Batgirl Bat-Trap Homepage. Though it seems to be part of a fetish site (about Batgirl being tied up and the like), and though the prose in the fanfic is kind of over-ripe sometimes, some of the stories aren't bad. And if you read enough of them it really does, in a weird way, come to feel like the author has enriched and expanded the '60s Batman universe for the better. It helps that the author has, instead of just writing straight-up Batman stories, writes stories focusing on an under-used character (Batgirl) and creates a new universe of characters to back her up, even while the main characters of the original show still have a lot to do.

That's the most legitimate use of fan fiction: creating stories that the original show would not have done, with characters who weren't the stars. In that sense, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is the greatest fanfic of all time: it's a Hamlet fanfic that turns the spotlight on two under-utilized characters from the original play. And what's wrong with that?

I also think that, quality aside, fanfic is an important part of a show's fan community. Writing a fanfic is a way for a fan to express his or her take on a character, or the show's premise, or the way it's developing. It may not have value to someone outside the fan community. But within that community, you can look at Fan X's fanfic and understand, better than that fan could put it in non-fictional prose, what Fan X thinks the main character wants or where that character is headed. I never got strongly into the fanfic culture, but when I was a poster on alt.tv.animaniacs a decade ago, that group would have been much the poorer without the fanfic, in-character songs, in-character skits and much more created by fans. Heck, my first post on that group was a fanfic where Chicken Boo was Sweeney Todd, complete with song parodies (London was OK with him cutting up his customers and making them into pies, but they turned on him when they discovered he was a giant chicken). That's just part of what being a fan is all about.

Your choices for good fanfic?

Update: McGrath responds here; I don't have much to argue with in this post (yes, "overripe prose, and the weird, slightly fetishy sheen" are indeed an off-putting part of almost all fanfic).

There's actually a reason why someone might turn their energies toward fanfic instead of coming up with original stuff, and one of the commenters over at McGrath's blog implies it: coming up with good original characters can be really hard. And without good characters, it's harder to do good writing.

So for some of these fanfic writers -- and we're talking people who do it for fun, not professionally -- it's easier to start with clearly-defined characters and setups that someone else came up with, and build from there; the stories and dialogue flow naturally from that.

I remember years ago I started to write a fanfic for a now-defunct hour-long action-adventure show that shall remain nameless. I'd gotten up to like 10,000 words when I stopped, and I stopped because I realized I was putting all this energy and work into a fanfic that I should be putting into real writing. But it was so much easier and more fun than real writing, and that's because I knew who the characters were and didn't have fo "find" them in the writing. I still think those 10,000 words are some of the funniest writing I ever did (not that that's saying much).

Of course it's not the same caliber of writing as original writing, nor even a spec script. While a lot of specs are bad, they do require one thing that fanfic doesn't, and that's discipline. A spec script not only requires that you format the text properly, but it requires you to fit everything into a set structure and a reasonable length (meaning you can't write endlessly long scenes or wander away from the plot for thousands of words). But of course that's another reason why people find fanfic enjoyable to write, that it's free from the constraints and disciplines of writing a spec.

The Animated Man

I'm a little late in mentioning this, but check out Jenny Lerew's review of Michael Barrier's new Walt Disney biography.

Since I write this blog as an animation artist and fan, and that's who I write it for, I'll put it this way: Animated Man is the book I've always wanted to read on Disney the person, and the one that I've enjoyed the most (of the two recently released and the previous few), because it's plain the author understands exactly how animated cartoons are and were made--what they are, what they can be, and how it felt to work for Walt Disney at that incredible time in history, for better or worse.

Coveted

One more WKRP article, but a good one: An interview with Richard Sanders (Les Nessman). Sanders was a writer as well as an actor; his writing partner was Michael Fairman (a fellow character actor who appeared on the show a couple of times), and together they wrote one or two episodes every season, including the famous "Ferryman's Funeral Home" episode.

Q: Do you think people will notice the missing music?

A: I think in certain shows it's going to be sorely missed because that was the thing that made it different than any other show about radio that had ever been on. We used actual music at the time, the music that everybody was listening to at the time — and sometimes before they were listening to it. It became almost like a radio station. Record companies would send us copies of their new releases and people would listen and decide.

A lot of times, Tim and Howard would choose the music they wanted to use and the writers would try to work around that. Sometimes songs would come out that people hadn't heard and they would become popular as a result of that. And because it was playing up-to-date music, then the disc jockeys all around the country the next day would talk about the show because they would talk about the music, too. So it really helped, hugely.

Jack Valenti, RIP

He was the head of the Motion Picture Association of America, and most people will remember him for creating the MPAA ratings and as a villain of the documentary This Film is Not Yet Rated.

But I'll always remember him from his brilliant guest appearance on Freakazoid!. This scene, come to think of it, is really an earlier, shorter, funnier version of This Film is Not Yet Rated.

Speaking of the Late '90s

I see that Sabrina the Teenage Witch Season 2 is getting released. As I've said before, this show was never again as good as it was in the first season, when Nell Scovell was running it. She left or was pushed out, several cast members were dropped by the new producers (including Paul "Freaks and Geeks" Feig), and it just wasn't quite the same. But it was still entertaining in the second season, and certainly it remained one of the more entertaining entries in the very difficult genre of fantasy-comedy.

How difficult it is to do fantasy-comedy was proved that very season (1997-8) when ABC made a decision that may have killed off its Friday night TGIF lineup: delighted with the success of Sabrina, they ordered two more shows that were fantasy-comedies in the exact same style. You Wish was from the underrated Michael Jacobs (creator of the underrated Boy Meets World), about a genie working for a single mom and her kids. And Teen Angel was from The Simpsons' Al Jean and Mike Reiss, about a kid who dies from eating a spoiled hamburger but comes back as the guardian angel of his geeky friend, who lives with his... yes, you guessed it... single mom. (Hilda and Zelda were so popular on Sabrina that the network apparently figured that people primarily wanted to see kids without father figures.) These producers weren't particularly happy to be doing this kind of material; Jean and Reiss admitted that they pitched Teen Angel only because ABC/Disney wouldn't take any of their other sitcom ideas. But the glut of wisecracking fantasy-comedies, of Sabrina followed by two inferior imitations, not only weakened Sabrina but weakened the once-mighty ABC family-friendly lineup.

Experiments With Cheesy Video Effects

I am trying to figure out how to do video effects on my computer. Why, I do not know. But I took a scene from Tootsie and amateurishly used wipes to whittle the scene down to the best parts of the whole movie: Bill Murray ranting about the theatre.

Things That Should Suck, But Don't: Unhappily Ever After

The local multi-cultural channel, OMNI, is showing repeats of Unhappily Ever After. (They show it at 11:00 p.m., so I sometimes watch it when The Daily Show isn’t doing anything interesting. But most of my memories of episodes come from a few years back when I had to watch it in syndication because it was the only thing on while I was exercising.) Why anyone would choose to rerun this, other than the fact that the syndication rights are probably cheap, I’m not completely sure. But I’m nonetheless glad they are, because it’s given me a chance to remind myself that I kind of liked this show.

I feel almost nervous about admitting that, because this was considered one of the worst shows of the ‘90s – and not without good reason. One person actually got angry at me when he discovered I liked Unhappily Ever After. But let me try to explain why I like it.

First, some background. Unhappily Ever After was one of the early shows created for the then-new, now-defunct WB network. At that time (before it made its mark with teen shows) the new network was trying to do a lot of low-budget videotaped sitcoms with a blue-collar feel, so they went to Ron Leavitt, co-creator of Married With Children, and asked him for something similar. Leavitt and Arthur Silver (another Married writer who had started out in the Miller-Milkis-Boyett salt mines on shows like Joanie Loves Chachi) came up with a premise that was basically Married with a twist: what if the Al Bundy ripoff (Geoff Pierson) actually got divorced from the Peg Bundy ripoff (Stephanie Hodge)? Of course, after the first season, this was abandoned, the dad moved back in with his family and it became a straight-up Married With Children ripoff.

The only thing setting it apart was that the dad was a full-fledged psychotic, and that his psychosis manifested himself by his hallucination of a talking stuffed bunny who would rant about how much everything sucked. This bunny was a puppet voiced by Bobcat Goldthwait. Actually, this was kind of a ripoff too, because the character resembled the foul-mouthed sock puppet “Skank” (himself a parody of Married With Children and similar shows) voiced by Andy Dick on The Ben Stiller Show.

Geoff Pierson was no Ed O’Neill (well, nobody is – O’Neill’s Al Bundy was one of the greatest pieces of comic acting in TV history – but even by that standard, Pierson wasn’t that good), and Stephanie Hodge looked bored through the whole thing and left the show a year before it ended. However, the casting director did make some good choices for the three kids. For the little kid, Justin Berfeld, later of Malcolm in the Middle. For the middle child, Kevin Connolly, now on Entourage. And for the Kelly Bundy role of the sexy teenage daughter, Nikki Cox. If you ever saw an episode of this show, you’ll recall that Cox was exploited like nobody else you’ve ever seen: the audience was ordered to scream and hoot and holler every time she came in (not just her first entrance in the episode; every damn time), and the wardrobe people put her in FCC-baiting costumes. Cox is very attractive and funny and has always deserved a really good vehicle (her self-titled sitcom Nikki wasn’t it, and neither is her role on Las Vegas), but the exploitation element was so blatant here that you could almost wind up feeling embarrassed for her.

Okay, so all of that said, why did I enjoy this unevenly-cast, cheaply-made, sometimes embarrassing show? Because the writers, knowing that the show was all of the above, would often say to hell with it and indulge themselves in the most insane stuff I’ve ever seen on a network sitcom. Rants against celebrities, an occasional feature on Married With Children, became the main joke on Unhappily, with every episodes abounding in nasty references to any celebrity the writers didn’t like. Frequent objects of hate included aging musicians, Quentin Tarantino, that “Monday Seinfeld/Tuesday Seinfeld” ad on KTLA, the cast of any show that was beating them in the ratings – every other show, that is to say. The puppet started talking to the audience, and then the other characters started doing it, until by the end of the series one joke was preceded by a minute of Kevin Connolly asking us to guess what the punchline would be (“You know I’m going to ruin this painting, but how will I do it?”). The plots became more and more freakish with every passing season. In the first couple of seasons, it was a fairly standard Married With Children ripoff; in the final season, with the mother gone, it was totally nuts.

And because most of the jokes revolved around the writers’ hatred of late ‘90s culture, the show is a perfect time capsule of the late ‘90s cultural moment. (For example, the final season introduced a goth girl as a character; after her first scene, Nikki Cox explains that even though the goth look is out, sitcom writers are always at least a year behind the times.) The trends of the late ‘90s were all there, not only pop-cultural but political; there was a weird irony whenever they’d make political references – and they made a lot – because their drunken audiences would cheer loudly at references that were meant to be ironic. You could almost see a new political cultural trend developing, unintentionally, when Nikki Cox tried to explain to the other characters the dangers of mob rule and assuming that someone must be a terrorist just because he’s accused of being one (this was in reference to the Atlanta Olympics incident) and not only the other characters didn’t get it, but the studio audience didn’t either. Or look at this chillingly prescient speech and how the studio audience agrees with it.

Listen, world, don’t get too cocky out there. The real Americans are still here. One day, we’re going to wake up from our drunken stupor, realize we’ve got a fat Miss America, and say “What the hell happened here?” And on that day, we’ll grab our guns and swig one more beer, and kill, and kill. and kill, until this is the great country it once was! U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!

I’m not trying to make this show out to be a work of subversive genius. It was kind of subversive, at least in the sense that the writers were sneaking in all kinds of things that were too smart or weird for their target audience. But it was also kind of bad. Still, it was crazy and funny and often refreshingly angry. Let me put it this way: it was essentially a bad show, but in terms of being weird, mean-spirited and tasteless it was the show that Family Guy never had the nerve to be -- and much funnier than Family Guy could dream of being. And if you want to understand what the late ‘90s were all about, you could do worse than watch a few episodes of this thing.

I’ll close with two sample stories to give an idea of what I’m talking about.

- The premiere of the final season (written and executive-produced by Kevin Curran, a Married vet who’s now writing for The Simpsons along with a couple of other Unhappily writers), was an X-Files parody where the paranormal phenomenon is the dancing baby from Ally McBeal, who only appears to women who are ovulating; it turns out it’s a midget who enjoys dressing up as a dancing baby and once fathered a child by Bea Arthur. Meanwhile, the other characters play a prank on Justin Berfeld by convincing him that this episode is all about him and how he needs glasses; he doesn’t catch on until the end that the camera is never on during any of his scenes. The episode ends with a caption: ”In loving memory of The Magic Johnson Show, 1998-1998."

- The conclusion of a two-part episode where the mother dies: a tanning-salon accident causes her to be fried into beef jerkey, upon which Kevin Connolly eats her. But she comes back as a ghost, and insists that she will haunt the house until they show her some love. After the family gets Father Guido Sarducci to exorcise her, she takes a hint and leaves, but a WB network executive shows up to insist that the series go back to status quo. Oh, and Nikki Cox sums up the episode by saying that they need the mother because “We need a common enemy. It’s kind of like when we lost the Russians as an enemy; who are we supposed to fear now? The Arabs?”

Rock n' Roll Fantasy

I haven't said much more about the WKRP-on-DVD issue because it's kinda depressing. For the sake of the people involved with the show, I hope it sells well. I especially hope that it sells well enough to justify an actual music budget for seasons 2-4, because those seasons often had entire scenes accompanied by music, and if you don't pay for the song, you have to cut the entire scene because the dialogue track doesn't exist in isolation.

There's one episode in the fourth season where a whole scene is underscored by the Beatles' "Come Together." Except for Johnny mentioning John Lennon, the music is so quiet you'd hardly know it's "Come Together," and it's mostly there to make an obscure in-jokey point about the scene. But still, it's the Beatles, and it's there, and I have no idea how this scene will ever make it onto a DVD.

The set seems to be doing OK at Amazon, and I have noticed that people who haven't seen the show in a while don't seem to mind or notice most of the changes, except for the really obvious ones like changing Jennifer's doorbell. But it might be doing better if Fox had ponied up more money to release a better product. There's no reason to feel gratitude to a company for releasing a product that doesn't meet expectations.

Here's a video compilation with some music-related moments and dialogue that either don't make it onto the DVD or make it only with changed music.



One episode that doesn't lose a lot of footage but is kind of weakened by the lack of music is an episode Hugh Wilson wrote called "I Want to Keep My Baby"; it's about a woman leaving her baby at the station, and Johnny's attempt to return the baby to its mother, so most of the songs were chosen for their relationship to the situation:

- "Baby" by Carla Thomas
- "Teach Your Children Well" by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young
- "Return to Sender" by Elvis Presley
- "Your Smiling Face" by James Taylor (at the end)

With My Chin on My Knee

One more excerpt from New Faces Of 1952. This was sung by Robert Clary, who along with Ronny Graham probably did the most material in the show; Graham isn't in this scene, but he wrote the music and lyrics for the song, "I'm In Love With Miss Logan." Clary, whom you know as LeBeau on Hogan's Heroes, plays a boy with a crush on his teacher. His French accent (which is explained by calling the character "Andre") just makes the scene more charming and sweet.



By the way, the film version is available on a bunch of public-domain DVDs; they're not great quality -- they look like these YouTube clips, basically -- but they give an idea of what the show was like (though the breakout star, Eartha Kitt, has some numbers that she didn't perform in the original show).

And this long essay gives an overview of Leonard Sillman's New Faces revues. Young performers who appeared in these revues over the years, in addition to the bumper crop of the 1952 edition, included Henry Fonda, Imogene Coca, Alice Pearce, Inga Swenson, Virginia Martin, John Reardon, and Maggie Smith.

Scuzzy and Harriet

Lot o' bad news about TV-on-DVD releases lately. The latest is about the Ozzie and Harriet "Best Of" collection. According to this post at Home Theater Forum, the episodes on this set are all 22-minute syndication versions. Nuts.

You Can't Chop Your Papa Up in Massachusetts

When there were all those stories two years ago about Michael Brown, the then-current head of FEMA, for a moment I was confusing him with the Michael Brown who wrote "Lizzie Borden" in New Faces of 1952. As performed by -- at least I think it's him -- Ronny Graham, it was one of the big hits of the show and the 1954 film version.



Graham, who died in 1999, was one of those guys who was really talented at everything and never quite a huge success at anything. As a songwriter, he wrote the lyrics for the Broadway musical Bravo Giovanni (with Cesare Siepi and the young Michele Lee), but the show didn't last long and Graham's contribution was very uneven. As a performer, he was never a huge headliner, and he did guest-starring work on television but didn't have a regular role on a series. And as a writer, he co-wrote some of his friend Mel Brooks's movies (but not his best ones) and spent some time as a staff writer on M*A*S*H (after the show was already a little past its prime). He was an interesting and brilliant guy, always this close to being famous and never quite there.

Grudge Matches I'd Like To See: Dennis Hopper vs. Christopher Walken

Two of Hollywood's busiest exponents of the art of creeping audiences out go up against each other. Who wins, Dennis Hopper with his manic psychosis, or Christopher Walken with his more low-key creepiness?

Grudge Matches I'd Like To See: James Bond vs. Willy Wonka

James Bond is once again assigned to sneak into a madman's impenetrable fortress, get past his henchmen, and blow the place up. This time, the madman is Willy Wonka, the crazy proprietor of the Wonka chocolate factory.

Can Bond get past Wonka's various traps, Oompa-Loompa henchmen, etc. and blow the factory up the way he blew up all those other hideouts? Or is Wonka too wacky for Bond?

Wing Ding Tonight

You may remember that in a couple of posts about Frank Tashlin, I mentioned that he seemed to be obsessed with showing off his female characters' legs. I wasn't basing this on anything he said (there weren't many interviews with him), but just on the content of his movie, like the pinups-come-to-life scene in Hollywood or Bust.

But after I wrote that, I came upon a couple of newspaper articles from the early '50s where Tashlin was quoted, one of Son of Paleface (one of his first and best) and the other on Marry Me Again (an obscure black-and-white comedy with Marie Wilson and Bob Cummings). I don't have them right in front of me so I can't quote them directly, but here's what they were about:

- In the article on Son of Paleface, Tashlin talks about how he did something new with Jane Russell: "We lowered the camera and discovered her legs," he exults, adding that Howard Hughes called him and the producer (Robert Welch) up and thanked them for showing new aspects of his contractee.

- In the article on Marry Me Again, Tashlin talks about the buxom Marie Wilson and the censorship problems that they ran into (with the censors checking to make sure her dresses weren't too low-cut). But then he says: "Fortunately, there's nothing wrong with legs, and Marie has good ones." Then Tashlin proceeds to detail every scene and costume in the picture where he had the opportunity to show off Marie Wilson's legs.

I would say that this is something a Tashlin biographer, if any, should look into. Except, really, there's nothing very complicated or sinister about it: the guy was a leg man.

What's In a Comedian's Name?

You know one thing I always appreciated about Laurel and Hardy? It's that they almost always played characters called "Stan" and "Ollie." Even after they started doing features, they didn't feel a need to make up new character names every time; they were Stan and Ollie, they knew we knew them that way, and there was no reason to call themselves anything else.

Most comedians and comedy teams, especially in features, wouldn't or couldn't try that, so even though they played the same characters in every movie, the writers had to go through this charade of finding new names. If a comedian made enough movies, the writers could conceivably find themselves looking for the 20th or 30th character-appropriate name for the exact same character. Not an easy task.

Sometimes it works. W.C. Fields and Groucho Marx's crazy character names are part of their appeal. And sometimes even a conventional name can work if it's used right. It was usually annoying that Abbott and Costello had to play characters not named Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, but Costello's cry of "Oh, Chuck!" (a substitute, I suppose, for "Hey, Abbott!") became one of the most famous bits from Hold That Ghost.

But usually you wish that the writers would just admit it: like cartoon characters, a screen comedian is always the same character even when the setting changes. Even though Mickey Mouse is a steamboat captain one year and a brave little tailor the next, he's still Mickey Mouse. So why should Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis have to constantly pretend to be someone other than Dean and Jerry?

Obviously, the hardest job in these comedy-team re-namings is coming up with new names for the straight man, the guy who can't have a funny name. It's very hard to remember Zeppo Marx's different character names. And as for Dean Martin, oy. I'm going to list, in random order, the names of Dean Martin's characters from the Martin and Lewis movies.

You will try to guess, without looking at Dean Martin's IMDb listing, which name is from which movie. Betcha can't do it. I certainly couldn't.

Bill Baker
Bob Miles
Bill Miller
Chick Allen
Steve Wiley
Joe Anthony
Pete Nelson
Herman Nelson
Rick Todd
Larry Todd
Vic Puccinelli
Slim Mosely
Steve Harris
Al Crowthers

The Boston Beguine

I'm sorry I haven't been posting much lately (particularly if rants about music replacement in television shows don't count as real posts). Hopefully I'll be able to get a longer post up soon, but in the meantime, here's something entertaining: Alice Ghostley sings "The Boston Beguine" in the film version of New Faces of 1952 (retitled New Faces because it wasn't 1952 any more).

This revue was the most successful of producer Leonard Sillman's series of Broadway revues showcasing young writing and performing talent, and many of the performers hit it big (Eartha Kitt, Paul Lynde, Robert "Hogan's Heroes" Clary and Carol Lawrence). The songs were more cabaret-style songs than Broadway; most of them were written by songwriter-performers (Arthur Siegel, June Carroll, Ronny Graham) and they had an intimate, one-on-one feeling, maybe a little too much so for Broadway, which could explain why these songwriters didn't become big successes in Broadway book shows. On the other hand, "Boston Beguine" is also a cabaret-type song -- a coyly clever parody number -- and its composer-lyricist, Sheldon Harnick, did become a big success: working as a lyricist only, he was teamed with composer Jerry Bock and they did Fiddler On the Roof and the rest. The version in the film is slightly truncated, cutting a passage that quotes Cole Porter's "Begin the Beguine" (maybe they would have had to pay to use it?).

Where The Deer and the Antelope Play

Here's the late great Ralph Bellamy talking about the making of The Awful Truth. About two or three minutes into the clip, he describes Leo McCarey's method of working: he had no script, the actors didn't really know what the story was from moment to moment, and he threw the actors into scenes without any preparation. The first scene Bellamy shot was singing "Home On the Range" with Irene Dunne at the piano: Bellamy couldn't sing, Dunne couldn't play the piano very well, and that's exactly what McCarey wanted.

Even today, when improvised comedy is more legitimate and respected than it was in 1937, can you imagine anyone making a film like this? Even an independent film? In his prime, McCarey was so well-respected by the studio bosses that they would let him make a film without a real script; according to Bellamy, Harry Cohn left McCarey alone and trusted him to make things turn out right, even when the actors all complained about him.



And here's the "Home On the Range" scene.

Muzak

If you want to get a little more depressed about music changes to TV-on-DVD releases, Sitcoms Online has a list of the music changes in season 2 of Happy Days.

Not only has Paramount replaced "Rock Around the Clock," they've cut just about every real '50s song except Fats Domino's "Blueberry Hill." (If you don't license "Blueberry Hill," releasing Happy Days is pretty much impossible, given that it was sung about 9,000 trillion zillion billion times in the series.)

The one thing I'll say for Paramount is that they did license all the music for the first season of Happy Days. Then the set didn't sell much, and they lost money on it. So they can at least point to actual proof that season 2 of Happy Days wouldn't sell enough to make back the expense of paying for the music. Obviously this doesn't apply to a studio releasing the first season of a show with all the music gone (but we've been over that before).

It Sure Isn't Yooooouuuu

Not only was the late Stan Daniels (co-creator of Taxi, co-producer of the best seasons of Mary Tyler Moore) a great comedy writer; he was also a songwriter. He wrote the songs (music and lyrics) for the musical So Long 174th Street, and when he and Ed. Weinberger created Phyllis, Daniels wrote the lyrics for the hilarious theme song -- one of the few TV theme songs that's a direct parody of another songwriter (in this case, Jerry Herman):



It's interesting how many television writers started out as songwriters, or aspired to become songwriters. Joe Keenan (Frasier) and the team of David Crane and Marta Kauffman (Friends) are only two examples of people who were librettists/lyricists before they went to California to write for TV. Tom Whedon, head writer of The Electric Company among many other credits, was a song lyricist, and of course his son is a career screenwriter who aspired to write musicals. Bill Persky and Sam Denoff wrote music and lyrics for Broadway-style songs in many episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show. Arnold Horwitt, who wrote the lyrics for the Broadway show Plain and Fancy (with the song "Young And Foolish" that Eddie Fisher made into a hit), later moved out West to write for sitcoms. And of course, there was that writer for the television comedy Topper, Stephen Sondheim. Many, many other examples.

Where an Outtake Can Lead

When it comes to outtakes, the usual ones -- forgetting a line and cracking up, forgetting a line and swearing -- are OK. But I prefer something a little more meta-humorous like Bob Newhart's famous absent-minded mistake from the first season of Newhart:



I wonder if this moment helped inspire the show's finale, eight years later? Probably not, but it's fun to pretend that it did.

Vote, Vote, Vote!

Warner Brothers has set up some kind of online survey to see which animated TV shows people want on DVD.

Please go there and vote for Freakazoid! The survey allows you to vote for as many other shows as you want -- Tiny Toons certainly ought to be on DVD, and I suppose the '80s version of The Jetsons must be wanted by all those Orbitty fans out there -- but you gotta start by voting for Freakazoid!

You Fill Me With Inertia

I'm glad that Bedazzled (the original, not the Brendan Fraser remake) finally got reissued. I notice from the booklet notes that Peter Cook expressed some reservations about Stanley Donen's direction of the film, or at least the way he and Dudley Moore responded to his direction. As film neophytes working for an experienced director like Donen, they perhaps deferred too much to his judgment and didn't give themselves all the freedom they needed to be at their funniest.

Also, by this time Donen -- who had been living in Europe for years and had just made the innovative, fragmented Two For the Road -- was filling all his movies with crazy camera angles and trendy "cinematic" effects. Which works fine for something like Two For the Road, but not so much for a straight-up comedy-thriller (compare Donen's incomprehensible Arabesque to the much more normal Charade, which he made only three years earlier) or a satirical comedy like Bedazzled. I sometimes wish he'd let up with the angles and filters and let Cook and Moore do their thing, and I also don't care for the extensive use of post-dubbed dialogue (a bane of '60s movies all over the world).

But Cook and Moore are so funny that even a tilted camera angle can't stop them. And despite my carping about Donen, he does bring a certain warmth to the film and to the relationship between Cook's devil and Moore's sad-sack Faust. And there are a number of scenes where he tones down the with-it technical flourishes and lets Cook and Moore have more leeway; and still other scenes where his attempt to be groovy sits well with the material. Like this scene where Moore wishes to be a pop star so girls will love him -- only to find that his fame is eclipsed within minutes by Cook's rival act ("Drimble Wedge and the Vegetations"). Moore's music -- the same melody arranged into two different styles of song -- is a dead-on parody of late '60s pop styles, and Donen matches it with a spoof of in-concert films and broadcasts.



And here is a transcript of Cook's lyrics:

I don't care.
So you said.
I don't want you.
I don't need you.
I don't love you.
Leave me alone.
I'm self-contained.
Just go away.
I'm fickle.
I'm cold.
I'm shallow.
You fill me with inertia.
Don't get excited.
Save your breath.
Cool it.
I'm not interested.
It's too much effort.
Don't you ever leave off?
I'm not available.

WKRP Music Addendum: What They Shoulda Done

Sitcoms Online has a review of the WKRP set that is more or less aligned with mine.

Also, since writing the original list, I've actually discovered still more cuts in the DVD set. In one episode, Johnny sings a line of "So Long For a While" and exits the room. Now he just leaves without saying anything. I would say that of the 22 episodes in this set, more than half of them have footage cut from them for one reason or another.

But one more thing I wanted to add, as a WKRP-ite, is this: what would a legitimate, acceptable DVD release be like? That is, I've said that a legitimate DVD release could change some music but not the "essential" songs. But which songs are "essential?"

So I went through this list which another fan compiled, of most of the songs used in the first season (there are a few he missed). As you can see, there were about 50 rock recordings used in that season alone.

Here are the recordings (not counting onscreen performances, admittedly) that are so important to the episodes -- either because they're timed to the action, related to the plot, or intertwined with the dialogue -- that the DVD should have kept them. It goes without saying that almost none of them are included on the current DVD.

Pilot (1)
Queen Of The Forest by Ted Nugent

Pilot (2)
Old Time Rock N Roll by Bob Seger

Bailey's Show
Boogie Oogie Oogie by Sukyaki
Jailhouse Rock by Elvis Presely

Turkeys Away
Dogs by Pink Floyd

Love Returns
Beast Of Burden by The Rolling Stones

A Date With Jennifer
Hot Blooded by Foreigner

Tornado
Goon Squad By Elvis Costello and The Attractions

Goodbye, Johnny (1)
Surfin U.S. A. by The Beach Boys

Johnny Comes Back (2)
Into The Mystic by Van Morrison
Layla by Eric Clapton

Never Leave Me, Lucille
Everybody Rock N Roll The Place by Eddie Money

I Want To Keep My Baby
Baby by Carla Thomas
Lively Up Yourself by Bob Marley
Return To Sender by Elvis Presley
Your Smiling Face by James Taylor

Young Master Carlson
Caravan by Van Morrison
Patton Main Title - Jerry Goldsmith
Soul Man by Sam and Dave

Fish Story
Drinkin Wine Spo-de-o-de by Jerry Lee Lewis

The only recordings kept on the DVD are "Boogie Oogie Oogie" and "Lively Up Yourself." Why these two? I have no idea.

(I didn't count the song snippets in "The Contest Nobody Could Win" as essential songs because you're not supposed to recognize the excerpts as individual songs anyway, and I'm not even sure if they're actually the songs referred to.)

As you can see, even that whittled-down list amounts to about 20 songs, and that's not counting the onscreen performances like "Heartbreak Hotel" that Fox doesn't want to pay for either.

If a DVD release included the above songs and not the others, I would be OK with it and I think most fans would be, if not overjoyed, at least accepting. But of course, that list would simply cut the music licensing fees down from a large fortune to a small fortune. It would be, let us say, about what the music licensing costs might be for a season of The Simpsons (which seems to use an average of one real song per episode). And of course Fox, or Paramount, or whoever, doesn't want to expend that kind of music budget on a 1978 series.

What it comes down to, then, is that you can release an acceptable WKRP set with reduced music costs. But you can't release it on a very low budget. And Fox's mistake, I think, was not bailing on this project when the budget didn't allow for any kind of substantial music licensing.

Here's an example of how music licensing should have worked for this show. This is a clip from the second episode, where Johnny Fever plays three songs: one at the beginning of the scene, one at the end, and one in the middle. The songs at the beginning and end are very short and not really related to the scene except in the sense of being noisy. They are unimportant enough that they were actually replaced in the first syndication package (the one that kept most of the real music). But the song in the middle, "That Old Time Rock N' Roll," is specifically timed to the scene and set up by the dialogue. The scene makes no sense without it.

If a DVD set had changed those two shorter songs but kept "That Old Time Rock N' Roll," I'd be fine with that. But changing everything -- as in the version used on the DVD -- ruins the scene and severely weakens the whole episode.

This Collection Makes Sense When You Think About It

While Fox's TV-on-DVD division is kinda messing up (see below), their producers of classic movies are doing some interesting work, for now. They've had some mis-steps, like the use of what many critics considered an overly dark transfer of The Gang's All Here, but they are releasing a lot of catalogue movies andthey almost always manage to include some newly-produced special features (unlike Warner Brothers, which often uses vault material like shorts and cartoons instead of producing special features).

However, unlike Warners, which markets its classic movie releases intelligently through print ads and cross-pollination with Turner Classic movies, Fox doesn't seem to give its classic movie releases much publicity, which leads me to wonder if they're making any money on these sets. Also, whereas Warner's George Feltenstein is pretty smart about figuring out which movies fans will want to buy, the Fox department seems to pick old movies almost at random, leading to a lot of rather unpopular movies being marketed as "classics."

On the other hand, this leads to some movies coming out that probably wouldn't otherwise. Case in point, Fox has set a July release date for The Joan Collins Superstar Collection, five movies from Joan Collins' years as a Fox contract player. Now, none of these movies -- The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing, Rally 'Round the Flag, Boys!, Sea Wife, Stopover Tokyo, Seven Thieves -- are great movies, or much-in-demand movies, and Joan Collins was not any kind of a "superstar" while she was at Fox (she would be the first to admit that she was mostly wasted by the studio), and name recognition seems to be the main basis for putting together this set. But still, it's great to get some of these movies, for various reasons.

For example, Rally 'Round the Flag is the great Leo McCarey's last comedy, and while the stars -- Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward -- did not respond well to McCarey's improvisatory style (this method of working must not have appealed to Newman very much), the supporting actors did, especially Collins, who's better and funnier here than she was usually able to be in her movie career.

Dubbing, Book 2: Martin and Lewis in German

What else is there to say?



As in most musicals, the dubbing stops when the characters start to sing. They would sometimes dub songs by supporting characters (if there was a separate accompaniment-only track for the song), but the audience would feel cheated if you overdubbed Dean Martin or some equally well-known singer with a separate singing voice.

Also, the fact that the singing wasn't usually dubbed in these films is a data point against the theory that Jerry Lewis was popular in France because of the guy who dubbed his voice. (It sounds weird, but I've heard several people say this in one form or another.) The French, like everyone else in the world, knew what Jerry Lewis sounded like because the dubbed versions used his voice when he sang.

Of course, the whole idea that Jerry Lewis was unusually or freakishly popular in France is a myth that goes all the way back to the early '60s. Given that Lewis was a huge star in American movies until the mid-'60s, it never made much sense to see his French popularity as out of the ordinary; his movies were popular in France, but they were equally if not more popular in America.

The Rewards of Being Good At Audio Dubbing

Someone synched up the famous Orson Welles "Frozen Peas" audio outtake with the animation of the Brain (of Pinky and the Brain) doing the same routine. It works surprisingly well.

Toot Toot

As you may know, Warner Brothers got the rights to the Fleischer cartoons a while back. Fortunately the studio's flagship property, Popeye, appears to be the second cartoon franchise to be handled by Warner's classics division (apart from Looney Tunes, most of the other DVD sets has been from their less careful "family entertainment" division). The result is Popeye the Sailor: Volume 1, 1933-1938, July 31.

Jerry Beck has more information on what sounds like a great set.

Be a Clown, Be My Love

Some more MGM musicals will be released on DVD on July 24.

They include:

- A sspecial edition of MGM's cult flop The Pirate, an Arthur Freed/Vincente Minnelli/Gene Kelly/Judy Garland/Cole Porter musical made at a time when Minnelli's musicals were kind of stilted and garish. After the failure of this movie, he and Freed toned it down a notch and started setting musicals in familiar settings with somewhat more realistic plots. (Minnelli and Freed's next two musicals together, American in Paris and Band Wagon, are both contemporary stories, not wacky period pieces like The Pirate.) And yes, Freed completely ripped off Porter's "Be a Clown" four years later when he wrote "Make 'Em Laugh" for Singin'in the Rain.

- A double-feature of Fred Astaire musicals: Royal Wedding, which up to now has only been available in bad-looking public domain prints, and The Belle of New York, Freed's last attempt to do an original whimsical fantasy musical (and, like all his whimsical fantasy musicals except maybe Brigadoon, flopped at the box office) and Vera-Ellen's only chance to do a lead role at MGM.

- Words and Music, which bears absolutely no resemblance to the life of Rodgers and/or Hart.

- A double bill of Mario Lanza/Kathryn Grayson musicals: The Toast of New Orleans and That Midnight Kiss. Both were produced by Joe Pasternak, who was MGM's schlockiest producer of musicals but whose films were probably more consistently popular than Freed's. Pasternak's movies always had certain basic ingredients: sweet, innocent characters and plots, wacky ethnic supporting characters, and lots of light pseudo-classical singing (he made Deanna Durbin a star at Universal). Midnight Kiss may be his ultimate film because it features most of his favorite contractees after Durbin: Mario Lanza, Grayson, and pianist Jose Iturbi, who Pasternak kept putting into movies like Anchors Aweigh for no appreciable reason. Here are the three of them in a number that was cut from the film, but will be on the DVD as a bonus feature:

On a Happier Note...

Here's the finale from Paramount's Variety Girl, the last of the all-star studio revues where the studio's contract players gather together for a good cause. Most of these films were made during the war, but this is from 1947, and the good cause this time was the charity organization Variety Clubs International.

Almost every Paramount star except Betty Hutton is in this film. In the finale, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby sing "Harmony" by Crosby's regular songwriting team, Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke, and then the other stars all come on to sing a bit of it. I would suggest that you try to identify which stars are in this picture, but the person who uploaded this has put in the opening credits, where most of the stars are identified with caricatures by T. Hee.



By the way, the same person has uploaded another bit from Variety Girl, a scene with Burt Lancaster, William Demarest and Lizabeth Scott that may have the unfunniest punchline in history.

WKRP DVD Not OK

I got a copy of the first season of WKRP in Cincinnati and the news is not good. Which is disappointing to say, because I was lobbying for this release and believed – and still believe – that it would have been possible to reduce music costs without damaging the integrity of the show. That’s not what’s happened here.

Below I have compiled a list of music changes on the new DVD. As you can see, it’s pretty similar to the list of music changes from the late ‘90s syndication package; some of the generic music and overdubbing is the same in both versions. But I was prepared to be OK with this set if it was better, or no worse, than that syndication version. Unfortunately, it’s worse in two ways. One, there were a number of songs that were retained in that syndication package (which ran on Nick at Nite and elsewhere) that are replaced here. Songs like “Dogs” by Pink Floyd and “Jailhouse Rock” by Elvis Presley are now gone. And second, because most of these episodes don’t allow the music to be separated from the dialogue track, they’ve dealt with this problem by cutting footage from several episodes.

I’m not making Fox out to be a mustache-twirling villain here. WKRP is a tough property to bring to DVD. First, the original elements may no longer exist, so the copies they were working from were probably the same copies created for the late-‘90s syndication package; that’s why some of the generic music from that package is heard here. (On the other hand, while the original elements may not exist, the original soundtracks certainly do, for the most part. All you have to do to put a song back is take the same scene out of the older syndication versions, which are easily available. So if Fox had had the budget to put back these songs, they could have done so.) Second, music licensing costs are just insane these days. Third, other MTM properties have not sold well for Fox of late, which probably made them unable to justify much of a budget for WKRP.

But ultimately, this isn’t a good way of dealing with the music problem. I felt, and still feel, that you can create a legitimate DVD release of WKRP by changing songs at the margins (songs played only in ten-second snippets; songs that aren’t identified by name or timed to the scene) and leaving in the “essential” songs. But in this DVD release, there's little more half-a-dozen real musical recordings left in. There's the songs performed on the show by Detective and Hoyt Axton, and two or three songs played by Venus, and that's about it.

It's possible that Fox meant well. They’d been getting requests from fans to release it, so they did. And many of the songs that were cut are just incredibly expensive, like Pink Floyd. But ultimately, if they couldn’t afford to release the show with more music than they've included here, this might be one of those cases when they should have turned a deaf ear to fan requests. After all, they knew they couldn't afford to keep the music; we fans didn't. Or perhaps it would have been better to start with a best-of disc, focusing on episodes without much music (good sales of that disc could have justified a bigger budget for the first season).

There are two positive things to be said for this set: There are some extras (two audio commentaries by cast members and creator, and two featurettes), and the episodes look pretty good for videotaped late ‘70s episodes. Since it's cheaply priced, it might be worth buying if you want DVD-quality copies of some of your favorite scenes. Most of the best-known scenes didn’t have rock music in them, so the turkey drop, the Chi Chi Rodriguez report, the Ferryman’s Funeral Home commercial, etc, are here, and if you haven’t seen them in a while, you can see them here.

But still, this isn’t exactly “WKRP in Cincinnati: The Complete First Season” as it says on the box. It’s more like “WKRP in Cincinnati: Extended Highlights from the First Season.” To get the complete first season, we’ll need to wait for the copyrights to expire, or for Fox to give up and license the show out to a smaller company.

-----

WKRP in Cincinnati, Season 1 DVD
List of Music Replacements and Cuts

Pilot
“Queen of the Forest" by Ted Nugent replaced with generic music.

Pilot Part 2
“That Old Time Rock n’ Roll” by Bob Seger replaced with generic music.

Les on a Ledge
Song at the beginning replaced.

Hoodlum Rock
The songs (by the band Detective) are intact, but the episode is a cut 22-minute syndication version. The original full-length version is available at the Museum of Television and Radio.

Hold-Up
All songs replaced.

Bailey’s Show
All but one song replaced. Footage is cut from two scenes.

Turkeys Away
“Dogs” by Pink Floyd replaced. Much of the scene has been cut out entirely.

Love Returns
Rock songs replaced. Part of a scene has been cut.

Mama’s Review
The clip of Venus in the booth, which was the only "cutaway" clip taped especially for this episode (this is a clip show) is cut and replaced with a clip from the pilot.

A Date With Jennifer
“Hot Blooded” by Foreigner replaced. 22-minute cut syndication version.

The Contest Nobody Could Win
All songs replaced. Someone has re-dubbed the people calling in about the song identification contest, so that they're now identifying fake songs and groups.

Tornado
Elvis Costello song "Goon Squad" replaced. Some footage cut.

Goodbye, Johnny
“Surfin’ U.S.A.” by the Beach Boys replaced.

Johnny Comes Back
All songs replaced with generic music.

Never Leave Me, Lucille
“Everybody Rock n’ Roll the Place” by Eddie Money replaced, with some dialogue cut. The episode originally started with Les singing “Heartbreak Hotel”; that scene has been cut.

I Want to Keep My Baby
All songs replaced except one Bob Marley song. Some footage cut from several scenes.

A Commercial Break
All rock songs replaced. Johnny singing "So Long for a While" has been cut.

Who is Gordon Sims?
One song replaced.

I Do… I Do… For Now
Jennifer’s doorbell, which played “Fly Me to the Moon,” is replaced with a public-domain song.

Young Master Carlson
All songs replaced, even the theme from Patton, a Fox film. Some footage cut from one scene.

Fish Story
All songs replaced. A scene of Venus singing is cut.

Preacher
All songs replaced.

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Update: I wasn't clear about how many episodes in this set are from 22-minute syndication masters (not counting the episodes that have had some footage cut from the full-length 25-minute masters.) There are two: "Hoodlum Rock" and "A Date With Jennifer."

Update 2: A couple of people in comments have wondered how I got a copy this early, which is a fair question. The answer is that Fox sent out advance review copies this week. I believe other writers/reviewers got their copies of this set at the same time I did; I was just the first to write a review.

Update, April 13: - I added a few music changes and cuts to the list that I didn't catch before.

"The only thing I did at RKO of any note was lose my Texas accent."

After writing my post on Dorothy Malone, I found her 1985 interview with Gerald Peary, which gives a good overview of her career and features her recollections of working with Liberace ("He asked me out. I liked him a lot"), Howard Hawks, and Douglas Sirk.


But the article says she did three films with Martin and Lewis. I thought she did only two -- Artists and Models and Scared Stiff (see below). Was there one I'm forgetting?

How Odd

Season 2 of The Odd Couple will come out on August 28, from CBS/Paramount Home Video; as the link explains, Time-Life got first dibs on the first season, but not the others. I'm glad we'll get more than the first season, but I wish Time-Life had done the whole series the way they did Get Smart; given Paramount's corner-cutting I doubt Paul Brownstein will get to provide special features for all the seasons, the way he did for the season 1 set. Maybe I'll be wrong.

Also, Paramount is the most notorious studio when it comes to music replacements -- the latest surprise is that they've cut "Rock Around the Clock" out of Happy Days season 2 -- so if The Odd Couple had any music or singing in it, there's reason to be nervous. Does anyone remember if there were any episodes that used music in any prominent way?

The good news is that Paramount's re-release of the first season (April 24) will carry over Brownstein's special features. It will also have a bonus disc of favorite episodes from the later, better seasons.

Random Musical Number

The greatest gambling system of all time, from Bells Are Ringing.

We'll be rich! We'll be rich! We'll be riiiiicch!



Of course the authors of Bells Are Ringing, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, knew that Beethoven's sixth symphony is not his Opus 3. A major plot point hinges upon the fact that some of these "bets" don't co-relate to real pieces of music.

I think my favorite composer/racetrack correlation (apart from the Handel one, which was probably the whole point of doing this subplot in the first place) is "Sibelius is Sportsman's Park."

Well, That's Good

I (and others) complained that the first two Animaniacs DVD sets focused entirely on the writers and voice actors and had absolutely nothing about the animation, so the special features listed in this press release are a good sign:

* They're Totally Insan-y "In Cadence with Richard Stone" - Composer Richard Stone -His music and influence on how he made Animaniacs come alive.
* They can't help if they're cute - They're just drawn that way - This is about the animation and how they came up with the characters. (25 minutes)

I know that these shows are not considered notable for their art or animation, and I'm not saying they necessarily should be. By the time Animaniacs came along, a certain tension between writers and artists, which started on Tiny Toons, had in some cases turned into outright hostility. This isn't, as John Kricfalusi will always insist, because all animation writers are talentless hacks. It is, if anything, a sign of the opposite: the instinct of scriptwriters, on any show (live-action or animation) is to write their material and then fight for it to be done exactly as written. Writers are suspicious of the attempts of the actors to deviate from it; but though animators are actors, they quite rightly consider themselves more of a creative part of the process than a live-action actor. The result is that you get writers who consider their material to be sacrosanct and artists who don't like being told to put their own creativity on hold.

I recall an animator once told me about directing on a '90s cartoon show (not Animaniacs, and not one of the Spielberg/WB shows) where he suggested to the writer that they cut something to make the episode easier to animate. The writer objected: "Listen, there's a lot of me in that script." Which may sound kind of egomaniacal, but in fact it is what you'd expect a writer to say -- whether it's a good script or a bad script, a good show or a bad show, writers are naturally protective of what they've written. This becomes much more of a problem on an animated series, though, especially because writers have been known to write stuff without much thought to how the artists are supposed to execute it.

But I happen to think that Animaniacs would never have been a success if the animation, direction and boarding hadn't been of a high quality (if nothing else, once the art aspect of the show started to go downhill, it was a lot less fun to watch), and I hope that this DVD will bring in some of the people who were involved with creating these cartoons -- Rusty Mills, for example, or Rich Arons.

Also, the last Pinky and the Brain special feature is:

* It's All About The Fans! -Although the show has stopped airing, the fans are still blogging and supporting their return to the air. There are fans that go to AOL chat rooms and those who go to ComicCon to hopefully catch a glimpse of Maurice LaMarche (the Brain) and Rob Paulsen (Pinky) and to get autographs. What better way to pay tribute to this Emmy ® winning show. Rob and Maurice sit down and share some of their most memorable fan encounters, letters received and reveal some celebrity fans who loved the show.

'80s Flashback

Did you know that there was a two-part Trix commercial (didn't you just love those cereal commercials that were, if you'll pardon the expression, serialized?) where Bugs Bunny tried to help the Trix Rabbit get some Trix from those rat-bastard kids?

Part 1:




Part 2:



Of course this completely disproves the theory of WWWF Grudge Match's Brian Wright, in the epic Lucky the Leprechaun vs. the Trix Rabbit match, that "Bugs is just too cool to in anyway associate with Trix."

In Like...

I spent a very happy weekend with the new DVD of Errol Flynn in The Adventures of Don Juan, the definite highlight of the new Errol Flynn collection and the only one with a commentary track (by the director, the late Vincent Sherman, supplemented by facts n' figures from the ubiquitous Rudy Behlmer). Fortunately it's available separately.

Though I'm a fan of Flynn's big three swashbucklers, Captain Blood, Robin Hood and The Sea Hawk, I hadn't previously seen this 1948 picture, which was based on an idea that had been considered as early as 1939. (As Behlmer explains, Warners mostly stopped making period costume pictures during the war because they depended on the foreign market to turn a profit, and much of the foreign market wasn't available any more.) By the time the project finally got off the ground, under the studio's star producer Jerry Wald, Flynn was pushing 40 and Warners had not made this kind of movie in almost a decade.

This should have been a big disadvantage, but Wald actually made it work by approaching the film as a conscious pastiche of Flynn's earlier films, with a hint of self-parody. In 1948 nobody was making films with shout-outs for movie buffs, the way directors do now, but Don Juan comes close to being a film-geek picture, with tongue-in-cheek nods to the other swashbucklers (like a sideways reference to the plot of The Sea Hawk when the King of Spain mentions what happened to the Spanish Armada), and "hey, it's that guy!" casting, like bringing back Una O'Connor as yet another lady-in-waiting. There are also meta-references; when we hear about Don Juan's reputation as a lady's man and the question of how much of the gossip is true, we can't help thinking of Flynn himself, and giving Flynn's then-wife a cameo appearance just adds to the connections.

The way the plot is set up is also a satisfying way of dealing with an older, heavier Flynn: he starts the film as a wastrel interested only in living it up and chasing women (like Flynn himself, or his own public image). As the movie goes on, he's drawn into fighting for something more important, namely the stuff swashbucklers are always fighting for: doing his duty by the Queen and dispatching a treasonous schemer in a big climactic duel. On a meta-level, it's Errol Flynn being called back to do what he hasn't done for a while, namely be the costumed swordfighting hero that we all love.

The script, by two writers who specialized in comedy (George Oppenheimer and Harry Kurnitz) is very funny, with some great jokes in the three different set-pieces about Don Juan being interrupted by a young lady's husband and/or fiance. Sherman's direction is efficient, the costumes and Technicolor photography are outstanding, the fight choreography is exciting. The sets have that fun minimalist look we associate with Warners productions -- as the most cost-conscious of the big studios (they re-used stock shots from Robin Hood in this picture to save some money), even their big-budget productions used no more props or set areas than were absolutely necessary to film a scene, and the result is an entertainingly unreal look, where you know it's just a set -- maybe even a set you've seen used for something else -- but it's more fun to look at than a more elaborate set.

The weakness of the film is the love story of Juan and the one woman he can't have, the Queen, played by the beautiful Swedish actress Viveca Lindfors. She was a fine actress, and you can see why Warners was hoping she would be their answer to Garbo or Bergman, but she didn't have any real star quality, and so you don't really buy that Flynn would reform because of her. It's not her fault, though; it's an under-written part. Sherman mentions on the commentary track that he would have liked to emphasize the love story more, but in making a Flynn swashbuckler it was considered essential to play up the fights and the fun. But the result is that the character who should be a big part of the story -- the woman who finally wins Flynn's heart -- isn't much of a part. And because it's not much of a part, that meant it wasn't something that could be offered to a really big star like Bergman or (at that point in her career) De Havilland.

But the other stuff more than makes up for that weakness, and this is a highly recommended film and DVD. I have to admit, though, I don't quite share the enthusiasm for Max Steiner's score (Erich Korngold, who usualy scored this type of film, was no longer with the studio and had had a heart attack). His main theme is a good one, but he repeats it way too many times.

Song of the Speculation

USA Today has a new article on Song of the South and the Disney company's continued head-scratching over whether or not to re-release it.

Carte Blanc

J.E. Daniels posts a 1986 Starlog interview with Mel Blanc, along with a few comments from Friz Freleng. You can't always believe Blanc's stories, nor his evaluations of people he worked with, but it's still an interesting read.

One thing I hadn't quite caught before was that unlike today's voice actors, who tend to prefer recording radio-style with other actors, Blanc disliked that method of recording a cartoon because it took longer. So the way he tells it, he eventually switched over to just recording each character separately. Or at least, he was doing this by the time the cartoon studio was winding down, because you can hear him doing it on the '60s recording-session excerpts on the Looney Tunes Golden Collections, where he announces which character he's doing and then does a few takes of each line.

One Angry TV Producer

Barney Rosenzweig, producer of Cagney and Lacey (a show I have to admit I'm not very familiar with), spent two years trying to get his show on DVD... only to find that, after the DVD set had been announced, it had to be pulled because the copyright owners hadn't negotiated the music rights.

This was announced on his blog and then on TV Shows on DVD, and that same day, everything was worked out:

Back to the Internet. Your response was instantaneous. Within a half hour of the posting on the East Coast, the intercom lines between MGM and FOX were already buzzing on the West Coast. Columnists on the Internet and at various major papers, including my own Miami Herald, dropped everything to jump onto what was a pretty interesting story of a pissed off producer and some clumsy handling of interior PR by a couple of major corporations.

Proving that the Internet is a great organizing tool for those of us who collect old television shows. For the other stuff, like saving the world and so on, maybe not, but the television shows thing -- we're organized.

When, Said the Prairie Hen?

I mentioned "In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening" in my post below, and I figured I might as well embed the number, just for you Bing Crosby/Jane Wyman/Frank Capra completists.

The thing to note about this number is that unlike the other song I posted, and unlike most numbers in movie musicals, this was recorded "live" on the set, instead of lip-synched. I don't know if it was Crosby or Frank Capra who wanted it done this way, but it's nice to actually hear the singing take place in the actual acoustic of the room. As I understand it, Crosby and Wyman were outfitted with earpieces so they could listen to the rhythm (Wyman seems to be putting her hand to her ear to test it at one point).

When movie musicals started, most songs were in fact recorded on the set; this was phased out sometime in the early '30s. For the most part, this was a good decision (you just couldn't get really good quality of performance or sound when recording songs on a movie set), but sometimes you do miss it -- especially in musical scenes with a lot of dialogue, where you could frequently see the directors and technicians struggling to figure out how to record the dialogue in the middle of a musical number. (M-G-M musicals may have jumped the shark when they started turning off the sound for the entire number and post-dubbing the dialogue as well as the singing. If you're going to film the whole movie without direct sound, this might as well be a Sergio Leone picture.) Peter Bogdanovich tried returing to direct-sound musicals for At Long Last Love; no one will ever know whether this was a good idea or not, because the movie starred people who shouldn't have been singing at all.

Ye Olde Groaner

One thing about Bing Crosby as a film performer is that while he didn't make the very best musicals, he was probably the very best at a particular kind of number that everybody tried to do. I'm talking about the "clowning around" number, where the leads act all goofy, mug a lot and do silly business while singing a silly song. Crosby has one of these in almost every movie he did, and he's very good at them. He was good at making lines and business seem spontaneous, even if they weren't, and at getting a "live" feeling into the very canned process of shooting a movie musical number.

A lot of performers had a fondness for this type of number but rarely did it well; Gene Kelly is an example of a guy who always had to have a three-minute mugging/clowning scene that almost always is a low point in the movie (like "By Strauss" in An American In Paris -- though the "Moses Supposes" number in Singin' in the Rain actually does work). The Rat Pack types always tried to do this kind of thing in their movies, and it was usually not very good -- but Sinatra did pull it off when he clowned through "Well, Did You Evah!" with Crosby in High Society. Bing was just good at this kind of thing.

Here he is with Jane Wyman in Just For You, in the movie's big number "Zing a Little Zong." The song and the number are obviously an attempt to repeat the success of the Crosby-Wyman duet "In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening" from Here Comes the Groom, but Crosby and Wyman seem like they're having fun, and the tune is another one of those insidious Harry Warren tunes that you can never get out of your brain.



Incidentally, Jane Wyman is an example of how little a movie actor is helped by being able to sing. In the theatre, a good actor who can also sing is extremely valuable and has an expanded range of options, because it means that he or she can do straight plays and also do musicals. But movie musicals were for the most part built around specifically musical performers, who didn't usually do non-musical films. So it was pretty rare for someone to go back and forth between musicals and non-musicals, as they would in New York.

This meant that once a musical performer's non-musical career started to take off, he or she would start to phase out musicals almost entirely (Irene Dunne, for example, made very few musicals after the mid-to-late '30s). So though Jane Wyman could sing, she didn't usually; she built herself up to a star in non-musical films, then did a few musicals in the early '50s, and then went straight back into doing exclusively non-musicals. Strict separation.

Dorothy

It's not her birthday and thank goodness, she's not dead, but for some reason I was just thinking about Dorothy Malone.

She's always been one of my favorite actresses from Hollywood's "transitional age" -- the era from the late '40s through the early '60s when the studio system was collapsing, the production code was slowly crumbling, and the whole business was in an identity crisis. She was a Warner Brothers contractee, but whereas she might have moved up the ladder if she'd come along earlier, in the postwar studio system there was no real process for this. So even after she blew everyone away with her one scene in The Big Sleep, it took her years to move up from bit roles; as late as 1953, released from Warners, she was still playing a very small part in a Martin & Lewis movie, Scared Stiff. (That's the one where she says "I'm just an average girl" and Dean replies: "Honey, if you're an average girl, I've been going out with boys.") She finally made a breakthrough by winning a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Douglas Sirk's Written On the Wind, but by then it was almost too late for her to move up to leading lady roles: she was only 30, but in Hollywood, a 30 year-old actress is considered slightly over the hill. She did get a couple of lead roles, like playing John Barrymore's daughter Diana in Too Much, Too Soon (with Errol Flynn playing his old friend John Barrymore), but instead of Too Much, Too Soon, her career was a case of Not Quite Enough, Not Soon Enough.

Of course she had a very fine career, even if she didn't always get the roles she deserved. She's one of those actors whom you can always count on to be good, no matter how bad the movie may be. She was sexy and smart and somehow more "real" than most Hollywood starlets; even when she was very young, she seemed like an actual human being rather than a factory product. And she had these unique facial expressions that I always associate with her; she always looks like she's breathing heavily and trying to repress her passionate feelings (feelings of love, rage, whatever), with her mouth slightly open and her eyes sort of looking sideways.

Like most people, I first became a Malone fan with The Big Sleep. I also remember liking her when watching Warner Brothers' endless, toothless war epic Battle Cry (not one of Raoul Walsh's better war movies). The cast was huge, but by far the best thing in it was Dorothy Malone as an unhappy wife who seduces young Marine Tab Hunter. (She even gets to repeat her glasses on, glasses off routine from The Big Sleep.) Malone is as she always was, and just by being as good as she usually was, she outdoes everyone else in this creakily-acted movie. But she only has like three scenes in the picture; Hunter dumps her and then she's forgotten, unless she has another scene I didn't catch. But this was one of those movies where I said: forget about the war, let alone these other soap-opera relationships; bring back the Dorothy Malone character.

By the way, off topic: notice that that entire scene is underscored with music. Max Steiner always seemed to want to put in as much music as he could into a picture, and he (and Erich Korngold, when he was at Warners) would essentially treat a dialogue scene as a sort of opera, with the orchestra as accompaniment to the actors' voices.

"Our survival hinges on one thing - finding someone who not only can fly this plane, but didn't have fish for dinner."

Warner Home Video deserves credit for putting out some of the titles in their Cult Camp Classics Collection. Some of these movies are important for reasons other than their camp value: Zero Hour! of course was basically remade (with intentional humor added) as Airplane!; Land of the Pharaohs is Howard Hawks' only CinemaScope movie and his only attempt at an ancient-history epic (writer William Faulkner basically admitted that he and Hawks were just ripping off Red River and setting it in ancient Egypt); and Hot Rods to Hell is, well, it's a movie called Hot Rods to Hell and Dana Andrews and Jeanne Crain are in it. And it inspired a Freakazoid! episode called "Hot Rods From Heck!"

My one objection is including Caged in this collection, though I'm very glad to see it getting released -- it's never even been on VHS. But while it's an early women-in-prison movie, it's really not campy; it's a serious Warner Brothers social-problem picture, with excellent acting, and doesn't belong in a collection of movies with not-so-great acting.

Oh, well. Still a good collection, even if the commentary on Land of the Pharaohs is by Peter frickin' Bogdanovich. Here's a brief clip from Hot Rods to Hell: