John, Alias Johnny, Alias Jack, Alias Jackie

Thad presents a scene from Chuck Jones's "Daffy Dilly" (1948), animated by Ken Harris and written by Mike Maltese. There are few funnier scenes in all of cartoonery.

As Thad said, "Daffy Dilly" was not a cartoon that Jones was particularly willing to talk about. Because he became so wedded to his post-1953 interpretation of Daffy as a pathetic figure (Daffy, he would say over and over again, is what we are, while Bugs is what we'd like to be), he didn't like to bring up the fact that Daffy had a long history as a more multi-faceted character, and that he himself had made some of the best cartoons with that version of Daffy.

By 1948 Daffy was no longer the Woody Woodpecker-ish, crazy figure that he had been very early on, and his avaricious tendencies (something that usually set him apart from Bugs) had been a major feature of his character for many years. In this cartoon, he's doing everything out of greed, and the butler character usually gets the best of him; those are things that set him apart from Bugs and would be carried over into the Daffy that Jones came to prefer. But while the Daffy in "Daffy Dilly" is not exactly "Daffy," he has a lot of resourcefulness, has more moods than just the non-stop anger he'd be displaying by the late '50s, and he actually enjoys being a cartoon character. And because Jones doesn't want Daffy to become completely off the wall of annoying like he sometimes went in Clampett or McKimson cartoons, he actually comes up with one of the best versions of Daffy: very different from Bugs Bunny, not exactly a winner, but someone who can have fun and mess with people's minds when the situation calls for it.

But Jones of course abandoned that version of Daffy pretty quickly and became absolutely committed to the idea that Daffy had to act the same way in every situation -- part of the problem with his later cartoons, where all the characters are boiled down to one character trait which they have to display over and over. The Daffy from "Daffy Dilly" appears in a few other Jones cartoons, like "A Pest In the House" and "The Ducksters" and possibly even the first hunting cartoon with Bugs and Elmer, "Rabbit Fire" (Daffy is angry for large swathes of that cartoon, but he also teams up with Bugs at the end to mess with Elmer). These cartoons represent Jones's best work with the character of Daffy, and some of the best work anyone did with the character; it's too bad Jones didn't see it that way.

You can also see some of this "intermediate" Chuck Jones Daffy in this clip from The Ducksters -- Daffy is no longer crazy (even Clampett had sort of given up on that by the time he made "The Great Piggy Bank Robbery"), but he's not the angry asshole he would later become; he's really having fun tormenting Porky, as we all would. And while we see all of Jones's instantly-recognizable poses and expressions -- it's not in this clip, but this was one of the first cartoons where he would show a character's consternation by removing any separation between his eyes, turning his two eyes into one for a moment -- the animation isn't as rigid as it would become in his later cartoons, where the animators were basically filling in the blanks between Jones's pose drawings.

By the way, the person who posted the above clip from "The Ducksters" identifies it as Ken Harris's animation, but it looks more like Ben Washam to me, at the beginning anyway. Anybody know?

You Will Buy This Video

I promise to shut the hell up about the DVD release of WKRP in Cincinnati until we're closer to the April 3, 2007 release date, when sales will decide whether we get the rest of the series. But I had to link to this, having made it some time ago (for a presentation that didn't go anywhere) and not knowing what else to do with it: randomly-selected clips from the first season. It now can be used as kind of an amateurish promo for the season 1 DVD, but at least it gives an idea of some of the episodes that will be included.

Back When Saturday Night At the Movies Was Good

TV Ontario's Saturday Night At the Movies is one of those shows whose archives really should be made publicly available. Elwy Yost built up a huge collection of interviews, on film and in the studio; whenever he and the producers acquired a movie to show, they would find people involved with the film who were still alive, interview them, and show long uninterrupted chunks of those interviews. Yost's sycophancy was kind of a joke at the time, sort of like James Lipton's is now, but he asked good questions and let people talk. And he got everybody, whether it was stars like Jimmy Stewart and Joel McRea or creative people most of the audience had never heard of.

For example, the first episode I watched, and the only one I still have on tape, featured two Marx Brothers movies; the interviews section featured (apart from a studio interview with a critic) interviews with some of the Marx Brothers' writers, like Irving Brecher (At The Circus and Go West) and Nat Perrin (Duck Soup). For a Preston Sturges episode, Yost had Eddie Bracken in the studio and interviewed him at length; Bracken claimed to have directed one scene in The Miracle of Morgan's Creek. The prints of the movies weren't always the best -- this was before it became acceptable to show widescreen movies letterboxed, so you got all the CinemaScope movies chopped in half -- but it was always worth it for the interviews.

After Yost left, and after the Ontario government cut the budget, the interview segments were reconfigured as part of a partnership with the film department at York University. Now the interviews would be less about the movies being shown and more about a particular theme (musicals, film noir, the role of a producer), and they would use much shorter interview clips from Yost's interviews as well as some newer interviews. These can still be good, but they're pretty standard combinations of movie clips and talking-head clips. The days when you would get old actors, writers and producers talking uninterrupted for several minutes -- those are gone, and I don't think we'll ever see them again. But TVO, or the Motion Picture Academy (Yost donated copies of the interviews to them) should really find some way of releasing some of these interviews; they're mostly going to waste now.

Here's an example from that Marx Brothers show: a segment with Nat Perrin, one of the writers on Duck Soup (he and his partner wrote "additional dialogue," and some other routines in the film were taken from a radio show they wrote for Groucho and Chico). Perrin, who later became writer-producer of The Addams Family, talks about the Duck Soup, and gives his contrarian opinions on the film -- he doesn't like it, thinks it was too disorganized and zany -- and on Leo McCarey -- he's not impressed, but he admits that the Marx Brothers respected him more than other directors they worked with. You may, as I do, think he's totally wrong about Duck Soup, McCarey and Marx Brothers humor. But the point is, he's a guy who wrote for that movie and he's earned the right to talk about it, and Yost lets him talk.

"Gordon Didn't Abandon You. You Abandoned Him."

And I thought I'd written the longest post on the decline of Gordon Korman. Turns out I wasn't even close. This post, written last year, must be the definitive statement of Korman fans' disappointment in just about everything he's done for the last decade and a half:

"An Open Letter To Gordon Korman"

Sample excerpt, full of references that will only be recognized if you're a fellow Kormanite:

Gordon, if I were Bruno, I would long ago have been expelled by Mr. Wizzle for ranting about the sanctity of your books being threatened. If I were Bugs, my insappably blind optimism would be gone. If I were The Fish, you'd be dead of my steely glare. If I were Querada, more than just the curtains would have burned down. Of all your characters, I think only Jordy's agent would be on speaking terms with you.

We miss you. We mourn the death of a writer of great potential and his replacement by a robot, as Gramps would say. It's as if the poetry, not Gavin G. Gunhold, got runover by the trolley.

Speaking of Korman, and because I never get tired of using this blog to burn off stuff I wrote and will never get to use anywhere else, I once wrote a bunch of songs in an attempt to make a musical out of Korman's last great book, A Semester in the Life of a Garbage Bag. It never went anywhere -- I never even got to the point where it would have been worth my while to find out who owned the rights -- but here is one of the better lyrics I came up with. It's based on the scene in the book that's quoted at the link above. Raymond Jardine (the "Bruno" character) and Sean (the "Boots" character), both miserable because the girl they're both attracted to is on a date with the school's most useless jock (a guy who's just good enough to be a bench player on every school team), wallow in misery by drinking tomato juice -- which Raymond hates -- and watching a Croatian-dubbed version of Gunsmoke. Raymond's philosophy is that it's fun to be miserable, and Sean starts to come around to his way of thinking. So that's what I tried to put into the song.

RAYMOND
Good TV and decent food
Wouldn't mesh with our mood.
Happiness must not intrude --
Let's be miserable.
(It's the only way to be.)
Silver linings, skies of blue,
Sicken me, sicken you.
We're not meant to muddle through --
Let's be miserable.
She,
You know who,
Went out and got
You know who,
Someone's who's not
Me or you.
Now that we've missed our shot,
What can we do
But watch Croatian cable shows,
Sipping juice, counting toes,
Spilling chip-crumbs on our clothes,
Let's not lie to ourselves,
Let's just cry to ourselves,
We've got this big pig sty to ourselves,
So on with the regrets,
And let's be miserable.
(It's the only way to be.)

SEAN: You know what's scaring me, Raymond?
RAYMOND: That you agree with me.
SEAN: That, and I understand what Marshal Dillon's saying in Serbo-Croatian.
RAYMOND: The guy who dubbed Festus did a pretty good job too.

SEAN
When you've failed at every plan,
Throw a fit if you can.
Take it like a girly-man --
Let's be miserable.
(It's the only way to go.)
No one needs to call the fuzz;
I'm no threat, never was.
All I want to kill is buzz --
Let's be miserable.
His
You know what
Caused her to fall
You know how.
And so it's all
Over now.
Now that we've dropped the ball,
Let's take a vow
To sit and watch the laundry spin,
Darkness calls, let's give in.
I can't bear it if we grin.
She won't gaze in my eyes,
I've got a mournful glaze in my eyes,
I'll sob until it stays in my eyes.
So play the shrill cassettes
And let's be miserable.
(It's the only way to --
It's the only way to --
It's the...)

Hey, is this one of the color Gunsmoke episodes?

(Blackout.)

Andy Kaufman Explained

A while back I wrote a post highlighting a rambling Andy Kaufman monologue from an episode of Taxi, and arguing that Kaufman hadn't rehearsed. The commenters, along with more viewings of some of Kaufman's own routines, convinced me I was wrong: that's just the way Kaufman liked to deliver his lines. But I was still wondering why Kaufman was doing his own thing in that particular episode, whereas in most of the episodes he delivered his lines in a more disciplined way. Well, I've figured it out; I incorrectly assumed that the episode was directed by the show's regular director, James Burrows, but it turns out Burrows was away that week and the episode was the work of one of Paramount's contract directors, Jeff Chambers. Apparently Burrows leaned on Kaufman to tone down his Foreign Man schtick and say the lines without all the halting and hesitating, while a guest director let him do what he wanted (or at least couldn't stop him, whereas Burrows could). Another minor TV-geek mystery solved, and one of the few cases where the identity of the director makes a tangible, clearly-visible difference in the tone of a sitcom.

Trunk Songs, Round 1

We all know that every musical has a number of songs that are dropped during rehearsals or during tryouts. (It would be interesting to find out whether there has ever been a musical that never cut one song after rehearsals started. I would think not, but I might be mistaken.) Some of these cut songs have been recorded on albums like Bruce Kimmel's "Lost in Boston" CDs. But there's another kind of cut song that I find intriguing: songs that are cut from one musical and then incorporated into another.

This isn't very common. Since the Rodgers and Hammerstein era, most songs are written for a specific character or story, and so a song that is written for one show isn't usually appropriate for the next one. And even when musicals were looser and songs were written less for character and more to fill designated "spots" (comedy number, belt, eleven o'clocker, ballad), there wasn't a huge amount of recycling, because every show had a different set of performers, and song that was written for, say, Ethel Merman couldn't be dusted off and given to Gertrude Lawrence.

Still, there have always been individual songs that a songwriter or producer couldn't quite bring himself to give up on. The most famous example is George and Ira Gershwin's "The Man I Love." They wrote it for Adele Astaire in Lady, Be Good!; it was cut. George Gershwin, knowing that the song would be a sure-fire hit if only he could get it into a show, kept on trying to fit it in somewhere. He got it into Strike Up the Band in 1927, but the show closed out of town (it would eventually reach Broadway three years later, but without "The Man I Love"). So he tried to get Marilyn Miller to sing it in Rosalie in 1928, and again it was cut. Finally Gershwin gave up and let it be published as a stand-alone song, and it became a huge hit.

An example of a cut song that actually did make it into another project is "Say a Prayer For Me Tonight," written for My Fair Lady. Eliza Doolittle (Julie Andrews) was supposed to sing the song before going off to test her newfound training at the Embassy Ball. It was cut, and quite rightly so; it slowed the show down, and Andrews already had plenty of numbers to sing. But two years later, Vincente Minnelli had Lerner and Loewe pull the song out of cold storage and gave it to the title character of Gigi. But that demonstrates the danger of re-using cut songs. Not only is "Say a Prayer" one of the weakest scenes in the movie (in my opinion anyway), the song, having been written for one character, is just wrong for this other character: for example, it's a bit incongruous for a French girl to sing "Pray I'll be Wellington, not Bonaparte." (Yes, Wellington won, but still. Gigi shouldn't be unpatriotic.)

Then there's the case of a really good song that gets cut from a hit show, and gets incorporated into a flop. This can't be fun for the songwriters, who are left with the knowledge that the song would have gotten famous if only it had managed to survive as part of the hit show. A song that comes to mind is "Smashing New York Times," which Charles Strouse and Lee Adams wrote for Applause. It was a musical adaptation of All About Eve, and the song was an ironic ballad about one of the themes of the source material -- theatre people who are more interested in their careers than in their emotional lives:

We trade our lives
For just some good reviews,
For "smashing" - New York Times,
"Terrific" - Daily News.
We do our shows,
And what does it all mean?
We're grateful when we get
"Just swell" - Time Magazine.
The words we need are not from our lover
But words some stranger writes.
Fond caresses
From newspaper presses
Won't warm you on winter nights.
So hold me close
And whisper soft to me:
"Perfection" -- CBS,
"Just lovely" -- NBC.
And as we part,
These words I need the most:
"Come back soon" -- New York Times,
"I love you" -- New York Post.

It was by some distance the best and most interesting song Strouse and Adams wrote for Applause, so of course it got cut. Applause was probably the worst hit musical of its era, if not of all time -- with talented people like Strouse, Adams, Betty Comden and Adolph Green contributing some of the poorest work of their careers -- so it figured that the best song would get chopped. But Strouse and Adams, rightly proud of the song, found a place for it seven years later when they wrote A Broadway Musical, another back-stager (based loosely on their experiences writing the Sammy Davis Jr. vehicle Golden Boy). Since this show was also about theatre people, "Smashing New York Times" fit fairly well into it, even though ultimately it would make more sense in the context of the All About Eve story. But the show, despite a pretty good score, was a bomb, lasting something like one night. And "Smashing New York Times" wasn't heard again until Jason Graae sang it on one of Kimmel's "Lost in Boston" albums.

More trunk songs in a later post.

Let's Be Friendly

I write a lot about "lost starlets" -- movie actresses who I think had what it took to become big stars, but didn't make it (in part because women's roles went into free-fall in the '60s and never fully recovered). But there's another type of "lost starlet," probably a more common type: actresses who were clearly intended to become stars, who got the buildup and publicity associated with young stars, even though in retrospect they really didn't have anything resembling star quality. You could never tell who the studios would try to build up, especially from the '50s onward, when the studio system was collapsing and the judgment of studio executives was often very questionable. And so you'd get people selected for The Buildup seemingly at random.

The person I always associate with pointless publicity buildups is Pat Crowley. Not that she was a bad actress; she was a very good actress and a very pretty woman, and she eventually achieved some success as the lead on the TV version of Please Don't Eat the Daisies. But in Hollywood there are lots of good actresses and lots of pretty women, and somehow, around 1953-54, Paramount executives seem to have gotten the idea that she had something all the other pretty actresses didn't. And so she got a cover story in Life Magazine, always a sign of a major publicity roll-out (scroll down; it's the March 29, 1954 cover). Unexceptional supporting roles in unexceptional Paramount productions like Forever Female and Martin and Lewis's Money From Home garnered her a bunch of publicity shots and press releases that implied she would be the Next Big Thing.

And just as soon as the publicity push started, it was over. Paramount, having given her all that publicity, didn't even give her a leading role in a movie. Not that she deserved a lead role that early in her career; I don't think she did. But the build-up implied that the studio had something in mind for her, and yet there was no follow-through whatsoever, meaning the money and time spent on that build-up was essentially for nothing. It's not a slam on Pat Crowley to say that; it's just a sign of how inefficient the studio system had gotten by the '50s: instead of the publicity machine working hand-in-hand with the producers and executives to create new stars, it was like people would be selected at random for Star Treatment without any apparent follow-through at all.

Ms. Crowley had a very long and successful career, especially on television; Dean Martin liked her enough to have her as a guest on his variety show a few times, and she also appeared in the last Martin & Lewis movie, Frank Tashlin's Hollywood Or Bust. Tashlin seemed to like her, since he filmed several scenes showing off her legs: for Tashlin, Hollywood's most fetishistic director (something I've written on endlessly), calling attention to an actresses' legs was the highest complment he could pay her. Also, the birthplace of Crowley's character, Weehawken, N.J., is actually Tashlin's birthplace.



By the way, I'm quite serious about Tashlin and his obsession with women's legs; look at almost any of his movies. In Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? he tries to get us on Betsy Drake's side by demonstrating that she has better legs than Jayne Mansfield; after shooting the scene, he took Drake off the set, still wearing short-shorts, and led her into the studio commissary to show her off. That's the Tashlin Doctrine.

Mentos, The Freshmaker

WWWF Grudge Match used to have a term they used frequently: "Mentos Level Coolness (tm)." This was considered to be the highest level of coolness attainable, and there were many arguments about whether it was possible to surpass Mentos Level -- for example, did John McClane's nearly superhuman coolness demonstrate that he had broken the Mentos barrier?

The reason I bring this up is that I was trying to think of cultural phenomena that are specifically associated with the early '90s -- as opposed to the late '90s, which I've gone on and on about. I couldn't think of a lot of things that really scream "early '90s" to me; for some reason that period doesn't have the kind of cultural profile that the late '90s or the late '80s or the early '70s do. But I did think of some commercials that seem to be associated with the 1990-1995 period. One of them is the infamous "I've fallen and I can't get up" commercial. And another is Mentos (tm), with its commercials about how incredibly cool you would become just by the act of doing whatever the heck you did with Mentos.

If I could think of a cultural profile for the early '90s, it would be this weirdly bland idea of what was "cool," and all these commercials that implied that cool and hip people did things once considered incredibly square (like those Head and Shoulders commercials with the "cool" person making annoying quips).

There are a lot of Mentos (tm) commercials online, but none of them come close to Tai (Brittany Murphy) singing along with a Mentos (tm) commercial in Clueless.

Ship Shows

"By arrangement with the U.S. Navy's international distributor, EURPAC, Shout! Factory has also created a specially-packaged edition of McHale's Navy exclusively for Naval bases worldwide."

Now, I'm sure McHale's Navy is very popular with the U.S. Navy; it is to them what Sergeant Bilko was to the Army and Gomer Pyle to the Marines. But we're talking about a special, officially-approved edition of a television series that seems to convey the following message: You can be a layabout, a con man, or in Ernest Borgnine's physical condition, and you'll still win every battle.

I don't know if they've thought this through, is all.

Speaking of McHale's Navy, one of the writers, Danny Arnold (Barney Miller, Bewitched, That Girl) went on to create a series based on the movie The Wackiest Ship in the Army, about the crew of a creaky old schooner that somehow winds up being given an important assignment during WWII. Wackiest Ship, however, was an hour-long show instead of a half-hour, and Arnold sort of made it a precusor to what would later be called dramedy, with a mix of McHale's-ish comedy and more serious war material than McHale's usually did. It only lasted one season, but I wish someone would re-run it.

Mike Evans Addendum

One addition to my post on the death of Mike Evans: here's an excerpt from the episode I was talking about, where Lionel Jefferson (Evans) finally tells Archie Bunker, without any irony or sarcasm, what he thinks of him -- that he considers Archie a friend but won't put up with his bigotry any more.

The scene is also a reminder that for the first three seasons, Lionel's father George never appeared on the show; instead his brother Henry (Mel Stewart) filled in for him in arguments with Archie. According to legend -- or the Wikipedia entry, which in today's culture is equivalent to a legend -- this was because Norman Lear didn't want anyone except Sherman Hemsley to play George, and was willing to wait until Hemsley was available to introduce George as a character.

It's a New Year, and You Know What That Means...

...A whole different group of works will reach the arbitrary milestones of their 50th or 25th anniversaries. With all the anniversary DVD editions, reunion specials and last-minute filler articles you might expect.

The problem this time around is that the two years covered under the 50/25 rule are 1957 and 1982, and neither seems at first glance to have been a particularly distinguished year. Especially when it comes to movies. The Best Picture winner for 1982 was freakin' Gandhi -- which, sure enough, has a 25th anniversary special edition DVD coming -- but even apart from that, 1982 is the year of E.T., which already had a big and largely ignored anniversary reissue five years ago, and the year of Tootsie, which doesn't really hold up except for the amazingness of Bill Murray.

1957 wasn't a great year movie-wise either, certainly nothing to compare to the bumper crop of 1956 or 1959. There will be tributes to the sanctimonious The Bridge on the River Kwai, but I'd unhesitatingly say that the best movies of 1957 were Sweet Smell of Success, the glorious last gasp of the original film noir cycle, and Frank Tashlin's Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, the epic satire that, according to Jonathan Rosenbaum, almost destroyed Tashlin's career. Sweet Smell really deserves a 50th anniversary re-release and DVD edition, but probably won't get one.

There are some other works that will probably get some attention. This will be the 50th anniversary of West Side Story, requiring people to point out patiently, once again, that the original Broadway production was not a failure and the Broadway cast album alone sold a million copies. Also it's the 25th anniversary year of Cheers -- reunion, anyone?

What are some books, movies, shows, anything that are in for their 50th or 25th this year?

Meanwhile enjoy a clip from Rock Hunter and be glad that Joan Blondell was cast in this scene instead of Fox's original choice, Thelma Ritter.

Foot Powder

Specs and extras ("spextras?") for the first season of WKRP in Cincinnati.

The set is priced higher than Fox's identically-packaged Bob Newhart Show sets (Fox, by the way, is pretty much addicted to these double-sided discs for all but a select few shows; they're annoying, but apparently they save a lot on manufacturing costs), which leads me to hold out hope that the sets were more expensive to produce, in turn leading me to hold out hope that some music has been paid for. That's a lot of hope to be holdin' out.

Among the special features listed are a featurette on the making of "Turkeys Away" and commentaries on two other episodes: "Johnny Comes Back" (the one with the "Red Wigglers" jingle and Mr. Carlson mistaking cocaine for foot powder) and the pilot.

Happy Goyish New Year!

I know a man, his name is Lang,
And he has a neon sign.
And Mr. Lang is very old,
So they call it Old Lang's Sign."
-- Allan Sherman

In New Year's resolutions every blogger now is wallowing --
I've got some resolutions too; among them are the following:

To follow more Canadian TV, for that's a path
That has been blazed impressively by people like McGrath.

To write more animation posts, although the ones I've had
Have been somewhat supplanted by the brilliant work of Thad.

To interview some people: writers, singers, makeup men,
So they can share some anecdotes if they won't blog like Ken.

To put a bit more humour in my posts before they're done,
And do some subject headings with a groan-inducing pun.

To see less entertainment that is canned instead of live --
I haven't seen a human face since nineteen-ninety-five!

And finally, to find an URL a little less confusing,
Since many people say they can't recall the one I'm using,
Though if you're hep to Hackenbush, it's slightly more amusing,
I want to find an URL to bring my old, old blog some new zing.

A 1996 Simpsons Clip For Our Time

You don't know how often I've thought of this one in the past year, and in how many different contexts.

The Year Of David "Dead Weight" Birney

Denis McGrath watches the first season of St. Elsewhere. While it still mostly holds up for him (as it does for me), he notes some stuff that seems alien to us now, like the broader, more theatrical acting. He also notes that even though St. Elsewhere was the fastest-paced drama show of its time, thanks largely to the innovations of producer-director Mark Tinker (son of MTM founder Grant Tinker -- that's one helluva talented family), it still has a lot of slow spots compared to today's shows:

But the stories, again, sometimes drag. I found myself wondering, simultaneously, what could we do with that extra seven minutes today, and marveling on how, even in a quality show like this -- how little the audience was trusted to put two and two together.

I sometimes think that there's a connection between the longer running times and the slower pacing. By the '80s, movies had adjusted their editing styles for greater speed and economy; instead of showing a guy getting out of the car, knocking at the door, and going in, you just cut directly from him getting out of the car to him entering the house. That wasn't happening on TV, for the most part. And while part of it is that they didn't trust the audience, another part of it was that shows couldn't always afford to chop out footage: whereas shows today always ran long, it was quite common in those days for shows to run short. In the first season of The Rockford Files, according to James Garner, the writers always included a car chase so they could deal with the problems of filling 50 minutes of screen time: if the show was running very short, they'd make the car chase very long; if it was only a little short, they'd keep the car chase at a more reasonable length. Other hour-long shows dealt with the length problem by having closing credit sequences of varying lengths, so they could fill the slot by playing the theme song for two minutes.

Today's shows always have tons of "deleted scenes" that fall into the DVD extras bin because there's not enough time to put them in the show. This wasn't so much a problem when the show is 48-50 minutes; the problem is how to create enough material when you have a limited amount of shooting time. And part of the way they dealt with that, I think, was not to end scenes too early or start them too late -- because if you chop a scene down to its essentials, you may have a tighter scene but you've also got a 42-minute show. (Once Moonlighting started to get unusually fast-paced -- not only in dialogue delivery but in some of the editing, with the directors and editors doing without any exterior establishing shots -- they ran into exactly that problem, coming in with 40-43 minute shows; that's why they did those teasers with the stars breaking character, because the shows were coming in at what would nowadays be standard length for an hour-long.)

While I deplore the short running times of today, a lot of it is mostly on principle; I just don't like the sheer greed involved in cutting the entertainment down to the bare minimum so networks can show 20 minutes of commercials. But principles aside, I have to say that in many ways the current 40-42 minute lengths are better for a drama episode than the old 48-50 minute lengths; at least, it's better to have an episode that's a bit too tight than one that's too padded-out. On the other hand, part of what's killing the half-hour comedy is that 20-21 minutes is basically an awful length for an episode, at least if you're trying to tell a story with any kind of point to it. And when the lengths of drama shows are cut down again -- as I fully expect they will be -- they may also reach the point where the advantages of tight storytelling are swamped by the drawbacks of having no time to tell a story.

More Lubitschiana

Here is another short excerpt from The Love Parade, a movie that's never been on VHS, DVD, or any format except a laserdisc box set issued just before the laserdisc died out completely.

The "Lubitsch Touch" (tm) is just as hard to define as "chemistry" (see below). But here's my take on it: Lubitsch specialized in getting the most mileage out of things that are not seen. This has very little to do with getting around the censors or saving money; even when something could be shown on the screen with no trouble, he'll try and find ways to do the scene without showing it. You know the old saying "Show, don't tell?" Lubitsch's motto might have been "Tell, don't show." He believed that what we don't see is funnier than what we do see, and because he was focused on character rather than gags, he believed in focusing our attention on the way people react to occurrences, rather than the occurrences themselves.

The example here is the scene in The Love Parade where Chevalier and MacDonald first have dinner together. It's a simple scene in outline: they meet, they talk, they have a drink, and they go into her boudoir together (this is 1929, pre-Code, so it's OK to have a woman invite a man into a room with a French name). But Lubitsch doesn't want to show us the scene: it would be too long, and nothing would happen in it that is of any interest; it's just the lead-up to their big scene together. But he can't start with that big scene, because he needs to set it up first, have them get really interested in each other. So the way he and his writers do the scene is to have three groups of supporting characters eavesdrop on Chevalier and MacDonald, and talk about what they're doing. MacDonald's cabinet ministers, MacDonald's ladies-in-waiting, and the servant supporting couple (Lupino Lane and Lillian Roth) all report different things and have their own reactions to what's going on. And the result is something much more entertaining, and about half as long, as Lubitsch would have gotten if he'd just shown us the action that's being described. Tell, don't show.

Chevalier, MacDonald and Chemistry

We talk a lot about which stars have on-screen "chemistry" and which ones don't, and none of us are any closer to figuring out what, exactly, produces this chemistry -- we know it when we see it, but it's very hard to define. Watching my VHS copy of The Love Parade, the first sound movie by Ernst Lubitsch, I was reminded again that there are some stars who really have nothing in common, shouldn't go together at all, who somehow wind up having great chemistry on the screen. In this case it's Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald, in their first of four teamings (the others were Lubitsch's One Hour With You and The Merry Widow and Rouben Mamoulian's Love Me Tonight).

It's a very strange pairing. You've got the heavily-accented French entertainer matched up with the "Iron Butterfly" from Philadelphia. You've got two singing styles with absolutely nothing in common: he the music-hall singer, she the shrill soprano. You've got his broad grin and her subtle smirk; his warmth and her reserve. They didn't particularly care for each other, according to legend; he thought she was a prude and she thought he was a scoundrel. And yet they just seemed to click better with each other than with anyone else. Chevalier kept trying to make movies with other leading ladies, but he couldn't click with anyone; Claudette Colbert, being French, was a good match for him in Lubitsch's The Smiling Lieutenant, but her limited singing ability meant she couldn't do musicals with him on a regular basis. And MacDonald never had another really successful leading man until she re-packaged herself with Nelson Eddy; you only need to look at how poorly she's paired with Jack Buchanan (in Lubitsch's Monte Carlo) to realize how well she worked with Chevalier.

In their first scene together in The Love Parade, and therefore their first scene together in any movie, Chevalier and MacDonald immediately show that they have what it takes to be a great team. If I had to define "chemistry," the closest I could come to doing so would be to say that chemistry occurs when two stars manage to appear interested when they look at each other; each actor has to convey the impression of really seeing something fascinating and fun in the other. Note that I said they have to look interested, not be interested; there are plenty of actual romantic couples who have no chemistry whatsoever because they regard each other with fishy stares or generic eye-batting.

Chevalier and MacDonald also work around the problem of differing singing styles, as they often did, by talking their way through large portions of the song (in this case, the double-entendre-fest "Anything to Please the Queen"). But the highlight of the scene, and a perfect example of Lubitsch's way of suggesting things wordlessly and letting us fill in the blanks, is the part near the beginning: MacDonald, as the Queen of Sylvania, reads a report on Chevalier, an envoy recalled from Paris for his scandalous behavior. She reads the report, and we don't see it, but we see her face as she reacts to Chevalier's unknown exploits: she's alternately amused, disgusted, and finally turned on. There's no way Lubitsch could have conveyed as much with any actual description of what Chevalier has been up to.



And yes, Paramount recycled the name "Sylvania" for Duck Soup a few years later.

As to The Love Parade itself, I've seen it twice with an audience and it always goes over very well; in fact, I think this may be the most entertaining of the late-'20s talking pictures, the one that best overcomes the limitations of early sound recording and the static camerawork necessitated by the microphones. Lubitsch had always used fairly static camera work, and his movies rarely ventured outside the studio, so he didn't have to adjust his methods that much (whereas some directors were clearly hurt by the new difficulties of doing location shooting or complicated camera moves). And because his movies are so stylized, with characters who are in part parodies of stock characters from other movies, the biggest problem of early talkies -- the stilted acting and line delivery -- actually works to his advantage; the characters are talking over-formally because they're sending up the way people talk in movie and stage musicals.

The other thing about Lubitsch's approach in his first musical is that he takes a standard form of the stage and screen musical -- in this case, the Ruritanian musical, set in a mythical kingdom where no one seems to have any serious problems -- and makes it dirty. The plot and characters of The Love Parade are all standard for a Ruritanian operetta, but they're all obsessed with what Preston Sturges would later call Topic A, and Lubitsch's constant joke is that everyday lowbrow concerns of the flesh have infiltrated the sexless world of '20s operetta. You might have found this story or these characters in another stage or screen musical, but you probably wouldn't have the cabinet ministers whispering to each other about the main job of a husband ("Of course, he has something to do"), or Chevalier implying that he had an affair with Marie Curie.

Hotcha Cornia!

One more reason why I love the movie Thank Your Lucky Stars: it features Spike Jones and His City Slickers being promised a radio deal by the poor man's Dick Powell, Dennis Morgan.

You Can See the Punchline Coming, But It's Still Funny

This is a scene from the Taxi episode "On the Job." Every year the show did a two-part episode consisting of little sketches for each of the cabbies; this was about the jobs the characters get when they're laid off from the cab company, and it was probably the best of those "sketchisodes." This sketch, with Jim as a door-to-door salesman, is one of those bits where it's not hard to guess what the punchline will be, but it's still incredibly funny because of the genius of Christopher Lloyd, plus the super-efficient direction of James Burrows back when he was still the best comedy director in the business.

The other thing that this scene illustrates is that even though the sitcom is generally considered a lesser form of TV comedy than sketch comedy (there's a reason Aaron Sorkin does a whole show about the power of sketch comedy to Change The World), there are actually some advantages that a good sitcom has. If this routine were done as a self-contained sketch with new characters -- and something like this routine probably had been done as a sketch not once but many times -- it would feel kind of bland. What makes it work better in Taxi is that it uses a character, Jim, who's built up a lot of audience goodwill in his two years on the show. Instead of a sketch about an idiot ruining a woman's carpet, which is what it would be on Saturday Night Live, it's a little story about a character we like; we know he's doing everything he can to succeed at something he doesn't really understand, and the scene becomes funnier and sharper because we're on his side. It's a better scenee because it's on a sitcom, not in spite of it.

"People who like to smoke candy and listen to cigarettes will love it."

Great article by Elbert Ventura in Slate about the other, better Jimmy Stewart Christmas movie: Ernst Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Corner.

See also this appreciation by Jim Henley, where he notes that Shop Around the Corner is one of the few movies that really embraces and understands the commercial nature of the Christmas holiday (take that, Charlie Brown Christmas!):

The glorious thing about Shop is that its focus is so relentlessly commercial. Its Christmas is the season of shopping; its characters’ chief holiday concern is whether they’ll make plan. Once Alfred knows that Klara is his dream girl, his concern turns immediately to whether she’ll be getting him the wallet he wants, or some less suitable gift he knows, by way of the grapevine, she’s thinking of getting her mystery sweetheart. (She doesn’t quite know yet that Alfred is him.) When the store owner has his heart attack, everyone worries about his health, and also how it will affect sales.

I had fourteen of those Christmases during my days in retail management, and the way the movie gets that life right is a special thrill. There’s a special pride in watching the stack of something you had the foresight to order heavy dwindle because it is, indeed, the thing that people want, and a special delight too - you see the money piling up, and you see people happy because you successfully guessed what would make them happy. Closing up a store on Christmas Eve after a successful season feels like ringing down the curtain on a well-reviewed show.

With so many movies and TV specials that are about what Christmas should be -- less commercial, less shopping-oriented, less about gifts and money -- it's nice to see Lubitsch and Samson Raphaelson making a feel-good movie about what Christmas really is, and showing the pride and joy the characters feel in having a commercially-successful Christmas sale.