Ollie Johnston

Update: Here is a 1956 Los Angeles Times article on Ollie Johnston's other great lifelong enthusiasm -- restoring and running antique trains. (Click to enlarge.) I know it's not related to his animation work, but I somehow feel like I can see that enthusiasm -- or maybe the fact that he just was so enthusiastic -- in his work. Obviously his animation does not depend on what he did in his off hours, but his work was that of a man who didn't do just what was required and no more. A man who has a hobby is a man who enjoys working hard at the things he loves, whether it's drawings or locomotives.

The Live Steaming clam-bake shown here took place at the Flintridge, Calif. home of Oliver Johnston. His layout, with 970 feet of track, is one of the largest in the west.

It takes about 5,000 hours to make a good model and minimum cost to have one built for you is $5,000 (Live Steamer Walt Disney recently had two built for Disneyland, cost: $35,000 apiece). Plans are procured from a railroad, then scaled down to 1/24, the most popular size. Most workmen scorn buying parts, make even their own nuts and bolts.

Johnston's La Cañada Valley 515 is a typical model. The locomotive is three feet, 11 inches long, weighs 251 pounds. The tender is three feet even, weighs 90 pounds loaded, which includes 45 pounds of water and the Live Steamer's favorite fuel: pea-size Welsh coal.

Nothing much happens on a run, unless a boiler explodes (very rare) or a flying cinder hits a shirt hanging on the line (pretty common). Mostly, the train just puffs and smokes around the track whistling for a grade crossing, stopping to take on water, finally pulling into the station.

Just, in fact, all the wonderful, exciting, fascinating things that make life, for a Live Steamer, really worth living.

Please see Jenny and Jerry's round-up at Cartoon Brew.

Via Newspaperarchive.com, here's Johnston in 1954 (right) with Milt Kahl (left), doing some work for the opening of Marineland.

Kismet Kate

The release of the movie version of Kismet on DVD is just another sad reminder that what could have been a terrific movie musical, done right, turned out to be a very weak one. I love the stage Kismet musical, but its tongue-in-cheek, bordering-on-parody operetta style is very difficult to bring off, and Vincente Minnelli, a director who didn't have much sense of self-parody and reportedly hated the show to begin with (and did it only so MGM would let him direct Lust For Life), was not the man to do it. And though you can get a sense of what Jack Cole's Broadway choreography was like, Cole's bawdy, showy style did not fit with the overly-tasteful Fred unit style; the sets, costumes and photography are not backing him up, and the numbers that were probably knockouts on Broadway just seem a little under-powered. Maybe this project would have been better at a studio like Fox, whose less tasteful photography and sets fit better with Cole's style (remember, Cole choreographed and directed the gloriously tasteless musical numbers in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes). You could say that Arthur Freed's relentless good taste did this project in. Though speaking of taste, one thing to be said for the movie is that -- due to the post-Moon Is Blue collapse of the Production Code -- none of the lyrics had to be cleaned up for the screen; even "Rahadlakum," a song about an aphrodisiac, was able to be recorded and filmed (the first part got cut, but for time, not content).

Of the principals, only Ann Blyth is really right for her part: Howard Keel just doesn't have the charisma and style for an Alfred Drake part. (Drake, interviewed about why MGM kept passing him over for movies, said: "They had a guy they used for my parts. He wasn't very good." I think Keel was good, but not for this part, or even for Kiss Me Kate.) Vic Damone was a terrible idea, Dolores Gray is good but doesn't really have the right kind of voice for "Not Since Nineveh" -- it was written for Joan Diener, a performer who had both a belt and a high soprano voice, and Gray can't do the soprano parts of the song -- and casting non-singer Sebastian Cabot as the villain forced them to cut the wonderful quartet that precedes "And This Is My Beloved."

One thing the DVD release enables me to do, though, is to do a side-by-side comparison of some of the original Alexander Borodin music and the songs that Bob Wright and Chet Forrest created for Kismet. Wright and Forrest's specialty was making pop songs out of classical music, something they'd been doing since the '30s when they were at MGM. Instead of just taking the classical tune and putting lyrics to it, they would take the main theme from the original piece and then compose a new "B" section, re-do the ending, and turn the whole thing into an actual pop song with an A-A-B-A structure. This is what they did with all three of the big hits from Kismet, "Stranger in Paradise" (from the Polovtsian Dances in Borodin's Prince Igor), "Baubles, Bangles and Beads" (second movement of Borodin's second string quartet) and "And This Is My Beloved" (third movement of Borodin's truly awesome second string quartet). As you can see in the video below, each of the songs has new material that wasn't in Borodin's original pieces, and that's how the songs become true hit songs instead of just classical music with new words.

There were a few songs in Kismet that didn't follow this pattern; "Rahadlakum" is a completely original composition by Wright and Forrest, and two or three songs are taken directly from Borodin with no newly-composed music. The passage that precedes the "Gesticulate" number (that song, by the way, is based on Borodin's first symphony) is just Konchak's aria from Prince Igor with English lyrics.

WKRP Episode: "Jennifer's Home For Christmas"

This fine Christmas episode from season 2 uses a plot hook that had been used before -- in fact, Happy Days did the "everybody brings a Christmas tree" thing only a year before this -- but does it better. Jennifer slipping into her real accent on the phone is one of my favorite jokes from the show. (In a strange way, Jennifer is to WKRP as Jack Donaghy to 30 Rock or Barney to How I Met Your Mother -- there's so much we don't know about these characters that the writers can have a lot of fun hinting at their unseen lives and backstories.) This episode guest stars George Gaynes -- who later directed an episode and worked for Hugh Wilson on Police Academy -- and takes advantage of his linguistic skills.

Music: "Merry Christmas Baby" by Chuck Berry, "Jingle Bell Rock," and the most famous recording of "Jingle Bells."


WKRP s02e11 Jennifer's Home For Christmas by carpalton

Lucky Berkeleyites

If you're in or near the Bay area (and I'm not saying you shouldn't be), the University of California at Berkeley is holding A week-long Frank Tashlin retrospective. There have been a bunch of these recently, but all south of the border (the Canadian border, I mean); I especially recommend next Wednesday's screening of Artists and Models because while the DVD version looks fine, I have a feeling that the otherworldly riot of color would look even better on a big screen in a dark theatre.

A few random points on Artists and Models while I'm at it, since this is one of those movies I just love (there are greater movies, maybe even better movies by this director or these stars, but there are few other movies that are more fun), because none of them are worth a separate post in themselves:

1) The plot of Artists and Models, if you look at it rationally, has so many holes in it, even for a comedy, that the script would be thrown out of any screenwriting class. Some of this is probably due to cutting; it's a long movie and some scenes were cut for time (including Shirley MacLaine's solo "Bat Lady" dance, which appears to be lost), and I imagine some of the deleted scenes would explain why Eva Gabor's character starts out thinking that Dean Martin is the person she needs to seduce and then, without any explanation for how she found out the truth, switches to trying to seduce Jerry Lewis. But there are various other unexplained plot points, things that are brought up and then never referred to again (Martin is worried about telling Lewis that he's drawing the "Vincent the Vulture" comic because "then we'd be through as pals," but this is never addressed), and stuff that just makes no sense, like how can Martin's character draw a best-selling comic book under his own name without Jerry Lewis's character finding out about it? You just kind of have to go with it; it's like a '50s throwback to many silent and early sound comedies that were very loosely structured and informal and didn't ask to be judged by classic principles of story structure. But you can see why Jean-Luc Godard fell in love with Artists; the idea that a movie can ignore all rules of storytelling logic, and get away with it if the individual scenes are entertaining enough, must have been very encouraging to him.

2) The publicity photo of Martin, Lewis, and the four top-billed women in the film (all dressed, of course, by Edith Head, who did some of her best work on this picture), appears to be the one Shirley MacLaine was talking about when she wrote that Jerry Lewis was a real jerk during the taking of a cast publicity photo with these six participants. Apparently he tried to essentially direct the taking of the photograph and tell everybody where to stand and what to do. Viewed that way, it's kind of a metaphor for why their partnership broke up: Jerry standing there trying to control everything, Dean looking a little ticked off. (Click to enlarge).



3) I notice that while Shirley MacLaine's character is called "Bessie Sparrowbush" in the film, many cast lists give the name as "Sparrowbrush." I wonder if somebody sneaked the name "Sparrowbush" past the censors by deliberately misspelling it in the cast list.

4) When I tried to research this film I didn't come up with much (to find out anything about its production I'll have to wait until I can look at Hal Wallis's papers, which are housed at the Motion Picture Academy's library), but I did find a Sheilah Graham column, complete with a quote from producer Hal Wallis, revealing that the part of Dean Martin's love interest was originally offered to Lizabeth Scott, a longtime Wallis contractee who had already been Martin's vis-a-vis in Scared Stiff. Scott turned down the script, upon which Martin asked for Dorothy Malone, his other love interest from Scared Stiff. That same year, Martin also made You're Never Too Young opposite Diana Lynn, who had been his love interest in the two My Friend Irma movies.

Straight From the Hartley

I guarantee you I won't be doing Archie nostalgia posts all the time, but via this comment, I see that other bloggers are rediscovering Al Hartley's infamous Christian Archie comics. The insanity of these comics is different from the insanity of the Frank Doyle/Samm Schwartz story I wrote about below; the stories by Doyle and Schwartz are crazy because they're intentionally crazy, not to mention very funny, while Hartley's stories are crazy but sincere and they're kind of disturbing because they're so sincere. (Favorite line: "Now we have books that say we all came from monkeys -- and the children are starting to ACT like it!") I've written about these Spire comics in a previous post, but the thing I want to re-emphasize is that Hartley had actually been writing and drawing this kind of material in the mainstream Archie comics for several years. The reason he took it to a separate Christian comic is that his bosses at Archie asked him to cut it out. But he was a talented artist and apparently a very nice man, so I'm not surprised that he managed to talk them into letting him do the Spire titles.

I actually have some examples of Hartley's Christian material in the "regular" Archie titles (I don't have a lot of Archie comics left over from childhood, and I don't feel like going out and shopping for them, but I do have this one) from a "Sabrina's Christmas Magic" special issue in 1972. Hartley wrote and illustrated a lot of Sabrina stories in the early '70s and really seemed to get into the character despite the references to witchcraft. So in this issue, the first story has her going to meet Santa Claus, and teaching children about the importance of faith over reason (click on the images to see them enlarged):






And then, as if worried that that was too allegorical, Hartley gets specific at the end of another story which he wrote and drew for the same issue:



I don't want to sound like I am bashing Hartley; his injections of religion into the Archie world are actually quite sweet and non-sectarian, and honestly I think the publishers would have been better off letting him continue with that instead of doing the more hard-core Spire material. But I wonder how he squared that religious content with the portrayal of witchcraft, or the rather obvious cruel streak he displayed in the stories he wrote/drew:



I'm no theologian, but even as a kid I thought that there was something morally wrong about drowning somebody and laughing at it. Apparently Hartley's message is that if Sabrina doesn't like you, she will kill you and that's a good thing.

Syndication Performance

I was looking through the 1984 book "Television Comedy Series: An Episode Guide to 153 TV Sitcoms in Syndication," by Joel Eisner and David Krinsky. (Jerry Beck, back when he was working in TV catalogue sales for United Artists, is credited as one of their sources for the information.)

The book was useful at the time, when episode titles and writing credits were hard to find for most shows; it's been rendered obsolete by the passing of time and the availability of online episode guides. Also, the authors have a bizarre rant in their introduction about how badly television has declined since it started in with social issues and stuff. ("Television banned violence on network shows when they thought it was harmful to children, but did they ever stop to think what mental harm is done when a child believes prostitution, vasectomies, unwed mothers, V.D. etc. are all hilarious subjects?") However, one thing that Eisner and Krinsky have in many of their descriptions, which I find interesting, is a description of how the show did in syndication. (They got some of their information on the shows from TV stations and syndicators, so along with the episode lists they were presumably also able to find out how these shows were doing in reruns, or if they were even being rerun at all.) I thought I'd make a note of some of their descriptions to show how some shows were doing circa 1983 when they were writing this.

I don't know how accurate their information is, but I would suspect that it's fairly close to the mark because it mostly confirms things that were known already: all of the MTM comedies except WKRP performed disappointingly in syndication; Happy Days and its spinoffs all tanked in syndication but The Odd Couple was a huge syndication success; some of the Norman Lear comedies didn't do as well as expected.

One thing that's obvious, once again, is that there is no relationship between how popular a show is in first-run and how popular it is in syndication. Part of the reason is that syndication audiences tend to be younger (a bigger percentage of children is watching in daytime reruns than in prime time), but that can't be the whole explanation for every success or failure. Also it seems like shows that focused on women didn't do well in syndication at the time, though I think that's probably changed since then.

Barney Miller - "The series still does extremely well in syndication."

The Beverly Hillbillies - "The now-syndicated episodes are popular in many Southern cities but not elsewhere, perhaps because it is felt to be so out of date."

The Bob Newhart Show - "The series was very popular during its original run, but it has been a failure in syndication. It now usually runs during the middle of the night or early afternoon."

The Brady Bunch - "Remains one of the most popular reruns of all time."

Chico and the Man - "The series has all but died in syndication even though it is still run all over the country. This is due to the death of Freddie Prinze during the series. What makes matters worse is that now that Jack Albertson has also died, the series is in worse trouble. Within a few years, the show will probably disappear from the air completely."

The Dick Van Dyke Show - "The show was a big hit during the first years of its syndication. However, it has died out in popularity because of its dated look -- caused by the black and white film and fashions of that time."

Family Affair - "The series is still run occasionally but has become too dated for many people and has begun to disappear from many stations."

The Flintstones - "It is still a big hit over twenty years since it was first created, as it can never become dated."

Gilligan's Island - "Despite contemptuous reviews by critics... Gilligan's Island has remained one of the most successful syndicated comedy series of all time."

Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. - "Still a popular series today, Gomer Pyle's main audience is in rural areas of the U.S."

Happy Days - "The reruns have not done very well at all. Syndicated under the title Happy Days Again, it has been a big disappointment to the local stations which run the show."

The Jeffersons - "The series is not doing as well as it was expected to do."

Laverne and Shirley - "The series is still doing well on the network, but it is a complete failure in reruns despite the fact that it is running all over the country."

Mary Tyler Moore - "This was a very popular series during its rrun, but has suffered in syndication. This is also a more sophisticated series which fails to attract the attention of children."

Maude - "It has done very poorly in syndication."

Mork and Mindy - "It entered syndication in September 1983 and immediately died."

Nanny and the Professor - "Seen frequently on small rural stations (mainly UHF) but rarely in large cities."

The Odd Couple - "The series did fairly well on the network but is a big hit in syndication."

What's Happening! - "It didn't do very well on the network, but it is doing rather well in syndication."

Other shows that did well in syndication include:

The Addams Family
Bewitched
Get Smart
Green Acres
Hogan's Heroes
I Dream of Jeannie
I Love Lucy
Leave it to Beaver
M*A*S*H
The Munsters
Three's Company
Welcome Back Kotter
WKRP in Cincinnati.

Shows that didn't do well in syndication (as of this book):
Diff'rent Strokes
Here's Lucy
McHale's Navy
Our Miss Brooks
The Patty Duke Show
Rhoda

Beam Me Up, Raymond Scotty

I don't quite get what this Your Hit Parade show (from 1955) was trying to accomplish with the superimposed graphics (if those graphics are indeed part of the original; they seem to be). But it does lend a sort of prototypical music-video style to this performance by the show's bandleader, Raymond Scott (with his Quintette), of... well, you know which piece.

HestFest

I've always thought Charlton Heston was one of the better stars of the '50s and '60s when it came to choosing projects. With the collapse of the studio system, and star actors actually able to choose what movies they made and for whom, some stars made really bad choices. (See Brando, Marlon.) Heston made some bad movies, as everybody did, but he also picked some really interesting films that probably wouldn't have gotten made without him, like Will Penny (which he sometimes cited as his favorite).

He also had pretty decent taste in directors at a time when many stars preferred to work with hacks with whom they felt comfortable, or just didn't care who directed them; Heston most famously recommended Orson Welles for Touch of Evil, and also asked for Franklin Schaffner to direct Planet of the Apes. (Which is another movie that must have seemed fairly risky when he committed to it, given that it was produced by a man whose biggest previous credit was Dr. Dolittle.) He made a lot of good movies, and the reason his mannerisms are so easy to make fun of is that he was such a distinctive screen personality.

A Great ARCHIE Story You'll Never See Again

I still haven't found it, but I'd like to give a brief summary of this totally insane multi-part story. I read it in digests years ago, still have some excerpts of dialogue that I wrote in an old notebook, but what I don't got is the story itself. Still, I wanted to summarize it because it was so bizarre, in such bad taste, and so full of Frito Bandito-esque stereotypes that you'll likely never see it re-printed again. (I think it dates from the late '70s or early '80s, when Latin America was in the news a lot.)

Update: I finally found the story, in Jughead # 226, from 1974. I've added some screen captures from the story.

The artwork was by the great Samm Schwartz and I'm pretty convinced that Frank Doyle wrote it. Most of these stories didn't have credits, but the Vaudevillian dialogue was so Doyle-esque that it either had to be Doyle or a very good imitator of his style.

Here's how it shook down:

Mr. Lodge is upset because Jughead is always hanging around his house. (Why is his attention focused on Jughead, who normally doesn't hang around Lodge's place very much, rather than Archie, who actually is always there? Because this is a Jughead story. Go with it.) Smithers, Mr. Lodge's butler and -- in Doyle's stories -- also Lodge's buddy and confidante, suggests that Lodge should get Jughead out of the house by asking him to run an errand.

Lodge writes down a shopping list for Jughead, but accidentally gives him the credentials for an ex-diplomat whom he had hired to go down to an obscure village in Honduras and deal with a local bandito who is terrorizing Lodge's plant. (Yes, even Mr. Lodge is taking jobs out of America and building plants in low-paying Latin American countries.) Jughead reads the instructions and says: "Wow, when he sends you on an errand, he really sends you on an errand."

Using the credentials, Jughead is flown to Honduras to meet with the bandito, El Slobador. Turns out that El Slobador's campaign against the plant was just a ruse to get a valuable American down to his hideout: he and his men announce that they will hold Jughead for ransom and make Mr. Lodge pay $1 million for his return.



When Mr. Lodge gets the notice that Jughead is being held captive in Honduras and the banditos expect Lodge to pay $1 million to get him back, he finds this so funny that he goes into hysterical laughing fits and has to be taken to the hospital.



At the bandito hideout, Jughead spends most of his time eating the tamale pies and other delicacies cooked by El Slobador's mother, Mama. Mama is the worst cook in the world, and she appreciates the fact that this gringo is the only person who really enjoys her cooking. ("Nobody, not even you no good papa! -- ever appreciate Mama's cooking like this beautiful gringo!" "My no good papa still be here if he no eat Mama's cooking!")



Finding that Jughead has an unlimited appetite and will eat anything, the banditos all give him their food so they won't have to eat Mama's "rotten cooking."

With Mr. Lodge still in the hospital, Veronica, Betty and Archie decide that the only way to rescue Jughead is to go down to El Slobador's hideout and offer themselves as his new hostages: Veronica explains that Lodge won't pay to save Jughead alone, but he will pay to get her back.



When Betty, Veronica and Archie get to the hideout (El Slobador: "What is this, gringo country club?"), Jughead offers them one of Mama's tamale pies. Betty and Veronica eat one and immediately spit it out and writhe in pain.

BETTY: Jughead, that's terrible!
JUGHEAD: It's hard to take at first, but it'll stick to your ribs.
VERONICA: So would a can of Elmer's Glue All, but I wouldn't drink it!

When El Slobador finds out that Veronica is Senor Lodge's daughter, he decides that he can keep her and kill Jughead. (Jughead: "Thanks a lot, guys. Eveerything was great when I was his only hostage.") El Slobador is about to cut off Jughead's nose and send it back to America, but Jughead is saved by two things: one, Mama hits her son on the head to stop him harming her favorite gringo:



And two, El Slobador's men inform him that they don't want Jughead hurt, because if he dies, they'll have to go back to eating Mama's cooking.



El Slobador reluctantly agrees that Jughead is saving their lives, but he asks how they're going to make any money off this hostage situation. Archie, Betty and Veronica suggest that they should just stop being banditos, which the men laugh at: "It's tradition. All the men in this village are banditos and all the women are horrible, rotten cooks." But, while Jughead is in the hideout still eating everything in sight, Archie points out the real problem here:



Veronica then suggests that instead of being banditos, they should go work at her father's plant. The banditos are reluctant until she points out that the plant has its own cafeteria with food that is not made locally. Instantly every bandito in the village is lining up to apply for work at the American factory.

So the Lodge plant is saved, Jughead is safe, and the foursome return home. They visit Mr. Lodge in the hospital, where he has recovered from the laughing fit that almost killed him. Jughead thanks Lodge for entrusting him with this diplomatic mission by giving him a souvenir from the adventure -- one of Mama's tamale pies.

WKRP Episode: "Baby, If You've Ever Wondered"

The ninth episode to air in the second season, this episode is about the dreaded moment for every radio station -- the day the ratings arrive. It sort of wraps up the original premise of the series, resolving the original question of whether Andy would be able or willing to do what it takes to change the station. This episode is in many ways the one where the characters were really finalized: from this point on, all eight characters would be pretty much what they are in this half-hour.

Music includes: "Goodbye Stranger" by Supertramp, "Don't Stop Till You Get Enough" by Michael Jackson, and "Rockin' My Life Away" by Jerry Lee Lewis (who was probably the artist whose music was featured most often on this show).


WKRP s02e09 Baby, If You've Ever Wondered by carpalton

The Sleaziest Family Movies Ever

Someone should really write a biography of Joe Pasternak, the Hungarian refugee producer who saved Universal -- with his Deanna Durbin movies and Destry Rides Again -- and then moved to MGM and made stars out of Mario Lanza, Jane Powell and Kathryn Grayson. He produced hit movies for over 30 years, more than that if you count the films he produced in Germany and Hungary before he fled to America. None of his movies are great and few of his movies after his move to MGM are even good (some of his Universal productions still hold up very well), but he was probably MGM's most successful producer in terms of consistent box-office results, and he kept producing hits long after the rest of MGM was in a state of free-fall. So while Arthur Freed's musicals were way better than Pasternak's, Pasternak had fewer expensive flops and probably more big hits. And after the market for original musicals started to shrink, he re-calibrated and made a bunch of successful non-musical "family comedies" that could have been musicals if they'd had a few extra songs.

It's these '60s "family comedies" that are a strangely fascinating cultural relic, because Pasternak's success in this field involved making some of the sleaziest family movies in Hollywood history: movies like Where the Boys Are, The Courtship of Eddie's Father, Penelope and Please Don't Eat the Daisies are a very strange mixture of wholesome entertainment and sentimentality, the kind of thing Pasternak had known how to do since the '30s, with a large dose of sexism, leering and other examples of what passed for hip in the Rat Pack era. TCM showed two 1963 Pasternak productions the other day, The Courtship of Eddie's Father (directed by Vincente Minnelli, who had been Freed's guy rather than Pasternak's) and A Ticklish Affair (directed by George Sidney, who had worked for Pasternak as far back as Anchors Aweigh). Both are ultra-cutesy family comedies about adorable widows and/or widowers with adorable sons. But Courtship has a bunch of boob and butt jokes and the most sexist line in movie history, while A Ticklish Affair has, among other things, a scene where Red Buttons admires the short-shorted gyrations of Shirley Jones -- who plays his sister.



Nothing was sleazier than '60s family entertainment, for reasons I've outlined before, but somehow Joe Pasternak seemed to take it up a notch, so that his movies seem squarely aimed at the perfect early '60s family: two kids, one martini-swilling mom and one dad who leers at everything in skirts. It's like a series of movies for the people in Mad Men.

Towards the end of his career Pasternak, of course, wound up producing a couple of Elvis Presley movies, the kind of movie that's synonymous with wholesome sleaze. Neither of them were anywhere near as good as Viva Las Vegas, though (which was produced by Jack Cummings, the quietest of the big MGM musical producers but in some respects the most tasteful). Two of the writers on those films, Ted Flicker and George Kirgo -- who, like many writers in the '60s, bounced back and forth between medium-budget movies and TV -- recalled a bit about what it was like to work for Pasternak at a time when he was basically the only successful MGM producer left at the crumbling studio:

THEODORE J. FLICKER: Joe Pasternak called me and said, "The studio thinks that these two kids, Sonny and Cher, are going to be stars. What if you wrote and directed a picture for these kids, Sonny and Cher? You know, like "A Hard Day's Night"?" And I said, "I would love it!"

GEORGE KIRGO: Now this was a Friday when we talked, and over the weekend, Sonny and Cher were out and Presley was in.

THEODORE J. FLICKER: Joe called me and said, "The studio's decided that Sonny and Cher are not going to be big stars, and so they've cancelled the project. I feel terrible about this. But I've got an Elvis Presley picture going. You could write that, but you can't direct it because Norman Taurog" -- he won an Academy Award for "Skippy" (1931) -- "has already been signed to direct it." And I said, "Fine. The only thing is, this I won't write alone." I said, "I know who I want to write it with -- can I bring another writer in?" And he said sure, so I called George.

GEORGE KIRGO: He told me it was for Joe Pasternak, and I said, "I know Joe. Okay. What's it about?" And Flicker just shrugged and said, "We'll figure something out."

Tiny Toons and Freakazoid DVDs Announced

Freakazoid! season 1 and Tiny Toon Adventures volume 1 will come out on July 29, the week after the San Diego Comic-Con (where, hopefully, Warner Brothers will give the sets at least some promotion).

The good news is that the first Tiny Toons set will have 35 episodes, meaning that if the pace keeps up they'd be able to release the whole series in only three sets. (This may be a nod to the problems they've encountered in getting out the fourth Animaniacs set.) Hopefully it'll sell well enough at the high-ish price point to justify bringing out the rest of the series. The episodes will be not in production order but airing order, which I think works better. If you look at the episode list you'll see that they "front-loaded" the run by putting many of their best episodes in the first couple of weeks; the poorer episodes, with bad animation or scripts that felt like recycled '80s Saturday morning cartoons (like "Sawdust and Toonsil," which has every '80s cartoon cliche imaginable, all played straight instead of parodied), were saved for after the show had already established itself.

Since Freakazoid! is my favorite of these shows I'm hoping like crazy that WB brings out the second of the two short seasons. The extras look terrific, including audio commentaries and original network promos, which the other shows don't have. How much information the WB lawyers have edited out this time remains to be seen/heard, but with F!, much of the stuff we need to know is in the show itself, like its frequent mockery of the WB's original conception of F! as a "toyetic," merchandisable show.

Jules Dassin Dies, But Never On Sunday

Jules Dassin died Monday at the age of 96.

Like Richard Widmark, whom he directed in Night and the City, Dassin is someone whose reputation was hugely enhanced by the renewed popularity of film noir. He made some great American postwar noirs and noir-ish films, and when work dried up in the U.S. due to the blacklist, he took the American noir style to France and made Du Rififi Chez Les Hommes, which completely revolutionized crime movies all over the world.

Rififi wasn't the first heist movie -- The Asphalt Jungle and The Lavender Hill Mob among other films had done something similar -- but its success made the "caper" movie, where the main focus is on an elaborate plan and how it plays out (and specifically how things don't go quite as planned), hugely popular for the next 15 or 20 years. Movies like The Pink Panther or shows like Mission: Impossible wouldn't exist without Dassin's film.

Obscure Musicals: KEAN

There are very few Broadway musicals that flopped even though they were completely satisfying. In fact, I'd say there haven't been any: if a show flops, it almost always had at least one really serious flaw. But the flawed musicals are often more interesting than many of the hits, which is why I often find myself listening to the flops and thinking about them more often than many of the hit shows.

One flop that was probably more interesting and ambitious than any hit musical of its season was Kean, a 1961 star vehicle for perhaps the greatest male star of the musical theatre, Alfred Drake. Most of the great stars of the musical stage have been women: Mary Martin, Ethel Merman, Gwen Verdon. Drake didn't do as many shows as they did, but he was one of the few men, perhaps the only one, who was such a strong, larger-than-life personality that he could completely dominate an evening. He also had a larger-than-life persona to match any female superstar's: though he first became famous as the original lead in Oklahoma!, it was in Kiss Me, Kate and Kismet that he really came into his own by developing an unusual, tongue-in-cheek style. He had a good baritone voice, maybe not as good as some of his contemporaries, but he used it as a slightly over-the-top parody of old-fashioned musical theatre singing and performance. It was a tricky act because if he'd taken it even a little too far, he'd have wound up being campy and taking the audience out of the story; he didn't go too far, and the result that he came off as hipper and more self-aware, and more genuinely funny, than any romantic leading man in the history of musicals.

His greatest achievement was Kismet, a show that was tailor-made for his style: it was a tongue-in-cheek, deliberately over-the-top takeoff on operetta where the whole show was just like Alfred Drake himself. It's been said that Drake's performance in Kismet was the musical-comedy equivalent of Laurette Taylor in The Glass Menagerie, a one-of-a-kind performance that can't be described and can't be forgotten. After starring and directing in a flop non-musical play, Love Me Little (Drake didn't have as much luck with non-musicals as he did with musicals), he was ready to do another musical. Kean was essentially a self-produced vehicle; the credited producer was Robert Lantz, but Lantz was Drake's agent. Drake brought back many of the people who did Kismet, including songwriters Robert Wright and Chet Forrest; they had mostly specialized in adapting the music of other composers (Borodin in Kismet, most famously) but this time they were given the go-ahead to do a completely original score. And for the book, the production team hired a young and very talented writer, Peter Stone, who would go on to write Charade and 1776.

The source material for Kean was a play by Jean-Paul Sartre based loosely on the life of the great Shakespearean actor Edmund Kean. As set out in the musical, Kean's problem is, well, existential: he is only "real" when he's acting and he has no idea who he is offstage, no idea whether anything he feels or says is real or fake. He deals with two potential love interests (a woman who dumps him for the Prince Regent and a young aspiring actress who winds up playing Desdemona to his Othello); the climactic scene comes when Kean, forced to make a public apology, "lets Shakespeare apologize for him" by building his apology entirely out of Shakespeare quotes. By doing this he comes to terms with the fact that his identity is inseparable from his acting; "you make me real," he tells his audience.

This is pretty ambitious stuff for a musical, and it was, of course, perfect for Drake, who got to do absolutely everything: comedy, drama, romance, violence, Shakespearian acting and wearing awesome period costumes. It also had a fine production: Jack Cole, the great choreographer who had been a big part of the success of Kismet, directed and choreographed the whole show, bringing big splashy theatrical gestures to every scene, like the opening number, "Penny Plain, Tuppence Colored", where a street vendor walks down the theatre aisle and up onto the stage selling commemorative cards of Kean in his greatest roles.

The biggest flaw of the show, the crippling flaw, is that there was really no one and nothing for the audience to root for. Kean's identity crisis is very ambitious and raises a lot of questions about art and life, but it's not a very theatrical problem: because his problems are mostly internal and philosophical, they can't be clearly stated in song or script. And the problems that can be clearly stated -- romantic problems and so forth -- are not very interesting because they are subordinate to the philosophical problem. And so you had a great star performance in a great-looking show that didn't go much of anywhere.

A subordinate flaw was that Wright and Forrest, as songwriters, were better at writing for Drake than they were at writing genuinely memorable songs. (On their own, I mean; their Kismet songs are great, but most of them owe a big debt to Borodin.) I like the score, but it's not a great one. You can see why Drake wanted them for the show: they write to his strengths, all his strengths, and they are good at expressing some of the more obscure issues of the play in music and lyrics, but their melodies are more functional than memorable. "Sweet Danger," the big love ballad (and the closest the show came to having a hit), is typical: the music is essentially imitation Tchaikovsky, complete with that vaguely Slavic extention of the melody in its fourth phrase, but it does move the plot along and the lyrics are cleverly written to work either as a standard love song or a song of pretend Kean-style love: "We'll be in love, and we won't care."

KEAN Sweet Danger
Uploaded by tobiagorrio

Another song even more skilfully tailored to Drake's strengths, and almost certainly the best song in the score, is "To Look Upon My Love," where the first refrain is a love song and the second refrain is played for laughs.

KEAN To Look Upon My Love
Uploaded by tobiagorrio

But then there are other songs in the score that work theatrically but don't work so well as songs. Like "The Fog and the Grog," a song for Kean and his drinking buddies (including Chris "Mr. Belvedere" Hewett). Some people really like this number and I understand it went over well in the theatre. I find it hard to like, and the wordplay in the lyrics is the stupidest until (and similar to) Sondheim's "the puddle where the poodle did the piddle."

KEAN the fog and the grog
Uploaded by tobiagorrio

With mixed reviews and no hit songs, the show was always in trouble; it might have run longer on Drake's star power, but his health was not the best at the time, which caused him to start missing a lot of performances. This hurt the show in that it made it harder to make changes and fix it during the tryouts (a lot of changes were made after the Broadway opening, presumbably because by then Drake was in the show more consistently and they could judge how it was working). Anyway, the show closed after a little over 100 performances.

Kean, unfortunately, would be Drake's last original musical, though he did play the Maurice Chevalier part in the Broadway version of Gigi.

WKRP Episode: "Carlson For President"

The sixth episode of season 2, the plot every comedy is required by law to do at some point: a character runs for local office. The freelance script doesn't always get the characters quite right (well, Herb is totally in-character as the sleazy campaign manager), but the episode does have some excellent bits like the Star Wars commercial, the altered campaign poster, Les's Armenians line, and one of my favorite dialogue exchanges from the show, the "muy dinero" bit. Also, the episode contains a bunch of Nixon references.


WKRP s02e06 Carlson For President by carpalton

Tex Avery Speaks in 1933

I paid for a one-day pass to the archives of the Dallas Morning News and in the process of looking for something else, I found an interview with hometown boy Fred "Tex" Avery -- from 1933, when he was working on Oswald the Lucky Rabbit shorts. Some of the article is unreadable, but I'll attach it as an image file (click on it to see it enlarged) and transcribe some Tex quotes of interest:

"Sometimes when we are rushed or are behind on a picture we resort to cheating which means making a character do some one thing over and over. For instance, we'll make Oswald chase the dog for a longer stretch than usual. In this way we can use the same drawings over several times and save ourselves hundreds of drawings."

"Pooch the Pup is only six months old. He has lots of possibilities. But Oswald is about eight years old. Just now we are working for a bigger and better Oswald.'

"Every friday afternoon we have a gag meeting for the entire office force. We suggest a week beforehand in what locale the next picture is to be shot. The following Firday when each man comes to the gag meeting he has on hand all the gags he can think of to suggest as laughs for the next picture. Everybody in the office force passes on the gags to be used and we're a pretty hard bunch to please, because we always have more than we need. For each picture we have two such meetings.
"An example of thse gags was a bullet scene. It was a western and as usual the hero was shooting it out with the villain. The hero shot his gun and the villain shot his. There was a cut and the next scene showed a little bullet and a very large one running towards each other in mid-air. The little bullet saw the big one, squealed weakly and ran back into the barrel of the hero's gun. All of which was supposed to be good for a laugh."

"If a character is going to say 'hey,'" continued Mr. Avery, "We take a mirror and say 'hey' ourselves and see how our mouth looks and then draw him accordingly. Sometimes you'll see a fellow" (he calls them all kids or fellows for they're all between the ages of 24 and 30) "get up and start skipping down the aisle between the desks. We don't bother to even look surprised because he's just trying to see how to draw a character trying to skip."
"Do you have to be a finished cartoonist to be an animator?" we ventured timidly.
"Quite on the contrary. The secret in animating is first to have an everlasting sense of humour, next to be able to see the commonplace in a funny way and most important of all, to be able to sketch your idea so that the other person will think it's funny."

"Recently we've had the majority of our laughs as puns on the film stars. Of course, they're going to get enough of it soon and put a stop to it, but it's always good for a laugh while it lasts. I like drawing an animal with a mouth like Joe E. Brown or a nose like Schnozzle Durante."
"Do you ever see or work with any of the film stars?" (We had to ask the inevitable.)
"Oh, they come to visit all the time. They have as much curiosity as anyone and very few people know how animateds are really made. Nancy Carroll and Gary Cooper were in just a few days before I left [on vacation]. She's a cute trick and rather smart. Yes, Garbo has been in," and he laughed the I-knew-that-was-coming laugh. "They always create a little turmoil but it quickly subsides and everybody goes back to work."

"We had a heck of a time trying to get the sounds for a lone tree falling in one of the Pooch shorts. But finally we found that a bamboo pole slowly split would give the sound of the squeak that precedes a fall and then one of the boys stood on a chair and dropped another chair to the floor to give the crash as the tree hit the ground. It wasn't bad either. I do all the talking for Oswald in a little high squeaky voice and it ruins my throat for days. Another boy in the office who can throw his voice even higher talks for Kitty, Oswald's girl friend."

And the article also mentions his nickname:

Avery had on a [?] silver ring with "Tex" engraved on it, which brought forth a multitude of questions. It seems that as usual the Californians have dubbed him "Tex" so he was just wearing his hospital tag.

RIP Richard Widmark

An unusual star whose reputation has increased in recent years with the renewed popularity of noir. A lot of his Fox movies are really more semi-noir than pure noir, but Widmark always felt like a noir icon, and along with Kirk Douglas he set the tone for a lot of lead actors to come by taking the brutality of his villains:



...And applying it to his "heroes":

Grudge Match: Carla Tortelli vs. Sophia Petrillo

Battle of the small, foul-tempered Italian ladies played by Jewish actresses in popular '80s NBC comedies: Carla Tortelli (Rhea Perlman) from Cheers vs. Sophia Petrillo (Estelle Getty) from The Golden Girls.

Will Carla's unmatched RAGE™ and comparative youth give her the advantage, or will Sophia use her mafia experience and dirty-tricks ability to destroy Carla?

One thing is for sure: nobody is going to dare to try and break up this fight.

Phlegmation, or "We've Suffered Enough On Saturday Mornings"

I came across a taped-from-TV copy of one of the last good "Animaniacs" cartoons, "Back in Style" written by Tom Minton and directed by Liz Holzman. This cartoon was sort of a tour through animation of the early TV era; the Warners are loaned out by the struggling Warner Brothers to various cartoon companies (a take-off on Warners' loan-out of Porky and Daffy to Filmation's "Groovie Goolies").

Unfortunately the cartoon was animated by Akom, which had to do a lot of re-takes just to get the so-so level of animation in the finished cartoon, and the timing is not as sharp as the best earlier episodes of Animaniacs or Tiny Toons. (I don't know the exact reason for it, but even in cartoons animated by good studios like TMS, most the later "Animaniacs" cartoons seem to suffer from timing that's just slightly off and pacing that's just a little too slow.) But the slam on Filmation -- the endlessly recycled shots and walk cycles, the pointless voice-overs covering over-long establishing shots -- is a lot of fun and must have been very cathartic for ex-Filmation people.



Minton wrote a bit about this cartoon in comments at John K's blog last year.

LOVE AFFAIR, Unluckiest Movie Of All Time

TCM ran Leo McCarey's Love Affair the other day, which reminded me that I'm not sure which of the many public-domain versions of this film to buy. Can anyone recommend a DVD of Love Affair that has decent picture/sound quality?

When I say Love Affair is the unluckiest movie of all time, I'm talking about what happened to it many years after it was released. This film really should have become one of the great classics of all time, since it has everything: one memorable scene after another, two great lead performances (Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer) and one equally memorable supporting performance (Maria Ouspenskaya). But the same director remade it as An Affair To Remember, and he remade it almost line-for-line and scene-for-scene. And since Love Affair fell into the public domain, it couldn't get the kind of exposure that it might have gotten had it been part of a studio library. (I know that It's a Wonderful Life became more popular because of its public-domain status but that doesn't usually happen. Most of the time a movie that falls into the public domain gets a bit devalued because it circulates in such terrible prints.) Which means that all the great scenes from Love Affair are best-known to the public in their Affair To Remember incarnations, and Love Affair, which should be known as a masterpiece, is instead mostly known as the trial run for AATR.

I think AATR is a good movie, but Love Affair is much better. The casting, for one thing, is better. Grant and Kerr are fine in AATR (Grant in particular is way better than he usually was in the '50s, an example of how much more he gave when he had a director he respected) but they are both a little bit miscast. These are parts that were tailored to Boyer and Dunne, the charming Continental playboy and the spunky American singer. Cathleen Nesbitt can't compete with Maria Ouspenskaya in the original, either. And while McCarey's technique is very much the same in both films -- he has the basic dialogue and blocking but he lets the actors improvise bits of business and delivery, and tries to make the scenes come out as natural as possible -- everything in the remake is just a little more formal and souped-up than the original. The ending is a sure-fire tear-jerker both times, but in the original, Boyer and Dunne are so natural together that you almost feel, as in all of McCarey's best movies, that they're not really "acting." And there's a bit more comedy cutting through the sentiment even here: look at the reaction shot of Boyer when Dunne tells him "if you can paint, I can walk."





Because it was remade, Love Affair's uniqueness has been de-valued a bit, but it really is an extraordinary combination: a romantic comedy combined with tearjerker soap opera combined with religious drama combined with elements of the musical. I can't think of an American director other than McCarey who could have brought off this mish-mash and made it all feel organic and somehow real. The remake is good, but the seams show: the elements don't cohere.



This brings us to the fact, as a commenter once pointed out here, that Irene Dunne was a very unlucky movie star in that many of her best films were remade starring other people. When studios remade an older film, they tended to withdraw it from circulation for a while so as not to create comparisons. (And when MGM remade Show Boat they bought Dunne's version from Universal just so they could prevent it from being reissued.) She was one of the greatest stars of her time, certainly the most versatile, but the fact that so many of her movies were un-promoted for so long made her more obscure than she ought to be.