Magazines 1980-1989
It started with a handshake. In March 1982, I was all of 25 and I had been without a full-time job for a year or so. My first gig out of college had been at Firehouse magazine (1978-1981), where I learned all I ever wanted to know about the fire service industry. After two-and-a-half years on that job, first as assistant editor and then as associate editor, I had had enough. I left for a gig at Americana magazine – which started as a promising partnership and ended up a disaster. I left after six months – writing about firefighters was more my thing apparently than making rocking chairs seem interesting – and I took off for a year to write my first book, produce cable TV's Videosyncracies, and discover improvisation. And then I got my job at Habitat. While there, I wrote a great deal of freelance stories for various pulcications, and in the process, met a number of my childhood idols: Patrick McGoohan, Raymond Burr, the cast of Monty Python. And I got paid for it too! Nice work if you can get it and for a while, I did.
A Chorus Line
A CHORUS LINE
1985. Michael Douglas, Alyson Reed, Terrence Mann, Audrey Landers; dir. Richard Attenborough: 117m. (PC-13) Hi St D cc $79.95. LV $34.95. CED. Embassy. Image; excel.
If A Chorus Line is a play about faith, the overpowering, almost mythical belief actors have in their profession, then A Chorus Line: The Movie is an appalling demonstration of a director's lack of faith in his material. Granted, the show's story and structure have defeated many in the 10 years it took the musical to reach the screen. It is an intensely theatrical experience, a show in which actors, alone on a bare stage, reveal their loves, fears, and dreams to the voice of a faceless, offstage (and to them, omnipotent) director.
What's amazing is not the film's failure-artistic success would have been a surprise-but that it fails so miserably. Director Richard Attenborough evidently believed so little in the musical that he has junked its key elements. No longer a play about actors, it is now about two sophomoric lovers: the director, Zach (Michael Douglas), and chorus girl/dancer Cassie (Alyson Reed). The other actors' lives and monologues become fodder for the pair's fights and flashbacks.
Never has a director worked so hard against his material. Dance numbers are effectively obliterated by closeups, reaction shots, and jumpcuts. Backstage scenes, extraneous exteriors, and silly flashbacks open up the intense, intimate audition situation. The movie's style is wildly inconsistent, starting off cinema verite and then jarringly turning to highly stylized songs. And those songs: badly overdubbed and accelerated to a disco beat, they parody the originals, which were gritty, amusing, and simple. "What I Did for Love" has been given to Cassie, changing it from a moving actor's hymn to a trite lover's lament.
But that's par for the course in this predictable mishmash. It certainly says something that 10 years after seeing the play I can still remember moments and characters vividly. Ten minutes after this ended, all I could remember was how infuriatingly bad it was.
VIDEO, FEBRUARY 1988
Art Schneider
ART SCHNEIDER
A Veteran Editor a Cut Above the Rest.
For Art Schneider, A.C.E., it was one of the most memorable moments in his life. Bob Hope was taping a 1965 comedy special.
on NBC and Schneider, Hope's videotape editor since the 1950s, was standing offstage when Hope called him out. "Most of you don't know what goes on behind the scenes during the editing of our show," began Hope. "We have a man in the basement ... who fixes all our mistakes, and we'd like to honor him tonight with the annual Bob Hope Show Crossed Scissors Award for Jump Cutting Above and Beyond the Call of Duty.
To many in the industry, Schneider has always been known as "Jump Cut," the editor's editor, racking up screen credits and awards almost since the beginning of television. As an NBC staff engineer from 1951 to 1968, Schneider edited over 500 variety shows, documentaries, music specials, series and news programs, winning four Emmys in the process. His work helped define the medium.
From the start, Schneider's modus operandi has been to edit quickly, efficiently and seamlessly. To improve video editing in the '50s-a cumbersome process, which involved the hand-splicing of tape-he worked with his colleagues at NBC to develop the first offline editing process as well as an early time-code system. As chief editor of the network's Rowan and Martin's Laugh-in in the late '60s, he was notorious for his organization and imagination.
"To edit Laugh-in, we had to adapt the technology to our concepts and not vice versa," says Laugh-in Creator and Producer George Schlatter. "At the time, video editing was primitive and considered a technician's job. Art helped change that. It became an artistic job."
Schneider's ambitions once lay elsewhere. When he was 18 and a model-airplane enthusiast, he entered the University of Southern California with the goal of becoming an aeronautical engineer. He explains, however, that he couldn't master the math required for the field. "I changed my major three times before I finally settled on cinema studies," he recalls. "There's not much math in that."
Schneider soon found he had a knack for cutting film, and it was during his senior year that a professor introduced him to an NBC executive searching for a film editor. "The job they offered was simple-editing leaders onto kinescopesbut they didn't want to spend the time training beginners how to edit," recalls Schneider. "They wanted someone who already knew how to do it."
A four-hour job interview led to what would be a 17-year career at the network. Although eventually he became the network's supervising editor, he began as a "Group 2 Engineer" -handsplicing videotape and film, and operating kinescope machines and camerasbecause the term "editor" was not officially sanctioned by NBC until the '60s.
Schneider worked constantly, averaging 40 to 50 shows a year and racking up such credits as 51 Bob Hope shows, three critically acclaimed Fred Astaire programs, and specials starring Judy Garland, Pat Boone, Milton Berle and Jack Benny. "My USC training in cinema really helped," he says-particularly for specials, "which were tricky. You couldn't just grind them out like [you might on a] series. The star wanted to put the best foot forward."
In 1967, Schlatter, a former colleague from NBC's Colgate Comedy Hour, apI proached him with the Laugh-in pilot. "I thought it had a funny name and a pretty thick script," Schneider recalls, "but I said, 'Fine, I'll do it.' " The script was thickfour inches, to be exactand, at a time when 80 edits an hour for video was considered excessively complicated, Laugh-in weighed in at about 400. "It was a gargantuan task," says Schlatter, "and Laugh-in may have been the first show on TV whose editor was recognized for the contribution he brought to the whole."
With its quick blackouts, short sketches and zany music pieces, Laugh-in was an editor's nightmare. Schneider, with Schlatter at his side, spent three weeks of 20-hour-a-day edits to produce the pilot. "At the end of the first assembly [which took five days], George didn't like what he saw. He sat back and cried, 'What have I wrought?' " recalls Schneider, who wound up recutting the program five times. "After the fifth, George was satisfied, but I was still bothered by something that didn't quite click. I couldn't sleep, thinking about it." Then, as he lay in bed, he had an inspiration:
He would add a tag scene after the closing credits-a discarded piece of footage of Arte Johnson as a Nazi saying, "Verrrry interesting." Not only did Schlatter love the touch, the bit became a catchphrase of the series.
In 1968, Schneider left NBC to form, with Schlatter, Burbank Film Editing (where he continued to work on Laughin). Schneider left in 1970 to work at CFI, where he stayed until 1976 and helped develop the first CMX 300 on-line editing system. From there he freelanced on a variety of projects, including off-net hours for syndication and documentaries on pollution. In addition, he served on the board of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences; became a member of the SMPTE education committee; and began writing (over 50 articles) and lecturing on his profession.
Although recently semi-retired, the 59year-old editor is keeping busy. In March, for example, Focal Press published Electronic Postproduction and Videotape Editing, Schneider's history of and guide to working the TV editing business. And he is currently writing a new book, A Dictionary of Postproduction Terms.
"To be successful," Schneider concludes, "you have to be very, very dedicated. And you have to work your butt off."
WRAP, September/October 1989
Christmas Movies
The Spirit of Christmas Past
Ever-popular holiday movies and specials are back on the box this year.
Holiday spirit or holiday humbug? Charles Dickens enjoyed writing Christmas stories that fairly vibrate with good cheer, sentiment, and warmth. His contemporary, Anthony Trollope, thought such tales were a cynical exploitation of the season. No matter who was right, the equivalent of the Victorian Christmas story is still intact and is on the air today. Christmas-oriented movies and specials and holiday episodes of regular series appear throughout December-many rerun from past years and all emphasizing love, harmony, and the importance of relating to others.
If past practices are followed, the movies and TV programs that will be shown this season should include most of the ones in the following list. Although there will be some new programming, stations prefer the traditional 'because, says one observer, "people like to anticipate these specials. There are so few things they are sure of these days."
A Christmas Carol. Perhaps Charles Dickens' most popular story, his 1843 A Christmas Carol has been the basis of countless movie and television? adaptations, most of which invariably tum up on the tube during Christmas week., Among theatrical films, there is a 1935 British version called Scrooge, a 1938 MGM film starring Reginald Owen, a 1951 adaptation with Alistair Sim (generally considered the best), and a 1970 musicaJ (also titled Scrooge) with Albert Finney singing Leslie Bricusesongs. A 1979 made-for- TV movie called An American Christmas Carol updates the story to 1933, casting Henry
Miracle on 34th Street. The best of the Christmas goodwill movies, Miracle on 34th Street (1947), is show'n every year'on local stations during the' holidays. This amusing story about a Macy's Santa Claus who must' prove in court that he is the real Kris Kringle won Academy and Golden Globe awards for writer-director -George Seaton and for Edmund Gwenn, who plays Santa with just the right amount of naivete, charm, and worldly wisdom. Co-starring Maureen O'Hara, John Payne, and a young Natalie Wood (as the girl who doesn't believe in Santa Claus until the end), the film delivers a message that never gets sentimental-to trust and believe in people. Although it ~as remade in 1973 with Jane Alexander, David Hartman (now host' of Good Morning America), and Sebastian Cabot, the 1947 version still remains the favorite.- (A 1977 TV Guide poll ranked it number 9 in a list of the 13 most popular movies on TV; Casablanca and King Kong headed the list.)
March of the Wooden Soldiers. Originally titled Babes in Toyland (but renamed to avoid confusion with the 1961 Walt Disney movie), this 1934 film was among Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy's most financially successful efforts and the most ambitious project undertaken by their producer, Hal Roach. Casting Laurel as Stanley Dum and Hardy as Oliver Dee (characters who incorporated attributes of Mother Goose's Simple Simon and the Pieman), two employees of a cantankerous Santa Claus in a Toyland populated by human-size mice, pigs, and rabbits, Roach and his collaborators completely discarded most of the Victor Herbert operetta on which Babes was ostensibly based, keeping only some of the score. As one critic pointed out, Roach combined "elements of Mother Goose with the hoariest of screen villains, the heartless landlord, and bogeymen straight from the Brothers Grimm." The movie was a critical success as well, with critic Andre Sennwald, in the December 13, 1934, issue
Great Expectations. Although Dickens' great book has almost nothing to do with Christmas, apparently TV programmers find its Victorian flavor especially appropriate, because various film adaptations appear regularly this time of year. Although adaptations of the novel were made in 1934 and 1974, most stations prefer to broadcast the superlative 1946 David Lean version. Dickens' story of a young boy, Pip, brought up with "great expectations" of love and money, is a romantic tale of disillusionment and mystery. Noted Gerald Pratley in The Cinema of David Lean: "What Olivier has done for Shakespeare on the screen, Lean has done for Dickens." Great Expectations is perhaps the most effective translation of novel into movie ever made, the first adaptation of a Dickens story to masterfully capture the flavor of a novelist many claim to be well suited for the screen. Although Lean and his cowriters pared and edited the mammoth 1861 novel, they retained the right scenes and characters to capture the spirit of the story. Here is the convict Magwitch (Finlay Currie) confronting the young Pip (Anthony Wager) on the desolate moors. Here is Miss Havisham (Martita Hunt) in her decaying mansion, Satis House, plotting revenge on the world. Here is Jaggers (Francis L. Sullivan, repeating his role from the 1934 version), the imperious lawyer only interested in "facts, facts, facts." And here are Alec Guiness (in his first film role), John Mills, Valerie Hobson, and Jean Simmons brilliantly bringing life to Dickens' gallery of unforgettable characters. Great Expectations earned a place on The New York Times' list of "10 Best Films" of 1947, Academy Award nominations for best picture and director, and awards for cinematography, art direction, and set decoration.
A Crosby Christmas. Almost as much as Santa Claus and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Bing Crosby came to epitomize the Christmas spirit, through songs such as "White Christmas" and his holiday TV specials. He also appeared in four very popular Christmas movies. Holiday Inn (1942),
It's a Wonderful Life. Frank Capra's movies, although "Capra corn" to some, epitomize the Christmas spirit. In Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), and Meet John Doe (1941), Capra trumpeted human virtues in sentimental stories of Americana. It's a Wonderful Life, made in 1946, was his most whimsical, a "Christmas Carol" tale reaffirming the common man's essential goodness. The movie, Capra's first postwar effort for his own company, Liberty Films, was based on "The Greatest Gift," by Philip Van Doren Stern, a short story written for a Christmas card. Dalton Trumbo and Clifford Odets had worked on the screenplay for another producer, but when Capra bought the property (for $50,000), he used other writers and concocted scenes of his own. The movie tells the story of George Bailey (James Stewart), a would-be suicide who believes his life is a failure until his guardian angel (Henry Travers) shows him what life would have been for his family and friends if he hadn't existed. In the end, the townspeople gather to support George in his greatest financial struggle, proving that no man faces the world alone as long as he has friends and love. It's a Wonderful Life, which received five Academy Award nominations (but no awards - The Best Years of Our Lives took them all that year), is Capra's own personal favorite among all his films (he watches it each Christmas). It was remade for television in 1977 as It Happened One Christmas, with Marlo Thomas in the Stewart role.
The Homecoming-A Christmas Story. Before there was The Waltons, there was this 1971 forerunner, a TV movie featuring Patricia Neal, Edgar Bergen, and Richard Thomas in the kind of warm family tale that became a staple on the popular series. The story, based on Earl Himner Jr.'s recollections of his youth (previously the basis for the 1963 Henry Fonda movie Spencer's Mountain). won critical kudos, a Christopher Award, and three Emmy nominations. It also convinced CBS to try a, series, and although The Waltons was a slow starter in tho ratings, it became the most popular show in its tirneperiod for seven years. The Homecoming, rerun almost every year, appeared five times on Variety's "Toprated Movies on TV, 1961-1979" list, a record for a TV movie.
Amahl and the Night Visitors. On Christmas Eve 1951, NBC broke new ground with an opera, by Gian-Carlo Menotti, specifically written for television, Amahl and the Night Visitors, and the network rebroadcast the story every year until 1966. Well received by critics and viewers, the story concerns a crippled boy's encounter with the Three Wise Men on their way to the Christ child, and the Christmas lesson he learns about giving. In 1978 NBC staged a new version" filmed in London and Israel, which has been rebroadcast on public television every year sInce.
Children's Specials. The best children's specials are usually the older ones. A Charlie Brown Christmas, first broadcast in the 1960s, shows there is more to Christmas than commercialism. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964), with Burl Ives singing the hit song, uses stop-motion (animation of three-dimensional figures) to tell how Rudolph saved Christmas. How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1966) is a Dr. Seuss cartoon-poem narrated by the late Boris Karloff, while Frosty the Snowman (1970) depicts the life of a happy snowman. "When things are produced for little children," an ABC executive remarked in TV Guide, "they have a new audience every year. Peanuts specials will run till the sprocket holes wear out."
Christmas Videotapes. If you can't catch a special or TV episode when it is broadcast, you can always record it on videotape or, sometimes, rent or buy it. The above-mentioned movies available on tape include: Scrooge (1970), Miracle on 34th Street (1947), Holiday Inn (1942), It's a Wonderful Life (1946), and Babes in Toyland (The March of the Wooden Soldiers, 1934). Also available are three special Christmas tapes: The Night Before Christmas and Silent Night, Holy Night, both holiday cartoons; and Merry Christmas to You, a compilation of cartoons and Christmas episodes of Lassie and The Lone Ranger from the 1950s. Prices begin at $64 in most stores.
DIVERSION, December 1982
Doctors on Film
Saintly surgeons: Raymond Massey (left)and Richard Chamberlain in Dr. Kildare.
THE DOCTOR'S DILEMMA
The Changing Image of the Doctor
on Film and in Television
By TOM SOTER
written for MD, October 1989
When Evan Flatow graduated from Columbia Medical School, the keynote speaker was not a cardiologist or a surgeon. He was Alan Alda, the actor. "Ours was the first to have a non-medical figure address our college," recalls Flatow, who now practices in New York. "Everyone was impressed by his character (Dr. Hawkeye Pierce on TV's M*A*S*H). You know, they say a non-doctorr can give a better commencement address than a doctor. And it's true."
Many doctors are also saying that television and film physicians make better doctors than the real thing - at least in the public's eye. "I became a doctor in part because of Ben Casey and Dr. Kildare," notes Dr. Peter Hesslein, associate professor of pediatric cardiology at the University of Minnesota. "When I was coming out of college in the sixties and early seventies, I had a strong urge to be a public servant, and those shows made medicine seem very attractive. Agrees Dr. Thomas Barnard, a cardiologist in New York: "I saw Dr. Kildare as a kid. It was exciting and glamorous."
Indeed. At the height of their popularity in the early 1960s, Kildare and Caseywere watched by 32 million teenagers a week. Comic books, board games, record albums, and even a popular "Ben Casey"' medic's shirt flooded the market, while Kildare star Richard Chamberlain became a recording star with a vocal version of his show's theme. "Ben Casey was sort of like a surgical Perry Mason," observes Carole Mann, a fan in Amarillo, Texas, in Cult TV. "He was the kind of take-charge guy that I thought I'd want to marry - totally in control."
To the public at large, that was the standard image of a doctor: "We were made into kind of demi-god," says Dr. Christine Edwards-Freeman, a New York-based obstetrician and gynecologist, an all-knowing figure, dispensing words of wisdom with a helpful injection. Those beliefs were borne out by a poll taken in the 1960s that found the public rated physicians second only to the Supreme Court justices for compassion, integrity, and sagacity.
No longer. In an age of cynicism, doctors – like most extablishment figures – are viewed with increasing mistrust. "We now get a lot of negative press," claims Dr. Steven Lamm, a clinical assistant professor of medicine at the New York University School of Medicine. Agrees Hasslein: "People used to expect miracles from doctors. We were viewed as geniuses. Not anymore." An October 1989 New York Times op-ed article, for example, discussed hospital care, concluding with the observation: "We can no longer assume that the interest of the health provider is in the best interest of the consumer. Health care is big business."
How did it come to that? And what role did films and television play in the real-life doctor's fall from grace? To understand, we must examine the fictional physician's long-standing image. "He was usually strong-willed and humanitarian," notes Dr. Mark Goetting, of the pediatric-intensive care unit at the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit. "He was good, but shallow in the sense that there was almost never a struggle about the right or wrong of what he was doing. There would never be a questioning of medicine or of the procedure."
Insuch films as Calling Dr. Kildare, Magnificent Obsession,and The Quiet Duel, the physician was a noble superman who could cure illnesses in a single bound. So great was his power that on Emergency, a 1970s TV series about paramedics, he could operate on a lamb suffering from smoke inhalation and cure him. To Ben Casey (Vince Edwards), the "operating room [was] like a church," and the surgeon was the divine messenger. So much so, in fact, that in The Citadel(1938), the idealist new doctor (Robert Donat) must battle mistrust and hatred to cure tuberculosis. "I'm not going to be influenced by ignorance and superstition!" he cries out messianically. "I'm working for these people and will not let their stupid prejudices stop this work!" As the elderly Dr. Zorba (Sam Jaffe) explains on Ben Casey: "We ae not just men. We are doctors...Therefore we can and must work under great stress."
Ben Casey comic book.
Even when doctors are shown to be less-than-good – as they are in The Citadel in which most physicians are more interested in relieving bank accounts than pain – the bad side is depicted simply to highlight the good. "Your work isn't [to earn] money," remarks the hero's wife (Rosalind Russell). "It's bettering humanity."
That impression persisted through countless films and TV series, aided and abetted by the American Medical Association (AMA). To needy producers and writers, the AMA offers lists of doctors who can act as consultants. To news reporters, it provides footage and reports on the latest medical breakthroughs, along with packaged interviews of physicians. Consequently, in such TV shows as The Doctor, Doc Corkle, Doc Elliiot,, D. Hudson's Secret Journal, Medic, Rafferty, The Nurses, Marcus Welby M.D., The Interns,and Caseyand Kildare, the physicians as missionary soon became a cliched portrait as the medico offered drugs and psychological insights. "You chose the wrong girl," dynamic Dr. Joe Gannon (Chad Everett) advises a patient on Medical Center. "She was unhappy, lonelly. She's willing to trust her life to you. If that doesn't make you somebody, then all your dreams and fantasies weren't true!"
The effect all these shows had on the public was clear-cut. "Adult patients in general expect a doctor to wear a white coat, be slightly gray at the temples, stroke his chin and say, 'hmmm,' a lot," notes Hesslein. Agrees Lamm: "The physical appearance of the doctor on TV is of a suave, sophisticated, and elegant person. And on TV, hospitals are always neat and orderly – not frenetic as many hospitals are. We can't meet those expectations."
The film and TV doctors spend whatever time it takes and whatever care is needed to find a solution. On Ben Casey, the smolderingly handsome Casey becomes obsessed with the problems of an elderly architect who may or may not have suffered a stroke. On Trapper John, M.D., recalls Goetting, "Trapper would buck the system and lose his temper – not because he was a person who was having a bad day but because he was indignant that he didn't have enough money to treat a patient. When a doctor failed – as one did on Medical Center, collapsing from overwork – it was only because he was so dedicated and selfless that he was pushing himself to an extreme. Explains Goetting: "Here is a person so concerned, so essential, that he is running himself down."
The Citadel: MDs as fallen angels.
In addition, doctors always knew best. "Their course is always well-planned and interference would be for some social reason, like a religious objection to the transfusion of blood," notes Goetting. "There was never a questioning of the medicine or the motivation of the physician. The doctor was always right." In Life for Ruth, for example, a dedicated doctor (Patrick McGoohan) battles the religious beliefs of a young girl's parents in an attempt to get her a life-saving blood transfusion.
Because of such portraits, notes Edwards-Freeman, "everyone comes to the doctor with a pain and you're supposed to feel them and say, 'Ah ha! This is why you're suffering,' and then cure them. The media has built us into gods." Adds Barnard: "Most of these shows succeed in terms of technical accuracy, except that the doctors always had a textbook case, with the latest state-of-the-art therapies available. In real life, however, you don't have a textbook disease. Usually you have an array of complicated problems: diabetes, heart disease, hyper-tension, problems at home with your wife. Real [health-care] problems don't fit into a slot as neatly as we like."
The media image has created some dangerous stereotypes, as well. "In cardiac arrest, less than 10 percent of the patients will wake up. You may be able to get the heart restarted, but there is usually massive brain damage. Yet if you watch Emergency, you'd think CPR is wonderful. It creates the impression among the public that once the paramedics arrive, everything will be okay. That's not the case."
Similarly, many medical shows put forward almost magical surgical solutions – heart and liver transplants, for instance – that mislead the public. "Heart transplants are not performed that often," explains Barnard. "You have to have the right patient and the right situation. You wouldn't give a heart transplant to someone who had a multi-system problem, where the heart is sick and so is the liver and something else might fail." 
Medical Center's James Daly (left) and Chad Everett.
Television images create other misconceptions, too. "People expect to see a male doctor," says Dr. Marcia A. Harris, a New York obstetrician and gynecologist. "A lot of times, patients can't accept the fact that I'm a doctor. They think I'm a nurse. Especially the older womem. They'll say, 'Send me the real doctor.' I say, 'Honey, I'm as real a doctor as you're going to see.'"
Other times, the sick cannot understand why there is no answer for their ailment. In Ben Casey, a stroke victim is cured through surgery (after Casey discovers it wasn't a stroke after all), while on Medical Center, a young woman with a benign tumor on her spine is saved via an operation (and also finds true love with another patient). Marcus Welby takes such cures to ridiculous extremes, as the folksy Welby (Robert Young) diagnoses and treats the most exotic diseases imaginable. "For a family pediatrician," observes Barnard, "he saw an amazing variety of diseases – the kind that a major medical referral service like Massachusetts General Hospital might see. He would always find the cure." (While in medical school, Barnard and his fellow students often tried to diagnose the weekly rare disease before Welby did. "It was a great game," he says.)‘
Yet, claims Edwards-Freeman, "the TV producers have, if you'll pardon the expression, 'doctored' things up a bit. Illnesses don't always work out well." Agrees Lamm: "Television has greatly exagerrated our ability to cure everybody. We are given omnipotence." In real life, adds Barnard, "sometimes people get better and go away and you never know what it was that was bothering them. That's disconcerting to a patient. He never knows what he had; but you can't have doctors on shows come in and say, 'We don't know what you have. Rest at home and come and see me in two days.' That's not what people expect." Barnard cites the first experience he had with AIDS in 1978. "We took tests, offered treatment, but just couldn't figure it out. And that happens real often. But the shows give you the idea if you get something, go to the doctor, he'll put a label on it, give you some medicine, and you'll get well." 
Lionel Barrymore (left) and Lew Ayres in a Dr. Kildare movie.
That raises another issue: depicting the mundane. Not every case is as dramatic as the ones on television, and some require extensive and boring treatment. "The media want a cure for cancer every day," says Dr. Alan Matarasso, a New York plastic surgeon. "When they do a TV program or a movie, they're not interested in the nuts and bolts work, they want action. But 50 percent of an intern's time is not spent cutting up victims: it's doing scut work: drawing blood, taking someone to a chest X-ray." Adds Barnard: "There are a lot of things that are chronic, that patients have to live with. And chronic problems are not very dramatic. You don't see a guy coming in for treatment – one day he's better, the next day he's worse. That's not very exciting."
By not showing such aspects of the physician's work – as well as ignoring his paper work and home life – these programs made it difficult for patients to understand why doctors couldn't spend as much time with them as the TV physicians do. "On television," remarks Lamm, "a doctor sees one patient throughout the show. I'm seeing 30 patients a day. There was a time when physicians would go to the office early, see maybe 40 patients, then go on house calls, then get home at 10, 11 at night. Today, physicians are demanding a little more of a private life. A lot of doctors are not willing to work from 8 A.M. to 11 P.M. It's not good for a normal human being and is counterproductive. If I go home at 7, I'll be a more sane individual."
Yet the image persists. On Quincy, a crime show about a crusading forensic pathologist who is a former private practice physician – Dr. Quincy (Jack Klugman) will order multiple tests on individual cases, undertaking a lot of the investigative footwork himself. "It's very unrealistic," complains Goetting. "In Detroit, the average number of bodies that arrive for an autopsy in a morgue is 11 per day. Plus there is a very tight budget. If the state ordered the number of tests Quincy did, or spent that much time on individual cases, the other cases would suffer. On Quincy, it looks like time and money are no object. The mission is paramount. That's just not accurate."
Toshiro Mifune in The Quiet Duel.
Money restrictions are the reality. With rising costs caused by rent, staff, malpractice insurance payments, and medical school bills, many doctors must see as many patients as possible. "Bill Cosby plays a doctor on The Cosby Show but he always seems‘ to be at home," says Edwards-Freeman. "I guess personal envy is involved, but I wonder how he does it." Agrees Dr. Michael Mitchell, a New York pediatrician: "You are on call 24 hours a day. Marcus Welby hurt our image. You would see Welby, with no bags under his eyes, always refreshed, smiling, perky. He was never rushed because he had a roomful of people in the waiting room."
"The costs of doing health care, malpractice insurance, and hiring a well-trained staff are causing physicians to become businessmen," notes Dr. Richard Stein, acting chief of cardiology at the State University of New York Health Science Center. "We have to charge more, see more people, and our income is still diminishing. If I was primarily interested in money, it would make more sense today for me to get a two-year MBA or a three™year law degree. That's more cost-effective than four years in medical school and six years in post-graduate."
Such costs are cutting into the humanitarian aspect most often depicted on television. Matarasso points to a colleague who did Medicare work and was reimbursed only 37 cents. So he says, 'To hell with it. I won't see indigent patients, only well-heeled ones.' The government says take care of the indigent, but what profession can afford to do pro bono work? If I go to a clinic and stitch on some guy's hand and it doesn't work properly because the guy didn't follow instructions, some lawyer can sue you for malpractice. I did it for free, so who needs it? They say there are two ways to get rich: win at Lotto or sue a doctor.'
These pressures were rarely explained in medical shows – until St. Elsewhere premiered on NBC in 1982. Here was a new kind of doctor show, one that explored the personal stresses of being a physician. Depicting a seedy hospital called St. Elgius in Boston, a typical episode might depict a doctor being mugged in an emergency room, a mentally ill patient wandering the halls, and/or two doctors making love on a slab in the morgue. "That series came closest to my experience as an intern," notes Dr. Elissa Ely, a Cambridge psychiatrist who did a medical internship. "The doctors suffered. They laughed. They cried. They lost patients. It was bloody."
On it, doctors made mistakes. In one installment, a patient died because of the faulty administration of a drug. "The doctor involved falsified the records," recalls Goetting. "That kind of thing happens. The program also showed conflicts that go on at hospitals: nurses bickering with doctors, rivalries and mistakes among interns. The accent was on the interpersonal." Dr. Craig (William Daniels) in St. Elsewhere "was dogmatic, condescending, arrogant," adds Goetting. "Technically, he's a good surgeon, but he offends people because he's so arrogant. On occasion, he would make a mistake. But you could understand why."
Nonetheless, for all St. Elsewhere's realism, many physicians feel it, too, is a fantasy. "There's just more drama than you'd find in an average hospital," remarks Barnard. "People being killed in car wrecks, murderers and rapists running loose – it does happen, but not every week. That can skew the perspective."
Some claim, though, that such shows have really helped create a balance by offsetting the omnipotent image of the past. "I don't know if the stereotype of the decadent doctor first appeared on TV or if TV just reflected a public perception," says Goettling, "but television doesn't depuct physicians as missionaries anymore. It depicts them as people of undistinquishable motivation."
David Morse in action on St. Elsewhere.
"What's good about these medical shows is that they show a side that nobody in medical school bothers to explain," remarks Dr. Charles Goodrich of New York. "There is a human side to being a doctor. Students are taught medicine but not how to help the human being to get better and healthy, which is a complex affair, involving science and sociology." Notes Lamm: "A lot of physicians treat the disease, but it takes a lot longer to treat the patient. In the old days, all we could do was hold their hands and watch them die. But now medicine is so much better, we don't have to spend as much time with them."
Lamm recalls a visit from an 82-year-old woman with a cough. Within a minute and a half, he had diagnosed the problem, "but I couldn't just say that. It wouldn't have been satisfactory to her. I had to hold her hand and explain the symptoms, that she'd have this cough and that it was normal and tell her that she'd live. That's important – and it takes time."
"Until we face the fact that cures are not just microbiological, we're going to miss the boat," adds Goodrich.
"You've got to look at the psychosocial cause of a disease, as well. The roots of cancer lie in a subtle interweaving of internal and external stresses. AIDS is a good example. There is a human health solution: reduce AIDS risk behavior rather than just treat the disease."
In the end, most physicians agree that all cinematic and video doctors are based on an important societal need. "From a patient's point of view, a lot of what we do is magic," explains Hesslein. "I think for our work to have an effect, that has to be. I firmly believe that if a patient believes in what you're doing, you're on the right track. He will feel better no matter what you do. That's why shows like Kildare, andCasey had a strong public following. Patients like to look on us as almost faith©healers, and we may be happy to foster that belief. It might not be an honest view. But it's what people want doctors to be."
Fawlty Towers
1975, 1979. John Cleese, Prunella Scales, Connie Booth, Andrew Sachs; dir. John Howard Davies, Douglas Argent, Bob Spiers. 4 cas. 90m. ea. $29.98 ea. CBS/Fox. Image: good.
Cleese
SUGAR IN THE SALT SHAKER
By TOM SOTER
from VIDEO, March 1987
Everyone has stayed in a bad hotel at one point or another, but it's unlikely anyone has ever had the ill luck to check into a seaside resort hotel as horribly run as Fawlty Towers. The Spanish waiter speaks no English; guests die; and there is sugar in the salt shaker. And if you try to complain you could get involved in an exchange like this:
Guest: "These prawns are off."
Hotel Manager: "But you've eaten half of them."
"Well, I didn't notice at the start."
"You didn't notice at the start?"
"Well, it was the sauce. I wasn't sure."
"So you ate half to make sure. Do you want another first course?"
"Well, cancel it."
"Cancel it! Deduct it from the bill is what you mean."
"As it's inedible."
"Only half of it's inedible, apparently."
"Well, deduct half now and if my wife brings up the other half during the night we'll claim the balance in the morning."
That's the kind of place Fawlty Towers is, primarily because that's the kind of man hotel manager Basil Fawlty (Cleese) is-a toadying, bullying, hilarious hotelier who can turn a fire drill into an exercise in insanity and can never, ever get anything right. To Basil, hotel guests are an encumbrance, people who "expect to be waited on hand and foot while I'm trying to run a hotel...poking around for things to complain about." Basil is hindered and helped by Manuel the nitwit waiter (Sachs), whose broken English is only' matched by his broken intelligence, waitress/maid/aspiring artist Polly (Booth), and his wife, Sybil (Scales), a sharp-tongued engine of efficiency.
The 12-episode BBC series is pure genius, a show that alternates between side-splitting farce (Basil and Manuel trying to find a runaway rat while a hotel inspector prowls about) and cutting dialogue. To call Fawlty Towers the funniest series ever made may be an overstatement, but not much of one. It is certainly the funniest show ever made about a hotel-a wild, terrific comedy feast that is nearly flawless.
CBS/Fox has released the entire series on four cassettes of three episodes each. Check in!
Hitchcock Rarities
Rare Hitchcocks Rediscovered
Those who wondered what Alfred Hitchcock did before Psycho (or North by Northwest. Vertigo and Strangers on a Train. for that matter) will be happy to learn that Hollywood Select has released 17 of his earliest films, some never before available on video. Among the treasures are a film – the director called "the first true Hitchcock picture"- The Lodger, a 1926 silent about Jack the Ripper-as well as some atypical entries. The Ring (1927) is a story of two prizefighters in love with the same woman. Champagne (1928) is a romantic melodrama which Hitchcock claimed was "the lowest ebb of my output." The Manxman (1928), his last silent picture, concerns a poor fisherman, a lawyer and the woman they both love. There's also Juno and the Paycock (1930), based on the Sean 'Casey play; Waltzes from Vienna (1933). a biography of Johann Strauss, which Hitchcock described as "a musical without music made very cheaply," and Rich and Strange (1932), perhaps the most fascinating of the bunch. The dialogue and characterizations in this tale of a middle-class couple traveling abroad are from the stone age of cinema, but the innovative cutting and other effects mark Hitchcock's early genius.
To call these titles rare is an understatement. Prior to this release, many existed only in film libraries or in private collections. According to Conrad Sprout, the president of Hollywood Select, there are just two copies of Juno in this country. He had to send a messenger. to England to obtain a copy of Waltzes. "I know where to find them," he says, "because I'm a movie buff and a collector myself."
VIDEO, October 1988
I Am a Fugitive
I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang
B&W. 1932. Paul Muni, Clenda Farrell; dir. Mervyn Le Roy. 76 min. Beta, VHS. $59.95. Key. Reproduction: B +
Despite its hokey title, this early sound classic is tense and exciting. One of Warner's Depression-era "social protest" films, I Am a Fugitive features the great Paul Muni as James Allen, a down-and-outer sentenced to 10 years' hard labor in a Southern chain gang for a petty crime he didn't commit. Allen is innocence betrayed, and the movie makes a telling case against the inequities of a system that allows society's poorest to suffer the most. But the film's drama is not all didactic: there are two thrilling escape sequences and a suspenseful manhunt in which Allen bareiy avoids capture. Director Mervyn Le Roy (who later produced The Wizard ofOz, ofall things) opts for a documentary style which effectively builds tension until the downbeat ending. The VHS reproduction is fine for a film this old, with good sound.
VIDEO, 1988
Improv: A History
COMEDY ON THE EDGE
By TOM SOTER
from DIVERSION, February 1982
Three men and two women stand on a bare stage. Suddenly, quickly, each says one word at a time. "Jim" "went" "to" "see" "his" "mother." Faster and faster, they speak until the five sound like one person telling one complete story. It is an impressive performance, and even more impressive when one realizes that it is completely improvised.
When most people think of improvisation, they think of quick jokes, one–liners, and stand–up comedians. Yet when most stand–up comedians think of improv, they are puzzled. "Most of them think we have a wonderful storehouse of one–liners that we just associate with the situation," said Paul Zuckerman, producer and former cast member of Chicago City Limits, a New York improvisational troupe. "People don't really understand what improv is."
Improvisation is the "comedy of the moment," and it has become so successful since its rebirth in Chicago many years ago that dozens of improvisational groups have sprung up around the country, with a solid handful in New York City. It's no wonder, too: improvisational alumni include Robin Williams, Chevy Chase, Alan Alda, and Joan Rivers. Such TV series as Saturday Night Live and SCTV often developed material using improv techniques, further giving respectability to improvisation's brand of fast–paced humor.
What is improv? It has its basis in the commedia dell'arte, an Italian Renaissance form of theater in which a traveling comedy troupe would perform farces without a written script. Though the basic scenario was agreed upon, the pacing of the story often depended on audience reactions.
Modern improvisation started in Illinois in 1955 when students from the University of Chicago began performing improvised skits from their own scenarios. This group developed into the Compass Players and later into Second City, from which many other improv groups are descended. In the near–vacuum of political humor of the early '60s, Second City's off–the–cuff comedy –– dealing with literature, the Church, Korean War veterans, Joe McCarthy, and marijuana –– was as unusual for its material as it was for its method.
Compass Players
"When we started out at the Compass," recalled Del Close, one of the company's early members, "we were entertaining each other and our peers. Where did you go to hear jokes about Dostoevski or Newton's third law? Certainly not the burlesque house. And in the anti–intellectual environment of the Fifties, it took a certain amount of courage to stand up in public and admit that you had an education you weren't ashamed of."
Del Close: Compass Player
Taking a chance is one of the most important elements of improvisational work. But the risk is somewhat less than it might seem to the audience because the improviser is guided by training and by discipline learned and developed through a series of rehearsal/performance "games."
All these games involve skills that everyone everywhere uses without even thinking twice: listening, observing, and communicating. In fact, everyone improvises every day because everyone speaks off the cuff, without using a script: You listen towhat people tell you; you observe how they say it (are they angry or happy?); and then you communicate your response, either verbally or non–verbally. Everyone goes through this process –– but only improvisers turn it into an art form.
Improvisers also build on trust. First, they trust that their partner will help them –– and second, they train themselves to trust their first response to a suggestion by the audience or an idea by their colleagues. Trusting is one of the things that gets in the way of everyone when he or she is trying to create: every person can be spontaneous –– think of when you are having a good time joking around with friends; or of the spontaneity of children, who say the first thing that comes into their heads.
What gets in the way of spontaneity is our own self–censorship, our feeling –– taught us by our parents, our peers, our employers –– that there are certain "acceptable" and "unacceptable" things, and that we can look foolish if we do the latter and not the former.
Improv is about teaching a person that it is okay to look foolish and say silly things; that only by saying what is silly can you get to what is truly funny. The more you trust yourself, the more amusing you can be.
Similarly, an improviser must build up a bond of trust with his colleagues. Part of that means never denying the reality set up by his partner. When Joan Rivers was with Second City many years ago, said Close, "she would break the reality of a scene in order to get a laugh. Someone would say, 'What about our children?' and Joan would say, 'We don't have any.' Okay, you get a quick, easy laugh, but you've also punched a big hole in the scene. All the actors have on stage is each other's belief and faith and if that's gone, then you've just got cheap wit."
Improv is also about making assumptions. An improviser always tries to add information to a scene, in an attempt to be "active" and not "passive." An improviser asking "non–assumptive" questions –– ones that offer no information about him or the other character –– can cripple his partner because such questions do not further a scene. A player who asks, "What's that?" doesn't give his partner anything with which to work; he establishes no connection between them. On the other hand, a question like, "Aren't you ever going to take out the garbage?" implies both that the two know each other and that they have a particular conflict.
"Once the audience suggested 'film noir,'" recalled CCL's Paul Zuckerman about an improv exercise in which the improvisers tell a story using different movie styles. "What did that mean? I thought, it's a French word meaning 'black' or 'night,' and I thought of a school of film where you have incredible use of shadow. So I used that kind of imagery. Rather than saying, 'I don't know, so I'll just try not to be noticed.' You have to make a strong assumption."
CCL's Paul Zuckerman: noirish
Improvisers also observe their own body language, and trust that it will suggest ideas to them. "It is possible to get a clue from your body as to what kind of character you might be," explained Close. Standing pigeon–toed, for instance, with head bowed, might suggest to the improviser that he is a passive, submissive character; he might approach the cast member on stagehesitantly. If he thrusts his chest out, however, and holds his head high, that might suggest he is a powerful figure, on his way to the presidential suite.
Using your physical and emotional self is crucial in improvisation because the improviser, with so little time to think, is often playing a thinly disguised version of himself. You might be playing a pair of doctors and you don't know much about doctors. What's more important is that you're two men who happen to be doctors. The scene should not be about medicine but about how two people react –– realistically –– to a life and death situation.
On stage, of course, none of these theories are obvious. The improvs are fast and clever, and the audience responsive. Improvisation, in fact, is a mystery, and the reason audiences are interested is because everyone is trying to find the solution. "Improv is mutual discovery, mutual support," noted Close, "[it is] the adventure of finding out what it is we're doing while we're doing it. All you know is where you've been. You don't know where you're going."
Monty Python
By TOM SOTER
From: VIDEO, January 1987
And now for something completely familiar. Those who have been aching to add the Piranha Brothers, the Ministry of Silly Walks, and the Dead Parrot to their video collections should take heart. Those who don't know what we're talking about, be warned: Monty Python's Flying Circus is finally coming to video.
The British television series, which had passed over such possible titles as Owl Stretching Time and A Horse, a Spoon and a Bucket, was created by five Britons and an expatriate American from Minneapolis. It was a television groundbreaker that combined eccentric sketch comedy (a clinic where you pay to 'argue, be insulted, or be hit on the head) with bizarre,animation (a baby carriage that devours passersby). It came to America via public television in 1974 but was never available on tape until now.
"We didn't know when the best time to release them was," says Python animator-turned-film-director Terry Gilliam. "Since we got the [ rights to the show a while ago, we've been discussing the best way to present them. We could have sold to network TV and made a lot of money, but we finally said, forget it. We wanted 'them to go out without commercial breaks."
Monty Python's Flying Circus
The group decided to sign with Paramount Home Video after Python representatives met with Timothy Clott, the company's senior veep in charge of home video. Not only had Clott been very successful with his carefully packaged and advertised Star Trek videos, he was also a knowledgeable Python fan from way back.
"They were encouraged," says Clott, "and they were happy with our marketing plans." Paramount will release two 60-minute volumes at $24.95 apiece every three months. Each will contain two episodes linked thematically, not chronologically, and each will be packaged with bizarre Gilliam artwork. "There are diehard Python fanatics in every marketc place," notes Clott.
The same fans will also be happy to learn that a Flying Circus first cousin is also coming to video: Fawlty Towers. The 12-episode sitcom was created by Python John Cleese after a stay at an English seaside hotel. "The manager was so rude he Was fascinating," recalls Cleese. "He thought the guests were sent along to annoy him and prevent him from running the hotel."
That became the basis for this frantic farce, among the most hilarious-if shortlived--comedies ever made for television. Late guests, angry guests, even dead guests all get the same, bad-tempered treatment from hotel owner Basil Fawlty (Cleese), aided and rrustrated by his sharp~tongued wife, Sybil, his clever assistarlt, Polly, and his nitwitted Spanish waiter, Manuel. The series, taped in 1975 and 1979, ended when Cleese became bored with it, and is now coming to video in its entirety from CBS/Foxas part of the BBC's 50th anniversary celebration.
Original appearance in VIDEO
Peter Lorre
The pudgy moon-faced man cowers before the crowd, his eyes darting back and forth.
"Always," he says softly, "there's this terrible force inside me, driving me on. I'm always afraid of myself. Of people. Of ghosts." His voice is rising, becoming frantic. "Always I must walk the streets alone. And always I am followed-soundlessly. YetI hear it. It's me, pursuing myself. I want to run-to escape-from myself. But I can't. I can't escape. I must obey. Forced to run endless streets, pursued by ghosts. Ghosts of mothers. And of those children. They are always there-always!" He is screaming now. "Who knows what it's like to be me? How I'm forced to act. How I don't want to but must!"
It is Peter Lorre as Hans Beckert, pleading for his life in the climactic moments of Fritz Lang's M (1931), the story of a man driven by a compulsion to kill. It was Lorre's greatest role. It was also, in a way, a blueprint for his life. Like Beckert, Lorre was a man pursued by and pursuing his past, never able to obtain what he wanted in a 33-year film career which can now be seen on tape. He was tragically stymied by his talents and compulsions.
Born Laszlo Loewenstein in Rosenberg, Hungary in 1904, Lorre became fascinated with improvisational acting and psychology at an early age. "Psychology was Lorre's first love; his avocation," notes Stephen D. Youngkin in The Films of Peter Lorre. "He numbered among his patients the characters he rendered on screen." Performing in clubs and small theaters, the actor eventually caught the eye of playwright Bertolt, known for his "social" dramas, such as The Threepenny Opera. The writer was fascinated by Lorre's ability to suggest so much with so littleby widening his eyes or lowering his whispery voice-and there was a strange dichotomy in his boyish face and half-closed eyes. He seemed both innocent and malicious at the same time-a child ready to kill.
Lorre himself was aware of his unusual looks and exploited them fully. He realized he was not a traditional leading man, and so was reluctant to sign with director Fritz Lang when the filmmaker approached him in 1930 with a movie role. It was the part of a child murderer, based on the real case of a psychopath who killed because he had to. The story fascinated Lang as a treatise for the care of the insane, and he saw Lorre as perfect casting: he looked so cherubic himself, how could he be a killer?
For Lorre, who eventually accepted, the role meant more: it was an opportunity to capture a psychologically dense personality onscreen and make him attractive. The audience would feel for him even as they loathed him. "It is all a matter of understanding," he explained. "I did not see the actual murderer. I did not need to ....murder. His voice, his looks, his attitude all indicate a man betrayed; you can feel for him even as you fear him. "I won't go back!" he yells when threatened with a sanitarium. "You won't make me!" Yet all he could do was go back. "I remember that he referred to his work as an actor as 'making faces'," remarked a colleague, Margaret Taichet, in The Films of Peter Lorre, "and I'm sure there was a bit of boredom and bitterness that he did always get the same type of roles. "
A planned Broadway stage production of the life of Napoleon fell through. His personal finances were shaky, as was his health. In despair, he took on more horror parts, and his self-image reached a low ebb. (Typical of the fan mail received and the replies he gave was this exchange: "Dear Master, I would love to be tortured by you." Lorre: "You have been tortured enough by going to see my pictures.")
Then John Huston cast him as the effeminate Joel Cairo in his remake of The Maltese Falcon (1941), starring Humphrey Bogart. The performance-a mixture of childishness, menace, and suavity combines much from before, but is also a masterpiece of understatement. Cairo seems like a child playing grownup and he is compelled, once again, to kill and to search for the elusive, priceless falcon. More importantly, though, work on the movie rejuvenated Lorre's life. The camaraderie of the Warner Brothers production-Huston, Bogart, Lorre, and others would play cards between takes - helped Lorre enjoy his work, and he felt opportunities were opening up again.
He did more for the studio, most notably Casablanca (1943), in which he makes a small part a telling one. His two scenes bring out the essential Lorre: the slippery kid, wanting so much to be liked ("You must be impressed with me now") and the man trapped by powers beyond his abilities ("Rick! Rick! Help me, please! "). It is Lorre's life again, and he plays it with fervor.
These were to be his last great movies. Arsenic and Old Lace (1944) demonstrates his gift for comedy, taking the helplescompulsion of M to comic levels. It also introduces a new Lorre figure, also probably taken from the frustrations of his life: the happy boozer who copes with murder and mayhem through the bottle.
The films got worse now, and Lorre was never able to break away. He tried in vain to sell his old mentor Brecht's film treatments, and when the playwright left Hollywood in disgust was tempted to join him in a new European theater-company project.
It had been Lorre's dream to do serious work again, but it was too late. He didn't have the strength to give up what he had become.
"I can't stand living in Europe," he explained later. "I like Hollywood .... It is not a crazy, nervous place. An actor is less bothered here than anywhere else. You can live your life as you please and nobody cares." That was the problem. Nobody did care-about all the work Lorre put into his roles (the New York Times remarked that "Hollywood has used Lorre's tricks but not his talent"), about his frustrations, or about his money worries. He had been twice married now and had put his finances in the hands of an incompetent business manager. When it all came apart, Lorre returned to Germany in disgust.
There he made one last attempt to escape from the "ghosts" of his terror-movie past. Der Verlorene ("The Lost One"), written and directed by the actor, was a grim, realistic story of the aftereffects of World War II on Germany. Lorre played another tortured soul, as psychologically layered as Beckert had been, and also compelled in the end to murder. He put his all into the movie. "With a patience which I had never before experienced," noted an actress in the film, "Lorre tested further and further, until one gave oneself up almost unconsciously in order to be the person that one had to portray .... The filming was hard but wonderful."
Yet the movie was a critical and commercial failure. It was, commented critic David Thomson, the "turning point that failed to turn ... a worthy film that lacked his poetic eccentricity as a supporting actor."
For Lorre, it was effectively the end. He gave up trying to be a serious actor and relied only on his tricks-not his talent-to get by. Entering a sanitarium afterwards, he gained 100 pounds and became a grotesque parody of himself (when appearing in Five Weeks in a Balloon, Groucho Marx asked him, "Do you play the balloon?"). It was as though the lack of control in his career had been externalized in his girth.
He played in comedies, melodramas, horror parodies in movies, on television (which he hated), and on radio. He became, in such films as Tales of Terror (1962), a hollow man, a Beckert compelled to act no matter how degrading. "Making movies used to be such fun, " he said near the end of his life. "It isn't any longer. Now it's a very coldhearted business."
He died suddenly in 1964 of a cerebral hemorrhage. His last film was called, appropriately enough, The Patsy.
VIDEO, 1984
Sci-Fi Horrors
We have always been afraid of things that go bump in the night, of ghosts and ghoulies and spirits that mirror our fear of the unknown. But since the A-bomb exploded over Hiroshima, America's fears have become less fanciful, and more deeply rooted in reality. Technology, the cold war, nuclear apocalypse; the modern world is rife with potential demons and killers. As the Edmund Gwenn character puts it in Them! (Warner, $59.95): "When man entered the atomic age, he opened the door into a new world. What he will eventually find in that new world, nobody can predict."
Since the early 1950s, sciencefiction filmmakers have reflected, consciously or unconsciously, the public's anxieties, and have created some of the wildest and most thought-provoking movies ever made. Noted science-fiction director Jack Arnold agrees: "I think science-fiction films are a marvelous me~ium for telling a story, creating a mood, and delivering whatever kind of message should be delivered."
UNWELCOME VISITORS
Arnold was responsible for one of the earliest films of the "what scares us" genre: 1953's It Came from Outer Space, a subtly disturbing story about aliens who crashland in the American desert and are hunted and nearly killed by terrified humans. "It said that we as a people are afraid of anything that is different from us," the director explained. "If it's different, we hate it, we want to- destroy it. That's our failing as human beings."
Sometimes, though, that "failing" is the only thing that keeps us alive. More typical of the "invaders are coming" school are 1951 's The Thing (RKO, $29.95) and 1954's Them!, which featured menaces that cannot be reasoned with. In The Thing scientists and soldiers uncover a spaceship buried in the arctic ice. Its hulking pilot (James Arness) turns out to be a soulless, living vegetable bent on destruction. A scientist who tries to communicate with the visitor is brutally brushed aside; it's left to a group of resourceful soldiers to engage the alien in a violent battle to the death.
The creature in The Thing could have been a metaphor for the Russians as seen by 1950s America: emotionless, fearless, destructive. Similarly, the giant ants created by atomic radiation in Them! are perhaps another symbol for the "warloving" communists. In both movies there is a subliminal fear of science run amok, a fear of the bomb,which like the giant ants in Them! was rapidly proliferating beyond man's ability to control it. Them! screenwriter Ted Sherdeman noted:"Nobody' trusted the atomic bomb at the time." It was no coincidence that Them! (Warner Brothers' biggest-grossing release of 1954) was released soon after the ,Russians exploded their first hydrogen bomb.
Our fear of Russia also brought' a paranoid fear of brainwashing and foreign subversion. Invaders from Mars (Nostalgia Merchant, $29.95)-William Cameron Menzies' chiller about martians who take over the minds of humans· as a prelude to invasion-is an early (1953) example of Hollywood's preoccupation with this fear. But the definitive expression of such anxiety has to be Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Republic, $59.95), made in 1956. Based on Jack Finney's short novel The Body Snatchers, the movie is a grim chronicle of the relentless takeover of a small California town by alien pods. Humans are replaced with duplicates, exact in every detail' save one: They have no emotions. "There's no room left for love," explains one of the pod people. "It doesn't last. Life is simpler without it." The move is supremely successful as a thriller, but Invasion works on another level: as a parable about the dehumanization of man.
SCIENCE GONE AWRY
The fear of dehumanization has been expressed often by science fiction authors, from H. G. Wells to Philip K. Dick, and in movies, from Metropolis (Vestron, $79.95) to Brazil (MCA, $79.95). In one especially colorful film, 1953's The War of the Worlds (Paramount, $59.95), inhu-
man machines commandeered by equally inhuman martians nearly destroy the earth, but it was in the sixties and later that our fear of technology came into sharp focus. Films such as 1964's Fail-Safe (RCA/ Columbia, $69.95) and 1983's WarGames (CBS/Fox, $79.95) suggest that our growing dependence on machines may prove to be fatal. In both films, computers malfunction in such a way as to bring the world to the brink of nuclear Armageddon. Fail-Safe, which is loaded with speeches that keep hammering this point home, ends with the unsettling image of New York City destroyed, ironically, by American bombers, in atonement for the accidental destruction of Moscow.
In 1964 director Stanley Kubrick gave us Dr. Strangelove: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (RCA/Columbia, $69.95), showing a military chain of command run by lunatics. Dr. Strangelove's dark satire says that there is no hope for survival: Machines cannot protect us because they are built by men who are insane with their quest for power. Our only solution is to rid ourselves of the bombs-or else man's fate may reflect the movie's chilling conclusion ... the world's destruction.
But Dr. Strangelove's humor kept the film from being as harrowing as other nuclear-aftermath movies that have dealt with our fear of the bomb. The best of these films is probably On the Beach, Stanley Kramer's sober 1959 production featuring Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire, and Anthony Perkins, as survivors of thermonuclear war. All are in Australia, helplessly waiting for the nuclear fallout to drift south and kill them.
The movie, based on Nevil Shute's novel, is really a soap opera with a message, and it works wonderfully well. The everyday moments of these characters' livesfeeding a baby, riding a horse, going on a date-become tremendously important and moving, because each could be the last. Many scenes in the film are wrenching, and the viewer has to agree with one character, who cries out in anger: "It's unfair! I didn't do anything! Nobody I know did anything!" This outcry gives voice to two realizations: The characters' deaths are unjust, but also unavoidable.
The movie was controversialthe New York Daily News called it "defeatist ... [a] would-be shocker, which plays right up the alley of the Kremlin and the western defeatists and traitors who yelp for the scrapping of the H-bomb." But On the Beach was also a huge popular success and a worldwide money-maker. With its mixture of documentarystyle realism and heart-tugging sentimentality, the film set the standard for such subsequent "aftermath" epics as The Day After (Embassy, $79.95), Testament (Paramount, $59.95), and Threads (World Video, $64.95).
FUTURE SHOCK
A film that used the postwar theme as a starting-off point is '1968's Planet of the Apes (Playhouse,' $59.98). This thoughtful thriller encapsulates many of the fears of the fifties and sixties and is one of the most underrated sciencefiction films to date.
Charlton Heston is George Taylor, the last survivor of a quartet of U.S. astronauts who have landed on a topsy-turvy world where apes are the rulers, humans the beasts. Heston is perfectly cast; with his streamlined physique, he is the "perfect man" II la Michelangelo, constantly on the run to avoid the ape masters who want to lobotomize, castrate, or kill him. Rod Serling and Michael Wilson's philosophical script is given passion and energy by Franklin J. Shaffner, a director who stages action scenes with remarkable vigor.
The final irony of Planet comes when Taylor discovers that he has landed on the future planet Earth: Man has destroyed himself with the bomb and opened the door for apes to take over the world.
Besides starring in three more Planet of the Apes movies (the entire set is available from, Playhouse for $299.90: Planet of the Apes, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, Escape from the Planet of the Apes, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, and Battle for the Planet of the Apes), Heston also appeared in two other sciencefiction parables. In 1971 's The Omega Man (Warner; $59.95), he's the last survivor of a civilization destroyed by germ warfare, a rarely expressed cinematic fear. This frequently powerful movie pits Heston against killer mutants who have been created by a blunder of science.
Even more forceful in its message is 1973's Soylent Green (MGM/ UA, $59.95)~ The near-future world is overpopulated (New York City has forty million inhabitants); the world is grossly polluted (a green smog keeps temperatures in the ninetydegree range, day and night); and the world is dehumanized (lovemaking is handled by licensed prostitutes known as "furniture"). As director Richard Fleischer observed: "The idea was to make the people as recognizable to the people of today as possible, because it's a very short extrapolation from what we have presently in our society." In other words, the horrors of the future are right behind us-and gaining fast.
The ultimate mirror of our fears has to be Terry Gilliam's Brazil, one of the most visually stimulating films ever. Essentially a reworking of George Orwell's famous novel 1984, Brazil is the tale of a man swamped by a heartless and faceless bureaucracy. The story suggests that dreams are the only escape from the cold realities of the postmodern life in which the protagonist lives. Only in his dreams do romance, adventure, and pleasure exist-only in his dreams does he truly live.
DON'T LOOK NOW
Prophecy? Warning? Fantasy? The year 1984 has come and gone and 1984's vision has not come to pass. Perhaps cautionary movies like these help to cool things off by giving our fears a release valve they might not otherwise have. But we must not turn our backs on their warnings. Consider 1979's The China Syndrome (RCA/Columbia, $69.95), a story about an accident at a nuclear plant. Twelve days after the movie opened, the Three Mile Island accident was in the news. As one observer commented: "The bull's-eye hits in the picture are remarkable. China's reactor has a defective pump that vibrated itself into destruction; Three Mile Island had two defective pumps that vibrated so badly that they were stopped to prevent destruction. China's nearmeltdown threatened an area the size of Pennsylvania. Three Mile's was in Pennsylvania."
Scared?
VIDEO TIMES/October 1986
Scrooge
The publisher didn't believe in Charles Dickens' Christmas book – the author had to use his own money to finance its five-shilling color-plated first edition. But A Christmas Carol has always been popular: on the day it was first published, December 25, 1843, it sold 6000 copies. Since then it has earned additional fame through scores of dramatizations, including many film and television versions. Eight of these are now on tape, and they star an unusual cross-section of performers, from Alistair Sim and Henry Winkler to Mickey Mouse and Mr. Magoo.
"Should all of Charles Dickens' marvelous creations, from Mr. Pickwick to Edwin Drood, be suddenly threatened with extinction, the story of Mr. Scrooge would certainly survive," observes Michael Patrick Hearn in The Annotated Christmas Carol. "It has become part of Christmas folklore. " What most modern readers don't know, however, is that at the time of the story, the Christmas tradition itself was threatened with extinction. The Industrial Revolution had given impetus to a recent trend of people turning away from holiday cheer and charity, and by the mid-19th century many did not even look on the day as a holiday.
Dickens, who fondly remembered the old traditions (which were maintained more in the country than in the city), wanted to revive them, and the good will that went with them. He was also concerned about the plight of the poor, who depended ahnost. entirely on volunteer charity. "My heart so sickens within me when I see these scenes, that I ahnost lose the hope of ever seeing them changed, " he wrote after visiting a school for poverty-stricken children.
The author soon hit on the idea for A Christmas Carol as a way to address the issue. In the story he reworked a pair of previous tales to tell the saga of aged miser Ebenezer Scrooge-cruel to his underpaid clerk Bob Cratchit, uncaring of charities, and scornful of the Christmas spirit, which ·he called "humbug." On Christmas Eve Scrooge is visited by four ghosts: his former partner Jacob Marley, chained and damned because he refused to do good while alive; and the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come. These ghosts take Scrooge to witness scenes of his youth, of current Christmas cheer he is missing, and of his death and the joy it causes his debtors and "friends."
The story is most effective in its use of Tiny Tim, Bob Cratchit's "good as gold" crippled son, who will die from poverty if Scrooge does not change, and in its comment on the restorative powers of memory. It is by remembering, by seeing how he once was-kind, generous, unconcerned about the security of money-that Scrooge first begins to change, and to believe in Christmas. "Scrooge," notes Edgar Johnson in his definitive biography of Dickens, "is the embodiment of all that concentration upon material power and callous indifference to the welfare of human beings that the economists had erected into a system, businessmen and industrialists pursued relentlessly, and society taken for granted as inevitable and proper. The conversion of· Scrooge is an image of the conversion for which Dickens hopes among mankind."
The success of the book was more than Dickens himself could have predicted. Beyond the book sales, there were unauthorized stage versions, plagiarisms, and even a "sequel” (a book purporting to tell the life of Scrooge and Tiny Tim until the former's death). There was also a whole new genre: the "holiday book," which Dickens (and his contemporaries) continued to write every year, reworking the Carol's elements of the supernatural and holiday redemption.
And then came the film versions: silents in 1908, 1911, 1913, and 1914, then a slew of talkies, including a new TV adaptation this year starring George C. Scott. Most of these are now available on tape (the most noteworthy exception is the 1938 MGM adaptation starring Reginald Owen) and all offer something of interest to someone. Here's a chronological rundown of what's around, with particular attention paid to the humbug mixed in with the genuine holiday goods.
Scrooge (1935). For Carol collectors only: This was the first sound version of Dickens' story and it stars Sir Seymour Hicks, a distinguished British stage actor who had appeared as Scrooge in a 1914 silent version. His is the best performance in this fairly inept low-budget British production, represented here in a deteriorating print from Reel Images/Video Yesteryear. Dark figures walk in shadowy streets, made even more shadowy by the film's poor contrast. But that's the least of the film's problems.
Technical tricks were then limited in the struggling British film industry, so when Marley makes his appearance all we see is an opening door, a terrified Scrooge crying to the empty air, "Who are you?" and the reply: "Look well, Scrooge, for only your eyes can see me." Then the miser has a talk with a chair in the best Topper tradition. The visits to the past and present are equally wretched.
Although Scrooge's childhood is cut entirely, other familiar characters are here:
Tiny Tim, singing an off-key "Hark the Herald Angels Sing"; Bell, his ex-fiance, delivering her lines with what sounds like a German accent; and Bob Cratchit, looking and acting a lot like a humorless Stan Laurel. Hicks tries to overcome it all and has some success in making his character believable. And Dickens' happy ending still has a nice feeling, but it's not enough to pull this one out of the dumpster. As a curiosity Scrooge is fascinating. As drama it's dull.
A Christmas Carol (1951). This might be called the "Psychological Scrooge." More than any other version, Brian Desmond Hurst's adaptation, scripted by Noel Langley, emphasizes the motivations that guided Scrooge, making him less a symbolic figure and more a complex, tragic everyman. "Nobody ever cared for me, " the child Scrooge says to his sister. "Nobody ever will." This fear and its effects are shown in a series of new scenes, extrapolated from ideas in the story, in which young Scrooge betrays his kindly employer, abandons his fiance, and buys out his former' mentor. A deathbed encounter between Marley and Scrooge shows the depths to which his fear has taken him, unmoved by his best friend's passmg.
The 1951 Carol was created by two past masters of adaptation, Hurst and Langley, who between them had worked on' The Wizard of Oz, Ivanhoe, The Pickwick Papers, and Tom Brown's Schooldays. They were helped by a lively crew of professionals: Alistair Sim, Mervyn Johns, Michael Hordern, and Ernest Thesiger in a wonderful cameo as an undertaker waiting outside the door of Marley's room for him to die ("Ours is a highly competitive profession"). As Dickens enthusiasts, Hurst and Langley brought a loving attention to detail: the London stock exchange was used as a backdrop for one scene, real Victorian toys were employed for Tiny Tim's scenes in a toyshop, and Dickens' dialogue was used constantly.
And even when the words aren't his, they are unerringly on-key: "A message from Mr. Marley to Mr. Scrooge. Just say that Mr. Marley ain't expected to live through the night and if Mr. Scrooge wants to take his leave of him he should nip along smartly or there won't be no Mr. Marley to take leave of as we know the use of the' word." New scenes added – such as young Scrooge at work with young Marley (here played by Patrick Macnee, later of The Avengers) – are seamlessly Dickensian. Most wonderful of all, though, is Sim, who makes Scrooge's gradual transformation, from uncaring to joyful, completely believable.
The main fault in what is probably the best production yet are the tacky special effects (a twirling hourglass on wires represents the passing of time). These are not enhanced by the shockingly bad condition of the print used to make this tape. Besides scratches and dust, many frames are missing (which causes a lot of skipping), and the black & white contrast is poor, giving the darker scenes, obviously lit for atmosphere, a washed-out look. Inaudible sound often compounds the difficulty of understanding thick English accents. This Christmas Carol is a good film given a bad presentation.
Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol (1964). The premise of this TV musical, produced when the myopic Mr. Magoo was reaching the peak of his popularity, was typical of many TV adaptations of the Carol: the producers would take familiar series characters (such as Felix and Oscar in The Odd Couple, or Ralph and Norton in The Honeymooners) and cast them as Scrooge, Cratchit, and the ghosts in a retelling of the tale, usually done as a dream or a stage production.
In this Carol the miser is played by Quincy Magoo (astute casting since he could never see the world clearly in any of his previous cartoons). The plot follows the main points of the story (though it inexplicably switches the chronology of the Spirits of Past and Present), using a silly device in which Magoo acts as Scrooge in a hit Broadway version (though all the special effects and scene changes shown would have been impossible in any theater I know).
It's all pretty dreadful, from a series of forgettable Broadway-style tunes by Jule Styne and Bob Merrill ("I'm All Alone in the World," "Razzleberry Dressing," "Ringle, Ringle, Coins When They Mingle") to the limited animation employed (popularized by Hanna-Barbera Productions in The Flintstones and The ]etsons; George Jetson seems to be playing Cratchit). The colors are flat, the characters lifeless and jerky, and the whole show is inspid and commercial. The tape is also terribly reproduced, giving the whole thing an ancient look. Strictly for kids, and not very demanding ones at that.
Scrooge (1970). In 1968 Lionel Bart's musical Oliver!, based on Dickens' Oliver Twist, came to the screen, and it was such a hit that Leslie Bricuse (Dr. Doolittle, Goodbye Mr. Chips) conceived, wrote, and scored a musical rendering of the Carol. There had been musical versions before, but none as lavish as this colorful production, just released on video by CBS/Fox. Originally shot in widescreen, the movie's images are noticeably truncated in some spots, and there also seems to be a phasing problem in many points (the corner of the image often shakes and is out-of-focus).
Aside from these difficulties, however, the film is top-notch, a lively "family" adaptation that is best when it is faithful to the original tale and dialogue, worst when it gets too cute-as in an added sequence in which Scrooge visits Marley in hell and has a huge chain placed aroµnd him. The Oliver! -like songs include the popular "Thank You Very Much," "I Hate People," and "Father Christmas." There's a lot of dancing, good cheer, and special effects, ably hat!dled by a cast that includes Alec Guinness as Marley's ghost; Edith Evans, Laurence Naismith, and Anton Rodgers. Albert Finney looks as though he is enjoying himself as the miser and has an affecting scene when he watches and vainly tries to change his past. Dickens might have enjoyed this one. Ronald Neame, who handled The Poseidon Adventure, directed and seems to have based many of his camera setups on the 1951 Carol.
An American Christmas Carol (1979). You can almost see an executive coming up with the idea for this TV movie: "A Christmas Carol is old-hat. Let's update it to Depression-era America and get the hottest star on TV today, Henry Winkler. It can't miss."
Surprisingly, it doesn't, thanks in large part to Winkler's sensitive performance as the Scrooge character, renamed Benedict Slade, an unscrupulous loan shark in Concord, New Hampshire in 1933, and also thanks to Jerome Coppersmith's excellent script, which captures the spirit of Dickens' story without sticking to the letter. For instance, the ghosts are all here, but this time; in best Wizard of Oz fashion, they are people Slade/Scrooge has cheated.
The approach makes the story even more universal (if that's possible), showing that the facts of the tale may change but the essential truth remains: we so often shut our eyes to what is around us, pretending we don't know, when we really don't want to know. When Slade sees the effects of his actions (courtesy of the three spirits), he tries to excuse himself by pleading ignorance. But as the Cratchit figure (well played by R. H. Thomson as a decent man trying to keep his job and conscience) explains to his daughter at Tiny Tim/ Jonathan's grave: "When someone is remembered with love, their spirit never , really dies. So instead of looking for someone to blame, let's make a promise to each other. We will always remember little Jonathan."
Memory is movingly worked into this version, with touching performances by Susan Hogan and Chris Wiggins, and a superb job by Winkler as Slade, aged 22, 36, and 80. The scene in which he brings the means of salvation to Little Jonathan is so well-played that it brought tears to my eyes; it is an effective use of sentiment in which Winkler's actions belie his external crustiness. He becomes a lovable curinudgeon whose bark is no longer as vicious as his bite.
The direction, by Eric Till, is crisp, using" visual cues to imply future events (a burning cigar on a desk tells how a fire in the next sequence began), and the lighting recalls the sepia look of old Christmas cards. There are no technical problems to speak of; the colors are well-reproduced, and the sound is fine. "This is an entirely new approach to the Dickens story," Winkler said in 1979. Yet in being new, the filmmakers really went back to the basics and came up with a thrilling interpretation of the same message of charity and goodwill upon which Dickens himself was so keen.
A Christmas Carol (1982). This Australian animated film is part of "The Charles Dickens Collection," a series of Dickens adaptations acquired by Vestron. In style it is much like the old Classics Illustrated comic books, and as such it is faithful to the source material and can serve as an introduction to the story if nothing better is on hand. Beware: the colors are flat and dull, and the animation – though pretty good by modern standards – is jerky and limited compared to Disney or the old Warner Brothers cartoons. The voices often don't match the intent of the words (the Ghost of Christmas Past seems peevish, and Scrooge is cruel even when he's trying to be nice). It's a wonderless retelling, a message without any merriment.
Mickey's Christmas Carol (1983). Walt Disney's name has become synonymous with kid's stuff. A Christmas Carol is essentially a child's story, for as Dickens said, "If we can only preserve ourselves from growing up, we shall never grow old and the young may love us to the last. Not to be too wise, not to be too stately, not to be too rough with innocent fancies, or to treat them with too much lightness are points to be remembered."
That could be the credo for this wonderful half-hour cartoon, which returns to the form the studio pioneered. This version (Disney's second) casts familiar characters in the roles: Scrooge McDuck is the miser (with the voice of Alan Young, Mr. Ed's Wilbur, who also worked· on the script), Mickey Mouse is Bob Cratchit, the Giant from Mickey and the Beanstalk is the Ghost of Christmas Present, and Goofy is Marley. As one animator points out in the revealing Making of Mickey's Christmas Carol tape: "There was a challenge in every character in this picture because the part the cHaracter was playing sometimes didn't meet up exactly to the part the character was .... Goofy is a fumbling, bumbling idiot. .. but he had to play Marley, who has to scare Scrooge somehow .... That was a big problem. . . I think we handled it successfully. "
They do it by remaining faithful to the tale's main points and having fun in the process (Goofy trips and falls down the stairs; the Giant/Ghost cries "Fe Fi Fo Fum-" before recollecting that he isn't supposed to say that). The animation is wonderful, excellently reproduced on this flawless tape: fluid and colorful, with rich tones and textures that suggest life on every frame, trom Scrooge's glistening golden pile of money to an ominous graveyard scene. This last is Disney at its best: somber purples, mixed with a red glow in the sky, create an effective mood as Mickey/ Cratchit bids farewell to Tiny Tim. Then follows a nightmarish sequence of flames and death for Scrooge.
Mickey's Christmas Carol is the sort of cartoon they weren't supposed to be making anymore: the characters and background are constantly moving, and it's exciting to watch, the kind of work that fills children (young and old) with the sense of wonder that is a part of Dickens' story.
Scrooge's Rock 'n' Roll Christmas (1983). When A Christmas Carol had reached the peak of its popularity, Dickens was ilispirited to see the crop of plagiarisms and bastardizations that soon appeared. These ranged from a theatrical· dramatization, A Christmas Carol; or The Miser's Warning, to an outright ripoff, "A Christmas Story reoriginated from the original…and analytically condensed for this work;" Such unauthorized adaptations were par for the course, though they still infuriated Dickens, who complained to a friend that his work had been "made to appeared a wretched, meagre, miserable thing; and is still hawked about with my title and my name-with my characters, my incidents, and whole design."
One wonders what he would have thought of this misconceived video, a "free adaptation" that has, little to do with Dickens, the Carol, or the spirit of Christmas. Opening in a dimly lit workroom on Christmas Eve, the tape introduces us to a rather ratty looking Scrooge bemoaning the humbug of Christmas. Then a pretty young woman, looking like an over-aged Alice in Wonderland, enters the workroom thinking it's a record store. She uses a magic crystal ball to cheer Scrooge up with performance videos of, among others. Three Dog Night, Paul Revere and the Raiders, Mike Love of the Beach Boys, and Bobby Goldsboro, all singing big Christmas hits.
The premise is bad enough, but the videos are even worse: bland demo tapes for the stars, who frolic in the snow or stand in front of Christmas trees lipsyncing such tunes as "White Christmas," "Rocking Around the Christmas Trees," and "Jingle Bell Rock. " The nadir probably comes during "Do You Hear What I Hear?" – a saccharine song warbled by Love and Mary Magregor, who hold a bored six-pound sheep between them (I wonder what it was thinking?).
The clips are interspersed with inane commentary by the pseudo-Alice and the cantankerous Scrooge-who, as played by Jack E1am, seems more like a drunken Grizzly Adams than Dickens's creation ("I didn't see no dogs," he quips after a song by Three Dog Night). The whole extravaganza, well-reproduced on tape, was directed by Bob Franchini and Lou Tedesco. It is the worst sort of holiday Dickens' exploitation, the kind of kitschy music-hall variety show I thought no one had the nerve to produce these days. Bah, humbug indeed.
VIDEO, December 1984
Star Trek: The Original Series
VIDEO CLIPS
Produced for Home Viewing
Color. 1966. Where No Man Has Gone Before, The Corbomite Maneuver, Mudd's Women, The Naked Time, Charlie X, The Enemy Within, The Man Trap, What Are Little Girls Made Of?, Dagger of the Mind, Miri. William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelly; dir. various. 50 min. ea. Beta, VHS. $14.95 ea. Paramount.
Its creator Gene Roddenberry called it a "Wagon Train to the stars," but that earlier series has been forgotten while Star Trek cruises on, rerunning and rerunnirig around the country. Kirk, Spock, Bones, Scotty, Uhura, and the other denizens of the huge 23rd-century stars hip Enterprise-along with phrases like "Beam me up Scotty," "He's dead Jim, " and "To boldly go where no man has gone before"-are more familiar to some people than their own families. Why? Though you can look for the answer in books, at conventions, even in Ph. D. dissertations, the show itself is still the best place to look-and Paramount's release of all 79 episodes on videotape will sure help.
The first 10 episodes-beginning with the series' second pilot, "Where No Man Has Gone Before," and running through "Miri"-show what all the fuss has been about. A typical episode presents the heroic Captain Kirk (William Shatner) with a seemingly insoluble dilemma, such as a plague affecting the1crewmembers ("The Naked Time") or a menacing alien capable of destroying the ship ("The Corbo mite Maneuver"). The solution usually reaffirms what it means to be human, and entails the assistance of Science Officer Spock (Leonard Nimoy) and Chief Medical Officer McCoy (DeForest Kelly). They are two sides of the human coin-one is logic, the other emotion-and Kirk's wit and decisiveness balance them out.
Humanity is what the series is about, for all its sci-fi trappings. The best episodes deal with human issues from growing up ("Charlie X") and sexism ("Mudd's Women") to penal systems ("Dagger of the Mind") and computers ("What Are Little Girls Made Of?"). In "The Naked Time" the crewmembers are affected by a virus that forces them to reveal their innermost selves: their fears, hopes, and dreams. In "The Enemy Within" Kirk is divided into two parts of the same man: one savage, the other compassionate. In "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" a brilliant scientist transplants his mind into an android body but finds that his soul is missing. He can think, but he is not human. To be so, says Star Trek, is to feel. To make mistakes. To be emotional. To care.
The best Star Trek is the stuff of opera: stylized morality plays with characters painted in broad strokes that allow the viewer to empathize. As David Gerrold, a former Star Trek writer, put it in The World of Star Trek: "We want to be as brave as our Captain Kirks, as cool as our Mr. Spocks, and as outspoken as our Dr. McCoys. We long to be as colorful and as larger-than-life as they are."
For the uninitiated (if. there is such a thing), the best of the first 10 are "Charlie X," a witty yet disturbing episode with Robert (Strangers on a Train) Walker's lookalike son as a human with strange powers, learning what it means to live in society; "The Naked Time," which spotlights all the leads in moments that would eventually become familiar as shtick (was this the first time Scotty warned that· "the engines can't take much more of this, " or that Spock cried?); and "Where No Man Has Gone Before," with Gary (2001) Lockwood and Sally (M*A *S*H) Kellerman as two crewmen transformed by an alien energy field. Shades of 200 l! Yet Kirk's message is melodramatically telling: "Do you like what you see? Absolute power corrupting absolutely?" The best episodes have calculated histrionics and well-staged action. They are notable for the wildly varying performances of Shatner, who can be both terribly good and terribly bad-all in the same episode (see especially "The Enemy Within").
In the end, what do you say about Star Trek? That it has a message? That it has good character types? That it has concepts? And that it now has the welcome familiarity of an old friend? Yes, and you can even say it's fun.
The transfer is excellent, the majority of the episodes exhibiting crisp color and sharp sound. The earlier shows have faded a little, but not too noticeably. That the shows are uncut is a delight.
VIDEO Magazine, 1984
TV Industry Stories (2)
SUPERBOY, which follows the adventures of Superman at a collegiate 19, is streaking across TV screens nationwide this fall. Presented by AlexanderSalkind and executive-produced by his son, Ilya-the team that produced the first three Superman theatricals - Superboy has been an exercise in super-speed, and a trial by fire for the fledgling MGM-Disney Studios in Orlando.
Announced in February for an October air-date, the series is the first ever to be shot at the studio, a new venture that includes three convertible sound stages and a 1,000-foot, New York City-street set. "We chose Orlando because of the great variety of locations in the surrounding area;' notesIlyaSalkind. "You have everything... [except] mountains."
In addition, all post work is being done at the facility by
The Post Group, which is running Disney-MGM Studio's postproduction arm. At Post, the processed film is transferred to tape via a Rank Mark IV, with a colorcorrected one-inch master then made into laser discs with an ODC (Optical Disc Corporation) machine. Off-lining is then done on the CMX 6000 random access editing system, with the resulting edit decision list taken to the on-line editing stage where any special effects elements (such as x-ray vision) are incorporated. Special effects are created from a Digital FIX machine in conjunction with an Abekas A-64.
Many of the special effectsincluding the blue-screen flying sequences perfected by Superman III-have been borrowed from the Superman features. "The new things;' Ilya Salkind explains, "are complete electronic motion control, which we didn't have [when we started the movies in 1978]. There is also the extra kick of TV electronics and the fact that things which may not look wonderful on the big screen are fine on the smaller screen." The series, which is being shot in 35mm, is being transferred to tape for effects. "You have a vast improvement on look and a sharper image when you use film," Salkind adds. "We never even thought of tape [as the primary medium]."
Although Superboy is Salkind's first television venture, he is being assisted by familiar faces and TV veterans. From the Superman features, BobSimmonds is the line producer and Colin Chilvers, who won an Academy Award for special visual effects on Superman: The Movie (the original film), is one of three directors. (The other directors are Jackie Cooper, who played Perry White in the movies, and Reza Badayi, whose credits include Cagneyand Lacey.) From TV, executive story consultant Fred Freiberger produced the last season of the original Star Trek, while writers Michael Morris, Howard Dimsdale, Ed Jurist, Bernard M. Kahn and Robert Barbash wrote for programs including All in the Family, Quincy and The Six MillionDollar Man.
The first 13 half-hour episodes, syndicated to 92 percent of the U.S. by Viacom Enterprises, are budgeted at $500,000 apiece. "We take seven days to shoot, and 10 days in postproduction," observes Salkind, who admits the pace is. a challenge compared to the more leisurely world of films:
"We don't have six months to solve a problem." Costs are much lower than in Hollywood, he notes, and after an initial shakedown period -':'which you would have anywhere''--the crews (local and L.A.-imported) have been top-notch. "Some are even working 16-, 17-hour days," he adds.
Nonetheless, Salkind claims the program will not take the kind of shortcuts the original Superman TV series took in the 1950s, when special effects were amortized by using the same shots over the course of 104 episodes: "You can't cheat like that. Of course, sometimes he flies in the same way, but we will always re-do it."
To Salkind, however, the most immediate concern is not effects but character. "The original TV series had very good characterizations that the audience could relate to. That is very hard to do and it all really boils down to that. Special effects can help a show, but if the characters are not there, you have nothing."
wrap • october 1988
WAR OF THE ROBOTS
NEW YORK-The robocams are fighting it out. NBC made the first move, spending two years developing robotic cameras for NBC Nightly News and NBC News at Sunrise. That $750,000three-cameras-on-tracks system made its debut in March (WRAP 4/88). Then New York independent WPIX-TV followed with a robotic studio (which one source says cost $200,000). Now ABC has announced that it is developing its own robot setup, that will begin on-air testing inthe first quarter of '89.
"We don't like anything that we see now," asserts Eric Rosenthal, general manager of audio-visual system engineering at ABC. He feels that WPIX's trackless robocams - Ikegami cameras utilizing Vinten Equipment Inc.'s MicroSwift servo-control system oscillate if they are raised too high on their pedestals. "They have too much play in their bearings, and they have 'a rubbery feeling. I don't feel like I have control; the camera and. joystick don't move as one." As for NBC's system, manufactured by Evershed Power Optics, Rosenthal says: "Having those tracks means they're not very flexible. If one camera goes down, it's very hard to replace it."
Not so, counters NBC's Bobby Lee Lawrence, general manager of news engineering, who has supervised the network's project:"We always have another camera standing by on set in case a camera goes down, which has very rarely happened. And if the mechanics of the tracks fail, we can switch to manual and someone can go in and push it."
That problem actually occurred on one news broadcast when the camera started "a lateral move"without instructions. On-air Anchor Connie Chung began moving with the camera, but was saved any embarrassment when the system was switched to manual. "Sure there are bugs to iron out;' says Lawrence. "The motors were underspeed. We found that after two weeks they started running down and the cameras would not respond as quickly. We've fixed that by upgrading to a stronger motor."
NBC's next move is to install robotic cameras in Washington, D.c., Burbank, Calif., and London, and after that-probably in two years - the network will add what WPIX already has: a computer-operated switcher, saving $100,000 on a staff job.
These moves don't phase ABC. Notes Rosenthal: "We were not looking to be the first. We are interested in solving problems in a long-term fashion. We are currently looking at many systems - TSM [Total Spectrum Manufacturing Inc.] and others-that are quiet, lend themselves to state-of-the-art control and are flexible. We are also adding our own designs." Adds Julius Barnathan, president of ABC broadcast operations and engineering: "We are looking at NBC only to find out what not to "
"A year ago, ABC said they had no interest in robots," counters NBC's Lawrence, "so I think it's wonderful that they're doing this. I'm glad they don't like our system or WPIX's. Ours was the first in the industry and the first is not necessarily going to be the best. ABC will learn from mistakes and maybe come up with a better system - and that can only enhance the industry."
WRAP, 1988
STUNTS IN POST
• LOS ANGELES- Jim "Bullet" Baily, a 33-year-old Australian stuntman, was keen on setting a world record-and on appearing on American television-when he arranged an unusual gimmick. He would drag behind a car on his stomach and let go at 85 m.p.h. The car would then swerve away, with Baily carried by the momentum through a 306-foot, 1,600degree flaming tunnel. Baily would wear a protective suit but only had a minute of oxygen. "Because of the flames, we couldn't really see him if he got stuck in the middle;' recalls Producer· Joshua Morton, who filmed the event on four 16mm cameras in 1981. "If he didn't make it through, he didn't make it-period;' Baily made it, zooming in and out of the flames in 4.2 seconds.
Now, seven years after Baily's accidental death, which occurred during another stunt, the segment has found a home in Jericho Productions' Playing with Fire, part of the Arts & Entertainment Network's Living Dangerously series, airing this season. Although the episode uses archival footage of famous stunts of the past as background, the bulk of the one-hour show offers film and TV excerpts of Baily, as well as contemporary interviews with people who knew him.
Morton, a self-styled "microproducer;' assembled Fire in three months for $80,000, combing UCLA archives for vintage footage and the U.S. and Australia for clips of the stuntman. The result was a potpourri of material, from Betacam and 3/4-inch tape to 16mm film and 35mm black-and-white film and slides.
"I shot the interviews on Betacam for cost reasons;' notes Morton, who generally employed a BVW 505 Betacam SP CCD camera. "I have a film background, . but I really think the tape here looks great. It's all a question of how you light it. We used available daylight with some fill thrown in;'
Due to the variety of formats, editing the program took some careful juggling. According to Morton, the process started off at Starfax in Los Angeles, where the material was transferred to halfinch tape. Morton then off-line edited at his home on a Panasonic AG-6500 before continuing the process at Varitel Video in Los Angeles. From a computerized edit list compiled by Morton, Varitel transferred all Fire footage-except for the Beta, which was edited as is-to oneinch for on-line editing. Ampex ADO and Quantel Paintbox workwith sound effects added to the archival footage at Coley Sound.
"I used a Paintbox for a logo and the ADO for a bumper montage of slides ... and the opening and closing credits;' explains Morton. "We had to reposition them on-line to make them smooth. We did some color enhancing, too, but in general I didn't do a lot of fancy
stuff. The material was so strong on its own, I just did straight cuts. That's what a documentary is to me."
Baily's fatal adventure proved the most difficult to salvage on tape as it "wrinkled and looked like a VHS copy;' says Morton. He explains that Baily, intent upon recording himself as he hung (via a glider hitch) from the wheels of a small airplane taking off, attached a camera, using a 3/4-inch work tape, under the wing of the plane. Not satisfied with the taped results, Baily repeatedly tried the stunt as he repositioned the camera at different angles, until his 300-foot plunge.
While Morton is utilizing this last tape in Fire, he insists that the' program is not meant to be sensationalistic. If anything, he stresses, it's to show that Baily went too far too fast. "For years I've had this material;' says Morton. "I know it sounds like bull, but I really mean it; I wanted Jim to have his moment. I wanted to finish his story."
MTV AT MY HOUSE
ADAMS, MASS.-As winner of an MTV contest called MTV At My Place With Belinda Carlisle, Dawn Wellspeak and her Adams, Mass. home have become the stars of MTV's game show, Remote Control, its dance program, Club MTv, and several video-jocky (VI) segments.
One fan's fantasy can be a producer's nightmare, however, as the MTV staff had only one week to prepare. "It could have been a studio apartment," says Lauren Corrao, producer'for the Remote Control segments, who says that although the house was not spacious - it included seven rooms and two bathrooms, all eventually occupied by equipment and crew-it was workable. NEP supplied the equipment, which besides lights, soundboards, mics and monitors, included two one-inch hand-held cameras on tripods and one Steadicam. "While they were setting up on Tuesday night;' notes Corrao, "we were able to free up the Steadicam to shoot some VI segments."
Part of the setup involved building a wall between the living room and dining room that the Remote Control host would tear down on the air. "I wanted to knock down a real wall;' jokes Corrao, "but they wouldn't let me." She and her colleagues did have their way in everything else, however, like rearranging furniture, drilling holes in the driveway for a tent, parking a tractor trailer on the front lawn, and painting logos on the house itself.
By the time the equipment was set up, there was barely room for the Remote Control contestants. Says Corrao: "The basic idea was not to build a set and put it in someone's home, but to actually get the feel of their home. We used very few outside props. My only regret is we couldn't fit in a studio audience;'
The show also adaptedMTV's standard formats. Instead of "Beat the Bishop," for instance in which a "bishop" races around the studio collecting props while a contestant tries to figure out a math problem, the home-grown Remote featured "Beat Your Mom," with Dawn's mother racing around the kitchen collecting pot holders.
The biggest worry of the dayand-a-half shoot was the weather, as Club MTV was to be shot in the backyard. Naturally, it was pouring on the morning of the taping, so the production company ordered tents and debated whether to move the festivities into the garage. While Remote Control and VI segments were being shot inside, however, the rain let up enough for the show to go on as planned.
"It was really fantastic;' observes Corrao of the experience. "That's what TV production is all about: figuring out how to get a problem solved." The house, incidentally, was restored to normal, except for one change: "We painted a big MTV logo across the front of the house" says Corrao, "and had paintings of dancing legs on the back for Club MTv. I heard they're keeping the MTV logo; I don't know about the legs."
WRAP, October 1988
TV Industry Stories (3)
Station Profile
KTRK-TV is "so strong;' says Ken Hoffman, TV columnistfor the Houston Post, "they could run my home movies, unedited, and still earn 25 shares." Hoffman is exaggerating the strength of this Capital Cities/ABC 0&0, but not by much. In reality, for example, KTRK's 18-year-old Million Dollar Movie soundly beat two shows in King World's power trio in Arbitron's May '88 book:The Oprah Winfrey Show, by a full rating point, and Jeopardy, by two points. Both air on CBS affiliate KHOU-TV.
Other examples of the station's dominance: From 9 a.m. to midnight, the May Arbitron book gave KTRK a 9 rating/23 share versus a 6/16 for KHOU and a 6/14 for NBC-affiliate KPRC-TV. KTRK's local news hour at 6 p.m. earned a 13/25 in May, equaling the other affiliates' numbers combined (KHOU, 7/14; KPRC, 5/10). At 10 p.m. the station pulls a 19/33 versus KPRC's 9/16 and KHOU's 9/15. Even ABC's less than spectacular prime-time schedule is consistently number one in the city-thanks, says former news' director Jim Topping, to KTRK. "The station has such a strong identity;' he observes, "that when people are making up their minds for evening viewing, they gravitate to KTRK."
Loyalty and affection are the , magic words for the station. "They have an infallible touch for being part of the community;' says the Post's Hoffman. Paul Bures, KTRK's president and general manager, concurs: "We try to identify and address issues of concern to Houston/"
More practically, remarks Topping, now general manager of CapCities/ABC 0&0 KGO-TV San Francisco, HUT levels indicate that local viewers are voracious newshounds, especially where their community is concerned. "They have a strong sense of identity and regional pride;' he notes.
KTRK feeds that appetite by placing a strong emphasis on local news and public-affairs programming. It is the only station in the market that runs a full hour of news at 6 p.m. (following a 5-5:30 newscast and World News Tonight at 5:30). According to Topping, "that move gave us an advantage. We could cover more stories in depth and give more time to breaking local stories [than our competitors]." In 1983, the 85-person news departments lightly larger than KHOU's and on par with KPRC's began a series of "task force" reports in which six reporters would spend 30 minutes on a story from six different angles."
The most recent' task-force feature, in May, was a look at the drug epidemic' in Houston, analyzed from the point of view of a neighborhood resident. That report was also tied into a half-hour documentary, two talk shows focusing on black and Hispanic neighborhoods, a special segment on Good Morning, Houston, a 7-a.m. news feature and an editorial.
"The response was tremendous;' recalls Bures, "with many people requesting we repeat the half-hour special:' KTRK did, in prime time, and it beat CBS and NBC shows in the time period, as well as an Astros baseball game on an independent station.
A kindred approach is also employed with Cood Morning, Houston, the Monday-Friday 9-a.m. show that regularly beats its network competitors by asmuch as five points. (May Arbitron figures gave it a 7/28 over 2s at the other affiliates.) "That is a very important show for us;' observes Bures of the 16-year-old talkfest. "We did a careful appraisal of who's watching and designed a thoughtful, informational program that helps people understand how to live better."
"When you watch [Good Morning, Houston];' says the Post's Hoffman, "you feel like you're taking a rocket back to the 1950s. It's dominated by this male host, a big lug of a guy, and the female cohost who does morning exercises" But Hoffman also thinks the station is incredibly canny. "Jim Topping was always right on top of everything;' he says. "If another station let a reporter go, he would pick him up. I remember a radio reporter who had a very aggressive style. His station fired him. Topping hired him and molded him into a friendly and successful TV personality for the station. Topping saw opportunities and took them:' (At press Jime, Topping had not been replaced at KTRK.)
In early fringe, Hoffman says the station has eschewed syndicated fare or talk shows (it has only The New Sea Hunt and Donahue) for Million Dollar Movie, one of the last of the afternoon film showcases. In May, the movie earned an Arbitron 8/22 against a 7/18 for Oprah (KHOU) and a 7/18 for Ceraldo (KPRC) in its first hour, increasing its lead as the afternoon wore on. "We are discriminating in our library;' explains Bures. "We try very hard to put films on that will play well in this marketplace-like westerns-rather than looking at what New York critics like."
The Houston market has been hurting lately with the dismal state of the oil business. But the situation is improving, says Bures, who became president and general manager in 1986. "It is substantially better than it was a year ago. The future is not all blue skies, but it's promising."
As for KTRK: "We see no changes. The biggest challenge in being number one for so long is in how we evolve .... We must always satisfy three masters: our community, our shareholders and our station."
VIEW, AUGUST 15, 1988
TV Industry Stories (4)
MARKETS
51-100
WJXT-TV
JACKSONVI LLE, FLA.
Station Profile
Call it the tail wagging the dog or a helping hand from along-time partner. Or just call it a typical move for an atypical station: CBS-affiliate WJXT-TV Jacksonville, Fla., spent nearly 50 percent of its in-house promotion budget during last November, February and May's sweeps promoting CBS prime-time series Dallas, Falcon Crest and Knots Landing.
"We thought it was time to stop criticizing the network for things that weren't their fault;' explains VP and General Manager Gus Bailey Jr., citing the takeover bids and management turmoil that have plagued CBS. "That's affected their ratings and we thought we should do what we could to help them:'
Also, he admits, to help the station. Since it began broadcasting 39 years ago, WJXT has never ranked anything other than number one from sign-on to signoff. In fact, doing the unusuallike running such off-net hours as Hawaii Five-O in early fringehas become a trademark of the station. And CBS's prime-time schedule, often number three in the rest of the country, is number one on WJXT.
"Consistency;' says Bailey, is key to WJXT's success, "and a belief by the viewers that we care about them:' As evidence of the first factor, the general manager cites the station's stable personnel roster. WJXT weatherman George Winterling, for instance, has been with the station for 25 years. "We did a study;' Bailey notes, "and we found the average length of employment for full-time employees here was 11 years. That's a long time in this business. I'm only here seven years-I'm a newcomer."
In January WJXT added a more efficient computerized closedcaptioning system for its news programs. "Jacksonville has a much -larger- th an -ave rage hearing-impaired community," explains Bailey. "Sure [the rrew system is] expensive, but we felt it was important to service that group."
According to Bailey, WJXT also serves the community via tough investigative news reports and prime-time specials on topics of concern to the community, such as odor pollution, car tolls and the inmates of Florida's death row. "Some of the largest number of inmates are executed in Florida;' he says. "We wanted to look into that so we did a prime-time special, 'Death in the Sunshine: Most stations shy away from that kind of thing."
WJXT has been rewarded by impressive numbers for all of its news programs. Its noon news had a 64 share in the May Arbitrons (compared with a 17 share for NBC-affiliate WTLV-fV's ll:3O-am. news). At 6 p.m., WJXT pulled a 49 share (compared to a 22 for WTLV and a 7 for WJKS:rV, the ABC affiliate). At 11 p.m. WJXT had a 43 share, WTLV, a 20 and WJKS, a 9. From sign-on to signoff, WJXT averaged a 33 share in the six-station market. "In the May book;' claims Bailey, "we ranked second in the U.S. from sign-on to sign-off for five-station or lar~er markets."
WJXT has also been highly decorated for its news and journalistic achievements. The station won the du Pont award twice, as well as the Region 14 Award of the Radio:rV News Directors Association for best overall news reporting in a four-state area. Bailey says WJXT's parent corporation, PostNewsweek, has further rewarded
the station by agreeing to upgrade the station's facility. In 1990, operations move from a 28-yearold building into a completely new one.
Other changes are underway at WJXT-some of them as a result of the competition. WTLV, recently acquired by Gannett, is making an aggressive effort to be more competitive with WJXT. The NBC affil has scheduled some potential ratings damagers for the fall: The Cosby Show at 5 p.m. will lead in to the region's only 5:30 newscast, with Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy from 7-8. These last two shows were taken from WJXT.
Bailey is concerned but not worried, and is responding with a two-hour talkathon from 4-6 that pairs Oprah with Ceraldo (currently on WTLV). Says Bailey: "We hope to build up a good head of steam;' that hopefully will propel the station's 4-8-p.m. block past WTLV's schedule in the rating books.
As for the future, Bailey has noted that the NBC affiliate has had success-45 shares-with a pre-1Oday news show, so he plans to start his own 6-7-a.m. program in the fall. "Weve put it off, frankly, because of the turmoil with the CBS morning show. We felt we didn't have as strong a show to wraparound as Cood Morning America or 1Oday. But if an NBC station can do that well, we figured we might as well give ita shot:'
There has also been talk of network hopping. "NBC approached
[WJXT] some time ago about switching," says Nancy McAlister, TV critic for the Florida TimesUnion and Jacksonville Journal,"but they decided to stick with CBS. I think Bailey feels you can't jump ship when the network is down. Ratings are cyclical."
The bottom line for WJXT, however, seems to be a sense of responsibility. "We have an image oflong-time stability and of caring about the community. And once you get that image, you don't squander it, you build on it, constantly improving it and making it better," Bailey says. "You have to keep on refurbishing and renewing yourself. You owe that to the community. And, practically speaking, it's much harder to jump start a station if you let it go bad than if you keep it running well all along."
VIEW, AUGUST 15, 1988
TV Industry Stories
BROADCAST/CABLE BLISS
BURBANK-In what is being billed as a TV first, a broadcast network, NBC, is producing a program for The Disney Channel, a national cable service. "It's simple, really," says Gene Walsh, VP/media planning for NBC Productions, who is responsible for the new show. "We're a supplier of shows, so we supply:'
The product is nothing out of the ordinary. A sitcom called Good Morning Miss Bliss, it features Walt Disney contract player Hayley Mills and chronicles the adventures of, in Executive Producer Peter Engel's words, "the last of the great teachers:' Although the pilot was well received by NBC's executives and the public-it won its time period against a James Bond movie and a miniseries when it aired on July 11, 1987 -the net-
work, top-heavy with successful skeins and/or previous commitments, passed. "I think it was a little too soft, too family oriented for them;' opines Engel. But those were virtues to the folks at TDC, which was looking for a network-quality, first-run series.
After 13 episodes are produced at the NBC studios in Burbank, the series will originate from the Disney-MGM Studios at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Fla. (see related story in this section).
An NBC spokesman reports that the show starts on the West Coast so that production heads at both NBC and Disney have easy access to Miss Bliss as its concept is being developed. In addition, a larger pool of technical and creative talent to draw from in Burbank is expected to help the show "get into a groove;' before it is moved to the new facility.
The four-camera, videotape series is being posted in Orlando at the new Disney-MGM postproduction facility installed by the Post Group, in addition to the California facilites. The writing staff will be headquartered in both locations.
The deal gives Disney 80 episodes to run over two years, with NBC then having the option to pick up the series for network broadcast. After that, Buena Vista, Disney's syndication arm, could syndicate. Observes Engel: "Disney gets shows with more production values than cable normally has, and NBC gets 80 episodes of a show already paid for in another venue. It's a new distribution pattern - horizontal rather than vertical.
"There is no real difference in doing it for Disney rather than NBC;' Engel continues. "Maybe there are not as many people involved in the approvals process, and budgets are not as high, but since we have 80 episodes we can amortize a lot. We can make firmer deals and offer more employment. And we may be able to make dollars go farther in Florida. But no one will be able to see the difference in quality between this show and the network pilot."
NBC NEWS BY NORTHWEST
• SEATTLE -Call it a costs=aving measure. Or call it an innovation. But don't call it a "minibureau."
"We don't really have a name for what we do;' says Scott LaPlante, the news operation manager at Seattle NBC-affiliate KING-TV. "I'm sort of a liaison for NBC News. I work for KING, but when NBC needs something done, I get it for them:'
LaPlante's role is the latest wrinkle in network news operations-the network news bureau that isn't a bureau. It all started in December 1987 when, according to an NBC spokesman, the network acknowledged a few facts: "The Northwest is an important area to cover. KING has an outstanding news organization. Why not take advantage of that?"
Instead of spending the money to open up a full-fledged bureau, NBC contacted KING News Director Don Varyu and asked him if he had someone who could lineproduce stories in Seattle and the outlying areas, as well as keep an eye out for material that might be of national interest. Varyu tapped LaPlante, who supervises photography and editing at the station and also coordinates satellite feeds of Northwestern news footage to NBC affiliates nationwide.
"Scott works for us but takes time out for NBC projects;' says Varyu. "It's a real juggling act and he does it well."
According to LaPlante, who supplies story ideas, sound bites and even segments (via satellite)for the Today show and News at Sunrise, the arrangement benefits both network and affiliate: "They may come to me and say: 'We're doing a segment on the environment. Can you give us anything?' On the other hand, I may be doing 'a story for KING that is of national interest, like the one I suggested on the Portland Symphony conductor, James DePreist ... he's a real Renaissance man:'
Although KING acquired no new ENG equipment (LaPlante did get a computer hook-up. with NBC News so he could keep track of what stories are on tap), there are other benefits. "The network was interested in covering Mary Decker when she ran in Eugene, Ore., because she would be in the Olympics,"' says LaPlante. "I went down there as line producer and covered it for them. NBC picked up the tab, but KINGbenefited because we got material out of it, as well:'
LaPlante works with NBC correspondents and technicians, but has also used local crews for fast-breaking news. "If something big happens in Alaska, I'm three or four hours ahead of L.A. where the networks have full bureaus:'
The savings to NBC are hard to calculate, but they can only be large, since complete news bureaus usually employ a minimum of 25 people. "Cost is certainly a factor;' notes an NBC spokesman. Is it a trend? Not if you ask CBS and ABC. Says a CBS spokesman: "If we felt we needed a bureau in Seattle, we'd set one up:' Adds Elise Adde, director of news information at ABC News: "We have no plans for minibureaus. We are perfectly happy with the bureaus we have."
wrap. september 1988
The Honeymooners
The Lost Episodes
B&W. 1985. Jackie Gleason, Art Carney, Audrey Meadows, Joyce RandolPh; dir. Frank $atenstein. 55 min. ea. Beta, VHS. $29.95 ea. Maljack/MPI.
He is the most famous bus driver in the world-which is remarkable given that he is also a loudmouth, a braggart, and a little thickheaded. But he is Ralph Kramden, and as the focus of The Honeymooners his schemes, passions, and whopping mistakes have become well-known and beloved. Now, with Maljack/MPI's release of recently unearthed Honeymooners kinescopes, the story, as they say, continues.
It began in TV's golden age of the early 1950s. As part of TheJackie Gleason Show, The Honeymooners was originally an eight-minute sketch about a quarreling husband and wife (Gleason and Pert Kelton, later replaced by Audrey Meadows). It soon grew to 15 minutes, 30 minutes, even an hour. As it grew, so did the characters. Soon Ralph and Alice had neighbors: sewer worker Ed Norton (Art Carney) and his wife Trixie (Joyce Randolph).
"Unlike I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners wasn't a farce," recalls one of the show's writers. "Lucy would blacken her teeth and Ricky wouldn't know her. We never did that. We worked from a possible-though perhaps not probable-premise.:. and proceeded from there." Premises like Ralph competing for a "pot of gold" on a TV quiz show ("Go for the gold," says Alice, "you've already got the pot"); or, Ralph mistaking dog food for his wife's pate and trying to market it (everyone thinks it tastes great); or Ralph trying to impress his old high-school rival by pretending he's president of the bus company ("I run things," he explains).
It all became as familiar as ritual and The Honeymooners went on to become a fixture on Gleason's show for years, eventually spinning off into the 39 episodes now in syndication, Later, it was as an hour-long Christmas special in 1978. The series' durability came from its familiarity and from its characters: Kramden as a comic Everyman, Norton as his wise/dumb sidekick, ready to rib Ralph but also ready to help, no matter how crazy the idea.
"The poor soul hasn't got a hell of a lot of .ability," observed Gleason recently, "but he keeps trying. He gets schemes and the schemes are all to make him and Alice happy. And he fails. And when he fails, she feels a great deal of affection. She knows why he did it."
It's terrific news that Gleason has unearthed 75 kinescopes of the series, episodes seen only. once and then stored away. Among these well-preserved and restored shows are some real curiosities. In one Gleason plays all the characters made famous on his variety show. While Ralph is out shopping for Christmas, Alice and the Nortons are entertained by Reggie Van Gleason, Joe the Bartender, and the Poor Soul. Another program, filmed when Gleason was laid up in the hospital, parodies Edward R. Murrow's Person to Person show by staging an interview with Ed Norton's father (also played by Art Carney).
The first tapes from Maljack are mostly from 1953. Volume 1 demonstrates classic Kramden misunderstandings. "Letter to the Boss" has Ralph thinking he is about to be fired. After writing an angry letter to his boss, he finds he is about to be promoted instead and spends the rest of the story trying to get his letter back. In "Suspense," Ralph overhears Alice rehearsing for a play and believes she is plotting to kill him. Volume 2 spotlights Art Carney in one of the most talked-about "lost" episodes, "Norton Moves In," which finds Ralph and Ed sharing an apartment-and a cot. The second tape also features "Songs and Witty Sayings," a 1955 episode in which Gleason and Carney impersonate Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, to whom they often have been favorably compared (Stan and Ollie were reportedly big Honeymooners fans themselves).
Because the show was performed live, it has the immediacy and excitement of a stage production: props break, actors ad lib, and the audience applauds when each star enters. It is a style of television that cannot be recaptured today. As Gleason used to put it, "How sweet it is."
January 1986 Video
The Untouchables
The Untouchables
1987. Kevin Costner, Robert De Niro, Sean Connery; dir. Brian De Palma. 119m. (R) Hi St cc V $89.95. B $29.95. LV St $34.95.
Paramount. Image: good.
"When he pulls a knife, you pull a gun," advises policeman Jimmy Malone (Connery) in The Untouchables. "When he sends your man to the hospital, you send his to the morgue. That's the Chicago way." The brutal era of gang warfare that defined the Windy City in fact and fiction during the 1920s provides the background for this bigscreen update of the '60s TV series. While the movie is engrossing and well-made, its morality is deplorable.
De Palma and screenwriter David Mamet have taken real-life hero Eliot Ness and turned him into a pantywaist. The real Ness was an agent sent to Chicago by the Treasury Department to clean up AI Capone's bootlegging operation, which had been winked at by local authorities on the
.take. Ness' team became known as the Untouchables because they couldn't be bought and worked aggressively to enforce the law.
In the TV film, The Scarface Mob, and the subsequent hit series, Robert Stack played Ness as a no-nonsense he-man, solid, savvy and cynical, an avenging angel for the public good. The film makes Ness (Costner) a young and idealistic family man and turns The Untouchables into a kind of perverted Star Wars, with Sean Connery as Obi-Wan Kenobi and Ness as Luke Skywalker.
Malone-teacher, father and soul of the team-is a 20-year veteran cop who has given up on fighting the corruption around him but sees a new opportunity in Ness. Playing on his well-known reputation for integrity, the actor is terrifically moving (and amusing) as a vulnerable, tough and fascinatingly complex figure. He is the heart of the movie, which aims for epic status from the first shot-a striking overhead view of Capone (De Niro) holdingcourt as he is being shaved-to one of the last-a man plummeting from the top of a building.
Cinematic flamboyance is Brian De dr Palma's signature. The director uses dozens of impressive movie tricks-pans, tracking shots, slow motion-with the cold GI efficiency of a brilliant film student. But it's inl as hollow as Costner's Ness, and the technique is nothing more than a glossy cover for a dirty book. The message-the ends tit justify the means-is more than objection- vi, able, it completely undercuts the actual ur heroism of the Untouchables and is itself undercut by the reality of what happened to ill; Capone. In the end, he was thwarted by the ca law, not in spite of it, jailed for non-payment of income tax.
Unforgettable Year
1987: The Unforgettable Year
1988. Tom Brokaw; dir. Marcia Ku)Per Schneider, 75m. V only. $24.95. Wood Knapp. Image: good.
If you like NBC Nightly News, you'll love this compilation of 1987's big events, as reported by the network. TV newscasts are essentially headline. services, so if you can imagine a 75-minute headline, you have a pretty good idea what this is like.
This answer to a news director's prayers. ("What can we do with yesterday's reports? ") recycles items about everything from the Wall Street crash and. the NFL strike to the sexual follies of Gary Hart and Jim and Tammy Bakker in a kaleidoscope of images and words, reducing the major and magnifying the minor. Conservative activist Howard Phillips is seenCalling Ronald Reagan a "useful idiot" for Soviet propaganda; the Pope kisses an armless man who has played the guitar with his f~et; forest fires rage out of control; a little girl is rescued from a well; another child is the sale survivor of a major air crash. Memorable lines are replayed, from Ollie North's claim that the IranContra plan was a "neat idea" to comedian Mark Russell's quip: "There is no smoking gun [in this scandal]-we sold it to Iran."
Yet everything takes on a sameness in this report, which is clever, slick and disc1udes with an interminable number of clips of departed stars, such as Fred Astaire dancing, Liberace preening and Rita Hayworth slinking. 1.987: The Unforgettable Year is symptomatic of the worst and best of TV news: glitzy, simple-minded and powerful.
Young Comedians All-Star Reunion.
Robin Williams, Harry Anderson, 1986. dir. Walter Miller. HBO. Image: good. 60m.
Comedy isn't pretty, Steve Martin once said, but it shouId at least be funny.
This HBO special offers five big-name comedians introducing five "stars of the future," most of wjom will probably find this their pinnacle. There's Howard Busthis, a clean-cut guy telling sex jokes. ("Last night my girlfriend and I had violent sex. I pulled down my pants and she kicked me in the groin.") Barry Crimmins. a chubby man' with a walrus moustache. offers jokes about the death penalty. acid rain and Grenada. John Mendoza, who sounds like a bitter, nasty Rodney Dangerfield, has the best zingers of the bunch. which isn't saying much. "You ever wonder if illiterate people get the full effect of alphabet soup? ... You ever wonder what kind of sexual protection the woman is using? My date was using foam. By the time I found out. I looked like a mad dog."
Sex and failed relationships are the staples of these monologues. taped before appreciative audiences in Toronto, Los Angeles. Boston. New York and San Francisco. The veterans' bits, performed before they introduce the newcomers. show the startling difference: Harry Anderson's charming. low-key magic tricks and Robin Williams' off-the-wall free associations are as brilliant and unpredictable as their guests' material is forced.
It's true, you can try too 'hard. As Groucho Marx noted upon meeting a woman who had 20 children because she "loved her husband." "I love my cigar. But I take it out of my mouth once in a while."
68 VIDEO MAY 1988
;;
Video
Video Bar
Hey Bartender!
Bored by those endless football games while you teeter on a bars tool drinking . Schlitz? Tired of the convoluted soap opera that distracts your date in the diner? Cheer up, video Muzak is here, Video Television (VTV), billed as an elbow-bender's balm, enters the scene this month at over 500 clubs, restaurants, and bars throughout the U. S. As a child of MTV, VTV is an eclectic concoction of music videos, comedy and film clips, and advertisements. Steve Martin tells jokes. Betty Boop sings. Camel cigarettes looks for Real Men. And Flash Gordon conquers the Universe. Video snippets from the worlds of sports, fashion, music, and history round out the picture. Much of it is public domain material, though HBO, among others, okayed many of the film and concert clips.
Jay Coleman, publisher of Rockbill, dreamed up the idea when he was asked to do a Camel cigarette commercial to screen in dance halls. The ad was an award-winning hit with Camel, but Coleman was frustrated by his lack of control over who was watching, when, and hpw often. VTV is his attempt to 'correct that.
What VTV comes down to is another outlet for advertising. Cigarette and hard liquor ads that are now forbidden on broadcast and cable TV can play on VTV because it is delivered by Federal Express, not the airwaves. "What better place to advertise liquor than in a bar?" asks Jane Yusko, VTV's sales director. "The ir products are sold there, so when a commercial for a brand comes on it reinforces the customer when he's about to order." But the health-conscious need not worry: VTV is also airing public service spots on drunk driving.
The service's subscribers get 8 hours of programming a month. In return they play the tapes 20 days a month, 4 hours a day. At the end of each month, they exchange them for new tapes. One source estimates that 500,000 people will watch VTV, if 'watching' can be said to accurately describe what they'll do. After all, how many people 'listen' to MuzaK? Then again,it could be a videoholic's dream.
44 Video February 1986
Monty Python's Flying Circus
FROM DIVERSION
MAY 1987
And now for something completely Python: the complete (well, almost) history of the show that nearly began as Owl Stretching Time and A Horse, A Spoon, and a Bucket, yet went on to become one of the most successful, ground-breaking comedy programs in television history. Monty Python's Flying Circus, the half-hour series, ran on British TV from 1969 to 1974. On Python, anything went-a Minister of Silly Walks who goes off to work, a house that devours people and neighborhoods, a talk show host who blithely interviews a stuffed cat.
"We always felt, 'we'll do what makes us laugh'," recalls Terry Jones, one of the six members of the group. 
And though some viewers don't agree, calling the team's work tasteless and unfunny, many more have joined in the fun, turning their 45 shows (just now coming out on tape), movies, records, and books into hits.
Monty Python's Flying Circus, influenced by British radio's seminal Goon Show (with Peter Sellers), snuck onto the U. K. scene in October 1969 as a late-night replacement for a religious talk show. Few were watching, and even fewer at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) knew what to expect. (The ambiguous title was meant to keep as many people as possible in the dark.) The series had been sold on the basis of previous work by the six Pythons-Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin-who had all worked on such popular programs as At Last the 1948 Show, The Complete and Utter History of Britain, and The Frost Report.
But Monty Python would be like no other series, and would change the nature of television humor. The Pythons were the first true video comedians, brilliantly using the medium to poke fun at TV, politicians, doctors, the military, the clergy, the upper classes, surrealism, documentaries, and life in general.
"When we decided to do Python, "recalls Terry Jones, "I was thinking, 'What kind of' shape are we going to give it?' And I remember looking at Spike Milligan's show, Q5, on TV and thinking he was doing outrageous things in comedy. He'd start a sketch and then it would suddenly turn into something else. Or someone would push a door onscreen and he'd walk through it. And he just didn't bother about finishing off everything. I suddenly realized we had all been writing cliches till then. "
The Pythons planned their comedic chaos very carefully. Sketches did not simply follow one another; they didn't have guest singers separate segments, as was the custom. Instead, there were routines, animations, non sequiturs, subtitles, voiceover narration, and general silliness, all tightly linked. Notes Terry Gilliam, "We tried to interrelate everything."
In one show, for instance, a sketch called "A Book at Bedtime" finds a man reading aloud a picturesque description of a castle, stumbling over words he can't pronounce. The scene shifts to the castle being described; a Scottish highlander falls from a turret. Next is a segment about "Kamikaze Highlanders" who jump from turrets. One man remarks to another, "We have no time to lose, " which segues into a sketch about the "No-Time-to-Lose Advice Center," where people are given advice on how to use the expression. This turns into a cartoon about "No-Time Toulouse," a French Impressionist gunslinger in the Old West, before a return to the Kamikaze Highlanders. More sketches follow; the show ends full circle with the "Book at Bedtime" sketch.
NO PUNCHLlNES
In their former lives as writers, the Pythons had constantly felt trapped by the "tyranny of the punchline," the requirement of concluding a funny sketch with a brilliant joke. "We kept seeing so much good work being weakened by a weak ending, " says Gilliam. "So we did the obvious thing: get rid of the weakest link."
Gilliam played an important role in that. A former magazine illustrator, the transplanted American had made a mark on British'television with a limited-animation cartoon short, Elephant. In the stream-of-consciousness exercise, a man is hit by a falling elephant, squashed, and then transformed into something else.
Eric Idle (left) and Michael Palin in Life of Brian.
"Terry had been very worried about it, because he said, 'It doesn't really make sense'," notes Jones. "I felt, 'Why not amalgamate the freedom that Spike Milligan's got-not having punchlines-and use Terry's animations to flow in and out of sketches'?"
Besides giving the series a shape, Gilliam's wild animations (a TV set drilling holes in eyes, a man slicing off his head while shaving) gave the series a violent tone, which bled over into some of the sketches. "Sam Peckinpah's Salad Days," for example, opens with a tennis garden party. A ball is tossed to one of the picnickers, hitting him in the head-which suddenly explodes. Another man grabs the arm of a companion and it comes off, spurting a fountain of blood in slow motion. And so on.
Surprisingly, the BBC gave the Pythons little trouble until their third year. "They started to get more interested because it was more successful," observes Gilliam. "They had to show their involvement. We had one session where the BBC gave us this huge list of things that had to be dealt with. They were totally misinterpreting everything that was going on. In one of the sketches, John pushes a severed leg through the door and says, 'Sign here.' And that was referred to as the scene where the man pushes the giant penis through the door."
The Pythons both wrote and performed the material. Usually Idle and Gilliam would create alone; Chapman and Cleese and Palin and Jones would collaborate. Recalls Palin, "Terry and I would write together for a week, working quite closely in the same room, swapping ideas around. Then there'd be a reading session. You could tell , from the laughter around the table when something had worked and when it hadn't." The group would discuss the material for several days, followed by more rewriting. Idle soon became known for his wordplay, Chapman and Cleese for their logic and acerbity, and Palin and Jones for their flights of fancy and imagery.
Ideas suggested by one member were often developed by another. That process led to "The Pet Shop," a classic piece in which a customer has an incredibly hard time trying to return a parrot that was sold to him dead, nailed to its perch. "It's based on a guy I originally bought a car from," says Palin. "If anything went wrong with it, he would never admit it. There was always some excuse. You'd say, 'The brakes don't work' and he'd say, 'That's because it's new. It needs a bit of adjustment.' 'But I went down a hill and nearly killed myself. ' I remember telling John about this character and he thought it was very funny. Then he and Graham wrote something. It was Graham who had the idea that it should be a parrot." Similarly, Graham Chapman recalls trying to create a sketch with Cleese about a "Ministry of Anger," which Palin and Jones turned into a "Ministry of Silly Walks."
"In Python," notes Palin, "any loose· ends could lead to something that made a nice, surrealistic whole." says now.
Monty Python's Meaning of Life
.
NO MONEY
Through it all, the deadlines-ten days to do a show-and a slim budget led to great creativity. "Necessity always makes us make leaps," remarks Gilliam. "That was the advantage in television. We did nothing but take chances to fill up that halfhour every week. I've always been convinced that with enough money we could really have been mediocre beyond be lief. Case in point-Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Had we the money, we would have had horses, not men pretending they were horses banging coconuts to make galloping noises."
In 1972, the group made its first tentative step into the film world with And Now for Something ComPletely Different, a remake of about 40 TV pieces. The idea was to introduce the troupe to America, but the movie--over which they had little control –pleased neither the Pythons nor their potential audience, and was a disappointing flop.
It wasn't until 1974 that the team made it in the U.S. in, of all places, Texas. A local public broadcasting station picked up the series-both commercial and public television had rejected it as "too British" -and the ratings were great. A cult developed, and the Pythons began turning up on other PBS channels around the country. By then, a second movie was in the works, and the series itself was on the wane. John Cleese had become bored ("I felt we were just repeating ourselves," he says) and refused to do any more TV. (Six episodes were made without him.) The group turned again to film, this time retaining creative control. The result was a parody of the Arthurian legend, directed by Jones and Gilliam: Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
"We did feel we had exhausted Python on TV by then," recalls Palin. "But Terry Jones, myself, and Terry Gilliam were interested in cinema. We were going to set up a film anyhow and it seemed a shame not to get all the Pythons in." Holy Grail has all the best elements of the series, hung loosely on a quest plot.
The episodic narrative finds Arthur and his knights encountering a killer rabbit, a three-headed knight whose heads are always arguing among themselves, and socialist peasants debating the class system. The movie was a hit, helped perhaps by a Python stage show in America (a later tour was captured in the film Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl), records, and publicity surrounding a lawsuit the group brought against ABC-TV when the network aired heavily edited versions of the programs. The landmark court ruling that favored the Pythons' position and more generally strengthened artists' rights. 
Michael Palin
NO PYTHON
By 1975, the troupe was in a paradoxical position: the components of this internationally successftll unit were all anxious to work as individuals. "What I hate most is repetition," observes Gilliam. "I hate the feeling that I know the answers to things. I like being constantly surprised." In Palin's view, "There's a certain desire within you to try and find out what you can do on your own. When I'm in a group, I tend to be more submissive so I'll blend in. There are certain times when I can only express what I want when I'm out on my own."
The six began to work apart, with varying initial results. John Cleese created the 12-episode sitcom, Fawlty Towers, a brilliant farce about a rude hotel owner. "It was my most successftll non-Python effort," he now notes. "It's about as funny as I can be." Eric Idle appeared on Saturday Night Live (as did Michael Palin), developing the creative alliances that led toa mock documentary on the "pre-fab four," the RutIes, a legendary singing group whose career very much resembles the BeatIes'. Michael Palin and Terry Jones collaborated on Ripping Yarns, a nine-episode TV satire of "boys' adventure" stories. Graham Chapman wrote a semi-factual book called A Liar's Autobiography, Volume VI,· and appeared in a film, The Odd Job. Terry Gilliam wrote and directed Jabberwocky –with Palin in the lead-a dark, vulgar story about a medieval peasant fighting a monster.
By 1978, the group had reconstituted itself to create its finest work, Monty Python's Life of Brian. The story of Brian Cohen, a contemporary of Jesus, roughly parallels the life of Christ. It had started as a title,]esus Christ: Lust for Glory, but the Pythons eventually decided that Christ's preachings were not a good subject for satire. The movie instead went after the followers of Jesus who distorted his message. Says Cleese, "I think Life of Brian was the most successful Python film. It was about important matters and had a good story."
That story involves a lisping Pontius Pilate, a group of revolutionaries who would rather argue than revolt, and wild crowds who keep mistaking Brian for the Messiah. "There's a fairly simple point to the film," observes Palin. "Don't believe everything because you're told it by somebody wearing some sort of outfit. Just have a little think."
The movie was strongly protested by religious groups who had never seen it; the controversy made it the Pythons' biggest money maker up to that time. As Palin notes, "It was our most successful because of an intelligent script, good performances, and a lot of help in the publicity from nuns, bishops, and Mrs. Strom Thurmond."
"After Life of Brian," recalls Gilliam, "there was great pressure on us to do another film quickly to take advantage of the success. We were all greedy enough to go along with that line of thinking and we tried it. It didn't work. The chemistry just wasn't right. We didn't need to make the film, so we stopped."
THE SOLO YEARS
Gilliam then directed two critically and commercially well-received fantasies: Time Bandits, featuring Palin, Cleese, and Sean Connery, and Brazil, a 1984-type tale with Palin as a villain. The latter brought Gilliam into a bitter conflict with Universal Pictures, which initially refused to release it, claiming the story was too downbeat. After a year of acrimony, the movie appeared, to great acclaim. Idle wrote a play, Pass the Butler, for London's West End. Chapman starred with Idle and Cleese in a misconceived pirate spoof called Yellowbeard; Palin made two entertaining comedies, The Missionary and A Private Function. Cleese began a company to produce corporate training films; Jones wrote a children's book.
Terry Jones in The Meaning of Life.
The group came together in 1983, for what could be the last time, to do a sketch movie, Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. "Getting six people together to try and make a narrative film is very difficult, " observes Gilliam. "Everybody had been going his own way. It was more difficult to get everybody to agree on things. We wanted to do a film as a group and the easiest way to do it was to find a backbone that we could string a lot of sketches on."
Jones directed, and the final result works on many levels, poking vicious fun at the church, snobs, Americans, and fools. Meaning of Life provides a fitting coda to the group's collective work. Monty Python ends as it began, with sketches that push the boundaries of taste as far as they can go. "I feel comedy ought to be about something, but I wouldn't be presumptuous enough to say that's the only purpose," Jones observes.
As for the future, "There is a ten percent chance we'll work together again," says Palin. "John's dead set against it, which is silly really, because nothing is absolute in this world. Everything changes."
Street Performers
FOOTLOOSE
MUSICIANS
By Tom Soter
from F: FUJI FILM MAGAZINE,
published in Japan, 1987
Translated from the Japanese
Sean Grissom
New York's Columbus Avenue is a residential street, lined with 10- and 1l-story buildings. At night, however, it becomes an unofficial entertainment center, in which a man juggles fire for a crowd of onlookers, another races turtles, and classical musicians oboists"
violinists, miramba players, and cellists -- offer Bach, Brahms, and Haydn in a ''lay they've never done before. On the street.
Street performing has been a way of life in New York for almost as long as there have been streets. And more and more classical musicians are taJdng to the open air for various reasons,and with varying results. There's Sean Grissom, the 26-year-old commercial artist from Texas, whose "Cajun Cello" – a modified antique cello which allmiS him to perform bluegrass music as roll as the classics – has won him numerous street contests (as well as three trips to Japan).
Or Robert Teitelbaum, the 33-year-old former contracts collection agent who spent seven years at a job he hated before giving it all up for music on'the streets. Or Ronald Viogiani, 22, the low-level clerk at the Fashion Institute of Technology and grandson of an amateur drummer who dreams of Carnegie Hall – but for now plays on the streets and in the parks of New York.
They're all tied together by their love of music and their work on'the streets, yet all have different approaches to this unusual profession. "A lot of performers get into this late in life," says Teitelbaum. "It's not the sort of career choice you make early on. You fall into it."
Take Teitelbaum himself. He had studied music for four years and then entered a graduate program in which he practiced on his marimba four or five hours daily. Then, one day, he woke up and said to himself, "I'll never practice again." And he stopped playing. For seven years.
"I said, 'Why am I doing this?' I forgot the reasons why I went into it. Then I was training to be a classical performer, I had lost that special something that had drawn me into music. I wasn't in love with it anymore."
Street performing rekindled the romance. The ex-musician was working for his family firm at a contracts collection agency and also taking a course in marketing when he saw a miramba player on the street. He was fascinated by her grace, her music, and the warm response of the crowd. He became excited about the miramba and seven months later he was out on the street himself. "Part of performing is an ego trip," he notes. "I wouldn't be there if people dictll't smile and respond. Part of the gratification is knowing you did it \rell."
"Street performing changed my perspective on what muSic is and what performing' should be," observes Valerie Naranjo, the marimba player who so inspired Teitelbaum. The 27-year-old musician came to New York from Colorado in 1981 and needed a quick thousand dollars for graduate school studies. She took her seven-foot long, l40-pound marimba -- a percussion instrument that creates many haunting melodies when struck .. lith mallets in front of the Metropolitan Museum on Fifth Avenue and played. And played. And played.
The crowds were large and generous, and she made as much as $25 to $50 an hour playing Bach, the Beatles, and contemporary West African music. "It's a balance between what I want to play and what people enjoy listening to," she says. "Hopefully, there's overlap."
Although money was her original objective, that soon changed. "I stopped seeing myself as the center of the performance. The center was the energy created by bringing people together with the music and the instruments. Not enough of that goes on. 'We live in a society where the arts are a commodity and an industry rather than something that people share. That's unlike India or Africa where people as a whole participate in art as part of their lives. The closest thing to that here seems to be street performing. It makes something as mundane as walking home from 'work an artistic experience."
Indeed, the success of street performing has led to sUbway performing, a t'io-year-old, city-sponsored arrangement called MUNY (Music Under New York). Funded with a $70,000 grant, the program allows 50 musicians to play classical, jazz, and blues at selected sub'vay stations throughout New York. "The crowd down there is different," says Naranjo. "They're working people. They take it much differently than people strOlling around Central Park do. In the parle, I feel it's more of an entertainment. In the subway, it's much more a salve because everything is so unpleasant."
"I don't like that kind of crOWd," notes Teitelbaum. "It's rushing by you. I like to catch people in a leisure situation. A rush hour crowd tosses you a quarter and listens for two seconds. That's tainted money. They're giving it for pity, not because they enjoy the music. I \vant people to listen."
That was Gary Kvo' s approach, as well. A 22-year-old Julliard Music School student, he needed money when he first came to the city three years ago from a small town in Connecticut. He brought his sky blue-colored violin out on the street, hOOked it up to a battery-operated amplifier and began playing classical music. Small groups of people would gather aria applaud. They were all struck by the intense young man who refused to talk to anyone and seemed to be alone in a world of Dvorak, Stravinsky and Handel -- a world far removed from the rumbling streets.
Detail from a page of the original article, in Japanese.
"I wasn't doing a comedy show," says Kvo, who numbered among his audience Yoko Ono (she once dropped a 20-dollar bill in his case). Yet he admits that are great differences between the street and the concert hall. "When you're performing for concert audiences, they're there because they want to hear you. When you're on the street, you have to grab people's attention. Playing on the street doesn't mean lowering the quality. It's just a different demand. If you can find something people like, you're in luck. It kind of challenges you to see how fast you can do get them. You sell yourself."
"On stage," adds Robert Teitelbaum, "you're 30 feet away. On the street, you can reach out and touch your audience. Doing the street has made me less of a musician in the classical sense and more of an entertainer. It's different from the concert hall because you have to coerce them. If you played classical music beautifully you wouldn't attract them. You need more razzle dazzle." Kvo 'concurs. "Lively music worles better than slOl,er pieces. Often I would play one piece that looks a lot more difficult than it is."
Teitelbaum has adopted different tactics for different crowds. lilt works better if I have a 20-minute set and then pass my hat. That breaks up the shows and gives a definite point for people to contribute., I've also added audience participation, where audience members come up and join me for simple duets on the marimba. I got the idea from watching people 'iatch me. They always want to come up and hit it. So I'm fulfilling a need for them to become involved." Tei telbaum' s course in marketing has also been a big help. "You have to understand your ma;:-ket. I look at what happens when I play certain tunes, or make changes in my presentation. A lot of performers don't do that. They just play. They don't seek out crowds and locations that are suitable to their music. It's like the guy who sits in a dark corner and strums his guitar and wonders why no one pays attention. What to do and how to do it ma]{es a big difference in the attention you get."
Sean Grissom would agree. An unorthodox cellist, he is probably the most visibly successful classical performer on the New York streets. Besides making a living from his curbside earnings, he has traveled to Japan three times, the first as a representative of the United ,States at the World Street Entertainers Festival, where he hobknobbed with street performers from England, Holland, Brazil, and ~rance. This year, he will spend six weeks in ToJ'Y0 and Osaka for the Fuji Television Electronics Exposition.
"It's the damndest thing," he observes. "From playing on the street to going to Japan. I love to see my snob colleagues in the classical business who look do,m on street performing. When they hear what I'm doing it really shakes them up."
He has also started a small record company called Endpin to publish, record, and sell his street music. In 1986, he sold over 3,000 cassettes of Cajun Cello Live! and he has just order 2,000 more. He met his business partner/manager through a street performance connection and \Vas also elected to the New York Cello Society because of the notoreity he had gained on the street. Grissom, who has degrees in commercial art and music performs an interpretation of the Japanese song "Cherry Blossom," as well as cello arrangements of Bach, Dvorak, Saint-Saens, the Beatles, and a Spanish flamenco number. "I get people to listen \~ith the lively music and then sneak into the·classical stuff."
He has ingeniously adapted his cello to the street, mounting a tiny taperecorder in the rocJ{ of it which provides piano accompaniment. He has also added a strap to the instrument so he can dance to his tunes and more freely interact with the crowd. He receives nickels, dimes, subway tokens, Atlantic City casino chips, and foreign coins (he has a collection of ones from Brazil, France, and Holland). "The street's been really good," he notes. "I got skilled on the streets and I can do my o\m thing. I don't have to deal with the hassles of a club unless I want to. I can make more on the street and play for five hours." 
Page of original article.
But there are a number of drawbacks that all classicists report -- not the least of "hich are the rough conditions. The police can be the biggest problem. Gary Kvo remembers collecting a crovd of 15 or 20 people with his music and noticing that a police car had pulled up to the curb. An officer got out and stood watching the show. Kvo felt his time "laS up. Although there is no la\V against performing on the street, the POlice can arrest performers for disturbing the peace. "I thought he was going to wait for me to finish IiIy act and then take me away," recalls Kvo. At the end of the performance, however, the officer \ialked up to the artist, handed him a five dollar bill and said, "You're good."
There are also weather problems. Grissom played for only 10 minutes in 120-degree heat and nearly collapsed, while Teitelbaum was caught in many thunderstorms that could have damaged his instrtnnent if he hadn't brought a tarpaulin. And Kvo often had to stop if the wind became too strong and started blowing away his money.
But the biggest headache is coping with the noise. "It's very hard to play outsid~/" says ~ona~d Viogiani, the 22-year-old clerk who is a clarinetist with the New Trio d'Anches, a woodwind trio that won a scholarship to study in France. "There's nothing to keep the sound fran going straight up. There are no accoustics. You have to play really loud and that's a strain for 2\ or 3 hours."
Viogiani's group also had a bizarre experience one evening. "At the height of the day, our trio was playing on the street, and right across from us was another trio -- two flutes and a cello -- doing the exact same Haydn piece 'ie were doing. They were competing \Vith us. We'd do a movement, then they'd do a movement. The sounds began to meld and it didn't sound very good."
Then there are crowds. Teitelbaum once had ,stones thrown at him, while Grissom was doused with water at least five times. Kvo's experience was even more daunting: he ~~s playing his violin when a drunken man turned up and poured a bottle full of ciagrette ash onto the performer. Kvo lost his temper and pushed the man to the ground. The drunk responded by destroying the musician's amplifier. The incident shook Kvo up so much that he retired from street performing a month later.
There are also the good audiences. Valerie Naranjo remembers playing for a middle-aged group of people in front of the Metropolitan Museum who came to her defense when an irate man tried to have her removed. Grissan l'laS once dragged off the street by enthusiastic party-goers who brought him to a party (and paid him to be) a musical gift for the host. Anqther time, a woman pleaded with Grissom by long-distance telephone, insisting he come out to San Francisco -- at his own expense - to entertain guests at her home. And a Teitelbaum performance once touched a former miramba player so much that he asked if he could playa tune on Teitelbaum's instrument.
Page of original article.
"I believe in the healing power of art, of music, of those kinds of things things that bring people together," say Naranjo. "The most concrete way I've been able to manifest that is in street performing. The end result is the audience is made much happier and I'm made much happier."
There are, of course, the Aaron Minskys of the 'iOrld -- the unhappy and unlucky street performers. A classical cellist by training, Minsky had heard' there ''laS good money in street performing. "A friend of mine had made $70 one afternoon," he recalls. "I was hard pressed for cash, so I took out my cello and played on the street for a whole afternoon. I made five dollars."
Another friend told him that he should go out with a quartet since most quartets maJ<, where he had heard people were more generous. They went. And played classical music, blues, and fi~ally, in disgust, a weird atonal improvisation. No one stopped, except for a long-haired , drugged-out man "no said, "You guys should be on television."
Minsky's spirits brightened when a young man who had been successfully selling ties nearby took pi ty on them and offered each of the quartet a free $10 tie. After he left, however, they found out that it had been a joke: the man had sold them children's ties. Nonetheless, the group put them on and continued playing their atonal improvisation until a passerby took a polaroid of the foursome. Minsky asked if he could keep it as a souvenir," he said to his friends. "That's a picture of the last time I played on the street." And it was.
"Street performing's not for everyone," says Grissom. "But it's important. When you're in school, you're given tools but you're not told how to get work. I found the street just offered a way to take the tools and do something with them. Adds Viogiani: "It's hard to get a job in an orchestra. Vacancies are only created when musicians retire or die. That's why I turned to this sort of music."
Most street performers hope to go on to bigger things. "I don't want to be 50 or 60 and say, 'Come on, kids, comer see granddad on the street. But a few feel like Robert Teitelbaum, who observes: "I have no desire to stop playing on the street. A lot of people are out there too be discovered. Not me. I want to do what I'm doing. If someone offered me a world tour, I'd turn it down. Unless it was a tour of street performing that is."
I WAS A STREET PERFORMER
If classical musicians are a rarity on the street, improvisational comedy groups are even more scarce, akin to an endangered species. I have the unique distinction of being in the only improv group to play successfully on those streets for over a year, and the only one to appear in the Village Voice's Festival of Street Entertainers in 1985. I got into it by accident. A writer and editor by trade, I began studying improvisation in 1981 to improve my writing skills. I liked it so much, hmiever, that I "laS soon performing with a six-person group in nightclubs around the city.
One evening, however, our club date was unexpectedly cancelled. The six of us were standing on the street when one of the group said, "Why don't we perform right here?" We did and within an hour iie had a crm,d of 50 or more watching us sing, dance, and perform comedy skits created fran their suggestions. In less than an hour we had made ovef $100.
After that, we iiere hooked. we more or less shunned the clubs and instead were on the streets, in the park, and an~1here outside we could find to perform. It was a thrill to have groups of 100 and 200 people watching us, and our 'work got better and better depending on the size of the audience.
We had our share of mishaps. Once a pair of drunken teenagers interrupted a show and joined in a skit. Another time, we were singing an improvised song \ihen a rain of ''later came pouring down on us from an apartment windOli above. We were drenched, but cheered up when our audience started yelling abuse at the person in the window.
And then there was the policeman who very politely asked us and our crowd of about 50 to move across the street because were blocking pedestrian traffic. We did - and like the children in the Pied Piper fairy story, the crowd happily followed us! We finally gave up the streets -- not because it became less fun but because it got too cold. But if you asked me what the most exciting creative work I ever did ,laS, I wouldn't hesitate in my reply: creating a crowd out of thin air.
Star Trek
from DIVERSION, FEBRUARY 1988
The scene is familiar. On the bridge of the starship Enterprise, control center, the "Star Trek" crew is once again facing an alien life-form that is threatening humanity's very existence. But wait! There is no halfhuman, half-vulcan Mr. Spock in sight. Where's Captain Kirk or Dr. McCoy? Beam me up, Scotty-a guy named Picard is commanding the Enterprise, and on board with him are an android named Data and a beautiful half-human woman named Troy. Have aliens taken over the Enterprise at last?
Not exactly. This crew is part of "Star Trek: The Next Generation," a syndicated series created by "Star Trek" originator Gene Roddenberry that picks up the action on board the Enterprise 78 years after the adventures of the old crew. And if you've never heard of "Star Trek," new or old, come out of your cave: It is simply the most remarkable success story in television history, a show that has inspired books, record albums, movies, doctoral dissertations, and hundreds of fan clubs throughout the world.
In the Beginning
It all started in 1964, when Roddenberry, a writer of TV westerns, dramas, and crime shows, finally got fed up with the restraints placed on him by network censors. "You really couldn't talk about prejudice, sex, labor management, or war," he noted recently. "I decided 1 was going to leave TV unless 1 could find someway to write what 1 wanted." 
Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock.
Roddenberry let out his frustrations by creating a science fiction series in which he could deal with moral issues disguised as outer space plays. Vietnam, nuclear war, women's rights, racism-they all came under the microscope in "Star Trek," albeit in the manner of action and adventure on other planets. "It apparently went right over the censor's heads," says Roddenberry, "but all the fourteen-year-olds in our audience knew exactly what we were talking about."
The "Star Trek" odyssey began in 1966 on NBC, with an opening narration that explained: "Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: To explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no man has gone before. " The series detailed the adventures of a huge starship in the 23rd century as it investigated unknown planets in unknown galaxies. The 430 crew members included the young, dynamic Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner); the apparently all-knowing Mr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy, with pointed ears); and the hot-tempered Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy (DeForest Kelley). A typical episode presented Kirk with a seemingly insoluble dilemma: a plague affecting the crew or a menacing alien capable of destroying the ship. His solution, devised with the help of Spock and McCoy, usually reaffirmed what it means to be human.
The issues "Star Trek" confronted ran the gamut from growing up and sexism to penal systems and computerization. In one episode, for instance, a brilliant scientist transplants his mind into a robot's body, but finds that his soul is missing. He can think, but he cannot feel or make mistakes or be emotional. The lesson: He is alive, but he lacks the qualities that are the essence of humanity.
The program is fascinating partly because its effects were done so ingeniously. Unlike such high-tech sci-fi series as "Battlestar Galactica," which had brilliant special effects, "Star Trek" was made quickly and produced on a shoestring budget: Two-dollar saltshakers doubled as medical instru- ' ments; alien landscapes looked like yesterday's studio set. But it didn't matter. "Star Trek" valued characters and drama over effects, and its followers loved it.
Leonard Nimoy and Nichele Nichols.
"'Star Trek' came along at a time when most television leads were antiheroes," Roddenberry said in a 1976 interview. "On 'Star Trek,' we decided to go for real heroes in an oldfashioned sense, people whose word was their bond, who believed that there were some things more important in life than personal security or comfort."
The Enterprising Kirk
Kirk, naturally, was a captain's captain, a hero's hero. "People are fascinated by Kirk," noted Shatner in 1983. "He's somebody who fights nature in order to have sway over his own fate. For most people, that's impossible." Or as David Bianculli, a television critic, put it: "Kirk's character was app~aling because he was cerebral, so he was always addressing the big, issues, like what humans are here for, how humans should interact, how to succeed through nonviolence. That was different; in 'Gunsmoke,' for exam, pie, you never saw, Matt Dillon agonizing over whether to pull the trigger."
Despite all its qualities, in its initial appearance "Star Trek" was a failure. NBC, unsure of how to promote it, constantly shifted the show from time slot to time slot, and by 1969 it was being bested by "Iron Horse" and "Mr. Terrific." After 79 adventures, the Enterprise went into dry. dock. But, like the phoenix or Count Dracula, "Star Trek" wouldn't stay down. The show was immediately put in syndication on stations around the country and quickly gained a new audience-people who had never seen it in its original time slots. And people didn't just watch it-they virtually lived it. Fan conventions began in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. A cartoon version ran on Saturday mornings in the 1973-74 season. Comic books, novels, and toys inundated the market. "Star Trek" was a cult phenomenon. By the mid-1980 s, the series's owner, Paramount, reported that it was the most successful syndicated show ever, topping such perennial favorites as "Perry Mason" and "Little House on the Prairie. " Over 140 stations carried it, and many ran it every day of the week.
Brochure from the second Star Trek convention in 1973.
Celluloid Heroes
You didn't have to hit Paramount over the head with the show's nationwide popularity: The studio reassembled the original cast in 1979 for Star Trek: The Motion Picture, an effectsladen, duller-than-dirt epic that missed the point of the show's success. That disaster, however, was followed by three sequels that were right on target: stories about people, about choices to be made and issues to be resolved, all done with drama, humor, and a great deal of panache. But there was a problem. The "Star Trek" following was getting stronger as the cast was growing older. How could the Enterprise continue laying its golden eggs over the next 20 years? "Star Trek: The Next Generation" is the answer. A new syndicated series with a new cast, "The Next Generation" replaces the fiery young Kirk with JeanLuc Picard, an aristocratic, bald French-Englishman in his 50s. Instead of Spock, there is Data, an android who wants to be human. But that's where the similarities cease. For as production associate Susan Sackett put it when the'series began, "Weare not putting clones of the original characters into this. The reason Gene set the new series [long] after the original series was to free it from the old 'Star Trek' pattern. It gives us a chance to take it a step beyond."
Future Shock
The new starship Enterprise contains even more unusual crew members than its predecessor: aliens, the android, many more women in executive positions, and even a 16-year-old boywonder who gets on the captain's nerves. The Enterprise itself is fancier, and the show's budget is vastly bigger (at about $1 million an episode, it is in fact one of the most expensive science fiction series ever).
But the stories have been typical "Star Trek," showcasing issues rather than ray guns and attempting topicality in the guise of sci-fi. In one episode, for example, the crew tries to cope with hostage-takers, yet seeks to understand rather than destroy them. "Terrorists feel that they have been wronged," Roddenberry told the fan press. "They feel very passionate about their beliefs. Today, in the United States, we should be exploring why they feel that way. What could we possibly have done wrong? And how can we fix it? The answer is not the current answer, hating them. And the answer in 'Star Trek' is not going to be hating them." 
Cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation
What the new show lacks, however, is the strong chemistry among the characters that sparked the original series. There is an almost familial bond between Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and the rest that makes the first "Star Trek" watchable even when the story lines are weak. But on "The Next Generation," there are too many personalities that aren't meshing. And the writing! In one episode, the "away team" (or landing party) beams down to a pleasure planet where breaking a law-any law-means death. There is no appeal, no chance to claim mitigating circumstances. Though the point that laws must take events into account is valid, the tale is handled with incredible ineptitude, culminating in a silly deus ex machina. It's boring, too, so full of talk that it might be mistaken for a PBS debate show, and there's very little drama.
Will "Star Trek: The Next Generation" succeed? So far it is a hit in the ratings (Variety, the show business trade paper, offered the headline: "'Star Trek' Earns Hyperspace Ratings"). And its critical reception has been nothing if not warm, although the ~ original cast initially expressed some :g resentment. "I think they're trying to "'- fool the public," James Doohan, who played Chief Engineer Scott, told Starlog, a fan magazine. "They are calling it 'Star Trek' when we know what 'Star Trek' is, which is the characters." Added Leonard Nimoy: "We were lucky to catch lightning in a bottle with the characters we had. I don't know if they can do it again." But Nichelle Nichols, alias Lieutenant Uhura, was more encouraging: "It has the genius of Gene Roddenberry behind it. He did it once; there's no reason he can't do it agam.
Sci-Fi High
And though some might argue that the success of the new "Star Trek" depends on whether the drama is better written or the characters develop chemistry, "Star Trek" has really gone beyond that, gone beyond even its creators' grandest dreams. "Star Trek" has become as much a part of America as the Rose Bowl and Cabbage Patch dolls. It's no wonder that a recent poll of critics, science fiction writers and editors, and TV watchers rated the old series the number one science fiction show of all time. D. C. Fontana, the original show's story editor and the new one's script writer, explained it: "The stories appeal to generation after generation. I was talking to a twenty-threeyear-old real estate broker. He was only three or four years old when the show originally ran. When he got to college, everybody gravitated toward watching 'Star Trek' reruns because they found something in them, something that spoke to them. And that's 'Star Trek"s continuing appeal. The characters are still speaking across twenty years to today's generation. "
Raymond Burr
BY TOM SOTER
from VIDEO, September 1986
Raymond Burr is big-perhaps 300 pounds-with blue cow eyes that seem to stare into your soul. At 69, his hair is short-cropped and gray and he wears a trim goatee that covers his oval face. He is talking about Perry Mason, which is not surprising, since the lawyer-detective has recently catapulted Burr back into the limelight. In 1985, he played the late Erie Stanley Gardner's creation-as he had 271 times before-in Perry Mason Returns, an NBC TV-movie. It was the most-watched television film of the year, beating everything (including The Cosby Show). In May, he returned in Perry Mason: The Case of the Notorious Nun, and is presently working on three more Masons. 
"I begged CBS [the original producer of Mason] to let me do a two-hour movie for nine years," he says. "They wouldn't. When NBC offered me this, I jumped at it."
He has always believed in the principles of Perry Mason, which he sees as a reaffirmation of the world's best justice system. He would probably agree with Gardner's assessment of Mason's appeal: "Mason is for the underdog. People want to know that there is someone out there looking out for their rights."
That identification helped make the series one of the most successful in TV history and earned Burr a pair of Emmy awards. Among the top-rated programs during its CBS run (1957-1966), it has never left the airwaves, showing without interruption in over 70 countries and in hundreds of cities throughout the United States. Taping and collecting all the episodes has become a popular hobby for fans.
Surprisingly, Burr was no one's first choice for Mason. Between 1946 and 1956, he had appeared in 60 movies, usually – because of his imposing bulk – as a villain. He threatened the Marx Brothers in Love Happy, chased Lex Barker in Tarzan and the She-Devil, stalked Natalie Wood in A Cry in the Night, and stared across a courtyard at Jimmy Stewart in Hitchcock's Rear Window, where he was both moving and menacing as the pathetic wife murderer. He appeared in virtually anything, from Godzilla (inserted, as American reporter Steve Martin, into the 1954 Japanese film) to George Stevens' A Place in the Sun, where he was memorable as the limping district attorney opposite Montgomery Clift.
Despite their varied significance, all these films were essential to his craft. "Acting is just another form of communication, " he says. "And if you can not communicate-if you don't have the opportunity-then you could be the world's greatest actor, but it means nothing."
He grew tired of playing heavies, however, and decided that TV was his ticketout. When Perry Mason came up, he was asked to audition for the role of district attorney Hamilton Burger. He insisted they let him try out for Mason as well. When Erle Stanley Gardner saw him he said, "That's Mason," and Burr beat out Fred MacMurray and Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. for the part.
Burr threw himself into the role with the dedication of a true believer, although he now claims, "I prepared for it the way I prepare for any role." He talked with "countless" judges and "countless" lawyers and then went to "countless" courtrooms to see the system at work. During the series, he double-checked each script with six appellate judges. During production, he lived in a bungalow near the set, usually rising at 3 AM to study his part.
It paid off. Perry Mason was a hit, as formulaic as Greek tragedy but much more entertaining. As TV historians Harry Castelman and Walter J. Podrazik observed, "Perry Mason was a triumph of technique over format, because every episode in the series was identical ... The series was a straight whodunit, complete with a full range of suspects and clues that allowed the viewer to become an armchair detective." The shows (which had such colorful titles as "The Case of the Treacherous Toupee" and "The Case of the Grinning Gorilla") usually climaxed with exchanges like this:
Mason (pausing, then staring thoughtfully at the witness): "All right, Miss Howard, let's get down to cases. Mr. Granger gave you the gun, the weapon used to murder George Lutz. You returned a different gun. You knew Mrs. Granger was going to be on that hilltop. You destroyed evidence. If you are not trying to protect someone, then you murdered George Lutz!"
Witness: "No! No! I didn't! It was an accident! It was Mrs. Granger, she was supposed to be the one ..."
Mason: "You mean you deliberately aimed at Mrs .Granger and Lutz got in the way?"
Witness: "No! I didn't say that! I didn't shoot Mr. Lutz!"
Mason: "Then who did?"
Witness (pointing to a man in the courtroom): "He did it! Herbert! Herbert Dean!" (Gasps from the gallery.)
Burr remembers if all with a brooding sadness. His usually booming voice lowers as he stares straight ahead. "The only regret I have in my whole life is that I did Perry Mason for too long. I should have gotten married, had children. Had a life." He doesn't mention that he was married three times, that two wives died suddenly and that a third divorced him. He doesn't talk about his only child, either, who died of leukemia. AlIne does say is: "I was so tied up with that show. I built one of the most beautiful homes in California, and I never lived there."
The show wasn't all that occupied him. .With it came a commitment to do good, to carry the character over into real life. And so this Canadian hardware merchant's son who took up acting after seeing Philip Merivale onstage in Death Takes a Holiday became a real-life crusader for justice. He made thirty goodwill trips to Korea and Vietnam during the wars there, visiting the wounded and conveying messages home; provided financial support to foster children in five countries; delivered scores of speeches before lawyers and law enforcement groups; arid engaged in ceaseless fundraising and lobbying activities for the Cerebral Palsy Association, National Safety Council, B'nai B'rith, and the March of Dimes. It was such a crusade that led him to Ironside.
"After Perry Mason, everybody said I would never work another day in anything," he remarks. "And the writing was on everybody's wall that you would never be able to make a success doing a show about a handicapped person. And I thought, 'All the handicapped people out there-if they're being told this every minute of every day, what is that doing to them?' "
Ironside was almost as big a success as Mason, running from 1967 through 1975. Burr's company produced it, and he made it more personal: the crippled chief of detectives was plainly vulnerable, fighting his physical pain and helplessness by crusading against injustice. Burr was soon on the road campaigning for the rights of paraplegics. "I have been to forty states, and we changed the laws in every one," he notes. "If you look into it, you'll find that people in wheelchairs can't vote because they can't get through the polling booth. Or into government offices. Try going to City Hall in a wheelchair. Or anywhere. We've gotten curbs lowered so handicapped people can go down in the street. Handicapped people want to do it for themselves."
Burr as Ironside
He is still obsessed with work. To him, it equals living. And yet he seems to be searching for something. Respect? Truth? People? He remembers Pope John XXIII, whom he knew and portrayed in a TV drama. He talks about Henry the Navigator, "one of the most significant figures in history. Without him, Columbus wouldn't have discovered America. This country might not have been discovered for another 200 years."
He seems to know so much, to do so much, to still want so much more. All types of people fascinate him. ''I am most at home with the Fiji Islanders and the Portuguese," he notes. 'They have a great deal of respect for each other. As perfect strangers, they respect their fellow men more than any other nationals in the world." Until recently, he owned a 4000-acre Fiji island, where he raised orchids and helped build a school. These days, when he is anywhere for long, it's southern California.
He resents every wasted minute. "There are two things I cannot stand. One is people who lie to me and people who are late. That's the most disrespectful thing in the world. I don't care when you make the but 1 have no idea what to do with my if you're half an hour late. Arid the time you're late, I'm not going to be there."
The threat is tempered with a laugh, and the moment sums up much of what Burr is about: generosity mixed with impatience, selflessness with sarcasm, confidence with insecurity. He recalls a painter who asked him to pose for a portrait. The actor consented, but only if the artist would paint both the canvas, showing Burr's front and back. There's a chuckle in his eyes as explains. "I don't like my face, and I to be able to turn it to the wall." He smiles, adding, "I think it's a wonderful idea – to just have your back to the room."