Mark Evanier's Blog, page 132

Today's Political Post

Ed Kilgore suggests what Joe Biden should say if/when he steps aside. I think it's a "when" and I'd like to think there are good and proper reasons that he hasn't done so yet and is just waiting for the right moment. But Kilgore's right: Biden ran for a second term because Donald Trump represented such a threat to Democracy…and Biden should now pass the torch for the same reason. And Trump should drop out of the race just because he's Trump.

Set the TiVo!

That is, if you still use a TiVo. I had to switch over to streaming for my TV viewing because I had to dump my cable provider and…well, it's a long story that has nothing to do with Bob Newhart. This post is to make sure you know that CBS is airing a tribute to him at 8 PM on Monday evening. Wonder how long ago they started working on this.

Here's a story that also has nothing to do with Bob Newhart: It involves a certain older performer — I shall withhold his name — whose work I loved and who was still around but showing signs of failing health. His agent told me that this certain older performer was in really poor shape and had but a few weeks (at most) to live. I mentioned this to a friend who worked for the TV show Entertainment Tonight — which is the entity that produced the Newhart tribute.

I told my friend — who also loved the work of this certain old performer — because I thought E.T. might want to assemble some brief video clips to air when, as seemed imminent, they had to assemble an on-air obit for the c.o.p. My friend thanked me for the tip and said, "I'll make sure they get it ready now. If we wait until he dies, we might be too busy to do it or to do it right. But if we already have it assembled, they'll air it."

So they scurried about and found the clips and edited them into a fine short video tribute and waited for the certain old performer to die. When he did, they didn't air the clip package. My friend was no longer working there and neither was anyone who knew they had it ready to go…or where it was. You see, it was twenty-three years later.

Today's Bonus Video Link

This is the entirety (an hour and twenty-one minutes) of a movie that changed my life a little.  It was one of a number of features assembled by a man named Robert Youngson who in the late fifties/early sixties liked to prowl through vaults of silent movie comedies, pick out the best scenes and assemble them into compilation films.  He was widely criticized for truncating and altering a lot of classic comedy and also for adding in inappropriate (some thought) music and intrusive (everyone thought) narration.

Then again, he was also praised for shining a spotlight on comedians and comedies that were long forgotten and difficult to see anywhere in any form back then. A lot of my love for silent movies and performers like Laurel, Hardy, Keaton, et al came from Channel 9 here in Los Angeles showing Youngson's films over and over and over. Often, it was on a program they had called The Million Dollar Movie and the way it worked may seem counter-intuitive but I guess it worked for a while.

Each week, one movie was designated as "The Million Dollar Movie" and I don't think any of them cost a million dollars to make. Some of them probably haven't grossed that much to this day. In that week, that film aired eight times that week…occasionally, nine. They ran it in prime-time Monday through Friday and then twice on Saturday and sometimes once on Sunday. This is the same movie we're talking about.

I recall watching the feature below, When Comedy Was King, multiple times the week it was The Million Dollar Movie; likewise, an earlier Youngson cut-and-paste job called The Golden Age of Comedy. They also ran both at times when they were not The Million Dollar Movie, especially following a baseball game or other sporting event. If the game ran long, a Youngson compilation was easy to chop down.

This is not the best way to see this material but when I was ten years old, it was just about the only way. I especially loved the last sequence here with Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy. It was their 1929 short Big Business, which ran 20 minutes in its original release but for his purposes, Mr. Youngson scissored it down to about ten. It was still funny at ten but better in every way when I finally saw the whole thing.

Then again, some of the clips of the lesser comedians were probably improved by being whittled down to their best moments. Keep that in mind as you watch this if you watch this…

Very Early Saturday Morning

Comic-Con International starts in four days. I am always amazed when, around this time, I get a call or an e-mail from someone asking me if there's still time to get a panel they suddenly want to do on the convention schedule. I woke up this morning to an e-mail asking me this.

Today's Video Link

And here's how they did it at Hillsboro High School in Nashville, Tennessee…

Checks Mix

Among the reasons that Al Gore was never President of the United States was that a lot of people thought he was a "congenital liar" because of a confusion over the popular novel, Love Story by Erich Segal. Wikipedia's description of this confusion syncs up with what I remember hearing at the time…

It is sometimes said that Al Gore falsely claimed that the plot is based on his life at Harvard. In fact, Al Gore mentioned correctly, that he had read that the characters were based on him and his wife. In 1997, Segal confirmed Gore's account, explaining that he had been inaccurately quoted in the Nashville Tennessean and that "only the emotional family baggage of the romantic hero was inspired by a young Al Gore. But it was Gore's Harvard roommate, Tommy Lee Jones, who inspired the half of the character that was a sensitive stud, a macho athlete with the heart of a poet." Erich Segal had met both Jones and Gore at Harvard in 1968, when he was there on sabbatical. Jones would go on to appear in a supporting role in the film adaptation of the novel.

In other words, Gore didn't lie — or if he did, it was about something pretty trivial — but if you were against his candidacy, you could probably spin the confusion that way, lying to say he'd told The Lie of the Century. That did him some real damage to the man as did a similar twisting of a statement he uttered that made it sound like he was claiming he alone created The Internet.

That wasn't so long ago and I'm amazed at how it is now possible for You-Know-Who to lie openly about matters of substance and not lose the support of the kind of voter who was appalled at Gore's supposed mendacity. Here's a link to Fred Kaplan writing about some of the lies in Trump's speech at the Republican National Convention.

And while we're at it, here's a link to Politifact's fact check of that speech, here's a link to a long CNN fact check, here's a link to the Washington Post fact check, here's a link to the Associated Press fact check and here's a link to the New York Times fact check. You may notice a lot of repetition but no one caught them all.

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Comic-Con Stuff

I'm still seeing online discussions about the possibility of Comic-Con leaving San Diego and relocating to Las Vegas. This is another one of those topics upon which I don't want to squander a lot of time. I still think it won't leave San Diego because I still think San Diego would be stupid-beyond-belief to let it go. I also think that if it did go elsewhere, Vegas would be among the least likely places and not just because of the weather.

What I will mention here is that just about every online discussion I've seen arguing for Vegas says that the annual Consumer Electronics Show there is way bigger than Comic-Con and that plenty of cheap hotel rooms are available in Vegas during the C.E.S. Hmm…let's fact-check that: The official attendance count for the C.E.S. held in January of this year was — and you can verify this here — 138,789 attendees. All the reports on last year's Comic-Con in S.D. say it had 150,000 attendees.

The city of Las Vegas was famously built on people not being able to do math…but I still believe 138,789 is not way more than 150,000.

And really those numbers don't mean much in any debate because no one knows how many people would attend Comic-Con if it wasn't limited by the capacity of the San Diego Convention Center. The folks arguing for the con to move to Las Vegas think it would be way, way bigger there but assume increased demands would not lead to increased room rates. But hotels in Vegas love to raise rates when the town gets crowded. They do it on certain holidays — New Year's Eve, especially. And during the first of what will be several Formula-1 races in Vegas, hotels were charging thousands of dollars per night for rooms that usually go for a few hundred.

And lastly, let's remember that Comic-Con attracts more visitors to San Diego than the official attendance. Lots of people travel there during Comic-Con because there are so many events that are accessible even if you can't get a badge for the con itself. Here's a list of some of what's available to those folks this year.

Phunny Phone Calls

Many of Bob Newhart's early stand-up routines involved him talking on an imaginary telephone. You heard his side of the conversation but not the other person. Before him, Shelley Berman did some popular stand-up routines talking on an imaginary phone to an unheard party. Well actually, Shelley usually did his sitting on a stool but it was the same idea. Mr. Berman was known to suggest that Mr. Newhart had cribbed the idea from him.

Shelley Berman was by no means the first comedian to do such routines. He might not even have been the thousandth. Just to name three, there was Arlene Harris, a popular radio comedienne…there was Georgie Jessel talking to various folks including his mother…and one of the oldest comedy records was a thing called "Cohen on the Telephone," recorded in London by Joe Hayman in 1913. Others recorded their version of Hayman's routine and you can hear one from 1916 on this Wikipedia page.

So Shelley Berman didn't invent that or even come close to inventing that. Now, is it possible that Bob Newhart got the idea to do routines like that from Berman? Sure. It's also highly likely that Warner Brothers Records decided to take a gamble on putting out an album of Newhart routines because they saw the sales figures on Shelley Berman's albums. But that's not plagiarism or theft or anything of the kind. It's just kind of how show business has always worked.

Folks on the Internet have been arguing over whether Shelley Berman's claim that Newhart stole from him has any merit and I've been asked my opinion. My opinion, as you can see, is "Not really."

Today's Video Link

Here's the way they did "Sit Down, You're Rockin' the Boat" on the TV series, Glee. The gent at the piano is my pal — with whom I sometimes write songs — Brad Ellis…