Mark Evanier's Blog, page 184

Today's New Year's Eve Video Link #3

It's already 2024 in Australia! Here's how they welcomed in the new year in Sydney…

Today's New Year's Eve Video Link #2

Hey, how about some Smothers Brothers?

Today's New Year's Eve Video Link #1

Here's Johnny Carson's show from December 31, 1982 — in other words, New Year's Eve. It features Tina Turner, magician Jonathan Neal Brown, a variety act named Dr. Flame-o and a very young Bill Maher…

Last Day of '23!

Like any sane human being, I'm staying in this evening. If you're sane enough to do the same, you might want to enjoy some of the video links I'll be posting here.

You might also like to tune in Stu's Show, the video podcast hosted by my buddy Stu Shostak and his lovely consort, Jeanine Kasun. The guests on tonight's New Year's gala will be cartoonist Scott Shaw! along with authors Julian David Stone and Antonia Carlotta, plus there will be fun film clips and comedy and all sorts of things. It's starts at 8 PM West Coast Time which is 11 PM East Coast Time and here's a link to watch his channel which will begin airing the show when it commences.

If that doesn't work for you, you can figure out how to watch it over at the Stu's Show website. If you have a Roku TV with the Stu's Show Channel installed, you can watch it there.

ASK me: Silent Movie Stars

One of those folks who asked me to withhold their name sent me this…

What encounters, if any — even fleeting or from a distance — have you had with folks whose greatest show biz fame and/or achievements — however slight — came from their work in silent film? Which is to say not George Jessel or Mickey Rooney — both top-billed silent stars — but rather someone like Baby Peggy, or as obscure as Wyn Ritchie Evans (1900-2003), child of Billie Ritchie, wife of composer Ray Evans, and occasional Chaplin bit player from Pay Day (1922) to The Great Dictator (1940).

Well, the biggest star of silent movies I ever met was Harold Lloyd, who was a pretty big star. I told that story here. I also met his one-time partner, Hal Roach, who was a pretty important producer of silent movies. Both Mr. Lloyd and Mr. Roach did a lot in the talkie era but they distinguished themselves enough in the silent days that I think they qualify.

Harold Lloyd and Hal Roach

My time with Mr. Lloyd was brief and what I wrote about it pretty much tells you everything I got out of him. I spent more time with Mr. Roach and I wrote about it here and here. Mostly, we talked about Charley Chase and Our Gang because Mr. Roach was more loquacious about them and I got the feeling he'd been overinterviewed about Laurel and Hardy.

He also talked a lot about the studio he ran and about how everyone on the premises — the cameraguys, the prop men, the carpenters, everyone — knew comedy and it wasn't just the gagmen and the actors who put in the funny. I remember him saying (approximately), "Take a look at the films Stan and Babe made for me and then look at the films they made for other studios." (Do I have to explain that "Babe" was the common nickname for Oliver Hardy?)

Actually, what I remember most about my time with Hal Roach was him asking me about "these girls today." He'd been reading in Time or Newsweek these stories about how the young women of then-today were amazingly promiscuous. It was not "dirty old man" talk so much as honest curiosity about whether what he was reading was to be believed. And he must have used the phrase "When I was your age" a hundred times.

I may be missing someone but I'm thinking the only other person I can recall meeting who worked in silent movies was the film editor, Martin Bolger. I did spend about ten minutes once with Billy Gilbert who got into movies just when they were starting to talk and may have made a silent or two but I got nothing out of that conversation except being able to say I'd met Billy Gilbert.

I wish I'd met more of those folks. They were a number of them around when I became interested in silent films but I didn't really know how to contact them and was actually very shy about approaching strangers. From the few I did meet, I don't think I learned anything they didn't say in recorded interviews but it was great to "connect" with them in any way, no matter how superficial.

Today's Video Link

Below, I have embedded a half-hour episode of the game show I've Got a Secret from May 25, 1964. I've set the embed to start playing at the beginning of the third game of the night…the celebrity guest spot. If you want to view the whole show from the beginning, just move the slider all the way to the left. If you just click, you'll see that celebrity guest spot right away and I think you'll enjoy it…

The Ivar – Part 1

I have occasionally mentioned the Ivar Theater in Hollywood on this site. It's an unremarkable little theater that at various times has seated between 250 and 350 and has gone through many changes.

It was built in 1951 by a gent named Yegishe Harout who owned various restaurants in the area and for twenty years, it featured plays that online sources tell me included The Barretts of Wimpole Street, The Glass Menagerie, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and The Pajama Game. I believe Billy Barnes had one of his famous revues at the Ivar in the early sixties.

Bill Bixby played there in The Fantasticks and later in Under the Yum-Yum Tree. Stop the World, I Want To Get Off played there, as you can see in the above photo. And I know of two other plays that graced its stage. I know because I saw them — one of them twice.

In the late sixties, my parents took me there to see a production of Neil Simon's The Odd Couple. Jesse White starred as Oscar, Roy Stuart played Felix and it was directed by Neil's brother Danny Simon, who was in some ways the inspiration for Felix. I've written about it a few times here (here, for instance) and guessed then it was in 1967. I also reproduced this ad…

It later dawned on me that the ad gave me a clue as to when I saw the play. It says, as you can see unless the image is missing, that the play opened on Thursday, August 24.  In the late sixties, August 24 only fell on a Thursday in 1967…so I was right.  We saw it not long after it opened and it was a wonderful production. A lot of my love of live theater and that play and its playwright came from that evening at the Ivar.

The musical You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown played there from March 12, 1968 to November 9, 1969, which was one of the longer runs a play ever had at the Ivar.  This is the one I saw twice.  I no longer have or can find my Playbill from either visit but I found online this list of the cast members: Gary Burghoff, Judy Kaye, Russ Caldwell, Hal James Pederson, Nicole Jaffe and Robert Towers. I have no idea if that's the cast from opening night or closing night or if any roles changed hands in-between. Probably, some did.

And yes, playing Charlie Brown was the same Gary Burghoff who played Radar in the movie and the TV series, M*A*S*H. According to IMDB, the movie filmed from April 19, 1969 to June 22, 1969…so Mr. Burghoff either took time off from the play or was working two jobs for a while. I'm about 80% certain he was in it when I saw it the second time, which I'm 100% certain was its next-to-last performance on Saturday evening, November 8.

The first time, I went with my parents. The second time, I took a girl named Lynne on a first date. It was my third first date and while I would never claim I ever got real good at first dates — or second or third, etc. — I was a lot worse when I was 17 than I was later. And before your imagination runs away with you: No, nothing happened that would have riled the Comics Code had it happened in an issue of Archie.

Still, I had a great time and I made a mental note to keep an eye on what was playing at the Ivar for future dating purposes. Alas, I never took another date there. Two years after Charlie Brown, Lucy, Linus and Snoopy departed, naked women and porn queens took the stage at the Ivar and it turned into…well, certainly not the kind of place your parents would take you or you'd take a first date or any date. And now that I have your attention, I'll tell you that this is a two-part story and the conclusion should appear here in the next few days. Maybe.

Today's Video Link

From the 1988 Jerry Lewis Telethon, here's one of my favorite performers — George Carl. Mr. Carl passed away in 2000 and I only got to see him perform live once but I'm still laughing from that one time…

ASK me: Different Creators on Different Strips

From Mike Masters comes this…

Enjoyed your discussion of inking. enjoyed even more your comments about Wally Wood. I thought Wally Wood's brief stint on Justice Society in the 70s and his take on Golden Age Superman were magical. One wonders what a longer stint on Superman would've been like.

Is there anyone of that era you would have particularly liked to have seen on a book they didn't do? DC famously offered Jack Kirby the regular Superman book but he turned it down. Are there any other "almost happened" situations that you would have liked to have seen? On the other hand, any "almost happened" that you think would've turned out badly?

When Jack went to DC in 1970, he was sorta/kinda offered Superman but not really. The character was in a state of flux then because sales were down and the property's long-time editor Mort Weisinger had been retired, somewhat against his will. So there was a lot of talk about "What do we do with Superman?" and assigning their new "get," Jack Kirby to it was discussed, if only to flatter Jack when he was being courted.

I don't think that could ever have worked out. DC was never in a trillion years going to let creative control of Superman happen outside their office and Jack would not have been Jack if he'd had to deal with all their rules about how the character had to be treated. They wouldn't even let his drawings of Superman be published without serious retouching to make them look like the character had always looked.

I think Wally Wood would have had much the same problem if he'd gotten the assignment when he was, in my opinion, at his creative peak. Wood was a guy who did his best work when he was left alone and the management of DC Comics during that period was never going to leave anyone alone; not when they were doing the main Superman strip at least. They didn't even leave Jack alone on characters he created.

There is really no one from that period — writer or artist — I would have liked to see assigned to a comic created by someone else. There are people I think could have done a better job on certain established properties than the people who did them but I would have liked to see my fave writers and artists baking from scratch. I'd have liked to see them produce a comic born out of their own interests and ideas rather than have them assigned to an existing book just because it needed a writer and/or artist.

And I know some reading this will say, "Well, this artist did a great Batman" and "This writer did a great Hulk" and I might agree with you. But I would have liked to see what that artist and writer could have come up with without being saddled by decades of what had come before. And had their work compared to those who had come before them.

From the E-Mailbag…

Mike Hagan sent me a very important correction to my map of states I've visited…

On your list of traveled states, you omitted Missouri.

However, I know you have been here. In 2008 at the Mo-Kan Comics Conspiracy, a friend and I met you, had you sign your new (then) Kirby: King of Comics book, and had an enjoyable conversation for 10 minutes or so. The event was held in Kansas City, Missouri. Easy to see why you'd forget…the event was lightly attended from what we could tell. But, hopefully, you had some barbecue when you were here.

I didn't forget the convention. I forgot that a con in that Kansas City wasn't in the state of Kansas…which is an easy mistake to make. I have now yellowed Missouri on the map and unyellowed Kansas. Thank you for catching that. Maybe someday I'll get to Kansas and I can yellow it back up.

We did have barbecue there — at Arthur Bryant's (which did not impress us) and at Jack Stack (which did). I see that Jack Stack ships ribs and other eats nationwide but I doubt that by the time a shipment got to my table, their burnt ends and other fine concoctions would be anywhere near as wonderful. And before anyone tells me otherwise, let me remind you that there are no cooking or reheating instructions that I can't screw up.