Mark Evanier's Blog, page 198

Today's Video Link

The Legal Eagle is back with an interesting video about all these one-time associates of Donald Trump flipping on the man to whom they pledged their unreturned loyalty. Devin Stone turns most of the duties on this one over to his own associate, Spencer the Scowl Owl, but comes back at the end to add to the discussion…

From the E-Mailbag…

My post about the Some Like It Hot sitcom pilot brought forth a lot of mail including this one from someone who signed their message "LJS"…

Longtime fan from many venues, but I'm not going to bore you with all of them now. Just wanted to follow up about the Some Like It Hot pilot. I've never seen it either (I wish I had), but Laurence Maslon has. He writes about it in his book on Some Like It Hot.

Besides the cast members you mentioned, Robert Strauss, Jack Albertson, and Jerry Paris (you might be able to find a Dick Van Dyke Show connection there…) all appeared. Anthony Caruso played Spats Columbo's brother (although Maslon has a source that says George Raft wanted to do it as a twin) and Rudy Vallee plays a character called "The Millionaire" who was apparently meant to recur.

Besides Ms. Shawlee (whom Maslon said only got one line in the episode), Mike Mazurki and Sandra Warner returned from the movie. The pilot was written by Herbert Baker, who had a lot of experience in comedy, and directed by Walter Grauman, who didn't. (He was a very fine director of dramatic television shows, however.)

Billy Wilder was supposed to consult, but unsurprisingly, he got busy. He did retain 20% ownership of the show, though. It was a co-production of Ziv and The Mirisches, filmed at NBC. The most interesting trivia Maslon shared was that Curtis was paid with a painting he liked at a local gallery and Lemmon was paid with a shopping spree at a men's clothing store.

Please let us all know if any of your readers know a source for seeing the pilot anywhere. It must still exist somewhere because Maslon has seen it.

Thanks for everything on the blog and for your many other contributions, too.

I hereby let you know that it turns out that a friend of mine has a copy of the pilot and I'll probably see it next time we get together. I shall report on it here after that happens. The friend does not however know the answer to a question that others in my e-mailbox asked me: Did this thing ever air? Back then, it was not uncommon for the networks to burn off unsold pilots, usually in the Summer and usually in "anthology shows" with names like Vacation Playhouse.

But not all unsold pilots made it to air and I would think that if this one had, we'd know more about it. If it never aired, that might explain why there's no mention of it on IMDB.

Interesting that Herbert Baker wrote the pilot. I picketed with Mr. Baker during one of the many Writers Guild strikes and we talked about his work with Danny Kaye (didn't like the man) and Henry Morgan (did). I wish I'd known about the pilot then so I could have asked him about it. He died in June of 1983 so this must have been the 1981 strike. There have been so many, it's hard to keep track.

Today's Video Link

As followers of this site know, I really like a cappella singing combos and one of the best I've found is Voctave, an aggregate of great singers whose membership seems to change a bit with every video. Here's whoever was in the group when they made this one performing a song from Meredith Willson's The Music Man. Don't write me thinking you've found a spelling mistake, Brent. He spelled it with two "L's."

Where to Eat in L.A.

A Google Maps user has created an interactive online map of older restaurants in Los Angeles and the surrounding areas. Jake Hook's map lists over 1,000 places to eat that have been in business for at least twenty years and he singles out what he considers the true classics. I've only been to a small percentage of these places but he sure brings up a lot of memories of places I've been and places I've always been meaning to try. Here's the map.

Pilot Lite

We're all familiar with the 1959 movie Some Like It Hot starring Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis and Marilyn Monroe. But how many of you know that in 1961, there was an attempt to turn it into a weekly situation comedy for NBC? I sure didn't but recently, my assistant Jane Plunkett called it to my attention. Even weirder is the fact that as a favor to its producer Walter Mirisch, Lemmon and Curtis made a cameo appearance in the pilot and…

Well, here's where it gets real weird. As you may recall, the movie directed by Billy Wilder was about two musicians — Jerry (played by Mr. Lemmon) and Joe (played by Mr. Curtis) on the lam from The Mob. In the pilot, they're still on the lam so what do they do? They get plastic surgery and it not only changes their appearances, it turns them into two completely different actors! After the surgery, Jerry is played by actor-comedian Dick Patterson and Joe is played by the singer Vic Damone.

Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis in the pilot.

Thereafter, Patterson and Damone played Jerry and Joe for the rest of the pilot and for all episodes thereafter. Unfortunately — or perhaps fortunately — there were no other episodes. No sponsor picked it up nor did NBC. The character of Sugar Kane Kowalczyk — played so memorably in the film by Marilyn Monroe did not appear in the pilot but Tina Louise, later of Gilligan's Island fame, played a similar type of lady named Candy Collins.

And Sweet Sue, played in the movie by Joan Shawlee, did reappear in the sitcom version. She was played by — wait for it — Joan Shawlee.

Dick Patterson and Vic Damone in the pilot.

Dick Patterson was another one of those actors who appeared in bit parts in almost TV show of the sixties…and the seventies and the eighties. He was part of the troupe of performers who appeared in Billy Barnes revues in the early sixties so he turned up once on The Dick Van Dyke Show. He played talk show host Stevie Parsons there before Richard Schaal took over the role. Patterson was later a frequent sketch player on The Carol Burnett Show when they needed an extra man. He had performed on Broadway with Burnett in Fade Out, Fade In. Dick Patterson passed away in 1999.

Vic Damone was, of course, a popular singer of popular music. He also turned up on The Dick Van Dyke Show and I remember a fun little "summer replacement" show he did in 1961 and again in 1962 on NBC. It was called The Lively Ones — the same name as a hit song he recorded — and I've never seen a trace of it since it originally aired.  Mr. Damone left us in 2018.

So now you're probably wondering: How was the Some Like It Hot sitcom pilot? I'm wondering that too. I've never seen it and didn't even know of its existence until just the other day. Maybe someone reading this knows where there's a copy. I wouldn't get my hopes up for a masterpiece, considering the icy response it seems to have gotten from the network and potential sponsor. But it might be interesting to see…especially the sequence in which Lemmon and Curtis turn into two other actors.

Television has adapted (or tried to adapt) a lot of movies and I wonder if anyone ever thought of that. Somehow, I don't think when they were prepping the TV version of M*A*S*H, anyone said, "Hey, what if we got Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould to appear and in one scene, Hawkeye and Trapper John were severely injured in a shelling and after extensive plastic surgery, they turned into Alan Alda and Wayne Rogers?"

Why I Don't Like Halloween

This is my almost-annual post about why I don't like Halloween. I run it each year and sometimes I change the name of the anti-gay person in the last paragraph — but if you've read it before, there's no need to read it again…

At the risk of coming off like the Ebenezer Scrooge of a different holiday, I have to say: I've never liked Halloween. For one thing, I'm not a big fan of horror movies or of people making themselves up to look disfigured or like rotting corpses. One time when I was in the company of Ray Bradbury at a convention, someone shambled past us looking like they just rose up from a grave and Ray said something about how people parade about like that to celebrate life by mocking death. Maybe to some folks it's a celebration of life but to me, it's just ugly.

I've also never been comfy with the idea of kids going door-to-door to take candy from strangers. Hey, what could possibly go wrong with that? I did it a few years when I was but a child, not so much because I wanted to but because it seemed to be expected of me. I felt silly in the costume and when we went to neighbors' homes and they remarked how cute we were…well, I never liked to be cute in that way. People talk to you like you're a puppy dog. The man two houses down…before he gave me my treat, I thought he was going to tell me to roll over and beg for it.

When I got home, I had a bag of "goodies" I didn't want to eat. In my neighborhood, you got a lot of licorice and Mounds bars and Jordan Almonds, none of which I liked even before I found out I was allergic to them. I would say that a good two-thirds of the candy I hauled home on a Halloween Eve went right into the trash can and I felt bad about that. Some nice neighbor had paid good money for it, after all.

And some of it, of course, was candy corn — the cole slaw of sugary treats. Absolutely no one likes candy corn. Don't write to me and tell me you do because I'll just have to write back and call you a liar. No one likes candy corn. No one, do you hear me?

I wonder if anyone's ever done any polling to find out what percentage of Halloween candy that is purchased and handed-out is ever eaten. And I wonder how many kids would rather not dress up or disfigure themselves for an evening if anyone told them they had a choice. Where I live, they seem to have decided against trick-or-treating. In earlier versions of this essay, I used to say, "Each year, I stock up and no one comes. For a while there, I wound up eating a couple big sacks of leftover candy myself every year." But I haven't had anyone at my door for three or four years now so I don't bother.

So I didn't like the dress-up part and I didn't like the trick-or-treating part. There were guys in my class at school who invited me to go along on Halloween when they threw eggs at people and overturned folks' trash cans and redecorated homes with toilet paper…and I never much liked pranks. One year the day after Thanksgiving, two friends of mine were laughing and bragging how they'd trashed some old lady's yard and I thought, "That's not funny. It's just being an a-hole."

Over the years, as I've told friends how I feel, I've been amazed how many agree with me. In a world where people now feel more free to say that which does not seem "politically correct," I feel less afraid to own up to my dislike of Halloween. About the only thing I ever liked about it was the second-best Charlie Brown special.

So that's why I'll be home for Halloween and not up in West Hollywood wearing my Marjorie Taylor Greene costume. I'm fine with every other holiday. Just not this one. I do not believe there is a War on Christmas in this country. That's just something the Fox News folks dreamed up because they believe their audience needs to be kept in a perpetual state of outrage about something. But if there's ever a War on Halloween, I'm enlisting. And bringing the eggs.

Today's Video Link

Here's a Woody Allen rarity. In 1965, reportedly when he was in the U.K. filming his role in another Woody Allen rarity — Casino Royale — he hosted a special for Granada Television. It consisted of him doing stand-up interrupted by one musical act. Wikipedia says the show runs 38 minutes but this video (which seems to be complete) runs 27 minutes.

If any of this seems familiar, I linked to some excerpts from this show many years ago. If you don't have time to watch the entire thing, he does his Moose routine at 21:25, then plugs the record album on which it appeared. Thanks to a reader of this site who calls himself or herself "Orange Apple" for pointing me in the direction to find this…

Not So Fast…

Back in this post, I said the following about the comedian Hasan Minhaj…

The Daily Show will return on October 16 with more of its on-air auditioning guest hosts. I would guess that Hasan Minhaj is no longer as high as he once was on the list of those who might get the job permanently. Mr. Minhaj, who I liked the few times I saw him perform stand-up, has been accused and has more or less confessed to telling stories from his life that were exaggerated to the point of being…well, if not lies then the next-closest thing.

True, most comedians do exaggerate or simplify true tales to make them shorter or clearer or more pointed or, most often, funnier. I think most audiences understand that but there's a line one can cross and Minhaj seems to have crossed it too far too many times. To his credit, he's confessed to his "crime" but that doesn't give him back all or even enough of his credibility.

I would like to formally retract that part of the post and replace it with a big "I'm not sure." The charges against Mr. Minhaj were first made in this article in The New Yorker. Minhaj has now released a lengthy video response which basically says, "Yeah, I exaggerated and changed some facts but it's nowhere near as bad as the piece in The New Yorker made it out to be. If you wanna watch his whole reply, here it is. Parts of it seem pretty convincing to me but you can and will decide for you…

The New Yorker has responded with a statement that essentially says, "We stand by our story." Like I said, you can decide whatever you want about this. That's if you even care at all and I can see where you might not. Heck, I might join you.

I said it looked to me like Minhaj had crossed the line far too many times but it now looks like to me that while he crossed it, he didn't cross it as far or as often as the article suggested. Maybe. I think I'll hide behind that big "I'm not sure" or maybe even a bigger "I don't care."

Bugging me

A number of you have written in to ask me about last week's termite tenting of my home. Some, like Prentice Hammond, wrote to ask "Does this termite gas do anything to the contents of your home? Collectibles in particular (one of a kind items)? Comics, say, or books?"

Answer: Nope. It can harm pets and plants and you have to remove (or bag in special bags) all food items that are not still factory-sealed in glass, metal or plastic. But I've had my house tented and filled for a couple days with Vikane® gas every fifteen years or so and it doesn't harm artwork, books, old comic books…anything. In fact, it probably helps some collectibles since I own a few books that show signs of termite gnawing and this stops that…for a while.

There are quite a few videos on YouTube that tell you how to prep your home for a fumigation.  Check one out if you're thinking of having it done.

I've also had questions from folks who live in Southern California asking me who my exterminator is and if I was happy with their work. I was…very.  So I am pleased to recommend Morales Exterminating Company.  Ask for Robert and tell him I sent you.

Today's Video Link

In the past here, I've featured some videos from the folks at Hellthy Junk Food, a video enterprise run by a couple — J.P. Lambiase and Julia Goolia. Recently, they separated and J.P. is now devoting his time to trying to establish a career as a stand-up comedian and is posting videos of how that's going.

Julia, whose real last name is of course not Goolia, is now holding down the Hellthy Junk Food fort by herself and she's still posting food-oriented videos like this one. In it, she went to several local supermarkets in Florida and did some comparison shopping.

Comparison shopping is something I sometimes like to do though I do it by looking up the prices of my local markets online which is more easily done on Instacart. Go there, put in your address and look up, say, the price of a gallon of milk. Or the price of any item else which is identical or pretty much identical no matter where you buy it…like a can of Campbell's Cream of Anything Soup or a box of Cheerios. Often, the range of prices is more than a few cents — as the charming Ms. Goolia found…