Freida starts this week.
Which scenario would you prefer? A great show with a dream cast but one which doesn’t pay as much, or a great payday on a mediocre show?
How great a payday? If it’s LeBron James money then I’ll tough it out and have enough “fuck you” money to do any damn thing I want.
But realistically, I would cheerfully sacrifice some income to do a show I was proud of with a dream cast. Those are rare precious opportunities.
But again, are we talking Tom Brady money?
From Mighty Hal:
I was unexpectedly introduced to an artist I admire. This came out of nowhere (I had no idea the artist was in my country, much less visiting my hometown), and my mind went completely blank. I couldn't think of anything to say until much later, when my opportunity was long gone. Has something similar ever happened to you?
Yes. One time. With John Wayne.
David Isaacs and I had a meeting at Warner Brothers. We arrived early (the one day in 15 years the traffic wasn’t bad) so took the opportunity to just walk around the lot.
On one of the soundstages they were filming the movie THE SHOOTIST. As we strolled by, there was John Wayne, in full costume, standing above us on the stage landing, smoking a cigarette. So he was about 10 feet tall.
He saw us and said, “How’s it goin’, boys?” We were both completely tongue-tied. I think I managed to stammer out “Fine, Duke.”
Other than that, no… although I never was introduced to Natalie Wood.
Anonymous asks:
Penny on BIG BANG said she did a performance of ANNE FRANK on a stage over a bowling alley. Did you and David have any similar experiences?
Yes, I’m sure over the same bowling alley. On Ventura where Jerry’s Deli used to be. We had some one acts performed there.
Also, we did a night of one acts over a pizza parlor at 5th & Western in downtown Los Angeles.
Happy to say my full-length plays have all been performed at ground level.
And finally, from Michael:
I think you have alluded to this before, but do you think you would have pursued your baseball announcing career if you had a better experience working on MARY, even if it was still cancelled after 1 year.
No, I would say it was more of a midlife crisis thing. It was also the first time in years I was not working full-time on a show and was able to pursue my dream.
And I figured, if I didn’t go for it then I never would.
What’s your Friday Question?
21 comments :
I discovered this gem yesterday: https://www.mixcloud.com/retroradiojoe/khtz-los-angeles-beaver-cleaver-08-12-79-cc/ It is a great air check! If you were a Program Director now, how would you critique this young disc jockey?
I thought Wayne had given up smoking by then…?
With regards to television shows with cliffhangers, when the new season would start a cliffhanger would usually be solved right away. This is the case where someone is about to go into labor then has the child when the new season begins, or gets a new job and starts the next day/week as the new season begins...
How do they account for the time lost over the summer break, pick right up, and yet still have a regular season with Thanksgiving and Christmas episodes in the correct timeline? I know only a few times that a show would use the summer break wisely, but other times we had to believe the new season begins where the last one stopped, sometimes in the same scene, and the timeline is a mess.
John Wayne was dying of cancer by then, and (as the doctor played by James Stewart informed him) so was his character in The Shootist. I'm not at all a Wayne fan except for that film. Whether smoking ruined his health is debatable, if you know the story of the filming of The Conqueror 20 years earlier.
Better to be above a bowling alley than beneath one, I imagine.
If you had that LeBron money, what would you do? Buy a network and fill it with your own shows? Buy a baseball team and announce the games? Erect a statue of Natalie Wood larger than Palm Springs Marilyn? Consider this a Friday question.
Re Jim Amato:
John Landis has a doppelgänger
N. Zakharenko
Your comment is ironic because Ken mentioned in one of his podcast episodes - I forget which - that in the early 80s he was once mistaken for Landis while in a restaurant. Someone who was disgusted by the scandal of the Twilight Zone accident screamed at Ken. I'd love to know what Ken said to the guy, as he didn't say on the podcast.
How soon we forget. Wrapping up a phone call with my adult daughter, I said I was going to watch a John Wayne movie. "Who is John Wayne?" she asked.
When she was younger, we used to watch John Wayne movies together! Twice, anyway. I guess it takes more than two viewings to remember the Duke.
I saw an advanced screening of "Trading Places" back in 1983. When I was leaving the theatre, I noticed John Landis wandering around in the lobby. I approached him, and he looked a bit apprehensive, possibly thinking that I was going to harangue him about the Twilight Zone killings. I told him that I enjoyed the movie. He looked very relieved, and said "thanks".
Well, being tongue-tied is not the worst thing that can happen when trying to talk to a star. Back in 1968 I won a date on Chuck Barris's The Dating Game. It was to attend the premiere of Isadora and to be photographed with celebrities at the party following. They sent a photographer with us. At one point at the party we were introduced to Vanessa Redgrave and Franco Nero as "The winners of The Dating Game." Now I had been knocked out by Vanessa's performance in the movie. I was in awe of her, literal awe.
So Vanessa said exactly what you'd expect her to say, "What is 'The Dating Game'?" Before I could inhale enough air to say, "It's nothing, it's a dumb game show, You are a GODDESS! Allow me to worship at your feet. Would you accept my first-born as a tribute?", my date said, "You've never heard of the The Dating Game?" in a shocked, whiny tone of voice that implied "Have you been living in a cave?" My date then spent the precious minute and a half we had with Vanessa explaining to her, IN DETAIL, just exactly what The Dating Game was, while Vanessa kept a pasted-on gracious smile, as her darting eyes said, "Please get me away from this crazy woman before she kills me." Needless to say, there was no second date.
(The evening became more pleasantly memorable when I got in the buffet line and realized that the very-short frizzy-haired old lady in front of me in the line was Elsa Lanchester. My date was at the table, so I was able to chat for ten minutes with Elsa, the star of my favorite movie of all Bride of Frankenstein I will never forget that evening.)
Then there was the time I was talking to a very familiar character actor, and I mentioned how I'd enjoyed him as the doctor in Forbidden Planet. He then informed me that that was Warren Stevens. I was talking with H.M. Wynant. He was very nice about it, but I felt mortified. (In recent years, I've become friends with HM Wynant's wife, and I swear, she calls him "H".)
John Wayne had lung cancer. As a result one of his lungs was removed. He died from stomach cancer years later.
"gottacook said...
John Wayne was dying of cancer by then, and (as the doctor played by James Stewart informed him) so was his character in The Shootist. I'm not at all a Wayne fan except for that film. Whether smoking ruined his health is debatable, if you know the story of the filming of The Conqueror 20 years earlier.
Oh yes. Everyone involved with The Conqueror died of cancer. It wasn't bad enough that they location shot on a radioactive site from an A-Bomb test, but then they hauled truckloads of that radioactive dirt back to the studio to use in the sets so it would match the location dirt, and everyone continued to be exposed to the radiation, even after the location shoot ended. (There's a photo of John Wayne on the location with his son Patrick, then a small boy, holding a Geiger Counter, seeing the fun radiation! It's a horribly blackly-comic photo.)
I've just read a terrific new book on Claude Coats, a Disney artist who became a major Imagineer, and who personally designed the Alice in Wonderland ride, the Pirates of the Caribbean, the Haunted Mansion (With Marc Davis), and the Voyage to Inner Space, among other rides. (One of his specialities was making great use of limited space, so he did the track-layouts on all the classic Disneyland dark rides.)
There's a chapter on Disney attractions he worked on designing that never got made, and one was a "Uranium Prospector" thing where kids could use actual Geiger Counters to detect ACTUAL RADIATION from ACTUAL URANIUM!. This has to be The Worst Disney Attraction Idea of All-Time. Welcome to Cancerland! Tomorrowland becomes Tumorland!
I despise John Wayne and avoid his movies (Though I have laughed my way through his hilariously awful performance in The Conqueror), but I saw The Shootist. I was visiting a friend who was dying of an inoperable brain tumor, and The Shootist was on TV, and my friend insisted we watch it together. Well, when you're visiting a friend who is dying of cancer, you never say "No" to him. It was excruciating, like watching Titanic as you drown. Four months later I was one of the handful of people scattering my friend's ashes off of Overhang Rock at Glacier Point in Yosemite, at midnight under a full moon, as per his explicit instructions. (Highly illegal but there were no cops or rangers around at midnight. It was 1993, so call a cop! The statute of limitations is long since run out.)
"DanMnz said...
With regards to television shows with cliffhangers, when the new season would start a cliffhanger would usually be solved right away. This is the case where someone is about to go into labor then has the child when the new season begins, or gets a new job and starts the next day/week as the new season begins...
How do they account for the time lost over the summer break, pick right up, and yet still have a regular season with Thanksgiving and Christmas episodes in the correct timeline?"
Well often they just ignored it. On the original Dynasty it NEVER snowed in Denver! (But there were palm trees!) When they wanted Crystal Carrington to go skiing, they had her travel to a ski resort in another state, because, you know, there's no skiing in Colorado!
The first season of Dallas, which was only 6 episodes, was shot in the winter, and everyone is dressed really warmly, in thick parkas, in all exterior scenes, as it was clearly cold as hell when it was shot.
But when it got picked up for a full series and season 2, they began shooting in summer, and by winter, were shooting back in Hollywood. (Well, Culver City.) You could ALWAYS tell the difference between the location South Fork swimming pool with a real horizon behind it, and the soundstage South Fork swimming pool, with a cyclorama for a horizon. So it was never winter in Dallas again, and you never saw JR Ewing in a thick parka again after episode 6.
With regards to television shows with cliffhangers, when the new season would start a cliffhanger would usually be solved right away. This is the case where someone is about to go into labor then has the child when the new season begins, or gets a blowjob and starts the next day/week as the new season begins...
How do they account for the time lost over the summer break, pick right up, and yet still have a regular season with Thanksgiving and Christmas episodes in the correct timeline? I know only a few times that a show would use a hummer wisely, but other times we had to believe the new season begins where the last one stopped, sometimes in the same scene, and the timeline is a mess.
The Duke’s politics and personal views were often reprehensible. But in the right movie and right role, with a strong director, he produced incredible performances, using his bulk and power in tandem with the character’s flaws and quirks. “The Searchers” and “The Shootist” are prime examples.
A propos and quite newsworthy, our firm hosted Salman Rushdie before he gave a lecture some years ago. I was fortunately not tongue tied when introduced to him and had a long and interesting discussion about one of his books. I hope he can recover.
Prairie Perspective
Marion Morrison was a draft dodging chickenhawk with reprehensible views who had the dramatic range of a pencil. He never gave incredible performances, he was the same in every film, trading on his undeserved image as a macho man.
I was going to refute Prairie Perspective's (Is that the name on your birth certificate? Unusual. Well, if I were trying to pass off John Wayne as a competent actor, let alone a "Good" actor," I'd use a fake name too) remarks on Wayne's acting ability, but "The Duke was Puke's" comment said it perfectly. (Another weird birth certificate, but I appreciate the sentiment.)
Hiring John Wayne to "act" was like hiring an Amish car mechanic to fix your auto.
I have no doubt your joining the staff of a mediocre show would improve said show immensely.
I got a call from a friend that Terry O'Quinn was going to be at a bar about 4 blocks from my house in about 15 minutes. This was in south central PA, not a real hotspot for celebrities. Apparently he was friends with the owner.
This was probably about the midway through the run of Lost. Lost wasn't a show I watched, but I was a big fan of him from Millennium, the vaguely related cousin to the X-Files.
I thought about it, but decided not to go. He would probably get bothered by enough people as it was and I really had nothing to offer him on a Saturday night. "Hey, I liked you in a show you did six years ago, but I can't be bothered to watch the thing you are in today."
Hi Ken,
A possible Friday Question: What are the shows, past or present, you feel are overrated?
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