Once upon a time, in the early days of the Kennedy Center Honors, they didn't just honor popular performers still often in their prime but it was for legends.  I guess after a while, if you honor five a years and go on for 40 years, eventually you run out of legends.  (Though I wouldn't be surprised if a desire for ratings and bringing in younger audiences has had some affect.)  But this is from the days when legends were still there on the table.

This is the 1983 Kennedy Center Honor for James Stewart.  And it's a good one.  That seems to be rare when the honoree is an actor, since it generally tends to be difficult to build a good foundation of entertainment.  And the entertainment, as far as most presentations go, is indeed low-key.  But even without that, they pull it off.  Low-key as it is, what what do with it, is choice.

Make no mistake, the entertainment in memorable.  In fact, though this is from 34 years ago, I still remember watching this live when Carol Burnett brings out her backup singers.  The emotional reaction from Jimmy Stewart is memorable.  Over the years, the Kennedy Center Honors has done something like this a few times.  And it's always been pleasant.  But I think this was the first time, and specifically because of how it relates to Jimmy Stewart's overall career and life, this is pretty much the one time when it really worked so movingly.)  Actually, "emotional" is what is the centerpiece of making this presentation so good.

(A quick side note.  Throughout her appearance, Burnett repeated apologizes for not being a real singer.  In fairness, part of her saying that is as a set-up for bring out her back-up singers.  However, she later keeps repeating it.  But it's worth noting that she starred in two Broadway musicals, Once Upon a Mattress and Fade Out-Fade In.)  

For starters, Burt Lancaster is the host of the segment.  Then, far more than most (which is understandable, given the honoree), when they get to the filmed biography, it is just overloaded with great clips.  And then later when Carol Burnett (who has long been public about idolizing Jimmy Stewart) sings another song, which is related to a Stewart movie, you wonder if she'll make it through.  And she's preceded by an impressive guest, who stays around and joins her for the song.

It's all pretty wonderful.

It's been a while since we've had a Mystery Guest segment from What's My Line?, so let's rectify that.  The guest isn't someone most people reading this will likely have seen -- but that's largely the point in posting this.  And one of the fun things about the Mystery Guest segment, having game show contestants who you would never expect to think of seeing in this venue.

This guest contestant here is the legendary Italian actress Anna Magnani.  As I said, I doubt most people here have seen her (though some surely have -- I will vouch for Nell Minow, without even checking first), and many people probably don't even know of her.  But two years after this appearance, she would win an Academy Award as Best Actress for the film, The Rose Tattoo.  She starred opposite Burt Lancaster, and Tennessee Williams wrote the part expressly for her.

The segment comes at the 17:45 mark.  Though she speaks English well-enough to have done so in The Rose Tattoo, she clearly feels more comfortable in her native language and uses an interpreter here.  (Since this is two years before The Rose Tattoo, perhaps she was still working on getting better at it at this point...)

Anna Magnani (17:45) Interpreter, soon to win be Oscar for Rose Tattoo, three years

And what the heck, let's just toss in a bonus video while we're at it, just because you've been so good lately.  Here's an almost 8-minute clip from her Oscar-winning role, so you can have a better idea about Anna Magnani .and her talent.

A couple of months ago, I wrote an article about meeting with Al Gore in 2007 when he interviewed me to be the writer for a proposed daily radio commentary show he'd do.  (The tale is long, but if you missed it, you can read it here.)  The crux of the story though came when I handed over to him some samples of my writing, pieces I'd done for the Huffington Post, and one of them was an article I'd written about Gore himself the year before, after having just seen an early screening of An Inconvenient Truth.  

Because of a glitch, I nervously had to sit there as Gore read in front of me what I wrote about him -- all the more nerve-wracking because I'd started the article by apparently bashing him, describing every freaking major slam that had been made against Al Gore. Yes, I then refuted them all in full detail, but only I knew that, not whoever would be reading the piece  Including, oh...Al Gore.  Who was sitting in front of me.

And there I waited, as he read it.  And it was hellish.  But when at one point he read out-loud, "Single craziest political performance I've ever heard..." and burst out laughing -- I knew I was home free.  (And knew that spoke really well of him.)  And when he got to the last line and finished, he looked up at me, paused a moment and then said firmly, "Thank you."

Phew.

(I did get hired.  We recorded five demo shows, and they signed up 250 radio stations and raised a lot of money, but that wasn't enough for the syndicator, Westwood One, and the show didn't go forward, alas.)

I told all about that meeting in the earlier article, but though I mentioned the original Huffington Post article, I didn't include it.  And with Al Gore's follow-up to his Oscar-winning documentary now here, An Inconvenient Sequel, I figured this would be as good a time as any to do so now.

Here 'tis.


​May 4, 2006

The Return of Al Gore:  Apparently, It is That Easy Being Green
 
  
Mention the name of Al Gore for President in 2008, and you’ll have to duck from the hailstorm of responses, most of which are snickering ridicule.
 
Al Gore may not even be a candidate, as he himself has said – at present.  But one snickers at their own peril.  Al Gore is a very different man than when the Democratic nominee in 2000, and anyone who hasn’t noticed has not been looking closely, or at all.  The jokes may fly, but while people are laughing, they will find that Al Gore has passed them by.
 
There are three reasons Al Gore gets dismissed:  he’s a loser, he’s wooden and he says he invented the Internet.
 
Oh, life is so difficult when none of our assumptions are true.
 
The truth begins with one inescapable reality:  even at his most-derided worst, Al Gore won the popular vote against George Bush.
 
That’s what’s known in debate clubs as an impossible fact to deny.
 
If Al Gore was the Democratic nominee (a huge “if”), there’s no reason to think he would get any fewer votes than he did before.  (Especially with no third-party candidate.)  That’s an awfully good starting point:  that you previously won the popular vote for President of the United States.  Even George W. Bush couldn’t say that when he ran for re-election.
 
In 2000, George Bush was a potent candidate.  He was seen as a uniter.  Compassionate.  His namesake father was a former President of the United States.  And Al Gore still received more popular votes.
 
And at his boring worst, that’s Al Gore’s starting point.  Winning the most votes.
 
Ah, yes, that boring thing.  Grab a chair and catch up with reality.
 
On May 26, 2004, Gore delivered a speech at NYU that blasted the Iraq War, and even called for the resignations of those behind it.  (This was two years before the current parade of generals.)  It  was so fiery that conservative pundits didn’t know what to make of it until they could unite on their talking points.

“Gore's speech is the single craziest political performance of my lifetime…” – New York Post columnist John Podhoretz

“He's really nuts.” – Fox News host Sean Hannity.

“It looks as if Al Gore has gone off his lithium again.” – Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer

Hardly the description of someone wooden.  These are the sounds of  conservative cowboys hiding the women-folk and circling the wagons at the terror of a free-speaking voice rising against them.  
 
And what did Gore thunder?


“George W. Bush promised us a foreign policy with humility. Instead, he has brought us humiliation in the eyes of the world.  He promised to ‘restore honor and integrity to the White House.’ Instead, he has brought deep dishonor to our country and built a durable reputation as the most dishonest president since Richard Nixon.”

These are not the cold, diplomatic words of today’s wary politician.  This blistering outrage is what Gore’s been saying now for years, far ahead of most other Democrats.


That leaves but the matter of Al Gore, inventor of the Internet.  “During my service in the United States Congress,” Gore said to Wolf Blitzer on CNN, “I took the initiative in creating the Internet.”

That’s it.  And the men who are considered inventors of the Internet, Dr. Vinton Cerf and Dr. Robert Kahn, agree!  

“…As the two people who designed the basic architecture and the core protocols that make the Internet work,,” they wrote, “we would like to acknowledge VP Gore's contributions as a Congressman, Senator and as Vice President.  No other elected official, to our knowledge, has made a greater contribution over a longer period of time.”

Well, how about that?
 
Winner, impassioned, and he helped create the Internet.  Go figure.
 
And now, Al Gore has been given a really big platform.  Movie star.

A new documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” was one of the hits of the Sundance Film Festival.  At heart, this is a filmed version of the richly-involving multimedia presentation Gore gives on global warning, but much more.  It’s a wonderfully-crafted look at Gore and his life traveling around the world, dragging his own luggage through airports.

Gore has given the presentation over 1,000 times by his estimate, and his passion is visceral, along with his knowledge and concern.  What one sees is an engrossing event that is at times terrifying, always fascinating and occasionally hilarious. The film (for which Huffington Post contributor Laurie David is one of the producers) flies by.  That’s 100 minutes of watching Al Gore talk and being riveted.  Admit it: those are two concepts you previously would never have dreamed of ever seeing in the same sentence.  Unless perhaps if it continued – “…to the floor with bolts.”
 
And that’s the point.

Whether or not Al Gore runs for President again; in fact, whether or not he should, make no mistake: there is substance here.  And passion.  And outspokenness.  And now he’s got an 80-foot high soapbox.    
 
 

​

I was sorry to read about the the passing today of the great playwright Sam Shepard, at the age of 73. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his play Buried Child and wrote other works that included True West, Fool for Love and Curse of the Starving Class.  He later returned to his very-early days of acting and had a successful career at that, getting an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor in The Right Stuff portraying Chuck Yeager.  His many other films included Days of Heaven, Resurrection, Baby Boom, Black Hawk Down and Steel Magnolias. 

I worked with him on one movie, the very little known Bright Angel, which was based on two short stories by the acclaimed author Richard Ford.  It was a solid, small independent film that had a very good cast for such a tiny, unknown movie that included Dermot Mulroney (who was the star), Delroy Lindo, Bill Pullman, Mary Kay Place, Valerie Perinne, Burt Young, Lily Taylor and Benjamin Bratt in what might have been his first movie, along with Sam.  And it was in one particular instance dealing with Sam Shepard that was perhaps my finest moment as a movie publicist.  (Which I suppose is not saying a lot, given that movie publicity is not filled with fine moments...)

In the film, Sam played a small, but important supporting role (I think as Dermot's father, though I wouldn't swear to that at this point), so he wasn't at the filming location in Montana all that much, maybe a few days.  Sam was a nice-enough fellow, willing to chat, though taciturn and a bit distant, seeming to prefer the quiet and being alone, there to do his job.

At one point, a video crew hired by the company came up to Montana to shoot for two days and get material for putting together an "electronic presskit," the EPK  They timed their visit to be there specifically when enough of the actors would be around, but most especially Sam Shepard.  He would be on the set filming during their second and final night, when we were out on a big field all evening until the wee hours of the morning, a ways outside of our base residence of Billings.

All was fine as the video team was getting their interviews and behind-the-scenes footage...but with one tiny hiccup. The night they showed up on the set, Sam absolutely refused to do an interview.  Nope, no way, doing a video interview was not for him, no, absolutely not.  I'm not sure if he was against all publicity (I suspect that wasn't the case), or if it was just because this was such a small role and he didn't want it made to seem otherwise, or maybe because it was to be videotaped, rather than a more simple print interview.  I did sense that he wasn't a publicity hound and was reticent to do publicity in general, but mainly was adamant about not doing publicity specifically for this.  Not at all, nothing.  Sorry.  Nope.  I asked a few times, as politely as possible, but the answer was always a blunt, polite, but crusty, "No."  

(I didn't try to do an interview for my own written purposes, but I didn't think I really had to, and so didn't want to push him for it, preferring to put my efforts into the video interview.  During his time there, I had chatted with him briefly a few times and got some off-handed replies that were very helpful, which I marked down after walking away, and also picked up random comments from standing with him as he talked with the director about the movie, so I could just use those in fleshing out the production notes I was writing.) 

His refusal to do a video interview was causing great stress for the "EPK" crew.  Though he wasn't the star, and it was just a small role, he was still the most-famous name in the movie.  And he was the reason they were there that night.  And they knew they couldn't go back to the production company and say that, "Sorry, no, we didn't get anything from Sam Shepard" and justify what they were paid.  (And I knew, having been around on movie sets as a publicist long enough, that to cover their rear I'd no doubt be the one blamed for it all, how the unit publicist just was no help and couldn't get Sam Shepard to talk to them.)  They were able to get some behind-the-scenes footage of him when acting, but that wasn't remotely good enough.  And as the pitch-black night went on and got later and later, they got more and more concerned.  They'd ask me to try again, but there was a limit I could do -- it seemed that pushing any farther than I had risked pissing off Sam Shepard, and not only might he shut down, but I'd be reamed out for mucking up the set.  I'd keep my eye on him, seeing how his mood was, go over to chat and listen for any crack in the exterior, but I could tell that the answer was no, period.

And then I had my Great Revelation.

I explained it to the video crew -- I said I knew from chatting with Sam since he'd arrived in Billings that he was a massive admirer of Richard Ford's works, and in fact that was one of the main reasons he agreed to be in the movie, in such a small role.  I said to the video director that I thought it was remotely possible that Sam might be willing to answer a couple questions on camera specifically and only about Richard Ford, to help promote a fellow-writer's works.  If I could get him to do that, would that be enough for the video?  The guy lit up -- that would be great, it would work, and besides, "Once I get him on camera, I'm sure I can get him to talk about some other things."  If he couldn't though, he would be really happy to get anything with Sam Shepard on video.

So, I kept an eye on things, picked my moment when it seemed all was low-key, and went over to Sam who was sitting alone, off to the side.  It was probably about 2 AM at this point.  I laid out my thought to him, might he be willing to talk about Richard Ford -- and Richard Ford only -- to the video crew for about three minutes?  To get some well-deserved attention on the novelist?  And to my utter relief, Sam said yes, he'd be absolutely fine answering a couple questions about Richard Ford on camera.  O huzzah!

When I told the video director, he was overjoyed.  They set up their camera, asked their few questions about Richard Ford and -- exactly as he anticipated -- once he got Sam talking on camera, he was politely able to stay pleasant and conversational and keep Sam chatting.  And in the end, they got about 15 minutes of Sam Shepard on video.

Afterward, the video director was in heaven.  It seemed like he was beaming so much that it shined through that very dark Montana night.

Just to finish things up, here's a short trailer for the movie.  It really wasn't a "thriller" like the narrator says, but far more a character study of people impacted by their challenging circumstances, although there was plenty that was tense throughout in the edgy story.  And all the better, you'll also get to see scenes here from that dark night out on the field.  And a bit of Sam.

This interview with Andy Serkis on Stephen Colbert's show starts of quite entertaining, as he talks about doing motion-capture performances in movies, and they show fascinating footage for the new Planet of the Apes movie that explains this.

But then the interview takes a glorious turn, as Colbert asks Serkis to read several tweets from Donald Trump, but done in the voice of Serkis's most-famous character, Gollum, from The Lord of the Rings.

Even if one is the most fervent Trump supporter, I think it will be difficult to listen and not to crack a smile through gritted teeth.

Here are a couple of folks sitting down for a chat with Larry King back in 1999.  A half-hour with Dick Van Dyle and Mary Tyler Moore.

One interesting side note.  Late in the interview they get asked about working together, and bemoan never have been able to find something in recent years.  Dick Van Dyke mentions a played that they'd be great in, but that they never were able to pull it off.  The play is The Gin Game.  They pulled it off -- made it for TV four years later, in 2003.  Whether that would have happened without their being on Larry King Live, who knows?  But I suspect this had a lot of do with it.
​

This morning, the Huffington Post had an article by their Entertainment Editor Sara Boboltz about Betty White being accepted for membership into the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the group that votes on the Oscars.  From the headline and opening passage, I thought the article would be questioning the Academy's decision, deriding the action which is tenuous at best.  Instead, Ms. Boboltz snarkily took them to task for taking so long to accept the beloved 95-year-old Betty White into its group after 72 years acting.

To be clear, I don't really care one way or the other if Betty White is in the Academy.  Personally, I don't think she remotely deserves membership -- for reasons I'll explain -- but if they want to make her a member for any reason, it's their club.  And it's a lovely tribute.  So, fine, not a problem.  What rubs me the wrong way is something else entirely.  It's that not only was the author was so snippy about the Academy's supposed long delay and terrible oversight, but she's the "Entertainment Editor" and one would hope she would know better.

After all, here's how she ended the piece, chiding the organization for this seemingly egregious omission.  "Apparently," she wrote, "the Academy has also used the opportunity to correct the decadeslong oversight that was not inviting Betty White to join its exclusive club. Be better, guys."

Worse, it was the silliness of her justification for why she believed Betty White long-deserved membership.  (The correct answer, by the way, is -- "Betty White is a Hollywood icon, and it's just such a nice honor for them to have made.")  What she wrote though to explain why this should have been done oh-so long ago and why the Academy has been oh-so thoughtless and male-based was --

"Aside from acting as a badge of honor for top figures in Hollywood, Academy members are given the esteemed privilege of choosing Oscar recipients. White has never been nominated for that award, but she has been nominated for four Golden Globes for her performance in “The Golden Girls” and 21 Emmy awards for various roles, five of which she won for her roles on shows including “The Golden Girls,” “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and others. She’s also got a Grammy. All of that, coupled with her standing as the legendary Betty White, makes her absence from the Academy membership a bit of a head-scratcher."

It is only a head-scratcher if you don't know what you're talking about.

Okay, here's the thing.  Look at that list she re references.  Pick out all the ones that are...well, y'know...MOVIES.  Zero.  None.  Nada.  The Emmys are TV.  The Golden Globe awards were for TV.  The Grammy is for audio recordings.  There is absolutely nothing Ms. Boboltz pointed to that had anything to do with movies.  And it's not terribly hard to figure out why that would be not just important, but 100% essential.  After all, just check out the frigging name of the organization.  It's the Academy of MOTION PICTURE Arts and Sciences.  You can't miss it.

I thought Sara Boboltz was going to ask "Why now"?  Why was Betty White given Motion Picture Academy admission now, when she hasn't even been in a movie in seven years?  Or that she was going to point out that in 72 years of acting, Betty White has only been in around eight movies.  And never starred in one, all small roles.  I would challenge Ms. Boboltz -- or you -- to simply name three movies that Betty White has ever even been in.

Okay, she played the grandmother in The Proposal in 2009 with Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds, and was great fun in it.  Before that, the last major film Betty White was in was Advise & Consent.  It was made in 1962, that's over half a century ago!

But pretty much the entirety of her career -- and yes, it's a legendary career -- is in TV.  And the Motion Picture Academy is for motion pictures.  Movies.  Feature films.

But again, if the Motion Picture Academy wants to honor Betty White and have her as a member -- more power to them.  Hey, who wouldn't want to have Betty White at their party?  She's had a great TV career, been in a handful of movies and appears to be pretty much beloved.  So, very nice for the Movie Academy if that's what they wanted.  They figured out a way to admit her, which is their absolutely right, so swell.  It was a nice thing to do.

But for the Entertainment Editor of the Huffington Post to take AMPAS to task in such a snide way, suggesting male bias and ageism for not having Betty White as a member -- that's utterly foolish.  (She even brings in charges the Academy has faced of race bias.) That shows ignorance of what the organization actually is.  It's really simple -- she's a TV actress.  A wonderful TV actress. But AMPAS is for movies.  One would hope that an Entertainment Editor would grasp this.

There's one unintentionally funny thing in Sara Boboltz's article that makes her snarky gaffe all the more pointed. She had a perfect set-up for a wonderful joke, but got caught up in trying to slam the AMPAS and totally missed what was sitting there on a silver platter in front of her.  (Or silver-haired platter.)  It comes in a passage where she is trying SO hard to bring out the organization's bias and writes -- "In recent years, as Oscar winners have continued to look a bit too white and male for many tastes..."

Arghhh!  What a lost opportunity for a great quip to put everything in proper, whimsical perspective.  But her blindness is making A Point (no matter how off-base) forced her to miss what was in front of her.  Because what she could have written -- and I'll even go so far as to say what she should have written -- was --

"And now the Academy has decided to make themselves even more White.  But in the best way possible."

Okay, I guess we might as well continue this thread to its logical conclusion.  We started with a posting about a documentary on Frank Loesser.  That brought about a video of a classic song that most people didn't know Frank Loesser wrote the lyrics for.  And today?

Today, we have the song that Mel Brooks wrote for his 1974 film Blazing Saddles that parodied the Loesser number.  Plus, a bonus.

The original song in question is "The Boys in the Backroom" which Marlene Dietrich sang in the movie Destry Rides Again, that had lyrics by Frank Loesser and music by Frederick Hollander.  And Mel Brooks parodied it with his song, "I'm Tired," for which Madeline Kahn knocked down the room with her take-off on Marlene Dietrich.

And here's the bonus.

In 1986, Madeline Kahn recreated the number for Comic Relief.  I have to believe that she watched and rewatched and then watched the movie again, because it's seriously impressive has spot-on she did the number a full dozen years later.

The video quality is lousy.  But that's the only thing that isn't a hoot.  And it's especially a joy watching her do the song with a theater audience because it means this time, she gets the very-deserved laughs.
​