Roger ingratiated himself with me the first time we met, which was over lunch, back in the early '80s, at a snooty-tootie French restaurant in the nation's capital that I thought would impress both him and his TV buddy Gene Siskel. Lunch over, Roger stood up, grumbled amiably, looked the room over and asked, "Is there a Popeye's Fried Chicken around here?" Swank eateries were not for him.
Siskel and Ebert, as they were always billed, had come to Washington, where I worked as a TV critic, to plug their weekly movie-review show. Public TV's low-budget "Sneak Previews" had become syndicated TV's lucrative "At the Movies" with Roger and Gene now firmly established as stars like no other. Obligingly, as if anything else would have short-changed everyone in the place, Roger and Gene argued loudly and intermittently all through lunch, just like on TV, and I wrote later that having Siskel and Ebert bicker at your table was like Pavarotti dropping by to sing "Nessun Dorma." Or words to that effect.
Over the years, Roger and I kind of clickety-clacked along parallel tracks, he reviewing movies on television, me reviewing television in print—and of course, him making millions. To add to the link between us, we looked superficially alike, both of us "portly," to use a euphemism for the obvious appropriate adjective, both bespectacled, and both Pulitzer Prize winners (Roger was the first film critic ever to win), though I sort of had to beg for mine.
We were also both, at heart, Midwesterners, not the provincial kind you see in "Nebraska," I hope, but guys who didn't give a rat's ass what Woody said to Nora at Elaine's. We'd run into each other now and then, always fun for me. Among the encounters was a memorial service for the great film critic Pauline Kael, one of the first to spot Roger's talent, at a cinema in New York. Roger was there with wife Chaz, while most other movie critics had stayed churlishly away.
Kael had died in 2001 at 82. Two years earlier, Siskel died—at the much crueler age of 53. Thus ended what had been a sensationally successful run for the odd couple of criticism, a duo whose dissimilar horizontal-and-vertical profiles and prickly Hope-Crosby badinage had helped make them genuine American icons. Gene was still alive but very ill when I accepted Roger's invitation to substitute for him on first one, then a second episode of "At the Movies," taped back-to-back in Chicago, a city I had loved from a childhood lived in one of its more remote suburbs.
Roger assured me that he and Gene had mutually chosen me to fill in, which was lovely to hear, but the experience became traumatic when Gene died before the second show aired. I feared I would look like I was opportunistically auditioning for his job even as he lay dying, but Roger and I both knew such casting would have been absurd. Even if I'd been temperamentally a good contrast, and I wasn't, two fat guys reviewing movies just wouldn't work.
What I gleaned from that week in Chicago was how hard it was to see ten movies in one week but, more importantly, what a thoughtful and conscientious mensch Roger was. When I screwed up a reference to one of the film's actors during the taping, Roger smoothly covered, correcting the error without it showing and thus without shaming me, or necessitating a stop-tape. Later, when the Walt Disney Company, owners of the show, tried to cheat me out of half the compensation agreed upon, Roger stepped in and made them behave. It really was the principle of the thing, and Roger knew about principle.
But I finally got to know Roger well during the last year of his life, although we never spoke—except by email, since illness and surgery had robbed him of his voice, as dirty a trick as fate could play. And here's the kick: Roger spent many of those emails trying to cheer ME up. I was in shock from having a 39-year tenure yanked out from under me by one of the nation's newspapers whose money-men decided on downsizing. And loyal old veterans be damned.
"I have a little thingee in my mind that likes everything I write," Roger wrote me. "You have a little thingee that hates everything you write. You are a writer, not just a TV critic." That was a short subject, a trailer for the feature attraction, which came a few days later:
"When you split with the Post, you thought,'F— it, that's that. The bastards.' Already down on yourself, you felt defeated by the disconnect between your great public success and your private feelings of aimlessness. Your response was to sit passively and let depression come crashing down upon you. You would prove to the bastards that when they thought you were great, that was just one more example of how wrong and deluded they were about everything."
If anybody knew about facing depression, he did. He had been through an ordeal that made mine look like the sniffles.
"When, without warning," he wrote, "I found myself unable to speak ever again, my TV career and life as I knew it were gone overnight. In the bargain, they'd ripped apart my right shoulder to harvest flesh and muscle to 'rebuild' my face, which failed so spectacularly that I do now truly look like the Phantom of the Opera. They also took a bone from my right calf, so I could hardly walk. On top of that, I couldn't eat!
"After rehab, Chaz took me to the Pritikin Longevity Center, a place I had loved." But instead of letting himself be rehabilitated, he wrote, he sunk into lethargy and stasis. "So as not to seem only staring at the wall, I pretended to sleep."
And then—"Something happened. I was a newspaperman. Not a 'writer' who needed inspiration, a newspaperman trained for years to bang stuff out. Good, bad, it didn't matter. There was a deadline and a hole to be filled. I wanted to see that movie 'The Queen,' and I saw it, I wrote a review, because I didn't go to see these movies for my own amusement, you see. I get paid!"
He was making his epiphany, mine. Maybe I didn't leap up and trill "whoopee," but I was jolted in a positive way. To quote all of Roger's therapeutic praise would look self-aggrandizing, but he went further, issuing another invitation, this time for me to write for what he called his "blog" but which became his website and is now part of his legacy. I'm still not happy about writing, but if not for Roger, I'd be searching for new walls to stare at right now.
Writers, journalists, critics, whatever, are not usually kind to one another. While being jabbed and maligned at the old roost, with a guy who wanted my job circulating hostile internal memos (yes, even paranoids have enemies), a New York essayist used his blog to offer up about a thousand words on why I should be fired. Or maybe shot, it wasn't clear. But eliminated. It was unmistakably one writer urging that another be forcibly retired.
The thing is, those two monsters were typical, whereas Roger was the gloriously generous and confident exception. He was nothing but encouraging, ever, always. He forced me to see daylight. He helped me out of a deep hole. And then he died.
It was fitting that my best friend called with the news. He didn't have to spell it out; I could hear it in his "hello." He asked if I were watching the news. When your best friend asks you that, you know there's something terrible happening. I asked him a one-word question: "Roger?" His silence was the answer. I felt all the air go out of me. I thought I was literally imploding. It was the same devastating sensation I'd felt twelve years earlier, standing in the National Cathedral as a casket containing the earthly remains of Katharine Graham passed me on its way up the aisle.
During our year's correspondence, which amounted to nearly 200 emails from each of us, I told Roger I'd never known, until having just read it somewhere, that in the darkest days of his nightmare, he was in fact declared dead by doctors. I received this defiant and ebullient reply: "Yes, but the bastards were wrong!"
This was Roger Ebert. This was my friend.
]]>For years, forgive me, I have been telling this story and no one but me seems to find it funny. And yet, I persist:
Back in a previous century, during a visit to Los Angeles, some friends entreated me to join them at a local nightspot to see longtime MGM musical star Ann Miller ("Easter Parade," and many others) debut a stage show presumably consisting of her greatest hits. It happens, though, that on that same night, "Kiss Me, Kate," in which Miller memorably costars, was having a very rare 3-D screening in a repertory cinema on Sunset Boulevard. I insisted I was going to the movie, not the stage show, and when ridiculed for my choice, asked rhetorically:
"Who wants to see her in person when I can see her in 3-D?"
You see the subtle irony there? Well maybe it's TOO subtle. Regardless, I've been a fan of 3-D movies ever since, as a kid, I ducked flaming arrows and whipped-cream pies at the Crocker Theater in Elgin, Illinois. I didn't think movies could get any better. Fortunately, they did. But 3-D still has a big place in my heart, and so I am thrilled at the prospect of World 3-D Film Expo III, running Sept. 6–15 at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood.Some of the films in the "expo" have never been exhibited 3-dimensionally in the U.S. before, and some may never be projected in their original form again.
The expo is not to be confused with a 3-D "festival" playing in downtown L.A. later in the month; that one consists of only new-age-of-3-D films, like "Avatar" and "World War Z" and so on. And that kind of digital 3-D, I feel, doesn't have quite the literal depth of the original analog 3-D of the 1950s, the kind that was going to "save" the movies from that ominously encroaching monster, television. Unfortunately, you needed special glasses to see 3-D (though NOT the red lens/green lens kind that came with 3-D comic books) and wouldn't you know, along came 20th Century Fox's CinemaScope, the movie miracle "you see without glasses," as the ads screamed, and the short-lived 3-D fad was shorter-lived than it should have been.
It had offered up a few years of wondrous thrills, however, and yes, one of the pleasures of the 3-D Expo, at least for boomers and those even older, will be evoked memories, a teleportation back to a world when telephones stayed at home and TV shows were pleasantly stupid, as opposed to the grimly stupid ones we have now. Three networks were able to come up with worthwhile programming in about the same quantity as 500 channels are today—but that's another column.
Jeff Joseph, 60, remembers the original 3-D era, while his partner in organizing the festival, 48-year-old Dennis Bartok doesn't quite, but both have invested much time and passion in this third and possibly final 3-D event. The last one was in 2006, the first in 2003, and both drew satisfyingly large crowds. If the crowds are not quite as large this time, it will probably be because people don't understand the difference between the latest incarnation of 3-D and the original, seemingly more glorious kind of yesteryear.
"We always said we'd never do another Expo after the last one," Bartok recalls, since rounding up prints and clearing the rights is a logistical nightmare, but the return of 3-D to movie theaters across the land—a land which is also in 3-D, of course—plus the discovery of previously unseen, very rare 3-D material convinced them to do at least one more. Yes, we have 3-D television now, but the glasses are bulky and the medium has failed to catch on in a big way.This is likely to be the last 3-D Expo of its kind because, as Joseph says, "If we'd waited just one more year, we probably couldn't have done it," not only because some of the materials are so close to deteriorating but because, as Joseph says, "film is dying so quickly in Hollywood that we had trouble even finding an editing room to screen the prints in."
Indeed, one difference between new and old 3-D is basic to all movies: the rapid fading away of projected 35mm film and theaters that still show it, the near-extinction of the friendly old projectionist (the sole projectionist for the Expo is 70) and the unstoppable rise of digital cinema. "Kiss Me, Kate," for instance, will be back for a third Expo, but Joseph thinks this will probably be the last time this sole surviving 35mm Technicolor print of it will be dual-projected in a theater as the good Lord intended. Two prints, left-eye and right-eye, were needed for original 3-D, and that meant two perfectly interlocked projectors to play them back as one. If you took your 3-D glasses off, you saw mainly a mucky blur on the screen, whereas if you take off your digital 3-D glasses, you will still see recognizable images.That is one major difference, and when goaded, both Joseph and Bartok basically agreed with me that the old 3-D had the virtue (and it is a virtue in some things) of being far less subtle than the current kind. Not for nothing was the first 3-D film, "Bwana Devil," ballyhooed as promising customers "a lion in your lap!" Still, Joseph and Bartok do not denigrate current 3-D, which is much simpler to exhibit than the old kind; besides, RealD, one of the two major 3-D companies now dominating the business, is a sponsor of the Expo. But the entrepreneurs probably wouldn't be having this big event if 3-D had returned to popularity in its original, fabulous form.
Some of the early 3-D films have already been transferred to digital format for preservation and others will be—but most likely only major, big-studio titles like Warner Bros.' stupendous "House of Wax" and, from the same studio, Alfred Hitchcock's "Dial M for Murder" will be saved. Many of the films in the Expo are the less celebrated kind for which original 3-D was best suited: genre movies like Westerns, science fiction and horror. Expo III will include screenings of the Western "Taza, Son of Cochise," starring Rock Hudson and directed by Douglas king-of-mush Sirk; Jack Arnold's "Creature from the Black Lagoon" with one of its stars, Julie Adams, making a personal appearance; and Arnold's "It Came from Outer Space," with stars Barbara Rush and Kathleen Hughes personally appearing.
And of course, the schedule includes that warhorse of warhorses in the 3-D universe, and one of Vincent Price's finest and least epicene (to borrow Pauline Kael's adjective) performances, the aforementioned "House of Wax," a gorgeous remake of the 1933 "Mystery of the Wax Museum" which contains arguably the most memorable of all 3-D sequences, one which has nothing to do with the plot of the picture and isn't in the least bit horrifying: the Paddle-Ball Man.This is a guy who stands outside the wax museum on opening night and whacks, naturally enough, a ball with a paddle. As he does his tricks, the little ball at the end of the rubber band seems to zip out into the house, and in a Pirandellian spirit, the man with the paddle talks about aiming the ball for, say, the popcorn being held by the fellow in the third row of the movie theater.
(The sequence is beautifully scored, by the way, and though someone else is given screen credit, I'd swear the great Max Steiner himself must have dropped by and written the music for this one part of the film. It's an iconic sequence if there ever was one, although I try so hard to avoid using that word).
From my childhood, I most vividly remember one other moment from the film, and it is only a moment. A young Charles Bronson, in an Igor-like role as a mute thug who works for the mad maniac running the museum, seems to spring at the heroine, Phyllis Kirk, from right out of the audience. Really, he just rises in silhouette, as I recall, from the lower right of the screen, but it's a kind of "gotcha" trick that made us kids jump in our seats.
For the record, "House of Wax" was directed by Andre deToth, a man who had only one working eye and thus could not truly appreciate the 3-D effects he was helping to create. An irreverent old Hollywood joke had it that the film was actually codirected by DeToth and Raoul Walsh, because they had two good eyes between them. In later years, DeToth discredited himself by launching a tirade against Alfred Hitchcock, of whom he was perhaps a trifle jealous.
Hitchcock, meanwhile, was reportedly not enthused about working in 3-D, and by the time his "Dial M for Murder" was released, the fad had waned and the picture played mostly 2-D (or "flat") engagements. But it is a better movie in 3-D than 2—less claustrophobically stagey, for one thing. And there is a certifiable made-for-3-D moment, when Grace Kelly is being strangled by a hired intruder and, forced backwards onto a desktop, she reaches behind her for a pair of scissors with which to defend herself, her arm and the scissors both in-your-face.
Among the rediscovered rarities to be shown at the Egyptian is a 1946 Russian version of "Robinson Crusoe" which was produced in a variation of the 3-D process that apparently was unique to the Soviet Union. There is no English language version of the film and the use of subtitles would be problematic considering the 3-D illusion, but Joseph and Bartok say there's relatively little dialogue in the movie anyway, and most of it at the end, when the picture breaks into five minutes of good old-fashioned socialist propaganda. It's highly unlikely that anyone viewing the film will fall victim to the agitprop and convert from capitalism.
The two entrepreneurs told me things about 3-D, then and now, that I certainly never knew—one of them that the two prints, left-eye and right-eye, were virtually identical, so that when the 3-D craze crashed, or when providing films to theaters not rigged for interlocked dual-projection, studios could simply send out either of the two 3-D prints, thus doubling their print inventory. Some of the films will be projected in absolute ultimate authenticity—not just in original analog projected 3-D, but some in their proper wide-screen aspect ratios and some on a literally silver screen, because "silver screen" is not just a fanciful term; the screen really was once silver (made of aluminum, but silver-looking) and though prone to hot-spots, facilitated dazzling 3-D images that a plain white screen could not equal.
Other films to be screened range from the sublime to the preposterous—from bosomy Jane Russell (3-D was "made for" her, said the leering ads) in "The French Line," a 1954 musical, to a 1953 sci-fi muddle that is frequently cited as one of the worst or at least silliest movies ever made, "Robot Monster," in which the eponymous villain is a man in a gorilla suit with a goldfish bowl on his head.
Even the lowliest 3-D movies tend to be well-crafted, Joseph says. "'Robot Monster' is actually well-shot,' he says, "and the 3-D is spectacularly good." Some of the films are campy, yes, but some are brilliant, several are extremely rare, and all of them are explorations into a super-sensory cinema that existed for one crazy golden moment in time. Bless these guys for bringing these films back for another look—every beautiful "D" of them. ]]>I spent a night in jail once—27 hours, in fact, in Baltimore, Md., courtesy of a deranged traffic cop who thought jail a fit punishment for speeding. Two other men and I were squeezed into a cell that, said a posted sign, was to accommodate only one, and from sleeping on that cell's cold cement floor near a constantly coughing man, I caught pneumonia and could arguably have died. It took a week in intensive care to cure the infection.
Oddly or not, that is a story for another time. I bring it up because I furthered my urban education on that miserable night. I was processed at the jail with a group of about 100 other men arrested on various charges. Of that hundred, at least 90 were black—the young black men of Baltimore who, several of them told me, were routinely arrested on Friday nights and thrown in jail. One kid told me a cop arrested him in a bar because the cop thought the kid had "too much money" in his pocket. This was a typical Friday night; the cops rounded up the usual suspects which to them meant young African-American males.
How could I not think of this when watching televised coverage of the George Zimmerman trial and hearing all that talk of racial profiling? As on that long night in Baltimore, I got from the trial and the attendant commentary a profoundly disheartening impression of what life is like for many young black men in America, suburban as well as urban.
It makes one wonder how much progress there really has been in what are termed "race relations" in this country. If there has been progress, a tragedy like the killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Fla. by the unrepentant Zimmerman, an armed would-be cop, is all it takes to drag us back into the sad, sordid past again, as if Martin Luther King Jr. and his "I Have a Dream" speech were still ahead in the vague fog of the future, and as if Barack Obama were still a nearly anonymous teenager himself.
And as if a hundred other things that had seemed like steps forward had never happened.
My task is to comment on TV coverage of the trial, especially the last few days and Saturday night's climax, but the issues of race and profiling and prejudice, so much a part of this story, were not nearly so prominent a part of that coverage as they should have been, especially considering all the hours that ticked by. The coverage instead was all about legal strategy, and courtroom theatrics, and whether or not the trial was sufficiently entertaining to keep people watching.
(Some media critics, incidentally, have been all a-tweet and about the fact that networks were giving more time to the Zimmerman trial than to the current unrest in Egypt. I think they radically underestimate how reverberant the Trayvon Martin case has been and will continue to be, and I don't see why Americans should be ashamed of themselves for being more concerned with domestic problems than with foreign affairs, even if the oil supply is threatened).
More than once during the trial coverage, an anchor or correspondent would worry aloud, on the air, if viewers might be less than fascinated with what was happening on the screen. CNN had wall-to-wall courtroom coverage, and other networks like MSNBC and Fox devoted many hours to live courtroom proceedings, and while dedicating so much time to the trial was commendable, it was often marred by a tendency to pander—to play up the trial for its "fireworks" (a word used far too often) and histrionics while playing down or simply ignoring its troubling social, legal and political ramifications.
On Thursday, CNN anchor Jake Tapper actually adopted an apologetic tone when recapping such events of that day as the distribution of meticulously worded instructions to the jury. "It doesn't exactly sound like must-see TV," Tapper ruefully told viewers, "but there were, in fact, plenty of fireworks during today's hearings."
Fireworks? Oh, good! Because it might not be enough that an innocent African-American boy died a senseless death at the hands of a man charged with second-degree murder. Or that issues of racial profiling and Florida's bizarre "stand your ground" law were very much a part of the story. No, we the TV viewers of America, jaded and impatient that we are, must have fireworks if we're going to sit through a jury trial. Tapper even got CNN's otherwise helpful and tireless legal analyst Sunny Hostin to acknowledge that some of the day's proceedings were "not that exciting."
Hostin said optimistically, "I'm looking forward to tomorrow, to see some really good lawyering." Actually, there was plenty of really bad lawyering, especially by the prosecution, but the remark reflects the thrust of the television coverage; the story was presented, of course, as a competition, a clash amongst attorneys with the desired outcome being not justice or the absence of it but the proclaiming of winners and losers.
It struck me as almost laughably ironic, incidentally, that CNN clumsily attempted to bleep harsh language and to obscure what the network told viewers were unusually graphic graphics used by lawyers because they might upset us as we watched at home. Of course we should have been upset, but not about a few bad words or bloody photos. Besides, the harsh words were being quoted by lawyers, and their very harshness was germane.
But CNN thinks we can't handle too much realism in our televised reality; thus the blundering censorship. Network nabobs also were worried, clearly, that we might become bored and tune away, and so it kept a perpetual news ticker parading headlines across the bottom of the screen. Unfortunately, nobody thought to change those headlines very often, so maybe 25 times, maybe more, over one six-hour period, viewers were informed that Justin Bieber had pee'd into a janitor's bucket. This during a very, very serious trial.
CNN decided to stay on the air with trial "coverage" even while there was nothing to cover but a closed door—behind which the jurors deliberated. Anchor Don Lemon did his best to fill the time even though he had almost no information to impart, at one point telling viewers, "Any minute now, we may get a big clue to how close we could be to a possible verdict." Later he said, "People are anticipating something happening, and something happening very soon." In fact, it would be hours, but you had to admire his sang-froid, if that's what it was.Channel-surfing during the coverage, it was easy to get the impression that few criminal lawyers in America had not been enlisted as hired legal experts by the networks. Old reliables like Jeffrey Toobin on CNN could be depended on for solid analysis, and Ms. Hostin was for the most part a valuable addition to coverage. Lawyer Tom Mesereau, who previously "represented Michael Jackson" according to CNN, should get credit for predicting on Thursday what the verdict would be on Saturday night: "I think they're very close to an acquittal," he said of the unseen jury.
Arguably most obnoxious of the commentators was ABC's expert but omnipresent Dan Abrams, who always materializes on-camera looking primped, powdered and primed, speaking loudly and with absolute finality about every topic he touches. He's turned the guest-lawyer gig into a TV-personality job, having graduated to co-anchorship of ABC's "Nightline." He needs to pull back a little in the obsessed intensity department. Even a viewer distressed and demoralized by the jury's quixotic verdict might have been thinking, late Saturday night when it came in (vs. Saturday afternoon, as Abrams had predicted), "Well, at least I don't have to listen to Dan Abrams for a while."Fox News takes a lot of grief for being "tabloid," but most of the networks have tabloid streaks a mile wide. NBC News seems to show the most restraint and to place the greatest value on decorum. Brian Williams began "NBC Nightly News" on Friday by describing the trial proceedings as "closely watched, very highly charged." That gets the point across just fine and without hyperbole. But over at "ABC World News," Diane Sawyer told viewers in the opening "tease" that there had been "a final, dramatic showdown in court" and that although the defense had a big day, "the prosecution" would "come roaring back" later.ABC News reached perhaps the lowest point of the coverage, though, with Friday night's edition of "20/20." The matter of possible urban violence breaking out in the event of Zimmerman's acquittal (unlikely, even insane, as that once seemed) had indeed been spoken of during everyone's coverage, so far as can be determined, but in a mostly responsible way. But this is how a breathless announcer opened ABC's "20/20" Friday night:
"Is a racial powder keg about to explode?! Countdown to a Verdict!"
I think that will stand, for now anyway, as the nadir.
Coverage of the trial, like the trial itself, will be much discussed in the days and weeks ahead. It's nothing new for television professionals to assume we demand entertainment values from news programming. And maybe, conditioned by years and years of it, we do. Certainly a viewer is bound to see characters in the drama as heroes or villains, with those opposed to Zimmerman and what he represents seeing the sneering, preening defense attorney Don West as a particularly arrogant example of the latter.
Having tastelessly begun the defense's case with a feeble knock-knock joke, West was, like his client, anything but remorseful as he looked back on the trial at a press conference late Saturday. "I still think the joke is funny," he insisted. "I'm sorry I didn't tell it better." His colleague, Mark O'Mara, was similarly proud of himself. "I thought every time I opened my mouth was a great moment," he said in answer to one reporter's question. And: "Everything I do, I think is done well." Ah yes: Why people love lawyers.
The gloating and crowing seemed shameful. "We are ecstatic with the results," O'Mara had said earlier—ecstatic? With a 17-year-old boy pointlessly killed? West also declared it had been "disgraceful" even to prosecute Zimmerman and put him on trial, as if he were the victim in the case.
I think in days ahead we may hear from some of the African-American journalists who covered the case about special pressures they may have felt. Pierre Thomas of ABC News comported himself professionally throughout, but at the end he had to ask rhetorically "Why did Zimmerman see Trayvon Martin as a threat?" and to predict that the kid with the Skittles has become, and will remain, "a major, major symbol" in the African-American community. That's probably an understatement.
Of all the thousands of words from all the dozens of characters in the tragedy, the most memorable, I thought, were spoken by a woman from Georgia interviewed on ABC News outside the courthouse. "I just thought," she said, weeping, "we were going to get some kind of justice."
]]>"Carson on TCM" is the no-nonsense title for the collection, culled from three decades of chats that Carson had with guests on "The Tonight Show," the informal salon over which he presided until 1992. Yes, a pause while many of us sigh, "Can it possibly be that long ago that he left?" The tears have scarcely dried on my pillow (okay, a slight exaggeration).
Chevy Chase, of all people, casually utters on one of the restored interviews (airing July 8) what turned out to be a simple but prescient prophecy: "There's nobody who's going to be 'the next Johnny Carson.'" This was 1986, long before national panic had set in over Carson's announced departure, and Chase made the remark in response to then-common speculation that he might be just the guy to disprove his own prediction. When Chase did try his hand at a late-night talk show, on Fox in 1993, it was a disaster, largely because Chevy Chase simply has no interest whatever in other people. (It's not a mean thing to say; he's fairly typical of many actors and comics).
Carson seemed truly and selflessly interested in other people, famous or not, and of the many celebrities who'll pop up as part of this array, only a minority seem to have been booked merely to plug an upcoming movie or TV show. Kirk Douglas (July 1), for example, had written his autobiography after years of delay, yes, but he did relatively few talk-show appearances to hype it, and the interview is a genuine delight, two champs gently sparring.
But back to Chevy Chase. The excerpted episode on which he appears, from December 1986, also includes a visit from our own beloved Roger Ebert and then-partner Gene Siskel, and of course it is wonderful to see them again, Roger looking particularly young and buoyant. They were on the show several times and had an agreement between them to alternate on seating; this was Gene's turn to occupy the chair closest to Carson, Roger on the iconic (for once the word fits) couch. It turned out to be felicitous placement for Roger, and Gene may well have regretted it, because Roger and Chevy get some funny business going, impromptu and seemingly good-natured horseplay — though with Chevy Chase, you can never tell for sure. His nature isn't always good.
Roger had looked with disapproval on Chase's 1986 film "The Three Amigos" and admitted as much, even with Chevy sitting right next to him. Encouraged by Carson, Chevy went into his funny-faces routine, mocking Roger literally behind his back as Roger talked about being disappointed in the film — but also saying, diplomatically, that Chase had made better pictures in the past and would surely make more in the future. (Even before becoming a sensation on "Saturday Night Live," Chase exercised his facial acrobatics in such comedy bits as a pantomime to classical music, in "Groove Tube" or "Channel One," early media-minded satirical troupes).
It's basically a sweet sequence, though you may be surprised to see Carson taking Chase's side; then again, who in show business ever steps forward to defend critics? Not that many years before, Carson had said of Chase that "he couldn't ad lib a fart at a bean-eating contest," based on seeing Chase and the rest of the SNL cast standing around speechless one night when the show ran short. Did Carson really say that? Yes, I know he did, because he said it to me. I interviewed him a few times, the first at his home in Bel Air, with third wife Joanna Holland wafting around in a gracious-hostess get-up.
Carson and Chase made up later and became poker buddies. So you never know. In the excerpt, Chase taunts the two critics with a snotty, "When are your next pictures coming out?" Roger adroitly counters, later, by mentioning-while-pretending-not-to-mention "Oh, Heavenly Dog," a 1980 fiasco in which Chase ignominiously costarred with Benji the mutt. Roger holds his own with Chevy and doesn't seem to resent the moderate mockery going on behind him. It may seem less than momentous now, but it was the kind of Carson moment that people were bound to talk about the next day.
Today, of course, the talk-show host most likely to generate water-cooler buzz is the great David Letterman, who is easily Carson's equal at snappy ad-libs if not when it comes to projecting warmth. Certainly Letterman ranks as a colossus when compared with other would-be Carson's around him — especially Jay Leno and the opposite-of-electrifying, that Johnny-come-lately Jimmy Kimmel.
What about Conan O'Brien? Funny I should ask; on brief leave from his own cable talk show, he hosts the TCM Carson series, very capably and self-effacingly. We'll never know what heights Conan might have scaled if he'd gotten a fair shake at the "Tonight Show," but it all became such a crazy quagmire, with Leno going and coming and doing his disingenuous best to appear as if he hadn't a mean bone in his body. Maybe not a bone — but what about his liver, gall bladder or mean spleen? And yet with Leno now on the receiving end of yet another shaft from NBC's bottomless quiver, it's hard to maintain any hostility toward him. He still shines on the part of the "Tonight Show" that Carson made the most important, the monologue. Leno is a great joke-teller.Uhhh, I think I got off on a tangent there. Well, I'm old, old enough to remember most of the Carson interviews from their first time around. Even though he'd made perhaps too many appearances on the show, George Burns is truly funny in a 1989 Carson appearance to be shown in the July 1 show. It is still infectious to share Carson's delight at hearing Burns tell stories about Johnny's idol, Jack Benny (who was also idolized — and discovered — by Carson's illustrious predecessor, Jack Paar). And you can gauge the generational difference in talk shows of then and now in one Carson remark to Burns: "Let's talk about Al Jolson a little bit." Yes, children, it used to be that no discussion of show-biz legends was quite complete without an Al Jolson anecdote.
The premiere of "Carson on TCM" also includes chats with Doris Day (briefly contemplating the word "horny," of all things), Mary Tyler Moore (when still married to Grant Tinker, chairman of NBC in another era), Neil Simon, the most successful playwright of the 20th century, and an utterly disarming Drew Barrymore, age 7 (in 1982) who now-famously tells Carson, "I've been waiting all my life to meet you…" Johnny says he stayed on the "Tonight Show" an extra seven years just for her.These aren't really interviews so much as conversations, the more to Carson's credit. He was expert at putting guests at ease and at asking potentially troublesome questions in a non-confrontational way. People who lived through the era might consider Dick Cavett a better mainstream interviewer, but Cavett was never half as much fun to watch as Carson was.
In our Bel Air interview, Carson said he didn't think he'd still be hosting the "Tonight Show" when he was 55. He was 67 when he quit, essentially having been crassly forced out by the ruling NBC idiocracy, and he was 79 when he died. I got to interview him again — his last major newspaper interview, I believe — when he was awarded the Kennedy Center Honors, a prize that also later would go to Letterman.
I remember driving through the gates of Johnny's Malibu home and seeing a guard posted in a tower nearby; otherwise, Johnny would explain, gawkers would scale the fence and trespass. I stood at the exact spot in the shiny, spacious and oddly metallic foyer of his house where neighbor Bob Newhart, on his first visit, had jokingly inquired, "Which way to the gift shop?" Carson laughed as he recalled that. Then, seemingly uncomfortable in the palatial surroundings, he proposed we adjourn to his "tennis house" across the street, where logically enough his tennis court was.
Before the interview, Johnny showed me a wall of photographs, big stars who had all appeared on his "Tonight" show when it still aired nightly from New York, and he told me that all the kinescopes and videotapes from those early shows were lost, gone forever, though a tiny bit remains of Groucho Marx introducing Carson on the first show. Thus "Carson on TCM," which will include excerpts dating back to the '70s (Fred Astaire, to name one long-ago guest) seems particularly priceless.
Our interview over, Johnny walked me back to the big house across the street, to the driveway where my car was parked. I thanked him, shook his hand, and started to get into my car as he walked toward the entrance. And then out of pure emotion and sudden impulse — and laugh if you will — I called out to him.
"Johnny?" He turned around. "Thank you." I guess I meant thank you for the interview, but in my head I imagined I was speaking for the whole country, for everybody who'd ever survived a depressive spell with his help, for thirty years of uncommonly, unfailingly faithful service.
And there were tears in my eyes, dammit. I couldn't help myself.
For its July 1 launch, Carson on TCM will open with Johnny Carson's adorable 1982 interview with 7-year-old Drew Barrymore, who has since grown up to be a Golden Globe-winning actress and co-host of TCM's The Essentials. The night will also feature interviews with Kirk Douglas (taped in 1988), Mary Tyler Moore (1978), writer Neil Simon (1980) and George Burns (1989), one of more than 20 Academy Award® winners featured in the collection.
The July schedule for Carson on TCM will also feature interviews with such stars as Doris Day (taped in 1976), Charlton Heston (1976), Tony Curtis (1973), Shelley Winters (1975), Ronald Reagan (1975), Robin Williams (1981), Mel Brooks (1975), Bette Davis (1983), Fred Astaire (1979), Henry Fonda (1980), Elizabeth Taylor (1992) and William Holden (1976), to name a few. A complete July schedule is included below.
Carson on TCM — Series Premiere: Monday, July 1, at 8 p.m. (ET)
Monday, July 1
8 p.m. — Carson on TCM: Drew Barrymore (1982), Kirk Douglas (1988), Mary Tyler Moore (1978), Neil Simon (1980), George Burns (1989)
Monday, July 8
8 p.m. — Carson on TCM — Doris Day (1976), Charlton Heston (1976), Chevy Chase (1986), Steve Martin (1979), Tony Curtis (1973)
Monday, July 15
8 p.m. — Carson on TCM: Shelley Winters (1975), Ronald Reagan (1975), Robin Williams (1981), Jonathan Winters (1988), Michael Caine (1983)
Monday, July 22
8 p.m. — Carson on TCM: Mel Brooks (1975), Dom Deluise (1976), Bette Davis (1983), Burt Reynolds (1972), Fred Astaire (1979)
Monday, July 29
8 p.m. — Carson on TCM: Henry Fonda (1980), Elizabeth Taylor (1992), Susan Sarandon (1974), William Holden (1976), Goldie Hawn (1980)
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Jay Leno and I go way back. One of my fondest memories is of Jay chasing me around the parking lot of the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles. I always tell people that I thought of the Bel-Air, which I could still afford in those days (long long ago), as more a sanitarium than a hotel. You know how in L.A. your waiter has probably written a screenplay or two? At the Bel-Air, one of the parking attendants had actually starred in an ABC network series several years earlier! He played a wolf-boy.
But back to Jay. This was a few years before he took command of "The Tonight Show." My rental car had been brought around and I was about to get in when, from the car behind, I heard a familiar squeaky voice: "Hey, Tom! Wait a minute!" It was Jay Leno, alighting from one of the cars in his 500-car collection. Or 5,000, whatever. And for some reason, I kind of recoiled, or looked more nervous than usual, because he said, "Don't be afraid! I'm not mad at you!"
And yet as he came toward me from his car, he looked so gigantic, I made a bumbling attempt to get into mine, like I was escaping with his wristwatch or something. I guess I'd written something negative about a network special Jay had done and he thought I thought he'd be mad. Whatever, the Nicest Guy in Show Business (or so it had seemed back then) took pains to say he didn't consider it personal and wasn't upset.
He shouldn't have been, because for years I had written raves about Jay and interviewed him repeatedly when he came to Washington for comedy-club appearances. He always had modest, single-room hotel accommodations and his overnight bag would be spilled out on a chair or bed. He was or presented himself as a man of the people, the Johnny Appleseed of Comedy, a tremendously affable and infallibly funny pro who never ever tired of touring. But that was then.
I wrote so positively of him that his then-agent, the notorious and since deceased Helen Kushnick, told me I had helped Jay land the "Tonight Show" gig. Really?!? Of course, it may just have been a form of flattery. Kushnick was portrayed as a meddlesome monster in "The Late Shift," based on Billy Carter's book about the bloody battle to succeed Johnny Carson as host of "Tonight." For the record, I don't think anybody ever really did succeed him. Or ever will.
Whether I helped Jay or not, I was and am a devoted fan of David Letterman, who had brought such irreverent inventiveness to not just late-night TV but really the whole medium of television, tipping over once-sacred cows faster than they could be propped up again. He was full of mischief, which reminded me at the time of my original late-night hero, Jack Paar, courter of controversy. Although Paar became a Letterman fan, they really had little in common except pricey homes in suburban Connecticut and a Midwestern background.
In an act of kindness and respect that struck me as extremely uncommon in show business, or anywhere, Dave invited Jack and his wife Miriam (they died within a few years of each other, Jack in 2004) to lunch at the 21 Club in Manhattan; he even sent a limo to fetch them. Miriam went off shopping. I got to sit in at lunch. It was great; I didn't have to say a word the entire time.
Dave subsequently made it clear that he and I were not friends. Well of course not, and tempting though it may be, critics should never try to be friends with the people they write about. But that lunch, that gesture, couldn't help but deepen my regard for him -- not because I was there, but because he took the trouble to make Jack feel remembered. Dave, Jack and Johnny all had in common that they were born to broadcast. As Ted Koppel once said of Sam Donaldson, "If there had been no television, he would have gone door-to-door." It was said with affection.
So anyway, Jay got off to a terrible start on "Tonight," and we may never know if he was or wasn't aware that Kushnick had planted a nasty story about Carson in the New York Post, quoting NBC executives as saying Johnny and his audience had grown too old and that they were anxious for him to leave.
Now, of course, there is a sense of irony and déjà vu as Jay does battle with today's NBC executives -- a feckless bunch of stiffs from the corporate cable world -- and Carter is back on the late-night beat yet again, reporting that NBC executives think Jay and HIS audience are now too old and suggesting it's time for HIM to go! -- and for ambitious, money-mad and young Jimmy Fallon to move from 12:35 a.m. to 11:35 p.m. and host "Tonight." Fallon has done nothing to shoot down the rumors, but then he's busy pimping for a credit card company and his own production outfit.
What went around having thus come around, I now feel a real empathy with Leno and a residual affection, too. He is a great comedian. When he was in his element, at the comedy clubs, he was masterful, wonderful, indomitable. I saw him match wits with a heckler once at Caroline's in New York. Of course, the heckler's wit was no match for Jay's, but Jay put the guy down and retook command of the audience in a gentle, non-abusive way. He really wouldn't rest until he'd won the heckler over, just as he had to win over everybody in the club or die trying. Such is the curse and the joy of being one of society's professional jesters, as opposed to a mere buffoon like, say, a couple of presidents I could mention.
(AP photo)
Leno is reportedly angering NBC executives by making jokes about them on the air. Good God, this is supposed to be new? I'll never forget Carson including in one of his monologues, just after a faltering NBC had put merciful ends to a flock of its lamest prime-time shows, that NBC stood for "Nine Bombs Canceled." Considering the fact that in a recent week "Saturday Night Live" was the highest-rated nighttime show on NBC -- not the highest-rated late-night show, the highest-rated NBC show, period -- those executives ought to shut up and get to work, not whimper over a comedian's jibes. (Dave has been generous at ridiculing network executives, too, and why not? It is precisely what they deserve).
The other night Leno noted that science might soon make possible the "Jurassic Park" trick of bringing back extinct species -- and that this should give hope to NBC. That same night, for the record, Letterman, Leno and Fallon all did jokes about the guy who made a car run on coffee by saying that if we thought it cost a lot to operate cars now, wait 'til Starbucks got into the act. Oh yeah, we really need four or five of these shows in late-night to do variations on a single joke. No wonder some of us have retreated to "Perry Mason" on ME-TV or "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" on Antenna TV. Or the relatively safe haven of our own dreams.
Jay's contract runs through 2014; it'll be interesting to see if tiny-minded NBC executives employ psychological warfare in attempting to force him out earlier, or if Fallon's camp will be issuing ultimatums , as Leno's once did, threatening to go to Fox unless early guarantees are made. Of course, Fallon probably already has the "Tonight Show" guaranteed him once Leno leaves, but it's when Leno leaves that is up in the air, no matter what it may say on paper.
Leno still can make me laugh in a snap. But something changed when he took over the "Tonight Show." It seemed as if getting the show was more important to Leno than doing the show; it was like a trophy for his mantel, but he didn't really want to cuddle with it under the covers. He still lights up infectiously when a joke works, but his writers often let him down (then again, he is one of them), and too many of the pre-taped bits ("Jay-Walking") fall flat.
The other night Leno did a bit from the studio audience that supposedly spoofed such talent-show competitions as "American Idol" but was really an embarrassingly blatant rip-off of Letterman's "Stupid Human Tricks." Even Jay's congratulatory "Nice job," which he says to rock groups no matter how lousy their performance may have been, is a duplicate of what Letterman has always said to musicians and comics who perform on his show. Actually, the "guests" who just "talk" with Letterman are of course performing, too; Letterman even sometimes says a demeaning "nice job" to them. He won't let us cling to ANY of TV's little illusions, which is good but only up to a point.
By the time Letterman sees them, most of his guests have been "pre-interviewed" by producers and virtually rehearsed to death, but this is common to all the major talk shows -- and in spite of it, many of them still sparkle spontaneously with Letterman as they do on no other show, partly because he will ignore the notes and go off on some mad tangent of his own. As for his being uncompromising, he once responded to the litany of rave reviews I had lavished on him in the '80s and '90s by calling me "sycophantic" to interviewer Lloyd Grove. Pressured by his executive producer, he did call to apologize (oh, I had clout in those days) and had me helpless with laughter by the end of the very brief conversation.
When I said I certainly didn't want to be considered a "whore" for the Letterman show, he said I was over-reaching.
I don't judge talk-show hosts, or anybody, by how they react to reviews from me or anybody else, I hope, but Conan O'Brien, who got the lousiest deal of any talk-show host ever (from NBC, of course) and is now tucked away on one of the Turner cable stations, not only forgave me for some very negative things I wrote when he started out but quoted a few of them in one of his celebrated hilarious commencement speeches (practically a second career for him). I thought that showed tremendous -- uhhhh -- self-loathing? No, no, it showed how very grounded and self-effacing he was.
He has more pure integrity than any of the other boys, and maybe that's why he ended up with "the fuzzy end of the lollipop," as Marilyn Monroe says in "Some Like It Hot." But we needn't despair for Conan; he is reputedly making a fortune. He is undaunted and uncomplaining, two things no one has ever accused me of being. Send in your daunts, I cave. And complaining is, arguably, my life's work.
Sorry to have gone on so long with this, but then the late-night story keeps going on, too. Maybe Billy Carter is even planning to do another book -- heaven help us. Conan is the guy who ought to get the last word. At what I think was his most recent commencement address, to graduating students at Dartmouth in 2011, he quoted himself -- the last words he said on NBC before the "Tonight Show" was gracelessly yanked out from under him by executive goons and given back to Leno. Choosing to be grateful for the good things rather than bemoaning the bad, O'Brien told the students, "Work hard, be kind, and amazing things will happen." God bless him.
]]>Aye, it's the age-old story. Oh the naming of a new pope, sure, but there's another less-age-old story: TV networks covering something that their anchors and reporters call a glorious spectacle and then ruining the spectacle with superfluous graphics littering the screen.
CBS News showed the most visual restraint (and dignity), and ABC tied with CNN in showing the least, in coverage from the Vatican of the big event: Pope Francis I -- formerly Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina -- taking over after his predecessor suddenly retired, the Catholic world having muddled along popelessly for only a short period as cardinals deliberated behind extremely closed doors.
We kept hearing from the assembled journalists that there are 1.2 billion Catholics in the world, but when it's pope-choosing time, the whole world is Catholic -- or at least it seems that way (it also seems that way whenever they show "Going My Way" or "The Bells of St. Mary's" with Bing Crosby as Father O'Malley on TCM, and why the Church hasn't sainted Bing by now, I will never know).
You're compelled to watch even if the selection of the pope will have little or no impact on your life; it's a rare kind of ecumenical event.
Diane Sawyer and ABC News colleagues high-tailed it to Rome earlier in the week for coverage with all-stops-out, whereas NBC's Brian Williams, most literate of all network anchors, stayed in New York and watched the proceedings on a big screen in the studio. We don't have figures, but obviously more of us were watching on big screens of our home at home than was true the last time a new pope was announced, and more had access to beautiful high-def pictures of the event.
It's especially unfortunate, then, that the screen had to be cluttered up with junk from the networks' computer graphics departments, but obviously viewers "just tuning in" have to be told what they're watching and from where. Clicking around among the networks, the on-screen headlines were different but the same once the white smoke had emerged, the traditional signal that a new pope has been named.
"New Pope to Emerge Any Moment," promised the headline on CNN during the long hour's lag (long in terms of air time) between the holy smoke and the appearance of the new pontiff. "New Pope to Appear Momentarily," said NBC. "Awaiting Announcement of New Pope's Name," said an impatient ABC. "New Pope to Appear Shortly," CBS said hopefully.
In addition to such essentially essential information, though, ABC and CNN ran a lot of typographical gingerbread across the bottom of the screen, just to impose movement on a technically static picture, and increasingly, the bottom of the screen became the bottom HALF of the screen as clutter conquers all. The more acreage that's surrendered to the captions and ticker-tape headlines, the more frustrating it is to watch.
Television is obviously a great visual medium for storytelling, and yet there are few sights more common in newscasts, national and local, than correspondents standing in front of a catastrophe or other news event and telling you what you'd be able to see if they'd get out of the way. "Behind me, aliens from Venus have landed in a gigantic flying saucer trimmed in monkey fur." Whatever.
Yes, I've been bemoaning such facts of life for many years, in one venue or another, and there's never been a sign that it's done any good. But someone has to decry the madness! Or, uh, if it's not madness, it's at least tacky.
The overall look of graphics on TV has tremendously improved. It used to be, back in the three-network era, that CBS was always admired for its graphics -- from the world's greatest logo, the Eye, to network promos and various displays and even an annual animated Christmas card -- and everybody else was an also-ran. Now, thanks in part to the spread of computers with enormous capacity for fancy graphics, and increased sophistication by those who operate them, good graphics are taken-for-granted and common.
How ironic then that ABC News graphics manage to look so crappy. Just big and ugly and intrusive, as was the case again yesterday (I know it's a small detail, but could they possibly have picked out a clunkier typeface for the nightly "World News" and other ABC News shows than the one they've got?). The network had to go out of its way to look bad.
The faces of the faithful gathered at St. Peter's were, of course, more important than type faces in coverage of the pope show. Directors sensibly cut from big wide shots of the scene to individual portraits of people in the crowd. Networks showed enterprise in getting the faces of their own correspondents on the screen amid such a huge surging throng, with some correspondents' faces lit up as if by hand-held flashlights and visible in the dark from considerable distances.
Unfortunately for ABC's David Wright, somebody had brought a huge flag along and it managed to unfurl right in front of his face, so all the light in Rome couldn't have helped him.
Each network had put out the call to round up the usual suspects -- that is, find a Catholic expert to be on-hand so that arcane aspects of the rituals could be explained to viewers. These spokespeople tend to be cheerleaders for Catholicism, but there's no reason they should have to fake objectivity. On ABC, Archbishop Wilton Gregory was ready with encomiums to the new pope immediately upon his first appearance: "He is truly a holy man, a humble man!" But then what else can they say -- "he seems like a nice guy"?
In fact, he did seem like a nice guy when it came time to speak to the crowd. He talked in relatively conversational terms, and even told the huge mass of people to go home and have a nice night -- setting "a completely different tone" for a pope, as Mark Phillips noted on CBS.
ABC's Cecilia Vega was more succinct if perhaps too informal when she gushed simply, "Wow!"
Wow, we got us a hip pope!
Oddly, a CNN anchor kept hedging about the identity of the new pope even after every other network had stated it as a matter of fact. "We believe" the new pope is from Argentina, the anchor said, adding that he is "named Francis, we believe, according to Italian television." According to Italian television? How about according to American television, where by this time it was a stated certainty. Except for CNN, that is.
For the most part, American television did a respectable and respectful job, and there didn't seem to be an excess of chatter about various Catholic scandals of the past several years. Of course, when they have an hour of time to fill with nothing happening -- and not much to show except a photograph of an empty balcony onto which the new pope would eventually stride -- they can be forgiven for reaching for whatever's handy.
Even a skeptic, perhaps even a cynic, could watch the telecast and feel impressed by its immensity and yet also feel basically unmoved. But when the new pope himself spoke, and when he recited traditional prayers from that balcony, and when cameras showed faces of the faithful bowed in humility and praying with him, the screen seemed to glow with a virtually holy light.
And now, back to our regular programming....
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Listen -- a billion people are throwing up. That's a rough estimate of course, but every year somebody at the Oscars says a billion people on the planet are watching the program; however many watched this year's Oscar show, they may well have felt sickened by it. It was a stomach-churning, jaw-dropping debacle, incompetently hosted and witlessly produced.
But even in Hollywood and even on television, nothing is 100 per cent bad, and at about 11 p.m. Eastern time, Barbra Streisand magically materialized onstage to sing "The Way We Were" as a tribute to the late Marvin Hamlisch, and there wasn't a dry eye in the world. At last, a true living legend -- a genuinely thrilling star.
Then the producers managed to pull off a big emotional climax by having First Lady Michele Obama read the name of the Best Picture Winner ("Argo") "live" from the White House, peering out from under her bangs and lending the festivities at least of hint of -- what else -- festivity. And some much-needed class, too.
Streisand was in great voice, commanding and brilliant, the best thing on the show by far. Singing performances by Adele (the theme from "Skyfall"), Shirley Bassey ("Goldfinger") and a few others also helped elevate the proceedings from depths plumbed from the very outset on.
Hollywood historians will debate whether the 1989 Oscar show, disastrously produced by Allan Carr (with Rob Lowe singing to Snow White), will remain the worst ever or if this year's, sadistically concocted by producers Neil Meron and Craig Zadan, will take the dishonor as all-time most horrible. Both, let's face it, will live in infamy, like Pearl Harbor.
Skeptics were wisely taken aback when Seth MacFarlane, a squirrelly little ham whose forte is producing dirty cartoons for television, was chosen to host this year's event, and there was more astonishment when it was later announced he would sing and dance as part of his performance. He turned out to be the proverbial triple threat; he not only couldn't sing or dance but he was no stand-up comedian, either.
MacFarlane's attempts at irreverent humor -- like saying "Lincoln" star Daniel Day Lewis had attempted to "free" African American actor Don Cheadle backstage -- was apparently supposed to give the aging Oscarcast some kind of "edge." But people don't want an Oscars with edge; they want entertainment and schmaltz. MacFarlane laid one egg after another, many of them in the first seventeen hideous minutes: an off-the-wall sketch in which MacFarlane chatted with William Shatner (in his old "Star Trek" outfit -- from the motion picture series, mind you) about how to do the show.
There were mock headlines from "the future" assailing MacFarlane as having turned out to be the worst Oscar host ever, and the farce became fact; he WAS the worst host ever. Maybe not just of the Oscars, either -- maybe the worst host of anything.
"The show's a disaster," Shatner said kiddingly to MacFarlane, but the words rang horribly true, and only a few minutes in. Everything seemed wrong, even the set (at times, MacFarlane seemed to have been installed against a backdrop from the old "Hollywood Palace"), and especially a stupid bit of retro sexism directed at actresses in the audience, "We Saw Your Boobs." MacFarlane sang that accompanied by, for some completely unfathomable reason, the Gay Men's Chorus of Los Angeles.
Then Channing Tatum and Charlize Theron were trotted out to sing and dance "The Way You Look Tonight" from the classic Astaire-Rogers film, "Swingtime" -- but Astaire and Rogers they screamingly were not. Why hire MacFarlane to lure a younger audience to the Oscars and then have today's stars clumsily stumble through old-timey material?
So many details were mystifying or infuriating, like having a pair of socks, a white pair and a brown pair, re-enact a scene from the movie "Flight" starring Denzel Washington, or putting MacFarlane in a nun's habit so he could torment Sally Field (long ago the "Flying Nun" on TV) in a lame sketch taped earlier in the green room backstage. The saddest thing was that jokes meant to be self-deprecating just seemed horribly accurate, as when MacFarlane promised viewers "a telecast designed to put your patience to a test" or called his own movie "Ted" his "mediocre effort."
With MacFarlane flailing so miserably, the usual bugaboos of Oscar shows seemed more irritating than ever -- as when one of four men who won an early Oscar hogged the spotlight and thanked his children while the other three winners had to stand by silently. When will Oscar winners ever learn to shut up about their damn kids and stop treating this supposedly global event like a small-town pancake supper?
It seems a certainty that Zadan and Meron won't be invited back to ruin another Oscar show (the term "Academy Awards" was all but banished from the program; apparently it's considered too stuffy for today's hip audience) and, perhaps knowing that, they managed to infest this year's with tributes to their own work, mainly the Broadway musical "Chicago" which they turned into a film. You'd think "Chicago" had been the equivalent of "Oklahoma!" combined with "Guys and Dolls" for all the fuss made about it.
That the show was such a dreadful embarrassment seems especially unfortunate because the consensus has been that this year's list of nominated people and films is particularly auspicious, with many of the top winners remaining unpredictable until show time -- or some of them, anyway. Maybe there's an axiom lurking in the wings: the better the crop of films, the worse the Oscar show? It would take weeks of painful research to figure that out, and who would want the job of looking at all those old Oscar shows -- unless you went back to the Bob Hope or Johnny Carson days?
Then again, no matter how bad some of the old shows might be when revisited, this year's will remain the ultimate loser -- at least for the next twelve months, after which somebody else will take another whack at it. This year's edition could have earned one lasting distinction anyway -- the first time the Oscar telecast was even worse than the ridiculous and insipid Red-Carpet Show that preceded it.
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Roughly five months ago, back in the summer of '12, the spectacularly popular Robin Roberts, co-anchor of ABC's "Good Morning, America," left the show for a sabbatical of indeterminate length. She might be gone for six or eight months, viewers inferred, or for a year. Or, forever.
In the cruel aftermath of treatment for breast cancer five years earlier, Roberts had developed a rare and serious bone disease, and now she would have to undergo extensive and dangerous treatment, including a bone-marrow transplant, for that. Hers had become a more harrowing survival story than most of those she'd dealt with in news reports on the program.
Much less memorably, within the same time frame, yours truly wrote a column critical of ABC for, I thought, too-blatantly exploiting the Roberts story for its ratings potential. After 16 years of getting shellacked in the Nielsens by NBC's long-dominant "Today" show (sometimes it seemed that the invention of "Today" had miraculously preceded the invention of television, and that TV came along so there'd be some place to put it), "GMA" was now sometimes tying and sometimes beating "Today" in the ratings. It had been a long time coming.
A single ratings point can be worth millions in advertising dollars to a network, and you'd have to be very naïve to imagine that the possibility of taking over the top spot in morning television hadn't occurred to ABC executives, especially since the entire network TV business has been in a very precarious state since the emergence of the Internet and its evil twin, cable. Owned for decades by electronics giant RCA, NBC found itself part of General Electric, then partnered with Universal Studios and then, in a $30 billion deal, owned by cable colossus Comcast.
To note that these are high stakes is preposterous understatement.
Even so, I was knocked for a loop or two by ABC's reaction to my column. A testy vice president issued a vituperative denunciation that condemned me BY NAME (unusual even in the nutty network business) for daring to suggest that the Roberts saga was being used to gain a ratings advantage over competitors. This allegation was furiously dismissed and denied, but ABC reacted so hysterically to it that, I thought, they gave it credence -- the old "thou doth protest too much" syndrome. It seemed to me -- repeat, "seemed" -- that in the ensuing days and weeks, ABC treated the story a bit more dispassionately, which ideally is how news should be treated by journalists.
It even occurred to me, though only for a minute, that maybe, just to get the network's easily gotten goat, I should do a follow-up column taunting ABC for UNDER-covering the story and asking rhetorically if they had "ice-water in their veins," which is what Lou Grant mockingly accused his disbanding newsroom colleagues of having when they briefly stopped crying on the last episode of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show."
However, I thought to myself, maybe ABC executives wouldn't find that very funny and, much more importantly, people in the real world might fail to be amused by it as well. So I didn't do it.
In no way, not even for a sliver of a particle of a split-second, did I, or would I, make light of Roberts' plight, and I certainly never accused her of "exploiting" her own illness. NOBODY is that competitive, not even in the network TV business. ABC spokespeople hastened to point out, in their defense, that the promos and special reports and overall coverage were presented to Roberts for her review before air and that she did not object. So be it.
I don't and didn't mean to imply, either, that the promotion and publicity people at ABC News, or network executives in other departments, or Roberts' coworkers on "Good Morning, America," are all a flock of cynics right out of Paddy Chayefsky's "Network," that entertainingly mean-spirited attack on the supposedly soulless TV business released in 1976 -- a galaxy far, far away.
When Roberts returned to "GMA" on Wednesday, Feb. 20, the outpouring of emotion and admiration by her fellow staff members was unmistakably sincere, and the tears of joy were certainly not prompted by anything to do with ratings. Looking into one of the cameras that could be said to love her as much as her coworkers do, Roberts told viewers: "I have been waiting 174 days to say this: 'Good morning, America.'"
Other cameras had captured her, earlier on videotape, as she returned to the network's Times Square studios engulfed by cheering well-wishers. The scene, in fact, resembled President Barack Obama's entrance into the House of Representatives earlier in the month for his State of the Union speech, but Roberts received an even more enthusiastic mass greeting. Obama and First Lady Michelle appeared early in the "GMA" telecast to welcome Roberts back to her TV home, an unusual (videotaped) tribute to be sure. (Roberts ALSO interviewed Mrs. Obama, for airing Feb 26.)
Many more celebrities taped brief welcome-back messages -- everyone from cast members of the Grand Ole Opry to the one-and-only grand old Oprah. The Muppets were there on tape, and players from the L.A. Lakers (who presented Roberts with a personalized purple-and-gold jersey) and colleagues whom Roberts had known when she worked at ESPN, the all-sports network. Even amidst all the daily, 24/7 ballyhoo of commercial television, the tributes seemed genuine and authentic. Nobody, it appeared, had to fake it.
And Roberts' natural radiance really did come across as even more radiant, and even more natural, than ever.
Her return did, indeed, have the requisite ingredients for a bona fide inspirational tale, the kind that TV traditionally makes up and peddles as the truth. But this one was for real. "I keep pinching myself, and I realize this is real, this is actually happening," Roberts said to the coworkers around her on the "GMA" set. Perhaps no word in the TV lexicon is as over-used and abused as "reality," but every now and then, reality does break through TV's curtain of artifice and empty ruckus, and this was one of those moments.
It's hard, generally, not to be skeptical when TV personalities claim to be terribly moved, or hugely sympathetic, or soft-heartedly distressed by this or that item in the news. Really now, don't you get a lump somewhere other than your throat when a guy like Matt Lauer, the "Today" show host, tells some figure in the news -- someone going through a traumatic ordeal -- that they'll be remembered "in our prayers"? Who can honestly imagine Matt kneeling at the side of his bed and asking God to bless and keep Hattie McHattie of Hattiesberg, Ark., whose house floated away in a flood?
Yeah, right -- just before, "and bless mommy, and daddy, and Fluffy and Muffy"?
But now, as it must in nearly every story dealing with commercial television, the subject of ratings raises its mighty head. Sure enough, and predictably enough, Robin Roberts' return to "GMA" gave the show's already high ratings a substantial boost. An estimated 6.1 million viewers tuned in to welcome her back, as opposed to 4.9 million who watched "Today" on NBC that morning. The namby-pamby New York Times, daring defender of the status quo, was all aglow welcoming Roberts back, noting with an implicit tut-tut that some critics had "grumbled" about the hype and promos five months earlier -- a gutless Times writer essentially dismissing them as Blue Meanies.
Roberts clearly loves her work and many of her coworkers. One can hope, though, that she won't overdo the good-soldier bit now that she is, tentatively, back (she will not appear Monday through Friday on "GMA" at least for a while -- doctor's orders -- but will show up as her health allows). As part of Welcome Back Week, Roberts was interviewed by fellow ABC News star Diane Sawyer and was scheduled for a special edition of "20/20" -- as well as working the Oscars on ABC in Los Angeles over the weekend and, while out there, making an appearance on the network's late-night bore, "Jimmy Kimmel Live."
She's got that certain "something" that earns a select few personalities special places in the public's affection and esteem, and even honorary membership in their extended families. If you could bottle that something and sell it, as the old saying goes, you'd make a zillion. And the networks would overdose on it before you could say "Welcome back, Robin" -- which every ABC News correspondent did say in every single report that aired on the day she returned.
]]>Back in ancient days of rampant ignorance and sexist effrontery, a TV commercial for a product now forgotten depicted a happy married couple whose cheer seemed guaranteed by the woman's subservience to the man. At the end of the ad he uttered a phrase that entered, to the dismay of millions, the iconography of the time: "My wife -- I think I'll keep her."
On Tuesday night in Washington, Barack Obama essentially renewed his vows with the American people, especially those who voted him back into the White House for a second term, by delivering a forceful and dramatic State of the Union address. It was a speech intended, at least partly, to let viewer-voters know that the whirlwind chief executive appreciates their display of faith. And you could all but hear a chorus of satisfied citizens affirming their choice: "Our President -- we think we'll keep him."
Okay, they basically already said that in November when casting their ballots, but in his speech Obama was approving our approval and reassuring us that our faith in him is justified and that he's going to pursue the course implicitly endorsed on Election Day. We're all in this together, he said, and we can rest assured we've got the right guy steering the ship. It's certainly not going to flop over in the waves and end up on its back like a turtle.
Obama's speech did tick off one pressing crisis after another, but Obama emphasized that every problem can be solved, and in making the point repeatedly he set up a rhetorical rhythm that probably echoed the religious refrains he heard in church as a young man: "We can do this," and "We can get this done," and similar sentiments, each repeated as the crowd's applause, and seemingly its enthusiasm -- its passion, even -- grew in fervor. Obama's delivery turned quasi-musical and essentially evangelistic once he got two-thirds into the speech and took on the touchiest topic of the night, gun control -- a national fixation in the aftermath of such terrible tragedies as the murders of schoolchildren in New Town, Conn., and, at the very moment the President spoke, the fiery shooting death of an apparently deranged and homicidal ex-cop in southern California.
The president stayed safely away from flamboyance or posturing that could be seen as demagoguery. A refrain like "Let's get it done, let's get it done" was spoken almost conversationally, not with wild-eyed fanaticism, but the words still carried hefty impact. There are no unconquerable problems, Obama was saying, whether talking about the ease with which lunatics can obtain assault weapons or the difficulty that middle-class couples have getting their homes re-financed.
One of his most quotable lines came earlier, and it was in part an attempt to subvert what the Republicans were tediously certain to say in their response to the presidential address later in the evening. "It is not a bigger government that we need," Obama said, "but a smarter government." He wanted to make that distinction and not have to hear Republicans say, yet again, that he was calling for a bigger, fatter, richer, more intrusive, more obnoxious federal government. But none are so deaf as those who won't listen. So it was that Rep. Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), currently a media darling, materialized after the President's address to deliver the GOP response and insisted that in his speech, Obama had again endorsed the idea that "every problem can be solved by the government."
But he didn't say that. He didn't even imply it. He went out of his way not to say it. The loyal opposition, however, keeps playing the same broken record over and over, with Rubio declaring vaguely that many of the nation's problems were caused by some sort of "moral breakdown" in our society, not by the conspicuous failures of Congressmen and Senators.
As Bob Schieffer noted in après-speech commentary for CBS News, it is "very hard to compete" with the President after he has delivered a speech to the nation amid the hoopla and pageantry that surround presidential appearances. No sooner had Mr. Obama walked into the cheering House chamber than he stopped in his tracks to press flesh and grin greetings and look lovable while slowly making his way up the aisle to the platform from which he would speak. When, an hour later, he walked out via the same route, he even paused to sign autographs, which always seems kind of a tacky thing for a president to do after making a televised address to the nation. This isn't some damn county fair.
Signing autographs isn't the president's idea. People thrust pieces of paper in his face and he obligingly scribbles on them. But it looks so tacky. And it's what used to be called in broadcasting (maybe still is) "Dead Air." Nothing much is happening but we're all forced to stare at it anyway. Sometimes it seems that Obama enjoys these particular trappings of power just a wee bit too much -- but on the other hand, it's good to have a president who appears not only comfortable in the job but who actually relishes it.
The portion of the speech dealing with gun violence -- what might be considered the third act of the address -- was the most forcefully written and delivered. Even here, the president stopped short of pounding a fist on the rostrum and playing on emotions. Speaking about victims of gun violence, some of whom had been seated in the gallery, the President asked rhetorically if the matter of gun control doesn't at least deserve being brought to the House and Senate floors and debated there. "They deserve a single vote," he stressed, in another of his thematic refrains. "They deserve a vote!"
And in an eloquent rebuff to the constant chant that government "IS the problem" and that everything would be ducky if the government shrank or shriveled up or maybe just stole away in the night, like a football team being hustled out of Baltimore and off to another city, the president said with affecting simplicity, "We were sent here to make what difference we can." There was, indeed, something grimly absurd in Rep. Rubio's implicit assertion that government should buzz off, like an ogre in a bad dream.
If government is so evil and ought to get lost, then what the hell was Rubio doing there -- selling No-No hair clippers?
While the content of Obama's speech was bound to make news, so too were the means of its delivery. Diane Sawyer and her colleagues at ABC News, the best gang currently working the national beat for television (though NBC's Brian Williams is the best anchor), pointed out that streaming of the speech on Twitter and elsewhere on the Internet had resulted in "727,000 tweets" by the time the speech ended. In a potential historical first, it was also reported, the president's speech aired on Cuba's state-run television channel.
It was more annoyance than embellishment, however, when ABC ran tweatings and text messages along the bottom of the screen, some from ABC correspondents but others from -- who? The man in the moon? These asides really added nothing, and putting them there suggests that too-restless ABC News producers fear the audience will become bored by anything so prosaic as a presidential address -- that we poor, dumb viewers need gingerbread and geegaws and other visual junk running around on the screen in order to sustain interest.
NBC News also took note of tweets about "SOTU" -- yes, like everything else in Washington, the State Of The Union address has to be reduced to some trite abbreviation -- but streams and tweets were nowhere near as valuable as comments by Andrea Mitchell, Chuck Todd and other network stalwarts. Williams, who sometimes comes across as strangely sad when delivering the news (then again, the news usually is pretty damn sad) brightened to the task at hand, getting a buzz from politics.
Before the speech, Diane Sawyer's co-anchor George Stephanopoulos said it was being estimated that, depending on how much applause the president got, the speech would probably last about an hour -- and as Judy Woodruff pointed out on PBS, it came in just "a second or two" short of that. It didn't seem a minute too long, however, and what better gauge of a speaker's effectiveness is there than that?
]]>by Tom Shales
Okay, now we know: God DOES "care" about the Super Bowl, as people were wondering during the big build-up to the game -- the one that began around Thanksgiving, 2012. Yes, God cares; He HATES it. And that's why He (or, yes, She) turned off the lights on Super Bowl XLVII in New Orleans Sunday night and left everybody standing there and waiting for the second half to continue. Maybe it was a kind of Old-Testament warning -- ya think?
Strange, really; the plug was pulled on the all the hyperactive pyrotechnics, computerized bells and digital whistles, and the big huge thing looked stunningly, even laughably insignificant. Just a bunch of guys standing around in the dark, wearing tight pants and looking lost without a ball to chase up and down a field. But the really "lost," and perhaps real losers, were the members of that crack CBS Sports announcing and commentating team. It was hilarious, really; without their semi-scripted statistics and hoary clichés to bandy about, faced with a eerie unknowns and the threat of having actual news to report, they turned into a bunch of tight-lipped shrinking violets, making small talk so small it was hard to believe The Whole World Was Listening.
Actually by that time, much of the world had probably gone to bed. It seems unlikely the game will top the record ratings of 103 million viewers set by last year's Super Bowl -- on NBC. As the minutes ticked by and the game hovered in dark limbo, the boys in the blazers became increasingly desperate. Big James Brown tried to cover the silence with a recap -- "for those of you just tuning in." Now wait; who "just tunes in" the Super Bowl 80 or 90 minutes into the show? You either watch it or ignore it.
"Honey, see if the Super Bowl's on. It's February, isn't it?"
Wouldn't it be nice if the record for viewers was set by the Animal Planet's super-wonderful "Super Puppy Bowl," a pretaped romp featuring a couple dozen of the cutest little dogs on the planet, or presumably; it's hard to get an accurate reading on something like that. Considering the big nothing that was happening on CBS, many viewers may have turned over to see what those puppies were up to.
Whatever else they must do, meanwhile, CBS announcers must avoid in any way impugning the integrity or sanctity of that grand humanitarian organization, the NFL. They must always spout the official NFL line or their multi-million dollar salaries might be in jeopardy. Everyone in the crowd remained wonderfully "calm" one announcer said, and a shouting match between one coach and a Superdome official was largely ignored.
More than one announcer in the near-dark said one and all were "waiting for a statement from the NFL" as to the cause of the power failure. They had to have a statement for that? Maybe they couldn't even say the lights were definitely out until the NFL declared them so. These are seasoned broadcasters, most of them; how could they let themselves look so helpless?
Bill Cowher, one of the CBS blowhards, was determined to put a smiley face on it. A disaster, a calamity, a mess? Oh no, he said of the power failure: "It's just like another, longer half-time...."
Oh sure, that's all it was. Just what the players and coaches (and fans) needed: a roughly 35-minute 'second halftime' to drain all the momentum out of the game and the telecast and discourage everyone in the stadium, as well as us folks out here in Television Land. And unfortunately, sassy and saucy Beyonce couldn't be dragged back out onto the stage (with Destiny's Child) to start bouncing and flouncing again and make it literally a second halftime. Somebody somewhere on the Internet had rushed to call her all-girl revue "the best halftime show ever," but every year somebody declares that year's show the best halftime ever.
It was hard to tell if gorgeous Beyonce sang a medley of songs or just one long song in what seemed like a kinky, black-leather-lingerie reboot, with real boots, of an old Busby Berkeley production number (replete with overhead camera) from the 1930's. Of course Busby couldn't be as overtly sexual as Beyonce and company were. It was hot stuff but strangely empty and unaffecting. That is, the instant it ended it was as if it had never happened. We can just be thankful the power didn't fail during the show, because those poor dancers and singers would have looked pathetic standing up there with no roaring soundtrack or seizure-inducing light show to decorate their act.
Beyonce did sing "Bootylicious," of course, and it was definitely Beyoncilious.
After all the (absurd) fuss made when it appeared Beyonce had lip-synched the National Anthem at President Obama's Second Inaugural, Beyonce swore she would sing "live" at the Super Bowl, and for all we or you know, she did, but the sound balance wasn't very good and it was hard to tell where one "hit" ended and another began. In fact some of the camera shots of Beyonce, especially the close-ups, looked like THEY might have been videotaped inserts; wouldn't that be a hoot? It's kinda too bad that CBS couldn't haul out the second half of last year's game and play that when the lights went out, just to see if anybody could tell the difference. Immediately, that is. How many people would have known? Well, of course; it would seem odd that the San Francisco 49ers were no longer pitted against the Baltimore Ravens. At least, though, there would have been movement on the screen, fully lit.
For a couple of decades, commercials at the Super Bowl have received as much attention as the game itself, a truism if there ever was one. Now, of course, there are even commercials advising people to tune in the Super Bowl to see other commercials. During the game, the announcers more than once told viewers that if they wanted, they could rush to their computers, go to a CBS Sports web site, and get, among other things, "immediate access to the commercials" shown at the game. Goody!
Have we become a society so desperate for sensory stimulation and so gullible to the ploys of Madison Avenue that we now beat a path to see or re-see 30- and 60-second advertisements for crap we probably don't want or need? The hype over the hype has become -- what else? -- hyperhype. We are moving through the universe at hyperhype hyperspeed. It is not a condition conducive to rational, reasonable thought or intelligent discourse. As if you didn't know.
For my money, not that I have any, the best ad ran very very late in the game and contained no overt computer animation and moved at a stately pace and was narrated by, of all people, Paul Harvey, the great and legendary radio broadcaster who died in 2009 at the age of 90. Harvey left behind many voice recordings, and though he was sometimes dismissed as just another political conservative, he was capable of an Everyman sort of eloquence.
This piece was "God Made a Farmer," Harvey's prose ode to the American agrarians who raise the nation's food, and it was accompanied by simple but stunning still photos of farm life. There was no pitching of a product except for a credit at the very end: the ad was sponsored by Ram Trucks, presumably common fixtures on farms of then and now. Anyway, it was beautiful.
Other advertisers went a considerably different route, testing the waters to see how audacious or just dirty they could be, with Doritos winning approval in some quarters for its cheeky mini-sitcom on a theme of bestiality -- a man who apparently is love-slave to a goat, and the goat raises hell when it goes to the cupboard and there aren't any Doritos in it. Yes, it was stupid.
Another Doritos ad featured a group of men who dressed as ballerinas and in other forms of drag to please a kid and were discovered by a real woman as they pranced around a room. Yes, even stupider than the goat.
It was immediately followed by a different kind of sexual tease, a collection of men shimmying and slithering in their Calvin Klein underpants. It was weird going from the male ballerinas to the jocks in jocks, or nearly.
A Volkswagen commercial that provoked considerable criticism before it aired on the Super Bowl -- and most of the ads are now available in advance, as part of the ads-for-ads campaign -- featured a man from Minnesota who obviously thought he'd seem much cooler if he talked with a Jamaican accent. Later he is seen in a car with an Asian passenger. It didn't seem racist or particularly offensive, though you never know what will tick people off.
In this Internutty age, the web's influence was evident in several ads. Jimmy Fallon, the former comedy star who now is a one-man advertising conglomerate -- and he should be ashamed of himself -- was asked to mastermind a commercial in which ordinary people (imagine) send in tweets about Lincoln cars and then Fallon's staff illustrates them. It was a big yawn.
Meanwhile, Coca-Cola asked viewers to vote for their favorite character in a commercial that showed various stereotypical folk -- cowboys, an old-fashioned Arab sheikh, a bunch of post-apocalyptic road warriors -- racing through the desert to get to a Coke. The result of the voting would be shown at the end of the game, but I had no interest in sticking around for that. What guarantee would a viewer have that the results weren't just cooked in advance by Coke -- you know, Coke-cooked -- and who could care anyway?
Several movies were advertised, one not opening until Memorial Day, with the usual splashy displays of computer animation, explosions and crashes and booms, but the neatest technical trick of the night was probably the one seen during the halftime show, when Beyonce was electronically cloned into several Beyonci -- dozens of Beyonci! -- and here we thought there would never be another.
During the 70-hour pregame show (or so it seemed), President Obama was interviewed live from the White House by CBS anchor Scott Pelley. The president made a bit of news when he said he fully supported admitting gays and Lesbians to the Boy and Girl Scouts of America. He was also asked about the intense violence of pro football -- violence that has resulted in players suffering multiple concussions that led to permanent brain damage -- and he referred to himself as being among "those of us who like to see a big hit" now and then.
He meant one player colliding with another. Later a sideline reporter said one object of the game is to "find a way to legally 'hit'" the quarterback. Just good clean fun!
CBS and the NFL poured on patriotic sentiment "to honor America" before the kick-off, as could be expected. "America, the Beautiful" was sung by twenty-six students from the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., site of the still-recent tragic mass murder. This oddly was not as moving as it sounds, mainly because the slow-witted CBS director failed to show us the beautiful faces of the singing children. Instead we got more and more close-ups of the sweating players and the celebrity coaches and other such oft-photographed persons.
Perhaps this is the way the NFL wanted it. Year after year, the way the NFL wants things seems increasingly to rule, but then pro football is a big business -- a very very big business. Maybe all the inflated egos at the NFL and in the plush executive suites of CBS will get a jolt from the fact that a power outage will prove to be the big highlight of this year's Super Bowl and the only reason for which it is remembered.
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