One more thing about Plan 9 From Outer Space

The movie was wide screen when shown in theaters. They cut off the top and bottom of the picture. When you see the shadow of the microphone of the script sitting on the co-pilot's lap, you wouldn't have seen that in the theater. Maybe the airplane cockpit set wasn't that bad in wide screen.

TV Guide's lousy top 60 TV show list

Counterpunch.com ran an article, "The Futility of Top Ten Lists" subtitles "Depth Takes a Holiday", by Walter Brasch.

Much of it deals with TV Guide's list of the top 60 TV shows.  You can read the whole thing here.

TV Guide also loves lists. This month, it threw out a list of what some of their editors irrationally believe are the “60 Greatest Shows on Earth,” complete with a sentence describing each show. And, like most lists, it’s little more than annoying static.

The top three shows, according to TV Guide, are “The Sopranos,” “Seinfeld,” and “I Love Lucy.” Squeezing into the list at the bottom are “Monty Python’s Flying Circus,” “The Good Wife,” and “Everybody Loves Raymond.” In between—and completely without any logic, except for the editors’ over-ripe egos that they actually know something—are numerous shows, some great, some better than mediocre...

The editors also didn’t explain how “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” by all accounts one of the best comedies on TV, was rated no. 7, while Sid Caesar’s “ Your Show of Shows,” a 90-minute live comedy show in the early 1950s that exposed America to the acting and writing talents of Carl Reiner, Imogene Coca, Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, Howard Morris and dozens of others, was 37th on the list, 19 below “SNL,” which should have used the Sid Caesar show—or even its own first half-dozen years—as models of comedic genius. Missing from the list of the “60 Greatest” is “The Tonight Show, with Steve Allen,” which established the standard by which all other late night show operate.

...

Also missing from the “60 greatest” list—and indicative of TV Guide’s lack of understanding that America extends beyond the polluted Hudson River— is “NCIS.” TV Guide editors freely mark the best prime time shows to watch each day; they usually don’t give “NCIS” that distinction. Only in the past couple of years, exhausted by seeing “NCIS” at the top of the ratings week after week, have they published major features about “NCIS,” while constantly gushing over shows and stars that have no chance of lasting a decade in prime time.

For 10 years, the actors and crew of TV’s most-watched show have just done their jobs, and they have done it well. Every actor is someone who could be on Broadway or handle a major film role.

The writing on “NCIS” is fast-paced and thought-provoking, wringing emotion from its 20 million viewers each week. Unlike many procedural dramas, this CBS show’s writers layer a fine coat of humor that is far better than what passes as half-hour sitcoms these days.

The production values exceed most other shows—from lighting to camera movement to even prop placement. The behind-the-scenes crew may be among the best professionals in the industry.

Behind the scenes, the cast and crew are family. They work together. They care about each other. Numerous shows claim this is true with them. But, the reality is their claims are little more than PR sludge. With “NCIS,” the claims are true.

There are no scandals and there doesn’t seem to be much ego among the actors.
In 11 seasons, Mark Harmon, who can evoke an emotion in the audience merely by a slight look and no words, has never been nominated for an Emmy. As every good actor knows, true acting is when people don’t know you’re acting.

Portraying the fine nuances of a character is a quality that sustained James Garner’s career for five decades. Like Mark Harmon, Garner never won an Emmy, and his popular show, “The Rockwood Files” never made it to TV Guide’s “60 Greatest” splash of nonsense.

Mark Harmon and James Garner, both masters of their craft, may not even care they’ve never won an Emmy. They, like millions of us already know, a spot on TV Guide’s “60 greatest shows on earth” is not the recognition they crave – but probably deserve.

Walter Brasch’s book, America’s Unpatriotic Acts, was the first major book to catalogue and then destroy the government’s belief that the PATRIOT Act was necessary to protect American security at the expense of the Bill of Rights. His current book is Fracking Pennsylvania, which looks into the health, environmental, and economic effects of fracking.

I guess I should try watching NCIS. I listened to a few minutes if it a couple of years ago and attacked it on this very blog. Was it the one where Justin Bieber got shot?

Dylan Sprouse

Now nude pictures of former child star Dylan Sprouse have made their way onto the worldwide web. He and his twin brother, Cole, played a child prostitute in The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, based on the book by "J.T. LeRoy". LeRoy was supposedly a sado-masochistic transvestite teenage boy prostitute from West Virginia but turned out to be a depraved middle aged woman from California.

Cole and Dylan are better known for their Disney Channel series, The Suite Life of Zack and Cody, about twins living in a hotel suite. It was terrible. And their boy prostitute movie was no picnic either.

But here it is----another former Disney child star doing this sort of thing. Miley Cyrus swung naked on a wrecking ball, Britney Spears who stopped wearing underwear and there were the ones who were in Spring Breakers. And, for that matter, there was Haley Mills who did some nude scenes in the '60s.

I don't think that the kids are reacting against Disney, they're trying to shake off their wholesome past. I think it's a natural progression----this is what Disney has done to them. I can't explain how, but I'm sure it's true.

Dylan has said that he liked the pictures---that he's been working out at the gym and is happy with his new firmer self. 

Well, I can name someone else who worked out in a gym and was happy with his body----ANTHONY WIENER. This is what physical fitness does to people.

How little do actors work?

Sonny Tufts, Victor Mature

How much do actors get paid for a guest spot on a TV series? I ask because, look at Internet Movie Database. Most of these actors seem to work one job every two or three years if that. How do those poor devils make a living? And how do they keep in practice if they only act a few days a year? I know a lot of them are working other jobs.

Actors are like teachers. When I was in school, I realized that, no matter how little respect I had for certain teachers, they all knew so much more than me. And you look at, say, Sonny Tufts, regarded as a terrible actor. He came to Hollywood during World War Two. A football injury kept him out of the war and Hollywood needed male actors. All their regular guys had been drafted.

Tufts became a bit of a joke. His name came up on The Bullwinkle Show, The Monkees, Johnny Carson cruelly mocked him.

But the guy went to Yale, studied opera, auditioned for the Metropolitan Opera but ended up acting on Broadway before venturing off to Hollywood. No matter how little respect you have for him, Sonny Tufts was still better than you.

He must have had some talent and looking at imdb.com, he seemed to be doing pretty well, although one of his last credits was in Cottonpickin' Chickenpickers.

The poor guy died at 58. He was from a rich family, related to the guy for whom Tufts University was named. Maybe "Sonny Tufts" was a bad name for an actor. His real name was no picnic, either, Bowen Charlton Tufts III. It's hard to pronounce the name "Tufts", unless you give up and just say "Tuffs".

If you want to make sure your child doesn't grow up to be an actor, just give him a lousy name.

Ed Wood vs. Herschell Gordon Lewis

Ed Wood worked so hard. Plan 9 from Outer Space had a fairly complex plot, three or four different threads going---the old man, the army guy, the airline pilot, the police. I thought it was nicely edited. It had special effects, constructed sets, miniatures. It had a few decent actors---Gregory Walcott, Tom Keene, Lyle Talbot, Dudley Manlove who was big in radio; Joanna Lee who went on to be a writer and producer in television (although she cheerfully denied any connection to Plan 9). It had scenes in The Pentagon, in the barren desert landscape outside Washington, D.C., in and around Los Angeles. He had one good shot of Tor Johnson rising from the grave.

Contrast that with the crap Herschell Gordon Lewis churned out. He filmed whole scenes in one master shot. He never tracked or dollied like Ed Wood did. His storylines were simply excuses for sex or gore scenes. Everything was brightly, evenly lit.

So. Should you be more like Herschell Gordon Lewis or more like Ed Wood? You probably wouldn't want to be either one, but they didn't choose to be who they were, either. For someone just setting out with a digital camcorder, with little money, experience, and probably not much talent, how hard should you really try?

People watch low budget movies and think, if it's any good, that if the filmmaker just had some money to work with they might have made a pretty good movie. You never think that watching the movies of Ed Wood or Herschell Gordon Lewis.

Lewis probably had less to be embarrassed about. He made few pretenses.

Ed Wood made a deeply but weirdly personal film, Glen or Glenda, a heartfelt plea for tolerance. Plan 9, bankrolled by a Baptist church, called for an end to the arms race. Bride of the Monster ended with a nuclear explosion intended to protest nuclear weapons.

Herschell Gordon Lewis knew when to quit. He went into "direct marketing". Ed Wood stuck it out to the bitter end.

It's bothered me for years

I've never told anyone about this. But it's been eating away at me for more that forty years.

When I was in the fourth grade, I was reading one of those books----what are they called? Primers? One of the reading books they had that you'd read to practice reading. They had little stories in them. I think university professors wrote them. I had a teacher in high school who said he had a professor who wrote textbooks like that who tried putting in stories about children of different races being friends, but publishers wouldn't accept them because they couldn't be sold in the south. So he tried doing stories with animals, with a brown dog and a white dog playing together, and they wouldn't publish those, either, because, again, school districts in the south wouldn't buy them.

There was a children's book in the 1930s called The Rabbit's Wedding that was banned in several states because it showed a black rabbit marrying a white rabbit.

But that has nothing to do with what I'm talking about.

There was this one story in the book that was different from the others.

It was about a couple. I don't know if it specified where they lived. But when their baby was born, he was very small. Not Tom Thumb small----he was a very small baby but within the bounds of normality. The father suggested a name for him, but the mother thought it was too grandiose because the baby was such a "li'l bit". The father jumps at it.

"That's what we'll name him! Lil Bit!"

I guess they were hillbillies.

Their son, Lil Bit, was still puny when he went to school. When the teacher asked his name, the class laughed when he said "Lil Bit".

Lil Bit was an outcast, being puny and having such a stupid name.

Then one day, because the roads there were so poorly maintained, the school bus went off the road and rolled down an embankment into a ravine. The children were trapped inside. They couldn't escape. But there was one child who was small enough to squeeze out the window. It was Lil Bit. He climbed out and ran for help.

And everyone was nice to him after that.

At the time it depressed me to think that there were kids who this story was written for, who lived places with dangerous roads with parents who couldn't pronounce the word "little".

It also bothered me that they used that stupid plot, where a kid is an outcast because of some trait that ends up making him a hero.

Herschell Gordon Lewis' "Linda and Abilene"

I was always weirdly fascinated by the work of Herschell Gordon Lewis. I read an interview with him, and he was proud of having filmed everything in 35mm color. He was angry about art filmmakers shooting with handheld cameras. He always had his camera mounted on a tripod. And he always used bright, even Brady Bunch-style lighting no matter how inappropriate it was. His movies were completely artless, and he was proud of that, too---the fact that all he was doing was grubbing for money.

He generally filmed in master shots. If an actor flubbed a line sixty seconds into a ninety second shot, he said he would cut, move the camera and start filming again from the point where the line was flubbed. He bragged about how little film he used.

On the DVD commentary on one movie, he claimed to have not wasted any film at all. There were no outtakes He used everything he shot. Obviously untrue since there was a bonus feature on the DVD showing outtakes. I think he said somewhere else that he filmed on a 1.5:1 ratio.

So I was intrigued by a western he made, Linda and Abilene.

The movie starts with Abilene and her brother, Todd, standing over the fresh graves of their parents. They go back to the farm. Later, Todd spies on Abilene while she bathes naked in a stream. They masturbate that night thinking about each other. We know this because we hear their thoughts in voice-over.

One night, Abilene stands naked in her room admiring herself in a mirror. She hears a wolf howl and screams for her brother who rushes in. Then they start having sex. They do this over and over in repeated sex scenes.

Todd begins to suspect that what they're doing might be wrong, especially since it was 1869 and they didn't have contraceptives. So he goes to town, hangs around with a prostitute in a bar. He tells her his sister is home alone at the farmhouse three miles down the road. A cowboy overhears, gets up and leaves the bar.

While Todd is in bed with the prostitute, the cowboy is raping his sister.

When Todd goes home and finds out, he comes back to town to fight the rapist. He beats up Todd and shoots him, but before Todd dies, he shoots and kills the rapist.

The prostitute, Linda, has sex with Abilene. Then they bury Todd and I guess Abilene becomes a prostitute.

Some of the movie was filmed at Spahn Ranch while the Manson Family was living there. One Manson follower was an extra in it.

I watched it wondering if it was possible to make something other than a soft core porn film using the same ingredients, but I don't think it's possible.

 Is it possible to make a commercially viable movie that crudely-made today? Is there any niche audience that would be charmed or amused by anything that poorly made? Gore has gone mainstream and with sex you'd have to compete with the massive porn industry.

Lewis started making gore movies because they had to think of something. Hollywood started making sex movies, so they had to figure out something that was in such bad taste that Hollywood wouldn't touch it. Today, I don't think there is anything that would have any commercial potential that Hollywood wouldn't freely exploit.

Linda and Abilene is available for instant viewing on Netflix if anyone's interested.

Woody, Mia, Ronan

John Baxter

John Baxter, in his biography of Woody Allen, thought that the fawning biographies of Allen written by Eric Lax contributed to the public's dismay when he broke up with Mia Farrow. Lax's books presented Allen as a living saint completely devoted to his art with an idyllic relationship with Mia Farrow and her children.

And now----now Mia Farrow's suffering the same thing. Throughout that mess, the break up with Allen, the molestation accusations and the custody trial, Mia was presented as an innocent victim, a living saint adopting all those children. She started going to church again. Had all the kids baptized--even Soon-Yi showed up, although she wore jeans. She reportedly had to have surgery on her tear ducts because of all the crying she did. She put a huge crucifix in her bedroom. She said that she was suffering because of all the bad things she had done. She was a single mother trying to protect her children from that very bad man.

So, after all that, she springs it on us that she doesn't know who the father of one of her children is because she was sleeping with a 72-year-old married man at the same time she was in a long term relationship with a man she falsely accuses of being a child molester.

It could be that having all those adopted children who presumably don't know who their biological parents are has made Mia think that announcing to the world that she doesn't know who Ronan's father is wouldn't have an effect on him. Although Ronan could be more like Bud Bundy begging his mother to tell him he was the result of a one night stand with a cool guy.

Hasn't Allen been paying child support all these years? You think he paid for Ronan's college?

The Trip (2010)

Watched The Trip (2010) starring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, directed by Michael Winterbottom. It was good, pretty funny. I haven't really seen their other work. This was reportedly edited from a TV series.

I remember long ago reading an interview with David Letterman. This was before he had his show. He said he was different from most comedians. He said that you would never want to take a road trip with a comedian. It would quickly become a nightmare. But he said he would be good company on a long drive.

The Trip is about Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon reportedly playing fictionalized versions of themselves, driving through the north of England so that Coogan could write an article about the cuisine. They drive each other crazy, one more than the other.

They sit in very expensive restaurants eating stuff I would never order doing impressions of Michael Caine, Sean Connery, Roger Moore, Al Pacino----those are the ones that stand out. Strange that no one can do a passable Woody Allen.

England is a better looking country that I realized. I thought it was all flat and New England-like, but the landscape was beautiful. They drive a Land Rover.

There's no nudity and very little indecent language. Although there is phone sex. Phone foreplay, anyway.

An alternative to the phony trailer

Here's my suggestion. Instead of making a fake trailer for a nonexistent movie the way so many people have done, make a fake documentary where serious academics discuss the artistic, technical and dramatic aspects of the nonexistent film.

Maybe have a trio of enthusiastic young film students interview the filmmaker in an in-depth discussion.

Wouldn't that be better? Or at least easier? Or just different?

The voice of Charlie Brown

I watched a promo for the fall line up for CBS TV, 1968. One of the shows was Blondie, based on the comic strip. We saw the kid, Peter Robbins, who played Alexander which was interesting. He had been the voice of Charlie Brown on the Peanuts Christmas special, and, yep, he sounded like Charlie Brown.

I knew this because the poor kid is now in his 50s, is seriously ill, and was arrested for making threats. He reportedly threatened people by saying he had nothing to lose because of his medical condition.

According to imdb.com, he was paid $125 to do the voice of Charlie Brown.

"It is my natural voice," he said, "but it has a special kind of inflection, a mixture of anxiety and reflection as only a 9-year-old can display."

It's pretty bad, paid a lousy $125 (about $800 today) for something that follows you the rest of your life and gets you into the national news when you get arrested forty years later.

Mad Youth, 1940

Not a still from the movie, but a couple of dancers who were in it. 

And they did this dance move in the film. And he was wearing the same shirt.

Saw an old exploitation film called Mad Youth. It started out promisingly enough. A rich woman spends her alimony hiring male escorts. While the woman and her escort are out playing bridge, her daughter has some friends over for a party. They play strip poker. A couple dances. The girl's dress flies up every time she twirls around. Another girl marches into the living room dressed as a drum majorette. She begins tap dancing while twirling a baton.

At the bridge party, a drunk sings a song about Broadway.

The mother keeps hiring the escort who is a deposed Russian Count. He's alarmed that she keeps asking for him. He calls the daughter and asks her out. They go to a restaurant with a floor show. First we see clog dancers then a "matador" fights a tiny bull.

We see a montage of the escort and daughter dating. They see a knife-throwing act, a magician sawing a woman in half, a man painting a picture with his feet.

When the mother finds her diary and learns she's been dating her escort, the daughter goes to see her friend who, it turns out, is now enslaved by a prostitution ring. They try to force the daughter into prostitution as well.

The escort talks to the mother. She doesn't know where the daughter is.

"You mean to tell me you let your daughter go to visit Helen without even knowing where she lives?" he says in his Russian accent. "But all we know about her is that she ran away to marry a man she'd never seen, a man she met through a matrimonial agency advertisement...Don't you know that some of those agencies are the worst kind of traps? That many of the customers are criminals, morons, white slavers or people who are physically or mentally diseased?"

"Oh, I'd never given it a thought."

"Oh you American mothers, with your bridge parties and beauty shops and your silly flirtations, wasting your lives and neglecting your duties, letting your children run wild for lack of sensible parental supervision."

"You don't know American children. They're spoiled and disobedient and drunken."

"Drunken? Yes. Drunk with the exuberance of youth and sheer joy of living. There is nothing really wrong with the children of today. Nothing that proper environment and congenial home life wouldn't correct."

"What do you expect us modern mothers to do?"

"Quit trying to be butterflies. Get back to the business of being mothers like your mother and your grandmother and generations of mothers before them."

"A lesson in morals and ethics is fine coming from you, a professional gigolo."

"That's all changed now. I have found a real job. And I've worked long enough to know that I can hold it and earn an honest living."

"That's all very interesting but I don't see that it concerns me."

"But it does concern you. I am going to marry your daughter."

He uses his gigolo detective skills to find his way to the brothel where the daughter is a prisoner.

Russian escorts are tough customers. They fight their way out and speed away in a taxi.

"Oh, Count. I'm so glad you came."

"Don't call me 'Count', Marian. All that stuff is behind me...I got my American citizenship papers yesterday and I've got a job. We'll get married and we'll live like self-respecting, self-supporting Americans should."

Paul Walker

The guy was 40-years-old. He was with a guy who was 38. They were a couple of middle aged men driving 90 miles per hour in a 45 zone. It was by sheer chance that they crashed into a lamp post instead of a family in a minivan. TMZ posted video of Walker claiming to have driven 185 miles per hour on the freeway. If this was true, to hell with him. The world's a better place without him.

Sound of Music live went okay, I hear

Erin McCarthy tweeted:

Carrie Underwood has a great voice, but she can't act her way out of a brown paper package tied up with string.

Seems like she was singing awfully loud, though. Is that normal? The poor girl never claimed to be an actor.

I watched about 45 minutes of it. I was horrified when the kids came running down the stairs without using the banisters. I would consider that a stunt. It seems like using stairs a lot on live TV was an invitation to disaster. Wonder how many times the kids fell down in rehearsal.

The sound was bad at times, like you could hear an air conditioner going, and I kept expecting to hear a studio audience.


The irony about live performances like this is that they have to be so well-rehearsed that there's no feeling of spontaneity. But if it weren't live, it would just be a made-for-TV movie.

I heard the thing went okay. No disasters.

The Sound of Music---Live!

I passed up the chance to see The Sound of Music performed on a tiny stage at a community theater. I should have gone! It would have been like a 3D movie. But I have sympathetic stagefright anyway and with them singing as well as acting, it would have been too much for me.

Now it's going to be on live TV.

The grim reality was that Maria didn't love her husband when she married him (she said she loved him later). She wanted a husband and he wanted someone to take care of his huge family. He wasn't rich---he had lost all his money in bad investments which is why he didn't object to his children performing in public. They needed the money.

Poke around on Wikipedia. You can find the name of the submarine that Captain Von Trapp commanded in World War One, and you can see a list of the ships he sank, although they don't give the death toll.

They didn't flee. The Nazis weren't trying to force him into the Navy. The family just happened to move, and they returned to Austria several times during the Nazi era without any trouble.

It would be interesting as the lurid story of a defrocked nun hired to care for a bunch of neglected children whose rigid authoritarian father runs their household like an Austro-Hungarian submarine. The teenage daughter dates an admirer of Adolf Hitler. The children have a pathological fear of thunder. The captain's wealthy fiancee tries to get rid of the fallen nun but fails and is forced to flee.

Twin Peaks on Netflix

I know I'm years and years behind the times.

I'm sitting here watching Twin Peaks.

It reminds me of The Love Boat. You could turn it on in the middle, watch as much or as little of it as you wanted and it didn't matter that much.

It's interesting. It's all right.

I don't really like the FBI guy.

Phil Donahue did a show on it. They had one of the directors on. A sort of loud obnoxious woman in the audience seemed to hurt his feelings when she said that she wasn't trying to insult him, but she could see the difference when he was dircting and not David Lynch. The actors defended his directing.

I'm sitting here and I can't tell who directed what.

It's a TV show. You only have a week to film. I suppose there would be a difference but I can't see how the director mattered that much.

Now there's an insurance salesman named Neff, a reference to Double Indemnity which is sort of annoying.

Sound of Music on live TV

I'm on the west coast. That means that, even if I watch The Sound of Music "live" on NBC Thursday, it will be delayed three hour. They will have bleeped out any obscenities the actors blurt out and blurred out any humiliating wardrobe malfunctions.

I find live TV stressful to watch. Videotape is cheap and plentiful. What's the point?

Since Carrie Underwood (who I had never heard of before) is playing the defrocked nun Maria, I thought they should get Dolly Parton as Mother Superior (was there a Mother Superior, or am I thinking of The Flying Nun?) and Justin Bieber as Rolf.

I may watch a little of it, but I think I'll be traumatized if anything goes wrong. I've been living with other people's humiliation for years.