Gallagher, RIP

The comedian Leo Gallagher has died at age 76. He's said in interviews that he had stints in his heart and could go at any time.

The first I saw him was on a game show called Make Me Laugh where comedians would try to make contestants laugh and it seems strange to say now, but Gallagher was the best one. He was huge in his day. A prop comic. Had several specials on Showtime. His thing was smashing food with a sledge hammer. I don't know if that became a millstone around his neck but he couldn't escape it.

He walked out of an interview with Marc Maron and I watched a video of him being kicked off a radio show somewhere. He turned crabby as he got older. Like some comedians, he was never funny in interviews.

Gallagher made a fortune on tour, but Maron thought that was what hurt is career, that touring was a dead end. It was one reason he didn't end up with a sit-com or a talk show.

Fellow prop comic Joel Hodgeson from Mystery Science Theater once caught Gallagher backstage rummaging through his props. I don't remember their exchange but he didn't like him after that.

There are advantages and disadvantages to being easily imitated. 

Reportedly, Gallagher's agent started representing Carrot Top as well. Gallagher thought he was being edged out by the new prop comic, so he got his brother, Ron Gallagher, to perform his act as Gallagher Two or Gallagher Too. His brother looked and sounded just like him apparently and Gallagher thought that two of him could overwhelm the competition. Eventually, Leo Gallagher wanted Ron to stop performing his act, but Ron kept doing it, so Gallagher sued him which resulted in his (Leo Gallagher's) alienation from his family. I don't know why this happened. Maybe his brother had given up some other career to help him compete with Carrot Top and if he didn't continue to perform, he'd be left without an income. No telling who the bad guy is here.

Paul Haggis loses

 

The jury decided for the plaintiff in the rape lawsuit against Paul Haggis.

The jury awarded the plaintiff $7.5 million in compensation and recommended punitive damages which will be decided on Monday. 

Haggis's attorney admitted that there was no evidence that his victim had any ties to Scientology, but they kept trying to use that anyway, claiming it was all retaliation for his leaving the "church" and criticizing it. What was he doing in that "religion" in the first place? He's a monster.

Bigfoot (1970)

I never rented it, but I used to see the box for it in a local video store.

It's tagline was "BREEDS WITH ANYTHING." It was rated GP---what we now know as PG. There's no breeding in this thing. It was in color, by the way.

Joi Lansing is captured by Bigfoot after her small airplane crashes in the wilderness. (She was the murdered girlfriend in Touch of Evil, the one who says, "...I've got this ticking sound in my head!")

There's a motorcycle gang. They ride matching Hondas and wear slacks and windbreakers instead of leather jackets. One of their biker chicks is abducted as well. When the biker calls for help, the sheriff laughs it off. He gets LOTS of calls about Bigfoot and thinks this is proof they're fake.

It had a number of declining older stars. John Carradine plays a traveling salesman who hopes to capture a Bigfoot for profit. With silent film and B movie cowboy Ken Maynard, Sigourney Weaver's uncle, Doodles Weaver, who hit it big on Spike Jones' radio show, and James Craig whose career took off in the '40's, I suppose because he was 4F and stayed out of the war. 

A lot of it filmed on indoor sets. It had one very tall Bigfoot and a few that weren't much taller than Joi Lansing.

Wasn't lurid or amusing. I was right to skip it in the video store, but it's free on Tubi. To find it there,  search for "big foot". They have it as two words.  

Terry Gross vs Stephen Fry

I used to listen to Fresh Air with Terry Gross on public radio. I quit and I don't care for her anymore for various reasons. She has biases and makes assumptions that make her sound stupid at times, at least to me, and I'm not interested in pop music. But there are these questions she asks---here's an example from an article on "The Middle Mind" by Curtis White:

The critical moment in the interview came when she asked him (I’m paraphrasing from memory), “What was it like when you were in that car accident and your sister was driving and she died but you didn’t?” Was she leading up to a telling psychological reading of the work in question? No. She wanted to know and I suspect her audience wanted to know what it was like to be in an auto accident in which his sister died! That’s it. Do we learn something about writing, or the arts, or culture? Do we learn anything? No, we learn that he was traumatized by the event.

This came to mind while reading something on a BBC website. They ask a number of movie directors the same series of questions, one of which is "What's the dumbest question you've ever been asked?" Because the question is asked in an interview, they think of questions from interviewers, not idiotic questions friends, family or co-workers have asked over the course of a lifetime.

Here was Stephen Fry's answer:

...But there is a classic journalist question, which they should be trained never to ask and that is: "What's it like..." So you get: "What's it like working with John Travolta?" To which there's no real answer. You can be very literal and say: "It's like riding a cloud in a pair of cinnamon-coloured pyjamas, upside down on a Wednesday. That's what it's like." You know what I mean? Everyone always asks, "what's it like...?" What do they mean, what's it like? They just can't think of an intelligent question to ask.

Come to think of it, I don't like Fry either.

Woody Allen's Rifkin's Festival (2020)

I liked it although I can see why people didn't. Wallace Shawn didn't seem up to it at first, but  I came to accept him. 

The film festival didn't seem very convincing. I assume there were more people at the real thing. It was no Stardust Memories. There are black and white sequences where Wallace Shawn has dreams based on scenes in old movies---Citizen Kane, Seventh Seal, Exterminating Angel and Breathless among others---which didn't work very well. 

Shawn plays a film snob who used to teach a class on the subject. He's now trying to write a novel but is hampered by his own impossibly high standards. He goes to the festival with his much younger wife who works as a press agent for a couple of directors. He suspects she's sleeping with one of them. He goes to a young (female) Spanish doctor in an open marriage for chest pains and becomes smitten. 

There's a scene where Shawn uses what I assume is correct Japanese pronunciation for Kagamusha and Tatsuya Nakadai. I've only uttered Nakadai's name once in conversation, but I want to confirm he pronounced it correctly in case I ever have to say it again.

They bring up some movies Shawn doesn't like, such as Some Like it Hot, which Allen mentioned not caring for in his memoir.

Maybe it should have bothered me that Wallace Shawn was married to and went after much younger women, but his inadequacies were blatant enough that it wasn't fooling anyone.  His motion picture debut was in Manhattan playing Diane Keaton's ex-husband and that was meant as a gag. I've seen movies about older women with much younger men and I didn't find them perverse or upsetting. 

I was going through my DVD list on Netflix eliminating anything I could simply watch on streaming video and was surprised to find that this was free on Tubi.

Old time radio

Been listening to a lot of radio shows. None of them are all that good. I thought I'd like the soap operas---they were better suited for radio with long conversations, but they weren't operatic enough. One, Aunt Mary, had a long scene of a guy eating breakfast and talking about his lousy job prospects. 

I heard a clip from another episode where Aunt Mary discusses a relative who's on trial for murder, so I thought it would be better than it was.

Radio episodes of Dragnet were surprisingly violent. In one, a disturbed high school boy had been slashing girls with a knife in the crowded hallways between classes. He somehow managed to do this dozens of times without anyone spotting him. Things were very different back then and this had gone on for weeks before the principal deigned to call the cops.  

Dragnet episodes were based on real cases. I heard that you can search old newspapers and find the ones that ended in death sentences.

You might not want to binge-listen to 15-minute radio serials. There's a certain amount of recapping every episode which means that they explain everything again every several minutes.

I guess radio was an easy gig. You just stand there and read your script. Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall had a show, as did James Stewart, Dick Powell and other stars who, today, would be too big for television.

There was an NBC radio series of plays by Arch Oboler including one based on Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun and The Family Nagachi broadcast in 1945 about a Japanese-American family imprisoned in internment camps during World War Two while their son was fighting the Nazis.

Here's a source for free downloads.

Halloween 2022

We had mostly middle school kids this year, and they weren't like before, timid and ashamed. They were brazen, freely taking what they wanted.

I suspect the pandemic was behind it. They missed a couple years of trick-or-treating and now they felt entitled. Also, it was raining which probably kept the little kids inside. 

I put my Covid mask on when I opened the door so I wouldn't have to smile.

"Go on! Take more! It's getting late," I said. One kid picked up all he could in one hand, but most didn't seem to want candy that bad. It made me question my taste, like I bought candy nobody liked.

I tried to make the pumpkin look like it was carved by a madman, but I don't know if it came across that way. It only took a few minutes; it wasn't much work, so that was good.