A plea for an actual classic TV network: Turner Classic Television?

It is entirely obvious to anyone who digs nostalgia that b&w films and TV shows are anathema to cable broadcasters. Given our short national memory (which began disappearing when Reagan became president), I understand this fact, but still wish there was some kind of classic TV network currently on cable.

“Nick at Night” has been showing very recent-vintage family sitcoms since 1990s; it is utterly useless to fans of classic TV, as is its onetime “replacement” network, TV Land. You know how the replacement network thing works, right? A franchise is established, and then the creators of said franchise begin to sorta alter (and usually tarnish) the original, and so a secondary network is created to do what the original network used to do. In the case of Nick, it left behind the Fifties long ago, then ditched the Sixties, with the exception of a few very beloved sitcoms.

As time went on, even the Seventies was phased out on Nick. SIDE THOUGHT: Being a child of the Seventies, I firmly believe that it was the decade when American TV series really went into the crapper, as far as the quality of the most popular shows (writing, acting, even concepts; Sixties concepts were indeed “gimmicky,” but at least they went all over the map). The auspicious beginning of the decade, with the debut of the groundbreaking Norman Lear and MTM sitcoms, led to the painful '77-'80 era, when the Lear shows set the bar (low, mighty low) for the long-running sitcoms that would "jump the shark" from that point on, and the MTM shows wisely left the air while they were still funny. END OF SIDE THOUGHT. Once the Eighties Cosby Show/Family Ties/Growing Pains family series became the focus of Nick at Night's schedule, it was pretty much the end of the truly classic nostalgia factor, and the shows were not only spanking new, they were just off their network run.

Thus, TV Land appeared, in order to “pick up the slack.” In a few years it too became ashamed of its classic TV programming, relegating it to "off" hours, while producing new reality shows and showing movies that are edited for TV and theoretically relate to the viewer demographic (not forgetting airings of spankin' new reruns of "Extreme Makeover" series, which are someone's idea of classic television — someone very sad). Around this time, we who had broader cable choices were able to latch on to showings of classic b&w shows on GSN (and we know what happened there, don’t we?) and the onetime Nostalgia Network.

Whatever did happen to the last-mentioned? Well, it’s now the American Life channel, and its schedule is here. The channel tries to appeal to baby boomers, or Gen Xers, or whomever might watch old TV shows that aren’t all that old (plus “health and wellness” shows and now some kickboxing — but only a little). The Color Honeymooners (which is dazzling to the eye, but mighty hard to sit through, esp. when Kramden, Norton and co. go on foreign cruises) and Mission: Impossible are the only Sixties shows left in their lineup, which is now mostly drama series of the pre-Law and Order variety, and the lesser MTM sitcoms (where’s Paul Sand in Friends and Lovers?). In researching this blog entry, I found that the channel was bought in 2001 by the Unification Church, so they have what one advertising blog calls a “mandate for family values programming.”

Thus, we have a network that used to show nostalgia, and used to be called the Nostalgia Network, but no longer has much of a connection to it. Today I learned of a channel not carried in NYC, called the Retro Television Network (RTN). The network’s lineup is here. And again, you’ll notice that it’s a nostalgia network that believes its nostalgia fans only want to watch old shows in color. The selection comes from one library (I believe it is the Universal one), and is heavy on crime and action series, with a small smattering of comedies (The Munsters Today???), and things that were awful then and are awful now (That’s Incredible!).

RTN shows a handful of b&w shows (the sublime Jack Benny, Mike Hammer with Darren McGavin, The Rifleman, Bachelor Father, The Cisco Kid). But, as is the case everywhere else on the cable dial, classic TV is thought to be purely color series, and the Fifties are to be forgotten, the Sixties merely tolerated, and the Seventies indulged in if you’re talking those awful ABC shows that everyone watched out of sheer pre-cable zombiedom (I’m looking at you, Three’s Company, the acme and nadir of dumb-ass Seventies TV).

Thus, I make a modest proposal which I’m sure won’t materialize, but I sincerely hope that it will. Since Turner Classic Movies has proven to be THE one source for classic b&w film on television, I wish that the folks responsible for programming that network would take a chance on a Turner Classic Television network, where we could indeed see the rest of Television Past. On my personal wish list would be the gems of the Fifties (live TV plays, Mr. Peepers, Bilko, et al), the forgotten dramas of the Sixties (Naked City, East Side West Side), and the comedies that were indeed funny and not dunderheaded in the Seventies (Barney Miller among a few others). Shows that have not been in syndication since their original runs would be incredibly welcome — Comedy Central, when it was The Comedy Channel (and aired a top-notch roster of classic TV comedy fare), had a bizarre afternoon slot for failed Sixties/Seventies shows called “Sitcom Sanctuary” that was terrific.

Mostly, what I would like to see aired on some nostalgia network at some point, in any capacity, would be the wonderful VARIETY SHOWS that were a staple of network TV from the Fifties through the Seventies: from Berle, Allen, Caesar, and Kovacs, to The Hollywood Palace, The Dean Martin Show, and of course Ed Sullivan (with the specialty acts left in).

This is, of course, a concept that most would say wouldn’t fly because: a.) people won’t watch b&w anymore, except a niche audience, who could buy the shows on DVD anyway (if they even exist on that transitory medium); b.) kids have no idea what b&w is and don’t care; c.) the Trio Network, which made a practice of programming real quality classic TV, failed; d.) the “comfort shows” people crave have changed from things viewers saw growing up to the shows they remember from a handful of years ago (does anyone anywhere, though, consider the Jim Belushi sitcom a comfort show? Really?); and e.) you’d need to set up a network that would delve into different libraries of programming, and not just air one kind of classic TV rerun.

Well, all of these things were obstacles to getting a unified source for classic movies on TV, until the Turner people made a “replacement network” for TNT, which had been airing some rare and terrific gems from the Turner Library. TCM has become the model of a real nostalgia network as far as film is concerned, and it is the model for what could be done for a classic TV network. There *is* an audience for this kind of thing, it is just a dispersed one that is completely ignored by the existing nets because of the viewers’ age, their buying habits, and the fact that, although much lip service is given to the concept of “alternative” TV programming, there really is none on American television (with the exception of, ahem, what remains of cable-access).

It’s a certainty that classic TV would never fetch the kind of numbers that American Idol gets on a weekly basis. But, then again, TCM has cultivated a very devoted audience, and those folks are eagerly addicted to the channel. Again, there *is* a market for this kind of TV repository of all the good shows that aired on American TV from the Fifties through the Eighties. We’d just need Turner, or an organization with as much courage, foresight, and marketing savvy, to set it up.

Flying through the streets of San Francisco: Deceased Artiste William A. Fraker

In months past, I tried to keep track of the full-length films that were hiding in plain sight on YouTube. I’ve had other things to write about in the time since, but it’s not like the influx of uploads has stopped or anything. I offer as evidence of the raving fandom (and you have to be a fan to take the time to upload a feature film onto YT piece by piece by piece…) clips and entire features that showcase the work of cinematographer William A. Fraker, who died this week at 86.

Fraker is credited with additional photography on the surprisingly good Esperanto-Shatner horror pic Incubus, but his mainstream bow as d.p. was the Curtis Harrington thriller Games. He next did the very evocative The Fox starring a personal fave, the always on-edge Sandy Dennis. The film’s look is beautiful, and most of the picture is on YT:



One of the most successful films he worked on was Rosemary’s Baby. Here is the trailer for that classic (which was on YT, but has obviously been taken down or “hidden” under a fake name):



Fraker personally shot the amazing car chase from Bullitt:



Most interesting is a film I haven’t caught up with, Dusty and Sweets McGee. The very intense and well-scored opening of the film used to be up on YT, but now only this dramatic scene can be found. Still looks like a fascinating movie:



Fraker shot additional scenes for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (which is indeed up in its entirety on YT), and did terrific work on Richard Brooks’ atmospheric time-capsule pic Looking for Mr. Goodbar. The trailer is here. The last film to fascinate me that Fraker worked on was the wonderful train-wreck known as The Island of Dr. Moreau. Good to know that Fraker’s camera beheld the always magical Nelson de la Rosa (not to mention mountainous Marlon):

Life lived in public: Deceased Artiste Gary Coleman

He was 4’7”, a child star, and we knew every twist and turn of his existence. At different times I was amused by, bored by, and felt bad for the little man who had been “Arnold” on Different Strokes. When a celebrity dies, you think back to something they did or said that made an impression on you — when the announcement of Coleman’s death came out this week, I remembered that he had revealed on a daytime talk show (I’m pretty sure it was Geraldo) that he had a condition whereby he hadn’t “sat down” on the toilet (somesuch delicate phrasing) for years, and instead voided himself in another manner (presumably a colostomy bag). That’s the point where you realize the colorful little person on TV isn’t leading such an amusing life in private.

So many of Gary’s public and private run-ins were recounted on tabloid TV, with probably one of the lower moments being his stint as a mall security guard, when he was accosted by an autograph seeker who got pissed off and he wound up punching her. He did have a temper, but then again if you were constantly in the public eye and your show biz fortunes found you starring in the mockumentary Midgets vs. Mascots, I think you’d be pissed off too.

But let us have some levity (please!). Here he is doing some shtick for the WWF with Jeff Jarrett, master of the “guitar shot”:



A much-circulated ad he did a for loan service that included an outtake of him laughing:



Along with the clip where he spoke to the camera excoriating “bone-headed idiots!”, this particular clip of him earlier this year cursing out someone on the panel of the horrific tabloid-TV crapfest The Insider is the most popular Coleman show of anger (actually he’s rather composed):



One of the best Seventies shows that has been out of distribution for a long time is Fernwood 2-Night. Here is a scene from the show’s second incarnation (America 2-Night) with Gary as “Little Wayne Coleman” (someone yells “Hey, Gary!” when he comes out, and Martin Mull ad-libs “isn’t it sad when cousins marry?”). Gary played a local California boy that Barth Gimble (Mull) was trying to adopt; he later hosted the “kids version” of the show (which appeared on the show proper) in Barth’s place.



And the two single best clips you’re gonna find. Italian TV host Sabrina Salerno journey to L.A. to talk to “Arnold.” The show is Matricole & Meteore, and included are scenes from Different Strokes dubbed in Italian, a Euro view of L.A. (which still seems to include disco), and Gary saying his tagline in Italian:



But the kitsch mother lode is this “career change” moment when Gary was making the talk show circuit with Michael Jackson impersonator Dion Mial to promote a single they’d released called “The Outlaw and the Indian.” It’s pretty special:

Conservatives say the darndest things: Deceased Artiste Art Linkletter

Usually I’m filled with a sort of reverent wistfulness when I write about a celebrity who has died, but I have to admit at the outset of this post that I always felt that Art Linkletter’s most prominent trait on TV was his sanctimoniousness. His interviews with kids were way cloying, his hosting benign, and his comedy… well, it wasn’t really comedy. He was involved in the creation of Groucho’s You Bet Your Life, so he somehow participated in something I really enjoyed. His own stuff? As the kids nowadays put it, “meh.”

Linkletter was openly conservative, and seemed like the very definition of the old guard, a narrow-minded gent in every way. He lived to 97, but spent the better part of his time in the media in the last 41 years preaching against drugs. He blamed the 1969 suicide of his daughter Diane on LSD, even though it wasn’t found in her system upon her death. He made it his personal mission to “save” America’s youth, and warn parents that their kids were indulging in dangerous, nay lethal, behavior. Throughout the crusade he never appeared to me to be dismayed by his daughter’s death, but rather seemed like an opportunist exploiting her demise to create a new identity for himself, one that allowed him to condemn the drug culture, and by extension the liberal “permissiveness” of the Sixties and Seventies. Perhaps there was grief behind his crusade, but in his TV appearances, you merely saw a hateful older man who had decided that the villain that killed his daughter was the demon “drugs” and not her own inner turmoil (or perhaps his own bad parenting?).

John Waters’ joyously dark short “The Diane Linkletter Story” is no longer on YouTube (ah, now there’s a piece of nasty-assed satire), but I can offer you an appearance by Art selling “Circus Nuts” on a TV ad with Diane:



The solid-gold shameless 45 that Linkletter put out after his daughter’s death, a melodramatic spoken-word recording (that subsequently won a Grammy) that he had recorded with Diane about a father’s anguish over his runaway daughter. Corny as fuck, startling kitsch, but only because Linkletter meant it to be heartwarming and sincere, and was in fact exploiting his kid’s personal trauma. This recording is used in the soundtrack of the Waters movie, and yes, it does seem to imply that any girl who’s forced to participate in the recording of a bummer like this would’ve wanted to off herself:



And to close out, a pretty amazing bit of early “ambush TV,” in which host Stanley Siegel (wherever did he go?) “sandbags” Dr. Timothy Leary with a call-in from an outraged Art Linkletter. I agree with Leary that the ever-pompous Linkletter made a living off his daughter’s death. Siegel allows Linkletter to tell off crazy ol’ Tim at length. Art also condemns the Jefferson Airplane, Allen Ginsberg, and the whole hippie culture — he truly was one of those folks who was outraged that the youth culture of the Sixties ever happened, and set out on this crusade to assuage his own guilt or emptiness, and to find a “cause” that could indeed prolong his long-dormant career.



UPDATE: Dick Cavett confirms that, despite hosting a show called People Are Funny, AL wasn't a funny guy at all. Here is his account.

The Mark Twain Prize to... Tina Fey?: A list of far more deserving candidates for a lifetime achievement award

[The pics used to accompany this blog post are meant to illustrate a point. A pretty obvious one.]

The American Film Institute’s Lifetime Achievement Award shows were really something to watch back in the 1970s and ’80s. The folks receiving the prize were bona fide A-list talents who were without question worthy to get a lifetime achievement award. Two-hour award presentations were made to performers and filmmakers on the order of Ford, Welles, Hitchcock, Capra, Huston, Astaire, Cagney, Gish, Davis, Stanwyck, and Fonda.

In the 1990s, as U.S. culture and entertainment took its precipitous slide toward the utter soulless crap that is extremely popular in today’s mainstream, the AFI Award began going to performers and filmmakers whose careers were still in full flourish, but who could guarantee a solid audience for the TV airing of the award show. What had been amazing about the AFI was that, even though the usual “mavericks” (Ray, Fuller, Sirk, and on and on) were going to be ignored, in the '70s and '80s you were treated to CBS (I believe that was the network) presenting a two-hour show saluting the work of Lillian Gish or John Ford or Orson or some Golden Age star who worked in the era of black and white that network television wants to stay far, far away from (the opening and closing moments of Wizard of Oz aside).

Then, with the sole exception of Robert Wise, the AFI turned to honoring only those who would attract TV ratings and a roster of current-day Hollywood names to salute him/her. Nicholson, Eastwood, Spielberg, Scorsese, Streep, and others whose careers were still moving along at a steady clip were then honored, and the result was similar to the many, many moments in the Oscar ceremony when Hollywood slaps itself on the back and reminds us all what wonderful movies used to be made, and how the pap that comes out these days is the obvious continuation of what came before. The most interesting thing about the list of winners that can be found here is that the recipients have gone from being in their 70s and 80s to 45 for the extremely charming but oh-SO-non-versatile Tom Hanks (45).

I bring up all this about the valuelessness of the AFI awards, and the shameless grab for TV ratings (or even a network to air the event — for a bit it was relegated to cable from its original network home), to bring up the subject of yet another valueless encomium, the Mark Twain Prize for Humor. The Kennedy Center presents this honor, and it has been sort of dubious since its inception — what makes the Kennedy Center board experts on humor in America? Whatever their qualifications are or aren’t, the award has followed the same trajectory as the AFI award, except it has been even more singularly pathetic in its choice of honorees, its ignoring comic legends who deserve appreciation, and its craving for viewers (especially since the show airs on PBS, and not a commercial network).

The prize jumped the shark when it made its first fourth honoree, and its first female, Whoopi Goldberg, in 2001. I’m not going to debate Goldberg’s comic pedigree — she did do great accents and voices back when she did standup, but that was a very long, long time ago. In any case, they leapfrogged over the first modern female standup, Phyllis Diller, the second, Joan Rivers, and the many women who populated variety television (never mind the women comedy writers) to move on to Whoopi, after having saluted two national treasures and comic innovators — Richard Pryor and Jonathan Winters — and one gent who had a good run in the Fifties and Sixties, Carl Reiner.

Probably the next horrific honoree was Lorne Michaels in 2004. Michaels spearheaded a show that was brave, bold, and innovative for five years, and has been a walking-dead example of everything that is dull, boring, and formulaic in TV sketch comedy since then (with the exception of the sterling 1984-85 season, which was cast almost entirely with “ringers,” meaning people who were already proven commodities as sketch/character comedians). There have been others whose contribution to American comedy is indisputable (Neil Simon, Bill Cosby, George Carlin, Lily Tomlin), but the obvious mandate is to interest TV viewers in the ceremony, and so this year the winner of the prize is none other than the pin-up of snarky sketch and fake-news comedy, Tina Fey.

I am not going to debate the merits of Tina Fey as a comedian here. I find her stuff pleasant but not memorable. The hubbub that surrounded her Sarah Palin imitation in 2008 was fascinating, in that there were other comic actresses on the Web doing equally good impressions of the Brainless One, and Fey’s “material” was essentially direct quotes from Palin’s own verbal missteps. Fey is a good-looking woman (never let that slip out of the equation), and she is currently a powerhouse to be reckoned with in terms of reputation, paycheck, and drawing power. But is she the 2000s equivalent of Dorothy Parker? Not on your life. Except, of course, to those who consume only contemporary mainstream culture, and are not familiar with anything old, foreign, or even slightly "alternative."

In any case, since the Mark Twain Prize has now irredeemably jumped the shark, I would like to submit for public view a list of the people they’ve forgotten to honor (in case you haven't been looking at the pics I've scattered throughout this post). Maybe they feel these people wouldn't be “ratings bait” — then again, on PBS you’d think an older name would be ratings bait, but PBS is as dull and lifeless as the rest of American broadcasting these days.

I’m leaving out the names of such folk as Professor Irwin Corey and Bob Elliott, as I think that, though they richly deserve the prize, a mainstream board like the Kennedy Center’s would never be that hip. I also leave out the solid gold name of Woody Allen (who was without doubt in the top rank of American humorists of the second half of the 20th century), since I have the feeling that he has already turned the honor down. I can’t help but feel that they’ve never asked Mel Brooks, though, since I don’t think he would turn it down (not a man who revisits an item like Spaceballs). I know that they’re probably already prepping the Twain Prizes for Adam Sandler, Will Ferrell, and Jack Black, so let me remind everyone who is still alive and deserves the Prize. If it really had any meaning.

• SID CAESAR
  
• Mort Sahl
  
• Shelley Berman
  
• Nichols and May
  
• Dick Gregory
  
• The Smothers Brothers
  
• Mel Brooks
  
• the aforementioned grandma of women standups, Phyllis Diller
  

And after all that, I’m not even going to mention that Mark Twain was a WRITER for fuck’s sake, and that breed of humorist hasn’t even been given a second thought. Then again, when your comedy prize is little more than a joke, well… it writes itself, doesn't it?