Archive for the ‘TV’ Category

Obit watch: September 15, 2022.

Thursday, September 15th, 2022

Mark Miller. Other credits include “The F.B.I.”, “Adam-12”, “The Name of the Game”, and “Harry O”.

Fred Franzia, cheap wine guy.

His most famous acquisition was Charles Shaw, a label with a strong reputation among winemakers that filed for bankruptcy in 1995. In 2002, Mr. Franzia started selling the wine exclusively at Trader Joe’s for $1.99 a bottle (in some cities, it can now cost up to $3.99). The wine became affectionately known as Two-Buck Chuck.
The company says it has sold over 1 billion bottles.

Two Buck Chuck is now $3.99? Thanks, Joe Biden!

(Five Billion Vodka Bottles to the Moon: Tales of a Soviet Scientist, by Iosif Shkolovsky. Vodka bottles and wine bottles are pretty similar in size, right?)

Obit watch: September 12, 2022.

Monday, September 12th, 2022

Marsha Hunt. She was 104.

Credits include “Harry O”, the 1940 “Pride and Prejudice”, “Run for Your Life”, and one of the spinoffs of a minor 1960s SF TV series.

Bo Brundin. Other credits include “The A-Team”, “Raise the Titanic”, the good “Hawaii Five-O”, and “The Day the Clown Cried”.

Jack Ging. Credits include “Wings”, “The A-Team”, “B.J. and the Bear”, “The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo”, “The Six Million Dollar Man”…

…and eight appearances on “Mannix”. (“The End of the Rainbow”, season 2, episode 5. “Medal for a Hero”, season 3, episode 14. “The Sound of Murder”, season 5, episode 17. “Lifeline”, season 5, episode 21. “A Puzzle for One”, season 6, episode 11. “A Game of Shadows”, season 6, episode 15. “A Night Full of Darkness”, season 7, episode 17. “A Choice of Victims”, season 8, episode 12. It looks like he was “Lt. Dan Ives” in all but “The End of the Rainbow”, in which he played “James Spencer”.)

(Hattip: Lawrence.)

Edited to add: better obit for Mr. Ging from THR.

Obit watch: September 8, 2022.

Thursday, September 8th, 2022

I started preparing the obit watch this morning, before things happened. Mike the Musicologist sent this over:

I’m reminded of C.S. Lewis’s passing…on November 22, 1963.

Bernard Shaw, former CNN anchor.

Shaw was CNN’s first chief anchor and was with the network when it launched on June 1, 1980. He retired from CNN after more than 20 years on February 28, 2001.
During his storied career, Shaw reported on some of the biggest stories of that time — including the student revolt in Tiananmen Square in May 1989, the First Gulf war live from Baghdad in 1991, and the 2000 presidential election.

NYT.

Anne Garrels, NPR correspondent.

As much as Anne Garrels loved Russia, she is probably best known for her reporting during the 2003 Iraq war. She was one of a handful of foreign reporters who remained in Bagdhad as the war began. As she told Susan Stamberg, she used a satellite phone for her reports and went to great lengths to conceal it from Iraqi authorities.
“And then I decided it would be very smart if I broadcast naked, so if that, god forbid, the secret police were coming through the rooms, that would give me maybe five minutes to answer the phone, pretend I’d been asleep and sort of go ‘I don’t have any clothes on!’ And maybe it would maybe give me five seconds to hide the phone,” she said.

NYT:

Her most acclaimed reporting came during the 2003 Iraq war. More than 500 journalists, including more than 100 Americans, covered the run-up to the war. But once the United States began the all-out bombing campaign known as “shock and awe,” she was one of 16 American correspondents not embedded with U.S. troops who stayed — and for a time was the only U.S. network reporter to continue broadcasting from the heart of Baghdad…
Once she was home, other reporters interviewed her about her ordeal. She told of subsisting on Kit Kat chocolate bars and Marlboro Lights, bathing by gathering water in huge trash cans, and powering her equipment by attaching jumper cables to a car battery, which she lugged up to her hotel room every night.

She was 71. Lung cancer got her.

Don Gehrmann. Hadn’t heard of him before, but he had an interesting story. He was a runner. In the “1950 Wanamaker Mile”, he ran the race in four minutes and 9.3 seconds.

It took him 314 days to win the race.

In the 1950 Wanamaker Mile, on Jan. 28, Gehrmann seemed to catch Fred Wilt at the tape, or did he? Both first-place judges said Wilt had won. Both second-place judges said Wilt had finished second. The finish-line picture from the phototimer was inadvertently blocked by a judge. And so it was left to the chief judge, Asa Bushnell, who was at the finish line, to make the call. He declared Gehrmann the winner, with a time of 4 minutes, 9.3. seconds.
But that did not settle the matter. Wilt, an F.B.I. agent when not competing and a future inductee of the National Track & Field Hall of Fame, protested, and 13 days later the Metropolitan Amateur Athletic Union’s registration committee, reversing Bushnell, declared him the winner.
Then Gehrmann protested that decision, and the matter carried over almost a year later to the A.A.U.’s national convention in Washington. By a vote of 314 to 108 — 314 days after the race — that ruling body’s board of governors upheld the chief judge’s decision and declared Gehrmann, forevermore, the victor.
Some were skeptical. As Howard Schmertz, the Millrose Games’ assistant meet director in 1950, told The New York Times in 2011, “The final decision was made by maybe a dozen people who saw the race and a few hundred who didn’t.”

In a 1976 interview with United Press International, Gehrmann described how the sport, by then having gone professional, had changed. He recalled that for his workouts he had usually run just 2 ¼ miles, that his pre-meet meal had usually consisted of a hamburger, French fries and soda pop, and that the cinder tracks he had run on stole a lot of energy.

Obit watch: August 31, 2022.

Wednesday, August 31st, 2022

Richard Roat, actor. Other credits include “The F.B.I.”, “O’Hara, U.S. Treasury”, the good “Hawaii 5-0”, “Columbo” and “McMillan & Wife” (he missed “McCloud” for the trifecta, but also did “Hec Ramsey” and “Banacek”), and “Westworld” (1973).

William Reynolds. Where is my “The F.B.I.” box set, darn it? Other credits include “Dragnet 1967”, “Pete Kelly’s Blues” (the TV series), “All That Heaven Allows”, “Francis Goes to West Point”, and “Project U.F.O.”

Roland Mesnier, former White House pastry chef.

The French-born Mr. Mesnier served as a member of the chief executive’s kitchen cabinet for nearly 25 years. He catered to the idiosyncratic tastes of five presidents, their wives and their guests, an experience he chronicled in several books.
Mr. Mesnier was hired in 1979 by the first lady, Rosalynn Carter, and served until he retired in 2004, during the administration of George W. Bush. He worked from a modest space in the East Wing, armed with about 300 original pastry molds and an eclectic set of tools, including an ice pick, a coat hanger and a tire-pressure gauge.
Despite the president’s background as a legume farmer, he reported, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter disdained peanuts and sweets in their family’s recipe for a sticky cheese ring — a recipe, Mr. Mesnier said, “that no one tried to steal.” He rated it on a par with Bill and Hillary Clinton’s “atrocious concoction of Coca-Cola-flavored jelly served with black glacé cherries.”
Nancy Reagan often skipped meals but partook of dessert. (She routinely denied her husband chocolate, but Mr. Mesnier smuggled mousse to President Reagan when the first lady was out of town.)

In 2001, Mr. Mesnier took three weeks and 80 pounds of gingerbread, 30 pounds of chocolate and 20 pounds of marzipan to construct a replica of the 1800 White House for the Christmas holiday.
He sometimes served flaming desserts — but, he said, he gave that up after a woman’s fox shawl caught fire when she leaned across the table at a holiday reception.

(Obligatory.)

Obit watch: August 30, 2022.

Tuesday, August 30th, 2022

It was already a semi-busy day, but I thought I’d hold obits until tonight just in case something big happened.

Narrator: Something big happened.

Mikhail Gorbachev. NYT. Alt link. Oddly, I can’t find anything about this on the English language Pravda site.

In other news, a lot of young or relatively young people have been passing away.

Ralph Eggleston, noted Pixar animator.

Eggleston was hired by Pixar in 1992 during the development of the first computer-animated feature that was to become Toy Story, beginning what was to become a long and hugely successful career at the animation studio. He worked as an art director on Toy Story, which was released to universal acclaim and great box office success in 1995. Eggleston went on to win his first Annie Award, for best art direction for his work on the film.
Pixar enjoyed a historical run of success in the 1990s and early 2000s and Eggleston, known affectionately as Eggman at the company, was a key player in the films the studio produced for nearly three decades. He worked as an art director on A Bug’s Life (1998), Toy Story 2 (1999), The Incredibles (2004), Cars (2006) and Up (2009). He was a storywriter and visual developer on Monsters, Inc. (2001), a production designer on Finding Nemo (2003) and WALL-E (2008) and a character designer on Ratatouille (2007).

He was 56. Pancreatic cancer got him.

Charlbi Dean, actress. She was in “Black Lightning” and the forthcoming “Triangle of Sadness”. She was 32: according to reports, she died of an “unexpected sudden illness”.

Luke Bell, musician. He was also 32: friends said he had been missing for a week before his body was found.

Neena Pacholke, morning news anchor for WAOW in Wisconsin. She was 27 and engaged.

The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). You can also dial 988 to reach the Lifeline. If you live outside of the United States or are looking for other help, TVTropes has a good page of additional resources.

Obit watch: August 26, 2022.

Friday, August 26th, 2022

Joe E. Tata, actor.

Credits other than “Beverly Hills, 90210” include “Monster Squad”, the 1966 “Batman” series, “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea”, “The Outer Limits”, “Mission: Impossible”, and “Lost in Space”.

He also did a fair number of cop/PI/procedural shows, including “O’Hara, U.S. Treasury”, “The F.B.I.”, “Cannon”, “Quincy M.E.”, eight episodes of “The Rockford Files”…

…and “Mannix”. (“A World Without Sundays”, season 7, episode 8. “A Problem of Innocence”, season 6, episode 23. “What Happened to Sunday?”, season 4, episode 15.)

E. Bryant Crutchfield, inventor of the Trapper Keeper.

By way of Mike the Musicologist: a nice tribute to Richard Taruskin from Alex Ross. (Link goes to archive.is because I’m not sure how long that will stay available for non-subscribers.)

By way of The Mysterious Bookshop: Michael Malone, novelist and TV writer. He won a Daytime Emmy for “One Life to Live”, and an Edgar Award in 1997 (Best Short Story for “Red Clay”, in the anthology Murder for Love).

Obit watch: August 23, 2022.

Tuesday, August 23rd, 2022

Gary Gaines, former football coach at Odessa Permian.

His record from 1986-89 was 47-6-1.
Gaines led Permian to the fifth of the program’s six state championships with a perfect season in 1989, then left to become an assistant coach at Texas Tech.

Yes, this is the coach from “Friday Night Lights”, the book (affiliate link) and movie (ditto).

“I just can’t find the words to pay respects,” Ron King, a former Permian assistant, told the Odessa American. “It’s a big loss for the coaching profession. There are a lot of coaches he took under his wing and mentored.”
Gaines, who was played by Billy Bob Thornton in the 2004 movie, said he never read the book and felt betrayed by Bissinger after the author spent the entire 1988 season with the team.

Vincent Gil, Australian actor. Credits include “Chopper Squad”, “Riptide” (the 1969 series), “Cop Shop”, “A Cry in the Dark”, and “Nightrider” in the first “Mad Max” movie. (Hattip: Lawrence.)

Obit watch: August 22, 2022.

Monday, August 22nd, 2022

Virginia Patton, actress. She had a short career: most notably, she was apparently the last surviving adult member of the “It’s A Wonderful Life” cast. (Karolyn Grimes, who played “Zuzu”, is still alive, as is Jimmy Hawkins, who played “Tommy”.)

Josephine Tewson. She did a lot of British TV, some of which made it to PBS here. Most notably to my people, she was “Elizabeth”, the neighbor of “Hyacinth Bucket” in “Keeping Up Appearances”.

By way of Lawrence: Alexi Panshin, SF author.

Tom Weiskopf, noted golfer.

Obit watch: August 15, 2022.

Monday, August 15th, 2022

Anne Heche, for the record. THR.

On an administrative note, this has been an unusual situation that I didn’t know how to handle. Various outlets were reporting her death, in the sense that she had been declared brain-dead, which qualifies as legal death under California law. However, those outlets were reporting that she was still on life support while the hospital looked for a compatible recipient for her organs. I made the administrative decision that I would not run an obit watch for her until the NYT ran an obit. Unfortunately, the NYT sometimes takes a day or three or more to run obits: in this case, they didn’t take that long.

I’m still not sure I made the right call in this case. Between Ms. Heche and Tony Dow, it’s been kind of a weird time for the obit watch.

Robyn Griggs, actress. She was a regular on “Another World” and “One Life To Live”, but really didn’t have a lot of credits other than those.

Denise Dowse. Other credits include “Seinfeld”, “Starship Troopers”, the 2003 “Dragnet” series, and “A Stone Cold Christmas”.

Obit watch: August 10, 2022.

Wednesday, August 10th, 2022

Taiki Yanagida, Japanese jockey. He was trampled during a race a week ago, and had been hospitalized since.

Ryan Fellows. He was on a show called “Street Outlaws”, which airs on Discovery, and seems to involve drag races on closed public roads.

Citing “a source connected with the show,” TMZ says Fellows crashed during the eighth out of nine races scheduled for the night and that Fellows was driving a “gold Nissan 240Z.” It’s unclear whether this is actually the orange “Scooby Doo” Nissan documented extensively on social media and described as a 280Z by Fellows on YouTube or a different Z altogether. The Street Outlaws star reportedly lost control near the finish line causing the car to roll and catch fire. Onlookers apparently attempted to get him out but could not do so in time.

Gene LeBell, noted stuntman. 252 credits in IMDB.

During taping, it was reported that Lee was beating up on the stuntmen, prompting stunt coordinator Bennie Dobbins to bring in LeBell to help set the actor straight by “putting him in a headlock or something.”
In his 2005 autobiography The Godfather of Grappling, LeBell remembered grabbing Lee, who then “started making all those noises that he became famous for … but he didn’t try to counter me, so I think he was more surprised than anything else.”
He then hoisted Lee over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry and ran around the set as Lee shouted, “Put me down or I’ll kill you.”

If that rings a bell, yeah, Quentin Tarantino says that Mr. LeBell influenced the Cliff Booth character in “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”. Apparently in more ways than just the Bruce Lee bit.

Booth also had an accusation of murder hovering over his head, which might have been a veiled reference to LeBell being charged in the murder of private investigator Robert Duke Hall in 1976. LeBell was acquitted of that charge, and his conviction as an accessory to the crime was later overturned.

Here’s a PDF of a vintage NYT article about the Hall murder, if you want to start down that rabbit hole.

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#96 in a series)

Tuesday, August 9th, 2022

This is a bit of a change-up pitch.

RBB is a German public broadcaster. More specifically:

RBB is one of the nine regional public broadcasters that make up ARD, Germany’s joint pubweb network which, with an annual budget of $7 billion (€6.9 billion) and more than 22 thousand employees, is the world’s largest public broadcaster. RBB is also one of the main sponsors of the Berlin International Film Festival.

Patricia Schlesinger was the director of RBB. She resigned on Sunday, as did Wolf-Dieter Wolf, chairman of the board.

On Monday, Berlin’s public prosecutor confirmed it had opened an investigation into accusations Schlesinger embezzled RBB funds to support her lifestyle, including getting the network to pay for lavish dinners at her home and financing her private use of a luxury company car.

Schlesinger, who was on a $308,000 (€307,000) annual salary at RBB, is accused of using the German public broadcaster to bankroll a lavish lifestyle for herself and her ex-husband, the Spiegel journalist Gerhard Spörl. Among the allegations, many of which have been revealed in explicit detail in the German media, are that Schlesinger regularly hosted exclusive dinners at her home for prominent guests, getting RBB to pick up the bill, and that she pushed through a $662,000 (€650,000) luxury renovation of her office – all while cutting jobs and programming costs at her network.

Wolf-Dieter Wolf has been “linked with some of the accusations leveled at Schlesinger”, whatever that means.

Obit watch: August 8, 2022.

Monday, August 8th, 2022

Clu Gulager, long time character actor. THR.

165 acting credits in IMDB. Man was in everything, from “The Virginian” to “The F.B.I” to “The Last Picture Show” to “Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood”, with lots of stops along the way…

…including “Mannix”. (“The Man Who Wasn’t There”, season 6, episode 16.)

Roger E. Mosley. Credits beyond “Magnum, P.I.” include “The Rockford Files”, “McCloud”, “McQ” (which Clu Gulager was also in), “The Mack”, and “The Sixth Sense” (the 1972 TV series).

As Mosley remembered it, his agent told him: ” ‘It’s starring this guy Tom Selleck. Tom Selleck has made about five pilot shows … and none of them has sold. So here’s what you do, Roger: Sign up for the show, go over to Hawaii, they’ll treat you good for the 20 days it will take to shoot the [pilot], you’ll get a lot of money, and then you come home. A show with Tom Selleck always fails, and you’ll be fine.’
“Well, 8 1/2 years later … “
Mosley in real life was a licensed private helicopter pilot (something the producers discovered after he was hired, he said) but not allowed to fly on the series.

Obit watch: August 3, 2022.

Wednesday, August 3rd, 2022

Vin Scully. LAT through archive.is.

For all the Dodgers’ marquee players since World War II, Mr. Scully was the enduring face of the franchise. He was a national sports treasure as well, broadcasting for CBS and NBC. He called baseball’s Game of the Week, All-Star Games, the playoffs and more than two dozen World Series. In 2009, the American Sportscasters Association voted him No. 1 on its list of the “Top 50 Sportscasters of All Time.”

In a poll of fans conducted by the Dodgers in 1976, Mr. Scully was voted the most memorable personality from the team’s first two decades in Los Angeles. In 1982, he was elected to the broadcasters’ wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame. In 1995, he received an Emmy Award for lifetime achievement in sports broadcasting.

Fans came to trust him when the team struggled and he wasn’t afraid to say so. After television took over, his broadcasts retained a familiar tenor; belonging to a generation before instant replay, he still used his words to paint a picture. Every game included shots of children in the stands. Every at-bat, it seems, prompted a quip.
Talking about an opposing player, Scully once said: “Andre Dawson has a bruised knee and is listed as day-to-day. … Aren’t we all?”

Home life was devoted to children and grandchildren and a reading list that included James Michener as well as books about famous court trials.
“I’m certainly not an intellectual,” he said. “I just have a fairly curious mind.”

Mo Ostin, music executive.

The list of artists signed to the constellation of affiliated Warner Bros. labels when they were guided by Mr. Ostin reads like a dream-world music hall of fame. It includes pivotal singers of the 1950s like Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby and Sammy Davis Jr.; innovators of the 1960s and ’70s like Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell and the Grateful Dead; and game-changers of the ’80s and ’90s like Madonna, R.E.M. and Green Day.

“Batgirl”, the movie. I’m seeing estimates that this cost between $90 and $100 million, so it’d have to pull in about $300 million to break even. Does Warner Brothers have no confidence that they can make at least $300 million? Doesn’t any superhero movie these days pull in about $300 million in the first week?

Or is this part of WB’s Machiavellian plan? Announce that they consider the movie to be un-releasable, wait for the Internet clamor to see the movie (insert accusations of sexism and racism), then reverse their decision, release the movie, and hope that public attention gets them to at least break-even? (See “Snyder Cut“.)

Obit watch: August 1, 2022.

Monday, August 1st, 2022

It never fails. I posted an obit watch yesterday, and as soon as I did, it got hectic.

Samuel Sandoval has passed away at the age of 98. Mr. Sandoval served his country with honor during WWII as one of the Navajo code talkers.

Sandoval was among four remaining code talkers still alive today, from the hundreds who had been recruited during the war. The three others who are living include Peter MacDonald, John Kinsel Sr. and Thomas H. Begay.

Nichelle Nichols. THR. Tributes.

I’m sorry if it seems like I’m giving her death short shrift, but her passing has received an enormous amount of attention, and anything I could add at this point would be superfluous.

Bill Russell.

Russell was the ultimate winner. He led the University of San Francisco to N.C.A.A. tournament championships in 1955 and 1956. He won a gold medal with the United States Olympic basketball team in 1956. He led the Celtics to eight consecutive N.B.A. titles from 1959 to 1966, far eclipsing the Yankees’ five straight World Series victories (1949 to 1953) and the Montreal Canadiens’ five consecutive Stanley Cup championships (1956 to 1960).
He was the N.B.A.’s most valuable player five times and an All-Star 12 times.
A reedy, towering figure at 6 feet 10 inches and 220 pounds, Russell was cagey under the basket, able to anticipate an opponent’s shots and gain position for a rebound. And if the ball caromed off the hoop, his tremendous leaping ability almost guaranteed that he’d grab it. He finished his career as the No. 2 rebounder in N.B.A. history, behind his longtime rival Wilt Chamberlain, who had three inches on him.
Russell pulled down 21,620 rebounds, an astonishing average of 22.5 per game, with a single-game high of 51 against the Syracuse Nationals (the forerunners of the Philadelphia 76ers) in 1960.
He didn’t have much of a shooting touch, but he scored 14,522 points — many on high-percentage, short left-handed hook shots — for an average of 15.1 per game. His blocked shots — the total is unrecorded, because such records were not kept in his era — altered games.

Pat Carroll. THR. Other credits include “She’s the Sheriff”, “Too Close For Comfort”, and “ER”.

John Aielli, longtime local public radio host.

Paul Coker Jr. Interesting guy: he was one of the old-time “Mad Magazine” staff (aka the “Usual Gang Of Idiots”). He was also a production designer for Rankin/Bass.

As either a character designer or production designer, Coker lent his talents to such Christmas and Easter specials as Cricket on the Hearth (1967), Frosty the Snowman (1969), Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town (1970), Here Comes Peter Cottontail (1971), The Year Without a Santa Claus (1974), Rudolph’s Shiny New Year and Frosty’s Winter Wonderland (both 1976), Nestor, the Long-Eared Christmas Donkey and The Easter Bunny Is Comin’ to Town (both 1977), Jack Frost (1979), Pinocchio’s Christmas (1980), The Leprechauns’ Christmas Gold (1981) and Santa, Baby! (2001).

Hattip to Lawrence on this one, and for reminding me to order the Rifftrax of “Nestor the Long-Eared Christmas Donkey” for Christmas viewing this year.

Obit watch: July 31, 2022.

Sunday, July 31st, 2022

Burt Metcalfe. In addition to his producing credits on “M*A*S*H”, he did some acting. Credits include “The Twilight Zone” (“The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street”), “Perry Mason”, “The Bridges at Toko-Ri”, “The Outer Limits”, and the “12 O’Clock High” series. Producing credits also include “AfterMASH”.

Stuart Woods, another one of those big-shot thriller authors.

Mr. Woods, who was also a swashbuckling licensed private jet plane pilot and trans-Atlantic sailor with homes in New York, Maine and Florida, tacked into his career as a novelist somewhat haphazardly.

He later moved to Ireland, where he began to write his first novel. But he was soon diverted when he became enamored with sailing and began racing. In 1976, in a race from Plymouth, England, to Newport, R.I., that took him 45 days, he finished about in the middle of the field.
He then wrote a nonfiction account of the race, “Blue Water, Green Skipper,” and, after returning to Georgia, sold the American rights to W.W. Norton & Company. It also agreed to publish “Chiefs,” the thriller that Mr. Woods had begun eight years earlier.

He was another one of those guys whose books I saw all the time on the rack at the grocery store, but I’ve never actually read any of them. Chiefs sounds like it might be a good place to start…

Mary Alice, actress. She won a Tony for “Fences”, an Emmy for ““I’ll Fly Away”, and appeared in “The Matrix Revolutions” among other credits.