Archive for the ‘TV’ Category

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Obit watch: July 27, 2022.

Thursday, July 28th, 2022

Tony Dow is really most sincerely dead. NYT again. My thanks to the many people (including Borepatch) who tipped me off to this.

Faye Marlowe. She had a short career: “Hangover Square” seems to be her best known film.

Jered Barclay. He did a fair number of Westerns, “Hawaiian Eye”, “Surfside 6”, “Coronet Blue”, and other credits. He was also in vaudeville and theater, and did a lot of voiceovers.

Bernard Cribbins. Credits other than “Doctor Who” include “Frenzy”, the 1967 “Casino Royale”, “Space: 1999”, and “Coronation Street”. (Edited to add: NYT.)

Lourdes Grobet, photographer. One of her specialties was photographing luchadores, and some of those photos are reproduced in the obit (including one of her dancing with El Santo).

U Phyo Zeya Thaw, Burmese rapper. He was 41.

His execution, and those of three other political prisoners, were announced in the junta-controlled news media on Monday. His mother, Daw Khin Win May, confirmed his death.
The four men were convicted of terrorism charges in trials widely denounced as a sham. The four executions, including that of the veteran democracy activist U Kyaw Min Yu, popularly known as Ko Jimmy, were the first to be carried out in decades in Myanmar.

Posted in Obits, Photography, Theatre, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: July 26, 2022.

Tuesday, July 26th, 2022

Great and good FOTB RoadRich sent over a couple of obits for Tom Poberezny, former head of the Experimental Aircraft Association. He took over for his dad, Paul Poberezny, in the 1990s and ran EAA until 2010.

One of the most talented aviators of his day, Tom was world aerobatics champion as part of team USA in 1972 and was United States Unlimited aerobatics champion the next year. He went on to become part of the three-plane Red Devils aerobatic airshow act, later known as The Eagles, along with Gene Soucy and the late Charlie Hilliard.

Yoko Shimada. Credits other than “Shogun” include “Kamen Rider”, “Chicago Story”, and “We Are Youth”.

Paul Sorvino. THR.

He was another one of those people whose personal politics I have no idea about: he acted (and sang a little) and did it well. I was always happy to see him in something.

172 acting credits in IMDB.

I’ve said before that my ideal “Law and Order” lineup is Briscoe/Logan/Stone/Kincaid. But one of our local broadcast channels was re-running the early “L&O” episodes late at night a while back, and I recorded some of the ones with Sorvino as “Phil Cerreta”. He gets a lot of attention for playing mob guys, but he was really good in that role too.

There’s one episode in particular (“Heaven”, season 2, episode 10, based on the Happy Land Social Club fire) that stands out for me. Ceretta and Logan are looking at 53 bodies lined up outside the fire:

Det. Mike Logan: I’ve never seen this many. You?
Sgt. Phil Cerreta: Not in civilian life.

This is writing (the episode is one of my favorites) but it is also acting. I can’t find a clip online, but if you watch it, Sorvino’s delivery puts a lot across in four words: this is a man who saw some stuff during the war, and still carries those memories.

Tony Dow. THR.

Other credits include “Quincy, M.E.”, “Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star”, “Diagnosis Murder”, and “The Kentucky Fried Movie”.

Lawrence pointed out to me “Who Killed Maxwell Thorn?”, the final episode of “The Love Boat”, which features Wally, Beaver, June…and Peter Graves, Barbi Benton (hi, pigpen51!), Florence Henderson, Robert Reed, and Ted McGinley, among other stunt casting. I was never a big “Love Boat” fan, though I did watch it (three broadcast networks, people) but (as I told Lawrence) this whole episode is one giant wink at the audience. And (as Lawrence also pointed out) it ties in to the Tommy Westphall Catastrophe.

Edited to add: Well, crud, this is embarrassing, but I did have three sources, and they apparently made the same mistake. Tony Dow is NOT DEAD. Repeat: Tony Dow is NOT DEAD. But he is apparently in hospice care.

Posted in 1970s, Movies, Obits, Planes, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: July 25, 2022.

Monday, July 25th, 2022

Man, it got busy up in here all of the sudden.

Bob Rafelson. THR. Other credits include the “Poodle Springs” TV movie (with James Caan as Marlowe, based on Robert Parker’s continuation of an unfinished Chandler novel), “The Postman Always Rings Twice”, and “The King of Marvin Gardens”.

The Saturday Movie Group watched “Five Easy Pieces” not too long ago. I think I echo the general consensus when I say that it was very much like “The Last Picture Show”: a good movie that none of us want to see again.

David Warner, British actor. In case you were wondering, he’s the photographer who loses his head in “Omen”. Other credits include “TRON”, “Time Bandits”, the “Hogfather” TV movie, and lots of genre stuff, including some appearances on spinoffs of a minor 1960s SF TV series.

Diana Kennedy. She was well known (at least to me and I think to other people who follow food) as the woman who introduced true Mexican cooking to the US.

At a time when most Americans’ concept of Mexican food was limited to tacos and enchiladas, Ms. Kennedy unfurled an ornate culinary tapestry, exploring the distinctly regional nature of Mexican cooking, defined, like the cuisines of Italy and China, by local geography, climate and ingredients.
“The regional dishes of Sonora, or Jalisco, have practically nothing in common with those of Yucatán and Campeche; neither have those of Nuevo León with those of Chiapas and Michoacán,” she wrote in the book’s first chapter. In Oaxaca, she explained, “certain chilies are grown and used that are found nowhere else in Mexico.”
The Mexican food known to most Americans, she wrote, was a travesty: “a crisp taco filled with ground meat heavily flavored with an all-purpose chili powder; a soggy tamal covered with a sauce that turns up on everything — too sweet and too overpoweringly onioned — a few fried beans and something else that looks and tastes like all the rest.” This state of affairs she hoped to correct.

…

In “The Tortilla Book” (1975) and “My Mexico” (1998), Ms. Kennedy continued the journey begun in “The Cuisines of Mexico,” elaborating on her findings as she roamed the country in her pickup truck, quizzing local cooks, taking notes and developing, as a side project, an atlas of indigenous herbs and plants.
Along the way, she clued readers in on the secrets of making wasp’s nest salsa, roasting a whole ox or cleaning black iguana for a special Oaxacán tamale.
“There is always someone who wants to know how to clean an iguana, so why not?” she told an interviewer for the journal Writing on the Edge in 2011. All three books were gathered in one volume in 2000 under the title “The Essential Cuisines of Mexico.”

…

Ms. Kennedy spared no effort to track down information. She served an apprenticeship in a bakery before writing her tortilla book. She traveled dusty back roads by bus or in her truck, sleeping in the back, en route to remote villages in search of obscure recipes, questioning saleswomen at local markets or wangling invitations to home kitchens.
“I’m out to report what is disappearing,” she told The Times in 2019. “I drive over mountains, I sit with families, and I record.”
She took a dim view of chefs and writers who did not do the same, and her criticism could be withering. “They’ve not done the travel and the research that I’ve done,” she told Saveur. “None of them, not one. I have traveled this country, wandering — it’s why I’m not rich! — and taking time, and nobody else has done that. Nobody else has seen a certain chile at a certain stage in a market in Chilapa, and then gone back in six months and seen other chiles.”

…

In 2010, she gave The Chicago Tribune a terse assessment of her work. “I am tenacious,” she said. “And I love to eat.”

Johnny Egan, coach of the Houston Rockets from 1972-1976. He was 129-152 overall during his tenure.

The Hartford, Connecticut native played for six NBA teams: Detroit Pistons (1961–63), New York Knicks (1963–65), Baltimore Bullets (1965–68), Los Angeles Lakers (1968–70) and San Diego/Houston Rockets (1970–72). The guard played with the Cleveland Cavaliers for the 1970-71 season.

Melanie Rauscher, who was on “Naked and Afraid”. She was 35, and the circumstances seem particularly sad.

Corey Kasun, a rep for the Prescott Police Department, confirmed to TMZ that the reality star was dog sitting in the city while the homeowners were out of town. Upon their return, they discovered Rauscher dead in their guest room, near several cans of dust cleaner containing compressed air.
It remains unclear if Rauscher consumed the cans’ contents.

Posted in 1970s, Food, Movies, Obits, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 22, 2022.

Friday, July 22nd, 2022

Great and good friend of the blog Joe D. let us know about the death of Al Evans.

Al was one of the old time Austin BBS people, and a personal friend of mine from back then. The Facebook post is a nice tribute to someone who was a good person, and whose passing leaves a hole in the world.

Taurean Blacque. Beyond “Hill Street Blues”, it seems like he had a pretty active theater career, and other credits including “The Bob Newhart Show”, “Taxi”, and “DeepStar Six”.

In 1982, Blacque received a supporting actor Emmy nomination for his work as the toothpick-dependent Washington on Hill Street but lost out to co-star Michael Conrad. Amazingly, the other three nominees — Charles Haid, Michael Warren and Bruce Weitz — also came from the 1981-87 series, created by Steven Bochco and Michael Kozoll.

Nostalgia is a moron, but man, wasn’t that a heck of a show?

Shonka Dukureh passed on at 44. She was a musician, and also plays “Big Mama Thornton” in the current “Elvis” film.

Lawrence sent over an obit for Alan Grant, comic writer (“Batman”, “Judge Dredd”).

Werner Reich. He survived Auschwitz and Mauthausen (and the “35-mile death march in snow and ice” between the two). He also learned a card trick from another prisoner, Herbert Levin (aka “Nivelli the magician”) while he was in Auschwitz.

Mr. Reich, who became an engineer after his immigration to the United States, never lost his love of magic, performing close-up tricks with cards and coins for small groups of other magicians, at temples and at his sons’ birthday parties.

…

Mr. Levin’s card trick stayed with Mr. Reich the rest of his life.
“We loved anything that could take us away from Auschwitz for even a moment, that could take our minds off our memories and the horror around us,” he said in the 2017 interview.In England, he immersed himself in magic. He bought a deck of cards, then some magic tricks and books, and still more tricks and books.
“There’s a very, very thin line between a hobby and insanity,” he joked during his TEDx Talk.
Mr. Reich never saw Mr. Levin after Auschwitz and did not know that he had also emigrated to the United States, resumed his magic career and lived in Rego Park, Queens.
Mr. Levin died in 1977, but Mr. Reich did not learn of the death until nearly 30 years later, when he read an article in The Linking Ring, the monthly magazine of the International Brotherhood of Magicians, to which Mr. Reich belonged.

Posted in Magic, Movies, Nazis, Obits, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 21, 2022.

Thursday, July 21st, 2022

Rebecca Balding, actress.

Other credits include “Supertrain”, “The Rockford Files” (“Dwarf in a Helium Hat“), “Lou Grant”, and “MacGruder and Loud”.

Posted in 1970s, Obits, TV | 1 Comment »

A horse is a horse, of course, of course…

Tuesday, July 19th, 2022

…and no one should flee from a horse, of course,
Especially (of course) if the NYPD owns that horse.

Somebody in the thread responded with a still, but what the heck, let’s go to the ‘Tube:

(Jessica Walter! Damn!)

Posted in 1970s, Horses, Law, NYPD, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: July 19, 2022.

Tuesday, July 19th, 2022

Mickey Rooney Jr.

Not a whole lot of credits in IMDB. I’m wondering if “Beyond the Bermuda Triangle” counts as genre. (Fred MacMurray? On a totally unrelated note, I just picked up the 4K/UHD package of “Double Indemnity” during the Criterion 50% off sale, and am looking forward to watching it soon. I’ve never seen it, but I keep hearing it is one of the great noir films.)

Michael Swanwick posted a nice tribute to Claes Oldenburg on his blog.

Posted in Art, Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 10, 2022.

Sunday, July 10th, 2022

L.Q. Jones. Beyond “The Wild Bunch” and other Peckinpah films, credits include writing, producing, and directing “A Boy and His Dog”, based on the Harlan Ellison novella.

Adam Wade. Other credits include “B.J. and the Bear”, “The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo”, and “Come Back Charleston Blue”.

Tony Sirico. THR. Other credits include “Goodfellas”, “Police Squad!” (“In Color!”), and “Jersey Shore Shark Attack”.

Lenny Von Dohlen. “Tender Mercies” is a swell movie, and you should watch it if you haven’t. Other credits include “The Equalizer”, “Walker, Texas Ranger”, and multiple appearances on “The Pretender”.

Susie Steiner. This is kind of sad. She was a British novelist who broke out in 2016 with a crime novel, “Missing, Presumed” that got a lot of attention.

Around that time, she was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa and gradually went legally blind. She wrote two more novels, “Persons Unknown” and “Remain Silent” in the same series as “Missing, Presumed” (featuring Manon Bradshaw). In 2019, she was diagnosed with “glioblastoma, grade 4”, which eventually killed her.

Bill J. Allen. I hadn’t heard of him, but I wanted to highlight the obit because I find it interesting.

Mr. Allen was an Alaskan businessman.

As the president and chief executive of the Veco Corporation, an engineering and services company he co-founded in 1968, Mr. Allen sat at the intersection of Alaska’s vast oil industry and the equally vast political interests arrayed around it.
He specialized in greasing the connections between the two, shuffling money into the coffers of friendly politicians, who in turn kept companies like Veco flush with work. By the early 2000s, Veco was the largest Alaska-owned and Alaska-based company, with 3,500 employees, 18 subsidiaries and $400 million in annual revenue.

He allegedly threw around a lot of money to get his way.

Eventually he and one of his vice presidents, Rick Smith, settled into an almost comically corrupt arrangement with a coterie of state politicians.They regularly booked a suite at the Westmark Baranof, a luxury Art Deco hotel four blocks from the State Capitol in Juneau, where they dished out money and told their visitors what they wanted in return.
Mr. Allen and his circle seemed to revel in their shamelessness. He and Mr. Smith always booked Suite 604, and Mr. Allen always sat in the same chair. He bragged that he kept $100 bills in his front pocket, the easier to dole them out to friendly politicians. The girlfriend of one politician even had hats embroidered with the letters CBC, for “Corrupt Bastards Club.”

The Feds wiretapped the room and eventually came down on them. Mr. Allen was also alleged to have sexually assaulted underage girls, though as far as I can tell he was never charged with any criminal offense related to this.

Mr. Allen became the government’s key witness in a string of corruption and bribery cases against state and federal politicians, several of whom were convicted.
The most prominent of them, Senator Ted Stevens, was indicted in 2008 on charges that he had failed to register a series of gifts from Mr. Allen, notably an extensive renovation of the senator’s home south of Anchorage.
The two had been friends — they even owned a racehorse together — but that didn’t prevent Mr. Allen from providing critical testimony against the senator, telling the jury that Mr. Stevens had used an intermediary to ask him not to send a bill for the renovation.

As you may know, Bob, Senator Stevens was convicted and lost his re-election bid. As you may also know, Bob, three months after he was convicted, it came out that the government had witheld potentially exculpatory evidence (“including an interview in which Mr. Allen said he had never spoken with Mr. Stevens’s intermediary“) from Mr. Stevens’s defense team, the charges were dropped, and Mr. Stevens was killed in a plane crash in 2010.

Posted in Books, Law, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 8, 2022.

Friday, July 8th, 2022

For the historical record, since everyone is on this like a fat man on an all you can eat buffet: Shinzo Abe. Alt link. The Mainichi. Japan Times.

Larry Storch. 249 acting credits in IMDB: beyond “F-Troop”, they include “Kolchak: The Night Stalker”, “The Happy Hooker Goes to Washington”, “The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo”, “Lancelot Link: Secret Chimp”, “Airport 1975″…

…and “Mannix”. (“Another Final Exit“, season 1, episode 20. “Portrait in Blues“, season 8, episode 1.)

Edited to add: NYT obit for Mr. Storch, which probably went up as I was writing this.

Gregory Itzin. Credits other than “24” include “Airplane!” (and “Airplane II: The Sequel”, but he went uncredited in that), “Street Hawk”, “Lou Grant”, and “FBI: The Unheard Music Untold Stories”.

Posted in 1970s, Mannix, Obits, TV | 7 Comments »

Obit watch: June 28, 2022.

Tuesday, June 28th, 2022

Mary Mara, actress. Credits other than “Law and Order” include three episodes of a spinoff of a minor SF TV series from the 1960s, “ER”, “Nash Bridges”, and “Dexter”.

Posted in Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Thing I did not know.

Friday, June 24th, 2022

The director of Elvis Presley’s 1968 comeback special (Steve Binder) also directed…”The Star Wars Holiday Special”.

Posted in 1970s, Bagatelle, Elvis, Music, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 23, 2022.

Thursday, June 23rd, 2022

Tony Siragusa. 55. Damn.

Siragusa, nicknamed Goose, played in the N.F.L. for 12 seasons, seven of them for the Colts, who acquired him as an undrafted free agent in 1990. He joined the Baltimore Ravens in 1997 and retired after the 2001 season, one year after playing a key defensive role as the franchise won its first Super Bowl.

…

Siragusa, known for his imposing heft at 330 pounds during his playing days, was a key member of the Ravens’ championship team in the 2000 season. While that season was one of his worst statistically — he recorded only 27 tackles without any sacks — he contributed to one of the N.F.L.’s most fearsome defenses, absorbing blockers to allow the star linebacker Ray Lewis, defensive back Rod Woodson, lineman Sam Adams and others to succeed in their roles. That unit set N.F.L. records for the fewest points allowed (165) and rushing yards allowed (970) in a 16-game regular season.

James Rado. He was one of the creators of “Hair”.

Posted in NFL, Sports, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 13, 2022.

Monday, June 13th, 2022

Philip Baker Hall. THR.

Other credits include “Hardcastle and McCormick”, “Quincy M.E.”, “The Man with Bogart’s Face”, “Ghostbusters II”, “The John Larroquette Show”, and “Cradle Will Rock”.

NYT obit for Julee Cruise, which makes explicit something that the other obits only implied:

Her husband, Edward Grinnan, said the cause was suicide. He said she had struggled with depression as well as lupus.

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

Posted in Movies, Nixon, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 6, 2022.

Monday, June 6th, 2022

Linda Lawson, actress. Other credits include “Sea Hunt”, “Hawaiian Eye”, and “Ben Casey”.

Alec John Such, drummer bassist [thanks, LP] for Bon Jovi.

Lawrence sent over an obit for Isidoro Raponi, who did a lot of practical effects work.

His biggest triumph in the sector was helping to design, build and operate E.T. for the 1982 Steven Spielberg film E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. His résumé includes work on such other big films as King Kong, Alien, Close Encounters of the Third Kind., Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend, Gangs of New York, The Aviator, The Green Mile and The Shawshank Redemption.

Posted in Movies, Music, Obits, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: June 3, 2022.

Friday, June 3rd, 2022

Brad Johnson, actor. Other credits include “The Outer Limits” (the 2000-ish revival), several appearances on “CSI: Original Recipe”, and “The Robinsons: Lost in Space”.

The last Howard Johnson’s. But there’s a quibble:

The Lake George, N.Y., location is closed, and the property is up for lease, listing agent Bill Moon of Exit Realty Empire Associates confirmed. However, Moon said, for the last several years, the restaurant wasn’t operated as a “traditional Howard Johnson’s experience.”
“It was a local lessee that was running a restaurant out of the Howard Johnson’s building,” he said.

Howard Johnson’s fried clams.

Apparently, there’s a Kindle edition of The Oranging of America and Other Stories by Max Apple. (The titular story is about Howard Johnson and his personal assistant. It is a fun collection. Affiliate link.)

Ten Restaurants That Changed America by Paul Freedman. HoJo’s was one of them.

The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen by Jacques Pépin. Mr. Pépin worked for HoJo’s in the early 1960s.

“Eat My Globe” interview with Mr. Pépin, which is notable for the following:

…But the dish that everybody loved was the fried clams from Howard Johnson’s.

Posted in Food, Kindleing, Obits, TV | 1 Comment »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »