Archive for the ‘TV’ Category

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Obit watch: June 1, 2022.

Wednesday, June 1st, 2022

Lester Piggott, one of the great British jockeys. I don’t know a lot about British horse racing (or Irish horse racing, for that matter, though I can tell you who Shergar was) but even I’d heard of him.

With 30 victories, Piggott holds the record for the most wins by a jockey in the five British Classics races — the Epsom Derby, the 2,000 Guineas Stakes, the 1,000 Guineas, the Oaks Stakes and the St. Leger Stakes — and he is the last British jockey to win his country’s Triple Crown, aboard Nijinsky in 1970.

…

“The way he rode, with an unusually short length of stirrup for a relatively tall man and his bottom high in the air, must have made the horses feel there was no weight on them,” Luck said in a phone interview. “People said to him, ‘Why do you ride with your butt in the air?’ And he said, ‘Well I have to put it somewhere.’”
Luck added, “Piggott ushered in a golden generation of riders in Europe; he was the one they all aspired to.”

Kenny Moore. He sounds like an interesting guy: he was an Olympic marathon runner, an early tester of Bill Bowerman’s shoes (which went on to become Nike), an All-American in cross-country…

…and a long-time Sports Illustrated writer, specializing in track coverage.

“He wasn’t a writer of devices,” Peter Carry, a former executive editor of Sports Illustrated, said in a phone interview. “He was a guy with a real literary bent and a real sense of language. He was quite economical and eloquent at the same time.”

…

George Hirsch, a former publisher of Runner’s World magazine, which Mr. Moore wrote for after he left Sports Illustrated, said that Mr. Moore’s athletic past had enhanced his access to his subjects.
“I can remember when he interviewed someone like Bill Rodgers or Joan Benoit,” Mr. Hirsch said in a phone interview, referring to two elite marathoners, “and he would run with them and see who they were in ways that he couldn’t have done if he had not been an elite runner.”

Charles Siebert, actor. Other credits include “Xena: Warrior Princess”, “Mancuso, FBI”, “And Justice for All”, “Richie Brockelman, Private Eye” (and of course “The Rockford Files”), and “Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo”.

Posted in Horses, Movies, Obits, Spiders, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

Headline of the day.

Friday, May 20th, 2022

Red Power Ranger among 18 arrested in Texas PPP fraud case

Posted in Law, Media, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: May 19, 2022.

Thursday, May 19th, 2022

Vangelis (Evángelos Odysséas Papathanassíou).

Yeah, yeah, yeah, “Chariots of Fire”, “Blade Runner”…

…in the late ’60s, he found success as a member of the Greek rock band Forminx and then with the progressive group Aphrodite’s Child, which had hits with the single “Rain and Tears” in 1968 and the influential album 666 in 1972.
He enjoyed a partnership with Yes lead singer Jon Anderson, and they released four albums as Jon & Vangelis from 1980 through 1991. (He had been asked to join Anderson’s prog rock band in the wake of keyboardist Rick Wakeman’s departure but declined.)

…

His other big-screen work included Costa-Gavras’ Missing (1982), the Japanese film Antarctica (1983), Roger Donaldson’s The Bounty (1984), Roman Polanski’s Bitter Moon (1992) and Oliver Stone’s Alexander (2004).

How about a musical interlude?

Ray Scott, pioneer of bass fishing as sport.

The idea for a bass fishing tour came to Mr. Scott, then an insurance salesman, when rain cut short a fishing outing with a friend in Jackson, Miss., in 1967. Stuck in his hotel room watching sports on television, he had an epiphany: Why not start the equivalent of the PGA Tour for bass fishing?
He held his first tournament at Beaver Lake, in Arkansas, where 106 anglers paid $100 each to compete over three days for $5,000 in prizes. A second tournament followed that year; in 1968 he formed a membership organization, the Bass Anglers Sportsman Society, or BASS.
In 1971, Mr. Scott started what has become known as the Super Bowl of bass fishing: the Bassmaster Classic, his organization’s annual championship tournament, which he paired with a merchandising expo for manufacturers of bass fishing boats and gear.

…

Mr. Scott was the showman of BASS, the umbrella company for tournaments, magazines and television shows. Easily recognized in his cowboy hat and fringed jackets, Mr. Scott memorably served as the M.C. for tournament weigh-ins, entertaining thousands of fans with his exuberant patter as anglers pulled flopping fish out of holding tanks.
“Now, ain’t that a truly wonderful fish?” he asked one tournament crowd. “How many of you want to see more fish like that? C’mon, let’s hear it for that fish!”

NYT obits for Rosmarie Trapp and Sgt. Maj. John L. Canley.

John Aylward, actor. Other credits include “Stargate SG-1”, “The X-Files”, and “3rd Rock from the Sun”. He also did some theater:

He appeared in stage roles at the Kennedy Center with Kentucky Cycle, and at Lincoln Center with the play City of Conversation. A classically trained actor, Aylward performed everything from Shakespearean roles to farce with plays by Alan Ayckborne, and dramas by David Mamet, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams.
His standout roles included playing Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, Richard III, Scrooge in Inspecting Carol and Shelley Levine in Glengarry Glen Ross, a role he played twice.

Marnie Schulenburg, actress. (“One Life to Live”, “As the World Turns”) She was only 37, and died from cancer.

Posted in Fish, Music, Obits, Sports, Theatre, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: May 17, 2022.

Tuesday, May 17th, 2022

Maggie Peterson, also known as Maggie Mancuso.

She doesn’t have that many credits in IMDB, but they are interesting. She appeared several times on “The Andy Griffith Show” (and in “Mayberry R.F.D.” as well as “Return to Mayberry”) and did guest shots on “Green Acres”, “The Odd Couple”, and several appearances on “The Bill Dana Show”.

And she was “Rose Ellen Wilkerson”, the long-suffering and slightly dim girlfriend of Don Knotts’s character in “The Love God?”, which both Lawrence and I have written about.

The print edition of “People”, though this does not seem to be official yet. Noted:

Sources told The Post that under Wakeford, People had been selling more than 200,000 copies at the newsstand a week. Since then, newsstand sales have been uneven, with a May 2 Prince Harry cover dipping to about 160,000 copies sold, and a March 14 Lizzo cover cratering to between 125,000- 150,000 copies sold, which is said to be one of the worst selling issues in People’s half-century history.

Katsumoto Saotome, Japanese writer. His major project was six volumes of stories from survivors of the Tokyo firebombing.

Mr. Saotome traced his efforts to document the Tokyo firebombing to his attendance at a lecture given by a well-known history professor in 1970. He recalled asking the professor why the attack air was never mentioned in the same textbooks that described the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. The professor told him that there was little documented evidence about the experiences of those who had lived through the firebombing.
Mr. Saotome decided he would seek out fellow survivors and ask them to share their stories of that terrible night. “I was not a popular writer,” he recalled, “so I had a lot of spare time.”

He also established, using private funds, a memorial museum.

He reserved some of his most potent anger for the Japanese government, which he said should have taken more responsibility for starting the war and compensated survivors of the firebombing. A group of them sued the government in 2007, but Japan’s Supreme Court rejected their claim.
Mr. Saotome said he never forgave his government for awarding Curtis LeMay, the United States Air Force general who had been the architect of the Tokyo air raid, its highest decoration for a foreigner, for helping to establish Japan’s modern air force after the war.

Jürgen Blin, boxer. He was best known for fighting Ali in 1971 (after Ali’s loss to Joe Frazier). Mr. Blin was knocked out in the seventh round.

Posted in History, Movies, Obits, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 13, 2022.

Friday, May 13th, 2022

Fred Ward. Damn.

Credits include the titular character in “Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins”, “Sgt. Hoke Moseley” in “Miami Blues”, “Quincy M.E.”, “Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann”, “Tremors”, “The Right Stuff”, and “Det. Harry Philip Lovecraft” in “Cast A Deadly Spell”.

Bruce MacVittie. Other credits include “Waterfront”, “Homicide: Life on the Street”, “Spenser: For Hire” and “The Equalizer”.

Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, head of state of the U.A.E. As always, don’t look to me for geo-political takes, as I know nothing.

I have not found a good obit yet, but Randy Weaver apparently passed away. Here’s Reason‘s take.

…an FBI sniper opened fire as Randy was entering the cabin. The shot missed Randy and struck Vicki as she was holding their newest daughter, 10-month-old Elisheba. Vicki was killed instantly.

That sniper was Lon Horiuchi. Lon Horiuchi murdered Vicki Weaver.

The RRTF report to the DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) of June 1994 stated unequivocally in conclusion (in its executive summary) that the rules that allowed the second shot to have been made did not satisfy constitutional standards for legal use of deadly force. The 1996 report of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Government Information, Arlen Specter [R-PA], chair, concurred, with Senator Dianne Feinstein [D-CA] dissenting. The RRTF report said that the lack of a request by the marshals to the Weavers to surrender was “inexcusable.” Harris and the two Weavers were not believed to be an imminent threat (since they were reported as running for cover without returning fire). 
The later Justice task force criticized Horiuchi for firing through the door, when he did not know if anyone was on the other side of it. While there is a dispute as to who approved the rules of engagement which Horiuchi followed, the task force condemned the rules of engagement that allowed shots to be fired without a request for surrender.

Posted in FBI, Law, Movies, Obits, Theatre, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: May 10, 2022.

Tuesday, May 10th, 2022

Lawrence sent over an obit for James R. Olson. He passed away on April 17th, but I haven’t seen anybody else cover this. (THR put up a story literally as I was writing this.) Which is odd, because he had a pretty interesting career before he retired in 1990.

After serving in the U.S. Army, Olson moved to New York to study in Lee Strasberg’s Actor’s Studio. He subsequently starred in several Broadway productions in the 1950s and 1960s, including J.B. (1958), Romulus (1962), The Three Sisters (1964), and Of Love and Remembrance (1967). He also appeared in numerous touring productions throughout North America.

He also did a lot of TV and movie work. He was another one of those actors who hit the NBC Mystery Movie trifecta: appearances on all three of the original series (“McCloud”, “Columbo”, “McMillan and Wife”). Other credits include “Moon Zero Two”, “The Andromeda Strain”, “The Bold Ones: The Lawyers”, “Lancer”, “Ironside”, “The Rookies”, “Police Story”, “The F.B.I.”…

…and “Mannix”. (“Game Plan“, season 8, episode 2. “Odds Against Donald Jordan“, season 2, episode 21.)

Jack Kehler. Other credits include “Karen Sisco”, “NYPD Blue”, “NCIS: Original Recipe”, “NCIS: Los Angeles”, and something called “The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards”.

Midge Decter.

Ms. Decter was in the forefront of an ideologically evolving generation of public intellectuals. Cutting their teeth on leftist politics in the 1930s and ’40s, they settled into anti-communist liberalism in the 1950s and early ’60s. Jolted by the turbulence of the student and women’s movements, they later broke from liberals to embrace a new form of conservatism — championing traditional social values, limited free-market economics and muscular American foreign policies — that reached its zenith in the early 21st century in the administration of President George W. Bush.
Ms. Decter wielded her influence as editor of Harper’s and other magazines, as an author and book editor, and as a political organizer and frequent speaker.

…

Ms. Decter’s ideological shift in the late ’60s stemmed from a rising concern that she expressed in her 2001 memoir, “An Old Wife’s Tale: My Seven Decades in Love and War.” Liberalism, she said, rather than speaking to the common man and woman as it had in the past, was veering off the tracks into “a general assault in the culture against the way ordinary Americans had come to live.”
She and her husband, the writer and fellow former liberal Norman Podhoretz, worried about the effect the new thinking, particularly that of the counterculture, might have on their children and succeeding generations.

Also by way of Lawrence: Adreian Payne, basketball star at Michigan State.

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

Obit watch: May 9, 2022.

Monday, May 9th, 2022

This was another one of those weekends where I got behind the power curve and am playing catch-up. I expect that next weekend will be closer to what passes for normal around here.

Mickey Gilley.

A honey-toned singer with a warm, unhurried delivery, Mr. Gilley had 17 No. 1 country singles from 1974 to 1983, including “I Overlooked an Orchid” and “Don’t the Girls All Get Prettier at Closing Time.”
He placed 34 singles in the country Top Ten during his two decades on the charts. But he was ultimately best known as the proprietor, with Sherwood Cryer, of Gilley’s, the honky-tonk in Pasadena, Texas, that became one of the most storied nightspots in country music.

…

“There wasn’t anything nice about that club,” he said in a 2019 interview with The Santa Fe New Mexican. “I mean, Gilley’s was a joint. But it worked because of what it represented — country music and the cowboy image.”

Interesting fact #1 which may not be generally known: Jerry Lee Lewis and Jimmy Swaggart were cousins of Mr. Gilley.

Interesting fact #2 for the benefit of FotB RoadRich:

Gilley was a licensed pilot, holding an instrument rating with commercial pilot privileges for multi-engine airplanes, as well as private pilot privileges for single engine aircraft.

George Pérez, comics guy. (“Wonder Woman”, “Avengers”, “The New Teen Titans”)

For the record, NYT obits for Kevin Samuels and Ric Parnell.

Dennis Waterman, British actor. Credits other than “The Sweeney” include “The Life and Loves of a She-Devil”, “Tube Mice”, and “Stay Lucky”.

Kenneth Welsh. 242 credits in IMDB, which is pretty impressive (Clint Howard has 253). Other credits include one of the spinoffs of a minor SF TV show from the 1960s, “Perfect Storms: Disasters That Changed the World”, “Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer”, “Due South”, and “The X-Files”.

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

Obit watch: May 6, 2022.

Friday, May 6th, 2022

Mike Hagerty, character actor. Credits other than “Friends” include “Space Truckers”, two episodes of a spin-off of a minor SF TV series from the 1960s, and “Speed 2: Cruise Control”.

Lawrence emailed an obit for Kevin Samuels, a YouTuber I’d never heard of but who was apparently followed avidly by some and hated by others.

Edited to add: better writeup from NBC News.

Domino, popular and beloved University of Texas cat. (Hattip: FotB RoadRich.)

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

Threads from Twitter that amused me.

Friday, May 6th, 2022

By way of President Dawg, a long thread on “Convoy” (the song and the movie) and the ’70s trucker/CB culture:

Includes bonus “Phantom 309”, MST3K, and “B.J. and the Bear” references.

I’m a little old for this, but:

Posted in 1970s, Movies, Music, Radio, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 4, 2022.

Wednesday, May 4th, 2022

David Walden. There may be some folks out there for whom that rings a bell. For the rest of the crowd, he was one of the pioneers of the early Internet.

In 1969, Mr. Walden was part of a small team of talented young engineers whose mission was to build the Interface Message Processor. Its function was to switch data among computers linked to the nascent Arpanet, the precursor to the internet. The first I.M.P. was installed that year at the University of California, Los Angeles. The I.M.P.s would be crucial to the internet until the Arpanet was decommissioned in 1989.
Mr. Walden was the first computer programmer to work with the team. “The I.M.P. guys,” as they came to call themselves, developed the computer in nine frenetic months under a contract secured by Bolt Beranek and Newman (now Raytheon BBN), a technology company in Cambridge, Mass.
The I.M.P.s served as translators between mainframe computers at different locations and the network itself. Each I.M.P. translated what came over the network into the particular language of that location’s main computer. The translation work of the I.M.P. evolved into today’s network routers.
The work of Mr. Walden and his colleagues was unprecedented. “They had no models to draw on,” said Marc Weber, a curatorial director at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. “They were creating out of whole cloth a new class of machine.”
He added, “They took a very new idea at the time and turned it into a living, breathing, working machine with its own software and protocols that became an essential component of the network that grew to connect all of us.”

Noted: the NYT obit is by Katie Hafner. Her book with Matthew Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet (affiliate link) covers this and lots of other early Internet history, and I enthusiastically recommend it.

Lawrence sent over an obit for Kailia Posey, who was on “Toddlers & Tiaras” as a child. She was 16 years old, and according to her family, died by suicide.

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 Geek, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 3, 2022.

Tuesday, May 3rd, 2022

I know this sounds like the setup to a joke, but it isn’t: Ric Parnell has passed away.

Mr. Parnell was perhaps best known as “Mick Shrimpton”, one of Spinal Tap’s many drummers.

Parnell played in multiple bands, including Horse, Atomic Rooster, Nova and Stars. He claimed he declined invitations to play in Journey and Whitesnake, but is credited with playing drums on Toni Basil’s song “Hey Mickey” in 1981.

David Birney.

Mr. Birney’s theater career began in earnest in 1965, when he won the Barter Theater Award, enabling him to spend a season acting in shows at the prestigious Barter Theater in Abingdon, Va. He moved on to the Hartford Stage Company in Connecticut, and in 1967 he played Antipholus of Syracuse in a New York Shakespeare Festival production of “A Comedy of Errors.”
Mr. Birney made his Broadway debut two years later in Molière’s “The Miser.” And in 1971 he starred in a Broadway production of J.M. Synge’s “The Playboy of the Western World” at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center. Mr. Birney played Christy Mahon, who enters an Irish pub in the early 1900s telling a story about killing his father.

…

Over the rest of his theatrical career, Mr. Birney played a wide variety of roles, including Antonio Salieri, as a replacement, in Peter Shaffer’s “Amadeus” on Broadway; Benedick in “Much Ado About Nothing” at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, N.J.; Hamlet at the PCPA Theaterfest in Santa Maria, Calif.; and James Tyrone Jr. in Eugene O’Neill’s “A Moon for the Misbegotten” at the Miniature Theater of Chester, Mass.

He also did a lot of TV work, including a recurring role on the first season of “St. Elsewhere”. Credits other than “Bridget Loves Bernie” include one of the spin-offs of a minor SF TV show from the 1960s, “FBI: The Untold Stories”, the good “Hawaii Five-0”, Serpico on the “Serpico” TV series, “McMillan & Wife”, and “The F.B.I.”

Ron Galella, photographer and historical footnote. He was one of the early “paparazzi” – indeed, it seems to me that he was one before the term came into common use.

He was perhaps most famous for relentlessly photographing Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

Mrs. Onassis waged a running court battle with him throughout the 1970s and early ’80s, testifying in one court hearing that he had made her life “intolerable, almost unlivable, with his constant surveillance.” Mr. Galella in turn claimed the right to earn a living by taking pictures of famous people in public places.
In 1972, a judge ordered him to keep 25 feet away from Mrs. Onassis and 30 feet away from her children. A decade later, facing jail time for violating the order — hundreds of times — Mr. Galella agreed never to take another picture of them. And he never did.

…

Reviewing “Smash His Camera,” a 2010 documentary about Mr. Galella, the critic Roger Ebert articulated the ambivalence many felt toward him, whether or not they knew the name of the photographer behind the memorable pictures he took. “I disapproved of him,” Mr. Ebert said, “and enjoyed his work.”

Posted in 1970s, History, Law, Movies, Obits, Photography, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 2, 2022.

Monday, May 2nd, 2022

It was a busy weekend, so I’m playing catch-up on a lot of stuff here.

For the record: Naomi Judd. THR.

Klaus Schulze, musician.

He played drums on the debut albums of the German bands Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra Tempel before starting a prodigiously prolific solo career. In 2000, he released a 50-CD retrospective set of studio and live recordings, “The Ultimate Edition.” But he was far from finished.

Jacques Perrin, French actor. Credits include “Z”, “Cinema Paradiso”, and “The Young Girls of Rochefort”.

Neal Adams, comics guy.

During his Batman run, Adams and writer Dennis O’Neil brought a revolutionary change to the hero and the comics, delivering realism, kineticism and a sense of menace to their storytelling in the wake of the campy Adam West-starring ’60s ABC series and years of the hero being aimed at kiddie readers.
He created new villains for the rogue’s gallery — the Man-Bat and Ra’s al Ghul as well as the latter’s daughter, Talia, who became Batman’s lover. The father and daughter, played by Liam Neeson and Marion Cotillard, were key characters in the trilogy of Batman movies directed by Christopher Nolan.

Joanna Barnes. Beyond “Parent Trap” and “Auntie Mame”, she had a fair number of 70s TV credits, including “The Name of the Game”, the good “Hawaii 5-0”, “O’Hara, U.S. Treasury”, “McCloud” (and, interestingly, “Cool Million”, a short-lived show in the “Mystery Movie” wheel), “Quincy M.E.”…

…and “Mannix”. (“Fear I to Fall“, season 2, episode 12.)

Jossara Jinaro. Credits other than “ER” include “Doctor Who: Alternate Empire” and “The Devil’s Rejects”.

Rachelle Zylberberg, aka “Régine“, disco entrepreneur. At one point, she supposedly owned 23 clubs. (“Some of her clubs, she explained, were franchises owned by local entrepreneurs who paid up to $500,000 and gave her cuts of the action to use her name.”)

Régine made exclusivity an art form. She attracted privileged classes by selling 2,000 club memberships for $600 each, and by requiring tuxedos and evening gowns to get in. She installed a flashing “disco full” sign outside to discourage the hoi polloi and a slide-back peephole at the door to inspect supplicants for admission to the pounding music and gold-plated glamour of her Valhalla.

…

Saluting Bastille Day in New York, the patriots included Gov. Hugh L. Carey, Ethel Kennedy, Margaux Hemingway, Elizabeth Taylor and John Warner (at the time, the chairman of the United States Bicentennial Commission), and Senator George S. McGovern, the 1972 Democratic presidential candidate.
“If anyone had second thoughts about celebrating an event that theoretically ended the privileged class, in a room some 40 times as crowded as the Bastille dungeon on that fateful day, no one made them audible,” The New York Times reported. “To be fair, it was somewhat difficult to make anything other than isolated words audible.”

Kathy Boudin is burning in Hell. Peter Paige, Edward J. O’Grady, and Waverly L. Brown were unavailable for comment.

Posted in 1970s, Law, Mannix, Movies, Music, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 29, 2022.

Friday, April 29th, 2022

Harold Livingston, screenwriter. It doesn’t seem like he was terribly prolific (21 writing credits in IMDB) but there’s some gold.

His biggest credit seems to be the screenplay for the first movie based on a minor SF TV show from the 1960s. Other credits include “Run For Your Life”, nine episodes of “Mission: Impossible”, “The Bold Ones: The Protectors”, “The Name of the Game”, “Banacek”, “Archer” (the 1975 “Archer”), “Barbary Coast”…

…and “Mannix”. (“The Girl from Nowhere“, season 7, episode 19. “A Small Favor for an Old Friend“, season 8, episode 7, one of the “old Army buddy” episodes.)

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

Obit watch: April 21, 2022.

Thursday, April 21st, 2022

Robert Morse, actor. THR. Other credits include “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” (both the Broadway musical and the film version), “Night Gallery”, “Trapper John, M.D.”, “Wild Palms”, the 1985 “Twilight Zone” revival, and a short called “Why I Live at the P.O.” based on the Eudora Welty story.

Dede Robertson, Pat Robertson’s wife.

CNN+. NYT

Posted in Media, Movies, Obits, Religion, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 16, 2022.

Saturday, April 16th, 2022

Liz Sheridan. THR.

Other credits include a recurring role on one of the worst TV series ever, “Riptide”, “Kojack”, “Herman’s Head”, and “Deadline for Murder: From the Files of Edna Buchanan”.

Posted in Obits, TV | Comments Closed

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