Archive for the ‘TV’ Category

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Obit watch: December 3, 2019.

Tuesday, December 3rd, 2019

Robert K. Massie, author, historian, and Pulitzer Prize winner.

Mr. Massie said his literary odyssey was set in motion by research he did at the New York Public Library during lunch breaks from his job as a young journalist. It was purely personal research at first: He wanted to know more about the bleeding disease of hemophilia and how he and his wife at the time, Suzanne Massie, who became a noted Russian scholar, could help their hemophiliac son, Bob.
During his research he became fascinated with perhaps the most famous childhood case of hemophilia, that of Alexei, a son of Nicholas and Alexandra. It was to help Alexei that Alexandra had summoned Grigory Rasputin, the notorious faith-healing monk who gained influence over the imperial court. Public disdain of Rasputin contributed to the Russian people’s turn against the monarchy, helping to pave the way for the revolution of 1917.
Mr. Massie wound up writing an article on hemophilia for The Saturday Evening Post, where he had taken a job in 1962. He wrote an accompanying article about Alexei and his parents, but The Post did not print it. Still, he found himself unable to abandon the family drama of the Romanovs, as the Russian dynasty was known, and he eventually quit his job to pursue the subject full time.
A decade later, “Nicholas and Alexandra” was published to acclaim. Though nearly 1,000 pages long, it sold more than 4.5 million copies and is regarded as one of the most popular historical studies ever published.

When I was a little kid, we had a Reader’s Digest Condensed book that had Nicholas and Alexandra in it. I remember being both fascinated by it and incapable of understanding it, because I was a little kid, and Russian history was just a little above my level. Not too long ago (back when I was at St. Ed’s) I read – and loved – the actual, non-condensed book.

Lawrence tipped me off to this, but I don’t have an obit to link: Dorothy Catherine Fontana, aka D.C. Fontana. She did a lot of writing for television, including “The Waltons”, “Land of the Lost”, something called “Captain Simian & The Space Monkeys”, “Babylon 5”, “Dallas”, “Logan’s Run”, “Lancer”…

…and she was also heavily involved with a minor series called “Star Trek”, as well as some of the sequels: “Star Trek: The Next Generation”, “Star Trek: The Animated Series”, and various spin-off products.

Edited to add: THR obit. (Hattip: RoadRich.)

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

Obit watch: November 28, 2019.

Thursday, November 28th, 2019

Godfrey Gao, actor. He was in “The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones” and did some other work in Chinese films. (He was also the voice of Ken in the Mandarin version of “Toy Story 3”.)

Mr. Gao was 35 years old. He died of an apparent heart attack while filming a Chinese reality TV series, “Chase Me”, in which “participants scale tall buildings, skid down obstacle courses and hang from tightropes”.

The death of Mr. Gao, who was born in Taiwan and raised in Canada, set off a wave of anger on the Chinese internet, with millions of people criticizing the entertainment industry as focused on ratings at the expense of safety.
By Wednesday evening, the death of Mr. Gao was one of the most widely discussed topics on Weibo, a popular microblogging site, and hashtags about it had garnered hundreds of millions of views.

William Ruckelshaus, “Saturday Night Massacre” figure.

And on a night of high drama, as the nation held its breath and constitutional government appeared to hang in the balance, Nixon ordered his top three Justice Department officials, one after another, to fire the Watergate prosecutor, Archibald Cox, rather than comply with his subpoena for nine incriminating Oval Office tape recordings.
Mr. Cox’s complete independence had been guaranteed by Nixon and the attorney general during the prosecutor’s Senate confirmation hearings the previous May. He could be removed only for “cause” — some gross malfeasance in office. But none was even alleged. Nixon’s order to summarily dismiss Mr. Cox thus raised a most profound question: Was the president above the law?
Mr. Richardson and Mr. Ruckelshaus refused to fire Mr. Cox and resigned even as orders for their own dismissals were being issued by the White House. But Robert H. Bork, the United States solicitor general and the acting attorney general after the dismissal of his two superiors, carried out the presidential order, not only firing Mr. Cox but also abolishing the office of the special Watergate prosecutor.

Clive James, British critic.

He once dismissed a tedious public affairs program as “the mental equivalent of navel fluff.” He described William Shatner’s acting technique in “Star Trek” as “picked up from someone who once worked with somebody who knew Lee Strasberg’s sister.”

Jonathan Miller, theater and opera director, “Beyond The Fringe” member, television host, and medical doctor.

I’m generally unfamiliar with his theater and opera work. But I remember when “The Body in Question” aired on US television: I was pretty impressed with the episodes I managed to catch, and would love to watch the whole series again. (It looks like it may be on YouTube, though not in great quality. I can’t find a DVD of it, or of “States of Mind”, which I would also love to see.)

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

Obit watch: November 24, 2019.

Sunday, November 24th, 2019

Gahan Wilson, one of the greatest cartoonists ever.

Michael J. Pollard, character actor. Among his roles: “C.W. Moss” in “Bonnie and Clyde”, “Jahn” in the “Miri” episode of “Star Trek: Original Recipe”, “Fauss” in “Little Fauss and Big Halsy”, and a lot of assorted 60s and 70s TV.

At the Actors Studio he did a scene with Marilyn Monroe, at her request. According to Ms. Ephron, when Ms. Monroe had called him up to do the scene, she said: “Hello, this is Marilyn. The girl from class.”

NYT obit for Fred Cox. (Previously.)

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

Obit watch: November 13, 2019.

Wednesday, November 13th, 2019

Zeke Bratkowski, Green Bay Packers quarterback. He didn’t quite get the level of fame he probably deserved as he spent most of his time backing up some guy named Starr.

By way of Lawrence: Charles Rogers, first round NFL draft choice (and second overall pick) in 2003.

The 6-foot-3, 220-pounder had just 36 catches for 440 yards with four touchdowns in 15 games before he left the league in 2005.

Also by way of Lawrence: Virginia Leith. Possibly an obscure figure, but some folks may remember her as “Jan” (or “Jan In the Pan”) from “The Head Brain That Wouldn’t Die”, which was (of course) a MST3K.

Interestingly, she also did guest shots on some of the better cop shows of the 1970s: “Baretta”, “Starsky and Hutch”, “Barnaby Jones”. “Police Woman”.

Frank Giles, former editor of The Sunday Times of London. He may be best remembered as the man who published the Hitler diaries, though he claimed he knew they were fake and Rupert Murdoch ordered them published anyway.

Posted in 1970s, History, Media, Movies, Nazis, NFL, Obits, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 11, 2019.

Monday, November 11th, 2019

pigpen51 left a very kind and much appreciated comment on the last obit watch. In that vein, someone who I feel like i should remember, but is probably just a little outside the fringes of my consciousness:

Maria Perego. She created Topo Gigio.

Ms. Perego, who worked alongside her husband, Federico Caldura, came up with the 10-inch-tall Topo Gigio in the late 1950s. Topo Gigio was a sort of cross between a puppet and a marionette; three puppeteers, hidden in a black background, moved various body parts with rods.
According to “Sundays With Sullivan: How ‘The Ed Sullivan Show’ Brought Elvis, the Beatles, and Culture to America,” a 2008 book by Bernie Ilson, Mr. Sullivan saw a tape of the puppet from Italian television and booked Topo Gigio for a series of appearances on his popular Sunday-night CBS variety show. The first, the book said, was on April 14, 1963.
Ms. Perego and two other puppeteers were on hand to impart the movements, and a fourth provided Topo Gigio’s voice — but, Mr. Ilson wrote, Mr. Sullivan had not realized that someone would also have to serve as the puppet’s straight man. Mr. Sullivan, who was famously wooden on camera, stepped into that task for the initial appearance, figuring he would arrange for a professional comic to take over for later ones if the bit caught on.
“It was evident from the very first appearance, however, that the chemistry between Sullivan and Topo Gigio worked extremely well,” Mr. Ilson wrote. “The exchanges between Sullivan and the mouselike puppet revealed another side of the host, a warm and humanizing element.”
Mr. Sullivan remained in the role of sidekick for what the book says were some 50 appearances by Topo Gigio over the years. (Other sources give higher numbers.) The appearances often ended with the mouse saying, in a thick Italian accent, “Eddie, kiss me good night.”

A little late on this, but: Ernest J. Gaines. (The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, A Lesson Before Dying)

Laurel Griggs. Nobody should die at 13.

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

Obit watch: November 5, 2019.

Tuesday, November 5th, 2019

The part of me that doesn’t really want to acknowledge reality TV stars is outweighed by the part of me that thinks Rudy Boesch deserves acknowledgement for honorable service to his country.

He joined the merchant marine in 1944 and enlisted in the Navy the next year, training in underwater demolition and serving on ships over the next 17 years.
In 1962 he was among the first SEALs, given charge of setting physical fitness and other standards for Team 2.
“Rudy Boesch had a special understanding of his men,” Mr. Watson wrote, “what they did, and why they did it. That is very rare. There was never a man more devoted to the Navy and the SEALs.”
Mr. Boesch served two tours in Vietnam, though he never talked much about what specifically he did in the service. Between the tours he worked and competed with the Navy bobsled team. He retired from the Navy in 1990 as a master chief petty officer.

Also worth noting: the Wikipedia entry on his military career. I don’t want to quote it here because it has a lot of citations, but suffice it to say that are a lot of Boesch stories.

Overall, in his history of SEAL operations in Vietnam, former SEAL T.L. Bosiljevac writes that Boesch symbolizes much of what the SEAL teams represent and that, “There are a lot of colorful personalities among the teams, but even considering the best of those, Rudy Boesch is a legend. Everybody knows Rudy, and you can bet that Rudy knows everyone in return … [including] some of the Navy’s top brass.”

Posted in History, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

70s television (and aircraft) geekery.

Tuesday, October 22nd, 2019

Those of us who are, shall we say, of a certain age, fondly remember “Baa Baa Black Sheep“.

By way of McThag (and thank you sir): a history of the Corsairs used in filming the show.

A total of eight Corsairs, of varied backgrounds, participated in the filming: four FG-1Ds, two F4U-7s, one F4U-1A, and one F4U-4. Five were combat veterans, two have turned hot laps at Reno, and two later became Oshkosh Grand Champions. Since the conclusion of Black Sheep in 1978, one FG-1D and one F4U-7 have been lost. Of the remaining six aircraft, four are actively flying, one is maintained in airworthy condition but not flown, and the last is awaiting restoration to airworthy condition.

Posted in 1970s, Geek, History, Planes, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 20, 2019.

Sunday, October 20th, 2019

Nick Tosches, fiction writer and biographer.

One of his most attention-getting biographies followed in 1992. It was “Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams,” about Dean Martin.
“Recordings, movies, radio, television: He would cast his presence over them all, a mob-culture Renaissance man,” he wrote of Martin. “And he would come to know, as few ever would, how dirty the business of dreams could be.”
For Mr. Tosches, Martin was a celebrity who beat the unrelenting fame machine, the one that often ground stars up and consigned them to early deaths. (Martin himself died in 1995 at 78.)
“I would describe Dean as a noble character in an ignoble racket in an ignoble age,” Mr. Tosches told The New York Times in 1992.
“Life is a racket,” he added. “Writing is a racket. Sincerity is a racket. Everything’s a racket.”

If everything is a racket, is anything worthwhile? Like trying to help out the poor?

Dr. Paul Polak, a former psychiatrist who became an entrepreneur and an inventor with a focus on helping the world’s poorest people create profitable small businesses, died on Oct. 10 in Denver. He was 86.

…

In an era when foreign aid is largely based on charity, Dr. Polak (pronounced POLE-ack) instead advocated training people to earn livings by selling their neighbors basic necessities like clean water, charcoal, a ride in a donkey cart or enough electricity to charge a cellphone.
Although the nonprofit companies he created did accept donations, their purpose was to help poor people make money. His target market was the 700 million people around the world surviving on less than $2 a day, and he traveled all over the world seeking them out.

…

His most successful project was in foot-powered treadle pumps to pull water out of the ground. Beginning in 1982, he sold millions for about $25 each in Bangladesh and India, he said. The company he created for the project, iDE for International Development Enterprises, now operates in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
The cost included the mechanism, which could be built in a local welding shop, and drilling the well. Dr. Polak’s organization trained thousands of welders and drillers. The customers — small farmers — supplied the foot power and long bamboo handles for the pumps, the device resembling a crude elliptical trainer.
To sell them, Dr. Polak ran a publicity campaign: a singing, dancing Bollywood-style movie about a couple that could not marry because her father could not afford a dowry. But once he bought a pump and could grow vegetables in the dry season, when they fetch more money, love triumphed.

…

By contrast, he said, the World Bank was subsidizing expensive diesel pumps that drew enough water to cover 40 acres. They were handed out by government agents, who could be bribed, he said, and the richest landowner would thus become “a waterlord,” who could drain the aquifer supplying everyone else’s wells and then charge them for water.
“It was very destructive to social justice,” Dr. Polak said.
Another franchise company he started in India was Spring Health, which uses battery power to convert salt into chlorine. The bleach is used to disinfect local water, which is then sold door-to-door in refillable containers.
Franchisees get caps and shirts with distinctive blue raindrops, and street theater troupes help uneducated people make the connection between dirty water and diarrhea, which sickens millions of children every day and, when chronic, can leave them mentally and physically stunted.

Bill Macy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Maude’s husband. But he knocked around a bunch of other stuff too.

Samuel Hynes, literature professor, author, and WWII torpedo bomber pilot. I’ve heard that Flights of Passage: Recollections of a World War II Aviator is a terrific book: anyone out there care to comment?

Not an Oracle guy, but for the historical record: Mark Hurd.

Sara Danius. She was the first woman to head the Swedish Academy. The Academy gives out the literature prize, and she was behind Bob Dylan winning in 2016. She was forced out in 2018.

I note this obit here less because of interest in the literature Nobel, and more because I find that it contains a remarkably high level of editorializing for a NYT obit.

She herself was never accused of wrongdoing. But she was the public face of a global institution whose reputation had been severely damaged.
Behind the scenes, her enemies within the academy sought to protect the accused man. They resisted her attempts to bring in law enforcement and forced her out.
When she left, Ms. Danius acknowledged that her colleagues had lost confidence in her leadership. She also defiantly suggested that arrogant and anachronistic forces within the academy had invoked the institution’s traditions to deny accountability.
“Not all traditions are worth preserving,” she said.
Her abrupt departure infuriated many women — and many men as well — across Sweden, a country that prides itself on gender equality. She was widely viewed as a scapegoat.

…

The man at the center of the sex scandal, Jean-Claude Arnault, was found guilty last year of raping a woman in 2011 and sentenced to two years in jail. In his appeal of the verdict, the appeals court found him guilty of raping the same woman twice and extended his sentence.
In addition, his wife, Katarina Frostenson, a poet who resigned from the academy, was accused of leaking the names of prize recipients to Mr. Arnault on at least seven occasions so that their friends could profit from bets. The two have denied all charges and said they were the objects of a witch hunt.

Posted in 1970s, Books, Geek, History, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 12, 2019.

Saturday, October 12th, 2019

By way of Lawrence, Robert Forster.

Yeah, he was great in “Jackie Brown”, which I still think is Tarantino’s most restrained and disciplined movie. But he did a lot of other movie and TV work to varying degrees of success. As I’ve said before, I wasn’t a “Twin Peaks” guy, so I missed him there. But he was in “Avalanche”, “Maniac Cop 3: Badge of Silence”, and “The Black Hole”, he did guest shots on many series (“Magnum, P.I.”, “Jake and the Fatman”, “Police Story”), and he was in a few unsuccessful series (“Banyon”, “Nakia”, “Karen Sisco”).

Aleksei Leonov, Russian cosmonaut and the first man to walk in space.

What Mr. Leonov did not reveal until many years later was that he and his fellow cosmonaut, Pavel I. Belyayev, who was also an Air Force pilot, were fortunate to have survived.
Mr. Leonov’s specially designed suit had unexpectedly inflated during his walk, and its bulk was preventing him from getting back inside the Voskhod.
“I knew I could not afford to panic, but time was running out,” he recalled in the book “Two Sides of the Moon” (2004), written with the astronaut David Scott, about their experiences in space.
Mr. Leonov slowly deflated the suit by releasing oxygen from it, a procedure that threatened to leave him without life support. But with the reduced bulk, he finally made it inside.
“I was drenched with sweat, my heart racing,” he remembered.
But that, he added, “was just the start of dire emergencies which almost cost us our lives.”
The oxygen pressure in the spacecraft rose to a dangerous level, introducing the prospect that a spark in the electrical system could set off a disastrous explosion or fire.
It returned to a tolerable level, but the cosmonauts never figured out the reason for the surge.
When it came time for the return to Earth, the spacecraft’s automatic rocket-firing system did not work, forcing the cosmonauts to conduct imprecise manual maneuvers during the descent that left them in deep snow and freezing temperatures in a remote Russian forest, far from their intended landing point.
It took several hours for a search party to find them and drop supplies from a helicopter, and they spent two nights in the forest, the first one inside their spacecraft and the second one in a small log cabin built by a ground rescue crew, until rescuers arrived on skis. They then took a 12-mile ski trek to a clearing, where a helicopter evacuated them.

He also survived an attempt to kill Leonid Brezhnev, but you’ll have to read the obit for that story.

Anna Quayle. The name didn’t ring any bells with me, but she was in a bunch of stuff: “A Hard Day’s Night”, “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang”, “Casino Royale” (the first one, with David Niven), “Stop the World – I Want to Get Off”, and the list goes on.

…died on Aug. 16, although her death was not announced by her family until early October. She was 86.
Her family did not say where she died or specify the cause. She had received a diagnosis of Lewy body dementia in 2012.

Posted in 1970s, Geek, History, Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 11, 2019.

Friday, October 11th, 2019

The Francis Currey obit provoked a lively and delightful string of comments. Please go read them, if you haven’t already. And my thanks to Lawrence, pigpen51, and thinkingman.

I held this one from yesterday because I didn’t want to detract: Karen Pendleton, one of the original Mouseketeers.

In 1983, Ms. Pendleton was a passenger in a car accident that injured her spinal cord and left her paralyzed from the waist down. Eight years later, she earned a bachelor’s degree from California State University, Fresno; she went on to earn a master’s in psychology there.
After the accident, she became an advocate for disability rights — she served on the board of the California Association of the Physically Handicapped — and worked as a counselor at a shelter for abused women.

…

Ms. Pendleton was often reminded that fans of the Mouseketeers felt great affection for the show. In 1986, when she was a judge for a beauty pageant for women in wheelchairs, she met a woman with polio who said she had been abused by her parents.
“She said, ‘Being able to see you on “The Mickey Mouse Club” was the only happy part of my childhood,’” Ms. Pendleton recalled in 1995. “My eyes just filled up with tears.”

Bjorn Thorbjarnarson. This is one of those obscure but interesting obits: Dr. Thorbjarnarson was a surgeon who specialized in operations involving the biliary tract. Among his patients: the Shah of Iran.

Dr. Thorbjarnarson led a team of surgeons in removing the shah’s gallbladder, a portion of his liver and several gallstones blocking a bile duct — all under highly unusual circumstances.
“Armed guards controlled the traffic to the patient’s room, and all blinds were always down,” Dr. Thorbjarnarson wrote in a letter in response to “The Shah’s Spleen: Its Impact on History,” an article in The Journal of the American College of Surgeons, in 2010. “Threatening calls were received by nurses attending, but none to me. Outside, the hospital was surrounded by a howling mob, controlled by barricades, calling for the shah’s head.”

He also operated on Andy Warhol, and was sued.

Warhol’s estate continued a private investigation, however, and in 1991 filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against the hospital (now known as NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center) and individuals involved in his care. At a trial in State Supreme Court in Manhattan that year, the estate’s lawyers argued that doctors and nurses had neglected Warhol’s postoperative care and given him an unsafe amount of intravenous fluids.

…

Lawyers for the hospital, as well as for Dr. Thorbjarnarson and Dr. Denton S. Cox, the attending physician and Warhol’s longtime doctor, contended that Warhol had been well enough to watch television and make telephone calls from his hospital room as he recovered. An autopsy gave the cause of death as cardiac arrhythmia, which the hospital argued was related to Warhol’s poor health and not caused by medical error or negligence.

I know it is an obit (De mortuis nil nisi bonum) and it is from the NYT, but i do think the paper makes a good case that Dr. Thorbjarnarson and the hospital weren’t responsible for Warhol’s death. Warhol was a gravely ill man who was deathly afraid of hospitals (being shot by Valerie Solanas will do that to you). He put off treatment until he couldn’t any longer, and even tried to talk Dr. Thorbjarnarson into treating him at Warhol’s home.

“Dr. Thorbjarnarson refused Warhol’s entreaties and found himself justified three days later, when the sick man was at last on the operating table,” Mr. Gopnik said, adding, “The surgeon found a gallbladder full of gangrene.”

The case was settled out of court.

Posted in Geek, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 8, 2019.

Wednesday, October 9th, 2019

Marshall Efron, public television personality of the early 70s.

I’d heard the name, but really didn’t have any association with him: I was very young when “The Great American Dream Machine” was on the air, and I wasn’t much older when “Marshall Efron’s Illustrated, Simplified and Painless Sunday School” came around the first time. (The latter was supposedly re-run frequently, but I’ve never seen an episode.)

By the time “Dream Machine” appeared, Mr. Efron had also begun acting in movies, including the first feature by a young director named George Lucas, the science fiction thriller “THX 1138” (1971). He would continue to act and do voice work in films and television throughout his career. His voice credits included the series “The Smurfs” and “The Biskitts” in the 1980s and the animated films “Ice Age: The Meltdown” (2006) and “Horton Hears a Who!” (2008).

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

Obit watch: October 7, 2019.

Monday, October 7th, 2019

Ginger Baker, noted drummer.

Both as a member of the ensemble and as a soloist, Mr. Baker captivated audiences and earned the respect of his fellow percussionists with playing that was, as Neil Peart, the drummer with the band Rush, once said, “extrovert, primal and inventive.” Mr. Baker, Mr. Peart added, “set the bar for what rock drumming could be.”

Random thought: could Mr. Baker play “YYZ”?

Mr. Baker’s appearance behind the drum kit — flaming red hair, flailing arms, eyes bulging with enthusiasm or shut tight in concentration — made an indelible impression. So, unfortunately, did his well-publicized drug problems and his volatile personality.
Mr. Baker, who by his own count quit heroin 29 times, was candid about his drug and alcohol abuse in his autobiography, “Hellraiser,” published in Britain in 2009.

Got to give it to the man: he was persistent.

He was also, by all accounts, not a very likable man. Journalists who interviewed him tended to find him uncooperative at best, confrontational at worst. The hostility between Mr. Baker and Mr. Bruce, which sometimes led to onstage altercations, was the stuff of rock legend. The 2012 documentary “Beware of Mr. Baker” — the title is taken from a sign outside the house in South Africa where he was living at the time — begins with footage of Mr. Baker physically attacking the film’s director, Jay Bulger.

Lawrence put “Beware of Mr. Baker” on our big movie list. We actually want to watch this, but man! That is a hard movie to find: the DVD and Blu-Ray are “unavailable” from Amazon, and they do list it under “Prime Video” but it’s currently “unavailable” there as well. The movie’s website is apparently now owned by a domain squatter who uses it to advertise casinos, and we haven’t been able to check Netflix or Hulu (not being subscribers to either one).

Rip Taylor, comedian and game show guy.

Mr. Taylor was often confused with the character actor Rip Torn, who died in July.

This.

I kind of got overtaken by stuff over the weekend, so here’s your historical record obit for Diahann Carroll. Little mentioned in her obits, but well known to us common sewers connoisseurs: she was also in “The Star Wars Holiday Special“.

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

Obit watch: special all Mannix edition, September 24, 2019.

Tuesday, September 24th, 2019

Jan Merlin.

In a painful year in England and Ireland in which he served as a “movable prop” and received no screen credit, Merlin donned masks and heavy makeup to portray several characters and substitute for Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis, Frank Sinatra and others in John Huston’s The List of Adrian Messenger (1963). He then wrote a 2001 novel, Shooting Montezuma, based on that experience.

He did a fair amount of other movie work, including “The Oscar” and “The Hindenburg”. He also did a lot of TV, including ‘The F.B.I”, “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea”, “Mission: Impossible”, and, of course, “Mannix” (“A Chance at the Roses“).

Sid Haig. He was in Rob Zombie’s movies, but before those, he was a prolific character actor. He shows up in a couple of Tarrantino films, some blacksploitation stuff, “THX 1138”, and a lot of 70s TV: he was a regular on “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman”, “Get Smart”, “Mission: Impossible”, and, of course, “Mannix” (“Deja Vu“).

Cool story, bro:

The movie was apparently something called “High on the Hog“, which Lawrence pointed out also stars Robert Z’Dar and the legendary Joe Estevez.

Posted in 1970s, Mannix, Movies, TV | Comments Closed

Connections.

Monday, September 23rd, 2019

We watched the original “Night Stalker” Saturday night.

(Hi, Pat!)

That KL Studio Classics blu-ray is pretty awesome: the remaster is sharp and amazingly vivid. (I didn’t see “Night Stalker” when it was originally aired: I was (mumble mumble) years old and my parents wouldn’t let me watch it. This is actually the first time I’ve seen it, but my basis for comparison is the DVD of the TV series and the MeTV rebroadcasts: both seem a little muddy. If KL does a remaster of the series, I am there, man. And I plan to pick up the “Night Strangler” sooner rather than later now.)

The blu-ray also includes some good extras, including an interview with the director, John Llewellyn Moxey (who passed away in April of this year, at 94. I don’t recall seeing his obit reported.)

Anyway, Mr. Moxey was a prolific TV director: his credits include ten episodes of “Mannix”…

…including “End Game“, one of several episodes involving an old Army buddy of Mannix that’s out to get him…(“End Game” is a pretty tense and solid episode: it seems to show up a lot on the top ten episode lists I’ve seen.)

…and “A Ticket to the Eclipse“, another episode featuring an old Army buddy of Mannix that’s out to get him…

…and this time, the old Army buddy is played by none other than Darren McGavin his own self.

Just one of those curious connections that pop up sometimes. (Mr. Moxey seems to imply in his interview that he and Mr. McGavin didn’t know each other well, but they (and their wives) became close friends during the “Night Stalker” filming. Which is odd, because “A Ticket to the Eclipse” aired September 19, 1970, while “Night Stalker” aired January 11, 1972. So “Ticket” was probably filmed at least a year before “Night Stalker”. But, you know, maybe it took filming on location in Las Vegas to make them friends.)

(Lawrence: “Everyone in this movie looks hot.”)

Posted in 1970s, Mannix, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 17, 2019.

Tuesday, September 17th, 2019

Phyllis Newman, actress.

Ms. Newman won a Tony in 1962 as best featured actress in a musical for “Subways Are for Sleeping,” whose book and lyrics were written by her husband, Adolph Green, and his regular collaborator, Betty Comden. In the show, Ms. Newman played a long-term resident of the Brunswick Arms who, to stave off eviction, has shut herself in her room, a role that required Ms. Newman to spend the play in an unusual costume.
“Her line is that she is sick,” Howard Taubman wrote of the character in his review in The New York Times, “and to prove it she wears a towel wrapped around her excellently appointed torso. The only addition to her costume all evening is a pair of black gloves.”

Both my mother and the paper of record tell me that she was also a fixture on a lot of 70s game shows and talk shows, but I don’t remember that.

Cokie Roberts obit will probably be tomorrow, to give the dust time to settle.

Posted in 1970s, Obits, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

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