Laughing It Up with George Schlatter

I was delighted to see, on the People magazine site, an article about George Schlatter. George who? It seems there’s a brand-new documentary, Sock It to Me: The Legend of George Schlatter, now coming onto the market to celebrate Schlatter’s 96^th year.  Back when I was a college kid, Schlatter was the producer of a little sketch comedy show called Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In. As a one-off TV special that aired on  September 9, 1967, the show generated such buzz—especially among young audiences—that it returned as a weekly series, replacing the once-huge Man from U.N.C.L.E, at the beginning of 1968. It ran until July of 1973, when its youthful sexiness finally ran out of steam. 

 I take all this personally partly because Laugh-In was must-see TV where I lived. Its inspired brand of silliness (Goldie Hawn frugging in a bikini and a lot of flower-power tattoos; Arte Johnson as a dirty old man constantly being whacked by Ruth Buzzi’s handbag; Lily Tomlin as precocious little Edith Ann proclaiming “That’s the truth!” and blowing raspberries) will always stay with me. At a time when public life seemed increasingly fraught, it was a joy to laugh at bad  jokes and sketches performed by talented showbiz newcomers.

  Hawn and Tomlin, in particular, have certainly gone on to major Hollywood careers. But the show was also so trendy that it attracted guests with high star-wattage. When Schlatter and his writers unearthed Dewey "Pigmeat" Markham’s goofy “Here Comes the Judge” routine, Sammy Davis Jr. started showing up regularly in a judicial robe and powdered wig to increase the hilarity: I’m not exactly sure why we laughed so hard, but it was awfully funny. (Briefly there was even a car model on the market called The Judge, meant to capitalize on the show’s catch-phrase.) There were also frequent guest appearances by major social and political figures. Early on, one of the show’s recurrent gags was for a cast member to say, “Sock it to me,” and then get doused by a pail of water. Pretty soon, there were quick cuts of celebrities—including presidential candidate Richard Nixon—reciting variants on the “sock it to me” line. (Nixon was all innocence, quizzically asking, “Sock it to me?) 

 The other reason I’m delighted to learn of George Schlatter being alive and well is that, as a long-ago budding journalist, I got to do a sit-down interview with the guy.  It was late 1968, I think, and I was writing on entertainment for the UCLA Daily Bruin. With Laugh-In such a money-maker, Schlatter was launching a new and even more adventurous show. Called Turn-On, it was intended to make creative and humorous use of computer technology. But critics hated it, and audiences did too. By the time my article was published, Turn-On had been turned off by the network, after a single episode hit the airwaves. It’s still considered one of the biggest fiascos in TV history.

 As Turn-On was being readied for that fatal first airing, Schlatter was delighted to be interviewed by a young college journalist. He was cordial and funny. After the Turn-On debacle and the publication of my interview, he took time out from licking his psychic wounds to write me a thank-you note. After all these years, I’d have a really hard time digging out either the published interview or his response. But I remember I had quipped that he—then almost forty—relied in conversation on a “predictably with-it vocabulary.” He answered back, “At the risk of exhausting my predictably with-it vocabulary, your piece is a gas!” 

Keep on trucking, George!  

 

"80 For Brady”: Before Time Passes Us By

On a flight back to L.A. following a trip that was alternatively inspiring and stressful, I was looking for light-weight entertainment on my seatback system. That’s why I turned to 80 for Brady, a comedy I knew would distract me from the cares of my everyday world. How could it fail to amuse, given that its cast was headed by some of Hollywood’s most reliable veterans? The combined star power of Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Rita Moreno, and Sally Field (not to mention their combined Oscars, Emmys, and other accolades) was sure to divert me from my own anxieties. And so it (mostly) did.

 Very loosely based on an actual group of octogenarians with super-sized crushes on New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, the plot features four lifelong friends of a certain age who stake everything on a trip to Houston to cheer on their hero in Super Bowl LI.  Of course the differences between the four women are sharply delineated. Trish (Jane Fonda) is a still-glamorous former beauty queen with a record number of failed romances. Maura (Rita Moreno) is a recent widow whose life in a dead-end retirement home is stifling her competitive spirit. The youngster of the group is Betty (Sally Field), who keeps reminding everyone that she’s personally not yet 80. She’s (theoretically) the responsible one: a mathematics whiz whose fellow-professor spouse (Bob Balaban) is a bit too clingy for the good of their marriage. Finally there’s Lou (Lily Tomlin), whose need for a big adventure at this point in her life clouds her judgment, and is the axis around which this story turns.

 I always dread movies that demean “cute” senior citizens by showing them trying to emulate younger, hipper folks. And of course there’s some of that here, including the inevitable (sigh!) sequence in which they accidentally trip out on cannabis gummies. And I winced when so much of the plot hinges on the search for an essential lost item (yes, I too had just lost something important, which is why this plane trip was so fraught for me.) Still, there’s fun to be had when the four overcome the world’s easy stereotypes about the elderly by showing they can dance like champions, play a killer hand of cards, and emerge victorious from a spicy food competition hosted by TV’s Guy Fieri.

 What startled me, in retrospect, was the weird parallel between 80 For Brady and the kind of movie my peers and I enjoyed when we were teenagers. One big hit in my junior highs school crowd was 1960’s Where The Boys Are. It’s the story of four college co-eds (back then the term was still used) who head south to Florida for spring break. Of course their #1 goal is romance, and they mostly find it, with very mixed results. The natural leader of the group (Dolores Hart) discovers the kind of love that may last a lifetime. The joker (Paula Prentiss in her film debut) finds an equally tall, equally goofy opposite number (Jim Hutton), and they briefly enjoy a romantic romp. Poor Angie (recording star Connie Francis) never succeeds at love, but she gets to sing the plaintive title song, which was soon blasting from radios throughout the country. And the most serious of the plotlines features lovely Yvette Mimieux whose trusting nature leads her into a genuine crisis.

 The ladies of 80 for Brady are mostly not looking for love, or even sex. Their problems are darker: widowhood, the diminishing of personal autonomy, life-threatening illness. Which doesn’t stop them from having fun wherever they can find it.

Exit Laughing: A Farewell Tribute to Carl Reiner

I never met Carl Reiner, but I’ve been near-by. After a big-deal screening at the Motion Picture Academy, I sat in a restaurant booth adjoining the booth occupied by Reiner, his wife Estelle (famous for “I’ll have what she’s having”), his pal Mel Brooks, and Brooks’ wife Anne Bancroft. The hearty merriment at that table spilled over to where I sat, to the point where I wanted to tell the waiter, “I’ll have what they’re having!” (So sad that now, in the wake of Reiner’s recent death, Mel Brooks is --at 94–the last survivor of that jolly foursome.)

Reiner did it all: he was a comic actor, a writer, a director, a producer, a husband, a father, an all-around mensch. In his honor, I’ve just watched three films he directed, starting with the earliest, Enter Laughing. This 1967 flick, based on a Reiner novel that became a Broadway play, features the sweetness, the goofiness, and the Borscht Belt yucks that have marked Reiner’s work ever since. Young Reni Santoni’s role (played by Alan Arkin in the stage version) is that of a nice Bronx kid who pines to be an actor, like his idol Ronald Colman. Though his parents have decreed he should go to pharmacy school, he sneaks away from his machine-shop job to meet a shyster thespian (Jose Ferrer, dripping with pomposity). There’s an hilarious audition scene (see below) in which he triumphs over two other loser-candidates (the young Rob Reiner is one) simply because the impresario’s actress-daughter (Elaine May) finds him cute. The film’s working-class Jewish elements, including the memorable appearance of old vaudevillian Jack Gilford and a lot of schtik about a prayer shawl, seem to tie in to Reiner’s own Bronx upbringing. His debut as a movie director is hardly a polished one, but there’s a real sense of personal investment in this light-hearted trifle. 

 Reiner’s directorial career was undeniably lifted by his collaboration on four films with Steve Martin. Martin’s comic stock-in-trade has always been his WASP roots. He pokes fun at himself in The Jerk (1979) as Navin, the son of poor but lovable Black sharecroppers. Though too dense to figure out he’s adopted, he’s the one family member with no sense of rhythm, and his favorite birthday treat is a bologna sandwich on white bread with a cellophane-wrapped Twinkie for dessert. Remarkably, when he goes out into the world, his innocent invention of a device for glasses-wearers called Opti-Grab, earns him a fortune. But it all goes down the tubes when his invention turns out to make users crossed-eyed. Carl Reiner has an hilarious cameo as a cross-eyed version of himself, hauling Navin into court as part of a class-action lawsuit.

The Jerk ends with Martin’s character happily dancing up a storm with his down-home family. A ballroom pas de deux also ends perhaps my favorite Martin/Reiner collaboration, the hilarious All of Me. The inspired 1984 pairing of Martin with Lily Tomlin posits that he is a lawyer who’d rather be a musician and she is a dying heiress who plans to come back from the dead via a mystic transmigration of her soul, as arranged by a charming but pixilated Tibetan guru (Richard Libertini). Somehow, Tomlin’s spirit ends up in Martin’s body, with hilarious results. I suspect if these two Steve Martin films were released today, the political-correctness police might come down hard on them, accusing them of cultural appropriation as well as racial insensitivity. But they’re good-natured fun, something we truly need now. Thank you, Carl Reiner, for making me laugh.

Senioritis: Is Hollywood Rediscovering Ageing Boomers?

It’s not easy being (ahem!) a person of a certain age. In the COVID-19 era, Seniors are considered particularly vulnerable. We’re constantly warned about interacting with others, and so we’re stuck at home with our TV sets, watching the young and the beautiful cavort and canoodle. And then there are those commercials, reminding us of the failings of our bodies, and recommending denture creams, diabetes cures, and Viagra. (Thank heavens for cable!)

I applaud Erica Manfred, a fellow member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, who has managed to turn her age into an asset. As a longtime Florida-based freelance journalist, she now specializes in the needs and aspirations of senior citizens. She writes about technology, health, and financial matters from a senior perspective. And she also has her eye on the entertainment world, chronicling how Seniors are portrayed on both the big and the small screens. On a site called Senior Planet she writes approvingly about Game of Thrones, praising the long-running series for making its elder characters—like Diana Rigg’s Olenna Tyrell—some of the saga’s most complex and interesting.

In a 2015 piece on the same site, she compares two dramatic films that showcase ageing rockers looking back on what they gave up to become who they are. In Danny Collins, Al Pacino plays a once-heartthrob who now makes a tidy living playing nostalgia gigs, all the while consumed with self-loathing. Ricki and the Flash, which was Jonathan Demme’s final feature, puts the spotlight on Meryl Streep as an Indianapolis wife and mother who long ago broke with her family to launch a showbiz career. She’s now a music-industry also-ran, working as a checker in an L.A. supermarket while also headlining the house band at a rowdy Tarzana hangout called the Salt Well. But she’s  suddenly summoned back home when a crisis befalls her grown daughter (played by Streep’s actual daughter, Mamie Gummer), and the rest of the film deals with her unsteady reconciliation with the family she left behind. As Manfred sagely puts it, “There’s nothing all that new about regret and remorse, but Ricki and the Flash might have put its finger on a predicament that’s fairly unique to aging Boomers; we were the first generation to claim self-fulfillment as our birthright, and many of us chose to put duty and responsibility aside to follow our dreams.” She also notes, “Women, especially, grapple with family versus career, and may have given up one for the other. As Ricki says bitterly at one point, ‘No one blames Mick Jagger for leaving his family to play music.’” 

 For TheAtlantic.com, Manfred highlights what she sees as “the encouraging greying of Hollywood.” Noting the enormous box office success of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and its sequel, she believes that the movie industry has discovered the growing power of older audiences at the box office. The upshot, she feels, is that more and more recent movies make room for characters who challenge our assumptions about ageing. As a result, some of our best actors are given an opportunity to play juicy roles that go far beyond geriatric stereotype: see Robert Redford in The Old Man & the Gun, Jonathan Pryce and Anthony Hopkins in The Two Popes, Liam Neeson as a credible action hero in a whole slew of suspense dramas. Among older actresses are Lily Tomlin toplining Grandma, Sally Field in Hello, My Name is Doris, Blythe Danner in the romantic and poignant I’ll See You in My Dreams. And of course Tomlin and Jane Fonda  TV’s Grace and Frankie boldly exploring the late-in-life years.