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There was one called "Mon Petit Chou" with Lee Marvin as the brutish piano player boyfriend of a French singer...in Pittsburgh. Noteable: Sam Peckinpah directed it. Noteable: star Martin Milner has quite the fist fight with Marvin at the end -- and wins -- but the show ends with the French singer continuing on with the abusive Marvin as Milner must leave town. Marvin has a propensity to slap the French singer around and the show doesn't punish him...downer ending.
And back to that Lorre/Chaney Jr./Karloff episode.
Again, that's the only one I remember from its broadcast. I was big on the Universal movie monsters as a kid, and TV Guide played up these guys coming together for a "Halloween episode" of Route 66...so suddenly, I was interested in a show that otherwise for "adults." I asked to get to stay up late to watch it. The episode opens with the three actors on a "conference call"(actually called that) and uses split screens for Lorre in Chicago, Chaney in Los Angeles, Karloff in London...very ahead of its time for 1962. David Thomson has called Lon Chaney Jr "that saddest of actors" and he always seemed so...getting small roles but looking sad and terrible(alcohol?) He is sympathetic in this episode but the sadness comes through. (Lorre wasn't doing great, either - only Karloff was really in OK professional shape at the time.)
Despite the restrictions of contrivance and sometimes subpar writing of 60''s TV, those Route 66 episodes are a nice time capsule of America in the early 60's -- "on location," with the requisite lineups of top guest star actors. Worth a look.
And George Maharis was the cooler of the two guys and the show DID crash and burn after he left.
A bit more on Route 66:
I stumbled onto the episodes on YouTube some time ago and I was always thinking of writing about them here given the presence of Balsam and Oakland and Miles in the episodes. With Balsam and Oakland especially, the cadences and body language of both men were EXACTLY as they were in Psycho -- Balsam with his little nods while listening and his pursing of his lips and his deep voice; Oakland with his bombast and oversell. And Balsam wears a hat.
But watching several episodes back to back(or skimming them, with fast forward) I was impressed by the mood and look of the show. The instrumental "Route 66" theme song by Nelson Riddle is not to be confused with the jazz tune with lyrics ("Get your kicks on route 66") that came before it. No, the TV theme song was at once more cool and more ...melancholy in a weird way. These two guys drive into these desolate towns and big cities and the music sets a mood of "ennui on the road." VERY moody.
And the location work is just great -- famous cities, UNfamous cities -- all across America.. (The YouTube comments are filled with people saying: "I was there when they filmed that episode in 1962, that's my house 20 minutes into the show." "I used to work at that marina; its still there.") A national shared event.
Sterling Siliphant had a big reputation as a TV dramatist, his scripts ALMOST reach good movie-level writing. Balsam's lines are just plain weird in "Somehow It Gets to Be Tomorrow" but that title is very sad at the end: Balsam is a social worker trying to help two wayward orphans on the run....he's hoping that tomorrow will be good for both kids.
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That's what I like about Mirsch's book. He has a pretty photographic memory for how ALL his movies came together, the deals made, etc. (And having to do "the dirty work": John Sturges made MIRSCH take Joan Hackett to lunch and fire her. Ah, the life of the producer.) You can sense, going in, that even with John Sturges as the director, The Satan Bug was not given a budget big enough to attract major stars and had to be made "on the cheap."
Noteable: the head villain(mad scientist) is Richard Basehart, he of the short stature and big voice(I guess James Mason was unaffordable). His two henchmen -- both stocky and middle-aged young -- were played by Frank Sutton(Gomer Pyle's DI) and Ed Asner(Lou Grant.) And there were roles for Psycho alums John Anderson and Simon Oakland.
One of Mirsch's other flops was a comedy called "Fitzwilly" about a butler(Dick Van Dyke) who organizes a crime ring to support the household of his no longer rich dowager boss. It was a nothing movie(with, noted Mirsch, a pretty good romantic theme song called "Make Me Rainbows" that even I remember) but what's interesting is that Mirsch first took a meeting with the retired Cary Grant to try to bring him back in the role. Grant accepted the meeting because....Walter Mirsch. But he didn't accept the role.
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But Walter is honest about the ones that didn't work. Here he is on The Satan Bug:
"We were disappointed that we were not able to get a major star to play the leading role, but finally the idea of using a young actor named George Maharis was suggested. George had been in Route 66 and John (Sturges) pressured us to cast him. I felt that the subject required a major action-adventure star. George Maharis wasn't that, not did he ever become a major movie star."
Well, that's pretty direct. I wonder who turned them down? The story was too much of a pulp thriller, I suppose, to lure in Paul Newman; Sturges must have asked Steve McQueen(his star in The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape), but must have gotten a no. How about James Garner from The Great Escape? Rock Hudson might have been star enough. Reliable second tier Rod Taylor? James Coburn wasn't ready yet. Were Bill Holden and Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas "too old?"
I take note of this because Walter Mirsch mentions that he "couldn't get a major star to play the role." I wonder why? The money? The script?(Hell, it was from Alastair MacLean under a pseudonym by heavyweights James Clavell and Edward Anhalt -- you could look THEM up.)
Walter Mirsch also writes this on The Satan Bug: "After shooting for about two weeks at a Palm Springs location, John (Sturges) called and told me that he was very dissatisfied with Joan Hackett, the leading lady he had chosen. He asked me to get in touch with Joan and to explain to her that we were going to replace her. I arranged to meet her for lunch, and it was a painful experience for both of us. We then chose Anne Francis, who had worked with John on "Bad Day at Black Rock."
So THAT's how Anne Francis got the female lead in "The Satan Bug." Sturges remembered her from Bad Day. Too bad for Joan Hackett..but that's showbiz. And Anne Francis was one hot number in 1965; she launched her "sexy karate private eye show" Honey West, the same year.
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2. The Satan Bug (1965). A not-much-discussed biological war thriller directed by hot-at-the-time, usually reliable John Sturges. And... it's on youtube too.
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The movie is what you might call "handsome" (with much of the Panavision wide screen taking in images of the weird and beautiful Palm Springs desert area for the suspense and pursuit) and it has a great Jerry Goldsmith score of a certain type(buzzing electronic SciFi music, as with Fantastic Voyage and Planet of the Apes.)
But it is awfully spare, not a TV movie, but pretty small.
One of the better "practical" books I have on movies is by Walter Mirsch, and its called "I Thought We Were Making Movies, Not History."
Its a fun read, because Walter writes about the many,many, MANY movies that the Mirsch Brothers made(mainly at United Artists, then at Universal) and some of them were very big: Some Like It Hot, The Apartment(they were Billy Wilder's guys right up through The Front Page at Universal); West Side Story; The Magnificent Seven(and all its cheapjack sequels); The Pink Panther(and all its OK sequels)...Hawaii..In the Heat of the Night.
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So now, the LENGTH of your standing ovation can matter...and can kill you.
Flashback: Hitchcock came to Cannes in 1972 to show Frenzy out of competition . He was accompanied into the event by Princess Grace(after all , it was HER country). There are photos, the former Grace Kelly has trendy long 1972 hair -- you can see the older star she WOULD have been on screen. I wonder what SHE thought of Frenzy?
Anyway, Frenzy got a ten minute standing ovation or something like that, and I always found that to be part of the great "Hitchcock comeback of 1972." But now I'm not so sure. Of the comeback...yes. Of Cannes applause meaning anything...no.
On the other hand: Scorsese and his "Killers of the Flower Moon" got a ten minute ovation this year. And QT and "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" got a ten minute ovation in 2019.
Or something like that...
And: Brian DePalma made a 2002 thriller called "Femme Fatale" which has an opening set piece jewelry robbery AT the Cannes event, it was for me the only real "look inside" at the event, with great big Panavision images of the red carpet and the applauding theater crowd. Worth a watch for the Cannes elements alone.
Somewhat relatedly: I saw a photo from the Cannes film Festival prize-giving over the weekend: QT was handing out the Palme D'Or top award, which was bizarre given that he wasn't on any of the Juries.
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Yeah, but he's really the kind of "star director writer (sometimes actor)" that Old Hollywood was built on.
I sometimes feel a lot of people are missing that about QT. His movies have sick scenes in them, ultra violence and -- more fatally -- large doses of overlong self-indulgence in scene length and dialogue. But the man and his movies "caught a wave" in 1992 that has crested for 30 years and has left him afloat as one of our true superstar directors, "just for the fun of it." (And as with Billy Wilder and Woody Allen, he WRITES his own stuff, all alone, which Wilder did not do.) And I will note: I find those sick scenes and overlong scenes to be flaws in the films but I love ALL the films. He knows what he is doing. He's an entertainer who works with big stars. Kind of like Hitchcock --whom it turns out, QT pretty much doesn't respect at all.
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Cannes strikes me as the ultimate insider house of cards built out of back-scratching and back-biting and personal vendettas!
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Yes, well THIS year -- Johnny Depp showed up and THAT started something. He has his supporters, but a contingent of women came on stage wearing shirts bearing Amber Heard's image. (Hey, why give EITHER of them much attention, eh?)
I have found this to be the funniest aspect of Cannes in recent years:
Internet press agents dutifully report that various debut movies and their casts and directors got "a ten minute standing ovation" or "a nine minute standing ovatation" as if this is BIG NEWS when actually it is just the weird star-poking nature of the crowd.
But this backfired: the new Indy Jones movie ONLY got a "five minute standing ovation" -- so it must be terrible. However, STAR Harrison Ford got a "ten minute standing ovation" BEFORE the movie came on.
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Wilder and Hitch probably understood each other's tricks better than most. Both spent crucial time in wild, sexually diverse and free 1920s Berlin (e.g., https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/billy-wilder-in-weimar-berlin ), and both were ready to make bank in Hayes Code America from hinting at the presence of all the sophisticated/sordid stuff that was officially repressed there, i.e., that had only broken out into the open back in Weimar Berlin. And 1920s Berlin was, of course, full of hotshot film-makers and painters and dramatists that young 'uns like Wilder and Hitch (and Siodmak, Ulmer, Zinnemann, and many others), of course, could soak up enormous amount from and would use to their advantages throughout their American and English Language careers.
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Great historical stuff in there, swanstep. Funny, given how quickly Germany plunged into horror by the 30s, that it could have been such a hot and humid breeding ground for great filmmakers, Expressionistic style, and sinful content in the 20s. (I always felt this came back a little when the Beatles kept jumping over to Germany to play clubs and bed strippers in the 60s.)
I guess we can add Fritz Lang there?
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Sidebar:
Netflix is running Billy Wilder's "late movie"(in the dire Tarantino tradition), The Front Page of 1974 right now. It was released at Christmas 1974 by Universal in an attempt to tie into the nostalgia of "The Sting" in the Christmas of 1973. Wilder brought along the insurance of Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau as stars -- but only Matthau was really bankable, and just coming off a trio of thrillers -- Charley Varrick, The Laughing Policeman, and The Taking of Pelham 123 -- that made his Billy Wilder vehicle(from an old 20's play) look that much more dated. The Front Page is OK enough -- the play was solid foundation, Lemmon and especially Matthau were fun. The support cast(including Charles Durning from The Sting, and young Susan Sarandan) was great. The real flaw to the movie was WILDER, who burdened the classic play with his dated re-written lines -- an attempt to be modern with un-hip cussing and clumsy sex jokes and anti-gay humor... WILDER was the problem with his own movie.
And Universal honcho Lew Wasserman figured that out. Wilder's new contract with Universal was summarily ended and he was sent out into the wilderness. Meanwhile, Wasserman kept his old pal Hitchcock on contract and supported for one last film(Family Plot.) I'm sure some of this was Wasserman's loyalty to Hitch as a friend, but also: Universal's ownership of Psycho and the Hitchcock TV series were lucrative and Wasserman KNEW that Universal stood to own the Paramount movies like Rear Window and Vertigo some day. So : Hitchcock IN, Wilder OUT at Universal.
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What a bunch of liars.
Well, they all have their reasons.
Ha ha. Lots of famous writers, including one who died last week, Martin Amis, have been *utterly obsessed* with the dark sides of ambition and success in fields that often pose as being very un-business-like or even as fundamentally uncompetitive and high-minded. Gore Vidal's famous dictum that for writers, 'It's not enough to succeed. Others must fail.'
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A famous and grim line, that one. And I guess SOME in Hollywood live by it. That Easy Riders, Raging Bulls book is full of such bile. Director Robert Altman and studio guy/producer Don Simpson hated each other; their quotes in that book are awful but Altman had the last laugh when Simpson died of drugs on the toilet: "I'm glad he's gone. I only wished he suffered more." Man, life's too short, guys! (As Don Simpson found out.)
To the contra: we had what looked like some pretty good fellowship among the "movie brats" of the 70s: Spielberg and Lucas and Scorsese and Coppola worked on each other's movies, gave each other points, used the same actors, etc. DePalma was part of that crowd but needed some years to get the same kind of respect(because of his Hitchcock copycatting.) Still: they DID seem to help each other.
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Anyhow, *not everyone* in Hollywood succumbs to the temptations of pettiness and spite and feathering ones own nest and subtle undermining of others that's part of the on-going brute competition for attention, collaborators, money, fame, posterity, and all the rest of it, but a hell of a lot do.
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Perhaps as they grew older, fearful bitternesses arose. Wilder saying about the dead Hitchcock: "I'm glad I don't have him to compete against anymore." Elsewhere, when Some Like It Hot and The Apartment hit back to back and the latter won Oscars, Wilder noted that he FINALLY had a bankable name. Prior to then, Wilder noted, "Only DeMille and Hitchcock had name clout at the box office."
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When women were assumed to be ready to leave the workforce as soon as they found a husband, that shit about finding another job made a bit of sense, even if it was totally unfair and one-sided. After all, she'd failed to find a husband at that job, why would she want to stay at a place that had failed to provide her with a husband? Which was a horribly limited view at the time, and fortunately it seems to have all gone away some times around the 1970s.
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Well, I'll take that point, but in my experience with some of the couples at the workplace I knew, the MAN left for other work. It really depended upon mobility.
I think in certain government jobs(police?) if couples are formed, the rules REQUIRE someone to quit. Its a tough situation, really.
But honestly, and again, from my own experience. Lots and lots of men and women work together and its professional and usually these men and women have spouses "outside" and contrary to all the "affair movies" and such...its cool. Husbands and wives are OUTSIDE the company, co-workers are off limits to married workers. Until they aren't. The real world.
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But of course people still shit where they eat, and it leads to situations like the one at my last job, where two exes who hated each other in spite of their growing child still worked at the same place, because damned if either was going to give up the excellent jobs they both held. They didn't have to work together directly, they avoided interacting, which didn't stop the office busybodies from constantly gossiping about them both.
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Well, that's when the shit/eat issue becomes real hard. Because...you just have to live with it when you break up. Can we?
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So if anyone but Roger is reading this remember: Don't shit where you eat!
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And Roger also notes this: one other route (so famous in the press) to coupledom is : internships. People coming through temporarily, so they can be pursued when they leave.
Nothing's easy about love.
Universal patented the Sensurround process but only used it in a few more movies: Midway(WWII bombing action); Rollercoaster(for the rollercoaster rides) and a Battlestar Galactca movie. Evidently the speaker set ups cost too much to set up and sometimes knocked plaster off the walls and ceilings of theaters.
Sensurround was created by big speakers BROUGHT INTO the theater. Soon, Dolby, THX, and all the other modern sound processes would be BUILT IN to the theater.
I remember when the disaster movie craze was happening.
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It seems like all crazes start with a stand alone blockbuster or two. "Airport" was SORT OF a disaster movie -- except the plane made it and there was only one death. It was more of a multi-character soap opera. But Airport was a hit, and when The Poseidon Adventure hit big (and it WAS a disaster movie)..game on. By 1974, there were plenty in the pipeline ready to release. In 1975, we got "The Hindenburg," as a 'historical disaster movie" with a real disaster.
"Jaws" was sort of sold as a disaster movie...and might have felt more like one had Heston played Chief Brody, which would have been horrible. It overcame the disaster moniker to play more like a very special mix of thriller, horror, adventure and...comedy.
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There were also quite a few TV movies as well.
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Yes, much cheaper productions with TV level stars. I think Irwin Allen produced one called "Fire" and one called "Flood."
One of the first ABC Movies of the Week was "Seven in Darkness," about a plane crash and the survival in the mountains of the seven survivors...all BLIND. And when they reached a rickety bridge that WE saw led to a big gap..."and now a word from our sponsors."
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I remember my dad wanting to see Earthquake when we were on a trip in Miami because the theater had Sensurround which wasn’t available in Key West where we lived.
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Nice place to live! I'm envious.
Yes, the key to Earthquake was that Senssurround, which I found quite fun -- really shook the theater and assaulted the ears. They used it over the first "long" earthquake, a shorter later one, and the final dam break.
As I found out the time, anyone can duplicate the Sensurround experience if you go to a jacuzzi or hot tub, get in, turn on the jets...and lower your head underwater near the jets. EXACTLY the same sound and vibration. I discovered this by accident.
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Carol was mainly playing Karen Black’s part but they edited in some prerecorded scenes of her playing her version of Nora Desmond and Harvey playing her butler.
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The perfect use of Burnett's "old movie spoofery" in a new context...
Well I agree on the workplace danger of shitting where you are eating.
I'd say it is only truly successful when one of the partners voluntarily elects to move to a new job. Which is a pretty big sacrifice unless one or both are in "entry level" positions and moving on is not a big problem.
Speaking of "Mad Men," after Don's first wife Betty divorces him and he's living on his own, he sequentially:
ONE: Has a one night stand with his secretary who MUST quit her job in the aftermath.
TWO: Has a one night stand with his NEXT secretary, who is of "better stock" and hence becomes his second wife AND his co-worker in the office -- he promotes her to ad job. But she REALLY wants to be an actress in commercials -- and then Hollywood. All SORTS of trouble ensues.
THREE: Is given a real old battleax secretary after the first two end up as his bedmates.
So THAT show got it.
But still: boys and girls together under one roof on a daily basis...romances do occur.
..and it IS funny that neither Professor Fate nor his henchman Max are fazed by her beauty at all. They just ignore her or fight with her...
A thread over a 16 year period (at least) and we got a real mystery here:
"Robert Turner" or "Albert O'Nan"
...which WAS The Farmer in The Great Race?
In any event, I like all the stories about both of these men and I didn't realize the opening scenes were shot in Kentucky. I must admit, the terrain doesn't look anything like California....
But...Mrs. Robinson!
Also a nicely "mature" love interest for George C. Scott...though love never really gets a chance to show up in this story.
Great question. Nope, it was always called "Airport 1975" and it didn't make sense at the time. I think it came out in October...plenty of 1974 was left.
They corrected the mistake three years later: "Airport '77" WAS released in 1977.
Interesting "release trivia":
When "The Poseidon Adventure" became such a hit at Christmas of 1972(it was either Number One or Number Two for the year, behind The Godfather) "the race was on" to make more disaster movies.
And the first crop of them hit two years later, in late 1974, in this order:
October, 1974: "Airport 1975" a Universal movie(cheapish) with Charlton Heston and George Kennedy.
November, 1974: "Earthquake" a Universal movie(cheapish but better effects)...with Charlton Heston and George Kennedy. (Universal had no real "range of casting," eh?)
December, 1974 "The Towering Inferno" a joint Warner Brothers/20th Century Fox movie, very expensive with two very big stars(Steve McQueen and Paul Newman) leading the all-star cast. It was said that two studios needed to finance the film to pay for two superstars, two directors, and two books combined into one title(The Tower and The Glass Inferno.)
The Towering Inferno was from Irwin Allen, who also produced The Poseidon Adventure and who, this time, had the budget to buy the best in talent. I recall building excitement as a lot of us waited for The Towering Inferno at Christmas by watching the "lesser" Airport 1975 in October and Earthquake in November -- they were the "opening acts" for the Big One.
But soon...the disaster craze died down and out. At the end of the 70s, Irwin Allen pitched nothing but losers, one(The Swarm) by one(Beyond the Poseidon Adventure) by one(When Time Ran Out...about a volcano...with a humiliated looking Paul Newman in it.)
Came 1980 and the spoof "Airplane" the disaster movie craze was over.
Until it came back...
Oddly, amidst all these movie roles, Karen Black did a TV movie that turned out to be famous. It was called "Trilogy of Terror" -- three different stories, only one of which was memorable but pretty scary for TV: it was about a "devil doll" with a knife chasing Black all around her apartment with murder on his lil biddy mind.
Still, the fact that Black DID a TV movie in the same year she did "Day of the Locust" suggested that she wasn't really cracked up to be a star. And within a few short years, she wasn't a star anymore.
I'll concede that her looks may have been part of it. Her offbeat beauty and lower class manner FIT the counterculture of Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, and Drive He Said. But when she tried to move up and over into "mainstream film" (Airport 1975, an Alfred Hitchcock movie)...she looked lacking.
Still -- she's passed away now and her career HAS those counterculture classics, and Hitchcock's final film, and even the camp stardom of Airport 1975 -- there's a whole book on 70's movies with the title "The Stewardess is Flying the Plane!}
That would be Karen Black....