I started my professional TV career in the fall of 1979 as a once-a-week movie critic on Milwaukee's ABC affiliate. During that time, I went to a downtown Milwaukee screening room to see an upcoming, new movie release. It was GREASE 2, a 1982 follow-up to the hugely successful movie musical, GREASE.
I felt that GREASE 2 was rather tepid. However, there was one cast member whose work hit me like a bolt of sweet lightning. Not only was she a major babe, she had major talent and undeniable screen charisma. After the movie ended, I asked the publicist, "Who was that blonde?" The answer was...Michelle Pfeiffer.
In the late 80s, I had my own prime time celebrity talk show on VH1. Actor Beau Bridges was my guest for one edition and revealed that he and his brother, Jeff Bridges, would be playing bickering brothers who are a piano duo act in a new movie. He added that they were looking for "the right girl" for the female lead of the singer brought into the act.
The right girl was certainly found. Michelle Pfeiffer played the female lead in 1989's THE FABULOUS BAKER BOYS, one of the best American films of the 1980s. The performance brought her an Oscar nomination for Best Actress.
Today is Michelle Pfeiffer's birthday.
I flew my mom in to New York to visit me and be entertained for a few days. I took her to see THE FABULOUS BAKER BOYS. It was about the third time I'd seen it. After the movie, Mom said this about Michelle Pfeiffer: "She's about the best thing since Barbara Stanwyck!"
Here's a reminder of how good that movie is --
Here's a trailer from another film that earned Pfeiffer one of her three Oscar nominations. It's for 1992's LOVE FIELD.
Happy Birthday to Ms. Pfeiffer. She sure has come a long, long, fabulous way since GREASE 2.
I am one of those folks who has become addicted to the loopy optimism and complicated heart of TED LASSO.
Ted's team goes on the road in the current episode. If you have access to the series on Apple+, you must see it. Episode 6 shines with four things I love -- Chet Baker music, Burt Bacharach music, the beauty of Vincent Van Gogh and male bonding.
Here's a Season 3 trailer.
LET'S GET LOST is the name of a documentary about jazz musician/vocalist Chet Baker that was made by Bruce Weber and released in 1989. Baker sang "Let's Get Lost" on one of his albums. The song came from a 1940s Paramount musical called HAPPY GO LUCKY starring Mary Martin, Dick Powell and Betty Hutton.
I'll end with a quote from Lasso team player Zava in one of this season's episodes:
"if you put your energy into the thing you truly love, the Universe puts its thing back into you."
I loved him ever since I was a little boy growing up in South Central Los Angeles. We had his records. Every Harry Belafonte TV appearance was Must-See Family Viewing in our house. We loved his smart, entertaining music variety specials. We saw his movies on TV and on the big screen -- his three films with Dorothy Dandridge: 1953's BRIGHT ROAD, 1954's CARMEN JONES for which Dandridge received her groundbreaking Best Actress Oscar nomination, and 1957's ISLAND IN THE SUN. At the drive-in, we saw him in THE WORLD, THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL and ODDS AGAINST TOMORROW. He showed his skills as a character actor in 1972's BUCK AND THE PREACHER, a western co-starring and directed by Sidney Poitier.
He spoke words of wisdom as a character in Spike Lee's Oscar-winning 2019 film based on a true story, BlacKkKlansman. Harry Belafonte received an honorary Oscar in 2014.
We saw his tears and joined him in grief as we watched the live 1968 network news telecast of Dr. Martin Luther King's funeral. Belafonte sat with King's family as he attended his assassinated friend's funeral. Belafonte had also attended Dr. King's historic 1963 March on Washington
Harry Belafonte was a singer, a true and trailblazing show business icon, a stage and screen actor, a Civil Rights activist and a great humanitarian. He was an elegant, earthy warrior. His work, his words and his wisdom had a tremendous impact on my life and career goals. I loved him deeply and dearly. He will be missed.
In a fine documentary by my friend, Joan Walsh, I am extremely proud to have been a contributor. Joan and I are seen in this short promo for her documentary.
I grew up in an L.A. household where the scheduled day for the prime time airing of a CBS Mitzi Gaynor music variety special was like a Holy Day of Obligation decreed by our mother. Those sensational specials were required viewing. Mom loved Mitzi Gaynor -- and I picked up the love from Mom. My favorite Mitzi Gaynor movie is the 1958 adaptation of the Rodgers & Hammerstein Broadway classic, SOUTH PACIFIC. It's a tale of love, war and a plea for racial tolerance with a gorgeous score. Mitzi Gaynor plays the All-American, girl next door Army nurse stationed in the South Pacific during World War 2. Rosanno Brazzi stars as the French expatriate, the widower of a Polynesian woman, who helps the American naval forces. They two fall in love. Later, Army nurse Nellie Forbush is emotionally conflicted when she meets his two dark-skinned children. She's a native of Little Rock, Arkansas where, unfortunately, her community did not embrace racial diversity and equality. Here's any early scene from SOUTH PACIFIC with Mitzi Gaynor and Rossano Brazzi. His singing was dubbed.
The Pulitzer Prize winning Broadway play starred Mary Martin. The play and the movie are loosely based on the James A. Michener collection of short stories, TALES OF THE SOUTH PACIFIC. The 1947 publication won a Pulitzer Prize as did the 1949 Broadway show.
The main story used from the book is "Our Heroine" and focuses on Nellie Forbush. I read it a few summer ago and was by how bold and relevant it is. One of the main views Michener puts forth is the complexity of that war. Were all G.I.'s patriotic men fighting for freedom and democracy or were some hiding racial bigotry and using the war as an license to kill people of another race? Nellie and the other army nurses had to be careful and protected against nighttime rape by G.I's who would later be jailed. She was taught in Little Rock that it might be okay to date an Asian because they were seen as light-skinned like White people -- but dating anyone darker was definitely forbidden. While a war rages on around her, Nellie Forbush is at war with herself. Her friend, Lt. Joe Cable from Princeton, New Jersey, is also at war with himself because he has fallen in love with a lovely Tonganese woman. Here is a very strong and accurate song he sings -- the kind one did not often hear in a Broadway musical of that time. John Kerr, also dubbed, sings "Carefully Taught."
The song still holds up in today's America.
One of the strongest, most surprising and most memorable sections of the "Our Heroine" short story is Nellie's inner monologue about race and what she's been taught. She says the N-word over and over again with a World War 2 machine-gun like rapidity. She's exorcising the word and those bigoted lessons from her life so she can move on to love the expatriate and his children.
A SOUTH PACIFIC movie DVD had Mitzi Gaynor's audition as one of the extra features. When I saw it and when I watched the depth of some of her dramatic scenes in the movie, I came away with a feeling that in between the audition and landing the role, she read the source material and realized she'd be, in part, playing a dark side of the sunny All-American girl. I love her performance.
If you can find it at your local library, consider reading Michener's book -- especially that short story. Here's a Mitzi Gaynor screen test for the lead role.
Today is April 18th. On this day, back in 2019, I was contacted directly and hired to be a freelance scriptwriter for primetime hosts on cable's TCM (Turner Classic Movies). I grew up in Los Angeles where Hollywood movie production was a major industry like Lockheed used to be. My love for classic films started about the same time I was learning how to read in elementary school. I was blessed with having working class Black parents in South Central L.A. who loved classic and new movies. My favorite pastime was a Rivers Family night at the drive-in movies. I was thrilled to see people on the big screen who looked like me, my relatives and neighbors in films like A RAISIN IN THE SUN and PARIS BLUES, both starring Sidney Poitier. Other movies we went to see included SAYONARA, THE BIG COUNTRY, ELMER GANTRY, THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI, CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF, SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER, HUD, EL CID, foreign films like YESTERDAY, TODAY AND TOMORROW starring Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni and even fun, fizzy entertainment such as BYE BYE BIRDIE and WHAT A WAY TO GO! To this day, Mom and Dad were the only people I knew who saw SPARTACUS and said that it was perfectly timed for the Civil Rights Movement era in that had overtones of America's history of slavery and discrimination.
In the late 1980s, when I got my own prime time celebrity talk show on VH1, Kirk Douglas was my first guest.
When they aired on TV, Mom introduced me to ON THE WATERFRONT, ALL ABOUT EVE, AN AMERICAN IN PARIS, BORN YESTERDAY and just about any movies starring Barbara Stanwyck, Ingrid Bergman and Simone Signoret. My first introduction to Shakespeare came thanks to my postal clerk dad who a multi-record set of scenes from HAMLET starring Laurence Olivier. Dad's favorite classic films were FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS, KINGS ROW and SHANE.
I tell you that because, at the time, local L.A. television had no shortage of movie hosts and Hollywood news reporters. But none of them was Black. We were left out of the classic film TV hosts jobs and the general discussion of classic films. And we were not assigned a Hollywood/film beat either in TV or in local newspapers. There was no representation of people who looked like my parents, grandparents, neighbors and teachers. This was how the community I lived in and loved was portrayed in national news. Our family lived in the curfew area during the Watts Riots, as they were called. Click onto the link below:
I wanted to challenge that image in my TV career. I wanted to give some history and representation in my own way.
In scripts I wrote for TCM's Ben Mankiewicz, I added film-related history about trailblazing African American architect Paul Revere Williams who designed homes for Johnny Weissmuller, Frank Sinatra, Barbara Stanwyck and Lucille Ball & Desi Arnaz. He was designing Hollywood homes when Black people were not permitted to buy homes in Hollywood. I wrote that tennis great, sports legend and jazz vocalist Althea Gibson had a role as a plantation maid in John Ford's THE HORSE SOLDIERS starring John Wayne and William Holden (1959). The film was shot on location in Louisiana. But Gibson, a Wimbledon and U.S. Nationals tennis champ, had to shoot her scenes in Hollywood because deluxe Louisiana hotels discriminated against Blacks. The Althea Gibson casting and significance is something I learned from Mom and Dad when I was a kid. I wrote that veteran Black actor Clarence Muse (Hitchcock's SHADOW OF A DOUBT, Lubitsch's HEAVEN CAN WAIT, the musical FLYING DOWN TO RIO and last seen in THE BLACK STALLION) got onscreen credit for co-writing the screenplay to a 1939 RKO period musical. He co-wrote it with famed Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes. That was a major achievement for Black artists contributing to a major Hollywood studio release. The film is 1939's WAY DOWN SOUTH. Ben read those items from my scripts plus other info such as the Irving Berlin song "Easter Parade" was introduced in a Broadway musical by...Clifton Webb, star of the film noir murder mystery, LAURA, and that Carol Lynley absolutely loved working with a very professional Judy Garland for two weeks of rehearsals for the 1965 black and white biopic, HARLOW. Lynley was cast as Jean Harlow. Garland was in rehearsals to play Harlow's mother, but she was replaced by Ginger Rogers who had replaced Judy in the 1949 MGM musical, THE BARKLEYS OF BROADWAY, starring Fred Astaire.
I hope Ben likes my work. I think my parents would.
