Spaghetti & Meatballs & Hollywood

 Jon Favreau is a big, huggable bear of an actor who turned to directing and gave us some entertaining films. Favreau played the loser at love trying to get dates in the 1996 comedy, SWINGERS. He directed Will Ferrell in the Christmastime comedy, ELF. He directed Robert Downey Jr. in IRON MAN and IRON MAN 2. He directed the totally enjoyable and food-centered comedy, CHEF. Favreau starred in that one along with Robert Downey Jr., John Leguizamo, Sofia Vergara and Dustin Hoffman.

Jon Favreau loves to eat. He's the host of a Netflix series called THE CHEF SHOW. 

On the weekends, I love to be a couch potato for a while and watch cooking shows on TV. I used to turn on Food Network but now it seems like all their cooking shows are competitions with winners picked by a panel of three judges. So I go to PBS.

I really dig seeing the dishes being made and hearing the recipes given while the chef is creates the dish. At the end of the shows, the completed dishes look terrific and I'm sure they are tasty. Would I try to make them myself? No. Because they ultimately get fancy with spices most of us do not have on our kitchen shelves -- spices like marjoram, allspice and cardamom.

Favreau and Los Angeles chef Roy Choi ate at a restaurant there in L.A. They fell in love with the restaurant's $24.00 spaghetti and meatballs dish. Roy makes it and tells us that, instead of the $24.00 version, he's making a $4.00 version.

I just had to share his dish and recipe with you, Roy Choi keeps it simple. He used ingredients you'd find in your average kitchen. Nothing fancy but, man, does it look delicious. It is a dish that I would try to make. It looks fabulous for solo dining, family meals or a good date night dish to make. You get excellent tips while Roy and Jon make the low-budget spaghetti and meatballs.. You also learn something about film history,

If you get Netflix, search for THE CHEF SHOW. Go into Volume 4 and click onto Episode 2, "Roy's Italian Cuisine." The spaghetti and meatballs recipe segment is the first 15 minutes of that episode. Here's a trailer for the show.

Yum.

Classic Film Tip for Memorial Day

 I watched a lot of old movies on TV when I was a youngster growing up in Los Angeles. This was before the dawn of 24-hour cable television, VHS tapes, DVDs and such. Local independent TV stations were connected to known Hollywood studios and their film libraries. KTLA/Channel 5 was connected to Paramount Pictures and aired plenty of that studio's classics. One was a feature made during World War 2 and had a trio of Paramount's top female stars playing women in war. The movie does not get a lot of talk today, but it should. I watched it in my youth because it's action-packed and I loved its three stars. Today, I watch it because it's one of those rare 1940s Hollywood films that focused on women who served in the war. The movie is 1943's SO PROUDLY WE HAIL! starring Claudette Colbert, Paulette Goddard and Veronica Lake. 

In many Hollywood films made about our involvement in World War 2, movies made during the 40s, the female characters were the loving sweethearts at home praying for the survival of their men in uniform overseas. In SO PROUDLY WE HAIL!, the three stars play Army nurses. These nurses either have or will have sweethearts. The nurses also have very hard jobs and they are devoted to their work. They face life and death as they tend to the wounded men.  Alongside the soldiers, the nurses are in the dirt and they run for cover when bombs strike. They, too, face danger. This entertaining, strong movie also shows the emotional and physical toll the work and the war took on military nurses.

The story follows the nurses during the grueling, bloody campaign in the Pacific. Paulette Goddard received a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for her performance.  The screenplay is very good at taking the screen personalities moviegoers loved about Colbert, Goddard and Lake in light fare and applied them to a war drama. What moviegoers loved about the three stars, they got in this movie. Veronica Lake was famous for her peek-a-boo glamour girl hairdo -- a hairdo that covered one eye in a most alluring way. As a military nurse, she must wear a sensible hairdo. However, she employs her peek-a-boo do in her final and most dramatic, heroic scene. SO PROUDLY WE HAIL! was directed by Mark Sandrich. Allan Scott got an Oscar nomination for his original screenplay.

This movie with its stars in fine form, and the fact that it highlighted women serving in war, make it worth a look. Here's a preview.

Enjoy your Memorial Day.

Anthony Perkins & Sondheim

 I was casually searching through a website and found an old network TV chestnut. I remember it being promoted on TV when I was a little boy but it aired too late for me to see. Mom and Dad made me go to bed. This chestnut was a one-hour ABC TV special. An original 1966 Stephen Sondheim musical starring Anthony Perkins. Before you say "What? Anthony Perkins?!?!?," the actor starred in a Frank Loesser Broadway the same year Hitchcock's PSYCHO opened (1960).

The ABC TV special with new music and lyrics by Sondheim is EVENING PRIMROSE. Perkins' leading lady was Charmain Carr right before she started shooting the role of Liesl in THE SOUND MUSIC. She sang "Sixteen Going on Seventeen" in the movie.

The special has a weird plot. A young poet hides out from the world at night in a major Manhattan department store, He feels that, at night, he can get poetry written. Then he discovers this group of old folks who've been secretly living in the department store for years. A Mrs. Mundy, a grand old dame who lives in the past, accepts the young poet into her group -- but he later discovers that he's forbidden to leave. He falls in love with her young, lovely maid who can't read or write and reveals to him, "I haven't seen the sun in thirteen years." She wants to leave the department store.

Perkins has a fine opening song when he's alone (he thinks) in the department store. The song is called, "If You Can Find Me, I'm Here." I think Sondheim took the end of that song and applied it to his song from Broadway's FOLLIES (1971), "I'm Still Here." There's a Madam Armfeldt of 1973's A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC vibe  to the Mrs.  Mundy character.

If you're interested, you may be able to find EVENING PRIMROSE on YouTube.

If you want to hear Anthony Perkins sing, here's a vocal from an album he recorded:

And here's his opening number from Stephen Sondheim's EVENING PRIMROSE.

It was a one-hour TV special. Without commercials, it runs about 50 minutes.

SOMEBODY FEED PHIL Again

 A while ago, I wrote about how much I was won over by the tall, lanky, affable, funny and wise food/travel documentary series host, Phil Rosenthal. He's the host of SOMEBODY FEED PHIL which is back for Season 5 on Netflix.

As you know, this was an emotionally brutal and infuriating week that came on the heels of the Buffalo, New York supermarket tragedy. I cried a lot this hearing the news out of Uvalde, Texas. I needed something to make me smile for a while and refresh my spirit. SOMEBODY FEED PHIL did the trick.

For Season 5, I went to Episode 5. Phil visits Madrid, the capital of Spain. Again, he presented a show that made me want to grab my passport, some casual clothing and a fork. As Phil says about Madrid, "It's glorious and the food is spectacular." 

Phil doesn't give you recipes. He shows you the final product and describes it to you as he happily eats it. We always learn something new about the location and the food. For instance, here in America, we have a mental image of a tortilla being a round, flat object. In Madrid, it's round, larger and has two sides -- a top and a bottom. The middle is filled with sliced potatoes, ham and cheese. I would love to fly to the food market Phil visited and have one. As usual, he engages with restaurant owners, chefs and customers. He shows the thrill of meeting new people, sharing food with them and embracing another culture.

In Spain, he takes us to one of the country's oldest restaurants -- a place once frequented by writer Ernest Hemingway -- and delights in its pork dishes. The Spanish people love pork. Then Phil takes us to a restaurant where the young, tattooed, friendly and award-winning chef is the future of Spanish cuisine. Believe me -- descriptions of his dishes would not do them justice. You have to see them. They truly are culinary works of art and Phil's tastebuds seem to be in heaven as he eats them. Here's a trailer for Season 5.

Thanks again, Phil Rosenthal, for making me smile -- and making me hungry.

Ray Liotta, A Good Fellow

 News broke that actor Ray Liotta, age 67, passed away in his sleep while on location to shoot a new film. Ray Liotta, a fine actor with riveting eyes, a distinct East Coast voice and a face that looked like he occasionally washed parts of it with sandpaper instead of soap. He played baseball legend "Shoeless" Joe Jackson in 1989's FIELD OF DREAMS and followed that his performance as gangster Henry Hill in Martin Scorsese's GOODFELLAS. That gangster role shot Liotta's film career up to a new height.  Although he became well known for the Scorsese film, my personal favorite Liotta performance is in a romantic comedy called CORINNA, CORRINA. In this breezy 1994 movie, he starred as widower commercial jingle songwriter who hires a housekeeper who can also take care of his sweet, lonely little girl. The housekeeper brightens his household -- and his life.

I loved Liotta's work -- especially when did a comedy like the aging biker John Travolta movie, WILD HOGS. You have to watch through the closing credits on that one.

Ray Liotta gave me on of the kindest, most memorable moments I ever experienced on TV. After my wonderful 3 years of on-air work for VH1 were done, I did some guest host work on CNBC and, in 1992, I hosted a syndicated month-long summer replacement game show. Also in 1992, I was approached by WNBC local news executives to be the entertainment reporter and third member of a 3-person host team for a new local live weekend morning news program that was in the work to premiere in the fall of 1992. I took the job. But, once my employment started, I felt a definite wall of racial exclusion. Instead of being the entertainment reporter in the studio, I was assigned to be the man-on-the-street doing live segments from street fairs, food festivals and such. When I told the show's producer that I took the job because I was told that I'd be doing film reviews, she replied "I don't think you have the skills to do film reviews." 

I began my professional TV career in 1980 as the weekly film critic on Milwaukee's ABC affiliate. During those four years, I also did print reviews and I was contacted by Chicago PBS to audition to be half of the new film review duo when Siskel & Ebert left PBS Chicago to do their show for Disney syndication.

I had to fight to do celebrity interviews for that local weekend morning news show and I occasionally won the battle. One of the celebs I interviewed was Ray Liotta when he was promoting a 1994 action drama called NO ESCAPE. Upon meeting him and exchanging some chit-chat before the camera rolled, I realized that Ray Liotta knew more about my New York TV career than my local weekend morning news show bosses did.

At the end of our interview, Ray Liotta looked at the camera and said to WNBC/Channel 4 as he pointed to me, "...you're lucky to have him."

I was and am still touched by that generosity of his. One more thing: Did you know that Ray Liotta had done musical work onstage? In the interview, he told me that in college, he played The Emcee in his college production of CABARET. That's the role Joel Grey did on Broadway and in the movie version.

Tom Cruise In Person

 Because he's in the entertainment news right now regarding his new action movie, I thought I'd share this Tom Cruise story from the late 80s.

I had a longtime, very dear friend named Gail Joseph. We did some TV work together in New York City. Then she moved to Southern California where she became head of NBC TV publicity in Burbank. If you mentioned her name to any of the FRIENDS cast members, he or she would definitely know it, Gail loved classic movies and classic TV shows.

Whenever I had VH1 or other TV business to do in Los Angeles, Gail would make time to see me and hang out. One night, around a 4th of July weekend, we went to have dinner and laugh. Gail picked a family-oriented Asian/American restaurant in the Hollywood area. She mentioned that the food was good. We walked into the large restaurant and thought it had closed for the night. That's how unpopulated it was. The bartender enthusiastically motioned for us to come in and said, "It's All-Star night." In Southern California, All-Star night is a hugely popular Dodgers baseball event/game. And it was 4th of July weekend. That explained the few customers.

While we were laughing and eating, Gail looked past me and then lowered her voice.

"Don't make it obvious. Don't be like Lucy Ricardo when she saw William Holden seated next to her at the Brown Derby. Turn around casually and look at the table to the right against the wall."

I did. Seated at that table, dining with a companion, was Tom Cruise.

Gail went on, "Now look three tables to the left."

Gail and I were within earshot. Two teen girls, visiting California, were wiggling in frustration trying to explain to their sweet, sweater-clad dad who the man sitting behind him was. The girls were excited, frustrated and trying not to make it obvious that they'd recognized a major movie star. But Dad was responding with "Who?" "Who is he?" "TOP what?"

He got up from his table and walked over to Tom Cruise's table where he very politely interrupted, explained that he was a Midwest tourist and added that his two daughters told him they were sitting near a movie star. The two girls were melting in humiliation.

Tom Cruise, with a warm and broad smile, stood up, shook the man's hand and asked to meet his daughters.

Well you can just imagine how stunned and in a sheer state of glee they were. Not only did Tom Cruise introduce himself to the girls, when he noticed that there was a camera on their table, he posed for a photo with them taken by Dad. Cruise posed for pics with the girls together and then with each one individually. Then he had one of them take a photo while he posed with their dad.

It was a totally delightful, funny and charming celebrity encounter to witness. And it happened when no more than a dozen people were in the restaurant and no entertainment reporters with cameras were present.

I said to Gail, "I hope that when those girls go back to school in the fall, their first homework assignment is to write a paper about what they did over the summer vacation."

Here's a trailer for the TOP GUN star's new movie.

It's Kenny Rankin

 Yes, I've been dropping some music for you lately -- and I'm about to do it again. Your ears could use something soothing after all the cacophony of the day. My first profession broadcast job was in Milwaukee after I graduated from Marquette University, I read the news on 93QFM, an FM rock radio station. Being a radio station, record companies constantly sent all sorts of albums for possible airplay. Of course, many of them went un-played and were set out for staff members to take home if they wanted them.

That's how I discovered the vocal artistry of Kenny Rankin. I was initially hooked when I read the song titles on one of his albums. He'd mixed current tunes in with standards I'd heard done Ella Fitzgerald, Carmen McRae, Morgana King, Chet Baker and Tony Bennett on Mom and Dad's record albums at home when I was a kid in L.A. 

When I heard Rankin's interpretations and vocal range, I was an instant fan. Here he is now. This is "Haven't We Met?"

This is "Blame It On My Youth," an old tune with music written by Oscar Levant.

Here's one more. "The Way You Look Tonight" won the Oscar for Best Song. Fred Astaire introduced it in the classic 1936 original musical comedy, SWING TIME, co-starring Ginger Rogers.

Kenny Rankin, What a fine singer he was. He didn't employ a lot of showy vocal gymnastics that eclipsed the story and emotion of the song. He had a great jazz style that focused on the heart of song and he made sure you heard the lyrics.