Let it run into Tattletales. The first episode was the one I saw during the Bob Barker marathon a few weeks ago, where he was joined by Pat Cooper and his smart wife Patti and William Shatner and his girl Marcy. Bob and his wife Dorothy Jo didn't do to well there. They did much better in the second episode. I'm not surprised they had great stories. They'd known each other for so long, they met at an Ella Fitzgerald concert and married right out of high school.
Went for a walk after the show ended. It rained hard this morning, but by quarter after 2, the rain had taken a temporary leave of absence. I wanted to get pretzels, but despite it being nowhere near 4 PM, the pretzel shop was already closed. I wonder if they went on vacation this week? Ended up at Dunkin' Donuts for a Pepsi Zero and cream cheese-stuffed bagel bites instead.
I got home just in time. It started raining again as I strolled down East Clinton. Good thing I brought an umbrella. It picked up not twenty minutes after I got in and has been raining hard off and on ever since.
Put on You Must Remember This as I had lunch, and then while resting. It's entirely appropriate that Linda Young sent me this five-part American Masters special on Warner Brothers for Christmas. They just turned 100 this year, making it a good time to chronicle their history. The first three episodes chronicled Warners' history from their first silent star Rin Tin Tin through the late 1960's, when they released the groundbreaking (and very violent) Bonnie & Clyde and Cool Hand Luke.
Sound movies began with them, with Al Jolson's melodramas The Jazz Singer and The Singing Fool that had to be heard to be believed. They reveled in the lawlessness of the early 30's with tough ladies like Barbara Stanwyk who could be utterly amoral and gangsters like Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney who flouted the law and paid for it. Even after the Hays Code began to be enforced, Warners could count on Busby Berkeley and his kaleidoscopic fever dreams to pack in audiences, or Errol Flynn's swashbucklers that proved historical action stars could be even tougher than the mobsters.
No one got more patriotic than they did before and during World War II. They produced four of my favorite movies from this era, three of them with reluctant romantic lead Humphrey Bogart - the twisty private eye caper The Maltese Falcon, the ultra-patriotic Yankee Doodle Dandy, the Oscar-winning Casablanca, and Bogie's first encounter with his future wife Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not.
Even classics like The Big Sleep and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre with Bogart and White Heat with Cagney couldn't stop their slide in the late 40's as television and difficulties with the House Un-American Activities hearings cut into their business. Jack L. Warner put his money on massive epics like My Fair Lady, and while that was popular, most of his audience preferred more violent action in Bonnie & Clyde and The Wild Bunch. The exception to the malaise were the Looney Tunes shorts, which were at their peak of creativity in the late 40's, 50's, and 60's, even as the studio around them crumbled.
Worked on writing for a while after the third episode ended. Joyce is nervous about the dark forest. Richard is not. The only thing that can harm him is water or sharp denting objects. Charles just hopes there's nothing in there that eats hay.
Broke for dinner and Match Game Syndicated at 7 PM. The first episode featured Gene and Eva Gabor explaining how an overly enthusiastic contestant accidentally kicked Eva's foot so hard when he came to embrace her, he took her toenail off. Eva was a good sport about it, but she did have it wrapped up and on ice. In the second episode, a college student who was a cheerleader showed off some of her moves for a very appreciative crowd.
Spent the rest of the evening finishing out You Must Remember This. Warners' tough-guy sensibility was nowhere more in evidence than in the 1970's in hits like A Clockwork Orange, Dog Day Afternoon, Barry Lyndon, and All the President's Men. With the debut of Superman in 1978, Warners more-or-less created the superhero movie as we know it today. The first three Superman movies were among my favorites when I was a child. I was far more interested in them than I was in Spielberg's epics The Color Purple and Empire of the Sun. While the adults talked about the Oscar-winner Driving Miss Daisy, every boy I knew imitated the Joker of the Tim Burton Batman and the potty-mouthed wiseguys of Goodfellas.
Normally, my stepfather loved Clint Eastwood. We had The Outlaw Josey Wales on video and he would watch the Dirty Harry and Any Which Way But Loose movies on cable. Unforgiven, however, proved to be a little too dark for even his taste. He far preferred The Fugitive when we rented it in early 1994. Warners also had early-mid 90's hits with Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, the ultra-romantic The Bodyguard that made a movie star out of Whitney Houston, and the campier Batman Forever.
They dove headfirst into action franchises by the end of the decade with the smash success of The Matrix. The slow-mo visuals and martial arts sequences were as influential in the early 2000's as Al Jolson and his "Blue Skies" had been 80 years earlier. I fondly remember seeing the First Gulf War action comedy Three Kings in the theater with my then-boyfriend when it came out and drooling over George Clooney in that and Ocean's 11. My little brother far preferred the animated Space Jam and Pokemon: The Movie and the much-loved and influential Harry Potter fantasy films.
Honestly, the last segment lost my interest as they droned on about then-recent releases. I actually wouldn't mind seeing them update this for their 100th anniversary and discuss more recent hits like the Harry Potter Deathly Hallows films, The Artist, the various DC Comics movies (and attempts at turning them into a Marvel-like universe), the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit series, The Lego Movies, the Paddington films, and their many mergers that ended with them belonging to Discovery.
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