Hold Your Applause

Charles Nelson Reilly: Just Give Him The Plane Fare And He Was There

James Poniewozik has a nice appreciation of Charles Nelson Reilly, who died late last week. I'm just barely old enough to remember the last role truly prominent acting role Reilly had, as comic relief in the TV version of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. Prior to that he had a significant Broadway career, capped with a Tony in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, but when The Ghost and Mrs. Muir ended Reilly was only about 40. However, the era of his greatest fame was yet to take place, as he became one of the pioneers (along, I suppose, with Charo) of the role of Someone Who Is Famous For Being On Television.

Reilly was able to reinvent himself as something of a television utility man, a reliably funny presence on talk shows back when there was still a role on such shows for raconteurs with nothing in particular to promote; and a guest star who connoted camp. He became best known, of course, for his various game shows, especially the 1970s version of The Match Game, which even a sheltered kid could tell was titillating in a way that shletered kids couldn't quite get. Reilly wasn't the best celebrity player on the show or even the best drinker; those roles were reserved for Richard Dawson. But CBS needed a gay guy on its game shows to compete with Paul Lynde, and Bob Barker just wasn't up to the task. Seriously, as Poniewozik says, Reilly (and Lynde) helped introduce a gay sensibility to American living rooms in an ear when most had no idea what such a thing was.

Reilly was mostly playing a version of himself when he did any acting in the last 30 years of his life, but one exception was the character of the sci-fi novelist Jose Chung on The X-Files and Chris Carter's other Fox series of the era, Millennium (Reilly got an Emmy nominations for Millennium). Why Carter thought of Reilly is anyone's guess; perhaps it was the doing of the show's whacked-out genius Darin Morgan, who wrote that episode (and Reilly wasn't even the weirdest thing in it; Jesse Ventura and Alex Trebek also had roles in the episode). But it proved that even given the strangeness of the setting--a serious part in an uncharacteristically silly hour on TV's creepiest show--Reilly really did have acting chops. Still, he never looked down on the work that paid the bills for decades, so for that, his fans say [blank] you.

The Most Unthinkable Disasters Descend Upon Us

Sad news today that director Bob Clark and his son were killed in a head-on collision on the Pacific Coast Highway, apparently the victim of a drunk driver.

What a weird career he had. Clark started out in genre films in the 1970s, in the same low budget milieu that spawned the likes of Brian DePalma, Jonathan Demme, and John Carpenter. But while those men moved on to greater things soon enough, Clark's big commercial breakthrough was exploitation writ large. The teen sex farce Porky's was really a horrible film, featuring "teenagers" who all looked about 30, puerile sex humor, and a young Kim Cattrall naked and howling like a dog (OK, it wasn't a total loss).  The inevitable sequels were even worse.

But the commercial success of Porky's allowed Clark to make a labor of love, an adaptation of a Jean Shepherd tale that would become A Christmas Story. The film didn't strike an immediate chord; with no real stars and a distinct lack of the sentimentality that characterizes most holiday flicks, it didn't have the sort of hook to draw big audiences in theaters (the Porky's background probably didn't help either). But a small cult and its word of mouth insured that the film got new attention every holiday season, which led to exposure on television...and then, within the last 10 years, it has become the holiday film that millions make a point to see once a year. Despite its circa 1950 setting, it still seems contemporary somehow, and few films of the last 30 years have been as quotable.

After A Christmas Story, Clark went back to the sort of work that can charitably be termed forgettable: the Sylvester Stallone/Dolly Parton opus Rhinestone and the unclassifiably idiotic Baby Geniuses chief among them. But the film that stands out as anomalous in his career, both in its subject matter and in its quality, will insure that he's remembered annually, and few directors can say that at the end of their lives.

Don't Look Back

Motoring around the Internet today, I was a bit surprised to see the outpouring of emotion regarding the sudden death of Brad Delp,lead singer of the band Boston. There were two major reasons for my surprise.

First, Delp wasn't really "famous" in the true sense of the word. To the extent anyone in Boston was well-known, it wasn't frontman Delp so much as it was the reclusive guitarist/technical whiz Tom Scholz (who coincidentally turned 60 today). The mid-1970s saw the dawning of the so-called "corporate rock" era. No longer did giants like Jimi Hendrix, Mick and Keith, and Robert Plant bestride the earth--well, some of them were still around of course, but outside of Kiss, brand new rock "stars" were in short supply--punk was a reaction to the rock cult of personality. Bands like Styx, Kansas, Bad Company, and Boston didn't have any sort of public image--when you thought of Boston, you were more likely to think about the band's logo than about what any of the band members looked like, let alone who any of them were dating or what their politics were. And yet, despite Boston's existence as primarily a studio band notorious in its time for hardly ever releasing new music, Delp obviously struck enough of a chord over the years that his death at 55 prompted real sadness.

The second reason for my surprise is that the dividing line between the "heroic" era of rock and the corporate rock era also marked, roughly, the era when the early baby boomers stopped caring about new music. Boston was a constant presence when I was in high school, but those a few years older than me were more likely to sing along with Bob Seger's then-new "Old Time Rock and Roll"--or go to discos, even if they pretended later they had nothing to do with disco. Even though Delp was himself a baby boomer, his death is really a time for mourning for post-boomers, or late boomers like me. And we're not used to seeing our preoccupations becoming big news.

Boston was not a great band; though they had an instantly recognizable sound, there was, to put it mildly, a sameness to their songs, and a certain lack of emotional heft. Delp actually tried to provide some emotion, but oftentimes (such as on "Don't Look Back" the single) his vocal was nearly buried in the mix, subordinated to Scholz's noodling around. However, if they did nothing else, Boston would always be remembered for their first single, "More Than A Feeling", clearly one of the greatest rock singles of all time. The song is now 30 years old, which is more than enough time for the culture to identify what songs instantly recall a particular era, the way "In The Mood" does for World War II or "Hungry Like the Wolf" connotes the heady early days of MTV. "More Than A Feeling" is the radio song of the late-1970s for me and many others, and never do I not crank the volume when it comes on. So thanks, Brad.

James Brown: He Made Us Feel Good

The word "legend" gets tossed around about any figure in entertainment with a longer shelf life than the Pussycat Dolls, but it's almost impossible to overstate the influence of James Brown, who died Christmas morning at age 73. I would submit that over the last 50 years in popular music, only Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan rival him in the three categories of influence, artistry, and larger-than-life persona. And if you look at what's charting today, Brown begins to stand apart. His death means that half of the first class (1986) of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has now left us (along with Elvis, Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, and Buddy Holly).

Because of the holiday and the fact that most news organizations already have their year-end wrap-ups in the can, Brown's death isn't getting quite as much attention as it deserves (I ran across a few people at Christmas dinner tonight who still hadn't heard the news), but I can assure you this is a huge, huge event in the African-American community, where the Godfather of Soul/Hardest Working Man in Show Business/Soul Brother Number One is going to be mourned in Elvis-like dimensions. If I find some good appreciations of J.B. out there, I'll link to them. (Here's one, from Richard Harrington of the Washington Post, and Washington was a city that loved Brown like no other.)

Unlike the aforementioned Presley and Dylan, who were national figures essentially within a couple of years of starting to record, Brown was almost completely unknown to white audiences before the mid-1960s, even though he had begun landing on the R&B chart with regularity around the same time that Elvis hit. It wasn't until the remarkable Live at the Apollo album in 1963, with its sizzling version of "Night Train", that the (cough) "mainstream" really came to understand what was going on. The over-the-topness of it all was an eye-opener to an America that was still several months away from experiencing Beatlemania. The T.A.M.I Show is more talked about today than it was watched in its own time, but the judgment of everyone who saw it was that Brown stole it out from under the noses of the other young turks on the bill, most notably the Rolling Stones, whose lead singer would become less stationary after getting a look at The Godfather.

Motown was at its peak in 1965, but that was also the year that Brown's period of greatest artistic and chart success began, with the pop hits "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" and "I Got You (I Feel Good)" These songs featured the beginnings of what would become the signature James Brown style, which incredibly enough represented the roots of the three main branches of black popular music that developed thereafter: funk, disco, and hip-hop.

Brown was a truly great singer and improviser, but his songs would increasingly downplay the importance of melody on a level never before heard in mainstream music, and emphasize the rhythm--an innovation that would inspire Sly and the Family Stone and eventually lead to funk acts like Parliament and Bootsy's Rubber Band (Bootsy Collins got his start as a teenage bass player for Brown). "Cold Sweat" and "Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine" (no one had more multipart or parenthetical hits than James Brown) would strip things down even more, with guitarist Jimmy Nolen  leading the band.

No one had more hits on the R&B chart than Brown, but he never did score a #1 pop hit. And by the mid-1970s, hits were becoming rarer for him in R&B as well. Disco provided a toned-down and glossier version of Brown's rhythmic innovations (though one of the biggest disco acts, K.C. and the Sunshine Band, never totally lost its Brown-influenced sound). Early hip-hop DJs brought Brown's beats back to the streets, though they weren't always recognized as such except by the cognoscenti (an exception was Chuck D giving a shout-out to Brown's widely sampled "Funky Drummer" in the opening line of "Fight the Power").

While Brown wasn't associated with radicalism or the counterculture, he was nonetheless a political presence, recording "Say It Loud--I'm Black and I'm Proud" at a time when the term black had still not entirely replaced Negro and colored in polite company. And black pride rather than anger was the key to most of his message music. Brown was credited with keeping Boston from exploding after the Martin Luther King Jr. assassination, pleading with his concert audience to avoid violence. (The hairstyle Al Sharpton wore for years was a tribute to Brown, one might say comically so.)

Brown had a police record as a young man and famously got into extremely serious trouble in the late 1980s, not long after "Living in America" had given him his last major hit. High on PCP, he got into a chase with police and was sent to prison. Only a couple of years ago, he was arrested again on charges of beating his wife. But he continued to tour, and in fact an announcement was made on Sunday when he was still expected to recover that he would be making his scheduled New Year's Eve concert appearance. Not at his physical peak by any stretch but remarkably athletic for his age, Brown may still have been the hardest working man in show business, continuing to show off many of the moves and showmanship that so inspired Michael Jackson in the late 1960s (people who don't have any memory of the Jackson 5 have no idea of the extent to which Michael was aping Brown back then).

If you don't own any of Brown's records, get on up! and purchase some with that gift card I know you got today.

Ahmet Ertegun: Soul Man

The death of Ahmet Ertegun yesterday won't get the sort of attention accorded to the passing of more obvious celebrities, but he was on the shortlist of the most influential figures in American musical history, at least on the corporate level.

Ertegun's life story was phenomenally interesting. Born in Istanbul in the early years of post-Ottoman Turkey, he seemed on his way to a comfortable life in the country's secular elite. His father was a key diplomat and was serving as ambassador to the U.S. at the time of his death during World War II. By then, Ahmet and his older brother Nesuhi had become westernized through the influence of music, particularly jazz. A graduate of the nation's most eccentric college, St. John's in Maryland, Ertegun set about entering the record business and founded Atlantic Records in 1947.

From the beginning, the label run by this cultured Muslim immigrant specialized not so much in jazz, but in a bouncy offshoot called rhythm and blues. Atlantic's first big star was Ruth Brown, one of the first R&B artists to draw an appreciable white audience. In the early '50s, the label signed a blind pianist who was already comfortable in numerous genres, but tended to favor a Nat King Cole ballad style, Ray Charles. Ertegun stuck with Charles for several years and even wrote 2 songs for him, "Heartbreaker" and the boogie woogie classic "The Mess Around", while the budding genius worked out his own style.

1954 was a seminal year for Atlantic, the year Ray Charles released "I Got A Woman", which brought gospel cadences to the sinful world of the blues, and a new sound--soul. Still a small young label, Atlantic was making itself a major force in commercial black music, important at a time when racial barriers were weakening. But those barriers remained not insignificant. Joe Turner's "Shake, Rattle, and Roll" was a huge R&B hit for Atlantic, but white audiences were introduced to it via Bill Haley and the Comets' version. Rock n' roll was a tough nut to crack for Atlantic in the early days, though by 1957 the label had scored several comic hits thanks to The Coasters. Gospel crossover star Clyde McPhatter was making a name for himself as well. And Ray Charles finally broke through to the wider, whiter world with the unstoppable "What'd I Say."

Atlantic couldn't afford to keep Charles after that, but the label continued to thrive in the '60s. Ertegun's philosophy was still to go where the bigger labels wouldn't, and to find the raw sounds that might pay off a few years down the road. While Motown polished black music to an admittedly brilliant sheen, Atlantic and its Memphis outpost Stax stayed grounded in the church. Ertegun rescued Aretha Franklin from Columbia, which had tried to turn her into a Dionne Warwick type, and unleashed her inimitable churchy style on the world. Atlantic was also home to Otis Redding, whose plaintive rawness was just beginning to catch on at the time of his death. The label became a home to many of the more progressive figures in jazz, such as John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman.

And eventually, even rock and roll. Ertegun fell in love with Eric Clapton, and his power trio Cream became Atlantic's first big rock act. Atlantic was the U.S. dsitributor for Led Zeppelin, and for several years, the Rolling Stones. Even as Atlantic came under the aegis of Warner Brothers and Ertegun gradually was old enough to be the father, and then the grandfather, of many of his label's biggest stars, he never lost interest in new artists and never lost his eclecticism (though Atlantic's biggest hitmaker of 2006 was James Blunt, who, to keep things polite in this obituary, is not Ray Charles). Ertegun took an interest in the development of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and was part of its second induction class in 1987, but remained modest about his importance even as the accolades of a lifetime rolled in.

Ertegun took a tumble backstage at a Rolling Stones concert 7 weeks ago and suffered the head injury that took his life. Rocking to the end--we should all be so lucky.

Mash Note For Robert Altman

Robert Altman probably would have been out of place in any era, and I say that because he didn't even seem to fit with Hollywood's most famously anti-establishment era ever, the 1970s. Compared to the likes of Scorsese, Spielberg, DePalma, and Bogdanovich, Altman was older--a World War II veteran in fact--and had come up through the lower ranks of the film industry rather than through film schools, getting his education on the job rather than through theory or contemplating the New Wave. Altman started out making industrial films and then turned his attention to television by the late 1950s, working continually on shows such as Combat!

His first significant feature didn't come until 1968, the man-goes-to-the-moon drama Countdown, but MASH came 2 years later, and while it's probably not the most emblematic of his films (that would be Nashville), it had all the earmarks of the Altman style. It seemed anarchic, with overlapping dialogue that came across as practically unrehearsed. Hollywood was still a pretty conservative place in 1970--The Green Berets had come out only 2 years earlier--so the depiction of Army doctors as longhaired, sex-crazed, and anti-bureaucracy was startling to many viewers, as was the frankness of the operating room gore. While the film was set in the Korean War, the allusions to Vietnam were unmistakable. MASH was also funny in a way that was immediately accessible, and it would become the only Altman film that ever qualified as a clear box office smash.

But in what would become a career-long pattern, Altman and his film did not win Academy Awards in 1970--those honors went to the more conventional Patton and its director Franklin J. Schaffner. Like his contemporary Stanley Kubrick, Altman was probably just too weird to ever get an Oscar without the ratification of boffo box office (the photo above was taken this past February when he received his honorary Oscar).

Despite his uncompromising ways, Altman remained A-list for the remainder of the decade and had no trouble getting top actors to work for him (in retrospect, it's incredible that no one ever won an Oscar for acting in an Altman film). He had the novel idea of casting Elliott Gould as Philip Marlowe (The Long Goodbye), and made one of the early revisionist westerns, McCabe and Mrs. Miller. As the Bicentennial loomed, Altman made Nashville, as good an evocation of Watergate-era America as has ever been made, and a film whose sweep and panoply of characters is still highly influential (clips of Emilio Estevez's new Bobby reveal his obvious debt to Nashville, and it goes without saying that Aaron Sorkin's walking-and-talking set pieces would be unthinkable without Altman).

But Nashville wasn't the big hit of 1975; Jaws was. Hollywood saw the sort of money that was out there, and was pulling back from its brief flirtation with the avant garde. At the same time, Altman's ability to pick scripts and stories seemed to flag, and the critics that had championed him began to criticize him as mannered. His films of the late '70s weren't successful, but at least he wasn't losing a lot of money. That would change with the misbegotten Popeye. His attempt to do something offbeat instead of making what today would be called a popcorn movie left audiences cold, and Altman seemed on his way to following fellow rebels Bogdanovich and Hal Ashby into oblivion.

Altman continued to work, though throughout the 1980s you weren't likely to see his films on the big screen unless you lived in a large enough city. His adaptation of Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean introduced Cher as an actress to be reckoned with. Later in the decade Altman lent his distinctive style to the HBO miniseries Tanner '88, which covered a fictional presidential candidate with what was then considered startling realism, including walk-ons from real politicos and journalists.

Altman's big comeback came in 1992, and ironically enough it came in the form of one of the most brutal of all Hollywood satires, The Player. For the first time since Nashville, Altman was popping up on 10-Best lists again, and had an Oscar nomination. He followed that up with Short Cuts, which was probably too long and sprawling to ever be a big hit, but received more stellar reviews and Academy Award nominations anyway. The films that came after were not as widely praised, but Altman had one last masterpiece up his sleeve, 2001's Gosford Park. This was probably Altman's best chance to win an Oscar--it even had the British setting (it didn't seem Altman-like)--but it was 1970 all over again. The big winner was A Beautiful Mind and its director Ron Howard, which would have pissed Altman off to no end if he was the sort to care about honors.

It's going to be tempting now to look at Altman's final film, this spring's A Prairie Home Companion, as a deliberate goodbye. The film and the radio show it's based on are about anachronism, entertainers out of place in an America changing rapidly. What attracted Altman to Garrison Keillor's pride and joy must have been its story of eccentrics doing what they want regardless of the popular taste. It's a message that's always been in short supply in Hollywood and has become a little more so with Altman's passing.

Curly's Last Roundup

The headline story in the entertainment world today is the death of Jack Palance at age 87. Like his contemporary Richard Widmark (who's still with us in his 90s), Palance just plain had a face made for villainy. I hadn't realized until reading his obit that his career took off with unusual suddenness--an Oscar nomination only 2 years after his film debut, and a second nomination in his career-defining role as the bad guy in Shane a year after that.

Like a lot of character actors who did time in the B-movie salt mines, Palance was "rediscovered" to some extent late in life, although it didn't take a walk-through in a Tarantino film for him to gain prominence again. He got his Oscar in 1991 for City Slickers, and rightfully so, as he did wonders with a role written as little more than self-parody. And was it widely known that Palance replaced Brando on Broadway in A Streetcar Named Desire? I would not have guessed that those 2 would have gotten within 10000 miles of playing the same role.

A few words about a couple of other departures in the last 2 days:

Wil Haygood has a nice appreciation of the career of Ed Bradley. He was a rarity in the higher reaches of network journalism, because while he could cover anything well, I always got the sense that national politics didn't interest him a whole lot. His profiles of personages from the entertainment world, especially one of Lena Horne from his early days on 60 Minutes, were respectful without being fluffy. He had a sit-down with Bob Dylan a few years ago, a terrifying assignment for the most hardened of journalists since Dylan interviews are a lot like Dylan concerts--you could get lucky, or maybe Bob is in a bad mood that day. But I think Dylan knew that he had Bradley's respect and cooperated accordingly. Bradley also did his part in promoting jazz, serving as the host of Jazz at Lincoln Center (that was definitely a "good radio voice"). Like his former 60 Minutes colleague Harry Reasoner, Bradley left too soon.

And second generation soul star Gerald Levert has died at age 40. My first instinct was that the death had to be of non-natural causes, but no, it was a heart attack. Levert came along during the "new jack swing" era of the late '80s, the last era in which male r&b singers were still able to go toe-to-toe with hip hop commercially. These changing times insured that Levert would never achieve the same level of fame that his father's group had.

Jane Wyatt 1910-2006

Jane Wyatt died at age 96  on Friday. I think the Father Knows Best cast must have the opposite of a curse hanging over its head; Robert Young also lived into his 90s.

I never caught Father Knows Best until several years into my TV watching life, sometime in the 1970s. The perfectly composed Margaret Anderson was quite a bit different from my mother and from yours too, never seeming tired or frazzled or impatient or anything less than perfectly competent. That was the archetype of the time; Harriet Nelson and Donna Reed were the same way. But despite the show's retro title, Wyatt's character was never given short shrift. I can think of more damaging unrealistic portrayals, that's for sure. And seeing what passes for family comedy these days, looking down on Fifties sitcoms seems a bit ungenerous.