Showing posts with label Sid Caesar. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sid Caesar. Show all posts

Saturday, December 3, 2022

Woody Allen: Part One

 First of Two Parts

Portrait of The Artist As A Young Man, without bucket hat


“Spielberg has said he makes the kind of pictures he enjoyed as 
a child. I like to make the kind of pictures I enjoy as an adult.”
-- Woody Allen

Deconstructing Heywood Allen:

Manhattan’s Nebbish Gagman

by Jamie Jobb

Born Ashkenazi Jew and raised Brooklyn bohemian in a big extended Midwood family, who could be more “New York” than Heywood “Woody” Allen? As a teenager, Heywood legally changed his birth name – Allan Stewart Konigsberg – to “Woody Allen” and after school began sending jokes under that nom deplume to newspapers, which eventually brought him to the attention of his heroes Bob Hope and Sid Caesar. In those early days of live broadcast television, Woody landed in Manhattan as a gag-writer who would develop into America’s top sanitized stand-up comic, destined to monetize his moniker – while the edgier Lenny Bruce developed his rap sheet on the flip side of comedy’s coin.

No matter what name applies, keep in mind that the guy pictured above – without his trademark tennis-club bucket-hat – just turned eighty-seven years old. And he’s at work on his final film, an untitled French project starring Isabelle Huppert.

Writer-director Woody Allen was productive for half a century. His mother lived to ninety-six; his father lived to be one hundred. “By the time he was sixteen or seventeen, he was making more [income] than his parents … and regularly employed every day of his life since,” said biographer Eric Lax.  Although his film career is winding down, Woody will continue to write short stories on the same German-made Olympia portable typewriter he got when he started sending gags to Broadway columnists. 

Despite his own private turmoil near the end of the Twentieth Century, Woody Allen has been seriously funny in public for seven decades. He was peerless among working cosmopolitan filmmakers. This strange nagging man created some well-respected dramatic works (“Hannah and Her Sisters,” “Interiors,” “Husbands and Wives”) although his thoughtful comedies are what distinguish his long, albeit controversial, career. 

He averaged one-film-a-year after he directed his first picture by himself (“Take the Money and Run”) in 1969, when he was thirty-four and his show-biz name was well established. Woody came to filmmaking a little late in life, after he’d frequently appeared as a guest of Johnny Carson, Dick Cavett, Merv Griffin … becoming “A Household Name” telling jokes all across America.

He dropped out of a collegiate “motion picture production” course before he was invited to join Caesar’s writers’ room – the center of the universe for gag-writers in the 1950s (see “Reality TV One”).

That was a wise career choice. Wiser still was Allen’s hooking up with managers Jack Rollins and Charles Joffe who had never represented a writer before, but had the vision and resources to mold Woody into an international celebrity. “With the same horn-rims and casual clothes which would become his trademark,” writes biographer Julian Fox, “Woody was ... a universal comic voice, in appearance and complexity so like the audience he was entertaining that, within two years, he was being widely touted as the most popular stand-up comic in America.”

Woody Allen’s transition from famous stage-and-tv act to world-famous filmmaker was more gradual. His “early funny films” were co-written with Mickey Rose or Marshall Brickman, and those performance-based scripts seemed more like Show-of-Show sketches or SNL skits. But as Allen began writing films alone, things changed. He became more cinematic, more “European”. According to Julian Fox, Woody evolved from “hip, neurotic urban successor to Chaplin, Keaton and the Marx Brothers” into a “middle-class Chekhov” or more accurately a lighter version of Sweden’s drama-demon Ingmar Bergman.

Certainly any Woody Allen movie begins like a Bergman film, with the writing. Only a handful of Woody’s films have had co-writers. A prolific Playboy short-story scribe published primarily in The New Yorker and Esquire, Allen knows how well that writing form translates onto the big screen. Of course, the writing is simply the beginning and his investment in the work gets more deeply rooted once he assumes his critical “role” in the production as director on the set.

Woody Allen’s plentiful strengths as a writer/director:

    • evolved visual style 

    • evolved sonic style

    • ridiculous dialogue from 

    • ridiculous characters in

    • ridiculous situations and 

    • ridiculous relationships 

    • jokes embedded into plots

    • surprising story interjections

    • open to actors’ improvisations

    • scenes crafted in master shots

    • note-perfect musical details

    • age-perfect period settings.

Some might argue that Woody Allen is the “most historic American filmmaker” after Ken Burns!  But that’s another story.

Woody’s weaknesses:

    • over-narration

    • too many characters

    • “small-part” cameo-casting 

    • hands-off directing style

    • narration during montage

    • odd cross-generational casting

    • slow pacing, particularly later films

    • lax backstories, particularly later scripts

    • sustained agitating tone, i.e. Woody’s “voice”. 

Allen’s narrative inadequacy is particularly odd given that’s often the first topic dramatic writers discuss when evaluating their own works. Who’s telling this story?  Why? And how? 

Many writers believe it’s best to have no narrator at all, but to let characters and situations move the story forward through dialogue and action within scenes. Narrating too many details is insulting to an audience, it belittles screen-writing Rule No. One -- “show, don’t tell.”

Certainly Allen can craft a perfect narration. He wrote one for Sandy Baron in “Broadway Danny Rose” (1984). It’s brilliant: Baron sitting around a table with other comics spinning yarns in flashback. Sandy’s “reminiscence” is the longest story, and main narrative thread of the film. Although Woody does cut back to his table scene, most of Baron’s shaggy-dog monologue is voice-over – and it truly propels the story.

Jump forward twenty years and we find Woody regressing with over-narration seriously bogging down his screenplays. It’s as if he’s channeling his Inner Robert Benchley. The obvious culprit: Woody’s short-story narrative voice occupies too much room in his scripts which should be rejoicing in his dialogue and silly situations, but not muddling through overstated plot-points and I-told-you-so expositions. 

This is the case with his screenplays for “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” (2008) and “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger” (2010). Curiously, Woody was toying with narration at this time as he had characters turn from dialogue scenes to face the camera and suddenly narrate. That didn’t work for Jason Biggs in “Anything Else” (2003), nor for Larry David in “Whatever Works” (2009). Woody is best when his narratives are embedded.

* * * 

Eventually by playing male leads in his own films, “Woody Allen” transformed himself into a character so world-renowned that his on-screen nervous nebbish seems to have consumed any semblance of the real guy who actually dreamed him up. Unlike, say Benchley or Will Rogers, who left a bit of wiggle-room room between their on-screen characters and their actual selves. 


Or “Seinfeld” writer Larry David who dreamed up the character “Larry David” for his “Curb Your Enthusiasm” HBO tv series. It’s difficult to see Allen’s “Whatever Works” (2009) without having this thought rush through your mind watching Larry David as Boris Yellnikoff channelling HIS Inner Woody Allen to narrate directly into the camera:
Has the filmmaker taken in-your-face New York 
self-expressionism beyond the bounds 
of decent identity theft?!? 

As my speech-therapist wife points out, what truly distinguishes Woody Allen is his peculiar “prosody” … exactly how he talks, the music of his voice. This includes his rhythms, timing, tone, emotional state, syllable-stress patterns and other vocal elements which color his particular style of speech filtered as it is through Flatbush, Tin-Pan Alley, Borscht Belt, Harlem jazz beats and live television. 

One way to clearly hear how a good actor can “channel” Allen’s syncopated speech rhythms is to observe how the distinguished Sir Kenneth Branagh handled “the Woody role” of Lee Simon in “Celebrity”. Close your eyes and hear for yourself:

https://youtu.be/5LJaiQ_YJEs

Anyone who’s tried to do so can verify that directing oneself on screen is difficult at best, particularly with other actors in a complex scene. To act in front of a camera, most actors require another set of eyes. It takes a talented free-thinking thespian to look at a character “objectively” from the inside out – and still be able to tell everyone else what to do in the scene. 

Movies in which Woody-the-director failed to cast Woody-the-actor are among his funniest: “Purple Rose of Cairo” (1985), “Bullets Over Broadway” (1994), “Celebrity” (1998).

Allen’s later films in which he reappeared as “the Woody character” directing his own scripts -- “Anything Else” (2003), “Scoop” (2006) -- do not distinguish his acting, his directing nor his writing.

As Woody aged and continued to cast himself as the neurotic love-sick New Yorker, he began to lose his audience. He just isn’t credible as a lallygagged octogenarian wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing Lothario. No wonder younger audiences avoid him, and his old fans long for his “early funny ones”.

Woody Allen’s endurance allowed him to choose among the world’s best actresses and comediennes for his casts. Whatever their generation, he wrote unique roles and scenes for them: Elaine May, Lily Tomlin, Anjelica Huston, Tracey Ullman, Julie Kavner, Olympia Dukakis, Judy Davis, Dianne Wiest, Louise Lasser, Lynn Redgrave, Geraldine Page, Gwen Verdon, Maureen Stapleton, Mariel Hemingway, Meryl Streep, Diane Keaton, Samantha Morton, Uma Thurman, Gena Rowlands, Blythe Danner, Jennifer Tilly, Téa Leoni, Carla Bruni, Christina Ricci, Naomi Watts, Winona Ryder, Stockard Channing, Debra Messing, Scarlett Johansson, Patricia Clarkson, Cybill Shepherd, Bernadette Peters, Jessica Harper, Jodie Foster, Carrie Fisher, Sandy Dennis, Mia Farrow, Helen Hunt, Kathy Bates, Demi Moore, Juliette Lewis, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Julie Hagerty, Kirstie Alley, Barbara Hershey, Helen Bonham Carter, Rachel McAdams, Penelope Cruz, Freida Pinto, Parker Posey … and this is NOT a comprehensive list!

However, no other woman on Earth means more to Woody’s film career than his only sister, Letty Aronson, who also functions as his business manager and main organizer.  It could be argued that Letty helped stabilize her older sibling’s career during his tabloid issues of the mid-1990s by keeping him focused on his writing and shooting schedules.  We all should have such a sister!


* * *

In his 2011 documentary Robert B. Weide asked Woody to name “movie star crushes” he had as a kid or young adult, and he listed without hesitation: “Rita Hayworth, Vivien Leigh, Ava Gardner.” Often it seems that Allen creates male leads who get tangled in triangles so he can work with three great female actors all at once! Mise-en-scène et menage-a-trios! Or as a California friend calls it: “Woody porn”.

“The unfathomableness” -- as Allen himself inarticulately states it -- “of desire” is Woody’s primary concern as an artist. Which begs the age-old question: was his a bottomless pit or a dry well? At what point did Woody become too old to pull off such characters of limitless desire?

In “Scoop” (2006), a tabloid-comic murder-mystery, Woody didn’t even bother to come up with any kind of compelling motivation for his lead character, an old stand-up magician, to buddy-up with a vivacious college journalist. Scarlett Johansson, a woman whom Woody calls “a crippler”, plays the student called out of an audience to assist him with a trick. Further muddying that story was the random appearance of an apparition who seems to defy death at will, but appears at all the right narrative moments. The film had a shoddy backstory, poor premise, muddled clues, confused characters and as a result, it’s not very funny.

Recently I asked twenty friends to send me their lists of favorite Woody funny movies.  Almost all of them are seniors or late middle-aged. As expected, “Annie Hall” topped most lists, along with several votes for “Manhattan”. But otherwise there was little agreement, with too many films to choose from – although I’m sure few friends are familiar with Woody’s complete works. Curiously, only two people picked any of his movies from the Twenty-First Century.

One lifelong friend who lives in Southern California and teaches a collegiate class in film history wrote: “I must tell you that today's students do not get ‘Annie Hall’. The New York/Jewish angst for which Mr. Allen is so famous, does not compute. Mexican, Filipino and Vietnamese students are simply not impressed. Mel Brooks, Yes; Woody Allen, No! And then there's the unproven pedophile stuff…female students threatened to boycott my class the night I showed one of his films. I teach 19-20 year-olds and the female students do not like him. There's a new generation out there who’re just not interested in Woody Allen.”

That’s a shame, because the old generation has similar feelings too. A seventy-year-old Florida friend seemed to sum up his generation’s feelings: “My interest in his work waned with the advent of his personal relationship with his adopted daughter … and that’s still the elephant in the room, for me, whenever he appears on screen. Just sayin'.”

Many people agree with these negative personal opinions, and it’s unfortunate that Allen’s private proclivities prevent people from appreciating his films, particularly his later “funny ones”. Certainly, his own personal history is no laughing matter and few of us can relate to its details: Woody married his adopted daughter on Christmas Eve 1997 which caused further public uproar over what seemed vengeful payback for unsubstantiated child-abuse charges several years earlier brought on by a former leading lady and mother of eleven children. Nobody can write such a convoluted family plot.

Curiously the climax of Woody’s Jerry-Springer drama coincided with his most complex work in which he “deconstructs” his life and personal relationships.  “Deconstructing Harry” – released two weeks before Christmas Eve 1997 – is his most fascinating “comedy”, a harshly-funny masterpiece. Fittingly the edgy film is full of jump cuts which dropped Woody’s annoying nervous ticks onto the cutting-room floor.  Still, the picture failed at the box office, losing almost half of it’s twenty-million-dollar budget.

The Telegraph of London was brutal in its review:  “This is Allen’s most scorching anatomy of marital bonds, a film so bitter, witheringly frank and unsentimental he entirely reinvented his style of shooting and editing for it.  Jump cuts abound, straight-to-camera interviews break up the plot, and Carlo Di Palma’s handheld camera whip-pans all over the place, seeming to reel from one accusation or gossip-bomb … ”

He followed that film with “Celebrity” (1998) but curiously Woody-the-actor is absent from that one. Considering the current glut of “reality tv”, perhaps he should have cast himself in the lead instead of Branagh. After all, Woody was writing about a subject with which he had extremely intimate relations … the public follow-spot. 

With his tabloid turmoil and his Bergman period now far behind him, Woody finally took his own advice – offered by his character David Dobel, a writing mentor in “Anything Else” (2003): 

“I would stick to the jokes if I were you. That’s where the money is.” 

Although his old typewriter will now only hammer out jokes in short-story form, it’s now time to revisit Woody’s movies as his filmmaking career winds down. We’ve looked at a dozen of those works – particularly his top bananas, the very funny ones – in Part Two, here: 

http://jamiejobbbackstagepass.blogspot.com/2022/12/woody-allen-part-two.html

* * *

WOODY AS WRITER-DIRECTOR – ALL THE FILMS:


Take the Money and Run (1969)

Bananas (1971)

Everything You Always Wanted to Know … (1972)

Sleeper (1973)

Love and Death (1975)

Annie Hall (1977)

Interiors (1978)

Manhattan (1979)

Stardust Memories (1980)

Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982)

Zelig (1983)

Broadway Danny Rose (1984)

Purple Rose of Cairo (1985)

Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)

Radio Days (1987)

September (1987)

King Lear (1987)

Another Woman (1988)

New York Stories (1989)

Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989)

Alice (1990)

Scenes from a Mall (1991)

Shadows and Fog (1991)

Husbands and Wives (1992) 

Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993)

Bullets over Broadway (1994) 

Mighty Aphrodite (1995)

Everyone Says I Love You )1996)

Deconstructing Harry (1997)

Celebrity (1998)

Sweet and Lowdown (1999)

Small Time Crooks (2000)

Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001)

Hollywood Ending (2002)

Anything Else (2003)

Melinda and Melinda (2004)

Match Point (2005)

Scoop (2006)

Cassandra’s Dream (2007)

Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008)

Whatever Works (2009)

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010)

Midnight in Paris (2011)

To Rome with Love (2012)

Blue Jasmine (2013)

Magic in the Moonlight (2014)

Irrational Man (2015)

Cafe Society (2016)

Wonder Wheel (2017)

A Rainy Day in New York (2019)

Rifkin’s Festival (2020)

UNTITLED (2022)


“I’m having trouble because I’m a Hollywood hack
who never gave actual literature a real shot, until now.”
-- Gil Pender (Owen Wilson) in “Midnight in Paris”

* * *


FURTHERMORE

You Tube’s computer-generated video-bot for all things Woody:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCliU4pi7c3yUDL 0KtOEOaSg

The Woody Allen Pages, probably the best resource on line:
http://www.woodyallenpages.com/

Current filmography with gross earnings:

London Telegraph ranks every Woody film from worst to best:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/film/what-to-watch/woody-allen-movies-best-worst-ranked/
Woody’s “official” website with not much to offer:
http://woodyallen.com/

Very funny clip, Woody boxing “Australian Light Heavyweight Champ” (2:13):
https://youtu.be/dPqvqPIGFts

Tabloid Sensation: “Woody and Mia: A Greek Tragedy”
http://nypost.com/2014/02/08/woody-mia-a-greek-tragedy/

“Woody: Movies from Manhattan” - biography by Julian Fox (1997)
http://www.worldcat.org/title/woody-movies-from-manhattan/oclc/34731246?loc=

“Woody Allen: A Biography” (1992) - biography by Eric Lax (1992)
http://www.worldcat.org/title/woody-allen-a-biography/oclc/606437930

(Thanks to Contra Costa Library for its help in researching this posting.)

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Tuesday, October 6, 2015

Reality TV - Part One


L-R: writers Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Mel Tolkin pitch pages

to hard-to-impress Sid Caesar in the original writers’ room.


“Real People, Not Actors”

Gutting the Writers’ Room

“I called the Writers’ Room the sanctum sanctorum.  If you look those words up you’ll see they come from the biblical phrase ‘holy of holies,’ which is an indication of how important I thought the place was.  The show began in that room, where young, creative people were pitching ideas, catching them in the air, and putting them down on the written page.  If it’s not on the page, it’s not on the stage.”
-- Sid Caesar
by Jamie Jobb
first of three parts

Scripted television shows emerge from a “writers’ room" which implies several writers comfortably cocooned within their own convivial womb of studio make-believe.  Everyone cradled there, scribbling characters and stories then flinging fresh punchlines at them to see what sticks -- that’s what happens in these rooms for writing.  

Nothing wrong with words ground round in a group setting, like making sausage … or law.  Just keep your mess behind closed doors, please.  This close-scripted teamwork takes a lot of writing and rewriting, cooperation and competition, cross-talk and gagging.  It’s not for the faint of heart.
Great tv shows flow from writers’ rooms.  Some quick examples: “Big Bang Theory,” “Modern Family,” “Seinfeld,” “The Dick Van Dyke Show” (itself about tv writers).  Folks have been rewarded handsomely for their commitment to that room and the frictional fictions which mature there.  

Brainchild of American comic genius Sid Caesar for his live NBC-TV broadcasts in the 1950s, Caesar’s prototypical writers’ room harbored immense talent: Neil Simon, Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, Max Liebman, Larry Gelbart -- all of whom found fame on stage, screen and tv.

Ironically, their brilliant careers were overshadowed at the time by a now-less-famous bullpen of other scribes who pitched in Sid’s “sanctum sanctorum”: Mel Tolkin, Lucille Kallen, Tony Webster, Joe Stein, Selma Diamond, Aaron Ruben, Mike Stewart, Shelley Keller, Phil Sharp, Charles Andrews, Neil’s brother Danny Simon, Sid’s brother Dave Caesar.  
Before Sid’s shows, tv productions did not allow The Talent and the writers to comingle in pre-production. Caesar’s innovation opened doors for future television writers to pitch their pages in similar such rooms for many other tv-star show-of-shows which followed.  Caesar wrote: “The writers’ room was more than just a place; it was a state of mind and a standard to aspire to.”

Pitted together there in the same room, Caesar’s writers realized the significance of their good fortune.  Reiner’s “Dick Van Dyke Show” on tv, Brooks’ “My Favorite Year” on film, and Simon’s “Laughter on the 23rd Floor” on Broadway all paid loving homage to Sid’s original writers’ room.  

Sixty years later, Sundance TV now actually offers a program called “The Writers’ Room” where teams of writers yak in profuse detail about their cable tv shows on a studio set designed to look much like such an inner sanctum.

For outsiders, “The Writers’ Room” is tough tv to comprehend, particularly for those of us with little knowledge and less interest in the shows which employ all these collegial scribes dropping all their inside jokes.  What the quark are they laughing about anyway?

It’s difficult to see Sundance TV’s point of committing so much air time to this sort of closed-circuit commentary on “hard scripts”.  Perhaps everyone who watches Sundance is a wannabe writer/director or paparazzo/autograph hound? Brew me that La Dolce Vita Grande Latte and let’s look at your dang script right now!

But who is this reviewer -- himself a Tennis Channel subscriber and devotee of Jean-Luc Godard -- to criticize anybody’s closed circuitry?  Furthermore: who the heck foresaw poker as dynamic sporting television!?!

“Soft scripts” reduce the role of the Writers Guild of America because “reality” television “writers” simply suggest storylines for these “scripts”.

All the rest -- dialogue, scene structure, story detail -- is handled on set by people with strange job titles: “story consultants,” “story producers,” “supervising story producers,” “field producers,” “story consultants” and/or “deliverables coordinators”!  

Instead of scenes and dialogue, all these field producers do is “write” the show’s format, cast real people to type, and edit the story in post production.  As one disgruntled writer phrased it, soft scripts simply require “real people, not actors”.  

As if actors are unable to speak for themselves!  Reality tv characters speak not only for themselves but also for their self-inflicted plotlines, if such can be called “plot.”

Their titles tell all we need to know about these low-budget “reality” shows: “Hardcore Pawn,” “Ax Men,” “Cake Boss,” “Sister Wives,” “Mystery Diners,” “Ghost Hunters,” “Ice Road Truckers,” “Breaking Amish,” “Bug Juice,” “Urban Tarzan,” "The Prancing Elites," “Celebrity Wife Swap” to name the most luridly ridiculous offerings.

“Reality” programs have become so ubiquitous that they’ve become franchised: “Real Housewives of _____,” “Million Dollar Listing _____,” “Survivor _____,” “Real World _____,” and “_____ Moms”.  These programs change location and casts, but basically remain the same show wherever the heck they go.

We know producers are running out of ideas when spectacles like “Naked Dating _____” start replicating themselves -- not only does that franchised program eliminate the writing, it eliminates the wardrobe altogether, leaving only tattoos and blurred private parts to hide behind the small talk!  Are we titillated yet?

“Actor”/characters on most of these shows follow one simple plotline: 1) offend each other, a lot and 2) apologize for it, a lot.  Call this: “So Sorry TV” … stripped-down stories which eliminate any need for actual actors on sets or writers in rooms, thus greatly reducing the show’s payroll with only “real people, not actors” speaking their minds’ own lines.  

Although no one knew it at the time, “An American Family” launched “reality tv” when it was filmed in Santa Barbara in 1971 and aired in winter 1973 on public television of all places!  Back then, it was a curiosity on PBS otherwise known for its wildlife documentaries.  This time they focused the wildlife cameras on people -- or rather “Californians”, a species foreign to most of the rest of the USA at that time.

The documentary film crew lived “in the wild” with a family long enough to capture an actual divorce scene through an open doorway!  It was very dramatic then and did not seem staged.  

By the way, the show truly was "filmed" on 16mm as no great portable video existing then.  Although this show has been mislabeled “video verite”, it’s a very good example of “cinema verite” -- right down to the choice of film stock (Kodak Tri-X). The series was a dozen one-hour episodes for its lone season featuring the five children and two parents of this seemingly typical suburban family, the Louds.

None of the Louds came across as members of any kind of Looney Tunes Duck Dynasty.  They seemed to be real folks -- perhaps because they were exposed on film, something the “shine” of video can not reproduce.  As the show progressed, it seemed to dawn on some of the Louds that they were not taking enough advantage of their situation.

Halfway through the series, the Loud kids tried to capitalize on their free air time like early rock-and-roll adapters Ricky Nelson, The Partridge Family and The Brady Bunch.  But by then it was too late; there weren’t enough remaining episodes to sustain the Loud Band’s media presence on a weekly show which was not intended to be renewed.  

“An American Family” is most renowned as the program where Lance Loud “came out of the closet”, the first person to do so on American broadcast tv.  It was clearly a calculated move on his part.  Now gay characters overpopulate television sitcoms in numbers far beyond their actual presence in the population!  Lance Loud -- the first “reality tv” star -- led the way.

At the time Lance seemed quite courageous, despite his self-consciously queer on-screen silliness.  He moved to the East Village during the show and has been an icon within the LGBT universe ever since. (See sidebar “Tracking Down An American Family”.)

While Bravo seems to be cable tv’s charcuterie most committed to grinding fresh cold cuts of “reality tv”, other channels give Bravo quite a run for its money: A&E, CMT, MTV, VH1, TLC, truTV, WB, USA, Lifetime, Disney, Spike, History, Food, Animal, Fox.  That overproduction of soft-scripted shows now slips a huge condom over the writers’ room -- the concept not the Sundance program.  Sid Caesar would not be happy.

The ongoing conflict between written and vernacular tv sludges across an ever-vast-and-vaster-wasteland of commercial cable television.  Things are so sticky that Bravo last season upset its own applecart with "Girlfriends Guide to Divorce" a very good hard-scripted show shot “on-the-fly” like a reality program.

It’s more than oddly ironic that Bravo -- king of the soft-scripted series -- would set such a high standard for more “real” sitcoms with its very first offering which contains none of those face-the-camera "confessional"
moments that are a hallmark of reality tv.

* * *

“Your Show of Shows”
Sid Caesar Links


Basic Sid Caesar Links:

View video of Sid and his costars.  Plus order DVD box sets:


Link to Sid Caesar offerings on Netflix:

You Tube playlists featuring Sid Caesar and his pals:

More about The Writers’ Room tv show:

* * *

Tracking Down
“An American Family”


Although the complete twelve episodes are unavailable on video, quite a few clips from “An American Family” can be found on line.  Start with these articles if you’re interested in pursuing this pioneering work of tv documentary:


A PBS feature on Lance Loud:

You Tube playlists of clips from the show and its aftermath:
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