Jew Eat Yet?

Six Feet Over

Oy, I’ve never conducted an interview in my life and suddenly I’m Barbara Walters! First I get to send some crazy questions to the great AmbivaBlog and post her replies and then I had the pleasure yesterday of doing a Q&A with Jill Soloway. Jill is the co-executive producer and writer of what I consider to be the best show on television, “Six Feet Under.” The show is about to call it quits after five intense seasons. Jill wrote a novella called “Jodi K” that was just published in an edited collection by Susie Bright called “Three Kinds of Asking For It.” It’s a wistful story of longing and innocence that delves unabashedly into the taboo topic of what happens when a 14-year-old girl starts fantasizing about her best friend’s father. In the fall, Simon & Schuster will publish Jill’s brilliant memoir called “Tiny Ladies in Shiny Pants.” Not since David Sedaris have I read a book that made me laugh so hard that loved ones were concerned for my health! Jill covers all sorts of topics in her “womanifesto,” from her obsession with celebrity (why would I relate to that?) and her earliest sexual exploits, to summer camp, sororities, and Monica Lewinsky.

Jill wrote some of the best episodes of “Six Feet Under” including the third season finale called “I’m Sorry I’m Lost” in which Nate’s wife, Lisa Kimmel, bit the dust. Lili Taylor’s Lisa was one of my favorite characters on the series and I often found myself defending her in the same way that I stood up for Baroness von Schrader in “The Sound of Music.” Most people I know saw Lisa Kimmel as Nate’s shrewish ball and chain but I always found her to be one of the most appealing characters on the show and the best thing that ever happened to tortured Nate. Why shouldn’t someone call him on his shit? I couldn’t bear the idea that Lisa had killed herself (she never would have left her daughter, especially knowing that her arch rival Brenda would likely step in) and I was “relieved” in Season 4 to learn that she had been offed by her brother-in-law with whom she was having an affair (now that I could believe—I never said I thought Lisa was perfect!). Am I the only one who is creeped out that Maya is calling Brenda “Mommy” this season? It’s not like she was an infant when Lisa died. At least Brenda had the decency in a recent episode to talk to Maya about her dead mother.

When I was with Jill I considered chloroforming her and holding her hostage until she told me whether Nate died at the end of last Sunday’s episode but I knew it wouldn’t do any good. Jill’s mom Elaine lives near my sister in Chicago and after the Season 3 finale we practically forced bamboo shoots under Elaine’s fingernails to make her cough up what happened to Lisa Kimmel but Elaine wouldn’t budge. Those Soloway gals sure know how to keep a secret! Remind me to hide in their attic during the next Holocaust. Oh wait, never mind—they’re likely to be on the Nazis’ short list too, especially since Jill admitted that she is becoming more Jew-identified the older she gets. Some of the funniest parts of her book are the ways she describes the difference between her Gentile boyfriend’s family (“where he’s from, people feel it’s rude to ask anything more personal than ‘care from some sweet tea?’”) and the boundary-free, total disclosure zone that is Planet Soloway. The original title of Jill’s memoir was “Why Do Jews Go to the Bathroom with the Door Open?” but it was changed when the publisher worried that people might think it was too Jewish or full of jokes to read in the john! I could so relate to Jill’s accounts of how her family members spent hours talking about what they were going to do or just did do in the bathroom. This must be a Jewish thing. The other day I was listening to a tape recording I found of my family from March 1, 1960 (I was six months old and can only be heard burping and farting) and half of my parents’ questions to my brother and sister are about being on the toilet. “Did you make today, Susie? What did you make? Where did you make, at Buba’s house? Brucie, do you have to go pish?” Why are we Jews so obsessed with going to the bathroom? My siblings answered these questions on the tape as non-chalantly as if they were being asked their favorite color.

I think there are four more episodes of “Six Feet Under” left and I’m already experiencing withdrawal. Has there ever been a better depiction of family dysfunction? The show has one of the best casts in the history of television. Don’t you love that Frances Conroy’s Ruth Fisher and Lauren Ambrose’s Claire really look like they could be mother and daughter? As much as I wanted to hurl myself into the TV set and become one of the Waltons when I was growing up, I never thought those people looked anything like each other, even with their red dye jobs. At least the Brady girls looked like they could be related. Jill Soloway first rose to prominence when she and her talented sister Faith produced “The Real Live Brady Bunch” in which they got their actor friends to present actual “Brady Bunch” scripts as live theatre. It was a brilliant concept that appeared at just the right time for aging baby boomers and the show became a phenomenon across the country, leading to other Soloway collaborations that skewered pop culture such as “The Miss Vagina Pageant” and “Not Without My Nipples.” But it was Jill’s infamous short story called “Courtney Cox’s Asshole” that landed her the plum “Six Feet Under” gig. (Oy, the search engines are going to go nuts now that I’ve used “vagina” and “asshole” in the same paragraph!)

In addition to Lauren Ambrose and Frances Conroy, I’m really going to miss Rachel Griffiths’ troubled Brenda, Justina Machado’s fiery Vanessa, and Joanna Cassidy’s brilliantly twisted Margaret Chenowith. If Cassidy hasn’t won an Emmy yet for her magnificent portrayal of Brenda and Billy’s psychiatrist mother, I’m going to break into Lucille Ball’s crypt at Forest Lawn and steal her one myself. Oh, and don’t forget the superb recurring characters played by Patricia Clarkson and Kathy Bates, both featured in Jill’s recent episode “The Rainbow of Her Reasons.” This episode included the tour-de-force ballad that Lauren Ambrose belted out on top of her desk (to the tune of “You Light Up My Life”) at her miserable temp job as she struggled with her dreaded pantyhose:

You ride up my thighs
You're tight on my ass
You climb up my crotch.
You ruin my day
And fill my soul
With hate!
It can't be right,
When they feel so tight.
'Cause you—you ride up my thighs!

Most of the female characters on “Six Feet Under” could be categorized as “difficult women.” As if we’re not all “difficult” in some way. The one character who seemed to represent simplicity, George’s daughter Maggie, just jumped in the sack with Nate while his pregnant wife dragged herself to the Maggie’s reviled Quaker meeting at Nate’s request. Oh, Nate, that is so low! On the other hand, I’m happy to see that all of the expectations we had for these characters at the beginning of this season are being blown to bits. Interesting that David and Keith now seem the most traditional of the lot. As gay TV characters go, they’re so well written that they make “Queer as Folk” look like a minstrel show.

Yikes, I could babble about “Six Feet Under” for hours on end, until the same white obituary notice from the beginning of every episode appears on your computer screen, only this one will read, “Danny Miller’s Blog, 2004-2005.” I’ll post a link to the Jill Soloway article when it comes out. The only bad part of the interview is that now I have to listen to my own voice on the tape as I transcribe it. What a nightmare, especially as I realize that I talked way too much and kept interrupting my subject with anecdotes of my own. So much for my interviewing skills. As Kendall’s Texas relatives would say, “that boy missed a great opportunity to hush!”

I was driving through Beverly Hills this morning and stopped at a light on Santa Monica Boulevard. When the light turned green I almost didn’t see that someone was still crossing the intersection in front of my car. The 70-year-old man gave me an accusing look through his oversized glasses before moving on. And then I realized—it was Larry King. Was that a sign that my interviewing days are numbered?

The AmbivaBlog Interview

Those Gottliebs are at it again. This is the family that I met through blogging but I’m convinced that I have some past-life connection with them, not to mention the times in the mid-1960s when we were probably fighting over the same box of Sea Monkeys or Magic Crystals at the Museum of Science & Industry Gift Shop. I now spend more time reading this family’s wonderfully diverse blogs (nine of them at last count) than I do reading the L.A. Times, and I learn much more from the Gottliebs. A few days ago David “True Ancestor” Gottlieb presented a challenge whereby you could request an interview and he would give you five questions of his own choosing. I volunteered and enjoyed answering David’s questions, at times turning as curmudgeonly as I do on job interviews when I’m asked what my goals are for the next five years. The blogging matriarch of the clan, older sis Annie “AmbivaBlog” Gottlieb, author and editor extraordinaire, then requested I interview her so I sent her five questions which she was gracious enough to answer with her usual wit and honesty:

1. Describe a memory from childhood of a time when you first realized that you couldn’t trust everything that adults told you.

I wonder why I'm having such a hard time coming up with a memory on this theme. My sense of betrayal by adults was so much more global and nonspecific. Like they said they loved you, but so often that wasn't what I was feeling.  The adult men in my family were much kinder and more trustworthy than the women, but the women were dominant and the hapless men and kids were both in their thrall.

The best I can do for something specific is that my father was always telling us not to be selfish, but our mother was extremely selfish, and he adored her, so apparently he had a double standard. It seemed extremely unfair that you could best get the world to revolve around you by doing exactly what you weren't supposed to do. My father also once said, "There's only room for one like that in a family," and I certainly never dared to try her trick myself.

2. If you could go back to one day in history, what day would it be and what would you do there?

The first thing that comes to mind is wanting to be in the crowds on the streets of Manhattan on the day of World War II ended. You've seen the photographs. I'd be kissing a sailor, of course!!

The second thing that comes to mind is, I'd like to have been there to hear the Sermon on the Mount. I'd like to have seen and heard Jesus, my landsman, as he really was, not as he has subsequently been imagined and interpreted. I hope I would have had the guts to be one of his followers.

3. If you could play any role in a Broadway musical (you would be able to act, sing, and dance as necessary) what part would it be and why?

Funny — I've never thought of Broadway musicals in terms of characters I'd like to be or play. I've always loved the musical as a whole — oh, no, WAIT — I know!! Anna in "The King & I!" I've written on this blog about how I wrote to Yul Brynner when I was 8 and he answered me!  I totally identify — name and all — I even actually had a dream once in which I sang ALL of "Shall We Dance?" while waltzing with my Japanese karate teacher!  And, I love the song 'Hello Young Lovers."

4. What is one of the biggest regrets you’ve ever had involving a family member?

This is not fun, but I have to be brutal and say — having an abortion. That involved two family members, both the son I don't have, and my husband's mother (though we weren't legally married at the time), who had just died and whom I adored.  She always wanted a grandchild. Somehow this was her shot at having one, and I dropped the ball.  And lost her in the process.

Sure, I have some family-of-origin regrets — torturing siblings and the like — but they pale in comparison.

5. What was your favorite TV show at ages 10, 20, 30, 40, and 50?

I'll embellish the question by adding that my first ever favorite TV show, at perhaps age 3, was the great "Kukla, Fran & Ollie."

Age 10: "Davy Crockett" with Fess Parker. King of the Wild Frontier.
Age 20: I was in college, a snob, and actually didn't watch TV.  No one had one in their room then, it was just black and white and in the dorm living room with the piano.  (On second thought, maybe it was not so much that I was a snob as that I was just discovering sex, which had TV beat all to hell.)  The only thing I can remember watching on TV at all in college was JFK's funeral, my freshman year.
Age 30: (I had to Google 1976 TV shows!) "Kojak."  (Runner-up: “Sanford & Son.")
Age 40: "Hill Street Blues."
Age 50: "NYPD Blue" and "ER." (As you can see, I liked dramas better than sitcoms. I got really sick of both "NYPD Blue" and "ER" after a few years, when the original actors got sick of them and they started killing characters off so the actors could leave.  "NYPD Blue" lost me after the Jimmy Smits character's gratuitous death. Couldn't they just have let him move to Tucson and be a cop there, like my friend Nick? He could've had his own spinoff show about the border patrol, which would've been a complex, wrenching issue for him as a Hispanic. I'm glad I wasn't still around at "ER" for Dr. Greene's brain tumor, since I've been terrified of brain tumors ever since reading John Gunther's Death Be Not Proud, about his son's death from one, as a kid.  No, you won't catch me with my cellphone pasted to my ear . . . On "NYPD Blue," whenever they ran out of ideas, they either pushed Andy Sipowicz off the wagon or made somebody close to him die.  (Apparently that was because David Milch was such an alcoholic.) They also started having this stilted dialog that was upper-middle-class people's idea of how working-class people talk. Like bad David Mamet. . . . Then "The Sopranos" came along and completely ruined me for normal hour-format TV drama. All I can bear to watch any more is "Rescue Me."  Those will probably be my 2 favorites when I'm 60.  Which goes to show that both my tastes and the best of television have steadily improved!)

Interviewer’s note: Thanks, Amba! According to the rules, people, you can now ask her to interview you. And three cheers for “Kukla, Fran, and Ollie,” also one of my favorite childhood shows! Burr Tillstrom was a genius and Fran Allison could make me believe a grocery bag was alive. Have I mentioned that I just saw Fess Parker at the Hollywood Bowl singing his old Davy Crockett song 50 years after the fact? And hey, I always wanted to play the Yul Brynner part in “The King and I” so we’ll have to go on the road.

Shall we dance?
On a bright cloud of music shall we fly?
Shall we dance?
Shall we then say "Goodnight” and mean "Goodbye"?
Or perchance,
When the last little star has left the sky,
Shall we still be together
With our arms around each other
And shall you be my new romance?
On the clear understanding
That this kind of thing can happen,
Shall we dance?
Shall we dance?
Shall we dance?

E-Ticket

Try as I might, I can’t let this week’s 50th anniversary of the opening of Disneyland go by without comment. I know it’s sort of cool these days to dismiss the entire Disney corporation as an evil empire whose sole aim is to lure our children into their corporate lair like crack pushers in the school playground and create new generations of mindless consumers with glazed eyes and open wallets. I have often joined in anti-Disney rants, railing about the over-commercialization, condemning Disney’s distorted treatment of women, sympathizing with showbiz friends who say it’s the cheapest studio in town, and repeating speculation that Walt Disney himself was an anti-Semite (Jews were the butt of many jokes in the early Disney cartoons—in one scene in the original version of “The Three Little Pigs,” the Big Bad Wolf comes to the door dressed as a stereotypical Jewish peddler—an image straight out of Der Stürmer). But in the privacy of my own blog, do you want to know what I really think about Disney’s worldwide domination?

I love it, I love it, I love it, I love it!

Being the pop culture slave that I am, many of my happiest childhood memories revolve around Disney. Seminal moments of personality development occurred as I was hooked up to the IV drip of the Disney machine. My supersized Disney diet included such staples as the Mickey Mouse Club, The Absent-Minded Professor, Babes in Toyland, Swiss Family Robinson, Mary Poppins, The Sword in the Stone, The Three Lives of Thomasina, The Parent Trap, That Darn Cat, The Computer Who Wore Tennis Shoes, The Happiest Millionaire, The Gnome-Mobile, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, The Jungle Book, and, every Sunday night, Disney’s Wonderful World of COLOR, COLOR, COLOR! (Please note that the absence of the classic Disney animated films on my list is only because of the lack of VCRs and revival screenings in the 1960s—I came to love those films later on.) But by far the most exciting Disney experience of my childhood had to be my trips to Disneyland.

Our first visit to the Happiest Place on Earth occurred during the 1967 Summer of Love. While hippies and other counterculture types were gathering in the head shops of Haight-Ashbury, I was breathing in the psychedelic fumes of Disney Spirit. We stayed in the glorious Disneyland Hotel (back when there was only one official hotel for the park—I believe this original one was recently bulldozed)—a child’s Shangri-La complete with themed restaurants, a monorail stop that would take us right into Disneyland, and a distinct smell of oranges (did they pipe in this artificial smell in memory of the groves that once filled these 100 acres?). It’s almost embarrassing to admit how excited I was to hurl myself into the Disney dream. Somewhere in a box in Chicago is my dog-eared scrapbook of the trip, stuffed with Mickey Mouse-shaped menus, Instamatic portraits of our encounters with Goofy, Winnie the Pooh, and Chip n’Dale, and remnants of our Disneyland ticket books.

In those days you paid a very small admission fee to get inside the park ($2.00 for adults and 60 cents for children) and then you purchased ticket books for the different rides which were given with A through E designations. The coveted E-tickets, of course, were for the Big Experiences like the Matterhorn Bobsleds, the Submarine Voyage, and It’s a Small World, a ride that premiered a few years earlier at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York. Going on this ride helped me deal with the trauma I still felt at being left behind during my family’s fabled vacation to the World’s Fair. E-Tickets were supposed to be the most sought after coupons but I also favored the more sedate C-Tickets that provided entry into escapist fare such as Peter Pan’s Flight, Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, and Mike Fink’s Keel Boats.

We stuffed our faces at Aunt Jemima’s Kitchen where large African-American waitresses called us “honey chile” and recreated the “happy, carefree days” of life in the Old South (the NAACP must have rightfully protested this throwback because the name of the restaurant was changed to the Magnolia Tree Terrace in 1970). We went on Monsanto’s Adventures Through Innerspace (Disneyland pioneered the idea of amusement park rides with heavy corporate sponsorship) and I truly believed with all my heart that we were shrinking down to microscopic bits as we explored the world residing inside a snowflake. As we exited our little cars which had miraculously returned to normal size, we were shown the “modern miracles created by rearranging the molecules, not only of water, but of air, coal, petroleum and many other raw materials. THIS IS MONSANTO!”

We marveled over “Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln” (which also debuted at the blasted 1964 World’s Fair) featuring the first fully functioning audio-animatronic human figure who actually stood up, spoke, and gestured to the audience. Amazing. What if the rumors of Disney’s predelictions were true and this technology was secretly handed over to our enemies? Can you imagine “Great Moments with Adolf Hitler” with a walking, talking Fuhrer and an army of audio-animatronic SS officers?

The Disney “Imagineers” had also created the brand new “Pirates of the Caribbean” which featured a whopping collection of 64 fake human figures and 55 fake animals. This was my favorite ride and we waited again and again in the hellish lines to join the bloodthirsty pirates on their rampage through a Caribbean outpost. What other children’s ride in the world boasts a scenario that is centered around rape and pillaging? We learned the word “wench” and laughed when the local women were caught by the lascivious pirates. “Yo-ho-ho, the pirate’s life for me!” Four decades later, the pirates are still chasing women, but as a 1990s nod to political correctness, we are now supposed to believe that they are chasing them for the trays of foods that have been awkwardly placed in their audio-animatronic hands instead of for their bodies. Oy.

Our second trip to the Magic Kingdom occurred in 1971. My parents were in the middle of their hideous divorce, and during the worst of it my dad got the idea to squirrel us away to California for a bit of a reprieve. The Times They Were a-Changin’ at the Happiest Place on Earth. The summer before Abbie Hoffman’s Yippies had invaded the park and forced it to close early for the first time ever. While the park had just welcomed its 100 millionth guest, the changing political climate had forced the closure of Frontierland’s Indian village (featuring REAL Indians, the signs boasted—dirt poor locals who were forced to shvitz in the sun all day long looking authentic while tourists riding by on the Disneyland Railroad snapped their photos). The Indian War Canoes became the Davy Crocket Explorer canoes and that paean to the Old South, the Magnolia Tree Terrace, was shut down for good.

Our new favorite ride was New Orleans Square’s Haunted Mansion, another marvel from those clever Imagineers. The original plans for the ride told the story of the owner of the house, a wealthy sailor who built the mansion for his soon-to-be wife. When the wife discovered that the sailor was actually a pirate, he had no choice but to axe-murder her just before their wedding. At the last minute Walt decided this story was a bit too frightening for the kiddies so they did away with it while keeping many of the original props including the distorted wedding march, the skeletal bride with the glowing, beating heart, and the disembodied heads that popped up in the graveyard screaming “I do!” to taunt the would-be bride.

In 1971, Tomorrowland was looking a bit tired. Following the Apollo lunar landing in 1969, Disneyland’s “Voyage to the Moon” was given a minor facelift and renamed “Mission to Mars” but it still looked woefully out of date compared to the real NASA footage we were able to see every night on the news. This image of the future where everything was encased in sparkling white plastic was starting to seem a little retro but it wasn’t until 1998 that Tomorrowland was re-envisioned as a place of color with hydrophonic farms and state-of-the-art computer technology.

My next trip to Disneyland took place in 1984 when I was in Los Angeles on a business trip. I made a nostalgic pilgrimage to the theme park which looked even more faded than it had in the 70s (Tomorrowland was now truly Yesterdayland) but what I remember most about that visit was the 30th reunion of the original Mouseketeers. There, in the flesh, were those icons of my youth, now in their mid-40s and being forced to dance and sing their original Mickey Mouse Club tunes over and over again in the blazing Orange County heat. Annette, Sharon, Bobby, Darlene, Karen, Cubby, Tommy, Cheryl, Don—they were all there, God love them. Annette Funicello, by far the most famous Mouseketeer and a bona fide Disney goddess, would soon be diagnosed with debilitating MS so this was sadly one of the last times we Baby Boomers got to see her strut her stuff and play off her “Beach Blanket Bingo” persona. And poor Darlene Gillespie, once my favorite Mouseketeer, would soon become embroiled in a case of securities fraud and spend a couple of years in the slammer.

M-I-C—See you real soon!
K-E-Y—Why? Because I LIKE you!
M-O-U-S-E!

When I moved to Los Angeles in 1986, one of the advantages frequently repeated to me by my Chicago family and friends was that I could go to Disneyland ANYTIME I WANTED TO! But DID I want to? After Leah was born I loved introducing her to the park, especially since her French mom wouldn’t go near the place. But my youthful tolerance of the oppressive heat, endless lines, and rides that deposited you into high-priced stores was gone. I realized that it only worked when Leah and I went to Disneyland by ourselves. If another adult accompanied us, I couldn’t resist spewing a steady stream of complaints about all that was wrong with the place. When we were alone, I was better able to see Disneyland through my daughter’s eyes and remember why it was so magical for me when I was her age. I did institute a two-year rule—I could only handle a visit every two years, and that one had to be off-season, preferably a freezing rainy Tuesday in November.

The new trend is to create feature films out of Disneyland attractions. “Pirates of the Caribbean” with Johnny Depp was a surprise success, “The Haunted Mansion” with Eddie Murphy was a surprise flop. Please tell me they’re not going to make a movie version of “It’s a Small World.” If they do, it should be made as a horror film. As it is, I can never look at those scary multicultural dolls without thinking of the infamous “Trilogy of Terror” in which Karen Black is chased down and hacked to death by an African doll straight out of that evil ride.

It's a world of laughter
A world of tears
It's a world of hopes
And a world of fears
There's so much that we share
That it's time we're aware
It's a small world after all.

This simple ditty would have made Joseph Goebbels proud. Never in history has any song been implanted more easily in people’s brains, causing even the most mild-mannered Disney lover to wake up in the middle of the night, three days after their visit to Disneyland, shouting:

“SHUT UUUUP YOU FREAKING DOLLS OF SATAN!!”

Liv Ullmann’s Face

I know I’ve lived in southern California too long when the natural aging process starts to seem like an abnormality. Last night I saw the film “Saraband” which is director Ingmar Bergman’s final film (although he’s been calling every film that since 1982’s “Fanny and Alexander”) and a sequel of sorts to his great 1973 film “Scenes from a Marriage.” I won’t analyze it so soon after my rant about movie reviewers, except to say that it is so expertly acted, so true and raw, and so deliciously counter to anything available in American mainstream films, that you’d have to be out of your mind not to run to a theatre that was showing it. My eyes had already welled up with tears five minutes into the film as I watched Liv Ullmann’s Marianne encounter ex-husband Johan for the first time in 30 years. It's clear that 85-year-old Bergman’s allegedly last film is one of his best—but what I really wanted to talk about was Liv Ullmann’s hauntingly beautiful face.

I’m not talking about beauty by traditional Hollywood standards. If given the chance, the Powers That Be in this town would surely opt for a Soylent Green-like scenario where all women were euthanized on their 34th birthdays and their cremains used to fertilize the feng-shuied gardens of Beverly Hills. Then for the under 30 crowd, teams of Dr. Mengele-inspired radio talk show hosts would stand at the gates of the major studios and separate the would-be starlets into two lines, with only the women exhibiting botoxed brows, proper saline implants, and bas-relief ribcages allowed entry.

I have always loved Liv Ullmann and of course I always thought she was extremely beautiful—who didn’t? But watching her on the screen last night at the age of 66, I could not tear my eyes away. How sick is it that I’m so used to actresses d’un certain âge doing anything in their power to look younger than their years that seeing Liv Ullmann’s lined face and aging skin nearly took my breath away? So that’s what it looks like! Oh, how grateful I am that this brilliant actress has never gone under the knife and transformed herself into one of those taut-skinned wrinkle-free cat-eyed robots with tattooed lip liner, teeth as unnaturally white as her patent leather Manolo Blahniks, and casaba melons stuffed down her Danskin. Even when Liv Ullmann was considered a Hot Babe in Hollywood, she fought with her handlers over her image. One of the first things I ever purchased with my own money was Ullmann’s superb memoir, "Changing.” I can still see my proud green-inked inscription on the inside front cover: “Danny Miller, March 22, 1977.” I had never read a celebrity autobiography that was so honest and soul-searching. Ullmann wrote about her early experiences in Los Angeles:

My bathroom was the size of an ordinary Oslo apartment. It was so grand that the toilet was built like a throne so that one should never feel confused about being a film star when nature called.
“You must cut your hair,” said one producer.
“No!”
“I’ll make you the biggest star if you’ll just dress a little differently.”
“I’m used to dressing this way.”
“Perhaps you should wear some more make-up. Send the beauty parlor bill to me.”
“Certainly not.”

It’s no wonder Ullmann’s promising Hollywood career tanked. She made duds like the shockingly bad musical “Lost Horizon” that was shot on recycled sets from “Camelot” and did so poorly at the box office it was nicknamed “Lost Investment,” and the drab “Forty Carats” which featured the tagline, “She’s engaged…to a YOUNGER MAN!” Good God, Liv Ullmann was already reduced to Frustrated Older Woman in 1973—at the ripe old age of 35! Why should we be surprised that she hightailed it out of Beverly Hills and straight back to Europe where people were allowed to get older without feeling as if they were committing a heinous crime?

Liv Ullmann appeared on this Time magazine cover during her brief reign as America’s Norwegian Hottie. But I truly believe she is more beautiful now than she was during her smooth-skinned Henry Kissinger-dating days. Not that there’s anything wrong with youthful beauty, but don’t you agree that the lines and textures on Liv Ullmann’s face today allow for greater expression as an actress and a person than the blank slate of her once perfect complexion? Am I guilty of reverse prejudice here? I just know that if I were given a choice of spending time with an actress I’d vastly prefer Liv Ullmann to Liv Tyler. Keep your Maggie Gyllenhaal and give me Maggie Smith. Katie Holmes, please send in the ghost of Katie Hepburn on your way out. It’s not that I have some kind of wrinkle fetish (well, I DO think wrinkles around the eyes and mouths of women are extremely sexy even though the women in my life never seem that pleased when I point theirs out!), it's just that I find the combination of a lived-in face and body and a lifetime of experiences so much more appealing. Did I mention that in “Saraband” Liv Ullmann and 82-year-old Erland Josephson who plays Johan have a nude scene together? In American films even Liv Tyler is getting too old to appear nude.

There’s another great benefit of seeing surgery-free older actors in films. Even though as a man I’m given much greater leeway by the ageist standards of our society to get older without being the subject of ridicule and disdain, I still find myself occasionally greeting my reflection in the mirror with shock and horror. Who the hell is that fat old bald man and what has he done with the 23-year-old version of myself I still think should be there? It’s only when I see people like Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson that I realize how few images we ever get in the media of people over 60. I actually came home from the movie last night and felt better about myself when I looked in the mirror. Oh, look, I’m getting older…less hair, thicker all over, some skin discolorations here and there…how interesting! I believe that our country’s obsession with youth is fucking all of us up, even those of us who aren’t suffering from rampant Body Dysmorphic Disorder and think we accept the inevitability of the aging process.

Having escaped from the trap of Hollywood that would have spit her out long ago, Liv Ullmann’s career is only getting better and better. Apart from her role as Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF and Vice President of the International Rescue Committee, Ullmann has now directed four excellent films and is in pre-production on a new version of Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” (which she played on Broadway 30 years ago) in which she will direct Kate Winslet as Nora and John Cusack as Torvald.

Through it all, Liv Ullmann has never been afraid to show her real self. Whether it’s talking about her fears about how she raised the now 35-year-old daughter she had with Ingmar Bergman, her famous inability to make small talk, or her complete lack of interest in camouflaging her real age, she is someone whose imperfections create a much richer persona than the typical Movie Star. Talking about her long career, Liv Ullmann recently remarked:

“The best thing that comes with success is the knowledge that it is nothing to long for.”

Family Pictures

When movie critic Gene Siskel died in 1999 my father called me the next morning and told me I should apply for his job at the Chicago Tribune. He was completely serious, convinced that I could call the paper and they would jump at the chance of hiring me to fill the shoes of the internationally known critic. No matter that I had never written a single film review in my life, had absolutely no interest in writing film reviews, and couldn’t stand most movie critics and their pretentious ramblings. I had been burned by several agonizing film criticism courses in college where I had read countless high-fallutin’ critiques of the nouvelle vague in publications such as Cahiers du Cinéma and Positif. My own critical nadir took the form a 30-page paper I wrote during senior year that examined the theories of a French philosopher as they related to the use of time and narrative in the sitcom “Laverne and Shirley.” Kill me. In truth, I did occasionally read folks like Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, and Roger Ebert, but I certainly never aspired to join their ranks. One of the main reasons why I have always gone to so many movies by myself is because I’m uncomfortable with the idea of giving my assessment of a film as I’m walking out of a theatre. When I’m with other people I always feel the pressure to comment, and all I can usually eke out is a wan “I liked it” or “good movie!” or “boy, that sure sucked!” Not exactly André Bazin. My father, God love him, never gave up on this idea of me writing movie reviews for well known publications. And I still yell at him whenever he brings it up, telling him I’d rather work in a toothpaste factory. Which is why I’m more than amused that my blog has unwittingly produced a steady stream of…well…film reviews? Of a certain fashion, of course, not quite New York Times material! I just paged through and realized that since I started writing this last December, I’ve offered up my take on The Aviator, The Philadelphia Story, Imaginary Heroes, The Assassination of Richard Nixon, The Bachelor and the Bobbysoxer, The Woodsman, Birth, The Saddest Music in the World, The Bad Seed, Annie Hall, Born into Brothels, Fiddler on the Roof, The Snake Pit, Kinsey, Bride and Prejudice, Hotel Rwanda, Downfall, Watermarks, Song of Bernadette, Ladies in Lavender, The Graduate, Revenge of the Sith, Mad Hot Ballroom, Shake Hands with the Devil, Carousel, Bewitched, War of the Worlds, and The Sound of Music. I’ve also done profiles of Doris Day, Greta Garbo, Harold Arlen, Jane Fonda, Julie Newmar, and Anne Bancroft, a look at famous child stars, and a bunch of features about the Oscars and other awards shows. Good God, maybe I AM Gene Siskel!

No...I’m really not, although I used to “work” with him. Just out of college in 1980, I had a brief stint as a copy clerk at the Chicago Tribune. It was a thankless job, pulling copy off the wire machines, but it was fun being privy to breaking news stories and loading them into the pneumatic tubes that carried them away with such a forcible whoosh I always thought my arm might accidentally be sucked away with the article. Siskel would often come into my area and start pulling copy off the machines himself if there was a story he was tracking. Being at the bottom of the journalistic food chain, he never gave me the time of day and sometimes he’d sit down in my chair and put his feet up on the machines that I was supposed to be monitoring which really pissed me off. And why oh why did he spend all that money on John Travolta’s white suit from “Saturday Night Fever?” Did he like to put it on? I did think Gene Siskel was a fine journalist, though, and I was sad when he died so young from complications after brain surgery.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised at how often I write about movies on this blog. After all, I do see an awful lot of films and my passions and opinions on the subject tend to run high—both my unbridled contempt for the mainstream and utterly useless Hollywood glop that we are so frequently forcefed, as well as my undying gratitude for the few films that dare to contain an original thought or idea. One film that I just saw that definitely fits the latter category is The Talent Given Us by Andrew Wagner. This odd but remarkable film features Andy, his parents, his two sisters, and his friends all playing themselves. Having seen an ad for the film I assumed it was a documentary about a dysfunctional Jewish family. It was only halfway through the film when I finally understood that this was fiction, despite the fact that all the characters were using their real names and playing versions of themselves. The parents, Allen and Judy, were both 70 and clearly had big problems in their marriage. I was surprised when Judy suddenly announced she wanted to leave Allen. How lucky that they happened to be filming at that moment, I thought, and it reminded me of Pat Loud’s on-camera break-up with her husband on TV’s very first reality show, the amazing “An American Family,” shown on PBS in 1973. I was also impressed that sisters Maggie and Emily were willing to be so honest about themselves in front of the cameras, even when it put them in an unflattering light. Emily, who was occasionally recognized during the film’s cross-country driving trip because of her recurring role as paramedic Doris Pickman on "ER," talked incessantly about the plastic surgery she was planning on having as soon as she got back to L.A. Old, ugly rivalries between Emily and Maggie came to a head during the endless car ride forcing first one, then the other sister to jump ship. While the family’s dynamic was outrageously funny and horrific, it all rang completely true. Andy and his sisters appeared at the late-night screening I attended (gotta love those independent filmmakers!) and I learned that while the sisters both act professionally, the parents do not and it’s astounding the way Wagner was able to wring such real performances out of them. Turns out the film was entirely scripted from beginning to end, weaving in a few actual facts about the characters, such as Emily’s role on "ER." My mind immediately raced to the idea of using my own family to create a cathartic piece of fiction.

It isn’t hard to see parallels between my family and the Louds of Santa Barbara or the Wagners of New York and Los Angeles. We even had practice living out painful family dramas in front of the camera! My father works in the security business and was also a gadget junkie in the early 70s, so we were the only family I knew who had a Nixon-era videotaping system in our house. It was a black and white camera that recorded grainy video images onto a large reel-to-reel tape that cost a fortune and lasted for 30 minutes. My brother Bruce became the unofficial videographer of the family’s collapse. In one tape, you see all of us sitting around the living room as my mother arrives home quite late and seeming very nervous and on edge. With the cameras still rolling, she joins the scene and starts sparring with my father, using a series of double entendres that went completely over my 11-year-old head. It was only years later that I was able to put the pieces together and realize that in the video my mom had just come home from a tryst with her still secret lover. A team of analysts should be hired to watch our sad, desperate machinations that reveal so much through coded words and uncomfortable body language. I do remember my father’s prescient “joke” as he and my mother were ratcheting up their sarcastic repartee: “Tell it to the lawyers, Judy!” The photo above shows my family several years earlier at my brother’s Bar Mitzvah in the Catskills. I’ve already posted the one group shot of my family taken at my ill-fated Bar Mitzvah which occurred during the middle of my parents’ ugly divorce. It would be a full 26 years before the five of us were in the same room again.

This 1998 reunion was not planned. I was coming to Chicago from Los Angeles for my cousin Sarah’s wedding and both my parents wanted to see me as soon as I arrived at my sister’s house. When my brother stopped by, there we suddenly were, “Reunited (And It Feels So Good)”! Or did it? Something inside of me sensed that this was a moment that would never happen again and needed to be recorded. I placed my camera on my sister’s TV, set the timer, and ran into place on the floor between my sister and brother. It’s not a good photo but to me it’s a critical piece of my family history. Little did any of us know that less than a month after this photo was taken my mother would be diagnosed with small-cell lung cancer and be dead in less than five months. My mother’s death foiled my plans to create a Wagnerian piece of fiction with my family members playing themselves. Not that they would have agreed to do it, but I still fantasize about this idea. The power of being able to put the words I want to hear in their mouths is so exciting to me that I almost wonder if I should find an actress who could play the part of my mother. Shirley MacLaine maybe? Well, it probably wouldn’t work, just like you couldn’t have a Beatles reunion without the real John Lennon and George Harrison. But imagine all the cathartic possibilities of directing your family members in a film that YOU get to write. The opportunities for “closure” are intoxicating! Maybe I should approach Shirley Maclaine—it will help with my distribution deal! Then my mom could grab Gene Siskel and some popcorn and watch my recreation of that living room scene from the early seventies. Shirley MacLaine will be brilliant saying the lines that I so wanted my mother to say all those years ago. I’ve no doubt Siskel will give an enthusiastic Two Thumbs Up!

The Day That Belongs to You

Today is my wife Kendall’s birthday. Sometimes Kendall has a hard time asking for what she wants, so I was delighted when she was so specific about what she wanted me to make for her birthday dinner tonight: crab puffs, green gazpacho, BLTs, and angel food cake with chocolate frosting (“not that chocolate buttercream business that you like but REAL chocolate!”). Oy, what does this Jew know from crab puffs and BLTs? Oh, and if any of my orthodox relatives in Israel have found my blog, I can assure you I’m using kosher crab substitute and turkey bacon (yeah, right—I won’t even mention the shrimp I’m putting on top of the gazpacho). I always considered angel food cake a totally goy dessert. The Jewish version of that would be sponge cake and I still remember the story my mother used to tell of helping my great-grandmother Alta Toba make it. Apparently sponge cake batter is very fragile and you’re supposed to stir it in one direction only. My 12-year-old mother didn’t realize this and started pounding on that batter every which way inducing a high-speed tirade in Yiddish from Alta Toba that her cake was ruined.

Kendall always braces herself when she asks me to make something simple like BLTs. She knows I’ll find a way to turn this easy request into a complicated, insanely expensive all-day affair. I already stopped by the gourmet restaurant supply store near Leah’s camp to buy a special kind of smoked bacon that is only available there, then went over to La Brea Bakery to get a great pain de mie for the sandwiches. Now I need to get some imported Eric Bur mayonnaise and stop at Farmers Market for a selection of heirloom tomatoes and organic lettuce. I know Kendall would be just as happy with Wonder bread, Oscar Mayer, and Hellman’s, but if there’s a way to make a BLT that costs $50, I’ll  find it! And of course I need a new good quality pan for the angel food cake, special refrigerated cake flour from the restaurant store, and the finest Belgian cocoa for the non-buttercream frosting. No wonder cooking a “simple meal” always turns into a High Mass. I’m sure my snooty food tastes come from a childhood full of spaghettios and TV dinners. Uh-oh, every time I besmirch my childhood food intake, I feel my mother’s accusing glare from the Great Beyond saying, “What about those stuffed veal breasts and lamb shanks I slaved over?” Truth be told, my mother was an excellent cook when she wanted to be, but for many meals we enjoyed an abundance of processed foods designed to free newly liberated women from kitchen drudgery. Oh well, it was the 60s, when chemical concoctions like orange-flavored Tang were considered tasty treats.

One of the most unexpected results of starting this blog last December has been the explosion of fan mail Kendall has received from people who loved her book, “The Day I Became an Autodidact.” Hardly a day goes by without several “Whatever happened to Kendall Hailey?” Google searches leading people to my site. These search terms are right up there with all the people looking for Amy Carter and the creepy folks who are trying to find nude photos of the Walton girls. Having found my blog, her fans write to Kendall to tell her how much her book meant to them and how many people they’ve given it to. One woman talked about how her late husband so admired Kendall and how much it would mean to him for Kendall to know that. Another woman was so excited to get a response from Kendall that it inspired her to start her own blog. Many people keep begging for a follow-up to Kendall’s wonderful memoir and I’m here to tell them that she has completed one that is just as funny and insightful. I think agents and editors would be crazy not to take advantage of this devoted following and ready-made audience. Kendall hears from people around the world. A sweet 11-year-old boy named Anurak from a “Gifted Educational Programme” in Singapore was assigned a list of writers to choose from including Kendall, Maya Angelou, Annie Dillard, Eudora Welty, and Anne Frank. “Well, to make a long story short,” he wrote to her recently, “I zeroed in to Ms. Kendall's book because BY FAR, it is the most interesting book! Anne Frank is WAY too common and dry.” Oy, with humble apologies to Anne Frank, I have to agree that Kendall’s book fits right in there with that esteemed group. Anurak then sent us the “bio-poem” he wrote about Kendall for his class:

Kendall
Intelligent, Rebellious, Studious, Determined,
Daughter of Oliver and Elizabeth, Sister of Brooke,
Who cares deeply about her family and close friends,
Who feels that people should be in charge of their own lives,
Who needs to read every book she can get her hands on,
Who gives love to her family, inspiration to her parents and encouragement to her fellow scholars,
Who fears everyone in the world being controlled and not having any choices,
Who would like to see people getting the best possible education they can,
Resident of Los Angeles, California, the United States of America.

You go, Anurak! I couldn’t have said it better myself. Kendall has so many skills and talents. In addition to writing, acting, and her new passions, paint scraping, concrete removal, and housepainting, she is also a magnet for children of all ages who worship her on sight. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone who has that level of patience, love, and unending ability to focus on the wee ones. And I love how, like a cult leader or a modern-day Jean Brodie (“Give me a girl at an impressionable age and she's mine for life!”), Kendall is able to pass on her unique interests to her young following. Even the the two-year-olds in Kendall’s circle know the words to every Doris Day song and prefer a good June Allyson movie to a Disney classic.

I am eternally grateful for the day I walked up to Kendall at the Bel Air Hotel and asked, “Are you Kendall Hailey?” I am thankful for Kendall’s wonderful, loving relationship with Leah. I so appreciate everything Kendall does to beautify our beloved home (you should see that gal with a sledgehammer in her hand!). And I am especially grateful for Kendall’s capacity to see through the layers of my own tortured psyche and her abililty to find the human being that lives under all of that neuroses and angst.

Kendall’s late father was the talented playwright Oliver Hailey. Every year on my birthday Kendall sings me the birthday song that was written for one of his best plays, “Who’s Happy Now?” just so he could avoid paying those silly royalties to Mildred Hill (did you know that every time you hear “Happy Birthday to You” in a movie the estate of Mildred and her sister Patty gets big bucks?). But I love the version from Oliver’s play and now I sing it to Kendall with full gusto (with thanks to Kendall’s mom Betsy for helping me with the lyrics):

There’s one day in each year
That is yours when it’s here
It’s the day that belongs to you!
And whene’er it appears
In a lifetime of years
The day that belongs to you!
The people who love you
Will always be thinking of you
Whether they’re near you or far away
But to whom it concerns
Many happy returns
Of the day that belongs to you!

(Don’t even think about singing that song without paying dearly into the Hailey royalty fund! Two can play at that game, Miss Mildred J. Hill!)

Thank you, Kendall Hailey, for being you and for being in my life. I love you.

And now on to those damn crab puffs!

Climb Every Mountain, Ford Every Stream

Yesterday I was ready to give up on Hollywood for good. Still smarting from my disappointment over the awful “Bewitched,” I had a momentary lapse of sanity while walking by the magnificent Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard and slipped in for a matinee of the new Spielberg film “War of the Worlds.” Steven, Steven, Steven, what happened to you? This film was such a load of crap I wanted to fax the Library of Congress urging them to add “Bewitched” to the National Registry of Classic Films. What an agonizing two hours. It’s not that I don’t like scary movies. I’m a huge fan of films like “The Exorcist” and “Poltergeist” and even alien takeover films like “The Day the Earth Stood Still, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” or the more recent “Mars Attacks!” But this nightmarish hooey? All it produced was a theatre full of shell-shocked people with dangerously high adrenaline levels. It was hideous, ugly terror from beginning to end with no rationale, no message, no three-dimensional characters, and no thought-provoking analogies to world events such as the McCarthyism, the Cold War, or international terrorism. We see the disgusting, murderous aliens at various points in the film but there is never the slightest clue why they are destroying our planet with their machines that they buried in the ground thousands of years earlier and are only now activating. (Interesting that with all the high-rise construction on the eastern seaboard that no earth-bound crew ever noticed one of those things!)

This vile depiction of alien life seemed even sadder to me coming from Steven Spielberg, the same man who brought us the inspiring “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “E.T.” What has happened in the past 25 years to so sour Spielberg’s take on the possibility of other life in the universe? I realize this film was based on H.G. Wells’ 1898 novel “The War of the Worlds” but this modern depiction of the story carried none of the visionary charm of that book or even the creative terror of Orson Welles’ 1938 radio mystery (despite the bookends of Welles’ opening and closing narrations which in the context of this film seem pompous and out-of-place). It isn’t hard to see the message Spielberg and screenwriter Josh Friedman were trying to get across—Tom Cruise as incompetent and bitter divorced dad gets his surly kids for the weekend and through the gift of alien world domination and mass destruction proves that he really, really cares about them after all. I wanted to puke at the ridiculous ending of this film, if you can even believe that a movie showing most of humanity being exterminated has a “happy” ending! While “Bewitched” irritated me for its lack of creativity, “War of the Worlds” made me angry and ashamed that I added my $9.00 to the profits of such a meaningless, ugly slice of American culture that will spread its tendrils around the globe with the same speed as the tripod-walking aliens. And frankly, I’m not that thrilled to be paying into the coffers of Tom “I know psychiatry—you don’t!” Cruise although I’ve never been one to boycott films because I disagree with the personal peccadilloes of the actors. Since I’m on the subject, I’ll say that apart from being a shoo-in for 2005’s “Jackass of the Year” award for his disinformation campaign about post-partum depression and other mental conditions he knows nothing about, Cruise's performance in this film is so dull and opaque that I’d rather watch him jumping up and down on Oprah’s couch having a manic episode about his new lady love.

Feeling wobbly and traumatized as I walked back onto Hollywood Boulevard, I was relieved that it was time to pick Leah up to go to last night’s “Sing-along Sound of Music” at the Hollywood Bowl. Watching Julie Andrews twirl on the top of that mountain as 18,000 people in the sold out Bowl cheered her on was like a salve for my spirit. I know there are plenty of folks who dismiss “The Sound of Music” as a treacly insulin-inducing saccharine fest, but I love every beautifully composed frame of it. Not that I agree with every decision that was made, such as forcing bad British accents on the American actors playing the Von Trapp children, but I think it’s a near perfect film that rises above its faults, including its frequent departure from the actual life events of the Von Trapps. (And have you ever noticed that there’s not a single reference to Jews? But why should there be in a story about Nazi-occupied Europe?)

This being the 40th anniversary of the film’s release, they had plenty of surprises at the Bowl before the film began. Besides the traditional costume parade and contest, the pre-show last night included a reunion of all seven of the kids from the movie. Charmian Carr (Liesl) usually attends the sing-alongs, but this was the first time all of the “kids” (now in their 40s, 50s, and 60s) were on a stage together in 15 years. They are all still close to each other and I was especially happy to see one of my favorite former child stars, Angela Cartwright, who brought back fond memories of lusting after Penny Robinson. There was a filmed message on the big video screens from the Captain and Maria, Christopher Plummer and Julie Andrews, saying how much they wished they could have been there, and looking like the old married couple we all wish they were.

Then they brought out the great-grandchildren of Georg and Maria Von Trapp who have carried on the family tradition and now tour the world as the Von Trapp Children. I thought to myself, “Oh no, just because their last name is Von Trapp we’re supposed to listen to them sing?” So I was shocked when they opened their mouths and out came the most beautiful music this side of the Nonnberg Abbey. They sang songs from the film as well as other German and modern favorites, and far outshined the vocal talents of the movie kids (who, except for Charmian Carr and Angela Cartwright, were dubbed by professional singers). Leah and I got to meet the Von Trapp offspring and get a close look at their costumes which were the actual dirndls and lederhosen sewn by Maria and worn by the real-life Von Trapp children in the 1930s and 40s, complete with 100-year-old Austrian gold coins as buttons!

The traditional “Sound of Music” costume contest and parade featured its usual mix of Drag Queens (one enormous man dressed as “Big Maria” made it to the top five!), whole families dressed up as “My Favorite Things” (everything from brown paper packages tied up with string to wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings), adorable little girls dressed as Marta, Brigitta, or Louisa Von Trapp, and some really innovative costumes including this year’s winner, a guy dressed as the carburetor the nuns remove from the Nazis’ car (“I have sinned, Reverend Mother”) so that the Von Trapps can escape into the Austrian Alps and make their way to safety in Switzerland (no matter that such a journey is geographically impossible). An audience favorite was the group of five women with huge breasts wearing tight, plunging neckline shirts on which were written “These hills are alive!”

Have you ever watched a movie with 18,000 other people? It is a true communal experience and the film was a joy, especially since I was still recovering from the end of the world as we know it. The only thing that always rubs me the wrong way at these sing-alongs is the treatment of Eleanor Parker’s Baroness Von Schrader, the woman Captain Von Trapp almost marries before Maria enters the scene. Every time Von Schrader appears on the screen the entire crowd erupts in hisses and boos. I’ve always felt that this was undeserved and that the Baroness gets a bum rap. True, she threatens to send the Von Trapp children off to boarding school (but only after nasty Friedrich hurls a soccer ball at her gut) and she does sort of trick Maria into going back to the convent, but hey, she was just trying to hold onto her man! In the end, when she realizes her fiancé is truly in love with someone else, she removes herself with such dignity and class that I think that all 18,000 patrons of the Hollywood Bowl owe her a written apology. Luckily, I found one woman in my row who shared my take on the Baroness and we cheered loudly for her—as risky a move in this mob as Boston Red Sox fans cheering in Yankee Stadium.

At the exact moment when Georg and Maria finally kiss for the first time, we all took out the paper firecrackers from our goodie bags and popped them in unison. What a sound! I love the story that Julie Andrews tells of that scene. To get the proper angle, director Robert Wise had Andrews and Plummer standing nose to nose during the song “Something Good” in which they announce their love for each other. The actors found this position very odd and ruined take after take of this serious moment by bursting out laughing. Finally, an exasperated Wise decided to film much of the song in silhouette, just to hide the slap-happy actors’ shenanigans.

Another cool moment last night was during “Edelweiss” when everyone opened their cell phones and waved them in the air, creating an ocean of tiny blue and white flickering lights that was something to behold. This is the modern-day equivalent of waving your cigarette lighter at a rock concert! I guess no one even carries lighters anymore, except the army of costumed nuns Leah and I noticed during intermission who were getting in their last drags while fixing their wimples.

Even though I thought “War of the Worlds” was one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen, it still scared the bejeesus out of me. I realized as I was watching “The Sound of Music” that I was suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. As I gazed down at the gigantic screen in the bandshell, I kept imagining the giant alien machines springing forth over the Hollywood Hills and obliterating all of us with a few well aimed shots of their death rays. Luckily, just as I started to freak out, thinking of the aliens going after Leah the same way they tormented poor Dakota Fannning, Herr Zeller, the Anschluss supporter who tries to bring the Von Trapps down, appeared on the screen. Hooray, a villain we could understand! I never thought I’d be so grateful to see a Nazi.

Will the Real Danny Miller Please Stand Up?

Forget the political sites, I inadvertently started my own firestorm of controversy with my innocent little blog. It started when I was cited in last Sunday’s Los Angeles Times in a small article about my nephew’s band, The Blisters, and the recent oatmeal commercial they shot here with director Errol Morris. After stating that the boys’ parents declined to comment, the columnist writes that “an account on a blog kept by the boys’ uncle, Danny Miller, gives more detail” and then quotes from my blog. Needless to say I was shocked to see this mention which also appeared in the Chicago Tribune and in the online edition of both papers. I was surprised that he didn’t try to contact me himself and I was amazed to see myself as a “source” for an item in the newspaper. It made me think about all the stuff I write in here and how in some cases what is “true for me” would not exactly stand up to the most stringent of journalistic standards!

Some folks on a Wilco fan website called Via Chicago saw this article and looked up my blog. It wasn’t long before they were linking to it on their website. In a recent post where I was writing about the Wilco concert and my memory of my mother meeting Jeff, I included a wedding photo of my sister and my brother-in-law which someone from Via Chicago posted onto their site. That person was then roundly attacked by several diehard fans. People said it was “creepy” to post such a personal photo on a fan site, said it “went way over the line,” ordered the photo taken down, complained that they should show the Tweedys more respect, etc. I think it’s sweet that some of the Wilco fans feel so protective of Sue and Jeff, but I tend to agree with the other folks who argued that moving the photo from one public site to another public site is no big deal. Hey, I’m the one who is constantly stealing borrowing photos from other sites to illustrate my posts. I agree with one poster who said “there is no privacy on the Internet.” That’s why I’m not posting anything that I wouldn’t want to be in the public domain, not that I wasn’t surprised to see that photo end up on a Wilco discussion board.

What do you think? Am I wrong to consider any photo on the Internet as fair game? I guess there are limits. I sure wouldn’t want photos I post of my daughter to appear on any site frequented by pedophiles or other creepy characters. But I think all of the visuals I’ve posted have been fairly benign, with the possible exception of the softcore pornography Julie Newmar sent me when I was 11! And I would never download photos from blogs or other sources that specifically state that they are against this, such as photographers’ or artists’ sites.

It was fun to check my StatCounter results yesterday and see that the hits on my blog had skyrocketed from one to two hundred a day to a whopping 775. Should I start pandering to this new crowd to keep my numbers up? On Mondays I’ll post selections from my sister’s teenage journals. On Wednesdays I’ll conduct online auctions of the clothes Jeff gave me last year after he lost some weight. And on Fridays I’ll provide MP3 files of Wilco remixes intercut with my favorite Rodgers & Hammerstein showtunes: “Jeff Tweedy IS Billy Bigelow!” The discussion on Via Chicago got so heated that I posted on that site for the first time myself just to say that they needn’t worry. My sister and Jeff weren’t upset about the photo and believe me, if I ever posted anything on my blog that she took issue with, I’d hear about it right away. To prove my point (and to try to hold onto my new audience for just one more day) I’m posting one last photo of the cute couple that I still have in my computer from last summer. 11 years later and they still have it! For a fun activity you can place it next to the earlier one I posted and check for new wrinkles and age spots!

The funniest thing to come out of the Via Chicago furor was the fact that several people expressed doubts that I was the “real” Danny Miller! As if I’d register under a false name as some kind of hoax! Lord, if I were going to do that I’d at least pretend I was Tom Cruise so I could recant my slavish devotion to Scientology and publicly apologize to Brooke Shields. Of course it is very easy to assume false identities online, as we all know, and having such a hideously common name, there are plenty of real Danny Millers whose identities I don’t want to assume but whom I know people often think are me. Richard Cohen had a great post recently about all the Richard Cohens he’d come in contact with and I’ve spent half my life saying “No, you have the wrong Danny Miller.” I get frequent calls for Danny Miller the sculptor, Danny Miller the Vietnam vet, and Danny Miller the wrestler. Many people from my past hear my name each day as the producer of the great NPR program “Fresh Air” with Terry Gross (I wish!) and when Jeff was on that show last year everyone thought it was me. A quick Google search of my name yields, if you can believe it, over two million hits! At the top of the list is a professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales in Quebec, a multimedia artist in Chicago, a professor of anthropology at Cambridge, a cardiothoracic surgeon in Georgia, an assistant professor of emergency medical care in Kentucky, the Danny Miller Band in Wisconsin, a sophomore at Seattle University, the Danny Miller Benefit to raise funds for an injured boy whose parents own a jungle theme park in San Diego, Danny Miller Park in Greendale, Indiana, named after some poor kid who died in 1973, a man in Missouri who got power of attorney for his aging grandfather and proceeded to transfer all of the grandfather’s property to his own name, and so on. There were even three Danny Millers in my college class (I used to always get the wrong grades). The scariest thing is that there are also several Danny Millers posting online poetry. I don’t want to be unkind so all I’ll say is THAT IS NOT ME!! Trust me, the only poetry I will ever be posting (or writing) are my obnoxious Valentine’s Day poems that Kendall forces me to pen each year!

Yikes, have I reached a new level of narcissism? London is steel reeling from its terrorist attack, the world is going to hell in a handbasket, and all I can talk about is me, me, ME! But wait—it’s NOT me! Damn it, one of those other Danny Millers has hacked into my site. Phew, I’m not responsible for this post!

…Bothered and Bewildered

Here are my two biggest disappointments of the past year:
1. the re-election of George W. Bush
2. the movie version of “Bewitched”

Perhaps comparing the two sounds a bit over the top but after taking Leah to the film yesterday I see a direct parallel between the misguided plans and colossal waste of money that defines both the war in Iraq and the remake of this classic TV show. Perhaps no lives will be lost because of the lousy film, but American culture has clearly taken a beating in both cases. Who is to blame for the abomination of this film? Nicole Kidman seemed like the perfect 21st century Samantha. She looked just right for the part and performed it with her usual skill, class, and humor. Will Ferrell was a fun choice for Darrin, especially as played in this story of a movie actor with a sinking career being cast in the remake of the “Bewitched” TV show. Shirley Maclaine as Endora? Perfection, down to her hair, costume, and speech patterns. Michael Caine couldn’t be better as Kidman’s warlock dad. The film was directed by Nora Ephron and written by Nora and her sister Delia. Who could ask for a better pedigree? So why did the film stink up the joint? Here are some of the reviews I read after seeing “Bewitched” for myself:

“Unrivaled in modern times for smugness, vapidity, and condescension. To spend even 10 minutes in the movie's universe is to experience the Sartrean nausea of an utterly hollow head and heart.”
-- Michael Atkinson, VILLAGE VOICE

“It's one of those movies where you smile and laugh and are reasonably entertained, but you get no sense of a mighty enterprise sweeping you along with its comedic force. There is not a movie here. Just scenes in search of one.”
-- Roger Ebert, CHICAGO SUN-TIMES

“It's so lightweight that the wind from a passing broomstick would collapse its foundations."
-- Jeffrey M. Anderson, COMBUSTIBLE CELLULOID

“A travesty of monumental proportions.”
-- James Berardinelli, REELVIEWS

What really makes me fume is that not only have these incredibly talented people made one of the worst films of the new millennium, they also have come close to doing serious damage to a pop culture mainstay that didn’t deserve to be so maligned.

The REAL “Bewitched” premiered in 1964. I was five years old and I was hooked from the very first black and white episode. The pilot was supposed to begin filming on November 22, 1963 but was postponed because of Kennedy’s assassination. John F. Kennedy was a friend of producer William Asher’s and in television terms JFK’s death seemed to punctuate a transition from the more homespun family sitcoms to the spate of shows that relied on a magical or supernatural subplot to keep the action moving. “Bewitched” would be soon be followed by "I Dream of Jeannie,” “Nanny and the Professor,” “The Munsters, “The Addams Family,” and many others, but “Bewitched” led the pack, consistently making its way into the Top Ten. There were a total of 264 episodes in the show’s 8 year run and I’m sure I saw every one of them several times.

Actress Tammy Grimes had originally been cast as Samantha Stephens but, thank God, turned the role down to do a Noel Coward play on Broadway. Enter Elizabeth Montgomery, Bill Asher’s wife and the daughter of 1930s movie star Robert Montgomery. Like Laura Petrie before her, Elizabeth’s Samantha was a TV icon who straddled two worlds: the traditional patriarchy that would have her  wearing a cocktail dress and pearls as she did her daily vacuuming, and a burgeoning awareness that women’s roles were undergoing radical changes that would lead to all sorts of opportunities beyond the family home. One thing everyone agreed on—Elizabeth Montgomery was hot! In those days our pop culture proto-feminists still had to be drop dead gorgeous, it was the early 60s after all.

Of course the entire premise of “Bewitched” screamed for a Betty Friedan intervention. Samantha Stephens was a witch who voluntarily gave up her powers so she wouldn’t outshine her mortal husband. How many millions of women in Samantha’s generation had denied who they were because the men in their lives felt threatened? It is inconceivable to me that the new movie version of “Bewitched” didn’t exploit this premise at all or give it a modern spin. But while Darrin Stephens did everything he could to stifle his wife’s individuality, Samantha was no pushover. Sometimes she metaphorically told Darrin to go to hell such as the episode when the two are fighting in their bedroom. Sam is brushing her hair and staring straight ahead into her mirror ignoring Darrin as he rants and raves about something she had done. Samantha doesn’t even glance his way or miss a brush stroke as a small wave of her hand magically sends Darrin to the downstairs couch for the night. Now that's power! I spent most of the eight years of the show wanting to tell Darrin to take a flying leap for his intolerance of his wife’s heritage. At least the first Darrin, Dick York, seemed to truly love his wife. Things got worse with Darrin #2, Dick Sargent, whose criticisms of Samantha’s witchcraft didn’t seem to be accompanied by much tenderness. I remember thinking, what if Samantha and her family were Jews instead of witches? What kind of intolerance was the show promoting? The Stephens' daughter Tabitha, however, was an early civil rights advocate. Remember the episode when she gives her black friend white polka dots and gives herself black polka dots so that they could "be the same"? Okay, so they stole the idea from a "Star Trek" episode, but at least Tabitha was trying!

The cast of the sitcom was without equal. Most had come from successful film or stage careers. Maurice Evans (Samantha’s father) was a highly regarded Shakespearean actor. Agnes Moorehead (Endora) was part of Orson Welles’ Mercury Theatre and starred in films like “Citizen Kane” and “The Magnificent Ambersons.” Alice Pearce (Gladys Kravitz) played Lucy Shmeeling in the MGM classic “On the Town” and George Tobias (Abner Kravitz) also appeared in some of the best films of the 1940s and 50s including the original “Ninotchka” with Greta Garbo and the musical remake “Silk Stockings” with Cyd Charisse. Paul Lynde (Uncle Arthur) was very funny back then and seemed to come out of the closet on “Bewitched” years before he had the courage to do so in real life (Darrin #2 was the other famously closeted cast member). Marion Lorne (Aunt Clara) was a beloved character actress who had a great scene in “The Graduate” along with fellow “Bewitched” alum Alice Ghostley (Esmerelda). And don't forget Samantha's counterculture dark-haired hippy cousin Serena who flaunted authority and espoused free love! Of course Serena was also played by Elizabeth Montgomery but she was listed in the credits as Pandora Sparks. Sparks would get her own fan mail each week and rumors would fly whenever Bill Asher left the studio with his wife still in her Serena wig!

Are there other geeks out there who remember that the Stephens’ address was 1164 Morning Glory Circle? The house still stands today at the Warner Brothers Ranch in Burbank although the interiors were shot at the Sunset Gower Studios miles away. Sally Field’s 1965 “Gidget” lived next door to the Stephens and several scenes from the show provided a color preview to Darrin and Samantha’s home when “Bewitched” was still being filmed in black and white. The Kravitzes' house across the street was also home to the Partridge Family and the Stephens' house was featured in many episodes of that show. Down the street was the home of Major Anthony Nelson of Cocoa Beach, Florida. This house was also the residence of the Andersons in “Father Knows Best” as well as “Dennis the Menace” and “Blondie.”

The list of squandered opportunities in the movie “Bewitched” are too numerous to mention. Casting brilliant Amy Sedaris as busybody neighbor Gladys Kravitz and then giving her absolutely nothing to do? Implying that Maclaine's character, an actress hired to play Endora, is really a witch and then dropping this plot point without explanation? Arrrgh! Was this a case of too many studio executives tinkering with what was once a decent script? Everyone should save their money and rent the DVDs of the TV show which are now available. I remember how much I loved the time travel episodes such as when Sam goes back to the First Thanksgiving, gets stuck in Salem during the witch trials, almost becomes an ill-fated wife of Henry VIII, and befriends a range of historical figures from Leonardo da Vinci to Benjamin Franklin.

I just saw an interview with Erin Murphy who played Sam and Darrin’s daughter Tabitha on the show and still looks the same even though she’s now the mother of six boys. She said that she finds herself telling people that her dad was in the advertising business and then has to remind herself that McMann & Tate doesn’t really exist and that Darrin is not her father! She did marry a man named Darrin, however. She said that original cast member Bernard Fox was supposed to reprise his role in the movie but was canned at the last minute. Too bad—I’m sure he could have helped save that piece of junk.

“Dr. Bombay! Dr. Bombay!  Emergency! Come right away!”