Showing posts with label Dramedies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dramedies. Show all posts
Friday, February 23, 2024
Movie Quote of the Day (‘Better Living Through Chemistry,’ on the Fate of the Trophy Wife)
Monday, November 21, 2016
TV Quote of the Day (‘Gilmore Girls,’ on What Lorelai Will Do to Impress a Cute Guy)
[Sookie is
frosting a cake, with Lorelai sitting next to her.]
Lorelai
(played by Lauren Graham): “Dumb, dumb,
dumb.”
Sookie
(played by Melissa McCarthy): “Oh,
come on.”
Lorelai:
“Sure, I fish. I also bodysurf and walk on the moon without a space suit.”
Sookie:
“You were trying to impress him.”
Lorelai:
“Ugh.”
Sookie:
“What ugh? You like him.”
Lorelai:
“I like him, but I’m not sixteen. I don’t lie to guys to make them like me. I
just got stuck when he said fishing and camping, and I was trying to be nice
and not say, ‘Fishing? Great – cold, wet, and smelly. My three favorite things
after those witches from Macbeth.’”—Gilmore Girls, “Lorelai Out of Water,” Season 3, Episode 12, original air date Jan. 28, 2003, teleplay by Janet Leahy,
directed by Jamie Babbit
Wednesday, August 3, 2016
Movie Quote of the Day (‘Nothing in Common,’ As Father and Son Face Off)
Max
Basner (played by
Jackie Gleason): (snarling): “Why
don’t you get yourself a regular car?”
David
Basner (played by
Tom Hanks): “It’s a jeep, Dad. I look good in it.”
(They climb
in, Max doing so uneasily.)
Max:
“This goddamn car. You have to be a mountain climber to get in it.”
(David puts on
the radio to fill the silence. Max thrusts a big, fat, smelly cigar toward him.)
Max:
“Want one of these? They’re Honduran.”
David
(sullenly): “No.”
Max:
“You can’t get the Cubans anymore.”
David
(hoping to put this to rest): “No,
thank you.”
(The silence
resumes, finally broken by Max.)
Max (morosely):
“I lost my lines. They fired me.”
[David gets
out of the Jeep and walks around angrily for a minute, then gets back in.]
David:
“What are you gonna do?”
Max:
“I know you hate me. But you have to help me.”— Nothing in Common
(1986), screenplay by Rick Podell and Michael Preminger, directed by Garry
Marshall
When Garry Marshall passed away a week and a half ago, the
director-producer-writer-actor was recalled most often for several TV series (Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley, The Odd
Couple, Mork and Mindy) and films
(Pretty Women, Runaway Bride, The Princess
Diaries). But for me, the work that lingers in my memory the longest is the
dramedy Nothing in Common, released
30 years ago this week.
Although only Marshall’s third film to that point,
he demonstrated a sure touch with a variety of actors: an insecure model unsure if she could establish herself as an
actress (Sela Ward), an up-and-coming star (Tom Hanks), and an aging legend who needed to be treated with care
(Jackie Gleason). He needed all of
this skill in serving a script that threaded together a romantic comedy and
deeply serious drama.
On one level, the film can be enjoyed as one of the
best screen treatments of the creative exhilaration of the advertising world,
focusing on how Hanks’ David Basner woos clients as easily as women. It’s
breezy and insouciant, a throwback to the Rock Hudson-Doris Day comedies of the
late 1950s and early 1960s.
It takes a long while for the yuppie David to
realize that life is not that easy. That recognition arrives courtesy of what
he has not bothered to notice—has not really wanted to notice—on his headlong path to success: that the marriage
of his parents (played by Gleason and Eva Marie Saint) has come apart.
The beginning of the above exchange between David
and Max hints at part of the reason for the crumbling marriage: Max’s
irascibility. But David’s resentment at being drawn into the parental quarrel,
we’ll soon learn, increases because of guilt over traits shared with his
father: lack of commitment and a wandering eye.
In his cinema swan song, Gleason employed none of
the attributes that had endeared loud-mouthed Ralph Kramden to audiences in The Honeymooners, such as his helpless,
inept dreaming and constant sheepish begging of forgiveness from wife Alice.
Even in this scene, when we realize the extent of Max’s emotional
extremity—getting fired from his job, like another used-up salesman, Willy
Loman—we know that this not-very-good father was temperamentally unsuited for
his sales specialty: children’s clothing.
And Max's cigar: It sums up an awful lot
about the attitudes and appetites that have brought him to his current pass,
one so desperate that he has to beg help from the son he really has never
communicated with. Within the immediate context of this scene, it signals both
his in-your-face personality and his half-hearted, clumsy attempt to ingratiate
himself with David. Before long, though, the gesture says even more about the
self-indulgence that imperils first his marriage, then his health.
How much of himself an actor brings to a part is a
complicated question, and Gleason’s role in this movie is a case in point. He ate
and drank to excess, cheated on his wives, was an absentee father, and could be
cruel to others involved in his shows. It was as if he felt bound to inflict on
others the hurt he experienced when his father abandoned the family. If it sounds familiar, it should: Max seems an awful lot like him, but without the transcendent acting talent. (In fact, the screenwriters of Nothing in Common, Rick Podell and Michael Preminger, drew on much of this unhappy background when they created the 2002 TV biopic Gleason, starring Brad Garrett.)
Yet that talent is impossible to discount, and
perhaps, at some level, Gleason understood all too well how Max must feel. In
his 2012 memoir, My Happy Days in Hollywood,
Marshall noted that Gleason was thoroughly professional and uncomplaining during
shooting, despite considerable physical frailty. (He died of cancer a year
after the film’s release.) The actor concentrated on his work and did an exemplary job in humanizing without sentimentalizing this most difficult of men.
When Nothing in Common was filmed in the mid-1980s, “selfish” was associated so frequently with “yuppie” that it might as well have been a barnacle stuck to the noun. If Hanks’ David is not outright selfish, he is certainly self-absorbed. While the film initially earns comic mileage from his attitude (“Does self-involvement count?" he responds when a lover asks if he’s involved with anybody), a reckoning will be in order.
What could make such a person snap out of this
emotional constriction? Ties of family so strong they override years of
distance, misunderstanding and wariness. Until the 2007-09 financial crisis,
probably nothing forced baby boomers out of their careerist zone so much as the
need to care for their aging parents.
Nothing
in Common was Marshall’s attempt to execute the same kind of
change in direction that Neil Simon was performing around this time with Chapter Two and his Eugene Jerome
autobiographical trilogy: comedy not merely shot through with one-liners, but
filled with rue. Audiences did not respond as enthusiastically as they did to
his preposterous prostitute-as-Cinderella tale, Pretty Woman.
But, in addition to providing Gleason with a memorable fadeout and Ward with a good career launching pad, the film served notice that Hanks—not unlike
Jack Lemmon in The Apartment—could
master drama as easily as comedy. Moreover, in depicting the discomfort and
agony of a Me Generation forced to choose between career aspiration and
unwanted personal responsibility, it still rings today with powerful truth.
Thursday, September 17, 2009
This Day in Television History (“Room 222” Goes to Head of Class)
September 17, 1969—The decade that stressed engaged, relevant teaching received its ideal series: Room 222, premiering on this date before going on for five years and 112 episodes.
When the half-hour show began, I was starting fourth grade; when it finished, I was in the middle of the eighth. Each week during that formative period of my life, I looked forward to that deeply soothing opening theme by Jerry Goldsmith (who later created the jagged, disturbing Chinatown theme), because the ABC dramedy offered a view of the fascinating world of high school that my brothers knew so well and that I would soon enter—and fueled my interest in the subject taught by main character Pete Dixon: American history.
After it was canceled in 1974, the show might have gone into syndication, but it might just as well have entered the federal witness protection program: I never saw it again after it went off the air until this past winter, when I visited the Paley Center for Media (the former Museum of Television and Radio) in New York. Curious, I selected for viewing the first and last episodes in the museum’s library. The difference between the two was marked, for reasons I’ll get to in a minute.
Miles Davis may have assisted at “the birth of the cool,” and President Obama never seems to sweat. But both could have been taken to Cool School by Pete Dixon (played by the superb Lloyd Haynes).
As a youngster, I usually fixated on some fact that Dixon brought up in class—something about the Declaration of Independence, say.
It came as a mild shock, then, when viewing the initial episode at the Paley Center, to discover that my fact-fixation was diametrically opposed to Dixon’s open-ended, Socratic method of classroom engagement. “The world is being revised,” he said, explaining the rationale for the students’ updated textbooks. “You’d better be doing some thinking.”
The plot of the episode, “Richie’s Story,” concerned a bright student who tried to conceal that he came from outside the district because he didn’t want to attend that dead-end inner-city school. The episode brought to the surface Pete’s compassion, as he interceded for the teenager with principal Seymour Kaufman and guidance counselor Liz McIntyre.
The first episode, I think, was one of the best in the history of television. No wonder: It was written by show creator James L. Brooks, who would go on to write and direct one of my all-time favorite TV sitcoms (The Mary Tyler Moore Show) and all-time favorite films (As Good As It Gets).
In the course of 30 minutes, virtually every character was carved out shrewdly, with a careful balance maintained between drama and light satire. (Newbie student teacher Alice Johnson inquires if Pete prefers to be called colored, negro or black. “I’ve always preferred ‘Pete,’” he answered. Moreover, Dixon regards with amusement a white fellow teacher who lists all his favorite jazz musicians--all of whom just happen to be black--to impress the African-American faculty member with his liberalism.)
At the same time that the dramedy explored life at L.A.’s Walt Whitman High School—including issues regarding race and drugs becoming increasingly contentious in America—it became apparent that the creators of the show had—the pun is irresistible—done their homework on American education. What accounted for this verisimilitude?
Perhaps one key to this might be Brooks’ own background. For the two years just before he created the show, he worked as a writer and producer of documentaries for David L. Wolper, whose series and specials—often on recent history—had started filling up primetime hours in the late Fifties and Sixties. Making Pete Dixon a history teacher would allow Brooks to identify better with the character.
The immediate progenitors of Room 222—and, undoubtedly, the reason why ABC green-lighted the project—were two successful 1967 films on teachers in tough high schools: Up the Down Staircase and To Sir, With Love. But Brooks and writing partner Allan Burns, I think, were using this now-familiar character type to try out something different.
Years ago, I recall reading an essay in The Atlantic Monthly (which, unfortunately, I can’t locate in the magazine’s online archives) on the central character in series created by MTM, the studio formed by Mary Tyler Moore and husband Grant Tinker. From the sitcom starring the actress in the early Seventies to Hill Street Blues, premiering a decade later, this character is a middle manager: a calm eye in the midst of a chaotic workplace environment.
Pete Dixon, I would argue, represents a testing-out of this theme. Torn between the administration and students, he has to maintain order in a world that, as he notes, is not only under revision, but still subject to the eternal terrors involved with growing into adulthood.
He is not, of course, the only character who became a favorite with viewers over the years. There’s also secret girlfriend Liz McIntyre (Denise Nicholas); sardonic but dedicated principal Seymour Kaufman; and student teacher Alice Johnson. (In the latter role, Karen Valentine’s progress from cheerleader perkiness in Season 1 to the subdued teacher in the final season follows the same trajectory as Katie Couric’s movement from The Today Show to The CBS Evening News.)
Despite excellent scripts during its rookie season, Room 222 was almost canceled because of low ratings. Luckily, the networks had much more patience in those days with Nielsen-challenged series than they do now. So ABC gave it time, and the series won an Emmy for best new series at the end of the year. In all, it would win seven Emmys and seven Golden Globes in its first two years. (It never, however, ranked higher than 25th in the ratings.)
The departure of Brooks and the natural tendency toward exhaustion began to tell slowly on the show after a few years, with plots becoming more predictable.
For instance, in “Pardon Me, Your Apathy Is Showing” (Season 4), Kaufman allowed students to form a Marxist club, only to have one particularly excited member clamor to invite a Communist Party leader to speak to the school. The denouement involved a deus ex machina, or “god out of the machine”—an ancient dramatic device in which a force resolves the conflict all too neatly.
When the half-hour show began, I was starting fourth grade; when it finished, I was in the middle of the eighth. Each week during that formative period of my life, I looked forward to that deeply soothing opening theme by Jerry Goldsmith (who later created the jagged, disturbing Chinatown theme), because the ABC dramedy offered a view of the fascinating world of high school that my brothers knew so well and that I would soon enter—and fueled my interest in the subject taught by main character Pete Dixon: American history.
After it was canceled in 1974, the show might have gone into syndication, but it might just as well have entered the federal witness protection program: I never saw it again after it went off the air until this past winter, when I visited the Paley Center for Media (the former Museum of Television and Radio) in New York. Curious, I selected for viewing the first and last episodes in the museum’s library. The difference between the two was marked, for reasons I’ll get to in a minute.
Miles Davis may have assisted at “the birth of the cool,” and President Obama never seems to sweat. But both could have been taken to Cool School by Pete Dixon (played by the superb Lloyd Haynes).
As a youngster, I usually fixated on some fact that Dixon brought up in class—something about the Declaration of Independence, say.
It came as a mild shock, then, when viewing the initial episode at the Paley Center, to discover that my fact-fixation was diametrically opposed to Dixon’s open-ended, Socratic method of classroom engagement. “The world is being revised,” he said, explaining the rationale for the students’ updated textbooks. “You’d better be doing some thinking.”
The plot of the episode, “Richie’s Story,” concerned a bright student who tried to conceal that he came from outside the district because he didn’t want to attend that dead-end inner-city school. The episode brought to the surface Pete’s compassion, as he interceded for the teenager with principal Seymour Kaufman and guidance counselor Liz McIntyre.
The first episode, I think, was one of the best in the history of television. No wonder: It was written by show creator James L. Brooks, who would go on to write and direct one of my all-time favorite TV sitcoms (The Mary Tyler Moore Show) and all-time favorite films (As Good As It Gets).
In the course of 30 minutes, virtually every character was carved out shrewdly, with a careful balance maintained between drama and light satire. (Newbie student teacher Alice Johnson inquires if Pete prefers to be called colored, negro or black. “I’ve always preferred ‘Pete,’” he answered. Moreover, Dixon regards with amusement a white fellow teacher who lists all his favorite jazz musicians--all of whom just happen to be black--to impress the African-American faculty member with his liberalism.)
At the same time that the dramedy explored life at L.A.’s Walt Whitman High School—including issues regarding race and drugs becoming increasingly contentious in America—it became apparent that the creators of the show had—the pun is irresistible—done their homework on American education. What accounted for this verisimilitude?
Perhaps one key to this might be Brooks’ own background. For the two years just before he created the show, he worked as a writer and producer of documentaries for David L. Wolper, whose series and specials—often on recent history—had started filling up primetime hours in the late Fifties and Sixties. Making Pete Dixon a history teacher would allow Brooks to identify better with the character.
The immediate progenitors of Room 222—and, undoubtedly, the reason why ABC green-lighted the project—were two successful 1967 films on teachers in tough high schools: Up the Down Staircase and To Sir, With Love. But Brooks and writing partner Allan Burns, I think, were using this now-familiar character type to try out something different.
Years ago, I recall reading an essay in The Atlantic Monthly (which, unfortunately, I can’t locate in the magazine’s online archives) on the central character in series created by MTM, the studio formed by Mary Tyler Moore and husband Grant Tinker. From the sitcom starring the actress in the early Seventies to Hill Street Blues, premiering a decade later, this character is a middle manager: a calm eye in the midst of a chaotic workplace environment.
Pete Dixon, I would argue, represents a testing-out of this theme. Torn between the administration and students, he has to maintain order in a world that, as he notes, is not only under revision, but still subject to the eternal terrors involved with growing into adulthood.
He is not, of course, the only character who became a favorite with viewers over the years. There’s also secret girlfriend Liz McIntyre (Denise Nicholas); sardonic but dedicated principal Seymour Kaufman; and student teacher Alice Johnson. (In the latter role, Karen Valentine’s progress from cheerleader perkiness in Season 1 to the subdued teacher in the final season follows the same trajectory as Katie Couric’s movement from The Today Show to The CBS Evening News.)
Despite excellent scripts during its rookie season, Room 222 was almost canceled because of low ratings. Luckily, the networks had much more patience in those days with Nielsen-challenged series than they do now. So ABC gave it time, and the series won an Emmy for best new series at the end of the year. In all, it would win seven Emmys and seven Golden Globes in its first two years. (It never, however, ranked higher than 25th in the ratings.)
The departure of Brooks and the natural tendency toward exhaustion began to tell slowly on the show after a few years, with plots becoming more predictable.
For instance, in “Pardon Me, Your Apathy Is Showing” (Season 4), Kaufman allowed students to form a Marxist club, only to have one particularly excited member clamor to invite a Communist Party leader to speak to the school. The denouement involved a deus ex machina, or “god out of the machine”—an ancient dramatic device in which a force resolves the conflict all too neatly.
In this case, the thorny freedom-of-speech issues were posed but never answered, because the student, Nick (played by Barry Livingston, Ernie of My Three Sons), is savagely disillusioned when the Communist, just like any self-respecting capitalist tool, demands money for his appearance—a lot.
By the final episode, “Cry Uncle,” which aired on January 11, 1974, you can see how tired everyone is. With none of the beautifully ironic lines of the pilot episode, Haynes seems less cool than disengaged. Constantine is now close to a pussycat as Kaufman, dealing with a nephew’s desire to become a comic, in a conventional follow-your-bliss plotline.
By the end of the show’s run, you started to wonder about Bernie’s hair.
You remember Bernie, right? Flaming, frizzy hair, standing so straight up and in such profusion that it seemed to have a life of its own?
Well, the show had been around so long that you wondered if this perpetual “student” might be ready for a toupee.
From what I discovered from the Web, he might have made it through 1974 with the follicles intact, but time began exerting its inexorable toll. For proof, see this link from actress Angela Cartwright’s Web site. (Look for the shot of the actress with the actor playing Bernie, David Jolliffe, and grown-up child star Billy Mumy.)
I've recently discovered that at least the first season of Room 222 is available on DVD. I won't look forward to it quite as much as I did to my high school reunion, but it will be awfully close. And I'm glad that it's around to inspire a new generation of teachers to dare the impossible as they educate another round of kids who'd rather be anywhere but sitting still in a class.
By the final episode, “Cry Uncle,” which aired on January 11, 1974, you can see how tired everyone is. With none of the beautifully ironic lines of the pilot episode, Haynes seems less cool than disengaged. Constantine is now close to a pussycat as Kaufman, dealing with a nephew’s desire to become a comic, in a conventional follow-your-bliss plotline.
By the end of the show’s run, you started to wonder about Bernie’s hair.
You remember Bernie, right? Flaming, frizzy hair, standing so straight up and in such profusion that it seemed to have a life of its own?
Well, the show had been around so long that you wondered if this perpetual “student” might be ready for a toupee.
From what I discovered from the Web, he might have made it through 1974 with the follicles intact, but time began exerting its inexorable toll. For proof, see this link from actress Angela Cartwright’s Web site. (Look for the shot of the actress with the actor playing Bernie, David Jolliffe, and grown-up child star Billy Mumy.)
I've recently discovered that at least the first season of Room 222 is available on DVD. I won't look forward to it quite as much as I did to my high school reunion, but it will be awfully close. And I'm glad that it's around to inspire a new generation of teachers to dare the impossible as they educate another round of kids who'd rather be anywhere but sitting still in a class.
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