Mr. Hunt, Mr. Jones, Ms. Atkinson, Mrs. Salgo, Mr. Hamilton, Mrs. Bixley, Dr. Gardner, Ms. Diamond, and Mr. Castricone

Bunch o'writers eating lunch on a Friday and this comes up. As I once wrote in an op-ed -- wonder who I'd be if I had 20 more names I had to try to squeeze into the title of this post?

For we who work with words, there is no greater debt we have than to those who pushed us in school. Who made the difference for you?

Let Taylor Mali break it down for you.

Okay, Enough is Enough

WHEN Vancouverites start telling you that the rain that has not let up for weeks is getting THEM down, and saying stuff like, "by now we should have had a week of solid sunshine," it's hard to keep up one's spirits. Without spirits, I mean.

The thing is, it's almost time for me to go back home. And if the sun doesn't shine soon, and if I can't see those mountains and all that beauty y'all go on about, I'm afraid I'll just have to go back to Toronto and talk about how awful the weather is. You know, we'll all drive our Toronto cars and sit at our Toronto cafes and have our Toronto conversations about Toronto things and we'll chuckle, oh yes, we'll chuckle our Toronto chuckles and feel all...Toronto. And we all know how much you hate that.

Unless you make the sun come out.

(This Picture shows the view from the window of the writer's room in the Blood Ties Production Office in Maple Ridge, B.C. Allegedly there are mountains just over the horizon.) Yeah. Right.

Marsha! Marsha! Marsha!

She never lets me have a bump!

And she's the reason why Cindy's hooked on cough syrup!

Exxxxcelllent.

It's like finding out that Batgirl had a penis.

Dave, I Want To Go Home

Aw, nuts.

From the Los Angeles Times:

Calvert DeForest, the roly-poly character actor with the black-framed glasses and seemingly clueless delivery who developed a cult following as Larry "Bud" Melman on "Late Night with David Letterman" in the 1980s, has died. He was 85.

DeForest, who continued appearing with Letterman under his own name after the late-night comedian moved to CBS in the early 1990s and last appeared on the show in 2002, died Monday in a hospital in Babylon, Long Island, N.Y. after a long illness, said a spokesman for Worldwide Pants, which produces "The Late Show With David Letterman."

"Everyone always wondered if Calvert was an actor playing a character, but in reality he was just himself--a genuine, modest and nice man," Letterman said in a statement Wednesday. "To our staff and to our viewers, he was a beloved and valued part of our show, and we will miss him."

Like a lot of people my age, one of my first memories ever of DeForest was a couple of appearances on the original "Late Night" -- on the third anniversary special, maybe, when he was tasked with interviewing someone, welcoming them to New York, and then giving them a hot towel.

He couldn't master the actions. At all. He'd point the mike away from the interviewer and toward himself when they answered a question, point the mike to them when he asked a question, so most of the thing was off mike. Then he'd fumble the towel, and remember too late to tag it with the awkward laugh at the end. The clumsiness of the action reduced Letterman to hysterics. And me too. And probably a whole generation of Gen X'ers staying up too late so they'd be tired in homeroom the next morning. And maybe a few older kids for whom a couple of bong hits only increased the hilarity.

I encountered Calvert DeForest personally exactly twice. The first time was on a University trip to NYC. He was taping what would be the kickoff of the "Goodwill Tour" that was supposed to take him via Winnebago to Tierra Del Fuego. A few weeks later, a clearly unhappy DeForest would petulantly beg Dave on the air to let him come home. But on this night he trundled out big as life and did his bit where he entered the Winnebago, and triumphantly left New York.

The night before, I had stupidly tripped and gone over on my ankle in a very dimly lit nightclub. So I was on crutches. We were hanging around 30 Rock, after having failed to get into Letterman. Then I noticed the Winnebago parked on 51st Street. I think it might have said something about Calvert DeForest on the side of it. This was right after he dropped the Larry Bud appellation and started going by his own name on the show. (Though news reports frequently get it wrong, they actually had mostly dispensed with the Larry Bud name before he left the NBC show.) In fact, the reason I remember that is because I clearly recall having to argue with a few classmates that "Calvert DeForest IS Larry Bud Melman,"-- hence the sign on the Winnebago was a Letterman thing. This, in the pre-internet, pre-Celeb24hournewsworld, pre-Google age, was how knowing useless shit paid off.)

I was depressed about being in NY on crutches, but when I saw that Winnebago I was stoked. I'd been watching Dave and I'd heard him primping for the upcoming tour -- and I knew that if we just hung around, pretty soon we'd see the next best thing to Dave.

When he finally came out, he was not surrounded by handlers or people. He was just a short, small, scared actor trundling across a street in midtown Manhattan. I don't know what he thought as he saw a six foot three guy lumbering toward him in a dark trenchcoat on crutches, but to his credit, when I touched him, and threw my crutches down and said, "I can walk!" he smiled. And then, when I took a couple of tentative steps (obviously still in pain) he said, "Are you really hurt?" with something like real concern.

It's hard when you straddle that netherland between being someone who's being laughed at, and laughed with... and I'm not sure how much comfort DeForest ever had in that role. I'm not even sure what side of that line he thought he was on.

We've gone so far past the age of Larry Bud Melman. We now regularly know from the rhythms of Springer and Reality TV that there are some people you want to hate; and some people the medium practically demands that you laugh at, because of their venality, or cluelessness, or arrogance.

But Calvert DeForest wasn't like that. He was always a little lost. And what made his bits so joyously funny wasn't just the absurdity of him -- that voice and that white hair and the seeming willingness to do anything -- it was the sense you got, the very real sense, of displacement. You weren't sure where the character stopped and the man himself started. He was guileless.

The second time that I met Calvert DeForest, it was when his second career, his non-Letterman career, had really taken over. His appearances on the Letterman show had grown more infrequent since the move to CBS anyway, and now you were as likely to see him in a music video or pitching something as in the role where he'd always shone the best: as a slightly befuddled older man doing the puckish bidding of another cranky man who just happened to have his own late night TV show.

I rode around with DeForest for most of a day in Toronto, when he was up doing media appearances for a series of Pizza Hut commercials. (I was doing a story for the show I was a producer on, mediatelevision.) We shuffled from radio Station to TV Station to newspaper interview... Everyone who met him was delighted to meet him. And everyone who met him obviously had his own view of the man himself. They had their own favorite bits. The radio guys tried to get him to say lines from favorite movies. While I have to admit, hearing him say, "Don't ask me about my business, Kay!" brought a smile to my face -- he didn't seem to relish the experience very much.

As I talked to him in that limo that day, it became more than clear to me that DeForest really wasn't dialled in to what his place in the culture truly was. It reminds me of a story that Paul Simon once told about meeting Joe DiMaggio and Joe DiMaggio complaining about Mrs. Robinson: "You say I've gone away, but I haven't. I'm still here." Commented Simon wryly: "I guess Joe hadn't really accepted his place as cultural metaphor."

Well, neither had DeForest. He might have been asked to hit his marks (which he never could) remember his lines (uh uh) and emote (please) but no amount of Pizza Hut cash could make him more sanguine about his life as a shill and a punchline.

He had always wanted to be an actor -- had dreamed of it. But even five hundred miles and sixty years away from his native Brooklyn he couldn't quite escape the reach of his disapproving mother -- who he talked about in alternatively hushed and reverent tones that were kind of heartbreaking. She had been an actress for a short time, and she said it was no life for anybody.

His Dad was a Doctor. His uncle actually helped invent the technology which made broadcasting possible. (Check out this site for more on that.) DeForest's mom died when he was forty, and it was only then that he got the courage to branch out, follow his dream, and quit his job in the pharmaceutical industry. He volunteered, and did a few dumb things in the 70's -- which was a nasty time in NY and no time to try to be an actor, of all things. I think he did a lot of extra work.

As we bounced around Toronto in the back of that limo, he talked about another, way more fateful limo ride -- the one that brought him from his job as a file clerk at a rehab clinic to his first meeting with David Letterman. Letterman had seen him in a couple of staffer's NYU films - and thought he saw comedy gold in action.

It was DeForest, and not Letterman, in fact, that opened the very first episode of Late Night With David Letterman. Merrill Markoe had come up with the "Larry 'Bud' Melman" moniker, and when people tuned in to that legendary first show the first face they saw was DeForest's, doing a riff on the prologue to Boris Karloff's Frankenstein.

DeForest, by the time I really met him, was a lifelong bachelor. He spoke reverently not of Letterman and his own showbiz life, but of the theater, and Broadway, and old film starlets of the 30's and 40's -- stars that maybe he could imagine his mother acting with, all those years ago in a time and a New York that had long since faded into... well... the postmodern city where a gap-toothed, wry and cynical Midwesterner could use an aging Walter Mitty as an endless -- and endlessly amusing -- visual punchline.

I don't want to leave the impression that DeForest didn't appreciate the turn his life had taken. He did. He was downright serious when he talked about the rehab clinic and the horrible and sad people that he saw there, and how glad he was to be rid of that. His speech, in person, had that same nasal Brooklyn honk. The glasses were just as thick as you think. He was stout, but impeccably tailored -- his hair was straight and clean and neat. And he carried with him, as all great comics do, the whiff of melancholy.

I don't know if DeForest was always in on the joke, but at least for the day I spent with him, he was a guy who knew what he had. But it had never stopped him from wanting something else. He showed me a picture of his mother, and a picture of him -- as a young man -- and does it need to be said that the guy who was such a funny looking dude on Letterman wasn't bad looking in his youth?

I got out of the limo, having gotten my story, and sure as I could be that DeForest would have traded everything for a chance to have one great scene in black in white with one of those fine old Hollywood legends like Lana Turner, or Ava Gardner.

He signed a picture for me. It got smudged, and now probably it's lost. An ephemeral end to an artifact for a man with a kind of ephemeral fame.

But Good Lord, when he smashed through the Berlin Wall? I laughed like a drain.

Good Night, Calvert. I hope wherever you are, the Bijou's playing the movies you love, and someone else is handing out the hot towels.

Bravely Waving to and Fro

I've talked about hand waving, its uses and its troubles, before. This post is the kind of hand waving you do when you're tired from production rewrites and really just want to spend some time watching people say things you wrote and make them seem better. So in no particular order here's a couple of chunks of red meat for you to chew on:

It's appropriate, as my last episode of Blood Ties goes to the floor today, to point to this lovely essay on the blog of writer Doris Egan (House, Smallville, Numbers) about what TV is really like when you work on a show:

It's not unusual to see a writer/producer running through the halls during prep, hurrying to casting meetings, tone meetings, production meetings; rushing back to put out new pages; rushing off again before somebody drives somewhere without them -- because nothing can wait. And once shooting does begin, the train only goes faster. There's no time to do anything but field each potential disaster as it comes, and if something goes wrong while shooting a scene -- well, that's it, that's what the world's going to see. There's no budget and no time to re-do anything...

I remember watching an episode of Smallville where an actress said the word "ancestors" instead of "descendants." People made fun of the writer, but not for a second did I think that was what was in the script -- if it were, about fifty people would have commented on it before shooting. I can well believe it happened while shooting the scene, however. Actors are not machines, though they're expected to perform as if they were; and the wrong words will come out way more often than you think. Consider: they're only given about fifteen minutes to rehearse, a little bit of time while lighting's being set up, and then they're tossed into the lion's den. And then there's the pressure of filming -- and it is pressure; if someone were to point a camera at me I'd forget my name. And it's not as if we were asking them to simply perform a task; no, we're saying, "And by the way, could you be wonderfully talented and entertaining while you do that? Starting… now." I'm continually in awe of how consistently actors take all this straw and hand you gold back...

And the train speeds on. Thirteen, fourteen, sometimes fifteen hours a day. You've got enough time to drive home, wind down, get your six hours of sleep, and hurry back...

As you can tell from this, I hope, my respect for television directors, crews, and actors is enormous, and whenever I hear rumbles from the heartland that suggest those Hollywood folks are lollin' around by their pools getting stoned, I think, if only you knew. The Puritan work ethic is alive here more than anyplace I've ever seen, and I worked on Wall Street during the 90s, when they assumed associates were there to put in endless hours. Try going to a party where television people are gathered; by 11:00 pm they're on their way home, because it's going to be a long day tomorrow. The usual end of the workday, for a writer, is about 7:00-8:00 pm; and we're spoiled and cosseted children of privilege compared with the production crew. Whenever we're filming an episode of mine, I look at the people around me and think how remarkable they are, and how fortunate I am to be in their company.

Amen to that. The full post is really worth reading, as is everything on Egan's LiveJournal. She's a self-described "process nerd," which is what every TV writer needs to be, at least on some level.

Then, I thought to myself, you really shouldn't let the premiere of The Riches go by without saying something about it. But then there's Allesandra Stanley's review in the NY Times, which says it far better than I ever could:

So much research is devoted to studying whether violence on television desensitizes children. Yet nobody seems to worry that adults are becoming inured to excellence.

“The Riches,” a new series that begins tonight on FX, could serve as the control in a much-needed experiment. It’s so compelling it deserves to be a hit, generating as much media attention and Internet chatter as “Deadwood,” “Nip/Tuck” or “24.” (It would be blasphemy to invoke “The Sopranos,” since no show is that good, not even “The Sopranos.”)

So if “The Riches” does poorly, then it can only mean that there is too much high-quality television driving away the bad.

Stanley's tongue is planted firmly in-cheek, but not too far. I was just blown away by this premiere. Not just Eddie Izzard, but the freshness of the story area (I've never seen anything about American Travelers, or Roma...) The con-angle has been played before, sure, but the culture of these people has not; and the oddness, the alien-nature of this world, to me, is everything that Big Love wasn't. I want to see more of how these people see the world: and our world, too.

When Hugh offers Wayne a job as a lawyer in his real-estate empire, Wayne isn’t sure what “in house,” means and repeats the words thoughtfully until Hugh supplies the rest, “in-house counsel.” But Wayne cements the deal with a con man’s bluff, taming the bullying Hugh with a game of Russian roulette.

“A good lawyer makes you believe the truth,” Wayne says after aiming a gun at his future employer’s head. “But Hugh, you know what a great lawyer does? He makes you believe the lie.”

Hugh gives him the job, telling Doug that he’s a sick fellow, “and I like that in a liar.”

Viewers will also learn to like these liars.

“The Riches” is that rare thing, a dark, sophisticated series that speaks to our most childlike natures. Just as little boys and girls dress up as the Little Mermaid or pretend they are enrolled at Hogwarts, the Malloys tempt even stand-up adults to assume a new identity and live it to the fullest — on someone else’s MasterCard.

Well, I can't do better than that. So I'll just say The Riches is worth watching, and I'll probably have more to say once I've seen a few episodes.

I also think in all the "avenge me while you see my ghost" subgenre (Medium, Ghost Whisperer) Raines clearly stands out. Two words: Jeff Fucking Goldblum, bitches. The twist got me. It all got me. It's new on the list.

And finally, if you're in the USA, tonight you get to see my non-sexual hetero mancrush spread his wings. The much anticipated This American Life TV show premieres on Showtime tonight. David Carr had a nice profile of host Ira Glass in the Times.

That's it. Now, I'm going to watch people work harder than me.

David O. Russel and Lily Tomlin are Having A Very Bad Day

I can remember the latte I was drinking when I read the article where this video was referred to obliquely. This has been making the rounds in Hollywood apparently for years.

But in Canada we're not used to hearing these words. Thinking them, yes. Just not saying them out loud.

On set.

In front of everybody.

Oyyyyyy.

This is so totally NSFW.

UPDATE: as fast as these links go up, they come down...but here's another one.

Damn You, Comedy Week! Part VII, The Final Laugh

Man. You try to make a graceful exit from the week, and then the New York Times profiles not only Amy Poehler, but Jim Gaffigan, too? An embarrassment of comic goodness!

The Poehler article is interesting for hanging a lantern on the "she's funny for a girl" trope while still kind of saying, um...she's funny for a girl.

When Ms. Poehler, a native of Burlington, Mass., and a graduate of Boston College, first arrived in Chicago in 1993, the scene was in flux. “You’d hear, ‘Oh, women aren’t funny,’ and most of the improv teams were eight guys and one woman,” said Rachel Dratch, a Chicago veteran who would later join the “SNL” cast. “But within like four years it had kind of switched up.”

As Ms. Poehler rose through the ranks at ImprovOlympic (now known as I.O.) and Second City, gender divisions within these institutions’ comedy teams began to even out, and she found herself in the company of strong female performers like Ms. Dratch and Tina Fey, the future “Saturday Night Live” head writer and “30 Rock” creator and star, who appeared with Ms. Poehler in an I.O. group called Inside Vladimir.

Soon Ms. Poehler was invited to join the Upright Citizens Brigade, a sketch comedy troupe whose formidable roster included Adam McKay, another future “SNL” head writer and the director of “Talladega Nights,” and Horatio Sanz, soon to be one of the show’s stars.

“We were a group where I think our shortest guy was like 6 foot 1,” recalled Matt Besser, a founding member. “So it’s not just intimidating to perform with us because of our experience, but also because we were literally towering above most people physically. But Amy was able to get onstage with us, and that just didn’t seem to matter.”

On the other hand, the Gaffigan article goes into an aspect of his act that I was unaware of:

He also said he was gratified by his fans’ repeated support for the decision he made about five years ago to quite literally clean up his act and purge it of the “cussing,” as he calls it, that he found he was using as a crutch. (On the meet-and-greet-line in Charlotte, he tried to warn some unsuspecting audience members about to buy one of his older CDs that his language was coarser.)

“The topics I’m discussing — there’s no reason to curse when you’re talking about escalators,” he said. “Among comedians, George Carlin, Richard Pryor and Lenny Bruce are, in a way, the martyrs who fought for us to have the right to curse. I feel like they also made it possible for us not to.”

Mr. Gaffigan’s big break came in 1999, when he was booked to perform a stand-up set on “Late Show With David Letterman” after five years of trying. As a fellow Indiana native (Mr. Gaffigan grew up in Chesterton, in the northwest corner of the state), he said that he had regarded merely shaking hands with Mr. Letterman as something akin to “meeting Mark Twain.” Among the jokes he told that night was this one: “I’m from Indiana. I know what you’re thinking. Indiana. Mafia.” From behind him, he could hear the host giggling. After Mr. Gaffigan was finished, Mr. Letterman rewarded him with an honor that to this day he bestows only rarely: he invited Mr. Gaffigan to sit down next to him at his desk.

“Literally, that night, my life changed,” Mr. Gaffigan said.

The article also goes into how his wife was instrumental in developing many of the hallmarks of his act -- including the "inner voice." In its own way, I think that's as much a refutation of the whole "women aint funny" trope, even if it, at the same time, resurrects the whole "behind every great man is a..." thing. Now, if he would only tour to Canada...

Anyway, go about your business.