Sarah Palin to Star in New Reality TV Show at Fox?

I don't give much credence to the rumors floating around the Net that Fox's Entertainment Group has bought the rights to that old Della Reese series about three cherubs tasked by Jehovah with walking the earth to give hope to the depressed and downtrodden. Fox reportedly is planning to rejigger it as a reality TV show for Sarah Palin.

The former Alaska gov. reportedly will be traipsing around the country, pressing the flesh with the common folk whilst doling out miracles, a new stove here, a box of pampers there, even a nice vinyl siding job to some poor slobs stuck in a double-wide.

In addition to preaching the impending Armageddon heralded by the election of the anti-Christ Barack Obama, the Republican sexpot dubbed "Caribou Barbie" likely will remind the lumpen proletariat that the GOP loves them.

According to the New York Times, the uncrowned queen of the Tea Party movement recently sold her documentary series Sarah Palin's Alaska to The Learning Channel.Discovery Communications, TLC's corporate parent, described it as a “documentary series about the remarkable Governor Palin and her home state of Alaska.”

This set off the recent spate of rumors that she has signed an even more lucrative deal with Fox, for whom she hosts the series Real American Stories. Ratings for the show -- which debuted on April Fool's Day -- have proven disappointing, according to the Huffington Post. Thus, there is a desire on the part of Fox executives to "rebrand" her.

Why don't I believe it? Because the Internet rumor mill says Fox has changed the title to Touched by an A$$hole. (Yes, the dollar signs are part of the title!) Now, if this were MNBC they were talking about...

Is Jack Nicholson a Method Actor?

"I was talking to Sean Penn on the phone today. I told him it was interesting that they managed to leave me off this long list of Method actors they'd published in some article. I told him, "I'm still fooling them!" I consider it an accomplishment. Because there's probably no one who understands Method acting better academically than I do, or actually uses it more in his work. But it's funny -- nobody really sees that. It's perception versus reality, I suppose."

-- Jack Nicholson

What's Jack Nicholson Up To? Oh, About 280

Jack Nicholson, one of only four thespians to win three Academy Awards (the Great Kate Hepburn tops the list of winners after racking up four of the tchochkes) hasn't quite hit Brandoesque proportions, but there's going to come a time soon when he steps up on the bathroom scale, and the readout will blurb, "TO BE CONTINUED."

[Old-fashioned bathroom scales start a whole new revolution after the 300 mark for you readers under the age of 40. But you probably wouldn't be here anyway. "Jack Who?"]

Jack Nicholson and his buddy Marlon Brando used to live side-by-side on Mulholland Drive above La-La land on a stretch of the road dubbed Bad Boy Drive as fellow sybarite Warren Beatty (and Jack pal) lived near-by. Brando famously told PLAYBOY Magazine in 1979 that he didn't give a shit about how fat he was, and that fans and the media should stop hounding him and Elizabeth Taylor (who was his co-star when he delivered a knock-out performance in Reflections in a Golden Eye) for just being human.

Jack first let it all hang out in Terms of Endearment, which featured the actor with the greatest Gollywood grin since Dean Martin (TV and moviedom's fabled "King Leer") in a bedroom scene with Warren's sister Shirley MacLaine in which his pot belly threatened to buckle his knees.

Check out Saucy Jack in these photos, cruisin' with some young ladies. Looks like Jack has more lust for the hero sandwich than the starlets!

Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis Break Up

It's probably falls into the "Hard to Believe" category, but Jerry Lewis was one of the top box office stars of all time. From 1951 through 1963, Jerry Lewis made the list of Top 10 Money Making Stars 11 times, either with Dean Martin or solo, failing to make the list only in 1959 and '60.

Dino, himself, didn't make the list again until after the ebb tide of Lewis' screen popularity went out. Martin made the Top 10 List of Box Office stars twice as a solo act: Buoyed by the Matt Helm spy spoof series, he cracked the Top 10 in 1967 and '68, ranking #4 & #6, respectively.

Martin & Lewis first were voted in the Top 10 in 1951, coming in at #2, topped only by John Wayne. It was the first of six straight years on the list. Ironically, 1951 was Abbott & Costello's last year in the Top 10. (Show business legend has it that Martin & Lewis were "discovered" by Abbott & Costello.)

The comedy team of Bud Abbott & Lou Costello, Martin & Lewis' only rivals as a comedic team in terms of box office popularity, had debuted on the list in 1941, the first of four consecutive years in the Top Ten, and were #1 in 1942. They also made the list in 1948, '49 & '50, seven times in total, one more than Martin & Lewis. However, by the early '50s, they definitely were suffering from over-exposure. Their career went into eclipse, as Martin & Lewis became America's comic darlings.

The year after being voted onto the money makers list by theater owners, Martin & Lewis duplicated Abbott & Costello's distinction by being named the #1 Box Office attraction in America. For the next four years, they were ranked #2 two straight years, then #7 and #6. In 1957, Jerry Lewis as a solo act cracked the Top 10 at #9 and was #3 the following year, his best showing without Dino.

Here is links to an excellent series on the Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis crack up, featured on Michael J. Hayde's blog BETTER LIVING THROUGH TELEVISION:

I. Martin vs. Lewis, Round One (March 1954)

II. Martin vs. Lewis, Round Two (June-August 1955)

III. Martin vs. Lewis, T.K.O. (June-July 1956)

Anatomy of a Flop: "Camelot" (1967)

The movie musical Camelot (1967) doesn't rate as one of the all-time movie musical bombs of the late 1960s that nearly wiped out Gollywood, but it was a disappointment. It's co-stars, Richard Harris and Vanessa Redgrave, were hardly singers (though Harris would score a #2 hit with MacArthur Park the following year).

The stars of the original Broadway musical might have salvaged the film, but Richard Burton was offered a fortune by Warner Bros. to recreate the role of King Arthur but didn't think the musical could make a successful transition to screen. Burton's Guinevere, Julie Andrew, then the #1 box office star in America after the great success of The Sound of Music, turned Jack Warner down. Warner had earlier given her a thumbs down, casting Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady instead.

Here's a detailed look at the failure of the show that had been so memorable on Broadway: "Broadway's Camelot Proved a Disappointment when Transferred to Celluoid."

Sources:

The Cobra's nose, The Lusty Month of May-O

Anatomy of a Flop: "Paint Your Wagon" (1969)

Lee Marvin inexplicably got nominated for a Golden Globe Award as Best Actor in a Comedy or Musical for his turn as the horny miner in Paint Your Wagon. (Inexpliable, if you don't realize the Golden Globes were even more corrupt, more up for sale, then they are now. The FCC banned the Golden Globes show from being televised for a decade, due to the corruption of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association that makes the awards.

Why would macho man Lee Marvin be cast in a musical? why would Clint Eastwood be cast as his co-star? And how did Marvin, whose voice co-star Jean Seberg (another non-singer, but who was dubbed) described as the sound of a gurgling drain pipe, socre a Top 10 hit single?

Here's a detailed look at the flop:

"Paint Your Wagon" Painted Paramount Pictures' Books with a Plethora of Red Ink

8 Movie Stars Who Starred in a Movie Musical (and Shouldn't Have)

Fred Astaire, the greatest song and dance man Hollywood ever produced, only got one Oscar nomination in his great career, and that for a dramatic role in the 1974 disaster film The Towering Inferno. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences gave him an honorary Academy Award in 1950 to recognize his unique artistry, but where was the recognition when this all-time great was at the height of his powers?

A related question is what possesses an "A-List" actor, be he the winner of Academy Awards or ranked among the top ten box office stars (or both), want to make like Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly and trip the light fantastic on screen while warbling tunes with a voice that should never have been heard outside their shower stall?

James Cagney, the great cinema tough guy, turned the trick, winning an Oscar playing song man George M. Cohan in Yankee Doodle Dandy, but Jimmy had been a hoofer in stage musicals before making it on the silver screen. His song and dance turn in the "Shanghai Lil" number in Footlight Parade (1933) was the highlight of one of the more memorable of the early musicals.

Here is a list of 8 A-List Actors Who Should Have Never Starred in a Movie Musical (Even Though They Did). They include Lee Marvin, better known for such action pics as The Dirty Dozen, and cinema cowboy Clint Eastwood, both of whom starred in the monumental flop Paint Your Wagon. Marvin incredibly scored a Top 10 single with his crooning of "Wand'rin' Star" and a Golden Globe nomination!

Paint Your Wagon was one of a parade of big musical flops of the late 1960s that nearly did in the Hollywood studios.

Pernell Roberts: Leaving The Ponderosa

Into the early 1970s, when his career had sputtered out, Pernell Roberts' leaving the career-making bonanza that was BONANZA was considered one of the greatest screw-ups in show-business history, and certainly the biggest in TV history. He was leaving a #1 rated show that made the three other stars incredbily wealthy. (It went on as #1 two years in a row after he left, and set a record for being in the top 10 nine times. In the early 1990s, a poll of Baby Boomers rated it as the #1 best remembered show.)

Pernell Roberts (1928-2010) was kind of like TV's version of the Marlon Brando of the 1960s, who just appeared in one awful or unsucessful movie after another and whose career sank into unbankability.

Hollywood columnists found it amazing that Roberts would just walk away from a bonanza that most actors never even came close to, and they used his subsequent "ruin" to show that spoiled actors (like Brando) were justly punished for their sins. (Roberts initally had good guest roles on other TV shows but by the early '70s, the prominence of his parts had declined. For instance, he appeared nearly every season as a guest on MISSION:IMPOSSIBLE, until the final years. He had become a lesser Don Stroud -- another frequent guest star on TV series -- but Stroud had never tasted Pernell's success.)

I always wondered what he thought about his THE CRUCIBLE co-sstar Lee Marvin making the transition from series TV (M-SQUAD) to movie superstardom. Did it have any effect on that decision in 1965 to leave. ('65 was the year Marvin appeared in CAT BALLOU & SHIP OF FOOLS; he won the Oscar the next year and a year or two after that began a nice streak in the Top 10 of Box Office Stars.)

Lee Marvin had some kind of loopy, insane intensity (well used in THE CRUCIBLE, one of the best BONANZA episodes) that made him an ideal star for the 1960s.

The rate of TV stars trying to make the transition to the silver screen was very low in the 1960s. Steve McQueen did it, yet his TV show was short-lived and not nearly as popular as BONANZA. BONANZA was the most popular show if its time, and ebing type-cast as "Adam Cartwright" forever must have been on his mind.

But Pernell Roberts stepped out and nearly into career oblivion, until he was resurrected by the fates in TRAPPER JOHN, M.D. I was happy to see him back, though I rarely watched the show.

Here's an excellent summation of his struggle with BONANZA: The Restless Ballad of Pernell Roberts.

Lynn Redgrave R.I.P.

Lynn Redgrave died of breast cancer on May 2nd. She was only 67 years of age. Her actor brother Colin, a Marxist fanatic like Vanessa Redgrave, recently passed away. 

Redgrave was superb in GEORGY GIRL (1966), for which she received one of her two Oscar nominations. James Mason (who also got an Oscar nod for the flick), as the rich, much older toff who employed her parents as domestic servants, matches her great performance...

[SPOILER ALERT]

...as we find out the old fart actually loves her in the end, just from a look by that extraordinary actor, sitting on the steps of his house with Georgy's father, who has just asked "Who would want to marry" his daughter. (Unlike a Hollywood movie, they love is not returned, though they do get hitched!)

London's conservative newspaper, The Telegraph, ran a first rate obituary of Lynn Redgrave.

From the horse's Mouth (Roman Polanski's Defense)

Straight From the Horse's Mouth (The Mouth of An Ass is More Like It!):

I can remain silent no longer! by Roman Polanski

Los Angeles Time Story on Roman Polanski's Latest Stratagem

Remember: This is a man who at the age of 44 not only drugged & raped a 13 year-old girl but he did it in the house of a friend (Jack Nicholson). The resulting police investigation resulted in said friend's live-in girlfriend (Angelic Huston) being busted for drug possession and winding up with a criminal record.

The director's latest "defense" (how many times have we heard that he must be forgiven because 1.) he is a Holocaust survivor, and 2.) his first wife Sharon Tate was murdered, not to mention 3.) his victim has forgiven him (as if that has any bearing on his fleeing prosecution) is the same old reason he used to justify bailing out: Someone allegedly overheard the judge overseeing his case saying prejudicial things against him in a country club locker room.

Not only is this hearsay, something that has little value legally, but said judge is now dead and can't defend himself.

What a scoundrel this Polanski is!

Roman Polanski: 'I can remain silent no longer'

Famous Movie Catchphrases: "You Ain't Heard Nuthin' Yet!"

Famous Movie Catchphrases: Many Famous Movie Lines Were so Overused They Became Clichés

Did Broadway Legend Jeanne Eagels Really Die of a Heroin Overdose?

I used to buy into the idea that the great actress was a heroin addict, but I no longer do. Read about it here:

Jeanne Eagels: Legendary Actress Died Under Mysterious Circumstances

Father Knickerbocker Wrote "A Pictorial History of Historical Pictorians"

The rise of TV punditry hearkens back to the old days, when the Metropolitan New York area had a score or more of dailies and columnists like Walter Winchell who could make or break more than just Broadway actors and movie stars!

Sir Cecil Seltzer, 2nd Baronet Litchfield: A Profile of the Former "New York Herald Tribune" Columnist

Sandra Bullock Beomes 1st Woman to Win Oscar & Top Box Office in Same Year!

I don't know which one is more unbelievable: That Sandra Bullock won an Oscar or was named the #1 box office star in America. That she won a Razzie Award as Best Actress in the same year is far more in th realm of probability.

Sandra Bullock Becomes 1st Woman to Be Voted #1 Box Office Star & Win Oscar in Same Year

The Top 3 Books that Should Be Turned into Movies

Jack Kerouac's On the Road, Bud Schulberg's What Makes Sammy Run? and Charles Bukowski's Women are The Top 3 Books that Should Be Turned into Movies.

10 Who Pioneered the Way for Women in Directing

Read about it here: 10 Female Movie Directors Who Pioneered the Way for Women in Directing.

The Films of Bobby Darin

Bobby Darin, a near-legendary crooner, also had quite a career (for awhile) as an actor. Read about here: The Films of Bobby Darin

Dorothy Arzner: Sole Women Director of Hollywood's Golden Age

My piece Dorothy Arzner: Lesbian was Sole Woman Director in Hollywood's Golden Age, tells her remarkable career.

Hollywood Power Lesbians of Hollywood's Golden Age

A look at Hollywood Power Lesbians of Hollywood's Golden Age, including Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich (and her pursuit of Carole Lombard), and the infamous harlot Tallulah Bankhead (detailing her seduction of  Hattie McDaniel, "Mammie" from Gone With the Wind!).