Prime Time

The New Idiocy

Prime Time

by

Richard C. Walls

It was a perfect Tomorrow Show, starting off with a disgruntled pastor babbling some fantasy about there being too much sex on television (imagine!), followed by a surly Rona Barrett review of William Holden’s new epic The Earthling (tho she’s still unabidable as a human being, many of Miss Rona’s reviews are surprisingly on the mark), and then an appearance by a seemingly softened E. Costello, which if you didn’t see you’ve probably heard about by now, then back to Barrett hyping some comic whose name I didn’t quite catch (something Winslow, who came across as Jonathan Winters on speed, i.e., another Robin Williams) and then the dessert to this meaty repast, an interview with Frank Capra. Capra, who’s 83, was halting and forgetful and the anecdotes were well worn but the audience was joyfully respectful, laughing and applauding as if they were hearing it all for the first time. Towards the end of the interview, as Capra was talking about the negative reaction that the Washington, D.C. press had to Mr. Smith Goes To Washington (’39) when it was first previewed there and how they resented the intrusion of Hollywood into the sacred realm of political commentary, resenting particularity the power of the cinema as an instrument of influence more wide-reaching than their own, one could observe Snyder’s eyebrows locking fitfully as thoughts began to form like rainclouds on the clear blue horizon of his mind. Leaning forward and pausing between each word for emphasis, he delivered his little cloudburst to Capra: “Why do you think that people who write about television write bad about it? Because it has more power than they do and they can’t stand it. ”

Gee whiz. Now everybody knows.

HAPPY DAYS: It’sbeen a dreary two months TV-wise (speaking of the December-January that preceded the writing of this column), a reflection of a dreary reality. The first news of Lennon’s murder arrived on the screen at the exact moment that Carson was to respond to Ed McMahon’s famous Set Up for The Bit (“You are wrong o gun control breath”). Television’s response to the tragedy was, for the most part, depressingly bad—too many sociological eulogies delivered by people who had no idea of what was going on in the 60’s (and have no idea that anything is happening now), aging record industry moguls lamenting the death of the “counterculture”—and for once television’s basic absurdness, it’s perpetuation of an alternate (and shoddy) reality as a response to life’s complexities, wasn’t amusing.

January brought more grist for the mindless mill. The timing of the hostages’ release to coincide with Reagan’s inauguration ceremonies might have started with the Ayatollah’s tortuous sense of humor but the result was a wave of patriotism unparalleled since the early 50’s. All sludge broke loose as the freed Americans (“heroes in an age of anti-heroes” said more than one blithering commentator) slowly made their way home. Columnists who specialized in one-sentence paragraphs posing cute universal questions (“Have you ever noticed how when you pass age 30 you start to mutate?”) wrote epigrams for the new idiocy while usually portentous TV news personalities turned into beaming cheerleaders. It was a glorious time for the glib, the uninspired, (and, it should be said, the simple and the good), the people who were so fucking fed up with the way things are (a healthy vital emotion) that they desperately wanted things to be the way they once were (the dull stifling pay-off of their anger).

These two media-enhanced events, the response to Lennon’s death and the response to the hostages’ release, occurred so close in time that in my mind they bled together, the one seeming to follow quite naturally after the other. The eager bland faces of the flagwavers singing still another chorus of “America The Beautiful” seemed to be reacting to the news that everything was all right now, that blind and uncritical faith in one’s country was now not only allowable but desirable behavior. After all, a whole generation of troublemakers had just been, even if only symbolically, murdered, duly mourned, and laid to rest.

Right?

HAMBURGER HELPER FOR THE MIND: Lately I’ve been reading a lot of star bios, partly because of my continuing fascination with old movies and partly because the local sleaze-pit of a bookstore has a whole rack of ’em to choose from (this bookstore is interesting, being divided into two parts—one half in an “adult” section with books, magazines, video and tape cassettes with names like Bondage and Clyde, and Here Comes Mona as well as toys for the discriminating hedonist—inflatable women, shiny pink dildoes that would rupture an elephant—while the other half is a “straight” bookstore with a decidedly bus terminal ambience—lotsa gothic romances and contemporary horror novels, a handful of books by the likes of Roth/Updike/Malamud and a gaggle of periodicals for UFO buffs and lonely teenage girls plus a stunningly wide variety of detective magazines aimed at unfulfilled sex criminals). Generally, these star bios are run-of-the-mill garbage, being either gimmicky exposes or respectfully tedious hackwork, but now and then something truly awful comes along, like A Dreadful Man by Brian Aherne. This is a strange little book which purports to be a biography of George Sanders, which it isn’t. Sanders was a fascinating man who apparently behaved in real life very much like he is on the screen, a disdainful and arrogant man but eloquently witty, insufferably rude to people he didn’t like (which seems to have included almost everyone) and only barely civil to those he did. He was in character to the end, when in ’72 at the age of 65 he left behind one last curdled message—“I am committing suicide because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I leave you all in your little cesspool and I wish you luck.” Who was George Sanders and how did the caddish intelligence that informed such roles as Addison De Witt in All About Eve and a dozen others lead to such a dismal and unimaginative end? One imagines that a book which addressed these questions would be engrossing but, this ain’t it. Instead, the book begins, after some sketchy info about Sanders’ early life, in the mid-50’s and consists mostly of letters to author Aherne (who was one of the enigmatic Sanders’ few close friends) from Sanders’ second wife Benita Hume, letters that are full of tiresome travelogue descriptions and catty remarks about friends who are never clearly identified. Added to this are Aherne’s own shaggy dog anecdotes about his later career (doing the roadshow edition of My Fair Lady, playing Johann Strauss for Disney, appearing in Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Cavern (’65)—now that should have been interesting but the best we get is Aherne’s description of Ulmer as “a rather florid, tempermental character who had much experience and some talent but so far not much success.”) Amidst all these pointless digressions Sanders makes an occasional appearance, a minor character in his alleged biography. A strange and truly dreadful book and heartily recommended to regular readers of this column.

I DON’T MAKE THESE UP: This month’s Creative Programming Award goes to Canada’s CBET-TV Windsor which recently showed the ’62 film version of O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night on Action Theater. Which is a little like showing Plan 9 From Outer Space on Million Dollar Movie. And having managed to mention both Plan 9 and Canada I can end this month’s column a complete and happy man.