June 22, 2008 - June 28, 2008

George Carlin's first closeup

The above is from the opening credits of the 1968 Doris Day movie, With Six You Get Eggroll, which was George Carlin's film debut. He played a drive-in carhop named Herbie Fleck, whose main role was to make the most of his lame dialogue and provide the only half-assed laughs in the entire movie. Here he is in his first closeup, putting the moves on Doris (who, in real life, would have been 15 years older than George).

It's the only movie appearance of Carlin from his "Hippy-Dippy Weatherman" days, and he didn't make another film until Car Wash eight years later.

But a young, clean-cut George Carlin isn't the only surprise this late '60s clunker has to offer us today-- how about a closeup of Creed Bratton of The Grass Roots!

(Yes, it's that Creed Bratton.)

And if that's not enough, how about Klinger and Father Mulcahy as hippies?

Posted by Steve Monaco at June 28, 2008 4:23 PM

The Monday Movie Quiz #181

Think he's ugly? You should see what he's usually shooting at.

Okay, a couple more clues.

Know it? Then you must know what to do-- send me an email by late Sunday with the country, er, title. If you're correct, expect to see your name in next week's still Tim Russert-related winner's circle.

Posted by Steve Monaco at June 23, 2008 3:04 AM

Last week's Movie Quiz winners

Only a couple of people speculated (correctly) on my motive for making Network this week's quiz movie: "Did it have anything to do with the Tim Russert Grieve-athon?" Yes, it did. Watching TV news turn itself into the only story of the week, for 24 hours a day, made me wonder what the movie's author, Paddy Chayefsky, would make of it all. Would he be amused that so much of what he predicted came true? Or would he be annoyed that reality ultimately went even further with the joke than he did?

(Until they broadcast the funeral, too, I was afraid they might not even bury Russert, but instead put him on a post-mortem tour like James Brown and call it "Meet the Press Corpse." And I thought it interesting that a day or two after he died, so did Stan Winston, special effects great and the creator of Pumpkinhead-- it was like Pinocchio dying and then Geppetto. Okay, enough mean-spirited jokes and back to Network.)

Besides the movie's eerie predictions of today's entertainment news and reality TV, Network's network-- Union Broadcasting System or UBS-- might just as well be called Fox. Always last in the ratings, UBS crawls to the top with a combination of a reality series about terrorists (who film themselves committing crimes) and a newsman, Howard Beale, who goes crazy on-air. Beale, billed as "The Mad Prophet," fits the new UBS programming strategy, expressed by Faye Dunaway's character, Diana Christensen: "I want angry shows!" And, of course, angry newsmen.

As a film, Network is as good as '70s cinema gets, and Chayefsky said it was the best cast to ever do one of his scripts. Everybody's great in it-- Dunaway and William Holden (above) as unlikely lovers, Robert Duvall and Ned Beatty (pic clue #2) as Fox, er, UBS execs, and especially Peter Finch, in his Oscar-winning (and last) performance as the newsman who's mad as hell and not going to take it any more.

But for all the talk of Chayefsky and Network predicting television future, in one way, the man and the movie were dead wrong. While the "Mad as hell" speech is known even by people who haven't seen the film, it's some of the other monologues Finch delivers that are the most remarkable. Listen to this, a eulogy for his network's boss, Edward George Ruddy, and then compare it with the stuff we hear from TV news "personalities" today.

We didn't come close to getting Howard Beale-- if only we'd been that lucky.

(NSFW: Remember, Howard says things like "bullshit" when he's on the air.)

Congratulations and a "Get Out of Atonement Free" card to the following quiz winners: E. Yarber, Wayne Palmer, Nancy Louise Rutherford, Dave Mallow, Bill Kelly, Bob Redwing, Corey Anderson, Michael Mattson, Mick, Thomas Miller, Dean Carlson, Christina O'Sullivan, Bill Hearne, Fred Lorence, Kevin Musolino, Denny Lynch, Song-Un Lee, Paul Rignell, and Vince Tuss.

Posted by Steve Monaco at June 22, 2008 6:27 PM

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