Rush Limbaugh, 1951-2021

Rush Limbaugh built an empire on unfairness, and boy, did it catch on.

Most Americans are too young (*sigh*) to remember when radio and tv broadcasts were subject to the “Fairness Doctrine,” established in 1949 by the Federal Communications Commission. Along with an “Equal Time Rule” which applied to political candidates, the regulation mandated the presentation of opposing points of view on controversial issues or political endorsements. What right did the FCC have to stick its nose into local broadcasters’ business? Because the airwaves are owned by the public and only temporarily licensed to for-profit companies.

One of the signature features of 60 MINUTES when it debuted in 1968 was a segment called “Point/Counterpoint,” in which liberal Nicholas von Hoffman and conservative James J. Kilpatrick debated a particular topic. As Shana Alexander took over for von Hoffman in 1975, making the segment a de facto battle of the sexes, SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE was just going on the air. In SNL’s early years Jane Curtin and Dan Aykroyd had a ball satirizing these debates: “Jane, you ignorant slut!” That line was funny because the real thing was all about ideas, not personalities, and 60 MINUTES’ back-and-forths were conducted with the utmost propriety. The fact that such a respectful atmosphere now feels innocent, even quaint, can be traced directly back to El Rushbo.

There was talk radio during those days, it was just very different. When I lived in Georgia in the early Seventies, on long car trips I loved tuning in to WRNG (“Ring Radio”), an all-talk station in Atlanta. Each jock had a four-hour show and spent it all on telephone call-ins. The host could steer callers toward a topic, but the real stars were the civilians on the line. You could hear crazy tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorists, but a later caller would usually inject a dose of reality. Even then, though, I noticed that the ranters were more entertaining. One of the WRNG personalities was a guy named Neal Boortz. He was still doing his thing as late as 2013, but something had long since changed. For WRNG he was a forensic referee, but over time he morphed into fire-breathing right-wing bombast. This is how it happened:

In 1987 the Reagan administration repealed the Fairness Doctrine, claiming that there were so many media voices in the marketplace that it was no longer needed. Now you could say whatever you wanted without opposition or reproach. The following year a radio syndicator hired a glib 37-year-old Sacramento jock at exactly the right time, and offered his conservative-oriented show for next to nothing as long as you agreed to run three or four minutes of “national” ads. The rest of the commercial time was yours. THE RUSH LIMBAUGH SHOW was eventually carried on more than 600 stations, the reach ever larger and larger as the show moved around to bigger stations at contract renewal time.

By the late Eighties the radio business had been fighting to stay standing in the midst of several cultural hurricanes. For decades a leading and lucrative format had been “Top Forty,” or repeated playing of popular rock and pop singles. But since the late Sixties music fans had been enticed by the clarity and range of album-oriented FM stations. Then in 1981 MTV went on the air and supplanted Top Forty radio as the best way to “break” new acts and records. The business was anemic when Rush came along and changed everything — and AM was just dandy for talk, which doesn’t require a Bang & Olufsen rig to enjoy. Most broadcasters will tell you that Rush Limbaugh is the guy who personally saved the AM dial by paving the way for so many others.

While Rush was emerging to lead the conservative ecosphere, I was in New York working in the book business. One day in 1992, when I was at Bantam, a competitor of ours, Pocket Books, released THE WAY THINGS OUGHT TO BE and it shot to the top of the bestseller list. I had never heard of Rush Limbaugh, but a ton of book buyers sure had. I asked our publicity czar, Stuart Applebaum, if he could explain the new publishing pheenom. “Conservatives don’t have anything to read,” he said. (They do now, even have their own imprints; one of them, Regnery, recently picked up Sen. Josh Hawley’s discarded book after he basically fist-bumped the murderous Jan. 6 mob at the Capitol, triggering a Simon & Schuster morals clause.)

I had to know, so I got a pal to send me a copy and took it home. Although I had still never heard the sound of Limbaugh’s voice — the thing that made him famous — I think I managed to get a load of his public persona all the same. He was an extreme reactionary, brash but so over the top that he was funny too. He clearly saw himself as an entertainer, not a journalist. Some of his provocations were nothing more than a way to get under the skin of the other side, to “own the libs.” Heck, El Rushbo invented owning the libs. But he did it with unrepentant flair. For example, his network was modestly called “Excellence In Broadcasting.”

When I heard him speak for the first time, we were in the same room. The following year, I happened to be in the David Letterman studio audience for Rush’s first guest spot, promoting his second book SEE, I TOLD YOU SO on Dave’s old NBC late-late show. By now people outside the Limbaugh fan base were vaguely aware of him, so he knew he was in the lion’s den. He demonstrated comfort and good cheer, got that faux-boastful personality stated, and ably dealt with a rather hostile crowd (“Let the wrestling begin,” said Dave at one point) while getting his jabs in at the Clintons to groans but smiling all the time. Looking back, I think Rush always resonated not just for what he said, but the way he said it. 

Yes, the media probably did have a liberal bias — truth itself has a liberal bias — so to many conservatives it was a novelty hearing a point of view that actually reflected their own. Rush was speaking for them so accurately that his fans took to calling themselves “dittoheads.” Damn right, Rush: ditto! But anybody can spout reactionary wisdom. What set Limbaugh apart were his terrific performative chops — he could vamp like a jazzman — and a carefree attitude that deflected so many incoming bad vibes like the ones in that NBC studio. 

That verbal Fred Astaire touch is why Rush is irreplaceable. Today’s conservative stars, especially on the Fox News Channel — whose high concept on its launch in 1996 was basically “Rush Limbaugh On TV,” and whose slogan “Fair And Balanced” owned the libs at gut level — are stern and humorless. Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and all the Fox blondes are simply selling outrage, not right-winger fun, and that’s hard to sustain. Remember when Dubya’s color-coded Homeland Security Advisory System remained at “elevated” risk for terrorism every day for months? You can’t keep it up. For longevity you need a song and dance man, a “rodeo clown,” as Glenn Beck memorably described himself. Which brings us to that orange guy, the one with the bizarre combover who cheats at golf. That doofus was nothing but a Rush Limbaugh imitation, and a poor one at that.

Talk about dittoheads. They even amazed the game show host turned candidate: he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any voters. He may or may not have been surprised when a violent mob did exactly what he told them to do, but there’s no denying he was fascinated. His whole reason for being was owning the libs. He was cruder and dumber than Rush, but even the old broadcaster had to be impressed by the idea of receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom during the State of the Union address. Hi, libs!

The portly loser of the 2020 election took his cues and even some of his cadences from Rush, who never missed a chance to use Barack Obama’s middle name, now as much a part of conservative nomenclature as is “Democrat,” as in “the Democrat majority in Congress,” and was all in on “birtherism.” At least Rush was most often punching up, a concept that eluded Mr. Obama’s successor (all bullies are frightened when they must face real power). But not always. The fast-food fan’s shameful pantomime of a physically lesser-abled reporter mirrored Limbaugh’s odious burlesque of Michael J. Fox’s Parkinson’s condition, one of the lowest moments of his career. The guy with the crotch-length neckties has a propensity for grade-school derisive nicknames, his bathetic attempt to emulate Rush’s genius for coinage, as with his word “feminazi,” which is both malevolent and funny at the same time. Of course, Limbaugh once held up a photo of thirteen-year-old Chelsea Clinton and called her the “White House dog” on the air, so he has certainly wallowed in similar disgusting muck.

Most of all, Rush Limbaugh spent three decades stirring the cauldron of conspiracy that now composes the entire Republican Party. Reason is for saps. You can believe yourself the victim of a vast government conspiracy while at the same time believing the bureaucracy to be incapable of the simplest actions. You can hate “blue-state bailouts” when your own red states depend on them to subsidize your existence. You can scream for law and order while you are commandeering a state or federal capitol building. You can call for deportation of undocumented immigrants while taking advantage of their willingness to do highly physical or unpleasant jobs. The way things ought to be, Rush explained, and then see, I told you so. 

When the word spread that Rush had passed away yesterday morning from complications of lung cancer, one Facebook poster quoted Bette Davis: “You should never say bad things about the dead, you should only say good. Joan Crawford is dead. Good.” While I wouldn’t go that far, Rush Limbaugh was responsible for encouraging the bitter tribalism that keeps Americans from solving common problems. But he couldn’t have done it without the complicity of his audience. I hope enough dittoheads will be forced to use their own brains now and perhaps rediscover comity in the bargain.

Milton Glaser, 1929-2020

Milton Glaser was one of the few graphic designers whose name was known outside the advertising field. It’s because time and again he was able to come up with the kind of concept that made you shake your head in awe and jealousy. They were so brilliant that your first reaction was, who thought of THAT?, and so inevitable that the next was, why didn’t I think of that?  

I first associated his name with that remarkable Bob Dylan poster, the silhouette with the multicolored psychedelic hair, that came inside every copy of his GREATEST HITS album in 1967. This same guy designed the swirling logo for New York magazine, which he co-founded. The logo for Brooklyn Brewery, that’s his too. And the DC Comics “bullet.” And tons more.

But I think his masterpiece was something he did gratis for his beloved home state. He says he scribbled it down on a taxi ride. No matter who you are or where you live, I’ll bet you’ve seen it. Three huge letters set in American Typewriter along with a rich red heart of exactly the same height. I (heart) NY. I love New York. It’s so arresting that it’s been glommed over the years by hundreds of wannabes. Including, about 32 years ago, by your author.

When I first got into the advertising business in the mid-Seventies, my agency sent me to a creative seminar in Florida — and one of the reasons I wanted to go was that the keynote speaker would be Milton Glaser himself. Before he began his fascinating slide show and discussed his own work with wit and intelligence, he said something that I’ve never forgotten. It’s the best definition of that ineffable quality we were all seeking that I’ve ever heard.

“Creativity,” said Glaser, “is telling the truth in an unexpected way.”

Milton Glaser’s contributions to our culture seem limitless. But now I’m afraid the list has become finite, because the great man has passed away at 91. He leaves a world he personally made more exciting (“There are three responses to a piece of design — Yes, No, and Wow! Wow! is the one to aim for”) but is now that much less creative. 

6/30/20: Milton Glaser’s final interview.

Richard Penniman, 1932-2020

My boss at the ad agency and I had gone to Dallas to shoot a commercial, early Eighties. We were in the hotel lobby checking in, and he left the line to take a whiz. I overheard the guy in front of me give his name to the check-in lady. “Reverend Penniman.” Even from behind him I could tell. As he turned around, yep, exactly right. 

“Reverend,” I said, “I just want to say thank you for all the good rockin’ you gave me.” His face lit up as if it hadn’t been the five millionth time he’d heard that. “I tell you what, young man, it was MY PLEASURE.” I said, “I’m here with somebody, he’s in the john, could you wait a few seconds? I want to make his year.” He giggled and turned back toward the desk as my boss walked up.

Now came one of the top ten most delightful moments of my entire life. “John Broderick,” I said, “meet Little Richard.” The Reverend swung around, SHRIEKED, and hugged us both. He puffed up with energy. Joy exuded from him. We were just two normal guys, but he was a star. The whole encounter took less than a minute, but I’ve never forgotten it and I never will. 

Bye bye, Rev. I’d say, get them off their booties up there, but I’ll bet you already have.

Harlan Ellison, 1934-2018

Some musicians don’t need a last name. Cher doesn’t. Neither do Beyonce, Madonna, Bjork or Beck. But there’s only one author I can think of whose surname became unnecessary through the sheer force of his personality.

Harlan.

And now there are none left.

Harlan Ellison passed away peacefully in his sleep Wednesday night. We shall never see his like again, only pretenders and wannabes. Harlan is un-clonable. This DNA is RIP.

He built a career out of being an immensely talented person who would take no shit from anyone. (Not even a megacelebrity, as Gay Talese recounts in the opening scene of his landmark essay, “Frank Sinatra Has A Cold.”) An individual who dealt with Harlan professionally once told me that s/he figured in to any Ellison financial calculation a “PITA Factor,” which means exactly what you think it does. Not only didn’t Harlan suffer fools gladly, he didn’t suffer the fuckers at all. And in his luminous career he met plenty of fools, because after living the life fantastique, he moved to Hollywood.

Harlan was part of the second wave of fantastic fiction (the third if you count Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, but I want to simplify), following behind Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke and the other pioneers. His generation — Norman Spinrad, J. G. Ballard, Ursula K. Le Guin, even Kurt Vonnegut — tested the boundaries of what had been known as “science fiction” or “fantasy.” Why was legitimate metaphorical musing on the human condition relegated to a literary ghetto? Somebody (Fred Pohl?) once said, “Science fiction deals with all places in the universe and all times in infinity. Therefore, ‘mainstream’ fiction — here and now — is simply a subset of science fiction.” Harlan began his career in the final days of the pulp-fiction era, when you sold your words by the pound. But I think he was forever torn between wanting to be that world’s hero and wanting to escape it completely.

When he relocated to Los Angeles, it was to write scripts for tv (mostly) and movies (his sole feature credit, THE OSCAR, was an infamous flop). But he was good at it, a particular natural at fantastic subjects. Harlan wrote “The City At The Edge Of Forever,” which many consider the finest STAR TREK story ever produced, and a couple of his scripts for THE OUTER LIMITS were evidently osmosed so subtly by the young James Cameron that, apres lawsuit, THE TERMINATOR’s end-credit crawl now includes, “Acknowledgment to the works of Harlan Ellison.”

In print, Harlan wrote shorter fiction almost exclusively, which many feel is harder than writing a long novel because you have to stay precise. All I can tell you is that I consider “I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream” and “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said The Ticktockman” worthy of inclusion in 20th-century tip-top short-fiction collections, up there alongside J. D. Salinger, Shirley Jackson, Ray Bradbury and Eudora Welty. There are more Ellisons that could fit in there too. As with Tom Wolfe (R.I.P.), Harlan’s energy and electricity make the pages crackle, again and again. Man, what a writer. So imagine my consternation after I muscled my way into the book business and heard my first Harlan story.

A colleague (I won’t tell you who, when or where) answered the phone one day when hisser boss was out for lunch. It was Harlan on the line, furious because of something hisser boss had either done or failed to do (Harlan tended to assume the SUITS were ALWAYS SCREWING HIM), and he screamed at this recent hire, who went ashen: not only were hisser ears being blown off, but the screaming guy was a personal literary idol! After Harlan’s hangup, this new hire seriously considered resigning; it had been that vicious. Agonizing minutes passed. The phone rang again. It was Harlan in apology mode. He realized after the fact (probably post-consultation with wife Susan) that his beef had not been with the poor schnook who’d had the bad luck to answer the phone. This schnook told me, “HERE was my hero: he was generous, funny, warm, sincerely sorry that he had upset me. THIS was the artist I loved and respected.” Um, pure Harlan.

You’re going to hear many more Harlan stories in the coming days, and he also won’t be the hero in a lot of them. But all I’m qualified to write about is what has personally happened to me. Though I’m perfectly aware of Harlan’s acerbic nature and have witnessed it at close range, I guess I managed to avoid pissing him off during an acquaintance that lasted more than twenty years, even though I was definitely a suit myself.

I was working in the publisher’s office at Bantam when I heard that Harlan admired the work of Don Coldsmith, who wrote historical novels about the American Indian from the tribe’s point of view. I asked for Harlan’s address and started sending him a copy of each new Coldsmith, out of the blue. Each time, back would come the Ellison method of communication, a 3×5 postcard crammed full of words of gratitude and a joke or two, all typed on a manual typewriter, the lifelong axe of this proud Luddite. Later I became Don’s editor and Harlan’s books began to arrive inscribed: now two cards would come back, one to Don ℅ me. We had still never met. Still later I moved on to science fiction, and one day I found myself at a convention a few feet away from Harlan and a group. I walked up to introduce myself, but he saw my name tag first and bellowed, “Now HERE’S a SMART EDITOR!” He had no idea whether that was true or not, but I’d done some nice things out of simple courtesy, and Harlan Ellison did not forget a kindness any more than an injustice. 

I never redeemed my Brownie points professionally, but we did stay in touch, usually by mail and then later on the phone, maybe once a year or so. One guy was thinking about the other (or Harlan flipped past my name on his Rolodex. Yes, his Rolodex) and had 15 minutes to spare. Only once did Harlan call for a favor. Somebody had told him he was a clue, “Sci-fi writer Ellison,” in that day’s New York Times crossword: would I grab him a copy? (His papers will probably be the most entertaining batch ever inspected.) He checked in after 9/11. I checked in after he had a stroke. All other calls were just how-ya-doin.

He had idly invited me over to his house for a visit next time I was in SoCal, and the chance came up. Before I left my Century City hotel, I said on the phone, “Down South when we say something like this we mean it, but I’m letting you back out now.” “No, no,” he said, ”come on over.” I followed his directions to Sherman Oaks in my rental car — I hate driving in LA! — and they were precise down to the individual bottleneck. My reward was several happy hours eating Chinese takeout and shooting the shit at the fabled Ellison Wonderland. 

Harlan shared something important with Ray Bradbury: they both never grew up. Not deep down where it matters. His home was festooned with the kind of collectibles young boys had a generation before mine: cartoon and Western and space figurines, pop culture oddities, paraphernalia of every kind extending back to the pulp and radio eras. It was the house you dream of when you’re a short Jewish kid in Painesville, Ohio, and real life is an actual physical battle. 

Later I started to write a little fiction myself, and one story in particular, in which a company like Microsoft merges with one like Disney, was so obviously influenced by “Repent, Harlequin!” that I dared to send it to the maestro. He called up a few days later and asked me if I really wanted to know what he thought. Uh-oh. And he calmly, gently explained that I had ruined a great idea with lousy execution. His bedside manner was so deft that I wasn’t thinking, Harlan hated my story (he didn’t, he just thought I’d dropped an interesting ball) so much as, Harlan read my story. My piece was entertaining enough that Gardner Dozois (R.I.P. — what a terrible year this has been for authors, and it’s not even half over) had already placed it on his Honorable Mention list in THE YEAR’S BEST SCIENCE FICTION, a tyro’s Hugo, so I didn’t feel threatened or crushed. I felt honored, and I took Harlan’s advice to heart. So the same guy who was famous for tearing people new assholes did some delicate laser surgery on me instead, and I’m a better writer for it. 

All he ever wanted was respect (and boy did he get it: he’s probably the most awarded writer there is). That, and for the scribes to get paid fairly by the Pharisees. Most of the articles you’re about to see will probably emphasize Harlan’s pugnacity, but I am living proof that he only resorted to opposition when he felt forced to. I wasn’t really part of his life, but he sure was part of mine, and I will definitely miss that growl “DUPREE!” on the phone. Any suits at any hereafters which might get the Ellison assignment would be well advised to play by the rules. Or else you’re gonna be so sorry.

 

Bill Minor, 1922-2017

The great journalistic lions who reported the civil rights movement from behind enemy lines are inevitably passing away, even those who’ve led long lives. This year alone, we’ve already lost John Herbers, who reported for the New York Times but was revered by us in the Jackson, Mississippi UPI bureau for his previous work there. (He was still an icon when I got to that same bureau in the late Sixties.) And now, just as sadly, legendary reporter Bill Minor left us yesterday.

“Real news” journalists in the Deep South during the civil rights era were essentially war correspondents. Telling the truth from inside the Jim Crow culture was dangerous. The entire political and legal establishment was set against these guys, and as far as home-grown journalism was concerned, well, the local press was under local rule and it would call out “Yankee agitator” reporters by name. Good ole boys still ran things, including the state legislature and every significant institution.

The Paul Krugman of Sixties Mississippi was a nasty little bigot named Tom Ethridge, whose “Mississippi Notebook” column ran several times a week in the Clarion-Ledger, the state’s largest paper. In one titled “NAACP Witch Doctors,” Ethridge wrote, “The NAACP and their associates, seeking to exploit the unfortunate (Emmett) Till affair, have dug deeper into their bag of tricks. In a sense, they have reverted to ancient tribal instincts.” He liked black people just a tiny bit less than he liked union organizers: UAW founder Walter Reuther was the “top labor-fuehrer.” The paper printed no opposing point of view. There was your op-ed culture.

People like that were emboldened back then: they thought they represented the state as a whole. Reporters who spoke truth to power were on the bidness end of hate mail, death threats, and the occasional bit of vandalism: broken windows and even some flammable crosses. Then as now, none of the intrepid white patriots responsible had the guts to identify themselves, by day or by night. Bill Minor was one of the few public people to display the courage they so pathetically lacked.

Bill’s original podium was the Times-Picayune, the New Orleans paper, where he worked for almost thirty years reporting on Mississippi affairs (it’s next door to Louisiana), starting with the 1947 funeral of the notorious arch-racist Sen. Theodore G. Bilbo. He covered every important development along the way: the Dixiecrats, Emmett Till, James Meredith, Medgar Evers, Goodman-Chaney-Schwerner, John Stennis, Ross Barnett, Trent Lott, and a lot of stuff you haven’t heard of, like the Mississippi contingent of influential Goldwater supporters who licked their wounds in 1964 and then helped jump-start the Republican Party across the entire Deep South, paving the way not only for Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, but arguably the current guy too.

Bill at work in his heyday, when everything was on paper.

In Jackson, the state capital, Bill had a reputation as a liberal, but only by comparison. He came from Louisiana, also a white-oriented culture — hell, in the late Forties the whole country was white-oriented — and it took some observation and soul-searching after his Navy hitch in World War II before he gradually came to appreciate that a society in which segregation was legal and proper was not a just society. But if you’re open to new ideas in a state where change is the literal enemy, you must be a pinko. In reality, all Bill was, was honest.

When the Times-Picayune shut its Jackson bureau in 1976, Bill bought a paper called the Capitol Reporter and printed a weekly broadsheet for about five years. I published a few articles in the Reporter in the late Seventies — it was also a great paper for arts and culture, kind of a down-home Village Voice — but the reason people picked it up was to read Bill Minor on politics.

Racism and xenophobia have hardly been extinguished in the South — nor, I submit, where you live — but Mississippi has not stood still. The paper which ran those Tom Ethridge columns is under new ownership, and until a couple years before he died, one of its most popular columnists was…Bill Minor. I never ceased to be amazed by the genuine love he showed for his adopted state: his famous “Eyes on Mississippi” column always had its own eyes on the potential that sometimes, it seemed, only he could see. He was a stalwart, a treasure, an exemplar, a damn fine newsman, and today Bill Minor is remembered fondly and tearfully at the state Capitol and far beyond.

A documentary on Bill’s life screens next month at the Crossroads Film Festival in Jackson.

Jack H. Harris, 1918-2017

Jack H. Harris passed away a couple weeks ago at 98 after a long and happy life. That name probably means nothing to you, but it means a lot to me. Mr. Harris was partially responsible for my Master’s degree.

Jack Harris was a movie producer with a real eye for developing talent: he produced the first features by John Carpenter and John Landis. But it was his own first feature that cements his place in Hollywood history. In 1958, Jack H. Harris produced THE BLOB.

It was the age of exploitation in the movie business as the industry frantically swatted away against the incursion of television on its customers’ leisure time: movies needed to be — or at least seem to be — bigger, bolder, better. Plus, by the late Fifties the recently christened “teenager” had developed into its own lucrative category for marketers. As another contemporary showman put it, these kids loved cars, girls and ghouls. So movie after movie gave it to them. And towering over them all was a big ball of malevolent jelly, the frickin Blob.

The Blob’s from outer space. It falls to earth in a meteor or something. An old man pokes around the crash site with a stick into some goo that suddenly rushes up the stick and onto his arm! (The old roll-the-film-backward gag, but it looked good to us.) We never see this schnook again. Every time the Blob eats something it gets bigger and hungrier, and how are you going to stop it?

Now here’s the thing. The first people who realize we Earthlings are in trouble are…teenagers! Well, sort of. “Steven” McQueen, in his first leading role, was already 28, and his squeeze Aneta Corseaut — who went on to play Andy Griffith’s Mayberry love interest, Helen Crump — was 25, but you get the idea. The cops don’t want to hear from hepcat Lover’s Lane jalopy jockeys. No adult does. It gets worse and worse until the Blob finally makes its public debut at a crowded movie theater, and by now it’s the size of a movie theater. If the squares had only listened!

The Blob is ready for its closeup at the Colonial Theater in Phoenixville, PA.

About fifteen years later, THE BLOB figured into a notion I was mulling for my Master’s thesis at the University of Georgia. I wanted to write something on popular culture — just entering the halls of academia at the time — but there had to be a serious subtext. I decided to look at fantasy and science fiction movies in the period from Hiroshima to JFK’s assassination (when our national innocence evaporated), through a Commiephobe’s point of view. Monsters were then wildly popular, I thesed, because Americans were frightened of Russian saboteurs and uneasy about the still unknown consequences of opening the nuclear Pandora’s box. Invading aliens represented…invading aliens. “Atomic testing” induced wild mutations, most frequently gigantism. And outer space was a fearful place: anything could drop from the sky. Even…a blob!

By now this all may seem obvious, but at the time — I remember listening to the Senate Watergate hearings over my shoulder while working — it was fairly unmowed ground. I touched on dozens of examples in the paper but went into greater detail on four movies, and one of them was THE BLOB. So I have a soft spot for that mound of mush.

Guys like Jack Harris weren’t trying to send a message. They were just trying to make money. Most critics savaged THE BLOB, but it became a smash hit anyhow, and that means something. If a movie is popular, by definition a great many people have been persuaded to buy tickets. So it is, ipso facto, scratching some itch — maybe not even articulated but genuine just the same. At least that’s how Thesis Boy saw it.

I’m not sure whether THE BLOB is still part of our shared culture. Once it definitely was: everybody knew the goo, even if they hadn’t seen the flick. But the times they have a-changed. One of the reasons I know Jack Harris’s name is that I created an appendix at the end of my thesis with the critical info on about 150 movies, all laboriously gleaned from staring into a tv screen — for you kids, I was “live streaming” — and jotting as fast as I could. At the time I considered that appendix a more important piece of scholarship than the paper itself. But it’s utterly worthless today. Every little cross-referenced mote, down to uncredited cameos, is available with a couple of clicks on IMDb.

But they still remember THE BLOB in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, the real-life location of that famous movie theater attack. Every year they hold a Blobfest. The next one’s in July. I’ll bet it’s a little sadder now that Mr. Harris is gone, but they’ll honor his memory: after all, NOTHING CAN STOP IT!

In 2014, at 95, Jack H. Harris became the oldest honoree in the history of the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Jim Dollarhide, 1952-2016

Jim Dollarhide apparently died on Wednesday in a fire at his lakefront home in Madison, Mississippi. I say “apparently” because they found a body in the still-burning rubble of his 3800-foot house and Jim is missing, but it will require some dental examination to make sure. The firefighters said the “structure was fully involved” by the time they got there at 10:41 p.m. after an emergency call from a neighbor, and the upper levels had already collapsed. It’s almost certain Jim is gone. If I have to retract this piece, I will do so with great joy.

I’ve known Jim since my advertising days in the Seventies. He was the first filmmaker I got to spend quality time with. I like movies and all, and I took enough production courses in graduate school to get some idea what filmmaking feels like, but this was the first guy I ever met who had already decided to make a living at it. To Jim, a beautiful image might be all well and good, but it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing: it has to move.

You meet lots of gifted photographers in the ad game, but they produce a different kind of art. The still shooter shows you an instant in time. The filmmaker shows you the passage of time. Jim had the eye for nifty composition which any good fotog possesses, but it was that third dimension, the depiction of duration, that fascinated and obsessed him.

Jim was a blue-collar filmmaker. By that I mean he was no rarefied sissy on location; he could get down and dirty in physical labor with his crew, made up of people he liked and respected. But he demanded professionalism and courtesy. Once my ad agency hired Jim to do some films and tv spots for Yazoo Mowers, those big-wheeled monsters built like tanks. I was the agency producer, meaning all I had to do was stand around and nod, and guzzle the occasional soft drink. But even with my light load of responsibility, it was the most horrible shoot I’ve ever been on. For two weeks it was steaming even by Mississippi standards (Jim’s grips showed me how to dip a neck scarf in Sea Breeze astringent and ice water to cool down the circulation), we were in a severe drought so most grass was brown and we had to figure out how to color it (the mayor had even forbidden people from watering their lawns), and too many of the setups were on undulating spreads that required time-consuming engineering to lay dolly track for smooth camera motion. But we made it through somehow, and celebrated with a wrap party at Jim’s house. I decided to buy each of the crew members a really nice knife to say thanks for going above and beyond. I guess I’d gone there too: one of them said, “This is the first time a producer ever gave me anything.” Jim was walking by, and over his shoulder came, “He gave you a job.”

Me, trying to look productive on that godforsaken Yazoo shoot. Jim is peeking out from my left armpit.

Jim’s page on IMDb notes that he “founded a production company called ‘Imageworks’ two decades before Sony Pictures used the term.” I know it does because I’m the one who put it there. We were both running teensy little outfits in the Eighties and we had a symbiotic relationship. He was doing fewer commercials, which are tightly scripted beforehand, and more industrial films and longer documentaries, where he could call in a writer at the pre-production stage. The difference between our two companies was that, unlike my lo-tech professional wordslinging, Imageworks was hugely capital-intensive. Jim had to keep up with emerging technologies, so he needed new equipment all the time. He originally had one of those honking Steenbeck flat-bed editing decks, where to make an edit you physically snipped the film and spliced it back with tape, which is how movies had been cut since time immemorial. In those days some bigger houses were using a process called “negative to tape” for their first baby steps into online editing, but Jim had to separate wants from needs in order to survive in the more frugal environment of central Mississippi. Now the Steenbeck is as quaint a relic as the X-Acto knife, but Jim had long since moved on. It’s a shame that he largely missed out on the digital revolution of the past few years — shooting on location is cheaper and nimbler than it’s ever been before.

Jim not only loved his craft, he also loved his native state of Mississippi, but not in a Confederate way. He was a huge music fan and cherished the rich tradition of Mississippi Delta blues. He shot thousands of feet of B. B. King and became a good friend; Jim’s documentary plays every day at the B. B. King Museum in Indianola. After all the years slogging and working together for industry and commerce, I guess my favorite film of Jim’s is the scriptless HARMONIES: A MISSISSIPPI OVERTURE (1994), a labor of love and a piece of pure cinema that tells you everything you need to know about him in just 25 minutes. He was a kind, upstanding, talented man whose generosity of spirit mentored so many young men and women; their praises and tears are pouring in equally today. Goodbye, Jim. You were one of a kind, and you are already missed.

The boys in the day. Jim is front row left.

Eudora Welty, 1909-2001 (Late)

I wrote this the week Eudora Welty passed away and just found it again after all these years. It’s for her friends and admirers.

Eudora Welty died at the age of 92, in Jackson, Mississippi, the town where she lived most of her life. Until her health became frail a few years prior, she had been a fixture of daily life in her quiet, wooded neighborhood, but not in the way William Faulkner once prowled the streets of Oxford, where the bemused locals referred to him behind his back as “Count No-Count.” Miss Welty—for that is how everyone addressed her until they were sweetly admonished to use her first name instead—was a genteel, beloved, active member of the community. She could be seen pushing her grocery cart through the aisles of Jitney Jungle #14, inside its absurd and incongruous “English Village” façade, straining to reach a can on the top shelf but always bearing her beatific smile. She was a regular at Fannie Mae’s hair salon, where gab was as important as styling. One might easily pass her walking on the street in the sultry summer twilight. Never did anyone stop, point, whisper that they were in the presence of one of the towering figures in American letters.

That’s because Miss Welty did not tower. Her work did that for her.

She possessed two talents that many writers of prose tend to overlook, and about which most hotshot screenwriters, judging from their output, can only dream: Eudora Welty had exceptional eyes and ears. Her authorial might derives from a gloriously detailed visual atmosphere, and from her uncanny ability to replicate, and then enhance, the quirky Southern idiom she heard every day and had stored in memory from her girlhood. She enjoyed watching others exercise those talents, too, and was an ardent theatergoer in a time when Jackson sported more than one credible company. She served on the board of directors of New Stage Theatre, the pioneering group that had opened its doors in the mid-Sixties with a raging production of WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? at a point when the community was more accustomed to the likes of SOUTH PACIFIC, and she saw nearly every show there. That’s how I got to know her, and that’s when she became “Eudora” to me.

At cast parties in the ornate residences of Southern ladies who lunched, in the rarefied social strata unlocked by her accomplishments, she would come up to the smitten amateur actors and bestow the kindest praise. She didn’t like everything she saw and she told you so, but her scorn was usually reserved for the playwright. I always wanted to say, compared to what you do, we’re five-year-olds putting on a show with flashlights in Daddy’s living room. I even suspected that her enjoyment might be something like what Daddy feels for his lisping children. But that’s not how one accepts a compliment gracefully, and Eudora was the living embodiment of grace.

Once Ivan Rider, then New Stage’s artistic director, invited me to dinner with Eudora, just the three of us. Wow! I looked forward to the event eagerly but nervously. What could I possibly say to amuse her? After a cocktail or two—and she was never shy about cocktail hour—I realized she was using a conversational gambit that comes in handy any time: we were talking about me. But whereas most of us coax someone onto the subject of themselves just to break the ice, Eudora was simply feeding the natural curiosity that made her an unique cross between an artist and a journalist. Ivan had conspired to serve barbecued shrimp, a New Orleans delicacy. To partake, you throw some old newspapers on the table, dump out the shrimp, put on bibs and any other protection you might have, and peel your way through the spicy, delicious mess. Eudora said this was a great dish because its sloppiness washed away any pretense, and diners would always “rise from the table as friends.” By this time, she was talking about herself. She’d just read a novel by a then-fashionable and wildly successful Southern author, and was not impressed: “Honey, you may think you’ve got it. But you don’t.”

The last time I saw Eudora, a friend had asked if I might facilitate some inscribed books for Christmas presents. Eudora insisted that we both come over. On the day, I was mortified that my friend was lugging an imposing stack of COLLECTED STORIES—I thought too many. But its author couldn’t have been more gracious, as ever. On her table was the current issue of Newsweek, with its stark black-and-white cover photo of John Lennon. She was quite disturbed over Lennon’s murder, not as a Beatles fan—she said she liked some of their melodies but I didn’t sense any particular passion—and not just for the potential work that the world wouldn’t get to hear, but chiefly for its meaninglessness; why slaughter an artist who had never hurt anyone? The culture of insanity had already introduced itself with Charles Manson, but we had not yet arrived at the point where schoolchildren took revenge on their tormentors with bullets. Eudora was perplexed over Mark David Chapman. Her vast empathetic skills were of no use here. She couldn’t put herself in his place. In the ensuing years, I’m sure she had to wrestle with this problem again and again, but by then I had moved away, to New York. And then she was gone.

Don Pardo, 1918-2014

I was waiting for the Don Pardo obit like a horror-film audience member peeking through hisser fingers, but when it finally came it was still a shock. “A light just went out,” as they say when somebody important to you passes away. Well, one just did last Monday, an announcer so strong and true that he was still strappin’ on the cans at age 96.

Don Pardo had been active since the heyday of radio, but he was best known to those of a certain age for his work on tv game shows, especially THE PRICE IS RIGHT and the original JEOPARDY!, the network version hosted by Art Fleming. (The Alex Trebek JEOPARDY! is syndicated.) We knew his voice because it was rock-solid, and we knew his name because the hosts of those shows would often call out to him on the air: “Don Pardo, tell her what she’s won!” His only real competition was a guy named Johnny Olson, who announced all the Mark Goodson-Bill Todman game shows and THE JACKIE GLEASON SHOW. Olson’s was the very excitable tenor voice that made a catchphrase out of the words “COME ON DOWN!”

So, in 1975, when Lorne Michaels hired Pardo to announce SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE (originally called NBC’S SATURDAY NIGHT) it was certainly through a gauze of irony. The hippest thing on tv, billboarded by an ancient Mr. Game Show? And Pardo did indeed have enemies among the hipsters, including the curmudgeonly Michael O’Donoghue, who also loathed the Muppets with which he was forced to share the stage in the early days. When O’Donoghue briefly took over after the disastrous Jean Doumanian season, he tried to throw Pardo out along with the rest of the “old guard,” including longtime director Dave Wilson.

But Pardo and his strange stretched syllables had already become as totemic to SNL as Lorne himself. The record will show that Don Pardo billboarded SNL episodes for 38 seasons, missing only season 7, when Lorne too was gone, even though Pardo flubbed the name of the “Not Ready For Prime Time Players” on the first live broadcast. (There were a few more flubs that night, making the experiment even more thrilling: it was actually live.)

I’d wager most everybody who has ever been connected with the show, even those who hated the experience – and there are plenty of them – have “something in their eye” right now in memory of Don Pardo. Even we simple fans do. He was the sound of American comedy through thick and thin, his dulcet tones matching and encouraging our own excitement. Goodbye, Mr. Pardo, and please give our regards to Belushi after first slapping him around a bit for leaving us far too young. You showed us, and told us, how to do it right.

9/19/14: Today we learned that former longtime cast member Darrell Hammond, the impressionist who actually subbed for Don Pardo a couple of times when the elder voice was ill (and completely fooled us!) will be SNL’s new announcer, but as himself: the “Don Pardo voice” will be permanently retired out of respect.

Christopher Jones, 1941-2014

What a fascinating career had Mr. Christopher Jones. Blazingly handsome – even we straight guys noticed! – he made his bones on tv but then got cast in a low-budget AIP satire called WILD IN THE STREETS and became a mini-icon in 1968, the perfect year to do such a thing.

Robert Thom’s script is about a rebellious kid who grows up to become a pop star and then takes the next logical step: he literally turns celebrity into power. He sponsors rallies, elects a Senator, lowers the voting age to 15, and finally installs “Max Frost” as President, at which point he declares 30 to be the mandatory retirement age and sends all geezers to LSD-fueled sunset camps. Hilarious – unless you’re a geezer yourself.

WILD IN THE STREETS is a monster movie in which the monsters are normal coddled boomer kids. We saw it as a goof, and our parents never heard of it, so there goes your satire. (Except for the final scene, in which a young groovily-raised tyke acquires camera and says, “We’re gonna put everybody over ten out of business.” Haw haw….huh?)

Chris Jones, the “new James Dean,” was the drive-in crowd’s faux hero because of this role, and we completely understood it was faux, even down to the Barry Mann/Cynthia Weil songs Chris was hurriedly lip-synching. (One of them, “The Shape Of Things To Come” – thanx, H.G. Wells! – actually became a for-real pop hit, credited on the single to “Max Frost and the Troopers”!) Here’s Chris’s lip-synch from the movie.

But we drank in his next pic, the ludicrous THREE IN THE ATTIC, and then the classier THE LOOKING GLASS WAR, and no less than David Lean was also seduced, hiring Chris for RYAN’S DAUGHTER. (I think Lean came to regret his casting decision.) Chris retired from acting and became a hermit anent showbiz.

Quentin Tarantino, who’s perfectly aware of everything I’ve just written, begged Chris to come out of retirement for PULP FICTION: he wanted him to play Zed, the redneck sadist role that eventually went to Peter Greene. Only Larry Bishop, Joey’s son and his old WILD IN THE STREETS mate, could coax Chris out for a limp, incomprehensible mob story called MAD DOG TIME. I thought he looked and sounded fine, just profoundly disinterested.

Goodbye, Chris. If you knew who you were to a sliver of boomers, then I hope that could possibly make you happy once in a while. If it made you sad instead, then I feel complicit, but there the film is; I’d rather just sing “14 Or Fight” once more. My very fondest wish is much simpler. I truly hope you didn’t care.

10/1/16: A nice piece by no less than J. Hoberman on the release of a new Blu-Ray transfer. It looks great.