The Modern April 2012 V1 N7

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April 2012 • Vol. 1, No. 7

www.themodern.us

your life in retro

Banned in America!

Cigarette Ads on TV GCB’s Mark Deklin Smash’s Will Chase We’re So Dizzy Over Tommy Roe! Rachel Nichols’ Retro Hee Haw • Wacky Packages • Cold Turkey

c ntents T h e M o d e r n — Yo u r l i f e i n r e t r o In this issue:

Cover Story Cigarette Ads on TV Go Up in Smoke

Where there’s smoke, there’s fire: The FCC bans tobacco advertising on television.

Retro Rewind: Cold Turkey

The battle of the butt! Eagle Rock, Iowa gives up smoking for 30 days.

The Great Forgotten Fire Songs – these tunes are smokin’!

Here and Now

Mark Deklin

The TV vet talks of the joy of GCB and the heartbreak of Lone Star.

Will Chase

The new hit NBC series Smash puts the versatile actor’s stage talents to the test.

Reconnecting

Tommy Roe

We’re so dizzy, our heads are spinning over his upbeat Sixties grooves.

Girlie Action

Rachel Nichols

The in-demand actress chats up the retro that makes her happy.

On the cover: Daniel Passaro

Retro Sports The Human Drama of Athletic Competition — plus our home run sports quiz!

Read This Retro Book Starstruck — a look at the puzzling passion between fans and stars.

Mad Women The Best of Everything — career girls living large in Manhattan — a flick most quotable.

The Kick-Ass List The Simpsons — 1990s. Ten very animated Simpsons musical productions.

Retro Foodie The Trailer Park Bar and Lounge — get in touch with your inner-trailer troll.

Girls Were Girls & Men Were Men Jennifer O’ Neill: her turbulent life and her curious career choices.

Picker/Grinner/Lover/Sinner Summer Girl hell — what it was like to be cast in LFO’s “Summer Girls” video.

I Get Around The 1955 Super Nash Rambler Funny Papers Comic Book Ads — see where you can best buy your Sea Monkeys.

Dig This DVD Hee Haw — this long-time cornpone favorite really fries our taters.

Internalize This

Retro Tech

Retro Merch

The New Oldies

Parting Shot: Shy, retiring, blushing flower Joey Heatherton lulls us to sleep with her Serta Perfect Sleeper jingle. Not.

letter from the editor

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes According to the American Cancer Society, in 2011, tobacco use killed almost 6 million people worldwide. Tobacco-related deaths have nearly tripled around the world in the past decade. And if trends continue, one billion people will reportedly die from tobacco use and exposure during the 21st century. That’s billion with a b. That’s one person checking out every six seconds.

According to the U.S. Surgeon General, smoking harms nearly every organ of the body, causing many diseases and reducing the health of smokers in general. And even though smoking is the #1 preventable cause of death in the United States, it causes over 393,000 deaths each year.

Yet according to The Tobacco Atlas from The American Cancer Society, revenues from the global tobacco industry are likely to approach a half a trillion dollars each year.

Have you and your diminished attention span glazed over yet as a result of all these stats being tossed at you? The tobacco companies are counting on it. That’s why, despite the ban of tobacco advertising on television and radio, Big Tobacco continues to flourish and profit, even with a product that is known to do what it does (see info above).

They’re betting on human nature, and winning. The anti-smoking website called thetruth.com sums it up best: “tell someone not to do something and they will. Don’t read the next sentence. See what we mean?” They’re hip to the fact that telling people not to smoke doesn’t work. Instead, their goal is not to preach but to get the “unfiltered” information about tobacco to smokers and non-smokers alike. They don’t have money and power, but they do have information.

Information is awesome.

Ron Sklar Editor

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Yo u r l i f e i n r e t r o .

C o n t a c t

Editor • Ron Sklar | Art Director • Jennifer Barlow | Copy Editor • Patty Wall Contributing Writers: Desiree Dymond • Brendan Fallis • Mitch Gainsburg Eve Golden • Jay Jacobs • Ron Passaro • Jack Rotoli • Jacob Schirmer William Shultz • Art Wilson

u s :

i n f o @ t h e m o d e r n . u s

m dern is smokin’! the

The Modern is targeted toward 65 million baby boomers and their babies.

For advertising info,

email us at info@themodern.us Your life in retro. The past is very now.

here & now: mark deklin

The TV vet talks of the joy of GCB and the heartbreak of Lone Star. And why the reboot of Hawaii Five-O kicks ass.

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“I don’t think Good Christian Bitches was ever going to be a title like that for television,” says actor Mark Deklin. “They shortened it to GCB, which is what everybody would call it anyway.”

Smooth move for the new ABC hit comedy series in which Deklin, in a rare turn, co-stars as a closeted husband. The show is based on the bestselling book by Kim Gatlin, and produced by Sex and the City producer Darren Star.

“He’s a cowboy and a clothing designer,” is how Deklin explains his character, Blake.

“He’s a rancher and a horse breeder. He runs the western wear division of a clothing company. [The character and his wife, Cricket, played by Miriam Shor] have a really fun and interesting marriage.

They love each other madly and have a fantastic time together. But there is wackiness in between.”

The Modern | April 2012

Very much like Deklin’s own career, which has touched such projects as Charmed to Frasier to GSB’s common comparison, Desperate Housewives.

“I think people will tune in expecting a certain animal,” he says of the easy parallels to Housewives, “but it has its own voice. More than anything else, I think people will be struck by how funny it is. Even though it’s an hour-long format, we’re making a comedy.”

That’s a long way from his last most notable series, the critically acclaimed but short-lived Lone Star. It appeared very briefly on Fox in 2005.

“When you go into a project, there are so many variables,” he says. “I’ve done what I thought was great television. I was so proud of Lone Star, and we lasted two episodes. You can just never tell, but I’m really hopeful. [GSB] is getting a lot of buzz, and I think it’s going to transcend people’s expectations.”

A long-embattled veteran of series television, Deklin knows how to roll with the punches and the ratings.

“That whole week was shocking,” he recalls of Lone Star’s cancellation. “I remember seeing a photo in USA Today, with a picture of our lead guy, and the headline said, ‘The best television show you’ll see this year.’ A week later, we premiered, and the ratings were not what we wanted them to be, and not what the network wanted them to be. So we were put on the chopping block.

After just one episode! www.themodern.us

ANGELO KRITIKOS

Mark Deklin

“The day we got cancelled, I wasn’t working that day and I was with my family. I was holding my daughter in my left hand, and we were laughing about something.

And the phone rang, and it was one of my producers with the bad news.

And it was this wonderful moment where I was holding my daughter, and it put it all into perspective. I felt myself feeling really tranquil about the whole thing. Like ‘oh, well, we got cancelled,’ but what really matters is that I have this beautiful, healthy girl in my hands. And that is so much more important than a TV show. That was one of those life-metaphor moments.”

Retro-lovers have also seen him recently on the CBS Hawaii Five-O reboot, whose character’s future remains in question and rests solely on the survival of GCB. He says, “Once we wrapped production on GCB, I got a call to come back to Hawaii. They brought me back, but essentially CBS would have to ask ABC for permission every time they wanted to use me.

And I can see how that would be annoying. In the episode they brought me back for, I get shot. But I don’t die. And I thought that was kind of clever because it leaves the door open for them. So if GCB becomes a big, fat hit, I suppose my character will disappear from Five-O. But if we’re not, maybe I’ll get called back and they’ll say, ‘hey, you recovered very well.’ So we’ll see how that plays out. It’s a nice problem to have.”

Deklin also guested on Hot in Cleveland where he had the pleasure of working with legend Betty White.

“It is everything you expect it and want it to be,” he says of White.

“When I talk about Betty, I always use the word ‘yummy,’ because I

can’t think of a word that describes her better. She is such a delight.

First of all, at 90-years old, she’s sharp as a tack. She just exudes sweetness and light. She’s got a wry sense of humor, and she can give it, but she is also gracious and courteous and kind.

“My daughter came to the set, and she and Betty really hit it off.

It was a great set to work on. Betty and my daughter became buddies: a 90-year-old woman and a twoyear-old little girl who both look like they have known each other for years. And it’s really cool to see.”

In addition to acting, Deklin is in great demand as a fight direc-

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think I am good at that because I am an actor. I can work from that angle. They are professional actors, but they are not necessarily professional stuntmen. You have to adapt accordingly.”

Adapting is a life skill that Deklin knows well.

“I have to remind myself that I’m very blessed,” he says. “It’s very easy to grouse and grumble and be very frustrated. To say, ‘Why don’t I have this?’ I do have these moments where I feel that way and then I say, ‘Hold on a second. I have been lucky enough to make a living doing what I love to do.’ I basically made a living for the last

If I retired tomorrow and I never worked again, I can

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look back and say I had a good ride.

Mark Deklin

tor, showing actors (among them Kevin Kline) how to make it look easy — and meaningful.

“A lot of fight directors come from the world of stunts,” he says, “and I have great respect for that world and those guys. But they don’t necessarily understand the actor’s process. They understand how to build a fight, how to make it really cool and really great looking. But I’m not working with stuntmen. I’m working with a Shakespearian actor or a musical theater actor. I have to build the fight to their bodies and really adapt it to them. And really make it an extension of the story that they are already telling as opposed to a separate event. And I do

20 years doing what I love. I’m not super rich and I don’t need to be. I am able to make a living and I have a family that I am able to support.

That feels terrific. There is pride in that.

“I grew up in Pittsburgh. My dad was a building supplier. I grew up on construction sites. It was a very blue-collar environment. For that reason, I didn’t really pursue acting as a career until I was 25. In my mindset, I was like, ‘I like acting, but it’s not really a job.’ I feel like I had to have a viable living. And I feel like I proved that. And there is a real satisfaction in that. If I retired tomorrow and I never worked again, I can look back and say I had a good ride.”

April 2012 | The Modern

here & now: will chase

Will Chase

the versatile actor’s stage

is a Smash!

talents to the TV test.

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The new hit show puts

On the smash NBC hit Smash, Broadway veteran Will Chase sinks his acting chops into not one, but two meaty roles. As Michael Swift, he is the love interest of Debra Messing’s main character, making for the required steam and sparks that fog up our TV screen. If that were not enough,

he also plays the complex, legendary love interest of Marilyn Monroe (namely Joe DiMaggio) in the fictional Broadway musical that is the center of the story.

Quite an exciting challenge for the can-do actor, who has actually appeared on Broadway (in real life!) in such diverse fare as Rent, Miss Saigon and Billy Elliot.

His on-stage experience is key The Modern | April 2012

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to the development of his two complex TV characters. He’s been given the tall task of a telling a televised tale of a Broadway musical, from two angles.

He says of his vast experience on The White Way, “It only feels like a job when you are on the way to the theater or on the way home.

But actually standing on that stage, you pinch yourself. You can’t believe it. When you are walking down the street and your picture is out on the marquee, that’s when you go, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe I’m on Broadway.’ For me, it certainly never gets old and never gets tiring.”

Of course the novelty never wears off, not when you have humble beginnings in Kentucky, where the Broadway stage is as far away as Mars.

“My cousin was in the musical Guys and Dolls in high school,” he says, “and in my mind, that was the best production of anything I have ever seen. But I was like eight at the time.”

Still, as he grew, so did his dream of pursuing a career in entertainment, with the usual detours.

“I grew up singing in the church,” he says. “I was studying

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to be a percussionist. I fell into [acting] in college. From the day I graduated, I moved to Chicago and started a musical theater career. It was a good fit, one of those things that really fit in my life, and I was very passionate about it. Then I just started climbing the ladder, New York and national tours. It was a passion as opposed to something I was supposed to do.”

His role (within a role) of the troubled, protective, old-fashioned Joe DiMaggio, who is in love with a woman who happens to be an icon, gets a humane, understanding treatment from Chase. “[The film] The Seven Year Itch shows that iconic picture of Marilyn with her skirt blowing up,” Chase says. “Joe was pissed off at that. He was that lovable baseball player, but he was also very jealous. It brought a lot of volatility, because every man on the planet wanted Marilyn. But when she died, for twenty years Joe sent roses to her grave. Every week for 20 years. It was one of those lovely traumatic relationships.”

He is also pleased to be working with Will & Grace’s Debra Messing, who is getting the rare chance to show television viewers what else she is made of. www.themodern.us

“I think people are going to be really surprised,” he says of his costar. “They have not seen Debra like this. Here, she really gets to go deep. Because of our characters’ background together on the show, I don’t think people are going to recognize her, but I think they are going to like what she’s doing. She has a musical pedigree. She’s trained.

This is a nice departure for her and I think people are going to be pleasantly surprised.”

The series itself, which contains a show within a show, can

way musical, Lennon. Although it opened and closed quickly in 2005, it was a career high for Chase.

“It was very trippy,” he agrees. “I couldn’t get over playing my musical icon, and then being part of a nine-member cast. It was pretty amazing. Yoko said to me, ‘John would have loved it.’ It made me so happy to hear that. It was a dream come true.”

Unlike Broadway musicals scores, it seems that The Beatles are Chase’s biggest influences, musical and otherwise.

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It only feels like a job when you are on the way to the theater or on the way home.

But actually standing on that stage, you

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pinch yourself.

have the effect of a house of mirrors on the actors.

Chase explains, “We record a song three of four weeks before we shoot the episode [in which the song is featured]. And for me, the challenge is trying to find the emotional content of the song when you are three episodes behind. So you have to use your imagination a little more than say any given night on Broadway when you perform a song live. With that said, the music really does speak to the Marilyn and Joe characters and the actual show within the show. They are also layered enough that they also follow the emotions of our characters, Michael and Julia. But you record way in advance, which is kind of weird and trippy.”

Trippy? How trippy is this: his gig as John Lennon in the Broadwww.themodern.us

Will Chase “The Beatles probably affected every aspect of my artistry,” he says, “my acting, the way I listen to music, the way I read lyrics. I am a huge Beatles freak. I’m also a huge fan of the Canadian band Rush.

The music made me pay more attention. I know naming The Beatles is an odd thing for an actor to say.”

He lists his acting influences as mostly the usual subjects, (Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, Albert Finney, and Michael Caine), but his daily pre-performance mantra is strictly unorthodox.

He says, “As I’m getting older, I’m trying to be more selfless. I have a mantra which April 2012 | The Modern

is a little expletive. I say, ‘fuck the audience! ‘And it’s not meant to be mean.’ It’s meant to invite these people onto this thing, because nothing like this will ever happen again. That night is never going to happen again. That’s my mantra. Fuck the audience! Take them home with you!”

With the huge success of Smash, Chase’s one-night stand with audiences may turn into a long-term relationship.

reconnecting: tommy roe

Hooray for

Tommy Roe! We’re so dizzy, our heads are spinning over his upbeat Sixties grooves.

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“I haven’t recorded in so long.

It’s like a whole new ball game to me,” says Tommy Roe, the guy who was once considered the king of bubblegum pop back in the Sixties. “The business has changed so much. The record business is really in trouble, with all these digital downloads, it doesn’t even pay to put out a CD anymore. People aren’t buying them.”

That’s not stopping the unstoppable Roe, though. The man who gave us such everlasting gobstoppers as “Sheila,” “Dizzy,” “Hooray for Hazel” and “Sweet Pea” is back in the studio and writing songs that, he claims, are very un-Tommy-Roe-like. That means controversial.

“I’m jumping in with both feet,” he proclaims. “You just have to adapt to what’s going on. There is no going back. I watched the business change from the time I was fourteen-years old.”

That’s when he was a country boy fresh out of Georgia, who wrote poetry to his first girlThe Modern | April 2012

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friend, Frieda. A producer out of Atlanta heard him, liked him, but hated the girls’ name as the song title. He suggested something softer, and with a little fine tuning, “Sheila” became a millionselling record in 1962.

“So what they say when there isn’t anything left to say: the rest is history,” he says.

Also like they say, that was only the beginning. He continued to write his own songs and record them too. As the pop culture landscape — and the record charts — forever changed soon after his first hit, he kept his eye on the prize of staying relevant and churning out a product that people bought.

“I went into the Army, and when I got out, I wondered how I would survive,” he says. “I needed to make a record that would be relevant to what was going on. So I wrote soft, fun, bubblegum kind of records. And I was the only one doing that. So I think that was one of the reasons I was able to carry on like I did.”

Those succeeding hits, like “Sweet Pea” and “Dizzy,” became monsters on the AM dial, and outsold the hippies and the druggies. This despite the gooey reputation they initially earned.

“It would irritate me because the DJs would talk about them as if they were not up to standards,” he says of his recording history. “They would kind of put it down. I took it all in stride and I just rolled with it, but I think happy music is a great thing. Today, I think it’s wonderful.

That’s what bubblegum music is.

It’s uplifting and it’s happy. It has a great beat to it. The lyrics are fun. It doesn’t bother me at all, but at first, it did.”

Finding a musical niche in the www.themodern.us

mid-Sixties, and being true to it, were akin to brain surgery. Almost overnight, the charts were quickly dominated by aliens.

“The Sixties were hectic, crazy,” he says. “It’s just like all of the documentaries you’ve seen. I mean, that’s the way it was. The British artists were pushing all the American artists off the charts.

The American artists were struggling to stay in the record business. I was very fortunate to carry on through the entire decade of the Sixties, and I think it was be-

them. I have fans come up to me almost with tears in their eyes and talk about how their mother used to sing ‘Sweet Pea’ to them when they were a little child in the crib.

Those are fantastic stories, and it took me a while to mature and understand that my music was really touching people emotionally. I had never thought about it. It was never in my plan, but it happened. It’s a wonderful feeling. It’s a gift.”

He continues to stay inspired and create music from his home base in Beverly Hills, and assures

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You just have to adapt to what’s going on. There is no going back. I watched the business change from the time

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I was fourteen years old.

Tommy Roe

cause I wrote my own material. If I hadn’t been a songwriter, I don’t think I would have survived either.”

Roe continues to perform and share the love with people he touched but never knew.

“It’s very gratifying,” he says of his huge fan base. “When I was younger, I had fans approach me but I didn’t take it very seriously.

But as I got older and I was dealing with the fans who grew up with my music, I started to understand how important music was to them, and how it left a mark on

us that a new collection of work is forthcoming.

“I still love to write and I still love to make records,” he says.

“And if you love something, you’ve got to do it. And I’m out here doing it. It’s the whole ball of wax for me. But we’ll see what happens.”

Buy “Dizzy” Buy “Sheila” Buy “Hooray For Hazel” Buy “Sweet Pea” April 2012 | The Modern

girlie action

I, Rachel Nichols The in-demand actress chats up the retro that makes her happy.

By Jay S. Jacobs Rachel Nichols’ life has taken her on a crazy ride from the catwalks to the red carpets, but amazingly she is still just a normal small-town girl. Nichols would rather be with her family in Maine than at some star-studded gala in Hollywood.

Still, less than ten years into an acting career, she has starred in huge movies like Star Trek, P2, Dumb and Dumberer, Conan the Barbarian and GI Joe. On the small screen she was a regular on Alias and spent much of the last year on the popular drama Criminal Minds. Nichols is currently hard at work on her two latest projects, co-starring in the movie version of James Patterson’s hit novel I, Alex Cross and taking the lead role in a buzz-worthy upcoming series called Continuum from the creator of 24.

Nichols was nice enough to give us a call recently from Vancouver, where she is filming Continuum, to tell us a bit about her life, her career and what makes her happy.

You originally went to Columbia University in New York to be a Wall Street analyst. How did you change to modeling and then acting?

One of the great things about New York City is that it is one of those places where things that you The Modern | April 2012

never envisioned for yourself or thought could happen — they happen. It’s just that kind of a place. That’s how modeling started for me. I was in the right place at the right time. Friends of mine were at an agency that I trusted. I went, “Oh, model? Sure.” I wanted to save money to pay to go to graduate school. I started modeling. I moved to Paris. Then I came back to finish my studies. Through the modeling I started doing commercials and through the commercials I started acting — little things, here and there. By the time I graduated, I was torn. Should I stay in New York and be the banker I thought I wanted to be, or should I take a chance and move to LA? I hired a moving company and moved across the country. I’d saved enough money so I could live in LA for a year without working. If I didn’t work, then I would go back and either go to graduate school or take that bank job. I stayed. And I worked.

I remember you saying that you changed a lot when you went away to college. What were you like as a girl growing up in Maine?

I was really shy, which is sort of ironic, given the career path I’ve chosen. I was very studious. I played sports, not particularly well. I have a great family. My parents are still married after 36 years. I have a brother.

I didn’t really know what else was out there until I left and I went to school. But when I left to go to Columbia — obviously, going from Augusta, Maine to Manhattan — I knew I wanted a change. I was a late bloomer.

I was shy and very into books, which was awesome. It took a while for me to really grow into my personality, who I am now. Going away to school and having parents that were so supportive played a big role in that.

What were some of your favorite books and the books that stuck with you over the years?

My favorite book of all time — which I didn’t read until I was in college — is The Garden of Eden, an [Ernest] Hemingway book. Growing up, I was a big fan of reading in general. Everything from James and the Giant Peach to Nancy Drew, which I remember reading when I was in the first grade. [I’m] a big fan of Shel Silverstein. I love his poetry. I always give those books whenever any of my friends have children. R.L. Stine and Sweet Valley High those were all book series when I was growing up. I read everything www.themodern.us

that was put in front of me. My parents were great, because they just wanted us to read. As long as we were reading, we could read whatever we wanted.

And we only had four stations on our TV, so that wasn’t very fun to watch.

What were some of the other things you were passionate about growing up?

When I was in junior high, I played the saxophone, but I stopped playing in high school. I started playing sports because all my friends were playing sports. I was a dancer. All little girls in Maine take dance lessons and are Girl Scouts; little boys are in Boy Scouts and take tae kwon do. I took tap, jazz, ballet and point. I was very, very active. My studies were very important to me. I certainly kept myself busy.

Do you have any things from back then that are still sacred to you — that you have to take with you no matter where you move?

Even as I sit here in Vancouver, I have a pillow — a real, proper, old school, heavy feather pillow. The thing weighs like ten pounds, and I have to travel with it. I can’t sleep without it. (laughs) It’s been all over the world. It’s moved with me to Paris. It was with me in New York. It was with me in LA. I take it everywhere with me, unless I go home to Maine, because it has a sister there.

What do you miss most that you lost along the way?

My parents always joke that I never lost anything, not even a Barbie shoe. I meticulously kept track of everything. I’m very good at that, so I don’t remember actually losing something that I loved. I did have a few pieces of jewelry that were (whispers) stolen.

What do you miss the most about living in New York?

There are so many things to miss about living in New York — which is not to say that I don’t like living in LA and I certainly love Vancouver. But there is this thing in New York. If you haven’t been there, people aren’t going to know what I’m talking about.

You could blindfold me, spin me around, fly me in a plane for 24 hours and put me in the middle of New York City… and I’d just know. There is a feeling that I have when I’m there. There is an energy. I just love it there. I love the cacophony of the city. I love how you can get anything that you want at any hour of the day.

You had told me that growing up in Maine, people did not really think about things like growing up to be an www.themodern.us

April 2012 | The Modern

girlie action actor or model or sports star. Did you ever imagine in your wildest dreams being in the movies?

I remember when Mel Gibson came to Maine and shot The Man Without a Face. Pretty much the entire state of Maine had the day off to go try to be extras in the movie. I’ll never forget that. At the time, it didn’t interest me at all, but I thought it was fascinating that everybody else was so interested. That’s very funny, given the path that found me.

Do you ever remember seeing an actress or someone and thinking, “I wish I could do that?”

When I was in third grade, I told my mom that I wanted to be Paula Abdul. Her album Forever Your Girl was out and she was all the rage. She could dance and she was so cool. My mom will never let me forget that I wanted to be Paula Abdul. But I’d think there are so many girls that wanted to be Paula Abdul, I should choose someone that fewer people wanted to be. Then I’d have a greater chance of being that person. That was how my mind worked.

You could have been Stacey Q. Paula Abdul was pretty much the only one. I grew up with the belief, because my parents were so supportive, that I could do and be anything I wanted.

Aside from a singer. My mom told me I should never sing unless I’m in the shower, alone. And she’s right.

You’ve done quite a few sci-fi or horror roles over your career. As a viewer, is that the kind of thing you tend to watch, or what types of films do you enjoy?

I watch everything. (laughs) I always have movies in my trailer, especially when I’m on set. Right now, I’ve got everything from The ‘Burbs to Toy Story 3 to Bridesmaids. I try not to watch movies at work that are going to make me cry, because my make-up artists will not be thrilled with me. It just takes the The Modern | April 2012

right kind of mood. Sometimes I’m in the mood to be scared out of my mind. I adore The Exorcist, but it freaks me out every time. I’ve seen it 25 times. My favorite movie of all time is Silence of the Lambs, which I know is a weird favorite movie. I’ll watch anything.

Then if I like it, I’ll watch it over and over and over again. I love children’s movies, too. Toy Story and Babe and all those.

You just mentioned Silence of the Lambs. I remember you telling me last time we spoke, while you were on Criminal Minds, that serial killers strangely fascinated you. Why do you think the macabre and horrible can be so interesting?

It’s an out-of-body, other-world kind of feeling. I’m certainly not celebrating anyone who’s killed a large number of people — it just seems so foreign to me.

The idea that someone could have that mentality, that somebody could have the stomach to chop people up in little pieces. Or eat them, or kill them, or anything. I think a lot of people are fascinated by those intangible things. You’re thinking along the lines of, “How could a person be like this?” That’s what fascinates me, just the idea that I can’t relate to them on any level, but I’m fascinated that they are out there.

What was the first movie you ever saw that really blew you away?

We didn’t have a VCR until I was in the eighth grade. Everybody else had one. We didn’t have one until late. The first movie we ever watched on the VCR was Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, which was very funny. It had just come out. As a family we would watch Indiana Jones and Romancing the Stone. I always loved action/adventure movies, my brother and I both did. Back to the Future. Maybe it was the whole experience of watching movies with my family. It was great. I remember going to see Batman in the theaters and being completely blown away by it.

Is there a certain movie that if you are in a bad mood it automatically cheers you up?

When Harry Met Sally. That would be right up there with Silence of the Lambs.

Is there something you watch when you need a good cry — obviously when you have a day off from make-up?

The Virgin Suicides, even though it doesn’t make me really cry, is an interesting sort of mind game. It’s very depressing, but it’s so beautiful in so many ways that I can’t turn myself away from it. Then, if I watch Stella or Beaches or anything involving Bette Midler, I’ll lose my mind. www.themodern.us

Tell me a bit about Continuum? It sounds like a fascinating show.

It’s awesome. I read the script and I went: “I’m in.”

I love it. It’s great. Basically, the brief summary is I’m a woman from the future, a future law-enforcement officer, fighting terrorists from the future in the present day — after we all accidentally go back in time.

I love action, obviously, [I’ve done] Alias and GI Joe, even Conan. I get my fight scenes and I get the real action bits that I love. I get to brandish weapons and fire guns. But it’s not just another cop show. There’s a very big element for me that’s new. I have a family in the future. I have a son in the future that I’m trying to get back to. It’s a very emotional role as well, which I really like. The cast is fantastic. I’m the only American in the cast.

Any word on when it will be getting a US release?

Graham King, who is primarily known for producing movies with Johnny Depp and Leo DiCaprio, his production company is producing the show.

What they decided to do is — I’m up here shooting ten episodes. We’re going to shoot those ten. Instead of doing a pilot and then doing that whole rigmarole, they really wanted to have control. They really wanted to have power over what the show was going to be.

So, we’re shooting ten straight episodes and they are going to sell it. As soon as I know, I’ll be shouting it from the treetops, but right now I don’t know where it is going to end up.

You have been in a few police dramas recently. As a viewer, did you have any favorite ones?

I love them all, which I know is super-lame to say, but I was always a huge fan. I get it from my mom.

My mom loves all of those shows. My mom was a huge fan of Criminal Minds before I was on the show.

She’s much like me: Criminal Minds is about hunting serial killers. I’ll watch pretty much any of those shows, because I like solving crimes.

You also have the movie I, Alex Cross coming up, based on the James Patterson novels. I know it’s sort of a reboot of the series; Morgan Freeman had played the role before and now it is Tyler Perry. What is that going to be like? How is he doing in the role?

I adored working with Tyler. You meet him and you love him. You realize why he is as successful as he is.

He’s one of the more sincere, genuine… he’s very quiet, but he’s very intelligent. He’s lovely, just lovely. The same goes for Ed Burns. Ed Burns is just every bit the guy from Long Island that you would expect him to be.

And I love [director] Rob Cohen. I’ve been friends with www.themodern.us

Rob for years. The franchise gets a reboot, but this will change the face of the franchise. Along Came a Spider and Kiss the Girls are two fantastic movies, and obviously Morgan Freeman is always great. There’s a lot more action in I, Alex Cross. It’s a lot faster paced. There are more guns and car chases and stuff like that. The storyline is still there, obviously, because it’s James Patterson and that is his most famous character. But it is an updated, action-based reboot, with the same heart that his stories usually have.

What kinds of things bring you back to the old days?

What makes you nostalgic?

I never appreciated growing up in Maine until I lived in New York, California and Paris and I traveled the world. God, I love to go home. I spend every minute with my family that I possibly can. Maine will always be in my home. It doesn’t matter how old I get or where I live. It can be something as simple as a Yankee Candle. They make a candle called “Christmas Wreath” — that is the scent. It’s only on sale at Christmas. I have them all over my place in LA. When I get homesick, that’s my go-to thing. Anything Christmas brings me home, because it was always such a special time in my household. Also, for years my dad had a 1976 gigantic extended cab Ford truck. If I see anything like that, I will immediately, immediately think of home. It’s funny what brings me back. It can be a smell in the middle of the day in the middle of the street. I don’t know what that was, but it makes me think of home. I’ll immediately call my parents.

Jay S. Jacobs is the author of the books Wild Years: The Music and Myth of Tom Waits and Pretty Good Years: A Biography of Tori Amos. He is also senior editor and founder of the pop culture web magazine www.popentertainment.com.

April 2012 | The Modern

cover story: cigarette ads

The Modern | April 2012

www.themodern.us

Cigarette Ads on TV

Go Up in

Smoke Where there’s smoke, there’s fire: The FCC bans tobacco advertising On January 1, 1971, at 11:59 p.m., viewers of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson unknowingly witnessed the abrupt end of an empire: the very last cigarette commercial to be aired on television.

The brand was Virginia Slims, which was marketed to the newly liberated woman of the Seventies.

The message: “you’ve come a long way, baby.” And how true. Since the dawn of television, the cigarette was king of the tube, and responsible for recruiting millions of smokers.

For decades, smoking was generally considered acceptable, glamorous, a rite of passage, and even young and sexy. But no more.

Billions of smokes were sold as a result of some of the most sophisticated and clever advertising and marketing of its time. Slick salesmen told you to try their brand and see why it’s different (even though

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there was essentially no difference among cigarettes). Major stars of the era, like Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, urged you to give their brands a try. Fred Flintstone hap-

pily lit up a Winston, while Rob and Laura Petrie puffed on Kents on The Dick Van Dyke Show.

Even doctors lent their credibility to certain brands, saying

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S k l a r April 2012 | The Modern

cover story: cigarette ads that the brand they endorsed was “mild on the throat,” and “caused no irritation.”

In the Fifties, television shows were sold directly to advertisers, not the networks. The advertisers, like Phillip Morris or Lucky Strike, decided where and when the series would be aired. And banging you over the head with their message was not beyond them: “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should,” “I’d walk a mile for a Camel,” and “Lucky Strike means fine tobacco” are only a few of the hundreds of

which now focused on the dangers of smoking.

Another blow to big tobacco: a late-Fifties scandal involving TV game shows, in which it was uncovered that certain quiz programs were rigging the game by providing contestants with correct answers in order to increase the drama. As a result, advertisers got the wrist slap of their lives, and forever lost control of the television schedule. That power was then given directly to the networks. Advertisers could now

for tobacco advertising.

By 1964, the Surgeon General’s report claimed that indeed cigarette smoking could cause death.

By now, all bets were off. In 1967, the FCC declared “equal time” with anti-smoking ads, which were becoming more sophisticated and persuasive. The networks were furious — anti-smoking ads, by law, had to be given away for free. As a result, networks lost advertising revenue by the billions.

The tobacco companies wanted out. It wasn’t worth it. By 1969,

messages that bombarded television viewers throughout the first years of TV. It worked, too.

What changed everything: in 1952, a series of articles in Reader’s Digest, entitled “Cancer by the Carton,” linked smoking to lung cancer and other causes of death. This was nothing less than a bombshell.

Smoking immediately declined in the United States. Studies and counterstudies followed, but the evidence was becoming painfully apparent. Pressure was on for the Surgeon General and the FCC to take a closer, more sober look at this product that was allegedly killing its customers.

The tobacco companies knew everything about marketing but were not prepared for the media,

only buy time, not control it.

Suddenly, the tobacco companies were on the defensive. In desperation, they touted — loudly and consistently — “filtered” cigarettes, which apparently offered some protection from toxicity. They also tried to buddy up to Americans with crush-proof and waterproof packaging, “lights” and even longer cigarettes.

Despite the claims that filters and low-tar were safer, the FCC and the Surgeon General soldiered on. In 1962, the first anti-smoking public-service announcements began to air on TV, even though most of them were broadcast in the middle of the night. Nevertheless, this suddenly made television a hostile home

the FCC decreed that all cigarette advertising would be banned from radio and television by January 1, 1971. So it was written. So it was done.

Did the tobacco companies suffer as a result? Take a guess.

With cigarette advertising gone from TV, so were the free antismoking ads. And there were always billboards, newspapers, magazines and sports stadiums… and Europe and the emerging countries of the Third World… and, eventually, the Internet. Although smoking continues to decline in America, the tobacco companies continue to reap the revenues that television no longer needs to help them sow.

Smoke ’em’ if you got ’em.

The Modern | April 2012

www.themodern.us

retro rewind

Cold Turkey The Battle of The Butt! Eagle Rock, Iowa Gives Up Smoking for 30 Days to Win $25 Million

By Ronald Sklar The brilliant Cold Turkey was somehow stillborn on arrival, a critical and box office dud. It was filmed in 1969 and nervously shelved until its reluctant, hurried release in 1971. The social comedy focuses on the evil of Big Tobacco, the national frenzy that the media is capable of stirring, and the easy seduction and corruption of good, decent people. It was produced by Norman Lear, the man who brought us All In The Family that very same year. While Family became a legendary megahit, Turkey languished forever, not even finding new life on video or cable.

Yet the two projects are similar in their knack for spot-on casting (Dick Van Dyke, Jean Stapleton, Bob Newhart, Vincent Gardenia, Bernard Hughes), social relevance and smart comedy. The clothes look funny, but when it comes to cigarette addiction, nothing has changed. Not really.

The plot? Genius: a tobacco company offers $25 million to any town in America that can give up smoking for thirty days (knowing full well that not even an office steno pool or apartment building can succeed at such a challenging task).

The Valiant Tobacco Company’s plan is to create goodwill and look less evil; that “it’s the thought that counts.” The idea stemmed from the work of Alfred Nobel, who created the Nobel Peace Prize to distract the world from the fact that he also created dynamite.

The company will attempt the same twisted logic — awarding an American town for stopping the destructive, addictive, lethal behavior associated with the very product Valiant produces.

Eagle Rock, Iowa (population 4006) takes up the challenge with a signed pledge by every resident. In the Bible Belt, a signed pledge really means something. Their aim is true: Eagle Rock was once thriving and buzzing, but now blows in the wind and faces an uncertain future after an Air Force base leaves town. What happens next is nothing short of a miracle — a resurrection: as the month trudges on, and the cigarette haze disappears from the landscape, the town finds a clear sense of purpose. Thousands of tourists and the media descend on the community, now considered even by Time magazine as the The Modern | April 2012

center of the universe. The world watches and waits.

The townsfolk feel stronger, unified and more determined as a result of giving up cigarettes. It seems that they may be carrying out the Lord’s business. They are also conflicted by evil forces: greed and vanity envelope them as they anticipate their payday and smile for the thousands of curious television and tourists’ cameras. Meanwhile, the tobacco company grows desperate as their plan backfires. They feverishly work to get one person — any person — to light up before the thirty days are up. That should be easy enough, right?

Dick Van Dyke nails it as the town minister who leads the cause despite his personal demons, and Bob Newhart is evil incarnate as the tobacco company’s public relations stooge who creates the plan and then must foil it. Jean Stapleton previews Edith Bunker as a church lady, and even Richard Nixon (or at least his body double) makes a cameo, his arms raised in peace signs.

Like cigarette smoking itself, Cold Turkey is an addiction. We’ll get you hooked with this freaking hilarious clip. The rest is up to you. www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoUyxzECX8k&feature=related www.themodern.us

the great forgotten

Fire songs These songs are smokin’!

There are very few things in the world more seductive and potentially damaging than fire – and don’t think the music hasn’t noticed that. More than any other element, fire has played a regular role on the hit parade (take that, air!). Fire can symbolize love, heat, passion, frenzy, destruction, obsession, pain, and loss of control – all favorites of the struggling artistes. There are literally dozens of songs that have revolved around fire since Jerry Lee Lewis set the world alight with “Great Balls of Fire” and the Platters lamented that “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” Here are some of the other greats.

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“Light My Fire” - The Doors

This is the song that introduced the world to the enigmatic lizard king Jim Morrison and his soon-tobe-legendary group. Though credited to the whole band, the song was written mostly by keyboardist Robbie Krieger, with just little flourishes added by the rest of the guys. Playing up the idea of fire as passion, this seven-minute-long jam (though there was a threeminute-long single version with all the instrumental breaks edited out) was an extended seduction – a pose which Morrison would use successfully throughout his career. The song was also malleable enough that just a year later, a tejano-tinged cover by Jose Feliciano followed The Doors’ original up the charts. www.youtube.com/embed/6O6x_m4zvFs

“Ring of Fire” - Johnny Cash

“Love is a burning thing, and it makes a fiery ring.”

It sounds pretty horrific, but “Ring of Fire” is actually a tribute to the power of love. Written by Cash’s soonto-be wife June Carter, with Merle Kilgore, the song is about surrendering oneself to love completely no matter how hot it becomes. Carter’s sister, Anita, originally recorded the song but Johnny had a dream of the tune accompanied by Mexican mariachi horns. Therefore, he gave Anita’s version a while to see if it would connect before recording his own dream version. It eventually became one of Cash’s most beloved standards. www.youtube.com/embed/It7107ELQvY

“Fire” - Crazy World of Arthur Brown

“I am the God of Hellfire and I bring you – FIRE!” With that bonkers opening spoken-word interlude, Arthur Brown launches us into possibly the most eccentric pop hit of the Sixties, with wild, offbeat instrumentation and strange, writhing, yelping vocals.

It became a bit of an international sensation and the sweet, intellectual, hippyish Brown had to defend against charges of being a Satanist. Brown claims that the song was part of a concept album and the specific song was done in character – you gotta love the Sixties.

Though making huge fans (Pete Townshend of The Who in particular has been a long-standing supporter, even re-recording “Fire” with Brown for Townshend’s “The Iron Man” solo album), Brown was never able to recapture the wildfire popularity of his breakout hit and eventually settled back into obscurity. In the small www.themodern.us

world files, after Arthur Brown’s musical career pretty much smoldered out (though to this day, he still periodically records or plays live) he took a job as a teacher.

One of his students, Martin Briley, followed in his footsteps as a one-hit-wonder with the 1983 chart hit “The Salt in My Tears.” www.youtube.com/embed/vCTaxGhRC5M

“Fire” - Pointer Sisters

Though they had been around for several years, the Pointers became big stars thanks to this Bruce Springsteen-penned charmer. (Yes, once upon a time, Springsteen wrote semi-regularly as a gun-for-hire for R&B singers, also penning “Protection” for Donna Summer, “This Little Girl” for Gary U.S. Bonds and offering his little-known b-side, “Pink Cadillac,” to Natalie Cole.)

Several years later, Springsteen had a minor hit with his own live performance of the song. Also, over thirty years on, Robin Williams’ imitation of Elmer Fudd singing the song (“But when we kiiiiiss, woo, it wike fi-wah”) is still a gut-buster. www.youtube.com/embed/rarro42uIVU

“Smoke on the Water” - Deep Purple

Based on a true event, the song was inspired as the early metal band was recording in Montreux, Switzerland (home of the famous jazz festival). Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention were playing a gig at a nearby casino complex. One of the Zappa fans shot off a flare gun during the show, catching the roof on fire and ended up burning down the whole complex. The members of Deep Purple watched it all burning down from across the lake in their hotel room. The scary experience inspired the writing of this song, which is still remembered as having one of the most distinctive guitar riffs in Seventies rock. www.youtube.com/embed/arpZ3fCwDEw

“Fire Burning” - Sean Kingston

See, we do listen to current radio too. This 2009 hit from Jamaican/American rap/reggae artist Kingston was his most blatantly dance-pop confection, slipping in bits of techno, pop and rock. Produced by Lady Gaga collaborator RedOne, there wasn’t a whole lot of depth to the lyrics – yet another fire on the dance floor ode – but a simmering beat that lit up the floors that summer. www.youtube.com/embed/YkyhvCdJ_vM April 2012 | The Modern

the great forgotten “Disco Inferno” - The Trammps

A timely choice, as Trammps lead singer Jimmy Ellis died this past month. Possibly the most popular fire-on-the-dance-floor song ever, this originally eleven-minute dance jam burned up the discos in the late Seventies. Pretty much unnoticed when it was the title track of the band’s 1976 album, the song ignited a couple of years later as the only song to become a hit off of the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack which was not performed or written by the Bee Gees. www.youtube.com/embed/A_sY2rjxq6M

“Fire in the Morning” Melissa Manchester

Here is proof that fire songs can be soft, happy and mellow as well. Manchester’s 1979 hit paid tribute to relighting old passions with an old flame. This sweet and nostalgic tune looks at flame for its comforting and nurturing effects – laying by the fireplace and snuggling together for heat. www.youtube.com/embed/oWjLLQJL4Ng

“I’m on Fire”- Bruce Springsteen

Springsteen’s second fire song on this list (though the first that actually earned him a hit). This story-song had Springsteen playing a character of a man losing touch with reality as he obsessively stalks the woman of his dreams. The video watered down this concept significantly, making him a mechanic with a crush on the rich married lady who dropped off her expensive vintage sports car. www.youtube.com/embed/lrpXArn3hII

“Burning Down the House” Talking Heads

This was arguably the definitive song for the brainy CBGBs art rockers. It was certainly their biggest hit. www.youtube.com/embed/g8D4AsLzlM0

“Fire” - The Ohio Players

These days, the Ohio Players are best remembered for their soft-core album covers, but in the day they were the funkiest band on the planet. This 1974 single was their first chart-topping hit, as was predicted by Stevie Wonder on his first listen while it was still in the recording process. Today, “Fire” is used as the theme to the FOX-TV reality series Hell’s Kitchen. www.youtube.com/embed/Y47G-Wa4qfs

“Burning Love” - Elvis Presley

This 1972 smash is arguably the last truly rocking song by the late, great King, coming out as he was descending deeper and deeper into his drug-addled Vegas years. Written by a semi-obscure Nashville songwriter named Dennis Linde (who also played the electric guitar salvo in the single), the song peaked at two on the Billboard pop charts – held out of the top spot on the charts by fellow-Fifties-survivor Chuck Berry’s comeback novelty hit “My Ding-a-Ling.” Presley would never hit the Top Ten again. Ironically, word is that Presley never overly liked the song and felt uncomfortable singing it. It’s a shame, because it was one of his best singles. He would be dead in a mere five years, but Elvis never sounded more alive than he did on this song. www.youtube.com/embed/DcJac6OykfM

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retro sports

The Human Drama of Athletic Competition

By Mitch Gainsburg Back in the Seventies, a sports announcer, Jim McKay of ABC Sports, would utter a specific phrase every Saturday afternoon before the start of the Wide World of Sports broadcast. It would be right after we watch that ski jumper wipe out in the snow (I’m still wondering how he didn’t die). Here’s what he said: “The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat, and the human drama of athletic competition.” There it is, twelve words and simple enough.

In the Seventies, you only had three or four TV channels, and most of the sports action was on the weekends. Two or three camera angles gave us the needed view of the game. Sports talk had not yet made it to the airwaves and most of our info came from this thing in the newspaper called the sports section. These days, we have 24/7, up-to-the-minute sports information at the touch of a finger or click of the mouse. Forget water-cooler chat — we don’t even have to leave our desk. “How was your work day” is replaced by “did you hear what the NY Yankees did” or just plain “who scored?”

These days, America lives and dies with their sports teams and the players on them. They rant, beef and cry

daily to the radio host or favorite blog. We refer to our team as ours or we, like they are actually are part of the results. Funny, sometimes they are. Ever watch a baseball game in Philly or a football game in San Fran? I’m not just talking about noise, I’m talking about knowledge. And to get knowledge you have to be a part of the “thrill of victory.”

Teams, coaches, and the players are on a short leash and better bring on the thrill of victory before the agony of defeat, because if the talk is negative on the radio or Internet, you could be heading out of town. Today’s fan eats, sleeps, works, talks and fights sports. It even finds a way to run their lives and dictate their moods.

The “human drama of athletic competition?”

You’d better believe it. It’s relevant in the third level of a NY Rangers game, at the Linc in Philly, a Chicago Bulls game and just going to an Oakland Raiders event. Players know it, feel it and fear for their jobs to just do it.

Mitch Gainsburg, aka “Cashy the King,” is host of Sports Goombahs Radio and webcast@www.sgshow.net and from the studios of 1490 WBCB am Levittown, PA Listen here and visit his Sports Goombahs website: http://www.wbcb1490.com/feed1.htm http://www.thesportsgoombahs.com

retro quiz

Play ball!

Play our challenging retro baseball quiz on home runs.

By William Shultz 1. Roger Maris broke Babe Ruth’s home run record in what year and with how many home runs?

2. Which 3 players broke Maris’ record and why do a majority of baseball people and fans feel it was undeserved?

3. Babe Ruth broke the home run record twice in his career.

Which years and how many home runs?

4. Why did the Commissioner of Baseball originally put an asterisk next to Maris’ accomplishment?

5. If you don’t count Barry Bonds as the all-time leader in home runs (762), who is the all-time leader and with how many?

1. 1961 and 61 2. Sammy Sosa, Mark McGwire, Barry Bonds. Steroid use.

3. 1921–59, 1927–60. 4. He broke the record in a 162 game season, where Ruth did it in a 154 game season. 5. Hank Aaron with 755.

read this retro book

Stars In Our Eyes: Why We Are Starstruck Michael Joseph Gross’ classic look at the relationship between fans and stars explains this puzzling passion.

By Ronald Sklar We’re surrounded by them from birth to death. They are as much a part of our lives as our family, friends and children. They give us love, shape our worldview and influence the way we see ourselves; they give us sexual satisfaction; they disappoint us and sometimes leave us.

We often keep our love for them a deep, dark, shameful secret — for others, we proudly announce our love for them to the world.

They are celebrities.

In Michael Joseph Gross’ mesmerizing and now classic book, Starstruck (Bloomsbury USA), the strange but common relationship between fan and star is examined and dissected. Most of the experience is related to us first hand, as Gross moved to LA to be closer to the action. He has an inside track to this passion, spending his midwestern childhood obsessively collecting autographs.

Gross explores why we are so drawn to famous people and how they react to us. He also investigates why our obsession with celebrity is stronger than ever, and yet very few of us would ever admit out loud that we are vulnerable enough to fall for it.

What exactly is the strange phenomenon of celebrity and how and why do we become fans? It’s a subject that is rarely dealt with, until now.

Michael Joseph Gross is a freelance writer who has written for The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Atlantic Monthly, Entertainment Weekly, Elle, The Nation, and many other magazines and newspapers. He won PEN/New England’s 2002 Discovery Award for nonfiction.

It’s obvious that you’ve poured so much of yourself into this book.

I decided that the only way to write this book is as if I had nothing to lose. There are so many truths that entertainment journalists shade, truths that we only allow partial expression of. If you are going to write something that means anything, you have no choice but to do your best to tell the whole truth. It also makes things funnier.

The Modern | April 2012

At some point during my writing of this, I found a quote from Mark Twain that said, “‘The absolute truth is the funniest joke in the world.’”

What inspired you to write this book?

After college, I went to seminary. After seminary, I worked in politics as a speechwriter for the governor of Massachusetts. After that, I became a freelance writer and I found that most of my articles were about admiration, how admiring someone helps form character.

For me, because autograph collecting and being a fan as a kid were such important ways of making myself up, I decided to look at the paths other people have taken in fandom too.

The first expedition I took was to write a piece for The New York Times magazine, about professional autograph collectors. That story — to my surprise — really hit a chord with a lot of different kinds of people, including very powerful media people who you wouldn’t expect to identify with passionate fans. But they do. Few people working in the media or entertainment ever make anything meaningful that is not fueled in some way by the emotional impulses of fandom.

I thought that it might be worthwhile to go to LA and find out how fandom expresses itself up and down the social spectrum, in obvious people like autograph collectors, but also people who you wouldn’t initially think of as fans but who are — celebrities, directors, producers, writers.

You’ve said that our culture encourages us to become fans, but when we do, we are labeled as freaks.

The same media that force feeds us images of celebrities also tells us that fans are freaks. We’re in a huge hurry to trivialize fandom — to call it shallow, empty, corrupting, juvenile.

How do you see the difference between fans and stalkers?

Stalking is a symptom of severe mental illness. It has nothing to do with the everyday insanities of fandom that the rest of us experience. Stalking is not the funhouse mirror image of autograph collecting. It is a www.themodern.us

whole other territory. And yet, there is something really intellectually appealing to a lot of people about the idea that the fan is a stalker waiting to happen. It makes a tidy argument.

How has the Internet changed fandom?

One of the effects of the Internet is to create the illusion of greater intimacy while actually increasing the distance between stars and fans. The Internet allows greater bandwidth of information about stars’ personal lives but actually lacks personal involvement in the purveying of that information.

Increasingly, you’re also seeing stars create websites that have two levels of access, just like porn sites. There is one level that you get for free (example: Halle Berry’s site: Hallewood. com) where you can look at quicktime movies of Halle working out, running on a treadmill, doing her abs routine. This level is for free.

Then you have a chance to enter a sweepstakes to see her in person, or even have a chance to ask her a question that she may answer on the website. This level is something like thirty-nine dollars a year. For that, you also get a fake autographed picture.

A lot of celebrities have this same model. It’s mostly female stars who are in some way sex symbols. There aren’t as many male stars who have exploited the medium yet. But one great one is Adam Sandler’s website which is filled with amazing short movies — Adam taking care of his dying dog, or getting a haircut. We see every little detail of his life.

That is an example of a site that offers greater intimacy and actually does deliver it. In no way does it profit from the interactions that it invites.

That is what I think is most telling about the majority of movie stars’ websites. Any of us born in 1970 or earlier could make contact with a star by just writing a fan letter and putting a stamp on an envelope. It’s almost impossible to do that now. Through the Internet, stars have learned that they can ask for — and get — a considerable amount of money just for providing the illusion of personal contact.

You show us two extremes in perceptions of star power: Michael Jackson and Dolly Parton. In many ways, both stars are very similar, but how do they differ? www.themodern.us

Even though they are two of the most spectacularly artificial human beings in America, Dolly has been able to convince the world that she is real. That’s the word everybody uses to describe her: “She’s just so real.” She evokes both the kind of awe we reserve for stars from outer space (Michael Jackson, Cher) and at the same time the fellow feeling that we have for stars who are most like us (Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan). [Dolly] is a true paradox. Nobody is more artificial and nobody is more authentic. Paradoxical characters I think are the ones who are of the most enduring interest. Jesus fascinates because he is a paradox.

Michael’s story is an American tragedy. And Dolly is the classic American success story, the American Dream.

Jackson’s story is like a warning: if you start transforming yourself, you might not know when to stop. You just lose yourself completely. However, Parton’s life is like a promise, that if you start transforming yourself, you become more essentially yourself. She has had all this plastic surgery, but she is almost like an artist of plastic surgery. The more she changes in order to fit the vision of herself that she had when she was a kid, the more people love her.

You also touch upon the state of entertainment journalism and how it influences fandom. You use Mary Hart as a prime example of how the industry has changed over the last few decades.

Writing about entertainment journalism, I chose to concentrate on Mary Hart because I think that Entertainment Tonight (ET) is the watershed event in the history of entertainment journalism and has not been sufficiently recognized as such.

ET was the first syndicated show to be sent by satellite to stations around the country. Mary Hart was not just on-camera talent, but she was traveling all over the country to build this business and sell this show in a way for which she has never been given credit. She is an extremely smart businesswoman.

Her longevity alone as a woman in this business is just staggering — she’s weathered five co-hosts in twenty-some years.

ET took real information about the business of the entertainment industry into people’s living rooms for the first time. This show was the first to report things April 2012 | The Modern

read this retro book like box office grosses. Before this show, none of us talked about that.

Over time, however, ET became more sensational, more preoccupied with gossip. Its notion of entertainment broadened to include stories like the Michael Skakel trial and Chandra Levy’s disappearance. More and more competitors arose (E!, Access Hollywood, etc.). ET has gone way off on the side of gossip. This has probably been difficult for Mary Hart.

The evolution of entertainment journalism over the past couple of decades reflects the evolution of entertainment in America. Particularly in the last five years, looking at the rise of reality television, this is where things have gone completely off the rail. Entertainment and gossip have completely merged. Reality shows are interesting because they’re filled with people who do the kind of things on camera that — until recently — none of us would even admit to our friends that we did: lie, cheat on our spouses, say horrible things to our parents.

However, I think that we may be due for a change in course here soon. Fans have an appetite for story and characters and not merely for sensation—and that appetite for narrative is by far the more sustaining pleasure.

How have publicists’ roles changed in the last few decades, and how are they associated with fandom?

Publicists have more control over access to the stars now. They’re strange characters, publicists. Most of them have a lot of disdain for fans, and I don’t think it’s hard to figure out why that is. How can you ever turn your life so over wholly to the creation of a star and to serving the whims of a star as a publicist does, unless you are dying to breathe the air of fame?

You describe “People Storms” in your book when you discuss your red carpet experiences with Sean Astin.

One of the reasons I love talking to Sean Astin is because he is able to describe the experience of fame from so many different angles. He grew up as Patty Duke and John Astin’s son, and he was a child star himself.

He is now an adult and has children of his own. He is observing the way his career affects their lives. One of his daughters becomes very frightened when they go out in public and people start to ask for his attention.

She calls what happens a “people storm.”

Sean allowed me to accompany him down the red carpet as he entered an awards show. The fans in the bleachers think that the celebrities see them as a sort of anonymous mass, when in fact, the entire time we were walking down the red carpet, Sean was noticing very specific things about individuals, and talking about why they were dressed the way they were The Modern | April 2012

dressed or why they were saying the things they were saying. You would hear these large, loud obtuse comments like “You’re great!” coming from the stands.

But we were surrounded on the red carpet by people like Dennis Quaid and Uma Thurman and Queen Latifah and I would listen to what they were saying to one another and it was essentially the same thing, often the same words: “You’re great! You’re great!”

At one point, Sean put his arms around my shoulder and, gesturing to the fans, said, “Aren’t you glad that you’re over here instead of over there?” It sounded almost like he was bragging, which would have been out of character for him. I was wondering what he was getting at, and I said, “Yes, I sure am.”

He asked me, “Do you know what the difference is?

About two feet.”

How do you feel about celebrities now that you’ve exorcised your thoughts in this book? Are you completely over it?

I am on sabbatical! However, if I walked out the door and Renee Zellweger was walking down the street, it would make me very happy for about five minutes. But most of the time, when an opportunity arises to go to a celebrity party, I’d rather go to the beach.

So what is it about our love affairs with celebrities? Why are we all fans?

Celebrity is something that we enjoy, even if we don’t admit that we enjoy it. And for the most part, it’s good to enjoy it. It’s healthy. It helps connect us to other people: we really can learn something about a new friend by asking, ‘Who’s your favorite Desperate Housewife?’

Also, if we didn’t have these people to dream about, then we would have to do some serious hating of the unfairness of life. And our relationships with stars ebb and flow, just like all of our relationships. We need them more and less at different times of our lives, and we need different kinds of them at different times of our lives.

It’s like love, but it’s not love, and it’s really important never to forget that. This is an imaginary relationship. The connection that we feel to a star is actually a connection to a piece of work that the star has made. This adds a layer of abstraction in to the relationship and makes it less like love, and more like being in love with love.

The initial impulse of fandom always comes from the impulse to love, and that’s why fandom matters.

That’s why none of these feelings — no matter how stupid and silly and embarrassing they are — none of them are a waste of time or shameful. They are just there to enjoy. Celebrities give us pleasure that almost no one has bothered to describe. www.themodern.us

Mad Women

The Best of Everything Career girls living large in Manhattan — a flick most quotable.

By Eve Golden The early 1960s never seem to go away: the upand-at-’em perkiness of the Kennedy years; the chic, pared-down fashions; the fascination with pushbutton technology; the pills! the cocktails! Mad Men is only the hottest new reincarnation. Take a peek at this season’s Banana Republic and J. Peterman catalogs, they look like costume sketches for The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone.

To really sink into the warm bath of JFK-era nostalgia, you cannot do better than the lush, enjoyable film The Best of Everything (1959), really one of the greatest Working Girls in the Big City movies. The Best of Everything — based on the Rona Jaffe novel of the same title — follows the glamorous ups and downs of Career Girls Hope Lange (like a budget Grace Kelly, all perfect bones and Connecticut breeding), Diane Baker (the country bumpkin) and Suzy Parker (glamorous, ill-fated and trying so hard to act, bless her little nylon hose). The three work at Fabian Publishing, loosely based on Pocket Books, where Rona Jaffe actually worked. The book had told the story of five girls, which had to be cut down to three for the movie: divorcee Martha Hyer and trashy office manager Sue Carson are only seen briefly, though professional comic Carson in particular steals every scene with her Pert Kelton-like wisecracking.

(Look quick in the early “girls arriving in the office” scene and you will see a quick flash of someone who appears to be Divine in Female Trouble!)

To this day, many New York women (especially those of us in publishing) are unhealthily obsessed with this little gem — I have worked with many who can quote voluminously from it (“You and your rabbit-faced wife can both go to hell!” “You college girls The Modern | April 2012

think it’s so easy — you can just breeze in overnight and become an editor.”). Back in the early 1980s, when I was a young Office Girl, new to the Manhattan job market, much of the early ’60s still held sway. We had our middle-aged bottom-pinchers, our “leery of women’s lib” types, and we still used typewriters (one typo and you had to start over — bosses would not stand for Wite-Out). And I was hired out through a New York agency called — I swear I am not making this up — Tempting Temps.

My friend and fellow office temp Kathy and I not only memorized the film, but the book as well: “It was our Bible,” Kathy says today. “We so enjoyed being Temp Temptresses, and always made sure to be ‘crisp and stylish in our budget cottons,’ as the paperback book cover advised.” Ila Stanger, Managing Editor of More magazine says (thinking of one of the film’s stars), “Well, I always wanted to be Suzy Parker. In Harper’s Bazaar, that is, not cringing on Louis Jourdan’s fire escape (or was it outside his door?). But then again,” says Ila, “it was for love of Louis Jourdan, and I understood.”

Mind you, The Best of Everything is one of those good/bad movies, like The Bad Seed; equal dollops of unintentional camp and genuine wonderfulness. Plus “gowns by Jean Louis!” No woman can really suffer beautifully unless she is sporting the floaty chiffons and tailored suits of the future Mr. Loretta Young. And one of the most lush, melodic soundtracks of the era, by the great Alfred Newman; it is one of the most-played on my iPod, lulling me into a Babe Paley-caliber sense of elegance as I go about my errands. “Sometimes I play the soundtrack around the house for inspiration,” agrees L.A. writer Donna Lethal.

In a wonderful 2004 Vanity Fair article about The www.themodern.us

Best of Everything, Laura Jacobs calls the dazzling opening credit sequence “a thrill, a tone poem to arrival, home movies meet Hart Crane.” It’s like a 1959 version of Woody Allen’s opening to Manhattan: New York before the architectural crap-fest of the 1960s and ’70s took over (though the girls’ workplace is set in the brand-new monolithic Seagram Building on Park and 52nd—to this day I cannot walk past it without doing my “Hope Lange looking up ambitiously” pose).

This is a Woman’s Movie, so all the men — without exception — are just awful. Even the “hero,” played by cleft-chinned Stephen Boyd, is a bitter alcoholic who wants poor Hope Lange to give up her career.

The rest of them are even worse: the lying, skirt-chasing boss (Brian Aherne), the reptilian-cold theatrical producer (Louis Jourdan), the weasely cheating married man (Lionel Kane), Hope’s terrible fiancé (Brett Halsey) and — worst of all! — the soulless predatory playboy, portrayed by the terrifying Robert Evans, looking as though he has been dipped in Valvoline.

“Here’s to men,” says Suzy Parker at one point, “bless their clean-cut faces and dirty little minds!”

The starlet trifecta of The Best of Everything encompasses the classic Good Girl, the Lady, and the Vamp combination. Pert, wholesome Diane Baker played country gal April, who — I don’t think I am ruining anything here — gets herself knocked up by Robert Evans. Hope Lange, of course, is the nominal star, growing more glamorous, chic and pareddown as she moves up the corporate ladder (to the concern of Stephen Boyd, who wants her to stay a “real woman”).

And then there is Suzy Parker. Oh, Suzy, Suzy, Suzy. She plays Gregg Adams, an actress who officetemps, much as I did back in the Eighties. Suzy was one of the best and most successful models of the 1950s — and I must emphasize that being a good model takes a particular talent. Good bones are not enough. But as an actress… poor Suzy could walk across a room unconvincingly. In The Best of Everything, she plays a really bad actress, which was a wise choice, but then she had to have “nervous breakdown” scenes. Director Jean Negulesco (or perhaps cinematographer William Mellor) opted to tilt the camera at odd angles during these scenes, to indicate “Suzy is crazy here.” But how she tried, and you can’t help but root for her.

The real reason to watch The Best of Everything is to worship the fabulousness that is Joan Crawford in her latter years. There is no way Meryl Streep did not study this performance for The Devil Wears Prada; Joan’s mean boss, Amanda Farrow, is by turns icy, www.themodern.us

menacing, sympathetic, nurturing, hard as nails. It’s a quiet, intelligent performance, and it reinforces my stand that Joannie was one of the great, under-appreciated actresses of her day. Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn were seen as Brilliant Actresses, and Joan dismissed as “just a movie star.” But Bette and Kate can often come off as arch and mannered (can you watch Kate in Alice Adams and not want to slap her till she cries?). Joan under-acted, and as crappy as some of her films were, she — like Claudette Colbert and Barbara Stanwyck — never gave a bad performance.

And poor Joan was particularly vulnerable at this time: her fourth and last husband, Alfred Steele, had recently died, leaving her pretty much broke.

She was in her fifties and hadn’t done a movie in

two years —this was the first time she was not to be “starred.” Surrounded by young popsies. Suzy Parker and Diane Baker later remembered her as being terrified. But she girded her Joanitude and came through, as she always did, which is why I wear a “What Would Joan Crawford Do?” bracelet for inspiration.

One last word of advice: read the 1958 book the movie was based on. The Best of Everything is Rona Jaffe’s best novel (OK, I know that is like being called “the smartest of Charlie’s Angels”). But if you are going to commute to the city via New Jersey Transit or Metro North, you need to balance a paperback copy of The Best of Everything on your crisp and stylish budget-cottened lap.

Eve Golden, who wrote The Bottom Shelf for Movieline in its 1990s heyday, has written seven books on film and theater history. Her biography of John Gilbert will be published next year.

April 2012 | The Modern

the kick ass list

The Simpsons –1990s Ron Passaro, our composer-in-residence, tries not to have a cow over ten very animated Simpsons musical productions.

By Ron Passaro The most iconic cartoon of the last 20 years is also the source for some of the greatest musical numbers ever written. I’ve undertaken the brutal task of trying to come up with the 10 best songs from the series thus far.

10.

“Springfield, Springfield” - Boy-Scoutz ‘n the Hood - November 18, 1993 Starting off my list is a parody from On the Town’s “New York, New York.” Bart and Milhouse blow their newfound money on Super Squishies at the KwikE-Mart. There’s so much sugar in these syrup-only Squishies that the boys begin to hallucinate soon after leaving the store. Their trippy journey through Springfield is accompanied by this song. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSOlrrbRPcU

9.

“Paint Your Wagon” - All Singing, All Dancing - January 4, 1998 Homer and Bart prepare to watch what they expect to be the “bloody mayhem and unholy carnage of Joshua Logan’s Paint Your Wagon,” starring Clint Eastwood and Lee

The Modern | April 2012

Marvin. Instead, they are exposed to one of the hokiest show tunes ever written. As Homer and Bart wonder why people are singing instead of killing each other (“Yeah, their guns are right there,” Bart points out), Homer thinks they’ve been saved: “Wait, wait, wait... here comes Lee Marvin. Thank God. He’s always drunk and violent.” To their horror, Lee joins right in with the others to continue the song. This opener served as a great lead-in for a clip-show episode of some of the best song moments in Simpsons history. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSOlrrbRPcU “Dr. Zaius” - A Fish Called Selma March 24, 1996 “You know what? I was on the can earlier and realized that ‘Zaius’ rhymes with ‘Amadeus.’ So I was thinking we should totally throw in a scene where the family attends a

8.

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3.

Planet of the Apes musical… and they sing a parody of ‘Rock Me Amadeus’ called ‘Dr. Zaius!’” That would have been my guess on how this ridiculous and ridiculously amazing song came into existence. But that’s not how it happened. The original script already had a Planet of the Apes show in it starring Troy McClure. However, during the rewriting phase, the writers decided to expand it to include a song. “Dr. Zaius” was born. Thanks be to all that is good, from chimpan-A to chimpan-Z. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMnG3gOqigE

“See my Vest” - Two Dozen and One Greyhounds - April 9, 1995 In this parody of “Be Our Guest” from Beauty and the Beast, Mr. Burns describes all the crazy clothing articles he has from various animal skins. It’s a clever list song that includes nowlegendary lyrics like “See my loafers? Former gophers” and “These white slippers are albino African endangered rhino.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsFHEK_o9U8

“We Put the Spring in Springfield” - Bart After Dark November 24, 1996 Marge finds out about a burlesque house in Springfield as well as the fact that Bart is now working there. She starts a crusade to shut down the Maison Derrière, as the house is called. Homer confronts the mob of people ready to burn the establishment to the ground and convinces them to let it stay by singing this song. It’s the first of two songs on this list to have won an Emmy for “Outstanding Music and Lyrics.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeYyzoONK6U

“I’m Checking In” - The City of New York vs.

Homer Simpson - September 21, 1997 While in New York City, Marge and the kids decide to take in a Broadway show. After all, it’s a must when visiting The Big Apple! The show they picked is called Kickin’ It: A Musical Journey Through the Betty Ford Center. That name alone is pure, pure gold. The song, featuring a character based on Robert Downey Jr., is extremely catchy. It rightfully won an Emmy for its awesomeness, or more specifically “Outstanding Individual Achievement in Music and Lyrics,” It also received an Annie Award for “Outstanding Music in an Animated Television Production.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LP5pmZKAirw

7.

“Cut Every Corner” - Simpsoncalifragilisticexpiala (Annoyed Grunt)cious - February 7, 1997 Marge’s hair is falling out due to stress so the Simpsons need a nanny. Enter (by way of floating umbrella) Shary Bobbins. The episode itself is, of course, a spoof of Mary Poppins. There are several songs, more so than any other episode I’m guessing (excluding perhaps “All Singing, All Dancing” mentioned earlier), and they are all quite good.

I highly recommend checking out “Minimum Wage Nanny” and “A Boozehound Named Barney.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwaQxDkpcHY

6.

“We Do” (The Stonecutters Song) - Homer the Great January 8, 1995 “Who robs cave fish of their sight? Who rigs every Oscar night?” The Stonecutters, of course! This rousing anthem of the Stonecutters was nominated for an Emmy for “Outstanding Music and Lyrics.” Another late addition in the writing process, the song was not part of the original script and was suggested

by Matt Groening himself. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZI_aEalijE

5.

4.

“Who Needs the Kwik-E-Mart” - Homer and Apu - February 10, 1994 As all of us Simpsons fans know, Apu does in fact need the Kwik-E-Mart. However, in this upbeat number he tries to convince himself otherwise. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe4BljAM3JQ

www.themodern.us

2.

“The Monorail Song” - Marge vs.

The Monorail - January 14, 1993 I’ve always wanted to see a system of monorails weave their way through New York City. Impractical, yes, but it definitely would be cool. So I totally understand how Lyle Lanley was able to convince the good, unsuspecting residents of Springfield to allocate the city’s renovation funds to his scam monorail business.

And you know what? A little ditty to help sway the naysayers never hurts.The number one song on my list goes to “The Monorail Song.” It’s a wonderful and hilarious parody of the famous patter song,“Trouble,” from The Music Man. Not only is the song outstanding, but the episode overall, written by Conan O’Brien, is one of the best of the entire series. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEZjzsnPhnw

1.

Ron Passaro is an in-demand composer of film and TV scores, as well as a number of other musical projects.

April 2012 | The Modern

retro foodie

Jacob Schimer

Trailer Park Bar and Lounge Get in touch with your inner-trailer troll.

I am always on the lookout for a bar or restaurant that I consider a go-to spot to take friends and family when they are in town — a place that is comfortable and offers great food and drinks. A couple of weeks ago I stumbled upon a home away from home at the Trailer Park Bar and Lounge, located in the heart of

in the center of the room. Hayley and I giddily made our way to the kitschy oasis of umbrella drinks and planted our rears on the 1950s-style diner bar stools.

We grabbed a bar menu and quickly decided on Jim Bob’s I.Q., which promised to “erase any signs of previous intelligence.” The drinks appeared quickly, topped with the signature Tiki umbrellas and colorful bendy straws. We downed the first round and felt a

Chelsea at 271 W. 23rd Street. My friend Hayley and I were in search of a place to grab a drink and some grub and to spend a lazy afternoon together. We were taking a stroll along 18th Street and came upon a toilet bowl sitting on the sidewalk. It seemed a little strange at first, but then again it was New York City. We then noticed a screen door entrance to the bar Trailer Park; it looked quite unique so we headed inside.

The first thing that caught my eye upon entering the lounge was the 1930s throw-back Tiki bar located

little lightheaded; Trailer Park’s promise was ringing true. The food menu was within reach and we noticed that they had a wide array of old school Americana grub. Our stomachs were grumbling so we ordered quite a few items including the sloppy Joe, chili mac ’n cheese, sweet potato fries, loaded chili nachos and a couple of moon pies for dessert. Hayley ordered a round of Trailer Park’s famous strawberry margaritas while I took a little tour of the joint on the way to the john.

I stumbled upon a 1950s-style trailer home that was embedded into the wall of the bar. Surrounding the trailer home were pictures of Elvis and old news-

By Jacob Schimer

The Modern | April 2012

www.themodern.us

paper ads selling braziers and instant glamour wigs.

True to trailer park style, there were old metal and plastic lawn chairs surrounding picnic tables for a retro dining and boozing experience. Overwhelmed by all the evocative décor, I made my way back to Tiki bar land and was greeted by massive amounts of comfort food. I made a quick grab for the sloppy Joe and sunk my teeth into the steamy bun and juicy beef center. The sandwich was piping hot and glorious in flavor and texture. It was tangy, zesty, sweet and salty, all of the components needed to make a true all-American sloppy Joe. I saved half the sandwich for Hayley and moved onto the loaded nachos. They were a mound of cheesy chili heaven and I worked my way from top to bottom savoring every crispy, cheesy, saucy bite. Hayley could see I was in ecstasy and quickly joined in on the action and the nacho mound was soon leveled to nothingness. By this time I was feeling quite full and had to take a break from the food spread. I needed something refreshing and bubbly to wash down all of the amazing food. We had made our way through most of the signature drinks

instead of; champagne in a can. The name alone was intriguing enough to order a round; it’s not something you see everyday. Tiny pink cans of champagne arrived accompanied by more bendy straws (can’t get enough of those), and Hayley and I pop the top to the little bubblies and began to swig. We couldn’t help but laugh with excitement and were surprised at how tasty the drinks were. It was definitely a nostalgic trailer park moment.

Full and definitely tipsy, Hayley and I wrapped up the rest of our food and made our way to the screen door exit. I took in all the surroundings one last time and felt as if I had been frequenting Trailer Park for years. There was something very comforting and fun in the atmosphere that made me feel warm and fuzzy all over. Trailer Park was definitely my new go-to spot to make friends and family feel right at home in the Big Apple.

Jacob Schirmer is a foodie from Kansas with an appetite for life. New York City satisfies his every craving.

For more information on Trailer Park, go to http://trailerparklounge.com

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girls were girls & men were men

Jennifer O’Neill Her turbulent personal life could have made a compelling film.

By Jay S. Jacobs Hollywood is always a welcoming destination for women of great beauty. In the history of gorgeousmodels-turned-actresses, very few were as strikingly pretty as Jennifer O’Neill. She radiated a wholesome, natural attractiveness — although she could also be quite sexy if that were called for.

Her own life was not always so wholesome, which is possibly part of the reason that she never became a bigger star. This is despite the fact that she was introduced to the movie world as female lead in John Wayne’s Rio Lobo. She followed it up with one of the iconic roles of the Seventies — the gorgeous war bride who becomes the romantic fantasy of a shy teenage boy in the smash hit Summer of ’42.

Of course, even then, O’Neill was no stranger to inspiring men’s fantasies. She was a supermodel before the term was even coined. She was born in Rio de Janeiro, the daughter of a banker. Though she was born in Brazil, her dad was of Irish-Spanish descent and her mother was English. The family moved to Connecticut when she was still a girl.

Still, the dark side and bad luck, which would follow her through much of her life, was apparent at a very young age. She had attempted suicide at 14. Then, when she was 15, she broke her back and neck in three places in a horseback-riding accident. (Despite this, she is still an avid lover of horses.)

The family moved to New York City and, at 15, her modeling career immediately flourished. In fact, she started a prolific relationship with Cover Girl cosmetics, which led to her appearing in their advertising for over thirty years. That is an insanely long run for a female model, but even today, well into her sixties, she is a strikingly attractive woman.

Men were awed by her soft, classic beauty. Of course, she loved men too. She has been married a staggering nine times (to eight men) — rivaling Elizabeth Taylor and Zsa Zsa Gabor as Hollywood’s most-often-wed starlets. The first marriage occurred when she was only 17. At one point, she married four men in four years.

O’Neill’s film career began when famed director Howard Hawks cast her for a small role in For the Love of Ivy. He then cast her against the Duke in Rio Lobo.

Still, despite this kind of recognition, O’Neill had to beg for a chance to audition for the role that made her a The Modern | April 2012

star — and she did it against the recommendation of her agent. The makers of Summer of ’42 thought she was too young. O’Neill was still in her early 20s and they were looking for a woman in her 30s — in fact, they were hoping to hire Barbra Streisand for the role.

(That would have made it a very different film.) However, O’Neill blew them away in the audition and got her role of a lifetime.

It was not merely a “role of a lifetime” because it was her dream role; it was also because she was never offered another role nearly as memorable. Still, she worked regularly through the Seventies and early Eighties in films like Lady Ice, The Reincarnation of Peter Proud, Whiffs (with Elliott Gould, to whom she was engaged but never married) and Scanners. She even spent a year working in Europe and gave an acclaimed performance in the Italian film L’innocente.

At the same time, her personal life was spiraling out of control. Beyond the multiple marriages and divorces, she had problems with money (husband #5 spent all her savings) and husbands’ infidelity. Then, in October 1982, O’Neill was involved in a mysterious shooting in which she called the police to say that she had shot herself while cleaning her gun. When the ambulance arrived she was bleeding profusely from the stomach and barely conscious. She has always claimed that the shooting was accidental.

However, O’Neill got her life back on track and was finally cast in the role that she hoped would revive her career. It was a television series called Cover Up — a buzz-worthy action series in which O’Neill co-starred with Jon-Erik Hexum, a hot upcoming young actor best known for the earlier series Voyagers!

Sadly, less than a week away from the two-year anniversary of her own shooting, another tragic gun accident rocked her world. While on set of the show, costar Hexum killed himself while joking around with a prop pistol. It was loaded with blanks, but Hexum did not realize that the discharge would still be enough to shatter his skull when he stuck it to his head and pulled the trigger. Only six episodes of Cover Up had been filmed at that point. The producers hurriedly brought in a new co-star, but the damage was done. The tragedy cast a pall over the whole enterprise and the show limped its way to the end of the season before being mercifully canceled.

That was not even the end of the gun violence in her www.themodern.us

life. Her ex-husband, Nick de Noia, a choreographer who helped create the Chippendales dancers, was also shot to death in 1987.

Soon after Cover Up was taken off the air, O’Neill realized her life was out of control. She became a bornagain Christian in 1986. But it was not enough just to save herself. She formed the Jennifer O’Neill Ministries and became a televangelist as well as a staunch pro-life advocate.

O’Neill has traveled a long, winding road in her career. However, despite the fact that she never quite reached the heights she may have, she had a long, intriguing body of work. Here are some of her best roles.

Dorothy – Summer of ‘42

This soft-hued nostalgic coming-of-age story set on the beaches of Massachusetts during World War II is still O’Neill’s finest showcase. Summer of ’42 tells the story of a shy teenaged boy named Hermie (Gary Grimes) trying to learn about sex and love during his final summer on Nantucket with his parents.

While wasting time with his two buddies and trying to meet girls, he soon spies and develops a huge crush on O’Neill’s Dorothy, a twenty-something military wife staying at the little cottage down the beach. He becomes determined to get to know this lovely older woman, and when tragedy touches her life, he comes to know her much more closely than he ever imagined. O’Neill has the tricky role of being both Hermie’s fantasy and keeping grounded to her character’s own reality, and she pulls it off with an understated grace and charm. www.youtube.com/embed/LFgNrgTX_t8 Anne Curtis – The Reincarnation of Peter Proud Though very much a product of its time (when was the last time you heard someone talking about reincarnation?) the film is a surprisingly taut and twisty thriller and one of the lost classics of the Seventies. Michael Sarrazin plays a professor who starts having very vivid dreams — which seem to be from a former life — of a town that he has never seen and of being murdered in a lake. When he stumbles onto the town he has been dreaming of he soon falls in love with O’Neill’s Anne, the beautiful daughter of the murdered man. They www.themodern.us

are being watched disapprovingly by the man’s alcoholic widow (well-played by Margot Kidder in aging makeup.)

It is an interesting (and slightly scandalous) philosophical conundrum, but O’Neill makes it believable that she could make a guy could fall for a woman who is kinda his daughter, just one lifetime removed. www.youtube.com/embed/J_W0RlH5Z0s Kim Obrist – Scanners A huge indie hit when it was released, Scanners is now remembered mostly (if at all) for two reasons. First, it was the breakthrough film for acclaimed director David Cronenberg (though he had been working in TV and cheapie indies for about 15 years). Secondly, for the SFX money shot, in which a psychic blows up a man’s head with his mind. It’s a little hard to be remembered as female lead in something like that, but O’Neill made an impression as another psychic on the run from the crazed killer. Though she did not have the biggest role here (those went to the less-well-known Stephen Lack and a youngish Michael Ironside), O’Neill did get top billing due to her name recognition. She added a little needed estrogen to an extremely testosterone-heavy film. www.youtube.com/embed/_m47rlNsLic Shasta Delaney – Rio Lobo

There are very few less necessary things in Hollywood than a woman in a John Wayne movie. However, for her first lead role, O’Neill pulls that very thing off pretty well. She has more dimensions and nuance than her co-star (not exactly a hard thing to pull off; Wayne was never known for his subtlety and craft as an actor) and she creates a believable postmodern western woman. The movie was just a hair too reminiscent of Wayne’s greatly superior True Grit, which had been released just a year before, but O’Neill makes a charismatic female lead. www.youtube.com/embed/ky_gzQvTtbE Paula Booth – Lady Ice In a sort of fun role-reversal of The Thomas Crown Affair, Donald Sutherland plays an insurance investigator who is investigating a rich young woman as a possible major jewel thief and falls in love with her. O’Neill plays the potential crook with equal parts charm and menace. She drives fast cars, skinny dips in pools and toys with his emotions with wild abandon — all the things necessary for a good femme fatale. www.youtube.com/embed/f_782c5DNRY April 2012 | The Modern

picker/grinner/lover/sinner

Summer Girl Hell My Experience of Working on the “Summer Girls” music video with Boy Band LFO.

By Desiree Dymond Back in the spring of 1999 I found out I had booked the lead role in a music video. Although I was mistakenly told I was booked for a Santana video, I showed up on set with much hopeful excitement at meeting one of my guitar heroes. I made my way through the security guards and onto one of the location vans parked along the Coney Island Boardwalk. I took a seat at the kitchen table. I was flipping through a magazine when a group of guys I didn’t recognize stepped onto the van. They eyed me suspiciously before deciding to introduce themselves.

“Hi, we’re LFO,” someone said as I glanced up, magazine still in hand.

“Hi,” I replied. I wasn’t sure what they were talking about, but things felt awkward.

“Do you know who were are?” someone else asked.

Hesitantly, I told them “no” and they exchanged irritated glances all around. Then I was informed by someone else that they were the band I was to be working with on this shoot. It turns out that I was sitting in their private van, I was to please kindly leave to join the rest of the girls in the extras’ van. I heard a whisper from one in charge to another, “But she’s the lead!” Then more hurried whispers of others arguing my fate as I made my way out.

This shoot was not starting off on a good note.

Several hours of hair, make up, and wardrobe later, I was standing under an awning of a hotdog stand on the boardwalk in a blue bikini and linen capris, shivering, waiting with the crew for the rain to stop. We were to be shooting outside for the entire video, but the cold wind and rain were slowing things down.

When we finally started shooting, the director put me in my spot for the take and told me to stay within a small box he drew with his fingers. The other models were placed around me randomly. As soon as we started shooting, I felt a boney elbow in my side. A girl in a white bikini was trying to push me out of my place. I moved a little, hoping the director would notice this so I wouldn’t have to deal with it, but the heroic director just turned a blind eye. Great. I was on my own. Then the girl started getting more aggressive throughout the shoot, literally pushing me out of my spot as the lead The Modern | April 2012

so she could stand where I was supposed to be, hence getting more on-camera time. I pushed her back once, and she gave me a look like she was going to cry. Oh, brother.

I heard from the other models that the girl was picked up on the boardwalk, not even hired to be working on the shoot like the rest of us, but volunteered to work on the video for free. Her hulking boyfriend lurked on the sidelines. He looked enraged as she flirted callously with the guys in the band in front

of everyone. He pulled her aside every once in a while to set her straight. No one could understand what he was saying because he would reprimand her in Russian. Despite her boyfriend’s caged-tiger show going on a few feet away, she’d drape herself all over the boy band members, kissing them all over the face and having her hands all over them immediately after arriving back on set. The director loved this. At one point he instructed all of the girls on the shoot to do the same thing. We just all nodded our heads yes, and gulped, looking at these egomaniac, Zoolander-type guys frolicking with this www.themodern.us

out-of-control girl who looked like she had just snorted a rail in the bathroom a few minutes before.

Things got even more interesting at lunchtime.

White Bikini had disappeared and the guys were nowhere to be seen. Rumors among the girls had it that she was in the private van with the guys. Someone said they saw her boyfriend scoring coke on the boardwalk.

Someone else said she was in there doing something of a more devious sexual nature. The rain poured down during our lunch and the time dragged on that the foursome was MIA. One of the boy-band members looked particularly smitten with her after lunch when they mysteriously emerged on set, though nothing of the rumors could be confirmed or denied. All I knew was that now she was much more emboldened to push me out of my spot and have her way with the rest of the cast and crew. Soon after lunch ended, the director started placing her next to me in all of the shots.

this supposedly harmless girl had been spotted flirting with the guys in the band. The models were getting it now: if you wanted to succeed on this video you were going to have to get into an unprofessional situation with the guys behind camera.

They could not have paid me enough to do that.

Almost everyone wanted a cut of the action now. It was a free for all. More girls felt empowered to take the spot I was standing in. Fighting back was like trying to stop a tidal wave. No one in the crew was calling the shoot into order. It was chaos. There were two distinct camps of girls. One who would not participate in the miserable struggle, and the other who was rife for the battle. The battle camp fiercely competed with White Bikini to see who could push who out of their way faster and then pretend like they weren’t doing it. One girl would elbow White Bikini out of the way and she would push back for an entire take, both with enormous

Then the director suddenly announced that each of the guys wanted a girlfriend now, not just me as the one “summer girl.” I somehow got paired with one of the guys in the band who was becoming more and more intolerable as the day went along. White Bikini was paired with one of the guys, and they took a girl that was working on the crew to be paired with the other. A groan came from the group of at least 15 young models when realizing we were now competing with girls scheming to get on the shoot from the crew as well. There was a whisper among the models that

fake smiles plastered on their faces the whole time. Then, as they were struggling, a third girl would slyly make her way into the spot like she didn’t know what was going on. Then the melee would turn into a three-girl scuffle. It was an amazing shit show. To my relief, the sun went down and the first day finally ended.

The second day started off at 5 a.m., exactly where the first day had ended: war. I had given up trying to stay in the spot the director would place me in at this point and just let the wave of girls push me into the background.

When we got to one of the last shots where we were supposed to be playing in the ocean with the guys, I found it difficult to pretend like I was having fun. One

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April 2012 | The Modern

picker/grinner/lover/sinner of the guys kept snapping his fingers at the makeup artist to fix his hair, or whatever it was that needed attention each time. I was fantasizing about putting him in his place, or maybe drowning him, but thought better of it.

All I could do was exchange glances with other girls who found this situation nauseating. The poor make-up artist would come running with her primping equipment to satisfy what he thought was his impressive behavior. The battle camp girls pretended like this was such a cute thing for him to be doing, so they frolicked to him like moths to a flame in order to carry out their ulterior motives. I’d had enough. I just wanted my money at that point, so that stopped me from walking off the set. I just sort of stood there on the sidelines, ankle deep in the cold salt water, watching the drama continue with disgust. To my surprise and following annoyance, the director noticed me, asked what I was doing, and told me to get back into the shot and have fun.

Then came the bonfire scene. I was placed next to my “boyfriend” for the day and we were supposed to be getting cozy next to the romantic beach fire. Romance was far from my mind as he continued to snap his fingers at the make-up artist to a chorus of giggles.

Repulsed beyond repair, I did my best to be near him.

“Desiree, can you put your face next to his and act like you like him more?” His stubble was as abrasive as his personality. He kept moving about with the stubble on his face scratching mine, and his elbows slamming into sensitive parts of my chest. He’d stand up, stepping on my foot along the way to emphasize the punch lines of some of his oh-so hilarious jokes. The final straw was when I was obliviously elbowed in the stomach by the brute, knocking the wind out of me. I stormed off

set barely able to contain my anger, with flashbacks of being bullied in high school going through my mind.

This was my first music video shoot, of what ended up being my career for over 14 years, and my opinion of the entire industry was already completely shot.

Ok, so in my mind I stormed off, but really I just snuck off set for a touch up so no one would notice the psycho serial killer starting to emerge in me. I spoke to the makeup artist who kept getting snapped at for a while on the sidelines before returning. She told me of working in the business for over eight years, that this was the worst shoot she had ever seen. To my relief I learned that these types of things were not the norm, and I could certainly expect better on my next shoot. Somehow I made it through that last awful shot with out having to add assault to a newly acquired rap sheet. We’d spent 32 hours shooting, and standing out in the cold spring rain in bathing suits over the course of two days. I gratefully made my way to the Coney Island subway lines that were to carry me home, without a second glance back at the smoldering rubble of what had once started out such a promising horizon.

Desiree Dymond is a model, singer/ songwriter and blogger residing in New York City.

Watch the actual video here: http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=NHuGG_FsC20 Buy the tune here:

internalize this

No More Rice Krispies!

A tragedy of operatic proportions.

by Ronald Sklar Not an opera lover and yet an aficionado of Rice Krispies? Then you’ve been waiting for this your whole life! Naturally, it’s “Vesti la Giubba" from the opera Pagliacci by Ruggero Leoncavallo. However, the plot in this production differs slightly, and involves a mother-in-law joke. Feel the man’s pain as you sing what he sings; he suffers. You should too as you obsess on this — as we do — today! http://youtu.be/J7joApY9dnw

The Modern | April 2012

www.themodern.us

i get around

The 1955 Nash Super Rambler Brooklyn’s vintage car maven, Len Shiller, shows us how AMC was first in mediocrity.

By Ronald Sklar You’re gawking at the intriguing but baffling 1955 Nash Super Rambler, a super but desperate product of the shotgun marriage between the floundering automakers Nash and Hudson.

These two also-rans hooked up to create the American Motors Corporation (AMC), which would go on for decades to create odd, problematic, defective, inferior cars (most infamously The Gremlin and The Pacer).

As the American auto industry slipped into mediocrity and shoddiness, AMC lead the way.

The actual idea was a good one (compact cars), but in 1955, America was not buying. Not even the famous Italian designer Battista Farina, who restyled the body and interior, could lure buyers away

The Modern | April 2012

from The Big Three.

In 1955, if you were sensitive to gas prices (around fifteen cents a gallon), or more specifically, if you were a woman, then this was the car marketed directly to you and your delicate sensibilities.

For the fellas, the hood ornament sported the likeness of a flying lady, complete with wings — not only naked, but anatomically correct.

The sedan sported a 1/3 to 2/3 split in the seat, rather than the customary split down the middle.

Easier to crawl into the backseat.

Why was it Super? Anybody’s guess, but you had a choice of purchasing this vehicle as either a Nash or a Hudson (decisions, decisions). Not a great selling point by anyone’s standards. Either way, you get the R for Rambler on the hub caps.

www.themodern.us

funny papers

Comic book ads Who needs the Internet? Purchase Sea Monkeys, X-Ray Glasses and Dingos, all in one place.

By Jack Rotoli These days, comic book ads are mostly for video games, in-house spots for upcoming issues of the latest comics and the occasional, yet always-admirable antidrug campaigns.

Comic book advertising was different when I started collecting in the early Seventies. I was never athletic, and I don’t plan to be anytime soon, but the games and products advertised weren’t virtual, and couldn’t be

played from the sofa. Some of them even required actually leaving the house.

Comic book ads featured model building, bike accessories, model railroading, slot cars, toys and games that we played with friends, in the same room, in the same house and in the same city. A multi-panel comic strip, “Cap’s Hobby Hints,” featured a friendly old hobby shop owner who showed kids how to improve their model building skills, do repairs or create tools to help with their favorite craft.

The Modern | April 2012

You were guaranteed to be the life of the party with a complete show of magic tricks or chewing gum that turned your victim’s tongue black and wear see-behind glasses. You could learn to throw your voice, and though I never broke into my wallet for the buck, I was always curious about the fantastic illusion behind those X-Ray specs.

The Olympic Sales Club and American Seed Company inspired the entrepreneur in kids with the promise of fabulous prizes to hawk customized holiday greeting cards and flower and vegetable seeds. Imagine selling only seven boxes of greeting cards and getting an acoustic guitar, or a chemistry set for supplying your family farmer with veggie seeds.

I often wondered how many classic comic books were ruined when the reader clipped out the coupon for free admission to Palisades Amusement Park. I mean, could Superman be wrong about the Caterpillar and Jet Plane?

Other hobbies were big business to catering to the OCD in all of us (me). One ad boasts “one hundred million years” of postage stamps from prehistoric times to the space age — a collection of 217 stamps for a quarter. Naturally, I thought the postal service was around that long, but the stamps featured images of dinosaurs and rocket ships.

Boy, was I disappointed! I wanted stamps licked by the Flintstones.

Horror great Vincent Price hawked a kit that made shrunken heads out of apples, while Don Adams (of TV’s original Get Smart fame) and Lucille Ball pitched ‘Skittle’ games, not the candy, but table-top bowling and billiard games for the whole family — loud games, very loud — lots of banging plastic balls and pins and noise. Before he switched careers, and I don’t mean the Police Squad movies, football great O.J. Simpson, appeared as pitchman for Dingo Shoes.

One of my favorite ads came out in the summer. The www.themodern.us

comic book’s center spread often featured the Saturday morning cartoon lineup of new animated series and returning favorites. Johnny Quest was onw of my faves.

Moby Dick, the white whale of Herman Melville’s classic novel, returned in animated form (and happy), followed around on adventures by two scuba-diving kids and a seal. Now that’s reality TV, baby!

Then there was Shazzan; not Shazam-with-anm, but a genie who appeared whenever the two stars, Chuck and Nancy, and their flying camel Kaboobie, got into a jam and connected their puzzle-piece rings. Shazzan got them out of trouble every week. The cool part about this center-spread ad was the Saturday morning schedule condensed into a neat, wallet-sized cut-out you could carry with you in case — for some reason — you were caught off guard and needed to know immediately when Moby Dick aired next weekend. I never cut out the schedules since I never had a wallet.

Wants to send you to a

Yankees game Baseball Santa Claus offers FREE sports tickets to those New Yorkers who may not otherwise have the means to attend. The tickets are awarded through an essay contest that asks why you think you deserve the free tickets.

Answer as best you can, and that sweet booty may be coming your way in time for spring.

The old comics become neat little time capsules and remind me of what toys I played with and which Christmas Santa brought them.

I always had a pet when I was a kid. Growing up, I had a dog, a parakeet and an aquarium full of tropical fish, but I always felt sorry for the poor kid whose only animal companionship was ‘sea monkeys’ or an ant farm. You can say what you want about the ‘educational value,’; personally, I prefer vertebrates. Despite what the ad said, you can’t ‘train’ sea monkeys, but gold fish love ’em!

The stories, adventures and multiverses of various characters in the comics have a history all their own, creating a timeline — a lifeline to sweep away the reader. When I look at the old ads, I remember where I was, sometimes where I bought the comic and whom I was with. The old comics become neat little time capsules and remind me of what toys I played with and which Christmas Santa brought them; they bring back that childhood thrill all over again.

Jack Rotoli is an artist and writer living in Pennsylvania. www.themodern.us

April 2012 | The Modern

Promoting: • Literacy and education • Paying it forward • College scholarships • Great memories!

www.baseballsantaclaus.com

retro tech

Adventures in Modern Sound

By Art Wilson For centuries, a lonely soldier’s connection to home had been postal letters, but in the late 1960s some of us started to exchange personally recorded voice “letters” on tape. The format was a three-inch open reel, compact enough to send in a box via the mail.

Some of my correspondents and I saved our received tapes and spliced them together onto a larger standard reel. Years later, just as I have found old letters and photos, I have been quite entertained by hearing these nostalgic audio letters.

We music buffs would flaunt our personalities via our record collections. Tape recording personal albums allowed us to consolidate albums and back them up so the original vinyl wouldn’t have to be played too

a keyboard in the band, often a prestigious Hammond B-3 organ, the size and weight of a piece of furniture.

Smaller, lighter, portable keyboards simulating some effects would be available, but wouldn’t compare to the rich, variable sound of the B-3.

Amplification and projection of the organ’s sound is through a separate “piece of furniture,” the Leslie Speaker. It is a wooden cabinet housing speaker that, when rotating at variable speeds, produces an appealing Doppler effect vibrato sound. You can hear examples of this on the recordings of The Young Rascals and early Santana.

I had a friend who was a doctor doing his residency at a local hospital, but he was also an electronics expert and a certified — I suppose — Hammond repairman (thus an “organ doctor”). Top musical acts coming to town would seek him out for repair jobs. His apartment living space was filled with electronic gear and organs.

The progression of audio portability followed two paths. Street culture embraced the “boom box,” a self-

Street culture embraced the “boom box,” a self-contained unit, a combination radio and cassette player with customizable volume and tone controls and quality sound through stereo speakers. much and become physically “worn out.”

But it also let us shuffle tracks into “mix tapes.” I was proud of my compilations, using them to provide background for get-togethers and parties.

After the Army, I pursued careers related to my degree in chemistry. I had been a moonlighting professional musician since college, and decided to give music a full-time try, which lasted three years. In the era of my early musical career, there would typically be The Modern | April 2012

contained unit — a combination radio and cassette player with customizable volume and tone controls and quality sound through stereo speakers. They became larger, more ostentatious, and louder; sometimes invading the public’s space with sound. This paralleled louder and more invasive car audio systems.

A backlash to this was the Sony Walkman, a radio supplied with small, comfortable headphones, satisfying the listener at any volume, but not disturbing their outside surroundings. This would require, of course, caution for the hazards of ear damage and loss of www.themodern.us

awareness to one’s surroundings.

Soon a Walkman cassette player followed, and then it combined with a radio. Other manufacturers competed with their own models.

These devices gave the audiophile mobility, carrying a lightweight player on their person.

Back in the realm of component high fidelity, the cassette tape format became respectable, even at a low tape speed, but with quality technology. The cassette tape deck replaced open reel recording in home systems.

There will be more of this story as the beat goes on.

Art Wilson is a Philadelphia-based musician, teacher, software specialist and retired chemist.

The New Oldies DJ Brendan Fallis Some oldies are so old, they’re new. Just ask NYC DJ Brendan, like we did.

The Contours | Do You Love Me: a classic twisting song that everyone knows but doesn't always expect. Can't go wrong.

Don’t just read about these joints and gems – feel them! Ya feel me?

Beatles | Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da: Again, such a catchy, corny chorus that has reinvented itself and become cool with the time today!

Fire – Arthur Brown (mp3 – Cheap!)

Depeche Mode | Just Can't Get Enough: The melodic voice mixed with a foot tapping beat and a synth…magic!

Ring of Fire – Johnny Cash (mp3 – Cheap!)

ESG | My Love For You: Way ahead of their time, and I just found out about them now!

The Best of Everything – Joan Crawford (DVD – Cheap!)

Eagle Eye Cherry | Save Tonight: Cause every night needs one song that women can't help but dance to, to reminisce.

Summer of ’42 – Jennifer O’ Neill (DVD – Cheap!)

Find out more about Brendan here: W: www.brendanfallis.com T: twitter.com/brendanfallis F: facebook.com/djbrendanfallis

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April 2012 | The Modern

Dizzy – Tommy Roe (mp3 – Cheap!)

Rachel Nichols (poster – Cheap!)

dig this dvd

Hee Haw

Premiere Episode and Laffs (Time/Life–2004)

This long-time favorite of The Silent Majority really fries our taters.

By Ronald Sklar In the summer of 1969, the American Dream seemed to be approaching its waking stage. The awesome miracle of man’s landing on the moon that July only made the earth’s reality more grim: the war in Vietnam, protests and violence in the streets, Woodstock and rock music, hippies, the Manson murders, Teddy Ken-

nedy and Chappaquiddick, racial polarization, the recent political assassinations, a surge in crime, women’s liberation and a new code of sexual conduct made America a very different place than it was at the beginning of that decade.

The only thing that refused to give in to this change was prime-time television. Although the country seemed to be coming apart at its seams during the network news broadcasts, there was no evidence of this turbulence after 7:30 p.m. There was a good reason for this: unlike today, “reality” TV was the last thing Americans desired.

Television entertainment remained constant, deThe Modern | April 2012

pendable and safe; as far removed from logic and living as possible. Lucy may have continued her wacky antics in shorter skirts, but America loved her as always. In addition, the Clampetts still churned their own butter by the cement pond, Sister Betrille took flight at the hint of a breeze, Dean Martin crooned, Johnny Carson chatted, Samantha Stevens twitched, Jeannie blinked, and Gomer Pyle served KP duty. Old dependables like Mayberry RFD, Family Affair and My Three Sons presented an orderly, smiley down-homeness that bathed its fans in living color, but served an ideal that vanished once the TV was turned off.

Small hints at relevance, or any attempt to reflect the changing culture was handled delicately, with oven mitts. NBC’s LaughIn, for instance, was wild, but not crazy: it was vaudeville in mini-skirts and bellbottoms. The real try was by CBS, with the controversial Smothers Comedy Brothers Hour (yes, that was its title). The hip variety show, hosted by the folk-singing duo of Tommy and Dick Smothers, was aimed at youth and took pot shots literally, with subtle humor about drug use and a thinly veiled celebration of the newly emerging counterculture. It also jabbed at the Nixon administration, the war in Vietnam, and the absurdity of network censorship. It was daring in its www.themodern.us

day, but CBS eventually got cold feet and dropped the show by the summer of ’69.

CBS would regain its bravery in 1971, forever changing the face of television with the premiere of All In the Family. It was part of the network’s attempt to find a younger, more urban and sophisticated audience for its advertisers. As a result, Archie Bunker’s loud-mouthed arrival killed almost everything with a tree in it: The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, and Petticoat Junction were all cancelled to make way for the new trend of upscale, educated city dwellers like Mary Tyler Moore and Bob Newhart.

Another casualty of this corporate decision was the removal of the very show that replaced the Smothers Brothers only two years before: Hee Haw. Hee Haw gets no respect, but has an incredible history and astonishing legacy. It’s easy to dismiss a show this square, but it has a sure place in the history of television entertainment. Though basically designed as Laugh-In in a barnyard with its endless parade of corny jokes and country flakes, it manages to hold down a sure and steady weight and a timeless appeal that Laugh-In could never achieve.

Hee Haw was a dubious idea, but an instant hit with viewers when it replaced the Smothers Brothers. It was a soothing salve that smoothed over the torn wound of the former holder of that time slot. Hee Haw may have been a direct result of President Nixon’s infamous speech about the “Silent Majority,” in which he names and acknowledges a large group of unheard-from, middle-class people (mostly in rural and suburban areas who were not the “cultural elite” of New York or LA). These were the ungroovy, the followers of Bob Hope, not George Carlin. We take this idea for granted now, but in the heat of the moment then, it was a revelation.

The Silent Majority, according to Nixon, went to work every day, got their hair cut every week, obeyed the law, attended John Wayne movies and paid their taxes. They did not speak up about politics and did not take to the streets to protest. Still, they were nevertheless appalled by what was going on in the country and longed for a return to law and www.themodern.us

order, family values and stability.

This was also the same year that country singer Merle Haggard scored a mega-hit with “Okie From Muskogee,” (“we don’t burn no draft cards down on Main Street”), a Silent Majority anthem that celebrated down-home values and short hair. This seed of a philosophy eventually strengthened and grew into the Republican Revolution of the Reagan era.

In the meantime, these were the people, by the millions, who watched Hee Haw. When the show was cancelled by CBS two seasons into its run, it immediately turned to syndication (a rare occurrence at the time). The move was a smart one — it settled in for a long visit both nationwide and around the world for an additional quarter century. To date, it is one of the longest-running syndicated programs in history. And it was one of the few network (and then syndicated) series to be broadcast not from the “cultural elite” centers of New York or LA but from Nashville (as well it should).

Hee Haw doesn’t exactly give you a swift kick in the britches, but it works hard to entertain you. Its sets are simple (front porch, cornfield, hay wagon), its jokes are simpler (“ya know, my brother’s wife is 40. He didn’t like her, so he traded her in on two 20s.”), and its production values are even simpler still (the canned laughter, for instance, is painfully obvious).

The transitions are awkward as well. We see, for instance, a tight close up on Buck Owens reacting to a joke he has obviously not heard at all. Then he wipes the smile off his face, gets serious and turns to the camera and says, “Here’s Charley Pride.”

What isn’t so simple is the confidence and ability of its cast, from super-duper charming co-hosts Roy Clark and Buck Owens down to its hysterical regulars like Junior Samples and Lulu Roman, and its amazing march of musical guests, from Loretta Lynn to Johnny Cash. Even if you are not a fan of country music, you would be surprised at how much this hit parade does not make your skin crawl.

The first episode is a pure delight. You get Roy Clark pickin’ and a-grinnin’ (for real — he April 2012 | The Modern

dig this dvd still has one of the best smiles ever to flash on the small screen, and we will forgive him for the ascot he’s wearing); you also get the legendary Buck Owens proving why he is legendary; and Loretta Lynn is singing the incredibly politically incorrect “Your Squaw Is on the Warpath;” despite the fact that the angry song is about a woman done wrong, she sings it with a happy face.

We are first introduced to the fascinatingly backwoods Junior Samples (a sixth-grade dropout who literally struggles to read the cue cards and cannot say the word “trigonometry,” even after one thousand takes). As the series progresses, Samples finds his footing and his confidence, but here he doesn’t know

which way to look and doesn’t get half the jokes he’s given to say. (FYI, here’s the trig joke: Junior: Why did the judge lock up old Stan Hawkins fer?” Roy: “Bigotry. He had three wives.” Junior: “That’s not bigotry, that’s trigonometry.”) It only makes you dig him more.

The brilliant Archie Campbell expounds incredible comic monologues in the characters of a tongue-twisting barber and a cigar-chomping doctor, and Minnie Pearl (wearing her trademark hat with the price tag still attached) does her downhome best with some knee-slapping anecdotes (her brother holds a hot horseshoe and immediately The Modern | April 2012

drops it on the ground, not because it’s scalding but because he knows how long it takes to look at a horseshoe). Minnie Pearl is such a special, special guest that attendance is mandatory: the entire cast sits on the porch with her and hears her spin her rambling tales while they laugh uproariously at any little ol’ thing she says.

The show stays country for most of the time, but it does get a little groovy when Buck Owens revives the always-crowd-pleasin’ “Johnny B. Goode” while the hip-as-it-gets Hager twins (male) frug in their suede vests, tambourine and tight pants. Meanwhile, Lulu — all three-hundred pounds of her — does a swingin’ watusi. If you think you are going to live your entire life and not witness this, you are making a huge mistake.

The comedy is clean enough for a seven-year old. The closest they get to controversy regards sex (Grandpa Jones: “What do you call a man who doesn’t believe in birth control?” Roy Clark: “A daddy.”), violence (Archie: “Junior, I heerd up thar in Noo York they’s a man gits hit by a car every thirty minutes.”

Junior: “Lord, bet he’s getting’ t’ard a that by now.”) and religion: (Archie: “You send that Bible to your boy?” Clem: “Yep, the man in the post office axe me, ‘Is there anything in that package that kin be broken?’

I said, ‘Only the Ten Commandments.’”).

Hee Haw tries unsuccessfully to introduce national catchphrases (examples include: “Hey, Grandpa, what’s for supper?” as well as “doesn’t that fry your taters?” and “not silly, but merely foolish.”) and although they were quotable enough, they could not keep up with Laugh In (“sock it to me,” “you bet your sweet bippy” and “one ringy dingy.”). The humor is all cornpone, and it’s loaded with starch. It kicks up a temporary dust, like talcum powder, and it keeps you as dry as the delivery of the punchlines. It’s painless – you won’t feel or remember a thing.

For reasons unexplored, “rednecks” are the only minority group in America who are left flapping in the wind without defenders coming to their aid. Unjustly, it seems to be okay to belittle and tease them without reprimand. This seems unfair, but Hee Haw always celebrates and champions its own stereotype.

However, watching a bunch of country folk lying around on a hot afternoon, or pickin’ and a-grinnin’, or trading gags in a cornfield doesn’t make you feel superior — it makes you feel jealous of the simple life. After all, we can’t play guitar like Owens or pick the banjo with a winning smile like Clark; we can’t convincingly greet everyone like Minnie Pearl (“HOW-DEEEEE!”), and we can’t read a cue card like Junior Samples. www.themodern.us

retro merch

Jay S. Jacobs

Wacky Packages They’re like real products. Only fake. And funny.

By Jay S. Jacobs I’m gonna drop a little knowledge on you that can potentially make you rich. It is just this: there is nothing in the world so stupid or gross that it won’t make a ten-year-old kid laugh. In fact, the stupider and the grosser it is, the funnier they will find it.

This rule was thoroughly understood by the geniuses who brought the world Wacky Packages. Yet, who knew at the time the huge influence these joke stickers would have on pop culture?

Wacky Packs were created by the Topps Chewing Gum Company, best known for baseball cards and cards for all the other sports. However, the company offered a sideline of popular non-sport-related cards that also inhabited the penny-candy rack.

With the popularity of humor magazines like MAD, Topps thought it would be fun to do their own little line of cards in a similar vein – gently (and sometimes not-so-gently) mocking favorite American products. For example, their version of Cracker Jacks would be Cracked Jerks, Wonder Bread turns to Blunder Bread, Band-Aids are Band-Aches and Chock Full O’Nuts coffee would become Chock Full O’Nuts and Bolts.

These – and many more – were accompanied by funny cartoonish artwork and wild, irreverent puns on the real products’ catch phrases.

Topps hired a pair of kids – college-aged young writer Jay Lynch and artist Art Spiegelman – to create the stickers. Spiegelman would later go on to win a Pulitzer Prize for creating the ground-breaking graphic novel Maus. Over the years, many other acclaimed comic artists would work on the series, including Bill Griffith, Tom Sutton, George Evans, Kim Deitch, Drew Friedman, Norman Saunders and Bhob Stewart.

The first series of Wacky Packies ran from 19671969 and featured 44 stickers. They became so popular that the series has been rebooted periodically ever since, with new sets coming in 1973-1976, 1985, 1991 and 2004. Eventually, they would be released as cards rather than stickers, but otherwise the basics of the www.themodern.us

series have stayed true – sophomorically parodying popular current products.

However, the cards’ boom time was in that first late Sixties release and the next wave, which were distributed between 1973 and 1976. (In fact, card traders’ lore suggests that at their height, the stickers outsold even baseball cards for Topps.)

Still, in recent years, a huge retro fascination has built up for Wacky Packs. In the 1990s a poster was released to art stores which was simply a sheet consisting of dozens of Wacky Packages. There have also

been rollouts of postcard sets, erasers and two coffeetable books on the history of the series.

All due to finding some gross ways to make kids laugh. Capitalism is an amazing thing.

Jay S. Jacobs is the author of the books Wild Years: The Music and Myth of Tom Waits and Pretty Good Years: A Biography of Tori Amos. He is also senior editor and founder of the pop culture web magazine www.popentertainment.com.

April 2012 | The Modern

parting

sh t

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZU_rvR_wZGs Yeah, Joey Heatherton will get you into a sleepy space, just like the Battle for Iwo Jima. This restful theme (including blaring horns) is just the ticket to ease yourself off to a peaceful slumber. Nice Flo Henderson ‘do on Joey too, and she does some before-bed limbering exercises in her low-cut nightie-nights. And remember to always say “you’ll LOVE it” exactly the way Joey says it. She’s so shy, so introverted, so retiring. Sleep well, fellas.

Ronald Sklar