COMING IN 2018: WE'RE ENTERTAINING NOURISHMENT FOR THE MIND, BODY & SOUL

We will return in 2018 with a new look, mission & direction. Stay tuned as we develop our online destination that celebrates contemporary & retro pop culture as well as body, mind & spirit!

Thursday, June 10, 2010

Looking for Jeannie's bottle? Erik Estrada's beefcake uniform? Elton John's Bob Mackie ode to a futuristic Mrs. Roper? Have we got an auction for you

Hollywood on the block: Film, TV memorabilia up for bids this week in Calabasas auction » Ventura County Star

Profiles in History, the world’s largest auctioneer of Hollywood memorabilia, is excited to present Marilyn Monroe’s “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend” pink satin gown—the most important film dress to ever come to auction—at their June 10-12 summer auction, which features over 1,500 lots of film, television, music and historical memorabilia.

Hurry, the auction begins today and ends Saturday, June 12. Worldwide bidding begins at noon Pacific Time each day. Bids can be placed in person, via mail, phone, fax or live on the Internet by visiting http://profilesinhistory.com or http://liveauctioneers.com.

Here are a few retro-funky highlights:

Elton John stage costume by Bob Mackie. $3,000 - $5,000

Wayland Flowers’ “Madame” puppet with fainting couch and Flowers’ performance vest. $25,000-$30,000


Erik Estrada "CHiPs" Uniform from CHiPs. $3,000 - $5,000
Original Barbara Eden signature first season “Jeannie” bottle from I Dream of Jeannie (NBC-TV, 1965-70) $15,000-$20,000

Clayton Moore’s trademark “Lone Ranger” mask with gloves from The Lone Ranger $12,000-15,000

Original “Balok” Puppet Head from Star Trek: The Original Series        (NBC-TV, 1966-69) $20,000-$30,000

Fess Parker signature “Daniel Boone” coonskin hat from Daniel Boone (NBC-TV, 1964-1970) $10,000-$12,000

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

TV's top-rated tabloid twosome--CBS Corp.'s "The Insider" and "ET"--all but ignore CBS star Charlie Sheen's domestic violence arrest, guilty plea after "The Insider" attacks tragic Gary Coleman about same in his final TV interview


 The Globe magazine will soon publish Gary Coleman’s “death photos,” but it isn’t the first tabloid to exploit the late actor’s dying images.

Coleman’s ex-wife, Shannon Price—called “cold, cunning and creepy” for her questionable conduct during and after the actor’s dying days—this week defends herselfonly,” as its promo proudly blares, “on The Insider!” (as well as its sister show, Entertainment Tonight).

Here’s hoping Price holds a mirror up to The Insider's producers and panelists, who, after hosting Coleman’s disturbing TV swan song in February, should know by now that tabloid TV exposure is a two-way street.

If anything good can come from the diminutive Diff’rent Strokes star’s tragic death from a brain hemorrhage at 42, it will be the beyond-timely demise of the attack-style television “interview” and throw-’em-under-a-bus “coverage” that helped write his troubled life’s final act.

Namely: the well-deserved mercy killing of a brand-defining chunk of the CBS Corp.’s once-benign (read: pre-Anna Nicole) ET and its more transparent, gossipy, mob-scene offspring—the show whose aggressive badgering and exploitation could have sent the infamously quick-to-anger Coleman to an even earlier grave in February—The Insider.



via The Insider  

Varying levels of tabloid toxicity sadly unite TV’s most influential block of half-bloodthirsty, half-obsequious entertainment news shows. The target of these schizophrenic series’ dark sides? Rarely, if ever, a CBS headliner, film giant or a celebrity who otherwise has current bankability, high-placed PR and legal teams and the collective power to shut down these infotainment series.

To wit: CBS’s Two and a Half Men star Charlie Sheen planned to plead guilty this week in an Aspen, Colo., courtroom to a misdemeanor third-degree assault charge stemming from his felony menacing arrest on charges he threatened his wife at knifepoint on Christmas day. But, aside from brief, vague reports (mostly on their web sites), both ET and The Insider have all but ignored this story for months—though they chirpily trumpeted his recent press release revelation that he’d signed for two more seasons of his series “after two-and-one-half months of a whirlwind of speculation” (and for upwards of $2 million per episode).


via The Insider--the show's web site (and not the series itself) last "covered" Sheen's troubles via this interesting analysis

No, today’s prey are yesteryear’s luminaries clearly on their way down, out and potentially six feet under—or at least those former stars struggling to re-spark or resuscitate their image and livelihoods by coming to the (A-list-)celeb-friendly series that often unapologetically deliver the final blow.

In his last TV interview, the often-agitated and visibly weakened Coleman—fresh from his own domestic violence arrest and plea deal, a seizure and head injury in January and pneumonia and heart surgery last fall—suffered one of his problem-plagued life’s final indignities during his visit as an in-studio "guest" at The Insider on Feb. 17.

The show's celebrity attorney panelist flesh-chewing interrogator, “CBS legal correspondent Lisa Bloom,” relentlessly pounded the actor with the same aggressive question—Did you abuse your wife?!—despite the fact that he'd already answered her. Her button-pushing "cross examination" of the embattled, embittered and explosive former sitcom star was a rude and ruthless spectacle that The Insider was all too happy to spin and exploit ad nauseum across the next several days of February sweeps.


via The Insider

(Coleman, long strapped for cash and ever-desirous to set the record straight—like any public figure—on his terms, would return to the studio he fled to confront Bloom’s co-panelists on Feb. 26. That appearance was apparently so taxing that the actor suffered a seizure while on set. Fortunately, an infinitely more empathetic Dr. Drew Pinsky was sitting in Bloom’s chair and administered life-saving procedures on Coleman during his still-unseen swan song. Tellingly, Pinsky has interviewed for the syndicated TV newsmagazine Extra—not ET or The Insider—about Coleman in the days following the actor’s death on May 28.)


Bloom—who now represents Michael Lohan (!)—soon chimed in on Joy Behar's Headline News show. "I'm an attorney," Bloom stressed after Behar played an abbreviated clip of the on-air debacle. "I've represented a lot of women and children in abuse cases. I know how to talk to batterers. I know how they respond. They generally only go after their own family members. And Gary Coleman has pleaded guilty to a domestic violence incident against his wife, but it was pleaded down to a misdemeanor and he only had to pay a $500 fine—no jail time."

She was referencing Coleman's arrest on Jan. 24 for failing to appear in court on previously-unpublicized charges of domestic violence against his wife, 24-year-old Shannon Price, during an incident at their home in Santaquin, Utah on April 18, 2009. An Associated Press report said details of that incident were not outlined in court documents but qualified Coleman's defense attorney, Randy Kester, as characterizing the event as an "argument that got out of hand." "No one was injured and no ambulances were called," Kester said. "It was just a disagreement."

It wasn't the couple's first quarrel—or their last. Price was arrested in July 2009 and charged with domestic violence after a furniture-toppling row with Coleman. Bloom failed to mention Price's arrest. To be fair, the celebrattorney also didn’t bring up Coleman’s arrest and conviction for punching a female autograph-seeker who the 4’8” actor said taunted and intimidated him in 1998. Nor did Bloom remind us he also was accused in 2008 of trying to run down a male fan who snapped his photo at a Utah bowling alley. That fracas resulted in no arrests and was settled this January for an undisclosed sum.

A week prior to his Insider outburst, Coleman pleaded guilty to a class B misdemeanor charge of domestic violence/criminal mischief stemming from the still-murky April 2009 incident. In exchange for his plea, prosecutors dropped a domestic violence/assault charge and the judge ordered the actor to pay a $595 fine and attend classes on avoiding domestic violence.


via The Insider

The judge also should've sentenced Coleman to stay away from ravenously provocative infotainment shows. Especially on the days that Gloria Allred's legal eagle daughter sweeps in for the kill.

"I think in this country," Bloom continued to Behar at the height of the TV’s Tiger Woods hate-a-thon, "we're really tired of seeing celebrities get away with bad acts against their own family, drug use, whatever it is. They're never held accountable. Nobody ever asks them the hard questions. They get a pass on all of the shows. So I was there to see if he was going to answer the questions." (Coleman's initial response to Bloom—“There is no abuse that goes on at my house”—apparently was not precise enough for the attorney.)


 Bloom's argument sounds pretty reasonable. Until you remember that Entertainment Tonight and The Insider are anything but journalistic enterprises with reputations for calling out Hollywood BS.

In fact, ET has had its lips suctioned to so much corporate-synergized celebrity butt for so long that Mary Hart can't smile without giving Tom Cruise or an NCIS star a wedgie. So, yeah, Ms. Bloom, we'd all love to see one of your entertainment news co-horts ask your network’s cash cow Charlie Sheen a hard-hitting question about, say, his drug use or alleged domestic violence, instead of parroting his attorneys’ and publicists’ carefully-crafted media statements.  But guess what? It ain’t gonna happen.

Because Sheen, like NCIS star Mark Harmon and former Paramount Pictures golden child Cruise, is a current celebcommodity (let alone one on the company payroll) whose access, success and/or influence both shows need to survive. Likewise, we’ll never see these shows even gently press the sometimes-controversial Cruise about Scientology in favor of asking him insipid, sycophantic questions about why his daughter is or isn’t wearing shoes in a paparazzi photo.

But God forbid Cruise or anyone else now in ET/The Insider’s favor falls on hard times and no longer proves lucrative and/or legally threatening to the industry. To see that terrible fate, we need look no further than Gary Coleman, Dana Plato, Lindsay Lohan, Anna Nicole Smith, Britney Spears, Michael Jackson and any retro star "caught" looking fat, old, disoriented, intoxicated, tired or frail. Or, as in the case of Farrah Fawcett in a wheelchair—her long-dreaded "final photo"—trying to live their final days in dignity with an ET-paid pap invading what little privacy they have left by shoving a camera lens in their face.

America already knew Gary Coleman was a troubled and angry and sick “former child star.” We didn’t need The Insider to put him--and now, postmortem, his ex-wife--on camera and incessantly poke him with a stick to remind us how cruel Hollywood can be.



Sunday, June 6, 2010

1986's Sitcom Provocateurs: Christopher Hewett, "Still the Beaver," "Me and Mrs. C" and "Snatch"



We know what you're thinking. "They said, 'Christopher He Wet.' Huh-huh, huh-huh, huh-huh ..."

Yes, we did. But primetime TV said it first--a full decade before MTV's Beavis and Butt-head "Did" America, and nearly a quarter century before FOX's The Cleveland Show spoofed a ballsy reference to the Urban-dictionary-entry-inspiring Mr. Belvedere himself.



You can thank the socially and sexually provocative mid- to late-1980s, America. Although Three's Company went to the big double entendre in the sky in 1984, its legacy of libido-charged innuendos changed the TV laughscape forever. And the zany farce's naughty humor, well, got a whole lot naughtier while climaxing (!) shortly after the we-know-what-that-title's-really-referencing Still the Beaver and Me and Mrs. C became ratings semi-sensations for the Disney Channel in 1985-86 and NBC in summer 1986, respectively. (Come to think of it, Happy Days--which also died in '84--was pretty smutty, too: "Sit on it, Mrs. C!" Helloooo!)



Okay, Me and Mrs. C was really a short-lived sitcom about (quoting the Associated Press) "a 62-year-old white widow who takes in a 22-year-old black boarder." And Still the Beaver (renamed The New Leave it to Beaver for its 1986-89 TBS run) was really about a 62-year-old white kiddo who after 22 seasons of syndication still had no idea his nickname had a vulgar connotation. But still. Their double-entendriffic titles alone paved the way for TV's biggest smutcom.

Enter Snatch!

"What's Snatch!?" you ask. Well, according to its official Facebook page, ''Snatch!''--not to be confused with Vicki! or Cleghorne!--"is an American television sitcom that originally ran from 1986 to 1990."

"Hmmm," you're thinking. "Must've been one of those syndicated classics from the Emmy-winning writer-producers of She's the Sheriff and (The All-New) We Got it Maid."

To be honest, our memories, like Snatch!'s  eponymous lead character, are a little fuzzy. Perhaps we should again quote the show's official Facebook bio: "The show was centered around a Mary Tyler Moore-esque character named Sally Fenway working her way through life and love in New York City. She also happened to have a wise-cracking, hairy, eel-like creature living in her vagina named Snatch."

"Oh, yeah," you're saying to yourself. "The Small Wonder spin-off."

Yeah. That one.

Again quoting Snatch! literature (because, this way, if you're offended, we can just be all, "We're just sayin'"): "The series starred Geneva Carr as Sally Fenway, Fred Berman as Sally's neighbor Ruben Maricasa, Jason O'Connell as her boss Nigel Flavinworth, Billy Warlock as co-worker Robert Marcus, and Sally Struther as Sally's mom, Roberta Fenway. The character of Snatch was portrayed by a live-vagina/hand puppet operated primarily by Jason Favale."


Phew. Glad that's over. Anywho, Snatch! somehow flew under the radar with its behind-the-bikini line humor. Maybe because the Terry Rakoltas of the world were too busy linking FOX's Married ... with Children with impending Armageddon to notice that Sally Fenway's crotch-puppet wasn't popping up just to chomp cookies or sass "Mr. Snuffleupagus" while teaching kids the alphabet.

Snatch! creator Berman is especially funny in this filthy Fragglerock. His nosey neighbor Ruben is a cross between Three's Company's Mr. Furley and Felipe Gomez as channeled through Will and Grace's Jack McFarland on crack. (Yes, the drug crack.) And Geneva Carr--famous for her hilarious spots as the grimacing, finger-waving mom in the AT&T Family Talk commercials--handles the lead role with aplomb. Or is that Eve's Plumb? Either way, she handles it. And she handles it well.



Also serving as a series producer (along with Now Lookee Here Productions' Jason Chaet and Jason O'Connell) is Ethan Duff, writer/director/producer of the acclaimed comedic short film Was Monroe Raped? That darkly comic project--also starring the fascinatingly versatile Berman--focuses on a scarcely-seen episode of the '80s sitcom Too Close for Comfort in which Jim J. Bullock's character claims to have been kidnapped and sexually accosted by two large women in a van.

No word yet if one of these women was a surly, gravelly-voiced crotch-puppet.