Variety shows aren't my thing, but Jiminy Glick terribly interviewing celebrities definitely is

I don't care for variety shows, except for Muppet Show clips (or the occasional Carol Burnett Show sketch clip) and sometimes SNL, which, if you think about it, is really just a '70s-style variety show, but without a scantily clad resident dance troupe, and that makes you wonder about an SNL in a parallel universe where, since 1975, a goateed Lorne Michaels implemented a group of Fly Girls on his show, and all those Fly Girls are white. Variety shows are such an outdated and creaky form of TV. I always feel like I need to be 78 years old and fond of prune juice in order to enjoy a variety show from start to finish.

When the Miami-based Sábado Gigante said "¡Adiós!" after 53 years of old-fashioned TV, it was a sign that even non-English-speaking variety shows are doomed. Yet that hasn't stopped NBC from pushing for the variety show to come back to American TV, first with the now-defunct Best Time Ever with Neil Patrick Harris and now with the summertime replacement show Maya & Marty. The Tuesday night show pairs up two great comedians from completely different eras of SNL: Martin Short--whose best shtick, prior to his one season on Dick Ebersol-era SNL, took place on SCTV, the classic sketch show that constantly ripped apart the cheesiness of variety shows, whether it was through Short's Jackie Rogers Jr. character or Eugene Levy as Gene Shalit incongruously doing musical numbers with Catherine O'Hara as Rona Barrett and Joe Flaherty as Gene Siskel--and '00s SNL regular Maya Rudolph, a Prince song-covering, TCM-watching pre-'90s-showbiz nerd type who genuinely enjoys the cheesiness of variety shows (Maya & Marty is her second attempt at a variety show, after the one-off Maya Rudolph Show special). Despite that pairing, which sounds nice on paper, Maya & Marty does not look enticing to me, except for one element, and it's the only part of Maya & Marty I've been watching online: the return of celebrity interviewer Jiminy Glick.

Way before Ali G trolled politicians or Zach Galifianakis embodied fake awkwardness between two ferns or Eric Andre caused a genuinely uncomfortable Lauren Conrad to walk out on him or Stephen Colbert pretended to know nothing about hip-hop while interviewing an in-on-the-joke Eminem, there was Glick, Short's funniest character and an interestingly late addition to Short's repertoire. Glick and his weird, Merv Griffin-ish voice didn't appear first on either SCTV or mid-'80s SNL and instead emerged from a much later and completely forgotten venue: Short's 1999 daytime talk show. I tuned in to The Martin Short Show for only one reason: to see Short badly interview the likes of Ted Danson and a Dharma & Greg-era Jenna Elfman as Glick. It was far more entertaining than Short doing polite interviews for real as his normal self.

The audacity of Swope

The New York Times said blogging is passé, so I'm not going to blog anymore.

I'm kidding. Actually, I won't be posting stuff for a while (and haven't done so since February 28) because I'm busy working on not just one self-published print compilation of material from A Fistful of Soundtracks: The Blog but two.

When I allow myself some free time to surf the Web, one site I've been checking out lately is Trailers from Hell, which is run by one of my favorite underappreciated directors, Joe Dante (whose work for TV has been more interesting than his recent film work--I love Dante's anti-Bush Administration Masters of Horror episode "Homecoming"). At Trailers from Hell, Dante's filmmaker and screenwriter friends present trailers of their favorite films and discuss why those films are their favorites.

Trailers from Hell has been on fire lately with some nice commentary tracks about trailers for old films I like, so to keep this blog from looking like it's frozen in time, I've got Whole Wide World and Jolene director Dan Ireland's Trailers from Hell commentrak for the trailer for the 1969 advertising industry satire Putney Swope, which the site posted for Black History Month (the video also gives me an excuse to again post an Obamicon of Putney Swope that was made by me). Ireland's commentrak is followed by History of Violence film adaptation screenwriter Josh Olson's Trailers from Hell commentrak for the trailer for the late Peter Yates' entertaining 1972 adaptation of the Donald E. Westlake caper The Hot Rock. (The Putney Swope and Hot Rock trailers are particularly interesting because they don't contain voiceover narration, which makes them less like the voiceover-heavy and corny trailers of their era and more like the announcer-less and stylish trailers that are more common today and have influenced the CBS prime-time promo department to go announcer-less.)

Putney Swope is the story of an ad agency's token black employee (Arnold Johnson) who gains control of the business, revolutionizes the ad industry with frank and sexually explicit ads and winds up becoming as fatuous and corrupt as the stolid and whitebread Madison Avenue culture he initially fought against (he makes the mistake of getting high on his own supply: himself). Director Robert Downey's most famous flick appeals to my anti-authoritarian side, so I like it and will probably rewatch it when it turns up on cable again, even though the slo-mo titty-baring stewardess ad goes on way too long (it's nice to look at though), the film falls apart at the end and Downey's redubbing of his own lead actor sounds terrible. Johnson constantly bungled his lines, so Downey erased Johnson's voice from the soundtrack and inserted his own. He sounds less like an old black man and more like Cleavon Little when he pretended to take himself hostage and imitated a white thug in Blazing Saddles ("Hold it! Next man makes a move, the n----r gets it!"). The elder Downey's performance is an odd precursor to his actor son's portrayal of a movie star pretending to be black in Tropic Thunder.

I like to think of Putney Swope as a spinoff of Mad Men in which one of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce's rival businesses gets taken over by the militant friends of Hollis the elevator operator. I agree with Hammer to Nail that the film is dead-on about how "people will be cruel and craven no matter what side of the power dynamic they occupy," which makes it as relevant now as it was in 1969.

Trailers from Hell also did an entry on The Hot Rock, which contains an enjoyable Quincy Jones score that Jones considers one of his favorites and was sampled by Eminem in "Like Toy Soldiers," as well as cameo appearances by a then-under-construction World Trade Center and a young Christopher Guest. Afghanistan banana stand.

"Rock Box" Track of the Day: Classic & 86, "Ridin'"

Song: "Ridin'" by Classic & 86
Released: 2004
Why's it part of the "Rock Box" playlist?: It's featured in the Jersey-set Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle and may be the best song to bump in your ride while driving through Jersey since "Woke Up This Morning."
Which moment in White Castle does it appear?: Both the opening and closing credits.

White Castle fans who enjoyed "Ridin'" might have wondered, "Who the hell are Classic & 86? Did they skip the planet?" I didn't know who they were either. At first, I thought that after releasing "Ridin'," Classic ended up as a UPS driver like Thugnificent on The Boondocks, while 86 is toiling away in the same kind of office from hell where Harold would spend his workdays being a walking doormat. I did some digging around the Web and landed on an Urban Dictionary entry that actually listed some useful information about them instead of feeding me info that Classic & 86 is a new expression for getting a tug and chug.

After following a paper trail that started from Urban Dictionary, I found out that the two rappers, who have separate careers and teamed up on "Ridin'," each have recorded more than just that one song and are still making music. Classic is Chris Classic, a protege of the late Jam Master Jay who's frequently contributed hip-pop tracks to prime-time soaps like Gossip Girl and a bunch of movies I want nothing to do with (Harold & Kumar star Kal Penn's 2007 masterpiece Epic Movie, Disaster Movie, the Alvin and the Chipmunks movies and most recently, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps), while 86 is Miss Eighty 6, who also received some airplay on Gossip Girl. Before "Ridin'," Miss Eighty 6 recorded under her real name Sarai. A commenter under Sarai's 2003 "Ladies" video on YouTube wrote: "bring Sarai back - will trade for Ke$ha."

"Ridin'" is good, solid hip-pop with lyrics that are actually more than four words long--it's not the same kind of hip-pop Eminem astutely criticizes and ridicules in his just-leaked track "Syllables" when he says "nowadays these kids jus'/Don't give a shit about lyrics/All they wanna hear is a beat and that's it." The 2004 tune also showed up in the Usher rom-com In the Mix, The Air I Breathe and the Melrose Place revival, but it will forever be identified with a cult flick that's one of my favorite comedies of the '00s.

Back with another one of those Hot Rockin' beats

Featured during this month's A Fistful of Soundtracks mini-playlists is Quincy Jones' laid-back main title theme from the 1972 Donald E. Westlake adaptation The Hot Rock, a cue that's both supercool (like Jones' sampled-by-the-Pharcyde cover version of the Lovin' Spoonful's "Summer in the City") and an effective foreshadowing of how hapless Robert Redford's Dortmunder and his crew will be for much of the rest of the movie.

Long before his charttopping success as a producer for performers like Michael Jackson and James Ingram, the trumpeter/bandleader was a trailblazer as one of Hollywood's first African American film and TV composers (the original In the Heat of the Night, Ironside). I have an affinity for older caper movies like The Hot Rock and the funkdafied scores Jones wrote for several of those flicks. Every time a '60s or '70s Jones score is released on CD, like most recently, the score from another Westlake adaptation, 1968's The Split, it's an event at the Aquino castle. I wish more Jones scores got the same lavish treatment the Split score received from the Film Score Monthly label.


The Dixieland-style end title theme is the only cut from the Hot Rock soundtrack that's ever found its way to CD. Rhino added it to the "Gone Hollywood" portion of 2001's Q: The Musical Biography of Quincy Jones box set. Unfortunately, the rest of the soundtrack, which was released by the Atlantic-distributed Prophesy label, remains out of print and can only be found on various mp3 blogs. The Hot Rock score's absence on disc is odd because it was one of Jones' favorite film music projects. He was so pleased with the results of his score that he wanted all the major jazz musicians who collaborated with him to receive on-screen credit. The long list of musicians at the Hot Rock scoring sessions who received credit included saxman Gerry Mulligan, trumpeter Clark Terry and drummer Grady Tate, whose militaristic-sounding solo at the beginning of the main title theme was sampled in Eminem's "Like Toy Soldiers" in 2004 (six years before "Like Toy Soldiers," Jurassic 5 sampled "Hot Rock Theme," a loungy and more upbeat version of the movie's main theme that the Don Elliott Voices recorded specially for the Prophesy album, in "Improvise").

Jones' Hot Rock theme makes me want to go steal a diamond.