Well, dear readers, for the first time in six years I watched the Oscars last evening. We had us a little Bash – of course, the glory days of our Oscar Bashes are long gone – they were legendary, those days, but alas and alack, they are in the past. The partay began very slowly but those who were there had fun. Then as it went on, a few more folks showed up and that was more fun. Even Edisaurus showed up. And we did manage to get to twenty-six pages and over 750 postings. As to the Oscars, my namesake, Jimmy Kimmel was a decent host. He had some good laughs but his monologue went on for sixteen minutes, which was a bit much. And a bit he did with the audience two-thirds of the way through the show, bombed big time. Unlike some years in the past, this was a relatively tame and safe Oscar show. There were no surprises at all and that’s always boring. But when I say tame and safe that, of course, doesn’t describe the ridiculous, childish behavior of the audience, hooting and hollering like the audience at American Idol. We got performances of the five nominated songs, the only one of which was interesting was the Bollywood-style number from RRR. The others were the predictable power ballads with trite anthemic lyrics that always say the same thing, year in year out – rise up, be my strength, stand strong, you can do it, blah, blah, blah, accompanied by predictable music that all sounds the same, these days usually sung by breathy singers who always seem like they’re about to run out of breath. Gone are the days of the great melodists and lyricists of movie songs, the Mancinis, the Legrands, the Bacharachs, the Stynes, the Loessers, and those types. Interestingly, we did get quite a bit of Mancini with the play-on music. It all ran three hours and thirty-five minutes and a lot of that were the endless breaks for four minutes of commercials. A couple of the speeches were nice, but some went on too long and talked about too many extraneous things.
But now, we have to have my one big rant and where the Oscars have failed year in and year out for at least a decade – they never learn. For the In Memoriam section they have a singer doing a song. No. Stop. We want to concentrate on those who left us, that’s what it’s about. I don’t care about Lenny Kravitz singing some bad song and I certainly don’t want to see wide shots when they’re showing people on the screen. It’s not brain surgery – what we want is nice background music while the faces flash across our screens. No singers, no lyrics. Have some damn respect. And then I’d like to know who made the decisions on who was shown and who wasn’t. I’ll start with the most egregious omission because it was, for me, outrageous, and that was our very own Cindy Williams. I mean, they had someone named Mary Alice. Very good actress, but none of her film credits tops American Graffiti, and none of her TV credits comes close to Laverne and Shirley. But let’s not stop there – let’s continue: They have Jacques Perrin, a good French actor but hardly the star that Jean-Louis Trintignant was and who wasn’t there (all the missing people are on the Oscar website, so they obviously knew who they were omitting. No Robert Morse? No Bert I. Gordon? No Owen Roizman (look up his credits)? No Arnold Schulman, wonderful writer? No Henry Silva, Paul Sorvino, Stella Stevens, Marsha Hunt, Joe Turkel? David Warner, for heaven’s sake? Clu Gulager? Melinda Dillon? Director Hugh Hudson? Diane McBain? Ed Asner? I mean, maybe don’t have the Jimmy Kimmel audience bit that bombed and add one more minute – you could have twenty more people in one minute. It was infuriating.
After the show, I caught up on e-mails, then went to the Tube of You to see if there was anything interesting there. Funnily, Target Earth, the movie I saw at my very first sneak preview in 1954 was there, so I clicked on it and watched the first ten minutes. We find two people who are alone in a deserted city. They wander the streets, trying to find any sign of life. The majority of the streets they’re wandering are on the backlot. But then thery’re on real streets, obviously shot at dawn. I always assumed like most sci-fi movies of that era, that it was shot downtown. But this time I took note of the stores. I still thought it was probably downtown, although my instinct, which is usually right, was that it was somewhere on Wilshire Boulevard, but probably closer to downtown. Anyway, I had three touchstone stores – C.H. Baker shoes, Boulevard Stationers, and Leed’s. I began on Google but could find nothing from that era. Then I went to newspapers.com and found an ad for Leed’s. They had several downtown stores, one in Glendale and one in Hollywood that all could have been it, as well as one on Wilshire Boulevard. So I Googled all those addresses and looked at the street views and while several were certainly close, none was quite right. The closest were Glendale and then Hollywood Boulevard. Then I searched C.H. Baker and they had several downtown stores, none that looked right except the one on Hollywood Boulevard and it was in the right proximity to the Leed’s on Hollywood Boulevard. But it still didn’t feel right to me. So, I tried the C.H. Baker on Wilshire and that was clearly it, in the Miracle Mile, but the Leed’s address didn’t match. So, I found an advert for Boulevard Stationers, which was just to the right of C.H. Baker and voila, the addresses matched up and the building was absolutely the right building, even now. But that left the mystery of the Leed’s address, so I went back to the ad and zoomed in on it and because the ad was blurry to begin with, the first number I’d read as a three was a five and then it all worked. Wilshire Boulevard and Cloverfield, south side of the street. And if you flipped the camera around to the other side of the street? Du-Par’s, northwest corner of Wilshire and Cloverfiels and just three years earlier the home of my father’s restaurant, the Kiru Café. Pretty cool
Otherwise, I got ten hours of very needed sleep, had a terrible allergy attack and took a Claritin-D but it really messed with my throat, so I hope that abates soon. It was a twenty-four hour pill that already feels like it’s wearing off even though it should last until one tomorrow. I just sneezed as I typed that. It takes really bad air to cause the allergies to be this bad. I decided on Jack in the Box for food and had it delivered – a cornucopia o’ stuff – tacos, breakfast Jack, onion rings – it was a very good batch and I was happy. Later, I had a piece of cheesecake for a sweet. Then I watched a bit of the red carpet, which was, as it always is, completely embarrassing. It made you actually miss Joan Rivers and Roger Ebert. Some of the men’s outfits were horrid but not as horrid as some of the women’s. And the rest you know.
Today, I’ll be up when I’m up, hopefully I’ll be past the allergy stuff, and hopefully the throat won’t feel weird. I’ll eat something light, but fun, I’ll pray for a huge major miracle or there will be hell toupee, Marshall Harvey will drop by with the external drive, which Karen Staitman will then come pick up. For the next couple of days, she’ll be uploading everything to Amazon for their perusal and approvals that everything is up to spec and she’ll give them our proposed launch date. Then we have our first Kriterland rehearsal, which I’m looking forward to. After that, I can watch, listen, and relax.
Tomorrow, I have to put some pressure on my blurb people to get me their stuff so we can announce the book, which I’d like to do by Tuesday or Wednesday. I have lots of other stuff to attend to, including some work on the project with David Wechter. Thursday is our second Kritzerand rehearsal, our stumble-through is on Saturday at 11:30 and I’ll go directly from that to the Ahmanson to see The Secret Garden, after which I’ll come home and eat. Then Sunday is our soundcheck and show.
Well, dear readers, I must take the day, I must do the things I do, I must, for example, be up when I’m up, hope for no more allergy issues, hope for a huge major miracle, eat, get an external drive and give the external drive, have a rehearsal, and then watch, listen, and relax. Today’s topic of discussion: What locations in movies have made you immediately want to go visit and did you ever do that? Let’s have loads of lovely postings, shall we, whilst I hit the road to dreamland, happy we had even a little partay for the Oscar Bash.