Bartcop Entertainment News - Monday, 27 August, 2001

(Bartcop Entertainment)

Monday

27 August, 2001

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

TV News

Cindy Adams of pagesix.com is reporting...."Now, about this Modesto, Calif., 
representative, Congressman Leery Condom. Forget stupid questions like did you 
kill her, did you love her, did you do her? Why didn't Connie ask the important 
question: Who the hell did your hair? 

What's with that pompadour? What's with that ABC - Always Be Coiff'd - network 
that it spawns heads like Sam Donaldson, Ted Koppel and Congressman Condom? 

Everyone was interested in this guy's lower parts. Me, I'm interested in his 
upper ones. I don't care who's servicing his loins. I want to know who's taking 
care of his hair. 

Anybody ever see a teased, back-combed, gelled, sprayed clump atop a man's head 
like that congressjock sported on TV? I saw police combing the woods in D.C. in 
their fruitless search, but they would need a machete if they wanted to hack 
through this guy's topknot to look there as well. 

And he has highlights. The ILO Salon in Washington, where he's a client, 
admitted he used an alias and had special treatments like hair tints. 

Listen, I know D.C. gents have facelifts, eyelifts, tummy tucks, lipos and 
lenses. But frosting? Who does this public servant from this cockamamie town out 
West think he is - Jennifer Aniston? 

We've got homeless, we've got AIDS, crime, taxes, Social Security woes, a lousy 
stock market, abortion problems, stem-cell divisiveness, Ralph Nader, poverty, 
hunger, guys running around getting photo ops on Vieques ... and Leery Condom's 
getting his hairs frosted and gelled. And posing with his wife for People 
magazine like one of those Edward Hopper paintings. 

To read the whole article, It's The Hair

TV News

Edie Falco, television's Carmela Soprano, looks terrified. 

She's seated across from Sandra Bernhard in a TV studio, answering questions, 
and doesn't know what to expect. Will Bernhard take an innocuous statement and 
go off on an embarrassing comic tangent? Will she make a snide comment about her 
clothes, as she later does to Steve Van Zandt, a fellow cast member on ``The 
Sopranos (news - Y! TV)''? Will she ask about some obscure movie role Falco 
would rather forget? 

No need to worry. Bernhard is deferential, even fawning, toward her first guest 
on ``The Sandra Bernhard Experience,'' which premieres on A&E Monday, Aug. 27 at 
11 p.m. EDT. 

``The Sandra Bernhard Experience'' is derived from an Internet talk she had done 
for several months. A&E is trying out five shows during the week before Labor 
Day and if it's successful, it will become a regular series. 

The show is filmed in a Manhattan studio without an audience. Bernhard's 
longtime musical companion, Mitch Kaplan, accompanies on the piano and former 
magazine journalist Sara Switzer doubles as co-host and head writer. Bernhard 
said she's ``here to reel me in when I get out of hand.'' 

Bernhard grew up watching Dick Cavett, Johnny Carson and Merv Griffin and hopes 
to emulate them on her show. 

``They weren't exploitive or sensational,'' she said. ``I think people came on 
to have a good time, it wasn't just about hyping somebody's latest movie. People 
came on and were anecdotal and told stories and had fun.'' 

The most promising part of her show is the opening segment. She stands with her 
back to Kaplan's piano as he plays, and delivers a comic riff and a song. In one 
episode, she reads descriptions of Playmates' lives from vintage Playboy 
magazines, and wonders what happened to the women. 

These opening segments succeed in setting a mood of late-night intimacy. ``I 
like to think of this place as my home,'' she says, ``and no one likes to be 
alone in their home.'' 

Her challenge then is to avoid another late-night pitfall: putting her guests to 
sleep. 

To read the rest of the article, Sandra Bernhard

To check out A and E's schedule, A & E

Book News

Pagesix.com is reporting....." Did reclusive "Catcher in the Rye" author 
J.D. Salinger just sneakily publish his first piece of writing since 1965? 
Thursday's Times carried a five-line paid death notice for Salinger's sister, 
Doris. It stated that Doris J. Salinger, who died on Tuesday, was the daughter 
of the late Marie and Sol Salinger, sister of Jerome [J.D.] Salinger, and grand 
aunt of Avery, Maxwell and Gannon Salinger. 

What suggests J.D. Salinger himself penned the obit is that Doris' niece and 
nephew - J.D.'s estranged daughter Peggy and son Matt - are not mentioned. 
Salinger, 82, doesn't speak to Peggy, who penned "Dream Catcher" last year, a 
tell-all tome that described her father as a manic-depressive, bulimic, 
misogynist who drank his own urine and neglected his kids. Matt, a producer of 
amateur theatricals, keeps his parentage under wraps. A rep for the Times would 
say only, "We don't disclose who the individual is who submits a classified ad 
with us." Salinger's rep had no comment. "

To read the rest, jd salinger

BartCop TV Is Here!

Visit the site at BC TV

The 'Vidiot', has updated, again!

There is even more to check!

The Vidiot.

An amazing amount of information, on an amazing variety of TV shows, thanks 
to our Vidiot.

Film News

It's good news for Sophia Loren fans. The first question raised at a news 
conference with her Sunday: How long will she keep working as an actor?
"I have really no idea," the smiling Loren, 66, replied to a jam-packed roomful 
of reporters, cameramen and fans. "This is my profession. I think I would like 
to continue forever." "But in life, you never know," said Loren, who drew 
applause when she entered in a resplendent orange dress and jacket.

Asked whether movie celebrity has changed over the years, she said: "I don't 
think so. Stars are stars. It depends on what kind of film you're in. Really, 
the system hasn't changed."

Loren, who was given a Montreal International Film Festival special award, said 
she didn't know which of her films she liked the best.

The festival arranged a screening of Francesca and Nunziata, a new dramatic film 
by veteran Italian director Lina Wertmuller in which Loren plays a strong-willed 
mother. 

"I've made three films with Sophia," said Wertmuller. "She always brings a lot 
of enthusiasm to her roles."

Wertmuller dismissed the idea that aging could ever diminish Loren.

"She has a harmoniousness in her own self and can push away old age and still be 
beautiful."

To read the whole story, Sophia Loren

NEW!

Check it out at BC Astrology.

Have you ever checked out Robert Johnson's or Andres Segovia's horoscope?

Pretty cool stuff!


(And, to read Buzzcook's riff, see bcEntertainment (7/31/01)).

Cutting to the chase, here is Buzzcook's list of guitar gods:

Chick Webb

Robert Johnson

Albert King

John Lee Hooker
Hell if you don't already know John Lee, no link will save ya.

Joe Pass

Django Reinhardt

Andres Segovia

Mr. Guitar

Film News

Liz Smith is reporting...."  TOM HANKS may be one of America's most beloved 
success stories, and since his works of remembrance about World War II, he is 
also a young idol for a much older generation. 

But a few people in Hollywood are steamed at Hanks, who didn't do himself proud 
as the final eulogist at the Jack Lemmon memorial service, held at Paramount 
Studio a few weeks back. The beautiful theater on the lot was packed with 
Lemmon's family, pals and fellow actors. When it came Tom's time to speak, 
however, he tripped over Lemmon's name, not once or twice but an astonishing 
three times. 

And he was reading from a prepared speech. Hanks kept calling Lemmon "Jack 
Nicholson." The first time Hanks misspoke, he recovered himself and made a 
little joke that everyone found quite funny. 

But he made the audience rather uncomfortable when he did it again - and then 
again. As he left the stage, the evening's emcee, Charlie Rose, said to him 
pointedly, "Thank you, Kevin!" as if he were another speaker, Kevin Spacey. 

Larry Gelbart, Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis, Hank Azaria, Neil Simon and Jack's 
son, Chris, as well as Kevin Spacey, were wonderful in their remembrances of 
the incomparable actor. 

The event drew a starry crowd, with L.A. Times film expert emeritus Charles 
Champlin wearing a brown tie spangled with crimson "H's" and "47's," a 
remembrance that he and Jack had been in the Harvard class of 1947. 

To read the whole story, Tom Hanks





Jack Lemmon As 'Ensign Pulver' In "Mr. Roberts"





To read more of the Jack Lemmon Tribute, see BartCop Entertainment, 8/16/01

Theatre News?

Well, they pulled it off. 

Rather, Simon Morley and David Friend pulled it up, down, around, upside down, 
and just about every way it's not supposed to go. For 50 minutes. 

That was about the, ahem, extent of the Australian duo's Puppetry Of The Penis, 
which officially opened at Toronto's New Yorker last night. 

Not to sell Morley and Friend's talents short. 

Self-proclaimed masters of the so-called "Ancient Art Of Genital Origami," they 
are indeed the keepers of some seriously dexterous dongs -- wand-wielding 
wizards, if you will, with elastic imaginations and -- I say this as a 
guy -- what must be Herculean pain thresholds. 

But once -- or if -- you get used to the idea of the pair spending the better 
part of an hour flapping in the breeze en flagrant and non-chalantly 
demonstrating some 40 "installations" involving the male member, it's the 
audience who unwittingly supply much of the entertainment. 

Reactions range from giddy trepidation (the women), to wincing (the men), to 
uproarious laughter (everyone), and back to wincing (everyone again). 

Morley and Friend know how to feed off that perfectly. 

Their innocent enthusiasm suggests that they might as well be doing shadow 
puppets. 

At the same time, their self-deprecating tone that reminds you that they're not 
just in on the joke, they're the two buffoons who thought it up in the first 
place. 

And that's what this penis puppet phenomenon is all about. 

Men, by their very nature, are going to look between their legs for 
entertainment at some point -- usually quite early in life. What they find is 
bound to become an instrument for comedy. What's amazing is that it took someone 
this long to take such stunts from, say, the pub -- where Morley and Friend 
claim to have developed their routine, though I can't imagine I'd go over too 
well trying it at my local -- to the stage. 

Maybe it's just that they're such terrific wankers. 

The nudity is graphic, grotesque, but deftly de-sexualized. There's certainly 
a physical sense of discomfort as you watch, especially if you own one of those 
things, but there's little room for suggestiveness or awkwardness. 

I mean, it's a penis puppet. 

Things go where no man has twisted them before. An audience participant gets a 
unique view. 

Puppetry Of The Penis may well be destined for a future of drunken 
bachelorette parties. 

It's hard to recommend it as anything other than a funny freakshow. 

But, as a female friend sagely pointed, when else is a penis going to hold 
anyone's attention for almost an hour?   

For more insight, Puppets

TV News

It seems fitting that in the year 2001, the Sci Fi Channel is finally getting it 
right. And it didn't need a black monolith to point it in the proper direction.

For most of its nine years, Sci Fi has been little more than a cable-television 
repository for geek culture, the place where old science fiction shows went to 
die. Whether those shows were classic ("The Twilight Zone") or kitsch ("Lost In 
Space") didn't matter. The channel wasn't really doing anything anyone outside 
the hermetic world of science fiction cared about. It just sat there at the far 
end of the dial, barely noticed, like all the other niche networks. Sci Fi 
Channel, House and Garden Channel, Golf Channel. Who really cared except the 
true believers?

Yet over the last two years, Sci Fi has reconfigured and reimagined itself. The 
old shows are still there: warhorses like "Battlestar Galactica," "Quantum Leap," 
"Star Trek" and "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea." But they have been bolstered 
by original programming featuring the same kind of post-modern tricks that 
networks like Comedy Central and WB employ to attract twentysomething audiences. 
Sci Fi's new shows use the classic trappings of the genre: laser weapons, alien 
invasions, government conspiracies. But they add sexy protagonists and 
wise-cracking scripts filled with references meant for the generation that 
thinks the original "Star Trek" is both classic TV and a camp masterpiece. While 
Sci Fi's series run the gamut from essentially serious ("Farscape" and "First 
Wave") to decidedly wacky ("The Chronicle" and "Lexx"), it's clear that the 
network is not afraid to let the shows make fun of themselves anytime they want.

The channel is "doing an excellent job, moving away from their `home for dead 
series' aspect," said John Ordover, an executive editor in the "Star Trek" 
department of Pocket Books.

"They're doing what they should be doing, which is producing their own material," 
he added.

Bonnie Hammer, the president of the Sci Fi Channel, said: "If we want to invite 
the younger generation into our family, we have to be hip, we have to be cool. 
We want the kids who grew up with MTV."

This is one way of saying that Sci Fi wants to differentiate itself from the 
film industry, which thinks of science fiction primarily as a high-tech vehicle 
for digitized tales of space battles and alien frightfests. It's not that Sci Fi 
won't feature these things it has, does and will. But when the channel recently 
announced it was developing projects based on bestselling works by Philip José 
Farmer ("Riverworld"), Ursula K. LeGuin ("The Left Hand of Darkness") and Kim 
Stanley Robinson ("Red Mars"), it was tacitly acknowledging that it pretty much 
had the field of literary science fiction all to itself.

So original programming was the only way to go. And because the network could 
afford only a limited number of new series, it decided to confine them to Friday 
and Saturday nights. The debut of these shows was also accompanied by a larger 
than normal promotional budget, which may be a major factor in Sci Fi's success, 
at least in niche-TV terms: expansion to over 70 million cable homes, with an 
average audience up by more than a third from six years ago. The channel also 
boasts that almost half its viewers are female, and it has actually been able to 
come up with programming that is attracting attention outside the cultish 
confines of its hard-core base.

Still, most Sci Fi Channel programming remains retread series, grade-B TV movies 
and the occasional big-budget film you've already seen 1,000 times (although it 
does have the rights to one of the juiciest guilty pleasures on all of 
television, the old vampire soap "Dark Shadows," which is shown weekday 
mornings). Sci Fi also has a minor hit in "Crossing Over With John Edward." But 
the show, which features a medium who allegedly speaks with the dead, seems to 
belong more on the parapsychology channel than an outlet dedicated to 
speculative fiction.

So the Sci Fi Channel keeps improving incrementally, while waiting for that 
future bonanza. It's an interesting work in progress, the video equivalent of 
one of those "Star Trek" voyages: boldly going where no one has gone before; not 
quite sure how to get there or what it will find when it does.  

To read the whole article, Sci Fi Channel 

In Memory

From the moment the 15-year-old Aaliyah burst onto the scene in 1994 - an R&B 
singer whose sultry voice, striking good looks and sexy attitude belied her 
young age - it seemed as if everything she touched became a success. 

"I was trained since I was a little girl to be able to do it all," the 
22-year-old artist said in a recent interview with The Associated Press. 

Her career had barely begun to peak when she was killed in a plane crash in the 
Bahamas on Saturday. 

She is survived by her mother, father and brother. Calls placed by The 
Associated Press to some of her music collaborators were not returned Sunday. 

Aaliyah (pronounced Ah-LEE-yah) Haughton was born in Brooklyn on Jan. 16, 1979, 
and was raised in Detroit. 

She attended the Detroit High School of Fine and Performing Arts, whose 
principal, Denise Davis-Cotton, traveled to New York on Sunday to mourn with 
Aaliyah's family. 

"She was just a nice young lady," Detroit Public Schools spokesman Stan 
Childress said. "She was a straight-A student and an outstanding citizen." 

Aaliyah's career appeared to be predestined: Her mother, Diane, was a singer, 
and her uncle, Barry Hankerson, was an entertainment manager who was once 
married to Gladys Knight. By age 6, she was already on stage, appearing in a 
production of the musical "Annie." 

By the time she was 11, she was polished enough to earn an invitation from 
Knight herself to perform with her in Las Vegas. 

But the singer who would have the greatest impact on her career was R&B 
superstar R. Kelly, best known for hits such as "I Believe I Can Fly," and for 
writing and producing for performers such as Michael Jackson. 

Aaliyah lived on her own in Manhattan, picked her own movie roles and charted 
the direction of her music. But she was still very much a young adult, giggling 
during the AP interview as she talked about getting tattoos on her ankle and back. 

"The most enjoyable part is to touch people all over the world," she said. "To 
be able to go all those places, and have people know your name, and know all of 
your songs, and for them to be so touched by you, that some may cry - there's 
not words that can express how great that feels, and it makes all the hard 
stuff, it makes it worth it."

To read more of this tribute, Aaliyah

In Memory

Actress Jane Greer, a film noir star and former wife of bandleader Rudy Vallee, 
has died. She was 76. 

Greer, who as an icy brunette bested both Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas in 
1947's noir classic "Out of the Past," died Friday of complications from cancer, 
said her son, Alex Lasker. 

Greer was best known for her role as the seductive Kathie Moffat in "Out of the 
Past (see below)," which cemented her reputation as a noir vixen. 

"She was a bad girl you could fall in love with - who could take on Robert 
Mitchum and really make him melt," Lasker said. 

Bettejane Greer and her twin brother, Don, were born Sept. 9, 1924, and grew up 
in Florida. 

Throughout the 1940s and '50s, she worked consistently, appearing in "Dick 
Tracy, Detective," "The Prisoner of Zenda," and "Man of a Thousand Faces." Her 
career slowed by the mid 1950s, although she continued to act. 

In 1984, Greer appeared in "Against All Odds," a remake of "Out of the Past." In 
it, she played the mother of her original character. She later acted in David 
Lynch's TV series "Twin Peaks." 

Her on-screen character was not matched by her countenance in person, said 
daughter-in-law Anne Wile-Lasker. 

"She was just gracious and sweet. She had this image on film that she wasn't in 
life," Wile-Lasker said. 

Greer is survived by her twin brother; sons Alex, Lawrence and Steve; and two 
grandchildren. Her common-law husband, acting coach Frank London, died in January. 

A private memorial service will be held Sept. 9 on what would have been Greer's 
77th birthday. 

To read more, Jane Greer

Still MISSING




Marc Chagall's "Study for 'Over Vitebsk'"

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Or send it to this Marty


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