CinemaInternational wrote: ↑February 29th, 2024, 10:24 pm
I did some checking of Murder, She Wrote DVDs. They never did credit the hairdresser/s in the closing credits. One could take that one of a few ways....
A) That hairdresser was considered too lowly a job to include in 30-second long closing credits back in the day.
B) They didn't include it because the hairdresser was a member of the Witness Relocation Program hiding out from the Mafia.
C) They feared that if the hairdresser 's name was revealed, an irate guest star would follow her/him to their home and try to inflict grave bodily harm for damages to their tresses.
D) Or maybe they didn't include it because the hairdresser would be kicked out of the cosmetology institute of America.
E) Or perhaps there were no hairdressers, but the guest stars had to get to the filming set by running as best they could in a wind tunnel where in addition to wind, Aqua Net by the gallon would be blowing at them.
Honest-to-God, these are all Good, but I think WIND TUNNEL or MASHA'S THEORY ABOUT THE MONKEYS has the most hard visual evidence to back them up.
I have a theory of my own- I kinda think THE MALEVALENT SPIRIT OF JACK PIERCE was HAUNTING THE HAIR AND MAKE-UP DEPT. AT UNIVERSAL STUDIOS. I dunno if there was a full DANA/ZUUL POSSESSION thing playing out or if he worked through the electrical outlets or what- but there is something DARK SIDED AT PLAY HERE.
Last edited by Lorna on March 1st, 2024, 2:25 pm, edited 1 time in total.
CinemaInternational wrote: ↑February 29th, 2024, 10:24 pm As for the whole televangelist thing, the Murder in the Electric Cathedral episode aired in early 1986, a year before the Jim Bakker scandal broke. I don't really know if CBS was attepting to avoid scandal or not.
Already that season, they had aired an abortion themed episode of Cagney and Lacey which revealed that one of its two leads had had an abortion in the past , Falcon Crest had done a Thorn Birds style plot with a priest (Ken Olin) breaking his vow of chastity with foxy Ana-Alicia coupled with a plotline where Morgan Fairchild was found to be the victim of incestous rape as a child from her father, and Knots Landing had spent a season and a half (1984 to December 1985) with a subplot dealing with the rise and fall of an increasingly narcissistic, dangerous, hypocritical, amoral, and psychotic televangelist played by Alec Baldwin (who was playing the half-brother of one of the show's leads, Joan Van Ark), who snapped and planned to kill his wife (Lisa Hartman) after he got canned from the airwaves. Ultimately, the mother of his character (played by Julie Harris) discovered him about to push Hartman off the roof of a tawdry seven-story hovel of a building, and she lauched into a verbal tirade so intense that Baldwin's character started backing away from her, tripped on a discarded can of spray paint left on the roof and fell to his death. (Full admission: Baldwin's character on the show was so slithery and loathsome that I was genuinely thrilled to see him plunge to his death.) Plus NBC had done two abortion themed episodes on St. Elsewhere, and on ABC (much to Cybill Shepherd's protest, as she felt it made her character less likable to the public) Mattie Hayes revealed herself to be an atheist on Moonlighting and Spencer for Hire did an incest episode. So maybe CBS did hold back just in case they didn't want to ruffle any more feathers in the South and Midwest.
(END QUOTE)
Thank you for all that genuinely fascinating info!!!
THE FILING CABINET OF MY MIND is cluttered and I thought ELECTRIC CATHEDRAL was SEASON 3, but no- SEASON 2, which was one that was up and down in tone and quality as they tried to find the show an idenitity and deal with casting issues and (i'm sure) network constraints.
that's kinda wild that the episode ran BEFORE the whole JIM AND TAMMY scandal, especially as the actress playing the abused wife of NATWICK'S GRANDSON looks a lot like JESSICA HAHN, and then you add THE BARBI BENTON factor....downright prescient
they must've still been worried about being sued or something because i watched the end of the episode today and they really go out of their way to make THE TELEVANGELIST PLAYED BY STEVE FORREST a really decent guy.
Which...ick.
although again, I LIKE STEVE FORREST A LOT, in both his MsW appearances and MOMMIE DEAREST.
SPOILER IN RE: THE ENDING OF MURDER IN THE ELECTRIC CATHEDRAL
I RESTATE the fact that i am quite miffed that the solution to the mystery is that JUDY GEESON IMERSONATED BARBI BENTON BY ADDING TEMPORARY HAIR DYE (AND I PRESUME NUMEROUS WADS OF NEWSPAPER) IN ORDER TO TO MAKE HER OWN "HAIR" LOOK LIKE BARBI'S CHARACTER'S "HAIR" WITH NO MENTIONING THE OBVIOUS FACT THAT ALL IT WOULD TAKE FOR ONE TO IMPERSONATE THE OTHER IS A SIMPLE SNATCH AND RUN OR A TRIP TO BARGAIN CLOWN.
I would rewrite the finale to have THAT RONALD MCDONALD WIG lift up off of BARBI'S head in front of everyone in the room and declare
"NO YOU FOOLS! YOU STYOOPID, STYOOPID FOOLS!!!! T'WAS I THAT KILLED MILDRED NATWICK!!!! T'WAS I ALL ALONG!!!!!!" (DERANGED LAUGHTER)
Lorna wrote: ↑March 1st, 2024, 2:15 pm
...Aw, DACK RAMBO. Now THERE is a TRAGIC STORY- his twin brother DIRK died young and then DACK contracted AIDS in the early nineties, he died while appearing on the soap ANOTHER WORLD where he played SENATOR GRANT HARRISON. I was about 12 at the time and a big fan of AW, so I will always remember that.
Lorna, you're always on it. As soon as I saw DACK I thought of his twin DIRK (on "The Loretta Young Show" I think). I had a terrific press photo of those two. I think DIRK died in a car accident...late '60s...
You're welcome. I think maybe it is possible, the more I think about it, that CBS might have been begging for soft-pedaling the ending of the Electric Cathedral episode due to what their other shows were doing.... Of those other shows I mentioned that CBS had that year, the Cagney and Lacey abortion episode was in November 1985, Baldwin's plunge (playing a bad televangelist) on Knots Landing was in December 1985, and Falcon Crest's errant priest plot was wrapping up in February 1986, right around the time this MSW episode was scheduled to air (February 16 of that year to be exact), so maybe CBS told Universal to hold their punches because they couldn't take any more angry letters for the year (By this time, CBS was trying to play the act of the most-buttoned down network for content, perhaps a response to some lingering sore feelings directed at the network from one side of the political aisle over Archie Bunker, and from the other side over Maude in the 1970s). But then again, Murder She Wrote was an ideal show for CBS because it was deliberately uncontroversial. Other than "Snow White Blood Red", no other episode went overkill with violence, and controversial issues were absent.
Things would change though on other series. A year or two after the Bakker scandal broke, Designing Women did an episode where Annie Potts made a prank phone call pretending to be Tammy Faye, replete with emulating her crying, to a call-in line asking the question if Jim Bakker was punished enough for what he did. (Her answer was "no"). Murphy Brown dealt with a lot of hot-button polical issues. Dallas and Falcon Crest both featured topless nudity briefly in their later seasons. Knots Landing had a graphic sexual assault scene in 1989 I am still shocked by. NBC's St. Elsewhere and LA Law repeatedly went to the controversial topics well, their Miami Vice had a kinky sex scene involving Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith that was regarded as the most sexual scene ever seen on a basic network, and ABC 's Twin Peaks and NYPD Blue are still somewhat notorious.
And then CBS would show just how much they changed by airing Picket Fences for four years in the 1990s which was a real hotbed of a show that I think would still pack a wallop. Just the feature-length pilot of that show alone featured such topics as an abortion, sexual abuse of an underage teenager, a menage a trois, and a dead nude body shoved into a dishwasher. That show would later broaden their horizons to include such sundry topics as teenage sexual experimentation, an animal sacrifice cult, polygamy, human test tube babies carried to term in the wombs of cows, the murder of a senile man by his own son, a euthanasia -practicing nun killing terminal patients while warbling "Killing Me Softly with His Song", a transgender teacher appearing as the Virgin Mary in a Christmas pageant, a priest with a fetish for women's shoes, a mayor who had made a porno tape in the past, gun violence in elementary schools, a man keeping the mummifed corpse of the wife he killed in a closet, a criminal who would break into the houses of people and sexually pleasure himself in their bathtubs, an obese woman who killed her husband accidentally by rolling over in bed and smothering him, a female serial killer who would shove her victims into freezers [one of whom was decapitated in the process of retrieving the body], another mayor dying by spontaneously combusting, racial conflicts, and a woman using a steamroller to crush her husband who claimed that menopause made her do it. Watching the show was somewhere between watching a well-crafted show (because once you got past those outrageous elements, that's what it was) and reading the weirdest pages of the Weekly World News. It's on Hulu I guess for a new generation to get shocked by it all over again.
One does have to be aware that the networks did not only have to deal with irate viewers at some points with controversial shows, but also they could get into trouble with their beloved advertisers who helped paid for the shows. ABC got zapped that way twice in the 1989-1990 TV season, for after thirtysomething showed a nude gay couple talking in bed together obviously after sex (November 1989) and China Beach had a minor character played by Ricki Lake go through a back alley abortion (January 1990), they lost several advertisers (and over a million dollars) for both shows. Neither episode was ever re-run at all on ABC, and the thirtysomething episode was not seen uncensored again until the DVD release in 2009. (As a matter of record, the gay characters made a few more appearances on thirtysomething, and that show later did an episode excoriating the twitchiness of advertising companies [March 1991], but after that controversial China Beach episode, Ricki Lake was reduced to being a glorified extra for the rest of the season, and then was written out entirely, never seen, heard, or talked about ever again)
You know, it's kind of weird speaking of all this controversial stuff because these TV critics today try to dismiss pre-2000 TV as not taking any risks. If they only knew.... The earlier shows happened to be much better written to boot. My heart almost completely remains with the earlier shows.
Kingrat, Paper Dolls was based off of an earlier TV movie, but almost every part got recast for thw short lived series. I am pretty sure that Joan Collins was in the earlier TV movie in 1982. There were other would-be big soaps that didn't last in the 80s. You mentioned Berringers, but there were also the short runs of Secrets of Midland Heights, Number 96, Flamingo Road, Kings Crossing, Bare Essence, The Yellow Rose, and The Colbys to show that prime-time soaps would not always be a goldmine ratings wise....
HoldenIsHere wrote: ↑February 29th, 2024, 3:18 pm
Except for her early appearances on the show, I think Joan Collins always wore wigs as Alexis on DYNASTY.
Joan has been upfront about wearing wigs throughout her career, claiming it "saved" her hair.
Cher has said the same thing about wearing wigs to protect her real hair.
She wanted to wear a wig for her role in Mask, but Peter Bogdanovich insisted that she dye her hair red because the audience would tell she was wearing a wig.
She told him she had worked with people over the years who could design wigs that looked real, but Bogdanovich would not budge.
Well, Cher did dye her hair red, and it fell out in clumps!
So she ended up having a wig designed to wear in Mask after all.
She ended up cutting her real hair short to let it grow back out healthy.
An acquisitions specialist interrupts a capitalist's family dinner and cleans out the safe. The getaway is unencumbered by living co-thieves and so he is free and clear until he is caught with his pants down. Or they are on the floor. Or they are in a different room where he started his romp with two ladies of the evening.
I like Kirk Douglas more in his light comedy roles than in his dramatic roles. He is here perfect as a murdering thief with a grand sense of the absurd.
I am sorry to say that I found: Henry Fonda merely serviceable in his role as a humourless official.
Hume Cronyn, Warren Oates, Burgess Meredith, Lee Grant, Arthur O'Connell, Martin Gabel, Alan Hale Jr. and Victor French round out the cast.
7.8/11
This movie is available for viewing for free with commercials on: TubiTV.
I guess this could be called a record of the mid-80s Brat Pack at the height of their young fame (Rob Lowe, Andrew McCarthy, Demi Moore, Emilio Estevez, Ally Sheedy, Mare Winningham, Andie MacDowell), but this film is a pretty hollow affair that reveals, once again, that the difference between a good and a bad film is the quality of the script. This is supposed to be a look at the struggles of recent college graduates to adjust to life beyond the campus, but the characterizations are as thin as tissue paper and hardly believable. And this isn't the fault of the cast, as both The Breakfast Club (Estevez, Nelson, and Sheedy) and About Last Night (Moore and Lowe) both proved that these young actors could make a meal of a more nuanced part right about the same time as this. In fact, those other movies are kind of like the skeletons rattling around in this one's closet not only because we can see what the actors are capable of, and because it also shows just how poor the script is at realizing that young people are more than just horny party animals, but are actual human beings who have genuine hopes, fears, and dreams that this film's writers have no grasp in understanding. Still, kudos should go to the eternally undervalued Mare Winningham for actually getting in there and triumphing over the script by delivering a finely tuned performance, and the mid-80s pop music featured is very smooth. But otherwise, this is a botch.
Allhallowsday wrote: ↑March 1st, 2024, 5:40 pmBABETTE'S FEAST (1987) on TCM. It still works wonderfully.
I just watched this for the first time this morning (prompted by your mention)
I have to admit something terrible.
This movie was kinda giving me THE WHALES OF AUGUST flashbacks, and i became DESPERATELY WORRIED halfway through that it was going to have an unhappy ending- which I just could not handle in my fragile state- so I went to wikipedia and read the full plot synopsis, and then went on and finished the movie (which I loved) and honestly- I don't think it hindered my enjoyment of the film any knowing how it ended- the stress of being worried that everyone would get PTOMAINE POISONING and/or BABETTE WOULD BE BURNED AT THE STAKE FOR HERESY would have held me back from fully committing.
I love PERIOD FILMS OF THE 70S AND 80S because I feel like THAT is probably the closest to an accurate rendition of what the past was really like- enough props and costumes and locations were still extant and there were no green screens or digital editing.
This movie stands right up there with THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING (1975), STAND BY ME (1986) and THE DEAD (1988) as PERFECT CINEMATIC ADAPTATIONS OF SHORT STORIES.
Lorna wrote: ↑March 2nd, 2024, 12:11 pm
...
I just watched this for the first time this morning (prompted by your mention)... This movie was kinda giving me THE WHALES OF AUGUST flashbacks...
This movie stands right up there with THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING (1975), STAND BY ME (1986) and THE DEAD (1988) as PERFECT CINEMATIC ADAPTATIONS OF SHORT STORIES.
And what a lovely final scene!
It works better than WHALES OF AUGUST; it's wonderful. Glad you enjoyed it!
