Barney Rosenzweig's Blog

Some thoughts ...

2011-12-30T01:00:00.000-08:00

Like so many others, this writer is often inspired by the seasons… or the calendar itself… to put some thoughts in print for others who might, it is hoped, be motivated to read and respond. Trust me this much: this will not be a port-by-port detail of the cruise undertaken by all or even part of my family. First of all, there was no such cruise and, secondly, I think I have already received about as many of these detailed nautical reports so as to determine that, quite possibly, my family grouping was the only such body that remained land- locked throughout 2011. And for that contribution to the world’s ecology, a well deserved self pat on the back.

Although mostly on dry land, 2011 was a positive year… especially if you remove from the equation my middle daughter slicing off half her thumb in a kitchen accident. The only mandolin that will ever find its way into that household again will be a string instrument that my ethnically Italian son-in-law might actually be able to play. While seeking her Master’s degree in the San Francisco Bay area my oldest granddaughter helped to “occupy” Oakland, proving she is a chip off the old block, my middle grandchild, mid-11^th grade and with a good work ethic behind her, has announced she wants to attend an Ivy-League University, and the tiny six year old continues to progress through ballet, ice skating and other balancing acts. Their parents are all reasonably well (albeit in one case somewhat short of thumb). There were some losses this year… most notably for us, the wonderful director Reza Badiyi. In our extended family there were gains as well, the writing team Dawn Prestwich & Nicole Yorkin, who got their start on The Trials of Rosie O’Neill, executive produced The Killing, a fabulous new series for A&E, April Smith, who served a somewhat unhappy term on Cagney & Lacey, continues to successfully write her Ana Grey FBI series of novels and, I am told, has had one produced for TNT on which she wrote the screenplay. Early Cagney & Lacy-ite, Robert Crais, has his Elvis Cole and Joe Pike novels coming out in paperback any day now and as to the duo most of you are interested in… fasten your seat belts.

Tyne Daly wowed the world of Broadway with her stellar performance as Maria Callas in Terence McNally’s Master Class. She also starred in a lovely production I travelled to New Jersey to see as an old-fashioned out of town tryout. It Shoulda Been You is a charming musical in the tradition of Abie’s Irish Rose directed by David Hyde Pierce. I don’t know what the plans are for that show, but Tyne now moves on to London’s West End with Master Class with one of the more eagerly anticipated stage presentations for next year (previews begin late January, 2012). Tyne also joined us at the British Film Institute for their tribute to Cagney & Lacey on the occasion of the kick-off of whatever celebration there will be for the 30^th anniversary of this series. One nice result of that sold out evening and well publicized affair was an article in The Guardian by Kira Cochrane. It is, quite simply, the best piece I have ever read in a newspaper on the subject of our series. I commend it to you.

Of course you probably cannot link to the wonderful job Ms Cochrane’s editors did with the layout of the article, including a front page banner and a cover of their entertainment magazine, but… well…. you will get the idea. Why am I going on so about one newspaper break? Well, I don’t know about you… and I am none too sure how things stack up today… but when I was a boy, even in far away southern California, The Manchester Guardian (by which name The Guardian was then known) was one of the World’s great newspapers. Happy as I am with this article, I am thrilled to be a part of The Guardian.

Onward: Sharon did her bit in the fifth season of Burn Notice for the USA Network and in between seasons four and five continued to star in A Round-Heeled Woman early this year at the GableStage Theatre in Miami’s Coconut Grove. Then, following the end of production of season five on the aforementioned series, Ms Gless took off to England, with nary a break, to do an improved version of the play in Hammersmith, a London suburb. The play was so well received by audiences and critics that the owners of the venerable Aldwych Theatre in the West End proposed a move where in a record 48 hours the “new” version of the play was up and running in the theatre that for 25 years housed the Royal Shakespeare Company. Big thrill for Sharon, as one might imagine, but no rest which didn’t seem to matter to the critics who raved about her performance and gave high marks to the play itself. A Round-Heeled Woman will close next month and Sharon will return to the States for a bit of a lie-down and then commencement of season six for Burn Notice. Any new plans for the play (off-Broadway, Toronto, Chicago) will be kept in abeyance until her next major hiatus, in the fall of 2012.

Me? I am spending the year-end holidays in London trying to catch my breath from just attempting to keep up with Sharon Gless and Tyne Daly. As to the New Year there is a nice glimmer out there: MGM has licensed the entire Cagney & Lacey series to a distributor in Toronto. They plan to move on the show in 2012, but just how remains to be seen. My initial contact has been encouraging and the idea of a release of all episodes in one package is on the table as is the idea of doing this via direct mail in a print on demand fashion. I am encouraged also because for the first time since the series was (all too briefly) in the hands of SONY (before the previous managers at MGM “fired” them) there is someone in the distribution end who actually seems to know which one is Cagney and which one is Lacey. I don’t have to tell you it has been a difficult process with all the turmoil at MGM almost from the day they “inherited” the series from the Orion bankruptcy. We have been at the mercy of itinerant managers, a dysfunctional at the outset Fox/MGM home video department created almost overnight in a desperate (and it turned out, failed) effort to make the SONY withdrawal look good, then a slew of firings and hirings as money was infused and a larger group of corporate executives took on the very important task of (not in any particular order) resurrecting the James Bond series for theatrical release, getting ready the first in a trilogy of Girl with the Dragon Tattoo films and, of course, furnishing all their new executive offices. I am going to believe I am well out of there even if it means travelling to the tundra of Toronto. You should be hearing something from us on this long before spring .

Finally, a “thank you” and “farewell” to Jacqueline Danson, who has served us so well as our Web Master here for the past several years. Ms D is moving on, to bigger and better things. We will attempt to keep this site flowing without her, but she will be missed. For the forseeable future we will mostly update the site via this blog so keep watching this space to keep up to date. Thank you all for contributing your wonderful comments throughout this past year, for signing up for our survey about the full DVD collection (and if you haven’t done that, please do).

Thank you for your patience and know that it is my belief that there is a very good chance that your perseverance and faith will be rewarded in this coming New Year. Bless you all and a Happy New Year!

Barney Rosenzweig

Here I am in London ...

2011-12-03T14:19:00.000-08:00

Here I am in London in the afterglow of a truly wonderful evening at the British Film Institute’s salute to the 30th anniversary of Cagney & Lacey. Our own Jacqueline Danson, working with the BFI, did a terrific job of co-producing the whole thing, Sharon, Tyne, and I were all on “our game”, the sell-out crowd of over 400 was enthusiastic and loving, the moderator, Dame Jenni Murray, was sharp and the film clips that were screened were well received. Of course, no one from MGM was there. No one who could make a difference in the way this series is marketed or promoted witnessed the lasting enthusiasm and affection for the show or its stars. We move on. To what? Not sure. We are approaching the end of the year….a time for decision making and New Year’s resolutions. When I have some, I will send them your way by way of another blog. There is, I must add, some small light on the horizon. MGM has licensed the entire series to a new distributor out of Toronto and in a preliminary contact with him I discovered that, unlike anyone at the new MGM, this fellow actually knows which one is Cagney and which one is Lacey. It’s a start.

One of the reasons I have remained in London is that my spouse is here with her play A Round-Heeled Woman. It has just moved from a successful run in Hammersmith to the Aldwych Theatre in London’s West End. What a coup and what a performance by La Gless. Four Star reviews, the whole nine yards. If you have a thing for Charles Dickens and Christmas in London you must pop over the pond and see this. If you are already in London (or anywhere in the nearby English countryside) I urge you to come and see this work which will continue until mid January when Sharon must begin to wrap things up in order to return to production of year six on Burn Notice. Tyne Daly will be coming to the West End as well for her version of Maria Callas in Master Class, but the two will not overlap as Ms Daly’s play begins previewing on January 21st and runs for fourteen weeks at the Vaudeville Theatre. It was fun to go to Sharon’s opening at the Aldwych with Tyne at my side and afterwards we all were consuming far too many calories late night at the Ivy. The evening before, after the BFI event, Tyne and I put the too-tired Ms Gless to bed and went on to party at the Woolsey where we reminisced and had one of our best evenings in a long time. Onward:

Whatever the New Year brings for “Cagney & Lacey… and me “(can never resist a chance to plug the book) you will learn about it here and in the not too distant future. Until then, may you have a lovely holiday season and a joyous New Year.

Barney Rosenzweig

December 3, 2011

Of a seminar past, a conversation to come, play time (x2), and MGM!

2011-10-05T20:09:00.000-07:00

I would like to give a shout out to Elizabeth Proenza, US Army retired and a big-time C&L fan, for making my stay at Tempe, Arizona a whole lot nicer than did the USC football team. My Alma mater lost on the gridiron, but Ms Proenza had arranged for me to give a seminar and a guest lecture at Arizona State University while I was in town and that (unlike the previous Saturday's game) was a most pleasant experience.

The students were appreciative and attentive and their professor was most complimentary about my book (Cagney & Lacey... and Me in case you forgot).

While this was going on Jacqueline Danson was finalizing plans for the upcoming British Film Institute salute to Cagney & Lacey (November 29 in London, England). As to the home front: things at MGM are a bit murkier than originally thought, but I hope to have some real news in early November about what might or might not be possible as a result of the survey to which so many of you responded.

Sharon has already departed for London and A Round Heeled Woman rehearsals, having completed her season's work on Burn Notice. The play opens, as most of you know, the week after next, and I will be flying in right after the Cal game in San Francisco to cheer her on for the October 18 opening night. Tyne Daly is also readying a new play, It Shoulda Been You, for a New Jersey outing about which our own Carole R. Smith will report later.

Have any of you been watching the fairly new USA series Suits? The well-dressed, good-looking leading man is Gabriel Macht... oldest son of Stephen Macht who played Cagney's love interest in our series. Give the show a try... it's pretty good. I am disappointed by most of the new shows I have seen so far but continue to love The Good Wife and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. And I cheered at the Emmy's for the awards handed out to the folks on Friday Night Lights and Justified. All very good shows.

All for now... I will be reporting back to you in early November about what I have learned from MGM and on what transpired in London with the play.

Barney Rosenzweig Oct 5, 2011

Rumors/Rezi Badiyi

2011-09-03T08:51:00.000-07:00

By now most of you know that the article in the UK’s the Daily Mail got somehow garbled in my phone interview and that the story of the imminent revisiting of Cagney & Lacey either on television or the big screen is simply not accurate.

These things happen, although I am not at all clear how in this case since I was asked at the outset of the interview if the rumor of an upcoming production was true and I unequivocally responded that it was not. The conversation went on about the plausibility of such a thing and I acknowledged that we had often been approached by various writers and producers over the years and that we even had a few viable approaches including making it multi generational by bringing Cagney’s niece, Bridget, onto the force.

I believe I went on to lament that my perception was that MGM, the holders of the Cagney & Lacey copyrights, had other priorities, including revisiting their motion picture series of the James Bond franchise. That led me in the interview to segue into my thoughts about the website and the taking of the successful survey of fans, urging MGM to release the entire series on DVD.That was really my purpose in doing the interview in the first place. Oh well.

I normally don’t mind these things. I have been misquoted or misunderstood more than once in my life, and am only sorry to have disappointed those of you who got excited about the prospect. You know… eventually the story will be accurate. Someday MGM will get around to remaking Cagney & Lacey; hopefully while our fan base is still on the planet. In that case, the Daily Mail has scooped all its competitors once again.

I don’t want to leave this site without making mention of the passing of one of the members of the Cagney & Lacey first family, director Reza Badiyi. He was more than a good friend. He was an inspiration to all of us as well as being one of the most prolific, efficient and caring directors I have ever known.

It was in one of our very first episodes with Sharon as Christine Cagney. We had a strong scene of conflict between the two women. It was a very good… very tough scene, with both women pulling out a lot of potent emotional pyrotechnics. Everyone on the set had to be impressed with the talent these two were demonstrating in those early days of our series as Reza, next to the camera, watched carefully. “Cut,” he said, then added, “…Let’s do one more.” He moved to the two actresses who had given their all and probably couldn’t imagine why their director hadn’t printed the take and moved on. Instead he came close, leaned toward them, and very gently said, “Don’t forget the love.”

Sharon Gless and Tyne Daly have told me more than once it was one of the most important directions they had ever received in their storied careers. “Don’t forget the love.” We will not, and we will always remember this beautiful, talented, man… Reza Badiyi.

Barney Rosenzweig, September 2, 2011

Sharon Gless, Tyne Daly ...and Me - and the official C&L DVD survey!

2011-07-09T19:46:00.000-07:00

Tyne Daly has done it again. She has opened on Broadway to rave reviews with a bravura performance this time in Terrance McNally’s Master Class. Both Sharon and I will catch up with her and the show later this summer (the play is scheduled to close its limited run the latter part of August), but I feel secure in offering this seemingly premature “Brava” since I have seen her take on this role a little over a year ago at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. As is so often the case with Ms Daly she was (is) simply brilliant.
On the subject of summer, Sharon continues on with the fifth season of Burn Notice and, in August in London, the casting of the UK version of her play A Round-Heeled Woman. So, both “my” gals are gainfully employed and doing well.

Me? I am revisiting what is now draft three of a novel I began over a year ago. I am struggling with it for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that the plot is somewhat political and the American political landscape keeps changing faster and in more bizarre ways than I (let alone my novel’s leading character) can keep pace with. I have painted myself into so many corners that a new metaphor has to be invented since the number of corners in any metaphorical room should be limited to four, right? I am in more trouble than that.

Still, it is something to do while waiting for MGM to figure out the future and just how they will handle it vis-à-vis Cagney & Lacey and it also has me thinking of returning to the easier (at least for me) memoir form in writing down the stories from my past before … and after… C&L. I am also contemplating an audio version of Cagney & Lacey… and Me plus a re-launch of that tome via electronic technology (Kindle and the iBookstore).

Meanwhile, a question for the reader: the subject of technology brings up the probably very real issue that would be collectors of the original Cagney & Lacey series will most probably be frustrated in their goal of having something tangible and tactile that they can put on a shelf as part of a “collection.” Electronic downloads and such are not going to satisfy that urge so the question is how many of you are there? If it could be arranged on an “on-demand” basis to have the entire series sent to you on DVD in pristine fashion from the original negatives would you want it, and what would you pay for those 125 episodes? Would it be all right if they did not have special additional materials such as interviews or would that be an essential part of any package? Think about this, collect the opinions of your fellow fans of the show, and let us know by answering our new DVD survey.

Summer time will be over soon which is followed by the fall and that is when I am in California and will talk to the MGM caretakers of the moment about such things. It would be nice to have ammunition when bearding the lion in his den.
Barney Rosenzweig, July 8, 2011

Of London, New York and Miami ... spring blog

2011-06-10T17:23:00.000-07:00

Summer is all but upon us but before that happens I thought I should deal with spring. It was an active time of year in the Rosenzweig/Gless household. First there was that very quick April trip to London, followed by a trek out to Los Angeles, then in May our 20^th Wedding anniversary celebrated with friends in Florida, and a bash for Sharon’s birthday in New York. All of this built in, and around, the beginning of production for the fifth season of Burn Notice, Sharon’s Miami based TV series. Small wonder I haven’t been blogging of late.

The winter had ended with a record shattering Miami run of Sharon’s play, A Round-Heeled Woman at the GableStage Theatre. Having experienced that success the plan was then to take the play to England, open it this fall where it might run during the Burn Notice six month hiatus betwixt production of years five and six of that series, and then on to New York with the play for the fall of 2012. Sharon’s producers had wanted her to come to England to check out their idea for a venue, to do a bit of press and, coincidently, Ron Cowen and Dan Lipman, Sharon’s producers of Queer as Folk, had written Bonnie Blue Eyes, a major musical for the West End stage. It was just opening and Sharon wanted to be there in support. Then there was Tom Conti, her leading man from Chapter Two doing a play written by our pal, the late Jack Rosenthal and we both wanted to attend that with our good pal Jack’s widow, the wonderful actress/comedienne Maureen (no relation to the aforementioned Dan) Lipman so off we went.

We still had one evening open in the three day British dash (timed for the same weekend as the London Marathon, but a full week before the Royal Wedding) so we teamed up for dinner with Bill Paterson, Sharon’s co-star in Stephen King’s Misery. Bill and his award winning wife Hildegard Bechtler are always “must sees” being all on their own enough of an excuse to pop over the Atlantic for a long weekend break from Burn Notice filming even though, truth to tell, I am getting way too old for that kind of quickie. There is, by the way, no truth to the rumor that I went along merely to prove my nose was not at all out of joint at being excluded from the invitees to the big wedding thing and that I tagged along with SG to the UK as evidence of that.

London was fantastic. Bill Paterson and I exchanged books we have authored (his is Tales from the Back Green, mine… in case you forgot… is Cagney & Lacey… and Me). Even I have to confess that I got the better part of that deal. Bill’s book made me laugh and cry. He is as good a writer as he is an actor and so as not to leave Hildegard out of the equation I would add that the set she designed for the Broadway production of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia was most impressive and worthy of her considerable talent and resume.

Meanwhile, back on the West End, Betty Blue Eyes, based on the British film classic A Private Function is a worthy successor to the movie. Not sure if Broadway will get all the very English references, but it could well work out there after its considerable run in the West End. After the multiple curtain calls we discovered a new (to me) London restaurant: Rules. It could well have been one of the trip’s highlights. We went there with Ron and Dan after their show, raved about their work and the décor and cuisine at what we learned was London’s most historical dining establishment.

Next day, Tom Conti was on stage and great as always. The play is Jack Rosenthal’s SMASH and, although, it has never played in America, I think it would be a smash in the states. Jack wrote it many years ago and his spouse Maureen starred in the original production. It is a very clever piece about a group of creative types (a writer, a director, a composer, a lyricist and a producer) who come together to create a Broadway musical. Sounds similar to the about-to-be launched American TV series called SMASH (about a group of creative types: a writer, a director, a composer, a lyricist and a producer)… a conflict which could launch an interesting series all by itself (not to mention a plagiarism suit).

Exhilarating and tiring as all that was, we no sooner returned to Miami than Sharon went before the Burn Notice cameras and I took off for Los Angeles, the LA Times Festival of Books and a guest lecture at UCLA. The latter was fun for me, appearing for the better part of three hours in front of my friend, Tom Nunan’s graduate seminar on television production, but the book fair was another matter. It not only brought up a few old wounds about the lame way most books and their authors are promoted, but more to the point it was humbling as few of the hundreds of thousands of fair goers seemed to have any kind of a clue at all of what Cagney & Lacey was, let alone why anyone would write a book about it. Maybe that what has delayed this blog. It sort of takes the wind out of what remains of my sails (I almost wrote sales) when I witness firsthand how few people know or care about what I have always believed was a truly iconic television series. I am not wrong about that part. What I have to face is how ephemeral pop culture is and how audiences do move on.

So now will I.

Sharon could not get another break from Miami and Burn Notice for our anniversary at the beginning of May. These personal events come and go, but 2011 was significant in that it was our 20^th. Having just burned a lot of sleep and energy on the London thing, I overruled Sharon’s desire to grab the “red-eye” to and from LA in order to have a party with our family (all of whom live in California) and so we opted instead for dear friends nearer home in Miami, celebrating at the famous Miami Beach Forge Restaurant with 20 pals, one for each year of wedded bliss. Well, to be more accurate, one for each year, blissful or otherwise. Either way, it was a great party followed by another bash at May’s end for Sharon’s birthday. This time Burn Notice was taking a small hiatus for the Memorial Day holiday and so I treated Sharon to a swell dinner at Sammy’s Roumanian Steak House in The Bowery in New York for all our NYC pals including sparklies Rosie O’Donnell, Tyne Daly and Lee Grant. Sammy’s is always a hoot and the food is fantastic… provided you are on serious statin drugs or care not about your cholesterol numbers. This was followed by a week’s worth of theatre on and off Broadway. We saw Book of Mormon (cute, but very over-rated from my point of view), Arcadia (Stoppard may just be the world’s best playwright working in the English language so this is a must-see), House of Blue Leaves (a far better than average revival of the John Guare play with a nice cast), The Minister’s Wife (yawn… but I did LOVE the lighting. I don’t know about you, but I think when the lighting is what gets a review in a musical there is a problem), Jerusalem (a British import with a stunning performance by Mark Rylance. It is more than the old, “if you can’t be good be loud” admonition. Rylance is good AND loud). By the way, we did not see the very theatrical British import War Horse on Broadway as we saw this at its home base in London; a very good night in the theatre. Finalizing our New York musical fling was Priscilla, Queen of the Desert which made my own light-weight (and only) Broadway adventure, All Shook Up, look like West Side Story. This was followed (finally) by The Mother ***ker with the Hat (a play, much better than the title with a very nice young cast). Sad to say the real Broadway highlight was tapas at the Bar Centrale just over Joe Allen’s bistro on 46^th street. Great food and drink from an interesting, albeit limited, menu and sparklies galore in attendance…. a really fun post-theatre hangout. Best meal (other than Sammy’s) was the always reliable Frankie & Johnnie’s and the worst was the very expensive and perpetually overrated Nello’s on Madison Ave. Sharon loved (as always) Serendipity for the Sand Tart Sundae and we were both bereft to discover Gino’s… one of our favorite Italian eateries… had closed its Lexington Avenue doors. It had been a main-stay for Sinatra, Woody Allen and for my entire life of New York experiences. I remain stunned at is closing. Not as stunned as I was at the LA Times Festival of Books, but stunned none-the-less.

That is it for the spring. Amazon and Kindle now have the e-book Cagney & Lacey… and Me for sale on their sites, and any day now iTunes should be featuring the book as well. I am hopeful that this summer brings some good news about those electronic sales along with good reviews for the Mrs. and season number five of Burn Notice. It will be lighting up your television screens in a matter of days. Be patient.

BARNEY ROSENZWEIG

June 9, 2011

Plus ça change ...

2011-05-17T19:58:00.000-07:00

The more things change, the more things stay the same ... see: Corsets, Cleavage, Fishnets

More stars than there are in Heaven ...

2011-03-01T17:18:00.000-08:00

Barney responds to fans' recent comments about contacting MGM about the release of the rest of the Cagney & Lacey series on DVD ...

---

MGM ... yes, the company of Leo, the lion and "more stars than there are in Heaven" ... the place where (over 50 years ago) I began my show business career... has, apparently just dodged its umpteenth bankruptcy. Not without losing a couple of employees, including my best contact at what has been for some time a beleaguered company. Through machinations and show business vagaries they have, for some time now, been the holders of the underlying copyrights to Cagney & Lacey. They have been incompetent managers. Their predecessors, at Orion Pictures Corporation, were worse. Having you all bombard these folks now with pleas for competency might become a serious waste of time. On the other hand... there are new folks at the helm and who knows? Maybe something can come of all this turmoil.

Give me... and them... some time. I would like to meet with them and get a sense of the lay of the land before some international write-in campaign is begun. When I do that (and it will be later this year due to my schedule as much as theirs) I will report back to you and then perhaps we can decide together whether to storm the balustrades. We may be the wrong demographic for "storming" but we can at least contemplate that part of our long ago past. Give me til fall at the latest and I will get back to y'all on this important subject.

Meanwhile... a sad comment on our times: as noted above I have been in show business over 50 years and never before would it have been possible to report what is now on my desk. Within a few months time two of my former employees have been murdered. At Sunday night's broadcast of the Academy Awards, Ronni Chasen was memorialized after the senseless shooting that took place near her Beverly Hills, California home. She was an off again/on again publicist for me (most importantly on Cagney & Lacey: The Menopause Years) and then, only last week, came word of the murder by pirates in international waters off the coast of Somalia of Scott U. Adam... my production manager for a time on The Trials of Rosie O'Neill.

I could be wrong, and certainly in 50 years a lot of former associates of mine have passed on, but I don't think any of those went by acts of violence. To have two such events occur back-to-back has given me and mine plenty to contemplate.

Barney Rosenzweig
March 1, 2011

Christmas 2010

2010-12-26T08:47:00.000-08:00

I am hitting the word processor keys for this blog on Christmas night… just an hour or so before a quiet holiday dinner with my spouse, the ubiquitous Sharon Gless… As I do so she is having her assistant, Deb Mosk, drill dialogue into her head for A Round-Heeled Woman. It is something less than a week before La Gless goes before a live Miami audience to continue the process of this work in progress. For more on that I refer you to the play's website.

There is no question that I have been remiss about keeping in touch. The world of blogging has taken a back seat not only to my own casualness about the medium, but also because of a lack of prodding from web master Jackie Danson. It is not, lest you think it is, because of a diminished interest on her part… far from it. Ms Danson has simply been buried trying to launch the site for Sharon’s aforementioned play while simultaneously preparing my own memoir, Cagney & Lacey… and Me (remember, that?) for distribution via Kindle and other such devices.

But, as stated… It is Christmas. I always reflect on Christmas. For 73 years it has been me and baby Jesus with me being born on the 23^rd of the month and Him on the 25^th. Even with a two day head start, I have always come in second. It gives one pause and, while pausing, why not reflect?

I am happy to report that my health is fine-to-excellent… especially if one is prone to disregard an arthritic shoulder condition that has the doctor du jour recommending a replacement. Excuse me? The doc claims it will help my tennis game. Who knew there was an Andy Roddick model? I am giving this thought, but not a great deal of reflection.

My children and grand children are all doing very well…. Unless you count as a negative the hip replacement my youngest has just endured. (Does it sound as if I am preparing a pitch for Network TV of the bionic family… one part at a time? Not true. I have lost the will to pitch.)

Back to reflecting: My wife’s career, as well as that of her erstwhile partner, is flourishing. Besides the play, Sharon is looking forward to a production start this Spring of season five of Burn Notice. The series has also been renewed for a season six as well. Meanwhile, Tyne Daly is prepping to return to Broadway in Terence McNally’s brilliant Master Class. She follows that with yet another interruption of her visits to her recently arrived newest Grandchild (courtesy of middle daughter Kathryne) for a return to the musical stage via a major revival of Queen of the Stardust Ballroom. I reflect on the high price of Broadway tickets and rejoice that, at least with Ms Daly being present, one always gets full value for money spent.

I am also moved to reflect on the novel I have been working on… toying with… tossing out… then working on again. I came to realize how little fiction I myself actually read and just how hard this can be… What a mistake it is to take on current political events as a sub plot when such events can change so rapidly … and often. And who reads anymore, anyway? Lots of good reasons not to finish, but I reflect yet again and will continue to try.

I reflect on the disaster that is Florida real estate and find that I don’t give much of a damn. If I won the lottery, I would not move from Fisher Island or the sweet ground floor apartment we call home. I think about the generous friends I have in New York who let me stay at their fabulous Gotham digs almost anytime I have a hankering to go to the theatre and delight on how, after many years of frustration as a LA USED TO BE, I have finally mastered the logistical nightmare of that sprawling megalopolis simply by acquiring the car of my dreams. Now I no longer mind the endless California traffic swirl between quality family time and USC football, as I cruise with top down and Randy Newman cranked at full volume.

I reflect on the world of entertainment and how much I enjoy The Good Wife and Fringe on TV and how a couple of books this season (Empire of Dreams and Every Last One) have knocked my socks off, while the movies and Broadway have mostly missed for me with the exception of the Swedish movie trilogy of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Social Network, but that is Aaron Sorkin and he delivers so consistently as to be taken for granted. I am all but addicted to the versions of the news given nightly by Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow to the point where there is time for little else and I am grateful for DVR even as I nightly curse the DISH system my condo association got conned into purchasing.

And finally I reflect on just how many folks I have known in my life who breathed their last in 2010 and for how many their passing was… to me… a complete surprise. I read Jerry Weintraub’s book earlier in the year and attended David Wolper’s memorial service and was taken by how good both of these men were (and are) about keeping in contact and what a poor job I do of that. I attended the EMMY awards with my nominated spouse and my middle granddaughter, Greer, and found myself stunned by the IN MEMORIAM section at just how many of the honored who had passed were one time associates of mine with whom I had lost touch.

The thing about Christmas is this: it is very shortly thereafter followed by New Year’s. I think I should reflect on doing a better job in 2011 of keeping up with the business of keeping up.

Barney Rosenzweig

Christmas 2010

Vonetta McGee (Mrs Marcus Petrie)

2010-07-17T16:32:00.003-07:00

Vonetta McGee who played Mrs. Marcus Petrie died this week and way before she should have. Carl Lumbly played her husband both on Cagney & Lacey and in real life. They met on our show and theirs was a true love story. I haven't seen her or Carl for some years now, but have followed his success in a number of series over the past few years, including one of my favorite shows ever, JJ Abrams' Alias. My heart goes out to Carl. I always found him to be every bit as decent a man as was his C&L character Marcus Petrie; Vonetta seemed to be a perfect match for him. She was a beauty both inside and out, and I personally am grateful for all I learned from them both.

Barney Rosenzweig

Sharon and I took a break ...

2010-04-18T17:44:00.000-07:00

Sharon and I took a break: me from Miami and the beaches, Sharon from early Season Four work on Burn Notice. We flew to Washington DC to check out Tyne Daly in Terrance McNally’s Master Class and then trained on to New York to catch up on some theatre in The Big Apple.

Master Class is arguably McNally’s best and there is little that can be said about Tyne’s performance beyond the straightforward truth that she was fabulous. You can look elsewhere (check out the Washington Post review on the Internet) for corroboration and plot synopsis but Sharon, our mutual friend Rosie O’Donnell and I were quite simply blown away. The five of us (the aforementioned foursome along with Rosie’s friend, Tracy) all went out for drinks and dinner after the performance to Ris… a very good, and new-to-me, DC eatery. We laughed with and cheered for Ms Daly while also taking a moment or two to toast Tyne’s double loss of the past few months of her Mother, Hope Newell Daly, and of her Mother-in-Law, Josephine Brown. This was then followed by a raised glass to Tyne’s about- to-be-born newest grandchild by way of the circle of life and her middle daughter, the very beautiful Kathryne Brown.

Life and death has been on my mind this season. There was the Motion Picture Academy’s slight to the lovely and talented Farrah Fawcett with whom I worked on Charlie’s Angels and for whom I had great respect and an almost school boy crush. Her far-too-soon demise was made even sadder by the fact of it being eclipsed by the sensation of the same day passing of rock icon Michael Jackson. That the Academy’s annual memorial tribute to those in the industry that had died during the year failed to mention her was a gross omission.

Two television stars I worked with and with whom I had a nice relationship even more recently passed away and I mourn the loss of two of the nicer people I have ever known in a business not particularly celebrated for nice people. I here refer to Fess Parker, who besides bringing the character of Davy Crockett to the known world, starred for six years in Daniel Boone, a series for NBC and 20^th Century Fox that I had the privilege of producing for three of those years. Perhaps in some future blog I will reminisce a bit about that time of my life and that working relationship. “Perhaps,” hell; you can pretty much count on it.

John Forsythe was the other gentle man referred to. He and I worked together for one season of Charlie’s Angels where, as almost everyone now knows, he played the voice of the unseen on camera title role of Charlie. For a lot longer than that year we shared a terrific friend in Award Winning director Martin Ritt with whom John and I spent many a Saturday at Marty’s Race Track Box trying to keep up with our friend, the best handicapper of horse flesh either of us had ever met.

Fess rode horses and John bet on them. They were a great parlay.

Barney

It all began one year ago ...

2010-02-21T18:33:00.001-08:00

It all began one year ago on a day trip from Fisher Island to Palm Beach. I decided to take a mid-way break at one of my favorite joints on the sand near Ft. Lauderdale. Arruba's cheeseburgers are delicious and their quesadillas are as good as any and better than most. It was a beautiful day and I was feeling terrific. My good health was obviously on my mind as I opted to have neither of the house specialties, but instead opted for the far leaner fish stew.

The next day I was hit by a nasty stomach virus (read food poisoning). I felt awful, but was confident of my diagnosis and clear about the course of action to be taken; I would stay at home and rest, and do so in immediate proximity to my bathroom's toilet. There was to be no course of anti-biotic for me nor any other drug or preparation that might "plug me up." The "secret," I believed was to get rid of what was ailing me and to do so as naturally and quickly as possible. This may be a good prescription for the 25 year old I used to be, but now (at 70 plus) it was a disaster. I got sicker. I became dehydrated which led me to the doctor's office and the discovery that my dehydration could have caused severe heart damage and did bring about Atrial Fibrillation (irregular heart beat). A pill and some rest in my Miami doctor's office and I was back in regular sinus rhythm within an hour. I believed it to be a onetime event. It wasn't.

As the year wore on I would fall out of rhythm and again into Atrial Fibrillation. Most of the time I couldn't tell, but consuming chocolate, too much coffee or... well, who knows? There was no real pattern to when it would occur or when it would not. It is somewhat dangerous... more than doubles one's chances of a stroke. This last week I had what is called an ablation, performed by the terrific team at my my Alma mater, the teaching hospital at the University of Southern California. It is about a four hour procedure that electrically stimulates the heart via a conductor introduced to the heart by way of the femoral artery. In guys my age it works about 70% of the time and it appears I am in that group... "appears" in that there is no certainty of the permanency of the change from A-Fib to Sinus.

They are monitoring me now in Los Angeles which is why I am not on the beach at Fisher. And I have another couple of weeks of monitoring before that homeward trip. I feel good. I get a little tired mid-day, but I was always a napper so "no problema."

There is, as with most such tales, a moral and here it is:

I should have had the Cheeseburger!

A new Barney Rosenzweig blog via Carole R Smith

2009-10-22T09:55:00.000-07:00

Excellent news!!!! The past couple of weeks here have been unusual. As we all know, bad news travels fast and good news doesn't always catch up, so I thought you might be interested in the e-mail explanation Barney Rosenzweig sent to his family and friends.

---

There has been a plethora of phone calls, E mails and notes along with an occasional flower arrangement. All of it is appreciated more than I can say, but I thought I would try to say so anyhow. While at that, I thought I should probably explain what happened... not only to dispel bad information, but to clarify just what is going on and to allay any unnecessary concerns. There is also the possibility that what follows could be helpful should any of you experience something similar. So to the VGFOB (the Very Good Friends of Barney) here goes:

As most of you know, I came out to LA from beautiful Fisher Island to follow my custom and my passion: the USC football team. The trip also allows for quality time at that happy season with old LA friends and family. This year also happens to be the 50th reunion of my SC graduating class of which I am something called the "Legacy Chair" which requires some minimal amount of my time and attention. Coincidental with all this there is a bit of stir among the itinerant managers of the Cagney & Lacey library to actually do something, and, in addition, Sharon's play will be going into rehearsals in San Francisco early December so I found myself with more time on my hands than usual and decided to fill some of that with a visit to my LA Doctor for a check up and to discuss some pretty drastic weight loss ideas I have wanted to explore. Forget about the latter. DR Brodhead informed me that I was in Atrial Fibrillation and that he wanted me to see a cardiac specialist right away.

Now the Atrial thing is something that I knew a little about. I had experienced it for the first time last February following a bout with food poisoning that left me seriously dehydrated.
At that time, my heart very quickly went back into sinus rhythm pretty much on its own and I believed it was just one of those things that had corrected itself and would pretty much be a one-time event. Ancillary testing in Miami last February indicated another issue: my right carotid artery was 60% blocked. All the Cardiologists I spoke with said "take aspirin" and monitor the artery annually... it seemed that until there was 75% blockage, attempting to correct the thing could cause more harm than good. I quickly got back onto the tennis courts and was playing better than at anytime in my life when (in early May) I got knocked off my bicycle by an oncoming golf cart resulting in my getting banged up just enough to keep me on the side lines for six weeks, during which time I experienced a loss of physical conditioning and a corresponding weight gain. Back I went to the Miami doctors. While at it, they checked the artery again which was still registering 60-65% blockage... nothing to be concerned about as long as I was.taking aspirin.

I told all this last week to my new LA cardiologist, Dr. Leslie Saxon who is also head of the Cardiology Department at the USC Medical Center. The fact that I was back in sinus rhythm without medication and without feeling any differently than when I was in Fibrillation concerned her and she put me on some pills, ordered a stress test to take place in a few days and said she wanted to carefully monitor what was going on. I seem to be continuing to have an irregular heart beat without realizing it.

Last Saturday night, Sharon and I went out to dinner. I was feeling "edgy".... sort of in a bad mood (did I hear anyone ask "how could you tell?") I noticed that my lips felt numb... sort of the way they do when you leave the dentist. Then there was the same sensation in my finger tips on my left hand and eventually the entire hand and forearm and then my left foot and leg up to the lower calf. It was different than the sensation one has when an extremity "falls asleep"; there was no tingling sensation of the kind when normal blood flow returns. Sharon was nervous about what I was describing and from what she could discern from looking under "numbness" on the Internet she feared I might be having a stroke. Still I resisted her calls for me to go the hospital. It was 11 PM on a Saturday and I had no desire to spend the night in a LA Emergency room watching knife victims being patched together. I took an aspirin and went to bed, telling her I was feeling better (and the truth was I slept well) and woke up with no further symptoms. That lasted for about an hour and then the numb lips and numb left hand finger tips were back. This time my right leg was also slightly numb . It was Sunday morning. I called my doctor at home (who was concerned enough at our earlier meeting to give me his home number). Dr Brodhead said that he wanted me in the hospital for observation and that he would see to it that the admitting office would call me in a half hour with instructions of where to go. I asked if I could first attend an award event honoring my wife later that afternoon and he was incredulous. He told me to get my ass into the hospital and fast. Sunday came and went as did Monday and most of Tuesday. Lots of tests and constant monitoring... doctors in and out of my hospital room, meds and/or dosages changing and a strange discovery... that right carotid artery was now 85% blocked. The pictures of my heart revealed no damage and no clot forming activity (good news)... the brain scans showed no signs of any sort of incident or stroke (more good news), but the fact that my artery was now 20% more blocked than it was last July meant something must be going on that could become very bad news. The numbing I had experienced was being called a TIA (Transient Ischemic Attack). One third of the people who have them never have them again. One third have them repeatedly, and one third (the remaining folks) go on to have a major stroke. I was already in the second group and had no desire to be part of the third. I agreed to surgery on my carotid artery.

On Wednesday morning they cut me just below the jaw line and opened up my neck (what I believe used to be called "the mafia smile"). They did this while respecting the fact that my wife and grandchildren had never seen me without a beard and so, while I was unconscious, and before the operation itself, they made an effort to give me a better than average beard trim so that I would still look like me when the operation was over. Surgery time was under three hours and I was in "recovery" for about five more. The surgeon (Dr. Weaver) did a great job and released me from the hospital the next day. The neurological team concurred. Not so fast was what the cardiologist contributed and she kept me there for two and one half more days, moving me to the cardiac care floor to monitor my irregular heart beat while taking off for the SC/ Notre Dame game in South Bend and leaving me to watch the thing on television. (For those of you who saw the game, I have never been so grateful for blood pressure medication which is now a new addition to my medicine cabinet.)

I was surrounded the whole time by fabulous women... not just my cardiologist and those members of the medical and nursing team who are female, but by my wonderful granddaughters, my beautiful and caring children and my wife who fought for and got the private room, badgered everyone for constant reports from the staff, slept in a chair by my side while also guiding my middle daughter with her painful Kidney infection through a different medical bureaucracy, and managing to get me checked out of the hospital, handling all that paper work in record time, in order to get me to my kid's home for a plop down in front of the TV with my family in time for the kick-off of the SC/Notre Dame game... She did all of this while flying back and forth to San Francisco for casting sessions and production meetings on her play. You sort of have to see her in action to appreciate this combo of Sister Kinney and Jimmy Hoffa.

I am very okay. My doctors say I dodged a "major bullet." I spent Sunday shopping for new tires for my car. I am good for another 70,000 miles. A lot of those I hope to spend with you all. Many thanks again for your love and concern and for letting me know how much I am cared for.

Barney Rosenzweig

His Time of the Month

2009-07-07T11:21:00.000-07:00

If you grow up part of a minority group in America there are some things you just “get”. One of those things is probably more fine tuned in someone who is black and then, in order, Hispanics, Muslims, homosexuals, women—(even though they are in the majority, women are most often treated like members of a minority)--- Asians old enough to remember their treatment in the 1940s and the internment camps definitely qualify and would probably come next or, perhaps, the Jews… especially those of a certain age. I fall into this last category.

Like the blacks, the Hispanics, the Muslims, gays, women and Asians…. I “get” it; I recognize a bigot when I see one. I hear the buzz words. I am familiar with the terrain of their terminology. Now that we have an African American as President, and it is more prevalent than I have heard in… oh, such a long time…, my antennae are even more attuned than usual.

These days, here in the USA, we Jews are close to our apogee in terms of popularity. I am happy to relate it has been a long while since anyone saw those bumper stickers reading We Need Oil, Not Jews!! Thanks to Christian fundamentalists, who have come to realize you can’t have a “day of days” without an Israel, plus a whole bunch of tough guy “chicken hawks” rooting for the Jewish State to nuke Muslims… especially seein’ as how the US doesn’t “have the guts” for such a task… why, things have been down right quiet on the anti-Semitic front.

Bigots come in all shapes and sizes, but all brands of bigotry have ignorance as the common denominator. You can’t be at the top of your game and be a bigot. Prejudice of race, gender, sexual preference or religion has its root in stupidity and since we, as a people, are dumbing down even faster than most of us can calculate it is becoming a very big issue. Sarah Palin as Vice President? Rush Limbaugh as the spokesperson for one of the two great political parties of this nation? What ever happened to conservatives such as Nelson Rockefeller, Jacob Javits, Earl Warren, William Taft, Dwight Eisenhower… even Richard (you may not have liked him, and he may have had some personality flaws, but dumb he was not) Nixon?

I am reminded of this because of a memo I received today from our distributor of the Cagney & Lacey reunion films. Several retailers throughout the country have taken exception to the sub-title, The Menopause Years. I smiled when I heard this. I have been down this narrow road before.

What do we know? We know, for sure, that the merchants in question are guys. I mean, can you imagine a woman taking exception to the word “Menopause”? These male managers are taking exception and offense, and just like that southern governor, who so sanctimoniously lectured all of us on the sanctity of marriage before he started using his Passport to Argentina, these retail giants are determined to dictate their sensibilities… or what they like to call their “values”… to everyone else in their community. Since most of these middle managers… whether at retail stores or at your local TV station are guys… and, let’s face it, not the brightest lamps on the tree, our DVD distributor has a problem on his hands.

Never mind that every woman in the western world hears the word menopause in this context and knowingly smiles… Never mind that Cagney & Lacey is a brand name that is as current as your latest NYTimes crossword puzzle. This is another opportunity for stupid to win and it is the closest that this male manager is going to get to drape something in his own version of a Burka. You can bet, he just ain’t-a-gonna miss that opportunity.

Here’s your opportunity… drop by a store selling DVDs sometime soon. Don’t buy anything. Just tell the guy at the counter how you feel about this, tell him that come September you want to see Cagney & Lacey: The Menopause Years on his shelf or maybe this fall he will find a whole bunch of gals in burkas on parade outside his store. I would bet there is a female TV anchor out there in your town who would love to cover that story.

Barney Rosenzweig

July 09

Barney Rosenzweig's "Back 'Atcha" (6)

2009-02-27T18:00:00.000-08:00

In comments on Barney’s blog of tuesday, 23 january, 2007 A MESSAGE FROM EXECUTIVE PRODUCER BARNEY ROSENZWEIG :

--smudge wrote
Hi Barney,
Just wanted to say that I really enjoyed watching Trial of Rosie O'Neil. I especially loved the theme song. Can you confirm who sang it? I thought it was Carol King but when I was on the IMDB website they said it was Carly Simon. Also is it possible to purchase the song anywhere?

barney answers

Well ... you are partially right.

Carole King wrote the song ("I wish I knew") and she did sing it, but not on the titles. She sang it on camera in an episode we did ... where Tyne Daly was also a guest star ... and she sang it occasionally in concert.

Melissa Manchester was the artist who sang the lyric in the first season and for part of the second season when we experimented with using just the music, sans lyric, for the main title.

Don't you just hate it when the answer is longer than the question?

Oh yes, I am going to look into where one can purchase the song. I have an autographed by Ms King copy of the sheet music, but have never heard if she put it on one of her albums (do they still call them albums?).

By the way, for those who don't know, "I wish I knew" was the answer to the Carole King question posed musically, "What does the future hold?"

Barney Rosenzweig's "Barney Back 'Atcha" (5)

2008-12-17T20:02:00.000-08:00

In comments on Barney’s blog of monday, 18 august, 2008 BARNEY THE BLOGGER IS BACK AND WE'VE GOT HIM :

-- mimi wrote

BARNEY, Sir, oh thee king of the talents, one with the ideas, fearless one to the channel beings, and so on, lol. It's GREAT to "hear" from you! Just out of curiosity, have you ever considered doing any projects here in New England?

barney answers

It never got off the ground, but it would have fit right in with your “king of the talents” thing.

-- carolyn wrote

Thanks for the update Barney, but nothing about Sharon's Emmy nomination??? How creepy was she in "Nip/Tuck"???

barney answers

You think she was creepy… How would you have liked to have been living with that lady?

Actually, it was not so bad… certainly not as spooky as living with her during her days on the London stage as Annie Wilkes in Stephen King’s “Misery.” Now that was scary.

Sharon’s psychopathic character opens up the new season on Nip/Tuck coming up soon and, personally, I thought she should have won the award and not have to “settle” for a nomination. I haven’t seen this new episode, but maybe she will get another shot at that Emmy in 2009.

Think I’m biased?

-- melissa wrote

That's great news on the 4 movies. By the way, any progress made yet on getting Rosie O'Neill out on dvd?

barney answers

Any decision on Rosie O’Neill will be totally based on how we do with The Menopause Years in 2009.

There are a few legal things to iron out, but the big issue is the question of would this be at all economically viable. The response to the DVD package of our reunion films will go a long way toward answering that.

-- no1lulufan wrote

The UK have always had a fascination with all things American (in my opinion) but I also think this show came out at just the right time, when women were becoming more common in the work place etc. It seems that it was working women but also teenage girls (trying to find their identities) that watched the show - thats why I watch it!- and so maybe thats why it was such a hit?

barney answers

Maybe… your answer is as good as any I’ve ever heard, but still doesn’t totally explain why at the 50th anniversary party for the BBC Paul McCartney asked Sharon Gless for her autograph.

-- kristy wrote

I'm in a hurry this AM but will undoubtedly have many questions for you if you have time to answer for us all. Also, wanted to give you a heads up regarding a nice bit on C&L I saw this morning on a blog called "the rap sheet".

Here's the link: http://therapsheet.blogspot.com/2008/08/best-tv-crime-drama-openers-18.html

Is the bit true about Sidney Clute? I always thought you'd kept his picture in the opening titles through the run of the series because of the great love and respect you and the cast had for him (we all loved LaGuardia). Is it also true that having the picture there helped his family in a financial way - as the blog states? Good if it did. Take care and tell Sharon and Tyne we'd love to "hear" from them both. Saw a picture of Sharon, Rosie O. and Kathy Griffin (ADORED her live in "Dallas-adjacent" recently) at dinner in Vegas prior to Cher's concert. What fun! Did Sharon come home with any "PRINTABLE" stories to tell? :)

barney answers

So little that Sharon comes home with is “printable” but she has come up with her own blog.Thanks for the link.

I thought the rap sheet blog was excellent. Yes, Sidney Clute was a great friend of mine and I kept the character of La Guardia alive through the main titles and in script references for the life of the series and long after he had passed away from a particularly virulent cancer.

This gesture did not have any particular financial impact, but that would have been very secondary issue at any rate. Sidney was a life-long bachelor and his only family at his demise was a sister who, as I remember was, along with her husband, just fine financially.

-- cd wrote

I'm also in the UK, though have taken to setting the recorder to avoid the 6am rises ... I just wish someone could persuade ITV3 to show the movies, cos I've never seen them! (WEll, only the intro one)

barney answers

I don’t control the movies in the UK… or anywhere save the USA… but they are “purchasable.” If you want them on ITV3 or the BBC write to those companies, get your friends to do the same, and you might have some success. I believe Disney owns the copyright throughout the world.

---

In comments on Barney’s blog of friday, 29 august, 2008 BARNEY THE BLOGGER IS BACK AGAIN BETTER THAN EVER :

-- kristy wrote

Congratulations on the weight loss and thanks for sharing this portion of your journey with us. Weight is a definite struggle for me, too. I have lost approximately 75 percent of my excess weight in the last year. It's a tough battle but definitely worth the fight. I'm sure you agree!

barney answers

It is worth it and I am so glad I did it.

I would like to lose another 10% of my total body weight, but frankly I have only been able to maintain the original 10% and not go any farther. I know that the next step is harder than the first and that what has to happen now is less calories going in and more exercise (calories going out).

Part of the problem is that I am not as motivated as I was and the second part is my being a bit smug over the initial weight loss.

I may go back to Structure House for another four week session in 2009, but I am not yet committed to that.

Meanwhile, maintenance of that kind of weight loss over (now five months) is something about which I feel good.

---

In comments on Barney’s blog of tuesday, 7 october, 2008 Barney blogs from Panama:

-- kristy wrote

Glad you're blogging so frequently these days! You know we love hearing from you. Can you give your wife and her former partner a little nudge to do the same? I've been wondering what's up with "Round-Heeled Woman". ... P.S. Please never refer to yourself and a "dust-bin" in the same breath ever again! How did she ever manage to pick that one sentence to use as the quote from you???

barney answers

Right now, as I understand it, the biggest “problem” with Round Heeled Woman is Sharon’s lack of availability.

She has been working pretty much non-stop with Burn Notice, Nip/Tuck and Hannah Free and then everyone’s schedule went into a freeze while folks tried to figure out what to do with the upset of the writer’s strike.

As to nudging the women… see Tyne’s new blog about the play she recently did in Los Angeles and Sharon wrote a blog when she wrapped Hannah Free in Chicago.

As to the quote in the Times: … I think I blogged at the time that I was not on my game for the interview as a result of being badly out of practice. I wasn’t upset and don’t want you to be either.

-- carolyn wrote

hey, on the next release of Cagney and Lacey DVD's, can you include outtakes? I bet there is some funny stuff there, huh?

barney answers

Frankly I have always thought these “out takes” were always highly over rated as entertainment.

As a result I am none-too-sure any of this stuff was kept on The Menopause Years. I am going to look around our vault in a few days and will see if anything is there, but (believe me) there are a lot of reasons to have these films even without seeing Sharon or Tyne not at their best.

Barney Rosenzweig's "Barney Back 'Atcha" (5)

2008-12-17T19:58:00.000-08:00

In comments on Barney’s blog of monday, 18 august, 2008 BARNEY THE BLOGGER IS BACK AND WE'VE GOT HIM :

-- mimi wrote

barney answers

A simple answer would be no… although I once had an option on a project called Lancelot, the Lesser which was sort of a different kind of spin on “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court”… It never got off the ground, but it would have fit right in with your “king of the talents” thing.

---

carolyn wrote

Thanks for the update Barney, but nothing about Sharon's Emmy nomination??? How creepy was she in "Nip/Tuck"???

barney answers

You think she was creepy… How would you have liked to have been living with that lady? Actually, it was not so bad… certainly not as spooky as living with her during her days on the London stage as Annie Wilkes in Stephen King’s “Misery.” Now that was scary. Sharon’s psychopathic character opens up the new season on Nip/Tuck coming up soon and, personally, I thought she should have won the award and not have to “settle” for a nomination. I haven’t seen this new episode, but maybe she will get another shot at that Emmy in 2009. Think I’m biased?

---

melissa wrote

That's great news on the 4 movies. By the way, any progress made yet on getting Rosie O'Neill out on dvd?

barney answers

Any decision on Rosie O’Neill will be totally based on how we do with The Menopause Years in 2009. There are a few legal things to iron out, but the big issue is the question of would this be at all economically viable. The response to the DVD package of our reunion films will go a long way toward answering that.

---

no1lulufan wrote

barney answers

Maybe… your answer is as good as any I’ve ever heard, but still doesn’t totally explain why at the 50^th anniversary party for the BBC Paul McCartney asked Sharon Gless for her autograph.

---

kristy wrote

Here's the link: http://therapsheet.blogspot.com/2008/08/best-tv-crime-drama-openers-18.html

barney answers

So little that Sharon comes home with is “printable” but she has come up with her own blog.Thanks for the link. I thought the rap sheet blog was excellent. Yes, Sidney Clute was a great friend of mine and I kept the character of La Guardia alive through the main titles and in script references for the life of the series and long after he had passed away from a particularly virulent cancer. This gesture did not have any particular financial impact, but that would have been very secondary issue at any rate. Sidney was a life-long bachelor and his only family at his demise was a sister who, as I remember was, along with her husband, just fine financially.

---

cd wrote

barney answers

---

In comments on Barney’s blog of friday, 29 august, 2008 BARNEY THE BLOGGER IS BACK AGAIN BETTER THAN EVER :

kristy wrote

barney answers

It is worth it and I am so glad I did it. I would like to lose another 10% of my total body weight, but frankly I have only been able to maintain the original 10% and not go any farther. I know that the next step is harder than the first and that what has to happen now is less calories going in and more exercise (calories going out). Part of the problem is that I am not as motivated as I was and the second part is my being a bit smug over the initial weight loss. I may go back to Structure House for another four week session in 2009, but I am not yet committed to that. Meanwhile, maintenance of that kind of weight loss over (now five months) is something about which I feel good.

---

In comments on Barney’s blog of tuesday, 7 october, 2008 Barney blogs from Panama:

kristy wrote

barney answers

Right now, as I understand it, the biggest “problem” with Round Heeled Woman is Sharon’s lack of availability. She has been working pretty much non-stop with Burn Notice, Nip/Tuck and Hannah Free and then everyone’s schedule went into a freeze while folks tried to figure out what to do with the upset of the writer’s strike. As to nudging the women… see Tyne’s new blog about the play she recently did in Los Angeles and Sharon Sharon wrote a blog when she wrapped Hannah Free in Chicago.

). As to the quote in the Times: … I think I blogged at the time that I was not on my game for the interview as a result of being badly out of practice. I wasn’t upset and don’t want you to be either.

---

carolyn wrote

hey, on the next release of Cagney and Lacey DVD's, can you include outtakes? I bet there is some funny stuff there, huh?

barney answers

Frankly I have always thought these “out takes” were always highly over rated as entertainment. As a result I am none-too-sure any of this stuff was kept on The Menopause Years. I am going to look around our vault in a few days and will see if anything is there, but (believe me) there are a lot of reasons to have these films even without seeing Sharon or Tyne not at their best.

---

Barney Rosenzweig's "Barney Back 'Atcha" (4)

2008-12-12T08:24:00.000-08:00

In comments on Barney’s blog of monday, november 26, 2007 New Beginnings at End of November:

-- nicky wrote
There are quite a few members over at HT software forum who want the remaining seasons released aswell as plently here but oh well... Is there any hope at all for seasons 2+ to be released?

barney answers
There is hope. MGM is contemplating various methods of distributing the series beyond the 22 episodes that they have allowed to be released thus far. I, for one, am hopeful that a successful launch in 2009 of the quartet of reunion films (The Menopause Years) on DVD will encourage the powers that be to revisit the series as a whole and to create a deluxe DVD package of the entire work all in one piece.

That, I have always believed, is what the fans want and that is what I fought for (without success) the last time I did battle with the keepers of the warehouse.

-- ashleigh wrote
HEY BARNEY!! wow thanks for posting a fresh blog. i live in the UK, im 18 and i ABSOLUTELY LOVE cagney and lacey!! i click onto the site EVERYDAY and im really excited about the new book release-im hoping to get it for christmas!! as for future dvd releases...where do i sign to show my support??!!

barney answers
Your “support” is noted and well-taken. I’m hoping you’ve got your book by now, and (if memory serves which these days it rarely does) I believe you do..

At any rate, keep checking the website (every day may be a bit excessive, but whenever you think of us it will be there) and we will keep you and everyone else informed of whatever movements are afoot to get more of the C&L episodes into the hands of our loyal fans. Be patient… remember, there are folks out there who have been waiting for this since before you were even born.

Did I mention that we love our young fans? We do.

-- charzanne wrote
Is the next season coming along or do we need to start a petition :) Please let me know if any more Cagney and Lacey is available and thanks for season one. It made my decade.

barney answers
We are looking forward to making this decade even better for you, long before another decade passes. There are petitions from fans and the Hathor Legacy,but thus far there is no official movement afoot to start petitioning anyone… rather a wait-and-see approach and a fervent hope that the only part of the series that I truly control (The Menopause Years… our four reunion films) will do so well in its 2009 DVD debut that it will inspire those itinerant managers in Hollywood ( who control the original series) to revisit the idea of releasing the show in its entirety on DVD.

-- lisa wrote
Good luck with the negotiations - we NEED a full series release and the films......which part of that don't these people understand???

barney answers
In fairness, the conventional wisdom among the managers who control this vast collection of TV series (old and new) is that the vintage television business is either dead or dying. Their belief system creates a self-fulfilling prophecy so that… sure enough… when they reluctantly get around to finally releasing a vintage show it does fail. These young executives then get to be right. Lord knows, in show business, as in so many other things, being right counts for something… but in this case, I believe, their view is myopic.

It does require a greater effort to sell a show that has been gathering dust for 25 years over a show that is on the air every week and is everyone’s current favorite. The latter is so much easier to identify and it is so much easier to convince the controller of all that shelf space in all those retail stores, that the question all- too-often asked is “why bother?” Why bother with the old when the show in question was made before the new seller was born and usually predates the birth date of the kid who manages the retail outlets as well.

This is a turf war and the territory is valuable shelf space… How can a vintage show compete with “24”, “Lost”, or “Desperate Housewives”?

It can only be done by understanding that some… not all… not even most… but some vintage TV is ICONIC. It is television that has not aged badly and, in fact, stands the test of time.

Cagney & Lacey falls into that category, but it is hard to convince a group of young execs who haven’t the time to even look at the show that these 125 hours are very different than the tens of thousands of hours they have in all those boxes at their vast warehouses.

It takes a passion… usually the kind put forth by an individual (say the guy who made the shows in the first place) to get this done, but now it is all by the numbers and all administered by a group of folks who have come together ostensibly for no other purpose than to do this work, but who (in reality) have come together to protect their asses and not make any decisions that cannot be defended by… you guessed it… “conventional wisdom.”

And that, Lisa, is what they “understand.”

-- stevie wrote
I'm SURE season 2 wont be long, but could they hurry it up a little? I've watched the first season over and over again and am VERY eager to watch more, and the 'Menopause years' I've heard so much about.

barney answers
Well, The Menopause Years is on the way… probably in a store near you no later than mid 2009.

Hopefully season two and what comes after will follow suit. The good news is it is worth the wait. Season two is better than season one and season three is even better than that and so on… We just got better as we learned more and more how to do what it was that we did and got more comfortable in the process.

Frankly… this commitment to quality control… was the thing about the series about which I was most proud. A lot of shows start out strong and fade. That was not our problem. I hope you get to see the rest soon and that you will see for yourself what I mean.

-- jo wrote:
Happy belated birthday! How was the book signing at Books & Books? Re your blog / this site, a few small suggestions:
(1) if it’s not too sensitive, I’d like to hear your thoughts on the WGA strike, in particular the new media issues they are wrangling about. Also, has it affected Sharon and Tyne much? (hope not!)
(2) have you started any new projects / hobbies? Understand that you have just “stopped, not retired” :)
(3) a section for trivia Q&A on C&L episodes would be nice

barney answers
We already have a trivia quiz on the Cagney & Lacey site.

I am going to leave it to the fans to come up with some further trivia suggestions… of course, I will reserve the right to add to them, but I need to have something trigger me in that direction. Puzzles and quizzes are not my natural bent, but I appreciate the fact that they are much appreciated by many.

The WGA strike is now in the past (sorry, we are behind on much of this interactive blogging) but its effects are still being felt in the industry that is now wary of a strike by the Screen Actors Guild.

The Guilds have many legitimate grievances, but this is absolutely the wrong time to put an industry… any industry… in a strike mode. It would be especially devastating for all those workers who have already had to endure one strike by the writers to now have to undergo another. The actors could find themselves very unpopular and without support from any sister unions.

Sharon and Tyne seem to have weathered the WGA strike fairly well, but it did put a damper on their plans to do a play together as the schedules of their other commitments were thrown into a tizzie by the strike.

New projects for me? Nothing too definitive, although I have enjoyed public appearances such as the one you mention at Books & Books and at the library of the University of Southern California.

I would like to find a way for them to at least be a break-even proposition. I am thinking of going into the market for an agent who could book me to do some public speaking. I like it and think I am pretty good at it, but I need a person in the business end of it to show me the money!

-- gordon f. corbett wrote
I just looked at http://www.allmyfavoriteshows.com . It lists a complete series of "the best of Cagney and Lacey." The "regular" price it lists for this series is $389.99, and they are offering it for a slight discount at $68.99. It must be offering it almost world-wide, because its listing says that it is recorded "region-free," meaning that people who use NTSC and PAL can play it. They do not say that people using the French and Russian system, SECAM, can play it, so "region-free" is probably a falsehood.

The fact that the DVDs' boxes' artwork lists the title as "Cagney and Lacey," without the American ampersand, tells me that this series may be a British-licensed version.

Please tell me whether, if I buy this series, I will be purchasing "pirate" or other theft. If we lay out our hard-earned money for something, we do not want to cheat anyone out of his or her due.

Please let me know.

barney answers
Anything that has more than the 22 episodes released by MGM/Fox is pirated and probably a recording made off the air. Good detective work about the ampersand.

There were some episodes released abroad out of the UK, but not anything close to the number of episodes that MGM/Fox put out…

“The best of Cagney and Lacey”…. Not sure who made that determination… Even Sharon, Tyne and I can’t agree on what those episodes might be.

-- heather danette wrote
I was excited to hear about the release of the four "Menopause Years" movies on DVD. Especially since there seems to be little hope of the release of any more seasons for the series. However, I was very disappointed by the latest news reported on tvshowsondvd.com. According to the article, the four movies are going to be released on a new high definition player format. This new format, HDVMD, will require a new player that could cost $200 to $300. This is really frustrating. First, the First Season DVD is only available on Amazon.com which really limited its availability and success. Now, they are only offering the movies on a new format that will also limit its success. Are they still trying to sabatoge the success of this series?

barney answers
My understanding is that our distributor on The Menopause Years will be releasing the package of four in DVD and possibly other formats as well.

-- Kim wrote
Any word on when the 4 "Menopause Years" movies along with the rest of the series will be released? We have enjoyed watching the first season again 25 years later. Looking forward to watching the rest of the series and the 4 movies again. The shows are timeless.

I can not figure out why they would only release the first season instead of the complete series. It seems every other show ever made has been released. Who can we write to (or in more modern times email) to demand the release of the entire series?

barney answers
Hold your fire just a little longer. The Menopause Years will be released in not too many more months (hopefully before Mother’s Day 2009) and I am optimistic that we will learn more from MGM about the remainder of the series not too much longer after that.

If they turn an unreasonable deaf ear to the series (and I do think that is unlikely, but still could be based on just how The Menopause Years performs) then there is always the e-mail equivalent of a march on Hollywood.

---

Visit the official Cagney & Lacey website

Barney Rosenzweig's "Barney Back 'Atcha" (3)

2008-12-02T15:17:00.000-08:00

In comments on Barney’s blog of monday, July 2, 2007 APOLOGIES TO THOMAS WOLFE:

-- christieb wrote

Oh, now I am SO depressed and I was on such a high before that! I asked for the DVD for my birthday,which was Friday, and I have watched at least 10 episodes since. I just said to my husband that I sure hope they do ALL the seasons!(he was really happy that he got the RIGHT present and that I am still a cheap date! hahaha). This is beginning to feel like the old days when, by the way, I was one of those letter-writing fans to help save the show! Oh, and Barney, my 99-year-old grandmother bought me your book, which I am reading and loving. What can we do to help now?

barney answers

Do not be depressed. Help is on the way. We are releasing Cagney & Lacey: The Menopause Years in one package… all four of the reunion movies starring Sharon Gless and Tyne Daly… that we made a little over 10 years ago.

Those films have been “resting” most of that time and should help to maintain your reputation as an inexpensive date (I have had “cheap” dates and you don’t sound like one of those). The point is, if this release (on/or before mid 2009) does well, it will encourage the other guys at MGM and Fox to reconsider and put out the entire series in one wonderful/fulsome DVD package.

-- kristy wrote

Please keep in touch with us through this site and encourage Sharon and Tyne to do the same. We love you all and enjoy hearing how life is treating you!

barney answers

Kristy I am finally following your advice… and having a good time doing so. I will assign the fabulous Carole R. Smith to the task of getting the ladies to follow suit, knowing she can be more persistent than I. And, life… life… is treating me just fine. Thanks for asking.

-- anne wrote

Damn. I'm sorry the sales numbers weren't supportive enough. Perhaps those will improve over time? I still know of people who intend to buy the set. Could it be that more word of mouth is necessary? [Less than 20,000 Amazon.com buyers, really?-- did I do the math correctly?] I'm sorry the MGM execs are out of touch with this body of work, this series. I know it's hard to deliver bad news, but I hope this isn't over. Isn't there anything we can do about it? Fuckin' A.

Just please don't let the site die. Is that asking for something? I guess it is, then. Ah, well....

Don't be a stranger.

barney answers

Anne: I am trying, however belatedly, not to be strange.

As you may have noticed, with some help from Jacqueline Danson in the UK and our own Carole R. Smith, an attempt is being made to freshen all this up and to reinvigorate the base (hard not to be influenced by all the recent political jargon). Stay tuned to this website or, not to sound strange, check in from time to time. We hope to have new stuff for you on a semi-regular basis.

-- christine wrote

Man, I was fearing this, and I was hoping it wouldn't come. But I'm a brand new fan and it's because this season was released that I got to see the show. Now to think that I may never see the rest of it...?

There's got to be something we can do. It sounds like the whole thing was just the unfortunate victim of really bad publicity. I can't believe I may never see the rest because of bad publicity.

Seriously, I told my friends about it, I even got some of them into the show and they went and bought the set. This thing can't really be so hopeless, can it? Isn't there something we can do now?

barney answers

What to do? What to do? Have you bought my book? Too blatant an appeal, right? Okay, what to do?

How ‘bout this: I cause to be released the only part of Cagney & Lacey over which I have control (namely our four reunion films that we call “The Menopause Years”), I find the best distributor I can get and that distributor does a much better job than MGM/Fox, and you and your friends buy a ton of them and then, by example, we will have shown the bosses that there is an audience out there of old and new Cagney & Lacey fans, the suits in Century City do the right thing and release the show using our success on The Menopause Years as a model.

What do you think? Could work. Tell your friends ... again.

-- xanthophyllippa wrote

Let us know what we need to do, and we'll mobilize for you. Watching my S1 DVDs were an amazing homecoming for me, and I despair to think that additional seasons might not be forthcoming. Please let us know what we can do on your behalf. (And please keep in mind that some of us bought our discs from smaller outlets - like our local feminist bookstores! - and don't show up in Amazon sales stats.)

barney answers

As soon as we have a date certain on the release of The Menopause Years on DVD you all will be notified via this site.

Then… even before the release date, armed (as you then will be) with the name of the distributor, I think it would be very helpful to start asking Amazon, your local feminist bookstores and MORE IMPORTANTLY, Wal Mart and Costco and Blockbuster, etc. if they will be putting the DVD on their shelves.

There is nothing better than this kind of point of sale presentation… actually seeing the “goods” on the shelves of stores. That is what we rarely had on the first DVD release and that is what hurt us badly. The 23 year old store managers are not interested in “vintage television.”

But if enough folks show up, perhaps they will understand there is a difference between “vintage” and “iconic.”

-- ashleigh wrote

i live in england and i brought ma dvd set in virgin megastores and im still watching the episodes im on disc 3 now, so please know that they are being brought. its just ive not seen any publicity- the only way i knew it was happening was through this site (which is great by the way). so perhaps if wait for word of mouth or try to get some publicity going season 2 can happn. or is this just wishful thinking guys????

please tell me if theres anything i can do.... in the meantime keep the faith everyone-look what happened last time all the fans puled together!!

barney answers

Thanks, Ashleigh. Glad you like the site and I think, with a lot of help from fellow UKer, Jacqueline Danson, it is now going to get even better. More material will be available in a few months… namely our release of our quartet of reunion films (Cagney & Lacey: The Menopause Years) and how they do will help us determine a new pathway toward getting the entire original series out on DVD.

-- stuart wrote

I'm in the U.K and I bought my copy new and sealed from an ebay store. No amazon figures on my purchase then. I don't understand the logistics, but isn't it possible to strike up some kind of deal that allows you to release further seasons with other distributors/ companies? I know in the U.K networkdvd.co.uk release lots of different shows from different companies and don't rely on heavy sales. They released all six seasons of 3rd Rock over here long before they finally got released in the U.S and though I never saw a season clogging up the DVD charts, all six seasons got released.I realise what you're saying, but if the owners have no plans to release the rest, what's the problem in them leasing the show to such a company as i've mentioned.

barney answers

Boy, are you smart. What is their problem, indeed? They have… how shall I say?...”control issues.”

Getting a major film company to relinquish even a modicum of control or ownership to another entity can become a life’s work. W.C. Fields once said, “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again… and then quit. No one should think you’re crazy.” Anyway, I think it was W.C. Fields.

I am in the “try, try again” phase and am trying (also) not to be driven crazy. We are renewing our efforts (witness this new feature of actually answering the responses from fans that come in to us on the website), are preparing to release our quartet of reunion movies later (in mid-2009) and (for now anyway) only ask that you keep checking the website for whatever we can think of that will get all of the work on Cagney & Lacey into the hands of the people who loved it and want it.

-- elizabeth wrote

Re, the online amazon sales. Could the reason not simply be that a percentage of the cagney and lacey audience won't simply use online stores? And who can blame them? I know for a fact that release of the DVD has hardly been advertised in the UK if at all. From what I understand Cagney and Lacey, had and still has a large fan base in the UK, reach out to them. Plug it some more.

barney answers

We are working on just what you suggest.

A friend and fan from the UK, Website/Communications Consultant Jacqueline Danson, is helping to bring me into the 21st century via this website and has actually gotten me to sit down and answer the comments/questions from people just like you, Elizabeth. Do keep checking with us.

Jacqueline has gotten me to promise to do this sort of thing fairly often and I have resolved to try. Thank you for caring.

-- karen wrote

That is simply unacceptable...that will not do AT ALL! I am now going to pitch a huge hissy fit...What is wrong with the video retailers when you can probably buy all seasons of "ALF" but not of "C&L"?

barney answers

Well, I mean, after all, “Alf”…. I don’t know, there is a joke there somewhere, but… I am in drama, not comedy.

I love hissy fits… especially when they are directed at the very folks who bring me to a point of equal/or greater frustration. There is a cure. We just have to find it.

The cure is a work in progress but when I get it thought out (with help from Jacqueline Danson, Carole R. Smith and folks like yourself) it will be shared. Please keep checking the site and keep caring.

-- spy master wrote

... you've earned the right to bow out of the fight but if there's anything you feel that fans can do to get more seasons released, or anything, then let us know.

barney answers

Ain’t “bowin’” out so fast. Forgive the grammar… it's sort of my final tribute to the Sarah Palin “effect.” I am going (that’s gonna if you are a fan of the governor of Alaska) to give at least one more try to all this stuff.

Keep checking in on our website for developments.

I am hopeful that 2009 will (along with Barack Obama) give us reason for hope.

-- cheryl wrote

Barney - if we could set up a 15 or 20 minute internet "chat" with Sharon and/or Tyne at FFJ or WebSleuths, it would create excitement and publicity, and help mobilize the troops. It's very easy to do. Posters send in questions to a moderator who forwards them in real time to Sharon or Tyne at a computer. All they have to do is type in their response. It's kind of like e-mail, but only faster. Please let me know if you're interested in pursuing this option.

In the meantime, never say die. It's not over 'til the credits roll.

barney answers

No “die” from this guy.

As to your thought about the “chat” thing… I will paraphrase my old New Jersey pal, Lou Church, and simply say, “it’s in da woiks.”

-- k wrote

I dont understand the reason why a lot of old shows (that were on air in 1980s) are out in usa and europe (we also have Supercar in italian here without any kind of petition and so on) and it could not be the same for Cagney & Lacey.

barney answers

I think, in general, things are just better in Italy. At least they always were for me. I remember my first trip to Siena… well, that’s another story and probably better distributed on a less family friendly website.

The other truth is that, like most American film makers, I know little about the intricacies of the European marketplace. The traditional sources of finance in show business find it is to their general advantage to keep folks such as me as ignorant as possible. They even go to the trouble of having it all done in various languages, which no one can expect an American to follow.

Ciao, K. I will pass on your thoughts to the guys who control the Cagney & Lacey rights in Europe and beyond.

-- les wrote

Well - you have written ' Cagney , Lacey and Me ' . BUT - Any chance of getting Sharon, Tyne , or somebody to write a book about Cagney and Lacey . About the show itself - the episodes , the actors , the anecdotes , day to day stuff - this is what we really want ! You gave us tantalising snippets in your book . Would love to hear more . Still the best drama show ever made though - and you did it .

barney answers

“Tantalising snippets” ey? My God, Les, it was a tome.

Okay, okay, never argue with a customer. I will pass on the idea of Tyne and Sharon getting together to write a book (or books). Frankly, like you, I would love to read it.

Meanwhile I am toying with the idea of writing a Cagney & Lacey “before and after” book. What do you think? Not sure about snippets, though.

-- xanthophyllippa wrote

Can anyone attest to the legitimacy of the DVDs for sale at this online retailer? I'm a little nervous that there isn't any distributor or studio information associated with this item.

barney answers

This is probably too late a reply to do much good… and I promise to try not to have that happen in the future.

I am going to ask Carole R. Smith to interject here with the specific answer to your question about the online retailer so that she can be sued for libel instead of me.

---

Visit the official Cagney & Lacey website

Barney Rosenzweig's "Barney Back 'Atcha" (2)

2008-11-23T12:56:00.000-08:00

In comments on Barney’s blog of friday, march 23, 2007 WIN / WIN:

-- late edition wrote

I have a question, Mr R. I'm in Australia and I know from personal experience that there are a bunch of people out here hanging out for the DVD release .... is there any news about when Region 4 will get C&L on DVD? Thanks in advance for any news you can give Aussie fans.

barney answers

This is a good research question beyond my current pay grade. My worthy (and long-time) assistant, Carole R. Smith, will attempt to glean this information from the sometimes tight-lipped types at MGM/Fox, although (to be perfectly honest) she seems to have a way with them that I never did.

With any luck, Ms. Smith will simply add a post script to this and you will have your answer so that you can happily get back to the Barbie (is it spelled that way?---Does she spell it that way).

-- dusty iuga wrote

I am also writing because I want to speak with you about an animation I am working on. May I could speak with you? Maybe I could send you a DVD? Maybe?

barney answers

That way lies madness. Sorry, Dusty, I don’t take submissions and at this point in my life wouldn’t know what to do with one if I did. I sometimes get paid to read stuff and comment (it’s called what I [used to] do for a living). Now…. Not so much.

Does the expression “out of the loop” animate? I do (occasionally) give out free advice which is worth only slightly more than the amount paid for it. Let’s try doing that on this site and see if it gets too overwhelming.

Let me know more about your project, you (like your age and in what part of the world you reside) and I will see if I can come up with something semi interesting in response. Don’t write anything you wouldn’t want to see on a website.

-- jacksonintl2 wrote

When do we get the next installment of C & L? I've watched the first set 3 times; I'm hungry for more episodes! Is there a calendar for more release dates?

barney answers

There is, unfortunately, no calendar. There is not even a memo pad. To stave off your hunger, prepare yourself for the soon-to-be released quartet of Cagney & Lacey reunion films, “The Menopause Years” in 2009. It is a lovely repast and if enough partake I am betting your menu will soon be even more full of other Cagney & Lacey items and episodes.

---

In comments on Barney’s blog of friday, april 6, 2007 WHAT TO DO :

-- debbie wrote

I also can't wait for your book. I would love for you to autograph it for me. I don't know how you would though.

barney answers

By now you should know. This website provides all the info that is necessary about ordering, purchasing (more important) paying for my book. Autographing it is certainly my pleasure.

Think about ordering more… assuming that by now you already have yours…Publisher’s Weekly calls it a “Master Class” and I get a lot of wonderful comments about it that make me very pleased and proud.

Christmas presents for gal pals, mom? Why not write the New York Times book editor and request coverage on the book? Is this a flagrant enough pitch!? I am trying to get out of the starving author’s club… HELP!

---

In comments on Barney’s blog BOOK FAIR on sunday, April 29, 2007:

-- anne wrote

So when are you gonna hit the Portland or Eugene area? Nice big lesbian population here, guy, I'm tellin' ya!

barney answers

Anne…. You do know how to get a fella’s attention. I like Portland and Eugene. Being a USC fan, Corvallis is not one of my favorites, but I digress.

A trip like the one you suggest requires a sponsor… I am willing to sing for my supper, but there has to be … a supper. The book biz is very arcane and unless you write about Wizards or, in the case of the Portland you describe, witches… or self-help books with a sure fire diet to lose 50 pounds in 50 days… it just doesn’t cover expenses, let alone put food on the table.

Get all those Lesbians in a room…. Let me rephrase that… Gather ye…. No, too flowery. Put a good size group together that will pay some bucks for a luncheon, or whatever, to whichever charity or group you like, invite me up to speak and sign books and a deal can be made.

Stipend is a good word to remember regardless of your sexual orientation.

-- pip wrote

Any chance of a book tour in the UK?! Would love to catch up with you out here

barney answers

I, for one, would love it. For something like that to work, the book should probably have a publisher in the UK. Hey… the rights are available. Shop it around.

Part of the “deal” would be to bring this old guy to London and send him all around to whomever might be interested in getting a signed copy of… all right, I’ll say it myself… a very good memoir. Travel is not one of my favorite things, but I make exceptions for certain places and the United Kingdom would certainly be one of those.

-- Lori wrote

I like the idea of the crew sweatshirts being available. Please let us know when these are available and where we can order/purchase them from.

barney answers

This is about to happen. Keep turning to this website for an update. We will probably tie it all in with the 2009 release of Cagney & Lacey: The Menopause Years.

-- amy wrote

Hi my name ia Amy Arnett. I am from Jackson Michigan. I just wanted to know why no stores have cagney and lacey. My mom was going to get it for me for christmas but the stores she went to don't have it.

barney answers

This has been the bane of the entire process of getting the DVD packages out to an interested public. The problem is that those “in the know”… the so-called professionals who are the itinerant managers that control all the libraries of films and television shows… have developed a conventional wisdom that “vintage television” is a dying business.

They, having effectively killed whatever business there was, then go about proving the business is dead by doing what they have always done (a not-so-good job) which in turn enables them to be right.

It is sort of like what we have been doing in the US for the past 20+ years: keep electing people who hate government and then act surprised when they don’t govern well. I think it is called a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Believe me, Amy, I tried very hard to move these power types with the argument that Cagney & Lacey was not “vintage” television, but rather “iconic” television. It seemed like a better idea than telling them flat out what I thought of them. I was good in the meetings. I think they were impressed to some extent (at least they said they were), but it just didn’t resonate.

It did not translate to sales to the stores with the shelves and, without those, we get frustrated folks (such as your Mom) who can’t figure out where to buy the stuff.

Okay… you’ve found us. We will try to help all the Moms and all the daughters (and sons) who have Moms. Send us your orders for books. I will autograph them.

Try Amazon for the official DVD package that is out there and if you don’t get satisfaction, let us know and we will help.

Keep an eye on this site for the new DVD package of The Menopause Years and some merchandise that just might go along with that. Say “hi” to Mom and thank her for her interest.

You too.

Barney Back 'Atcha

2008-11-10T07:41:00.000-08:00

I'm going to do an occasional series answering your questions in the comments on my blogs, starting with the oldest.

Here goes ...

In comments on Barney’s blog of tuesday, january 23, 2007

A MESSAGE FROM EXECUTIVE PRODUCER BARNEY ROSENZWEIG:

-- melissa wrote

I'm hoping that the "menopausal" tv movies will be released on their own very soon also. If the 1,110 total signatures on our online petition is any indication, the dvd sales will be a highly successful venture!

I'd love to get an autographed copy of your book...any chance of a book tour that would bring you down south?

barney answers

The quartet of movies that we lovingly refer to as “The Menopause Years” should be available before 2009 reaches the mid-way point. I am hoping for “by Mother’s Day” but have little control beyond delivering the various elements that are needed in as timely a fashion as I can.

As to any eventual success… my grandmother would say, “from your mouth, to God’s ear.” Finally… as to a southern book tour. I love doing them and I have no aversion to any particular part of the country, but am still trying to figure out how to have one of these “tours” do more than pay the dry cleaning bill of the clothes I wear on the day of the tour.

It is a new business for me and I am an old dog trying to learn as fast as I can.

-- pip wrote

I loved The Trials of Rosie O'Neill and haven't seen them since their original run here in the UK. Any chance of that being released on DVD? Or am I just pushing my luck ;-)

barney answers

I only control the rights to The Rosie series in the USA and, even here, there are complications to which I periodically devote some time.

The success of the upcoming release of our quartet of C&L reunion movies will (hopefully) make it clear to me that it is worth going through the various machinations that are required in order to make this happen.

I am not altogether sure (as there have been no rumblings of a release of The Trials of Rosie O’Neill by anyone other than me, but (I think) at this time the Disney Company has “inherited” the world rights (outside the USA) from the now defunct MTM company with whom I was once in business.

-- k wrote

Ciao Barney. Please remember about all the fans in Europe (I am from Italy) and release Region 2 Dvds too... Thanks a lot.

barney answers

I wish I controlled the rights to the series in Italy… well, truth to tell, as long as I am wishing, how ‘bout a villa in Tuscany? I try to keep the pressure on MGM (which owns the underlying rights to the series) and FOX (the MGM designee to make and release the series on DVD).

They are a uniquely resistant group, but… let’s face it… had the first batch done better in the market place, these folks who like making money every bit as much as anyone would respond with more.

I don’t think they did a very good job with the first release (surprise, surprise) and I fought like mad to have the entire series put out on one large DVD package, rather than piecemeal, but they are in control and (for reasons that do not hold up under scrutiny) believe they know best.

Here’s another wish: Wish I could have answered this in Italian.

-- june m wrote

Secondly, a question: I have heard of two release dates for the show--1) the whole series (125 episodes) will be out by winter (according to a comment placed on amazon.com who got the news from USA Today) 2) Season 1 will be out on DVD on May 8. Can you tell me which is correct so that I can get the appropriate set?

barney answers

The thing wrong with getting back to you so belatedly is that events tend to answer without my aid. The Winter of 2008 is almost upon us and I have not heard anything from MGM about the entire series coming out on DVD.

It would be a lovely Christmas gift (to me, if no one else), but if that is to come to pass it will be the winter of 2009. I would admonish against the holding of breath, but would say that if the release of “The Menopause Years” goes well this spring (summer?) then… can winter be far behind?

-- steve in oxford, england wrote

Oh...you'll know this...will the C&L DVDs be released in the UK?

barney answers

I love answering questions for folks in Oxford, England, but then I am one of those used-to-be kids who grew up on movies such as “A Yank at Oxford” and “Goodbye, Mr. Chips.”

The DVDs of the series first 22 episodes with Sharon Gless as Cagney (as opposed to the very first episodes with Meg Foster as Cagney or the first film of C&L with Loretta Swit as Cagney) should already be there in the UK and being gobbled up by all our fabulous British fans.

I know of no plans to release the quartet of reunion films (The Menopause Years) in the UK so for those you will have to check this website incessantly… with a (here’s a clue you can keep under your mortar board) eye for earlyish 2009.

-- cheryl & tina wrote

I would love to hear your response to the question about release dates. I have heard August this year and then at amazon it states the release is 2010. I have not heard aobut a complete box set, but that would be my very favorite if I had to choose.

barney answers

Mine too… That is, a “favorite” being a complete boxed set. It could happen, but I cannot imagine where Amazon gets its news. Amazon barely knows that that there is a “collector’s edition” of my book, which (as long as it has been mentioned) can be purchased even cheaper through this website.

-- robbie wrote

Any chance that "The Trials of Rosie O'Neill" will be released on DVD? That was a beautifully orchestrated show. And, with the erratic scheduling of that show by the network, I haven't had as many opportunities to see all the episodes of that one as I have of C&L ...

barney answers

I am glad you asked, but would be even gladder (is that a word…? Don’t think so) if I had a firm answer. I pledge to redouble my efforts to get this back on track (it almost happened a year or so ago) if I get any sort of sense that the effort, expense and exposure to various legal problems is worthwhile.

I think the best way to do that is to make some kind of judgment about the responses we get on this website and on the success of the DVD of “The Menopause Years,” coming out in 2009.

And, lest it go unsaid, I agree with you completely that “The Trials of Rosie O’Neill” was a… how did you put it?….” a beautifully orchestrated show.”

-- no1lulufan wrote

i LOVE the show and im just so pleased youve managed to get this all together!!! the 1 thing i really wanna know is though when are you and the fab girls coming to england?? i would love to see you here and who knows i maybe lucky enough to meet you (ahh man i hope so that would be so cool!!)

barney answers

It would be “cool” and undoubtedly will be (cool to cold, that is) as the soonest I might be in England would be this January when Sharon is there doing some film work.

When I know, this website will pass it on. Meanwhile who is the no2 lulu fan?

-- jenn wrote

hi barney, please could you get the rest of the c & l series on dvd i think it is a fantastic show

barney answers

Would you believe I, too, think it is a “fantastic show”? Of course you would. Trust me, Jenn, I am trying. But there are powerful forces (apathy, stupidity, morbidity and corporate executives) who just will not get out of the way.

My answer to them is to try to show them up with a 2009 release of Cagney & Lacey: The Menopause Years and have it be successful enough for them to wake up and smell the opportunity. Stay tuned.

-- philippa wrote

Any chance of getting "The Trials of Rosie O'Neill" on DVD in UK-friendly format?

barney answers

When I made “The Trials of Rosie O’Neill” I dealt off the UK and all world rights outside the USA to MTM. They were then a viable television entity that controlled rights to many of the finest television series ever made: “All in the Family”, “Hill Street Blues,” “St. Elsewhere” etc.

So much for pedigree; they went belly up and their stuff (including “Rosie” and the C&L reunion movies) were sent off to new owners. In the UK… and don’t quote me on this… I believe the new owner is the Walt Disney Company.

Barney's Thoughts on Panama

2008-10-25T04:11:00.000-07:00

Back from Panama! Nice people. The dollar is the primary form of currency, you can drink the water, and Johns Hopkins has a hospital in the capitol city that takes Medicare from American citizens. It was off season, but I had no problem with the weather… although the reader should remember, I LOVE Miami and tropical nights.

I went to this equatorial country on an exploratory trip because I was told it was the next great spot for potential American “ex-pats.” That, being “too late” for Costa Rica, I should know that Panama is “Costa Rica five years ago.” Like Rick Blaine, on coming to the desert community of Casablanca “for the waters,”… I, too, was misinformed.

The Panama Canal… get your arms around that, those of you who have taken the knowledge of this thing…this place…as something not of the essence to the 21st century and understand: this particular water passage way is incredibly relevant to international commerce. And it is being expanded… widened… to accommodate the super freighters and tankers of the future. This latest expansion will be complete in 2014 and the anticipation of that has had the community of Panama City on the Pacific Coast of this tiny country in a boom economy for the past five years… a boom that may well continue for at least another five years and (possibly) beyond, but I would worry that it is closer to a coming bust than a continuing boom. Panama City is Miami of several years back… on steroids.

Without a calculator, the high rises are beyond the ability of anyone to count. Where else does one need window treatments for privacy on their 34th floor apartment? The proximity of these buildings to one another almost makes it possible to borrow a cup of sugar from one neighbor in an adjacent building no matter how high above street level. The density all but defies the imagination. The national “bird” is the crane… the construction crane. These machines are everywhere, allowing their handlers to just keep building and building. The cost of cement has more than tripled in the last 12 months. One might inquire what international economic crisis? The business of Panama City is business and it is truly international with Canadians and Russians buying apartments to sublease to visiting foreign executives and their families.

There are unhappy side effects. The city is dirty. Not the dirt of a third world country, but the dirt of construction, digging and the driving of pilings. It is the dirt of trucks carrying heavy loads that dig up the road ways, frustrating any attempts at moderating traffic while spewing dust and grime everywhere. And there is no end in sight.

There is an exception…sort of. There is the old section of town: Casco Viejo. It is quaint…beautiful, really, with its tiny 300+ year old plazas and night time views of the new towers of the new city. I saw a couple of small apartments that were partially refurbished, but like the rest of the neighborhood…only partially refurbished. Prices were comparable to what one might pay way uptown in Manhattan and certainly a higher cost than any loft apartment in downtown Los Angeles. And if you were to make this decision, where would you get the workers to finish the refurbishment in a community where everyone who knows how to lay brick, or wire an apartment or even paint one, is under contract for the foreseeable future to the developers who are building the new part of town and its high rises? And the coast line? The beaches? The former is brown… muddy… probably a result of all that Canal digging. The beaches are out of town… some, quite a ways out of town. 90 minutes to two hours up the Pacific Coast are some developments, villas, and townhouses on semi-finished golf courses and there are beach front lots starting at about $1,000,000 per parcel. These are a lot lower than California or Miami Beach lot costs, but still plenty pricey. There is an abundance of villas and small homes in these semi-gated communities in the $300 to $400 thousand range and I found one really elegant resort, The Intercontinental at Playa Bonita, about twenty minutes outside Panama City. No golf or tennis, but a great pool area and a lovely beach to compliment the very good looking spa. The rooms of this low rise and sprawling resort are nice and well appointed but at a minimum rack rate of $400 per night for a room and $800 for a small suite I am not sure who would make that trip when Resorts at Miami, San Diego, Boca Raton and Naples are much closer and no more expensive.

I was so smitten with the Intercontinental resort at Playa Bonita I was willing to overlook the bad mildew smell in my own Intercontinental accommodations in Panama City even though both Hotels were built and owned by the same developer. I even inquired about the planned residential section that this self-same developer is starting just down the beach and up the hill from Playa Bonita. They showed me the architects’ rendering of the soon-to-be-started structure. I could not contain myself: “Shame on you,” I said to the salesman who smiled at me as if he did not understand. “Muy feo,” (very ugly) I clarified. The pictures he was showing me were grotesque in their aesthetics. And big… 250 units in the one structure and worse yet, it was to be one of nine such building being planned for construction over the next 15 years in a sort of Stonehenge-like configuration. To me it looked like a mining town in some Arnold Schwarzenegger futuristic movie that takes place on planet M-42. I could not imagine any government allowing their beautiful countryside to be so defiled, but Mr. Berns, the developer in question has been at this Panamanian game a long time and I can only guess at his connections with people in power.

I kept looking, going to the Caribbean side of Panama and the city of Colon at the other end of the Canal. Way too industrial and the heavy (and obvious) police presence led me to suspect that crime might be an issue in this part of the country. From there I visited the countryside along the beaches just outside a charming (and somewhat primitive) community called Portobello. Much of it was beautiful and full of rustic charm, but here I confronted what I have so many times before… the reality that the life of an expatriate might just be beyond my abilities; that my idea of a third world country is Miami and the south Florida beaches.

Sometimes you just have to face who you are and what you are really capable of. It just might be that my idea of roughing it in my old age may be a small apartment a short cab ride from the beach, carrying my own aluminum folding chair, and the closest I will get to Central America would be to wear my made-in-Ecuador Panama hat.

Barney Rosenzweig
October 24, 2008

Barney Blogs from Panama

2008-10-07T09:26:00.000-07:00

It has been a busy week. Very little time to reflect on all that has happened in light of my all but immediate departure for Panama. Yes, that is right, Panama… as in Canal. There is no truth to the rumor that I am going there to buy a hat... although I just may buy a hat. (Did you know that the hat we all refer to as the “Panama Hat” is, in reality, made in Ecuador? But I digress.) There is also no truth that I am going to look for sanctuary in the event of a John McCain victory. It is true I cringe at the thought of another four years of Bush policy wonks, but I am not crazy. I am going to Panama for research. I want to find a sanctuary much like the one I have on Fisher Island in Florida, but that is more affordable. My health is such that I feel I must make some contingent plan for a much longer life than I heretofore ever anticipated. I will report my findings.

What has this to do with the busy-ness (almost spelled that business… think about that) of the week? True, there has been packing, checking weather forecasts, explaining myself to incredulous family members, and dodging all the USC haters who were just too happy after Oregon State revealed my team to be all too human, but—the fact is—much of the time was taken up with the resultant hubbub over my last blog. The response that so many of you had, and the subsequent calls by the LA Times and their production of an article about our fans and their loyalty to this show called Cagney & Lacey, was… well, gratifying.

I wish I had been more articulate with the Times reporter who called me for some comment on the whole thing. I am out of practice. No one interviews me very much any more and so I fear I was not as succinct as I might have been. Keeper of the flame is one thing, but I don’t want to be any crazier in that assignment than I am about anything else. Still, I have my standards: if someone wishes to write an article about Thelma and Louise and say that it was the best partnership of two women… ever…. in the history of Hollywood films or television, I would swallow hard , but I think that would be it. I mean, I would disagree, but… hey… to each her own, right? Everyone is entitled to an opinion, and taste (after all) is a subjective thing.

You only get into trouble with me when you say something like Thelma and Louise was the first female buddy film or that it was ground breaking (meaning first). That is where I get protective and territorial. I see that as revisionist history and that is what boiled my oil when I read Lynn Smith’s piece in the LA Times. I hated that she lumped my show in with Police Woman, but (again) there is no accounting for taste. What I got all pissy about was the “groundbreaking” thing vis-à-vis Prime Suspect and Cagney & Lacey.

I confess to being a bit rough on Ms Smith, and have written her a note of apology for going over the top with my reaction, but before and beyond that there is some good news: Ms Smith wrote about my initial reaction… and yours. The LA Times saw fit to publish it and I learned something in the Smith article about another instance of fan outrage over a similar some-time-ago “dissing” of Cagney & Lacey… in Daily Variety, no less! Fans took on the flame-keeping mantle without my cheerleading them on and I didn’t know about this until I read it in Lynn Smith’s article. So thank you… and thanks to Ms Smith for making me aware of that and something else: this Web thing has value. I am not always as clear about that as I might be. I guess it is a generational thing, but the Internet has not yet really fallen within my comfort zone. I like it better now.

Adios from Panama y muchas gracias a todo. Hasta luego. I’ll be back ’atcha in a matter of weeks.

Barney Rosenzweig
October 7, 2008

SAY WHAT??!!??!!

2008-09-21T04:59:00.000-07:00

I am pissed. You might ask, what else is new? You would be wrong to do so, for I have been a relatively benign blogger for most of the life of this humble website. No more. It is one thing to suffer the itinerant managers that indifferently control the libraries of virtually all of the television industry, but it is quite something else when a by-liner at the Los Angeles Times (I won’t defame the journalism profession by calling this person a reporter) does such a poor job of research (read none) as that presnted by Lynn Smith this weekend. What this individual wrote would be terribly offensive to this writer (and quite possibly this site’s readers) even if it wasn’t printed in the paper of record for the world of entertainment and bound to be syndicated throughout the civilized world.

I refer to the Saturday, September 20 Los Angeles Times CALENDAR front page and the article Tough, like Jane, where Lynn Smith writes only peripherally of the forthcoming EMMYs and the cop show nominees Glenn Close (Damages), Holly Hunter (Saving Grace), Mariska Hargitay (Law & Order: SVU) and Kyra Sedgwick (The Closer) while holding out for singular praise Prime Suspect, its creator Linda La Plante and its star Helen Mirren as the instigator of such roles.

Now, I am a huge fan of both La Plante and Mirren but that not the point. Ms. La Plante is on record referring to Prime Suspect as an homage to Cagney & Lacey or that the English BAFTRA Award producers flew Sharon Gless to London to present Ms La Plante her award when it was time to honor Prime Suspect as their “best dramatic series.” One might also ignore that upon receiving her EMMY for playing the famed English inspector, the fabulous Ms Mirren’s first words as she held her statue aloft were, “Thank you, Cagney & Lacey.” Still, it is hard to ignore, given that Ms. Mirren is always gracious about this and never lets folks forget that fact -- even showing up for a recent Cagney & Lacey tribute at The Museum of Radio & Television in Beverly Hills (now known as The Paley Center for Media) where she was photographed by various professional photographers, including many from the local and international press. One would think a TV reporter for a paper such as the LA Times might have noticed that.

The omissions, egregious enough all on their own, are something I might normally let pass, but Ms. Smith, not content with a sin of omission, felt she must go on, adding:

“Darker than American shows such as Police Woman and Cagney & Lacey….”

Now, I admire Angie Dickenson as much as anyone, but this linkage to Police Woman was pushing my envelope. Ms. Smith went on “…Prime Suspect, which was created by La Plante and starred Helen Mirren, is considered ground breaking for placing a tough mature and flawed woman at the helm of her own unit. Supported by legions of female fans, Prime Suspect practically established a new television genre…”

That did it: “ground breaking,” “tough mature and flawed woman…” “legions of female fans…new television genre..."

Say, what!!??

I take this as serious revisionism and, at the very least, very poor representation of historical fact. I guess as long as she stayed in the singular Ms Smith thought no one would notice. Still, if Ms. Smith was up on her subject she would know Cagney & Lacey was not only about women and their partnership… but was also about two singular women, Christine Cagney, who preceded Jane Tennyson as head of her own unit by years while demonstrating every bit as many flaws as her English counterpart, and Mary Beth Lacey who kept up with her partner’s frenetic pace while managing home, children, husband and a night school education was equally as ground breaking as a lead character in any television drama...ever.

Ms Smith then referenced the two acting awards Prime Suspect had garnered. Laudable though that is, it is only one-third the EMMY awards owned by the fabulous duo of Sharon Gless and Tyne Daly. I could go on, but believe I have made my point. This blogger encourages its readers to comment to the Times writer lynn.smith@latimes.com and to invite her to write to this website for her free autographed copy of Cagney & Lacey…and Me. She will learn something about the business she has chosen to write about if she reads it.

Barney Rosenzweig
September 21, 2008

BARNEY THE BLOGGER IS BACK AGAIN BETTER THAN EVER

2008-08-29T14:43:00.001-07:00

Before the summer is completely forgotten, I want to report in on what this guy did… and didn’t do. Mostly I went to camp, fat camp. Many of you have seen pictures of me in my book, but now (God how I hate to be the one to tell you) I don’t look an awful like that 185 pound guy of 20 years ago. The worst of it can be seen on the video blog put out on the Cagney & Lacey 25th reunion fete at the Museum of the Moving Image out in Beverly Hills. Imagine Orson Welles still alive and a whole less talented and you’ve got a pretty good picture of where I found myself late this spring. Enough. I packed up my car and headed straight north to Durham, North Carolina and Structure House.

Durham, of course, is home to Duke University… a great institution known for many things including round ball, gothic buildings, great academics, a fine medical school and a long history of treating obesity. I didn’t go there; went to Structure House instead which is walking distance (if you are into exercise) from the great campus of Duke. Why? Because, it was explained, Duke was largely focused on obesity as a medical problem and Structure House attacked the issue as a psychological one, including an emphasis on behavioral modification. Hey…get “shrunk” while trying to shrink, what a concept. It seemed like a plan, and it turned out to be a good one, but not right away.

The Structure House folk kept after me to talk to me about my “relationship” with food. Now, I have more than enough ex-wives who can testify to the idea that relationships are not my strong suit, and besides… I don’t have a “problem with food,” I just like to eat… a lot. They were treating me like I was an alcoholic or a druggy and the Structure House structure was a whole lot like what I imagine a rehab center to be like… except there were no locks on the doors and no matrons in the halls.

I always define myself as “a good camper.” I always forget that “a good camper” is what I am at the end… NOT at the beginning. I need time (sometimes days) to get my sense of place, to stake out my territory and to “get with the program.” More than one shrinker at Structure House predicted I would not make it through the first week of the four I had booked. I scoffed at the notion of attending a class on binge eating or a meeting of Over Eaters Anonymous. I was as full on “in denial” as that guy in the Minneapolis men’s room. I railed about the lack of frills at the facility, the mediocre food, the questionable science, but I noticed that on 1500-1600 calories a day, I wasn’t really hungry, and whenever I did feel like eating other than meal time, the Structure House requirement that I write down what I was doing at that time and why I might be feeling that way, sort of spoiled the moment and killed the urge to eat. I started going to classes and stopped napping while there. I also started to lose weight…. Over twenty pounds in four weeks.

I went to my first OE meeting and felt comfortable with the people there of all sizes and shapes. It pleased me to think that if I ever got into trouble with weight while at home or on the road, somewhere in whatever town I would be in would be having a meeting I could attend so that I might get my head screwed on a little straighter. I made some great pals there and, interestingly enough it was well into week three before anyone asked me what I did for a living or what kind of a career I ever had. When the word got out about “Cagney & Lacey” there was a little “buzz” on campus, but not much. I hadn’t been secretive about my career or whatever celebrity I enjoyed in the past… but it just wasn’t something we talked about much. Truth to tell, had not something come up about my having to watch TV one night because “my wife’s show (‘Burn Notice’) was premiering” I don’t think the subject of show business would ever have been broached.

I went to see the Durham Bulls play baseball and found myself at my first athletic event in over 60 years where I didn’t have a hot dog or peanuts. I wasn’t hungry and some sugarless gum got me past all the fast food outlets with hardly a whimper. At Structure House I liked the psycho dramas, the group therapy, the nutrition lectures, flirting with the nursing staff and all the studies and talks about mindless eating. It all became so do-able. Maybe an hour of exercise per day (some did a lot more, but not me), the above mentioned classes and those basic calories… all stuff I could do at home, or maybe even on the road. It was a great experience for me. It is a terrific program to which I commend all my pals and readers who are doing battle with excessive weight. No one, by the way, is there to lose five or 10 pounds. This is a heavy crowd and at a starting weight of 263, I was one of the smaller folks there. But I got a great education in the four to five hours of classes and group sessions I attended daily, got shamed into taking those walks and swims and NIA classes (non-impact aerobics) and truly came to appreciate the no frills approach as well as the recognizable and portion controlled tasty foods that were served.

I had a lot of separation anxiety about leaving and had I not already put a down payment on two weeks at the Hilton Head Health Institute in South Carolina as a way of decompressing on my way home, I would have stayed throughout the summer. All things end… one way or the other. Onward to Hilton Head… an easy five hour drive from Durham so I checked out on Sunday morning and checked in Sunday afternoon to my new digs near the shore.

Compared to Structure House, Hilton Head Health Institute is a luxury resort. It is a very pretty part of the USA and the facility is pretty close to state of the art without being over the top. It is also a lot more expensive, but still half the price of Golden Door, Cal-a-Vie or maybe even a comparable program at Canyon Ranch. I didn’t like it as much as Structure House, but a lot of that was just me and my feelings for the intensity of the experience I had at the place in Durham.
One thing I really didn’t like was the food. Not that it wasn’t delicious, but what it was, was largely unrecognizable and… therefore… something I didn’t feel I could replicate at home or at any restaurant I might frequent. They do teach you how to cook some of the stuff, but I was not ready for that conversion. I was into the “learning” and the experience of my new found understanding of my thing with food and, although what lectures they gave were good, there wasn’t enough for my tastes. A side light was that I wasn’t “on campus” for an hour before everyone knew there was a Hollywood Producer in their midst. It is, I think, a factor of money. Once you start going to slightly more expensive places, people put an extraordinary value on just what it is you do (did) and how you can afford to be there. It was not a problem, just something I found interesting. Overall it was a good, if not great, two weeks. I lost some more weight and reached my goal of a 10% body weight loss by summer’s end.

Would I go back to Hilton Head Health? Sure. It was a healthy vacation, a nice break, a sort of good thing to do while taking care of yourself and not coming home with an extra 10 pounds. But if I am ever in trouble again, I will get myself back to Durham and Structure House.

Summer is now all but over and there is another 20% of my weight to come off if I want to look like those pictures in the book. I may not make it, but it is worth the try… a pound a week for one year. The goal is reasonable and in addition to mollifying my vanity, I will find it a whole lot healthier life-style. It couldn’t hurt.

On to USC football and my first season with very few (if any) hot dogs.

Barney Rosenzweig

BARNEY THE BLOGGER IS BACK AND WE'VE GOT HIM

2008-08-18T14:46:00.000-07:00

This could well be titled “What I did on my summer vacation,” it could also be an apology for not doing this better or (at the very least) more often. I cannot explain my reticence to create “blog” entries on some kind of a regular basis, but I am resolved to improve. I am also determined to try my hand at some back and forth stuff with readers of this space on at least a bi-monthly basis so do respond and tell your friends about the web site.

I would also be remiss if I did not thank so many of you for your support of my memoir on the series. The book is doing well and this fall the Library at the University of Southern California will allow me to take advantage of that alumni connection by feting me and my book at an on-campus “Friends of the Library” luncheon. I am honored by this and never mind the fact that niece, Bridget Gless (a member of the library board), got the ball rolling on this for her favorite aunt’s husband.

Back to my theme: early in the summer I received a lovely and enthusiastic fan letter from a Ms Cathy Finn in Newfoundland sent via my publisher. She asked some questions that she suggested I might deal with on my blog so here goes:

a) Is there any possibility that we will ever see the complete series released on DVD (she then went on a bit about the “bloody owners of the show,” but then who could blame her)?

Well, yes Cathy, there is the “possibility,” and I promise to get a better, fuller explanation about it all this fall when I am out in California and dealing with the beast. It is hard. We are, for the most part, in the hands of itinerant managers of which the majority have never been in any other aspect of show business, have never participated in a production of any kind, and for the most part have never even seen the contents of any of the thousands of boxes that are in their control. You would be hard pressed to find any of the current “owners” who even now could tell you if it was the blonde or the brunette that played Cagney or Lacey and, as bad as that is, the people at Wal-Mart and at Target and other stores are even younger and even less informed. The youthful “buyer-manager” of video material at these outlets was, only a few weeks ago, in charge of “buying-managing” rakes and lawn mowing equipment. It is the store’s way of educating their middle managers to all aspects of the business, while… just between us… keeping them in one spot not long enough for them to learn how to steal. Add to all of that the fact that DVD packaging and selling of ancient video material is a dying business (and guess who killed it) and “possibility” is just about all there is. I will promise to stay on the case and do what I can with the one or two somewhat caring folk at MGM (owners of the underlying copyright) and who just might be willing to wrest this special show from the hands of the warehouses of Fox who (for the moment) has the license to distribute this stuff no matter how poorly they perform. Meanwhile, before too much longer, the material I do control: the quartet of reunion movies I like to call “The Menopause Years” will soon be out and available for purchase. As we have dates and places we will let you know.

Now, more from Ms Finn: b) Would Sharon and Tyne work together again should the right project present itself?

Absolutely. In fact they were planning to do a play together this winter in London’s famed West End, but Sharon’s lack of availability… due to the happy success of her USA series, “Burn Notice”… has forced that to a back burner. The two women remain great pals and both appreciate the very special history and chemistry that they share.

c) Why do you think the Brits took so to Cagney & Lacey? The show was popular in Canada, too, but the UK audience seems to have a permanent fondness for the pushy Irish-Catholic blonde and her sensible blue-collar partner from Queens. Curious.

Well… to be overly honest… I haven’t a clue. But thank goodness they do. Even today, “Cagney & Lacey” is playing on television in the United Kingdom. It has had more first run exposure on the BBC than any American series in history and when the BBC had its 50th anniversary celebration only two stars were invited from America: Sharon Gless and Tyne Daly. Readers of my book will recall that I was standing backstage at that anniversary event when Paul McCartney asked Sharon for her autograph! We were always a much bigger hit in the UK than in the USA and I really do not know why that was or, for that matter, still is the case.

For more of my summer shenanigans I will ask that you return to this website with some regularity. Carole R. Smith will put a banner or something on the home page to let you know whenever a new one appears and I swear it will happen with a lot more frequency from now on. I will also redouble my efforts to get Ms Daly and Ms Gless to share some of their recent adventures… some HAVE to be printable.

Barney Rosenzweig
Posted 8/19/08

It's me Carole Smith using Barney's blog space

2008-02-29T14:06:00.001-08:00

Hi - I'm blogging on this site today and Barney will be back here next week with a new and expanded blog. The book sales are doing well and we've received orders from as close as New York and as far away as Singapore and New South Wales.

Sara Waxman, the wife of the late Al Waxman (our beloved Lieutenant Samuels) is the Publisher and Editor in Chief of DINE (Sara Waxman Tastes and Tells) in Toronto (http://www.dinemagazine.ca/)
has commissioned Barney to write an article on the Miami restaurant scene.

Saw the brilliant Tyne Daly in the premiere presentation of Award-winning playwright, Edward Albee's, new play, "Me, Myself and I" at the McCarter Theatre Center in Princeton, NJ at its last performance of a limited six-week engagement and rumor has it that the play will be going to Broadway in the fall. If and when that information is confirmed, we'll post it. Barney and Sharon saw it on opening weekend. Incredible.

New Beginnings at End of November

2007-11-26T04:10:00.000-08:00

I am happy to report that we are getting some orders for the new “collector’s edition” of Cagney & Lacey… and Me. It is always nice to learn that folks are still turning into this website, even though we have all been a bit remiss about keeping it current and lively. A good many of these book purchases are from our fans in the UK which, frankly, we did not anticipate when calculating the inclusion of costs of postage in the flat price of $30. Never mind…those early birds just made a good deal. The redoubtable Carole R. Smith is doing some quick calculations and we will post a slight caveat for postage on future purchases outside the US of A which will come into effect once we (you should excuse the expression) post them on this web site. In the interim, you folks outside the US will not bankrupt us so feel free to order fast.

The USC football season is coming to an end…. There is some progress on the horizon for release of the quartet of Cagney & Lacey reunion films we all refer to as “The Menopause Years” and I am looking forward to 2008 as only someone who has experienced 2007 could.

I have but one New Year’s resolution, and that is to do a better job of keeping in touch via this website. “More and better blogs in 08.” It may not get me elected to public office, but it should at least pay part of what is due to those of you who have been so faithful to this cause in miniature.

I may not even wait for ‘O8, so please do keep checking in. If there is something in particular you want me to write about, let me know. Updates on the future release of more stuff on DVD will always be at the top of the list. I will push and pull and use all my influence with the dynamic duo, but Sharon Gless and Tyne Daly just may be two of the busiest 60something actresses in show business. Ms Daly is about to open in New York in a new Edward Albee play and Sharon is completing a multi episode commitment for the hit TV series Nip/Tuck. The various labor disputes in Hollywood and New York keep these two women on their toes, but they remain busy. I will look for quiet moments to get them to add to their blog sites.

Until next time…

Barney Rosenzweig

Apologies to Thomas Wolfe

2007-07-02T08:25:00.000-07:00

It has been a while since I have written anything for this site. Not true. It has been a while since I have had anything for release to this site. The truth is I have written…more than once, but…well, it is a matter of tone.

I live very well. I have a nice life and that, in no small respect, is partially due to a lot of you, the fans of Cagney & Lacey. No one has to take up a collection for me and I’m most definitely not someone for whom you should feel sorry. I emphasize this because, before submitting the last thing I wrote for this website, I asked a few intimates what they thought of what I wrote. They all said it was whiney and self-pitying. I didn’t mean that when I wrote it, didn’t see it when I read it, and certainly did not intend it to be that. But that is what they saw and so I ask that you please understand, this is not a pout.

Why write at all? I feel I owe you some answers and responses as well as updates. Here goes.

Thomas Wolfe wrote that one cannot “go home again,” yet the temptation to revisit a past as rich and full as the one I experienced during my last years in television was more than I could resist. It resulted in my first book, Cagney & Lace …and Me, and the repackaging of 22 episodes of the series on DVD through MGM/Fox.

Measuring the success of such an undertaking on strictly a financial basis turns out to be folly. No book with such a niche market as my memoir could sustain the kind of legal fees, insurance costs, publicity expenses, printing and shipping fees, distribution charges, and sales commissions that are built into such a venture. You have to think of it not as a business, but as a labor of love or, if you will, an ego trip.

The more potentially exploitable DVD market for such a jaunt down memory lane turns out to be more limited than you might think. The video marketplace for older television programming is dying. The retailers have been satiated with a glut of product and no group of itinerant managers in charge of distributing this kind of material can be expected to do the heavy lifting that is necessary, especially when one must factor in their need to husband energies they will have to expend over the next several years on the vast amount of product that fills their boss’s warehouses. It isn’t that they don’t care…they simply cannot reasonably be asked to care enough to make it happen for any one show.

But therein lies the problem and the bottom line factoid…we were not in the stores: not in Wal-Mart, not Blockbuster, not Costco, not Target. Walk into 10 stores in your neighborhood that sell videos and DVD material and you will find that maybe one of the 10 is carrying the DVD of Cagney & Lacey. It is hard with our demographic to rely solely on the internet and Amazon, but that is what we have had to do. Cagney & Lacey averaged a weekly audience of 20,000,000 viewers during its six years on the air. Less than one tenth of one percent came to Amazon to buy. We needed to be in those stores.

To overcome resistance from national chain stores and to find placement on those finite shelves that everyone covets requires a sales force with passion and zeal. Those are hard emotions to conjure for everyone of 150 or so different series that are in that huge MGM warehouse, and it is harder still when none of the sales team has ever been connected with the creation or production of the show, has never seen the episodes, or (as is the case with all too many of them) still don’t know which one is Cagney and which one is Lacey. It would be okay if it didn’t have any impact on the future, but (unfortunately) it probably does.

Fox and MGM will have to decide on whether to go to the expense of trying to launch another season of Cagney & Lacey on DVD. Normal “executive think” is to simply move on to whatever product is next in their warehouse, throw that up against the proverbial wall, hoping it will stick, and to keep doing that until something does. They have a lot of boxes, of a lot of different shows in those vaults, and executives, especially those not vested in the material in the first place, don’t like revisiting their failures. In other words: don’t hold your breath for Cagney & Lacey: Season II.

Thomas Wolfe comes back to mind, but I have to say I don’t regret the journey. I did some good work. I enjoyed writing the book and it was fun to get back on the road with Sharon and Tyne. It was a great high to be Rosie O’Donnell’s guest on “The View” and to hear the audience cheer and to see a line of nearly 400 people cue up outside Barnes & Noble on 5th Avenue in Manhattan. I liked doing the radio show in New York with Joey Reynolds and in San Francisco with Ronn Owens and it was terrific to have Helen Mirren appear at the Museum of Television and Radio event celebrating our show’s anniversary. Seeing old friends among the overflow crowd on that evening put together by Barbara Corday and hovered over by our own Carole R. Smith, was delightful. More than anything else, it was incredible to introduce my 12 year old grand daughter to Cagney & Lacey and for me to review some of those old episodes with her.

Wolfe’s thesis resonates nonetheless. I really don’t want to play David to the boss’s Goliath anymore. I am too old for that piece of casting and (as stated at the outset) have too nice a life to sacrifice much more of it to vainglorious battle.

But, no matter what, this trip home again is one I am glad I made.

Barney Rosenzweig

BOOK FAIR

2007-04-29T11:12:00.000-07:00

BOOK SOUP

On Saturday I had my first book signing ever at the LA Book Fair. It was only 30 minutes of “fame” in that Book Soup stall on the campus of UCLA, but we sold out the 50 copies of Cagney & Lacey…and Me that the book store ordered, and could well have done more if anyone (including me) had the requisite amount of confidence to predict such a success.

We have 200 more books awaiting signature at the Monday night event at the Beverly Hills branch of the Museum of Television and Radio. If we sell out there, I may start to get a trifle big headed…that is, until someone shows me the sales figures on The Da Vinci Code.

I hope by now you have ordered your copy of the book through Amazon.com or BarnesandNoble.com. I am told you can wander over to your favorite book store, but why do that? 99.9% of them will not stock the book (oh yee of little faith) and will only do for you what you can do for yourself and order it with their computer.

For those folks who are wondering, the DVD box of the Menopause Years quartet of films (the only films of Cagney & Lacey that I truly control) will be released shortly. We also have found a stash of the crew sweatshirts from our production of these reunion films and will be offering them for sale as well.

A hard bound gift addition of the book…with some extra features that the current book does not have…will be available by (hopefully) early summer. So, all kinds of good stuff, and all thanks to the continuing interest of so many of you. One couple came all the way from London to attend the Book Fair and the Museum tribute. Another twosome flew down from Vancouver to get their books autographed and to be part of the Television and Radio festivities. It is all very gratifying and, once again, I thank you.

Barney Rosenzweig

WHAT TO DO

2007-04-06T05:09:00.000-07:00

The question keeps popping up, from friends, fans, family and press…”What can I (we) do to help? What can be done to assure our getting the entire series on DVD and not just these first 22?” I have to tell you, it warms this old guy’s heart. Still “old guy” is the operative phrase and I am getting a bit weary of manning the balustrades.

My book is about to come out, I have finally gotten MGM to agree to release at least some of the series, I keep telling Penny at her Marketing Company and the irrepressible Carole R. Smith that I want to stop beating the drums, that I just want to relax and enjoy the “experience” of the Cagney & Lacey 25th anniversary. Of course, there is the fear that if I do just sit back, there won’t be any experience to…well… experience. “Never,” someone once wrote (I think it was me) “trust a studio publicist with unlimited product to release someone else’s stuff.” (It probably was me as, in retrospect, it doesn’t sound all that elegant). Still the point is well taken.

So what can you do? You want to see more of Tyne and Sharon. Maybe you want another generation to know what you already know--and maybe some things you do not--about Cagney & Lacey. And maybe, like me, you would like to have the entire series in collectable form on quality controlled DVD format.

Fox and MGM are putting out 22 episodes of our first year with Sharon Gless as Cagney and Tyne Daly as Lacey. There are 97 more episodes with this dynamic duo, six more from the early/early days with Tyne still as Lacey, but Meg Foster as Cagney. And then, there are the five movies: the quartet of Menopause Years films with Tyne and Sharon and the so-called pilot of long-ago with Loretta Swit playing opposite Ms Daly. What of all this “extra material?” It could all be yours…or not.

What if we give a party and nobody comes? Let’s face it. It all depends on how well this first release does in a competitive and diminishing marketplace. Manufacturing and marketing these items can be expensive. I have spoken to Fox/MGM of sales in the hundreds of thousands of units and they have countered that they would “settle” for sales in the tens of thousands, but either way (my hype being correct or their lower target level being reached) more DVD packages will be on the way and fairly soon…unless, of course, those sales levels are not reached.

So, what can you do besides buy the DVD and tell all your friends? You can help by making more people aware of the Mother’s Day release. No, you don’t have to canvas your neighborhood as you did in the old days when you were trying to get the war in Vietnam ended or (if you are as old as I) get Adlai Stevenson in the White House. What would be much more practical…and so much more hip…would be to contact your favorite retail outlet (Costco, Best Buy, Wal-Mart, Target or whatever) to tell the manager of that store that you are looking forward to his/her stocking the Cagney & Lacey DVD collection and how you and your friends are all eager buyers. On April 12, Fox is sending out a preview DVD to those buyer/managers to see how many they will order for their shelves. Timing is everything.

Better yet, you could write to your favorite daytime TV show (Oprah, The View, Ellen, Today, Good Morning America, Regis and Kelly) letting them know you would like to see Sharon and Tyne as guests, not only to talk about what they are doing these days, but to celebrate the Cagney & Lacey 25th anniversary, to take a look back at a quarter century of women on television. Face it, many of the bookers of these TV shows were in diapers when Cagney & Lacey was on the air and we have yet to be asked to appear on any of these shows. Perhaps they may need reminding that there is a fan base out there, not only looking for new stuff on the two women, but to exposure of the new DVD package in such a way as to make folks aware of the release of the series and thus generate the rest of the series on DVD.

Or, you can do what I say I want to do. Sit back, watch what happens and hope for the best. Maybe not.

Barney Rosenzweig
April 6, 2007

Win / Win

2007-03-23T18:33:00.000-07:00

The latest battle in the Cagney & Lacey narrative is over. Who won? We all did. Less than 19 hours after the posting of our last blog, MGM and I have reached a happy agreement that the DVD package, put together so diligently by the new FOX/MGM team, will be ready for release in the USA for Mothers’ Day 2007 as originally planned.

The impasse could have been even shorter except for the fact that I was tired this morning and elected to take a leisurely breakfast on my lovely island at a spot where the cell phones don’t work very well. Had that not been the case, MGM and I could have wrapped this up hours sooner. Never mind. The breakfast was delicious and I needed the time to clear my head.

You were all terrific. So many of you came to the fore as soon as it became known that there was a problem. Amazon.com pulled the pre-sale DVD package, stating release was postponed until 2010, but then, despite its name being a tribute to strong women, Amazon.com just does not know our fan base or just how much the press continue to take an interest in our saga. We are grateful to all of you and to those journalists who either ran stories right away or who have vowed to watch this whole process much more closely in the future.

What an amazing tool this Internet thing is. Of course, it helps that I am not looking for work and therefore feel I can just sort of “tell it, as it is” (or at least, how I see it). I am trying to remember…help me out here…was I much different when I did need the job?

Back to the Internet. Your response was instantaneous. Within a half hour of the posting on the East Coast, the intercom lines between MGM and FOX were already buzzing on the West Coast. Columnists on the Internet and at various major papers, including my own Miami Herald, dropped everything to jump onto what was a pretty interesting story of a pissed off producer and some clumsy handling of interior PR by a couple of major corporations.

“Dirty linen” I suppose is news. I like to think it was more than that. I think it was a valuable lesson…or lessons…learned by a whole bunch of people. I, for one, learned that this website is not the flop I thought it might be. I also was reminded that Cagney & Lacey has always been a good thing on which to hang one’s hat and that David & Goliath is, after all, a great yarn.

More important is that I believe MGM has learned some things and that these lessons will serve them well in what I hope will be a long future for them. What I feel they came to understand is that those boxes, on those seemingly endless shelves that they own and/or control, are more than “product” to those of us who created that stuff in the long ago. We may not be a model for Mother Theresa, but like her, many of us feel defined by our work. I know that when my time on the planet comes to an end, the obituary in the New York Times will lead with, Barney Rosenzweig, producer of Cagney & Lacey...

I think MGM and Fox both understand all that a little bit better today and it is important that they do, because, if they think I am a pain in the ass, wait until they start handling product produced by Steven Bochco, David Milch, John Wells, J. J. Abrams and David E. Kelley.

In the not so long ago, producers of vintage stuff didn’t live as long as the aforementioned, let alone yours truly and studios could just pretty much do whatever they might want. But now…even though they may have the legal right to autonomy…they can no longer ignore the moral and ethical rights of the passionate people who create this material and who still care enough to see it through yet another incarnation. MGM has now demonstrated to me they understand this and will act accordingly and it makes me smile for a whole bunch of reasons…not the least of which is that nearly 50 years ago, when I started this road into show business, that road began at the East Gate entrance of the then venerable MGM Studios. And now, all these years later, I am very okay about having that road come to an end with the very same company.

That’s it. For now. We will keep you informed. You have proven to be great allies and we…not just me, but Sharon Gless, Tyne Daly, Barbara Corday, Carole R. Smith, Paul Gendreau, Penny Sansevieri and her team at Author Marketing Experts, we all thank you for being there and for caring.

Barney Rosenzweig
March 23, 2007

A MESSAGE FROM EXECUTIVE PRODUCER BARNEY ROSENZWEIG

2007-01-23T21:13:00.000-08:00

Welcome to our web site and the Silver Anniversary celebration of our television series, CAGNEY & LACEY. Where, you might ask, have we been all this time and why are we coming back ‘atcha now?

It all started a couple of years ago when Torrie Rosenzweig, my youngest daughter and a film maker in her own right, became pregnant with the newest Rosenzweig on the planet, Zoey B. Torrie mentioned she was beginning to look for a job (something not too difficult in order to put aside a few bucks to tide her over during the then about to be baby’s first year). My kid’s specialty is the documentary form, for which she has won many awards, but when she needs a payday she goes to work on those film biography shows one sees so much of on various cable channels.

“Why not do one of the film bio shows you do so well on two fictional individuals?”

I am ever the helpful father and none too adverse to self-promotion as some of you might remember. I went on, “You could treat Cagney and Lacey as if they were real people…I could help line up all the clips you would need and I am sure Sharon and Tyne would cooperate.”

Torrie is an imaginative film maker, but she is also a daughter and so I was not too surprised to see her eyes roll when she answered, “Dad, that is your thing.… It’s not for me.” My shrug was not fully executed when she added, “How many years has it been, anyway?”

I used up all my fingers and toes and then realized…not as fast as she…that we were then approaching our 25th year. We both agreed I should do something about the anniversary.

So here we are, all those years later. Sharon Gless and I are in the 16th year of our marriage, Tyne Daly is still one of our closest friends, the memories are clear, if somewhat selective, and we have stuff to share; this website being only the beginning.

This Spring MGM and Fox Home Entertainment will release the first 22 episodes starring Sharon Gless and Tyne Daly on DVD. If that is a successful venture more will be coming from them. They are timing their release for Mother’s Day so now you can go somewhere other than a See’s Candy store for dear old Mom.

My book, Cagney & Lacey…and Me will be out and available from IUniverse, Amazon.com and other venues, with collector’s editions through this website. Oh yes, the subtitle of the tome is “An inside Hollywood Story OR how I learned to stop worrying and love the blonde.” Depending on how you all react to all of this pent up nostalgia there will be more on the way, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Tyne Daly and Sharon Gless will be regular visitor/contributors to all of this as…we hope…will be some of the writers, other cast members and creative contributors to the show. We have lost many in the last couple of decades. Al Waxman (Lt. Samuels) and Sidney Clute (La Guardia) are no longer with us, nor are recurring directors Ray Danton and John Patterson. They have passed away as has Barbara Corday’s erstwhile partner, and co-creator of the show, Barbara Avedon. Shelly List succumbed to cancer a few years back and Jack Guss, my close friend and first season story editor (when many of the pages were truly blank) has been gone longer than I care to remember. We will, on this site, often take time to remember these folks fondly.

As to our creative troika of Sharon Gless, Tyne Daly and yours truly…I have been, for the most part, happily inactive. Since C&L there was the TV series “Christy” which I produced, along with C&L alumni Tyne Daly (she won an EMMY on this show too), Pat Green, Kathy Ford, Chris Abbott and Ken Wales. I helmed the Sharon Gless series, “The Trials of Rosie O’Neil” (for which La Gless got her second Golden Globe) and umpteenth EMMY nomination and where C&L alums Reza Badiyi, Ray Danton, Joel Rosenzweig and Tyne Daly all came to play. I also did the quartet of “Cagney & Lacey” reunion films, which we lovingly call “The Menopause Years,” and there was a series for Jeff Sagansky at the then PAX Network, “Twice in a Lifetime,” on which C&L grads, Liz Coe and Al Waxman, did some great work.

Tyne stayed busy, winning a TONY for starring on Broadway in “Gypsy” and garnering another Broadway nomination for her sterling work in the dramatic award winning play, “Rabbit Hole.” Besides the stuff in the preceding paragraph she was (of course) brilliant for six seasons in the CBS drama “Judging Amy” which got her another EMMY to add to her “Christy” and “Cagney & Lacey” collection. On “Amy” she worked for Executive Producer Joe Stern, another C&L alumnus.

After “The Trials of Rosie O’Neill," Sharon did several TV movies, starred in two different plays in London’s famed West End (creating on stage the role of Annie Wilkes in Stephen King’s “Misery” and then opposite Tom Conti in Neil Simon’s “Chapter II”) and won over those very tough English drama critics in the process; was featured for five seasons on the ground-breaking SHOWTIME series “Queer As Folk,” and the soon-to-be released BBC mini-series, “The State Within.” She is now doing a pilot for the USA Network.

More to come…but only if you want.

Be sure to let us know your level of interest by filling out our survey and, as we used to say in the pre-cyber space era, “Stay Tuned.”

All the Best,

Barney Rosenzweig