THREE BAGS FULL

If you want to be charmed … even, quite possibly against your will … then you might be just the candidate for The Sheep Detectives. For me it was not an easy sell; I am not a Hugh Jackman fan (FYI, he’s in it); nor am I particularly into talking animals of any kind (although, if ewes will forgive me, I am partial to lamb chops).

Puns and prejudice aside, the movie’s opening is objectively slow and particularly low-key with practically nothing more going on than a Hugh Jackman monologue. Somehow, I hung in. The jokes began to play. The characters became more believable … even, I dare say, interesting … and soon …

​​​SPOILER ALERT

​BE CAREFUL BEFORE CONTINUING ON

 

… the Hugh Jackman character dies. So, for me, the picture started to work and by the end I was … well … if not totally captivated, then at the very least, somewhat charmed. I willrecommend this motion picture if you are ready for a G-rated sort of evening and/or could use some cleansing after the angst from The Bear (Hulu) or the gore from The Boys (Amazon Prime). This film could do for sheep what the now 30-year-oldBabe did for pigs … although, candidly, I remain more than a little partial to bacon.

You may stream The Sheep Detectives on Amazon Prime or purchase it on Apple TV. 

As to other shows with animals on the marquee, season five of The Bear surpasses even my own high expectations. The season opener, directed … as are most … by Christopher Storer, is a real tour de force for this filmmaker who found a way to make this oft-times claustrophobic series unusually cinematic. The cast, as you have undoubtedly heard, is simply terrific. This FXseries is most certainly must watch TV … with this final (5th) season, arguably, the best of the bunch.

House of the Dragon completes this week’s trilogy of entertainment featuring an animal in the title. Like Game of Thrones before it, this HBO series has its origins in A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin; both are lush-looking and extravagantly expensive.

I returned to this franchise reluctantly, primarily because of the betrayal I felt as an audience member to the short shrift given the all-important conclusion of Game of Thrones by the show’s creators, D.B. Weiss and David Benioff. It was as if they were in a rush to run off to their new career opportunities rather than honor the show that got them there and it did not sit at all well with this heretofore loyal viewer.

Having been a devoted fan of those 73 episodes over an eight-year span, that bitter aftertaste no doubt accounts for why I am so late in the game returning to Westeros and the 26 of the eventual 34 episodes of House of the Dragon currently streaming on HBO.

The resemblance between Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon does not take long to wane. The cast of this latest version (a prequel beginning 175 years before Weiss and Benioff arrived at the Seven Kingdoms) is not as compelling as its predecessor … understandable since Game of Thrones, by virtue of getting there first, pretty much had its pick of every top actor in the United Kingdom with the result being that House of theDragon had to settle for the leftovers, which … by the way … are still an impressive group.

The drop off in the writing in this newer show is noticeable, mostly in the way the storytelling (especially the opener of season one) was structured. D.B. Weiss and David Benioff, despite their much-criticized mismanagement of the ending of Game of Thrones, would never have allowed the kind of clunky beginning that almost had me turning off House of the Dragonmid-episode #1. 

Once again, I hung in and … not unlike Yellowstone, or any other TV soap opera … House of the Dragon began to weave its spell, overcoming the clumsy replacement of key actors mid-stream, without so much as an optical morph from the younger to the slightly older. 

I had other “issues” with the new creative team, but … in the final analysis it did not matter much. That is the nature of these “family” dramas. No matter how far-fetched the atmosphere, or how high or low the dragon might fly, ultimately, like The Pitt, Dynasty, Dallas, or any number of their forebearers in day-time soaps before them, these series all come down to family drama. Add that to the medium’s ability to draw us in, to bring us …over time … to care about a leading character(s) in such theatrics, and you have the essential difference between the on-going television series and the stand-alone motion picture.

Adding a sheep, a bear, or a dragon to the title may or may not be a factor depending on the audience. Me? I find it sometimes helpful for these notes to have a theme. Accuracy is also important, and there was a mistake in my last piece concerning actor Stephen Macht for which I must apologize. 

I wrote that, among other things, he co-starred with Sharon Gless in the TV mini-series, Centennial. My bad. It was TheImmigrants, produced by Bob Cinader for NBC, which had Macht and Gless working together for the first time rather than, as I wrote, John Wilder’s adaptation of the James Michener epicin which Gless starred with the likes of Robert Conrad, Richard Chamberlain, Raymond Burr, Barbara Carrera, Richard Crenna, Timothy Dalton, Andy Griffith, Mark Harmon, Gregory Harrison, David Janssen, Alex Karras, Brian Keith, Sally Kellerman, Donald Pleasence, Lynn Redgrave, Robert Vaughn and Dennis Weaver. I am told cattle, horses, sheep, bison, and beavers were also featured which, happily or not, gets this piece back on theme. I thought it pertinent to point that out.

 

Barney Rosenzweig

 

THE GUEST STAR

I am at that time of life where my wife oft inquires if I am certain I do not want some kind of memorial service or a celebration of “the life of” kind of party. Each time I reiterate my one desire … the only thing I want. That one thing is for her to do all she can … short of an outright purchase … to see to it that my obituary appears in the New York Times. That’s it. It is the only memoriam I want. That is how highly I regard that publication.

I was famous enough thirty years ago to have my obit in the Times be all but an absolute certainty. Now, past my prime … professionally as well as personally … that publication’s interest might well be in doubt.

When I write how I cherish responses to my Notes From A Warm Island as if they were reviews from that revered New York publication, now you might have a fuller appreciation of just how important your comments are to me.

Still, as much as I love to read those responses, my “policy” is to not respond but rather to file. True, occasionally, I break my own rule, but it is rare when I do so. Today features a major exception. I am compelled to do even more that simply respond because of an email from an old friend, actor Stephen Macht.

More than a friend or an actor, Mr. Macht was the star of my pilot for ABC’s, American Dream about which much is written in my forthcoming tome, Before and After Cagney & Lacey; for multiple seasons he was Christine Cagney’s serious boyfriend, he also played Sharon’s leading man in James Michener’s Centennial, written and produced by John Wilder, and he was the male lead in the San Francisco production of the play A Round Heeled Woman, starring Sharon and based on the best-selling novel by Jane Juska. You might also remember him as the Harvard ethics professor who in the TV series, Suits, gave such a tough time to the leading man (played by Stephen’s son, Gabriel Macht). In his spare time, Stephen studied to become a Rabbi, subsequently presiding over the marriage of Torrie Rosenzweig, the youngest of my three daughters, to her husband of over 10 years, John Coldiron.

Stephen is also a reader of these Notes From a Warm Island who wrote me about my article on the movie, The Way We Were, wherein I referenced my own remembrances of the McCarthy era which was the backbone of the Arthur Laurents’ screenplay of that fabulous film. Here is what Stephen Macht wrote, unedited, exactly as he sent it to me:

My Father Warned Me About McCarthy

I was eight years old.

My father stood in front of our black-and-white television and pointed at the screen.

On it was Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Without taking his eyes off him, he said quietly,

“Stevie… never let a man like that gain power.”

I didn’t ask why.

I didn’t understand what he meant.

I simply knew…

my father was afraid.

Years later I learned why.

My father had been one of the young lawyers who joined Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Working for the National Labor Relations Board, he believed that the rule of law rested upon something fragile:

Facts.

Evidence.

Due process.

He understood that when accusation replaces proof, when intimidation replaces persuasion, when fear replaces judgment, democracy begins to lose its footing.

An eight-year-old cannot understand constitutional law.

But a child can recognize moral seriousness.

The warning entered me…

long before its meaning did.

Decades passed.

I was cast as John Proctor in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario, Canada.

Every night I searched for the man beneath Miller’s words.

Not a symbol.

Not a martyr.

A man struggling to remain truthful when fear had become more powerful than truth itself.

Then one evening, after a performance, I walked out the stage door.

An elderly gentleman wearing a bowler hat was waiting for me.

His wife gently touched his arm.

“Don’t do this,” she whispered.

He stepped toward me anyway.

“What do you want?” I asked.

He said nothing.

Slowly…

he rolled up his sleeve.

Tattooed on his arm were the faded numbers from Auschwitz.

For a long moment neither of us spoke.

Then he looked directly into my eyes.

“You played Proctor as a Jew.”

I began to weep.

He had read me.

Then he asked quietly,

“Did you know they sold Jews for two golden candlesticks?”

I didn’t understand.

He was speaking about one seemingly insignificant exchange in The Crucible.

Proctor tells Reverend Hale:

“Since we built the church there were pewter candlesticks upon the altar… But Parris came, and for twenty week he preached nothin’ but golden candlesticks until he had them.”

Most audiences hear a complaint about a minister’s vanity.

That survivor heard something else.

He had lived in a world where human beings themselves had become less valuable than things.

Where people could be numbered.

Reduced.

Exchanged.

He wasn’t telling me how to play Proctor.

He was telling me that I had unknowingly told his story.

And suddenly…

I understood why.

Not because I had consciously set out to play Proctor as a Jew.

I hadn’t.

I had played him through the moral imagination my father had planted in me when I was eight years old.

Long before I understood his warning…

I had absorbed it.

My father recognized the pattern.

Arthur Miller gave that pattern dramatic form.

A survivor of Auschwitz recognized it in my performance.

Only then…

did I recognize it in myself.

Years have passed since that evening at Stratford.

Yet every so often, as I watch the public life of our country, shadows race across my mind.

Not because history repeats itself.

It never does.

But because it sometimes rhymes in ways that make the hair stand up on the back of my neck.

I hear echoes.

Not the same voices.

Not the same faces.

The same temptations.

The same seduction of certainty over evidence.

The same willingness to divide the world into the righteous and the condemned.

The same temptation to mistake accusation for proof.

The same pressure to mistake loyalty for truth.

I do not mean that history has returned.

It hasn’t.

Every age is different.

Every leader is different.

Every crisis is different.

What returns are the moral questions.

The names change.

The century changes.

The human heart changes far less.

And in those moments, I find myself back in two places at once.

An eight-year-old boy watching his father point at a flickering black-and-white television…

and a grown man standing outside the Stratford Shakespeare Festival while an Auschwitz survivor quietly rolls up his sleeve.

The years collapse.

The warning and the recognition become one.

That is why I still shiver.

Not because I believe history is repeating itself.

But because I know how easily the human heart forgets what it has already learned.

My father saw one such moment.

Arthur Miller gave it dramatic form.

A survivor recognized it in me.

And whenever those old shadows pass across our common life, I cannot help but remember my father’s finger pointing at the television…

and wonder whether we will recognize the warning—

even as history has already begun to shout the question.

Who are we?

It has taken me a lifetime to understand that my father was not merely warning me about one man.

He was teaching me how to recognize a pattern.

He was teaching me that the health of a democracy depends not only upon the character of its leaders, but upon the moral vigilance of its citizens.

Some truths enter us before we possess the words to understand them.

They wait.

Sometimes for years.

Sometimes for a lifetime.

Then one day…

someone who has suffered enough to recognize them…

reads us.

And suddenly the child, the father, the actor, Arthur Miller, and the survivor become part of the same completed action.

That is why I shiver to this day.

Not because my father was right.

Not because the survivor praised my performance.

But because, in one unforgettable moment outside a theater in Stratford, I realized that my father had not merely warned me.

He had formed me.

Stephen Macht

Odd Indeed

As I have gotten older … and even more curmudgeonly than I was when I was in my middle years … (a hard thing for those who knew me then to imagine, but it is true nonetheless) … my attendance at events … even something as simple as going out to the movies … has diminished greatly.

Mostly, I find attending a movie these days more than a little aggravating.  I readily concede, the popcorn at a commercial theatre is deceptively better than the kind I get at home … yet not so much better as to in any way compensate for those folks checking their cell phones in the dark while the picture plays.

There is also the matter of digital projection. If I am going to see a movie digitally, I might as well be comfortable at home watching on my 85” TV screen, indulging in whatever snacks whenever I want, and only occasionally having to chastise a neighbor for looking at their cell phone while … without commercial interruption … the film goes on … either on TCM, by Blu-Ray, or via the app I have on my home screen as a result of my membership in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

I last attended a movie theatre on that well-publicized weekend of Oppenheimer and the homage to Barbie back in 2023. I wrote about both films at the time, along with a screed about the substandard management of the Regal Cinema in Miami Beach. That theatre has since (understandably) gone out of business.

A lot has happened since that weekend: a national election, a changing of the guard in D.C., a new war in the Middle East, a national championship for the New York Knicks for the first time this century, the Ukrainians continuing to survive the Russian war machine, soccer (excuse me, football) becoming a very big deal in the U.S., a major realignment in college sports … most significantly with the Big 10 and the SEC … and antisemitism became a thing … again.  Oh yes, and Christopher Nolan made another movie … The Odyssey.

Nolan’s film is a box-office phenom. A giant among pygmies. The most talked about motion picture since the double bill of Oppenheimer and Barbie. Big … really big. Big enough to get me out of my living room, off my Island paradise, and into a movie theatre with 70 mm projection. (Note: I deliberately avoided IMAX. Not only are those theatres sold out into some distant date, but I also had no desire to endure any post-theatre neck pain caused from scanning from side to side as if I were at center court at a three-hour tennis match.)

Gables Art Cinema, in the Florida community of Coral Gables, provided exactly what I sought. Watching film, projected from reel to reel, whether 35- or 70-millimeters wide vs the digital image, has been said to be as different as listening to music on a vinyl recording as opposed to the same melody on a tape deck or CD. The presentation at the movie house in the Gables proved to be pristine.

Despite all that, I can sum up my view of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey in one word: disappointment.

You can stop here if you do not want to read about the banality of the dialogue, the unevenness of the casting, the lack of anything resembling “heart,” or the soul of what should have been a great movie. This one is all flash and dash … like a marvel comic book … except, at least in those comic books, the hero has an “origin story.” That story of origin goes a long way to making the lead more interesting … relatable … even, maybe, human.

I know, I know, mostly all you have heard are wonderful things about the movie and here is this old cranky guy trying to save you money and, in the process, raining on Mr. Nolan’s parade. I must here remind you of my praise for Oppenheimer three years ago. I have no “jones” about Christopher Nolan but I do worry, if this is what he did with the money he made on his previous film, who knows what he will do with all the lucre from this enterprise?  

In my experience, I have found that some folks … and most filmmakers … benefit from being reigned in a bit by having someone to whom they must answer. Nolan demonstrates with The Odyssey that, like our current White House maven, you trust him with unchecked power at your peril.

Homer created this piece over three thousand years ago. It has stood the test of time. I am led to believe Emily Wilson’s translation of a decade ago … the first by a woman into English … is, in a word, fabulous. None other than Claire Danes (Homeland) narrates the audio version. Reason enough, right there, to participate in the narrative.

Folks, I am willing to bet neither Homer’s nor Wilson’s teenage Telemachus ever once called Odysseus “dad” ... something he does in the Nolan movie … a lot … and the film contains a plethora of relatively modern swear words from Nolan’s mundane script as well.

The costumes ring relatively “true,” the effects and action sequences are all right up there with any of your lushly produced superhero movies but beyond that one must ask … why? What’s it all about? Where is the heart? What is the meaning? Why not use a narrator to bridge the gaps and give the story some perspective? What happened to all the sex and lyricism of … if not the original … than Ms. Wilson’s translation? How was this hysteria for tickets at the box-office created, and where can I find the marketing genius responsible for all this hoopla for my own Before and After Cagney & Lacey, coming out this September 30 and now available for pre-sale at Amazon?

Enough. How best to sum this up?

As a 20^th century Trojan from the University of Southern California, let me paraphrase Laocoön, a Trojan priest, who (according to Virgil) around 700BCE, spoke to his fellow citizens in ancient Troy, saying:

“Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.”

Translation: Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.

 

Barney Rosenzweig

THE WAY IT WAS

Donald J. Trump has raised the specter of communism as the “greatest threat” that America has yet to face. Not the Russians, the Iranians, income disparity, the cost of living, nor the fact that most Americans cannot afford a home, let alone health care, but … communism. That is the threat. That is the thing about which we must all be wary. Well, I must say, if nothing else, that has a familiar ring to it.

I was in high school when then-Senator Joseph McCarthy claimed to have a list of communists who had infiltrated the State Department; that list was never produced, but remnants of that awful time cascaded into my undergraduate days at the University of Southern California during the late 1950s, as well as after that into my career in show business.

The so-called “Hollywood Ten” predated my tenure in “the business,” but I worked, and became friendly with, director Martin Ritt, writer Mel Levy, actors Lee Grant and Howard da Silva. All of them had lost some of their most precious years for building their careers and sustaining their families because of (as it turned out) the nonsensical rantings of one crazed member of the U.S. Senate. That one Senator, along with the nation’s subsequent “Red Scare” and the blacklisting that followed, was all it took. At this juncture, one can only wait and wonder at how impactful this current President’s message of singling out “the other,” will be. So far it hasn’t augured well for Hispanics, Muslims, Asians, LGBTQ, or Jews.

An interesting sidebar to all this is that McCarthy’s Chief Counsel for that Senate Subcommittee in the 1950s was Roy Cohn … later to become lawyer and mentor to a youngish Donald J. Trump who obviously learned a great deal at the feet of this “master.”

I bring all this up in what is normally a very non-political forum because of the happy coincidence of turning on Turner Classic Movies on a rainy afternoon in the tropics. There, I enthusiastically discovered The Way We Were on my television screen, presented on TCM, sans commercial interruption.

The movie may have been director Sydney Pollack’s film, the screenplay by Arthur Laurents is terrific as were the stars, Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford. An abundance of riches.

Once again, within minutes (more like seconds if you were there keeping track), I am captivated. The Award-winning Marvin Hamlisch score (with lyrics by erstwhile Hollywood friends, Marilyn & Alan Bergman) continues to enhance scene after scene, but it is so much more than that. The aggregate of the movie … the perfect casting of the two leads, the period, the settings, the wardrobe choices, the screenplay, and the music … intertwined with memories of my own life … all converging as I watch through tear-stained eyes.

If you haven’t seen it … is that a silly thing to ask? I mean, who among us has not seen it? (I know, I know, short shrift yet again for Gen X, Millennials, Gen Z, and beyond.) Well, for those who need a refresher for whatever reason, The Way We Were is more than a romance; it also accurately depicts … and makes comment on … the politics of the 1950s, heavily impacting the Hollywood of my youth.

I was late to the game, arriving at my first job in show business at MGM in 1959 months before my 22^nd birthday; it was more than a year later when director Otto Preminger and actor/producer Kirk Douglas publicly announced screenwriting credit to previously black-listed writer Dalton Trumbo for Exodus and Spartacus. Chalk that off as an anomaly? Need I define what blacklisting meant, where only the most brilliant of those accused of being communists could get work behind the scenes using a pseudonym or worse yet, a substitute … a character who would take the meetings (and the credit) for a black-listed/unfriendly/alleged communist sympathizer?

Folks, it took the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences twenty-five years after Douglas and Preminger’s singular act of courage to finally (in 1985) get around to posthumously award the Oscar for best screenplay to Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson for The Bridge on the River Kwai. They waited that long even though Foreman and Wilson were NOT part of the “Hollywood 10,” but simply two members of the show business community who refused to cooperate with the now infamous House Un-American Activities Committee.

People were all but ruined by those historical and awful events … some, losing not only their savings but their lives. I got through that period unscathed but I can (at least) begin to imagine how painful it would be for those who did not survive to be with me in the present day … watching the Pollack movie … revisiting those years.

Even thinking of those times, especially as I watched the film from the comfort of my lovely living room, brought about pangs of nostalgia as well as an abundance of emotional fodder.

There was my over half-century crush on the leading lady; the uncomfortable remembrance of being rendered literally speechless by a happenstance first meeting of the one and only BARBRA, while walking the very same sands of the Malibu Beach Colony depicted in the film; those Colony days I so longingly recall in my soon-to-be-released memoir, Before and After Cagney & Lacey. (Do I risk the stigma of too much self-promotion? Why not? Don’t trees have leaves?)

There, too, is the recognition that a great deal of the motion picture’s sum total resonated with memories of my own life in Hollywood … for despite whatever struggles I may have written about in my two (… count ‘em … two) memoirs …regardless of the fact that Redford was more athletic, and much better looking … was the epiphany that, not unlike his characterization of Hubbell Gardiner, that in retrospect … paraphrasing that fictional character’s first line in his first novel … most everything in life had come easily for me as well.

The fact that one of my wives looked a bit like Streisand, that I have … more than once in my life … been loved as unconditionally as Streisand’s fictional Katie Morosky adored Robert Redford’s more-than-beautiful Hubbell Gardiner, no doubt contributed to the mix of my emotional response.

The movie also recalled for me that evening, late in my second marriage and even later in Redford’s career … when he was no longer as handsome as he had been … my then-wife turning to me in that studio screening room saying, “… well, Barney, it has finally happened. You are, at long-last, better looking than Robert Redford.”

Meanwhile, back in my living room and The Way We Were: the total commitment of a woman for her man, that level of emotional allegiance … his wonderment at the depth of her devotion … knowing it was something he was somehow not capable of experiencing, coupled … at least at some level … with my own regret at not being able to evoke that kind of vulnerability. It is a thing that … at nearly 89 years of age … still resonates for me.

Sitting in my easy chair on this rainy day in the sub-tropics, thinking of loves past and present, worried about a government gone mad, I find myself reacting as I would bet Hubbell Gardiner would: is this a private diary entry (after the Dr. Fauci experience, is anything ever really private?) or is it something for my readers on Substack? You decide …

 

Barney Rosenzweig 

A NIGHT IN & ON THE TOWN

Nostalgia has been on my mind of late … it “comes with the dinner” upon reaching one’s eighties. First there was my extended weekend going down memory lane with my Emmy award winning television series Cagney & Lacey, then there was another Amazon Prime presentation of an old documentary favorite, Who is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin’ About Him?).

Those “everybodys” include, but in no way are limited to, Robin Williams, John Lennon, Jimmy Webb, Randy Newman, Yoko Ono, and Ringo Starr. And those are just a few of the folks who go on about the gent who may well be the most talented singer/songwriter of his (my) generation. The 20-year-old Harry Nilsson documentary contains a whole bunch of Harry’s singing, some of his shenanigans, and … even though it went on for the better part of two hours … I was sorry to see it (and hear) it end. Consider my thoughts on the piece an unqualified rave.

Not so the other evening … the subject of which also belongs under the general heading of what “comes with the dinner” for octogenarians … especially those of us who attempt a night out with a small gathering of much younger adults … on a Saturday night … at one of the town’s hipper eateries … in the Midtown District of Miami. There is little in life that will bring one to reflect on age or bring on the feeling (realization?) that a crossover has been made to that of the ancients.

It is not the food; it is the sounds that dominate the night. The pounding/repetitive beat, the redundancy of the din with nary a pause between numbers (note: I cannot go so far as to call them songs … or even tunes. It is most definitely not Harry Nilsson). The inability to have any sort of communication (let alone conversation) with anyone who would normally be considered as being within earshot, creates something distinct from what … in my experience … is known as an evening of dining out.

I wonder at the ability of these youngsters to withstand the onslaught of incessant noise. Could it be their hearing has been damaged by too much time at overamplified “concerts” so that they do not notice the clamor of their surroundings, or have they simply become inured to uproar?

It seemed to me apparent that the Gen-Z crowd, who compose the bulk of the establishment’s clientele, have been raised to believe cellphones at the dinner table are somehow the norm; the result: they do not appear to miss … (or, apparently) even expect … conversation as part of the night’s menu.

This observation of mine was to be “good naturedly” belittled by my tablemates … my views of the dinner attributed to either my unwillingness to go with the evening’s “flow,” the inefficiency of my aging ear drums, or both. The words of the Harry Nilsson version of “Everybody’s Talkin’” goes on … “I don’t hear a word they’re sayin’” … on this evening I could certainly relate to that.

The idea that … just maybe … what I was observing was society’s evolution into something more dependent on a collection of cell phone apps than any human need for convivium, was not up for discussion. But then, an absence of discussion … certainly at  this restaurant … seems to be de rigueur.

My apparently antiquated view of aspiring to be an interesting dinner conversationalist fell on … for all intents and purposes ... deaf ears. As to what meets the eye, the clientele of the restaurant is pure Miami. Women dressed in the latest fashions… often beautifully, if somewhat scantily, clad … while the fewer men in attendance were, as is often the norm in the Magic City, wearing jeans and tee-shirts. So much for that.

Was the food good? Yeah… I guess, but it is not the accentuation of the positive one takes away from the evening. Besides the cacophony of sound, the close-to-$200 per person price tag might have seemed objectionable if not for the fact that the arrival of that piece of reckoning signaled a merciful close to the evening.

Outside the restaurant, the neighborhood traffic in the mid-NW 20s of Miami… both on foot and by car … has one wondering, can the era of the rickshaw be far from the new reality? Call me old-fashioned but having to pay $45 to the valet for one’s automobile, then having to wait for nearly a half hour for it to arrive, did little to balance out the evening. Is “Everybody talkin’” about that? If not, they certainly should be.

Perhaps it was this octogenarian’s sense that the gestalt of the restaurant and the neighborhood was that of an adolescent’s playground on acid, coupled with the feeling that if there was anyone there born before the 21^st century, they were doing a good job at keeping that simple fact under wraps. I only know the evening … and I … were getting old … older… very fast.

“One” (is the loneliest number), another Nilsson hit made even more famous by the 70s rock group Three Dog Night comes to mind, not in a morose way, but with the realization there is absolutely no social stigma attached to someone my age simply saying no to evenings such as these … and meaning it.

It is, after all, me and my Arrow.

Barney Rosenzweig

The Weekend That Was

 An understandable supposition by any reader is that there is a certain amount of objectivity, if not expertise, in this pundit’scomments or reviews of movies, theatre, and television shows.

Lots of luck with that. 

As you should have by now concluded, I have my own biases, pet peeves, and firmly held opinions about all sorts of things. The fact that I have been involved with productions in the world of New York theatre, both on and off Broadway, as well as major and independently financed motion pictures, along with at least 300 hours of prime-time television, has only solidified my prejudices as to what is worth watching and what is not.

My standards often reflect those of my generation, which for the most part must be older than that of any collection of readers (as often noted, I have shoes older than most of my readers). It is simply the fact of my being born nearly 90 years ago, and the concurrent disappearance from planet earth of most of my contemporaries.

So, take it or leave it for what it is as I now must tell you that one of my favorite weekends of television viewing was recentlybinge watching something like a dozen episodes of my own Cagney & Lacey television series starring Sharon Gless and Tyne Daly.

It has been forty years since I have seen this oft referred to “ground-breaking” series of mine, and folks … I gotta tell you: it is good. Still. Very good.

Admittedly, I cherry-picked through the 125 episodes, selectingtitles I remembered as either Emmy winners for me as the producer or for Tyne Daly or Sharon Gless. But I also looked at a few I only vaguely remembered and, there too, I was impressed by the uniformity of the show’s quality of performances, the writing, and the overall presentation. 

It is understatement to say it was a most welcome break, especially after the hard and tedious work of editing and submitting my second memoir, Before and After Cagney & Lacey (due to be released by McFarland & Co. Inc. publishers on September 30 but available now for presale on their site and through Amazon).

Call me self-promoter … label me as non-objective … what can I tell you? I cried, I laughed, and even my housekeeper … who was supposedly busy doing other things … let me know how much she enjoyed what I was streaming on my living room TV.

It was not a sudden surge of sentimentality nor a morose need for nostalgia that motivated this binge-worthy weekend. UCLA has selected Cagney & Lacey to honor with a screening of episodes to be moderated by Ms. Maya Montanez Smukler, author of the book Liberating Hollywood: Women Directors and the Feminist Return of 1970s Cinema; I was asked to select the episodes to be screened and to be present for that screening.

I could probably have picked two from memory but there were a couple of “issues.” To begin with, the episodes had to either be written, and/or directed, by a woman. Okay, easy enough since many of our best shows fell into that category. Secondly, because of the size of UCLA’s Billy Wilder Theatre at the University’s Westwood campus, pristine prints of the episodes were necessary for proper projection to the anticipated 300 to be in attendance.

Good news/bad news: Cagney & Lacey was filmed … not videotaped. 35mm negatives exist that are in the vaults of the underlying rights holder of the series … no less than the vaunted MGM studios. 

There is no question that great prints could be provided. In fact, back in the day, I remember renting a motion picture theatre for a week at a multiplex in Santa Monica, California, screening three episodes a night for five nights while inviting the audience to vote for which one we should submit for that year’s Emmy consideration. 

That was in the mid-1980s … we had lines around the blockevery night, the pictures looked terrific up there on the big screen, and we got great national publicity at the time for the stunt.

That week was more than a personal triumph … it was a thrillfor me to sit in that darkened room, listening to an audience laugh at the jokes and react to the performances on screen. It is not something a producer of television gets to do very often … if ever. A special memory.

Here’s the bad news part: MGM’s archival vault is in some undisclosed (to me at least) western state, probably deep under a mountain where my series is in the good company of all those late/great MGM movies of the past.

I was advised by the powers that know of all this that if I want two episodes, I would be wise to pick six … that way I could be assured that they could (most probably) come up with two from that batch.

Okay … six episodes. The challenges were not only to pick what I thought were among our best, but I needed to be sure Sharon Gless and Tyne Daly (who would both be on that UCLA stage with me) would be equally served along with the aforementioned requirement of Ms. Montanez … that the episodes shown be either ones that were written or directed or both by a woman since that was … more or less … the major underlying reasons for the evening in the first place.

Good news, again: women such as Emmy winners Karen Arthur and Sharron Miller had directed a number of our best episodes. Ms. Terry Louise Fisher (also an Emmy recipient along with Georgia Jeffries, Patricia Green, and Shelly List) had writtenmultiple episodes.

If you are of a mind to re-create my weekend’s experience, with some small effort you can find Cagney & Lacey on Amazon Prime and “purchase” each episode for $1.99. You will have to navigate past the four reunion movies we made some years after the series. They were successful in the ratings … and memory is… these were also worthy, but I have not seen them since the mid-1990s, and they were not the shows on which we built our reputation, so take that for what it is worth. 

Unless you are a true Cagney & Lacey junkie, I would also avoid season one since it was not until season two that Sharon Gless came on board and it is those 118 episodes, where she played Christine Cagney, that are the ones most of the world “knows” as the real Cagney & Lacey. It also is worth pointing out that during the six years those 118 episodes were on CBS, no other actress won an Emmy as the lead in a television drama but Tyne Daly with four wins or Sharon Gless with two. Overall, the series accumulated more awards than any CBS drama in history up to and including to this day. 

You want my picks? From season two: “Open and Shut Case,”one of the first co-written by Terry Louise Fisher, “Burnout,” co-written by Chelsea Nickerson. Season three: “Choices,” directed by Karen Arthur, written by Terry Louise Fisher. Season four: “Heat,” directed by Karen Arthur, “Who Said It’s Fair?” parts one and two, written by Patricia Green. Season five: “The Gimp,” directed by Sharron Miller, written by Cynthia Darnell. Season six: “Turn, Turn, Turn” parts one and two, directed by Sharron Miller written by Georgia Jeffries, Shelley List & Jonathan Estrin. Season seven: “Friendly Smoke,” co-written by Shelley List, and “Don’t I Know You?” directed by Sharron Miller, written by Kathryn Ford.

What? You counted more than six. Call them a producer’s half-dozen. For what it is worth, my first book features some interesting details about the making of a few of these episodes … you will have to read Cagney & Lacey … and Me to find out which. Shameless enough? 

The UCLA evening will be October 7, Ms. Gless, Ms. Daly, and I will be on hand. Rest assured, this old man of many prejudices will be sure to bring it up again before the end of September in case any out there want to attend.

 

Barney Rosenzweig

ME AND PONCE

 

In writing something recently about Ted Turner, Turner Classic Movies (TCM), and Gone With The Wind, I was reminded of my earliest days here in the subtropics of South Florida as a refugee from Hollywood.

It was very early on, even before I had developed my formula for success as a then newly retired individual … an accomplishment on which few, who knew me as a Type A Hollywood personality, would have bet money.

I did not know then, nor had I come to fully appreciate, that if one were a truly compulsive individual, it would be possible to be as driven about doing nothing as it was to be equally possessed about doing something.

The year was 1995 … a little more than 12 months after TCM had made its debut …  initially not making too much of a dent. I had just moved to Miami, and like Ted Turner before me, I believed in the potential of the public’s interest in the classic movie genre. I posited I could capitalize on that concept and make a little money, while indulging my ego by hosting and moderating nights at the movies for subscribers at an appropriate local venue.

I thought I found such a place on Arthur Godfrey Road in Miami Beach … an abandoned neighborhood movie house, shuttered for years, that was a mere 10-minute commute in those less trafficked days from my Island paradise.

True, at the time there was zero parking connected to the property, but what put the kibosh on the whole thing was the outrageous rent being asked for the venue. It has been thirty years and the place still has never been rented … proof enough, one would think, that I was right to believe the landlord was/is not a motivated individual.

My idea for hosting old movies and mining my expertise on the subject, giving what I thought might be interesting tidbits about the creation of those films, was put on hold; and then my own Fisher Island township suggested I contribute my time and expertise to such an evening, on the Island, once a week … gratis.

Well, money isn’t everything; my stock market holdings were doing all right and, I reasoned, massaging my ego by harkening back to my days as a guest lecturer at various California colleges, just might be payment enough.

It worked for a while but in one Q&A session after screening Casablanca I heard a neighbor ridicule the film because of the obvious phony airplane model used in the movie’s title sequence.

I had no rejoinder. If that is what was deemed memorable… or even worthy of mention … after watching one of the finest motion pictures ever made … then … I dunno, something about pearls and swine came to my thoughts and I decided, right then and there, to (once again) leave “show business” and remand myself to the beach.

Now and then, I am asked to repeat my Barney’s Nights at the Movies; it is flattering … a nice compliment, but the fact is that there is really no longer any need for those evenings whatsoever. Turner Classic Movies has caught on. It is a great success, proving Ted Turner’s adage that “if you live long enough, you cannot overpay for a library of motion pictures;” and it is right there … for free … as part of your basic cable package.

The movies on TCM run 24/7 without commercial interruption and (often) with great commentary and insight from the various hosts. I hereby fold my tent and defer to their winning recipe.

As to the formula that got me adjusted to retirement, I resort to a metaphor aligned with my upbringing as the producer of something like 300 hours of prime-time television:

“All my wires were plugged in to a television monitor … then one day I detached them all and plugged them all into a Fisher Island monitor instead. The secret? No loose wires.”

Once I discovered that the way this retirement thing was going to work was to fully commit to this lifestyle and not be half in and half out; I found the bliss in an unscheduled life. I am 88 going easily into my 90^th year, fully convinced that a health scare I had sixteen years ago at age 72 would have killed me if I had still been following my early life’s career plan.

Inactivity = longevity. Seems to resonate. Especially when you realize that Ponce de Leon searched for the “Fountain of Youth” in Florida and not Southern California … it all begins to come together.

At least it “works” for me.

 

Barney Rosenzweig