Rinaldo

No kidding there about the blonde syndrome. But Zachary Levi was definitely the right call for the final round (the other likely possibility, I think, was Wayne Brady, but he might have been too much into showing off). Even with wasting 10+ seconds on the wrong Jenner, he and Matt made it with room to spare. And Matt got some of those names seemingly out of thin air. Good work.

A Damsel in Distress gets a lot of flak, mostly for coming in the middle of the Astaire-Rogers series and giving us Joan Fontaine as a poor trade for Ginger Rogers. Some of the numbers are weirdly inserted too, like the dance sequence that comes out of three people repeating a spoken line again and again, or Fred singing "A Foggy Day in London Town" in a mist in the countryside. But there are fabulous Gershwin songs, and George Burns & Gracie Allen are just delightful. I don't know of another movie in which they got to show off their dance skills like this, and that funhouse sequence is deservedly famous. It won Hermes Pan an Oscar for Best Dance Direction. (The award was given for only three years.)

Interesting, and thank you for the report; as it happens, I've never seen Born To Dance in its entirety. I do think that Cole Porter is if anything underrated these days, but then I'm one of those older theatergoers, so what do I know. :) Eleanor Powell's singing was dubbed by Marjorie Lane in this movie. She was always dubbed on film, although she had sung acceptably onstage. Such was the attitude of the studios in those days, I guess.

It was Kenneth Tigar.

Pat (or at that period "Patte") Finley -- later Howard Borden's sister on The Bob Newhart Show -- played two characters with confusingly similar nicknames, Sparky and Twinks.

I think I agree with that. Often (not always, of course) the discussion of the content of a movie will be intertwined with what the hosts said about it, with which we may or may not agree. Or how the content of a movie fits with a TCM "theme" for the day or month.

Tonight I heard "David's heart attack didn't come with a warning. So now, his doctor has him on a bare-ass regimen to reduce the risk of another." Oh. A Bayer Aspirin regimen. The other one sounded like more fun, though.

I enjoyed the book start to finish (the end was not what I expected, but grew on me). But I am dubious about it as a movie for a different reason: it's so based on the written word (like The Moonstone, The Young Visiters, Daddy-Long-Legs, Pale Fire) that in my opinion it resists translation to stage or screen. Obviously it can be done, but the process removes what made the book special.

(Not all the titles I listed are among those available on Hulu, but a majority of them are.)

I agree on the relative plausibility -- I too had often thought "didn't they have all the stock footage they needed?" -- after all, they never showed Mary actually entering or leaving the house exterior. But that reason has been repeated widely (which of course is no guarantee of truth), and I too can believe that they were willing to spare the homeowner more annoyance, and maybe spare themselves more conflict and ill feeling, and just avoid the whole thing. If so, it didn't quite work out: that house is still the one people remember, and if visitors seek out any MTM location (which probably fewer and fewer have done each year), that house is what they find. Hey, when I visited friends in the twin cities, that's where they drove by for my benefit, though we didn't stop or gawk or anything. (They also showed me the duckpond and the downtown intersection.)

Additionally, with Phyllis having spun off into her own series as of season 6 (Rhoda had done the same a year earlier), the showrunners worried that there were no scene partners for Mary away from the office. So the move to a new apartment building would, they thought, help with that, with its manager who showed her the vacant unit, and two neighbors down the hall (Mary Kay Place and Penny Marshall). All three were built up in the TV Guide preview article that fall, as recurring additions to the cast. But in fact they never recurred, except for one further appearance for Penny Marshall; the scripts made do with the newsroom gang, plus Georgette and Sue Ann.

It probably wasn't the sole reason, but the story is that the owner of the house whose exterior they'd used for the establishing and credits shots was so annoyed with all the publicity and the sightseers who would drive by or stand outside, that they stopped making it available for new exterior shooting, and put up IMPEACH NIXON signs in the windows to make it unusable. So TPTB had Mary move.

Art Donovan? is that who you're thinking of? I've rewatched pretty much all the Lou Grant episodes on Hulu, and for me it holds up. Even if the type of series has become familiar since, it's just so well written and acted. Fantastic episodes like "Conflict" (conflict of interest), "Scam" (Lou looks for financial advice), "Hit" (Rossi helps a mother investigate the hit-and-run killing of her son), "Marathon" (one day in the city room), "Witness" (Billie goes into protective custody), "Hollywood" (a wonderful noir about a long-unsolved Hollywood murder), "Kids" (children's rights, with a very young Michael J. Fox), "Brushfire," "Cover-Up" (2 stories, contrasting perceptions of "guilty with nothing proved" against "innocent after being proven guilty"), "Blackout" (getting the paper out despite lack of electricity), "Nightside" (Lou sees the night shift), "Pack" (Aunt Flo returns!), "Catch" (Billie falls in love with the baseball player she meets on the job), "Double-Cross" (a personal favorite, about the fate of an artifact from a time capsule). That said, I'll concede that there are episodes that don't hold up so well, and a couple that seemed weak even at the time. These usually are connected with an "issue" that someone decided to turn into a story without feeling that strongly about it, and without building a good script around it.

Maybe this isn't the place to ask this, but when naming Mary's aunt, did nobody stop to think that Mary's cheerful "My Aunt Flo is coming for a visit!" might have a second meaning? Did that euphemism just not exist in 1975? Also, Flo was the only character, besides Lou himself, to recur on Lou Grant. She appeared on an episode about reporters following political campaigns, and got to know Billie Newman (Linda Kelsey).

Chiming in with Milburn Stone, I sometimes teach student composers and have read a fair number of histories and analytical books about film scoring. Friedhofer's work in general, and this score in particular, always seem to be praised.

(You're welcome!) I will say that the whole business with Lou's divorce didn't really work right for me -- the tone seemed off in relation to the show as a whole, and I was never convinced that there was sufficient reason for the marriage to end. None of the books about the show have really gone into it in depth, but I get the impression that they started out wanting to treat Edie's sudden discontent comedically, as something she picked up from slogans and magazine articles (Edie: "You only go around once." Lou: "You're leaving me for a beer commercial??"). But at the same time they didn't want to mock her or doubt the sincerity of her aspirations. So we ended up with a story that was neither good comedy nor satisfying drama. I sometimes wonder if a different casting of Edie might have helped. Unlike everyone else in the cast, Priscilla Morrill didn't seem to have any kind of comedic spark. Would someone like Maureen Stapleton or Lee Grant have been able to give things a different tilt? But the upside of all that was Lou's single status in later seasons, and some of his interactions with Janis Paige, Sheree North, Beverly Garland. Those were fun.

It really was cool, but looking back on the whole series now, it seems fitting that Mary left that fun studio apartment for the last two years of the series (even if the real-life reasons behind writing the move may have been more mundane). That's part of success in one's career and getting older: eventually one leaves the goofy student-type living arrangement behind, and finds a more "suitable" if more generic place to live.

I'll mention (expanding on something Ujio said) that while I'm not really someone who cries at TV or movies -- I may be thoroughly affected, but it just doesn't manifest that way -- there are two scenes in The Wire that invariably make me cry, even if I'm just talking (or even thinking hard) about them. One is sad, one joyful. The first one: Randy's reaction to Sgt. Carver in the hospital. I just wasn't ready for that. (It hits me so hard, I will sometimes watch Suburgatory now, just to see Maestro Harrell playing someone happy and prosperous. I think, he made it after all!! Yes, I'm a dork.) And on the flip side: Bubbles nonchalantly loping up the basement stairs to join his family at dinner. (The tears are coming even as I type this.) That, my friends, is five seasons of groundwork and development paying off profoundly.

aradia22, I believe we can still talk about endings and twists etc. here -- we've just been asked to so that someone else can still read the thread without having major surprises given away before seeing the movie in question. That's what David said when I asked about this in Site Business. Of course there's always some room for different opinions on what's "major," but what's life without some adventure?

Yeah, I'd forgotten how annoying this one was, with two of their worst civilians ever. He could make nothing of "green - ogre - animated - Fiona" (in an amusing breach of decorum, Christina Applegate emitted what we all were thinking: "Oh my God, really?"), or any of his other clues. And she got a good start on the final round, and then threw it away (Sudeikis didn't help). Still lots of fun bits, but not a satisfying segment overall.

I'll put in a word for The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, an unexpectedly faithful telling of L. Frank Baum's quite pagan origin story. The forest in which he was raised is located just outside Baum's land of Oz. Apparently R-B did this twice? The one I remember and love is a stop-motion rendition, but at Amazon I also see a conventionally animated version with different voices. If so, what a strange circumstance.

Rick Kitchen, you may be certain that when I call Santino my favorite, I've seen everything of his that I can get my hands on! :) I've seen all the episodes of Submissions Only (S3E4 is coming up, and this season he's credited as regular rather than recurring!), I saw The Importance of Being Earnest in its movie broadcast (and the funny YouTube bits where he and costar David Furr read authentic Jersey Shore dialogue in Oscar Wilde voices), I looked up the early Good Wife episode on which he appeared, and I traveled to NYC to see Cinderella in January (unfortunately catching his [very good!] understudy's scheduled performance). And just last Saturday I was in NYC again and saw him onstage at last in Act One, playing Moss Hart. So yeah, I like him a lot.

Thanks, joanne. If I'd heard of Sirens, it vanished from memory instantly, so this will make me seek it out. I'm interested to see how a character self-defined as asexual is dramatized in episodic format.

I agree that on that other site, it was hard to know whether to post in (or read) a thread that was about Headscratching, Angry, People Who Should Go Away, or a couple of adjacent ideas. So I appreciate consolidation. I do, however, think that Actors In Commercials is about more than "before they were famous": sometimes famous actors do commercials (and I cheer for them, as it's a nice chunk of change for them). And I did start a "Voice-Over" thread. The mystery of voices that we only hear seemed substantially different from the topic of onscreen actors.

More on the subject of fights: I've learned that a good punch can render your victim temporarily unconscious for as long as you like (without permanent damage), while leaving no impact on your hand. As long as you're a good guy, you can precisely calculate the amount of force needed for any desired result.