Vital Viewing (The Hannibal Run Edition)

Today's not Conan O'Brien's birthday, but there's reason to celebrate anyway as just the other day The John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts in Washington D.C. presented the man with the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. Now, you may have heard that thanks to an "Executive Order", TJFKCFPA has come under the thumb of the current occupant of the White House, something that may have been on O'Brien's mind as he gave his acceptance speech:

I've watched many of these Mark Twain Prize telecasts over the years, and the recipients very rarely mention the man the prize was named after, so as a Twain fan it pleases me to no end that O'Brien did and did so at such great length.

It also makes me think I should include an accompanying video of Twain, but that's not really possible. Late in life he did appear on film, but it was silent film, so we're denied the Great Man's acerbic witticisms. The best I can do is this:

And that's what Conan was talking about!

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1936-2025

The Mark Twain Prize seems to have passed Ruth Buzzi by, but that's the Kennedy Center's loss and not the loss for those of us who lived through a time when she was a regular, and a regularly hilarious, presence on television. Buzzi was best known for Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In and on that once-well-known rapid-fire sketch comedy show she was best known for her portrayal of homely, purse-battering Gladys Ormphby, but she played other characters as well. Perusing through what YouTube has to offer, the following comedy of manners is what gave me the biggest laugh:

Twain, that old foe of propriety, would have loved it.

Quips and Quotations (Current Affairs Edition)

 

I never felt easy till the raft was two mile below there and out in the middle of the Mississippi. Then we hung up our signal lantern, and judged that we was free and safe once more. I hadn’t had a bite to eat since yesterday, so Jim he got out some corn-dodgers and buttermilk, and pork and cabbage and greens – there ain’t nothing in the world so good when it’s cooked right – and whilst I eat my supper we talked and had a good time. I was powerful glad to get away from the feuds, and so was Jim to get away from the swamp. We said there warn’t no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don’t. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.

--Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, first published on this day in 1885.

One, Maybe Two, Degrees of Seperation

I have a quick question for you.

 What does Mark Twain and...

...Patty Duke have in common?

They both knew Helen Keller!

Twain, then 59, first met the 14-year old Keller and her teacher Anne Sullivan at a literary gathering at a private home in Manhattan in the 1890s. Impressed by Keller's comic book-superpower sense of touch, her only means of comprehending the world around her, Twain became and remained a close friend of hers for the rest of his life.  When Twain found out Keller was having some trouble getting into the college of her choice--schools of higher learning, being much less interested in diversity than they are today, were reluctant to give a scholarship to a blind and deaf girl, even one with her immense intelligence--he persuaded his friend Henry Rogers, a Standard Oil executive who in his off-hours preferred the company of authors to corporate bigwigs, to fund her education. She graduated from Harvard's Radcliffe College with high marks in 1904 and went on to become a world-famous writer, lecturer, and political activist (without going into particulars, her views were closer to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez than to the Koch brothers.)

On to Patty Duke, who came into the world a little more than three-and-a-half decades after Mark Twain left it. As I'm sure many of you already know, Duke played Helen Keller in the stage and film versions of William Gibson's The Miracle Worker (a phrase coined by Twain.) Duke and Keller seem to have met only once, when filming began on Worker, so the photos that emerged from that meeting--I had several to choose from--may have been publicity shots. Nothing wrong with that. The 1962  Arthur Penn-directed movie was more than worthy of the publicity. Duke turned in a superb Oscar-winning performance, convincingly playing not just a blind and deaf girl but a seven-year-old as well, even though she was fifteen at the time!


Without further adieu, and with no sign whatsoever of Mrs. Robinson or the identical twin cousin from Scotland, here's the trailer:

I have nothing particularly profound to say about any of this. I just find it interesting when famous people come into contact with each other.  

I have nothing particularly profound to say about this, either. And besides, Lucy's kid's not as famous as he used to be.

Clearly Clemens

 67-year old Mark Twain in front of his boyhood home in Hannibal, Missouri, and just to show you how commonplace photography had finally become by 1902 when this picture was taken...

 ...here's a photo (probably a snapshot from an early Kodak) of the photographer getting ready to take the photo!

 Whichever way you look at it, Twain attracted a crowd that day. By then he was one of the most famous people on the planet.

 The house is still in existence, though 109 years after Twain's death, it can be a little difficult discerning...

 ...truth from fiction.

Motion pictures were anything but commonplace in the first decade of the 20th century, but a year before he died, when he was 74, Twain managed to appear in one anyway:

 As for what Twain sounded like, I'm afraid I can't help you there. He was a silent film star only.

Quips and Quotations (21st Century Television Edition)

“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.”

--Mark Twain, who obviously never owned a set.

Quips and Quotations (Role Playing Edition)

 

"Where's Papa going with the ax?" (p.1)

When I was growing up, one of the weirdest of the many weird things I did, was to cast movies I planned to direct, or rather, imagine to cast movies I planned to direct, based on books I had just read. Early on it would have been something like Charlotte's Web or Encyclopedia Brown, then when I was a little older, War of the Worlds or A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. When I was in my thirties...Well, never mind that, you're probably wondering where I got my actors. Simple. I just poured through a TV guide for inspiration. Eve Plumb, who played Jan on The Brady Bunch, would have made a pretty good Fern Arable in Web, don't you think? Yes, I'm aware Dakota somebody played her in a recent film version, but I'm talking early 1970s. Plumb kind of resembled the Garth Williams drawing. Just dye her hair brown. Also, Fern's mother consults a child psychiatrist after her daughter tells her that animals talk. There were certainly times when Jan Brady could have used a good shrink. Though in her case more likely because she was upset that all the barnyard animals were paying more attention to Marcia. 

 

I'm also convinced that Russell Johnson, who was on Gilligan's Island, would have made a good Connecticut Yankee. I mean, if the Professor could somehow invent a lie detector machine with only coconut shells and bamboo at his disposal, just imagine what he could have done in medieval England. The possibilities are endless.

"I saw that I was just another Robinson Crusoe cast away on an uninhabited island, with no society but some more or less tame animals, and if I wanted to make life bearable I must do as he did - invent, contrive, create, reorganize things; set brain and hand to work, and keep them busy" (p. 53) 

 

 

  However, I found out later on that a filmmaker doesn't necessarily go through the mundane tasks of holding auditions and conducting screen tests all by themselves. An underling, appropriately enough called a casting director, does all that. The film's director (along with the producer and the the CEO of whatever corporation owns the studio) has the final say, of course, but that underling nevertheless serves a vital role, one that does not yet have an Oscar category all its own. A fellow by the name of Tom Donahue hopes to rectify that with an HBO documentary that came out last year called Casting By. Not long after the movie premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, a well-known director penned  the following open letter to The Hollywood Reporter taking up Donahue's cause: 

In my case certainly, the casting director plays a vital part in the making of the movie. My history shows that my films are full of wonderful performances by actors and actresses I had never heard of and were not only introduced to me by my casting director, Juliet Taylor, but, in any number of cases, pushed on me against my own resistance. People like Jeff Daniels, Mary Beth Hurt, Patricia Clarkson and others who are people I was unfamiliar with. A number of discoveries and careers have been launched by the energies and resourcefulness of my casting director. Not only did I use Meryl Streep for a small part in Manhattan when she was a relative unknown, but at the best my casting director helped start the film career of Mariel Hemingway and Dianne Wiest, a stage actress completely unknown to me but known by Juliet Taylor. I’m particularly difficult in the casting area because the whole process bores and embarrasses me. If it were up to me we would use the same half dozen people in all my pictures, whether they fit or not. Despite my recalcitrance, Juliet has forced me to meet and to watch the work of many new people and to hire people on nothing more then her strong recommendation. Because my films are not special effects films and are about human beings, proper casting is absolutely essential. I owe a big part of the success of my films to this scrupulous casting process which I must say if left to my own devices would never have happened. I might add also, anecdotally, that despite my firm conviction that I could never persuade luminaries like Saul Bellow, Marshall McLuhan, Susan Sontag, Mayor Koch and others to work in my films, the confidence and insistence of my casting director proved more accurate and I wound up getting these unlikely notables.

--Woody Allen

All well and good, but I wonder, does Juliet Taylor ever use a TV guide?

Quips and Quotations

‎When we are young we generally estimate an opinion by the size of the person that holds it, but later we find that is an uncertain rule, for we realize that there are times when a hornet's opinion disturbs us more than an emperor's.

--Mark Twain

Quips and Quotations

There is a good side and a bad side to most people, and in accordance with your own character and disposition you will bring out one of them, and the other will remain a sealed book to you.
 

 

--Mark Twain

Quips and Quotations (Spiritual Enlightenment Edition)

So I was full of trouble, full as I could be; and didn't know what to do. At last I had an idea; and I says, I'll go and write the letter - and then see if I can pray. Why, it was astonishing, the way I felt as light as a feather right straight off, and my troubles all gone. So I got a piece of paper and a pencil, all glad and excited, and set down and wrote:

Miss Watson, your runaway nigger Jim is down here two mile below Pikesville, and Mr. Phelps has got him and he will give him up for the reward if you send. Huck Finn.

I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn't do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking - thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn't seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I'd see him standing my watch on top of his'n, 'stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and suchlike times; and would always call me honey, and pet me, and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had smallpox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he's got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper.

It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:


"All right, then, I'll go to hell" - and tore it up.

--Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain

Quips and Quotations

The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out the conservative adopts them.

--Mark Twain

(I think Twain is using the words "radical" and "conservative" in the broadest possible dictionary sense--KJ)

Quips and Quotations

All generalizations are false, including this one.

--Mark Twain

Quips and Quotations

I have no color prejudices nor caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. All I care to know is that a man is a human being, and that is enough for me; he can't be any worse.

--Mark Twain