It’s a sad fact: many hours of TV history have been lost in order to make room on shelves for large, bulky videotapes. Among the most tragic examples are the first nine or ten seasons of The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson. The years in question are 1962 to roughly ’71, the New York years
Frequent visitors to this site will know that I collect TV shows on 16mm film. Older readers will remember this format from high school, when pizza-sized reels of film were threaded on a projector, the lights would go out and everybody took a quick nap. I stayed awake, and never lost my fascination with the
Peter Lassally worked as a producer on three important shows in late night: The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson, The Late Show with David Letterman and The Late, Late Show with Craig Ferguson. A soft-spoken gentleman, he was in his office on Ferguson’s show six or seven years ago when I asked him what the three
Did you know Sammy Davis Jr. could not land a special on a U.S. network TV schedule in the late ’50s — so he made one in Canada instead? That’s just one of the things I learned Monday from my pal Stan Taffel, 16mm film collector extraordinaire. Taffel is the president of Cinecon, an annual Los
PASADENA, Calif.–“No matter how smart of well-educated you are, you can be deceived.” That’s the message delivered by James “The Amazing” Randi in The Independent Lens production “An Honest Liar.” The entertaining and surprising doc airs March 28 on PBS. At 87, Randi looks more like Jasper Beardly on The Simpsons than Harry Houdini. His
This week, CHML’s Scott Thompson wanted to know how the heck a slob like me gets invited to cool stuff like the Canadian Film Centre TIFF BBQ. Connections, I tell him, specifically my old pal Slawko Klymkiw, the CFC’s Mr. Everything. I give the CFC’s TV program a good plug, mainly because it is an
I was speaking with Late Night host Seth Meyers Wednesday about several things, including his upcoming Toronto appearances at JFL42 as well as his animated series, The Awesomes. We were wrapping up, and I thought I’d better bring up one more subject: Joan Rivers. The latest report suggested she was “resting comfortably.” In Rivers-speak, that was code
It was thirty years ago, my first time in Hollywood. I was at the offices of TV Guide Los Angeles, at the time located on a top floor of a tower on Sunset Boulevard. I step into the elevator, and there’s Jay Leno. This was well before he became host of The Tonight Show. Despite