Wednesday, March 30, 2016

Break out your Disco Bondage Headgear, it's the HMOTD 1st Anniversary Special!


Well, it's our one-year anniversary on Friday, and we're celebrating in style with a special Friday-release episode of HMOTD!

It's our Season 2 wrap-up, and we talk Season 2 of WKRP, answer some Listener Mail, hype some of our favorite podcasts, and talk about the double-edged blade of nostalgia a little bit.

Tune in on Gordon Jump's birthday (that's Friday, April 1) for our Season 2 Wrap-up/1st Anniversary Extravaganza!

Friday, March 18, 2016

Show Notes for HMOTD 025: I Feel A Group Hug Building


REMINDER! Please send your questions for our Season 2 wrap-up episode before this weekend to thebigguy@holdmyorderterribledresser.com!

4:45 Venus's age: I do feel like the scriptwriters tend to elide things a little bit for the sake of clarity, especially around the main characters' ages. We get Johnny's age of forty.... one back in "The Doctor's Daughter," but in the first season episode "Mama's Review," the Big Guy does indeed say, "I'm 40, where I go is my own business!" And our reaction then, as now with Venus, is that the underlying assumption is that each of them mean "at least" x years of age. Venus really does need to be at least 35 for him to be a scholar of 1950s pop culture as we've discussed elsewhere.

6:10 "...you know, like Caine in Kung Fu.": Totally self-indulgent callback to our pilot episode where we also sampled Pulp Fiction.

8:30 Venus's outfit, the WREQ set: See title image above, and I'll add this image with the bubble-neon typeface of 'REQ's logo.


SO '80s radio, am I right? Speaking of '80s radio promotional swag, this little exhibit of bumperstickers from KLOS in Los Angeles is pretty great (courtesy our friends at 2 Warps to Neptune, a fantastic blog of '70s and '80s nostalgia you should definitely check out). Also, KMET in Los Angeles, the station that the film FM was based on, had a logo very similar to 'REQ's. Of course you had to display it upside-down, like the billboard.

Also, the WREQ manager, Jason Realli? That's Bernie himself, Terry Kiser, from Weekend at Bernie's.

10:00 Minicomputers: Esteemed historian of technology Robert MacDougall nails it! The minicomputer of the mid-to-late '60s indeed followed up on the mainframe of the late-'50s/early-'60s.

10:23 Megalo Communications/Clear Channel: Apparently Clear Channel itself was a little touchy about its branding in the aftermath of gobbling up 850 local radio stations, so it is now known as iHeartMedia. I feel so loved, don't you?

12:15: No-DJ automated radio: I did hear a station driving through Connecticut, either in the late '90s or early '00s, where there was no banter, no DJs, and actually no commercials, apparently because they were just starting a format change. I think it was from classic rock to "alternative," which in this period meant a lot of nu-metal and tired mid-'90s MOR alterna-rock. But it was unnerving at that point in history to hear just... music coming out of the radio, with only the FCC-mandated identification to break it up.

13:15 WFNX in Boston: Gone but not forgotten. We've talked about what WBCN was to the Boston music scene in the early '70s; I'd argue WFNX, and its sister publication, the late and very much lamented Boston Phoenix, were that to young people in the early '90s. WFNX was the radio station broke Nevermind, for Christ's sake!

13:35 "The Long Tail": This is a term I wasn't familiar with prior to recording this episode. You can see how like many predictive economic or social theories, when the rubber meets the road, especially when it comes to sectors like media that are controlled by four or five huge companies, it often does not hold up.

14:36 Dumb Starbucks: I will admit, using Nathan For You's "Dumb Starbucks" ploy was pretty thin gruel for relating to Rob's Starbucks CD point-of-sale story, but regardless, it does make me giggle. Especially the "we are legally allowed to use the coveted Starbucks name and logo, because we've fulfilled the minimum requirements to be considered a parody under U.S. law" part. *coff coff*

17:35 "How little streaming pays the artists..." One of my favorite bands growing up in Boston in the early '90s was the Blake Babies. Their guitarist, John Strohm, is now an entertainment and music industry lawyer and has spoken up passionately about artists and both the crisis and opportunity offered by the new landscape that the "disruption" of streaming has produced. Check his Twitter for occasional ruminations on this topic.

18:40 et subseq. Affirmative action: A lot to unpack here. Kennedy's coining of the term "affirmative action" came in Executive Order 10925, penned in March 1961, a little over a month into his Presidency. You can actually watch LBJ's Howard University speech in 1965 on YouTube; here's the text. Here is Ta-Nehisi Coates's definitive take on the topic, "The Case For Reparations," which I hinted at in the podcast. I chose Nixon's 1960 campaign commercial on civil rights because its rhetorical positioning of "anti-racism = showing the world we're better than they say/getting one over on Communism" is really interesting. Also, Nixon, as you can imagine, didn't do a lot of press around the 1969 Philadelphia Order. But as Rob says, Mr. Nixon is a slippery, contradictory character. It was hard to admit, as much as we've lionized them, that unions were a part of the white supremacist power structure in the postwar period, but they definitely were.

We did spend a lot of time on this episode on this topic, I freely admit. But I think it's because it's something that this silly little podcast has finally allowed me to see, in some small way. I take this stuff pretty personally. This podcast has led me to take this stuff personally, because the milieu I grew up in and social group that I came out of, the suburban, aspirational, ethnic working-class Reagan Democrats, Nixon's Silent Majority, the hard-hats, whatever... they were responsible electorally and conventional wisdom-wise for so much of what we lost with respect to race relations in the years since 1981, for so much of the movement backwards, for so much of what's happening today with white racial grievance being given new, horrifying life. The dogwhistles have been put away now; Atwater's Southern Strategy rhetorical trajectory has somehow completely reversed itself. And frankly? It's pretty fucking scary.

Editorial mode off. Back (largely) to the sitcom talk.

28:11 Martin Luther King, individualistic vs. collective solutions: MLK in 1963 had that long-present urge to cash the "promissory note" that America's ideals represented; MLK by 1968 had begun looking for bigger, more systemic change and revolution. The rest, as they say, is history.

34:05 Herb's plot as apologia for affirmative action: Sure, I might be reading too much into an inconsequential '70s/'80s sitcom. I got into a conversation on Facebook about this topic and told folks I'd port this comment over to the Show Notes:
My thought about "Venus Rising" being "stealth marketing" for affirmative action and quotas was a touch tongue-in-cheek; I think I can be faulted sometimes for idealizing this period in American history a bit too much. I doubt very much any writer in the WKRP writers room was thinking consciously about doing a sitcom episode that would get working-class whites on board with affirmative action. And yet... sometimes, writers' subconsciouses leak through into what they're working on. Our point about affirmative action being at a level of conventional wisdom past debate in the period from Johnson through Carter stands, as do our thoughts about Herb and Venus being diametric opposites on every level (white/black, square/hip, married/bachelor, uptight/easygoing) and yet making a real connection, an alliance of mutual interest, let's say.
 Also, I can't wait for the Soul Suds episode.

41:00 That long peal of laughter: It was awfully self-indulgent not to edit this out, but I knew I wanted to include in the Show Notes what the studio audience is laughing at in this scene: Venus smirking dubiously at the Big Guy while Johnny has nodded off on the couch:


Check out Venus kicking the urban cowboy look there! It's him and Buck Swope. "It's coming back!"

42:45 Bottle episode: Do I need to define "bottle episode" for all you sitcom aficionados? I figured not, but just to be safe.

46:25 The WKRP family: Thanks again to Michael Kassel for his indispensible tome on WKRP for the Gordon Jump's lasagna anecdote as well as the information on the cast really bonding in their crappy studio at KTLA during Season 1. And thanks to Jaime Weinman for his Frank Bonner quote.

Leah, no pressure on the Gordon Jump lasagna recipe. ;)

48:28 Howard Hesseman a.k.a. Don Sturdy: Here's the TV Guide story I mentioned. I love TV Guide.

49:20 Group dynamics: The group dynamics Wikipedia page is long and discursive but does include nearly every psychologist and industrial designer who contributed to the field.

50:24 Venus suggests mindfulness: We had to cut the bit of the podcast episode where we talk about Venus trying to get everyone to meditate, use visualization, and do what Venus calls "mindfulness." Ahead of his time, that Gordon Sims.

51:03 Esalen: See our Show Notes on "I Want You to Be a Golf Pro" for discussions on Esalen.

51:25 Google ngram on "group hug": Here's the "group hug" ngram:

52:30 Consciousness-raising: Consciousness-raising as a tactic for solidarity is such a powerful idea; it makes me think that other groups in desperate need of a raised consciousness could stand to be part of it.

54:26 The Hawthorne Experiments: The study at the Western Electric Hawthorne Works in Cicero, Illinois took place in the 1920s. The Hawthorne study was rediscovered in 1958 and thus the Hawthorne Effect was born in the heat of the Mad Men-era of management. Also, a 99% Invisible podcast on the secret history of the suggestion box might be a good idea.

56:30 Mike's former career: No, I'm not going to name my former employer. But you should check out these articles on toxic employees from a certain Business Review. Apparently, the flavor-of-the-month trend espoused by the Review right now is that you shouldn't hire them in the first place. Okay, good to know, guys. I'd still like to know what you do with the toxic employees you've already hired.

58:35 Primal scream therapy: The Primal Scream is the book, and primal therapy is the method. Primal therapy also involved other early-life experiential forms of therapy like rebirthing.

1:01:30 A Scanner Darkly: New-Path in both the film and original Philip K. Dick book was based on the Synanon spinoff X-Kalay in Vancouver. The method of insulting and abuse that Synanon used to bend their members to the group's will was called "The Game." This long read on Synanon is harrowing and fascinating.

1:03:25 Free love cults in the 19th century: I was specifically thinking of the Oneida Community and their own mutual denunciation ritual called "mutual criticism." I can thank research for my Geist: the Sin-Eaters game set in New England for that little tidbit of knowledge.

1:03:36 Struggle Sessions: The desire to go along with the majority and ostracize the outsider, sometimes unto death, is not unique to religious cults; many of the cults of personality around Communist/totalitarian leaders in the 20th century (including the late Maoism of the Cultural Revolution) feature this tendency as well.

1:04:01: est: est, for my money, is the single most fascinating group to come out of this fertile cross-breeding of the Human Potential Movement, the business world, cults, and the American tendency towards plain old hucksters. Werner Erhard, a.k.a. John Rosenberg, struck sparks at a time and place that was ready to receive his message of self-realization through abnegation. est was also a very controversial group with a lot of practices that bordered on cult behaviors: denying seminar attendees access to restrooms, long periods of self-study and public confession, and the aforementioned public confrontations.

That didn't stop est from being one of the biggest self-help groups in America during the WKRP period; the list of Hollywood stars who pledged their names to the organization is immense. The 1991 60 Minutes report whose introduction I use in this section is now samizdat; banned by legal action on behalf of Erhard, it exists now only on Wikileaks. You can find it there if you wish to watch.

est in pop culture, well, The Americans is a big one, but there's also the 1977 movie Semi-Tough, which includes an organization called "B.E.A.T." Semi-Tough starred our old friend... Burt Reynolds!

Wednesday, March 16, 2016

HMOTD 025: I Feel A Group Hug Building


Rob and Mike get upwardly mobile with "Venus Rising" and end Season 2 of WKRP with a big group hug with "Most Improved Station."
(Full show notes appear at Hold My Order, Terrible Dresser two days after each episode is released. All audio clips are the properties of their owners/creators and appear in this work of comment and critique under fair use provisions of copyright law.)

Check out this episode!

Monday, March 14, 2016

Whoa, We're Halfway There


Well, here we are, at the end of the second season of WKRP in Cincinnati! We cover "Venus Rising" and "Most Improved Station" this week, the final two episodes of the 24-episode Season 2.

We've done 25 podcasts as of this week. Sure, we've got our Season 2 wrap-up episode at the end of March, but with HMOTD 025 in the books, we've gotten to the halfway point of the podcast. Allow me to take a brief self-indulgent moment to say, "Wow. We did it."

Okay, now that the back-patting is behind us, we're very happy with HMOTD 025 this week. A lot of deep discussion on the issues raised by "Venus Rising": radio automation and affirmative action (and white America's reaction to it), and some good talk about what "Most Improved Station" has to say about workplace conflict resolution and 1970s pop psychology. Along with our usual appreciation of WKRP on its own; these were two funny episodes with a lot of heart.

To paraphrase Col. Kilgore from Apocalypse Now, "someday this podcast's going to end." Let's not think about that too much, it's too sad to contemplate. But our plan is to do what we did at the end of Season 1, and take a hiatus between Season 2 and 3. It's a good thing for us to recharge our batteries a little bit and come back fresh.

And we've got some big plans for Season 3! More live events to promote the show, more great new guest hosts, and Season 3 of WKRP, which definitely has some classics and some episodes we've been anticipating.

More meta to come in the weeks leading up to our Season 2 wrap-up (another reminder: send your Listener Mail questions to thebigguy@holdmyorderterribledresser.com!) but for now, we hope you enjoy HMOTD 025 on Wednesday morning!

Friday, March 4, 2016

Show Notes for HMOTD 024: Wolfgang Does Not Speak For the Entire Cartel


REMINDER! Please send your questions for our Season 2 wrap-up episode before the weekend to thebigguy@holdmyorderterribledresser.com!

Notes from Rob and Sean are marked as such; all other notes are Mike's.

2:40 Bill watching latch-key TV: Martin Starr, you can try to be the cooler-than-cool Satanist in Silicon Valley but I will always remember you as the rictus-cackling Bill Haverchuck watching afterschool TV. That is indeed Garry Shandling on Dinah Shore's show, by the way. I also can't argue with this blog entry that this might be, for a certain Gen-X demographic, the Greatest Scene in Television History. Also, my mistake: he wasn't eating cereal and milk, he was eating a grilled cheese, "Nickmann's" chocolate cake and milk (in a Darth Vader Burger King giveaway glass). Yow. Even I never attempted that combination after school.

[Rob: It is a great scene. Perhaps it doesn't have the same impact if you don't have a strong sense of who Bill is, but I find it sad and happy and moving and sweet. Helped a lot by The Who's "I'm One" (from Quadrophenia), just to tie things back to HMOTD 023.]

3:20 "Filthy Pictures," hour-long episode: I find that I've not been enjoying the hour-long WKRPs as much as the half-hours. I've made mention a few times on the podcast of how short a 1970s/80s sitcom feels today, and how quickly things have to get wrapped up, but I feel with "Filthy Pictures" and "For Love or Money" that sometimes the writers find themselves padding things a little bit. That being said, I wouldn't trade the Herb or Johnny/Bailey scenes in this episode for anything.

4:30 The Kiwanis: Is there a secret history to the Kiwanis? Well, I do like that no one can quite agree on whether the name comes from the Ojibwe phrase for "we fool around" or "we make ourselves known." On a "solemn Stonecutters ceremony" vs. "we're getting drunk and havin' ribs" level, that's just perfect. Also worth mentioning; the Kiwanis became a truly international organization with the foundation of the first Canadian chapter in? Hamilton, Ontario.

[Rob: Woo, shout out to the Hammer! Home to me, Sean, and The Hilarious House of Frightenstein!]

9:20 "I drive a Dodge, for gosh's sakes!" [Sean: The Big Guy also says he never tears the little tags off mattresses. Ah, mattress tags, one of the great comedy cliches of the era. This reminds me of the tornado episode which, I've long suspected, cemented the "mobile home" gag in our collective consciousness.]

11:15 Frolicking: In the words of the old IBM NFL commercials, "You make the call!" Andy, frolicking or not frolicking?


16:08 George Wyner: Boston native George Wyner! Yes, ADA Bernstein on Hill Street Blues, but I think folks of a certain age will always know him as Colonel Sandurz from Spaceballs.

17:32 The Story of the Goy's Teeth: You should really watch the entire Goy's Teeth scene from A Serious Man. As a Gentile who's a tad obsessed with gematria and Kabbalah (like many goyische occultists before me), the idea of getting a phone number from a series of Hebrew characters in a goy's mouth is pretty awesome—great RPG hook—and that's not even mentioning Uncle Arthur's Mentaculus.

20:10 The Big Guy seeing the photos: [Sean: It's interesting to note that, by the end, the only two WKRPers, apart from Jennifer, who see the pictures are Carlson and Johnny. Am I crazy that this makes me think of the quasi-mystical qualities (Fisher King, etc.) these two seem to share, as discussed in earlier shows? If we accept that Jennifer (or at least, her body) is in some ways like a goddess it seems oddly fitting that these two (who just a few episodes back were talking earnestly about God) are the only ones who, to borrow from Psalms, see the light of her countenance.]

[Mike: Yes, YES! Embrace the mystery of the Cincinnati Triangle, Sean.]

22:37 "Why don't we Watergate it?" Hesseman's delivery is fantastic in this scene. Also, let us remind everyone that the Watergate burglars were wearing suits.

25:15 Sneaking around a dark room, eyes light up: TVTropes calls it "By the Lights of Their Eyes."

[Sean: Note the different approaches to "dress in black for the mission" of the four characters:
  • Andy, black T and (spare) jeans
  • Venus, a snazzy ensemble complete with black gloves tucked into a matching jacket's epaulettes
  • Carlson, black cardigan
  • Johnny, no change, really]

26:43 "Well... maybe he'd like Herb." Another just perfectly poised line read, this time by Richard Sanders.

[Rob: Something we discussed a little: the Herb-tries-to-seduce-Gonzer scene is almost totally wordless. Which is probably what saves it from being a hideous trainwreck of homophobia today. But also, combine that wordless scene with the burglary scene, which is only words, no picture, and this episode is doing some interesting things with formal staging. Just sayin'.]

29:43 "Centerfold": Boston's own J. Geils Band! They were never bigger nationally than in the early '80s with "Freeze Frame" and "Centerfold," but earlier in the '70s Peter Wolf, J. Geils, Magic Dick and the boys were Boston's bar-rock mainstays. Peter Wolf started off as a DJ on WBCN, one of the most important FM album rock pioneers (we talked about them in our very first Show Notes!). Wolf was even big enough in the '70s to have dated Faye Dunaway, for God's sake! (A fact I was reminded of in the book on Network by Dave Itzkoff.) Another fun fact: Peter visited my uncle's pizza joint in Harvard Square at least a few times, frequently enough to take a Polaroid for Cafe Avventura's Wall of Fame.

[Rob: I've always thought "Centerfold" is an utterly inane, if diabolically catchy, song, but somehow it captures the hypocritical double-bind of the Madonna/whore complex more poignantly than it has any right to. In fact, I think when I first heard about the Madonna/whore complex, I immediately thought, "oh, sort of like 'Angel is a Centerfold'."]

31:00 Notes on Clothing: [Sean: Also, note the contrasts in Carlson's and Gonzer's clothing. "Suits vs. dungarees" has become "Suit vs. leisure suit."]

31:40 "Oh my God, it's Eric Estrada from CHiPs!" Arguably, 1980 was Peak Estrada; in November 1979 he made the top 10 of People's Sexiest Bachelors Alive list. As usual with peaks, you can expect the downfall shortly following. Estrada wanted more money from NBC in the fall of 1981, leading to his temporary replacement in the early part of the 1981 season; Bruce (now Caitlyn) Jenner played Officer Steve McLeish for seven episodes. CHiPs was canceled in 1983, after a Season 6 that featured Ponch and his new partner "helping a girl who believed that she was being targeted by UFOs and them racing against time to defuse a battery about to explode on an intelligent experimental police robot."

[Rob: I went looking for CHiPs clips to use in this episode and couldn't find anything especially good. I was surprised at how high and squeaky Estrada's voice was and how often they contrived to have him disco dance or perform (read: lip sync) disco numbers.]

33:45 Skyfall: Javier Bardem and Daniel Craig: undeniably hot. Honestly, this scene probably should've happened years ago. It's unrealistic to expect any secret agent to not have to honeypot for a member of the same gender; one of the bits I really liked about the creepy honeypot training montage in The Americans was the inclusion of all kinds of people who Philip would have to feign attraction for: men, the elderly, and so on.

[Rob: If you can bear to read nearly 100,000 words in ALL CAPS, I highly recommend Film Crit Hulk's mammoth and heroic engagement with the sexual politics of every single James Bond film in a bravura series of blog posts from 2014: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.]

35:20 Philippe and Ginger: [Sean: It's hard to watch this episode — in our modern era of sex tapes and revenge porn — and not be struck by how much harder it was to create and circulate nudity in 1980. You needed a photo studio, equipment and five-figure deals with nebulous European cartels!

Philippe/Johnny was right — $30,000 is a lot of money for such photos, circa 1980. Playmates of the Month reportedly get $25,000 today.

Also, 'Wolfgang and the cartel' could be a Falco album or a chapter from a Robert Ludlum novel.]

39:55 Marilyn Monroe and Playboy: The tale of the Playboy shots of Marilyn is really a foundation myth for Hugh Hefner's empire. I recommend David Halberstam's The Fifties for a detailed look at Hefner's rise. You can also check the Wikipedia page for Playboy, which is NSFW due to the Marilyn-on-red-drapes shots.

[Sean: Playboy circulation peaked at 7.1 million in November 1972 when one-quarter of all American college men were buying or subscribing to it every month. Today's circulation is about 800,000.

Magazine sales amounted to half of Playboy's $132M total revenue in 1970. The rest came from clubs, resorts, hotels etc. By 1975 circulation had dropped 20%, in '82 Playboy lost a reported $51M, by '88 the final Playboy club closed.]

43:45 The mainstreaming of porn: Occasionally I'll have reason to check out online scans of newspapers from the 1970s. And every time I do, I'm blown away by the ads for Rated-X movies right there in the Film section. In the post-home video and Internet ages, it seems ludicrous that people would go to a public theatre to watch porn, and especially couples, but it happened! I went looking for definitive reminiscences about this period, and the best I found was this long-form piece from Time in 2005 from the recently deceased film critic Richard Corliss.

44:23 The People vs. Larry Flynt: Thinking it may be time in the aftermath of Woody Harrelson's performance in True Detective Season 1 to revisit this film, which I didn't really think much of at the time of its release. Larry Flynt's a tough guy to deliver a sympathetic performance about, and then there's Courtney Love, who I didn't mind in Man on the Moon, but in this film, just didn't offer me anything sympathetic to grab onto.

We should also not forget that if anyone is the real-life Gonzer, it's Larry Flynt. He was the porn king of Ohio in the '70s! His obscenity/racketeering trial took place in Cincinnati! I seem to recall the boys from Devo waxing rhapsodic about the explicitness of his publications during that time (in Simon Reynolds's Rip It Up and Start Again, Mark Mothersbaugh says he wrote "Penetration in the Centerfold" as an ode to the first Hustler he saw). Wikipedia tellingly informs us that Flynt's publications "targeted working-class men." An interesting confluence of smut, the industrial Rust Belt, and the plight of the white working class.

[Sean: We talked during the podcast about the societal, cultural and market challenged girlie magazines faced (sometimes from each other) through the '70s. But things went from bad to worse in the '80s with the rise of the Reagan Republicans, the Moral Majority, et al.—who all crossed paths during Attorney General Edwin Meese's Commission on Pornography.

When, in its final report, the commission likened pornography to the Red Menace, it penned what must be one of the most Reaganite sentences ever:
"That the Communist Party is a lawful organization does not prevent most Americans from finding its tenets abhorrent, and the same holds true for a wide variety of sexually-oriented material."]
50:55 Bo Derek cover: Here's a link to the SFW Playboy cover, I'll let you go looking for the NSFW pics. Also, to recall an earlier Show Notes, watch the Cannon Films documentary Electric Boogaloo for the humorous but also kind of sad and creepy story of John and Bo Derek getting ripped off/nearly sued into bankruptcy by Golan-Globus.

52:32 Chas Tenenbaum: One of the most charming bits of The Royal Tenenbaums.

53:04 Sean's Dad: Nothing against the Moms out there; we've been effusive in our praise for them and their support. But it's obvious to me that Rob's amazement at Sean's dad's life echoes something that my circle of friends has always noticed; we all seem to have these dads with interesting skill sets gathered over years of multiple weird jobs. We've posited a League of Extraordinary Dads where our dads are a team of 500-point GURPS characters with this complete and thorough spread of skills.

56:42 Burt Reynolds vs. Philip Baker Hall: If you get a chance to find a copy of the very first DVD version of Boogie Nights, with the young Paul Thomas Anderson, get it; his director's commentary is embarrassingly dorky and enthusiastic. He talks about how he nicknamed this confrontational New Year's Eve 1979 party scene between Jack Horner (Reynolds) and Floyd Gondolli (Hall) "Godzilla vs. Mothra" because of the titanic clash of actors on display here.

59:10 Stroker Ace: Everything about Stroker Ace is kind of sad now. It was a huge bomb, nominated for multiple Razzies (of course, NOTHING was beating Pia Zadora's The Lonely Lady in '83, but Jim Nabors did win a consolation Worst Supporting Actor award). Burt and Loni, trying their best (and failing) to be Bogie and Bacall. The fact that Burt gave up the opportunity to be in Terms of Endearment is very Troy McClure. Wikipedia here bringing the profound pathos in the introductory text for Stroker Ace:
Burt Reynolds turned down the role of astronaut Garrett Breedlove in Terms of Endearment to do this film. The role went to Jack Nicholson, who went on to win an Academy Award. Reynolds said he made this decision because "I felt I owed Hal [Needham] more than I owed Jim [Brooks]" but that it was a turning point in his career from which he never recovered. "That's where I lost them," he says of his fans.
Man. I'll direct you back to the Monday Post we did on Burt if you want more sadness.

1:00:00 Loni in the Sky With Diamonds: On Wednesday, my college buddy Sam Wood (a famous artist for video games and RPGs, so you know his opinion on art matters) was listening to the podcast and shooting me IMs on Facebook. Here is an excerpt of that conversation. He's in white, I'm in blue.


If you really must see this piece of sanity-warping art, here's a New York Daily News article about Loni's 2014 auction. Scroll down to the slideshow at the bottom of the page. Yes, you did miss your chance to own it. I'm personally more enamored of the Madonna-and-child-esque painting on the right. Man. Hollywood people are WEIRD.

1:03:00 Zany schemes: [Sean: You know what else would have been funny? Especially in our proposed 90-minute episode? If the after-effects of each attempt on Gonzer and his studio had remained evident, but Gonzer for some reason remains oblivious that people are conspiring against him.

Think about it. He knows Carlson is mad at him, then his office is broken into (clumsily) but Gonzer never mentions it and the next time we see the studio, all's back in order. It would have been funnier if, when Herb arrived to seduce him, the window was taped over with cardboard and the floor still strewn with manila envelopes. Then, the next time, maybe we see Herb left his jacket behind. Then we see him nursing a hangover after drinking with Venus. Then...]

Wednesday, March 2, 2016

HMOTD 024: Wolfgang Does Not Speak For the Entire Cartel



Mike & Rob peep through the one-way mirror of history to spy on WKRP's "Filthy Pictures." With special guest sexpert Sean Davidson!

(Full show notes appear at Hold My Order, Terrible Dresser two days after each episode is released. All audio clips are the properties of their owners/creators and appear in this work of comment and critique under fair use provisions of copyright law.)

Check out this episode!