Salon.com > Jaime Weinman

Mary Tyler less

Tue, 17 Jul 2001 19:00:00 +0000

In a "Mary Tyler Moore Show" episode titled "The Dinner Party" there's a famous scene where Mary Richards nervously berates Lou Grant for taking three of the six available portions of food at her latest disastrous party ("Mr. Grant, you've got to put two of those back!"). The scene is often regarded as one of the funniest in the whole series. But if you watched this episode on the cable network TV Land, you didn't see that scene at all; it was cut to make room for more commercials.

That older programs are heavily cut in syndication or on cable is hardly a secret, but it might as well be for all the coverage it gets: TV critics routinely announce the latest acquisition by Nick at Nite or the Sci-Fi Network without bothering to mention, or even check, how heavily it will be edited. Older shows that ran three to six minutes longer than today's shows suffer the most; a 25-minute episode of "Mary Tyler Moore" is usually cut to 21 or 22 minutes in reruns.

Pitching a big tent

Tue, 24 Oct 2000 19:00:00 +0000

For a moment in the summer of 1999, "The Blair Witch Project" was the movie everyone was talking about. We all heard the story of how a little horror movie, shot for $30,000 on wobbly cameras held by unknown actors, was bought for $1 million and spurred on to a $141 million box-office success by the astute, Internet-based marketing tactics of distributor Artisan Entertainment. It was the kind of movie that makes huge money, generates a thousand parodies and gets everyone talking about a revolution in marketing; it was a phenomenon. With "Blair Witch 2," due out Friday, the question is the same one asked with every sequel to every phenomenon movie: When the phenomenon is over, what's left?

What’s up, Chuck?

Tue, 06 Jun 2000 19:00:00 +0000

Bugs Bunny spins around. A table and a nail file materialize out of thin air, and Bugs mugs at a huge, orange creature who has been chasing the rabbit through a mad scientist's lair. Instead of trying to escape from the creature -- who wears sneakers -- Bugs leans in with the nail file and starts to give him a manicure. "My, I'll bet you monsters lead interesting lives," he says in a high, effeminate voice. The monster is, of course, disarmed. The fast, unexpected and hilarious sequence belongs to the Warner Bros. cartoon "Hair-Raising Hare" (1946), one of the funniest of the hundreds of Bugs Bunny cartoons.

The man behind the cartoon was the celebrated Chuck Jones, the director of great WB animated shorts and the creator of the Road Runner, Wile E. Coyote, Pepe Le Pew and that now-ubiquitous singing amphibian, Michigan J. Frog. Though only one of several people who directed cartoons for WB in its 1940s and '50s golden age, Jones has become so genial and likable a representative of Looney Tunes -- in interviews and in two entertaining books of memoirs, "Chuck Amuck" and "Chuck Reducks" -- that now he is routinely talked about as though he were the only representative of that great cartoon tradition. Jones, in fact, is the only WB cartoon director to receive a special Academy Award for his work (in 1997), and no cartoon director has more famous or influential fans: Steven Spielberg, for one, wrote the foreword for "Chuck Amuck." There have also been laudatory essays on Jones by well-known film critics; Time's Richard Schickel singled out "a genius named Chuck Jones" as the greatest figure in WB cartoon history.