Let's all sing "Happy Birthday" to the Disney Organ, 10 years old; water witchery is debunked, but still popular; Merv Griffin interviews now memorialized on 12 DVDs.
Oscar nomination for Best Animated Film: 'Big Hero 6'
UPDATE 1/15/2015: Disney's "Big Hero 6" is nominated for Best Animated Film Oscar. Here's our Off-Ramp interview with two of the people who helped make it a hit.
Off-Ramp animation expert Charles Solomon goes to Disney to talk about the look of the Disney animated blockbuster "Big Hero 6" with production designer Paul Felix and Scott Watanabe, art director, environments.
"John (Lasseter) believes your story's going to change over the course of the years it takes to do these movies. But your world is something you're going to live with the whole time." — Director Don Hall, LA Times
Virtually every review of Disney’s animated hit "Big Hero 6" — which has brought in $112 million domestic and $148 million worldwide through this weekend — praises the imaginary city where the story unfolds: San Fransokyo, which blends famous San Francisco landmarks with elements of Tokyo's iconic skyline into a metropolis that feels both familiar and alien:
(Image: Disney)
Two of the artists most responsible for that look are production designer Paul Felix and Scott Watanabe, art director, environments. Felix was production designer on "Lilo & Stitch" and "The Emperor's New Groove," but his credits go back to the 1980s, when he did storyboard cleanup on "ALF." "Big Hero 6" is Watanabe's first film as art director.
RELATED: Meet Disney and "Fat Albert" animator Floyd Norman
First, why combine Tokyo and San Francisco?
"Initially," Watanabe says, " we wanted to have the freedom to create a new environment (not) tied down to reality, plus I think everybody just thinks it's cool."
"I think, too," Felix says, "Marvel (which originated the characters) wanted to make sure that this film was distinct from the Marvel Universe, so you wouldn't expect Iron Man to drop in, so it had to become our own story."
The team blended two very different cities. Says Solomon, "I wouldn't say Tokyo is oppressive, but it's kind of omnipresent, whereas in San Francisco you can look up at the sky." Felix says they had a graphic designer working for two years just to capture the signage needed. To get the quality of light right, Felix says they photographed from atop a skyscraper from dawn to dusk. And Watanabe recounts how, during the production, he'd joke "put a roof on it," when they tried to make a San Francisco icon look more Japanese, referring to iconic Japanese-style roofs.
(Image: Disney)
For the interiors, the two say it was essential to get the clutter right. It was a real challenge," says Felix, "to try to populate those sets with enough detail to conform with some of the research we saw." They took trips to robotics labs at Carnegie-Mellon and MIT, "and that clutter is there." Watanabe says he took inspiration from his Disney colleagues, many of whom have accumulated layers of mementos in their work spaces, and from home: "Just visiting my Japanese grandparents' homes, and they have clutter everywhere!"
Watanabe says one of the concepts animators developed was to let the clutter grow throughout the film, like plants, "Which worked out well for some things," Felix interjects, but in some scenes, "it started looking very much like cat or rat poop, so we had to dial back on where you actually see it."
Felix says their job is to create environments that give context to the characters, to make the experience richer and more immersive. "You're world-building from scratch," says Watanabe, "and that could come off as really cheap if you don't a true-to-life job."
Easter Egg for KPCC junkies: Did Rabe find a Lasseter/Miyazaki Easter egg in some early "Big Hero 6" art? Check out our photo slideshow.
A Canadian talks turkey on American Thanksgiving
As a Canadian living in Los Angeles, I get a lot of questions about my home and native land:
What do you call your States? (Provinces)
Why is your money so colorful? (Polymer)
And do you guys have Thanksgiving? Well, as a matter of fact, we do. We already did it. I think it was October 13th or something.
I honestly don’t remember because pretty much all Canadian Thanksgiving and American Thanksgiving share is a name. Canada’s version is not a $6 billion enterprise. It’s not really an enterprise at all. It's more like an earnest endeavor. The "ah, nice try" of national days off.
One of my friends, a composer named Steve London who moved to L.A. from Canada so long ago he’s apparently forgotten how to play the national anthem, says Canadian Thanksgiving is a lot like "Sunday, or a regular weekend. In the U.S., it's unbelievable. People just don't want you to be home alone. American Thanksgiving is way more fun."
RELATED: Thanksgiving music we can agree on
It's almost easier to define our Thanksgiving by what it's not. We don't do the Pilgrim hats – didn't have them. We don't do the sniping at in-laws. Okay, we sort of do that, but it's really a year-round thing. Same goes for the beer drinking. It's not our worst week to travel – Christmas has that title. And yeah, there's football on TV, but as hockey’s our religion, it’s more of a white noise machine used to mask silent parental judgment.
(Explorer Martin Frobisher, in what would become Canada, celebrated Thanksgiving for Not Freezing to Death in 1578)
So why are we so blasé about this holiday? One guess is that since we’ve been doing it since the 1500's, maybe we’re just over it. Yes, we did it first in Canada, so if you want to make the argument that we do it on the wrong day, sorry.
“In our family we celebrate both, says Alan Thicke, America’s favorite dad and Canadian icon.
(Alan Thicke and the cast of "Hope & Gloria," featuring future Off-Ramp intern Robert Garrova)
"But Canadians tend to be a little humbler, a little less ostentatious. We celebrate the settler, the Indians who kept us warm in beaver pelts and roasted turkeys or whatever the hell they did back then."
Thicke told me from the set of his new show, "Unusually Thicke," that the reason the holidays are so different comes down to the fundamental difference between our two countries. "They're doing things in a big splashy way that maximizes the opportunity for commercialization," he says. "All of the things America puts into its commercial exploitation, we tend not to do in Canada, we tend to think it’s a little gaudy, excessive, but that’s why they’re our big brother."
There might also be a touch of that Canadian pride thing. We grow up with a flood of U.S. TV shows and holiday specials coming over the border, and we’ve seen the Norman Rockwell-esque depictions of what Hollywood says the holiday is supposed to look like. For example, you guys have "It’s the Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown" where Snoopy dances with bunnies and people learn and share.
In Canada, we have the cartoon "Easter Fever," in which a bat auditions to replace the Easter Bunny, and flies into a tree.
So, maybe Canadian Thanksgiving is a just a chance to proclaim how different we are. Which is not to criticize the American version. The one you copied from us. I’ve never not been invited to several dinners, and it's moving to watch my friends, as they go around around the table naming things they're thankful for, reflect on how small their First World Problems really are.
So as your holiday approaches, and mine fades in the rearview, I will wish you all the best and hope that however we do or don’t celebrate on whichever day we so choose, we can all agree that gratitude is a gift, and whoever came up with Black Friday should be used as a welcome mat at Best Buy.
We go inside the living, breathing Disney Hall organ as it turns 10
I raised some eyebrows when I asked the L.A. Phil's Joanne Pearce Martin to play "Happy Birthday" on the Disney Hall organ. But she did so with gusto, as you can hear if you'll click the Listen Now button on the left.
And why not?! The orchestra is marking the tenth birthday of its signature pipe organ this month, with those huge wooden pipes that look like a box of french fries.
The organ is a work of art and a musical instrument, but it's also a huge machine, one you can walk around the inside of, and from the inside — way up above the Disney Hall stage, above the organist's perch — you can see the pipes and fully appreciate the way they work together.
That's where I talked with Manuel Rosales who built the organ (with German company Glatter-Gotz Orgelbau), and who demonstrated it with help from organ conservator Philip Smith, who played the organ from a console way down on stage.
Interview Highlights:
The organ is a living, breathing object?
It's complicated and each pipe is like its own musical instrument. And each pipe ages in its own way. Yet it has to be commingled with over 6,000 other pipes. So the way they sound today isn't the way they sounded 10 years ago. We can't say it's like fine wine that gets better with age; the molecules in the pipes soften and the tone mellows. But they don't lose their shimmer or their power.
Do other instruments have the organ's personality points?
A piano does, but it's very subtle. A harpsichord does. Harpsichords are the enfant terrible of the keyboard world. They change overnight — they can change in an hour. Organs are not quite that temperamental. But unlike an instrument that you can pick up and walk away with ... this has to all be done here. So we come to the organ on its terms, and we have to make the decisions of how we take care of it.
Do other concert halls have purpose-built organs like Disney Hall?
Some go back to the 1920s or so when those concert halls were first built. Some got rid of their organs or didn't maintain them and they just walled them up, like the Cleveland Orchestra. There are new concert halls — the one in Dallas has a beautiful organ, the one in Philadelphia; down in Orange County there's an instrument in the Segerstrom Hall.
So it's become popular again to have organs. And people like coming to concert halls because there are fewer restrictions on the kinds of music that you can play.
He built it; is he proud as the organ turns 10?
I'm real lucky to be here. That's the main thing. Many organ builders get to build organs in nice halls or nice churches, but they're a thousand or three thousand miles away. I'm 15 minutes away. So this is like my other living room.
The L.A. Phil has several upcoming concerts to celebrate the organ's tenth anniversary, including:
- Stephen Hartke’s and Saint-Saens’ “Organ” symphonies. (Nov. 20 at 8 p.m., Nov. 21 at 8 p.m., and Nov. 22 at 2 p.m.)
- “Happy Birthday ‘Hurricane Mama’: Pulling Out All The Stops” (Nov. 23 at 7:30 p.m.)
- The Holiday Organ Spectacular (Dec. 19 at 8 p.m.)
- Holiday Sing-Along (Dec. 20 at 11:30am and 2 p.m.)
- A continuing Organ Recital series in 2015 featuring Anthony Newman (January 11th) and Olivier Latry (April 19th)
And check out the extra audio: My first piece on the Disney Hall organ, when it was a "newborn" in 2004.
How an El Sereno charter school fought for (and won) the right to teach in an indigenous language
On a main thoroughfare in East Los Angeles, there's a brightly painted public school: Anahuacalmecac International Preparatory High School, part of the Semillas school network. Semillas — Spanish for "seeds" — teaches teenagers about their indigenous roots and culture.
Students there learn in Spanish and Nahuatl, incorporating Mayan mathematics and indigenous visual and performing arts. One course teaches indigenous diplomacy and youth leadership skills. Parents and grandparents are integrated into the student’s learning.
It’s not unusual in California for public school students to spend a good portion of their day studying math or science or any subject in a language other than English. But this little Los Angeles charter school is the only one that teaches in an indigenous language.
Principal Marcos Aguilar co-founded the indigenous charter school in 2001 to better serve kids in the El Sereno neighborhood of Los Angeles, many of whom have indigenous roots.
“We’re not visitors here,” he said. “We’ve been here for millennia, and its important for our children to grow knowing what our ancestors named the places around us many many years ago.”
Kids learn indigenous history. Aguilar said the concepts of community and collectivism that are deeply rooted in native culture are at the core of the school.
“We believe that our children should be able to receive an education that strengthens and fosters our culture as well as educates them to deal with the economy and the politics of the world that they will grow up into,” he said.
The school gets results. Last year, Semillas graduated 100 percent of its senior class, with 80 percent going on to four-year college, according to Aguilar.
But in June 2013, when the school’s charter license was before the Los Angeles Unified School District board for renewal, it was denied. Director of Charter Schools for L.A. Unified, Jose Cole-Gutierrez, noted “serious concerns” with the school’s academic performance and fiscal viability.
“We noted that in the year prior to this last year the school dropped over 150 points on the Academic Performance Index,” he said. “There were financial concerns that were severe, that also spoke to concerns to governance.”
The school countered that its API score put it in the middle of all schools in the state — far from a failing school. It added that other public schools in the area had worse test scores and were not graduating seniors onto college at the rate Semillas was, yet the district was not closing them down.
The school also pointed to its Western Association of Schools and Colleges accreditation, a rigorous evaluation by an esteemed educational institution. Semillas is also an official International Baccalaureate school, another process that requires high academic standards.
In short, teachers at Semillas didn't spend time teaching to tests. They used independent projects and UC college-approved courses to measure student progress.
The fiscal issue the district raised was a budget shortfall of half a million dollars. The school got a grant to cover it, but none of this was enough for district officials who reiterated concerns about governance and transparency.
But parents, teachers and supporters believed the district simply had a beef with the school, and that beef was political.
Few expected what came next: Principal Aguilar, dressed in a traditional Aztec feathered headdress, addressed the local board in defense of his school.
“We invoke the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as we call on the board of education to recognize holistic academic excellence and the strong community roots that Semillas represents, and we ask you to renew the charter of Anahuacalmecac,” he said.
Outraged parents and teachers had begun organizing. Mothers' meetings were held at the school to strategize. Students, shocked by the local school board’s decision, stepped up to speak out at protests that they themselves organized.
“We are here to let everyone know that ... Anahuacalmecac is our sacred house of learning, and we are going to defend it with everything we have for the future generations to come,” said senior Natalie Carillo.
She was addressing a rally at Cal State L.A. ahead of the school’s first appeal, which would be to the L.A. County Office of Education.
“Stand us as we defend our education,” Carillo said. “We will not let anyone block our road to college.”
At the appeal hearing, the school mobilized hundreds of supporters to attend and speak out. Including an Aztec elder who addressed the board members in Nahuatl.
The LACOE board was split in its vote, which meant it took no action. There would be no charter license renewal, and the only option left to the school was an appeal to the California Department of Education.
It was a soul-searching moment. And then, said Principal Aguilar, students made an appeal.
“The students organized a town hall and … their message to us [was] to not give up, to defend the school and to stay in the community because they believed in it, they believed in the mission and they wanted to graduate from Semillas.”
The students stepped up the organizing and began using social media and multimedia. They created little music viral videos. The fight took up much of the academic year, and between organizing, students continued academic work at their sister high school that operated under Semillas' other charter school license.
Meanwhile, the school’s legal team worked on its final appeal — kind of the equivalent of David taking his case against Goliath all the way to the Supreme Court. The focus remained on the school’s well-rounded academic performance and college acceptance rate, and the school’s unique model of indigenous education.
And against the odds, in May of this year, all 10 board members of the California State Board of Education voted yes to reinstate the charter license of Anahuacalmecac high school. Board members said they wanted to come and see the school’s indigenous education model in action.
Board member Carl Cohen said the school was a model.
“This looks like a school that is making a difference in a very diverse state,” he said. “We are a big state and we should be able to handle some schools that are outside the box.”
The California Charter School Association said winning at the highest level for a charter school has only happened twice in the past 5 years.
Students and staff, buoyed by the organizing victory, are back at work this year. It will be a momentous graduation moment come June, adds Principal Aguilar, because the original kindergarten class that started in 2002 when the school first opened will be the graduating senior class.
They almost didn’t have a school to graduate from.
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that "Few public schools earn a WASC accreditation." KPCC regrets the error.
In Napa and beyond, winemaking depends on witches
How do you find water in California's drought stricken wine country? You can pay thousands for a scientific survey or — for about $500 — hire a "water witch."
Damian Grindley, a two decade veteran of wine-making recently bought a winery of his own in Paso Robles. The property came with one water well, but soon needed another, so he got on the phone with the local well driller — who referred him to the local water witch.
Water witches, or dowsers, usually use a pair of L-shaped metal rods to find water. They'll walk the property holding the rods, and once they find what they're looking for, the rods will cross. Totally on their own, they say.
Dowsers are surprisingly popular in modern agriculture — Grindley says at least half of the winemakers in his part of Paso Robles use them.
One of California's most prominent dowsers is Napa's Marc Mondavi — a member of the famed winemaking Mondavi family. He offers his services for $500, a fraction of what a geologist would charge to survey the land.
"I’m referred to by most of the well drillers here in the valley, when people call them to drill a well. They would rather have a spot marked by a dowser than just randomly pick a spot, because there’s not water everywhere," says Mondavi. "And with today’s drought here in California, I’ve been very busy."
Mondavi claims a success rate of over 95 percent and says he keeps logbooks to prove it. When I ask him about skeptics, he doesn’t get defensive or worked up. Like most of the dowsers I’ve talked to, Mondavi doesn’t seem to mind that science is not on his side.
Allen Christensen with the U.S. Geological Survey says that geologists have some high-tech methods for finding underground water, but for the most part, they’re making educated guesses. They look at the shape and height of the land, the levels of nearby wells and other clues, like plants. Sometimes, though, you really just have to drill to find out.
Christensen says there's no scientific proof that dowsing works. So why do dowsers still get work? Even huge wine companies, like Mondavi and Bronco — the producers of Trader Joe's Charles Shaw — use dowsers to find water.
Christensen has a theory:
"I still think it’s more of a person who really understands the lay of the land more than it is an actual fact. They have similar experiences to drillers. So they already have a very good knowledge of how water is and where water is gonna be. So generally, a dowser won’t dowse in an area where he clearly doesn’t think there’s gonna be water."
If he's right, then dowsers are using the same clues a geologist would – they just don’t realize they’re doing it.
Damian Grindley, the Paso Robles winemaker, seems ambivalent about the practice. "Wine’s got a lot of art to it as well," he says. "Planting your vineyard, and developing your property, and looking for water — you know, maybe there’s a little bit of art and little bit of science in it too. I mean, there’s winemakers out there who will only pick their fruit by a full moon and they swear by it. There’s no scientific evidence, but a lot of them make great wine."
Can a pendulum decide your career and find your lost car? A history of dowsing, or 'water witching'
You heard earlier about the practice of dowsing — also known as "water witching." It's the practice of using objects like rods, pendulums and sticks to find water underground. But the practice goes back much further than that — and covers way more ground than just water.
Most historians trace dowsing back to the 16th century, when some German miners started using tree branches or pendulums to find metal ore. The practice caught on in other countries and soon it got popular enough to be declared “satanic” by the Catholic Church.
Before long people began to wonder: if dowsing is so great at finding things like water and ore, what else can it do?
By the 1700s, dowsers did everything from diagnosing illnesses to tracking down criminals. In southern France, judges would use dowsing to decide if a suspect was guilty or not.
In 1961, the American Society of Dowsers was founded, starting with just 70 members. Chapters sprung up all over the country, and now the Society says they have more than 5,000 members.
Karen Ashley Tippett is president of her chapter of the Society in San Francisco. Like a lot of the Society’s members, she treats dowsing more like a lifestyle than a hobby. Most of her friends are dowsers and she even met her husband, Dick Tippett, at a conference for dowsing.
According to the American Society of Dowsers, dowsing doesn't just help you find objects — it finds answers.
Am I on the right career path? Is my girlfriend cheating on me? What will the weather be like today? Are these beets really organic?
The American Society of Dowsers Then and Now
Members of the Society say they use dowsing to make major life decisions. A few years ago, Karen was on a path to become a teacher — she had taken classes and tests — but her pendulum thought better of it, so she quit the program.
Karen and Dick also use dowsing in lower stakes situations — they often dowse in the produce section to find the ripest fruit.
"And we’ve gone one further than that," says Dick. "We’ve gone into organic grocery stores and sat there in front of the vegetable section and gone, 'all right, is this beet really organic?' No. 'Are these beets over here really organic?' Yeah, they are."
Over a lunch of freshly dowsed shrimp salad, Karen and Dick were careful to tell me they know dowsing isn't scientific — that that's not the point.
"We all have those intuitive thoughts. It’s kind of like when you’re thinking about someone and you’re walking to the phone and the phone rings, and you were going to call them, but they got you first," says Karen. "We all have that innate ability to kind of tune into the unspoken world."
"You can dowse any time to get a yes/no answer," says Dick. "Dowsing takes the uncertainty out of life."
And who wouldn’t want that?
Huntington exhibit: Who captured iconic photos in England? Two Americans!
Off-Ramp commentator Marc Haefele reviews "Bruce Davidson/Paul Caponigro: Two American Photographers in Britain and Ireland," at the Huntington's MaryLou and George Boone Gallery through March 9, 2015.
Paul Caponigro supposedly said, “I love people. I just don’t want them getting in front of my camera.” But his contemporary, Bruce Davidson, made his living photographing people.
Both have an amazing new show at the Huntington.
RELATED: Read about the largest gift in LACMA's history and what it means to the museum
Bruce Davidson and Paul Caponigro, born in the 1930s, matured artistically in the 1950s and took different paths to photographic fame. Davidson became a high-end magazine photographer, working with authors such as Norman Mailer, with whom he did a famous series on Brooklyn street gangs. Caponigro took a more creative path, falling under the artistic influence of Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and Minor White. He used a big view camera with a tripod, while Davidson used Leicas.
Both knew each other’s work, but neither met until this show at the Huntington was compiled.
RELATED: See the photo of their first meeting
You could accurately oversimplify their work’s differences by saying that Davidson is a people photographer, while Caponigro does places. Both by coincidence ended up in the British Isles in the 1960s. And for both, that experience changed their artistic visions. Much of the work they did there has never been shown until now.
Caponigro’s original overseas destination had been Egypt, but 1960 anti-American turmoil there detoured him first to Ireland and then England. Clearly he found in the remote regions of both places the mystic experience he had earlier sought along the Nile. He said, “There’s a force in this land which is alive.” His work there, which he continued into the 1990s, often focuses on the prehistoric world of dolmens, standing stones, and their surrounding landscapes.
(Paul Caponigro (b. 1932), Stonehenge, 1967, gelatin silver print. © Paul Caponigro, photo courtesy of The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.)
Until 1977, when it was fenced in by officials, he practically lived at Stonehenge, which he photographed from many angles, in different lights, in varying seasons, in unimagined aspects. Perhaps no photographer has ever been this close to this ancient monument, and his stunning black and white portraits as shown here are definitive. But then, so are his landscapes and pictures of wildlife — and ever so rarely, even people.
But people were Davidson’s thing. His famous shot of a street waif with a sleeping bag over one shoulder holding a kitten was an iconic image in England. Yale exhibit curator Scott Wilcox notes that Davidson arrived in Britain with little knowledge of the place, commissioned by a fancy British magazine to do an American's eye view of the island. “He had the privilege being allowed on the inside,” said Wilcox. It was the first of his three camera-toting trips.
(Bruce Davidson (b. 1933), London, 1960, gelatin silver print. © Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos, photo courtesy of The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.)
Davidson first concentrated on London street scenes, including pub goers, street musicians, crowds and panhandlers. Then he moved out of London to resort towns, where he snapped couples sitting outside getting what sunshine they could, and then it was onward to Yorkshire and Scotland. Next he went to the U.S. to photograph the Civil Rights struggle and returned, to Britain, a changed man, to photograph the downtrodden miners of Wales in a style that evokes Walker Evans. In 1967, he went to Ireland to do a pictorial study of an Irish family circus. The result is an inspired career capstone of photographic virtuosity that is also lively and charged with delight.
WATCH: Kate Lain's "Still Looking," featuring Davidson and Caponigro
Behind the exhibit gallery, they're screening a short film by the Huntington's Kate Lain that shows the photographers as they appear today. Both men look as though their work has kept them young.
Bars, beers, baristas, boba in brand new beverage book 'Drink: Los Angeles'
When Eat: Los Angeles shut down, it was a sad day. We lost a valuable "Off-Ramp" contributor, and residents lost a smart guide to all the places you can get food and drink in Southern California. So we were glad to hear that Colleen Dunn Bates and her Prospect Parks Books team revived a part of Eat: L.A. in a pocket-sized book, "Drink: Los Angeles."
"We realized," says Bates, Drink L.A.'s editor, "that the city has become a locus for great drinking. And that did not used to be the case for L.A. We were outshone in many departments: there were better cities for beer, better cities to drink wine. There were certainly better cities for bars, and better cities for coffee. But now L.A. is holding its own if not leading in many of those categories."
BUY: "Drink: Los Angeles" from Vroman's
What happened? Contributing editor Garrett Snyder says, "One of the main strengths for L.A.'s drinking culture is what you'll find in arts, architecture, food, things like that, is that there's a lack of tradition. That used to be a negative, but I feel like now it allows — whether you're in beer, coffee, cocktails — to kind of strip things down and not have a dogmatic view of what you should have. It's produced a lot of things that are exciting, and aren't going on in the rest of the country."
"Drink: Los Angeles" includes more than 500 listings for great booze and juice bars, beer taprooms, wine stores, coffee houses, even boba shops. What you won't find: chain shops and eateries, and places that suck. They prefer to simply focus on the good and ignore the bad.
The guide also breaks down Southern California by region, and includes do-it-yourself pub-crawls in various hip neighborhoods. And for those of us who are getting increasingly crotchety about the noise level at many bars, look for the "ear" symbol, which denotes a place where you can hold a (reasonably) quiet conversation.
From RFK and MLK to Whitney Houston - The Merv Griffin Show now on DVD
UPDATE 11/12/2014: The Merv Griffin Show 12-DVD set has just been released. Here's our Off-Ramp interview from 2012, when they'd just begun licensing some of the archive for documentaries, and others.
Merv Griffin (1925-2007) created Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune, and those will probably be his legacy in the public's mind. But from 1962 to 1986, he hosted a daily talk show that was carried on all the major markets and featured all the personalities of the day.
Yes, over the years there's going to be a lot of froth, but as David Peck, the president of Reelin' In The Years, discovered as he began to prepare the Merv Griffin Show archives for licensing, Griffin hosted the lasting greats as well, including Rose and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Richard Pryor, Woody Allen, John Wayne, Joan Crawford, and a young girl who performed for the first time on television on his show: "Whitney Houston," Merv said, "Now there's a name you're not going to forget."
Peck says the Merv Griffin shows will be a treasure trove for documentarians, historians, and biographers; and there are plans to release DVDs, as well.
Dick Cavett used to write for Merv Griffin, and in 1965 alone, appeared on the show seven times. Cavett admires Griffin's business acumen, but also his stamina and ability to always be pleasant ... which of course was exactly what the home audience wanted.
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Audio:
1. Cavett and Peck join Off-Ramp host John Rabe for a fun interview of memories, discoveries, and rare clips of the Merv Griffin Show.
2. A medley of great Merv Griffin guests, including Whitney Houston, Woody Allen, MLK, RFK, John Wayne and Joan Crawford.
3. Merv Griffin Show 7/13/1981 - Jerry Seinfeld
4. Merv Griffin Show 12/10/1979 - Francis Ford Coppola
5. Merv Griffin Show 8/1/1966 - Richard Pryor and Jerry Lewis
6. Merv Griffin Show 7/13/1966 - Timothy Leary