For your singing and dancing pleasure, here they are.
Right from the very beginning it seemed like a very, very cute idea.
You make a movie to have the audience forget all their problems and get wrapped up in what the hell is happening on the screen.
You have less production on the screen and you have less story and you have less action.
Any parts, any time, any place, anywhere.
Thank you. Go!
The meeting is adjourned.
Eastwoods, the mayor, Lancaster and Douglas are a pair and Winkler's in despair.
On Wednesday, April 16th, 1986, this is Entertainment Tonight.
Music
Hello everyone. I'm Rob Weller.
And I'm Mary Hart.
It was the perfect mix for network news. An actor turned politician.
But the crisis in Libya has dominated the news and the story was all but ignored.
So here it is. Rain was falling in Carmel, California, but nothing could stop it from being Clint Eastwood's day.
Marilee Beck reports.
Clint Eastwood's race for mayor did sometimes turn Carmel into a three ring circus, but now the show has moved to the main tent.
In a light drizzle, Eastwood took the oath of office to start his $200 a month job.
I, Clint Eastwood, do solemnly swear.
Do solemnly swear.
Under the proud gaze of Eastwood's mother and stepfather, he became his honor, the mayor of Carmel by the Sea.
Congratulations, Mr. Mayor.
Applause
As for getting down to business, the man who's known for saying few words on the screen stayed in character with his newest role.
I'd like to make a motion that this meeting be adjourned.
Second the motion.
The meeting is adjourned.
Applause
This swearing in ceremony is the beginning of a new era, the new two year term for Mayor Clint.
And if these townspeople and tourists are any indication, it looks like the crowds will follow him anywhere.
In Carmel, Marilee Beck, Entertainment Tonight.
The Libyan crisis also preempted part two of CBS's mini-series, Dream West.
It aired last night. Now part three has been rescheduled for Sunday night.
The first two hours of the mini-series starring Richard Chamberlain took a beating in the ratings from the TV movie, Return to Mayberry.
Now NBC is talking to the stars about another TV film, Christmas at Mayberry.
And Stacey Keech, after time out for some bad times, is coming back as Mike Hammer.
With high hopes, viewer response will translate into a renewal of the series.
Dick Shoemaker reports.
He returns to TV Friday night on a special two hour CBS movie.
And there are high hopes he'll be back again in a regular series.
Hi, Mike Hammer.
The people will decide whether or not Mike Hammer comes back on the air.
That's basically what it comes down to.
If the numbers are good, they've told us that we'll be back in the fall.
This time, Mike Hammer is more sensitive to women.
The macho image softens somewhat by Lauren Hutton.
I'm sorry.
That's okay.
Come on, drink your beer.
Thanks.
You don't have to sing.
And you don't have to beat yourself up either.
Want to sit down?
I don't know.
I'm having trouble with small decisions.
The last time the demographics survey was done by the powers that be,
they discovered that Mike Hammer is very popular among men,
but it wasn't so popular among women.
So in an effort to try and get some of that audience,
that's one of the reasons why we're moving more in that direction.
Keech himself had some decisions to make ten months ago
when he walked out of a London prison.
He had served six months for smuggling cocaine.
Since then, he's campaigned against drug abuse.
But at this point, does he think he's paid his dues?
Yeah, I do.
As far as that goes, I do.
I mean, it's behind me now.
I want to move on to other things.
That includes trying to turn this $3.5 million TV movie into a regular role.
The script was a little different than other Hammer scripts
in the sense that it shows another side of his character.
It shows a little bit more compassionate side, a little bit more vulnerable side.
But don't be misled.
There's still plenty of old-fashioned action in the return of Mike Hammer.
The dangerous work on screen is done by stuntman Buddy Joe Hooker.
But you do see Keech in some scenes.
When you see me, you see me. That's me, yeah.
But I like to do that.
I mean, that's part of the fun of being an actor.
If you're going to be in an action show,
the fun part is to be able to do as much of that stuff as you possibly can.
As time goes on, I'll probably do less and less.
My broker is E.F. Hutton, and E.F. Hutton says,
not really, Rob.
The brokerage firm has announced it as higher television's number one star to be its spokesman.
Bill Cosby has signed a long-term agreement with E.F. Hutton
for TV commercials, print ads, and concert appearances.
Print ads and commercials are crucial to any sales campaign,
and movies are certainly no exception.
After a number of television stations and newspapers refused ads
for Tristar's Sexual Perversity in Chicago because of its suggestive title,
the movie is getting a new name.
The comedy starring Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, and Jim Belushi will now be known as About Last Night.
Another movie with a different sort of title problem is The Gig.
Will everyone remember The Gig as musicians slaying for a job?
Well, its star, Wayne Rogers, threw a party to spread the word.
Al Owens was there.
For your singing and dancing pleasure, here they are, the new Grenadiers.
Let's hear it, fellas.
A one, two, a one!
The Gig is the story about a bunch of middle-aged guys
in search of new meaning in life as they hit the road as musicians.
You're welcome to have a heart attack out there.
Oh, you want us to play soft?
And different.
Wayne Rogers, the star of the film, held a party at his new restaurant following the movie's premiere.
I want to do two weeks in Las Vegas singing.
No one will ever ask me, but in any case, that's my fantasy.
I was so depressed in this movie tonight because there were so many things in there that I have done, just like that.
Wayne Rogers is an actor, an entrepreneur, and a restaurateur.
And it seems appropriate his latest film, The Gig, is about a man who finally gets the job he's always wanted.
I have been secretly wanted to play a gig, that's true.
And finally, when the movie came about, that was my opportunity, so we played a gig in the Catskills.
So you weren't really acting then?
Of course not. Didn't you see me playing that trombone? Man, I was working.
That was heavy stuff. It's not a tough dude on a trombone.
Aloeens Entertainment Tonight.
Next, Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster, Hollywood's veteran hit team, reunites to play two tough guys.
And ahead, Yoko Ono goes on record about John Lennon's art.
Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas are the Hope and Crosby of the tough guy set.
They've starred together in half a dozen movies, a play, and they even did a song and dance number once on television.
Now, in more customary roles, they're back before the cameras.
Eric Burns has this on location report.
Well, right from the very beginning, it seemed like a very, very cute idea.
Burt Lancaster is making a new movie with an old co-star, Kirk Douglas.
I think we just work well. We seem to have no problem working together, and a certain chemistry comes across.
Douglas and Lancaster arrived in Hollywood 40 years ago, and they've been sharing movie marquees ever since.
Tough Guys is their latest.
It was written specifically as a Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster movie, and that was real obvious to me when I read it.
And I thought, what an incredible thing to be able to do, Kirk and Burt, 30 years after Gunfight at OK Corral.
Douglas!
I'll take care of Ringo.
We really got close to one another when we did Gunfight at the OK Corral.
I think we became very close at that particular moment.
I think you're scared, Harry.
Damn right I'm scared. If you had any brains, which obviously you don't have, you'd be scared too.
We were going to tell you about the plot of Tough Guys, but, well, let's have co-star Eli Wallach do it instead.
Two men who committed a crime went to jail for 30 years.
I was hired to get rid of them because of the mishandling of the crime.
So they get out of prison and they meet the, it's Rip Van Winkle with two wonderful actors, Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster.
And they are adjusting to the modern world and my aim is to get rid of them.
Just like an old vaudeville act, Douglas and Lancaster remain as smooth together today as ever.
And as confident as ever about what makes a hit movie.
You don't make a movie to deliver a message. You make a movie to have the audience forget all their problems and get wrapped up in what the hell is happening on the screen,
and what Burt is doing to Kirk and what Kirk is doing to Burt.
Because it's very reminiscent of the manner in which Kirk and I were portrayed in the earlier days.
And it's a sense, it's a kind of return to our fantasy. From that point of view it has an inbuilt nostalgia, I think.
In Tough Guys there is an underneath statement that sometimes old guys aren't as quickly finished as other people might think.
Burt and I in Tough Guys are pretty active tough guys.
The Omaha World Herald has dropped the remainder of this week's Doonesbury comic strip, calling it potentially libelous.
Earlier the Los Angeles Times had dropped the week's strip saying it was overdrawn and unfair.
Two other newspapers are running edited versions of the strip which satirizes the Reagan administration.
In 1966 John Lennon first met Yoko Ono in an exhibition of her work in a London art gallery.
Twenty years later that connection is renewed as people in New York City get to see a different picture of the late singer-songwriter.
Actually they can see 17 pictures, all hand drawn by Lennon, in an exhibition of his line drawings called This Is My Story, Both Humble and True.
The drawings cover key periods in Lennon's life. Most of them have never before been seen in public.
Some have his embossed signature with Yoko Lennon's counter signature.
His widow Yoko Ono released them in limited editions to stop the sale of counterfeit Lennon artwork and for a more personal reason.
He always wanted to do a sort of normal gallery show to just be accepted or be appreciated for what his work was.
I hope that he's going to be appreciated as an artist without people thinking, oh is this what the pop star did?
I hope someday he'll join us
And the world will live as one
Why primetime may not be so prime anymore, a special report on what could be a big change in the quality of the shows you look at each night.
Coming up on Entertainment Tonight, tomorrow Roman Polanski and his new movie Pirates and Amy Grant crosses over from gospel to pop.
Friday, Judge Reinhold likes his movie roles off beat and 20 shows that change TV traces the dramatic history of Masterpiece Theater.
All on Entertainment Tonight.
A recent dispute over rising production costs on the hit cop show Miami Vice threatened to force the show to move to Los Angeles.
That dispute has been resolved, but it does point out a growing problem for those who make television shows and for those who watch.
Gene Wolfe reports.
Miami Vice, Hill Street Blues, Hardcastle and McCormick, hour long action adventure shows, all popular and all expensive.
So expensive they're having trouble getting made.
It's very, very expensive to make our television and there have to be changes or it will become a dinosaur.
Henry Winkler is the executive producer of MacGyver. Every week that his company makes the show for ABC, it loses money.
The network gives you a fee. The show costs much more than the fee and the studio adds all that money that is extra, which is a considerable amount of money.
More money than I ever could even spell.
Winkler and other producers make TV shows by deficit financing. If a show costs a million dollars a week to make, the network may pay only three quarters of a million dollars, their license fee for the show.
The producer or studio must pay the other quarter of a million dollars each week and hope that they can recover the loss by later selling the show in reruns called syndication.
The rare hit show puts millions of dollars in the bank for its producers, but as TV programs become more expensive and as the networks cover a smaller percentage of those production costs,
producers may find themselves at the bank making more withdrawals than deposits.
We negotiate our license fees with them every year. We argue with them. We grab them around the throne and say, come on you guys, we're bleeding to death.
And they say, ah, come on, you've got the A-Team, you're a wealthy man. And they do that to you.
The fact of the matter is, the A-Team comes along. A show, a big hit like that comes along once every ten shows.
Stephen Cannell has produced some of the most successful action adventure shows on television, but today he's feeling the pinch.
The difference in the license fees of Greatest American Hero negotiated in 1979 and Stingray negotiated in 1986, fifteen percent improvement.
During that same period of time, the cost of all of the goods and services that we use to make these shows has gone up seventy-five percent.
It's up to the producers to find more economical ways to produce these shows.
They've just got to find shortcuts. They can't give the store away to the stars.
You know, they're doing an action show, maybe there'll be two stunts in the hour instead of five.
Fred Silverman has been on both sides of television show financing. After a long career as a network executive,
Silverman today produces Morning Star, Evening Star, and he keeps an eye on costs.
It's not an action show and there aren't any chases or physical stunts.
And it's, and you know, I think if the show is successful, that I don't see enormous deficits.
Television producers and network programmers are first and foremost in a business to make money.
But beyond affecting their bank accounts, the dispute over who pays how much could affect what we all see on TV.
You conceive of shows, I think, that you can project as being more controllable.
I don't think I could sell Hill Street Blues right now. I don't think anybody could.
Stephen Bochco was the original producer of Hill Street Blues. He left the show amid concerns over rising costs.
And he's now producing a new show, L.A. Law, in part because it costs less.
It's more controllable. It's more predictable in terms of how long will it take to make an episode.
What are the costs going to be? I hope. If not, I'm going to be on the tram out the front gate.
Having less money, you have less production on the screen, and you have less story, and you have less action, and you have less show.
As a writer, I just don't want to write scripts and care about my material and then turn around and destroy them when I produce them.
So I would much prefer just to get out of the game.
But few producers will get out of the game because the lure of big money is so great.
Magnum P.I. two years ago sold its reruns in syndication for a profit of more than a million dollars an episode.
I think it's not unlike the same reason people go to the racetrack or play the lottery.
The opportunity, the possibility of hitting that number or the horse or the pot at the end of the rainbow,
if indeed a producer is successful in that he produces the requisite number of shows for syndication.
And if the market is willing to accept his shows in syndication and pay the price that he projected, then he will have a very good time.
Two expensive shows, Miami Vice and Hill Street Blues, have already been renewed for next season,
showing that Hollywood producers and the networks can work together.
But the bigger problem remains. How to pay the bills for an increasingly expensive form of television?
In the end, the viewer may pay with fewer shows, less action and fewer adventures.
Gene Wolfe, Entertainment Tonight.
The white lie that turned into a white-hot career.
I talk with Saturday Night Live's John Lovitz, the pathological liar, when we return.
Here's the E.T. Digest for Wednesday, the 16th of April.
New on home video, Once Bitten, starring Lauren Hutton.
And in concert today, Jeffrey Osborne at Harris Tahoe in Lake Tahoe.
Celebrating birthdays today, Jimmy Osmond is 23, Karim Abdul-Jabbar is 39, Herbie Mann, 56, Edie Adams is 57,
Henry Mancini is 62, Peter Ustinoff, 65, and Barry Nelson is 66.
In show business, a little lie can go a long way.
Just ask Saturday Night Live cast member John Lovitz.
Dick Shoemaker did, and he got an earful, a mouthful, and a shoeful.
You may have seen him as the pathological liar on Saturday Night Live.
Thanks, but I'm not the president anymore. No, I'm the founder. Yeah.
He's really comedian John Lovitz. And how would he assess his career so far?
Well, I'd say I'm a lot farther than I was, and I had last year because last year, like in June, I was on unemployment,
and I wasn't working, and then now I'm on the show, and I've done like about five movies,
and I'm way ahead, and the liar character's really catching on a lot.
He did The Liar recently on HBO's comic release special.
See, it all started when I was living in Kentucky, in the... China, yeah.
In the movie Last Resort, Lovitz plays a French bartender who hates Americans like Charles Grodin.
Two red fruit cocktails. Two fruit cocktails. Yeah. Red. Right.
You have tokenze. What? Tokenze. Tokens.
Do you speak English? That's what I'm speaking English. What?
So whether it's The Last Resort or Comic Relief or Saturday Night Live, Lovitz can play a number of characters.
The Master Thespian. What's that? That's just me being a ham. That's what that is. I mean, it is. I'm just, you know...
For example? How do I do it? I go,
And then there was a time when I had the keen insight to realize that Shylock should be played as a Dane and Hamlet as a Hebrew.
Any part, any time, any place, anywhere. Thank God!
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration today announced the names of 100 journalists selected as potential space shuttle astronauts.
The list includes a wide range of magazine, newspaper, wire service, and freelance writers.
Among those from broadcasting are CBS's Walter Cronkite.
From NBC, Jay Barbary, Robert Bazell.
From ABC, Barry Seraphine, James T. Wooten, Lynn Sher, and Bill Blakemore.
Independent News Services' Morton Dean is also on the list, and so is the currently unaffiliated Geraldo Rivera.
NASA said the number of candidates will be paired down to 40 by the middle of next month.
Still want to go? Yeah, I understand it's going to be a couple of years maybe now before the shuttle's ready.
Season's wrap party for the cast of Falcon Crest, Carol Burnett-Tarzan yelling contest, and the premiere of Alan Alda's new film, Sweet Liberty.
Also, Roman Polanski's new film, also Amy Grant and our weekly preview of What's New on Video.
And that's all tomorrow on Entertainment Tonight.
Barry Manilow is once again on the charts. He has another hit. It's called He Doesn't Care, But I Do.
We care, so here it is. Bye-bye.
Music
Tomorrow at 4 on our magazine, Danny DeVito and Rhea Pillman give the secret to the happiness of their showbiz marriage.
Plus tips for refinancing a home, balance meals for kids and much more.
Now stay tuned for Highway to Heaven, next here on WJR-TV10.
Music