10
Thursday, April 14, 1983
Daily Nebroskan
As
ICS e
Entertainment
IVfefeiyMii, (GtminnisSiioe
patied by blaze
of Macgofs gmoD
By Pat Clark
The G. Cue: Mustafbena Miztaykh turned out to be an
even bigger mistake than I thought. He duped me into
believing he was the CQ Guy, and said he was ready to
meet Diane Pemberton. Pemberton, meanwhile, had her
eye on a prospect across the room, and si inked off, leaving
Miztaykh and the arsenic-tongued Mona Vermiami
twistin' the night away on a dance floor violent with the
sound and movement of rock n' roll behavior. I should
know what was on the dance floor; 1 was there too, still
handcuffed to Miztaykh 's ankle.
High-heeled threats stomped around me as Miztaykh
and Mona dragged me around the dance floor. 1 could see
the dame whose name I didn't know following along. Her
lips were moving, probably even forming words, but she
wasn't going to be heard so close to the dance floor, as
Charlie Burton and the Cut-Outs had a monopoly on
decibels for the duration of the set.
I looked over at our table, where Pemberton was
sitting again, her eyes looking tired and her face full of
failure. It was the kind of a face that a dame would put on
who had just wasted a lot more than time, any empty face
that was done dreaming for awhile.
"Rdgrzksnvbrt," I hear shouted into my ear. I turned
to look and it was the dame whose name 1 didn't know,
crouched on the dance floor screeching small talk into my
ear like nothing unusual was going on. 1 shouted at
her, and she shouted back, each of us watching our how-dee-dos
fall well-short of each other's ears.
I looked up at Miztaykh. He and Mona Vermiami had
organized the other dancers in a scam to free us from the
handcuffs. Between songs, Burton took time out from his
dual role as lead singer and chief puppet master to explain
the rules. "For a quarter a shot, everybody gets a chance
to kick, pry, bend, twist, or otherwise release the hand
cuffs. Think of it as your little kick for the cause of
freedom . . ." he said with the kind of oil-tongued confi
dence that could sell insurance to the dead. "Freedom is
important," he continued, the dancers caught up in the
hypnotalk, "and it was especially important to one
man ... the late, great king of rock and roll . . . Elvis
Presley."
There was more talk, but I didn't listen, as my
attention turned to the growing line of hopefuls handing
their quarters to Mona Vermiami at the other end of the
dance floor. You could tell from 30 feet away that it was
the kind of a group you wanted to stay 30 feet away, a
rock 'n' roll commando unit spiced with people who knew
their way around a pair of handcuffs.
The song started, and contestants started to take their
chances, stomping and pounding and kicking a three-ring
circus of violence while the music played. I looked at the
table; Diane Pemberton was gone, and so was the dame
whose name I didn't know.
I didn't have time to see where they had gone, be
cause some guy with feet for hands picked me up and
started beating me against the floor like a Neanderthal
doing laundry against a rock. "C'mon, break," he kept
saying, pounding me against the floor and repeating the
phrase in a nightmare mantra.
Another guy, either the bartender or head trainer for
the guy who was pounding me against the floor, was
screaming "The cuffs you idiot, the cuffs!"
"Oh," my Simian captor said, possibly expecting to be
lobbed a slab of meat for his sudden keen insight.
Without warning, the sound of a gunshot clanking
against metal sent goggle-eyed panic gurgling through the
dancers. The lower primate who had been so intent on
beating me into a thick paste jumped out of the way. I
looked at the handcuffs. The bullet had neatly severed the
cuffs, giving Miztaykh the opportunity to fall to the
ground in a faint. It looked like a good idea to me, but I
didn't faint. Instead, I looked up, where the dame whose
name I didn't know was standing there calmly brandish
ing the gun. "Hey, you," I said brilliantly.
"Margot," she said, anticipating my question. "My
name is Margot Blue."
"You certainly know how to get a guy's attention, Miss
Blue."
"Call me Margot."
"I'll call you Margot if you'll call me a doctor."
She smiled, her eyes lighting up with a punchline you
could see a mile away. "Okay, you're a doctor."
TnVyYi l
I i I ; 0 0 (
7- ..'
Vv ;i
'J i
'.
Bone and the Boilers, from Omaha, are playing at Larry's Showcase tonight through Saturday. Cover is $1.50
tonight and S2 Friday and Saturday.
show displays woirsft hod II V
By Pat Clark
Another Oscar night has come and gone, and once
again the best in cinema has brought out the worst in
television. From the opening "live action" shots of
stars flocking to the Awards presentation, to the closing
commercial plug for Atari, a little more than three hours
later, the Oscar show demonstrated, if nothing else, why
it is still worth the effort and money to go to a theater to
see movies.
Using the old television dictate that anything worth
doing is worth overdoing, the Oscar show featured no less
than four masters of ceremonies; Liza Minelli, Dudley
Moore, Richard Pryor and Walter Matthau. The job of
the Oscar night emcee, of course, is to act as traffic
cop, by handing the microphone over to still other enter
tainment figures for the actual awards presentations.
With four emcees, much of the time was spent passing
the mike to each other.
No one single Oscar emcee was really bad, the problem
was in having all four of them when any one would do.
Liza Minelli 's pie-eyed "ain't Hollywood wonderful"
approach would have been too frothy for almost any
thing else, but is exactly what people expect out of the
Oscar show. Moore's deflating opening line, "Good
evening, my pants are killing me," went over well as the
counter-pomposity capsule it was intended to be. Moore
then fell into a diatribe about not being nominated for
anything this year; a recurring theme that can only have
come across as egotistical to a television audience he
accurately described as, "four hundred million people,
two of whom I know personally."
Of the four, Pryor is currently the hottest entertainer,
but. was also the worst choice. Pryor's whole career has
been built on routines that cannot oe aired on network
television, so he was left with virtually nothing to say.
Matthau took the anchor leg of the Oscar relay and
shared with Pryor a grasp of the essential fact that the
job of the emcee is to relinquish the floor to the pre
senters as soon as possible. Unfortunately, Matthau,
like the others, also had to introduce at least one splashy
song and dance production number.
More than anything else, more than everything else
combined even, the production numbers kill the Oscar
show every year. This year was no exception. Television
is most successful when it is most intimate; it is, after all,
the medium that asks to sit in your living room and chat
with you. Groups of two and three people, where you can
make out who's who, have always worked better on
television than groups of 200 or 3,000. To capture a
Ziegfield Follies-sized production number on television
starts to look very much like the amateur photographer's
efforts to get the whole wedding party into one shot
with the family Kodak.
Nevertheless, production numbers are probably in the
Oscar show to stay; in fact, they seem to be growing in
number and scope over the years. They have helped to
make the Oscar show so big that it now deserves its own
awards, which, for lack of a better name, would be called
the Oscar Night Oscars.
This year's Oscar Night Oscars include :
Best Achievement in Setting the Equal Rights Move
ment Back 100 Years: Racquel Welch, in her role as the
frail sexpot playing opposite Tom Selleck. After they
read the nominees for Best Film Editing, Selleck handed
Welch the envelope and said the customary, "and the
winner is ... " Welch stared at the envelope a second,
handed it back to Selleck and said, "You have those
big muscles. You open it."
Best Effort to Save a Dogmeat Production Number :
The Temptations, who found themselves caught in the
"Eye of the Tiger" with Sandahl Berg nan and about
500 glitter-laden dancers. The only good that could come
of this is that "Eye of the Tiger" may now be dead
forever as a high school drill team tune.
Best Shot of a Celebrity in the Audience : The camera
man who spotted Lou Gossett, Jr., sitting back with one
arm around his son, the other hand on his Oscar and his
face full of relief. Give me a shot like this anytime instead
of a panoramic view of a hundred faceless dancers
splashing through another Salute to Hollywood.
Best Effort to Speed Up the Proceedings: We have a
tie. One Oscar Night Oscar in this category goes to John
Mishita, better known as the speed-talker in the Xerox
ads. He read the voting rules in less time than most people
spent thanking their relatives.
Mishita ties with Sigourney Weaver, who led into the
Best Supporting Actress presentation with a simple,
"time is of the essence," message..
Best Effort to Slow Down the Proceedings: We have
another tie. One Oscar Night Oscar in this category goes
to the director who asked Dudley Moore to
S-T-R-E-T-C-H what was by then already a two-hour
show. The director ties with Placido Domingo who
spent untold minutes telling Cher Bono-Allman-Hollywood
how gorgeous she was. The time for that
ot course, is at the party after the presentations.
Best tttort to Meet a CIA Agent: Edward Le Lorrain,
accepting the award for Best Documentary Short Subject
or his fihn, "If You Love This Planet," thanked the U.S.
lhefMPUtmnt "fr f yUr Help in distributing
Best Achievement in Undercutting an Acceptance
Speech: The hands-down winner here is ABC television
itself, for following up Sir Richard Attenborough's
monologue about Mahatma Gandhi's plea for world
peace with an advertisement for Atari video games.
There are more, of course. In the entertainment
business, there are always more awards. The first Oscars
were handed out by Douglas Fairbanks at the break
neck pace of four minutes and 22 seconds. This year the
three-hour-p us Oscar show did not even cover all the
awards, as the science and technical achievement Oscars
have been farmed out to a separate night that doesn't
get its own television time. At least, not yet.
