Mama Cass 1969 Special

Before chubby songbird Grammy-sensation Adele , there was Cass Elliott.

Look at her backup singers- The blonde on right is Edna Wright (later of "The Honey Cone" and Darlene Love's kid sister). Yes! Cass opens the show with backup vocalists Clydie King, Carol Willis and Edna Wright. Both Willis and Wright were in Honey Cone a few years later.

I betcha 1969 audiences had never seen a female singer as "HEAVY SET" on television before
-- little did they know what Americans would look like 40 years later.

If you had your first TV special - wouldn't you have Buddy Hackett and Martin Landau as your guests?


Watch Cass, Edna and Buddy shine  despite the lackluster CBS Television City audience who seem to be looking for Cher or  The Smothers Brothers.   LINK is HERE 

Peter Serafinowicz on Media Theft

 Link at pic despite blogger's new suckish interface - also here
I'm a big fan of this guy and his "bad habits" are no less than what I would expect from any self respecting British comedy production perticipant. From Gizmodo. Peter Serafinowicz: "Torrenting is probably too hassle-y for the average viewer: Installing Transmission, VLC, perhaps re-encoding to watch on my TV—but I'm pretty techy (ok, a geek) and have been doing this for years. ......................In the meantime, I'll be suing myself for pirating my own show. And I'm pretty scared, because I have an amazing lawyer."
Link to article

Debra Paget's First Dance for Fritz Lang

Two years ago or so Debra Paget's dance from Das Indische Grabmal (The Indian Tomb) was on a bunch of sites owing to her "artificially nude" appearance juxtaposed over Fritz Lang's exotic and tense mise en scene. It looked cool. This clip:



is not dissimilar and it's from the first film of his Indian Epic Trilogy - Der Tiger Von Eschnapur. The set is pretty spectacular as is Paget's gusto towards getting the performance maximized. A great lepers-that-look-like-zombies scene shortly follows in the film.