'Johnny Carson Show' out on DVD
LOS ANGELES (AP) - Last year, Joanne Carson reached into the climate-controlled wine cabinet stored in a corner of her Sunset Boulevard home and pulled out a rare vintage.
Carson had in hand 10 carefully maintained episodes of the 1955-56 "The Johnny Carson Show," starring her future husband in days before he made "The Tonight Show" his own.
The black-and-white films were a romantic memento for Joanne Carson: The shy Johnny Carson had wooed her with screenings of the comedy-variety show. He then gave her copies, episode by episode, one for her birthday, one for Christmas, another for Valentine's Day.
"They were valuable to me because they represented a very touching time, a very special time, when you're getting to know someone," said Joanne Carson, whose nine-year marriage to Carson, his second, ended in 1972.
The cache of old shows also stood for a promise.
"About a year before Johnny died, he said, 'Jo, do me a favour. Take those films someday, put them on DVD and share them. Because there aren't going to be any more,' " Joanne Carson, 75, recalled.
Emphysema claimed her former husband in 2005 at age 79. She and Carson had remained in occasional contact over the years, including during his subsequent two marriages.
"Because we started as friends, it was very important to Johnny that we end friends. And we stayed friends," said Joanne Carson.
She was preparing for an auction last year of memorabilia from her late confidant Truman Capote when she rediscovered Carson's courtship gift. "Joanne, you've got gold there," a friend remarked.
The shows are available on a two-disc DVD set from Shout Factory (US$24.98). There were 39 episodes produced of "The Johnny Carson Show," which aired Thursdays at 10 p.m. on CBS, and Johnny had picked his top 10 for Joanne.
She's unsure if there are any other copies. In the early days of television, live shows were recorded by filming a TV monitor. Known as kinescopes, the recordings often were lost.
The networks and producers "didn't keep anything. They erased the first 10 years of 'The Tonight Show,' " Joanne Carson said.
"The Johnny Carson Show" was part of Carson's journey to stardom.
After a series of local radio and TV jobs in Nebraska, where he was raised, Carson started at KNXT-TV in Los Angeles in 1950. His sketch comedy show, "Carson's Cellar," ran from 1951-53 and drew attention from Hollywood. A staff writing job for "The Red Skelton Show" followed.
The program provided Carson with a lucky break. When Skelton was injured backstage, Carson took the comedian's place in front of the cameras.
Producers sought to find the right vehicle for the up-and-coming comic, trying him out as host of the summer quiz show "Earn Your Vacation" (1954) and then "The Johnny Carson Show."
The DVDs reveal a rail-thin Carson, then 29, well-barbered but swimming in baggy suits and oversized shirt collars. He had yet to achieve the carefully tailored look he sported on "Tonight," but his unshakable poise was in evidence.
In his opening greeting to the studio audience and the sketches that followed, hindsight finds elements of the wry Carson charm and the comedy - ranging from pointed to pleasingly silly - that would make him a late-night legend.
"Johnny said to me, when we were watching the films, 'There's me without the polish,' " his ex-wife recounted.
Johnny Carson revelled in playing the kind of characters that would later populate "Tonight," and there are early hints of Carnac the Magnificent and others to come.
Many of the sketches, performed with a stock company that included comedians Virginia Gibson and Barbara Ruick, centred on TV itself, the revolutionary young invention that made the show - and Carson's ambitions - possible.
From the beginning, television couldn't help but be self-referential.
Carson did a bit about a father who comes home to find the TV set out for repair but his children staring, mindlessly, at the space it had occupied. He offered parodies of hit shows, including "You Are There" and "Person to Person," Edward R. Murrow's interview program (Carson's version of the sternly formal newsman was "Ed Furrow").
He envisioned a bright future for himself, he later told Joanne Carson, then the show was cancelled.
"He got very upset about it, left Los Angeles and moved to New York," she said. That's where Joanne Copeland, then an actress and model, met Carson and where he got a fresh start.
There were a few acting roles, then the game show "Who Do You Trust?" (1957-62), then an offer to replace Jack Paar on "Tonight." The late-night show, which Carson hosted until his retirement in 1992, made his career but helped end their marriage, Joanne Carson said.
"Johnny couldn't go anywhere, we couldn't stick our noses out of the door of the apartment, because people would grab at him. He had all these benefits to go to, all these openings. . . . I was a little girl from California," she said. "You just get to a point you can't do this anymore."
But Joanne Carson, who returned West and went on to earn graduate degrees in psychology and physiology, said her memories of Carson himself are only good.
"He was the best of the best. And that kind of style and class - you won't see it again," she said.
Fall Out Boy Ready To Rock On Honda Civic Tour
Pete Wentz says Fall Out Boy fans can expect "the biggest Fall Out Boy show they've ever seen" on the upcoming Honda Civic Tour, which begins April 18 in Charlotte, N.C. But, he adds, big is a relative term.
"A lot of bands right now are doing these really theatrical shows," Wentz tells Billboard.com. "Our friends Panic! At The Disco did this almost circus on stage, and it was crazy. But that's not what our band is. Our band's a rock band, so we look to bands like what Guns N' Roses used to do and what Metallica does and Foo Fighters and bands like that as far as what we're gonna do with our show. It's just gonna be a really, really, really big rock show."
Wentz says that in addition to playing the hits and pumping its latest album, "Infinity on High," the quartet plans to play songs from its catalog that have never been performed live, as well as re-arranged versions of other tracks and covers. "It'll be right back to Michael Jackson, probably," Wentz says of the latter. "I'd say expect Jackson 5 or 'Beat It' or something like that."
Fall Out Boy chose the other bands for the Honda Civic Tour bill, and Wentz says there were specific reasons to include all of them. They share a label with The Academy Is... and Cobra Starship, while rapper Paul Wall is a personal favorite who Wentz acknowledges "some people are gonna love us for and some people are gonna hate us for."
+44, meanwhile, is a chance to pay back blink-182 vets Mark Hoppus and Travis Barker for including Fall Out Boy on one of its tours. "And then," Wentz adds, "I feel like, as a band, we're really in our adolescence and we need someone who's gone through that before to ... show us the ropes and kind of just be around. I think Mark and Travis definitely represent that."
After the 43-date Honda Civic Tour wraps June 10-11 in Chicago, Wentz says Fall Out Boy plans to play some European festivals in the summer and then "go some places we've never been before, like Dubai and South Africa." The group also hopes to go to Uganda, where it works with the awareness group Invisible Children.
Superman Promises More Action Next Time Around
Brandon Routh, the actor who played Superman in last year's franchise revival Superman Returns, has indicated that the producers of the next sequel were sensitive to audience and critical complaints that the film lacked sufficient action sequences.
In an interview with the online edition of Britain's Empire magazine, Routh said that the last man-of-steel movie was formulated so that it would show Superman's love for Lois Lane and villain Rex Luthor using that against him.
"I just know that in the next film there will be a lot of action and I'm gonna get to fight something, or someone. An enemy with real physical power might be worked in there, definitely."
Routh provided no details, saying only that the sequel was about to begin pre-production "so there's a lot of ideas in the air and a lot of discussion about what's going to happen with it. I promise a lot of excitement."
DVD sales off to a slow start in 2007
LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Video industry executives concede that any slowdown in DVD sales so far this year is of their own making: Release schedules have been notoriously weak, with a lot of the high-profile titles that traditionally get saved for January or February pushed out the door in December to capitalize on the holiday buying frenzy.
The collective box office value of theatrical DVDs released in January was just $533.5 million, down 28.1% from the January 2006 total of $741.6 million. The February 2007 count was $542.8 million, 8% less than the $588 million theatrical value of February 2006 DVD releases.
Only now, in March, is the industry beginning to see a turnaround, with 17 films coming to DVD after earning $1.03 billion in theaters, essentially flat with the March 2006 theatrical tally.
Four of them grossed more than $100 million theatrically: "Borat" ($128.5 million), which came out on DVD March 6; "Casino Royale" ($167 million), released last Tuesday; "The Pursuit of Happyness" ($162.6 million), due March 27; and "Happy Feet" ($194.8 million), also coming March 27.
There were some success stories early in the year. Lionsgate had its biggest January ever and dominated sales charts with hits like "Saw III" and "Crank."
"Excess product in the holiday period created an opportunity for us in the first quarter," said Lionsgate president Steve Beeks.
Paramount Home Entertainment, too, has had a good first quarter, thanks to such titles as "Flags of Our Fathers," "Babel" and "Flushed Away."
The outlook for April and May is also good, with the box office value of announced April 2007 DVD releases clocking in at $603.3 million, compared with $671.3 million for the final April 2006 roster. And already, several big titles have been slotted for May, including "Dreamgirls" (May 1) and "Apocalypto" (May 22).
Family: Delp's death was suicide
CONCORD, N.H. - The family of Brad Delp, the lead singer for the band Boston, said his death was a suicide.
"He was a man who gave all he had to give to everyone around him, whether family, friends, fans or strangers," the family said in a statement relayed by police Wednesday. "He gave as long as he could, as best he could, and he was very tired. We take comfort in knowing that he is now, at last, at peace."
Delp, 55, died Friday at his Atkinson home.
Toxicology tests by the state medical examiner's office showed that Delp committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning, said Lt. William Baldwin. Police said Delp had sealed himself inside a bathroom with two charcoal grills sometime between 11:30 p.m. Thursday and Friday afternoon, when he was found by fiancee Pamela Sullivan.
Delp also left two notes taped to a door and letters to his family and Sullivan. Baldwin said police do not know the contents of the letters.
The family's statement said Sullivan, Delp's children and their mother, Delp's ex-wife Micki Delp, were grateful for the sympathy they had received.
Delp joined Boston in the mid-1970s and sang two of its biggest hits, "More than a Feeling" and "Long Time."
He had planned to marry Sullivan this summer during a break in a tour with Boston. A lifelong Beatles fan, Delp also played with the tribute band Beatle Juice.
Beatle Juice performed a benefit last year to help build a new public library in Atkinson, a small town of about 6,000 residents on the Massachusetts border.
The family said last week it planned a private funeral followed by a public memorial to be scheduled later.
Tarantino, Rodriguez bask in Death and Terror
LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - On paper, it sounds like the polar opposite of a box office sensation -- a three-hour ode to the Z-grade cinema of the 1970s, shot in the style of the time with enough sex and violence to satiate any exploitation junkie. But when the creative masterminds behind such a project turn out to be Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, suddenly, it seems like a Hollywood gold mine.
Indeed, there are perhaps no other filmmakers who could get a movie like Dimension Films' planned April 6 release "Grindhouse" off the ground.
In "Grindhouse," each director contributed his own feature-length segment to the film -- Rodriguez's "Planet Terror" sees Rose McGowan fend off a plague of zombies with a machine gun leg, while Tarantino's "Death Proof" features Kurt Russell as the homicidal Stuntman Mike, who enjoys running people down with his muscle car, a black Dodge Charger. Connecting the two are fabricated trailers for such upcoming features as "Werewolf Women of the S.S." from guest filmmakers including Eli Roth and Rob Zombie.
Rosario Dawson knows firsthand about Tarantino and Rodriguez's shared passion for grindhouse movies. The "Death Proof" actress starred in Rodriguez' 2005 film "Sin City," and she says it's exciting to work with two filmmakers so consistently committed to pushing cinematic boundaries.
"It was really striking being able to work with (Tarantino)," Dawson told the Hollywood Reporter. "It's the same thing as working with someone like Robert Rodriguez -- these young star directors who have a lot of talent and a lot of stories to tell and a lot of different ways they're capable of telling them."
Although the violent "Grindhouse" content would have most studios running for the hills, Bob Weinstein's Dimension label has enjoyed tremendous success with Rodriguez in the past on films including 2001's "Spy Kids," 2003's "Once Upon a Time in Mexico" and, most recently, "Sin City," a cutting-edge, black-and-white cinematic adaptation of the ultraviolent Frank Miller graphic novel of the same name.
With a budget of roughly $40 million, "Sin City" went on to earn not only rapturous reviews from a nation of awestruck fanboys but also nearly $75 million at the domestic box office -- enough to spawn a sequel that is planned for a tentative 2008 release.
Similarly, Harvey Weinstein's relationship with Tarantino stretches back to the earliest years of the filmmaker's career, when the former video store clerk burst into the industry spotlight in 1992 with "Reservoir Dogs." Over the past 15 years, Tarantino has remained fiercely loyal to the mercurial Weinstein, and together, they have collaborated on films including 1994's landmark "Pulp Fiction," 1997's "Jackie Brown" and 2003's "Kill Bill-Vol. 1" and 2004's "Kill Bill-Vol. 2."
"'Grindhouse' is a tribute to the movies I have loved for decades that have mostly been underappreciated and forgotten," Tarantino said recently in a statement issued regarding the director's grindhouse cinema retrospective at Los Angeles' New Beverly Cinema.
The festival, which runs through May 1, will feature such obscure gems as 1974's "Johnny Tough," 1975's Italian entry "Autopsy" and 1976's "Brotherhood of Death" -- all 35mm prints taken from Tarantino's personal collection.