Roger Catlin | TV Eye

The Friars Club’s Inner Sanctum

It was about time someone threw a party at the Friars Club of Beverly Hills. I had been staring at the building a block away from my balcony the last couple of times the TV critics press tour has been in Beverly Hills and longed to peek in the place where classic comedians had drank and toasted and roasted.

When AMC ponied up a month’s membership in order to rent it a night for a “Mad Men” party this week, there were no comics inside (indeed they had to bring in a lot of their own furniture). But the main floor was decked out in lavish red curtains and cocktail tables; a staff of waitresses had sharp black beehives circa 1960, martinis were stressed, and playing some jazz of the era was a jazz band led by Jeff Goldblum, of movies and  occasionally TV (the one season “Raines”).

Of course, the stars of “Mad Men” fit effortlessly into this mileau as well. But the only comics or old Hollywood around were in the photos or paintings on the walls.

Milton Berle was behind building the place in 1961, a West Coast satellite to the New York institution. The photos show how lively a place it was, with stops by Bob Hope, Groucho Marx, Red Buttons, Phyllis Diller, Rich Little and George Burns.

The more we explored, the more we got into corners of the place that had been cordoned off by velvet ropes. That’s where we found, upstairs, the famous pool room.

Like Mark Twain’s pool room, it’s a nice table, a few chairs and a big ashtray for cigars. Smoking was half the reason for the sanctuary, especially in a state that spearheaded no smoking laws. But more than that, there was sand on the floor, and not a little of it. An inch or two of sand covered the floor, serving as ready ashtray anywhere you walk, I guess (it would also be a welcome retreat for cats, I guess).

Anyway, a game was proposed, cigarettes were lit, and soon there was a cloud in that room that rivaled the worst downtown L.A. smog. Someone flashed a camera and all you could scarcely see images through the haze: not only smoke, but dust raised from the sand. Apparently there’s a sophisticated exhaust system for the room to keep the circulation rolling, but nobody thought to turn it on.

Eventually, Goldblum made his way up and sat in a chair, as did members of the “Mad Men” cast -- Jon Hamm, whose longtime girlfriend is Jennifer Westfeldt of Guilford, who has a new movie coming out of her own; and also January Jones, Michael Gadis, and also the show creator Matthew Weiner.

The stage was set for one of those moments – the kind of scene I always thought press tour would be. I just hadn’t expected to get such a lungful of smoke and dust out of it. And my shoes were just filthy the next day.

The Party Report

No press tour is over until the party report is issued. Nineteen days of press tour means about 17 nights of parties, in which the networks bring their stars, their booze and their brightest ideas in an effort to engage the gathered TV press to their goods.

Can you make conclusions about a network from the kind of party it throws? Who knows? Of the soirees thrown this year, most were right on site at the Ritz-Carlton Huntington Hotel & Spa; the rest were all in the city limits. Forget hob nobbing with Hollywood; we never got out of Pasadena.
Nevertheless, here, night by night, is what we have to report.

My Favorite 'Housewife'

Among the items I forgot to mention earlier was a short interview that emerged at the ABC party, where, as the darkness began to settle in the search became more frantic for Eva Longoria, the “Desperate Housewife” of choice that night.

But I was happy to talk to my favorite member of the cast – who is also the one hardly ever seen.

Since the show’s inception, Brenda Strong has played Mary Alice Young, the woman whose death was the central story of the show, at least for the first season.

The storyline was pretty much solved in season one, yet she returned to narrate season two as well.

But whether there is a future for Mary Alice, Strong says “more importantly, is there a past?”

Two Disney Stars, Unnoticed

Because ABC is owned by Disney, a few of the latter’s stars wandered around mostly unnoticed by press seeking broadcast stars.

But there’s been no bigger TV movie and no bigger album of any kind than “High School Musical,” whose Ashley Tisdale walked around largely unbothered – except by reporters with kids in the tween demographic.

“It’s fun,” Tisdale said of all the hubbub about the January TV movie that has since become a phenomenon. Shooting begins in January for the sequel due out next summer, she says.
In the meantime, she’s doing work on “The Suite Life of Jack and Cody,” in which she costars as Maddie Fitzpatrick.

Singing and performing in “High School Musical” came as a natural to her since the New Jersey native started her career in a girl group. She’s signed with Warner Bros. records currently and looking to recording her solo debut. In the mean time, she says, “TV is also my passion.”

As I was interviewing her, someone stood behind Asley, braiding her hair. Turns out it was an almost equally big star on the Disney Channel, Miley Cyrus, star of her own sitcom “Hannah Montana,” a hit since its debut earlier this year.

“I love it,” says Cyrus, whose famous singing dad Billy Ray Cyrus, plays her dad in the show as well. Her favorite part, though, is unexpected: “I love doing my own stunts.”

She’s also had the luck to perform a couple of her own songs in the show. She’ll get to perform them live she says when she goes out on tour this fall, opening shows for The Cheetah Girls.

My Failures at Press Tour, Part 2: The Expert

Because the first time I went to press tour, I had just been named TV critic and didn’t have time to see all the preview tapes, I went in with an open mind about new shows.

This seemed to serve me well. I’d listen to what everyone had to say about their show and then review their pilot closer to their debut. Early preview copies were always listed “not for review” anyway and I was only to willing to oblige; I had enough stuff to watch that I did need to review before the fall.

Not having seen the work kept me out of the loop of conversations with my colleagues, of course.

And when Jonathan Storm of the Philadelphia Inquirer did an annual roundup of the season outlook by interviewing other journalists, I had to decline.

But when Kristin Veitch, the glamorous and funny correspondent of E! invited me to take part in a roundtable about the new season and TV for USA Weekend magazine, which has a circulation of about 50 million, I didn’t want to beg off.

But I probably should have.

My Failures at Press Tour, Part 1: The Celebrity Date

It’s not like it’s the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington, where attendees are judged on the fame of those who accompany them.

But members have been known to accompany TV stars to the TV Critics Association Awards. Usually it’s only the winners who show up among the scribes and their dates, but one year somebody brought Larry Hagman, Toronto’s Rob Salem is practically famous for getting people from Lucy Lawless to Leslie Hope to join him.

I am not so well connected in Hollywood as to have any actress actually know my name. But I have been friends with Pauley Perrette, who plays the striking goth forensic specialist in “NCIS.”

Mostly because we talk about music and such every six months there is a CBS party at press tour.
She gets along great with a lot of TCA members and often closes down the parties, as she notes in her blog. So I thought maybe she’d be game to go to the TCA Awards as well.

Co-Opting the Kids

There was so much talk of platforms at the TV writers’ press tour, you’d think it was a convention about Kiss shoe fetishists.

Downloads, uplinks, mobisodes, iPods were all in the vernacular, but streaming on broadband is the one application that actually seems driven by the market.

It’s fun to watch little videos made by some dude in his basement, or some clip of a TV gaffe you didn’t happen to TiVo. Its insurrectionist spirit is like that of indie rock fighting the good fight against the turgid approved entertainment of corporate behemoths. Instead of a handful of corporate gatekeepers, everyone is a producer worthy of getting something seen by millions maybe.

The main arena for all of this at the moment, of course, is YouTube, the eminently searchable online compendium of thousands of these things. More than 70 million videos a day are seen on YouTube, the 17th most trafficked site on the internet.

When NBC announced it had made a deal with YouTube to help promote its fall schedule, it was concealing the fact that it had already been surreptitiously using it as a new way to create buzz and shows.

It’s obvious that NBC was the source the most-downloaded viral video to date, the infectious “Lazy Sunday” rap of Chris Parnell and Andy Samberg that began life as a late show clip on a “Saturday Night Live,” where it had upstaged the host, Jack Black.

Less well known was that the second most downloaded clip – with 5 million streams , “The Easter Bunny Hates You” also came from NBC.

And so the whole road to development of “Nobody’s Watching” looks suspicious as well.

Long Post; Little Pavarotti

“Great Performances” has over the years included a wide array of artists with Bruce Springsteen and Garrison Keillor appearing this summer alone and Liza Minnelli and Memphis soul spotlights due this fall. But when it comes down to it, they like to return to classical and opera – or the kind of classical pop crossover that’s been creating excitement at the boxoffice and during the all-important pledge time.

PBS thinks it has the next dude to bring them newfound money and pledges and cross promotion – a ploy that worked with acts as arcane as a Waltz King, Andre Rieu. In Vittorio Grigolo, PBS has found a guy with the sizzle of Simon Cowell’s Il Divo (a post in which Vittorio turned down!) with the showmanship of the king of this kind of crossover stuff, Yanni.

So what was he doing nearly naked in the pool following his press tour showcase?

Greatly Exaggerated

Playwright Neil Simon gets the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor at the Kennedy Center this fall.

But he was hard pressed at press tour to see any parallels with Twain – or be very funny – when he was asked about it.

“It's a great, great honor to get this prize,” Simon said. “but I wasn't taught to write about the
way I write through Mark Twain -- because he wasn't a  playwright.”

“I don't compare myself to him,” he said of Twain. “I wouldn't. I mean, he's had all  of those works and books and everything. Listen, he's not getting the award. I'm getting the award. He's giving it to me, so I'm very grateful to him.”

The event, to be taped Oct. 15, will air Nov. 20 on PBS.

Two Elizabeths; One Jane

Currently up for an Emmy for her work portraying “Elizabeth I’ in the HBO movie of the same name, Dame Helen Mirren has moved on to Elizabeth II for the upcoming film “The Queen.”

Not being part of the royal social circles, other than to “go get my damehood,” Mirren sys she watched a lot of film to learn how to play the queen.

“I did feel agreat level of concern about not betraying in cheap way,” Mirren told reporters at press tour on her 61st birthday. “As you can imagine, in England it's an incredibly hot potato and I didn't want to be sycophantic and groveling.”

Instead, she says, “I wanted to be truthful as I could be about that character and about the situation.”

In between queens, the busy actress found time to star in “Prime Suspect 7,” which will be the swan song of her character Det. Jane Tennison.

“Every time I've gone back to do it again, it's like greeting an old friend, sort of friend you've known from school. You've known her for a very long time, and you may not have seen her for five years but you feel like you know each other, you have that rapport. I have that sort of relationship with this character.”

”Prime Suspect 7” airs on “Masterpiece Theatre” on PBS Nov. 12 and 19.