Glass Shallot by Adam Baer | Adambaer.com

Cleveland Show Calling: The Kanye West Table Read

Recently, GQ posted a little one-question Q&A that I conducted with the co-creators of Fox's new "The Cleveland Show," premiering September 27. Below, is a piece about attending a table-read at the show's offices last spring, followed by a longer transcript of our conversation. 

Grab a folding chair in the front row; avoid clumsy boom-mic gaffers; sit close to the guest stars, and for the love of Hollywood, caffeinate. These are just some rules you should follow if you’re among the animators, production staff, agents, TV execs, writers, and miscellaneous VIPs invited to a table-read for The Cleveland Show, Fox’s "Family Guy" spinoff (premiering September 27) centered around Peter Griffin’s lovable African American neighbor. 

On the day that I drop by, last spring, in the Wilshire Boulevard offices, the scene is business as usual. Nearly. Superagent Ari Emanuel, the brother of the new White House Chief of Staff, is observing (he represents the show’s co-creator, Simpsons writing-staff alum Rich Appel). Taraji P. Henson has a guest spot, fresh off her Oscar nomination for “Benjamin Button.” Also in the house, wearing a crisp white shirt, is spiky haired executive producer and "Family Guy" mastermind Seth MacFarlane, the highest paid and most identifiable comedy writer in the world, no thanks to those Hulu ads in which aliens unfurl from his stomach. And there’s the humble presence of the day's most notable guest-star: Kanye West—quiet and composed, decked out in black, neon-yellow hightops, and his trademark oversized Wayfarers. (Sadly, Arianna Huffington, who plays a talking bear, is absent.)

“The Cleveland Show,” if this is the first you're hearing of it because you live in a glacier, is an attempt to recast the "Family Guy's" gentle deli owner as the patriarch of a new family in Rhode Island, where he lives with his gullible son, Cleveland, Jr., his new wife Roberta, and her ghettoriffic son, Rallo. But did you know America’s most heavily anticipated new African American sitcom’s really the brainchild of Mike Henry, a pale, 44-year-old white guy with easy smile from Richmond, V.A.?  As the source of Cleveland’s laconic whine and the gritty growls of Rallo, Henry seems as if he could just be some soccer dad from the burbs—and it’s a pretty surreal thing to watch, as he vacillates with epic smoothness between urban voice-archetypes as if somewhere inside him is a class clown from the South Side of Chicago. 

From the confines of his office, he says no one’s really ripped into him for doing black-voice—but that's just got to be a testament to how well he pulls it off. “Here Cleveland’s not just the Black Friend, but a much fuller, well-rounded character than he ever was," Henry adds. Appel, a former Harvard-educated lawyer who literally runs the read by announcing the script’s action as fast and naturally as a New York City auctioneer, sharpens the point: “There's a tradition in animated shows, and it’s a virtue that people often aspire to: colorblind casting. You have grown women playing Bart Simpson and Bobby Hill, and Hank Azaria as Apu.  We have Kevin Michael Richardson, who is African American,and while plays Cleveland, Jr., he also plays one of our most redneck, potentially racist [white] characters.”

An admitted “Family Guy” fan, Kanye is—surprise!—playing a character based on himself: a freestylin’ ladies man who competes for a chick with roley-poley Cleveland Jr. through a rap battle at a Jewish neighbor’s house. Picking up a Menorah, he spits: “This voodoo shit’s got nine candles/Your fat ass got nine loooove handles.” Kanye reads OK, if a little slowly, on the fly, but it's not half as magnetic as hearing him perform his own stuff—or, for that matter, posturing for attention on the VMAs.  Voiced smoothly with spot-on syncopation by actor Kevin Michael Richardson, Cleveland, Jr.'s retort wins: “Your flow is fated ‘n’ dated, deflated ‘n’ constipated. If I had to rate it? Hate it. Translated—you ate it… Hey cheeseball, you been grated. Chewed up, swallowed, defecated…On the DVD this won’t be pixilated.” 

Yep, this thing's written by the Family Guy crew.

And, expectedly, the in-crowd eats it up with cheers and measured guffahs. By the end, everyone’s congratulating each other, posing for snaps, and milling out to the hallway where a giant Cleveland cut-out stands in front of a large table of craft-service goodies. What I can’t forget, however, as Ari Emanuel offers Our Rap Icon a high-five handshake—power connection!—is how Hollywood rarely contrasts with its meta-depictions on shows like “Entourage.” To wit, the way Appel introduced the day’s Rhymin' Guest Star star an hour earlier: “The man who will appear two weeks from Saturday at my son’s Bar Mitzvah, I hope… Kanye West!”

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As with any reported piece, there's often at least one Q&A behind it. For the true Cleveland fan, here's a three-way phoner I did with the show's co-creators after attending the Kanye Table Read...

Uncurbed Enthusiasm

Usher in this new Jewish year (and this is an offer  open to atheist shunners of organized religion, believe me!) with this new Salon profile of former "Curb Your Enthusiasm" director Robert B. Weide. The former documentarian sees his feature directorial debut this week, but, for "Curb" fans, his Web site, duckprods.com, offers some facts about the show you want to know.  (Incidentally, Weide won one of his Emmy awards for one of our favorite "Curb" episodes, "Crazee Eyes Killah" [related pic above]).

A New Definition of Eco-Conscious

There was a time when Umberto Eco meant the world to me. I was a young college student, flooded with the "brilliance" of the postmodernists, and eager to lap it up. But I always found it sort of funny, all this meta-thinking about meta-thinking, all these linguistic symbolisms and academizing of pop culture. I even remember a friend and I mocking the titles of our new university classes: "Towards realizing deconstructionist comprehensions of the French fry's representation in popular culture as a symbol of both deliciousness and death." '"The Popular Semiotics of "Is": "To be" in our political theater." You get the idea.

At any rate, Umberto Eco was often our voice of reason. He took the postmodern movement somewhere sensible. He made us laugh, he laughed at himself, told great tales, and he qualified what soon became a rampant nonsense-parade.

So I wanted to like his new book: "Turning Back the Clock: Hot wars and Media Populism." That's why I reviewed it in today's S.F. Chronicle Book Review. But things didn't go exactly as planned.

Have a read:  "Eco takes critical look at war, Mel Gibson in 'Turning Back'," San Francisco Chronicle, December 16, 2007

"A Big Bowl of Right"

Before it got crazy-hot in Hollywood, I had a chance to enjoy some deli with "Curb Your Enthusiasm's" gracious Jeff Garlin, whose first writing-directing effort "I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With" arrives in theaters and on IFC very soon. Here's the story in today's NY Sun (please disregard a rude headline that tries to be cute, courtesy of someone other than the humble author), and have a look below the link for some transcript extras. "Curb" fans, your fix:

A Breakfast with Jeff Garlin: http://www.nysun.com/article/61673

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Jeff Garlin interview extras:
On watching his film in Hollywood's lame little screening rooms: “No, I actually prefer it to when someone’s seeing it on a DVD because you want everyone to see your movie on a big screen.  My movie seems to play better on a bigger screen than it does on DVD, which concerns me given the [IFC] “on demand” aspect of it.  But for this kind of movie, that on-demand aspect just gives more people the opportunity to see it.  So I don’t dispute it and certainly with a small movie, I’d do it again.”

AB:    You're funny. Are people usually nervous around you?
JG:    For the most part, no.  But, sometimes they are, which I find strange. Because I don’t think I’m shit.
AB:    Is it hard to direct, write, and produce at once?
JG:    None of it’s hard.  I hate to say that.  But the hard part of acting is learning lines.  Hard part of directing is putting in the preparation.  Hard part of being a comedian is... I don’t what’s hard about that.  It’s hard for other people who don’t have the skills that I have.
AB:    What are the skills that you have?
JG:    I’m funny!  Really, the hard part of show business is the business part.  That’s what I get paid for.  I don’t get paid to act or direct a movie.  I get paid to deal with the [nice people!] when it comes to negotiating a contract, or dealing with people who don’t have a creative point of view.  That’s what I get paid for. But HBO is a utopia.  HBO is different than other places.
AB:    What about getting this movie [“I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With”] made?
JG:    I banged my head against the wall to get ahead, and I still can’t believe it’s actually coming out, or that it was even made.
AB:    It’s funny, I like Sarah Silverman, but I never put you and her together in the same group of colleagues.
JG:    I don’t hang out with her much anymore.  I don’t think she hangs out with anybody, except for Jimmy Kimmel and whoever she’s working with.  She works hard.  I wrote the part for her.  I’ve been friends with her since she was 19. 
AB:    What was she like then?
JG:    She was this cute little girl.  The Boston Comedy Club in New York, I remember meeting her there, and she was very sweet.  We’ve been friends ever since. 
AB:    What do you think about her whole sex-symbol thing?
JG:    Well, she’s a beautiful girl and she’s got a high-level of sexuality.  Good for her.
AB:    She reminds me of girls I went to high school with on Long Island, but those girls also made me laugh.  Anyway, improv people are really kind of taking over now.  It requires more interior thinking, no?
JG:    Well, the thing about improvisation is that you can’t teach somebody how to be funny, but you can teach them how to improvise.  I’m not saying everyone can do it, but you can be taught to do it.  You can be taught how to act.  Plenty of people have never acted before, and people find jobs.  But you can’t teach someone how to be funny.  You can look at it this way: there are great violinists.  But you can teach lots of people to play the violin.  I think improv falls under the same guise.  I really do.  But comedy, you’re born funny or you’re not.   You’re born with greatness on the violin, or you’re not.
AB:    How would you teach improv? Do you teach?
JG:    There are basic rules, and if you follow the rules, you’re okay. Every once in a while, I’ll do a workshop for free.  I wouldn’t charge anybody for my knowledge.
AB:    What’s with the puddin’?  My father's a professor of rice pudding, but you’re not quite his age.
JG:    I love rice puddin’.  But, you know what, when I was a little kid all the way through my early 20’s, I didn’t like it. You find it later on.
AB:    Where do you find it?
JG:    At your local grocer!  You know who makes a good one?  Kozy Shack.  Kozy Shack pudding is tremendous.

Link: Red Carpet "Cheese" Interviews

Why Glass Shallot?

Because we are descended from connoisseurs of Kozy Shack.

god only knows how big love got away with it. oh yeah: money.

It's not like this is the first time this has happened. Let's just get that out of the way. But I am about to make an argument--one that some people may be tired of--that certain musical hits--especially works important to the course of music history--should be sacred. That is, you shouldn't be able to easily buy the rights to certain songs and then use them as the theme to your middling HBO dramedy, for instance, even if the composer of the song is OK with it and wants the money. The public should get to weigh in. Or at least take the producers of said show to task for such behavior if it's a blatantly atrocious move.

Here's my jumping off point: Now that the current season is about to end, I think it's high time to rake over the coals executive producer Tom Hanks and his use of the Beach Boys' "God Only Knows" as the theme song to the show "Big Love."

"God Only Knows" doesn't just mean a lot to music history--it's arguably the Beach Boys's most inventive but popular composition, save from a few other "Pet Sounds" tracks. And it just so happens to mean a lot to me and my fiance. (There; we said it. We're cheeseballs who also love harmonic analysis. Got it?) Anyway, "God Only Knows" is a song that we have (privately) made ours for personal reasons. (Though, God isn't part of those reasons; let me say that, too.) This may all sound lame, but that's the power of pop music, and that's why songwriters create tunes like this. The goal is to create something universally personal.

But by attaching a song like this to a manipulative soap opera like "Big Love"--to the entirety of the multi-season series, whose titles begin with a bizarrely stupid scene showing a polygamist and his sister wives skating on thin ice--the producers of the show have attached fictional scenes and pictures and characters and themes to this song. When we hear "God Only Knows" now, it's hard for watchers of the show to separate it from "Big Love." It's just too famous and so-called "absolute" a song for it to be victimized by such semantic manipulation. And yet no one pipes up.

Look: We (fans) don't own the song any more than "Big Love" does--in fact, we own it less because "Big Love" likely paid Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys a princely sum to use the music.  I know that. But we also don't broadcast to the world images of our lives--or worse, our lame narratives--with "God Only Knows" in the background. We don't rape the song of its absolute brilliance--of its ability to mean something different to different people--and render it a semiotic aid for one particular narrative that needs a lot of help.

If "God Only Knows" means something to us, the meaning is private. But "Big Love" has made it a public statement--an anthem that some people may now attach to religious fanatacism, polygamy, silly dramedys, Bill Paxton, Chloe Sevigny, Utah, ice-skating, etc. (I've just begun to associate it with mediocre TV, and that's a lot worse than all of the above.)

Frankly, I don't mind "Big Love." I think it's a middling show--watchable but not terrible.
But I also think that the producers should be publicly reprimanded for using a popular and meaningful and important song like this to draw in an audience. "The Sopranos" didn't need to abuse music this way--David Chase used an obscure  song as his series theme; his show stood on its own two feet. So, too, David Milch for John from Cincinnati; though his show was terribly confusing and at times unwatchable, the Joe Strummer-song "Johnny Appleseed" was the best part and never had the ability to help it along.

Not only are there lots of songs to be used for TV that might never win popularity without a creative music supervisor's suggestion; there are great composers around to write original music for such shows.

The egregious kicker? "Big Love" even has the gall to keep innovator David Byrne on as the show's fulltime composer but the producers don't use his music for its theme. It's not just cheap but sad. The decision trivializes a song that means everything to many music lovers and pop historians. That's how nervous the producers were about finding an audience and making money. All I can wonder is: What's next? An edgy, button-pushing dramedy about yoga teachers in LA who use their Los Feliz studio as a front for a terrorist cell introduced every week by John Lennon's "Instant Karma?"

Why Glass Shallot?

Because we've now opened the music supervision division of the company, and can actually suggest songs that aren't on everyone's favorite mixtape.

sopranos out of tune with real therapy

I adore the Sopranos--perhaps more than the average fanatic--even if this season has been fairly disappointing between episodes two and a few weeks ago. For that reason, though, it's been very hard for me to watch the writers and producers make a mockery of therapy all these years. From a family connected to the profession, I have to say that not only has Dr. Melfi been a poor therapist--which is fine and interesting to show, though I'm not sure that creator David Chase saw her that way from day one. She, and others in the profession on the show, also cross all kinds of important lines that real therapists wouldn't cross. Such as: how she socializes with her therapist, Elliot Kupferberg, played by Peter Bogdanovich. Of course, the "new" research that he cites this season--that sociopaths actually don't benefit from therapy, and may use it to enable and rationalize their behaviors--is real even if it's 30 years old. But last's night's contention that "the new thing" is "psychodynamic" therapy really got therapists angry all over the country. Psychodynamic therapy, of course, evolved from Freud and is the sort of purist, old-school talking-cure therapy that's losing popularity on its own as eclectic integration of the form along with cognitive behavioral therapy and other forms grow across the country (though the psychodynamics still have a stronghold in New York; see the CUNY clinical psych graduate program). The point, however, remains that psychodynamic therapy is what Melfi has been using on Tony all this time (and that Tony is lucky to have found a true M.D. psychiatrist that actually doesn't just prescribe pills but speaks with her clients in an era when many private practice psychiatrists mainly do "medication management" so they can bill for five patients an hour and leave the talking to psychologists). Why Chase couldn't quite get this stuff right is beyond me  (how about suggesting groundbreaking schema therapy for sociopathy--a way to change people with persistent personality disorders? Or perhaps Chase is implying that Melfi just decided to lie and insult Tony's intelligence for her own private victory over the sociopathic hulk, though I doubt he was going that deep). For this and other reasons--I loved Lorraine Bracco in Goodfellas, but has she turned in more than a few passable performances since Sopranos season one?--I am happy to see Dr. Melfi exit.  Again, there's a lot of Sopranos love here, but this therapeutic and medical relationship wasn't exactly the highlight of the series that changed television, and more fans should recognize that.

three kings: elvis + henry viii = who?

Hollywood must think much of Jonathan Rhys-Myers. He's oh-so-naturally portrayed two virtuous ,youthful versions of two of the most clear-headed men in history. And he's just 29. Young enough still to play a cackling, coke-headed George W. Bush in the forthcoming HBO original family crime drama "Oily Shrubs?" A natural progression like this simply cannot be stopped.

upright citizen regresses further

After having seen numerous shows at the Upright Citizens Brigade theaters in both NY and LA, I have to say, it's pretty sad knowing that Amy Poehler, one of the founders, is so far along in her career, and that the other three guys, who can be funny, aren't. One of the things that strikes you when you first see a UCB long-form improv show--especially a free one--is how many very young college kids come out for it. And how well, these aging middle agers--the three guys who founded the troupe with Amy--play to them (Amy is always somewhere else, though I have caught her a number of times, and she's delivered the goods, ratcheting up a performance as long as coked up Seth Myers isn't a guest, or worse, the unfunny Horacio Sanz). Now, from Joystiq, however, is a video from the chief UCB man-child Matt Besser, doing shtick on gamers. I'm not offended. I'm not a gamer. But Besser, man, come on: You don't have to keep skewing young to get a laugh. As the sharpest tool in the UCB box, it should be evident that hitting the right comedic note by now is no longer just indulging the USC freshmen. Hell, look at Conan. He's found a way to stay college-funny but age, brilliantly. For now, that is.

[via Joystiq]

note to the food network

Iron Chef America was kind of fun at the beginning, but how about kicking things up a notch and actually, you know, filming it the way it's supposedly filmed: With a guest chef randomly picking an Iron Chef to challenge, with both chefs learning of their secret ingredient one minute later, and with having to create dishes on the spot without prior knowledge of the so-called secret ingredient and a cast of sous chefs. Seriously, I think a few of the chefs--say, Mario Batali and Morimoto--could do it. And then the show would actually be exciting. Alas, this is reality TV.

You've got garlic in your soul

That's my favorite line from the Grinch's swanswong, heard again lovingly on ABC last night (what else would you expect from a shallot-monger?). Anyway, thank you for doing something fun, nourishing, and actually not terrible for once, network television. I almost couldn't believe I wasn't watching cable.