Enter. NEWS: David

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2013년 6월 29일 토요일

'Family Ties' creator Gary David Goldberg dies at age 68

By Alex Dobuzinskis

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Gary David Goldberg, whose hit 1980s television sitcom "Family Ties" gave a warm portrayal of generational conflict and launched the acting career of Michael J. Fox, has died at age 68, his son-in-law said on Monday.

Goldberg died of a brain tumor on Saturday at his home in Montecito, California, said his son-in-law Rob Dubbin.

"Family Ties" aired between 1982 and 1989 and ranked second only to "The Cosby Show" in viewership between 1985 and 1987.

In 1987, Goldberg won an Emmy for his writing work on "Family Ties," a show that also earned Fox three Emmy Awards for lead actor in a comedy series.

Born and raised in the Brooklyn borough of New York City, Goldberg worked as a waiter, traveled the world with his future wife, Diana Meehan, and ran a daycare center in Northern California before, in his early 30s, he landed a job writing for TV's "The Bob Newhart Show," according to Goldberg's website.

Goldberg went on to create his own company, UBU Productions, naming it after his Labrador Retriever, and it was through that company that he launched "Family Ties" in 1982 on NBC.

The show starred Michael Gross and Meredith Baxter as Steven and Elyse Keaton, a couple who were left-wing activists in the 1960s but went on to adopt a middle-class life as they raised four children in suburban Columbus, Ohio.

Much of the show's humor centered on the clashing values between the former hippies and their teenage Republican son, Alex, played by Michael J. Fox. Alex admired then President Ronald Reagan and read the Wall Street Journal, to the chagrin of his parents.

The Keatons' oldest daughter, Mallory, played by Justine Bateman, was less political than Alex, but differed from her mother by showing little interest in feminism.

In 2008, Goldberg told USA Today that "Family Ties" was "totally autobiographical in concept" for him.

"Diana and I were the parents, and our daughter Shana was as smart as Alex but could shop with Mallory," he told the paper.

After "Family Ties," Goldberg went on to co-create the television comedy "Spin City," which debuted in 1996 and starred Fox as the deputy mayor of New York. The show ran until 2002.

Goldberg also produced the 2005 romantic comedy "Must Love Dogs" starring Diane Lane and John Cusack.

He is survived by his wife, a brother, two children and three grandchildren.

(Reporting by Alex Dobuzinskis)

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David Alan Basche: Sit Down, Shut Up, and... Be Glad

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"Hollywood Unplugged," a new series on HuffPost Entertainment, shows our culture's most influential figures in a new light. Instead of focusing on their accomplishments, it examines how they continue to thrive despite the inevitable stress.

Huffpo asked me for some advice based on how I de-stress from hectic days filming in Hollywood on season three of my sitcom, The Exes. Well, I could say "do yoga" or "try biofeedback" or "aromatherapy" or a bunch of other stuff. Or I could just tell the truth: all you have to do is... stop. Stop running around, stop trying to return every email in your inbox immediately, stop cramming too much stuff into too few hours in the day. Sit down, shut up, and most importantly, be glad.

So first, when I say sit down, I literally mean it. Pull up a chair or a spot on the couch -- me, I like to sit on my folding chair in my dressing room. Just sit there. Yep, just sit for a minute. And if it's after work and you wanna pour a bit of single malt or a nice coffee or a tall glass of water, that's cool too. Do your thing (me, I like the single malt). The important part is that now you have stopped everything else. Harder than it might seem, actually.

Next, shut up. Just shut the hell up! No phone, no typey-typey sounds of texting, no music, no sound machine. Just you and your breath (and okay maybe the sound of the single ice cube melting in your scotch). Close your eyes and just sit there and shut up. I'm not saying you have to meditate or have a mantra or whatnot, I'm just saying that when I do it, the simple act of quieting myself is incredibly restorative. Stopping motion and stopping noise tends to also stop... stress.

Now what's with the "be glad" part? Well, once I've begun to enjoy these very still, very quiet few minutes, I like to think about what I'm glad about, what I'm grateful for. Go ahead, try it. Be glad you can sit down for a minute. Or be grateful you have a fulfilling, busy life that makes it hard to sit down for a minute. I'm grateful for my health, glad I'm making people laugh, glad my wife still likes me after a lotta years, grateful my daughter is growing, glad I don't take myself too seriously, glad L.A. has Astro Burger, grateful to be coming home to Harlem soon. It's a gratitude list. It works.

So let's recap: sit down, shut up, be glad. Scotch optional. Glad we had this little talk.

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2013년 6월 28일 금요일

David Finkle: First NIghter: Sam Mendes's "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" Needs Sweetening

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London--If you're a chocoholic like me, you're hoping Charlie and the Chocolate Factory will be as delectable as biting into a piece of fudge or a brownie or triple chocolate ice cream.
Sorry, fellow chocolate lovers. Though the musical at Theatre Royal Drury Lane begins with a cunning Quentin Blake animated film on how our favorite food proceeds from bean to bar, the musical adapted from Roald Dahl's children's story by David Greig with songs by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman is as bad a transformation to the stage as the Tim Minchin-Dennis Kelly treatment of Dahl's Matilda is good. Which means it's very, very bad as contrasted with very, very good.
That's another way of saying that the people responsible for bringing this gargantuan tuner to the public may have thought they could take their own ride on Dahl's coattails, but this time as the coattails pulled away from them, they've been left running desperately after. This isn't to declare that the tons of pounds and dollars poured into it don't have their effect. A friend I ran into on exiting the theater told me his six-year-old son sat through the proceedings with his jaw dropping.
It wasn't difficult to figure out why. The lavish production numbers are heaved at the audience one on the heels of another, especially in the second act. And to make them hotsy-totsy, set and costume designer Mark Thompson, lighting designer Paul Pyant, sound designer Paul Arditti, video and projection designer Jon Driscoll and puppet and illusion designer Jamie Harrison pull out every stop within reach--and that includes huge dancing squirrels.
Oscar-winning director Sam Mendes--whom you think would know better (look what he did with James Bond and Skyfall, look what he did with The Bridge Project, look what he did with you-name-it)--has put up the extravaganza with apparently little care other than to get those six-year-old jaws dropping. Choreographer Peter Darling--whose work is superb here and in Manhattan with the singing-dancing Matilda children--has merely cribbed from himself.
Of course, cribbing from oneself is fair enough, whereas cribbing from, to name three, Phantom of the Opera (an underground boat ride-a-glide), The Sound of Music (a yodeling number; don't ask why) and Lionel Bart's Oliver) is slightly more shameful. But maybe that's what happens when inspiration is lacking and only an impulse to keep things big and loud prevails.
For those who don't know Dahl's dark tale, lovable, impoverished Charlie Bucket (Jack Costello the night I saw it, who alternates with Tom Klenerman, Isaac Rouse and Louis Suc) idolizes chocolatier Willy Wonka (Douglas Hodge) and longs to win one of the five Golden Tickets wrapped in Wonka's ultra-delicious candy bars. Obtaining it will get him invited into his hero's sanctum and eligible for a mysterious grand prize.
It's no shock when he comes by one, along with four other children who are far more truly revolting than the self-proclaimed revolting children of Matilda. One's obese (I saw Jensen Steele), one's spoiled rotten (I saw Tia Noakes), one chews gum incessantly (I saw Adrianna Bertola) and one watches television (I saw Jay Merman). An equally revolting parent is pushing his or her kid to win Willy Wonka's favor.
Librettist Greig's storytelling, however, is so hapless that he thinks clinging to Dahl's plot is the way to go for the stage. He doesn't seem to grasp that Dahl gets away with things a dramatist can't. For instance, Greig doesn't clarify Willy Wonka's character. What does the man, who's dressed like a circus ringmaster, really think about children, and how is he related to the grizzled old man trailing Charley at the onset of action?
Worse, Greig lets the first act remain a stage wait as the Golden Ticket eludes Charlie--who lives with four twee, bedridden grandparents (Nigel Planer, Roni Page, Billy Boyle, Myra Sands) and two kind but out-of-work parents (Alex Clatworthy, Jack Shaloo). Meanwhile, the four children who get their Golden Ticket earlier are each introduced in obnoxious specialty numbers.
In the second act, with Thompson's sets whirligigging and Driscoll's dizzying projections plastering the walls, good-hearted Charlie and his Grandpa Joe ceaselessly race after Willy Wonka as the revolting parent-child combos do themselves in extravagantly as a result of unappealing character traits like impatience, greed and wrongful senses of entitlement.
And what are Hairspray tunesmiths Shaiman and Wittman contributing to an ostensible money machine that's far more ominous than Willy Wonka's looming monolithic factory? They offer lots of songs in lots of styles--the revolting-children material cuts a wide swath--but nothing memorable. There's definitely a scarcity of anything memorable for Hodge, whose La Cage Aux Folles Albin was brilliant. He's obliged to repeat an anthem called "It Must Be Believed to Be Seen," undoubtedly because someone thinks the upending of the cliche is devilishly clever. It isn't. After the team's disappointing 2011 Catch Me If You Can score, this follow-up doesn't regain much lost ground.
Hardly by the way, the best song in the score is "Pure Imagination" from the 1971 movie and nominated for an Oscar. Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley wrote the sweet ditty and surely deserve program credit. Perhaps they get it, although I looked in vain.
Hodge does a nice job crooning the Bricusse-Newley item while he and Charlie float around in what looks like a plastic cabin and is probably intended to be Dahl's Great Glass Elevator, but it's still not sufficient to float his performance above gallant commitment. Little can be said for any of the other cast members trudging through this swamp, except to congratulate them on giving their all to the disappointing project.
Word has it that Dahl, who died in 1990, objected to the first film version because it emphasized Willy Wonka over Charlie, as the title change implies. Following much of Dahl's plot, Mendes et al concentrates on Charlie to little avail, while ringmaster Wonka isn't seen, much less believed, until almost the end of act one.
Does any CatCF element rise above the mundane? A song called "Don't Ya Pinch Me, Charlie" with a promising beginning almost does, but just as it feels about to take off into rapturous Song-and-Danceland, it halts jarringly. Then, thanks be, there's the entrance of the Oompa-Loompas. Actually, they're lowered--actors' heads above puppet bodies--on a rainbow-curved set piece, whereupon they mug and tap dance with winning flare. At last, something with the theatrical flavor of a delectable chocolate bonbon.

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Gary David Goldberg, 'Family Ties' creator, dead at 68

By Tim Kenneally

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) - Gary David Goldberg, creator of the 1980s NBC sitcom "Family Ties," died Sunday following a battle with brain cancer, according to media reports. He was 68.

Born in Brooklyn, Goldberg began writing his career as a writer working for "The Bob Newhart Show," moving on to "The Tony Randall Show" and "Lou Grant," serving as writer and producer on both series.

After founding his own production company Ubu Productions (named after his dog, and featuring the line "Sit, Ubu, sit" in the closing credits for its shows; see video below), Goldberg created "Family Ties," which propelled Michael J. Fox into stardom as Alex P. Keaton, the Reagan Era, conservative son of liberal parents. The series ran for seven seasons.

Goldberg would later go on to work with Fox on the sitcom "Spin City," which Goldberg co-created with Bill Lawrence.

"Everyone has a mentor (or two hopefully) that touches his/her life," Lawrence tweeted Sunday night. "Gary Goldberg passed away today. Wish I had thanked him more."

The website for Ubu Productions and Goldberg's website have not yet made mention of his death. Goldberg's agent and a representative for the publisher of his autobiography, "Sit, Ubu, Sit: How I Went from Brooklyn to Hollywood with the Same Woman, the Same Dog, and a Lot Less Hair," have not yet responded to TheWrap's request for comment.

In addition to his television work, Goldberg worked on films such as "Must Love Dogs" and "Bye Bye Love."

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2013년 6월 27일 목요일