Archives for January 2024

Ross and Emily were never truly meant to be, but they actually genuinely almost weren’t. Helen Baxendale, who played the second wife of David Schwimmer’s character on Friends, was kind of a dud. That’s according to James Burrows, the veteran television director who was behind the scenes for classic sitcoms like Taxi, Cheers, Will & Grace, and yes, Friends.

Baxendale “was nice, but not particularly funny,” Burrows writes in his book Directed By James Burrows (via People). “Schwimmer had no one to bounce off. It was like clapping with one hand.”

Tough scenes, literally, for Ross’ doomed relationship with Emily. Apparently getting a new actor was considered, but “Often, you can’t recast, because of tight shooting deadlines or other logistical considerations,” Burrows explains. “You need someone who gets laughs. Sometimes you start an arc and it ain’t working out, so you have to get rid of that person. If it’s a day player, it’s a quick goodbye.” (On the other hand, “If there’s chemistry, the writers go to work to figure out some way of keeping the actor.”)

Despite Burrows’ clear misgivings, Baxendale had a relatively lengthy arc for one of Ross’ girlfriends. She appeared in 14 episodes of the show, including the infamous English wedding wherein Ross accidentally says Rachel’s (Jennifer Aniston) name while saying his wedding vows. No matter what anyone thinks about Emily, it’s a pivotal moment in Friends history.

Nevertheless, “In sitcoms and any type of romantic comedy, the funny is just as important as the chemistry,” Burrows says. “We discovered that any new girlfriend for Ross needed to be as funny as Rachel.” As funny as Rachel? That’s a high bar, and one not many of Ross’ girlfriends managed to cross. You’re not alone, Emily!

Students from schools at the opposite ends of the North Island are outraged after their final days were allegedly cut short in an impromptu assembly to avoid “prank day”.

One senior student from Mt Albert Grammar School, who wished to remain anonymous, said they felt they had been stripped of a “very sentimental and important time” in their lives after their time was cut short at an impromptu assembly today.

However, the school’s principal said the date had been confirmed “since the beginning of the year”.

Speaking to the Herald, the students said the cancellation came as a surprise to all pupils, who were called into a spontaneous assembly.

Many students left the assembly feeling hurt and confused, as did many teachers who were allegedly not informed of the sudden cancellation, they claim.

“Many of us have now lost the opportunity to say goodbye to friends in other year levels who we will likely never see again,” a student said.

The student theorised the cancellation was a pre-emptive measure to stop the students from participating in the pranks commonly associated with the school’s final days.

The students emphasised they personally were not involved in any planned pranks. Any pranks they had heard of involved “funny, harmless posters” around the school and a water fight involving small water guns.

They acknowledged students from previous years had participated in more extreme pranks, such as setting off fireworks or egging the school, but they felt they should not be punished for the action of a “select few past students”.

Another student, who also wished to remain anonymous, said the lack of communication to students and teachers showed a “lack of respect and appreciation”.

“All we want is for our last day not to be cancelled and to be able to say a proper goodbye to our teachers,” the student said.

Both students acknowledged they intended to attend senior prize-giving on Monday, but said they were unsure if all their teachers would be there and they believed they were not being given their full high school experience.

Mt Albert Grammar School principal Patrick Drumm disputed the students’ claims. “This date has been confirmed as their final day since the beginning of the year.

“Our senior students are utilising this time of the year to balance academic study along with the large number of celebratory events that are part of the year’s end,” Drumm said.

“A large number of senior students will return to school over the remainder of this week for tutorials and workshops in final preparations for the upcoming NCEA examinations.”

On the school’s website, it does not say today was the expected end of the school year for senior students.

Another school at the other end of the country also cancelled classes early to avoid the notorious prank day.

A student from St Mary’s College in Wellington told the Herald the year 13s were gathered together on Wednesday afternoon to be told “study leave” was starting early. Just like Mt Albert Grammar, no reason was given.

“This suspension caused most of us girls to be in tears and so disappointed with the school,” the student said.

“When we asked questions as to when we will do our internals we still had to complete and mock exams they told us we were not allowed on school premises.”

Another student said it was “extremely upsetting” to cancel the fun activities they had planned, none of which included defacing the school.

“One of our Year 13 students even came back from a family emergency to enjoy her final days as a college student and broke down when she heard the news,” the student claimed.

St Mary’s College has been approached for comment.

Rachel Maher is an Auckland-based reporter who covers breaking news. She has worked for the Herald since 2022.

Steve Martin had been honing his singularly silly stand-up act for a decade before the world truly caught on. That’s not surprising, as Martin’s comic persona was itself a put-on, a layered deconstruction of showbiz and stand-up that required his audience to perform a demanding mental calculus, all while the white-suited, bunny-eared Martin performed some of the most outwardly silly schtick imaginable.

But catch on the world did, with Martin’s appearances on the upstart late-night comedy series Saturday Night Live branding his deceptively brainy comedy into the public consciousness to the extent that SNL’s ratings routinely rose by a million or more viewers every time Martin was in the house. His first comedy album, 1977’s Let’s Get Small, went platinum and won a Grammy Award, making Martin’s inevitable follow-up, A Wild and Crazy Guy (released in October 1978), a critical and commercial sure thing. It was both, with A Wild and Crazy Guy doubling the sales of its predecessor (and reaching No. 2 on Billboard), Martin receiving another Best Comedy Album Grammy and the comic embarking on a stand-up tour whose wild success is documented in a midset shift on the album itself.

Beginning at the more intimate setting of San Francisco’s Boarding House, where Martin had honed his craft for years, the record’s two sides undergo a shift partway through the album’s fourth track, “A Wild and Crazy Guy.” Martin begins by feigning irritation that a new law requires him to make a midshow financial disclosure, running through his take-home from the relatively meager admission fee to the Boarding House before speculating that, if he charged $800 a ticket, he could retire. “This is what I’m shooting for,” notes Martin smugly, “One show — goodbye.”

Steve Martin’s Comedy Routine

The resulting Boarding House laughter then segues seamlessly into a rising, near-hysterical whooping, as the second half of the album shifts to Colorado’s cavernous Red Rocks Amphitheater, a leap not only of venue but of style. The Boarding House material is, while still inimitably Martin in its wacky string of bits and asides, more playfully intimate. Martin begins his set by immediately deconstructing the very thing he’s been doing for two weeks at two shows a night, deadpanning, “I think there’s nothing better for a person than to do the same thing over and over for two weeks.”

The Boarding House material allows Martin to expand upon his role as a paid comic, his insincere bursts of show business patter and desperate segues aping the flop sweat of a comedian terrified to lose his crowd ceding occasionally to a more knowing and mischievous tone. When Martin plays up his intellectual pretensions by running through his then-fictitious life as a renowned author, he rattles off works such as “Mind Gone Haywire,” “The Apple Pie Hubbub” and “Ceremony for a Fat Lip.” (Martin also prefigured Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure by airily mispronouncing a certain philosopher as “So-crates.”) He also expertly shuts down a heckler, does some offhand crowd work and generally works the modest-sized room like the pro he is. Whipping out his trusty banjo at one point for an impromptu bit of noodling, Martin further skewers his pretensions by boasting, “It’s not often that you can pay $4 to see someone jack off like this.”

READ MORE: How the ‘Sgt. Pepper’ Movie Flopped

When the album abruptly shifts to Red Rocks, Martin’s act shifts gears, too. Beginning with a mock-modest, “For me??” in response to the much larger audience’s rapturous greeting, Martin becomes the outsized, crowd-pleasing big-shot persona the sold-out amphitheater demands. It’s only appropriate that A Wild and Crazy Guy expands into this huge space: Steve Martin by this point is a comedy rock star. And, like a rock concert, the Red Rocks audience expects the hits, with Martin trotting out his unnamed “wild and crazy guy” foreign character, knowing full well that everyone in attendance now associates his on-the-make, boundlessly and unaccountably confident character with Georg Festrunk, the wildly popular Saturday Night Live version of the character.

Listen to Steve Martin’s ‘A Wild and Crazy Guy’

Martin being Martin, his greatest-hits approach to stadium comedy is still festooned with winking deconstruction. Taking on the implied audience desire for him to repeat old material, Martin fakes affront, proudly proclaiming that he will not do any Let’s Get Small material before berating the crowd with the exaggerated “Excuuuuse me!” catchphrase from that very album. Martin also kicks off this latter set by cleverly luring his ravenous crowd into a trap, ending his crowd-baiting call-and-response “nonconformists’ oath” by forcing the lavish audience to break up midway through the dutiful chant, “I promise not to repeat things other people say!” That the set closes with an elaborate performance of the SNL-introduced novelty hit “King Tut” (backed by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, billed as the Toot Uncommons) is the sort of big-finish show business crowd-pleaser designed to send an audience home satisfied.

Steve Martin Leaves Stand-Up Comedy

He’d leave stand-up comedy behind just a few years later. For the intensely private and deeply curious Martin, the inevitable trappings of phenomenal success as a public figure chafed. (Martin later revealed he was prone to panic attacks and wrote about the bewildering grind of secret backdoor entrances to stadiums swarmed with bellowing fans.) Meanwhile, as Martin later wrote about in his 2007 memoir of his stand-up days, Born Standing Up, his approach to stand-up comedy was always about reinvention and deconstruction.

Joke about “So-crates” though he did, Martin was an insatiable polymath, an avid intellectual and aspiring musician, art collector, playwright and author. Stand-up comedy, for Martin, was an old, beloved puzzle box to be fiddled with, insightfully and delightfully mocked for its conventions and cliches — and ultimately solved. In a 2008 interview with NPR’s Terry Gross, Martin, by then comfortably ensconced in his other wide-ranging interests, noted of his time in the stand-up spotlight, “But the act essentially, besides all the jokes and bits and everything, was conceptual. And once the concept was understood, there was nothing more to develop.”

READ MORE: When Steve Martin’s ‘King Tut’ Became a Surprise Hit

Martin would ride the ebbing stand-up wave for two more albums. 1979’s Comedy Is Not Pretty retreated to “mere” platinum status, its Grammy-nominated track listing interrupted with Martin’s narration of a story from his first book, Cruel Shoes, and a straight-ahead banjo instrumental. His final comedy record, 1981’s The Steve Martin Brothers, expanded the portrait of a person with one foot out of the comedy club door, the second side almost entirely made up of banjo. The record reached only No. 135 on the Billboard chart, with Martin claiming he’d never do stand-up again. His 2022 doubles act with pal Martin Short is less him reneging on that promise and more an affectionate return to the performing stage on his terms.

‘Saturday Night Live’ Movies That Were Never Made

Within the first two minutes of the new Dodger adventure, our top-hatted hero has been challenged to a duel by the president of the United States of America, which is a problem because Dodger (Billy Jenkins) is brandishing a gun that is actually a stick. His mentor, Fagin (Christopher Eccleston), fashions an escape using a bunch of nettles, and this rollicking Dickens prequel is up and running again – although Fagin doesn’t quite run fast enough to avoid being shot up the backside by a furious president. Dodger, which follows the Artful Dodger, Fagin and a gang of young thieves in the years before the events of Oliver Twist, is the creation of Rhys Thomas, who was once a part of the Fast Show’s cast – he was the car showroom employee who had to listen to Swiss Toni’s “making love to a beautiful woman” comparisons – and who went on to help Simon Day create spoof prog-rocker Brian Pern. His most underrated work is A Year in the Life of a Year, a mangled New Year roundup that showcased his talent for the lightly silly and the purely funny, skills that make him the ideal author of a comedy for older kids and childish adults. In this special episode, entitled Coronation, the US president is visiting what is about to officially become Victorian London. The new queen is to be crowned, which means Dodger and his crew have only one aim: steal the crown. As they duck, dive and scheme, we can once again enjoy the show’s aptitude for doing old jokes so well that they feel new. There are silly voices; a scene where someone says “starting … now!” but with a 20-second pause before the “now”; some fine business with two cups of tea, one of which has been spiked with laudanum; and a moment where an idiotic police constable, played by Thomas himself, says “I hate you!” and walks out of shot, the hilarity of which can only be explained by saying that Thomas is blessed with perfect comic timing. He’s also got all the right contacts. Dodger already has Eccleston enjoying himself shamelessly as Fagin, a mercurial toe-rag with an outrageous cockney accent, and Lenny Rush of Am I Being Unreasonable? fame as Morgan, an all-knowing shoeshine boy a la Johnny from Police Squad!. But when the call goes out for Christmas guest stars, suddenly there is luxury casting everywhere you look. After the cold open air and its flying bullets, we are inside Buckingham Palace, where the crown jeweller and the archbishop of Canterbury are briefing the queen about the upcoming ritual. The jeweller is Alex Macqueen, laying his simpering fusspot shtick on thick – the crown is decorated with “heleven hhemeralds and five woobies” – while the archbish is a deliciously tremulous Simon Callow, for whom “globe” is a word with three syllables. Best of all, the queen is played by Nicola Coughlan from Derry Girls and Bridgerton, whose faultless English-aristocrat accent adorns a portrayal of the young Victoria as a perpetually bored, highly impressionable tyrant-in-waiting, a sort of gen Z Violet Beauregarde. Vic is visibly excited by the arrival of President Martin Van Buren, AKA Toby Stephens, who has already got a big laugh with his impenetrable pronunciation of the word “duel” and who continues to romp in wide-legged cowboy mode through every scene he’s in: grabbing people by the lapels, hoicking up phlegm just when it looks like he might be a love interest for the queen, and essaying a nasal southern accent where every vowel sound is a “U”. There’s more! Tony Way is funny as Jon the News, a newspaper vendor who continues to bellow at the top of his voice when conducting a normal conversation – an old joke, but it’s done well – and there’s a toothsome guest role for Thomas’s old pal Paul Whitehouse as a stout yeoman of the guard, charged with keeping watch on the crown jewels, who isn’t quite stout enough. Dodger, Fagin and their friends – including co-writer Lucy Montgomery, the other half of a husband-and-wife team with Thomas, as Fagin’s landlady Minnie Bilge – embark on a caper that involves stealing the replica crown that sits atop the Madame Tussauds waxwork of the queen (also played by Nicola Coughlan), then swapping it for the real one during the coronation rehearsal. Before the heist kicks in, the run-through features a terrific running gag where Victoria impatiently shouts “skip!” at the archbishop of Canterbury, forcing him to omit the dull parts of his script and eventually making him sound like someone frantically fast-forwarding through a lacklustre podcast. There is a laugh every minute in Dodger but, perhaps more importantly, a general feeling of being given an unconditional treat. It’s a lovely early Christmas present.

Vinegar Syndrome’s 2023 Black Friday Pre-Order is now LIVE, and the sale is running from today (September 22) all the way through 11:59 PM EDT on Sunday, September 24.

In addition to the sales and discounted pre-orders, several brand new titles have been put up for grabs today, including The Prophecy 3-film trilogy on 4K Ultra HD!

Here’s everything that was announced today…

“Our latest VSU, D.A.R.Y.L., the 1985 cyborg/sci-fi Hollywood crossover film from Ozploitation director, Simon Wincer, and starring Mary Beth Hurt, Michael McKean, and Colleen Camp hits 4K UHD in an extras jammed edition, featuring an exclusive new restoration by Vinegar Syndrome!

“Then, upping the ante even further, we’re proud to present the 4K UHD debut of one of the bloodiest, boldest, and most unusual horror franchises of the 1990s, THE PROPHECY 1-3, including new and exclusive 4K restorations of Gregory Widen’s THE PROPHECY (1995), Greg Spence’s THE PROPHECY II (1998), and Patrick Lussier’s THE PROPHECY III (2000), all complete with plentiful extras and housed in a stunning, custom hard box.

“Plus, in our ongoing commitment to unearth and release the greatest in never-on-disc slashers, we’re proud to present the world Blu-ray debut of Michael Elliot’s notorious FATAL GAMES (1984)! You’ve heard for years that this one was “impossible,” well we’ve defied the odds and painstakingly restored it from the best surviving pre-print elements and proudly present the ultimate edition of this twisted gem, complete with an immense array of extras.

“And finally, what you’ve all been patiently waiting for since we first brought it up nearly a year ago, our most ambitious, audacious, unexpected, and important releases ever, and in honor of our tenth anniversary: Vinegar Syndrome’s LOST PICTURE SHOW; a ten-film collection of lost (and found) American genre cinema!

“From one of the earliest proto-slashers (THE LAS VEGAS STRANGLER) to perhaps the most demented “kids” film ever made (THE RARE BLUE APES OF CANNIBAL ISLE), and everything in between, be it grimy grindhouse treasures made by and for the dregs of Times Sq (BEWARE THE BLACK WIDOW), underground and arthouse sexploitation (DEEP INSIDE, BARBARA), unbelievably demented vanity projects (RED MIDNIGHT, THE LAST OF THE AMERICAN HOBOES), jaw-dropping 70s exploitation (VIOLATED!), a “most wanted” by many slice of demented horror/sleaze (THE SEX SERUM OF DR BLAKE; the original cut of Voodoo Heartbeat), and the final surviving work by one of our favorite auteurs, Carlos Tobalina (WHAT’S LOVE?), this collection features hours upon hours of trashy delights, all of which have been unseen and unavailable on video, until now!

“Plus, this collection includes Elijah Drenner’s new, feature-length documentary about lost genre films, AGAINST THE GRAIN, which tells the story of how genre and exploitation film distributors have taken on the incredible task of locating, preserving, and releasing an immense portion of cinema history.”

The following pre-order options are available now…

• Everything: VSU + all 5 November VS titles (3 announced and 2 secret)
• Individual listings for the 3 announced VS titles
• Just the new VSU
• Just the 2 Secret VS titles

Vinegar Syndrome teases, “And speaking of Secret Titles…what could they be? Well, one has never been on disc and we’re very confident it’ll satisfy a long standing request for many of you while the other is our most “major” surprise title ever, so much so that it woulda been a VSU candidate if not for all the slimy grotesquery and bloodshed…

“Finally, we want to remind you that if you’re planning to pick up our Black Friday lineup, this Pre-Order is the best time to do it, as this weekend only, prices on these titles will be notably lower than during the big Black Friday Sale itself.”