BEFORE: Shifting over to documentary mode makes things both easier and more difficult for me, it's easier because I don't have to decide what to watch for the next month or so, plus the films tend to be shorter, so I can pretty much coast for a while. But the process is more difficult because of all the archive footage being used, there are SO many more people to keep track of, and when I've seen them before, and really, just a logistical nightmare counting how many times I've seen Dick Cavett or Dick Van Dyke or Richard Nixon this week is a chore. (So many Dicks!)
Dinah Shore carries over from "Sly". Moving from one of the biggest male stars in movies to one of the biggest female stars in TV. Tomorrow's film I think is more of a curveball, but I'll be back to tribute / bio-docs before you know it. I think things might have been a bit weirder if I'd gone around the doc circle the other way, and followed the Sylvester Stallone documentary with the one about Katherine Hepburn. Oddly, they both would have used footage from "The Lion in Winter".
THE PLOT: Explores the vanguard career of Mary, who, as an actor, performer and advocate, revolutionized the portrayal of women in media, redefined their roles in show business, and inspired generations to dream big and make it on their own.
AFTER: I grew up in the era of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show", and when you're a kid, those characters on TV are REAL to you, like maybe you haven't figured out what an actor is, and that those people on TV are just pretending, but I do remember thinking it was weird that the show was named for Mary Tyler Moore, and the character was named Mary Richards, like there was something of a disconnect there, why does she have two different names, and which one is her real name? Perhaps I was also seeing reruns of "The Dick van Dyke Show" at the same time, and sure, that was probably confusing to me that the same lady who was a mother and housewife married to a TV show writer at 5 pm was also working for a Minneapolis news station at 8 pm, like did she get divorced, or did her husband die, and what happened to her son? And why does her husband keep calling her Laura, I thought her name was Mary?
(Things got weirder a few years later when the head writer at that news station somehow got a job as a captain on a cruise ship, by then I was probably starting to figure out that the people on TV were not really real... On top of all that, the guy who lived next door to The Jeffersons was often seen on "Sesame Street" painting numbers in weird places. Life can be confusing when you're a kid.)
There's so much to anyone's life when they live long enough, and if you only watch the sitcoms then maybe you don't think very much about the actors' lives when they're not on TV, how they have marriages and kids and divorces and they also have to go on auditions for jobs that they don't get, 99% of the time. Mary Tyler Moore almost didn't go to the casting session for "The Dick van Dyke Show" because she'd been rejected for so many acting jobs that week. And prior to that, she was barely seen on a show called "Richard Diamond, Private Detective" as the answering service operator who took messages for a very busy detective and relayed them to him in a very sexy voice - she was seen in silhouette except sometimes there were shots of her legs, which is about as sexy as TV got back then. But when she asked for a raise, the producers told her there were a lot of actresses with nice legs and sexy voices who wouldn't ask for a raise, so she was shown the door.
From there, it was on to tiny roles in shows like "Bourbon Street Beat" and "Johnny Staccato" where she played women getting arrested, and Westerns like "Wanted: Dead or Alive" and "Stagecoach West" where she played memorable roles like Brunette #2. This is actually the career path for the majority of actors, playing background roles with maybe one line of dialogue, if they're lucky, so when you land a major role in a sit-com, you'd damn well better take it, and thank whatever deity you worship that today was finally your day. Most sitcoms only go five years anyway, so even if you're making bank, you'd better save some money because before long you'll be going to auditions again. Mary Tyler Moore hit the jackpot twice, and even though there was just a four year span between those two shows, the whole world kind of changed in-between.
The original plan was for Mary Richards to be a divorced woman starting over again in Minneapolis at a news station, but CBS had three rules for their sitcoms - no Jews, no mustaches and NO divorces. Sure, it's the 1960's but let's bury our heads in the sand and pretend all the things we don't like don't even exist. So Mary Richards was fresh out of a bad relationship, but OK, it wasn't a divorce. People still tuned in every week to see her forming friendships at the TV station and working through some things, and reall, there was subtle feminism once a week on the TV. The same lady who was the first housewife to wear pants then became the first sitcom woman to put career first over trying to be a wife and mother. It's more ground-breaking than you think, really.
In real life Ms. Moore was also breaking ground by having her own production company, run by her husband, Grant Tinker, and also hiring female writers (still a rarity at the time) and taking some flack from both sides, from the conservatives for showing an independent feminist woman and from the feminists for not going far enough. (Really, they got stuck on her calling her boss "Mr. Grant"? Give me a break.). Then it was just a matter of sitting back and watching the Emmys come in, for what may have been the greatest ensemble of comic actors and writers working together to put out a weekly show.
But everything has to come to an end, the Mary Tyler Moore show and the marriage to Grant Tinker, so she had to re-invent herself again. She moved back to NY (she was born in Brooklyn Heights, lived in Flushing, Queens but her family moved to L.A. when she was 8) and took up stage acting, appearing in "Whose Life Is It Anyway?" and a failed version of "Breakfast at Tiffany's". Well, it just goes to show that everybody's got a few stinkers on their resumé, even Sylvester Stallone and Mary Tyler Moore.
Also starring James L. Brooks, James Burrows (last seen in "Robert Klein Still Can't Stop His Leg"), Debra Martin Chase (last seen in "Whitney"), Katie Couric (last seen in "The Queen of Versailles"), Joan Darling, Joel Grey (last seen in "Tick, Tick...BOOM!"), Dr. Robert Levine, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Julia Louis-Dreyfus (last seen in "You People"), Isaac Mizrahi (last seen in "For Love or Money"), Rosie O'Donnell (last seen in "Everything Is Copy"), Bill Persky, Bernadette Peters (last seen in "The Automat"), Phylicia Rashad (last seen in "Frankie & Alice"), Robert Redford (last seen in "The Company You Keep"), Rob Reiner (last seen in "Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You"), Ronda Rich, Beverly Sanders (last seen in "Magic"), Susan Silver, Fred Silverman, Treva Silverman, John Tinker, Lena Waithe (last seen in "The One and Only Dick Gregory"), Reese Witherspoon (last seen in "Fear")
with archive footage of Mary Tyler Moore (last seen in "Lucy and Desi"), Morey Amsterdam (last heard in "Gay Purr-ee"), Julie Andrews (last heard in "Minions: The Rise of Gru"), Patricia Arquette (last seen in "Otherhood"), Bea Arthur (last seen in "Idina Menzel: Which Way to the Stage?"), Edward Asner (last seen in "Muppets Haunted Mansion"), Manny Azenberg, Conrad Bain (last seen in "Postcards from the Edge"), Lucille Ball (last seen in "The Super Bob Einstein Movie"), Rona Barrett (last seen in "Richard Pryor: Omit the Logic"), Hugh Beaumont, Jack Benny (last seen in "Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It"), Rock Hudson (ditto), Deborah Kerr (ditto), Barbara Billingsley (also last seen in "Lucy and Desi"), Carol Burnett (ditto), Danny Thomas (ditto), Ellen Burstyn (last seen in "Nostalgia"), Sid Caesar (last seen in "Mel Brooks: Unwrapped"), Imogene Coca (ditto), Dick Cavett (last seen in "Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood"), Richard Chamberlain (last seen in "I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry"), Connie Chung, Tom Conti (last seen in "Oppenheimer"), Walter Cronkite (last seen in "Elvis"), Elvis Presley (ditto), Richard Deacon (last seen in "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (1956)), Tony Dow, Barbara Eden (last seen in "A Very Brady Sequel"), Georgia Engel (last seen in "Betty White: First Lady of Television"), Valerie Harper (ditto), Ted Knight (ditto), Gavin MacLeod (ditto), Betty White (ditto), Nanette Fabray (last seen in "The Band Wagon"), Betty Ford (last seen in "The U.S. vs. John Lennon"), Betty Friedan, Vincent Gardenia (last seen in "De Palma"), Sissy Spacek (ditto), Larry Hagman (last seen in "The Family"), Goldie Hawn (last seen in "The Christmas Chronicles: Part Two"), Audrey Hepburn (last seen in "Dean Martin: King of Cool"), Dustin Hoffman (last seen in "I Could Never Be Your Woman"), Timothy Hutton (last seen in "Beautiful Boy"), David Janssen, Danny Kaye (last seen in "Dionne Warwick: Don't Make Me Over"), Burt Lancaster (last seen in "1900"), Donald Sutherland (ditto), Cloris Leachman (last seen in "Alex & Emma"), Norman Lear (last seen in "Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You"), Bob Newhart (ditto), Carroll O'Connor (ditto), Carl Reiner (ditto), Sally Struthers (ditto), Tea Leoni (last seen in "House of D"), David Letterman (last seen in "That's My Boy"), James Lipton (last seen in "Val"), Rose Marie, Jerry Mathers, Larry Mathews, Garry Moore, Bill Quinn, Jason Robards (last seen in "Beloved"), Gena Rowlands (last seen in "Bad Reputation"), George Segal (last seen in "Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind"), Gloria Steinem (last seen in "Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists"), Ben Stiller (last seen in "Bros"), David Susskind (last seen in "The Kid Stays in the Picture"), Marlo Thomas (last seen in "LOL"), Grant Tinker, Dick Van Dyke (last seen in "Belfast"), Oprah Winfrey (last seen in "Jesus Henry Christ")
RATING: 6 out of 10 appearances as Happy the Hotpoint Pixie
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