by Mort Bryer and Frank Segers
The 46th Street office in Manhattan was for years the magnet to a broad assortment of eccentrics, out of work performers, press agents and other dubious urban species. Among the most memorable of these was Izzy Grove, who operated a poster-placement business in New York, and occasionally booked small ads in the Weekly on its behalf.
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by RON HOLLOWAY
The other day, a friend phoned to congratulate me on a Variety review I had written. I thanked him in as modest a voice as I could muster:
“Much obliged. But which review are you referring to?”
“John Ford’s The Searchers, of course.”
A great film, I assured my friend. But I didn’t write that review. Because when Ford’s The Searchers was released in March of 1955, I was 23 years old and still warming a seat at a Chicago university.
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by PETER BESAS
We are by now all old enough to remember who Al Jolson was, even if we weren’t around when the first sound feature film, “The Jazz Singer”, made filmic history.
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In a time when a good deal of popular music has been pared down to a redundant percussive beat, with lyrics that glorify the degradation of women, sex, and race, it seems outlandish to me that your magazines’ review of the 1927 version of “The Jazz Singer” was so ridiculously self righteous. Yes, I agree that the film is a relic, with only its being the first mainstream sound film to capture the general public’s imagination to keep it alive in the public eye (other than a chance to see the dynamic Jolson strut his stuff), but to decry it’s value because of Jolson’s penchant for wearing “blackface” is along the same lines as banishing from libraries the books of Mark Twain. Why not obliterate everything from our modern day consciousness that might be considered unpleasant?
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by LARRY MICHIE
The Simesite anniversary and the recent postings there sent me into a reverie about the transformations that have changed practically every aspect of show business in the last few decades. For most of those monitoring Simesite, of course, the biggest earthquake was the purchase of Variety itself almost twenty years ago. The new owners utterly discarded the colorful and sometimes wacky culture of Variety – presumably to their great satisfaction, although to the discomfort of many of those who were devoted to that culture – and the ensuing upheaval came at a time when show business journalism itself was rapidly changing.
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