On Television
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television SPIELBERG'S AMAZING DISGRACE BY MARVIN KITMAN The first of Steven Spielberg's A mazing Stories on NBC (Sunday, 8:00 p.m. EST) wasn't very amazing. The other early installments of...
...During the drive back home the woman screams, "That's the one...
...Nonetheless, the current "tales from the thin line between fantasy and reality by America's greatest storytellers,' as CBS has described them, are superior to the nonsense that filled Twilight Zone: the Movie...
...The answer to the last question is certainly yes...
...I love Spielberg's work...
...and her husband kills the man she has pointed out...
...True...
...I think Steven Wright is really Rod Serling's ghost...
...Ghost Train" didn't beat out Murder She Wrote, the overrated CBS mystery series starring Angela Lansbury as a pseudo-Miss Mar-pie...
...There has been something odd, bizarre, off-the-wall, flakey—whatever you want to call it—in all the episodes I've seen to date...
...I'm a coward, however, and quick to scare...
...It starred Bruce Willis of Moonlighting, and co-starred Bruce Willis...
...I especially liked the first, "Shatterday," based on a yarn by the legendary Harlan Ellison...
...Perhaps we should have expected a disaster...
...In the end, though, where wasAmazing Amy...
...It turned out that she was not a train but a traveler...
...Where was the creative genius of our time when "Ghost Train" was being made...
...None of them so much as batted an eyelash...
...The appearance of Amy Irving, the director's girl friend and the mother of his child, was disappointing as well...
...Anthologies sport different stars, different writers, and different kinds of stories each time out...
...Also a half-hour one-reeler, the premiere had the traditional zinger at the end, where Hitchcock dramas always say, "I gotcha" and we're Hitchcocked...
...Was lie wasting all his inventiveness on giving out interviews explaining how amazing it was going to be...
...Later they are in the car once more and she again says, "That's the one...
...It used to be so soothing and reassuring...
...Alas, his initial effort for the small screen was not only unbelievable, it was uncharming...
...After the wooden Indian she played in the Home Box Office (HBO) production of The Far Pavilions last season, this would not have exceeded her acting talents...
...The second and fourth episodes of A mazing Stories were a slight improvement...
...Nevertheless, he carried off both pictures...
...He refused to reveal plots or production details, and his episodes have been costing twice as much as those of the same network s award-winning Hill Street Blues, which was already giving the bookkeepers cardiac arrest...
...Ghost Train," the premiere, was supposed to be as great an event for television viewers as Halley's Comet is for skywatchers...
...I can get better special effects by eating pizza with sausage, mushrooms and anchovies before going to bed...
...I wondered how much the producer had to pay her...
...Much was made of how the usual review cassettes would not be sent to critics...
...Still, Spielberg had promised to make "Ghost Train" into a vehicle for her, and this was it—a cameo...
...Can't the powers at the Black Rock get hold of the same medicine...
...The whole thing played as if it were a Steven Wright one-liner—that is, it brought to mind cute observations like, "Last night I dreamed someone broke into my house and replaced everything in it with an exact replica...
...The show has been inconsistent, as anthologies usually are...
...A second-rate comic book, but less heavy in the symbolism department...
...It was enough, he explained to the press, to say that his handiwork would produce wonderment, fantasy, irony, comedy, excitement, thrills, chills, and laughs—all in a half hour, every week...
...I love the idea of half-hour television films starring big movie actors...
...The CBS reincarnation—a 60-min-ute affair comprising two or three segments—is less well-written, -conceived, -plotted, and -narrated than its predecessor...
...With big movie music, composed and conducted by big movie composers and conductors...
...Once, for instance, everything in show biz was said to be "fabulous...
...NBC's other anthology, A If red Hitchcock Presents (Sunday, 8:30p.m...
...Amazing" is an overused word, and verbal inflation eventually takes its toll...
...Directed by big movie directors...
...What I miss most in the new version is Rod Serling's voice...
...A few lights blinked, steam blew, and these remarkably composed people merely waved goodbye...
...The look of guilt on the professor's face at the conclusion was worth 30 minutes of my valuable time...
...The term became so devalued that my friend Sid Jacobson, a songwriter and the author of a new novel, Streets of Gold, had to invent the word "fantabu-lous" as a way of indicating when something merely wasn't bad...
...She was sitting there as a passenger when the camera lovingly panned the sole parlor car...
...I wish CBS could bring him back just as NBC has resurrected Alfred Hitchcock...
...Not that her saying something like "Is this Hohokus, conductor...
...Of course, it doesn't have the impact of the show it revives...
...EST), is pretty good...
...would have saved the show...
...The new CBS anthology, The Twilight Zone (Friday, 8:00p.m...
...Interestingly, Wright's September special on HBO was an anthology of one-line Twilight Zone plots, or a clinical report on a fellow who stayed up watching reruns of the show until his mind broke ("I hate when your foot falls asleep in the daytime...
...The other early installments of the series that I have seen also were decidedly underwhelming...
...This is a common adolescent fantasy in the Garden State...
...On his first day at school she is raped...
...Spielberg can't pin the blame on the writer of the first show, since he himself wrote it...
...Don't get me wrong...
...Spielberg's stock in t radc is not I he believable...
...his skill is to make the totally far-fetched seem, well, human and charming...
...The plot, supposedly inspired by his boyhood memories of growing up in New Jersey, was the familiar there's-a-train-in-my-living-room reverie: A defunct railroad magically belches smoke again one night and runs a locomotive along its former right of way, through your house...
...E. T. wasn't the most plausible story in the world, nor was Raiders of the Lost Ark exactly a textbook in Bible studies...
...This way at least you don't have to watch the same garbage being repeated—as you do with nonanthologies, or regular series, the season's alternate hot trend...
...Even the special effects were poor by Spielberg's usual standards...
...E.T.'s little Drew Barrymore, likewise heavily advertised, was riding in the parlor car, too...
...In the 1960s, the years of the original, you could interest people in such mysteries as whether the late Rod Serling who inspired the show, was afraid of the dark...
...Before it shot across my screen on September 29,1 was beside myself with excitement from the hype surrounding Spielberg's Comet...
...It is a story sufficiently strange and bizarre for CBS' The Twilight Zone...
...A prudent move, as we would soon find out...
...EST), which returned from the beyond this fall, is better than both of its NBC counterparts...
...Islhereanythingamazingabout the whole project other than Spielberg's two-year contract as executive producer, guaranteeing 44 installments, with a mere two of them actually by him, including the opener...
...No matter how strange or frightening or thought-provoking a show might be, Serling was always able to put it in perspective: There, there, it's only TV...
...But that's another tale from the thin line between...
...At first I thought she might be the train— the Highball Express, as old 407 was called in the script...
...He didn't want/1 mazing Stories previewed because, he contended, the suspense of the episodes would be ruined...
...It concerned a sick ballerina married to a college professor...
...The ratings were an additional cause for NBC regret...
...Those long-departed programs had an important cultural impact on the current generation of young people, who were mostly conceived while Serling was dreaming up his plots yet somehow know all 143 of them, including the one-hour versions that ran in 1963...
...It is amazing that this little su-perdirector from New Jersey succeeded in manipulating a hard-nosed TV giant like NBC into giving him unprecedented total creative control...
...The whole sorry mess raises serious questions...
...But the passengers must have plowed into a lot of buildings in New Jersey that evening...
...It proved to be a short-subject film resembling a comic book tale...
...it means it will be up all night...
...So was Judge Crater, unless the smoke fooled my eyes...
...Sorry about the living room,'" murmurs the conductor...
...Is that what they call an inside joke in Hollywood...
...Sure, the train goes through a house...
...Promising" is the word I myself would have used to describe the Spielberg undertaking...
...it's simply harder to beguile today...
...Anthology," incidentally, is the new word to be conjured with in TV land, a truly amazing word...
...She's crazy, you see...
...As presented on NBC, the script w as utterly beyond belief...
...At least that's my interpretation of his story about an elderly man who kept a ticket for a train that he missed as a boy and now w ants to catch on his journey to the great terminal in the sky...
...He had been promising everything to everybody for eight months before blast-off and had shown nothing to anybody...
...And considerably less amazing...
...Appalling Stories" would bea more apt title for this century's most ballyhooed TV arrival...
...All summer the papers had been proclaiming that she would be among the many glittering stars appearing in the opening broadcast—the biggest crumb of information thrown at the newshawks...
...Sometimes you can underestimate the ability of the American public to be fooled...
...Local psychoanalysts will be glad to tell you that it' s a sublimated sex dream...
...All the stories of the Twilight Zone ask the same basic question: Are we going nuts...
...Spielberg, however, has made it a metaphor—or semaphore—for death, our dying transportation system, and the fate of Jimmy Hoffa...
...Although the original was stronger, I must admit I have found the copy scary...
...It is meant to signal a change every week, the hot trend of the year...
...The main character, a man in a bar, accidentally phones home and finds himself, not his answering machine, responding at the opposite end...
...Irving had no lines...
Vol. 68 • October 1985 • No. 13
