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1968 (Forty years later...)
Aloysius J. Gleek:
--and the worst is--I can now hear the theme song in my head, incessantly! :P
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057789/usercomments
"That Was the Week That Was"(1964)
7 comments in total
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That Was the Real Must-See TV, 30 July 2003
Author: Gary Imhoff ([email protected]) from Washington, DC
TWTWTW, or TW3, had an astounding and brilliant list of regular, semi-regular, and guest performers who did brief comedic commentary on political topics and current events. But it is best remembered for three performers: its impossibly sophisticated "special correspondent," David Frost, who was introduced to American audiences by this show; the beautiful blonde folk singer, Nancy Ames; and puppeteer Burr Tillstrom, previously known almost solely for the children's show Kukla, Fran, and Ollie, whose innovative "hand ballets" have never been duplicated. For two short seasons, this was real "must-see TV."
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Razor-sharp political satire surpassing everything to follow, 10 February 2001
Author: gallifreyent from USA
Some of the brightest minds ever in entertainment were gathered for this furiously funny look at the week's news highlights. "TW3" was a cut above SNL's Weekend Updates, racing ahead of "Not Necessarily The News," and nosing out "The Daily Show" as the best of its kind. Fueled by the players in a period of stunning global events, the players managed both biting commentary and lively entertainment. Bring on the re-runs.
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Humor Comes in Many Forms, 6 March 2008
Author: wayne-496 from United States
This show was groundbreaking to the point of undeniably honest presentation of the parodies it performed, allowing the audience an understanding of the set and the presence of makeup and stage hands. Also, memorable for one episode completely lacking humor dedicated to the assassination of JFK. So much of this early experiment in TV Comedy can be interpreted as a framework for more modern shows like SNL, Colbert Report, and the like. The talent was diverse and intelligent. Tom Lehrer and David Frost contributed much to the format. As far as any criticism that may fall on this show, I don't care much for Country Music and my wife can stare at Monty Python for hours without cracking a smile, but that doesn't mean there isn't brilliant talent and huge entertainment value in both of those. TW3 emerged during a time when TV was experimenting with lots techniques and presentation style as well as cutting edge political humor.
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That Was the Week that Was **** Current Events At its Best, 19 November 2007
Author: edwagreen from United States
A very original, thought provoking show was 1964's was "That Was the Week that Was." It was also referred to as TW3 so as to shorten the title.
The show dealt with political and social commentary on the various news events of the week.
It had a great cast of comedians. Even veteran comedienne Doro Merande was a weekly regular on the shows.
I wonder what this excellent show would be like in today's political world. I guess it would have to kowtow to political correctness.
"That Was the Week that Was, Kennedy and Khrushchev Twist. O what a week that was! That was the week that was." This would be an example of the opening theme of the show as the cast assembled on stage.
For sure, current events was never like this. Nancy Ames and others were just terrific on this show.
I'd love to see this show make a comeback today.
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Like Mark Twain and Will Rogers, THAT WAS THE WEEK THAT WAS (TW3 for Short), Kidded Everybody! , 14 June 2007
Author: John T. Ryan ([email protected]) from Chicago, Illinois, United States
Political Satire has been a staple of comedy spoofing and sketches as far back as the old Vaudevillians and British Music Hall days. So how come both the Original Series, the BBC version and our own NBC Program lasted only one season each? The show used tons of talented people, both in front of Camera and in the support,behind the scenes-you know the Technical Boys. The Political Slant ran in all different directions, as they kidded anyone and everyone, Dems, Reps, Libs, Conservatives all were fair game.
The show made use of song rather than sketch as the main instrument. That meant writing new, fresh songs weekly, one of which would be hours old before air time! T keep up on the current events and fashion songs to spoof these news stories and at same time, be at least a little humorous to an audience would present a nearly impossible task.
Me thinks that is the reason there was no staying power for this format on either side of the Atlantic. Like a Shooting Star, it burned itself out in a brief moment of History. Oh, but what a moment it was!
NOTE:As far as we can tell, there is no VHS or DVD available that has any of the programs available, neither BBC nor NBC. However one of the writers, former M.I.T. Math Professor, Tom Lehrer, did cut a 33 1/3 rpm Record Album of several of his songs from the series. Titled THAT WAS THE YEAR THAT WAS, it dated back to 1964 and came out the next year. It is now available on both cassette and CD on either Warner Brothers or Reprise Labels. Check it out!
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Feh!, 22 October 2006
Author: cmndrnineveh from United States
Balderdash! This show was a complete humbug and was nowhere NEAR as funny as some of you guys remember it! What I remember was a pretentious show with lame, nerdy takes on what was going on around the world, with a very SMUG attitude exhibited by all the players! Especially Nancy Ames, (who hated hippies,) who you say was a FOLK singer??? Heh...I bet she didn't work the coffeehouse circuit much after comments she made on a daytime talk show, (it was either Merv Griffin, Steve Allen or Dick Cavett,) about "those smelly beatniks!" All in all, you're being WAAAYYY too kind to this turkey, which only lasted one year, and rightfully so.
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Apparently too far to the left for the right wing 10 August 2003
Author: tnsprin-2 from LI, NY
A great ground breaking show (never got to see the UK version). It got pulled not be course of normal lost or ratings. But after it was preempted for too many weeks by a boring political rally for a party. They used a former hack actor who was rewarded for his work with future political support.
Aloysius J. Gleek:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/29/nyregion/29towns.html?hp
From The New York Times:
Our Towns
Back to the Garden: A Woodstock Museum
Visitors to the Museum at Bethel Woods, an homage to the Woodstock Festival.
John Sebastian watches his 1969 self sing “Darling Be Home Soon.”
A hippie bus of the time, decorated in psychedelic colors.
By PETER APPLEBOME
Published: May 29, 2008
BETHEL, N.Y.
A funny thing happened on the magic bus trip back to the tie-dyed land of peace, love and music.
Yes, there were Jimi and Janis and Joe Cocker twitching around in film clips from the famous concert 39 years ago on the rolling meadow that was Max Yasgur’s alfalfa field. There was a real-life hippie bus in psychedelic colors, and displays of a stars-and-stripes suede jacket and love beads next to a minidress and go-go boots ensemble, the latter getup presumably not worn at Woodstock.
John Sebastian and Richie Havens were there to reminisce. They played Canned Heat’s “Going Up the Country” and “The Times They Are a-Changin’” by Bob Dylan.
But somehow “then” kept looping back to “now” at the unveiling Wednesday of the Museum at Bethel Woods, which will open to the public on Monday.
So there was Duke Devlin, famous as the hippie from the Texas Panhandle who came to Woodstock and never left, standing in the bright sun giving his spiel yet again for a German television crew as they waited for two squadrons of reporters in Peter Pan buses to descend on the field where the concert took place.
Stout and tattooed, with long gray hair and beard, Mr. Devlin is the embodiment of the transition of the Woodstock generation into the AARP generation. But he figures that if Woodstock is about nostalgia, it’s about more than nostalgia, too.
“Is it over yet?” he asked. “We’re still here talking. We’ve now got this wonderful museum, but I don’t call it a museum, I call it a time capsule. And without me getting too political, a lot of the same ingredients are still the same — we’ve got a war, we have civil rights, we have women’s issues. Back then, we got sick and tired of being sick and tired. I don’t know if this can be recreated, but something like it can happen again. We’re back in the ’50s, man. The reason we’re all here is because we’re not all there.”
Which is not to say that the museum, housed in a lovely laminated wood structure built by a company that long ago built Mr. Yasgur’s silos, tries to be the personification of the Woodstock ethos, whatever that was. Centered on a 6,728-square-foot permanent gallery, it’s part of Alan Gerry’s re-creation of Woodstock not as a vehicle for peace and love but as a vehicle for Sullivan County’s economic development. The site has become a $100 million arts center with a 15,000-seat outdoor performance space.
And along with voices marveling about how much fun they had in the mud or how Woodstock changed the world, we get to hear old Nixon-era stalwarts lambasting all that Woodstock has come to stand for. “The ’60s were just a terrible time for the country,” says former Attorney General Edwin Meese III, the biggest downer in a chorus of voices, yea and nay, that museumgoers hear after a 21-minute film of music from the concert. “It was the age of selfishness. It was the age of self-indulgence. It was the age of anti-authority, an age in which people did all kind of wrong things. That was the start, really, of the drug problem in the United States.”
But yea or nay, and it’s mostly yea, the most striking thing about the museum is the way that in the end, it’s less about the famous concert and yoga in the mud than about the era that the concert has come to represent.
“When I came to this project, there was this idea to memorialize the concert, which was about as far as it had gone,” said Patrick Gallagher, president of the firm that designed the museum. “And I said, ‘If it’s just a celebration of a celebration, what’s the purpose?’ And the more we peeled back the onion the more it was clear that the idea wanted to be Woodstock as the culminating moment, the capstone of the 1960s. We had to look back to look forward.”
So about 60 percent of the museum is about the politics and culture and music of the ’60s: pillbox hats, Elvis, the Bay of Pigs, the Beatles, civil rights, the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., and Neil Armstrong walking on the moon. And the rest is a quite vivid re-creation of the chaotic and unlikely process that led to 500,000 people shouting, “No rain, no rain, no rain,” during the summer downpours, Jimi Hendrix’s legendary performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and all the rest.
As for the music, Mr. Sebastian said that in the end, some was revelatory and a lot was something of a mess. “No matter what we say after the fact, most of us disliked our performances at Woodstock,” he said. “I can find you a quick dozen people who would look back on that performance and say, ‘Oh, man, I bit the big one.’ ” But as for the event, he said, he went home knowing that he had been a part of history.
He wonders why, if people love Woodstock so much, they don’t find ways to act on the things about it that matter. “It evaporated so fast,” he said. “One minute we were there and the next we were in Reagan-land.”
Still, he said, as one of the voices in the exhibit: “I guess it did give you the illusion of infinite possibilities. And maybe that’s the part that we have to say bye-bye to. Because that can’t be for your whole life or for every moment in history that you might happen to live through.”
As for saying bye-bye to Woodstock, not a chance. The museum opens a year before the 40th anniversary, probably the last big milestone at which most of the musicians will be able to perform without walkers. They’re just beginning to draw up plans, but Mr. Meese notwithstanding, don’t expect it to come and go quietly.
E-mail: [email protected]
Ellemeno:
Ang Lee will be adapting the book Taking Woodstock: A True Story of a Riot, a Concert, and a Life by Elliot Tiber and Tom Monte into the film entitled Taking Woodstock. The film will follow the life of a Greenwich Village interior designer who headed the Bethel Chamber of Commerce and issued the permit for the legendary 1969 Woodstock concert.
http://www.filmstalker.co.uk/archives/2008/04/stalked_ang_lees_woodstock_the.html
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According to Variety, Taking Woodstock will be based on the memoir of a motel owner who found a new venue for a music festival in Bethel, New York and paved the way for the legendary 1969 concert. The project is based on Elliot Tiber's Taking Woodstock: A True Story of a Riot, Concert, and a Life, and will focus on Tiber and the "colourful ensemble" around him. This will allow Lee to avoid going down the well-trodden route of concentrating on the epochal concert itself - and also bypass those potentially expensive music licensing deals.
Taking Woodstock is set to reunite Lee with his longtime writer James Schamus, who also scripted the likes of The Ice Storm, Ride with the Devil and Lust, Caution.
http://film.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,2275585,00.html
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Now Lee is tackling that most iconographic American event of the late '60s, Woodstock, as a comedy.
Lee's frequent screenplay collaborator (and Focus Features CEO) James Schamus is adapting Elliot Tiber's memoir "Taking Woodstock: A True Story of a Riot, A Concert, and A Life," released last year by Square One Publishers.
Tiber, then an interior designer in Greenwich Village, also was involved in the family business, a Catskills motel. As its part-time manager, he had become the local town's issuer of event permits, granting himself one annually for a small music festival. When he heard that the planned Woodstock concert had its own permit denied by a neighboring town, he called to offer his own. Soon, half a million people were on their way to White Lake, N.Y., and Tiber found himself swept up in a generation-defining experience.
Today, Tiber is a professor of comedy writing and performance. He should be ecstatic over who has been tabbed to direct.
http://www.charleston.net/news/2008/may/08/ang_lee_direct_woodstock_comedy39959/
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Focus Features Chief Executive Officer James Schamus confirmed the 1969-set film's active development. Schamus is adapting Elliot Tiber's memoir "Taking Woodstock: A True Story of a Riot, A Concert, and A Life" for the big screen.
The book, published last year by Square One Publishers, was written by Tiber with Tom Monte.
"Elliot's exuberant and heartfelt story is a perfect window onto the Woodstock experience, exploring an inspiring historical moment when liberation and freedom were in the air," Schamus said in a statement.
http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/Entertainment/2008/04/30/ang_lee_set_on_taking_woodstock/8327/
Shakesthecoffecan:
This Friday will be the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.
Ellemeno:
Teddy Kennedy's eulogy of his brother Bobby
[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9JTYnMpRyg[/youtube]
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