10/11/22
Newsletter124
The Crack of Dawn
I’ve been watching an enormous amount of interviews called Pioneers of Television on YouTube. They’re all lengthy interviews and, besides actors, include directors, producers, and writers. Last night I watched a long interview with Sherwood Schwartz (a Jew from New Jersey) who is known for having created and executive produced Gilligan’s Island and The Brady Bunch. He was charming and well-spoken and though I didn’t know it as I watched it, was already in his 90s when he gave the interview. I don’t want to pick on him, but he had a form of self-gratifying amnesia that’s common in Hollywood. He went on at length about how the great idea for The Brady Bunch just came to him out of nowhere like a gift from God – a divorced man with kids meets and marries a divorced woman with kids. The show premiered in September, 1969. Two of the biggest hit films of one year earlier were, Yours, Mine and Ours (1968) and With Six You Get Eggroll (1968), both of which are about divorced men and women with kids getting married. The best of the bunch is certainly Yours, Mine and Ours, with Henry Fonda with ten kids marrying Lucille Ball who has eight kids. But for Sherwood Schwartz to honestly believe that this idea came to him out of nowhere is absurd.
I find the whole concept of superheroes painful and awful. To me watching guys and gals in colorful unitards saving the universe from supervillains is less interesting than watching paint dry. But I do love the history of actual heroes, or at least the folks who were considered heroes at the time. America’s first two “superheroes” were: Davy Crockett and Kit Carson. They became “superheroes,” as opposed to just plain old heroes, because innumerable “Dime Novels” were written about them, without their permission, and their acts of heroism just kept growing and expanding until they became completely, utterly, and totally ridiculous. Both Davy Crockett and Kit Carson were “Frontiersmen,” meaning they participated in opening the western frontier. To our modern day horror Davy Crockett and Kit Carson’s superpowers were the ability to kill supervillains, known as bears and Indians. Davy Crockett could not kill enough bears (he called them barrs). Kit Carson could not kill enough Blackfeet Indians. When Blackfeet stole his horses, he and his pals sneaked into the Blackfeet camp and killed everybody. As Carson said, “It was a perfect butchery.” But Kit Carson was married to two different Native American women, had children, and lived among Native Americans. Davy Crockett became a congressman and died at the Alamo fighting for land America had stolen from the Mexicans.
I love irony. I think irony makes the world go around. Things aren’t just the way they are, and often don’t turn out the way we hope or expect. I think it’s brilliant that America’s greatest president by far was George Washington and he owned slaves. Nobody is calling George Washington a superhero, but he’s about as close to one as we’ll ever get. He beat the British who had the most powerful military in the world, then helped create American Democracy, then was the benign ruler for eight years, then peacefully handed over the power. But he also owned slaves – lots of them, and he felt sort of bad about it, but not enough to let them go.
Of our first five presidents: George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe, the only one who didn’t own slaves (who wasn’t from Virginia) was John Adams. But of those five presidents, John Adams probably comes in third, maybe fourth.
What does it all mean?
I am smiling as the day begins.