Movies Til Dawn

Here are two terrific clips of Joe Pyne in action. The first is an abortive interview with Lester Maddox in which Pyne challenges him to explain why blacks and Indians were given inferior seats in a coffee shop in Georgia (Maddox was the state's Governor), provoking Maddox to walk out on air. The second is an on-air physical assault, years before Jerry Springer took up the cause...   Subscribe in a reader

Not many remember Joe Pyne now--he is generally ignored when people discuss the birth of conservative talk radio/TV. But ask anyone who remembers him and they will tell you that he was the father of 'in-your-face' talk television--though he began as a radio host. He was insulting people on TV long before it became hip or even simply normal. His program was quite literally "shocking", verbally and physically aggressive. Bob Grant was given his start by Pyne, who asked Grant to take over his radio show when Pyne moved into TV--it's strange to think of these guys as having or beings mentors in this field, but Pyne encouraged Grant (and others) to take up his singular and shocking style. Pyne was a strange and seemingly dangerous guy--urban legends circulated about him, including one (which was true) about his having a wooden leg (World War 2 accident) which not everybody believed.  Pyne worked in radio on a number of small East Coast stations before he got his fi...

  Two more Bob Grant items today--a complete show from about six months after the 9/11 attacks, plus a tribute compilation. Grant died last year and a slew of the top "talkers"--Limbaugh, Stern, Sean Hannity, Opie and Anthony, Michael Savage--all took time on their shows to pay their respects to the one who started all of them on the road to ranting, raving, screaming, abusing, demeaning, destroying, accusing etc. etc.   Subscribe in a reader

Long before the advent of Rush Limbaugh, there was Bob Grant, a legendary New York "conservative"talk radio host who broadcast on WOR for much of the 1970s before leaving for WABC in the eighties and, after getting fired, returned to WOR again in the 90s. (One of his firings was due to his having referred to New York's African-American Mayor David Dinkins as "that mens room attendant"). Grant's act is largely one of yelling at callers who call in with political gripes or complaints about Grant himself. He eschews the long monologue format of Limbaugh, though he does occasionally drift into a ruminative state of mind, and has no sidekick or news segment or even, very often, guests. (Though he did, apparently, have David Dukes on a number of times. Hm.) He accuses most callers who speak with accents of being in the country illegally, contemptuously calling them "pal" before screaming "get off my phone!" and moving onto the next caller. T...

This week, I'm going to be posting various videos relating to a new, inexplicable interest of mine, the history of talk radio. Opening up the phone lines to the listeners goes back to the 1950s when, before the technology was available to actually hear the callers voices, a man named Ben Hunter (pictured above...duh) on KFI radio in Los Angeles, took calls and simply repeated the callers comments for his audience to hear, before answering them and engaging in a one-sided conversation. Ludicrous as this sounds, it was a popular enough breakthrough to hasten the development of the technology necessary to perfect the format. Here's a very nice article on Hunter and the talk radio breakthrough he created on an overnight show called The Night Owl Club. Hunter later became the host of KTTV's Movie Matinee, which showed an old movie every weekday from 12 to 3PM--guests generally followed, along with a Laurel and Hardy short. I wrote about Hunter a few months ago--along wit...

Below I've posted two clips which, together, give us a view of Welles that is both amusing and sad. First is the infamous audio of Welles at a voiceover session, destroying the director and in general behaving abominably (though it's hard not to empathize with him, given the annoying and confusing direction he's being given). No matter how many times you've heard this very famous clip, it remains freshly cruel and hilarious. But the second clip I've posted tells us a somewhat darker story. It's a sketch from a 1982 Billy Crystal Comedy Hour in which John Candy plays Welles. It's clear that his rendering of Welles--boorish, rude to technicians and dismissive of other's feelings--is based on knowledge of the audio tapes. And the audiences laughter at the routine suggests that they, too, are in on the Welles tapes. The question is HOW? There was no Youtube to spread the word back then. Weird audio was strictly black market stuff--I know because I used to ...