When I emerge from the downtown number 1 subway stop at West 50th street while en route to MoMA, I find myself across from the historic Winter Garden Theater, and I’m always struck by two things. One is that I am standing where Buster Keaton did while he was in rehearsal for The Passing Show of 1917. I am also struck by the sight of the immense billboard above the theater advertising whatever is playing there.
At one point during the multi-year run of Mamma Mia at the Winter Garden the tagline on the billboard for the show read: “You already know you’re going to love it!” I’d felt for years that this was the motto behind the creation of movies, TV and theatre but I’d never seen it spelled out blatantly in an ad.
The gradual shift from creating new and original musicals, movies and TV shows to ones already familiar to fans, to minimize any financial risk for the producers and presenters, has been ongoing for a long time. This past summer saw a slew or releases of reboots, sequels and franchise movies and streaming series as well as announcements of more of this for the fall. For instance, this summer’s two big comedies were the Naked Gun reboot and the sequel Happy Gilmore 2. There were big announcements by 99 year old Mel Brooks that he has sanctioned the productions of Spaceballs 2 and Very Young Frankenstein, and this month will see the release of Spinal Tap 2 and the airing/streaming of The Paper, a spin-off of The Office.
“You already know you’re going to love it!”
Whenever I’ve seen instances of new movies, musicals and TV shows that are things the public already knows they’re going to love, I have thought of something Ernie Kovacs said on his TV show 65 years ago.
Ernie Kovacs was a pioneering television comedian who worked in the medium from its dawn until his untimely death in January 1962 and whose unique brand of television comedy has left a mark on many comedians and filmmakers. Starting in April 1961 Kovacs wrote, directed and starred in a series of monthly half-hour specials that aired on ABC, and were sponsored by Dutch Masters Cigars. At some point in the fall of that year Ernie taped what would become his seventh special for ABC, which aired in December 1961. The special includes a fan favorite: a spoof of the then-raging fad of TV westerns. In his on-camera intro to the series of sketches, seated in front of a bunch of TV monitors, Kovacs sets up his satire of Westerns up by saying:
“There is a formula for success in the entertainment medium, and that is…beat it to death if it succeeds.”
When I was doing research for the first Ernie Kovacs Collection DVD box set (2011) which I curated, I came across some boxes of original scripts for the Kovacs TV shows in the Edie Adams archives. One of the boxes contained a folder with the script for this particular ABC special. It was interesting to see that the way this had been typed out, the end of the line had originally read “if it succeeds, beat it to death”. In some ways, the flow and rhythm of this may seem like it made more sense, but I have to imagine that when on set and saying the lines, Kovacs thought better of it and found there may have been a greater impact to his point by switching the order of the words to “beat it to death if it succeeds”.
The ironic thing, of course, is that a few months after taping his spoof of westerns on TV, Kovacs would find himself in front of the cameras starring in a pilot for a Western sitcom called Medicine Man (1962, unaired) in which his sidekick was none other than Buster Keaton.
