Wednesday, November 29, 2006

From the Forest to the Bird Cage


The opening of "Lou Grant": A great piece of nostalgia -- and I had forgotten that the intro was a clever little mini-movie depicting the life cycle of a newspaper. (Too bad this is the early Rebecca Balding-as-Carla Mardigian version and not the more familiar Linda Kelsey-as-Billie Newman one.)

4 comments:

Toby Eckert said...

Thanks for the nostalgia trip! I wonder how many newsroom positions Lou has had to cut lately.

Bill said...

For layoffs, I need the clip from "Broadcast News" in which one of the canned employees says to the higher-up, "I hope you die soon."

Shepcat said...

Brilliant. It reminds me of the phrase, "The deathless prose you write today will be wrapping fish tomorrow."

Holman said...

I still fondly remember when the Toronto Sun hired Lou Grant in 1979. Ed Asner was coming to film in Toronto at the same time Sun management was looking for a new city editor. Publisher Creighton (and his name is always said in just that way -- "Publisher Crieghton") decided it would be a lark to hire the legendary "Lou Grant" for a day. Peter Worthington, the editor-in-chief, was dispatched to Hollywood to arrange the stunt. As soon as Asner agreed, the appropriate notice was placed in the Sun's business section.

For those interested, Worthington wrote about the incident in an online article "The Little Stunt That Grew". (This is a reference to the Sun's slogan of the time: The Little Paper That Grew)

The only discrepancy I found in the piece is that Worthington says the reason they gave for firing Lou Grant was the constant distraction of TV cameras whereas I recall them saying they had fired him because they'd discovered he was an actor.

Perhaps they used both excuses.

Those were good days.