05-23-2016, 12:10 PM
(This post was last modified: 05-23-2016, 12:18 PM by Eric the Green.)
(05-23-2016, 09:27 AM)Anthony Wrote: Donald Trump is a national liberal - with even a slight left-liberal tinge: He says he doesn't care what bathrooms transgenders use, and has hemmed and hawed on abortion from Day One - while advocating policies that would send wages soaring, particularly for the lowest-paid workers, and would grant total tax forgiveness to the working poor.
I can't believe that someone as sophisticated as Mikebert could fall into the trap of going by tone over substance.
If you loved the late Morton Downey Jr., chances are you are going to vote for Donald Trump.
I can agree with that one. I didn't watch Downey; he might have been on cable I don't know. But here's an article. By the way I watched Joe Pyne in the late 60s with considerable delight, partly because he had on so many eccentrics and visionaries and hippie types of the time on his show, which he proceeded to berate but still gave them a platform. Pyne was the pyoneer
Morton Downey Jr. paved the way for the angry talk show host of today
Morton Downey Jr. is shown during a roundtable discussion on "Trash TV" at the National Convention of TV Programmers in Houston on Jan. 25, 1989.
(Gaylon Wampler/AP)
Before Nancy Grace, Bill O'Reilly or Rush Limbaugh, there was one angry mouth on TV: Morton Downey Jr.
He is but a footnote now but a memorable one for any of those who watched, with a combination of mild horror and fascination, the television antics of Morton Downey Jr.
They flashed for less than two TV years in the late 1980s and he has been dead since in 2001. But he remains a significant character, and you can see his influence now in the confrontational style of such "angry" media mouths as Nancy Grace, Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh and so many others, and in the raucous behavior of those cavorting on so-called reality shows. (my comment: including Donald)
The television premiere of a documentary film makes that point clearly and brings Downey back in all his vivid and loud and cartoonish weirdness. "Evocateur: The Morton Downey Jr. Movie," which airs 8 p.m. Thursday on CNN, is a fine film, featuring many of the principal players in the Downey saga, from former producers of his show, audience members, rival hosts and some of the now-familiar TV talking heads who got their feet wet on his program.
It makes the case that Downey himself was following in the footsteps of the now-forgotten Joe Pyne, a loudmouth of the first rank who pioneered the confrontational style in which the host advocates a viewpoint and then argues with anybody within earshot. He did this on radio and television in Los Angeles and, for a time in the 1960s, across the nation's airwaves.
Downey, always living uncomfortably in the shadow of his famous father, Morton Downey Sr., a hugely successful singer in the 1920s and 1930s, grew up in considerable luxury, in a house near the Kennedy family compound in Hyannis Port, Mass. He tried early on a singing career but drifted instead into radio, honing his increasingly nasty style at various stations across the country, including at WMAQ-AM here.
The man who "saved" him from that life and created this media monster was Bob Pittman, the founder of MTV, who says in the film, "(Downey) understood performance, how to turn everything into something theatrical. He was good on radio but he was made for television."
Actor Bill Boggs and talk show host Morton Downey Jr. sighted on May 11, 1988 at Elaine's Restaurant in New York City.
(Ron Galella / WireImage)
And so, Pittman put him on in 1987. Taped in front of a live and loud audience in studios in Secaucus, N.J., the "Morton Downey Jr. Show" was an immediate ratings success, moving into national syndication in 1988. Chain-smoking cigarettes and berating most of his guests, Downey was in sharp contrast to the other popular talk show hosts of the time, most notably the avuncular Phil Donahue. Another rival, Sally Jessy Raphael, comments in this film on Downey's appeal "as the prurient excitement of not nice people saying not nice things."
He and the format of the show — which took full advantage of the raucous studio audiences, collectively known as "the beast" — made it appear to Downey's supporters that he had the ability to capitalize on collective American frustrations and anger.
Interviewed in this film, Pittman also says, with the callousness we have come to expect from the executive suites of media folk, "Self-destructive people are always entertaining."
Not so much, frankly, as we see details of Downey's crude womanizing, his wicked temper and instability. He was married four times and had four children but only one of those intimates is interviewed for the film, a sad-faced daughter named Kelly.
At the height of his fame Downey took his show on the road. Not for cameras but rather live audiences, and when he parked at the Riviera Theatre in February, 1989, I was there.
In the Tribune I wrote that the show was one "of the strangest and most disturbing events" I had ever seen. "In front of a predominantly male, well-oiled and rowdy audience, the television phenomenon offered his unique brand of entertainment."
The evening's topic was the death penalty, with a four-person panel on stage.
"Now certainly many of the people in the crowd were not stupid," I wrote. "But judging from the attitudes of those who spoke from microphones placed in the crowd on either side of the stage, they were largely misinformed, inarticulate and terribly angry.
"Some of this might have been absurdly laughable — Downey is a showman who does not take himself as seriously as do his fans — were not people so enraged. Downey, sipping a beer and swaggering, played tour guide into the darkest corners of fears and frustrations …. However satisfied some might have been after (the show), I'm sure they weren't fully sated until later socking some poor schnook in the kisser in a barroom."
It all came to a quick end when the show began focusing on the case of Tawana Brawley, a 15-year-old African-American girl who claimed to have been raped by six white men, including a police officer, and had "KKK" and other vile words scrawled on her body. Show after show was devoted to this case, many featuring the Brawley advisor and then relatively unknown Al Sharpton. Downey beat that story to death and his ratings began to plummet, especially after Brawley's accusations were deemed false by a grand jury.
In a desperate stab at resurrection, Downey (echoing Brawley's lie) claimed to have been attacked in a San Francisco airport bathroom by three "skinheads" who chopped off his hair and drew a swastika on his face. The story made national headlines but was quickly and embarrassingly deemed false.
And that was that. The show was canceled and Downey drifted into a few unsuccessful comeback attempts, did some work in movies, contracted lung cancer and died. In some strange sort of immortality there is a website devoted to him, (mortondowneyjrhome.com), offering such items as coffee mugs and T-shirts.
"Evocateur" offers so much more, some of it compelling, some of it disturbing and some of it revelatory (Downey's first name was Sean).
When his show ended in 1989 I wrote, as this paper's TV critic, that the announcement "removes from our lives one of the most abrasive people ever to appear on television. But do not think that this represents a move toward a calmer clime. Downey whetted people's appetites for confrontational TV. There will be someone to take his place."
I had no idea how many would eagerly follow in his in-your-face footsteps.
"After Hours With Rick Kogan" airs 9-11 p.m. Sundays on WGN-AM 720.
rkogan@tribune.com
Twitter @rickkogan
This article and video goes further and mentions Trump:
http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/12/opinions/s...owney-era/
