a division of the Chersonian Institute

Category: Television (Page 15 of 23)

Cher Doing Promo Work for TCM and Mother’s Day Special

ChermomDetails are coming together on Cher's Mother's Day tribute to Georgia Holt. It will be titled "Dear Mom, Love Cher" and will air on Lifetime, May 6 at 10 p.m. PT/ET. Press information states,

Dear Mom, Love Cher provides a rare peek into Cher’s family
history and features interviews with not only with Holt and Cher, but
also Cher’s sister Georganne LaPiere Bartylak, and Holt’s grandchildren
Chaz Bono and Elijah Blue Allman, promises Lifetime.

The documentary begins with Holt’s beginnings in rural Arkansas and
runs through her six tumultuous marriages while pursuing a career among
Hollywood’s elite as a singer and actress.

Dear Mom, Love Cher includes a never-before-heard duet
performance with Holt and Cher, along with the long-lost recordings Holt
taped more than three decades ago that Cher has re-mastered for
commercial release later this year.

“This project started as a gift for my mom’s 86th birthday,” says
Cher, 66, in the release, adding: “Like most things in my family, it was
initiated by my sister Georganne, who asked me if I could update mom’s
album. So I went BIG (I’m known in the family for doing that),” said
Cher. “My sister and I are proud of our mom and we want to share her
with the world. My mom is EXACTLY like ‘Rocky.’ She NEVER gives up!
Well…if we must nit-pick, they aren’t totally alike. Rocky is a
fictitious boxer and mom’s a singer. He’s younger and a man. Other than
that they are the same person! FIGHTERS.”

This should be a great special. To publicize her latest projects, Cher has been doing some interviews including,

  • Cher and her mom posed for Entertainment Weekly online.
      
  • A phone interview with Patricia Sheridan from the Post Gazette. Listen to it here or read the pared down transcript here. What's interesting to me about this interview is the comment, "I could answer every question that you would ask and you still wouldn't know me. I would still have my privacy. I wouldn't lie to you….I have such a private core." And I just blogged about that recently. I so should get an A in Cher class! I also enjoyed hearing Cher talk about how she would sing with her mother and her grandfather and uncle would play guitar. All those childhood details are so interesting. I didn't even know how well she knew her grandfather.
      
  • Cher did an interview with Michael Logan for TV Guide about her co-host gig on TCM with Robert Osborne. This is an interesting discussion where Cher talks about why she finds older films more progressive than current films. And she calls Robert Osborne Robby. Of course. And she talks about whatever happened to her dream of remaking The Enchanted Cottage.
       
  • Cher also spoke about having done an interview for People Magazine. Be on the lookout.

 

Cher VCR Alerts

VoguelittlehatAlthough it may be months and months before we get Cher's new album of golden oldies (just kidding), there is plenty on tap for a spring o' Cher, starting a week from Friday.

Cher starts her 4-week run of classic movie Fridays on April 5. See the promo

Cher's mother's album (with Cher duet) should drop allegedly in early May right before Cher's special on her Mother may be aired on Lifetime on May 6.

Cher News talks more about Cher's tweets on promoting the special on Ellen and Jay Leno. I guess this is bad time for me to be thinking about cancelling my cable. Dammit.

In other news, Cher has flipped a house near where I used to live, Abbot Kinney in Venice, California. I moved in with Mr. Cher Scholar before he officially became Mr. Cher Scholar when he lived right off Abbot Kinney and San Juan. It was right as the neighborhood was starting to gentrify between 2006-2007. The neighborhood was still sketchy (our neighbor had chickens) but you could hear drum circles by the beach from the bedroom. The Edgar Winter Dog also lived there with us for a while. He loved cruising Abbot Kinney. People would come up to us and say, that dog is a party!

Read more about Cher's Venice, California, house for sale. Digital Spy speculates she may be planning a move to London because she has also re-listed her $45 million Malibu home.

 

Cher on TMC and Fashion Week

HuskeyCher with a husky on her head…and more news from Paris Fashion Week:

Cher wears a piece of everything in Paris

Fashion Police excerpt: "Cher was wearing head-to-toe crocodile and a huge fur hat, Fergie had a
fur jacket and leather pants. Joan said more dead animals than you would
find in the trunk of Gary Busey's car. With Cher wearing old leathery
crocodile hide; it is too on-the-nose!
"

Cher stays true to form in flamboyant court jester outfit while in Paris with singer Fergie. Those
Pantscheckered pants would look better if Sonny was standing next to her wearing them.

TMC

More information on the TMC Friday Night Spotlights

Friday, April 5 – Motherhood
8 p.m. – Mildred Pierce (1945)
10 p.m. – Stella Dallas (1937)
Midnight – Penny Serenade (1941)
2:15 a.m. – Bachelor Mother (1939)

Friday, April 12 – War Effort and the Homefront
8 p.m. – So Proudly We Hail (1943)
10:15 p.m. – Since You Went Away (1944)
1:15 a.m. – The White Cliffs of Dover (1944)
3:30 a.m. – Three Came Home (1950)
5:30 a.m. – The Best Years of Our Lives  (1946)

Friday, April 19 – Working Women
8 p.m. – His Girl Friday (1940)
10 p.m. – Woman of the Year (1942)
Midnight – Tender Comrade (1943)
2 a.m. – The Devil and Miss Jones (1941)

Friday, April 26 – Women Taking Charge
8 p.m. – The Great Lie (1941)
10 p.m. – Kitty Foyle (1940)
12 a.m. – The Palm Beach Story (1942)
1:45 a.m. – The Women (1939)

Tired old gossip

Gossip columns rediscovered the Cher-Tom-Cruise partnership again this decade and it made headlines in various online spots, including The Huffington Post: "Tom Cruise And Cher Dated? Celebrity Couples That Will Make You Scratch Your Head" and yes, this does mean Cher dated half the cast of Top Gun.

A mini-photo reel of TomCher:

Smiling for cameras….


Craddlerobber

with Nancy Regan. That's Tom on the left cut off.


Nancyregan

Party peoples… 

Chertom
      

Album Delays Makes the Place Behind My Eyes Hurt (& Steve Martin)

ChertofansCher, left, talking to her fans.

So it would seem Cher's album is delayed until fall and this is making the spot behind my eyes hurt not because I can't live without a new Cher album this month, but because we have to keep talking about it coming out all this much longer. They say in "new marketing" that you should create a buzz for your product on social media before it comes out. This is a good case study about how that can fall apart if the product doesn't come out on time. If Cher were just silently working on a new album, we wouldn't have a fan meltdown and we wouldn't have a Cher meltdown, one that may or may not have been either legitimate or dishy depending upon who describes it.

I don't know but I just need to lay down.

The Cher-Album-Delay Twitter stories:

Contact Music took the shout-down more literally, "Cher confirmed it will now be moved back until after Summer in an angry reaction to fans…Cher expressed her disappointment in further Tweets, which have since been deleted." But Idolator said it was "all in good fun" (ah, yes) with tweets like "AM OLDER THAN FIRE,& TWICE AS HOT !"

SmSigh.

Anyway, let's talk about me. I am the first one to say I would like a new Cher album about now because Mr. Cher Scholar and I are going through a shitty time with our transition out of Santa Fe, New Mexico. But I will have to console myself with my 40-something other Cher albums and the other billion or so consumer products at my disposal, starting with the new a new DVD my friend brought me a few weekends ago, Steve Martin: The Television Stuff. I loved this DVD so much I wrote a 7-page essay about it for Ape Culture. Not only do I think early Steve Martin work was ironic and brilliant, I draw a direct connection between his meta-stand-up and the ironic Generation X meta-writers Dave Eggers, David Foster Wallace and Douglas Copeland.

I've talked occasionally about how Steve Martin was a writer on The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour and friends with Teri Garr. He talks about this in his book Born Standing Up. In the DVD commentary of this set, he talks more about being a TV writer for The Smothers Brothers, Sonny & Cher and Cher, saying it was always his hope to become a regular comedic actor on one of those shows but it never happened. I once mourned that fact that Martin's humor never made it to Sonny & Cher skits, but now I think his own stand-up shows were exactly where he needed to break out and maybe The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour was not a good fit for his kind of abstract pieces.

This week Cher scholar Dishy sent me a 45 of a song I had never heard before, Sonny singing "I'll Change." Later I found this clip of Sonny singing "My Way" which I sent to Mr. Cher Scholar to cheer him up today. It worked.

CherpantsLet's all look at Cher in some silly pants and vow to get over these dramatic obstacles in our lives.

Cher at British fashion designer Gareth Pugh's fall-winter fashion presentation

Cher at Gareth Pugh's show and her tweet about it

Another story about the Pugh show

Cher shopping in Paris with Fergie

More Cher shopping with Fergie: Mr. Paparazzi says: "We love a random celebrity friendship, and here’s one that is particularly so….She and Cher hit some of Paris’ most upmarket boutiques and were obviously out to splash some cash; they left one designer store wearing a completely different ensemble than the ones they entered it in."

See? The world isn't coming to an end.

 

TV and Album Stuff Upcoming; Good New Cher Remix, New S&C Cover

WwCher Album News

So it's already March and there is no build-up going on for a new Cher album. There are only rumors she will perform at next year's Grammy awards (but didn't she say that last year?). Sure enough, her latest twitter reports indicate that the album may as yet be unfinished. 

GPhilly put it well as a tack-on to her tweet about all these delays:

Pop goddess Cher took to Twitter over the weekend to talk about her new
album, tweeting, “As an artist whose last release was 11 yrs ago!I  want
2 sing my heart out! Some think I haven’t sung because I no longer
Can..Its is why I’ve taken so Long..I want it 2B perfect.” The release
date is scheduled for not-soon-enough.

GayStarNews reports on another tweet regarding the album:

'All the songs in this CD have notes so high only dogs will hear them!'
Cher claims. 'Notes should go lower as singers get older. Ahh…well… You
Haven’t Seen the Last Of Me blew that! Think those are my highest notes?
All of the songs on this CD have choruses that are nose bled/break
glass notes!'

Both Cher World and Cher News reported on Cher's comments about the new DJ Mz Poppins remix of "Woman's World."

Cher called it "Truly Superb!…don’t know how she got vocal only??" Cher also said “Had To
Hear It JUST One More Time ! You Rock’n It With Those STRINGS MZ”

Cher World says, "In my opinion it is by FAR the best remix of Woman’s World, much better
than the original remix from Paul Oakenfold.  This version is unique and
makes you feel!"

I totally agree that this remix pumps some life into the song. Although the ubiquitous drum beat intro to these remixes truly fatigues me in my old age, I like the stronger driving main beat and the weaving synth…all which detracts from the lackluster lyric. Her remix also gives the song distinctive movements, specifically halfway through with "Love hurts" we slow back down for a rebuild. All mucho interesting. The DJ Mz Poppins remix can be found here.


CmTurner Classic Movies

Cher News has been faithfully following Cher tweets (it's truly the Lord's work) and reports Cher's news that she will be returning to TCM in April to co-host a Friday night show with "Robby" Osbourne.

John and I just watched The Caine Mutiny (1954) with Humphrey Bogart this weekend on TCM. I love that movie. It foreshadows Jack Nicholson's infamous breakdown in A Few Good Men and has a great scene with José Ferrer dressing down his clients in the final scene. There is no clear villain in this movie. You actually feel bad for Lt. Queeg.

New Acclaimed Sonny & Cher Cover

American artist Mark Koelek released a solo album this month called Like Rats which includes a cover of Sonny & Cher's "I Got You Babe." Lindsay Eanet in Black Book Mag gives it a good review:

Mk"Mark Kozelek Covered Sonny & Cher and It Is Beautiful…

…one of the standouts here is the stomach-dropping closer, a simultaneously
gentle and devastating take on Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe.” And how
quickly the warm, fuzzy Sonny and Cher classic
turns into a spare, heart-wrenching tale of desperation, of a broken man, down
on his luck, clinging to the one thing he has left in this life: his babe. This
is how you do covers, people
. Kozelek is a reminder that covering a song can
actually still be an artistic statement and really create the song anew as
opposed to just making overly precious folk versions of rap songs for YouTube,
perky college a cappella arrangements or soulless, grinning Glee soundtrack
reproductions. And thank God for that."

Never has "I don't know if all that's true" sounded so desperately resigned. You can buy the song on iTunes.

Best National Anthem Singers

CherIt’s Super Bowl Sunday this weekend and Alicia Keys is slated to perform the National Anthem.

OK! Magazine has just done a review of their favorite performances of the National Anthem: http://www.okmagazine.com/news/top-10-super-bowl-national-anthem-performances-cher-kelly-clarkson-carrie-underwood-more

Their list:

  1. Whitney Houston –1991—what a wowee that was. I bought the single cassette!
  2. Faith Hill—2000
  3. Kelly Clarkson—2012
  4. Jennifer Hudson—2009
  5. Carrie Underwood—2010
  6. Jordin Sparks—2008
  7. Mariah Carey—2002
  8. Cher—1999
  9. Beyonce—2004
  10. The Dixie Chicks—2003

Note the FOUR American Idol singers (three AI winners) in this top ten list. Cher’s inclusion is striking because she’s not the same kind of singer as the others (with the exception of maybe the country sangers). Many would make the case that she’s the weakest singer on the list (if you split vocal hairs about this sort of thing). I chalk up her inclusion on all these favorites listings to the fact that Cher has become, not only a real American idol, but a national treasure.

Rolling Stone magazine’s list: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/pictures/the-most-memorable-super-bowl-national-anthem-performances-20120130.

  1. Whitney Houston
  2. The Dixie Chicks
  3. Faith Hill
  4. Beyonce
  5. Cher
  6. Carrie Underwood
  7. Jennifer Hudson
  8. Aretha Franklin, Aaron Neville & Dr. John (in a New Orleans Tribute)—2006
  9. Garth Brooks—1993
  10. Mariah Carey
  11. Luther Vandross—1997

They say about Cher:

She left the Bob Mackie headdress at home, but Cher's throaty take on "The Star-Spangled Banner" still had the pop icon's unmistakable style – not to mention some impressive notes.

Rolling Stone, still hating on the idea of spectacle (at least when it occurred in the 1970s). Get over it, Rolling Stone!

The site The Week also posted their list recently: http://theweek.com/article/index/239018/the-10-greatest-national-anthem-performances-in-super-bowl-history

  1. Whitney Houston
  2. Luther Vandross
  3. Jennifer Hudson
  4. Cher
  5. Jordin Sparks
  6. The Dixie Chicks
  7. Beyonce (tie)
  8. Carrie Underwood (tie)
  9. Mariah Carey
  10. Vanessa Williams—1996

Their comments on Cher:

Cher can sing? Holy crap, Cher can sing! This was great. No complaints about Cher. The interpretive dancers were kind of weird, though. The Week's multimedia editor Lauren Hansen nails it: "Cher was surprisingly impressive, but like Mike Bloomberg with Lydia Callis, her spotlight was stolen."

Arbitrary diva rating: 90.4 percent Barry

This site also recommends Barry Manilow’s performance from 1984. I would heartily recommend his pitch perfect rendition. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A795MW-Qpow

I would also recommend Marvin Gaye’s brilliant and chill-inducing performance from the 1983 NBA All-Star Game: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRvVzaQ6i8A

Marvin   

Cher Shows & Videos Percolating

Cher's New Logo Show

Rumor is that Cher is involving Chaz as a Producer on the show. But as this rumor is flying from the rag The National Enquirer it's most likely a large pile of hooey.

Cher's New Music Video

CherNews is tracking the tweets and news of the happenings of Cher's new video shoot, including:

 

Critically Thinking about The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour

ArchieOver the years I have struggled with trying to get my head around The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour in any critical way. I don’t know if this is because I have a hard time revisiting many comedy shows I once loved as a young kid. The evolution of comedy sweeps you up and your sensibilities evolve with it. Looking back, the hilarity of certain scenes or gags don’t come off as funny anymore. Comedic timing speeds up year after year and old bits seem to drag on too long. Comedy gets more irreverent, more piercing, more ridiculous. Boundaries are pushed and you look back to jokes that fail to have any humorous shock value.

But I also feel this segment of Cher’s career, (and quite a big one at that), gets overlooked. Someone somewhere should be explicating the show. But pop culture academics aren’t mulling it’s relevancy.

But then a few months ago I came across the book Archie Bunker’s America: TV in an Era of Change 1968-1978 by Josh Ozersky (2003). The book jacket promised some interesting interpretations of 70s TV shows:

Archie Bunker’s America discerns what was “in the air” as television networks tried to accommodate cultural and political swings in America from the Vietnam era through the late 1970s. Josh Ozersky’s spirited examination of the ways America changed television during a period of intense social upheaval, recuperation, and fragmentation uncovers a bold and beguiling facet of American cultural history.”

The book is only available in hardcover and I’m not sure I would recommend it for simply reading about Sonny & Cher. For one reason, it’s expensive–even used. I was also hoping the book would show evidence that the Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour played a role in easing mainstream American into multi-culturalism with their progressive booking of African American acts and introducing international themes to comedy and torch segments, although these segments do look a bit stereotypical in retrospect. Unfortunately, the section on Sonny & Cher in the book is brief and, after reading the entire thing, I’m not sure what their example proves.

Some highlights:

The show was mildly licentious and filled with double entendres and showbiz hipness of the Vegas type. The entire production was suffused with a certain playful irony—“hey, we have our own show, let’s have some fun with it. ” This was in stark contrast to their variety progenitors, like the Smothers Brothers, who for all their boyish irreverence were in dead earnest about producing a polished product. Sonny and Cher giggled at their own jokes, refused to take their skits seriously, refused to kowtow to “the great audience” the way more straitlaced entertainers did. They muffed their lines, ad-libbed often, and (the key to the show) really related to each other.

Thus did the informal atmosphere of the rock scene come to television by way of Las Vegas. As rock music began to be accepted by the Establishment as a fait accompli, television accommodated itself and rock did likewise. Professionalism went the way of live drama, and the proscenium separating audience from performer became only a matter of talent and/or good luck. Thus, the video archives of such buttoned-up interview programs as The Mike Douglas Show, The Dick Cavett Show, The David Susskind Show, and so on often feature mumbling, incoherent “celebrities” who looked high. Singers would forget the words to their songs. Comedians would “crack up” at their own jokes. This would have been scandalous or at least disastrous as late as the 1960s, but programs like The Sonny and Cher Hour [sic] eased the audience into the new culture, much as the Lear and MTM programs had eased them out of the old one.

The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hourwas truer than most to the culture however, and it continued to be so as the Nixon nightmare wore on…The forces of entropy apparent in the short life of the Sonny and Cher series were emblematic of larger forces informing American life. The women’s movement, the fall of Nixon, and the overthrow of traditional attitudes regarding marriage, race, class, and deviance all combined with the largest and most acutely felt change of all—the collapse of the once-mighty American economy. The stylistic innovations of All in the Family and The Mary Tyler Moore Show were decisively engineered projects arising out of the network’s perennial lust for ratings, “buzz, ” and advertising revenue. Now, shows for an unhappy culture began to come off the assembly line.

So the show essentially eased America into the idea of performers making bloopers and acting irreverent? Is that all? If so, didn’t the crack-ups of Tim Conway and Harvey Korman do the same? Although the last paragraph above barely hints at this: I’d like to think the deadpan character created for Cher on the show was a powerful anecdote to the suppressed and patronized characters of Lucy Ricardo and Jeannie imprisoned in her bottle. At least this was the resulting interpretation for 3rd wave Gen X/Riot Grrl feminists like me.

I hope to dig up more pop culture theorizing about The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour as I peruse the libraries of academia. But for now this book, with these slight few paragraphs, has given me something concrete to chew on and has altered my view of the show’s possible importance to our cultural evolution.

 

Cher on Night of 100 Stars (1982)

Many thanks to Dany for sending the link to Cher's appearance on Night of 100 Stars in 1982. Check the video near the 6:20 mark. Cher appears at the back of the stage.

Stars

There are a few things I want to say about this clip:

  1. I was 12 in 1982 and I would cash-in the official Ladd-house rule allowing me to stay up one night a week for shows like this. The rule was first instated after my obsession with The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour in 1974 and during The Sonny & Cher Show, which ran in 1976-1977, during which time we moved from Albuquerque, New Mexico, to St. Louis, Missouri, most importantly from Mountain Standard Time to Central Standard Time, a difference of one hour which rendered my 8pm bedtime alarming in that I would miss my weekly fix of Sonny & Cher. Who I was obsessed with. My parents created this rule to accommodate the tragic situation. But after Cher's last TV show was cancelled, I used the rule for the first Solid Gold specials and these parades of celebrities performing scant seconds of theatrical fashion modeling. What a weird concept for a show. Hours of excitement for an ultimately frustrating few seconds of your sauntering celebrity of choice. Could you even get famous people to agree to do this today?
      
  2. Looking back on this episode with Cher in the mix, how awesome that she gets to be the center of this parading V, like a princess among celebrities. The Queen Bee. She is the enticing reveal, the centerpiece, the bride atop the cake! She smiles nervously and appreciatively, doing the runway walk with in a very modified Cher strut. She even tosses her bouquet in the fadeout.

Yes, it was good to be 12 years old in 1982, although it was a quiet time in between Cher comebacks. You thought nobody cared about Cher in that gap of fame time, but apparently they did.
 

Cher Contest and New Development Deal

60shollywood1960s Hollywood…it was an exciting time for Cher. She was just hitting the big time.

While I was in Urgent Care yesterday for chest pains (Mr. Cher Scholar and I were quite freaked out but it turned out to be costochondritis), I was reading all the announcements for Cher's new development deal on LOGO, an effort she and friend Ron Zimmerman had been working on since last year.

This sounds like a very interesting show and might give us a glimpse into Cher's experiences in this crucial decade in her life, least we dare to wish for Cher in a recurring role.

CNN says: "If Cher's potential Logo TV show would be anything at all like her Twitter feed, we're already on board."

News reports:

Cher is also trying to organize a twitter contest to bring some fans to her Malibu home for a preview of her album. Cher News has the wrap up: http://chernews.blogspot.com/2013/01/get-excited-your-chance-to-meet-cher.html

Unrelated….Sunday night as I was on the floor with my chest pains, waiting for Mr. Cher Scholar to get back from his job guarding Georgia O'Keeffe paraphernalia, I was watching the end of Oprah Winfrey's interview with David Letterman on her show Next Chapter. I love how Oprah dealt with the tough questions on Letterman and his feuds over the years, including his feud with her. But after that was over I turned to watching saved-up episodes of Family Guy. I thought if I'm going to die, I want to be watching Family Guy. Because I want to die laughing.

 

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