spatch

While driving through Medford today, muffyjo and I noticed that the Outback Steakhouse in the Stop & Shop plaza -- and indeed, one of the last few reasons to go to that plaza other than for the Stop & Shop -- is gone.



Windows boarded up, doors locked tight, sign removed from the facade, potential inconvenience apologized for, gone gone gone.

For many it may not be that harsh a blow to American chain restaurants, or to cuisine in general. And truth be told, the US Version of Australia that the Outback Steakhouse featured was tiresome and frankly embarrassing, what with the KANGAROO XING signs and boomerangs everywhere and dishes with names that used outdated Australian slang. The restaurant has ashamed at least one Australian expat I know in the States, and I am certain there are others whose faces will be slightly less red after hearing this news.

But then again, says Mr. Mondegreen, the coin falls on the other side of the shoe as well: There are US-themed restaurants elsewhere in the world which seem to believe that Texas is the true face of all things American. They might believe it -- and Texas believes it, for sure -- but it isn't truly representative of the country as a whole. So it was with the Outback Steakhouse and Australia. Embarrassing culturally, but ... oddly enough, this restaurant was a social focal point for me.

Several of my circles of friends, it turned out, frequented the Medford place. It was where bets were made over poorly-designed cocktails, where Margarita Bob conquered the chipotle-pineapple margarita, or where the margarita conquered him. We're still not sure of the final score there. The post-modern rock group Razorblade Motorcade (so post-modern, not a single song was ever written or recorded) had their CD cover art taken in the parking lot outside after eating there. One could get drunk and saunter a few doors down to the TJ Maxx (now AJ Wright) and make fun of the exquisitely tacky home furnishings out loud. (Trust me, it's worlds of fun if you've got the right store and the right buzz and don't have to drive anywhere.) It was also where a Theatre@First delegation regularly went after their monthly meeting and indeed, one of the first thoughts that muffyjo and I had when staring at the boarded windows was "Now where will the Steering Committee eat?"

Most importantly, it served the best cheese fries with or without the bacon on top and if you asked nicely you could get both ranch dressing and honey mustard sauce on the side and that was practically a meal in and of itself. The French Onion soup was definitely not recommended and I have a cracking great story concerning another soup of theirs which unfortunately cannot be told in mixed company, but their steaks were consistently good and again I draw your attention to the cheese fries and the copious amounts of alcoholic beverages, some of which were actually quite tasty.

It wasn't a destination restaurant. Nobody, with the exception of the T@F Steering Committee I guess, ever said "Hey! Let's up and go to the Outback Steakhouse!" The decision process leading to a visit usually went more like "Hey, let's go out to dinner! You free tonight? Awesome! Where should we go? No, not into the Square, it'll be too busy... oh that's a good idea, but I had Chinese last night... not feeling up for Indian? Hmm, what about Outback? Does that sound good? Okay, let's go."

Because of its magical power to be there for you by default, it was often referred to fondly as the Fallback Steakhouse. But now we no longer have our fallback.

Oh, there are other middle-class restaurant chains nearby. The Valley of the Things in Everett has a Texas Roadhouse, speaking of that whole Texas thing, which gives you free peanuts and lets you drop the shells on the floor (but which does not have a "No Yee-Hawing" section; make a mental note never to take someone there on their birthday unless you truly hate them) and a TGI Friday's. Cambridgeside has a California Pizza Kitchen which features a kitchen that makes pizzas obstensibly from California, and a Cheesecake Factory, which does not feature a factory that makes cheesecake. (That revelation is still a stinging disappointment.) You can head up to Burlington if you're really jonesing for a Chili's or, as the Medford sign suggests, another Outback.

But they're just not the same. Try as they might, they just won't capture the spirit of the place I'd been going to with friends of one stripe or another for eight, nine years now. I fully realize I am waxing rhapsodic about a restaurant chain of dubious theming and getting all nostalgic like Butters talking about Bennigan's, but you probably have a similar restaurant which you frequent. It may be embarrassing for you to admit it to the snobs you know who consider themselves gourmets, but you go anyway because hell not every trip out can be a visit to the French Laundry and your friends go too and it's fun and you know what to order and what not to and sometimes there are drinks specials. And then one day you go by and the whole operation has disappeared.

I am going to hit myself over the head with this keyboard if I use the words "end", "era", "of" and "an" in a certain combination, so I guess I should finish up and ponder the fireworks tonight instead. Or maybe just take a nap. It's been a long day.

One of the classic film urban legends (or rumors, or perhaps "hopes") is that somewhere in South America, stashed in someone's basement or hiding in a chest in an attic, is a full, uncut version of Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons. Welles finished his first cut of the film in 1942 while in South America shooting a documentary called It's All True, which itself was devised in an attempt to improve relations between the US and several key Latin American countries. We were in a war, see, and needed all the pals we could get. If we couldn't get pals, we would've settled for good neighbors.

Neither Ambersons nor It's All True turned out the way Welles wanted them to. Higher-ups at RKO, the studio which was to distribute the films, grew seriously unhappy with the way Orson was behaving while down in Brazil. Oh, sure, the guy worked like a madman, but he also played like a madman as well, and his filmmaking approach (progress? what progress? can't you see there are dances to dance, skirts to chase and delicious drinks to enjoy?) had long since ceased to worry the RKO brass. It had begun to piss them off something fierce. At this point in time Welles had only one film to his name. It just so happened to be Citizen Kane, which nearly everybody but William Randolph Hearst had praised, so Welles was under serious scrutiny from a lot of different eyes. His second film would have to surpass Kane in brilliance or else it'd just prove that Orson had gotten lucky the first time around.

The first audience preview of Ambersons was an absolute disaster. The film was previewed second on a double bill. The first film screened was a light-hearted, zippy peppy musical, which was what audiences wanted, especially so soon after Pearl Harbor. By all accounts, they loved it. The Magnificent Ambersons, on the other hand, was a brooding, slow-paced moody drama with (in the original cut) no uplifting ending, and it clocked in at just over two hours. Faced with this ordeal, the audience turned sour, began heckling, and left behind angry survey cards which were the 1940s version of YouTube comments only with just slightly less cussing (and, one presumes, without seventeen comment cards all containing the same line of dialogue with no extra comment.)

RKO knew they had to make drastic cuts to the film. Orson would never approve of their cuts, and they knew it. They also knew they didn't have to worry about that since Welles was completely powerless, being out of the country and without the right of final cut (he'd given it up during contract negotations.)

Welles could make suggestions from afar via telegram and telephone and he did, very much so, but his dispatches often carried no weight. If he had been in Hollywood, or if Robert Wise, the film's actual editor, could have gone to Rio to work with Welles (his trip was denied due to wartime travel restrictions) there's a good chance that the film might not have been butchered as it turned out to be. As it was, Wise edited the film under the guidance of studio executives who disliked Welles. Also involved with the editing process was Welles' own business manager, Jack Moss, but he was completely ineffective in defending the project and upholding what Orson wanted.

The result was a drastically shortened movie with a new, happier ending tacked on. Welles' relations with RKO fell apart. The studio eventually destroyed all the unused footage of Ambersons ("to free up vault space" was the official story, though it doesn't take a tinfoil hat to theorize they'd done it to keep the material out of Welles' hands.)

It's All True suffered disaster after disaster, including the accidental drowning death of an impoverished fisherman whose true story was being recreated for the film. The jangadeiro was one of four who sailed over 1600 miles down the coast of Brazil in order to bring public attention to their way of life, which involved working in a semi-feudal system of dubious legality. In the spirit of the pseudo-documentary, Welles had cast all four of the jangadeiros as themselves. However, as they were filming the re-creation of the dramatic conclusion of their journey, their raft capsized, killing one of the jangadeiros before a rescue crew could swim out to help him. Stop for a moment and boggle at that irony if you'd like; then we'll move on.

RKO quickly cut their losses on the project, which first had its budget slashed before it was eventually cancelled outright. Combined with the well-publicized Ambersons disaster, Orson Welles' reputation as an enfant terrible who couldn't finish a project was amplified and inflated, however justly or unjustly you want to call it.

Stories would later circulate that a print of the Ambersons first cut had been sent to Welles in Brazil, and there would be some folks in Rio who claimed to have seen it. Where that print went, though, nobody knows. It could very well be stashed somewhere. One can hope.

I only write this tonight (wait, was that just a lead-in?) because of an awesome piece of news out of Argentina. What appears to be an original, full print of Fritz Lang's Metropolis has been discovered in Buenos Aires. Lang suffered Hollywood studio butchery similar to Welles' ordeal when his amazing German impressionist masterpiece went over to the States. Executives at Paramount slashed nearly a quarter of the film's content, oversimplifying the story and removing key scenes for American audiences. Lang's original cut was lost in Berlin, and the versions of Metropolis you can get on DVD today will tell you, at certain points, what the next scene in the original narrative was supposed to have been. Even that, however, is based mostly on speculation.

Well, soon we won't need those title cards anymore. The discovered print has been brought to Berlin for restoration (after 80 years in hiding look as good you will not, hmm?) and it's only a matter of time before it's released. This is an amazing find. I cannot wait. Isn't it wonderful? And to think that maybe someday we'll be saying the same thing about The Magnificent Ambersons. Hope springs eternal, cat. Just remember that.

Ever have one of those mornings that start off so well that you think "Well, the only thing that could make this morning complete is an ice cream sandwich" and what do you know, there's ice cream sandwiches in the freezer?! Nrom nrom nrom. Friday started off that way. Quite nice.

Friday was a very long day. I took the Acela into New York for an evening of musical theater and then a late-late-late night bus ride back. Earlier this autumn I picked up one of the last few remaining face value tix for a Friday night performance of Young Frankenstein, currently in previews at the Hilton Theatre. Was pretty excited to get the tick (er, ticket) because hey, Mel Brooks and his creative team did a good job out with The Producers; hey, Andrea Martin is in it; hey, Sutton Foster too; and hey, Young Frankenstein was a funny film to begin with so if it gets the Producers treatment and goes all bigtime and stuff, I can boast and brag that I saw it before you did neener neener neener (with the exception of katre and some Seattle people, apparently.)

By the way, I finally discovered the beauty and glory that is the Acela train's Quiet Car. No cellphone conversations, no loud yammering, no screaming kids, just blessed quietness, all politely and quietly enforced. I mean, the loudest noises in the car, besides station announcements, were tiny things such as someone went rustling through a bag or an occasional "hrumph" from the older businessman seated next to me (he had a throat-clearing tic, apparently, or he just constantly did not like what he was reading.) All in all well worth the C-note you gotta drop for Business Class. I'm not sure if the Quiet Car only exists on the Express trains; there certainly wasn't one the last time I rode biz class on the Acela's local service, sitting in the Kiddie Business Class car and stopping at every station stop, it felt like, in Connecticut.

I arrived in NYC with the express intent of visiting the Museum of Television and Radio first, then dinner at a favorite restaurant, and then the show. It was a one-man trip, a solo venture, and I was glad to enjoy my solitude in the midst of the most crowdedest city in this time zone. And while I handily accomplished all three tasks, hooray hooray, I was not prepared for the insane humidity. God damn! The rain I was ready for but the humidity played hopscotch with my internal thermostat. I waited for my E train on the 42nd Street platform, amazed at the humid blech that hung over everything, in October, even! Whenever the A express stopped on the other side of the platform, I rushed over and hung out by the open doors of the blessedly air-conditioned train, then hustled back over to the E side. When I got to 53rd and emerged from the underground into the rain, my hair was already soaked and I hadn't even been aboveground yet.

( 1. In Which Pooh Bear Visits The Museum of Television and Radio )

I had to cut my time at the museum short for dinner. I still had some time left; your $10.00 admission allows you an hour's worth of viewing though they gave me nearly two (must've been a slow day) but I'd seen all I could see at that point. I'd definitely return with the list of flops I'd been working on.

Bidding Sandy and Fred adieu, I stepped back outside into the humidity, ambled over to a 6 train, and rumbled down to the 20s for some food.

I seem to have found myself watching Bob Barker's last turn on The Price Is Right.

So I can say I was there, man.


The first contestant won a Corvette, and then they played Plinko. The place is going nuts.

(LIVE BLOGGINGING!!!1 updates in comments)

Picture 'bout a Minnesota man so in love with a Mississippi girl that he sacrifices everything and moves to Biloxi...

IN THE EARLY WINTER OF 1927, silent film star Gloria Swanson travelled to West 50th and 7th Avenue in New York City to visit Samuel L. Rothafel, powerhouse showman, tireless promoter, and theater manager since "the days when pianists trebled 'Hearts and Flowers' whenever a Sousa march didn't fit." It was there that Roxy, as he was known to his friends ("...and you may call me that, too, when you write," he would later advise his radio audience) eagerly gave Swanson a tour of his nearly-completed prize: an enormous, outlandishly rococo movie palace capable of seating almost 6000 people. The actual auditorium number was around 5900, but in Roxy's inimitable fashion, he upped it to 6200 in the press by counting all the chairs in the offices, lounges, and even the maintenance rooms. Gloria walked with Roxy up to the upper balcony, where workmen were busy plastering the ceiling. Impetuously, she grabbed a trowel and inscribed "ROXY - I LOVE YOU - GLORIA" in one corner. Roxy ordered that it stay on the ceiling forever. The Roxy Theater opened on March 11, 1927 with Gloria Swanson's latest film, "The Love of Sunya", as one of the features and Swanson herself in attendance. The Cathedral of the Motion Picture had arrived. In 1961, after years of declining attendance, failed revitalization attempts and numerous protests, the Roxy was closed and demolished. Roxy himself was long gone, but Gloria Swanson paid one last visit to W. 50th and 7th, accompanied by a Life Magazine photographer. There, in evening gown and boa, she posed amidst the ruins. Swanson was photographed in several poses -- one echoed the glamour and beauty of the old palace in stark contrast to its reality. But the most enduring image is her pose to the left, arms outstretched in one final gesture of exaltation and praise to the treasure that was; Gloria triumphant.

The corner of W. 50th and 7th in Manhattan is now home to The World's Largest T.G.I. Friday's.