'The Uncensored Story' Of The Smothers Brothers.

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20101015
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'The Uncensored Story' Of The Smothers Brothers

DAVE DAVIES, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies, in for Terry Gross.

Our TV critic, David Bianculli, has watched a lot of television over the years,
but one show he loved as a teenager, which was canceled after just two years,
is the subject of his latest book, which is now out in paperback.

David's book, "Dangerously Funny," focuses on "The Smothers Brothers Comedy
Hour," and he makes a powerful case for the show's importance in TV and pop
culture history. The Smothers Brothers battled so frequently with network
censors that CBS pulled the plug on the show in 1969.

Tom and Dick Smothers gave a primetime platform to young writers like Steve
Martin and Rob Reiner, to new bands like The Who and Jefferson Airplane, and to
performers who opposed the Vietnam War, like Joan Baez and Pete Seeger. David
is the founder and editor of tvworthwatching.com, and he teaches at Rowan
University. He spoke with Terry about the Smothers Brothers last November.

TERRY GROSS, host:

David, welcome to FRESH AIR, and congratulations on the book.

Mr. DAVID BIANCULLI (Author, "Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of the
Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour"): Oh, thanks a lot.

GROSS: Now, you've brought some really good clips with you from episodes of the
Smothers Brothers' TV series, and I'd like to start with one because I think it
gives a good sense of the Smothers Brothers' comedy and also how they managed
to bring politics into their show. So would you introduce it for us?

Mr. BIANCULLI: Yes, sure. I like this because it's a fairly early clip, when
the Smothers Brothers are still sort of considered to be, you know, just
genial, nice folk satirists, and yet they're starting to hit on public issues
and even attack the president in a very obvious way.

GROSS: And this was President Johnson.

Mr. BIANCULLI: This was President Johnson at the time, yes.

GROSS: Okay, so let's hear it.

(Soundbite of TV show, "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour")

(Soundbite of applause)

Mr. DICK SMOTHERS (Comedian): Hey Tom, you know, I just read in the newspaper
this week where President Johnson has asked Congress to ask a series of taxes,
you know, to discourage people from traveling abroad. What do you think about
that?

Mr. TOM SMOTHERS (Comedian): I read that, too, but I don't think he has to go
that far. I don't think that's necessary to go that far with it.

Mr. DICK SMOTHERS: Well, look, it's a very, very, very, very difficult
situation. You know, people keep spending money abroad, and it's hurting our
economy. People keep wanting to travel to other countries instead of staying
here in the United States.

Mr. TOM SMOTHERS: Yeah, well, I think President Johnson should come up with
something positive as an inducement to keep the people, something very positive
as an inducement.

Mr. DICK SMOTHERS: Yeah, that's right. That's good thinking.

Mr. TOM SMOTHERS: But, look it, what can the president do to make people want
to stay in this country?

Mr. DICK SMOTHERS: Well, he could quit.

(Soundbite of laughter)

GROSS: David, was that considered pretty radical at the time?

Mr. BIANCULLI: Yeah, for an entertainment variety show, almost unprecedented,
where you had these figures that were actually talking about public policy.

TV in the '60s, the Smothers Brothers began in February of '67. At that point,
almost all of primetime was trying, intentionally, to be as innocuous as
possible, and so these guys were going against the grain.

GROSS: And that's one of the things that makes the story so interesting. You
know, it's the second half of the '60s. The youth culture has become the
counterculture. Youth culture has also become, a lot of it, the anti-war
movement. The country is, like, divided, people are going wild, and television
is reflecting somewhere between very little and none of that.

Mr. BIANCULLI: Yeah, it's almost - there are so many parallels to today that it
amazes me. The whole country seems, you know, ideologically divided.

Back then, it was a generation gap. It was - you were either a hawk or a dove.
You either supported the president, or you didn't.

And the Smothers Brothers came on, and at a time when there was one television
in the house, and everybody watched it; for the first couple of seasons, they
pulled this amazing magic act and straddled the chasm of the generation gap.

They had Kate Smith and Simon and Garfunkel on the same show. They had Mickey
Rooney and The Who on the same show and appealed to both, you know,
generations.

GROSS: Now, you know so much about so many different TV shows. You're just like
a walking encyclopedia of television. Of all the shows you could have written a
history of, why did you choose the Smothers Brothers?

Mr. BIANCULLI: This one - I wondered about that.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. BIANCULLI: I did - once I was into it, and I was into, like, my fifth year
of writing and my 10th year of writing. And I realized, I think this show first
of all was at a pivotal point in TV history, that Tom Smothers fought for
freedom of expression and fought for a whole generation and lost.

And so TV changed and changed really significantly. And I argue that we've
never gotten it back. I mean, the things that we think of as TV freedom, it's
on cable, or it's on late night - but in primetime, we've rarely had it since.

And then the personal thing is that this show premiered when I was 13, and all
of the stuff that was on there meant so much to me just because I was at that
impressionable age, and I was watching with my dad, and it was just a really
nice weekly experience.

GROSS: You mentioned you wanted to write this book in part because Tom Smothers
fought and lost. And what he lost was the censorship battle. There was a
considerable amount of censorship of the show, and he really took a stand, and
he lost, and the show was taken off the air by the network, CBS. Let's talk a
little bit about what censorship was like on TV then, and we're talking about
the second half of the 1960s. What are some of the things that you couldn't say
then that you can say now?

Mr. BIANCULLI: Well, famously, when Lucille Ball was pregnant in real life and
wrote it into her character in the '60s, she couldn't even use the word
pregnant in the episode in which she was having a baby. They had to say it in
Spanish, enceinte, you know. I mean, it was so ridiculous. The censorship was
so pervasive that even recounting it, it seems so silly.

They cut an entire sketch with Elaine May because it was censors getting
excited about the movies that they were censoring; and rather than cut a word
or two, they cut the entire sketch.

GROSS: And there was the phrase in it - what is it? - I feel my heart beating
in my breast, and they wouldn't let them say breast. So they ended up saying I
feel my heart beating in my wrist.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. BIANCULLI: Yea, beating wildly in my wrist, and they didn't even let that
go.

GROSS: They didn't let that go on the air, either?

Mr. BIANCULLI: Yeah.

GROSS: All right. So - and drug references. You couldn't use those, either.

Mr. BIANCULLI: Well, the drug references, if they caught them, they would take
them out. But the '60s, things were so new that they didn't recognize a lot of
them when they saw them. So the Smothers were able to slip some stuff by, and
Tom actually enjoyed this battle a little bit, and so did Mason Williams, who
was one of the writers.

And so they would put in things that really meant nothing and instruct the crew
and the writers and everybody around to laugh, like, dirty, sniggering little
laughs. And so the censors would say well, you can't say rowing to Galveston.
And they'd say, well, why not? Well, you just can't say it. So they would drive
them crazy just for the fun of it, too.

GROSS: As an illustration of some of the things that were - of the type of
thing that were censored, I want to play an excerpt of the show that you
brought with you, of Joan Baez dedicating a song to her then-husband, David.
What was the context of this, both in terms of Joan Baez' life and the Smothers
Brothers' show?

Mr. BIANCULLI: Joan Baez, her husband at the time, David Harris, was going to
prison for protesting against selective service and draft registration. And he
was facing this prison sentence, so Joan Baez, in support, did an album of
country songs and just recorded it. And so she went on the Smothers Brothers to
sing one of these songs and dedicate it to her husband.

She gave the dedication, which included the whole explanation of why her
husband was going to prison, and CBS cut the explanation. So it was like here's
a song for my husband, who's going to prison, and now "Green, Green Grass of
Home." It was just such an awful cut.

GROSS: It's awful in part, too - it's not only, you know, a form of censorship,
but also people might think that, you know, he'd like stolen or raped or, you
know, done something at gunpoint.

Mr. BIANCULLI: Exactly, exactly, right.

GROSS: What we're going to hear is the whole introduction, the unedited
introduction.

Mr. BIANCULLI: Right.

GROSS: All right. This is Joan Baez.

(Soundbite of TV show, "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour")

Ms. JOAN BAEZ (Singer): The next song is a song that'll be on my next album,
which will be coming out shortly. The album is called "David's Album." David is
my husband. David's sort of a California hillbilly, and so the songs on the
record are all country and Western, and it's a kind of a gift to David because
he's going to be going to prison, probably in June, and he'll be there for
three years.

The reason he's going is that he refused to have anything to do with the draft
or selective service or whatever you want to call it; militarism in general.
And the point is, if you do that, and you do it up front or over ground, then
you're going to get busted, and so - especially if you organize, which he does.
So this song is called "The Green, Green Grass of Home."

Ms. BAEZ: (Singing) The old home town looks the same...

GROSS: That's Joan Baez on the Smothers Brothers' show in March of 1969, and my
guest is our TV critic, David Bianculli, who's written a new book about the
Smothers Brothers, called "Dangerously Funny."

So the show went on the air, in a truncated form. How did Joan Baez react to
the way her introduction was edited?

Mr. BIANCULLI: She actually took it very well. What she did was she thanked Tom
for the fight because she wasn't a network TV person at that time, and Tom said
well, come on, say whatever you want to say. So she got the opportunity to say
it. They recorded it.

It was the network who overruled Tom, and what she appreciated is that he did
what he did so much of the time in the '60s: He ran right to the New York Times
and to other papers and said this was edited, you know, and this is wrong. And
there wasn't a lot of that done back in the '60s. You know, there wasn't the
whole tabloid culture. And so, to have a guy from television come out and talk
about his bosses - that was news then.

DAVIES: David Bianculli, speaking with Terry last year. His book about the
Smothers Brothers, called "Dangerously Funny," is now out in paperback. More
after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

DAVIES: Let's get back to our interview with FRESH AIR TV critic David
Bianculli. His new book, "Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of the
Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour," is now out in paperback.

GROSS: Perhaps the most famous case of censorship on the Smothers Brothers'
show was Pete Seeger singing "The Big Muddy."

Mr. BIANCULLI: Definitely.

GROSS: So there's a prequel to that story, and that is that it's amazing he
even got on TV because he'd been blacklisted, because why?

Mr. BIANCULLI: He'd been blacklisted. He was part of The Weavers, and it was
all the way back in Red Channels.

GROSS: The folk group, The Weavers.

Mr. BIANCULLI: Yes, the folk group The Weavers. And in 1950, his name was in
Red Channels, which was this pamphlet that was putting out - that was put out,
supposedly identifying people with communist leanings. So automatically, Pete
Seeger is gone, and because he's so aggressive in his beliefs, he's off
primetime for 17 years.

GROSS: Well, he had also refused to speak to the House Un-American Activities
Committee, which was investigating communists and communist sympathizers, and
he declined to even take the Fifth.

Mr. BIANCULLI: Right.

GROSS: So he was considered very hostile to the community in that...

Mr. BIANCULLI: Everything that he did, I think, in retrospect, is so incredibly
noble, but you know, it was against the mainstream then. And so Pete Seeger is
off TV, and the Smothers do this sketch that makes fun of LBJ, and President
Johnson calls William Paley, the president of CBS, at three in the morning to
complain.

Paley calls in the producers of the Smothers Brothers to say knock it off, take
it easy on LBJ for a while. And the producers say, I don't know how Tom is
going to take that. And Paley says, well, is there anything I can do, if you do
that for a while, as sort of to sweeten the pot.

They said, well, we've been trying to get Pete Seeger on. So let us have Pete
Seeger. And Bill Paley says, he's on. And so that's how he got on.

GROSS: I love that because in an act of trying to suppress speech, they let
Pete Seeger in the door.

Mr. BIANCULLI: Yeah, it's very weird. And then the amazing thing is it doesn't
stop there, because Pete Seeger wants to do this new song, which was against
President Johnson - I love the way it eats its own tail - and he wants to do
"Waist Deep in the Big Muddy," which has just come out on a Columbia Records
album.

So CBS Records says this is fine, but he tapes it for the Smothers Brothers, to
open the second season, and CBS says no. They let Pete Seeger come on, and he
does three or four songs, but when he gets to his big finish, "Big Muddy," they
cut it. It's just not shown.

GROSS: Now we're going to be hearing I think it's just the final verse of this
song.

Mr. BIANCULLI: Yes.

GROSS: Set up what happens before the final verse.

Mr. BIANCULLI: Well, what happens is, before the final verse - well, before
that, this whole season goes by, where Tom again goes to the Times, goes to
other papers, and there's a change in our policy toward Vietnam, or at least
our national feeling about Vietnam.

So by the end of the season, CBS says you can have him back on, and he can sing
it. So this is actually from when he got to perform it, and it was televised.
So I think it's such a triumphant performance, but the song itself is about a
sergeant who is just taking...

GROSS: A sergeant like in World War II, probably.

Mr. BIANCULLI: Yes, in World War II - taking a troop on maneuvers and taking
them to ford a river that he had before, but it had rained since. So what was
safe, now wasn't. And he was insisted that they go ahead. And waist deep in the
Big Muddy, and then neck deep, and he was taking them higher and higher, and he
drowns, you know, and the next guy in command says turn back, this is a bad
idea.

Now, that's a pretty easy analogy to the Vietnam War. We could use it right now
to Iraq or Afghanistan - but that was the message of the song.

GROSS: And in this last verse - well, we'll play the last verse, and then we'll
talk about it. Here's Pete Seeger on the Smothers Brothers' show.

(Soundbite of TV show, "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour")

(Soundbite of song, "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy")

Mr. PETE SEEGER (Singer): (Singing) Well, I'm not going to plant any moral.
I'll leave that for yourself. Maybe you're still walking, you're still talking,
you'd like to keep your health. But every time I read the paper, them old
feelings come on. We're waist deep in the Big Muddy. The big fool says to push
on.

Waist deep in the Big Muddy, the big fool says to push on. Waist deep in the
Big Muddy, the big fool says to push on. Waist deep, neck deep, soon, even a
tall man will be over his head. We're waist deep in the Big Muddy, the big fool
says to push on.

(Soundbite of applause)

GROSS: That's Pete Seeger in 1968 on "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour," and
he never says the word Vietnam, but it was so clear he's talking about Vietnam
there.

Mr. BIANCULLI: Yeah.

GROSS: So you had described how this song was edited out of Pete Seeger's first
appearance on the Smothers Brothers, but he came back and actually did the
song, and it was used, which is what we heard.

Mr. BIANCULLI: Yes.

GROSS: So how did he come back and get to sing it?

Mr. BIANCULLI: They invited him back near the end of the second season. They
were just - they kept pushing for it and pushing for it, and a lot of
television critics at the time, and commentators, sort of said hey. And so
finally, CBS relented and said you can have him back.

Around this time, Walter Cronkite had come on CBS and said basically, the
Vietnam War is unwinnable. So there was this whole change after the Tet
Offensive that changed enough public perception to make CBS think well, maybe
it's okay.

GROSS: The Seeger performance we just heard was in 1968. At the end of that
year, George Harrison came on the show to support the Smothers Brothers in
their fight for free speech on the show. And tell us a little bit about that
appearance, and then we'll hear a brief excerpt of it.

Mr. BIANCULLI: Well, I love the whole Beatles-Smothers Brothers connection
because in 1964, the Beatles show up on Ed Sullivan, CBS, Sunday night. It
makes the Beatles. It makes the whole British invasion. It changes society.

Four years later, the Beatles have stopped touring. They're still the biggest
thing in the world, and they've made this new thing called videos - of "Hey
Jude" and "Revolution," - and so for the United States premiere, instead of
giving them to Ed Sullivan, Sunday night at eight, they give them to the
Smothers Brothers, Sunday night at nine, you know. And that's basically saying,
attitudinally, we want to side with our generation; we want to be where the
Smothers Brothers are.

So at the beginning of this one show, George Harrison just shows up unbilled, a
Beatle, just to show up on the Smothers Brothers.

GROSS: Let's hear it.

(Soundbite of TV show, "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour")

Mr. SMOTHERS: Do you have something important?

Mr. GEORGE HARRISON (Musician): Something very important to say on American
television.

Mr. SMOTHERS: You know, we don't, we - a lot of times, we don't opportunity of
saying anything important because it's American television, and every time you
say something...

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. SMOTHERS: And try to say something important, they...

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. HARRISON: Well, whether you can say it or not, keep trying to say it.

Mr. SMOTHERS: That's what's important.

Mr. HARRISON: You get that?

GROSS: Keep trying to say it. That's what's important. Very interesting - from
George Harrison to the Smothers Brothers. It's amazing thinking of having a
Beatle in 1968, unbilled and unannounced.

(Soundbite of laughter)

GROSS: Like, people would be promoting that for days, weeks, months, if they
knew he was going to be on.

Mr. BIANCULLI: I know. And you know how much I love the Beatles. So I love that
clip.

GROSS: Right, right. Did that clip have any repercussions?

Mr. BIANCULLI: No, no. They were - but it's odd to me. After the show was - you
know, after they were fired, and the show was pulled off, Bob Ayenstein(ph),
one of the writers, says: How do you cancel a show or fire - you know, how do
you get rid of a show that gives you a Beatle?

You know, it is unthinkable. I mean, the talent roster that they had. One of
the things I wonder about is that if the show had been allowed to continue a
few more years, with Tommy's eye for talent, I think he would have been
"Saturday Night Live" except in primetime. He would have just had the best
comics, the best musicians and really pushed for social commentary.

GROSS: In talking about how the network limited what the Smothers Brothers were
allowed to say, you describe some of the other barriers, besides the people at
CBS headquarters, some of the barriers that were put in the way. Do you want to
talk about, like, the affiliates and the power that they were given?

Mr. BIANCULLI: The Smothers Brothers was the first show to be pre-screened for
affiliates, in other words to be sent a couple of days in advance so each
affiliate could decide, in its local market, whether what the Smothers Brothers
were doing on their show was acceptable.

GROSS: And what did that mean for the Smothers Brothers' production?

Mr. BIANCULLI: Well, it meant - the most obvious thing is they had to have it
finished sooner, and then it was giving them a new layer of censorship with
which to contend. It wasn't just - you know, Tom had this contract that said he
had creative control, and yet the censors, you know, the standards and
practices at CBS said, but that doesn't mean you can say or do anything you
want. You still have to go through us.

And so but even if he goes through them, then a local affiliate in Boise may
say yeah, but I don't like you making fun of, you know, the president. That's
just not right. And so what does he do? You know, is he going to not do a
sketch because of an affiliate?

Well, what he ends up doing is losing 15 or 20 affiliates that are no longer,
you know, showing the program, which weakens the ratings.

DAVIES: David Bianculli will be back in the second half of the show. His new
book about the Smothers Brothers, "Dangerously Funny," is now out in paperback.
I'm Dave Davies, and this is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies, in for Terry Gross. We're listening
to Terry's interview with our TV critic David Bianculli about his book
"Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour,"
which is now out in paperback.

The show premiered on CBS in 1967, and was cancelled suddenly in 1969. Because
the show reflected the counter-culture and the anti-war movement, there were
frequent battles with network censors.

David is FRESH AIR's TV critic, and he's founder and editor of the online
magazine TVworthwatching.com. He also teaches at Rowan University.

GROSS: You spoke to so many for research for the book. Did you speak to any of
the people who worked in Standards and Practices at CBS at the time and were
responsible for making the decisions about what the Smothers Brothers were
allowed to say and what their guests were allowed to say?

BIANCULLI: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I talked to, you know, among the people that I talked
to, there was Mike Dan, who was an executive then. I talked with Bill
Tankersley, who was the head censor for all of CBS for the entire period. He
was a key interview, and it took me about 14 years to get him. And also Fred
Silverman, who was just a young executive in CBS daytime then but was allowed
to sit in on all the programming meetings. But Bill Tankersley was the guy who
sort of ruined some really good conspiracy theories.

GROSS: How?

BIANCULLI: Well, you know, most of the people that are involved think that it's
Richard Nixon that got the show pulled off - or at the very least, it was Bill
Paley and it was Robert Wood, the new president. And what it really ended up
being was Bill Tankersley and his group just setting down rules that they
thought that Tom Smothers had to listen to. And when he didn't, they just
didn't want to have an upstart that could - you know, because they were looking
bad for the affiliates.

They had promised the affiliates they would get a show by certain day to
preview for them and if they couldn't do it, then they looked bad. The network
looked like the Smothers Brothers were running things, and then what would
happen? And so they drew that line in the sand. It was not a legal line in the
sand, and the Smothers Brothers later sued and won. But that's what got the
show yanked.

GROSS: Yeah. So what got the show yanked was the network saying, oh, you failed
to deliver a show on time. You didn't meet your deadline.

BIANCULLI: Right. And yet it was never a contractual agreement. It was just
something that they said, you know, from now on you have to do this because of
the affiliate demands. But it was never a contractual demand.

GROSS: And did the Smothers Brothers actually not meet the deadline?

BIANCULLI: Sometimes they didn't. Sometimes Tom would take the master and hide
it.

GROSS: Oh, just to prevent the affiliates from touching it beforehand?

BIANCULLI: Prevent the affiliate - or to prevent them from editing it before he
turned it in at the last minute for the affiliate judgment. There was a lot of
gamesmanship on both sides. I think of it as, in the '60s, you have parents and
kids and they're just against each other, and they're both butting heads more
than they should have.

GROSS: So when you spoke to the person who was the head of Standards and
Practices who was...

BIANCULLI: Bill Tankersley.

GROSS: Tankersley was responsible for deciding what could be said on the
Smothers Brothers show. What did he tell you about the Standards that were set
and why they were set for what could and couldn't be said?

BIANCULLI: Well, oddly, he was more lenient than most of the people underneath
him. Like, he had nothing to do with the Elaine May sketch being pulled, and he
said well, I saw nothing wrong with that. If they would've asked me, I would've
thought it was fine. He had no problem with Pete Seeger. You know, his things
were much more finite. But he was dealing with rules.

But this was the guy who had been at CBS for so long. He had fought with you
know, George Burns, with Rod Serling, with Alfred Hitchcock all the way back in
the '50s. And so a young, just-turning-30 Tom Smothers, this young little
whipper was not going to get the best of Bill Tankersley, as Bill Tankersley
saw it.

And Tom would call him up at home, you know, on nights and weekends and sort of
plead his case. He drove him - he drove Tankersley nuts.

GROSS: Well, if Tankersley would've approved some of the things that you
mentioned...

BIANCULLI: Mm-hmm.

GROSS: ...how come they weren't approved?

BIANCULLI: Well, he did approve some things, and they did - when they were
asked - once Tom was able to go to the head of CBS on the East Coast, he didn't
want to deal with the West Coast middlemen anymore. So it was just - and then
Bill Tankersley was saying: No, you can't. You've got to go through channels.
There's rules. Bill Tankersley was all about rules, and Tom Smothers was all
about no rules.

GROSS: So Tom Smothers wanted to bypass Tankersley, and Tankersley said you
can't.

BIANCULLI: No. He wanted - Tom Smothers wanted to deal only with Tankersley...

GROSS: Oh. Oh.

BIANCULLI: ...figuring you're the head guy. Let me just talk to you on the
phone. Let me send this stuff directly to you.

GROSS: I see.

BIANCULLI: Tankersley did it once and then said, no. You know what? This is not
going to work. We have the West Coast for a reason, and Tom just avoided them.

GROSS: So is there one show you can point to that you think really did in the
Smothers Brothers?

BIANCULLI: Oh, certainly. It's the first time that David Steinberg came on as a
comic and did a religious sermonette, a comic sermonette. It got more negative
mail than anything in the history of broadcasting up to that point. And so the
CBS censors sent Tom Smothers a memo saying, okay, you can have David Steinberg
back, but no more religious sermonettes ever.

So, he invites David Steinberg back, and even though it's not in the script,
says hey, how'd you like to do another one of those sermonettes? And so they
added in to the week's run through, and he does it. He tapes it. That entire
hour is never shown, and the Smothers Brothers are fired very shortly there
after.

GROSS: So you actually brought with you a recording of the sermonette that was
never aired.

BIANCULLI: Yes. Yeah. These are available now on, you know, Time Life has the
last two seasons out of "The Smothers Brothers," the best of them. And one of
the outtakes is this because it was never shown, this whole hour. Back then, no
one ever joked about religion other than Bill Cosby doing the Noah routine, and
that was, you know, that wasn't about content. This was about content.

GROSS: Okay. So let's hear it. This is David Steinberg.

(Soundbite of "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour")

Mr. DAVID STEINBERG (Comedian, actor, writer, director, and author): ...that
way. He got into a ship that was commandeered by 23 gentiles.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. STEINBERG: A bad move on Jonah's part.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. STEINBERG: And the gentiles, as they would, from time to time, threw the
Jew overboard.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. STEINBERG: Now here there are two concepts that we must deal with. There is
the New Testament concept and the Old Testament concept. The Old Testament
scholars say that Jonah was, in fact, swallowed by a whale. The gentiles, the
New Testament scholars they say, hold it, Jews. No. Jonah wasn't - Jonah, they
literally grabbed the Jews by the Old Testament.

(Soundbite of laughter)

GROSS: That's David Steinberg, and recorded in March of 1969. Never broadcast
on the Smothers Brothers show.

BIANCULLI: Yeah. There's a great story about that. When the Smothers Brothers
sued CBS and went to trial, David Steinberg was called as one of the witnesses
and the CBS lawyers, you know, made him redo his - that very thing, and they
crossed examined him. They said now, when you were saying New Testament, did
you - weren't you actually referring to testicles? Weren't you...

(Soundbite of laughter)

BIANCULLI: And David Steinberg said well, yeah. Why were you doing that?
Because otherwise, it wouldn't be funny.

(Soundbite of laughter)

BIANCULLI: And, you know, it's no wonder the Smothers won that case.

GROSS: Well, the case was, again, that the network accused him of not
delivering programs on time.

BIANCULLI: Mm-hmm.

GROSS: And clearly, what they were really worried about was the kind of content
and language that was, you know, getting them into trouble.

BIANCULLI: Yeah. The big difference is that the Smothers Brothers were not
cancelled. They had already been renewed for a fourth season.

GROSS: Mm-hmm.

BIANCULLI: They were fired. And so Tom was reacting, saying he was fired
unfairly because anything that he had signed in terms of a contractual
obligation he had lived up to, that it was all these other little, you know,
ephemeral things that they'd thrown on him you know, through the years that he
hadn't adhered to.

GROSS: And is that grounds on which Tom Smothers sued CBS after CBS fired the
Smothers Brothers?

BIANCULLI: Well, it's the one that went all the way through to the end. He
wanted to go on First Amendment rights and really make this a huge case.

GROSS: Mm-hmm.

BIANCULLI: But he was advised by his ACLU lawyers, who were the only people who
would represent him, that that would put it in a different court. It would make
it a different thing, and so just go for this more narrow focus.

GROSS: So he won.

BIANCULLI: Mm-hmm.

GROSS: Tommy Smothers won but how long did this take him to win?

BIANCULLI: Well, it took - the trial took a few months but it was two, three
years before the trial was on, and they won less than a million dollars. But it
stopped their careers. I mean, I liken the Smothers Brothers to, you know, when
Muhammad Ali, you know, gets pulled but he gets - he gets to fight again and
gets his championship back after sticking up for his ideals or Elvis goes away
to the Army, but comes back and gets more number one hits. The Smothers
Brothers were essentially done. They never had the power of the pulpit again
the way they used to, and I just think that's a shame.

GROSS: What do you think of as the, like, lasting effect of the Smothers
Brothers show?

BIANCULLI: I think that it's most visible right now in places like Jon Stewart
and Stephen Colbert and "Saturday Night Live" and Bill Maher. All of them are
outside of prime time, but they're all sort of doing elements of what the
Smothers did.

Stephen Colbert tried very briefly to throw himself into the presidential race,
just as Pat Paulsen had. A lot of Jon Stewart's humor is very much what the
Smothers was, and he admits that they were a very strong influence. Bill Maher
says the Smothers were a very strong influence. And "Saturday Night Live" I
sort of see as what the Smothers Brothers almost had the chance to become.

GROSS: Did the Smothers Brothers ask you to write the book? You allude to that
in the acknowledgements.

BIANCULLI: One time after I interviewed Tom, he said, well, are you going to
write the book? And I said what book? And he said, well, the book on us.
Because I had written, in a previous book, an entry on the "Smothers Brothers
Comedy Hour" and I guess it was - he agreed with it. And so he said I'll give
you total access, but total freedom. And as a journalist, that's just something
you don't get. And so I said, well, I'll have to think about it. And then I
waited three seconds and I said okay.

(Soundbite of laughter)

BIANCULLI: And he laughed, and then I remember him going down this very long
escalator in Atlantic City, and he yells up at me, just before he goes out of
sight, he goes: I just want to read it before I'm dead.

(Soundbite of laughter)

BIANCULLI: And that was 15 years ago. So I thank Tom for taking such good care
of himself.

DAVIES: David Bianculli, speaking with Terry Gross last year. David's founder
and editor of the online magazine TVworthwatching.com, and he teaches at Rowan
University. His book, "Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of the Smothers
Brothers Comedy Hour," is now out in paperback. You can read an excerpt on our
website: freshair.npr.org.

The clips we've heard, by the way, are from the Time Life video, "The Best of
the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour" volumes two and three.

Coming up, Ken Tucker reviews "Green Blimp," the new album from the Dwight
Twilley.

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Dwight Twilley's 'Green Blimp': Blissful, Emotive Pop

DAVE DAVIES, host:

Dwight Twilley is a Tulsa, Oklahoma-born rock and roller who came to prominence
in 1970's Los Angeles. His group the Dwight Twilley Band, scored its biggest
hit, the single "I'm on Fire" in 1975, and then struggled for years to achieve
stardom, but never quite got there. Now Twilley is back with a new album called
"Green Blimp.”

Rock critic Ken Tucker has a review.

(Soundbite of song, "Speed of Light")

Mr. DWIGHT TWILLEY (Singer, Songwriter): (Singing) When the sky is falling and
nobody tells you, you're going to need a bigger umbrella. That's right at the
speed of light.

KEN TUCKER: When Dwight Twilley staked his claim on pop stardom in 1975, he was
already an anomaly. The Los Angeles to which he'd relocated from Tulsa,
Oklahoma was about to go gaga over melodic punk from the likes of The Runaways.
The Sex Pistols in England and The Ramones in New York were seeking to disrupt
the very mainstream that Twilley held dear.

Like a pop version of John Fogerty, Dwight Twilley is his own kind of roots-
rocker - for whom the continuum in guitar-based music from the 1950s to the
present remains seamless. It sometimes hermetic, sometimes sealed off from
innovation, but when he hits a groove in a fast song or in his version of a
power ballad, such as this one, "You Were Always There," he really digs deep
and gets traction on a song's emotion.

(Soundbite of song, "You Were Always There")

Mr. TWILLEY: (Singing) When I was down, you were always by my side. When I was
broke, you would always save your dimes. But in the golden light, I know I was
all right because of you. You were always there. You let in the air. You were
always there. The love I have for you...

TUCKER: The title song, "Green Blimp," is an airy metaphor for the state of
bliss and freedom from worry that the singer wishes to attain. With its sing-
along chorus and mid-tempo harmonies, "Green Blimp" is Dwight Twilley's "Yellow
Submarine."

(Soundbite of song, "Green Blimp")

Mr. TWILLEY: (Singing) In the green blimp where I live, life is happy where I
live in the green blimp. And the white cloud...

TUCKER: Twilley has reached the age in his late 50s to have some regrets and
some second guesses. There are times when he must look around at contemporaries
such as Tom Petty, who sang background vocals on a few of Twilley's early
recordings, and wonder: Why couldn't I have gotten to where he did? It didn't
help that Twilley's key collaborator, Phil Seymour - also a first-rate pop-rock
artist - split from The Dwight Twilley Band in 1978, and died in 1993.

(Soundbite of song, "It Ends")

Mr. TWILLEY: (Singing) The person that you've known so long and a timeless
friend. The silhouette goes (unintelligible) the way that they were then. And
it ends. And it ends, just like it begins, where the ice is so thin.

TUCKER: That's a terrific song on the new album called "It Ends," that just
builds and builds in intensity as it proceeds. Twilley invariably presents
himself as a glass-half-full kind of guy. More importantly for the health of
his music, he's not a cranky nostalgist. For him, the past is the past, which
is the theme of one of the album's best songs, "It's Never Coming Back," with
its beautiful hammered keyboard opening verse.

(Soundbite of song, "It's Never Coming Back")

Mr. TWILLEY: (Singing) The choices were made for good or for bad, things that
you reach for, the dreams that you had we all wanted an altered life
(unintelligible) but they never ever, never coming back.

TUCKER: The current business model for pop music actually favors Dwight Twilley
these days. Freed from the pressure of trying to get a major label deal, he's
released "Green Blimp" as a download or in as-needed CD batches. He uses
Facebook to raise funds for financing the album and getting the word out.

(Soundbite of song, "Doctor")

Mr. TWILLEY: (Singing) Your (unintelligible) outside, playing chess. Some one
spin the bottle, we'll that's that. I want to play doctor, play doctor with
you. I want to play doctor...

TUCKER: Twilley has reunited with the original Dwight Twilley Band guitarist
Bill Pitcock IV, and gets some vocal assistance from Susan Cowsill. But "Green
Blimp" ultimately sounds most like Dwight Twilley sitting in his Tulsa
recording studio, hearing the history of rock 'n' roll in his head and doing
what he's done for decades: shaping that history into hooks and riffs and
passionately yelled vocals that convey the ceaseless thrill of feeling the
freedom that remains the great promise of this kind of rock 'n' roll.

DAVIES: Ken Tucker is editor-at-large at Entertainment Weekly. He reviewed
Dwight Twilley's new album "Green Blimp." You can hear three tracks from the
album at our website, freshair.npr.org.

(Soundbite of song, "Ten Times")

Mr. TWILLEY: (Singing) Ten times I tapped on your window, ten times oh so, so
long, ten times, ten times, I counted ten times. I wake up at night thinking of
you and I wonder do you think of me to.

DAVIES: Coming up, David Edelstein reviews "Hereafter" directed by Clint
Eastwood and starring Matt Damon.

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A 'Hereafter' Where Matt Damon Sees Dead People

(Soundbite of music)

DAVE DAVIES, host:

As a director, the 80-year-old Clint Eastwood isn't even close to hanging up
his six shooter. With more than 30 features under his belt, his latest is the
supernatural drama "Hereafter" starring Matt Damon. The script is by Peter
Morgan, who wrote "The Queen" and "Frost/Nixon."

Film critic David Edelstein has this review.

DAVID EDELSTEIN: In Clint Eastwood's "Hereafter," three people in three
countries have close personal encounters with death and subsequently find it
impossible to connect with the living, and the film follows each character in
turn until they finally meet. I won't say what happens when they do, but I
thought of Gertrude Stein's unjust verdict on Oakland: There is no there there.

Oh, there is a hereafter in the film, a life beyond this world. You see that in
the first 10 minutes. But the movie itself is hung up in a kind of twilight
zone, too mawkish and lame to make a decent ghost story, too contrived to tell
us anything enlightening about how to live in the shadow of death.

The film ends small but starts really, really big, with a tsunami crashing into
a Pacific beach resort and carrying off, among others, Cecile de France's
French TV reporter, Marie. The sequence is fast, tight and convincingly real,
but when Marie gets conked on the head and stops breathing, she has a vision of
the title realm, and it's dismayingly tacky and threadbare - a whitish void in
which streaky human silhouettes stare into the camera.

Yes, it's better than the other extreme - Peter Jackson's effects-heavy
postmortem playhouse in "The Lovely Bones." But it suggests all the same that
the dead have nothing better to do than stand around waiting for people to poke
their heads in. Or for someone like Matt Damon's George to carry messages from
one side to the other.

George is "Hereafter's" second protagonist. He gave up a lucrative career as a
medium talking to the dead, but his brother, Billy, played by Jay Mohr,
continues to bring colleagues to see him.

(Soundbite of movie, "Hereafter")

Mr. MATT DAMON (Actor): (as George) Another person came to see me for a
reading. Thank you. Your friend Mr. Andrea.

Mr. JAY MOHR (Actor): (as Billy) What? Look, I'll have a talk with him and make
sure nothing like that ever happens again okay? And?

Mr. DAMON: (as George) And what?

Mr. MOHR: (as Billy) Did you do it?

Mr. DAMON: (as George) What?

Mr. MOHR: (as Billy) The reading. Did you do the reading?

Mr. DAMON: (as George) Look, you still don't get it do you? You think just
because I can make money doing this, just because I can that I should do it,

Mr. MOHR: (as Billy) Yeah. Yeah, I do. I also think you have a duty to do it
because you gift.

Mr. DAMON: (as George) It's not a gift, Billy. It's a curse.

EDELSTEIN: When he communicates with the dead, George sounds like a typically
bogus cold reader. He says things like, I'm seeing a woman with dark hair: Is
that right? But he's supposed to be the Real McCoy, a man who can grasp
someone's hand and see that tacky whitish void in which streaky human
silhouettes stare into the camera.

The third protagonist is Marcus, a working-class London boy whose twin brother
gets run over by a car. Snatched from his junkie mom and placed in foster care,
Marcus Googles in anguish for someone to help him talk to his brother,
preferably since he's so needy, on a daily basis. That's where the movie
meanders for a long hour, with Marcus trying to see the dead, George trying not
to see them and Marie wandering around visiting researchers asking whether she
saw what she thinks she saw. A scientist played by Marthe Keller who claims
once to have been an atheist tells her, the evidence is irrefutable.

The evidence, of course, is thoroughly refutable, but you can be a card-
carrying skeptic like me and still enjoy comedies like "Ghost Town," or horror
pictures like "Poltergeist" or even sappy romantic thrillers like "Ghost." Not
"Hereafter," though. Peter Morgan's script is credulous in the most simplistic,
sentimental way imaginable. He says he wrote it after losing a close friend in
an accident and longing to make contact with the other side. So he creates a
world in which there seems to be some kind of conspiracy to keep us all from
knowing the dead have messages for us, messages that boil down to: forget about
us and live your life. Good advice.

It's a long decrescendo of a movie, directed in Eastwood's patented laconic
style that sometimes works and sometimes, like here, is dull and impersonal.
The solemn guitar-heavy score Eastwood wrote doesn't liven things up. And
neither does Damon, who's glumly self-effacing until the bewildering final
scene, in which George is suddenly able to see the future as well as the dead:

"Hereafter" closed the New York Film Festival and has been hailed in some
quarters as a masterly summing-up of Eastwood's long career, which is kind of
alarming. They're raving about him as if he has already given up the ghost.

DAVIES: David Edelstein is film critic for New York magazine.

(Soundbite of music)

For Terry Gross, I'm Dave Davies.
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