All-Star Entertainment Wrap-Up

Welcome once again to All-Star Entertainment Wrap-Up. THIS JUST IN! Bobby Darin threw a big party for Richard Pryor and Groucho Marx was there! I'm getting this out of the new Richard Pryor biography. And Groucho had just seen Richard Pryor on TV with Pryor's hero Jerry Lewis. And Groucho asked Richard Pryor, "Do you want a career you can be proud of? Or do you want to end up a spitting wad like Jerry Lewis?" Author Scott Saul captures Pryor's - and my! - incredulity: "'Huh?' Richard stammered. His idol a spitting wad?" I chalk up part of it to the age thing. Here's this upstart Jerry Lewis influencing a young comedian (Pryor called Jerry "the god of comedy" on the show) and here's Groucho (born 1890) sitting around at a party at Bobby Darin's house. He probably arrived early and really wanted to be home in bed. I don't know. I feel you, Groucho! Not the Jerry part, though. And anyway that's not nice party conversation, Groucho. This seems to be a good spot to mention that in the Bob Hope book we discover that Bob loved Lenny Bruce and went to see him perform numerous times in nightclubs. There's a little anecdote about Bob Hope and Lenny Bruce hanging out in a Florida parking lot. Here's something else: "One of the men who kidnapped Frank Sinatra Jr. in 1963 told an FBI agent that the gang had first considered snatching Hope's oldest son, Tony, but opted for young Sinatra instead because 'Bob Hope is such a good American and had done so much in entertaining troops.'" You know, I was thinking about the Frank Sinatra Jr. kidnapping yesterday! I almost tweeted something to Jimmy about it but I found out I had all the facts wrong, rendering my tweet useless. You know, Kent Osborne and I once wrote a screenplay with a part for Frank Sinatra Jr. as Himself. There was a subplot about a young woman who loves XENA: WARRIOR PRINCESS, that's how long ago we wrote this screenplay. Not that you can't love XENA: WARRIOR PRINCESS! I'm just saying it was still on the air when we wrote the screenplay. XENA star Lucy Lawless just played an ant on ADVENTURE TIME. True story. I believe our screenplay took for granted the audience's intimate knowledge of the film ROUNDERS as well. You know, this photo has nobody in it I've talked about here but it kept coming up while I was looking for an image to use, and I'm just going to go for it.