TV Confidential with Ed Robertson

We'll be back with a brand new edition of TV Confidential later this week. In the meantime, please enjoy this clip from February 2015 in which Tony, Donna, and Ed remember the Miracle on Ice, the U.S. men's hockey team's win over the Soviet Union's men's hockey team in the medal-round game on Feb. 22, 1980 during the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York.

TVC 678.1a: From February 2015: Tony Figueroa and Donna Allen remember the origins of The Andy Griffith Show (CBS, 1960-1968), the pilot of which originally aired during This Week in TV History as "Danny Meets Andy Griffith," an episode of Make Room for Daddy. Topics this segment include how the Andy Taylor we see in "Danny Meets Andy Griffith" is much closer in spirit to the character that Griffith played in No Time for Sergeants, and how the dynamics of The Andy Griffith Show changed once Don Knotts joined the cast.

TVC 678.1: Ed and guest co-host Chuck Harter welcome back actress, author, songwriter, composer, filmmaker, and reverend Alison Mills Newman (Julia, The Leslie Uggams Show, The Tree Widow). Alison's novel, Francisco, is a genre-bending, autobiographical story about a young black actress in the early 1970s who falls in love with an intensely driven filmmaker, makes her way through the Black Arts movement, and searches searching for her own way of seeing. Originally published in 1974, Francisco was recently reissued by New Directions Publishing and is available wherever books are sold.

TVC 678.2: Part 2 of a conversation that began last week with Laurence Luckinbill (The Boys in the Band, The Delphi Bureau, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, Lyndon, Hemingway, Teddy Tonight!, Clarence Darrow Tonight!). Topics this segment include how Larry's guest appearance on Harry O in the summer of 1974 resulted in Larry adopting an Alaskan Malumute, whom Larry named Mush (and who remained a beloved part of the Luckinbill family for the next thirteen years), and how William Shatner cast Larry as Sybok in Star Trek V after seeing his one-man show Lyndon on PBS. Larry's autobiography, Affective Memories: How Chance and The Theater Saved My Life, is available wherever books are sold through Sunbury Press.

TVC 678.3: Actor and author Laurence Luckinbill talks to Ed about working with William Shatner, both as an actor and as a director, in Star Trek V, as well as the approach he took toward playing Sybok, Spock's half-brother, in that film. Larry's autobiography, Affective Memories: How Chance and The Theater Saved My Life, is available wherever books are sold through Sunbury Press.

TVC 677.1: An encore presentation of an edition of The Sounds of Lost Television that originally aired in February 2012 in which Phil Gries plays audio highlights from the Feb. 11, 1960 broadcast of The Tonight Show, the night when host Jack Paar walked off the air after NBC had edited out a joke that Paar had told the night before without his consent. Topics this segment include how Paar was the first host of The Tonight Show to pre-record his show earlier in the day (prior to Paar, The Tonight Show had always aired live), plus a discussion of how the controversy that led to Paar's walk-off can be boiled down to who really controlled the content of The Tonight Show: Paar, the host, or NBC, the broadcaster? Audio courtesy ATVAudio.com.

TVC 677.2: From February 2012: Phil Gries shares more audio highlights from the Feb. 11, 1960 edition of The Tonight Show, including on-air reaction from co-host Hugh Downs and guests Orson Bean and Shelley Berman in the moments after host Jack Paar had walked off the air to protest NBC's decision to edit out a joke that Paar had told on the previous night's show. Also in this segment: Phil discusses that the role that Jonathan Winters played in convincing Paar to return to The Tonight Show (which Paar did on Mar. 7, 1960), plus Ed plays an clip from the interview that he and Phil did with Hugh Downs in September 2013 in which Downs reveals that, while he knew that Paar was going to quit prior to the taping of the Feb. 11, 1960 broadcast, he did not expect Paar to walk off at the beginning of the show. Audio courtesy ATVAudio.com.

TVC 677.3: Part 2 of a conversation that began last week with Erica Gavin, the actress known around the world as the star of Vixen! (1968), the satiric sexploitation movie produced, directed, and co-written by Russ Meyer that none other than Roger Ebert once described as "the quintessential Russ Meyer film." Topics this segment how Erica initially clashed with Meyer over how to approach the famous "lesbian scene" in Vixen! between her and Vincene Wallace, and how she worked out a solution that ultimately pleased Meyer. Chuck Harter co-hosts.

TVC 677.4: Actress Erica Gavin talks to Ed and guest co-host Chuck Harter about the time when she and Russ Meyer both met film critic and future Meyer collaborator Roger Ebert for the first time while doing promotion for Vixen! (1968), how Erica had earned Meyer's trust by convincing him to let her break the fourth wall while filming the final shot of Vixen, and how Meyer paid homage to Alfred Hitchcock by making a cameo appearance in the final scene of Vixen. Severin Films has just released Russ Meyer's Vixen!, Russ Meyer's Supervixens, and Russ Meyer's Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens on Blu-ray for the first time as part of a landmark partnership with the Russ Meyer Trust. The Blu-ray release of Vixen! includes more than three hours of extra features (including a brand-new audio commentary by Erica Gavin, plus archival interviews with Erica Gavin and Harrison Page), while both Supervixens and Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens are likewise chockful of extra features.

TVC 677.5: Ed welcomes actor, author, playwright, and Emmy Award-winning producer Laurence Luckinbill (The Boys in the Band, The Delphi Bureau, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, Lyndon, Hemingway, Teddy Tonight!, Clarence Darrow Tonight!). Larry's autobiography, Affective Memories: How Chance and The Theater Saved My Life, is a page-turning, brutally honest story of how Larry overcame a meager upbringing up in the Ozark Mountains to forge his way into a successful career as a working actor and playwright. While it includes a lot of great showbiz stories from Larry's career on stage, film, and television, Affective Memories is really a book that transcends genres, evoking many classic American themes (one of which is finding redemption and a second lease on life through the love of a good woman), while also providing insight into what it means to be an actor, the healing power of the performing arts, and the lifetime discovery of what it means to be human. Among other topics this segment, Larry shares the story of how he came to write Teddy Tonight, his one-man show about the life of President Theodore Roosevelt, to illustrate how to find the "motor" that drives the particular story one wants to tell, be that as a play, a memoir, or a long-form work of fiction.