"Seinfeld": "The Comeback"

As I mentioned briefly in the introduction to this blog, this 1997 episode finds George Costanza (Jason Alexander) belatedly thinking of a comeback to a joke made by another Yankees staffer. When he finds out the staffer has gone to work for Firestone in Akron, George goes there to offer his snappy rejoinder. Which, of course, isn't all that snappy. And the show got some things wrong about Akron. After the jump, a 1997 Beacon Journal article by Glenn Gamboa about the episode.
Here's the article:
Sometimes, fiction is a stranger to truth.
As the buzz about the city's surprise inclusion in the ultra-hip sitcom Seinfeld on Thursday night wore down yesterday, Akronites turned up the attention on some points the show didn't get exactly right.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
In case you missed it, the show went something like this: Jerry's neurotic pal George eats a lot of shrimp during a New York Yankees board meeting. Some guy makes fun of him and then takes a job in Akron working for Firestone.
George is demoralized, but comes up with a snappy retort. He flies to Akron to zing the guy. George meets with executives at Firestone. He zings. He gets zung. He goes home.
All right, so it wasn't too realistic.
Yeah, jumbo jets don't fly into Akron airports very often.
OK, Firestone doesn't have a board of directors any more. And its parent company, Bridgestone/Firestone Inc., left Akron for Nashville, Tenn., in 1992.
Sure, the room where George met the Firestone board was as big as some closets in the executive suites over on Firestone Parkway.
Does it really matter?
"I think it's an honor," said Mark Williamson, communications director for the city of Akron. "One of the only times Seinfeld leaves the neighborhood, they come to Akron. What more can you ask for?"
Trevor Hoskins, Bridgestone/Firestone's senior vice president, didn't mind, either. He said the company was happy to help the show's creators.
"The reaction to the Seinfeld program has been tremendous from both our employees and our customers," said Hoskins. "They're absolutely delighted with the recognition. And the wonderful thing about this is that it was free."
Even though more and more companies pay filmmakers to place their products or logos in their movies, Bridgestone/Firestone didn't pay a cent.
It did, however, lend them a Firestone sign that hung in the meeting room.
Even though Firestone was purchased by Tokyo-based Bridgestone Corp. in 1988, the company believed it was OK to use the Firestone name in the Seinfeld context.
"We were once a leading tire company in Akron," said Hoskins. "And we chose to give them the Firestone sign because it fit better with Akron and the origins of the company. When a program of the quality and popularity of Seinfeld calls up, we wanted to do whatever we could."
Seinfeld's writers contacted Bridgestone/Firestone about using the company for the episode about three weeks ago, said Hoskins. However, the company did not let its employees know about the mention ahead of time.
"We didn't advise anyone that we were going to do it because you never know if it will happen until it does," said Hoskins.
The result, Hoskins said, was a load of calls from thrilled employees and customers yesterday.
"It's generated more phone calls and good will than projects that involved much more planning," said Hoskins.
Even at NBC affiliate WKYC (Channel 3), where a lot of energy is going into preparations for next weekend's NBA All-Star Game, the Seinfeld-Akron connection caught some people by surprise.
And they weren't the only ones.
Thursday's Seinfeld was seen in 23.9 percent of Northeast Ohio homes on Cleveland NBC affiliate WKYC (Channel 3), according to overnight Nielsen ratings. That's about par for the series, which had a 22.5 rating the previous week, and was not even the most-watched show on Channel 3 that night; ER had a 30.3 rating.
And it was also well behind the 35 rating for The Drew Carey Show on ABC affiliate WEWS (Channel 5) on Wednesday.
But former Clevelander Carey's show -- which showcased other Cleveland mainstays, among them Mayor Michael White, former Browns quarterback Bernie Kosar and comic Martin Mull -- was promoted so relentlessly on Channel 5 that one wag dubbed it "DrewsChannel 5."
Seinfeld added to a week's worth of evidence that Northeast Ohio has become the center of the television universe.
Both Carey's show and NBC's hit 3rd Rock From the Sun are set here, and Carey was a guest star on Tuesday's episode of Home Improvement.
Carey's show, which also featured several Akron references, was another feather in the city's cap, said Williamson.
"You have people mentioning Akron on two of the most popular TV shows in the country at a time of year when a lot of people are watching TV," he said. "That's great.". Read more!

"Covert Affairs": Hooking Up

In the new spy series for USA Network, which premieres Tuesday, CIA agent Annie Walker (played by Piper Perabo) gets into a crime scene by implying she was a prostitute who witnessed the crime. And what kind of prostitute? Well, her name is Amber Truesdale and, she says, "I'm a good girl. I come from a church-going family in Akron. . . . My mother told me to always do the right thing." Read more!

"My Fellow Americans"

Jack Lemmon and James Garner play former presidents, and rivals, who join forces when the current president tries to have them killed. A key piece of information is in Lemmon's presidential library in Cuyahoga Falls. ...


Lemmon's character was born in Cleveland but says Cleveland wouldn't give him a good deal on property taxes. He got a better deal from Cuyahoga Falls for locating his library there.
After their helicopter is blown up, Lemmon and Garner catch a ride on an "NCAA Finals Express" train to Cleveland, posing as impersonators of themselves. They learn that the train will stop in Akron but have to get off in the town of Jefferson, apparently in Virginia, when they see their pursuers waiting at the station. They steal a car, planning to drive to Akron (Lemmon says they can get on I-77 near Galax, Va.), but there's a baby in the back seat so they return the car; fortunately, the family owning it is headed to Cleveland, and gives the two presidents a ride. As they enter West Virginia, the driver says they are eight to 10 hours from Cleveland.
They finally get to the library, which is a tacky little joint. (And, by the way, none of this was shot in Ohio.) But the evidence they have sought is not there, and they hit the road again.

. Read more!

"The Great Buck Howard": Very Big in Akron

The movie, now on DVD and Blu-ray, stars Colin Hanks as a would-be writer who takes a job as road manager for Buck Howard, a Kreskin-like mentalist who was big at one time.(He made many appearances on "The Tonight Show" during the Johnny Carson era.) But not now. Now, he's playing places like, well, Akron.

"For some reason, the people of Akron, Ohio, went nuts for him," Hanks says as we see Buck exiting an auditorium and greeted by a screaming crowd of fans. One fan holds up a sign saying "Akron (Heart) Buck." (Another major segment in the movie is set in Cincinnati.)

By the way, Tom Hanks, Colin's father in real life and in this movie, did some of his earliest stage acting in Cleveland. And in a small role is Ravenna native Nate Hartley (later seen more prominently in "Drillbit Taylor" and "Role Models"). Read more!

"3rd Rock From the Sun": Kind of Kent

After the jump, 1995 interviews with "3rd Rock" creator Bonnie Turner and star John Lithgow, with much about the series' NE Ohio connections.

NBC Entertainment President Warren Littlefield thinks the comedy 3rd Rock from the Sun is sensational and says, "We love all the elements, we love what it is."
It appears to be the most likely series to get on the NBC schedule once one of the network's fall offerings falters. It may make Northeast Ohio residents stand proud. But it also could make you stare suspiciously at your neighbors, wondering where they're really from.
3rd Rock from the Sun involves a band of extraterrestrials who take on human form and set up as family in a university town 52 miles from Cleveland.
Toledo native Bonnie Turner, who with husband Terry has written Wayne's World, The Brady Bunch Movie and other comedies, is a 1973 graduate of Kent State. And she said, "I picked Ohio (for the series) because that's where I went to school."
As for whether any of the professors were as odd as the alien played by John Lithgow in the series, she said, "When I was at Kent, I remember a political science professor who confused the living daylights out of me. He was nuts. ...
"When I was 18 years old and not aware of the world, he would talk about the bigger picture -- a world view. Which was what a universe-ity is about. He would stride around the room and make big gestures and speak in a big voice. He was almost a performance artist. So in writing about this character, I did think about that. ...
"A university is a place (extra-terrestrials) would pick out to go. Where else would you have access to diverse opinions, good minds, you know? ... And my natural mind was to set it in Ohio because I love the state, I love where I was born. And I love it because it was a regular place.
"If you're going to meet human beings, you're not going to meet them in Los Angeles," she said with a smile. "New York, Los Angeles, the South, their environment overtakes who they are, and they become what the city dictates they be. In the Midwest, they are family people, they're consumers, they're church people, they're moral -- they are human in the strictest sense."
Turner wanted to buttress the Ohio connection by calling the college Warren G. Harding University, only to find there was a real school by that name.
"We settled on Pendleton," she said, "because my mother always wore Pendleton wool and she went to the Pendleton store in Toledo. My earliest recollection of the fall, and being cold, and school time, was of Pendleton wool. So I said, let's call it Pendleton State University, and that sounded very Ohio to me."
As if that weren't enough Ohio-ness for one series, Lithgow spent part of a peripatetic youth -- "I went to 10 different schools," he said -- in Akron.
"I was there between '59 and '61 and I lived on the grounds of Stan Hywet Hall because my dad was the (theater) director there," he said. "And I went to ninth grade at Simon Perkins Junior High, 10th grade at Buchtel High and lived right up there on Portage Path in the carriage house. I loved Akron."
Although he was an acting veteran by then -- having made his debut at age 6 in a production of Henry VI, Part III -- Lithgow did give an Akron audience a taste of what was to come. "I played Lt. Rooney in Arsenic and Old Lace at Buchtel," he said.
But the Turners "had no idea that he had even lived there when we wrote the script," Bonnie Turner said.
"We had been writers for Saturday Night Live and he had hosted a couple of times, and we hit it off well and became friends. Then when he read the script and we talked to him three days later, he said, 'Oh, my God, how did you know? Did you know I lived in Ohio?' It was all a happy coincidence."
And far happier than Lithgow's initial reaction to the idea of playing one of four aliens: "Oh, no, not me."
"But about five seconds later I immediately got the comic premise of it," he said. He calls the aliens "marvelous fools, brilliant in their own way, but equally foolish."
They have no special powers but are afflicted both with curiosity and an unvarnished honesty that creates problems in their dealings with humans -- especially in the pilot, where the aliens are adjusting to human form and its accompanying emotions, urges and, um, parts.
The pilot stirred strong emotions among critics here, some finding it funny, others offended by what one writer called "the fixation on breasts, phallic symbols and the uncontrollable hormonal surges."
Turner said, "We are not a politically correct show. We are farcical. I'm always surprised that someone would think I, as a woman, would write anything to offend other women."
And the characters' preoccupation underscores their honesty, Terry Turner said. "I think our aliens have no power except for the truth," he said. "They always tell the truth. Which can be about the scariest power anyone can have."
And, in a way, Bonnie Turner sees that as an Ohio thing -- "an honest existence," she said. The aliens "are honest people, too, and they're going to walk among honest human beings."
Read more!