Shooting Craps with Joel Siegel

It seems like everybody in America could recognize film critic Joel Siegel. He was the guy with the mustache on the network morning news show who reviewed films and provided comic relief, the guy who wasn't the other guy like that, Gene Shalit.

That's kind of how I thought about Joel Siegel when I first met him in 1984. When my employers at KABC in Los Angeles wanted someone to produce a half-hour with Joel in Las Vegas, they asked me if I'd do it and, of course, I said yes. The program, hazy as it is in my memory now, was an Oscar prequel hype where we would shoot his wrap-around stand-ups at a Las Vegas hotel to demonstrate the horse-race aspect of the whole thing. As it turns out, Joel had a kind of love-hate relationship with Oscar predictions which my friend and Gold Derby analyst Tom O'Neil writes about
today. Here's a tease from Tom's first-person account:

Joel, being a celebrity, could be, well, a bit fickle. Sometimes he'd turn on the whole idea of Oscar punditry — vehemently, like a damning evangelist — and resign from GoldDerby in a huff. When I'd ask him why, he'd get all flustered, give me lots of babbling gibberish about how Oscar punditry cheapens the whole discourse of great films. Then he'd march away from me, cutting off further discussion with an abrupt waving of hands.

Of course, my brush with Joel was not the long-term relationship that Tom had, but a one-of-a-kind thing. I remember meeting Joel at the airport and sharing a seat next to him on the short hop to Vegas and hearing what he had planned. It was pretty clear that it was his show and I was there to tell the photog where to point the camera, to make sure the accomodations were okay and to run interference, if needed, with the hotel and fans. Not that I expected any more because, to Joel, I was the hired gun for the show.

The shoot went just fine. Joel knew his lines, knew when he liked a take and we all just jammed the work out in short order. Of course, when you're shining bright lights on a guy in a Vegas hotel, people notice. By the time we knocked off, everybody knew that Joel Siegel was there.

What I most remember about the night is that after we finished Joel ended up at a craps table for several hours, surrounded by at least a hundred people who would shout and scream and congratulate with every roll of the dice. Joel took the time to try to explain to me how craps works but, sadly, it seems not to have stuck.

He was a lot of fun that night. He was, like all talent (including myself when I've been in front of the camera), a lot to handle when the pressure of being "on" during a deadline hits, but that's no knock at all, but almost universal. I really liked him. After working with him, naturally, I never ever again thought of him as the "other" guy on the morning shows.

ABC News, of course, has some nice rememberances of him on their web-site today. I really enjoyed this page because it's all first-person information, like what Tom O'Neil did and what I've tried to do. Here's a parting selection from film colleague Roger Ebert.

There were four kinds of e-mails from Joel: (1) Good news; (2) Bad news; (3) Encouragement involving your own problems, and (4) Jokes. Mostly we got jokes. If all else had failed, Joel could have been a stand-up comic; in early days, he was a joke writer for Robert Kennedy. On the other hand, he ran a voter registration program for Martin Luther King, Jr., in Macon, Georgia.'

From the first day I met him, when he was a network star and I was only, well, an out-of-towner, Joel was a friend. We worked the red carpet every year at the Oscars, interviewing each other when things got slow. Chaz and I had dinner with Joel and his wife, the well-known artist Ena Swansea, soon after he got the bad health news, but he wasn't downbeat; he had hope and determination.

I really enjoyed Joel's spirit both on and off camera. And I agreed with his reviews far more often than not. He was opinionated without being mean. I'll miss him. Guess we all will...

• From MOVIE SMACKDOWN! - Two Films, One Review, No Holds Barred
  

Comments

[Pete Schulberg]

I met Joel when he worked with my father at an LA advertising agency. My dad was an account exec and Joel was a copy writer. They both had the Baskin-Robbins account, and one of Joel's jobs was to name the flavors. But he was doing some free-lance feature writing for the LA Times. His stuff was super, and the general manager of WCBS-TV in NY hired him after reading one of his pieces (even though Joel had never done TV). He later went over to WABC as the entertainment reporter/critic. In the late 60's, Joel and I joined the Army reserves to stay out of Vietnam. I'll never forget the letter Joel wrote me when he finished active duty and I was about to start: "Drill sergeants hate four kinds of people - people who are overweight, people who wear glasses, people who are intelligent, and people who are Jewish. I went four for four. Judge yourself accordingly." A number of years later, I bumped into former "Good Morning America" co-host Joan Lunden at the Atlanta airport. I gave her my card and wrote a few words on the back for Joel. He later wrote me back, "Say what you want about Joan Lunden - she delivers." Joel was a wonderful person on so many different levels. My dad and I loved the guy.

Hey Bryce, let's catch up! Congrats on the Hallmark movie. I'll bet Jackie wrote most of the good parts.