News and Notes
Commentary From the Editors
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Fess Parker Memorial Photo
Mr. Duffy asked for a photo of the late Fess Parker with Ed Ames as his sidekick Mingo. Wish granted!
To remember Parker onscreen you have to go back a 'fur piece,' as it were. He played Daniel Boone on TV for six seasons, starting in 1964. (He had also played Davy Crockett in episodes of the Disneyland TV show in the 1950s -- the shows that sparked the coonskin cap craze among kiddies in America.)
Parker gave up acting after the short-lived Fess Parker Show in 1974, but was one of the very first celebrities to get into the wine business. Fess Parker Winery made it very big -- in fact, as "Frass Canyon" winery it was the scene of Paul Giamatti's famous spit-bucket freak-out in the film Sideways.
Fess Parker died today at age 85, of "complications from old age." His obit from the LA Times has a great quote from him about the surprise popularity of Davy Crockett in 1954:
"We had no idea what was going to happen to 'Crockett'... Why, by the time the first show finally got on the air, we were already shooting the third one and calmly killing Davy off at the Alamo. It became one of the biggest overnight hits in TV history, and there we were with just three films and a dead hero."Good luck to you, Mr. Parker, wherever you are.
Photo supplied by WENN.
Labels: Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Ed Ames, Fess Parker, Paul Giamatti
Posted by Mr. Holznagel at 6:57 PM0 comments 
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Unknown Dump Truck Men Are Trashing Neverland
That didn't take long.The AP says that the trash man has already come to Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch.
...Pickup trucks and a large dump truck towing a flatbed were seen entering the 2,500-acre Neverland Ranch, a major piece of the singer's debt-strapped financial empire. It was not clear who had requested the fleet or for what purpose.I just spent some time trying to get a handle on the ranch itself. I've heard the name many times, natch -- mentioned mainly as an exhibit of Jackson's odd and free-spending ways -- but never quite got the whole scene. Now I get it.
One can start with these Neverland photos from our Jackson profile.Turns out the ranch is about 130 miles northwest of Los Angeles, up through Burbank, Oxnard, and Santa Barbara, and near the town of Solvang. (Google Maps shows the ranch here.)
Solvang is its own sort of Neverland, an "authentic" Danish village that has been on tourist maps for years. (Moreso since the area was featured in the film Sideways. The Thomas Haden Church and Paul Giamatti characters stayed in the kitschy windmill Days Inn in nearby Buellton, 10 short miles from Neverland.)
Neverkand is also about 18 miles north of Ronald Reagan's own getaway, Rancho del Cielo. (Jackson had Reagan in size, 2500 acres to 688.)
Here's a nifty Neverland map, posted by a video tech who worked a charity event there.
It's bigger than I thought. The map lists cages for elephants, giraffes, orangutans, tigers, bears, and a crocodile (yikes!) along with bumper cars, a ferris wheel, swings, a "sea dragon" (?), etc. (No Bubbles, though.) As for the layout, it's zoo animals to the north, rides in the middle, private residence to the south.
Jackson apparently lived in the middle of the amusement park when he was in residence; there wasn't a separate mansion elsewhere, as I had assumed.
Mr. Jackson spent more than 15 years living at the ranch. He wrote songs for 1991's "Dangerous" album while sitting in a treehouse overlooking the estate's four-acre pond. His three children were home-schooled on the third floor of the main house.As for the free-spending ways:
[Jackson] created a Neverland Valley Fire Department, with a small fleet of working engines and full-time firefighters who were occasionally dispatched to battle brushfires on neighboring properties.When he wasn't in residence, Jackson let schoolkids and other visitors have the run of the place.
At its peak, Neverland boasted a staff of 150, and cost $10 million a year to maintain, according to people familiar with the matter.
Oh, and Liz Taylor married Larry Fortensky there in 1991.
Now we find out that Neverland wasn't even really Jackson's any more. After much wrangling over debt in years past, he handed it over last November to Sycamore Valley Ranch LLC, a company owned partly by him but mainly by the powerful property company Colony Capital.
Which maybe explains the dump truck.
[ June 30 update: E! Online now says Neverland will host a public viewing of Jackson's body over July 4th weekend. Perhaps, in the Reagan tradition, the workers are just there to clear brush? ]
[ July 1 update: Unknown dump truck men are
[ Still later July 1 update: The Jackson family says there will be no viewing at Neverland after all. ]
Labels: Elizabeth Taylor, Larry Fortensky, Michael Jackson, Neverland, Paul Giamatti, Ronald Reagan, Thomas Haden Church
Posted by Mr. Holznagel at 6:37 AM0 comments
