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It was the morning of Tuesday, Feb. 9, three and a half days before the kickoff of the Winter Olympics, and on NBC’s Today the “Countdown to Vancouver” was in full swing. From the slopes of Cypress Mountain, Ms. Morales, in a red parka, gestured at a ski run behind her. Vancouver, she explained, was experiencing what was, by Canadian standards, a freakish heat wave. With time ticking down, officials were now dropping in snow via helicopters. (Plenty o’ banter about how we shoulda held the Olympics in New York, where at least a foot of the stuff is expected this week!)

“Natalie, how’s it look?” asked Matt Lauer, who was sitting in downtown Vancouver, awaiting an interview with the city’s mayor. Ms. Morales seemed confident that the city’s mental toughness would ultimately triumph over the adversity posed by the balmy weather. “This has been a superhuman effort,” she said.

In the weeks to come, NBC channels will air more than 800 televised hours of bobsledding, alpine skiing, speed skating, curling, luge and hockey. Amid the constellation of crowd favorites and comeback kids, one aging veteran of the games, bloodied yet still hungry for glory, will make a high-profile quest for redemption. That’s NBC. In the wake of its gruesome late-night face-plant, the network will spend hundreds of millions of dollars in the coming weeks doggedly proving that the histrionics of Team Coco are nothing compared to the heroics of Team U.S.A.

Olympic television has always thrived on nostalgia for past favorites, big (the Miracle on Ice) and small (Eddie the Eagle!). But this year, while watching NBC’s exhaustive coverage (the original “cyclonic perpetual emotion machine,” to quote Jon Stewart), American audiences are likely to experience a new form of longing. Nostalgia for the increasingly rare sight of an American media superpower bending the world to fit our stage. How will crowdsourcing replace all this?

In the four years since the last Winter Games in Turin, Italy, American life has drifted deeper into a new age of gnostic media consumption, in which every individual is capable of creative enlightenment and, as such, personally responsible for participating (whether through talk radio, Tumblr, Facebook or Twitter) in shaping the myths that sustain us. For the next two weeks, NBC will cast aside the ambiguities of participatory mythmaking and return us temporarily to the earlier era of narrative orthodoxy, in which a team of some 2,000 professionally ordained storytellers will join together in concert under the strict rule of NBC’s Olympics pope, Dick Ebersol.  

There are few things left in modern media life like the televised pageantry of the Olympics to convey that once pervasive feeling of what Daniel Boorstin called “the American illusion of omnipotence.” Walter Cronkite may be gone, but the Olympics can still reliably give us Bob Costas as the Voice of God. The full revelation of NBC’s coverage (double the number of televised hours from four years ago) will be passed down as always from on high, in the form of 1,001 human parables about the value of sacrifice, the cost of distraction and the fragility of earthly success. All that’s missing is the dramatic end to each story, which, of course, you will get to watch unfold live in HD.

Today’s assembly of NBC broadcasters can trace their lineage directly back to the original apostle of Olympic television, the late Roone Arledge. It was Mr. Arledge in 1964, producing his first Olympics for ABC, who figured out an algorithm for transforming dozens of sports Americans cared nothing about into an exalted form of scripted drama. Mr. Arledge’s epiphany was to narrow the vast field of competitors down to a few select characters, pile on the biography, crank up the stakes, drop in some bugles and let the snow fly. “More personalizing of competitors,” Mr. Arledge later wrote. “More sense of place … I hummed from my exalted summit.”

For the past half-century, Mr. Arledge and his disciples, including Mr. Ebersol (who in 1968 worked as Mr. Arledge’s research assistant during the Mexico City Games) have kept the Olympics humming . Along the way, they have endlessly refined the nuances of the presentation; this year’s technical advances include an increased deployment of radar guns and something called StroMotion cameras. But the basic formula has remained largely unchanged.

How much longer can it last? Vancouver will mark NBC’s sixth Olympics in a row. This year, thanks to the $820 million rights fee, the network could reportedly lose more than $200 million. In 2012, the network is scheduled to broadcast the Summer Games from London, for which it will shell out more than a billion dollars. Before the advent of broadcast television, Americans by and large ignored the Olympics. Now for the first time in decades, there’s a nagging question of what might happen to the Olympics after broadcast as we know it disappears.

Ron Simon, the curator of television and radio at the Paley Center for Media, told The Observer recently that pulling off the old Arledge formula has become increasingly hard, in part due to the proliferation of reality television—a genre that, like the Olympics, takes a cast of unknowns, builds up elaborate backstories and then sets the young go-getters against each other in obscure competitions. “We’ve seen every kind of triumph,” said Mr. Simon. “Everything seems clichéd. How do you make the story fresh? It was through the Arledge vision that the Games gathered this prominence in our psyche. This is the culmination of it. In many ways, it’s a grand hurrah for network television itself.”
Back in Vancouver, Matt Lauer launched into the network’s umpteenth profile of the winsome American skier Lindsey Vonn: the “golden girl” of these Olympic Games, who despite an unimaginable setback in 2006 was now once again “poised to be America’s breakout star.” It was one twilight round for the old mythmaking machine, still humming from the exalted summit.

fgillette@observer.com

The show had a daring premise: a hefty team of paramilitary journalists, outfitted with Kevlar vests and helicopters, would chase down alleged terrorists and war criminals, who at times were living openly overseas and in the U.S. See journalist, see journalist hunt, see journalist catch bad guy. That’s action.

After Mr. Corvo introduced The Wanted, he ceded the spotlight to the young man who had brought it to life. Charlie Ebersol, trim and confident, was wearing a get-up rarely seen in the sartorial backwaters of the District—a sleek gray suit over black Chuck Taylor sneakers. He was 26 years old, the swaggering scion of the actress Susan Saint James and the TV executive Dick Ebersol—the head of NBC sports, one of the creators of Saturday Night Live and arguably the second most powerful boss at NBC Universal behind chief Jeff Zucker.

Mr. Ebersol began by thanking NBC News president Steve Capus. He was a visionary, said Mr. Ebersol, for supporting a project led by two guys with no experience developing prime-time television. “We were blessed to have NBC News come on board,” said Mr. Ebersol.

The blessing was short-lived. Less than two months later, The Wanted has come and gone amid a flurry of largely negative reviews. The ambition behind the series might have been big, but the eventual ratings were tiny by prime-time NBC standards. The premiere on Monday, July 20, drew a scant 2.99 million viewers, fourth among the broadcast networks at 10 p.m., even finishing behind Spanish-language Univision. The second episode, on Monday, July 27, did even worse, attracting only 2.17 million viewers.

Mr. Ebersol’s NBC debut was a flop.

The Truth About Charlie

The Wanted was only Mr. Ebersol’s second project for television (he also produced a documentary film that was picked up by HBO—more on that shortly), but it’s clear looking back even to his college years that Mr. Ebersol, with his gilded pedigree, has long been big on ideas and weak on execution.

In the spring of 2003, as a board member of the undergraduate student union at Notre Dame, Mr. Ebersol proposed a concert on campus, the proceeds of which would go to charities in Africa. He told classmates he planned on lining up U2 and Bruce Springsteen to play Notre Dame Stadium. “This is not pipe dream,” Mr. Ebersol would later tell the campus newspaper. “One day, Notre Dame students will wake up on the morning of the biggest concert this country’s schools have ever seen.”

The concert never materialized (although Mr. Ebersol eventually did manage to get SNL-alum David Spade to perform on campus).

At the same time, Mr. Ebersol was struggling to realize his grand political goals in campus politics. Twice, he ran feverish campaigns to become the president of the student body. Both times, he lost.

In the fall of 2004, his family was struck with a sudden, public tragedy that briefly put him in the news. Shortly after takeoff, a private jet carrying Mr. Ebersol and members of his family crashed at a small, regional airport near their vacation home in Telluride, Colo. Mr. Ebersol’s younger brother Teddy died in the crash, and he and his father both suffered serious injuries.

After the plane crash, according to press clippings from the time, Mr. Ebersol left Notre Dame, where he was still a few credits shy of graduating, and moved to Los Angeles to learn the family business.

In a profile published in the Los Angeles Times in the spring of 2007, Mr. Ebersol was living as a long-term house guest of Lilly Tartikoff, the widow of legendary NBC entertainment chief Brandon Tartikoff. Then 24 years old, he was already playing the part of the seasoned Hollywood veteran, helping Ms. Tartikoff’s 12-year-old daughter pitch animated series to executives around town. Despite his inexperience, he began to pursue his birthright: flashy producer, potential NBC executive. No page duties required.

Out of Africa

Mr. Ebersol’s first apparent success as a producer came in 2005 when he and his childhood friend Kip Kroeger completed a feature-length documentary called Ithuteng (Never Stop Learning). The documentary, which was directed by Charlie’s teenage brother Willie, offered a moving portrait of an inspiring teacher named Jacqueline “Mama Jackie” Maarohanye, who ran a school in Soweto, South Africa, for underprivileged kids. The film was accepted in several festivals. HBO bought the rights. Oprah Winfrey gave a large donation to the school.

In the winter of 2005, however, a number of students from the school revealed to a South African news program that Ms. Maarohanye had coached them to make up false, horrific stories about their childhoods in order to get more money from donors. Eventually, the subject behind Mr. Ebersol’s glowing documentary was formally charged with offenses, ranging from assault to kidnapping to arson.

Though his project was undermined, Mr. Ebersol’s reputation as a producer escaped largely unscathed. The pair went on to make another documentary about a snowboarder.

Mr. Ebersol continued to work the Hollywood scene, eventually landing a much-coveted production deal with NBC Universal. Roughly two years ago, while on the lookout for projects, Mr. Ebersol met a young producer for NBC Dateline named Adam Ciralsky. Mr. Ciralsky had an idea for a series. Mr. Ebersol liked it. The two men—one with an idea and one with the ability to open doors—clicked. Meetings with then NBC Universal head Ben Silverman eventually led to a green light in Hollywood, which eventually led to moral, financial and personnel support for The Wanted from the NBC News division back in New York. It almost seemed charmed. Or, blessed, rather.

Wanted, Unwanted

Yet, like Mr. Eberson’s documentary about the South African school, The Wanted soon ran into controversy. Months before it was ready to air, the series triggered a round of stories in the press questioning the producers’ methodology. When reporters from The Wanted showed up at a small college in Maryland for a confrontational interview with a native of Rwanda who had been accused of war crimes (which he denied) and who was now teaching French at the school, the college president, a former journalist himself, criticized the producers for seemingly working hand-in-hand with Rwandan prosecutors. Human rights observers worried publicly that the show would accidentally target innocent individuals. Federal officials worried that such tactics could interfere with their investigations. Media watchdogs wondered aloud if it was such a good idea for NBC to further blur the line between journalists and law enforcement. Foreign correspondents scratched their heads.

At the same time, Mr. Ebersol was proving to have something of a tin ear to the mounting concerns. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, he explained that camera crew members were asked to watch The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum before shooting for the series—not exactly the kind of disclosure that would reassure critics worried that The Wanted was a shallow entertainment series masquerading as news. 

When the first episode aired, most TV critics piled on (“Silly, self-important and journalistically out to lunch,” wrote David Zurawik in The Baltimore Sun) while other critics, including Tom Shales of The Washington Post and a wide array of conservative bloggers, complimented it. But the low ratings ensured the series’ abbreviated run. After who knows how many millions of dollars spent on development, production and promotion, NBC executives said that after two episodes, they were done.

In the meantime, articles in outlets such as The New Republic and Buffalo News continued to take in-depth looks at some of the subjects targeted in The Wanted and inevitably found that the cases were complicated, nuanced and layered—not the kind of situations that would work in a simple good guys vs. bad guys format. Producers, it seemed, should have known better.

Overall, The Wanted amounted to what was arguably the worst public-relations hit that a broadcast news network has taken since CBS’s “Rather-gate controversy” and Mr. Rather’s subsequent lawsuit against his former employers.

Failing Upwards

In the end, NBC News executives won’t say exactly how much they spent on two poorly rated episodes of The Wanted, and no one has reported a precise figure in the press. Nor is it entirely clear what, if anything, will happen to the remaining episodes that have yet to air. Earlier this summer, ShineReveille International purchased worldwide distribution rights to the series. Questions to ShineReveille about the possibility of The Wanted airing overseas were referred back to Mr. Ebersol, who did not return repeated emails about this story from The Observer.

Of course, nobody is likely to lose their jobs for The Wanted’s shortcomings. Television development has a notoriously high fatality rate. Even when you’re succeeding, 95 percent of your new series might fizzle. Experimentation, even failure, can be a good thing—if you’re willing to acknowledge the reasons underlying the failure. 

For instance: to judge by The Wanted, big swaggering production values aren’t a magic solution to breaking through viewers’ apathy when it comes to international news. Also, famous TV pedigree or not, experience matters. No word on what Mr. Ebersol will take on next for NBC, but perhaps this time he should stay closer to home.

fgillette@observer.com

It wasn't easy working for a show like Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place . The big, respected hit-show teams get to swagger around Hollywood as though they had created The Mary Tyler Moore Show or E.R. , but as a Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place guy, the basic rule has been that you turn red when you tell people what you do for a living. And it's become a sadistic sport in the company town: In Action , the joke is that the wimpy screenwriter guy getting hired by Jay Mohr's character worked on TGaGaaPP . But now that they've taken the pizza place out of the show, added a bunch of good writers and TGaGaaPP is just Two Guys and a Girl , the people who put it together are hoping that they'll no longer be the biggest punch line in television. "We've basically been referring to the premiere as a pilot," said executive producer Kevin Abbott, a veteran of Grace Under Fire and Roseanne . Last season, TGaGaaPP started off slow, mired in tired old sitcom plot lines. But the suddenly sainted Jamie Tarses stuck by it and got it on the fall schedule. Now that she's departed, some have predicted that TGaaG will go the way of the aaPP . But Mr. Abbott said ABC executives say it's improved and will hold on. Judge for yourself tonight, when Pete returns from a horrible trip to Paris. [WABC, 7, 8 P.M.]

Thursday, Sept. 30

The supreme diss NBC executive Dick Ebersol reportedly meted out to Andy Kaufman 17 years ago is coming back to haunt him. After all, Kaufman is now a great man, the subject of a forthcoming Milos Forman movie, The Man in the Moon , in which he's being played by Jim Carrey. The movie is partly based on a biography, Andy Kaufman Revealed!: Best Friend Tells All , by Bob Zmuda. According to Mr. Zmuda's book, when Mr. Ebersol was producing Saturday Night Live , shortly before Kaufman died, he and Kaufman made a deal. As part of a comedy bit, the viewing audience was going to be allowed to call in and vote on Kaufman's continuing presence on the show. If the audience voted No–and it was basically rigged so they would–Kaufman would get the boot. But there was, reportedly, a payoff to the gag: when Kaufman left, in would come Tony Clifton, Kaufman's lounge-singing alter ego. The votes came in against Kaufman, as expected. But when Kaufman called Mr. Ebersol about Tony Clifton's entrance, Mr. Ebersol didn't take his calls, according to Mr. Zmuda's biography. Mr. Kaufman was out of luck and off the show for good, much to his surprise. At the time it must have seemed like no big thing to Mr. Ebersol. After all, by then Kaufman appeared to be nothing more than another washed-up comic stunt artist headed to Nowheresville. But then he suddenly died, rocketing him to a second life as comedy legend and taking Mr. Ebersol with him as cultural villain. But Mr. Ebersol, now NBC's sports president, will get a break. When Mr. Forman's movie is released, the telephone poll will be recounted but not the deal with Mr. Ebersol, according to a spokesman for Jersey Films. Still, the film's certain to be a Jim Carrey blockbuster. The lesson is: be careful whom you screw; you never know if he or she will end up the subject of a Milos Forman movie.

Catch Mr. Carrey tonight with Geena Davis and Jeff Goldblum in Earth Girls Are Easy . [Comedy Central, 45, 8 P.M.]

Friday, Oct. 1

Each fall television season, the big ad firms handicap the new shows to help their clients decide what to buy–like, should Lee Jeans put its Buddy Lee ads on Angel or stick with Buffy the Vampire Slayer ? Mike Greco, head of BBD&O's media research department, has released a report lumping the new shows into three categories: swimmers, which will last the whole season, floaters, which may or may not, and sinkers, which won't.

Here's how BBD&O says things will shake out–and as usual, only a handful of the 38 new shows are expected to make it.

Swimmers:

The West Wing (NBC), the half-hour Ally McBeal (Fox), Malcolm in the Middle (Fox), Angel (WB), Roswell (WB), WWF Smackdown! (UPN).

Floaters:

Odd Man Out (ABC), Once and Again (ABC), Wasteland (ABC), Judging Amy (CBS), Cold Feet (NBC), Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (NBC), Stark Raving Mad (NBC), Third Watch (NBC), Action (Fox), Harsh Realm (Fox), Time of Your Life (Fox), Popular (WB), Safe Harbor (WB), The Parkers (UPN), Shasta McNasty (UPN).

Sinkers:

Oh, Grow Up (ABC), Snoops (ABC), Then Came You (ABC), Family Law (CBS), Ladies Man (CBS), Love or Money (CBS), Now and Again (CBS), Work With Me (CBS), Freaks and Geeks (NBC), The Mike O'Malley Show (NBC), Get Real (Fox), Manchester Prep (Fox), Mission Hill (WB), The Badlands (Fox), Jack & Jill (WB), Grown-Ups (UPN), Secret Agent Man (UPN).

Tonight, see if you think Now and Again will make it–and where Glenn Gordon Caron can take this show about a fat guy whose brain is transplanted into a skinny guy's body. And how many viewers are going to turn it on waiting to see if John Goodman's coming back. [WCBS, 2, 9 P.M.]

Saturday, Oct. 2

Rich Hall was up at the Late Night with Conan O'Brien offices on Tuesday, Sept. 21, preparing for the next day's taping with Late Night writer Frank Smiley, when the phone rang. It was Louis C.K., asking Mr. Smiley to come down to the tiny Upright Citizens Brigade Theater to do his Dildo Boys comedy bit–in which Mr. Smiley leads a retro-leather-jacketed band of brutes who beat people with dildos–in "Louis C.K.'s Filthy Stupid Talent Show." Mr. C.K. insisted that Mr. Hall come also. When Mr. Hall took the stage with the other dildo guys–pumping his dildo-filled fist like a real old-school thug–he looked exactly the same as he did back on Saturday Night Live –the eyes are still buggy, he's still tall and wiry, his hair's still kind of greasy, his head still moves about like it's attached to his shoulders by a taut spring. Those who recognized him asked if Mr. Hall, who now lives in London, was in town for the Sept. 26 Saturday Night Live 25th-anniversary show. But as he milled about on the sidewalk after the show, Mr. Hall snapped at the notion. "I'm not interested in that," he said. "I hate the show. It kind of sucks now, doesn't it? It was good when I was on it." Asked why he thinks SNL sucks, he said, "It's not funny. Do you think it's funny? If you do your own stuff, it has a good chance. That's why some of the characters work. It's the sketch that doesn't work anymore. It's sad. It's just not that organic anymore. Every time I turn it on, I'm disappointed."

Though he hasn't enjoyed the same success as many of the other former cast members, Mr. Hall doesn't seem to be carrying any grudge. "I'm just telling the truth, right?" Well, sort of, but that Tim Meadows is pretty funny. And that Colin Quinn ain't bad either. Anyway, tonight, the new season kicks off with Jerry Seinfeld as host. [WNBC, 4, 11:30 P.M.]

Sunday, Oct. 3

Speaking of Mr. C.K. … even though you've likely seen his work–he came up with the Conan O'Brien staring contest bit and now writes for HBO's The Chris Rock Show –you probably don't know who he is. But you probably will soon enough. On Oct. 5, Comedy Central is going to tape his "Filthy Stupid Talent Show" for an installment of Pulp Comics . If all goes well, the network will pick up the sketch show as a regular series. Mr. C.K. started his Tuesday-night Upright Citizens Brigade "talent show" a few months ago as a mere comedic diversion, something fun to do at a small theater. The show's format has Mr. C.K., a paunchy, red-headed 32-year-old from Boston, doing a little stand-up and then emceeing a talent show with made-up acts. "I started to do it for the hell of it in the theater, figuring, if people like it, great, but that's the one that turned into something," he said. "Last year I had a deal with Castle Rock Entertainment for a sitcom. I wrote it and read it for CBS, and it was a huge amount of work and first-class tickets and nights in the Four Seasons and meetings with [CBS president] Les Moonves. Just a bunch of horse shit. All of that turned into nothing. It was like doing a term paper."

No matter what, though, Mr. C.K. should be O.K. Like, if you have to have your horse attached to something, it may as well be Mr. Rock. Mr. C.K. and Mr. Rock just completed scripting a remake of Heaven Can Wait for Paramount Pictures Corporation, and now they're working up a movie based on Mr. Rock's Pooty-tang character for the studio. The bottom line is that these writer guys, once they land, basically have it made these days. Tonight on The Chris Rock Show , the Rev. Al Sharpton. [HBO, 32, 11:50 P.M.]

Monday, Oct. 4

A very important film, Tommy , airs tonight on VH1. [VH1, 19, 8 P.M.]

Tuesday, Oct. 5

So how's Friends doing in the WPIX 11 P.M. time slot compared to how Seinfeld did in the same slot last year? (And that's a big, big question for us, since we were devastated when Seinfeld was hauled from 11 P.M. to the dinner hour–7:30 P.M.) As you'd expect, not as well. For the week of Sept. 20, Friends was watched at 11 P.M. by 463,250 city households. During the same period last year, Seinfeld was watched by 585,875 households. But, in a way, that's not too much of a surprise. The whole reason for making the switch was to give WB's slate of prime-time shows on Channel 11 a good boost, and that seems to be working already. Seinfeld is drawing 415,563 households at 7:30 P.M., compared with 279,313 for Frazier a year ago. And that helped WB's prime-time slate jump nearly two rating points compared to last year. Executives at WPIX are hoping it will go even higher when the belated WB prime-time slate launches in earnest this week. Tonight's WB premiere: Angel , the delightful Buffy spinoff. [WPIX, 11, 9 P.M.]

Peter Bogdanovich's Movie of the Week

The career of director Edgar George Ulmer, one of die-hard film buffs' major cult favorites, is an object lesson in the triumph of talent, courage, ingenuity and passion over time and money. Ulmer rarely had more than a minuscule budget and six days to shoot an entire feature; that is one to two days shorter than TV directors today are given to film a one-hour (actually, more like a 48-minute) series episode. The discipline and resourcefulness required to be able to turn out any sort of full-length product in that short a time is impressive by itself; forget about also revealing a strong personality and an often vivid style, as Ulmer did repeatedly in numerous Poverty Row classics like the nightmarish Detour (1946), or the uncompromising Ruthless (1948), or the remarkably atmospheric period horror tale of 19th-century Paris, 1944's Bluebeard [Saturday, Oct. 2, WLIW, 21, midnight] . The star is the legendary patriarch of one of our most enduring acting families, John Carradine, in a role he always ranked high among his best.

When I first saw Bluebeard over 30 years ago, I wrote for my movie-card file: "Strikingly directed and designed, evocatively scored and written story of a crazed artist who is compelled to murder his models after he has finished painting them, with a fine performance by John Carradine. The stylized sets; ironically lilting, romantic music; and, above all, Ulmer's forceful, subtly heightened, semi-abstract direction, all combine to make an unusually engrossing, poetic, modest little film, with a unique charm and sadness." Ulmer–who began in show business as a set designer for Max Reinhardt and first worked on pictures in production design–created Paris on the back lot, with little means and much imagination. This was especially personal to Ulmer, who once told me, "All my love for Paris came out in that picture." You know a film has strong visual powers when years have passed since you saw it, yet images and impressions cling to your memory. Bluebeard has that sort of magic, all the more astonishing when you consider the profoundly limiting conditions under which the film was achieved.

Ulmer (1904-1972), who was born in Vienna and worked with Reinhardt while still in his early teens, first came to the United States in 1923 with Reinhardt's famous Broadway production of The Miracle . His greatest movie experience was working with the transcendent German master F.W. Murnau on three of cinema's most important and influential films, The Last Laugh (1925), Sunrise (1927) and Tabu (1931). After co-directing with Robert Siodmak a famous short silent documentary, People on Sunday (1928), with Fred Zinnemann as assistant director and Billy Wilder as writer, Ulmer fairly quickly worked himself into the feature director's chair, and his third movie, The Black Cat (1934), was a successful Universal horror film with Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi (the two biggest horror stars of the 30's). But at this high point, Ulmer made a choice of the heart that would permanently affect his directing career. He fell in love with the wife of one of Universal's reigning monarchs, and she with him; Shirley Castle left Edgar's boss, and Ulmer was quietly blacklisted in Hollywood.

From then on, it was a topsy-turvy existence directing some of the wildest and weirdest assignments in picture history: for a Ukrainian committee, for a Yiddish organization, for companies in Mexico, Italy and Spain, from such infamous exploitation pictures as Girls in Chains (1943) to a Z-budget nudie, The Naked Venus (1958). The astonishing thing is that so many of Ulmer's movies have a clearly identifiable signature; and several, like The Naked Dawn (1955) or his last, The Cavern (1965), are B-budget classics. That so much good work could be accomplished with so little encouragement and so few means makes our current situation–much money, little talent–all the more distressing and Ulmer's achievement all the more impressive.

What tender regard we've learned to show for the sensitivities of the dead, whom we treat so much more thoughtfully than we do the living. How solicitously we debate the deceased's preferences concerning public image and literary reputation. Would Ernest Hemingway have wanted us to read his unfinished novel? Would Ralph Ellison have approved the current edition of Juneteenth ?

And all the time we're projecting like mad, assuming that we can imagine what we (or anyone) will desire once we've departed this world for the next.

Most of us, for example, might assume that it would be perfectly heavenly to look down–or up–from wherever we're spending eternity and find that our closest, dearest friend has written our life story. Not if we had read Bob Zmuda's Andy Kaufman Revealed!: Best Friend Tells All , a chatty account of the late comic, a 70's version of Lenny Bruce known for his over-the-top, on-stage explorations of the line between outrageousness and insult, for doing impersonations with an authenticity that stopped just short of full-blown multiple personality disorder, and for his wrestling matches with attractive female fans. Mr. Zmuda's digressive book–which offers simultaneously way more and way less information than we need–suggests that one might actually prefer the unkind fate of most biographical subjects: the chance to have your secrets exposed by a total stranger who despises you for no particular personal reason.

Randomly mingling biography and memoir, Mr. Zmuda–the producer of the Comic Relief benefits–reminds us that eulogy can be the most autobiographical of forms. Filled with grammatical howlers and half-baked cultural pronouncements ("Though the evidence of madras plaids and love beads and patchouli wafting on the air was fading, we had been out of Vietnam more than a year, and the notion that love could conquer hate had made its impression on more than a few"), the book makes you picture Andy Kaufman grabbing for that celestial (or infernal) blue pencil.

And yet, despite its flaws, Mr. Zmuda's reminiscence makes interesting reading for what it reveals, or reminds us about, the talented, inventive comic who dedicated himself so zealously to pushing buttons and testing limits. Mr. Zmuda's association with Kaufman extended beyond best-friendship to include intermittent work as Kaufman's writer, producer, procurer (gifted with a prodigious and rarefied sexual appetite, Kaufman once won a bet that he could sleep, in record time, with the entire staff of a Nevada brothel, a marathon presumably involving his favorite romantic activity: pinning women to wrestling mats for the rubbing and grinding that one lover described as "exhibiting all the earmarks of mild necrophilia") and other less readily classifiable duties. ("One of my strangest functions was to patrol the hall outside his room … while striking a small saucepan with a mallet.… My task was to check sound levels. If Andy could hear the pan resonating at a certain range we'd immediately change rooms or hotels.")

Having been more or less present at the creation of Kaufman's comic personae (Elvis; the befuddled Foreign Man, Latka, on the TV series Taxi ; the obnoxious, audience-abusing lounge singer Tony Clifton) Mr. Zmuda is able to track the rise and fall of Kaufman's brief, meteoric and bizarre career–the subject of a soon-to-be-released film starring Jim Carrey as the eccentric comedian. Kaufman got his start at the Improv, one of the New York comedy clubs that flourished during the 70's; his reputation grew after he became a semi-regular on Saturday Night Live during its early (and most inspired) seasons. He was tapped for a Friday-night comedy series, a launch that ran aground after the comic stalked off stage during a live performance; he made a number

of confrontational (and in some cases spectacularly disastrous) guest appearances on various talk and variety shows, appeared in

an awful movie, Heartbeeps , built a devoted audience on college campuses, where he wrestled–and slept with–untold numbers of undergrad Amazons, filmed his own TV special, triumphed at Carnegie Hall … and then watched his success disintegrate after a painful, public betrayal by Saturday Night Live producer Dick Ebersol.

Meanwhile, his biographer argues, all his planned performances were merely warm-up acts for the street theater that Kaufman loved most, the impromptu put-ons and practical jokes that he and Mr. Zmuda (who often served as his straight man and stooge) played on innocent bystanders in airports, restaurants and amusement parks–pranks that, sadly, lose their punch when recounted here. ("When the waiter arrived at our table, he took one look at Andy and was instantly repulsed by the massive ball of snot hanging from his left nostril.")

What's most compelling about Kaufman is that he was so clearly less interested in humor than in discomfort and provocation; his idea of a "triumph" was to have his alter ego, Tony Clifton, pelted with bottles, fruits and vegetables during a performance. His "two axioms" were "The audience doesn't have to like you, and you don't have to be funny … just interesting.… Failure and perceived mediocrity were concepts Andy toyed with his entire career." He liked seeing how far and how long a put-on could be sustained. His much-publicized feud with Jerry (The King) Lawler–during a match with the professional wrestler, Kaufman apparently suffered spinal injuries serious enough to necessitate his wearing a neck brace for months–was, Mr. Zmuda reveals, an elaborately staged hoax. Fascinated by the concept and the process of "bombing," Kaufman used his own family (gathered at a Catskills resort to celebrate Thanksgiving) as guinea pigs in his continuing experiments with public humiliation: "When it was show time, 600 paying customers sat back and watched Andy Kaufman introduce his family one by one, who then crossed to center stage and performed. It was exactly what the Kaufman tribe had been doing around the dinner table for 25 years.… But for paying strangers

it was worse than watching paint dry. After the first few 'acts' the crowd started rustling around in their chairs and within a few minutes quietly chatting among themselves. Their buzzing drowned out the real Grandma Pearl as she carefully related the tale of the rabbi and his dog. At any second, Andy could have come to the rescue … but he chose not to, rather he let his family quietly die one at a time. Since Andy was mesmerized by failure, he wanted his loved ones to experience it, to flop in front of a big crowd–a big crowd of strangers ."

Well, you can't help wondering: What kind of guy would do that to his grandmother? And it's a shame that Mr. Zmuda can't tell us. The closest he comes to an insight into Andy's rage and outrageousness–Kaufman never got over the death of his beloved grandfather–seems partial at best; it's finally no more convincing than the theory espoused by some of the comic's friends–that his fatal illness (he died of lung cancer in 1984 at age 35) was caused by Dick Ebersol's betrayal. It's too bad that Mr. Zmuda isn't a sharper writer, a deeper thinker, capable of helping us see how Kaufman's humor was inspired by, and reflected, the times in which he lived. Mr. Zmuda's loving, heartfelt attempt at resurrection fails to bring his friend to life on the page, and leaves us with a familiar disappointed feeling. As people say of jokes that don't translate: I guess you had to be there.