Yours Mine and Ours

I think I'm going to coin a new term. I'm a movie grazer. I like watching TV and grazing in and out of movies that I've seen before, know well, and enjoy watching again in bits and pieces. I know this sounds crazy to some who have to watch a movie from the opening studio logo to the end credits (even as they're being smushed on commercial TV broadcasts).

I'm not like that, though. On Friday, amid the post-Thanksgiving haze and without much interest in the college football games or reruns of CBS soaps or syndicated fare, I was channel surfing. Every time I saw something I liked, I stopped for a while. It was mostly movies. I watch Cary Grant and Sophia Loren in Houseboat, Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks in Sleepless in Seattle, there was a whole bunch of Goodfellas, because Bravo showed it back to back. So I watched the ending first, then stuck around to watch the beginning. What an incredible movie -- still!

Bob Carroll Jr. and writing partner Madelyn Pugh Davis (that's them in the pic, with Jess Oppenheimer in the middle) were writing for Steve Allen's radio in the 1940s when they decided to take a week off. Not for a vacation, but to write a script for Lucille Ball, who was looking for writers for her radio show My Favorite Husband. They got the job, and went on to write on all of Ball's TV shows, including I Love Lucy, The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour, Here's Lucy, and Life With Lucy, Ball's last TV show in 1986. Caroll also wrote for The Mothers-In-Law, The Paul Lynde Show, Dorothy, and Alice, which he also co-produced. He wrote the 1968 movie Yours, Mine and Ours (yup, Lucy again), which was remade a couple of years ago with Dennis Quaid and Rene Russo.

Carroll died of natural causes in Los Angeles on Saturday. (Pugh Davis lives in California. She released a book with Carroll in 2005 titled Laughing With Lucy.)

One of the stars of Drake and Josh, Drake Bell, was seriously injured in a car crash on Thursday evening. He and a passenger were waiting in a left-turn lane when a car hit them head-on. Bell's injuries are serious but not life-threatening... They include a fractured neck, a broken jaw, facial lacerations, and knocked-out teeth. He will reportedly undergo plastic and dental surgery soon. Bell was still in the process of shooting the fourth season of Drake and Josh.

It's absolutely terrifying to hear about someone getting so badly hurt in an accident when they weren't being reckless. In case you don't know who he is (because you aren't subjected daily to pre-teen programming like I am), Drake and Josh is a really popular show on Nickelodeon (not to mention one of the slightly-watchable ones)... Hopefully, he recovers and can return to work. I know a lot of fans are devastated.