Monday, March 30, 2015

A00431 - Jenna McMahon, Creator of "Facts of Life" Sitcom

Jenna McMahon Dies at 89; Created Popular Sitcoms

By 
Jenna McMahon with Dick Clair in "The Funny Side" on NBC in 1971.NBC, via Everett Collection
Jenna McMahon, who teamed up with Dick Clair, her partner in a comedy act, to create the long-running sitcom “The Facts of Life,” died on March 2 in Monterey, Calif. She was 89.
The cause was heart failure, her daughter, Kerry Holden-Dixon, said.
Ms. McMahon and Mr. Clair also created the character Eunice (played by Carol Burnett), and her fractious Middle American family, for a series of sketches on “The Carol Burnett Show.” Eunice’s mother, known as Mama and played by Vicki Lawrence, became the central character of “Mama’s Family,” a spinoff series that ran on NBC and in syndication from 1983 to 1990.
“The Facts of Life,” which ran from 1979 to 1988, centered on a group of boarding school girls under the guidance of a housemother played by Charlotte Rae. It was a spinoff of an episode of the popular sitcom “Diff’rent Strokes,” in which Ms. Rae played the housekeeper to a rich white man who adopts two African-American boys from Harlem. That episode, “The Girls School,” was written by Ms. McMahon and Mr. Clair.
Ms. McMahon was born Mary Virginia Skinner on May 24, 1925, in Kansas City, Mo., the daughter of George Skinner, an insurance salesman, and the former Mary McMahon, a homemaker. (She took her mother’s maiden name as her professional name because she liked the way it fit with Jenna, a diminutive of Virginia.)
She moved to New York to study acting under Stella Adler, then transplanted herself to California, where she met Mr. Clair while teaching acting classes. As a comedy duo, they played nightclubs, appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and “The Tonight Show” and became a leading comedy-writing team during the 1970s and ’80s. Mr. Clair died at 57 in 1988.
The two also wrote for “The Bob Newhart Show” and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and were jointly nominated for seven Emmy Awards, winning three times for “The Carol Burnett Show.”
They also wrote a 1987 special that starred Ms. Burnett, Whoopi Goldberg, Carl Reiner and Robin Williams, who won an Emmy for his performance. As a television actress Ms. McMahon appeared in episodes of “The Twilight Zone,” “The Bob Newhart Show,” “Welcome Back, Kotter,” “Love, American Style” and “Dennis the Menace,” among other shows.
She also wrote for the comedy series “Maude,” “Flo” and “Soap” and was a co-creator, with Mr. Clair and Stu Silver, of “It’s a Living,” a sitcom about waitresses working in a fancy Los Angeles restaurant. It appeared on ABC from 1980 to 1982 and was later seen in first-run syndication.
A scene from "The Facts of Life." From left, Nancy McKeon, Charlotte Rae and Lisa Whelchel.Embassy Pictures, via Everett Collection
Her marriage to James Holden, an actor, ended in divorce. Besides her daughter, she is survived by a brother, Bill Skinner.

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A00430 - Richard Glatzer, Co-Director of "Still Alice"


Richard Glatzer, Co-Director of ‘Still Alice,’ Dies at 63

By ASHLEY SOUTHALL



Wash Westmoreland and Richard Glatzer at their home in Echo Park in 2014.Emily Berl for The New York Times
Richard Glatzer, who helped write and direct the film “Still Alice,” which brought Julianne Moorean Academy Award last month for her portrayal of a college professor coping with early-onsetAlzheimer’s disease, died on Tuesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 63.
He had worked on the movie while struggling himself with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as A.L.S. or Lou Gehrig’s disease. His publicist, Ekta Farrar, announced his death.
Mr. Glatzer’s speech had become slurred, and he was showing other symptoms of A.L.S., a degenerative disease of the nervous system, when he and his husband, the British-bornWash Westmoreland, began working on “Still Alice” in 2011. The diagnosis came in 2013.
The film is based on the 2007 best-selling novel of the same title by Lisa Genova, a Harvard-educated neuroscientist, about a Columbia University linguistics professor who is deteriorating as she experiences the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.
Though his condition was far different from early-onset Alzheimer’s — which attacks the mind and spares the body — Mr. Glatzer found it difficult to read the book.


Julianne Moore in a scene from the film "Still Alice."Linda Kallerus/Sony Pictures Classics, via Associated Press

“It hit way too close,” he told The New York Times in November. “But when I finished reading, I knew we had to do it.”
In the early filming Mr. Glatzer appeared on the sets in Manhattan every day, even as he lost his ability to speak and the use of his hands.
He communicated with the cast and crew members through his iPad, typing with one finger and using a text-to-speech app. As his symptoms worsened, he typed with his big toe.
“I felt very much heard by everyone, every day,” he told The Associated Press last year. “And it’s so very important if you’re struggling with a disease like this to feel you still matter.”
The film was a critical success, and Ms. Moore won the Oscar for best actress as well as a Golden Globe Award.
Mr. Glatzer watched the Oscars ceremony from a hospital, where he was being treated for respiratory problems, and Ms. Moore spoke of him in her acceptance speech on the Dolby Theater stage in Hollywood.
“When Richard was diagnosed with A.L.S., Wash asked him what he wanted to do,” Ms. Moore said. “Did he want to travel? Did he want to see the world? And he said that he wanted to make movies, and that’s what he did.”
Mr. Glatzer was born on Jan. 28, 1952, in Flushing, Queens. He studied at the University of Michigan and earned a doctorate in English at the University of Virginia, where his work with the school’s film program led to a friendship with the director Frank Capra. He later taught screenwriting at the New School and the School of Visual Arts, both in New York.
He moved to Los Angeles to work on television shows, including “Divorce Court,” and used that experience to write and direct the 1993 independent film “Grief,” a fictional, comedic behind-the-scenes look at a show very much like “Divorce Court.” He was also a producer of “America’s Next Top Model,” the reality show hosted by Tyra Banks.
Mr. Glatzer met Mr. Westmoreland at a Los Angeles party in 1995, and the two were married in California in 2013.
They collaborated on three independent films before “Still Alice”: “The Fluffer” (2001), about the sex video industry; the award-winning “Quinceañera” (2006), a portrait of a Mexican-American family in Los Angeles; and “The Last of Robin Hood” (2013), a biographical drama about the actor Errol Flynn starring Kevin Kline and Susan Sarandon.
Besides Mr. Westmoreland, Mr. Glatzer is survived by their daughter, Ruby Smith, and his sister, Joan Kodner.
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Friday, March 27, 2015

A00429 - John Arras, Medical Care Philosopher


John D. Arras, Medical Care Philosopher, Is Dead at 69

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John D. Arras's research interests included physician-assisted suicide, rationing of medical care and social disparities in health conditions and care.

John D. Arras, a plain-spoken philosopher who preached that doctors should consider fairness and morality, as well as medical issues, in making life-or-death decisions about patient care, died on Monday in Galveston, Tex. He was 69.
He died after having a stroke while vacationing with his family, his wife, Liz Emrey, said.
Professor Arras, who lived in Charlottesville, Va., where he taught biomedical ethics, philosophy and public health sciences at the University of Virginia, served on the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues and was a founding member of the ethics advisory board of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
He conducted research into physician-assisted suicide, rationing of medical care and social disparities in health conditions and care.
In 1981, while on leave as chairman of the philosophy department at the University of Redlands in California, he was appointed to the clinical staff of Montefiore Medical Center in the North Bronx to work as a philosopher.
“We do not tell doctors what to do,” he said at the time. Rather, he said, his job was to help them grapple with complex and often conflicting moral, ethical and legal questions that used to be ignored or taken for granted.
John Dyer Arras was born on Aug. 25, 1945, in San Mateo, Calif. His father, Ernest Arras Sr., owned an engineering company. His mother, the former Margaret Dyer, was a homemaker. He graduated from the University of San Francisco, where he majored in philosophy and French, and earned his doctorate in philosophy at Northwestern University.
He married Ms. Emrey, with whom he served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Sierra Leone, in 1967. In addition to her, he is survived by two daughters, Marina Wright and Melissa Emrey-Arras; a brother, Ernest; a sister, Barbara Scruggs; and five grandchildren.
Before moving to the University of Virginia in 1995, where he directed the undergraduate bioethics program, he was an associate professor of bioethics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine-Montefiore Medical Center and an adjunct associate professor of philosophy at Barnard College.
Professor Arras was not afraid to address the most difficult philosophical questions.
If flu vaccines were in short supply, should infants or the elderly be given priority? Should undertakers receive precedence in being immunized over some other professions?
“This country doesn’t like to talk about rationing at all,” he said in 2004 when the C.D.C. recruited him and other experts to explore potential ethical issues raised by epidemics.
He returned to the topic last year, in “The Routledge Companion to Bioethics,” writing: “Some people apparently believe that if there is a right to health care, then any explicit rationing of health care must be morally impermissible. Nothing could be further from the truth. If we define ‘rationing’ as the denial of potentially beneficial care on grounds other than the welfare of the patient — i.e., on the grounds of cost, opportunity costs, fairness to others, etc. — then health care rationing is both inevitable and morally justified.”
Discussing doctor-assisted suicide, he argued that an enlightened debate should not be a stark choice between legalization and letting patients suffer. Rather, he said, both sides needed to listen to patients’ wishes regarding the forgoing of life-sustaining treatment, to deliver palliative care, to deal with clinical depression, to understand the ethics and legalities of pain relief, to sensitize insurance companies to issues of the quality of dying, and to amend laws that limit access to ameliorative medication.
When he was at Montefiore, he told a group of doctors that the staff’s heroic efforts to save a 75-year-old diabetic who had been admitted through the emergency room had been wrong, because she had already advised her physician that she did not want dialysis or medication.
“It was a case that foundered on prudence,” Professor Arras said. When death is inevitable and the patient wants it to occur naturally, he added, “the goal of the hospital is not to prevent death.”
He acknowledged that some oppose that view on religious grounds, but he questioned the basis of their thinking. “I don’t know why believers can’t have the view of God as a compassionate innkeeper,” he said, “who gives his residents the right to check out whenever they want to.”
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A00428 - Lew Soloff, Trumpeter for Blood, Sweat and Tears

Lew Soloff, Trumpeter for Blood, Sweat and Tears, Dies at 71

By DANIEL E. SLOTNIK
Lew Soloff was a gifted musician at home in many genres.John Abbott
Lew Soloff, a jazz trumpeter who reached a broader audience with the jazz-rock band Blood, Sweat & Tears, especially with a memorable soloon the original version of the 1969 hit “Spinning Wheel,” died on Sunday in Brooklyn. He was 71.
The cause was a heart attack, his manager Nancy Meyer said.
Mr. Soloff had little use for genre limitations. He was a session musician for Barbra Streisand, Frank Sinatra and Lou Reed; he was the lead trumpeter of both the Carnegie Hall Jazz Band and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra; he tackled Bach as a member of the quintet Manhattan Brass.
“For lack of a better word I call it jazz, but I consider any music that’s improvised to be in that genre,” he told The Jerusalem Post in 2002. “The key to what I like to do is to improvise.”
He did not do much improvising while he recorded and toured with Blood, Sweat & Tears, one of the first rock bands to include a horn section, after replacing Randy Brecker in 1968. But his playing was essential to the success of the band, whose self-titled second album, released in late 1968, won the Grammy Award for album of the year and included three singles that went gold and reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100: soulful covers of “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy,” originally recorded by Brenda Holloway; Laura Nyro’s “And When I Die”; and “Spinning Wheel,” an original composition by the band’s lead singer, David Clayton-Thomas.
The album version of “Spinning Wheel” featured a bebop-inflected upper-register solo by Mr. Soloff that captivated ears more familiar with rock ’n’ roll. The solo was removed from the 45 r.p.m. version to shorten the song for radio, but many musicians say it was transformational.
“There was no jazz-rock before Blood, Sweat & Tears,” the keyboardist Paul Shaffer, the leader of the “Late Show With David Letterman” band, said in a telephone interview on Monday.
“You changed the idiom,” Mr. Shaffer said, speaking of Mr. Soloff, a close friend, in the second person. “After you, rock ’n’ roll was no longer limited to triads and three chords.”
Mr. Soloff toured the world with Blood, Sweat & Tears. In 1970 the band played before 14,500 fans at Madison Square Garden; their opening act was a sextet led by Miles Davis. But Mr. Soloff left the band in 1973, seeking new musical challenges.
“It gave me the life experience of once having been a sort of rock star — not individually but certainly as a member of the band,” he said in 2002. “At one point it was the second-biggest band in the world. I’m thankful for that, but there was never enough improvisational freedom.”
Lewis Michael Soloff was born on Feb. 20, 1944, in Brooklyn. He grew up in Lakewood, N.J., and took up the trumpet at 10.
After graduating from the Eastman School of Music in 1961 and briefly studying at Juilliard, he began playing in New York with Maynard Ferguson, Tito Puente and Machito. He released eight albums as a leader and performed or recorded with Gil Evans, Paul Simon, Dizzy Gillespie and many others.
Mr. Soloff lived in Brooklyn. His marriage to the classical harpist Emily Mitchell ended in divorce. He is survived by two daughters, Laura Solomon and Lena Soloff, and two grandchildren.
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A00427 - Rod Hundley, Long Time Utah Jazz Announcer


Rod Hundley, an Outsize Personality on and Off the Court, Dies at 80

By 



Rod Hundley in 2010, when West Virginia retired the number he wore as a player at the university. David Smith/Associated Press
Rod Hundley, basketball’s irrepressible Hot Rod, who parlayed showmanship on the court with flair at the microphone to become a fan favorite for more than half a century, died on Friday at his home near Phoenix. He was 80.
Hundley was an electrifying presence at West Virginia University, played for the Lakers and stamped his persona on broadcasting, mostly for the New Orleans Jazz.
“Nobody did the things I did on the court and nobody has done them since,” Hundley said of his collegiate exploits in “Hot Rod Hundley: You Gotta Love It Baby!” (2012), written with Tom McEachin. “I’d shoot behind my back, sit on the other team’s bench and really work the crowd. I was a Globetrotter in college basketball.”
Hundley drove West Virginia to basketball prominence in the mid-1950s with his hot shooting and his antics, which included hook shots for free throws and hanging on the rim to await a lob pass.
A two-time all-American, Hundley preceded the future Hall of Famer Jerry West at West Virginia and was his teammate with the Lakers. They became two of the most celebrated figures in their home state.
“Hot Rod was the real first basketball hero in West Virginia,” West told Terry Pluto in the pro basketball oral history “Tall Tales” (1992). “He was like a Pied Piper; people were just drawn to him.”
Fred Schaus, Hundley’s coach at West Virginia and later with the Lakers, recalled: “In the middle 1950s, college basketball was coming off the scandals and it needed a shot in the arm, someone to bring the fans back. That’s what Hot Rod did.”
Hundley was a two-time All-Star guard in the N.B.A., playing with the Lakers for three seasons in Minneapolis and another three in Los Angeles, though he fell short of the expectations spawned by his college career.
He was a broadcaster for the Lakers, the Phoenix Suns, CBS and then, for a long stretch, the New Orleans Jazz and its successor franchise, the Utah Jazz. Hundley’s fast-paced style at the microphone, his wit and his storehouse of knowledge about the Jazz’s history made him one of the most recognizable personalities in Utah.
Rodney Clark Hundley was born in Charleston, W.Va., on Oct. 26, 1934, the only child of parents who divorced when he was young and sent him to live with relatives and at friends’ homes. His real homes were a Y.M.C.A. basketball court and the pool halls where he smoked, drank and pocketed more than his share of shots.
After setting West Virginia high school scoring records, the 6-foot-4 Hundley played for West Virginia University from 1954 to 1957, helping take the Mountaineers to their first three appearances in the N.C.A.A. tournament and averaging 24.5 points a game. He was an all-American in his junior and senior years.
The Cincinnati Royals selected Hundley with the first overall pick of the 1957 N.B.A. draft, but they immediately traded him to the Minneapolis Lakers.
Hundley played in two N.B.A. All-Star Games with the Lakers franchise, but he had knee problems, loved the night life and by his own admission lost confidence in his shooting. He averaged only 8.4 points a game for his six pro seasons but twice finished in the N.B.A.’s top 10 for single-season assists.
Hundley was the voice of the Jazz from 1974, when they entered the N.B.A. as an expansion team in New Orleans, until his retirement from the Salt Lake City-based Jazz in 2009.
His wit was especially evident one night when Utah forward Truck Robinson did not attend an anticipated postgame interview. Hundley asked his questions anyway, answered them, and wound up the “interview” by handing a gift certificate to the invisible Robinson as thanks for his nonappearance.
Hundley was sometimes viewed as an early version of the flashy Pete Maravich, who went from Louisiana State University to the New Orleans Jazz in the team’s inaugural season. When Maravich made a tough shot, Hundley might exclaim, “A gentle push, a mild arc and the cowhide globe hits home!” Hundley was a keen basketball analyst, and in 2003 he became the first former player to receive the Curt Gowdy Media Award from the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass.
Hundley left West Virginia about 12 credits short of a degree. But he eventually submitted papers to the university on subjects including broadcast journalism to earn a bachelor’s degree in physical education in 2000.
He had come a long way since his days as a young man whom no one wanted and who hung out at pool halls. But he could look back wryly on those troubled years.
“I gave a speech the other night and I started off telling how I had a pool table in my house,” he told Sports Illustrated in 1965. “I told them I wanted my children to have the same advantages that I had.”
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