![]() ![]() It leaves out the sound and motion, naturally, but Kovacs was a writer as well, and the bits and pieces collected here give a good picture of the man, the personality and the artist. “Ernie in Kovacsland,” which takes its title from an early series, will, of course, be of interest mainly to fans, or perhaps just fans of ephemera. Fields, adopted as counterculture heroes long after their heyday. Kovacs - an individual, an auteur, an outsider inside the system - also has something of the anarchic, world-upending, enrapturing appeal of Marx brothers and W.C. (Kovacs died in a single-car automobile accident in 1962, an event that rated a banner headline in this paper and an on-air eulogy from Harry Reasoner.) You might have felt the same shock of the (old) new seeing “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” for the first time, when it sneaked into America by way of PBS, or discovering “SCTV” when it quietly arrived here by way of late night TV. To be sure, you may have chanced upon his work, which has occasionally been brought back to light, on PBS and basic cable, and examples of which might be discovered on YouTube - chance being the likely and also the best way to encounter it, to get the full “What am I seeing?” effect, so singular does it remain six decades after his death. (As I wrote in a 2011 review of “ The Ernie Kovacs Collection,” a six-disc DVD survey of his career, still available, “He was a video artist before artists got around to making video,” his deadpan visual punning a forerunner to works by the likes of William Wegman and Bruce Nauman.) Mills, with co-author Pat Thomas, and actor-performer Ann Magnuson, whose “Kovacsland” essay cites him as a forerunner to the punk/art scene of 1980s New York, will speak. Presented by the UCLA Film & Television Archive, the event is timed to the publication of “ Ernie in Kovacsland: Writings, Drawings, and Photographs From Television’s Original Genius” (Fantagraphics), a thick, colorful scrapbook volume shepherded by Josh Mills, the son of Kovacs’ widow, co-star and archivist, Edie Adams. Three Kovacs specials, one from NBC from 1957 and two from ABC from 1961 - he had programs on every major network, including the short-lived DuMont - will screen Saturday as part of “ Ernie Kovacs: Television of the Absurd,” a free program at the Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer Museum in Westwood. It also said an eight-minute piece on the life of a drop of water appeared in an NBC special it was in an ABC special. JAn earlier version of this article referred to the UCLA Film & Television Archive as the UCLA Library Film & Television Archive. ![]()
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