JAMES GARNER’S DAUGHTER OPENS TRIBUTE SITE TO HER AWESOME FATHER

The Mighty James Garner’s daughter, Gigi Garner (a successful talent manager in her own right), has opened a tribute website to her father. She seems to be updating it fairly regularly with a number of terrific family photos and excerpts from Garners’ new memoir “The Garner Files,” which I loved and reviewed here.

Please check the site out.

Anyone who’s been reading me for any amount of time (or who has seen my Twitter wallpaper), knows of my all-consuming affection for all things James Garner, most especially “The Rockford Files.” You can imagine how much this tweet meant to me.

Tell me how it gets any better than that. You can’t, because it doesn’t.

The only bad news is that if this photo on Ms. Garner’s site displays the actor’s real signature, that means I got robbed on Ebay.

Cue my well-rehearsed of-course-I-got-swindled-again Rockford face.

FINALLY: AN HONEST ASSESSMENT OF HOLLYWOOD’S BOX OFFICE BLUES

With all of Hollywood and most of their sycophant entertainment media blaming box office and DVD woes on everything but bad product, this is the rare break from that absurd narrative:

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When growing up in Los Angeles, a singular delight was getting the TV Guide in the Sunday paper and scouring it, pen in hand.  My movie search.  In the sixties, Los Angeles had the greatest number of TV channels in any city: 2-4-5-7-9-11-13.  In trips to San Diego, the Mid-West or anywhere else, you’d be lucky to get two, maybe three channels.  And not very good ones.

Some years ago, my daughter asked: “…so in the olden times, Dad, when did you see movies?” Hmmmm.  Olden times.  As if the wheel, the pen, writing, music, and entertainment were invented with her generation.  I explained that there were two places to see movies.  Theaters and Television.  That was it.  No DVD, VHS, iPod, or Hulu.com.  My TV Guide search was essential to find the right movies and straighten out my schedule for the week by circling and grading the films.  After all, if a movie came on at 11 p.m., you’d be up for two hours to “The End.”

But each week, when I got the TV Guide in my young hands, it was like opening a present.  Before the internet, I explained to my daughter, we had this ancient forum called a “library” where you could get books on movies and famous actors.

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