Ronnie Schell, ‘Gomer Pyle’ best friend and ‘slowest rising comedian,’ dies at 94
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Ronnie Schell, who played the best friend to the title character on the 1960s sitcom “Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.” and whose gradual ascendancy in show business earned him the title of “America’s Slowest Rising Comedian,” died Friday. He was 94.
Schell died of natural causes at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. He had been hospitalized after a recent fall, according to publicist Harlan Boll, who spoke to Schell’s son Gregory.
Schell played Marine Pvt. Duke Slater opposite star Jim Nabors for three seasons on the popular CBS show.
He left during the fourth season to star as a DJ in his own sitcom, “Good Morning, World.” But it flopped after 26 episodes, and Schell returned to “Gomer Pyle” for its fifth and final season. By then, his character was promoted to corporal.
Schell was tagged with the “slowest rising” label by San Francisco radio personality Don Sherwood.
“It was Sherwood who coined the phrase because everybody I worked with moved on ahead,” Schell told The Mercury News in 2011, citing Phyllis Diller and the Smothers Brothers as newcomers who later hit it big.
Schell’s co-star on “Good Morning, World” was Goldie Hawn, who became a regular on “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In” and won a supporting actress Oscar in 1970.
“I always say it’s been mighty lonely in the middle,” he told the San Jose, California, newspaper.
But Schell found steady work, and sometimes outlasted his contemporaries who scored early success and later stopped or were no longer around.
Born Ronald Ralph Schell in Richmond, California, on Dec. 23, 1931, he joined the U.S. Air Force out of high school and served four years. He got into entertaining in the military and later at San Francisco State University, where he graduated in 1958.
While appearing in a college play, he received an offer to appear for two weeks at San Francisco’s Purple Onion comedy club, a booking that stretched to five months. Diller and the Kingston Trio shared the bill.
The Kingston Trio hired him as an opening act for their nationwide college tour.
Schell honed his comedy act at the famed hungry i nightclub in San Francisco, where Woody Allen and Mort Sahl got their starts. Schell performed his comedy act in Las Vegas for over 40 years.
He worked as a writer and sketch performer for Sherwood’s radio and television shows in the San Francisco Bay area.
“I didn’t get the big break, but I got many little breaks,” he told San Francisco State’s online alumni spotlight.
Schell appeared on a 1959 episode of the TV quiz show “You Bet Your Life,” demonstrating a comic barrage of beatnik jive talk for host Groucho Marx.
In 1962, he left the Bay Area for Los Angeles and two years later was hired for “Gomer Pyle.”
He had dozens of television guest credits, including “The Andy Griffith Show” and “The Patty Duke Show,” and in later years “The Love Boat,” “Mork & Mindy,” “Saved by the Bell,” “The Golden Girls,” and “Yes, Dear.”
Schell was the voice for the hockey puck-shaped character on the “Peter Puck” cartoons, which aired during televised NHL games in the 1970s. In the 1980s, Schell appeared in television commercials for Shakey’s Pizza.
His more than 24 film roles included “The Shaggy D.A.,” “Love at First Bite” and “Jetsons: The Movie.”
His extensive voice-over work included “Goober and the Ghost Chasers,” “The Skatebirds,” “Battle of the Planets” and “The Smurfs.”
Schell served as comedy adviser to actor Richard Dreyfuss in the 2019 Netflix film “The Last Laugh.”
He is survived by his wife Janet Rodeberg, sons Gregory and Christian, and granddaughter Chiara.
Gene Shalit, longtime ‘Today’ show movie critic with bushy hair and massive mustache, dies at 100
NEW YORK (AP) — Gene Shalit, a movie critic and arts reporter for the “Today” show over four decades who was known for his puffy hair, oversized handlebar mustache and affection for groan-inducing puns, has died. He was 100.
Shalit’s family announced the death Friday to NBC News, saying in a statement that he “passed away peacefully today after 100 years of an amazing life.”
Shalit joined “Today” as a contributor in 1970 and became arts editor in 1973, later settling in for his segment, “Critic’s Corner.” When he left the show in 2010, he was one of the last high-profile film critics on a major network.
“What resonated above his unusual appearance was his incredible wit, his remarkable intelligence. But he didn’t pound you over the head with it. He amused you. He enlightened and amused whatever subject he was on,” Guy Ludwig, Shalit’s producer for more than 20 years, wrote in an essay at the time of Shalit’s retirement.
It was no coincidence that Chicago critics Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel’s local “thumbs-up, thumbs-down” movie-review program, “Sneak Previews,” went national on PBS in the late 1970s and that “Today” show’s ABC rival, “Good Morning America,” hired Joel Siegel to be its movie critic in 1981.
“Shalit was instrumental in changing the balance of critical power in America. When he began his ‘Today’ tenure, newspapers and magazines were the primary sources for movie reviews. That’s where cinematic opinion was sparked and shaped,” The Plain Dealer wrote in 2010, calling Shalit “Daniel Boone in a bow tie and Groucho glasses.”
Magazine work led to NBC offer
Shalit started as an entertainment columnist for McCall’s magazine, eventually becoming senior film critic for Look magazine in 1968 and writing for Ladies’ Home Journal. His popularity in magazines led to an offer from NBC.
“No one at NBC had seen him. They’d only read his stuff. So he walked into this executive’s office and the executive took one look at him and said, ‘Mr. Shalit, have you ever thought of radio?’” wrote Ludwig. “They didn’t know how the public would react to someone who looked so different from people who were typically on TV in 1967.”
On the air, Shalit was a middle-of-the-road critic. Of 1986’s classic “Stand By Me,” he said it was different from other movies about youth “because of instead of grossing you out, ‘Stand by You’ is engrossing.”
“Many critics will give so much of the plot of a movie away that they destroy the movie for the viewer. … I just don’t give away the story,” he told The Associated Press in 1993.
Highlights in words
He liked “Enemy at the Gates,” starring Jude Law, calling it “a vivid dramatization of one of history’s titanic turning points.” But he called “Brokeback Mountain “wildly overpraised, but not by me” and drew condemnation from GLAAD for calling Jake Gyllenhaal’s character, Jack, a “sexual predator.” Shalit apologized.
He called “Frozen” “very cool.” He said the oddball title of “The Men Who Stare at Goats” was “heard to bleat,” and his review of “The Lovely Bones” read in part: “There’s no bones about it.”
He began reviewing on air the year of “Patton” and “Love Story” and ended his run with a critique of “Shrek Forever After,” of which he noted that the “bellow fellow is now a mellow fellow.” One highlight of this tenure was his descent into a fit of giggles while interviewing Carol Channing.
He called a remake of “King Kong” so “gargantuan that I must create new words to describe it: fabularious … a brilliantological humongousness of marvelosity.” His take on Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple”: “It should be against the law not to see it.”
In a 1981 interview with John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, Belushi said Shalit’s hair looked like “an ant farm on fire.” Nevertheless, he peppered his guest with so many questions about their daily life that it felt like therapy. He asked both comedians what their last meals would be. “What do you want to be doing 10 years from now, John Belushi?” Shalit asked. “Fiddler on the Roof” Belushi replied.
During his tenure, he traded quips with anchors ranging from Edwin Newman, Barbara Walters and Jane Pauley to Tom Brokaw, Bryant Gumbel, Katie Couric, Al Roker and Meredith Vieira.
Gumbel was not always a fan, once saying Shalit’s reviews “are often late and his interviews aren’t very good.” The critique came in what was supposed to be a confidential memo to Marty Ryan, the show’s executive producer at the time.
In 1994, while in St. Pete Beach, Florida, to cover Major League Baseball spring training, a car hit Shalit as he was crossing a street and broke his leg. After that, “Today” began recording his movie reviews in his home studio.
Early life
He was born in New York and grew up in Morristown, New Jersey, starting his grammar school’s first newspaper before writing a humor column for the newspaper while a student at Morristown High School. He graduated from the University of Illinois in 1949.
Shalit played the bassoon, but he said he started out on the clarinet.
“I didn’t practice for a few weeks and the teacher got furious,” he recalled in 1988, before playing bassoon in a New York City fundraiser. “He took away my clarinet and as punishment he said, ‘From now on, you’re gonna play THIS.’”
In 1987, he edited a book called “Laughing Matters: A Celebration of American Humor,” saying he wanted to introduce and reintroduce such old and new masters of American humor as Mark Twain, James Thurber and Russell Baker.
Shalit was regularly mocked on “Saturday Night Live” by cast member Horatio Sanz, who would appear on the “Weekend Update” desk dressed as Shalit and go on extended, barely coherent rants that punned the title of every movie he reviewed. Shalit also made cameos on “Sesame Street,” “Family Guy” and “SpongeBob SquarePants.”
Shalit was predeceased in 1978 by his wife, Nancy Lewis, and had six children.
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