#Michael died to cb

[ender-afton]

From and au me and my friend made

The tags give some info

[ciceroartwork]

Identity Lavinia Zichaierg Marie Schmidt

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AKA MRS. AFTON!!

THATS PRONOUNCED 'Z-eye-kuh-ye-air-guh' lmao

TWO MIDDLE NAMES CUZ HER PARENTS COULDNT DECIDE

Marie was 38 when BV and Elizabeth died

Michael was sixteen, Elizabeth 10/11, BV 5/6/7

she prefers to be called Marie. She will accept Zee as well.

She wholly believed it was a freak accident. She did not believe her husband was a monster, who created murderous robots and killed kids.

William died when she was 44 (6yrs later)

Michael died when she was 41 (3 years later)

She grieved heavily, but yet still remarried a while down the road. Only 'survivor', if she can be called one. She never took either of her spouses' last names. (William was upset about it, but didn't really do anything, her second didn't really care.)

She had went to 4 years of college for a degree in biology while her kids were growing up (she was a science and medical nerd)

She eventually became a doctor after the rest of the aftons died.

Badass. Best mom ever. She beat some dude's ass. (Michael got in a fight with someone and their father was shit talking Marie the whole time instead of focusing on the actual problem. He agreed to fight in the parking lot. There was a big crowd. And he got his shit beat by a woman a third of his size.)

William also discreetly dosed her with remnant from BV, Elizabeth, and Charlie.

Some general stuff:

Grew her hair out after Elizabeth + BV's death

Shaved her head in early 2010’s, realized her scalp (right side) was discolored, and dyed her hair so the off light-blue-purple color would have a reason to be there. (Remnant staining her skin. Her bone is discolored as well)

Side shave late 2010’s (Left side, she learned her lesson the first time)

Left eye is also very shiny

If anyone asks her about it she says it's glass. Dark off-green Its also slightly transparent, the veins are really obvious up-close

^ shave in the back (under hair. It's cooler and lighter.)

Heterochromia, her right eye is a bluish-gray, the left is was a dark green

She tries things from the new times and if she likes it she will continue to wear it even when it’s gone out of fashion. She looks and feels gorgeous

Both eyebrows are pierced, bottom lip piercing on left side, nose piercing on right. Also has a tongue piercing

Enjoys playing DnD (Oh yeah. CB was her DnD character. William changed her name and almost everything else about her.)

Not a fan of the smell of B-day cake, or cake in general. It's a texture thing.

Very specific and stubborn as an ass

She goes with the flow.

Very aware she should be dead.

People didn't really pay attention to her after the various locations shut down.

Does not particularly care for the internet, but it is convenient sometimes. Flip phone user. Does not need her phone to think for her. She does have a work phone, though

Her flip phone can text, call, and she has a small camera that she rarely uses other than to document Remnant-related stuff

Tried cocaine. Wasn’t a fan. Also occasionally smokes a blunt. Tried vaping but didn’t care for it. She still smokes though.

More detail on the half dead- she has a little trouble balancing, sometimes if she stands still she’ll start to careen to one side and stumble. (Usually the right)

When it gets really bad, she has a fold-out cane in her ‘purse’ (it’s more like a messenger bag. It’s covered in pins, faded on one side. Slings it across her body. Anything you need, she has. She has SPICES in there as well.)

She’ll be doing something, and then the next thing she remembers is that it's done with no memory of completing what she was doing. She came-to at the wheel of her car, actively driving in the middle of the woods with one of William’s prototype robots in the back seat, Henry in the passenger seat mid-conversation.

Later down the line:

She survived getting rabies (past the point that she should have. She died in the hospital.) (she still experiences moderate hydrophobia.)

She got brain cancer twice (family history of it.) (Thanks remnant. Also, the right side of her brain is dead, she cannot see well out of her left eye. Glasses do not help.)

Also, got murdered. Not by William, she didn't see the guy's face unfortunately, but she did help find three other bodies. She woke up in the morgue three days later. The autopsy agent(?) was actually reexamining her, as the Y cut was gone and that was not normal. He screamed as she sat up. He went and got the head Mortician. She (head mortician) was also dumbfounded, and had many questions.

How'd she help find three other bodies? Well, she was dumped in a location with other bodies. Her unseeing eyes remembered everything, and recorded it vaguely to the dead brain. The right side remembered, as best she could put it. When asked how she came back to life, she totally BSed, and said "Marilyn Monroe told me not to die/to open my eyes." And they kind of took it. Assumed she was a lil crazy, after all, she had been legally dead for three days.

Unfortunately, her cover was blown (although there really wasn't one to begin with) =( became local cryptid instead

Before Charlie's remnant decayed away (didn't have much,) she had problems sometimes (walking, muscle tremors, loss of memory for extended periods of time. Described as waking up in somewhere unfamiliar. Sometimes she just was unable to move. Intense headache, pressure in her head, felt like her head was going to explode. Also, sharp pain in her back and her throat, as if cut. She'd also get ice cold, her hands hurt.) Something about the memory properties of the remnant. It remembers the body. It remembers sensations the brain often cannot recall, such as pain. The actual, exact feeling of pain. It remembers. The occasional back pain (between shoulder blades) and throat pain went away as Charlie's remnant decayed.

also, she often gets high fevers, her body often realizing there's no brain activity and suspects rot. And it's alive, and trying to fight off an infection that isn't there.

Despite 0 brain activity in the right side of her brain, her remnant remembers the usual brain activity (medical nerd) and things that should be happening, and the way it felt as it slowly died. And thus, it still performs the correct duties for her to not become a vegetable.

Left eye is also oddly dark, the pupil, sclera, and iris are just one big ol mass inside of a circular orb. She has no pupil or iris, just one solid color.

the dead half of her brain is also a remnant factory, it replaced Charlie's as it decayed.

She also still appears to be in her late 30s

poor depth perception

Local Cryptid

Local teens talk about her in awe

Henry was also bestie with Marie, and was also used as a lab rat. They kept in touch until Henry burnt down FFPS, and himself.

Being married to someone and not aging was also kind of weird. She realized, and didn't know what to do, so she stayed.

No she didn't marry Henry, Idk who she married.

Marie also rediscovered remnant, and recognized it as why she was still alive after so much bullshit. She knew she had foreign remnant inside of her, she just didn't know who's it was. No DNA in remnant. She buried her discovery, but also tested on herself.

Some dude called her about William's old blueprints, (for HW2 and Special Delivery.) And other robots he made. And she supplied.

The dude also didn't think about the fact she should be dead, or the fact she looked 30. And looked exactly like William's wife. He and his supervisor shrugged it off as a coincidence.

she was very, very happy to finally get rid of William's shit, nobody would take it because they said it was 'cursed'. She was allowed to assist with major suspicion.

as BV and Elizabeth's remnant slowly decays, it it's equally replenished by Marie's own remnant.

Doctors were unable to study her brain and body, as her remnant didn't really carefor being dissected and ate through their tools. Mother like daughter I guess. It also rapidly repaired the damage, and caused chemical burns to the staff. She was highly apologetic.

CIRCUS BABY WAS HER BELOVED BRAIN CHILD

She assisted in the recreation (Special Delivery original models and HW2) cuz why not. She added the things she originally had in mind for CB to CB.

Post HW2 CB doesn't have the claw, and instead has a computer in there, connecting to the world wide web. It also contains highly protected sensitive documents. And Elizabeth's bone shards.

Elizabeth's bones were found inside the burned corpse of Scrap Baby, and Marie had a feeling they would like to reside in their host once more, and hid them away inside (special delivery) Circus Baby. Unaware they were her daughter's.

They were too burned to be identified.

During that time that Elizabeth's bones sat in Scrap Baby up to the point where they made it into Special Delivery Circus Baby, Elizabeth had no tether to the physical world.

Also the reason why HW2 Baby and Special Delivery Baby are so silly.

Other physical traits of Marie:

Her organs are flipped. Her heart is on the right chest, etc. Also her heart is backwards.

She only knows this because she cut herself open like the curious med student she is.

her heart is twice the size (ofc it is, she's such a sweetheart)

No complications

Circus Baby and Marie;

She recreated Baby from the ground up, with assistance of some of Henry’s work. (She couldn’t use any of her deceased husband’s as all of his work and research was destroyed during fnaf 6.)

Circus Baby was her brain child, all her idea. All her design. William decided that it would bring more revenue, and built her. He also made her kill children. Ofc, he didn't follow all of her ideas, deeming them 'too difficult' (they werent) and expensive, a waste of time to impliment. And the ones he did, he called his own, out of her earshot.

Circus Baby was always special to her. She was her own idea, and she considered Circus Baby with pride, despite the fact that almost everything changed about her. She kept her own version of her close to her heart. This version would later be reborn, as Help Wanted 2 and Special Delivery rolled around.

C is becoming the brainchild she developed so long ago for so long.

She is so proud of C. She will rant about her in the kind of way she also reserved for her (human, deceased) kids

She can also feel E’s Remnant pulling her to E’s bones when she gets close. But she also doesn't know it's Elizabeth's bones nor remnant.

Someone voicing how proud they are of C is doing things to her (Circus Baby) (Ofc, Ballora and a handful of others did so too, but like. WIlliam never did that. All he did was complain about her. So ofc, she is all for Marie. She isn’t exactly sure why she’s so proud though, and is aware of how she is in fact Marie’s brainchild. Its unfamiliar to her. William didn’t treat her very well.)

Marie is also one of the only people C will let touch her 100% of the time. It's comfortable.

Marie has also noticed that C is protective of her in some instances. C considers this an equivalent response to the positivity of Marie toward her. In a ‘this person actually cares for me. And about me. This feels like equal repayment for such’ kind of way.

Also, Marie is the only person that C wont complain about maintenance to. She doesn’t like the mechanics and doesn’t really trust them too much with herself, the other funtimes, her variants, or Ballora and her variants

Her additions/edits around HW2 and Special Delivery:

Ballora looks decent now

Computer inside Circus Baby instead of claw

Attempted to make Circus Baby sillier and ruffles

Made Circus Baby more resourceful; she uncut the corners William cut. Circus Baby requires less regular maintenance and uses less other resources.

Replaced B-day cake smell with Cherries (She likes the smell) also a mechanism so that the smell can change (like the little trees you can put in your car to make it smell good, but inside a robot.)

She experimented with (her own) Remnant, and discovered she could add regenerative properties; ArB has received such, and seems to melt slower. So far, there are little errors, though ArB does seem prone to right-brain more intensively.

(P.S. She was testing on other, nonsentient things first. Like motorcycles and the engine of her car. At some point, she figured it out and applied it to another problem.)

Helped develop the way Broiler Baby works, and added safety measures.

Marie's remnant research:

Marie’s earlier notes about Remnant are entirely chicken scratch and anxiously shaky, with some panicked thoughts written down among the notes. She was also majorly freaking out because she literally died. She remembered how it felt to be in such a ‘animalistic state’, in her own words, about the fear of water. She felt completely powerless, and was not a fan. She would donate blood because of the whole kinda-beat-rabies thing, but she’s AB blood type. She slowly got over the fear of consuming water, but it didn’t go 100% away. It still kind of haunts her.

She also has experimented with her remnant, (nonliving things specifically.) And studies it closely.

She has learned that the whole weird-pains thing she was experiencing for so long was actually memory from foreign remnant, and her own remnant is keeping the tomfoolery up because it has some sort of system to ‘remember’, and that foreign remnant remembers that ‘hey this hurts really bad, we’re injured’ and so hers had learned from it ‘hey this hurts really bad, we’re injured’ despite not actually experiencing the sensation itself.

She has attempted to put it under a microscope, and realized light was unable to penetrate it, however she has noticed that when set out with hydrogen peroxide, it will clump together and attempt to slide away from it. She had set it in a dish, and it flopped onto the floor with a splat. She stared at the inky black puddle dumbfounded.

She has noticed that under black light, it shimmers and glows brightly.

It is a non-Newtonian fluid. AKA it acts something like oobleck.

It floats in the middle of water as a spherical orb. It shouldn't be able to do that. Substances don't do that. Consistency of maple syrup when room temperature, however its viscosity changes with the temperature, and it gets runnier as it gets warmer. It solidifies under force, and is very crumbly.

It can boil at about the same melting point of copper, but will also spontaneously catch fire at the same time. When it catches fire, it is destroyed. And smells like burnt hair and blood (in her case specifically, Remnant from the robots smell like blood and burnt plastic/rubber, though that smell mostly comes from the body itself, rather than the remnant) It does not seem to have a vapor phase. It is either solid, liquid, or gone. Abnormal. That’s also not a thing that substances do. Might it be alive? When it is cooled to the freezing point of water, it spontaneously changes between being a solid, boiling, then becoming a liquid, and then goes back to solid, over and over again. I forgot the name for this. She also quite often looks at what she is doing and goes ‘what am I doing, I work at a hospital?’ and then continues on. (This isn’t the field she studied in.)

She was better able to do research on remnant, both because she was full of it herself, and because she was better able to see the effects, as she could pretty much study herself 24/7.

She also got more indepth research, more helpful research, as she wasnt just focusing on making herself immortal, and rather on the effects it had on objects. (cough cough, William Afton.)

No human or animal testing. She actually has morals.

Marie and William (ew)

She visited Fazbear Frights and told William (didn't know it was him because springlocked) that he was ugly. Also, she thought the whole FF thing was insensitive to the children that were murdered. And then the place burned down. She'd be lying if she said she wasn't happy that it burnt down.

Was not a very big fan of Ballora because of how sexualized she was. She recognized how she was built ‘in her image’. More like W’s gross sexualized image of an ideal wife. Ballora still makes her a little uncomfortable.

William slipped the remnant into her coffee. How tf did William ever get a woman like her.

Also, she was almost 100% the complete opposite of what William wanted in a wife (mostly just the childcare was fine with him. He wanted kids, but he didn't want to take care of them very much, thought that was her job. She made him take care of them.)

Well, if William didn't like her, why did they get married? Pretty trophy wife. Marie was drop-dead gorgous and the only woman who actually enjoyed being in his presence because she thought he was a weird little guy and found it kind of charming (she didn't see the entire picture until after marriage.) He was a intelligent weirdo, though of course, as we know, he wasn't intelligent all the time. He wasn't weird in a silly way, or a normal kind of weird way, he was weird in a 'im going to dissect this dead fox I found to see how it works inside/what it died from' kind of way.

He was a psychopath, a murderer in the making, and Marie didn't know he dissected dead things because he would go to his workshop in the shed out back. It had a cooler. And he was very sanitary with his work, and would make sure not to make a giant mess.

Marie also didn't see most of the murderer-in-the-making because she either brushed it off as him being a kind of weird, or she just was blissfully unaware.

She did see the suspicious stuff in the animatronics, though. Anytime she asked, William would give an annoyed look, scoff, and reluctantly give her a vague answer, so she mostly had to make assumptions. He left the blueprints spread out on the kitchen table one day.

Why in the world would Ballora ever need to mimic voices, if she wasn't the lead singer? Why would she need to mimic voices if she weren't some sort of puppet/play attraction? (Justified as to keep children from going places they shouldn’t. Deter and Misdirect Remote Activation.)

Why would Funtime Foxy need to copy the voice of parental figures and replay them? (She asked Henry, and he said William explained it was so that he could calm down children with a familiar, comforting voice.) Why did they have a variable scent release? (For the same reason, she guessed.)

Why did Funtime Freddy have a storage tank? (For party supplies.) Why did Bon Bon need to track parents? (To make sure that they didn’t mess with Funtime Freddy, as apparently he was messed with by adults frequently. He was not.) Why did he have voice mimicking too? (She assumed the same reason Funtime Foxy could. To calm children, and because of the hand puppet, which she didn’t realize was its own animatronic.)

Misc;

She was in the outskirts of New York during 9/11

She also had very neat, pretty handwriting until her right side went to shit.

Total sweetheart, but also badass. And intelligent. Paid close attention to details and didn't cut corners.

TEEN HIPPIE MARIE!!!!!

She is also very curious of how much damage she can take, without passing the point of no return to breathing.

Highschool sweetheart with William. Apparently her type is weird guys and just women in general LMFAO

Actively going to law school (why not)

Why does Marie look the way she does? (Piercings, ‘tattoos‘, the way she dresses?) Because she didn't like the attention of being stared at by strangers, curious as to why this random lady is in the 2000’s looking like she walked straight out of the 80’s. It was not really a disguise, but it helped her stay a little more discreet with the changing times.

Wait, how did she become immortal???? Answer; William put remnant inside of her while she was still alive, and that remnant revived her when she got brain cancer the first time. Why did she get brain cancer? It was an inherited trait from her dad’s side.

Each time she died, along with the natural decay of foreign remnant in her body that was unable to be regenerated because it was not her life force, remnant was consumed. This lead her body, the first time it died, to develop places in her brain where remnant was being produced to keep the balance. All of this occured in the right side of her brain, where the cancer was. The cancer started to produce remnant instead of malignant cells. And when she got brain cancer again, rinse and repeat.

Like a ‘hey, we brought this woman back to life but there's an imbalance in the body! That is not good! We can make more to replace what is lost! It might be better to concentrate it more as well!!! Yeah, let’s do that.'

images!

click on image for better details, it cut up the left two images.

✨️✨️ Zichaierg is my own brain child, a fictitious mushroom!! It is very parasitic!✨️✨️

!!Note to Jester ( @aceinacloset ) if you're reading this, Katherine can only properly interact with the Right side of Lavinia's body, consider it the dead half!! She can only see Katherine in her left eye, as it is the dead eye! =D also she thinks Katherine smells Iike blood and cherries. So.!!

[arrows-unofficial-ocs]

For the plot bunny askgame: Jamie Dornan (Belfast) + Ghosts (CBS) + Hetty Woodstone love interest, please??

@dancingsunflowers-ocs 💖

name: michael joseph coyle | daniel michael “danny” coyle

age: died at 40 (michael) | died at 12 (danny)

sexuality: heterosexual (michael) | heterosexual (danny)

job: dockworker (michael) | newsie (danny)

love interest: hetty woodstone (michael) | n/a (danny)

brief summary: it was said that widower michael coyle had died of a broken heart. he’d been called up to woodstone manor to retrieve the body of his 12-year-old son, danny, and the next thing michael knew he was dead. only he hadn’t expected to still be around and surrounded by a viking, a native american, a revolutionary war soldier, a grumpy woman, and most shockingly of all, his son. hetty woodstone had been horrified to discover that the irish had infiltrated her afterlife and her snide remarks had driven the father and son duo away from the main house. michael and danny had remained away from the house for over a century when sam and jay discover them by accident. sam invites them to join the house again. at first, hetty is offended by the mere presence of the irish in her home. but slowly as she starts to learn more about michael and as she begins to let go of some of her prejudices, things begin to change. of course, she can’t help but refer to danny as the devil child… but maybe the irish aren’t that bad after all.

5 adjectives to describe them: stubborn, hardworking, quiet, intelligent, paternal (michael) | mouthy, hardworking, stubborn, intelligent, creative (danny)

faceclaim: jamie dornan (michael) | jude hill (danny)

send me a fandom and i’ll create a plot bunny for it

[westeroswisdom]

Nikolaj Coster-Waldau has eight seasons of faux Medieval cred thanks to his character Jaime Lannister on Game of Thrones. In an upcoming production by the BBC and CBS Studios he gets to recreate some actual 11th century history in the series King and Conqueror.

Nikolaj's character never got to rule the Seven Kingdoms. But in King and Conqueror he portrays William the Conqueror who became King of England and ultimately the founder of the royal line which still reigns in London.

George R.R. Martin was heavily influenced by English, French, and Scottish history in ASoIaF. GRRM may have had William the Conqueror in mind when writing about Aegon I Targaryen.

In 1066, the English King Edward the Confessor died without an heir. As if dying without a direct descendant to claim the throne wasn't one of the most chaotic things a king could do, Edward took it a step further: He allegedly promised the throne to both his brother-in-law, Harold Godwinson, and to a distant relative, William of Normandy. Harold and William weren't the only ones with a claim, either. While the pope endorsed William's claim, the resulting war of succession would force Harold to fight Harald Hardrada, the king of Norway, who also claimed the thrones of Denmark and England and invaded the latter alongside Harold's brother, Tostig. Anglo-Saxon King Harold would have to defeat Harald before meeting William and his Norman invasion at the Battle of Hastings, all in the same year. If that sounds to you like a lot of drama that could easily be its own television series, you aren't alone. CBS Studios and the BBC are teaming to produce "King and Conqueror," a show about this most pivotal event in English history. James Norton ("Happy Valley") and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau ("Game of Thrones") are attached to be the titular King Harold and William the Conqueror, respectively. [ ... ] Historians might disagree on whose side of the story is more accurate, but screenwriters and producers agree that no matter what happened, the 1,000-year-old story will make for great television. Michael Robert Johnson ("Sherlock Holmes") will pen the series while Baltasar Kormákur ("2 Guns") will direct. "King and Conqueror" begins production in 2024.

There's actually a physical artistic link between the account of William's conquest in the 1060s and Game of Thrones.

After William's victory, his half-brother Bishop Odo was apparently the commissioner of a tapestry embroidered with scenes which tell the epic story of William's conquest. The cloth, now known as the Bayeaux Tapestry is an amazing 70 meters long. It can be viewed here.

So volunteers at the Ulster Museum in Northern Ireland where GoT was produced created a tapestry in the style of the Bayeaux Tapestry which tells the story of all eight seasons of GoT. See our 2019 post about it.

[ncisfranchise-source]

Brian Dietzen had a tall order when it came to the latest NCIS episode he cowrote with Scott Williams: the tribute to Dr. Donald “Ducky” Mallard and the actor who played him, the late David McCallum. But it’s one the two were more than ready to take on.

“When you lose someone very close, you can fall into just crying and mourning continually, and while we wanted to pay homage to him, we didn’t want that to be it,” Dietzen tells TV Insider ahead of the February 19 episode. “We wanted to celebrate the fun times as well, and we wanted to celebrate the amazing work that this great actor did on our show and also honor the character that he created. And I think both those people, the character and the actor, would love to see us continuing on and honoring him through continuing to do good work.”

The Season 21 premiere ended with Dietzen’s Dr. Jimmy Palmer calling Alden Parker (Gary Cole) to tell him of Ducky’s death. Now, the focus will turn to celebrating him—and solving the case he was working on before he died. Below, Dietzen talks about writing the episode and shares memories with McCallum, going back to their first scene together.

Talk about how you co-writing this episode came about because it is so fitting that you did so.

Brian Dietzen: We had the work stoppage this last year because of the [writers’ and actors] strikes, so we have a 10-episode order this season instead of our normal 22, sometimes 24 episodes. I’ve been cowriting with Scott Williams just about once a year, the last couple years, and so this year, I let my showrunners, David North and Steven Binder, know that I wasn’t going to request a script because we have a wonderful writing staff and I felt like, oh, there’s no need for me to step in there because we only have 10 episodes. Then David passed away, and I think that Scott really wanted to write his farewell episode and he thought it would be fitting if it would be a co-written with me. David and Steve said, that’s super appropriate. We all think that’s a really good thing, and you two obviously work well together, so go off and do your thing. I was really honored to be asked to do so, and I just wanted to make him proud.

What was your approach to this episode? Because you have to balance honoring David, honoring Ducky, but then also the case and the team’s grief.

Yeah, I think it’s really important that this remains an NCIS episode. It cannot just be some series of flashbacks to prior Ducky Mallard scenes. It was really important for us that we still have a case to solve. You’re living in a legacy of this person that you’ve lost, being Ducky, so we decided to craft a case where there would be something that would thematically link the case to the team’s loss, and those two don’t necessarily have to go hand in glove. They don’t have to be related. It’s not as though the case has to be related to Ducky in any way, but thematically speaking, it really should be.

Michael Yarish/CBS

What can you say about any characters returning or the acknowledgement of them and what Ducky meant to them?

What we tried to do with this episode was we tried honor the team that he worked with, and when I say the team, I mean the greater team, not just this team that we have right now that involves Parker, Torres [Wilmer Valderrama], Knight [Katrina Law], McGee [Sean Murray], Palmer, Kasie [Diona Reasonover], and Vance [Rocky Carroll]. The greater team is all of the different teams he’s worked with, many of which involved Gibbs [Mark Harmon], and then of course there’s Tony [Michael Weatherly] and Ziva [Cote de Pablo], and there’s Bishop [Emily Wickersham], Abby [Pauley Perrette], of course, and everyone in between.

And so when we wrote this thing, while it’s certainly not a show that’s just all about clips or anything like that, there are these remembrances of Ducky and we wanted to see him interacting with people that are on our current team and also people that are on our iterations of our team, too. I think we did a pretty good job with that, and I think that people like to see that they’re getting to see their Ducky many years past as well as the more recent.

What moments working with David came to mind while you were writing the episode then filming it?

Oh, about 6,000, if I’m being honest. I was going through, and I was looking up my first scene with him with a tape recorder at the end of Season 1. I was looking at “The Meat Puzzle” in Season 2. I was looking at “Detour,” a Steven Binder classic where we’re being chased through the woods directed by Mario Van Peebles. That was actually a really cool episode to look back on because David, if I look at it now, I thought, oh man, he was 80 years old, 81 years old when we shot that episode. And it’s Jimmy and Ducky running through a wooded forest at night in the snow, and obviously asking an 80-something-year old man to do that for continual night shoots, that’s not okay. So they ended up building a whole forest on our set and made it snow [and] we shot it during the day.

Monty Brinton/CBS

Some of those things hit me and memories hit me. And so as I’m watching all these old shows as we’re writing this new show, I can’t tell you how many just good times that we had together, and I don’t want to try to summarize it in just a couple of quotes here because it’s tough to summarize 20 years of friendship and 20 years of camaraderie and mentorship and great scenes together being shared. But what I will say is that the thing that I’ll always remember and that hit me so hard when I was watching all of these things is just what a terrific worker David McCallum was continually. He always showed up prepared. He knew his things. He did every scene with the absolute best of his ability. And that’s something that I watched him do for years and tried to adopt for myself as well. So yeah, it’s been an honor.

How do you remember Jimmy and Ducky’s relationship?

I see it as a partnership and somewhat of a mentorship. I remember there’s one point at which some writer on our staff years ago—I can’t remember who the person was exactly—started wanting to get into this, oh, he’s like a son to Ducky, this is like his father figure, and had some lines about that. And David said, “Oh, no, no, no, no, no. They’re partners, and they’re work colleagues. The second we start getting into a hierarchy of, he’s my son or I’m his father sort of thing, there’ll be a power dynamic that I don’t want to explore too much. I want it to be that Jimmy can speak his mind when he needs to and so can Ducky.” And that’s the way he treated it. It was really about, we’re in this thing together.

I think that was what was really, really great about those two characters is that they both lifted each other up. Jimmy had this reverence for Ducky that was so easy to see, and Ducky, the moment that he found out that Jimmy had passed his medical examiner’s license test, he was a doctor, the first thing he says is “Dr. Palmer” with all this pride in his voice. And I’d be lying if I didn’t say it made me teary to think about because David treated me that way as well in my personal life. He was very kind, very proud when I started to take over more of the load of the M.E. at NCIS. He’d call me and say, “I love the scene you did. I love this and that. I’m so proud you’re doing this in my stead.” And so yeah, art imitated life here and there.

What do you recall about your first and last scenes together?

Our first scene together, I remember I booked this episode. It was a one day guest star, and so I was just going to go and do one scene for NCIS, and it was a spinoff of JAG, and I think I’d seen one episode of it at the time, and I’ll be honest, I didn’t know who David McCallum was, and I’d never seen The Man from U.N.C.L.E.. At the time, I’d never seen The Great Escape. So I was pretty uncultured. I walked in, and I did this scene with this really terrific actor. That’s all I knew. I just knew, well, he’s really good, he’s really fantastic. And so I went home and I looked up, who is this guy? What has he been in before? Only to find out that he was like one of film and TV’s Beatles from the 1960s. [Laughs] He was a living legend, and that was pretty great.

And what was wonderful is that we got along well and the producer at the time, Don Bellisario, saw, oh, those two work really well together. Let’s have Brian come back next week and then the next week and then the next week. It’s because the two of us worked well together and we worked well on our scenes that I got to keep working. So that was really, really wonderful.

I’ll say one of the last scenes that I remember doing with David in person—because over the last few years, David was shooting most of his scenes in New York and we would have him on a screen or an iPad or something like that—was Ducky and Jimmy at a diner just eating together. There was no case that we were talking about, there was no red herring or anything like that. It was just two guys sitting there talking about a girl that Jimmy likes, and it was a friend listening to another friend over a sandwich. I thought, looking back on it, that’s really wonderful. Because we did that so often within our autopsy scenes where the scene is about this body before us and all of the evidence that we have to deliver to the rest of the team, but the dialogue could be about just about anything. We could be joking about things. He could be going off on some diatribe about something that was seemingly unrelated but it really came through historically in this situation. And so yeah, it was a cool scene to go back and reflect on.

[kickmag]

R.I.P. Tito Jackson

Tito Jackson of The Jackson 5 died Sunday of a heart attack at age 70 in New Mexico. Jackson breaking his father's guitar string was the catalyst that started The Jackson 5. Joe Jackson discovered his son's musical talent after scolding him for secretly playing his instrument. Mr. Jackson purchased Tito his own guitar and convinced him and his other sons, Jackie and Jermaine, to form a musical group. One year later, in 1964, Marlon and Michael joined the band. The Jackson 5 released their first single, Big Boy," in 1968 on Steeltown Records, a local record label. Joe Jackson managed to get his sons a record deal with Motown in 1969, and from there they became teen sensations thanks to hits like "The Love You Save," "ABC," and "I Want You Back." The Jackson 5 traveled the world and performed for such luminaries as the Queen of England. They were the first boy band, and their success produced Jacksonmania, where fans mobbed them wherever they went. The merchandise built around them included posters, coloring books, stickers, and their own Saturday morning cartoon. Tito Jackson did not play guitar on those Motown records, but he started writing songs, and his instrument was heard on recordings after they signed to CBS in 1976. Fans were treated to his guitar playing when The Jackson 5 performed live. Jackson played with his family throughout their changes from The Jackson 5 to simply The Jacksons. They still toured at the time of his death and were seen on social media last week acknowledging a memorial built for Michael in Munich, Germany. 

As The Jacksons, they had hits in the '70s with "Enjoy Yourself," and "Show You The Way To Go" while they were on the Philadelphia International label. The family also had their own variety show at this time. By the late '70s and early '80s, the group released their big single, "Shake Your Body (Down To The Ground)," and had further hits with "Can You Feel It," "This Place Hotel," and "Lovely One." They continued to release music until their last studio album, 2300 Jackson Street, which came out in 1989. In 1997, they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In 1995, Jackson's three sons, T.J., Taj, and Taryll, released their debut album, Brotherhood, as the group 3T.  They were signed to their uncle Michael's MJJ label and mentored by him. 3T was one of the biggest-selling groups in Europe, and their father Tito recorded a Jackson 5 tribute with them. 

In the early 2000s, Jackson embarked on a solo career and started playing in blues clubs with his band. B.B. King also handpicked Jackson to play in his band. Jackson had a hit record, "Get It Baby," with Big Daddy Kane in 2016 from his debut album, Tito Time.  He released his second solo album, Under Your Spell, in 2021. Jackson had recently moved to Claremore, Oklahoma, and had plans for an entertainment center in the Tulsa Arts District, a festival, and a documentary. 

[goblin-the-clown]

Corpse?

I'm so mad because I started writing my answer and I had written so much but my phone died and didn't save the draft 😭😭

Anyway thank you for asking, I love talking about him :D

Michael is the one mainly taking care of their siblings for most of their life, when he becomes a teenager he starts to become resentful towards not only his father but also his siblings. They notice Evan become more quiet and closed off (for reasons I'll probably talk about if I make a post about him) and decide to take their anger out on him. Scaring him whenever he can and pulling cruel pranks on him with his friends.

‼️TW for mentions of suicide beyond this point if you don't want to read that‼️

After the bite they hardly leave the house and barely talks to anyone. He doesn't know how he's supposed to get over what happened and keep on living so he attempts to kill himself. William luckily calls an ambulance and they arrive in time to help him. After this, William, being the responsible and caring parent that he is, decides instead of making sure his child is ok and trying to help them he tells his ten year old to not leave his side so it doesn't happen again. So Liz and Mike end up spending a lot of time with each other, despite arguing occasionally they start to form a bond which is immediately shattered when Elizabeth goes "missing".

During fnaf 2, he spends a lot of time at the pizzeria which is where he runs into Jeremy who is working as a dayshift security guard at this point. They end up going out a few times but since Michael can't have anything nice, Jeremy gets moved over to the nightshift and is killed by one of the animatronics. Yeah and then William decides he wants Michael out of the house during the night (so he can get up to nefarious stuff yk) and tells them to start working as the night guard at the new Freddy's location. He sees all of the freaky ghost robot shit and William is like "oh shit he knows I killed those kids" so he goes and sets them free and the whole springlock thing happens.

A few years later, Michael finds a note from William telling them to take up a job at CB's and try to find Elizabeth. He knows there's absolutely no way his sister is still alive if she's down there but they take the job anyway and then get scooped by Ennard.

Once he has control of his body again and Ennard is rejected, he starts to sort of become very cryptid like? Like they don't really see themselves as human anymore so he starts like eating out of bins and living in dark alleyways until Henry finds him and they start to remember everything again. So Henry has basically dedicated his life to figuring out who killed Charlie and once he does he begins looking for William and finds fazbears frights. He then tells Michael to take up a job there and burn the place down on the fifth night.

They both realise that they need to put an end to this and decide to start building a new pizzeria to trap all the souls inside. During his last week, Michael starts doing all the stuff he never did as a kid and basically trying to have as much fun as possible before their soul is set to rest.

If this sounds rushed that's because it is lol. Tysm for asking!

[drinkinboilingcoffee]

Serious FNAF movie thing again, hear me out: individual movie for each Afton WITH completely unique cinematography styles and framing based on the characters POVs. Examples (incoherent drabble warning):

-Michael: Mike’s movie would be the most traditional. It would have a classic slasher horror kind of vibe (maybe a bit more character centric); gore, creepy music, jumpscares, etc. Until it’s just… not. When the most horrific scenes happen (Bite of 83, scooper, finding out William is the killer, etc.), the music goes silent. The framing gets more jittery and broken. In the moments where it hits Mike hardest, the idea that he can pretend this is all a game or joke or his imagination vanishes and the world becomes as realistic as possible. -Evan/CC: The important thing about Evan’s POV is blurring how much is real and how much is his imagination. A multi-media effect would look amazing; imagine when he looks at his toys and the animatronics, they’re covered over by cartoonified drawings or claymation. The world itself could maybe distort more when he’s scared- look at artist like Jack Stauber for inspiration for the sorts of styles that look like they should be cute but turn out creepy instead (actually, if we could get Jack to voice act the dolls-) -Charlie & Henry: If these two had a movie I think it should be a conjoined one for a few reasons. For one, one of the bigger complaints people have about both characters is that their characters and arcs end up being nothing but projections of the other, that their characters are too dependent on each other. But what if we actually leaned into that? I’m kind of thinking Wes Anderson style symmetry in the shots- put the two side by side as much as possible until it becomes a signature. Then break that. Once Charlie dies, have Henry keep standing to his side in the shots, only Charlie is no longer there to fill hers. Maybe even do some reprises of the shots and songs with the Puppet in Charlie’s place. -Elizabeth: Elizabeth’s filming is unique in that it doesn’t use any filming techniques to look more frightening. It uses them to look less. The thing about Elizabeth is that I don’t think she’d ever admit or acknowledge how messed up everything is until it was too late. She tries as hard as she can to make her situation seem perfect and that spills over into her perception of reality. The lighting is bright, the colors are vivid, the music is calming. This almost never changes. Not when she’s being abused by William, not when Evan gets chomped, not at Charlies funeral, never. Whatever triumphant track plays when she finally gets to see CB? It keeps playing when she gets scooped by her, not fully cutting off until even after the screen goes dark. Maybe use lighting and focus tricks to make things seem hazy or like they’re in a dream, then if at some point Liz actually has a breakdown and the gravity of everything finally hits her, the world becomes entirely clear for the first time. -William: The best way I can think to describe this film is dissociated. The colors should be monochrome and diluted, the lighting hazy, any music used in a way that gives the distinct feeling it only exists in the scene’s background. Only a few objects (and people), the ones that fill William’s attention, should have their colors normal (the animatronics, remnant, Elizabeth, Henry (definitely Henry), etc.). Maybe when William is in the suit and in character as Bonnie, the background and music become more clear? If I had to give one piece of media to draw inspiration from, look at Joker. The camerawork should also be jittery, and if we could bring in the blood-hits-the-camera effect, that would look perfect.

ABSOLUTELY reblog with additional ideas I want to know if there’s any other serious fnaf movie angst stans out there

[isagrimorie]

I will preface this by saying I don’t hate seasons 1 and 2 of Picard, in fact, I really enjoyed some of the ideas and treatment on the first 2 seasons, and had fun with the first half of season 2 before Akiva took the reins.

This is said out of love more than anything else:

I think I will always be annoyed that Zhabran died in between seasons 1 and 2 just so Laris can fill in the role of a love interest for Picard season 2 because of narrative convenience and Covid.

Orla Brady is fantastic and I did want more of her in the show — and if Laris and Picard hooked up, I wanted it to have been Laris, Zhabran and Picard.

(Honestly, it’s why I find myself not being into Laris/Picard because it always felt like an odd fit without Zhabran.)

It’s not just seasons 2 and 3 who wasted Laris and Zhabran, season 1 did as well simply because it was 10 episodes shorter and as someone who loves all the Borg stuff, needed less of the Borg cube since the Borg were nothing more than dress setting for season 1.

Season 1’s story arc was too expansive for just 10 episodes to handle, IMO.

It had interesting ideas in it and one I appreciate but the crafting of the season and story was— I don’t get why CBS/Paramount didn’t pair Michael Chabon up with a seasoned showrunner — this is what the networks usually do when a neophyte becomes a showrunner. They pair them with a seasoned one and for the first 2 seasons they work on.

It also finally made sense why the pacing of the first episodes felt off to me, and had a lot of scenes where people talked and nothing seems to happen outside of it.

I just learned the first 2 episodes was originally 1 episode and then a decision was made during or after production to make it into 2 episodes. Eating up an episode so things could have added more to the characters.

But also STOP with 10 episode seasons for shows like Trek DAMMIT. There’s so much story and character stuff left on the table because there’s hardly any runway.

I thought Discovery season 5 would have 13 episodes back for the final season but nope. I thought SNW would have 13 episodes because the producers/showrunners were clear they wanted more than 10 episodes to tell the story but Nope.

This 10 episode seasons is driving me bonkers. Give me character interactions back.

Give me scenes where characters would be just shooting the breeze in the Bridge for a minute or two. It was done to pad the time BUT GUESS WHAT, it added a lot to the character dynamics!

Also, we would never have gotten the popular DS9 Federation / Humans are Root beer scene if they didn’t need time to fill it.

Anyway, this post has gone everywhere.

[fyrefrostanimus]

I still need to finish full references for most of the characters in the Everyone Lives AU but I might as well infodump what I know about the FNaF 6 cast after the fire if anyone wants to read it.

Michael

So, Frailty's remnant logic. If you know you know, if you don't it basically means that he recovers really quickly because molten soul metal is a hell of a drug. Mike actually didn't start recovering until AFTER the fire, since most of his body was rotten to the point it would take forever. Then the fire burned the parts that were stopping the remnant from really working (as you may guess it did not burn as Henry had anticipated) and it really was a shock when Michael passed out in the middle of the floor in front of everyone because his lungs just completely reformed and he hadn't needed to breathe in so long he'd just forgotten.

After he fully recovered (basically he looks like a normal human being again), his eyes took on a silver tone instead of the previous gray-blue. A little nod to the Silver Eyes trilogy even if it's just me taking the name literally.

Honestly way too much of Mike's stuff here is just "yeah this is how having remnant in his bloodstream affects him", so last one: while ghosts just phase through most people, Michael's a solid object (usually ghosts can only physically interact with other ghosts/directly haunted objects). Also he's kinda stuck being 23 forever.

Michael really likes Mother Mother, his favorite album is O My Heart. This might seem random but just listen to Body and you'll probably get it.

Since this AU came from nostalgia from an ask blog I used to frequent, he figures out that the older animatronics are still out there and goes around collecting them one way or another.

Henry

Charlie kinda shoved his soul into Lefty. She refuses to elaborate why to him.

Henry's a bit upset that he's still here, but maybe that's a good thing since no one else seemed to die in the fire.

Charlie

Her main reason for shoving her dad into Lefty was that THIS being his solution to keep her there pissed her off. Before you get on me for mischaracterizing her, imagine trying to fall asleep, but whenever you're about to nod off something wakes you up again so you're just constantly cranky from being tired for a whole week. That's basically what it was like insider Lefty for her.

She was inside the Puppet for a week before leaving it, and most of that time was spent inside a cardboard box that Michael was about to put into recycling. Box is box and Charlie was tired.

Charlie can interact more with the physical world, unlike most ghosts (eg. picking objects up, having more choice in when she phases through things, etc.).

William

He's just completely out. Everyone else could at least move after the fire (although Mike did have one of his legs charred to the point it crumbled when he tried to walk on it), but he's in UCN right now. Elizabeth in CB had to carry him out of the building.

William does still twitch occasionally, so he's obviously not dead. To reduce suspicion from the house smelling like someone died inside, they keep him in the basement and check on him once in a while to see if he woke up.

Elizabeth and Circus Baby

I got a lot to say on Elizabeth, honestly the reason I made this post was because I thought about her a lot while drawing her and I didn't want to forget it. Eventually I just decided "screw it, this IS the main AU I think about anyways so why not give everyone who wants to know an intro?". I'll color the text as it corresponds to each (green for Liz, blue for CB).

Originally she planned on only staying at Michael's house until William woke up and they split off (not like she would tell him). Elizabeth only stayed longer because it became really apparent that he wasn't getting up for a long while and she didn't want to leave without William.

She died in 1987 shortly after the second Missing Childrens Incident, and hadn't actually left Circus Baby until after the fire. So she spent about 36 years with no break inside the 7-foot-tall robot, and was extremely used to that. Once she's out and herself again, Elizabeth is suddenly about 4 feet tall and feels completely different. The closest thing I think to how she'd feel is weak/defenseless.

Michael managed to tell Elizabeth that William full well knew that Circus Baby would kill her if she went near it because that's what she was created to do, even having an emergency override: he just didn't pay enough attention to use it in time. She does end up believing this but it left her in a situation where she just couldn't trust anyone in the house for a while. William was shown to not really care about her as much as she thought he did, and she still didn't trust Michael. Elizabeth didn't trust Henry or Charlie either, and the rest of the Funtimes kicked Circus Baby (and by extension her) out to survive on her own. Eventually she built enough trust with everyone but it really did take a while.

The original MCI kids and Evan show up eventually, and Elizabeth subconsciously would count them and only really interact closely with one at a time when it was just the two of them. It's a habit she picked up from her time in Circus Baby and I don't think it really ever left her. So Elizabeth looks really shy at first, but really she's just functioning off of something that she has for years.

Circus Baby is still Scrap Baby when it comes to looks, but still goes by her normal name.

She has the claw on her right arm but no actual reason to use it, so sometimes she'll clamp down on something and not let go just for fun. This annoys basically everyone else since occasionally it will be one of their arms.

CB and Elizabeth still get along really well. CB's the only one Elizabeth trusts during that time period where no one else seemed trustworthy.

Everyone just calls Circus Baby either by her full name or CB (like I did here sometimes). But no one under any circumstances calls her just Baby. More from their own preference.

Molten Freddy

The Funtimes (minus Circus Baby who is still exiled) aren't exactly Molten Freddy anymore. They separated into their different characters again but take their sweet time figuring out how to take a form other than just a blob again. They'll figure it out eventually.

By eventually, I mean when Michael finally caves and goes back to the bunker for their casings. If Circus Baby can do it and not get locked back in, there's no way he can't (I would not doubt that the remains of his previous internal organs are still there, but he wasn't thinking about that part).

They get really excited seeing some of the most mundane slice-of-life things. Mike's building a LEGO set since he hasn't had enough time to do so in a while? They're immediately over there watching. The Funtimes probably haven't seen vents that aren't large enough for a grown man to crawl through and are questioning about why they exist if not as a mode of quick transportation around the house.

The Rockstars

Not much about them, but there's some notable things about the Rockstars I wanted to put here to finish this post off.

Rockstar Freddy's fucking dead. I'm not even holding back, he overheated in the fire and no amount of repairs are going to bring him back (UCN reference lol).

All the surviving Rockstars have some pretty bad fire damage, but none of them really care about it. The nice part of not having as much of a programmed personality is that you don't care how you look quite as much.

With Freddy gone, Rockstar Bonnie and Foxy do vocals together. Despite their grouping being called the Rockstars they actually do more country songs than anything.

[tabney2023]

Last Christmas by Wham!

Last Christmas was recorded in August 1984 at Advision Studios in London. George Michael wrote, performed, produced and played every single instrument on the track.

Wham! Last Christmas (YouTube Video)—George Michael & Andrew Ridgeley

 “Last Christmas, I gave you my heart, but the very next day, you gave it away. This year, to save me from tears, I'll give it to someone special.” ~George Michael

Wham! Last Christmas Crewneck Sweatshirt on Amazon

Andrew Ridgeley said, “Christmas was a big deal for Yog (nickname for George Michael), always. Last Christmas had to convey all of that sense of Christmas as we perceived it…a fantasy. Spirits were really high as you could imagine. It was a remarkable video shoot. We knew we had a #1 Hit on our hands. It was released on December 3, 1984 via CBS Records internationally. It spent 5 consecutive weeks at #2 on the U.K. Singles Chart.

Last Christmas by Wham! (3 tracks available on Amazon)

In the U.K., Last Christmas finally topped the charts on January 1, 2021, 36 years after its original 1984 release. Coincidentally, with the death of George Michael on December 25, 2016, Last Christmas reached #7 on the U.K. Singles Chart for 5 weeks—December 8, 2016 to January 5, 2017.

**********************************************************************

British Singer George Michael’s Last Christmas

George Michael was an English singer, songwriter, and record producer. He was a global superstar, adored worldwide, but died alone in his home at the age of 53 on December 25, 2016.

[whileiamdying]

Cass Elliot’s Death Spawned a Horrible Myth. She Deserves Better

The Mamas & the Papas singer was known for her wit, her voice and her skill as a connector. For 50 years, a rumor has overshadowed her legacy.

Michael Putland/Getty Images

By Lindsay Zoladz Published May 9, 2024 Updated May 18, 2024

Onstage with her group the Mamas & the Papas at the Monterey International Pop Festival in June 1967, Cass Elliot, the grand doyenne of the Laurel Canyon scene, bantered with the timing of a vaudeville comedian. “Somebody asked me today when I was going to have the baby, that’s funny,” she said, rolling her eyes. The unspoken punchline — if you could call it that — was that she had already given birth to a daughter six weeks earlier.

“One of the things that appeals to so many people about my mom is that there’s a certain level of triumph over adversity,” that daughter, Owen Elliot-Kugell, said over lunch at the Sunset Marquis Hotel in Los Angeles on a recent afternoon. “She had to prove herself over and over again.”

Elliot was a charismatic performer who exuded infectious joy and a magnificent vocalist with acting chops she did not live to fully explore. July 29 is the 50th anniversary of her untimely death at 32, a tragedy that still spurs unanswerable questions. Might Elliot, who was one of Johnny Carson’s most beloved substitutes, have become the first female late-night talk show host? Would she have achieved EGOT status?

Half a century after her death, her underdog appeal continues to inspire. Last year, “Make Your Own Kind of Music” — a relatively minor 1969 solo hit that has nonetheless had cultural staying power — became such a sensation on TikTok that “Saturday Night Live” spoofed it, in a hilariously over-the-top sketch in which the host Emma Stone plays a strangely clairvoyant record producer. “This song is gonna be everywhere, Mama,” she tells Elliot, played by Chloe Troast. “Then everybody’s gonna forget about it for a long, long time, but in about 40, 50 years, I think it’s gonna start showing up in a bunch of movies, because it’s a perfect song to go under a slow-mo montage where the main character snaps and goes on a rampage.”

Cass Elliot performing on her television special “Don’t Call Me Mama Anymore” in September 1973. After she went solo, she found it hard to shake her nickname.Credit...CBS Photo Archive, via Getty Images

“S.N.L.” didn’t make a single joke about Elliot’s weight — something that was unthinkable half a century ago. During the height of her fame, Elliot seemed to co-sign some of the jabs at her expense with a shrugging grin.

“No one’s getting fat except Mama Cass,” the Mamas & the Papas sang in tight harmony on the self-mythologizing 1967 hit “Creeque Alley.” After the infamously tumultuous group broke up a year later, Elliot was a frequent guest on “The Carol Burnett Show,” where she occasionally went for the cheap laugh. In an otherwise uproarious sketch about two prudish women browsing a store’s “dirty books” section, Elliot holds up a book titled “Eat and Lose Weight” and says, “I got as far as ‘Eat’ and then I didn’t understand the rest.”

“As she had learned early on, the best way to deal with an uncomfortable situation is with humor,” Elliot-Kugell, who has her mother’s cascading hair and dry wit, writes in her new memoir, “My Mama, Cass.” But, as she said over lunch, that doesn’t mean her mother was always laughing on the inside. “That pain had to go somewhere,” Elliot-Kugell told me. “When I think about some of the things that had allegedly been said to her during her lifetime, you can’t hear that over and over and not let it hurt.”

But of course, the most enduring joke at her expense was the one she didn’t live to tell, or to rebut. Have you heard the one about the ham sandwich?

For years, the origin of the story that Elliot died from choking on a ham sandwich — one of the cruelest and most persistent myths in rock ’n’ roll history — was largely unknown. Then in 2020, Elliot’s friend Sue Cameron, an entertainment journalist, admitted to publicizing it in her Hollywood Reporter obituary at the behest of Elliot’s manager Allan Carr, who did not want his client associated with drug use. (Elliot died of a heart attack, likely brought on by years of substance abuse and crash dieting.) But that cartoonish rumor — propagated in endless pop culture references, from “Austin Powers” to “Lost” — cast a tawdry light over Elliot’s legacy and still threatens to overshadow her mighty, underappreciated talent.

The Mamas & the Papas: Denny Doherty, Michelle Phillips, Elliot, Scott McKenzie (who joined a later version of the group) and John Phillips.Credit...Bentley Archive/Popperfoto, via Getty Images

ELLIOT’S SISTER, LEAH, coined a phrase for the strong, brassy way everyone in their family sang: “the Cohen Honk.”

Cass was born Ellen Naomi Cohen into a music-loving household in suburban Baltimore. Her stage name partly came from her father’s penchant for calling his spirited daughter “the mad Cassandra.” She was a precocious, uncommonly bright child who, in the years after World War II, liked to ask dinner guests what they thought about the “world situation.” In high school she was known for her bold, slightly unkempt personal style that flew in the face of 1950s decorum. According to her biographer Eddi Fiegel, Elliot sometimes wore “wild combinations of Bermuda shorts and high heels, with white gloves to cover her bitten-down nails.”

Many people in Elliot’s life trace her struggles with her weight to when she was 6 and went to stay with her grandparents while recovering from ringworm. They fed her well, as grandparents sometimes do, and she quickly became self-conscious about her size. By high school, she had been prescribed Dexedrine, an amphetamine then used as an appetite suppressant. “The thought that something is wrong with you is bad enough,” Elliot-Kugell writes, “but the idea that a pill or a drug might fix you can be even more dangerous.”

Still, Elliot showed remarkable self-belief. The book recounts her telling anyone who would listen “that one day she was going to become the most famous fat girl that ever lived.”

She struck a deal with her parents: If she moved to New York and didn’t find musical success in five years, she would come home and study a more respectable field, like medicine. She left home in late 1960; “California Dreamin’” was released in December 1965. She later told an interviewer: “I really just made it under the wire!”

Broadway was Elliot’s first love, but folk music was the style of the day. She brought her own distinctive flair to it in her early groups, the Big 3 and then the Mugwumps, which featured a Canadian tenor named Denny Doherty. After the Mugwumps’ split, Doherty fled to the Virgin Islands with his new friends John and Michelle Phillips to work on material for a yet-unnamed group. Elliot had sung with them casually while they were all hanging out — at least once when they were all on LSD — and she knew her voice was the missing piece in their sound.

But John, the bandleader, was brutishly reluctant. According to Scott G. Shea, a biographer of the Mamas & the Papas, Phillips “had a vision in his head” of “a group that not only sounded like an electrified Peter, Paul and Mary, but also looked like them.” Shea puts it bluntly: “Michelle was to be the centerpiece, and, in his mind, Cass was too fat to even be considered.”

The group projected a chumminess that was central to their appeal, but few people know how hard Elliot had to push to become part of the band. She showed up unannounced in the Virgin Islands hoping to ingratiate herself, but Phillips wouldn’t budge until an act of fate intervened. While walking down the St. Thomas alley that the Mamas & the Papas would later immortalize in song, debris from a construction site hit Elliot on the head and knocked her unconscious. John Phillips would later claim that Elliot’s concussion caused her vocal register to change, and it was another of those stories Elliot learned to repeat with a self-deprecating joke.

“The real story is that John didn’t like my mother’s look,” Elliot-Kugell writes. She believes “he made up the story about a fake increase in vocal range to justify his choice to finally add my mom to the band months later.”

Elliot went solo after the short-lived group’s demise, buoyed by the success of “Dream a Little Dream of Me,” a Mamas & the Papas single on which she sang lead. The final solo album she released, in 1973, had a pointed title: “Don’t Call Me Mama Anymore.” “The moniker of ‘Mama’ had always felt like a reference to her size — that is, ‘Big Mama’ — and she hated that,” Elliot-Kugell writes.

From left: Joni Mitchell, Elliot and Judy Collins at the Big Sur Folk Festival. Elliot became known as a connector in the Laurel Canyon scene.Credit...Sulfiati Magnuson, via Getty Images

Elliot remains an underrated heroine in the story of the Laurel Canyon scene, not only as a musician but also as an amiable hostess who knew how to link up like-minded people. Doherty liked to call her “the Puppeteer.”

In 1964, she introduced her friends John Sebastian and Zal Yanovsky; they became the Lovin’ Spoonful. When she heard that David Crosby and Stephen Stills had begun making music together, she suggested they add a high voice to the mix, and brought them Graham Nash. “I will give you a hundred dollars,” David Crosby told Elliot’s biographer, “if you can find a single person who says they hated Cass.”

But there was also something bittersweet about Elliot’s kinship with all these men. “I think part of the reason they all adored her is they weren’t threatened by her,” Elliot-Kugell said. “She knew more about these guys and had a relationship on a deeper level than some of their own wives or girlfriends had.” She added with a wry chuckle, “Did that mean she didn’t want to jump into bed with half of them? She probably did!”

Elliot’s unrequited love for her bandmate Doherty was perhaps the hardest to bear, especially after he and Michelle Phillips had an affair that nearly broke up the band before their first album was even released. Elliot had been smitten since the night they met, at a Greenwich Village bar where they each threatened to drink the other under the table, and eventually decided to drink … under the table. As he put it in his one-man show about the group’s history, “I knew she loved me, and I loved her too, but not like she wanted me to. She did weigh 300 pounds, and I wasn’t man enough to deal with that.”

The most difficult passages of “My Mama, Cass” are those in which Elliot-Kugell reckons with her mother’s persistent loneliness. “After the shows, when they’re screaming her name onstage and she’s bowing, she was the only one going back to the hotel by herself,” she said. “Everybody else had someone, and she didn’t.”

Elliot’s need for love and companionship is what drove her to the decision — relatively radical for a famous woman in the late 1960s — to become a single mother. When she learned she was pregnant at the height of the group’s success, after a brief fling with its touring bassist, she was defiant in her decision to raise the child on her own. “As it turned out,” Elliot-Kugell writes, wrenchingly, “my mom’s desire to have someone in her life who wasn’t going to up and leave her was what led to her desire for a child. It’s how I came to be.”

The Mamas & the Papas onstage in 1966. The group split two years later.Credit...Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

WHEN I FINALLY got Sue Cameron on the phone, she was calling from the Atlantic Ocean, “somewhere between Bermuda and Portugal.” A journalist for more than 50 years who has published a book titled “Hollywood Secrets and Scandals,” she sometimes gives lectures on cruise ships. She was happy to reminisce about her old pal. “She had a big smile and this wide open face, very happy to see people,” Cameron said. “You just would immediately love her and want her to be your best friend.”

Cameron met Elliot when she interviewed the Mamas & the Papas in 1966; they realized they were neighbors and quickly became “sit-by-each-other’s-pool kind of friends.” Cameron has stories, like the one about the night they ran into Ann-Margret and Elliot delivered the perfect one-liner about her massive engagement ring (“I could skate on that”); or all the times Elliot would walk around with a credit card in her shoe because she didn’t like to carry a purse.

Her most painful memory is her final dinner with Elliot at Mr. Chow in the summer of 1974, before Elliot left for London. She’d never seen her friend so happy. “It was just a magical moment,” Cameron recalled. “It was just, like, the crescendo of her being. She’d had some TV specials, she was now going to go do a big nightclub act. Everything was fabulous.”

After a two-day stint of partying in London, Elliot told her friend Joe Croyle — a dancer in her show who was crashing with her at Harry Nilsson’s pad — that she was going to take a bath and turn in early because she was exhausted. Croyle figured she would be hungry too, so he fixed her a sandwich with ham, the only thing he could find in the fridge, along with some Coca-Cola. The ham sandwich, the cruelly cartoonish symbol that would come to define Elliot, was actually a gesture of care: a friend making her a meal she never got to enjoy.

Cameron heard about Elliot’s death in the newsroom of The Hollywood Reporter, where she was working at the time: “I kicked into professional mode and said, no one else is going to write that obit. I’m going to do it.” She tracked down Carr by phone in Nilsson’s apartment. “He could barely speak,” Cameron recalled. She asked what happened, and he said he didn’t know. “‘Oh, wait,’” she recalled him saying. “‘I see a half-eaten ham sandwich on the night stand. That’s good. You tell everybody that she choked on a ham sandwich, do you understand me?’”

“And I did it,” she added, “because I wanted to protect Cass.”

What was she protecting her from? “I was not aware of a lot of drugs,” she said. “I just wasn’t one of those people. And I had some suspicion around the time that she was going to London that she was on some sort of pills, but I didn’t really know anything.” In a split second, Carr and Cameron decided there was less shame in a woman ridiculed for her weight choking to death than there was in her having a drug problem. “What a terrible thing,” Cameron said, “but I was in too much of a state of shock to clean it up.”

She, too, is confounded by the story’s persistence. “Of all of the things I’ve done,” she said, “this ham sandwich has followed me my entire life.”

That story had long haunted Elliot-Kugell, too, though she felt some closure after Cameron privately divulged its origins to her when they met for lunch in 2000. Elliot-Kugell is cleareyed about what probably caused her mother’s death: “I mean, look. She was up for 48 hours, and she was at a party. Do the math.” But she doesn’t want to dwell on that. “The thing that was really important for me was that I didn’t want to write a salacious book,” she said.

In some sense, any memoir by a child of the Mamas & the Papas exists in the shadow of Mackenzie Phillips’s 2009 bombshell, “High on Arrival,” in which she accused her father John Phillips of sexual assault. But Elliot-Kugell’s memoir belongs on a different shelf entirely. It is a humanizing portrait of a woman whose legacy has, for far too long, been reduced to an outdated urban legend.

And it is a tale of an imperfect mother and a grieving daughter, of loss and long delayed catharsis. A few weeks before we spoke, Elliot-Kugell went to visit her mother’s grave. “It’s always weird when I go there, because I never know what to say,” she said. “But that day felt a little different because when I went up to the grave, I just said, ‘Hi.’ Like the way I would greet one of my cousins, or somebody who I know really well who I haven’t seen in a while.”

“I thought to myself, ‘Why, why why does it feel like this?’” she said.” All at once it dawned on her: “After going through this experience, I feel closer to her.”

Read by Lindsay Zoladz

Audio produced by Adrienne Hurst.

[psalm22-6]

Source: the San Bernardine Sun, 25 December 1978 Wild to learn about the reach of the March/Laughton film from ‘35. Also this article is so funny to me because they can no longer just say Cosette, Fantine,  or Marius and assume that the reader knows who they mean so they end up saying Valjean’s ward, Valjean’s ward’s mother, and Valjean’s ward’s lover and other round about things.  Also I read in a later article that the program “drew 38 percent of the national audience, according to the Neilsen ratings, and was the week's highest-rated special.” But overall it was ninth in the week for ratings, tied with a rerun of MASH.

HOLLYWOOD  — If Victor Hugo was alive today he'd be one of the most sought-after writers by television network presidents. His stories contain all the elements deemed necessary to make a film or series successful. Most notable example is Hugo's "Les Miserables," written in 1862. Inspired by the French people seeking freedom from oppression, he wrote the now-classic tale of an impoverished man, Jean Valjean, who steals a loaf of bread to feed his starving family, and that act of survival sets off a chain reaction that includes drama, adventure, jeopardy, love, hatred and, above all, the action of the chase. CBS has picked the middle of what is usually considered an "off-week," the period between Christmas and New Year's Day when people are too preoccupied with holiday festivities to watch TV, to show the latest version of "Les Miserables," the Norman Rosemont Production in association with ITC Entertainment which occupies all three hours of CBS' prime-time programming Wednesday. It's CBS' gift-wrapped treat amid the rubble of reruns. The family that takes time out to relax from Yuletide activities will thoroughly enjoy a class production filmed in France and England in authentic surroundings that look as though no stone has been dislodged from its place since Hugo described its locale in his drama. Richard Jordan portrays Valjean, whose life is to be dogged by his obsessed pursuer, Inspector Javert, played by Anthony Perkins. As with his other revivals of the classics, "The Count of Monte Cristo," "The Man in the Iron Mask" and "The Four Feathers," all produced for both TV and theatrical release, Norman Rosemont has populated the cast with distinguished veteran actors. In his last performance, Claude Dauphin, who died recently, is seen as the kindly bishop who befriends Valjean. Sir John Gielgud is an elderly aristocrat. Celia Johnson is Valjean's housekeeper. Flora Robson is the head of a convent. Cyril Cusak is the convent's groundskeeper who provides brief refuge for the prison-escaping Valjean. Ian Holm is a greedy innkeeper. Joyce Redman is the bishop's housekeeper. 

Two young British newcomers, Caroline Langrishe and Christopher Guard, were chosen to play Valjean's pretty ward and the grandson of Gielgud. And Angela Pleasance is the beggar woman who further impedes Valjean's escape by entrusting her daughter (Langrishe) to his care. 

Of the many films on Hugo's classic (Jean Gavin as Valjean in the 1952 French movie; Gino Cervi in a 1943 Italian feature; Michael Rennie in a 1952 TV kinescope), the 1952 Warner Bros, movie with Frederic March and Charles Laughton is best remembered. 

Who can forget Laughton's Javert, having finally cornered Valjean (March) in a Paris sewer after his three-decade pursuit, shouting "The law is the law!" although, he, like Valjean, is aged and weary of this senseless pursuit. Did the specter of Laughton's dominating performance lurk in the background of this 1978 version? "No, not really," replied Glenn Jordan, who directed the $3 million production. "I saw the Laughton version twice and found very little I could use. One of the few things I thought interesting and useful was that Laughton played an eccentric. So I had Tony play it eccentrically, but in an entirely different way.

"Laughton was always Laughton in the end, not the characters he portrayed. I felt it was important to be the character Hugo intended because, after all, a lot of people have never seen those other versions or ever read the book." 

[Glenn] Jordan, who won an Emmy for the Ben Franklin specials on TV, among other citations for notable TV and stage productions, says that [Richard] Jordan, who first gained attention in TV's "The Captains and the Kings," and Perkins are much closer to the characters Hugo described in his lengthy novel. "I remember March and Laughton as being too old for their roles. They didn't really age as much as people would in real life, especially people who went through what they did. We assume Hugo's characters were about the same age in the beginning. The imprisonment period is 20 years, then a jump of five years passes, then it's 10 years more. [Really? March is such a young Jean Valjean]  "That's why it was important to cast young men who could age (via make-up and character change), rather than start out with older actors in those roles." Redoing the classics has bothered some purists who prefer to let the original versions stand on their merits. But Glenn Jordan has valid reasons for remaking a classic such as this. "The social problems of poverty and justice vs. justice, these are things, I think that are self-explanatory," he said. "But the human problems, the relations between the people are the most interesting because, it seems to me, that when you redo a classic you have to make it vivid for today's audience. "When you see older versions of such stories they are very much versions of their time and reflect the thinking of their time, including the style in which they were done." By PAUL HENMGER Gannett News Service

[kaleis-kingdom]

Facts about my Funtime Michael AU:

Funtime Foxy's eyes turn a silvery blue after Michael dies. (It's an Afton thing ig?)

Michael died the same day as Elizabeth.

He died at 15.

C.C lives.

Michael doesn't kill anybody as FT.Foxy.

Let's be honest. Besides the control shocks and whole murder bot thing? Mike is living his best (after?)life.

For the most part, he doesn't care if the nightguards know if he's sentient.

A nightguard will turn on the light and he'll just be dancing to himself.

The exception is William.

Michael will mess with William, but otherwise act like an animatronic.

Like he'll throw something at William when his back is turned, but never respond to Michael.

Despite all of this, Michael is the oldest Funtime soul.

The other funtimes go to him for help.

He's an older brother through and through.

Not a bully here.

He doesn't preform for parties much.

He has a high rating for kids, but parents don't like him.

(It's because he teaches kids curse words.)

There's no difference between FT. Foxy Michael, but there is a different between Elizabeth and CB.

It's because FT.Foxy's personality was inspired Michael.

Michael has adopted CB as another sister.

Still hates William. He found the blueprints, but unfortunately it was after William got springlocked.

[hallmark-movie-fanatics]

New in March - Hallmark Movies Now

The Way Home Season 1 (2023)  Starring Andie MacDowell, Chyler Leigh, Sadie Laflamme-Snow, Evan Williams, and Alex Hook.  New episodes available every Thursday.  Episodes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 available 

The Love Club: Nicole’s Pen Pal (2023)  Starring Brittany Bristow, Marcus Rosner, Lily Gao, Chantel Riley, and Camille Stopps. 

The Love Club: Sydney’s Journey (2023)  Starring Lily Gao, Jesse Hutch, Chantel Riley, Camille Stopps, and Brittany Bristow.

The Love Club: Lauren’s Dream (2023)  Starring Chantel Riley, Andrew Bushell, Camille Stopps, Brittany Bristow, and Lily Gao.

The Love Club: Tara’s Tune (2023)  Starring Camille Stopps, Brett Donahue, Brittany Bristow, Lily Gao, and Chantel Riley.

The Secret Ingredient (2020)  Starring Erin Cahill and Brendan Penny.   Based on a Hallmark Publishing original novel.  Hallmark Channel / Love Ever After 

You’re Bacon Me Crazy (2020)  Starring Natalie Hall, Michael Rady, Michael Karl Richards, Casey Manderson, and Rhiannon Fish.  Hallmark Channel / Spring Fever 

The Story of Us (2019)  Starring Maggie Lawson and Same Page.  Hallmark Channel / Countdown to Valentine’s Day 

March 1 

Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman (1993 - 1998)  Starring Jane Seymour and Joe Lando.  CBS / All six seasons available. 

It’s Christmas, Carol! (2012)  Emmanuelle Vaguer, Carrie Fisher, Susan Hogan, Johannah Newmarch, Catherine Lough-Haggquist, and Carson Kressley.  Hallmark Channel / Countdown to Christmas 

March 2 

The Way Home - Season 1, Episode  6 

Welcome to Mama’s (2022)  Starring Melanie Scrofano, Daniel di Tomasso, Lorraine Bracco, and Matty Finochio.  Hallmark Channel / Loveuary 

Just My Type (2020)  Starring Bethany Joy Len and Brett Dalton.  Hallmark Channel / Spring Fever 

March 9 

The Way Home - Season 1, Episode 7 

Color My World With Love (2022)  Starring Erica Durance, Benjamin Ayres, Lily D. Moore, David DeSanctis, and Karen Kruper.  Hallmark Movies & Mysteries

March 16 

The Way Home - Season 1, Episode 8 

March 23 

The Way Home - Season 1, Episode 9 

A Splash of Love (2022)  Starring Rhiannon Fish and Benjamin Hollingsworth.  Hallmark Channel 

March 30 

The Way Home - Season 1, Episode 10 

Cut, Color, Murder (2022)  Starring Julie Gonzalo and Ryan McPartlin.  Hallmark Movies & Mysteries 

And so much more. New movies pop up every Thursday. 

[ncisfranchise-source]

Brian Dietzen knew helping to write the “NCIS” tribute to David McCallum would be the best way to honor his longtime scene partner’s memory — that it would help him process his real-life grief was an added bonus.

The actor co-wrote the emotional hour of the CBS crime procedural alongside Scott Williams, chronicling the team’s loss of the beloved Dr. Donald “Ducky” Mallard. The storyline echoed reality as McCallum, who played the role of Ducky since Season 1, died peacefully in his sleep on Sept. 25, 2023. He was 90.

“I’ve lost a few people in my life, but never have I sat down and written a script or a story about them in the weeks following their departure. It was very odd… but helpful in a way,” Dietzen told TheWrap in an interview ahead of the episode’s debut on Monday. “A lot of the grief of losing a friend is softened by the fact that he’s a 90-year-old man who lived so much life.”

Dietzen recalled feeling honored when asked to help craft the farewell installment, a tall task to properly celebrate the beloved medical examiner-turned-NCIS historian, along with a real-life Hollywood legend. The episode, titled “The Stories We Leave Behind,” opened with Jimmy (Dietzen) arriving at his friend’s home in the morning to discuss a break on a case he was working on, only to find Ducky had died in his sleep.

“That was the toughest day that I had as an actor,” Dietzen said. “It took a village to put this together. I always felt like we were all in this together. That felt like the first time during the whole process where it was just me and David. That really hit me hard, I was a blubbering mess.”

“Every idea under the sun was thrown out [for this episode.] From having every ‘NCIS’ cast member from every spin-off come together in a huge funeral theme… nothing was off the table,” Dietzen said. “Those things can be very logistically difficult obviously, but we wanted to do something special… Michael said he would absolutely love to come and reprise his role as Tony.”

Dietzen noted how none of the old clips that played during the episode featured Tony, an Easter egg of sorts for his present-day cameo. He also said that Mark Harmon had been in talks to reprise his role as Gibbs, but was ultimately not available due to a scheduling conflict.

“I think everyone would love to see Gibbs make an appearance at some point. That is such a beloved character, TV history,” he said. “I’m really happy with the way [the scene] turned out. The way that it works with Jimmy and Tony. There’s an intimacy to that and there’s a familiarity to that.”

Dietzen further explained the specific choice of revisiting Ducky’s Season 19 speech during the episode, in which he reflected on letting Gibbs go after Harmon’s exit from the series.

“[Jimmy] is mourning the team’s loss of Gibbs and before that Bishop (Emily Wickersham) and before that the death of his own wife. But Ducky comforts him by saying, ‘Our pain is a small price to pay for his peace,’” Dietzen recalled. “I wanted that to be the last thing that we hear Ducky say in this episode, so he can seemingly eulogize himself, in a way. That was one [moment] that I felt strongly about and that stayed in the whole time.”