Chip Jacobs

Gordon, had he been injured today instead of 1940, would’ve had these extreme sorts burying their eyes. Even so, the things he survived as a quadriplegic still astonish. He just wasn’t getting as much air as these pros. Happy Holidays everyone, and if you get a chance, please check out Wheeling the Deal: the Outrageous [...]

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California is “failing,” or so says the British. Excuse us if I’ve heard this one before from supposed sharp-eyed observers convinced we’re past the tipping point to social doom. We dip into outsiders fancy for seeing ruin before the ruin is really there in our book Smogtown: the Lung-Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles. [...]

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My uncle, the protagonist of Wheeling the Deal: The Outrageous Legend of Gordon Zahler, Hollywood’s Flashiest Quadriplegic, developed a motto after enduring several painful economic times made manifold worse by being a quadriplegic in a company town – Hollywood – where physicial beauty and virility were door-openers and deal-getters. His philosophy was that until you [...]

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The Motion Picture and Television Fund is putting its legendary hospital and nursing home on ice. Why do I care besides being an incorrigible bleeding heart (and proud of it)? Only because the Fund, way back in the 1940s, kept my mother’s family from homelessness and despair after my uncle Gordon’s broke his neck and [...]

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Fullerhired my uncle to do postproduction, Gordon Zahler, for what I consider a terribly unappreciated movie about American society, circra-early-1960s by giving us a lens-eye view into an insane asylum, where a Pulitizer-jonesing reporter commits himself to track down a murderer. Over-the-top in spots, anarchic in others, ‘Shock Corridor” was not an early poor-man’s version [...]

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From the Los Angeles Times obituary about Charles Runyon, who died at 86 earlier this month … The jovial and genteel clown wore a spinning merry-go-round hat with his name on it, a half red and half red-and-white-striped clown suit with a fluffy Elizabethan-style collar and cuffs, and white gloves; and he had arching blue [...]

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The man was a larger than life personality. He didn’t just read the news. He put his conservative, authoritative stamp on it. He just had this credibility, an aura of perspective and calm, just as Walter Cronkite displayed during his years anchoring CBS’ nightly news. Click here for the Los Angeles Times obituary on old [...]

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And, for your complimentary set of Ginsu Knives (puma sharpening-stone extra), answer this: what was the name of the series that this young, chocolate-faced, early Hollywood personality was starring in during the point this apparent Fudgsicle/popsicle-facsimile commercial was shot in the early 1930s? My connection to him, should you wonder, is through my grandfather, Lee [...]

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Neither does most of the world. And it’s upsetting. During the years I was crafting Wheeling the Deal, one of the most repititive criticisms I heard was that I’d veered too far astray of Gordon’s story to chart the lives and losses of his similarly tragedy-stricken relatives. My left lobe agreed it was a point [...]

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There’s so much to this segment … and so much left out. Nonetheless, at least one network had the guts to tell it like it is. I’m proud to have contributed to it. So what if the aftermath was messy and some of the heroes died. We de-mythologized, and took our lumps just like our [...]

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