Donald Trump, Syria, Chuck Barris: Your Wednesday Briefing

King of game shows Chuck Barris dies at age 87

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American and British restrictions on certain electronic devices on some flights may lead to more thorough searches, including a check through travelers data.

Heres a guide to help you safeguard your information should customs officials demand access to your smartphone.

Google is trying to stop ads from appearing next to hate speech in an effort to protect its lucrative advertising business, after some major clients withdrew.

The S.&P. 500 went 64 consecutive days without declining more than 1 percent during a trading session. That streak ended on Tuesday. Heres a snapshot of global markets.

Smarter Living

Heading off to a job you hate? Here are some survival tips.

Recipe of the day: Try Persian herbed rice for a fragrant dish scented with dill, mint and saffron.

Noteworthy

Chance for a checkup.

In todays 360 video, visit a nonprofit that sets up temporary clinics providing free medical services to rural Americans.

Video Coming Out in Droves for Free Health Care

A nonprofit sets up temporary clinics that provide free medical services to people in rural areas of the United States. For the hundreds that showed up in Cookeville, Tenn., this was a chance to get a checkup, dental treatment or eye care.

By CHRIS CARMICHAEL, NIKO KOPPEL and KAITLYN MULLIN on Publish Date March 22, 2017. Photo by Chris Carmichael for The New York Times. Technology by Samsung.. Watch in Times Video

I might go down in the history as the butcher.

President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines is a child of privilege turned populist politician, an antidrug crusader who has struggled with drug abuse.

Obsessed with death, he has turned his violent vision into policy.

In memoriam.

Chuck Barris created The Gong Show, a lowbrow game show in the 1970s that became a cultural sensation in the U.S. He was 87.

Jerry Krause orchestrated the Chicago Bulls dynasty of the 1990s, assembling the teams that Michael Jordan led to six N.B.A. championships. He was 77.

Saying no to Trudeau.

Canadian diplomats in the U.S. have been ordered to stop setting up life-size cardboard cutouts of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at promotional events.

No reason was given, but his governing Liberal Party has tried carefully to balance the dapper leaders image as a celebrity with his role as a statesman.

Photo Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada (the non-cardboard version) attended a Broadway performance in New York last week. Credit Sam Hodgson for The New York Times

Best of late-night TV.

Jimmy Kimmel asked Dave Chappelle why, after 13 years, he decided to release a new comedy special. (Two, in fact.) Mr. Chappelle explained: Money.

Back Story

William Shatner has a birthday today.

So does the world-famous character that made his fortune: Capt. James T. Kirk of the Starship Enterprise, who set out to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations in the U.S. television show Star Trek.

Photo William Shatner in his one-man show Shatners World: We Just Live in It in New York in 2012. Credit Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

A Canadian, Mr. Shatner trained as a Shakespearean actor before moving into TV and film.

In the mid-60s, television executives rejected the first pilot of the show, but the second, in which Mr. Shatner played Kirk for the first time, fared better.

I never thought itd become a big deal, just 13 episodes and out, Mr. Shatner told The New York Times Magazine in 2010.

In fact, it lasted 79. The show gained a cult following in syndication and spawned a pop cultural phenomenon with multiple television series (a new one is planned) and 13 feature films (and counting).

Mr. Shatner turns 86 today, but James Tiberius Kirk wont be born for another 216 years.

For those who dont want to wait until 2233 to pay tribute to one of science fictions best-known names, boldly go to Riverside, Iowa, where a plaque proudly announces the Future Birthplace of Captain James T. Kirk.

Kenneth R. Rosen contributed reporting.

_____

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Chuck Barris, Producer and Personality of "Gong Show" Fame, Dies at 87

TV Legend Chuck Barris Who Created "Newlywed Game" Dies At 87

Mr. Barris wrote Palisades Park along an odd path to an eventual career in television. He was born in Philadelphia on June 3, 1929; his father, a dentist, died when he was young.

After graduating from Drexel University in his home city in 1953, he was accepted into a management training program at NBC in 1955. But, he told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 2003, the department he was placed in daytime sales was eliminated, and he found himself trying, unsuccessfully, to sell the devices then known as TelePrompTers.

During the payola scandals of the 1950s, he was hired to keep a young ABC star, d**k Clark, of American Bandstand, out of trouble. (He sat around doing nothing all day but drawing on a pad of paper, Mr. Clark told The Inquirer.) By 1959 he was ABCs director of West Coast daytime programming.

But he wanted to make his own shows, and in 1965 he came up with The Dating Game, in which a bachelorette or bachelor would choose a date from among three unseen members of the opposite s*x after asking them questions.

He followed that the next year with The Newlywed Game, another question-and-answer show that put just-married couples compatibility to the test. Both shows stayed on the air into the mid-1970s and spawned assorted sequels (The All-New Dating Game and The New Newlywed Game).

Mr. Barriss next game shows were less successful, but just as it seemed he was losing his touch, he came up with the concept that would catapult him to a new level of fame: The Gong Show, which had its premiere on NBC in June 1976. The show featured a series of performers, most of them amateurs, and a panel of three celebrity judges. Mr. Barris himself was the brash, irritating host.

The performers, who were often terrible, would be allowed to go on until one of the judges couldnt stand it anymore and sounded a gong, putting an end to the spectacle. Those who werent gonged were rated by the judges on a 1-to-10 scale. In keeping with the ridiculousness of the proceedings, the prize amount they vied for was ridiculous: $516.32 on the daytime version of the show, $712.05 on the prime-time edition.

Gene Gene The Dancing Machine, a regular feature on The Gong Show. Video by Thomas2878

The show, which ran on NBC until 1978 and then in syndication (with revivals in later years), became a cultural sensation. Critics complained about its crassness and cruelty, but Mr. Barris, like purveyors of burlesque and circus sideshows in earlier generations, knew there was a large audience for lowbrow. At one point the daytime version was attracting 78 percent of viewers 18 to 49.

In my opinion, a good game show review is the kiss of death, Mr. Barris said in a Salon interview in 2001. If for some strange reason the critic liked it, the public wont. A really bad review means the show will be on for years.

The ghost of The Gong Show is evident in numerous reality-television shows of more recent vintage the early rounds of any given season of American Idol, for instance.

Mr. Barris always bristled at the King of Schlock label that was hung on him as far back as The Dating Game. In a 2003 interview with Newsweek, he noted that shows much like the ones he created were by the 21st century being received differently.

Today these shows are accepted, he said. These shows arent seen as lowering any bars.

By the end of the 1970s, thanks to The Gong Show, Mr. Barriss television production company was busy and profitable, but he was itchy to try something else. What he tried, disastrously, was The Gong Show Movie, which he directed and, with Robert Downey Sr., wrote. It was released in May 1980 and flopped.

Mr. Barris gradually withdrew from television, selling his holdings, spending most of his time in France and turning to writing. He had already written one book, You and Me, Babe (1974), a novel about a television producer whose marriage failed; it drew heavily on his own rocky marriage to Lyn Levy, a niece of the powerful CBS chief William S. Paley, in the 1950s. They were divorced in 1976.

That first book sold well, but it was the next one that would give mr. barris yet another burst of notoriety: Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (1984), a supposed autobiography in which he claimed that while traveling in his role as a television producer in the 1960s he was also an assassin for the C.I.A.

The book got only a smattering of attention, but it caught some eyes in Hollywood, and in 2003, after many delays, a film version came out, directed by George Clooney and starring Sam Rockwell as Mr. Barris. (Charlie Kaufman wrote the screenplay, embellishing Mr. Barriss tale.)

The film brought Mr. Barris, by now in his 70s, a fresh round of publicity and endless variations on the obvious question: Was it true? Mr. Barris generally played coy, delivering elliptical answers that neither confirmed nor denied. The C.I.A. was more direct: Various spokesmen said Mr. Barris had had nothing to do with the agency.

In later years Mr. Barris continued to write books, among them the comic novels The Big Question (2007), about an outlandish game show where the stakes are literally life or death, and Who Killed Art Deco? (2009), about the murder of a wealthy young man.

In 2010 he turned to a much more serious subject with Della: A Memoir of My Daughter, telling the story of his only child from his marriage to Ms. Levy who as a girl sometimes turned up on The Gong Show. She died of a drug overdose in 1998, at 36.

Mr. Barriss second marriage, to Robin Altman, ended in divorce in 1999. He is survived by his wife, the former Mary Clagett.

Which of his several careers was his favorite? In 2007, during an appearance at the Book Passage bookstore in Corte Madera, Calif., he dealt with the question.

When you go to that great game show in the sky, he asked himself, would you rather be known as an author or as a TV game show producer?

Thats the easiest question of all, he responded. I would love to be known as an author, but I dont think its written that thats the way its going to be. I think on my tombstone its just going to say, Gonged at last, and Im stuck with that.

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Chuck Barris, Producer and Personality of "Gong Show" Fame, Dies at 87

Chuck Barris is Gone, & a Wheel Fail

Mr. Barris wrote Palisades Park along an odd path to an eventual career in television. He was born in Philadelphia on June 3, 1929; his father, a dentist, died when he was young.

After graduating from Drexel University in his home city in 1953, he was accepted into a management training program at NBC in 1955. But, he told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 2003, the department he was placed in daytime sales was eliminated, and he found himself trying, unsuccessfully, to sell the devices then known as TelePrompTers.

During the payola scandals of the 1950s, he was hired to keep a young ABC star, d**k Clark, of American Bandstand, out of trouble. (He sat around doing nothing all day but drawing on a pad of paper, Mr. Clark told The Inquirer.) By 1959 he was ABCs director of West Coast daytime programming.

But he wanted to make his own shows, and in 1965 he came up with The Dating Game, in which a bachelorette or bachelor would choose a date from among three unseen members of the opposite s*x after asking them questions.

He followed that the next year with The Newlywed Game, another question-and-answer show that put just-married couples compatibility to the test. Both shows stayed on the air into the mid-1970s and spawned assorted sequels (The All-New Dating Game and The New Newlywed Game).

Mr. Barriss next game shows were less successful, but just as it seemed he was losing his touch, he came up with the concept that would catapult him to a new level of fame: The Gong Show, which had its premiere on NBC in June 1976. The show featured a series of performers, most of them amateurs, and a panel of three celebrity judges. Mr. Barris himself was the brash, irritating host.

The performers, who were often terrible, would be allowed to go on until one of the judges couldnt stand it anymore and sounded a gong, putting an end to the spectacle. Those who werent gonged were rated by the judges on a 1-to-10 scale. In keeping with the ridiculousness of the proceedings, the prize amount they vied for was ridiculous: $516.32 on the daytime version of the show, $712.05 on the prime-time edition.

Gene Gene The Dancing Machine, a regular feature on The Gong Show. Video by Thomas2878

The show, which ran on NBC until 1978 and then in syndication (with revivals in later years), became a cultural sensation. Critics complained about its crassness and cruelty, but Mr. Barris, like purveyors of burlesque and circus sideshows in earlier generations, knew there was a large audience for lowbrow. At one point the daytime version was attracting 78 percent of viewers 18 to 49.

In my opinion, a good game show review is the kiss of death, mr. barris said in a Salon interview in 2001. If for some strange reason the critic liked it, the public wont. A really bad review means the show will be on for years.

The ghost of The Gong Show is evident in numerous reality-television shows of more recent vintage the early rounds of any given season of American Idol, for instance.

Mr. Barris always bristled at the King of Schlock label that was hung on him as far back as The Dating Game. In a 2003 interview with Newsweek, he noted that shows much like the ones he created were by the 21st century being received differently.

Today these shows are accepted, he said. These shows arent seen as lowering any bars.

By the end of the 1970s, thanks to The Gong Show, Mr. Barriss television production company was busy and profitable, but he was itchy to try something else. What he tried, disastrously, was The Gong Show Movie, which he directed and, with Robert Downey Sr., wrote. It was released in May 1980 and flopped.

Mr. Barris gradually withdrew from television, selling his holdings, spending most of his time in France and turning to writing. He had already written one book, You and Me, Babe (1974), a novel about a television producer whose marriage failed; it drew heavily on his own rocky marriage to Lyn Levy, a niece of the powerful CBS chief William S. Paley, in the 1950s. They were divorced in 1976.

That first book sold well, but it was the next one that would give Mr. Barris yet another burst of notoriety: Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (1984), a supposed autobiography in which he claimed that while traveling in his role as a television producer in the 1960s he was also an assassin for the C.I.A.

The book got only a smattering of attention, but it caught some eyes in Hollywood, and in 2003, after many delays, a film version came out, directed by George Clooney and starring Sam Rockwell as Mr. Barris. (Charlie Kaufman wrote the screenplay, embellishing Mr. Barriss tale.)

The film brought Mr. Barris, by now in his 70s, a fresh round of publicity and endless variations on the obvious question: Was it true? Mr. Barris generally played coy, delivering elliptical answers that neither confirmed nor denied. The C.I.A. was more direct: Various spokesmen said Mr. Barris had had nothing to do with the agency.

In later years Mr. Barris continued to write books, among them the comic novels The Big Question (2007), about an outlandish game show where the stakes are literally life or death, and Who Killed Art Deco? (2009), about the murder of a wealthy young man.

In 2010 he turned to a much more serious subject with Della: A Memoir of My Daughter, telling the story of his only child from his marriage to Ms. Levy who as a girl sometimes turned up on The Gong Show. She died of a drug overdose in 1998, at 36.

Mr. Barriss second marriage, to Robin Altman, ended in divorce in 1999. He is survived by his wife, the former Mary Clagett.

Which of his several careers was his favorite? In 2007, during an appearance at the Book Passage bookstore in Corte Madera, Calif., he dealt with the question.

When you go to that great game show in the sky, he asked himself, would you rather be known as an author or as a TV game show producer?

Thats the easiest question of all, he responded. I would love to be known as an author, but I dont think its written that thats the way its going to be. I think on my tombstone its just going to say, Gonged at last, and Im stuck with that.

Continue reading the main story

Source: http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&ct2=us&usg=AFQjCNHV_GymSFdqIAzwZbmjPpuj569O4g&clid=c3a7d30bb8a4878e06b80cf16b898331&cid=52779432460007&ei=N63SWMD_FJHJ3gHAvYHwCQ&url=https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/22/arts/chuck-barris-dead-gong-show-creator.html

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"Gong Show" creator Chuck Barris dies at 87

Chuck Barris, ‘Gong Show’ Creator And Host, Dies At 87 | TODAY

NEW YORK (AP) -- Game show impresario Chuck Barris has died at 87.

Barris, the madcap producer of "The Gong Show" and "The Dating Game," died of natural causes Tuesday afternoon at his home in Palisades, New York.

Publicist Paul Shefrin announced Barris" death on behalf of his family.

In addition to being a game show creator, producer and host, he also was a best-selling author and had success in the music world. He wrote the 1962 hit record, "Palisades Park," which was recorded by freddy cannon.

barris is survived by his wife of 16 years.

Source: http://cbs6albany.com/news/nation-world/gong-show-creator-chuck-barris-dies-at-87-03-22-2017-082121540

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