An appreciation of Buffalo NY’s all-night movie show.
Film fanatics 50-plus years of age who grew up near a metropolitan area probably had access to at least one late show host in their younger years. Back in those pre-VCR days, if you had the stamina to stay up past midnight, you were rewarded with somebody introducing the late night movie on the local station. And maybe in order to pay for the plumbing, they unabashedly plugged a nearby pizzeria in between reels. These hosts were also local celebrities who could have been seen at some hardware store’s grand opening at a shopping plaza. They weren’t a pre-packaged host like, say, Elvira. They were real human beings, talking to you that minute from across town or the nearby metropolis. They were in the same room with you: the congenial face in the box was a rare stranger that you allowed in your home on regular intervals. You may never know this person in the flesh, but night after night it was comforting to know that they were on the opposite end of the transmission, sharing this moment with you.
I was fortunate to have seen a few late night hosts when I became old enough to stay up. WJET (Erie PA’s ABC affiliate) featured Jim Cook on Saturday nights with The Late, Great Horror Show, serving up a double bill of horror films (often from the AIP catalog), interspersed with his crazy antics. When City TV began showing films all night (under their banner Late Great Movies), they too had an all-night host (however briefly) in Bob Segarini. But the late-night movie host that spoke the most to me was Barry Lillis, who presented The Cat’s Pajamas, an all-night movie show which ran seven nights a week from the mid-to-late 1980s on WGRZ-TV, Buffalo NY’s NBC affiliate.
After David Letterman said good night, I would just be able to put a ham and cheese bun in the oven before sitting down to see a camera pan of the blue snowy city with the opening sax solo from Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street”, which was the call to form. Barry (also TV 2’s veteran weatherman) would appear as the affable host, introducing the old movies and TV shows. In between reels, he would also plug Mike’s Subs for the hungry insomniacs, and then Bob Gist would pop up with a news brief about an accident down on Main Street. Then a still of slumbering cats perched in a crescent moon would appear as “Journey of the Sorcerer” or Steely Dan’s version of “East St.Louis Toodle-oo” played, before we were transported back to the show. Sometimes even the odd newsreel or serial chapter would pop up unannounced to fill some airtime before they began the morning day part. With such a busy programming schedule, it was little wonder that a 73-minute TV-movie would actually fill a two-hour time slot. Of course, the impromptu scheduling was time-approximate anyway, but to ensure that all of their intended programming did play, the second (or third!) feature would likely be shown without commercials.
Friday and Saturday nights were the busiest of all, with the standard plugs for Mike’s Subs, as well as giveaways (one time the love scene early in The Hustler was given a Brechtian notion when a subtitled appeared: “We have our winner- please hold your calls”!) and reading fan mail (yes!). In its heyday, The Cat’s Pajamas had its own “fan club”, who would receive coffee mugs and T-shirts with their logo.
One busy Friday night, the 74-minute W.C. Fields classic, It’s a Gift, took up two-and-a-half-hours! Nonetheless, they followed with Fields in Million Dollar Legs… uninterrupted (although sometimes the Cat’s Pajamas logo would appear if there was a delay in changing reels). This loose scheduling would drive prime-time programmers mad. Truthfully, this kind of practice on The Cat’s Pajamas was not at all upsetting. Usually, the movie you were watching was just part of the entire package. The point is, to all of those insomniacs, lonely people, babysitters, janitors and security guards, this show was a nightlight with a lot of warmth. These people were our friends!
Early in 1986, Barry turned the reins over to Randi Naughton, a ravishing brunette who would have Randi’s PJ Party on Friday nights, and, like her mentor, would read fan mail (often from these guys called Ace & Rob- where are they now?), hawk Mike’s Subs and occasionally have guests (including The Goo Goo Dolls, marking their first TV appearance). However, the other six nights had become host-less. The programming, nonetheless, did not change. Theme nights started: Mondays were their ever-popular kung fu flicks, and Sunday night was science fiction-horror night. Each night, the festivities started with a cartoon still of a cat dressed as Dracula or Indiana Jones (or whatever was relevant), married to a cheery voice-over (announcing the theme of the evening):
“Welcome to The Cat’s Pajamas, the all-night show on TV 2! Sit back and relax with your favourite movies and old time TV shows! Each night of the week, it’s a different theme! And tonight, it’s… SCIENCE FICTION HORROR NIGHT!”
From 1987 to 1988, pre-paid programming would gradually sneak into the schedule. The Cats Pajamas by then merely consisted of an old television show, followed by only one movie at 3 AM (broadcast without commercials, or at least the famous default: showing “Cat’s Pajamas” bumpers while reels changed). By 1989, The Cats Pajamas programming would be squeezed down to just Friday nights, while infomercials aired the rest of the week. Soon even Randi would disappear from the Friday nights. By then, the writing was on the wall.
The same instance when I moved away to university, The Cat’s Pajamas became a soft-focus memory. In fact, on the Friday night of the weekend that I was packing up to move, I turned on the TV to see “What’s on The Cat’s Pajamas tonight?” (Old habits die hard.) The oddball 1966 thriller Chamber of Horrors was airing. It felt like a brief reunion with an old friend. It felt like a goodbye. (I later learned that on the following Friday, The Cat’s Pajamas quietly signed off for good after showing the feature-length TV pilot for Search.)
Barry Lillis stopped as the WGRZ weatherman in 1997, and went on to be a respectable voice in the community with his co-founded Kids Escaping Drugs campaigns (one had seen advertisements of this very thing in between his on-air plugs for submarines), and most significantly, became an ordained minister in Niagara Falls! The Cats Pajamas is probably something he would prefer to leave behind, but if ever I met him personally, I would thank him for being that friend that I could always turn to. (UPDATE: in 2020, Father Barry returned to show biz! For about a year, he played music on weekdays 3 to 6 PM, on Buffalo’s jazz and easy listening station, WEBR 1440. Visit this link to listen live!)
The Cat’s Pajamas provided a good history of non-silent, non-subtitled cinema seven nights a week: one was as likely to find Penny Serenade as When Tae-Kwon-Do Strikes. Besides the communal warmth, another appeal of The Cat’s Pajamas was the wealth of nostalgia for any persuasion: Cary Grant in Room for One More, a trio of Vincent Price movies on Halloween night, It’s a Wonderful Life after Saturday Night Live, almost complete catalogs of movie series with Blondie, Charlie Chan, Bomba The Jungle Boy and Abbott & Costello; W.C. Fields addressing the ball, Ice Castles, David Janssen TV series, The Rose, Mario Bava movies, a 1944 newsreel showing how the Allies are doing, early-70s made-for-TV thrillers with Cloris Leachman, John Wayne B-Westerns, kung fu flicks with Bruce Li, Bruce Le, etc., “Our Gang” shorts, Papillon, a chapter from a 1932 serial with Bela Lugosi’s name way down in the credits…
Today, surrogate companionship is more prevalent than before. Every TV station runs 24-7; we have a wealth of programming at our fingertips to stream or to view on DVD or Blu-ray. But in the days of the late night movie host, one felt a genuine sense of community, knowing that I was sharing something with another human being on the other side of the screen.
The film has ended. On screen, TV-2 emits a cartoonish-still of a sun rising behind tall buildings. They’ve put it to music by something from George Benson’s “Breezin’” LP. Turn your head. Through the crevice between the drapes the ashen sky is now magenta. Communion has ended. The 525-lined sunrise has transported you back to a physical one. Take your fuzzy slippers off the footstool. Throw the aluminum foil in the trash. Go to bed. Dream.
Thanks, Barry. You were a true friend.
Note: this is an updated version of an article which appeared in Vol. #1, Issue #1, 2001, of The Eclectic Screening Room. It was a deliberate choice for the zine to begin with The Cat’s Pajamas (literally- it started on page one), so important was this program to my personal baggage. There is also a Facebook page devoted to The Cat’s Pajamas. Drop in here and say “Hi!”