He's a rebel and he was never any good.

□ [“Betty White turns 99 Sunday"]

Definitely the closest to a 'founder of television' still around.  I know she was on tv in the 1950s and an adult at the time, records say she had been on earlier but that's effectively where tv started.  Two decades later she was on the Mary Tyler Moore show and is probably the only main cast-member left.  Twenty years after that she played an old woman on Golden Girls and that was thirty years ago.  I'm not sure I've ever seen in her in anything else, but she was certainly a likeable actress.

□ [“Phil Spector: Pop producer jailed for murder dies January 16 at 81"]

Then there's this guy who was basically to rock'n'roll what Betty White was to tv.  More legendary but less likeable.  Near as I can tell, he was the first one to take advantage of a recording studio in and of itself.  Again I'm being too lazy to look up the specific details, but I think he started with an attempt to be part of a singing group but realized very quickly that he'd rather be behind the mixing board and obviously had the hits to justify it.

Spector was obsessed with making all the decisions, very much opposing the audience making any decision on how to listen.  I think it was headphones that he really didn't like, either that or how to arrange the sound on the speakers.  At his best, he made good decisions on this but never mind his ego, he quickly ran out of ability when the recording studio became more complicated than the ones he had pioneered.

There's the downside of expanding technology, keeping track of it is a full-time job, much less using it, much less competing against other producers or musicians who create and record their own songs.  He was cutting the curve in pop music at the time but it's sounded old-fashioned for several decades now.  I'm currently listening to the Ronettes "Baby I Love You" and it's great but noisy.  Even a generic rock band would sound better a decade later.

Then there was his ego which is mind-boggling in its own right.  I'm totally amazed at how he was able to work with the Beatles at all, much less continue with John and George on some solo work.  To this day Paul McCartney has always hated what Phil did to "The Long and Winding Road," although that I can' t agree with that, the official release is awesome and Phil's the one who made that happen.  John's first solo album was extremely basic in music and instruments and I can't imagine how Phil accepted it.  "Instant Karma" was a much more typical sound from him.

After that he was done.  The few people who tried to work with him quickly gave up.  He did inspire Jim Steinman but Phil hated Steinman's work which shows how far away he was from reality.  Very little was heard of him for the next few decades until he shot Lana Clarkson, a minor actress who I know best from her two appearances on Night Court even though looking it up right now, I can't remotely remember what she did.  Apparently one of the two episodes was where Markie Post became a regular character and Selma was gone.  [The previous episode was the last one with Ellen Foley who is best known for this show and for appearance on Jim Steinman works.  Wheels within wheels...]  She was also on an episode of Wings which I know I saw when it was new but remember nothing about anymore.

I'm increasingly suspicious that large conspiracies have been going on in Hollywood since before Betty White was born and I definitely think Phil Spector was involved in them.  He even made a cameo in the 1969 movie Easy Rider which is definitely where Hollywood changed in some aspects.  Of all the things Phil didn't do with his life, he suddenly decided to be filmed playing a drug dealer by two unknown actors?

Ok, the actors weren't completely unknown, one of them had a famous father and both had been in movies before that which even I've seen, not a common thing.  But they weren't remotely major stars.  I'm looking them up now and it's definitely not possible to find a direct path.  You start with one actor and lead to others, other movies, other people and those are just the famous one listed, nothing to do with Phil Spector or any unknown person.  How do you determine a pattern from there?  For example, the third creator of Easy Rider was the writer Terry Southern who went back to Dr. Strangelove which gets into Stanley Kubrick who was probably as insane as Spector but less violent and just as private.

If I could think of a fictional story to tell about this, I'd probably go for it totally because I suspect that, not counting whatever I totally made up, I'd probably be right about a lot of things and this would be the best way of describing them.  This is the sort of stuff I think about.