Convenient for whom? To what end? Can you clarify that?
Me too. (Unknown producerish guy) This vein’ the Dope n’ all, given the number of hits and the insane amount of focus being directed at it, if it were anyone with any degree of celebrity, I feel certain we would have our answer by now. Therefore, not a famous person.
Did Marlo Thomas ever answer on her Facebook page? Maybe someone should go knock on her door.
Lamia in Post 431 found the same identical listing in the New York Times.
The reason no one else has found any other listings is because these “papers of record” do not make their 1970 archives available for free on the internet. Google is not going to find anything other than the small papers for you.
Fortunately, this is a case where you can actually prove a negative. Any medium to large library is going to have these papers of record available to research. If you want to continue to make the claim that this listing was not found in the papers of record, go look at a copy of the papers and let us know what the papers do say in the TV listings for this date. For now, I believe Lamia.
And I would love to hear you explain how and why some person or persons altered copies of small newspapers to mislead us this way and whether they did so back in 1970 or 30+ years later when the newspapers were scanned by the google archivist.
By the way, are there any newspapers that contradict what these small newspapers say or did the party/parties responsible for altering them get to all of the newspapers?
This conspiracy is far too large for your tiny mind to comprehend.
The same way they altered the birth announcements in the 1961 Honolulu newspapers, so that Kenyan usurper could get into the White House. :mad:
I realize it isn’t evidence of anything, but McMahon and MM are looking away from the interviewer’s desk toward the stars, while all the stars are looking toward the desk. It makes me wonder if MM is someone connected with The Tonight Show, who was chatting with the guests along with McMahon during a break, while Carson, or whoever the host was, had stepped out, and they were filling time for the sake of the studio audience. I realize that he is wearing a tux, and that suggests he expected to appear on-air, but if there was a reception of some sort beforehand, which there might be, considering that they were in a guest studio, and there was an unusual number of guests, the producer might be in a tux.
In fact, maybe this guy is the on-site producer for the CA studio, or something like that, for whom having The Tonight Show would be an event, and he might wear his tux (he’d own one) rather than an ordinary suit.
Pretty sure Ed is looking at Brolin.
There’s an old Legion of Super-Heroes comic where our heroes find an old photo with an unknown hero sitting among them. The sum total of their reaction is pretty much, “Hunh. How odd”
This thread has convinced me that they would go batshit insane trying to find out who he was.
OMG I’ve been away from the SDMB for a week or so and had no idea this thread would still be going on.
Thanks to Lamia for confirming my findings (yes damnit I want full credit!) of the Photoplay award special in a “real” newspaper, since apparently small town newspapers don’t count enough because the Gray Men in Black Helicopters could have so easily edited them just to screw with our tiny minds. 
For those who keep plugging away at Peter Richman, please get off that bandwagon. I personally agree he looks the closest, but as I mentioned ages ago, his daughter said no (but that wasn’t good enough for some of us… oy, the hubris!) and finally we now know the poor guy himself wrote to one of our own saying definitively: “NO IT’S NOT ME THIS HAS BEEN GOING ON FOR YEARS BACK OFF WEIRDOS!!!” (Okay I’m paraphrasing.) 
My theory as to why John Wayne and Bette Davis aren’t there despite having been scheduled acc. to the TV listings along with Marlo Thomas/Danny Thomas/Carol Burnett/Glen Campbell/James Brolin, is that–well, they’re John Wayne and Bette freakin’ Davis. Wayne was off shooting a film, and I wager so was Davis. Nothing against the folks who showed up, but there are superstars and then there are TV stars, and unlike the 21st century, in those days film stars were in an entirely different category. Especially superstars like Wayne and Davis.
Point is, they seem less likely to show up for a magazine award event, especially one that wasn’t even going to be televised–unlike the 50th anniversary show the next year, which was shown on Glen Campbell’s variety show. Another coincidence. In reading about the awards they weren’t typically broadcast, but the winners were announced/piggybacked onto other variety/talk shows.
Point 1: Addressed. It was in the bloody New York Times.
Point 2: It was an annual award. They take place annually. Otherwise the following year would not have been the 50th annual awards. Is there some definition of “annual” I’m not following? There were ceremonies every year, but they were not telecast every year.
Points 3 - 5 are more difficult since Photoplay is defunct, but I’m going to say that Points 4 and 5 are just as valid for the Emmy theory. In fact, they’re more valid, because the Emmys are still extant and their history is far more codified.
The truth is, the only listing of these particular guests, and all of these particular guests (except MM) is in the New York Times and all the other smaller newspapers we found, and possibly we’d find more if anyone with LEXIS/NEXIS shows up. And that listing refers specifically to the Photoplay award, those particular guests, and Johnny Carson travelling to Burbank for that episode.
Needless to say, I’m on the side of "no, this isn’t a gag, because if it is it’s the stupidest, silliest gag on record. Why would anyone whip up a photo with this group of TV stars (exception at the time being Danny Thomas and Carol Burnett)? Because if our merry prankster 'shopped this guy in, he managed to find an image of all these guests standing around without someone sitting in the chair nearest Johnny? What are the chances of that particular seat would be empty? That’s the one that gets filled first, and then everyone starts moving downwards as the new guests arrive.
For the record, btw, I showed this to my sister (who is very good at face-guessing) and she guessed Fernando Lamas. I’m not convinced, myself–admittedly he’s a tough one because he looks different in every single image! But to me his eyebrows are always very dark and somewhat severe. This guy has paler eyebrows than Lamas did, at least I think so.
I still kinda like my first guesses of James Whitmore and Lloyd Bridges, but I don’t see why they’d’ve been part of that company. They weren’t in anything significant in either 1969 or 1970 IIRC. (Bridges was best known for Sea Hunt at that point, I believe.)
Actually, you know who he kinda reminds me of? The actor is a shade too young (he’d have been only 36 at the time) and definitely too obscure, but lookswise there’s a hint of Michael McGuire, who played Sumner Sloan on Cheers. But I can’t even guess what he’d have been doing on the show–his biggest credit at that time was a brief stint on Dark Shadows! So the search goes on.
I thought if there was a guest host, Ed would have the night off as well and the sidekick/second banana’s seat was filled by Doc. That was always how it was in the late 80s/early 90s, at least.
So the fact that Ed is there means this would have been a bona fide Johnny show?
Yes, it was a bona fide Carson show. I posted a link upthread with a listing from from the Sumter Daily Item showing that Carson was scheduled to broadcast the first of 13 programs from LA starting 11-11-70, and these people were scheduled to be his guests. The announcement was made by his executive producer, Fred de Cordova.
Here’s the link again.
ETA: Someone said upthread that they didn’t think Carson was there because MM’s arm was resting on Carson’s desk, which would have been rude had Carson been seated at the desk. It appears to me that MM’s arm is resting on the back of his own chair, with Carson’s desk angled away toward it from the right as we see it.
Agreed. His hand is clearly on the arm of his chair which would make it very difficult for his arm to be on the desk.
TinEye doesn’t recognize the picture or a cropped version of just him.
That Sumter clip is great, Starving Artist. I feel vindication! But oh, how frustrating it is to see that list of guests for the Nov. 11 show end with “…and others.” ARRRGH!
Clearly this guy’s name is Edward Alia. Ed for short.
You would think that the guy who it isn’t (Peter Richman), if he’d been getting bugged about it for years, would have found out who it is.
Also, if you count the letters in the names of everybody in the picture except MM, it adds up to 370. As in Flight 370.
I haven’t heard back from TV Guide. I’m not exactly surprised either, I could only find an email address for support, whatever that was supposed to mean. It’s very likely the mystery man is not a celebrity and wouldn’t be recognizable to any but a few people, all of who may be at least 60 years old now. I do find it odd that Richman says this has been going on for years. Has anyone found an internet reference to this photo that isn’t recent.
The funny thing now is that searching for the source of this photo tends to turn up this thread.
As for resting your arm on Carson’s desk being rude, you mean no one in the history of the show ever rested his arm on the desk???
FINALLY, we’re getting somewhere!
My friend Michael, who knows American pop culture and obscure celebrities like nobody’s business, took a look and wrote back:
Some of the people who responded said it was Peter Mark Richman – they are correct. He was kind of a multi-purpose actor who showed up everywhere on 70’s TV… I looked him up and he’s one of those guys that you would know him to see him.
I believe it’s possible that Richman’s daughter could be mistaken. If Richman himself denied it, that would carry more weight. (He didn’t come in and deny it himself while I was away, did he? The thread has grown so big, I’ve not had time to look through all the new posts.)
