Ghoulardi's kid

Speaking of TV horror hosts (as we were last week with Zacherley), Ghoulardi: Inside Cleveland TV's Wildest Ride, is a wonderful book about Ernie Anderson's antics as late-night host Ghoulardi on  Cleveland's Channel 8 (WJW) from 1963 to 1966. He is one of the most widely and fondly remembered of the regional horror hosts. And one of the most influential.

As Tom Feran and R.D. Heldenfels wrote in this 1997 book, WJW and Anderson "created an icon of popular culture whose legacy, decades later, would defy the disposable standards of modern media. Television was growing, still rough around the edges, into the common thread of community consciousness. Ghoulardi would first conquer it, amassing an audience of a size unimaginable today; and then transcend it, surviving in memories, attitudes, and language of a generation who would carry him to even wider attention."

It's a terrific book and one I highly recommend. And it comes with a fun coda. This passage appears on the final two pages of the book:

"Ernie's son Paul, an up-and-coming movie director, is stirring up trouble as eagerly as his father did. Paul's first movie, Hard Eight, came and went, but his second feature, Boogie Nights, was causing comment months before it was released. A look at the people working in and around the pornographic movie business in the '70s, the movie was the subject of eyebrow-raising stories about its subject, its male frontal nudity, and its two-and-a half-to-three-hour length. ... Through the efforts of the twenty-six-year-old auteur, it also boasted a cast of solid players like Don Cheadle, Julianne Moore, and William H. Macy. 'The worst thing you can do is be wishy-washy,' Paul said of moviemaking. His old man seems to have lived his whole life by the code, and Paul acknowledged 'I definitely inherited that trait.' As Boogie Nights sat on the verge of national release, Paul said he was next considering making a film about his dad — one that would focus especially on his years as Ghoulardi. He already had paid tribute to his father by naming his production firm The Ghoulardi Film Company."

Indeed, filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson is the son of Ghoulardi — Ernie Anderson.

Anderson hasn't made a movie specifically about Ghoulardi yet, but his most recent film, One Battle After Another, is up for 13 Oscars this coming weekend. To which Ghoulardi might exclaim, “Stay sick, knif!”