The SAG Awards, Get to Know Your Rabbit. The SAG Awards were awfully dull. One big surprise--Johnny Depp won the best male actor award--but then he wasn't there, so the moment fizzled. The best thing about the SAG Awards is that they give awards for entire ensembles. So they give the TV one to Sex and the City, but Sarah Jessica Parker is a no-show, and then they give the movie one to Lord of the Rings, and a huge group of lesser actors assembles on stage and mills about, while Sean Astin babbles boringly about something Guild-ish, until the hulkish John Rhys-Davies shoves him aside, seemingly for being tedious.

Lately, Rhys-Davies has been having some troubles. As he puts it: "I'm burying my career so substantially ... that it's painful."

It was only through Astin's speech last night that I realized he was Patty Duke's son. He didn't name her but mentioned that his mother had been president of the Screen Actor's Guild, and I put two and two together. John Astin is not his natural father, but adopted him after he married Patty Duke.

So let me just take this opportunity to say how much I love John Astin. And I don't just mean that I love him as Gomez on The Addams Family. I love him as Harry Dickens on I'm Dickens, He's Fenster, And I love him as Turnbull in Get to Know Your Rabbit.

I saw Get to Know Your Rabbit when it was shown, pre-release, in 1971, to a test audience in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I and it seemed like everyone else in that theater experienced it as the funniest movie we had ever seen. Somehow, even though it was directed by Brian De Palma and has Orson Welles in its cast, it fell into oblivion. I still have never come close to laughing as much at a movie as I did that night. I finally found a videotape of it, watched it again, and couldn't recapture the original feeling, maybe because I knew all the surprises. But Astin stands out as especially funny, especially, for some reason, while trying to keep pencils from rolling off his desk. For those in the know: "Pass your hand through the flame!"