Whoops! Charlie Rose Mistakenly Declares Friend Dead

[babylonsister]

Whoops! Charlie Rose Mistakenly Declares Friend Dead

DAVID BAUDER | January 2, 2009 04:36 PM EST | AP


NEW YORK — Filmmaker George Butler wants his friends to know he's very much alive, despite a premature obituary on "The Charlie Rose Show" this week.

During Rose's annual New Year's Eve tribute on PBS to notable figures who during the year, he included Butler, whose 1977 film "Pumping Iron" featured a then-unknown bodybuilder named Arnold Schwarzenegger. The screen even flashed a Butler tombstone, 1943-2008.

The PBS show had confused him with another George Butler, a longtime jazz record executive who signed Wynton Marsalis, who died April 9.

What's odd about the mistake is that Rose and Butler are old friends through Rose's first wife, meeting shortly after they graduated from college in North Carolina.

Butler, who lives in Holderness, N.H. and is making a film on Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans, didn't see his obit but learned about it when a fellow filmmaker called. He found out that some friends in New York were even planning a wake.

more...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/01/02/whoops-charlie-rose-mista_n_154908.html

[kskiska]

1. He should've just showed up at the wake.

[Wetzelbill]

2. oh how awesome would that have been

That would be the best joke ever, outside that it might cause half the room to drop over dead for real.