I have nothing more to say about Gary Condit except to note the following two headlines that appeared the day after his interview with Connie Chung. I think they demonstrate what a fine job he did of not saying anything of substance.
Condit Refuses To Acknowledge Affair
By MICHAEL DOYLE, Bee Washington Bureau
(Published: Friday, August 24, 2001)
WASHINGTON — Ceres Rep. Gary Condit said Thursday that he and Chandra Levy "became very close," but he refused to acknowledge having an affair with the Modesto woman.
Condit Admits Affair With Levy
By KILEY RUSSELL, Associated Press Writer
(Published: Friday, August 24, 2001)
MODESTO, Calif. (AP) – Rep. Gary Condit acknowledged a five-month relationship with missing intern Chandra Levy but said he had no idea what happened to her when she disappeared nearly four months ago.
Quick theater review: The touring company of Kiss Me Kate is camped at the Shubert Theater in Los Angeles for next month or so. This is the same production still playing on Broadway (though probably soon to close) where I saw it twice. Since this is a touring company, we get different stars, the same costumes, the same arrangements, the same revised book, and approximations of the same direction and choreography. The sets follow the same basic designs but have been simplified and downsized so they can be trucked from town to town.
I loved this show in New York but only liked it a lot in L.A., where the stars are Rex Smith and Rachel York. Smith is good and York is great but the chemistry between them — so essential to this tale of a warring theatrical couple performing in a musicalization of The Taming of the Shrew — doesn't quite click. But each scores with great solo turns, and the dance numbers are outstanding. The Act Two opener — "Too Darn Hot" — is worth the price of admission alone and so is the performance of Nancy Anderson in the role of Bianca/Lois. (I loved the lady who played it in N.Y. and Ms. Anderson is even better…)
So the news of what's on the stage is generally good. What isn't good is the news that the Shubert Theatre has only a year to live before it will be razed to make room for a 15-story office building. Playgoing in this town has been bad enough without losing the 2,100 seat Shubert where I saw Evita, A Chorus Line, Sunset Boulevard, 42nd Street, Ragtime and so many others. Some folks had figured that whenever The Producers makes its way west, it would wind up at the Shubert, especially if The Lion King remains ensconced another year at the Pantages, as seems likely. Los Angeles will probably lose a lot of great plays, simply because there's no place to play them.
I don't really know who Ron Newcomer is, other than that he loves to take photos of celebrities and have his picture taken with celebrities. He's put a staggering number of such pics, taken over 25 years, on his website (here's the link) and I find it strangely hypnotic to browse through them. The faces of the celebs change but, for some reason, Mr. Newcomer's never does.
At left above is the cover for the new DVD of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, which comes out September 18. I must say I'm a little baffled by this design, which was also employed on one of the VHS releases. See that photo at lower right? Know who that is? That's Edward Everett Horton, a wonderful character actor who is (a) just about totally unknown today and (b) in the movie for all of ten seconds. So why does he have one of the largest photos while Spencer Tracy — the film's main star — has a small one and other stars, much better known than Mr. Horton, are absent?
The most logical explanation I can come up with is that whoever designed this thing thought it was a photo of Jimmy Durante. Either that or this cover is the handiwork of Edward Everett Horton, Jr.
This is the "restored" version which, as you've all heard me say ad nauseum, is not really restored. It's cobbled together from discarded scenes and out-takes. I don't think much of it and, about a year ago when I finally got to sit and talk with Stanley Kramer for a time, he didn't seem to think much of it, either. (I haven't written a column about that chat because, among other reasons, I can't figure out how to tell it so it sounds like something that could happen on this planet. I had wanted for years to meet Mr. Kramer and ask him a few questions about Mad World but it never happened. Then, when I went out to the Motion Picture Country Home to visit Pat McCormick, it turned out his roommate was Stanley Kramer and…well, it was a very odd afternoon because Pat can't talk since his stroke, and Mr. Kramer's memory kept coming and going.)
In any case: An overlong Mad World containing scenes that don't belong is still better than no Mad World. And this DVD contains a good "Making of…" documentary, trailers and subtitles in English, French and Spanish. So I'm buying one and if you want to, they're taking advance orders over at Amazon.Com, which you can reach by clicking here.
Excerpts from the 1999 Comic-Con International Panel with Chuck Cuidera and Will Eisner can be read by clicking here. And an audio interview with Cuidera (as well as plenty of information on Blackhawk) can be found over on Dan Thompson's Unofficial Blackhawk Comics Website, which you can reach by clicking here.
Chuck Cuidera, who worked on the classic Golden Age comic books of Blackhawk and The Blue Beetle, passed away the night of August 25. He was 86. A native of Newark, New Jersey, Chuck was an excellent athlete who somehow found his way into the world of art, winning several scholarships and eventually graduating in 1939 from the prestigious Pratt Institute — an achievement of which he was very proud and which he would mention often. He started in comics working for the notorious Victor Fox and while there, worked on the company's main super-hero, The Blue Beetle, which appeared in both comic books and strips signed "by Charles Nicholas." (Cuidera's full name was Charles Nicholas Cuidera) Others, including Jack Kirby, took over the strip, retaining the Nicholas by-line.
At times, Cuidera would claim to have created the character but the timing of its first appearance makes this assertion questionable, at best. In any case, he soon migrated to Quality Comics, run by a man named Everett Arnold, known throughout the industry as "Busy" Arnold. But most of Cuidera's early work was done in the shop of Will Eisner who was in partnership with Arnold, and it was there that Cuidera's most enduring feature, Blackhawk, was created.
Again, a bit of controversy would always surround who did what on Blackhawk. Eisner recalled involvement in writing the first story, before handing the strip over to Dick French to write. Cuidera said he created it, that Bob Powell wrote the first story and that subsequent scripts were by himself. "I never drew a script by French," Chuck insisted when I interviewed him earlier this year. "Powell wrote the first one and I wrote the rest until I went into the service."
Eisner later said of the dispute, "Whether or not Chuck Cuidera created or thought of Blackhawk to begin with is unimportant… the fact that Chuck Cuidera made Blackhawk what it was is the important thing, and therefore, he should get the credit."
What is less arguable was that Cuidera — apparently with some assistance — drew the first eleven stories that ran in Military Comics before heading off to war. He served as a commando in the 36th Infantry Division's 143rd Regiment. While stationed at Paul's Point, off the coast of Martha's Vineyard, a boat capsized during a GHQ problem and Chuck was credited with rescuing some 30 soldiers — a feat for which he was given the Soldier's Medal. He was also rewarded with the approval of a previously-filed request to transfer to the Air Force. By the time of his discharge, he had attained the rank of captain with the 8th Air Force division.
His replacement as Blackhawk artist, Reed Crandall, soon lifted the feature to new heights and became identified with it. When Cuidera returned to comics work following his discharge, Crandall remained as lead artist on Blackhawk, and Chuck occasionally inked his work and drew back-up features, while devoting much of his time to a strip called Captain Triumph. He also served for a time as Quality's Art Director, where he became known throughout the industry for his crusty, blunt management style. One of Quality's artists, John Cassone, once told me, "Chuck really chewed you out if you drew something wrong or turned work in late."
In 1956, Quality Comics sold Blackhawk to DC, and the artists went with it: Dick Dillin as penciller, Cuidera as inker. Chuck inked for other DC books over the next 14 years, including Hawkman, The Brave and the Bold and the ghost titles, but was increasingly unhappy with the business and its pay scales. At the same time, he had become interested in SCUBA diving. He successfully designed and marketed a quick-release weight belt for divers, and taught skin diving for the Y.M.C.A. all around New Jersey.
"I saw no future in comics," he explained in a recent interview. In 1970, he was mulling an offer to become involved with city planning in his home town when he got into an argument with a DC editor over corrections to his artwork…an ironic turn of events, given Cuidera's own reputation as an art director. It was at that point that Chuck Cuidera left comics and focused his energies elsewhere, soon losing all contact with the industry. Years later, he retired to Florida with his wife. Within the comic book field, he was believed to be deceased until, just a few years ago, Golden Age expert Dave Siegel tracked him down.
In 1999, Charles Nicholas Cuidera was a Guest of Honor at the Comic-Con International in San Diego and had such a good time that he came back again, this year. At the '99 con, he was reunited with his old friend and employer, Will Eisner, for a historic panel on the origins of Blackhawk.
It was a pleasure to meet and interrogate such a pivotal figure in comic history. Chuck had a hard-as-nails exterior but he was genuinely moved to discover that he had so many fans and to see so many of his old cohorts. Alas, he did not live to see the hardcover Blackhawk Archives book which DC is issuing in September, reprinting his original eleven Blackhawk stories from Military Comics, as well as several by Crandall.
Still, he was delighted to hear that his work was being preserved in that manner, and that it would be devoured by a new generation. And of course, he was well aware that the Blackhawks would long outlive their maker…
Absent a confession that he'd killed Chandra Levy and dumped her body into the gloppeta-gloppeta machine*, I thought Gary Condit did about as bad as humanly possible in his interview with Connie Chung the other night. No, I take that back: He actually managed to do worse in the interview he did right after that with a local reporter in his home town of Modesto. I caught it on my satellite dish…and he not only looked even sleazier, he made his performance with Ms. Chung look worse, because he kept robotically repeating the same answers he gave there, over and over, draining every last droplet of sincerity from them.
It was like a game we used to play in improv workshops where you're given two lines of dialogue and, no matter how the scene plays out, you have to answer with one or the other. In Condit's case, they were "Out of respect for the wishes of the Levy family, I'm not going to get into that" and "I've been married for 34 years and I'm not a perfect man." Since not one of the questions asked could have been a surprise to the guy, you'd think he'd at least have planned some different ways to not say anything.
I have relatively little interest in Mr. Condit and, while it would be nice to see Ms. Levy turn up alive and well, I have no more interest in her than I do in any of the hundreds of men and women who manage to vanish each year in this country without the media going on Red Alert. The law enforcement officials who are charged with searching for Chandra Levy must feel trapped between the proverbial rock and hard place: They are incessantly hectored for not doing more to find her, but they know there's no acceptable answer to the question of why they're doing more to find her than they do to find anyone else.
What does interest me, sort of, about all this is how gleefully irresponsible the media has become in all this. Bogus reports of other affairs…oddities in the Condit household…reports of phone calls that actually didn't take place? Doesn't matter. Condit, they've decided, is guilty of something; if he didn't break the law, he's at least a hypocritical wife-cheater…so he and his family are fair game and accuracy is not required, especially during Sweeps Week. Early on, I had a faint hope that he'd turn out to be the Richard Jewell of Public Figures but there's no way that's gonna happen, no matter how this thing plays out.
What also interests me is this: Gary Condit is not some schmuck who got caught cheating on his wife. He's a seasoned politician schmuck who got caught cheating on his wife. He's experienced at evading dangerous questions and double-talking his way past topics he'd rather not address. People are upset because they think he's weaseling past all the hard queries…but that's in the Job Description we've come to define for elected officials in this country.
We expect politicians to lie and evade and then, if they're people we like, we forgive evasive answers and fibbing as some necessity of elected office. How many people do you know who were upset about all three of the following: Bill Clinton's "I never had sex with that woman," George Bush's "I was not in those Iran-Contra meetings" and Ronald Reagan's "We did not trade arms for hostages"? Most folks expressed outrage about one or two of those…but when it's their guy caught mutilating the truth, they rationalize or change the subject or say "The other guy did worse" or mutter, "Out of respect for the wishes of the Levy family, I'm not going to get into that."
Mr. Condit is being no less candid than most politicians in America if you ask them a question that they know will cost them votes. If he really thinks he can survive and win re-election, it's probably because he knows that, in the end, honesty garners little reward at the ballot box. I don't think it'll work this time…but, sad to say, it usually does.
(P.S.: For the funniest comment so far on it all, check out what Joshua Micah Marshall had to say by clicking here.)
*An obscure reference to a joke in the Jack Lemmon film, How To Murder Your Wife.
I've recommended articles by Joe Conason before and I'll highly recommend his current one. It's about Dick Cheney stonewalling on his energy commission while Republicans are leaking details of Bill Clinton's confidential conversations with Ehud Barak. Here's the link.
And another aspect of the same situation is covered over on Joshua Micah Marshall's Talking Points. Go there by clicking here and read down the page a bit because he keeps adding new items at the top..
Our pal Lorenzo Music passed away on a Saturday morning and I posted an obit here that evening. Word of his departure didn't make the wire services until Tuesday or Wednesday but it was all over the Internet by Sunday night, prompting many, many expressions of regret…and a few folks pondering if, perhaps, it wasn't on the news sites because it wasn't true. On newsgroups, message boards and in a few e-mails to me, four or five people were wondering if perhaps I was grossly-mistaken or pulling some wretched-taste hoax.
My first reaction — apart from wishing it was a mistake or hoax — was to take a bit of umbrage. It was like, "Didn't these people look at my site? Didn't they notice that I was someone who'd worked with Lorenzo? Who obviously knew him? There's even a photo of me with him up there." But then I realized something which I'll put it in bold italic type because I think it's important: These people were right to be skeptical.
Absolutely. The Internet is a repository of spurious information, some of it packaged to look very knowing and official, indeed. It is also a dandy place for hoaxes and miscommunication. Lately, those who follow news of the comic book industry on the 'net have witnessed one outright death hoax and another misunderstanding — both about professional artists, both so authoritative that even insiders were taken-in by them and passed them on. You should be suspicious of everything you read on the Internet, even if you read it here. Hell, you should be suspicious of everything you read in a newspaper or hear on the news…
Just received my copy of Groucho: A Photographic Journey, which is a fancy new book by Arthur "Son of…" Marx. It's a beautiful book of photos, most of which I'd never seen before. And if I'd never seen them, odds are you haven't, either. If you care enough about the Marx Brothers — Groucho, of course, in particular — to want to see wonderful photos of them, offstage and on, you need this book. You can order it from www.amazon.com or, if you want to pay a few bucks more and get it autographed, order it from www.grouchoworld.com. At the latter, you can also order the CD and home video of Frank Ferrante's glorious Groucho replication.
Well, no one I care about died today, so we'll put another $20 in the jackpot…and I'll use this space to plugone of my books. Last year, Sergio Aragonés and I did a six-issue mini-series for DC Comics and all six issues have just been reprinted in a nice, little trade paperback book. It's called Fanboy and it's the story of an aspiring comic book artist named Finster who has occasional troubles separating Reality and Fantasy. Sergio drew the Reality and an awe-inspiring array of guest artists drew the Fantasy: Neal Adams, Marlo Alquiza, Brent Anderson, Jordi Bernet, Will Blyberg, Brian Bolland, Dave Gibbons, Joe Giella, Mike Grell, Matt Haley, Russ Heath, Phil Jiminez, Bob Kane (posthumously), Gil Kane, Joe Kubert, Kevin Maguire, Frank Miller, Jim Mooney, Kevin Nowlan, Jerry Ordway, Wendy Pini, Steve Rude, Marie Severin, Bill Sienkiewicz, Tom Simmons, Dan Spiegle, Dick Sprang, Bruce Timm and Bernie Wrightson.
If you follow comics at all, a few of your faves are surely on that roster. I had enormous fun doing it and I hope it shows.
What you see above is a bad picture taken from the cover of one of Dave Barry's comedy records. This is not the Dave Barry who presently writes a syndicated humor column. This is the other Dave Barry, and he passed away recently. Here's the AP wire report…
Actor-Comedian Dave Barry Dead at 82
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Comedian Dave Barry, who opened for a number of top performers, including Wayne Newton, died Thursday. He was 82.
The comedian, who was not related to the Miami-based humorist of the same name, was born in New York City and started his career at age 16 on radio's "Major Bowes and the Original Amateur Hour."
He moved to California in the early 1940s and served in the Army during World War II entertaining troops.
Toward the end of that decade, Barry began performing in Las Vegas at the El Rancho Hotel. He was featured at the Desert Inn in a revue called "Hello America." He opened for Newton for more than eight years.
Barry had television and film credits, most notably in Billy Wilder's "Some Like It Hot," in which he played the role of Beinstock, the band's manager. In the latter part of his career, he entertained on cruise ships and appeared in the "Follies," a Palm Springs, California, variety show.
This report doesn't tell you a lot of things about Dave Barry — like, for instance, that for a dozen or so years there, he performed on Ed Sullivan's show as often as any stand-up comedian. It doesn't tell you that he actually was performing intermittently in Las Vegas as recently as 1988. He made them laugh in that town for something like forty years, which is quite an accomplishment.
It also doesn't delve into his not-inconsiderable work as a voiceover artist. He did his first cartoon work for Famous Studios when that operation was still based in Florida. Barry (who was then going under the name, Dave Siegel) was playing at a hotel in Miami. A man from the audience approached him at the bar after the show and said they needed someone to do the voice of Bluto…so Barry played Bluto in Seein' Red, White and Blue and perhaps one or two other films. When he moved to Hollywood, he sought out similar work there and got some, mainly for the Columbia cartoon studio and Warner Brothers.
For the latter, he was their all-star celebrity impersonator for a time, specializing in Bogart. Any time you hear someone doing Bogey in a Bugs Bunny cartoon, it's probably Dave Barry. He was also called upon to do numerous bit and incidental parts, and often supplied a trick voice that he claimed to have invented — a bubbly kind of thing that made it sound like he was talking underwater. This, he also used frequently when dubbing voices for Paramount's Speaking of Animals series.
He was also Elmer Fudd in the 1958 cartoon, Pre-Hysterical Hare. Barry told me he filled in a number of times for Elmer's original voice, Arthur Q. Bryan, on kids' records but also in the cartoons, sometimes being called in to do one line in a film that was otherwise voiced by Bryan. No one has been able to identify Barry playing Fudd in any records but he did once play Bugs Bunny on a record where Bryan was Elmer.
Had he remained based in Los Angeles, Dave Barry would probably have been a voice actor with as many credits as a Don Messick or a Paul Frees. He was enormously versatile and a tremendous mimic. But his stand-up act was his bread-'n'-butter and it took him away from the voice market for weeks and months at a time, prompting employers to turn to others and forget about him. A lot of what he did do when in town was looping and dubbing for movies. He was, for example, heard in Roger Corman's film of The Raven, making sounds for the title character and dubbing voices for Peter Lorre and Vincent Price*. In at least one movie, he redubbed all the dialogue for the Indian actor, Sabu, to make him more intelligible.
I only had the pleasure of meeting Dave on two occasions, both regrettably brief, but I saw him during what was probably his last Vegas stand, and he was terrific. Age had not slowed down his timing one bit…and, by the way, if I understand correctly what he told me, he was actually older than it says in the above obit. He was proud of his work in animation voicing and lamented that he should have stayed in L.A. and done more of it. When I met him, which was just a few years back, he hadn't done a cartoon voice since several DePatie-Freleng shorts of the mid-sixties, and I was hoping to find a part for him in one of my current projects, preferably doing Bogey.
Sorry that didn't happen. But he merits the best thing you can say about a deceased comedian: He truly was a funny, funny man.
P.S. The fact that Barry occasionally redubbed dialogue for Vincent Price has apparently caused some folks to presume he's the guy who does the Vincent Price imitation in the Bugs Bunny cartoon, Water, Water, Every Hare. Not so…and it was also not Vincent Price himself, as has occasionally been assumed — or Walker Edmiston, as has been reported in at least one published source. It was an actor named John T. Smith, who was heard in other WB cartoons, usually doing a gravelly villain voice. He was the dog in Chow Hound and the construction worker in No Parking Hare, to name two credits. Both have also sometimes erroneously been attributed to Dave Barry.
Want to know my problem with the press? A lot of it is demonstrated by a commentary piece that ran recently in The Wall Street Journal lambasting Hillary Clinton and apparently misrepresenting a lot of facts in order to do so. Over on a website called ConWebWatch, an author named Joe Moran laid down a pretty strong case that the editorial was, to put it politely, full of manure. Here's a direct link to his article. Please let me know if you ever come across anything that proves Moran is wrong orif you spot anyone other than Hillary-partisans finding fault with this piece. I think a lot of absolute nonsense has been printed about just about everyone in public life, be they Democratic, Republican or None of the Above. And you so rarely see (a) the source correct the error and/or (b) anyone rise to object unless it's consistent with their political agenda. If it slams the guy you're against, it's true, end of story.
I also think that any reporter or pundit who spends more than ten seconds on Al Gore's beard, or who reads any deep character or political insight into it, should be fired immediately.
Good editorial in the New York Daily News about our alleged president's financial planning. Here's the link.
NBC has been running and rerunning a limited number of vintage SCTV episodes in the Later slot, every night after Conan O'Brien. I'm told that they're not airing a wider array of episodes because, being up in Canada and all, the original series was very lax about clearing rights to the songs they used. Ergo, to broadcast certain episodes these days would require skillful negotiation and some hefty fees, so we get the same ones, over and over. Some (not all) of them are actually worth it…though you won't be enjoying them for long. NBC has decided to take Later back to the talk show format and to bring in Carson Daly to sit behind the desk, commencing early next year.
This is an interesting move and I can't say I really understand it. Before they began running SCTV, NBC was trying out different hosts in the job, reportedly to try and find the perfect one. What they wound up discovering was that it really didn't matter who hosted the thing. The show got a 1.5 rating no matter who sat in the big chair. It would have gotten a 1.5 if you'd hosted it or I'd hosted it or your Aunt Tillie had hosted it. Didn't make any difference. The ratings only fluctuated when a superstar guest appeared or when Mr. O'Brien provided an unusually strong lead-in. After a year or three of immaterial host tryouts, NBC announced they would use the time slot to test out new concepts and innovative programming…and they promptly came up with the new and innovative notion of airing reruns of an old show they already owned and had on the shelf. The SCTV reruns, by the way, have been pretty consistently getting a 1.5 rating, what a surprise.
So why dump free (or almost free) programming that gets a 1.5 rating to bring in a show they'll have to spend money to produce and which will get a 1.5 rating? The only explanation that makes any sense to me is that they have bigger plans for Mr. Daly…as they once did for Greg Kinnear and a few of the temps who replaced him. In any case, you won't be without access to SCTV for long. They're finally about to release some episodes on VHS and DVD — and we can only hope they haul out some that haven't been repeated into oblivion lately. The Godfather parody with Guy Caballero as the Don was brilliant but it loses a little something the nineteenth time you see it. Except for the part where Eugene Levy plays Floyd the Barber.
Every day, Monday through Friday, I make a point of visiting Comic Book Resources, a fine website that covers the funnybook biz. There, you'll find some fine columnists, including Steven Grant and "Gail," and you'll also find the daily column of my long-time pal, Scott Shaw! It's called Oddball Comics and it's an outgrowth of a slide show Scott has been presenting for years at conventions, always to capacity (and delighted) audiences. In the show and on the site, Scott presents some of the weirder comic books ever published — the kind that makes you wonder what, if anything, the editors were thinking that day. And no comics were ever odder than the ones that appeared on the comic called Superman's Girl Friend, Lois Lane. This week, Scott presents five thoroughly-bizarre Lois Lane covers, including the two above. Rush to Scott's website by clicking here and enjoy his witty, informative commentary on this cover and others.
