Monday, August 23, 2004

Everyone Urges the Condemnation of Attack Ads...

...but nobody does anything about them.

• Posted at 6:19 PM · LINK

Standards and Cowardice

Over on Cartoon Brew, the fine website he operates with Jerry Beck, Amid Amidi has posted some thoughts on what network censors do to animation. I take up the topic over in an essay in the section I call NOTES from me.

• Posted at 5:00 PM · LINK

George Kirgo, R.I.P.

A clever and brave man named George Kirgo has died at the age of 78. George had a long and very happy career as a writer and occasional producer of TV and movies. His credits in motion pictures included Spinout and Don't Make Waves. In television, he wrote for The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Nichols, The Governor and J.J. and a short-lived but very fine series called Another Day. It is unmentioned in obits like this one but George also had a brief career as one of the first movie reviewers on television (mostly on local New York stations) and this led to a run of appearances on TV talk shows, including Jack Paar's. He also worked for a time with Harvey Kurtzman.

I got to know George because he kept turning up in the office next to mine. When I was doing Welcome Back, Kotter, George was next door producing Another Day. When I was writing The Bay City Rollers Show, George was in the next office writing and producing a TV movie called Side Show for the same producers. (It's absent from his Internet Movie Database listing.) But I really got to know the guy and to respect him when he was President of the Writers Guild during its long, anger-filled 1988 strike.

All strikes are messy but this one, which lasted 22 weeks, was way messier than the norm. The Guild split into two factions over the issue of compensation for when our works are sold for home video. An earlier deal had given writers (and by extension, others in the business) a very nice deal in this arena but the producers were insisting on an interpretation of the contract that paid much, much less. We, meaning the WGA, believed our interpretation was the correct one and that the studios, which were just then beginning to realize how lucrative home video would be, knew that and were attempting to renege. We wanted to go to arbitration and let a court decide. The producers insisted that we settle the dispute as part of the '88 contract and retro-actively accept their interpretation.

I'm simplifying but basically, that's what caused the Guild to fracture. One side, the larger of the two, wanted to not accept the producers' terms on home video. The other side, most of whom I suspect now regret their position then, wanted to give in. The leader of this latter faction, by the way, was Lionel Chetwynd, who now makes movies that portray George W. Bush as a courageous hero on the morning of 9/11.

George Kirgo, as president of the Guild, held firmly to the opposite position but still managed to be president of all WGA members through a difficult period. Now and then on the picket lines, some writer, panicked about losing his home, would start screaming at George and look as if he might take a swing at this gentle, witty man. A couple of us taller folks became George's unofficial bodyguards but we weren't needed. Kirgo never flinched and Kirgo never feared, and on two or three occasions, I saw him take a frantic striker aside, talk calmly to him and dispell the terror and frustration. I greatly admired his leadership, his compassion and his willingness to give maximum effort for this elected position. The strike ended badly but it would have been a lot worse without George Kirgo. Today, the whole world is.

• Posted at 10:46 AM · LINK