Friday, June 24, 2005

A Rocky Reception

Here's a not-great photo taken about two hours ago. The lighting wasn't very good but I think you can make out four top cartoon voice performers, starting with the guy on the left, who is Tony Anselmo, the current voice of Donald Duck. To the right of him is Will Ryan, who's been heard on many of the Disney shows. The lady in yellow is June Foray and if you don't know who she is, you should be ashamed and should read this to educate yourself. And the gent at far right is Joe Alaskey, who currently does many of the Warner Brothers characters originated by the late, great Mel Blanc.

The occasion was a celebration at the Motion Picture Academy (from whence I have just returned) to honor June's many years of service to the Short Films and Feature Animation Branch. The Academy is, as you may know, a somewhat political entity with various folks lobbying for more attention and money to be directed towards their area of specialty. The lighting people are always pushing for more Oscars to be presented (and more prominently) for lighting, and for more film retrospectives and exhibitions to focus on lighting, etc. June's efforts on her committee are high among the reasons that there are still Oscars for short subjects, and now one for feature animation, and that all are presented in the on-air telecast and treated as major areas. So a load of her friends and cohorts convened to salute her, and there was food and drink and speechifying and applause and a very good time was had by all.

This is as good a place as any to mention that I am assisting Ms. Foray with her long-awaited biography. Soon, I will be advertising here for someone who wants to earn rotten money for transcribing interviews I'll be conducting with her. Right now, I'm asking if anyone out there can help me jog her memory with some of the more obscure things she's done. Her powers of recall are very good but no one could have worked as much as that woman has worked and remember more than about a third of it. The other day, she received a residual check for her work on the Frank Sinatra movie, Dirty Dingus Magee and she called me up and said, "Was I in that? What did I do?" I've never seen the film so she called Frank Sinatra Jr and he didn't know, either. But June's in a lot of movies dubbing other actresses and sometimes children, and I'd like to try and identify as many of them as I can.

In the speeches this evening, director Arthur Hiller mentioned one such role. When he did the 1971 movie, The Hospital, there was a line spoken by Diana Rigg that he thought was not perfect. This was decided during the editing process and as Ms. Rigg was back in England, he brought June in and she redubbed it with a slightly different inflection. She did it so well, he said, that Diana Rigg did not even notice the substitution and had to be told that it had been done and which line it was. That's the kind of thing I'd like to itemize...as many of those as possible. If you know of any, let me know. June is a remarkable woman and I have a feeling this is going to be a remarkable book.

• Posted at 10:26 PM · LINK

Listen In

Item before last, I mentioned the evisceration of author Ed Klein on today's Al Franken Show. Here's a link to a site where you can download a couple of WMA files with the audio.

• Posted at 3:37 PM · LINK

Say, Just Out of Curiosity...

Who created the 1975 Marvel comic book, Omega the Unknown?

• Posted at 12:25 PM · LINK

The Price is Right

Here's a nice list of Free Software Utilities one can download on the Internet. I have a few other recommendations in a couple of categories and I'll try and post them here soon. But over all, this is a pretty good source of good freeware.

• Posted at 12:12 PM · LINK

Surgical Radio

I'm listening to a little of The Al Franken Show at the moment. He has on Ed Klein, the author of that new book on Hillary Clinton, and Klein was either very, very brave to come on the show or very, very dumb. Reporter Joe Conason is ripping the man and his book into teensy shreds, citing errors and forcing Klein to either admit he got something wrong or to defend it by saying, "Well, I heard that from someone," and of course, he can't say who that someone was. I missed the first part but I haven't yet heard Klein able to defend the accuracy of anything being discussed. No wonder Conservative pundits are distancing themselves from this guy.

It's interesting to me that some of Klein's critics have brought up what I always felt was an underrated aspect of all the Clinton-bashing that goes on...and it's true of a lot of Bush-bashing and other political extremism that infests our national dialogue, though the anti-Clinton folks brought it to a high art. It's the sheer profit motive. There's money in writing books and giving lectures that demonize polarizing public figures. A certain amount of America — surely not the majority but more than enough to make a book into a best-seller — wants to hear that the people they despise are even worse than anyone could imagine. And here's the key thing: It doesn't even matter that much if the "information" may be incorrect, just as it doesn't matter to most fans of Pro Wrestling that the outcome of the match is predetermined. They want to hate someone and to see that person get beaten up.

No one of any substance is willing to stand behind Ed Klein's book but according to some reports, he's going to clear something like $10 million from it, plus whatever advances he receives for his next few projects. He's not making that money because he's a good reporter. He's making it because he's giving a certain group of people what they want to hear.

• Posted at 12:04 PM · LINK

Today's Political Rant

My pal Peter David saves me the trouble of writing an even longer post about how brain-fogged ridiculous the anti-flag burning amendment is. Read him, then come back here and read the rest of me.

Given the low incidence of the supposed crime, we have here a cure for which there is no known disease...but there probably will be. No one's really burning American flags, at least not in this country. But with a law in place that dares people to do so, can anyone believe that some folks won't be more inclined to fire up Old Glory?

One point I haven't seen much of is that the proposed amendment would give Congress the power to write laws to stop flag-burning...but no one has seen these laws. Maybe no one has offered up a draft of what one might look like because they know any such example will be impractical and impossible to fairly enforce.

How do you write a statute that would effectively and efficiently empower authorities to prosecute flag-burning? Merely saying one cannot burn a flag won't do it since the established, proper way to dispose of a tattered or unwanted flag is to burn it. Someone will have to define what it means to "desecrate" a flag, and that discussion always reminds me of the time that infamous rebel Abbie Hoffman appeared on The Merv Griffin Show wearing an American flag shirt and CBS covered up that part of the screen. They decided that was a desecration despite the fact that during the Griffin broadcast, there was a commercial in which Roy Rogers wore the exact same shirt, and that was deemed acceptable. CBS was then in the impossible position of trying to explain why it was "desecration" for Abbie Hoffman to wear the flag while arguing against the war in Vietnam, whereas it was fine for Roy Rogers to wear it while selling fast food. How will any law against flag desecration not run into that kind of highly-arguable conundrum?

For that matter, how are they even going to define the American flag? Those shirts were probably not made out of actual flags but if they were, would it alter their legal propriety? If I take a length of red and white striped cloth and burn it, am I burning an American flag? What if the pattern has white stars on a blue background but isn't, in its whole form, a flag? Are they going to arrest me for burning something that kind of looks like an American flag? What if I burn a 13-star flag? What if I design a 56-star flag with fifteen stripes and burn it? What if instead of burning a flag, I rip it apart? What if I rip it apart and re-sew it into an American flag jacket or cummerbund? I'll bet I could think of a hundred things to do with a flag that some would think was desecration and others would think was honoring it. Suppose I shredded and charred one? Would that be desecration? What if I shredded and charred one in order to re-create a famous battle scene from American history in which soldiers hoisted a damaged flag? Supposing I write a movie in which someone incinerates Captain America...

This can go on forever and it's something the courts don't need. I think it speaks well of America if we believe it's so strong and enduring that it can't be harmed in the slightest by some punk somewhere trampling on one example of Betsy Ross's handiwork. Of all the insulting things I've seen said of this country, I don't think any have been as contemptuous as the suggestion that we are actually harmed by flag-burning.

• Posted at 10:55 AM · LINK

From the E-Mailbag...

Here's a joke that's making the rounds via e-mail...

Q: How many Bush Administration officials does it take to change a light bulb?

A: None. There is nothing wrong with the light bulb; its conditions are improving every day. Any reports of its lack of incandescence are delusional spin from the liberal media. That light bulb has served honorably, and anything you say undermines the lighting effect. Why do you hate illumination?

• Posted at 8:32 AM · LINK