Thursday, August 11, 2005

Would You Believe...?

Any day now, there will be an announcement that a company (Time-Life, I believe) will begin releasing all the episodes of Get Smart on DVD sets. Almost every long-running TV series, and even some short-term ones, will be out on DVD in the next few years, with the exception of a few where there are contractual problems. And even most of those will be solved before long.

The old Adam West Batman series is currently the subject of some sort of argument I won't pretend I understand, though it may be a simple rights squabble between Twentieth-Century Fox (which produced the show) and Warner (which now owns the characters). Get Smart has taken this long because, I'm told, the various parties who were interested were having trouble sorting out the chain of title. The shows were sold to one company, which was acquired by another, which sold portions of its library to someone else...or something of the sort. For a long time, no one was all too sure who owned them. Certain other old TV shows aren't yet out on DVD because they employ a lot of music, and music clearances for DVDs can sometimes be costly and time-consuming.

When some company approaches the issue of releasing a TV show on DVD, there are many considerations. One, of course, is getting the rights and in some cases, as it was for a time with Get Smart, that ain't easy. There are also shows where the rights can be acquired but there are complications, like a star who doesn't want the old shows released, or wants them edited a certain way. Another problem in some instances is finding good source material when negatives are missing or damaged. If you're syndicating an old show and a few episodes are absent, that may go unnoticed. It won't if someone wants to put out a DVD set that will be advertised as The Complete Whatever...

Lastly, with some shows, it seems appropriate and commercial to include special features like commentary tracks, outtakes and a little "Making of..." featurette. This isn't always easy since old footage may be lost and folks involved in the show's production are often deceased or otherwise unavailable. Everyone I know who produces "bonus material" is frustrated that they weren't able to conduct certain interviews years ago, or that the studio in question won't let them bank interview material now for DVDs that may be released a few years down the line. When my pal Howard Morris died in May, we were all saddened. A couple of different DVD companies were especially upset with themselves that they never got around to interviewing him while they could. (Howie directed the pilot to Get Smart. I don't know if that series will have interviews but if it does, it's a shame they didn't get one with him.)

One thing which amuses me — and I may have mentioned some of this before — is that I can recall when movie and TV studios used to prosecute collectors who had old footage from their shows and movies. A friend of mine in the seventies had the only copy in existence of some outtakes from things that had been filmed at a facility where he worked. He was justifiably paranoid about the F.B.I. swooping down to arrest him or of some lawyer slapping a subpoena in his hand because he had this film. In the era of home video, many of those once classed as pirates have turned out to be valuable resources when the studios are looking to restore old films or find lost material for supplemental features. I don't know what to think of the ethics but I'm amused that they're now grateful that some people saved old film and tape, even though doing that was once considered theft.

• Posted at 10:47 AM · LINK

Legends of Comics

The weblog, Comics Should Be Good, is running an occasional series examining rumors from the history of comic books, declaring some true and others as urban legends. It's good stuff and I hope they (or someone) will set up a Snopes-style webpage that specializes in such debunking. I hereby volunteer to participate as much as I can.

In this item, they're puzzling a bit over the story that for a long time, Marvel Comics were distributed by Independent News, which was an arm of DC Comics and which restricted how many comics Marvel (which wasn't then called Marvel) could publish. This is true, and it even went past limiting the number of titles. Independent also steered them away from subject matters that competed head-on with DC books — or at least, they tried to. Marvel/Atlas publisher Martin Goodman was a pretty feisty guy who spent most of the years of this arrangement pressuring Independent to accept more books from him and to let him publish certain kinds of comics that he thought commercial. He also had hundreds of pages of comic book material he'd paid for but never published, and he wanted to publish westerns and "weird story" comics, for instance, so he could use up some of that inventory.

He was occasionally successful in convincing Independent, which is why, though the initial agreement in 1957 limited him to eight releases per month, he soon began to exceed that limit. In 1961, when he was permitted to publish Fantastic Four #1, he was over the eight-per-month restriction. They also yielded and let him publish some comics in genres that competed more or less with the DC product. When Marvel began to eclipse them in sales, some there regretted that concession.

One small thing that the weblog gets wrong is when they write, "...finally, in 1968, Marvel was a big enough sales success (and DC was in a major sales slump) that they were able to negotiate their way out of the deal entirely, allowing themselves to sign with Curtis Distribution. You may have noticed that 1968 saw the end of Tales of Suspense and Tales of Astonish. That was because finally, Marvel was free to make title decisions fully on their own!" That's almost right except that Marvel's 1968 expansion actually occurred while they were still with Independent.

What happened was that in late '67, Goodman finally won a major point in his ongoing battle with Independent. He wanted to publish more comics than they'd allow him to put out, and he wanted to do things like ghost comics and love comics, which they were then denying him. Finally, he said to them, in effect, "Look...my contract with you is expiring in March of 1969. At that point, you're either going to let me publish what I want or I'm going to find a distributor who will. You and I are both trying to sell our companies so we have a mutual interest in inflating our grosses. Let me expand now and it will give both companies a big boost." Jack Liebowitz, who ran DC and Independent, had previously been worried about allowing Goodman to flood the newsstands with product, fearing it would harm the market and harm DC. But he was then angling to sell DC and Independent to a company called Kinney National Services, and he saw the wisdom of even a temporary jolt to the distributor's fortunes. He also knew that Goodman wasn't bluffing; that he could find a distributor who would let him publish without restriction. Liebowitz wanted to keep Marvel under the Independent umbrella if that was at all possible, so they negotiated a new arrangement. It didn't lift all restrictions right away but it did allow him considerable expansion room, which he used to begin adding more titles.

The decision probably helped both companies. Grosses were up when Liebowitz concluded the deal to sell to Kinney. Goodman soon sold Marvel to an outfit called Perfect Film and Chemical Corporation. The only snag for DC was that since Perfect Film owned a magazine distributor, Marvel moved there when their old distribution contract expired.

Apart from that, the story as reported is true. Marvel was distributed for many years by DC. One of the reasons some comic book writers and artists felt so imprisoned in their jobs, and accepted that they had to tolerate some onerous terms of employment, was that the "competitors" weren't truly competing. DC and Marvel had a number of co-operative business dealings (the Comics Code was another) and there was often a feeling, true or not, that publishers were conspiring to limit pay scales and would sometimes agree not to hire certain individuals away from another company. As Jack Kirby once said, "Any time two publishers have lunch, somewhere a freelancer goes hungry."

• Posted at 9:42 AM · LINK

Still Bigger Than a Breadbox

As explained in this posting here, a wonderful little show is performed every Wednesday evening up in Hollywood — a fun and faithful resurrection of the great game show, What's My Line? Your host is J. Keith van Straaten (who produces with director Jim Newman). There's a lovely hostess/model, Claudia Dolph, and a terrific live musician, Adam Chester...and everyone really does a superior job of bringing the old program back to life for an hour or so.

I mention it again because I went again: My pal Nat Gertler and I were in the front row, rooting for our friend Len Wein, who shared panelist duties with comediennes Cathy Ladman and Jane Brucker, and comic actor J.P. Manoux. The four of them managed to guess the first two contestants — a lady who makes dog biscuits and another lady who gives flying lessons — but failed to guess a gentleman who juggles while drawing portraits. (They did get the juggling part, and then the gentleman gave a demonstration of his simultaneous skills.)

The Mystery Guest was David Faustino from Married With Children. After a few go-rounds, Mr. Manoux nailed him with the question, "Are you either David Faustino or someone else?"

If you're in or around Los Angeles on a Wednesday evening, you'll have a very good time at this show. Details here.

• Posted at 8:26 AM · LINK