Sunday, September 25, 2005

A Wistful Thought

If I'd been in New York last week, I'd have gone to see Kitty Carlisle Hart, who was performing at Feinstein's. 95 years old and still singing and telling stories about hanging around with George Gershwin. She was married to one of my favorite theatrical figures, Moss Hart, who was a giant even before he directed My Fair Lady. What an amazing lady.

• Posted at 9:59 PM · LINK

Fan/Fuel Economy

It dawns on me that I have a thought that combines the previous two postings — the one about gas prices and the one about people driving to the San Diego Con instead of getting a room. It occurred a bit more than 30 years ago, back when that annual event was called the San Diego Comic Book Convention...or maybe it was still the Golden State Comic Convention. It's changed official names a few times and no one ever really paid attention. It was always just "The San Diego Con" to all.

I had a friend named Bob who was about my age. I was around 22 then. Bob lived here in Los Angeles with his parents. That year, we all decided to attend the S.D. Con and all of us secured rooms in the convention hotel...all but Bob. He declared that we were saps; that he'd done the math and decided it was cheaper to drive down each day than to get a room.

Some figures. The convention was three days then. The rooms were around $18 a night plus tax. Gas was 40 cents a gallon. San Diego was just as far away as it is now, which is around 130 miles. So figure 260 round-trip. Bob was going to drive 780 miles in three days. His car got around 20 miles to the gallon on freeways so...hold on while I call up the calculator. (Before computers, I used to be able to do this kind of thing in my head.)

Okay. Three nights at the hotel was around $60. Driving to and fro cost him about sixteen dollars, plus I think he also figured in what he was saving by eating breakfast and dinner at home. On the other hand, he had to get up each morning at 6 AM, leave the house by 7:00, get to San Diego around 10:00 and then leave again by six or so. Since some of the best portions of the con are in the evening, he was spending 5-6 hours a day on the San Diego Freeway and foregoing about half the convention to save fifteen or sixteen dollars a day.

We mocked Bob for this. Even the cheapest of us — and you know how cheap comic fans can be — thought this was a silly way to save money. (And by the way, he wasn't doing this because he didn't have the loot. During the con, he spent a few hundred bucks on old issues of Captain Marvel, his main passion of the time.) His friends all ridiculed Bob relentlessly for what he was willing to do to save $44.

But I got to thinking: Let's say your car gets around 20 miles to the gallon. Gas was $3.07 a gallon when I filled it up last week. It'll probably be well over four bucks, maybe five by the next Comic-Con International. Let's say it's $4.25. Driving to and from San Diego will therefore cost around sixty dollars. The convention is four days and therefore four nights, and rooms will run around $200 a night. So if one drives back and forth instead of staying down there, an Angeleno could save $740.

Maybe Bob was on to something...

• Posted at 7:57 PM · LINK

Comic-Con Staying Put

In the last week, I've received a number of e-mails asking if I have any inside info on a rumor that the Comic-Con International is soon to relocate from its native San Diego. Yes, I have inside info. It ain't true.

It is conceivable that the day might come when some other town will be a better fit for the nation's largest gathering of people like you and me. It is also within the realm of human possibility that the civic leaders of San Diego — the ones who run the convention center and arrange deals for big assemblages to assemble therein — will dictate unacceptable terms. That's why the Comic-Con organizers need to always keep their options open and to explore alternatives.

But frankly, I can't think of another town that would work for the event. There's a huge Los Angeles convention center and another in Anaheim but both are vast, impersonal spaces in which you'd never find your way to, say, my panels. Either would make for a very different kind of convention. Housing would be harder to secure and farther from the con, and I suspect most Southern Californians would commute each day rather than pay for a room. That would, in turn, have a major impact on the convention itself. One of the things that makes a convention of that size economically feasible is that so many people spend so much money at local hotels and restaurants as a direct result of the con. (If they tried to relocate to Anaheim and kept the con in July or August, we'd be fighting for hotel space and intermingling with folks attending Disneyland during its peak season.)

The convention is well-run and if it was forced to move, I'm sure they'd figure something out. But it may never come to that and it certainly won't in the foreseeable future. So ignore the rumors. The con is staying in the 619 area code for now. Even if that means some of us have to park in 714.

• Posted at 5:09 PM · LINK

Today's Political Thought

Bill Clinton spent a goodly portion of his run-up to the presidency attacking Big Tobacco, and pledging to raise taxes on cigarettes, and America liked that because we all know Cigarette Companies are evil. It occurs to me that a Democratic candidate today could get a lot of similar traction running against Big Oil, and not by raising those taxes but by limiting profits and lowering prices. I don't know the precise wording but some sort of caps on what can be charged at the pump and how much Shell can gross would sit well with a lot of voters including, if certain polls are to believed, a lot of Republicans. I'm not sure I believe this survey which says that nine out of ten Americans believe that high gas prices are merely a matter of the oil companies gouging us for sheer profit. But the number's probably close to that and we don't even have any prominent figures making that case in public yet. America has come to that view on its own.

Suppose the Democrats made that a major theme of the 2006 election: "It's time to stop the oil companies from soaking us just because they can." Would this be unpopular with the electorate? More to the point, would the Republican party be credible in saying, "We'll handle that"? They can't even blame it on the war because it's their war, and America's becoming disenchanted with it, too. I think Republicans would be stuck. They probably couldn't even get George W. Bush to pledge not to veto any legislation that prevented companies from raising prices whenever they feel like it. It is said that ExxonMobil is now the most profitable company in the history of mankind, with profits of $110 million per day. Keep that in mind the next time you pay $3.09 a gallon for Super Unleaded. It's not because of Iraq or 9/11 and it won't be just because of Katrina or Rita, either. They're raising prices because they can, the same way you'd make your employer pay you twice as much if you thought he had no choice but to comply.

A small group would scream that it's Socialist to prevent anyone from earning as much money as possible. I don't think most Americans buy that premise when there's no reasonable alternative and we're all chipping in to make millionaires into billionaires. I'm not even saying there aren't drawbacks and dangers to the government freezing or otherwise limiting the profits in any industry. I just think that it's sounding more and more like an issue where the Republicans couldn't compete with Democrats on Election Day.

But don't worry if you think it's a bad idea. It's not like the Democrats will do anything with it.

• Posted at 3:50 PM · LINK

It Makes You Wanna...

Okay, let's imagine you have some friends that you don't really like that much. Let's imagine they have a small child. Let's imagine you have to go to their house and it seems appropriate for you to take a gift to that small child.

You want to give the kid something that will really annoy the parents to the point where they'll rip handfuls of hair from their skulls and run screaming into the street. What do you do?

You give the child one of these. To get the full effect, click the button that says "See it in action."

• Posted at 12:12 PM · LINK

Tommy Bond, R.I.P.

Tommy Bond, who played the bully in 18 "Our Gang" comedies and later was the first screen Jimmy Olsen, has died at the age of 79. Tommy was five years old when he was discovered and cast in Hal Roach's kid gang comedies. He played a few small roles in the films in 1931, then was dropped from the cast. Later, he was brought back and cast as Butch, the little tough kid who was always looking for an opportunity to beat up Alfalfa or otherwise cause trouble. He outgrew the role but went on to do parts in other films, and even did some animation voice work. (He was the little owl in the Warner Brothers cartoon, I Love to Singa.)

Tommy worked a lot throughout the forties, including playing Olsen in two Columbia movie serials of Superman which starred Kirk Alyn as the Man of Steel — Superman (1948) and Atom Man Vs. Superman (1950). In 1951, he gave up acting for production work and behind-the-scene jobs, a decision which caused him to turn down the role of Jimmy Olsen on the Superman TV series. The part went instead to Jack Larsen.

In his later years, Tommy became a fixture at autograph shows and film societies where he happily signed photos and copies of his autobiography, Darn Right, It's Butch. I enjoyed talking with him about his career and hearing his observations on how the business had changed. Needless to say, he thought it had changed a lot. Here's a link to the Associated Press obit.

• Posted at 12:47 AM · LINK

Vegas Vampires

A few years ago, I met a gentleman who was a high-level exec at one of the big Las Vegas hotel empires. He was an interesting guy who, in the half-hour or so that we were together, never allowed the conversation to stray far from his thesis, which I will now attempt to summarize. It was that Las Vegas was The Entertainment Capital of the World and that it will become only more so. Vegas, and especially the hotel company that employed him, would eventually steal away every important entertainment event in the world. Every major concert would be in Vegas. Every major TV show would film or tape in Vegas. The days of touring, he said, would be over. If Springsteen or the Stones decided to tour for a year, for example, some L.V. venue would instead make them an offer they couldn't refuse to just play Vegas for that year.

He even had this odd idea that Vegas could usurp the Times Square tradition of New Year's Eve. He said, approximately, "We will stage such incredible events here on that night that the world will no longer care what's going on in New York on New Year's Eve. They will tune in to watch what's happening in Vegas." (This was just after New Year's Day of 1997 when, as I wrote here, they blew up one of the Vegas hotels.) Inasmuch as it's my mission in life to forever point out The Obvious, I mentioned to the man that no matter what they do in Vegas, New York will always enjoy an insurmountable advantage. The New Year arrives three hours earlier in that time zone.

The man looked at me in a way that suggested that in all their meetings and planning sessions, no one had ever thought of that. And then he paused for a moment, and I could swear he was thinking, "There must be some way to change that..."

In the eight years since that conversation, Vegas seems to have abandoned any attempts to outdo Times Square in the category of New Year's Eve celebrations. Instead, they've gone after their theater. Avenue Q is the featured attraction at the new Wynn Las Vegas hotel and another theater is currently being designed to house a long run of Spamalot. Rumor has it that Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick have turned down a staggering pile of cash to do another year of The Producers in the gambling mecca, and that other huge money offers are looming. The idea here is not merely to import road companies of New York shows — Vegas has done that for years — but to start funding new shows by major Broadway producers. The costs of mounting a new show in Manhattan are huge and some of the Vegas entrepreneurs think they can make their city more appealing. The goal is to make it as important and valid for a show to open on The Strip as it is to open on The Great White Way. I don't know if they can pull that off but they're sure gonna try.

In the meantime, some Vegas promoters have set their sights on another city's entertainment success. A group there is about to present a plan to the city of New Orleans to rent Mardi Gras to Vegas for the next few years. The premise is that it'll be a while before the Louisiana city is in any condition to stage the annual festival...so they'll hold it in Las Vegas and at the same time, raise money to help rebuild New Orleans. It sounds like someone is a little too eager to capitalize on a tragedy...but if they can make the math work, it might not be a bad idea.

• Posted at 12:25 AM · LINK

September 26, 2005 • Current • September 24, 2005