Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Suite Payoff

One of the more interesting gambles when you go to Las Vegas occurs not in the casino but at the hotel check-in desk. Not everyone knows about this and not everyone tries it but those who try it think it's a better wager than doubling-down on 11 when the dealer's showing a six.

When checking in, you have a twenty dollar bill at the ready. You let the desk clerk see it and you say, with a casual manner and an air of nonchalance, "Uh, any complimentary upgrades available?" Translation: "If I give you this twenty, will you give me a better room for the same price?"

There are, of course, variations. Some flash more than twenty. Some try to get by with less. Many think the way it works — or works best — is to fork over the gratuity and then ask. If you do this and the answer is "no," the clerk may or may not feel it's sporting to return the cash, which is where the real gamble occurs. If you don't fork it over regardless, then the gamble is that you'll be embarrassed and perhaps feel like a hick tourist with no juice. In Vegas, it's okay to lose your money but you don't want to lose the illusion that you're important.

Does it get results? Sometimes. Conventional wisdom is that it's more likely to work with male clerks than female — I have no idea why — and that your best chance is when you check in late in the day because that's when they have a good idea as to how many rooms may go vacant that night and what class of rooms. Also, of course, if you're there on a crowded weekend or during a big convention, you may feel privileged just to get the room you booked, never mind any improvement.

My own experiences suggest that it will often yield better accommodations if (a) the town is not jammed and (b) the clerk seems friendly and in a chatty mood. It also helps to bring it up before he goes through the whole procedure of assigning you that crummy room next to the glopeta-glopeta ice machine that you'd rather not have if you can help it. And it doesn't hurt to act like you're used to getting upgrades this way and that you're kind of a regular visitor to the hotel...you know, the kind of guy who might be about to go drop a couple thou at a craps table.

If you want to know more about this form of institutionalized bribery, there's a website that's wholly devoted to how and where it's succeeded and how often. I don't know how much stock to put in the reports there but I know that like everything else in that town, the $20 Bill Trick pays off...sometimes. What I've never been able to find out — and now that I'm admitting it here, I'm sure someone will write and tell me — is how the hotels feel about it and if the employee keeps all or part of the money. Management knows this goes on and I can't imagine why they'd let the guy behind the front desk make all that extra cash.

• Posted at 7:43 PM · LINK

Scrappy Days, Part One

Among the perks of having a weblog is that if people keep asking you the same question over and over, you can answer it on your weblog and thereafter tell them, "Oh, I addressed that matter on my blog. Just go do a search for it." This is why over the next week or three or nine, I will be serializing the story of how the cartoon character of Scrappy Doo came to be, and what all I had to do with the birthing process.

People ask me if I knew at the time I was contributing to the creation of a such a hated thing as Scrappy Doo. No, I didn't and no, I still don't. I am aware that there are some folks out there who, given the choice of seeing the execution of Osama bin Laden or Scrappy Doo, would opt for Scrappy and wonder why you even had to ask. Such people are, I believe, a fairly recent faction, and I don't think they're as widespread as their noise level would indicate. I recall Scrappy being wildly popular the first few years he was on the scene. He certainly bolstered Scooby's ratings and kept the series on a good 2-3 years longer than it would have lasted without him.

Scrappy debuted on the Scooby Doo program in 1979 as a "new element." Scooby had been on the air for some time by then and the narrow formula of the series had become repetitive to the point where ABC was considering cancellation. One of the very real concerns was whether the writers could come up with the thirteen requisite ghost premises to do another thirteen episodes. Let me tell you how you sold a script to the Scooby Doo series in those days.

You'd go to the producer or the story editor and say something like, "How about a ghost who's an aardvark and he's been haunting ant farms?"

The producer or story editor would consult a list of all the episodes produced to date, and there was about a 95% chance he'd look up from it and say, "Did it in Season Four" or whatever season it had been in. Sometimes, they'd say, "Did it in Seasons Two, Four, Five and I have one in the works right now, same idea." But if you lucked into something in the 5% category, you had an assignment...even if you didn't have a clue who the aardvark would be when he took off his mask or why he was haunting ant farms. Didn't matter. You or someone else could figure that stuff out later. You'd done the hard part.

In setting the schedule for that year, it had come down to a decision between renewing Scooby or picking up a new series — the pilot script for which I'd written — from another studio. Joe Barbera called me in and said, approximately, "If this doesn't work, Scooby's dead. We have this new character that I came up with..." And he showed me sketches of Scrappy Doo, explaining that this was Scooby's nephew. We would add him to the show and this would make things just "fresh" enough, while still keeping the winning Scooby formula intact, that ABC would order thirteen more episodes. And thirteen more for the season after that, and then there would be the season after that...

I was not then on staff at Hanna-Barbera. Quite a few writers were and most of them had taken a shot in the previous months at writing scenes or an entire episode to establish Scrappy. The folks at network liked very little of what they'd done and were not about to green-light Scooby for another year; not without a finished teleplay that would show how Scrappy functioned, how he talked, where the comedy in the show would be with him around, etc. J.B. wanted me to write that episode. Even though it was competing with that other pilot I'd written, I said I'd do it. It was always very difficult to say no to Mr. Barbera.

The next thing that occurred was an unusually ugly negotiation between my agent and the gent in charge of Business Affairs for Hanna-Barbera. The latter took the position that this was not a pilot; that it was just another episode of Scooby Doo, so it should pay the same mediocre fee as all other episodes. My agent took the position that this was a pilot because (a) it was introducing a new character and something of a new format and (b) the network would or would not order episodes based on my script. I would also be going through several weeks of network meetings and extra rewrites, something that did not usually transpire on your average episode. Therefore, he concluded, it was a pilot and better pay was appropriate. The Biz Guy said no. My agent said, "In that case, Mark isn't doing it."

The Biz Guy said fine, Mark isn't doing it...or anything else for the studio, ever again. This was followed by the sound effect of the phone being slammed down. Then the Business Affairs guy called me at home and informed me that my days of writing for Hanna-Barbera were over. In fact, I should not bother trying to set foot in the studio again as I would be turned away. I pointed out to him that Scooby or no Scooby, I was still the editor of their comic book division. He said, "We'll see about that" and hung up.

Sure enough, I was banned from the studio for a good eighteen minutes, which is how long it was before Mr. Barbera phoned. He instructed me to — and I will clean up his language here a tad — "pay no attention to that damn idiot in Business Affairs." Before the sun set that evening, I had a deal to write the script that would introduce Scrappy Doo. The pay was sufficient (barely, of course) and there would be a small bonus if the show was picked up. The next day, I was to meet Mr. B. at the Villa Capri restaurant in Hollywood so we could brainstorm ideas over lunch.

This concludes Part One of The Birth of Scrappy Doo. Stay tuned to this weblog for the next exciting chapter, one of these days. Whenever I get around to it. Maybe in the next week or so.

• Posted at 2:29 PM · LINK

Today's Video Link

We have here the trailer for The Beach Girls and the Monster, a 1965 movie that was shot in about six days for less than what some producers now spend for six minutes of filming. It was originally released as Monster From The Surf but I guess that title didn't make it clear that there were girls in bikinis in it. Since that was about the only thing the film had to offer, it's probably wise that they renamed it.

The trailer is entertaining enough just from the sheer campiness but there are a number of things about this film that will interest the kind of person who visits this site. One is the narration, which was done by Art Gilmore, who did voiceovers for something like two-thirds of all the movie trailers made in Hollywood in the sixties. Doesn't he sound way too enthusiastic to be selling us what is probably the worst movie he ever had to sell us? Moviegoers of that era learned, or should have learned, that the more excited Art Gilmore was, the likelier the film was to suck Raisinets. He's almost giddy about this one.

Secondly: You see those two cops on the beach? Well, I think the one on the left is Clyde Adler, who was the foil for Soupy Sales then and the voice of White Fang and Black Tooth and Pookie and all those guys at the door. He doesn't cream anyone with a pie but I think that's Clyde.

Thirdly: Another great local kids show host of the sixties and a fine actor and cartoon voice person is Walker Edmiston. Walker is one of those guys who was on every damn TV show of the fifties, sixties and seventies at one time or another, and when he wasn't on screen, he was often dubbing the voices of actors who were. I worked with him on some of the Sid and Marty Krofft shows and he's a wonderful, wonderful man. In the fifties and sixties, he hosted brilliant shows in Los Angeles with his puppets, one of which was Kingsley the Lion. You don't really see Walker in the trailer but he had a large, particularly embarrassing role in the movie and even wrote its title song from when it was called Monster in the Surf. You do see a few moments of Kingsley singing that tune...to the lion's eternal shame.

And lastly, I have a story about this picture...not a happy one, I'm afraid. It was directed by a man named Jon Hall, who also starred in it. Mr. Hall was once a film star of some magnitude but by the time he made this, he was really touching bottom. In fact, I think it was the last thing he did. (He took his own life in 1979.)

Around 1971, Hall was broke and owed Uncle Sam a lot more money in back taxes than he would ever be able to pay. It became the sad duty of one Internal Revenue Agent to try and work out some sort of settlement deal. The agent kept negotiating payment plans that would let Hall off the hook for much of the debt but the way the I.R.S. worked (and probably still does), the agent then had to get his superiors to bless any settlement...and in this case, they wouldn't. They kept sending the agent back to demand more payment from Hall and it eventually came down to a complete seizure of Mr. Hall's assets, including the negative and all his rights to The Beach Girls and the Monster.

How do I know this? Because the I.R.S. agent was a man named Bernard Evanier. My father.

As I've explained elsewhere, my father hated his job and one of the reasons he hated it was cases like this one. He'd work out a payment plan to let Hall off by paying ten cents on the dollar over an extended period, which seemed reasonable given the man's financial condition. Then he'd go to his bosses for their approval and they'd say, "No, get more out of him and get it now." These were the same bosses who were then completely tearing up the tax bills of very wealthy, solvent men who were friends of President Richard M. Nixon.

It was a great deal for those friends. If you'd given $50,000 to Nixon's re-election campaign, you could get out of two million dollars or more of delinquent taxes. A few months ago when I met John W. Dean, I thanked him for his role in exposing these shenanigans. My father, by the way, did not even like the whole idea of taxes but he felt that if we had to have them, a guy making $20 million a year should at least pay as much as a divorced mother with a large family to feed.

I'm a little fuzzy on how the Jon Hall case was finally resolved but I know that Mr. Hall finally got off the hook with the Revenuers. He even called my father — who was retired by then — and thanked him for being compassionate and understanding about it, which would not surprise anyone who knew my father. I'm pretty sure the I.R.S. auctioned off the rights Hall had in The Beach Girls and the Monster but I don't know what they got for them. If it was more than twenty bucks, someone overpaid. Watch the trailer and you'll see why.

• Posted at 9:29 AM · LINK

February 15, 2007 • Current • February 13, 2007