Tuesday, May 8, 2007

Plugging Away

One thing we like to do here at newsfromme.com is to plug our friends' business endeavors. I have this friend named Bob Logan, who's a filmmaker, writer, director, all those things. He's directed some successful comedies like Meatballs 4 and Repossessed and he's working now on a movie that will bring the old F Troop TV show to, as they say, The Silver Screen. I was especially impressed with a movie he did a few years ago called Up Your Alley, which was a comedy about homeless folks. You wouldn't think that would be a fertile topic for humor but it was. A few years later, Mel Brooks — working with about a million times the budget — made Life Stinks, also a comedy about the homeless, and I liked Bob's film a lot better.

In fact, Bob's film was a triumph of making a professional-looking movie for almost no money. I don't recall what he spent but it was probably about what Mr. Brooks spent on donuts for his film. To share his expertise with the world — and, let's be honest, make a few bucks — Bob is now conducting classes in how to do what he did on Up Your Alley and other film endeavors. He calls it The One Day $99 Film School and I'll bet the folks who take it learn an awful lot in that one day. End of plug.

• Posted at 11:12 PM · LINK

Getting It Wrong

Last Friday, we blogged on here about a story in Newsday on the current state of long-running comic strips. The article set some sort of world record for errors per square inch. In almost all cases, the folks they identified as currently writing and drawing certain strips are not only not working on them, in some cases because they're dead.

As you may recall, I phoned the reporter that day and told him what he'd done. It's taken until this morning for Newsday to acknowledge any errors. Here is what they ran, in toto...

The current artist for the comic strip "Blondie" is John Marshall. Craig Boldman and Henry Scarpelli are the artists now for "Archie," and "Mary Worth" is drawn by Joe Giella and written by Karen Moy. June Brigman is the current artist of "Brenda Starr," working with writer Mary Schmich. For "The Phantom," Paul Ryan is the current artist and Tony DePaul is the current writer. The credits were given incorrectly in an Act Two story Saturday.

Actually, no. The credits were given incorrectly in a story that ran on Thursday, not Saturday. And the above list doesn't address all the mistakes in the piece. Nothing in it, for example, amends the erroneous statement that Alex Raymond once assisted on the Blondie strip. Moreover, the original piece says that Dan DeCarlo, Bill Zeigler, John Saunders and Stan Drake are all producing certain features when, in fact, those gentlemen are all deceased. Saying that someone else is doing those jobs would leave a reader with the impression that all four of those gents are still around and just aren't doing those jobs at present.

An incomplete correction, of course, only matters if someone reads both the original article and the correction, which is unlikely unless it's through my links. Newsday puts theirs in a "corrections" section that few readers probably ever see. I had trouble finding it on the website and I was looking for it specifically because I already knew the article was flawed and had complained. I have no idea where the correction is in the printed paper, if it's even in the printed paper. But I'll bet you it isn't prominent.

Many newspapers, when they correct an article that's available online, will post the correction on the same page. Newsday doesn't. At this moment, if you go to the page with the original piece on it, it's just as wrong as it ever was. There are some comments that readers have posted but the link is hard to spot, and those criticisms are only there because outsiders took the time to post them. Newsday hasn't corrected that page.

This may all sound trivial but ever since I got involved in comic books and strips, I've watched a steady stream of newspaper and magazine articles that just plain got things wrong. It's mind-boggling to me how many mistakes there are in such pieces. A few, I can understand. I've made some doozies in my own writing but the volume in some articles is staggering, especially given the easy availability of on-the-record sources. Even worse, of course, is when there is little or no willingness in some news organizations to issue corrections and it's all done a lot to shake my faith in journalism of all kinds and topics.

The guy who wrote that Newsday essay was not a moist-behind-the-ears intern. He is, amazingly, an editor and staff writer at the paper who is on the verge of retirement after forty years there...but he didn't take the ten seconds to Google "Blondie" and find out who currently does the strip. Is the person writing about Iraq for that paper adhering to the same standard?

• Posted at 9:57 PM · LINK

Hot Afternoon

A large chunk of Griffith Park is aflame at the moment. No homes are threatened. No one has been injured (yet) besides someone the news reporters were calling an "arson suspect" an hour ago, but he now seems to have turned into a "person of interest." The park has been evacuated and they're talking about what to do about all the animals up in the L.A. Zoo, just in case. Awful news.

It looked even scarier about an hour ago when I was trapped in a traffic snarl on Los Feliz Boulevard. Between the park evacuees and the emergency vehicles and the people stopping to look, cars were moving at about the speed of a tortoise on valium. The view from my car looked a lot like the above news photo and I don't have to tell you how much more chilling that can be in person.

Hundreds of fire fighters are on the scene. Most of them seem to be giving interviews to local news crews. There also seem to be around thirty helicopters up there. Two are doing water drops and the other twenty-eight are getting live shots of those water drops.

Well, at least that's how it seems.

The other day here, I wrote about the Rodney King Riots of fifteen years ago in L.A. I just remembered one moment from it that I will always treasure. The fires had all been knocked down. The riot was, for all intents and purposes, over though we weren't yet certain it wouldn't erupt again.

There was a hillside and one of the newsmen in a chopper showed it to us and said that fire fighters, most of whom had been putting out conflagrations for a day or two without sleep, were laying out tarps and lying down to nap. Back in the studio, the anchorman said to him, "We can't see them...can you swoop down and give us a better look?" The copter reporter said, as respectfully as he could, "We could...but we're afraid that if we go any lower, the sound of our copter will wake them up. And if anyone deserves a rest, it's these guys."

The anchorman hastily withdrew his request and the copter went no lower. I liked that. I love news coverage but I also like the idea of them getting out of the way of people who have work to do in a time of crisis. Or even naps to take after it's over.

• Posted at 4:45 PM · LINK

Today's Video Link

I'm not embedding a video today. Instead, if you can spare twenty minutes, I'm going to send you to another site to watch something I can't embed here. It's a clip from last Friday's episode of Bill Moyers Journal on PBS — an interview with Jerry Miller.

Jerry Miller was the 200th person freed from prison by a program called The Innocence Project. Basically, it's a concern that uses DNA testing to identify people who've been wrongly convicted. Mr. Miller spent twenty-five years behind bars for a crime that he didn't commit. It's an extraordinary story...not that an innocent man went to prison. That, sadly, is not all that unusual. What's extraordinary is Miller's attitude and his lack of anger about the whole ordeal.

Here's the link. Go watch Moyers interview Jerry Miller.

• Posted at 3:50 AM · LINK