Here's one group's list of the ten best foods you can eat...and the ten worst. Aside from the occasional can of Campbell's Bean With Bacon Soup, I don't eat anything from either list.
Say, did I ever mention this here? One time, my pal Tony Isabella and I were walking around a deserted area of Columbus, Ohio looking for someplace to have lunch. This was during a convention and it was Sunday and everything else around was closed...so we wound up at the only open place for blocks, which was a McDonald's. I think they're okay in pinch and this was a pinch.
To my surprise — I guess this was an experiment because I've never seen it anywhere else — this McDonald's had Campbell's Bean With Bacon Soup on its menu. It was even identified as that. You could go in and order a bowl of Campbell's Bean With Bacon Soup. It was the only time I've ever been in a restaurant — and yes, I know I'm using that word loosely — and they were offering hot food that I could prepare at home, exactly as well, for less money and probably in less time. I'm sure people who can actually cook have this experience all the time but it was new to me.
Then one time, another pal — Paul Dini — and I flew to Las Vegas for a day. We were walking through the food court in one of the casinos and we noticed a McDonald's there that was serving pizza. I think they even called it McPizza. Curiosity got to us and even though neither of us was hungry, we ordered one to split. Hey, what can I say? It was Vegas. You take gambles in Vegas.
When it came we each took one bite and then said, in unison, "You can finish the rest of this." Neither one of us did. It was the worst pizza I've ever had...far, far worse than you'd expect a McDonald's Pizza to be. It was also the only thing on the menu that didn't have much cheese on it.
It was also very small. I wanted to take it over to the Roulette table and see if they'd let me use it for a chip. Instead, Paul went to throw it away and in the trash can, there were about eight more pizzas, all with only two or three bites taken out of them. That was the last time I saw a McDonald's Pizza anywhere but apparently, some outlets still have offer this delicacy and I'll bet they're a lot better than the ones were in Vegas. They'd have to be.
If you think George W. Bush has screwed up the cause of Democracy in Iraq and made the world a more dangerous place there, you ain't heard nothin' yet. Fred Kaplan explains the mess we're now in with regard to Pakistan.
LAS VEGAS (AP) - Robert Goulet's name appeared for years on the marquees of the Las Vegas Strip and will be there again the day of his
funeral. The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority has asked hotel-casinos to honor the late singer and actor by featuring his name on
their marquees Friday.
And if they really want to honor him, they'll make his name larger than the $2.98 Steak and Eggs Graveyard Special.
The mood out here on the picket line is good, at least among those of us traipsing back and forth across two entrances into CBS Television City in Hollywood. We carry signs (except while blogging) and wave them in thanks as about 50% of passing motorists honk their horns. So far, the only dissent I've heard is a general grumbling over reports that our negotiators have taken an increase in DVD fees "off the table.". True, even doubling what we now receive there is a matter of pennies but there would be a lot of principle in those pennies.
There are SAG and AFTRA members out here on the line with us and I'm told that during the morning picketing before I arrived, a few Teamsters made a show of not crossing our line. The news crews have been here, shot their footage and left...so I'm not entirely sure why we're still out here. Maybe it's just to show the other unions in town that we don't think we're too good to pound pavement and shoulder signs. Even if that's not it, it somehow feels right to be out here, telling the opposition that we're serious and that they should just make us the offer that will end all this gamesmanship and restore life as we know it.
More later when I don't have to type it on Billy Barty's old keyboard.
The above is not a paid ad, at least not for this site. It's something I saw on a website I just visited and I couldn't resist copying it here so we could discuss it.
I've watched Glenn Beck a few times. In fact, I tuned him in last week because I thought (wrongly) he was having Penn Jillette on his program on a certain night. I not only think Beck is kind of an on-air looney but he strikes me as being well aware of it. I sense this about a lot of on-air talk show hosts and pundits; that they're out there saying whatever they've learned will get ratings and that the thought process doesn't extend far beyond that. If they believe it at all, it's only because they've been so rewarded for saying it that it's seeped into their bloodstreams.
I once wrote a TV special with a whole bunch of wrestlers who were in what was then the World Wrestling Federation...Vince McMahon's outfit. One of them was a very smart guy and a great showman who wrestled under the name, "Rowdy" Roddy Piper. He was a Bad Guy at the time but boy, was he good at it. Anyway, he said that it was often difficult to tell where the scenarios left off and reality might kick in. This is an approximate quote. He said, "You know, I'm up there in front of thousands of people and I'm kicking some guy in the crotch and bashing him over the head with a folding chair and everyone's cheering me on and I'm getting paid lots of money to do it...it's hard not to start really hating that guy."
So Glenn Beck may believe that nonsense he spouts, I don't know. What I do know is that if I were on CNN Headline News and they did that ad for me, I think I'd put in a call and ask them not to use my head as part of the word, "crap."
Dave Bittner sends a question which others have asked in various forms and which piggybacks on my previous posting...
There's a fundamental aspect of this whole writers strike that puzzles me, and I'm guessing I'm not the only one. How did the whole residuals system start, and become the standard of what's considered "fair" in Hollywood? In most other industries, even creative ones, a person gets paid for doing a job, and that's it. There's no expectation of ongoing payments. If I sell my house, for example, I don't send a check to the original architect, even though his design work contributes to the ongoing value of the property.
No, but if a Harry Potter book goes into another printing, J.K. Rowling gets another check. I disagree with you that ongoing payments are not the norm in creative industries. I get payments if an issue of some comic book I wrote in the seventies is reprinted. I get payments if a song I wrote in the eighties gets played again. It is a generally-established principle that if you create something that has an ongoing value — particularly if its reuse competes with new product — additional compensation is appropriate. This is not to say it's always paid. Comic books, for a long time, didn't pay for reprints. A lot of animation work still doesn't pay for reruns. But that's because of the way the financial structure of those fields developed, with creative folks placed at an economic disadvantage and not having the clout to get reuse fees. I don't think it's because they don't deserve them.
Residuals exist for a couple of reasons. One is that they are deferred compensation. Let's say you want to hire me to write your TV special and there's no WGA and no residuals and we're negotiating out in the wild. I suggest $10,000 would be a rational price. You were thinking more like $5,000. I point out to you that this is likely to be a great show that will rerun for many years to come and that you'll be able to sell it again and again and again. If we could be certain it would be, ten grand to me wouldn't seem unfair but as you point out, we can't be sure that it will have all those resales. So how do we resolve this?
Simple. We invent residuals. We agree that I'll write the show for $5000 or maybe even a little less, and that I'll receive another $5000 if you can sell it for a second run and then maybe $2000 if there's a third run and $1000 for a fourth and so on. The reuse fees are not a gift to me. They're part of the deal...and by the way, this is not all that hypothetical a scenario. I've made deals with this kind of structure for animation projects where the WGA did not have jurisdiction. Even some pretty stingy cartoon producers were glad to make them because it lessened their initial investments to have me, in effect, share a little of the risk.
(A quick aside: The other day, I was talking to Lee Mendelson, who produced all the Peanuts specials. He's making a new deal for the early ones, including A Charlie Brown Christmas, which is probably the most often-rerun TV show ever produced. Every time he sells it again, he gets paid again, often at rates comparable to what a newly-produced cartoon special would cost. The thing has made millions and millions of dollars each decade since it was produced and it continues to earn. Would someone like to look me in the eye and tell me Charles Schulz never deserved a nickel after the first run? Lee sure wouldn't make that argument.)
That's a very mature, honest way of doing business. What wouldn't be honest is if we made our deal as per the above and then you did the following. You say, "Wait a minute! I don't pay my plumber every time I flush my toilet," (a famous quote from a studio exec fighting the concept of residuals) and you try to lop off the back-end payments and just pay me the initial $5000 or so. No. The $5000 wasn't my fee for writing the show. It was more like a down payment. I wouldn't have done it for $5000 without the other part of the contract. But every so often in Hollywood, some exec gets the idea that they can maximize profits by reneging on the back end of their deals, and we have these silly, periodic battles over residuals.
Anyway, all of the above is one rationale for reuse payments. Another is a tradition — not in every circle but some — that creative folks share when their work has ongoing value. The reason we have a Patent Office in this country is that we wanted to encourage people to invent new ideas and that means giving them a structure through which they can cash in on their brainstorms and not be excluded from the ongoing exploitation of them. Residuals are one way that writers and artists avoid being excluded.
Yet another is that they are compensated when the lasting value of their work pre-empts new production. A situation which has occurred quite often in the cartoon business is this: You're hired to do a show and you really do a fine job on it. Everyone does. You get 40 or 65 episodes done and they're so good that when they rerun, kids are eager to see them again and again and so the ratings don't go down much. At some point, the studio says, "Hey! These shows are so strong, we don't have to spring for the cost of any more. We can just run these over and over forever!"
And they lay everyone off.
You're out of a job because you did it so well. This has happened many times and it continues to happen. Reruns narrow our opportunities to work on new product.
So if I'm writing a new show...well, I don't want to sit there and think, "Hmm, I don't want to put myself out of work. I'd better not do too good a job on this." That's not healthy for my soul and it sure isn't the ideal situation for my employer. It's far better for all of us if I have that incentive to make the show as big a hit as possible. That means I have to have an ongoing financial interest if the show turns out to have an ongoing financial value. I won't mind getting laid off if I'm sharing. I will mind if all I've done by contributing to a success is put myself out of business.
There's a lot more I could write about this but I have to get a comic book written this morning and then go picket this afternoon so this will have to do for now. The last thing I'll add is that I've been a professional writer since 1969. I've written comics and cartoons and live-action shows and screenplays and songs and stand-up comedy and commercials and books and magazine articles and...well, you name it. Sometimes, I've been excluded from the ongoing value, if any, of my work. Sometimes, I haven't. The healthiest business relationships I've had have been those where I had residuals or royalties or some other financial participation beyond my up-front paycheck — and I mean healthy for me and for the entity that was issuing those checks. Inclusion is a very wise thing for All Concerned. It puts you all on the same team, working for the same goal.
In all those creative fields, I've never encountered any employer or producer or publisher who thought I, or others doing my job, didn't deserve that continuing share. I've met a number who thought they could get by without paying it and sometimes, they can. But since they get paid for the rerun of the TV show or the resale of the movie or whatever, they certainly understand and embrace the concept of getting paid when a piece of work has enduring value. It's just that some of them want to keep it all for themselves.
Why is it that people keep telling me that the writers in the WGA are all overpaid, pampered and ungrateful individuals who should be thankful for the high wages and great working conditions that they have? What's the real story?
The real story is that those people don't know the real story.
The first thing to point out is that "the writers in the WGA" do not all work and that they sometimes go long stretches without pay, writing things that do not sell for a many years or at all. I know the job may look sparkling from afar, and I'm not about to suggest it's a bad one. Obviously, I pick my profession willingly and enjoy it. But the screenwriter who's wiping his butt with currency is the rare exception. Each year, the WGA knocks hundreds of members off its Active roster because even though at one point they had jobs that earned them membership, it's been a long time since they got one of those jobs or grossed even a modest amount in their profession.
If you read the stats, you'll discover that the average screenwriter makes something like $5,000 a year, which wouldn't qualify as "overpaid" in anyone's book. But the situation is really worse than that because there are people who get a million or three per screenplay. And when you have a couple of those guys around, it means there are an awful lot of people making less than $5K for it to average out the way it does.
As for the ones who do work often...
Overpaid? That's a relative term. We make a vital contribution to a very profitable industry and in the grand scheme of that industry, our pay is a teensy fraction. Or to look at it another way, there are people who have a lot less to do with the success of a TV show or a movie than its writers but who make a lot more money off it. When our wages are cut — and every WGA strike of my career has in one way or another been about wanting to cut our wages — the money we'd lose would not go to widows and orphans. Really, the Producers are not out to correct some horrendous financial injustice by slashing our incomes. They just want to pay less for something, the same way they'd pay less for light bulbs and film and Evian water if they could. (And by the way, I don't think any of the folks who pay us think we're all overpaid, perhaps because if anyone's overpaid, it's them.)
Pampered? Obviously, some of us don't think so. For whatever it's worth, I've never had a writing job where I felt particularly pampered, and that includes the good jobs. Someone please explain to me how I've been pampered because it sounds wonderful and I'd hate to think that was happening and I didn't know it.
Ungrateful? To whom should we be particularly grateful? To the studios that are now trying to cut our compensation and get out of funding the health plan to which they long ago agreed? We get hired because we provide a service that someone needs and they pay us for it. I don't see why we should be any more grateful to them for hiring us than they should be to us for delivering the work.
I don't mean to cry poverty here...just misrepresentation of the norm. Some writers do receive staggering sums of cash. This is generally because they contribute to something that makes even more staggering sums of cash. No one is expecting you to feel sorry for them but don't pretend we're all in that tax bracket. Besides, very little of the current contract dispute pertains to them, at least on a monetary level. The contract is all about setting minimums and the really rich writers didn't get that way working for minimums.
I can explain this better with the actors. The average actor is not Leonardo DiCaprio, considering which of his $15 million dollar offers he'll take next. The average actor is more like Herman Krellman, waiting tables at night and hustling to get auditions by day, hoping to land a two line part on some show every so often. Next year, when the Screen Actors Guild contract is up for renewal and the Producers try to lower costs there, they'll point to Leonardo and say, "Look how overpaid these actors are!" And then they'll (a) push for contract terms that will not significantly affect Mr. DiCaprio's income but will lower Herman's pay the next time he gets a job...and (b) offer Leonardo $25 million for his next movie.
How did I? By having a nice dinner at a fine Japanese restaurant with even finer company. Neil Gaiman was in town on a press junket in conjunction with the new film he co-authored, Beowulf, which even now is being hotly debated all across the Internet by people who haven't seen it yet. Hey, why let a little thing like that stand in the way of a strident opinion?
Anyway, Neil and I have been planning to get together for din-din for some time now so we dragged along Sergio Aragonés (who in the above photo looks like he has part of his mustache caught in his teeth) and I brought my lovely friend Carolyn and Neil brought his terrific daughter Maddie and his assistant Cat, and a friend of Cat's named Red. We all went to my favorite place to eat cooked food with teriyaki sauce on it while Carolyn eats sushi. Good food, good people, good conversation.
And I'm posting this to give a public "thank you" to Neil for contributing the perfect foreword to the forthcoming (it's actually coming out, people) book, Kirby: King of Comics from Harry N. Abrams Publishing. The book is heading towards publication and I should have a firm release date to announce here shortly...but it's looking like early February of '08. When it's out, you'll all get to see what a dandy thing Neil wrote for it. I'm telling you, this guy's going to go places.
Today's Video Link is actually an Audio Link but it's one of my all-time favorite Bob and Ray routines. I believe this recording of it is from one of their two Broadway shows.
No comparison to the current labor situation in Hollywood is intended or should be inferred. I'm only linking to it because I think it's funny.
November 6, 2007
