I get three or four e-mails a day lately asking me when my book on Jack Kirby is coming out, if my book on Jack Kirby is coming out, etc. The answer is that it's off to press and they're telling me I'll have copies to sign at the Wondercon in San Francisco, which is February 22-24. I doubt it'll be available much before those dates and I assume it'll be available everywhere soon after those dates...and you now know as much about this as I do. In fact, knowing you and knowing me, you may know more than I do. You can pre-order it right this second from Amazon where they're currently saying it'll be out February 1. It used to say March 1 on that page so maybe they know something we don't.
If you can't wait, Peter Sanderson is serializing a fairly detailed review over at Quick Stop Entertainment and he has Part One up. I almost wish he wasn't saying such nice things about it because in a day or so, I'm going to be giving a very nice review/plug to a book he worked on and it's going to look like some sort of sneaky trade-off.
No news on the strike front, and there may not be any for a while. We're still on strike and the other side is still trying to send out scary messages about not dealing with us for a decade or two. I would advise everyone not to believe rumors that come with no credible name attached...especially the ones that start "I was at a party and this guy said he'd heard that someone at CBS was saying..." It has been my experience that during a strike, a rumor that comes with no identified source has less than a 15% chance of having any basis at all in reality. This applies just as much to anonymous messages posted on Internet forums. Messages with identified sources or real signatures have a slightly better rate of accuracy, sometimes verging on as much as 50%.
The point is that just because someone announces "I just talked to Nick Counter and he said..." does not mean that Nick Counter said it or even that the person actually talked to Nick Counter or to anyone who had ever talked to Nick Counter. Come to think of it, even if Nick Counter really said it, that doesn't mean it's true, either.
(Speaking on Nick Counter: Have you seen his nickel counter?)
Our little labor dispute seems to bring out essayists with views I do not quite comprehend. A couple of them can be explained as just sucking up to (or working for) the studio heads, and I've read a few that seemed to me that the author had emotional issues with his own career and those who he thought were more successful. I'm especially dubious of those that rush to say "the Writers Guild has handled this all wrong" without suggesting any sort of scenario as to what we could/should have done differently. My pal Bob Elisberg penned a nice rebuttal in the L.A. Times to an op-ed piece that didn't make a lot of sense to me, either.
At the moment, the AMPTP is trying to sell the idea that this strike is about the WGA making unreasonable demands in the areas of Animation and "Reality" programming. It's not. It's about New Media and about the fact that the studios are simultaneously saying (a) that there's no money in that area and (b) that they're willing to lose many, many billions to not share that no money with us or any other union.
A touring exhibit is attempting to trace and maybe explain how so many of the great comic book super-heroes were created by Jewish folks. I keep getting asked about the connection and have never come up with any better explanations than the ones cited by others in this article.
Today, you get to see the opening and closing to one of the more bizarre cartoon shows ever on Saturday morning — Will the Real Jerry Lewis Please Sit Down. That was how it was punctuated, by the way — no question mark at the end. It was produced by Filmation and was on the air from 1970 to 1972 on ABC. Even at the time I wondered how it came about. A few years earlier, someone might have said to someone else, "Hey, kids love Jerry Lewis movies...maybe they'll watch a cartoon show about him." But by '70, Jerry's film career was crashing and the movies he was making were things like Which Way to the Front?, which targeted (and failed to snag) an older audience. His TV career wasn't doing much better. A weekly variety show on NBC had just been cancelled. So why did anyone think America was eager to watch an animated version of the guy? Your guess is as good as mine.
Publicity at the time said that Jerry contributed to the scripts, and I recall at least one article that claimed (wrongly) that he was doing his own voice. The lead was actually by David Lander, who later became famous playing the character Squiggy on Laverne and Shirley. At the time, he was a recent member of The Credibility Gap, a brilliant troupe of L.A.-based satirists who did most of their work on radio. The other voices in the Jerry Lewis cartoons were by Howie Morris and Jane Webb. As for working on the scripts, I'd be surprised if Jerry spent much more than a long lunch hour discussing ideas. (He was off shooting The Day The Clown Cried during much of the time the show was being produced. They should have based the cartoon series on that.)
In each episode, Jerry was placed by an employment agency in some job where he'd prove to be utterly inept but would somehow manage to save the day. Along the way, he'd either find an excuse to dress up like one of the characters Jerry had played in one of his movies or run into them...and that's about all I remember about it. I haven't seen an episode in 35 years and haven't noticed any groundswell of demand to bring it back. But one of these days, it'll turn up somewhere...
December 27, 2007
