Today, I heard from three people who received an e-mail from Amazon telling them their copy of Kirby: King of Comics had just shipped...and they received the book the same day they received this e-mail. One got the book yesterday and the e-mail today. In any case, since this morning's post, Amazon has changed the listing and they now say they have it in stock. So click right here and buy your copy.
I'll be signing copies at the Wizard World Los Angeles convention March 14-16 and at the New York Comic Con April 18-20 and at a number of bookstores which I'll announce here.
Also: I should have mentioned (but didn't because I didn't know) that the photo of Jack I posted on the message before last was taken by James Van Hise. Thanks, Jim.
This morning, I heard from two different folks who'd received their copies of my new book, Kirby: King of Comics. One had pre-ordered from Amazon and the other had pre-ordered from Barnes & Noble. So I guess it's out.
As of this moment, the Amazon listing still says "Usually ships within 2 to 5 weeks," which may mean they have copies on hand and no one has gotten around to changing the listing. Or it may mean that they've only received enough to fill pre-orders and are waiting for more before they switch it to say "In Stock." I am told that a second printing will be on the presses, probably early next week. For it, we're fixing two insignificant typos and one significant one (Jack did sixteen issues of The Demon, not eighteen) plus I rewrote two captions that could have been phrased better.)
But at least one person who ordered from Amazon has their copy in hand...so order with confidence. It is possible to actually receive your copy in this lifetime.
I'm pretty darned happy with how the thing came out. Naturally, there are things I wish I'd done differently — when are there not? — and with a topic as vast as Kirby, you often think of more points that should have been made, more details that should have been included. But of course. Fortunately, I have that other book on Jack in the works and I can put all that stuff in there.
Hope you like it. Hope you buy it. More importantly, I hope Jack and Roz would have liked it.
I haven't written lately about the late night TV situation. As this article in the New York Times explains, various other networks and syndicators are preparing to empty the vaults to secure the services of Jay Leno as soon as he becomes a Free Agent. Regardless of whether you like Jay or not (I do), you might get some jollies at the thought that darn near every "expert" prediction that has ever been made about this guy failing has been spectacularly wrong.
At various times since he got the job of replacing the legendary Carson, network biggies, ad agencies, TV pundits and others have forecast his demise, especially against the might of Letterman. And while it's true that Dave dominated for a while, Jay's ratings were never all that bad. The guy stayed in the game and kept at it...and he's now about to become one of the wealthiest, most powerful souls in show biz, thanks to NBC betting against him and engineering his replacement by Conan O'Brien. Not all that long ago, entertainment reporters were writing that the decision to install Leno instead of Letterman behind the Tonight Show desk was one of the dumbest moves in the history of the industry. I think it may work the other way around: Hindsight will show it as a wise notion, and the ouster of Jay will be seen as the dumbest.
Not that O'Brien won't do well in that slot. He might or might not, and the "might not" may have a lot to do with factors beyond his control. Is Jimmy Fallon really going to be going in at 12:35 after him? Lead-ins matter to some extent but so do lead-outs. There are some folks who watch Leno now because the Jay/Conan parlay interests them more than Dave/Craig. Fallon seems to me a little too low-key to command America's attention at bedtime and I'm curious as to why NBC might think otherwise.
More significantly, we may have Dave, Jay and Conan carving that 11:35 audience three ways. That was what NBC was trying to avoid when they opted to nudge Leno aside rather than allow O'Brien to hopscotch over to Fox for a competing show. If Jay winds up with an 11:35 show (or even, on Fox, an 11 PM one), NBC probably won't be very happy with the results. Not happy at all.
I didn't pay a lot of attention to the Oscars this year...and as far as I can tell, neither did anyone else. As I think we discussed here, the nominees turned out to be a lot of folks and films that might have achieved excellence but didn't generate the kind of emotional moments and issues where we really cared who or what won. To me, the biggest surprise of the evening was that they included Dabbs Greer in the "In Memoriam" montage and left out Joey Bishop. Jon Stewart, I thought, did an okay job of hosting, meaning he got some laughs and never really slowed up the proceedings. The clips from old Oscar telecasts were nice but there were times when you got the feeling someone had said, "Hmmm...we'd better remind the world what it was like to care about this event."
At least, those were my impressions after leapfrogging through the entire show in under an hour via TiVo. If you sat through every blessed minute of it, you have no one to blame but yourself.
Someone wrote to ask me what I'd do to make the Oscars interesting. Here's another one of Evanier's free brilliant ideas that no one will ever do: Leave the show exactly as it is but telecast an alternate version. Over on the ABC Family channel or some other network, run the exact same show with a live commentary track. Get together a couple of comedians — Kathy Griffin, for sure...maybe Lewis Black or Gilbert Gottfried...maybe four or five of them. Get someone who can make catty remarks about the gowns but who isn't Joan Rivers or Mr. Blackwell. Get someone like Leonard Maltin...no, on second thought, get Leonard Maltin. You need to have at least one person in this who knows about and cares about movies. Then let these people heckle the Academy Awards...or they can comment, annotate, discuss, whatever. So it's like you're watching the telecast at a real great party full of witty people.
Viewers who don't want their Academy Awards despoiled could watch the regular broadcast. Those who don't wish to see that — and they were not few in number this year — could switch over and watch the party version. I suspect there'd be a lot of them. In fact, let's find out with another one of our frighteningly unscientific polls. This one closes in one week...
I'm going to send you to two good articles by Michael Kinsley. In this one, he explains why "The Surge" has only been a success if you define success in some very odd ways. Then in this one, he comes up with what is to me, the definitive view on this story about John McCain maybe/perhaps/possibly having some sort of affair which might not have actually happened with a lobbyist.
This may interest someone. One of my favorite movies is The Odd Couple with Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon. One day in the early seventies, I was in a movie memorabilia shop in Hollywood browsing through several boxes of miscellaneous, unsorted old stills which they sold for something like a quarter apiece. Two of three of the boxes, as it turned out, contained not stills but proof sheets — and maybe in this day and age, I need to explain what those are.
When someone shoots 35mm negative film — which some photographers, amazingly, still do but which once was the norm — they usually have them processed and then turned into proof sheets, which are tiny prints (about an inch by an inch and a quarter) of the negatives. They're too small to use for much of anything except to figure out which shots are good enough to turn into...or at least, they used to be close to useless.
In the boxes that day, I found about twenty proof sheets from stills that were shot on the set of The Odd Couple. I didn't find the stills, themselves and they wouldn't have been in the quarter box, anyway. But I found all these proof sheets and they were of so little value that the storeowner gave them all to me for two bucks. I stuck them in a file folder and forgot about them.
This afternoon, I came across them and on a whim, had my assistant scan them at 1200 dpi, just to see how well they'd enlarge. Pretty well, it turns out. Modern technology makes it possible to get some pretty sharp images off these teensy photographs. Here's a low rez detail of the above frame...
I don't have anything in mind for them but suddenly, I have a whole mess of Odd Couple images I didn't have before. Also, somewhere in this house, there's a crate with other proof sheets. Some are ones I bought like the Odd Couple proofs but some are from my own work with a camera. I lost some negatives of photos I shot in the seventies, as well as the photos, themselves...but I may still have the proof sheets. That would sure be interesting. In the meantime, I just thought I'd mention this here because it may make someone think, "Hey, I've got old proof sheets squirreled away here. Maybe there are some images on them that can be scanned and put to some use."
In fairness to United Airlines (which wasn't very fair to me on Friday), our trip back from San Francisco was flawless. The plane wasn't crowded, it left on time, it got in early...and our suitcases were the first ones down the chute at Baggage Claim. Then again, my Friday problem with the company wasn't so much that things had gone wrong...it was that when something did go wrong, there was no mechanism to put it right. It all ties in with a mounting trend in a number of industries to treat Customer Service as some annoying obligation that they must handle in the cheapest, least-likely-to-serve-the-customer manner.
I have the same annoyance with computer and software companies that won't give you a Tech Support number (or worse, charge you to use it) and tell you that if you have a question or problem, send an e-mail. That enables them to hire someone cheap who may have very little to do with the company and who just sits there, checking e-mail every so often and responding with the most appropriate of several stock, pre-written replies. The stock, pre-written replies never seem applicable to my question or problem. If I have additional questions or don't understand something, that means additional e-mails...and a problem that might have been solved by a three minute phone conversation becomes a week of pen-palling with some stranger.
Several folks e-mailed me to tell me either their own airline horror tales or just the opposite. I heard from three different folks who have great experiences with United even when things go wrong. Why them and not me? Because in all three cases, they are not just Frequent Flyers but Incessant Flyers, with zillions of miles on United for business trips. One guy wrote that his company spends upwards of ten million bucks a year on airfare, most of it on United. For this, he gets services unavailable to me...including that if he isn't on a flight (his fault or theirs), he's on the next flight without question. He does not go onto the standby list with chumps like me. He gets a confirmed seat even if they have to bump someone else who has one. He also has a special Customer Service phone number that's answered in this country by someone who can actually do things for him and yes, I'm envious.
Preferential treatment? Absolutely...and I have no problem with that. If I ran United, I'd do cartwheels for passengers like that and give back rubs. I just think I'd be a little more caring about the customer who wasn't in that category.
It's like with these computerized phone-answering deals that tell you to press "1" if you want to make a payment, "2" if you need to check your balance, "3" if you'd like to order a pizza with black olives, etc. That can make things go quicker at times but too often lately, I find myself in need of an option they don't have: None of the Above. My problem is simply not on their menu. There's someone at that company who can help me and they've made it impossible (or at least, difficult) for me to get to that person. In some cases, it feels as if the system designer just plain didn't consider all contingencies. In others, you think that's the whole point of it...to avoid dealing with problems. That's sure how I felt on Friday sitting in the United terminal.
Jiggety-jig. Bad flight up and much trouble with the Internet connections at the hotel...but I have nothing but good to say about this year's WonderCon, held this past weekend in that city where Tony Bennett left his heart. Also: Carolyn and I ate almost every meal at the Canton Seafood Restaurant over on Folsom, a few blocks from the Moscone Center, and had great food. (So did all the friends from the convention we dragged along with us.)
The convention itself was so nice that I especially regretted missing Day One. I won't list all the folks I talked with because that gets boring but it was the kind of con where every time you turned around, there was someone you wanted to meet. And if you were just there to shop, the exhibit hall probably didn't let you down. I never made it to some aisles but the ones I walked were teeming with goodies. (Hey, here's a free thought that might make someone a nice piece of cash: Has anyone at a large con ever set up a booth for shipping? It would be like, "Make your purchases elsewhere, bring 'em to us and for the cost of postage/FedEx plus a small fee, we'll take care of shipping them to your home." I saw lots of stuff I might have bought but I didn't want to deal with lugging it all around the convention all day, then back to the hotel — in the rain, no less — and cramming it into my already-crammed suitcase, which was already near the airline weight limit.)
Mood of the con? Hard to say. As usual these days, there may be more interest in upcoming movies about comic books than in the comic books, themselves.
Hey, I'll make a prediction here and you can check back in a year or so and see if I'm right. My prediction is that very soon, the major companies — the ones that own or control characters of which a lot of folks would say "I loved that when I was a kid" — are going to experience a very real, impossible-to-ignore revulsion at some of the more warped interpretations. There was a time when DC, Marvel and others that took their leads from those companies were probably a little too fierce about the idea that there was one way to draw Superman, that there were certain things that Spider-Man shouldn't do or which shouldn't be done to him. Now, it feels like the pendulum has swung too far towards the notion that uglifying a character or building a mini-series out of some aberrant change in his or her mythos or life is saleable.
I'm not talking about regressing anything back to the way it was in 1964 or whenever. It is certainly possible to rethink an old concept and come up with the 2008 version, and some properties probably should exist in the "now." But what makes a great property great is a certain set of creative choices and constants...and if you make every single one of those subject to interpretation (or just plain inversion for the sake of a "stunt"), you dilute the basic concept down to the point where it loses its impact. Often, it's interesting to wring an interesting variation on the norm but if you wring enough of them, it can sometimes become difficult to even know what the "norm" is.
That's one of the things that struck me as I looked at some displays in the exhibit hall. Another was that I don't have the storage space for all the fine, hardcover art and strip reprint books I'd like to own. Yet another was that some industrious folks are producing some amazing books and art pieces and merchandise that I only see at conventions...which I guess brings me back to my idea about a service that would ship your purchases home for you.
So, all in all, a great WonderCon once we got there. I hope you got there, too. If you didn't, try to get there someday.
WonderCon, once you get to it, is a fun and joyous experience. It's a great con and when I get more time, I'll tell you about Saturday. The hotel's pretty good too, except that the High Speed Internet Connection in our room was apparently installed by United Airlines. It don't work so well so I'm currently in the bar in the lobby, blogging via a wireless connection that only works down here. The bar is packed with folks from the comic book business and every now and then, one comes by and says, "Wow, I read your blog but I never thought I'd see you actually working on it!"
Let's see who's around here. Image co-founder Jim Valentino just ambled past, and Batton Lash (creator of a fine comic called Supernatural Law) is pointing at me and grinning. Master comic book shop operator Joe Ferrara is hovering about and a somewhat tipsy Marvel artist who shall remain nameless, and who seems unaware of how loudly he's speaking, is hitting on a lady who looks about as likely to prance off to his room with him as I am to book my next few flights on United. Over in the corner, I see someone who's either Bruce Timm or the winner of a Bruce Timm look-alike contest and this isn't very interesting, is it?
Okay, so I'll tell you a little more about Saturday. Packed hall. Big stars. Lots of people in great costumes. We had a great Jack Kirby Tribute Panel with Herb Trimpe, Mike Royer, Darwyn Cooke, Kurt Busiek and Paul Dini. Then later, I did a one-on-one with Herb...a fascinating, gifted man who talked about working at Marvel "in the days when it was fun." I sometimes get the feeling it hasn't been that way at very many comic companies for a long time.
I signed a lot of copies of Kirby: King of Comics for folks and would have sold more but the one dealer who had them, Comic Relief of Berkeley, sold out rather quickly.
I need to get out of this bar and go back upstairs to write in peace 'n' quiet so I'll wrap this up. More later, if and when I get a working Internet connection.
I've decided to start an airline. I'm going to start an airline where we fly people around in the cargo holds of planes that transport steer manure. The flight attendants will be obese bulldykes who pass through the coach every twenty minutes to taser everyone and pass out live gophers as snacks. All flights will depart a minimum of three days late and will arrive under medical quarantine but without your luggage. As an added feature, my pilots will all be chronic alcoholics and they'll select their destinations at random. If you want to go to a certain place, you'll have to just get on some jet and hope it goes where you want to go. That, of course, presupposes you will get there at all, which often will not be the case.
That's the working plan for my new airline and I know...some of you are thinking, "That won't stay in business for long." To which I respond, "Hey, United Airlines is still in business." Given the option of theirs or mine, mine should be your airline of choice.
As you might guess, I had an unpleasant experience with them. Carolyn and I spent most of Friday at L.A. International Airport in the United Terminal...not, as intended, at the WonderCon in San Francisco. What happened was that we missed...well, we didn't exactly miss our flight to S.F. We got to LAX later than advisable but we still should have been on the flight.
Problem #1 in an endless series was that there were long, long lines to check one's baggage if you wanted to do so with an actual human being doing the checking-in. We could not have done that and made the flight, even if we'd arrived when they tell you to arrive. The only alternative was a bank of computer check-in kiosks...all part of United's ongoing and serious campaign to enable them to operate with a minimum of people to whom one can talk and ask questions and complain.
I'm rarely late for flights. Once in a while, it happens...and what usually occurs is that I can make the flight itself but there's some question as to whether my suitcase can. The person who checks my luggage warns me it may not travel when I do, and I elect to take that risk. The worst that can happen (in theory) is that once I arrive at my destination, I sit around at that airport and wait for the next flight, on which will be my bag. That, of course, would waste no more of my life than just waiting for the next flight on the departure end of things and — who knows? — I might get lucky and my Samsonite will get on the same plane. Sometimes, it does.
The computer check-in doesn't work like that. It won't accept luggage less than 45 minutes before the scheduled departure even (apparently) if the plane will be taking off late. By the time we got through the lines and to the computers — and the computers located our reservations, which took longer than it should have — we were 43 or 44 minutes from take-off time.
This should not have mattered. The policy at United, as it states on the ticket folders, is that your seat may be given away if you don't get your Boarding Pass a half hour in advance. We had ours the night before thanks to printing them out online. You also have to be at the departure gate 20 minutes before the flight leaves. We could have made that but we never had the chance.
What happened at the computer is a bit blurry but the computer system announced it could not check our baggage...and the next thing we knew, we were no longer on the 8:25 AM flight at all. We were suddenly flying standby on the 9:33 flight...and that might have been an acceptable alternative had there actually been a 9:33 flight. It was cancelled with an explanation something along the lines of "The plane for this flight from L.A. to San Francisco originates in Uruguay, and it's sleeting in Uruguay." One of those deals.
But it was okay, we were told, because we were automatically "rolled over" (they used that term and I had to admit I did feel "rolled over") to the standby list for the 10:03 flight. The problem with that was that all the folks who'd had confirmed seats on the 9:33 flight went onto that standby list — ahead of us. I think we were #152 and #153, which didn't look promising since the plane only held 138 people in the first place and already had 137 confirmed reservations. One person from the standby list made it on and we weren't among that one. I think this was the flight via which our suitcases travelled but we didn't.
It was like that all day. We didn't get on the 10:50 flight. We didn't get on the 11:57 flight. Flight after flight, we were standing by for a lottery we could not win. The order of the standby list kept changing — apparently, folks with a lot more United Mileage Plus points were given preference — but at no point were we within even the realm of "faint hope." A check of other airlines suggested no workable alternatives and, besides, our luggage had already flown United and would be waiting — we could only pray — at the other end.
Granted, airlines sometimes have to cancel flights but you'd think they'd have a better grasp of this situation since it only happens every hour or three. At any given time, the terminal is full of lost souls who arrived there thinking they had confirmed seats. There were a couple hundred of us trying to get to San Francisco via United and what I think annoyed me most was the utter disinterest in our predicament and the startling lack of anyone to talk to about it. I meant what I typed earlier about a conscious plan to limit the number of human beings with whom we get to interface. It's seemed to me quite deliberate, like someone at United said to someone else, "Hey, you know what wastes a lot of money? Having to deal with passenger problems! Let's stop doing that!"
I tried talking to various employees at various gates and encountered one or both of two problems. One was how every one of those folks seemed to be doing the job of about eight people. They were all frantic, rushing to get other people onto and off flights. One harried lady who looked like Cloris Leachman practically yelled at me, "I don't have time to deal with your situation." But the ones who might have had time didn't deal with my situation, either. The subtext was like, "Well, we're not responsible for the weather and we certainly aren't responsible if you were late...so you'll get there when you get there and it really isn't our problem!" The most I could get out of any of them was a directive to go to Customer Service, a misnamed department if ever there was one.
The line at Customer Service was not short and it was difficult to stand in it long enough to get to the front and to simultaneously be at the various gates where standby passengers were being called for possible openings. When I did get to speak with someone there, I got a lot of that "it's not our problem" attitude from a person who seemed to know less about the workings of United than I did, and who seemed to have picked up their brains at the Duty-Free Shop. Cloris Leachman had told me that if I didn't get satisfaction there, I should demand to speak with a Supervisor. When I didn't get satisfaction, I told the lady who wasn't satisfying me that I'd like to speak to a Supervisor, to which she replied, "He's just going to tell you what I told you." I said, "Well, I'd like to hear it from his lips." So a Supervisor was called over and before I said anything, before he even knew what the problem was, he announced, "Whatever she said is how it is." I asked to speak to the Supervisor's Supervisor but apparently, the Supervisors at United are all unsupervised.
What that woman told me there was confusing and useless. It pretty much came down to, "Just hang around until you get on a flight." I asked if there was anything I could do to make that a reality and she said something about buying First Class tickets if any became available (she couldn't be bothered to check and see if any were) and $700. I'm not sure if it was $700 each or $700 for the both of them but I was not inclined to give United Airlines that kind of money for any reason.
Thinking I was cleverer than I actually was, I tried phoning United Customer Service. This is not easy to do because no one at the airport would tell me the number and it was just about the only United number that wasn't on the ticket folder. I finally called the number for reservations and wormed it out of someone there. Upon dialing, I reached a fellow with a thick accent whose only interest seemed to be in repeating talking points that extolled the glories of the United Mileage Plus card. He had no idea what happens to passengers stuck in Standby Hell and no clue what to do about it. Finally, I asked him, "Where are you located?" and he told me he was in New Delhi. I asked him what he could possibly do for me from there and he said, "I could fill out a complaint and send an e-mail to someone in Chicago." Obviously, that wasn't going to change anything and I guess that's the whole point of it. You don't have your Customer Service phones answered by some guy in India if you want to actually provide Customer Service.
After way too many approaches to United staffers who hadn't the time or interest in our dilemma, one semi-sympathetic employee (there are always a few) told me that if I went back to Customer Service (yet again), I could pay an extra $50 per ticket and we'd be guaranteed seats on the next flight that had openings. Why no one had told me this earlier is a mystery but it may have something to do with the fact that so few people would even talk with me at all.
It was, in effect, buying our way to the top of the standby list and it seemed unfair but this was no time for contemplations of that variety. I waited another half-hour at Customer Service and paid $100 and they told us that we'd definitely be on the 5:15 flight. (When they told me that, I asked, "5:15 PM?" Because the way it had been going, you couldn't assume anything.) That was, of course, assuming that there even was a 5:15 PM flight. Carolyn and I spent a few more hours sitting in the food court eating Wheat Thins and Bugles and chasing them with that delicious $2.50 airport Aquafina water. And we actually — wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles — did get out on the 5:15 flight.
As you may have heard, United has announced that beginning later this year — in May, I think — passengers will have to pay to check more than one suitcase. A lot of people I know have announced that because of it, they will never fly United Airlines again. I think they have the right idea but for the wrong reason.
The Horrors of Yesterday: How United Airlines can get you from Los Angeles to San Francisco in about the time it would take you to hop there on one foot.
Today, Saturday and Sunday, I will be at the WonderCon in San Francisco. I'll be hosting some terrific panels...and you can see a list of them here. Find out all about the WonderCon over on this website and show up there. It's going to be quite rainy in S.F. this weekend so the event might not be as crowded as you'd expect and dealers might be more willing to give bargains. If nothing else, you can enjoy the pungent aroma of Wet Fans.
I'll be signing copies of my new book, Kirby: King of Comics. Yes, it's out and I'm told most major dealers should have their supplies next week...but they may not have 'em for long. My publisher says that every last copy of the first printing has been ordered by merchants or distributors, and they're hurrying to get a second printing on the presses. We'll be fixing a few teensy typos for it...and I should mention that in a week or so, I'll be opening a section of this website devoted to corrections and amplifications on the book.
I'll also probably be signing copies of the new issue of Will Eisner's The Spirit which came out this week from DC Comics. It's the first to be written by the awe-inspiring team of Sergio Aragonés and Your Obedient Weblogmaster, trodding in very large footprints. Mike Ploog and Mike Farmer did a superb job with the illustration and there's a wonderful cover by Jordi Bernet. Next issue is drawn (and drawn well) by Paul Smith. Also at some point during the con, Sergio and I will be over at the Dark Horse booth signing copies of the current Groo mini-series. (By the way: I'm currently assembling the letter column for the last issue of that mini-series and I'm short a few letters. Here's your chance, people.)
On Monday, I will be teaching a half-day class in Animation Voiceover Acting at Voice One, which is a respected school and recording studio. If you're in that area and interested in doing cartoon voices, you might want to check it out. Here's a link with all the info.
End of advertisements. We now return you to our regularly scheduled blog.
Duke Haring makes two points and I'm going to respond to them one at a time. Here's the first one...
First, the subtle but salient point Mr. Morris fails to distinguish is that Bill Clinton was not impeached for having an affair with Monica Lewinsky. He was impeached for lying about it under oath. Certainly, I don't live in John McCain's head, but I believe that was the basis for his impeachment vote.
I don't live in McCain's head either but after hearing him discuss it a few times in interviews, I got the feeling that the basis for his impeachment vote was that if you want the Republican nomination for president, you'd better not cross the extreme right wing of that party. Maybe it's just me projecting my viewpoint but McCain sure seemed to think the whole accusation against Clinton was nonsense and I remember him saying several times a conviction was impossible. But he still voted to let the process go forward and supported it and I guess I was disappointed that he went along with it. I'd like to think the John McCain of an earlier time would have parted company with the Republican mainstream on this. He used to do that once in a while when he thought they were wrong.
In one sense, you're right that it was about alleged lying, not alleged infidelity. But I think in a larger sense, it was about seeing how much they could embarrass Clinton and lower public opinion of him by trotting out as many details of salacious conduct as possible. And if Democrats applied the same sleazy manuever, they'd gin up some investigation of McCain's contacts with lobbyists and use that as an excuse to dig up and publicize every detail of the man's supposed affair. That would be wrong but it would be quite comparable to the process McCain endorsed in the Clinton/Lewinsky matter.
Here's the other part of Duke's message...
Secondly, while I am no fan of Sen. McCain — my vote went to Ron Paul — I find it interesting that the New York Times sat on this diddling the lobbyist story until after its endorsement helped McCain to effectively lock up the nomination. If the Times had run the story when it first had it, we might now be talking about the possibilities of Obama vs. Romney — not that this is any improvement in my mind. I'm just sayin'.
I doubt the story, at least in the tepid version the Times published, is going to do any harm to McCain's chances. It may even help him win over the kind of voter who thought the Times endorsement was a good reason not to vote for McCain. But it is odd that the Times endorsed the guy while it sat on this story and then released it now. The whole thing seems puzzling to me. What I'd like to know is: Do they think he had this affair? If so, why publish the story if you're going to tap dance around that? If not, why publish the story at all? If you aren't sure, why publish it now?
Here's another one of those 1986 educational spots that the Warner Brothers cartoon people whipped up for ABC. This one features the Coyote and the Road Runner asserting your Constituional Right to chase a bird up a mountainside and plunge into an abyss.
It's followed by the end credits for that season's Bugs Bunny and Tweety Show with, annoyingly, the theme song removed. But do note that June Foray received a voice credit, which was something that didn't happen often on WB cartoons.
Jeremy Morris reads my little comment on the McCain "affair" story (item before last here) and writes...
...under normal circumstances I'd agree with you. But there are two points that I think are salient here in the case of John McCain that make this event actually worth considering:
1. McCain's reputation is for "Straight Talking" and for "Campaign Finance Reform". He's the one who made these two things the centerpieces of his run for office and his Senate career respectively. Cheating on your wife puts a lie to his whole "Straight Talking" persona that he's wrapped himself in. Now, granted he probably only got into Campaign Finance Reform as a cause after his participation in the "Keating Five" scandal, but still - Campaign Finance Reform is one of his hobbyhorses. If he's having an illicit affair with a lobbyist, that shows that his championing of Campaign Finance Reform is a sham. Which you may be expecting, but there are still many people in this country who expect their politicians to actually believe the things that they say. The more examples of this sort of thing, the more that expectation can be lowered and the more people will hopefully pay attention to what the politician actually does instead of just the words they say.
2. McCain voted to impeach President Clinton based on Clinton's sexual conduct while in office. Had McCain stood up and called out his own party for the stupidity of it all, I'd have more respect and more sympathy for the Senator. As it is, this is a classic example of one being "hoisted by his own petard" - if he didn't want to play by these rules he shouldn't have put them on the table when the board was setup. Any Republican who voted to impeach Clinton in the Lewinsky matter deserves to have their sexual closet thrown open and have all of the moths shaken out. And if they didn't realize the Pandora's Box they were opening when they cast that vote then they are fools who doubly deserve what they get. (Personal bias note - I considered myself a Republican up until the whole impeachment circus. So I may still be a little bit bitter that the party that I supported at the time turned out to be a bunch of corrupt little children intent on scoring political points about trivial issues instead of actually governing like adults.)
I don't know that I can disagree with most of that. McCain's support for the impeachment of Clinton was, for me, the moment he vaulted the proverbial shark. It was when he stopped being a Republican I could see myself voting for and entered the phylum of "He's just like all the others." Where I guess I differ a bit with you is that I think the part of this story that obviously interests most people — Ooh, John McCain was cheating on his wife! — doesn't seem to have been nailed down with sufficient evidence, nor would it be the real wrong. If he's doing improper things to help out lobbyists, that's the sin, whether he's in bed with one financially or literally. I suppose one could argue that the sex angle to the story is a good thing because a story that just said McCain lets lobbyists manipulate him like he's Topo Gigio would not get as much attention...but you kind of hate to see it work that way. I do, at least.
How much are we spending for defense these days? Apparently, as much as the Bush Administration wants. According to — you guessed it — Fred Kaplan, military budgets are an outmoded concept. We sort of limit the spending in the formal budget and then spend any additional amount requested as a "supplemental" with little or no oversight.
And while I'm hectoring you into reading Fred Kaplan, I might as well go the distance: Mr. Kaplan has gifted me with an autographed copy of his new book, Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power, and I'm about halfway through it. It's a stunning, chilling account of mistakes that G.W.B. and his minions have made with regard to defense and foreign relations, not just in Iraq but around the globe. In case after case, someone — often Rumsfeld but there were others — had some new theory about what America should do, how we should position ourselves vis-a-vis some other nation...and it not only didn't work but actually achieved the opposite of the intended goal. The book is not angry and not intended to rouse rabble. It just lays out a pretty sorry history that will scare the bejeesus out of anyone looking for the government to make a safer world for us to all live in.
I don't care if John McCain was having an affair a few years ago. I don't care if he's having one now. Yes, there could be a certain impropriety since the lady in the news reports is a lobbyist...but that impropriety is one I already expect. These guys are all in bed, one way or another, with lobbyists. The sex stuff, if true, is none of our business.
So let me see if I have this straight. Bill Clinton was engaged by a heckler on the campaign trail. NBC News and MSNBC aired some sound bites of the heckler. Bill O'Reilly criticized them by saying, "There are plenty of nuts on the campaign trail but if you're a responsible news agency, you don't legitimize them by giving them airtime." Meanwhile, Sean Hannity — who works for the same news agency as O'Reilly — had the guy on as a guest, thereby giving him a lot more airtime and legitimacy. Jay Leno is having O'Reilly on his show this Friday night. Hey, Jay...how about asking him if he thinks Fox is not a responsible news agency? (Yeah, like that's gonna happen...)
Lastly, if you want to see a political campaigner humiliated on national TV, check out this clip of Chris Matthews interviewing a Texas State Senator named Kirk Watson. Watson was on to stump for his guy, Barack Obama...but when Matthews asked him to name any of Obama's legislative accomplishments, Watson couldn't name one. There actually are a number of things he could have said but apparently he didn't think it necessary to have any of them at hand.
Your announcement of a surprise birthday party for Larry Storch gives me a great opportunity to notify you and your readers that the Encore Westerns Channel is playing this month a 1957 movie called Gun Fever which features Larry Storch in the role of a vicious Mexican outlaw named Amigo. It's hard to reconcile Larry's comedic role in F Troop with the serious role he plays in this adult violent Western. I was amazed to see Larry shoot down a man in cold blood, beat another man nearly to death, and get into fistfights. Larry affects a Spanish accent in this movie which is so indescribably bad that it's good. For Larry Storch fans, this movie is not to be missed.
And you can "not miss it" on Sunday, February 24 at (on my satellite dish) 10:40 AM. Consult some listing to tell you when it's on in your area. That's assuming you even get that channel.
Back in the eighties, Saturday morning kids' shows were full of little educational spots, some of which were offensive in how condescending they were to younger viewers. But some were actually quite entertaining. Most of the Schoolhouse Rock segments, f'rinstance, were better and more memorable than the shows they came between. I can sing "Lolly, Lolly, Lolly, Get Your Adverbs Here" but I can't hum the theme songs from some of those shows, many of which I wrote.
ABC was the most insistent on public service spots. In 1986, they ran this one with Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck for a while. Rumor has it that the spot was yanked off the air because of a few objections from folks who were opposing then-current attempts to insert some amendment or other into the Constitution. They felt that kids were being indoctrinated into the notion that the Constitution can easily be changed and should be. Here's what these people were protesting...
Well, I think I can give up on Deal or No Deal again...and after last night's show, it wouldn't surprise me if much of America did, as well. As you may recall, they've never had a million dollar winner in this game, the whole point of which is to see if someone can win a million dollars. To coincide with sweeps, they launched the "Million Dollar Mission" during which more and more of those cute little briefcases contained the yearned-for amount...the idea being to weigh the odds to make a million buck win likely. Didn't happen, as we all knew going into last night's show. (How did we know it? Because if it had, the producers and network would have made darned sure we knew in advance so more folks would tune in to watch.) Even with half the cases on the board containing $1,000,000.00, the contestant wound up with less than half that.
Still, you could tell the producers thought it would all end with the Big Win. The show has gotten way too manipulative for its own good, trotting out deserving contestants and reminding us over and over how deserving they are, bringing on their friends and family members to say it every three minutes. They even had the prize models saying "You're my favorite contestant ever" and getting emotional about it. Last night's contestant — the one who was picked to play in a game calculated to make her a millionaire — needed the loot in order to have more children and to continue all her fine charity work, and you certainly wanted her to succeed. The producers sure expected it.
They started this running theme with The Banker (the show's unseen Bad Guy, who's somehow regarded as evil for offering players a guaranteed, often huge amount if they elect not to gamble) proclaiming that he was going to beat her and that he'd consider anything less than a million dollar win for her as a loss for her. The lady kept saying, "I always win," which was clearly untrue. A person who always wins would not be poor enough to be an appropriate contestant on Deal or No Deal. Anyway, it came down to this silly dramatic undercurrent: If she won the million, it would prove that she was, indeed, one who always wins. If she went home with anything less — say, a measly $800,000 — she was a loser. That was the premise the producers felt they had to lay in there to ratchet up the suspense...since it seemed so obvious going in that she'd win the mill.
Plus, they added this out of left field: Her husband was afraid of heights..so The Banker added a new, one-time rule to the game. Hubby was strapped onto a platform and incrementally raised into the air on wires. Each time she opened a case containing a million, thereby dropping the odds of her winning that amount, he'd be hoisted another level. Why? Just to add more drama to a show that seemed to have a foregone conclusion.
But at some point in the taping, the producers must have realized it wasn't going as expected; that they'd configured the game around an expected finale that might not be achieved. With no explanation, they called off the stunt with the husband and started back-pedalling on this lame insistence that she was a loser if she didn't head homeward with all the marbles. And indeed, it finally came down to this: She had two cases left. One contained a million smackers. The other held $200. There was an offer on the table of a little less than half a million.
Therein lies the problem with this game. To be interesting, it has to be played by contestants who are somewhat needy and for whom a million dollar win is life-changing, allowing them to buy that new house they need, send their kids to college, help out those less fortunate than even themselves, etc. That kind of person should not and (if they have a lick of sense) will not turn down half a million on a 50-50 chance of either winning twice that amount or going home with bupkiss. You'd hate them if they did. You'd hate them and you'd hate the show and you'd even hate yourself for watching the show for an entire hour, rooting for that person. Even if they won, the player would have won after being foolish and reckless with their family's future.
The lady last night didn't, of course, do that. She went home with a nice piece of change. It turned out she did have the million dollar amount in her case so even though she won big, the conventions of the show treated her as a bit of a loser. I sure felt like one for investing any of my time in the whole enterprise. Even recording the show on TiVo and fast-forwarding through all the padding, I still felt like I'd listened to a long, long joke without a punchline...and not because the lady didn't win a million dollars. But because of all the contrived dramatics it took to get there.
Earlier this evening, I attended a terrific surprise birthday party for the great comic actor, Larry Storch. That's Larry at right in the above photo, posing with his F Troop co-star, Ken Berry, who was among the friends of Larry's in attendance. There were a lot of great comic actors present, including Chuck McCann, Jackie Joseph, Marty Ingels, Hank Garrett, Warren Berlinger and Ron Masak. There were also top cartoon voice actors like Wally Wingert (who threw the shindig) and Katie Leigh, plus I got a hug from Stella Stevens. That alone was worth the drive out to the valley.
Among many others who were present was Lou Scheimer, who used to co-own and run Filmation Studios. Lou often hired Larry as a voice actor (The Groovy Ghoulies, for instance) and for on-camera live-action (The Ghostbusters). And I got to meet one of my favorite composers, Neal Hefti, who expressed disbelief that I knew the obscure lyrics to the title song from a movie he scored, How to Murder Your Wife. He quickly learned otherwise, and the look on his face was almost as good as a hug from Stella Stevens.
Larry Storch has, of course, been doing wonderful work for most of his 85 years on this planet. I probably first knew him as a recurring character on Car 54, Where Are You?, one of my favorite shows. (Hank Garrett was a regular on that series. He may be the last person alive who was.) I always thought Larry was screamingly funny as Corporal Agarn on F Troop, which is one of those rare shows that looks better with each passing year. He was also on a short-lived, unjustly-forgotten series called The Queen and I, which I would love to see again.
Not much else to report except to again wish Larry a happy birthday last month. One reason he was so surprised by the surprise party is that his birthday was in January. But no one cared. It was just nice to see him and to get all those people together in one room.
This one's from the TV show, Shivaree, which was one of those dance party thingies from the sixties that some of us watched just to see the dancers wiggle. The date is September 11, 1965 and you'll also be watching Ted Cassidy, who played Lurch on The Addams Family, introducing what was perhaps the least popular dance craze of the day. I have the feeling that not one human being on the planet ever actually did this dance if they weren't being paid to do it in this number on this show.
Cassidy was an interesting guy. Hanna-Barbera used him often for voices (and occasionally for on-camera parts in their productions of that nature). When I worked for Bill 'n' Joe, I used to see him around the halls all the time. It was difficult to not notice the guy. One time, I was running somewhere for some reason and he came out of a doorway and we darn near collided. It felt like I'd just barely run into the Empire State Building. I'm 6'3" and not used to being around folks who are substantially taller than I am.
He was looking for his wife who was somewhere nearby and I couldn't resist. I actually said, "Did she leave you in the lurch?" even though it didn't make a whole lot of sense and I'm sure he'd heard such remarks many times before. Still, he laughed the deepest, lowest-register chuckle I've ever heard in my life.
At the time, Mr. Cassidy had an odd gig. He was doing the roars for Godzilla for the Saturday AM cartoon series about everyone's fave gargantuan reptile. He'd come in every week or so and just roar into the microphone as the director told him, "Okay, Ted...now in this one, you just stepped on a hot dog stand...now, you're swatting away attack planes..."
That was in the first season of the show. Cassidy passed away before production started on Season #2 and Hanna-Barbera did auditions to find a "sound-alike" who could match the roar. Dozens of actors "read" (roared) for the part and they'd tentatively selected another very tall person, a friend of mine named Stanley Ralph Ross. Then it suddenly dawned on someone at H-B that they had hours on tape of Ted Cassidy roaring. Why not just use that? After all, it wasn't like the writers were writing new, innovative roars for Godzilla. So Stanley didn't get the odd gig. They used Cassidy's old recordings and paid his estate. Stanley complained that Ted Cassidy, dead, was getting more work than he was, alive.
Here's Ted Cassidy performing a dance that even I could do but won't. Thanks to Ken Plume for telling me about this clip...
You may remember a few years ago, a big deal was made in the Blondie newspaper strip about Mr. and Mrs. Bumstead celebrating their 75th wedding anniversary, complete with guest stars from other strips.
That was all well and good...but over in an Internet newsgroup, historian D.D. Degg has pointed out that today is actually their 75th anniversary. Blondie and Dagwood were married in the strip that ran on February 17, 1933. Here's a link to the original art for that historic strip so you can see for yourself.
Charles Barkley, who's an Obama supporter, is making the rounds of the political talk shows. I keep seeing him making statements like this one...
Well, I think, you know, people keep saying, well, he doesn't have enough experience on national security and things like that. First of all, whoever the president is, he's going to have tons of advisers. It ain't like the president gets to make every decision on his own. You have great advisers around you.
That's all true but I think it's a lame thing to say about your guy. If Obama is the Democratic nominee — which is looking a bit more likely these days — I'll vote for him, probably with more enthusiasm than I generally have in the voting booth. But I don't buy this idea that it's not a negative for an elected official to not have experience in so vital an area since he can surround himself with people who do. Hey, I don't know how to perform an angioplasty but I could probably hire someone who does to advise me. Want to let me work on your arteries?
I thought that was a dumb argument eight years ago when Bush supporters were telling us how it was okay that he had no experience in foreign affairs...or even much knowledge about what was going on in other countries. It's still a dumb argument. Given the choice of two people, we might weigh all the pros and cons and decide that the candidate lacking in some area was still the better choice. But let's not pretend it doesn't matter.
Here we have a pleasant little commercial for the Kellogg's cereals, showing us that the characters on their boxes get up every morning and eat the cereals that they appear upon. The legendary Thurl Ravenscroft provides the voice of Tony the Tiger (as always) and that's him doing the voiceover in the middle, presumably as Tony.
We're less than a week from Wondercon, an always-fun comic/media convention held annually in San Francisco. I'll be packing an umbrella because it looks like I'll need it but otherwise, a good time should be had by all, especially if they attend any of the panels I'll be hosting. Click here for a full list of them...and you should be able to find the full schedule over at the convention website, along with details on where the con is, how to get yourself in, etc.
Hey, someone reading this can do me a favor. On Sunday afternoon, I'm moderating a panel called The Art of the Cover, which we've done before with different people and which is always interesting. What we do on it is to bring in a number of artists who've created great covers for comic books and then we project some of those covers on a big screen and everyone discusses what's so great about them. The last couple times we've done it, attendees have called it one of the most educational panels they've ever seen for folks who care about drawing and about how comics come to be.
This year, we have Jim Lee, Tim Sale, Darwyn Cooke and Terry Dodson on the dais, and I need to pick out seven great covers by each and find good-sized JPEGs of them. If you are a fan of one of these fine artists, how about sending me a couple? You can just send the issue numbers but if you really want to help, send one or more clear JPEGs (at least 500 pixels high) to this special address: (That's an encoded address. If it doesn't work in your browser, just send to covers "at sign" newsfromme.com.) You'll save me the task of searching and you probably have better taste than I do, anyway.
I'll be around the con all three days, sometimes doing panels, sometimes signing my new book on Jack Kirby in the autograph area or at the booth for a fine retailer, Comic Relief, and I think they have me at the Dark Horse booth for an hour or two at some point. Say hello if you see me. I'm not nearly as busy as I try to pretend I am.
My pal Anthony Tollin reminds me that today is the 75th "birthday" of Doc Savage, it being that many years since the publication of the character's first issue. It was on February 17, 1933 that the great pulp hero debuted, the creation of writer Lester Dent. Hiding under the pen name of Kenneth Robeson, Dent wrote most of the 181 Doc Savage novels that appeared in the original run.
I recognize the importance of the character in the development of the "super hero" (some call him the first) and I also note that a lot of my friends love to read and re-read Doc Savage novels. That's a nice way of easing into the fact that I somehow never managed to warm to the Good Doctor. I tried...lord, how I tried. I read a Doc Savage novel and didn't like it, and when I told a friend who loved the books, he told me, "You picked the wrong one. That's the one nobody likes" and he recommended another of the books.
I got that one, read it, didn't like it either...and when I told another friend who was a Doc Savage fan, he said, "Oh, I wish you'd asked me. You picked the rotten one." He designated another of the books as the one I should read and...well, I guess you see where this is going. I think I read five or six of the books and each one was the wrong one. (Don't bother writing to tell me which one I should read. It's like Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown by now. I have too many non-Doc Savage books that I might like and haven't the time to read.)
All that said, I will recommend Anthony's reprint series of Doc Savage and Shadow pulps. They're handsomely assembled with the perfect art direction and historical material...and so many people love this work, there's a good chance you will, too. Click here for more info.
This afternoon, I was up at U.C.L.A., giving that speech I told you about. On my way in, I happened to notice a pay phone that was seriously out of order — someone had actually cracked the handset into two pieces — and I snapped a pic with the ol' cameraphone. Somehow, the image amused me.
As I was leaving, I passed the pay phone again and a young lady was standing there, staring at it as if she expected it to soon heal to the point where she could use it to phone her mother or something. I said to her, "This is just a hunch but I don't think it's working."
"I know," she said. "I was just remembering a conversation with my boy friend that felt like that."
I received my ballot today to vote on the new Writers Guild contract. Members had the opportunity to support "pro" and "con" statements to urge ratification or rejection of the offer and no one submitted a "con." So that should give you some idea of the chance of this thing not passing. I'll guess 93%.
I was a fan of the sixties musical group, The Turtles. Always liked them and the fact that they performed with a kind of "We can't believe we're getting paid to do this" attitude. For a year or two there, they seemed to turn up on every TV show and I was amused that they were always moving their lips and miming to pre-recorded tracks...and not even trying too hard to pretend they were singing live. In this clip, you see them wandering about with no regard to where the microphones are...and I think they even switch off a few times as to which voice each band member is assuming is his. It's like everyone but the lead singer was told, "If you feel like it, move your lips approximately in time to some voice, not necessarily yours."
This clip is from the Smothers Brothers' show on CBS in '67. It's the title song from the movie, A Guide for the Married Man, and no bouncier tune was ever recorded during that era. The Turtles had nothing to do with its composition. Leslie Bricusse wrote the intricate lyrics and John Williams did the music.
Give it a look...and then if you didn't see it when I linked to it last October, go watch this clip of the same two guys you'll see singing the main parts in the clip below. It's them, many years later, explaining the quaint legal problems that dogged the group during its brief but wondrous heyday.
My chum Earl Kress and I went out to the Hollywood Collectors Show yesterday. In case you've never been to one of these, it's a large ballroom where celebrities of various celebrity sit behind tables and sell autographed photos, signed books and other items that their fans might crave. There are also dealers selling movie and TV memorabilia.
The big lines were for Ernest Borgnine, Carol Channing, Jonathan Winters, George Kennedy and especially for Peter Falk. Earl and I had a nice time talking with, among others, Bill Mumy, Gary Owens, Michael Hoey, Beverly Washburn, Bernie Kopell, Bruce Kimmel and Mackenzie Phillips. Mike Hoey gave me a copy of his new book, a bit of which I read last night and enjoyed tremendously. You'll be reading more about it here when I find the time to finish.
We went to lunch with Chuck McCann, who had as many fans around as anyone. A lady was sitting at the table next to us in the restaurant and she kept saying over and over out loud, "I can't believe I'm having lunch with Chuck McCann!" Chuck went over and kissed her hand...and you've never seen a happier woman.
The show continues today out in Burbank. If you get out there, take cash. You'll probably find a lot of fun things you want to purchase...and people you've always wanted to meet.
It seems to me that in every presidential election, every candidate picks a "theme song" — some popular tune with a lyric that conveys hope and better days ahead — to be played at rallies and when the candidate is approaching or leaving the podium...
...and no one at the campaign ever bothers to check with the song's composer to see if that's okay with them. You'd think they'd do that just to avoid the awkwardness that comes when the composer makes a statement like this one. Which happens all the time.
Anyone who's interested in how the Writers Guild strike ended when it did and succeeded to the extent it succeeded should read the post by Howard Gould over on the Artful Writer website.
As I mentioned, I'm lecturing up at U.C.L.A. on Saturday (here are the details) about Li'l Abner. I'll be talking a little about the strip, a lot about the Broadway show and a little about the 1959 movie based on the Broadway show. I won't spend much time on the Li'l Abner animated cartoons...and I bet it'll surprise a lot of people to know that there even were Li'l Abner animated cartoons. They're among the most obscure cartoon shorts ever made, to the point where a lot of well-versed cartoon scholars have never seen one.
There were five of them: Sadie Hawkins Day, Amoozin' But Confoozin', A Pee-kool-yar Sit-chee-ay-shun, Porkuliar Piggy and Kickapoo Juice...all produced by the Columbia Cartoon Studio in or around 1944. The films made by that studio are rarely shown these days even though some of them were pretty good. Then again, a lot of them weren't much better than the Li'l Abner shorts, which were low on budgets and pretty much devoid of the wit that was so prevalent in Al Capp's newspaper strip. The folks who made these cartoons seem to have thought that Mammy Yokum was just Popeye in drag. (One of the directors was even Dave Fleischer, one of the men responsible for the classic Popeye shorts.)
The five cartoons have occasionally been available on videotape and have recently been in a syndicated package of Columbia cartoons that haven't been sold to any U.S. markets. Some of the prints that are around aren't very good and some are even "traced" cartoons. If you don't know what those are, I'll explain in the next paragraph. If you do know, you can skip it.
Over the years, there have occasionally been old black-and-white cartoons about which some studio head or other exec said, often wrongly, "You know, if these were in color, we could sell them to television." Back in the days before computer "colorization," this was done by having artists trace the entire black-and-white cartoon back onto paper...and then these drawings were colored and photographed like new animation. Usually, the work went to the lowest-paid artists overseas and the results looked it.
The Abner cartoons were made in color but at one point a few decades ago, the negatives were missing and no color prints were available...so black-and-white prints were traced into color, and when these made the rounds, they further diminished the reputation of these cartoons. Small wonder that most animation buffs know little about them. (Even the voice credits on these are mysterious. Frank Graham, who was in an awful lot of cartoons of the forties, is in these but I can't identify the other players.)
Here's two-fifths of the complete run of Li'l Abner cartoons. The first of these is Sadie Hawkins Day and it was released May 4, 1944...
And this one, which is a black-and-white print of what was originally a Technicolor cartoon, is Kickapoo Juice, which was released on January 12, 1945. It was the last one in the series...and I think it's pretty easy to see why these didn't catch on with the public...
I haven't seen either of these shows but I have my TiVo set for them...
On Monday, The History Channel debuts History of the Joke, a two hour special about comedy hosted by Lewis Black and featuring a whole mess of funny people including George Carlin, Robert Klein, Penn & Teller, Kathy Griffin, Shelley Berman and Dave Attell. Consult whatever you consult for the correct time.
Then on Wednesday, most PBS channels will be debuting the Great Performances presentation of Company, the musical by George Furth and Stephen Sondheim. They videotaped the recent Broadway revival and you can see a video preview — most of the opening number, in fact — over on this page.
Congress should not pass a bill granting the telephone companies retroactive immunity for FISA-related surveillance on Americans. In fact, we should never forgive the phone companies for anything. I'm especially against granting them retroactive immunity for their repair guys not showing up when they're supposed to.
The other day here, I noted my observation that when an author receives his or her first printed copy, that author will always open to a random page...and find a typographical error. My pal Neil Gaiman just sent me a message with the subject line "Great minds" and directed me to this post from his weblog of April 15, 2005. Here...I'll quote the relevant passages and save you a click...
My copy of MirrorMask the script-and-storyboards book was waiting in the mail when I got home -- it's huge and heavy and, really rather wonderful. (Gaiman's law of picking up your first copy of a book you wrote held true: if there's one typo, it will be on the page that your new book falls open to the first time you pick it up. It never fails. It used to make me sad or frustrated. Now I half-expect it.)
Neil is an optimist compared to me on this. I absolutely expect it. The part I haven't figured out yet is whether some cosmic force compels you to open the book to a page with a pre-existing typo...or if the typo just magically appears on whatever page you first open to. If I get my book and decide to open it to page 47, was the typo there on page 47 before I opened to it? An interesting philosophical question.
And I just realized what I should have done when I got my copy of the book. I should have opened to the foreword...which was written by Neil Gaiman. I would much rather that typo was on one of his pages.
Speaking of the Reprise! shows: One of the best I've seen was their version on On the Twentieth Century, which I raved about way back in this posting in 2003. A highlight of that show is our video link for today. It's the wondrous Mimi Hines singing "Repent!" Lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, tune by Cy Coleman.
I post here often about the Reprise! series that stages musicals up at Macgowan Hall at U.C.L.A. They do very fine shows there, as witness their current production of Li'l Abner, which I sturdily recommend. It runs through the 17th and seats are still available. I'm not sure if it still works but a few days ago, if you went to Ticketmaster and entered the word DAISY in the coupon space, you got a nice discount. Maybe you still can.
On Saturdays, the 2 PM matinee is preceded — from Noon 'til 1 PM — by an educational program on the history of the show at hand. Last Saturday, my pal Miles Kreuger hosted a great panel discussion with Charlotte Rae (who was in the original Broadway show), Stella Stevens (who was in the movie based on it) and Julie Newmar and Hope Holiday (who were both in both). Over on this page, they will soon be posting an audio podcast of this conversation. As of this moment, it's not operative.
Also on that same page, you can make reservations for this Saturday's program, which will be a lecture on the history of the Li'l Abner comic strip, Broadway show and movie, delivered by that great Li'l Abner expert, me. It's priced right. It's free.
Here's an e-mail from Brian Trester that deserves a public answer...
From what I have read in your strike updates, it seems to me that the WGA does not seem to respect animation writers or the field of animation. It seems to me they (the writers of animation) always get shafted and dumped as part of the compromises. I know you're a big name in writing for animation so my question for you is if I was solely an animation writer, why would I continue to support the guild when they always dump my demands in order to reach a better deal or just a deal with the motion picture people?
I maybe misunderstanding this and be 100% wrong, but that's what I perceive has gone on in the last several contracts, including this one. Also has there ever been talk of Animation writers forming their own guild to look after their needs since they seem to fall through the cracks quite a lot?
Brian, I was smack dab in the middle of the WGA's attempts to organize Animation Writers from about 1978 through the early nineties, and I've been watching the situation since then and occasionally helping out. Within the Guild, there's often a tendency for people to focus on their specific work area — feature writers who care only about feature writing, sitcom writers who think the WGA should expend all its capital on the needs of sitcom writers, etc. Apart from being neglected in that context, I have never seen any disrespect shown to the field of writing cartoons. When I was out lobbying various Guild officials and influential members to address the issue, I got back nearly 100% enthusiasm. It wasn't everyone's highest priority but everyone was in favor of it.
Unfortunately, there is the Art of the Possible. We're governed by labor laws, most of which favor the status quo. I was heavily involved in two major efforts — one to get the National Labor Relations Board to permit what is called Craft Severance. That means carving a group of employees out of one union (in this case, Local 839, the Animation Union) and allowing them to join another (in this case, the WGA). We lost in a very puzzling, illogical decision. Later, there was an attempt to do exactly what you ask about...form a guild for Animation Writers. Again, it was back to the same N.L.R.B. hearing rooms. This time, we won the battle on the regional level and then got reversed, via another of those illogical rulings, at the national. To make it all more baffling, a major part of the reversal was later reversed but there are other obstacles to trying that route again.
A union cannot do the impossible, and I am satisfied the WGA has done its best. I'm also satisfied that they're going to keep at it and that further inroads will occur. The Writers Guild will never represent all cartoon writing — it doesn't even represent all live-action writing — but it will represent more in the future.
I think you're wrong that they always dump Toon Writers' demands to reach a better deal in other areas. As far as I can tell, this latest negotiation is the first time anything relating to Animation has been a real demand. Actually, in many of its past negotiations, the WGA has been denied the opportunity to even present real demands of this kind. This time, it was able to make some and the one relating to Animation Writing among the first ones out of the briefcase. Yes, it eventually was taken off the table but I think this is the first time it ever really got onto the table. A number of past Guild advances suffered similar fates before eventually becoming reality.
One last thing. There's a limit to how much any union can do to improve your lot as a writer. There are studios that work off a financial model of delivering the cheapest product and often by screwing over the people who work for them. There's only one real way for a writer to avoid being abused by this kind of company and it's not "work hard to get WGA representation there." That's not going to happen with a certain kind of employer. The way to protect yourself is not to work for them. Some jobs are just like marinating yourself and leaping into the lion's den, and you shouldn't be surprised when you get gnawed upon.
Lately, everyone running for public office — Democrats and Republicans alike — seems to be campaigning as The Candidate for Change. They mention "change" more often than the panhandlers outside Canter's Delicatessen.
And what's odd to me is that the candidates rarely bother to emphasize that they're (presumably) talking about change for the better. I mean, no matter how bad things are, someone could change them for the worse. Supposing a candidate was in favor of banning all delicious food, giving everyone in America a case of whooping cough, letting everyone out our prisons and issuing them a loaded howitzer as they leave, replacing our currency with bowls of gravy, nuking one random U.S. city per week and banning all TV programming that does not include Tom Arnold. That would be a platform for change. It would also be the old Lyndon LaRouche platform but never mind that now.
It's good to be open to change and willing to change...but change just for the sake of change is kind of simple-minded. And I've come to think that when a candidate says that, it's because they and/or their handlers have decided that the American people are simple-minded.
If we believe this recent AP poll (and the others take you pretty much to the same place), the country is really disgusted with George W. Bush and Congress. Bush is at an all-time low, even with Republicans. Overall, he's at 30% and Congress is at 22%. I suspect the latter number is misleading because it encompasses two disparate kinds of dissatisfaction: Some voters are mad at Congress because of all it's done to oppose the Bush agenda and some are mad because it hasn't done more. Also, as the above-linked article notes, "[Congress] usually has lower ratings than the president because it is an institution people love to criticize. Many have negative views of Congress while still supporting their own House and Senate members." This country may report strong disapproval of Congress but we're going to vote to re-elect an overwhelming majority of those people.
But clearly, we aren't happy with two of our three branches of government...and if they asked about the judiciary, they'd probably score just as poorly. At some point, some focus group testing of us must have realized that we've started to salivate at the mere mention of the word, "change." We're so desperate to have confidence in someone in Washington that we aren't even thinking about making the wrong kind of changes. We should. Because we so often do.
Did you ever wonder how they came up with the name for Kellogg's Raisin Bran? Yeah, me neither. But I always love to hear the voices of Daws Butler (who plays Mr. Jinks in this spot) and Don Messick (who plays Pixie). Here's a vintage cereal commercial...
Hey, maybe you can help me with something. That is, if you own and know about BlackBerry handheld devices.
I'm looking for a good "notes" program for it...something on which you can enter notes and tasks and a "to do" list and maybe even maintain your calendar. The ideal software — and I'm not sure anyone makes this — would have a PC Desktop interface and could be synched up via the web. Back when I had a Pocket PC, I used a program called PhatNotes that was ideal for this. When I chose to upgrade to a BlackBerry, a salesguy told me (falsely) that he was reasonably sure PhatNotes had a version that would run on a BlackBerry and that if they didn't, there were several other programs that would give me the same thing. Well, there is no PhatNotes for BlackBerry and I've yet to find anything comparable. If you know of one, send me a note. Maybe I'll even pick it up on my Blackberry.
I'll be on Stu's Show this afternoon for a while, discussing the resolution of the Writers Strike. Stu's Show is the keystone program over on Shokus Internet Radio, our favorite online station. It can be heard live on your computer beginning at 4 PM Pacific Time, which is 7 PM back east and other times in other places. Stu Shostak and I will be discussing the strike at the top of the program for 20 or 30 minutes and I know you'll want to listen in, which you can do by clicking on this link at the appropriate time. The show then repeats throughout the rest of the week in (most days) the same time slot.
The other day here, I wrote about receiving the first printed copy of my new book, Kirby: King of Comics and instantly finding a typo. I hope no one took this as any sort of criticism or complaint about its publisher or any of the fine folks who worked on the book. This rule — when you first open your new book, you find a typo — is something I've been saying for years and it applies to every book from every publisher. There's something about the finality of it finally being printed that causes you to suddenly notice mistakes that weren't visible when it was possible to fix them.
I wrote about this many years ago in a column that was reprinted in my book, Superheroes in My Pants. And of course, when I got the first copy of that book from the printer, I instantly found a typo.
Let the record show that I am enormously happy with my new Kirby book. I have never been reticent to complain mightily about companies or editors with (or for) which I work and I have zero beefs this time. If you're a writer or you want to be a writer, I hope you someday have as fine an experience as I've had with my editor on this one, Charlie Kochman.
I'm watching Barack Obama give a speech in Madison thanking his supporters for whatever delegates he won tonight. This follows a speech by Hillary Clinton thanking her supporters for the delegates she's just added to her column.
I'm honestly torn as to the question of which of them would make the better president. But jeez, he is so much better at giving a speech than she is.
The Writers Guild still has to vote the new contract in but the strike is over. I have no idea how they got all those ballots and proxy faxes counted so swiftly but they did.
I hadn't planned on voting in today's Writers Guild election to end the strike (not to be confused with the other, forthcoming vote to ratify the new contract). It's going to pass overwhemingly and it sounded like a lot of bother to go to the Writers Guild Theater, park, go in, etc. But then I realized something: In one of the many coincidences in which my life abounds, my "every two year" ophthalmologist appointment was today...in the building next to the theater during the voting hours. In fact, it was easier and cheaper to park for the vote (they validated) than to park for the eye doctor.
What wasn't easier was to navigate through the mass of reporters — TV, radio, newspaper and ?? — that were massing outside, with all the TV guys either taping stand-ups or grabbing writers for quick interviews. The vote may not be known by 11 PM because it's been so heavy. As of around 3:00, more than two thousand proxy ballots had been faxed-in and while everyone knows the outcome, someone still has to verify and tally and do whatever else they have.
The mood seemed jubilant. I spoke with our president, Patric Verrone, and told him that while I'd voted to end this strike, I'd also voted to reopen the '85 and '88 strikes for him to renegotiate. He pretended to find that funny but I think he appreciated the compliment.
Here's a bit of TV history. For many years, a man named Mike Stokey made a decent living by producing and hosting a series of programs where celebrities played the game of Charades. The one in our clip today was called Stump the Stars and it ran on CBS primetime from 1962 to 1963. Originally, it was hosted by Pat Harrington, Jr and then Stokey, who'd usually hosted in its previous incarnations, assumed command.
Most of its previous incarnations were called Pantomime Quiz or something similar. It started as a local (Los Angeles) show in 1947 where it was reportedly produced on a budget of under $500 per half hour. Subtracting Mr. Stokey's cut and union scale for the celebs, it was probably still done for about that throughout much of its existence. It was one of the shows that was rarely out of production for long. When something else got cancelled, the network would hurriedly order up episodes of Pantomime Quiz. When they needed a summer replacement for some series, the network would hurriedly order up episodes of Pantomime Quiz. It was at various times on CBS, NBC, ABC and Dumont, plus there were also a couple of syndicated versions.
Here's a little over six minutes of an episode that aired on February 25, 1963. The announcer is John Harlan.
Well, how about if we talk about the Writers Strike? There are two votes to look at. One is the vote that's going on at this moment...a simple vote on whether to end the strike. Members have to go to the Writers Guild Theater in Beverly Hills today to vote — either that or fax in a proxy. Since everyone knows the contract is going to pass, I can't conceive of any argument for not ending the strike, nor do I imagine a lot of people will go to the trouble to vote at all. Voting closes at 6 PM and I'll bet they're able to tally the votes and, in time for the 11 PM News, announce that the strike is over. (I'll also bet that some members are already getting back to work. I mean, it's not like anyone's going to be prosecuted for scabbing if they start writing today.)
The vote to accept the contract will take a bit longer but it will go the same way. Right now, as per the Guild Constitution, "pro" and "con" statements are being solicited to go in with the ballot. I don't know who's writing a "con" statement and I'm sure they don't think they have a prayer of swaying enough votes to matter...but it will probably read a lot like this article by Kim Masters that argues that the deal isn't as good as some are making it out to be.
I'd like the contract to pass but I'd like it to pass 51% to 49%. I always like that. It gets you to the same place but it reminds the other side that what they gave us was just barely acceptable and a comparable offer next time might not be. It's not, however, going to pass with 51%. It's going to be more like 90% and even that might be an underestimate.
So now the big question is the Screen Actors Guild. They have a lot of the same issues we had and they also have quite a few that are specific to what they do. On the "same" issues, one presumes they're going to go for more...especially in the area of jurisdiction for New Media. What the writers get in a deal like this is not always directly comparable to what the actors get because we do different things but I doubt SAG is going to be satisfied with exempting as much of that marketplace as the WGA and the DGA have. My "read" of the actors is that they're even more militant than we were, and we were pretty danged militant. So if the AMPTP thinks they can offer them the same thing and avoid an actors' walkout, Jay and Dave and Conan may be getting more time off.
I haven't felt like posting here since yesterday afternoon because...well, it may sound silly but I didn't want to bump the Steve Gerber obit out of the featured slot on my "current" page. A phrase I'm hearing a lot from his friends is "I knew this was coming but I didn't think it would hit me so hard." I know how they feel. People ask me why I write so many obituaries and there are really two reasons. One is that with some of these people, if I don't, no one will. The other reason is that it's busy work. Someone calls and says, "A friend of yours just died," and it gives you something to do that's not unrelated and at least feels a little constructive.
As I think I said somewhere else on this site, I think grief is often a very overrated emotion, one we too often fall into because we think it's expected of us. I once attended (spoke at, even) a funeral where the widow seemed to think that she had to keep showing us her pain in order to show us how much she loved him. She also seemed to feel she had to get physically ill and to bring her own life to a screeching halt. When we got to the burial portion of the ceremony, you half-expected her to vault into the pit with the departed and ask the men with the shovels to cover them both over.
But a little grief, a little remembrance...that's okay. We need that.
There are hundreds of tributes to Steve all over the Internet, which is great, just great. Steve loved the Internet. He was one of the first people I knew to embrace it and realize what it could be. Back in the days of the 1200 Baud Hayes Smartmodem, Steve taught me the joys of a service called MCI Mail, which was not unlike the kind of e-mail that Barney Rubble would have used to send something to Fred Flintstone. I remember sitting with him in an office at DC Comics...I was there to support Steve (not that he needed me) in his explanation that some day soon, we'd be delivering most of our scripts via electronic transfer, and that artwork would go by this new thing called "Federal Express" until such time as the technology had advanced to the point where art could be sent via wires, as well. He was explaining this to one of the company's executives and the person looked at him like he was predicting a Martian invasion.
So I love it that everyone's celebrating Gerber on the web. A lot of it's over on his weblog, which I have hijacked and which we're putting to good use as a central clearing house for Gerber remembrances.
As I say over there, no word yet on any formal memorial services or anything. Actually, I think we're having a very fitting memorial service on the World Wide Web. I could tell you how important Steve and his work were to so many people but nothing drives home that point better than all those messages on discussion boards and all those postings on weblogs.
I don't know what my next post here will be about but it won't be about Steve. It's time.
You know, some of these are easy to write and some of them are excruciating. Welcome to the excruciating kind.
Steve Gerber died last night in Las Vegas after a long, painful illness. For the last year or so, he was in and out of hospitals there and had just become a "candidate" for a lung transplant. He had pulmonary fibrosis, a condition that literally turns the lungs to scar tissue and steadily reduces their ability to function. Steve insisted that his affliction had nothing to do with his lifelong, incessant consumption of tobacco — an addiction he only recently quit for reasons of medical necessity. None of his friends believed that but Steve did.
I mention that because in the thirty or so years I knew him, that was the only time I ever saw Steve perhaps divorced from reality. He was a sharp, brilliant human being with a keen understanding of people. In much that he wrote, he chose to depart from reality or (more often) to warp it in those extreme ways that make us understand it better. But he always did so from his underlying premise as a smart, decent guy. I like almost everyone I've ever met in the comic book industry but I really liked Steve.
Stephen Ross Gerber was born in St. Louis on September 20, 1947. A longtime fan of comic books, he was involved in the ditto/mimeo days of fanzine publishing in the sixties, publishing one called Headline at age 14. He had a by-mail friendship with Roy Thomas, who was responsible for the most noteworthy fanzine of that era, Alter Ego. Years later when Roy was the editor at Marvel Comics, he rescued Steve from a crippling career writing advertising copy, bringing him into Marvel as a writer and assistant editor. Steve soon distinguished himself as one of the firm's best writers, handling many of their major titles at one time or another but especially shining on The Defenders, Man-Thing, Omega the Unknown, Morbius the Living Vampire, a special publication about the rock group Kiss...and of course, Howard the Duck.
Howard, born in Steve's amazing mind and obviously autobiographical to a large degree, took the industry by storm. The creation was in many ways a mixed blessing to his creator. It led to an ugly and costly legal battle over ownership, which Steve settled out of court. It led to the occasional pains when he occasionally returned to the character and, due to reasons external and internal, found that he could not go home again. It also led to the sheer annoyance of watching the 1986 motion picture of Howard (produced with minimal involvement on Steve's part) open to withering reviews and dreadful business. Still, the issues he did are widely regarded as classics...and Howard is often cited as a character who only Steve could make work.
After he left Marvel under unpleasant circumstances in the mid-seventies, Steve worked with me for a time at Hanna-Barbera writing comic books, many of which were published by Marvel. An editor at the company had loudly vowed that the work of Steve Gerber would never again appear in anything published by Marvel. Just to be ornery, we immediately had Steve write a story for one of the H-B comics I was editing and it was published by Marvel with a writer credit for "Reg Everbest," which was Steve's name spelled inside-out.
About this time, Steve began to get work in the animation field, starting with a script for the Plastic Man cartoon series produced by Ruby-Spears. This led to a brief but mutually beneficial association with the studio, especially when Steve launched and story-edited one of the best adventure cartoons done for Saturday morning TV, Thundarr the Barbarian. Later, he worked for other houses on other shows, including G.I. Joe and Dungeons & Dragons.
Then there were other comic books, including occasional returns to Marvel and even to Howard. For DC, he did The Phantom Zone and later, A. Bizarro, Nevada and Hard Time. Last week in the hospital, he was working on a new Doctor Fate series for them. His other many credits in comics — which include Foolkiller for Marvel and books for Malibu and Image — are well known to readers of the last few decades.
What I feel the need to tell you is just what a great guy he was. In the seventies, when New York comic professionals were banding together to find ways to elevate the stature of the field and the living standards of its practitioners, Steve was at the nexus of so many of those efforts. When Steve was involved in his lawsuit with Marvel, many fellow professionals rallied around him with loans and gifts of cash and some of us put together a benefit comic book, Destroyer Duck, to raise money. People did that because they knew, first of all, that Steve was fighting not just for his own financial reasons but for matters of principle relating to how the comic book industry treated its creators. That some of the more pernicious business practices soon went away had a lot to do with Steve taking the stand he did. Also, those who knew Steve knew that when you were in need, he would do anything to help. He was, in every sense of the word, a friend.
He was one of my best friends and even though I knew this was coming — and even though part of me thinks it may be for the better, given what he stood to go through just to keep on breathing a few more years — it's a real blow. If you knew Steve Gerber, no further explanation is necessary. If you didn't, no further explanation can ever quite explain why.
Details of memorials and such will be forthcoming. I am now about to attempt a hostile takeover of Steve's weblog. I've been given permission to see if I can get in and take care of it but I won't delete anything, at least not for a long time. You might want to trundle over there and read some of his recent postings and especially some of the love and respect shown by his commenters.
If you're interested in the number crunching and fine details of the WGA contract, this weblog post by Cynthia Littleton over at Variety will give you much to chew on. I'm not sure I understand all the deal points but the more I understand, the better the contract seems to me.
And hey, I just noticed. You see that photo that adorns the article? The picture of writers standing outside the Shrine Auditorium before the vote? If you click on it and enlarge it, you can see me over on the right wearing a brown jacket. No big deal, I know...but I thought it was novel to see one photo from a strike meeting that didn't have Marv Wolfman in it.
I'm told that after I left the Writers Guild meeting last night, there was at least one member who got up at a microphone and, in an effort to stop a ship that had long since sailed, argued that the deal was not good enough to accept. That case can always be made, of course, and everyone knew that there were areas in which the offer was flawed. We do not negotiate with philanthropists, after all. Our reps face off with huge conglomerates who send out their emissaries with orders to not yield a single cent more than absolutely necessary. At times, it gets insulting how maniacal they are; how men and women who boast of the billions that their companies gross can be so muleheaded about denying you every possible dime. But it should not be surprising in this day and age.
Those who expect something much, much better than what the WGA achieved are destined to always be at the mike, insisting that the deal should be better. They're not wrong, at least in theory. Where they're often wrong is in that pesky "real world" part of the equation. And really, what's significant and quite unprecedented is that there were so few of them in this strike. I never thought I'd witness such togetherness in the Writers Guild of America.
Long ago, I observed the following: That when an author gets that first copy of his new book (or comic book or any publication) from the printer or publisher, he or she can open it to any random page and find a typo. There may turn out to be only one in the entire volume but there'll be one on the first page you look at. Every time. What's more, your immediate reaction will be to stare stupidly at it and think, wrongly, "There's a way to fix that."
Guess why I bring this up. Yesterday, I received a finished, bound, printed copy of Kirby: King of Comics, a new book from Harry N. Abrams Publishing all about the great Jack Kirby and his artistry. I opened the FedEx box, removed a plastic wrapper, opened to a page in the middle and there it was...a word that should have been italicized but wasn't. If you purchase this book, you may never notice it. But as its author, it was my solemn duty to not only notice it but to spot it the second I opened the thing.
Anyway, the book finally exists and I'll play humble here and not tell you how proud I am of it. I wish I'd had more pages because Jack is such a vast and important subject, and I know I've already angered a few folks by telling them that their favorite Kirby creation got either short shrift or no shrift at all. A much longer, detailed biography of the man will follow in a couple of years and will probably err in the other direction, telling you more than you want to know.
Some of you have been asking me if there's going to be a special edition of some kind with fancier binding or more pages or anything of the sort that might make you want to hold off on purchasing this one. There was talk of that and there may still be, but at the moment, the answer is no. The only current reason you might have for waiting is because the Second Printing will probably fix that italicized word...and then I'll open a copy of that printing and find another typo. That's how it works, people.
Also, many of you have asked me when copies will be available. Amazon sent all pre-orders an e-mail saying it wouldn't be able to ship until mid-March. As far as I know, they'll have copies well before that. The page on which they sell the book currently says it came out February 1 and ships in 2-4 weeks. The February 1 is wrong but the 2-4 weeks is probably accurate and 2-3 would be more accurate. I've been assured there will be copies aplenty at the WonderCon in San Francisco, which commences February 22.
Hope you like it. Hope you buy it. If you haven't ordered yet and wish to, click on the banner above...or here, I'll save you scrolling back. You can also click here. We are nothing if not accommodating.
Several folks have e-mailed to tell me that the offending live-blogger was a gentleman who, along with being a WGA member (and therefore allowed into the meeting) is also an L.A. Times staffer who was posting to the paper's strike-themed weblog. I kinda figured as much. There were a number of reporters outside who were angry that they were not able to get inside and report from inside the event, and I'm sure it didn't seem fair to let one guy have a jump on everyone else. In any case, I apologize again for premature posting.
I keep being wrong about something with regard to the Writers Guild strike. Having lived through far too many of these, I keep expecting vitriol and anger and even loud and honest dissent. The dissent is fine, even healthy, though it has too often been exaggerated in the press and by the folks with whom we negotiate. Twenty outraged members have this odd way of looking to some like a sizeable percentage of a Guild whose membership numbers in the thousands.
Throughout this strike I have constantly expected it to start; for some meeting to devolve into a mud wrestling competition. And I have constantly been wrong...because this strike is just about over and at least as of the time I headed home from this evening's membership meeting, what I'd been expecting hadn't started. The mood in the hall was unified, respectful, grateful and even celebratory. No vote was taken. That will occur shortly. But the sense of the room suggested the deal will be accepted and not, as I hope with all deals of this sort, by a whisker. I must admit the terms sounded better to me there than when I read the summary, which perhaps is an important lesson. Several points needed some explaining and amplification before their value was apparent.
A feeling of victory seemed to be the prevailing mood. I lost count of the well-deserved sta
March 1, 2008
