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 standing ovations and when they opened the floor microphones for questions or arguments, they began getting only questions and minor suggestions about deal points. As of the moment I left, no one had suggested that the deal not be ratified...and it would have been very easy for someone to say that if they'd genuinely felt it was improvable.
I still can't quite believe it. It goes without saying that no one likes to be on strike and that they're always nasty, messy affairs where too many people — many of them innocent bystanders — are injured. Unfortunately, like some other things in life that we wish never occurred, strikes are sometimes necessary. There are times when those in power (the employers, the Powers That Be) go for the lowball and think they have the clout to maximize profits by bleeding those who work for them. They come up with an either-or proposition, one with only two options: Go on strike or accept a rotten deal. I'm always astonished at the number of folks who leap to blame the union for taking the only viable course of action in that situation.
Not only is a rotten deal unacceptable for us but if we take it, the other unions get rotten deals...rottener, even. And when the next negotiation rolls around, we get the rottenest one of them all. That's how it works. You have to say no and stop that. You want to know why there was a Writers Strike? Because they didn't offer us in November the contract that they offered us at 1:30 AM (or whenever) this morning.
And they could have. It's not that fabulous an offer. It won't hurt the profits at Disney, Paramount, Sony, et al, one bit. What it does mean is that the writers who don't make the Megabucks (and that's the vast majority of the WGA) have a better shot at making a basic living. That's all this has ever been about.
I'm feeling very good about this strike. Like I said, I've lived through several and am usually appalled by something done by "my side." Sometimes, it's been gross mismanagement by the leadership. Other times, the leadership has done the best job possible but has been undercut by the fracturing of our ranks. None of that happened this time. Our president Patric Verrone, our Executive Director David Young, WGA negotiating committee chair John Bowman and everyone on that committee, along with the staff and Board of Directors all handled a regrettable situation about as well as it could have been handled. And the membership was right there with them because the issues were so clear and the need to say "no" was so obvious.
Before I leave this topic, I should apologize for something. As I said in an earlier post, I had not planned to "live-blog" from the meeting but sitting there, taking notes on my BlackBerry of things I wanted to mention here later, I was suddenly struck by that odd obsession I have to blog from odd places and I put up a post. A few minutes after, Patric on the stage asked people not to live-blog and I quickly took it down. Or at least, I thought I did. It's easier to post via BlackBerry than it is to delete. Anyway, that post has been removed. I don't think I disclosed anything privileged...certainly nothing that exiting writers weren't telling reporters outside as I was leaving. But Patric Verrone and his associates have done the most amazing, commendable job I've ever seen of managing a strike...and if he thinks it's wrong, it probably is. So I apologize to him and the Guild and I'll never do it again.
Several folks this morning are writing to tell me that Jack Larson turned 80 yesterday, not 75. They base this on various online sources saying he was born in 1928. Ah, but in the first minute of the video interview of Mr. Larson that the Archive of American Television has now posted, he says he was born in 1933.
Here — go watch it for yourself. I haven't had time yet to view the whole thing but it's almost an hour of Jack Larson (who rarely does interviews and never for this long) talking about his life and his career. And if he says he was born in '33...well, maybe he's fibbing but I'd want a better source than Wikipedia before I said otherwise.
Another correspondent noted that I interviewed his Adventures of Superman co-star, Noel Neill at the Mid-Ohio Con last Thanksgiving and will be doing so again at the WonderCon in two weeks. "You should get the two of them down to San Diego this year for a joint appearance," the e-mailer suggested. Yes, that would be great but Larson seems to be pretty shy or maybe just disinterested in that kind of thing and has always declined such invites. Maybe someday he'll change his mind. For now, you'll have to be content with the online interview.
The Writers Guild has reached a tentative (meaning, the membership still has to vote to accept it) deal with the AMPTP. A summary of the terms may be read at this link.
It's late and I have to get to bed...but it seems to me like an acceptable but not great offer. I think the membership will go for it though, of course, there will be those who will feel that after however-many-days-it's-been, the terms should be better. They are not wrong about that but I suspect it's the best deal we're going to get at this time. It does seem better on several points than the Directors Guild deal and one wonders if the DGA has some kind of "favored nations" provision that will upgrade those deal points to match ours.
As rumored, the deal runs through May 1 of 2011. Wonder how they arrived at that date. If the DGA and SAG both renew for three years, that means that in '11, the three unions will all have their contracts expiring in a three month period...and again, we're stuck going first.
Reserving the right to modify my view after the meeting tonight, I feel both pleased and disappointed by this deal. I am pleased the WGA took the stand it did. I believe that if we hadn't struck in November — if we'd caved and accepted the kind of offers they were positioning us for then — we'd have gone a long way towards destroying our livelihoods and those of many others who work in this industry. I'm sure some clown somewhere is going to crunch the numbers wrong and say, "Well, the strike cost Writers an amount totalling X dollars and the gains in the contract only amount to Y over the next three years." But really, this strike was never about that kind of math. It was about a more long range variety that took into account the entire future of our participation in new ways in which the shows and films we write will be marketed. There's no way to calculate the worth of that, and you certainly can't only look at what we will make in the next three years.
The whole battle was also about the way in which we negotiate...or, in most past cases, don't get to negotiate. It all invokes the old analogy of the schoolyard bully who demands a nickel from you one week, a dime from you the next, then a quarter, then fifty cents, etc. At some point, preferably early on, you have to put an end to that because even if at some point your losses seem trivial, they won't stay that way. The AMPTP has an almost inalterable rule: When you accept a bad deal from them, they come back the next time and try and force you to take an even worse one. I shudder to think how terrible the contract would have been in 2011 if we'd taken the kind of thing they were dangling at us last November.
I'm very pleased and proud of the solidarity that the WGA has shown to date. It may get contentious at the meeting tonight because now we can better afford to be contentious. But before the strike I had a lot of dire expectations of members threatening to split the Guild and of far more vituperative attacks on our leadership. With a few exceptions — and only a few — I think this was a very well-run strike. Admittedly, in some cases, the manuevering of the studios did not leave us with a lot of choices...but where we had choices, I think our leadership made the right ones.
Like I said, I'll write more after the meeting. I gotta get some sleep. Good night, Internet!
I have a lot of comic book conventions to attend this year. Usually, I don't make it to as many but I have this book coming out so it seems like a fine time to make the rounds. My whole schedule, if anyone cares, is over on this page.
Two weeks from today, my companion Carolyn and I will be in San Francisco for the annual WonderCon, where we always have a fine time. I, of course, will be hosting some panels and you can find a list of them on this page. You can find the entire programming schedule for the con on this page but why you'd want to go to any events other than mine is beyond me.
I'm nineteen minutes late with this. Yesterday was the 75th birthday of Jack Larson, who was so perfect in the role of Jimmy Olsen in the Superman TV series of the fifties. Those shows were done for about a buck and a quarter, with scenes shot wildly out of sequence to the point where the cast often wasn't sure which episode a given scene was even for. Still, the sheer personality of several fine actors made it all work, and Larson was a key reason.
I only met Jack Larson once and he seemed shy and a bit embarrassed by my telling him how much I admired his acting. He gave that up long ago and has had a fine, successful career as a writer and producer, which I assume makes him happier, which is all that should matter. Not long ago, he sat for a lengthy video interview for the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Foundation's Archive of American Television project. It should be available on Google Video in the next day or so and when it is, I'll link you to it.
At this very moment, lawyers are madly trying to finalize the language of a proposed deal 'twixt the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers and the Writers Guild of America. As we've been telling you here for some time, a key concern in this negotiation has to be the precise wording so that there's no wiggle room...so that the strike doesn't end and then the studios say, "No, we never agreed to that." This weblog post over at United Hollywood tells what's going on, and it matches what I'm hearing from other sources.
Assuming there's a deal to announce tomorrow night, it will be presented to the membership and discussed and debated. If our leadership recommends it, it will almost certainly be accepted. I mean, it's not like our negotiators can tell is it's an acceptable deal and then go back to the other side and say, "It's not an acceptable deal." My hope would be that when we vote, it doesn't pass overwhelmingly. If the number is 80%, the boys over at the AMPTP are going to say, "We could have got them cheaper." If it passes with 51%, they're less likely to lowball us the next time we meet at the table. (The mere fact that we sustained this strike for so long and didn't fold has already probably convinced them but a little more learning wouldn't hurt.)
I'll have more to say about all this after the meeting.
If this or a link to this hasn't appeared in your inbox, it will. This is the long (three and a half minute) version of a piece of amazing CGI animation that's making the rounds of a "fantastic machine." Some of its web appearances are shorter and many suggest that this is not animation; that it's a video of an actual invention cobbled together from parts of an old John Deere tractor (!) or various household items. Do not fall for this.
It was actually done and done brilliantly by a company called Animusic and that's a link to their website where they sell a DVD of such goings-on.
I'm hearing all sorts of things that may happen at the Writers Guild meeting tomorrow night. Yes, I will be there. No, I won't be live-blogging from it and that's because I want to pay attention and also not violate the sanctity of what obviously will be an important gathering. Rumors abound about what's in the offer that will be discussed and I'm trying to not formulate an opinion until I actually know what I'm formulating an opinion about. I think it's fair to say though that the offer will be good enough for some and not good enough for others.
I will pass along one rumor, though. It's that the current proposal is for a deal that would expire in May of 2011. That sounds odd to me because the Screen Actors Guild traditionally makes contracts that expire at the end of July and if they make a new three year deal without a strike, that one would probably expire in July of '11 and the AMPTP could again be in the position of facing both unions with linked arms. One of the Big Stories of this Writers Strike, and the reason it's been so effective, has been the unbreakable solidarity with SAG. I don't know why the studios would risk having that happen again. Perhaps they think they can move SAG's expiration month to December.
The above, I should underscore, may not be true. None of the rumors may be true, including the one that has all the lawyers on both sides still scurrying to commit to paper some terms that can be discussed tomorrow evening. About the only thing I'll predict for sure about the meeting is that there will be a lot of arguing and that the parking at the Shrine Auditorium is going to suck. If you're getting there, get there early.
As I've mentioned here before — to little apparent interest — I was a big fan of the cuisine at the old Love's Barbecue Restaurants. Alas, there are no more Love's except (according to the company website) for an alleged one in Jakarta, Indonesia. I'm dubious it's there and when I get a moment, I'm going to run over and check. In the meantime, all of the ones in this country have definitely closed. The only place that I believe still serves what is essentially the Love's menu is a former Love's situated in Brea, California. It's called Riley's.
My favorite thing on the Love's menu was their barbecued beans. When it became apparent to me that all the Love's were going away, I began searching for their recipe to see if it was possible for me to replicate these beans in my home kitchen. It doesn't take a lot of Googling to find two different recipes, both of which are presented as The Love's Recipe, sometimes with a little tale about how a friend who worked in one broke the Barbecue Code and divulged the secret. Here's one of these recipes...
5 pounds canned pork and beans
1 pound brown sugar
1 (14 oz.) bottle ketchup
2 bell peppers, chopped
1 teaspoon liquid smoke, to taste
8 slices bacon
Combine all ingredients except bacon in a large casserole or baking pan. Top with bacon strips. Bake at 325 degrees for 2 1/4 hours.
You'll find that recipe on at least a hundred websites and it may even yield a great pot of beans...but there's no way that's the Love's recipe. Love's beans did not contain bell peppers (I hate bell peppers) and were not topped with slices of bacon...and what's this about starting out with some arbitrary brand of canned pork and beans? Wouldn't the output of this recipe vary a lot depending on which brand of canned pork and beans you started with? Also, Love's beans tasted an awful lot like Love's barbecue sauce, and there's nothing in the above about adding in Love's sauce or any of the same spices. So phooey on this recipe.
A little more Googling and you may come up with the following putative recipe for Love's beans. This one is usually represented as having been exposed by an article in the L.A. Times...
3 (1 pound) cans pork n' beans
1 cup packed brown sugar
2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
2 teaspoons chili powder
1/4 cup dark molasses
1/2 cup bottled chile sauce
2 tablespoons vinegar
Combine all ingredients in bean pot or crockpot with lid, mix well. Cover and bake at 400 degrees F for 1 hour for thin bean mixture, or 1 1/2 to 2 hours for thicker bean mixture. Sprinkle with crumbled bacon bits to serve.
That sounds a little more like it but even without testing, I know that's not it. Again, we're starting with some random brand of canned beans, which means we have some arbtitrary sauce going into our concoction. Again, we have those bacon bits. I don't believe Love's beans had much, if any chile flavoring in them (I hate chile) and again, I don't see the elements in there that would convey or approximate the taste of Love's sauce.
It's still possible, by the way, to purchase Love's sauce via their website. It's a sweet BBQ sauce and usually I don't like sweet sauces...but I like this one and I sometimes use it in cooking. In case you're interested, the label on the bottle says it contains water, tomato paste, brown sugar, corn syrup, vinegar, salt, modified food starch, sucrose, spices, natural flavorings and a couple of chemicals.
One night recently, I actually had the following dream. It is rare that I remember dreams after I awaken and maybe the reason I recalled this one was that it came with a decent punchline.
A restaurant opened nearby that advertised itself as featuring the best dishes from now-defunct restaurant chains. Not a bad idea when you think about it. The proprietors, they said, had tracked down the owners of the extinct eateries and made deals to use their recipes and also their logos, so you could go in and get a simulation of some meal that you used to love at a chain no longer in business.
On the slim chance that they had included Love's in their repertoire, I raced to the restaurant and on the outside saw a display of the logos and names of the long-gone dining establishments whose menus were involved. As happens in dreams, the specifics were fuzzy...but I saw all these famous logos and in the middle of them was the one for Love's.
Ecstatic, I raced inside and took a seat at the counter. A waitress offered me a menu but for some reason, I declined. "Just bring me one of everything from the Love's section," I told her. "We only have one item from Love's," she said. "Whatever it is, bring me five of them," I said. Again, I have no idea why I did this in my dream but, you know, you do things in dreams that don't make a lot of sense. Some of us do things when we're awake that don't make a lot of sense, too.
So I sat there in this dreamed-up restaurant, drooling and anticipating and wondering which of the wonderful Love's entrees would soon be placed before me in quintuple helpings. Their ribs? Their chicken? Their ribs-chicken combo? Whatever it was, it surely came with a side of Love's beans and that's what I was really there for...to eat Love's beans. I waited and waited and waited for what seemed like months...and finally, just when I was beginning to give up hope, the serving lady came over and placed my order on the counter...
It was five vanilla milk shakes.
I'm not making this up. I really dreamed this, punchline and all.
Li'l Abner is one of my favorite musical comedies. I never got to see the Broadway original but the movie is very close to it and has been watched many a time in my house.
Since no full scale stage revival is imminent, we have to settle for "concert" versions which use minimal sets and smaller casts. I've seen several and last night, I was at the opening for the one currently being mounted by the Reprise! group, which stages shows up at U.C.L.A. This one's there through February 17 and if you're anywhere in the area, get yourself some tickets and perambulate on down to Dogpatch Country and catch it. Abner and his kin are in the very best of hands.
In the above pic, you see Eric Martslof, who has the title role...and the voice and physique to carry it off. So does Brandi Burkhardt, who plays Daisy Mae. Robert Towers and Cathy Rigby play Pappy and Mammy Yokum, and that's Fred Willard, who is properly sinister as General Bullmoose. (Not in the photo: Several other cast members who do outstanding work, including Michael Kostroff, who plays Marryin' Sam, and Larry Cedar, who plays Rufus T. Finsdale, the scientist.) Michael Michetti directed, Lee Martino did the choreography and Darryl Archibald is responsible for the musical direction.
I was struck by how great the show sounded. I always liked the score but the songs were especially lush and melodic last night. And the dancing — and this is not always the case with these "concert" performances — was amazing. Given how little rehearsal they get, it's an achievement that people are up there dancing at all, let alone this good. The hoofing was energetic and athletic and an awful lot of fun, especially a sequence where Ms. Rigby put her gymnastic skills to good use.
Yeah, the story's kinda silly. (Near the end, the police arrest General Bullmoose and haul him away. I defy anyone who sees the show or movie to explain to me exactly what they're going to charge him with, especially given the fact that they don't arrest Evil Eye Fleagle.) But if a cast hits the right joyous tone, it works well...and it worked well last night on the stage of Macgowan Hall. Which is where you'll hightail it before the 17th if you have a lick o' sense.
If I haven't done a sufficient selling job on it here, take a gander at a preview over on this page. And if you want to order tix — as of this afternoon, there will still some left — this page is where you want to go.
One other thing! There are two Saturday matinees ahead and each is preceded by a lecture on the history of the Broadway show. Each starts at Noon and runs an hour. Then, if you have tix for the matinee, you have to kill an hour...which is easy to do on the U.C.L.A. campus. (I killed several years there.) They clear the house and then the matinee performance commences at 2 PM.
This coming Saturday, February 9, the lecture will be delivered by my friend, the eminent historian of the theater, Miles Kreuger. And then on February 16, the lecture will be delivered by me. Both of us will have one or more special guests from the original Broadway production in attendance...I hope. For more information and the number to phone for reservations, check out this page.
I have a special e-mail address that I use to register on political websites where you have to register. Since I read a lot of them and over a diverse range of views, that address gets thousands of e-mails urging me to vote this way or that way or to not vote...and of course, almost every message includes a pitch to give money. A lot of them don't say much more than...
Don't you just hate and loathe [name of candidate]? Aren't you terrified that if [name of candidate] gets elected, your family will be [pick one: attacked, bankrupted, destroyed, etc.]? Well, we have the way to stop [name of candidate] and you can make it happen if you only send us money.
Stuff like that. If I were more cynical and mercenary, I think I'd just set up a batch of websites — one for every candidate out there with a disapproval rating of over 15% or so — and push the idea that I'm close to unearthing the scandal that will destroy them, once and for all...if only people will give me enough cash to complete my mission. Because of sheer competition, I don't think I'd get a huge amount of money but I bet I'd get enough to make it worth my while.
This morning, I took a peek in the mailbox of my special e-mail address. There were 12,000 messages in there, which I think is the maximum the inbox can hold. In perfect symmetry, the first five were pleas to donate to destroy Hillary Clinton, Mike Huckabee, Barack Obama, John McCain and Mitt Romney. I have a hunch the Romney Destroyers aren't going to be getting many donations after this morning.
The anti-Hillary and anti-Obama messages were from different addresses but obviously from the same author. They were both pushing John McCain with the following odd (to me) pitch...
There are seven undeniable reasons why we must elect John McCain. One is the War in Iraq and the other six are six Supreme Court justices who are over the age of 68.
I don't think the first of those reasons is going to do it for Senator McCain. Not with every single poll saying that Americans now oppose the War in Iraq by around a two-to-one consensus. They may be personally fond of the man — I am or at least was when he wasn't out pandering for the Limbaugh voters — but when it comes down to voting for four more years of Stay the Course? I don't think so.
And as for the other six reasons: If you're presuming that being over 68 means the person is likely to die in the next four years, is that a good reason to vote for a guy who's 71?
Yesterday in the class I teach in Humor Writing at U.S.C., we somehow segued from talking about the current Writers Strike to discussing the Great Comedians Strike of 1979. That was when the comics working The Comedy Store, the Improv and a couple of other L.A. clubs decided it was time to demand payment for appearances which had previously been pro bono.
This article, excerpted from a new book by Richard Zoglin, will give you the basics. It's an accurate portrait to which I would add one point. If you're going to read it, read it first and then come back and read the rest of this post.
Okay, you're back. The thing I'd add is that at the core of the comedians' complaint was that they felt what they did — their product, if you will — was being seriously devalued. It's very much like the way cartoonists are always asked for free drawings by people who think it doesn't cost them anything to give away what they do for a living. The Comedy Store, which then as now was/is run by Mitzi Shore, was big news at the time — a lot of careers had been made there — and every newspaper article or TV feature seemed to be driving home the point that comedians worked for free; that professional comedy was not something a club owner or talent booker had to pay for.
Imitations of The Comedy Store were popping up all over the place. Entrepreneurs thought there was a gold mine there, especially since they wouldn't have to lay out money for their star attractions. There were all sorts of stories about night clubs that had previously hired musical acts, and now the owner thought, "Hey, let's stop paying musicians and bring in stand-up comedians. Comedians work for free!" I heard one comic telling others how he'd received an offer to go play a club that was opening in Bakersfield. The money offered was insulting and when he told the proprietor that, the guy responded, "Hey, you should be grateful I'm even offering anything. The Comedy Store doesn't pay you a cent."
If it had just been a matter of The Comedy Store not paying, it might not have been much of an issue. There was an undeniable value to playing there for some. But it was a matter of stand-up comedy everywhere being viewed as something that didn't warrant payment, no matter how much cash the club was raking in when you were on stage.
I was even affected by it. I was writing for a comedian friend who, to put it simply, couldn't afford to pay me. In fact, after he performed, we'd go down to Carney's just down the street from The Store for burgers, and I'd have to pay for us both; that's how broke the guy was. A year or two later, he began getting paying gigs and making a decent living...but for a time there, it was just insulting that he had to live the way he was living, having to promise me that some day, he'd pay me what he owed me. (He did, by the way.) During this poverty period, he had a hard time explaining to his family and friends why, if he had what looked like a job and if they had to pay to go see him, he had to borrow the money to just get some new clothes to wear on stage.
The strike was a nasty thing, as most strikes are. Ten years later at a party, a comedian who'd crossed the picket line and one who was on that picket line almost came to blows over it, and I can think of a few combinations I still wouldn't want to gather in the same room. And as with so many strikes, the outcome seemed inevitable...and you had to wonder why they had to go through all that to get to that point. Alas, because of human intransigence, it is sometimes necessary. When the current Writers Strike ends, we'll be pondering why they couldn't just have given us that same deal back in November and made it easier on everyone...including themselves.
By the way: Several folks have written to ask what I think about the premise that the current shows hosted by Leno, Stewart, Colbert and a few others are really being ad-libbed or written by their stars, and that no scabbing is going on. I think the premise is absurd and I'll write more about this in the next couple of days.
This is from some film or TV show of the fifties...Eddie Jackson and Jimmy Durante entertaining the heck out of a roomful of extras. It's four minutes and I'll bet it makes you smile.
I'm back from opening night of Li'l Abner, as staged up at U.C.L.A. by the Reprise! group. When I have time tomorrow, I'll post a review but I just wanted to mention that if you're within commuting distance, get tickets and go. It's very good.
(By the way: I'm swamped with yet another deadline so the next few posts here are ones that I wrote some time ago. If you're the guy I'm working for, don't think I'm writing on my weblog instead of your project.)
Above is a photo I took at one of the Hollywood Collectors Shows. The guy with the glasses is my pal, Earl Kress. Forget about him for the moment. He always seems to have a sheep of one kind or another on his head. The one he's wearing in this picture is, of course, Lamb Chop, the adorable puppet made famous by the late Shari Lewis. The woman who has her hand inside the adorable puppet is Shari's adorable daughter, Mallory...or Mally to her friends.
I've been meaning to write a piece here about how Mallory is carrying on the family tradition with amazing skill and taste. A fellow named James H. Burns, who reads this site and often sends me interesting e-mail, beat me to it. He wrote this up and offered it to me for inclusion here. I'll meet you on the other side of it and add a few comments. Here's Jim...
Over the holidays, I caught a show with Mallory Lewis and that great American kids-TV icon, Lamb Chop.
Mallory is carrying on the great act and tradition begun by her mom, Shari Lewis, for decades, with such puppets as Lamb Chop, Charlie Horse, Hush Puppy...
I feel strange calling this "an act." Almost as strange as it seems to call Lamb Chop a puppet. Because while Shari Lewis was a spectacularly talented ventriloquist, she was also a terrific actress. And the reason I think she clicked with kids and adults both, beginning in the 1950s, was that she had that inner glow and charm that is almost imposible to capture in words, but which when it's there and glimmers, manages to transcend the TV, or whatever medium the performer inhabits.
And Lambchop lives in the hearts of millions.
Mallory Lewis' show, is terrific. It turns out she co-produced the last several TV shows her mom did, many of which are still available on video, over at Amazon. But no one knew, apparently, that she also, somewhere along the way, picked up her family heritage for performing —
And, as our pal Paul Winchell might have said, "Ventrilliliqui..."
Lovely and a good singer, Lewis' neatest attribute was her immediate, and warm, rapport with the kids in the audience. The show was a Chanukah party/concert in Manhattan.
And when Lewis appeared center stage, with Lambchop, I was moved. How could this be?
I'm not old enough to have seen the TV shows that first made Shari Lewis a household name. And I was too old for the PBS shows of the late 1980s that returned Lamb Chop and Company to fame. (And, to be honest, I got a little tired of hearing tykes singing that show's theme, "The Song That Never Ends...")
But the Shari Lewis show had become legendary in my home. Older relatives had grown up with her, and still loved her. And my father had been entirely taken with the winning gamine from the Bronx. As I became entirely enthralled by the later 1960s shows of Soupy Sales and Frank Nastasi, Chuck McCann, and Paul Winchell, folks would tell me how great the Lamb Chop series had been, and how great it would be if Shari would return to TV.
I must have seen Lamb Chop and the gang on some variety show appearance of some kind, because I had memories of the characters by the time they resurfaced.
But what was the power in that New York theatre, as Mallory Lewis began bantering with whom I guess one could even say is really her sister? I think it's the emotion that's palpable when people encounter artists and characters that they've loved since childhood. The ten year olds there had also grown up with Lamb Chop. And the joy in their minds was as strong as ours would have been, when tots, if encountering one of our childhood heroes.
By the end of the hour, at least a couple of the grandparents had tears in their eyes. But that's what happens when an icon comes to life, at least as marvelously performed by Mallory Lewis. (Lewis also hosts, and has written, a new DVD/video series for toddlers, Phonics for Babies, featuring a new conglomeration of puppets and characters.)
Afterwards, chatting with Joseph Giangrasso, the show's producer, I suddenly remembered that extraordinary episode of Love, American Style that Shari Lewis did with Paul Winchell. Lewis and Winchell play two ventriloquists waiting in a talent agent's office. Their dummies are on their knees. But the two of them are too painfully, way too painfully, shy to even talk to each other.
I mean, the ventriloquists.
So the two of them start chatting with their puppets. And fall in love.
It was one of the best vignettes produced on American television, in the '70s.
The great punchline to all this, was that Giangrasso then told me something I never knew...that that episode was written by Jeremy Tarcher, a celebrated book publisher, Shari's husband...
...and Mallory's Dad.
It's Evanier again. Mallory is just as good as James says, and the mood in the room when she performs is just as chilling...in a good way. I second everything he says.
I was fortunate to work with Shari Lewis on a project that, alas, never materialized. It was a Saturday morning pilot for CBS — a series that would have been not unlike Welcome Back, Kotter but with Shari as the teacher...and the only human in the show. The class would have been a grouping of new puppet characters. We spent several weeks working together on it before someone on high at the network decided they didn't want anything but animation on their schedule that year. Them's, as they say, the breaks.
But I was pleased that I got to spend some time with Shari. One of those lost treasures of television history — I don't know how many of its episodes even exist today — was the show she did for NBC Saturday morning from 1960 to 1963. It was a wonderful and musical little affair that tapped into the New York theatrical community of the day for both its performers and writing talent, and I suspect it would hold up very well if it could be rerun now or issued on DVD. Later on, Shari was always a welcome presence on my teevee in everything she did.
Shortly after our project fell through, I ran into her at the V.S.D.A. in Las Vegas, which was a big convention of companies that put movies and shows out on VHS tape. You may remember VHS tape. Shari invited me to sit with her at a booth as she signed hundreds of posters and photos for a company that was putting some of her work out on tape and the reaction from the autograph-seekers was fascinating. Everyone talked to her about Lamb Chop but not one person said anything that would indicate that Lamb Chop was not a living creature, let alone that Shari manipulated that creature and provided the voice. I'm sure they all knew but didn't want to fiddle with the illusion, just for themselves. I'm delighted that Mally Lewis is keeping the illusion intact.
Let the record show that the Zogby Poll missed on its prediction of the California primary race by — and this could be a new world's record for polls that are generally well-respected — about six miles. Their last, pre-election projection was Obama with 49% and Clinton with 36%. The final total was Clinton with 52% and Obama with 42%.
How bad is that? My guess is that if I'd asked every reader of this site to just take a wild guess without doing any polling or research gathering or anything...if you'd just plucked numbers out of the "hunch" part of your brain...almost all of you would have been closer than Zogby. I would have guessed Obama to beat Clinton by a point or two.
Mr. Zogby has occasionally been accused of slanting his polls towards one candidate over another, either because he personally favors that candidate or because he's being paid by a news organization that does. Leaving aside fake polls that a campaign may commission just for its own p.r. value, I don't think any of the major pollsters ever intentionally give us anything but their best possible estimate. It's too embarrassing when they're wrong and, besides, one poll skewing towards a preferred candidate wouldn't have any impact. Zogby's last poll in California couldn't have looked much better for Obama, and Obama still finished below all expectations.
I think the polls still have a value, especially when viewed in consensus. The consensus this time was probably, generally right...although it's interesting that so much of the exit polling was way off, causing several TV networks to say X was likely to win when Y won, and to even actually call one state for the wrong candidate. I don't know if it's this election in particular or if something about our national approach to voting is changing...but something's amiss.
Have you ever seen Avner the Eccentric? I haven't for about a quarter-century but it's good to know he's still out there, still touring with his odd brand of mime, magic and juggling. Avner Eisenberg puts on a fine show...the kind adults love but you could take a kid to it and he'd not only enjoy it but want to learn how to do all the neat things Avner does. If he comes near you, get a kid (or just be a kid) and go. Here's his touring schedule —
— and here's four and a half minutes of Avner being eccentric. (Oh...and take a moment and read Avner's Clown Principles. They should give you some idea of what's on his mind as he's performing and more importantly, what's not on his mind.)
I'm on a deadline so I'm only about 30% watching the returns for today's primary elections. But it seems to me like the big losers are Mitt Romney and an awful lot of pollsters. Many of the latter missed by so far, they oughta do the decent thing and get into some other line of work...preferably something where being able to predict is not important. Like, maybe, making those announcements at the airport about when my flight is going to board.
Also, it seems to me like John McCain is showing an awful lot of his strength in states which he's not going to win in November, no matter what. In fact, everyone on TV is making way too big a deal about how a strong performance by a candidate in a given state is a good sign for him or her to prevail there in the general election. News flash: In the general election, they let people of other parties vote, too...maybe not in Florida but in most states.
Back to my deadline. Oh, yeah: I was only on the picket line for a brief time today before I got called to go tend to a minor emergency (nothing you'd want to know about) but the mood out there was good and also very, very curious about where we stand.
We have here an excerpt from Steve Martin's intriguing new book on his life and old comedy act. I discussed the book in this posting but now you can read a key section over at this website...and should if you're at all interested in comedy.
And what you should really do is watch the video they have there (the link's on that page) of one of Martin's early appearances on The Tonight Show. He's very funny...though not as funny as Johnny Carson's jacket. Thanx to Jeff Abraham for telling me about all this.
I haven't plugged Shokus Internet Radio lately but the show they have on tomorrow sounds so good, I have to alert you. The genial Stu Shostak is welcoming Alan Young and Connie Hines to the capacious Shokus Broadcasting Corporation facilities. Mr. Young and Ms. Hines starred, of course, in that wonderful TV series about the talking horse and both have plenty to talk about besides that. Connie Hines, for instance, was a contestant on a famous (make that "infamous") TV game show called Dotto. The reason we say it's infamous is that it was one of the programs that was revealed to have been rigged. I don't think Connie has ever spoken in public about her experiences then but she's agreed to chat with Stu about them days.
Alan Young, of course, has a long history as one of our great comic actors. Mister Ed was just one of the things he's done and I hope there'll be time for him to discuss some of his other endeavors...such as his cartoon voice work speaking for Uncle Scrooge and his extensive career on the legit stage. Anyway, whatever they talk about, it oughta be a great show.
Now, here's the part where I tell you how to listen to it. This is not a podcast. This is Internet Radio, people. You have to listen when it's on. Tomorrow (Wednesday) it's on from 4 PM to 6 PM Pacific Time, which is 7 PM to 9 PM on the opposite side of America. And remember it's live so you can call in and ask questions...Stu will be giving out the number. The show then reruns in the same time slot for most of the coming week.
To listen in, go to the Shokus Internet Radio website and follow the directions. Most people log in, start the audio feed, then they minimize that window and go on doing whatever they're doing at their computers — playing games and browsing porn, mostly. But while they do, they'll be listening to a great show. And remember, Shokus Internet Radio is broadcasting 24/7 and there's always something interesting on it...occasionally even me.
Last night, television achieved some new "first" in the way of continued shows. Things got started on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart...then the bit continued on The Colbert Report...and finished, more or less, on Late Night with Conan O'Brien. It was a great idea and I wish I could tell you that it was funny but...well, maybe it was just me. I don't think any of these three guys, except maybe Colbert, is that great at physical comedy or at playing angry. Perhaps you'll find it all more amusing than I did.
Here's the first part from The Daily Show...well, actually during the strike he's calling it A Daily Show with Jon Stewart...
Then comes the second part from The Colbert Report...
...followed by Late Night with Conan O'Brien. And by the way, did you notice that the "outside in the hallway" scenes for all three shows were taped outside 6B at NBC? Just one of those things we spot.
Shelly Goldstein (or as we call her, Chanteuse Extraordinaire) is recording a CD this Saturday evening at the Gardenia, a fun supper club/saloon up in Hollywood. The show is called "One Fine Day: The Groovy Girls of the Sixties" and it features Shelly singing the hits of Carole King, Dusty Springfield, Laura Nyro, Mama Cass, Lulu, Lesley Gore and others of that era. She was going to have the place packed with friends but most of them are writers and the Writers Guild is summoning us all down to the Shrine Auditorium for a meeting earlier that evening. There have been many casualties of the strike but this is the last straw for some of us. Taking away someone's income is one thing but taking away some of Shelly's audience? Unforgivable.
I'm still going to try to be there for some of it. If you're not going to the Shrine and would like to be there for all of it, you'll have a very good time. The Gardenia is at 7066 Santa Monica Blvd., near La Brea. Dinner seatings start at 7 PM, Shelly warbles at 9:00 with the aid of her musical director Scott Harlan, guest performer Ray Jessel and even some back-up singers. Reservations are a must and can be gotten at (323) 467-7444. Don't be surprised if you aren't the most famous person in the house...or even close to it.
And if you'd like a little sampling of how well the Chanteuse Extraordinaire sings, here's a YouTube delight.
In the meantime, I also want to plug the current Tony's Poll polling. My longtime comrade Tony Isabella is asking all to vote on who in the comic book/strip universe they'd favor to be President of the United States. Go over there and vote and while you're in the comic strip category, let's stuff the ballot box for Pogo Possum. He'd be so much better than anyone we've had in my lifetime at least...and let's face it. You've voted for less realistic candidates than that.
By the way: Shelly and Tony have never met but they're both short, they're both fine writers and one of them looks great in a black cocktail dress with a pearl necklace. You can finish the joke yourself.
The Writers Guild is convening an "informational meeting" for Saturday evening at the Shrine Auditorium. Officially, the purpose of this gathering is to pass on info as to where negotiations stand...but leave us be honest. The main reason for announcing this kaffeeklatsch is to say to the AMPTP, "Hey, we're bringing the whole membership in...and on a Saturday evening, no less. It would be in your best interest for us to have a deal by then which we can enthusiastically recommend to the membership."
Could the deal be closed that evening? My understanding is no. The announcement says, "Neither the Negotiating Committee, nor the West Board or the East Council, will take action on the contract until after the membership meetings." I haven't seen an announcement yet on when the membership meeting for WGA East will take place. In any case, we'll know better where we stand after the meeting...and the Guild leadership will have a better sense of our unity and concerns.
Meanwhile, the rumor mill is spinning like a campaign consultant after a presidential debate. Tales abound of important screenwriters and showrunners uniting to pressure the Guild to take the current offer, whatever it is. There's a simple test as to whether these reports are true. If at the Saturday evening meeting, a number of important screenwriters and showrunners get up at the microphones and make direct or even veiled threats to go back to work regardless, then the rumors are true. If no such threats are made, the stories are not true and were never true.
I tend to believe the latter, at least until I see some names attached to these threats. So far, all I'm hearing for real is that some prominent folks think that from what they've heard, the deal is good enough to grab. That's not the same thing, especially when/if it's all coming from writers who are largely unaffected by minimums. My "sense of the Guild" is that while we're all eager to get this sucker behind us, we recognize that we're dealing with powerful forces who are out to wrong not only us but all the unions in town. If it takes time to get a settlement we can live with, it takes time.
Another rumor is that the negotiators have stumbled past the major stumbling blocks and that the only obstacle to a deal is the precise contract language. This may or may not be true...but the precise contract language is no small obstacle. Big companies have been known to agree to some pretty generous terms, figuring they can adjust the numbers or even renege outright by massaging the precise contract language.
I once had an offer that included a provision whereby I'd get 20% of the profits. This was back in the days when I was young and foolish...a term I often use to pretend that the foolish part of my life has ended. Anyway, I was impressed by the 20% until my agent said, "Yeah, but the definition of profits is so tight, it might as well be replaced by a sentence that says 'there will never be any.' They could offer you 200% of the profits and you'd still never see a nickel."
So whether they've agreed on the broad strokes of a deal or not, the thing needs to be committed to paper and scrutinized by lawyers before it's a contract. One hopes they're nearing that stage and that the looming Saturday meeting will hasten the process. One does hope.
And that's about it for rumors I've heard. I'm going to go out and vote and picket, not necessarily in that order.
Every year, Fred Kaplan is the only person in the country who actually reads the U.S. Military Budget. The folks in Washington who vote to approve it certainly don't, nor do they even read the kind of handy summary Fred provides. It usually turns out that we're spending way more than we have to, much of it on things we don't need and which won't make us one bit safer. But no one wants to oppose any of it because they don't want to be accused of being "soft on defense."
In 1976, when the Chuck Barris company sold The Gong Show to television, they launched two versions simultaneously: A Monday-through-Friday daytime version on NBC and a once-a-week syndicated version. To host the daytime, they originally selected John Barbour, who had recently been a TV critic on the local NBC news in Los Angeles. To host the evening version, they signed Gary Owens, who was best known for Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In and for his local L.A. radio show and for doing more voiceover work than any human being on the planet.
After the first week of the daytime show was taped, Barris decided Barbour was all wrong. It was one of those "different vision" problems. Barbour reportedly saw the show as something that might actually discover and nurture real talent. Barris wanted a show more like...well, what it became after he fired Barbour, trashed the shows that had been taped and took over hosting chores, himself. Mr. Owens hosted the nighttime show for the first year and then Barris took it over, as well. John Dorsey, who directed both versions, told me that it wasn't a dissatisfaction with Gary. It was because Barris just didn't want to pay someone else when he could do the job himself.
Our clip today gives you a little less than seven minutes of an Owens-hosted Gong Show with panelists Elke Sommer, Rex Reed and Jaye P. Morgan. The stunning blonde lady assisting Gary is Sivi Aberg, a beauty queen who turned up on a lot of TV shows in the mid-to-late seventies. The small person assisting him is Jerry Maren, whose career goes back to well before he was in The Wizard of Oz, and who is still a working actor. And you don't hear him on the clip but the show's announcer at the time was my buddy Jeff Altman, who is often seen on Mr. Letterman's program...or sometimes just heard. That's Jeff playing the bizarre State Trooper character who's been popping up recently in voiceover on Dave's Late Show.
Here's the clip. If you don't like it, you can stop it after 45 seconds by hitting your giant gong. You do have a giant gong, don't you?
Earl Butz, the one-time Secretary of Agriculture, died recently at the age of 98. Timothy Noah recalls the one thing he was noted for: Having to resign after he was quoted telling a couple of racist jokes.
I don't think telling a couple of racist jokes means you're a racist but Mr. Butz's other, non-joking statements and actions sure made him look like one, and his response when his jokes elicited outrage sure made him look foolish. At the time of the brief controversy, I was contributing to an underground-style newspaper and I wrote a piece that said, in effect, "I don't think he should have had to resign over the jokes. I think he should have had to resign because people that foolish should not be in public office." Looking back, I still feel the same way.
If you take the Amtrak train down to the Comic-Con International in San Diego, the nearest stop is the one on Kettner, not the one in Old Town. Basically, you want to go to the end of the line. So sorry.
Just wanted to let you know that parking at San Diego isn't much of a problem anymore now that there's these huge lots behind the baseball stadium. They only charge like $5 or $6 a day. True, you have to move your car at night, but two years ago I stayed at the W Hotel and moved my car to a lot near there every night and ended up spending just $10 a day in all. Much cheaper than the $26 or more a day at some of the hotel lots.
Good to know. And I wanted to also mention that a number of people I know in L.A. have discovered the joy of approaching Comic-Con as a day trip by train. They catch the Pacific Surfliner down at Union Station or wherever, and it's about a 2.5 hour trip each way. You can get off at the Amtrak Station in Old Town, at the main station in San Diego, which is a brief walk or cab ride to the convention center. For real fun and a slight sense of danger, get one of those kids with the pedal cabs to drive you to and fro. Matter of fact, I've been thinking of seeing if the con will let me bring one in to chauffeur me around the exhibit hall.
Wednesday morning at 9 AM Pacific Standard Time, many of my friends will being dialing and mousing like crazy as hotel reservations open up for this year's Comic-Con International, July 24-28. It's like a big, frustrating game of Musical Chairs since there will be a lot more people wanting rooms than there will be rooms. I hear that for a number of reasons — mainly more hotels opening up and the existing ones having fewer competing conventions — the situation will be much easier beginning in '09. That will be small comfort to those who will spend much of this Wednesday morn trying and failing to secure lodging for this year.
Do not write me and ask if I can help. I cannot help except to tell you that even after the initial ration of hotel rooms is gone, there will be more added. A year or two ago, I was given a long explanation of how the entire process works but there's no way I can replicate it here. Suffice it to say that just because they run out of rooms on Wednesday at 9:03 doesn't mean they won't have rooms available in a few weeks or a few months.
Also, the convention's hotel booking agency only has access to some percentage of the rooms at some hotels in San Diego. You may still be able to find something on your own, especially if you look some distance away from the Convention Center. Last year, a few friends of mine found shelter at a hotel about 10-15 minutes from all the action. Even taking a cab to and from the con each day, it was cheaper than what they would have had to pay to be nearby. Others have reported on successfully using the city's trolley service to commute from outlying motels, and a friend of mine likes to stay in San Clemente and use Amtrak to get to the convention each day. (Parking spaces at the convention are about as easy to find as copies of Groo that Sergio hasn't autographed.)
Yes, I know the convention is "too big," whatever that means. It's probably one of those valid complaints that there's no point in making because it's not going to get any smaller and, as a chum of mine points out, if they made it any smaller, they'd probably eliminate the parts of it that we love. For good or ill, the convention is the size it is and with that comes the problems of lodging and parking and crowds. Take solace in the fact that membership is now limited — in fact, it will sell out well before the convention dates — so the beast can grow no larger. If you accept its size instead of fighting it and moaning and wishing we were back to 3000 attendees at the old El Cortez, you can have a very good time down there. I certainly do.
Fred Kaplan, who is my favorite columnist when it comes to writing about American foreign affairs (Iraq, especially) has a new book out, which the Amazon people have yet to deliver to my doorstep. However, Slate has posted two excerpts here and here, which make me eager to read Daydream Believers, which is subtitled "How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power." If you read them and decide you want a copy of the entire book, click here to order one.
The other day, we linked to the opening and closing of a forgotten (but funny) TV show called The Good Guys. Here's a look at the middle of what I think was the first episode...as excerpted for a CBS network promo...
This is about the Writers Strike, of course. What I'm hearing is that a lot of the obstacles are out of the way and our leaders feel they have made substantial progress. But there is no deal yet and there are still some thorny negotiations ahead to get the terms committed to paper and to get the bugs out.
I hope this doesn't sound arrogrant or nagging but I really think we have to keep the cork in the champagne until there's a firm deal. We've come so far, it would be brain-dead stupid to blow it now. This strike has been about many things but what it's mainly been about is that the AMPTP felt they could force a bad deal on the WGA and then, by extension and precedent, on the Directors Guild, the Screen Actors Guild and other unions, as well. It's been about us saying no to that, resisting that kind of tactic and taking a stand that they did not believe we would take. This is no time to make them think the strike is weakening and that we're so eager to sprint back to work that they can force some bad terms into the endgame.
I may not be able to make it to the picket lines tomorrow but I'll try, and I'll definitely be out on Tuesday. We need to do that and we need to do what we can to not allow the "industry buzz" to be that we're ready to settle for anything our reps have achieved so far. I can't tell you the number of times I've either gotten screwed or almost gotten screwed with something that snuck into a deal at the last minute. One time, I had to write a script over a three-day weekend and we made the deal (verbally) on Friday night and I started writing. Saturday morning, the producer messengered a deal memo over to my agent firming up the terms...and my agent called me and said, "Stop writing."
They'd thrown in some terms that hadn't been discussed. They'd also made some subtle, unpleasant adjustments to the wording of deal points which had been discussed. It was suddenly a much worse deal.
What they were counting on, of course, is that I was too far into it to say no. I'd already spent 12 or 15 hours writing, they knew. I'd already cancelled other plans for the next few days, maybe even turned down other work, they figured. I'd already spent the money I'd be getting, they hoped. And most of all, I was already emotionally committed to the project. This is where we're sometimes quite vulnerable. We love what we do (or most of what we do) and it's tough to put on those brakes, difficult to say no at that stage.
But my agent insisted. In fact, he was livid. "Bait and switch," he called it and just on principle alone, he felt we had to make a stand.
I had to stop writing. He had to make it clear to them that we (he and I) were quite prepared to not do this project if the deal wasn't right. The thing was still due Tuesday morning but instead of writing it the rest of the day that Saturday, I did other things. Had dinner with some friends. Went to see the Groundlings, a local comedy troupe. It was kind of unsettling, I'll admit. Someone asked me what I was working on and I had to say, "Well, I might be writing a pilot script this weekend..."
When I got home, there was a message on my answering machine from my agent: "Okay, they just messengered me a revised deal memo and it's the deal we discussed with no loopholes. Go ahead and write." I had to work twice as fast but at least I got the contract I was supposed to get.
This happens all the time. All the time. It can happen in the new WGA contract if they think we're too eager to get back to work and are already burning the picket signs and planning how to spend those imminent paychecks.
You got a warm, happy feeling when you heard a deal was looming and the strike was almost over. You don't want to rekindle that awful "How long is this damn strike going to last?" feeling again but you may have to. Because we need to make it clear that this has all been about saying no to a bad offer. And if they think we won't, we'll get one. Still.
Not that it's going to decide the election or anything but I've decided that on Tuesday, I'm going to vote for Barack Obama. I won't be upset if Hillary Clinton is the nominee but I think he'd be the better candidate and — of greater importance — the better president. This is a slight preference but a couple of things I've read lately, especially that essay by Chris Durang, got me there.
A more significant decision, perhaps: I'm going to sign up to vote by mail from now on. I've been thinking of it as long as I've been helping out my mother, who can't get out easily to get to the polls, but I've resisted. I always had the feeling that I'd vote for Jones over Smith and then, after I'd mailed my ballot but before Election Day, it would come out that Jones was an escaped Nazi War Criminal who was in the employ of Reverend Moon, plus he was Michael Vick's partner in the dogfight business, along with being the guy at Southwest Airlines who keeps losing my luggage. And I couldn't do anything about it because I'd already voted.
But this time, my polling place is in a location that's too far away for me to walk to it, and it may be difficult to park in that area. That's all on top of the fact that my Tuesday is booked solid with meetings and errands, plus I want to picket (assuming we're still picketing) and I don't know when I'll be able to get over to vote. From what I read, an increasing number of people are making this decision and it may even affect the results. A lot of ballots were filled out and returned when John Edwards was still in the race and before some recent debate performances and developments which, if we believe the polls, are swaying some voters. Only two days ago, Rasmussen had Clinton at 43% and Obama at 37%. Today, it's 49% and 38%.
Which is not to say I believe the polls all that much. At the same time, the ABC/Washington Post poll has Clinton at 47% and Obama at 43%, Pew has Clinton at 46% and Obama at 38% and Gallup has two separate polls out done by different methodology. One has Clinton at 46% and Obama at 44%, while the other has Clinton at 45% and Obama at 44%. In the meantime, Zogby — who hasn't had the greatest track record lately so maybe he's due — has Obama in the lead in California, which has a pretty large chunk of the delegates who'll be awarded on Tuesday.
So is it an eleven point spread like Rasmussen says? Or a one-pointer like one of the Gallup surveys insists? Who knows? I only know that if I vote earlier, it'll be easier for me to not pay attention to this kind of thing. So from now on, I vote by mail.
Jeremy Steiner just wrote to remind me that on December 20, I posted the following on this site...
Folks keep asking me how long I think the strike is going to last. The other night over dinner with some writers, I made what everyone seemed to think was a strong case: All logic-based indicators would, I think, point to the AMPTP trying to make a deal on or around February 1 and not, as some have suggested, keeping the WGA out until next June or so.
If the reports are correct — and I'm still not willing to presume for sure that they are, or that a last second complication won't arise — then history will show that they made a deal on or around February 1.
Thanks for the AM America clip. I just wanted to mention that it wasn't a local show, but Good Morning America's immediate predecessor on the ABC network. In New York (where I'm from), AM America replaced a terrific local show, AM New York, which was co-hosted by Sandy Baron and John Bartholomew Tucker.
I remember that Stephanie Edwards was considered a scandal to the jaybirds because she was living with her boyfriend at the time. ABC thought it made the show more hip, though. BTW, Edwards' co-host was a guy named Bill Beutel, who'd done the network news for ABC back in the early 1960s, but he'd become much better known as the co-anchor (with Roger Grimsby) of New York's Eyewitness News. Beutel played straight man to Grimsby's soused curmudgeon. AM America lasted less than a year.
Correction noted. And I don't know what Stephanie Edwards is doing these days but there was a time when you couldn't turn on local TV in Los Angeles without seeing her on something. If she wasn't hosting the show you were watching, she was doing commercials for the Lucky supermarket chain. She used to co-host (with Bob Eubanks) the annual Rose Parade for KTLA here but for reasons variously reported as friction with Eubanks and/or the station's desire to have someone younger, she stopped getting up so early on New Year's Day. She was usually pretty good at whatever she did and if she's not working somewhere now, it's either by choice or quite a surprise. Anyway, thanks, Brad.
La La Land Records is a company that specializes in esoteric soundtrack CDs...and isn't it interesting that so many companies that have never and will never produce a record call themselves record companies? Anyway, they have a new one out that I'm guessing will interest someone who visits this site...
George Greeley was one of those composers whose work you heard countless times on TV and in movies. You can now order a limited edition collection of his scores for the TV series, My Favorite Martian. If you remember that show, you remember that it had a nice, jazzy underscore that hit all the right notes...and now you can hear it without the voice of Bill Bixby shouting, "Uncle Martin, where are you?" over all the nice music. Go here to order your copy.
When the Monty Python guys were first getting known in America, its members made a number of odd and sometimes uncomfortable appearances on television. Here from April 25, 1975, we have a little less than ten minutes of AM America, the local ABC morning show from New York, hosted then by Stephanie Edwards. It takes a few minutes to get to the interesting part but somewhere in there, we have the Pythons (minus Cleese) sort of co-hosting but not really getting to say much. But watch it anyway, especially what the boys do under the closing credits.
By the way: There's a writer credit in there for a Tom Meehan. Might this be the same Tom Meehan who two years later was responsible for the book for the Broadway show, Annie? And who has since done many a Broadway show, including The Producers? Might it?
The L.A. Times has edited its online (headline) article about the strike settlement and removed that odd line about an agreement that was released last Friday.
The creator of the comic strip Gordo, Gus Arriola, has died at the age of 90 due to Parkinson's disease. His strip, which ran from 1941 through 1985 was one of the first cartoons in this country to embrace Hispanic culture and characters, and it was quite popular, especially in papers throughout the southwestern United States.
Arriola was born in Arizona and grew up in Los Angeles where, fresh out of high school, he began working in the animation studios, starting with a job on the Krazy Kat cartoons being made by Columbia. As mentioned, Gordo began in '41 and many assumed it was the work of a Spanish or Mexican immigrant. In fact, Arriola didn't even set foot in Mexico until 1961.
It was a well-drawn strip full of good nature and good humor, and it was particularly admired by other cartoonists for its endless inventiveness. Arriola himself was much-loved by his peers and the world of cartooning is a little better for having known him, a little sadder for having lost him. Here's a link to the AP obit.
The Los Angeles Times says there's a deal, sort of. But it's an odd news story that quotes no one directly, is vague on just what's been decided and includes this odd sentence...
The writers' agreement, released late Friday, is modeled after a contract reached last month by the directors.
Huh? And double huh? There was no agreement released late Friday. What's this reporter talking about?
Obviously, something has been agreed upon but since there have been no formal talks and the deal hasn't even been presented yet to the Guild's Board of Directors, celebration may be one notch premature.
Over at The New York Times, reporter Michael Cieply is saying that the informal talks in the Writers Strike have eliminated all or most of the major obstacles to a deal. This is a hopeful sign, of course. There's a news blackout in place but it's hard to believe Cieply didn't hear this from someone in a position to know...and probably someone on the AMPTP side. He is not known for believing what writers tell him or disbelieving what studio execs say. At the same time, I'm also hearing sounds of optimism from sources close to WGA leaders.
That said, it's a fine, even prudent idea to not get one's hopes too high. It is a not uncommon negotiating technique to get the other side into the mindset that the deal is done, and then to throw in a last second demand. In past WGA-AMPTP contracts, negotiating has even continued after the deal was made and ratified. Weeks, even months after the '81, '85 and '88 strikes were settled and work resumed, reps from the studio side were still arguing over what had been agreed to, insisting that their notes said we'd agreed to X when we were certain we'd consented to Y. And even when we all agree on what we all agreed upon, we can't always agree on the interpretation of some clauses and codicils.
If the reports are true, we'll probably see an announcement early in the week of formal talks resuming, and then those might last a few days. If all goes well, the WGA Negotiating Committee and its Board of Directors will proclaim that they have a pact they can recommend to the membership...and then I'd be very surprised if it wasn't ratified. This is all assuming there isn't a last minute lowball.
Richard Clarke on what's going on with this FISA extension. Bottom line: The Bush Administration is using scare tactics to get its way on an issue for political purposes. Why does this not surprise us?
We mentioned here a few weeks ago the rumors that Young Frankenstein, now playing on Broadway, might not be doing anywhere near the business its backers anticipated. In this article, one of its producers says it's doing okay but admits to some marketing and strategic errors.
Last year on this date, it was our honor to wish a happy 95th birthday to the great comic book artist, Creig Flessel, whose work began appearing in comic books about the time original material began appearing in comic books. The cover at the above left was by him and it ran on Detective Comics #3, which was cover-dated May of 1937. The one on the right is from two years later.
Mr. Flessel is a fine, talented gentleman and an important figure in the history of this particular art form...so it was an even greater pleasure to wish him a happy 96th birthday here today, and I expect to tell him in person at this year's Wondercon in San Francisco. Rumor has it he'll be putting in an appearance. If he isn't there, it's okay. I can just wish him a happy 97th next year.
From the February 28, 1966 episode of the TV pop music series Hullabaloo, George Hamilton and Lainie Kazan introduce the show's dancers dancing to the theme from the concurrent TV hit, Batman.
For those of us steeped in Industrial Grade Trivia, there are three other connections in this clip to the world of comic books. One is that many years later, Mr. Hamilton would be involved briefly in an aborted business enterprise with Stan Lee. Another is that a few years after this show, Ms. Kazan would appear in the pages of Playboy and that layout would inspire Jack Kirby to create a memorable comic book character named Big Barda. And lastly, about the time this show was on the air, a noted comic book artist was involved in a romantic way with one of the ladies you see dancing in this number. More than that, I dare not say.
Anyone here been watching Deal or No Deal? I gave it up for a time — too much forced melodrama, too much padding, too many games where the big amounts were gone before the midpoint — but I'm back. Admittedly, I TiVo the thing, watch the first few minutes and then zip ahead to when it gets interesting, if it gets interesting. That it occasionally does lately is because of a stunt they're doing called The Million Dollar Mission.
After all this time on the air, no one has won the mil, which I'm guessing troubles the producers. They apparently figure that if they never award that amount, America will soon give up on the show. With so much of NBC's ratings riding on the program and a weekday version starting shortly, they probably need to give away a million smackers and soon. So what they do during the Million Dollar Mission is that every time a contestant doesn't win that amount, they add another million dollar amount into the briefcases. Instead of one, there's two, three, four, etc. The other day, a lady played a game where nine of the 26 cases contained one million bucks. She still didn't win the big prize so as they're advertising like crazy, Monday's episode features a game where there will be ten (10) one million dollar prizes in the cases.
The commercials make it sound like you'd better make sure you tune in because this looks like the night someone finally wins the big award. And I'm here to tell you it's not so. The contestant doesn't win the million.
How do I know this? Because the listing on my TiVo for the following week's show (February 11) says, and I quote...
"Eleven $1 million cases" (2008) The Million Dollar Mission continues with an unprecedented eleven cases on the board, holding $1 million each.
So no point in watching Monday when there are only ten $1 million cases. And you don't even have to have a TiVo to get this information. If you go to Yahoo TV right now and search for that week's episode, you'll see...
I'll bet the secret is also blown on most of the online services that provide TV listings. But actually, you could probably have deduced that the contestant on Monday's show doesn't win the million...because the promos, which they're airing every three minutes on NBC, don't come right out and say it. They say it's the biggest night ever, the most exciting and spectacular must-see episode...and they lead you to believe it's going to happen...but they don't say "Tune in and watch someone finally win the million dollars!"
That will happen shortly...and I have the oddest hunch that it will happen before the end of the February "sweeps" rating period. In fact, since they tape way ahead, I have the hunch it's already happened and that they've been scheduling episodes and inserting repeats in order to make sure it happens on a February show, preferably a late February show. What's more, when they get to that week, they're going to make sure everyone knows it, which means they won't be able to just say it's the biggest night ever, the most exciting and spectacular must-see episode, etc. That's what they say when the contestant doesn't win.
Instead, they'll say something more explicit...and then to make certain everyone knows, they'll leak it to the press or get it up on the Internet somehow...or something. What they won't do is let it be an actual surprise. TV doesn't do that anymore.
This one will be of interest to a lot of you but especially to those who grew up in the Los Angeles area in the sixties and seventies. One of the top local disc jockeys from that era was The Real Don Steele, who was heard on KHJ Boss Radio. He was quite popular and an awful lot of other radio personalities — in L.A. and around the world — wound up imitating The Real Don Steele.
He had a fun, energetic sound and as you can see in today's presentation, was wildly enthusiastic about absolutely everything. Every L.A. kid of my era knew that sound and also his catch-phrase. Throughout his radio shows, he'd often play a short clip of a female voice yelling, "Tina Delgado is alive, alive!" Who was Ms. Delgado and why was it so significant that she was alive? Mr. Steele never said, and you got the idea that even he didn't know; that it was just a stunt to get people curious.
Off and on, he also hosted various TV shows, mainly of the "dance party" variety. This is an episode of The Real Don Steele Show that aired on May 11, 1974. It starts with a commercial that includes a then-unknown-but-soon-to-be-famous Farrah Fawcett and then the show runs about a half hour over the four parts posted here. You will enjoy the musical acts of the day, lip-syncing to their hits. You will enjoy the teenagers dancing to the records. You will enjoy Mr. Steele's energy. And you will really enjoy some of the commercials.
One other thing: I'm assuming they taped in the KHJ studio, which was about the size of a three-car garage — one of those facilities that was erected in a building that was designed to do radio...and without a live audience. I know this show looks real cheap but considering what they had to work with, the producers and director worked miracles.
March 1, 2008
