Thursday, February 26, 2009

Kirby Kover Kredit

The folks at Heritage Auctions have, as they usually do, copies of Amazing Spider-Man #1 from 1963 up for bid. It's been called to my attention that when they list one of these, they always say, "Steve Ditko cover (Jack Kirby layouts) and art." Not that it's a huge deal but I think this is wrong. Ditko, of course, drew the insides but I'm pretty sure the cover is Kirby and Ditko, not Ditko working over Kirby layouts. I stand by my oft-made statement that once Jack was no longer working in the Simon-Kirby studio, I don't think he ever laid out a cover for anyone else. He pencilled hundreds that others inked, and sometimes his covers were significantly revised by others. But I know of no case where he laid out a cover and then someone else pencilled over his layout.

• Posted at 1:16 PM · LINK

Hollywood Labor News

If there's been any recent movement in the Screen Actors Guild situation, it's been kept quiet. As of now, the two warring factions within the guild are kind of circling one another, figuring out ways to mend whatever fences seem mendable. They had a scintilla of unity when the moderate group, which has taken over the negotiations and which is more eager to make a deal, didn't fare any better in their quest. The studios are trying to keep the actors divided and to make it more difficult for the two parties of SAG to come together and then to re-engage with AFTRA. They may be at least partly successful in this but right now, nobody's budging.

Meanwhile: The Writers Guild is putting Jay Leno through a kind of trial, discussing whether he violated strike rules when he allegedly wrote material for his show during our walkout. At arm's length, it might seem like an open-and-shut case that he did but there are a number of factors involved here. One is that there's some ambiguity in the distinction between writing for the show and writing for one's self. If a performer thinks of what he's going to say in front of the cameras five minutes before he says it, that's probably writing. If he thinks of it five seconds before, that's probably an ad-lib. I'm oversimplifying but you get the idea.

Or if Leno wrote jokes for his standup act during the strike and went down and did them at the Comedy and Magic Club, the guild is fine with that and, in fact, has no jurisdiction. If during the strike, The Tonight Show booked a standup comic to come in and do his act, that's not considered writing, either. But if Leno writes and tells a joke in Vegas and then uses it in his monologue on the show during the strike...well, again, there's room there to argue if he's writing for the show.

It is also worth noting that in the past, the WGA often looked the other way when some very prominent stars, including Mssrs. Carson and Letterman, committed the same supposed breach, and there are some very famous movie stars and screenwriters who could have been brought up on charges but weren't. I was on a committee many years ago where two WGA officers got into a yelling match over whether the Guild was going after the "little fish" and ignoring the whales. There were (then) a couple of cases where that seemed to be true. (I should also add that I researched this matter when I did an article last year on scabbing for New Republic and found that in past WGA strikes, there was a lot less of it than you might have imagined.)

Among those who know him, Leno has a pretty good reputation for ethics and apart from this little matter of going back to work during it, he was a strong supporter of the strike. He met with WGA leadership before he did, and I suppose the disposition of this current inquiry will hinge on what was said then and how it may have been interpreted or misinterpreted. Someone will also probably take into account the enormous pressure he was under, not only in terms of the staff of his show being laid off but with NBC probably threatening to sue him for breach of contract as a performer.

The guy was in a "no win" situation and I still like him. But I do have to say that I was disappointed when he went back and that I'm glad my guild is not pretending it didn't happen.

• Posted at 12:39 PM · LINK

Where in the World?

The Los Angeles Times recently did something very courageous and gutsy for a newspaper. No, I don't mean they pointed out an error by a public official. That gutsy, they aren't. But they decided to try and define the communities that make up Los Angeles. We have all these little fiefdoms with names like "Westwood" and "Cheviot Hills" that have no official boundaries. Most people more or less know where they are but not precisely where they start and stop.

The borders can be quite fuzzy...and I would imagine we have realtors to thank for that. If you can claim that the house you're selling is in "Bel-Air," you do, even though someone might argue that Bel-Air is confined to the other side of Sunset. There are also many areas where no commonly-used name seems to apply and the folks who live in those areas usually shrug when asked and say, "I live in Los Angeles," which is accurate but not useful in pinpointing where in Los Angeles.

It's brave for the Times to undertake the task because a lot of people disagree with their decisions...and before I forget, here's the link to what the Times staff came up with. A lot of folks are outraged or baffled or startled by the assertion that their homes aren't where they thought they were and that, for example, there is such a place as Chinatown but Little Tokyo seems to have disappeared. The areas where I grew up and where I now live seem properly designated to me...but the apartment where I lived in-between is assigned to a neighborhood name I would never have used to describe that location.

A lot of local blogs are dissenting and some are so vituperative that I doubt the Times map is going to settle the matter of where, say, West Hollywood stops and starts. But maybe it's a starting place.

• Posted at 9:41 AM · LINK

Today's Video Link

Elsewhere on this site, we have a section devoted to Castle Films, which were little 8mm or 16mm copies of Hollywood-type movies you could once purchase and run on your home movie projector. In the decades before home video recorders, that was a big deal.

Someone at the Castle Films company was very facile at trimming whole features down to one-reel lengths. Abbott and Costello Go To Mars (1953) was a 77 minute film...but Castle edited it down to a little under nine minutes and did surprisingly little damage to it.

They retitled it Rocket and Roll, perhaps because the original title was inaccurate. Amazingly, in Abbott and Costello Go To Mars, Abbott and Costello do not go to Mars. In Abbott and Costello Go To Mars, Abbott and Costello go to Venus.

I'm guessing what happened was that someone thought the Mars title was commercial and they started planning the film under that name. Then someone else decided it would be even more commercial to fill the movie with beautiful women in abbreviated costumes...so they worked that into the script, having Bud and Lou land on a planet ruled by gorgeous amazons. (One of them, though you probably won't be able to spot her in this, was Anita Ekberg.) At some point, someone decided the planet then should be Venus, so they made it Venus, even though it was too late to change the title. So what you wound up with was the biggest "misnaming" of a movie ever until some studio exec was unaware that Krakatoa was not East of Java.

This is the sound version that Castle issued. In a box in a closet downstairs, I have the 8mm silent version that I purchased around 1964. I haven't compared but I think it's the same cut but with title cards dropped in here and there...

• Posted at 1:35 AM · LINK