Colleen Doran is one of the best artists in the comic biz these days and also a forceful, wise voice on the topic of how to be in that industry and not get swindled. It's happened to her many times and she often blogs about her experiences and how not to replicate them over on this page.
She has been abused in other ways, as well. Attractive women — especially those in the public eye — sometimes have these problems. There's a TV show on the Investigation Discovery channel called Stalked: Someone's Watching that deals with a situation that too many people take lightly or treat as some sort of to-be-expected "price you pay" for being pretty. Years ago, I was involved with an actress who was literally afraid to dine out in public because "he" might be lurking nearby...and the police wouldn't or couldn't do anything until "he" did something more illegal than scaring the hell outta her, night and day.
Colleen bravely tells her story on the episode of Stalked: Someone's Watching that is running this week. It runs later again tonight (10:30 AM on my satellite) and twice again next Sunday. Consult, as we say in the TV business, your local listings.
I just watched its first airing and it's a chilling tale. I'm led to believe that the authorities do more now about this kind of thing than they did when my friend lived in a state of constant worry...but they still don't do nearly enough. Perhaps if more "stalkees" like Colleen made their stories public, these situations would be treated more like actual crimes — which they are — instead of potential ones.
The person who posted this clip to YouTube said it was Spike Jones with Mickey Katz. I don't see Mr. Katz in it. I think the poster thought Billy DeWolfe — who is in it — was Mickey Katz. But he got Spike Jones right. It's Spike's contribution to Variety Girl, a 1947 movie into which Paramount Pictures stuck every actor they had under contract...or who wandered anywhere near the lot while they were shooting. The male lead here is DeForest Kelley who, many years later, would play the doctor on some science-fiction TV show produced by Paramount...
I still don't think Newt Gingrich will be the Republican nominee. As Barney Frank says, Democrats couldn't be that lucky. But I'll say this for the Newtster: He's gotten a lot farther than any of us thought. And by "us," I mean folks who've looked at his history of ethics violations, his marital square-dancing, his constant selling-out to whatever special interest was paying him the most. You can see all of that if you look at his record or at the commercials Ron Paul is running against him.
Paul Waldman offers an interesting thought about what his supporters see in Gingrich, above and beyond the obvious sparseness of alternatives. They think he's smarter than Barack Obama and will expose him as an intellectual fraud...ergo, all the jokes about Obama using a TelePrompter.
I suspect one of the many ways in which they're wrong is that, first of all, politicians often rely on TelePrompters. Some have even relied on hidden hearing devices so someone could feed lines to them. It's another one of those cases for condemning Obama for something that was jes' fine when a guy they liked did it. Moreover, I get the sense that Obama doesn't use his TelePrompter to give him smart words but to reduce the stammer and to get them out faster. He's done fine in debates and other impromptu appearances. He just has more moments of hesitation between his nouns and verbs, sans Autocue.
I'd be curious to know what percentage of what's on his TelePrompter is material he himself wrote as opposed to a crew of speechwriters. I get the feeling it's higher than most. For some reason in this country, we think a politician is smart because intelligent thoughts come out of his mouth and we don't much care if they came out of his or someone else's head. Anyway, my problems with Obama have to do with what he does as President — more accurately, with what he doesn't do — and I don't think he isn't a very smart man. I also thought George W. Bush was a lot smarter than most folks thought he was. I just thought he was wrong a lot, as even smart people can be, and also that his goals for America was to make life better for the really, really rich. At that, he excelled.
As a fan of slapstick comedy (the constant pics of Laurel and Hardy should have tipped you off to that by now), I see a certain beauty in the placement of a pie into the face of someone. It is, of course, an art...and like all forms of art, it is possible to do it very, very well and very, very badly. Tomorrow in this space, I will be discussing the proper way to "pie" someone and I will give you this one preview: If the pie has an aluminum or even a paper plate at the moment of impact, the person throwing the pie is an ignorant douchebag who should be forbidden by law to ever again hurl any kind of pie or other replica of baked goods. In fact, this especially applies if it's a real baked good.
This ban should also apply to those who employ pies as an assault weapon and I'm not kidding about that. I actually once saw someone get hurt by a surprise pie-in-the-face...not seriously but there's nothing funny about attacking someone out of the blue like that.
It was one of the stars of a TV show I worked on — not a big star but a small star, someone whose name most of you would not know. I would like to think that is not unrelated to the fact that he had been an enormous and difficult jerk all season to the point of being roundly disliked by the crew and his fellow cast members. It was the last day of taping and the Associate Producer, who had been the recipient of much abuse, had ordered up a Pie Hit — to be delivered right after this star taped the last line he or anyone on the show had to tape.
Just before the director shouted, "It's a wrap!", a pie sniper was signalled to do what he'd been engaged to do. He was from a company that would "pie" the person of your choice and I thought at the time, "What an odd occupation." Can you imagine the conversation when this guy goes home for Christmas?
"So, Phil, your brother Mike just passed the bar and your sister Alice just got admitted to U.S.C. on a medical scholarship. What are you doing these days?"
"I work for a company that sends me around to hit unsuspecting people with pies." His family must be so proud.
I don't know what the call was like for his services but they did not come cheap. As I later learned, the customer had to sign a form that stated they would be present at the moment of impact. I guess that was so that if the recipient got angry, the pie-r could point to the client and say, "He arranged it! Slug him!" You also had to sign a guarantee that you would cover all costs if a lawsuit resulted and all medical bills if the deliverer got kicked in the groin or slipped on meringue or whatever.
Our A.P. decided he wanted to "pie" the star so badly, he agreed to all that, plus that pretty hefty fee. This was the same Associate Producer who kept running in and telling me, "You can't do a joke about Grover Cleveland! What if his descendants decided to sue us?"
The way this particular assassin worked was via what looked like a lovely gift box. It was open on one side — the side he kept towards himself — and the pie was inside. He would walk up to his intended victim as if delivering a present and hand it to the unsuspecting about-to-be-pied person. The person would (usually) take the gift and as it was transferred to his hands, the pie-r would extract the pie from it and shove it in the guy's face, ho ho ho. That was how it went on our stage.
Funny? Yeah, I guess for a second. The crew all laughed because they figured it was scripted and part of the show and that the fellow knew it was coming. When it was apparent that none of that was so, the laughter petered out. The reaction was thereafter more like if a stranger had walked up and punched the guy in the face.
The star was so startled that he fell to his knees. One of the dancers on the show was, as they say, "sweet on him." In fact, earlier that day, the Associate Producer had walked into the star's dressing room and discovered this particular dancer doing what he said was a fine impression of Linda Lovelace. Now, she rushed over to help him up, wipe off the pie and help him back to that dressing room.
I ran back there to see how he was and, I guess, to make sure he understood that despite our own arguments, I had nothing to do with him being custarded like that. The dancer was crying and she was putting some sort of contact lens solution she had into one of his eyes which was all red and swollen. The pie-r had hit him hard and apparently shoved crumbs of crust into and around his target's left cornea. Soupy Sales always knew to close his eyes at the last second...but Soupy Sales always knew a pie was coming. The star had hurt his knee too when he went down.
The dancer was probably more upset than the star. He looked up at me and said, "I guess I deserved that, huh?"
I said, "Nah. You maybe deserved a small tart but not a whole pie. At worst, a twinkie or a cupcake."
He thought for a second and asked, "Did the whole crew vote me this?"
I said, "No. And it wasn't me or any of the writers. But don't ask me who did."
"I won't," he said as he got up. "But I know what I've got to do." He started heading back out to the stage despite his dancer friend urging him to remain seated and let the swelling in his eye go down. She and I both followed him out there...and I wasn't sure what he was going to do. He couldn't very well start punching out everyone who had a reason to be mad at him.
He walked back out to the exact spot where the "hit" had been made and he called out for everyone's attention. Crew members were striking the set and moving scenery away but everyone stopped. And when he had near-silence, he announced — in a pretty loud voice because the microphones had all been shut down — "I want you to all hear the card that came with the pie." There was a little gift tag on the pie box and he pulled it out of his shirt pocket and read, "Thanks for a great season and for being a tremendous asshole!" He said that last word with a laugh and then said, "I'm sorry, everyone." The whole crew applauded him.
They might have applauded more if they'd seen what the card actually said. It said, "Thanks for a great season and for being a great sport!" It was the guy's best moment on that show...but you know what? I still think it was a crappy thing to do to someone.
Tomorrow in this space, I'll tell you the right way to make and throw a pie...and most important, when.
No, I haven't been neglecting you, dear Blog Audience. I've been working on a script but, more important, I've been configuring the software for the new version of this blog which will debut around or about the time they drop that big ball in Times Square. What's here won't change much from your vantage point — a slight redesign for cosmetic purposes — but the new software will make life easier on my end. None of the old postings will go away, though they may be offline for a week or two during the transition.
Yesterday (well, Saturday), I had to go out to the valley and my route took me past Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue, one of the great bottleneck traffic-jamming intersections on this planet. Making things more snarly than usual was a huge protest demonstration with people yelling and waving signs.
What were they protesting? I haven't the foggiest. Though the glacier-like flow of autos past them enabled me to watch the protest for three or four minutes, I have no idea what their crusade was about. The chanting was unintelligible. The signs were either illegible or hopelessly vague. One said, "Action now!" Another said, "We Won't Take It Any Longer!" If not for the fact that the signs had 3rd grade penmanship, I'd have suspected someone had ordered a set of generic picket signs, guaranteed to fit any strike, outburst or demonstration.
I felt bad for them. They were out there all day making a passioned effort for their cause, one I wholeheartedly support...
...or not. I have no idea. Maybe I should be glad they weren't getting their message across.
December 10, 2011
