Yearly Archives: 2003

Disney loses another round in the Pooh Wars. Have these guys won one battle yet? Here's the latest.

Here's the kind of thing that makes you wonder about the press these days. Makes me wonder, anyway. This AP news story is headlined, "Poll shows Sen. Santorum's popularity not hurt by remarks about gays." From that, a reasonable person would assume that his popularity rating is right about where it was before he made his controversial remarks.

But in the third paragraph of the report comes this revelation about the poll…

However, Santorum's remarks may have turned some undecided voters against him. His disapproval rating rose from 20 percent in April to 33 percent in May while the proportion of undecided voters fell by a similar amount, from 24 percent to 12 percent.

In other words, his disapproval rating has risen from 20 percent to 33 percent…but his popularity has not been hurt.

At Heathrow Airport today, an individual later discovered to be a public school teacher was arrested trying to board a flight while in possession of a compass, a protractor, and a graphical calculator. Authorities believe he is a member of the notorious al-Gebra movement. He is being charged with carrying weapons of math instruction.

Once in a while, it's interesting to fact-check anecdotes. Last evening at the tribute to him, Red Buttons told the tale of what was to have been his first Broadway show. Here's how that story is told in what I guess is Red's official bio…

In 1941, Jose Ferrer plucked Red out of burlesque for his first Broadway show, The Admiral Had A Wife. The show was supposed to open on December 8, 1941, but it never did. The show was a farce comedy about Pearl Harbor — great timing!

Kurt Bodden writes me to note that 12/8/41 was a Monday and asks, "Is it plausible that a Broadway show would open on a Monday?" Well, yes, it is. A play called Golden Wings starring Fay Wray and dealing with soldiers actually did open in New York on 12/8/41. It closed after a big six performances.

But Kurt's query led me to do a little skulking-about on the Internet and I found this article about the Wilmington Playhouse in Wilmington, Delaware. Here's the relevant paragraph…

The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. As luck would have it, the Playhouse was scheduled to present the farce The Admiral Had A Wife on December 8. The premise: The wives of Pearl Harbor admirals were really running the Navy. Though the show was probably meant to offer comic relief, 30,000 Delaware men and women were braced for war, and they weren't laughing. The show was canceled.

So it sounds to me like the anecdote is true but that one teensy detail has been fudged a bit. The story as told in Red's bio does not actually say the show was supposed to open on Broadway on that date but that's implied. Of course, it's a better tale if we're led to believe that it was an opening on Broadway that was killed by the bombing of Pearl Harbor, as opposed to an opening in Wilmington that might have led to Broadway. Not a big point, really, and it's nice to see the essential part of the story confirmed from another source.

While we're on the topic of Broadway opening dates, here's another slight possible fact-check. The Marx Brothers made their Broadway debut with a revue called I'll Say She Is, which opened at the Casino Theater on May 19, 1924. The way the story has always been told is as follows: The show, which extensively toured the U.S. for its pre-Broadway shakedown, was a hodge-podge of vaudeville — the kind of thing that even the Marxes knew had no place on Broadway. They were more interested in the employment of the tour than in playing New York, and tried to put N.Y. off as long as possible. They figured if they opened there, the critics would murder them, the show would close, and they'd be unemployed. But the show's backer insisted, as did their mother, who longed to see her boys on the Great White Way, and who refused to believe that the town would not adore them.

Hoping to minimize the inevitable critical burial, the brothers arranged for their opening to coincide with that of a serious drama. The idea was that the first-string drama critics would go cover the other show and that the second-string critics would be dispatched to review the Marx opening. The assistants, it was hoped, would be kinder or at least less outraged to see a vaudeville show passed off as a Broadway musical. Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Zeppo especially hoped to avoid the withering condemnation of Alexander Woollcott, who was then the Drama Critic for the New York World and known for shredding that which offended his snobbish sensibilities.

Well, as the story is told, at the last minute the other play postponed its opening and the first-string critics, who were already in their tuxedos and primed for serious drama, found themselves at the Marx show instead. They were therefore even more annoyed than they might have been to attend I'll Say She Is, and most spent the first act planning how they would pan the proceedings. What stopped many of them was that Woollcott was not only present but madly in love with what he saw on stage, Harpo especially. He spent intermission gushing to his colleagues about how wonderful the show was, which influenced many to not write the expected "this show has no business being on Broadway" notices. He also wrote a famous rave review, almost wholly about Harpo, which helped make the show a hit.

That's more or less how history tells it. But as I looked up the opening dates relating to the other play above, I chanced onto the wrong page and noticed that not only did I'll Say She Is open on 5/19/24 but so did a pretty famous show called Blossom Time. This was a Shubert production which ran 592 performances and featured an all-star cast and the music of Franz Schubert. It was by any measure a much more important opening than that of the Marx Brothers. So is it really true about the first-string critics all winding up at the Marx show because they had nowhere else to go? And why was Woollcott there and not down the street at Blossom Time?

His name's Paul Chadwick. His most famous work is Concrete, a solid strip about a pretty solid guy. He doesn't seem to have an official website displaying that and his other wonderful work but there is this unofficial site where you can get a little Chadwick. Which is better than no Chadwick at all, I suppose.

The Museum of TV and Radio over in Beverly Hills honors various folks for various reasons of achievement and excellence. Wednesday evening, they saluted Red Buttons for more than a half-century of fine comedy. Actually, on that basis, they could have honored about half the folks in the first two rows of the auditorium. Among the many joys of the evening was watching Mr. Buttons (still sharp at age 84) not only entertain the crowd but also his friends and co-workers like screenwriter Larry Gelbart and fellow comedy legend Sid Caesar who were in the house. Gelbart, who was an especially good audience, was the head writer on Red's 1952 TV series, which was a short-lived smash.

A big hit at first, it went off in '55 and Red Buttons, having worked his way up from Catskills hotels and the last burlesque house in Manhattan, found himself unable to get any kind of job. It was the low point of his career — lower even, he said, than when the show in which he was to make his Broadway debut was aborted the day before it was to open. (The comedy, which was set in Pearl Harbor, was supposed to begin performances December 8, 1941. You can figure out the rest.) In '56, it seemed like his career was over but an agent named Marty Baum — who was also present for the tribute last night — took a personal interest. He waged a relentless campaign to get Josh Logan, who didn't want to know from Red Buttons, to cast the comedian in a showy role in the 1957 Marlon Brando movie, Sayonara. Baum's crusade got him the job which in turn got him an Academy Award…which in turn revived his fortunes.

Since then, he's appeared in an odd array of dramatic roles and comedy jobs, the latter often at roasts and benefits. I've seen him a half-dozen times at local events, usually doing either his "didn't get a dinner" routine or some variation, and I've never seen him not get the whole room to laughing. Each time, the happiest one in the room was Mr. Buttons. Several times during the interview last evening, he said he considered himself "one of the luckiest people in the world" and spoke of how he does what he does because he loves it so. There are performers who are motivated by money and others who have some desperate need for recognition to prove they belong on the planet. But there are also some who just really, really enjoy seeing an audience enjoy itself. Last night, we all had a good time — but Red Buttons had the best time of all.

Jason Lethert runs HeroJournalism, a service which reports on the transfer of comic books to the big screen. He just sent me a question that has nothing to do with that…

In your post about the biased reviews of Sid Blumenthal's book, you mentioned the negative review by Joseph Lelyveld, and the subsequent correcting of Lelyveld's errors by Joe Conason. I was wondering if you read Lelyveld's response to Conason here.

Yes, I did. And the most telling part of the response is that he completely skipped over Conason's main point, which was that the 1995 report by the Resolution Trust Corporation had cleared the Clintons on Whitewater and stated that they had cooperated fully with the investigation.

One of the reasons I never gave more credence to those who claimed the Clintons were obvious, provable criminals was that the accusers never seemed willing to address that very exhaustive, exonerating report. A few claimed the report was biased, even though it was a case of a Republican law firm (Pillsbury, Madison and Sutro) being selected by Republicans to pore through the Clintons' financial history. A few claimed it was incomplete, even though the final report by the Independent Counsel issued more than five years later contained not one significant fact or conclusion not included in the R.T.C. report. Most of those who rode the Whitewater story either to journalistic benefit or partisan advantage just kind of pretended the report never existed and changed the subject. They didn't even want to ask why Ken Starr (and later, Robert Ray) took so many years and spent so much to investigate a case that the folks at the Pillsbury law office covered just as thoroughly in a matter of months.

And here once again, you have an example: Lelyveld and his colleagues told us for years in print that there was serious dirt in Whitewater; that the Clintons were heading for the ol' greybar hotel for their nefarious swindles. When that didn't come close to happening, the "spin" became that the Clintons had stonewalled and concealed the damning evidence. So what do you do when someone points out that a rather thorough investigation not only cleared them but said they'd turned over all relevant documents? You just change the subject. I'm less annoyed over this for what it did to the Clintons than for what it says about the news media in this country.

Here are two forthcoming DVDs you might want to pre-order or at least save some bucks for. On or about June 24, it will be possible to purchase The Best of Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, a 3-disc collection of moments from that ground-breaking comedy show of the sixties. The three discs hold 240 minutes of material from the years 1968-1970, including the famous Richard Nixon cameo, plus interviews with Gary Owens, Ruth Buzzi, and Arte Johnson. I've been watching the reruns of this show on the Trio satellite channel — or I was watching until I got sick of seeing the same small number of episodes over and over — and can report that they hold up very well. Not everything and everyone is wonderful, of course.

A year or so ago, I found myself at a party, surrounded by several members of the cast. I happened to mention that I never understood how Dan Rowan was ever allowed into show business. To my surprise, all of his co-stars who were present admitted that they didn't understand it, either. But most of the performers are terrific, and the songs by Billy Barnes are terrific, and the guest cameos are usually wonderful, and even the poorer jokes are over soon enough. About the only things that don't stand up are the occasional references to obscure news items and advertising catch-phrases of the day…and those are infrequent enough that I suspect that in trimming the Trio reruns to allow for more commercials, someone took the opportunity to excise that which had become obscure. Some of the smirking references to marijuana sound very Junior High School today, but that's sort of charming — as are the fashions, which seem to be coming back into style. So if you don't get Trio, or even if you do, you might enjoy watching four hours of this program, though probably not in fewer than four sittings. Watch for the DVD or pre-order it by clicking here.

Then on August 3, Twentieth-Century Fox Home Video is finally releasing Bob Fosse's controversial All That Jazz. Little has been announced about what will be on this disc but the British DVD which came out a year or so ago included an audio commentary by Roy Scheider, interviews with other cast and crew members, trailers, some cut footage, and a short featurette on Fosse as a director. This is a film I've viewed repeatedly and written about a number of times (here, for instance) and I'm still not entirely certain how I feel about it. It's kind of an almost-naked autobiography that does not always depict truth so much as the way Mr. Fosse might have wished things were or would be.

Its raw occasional honesty is in some ways mitigated by the cowardice in doing it all roman à clef, leaving him the deniability of fiction. Is Leland Palmer playing Gwen Verdon? Well, of course she is. And of course she isn't. The entire movie is made with a certain skill and beauty that makes much of its gossipy nature palatable and I guess ultimately I feel it may not be a great film, and Fosse may not have been a very good friend and mate…but it's a brilliantly-made bit of self-indulgence and a fine conversation piece. I'm buying the DVD largely to study it a few more times and because I want to hear Mr. Scheider's commentary. You might want to, as well…but even if you buy it, keep an eye out for some exhibition where you can see it on a big screen, because it loses a lot on a Trinitron. If you'd like to pre-order, as I have done, click here.

Is there a better renderer of classy comic book covers than Brian Bolland? I don't think so…

Michael Tomasky writes a good essay on the tactics of the outgoing Ari Fleischer, and at the way the Bush administration has changed the "tone" of politics.

A group of his fans have launched a drive to earn a posthumous pardon for Lenny Bruce, who was once convicted in New York for obscenity. Here are the details.

At the moment, it's book reviews written by highly-interested parties. Wasn't there a belief years ago that a formal review should be penned by someone who doesn't have a horse in the race? And if so, what happened to that policy?

The new book by Clinton cohort Sidney Blumenthal, The Clinton Wars, is presently being reviewed all over the place — and rarely by someone who doesn't have a vested interest in the book being totally believed or disbelieved. A large part of the work calls the New York Times coverage of Whitewater inept and dishonest…and the New York Review of Books assigned one of the men behind that coverage to review Blumenthal. (He did a pretty poor job of discrediting it and, as Joe Conason notes here, made some amazing errors in his review. Here's a link to that review.) The New York Times commissioned two reviews — one by another reporter whose coverage is criticized by Blumenthal. The New York Observer assigned Andrew Sullivan, a former editor of Blumenthal's who has invested a lot of column space perpetuating a version of the Clinton scandals that Blumenthal's book seeks to debunk. Vanity Fair is running as what may or may not be its only review a piece by Christopher Hitchens, who is called a drunk and a backstabber in the book — also a man who has wrapped a lot of his career around a lot of "facts" that Blumenthal says are not so. Slate ran two reviews today — one by Michael Isikoff, who is soundly criticized in the book; the other by Timothy Noah, who is a close friend of Blumenthal's.

Why does it have to be one or the other? I'm not saying these folks shouldn't have had the opportunity to write about the book and rebut whatever they felt warranted rebuttal. But wouldn't it be nice if some of these differing versions were evaluated by parties that weren't already wedded to one in particular? Who couldn't be accused of looking to settle scores or defend their own work?

I always come to these disagreements with the assumption that both sides are at least somewhat full of manure; that there are fuzzy memories and distortions and outright fibs emanating from all directions. Someone who has a stake in the matter may write with more outrage or passion but their reviews pretty much come down to "Don't believe a word of this dishonest book" or "Believe every word of this candid account." You'll get the occasional admission of one or two minor points just to look reasonable, but otherwise it's all or nothing. There is no one to impartially weigh whatever evidence exists and tell us which portions of the book stand up to scrutiny and which don't.

Once upon a time, that's what a reviewer was supposed to do. But these days, all we get are a lot of wrestling matches.

I love it when you stumble across a website that answers a question you've had for years. Like at least a few of you, I have long been curious about those huge fiberglass advertising figures you occasionally see adorning roadside businesses. They usually have their hands in a position that suggests they were designed to be Paul Bunyan holding an ax, but that someone adapted the mold to make them into someone else holding something else — like a muffler or a set of tires.

If you don't know what I'm talking about — or especially if you do — you'll want to visit this page and read all about what they call "Muffler Men." There's an interview with a guy who made a lot of them, plus a nationwide index to their location and the many variations and…oh, just go look. You'll understand. And many of you will go, "Oh! I've seen those things!"

The extremely wealthy Warren Buffett explains how the tax-cutting strategies of the Bush administration benefit the extremely wealthy. Read about it here.

As you'll recall, a group that claims to be promoting "family values" has been trying to get folks riled up over the fact that the recent Motor City Con had a few ladies on the premises who'd posed undraped for magazines, and also had some dealers who sold such magazines. Here's an e-mail from Janet Harriett, who was actually there…

I really enjoyed your blog comments on porn at cons, and I got a kick out of reading the con report you linked to. That organization seems to be among the many that exist for the sole purpose of being offended.

Last weekend, we attended the Motor City Con in Novi, Michigan, which also had an auction to benefit Make-a-Wish, former Playmates (who, incidentally, do not look half as interesting fully clothed and in person), and several vendors selling Playboy and a few more explicit magazines and videos in close proximity to non-adult material. As a rule, the adult material is well marked in separate boxes, which vigilant parents can easily keep their children from viewing. Many parents do not have a problem with their children and teenagers being exposed to seminude images, and those who do can certainly engage in a bit of parenting to keep their children out of those boxes or away from the booths that sell them. After all, there is no rule saying one must look through the wares of every vendor.

And as far as the presence of Playmates goes, every con we have attended that had Playmates advertised that fact heavily in all its promotional material, and it is rather difficult to purchase tickets without knowing if one or more might be there. It is not as if parents get their wristbands and suddenly find out that there are women there that make their living by selling photographs of themselves in various stages of undress.

Those who are not actively trying to be offended can get through cons by choosing to not spend time at the vendor and guest booths with adult material. Those who are might do better to choose not to attend at all and leave us our weekend of fun.

Agreed — especially with the line about organizations that exist to be offended. I think we sometimes don't pay attention to how much of our national dialogue is driven by sheer opportunism. A lot of us have a tendency to take viewpoints at face value and to debate them on that basis. One of the reasons I stopped listening to Talk Radio is that I heard one too many hysterical people of whom I thought, "That person would not care about that issue — or at least, not care that much — if they weren't on the radio with a need to keep it interesting." I don't mean they're always lying. I mean, I'm sure a lot of the authors of Clinton-hating books really do hate the Clintons. I just think they wouldn't hate them so much, or find so many reasons to, if Clinton-hating had not brought them fame and fortune. Mr. Bush seems to slowly be developing a parallel industry of folks whose incomes seem to hinge on being outraged.

The folks going "Shame, shame" towards comic conventions are trying to drum up a controversy, at least in part because that's their business. The cry that someone is forcing smut on our children is almost too easy for the crusaders to resist. Certainly, a lot of the Werthamesque persecutions of the fifties, as well as the occasional busting of comic shops these days, was/is based on the Easy Target principle. At the same time, I think the stores and convention owners need to recognize that to the extent these campaigns work at all, they work because they tap into a real concern out there. Some parents are flustered by how often sexual imagery is unavoidable; how their children see it and ask about it — or perhaps worse, see it and don't ask about it. Either way, it's an issue, and one that can be successfully exploited by those with a reason to do so.

A couple of folks wrote to me to say, "Playboy Playmates have no place at a comic convention. They have nothing to do with comics." I think that's also an unrealistic way to view the situation. The day of the pure comic convention is pretty much behind us. As anyone who's been to a Comic-Con International in San Diego can attest, the word "comics" has come to represent a certain energized concept of art and storytelling in an array of media — film, television, animation, gaming, etc. It no longer has to be printed on newsprint to be "comics" — a concept, by the way, that Jack Kirby was predicting in 1970. TV stars are flocking to comic conventions to sell autographed photos. Movie studios are engaging publicists who'll specialize in promoting their wares at comic conventions. The Playmates and porn stars can make money at them so they've become a part of comic conventions. That is the new reality, and convention organizers are going to have to deal with the zoning problems it creates. It may mean carving up the exhibitor space politely but firmly, designating certain portions as okay for the tots. It may mean going further to educate the public that a "comic book convention" just might have adult film stars lurking about. I agree with Janet that parents have to be pretty dumb to not know that kind of thing may be there, but dumb people do a lot to keep these so-called "pro-family" groups solvent. If convention owners and book store proprietors would be a little more attentive to this issue, they might not seem like such Easy Targets.