Monthly Archives: January 2009

A couple of folks wrote to ask what else I remembered about going to the audience testing for I Dream of Jeannie and Camp Runamuck. As I recall, it was early in 1965, several weeks before either was announced as a series, so our reaction may have been a factor in them landing on the NBC fall schedule. I'm pretty sure both pilots that were shown to us that afternoon were longer than what aired the following September and different in a number of ways.

The venue for the testing was a place called Preview House up on Sunset Boulevard, a few blocks east of Fairfax. I went with a friend of mine named Steve Hopkins and we had to wait in line for quite a bit. Through some confusion, we were actually a bit too old to be there — the testing was of kids 12 and under, and we were thirteen, but they let us in. We were shown to seats equipped with little handheld dials on cords. You could turn the dial all the way to the left to indicate you didn't like what you were seeing or rotate it to the right to show approval. Steve and I took our assignments seriously but a lot of boys and girls around us seemed to be just randomly spinning the thing because it was fun. As I recall, the place held around 200 of us.

A gentleman came out and talked a while, making it sound like the entire future of commercial broadcast television was in our hot little hands. Then he taught us how to use our dials and showed us a Mr. Magoo cartoon. I'm not sure if the man said this or if I read it somewhere later but the idea was that the Magoo film was the "control." It was shown at every Preview House screening and our responses to it would be measured against the responses of other test audiences to see how we weighed in against them. When we were asked if we had any questions, Steve wanted to know if our responses were individually recorded. Did they register that the person in Seat A-7 liked this or that? Or did they just record the responses of the audience as a whole? The host said he couldn't get into technical things like that and so we never found out. I might have felt a lot less self-conscious if I'd known.

Questionnaires were then passed out. We'd been promised that there'd be a drawing later for prizes and we were now asked to decide which items we'd select if we were the lucky ones. For instance, someone was going to win a case of cookies. In the booklet were photos of about ten popular brands of cookies and you had to check off which kind you'd like if you won. You then had to pick which candy bar you'd want if you won the case of candy bars and which kind of cereal you'd want if you won the case of cereal and so on. It seemed rather odd to me to have everyone fill out their choices this way. Why couldn't they do the drawing and then ask just the winner which brand of soft drink he or she wanted? Hmm…

After we all filled out the forms and passed them in, we were shown the Camp Runamuck pilot, which we kinda liked. It took place at a summer camp where the counselors were more childish than the youthful campers, and there was a lot of physical comedy and food fighting. I remember thinking that it was copied from the Disney movie, The Parent Trap, even to the point of having the same actor (Frank DeVol) play the camp supervisor. As I later learned, self-plagiarism was at work. The Parent Trap was written and directed by a man named David Swift…and David Swift was also the creator of Camp Runamuck. (Frank DeVol, by the way, was replaced when the series debuted the following fall. I hope my clumsy dialing wasn't the reason.)

We filled out some forms about how we liked what we'd seen, then it came time for the second pilot, which was preceded by several commercials — one for cookies, one for candy bars, one for cereal and so on. Then came the I Dream of Jeannie pilot, which we liked a lot. I darn near broke the dial, whirling it clockwise every time Barbara Eden was on the screen. Forms were passed out for our comments on Jeannie, and if there'd been a place I could have written something in, I'd have been the first person to ever demand they show Barbara Eden's navel.

As these packets were collected, someone called our host away and informed him of some dire news which he then passed on to us. Apparently, there was a problem with those questionnaires we'd filled out earlier — the ones where we picked the kind of cookie we'd want if we won the case of cookies, the kind of candy bar we'd want if we won the case of candy bars, etc. "We accidentally gave some of you the wrong questionnaire so just to be fair, we're going to ask you all to fill them out again!" New forms were passed out and Steve and I both noted that in each category, one possible selection was a product which had been in one of those commercials we'd seen and…

Hey, you don't suppose it was all a test to see if those commercials had caused us to change our minds, do you? Naah, they couldn't have been that sneaky.

That was about it. We were told that if we won the prizes, we'd be notified…and of course, we weren't. Given how sneaky these people were about getting us to fill out the prize form a second time, I'm skeptical that anyone got a case of anything. The host thanked us for coming and out we went. I suppose we should have felt somewhat exploited but it was kind of cool. The next week at school, we could tell our classmates that NBC had tested its new shows on us…and of course, we made it sound like the Head of Programming had called us into his offices and said, "Mark…Steve…I value your judgment so much that I'm going to let you program Friday night at 7:30!" Soon after, when Camp Runamuck and I Dream of Jeannie were announced, we could flaunt that we'd seen them, whereas the commoners had to wait 'til September. (Runamuck was a quick flop but managed to last all of one season. Jeannie was a hit for five years.)

Whatever "specialness" we'd felt at being a part of a select testing audience pretty much evaporated over the next year or so. Preview House got very active, I guess, because everywhere you went in L.A., there were teenagers handing out passes to go there and watch pilots and win valuable prizes. I declined at least one a week.

A friend of mine went once and reported back that he'd seen the pilot for a Batman TV show starring someone named Adam West. He'd also seen the same Mr. Magoo cartoon plus some pilot that never made it to series, and they'd done the same stunt about redoing the questionnaires that told them which prizes you wanted if you won the drawing, which I still don't think anyone ever did. I don't know how much the networks paid them to run this operation but I'll bet it was enough that they could have afforded to send someone a case of cereal once in a while. If anyone who was ever involved with Preview House reads this, I still want Cheerios.

People today are getting upset about this…

Impeached Gov. Blagojevich, on the first leg of his media blitz timed to the start of his impeachment trial, in an NBC interview broadcast on The Today Show Sunday compared himself to human rights heroes Nelson Mandela, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gahdhi.

I think it's a perfectly apt comparison. None of those other people are going to be the Governor of Illinois next month, either.

There will be a memorial celebration of Forrest J Ackerman on March 8 at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood. More details will be announced later but if you were a friend or fan, you might want to save the date.

Jim Frank writes to ask…

Over on Ken Levine's blog, someone asked him about the value of testing for TV shows. I assume they mean when the network shows a pilot to groups of viewers and tests their responses. I was wondering if you had any opinions about it.

Yeah, I think it's mainly done to protect network execs from taking the responsibility for decisions. They do it because it may later prove useful to say, "Don't blame me. It tested well." But in certain circumstances, it may have its value. Many years ago, there was an NBC series called Bracken's World…which, by the way, I'd love to see again. It was pure soap opera and not always in a good way, but I recall it as one of those "guilty pleasure" television joys. It was set in a movie studio and one of the big story gimmicks for the first season was that no one ever saw Mr. Bracken, the guy who ran the place. He was a faceless voice on a speakerphone.

I guess the idea was that this made him seem more mysterious and powerful, and made the people who labored under him seem more like pawns. Whatever the intent, testing indicated that it wasn't working; that audiences either didn't notice they never saw Bracken or felt like they were being sold The Danny Thomas Show but Danny Thomas wasn't showing up for work. If you were producing the program, I would think that would be very useful information to have…kind of like a comedian hearing an audience not laugh at a joke he thought was hilarious. In this case, the producers of Bracken's World decided to go ahead and show Bracken for the second season and they hired Leslie Nielsen. If they'd let him bring along his fart machine and be himself, the series might have lasted into Season Three and beyond.

There have also been times that testing indicated that audiences didn't "get" some series with a complex premise. And come to think of it, there's another good use for testing. Sometimes, it validates what you believe. Years ago, I developed a cartoon series for Disney called The Wuzzles. I liked most of how it came out but there was a character in it named Rhinokey whose voice I thought was grating and wrong. I argued for changing it and I lost.

Near the end of the first season, in an attempt to try and save a show that was probably going to be cancelled, they did testing on it and the test audiences were nearly unanimous in their dislike of Rhinokey. It didn't save the show — it was riding too low in the Nielsens by then — but I got a nice "I told you so" out of it.

The trouble with most testing is that people use it as a substitute for thinking. The Mary Tyler Moore Show famously tested as a surefire bomb, and they especially hated Mr. Grant. We are all fortunate that testing was ignored that time. Testing is also sometimes uselessly ambiguous. I was actually in the test audience, many moons ago, for the pilot of I Dream of Jeannie, the show with Barbara Eden and Larry Hagman. (It was a double-feature test session. We were also shown the pilot for another sitcom which soon became a series but not for long…Camp Runamuck.)

On Jeannie, the villain was a man named Dr. Bellows. We were asked, "Do you like Dr. Bellows?" and I didn't know how to answer. He was the villain. We weren't supposed to like him. If I thought he was a valuable part of the show, was I supposed to answer, "Yes, I like Dr. Bellows, he's a great villain" or "No, I don't like Dr. Bellows, he's a great villain"? There was no spot on the questionnaire to respond with anything but a yes or no.

I went to a few other test sessions over the years but they always seemed like a squandering of time. When I got into television, a network exec told me, "The trouble with those things is that the people who are willing to go in and do them are exactly the kind of people advertisers aren't interested in reaching. They're people with nothing to do all day or who have so little money that they'll waste three hours in the hope of taking home a five dollar prize." For a long time, CBS drew test audiences from L.A.'s famed Farmers Market tourist attraction, where I can often be found. I always declined the folks who approached to invite me to hike over to CBS (right next door) to "preview an exciting new television series and maybe win valuable prizes." I even declined once when it was a pilot I'd worked on…in that case, not because I thought it would be a waste of an afternoon but because I was afraid they'd catch me.

We are dismayed at the news out of New York this morning: MAD Magazine — the most successful humor publication in the history of mankind if you don't count The Washington Post — is downsizing. Its frequency of publication is being slashed from monthly to quarterly and all its ancillary publications, like MAD for Kids and the reprint books — are being axed. There is or will be a corresponding cut in its staff.

I am a devout MAD fan, having followed it through good times and bad. I have a complete collection. I've published a book on the history of the magazine and have interviewed just about everyone who ever was a part of it. I've written a few articles for the publication. And you see that painting up above? It's from the cover of MAD #46 and the Kelly Freas original to that painting hangs on one of my walls downstairs.

That 1959 cover was a joke but the new cutbacks aren't so funny. Which is a shame because lately, the magazine has been. Its current editor, John Ficarra, and his crew have kept the old tradition but made it relevant to today with sharp writing. (John is being quoted today as saying, "The feedback we've gotten from readers is that only every third issue of MAD is funny, so we've decided to just publish those.") The only thing really wrong with the magazine is that, perhaps unavoidably, it's a magazine.

Being a lover of its heritage, I'd be the first to trash Ficarra if the current MAD was unworthy of its name. It absolutely is not. But this kind of decline is very common in the periodical business. Playboy, this year, will only publish eleven issues and it isn't because the public is losing its interest in gorgeous nude women. Even before we all began living on the Internet and doing 90% of our reading there, magazines were on the way out. And since everyone got a computer, it's only become worse and worse. MAD has evolved to survive, adding color and advertising when that was necessary…but it can't escape the fact that people just don't read things on paper these days.

MAD will not go away. It's too valuable a brand name to ever disappear. (National Lampoon is still around. It just hasn't been a magazine since around 1988.) Today's announcement probably translates as follows: "We need to keep the name alive and to keep key staffers and contributors in the family. But it's losing money and we're going to scale it back and minimize those losses while we figure out what to do with it." Its new configuration is not a long-range plan…and maybe that long-range plan, whenever they arrive at it, will restore MAD to its former glory in some venue.

In the meantime, it's a shame. One of the best things about the magazine lately has been its topical humor, especially of a political nature. Being quarterly will kill most of that. Some of its best people (i.e., "The Usual Gang of Idiots") will probably go elsewhere, which will further wound it. I don't know what they can do with it but I hope they do it soon.

There are damp cats on my back step, staring at me like it's my fault it's raining.

Back in this posting, I talked about how my Aunt Dot used to go to the market and, as she shopped, nibble on items for which she had yet to pay. I asked how customary or acceptable this was and I got a lot of responses. Here are a number of them, starting with this from Alex Stroup…

I don't know if it is a new thing, though I knew several kids in college who would regularly do the thing of eating something and then hiding the packaging in the store and never paying for it. Not surprisingly, one of them was the same guy we discovered would generate an excuse to go back into the restaurant after a group dinner so he could steal the tip.

When I was a kid it was pretty standard to go ahead and open something while shopping (usually something to drink, but sometimes food) and then pay for it on the way out. That said, our grocery stores were independently owned neighborhood stores (though still the size of a smaller Safeway, we're not talking corner convenience stores) where the staff pretty much knew everybody who shopped there regularly. Maybe it is a habit that doesn't survive the transition to mega-corporate grocery stores very well.

Though a couple months ago, I was shopping (in Safeway) and was just suddenly overwhelmed with extreme thirst and so for the first time since I was a kid opened something – a bottle of water – and drank it on the spot paying for it on my way out. I felt like quite the rebel.

This one is from Keith Enright…

Just read your article about eating while shopping and I agree that it's always made me uncomfortable to see people doing that. However, here in the Twin Cities, there is a grocery chain (Rainbow Foods) where the carts actually have drink holders right in front of the push handle and they have signs encouraging you to enjoy a beverage while you shop and pay for it when you are at the registers. I've done it many times there, but still nowhere else!

Nathan Phillips sent this…

I am an ex-grocery store employee (surely one of many you've heard from by now) and the behavior you mentioned recently is very common among (frankly) the less enjoyable and polite customers, especially with beverages and fresh items like pastries. I worked in the deli and regularly saw folks downing sodas and such. Nearly all of them would hand the empty can (or what have you) to the cashier and pay for it at the end of their session, but once in a while our security person would catch a sly character consuming a donut or something and the customer would be confronted at the line and politely told something like "My dear sir/madam, you've forgotten to pay for your donut/muffin/cupcake/cookie, I'm sure it was an honest mistake" and the embarrassed shopper, not having known Big Brother was watching, would of course pay up, the wrapper invariably having mysteriously appeared in the patron's coat pocket or a nearby wastebasket.

The worst incident I ever saw of this sort, and the reason I now write to you, involved a loudmouthed middle-aged woman who liked to barrel around the store noisily munching on chips. One particular evening she spied some crab dip in the seafood department and snatched it up to supplement her usual on-the-go meal. One bite later, she appeared in front of the deli counter with a disgusted look on her face and practically threw the open tub of dip at me, a sizable chunk missing off the top. "I don't like this," she snarled matter-of-factly, "so I'm not going to pay for it." I just stood there kind of dumbfounded and she must have noticed I was a bit put off by her behavior because she felt the need to add "It's terrible, honey, honestly" before disappearing down another aisle.

My mother most definitely never taught manners of that kind, and I'm sure your Aunt Dot didn't either.

No, she sure didn't. This next one is from a reader who asked to remain anonymous…

We have a lot of problems with that in the store I work in. There are people who eat things while they're in the store and then don't pay for them. The ones who do what your aunt did make it harder for us to police the situation and identify the ones who don't pay.

There are also people who open a bag of crackers, eat a few and then decide they don't like them and they ditch the bag somewhere in the store. Of course, we have to throw it away then. Then there are the people who put a bunch of grapes in their cart and snack on them as they shop. By the time they get to the checkout counter and we weigh the grapes, they're a lot cheaper. A lot of people do this and don't realize what they're doing.

The other problem that is related happens at least once a day. Someone walks around the store drinking a Coke or a Pepsi or a bottle of water and then when they get to the checkout, they say "Don't charge me for this. I bought it next door and brought it in with me." We have to go along with that but how are we supposed to know? People do this a lot and it just puts us in an awkward position.

And here's another message from someone who shall go nameless. He brings up another aspect of this…

You make good points about the subject of noshing on food while shopping. I used to never do it, and all throughout my life, I would see opened packages of food tucked into the backs of shelves, obviously from those who wanted to eat something without paying for it.

One day I went into my Walmart Supercenter, and I was starving. One of those weird days where a fat man forgot to eat all day, and his energy plummeted suddenly 15 minutes after the grocery cart started to be filled. I knew something sweet would give me a temporary boost, but I didn't want to grab a single candy bar and open that. First off, the single candy bars were way upfront at the checkout counters, and I was trying not to make it look like I was trying to steal something. I grabbed a package of 6 packaged Little Debbie treats, and took small bites until my burgeoning headache and dizziness subsided.

The concerned young lady who asked your Aunt Dot not to munch on anything was at the very least concerned about the perception of things. I try to be aware of these things, too. I've had a terribly embarrassing experience where someone thought I was stealing something from their store. Beware being a heavy man pulling up your pants in a store, because someone who sees you at the wrong angle might believe you're stuffing something into those pants to avoid the checkout register. How fun, explaining that you didn't shoplift, you were just adjusting yourself.

I wish I were as 'black and white' about this subject. I'd rather never do it, and I mostly don't. But depending on the store I'm in, I'll break out into a heavy sweat. When that happens, I usually get a package of picnic napkins and use them to dry myself, so as not to look like I'm dying. I just make sure I do everything right out in the open, not hiding anything. When I get to the checkout counter, I tell the checker that I opened this package or that, and I tell them why.

My standard is not to do this thing in stores, unless it's necessary. I've seen people be brazen enough to grab a handful of grapes and eat them as they shop, and that's obviously stealing. There's no way to accurately tell how many grapes were taken, so the store's poop-out-of-luck.

I probably shouldn't be doing it this way, but I don't see myself changing.

I received about thirty other e-mails with no clear consensus. Store employees said it caused them problems but that in some stores, it was tolerated and perhaps even encouraged. And I guess that kinda answers my question. There's no universal custom or policy. Even knowing that, I'm still uncomfortable doing it.

Things are just getting worse and worse for the Screen Actors Guild. That big around-the-clock strategy meeting ended without a firm plan of action and divisions within the union are even deeper than ever before. Chief Negotiator Doug Allen was not fired, as many demanded, but he's clearly not the guy to bind things back together. His latest idea is a terrible one. He is now proposing that SAG put the producers' last offer to a vote of the entire membership. This is the offer that the SAG negotiators and Board of Directors turned down months ago as utterly unacceptable. Such a vote would probably make a bad situation worse. Here's why.

When a union negotiates with management, each side has demands they do not seriously expect will be in the final deal…things they ask for just so they can trade them off in the late stages of negotiation. The AMPTP is still demanding some things they're prepared to drop…and so is SAG. Call them bargaining chips…and of course, the longer these things go, the more once-serious demands turn into bargaining chips. To cite one biggie: SAG, right now, is probably going to have to abandon its quest for a substantial increase in DVD fees.

To vote on the last AMPTP offer is to vote on an offer with all the producers' bargaining chips still in place. To accept it is for SAG to give up all its bargaining chips without getting anything in return.

Obviously, it would be dreadful for the SAG rank-and-file to vote to do that. But rejecting it would also probably be disaster because it wouldn't get defeated by more than 80% of the membership, which is about what it would take to put the AMPTP on the defensive and change the game.

The members of SAG are weary, frustrated, angry, scared, divided and — most of all, worst of all — they don't see any effective stewardship. Those who side with Mr. Allen and SAG President Alan Rosenberg (and many do) question whether they can lead a union where so many members are circulating petitions demanding their ouster. It's one thing to want to charge into battle…quite another to believe there's some workable path to victory out there. SAG has splintered and no one in either faction looks at their leaders and sees someone with the power and organization to command a long war.

That's kind of what happened when the Writers Guild did its spectacular belly-flop in 1985. A lot of members thought the offer was abominable. It was…though I don't think any of us realized at the time how abominable. We thought it was a turd about the size of Kansas and it turned out to be more like the Louisiana Purchase. Even at Kansas-sized level, we were quite prepared to storm the beaches and take no prisoners…if (huge IF) we had the leadership in place to do that. We didn't.

Our guild's board and Executive Director (who was also our Chief Negotiator) were divided and so was the membership. A hefty-sized minority thought the deal was fine, the battle was too treacherous and we should take what we could get without a struggle. The majority wanted to fight but it wasn't 80+% of the Guild. The vote to strike was tepid — enough to strike but not enough to scare the other side. And even those us who voted to walk were arguing about which direction. "We're in no shape to fight this," a lot of my friends said as they voted for a contract they thought was lousy. Sometimes, you have to cut your losses and get out with your BVDs intact.

So if SAG votes on that last contract offer, they're screwed either way like it says in my subject line. If they accept it, they get the worst possible deal they could get in their present situation…a deal they could have gotten last June, which makes the last six months of squabbling and uncertainly look pointless and self-destructive.

But then if they reject it, they expose a bottom line. It would fail by ten points (if that many) and then the AMPTP could say, "Fine…we can wait two weeks, drop one minor bargaining chip and then announce that SAG has 30 days to accept it or we're pulling it off the table. That will win over enough people to make it pass." And if they thought that, they'd probably be right. By that point, enough SAG members would be worried about the utter destruction of their union that they'd rush to grab it.

Okay, so it's a lose/lose situation to vote on that offer. What if they don't? What happens then, Mr. Wizard? The other option is the strike authorization vote: Give the negotiators the power to call a work stoppage if the AMPTP refuses to improve the proposal. And the reason that's not a good option is that the AMPTP is no longer afraid of a SAG strike, especially one that would pass by a very narrow margin…if it passed at all. It very well might not; not with the economy circling the plughole and so many members unsure if their leaders could work together long enough to order in lunch. Some are even unsure who those leaders might be next week. (Several SAG blogs are running a "Doug Allen Deathwatch.")

The SAG constitution says that they need a 70% [CORRECTION:] 75% vote to strike. There seems to be enough opposition around that it's questionable they can get that. If they can, they surely can't get much more than that…which puts them in the same situation: Management will know it doesn't have to improve the deal much, if at all, to win the necessary votes. They may even be emboldened enough to not drop the bargaining chips they were once willing to toss.

In the meantime, the clock ticks away. The WGA achieved some amount of clout last year by threatening to make a shambles of the Academy Awards. This year, the ceremony is on February 22, one month from today. So with no SAG vote scheduled, the union has lost that opportunity. AFTRA, which took the producers' crummy offer, is signing contracts for shows which might have been SAG. And with each passing day, the belief that SAG leadership doesn't have it together grows stronger and stronger, as do worries that the whole union may collapse.

As I hope my tone conveys, I'm horrified that it's come to this. I'm not a SAG member but I've been rooting for them all the way and if they ever do strike, I'll be out there on the picket lines with a "WGA Supports SAG" placard. I think their cause is right and that this all represents an immense failure of strategy. Alas, in this world, that's the reason a lot of righteous crusades don't go the distance. Please, please…somebody pull this Guild together and prove me wrong.

Here, thanks to the referral of reader Tim Davis, are some amazing photos of the inauguration as taken from space. If you look carefully, you can make out the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial and Aretha Franklin's hat. (That's a switch on a joke Leno did the other night but it fits.)

Let's catch up on a number of items posted here in the last week or three…

• Remember that gaffe-filled production of A Christmas Carol that I attended? Well, a blog over at the L.A. Times has been covering its aftermath, including reports that due to dreadful box office receipts, many of the folks who worked on the play have not been paid in full. Here's the latest item and if you're really interested, the links in that posting will take you to earlier reports.
• Alan Burnett (thank you, Alan) sent me this link to a longer report on the recent Stephen Sondheim-Frank Rich interview. At least, it's longer than this one to which I linked.
• There seems to be a lot of debate around the 'net regarding Patti LuPone breaking character and stopping a performance of Gypsy because someone was taking photos from the audience. Some say it was unprofessional because it ruined the show for the rest of the theatergoers. I don't know that that's true. It was probably a split decision with some hating it and others thinking, "It's about damn time." You'd probably have to have been there to have a valuable opinion on it but from afar, it doesn't sound awful to me. People are writing, "Patti spoiled the mood because she came across as an arrogant diva." That's kind of what you're supposed to be when you play Momma Rose…
• Lastly: The item about U.S. Airways paying $5000 to each of the passengers on the infamous Flight 1549 brought some notes from folks more cynical than me. They suggested the airline was trying to buy the folks off; to obtain releases in order to avoid lawsuits that might be more costly. Perhaps. But it sure seems smart to me of U.S. Airways to at least make that kind of offer and make it swiftly.

And, oh yes: I just checked and George W. Bush is still the ex-president. I intend to check often, just to make sure.