Monthly Archives: April 2009

Many of you wrote me to say you enjoyed the little tale of the ad-lib that found its way into the Monty Python film, The Life of Brian. If you did — and I should have mentioned this but being an occasional lunkhead, didn't think of it — you'd enjoy a whole book of behind-the-scenes accounts from the making of that great film. My pal Kim "Howard" Johnson, the Python expert I consulted, was there and he kept a diary! It was recently published as Monty Python's Tunisian Holiday and it's one of those must-haves for anyone who cares about Python or even about how funny movies come to be. That's my recommendation. Here's an Amazon link to order one.

Recently here, we discussed the vital issue of who should be included in the exalted list of past Tonight Show hosts. It usually comes down to Steve Allen, Jack Paar, Johnny Carson and Jay Leno, with Conan O'Brien in the On Deck circle.

Which causes some of us to ask: What about Jack Lescoulie and Al "Jazzbeaux" Collins, who hosted the odd version of Tonight that came 'twixt Allen and Paar? What about Joan Rivers, who was Mr. Carson's permanent guest host for a long time? Or Joey Bishop, who wasn't a "permanent guest host" but who sat behind Johnny's desk almost as often as he sat behind his own on The Joey Bishop Show?

And hey, what about one other guy? When Steve Allen hosted Tonight, he did Monday through Friday, five nights a week, no reruns…and the show was an hour and 45 minutes long. In 1956, he added an hour-long Sunday night show to his workload and when that eventually proved to be too much, he turned Tonight over to another host for Monday and Tuesday nights. That host was Ernie Kovacs.

I said in the previous post I wasn't sure how long Kovacs had hosted. Al Quagliata, who operates The Ernie Kovacs Blog, sent me the answer. Kovacs hosted Tonight for two weeks in August of 1955 while Allen was filming The Benny Goodman Story. Then on Monday, October 1 of 1956, Ernie began doing Monday and Tuesdays and he continued through Tuesday, January 22, 1957. This isn't a lot of hosting. At most, it's ten days in '55 and then a stint of 34 days…only it may be less because both Christmas and New Year's Day fell on Tuesdays during that period and they may have taken some nights off.

So you can draw up your own rules here. A lot of Johnny's guest hosts hosted more than 44 episodes. Joey Bishop hosted 177 times. Joan Rivers did 93 and Bob Newhart handled 87. In addition to them and Leno, you have folks like John Davidson, Bill Cosby, Jimmy Dean, McLean Stevenson, David Letterman, Garry Shandling and David Brenner. They all hosted more Tonight Shows than Ernie Kovacs and there are still others. On the other hand, these people were all billed as guest hosts. Kovacs presumably was for his two weeks in '55 but for the other 34 (or less), it was "Tonight starring Ernie Kovacs."

I don't have an answer here. I could make the case that Kovacs belongs on the list because, brief as his stint was, it was his show those nights. The permanent host is "in charge" of his program in a sense that no guest host could be. Or I could flip and make the case that Joey Bishop and perhaps a dozen others hosted Tonight more times than Ernie Kovacs…so if you include him, you gotta include them.

I'm inclined to favor the former for what's probably a bad reason. I really like Ernie Kovacs. Talk about your television pioneers. Moreover, I think people forget what a funny man he was. All the retrospectives seem to focus on the visual gags on his shows, many of which were as much the creation of his writers and tech crew, and many of which were merely a matter of figuring out how to replicate Buster Keaton material in a TV studio. Where Kovacs (to me) soared was when he was just talking as himself or occasionally when he was playing a character. I'd love to see those old Tonight episodes he did, largely because I'm assuming there's a lot of Ernie being Ernie. Al Quagliata informs me that the Paley Center has a few clips from them totalling about a half hour's worth of material. He also writes…

My reason for wanting Ernie added is that he is, as far as I'm concerned, the originator of the TV sketch form that these late night programs (and SNL, SCTV, Uncle Floyd, Monty Python, et al) owe their success to. He was doing these things on TV in Philly before anyone else. He could have cared less about the interview portion as the clips of his tenure on Tonight will attest to (one of the reasons why NBC never made him the regular host after Steve Allen left).

Obviously, Ernie Kovacs deserves massive recognition for his many contributions to early television. I don't know that he originated the TV sketch form…and to the extent he did, that's a separate consideration from whether he qualifies as a host of Tonight in the same sense as Allen, Paar, Carson and Leno. My understanding is that Allen occasionally did sketches on his Tonight.

I'm also under the impression that the reason Kovacs didn't succeed Allen as full-time host is that NBC's execs had arrived at the idea that no one person could sustain Tonight for very long. That was why they turned to a multi-host, magazine format that made it more like Today and less of an entertainment program. Somewhere — darned if I can remember where — I read that when that format bombed, they scurried to restore the one-host entertainment format and inquired as to Ernie's interest or availability. He was by then off shooting a movie and had a contract for another to follow…so they went with Paar.

(And they still didn't think they needed to get back to what Allen and Kovacs were doing. Their original idea was to fill the time slot with three game shows, all hosted by Paar. It was largely because they couldn't pull that together quickly that they went with a talk show format.)

But hey, Ernie Kovacs was one of television's original geniuses. Would that more of his material was out on DVD. It keeps being rumored but never seems to happen. Maybe it would open up that marketplace if we reminded more people of the things he did, including hosting Tonight. So sign me up for that campaign. We can worry later about Jack Lescoulie.

The Orange County Register is conducting an online poll to determine the best "make-out" ride at Disneyland. Make up your own joke about "It's a Small World." At the moment, it's a landslide for "The Haunted Mansion" and I can certainly understand that. Something about the voice of Paul Frees always got me in the mood for hanky-panky.

In a similar vein, Disneyland is denying rumors that they've dismissed actors playing the Jack Sparrow character because women kept flashing them. Yo ho.

Yes, that's Carl Barks, the delightful cartoonist who wrote and drew Donald Duck comic books for years and created much of Donald's supporting cast, including The Beagle Boys, Gyro Gearloose and Uncle Scrooge. This is a photo I took in 1973 on a visit to the home he and his wife Garé then had in Goleta, California. His main preoccupation at the time was doing oil paintings of Donald, Scrooge and the gang…lovely paintings which then sold in the astronomical price range of $500-$1000. He would live to see some of them going for close to six figures. Anyway, he was working on this one at the time. He didn't work on it while we were there but he was nice enough to pretend to be adding brush strokes to it while I snapped some pictures.

Shortly after this visit, I was in the company of two comic collectors I knew. Both were around 30 years of age. Hearing that I'd been visiting Carl, one of them said, "Hey, we have to go up there and meet Barks before he dies." I winced and said I thought that was a crass way of putting it. The other fan replied, "Come on…the guy's old…he's not going to be around for much longer."

This was in 1973. Mr. Barks was 72 years old. As it turned out, he was around much longer. He died in 2000 at the age of 99, thereby outliving both those guys.

Our friend Paul Harris had a great guest on his radio show the other day…Tom Davis, formerly of the comedy team of Franken and Davis. In the early days of Saturday Night Live, no one contributed more than Franken and Davis. Franken's been busy trying to get seated as the junior senator of the great state of Minnesota. Davis has been writing a new book which I've yet to read. Come to think of it, I'm going to post an Amazon link to it and then use it myself to order a copy of 39 Years of Short Term Memory Loss: The Early Days of SNL from Someone Who Was There. And in the meantime, we can all hear Paul interview Tom Davis — it runs about fifteen minutes — over on the Harris Online website.

The great state of Texas.

If you're interested, better hurry. I think he only has one.

Negotiators for the Screen Actors Guild have reached a tentative agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers on a new contract. They've gone months and months of warfare and mudslinging without one and now they have one…probably.

SAG hardliners are already saying they will urge the membership to reject it and SAG softliners (to coin the opposite noun) are saying they could have gotten this deal months ago. Both sides seem to be saying this before they know what's actually in the deal, which will be unveiled before a SAG Board Meeting on Sunday.

It is rumored though that the contract's expiration date is June 30, 2011. If so, that would be a "win" for SAG, though at what cost we don't know. Recently, leaks from within the deliberation were suggesting that the expiration date was the stumbling block; that SAG wanted this date and the AMPTP didn't want them to have it.

6/30/11 would line up SAG's next negotiations with AFTRA's, which would help if those two unions are to patch up their differences and link arms again. It also would allow some coordination with other above-the-line guilds. The current Writers Guild contract expires on May 1, 2011 and the current Directors Guild contract also expires June 30, 2011. So the WGA gets to go first in the next round and interesting alliances are already possible. If SAG is getting the June 30 date, that makes the possibilities even more intriguing.

Beyond that, it's wait-and-see with the SAG contract. I suspect there will be a lot of yelling at what's not in the deal and a concerted effort to vote it down. But I'd be very surprised if it's so bad that it won't pass by a wide margin. It won't be a great deal. The union lost the chance to get one of those when it splintered with AFTRA. But it won't be so egregiously terrible that the members will turn it down.

Earlier this month, my friends Len Wein and Chris Valada lost a pretty good sized chunk of their house and belongings in a fire. They're moving (today, I think) into a rental home for what might be a year while their regular dwelling is rebuilt. Insurance is paying for most of the reconstruction but there are things that just plain weren't covered. One was Len's book collection, most notably his shelves of comic books he's written over the years.

The loss in that category is not primarily financial. Some of Len's comics — like the ones in which he co-created Swamp Thing or Wolverine or Human Target — go these days for hefty bucks but many do not. They're sitting in the bargain boxes at comic shops or in collectors' piles of duplicates. The big problem here is the time it would take to track down all the issues of everything. Len has enough other things to do, just to rearrange his life these days. So some of his friends decided to take that chore off his shoulders.

In that spirit was born The "Let's Rebuild Len Wein's Comic Book Collection" Project. The goal is to…well, you can probably figure out the goal. Go to that page. Read about it. See what you can send. And please spread the word.

I think it would be fine to let Texas secede from the United States. If they want to go, fine. Just as long as they pay their share of the National Debt before they go, let 'em.

It's not that I dislike Texans in any way. Every one I've ever met has been great. I just think it would be kinda fun watching Republicans try to retake the House, Senate or White House without Texas votes. The last Texan to occupy the Oval Office made that difficult. Texas leaving the union would make it darn near impossible.

And while we're at it, could we please do something to piss off Florida?

Another photo from my new stash. This one was taken at the first banquet of the group I co-founded (with Don Rico and Sergio Aragonés), the Comic Art Professional Society. The date on the slide is 1979.

The man on the left is Mike Sekowsky, who drew the early issues of Justice League of America and who handled Wonder Woman during the only period I ever found it readable. Mike did countless other comics of all varieties. He was one of the fastest, most dynamic comic artists of all time and he had a wicked sense of humor. Like many comic artists of his generation, he fell into the niche of drawing the kinds of things that publishers wanted (or thought they wanted), rather than what his muse told him to draw. If he'd listened to her, he might have been a great black humorist in the mold of Charles Addams. Or something.

And on the right, we have Rick Hoberg, another artist I've enjoyed working with and just having as a friend. I worked with Rick when he was just starting out, which was a few years before this picture was taken. It was fun watching him just get better and better.

This dinner was held at the Sportsmen's Lodge, a place in Studio City that recently shut down its formidable banquet facilities. I was in charge of the arrangements and when it came time to decide on an entree, I made the mistake of bringing the menu in to a meeting so everyone could vote on what we'd eat. Believe me…you don't want to ever do this. If you're ever arranging a banquet, just pick something you think most people will like and go with it. You don't want to go through the arguments and debates.

Our wealthier members wanted the most expensive dinner and proclaimed it demeaning to our field to have anything less. Having filet mignon made the statement that we thought cartoonists and comic book artists were worthy of filet mignon. Meanwhile, our poorer members said, in effect, "If you have filet mignon, we won't be able to attend…so you're saying that you don't want us." One member who was allergic to asparagus felt that if we picked that as the side dish, it was our way of saying that all his hard work for the organization was unappreciated. Another member started lecturing everyone on the inhumanity of veal.

On and on it went, way longer than the topic deserved, which should have been in the ten minute range. I don't remember how long it took or what we wound up with but it was a bad compromise. We'd made it to the stage where it was obvious we couldn't please everyone so to keep the peace, we opted for something that pleased no one. It was the first time in my life I was acutely aware that, yes, there is such a thing as Too Much Democracy.