It was announced today that Comic-Con is extending its contract with the San Diego Convention Center another year — through 2016. I still think it's going to be there a lot longer than that.
The same folks who bring you Comic-Con will be bringing you WonderCon, again in Anaheim on March 29-31 next year. They have thus far been unable to secure dates to have another WonderCon in San Francisco but I'm told they might soon secure a slot to have one there late in 2013. We should know about that shortly. I hope WonderCon can get back to that city where Tony Bennett left his heart because I really enjoyed those trips up there — for the city as much as for that con.
I'll be spending all day on a script, trying to not think much about Hurricane Sandy or the election. I can't do anything about either of those things and they both depress me.
I feel sorry for my friends — or anyone — in the path of "Frankenstorm." I expect most folks will be fine but to be evacuated from your home or to sit and wait in it for this monster to plow through must be so unsettling and upsetting. The sheer thought upsets me and I'm sitting here, about as far from Sandy as you could be and still be in the continental United States.
I sometimes wish our country was as concerned with protecting us from natural disasters as it is from possible foreign invasion. Maybe some of that money we're spending to defend ourselves from the Soviet Union could be put to better use prepping for things like Sandy and being ready to rebuild as necessary after the destruction caused by him or her. (I just realized I don't know if Sandy is named to be male or named to be female. Are we talking Sandy Koufax here or Sandy Duncan? Neither's that appropriate for something this scary. I can imagine people who'd refuse to evacuate for Hurricane Sandy who'd commence frantic packing if told they were in the path of Hurricane Brutus or Hurricane Hulk.)
(I just checked and Sandy is female as in Sandy Duncan. They alternate genders and the storm before her was Hurricane Rafael and the one after is Hurricane Tony. Hurricane Tony is probably going to be a hurricane that drops by, tells you you've got a nice place here and says, "We wouldn't want anything to happen to it now, would we?")
It's tempting to play politics with this thing…and indeed, we already have the obligatory Public Scold telling us Sandy is God's way of punishing us for Gay Rights. Hey, maybe it's His way of reminding us we need to do something about Climate Change. That would at least be more or less On Topic. And one could argue convincingly, I suppose, that it's the ideal time to dredge up the clip of Mitt Romney insisting we get rid of FEMA and let this kind of thing be handled by the states or, better still, the kind of private enterprise that firms like Bain Capital could manipulate. I just don't have the stomach for that debate at the moment. I'd hate to think anyone was sitting, hoping FEMA will botch things as badly as it did Katrina, so that a case could be made against another federal agency.
Anyway, I have to put all this stuff out of my mind today and I'm kind of posting this so I can stop thinking about it. Depending on the topic, blogs can be handy for that kind of thing. But to all who are having their lives wrenched by Sandy, know that you have a lot of folks outside its path who are hoping for your best possible outcome. That may not help much when your roof is leaking or your block is flooding but it's about all we can do right now. Wish we could do more…a lot more.
The New York Timesendorsement of Barack Obama is a well-written argument for a second term. Those of you who are supporting Obama will want to read it to be reminded why. Those of you who are not supporting him may want to read it to understand the thinking of those of us who are.
A note of reminder to those of you watching the polls closely: When pollsters brag about how accurate they were in previous elections — or when someone says, "This pollster was on the money last time so he's probably right this time" — they're comparing the final predictions by the pollster to what happened on Election Day. They're not evaluating in any way how correct that pollster was in what he said two months before the election, two weeks before or usually even two days before. They can't. No one will ever know how precise those predictions were. At most, you can say how much they matched what other pollsters said at that point.
I can say right this minute that all the pollsters are wrong — that Roseanne Barr is going to win 344 electoral votes — and no one can prove I'm wrong. Maybe if the election were held today, she would. And then November 5, my polling "detects" a massive switch to Obama or Romney — one of them winning by two points — and I'm back in the running. I might even wind up being the most accurate pollster of all.
Collectively, when properly chosen and averaged, the major pollsters usually chart a stable trendline to Election Day…though surprises are always possible, especially when you forget that there is a margin of error in all these polls. If you're two points ahead of me in a poll with a two point margin of error and I win, that should not be a shocker. It isn't even much evidence that the poll was wrong.
One other thing about polls. A friend of mine who used to be part of the Washington press corps once told me you should always ignore anything having to do with a campaign's "internal polling," meaning the polls the candidates themselves do and sometimes cite or leak. For one thing, he said, they're usually lies. A pundit or reporter who claims to have seen internal polls may very well be lying or the source which told him of the poll may well have been lying to him. At best, according to my friend, the campaign did eight internal polls, six were bad news and two were good, then they circulate only the two good ones, omitting any real data on how the polls were conducted.
At this moment, despite some claims of "Mittmentum," it looks to me like Obama has a narrow but significant lead in enough states to make it to 270 electoral votes, the popular vote looks closer…and Romney ain't going up. Something, perhaps relating to that big hurricane that's about to hammer the East Coast, will happen that might be a game-changer. I doubt the game will change much but it could.
Whoops! This just in: My polling shows that Roseanne Barr is now poised for a 50 state sweep, winning all the electoral votes this time plus several that were cast for McCain-Palin four years ago. Stunning. This may not hold up until Election Day but you can't prove it ain't true at this moment.
As I've written here before, the best night I've ever spent in a theater was down at the Ahmanson in L.A. and it was October 14, 1971. It was the second night of a revival of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum starring Phil Silvers.
The wonderful Broadway show — book by Bert Shevelove and Larry Gelbart, songs by Stephen Sondheim — ran on Broadway 1962-1964. It was originally written with Silvers more-or-less in mind but he passed on it, opting instead to star in Do-Re-Mi on the Great White Way. Given that Do-Re-Mi was a decent-sized triumph and that Forum went through extensive outta-town rewrites and almost closed for good in Washington, that was probably a wise decision on Phil's part. Forum did, of course, soldier on to become a smash hit with Zero Mostel in the part that Silvers had turned down…and Silvers wound up in the movie version, though playing a supporting role.
In early '71, Silvers was not working. He'd had an emotional collapse…kind of a nervous breakdown, he called it. He was living in a nursing facility when he got the call.
The Ahmanson had a four-play subscription season that fall. Tickets had been sold for four plays and suddenly, the first play had to be replaced due to some legal snag. The folks who had to do the replacing didn't see any other current production anywhere that they could import to fill those weeks so something would have to be concocted almost from scratch. There wasn't time to mount a brand-new play with untested material so, they figured, it pretty much had to be a revival. On top of that, to appease subscribers, it would have to be a revival of great importance with one or more great big stars.
An agent — and I'm not sure it was even Silvers' agent — had a suggestion: Why not revive Forum with the man who was originally going to play Pseudolus playing Pseudolus? That alone gave it importance and one big star. Silvers' presence attracted others, including Nancy Walker to play Domina, Larry Blyden as Hysterium, Lew Parker (Marlo Thomas's father on That Girl) and Carl Ballantine as Marcus Lycus. Ann Jillian was one of the courtesans. So was one of Broadway's great dancers, Charlene Ryan, who is now married to the eminent cartoonist, Sergio Aragonés. Co-author Shevelove directed and Mr. Sondheim wrote some new songs for it.
It sounded like a great show. It also sounded like great therapy for Mr. Silvers — something that might lift him out of his depression and all-consuming anxiety. That was as much the goal of All Concerned as putting on a great show.
Opening night (10/13/71) was flawed. Silvers went blank on his opening lines and some others. Props were in the wrong place. Scenery malfunctioned. The audience sorta/kinda liked it but not enough. The second night was perfect. I was there the second night…second row center. I was sitting close enough to get a few drops of Bilko Perspiration on me and to see that Silvers' glasses had no glass in them. He'd had cataract surgery, no longer needed specs and now wore empty frames so as to look more like Phil Silvers.
We had these wealthy friends, the Zukors. They were big donors to the Ahmanson so they got great seats — six of them. Two Zukors couldn't go that evening so my father and I were invited to take their place. I can't begin to tell you how wonderful that show was. Phil Silvers got a laugh on every single line. And when someone else was talking, he got a laugh reacting to what they were saying. The songs were beautiful. The women were beautiful. The sheer volume of laughter in the Ahmanson was beautiful. It also helped for me that I was then unfamiliar with the show. I'd seen and not absorbed much of the movie…and the movie's fine in its own way if you never saw a good production of the play. If you have, then you're conscious of how much it was diminished on screen. (Gelbart attended the opening and remarked it "was like being hit by a truck that backed up and ran you over again." For a good history of the show, read this.)
I wasn't the only one who loved it that second night at the Ahmanson and others that followed. Word of mouth trumped opening night reviews and the show began to sell out. I tried to get tix to go back but by the time I called, all that were available were the last three rows way on one side. Having been spoiled by those great seats, I decided not to sully my memory of that show by seeing it from afar and I passed. Two days later, I came to my senses and called to purchase bad seats…and they were all gone. If it had been an open-ended engagement, it would have been there a long, long time…but this was a subscription series. Another show was lined up to follow so as popular as it was, Forum had to stop.
It was Larry Blyden who said, "This production is too good to close" and he went out and raised the moola to take it to Broadway…but not immediately. They parked it at the McVicker's in Chicago for a few weeks to break in new cast members (Ms. Walker and a few others didn't go with it) and to wait for The Rothschilds to close so they could have its theater, the Lunt-Fontanne. Early in '72, it did and they moved in…and that alone was remarkable.
Great shows open all over this country and someone says, "Hey, we oughta take this to New York." I'm going to guess that a good 90% of those that make a real effort to make that journey never get there. It would not surprise me if the number was over 99%. And to go from opening night in the point of origin to a previously-unplanned opening night on Broadway in less than six months? Maybe one or two other shows have managed it but not many. Not many at all.
They were supposed to play two weeks of previews there then open but the producers were running out of money. They couldn't afford to wait two weeks for the expected great reviews to bring a stampede to the box office so they cut it back to three previews and opened 3/30/72 instead of ten days later. They got the reviews, they got the stampede…and they got something else. The cut-off date for the Tony Awards that year was April 1. That wasn't why they opened early but it had the happy result of making their show eligible for the Tony Awards that year instead of the following year. Just a few weeks later on April 23, Forum won three: One for Shevelove, one for Blyden, one for Silvers.
Silvers was ecstatic. He got up that year at the ceremony, forgot he was on live TV and went on and on about Forum and about Larry Blyden dragging the show against all odds to Broadway. He was very funny and while he may have ticked off the producers of the telecast, he delighted the producers of his own show, one of whom was Blyden. It made for a great, long infomercial for their production and brought another, larger stampede to the box office.
A great triumph? The end of Silvers' depression? For a time, yes. Then in August came tragedy. He had a stroke.
The understudy (an unknown) played to mostly-empty houses while the producers scrambled to find another comedy superstar to step into the role. Several biggies wanted to do it but none could get free from other commitments in time. The best anyone could come up with was Tom Poston, who learned the part in a hurry but failed to attract theatergoers. The show closed.
Silvers recovered somewhat from his stroke. He was never quite the same again but by January of '74, he was the same enough to go to England (where Sgt. Bilko reruns were still huge) and do a limited run of Forum over there. Which brings us to our video clip. It's an interview he gave then on the set of what I believe was the last time he trod the boards. I lunched with him a few years later and his speech was thicker and he was having trouble walking. I said something about how I wished I'd gone to New York to see him there. He thought I was referring to London and said (approximately), "I'm glad you didn't. It was a personal triumph that I was able to get through it at all but that was about it." He told me that when I saw that second night at the Ahmanson, I saw him and that show at its absolute best. I find that very easy to believe…
Over at the American Conservative, Daniel Larison discusses Mitt Romney's position on Iraq, which is the same as John McCain's and George W. Bush's. They all think, and Romney's advisors, all think that we should have stayed in Iraq. Someone once described McCain's stance as follows: "We should stay there until it's absolutely not necessary…and then we should stay there indefinitely after that."
John Avlon surveys the huge library out there of hysterical anti-Obama books. Wanna know why our civil discourse in this country is so uncivil? That's it right there: There's money in writing that Obama is a Socialist Muslim who will leave America looking like something out of The Omega Man. And I'm just cynical enough to suspect that many of the people writing those books don't even believe deep down what they're writing…
…or that they do mainly because it's a lucrative belief. Years ago, a noted professional wrestler told me of an odd thing that happened in his line of work. The scenario-writers in what was then the W.W.F. decided that his ring character should be mortal enemies with a certain other wrestler. So the two men, who had been casual friends off-stage, went out and tried to kill each other in the ring and in the pre- and post-match interviews and other public appearances. The wrestler told me — and this isn't a direct quote but it's close…
Night after night, I'd go out and tell the audiences and the camera of my loathing for this guy. Then I'd get in the ring and try to bash his brains in…and it made me very popular. The whole routine got my contract renewed at a higher price so I was making money off it and everyone was cheering me for beating up on this guy. Beating him up and hating him was good for my career so I started to really hate him. It was just easier than feeling like a big hypocrite and it made my act better.
And what is politics these days if not Wrestlemania with more clothing?
This is two of my favorite people yakkin' for a very funny hour, one that is well worth seventy minutes of your life. Rob Paulsen is an Emmy-winning actor for cartoons, best known as Pinky of Pinky and the Brain. He was also one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and is now another of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. He does an almost-weekly podcast called Talkin Toons where each week, he chats with one of his peers. One such talented guest is Fred Tatasciore, the current voice of The Hulk and many other characters. I've worked a lot with both of these men and they're walking, talking proof of my belief that the best thing a Voice Director can do is hire good people, then get the hell outta their way. Listen in as Rob interviews Fred about his career and you'll get a good sense of why I love working with these guys. And why the stuff winds up sounding so good…
Conan O'Brien's show sent Triumph the Insult Comic Dog to the final presidential debate to make trouble. It's wonderful how because he has a hand puppet and a camera crew, Bob Smigel has access and a certain amount of credibility to be in that room. I wonder how much he'd be tolerated without the puppet.
Have to admit that I'd largely forgotten that Conan was still on the air. When he went on TBS, I had my TiVo take a season pass to his program but they piled up on it unwatched. The ones I did get around to viewing didn't interest me nor did his guest list most nights. I deleted about 40 episodes I never saw, canceled the season pass and that was it for me and Conan. There was a time back in his NBC days I never missed him.
In the clip below, he has a bad spray tan and his hair in cornrows. This was the payoff for a deal he made with viewers: Give enough money to the Autism Programs and I'll host the show that way one night…
The Rolling Stone interview of Barack Obama. His comments on Ayn Rand are of particular interest. I'm not surprised he feels that way; just that he said it that way.
Jonathan Chait on the damage that would be done by the Paul Ryan budget. And I'm surprised we don't hear more quoting of the line from economist Robert Greenstein; that Ryan's plan will "produce the largest redistribution of income from the bottom to the top in modern U.S. history." Is it that the non-rich folks who back Romney-Ryan…
…are completely unaware of the assertion that Ryan's budget would do this?
…are aware but don't believe that assertion is accurate?
…believe it would do that and believe this kind of "redistribution" is a good thing? Or…
…just want to get rid of Obama so badly they'll allow this kind of thing to happen?
I suspect it's a combination of the first two with maybe a smidgen of the last one.
