Monthly Archives: January 2013

I lunched yesterday with the infamous Robert J. Elisberg, columnist for the Huffington Post and blogger at his own website. Bob is back from Las Vegas and the Consumer Electronics Show and he has now filed his final report on new technological unveilings there, with a special emphasis on stuff for us writers.

When we got back, I showed Bob a new electronic acquisition in my life: The Belkin @TV. This is a device you hook up to your cable box or DVR (in my case, the latter) and it ports the output of that component to an Internet stream you can access remotely. So I can go on my iPhone, my iPad, my laptop or any computer with a web connection and I can watch whatever's on my TiVo, including the live feed from my satellite dish. I can also program my TiVo remotely. It works rather well if what you're watching on has a good, high-speed Internet connection; less well if the connection ain't as good. I'll write more about it after I've played with it more.

There are times when it seems like the Republicans' main quarrel with Barack Obama goes something like this: "He's an obstructionist! He thinks that just because he has a majority behind him, he's allowed to stop us from getting everything we want!" There are times when those of us who support the president almost wish it was like that; that he didn't keep offering these people compromises. Then again, to many of them a compromise is a loss.

Years ago, I worked for a TV producer who had an odd (to me) way of doing business. If this sounds like I've just jumped to a new topic, wait. Maybe you'll think of some way in which this ties in…

This producer — some nicknamed him "Zardoz" — was constantly negotiating deals with people — actors, staff members, directors, even me. He had a serious-faced lady lawyer who handled the haggling for him. Some called her "The Lawyer Von Papen" in honor of Hitler's chief negotiator. She was murder when it came to arriving at terms with your agent, your lawyer or you. Away from the bargaining table though, she was charming and funny and very honest about the two-faced nature of her life. We even went out a few times and each time, she had a couple of wines too many. One of the perks of not drinking, I've found, is that you remain lucid and able to remember what others say or do while under the influence.

Via the alcohol, I learned she thought her boss was a pretty horrible person. Turned out, she liked him less than I did and I wasn't wild about the guy.

One week, my agent closed a deal with her for my continued services and a night or two later, we went to dinner. She'd been quite rough in the back-and-forth and had asked for a number of odd things. At the last minute, f'rinstance, after they'd finished mud-wrestling over money and settled on the dollar amounts, we had to agree to a clause that said that every script I handed in would be "double-spaced and legible."

I didn't get it. The scripts I'd handed in previously had all been legible. I'm a neat typist and we were just getting into word processing which meant that if a script wasn't double-spaced, you could make it so in under 1.5 seconds. I agreed to that condition and thereafter just ignored it and no one said anything.

When I asked her why every negotiation was so contentious and full of last minute demands from Zardoz, she said — with obvious distaste for what her employer required her to do — "He doesn't think negotiations are about arriving at a deal that works for both sides. He thinks negotiations are where he establishes that you're working for him, not with him."

She said that if she went to Zardoz and said, "I've been talking to Mark Evanier's agent and I think we can get him for $2000," the only question the producer would ask was, "Was that our number or theirs?" In other words, did she (on his behalf) first mention $2000 or did my agent (on my behalf) first mention $2000? If we'd suggested $2000 then the deal could not be for $2000 because the employee doesn't get his demands. He's the employee. He works for what the employer thinks is the right number.

So if the producer had been willing to pay $2500 and we asked for $2000, it was no deal. In that case, he'd offer $1800. The $200 didn't matter much to him. What did was that he had not agreed to my number. I had agreed to his.

It was a very strange but not unique game…and of course, once you understood it, very easy to defeat. My agent and I would decide that X was a fair price for my services. We'd ask for a number that was around 125% of X. Zardoz, via the lawyer lady, would offer X and we'd accept. Done and done. It also helped, my agent said, if he acted like he was unhappy about X and had been outfoxed into taking it. She said, "What we pay you doesn't matter much to him. He just has to prove he's in charge."

Not long after, my agent was making a deal for me with a different producer for something else. He called me with an offer he presumed I'd accept but before he told me its terms, he said, "It was an honorable negotiation."

I asked him what an "honorable negotiation" meant. He said, "It was only about the money."

You wanna know what a recording engineer does? Well, a lot of the time, he does this…

Okay, we're going to take this whole matter of the Pippin commercial clearly into the realm of Way Too Much Information! But that's what blogs are for, right? Andrew Leal sent me this…

I read about the Pippin commercial info on your site, and decided to check using one of the best commercial info sources I've found, as far as from the grey-flannel suit's mouth: the Clio Awards archive. Their entry confirms beyond doubt that the voice is indeed Alexander Scourby. Here are the full credits from the spot as they have it listed, most of which just confirm the info you already have about Ash and LeDonne:

Dance :60 / Pippin
Blain Thompson, New York
Television/Cinema, Best, 1974

Credits: Agency Producer(s): Peter Le Donne • Art Director(s): Morris Robbins • Client Supervisor(s): Stuart Ostrow • Composer(s): Stephen Schwartz • Copywriter(s): Peter Le Donne • Director(s): William Fucci • Editor(s): William Fucci • Performer/Voice: Ben Vereen, Pamela Sousa, Candy Brown, Alexander Scourby • Producer(s): William Fucci • Production Company: Fucci-Stone, New York • Scenic Designer(s): Carman D'Avino • Account Supervisor: Jeffrey Ash

I've found the Clio site to be an incredible resource and some of the revelations have been a surprise (everyone knows Gene Wilder voiced the stomach in the R. O. Blechman Alka-Seltzer spot, but I didn't know that the voices of the psychiatrist and the stomach's "owner" were supplied by Luis Van Rooten, a radio legend who worked on almost every coast at various times, sometimes shifting back and forth from week to week as demand arose, and was also heard in Disney's Cinderella as both the King and the Grand Duke.)

Okay, so that settles it: It was Alexander Scourby doing the voiceover. And if you've never seen the Alka-Seltzer spot Andrew mentions, it's this one. Thanks, Andrew.

I have in my e-mailbox 16 messages from readers of this site telling me with varying degrees of certainty that the voiceover on those Pippin commercials is by Alexander Scourby. I have zero messages suggesting any other name. Make of that what you will. (I shoulda thought of Scourby myself…)

Frank Ferrante, who somehow hasn't been mentioned on this site in a little while, informs me that the Pippin spots were produced by Peter LeDonne and Jeffrey Ash of the advertising agency of Ash/LeDonne. Here's an excerpt from Ash's obituary over on Playbill…

Pippin, the 1972 Bob Fosse-director Stephen Schwartz musical about a wayward prince trying to find himself, was a Blaine-Thompson client. Until then, Broadway producers had not invested much in television advertising, deeming it too expensive, and imagining its viewers were not prospective theatergoers. But with the box office flagging, the show filmed a television spot featuring a dance sequence of star Ben Vereen and two dancers. (The dance was not actually from the show, but a special routine created by Fosse for the commercial.)

"Stuart Ostrow had the guts to try television," Mr. Ash is quoted as saying in "The Anatomy of a Broadway Musical," an upcoming book by Ostrow. "Everyone said people who watch TV wouldn't spend the $9.90 to go to a musical. But we cut out all the newspaper ads and ran the TV ad with Ben Vereen and the girls."

According to Ostrow, in 1973 the fledgling Ash/LeDonne Agency—which was formed by Jeffrey Ash together with Peter LeDonne—set up a shoot in Princeton, New Jersey, to film "The Manson Trio" dance excerpt, starring Ben Vereen, Candy Brown and Pam Sousa. The spot worked. Tickets sales soared, and the show became a hit.

As I understand it, the rationale for not advertising Broadway shows previously went something like this: By the time a show begins having a lot of empty seats that need filling, all the folks in New York who might be interested in seeing it have seen it and you're aiming mainly for the outta-town crowd and tourists. A spot aired on New York local TV is not going to lure in tourists because they don't see it on their local stations when they're planning their New York trips and once they get to town, they don't waste their vacations watching TV. Or something like that. Whatever the rationale, the campaign for Pippin proved it was not valid.

Peter LeDonne, by the way, did the marketing for the show Groucho: A Life in Revue starring Frank Ferrante when it played New York in '86/87 and also was a producer of the West End production in 1987. That's how Frank knows him.

Frank is currently in Amsterdam (!) playing his other character, Caesar, in a show called Palazzo that at least in this video looks very much like Teatro ZinZanni, the show in which he sometimes appears in America. Frank's in this promo with the huge beauty spot on his cheek. He returns to America next month and resumes touring with his uncanny Groucho show. In March, he'll be in Arizona, Ohio, Kentucky and Virginia. Check out his schedule here — or if you're less than a hop, skip or jump from Amsterdam before the end of the month and you can go see him in this…

Someone who goes by the handle of Oswald (and is presumably neither the rabbit nor the lone assassin) writes to ask…

I marvel at the ability you or any professional writer has to sit down at the keyboard and just work, work, work until the script or article is completed. When I'm walking around, I think I could write and I think of many things I would like to write. When I sit down at the keyboard and try it, I get restless and distracted and can only write for about 20 minutes at a time before I have to jump up and go do something else. Needless to say, I can't get much written that I could ever do anything with. Is there a secret to sticking with it for a long stretch of time until you get something finished?

This will sound too glib but the secret is to just do it. You can always find something else you want to do when you could be or should be writing. In fact, the writers I know who get a reputation for missed deadlines and undependability share this common trait: They're all real good at finding something else they have to do, thereby giving them an excuse for not writing.

I write for any number of reasons, starting with the fact that I liked the whole concept and process well enough to make it my life's work. If I'd decided my dream was to work at an Arby's, I wouldn't wake up any morning and think, "Oh no! I'm expected to go in and slice faux roast beef all day!" I'd change professions if I felt like that. So one of the things you have to say to folks in your position, callous as it may seem, is "Hey! Either be a writer or don't! If you don't have the skills or motivation to do it, don't try to do it." There are thousands of professions I don't attempt because I know I could never do them. I sometimes tell people who ask that I became a writer because of all the occupations I could have chosen, that was the one at which I figured I might be the least incompetent.

I also write because I have things I want to buy, food included. And I write because I have things I want to say and I like the satisfaction that comes with packaging them into a format that someone else out there will read or watch. I like those things so much that sitting down here and working on something never feels like a chore or hardship.

That was one of the main things I learned being around the late/great Jack Kirby. Jack had an incredible work ethic. You would not believe the long and intense hours he put into writing and drawing comic books. I looked at him and I more or less thought, "I may never be able to create anything half as memorable as what he does…but it may be possible to work that hard." And his secret, I came to believe, was that he did not view the word "work" as a negative; that he defined it as something he wanted to do for himself as well as for remuneration. If you can't view your work that way, maybe you need to find a trade where you can.

My father hated his profession and couldn't find anything else…and I saw what it did to him, physically and emotionally. Often, he told me how happy he was that I seemed so happy in what I did. It dawned on me what the difference was in our "chosen" professions — or maybe it would be better to say the difference between the one I chose and the one he got himself stuck in. If no one was paying him or he didn't need the money, there's no way he would ever have done any of the things he did in his occupation, which was with the Internal Revenue Service. He would not have gone out and dealt with delinquent taxpayers in his spare time.

On the other hand: If no one was paying me to write, I might be doing something else to make a living but I'd still make time to write. I think that's why it never feels like a job to me. It's just what I do and it's nice that sometimes, checks arrive after I do it.

Great to see that our friend Peter David has recovered enough from his recent stroke that he's now able to blog. He has a lot of therapy to go but it sounds like it's going about as well as it can. Follow his comeback over on his page.

Here from 1975 is a commercial for Bob Fosse's musical, Pippin. This was one of the first times a Broadway show had ever been advertised on TV and it was successful enough that others tried it afterwards…with mixed results.

Scott Marinoff, who often sends me wonderful links to share with you, asked that I poll the house and ask this question: Can anyone identify the announcer doing the voiceover? Write me if you can.

And here's another commercial for the show. I can imagine this one being more successful in driving people to the box office. I can also imagine Fosse saying to the producers, "Let's see if we can get some heterosexuals into the theater." The man is Michael Rupert and the ladies are (I think) Sandahl Bergman and Kathrynann Wright…

A movie shot at Disneyland and Disney World was shown at the Sundance Festival. What's odd about that? Well, for starters, it's a dark, controversial film. And for closers, the Disney people didn't know anything about it. The filmmaker, his crew and his actors went to a park each day, paid admission and shot with small cameras.

But the Disney company knows about it now. If they didn't already, this article in the L.A. Times puts them on notice. Will they try to stop the movie from getting a general release? I would guess that the article doubles or triples the likelihood that they'll set their lawyers to the task.

Feeling pretty good today and I know why: No pressing deadlines. I have work I have to do but nothing that absolutely/positively has to be in tomorrow or Monday.

As a professional-type writer, I fight the constant three-way battle: Getting the work done on time, getting the work done to my satisfaction and getting the work done without staying up all night and screwing up my health and the rest of my life. I'm just coming off an extended period when that was not a battle; more like World War III. Dealing with my mother's illness and passing (of course) made it more difficult. One particular night when she was in the hospital, I ran back and forth, doing son-type things at the hospital, coming back here to write a few pages, running back to the hospital, etc.

I even tried writing at the hospital. At 4 AM one morning, I finished one script that had to be recorded the next day (i.e., six hours later) and I finished it working on my laptop in a small area they graciously cleared for me at the nurse's station. Around the time I typed, "The End," a nurse came by and told me that the doctor who'd asked me to remain "close by" had said it was okay for me to go home. I went home by way of an all-night FedEx-Kinko's, dropping the script off on a flashdrive so it could be Xeroxed for the actors and picked up the next morning by my assistant Darcie as she drove to the recording studio. I actually managed about four hours of sleep that night before I had to go in and direct.

I hate cutting things that close but it's sometimes unavoidable. If you look back at the time stamps on these postings the last few months, you'll see an awful lot that indicate I was here at the computer at 4 AM or 5 AM. This is never because I like to get up early because I never do. Sometimes, I go to bed at two or three with something uncompleted…then lie there for a long stretch, still "writing" in my head until I get up and finish the damn thing. I always sleep great once something (almost anything!) is done.

So I slept well last night and today, I'm finishing up the foreword for a book that's coming soon from the fine folks at Dark Horse Comics — a collection of Hal Foster's Sunday Tarzan pages. I more or less finished it Thursday night but they don't need it 'til Monday so I have the luxury of noodling with it and fiddling and seeing if I can tighten up or improve wording here or there. I also have to finish my end of the last six pages on Part Three of the long-awaited four-issue Groo Vs. Conan mini-series, also from Dark Horse. I dunno when it'll be out but Sergio brought me pages yesterday and I think we'll be done with our end of it in a month or so — no all-night binges necessary, at least on my part. (Sergio, by the way, has his medical problems under control but he has had to cancel his appearance at the WonderCon in Anaheim at the end of March.) I may also have time to whittle away at a pile of e-mails in my "To Be Answered" folder. There are messages in there where folks tell me Obama cannot possibly beat McCain.

This posting is kind of a Note to Myself to try, try, try not to get into those deadline jams again. One cannot avoid them all but there are times one can avoid the "I've got plenty of time" trap. It's Monday, the assignment is due Friday, it'll take you a day at most to write so you don't jump right on it. Somehow, other matters pop up and suddenly, you find yourself not starting on it 'til late Thursday night. Been there, done that too many times.

So I'm rededicating myself for the umpteenth time not to let that happen. It will, of course, but I want to see how long I can go before getting myself into the next "it has to be in tomorrow" trap. Wanna know when it happens? Just wait for a message here time-stamped between 4 AM and 8 AM. That'll mean I'm up finishing something at the last possible minute. Like I said, you can't avoid them all. You can just hope when you're racing the clock and up past your bedtime, it isn't because you were too dumb to start on it sooner.

Fred Kaplan on the end of the war in Afghanistan. And you can also read what he has to say about the hostage drama in Algeria.

Forgive the time code on this but it's too good to pass up. Here are two of my favorite singers — Jimmy Durante and Shirley Bassey — singing one of Jimmy's big hits…

You may have heard that Obama "signed 23 executive orders" this week. He didn't. That's just your mainstream media getting it wrong again.

And by the way, here's another pet peeve of mine. We have this strange fixation with numbers that don't mean anything. Politicians accuse their opponents of being responsible for X number of taxes or X number of tax hikes. I remember Michael Dukakis when he ran for president being accused of some horrifying number of tax hikes and most folks never knew that some of them were for a few pennies and only applied to a few people. If you're determined to vote against those who raise your taxes, you oughta be more militant about the guy who raised them once by three hundred bucks than the guy who raised them five times by twenty bucks. But a certain segment of our population only looks at the number of increases, not the amounts.

In the same sense, we have this hysteria that Barack Obama "signed 23 executive orders." Even if he had, doesn't it matter what's in those executive orders? Maybe some are trivial. Maybe some are things are things his detractors had proposed…and some were. But we have this Fox News narrative going that Obama is power-mad, dictatorial, Hitleresque, etc. So anything he does has to be spun as an outta-control Chief Exec.

If I were Obama, I think I'd start signing executive orders like crazy. Like when it was time for twenty-seven members of my staff to go to lunch, I'd sign twenty-seven executive orders that they go to lunch. I'd "sign" (i.e., have the autopen sign) hundreds a day and watch Sean Hannity go berserk screaming, "This Marxist president is now ordering government officials that they don't have to drink coffee on their coffee breaks if they don't want to." It wouldn't be good for the country but then nothing that's likely to be done in tandem with Congress these days does much good for the country. So the president might as well have a little fun.

NBC and ABC are out with dueling press releases, each claiming the "win" last week for their 11:35 PM show. The politicos who inhabit Spin Alley after a presidential debate, declaring their guy the winner and denying the moments when he got bitch-slapped, have nothing on the folks who write these press releases about ratings.

Here's the bottom line. There are two main ways in which the numbers are measured for shows like this. One is overall viewers. In this regard, looking just at the four nights when Leno, Letterman and Kimmel were all on opposite each other, Leno averaged 3.526 million viewers, Letterman had 3.135 million and Kimmel had 3.017. So if you were NBC, you could cite those numbers and claim your boy Jay won the week.

But then there's the 18-49 age bracket, which is the one most advertisers want to reach. In most cases, it's way more important. In that category, Kimmel had 1.074 million, Leno had 1.064 million and Letterman had 846,000. So if you were ABC, you could point at those and crown Jimmy the King of Late Night, at least for those four days. Or if you were NBC, you could claim a big win on total viewers and a near-tie in 18-49 and argue for Jay.

If you weren't a TV network, you'd probably just say Jay and Jimmy were neck-and-neck with Dave in a respectable third place. The three 12:35 shows — Fallon, Ferguson and Nightline — were even closer.

Judging by the numbers for the previous three days, this week's ratings should come in around the same…though tomorrow night, Kimmel has a clip show made up of the best moments from earlier in the week. So who knows how that'll do? Next week, Jay has a pretty decent lineup of guests in all new shows, Jimmy has decent guests but a rerun on Monday, and Dave is in repeats all week.