Monthly Archives: January 2017

Bill Maher returns to the air this evening. Gee, I wonder what he's going to talk about.

This guy returns February 12…

The other day here, I mentioned how few photos exist of the late Bill Finger, the finally-acknowledged co-creator of Batman. If you want to see all the ones that are known to exist, Marc Tyler Nobleman has them on his blog…which is only right because he found almost all of them. Marc is the diligent researcher and author who has uncovered and documented nearly all the biographical material that exists on Mr. Finger.

If you're over on his blog, take the time to order his book, Bill the Boy Wonder, which tells the story of unsung hero, Bill Finger. And keep your eye out for a forthcoming documentary about Finger and the battle to get him proper recognition. I'll let you know here when and where you can see it.

• Trump was in office for three minutes before he began turning the presidency into the Home Shopping Network.

Robert Rowe writes to ask…

Is it true that Hanna and Barbera in the later years of their partnership came to the studio on different days and worked on different floors because they seldom agreed when they discussed business matters in person?

Not to my knowledge. I wasn't around them in the last few years of their lives but when I worked there in the late seventies and early eighties, what I saw was two men who had divided up their business. Joe Barbera was the absolute monarch of selling the shows, developing the shows and getting them up to the stage of completed scripts. Then Bill Hanna was totally in charge of taking those scripts and turning them into animated cartoons to be delivered to the client.

They did have offices on different floors but that was because they headed different departments. Joe had a fancy office right near the entrance since he was the one who entertained buyers and important people. Bill was upstairs near where the animators were. Bill worked in shirt sleeves. Joe dressed like he was on his way to lunch with the head of the network. Here's a photo that was taken in Joe's office one day…

I doubt that story about coming in on different days. Bill Hanna — whatever anyone else may say about him — was a very hard worker. If there was a day when he wasn't in the building, he was probably visiting one of their subcontracting studios to check on things. Joe came and went as his meetings dictated.

I'm sure they disagreed on things — I witnessed a few discussions — but the working premise always seemed to be that each man had the final say in his area. For the most part though, they kept their arguments to themselves.

It may well have been different in the earlier days when they owned the studio along with George Sidney. They sold it in 1966 — a year some might say was a sharp dividing line in the merits of their output. Thereafter, the two men were employees — well-paid, powerful employees but still employees. When I was there, it sometimes felt like the agents and merchandising people were running the place…with the approval (usually) of Bill and Joe. At times though, it seemed more like acceptance than approval.

They were both extraordinary men. I fought with both at times and was so uncomfortable doing that because of who they were, I decided to stop working there. I respected many things about them and one was how well they made their partnership work for sixty (sixty!) years.

So no, I don't think they were enemies like the rumor made them out to be. But given how far apart their offices were in that building and how little interaction they seemed to have except for social events and photo sessions, I can see why someone might think that.

Even Fox News has Donald Trump at a 37% approval rating. That's low when you consider that he could probably do every horrible, bad-for-America thing that his detractors worry about short of nuclear war or mass genocide and he'd be at 25%. Soon, we will surely see polls that say an awful lot of people who voted for him are sorry they did. He hasn't even taken the oath of office yet and he already has his first two major scandals — the Russia thing and his refusal to divest or put his company in a blind trust. Doesn't look like either one of those is going away soon.

That is, to use the word that he appends to an awful lot of his tweets, sad. Even if you're among the 37% or so, you've got to think there's something really wrong when we're inaugurating a man who most Americans don't like. It's especially worrisome when it's a man whose modus operandi seems to exclude ever admitting when you're wrong or changing your approach. Everything is "double down" with this guy, along with "deny, deny, deny." I didn't see either Bush as a very good president but at least they both could sometimes — not often enough but sometimes — realize that what they were doing wasn't working and change course.

I sat down here to try and write something kinda positive but it just wasn't coming. The best I can do is to say that I don't think it'll be as bad as some fear…but that feels uncomfortably like the kind of confidence I had when I was confident there was no way this guy could win. I think I'll sit here and hope I'm wrong about a lot more stuff.

Turner Classic Movies is running A Face in the Crowd later today. It's on at 2:45 PM on my TV and you might want to check the schedule to see when it will be on yours. It is, first of all, a great movie with a stellar performance by Andy Griffith. All those years playing Sheriff Andy Taylor made you think that was all he could do but he's truly electric in this 1957 film directed by Elia Kazan and written by Budd Schulberg. Those who know the picture know why it's so appropriate for today. Here's the trailer…

David Remnick warns of what's coming after You-Know-Who places his hand tomorrow on what he once called the only book better than The Art of the Deal. He points out that there were people who thought that after the election, Trump would drop the sleazy campaign tricks, accept the gravity of the position he'd won and turn into another person. The fact that that obviously isn't happening is, I suspect, the reason Donald's approval rating has been dropping as fast as an elephant on a zipline.

The hearings of the last few days have been amazing. You can't get hired by McDonald's unless you have some concept of what the job entails. But apparently, you can get a position in Trump's cabinet if you have no idea what your department does.

I strongly agree with Kevin Drum that Barack Obama has been a very good president. I don't hold it against him that he wasn't able to deliver things like Single Payer Healthcare and a higher stimulus. I'm impressed that he accomplished as much as he did.

I've made a few false starts at writing a post that says that but Kevin did a perfectly fine job. Go read him.

We're big fans of Philippe the Original, a downtown L.A. restaurant that claims to have invented the French Dip sandwich. Whether it did or not, they sure make great ones…and a lot of them. Here's a profile of the place and it's history, including the story of how their signature sandwich was invented by accident. As I mentioned here, I'm always skeptical of these stories about how a famous food item was invented by accident. One of these days, we're going to hear how one day, someone accidentally spilled hydrogen into their oxygen or vice-versa and — lo and behold! — they invented water.

No, it's not Numberwang. It's Lewis Black talking about something that makes even less sense…

The debate over Climate Change generally takes place between Actual Scientists and people who say "I'm not a scientist" but believe their viewpoint is just as valid (if not more so) than folks who are Actual Scientists. Well, the Actual Scientists have announced now that 2016 was the hottest year ever recorded on this planet. Before that, 2015 was the hottest year ever recorded on this planet and before that, 2014 held that honor.

The Actual Scientists say that's significant and ominous. The "I'm not a scientist" people just kind of ignore it because…well, it kinda messes up their position and they can't have that.

• I'm not going to watch the inauguration on Friday. I'll wait for the Alec Baldwin version on Saturday.

Norvell Hardy was born on January 18, 1892 in Harlem, Georgia.  His father Oliver had been a soldier in the Civil War — fighting for The South, of course — and Dad died when Norvell was one year old. When Norvell was around the age of 18, he began going by the name Oliver Norvell Hardy.

A poor student in school, his interests turned towards entertaining and at least once, he ran away from home to join a troupe of actors and singers. Around the time he took his father's name, he got a job working in a movie theater in Milledgeville and as he watched the primitive films of 1910, he kept thinking, "I could do that." A few years later, he moved to Jacksonville, Florida and proved it. His first film role appears to have been an otherwise-forgettable 1914 short called Unwitting Dad. He was billed as "O.N. Hardy" but away from the camera, friends called him Babe. It was a nickname he picked up from a barber near the Lubin Manufacturing Company, which was the studio that gave him his first screen roles.

Babe Hardy moved from Florida to New York and then in 1917, to Los Angeles. Everywhere he went, he made movies — so many that researchers are still finding new credits for him. Mostly, he was in comedies but he did dramatic parts, as well. Mostly, he played "heavies" (what they then called the villains) but he was quite good when he was a lead comic.

In 1921, he played a small role as a mugger in a film called Lucky Dog. The lead comic — the person he tried to rob in the film — was the British comedian, Stan Laurel. Nothing came of their proximity then but in 1924, Hardy went to work for the Hal Roach Studio and a few years later, Laurel popped up there, mostly as a writer and director. In 1926, Hardy was cast in a short called Get 'Em Young but he injured himself in a kitchen accident and Laurel was tagged to return to a position in front of the cameras to fill in.

That led to Laurel acting in more Roach comedies. He and Hardy were both in a film called 45 Minutes From Hollywood, though they shared no scenes. Then they appeared in more films together and did share scenes…more and more until it became obvious that these two men were funny together. Before 1927 was out, there were Laurel & Hardy comedies and there always will be.

I can't think of anyone I enjoy watching more on the screen than Babe Hardy. A lot of comics in the silent era were funny because they fell off cliffs or into mud puddles. He did plenty of that as well as anyone but he could also be funny just reacting…or looking into the camera…or doing something simple like writing his name in a ledger. He died in 1957 but people still laugh at his performances and they always will. Today, in honor of his birthday, I'm going to try to find time to watch him and Stan be so wonderful in Sons of the Desert.

That is not only a photo of Bill Finger, it is darn near the only photo of Bill Finger. He did not leave many behind. What he did leave us was his contribution to the creation of Batman — a contribution that was formidable and throughout Finger's lifetime, criminally neglected or even denied.

That injustice has been undone somewhat as the credits on Batman now say "Created by Bob Kane with Bill Finger," whereas they used to just say "Created by Bob Kane." It's sad that Mr. Finger never lived to see this happen but at least it has happened. Unfortunately — and yes, I've written about this before here — his face has also been miscredited. Maybe that's his fault for not taking more photos when he was around but I keep seeing photos of other longtime contributors to DC Comics identified as Finger. Here are the two most often wrongly identified as him…

The man on the left is Robert Kanigher, who wrote Wonder Woman for about eight million years and who edited and often wrote DC's war comics for a very long time. When Kanigher received a posthumous Bill Finger Award, I procured that photo from a relative of Kanigher's and did an awful lot of Photoshopping to make it look even that good. It was part of the press release announcing the award.

The photo on the right is Gardner Fox, who wrote Justice League of America and The Flash and Hawkman and who created the last two and many others. Fox actually was the second writer to write Batman, shortly after the debut story, which was by Finger. Fox also won the Finger Award and therein lies some of the confusion.

The way search engines like Google and Bing index photos is that they find photos and then they find words and names near those photos. If I were to go onto the 'net and post a photo of you on many websites with the word "aardvark" near your pic, the engines would eventually decide you were an aardvark and would probably display the pic of you when someone searched for an image of an aardvark.

Because the photos of Kanigher and Fox have often appeared near the term "Bill Finger" on the web, the search engines display them when you search for a photo of Bill Finger…so I keep seeing them identified as him.  The new issue of Comic Book Creator magazine has the Kanigher image identified as Finger.  So I made up these two graphics and I'm posting them here to alert anyone who comes here…but I'm also posting them because I want them to get into the database of Google, Bing and other search engines.

Maybe now people who search for a photo of Mr. Finger will see these graphics and understand what is and is not a likeness of Bill Finger, the most neglected man in comics.  Feel free to help out and post them anywhere you like.