Hey, remember that Al Jaffee book that was briefly priced on Amazon for $14.24? The one that was originally $120 and was marked way, way, way down? I ordered two at that price and they came…and I'll write more about it tomorrow when I have time but I thought the book was a colossal disappointment, unworthy of the good name of Jaffee. It was worth what I paid but not a whole lot more.
Amazon is still changing its price every few days. It recently went from $78.75 to $57.35 and if it gets down below twenty bucks again, you might want to snag one. I'll tell you what I didn't like about it when I get a moment.
Last May, the TV Academy did an evening with folks they called "The Ladies Who Make Us Laugh." They were Bonnie Hunt, Margaret Cho, Caroline Rhea, Carole Leifer, Elayne Boosler, Lily Tomlin and Mary Lynn Rajskub. I wasn't there for it and truth to tell, I've only had time to watch a little of the festivities. But here's a video of that event in case you have an hour and 47 minutes to spare…
Disney is acquiring Lucasfilm for $4.05 billion. I don't really care that much about what it means for Star Wars or anything of the sort. I figure most of everything will eventually be acquired by Disney and if it isn't, it'll be acquired by Time-Warner. Then at some point, either Disney will acquire Time-Warner or Time-Warner will acquire Disney and we will effectively be living in a Communist world.
What intrigues me right now is that number: $4.05 billion. If the buyer pays $4.05 billion for something, that's because the seller turned down $4 billion, turned down $4.01 billion, turned down $4.02 billion, turned down $4.03 billion, turned down $4.04 billion and maybe then said, "Tell you what. Make it $4.05 billion and you've got a deal." And when they turned down the $4 billion, you just know they said, "What? You think we're crazy? You're trying to starve us."
Despite a killer deadline yesterday, I found myself intermittently watching a real killer named Sandy. DirecTV set up a special channel that hopped around from local station to local station in the path of the event some called Frankenstorm. It was an interesting way to watch TV news with the finger of some stranger somewhere on my remote. Whenever it would get dull or repetitive on one channel, they'd just switch to another.
I tried watching that channel this morning because it's too sad — a lot of reporters out in the field showing us devastation and asking people, "How does it feel to lose everything?" I wish TV news wouldn't do that. I know it's part of the story but it's the part of the story we all know and understand and don't need to see played out over and over. There are no unique answers and I often feel that the news crews are there to exploit suffering and to maybe get in the way of things. Those people have enough to think about today without having microphones thrust at them.
Some of the news coverage yesterday seemed helpful and at times, heroic. A lot of it seemed needlessly dramatic — reporters standing in harm's way, telling us that if we had a lick o' sense, we wouldn't be where they are. Then they'd give us information that could more easily have been dispensed from inside any newsroom with a good roof. At some point, it stops being eyewitness news and becomes a stunt show. I sensed that the person at DirecTV changing channels for me sometimes felt that way and would opt to leave the channel risking its reporters' lives and go in search of one offering useful data.
But mostly, I turned it off myself and tried to get back to the script that had to be written before bedtime, the one that pushed that bedtime past 4 AM. It was tough because I found myself thinking over and over: This kind of thing happens and will happen again. There must be a way we can conserve more resources for these moments. And maybe since even the most extreme deniers of Climate Change did listen to the nation's most prominent meteorologists about what Hurricane Sandy would do, and since those meteorologists were dead-on right, maybe we should all be listening to what those meteorologists think about Climate Change.
Here's an amazing nine-minute compilation of "100 Masters of Short Animation." It's probably most useful as a reminder of all the different things that animation can be in terms of technique and style and approach.
I won't pretend to understand the selections and exclusions. Willis O'Brien is in there but not Ray Harryhausen. Dave Fleischer and Walt Disney are in there but not Max Fleischer. Many Disney animators are in there but I think only one (Wolfgang Reitherman) of the legendary Nine Old Men…and so on. In some cases, the named person is the person who animated what you're watching. In some cases, it's the person who directed what you're watching. And in some cases, it's the person who hired the person or persons who directed and/or animated what you're watching.
But now that I've put those thoughts into your head, don't think of that. Just enjoy a reminder of the endless possibilities in animation…
From Walter White came this rapid response to what I posted earlier…
Just wanted to say thank you for the kind and heartfelt posting on newsfromme.com regarding Sandy, safety, doing more, etc. Here in Connecticut, where the brunt of the wind impact is hitting and storm surge pushing up Long Island Sound is going to cause not only coastal flooding, but rivers running in reverse (cue brilliant Elvis Costello tune… poignant to me, as I live near the Housatonic River which feeds into the Sound)….
I did, though, want to give you some hope. Last year we got hit with Hurricane Irene, which packed a heck of a wallop at the end of August, only to be hit with Winter Storm Alfred on this very day last year (three feet of wet snow falling in one night while leaves were still on the trees People lost power for weeks, buildings collapsed…it was eerie, that morning after the storm, with clear, blue skies and a perfectly white landscape, perfectly still and silent except for, every twenty seconds or so, the sound of another branch, somewhere, snapping…)
At the time, the response of the government was slow, of the utilities was slow (turned out Connecticut Light and Power hadn't bothered paying its bills to other utilities it had borrowed help from in the past…so the nearest help that would bother was in Ohio, and took days to arrive.) It was a huge fiasco, and much political hay was made.
What at the time seemed to be the usual forming of committees and requesting of studies that lead nowhere and have no effect began. Those happen all the time.
Except this time, it didn't. What we've experienced in the last four days has been a revelation: Timely updates and information of substance and usefulness; Well controlled plans to prevent problems before they become an issue; Coordination of personnel along the coast to aid evacuation to a large list of shelters which have been opened, staffed, and supplied as of yesterday; The closing of restricted access highways (anything with on/off ramps) to emergency vehicles only this afternoon; The suspension of public transportation last night, including buses, and declaring a State of Emergency, which is keeping many workers off the roads and at home, rather than what happened last year with people being stranded, unable to return home; Coordinating with FEMA a pre-landfall declaration for a disaster area designation, making the month of pursuant debating with the Federal Government last year over that issue post-crisis an already done deal this year; Additional road crews already conscripted and on their way, coordinated not by the utility companies alone, but as a joint effort with the State government.
Really — sometimes I think about it too deeply and I start to get teary just thinking about how refreshing it is to have a government being sensible, logical, proactive, and caring. Haven't seen this kind of efficiency before in my lifetime here. That a government would even learn from its mistakes enough in one year to effect that much of a transformation is incredibly heartening.
So, have heart. While we can do more, and should do more, for the first time I'm beginning to think maybe we will do more.
That's so good to hear. You know, I have little problem with an honest assessment — if there is such a thing — that a given function of government can be done better at the state level. I have an immense problem with this kind of boilerplate assumption that the Federal Government screws everything up and that everything would be better if they'd just turn it over to the states or, better still, private enterprise. Hurricanes don't respect state borders. I don't know why the preparedness and clean-up operations should.
What oughta matter here is not proving someone's theory of government incompetence but helping people whose lives are devastated by the kind of thing that no private insurance was ever intended to address. My mind reels every time I hear someone suggest that fire departments be "privatized." Fire departments! No one has any real theory of how that might work. Apparently, if your home is ablaze, you go to the Yellow Pages and call around to see who's available to come over with hoses and axes. I'm surprised some people are even willing to let our Federal Government wage war. They'd like each state to send its own delegation to Afghanistan.
I hope Sandy doesn't do as much damage as they say she might. It's comforting to hear that already, preparedness has minimized some of it.
Later, I received this from Walter…
Right now we're experiencing the worst of the wind… the worst storm surge is coming later tonight (about two hours from now)…. the wind is the worst it has been all day. Indoors, it sounds like we're on a ship in a squall at sea. I think the speeding up of the storm means the worst of it will be done by morning, rather than dragging on through tomorrow as they originally expected.
Anywho, I'm not a possessive sort – mi palabras, su palabras.
Hopefully, the power doesn't flicker on me again. I'm tired of rebooting my router and modem…
And hopefully, that's the biggest problem you'll have. Good luck, Walter…and anyone in the path of Frankenstorm.
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?
