Category Archives: To Be Filed

I cut a joke about Bob Kane out of the previous post. I thought it was funny yesterday morning when I posted it but by nightfall, it seemed like something people could view as mean. I have a number of mixed feelings about Bob but none of them make me want to be mean to him or his memory.

As I wrote here and other places, I knew Bob — not a close association but I certainly spent a lot of hours talking with him. He didn't seem to care about others in the comic book field very much but he did like to talk about himself and that's more fun when you have an audience. I've always been a good audience for people in the comic book field, especially those responsible for the comics I read as a kid.

There's no question that Bob got too much credit for Batman but in the rush to give credit to folks like Bill Finger and Jerry Robinson, a few folks out there may be too eager to undercredit Bob. Last year, a lady called me from a very prestigious magazine and asked me if I'd be so good as to help her vet or "fact-check" an article on Batman written by a so-called expert. I'm fairly sure the article has never been published and that may be because I (and maybe others) told her that many assertions in it were wrong or at least not supported by any evidence.

The first one went something like this: "Fans of Batman have been stunned to learn that Bob Kane, long hailed as the brilliant artist who created Batman, never drew a single panel of the Caped Crusader's comic book." That is not so…the part about him never drawing, I mean. Bob did not draw well and Bob did not draw for long…but he definitely drew until he had the clout and a contract that allowed him to live well while others slaved over their drawing boards.

The next assertion was that he really had nothing whatsoever to do with the creation of Batman. Again, not so. One can argue that there would have been no such character without Bill Finger but that doesn't mean Bob contributed nothing. And when one is condemning the anonymity and other wrongs forced upon Finger, one should not make it seem like this only happened to people if they collaborated with Bob Kane. The industry and others in it did this to lots of people.

This is admittedly not a great defense of Robert "Bob" Kane but that industry should get some of the blame. Sometimes in comics, alone or with others, you come up with something that's extremely successful and extremely lucrative. There's something dangerous about a profession that makes you think that to achieve any sort of fame and fortune for it, you have to try and grab everyone else's fame and fortune.

I have still not seen the Joker movie. I have a DVD screener of it that I could pop in any time but this feels to me like a film that should be seen in a theater…and when one is in the mood for a certain intensity that I can only take on certain occasions. I'll get to it but I'm never in a hurry to see any movie these days. I can't recall the last picture I couldn't take my time getting around to.

Still, I was glad to see the film get a little love if only because the names of Bill Finger and Jerry Robinson got on the screen last night and they've also been mentioned in some of the press for the movie. Their roles in the creation of the greatest villain ever in comics have never been properly acknowledged, nor have many other contributions to the Batman mythos.

They deserve it…as Rob Salkowitz explains in this news story this morning.

Last night, Cynthia Erivo did not win an Oscar.  She was up for two — Best Lead Actress and Best Original Song — and won neither. If she had, she would have entered the rare category known as "EGOT" — a person who's won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony Award. There are a number of people, including Lin-Manuel Miranda, Lily Tomlin and Hugh Jackman who are only one award away from that status.

Six people — Barbra Streisand, Liza Minnelli, James Earl Jones, Alan Menken, Harry Belafonte and Quincy Jones — have achieved EGOT but at least one of their awards was of the honorary/special variety so some might say they don't count. Going just by competitive awards, fifteen people have won at least one of each. Wanna guess who they are? Jot down your answers and then you can check those answers in this article. You will not get them all.

Through the miracle that is a TiVo with a Fast Forward button, I got through the entirety of the Academy Awards telecast in about twenty-five minutes. Nothing I'm reading online today has me thinking maybe I missed something important.

I did put the brakes on and stop briefly for a few of the acceptance speeches in the categories that don't usually get much notice. I did think Brad Pitt was pretty darn good in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. But what I always think about at these ceremonies is that when you see someone win for Best Editing or Best Sound Mixing, you're probably seeing the high point of that person's entire life…and a life-changing moment at that.

Brad Pitt's world probably didn't change that much last night. It's kind of like when they bring millionaire celebrities onto game shows and let them play for charity. Winning doesn't matter that much to them.

Actually, I'm not qualified to say whether Pitt's was the Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role because I didn't see all the others. I did watch A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood and didn't think Tom Hanks quite disappeared into the role enough to be convincing as a man who wasn't a natural performer. I felt the same way about him playing Walt Disney. Pitt may well have been the best choice.

I'm also not qualified to say how good or bad the ceremony itself was, having opted out more than 75% of it. Not having a main host seems to cut down on the morning-after judgements that the show sucked because people don't have a specific host to beat up on.

Needless to say, a lot of folks are upset at omissions in the "In Memoriam" reel. The big "How could they possibly leave him/her out?" reactions seem to be about Tim Conway, Luke Perry, Cameron Boyce, Jan-Michael Vincent, Carol Lynley, Michael J. Pollard and Sid Haig. My position here is that while I would have liked to see some of those folks included, I think the overlooking of people who weren't actors is the greater injustice. Have you seen anyone today express shock at the non-inclusion of a cinematographer or a writer or a producer? I didn't think so.

Here's a link to a photo gallery of the 163 people who could have been in the montage. If you enjoy kvetching about this, I'm sure you can find others to be outraged about.

The Broadway community has been mourning the prolific writer of great showtunes, Jerry Herman, who passed away last December. We have here an hour with Mr. Herman. It was recorded in 2009 and it's part interview. The other part is some of Jerry's better songs sung by Ron Raines, Debbie Gravitte and my pal Jason Graae, none of whom sing "Hello, Dolly!." But they do sing some songs you know and love and you can hear Jerry talk about them…

• The "In Memoriam" montage at the Oscars would be a lot more fun if they included a few people who didn't die in the past year but should have.

• Thank goodness I didn't go to the Oscars this year. Billy Porter's wearing the same thing I was going to wear!

So here's what you might want to know about Randy Rainbow's show last night at the Wiltern Theater here in Los Angeles…

It was packed. The place seats 1,850 and I'd guess there were 5 empty seats and 1,845 filled with someone who really, really doesn't like that person I hoped not to mention this weekend. I was kinda expecting the crowd to be mostly young and mostly gay but it seemed like a nice cross-section of humanity — plenty of folks over forty who arrived with someone of the opposite gender. And they all laughed an awful lot.

Mr. Rainbow turns out to be quite the all-around entertainer — funny, crowd-pleasing and charming even when being a little bitchy. He kept apologizing for his voice and saying he had a bug of some kind but he sang for most of two hours (no intermission) and I didn't hear any wrong notes.

His show is a well-crafted mingling of his videos and him singing live, often replacing his singing voice in a video with a live performance. The audience cheered the videos they'd played umpteen-zillion times on YouTube and cheered a lot of stuff they'd never heard before. And the show struck me as just the right length: Not so short you felt cheated, not so long he didn't leave us wanting just a little more.

He has a four-piece live band that backs him and augments pre-recorded music. Even sitting in the third row, I couldn't tell where the live musicians left off and the recorded ones began. The whole multimedia experience was pretty impressive…speaking of which, Randy Rainbow owns quite an array of different-colored sequined jackets. And interesting hats and costumes.

He did a segment taking questions from the audience and his replies were spontaneous, witty and even informative. No, he has not been asked to host Saturday Night Live and would love to. Yes, he's sometimes in the middle of prepping a new video when something happens in the news and he has to dump it or rewrite.

In his closing speech, he said that he's heard from Sondheim, Stephen Schwartz, Sir Andrew and other composers whose songs he's parodied and they've been 100% supportive. He expressed a bit of annoyance at the occasional fan who doesn't recognize he's doing parodies of famous show tunes and, as he put it, "thinks I wrote the score to South Pacific."

Here is his current touring schedule, though he said from the stage that more dates were being added, including Las Vegas. You'll note his itinerary includes some red states and I'll bet he sells out in them, too. My date and I had a good enough time to want to see him again next time he comes our way, and I'm pretty sure Randy Rainbow's going to be around when the current president is gone…and probably the one after that and the one after that and the one after that. Note that I am still optimistic there will be future presidents.

We now return you to our previously-scheduled Trump-Free Weekend, already in progress…

I'd planned to make this a Trump-Free Weekend both in my head and on my blog but things happen. One thing which happened is that Randy Rainbow is doing a one-night-only show at the Wiltern Theater here in Los Angeles tonight. Another one thing which happened is that a friend of the blog who bought third-row-center tickets for tonight can't use them and offered them to me.

And a third thing that happened is that I accepted. So I'm just going to go and hope that Mr. Rainbow doesn't mention Donald. With all the other things to talk and sing about in the world, why would he?

And now we must note the passing of Victor Gorelick who probably held the comic book industry record for working in the same place on the same characters. He joined the Archie company in 1958 and really never left, working his way up to editor-in-chief. He was 78.

He was seventeen years old when he started there in the production company where his first job was to take stories where fashion model Katy Keene showed a tad more leg or cleavage than the Comics Code liked and to correct the art. In addition to doing art fixes, Victor colored and lettered and eventually became more involved with the editorial end of things. On the side, he occasionally did some work for other companies, such as lettering and coloring for Tower Comics, but 99% of his career was with Archie and he deserves great credit for the enduring popularity of those characters.

I was pleased to know Victor and to occasionally have him on panels at Comic-Con. He was one of the good guys and there's good reason for sadness in Riverdale tonight. Archie and his pals, like all of us who got to know Victor, will miss him.

Orson Bean was an actor, a stand-up comedian, an author, a talk show guest, a game show panelist, an educator and about a half-dozen other things. If you can find a copy of his autobiography, Too Much is Not Enough, you might enjoy it a lot. Especially interesting is his account of being sorta-blacklisted in the fifties and being kicked off TV because he was an officer in an actors' group that opposed the blacklist.

And this may interest readers of this site. In the early days of MAD magazine, they attracted attention on the newsstand by buying material from well-known comedians like Bob & Ray, Henry Morgan, Wally Cox, Danny Kaye…and Orson Bean. When Ed Sullivan refused to have this sorta-blacklisted funnyman on his show, Bean picked up a few bucks for allowing MAD to adapt his stand-up material to use in the magazine and to slap his name on its cover. He was also a founding member of the Laurel and Hardy fan society, The Sons of the Desert.

He was a great humorist and personality and he sure worked a lot. For a few years, he was one of Johnny Carson's favorite guests but that ended when Bean began to explore, write about and talk about sexual liberation and group sex. The topics he wanted to discuss from Johnny's guest chair simply made Carson uncomfortable.

But he was a witty man and someone who deserved a lot better than his tragic end last night in Venice, California. He was walking when he was struck by one car and then another and killed. He was 91. How very, very sad.

I haven't linked to a Soundie for a while so I'd better explain what a Soundie is…or was. Soundies were the 1940's equivalent of music videos except they were black-and-white and shot on 16mm, and in many cases, the songs were written and filmed just for a soundie and not released on records. You had to go to a bar or restaurant to see and hear them. And I think I'll just crib the next paragraph from Wikipedia…

The films were shown in a coin-operated "movie jukebox" called the Panoram, manufactured by the Mills Novelty Company of Chicago. Each Panoram housed a 16mm RCA film projector, with eight Soundies films threaded in an endless-loop arrangement. A system of mirrors flashed the image from the lower half of the cabinet onto a front-facing screen in the top half. Each film cost 10 cents to play, and there was no choice of song; the patron saw whatever film was next in the queue. Panorams could be found in public amusement centers, nightclubs, taverns, restaurants, and factory lounges, and the films were changed weekly. The completed Soundies were generally made available within a few weeks of their filming, by the Soundies Distributing Corporation of America.

This particular Soundie was shot in 1942 and it stars Harry Langdon, who was briefly one of the great silent comedians. His career took a big nosedive around the time he took creative control of his films and many see a clear cause/effect situation there. But his career did crash and he spent the rest of his life appearing in cheaply-made comedies and sometimes writing for Laurel and Hardy or other folks who were having the kind of career he'd once had. He died two years after this film was shot. This is not him at his best but it's kind of a neat little short…

Sorry I haven't been here today for you, dear newsfromme readers. I've been so busy that I didn't even have time to watch Bill Maher's show when it was telecast two hours ago. I can't imagine what he had to talk about.

I'm going to make this a Trump-Free Weekend on this blog mainly because I don't want to waste my time thinking about him. I still think we're a loooonnnggg way from knowing how things are going to turn out in the Democratic Primary, let alone the November election. (By the way: I got my by-mail primary ballot the other day. It says "The ballot must be received by the elections office no later than 3 days after Election Day." Don't they know that we're California, the big primary? Assuming the rest of the ballots are actually counted on the evening of March 3, someone's going to declare victory. No one's going to presume that ballots that come in three days later can change anything.)

Here's something that I think I understand but I'm not sure. I subscribe to a number of online newspapers…mostly ones that I link to a lot on this site. For a long time, I didn't subscribe to the Los Angeles Times. When I looked up what Digital Access would cost, the price was as follows: $1 a week for the first four weeks, then $4 per week thereafter. That works out to $196 per year. No thank you.

They keep mailing me offers and I really didn't look at them. Right into the trash they'd go because I figured that even if they give me half-off, that's still too steep. Well, the other day, I paused to read one of those offers. These all involve entering a promo code included in the mailer I received.

It offered me Complete Digital Access for 99 cents a week. That's a little under $52 a year, down from $196 for the first year, over $200 a year thereafter. Sounds like quite a bargain, right?

It is but it gets better. They're really, really eager to send me a physical newspaper also. I assume this has something to do with ad rates keyed-in with print circulation. There are all sorts of different packages — daily delivery, Sunday only, Saturday and Sunday…all including Digital Access.

I picked Sunday only. And I just signed up for Sunday delivery plus Digital Access…for $9.88. That's per year.

That's how it works, people. I can get Digital Access for $196.00 a year or they'll discount it to $52 a year. But if I let them dump a copy of the Sunday paper on my front lawn each week, I get the paper plus Digital Access for an entire year for $9.88. This may not be in every zip code but it's in mine. Like I said, I think I understand it. But I'm not sure.

Ali Velshi, who you see a lot if you watch MSNBC, interviews John Oliver, who you see a lot if you watch what I think is the best show on TV — or it will be when it returns with new episodes on February 16…

As we all know, Utah senator (and 2012 Republican presidential nominee) Mitt Romney cast the only G.O.P. vote to convict Donald Trump in his impeachment trial. He's now being hailed as a man of conscience and a hero and a leader by a lot of folks who not so long ago were aghast at the notion of him becoming president. Conversely, many who supported him back then are now using descriptors like "traitor" and "disloyal." Donald Junior is insisting that Romney be kicked out of the Grand Old Party while others wonder how someone gets kicked out of a political party.

Here's my take on it. I believe that at some low level in our government — maybe some folks who sit on a city council somewhere — men and women act out of conscience and put the needs of The People ahead of their own careers and certainly their own parties. But it doesn't happen much higher than that. Probably at the state level and certainly above it, there is only one consideration: "How will this benefit me?"

They may put personal wealth ahead of personal power or vice-versa. They may care about fame more than money. They may even convince themselves that's what good for them is good for their constituents and for the nation. (That's kind of the Alan Dershowitz defense of, I suppose, all wrongdoing.) No matter why they want to serve, when it comes time to vote Yes or No, they vote based on what's better for themselves. That may or may not match up with what's better for the majority.

I do not mean almost everyone thinks like that. I do not mean everyone except the candidate I support. I mean absolutely everyone and I don't think I'm being overly cynical to say that. It includes Trump, Obama, Biden, either Clinton, Sanders, anyone named Kennedy or Bush…and of course, Mitt Romney.

Look: There's no place for this guy in a Republican party that asks "How high?" when Donald tells them to jump. We just saw his control of it. Men and women who thought he was guilty voted to acquit and they're now lambasting Mitt because he only voted that way once instead of both times. He wrapped his decision in Faith and Sacred Oaths Before God and following one's conscience and made it sound almost like a voice from the Heavens told him to vote as he did…and even folks who identity as Evangelicals are calling him a Judas.

Which I'll bet is fine because he's positioning himself as the candidate of Republicans who think Trump is destroying their party and might take the world along for the cataclysm. I dunno how many there are right now but it does not seem unlikely that their number could grow. If Trump really does shoot someone on Fifth Avenue or just babbles on at an increasingly incoherent rate, there could be a lot more Republicans who want an alternative to D.J.T. Romney hasn't yet said that's where he's setting up shop because people are mad enough at him for just the one vote.

But I think it's a nice trial balloon to see if there's a movement out there he can lead. And in the meantime, it's exposing all the marionettes in the G.O.P. who do not have it in them to say, "I disagree with my colleague over what the evidence shows but I respect him for putting conscience over party." What they're all saying is that if he does that, he has his priorities backwards. Me, I think his priority is another run at the White House.