Category Archives: To Be Filed

That's right, kids! It's your ol' pal Mark with another episode in his series about the life of a writer…especially the times when no one seems to want what he or she is writing. Part 1 can be read here, Part 2 can be read here, Part 3 can be read here, Part 4 can be read here, Part 5 can be read here, Part 6 can be read here, Part 7 can be read here, Part 8 can be read here and Part 9 can be read here. Part 10 goes something like this…

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One of those folks who wanted their question answered but not their name mentioned wrote…

Thank you for the series on Rejection, especially when you veer into talking about acting, which is what I do. A lot of what you write about writing is applicable to me and my world. In my case, my problem is a growing, sometimes irrational anger at the people who do the hiring and casting. They expect great competence from those of us who audition but I see little competence on their end, especially when it comes to informing us what the hell it is that they want. As you say, I often walk out of auditions and interviews with no friggin' clue what just happened. I don't know if I did well or I did bad because I don't know what I was supposed to show them.

I know you're not an expert at anger management but can you give me any pointers on what to do about the rage I sometimes feel at these situations and at the people who decide who gets to work on the stage and who has to go back to their day job at Olive Garden?

Well, the first thing of course — and I'll bet you know this — is to not direct that rage at the people you hope are going to hire you. Some of what happens in an audition is about whether you can act. Some of it is about whether you fit the part…and it's very important to remember that they may decide you're a terrific actor but not the one for this particular role. And some of it is to determine whether you're someone they can work with. It is totally possible to qualify on the first two counts but because you come across like a jerk or a troubled or angry person in the interview, you get disqualified or downgraded.

It is also important to remember that in any hiring situation, the folks with the power set the rules.  If you were Tom Hanks and they really needed you to get their movie made or make it successful, you could expect them to prove their competence to you.  Since you need them more than they need you, they don't have to be competent.  They just have to hire you.

All that said, I think it's important in this world to not conflate all your problems into one big, steaming resentment. Try not to think of any given acting job as more than one acting job. And you writers, don't think of any particular writing job as more than one writing job. It might be more than just that but the more you inflate it, the more you're setting yourself up for disappointment if you don't get it. Heck, you may even be disappointed if you do get it and all it turns out to be is the one job with none of the subsequent, presumed benefits.

We all have a tendency to fantasize. You're up for a situation that could, just maybe, change your life. Maybe it's a sitcom pilot and you get it and if it turns out to be the next Seinfeld or Big Bang Theory, it's going to lead to a lot of money and other offers. So you commence imagining all the many ways in which it might do that. When I started out, I sometimes thought that way and it was the wrong way to approach it. I learned to think of it in what was for me the right way: I'm up for one job…and all it might be is one job.

And if you think of it as one job, then the worst that can happen is that you didn't get one job.

The dangerous thing to do, I think, is to think like this: Oh, if I get this then they'll hire me again and again and others will want to hire me and I'll make a ton of money and my parents will finally get off my case to find another profession and my mate will stop nagging me about my income and I'll be able to afford to get my teeth fixed and I'll have health insurance and maybe I can get a new car before the clunker I'm driving falls apart and I'll have better self-esteem so I won't feel so bad about myself at times and maybe I'll get some awards and that will be even better for my self-esteem and maybe I'll even attract some real attractive members of the opposite sex (or the same one if that's applicable) and I'll have a great life…

And yes, there are writers and actors and others who think like that. Then when they don't get it or they do and the project fails, something within them feels they've lost millions of dollars that were never really there, that new car they never really had, the awards they were never really up for, etc. It increases the sense of loss exponentially.

Why do that to yourself? More importantly, why do that to yourself when the hiring/selection process is so capricious and controlled by so many factors that have nothing to do with you?

I know this is easy to say, not so easy to do but you oughta consider trying it anyway. Just think of any one opportunity as one opportunity and nothing more…because that's all it may be. Even if you get it, it might not lead to anything else.  And if you get it and it does segue into a regular gig or kickstart some real career momentum, great.  You can be happily surprised.  Isn't that better than being (unnecessarily) way more disappointed than you need to be?

I wish I had a great anecdote to post here about William Schallert, who passed away Sunday at the age of 93. He was a kind of performer I greatly admire — the guy who worked all the time without ever quite becoming a star, the kind of actor who'd enter a scene in some TV show or movie and everyone would go, "Oh, that guy!"

He occasionally had a named recurring role like Patty Duke's father on The Patty Duke Show or Admiral Harold Harmon Hargrade on Get Smart…but it was not easy to just tell people who he was. Even though he notched hundreds and hundreds of screen appearances, most folks didn't have a name to connect with the face.

Directors and producers love a guy like Bill Schallert. He wouldn't have worked that much if he hadn't been solid and dependable. He was also a voiceover specialist, a union activist and, based on the few times I got to meet him, a very nice guy. You'd think with all he did, I'd have a story about him but I don't. All I have is respect.

Dave Sikula writes to ask of me…

This time I have an actual question rather than a comment. Do you have any idea what it is about Los Angeles media and car chases? Seems like at least once a week (if not much more) I see something on social media from my SoCal friends about yet another car chase.

I left L.A. in 1991, before this phenomenon started, and in all the places I've lived since, have never seen anything like it. There are car chases here in the Bay Area, but stations cover them in retrospect (if at all). Why do all L.A. media stop dead when it comes to these things? Are they ratings-grabbers? Is there ever anything new to them? Are they actually exciting? Inquiring minds want to know.

Well, if you're asking why Los Angeles has so many car chases, it probably has something to do with having so many cars. More cars = more car chases.

Why do the stations drop everything and cover them? You said it: They're ratings-grabbers. There must be some evidence that if you're Channel 4 and there's a live high-speed chase over on Channel 2 that you're not covering, a lot of your viewers are going to switch over there to watch it.

Is there ever anything new to them? Sometimes. I think the appeal has a lot to do with the fact that they're live and unpredictable. Very little on television is except for sports — and most sporting events do not feature the possibility that you'll see someone, maybe even an innocent bystander, killed or injured. Also, a lot of police pursuits are on familiar turf. You often see it happening on streets you've driven on. I'm not proud that I find them (usually) fascinating but I'm afraid I do.

I am a big fan of Lewis Black, who just may be my favorite comedian working these days. I especially enjoy watching his show.

What show? Lewis Black has a show? Yes, he does and I've mentioned this here before. Most weeks, he is in some city on this continent doing his stand-up along with his opening act, John Bowman. At the close of each show, he does an additional 15-25 minutes that is streamed live to the Internet. I told you all about it here and yes, he's still doing it. However, I should also have mentioned that he has a fan club that you can join on his website for twenty bucks a year.

Now, you may be asking yourself, "Why the hell would I want to do this?" Well, two reasons…

• It gives you access to sections of his website that may interest you including interviews and articles and the complete archive of his little Internet shows. At any given time, you can view the most recent five or six of them for free but membership will allow you to watch 75 or so of them at your leisure. They're pure, mostly-spontaneous Lewis Black and they're usually quite good.
• It gives you the chance to purchase, without paying absurd fees to scalpers or ticket agents, good seats to upcoming live Lewis Black concerts. He has tour dates up for the rest of the year in, among other cities: Des Moines, Rochester, Skokie, San Francisco, Reno, Wichita, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Monterey and quite a few more. I got seats for his December 10 gig in Los Angeles.  They're supposed to be in the first four rows and I paid $90 each. Online agents are already asking $400 each for seats in the twentieth row…so that $20 fee to join his fan club is looking like a great investment.

And there are other reasons to join but if you like the guy, those two oughta be enough.  That's all I have to say about this.

Marx Brothers fans have been known to mud-wrestle over which of the brothers' films was the best but if you say their worst was the 1949 Love Happy, I doubt anyone will challenge you to a duel.  Its 85 minutes don't get much better than this one minute featuring but one Marx Brother and a then-unknown Marilyn Monroe. Note that by this stage in his career, Groucho had abandoned his famous greasepaint mustache and grown a real one…

Now that Donald J. Trump is the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party, a lot of folks who said they would never support him are supporting him. Just as a lot of people who are saying they'll never support Hillary Clinton will wind up supporting her.

By the way: I keep seeing articles on the web which write out Trump's name like that: Donald J. Trump. Why the middle initial? Is it unclear which Donald Trump anyone is writing about?

And in other news, I've decided that if I'm ever elected President of the United States, I will build a thirty-foot wall around cole slaw. And I'm going to make Canter's Delicatessen pay for it.

Yesterday here, I was talking about a silly plan some Republicans are toying with of running a third-party candidate — someone they consider, unlike Mr. Trump, a true conservative. The idea there is not to win the election the normal way but to split the vote such that no one reaches 270 and the decision gets thrown into the Republican-controlled House. I said — and I was wrong to say this — "It could be the third-party conservative or even someone whose name didn't appear on any ballot."

Why that was wrong: Because the Constitution, that document people swear by when it permits them to do what they wanna, says that the House would pick from "the persons having the highest numbers [of electoral votes] not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President." That would mean they'd pick that third-party guy since they sure wouldn't pick Hillary and the whole idea of doing this is not to pick Donald. It's still a terrible idea that wouldn't work and that would damage our democracy if it did.

Thanks to the many folks who wrote in to remind me of this.

David Letterman, who's looking a lot like Santa Claus in the Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer special these days, made a public appearance last Thursday. It was at a salute to the U.S.O. hosted by another bearded refugee from late night TV, Jon Stewart. The President and Mrs. Obama, as well as the Vice-President and Mrs. Biden were present and there was a comedy show with Judd Apatow, Jeff Ross, Hasan Minhaj and Kristen Schaal. But the big moment was when Dave came on. Here's some footage from the event…

Gregory Mankiw is a professor of economics at Harvard and he's listed some of the myths relating to the economy that one hears a lot, especially in election years.

The sad thing (of course) is that some of these will never ever be disbelieved by those who want to believe them — like the one about how cutting taxes, especially for the rich, is a guaranteed way to stimulate the economy. No matter how many times it's tried and doesn't work, some people will insist it just has to be tried again — and again and again and again. Remember the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

You know one of the reasons Donald Trump won the Republican nomination? Because the folks in his own party who oppose him are really lame at that. They dithered and delayed, long past the time there were viable alternatives to sell to potential Trump voters. By the time they decided they had to do something, the only other options they could offer were Kasich and Cruz. Kasich hadn't impressed many people as actually even being in the race. And Cruz is the guy that even other Republicans compare to Satan.

So now, here's the new plan: Some Republican leaders want to recruit a non-hysterical, traditional conservative candidate to run a third-party candidacy and to articulate the sane right-wing view, as opposed to whatever it is that Trump's selling. They recognize that this third-party candidate cannot possibly garner 270 electoral votes but that's not the point. The idea is that he or she (almost certainly a he) would split the votes so no one — Hillary, Donald or this contender — would make it to 270.

This would then throw the election into the House of Representatives which is more or less under the control of the Republican establishment. They then could award the country, not to the candidate who got the most votes from the American people or even the most electoral votes, but to a person chosen by the G.O.P. House. It could be the third-party conservative or even someone whose name didn't appear on any ballot. Correction.

Yes, it's come to that: "Let's not let the people choose the President. They pick people we don't like."

As Jonathan Chait points out, this idea cannot possibly work. The third-party conservative might cost Clinton a few raw votes but would instead take most of them from Trump. Hillary, who already starts with a tremendous electoral vote advantage, might well win states that Trump would otherwise win.

It's hard to believe they'll try this. Yeah, this is the year when a lot of stuff is happening that it's hard to believe but this one is really hard to believe.

An update from John Oliver…

I have been friends with my fellow writer Tony Isabella for around 48 years, which is amazing when you realize we're both in our late teens — emotionally, at least. He wrote to ask…

Was there one special moment or one special comic book that made you realize that you wanted to write comic books? For me, it was Fantastic Four Annual #1. I kind of sort of knew I wanted to be a writer. I had been writing since I was four years old, but it was that comic book that flipped a switch in my head.

No, no one in particular. As I've explained here about as often as comics and movies retell the origin of Batman, I decided when I was around five or so that I was going to be a writer. I just wasn't sure what I was going to be a writer of. At heart, I guess I wanted to do everything — books, TV, movies, plays, magazines, comics, cartoons, fortunes for fortune cookies, whatever — but I knew that couldn't happen. I kinda figured I'd wait and see which if any of those became feasible and then I'd be satisfied with any one of them. Little did I suspect I would eventually get to do most of 'em.

I loved comic books and had more than all the other kids I knew put together but I don't recall any particular longing to write them. Back in the sixties, the few times I came across articles or interviews that detailed how the business operated, I read that you had to live in New York and be able to go to the publishers' offices. That wasn't exactly true but I took it as true.

Living in Los Angeles, it just seemed more natural to stick with the kind of writing that was done in my city. It felt like I was living on a different planet than the one on which comic books were written, whereas TV was not all that far away. My family was not in show business but the lady who lived next door to us was a regular on The Andy Griffith Show and the man who lived across the street from us was the Technical Advisor on Dr. Kildare and we had brushes with others.

A life-changing force (in a way) was The Dick Van Dyke Show, which I watched with zeal. It made writing for television look like a great job and then when I got to go see an episode of it filmed, that really skewed my future plans in that direction. Hey, if you want to see the one I saw that night and don't mind sitting through some commercials, here it is. That thirteen-year-old kid you might hear laughing in the background? That's me.

Like you, Tony, I began writing letters to the letter columns in comic books. I did it, as I imagine you did, as a way of bonding with comics and feeling closer to them. I had a lot printed and I still remember a certain chill/numbness, such as I'd never felt before and have never felt since, when I purchased a copy of Aquaman #28 and found my letter printed. It was a dumb letter but it was mine and there was my name…and I recall thinking that it was an important moment in my life though why, I had no idea.

I had more printed and more…and even suffered the professional writer's dilemma of being drastically rewritten a few times. That annoyed me. I mean, you can rewrite me if you pay me but not if I'm writing pro bono and especially not if you change what I wrote so I seem to hold some viewpoint that isn't mine. I was giving up writing letters to comics when to my surprise, three East Coast comic book editors — Mort Weisinger and Jack Miller at DC, Dick Giordano at Charlton — individually wrote to invite me to submit scripts for their comics.

I tried it, doubtful it would lead to anything…and indeed, it did not. But it was a valuable learning exercise and soon after, I met Jack Kirby and then got recommended to write for Disney Studios and Gold Key Comics and one odd day, I realized I was writing 3-4 comic books a month without ever having imagined I could have a career in comics.

Because of this, I often tell beginning writers not to lock themselves into one conceivable career. If you have any talent at all, you can write many different things and while you can't pursue them all at once, you can be open to them. If you can envision ten different careers for yourself that would work for you, you have a much better chance of achieving success than if you have but one.

But you know that, Tony. Thanks for the question and I'll return the favor by suggesting everyone pick up a copy of Black Lightning, Volume 1, a fine collection of the ground-breaking comic you wrote for DC back in 1977. It's just been released and it can be purchased many places like this and it should be.

Do you have a question you'd like me to answer on this blog? If so, read this.

As Josh Voorhees points out, this election is all about stopping the person you don't want to see in the White House. The primary motivator for Trump voters is to stop Hillary. The primary motivator for Hillary voters is to stop Trump. This can't be healthy.

Hey, let's listen to Al Jaffee explain how the MAD Fold-In came to be…

That stand-off on the 91 Freeway ended shortly before 9:40 PM, which means an awful lot of folks sat in their cars, stuck there for two hours. The unidentified suspect was taken into custody. He was not, as seemed likely for a while, dead. He sat there for a long time, prolonging the inevitable.

S.W.A.T. units arrived around 9 PM and someone began trying to negotiate with the driver. I'm not sure what he had to offer except giving up without further delay or trouble, or what the cops had to offer except not shooting him. Anyway, somehow they couldn't come to an arrangement so after about the half hour on the scene, the S.W.A.T. guys busted the back window of the car, lobbed in a tear gas canister and the suspect was forced out and chomped on by a K-9 Corps pooch. I still think the hero of the evening was Stu Mundel.

As I was typing the above, I got a notice on my iPhone that Stu was broadcasting again on Periscope. He was showing us that after a long evening, he and the chopper were finally heading home. A job well done.