Category Archives: To Be Filed

A drawing lesson from our buddy, Tom Gammill…

Several of you have asked me to say something about the controversy that has resulted from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences nominating a total of zero non-white actors for its coveted Oscars this year. I haven't said anything before because I didn't see very many movies in 2015 so I'm not in a position to say that any particular non-nominated performance was more deserving than any particular nominated performance. And even if I did, it's not like the Academy always agrees with me…

Also, as racist affronts go, it does not strike me as the most serious one. An unarmed black guy getting killed during an arrest or a qualified job applicant getting turned away because of skin color…that's the kind of thing that should yield protests and outrage. I'm afraid I don't have a lot of coinfidence that the selection process for the Academy Awards ever involves a lot of logic or proper consideration so it's tough for me to get incensed at anyone being omitted. (Hey, didn't everyone say Steve Carell was an absolute shoo-in?)

The problem as I see it is not that the stars of Straight Outta Compton didn't get nominated. It's that there aren't enough people who look like them in the hierarchy of the motion picture business. Read this editorial in Variety.

The Academy has taken some swift steps to get a more diverse membership participating in the future. That may be a step in the right direction, though it seems to involve using a bit of ageism to combat racism. When you get a moment, read this letter from my longtime pal Bill Mumy who has been dismissed as an Oscar voter to make room for voters of more ethnic diversity.

But the problem really isn't the Academy. It's the industry. And I don't see anything happening that's going to change that.

Taken recently in a medical building I was passing through…

David Roberts tells why he believes Donald Trump will never be president. He makes some good points, though he seems to concede Trump getting the G.O.P. nomination. If I were forced to predict now, I'd still predict Trump won't win but it's not something on which I'd bet actual cash. Too much that couldn't possibly happen has already happened.

Somewhere on this site, I'm sure I stated a firm belief that this nation would never elect as president, someone who hadn't already been a senator, governor or important congressperson. I used to think that but Trump's success-to-date has convinced me that's not true. Even if he doesn't win, he's proven that's not as impossible as I thought. A different prominent public figure — one with similar strengths but not certain weaknesses — could do it.

The transition of this site from our old server to our new server is almost complete but for the next day or so, you may find some graphics missing or some internal links not working. All will be functional soon.

Tomorrow night on Fox, there's a live presentation of the musical, Grease, which sounds like it's got a pretty good cast. Aaron Tveit, who is terrific, has the male lead. Tveit, by the way, is 32 years old and the other actors are all, as is customary with this show, close to twice the age of the characters they're playing.

I'm not a huge fan of Grease. I think it's a lightweight piece of work with a few good songs…and when I've seen it on stage, which I have four or five times, I've always had the feeling the cast was having a better time than the audience. It's had an active history of revivals and restagings because it's easy to cast and cheap to stage. Sets and costumes are pretty simple and it doesn't hurt the show much if they look cheap and amateurish.

It also doesn't need a big orchestra and the nature of the show makes it attractive to folks who aren't hardcore playgoers, especially since the movie. In fact, since the movie came out, most groups that stage the show try to make their stage versions more closely resemble the movie, adding in songs written for the film and casting leads who resemble John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John.

Unlike the recent live musicals on NBC, this version will have a live audience, though reportedly a lot of the audience members will be watching much of the show on monitors. There are many sets and apparently what they're doing is placing a portion of the audience in front of each set (or sometimes in it like extras) and letting them watch the scenes on other sets on TV. So if you're there, you'll see some of the show right in front of you and much of it the same way folks at home will be watching.

More interesting is that several scenes are being staged outside. They're saying these scenes will be done "rain or shine." At the moment, there's a 100% chance of rain in the afternoon in Los Angeles (where the production is being done) and about a 70% chance during the broadcast. But as they say, the show must go on. There's a song in the show called "It's Raining on Prom Night." Let's see if it does. There could even be actual "Greased Lightning."

I'm fascinated by these folks who create music videos — many a cappella, some with accompaniment — for YouTube via computer-connected collaborations. Here's a jazz number uniting four such folks who probably don't all live on the same continent. The three vocalists along the top row are Meg Contini, Evan Sanders and Simon Åkesson. The fellow with the glasses is Danny Fong, who seems to have organized and produced this one. All these singers do a lot of these, and Danny has quite a few online that are just him singing harmony with himself. I would love to see some of these online singers build YouTube videos into a more mainstream career…

Daniel Klos wrote to ask…

Regarding your recent posting about Mel Brooks claiming to be broke prior to taking on the Blazing Saddles assignment: Whether he got the chronology right or wrong, when show business figures (particularly high profile show business figures like Mr. Brooks) claim to be "broke," are they simply being hyperbolic in their language? Or do they actually mean that they're living-paycheck-to-paycheck broke or on-the-verge-of-being-evicted broke? Since you are in show business yourself and may have more of a first-hand awareness of this than someone like me, how common is it for celebrities to actually be on the verge of being destitute once they've achieved their celebrity?

Not that uncommon…and I'm sure it happens in every industry where your take-home pay can go from low to high and then drop. We hear more about it happening with celebrities because we hear more about everything that happens to celebrities.

But it may be more common in show business because incomes can be more roller-coastery and less predictable. You know…you get hired on a new TV series. Your income goes way up. Will that series be on for ten years or ten weeks?

I'm thinking now of a friend who was on a sitcom. While it was on, his income was around $600,000 a year. The year after it was canceled, he made closer to $50,000 and the year after, less. He wound up selling the house and a lot of luxuries he'd purchased when he thought the money would be steadier and there'd be more of it.

Yeah, big stars do go broke and it's sometimes almost comical to hear that Willie Nelson or Wayne Newton or even folks with different initials have had to declare bankruptcy, sell their assets, etc. Something I've never quite understood is how someone with $30 million winds up broke. I mean, if you lose $30 million, it doesn't all evaporate one morning. It probably means that one week, you have $29 million and a few weeks later, you have $28 million and then you have $27 million…

When you get down to around $18 million, don't you say, "Hmm…maybe I'm doing something wrong here"?

From what I hear, Wayne lived on the presumption that he'd be packing them in at Vegas showrooms forever and then — not necessarily in this order — his voice went away and his audience went away. (Willie, I can't begin to explain. No one can do that much cocaine and he sure didn't spend it all on clothes.) I think what happens is that sometimes the money comes so easily and endlessly that you get reckless with living well and start gambling on new business ventures, figuring there's plenty more where that came from. And then there isn't.

I can't say exactly what it was with Mel Brooks. The Producers was not a very lucrative success for him at the time — more of a "cult hit" than we now remember. To get another movie made, he had to take a very low-paying deal on The Twelve Chairs and that did little business.

On the other hand, I remember that he got up at Howard Morris's last wedding and as part of a toast, he said, "I am so happy for Howie that he's discovered the same joy I once found…a wife who works!" Before Blazing Saddles changed his fortune, Mel's big problem may have been not that he and Anne Bancroft were in financial jeopardy but that she seemed to be the breadwinner. That mattered a lot to men of his generation.

Just speaking for myself, I have rarely been able to look very far ahead and estimate how much cash would be coming in or when it might arrive. I've been pretty conservative in my spending and I've never had a period when if everything suddenly stopped, I'd be worried about how to afford groceries next Tuesday or the next rent or mortgage payment. But I can sure understand the temptations involved or the cockiness or how sometimes what looks like an absolutely-certain project can suddenly fall through. It's hard to live within your means when you have no idea what those means will be in six months.

My man Fred Kaplan lists some of the ridiculous things said in last night's G.O.P. debate about U.S. foreign policy. There were an amazing number of them given that you-know-who wasn't on the premises.

Much is being written about the way Mr. Trump's success so far has changed the nature of political campaigns. The biggest impact I see is that people running for public office used to be at least a little afraid of saying something that was so untrue and ridiculous that it would change their public profile in an undoable way…like Al Gore getting typed as a liar for saying he'd created the Internet, which of course was not what he said or meant. Nowadays though, they all seem to think nothing like that can hurt them; that they're free to say whatever seems to work well in the speech or debate line today, and they aren't harmed if it's total Bandini. It's like the country has resigned itself to the concept that even the person they'll choose to support and cheer on is going to have to tell a lot of lies to get the job.

Several folks have sent me this. It's a guide to the actors who did voiceovers in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Those of you who've been to my Cartoon Voices panels at Comic-Con will recognize a number of these people.

You might have noticed this site crashing a lot lately. We have had an increase in traffic that has created some tech problems and we're in the process of rectifying them. There's a possibility the site may be down for some brief periods until we get it all rearranged and repaired so forgive us our outages. This should (note the emphasis) solve the problems. Thank you.

Here's an entire movie you probably won't want to watch in full, not that it's a bad one. It's The Fighting Kentuckian, made in 1949 and starring John Wayne, Vera Ralston and — and this is what interests me about it — Oliver Hardy.

Once he'd formally teamed with Laurel, Hardy only appeared on-screen and sans Stan in four films: A 1928 Our Gang comedy called Barnum and Ringling, Inc, Zenobia (which we wrote about here), then this one followed by a brief cameo in Frank Capra's Riding High (1950). He also did a brief off-camera voiceover in one other Our Gang film.

And after this, Hardy would only appear in one more film with Laurel — Utopia, also known as Atoll K — a pretty sad last effort for the greatest comedy team of all. Laurel appeared in no films without Hardy after they teamed.

Ollie's pretty good in this film. One forgets that he was an actor, not the lovable dunce he usually played on the screen. If you want to fast forward and see a little of him, he makes his entrance around 4 minutes and 50 seconds into the proceedings. And here's a chance to see John Wayne in his best period, before he started sounding like a guy doing an impression of John Wayne…

My wise friend Paul Harris reminds us how silly the whole idea of the Iowa Caucuses are…and how they probably don't even reflect who the people of Iowa want to see be elected president.

Still though, everyone is so eager for the election — especially the Republican side — to progress towards a decision that great importance will be attached to the outcome there. The fact that the past winners there have generally not gone on to the White House will be forgotten by folks who oughta know better and they'll be discussing how the outcome helps or hurts the Cruz campaign, how inevitable it makes Trump, who should or will drop out, etc. So it doesn't mean anything but it may still have a lot of impact. Politics is full of things that don't mean anything except that since people think they do, they do.

The current issue of Written By, the Writers Guild magazine, is filled with goodies. I already linked you to this interview with Woody Allen and now I call your attention to a chat with Mel Brooks, in which he talks a lot about his own genius and reveals some things I don't think I've ever heard before about The Producers.

I'm a little puzzled about the timeline Mr. Brooks presents. He talks about being broke after making The Twelve Chairs and his life being saved by getting the job to do the film that was ultimately called Blazing Saddles. Then he places his work on Get Smart during the period that he and a team were writing Blazing Saddles. Uh, Get Smart was created in early 1965, The Producers was made in 1966, The Twelve Chairs was made in 1969 and Blazing Saddles was made in 1973, several years after Get Smart had completed its five season run and left the air. He also doesn't mention that Buck Henry co-created Get Smart.

But maybe I shouldn't quibble. Any Mel Brooks interview is worth reading.

John Oliver's show returns to the air in a few weeks. In the meantime…