Category Archives: To Be Filed

A profile of my occasional employers, Sid and Marty Krofft…two amazing men who are soon to celebrate their sixtieth year in the entertainment industry. Make sure you check out the photo gallery.

Here we have Julien Neel, the man who loves to sing four-part harmony with himself, vastly improving a Beatles song.

What I thought of as I watched this was there was a time when John, Paul, George and Ringo were the cutting edge of music, producing the kind of tunes that caused adults to lament "the kind of songs that kids listen to these days" — and now here's one of those songs sounding about as safe and traditional as anything ever put on a record. But I kinda like it this way…

So they're saying Bill Cosby may "walk" because of a technicality in the case against him in Pennsylvania. A former district attorney there says he agreed that what Cosby said in the deposition in the civil case against him wouldn't be used in any criminal case against him. And without that deposition, the current criminal case against Cosby becomes a lot weaker.

I don't know about the merits of this argument and I assume that however the judge rules, someone will think it's a miscarriage of justice and maybe grounds for appeal. What I do know is that if this is the thing that gets Cosby his freedom, it won't clear his name in any way. It'll just mean that they had good evidence against him and weren't allowed to apply it. The end result will be that in the court of public opinion, he gets away with rape because he could afford good lawyers. It may save him prison time but it won't help his reputation. Or anyone's views of how our court system operates.

This is yet another in a series of essays here about how professional or aspiring professional writers can and must cope with two various kinds of rejection — rejection of your work by the buyers and rejection by various folks in the audience. Part 1 can be read here, Part 2 can be read here, Part 3 can be read here and Part 4 can be read here. Please do not reject any of them.

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Now then. If you are a writer or aspiring writer, you probably know or at least have access to other writers more successful than you. I can't speak for all those other writers but I bet I speak for 95%+ of them when I say they would rather not read your script. I sure wouldn't.

I don't want to read your script because…well, first of all, I don't enjoy reading scripts. I always have a couple of mine bouncing around in my head and that doesn't leave a lot of room for someone else's. I'll make the time/effort to read one that resulted in a great movie or which was written by someone I know to be a great writer because I might learn something there. The late Larry Gelbart gave me copies of a couple of his unproduced screenplays and I sure as hell read them.

Also, Larry wasn't expecting me to critique those scripts for him or help get them to someone who would produce them. That's a big difference.

When people say to me, "Would you read my script?" what I usually hear — buried deep or sometimes not so deep in the subtext — is: "Will you read my script and tell me how great it is?" That can put me in a very awkward place if, as is more than a little possible, said script doesn't strike me as great.

The first time a friend did that to me and I was dumb enough to agree, it did not go well. I realized too late that the friend did not want to hear, "Well, the opening is way too slow and I didn't understand that whole thing with the switched keys and the scene in the diner is totally redundant." He wanted to hear, "It's brilliant, it's perfect, start writing your Emmy speech!" When I didn't say that, it had a very real, damaging impact on our friendship.

The second time I agreed to read someone's script, it was because the someone had assured me that she really, really, really wanted criticism. "Tear it to shreds if you think it deserves it," she said…and I, fool that I can be, believed her. I didn't shred it but I did point out a number of things I thought were wrong with it, including the whole ending which didn't make sense to me.

It turned out she really didn't want that. What she wanted was for me to say something like, "You need to cut about five pages — and don't ask me which five because they're all so good — and fix the typo on page 14 and it'll be perfect!" Again, it was not a pleasant conversation.

The third time — I can be a slow learner — I thought the script was really bad. It was the pilot for a proposed cartoon show and though I had about twenty criticisms of it, we never got past the first one. The friend — who before the conversation concluded would no longer be one — began arguing with me. He'd said, "I really and truly respect your opinions" but once he heard a negative one, there went the respect. It was really an upsetting discussion for both of us, all the more so for me because I'd thought I was doing this guy a favor.

So that's one reason I don't want to read others' scripts. Another is that some day if I write something vaguely similar, I don't want them accusing me of stealing their idea.  (At least twice in my life, folks who have asked me to read their work have expected me to first sign a paper acknowledging that I'd read it and that they could sue me if I ripped them off.  There's a fine way to not get someone to donate their time and expertise to help you out.)

But the biggest reason is that I think it's a waste of both my time and theirs. They shouldn't care what I think of their script. I'm not in a position to purchase or produce it. And I'm not really in a position to get it to someone who could purchase or produce it.

My opinion doesn't matter. It could well be 100% wrong.

Did you ever see a truly awful movie? Of course you have. I'll bet you can name dozens. Well, someone approved the making of those movies. Someone who had the power to do so authorized the spending of a considerable sum of money to make each of those movies. It might have been a small company spending a few hundred thousand or a big company spending tens of millions but someone (probably several someones) made a bad investment.

In some of those cases, it may have been a matter of a good script being mauled and changed and not probably well-served by the production. But in some cases, it was surely a matter of a bad script that was misjudged.

If someone entrusted with greenlighting scripts for production can think a bad one is good, they can sure as hell think a good one is bad. The latter mistake is probably a hundred times as prevalent since the former misdiagnosis pisses away a lot of money and the latter doesn't. "No, let's not make this" is almost always a much safer decision so when they err, they err in that direction.

Nevertheless, you need to get your script to the person who can make that kind of decision, wrong though it may be. You don't have to get it to me. Me liking it doesn't help you. There have been a lot of movies that were very successful in a financial and/or critical sense that left me cold. If you'd written the screenplay that could result in one of them, that script would probably have left me cold, too. Which means I'd be wrong…and you'd be wrong to take that as meaningful.

There are two reasons why writers try to get readings of their scripts from someone like me. One is that they want the ego-boost if/when we say, "This is terrific." They want that thrill and they want some reassurance that they aren't wasting their time to hustle it along further.

The problem with that: Some people placed in my position will say, "It's great" just to make you happy and to avoid discomfort. And even if we don't say we love it, that shouldn't lessen your determination to get it to someone who can make it happen. Because we can be utterly, totally off-the-mark in our evaluations.

Then there's the second reason writers try to get readings from someone like me. They're usually hoping that we'll say something like, "This pilot for a new cartoon series is so wonderful that I want to send it to an agent I know. He's best friends with a guy at Disney and he told me his friend is looking for an animated series just like this!" That's probably not going to happen because I probably don't know of any such easy openings. At this moment, I don't think I even know of any not-easy openings.

Most of my jobs these days come from buyers approaching me…which is great because the part of my job I like the least is the "selling" part. I love the writing part. The selling part is sometimes a necessity so I can get to do the writing part or get what I've already written purchased and then produced or published.

I don't like getting involved in the selling part of my own work so I have no desire to get involved in the selling part of yours. Nor am I any good at it.  I don't stay in touch with what's happening at every studio and who's in charge of buying this week and what the hell are they looking for at the moment? If I did like that kind of thing, I'd have become an agent.

Agents specialize in all that…and if you have a spec screenplay or a pilot for a TV series or a bible for a new animated show, that's the person you need to get it to. Not me. Not someone else you happen to know who's in the business of selling his or her own work.  Except when we need one for ourselves, most of us don't keep up on who the agents are who are open for new clients.  (I haven't had an agent in over 20 years.)  And we certainly don't know every place in our field to sell a script or get a writing job. We just have the few connections we have that will pay us for what we write.

And finally, what we especially don't have are magic wands to wave and sell your script. If we did, we'd wave them over our own.

Here's a trick from one of my favorite magicians, Doc Eason. This one is not easy to do, no matter how effortless he makes it look…

Here's a good new interview with Bill Maher, whose show returns from hiatus tonight. Gee, what a shame he won't have much to talk about.

Rich Arndt read this article I linked to about the Ted Cruz "birther" issue and sent me this…

I think both the article (which is just fine for what it covers) and your own remarks are missing a bit of the boat on Cruz's eligibility to be president. While Cruz is quite likely eligible the G.O.P. has spent years screaming that Obama isn't or wasn't eligible under nearly the same circumstances — i.e., that of having a U.S. mother and a foreign father. The reason Trump is bringing it up now (and likely the only reason he's bringing it up) is because he has to — he's made such a huge stink about Obama not being eligible that to set silent on Cruz's eligibility may cause his own supporters to wonder why he's not bringing it up.

With Cruz's run the G.O.P. in general has to deal with a lurking controversy that they themselves set into motion eight years ago with their own idiotic rantings against Obama's eligibility. It isn't so much the actual legality over whether Cruz (or Obama) is eligible to be president of the United States, it's how to deal with the hypocrisy of why a black Democrat isn't considered eligible to steward the country by conservatives because his father wasn't an American yet a white Republican, under much (perhaps even exactly) the same circumstances, is. And even that doesn't address the claim certain G.O.P. members (including Trump) made that because Obama was allegedly born in Kenya (a falsehood, he was born in Hawaii) he was ineligible to stand as president while Cruz, who actually is foreign-born (born in Canada) is eligible for the office.

I dunno…it seems to me simpler than that. Trump's bringing it up because there are people out there who are on the fence as to whether to vote for him or Cruz. And having this issue dangling out there will probably cause some of those folks to say, "We'd better vote for Trump just in case it turns out later than Cruz isn't eligible." As sleazy political moves go, this one ain't bad.

This was the wrong video I posted last night. This is Matthew Broderick and much of the cast of the 1995 Broadway revival of How to Succeed in Business Without Trying, performing their big closing number at that year's Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. They are, of course, lip-syncing — to the cast album recording, I believe. But it's still worth watching. The lady who rocks the number at the end is the always-fabulous Lillias White, who has stolen every show she's ever been in…

Here's a summary of this whole question about whether or not Ted Cruz is a "natural born citizen" and therefore eligible to be president. Seems to me the loudest voices in this debate are folks who start with the question of whether or not they want Cruz to hold the office…then they work backwards from that to figure out an argument for why he is or isn't eligible.

I have no opinion on the matter. I'm not even sure whether I'd like to see Cruz be the G.O.P. nominee. Of all the people running, he's the one I think would do the most damage to the country. He's also the Republican I think would be easiest for Clinton or Sanders to defeat.

But I am leery when I hear someone described as an "originalist," meaning one who believes the Constitution ought to be interpreted the way the men who wrote it meant it. That sounds scholarly and fair but every originalist I've seen miraculously comes to the conclusion that the Founding Fathers' interpretation was just what he would want it to be. That's not deferring to them. It's finding ways to spin old James Madison quotes so they seem to support your prejudices and then insisting James outranks everyone else's views.

Fred Kaplan explains what happened in that incident where ten American sailors were arrested by Iranian forces. President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry handled it with civility and no harm done…while Republican presidential aspirants tried to spin it as presidential weakness and timidity. Ain't it nice to have grown-ups in the White House?

Last night, I posted a video link item about the 1995 Broadway revival of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Due to an error on my part, I linked to the wrong video excerpting that production. I've fixed it so the right video is now in place, three items back. If you checked it out before, you might want to check it out again.

We seem to have a lot of great actors dying lately. Alan Rickman is the latest but I wanted to make mention of Brian Bedford, who died yesterday at the age of 80. Most of his work was on the stage — seven Tony nominations, one win — but he appeared now and then on TV and in movies. In 1973, he voiced the title character in the Disney animated version of Robin Hood.

Perhaps the least important role of his career was that of a Fredric Wertham type doctor in an episode of one of Bob Newhart's shorter-lived situation comedies, Bob — the one in which Mr. Newhart played a comic book artist. That episode was written by Yours Truly but though I was on the set, I somehow managed to not meet Mr. Bedford. Everyone said though that he was a joy to be around and I'm sure that was true. He was certainly a joy to watch.

Longtime political reporter Walter Shapiro thinks the press is inflating the value and importance of a lot of polls that don't mean a lot. I like this part…

…TV ratings are not boosted by anyone displaying uncertainty about poll numbers and expressing humility before the voters. These days, the only three words that pundits can't say on television are "I don't know." Print and online publications get clicks by ballyhooing the latest poll numbers, no matter how meaningless. Nobody is going to headline a story, "Trump Leads In New National Poll with Little Predicative Value."

It's pretty much the same as that line I quote all the time from another seasoned reporter, Jack Germond: "The trouble with the news is we're not paid to say 'I don't know' even when we don't know."

In 1995, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying was revived for Broadway with Matthew Broderick in the Robert Morse part and Megan Mullally as his love interest, Rosemary. Before it opened there, the production tried out in La Jolla and I was invited to attend a performance and offer whatever criticisms I had. As it turned out, the criticisms I had turned out to be pretty much the same as the ones everyone had, which was to remove certain "improvements" to the book…

Like: Near the end when the schemes of Bud Frump were failing, they had Frump panicking and fleeing the building…and he ran into a non-working elevator and fell down the shaft. Thereafter, the actor playing Frump had a big Oliver Hardy-style bandage on his supposedly broken leg. I didn't understand what the point was of having the character break his leg and apparently no one else did, either. By the time the show got to New York, that was out. So was Robert Mandan, who was playing the Rudy Vallee part. I thought he was pretty great in the role but apparently the producers didn't.

Our video is a "sales reel" for this production made to push for group ticket sales. I believe all the stage footage was shot in La Jolla since Robert Mandan is in it. Also in there are Ernie Sabella, Jonathan Freeman and Lillias White plus other performers who did go with the show to New York.

For silly reasons, I saw it three times in Manhattan — once with Broderick and Mullally, once with Sarah Jessica Parker (soon to be Matthew's wife) as Rosemary and once with John Stamos as Finch and someone else as Rosemary. It was a pretty good show, all three times. This may give you some idea how good…

My friend Douglass Abramson sent me this and others have written to make the same point, though Douglass understood that I was making a joke…

I'm assuming that you know this and decided to ignore it in order to make your Quick Draw joke but the Padres are scheduled by MLB to be out of town during Comic-Con so they aren't competing with the convention center for parking spaces/trolley seats and to decrease the severity of the downtown traffic jams. The park has been rented out for studio promotions the last couple of years, but renting it out to Comic-Con to use for the current Hall H programming and possibly the media company booths could free up a lot of space in the convention center. Maybe enough to be able to sell some additional passes. CCI has, reportedly, been uninterested in the idea.

Yeah, I knew all this. I don't remember it well enough to repeat it here but there was an explanation of why the convention didn't expand into Petco Park next to the convention center. And I wasn't serious about putting Quick Draw! in there…though wouldn't Sergio's drawings look good on that big HD jumbotron scoreboard of theirs?