Category Archives: To Be Filed

Hey, let's watch the first sixteen minutes of the 1975 Academy Awards ceremony with your host, Bob Hope. Bob makes his entrance and delivers his monologue about 9 minutes and 40 seconds in…

Here's a real good article in Forbes by Rob Salkowitz about how Jack Kirby, my one-time employer, is finally getting some of his due.

There are some very ugly arguments to be found on the 'net between folks who want to believe Stan Lee was the sole genius behind the Marvel heroes and others who argue that Jack was. It leads to the kind of ugly that causes most rational folks (or informed ones) to steer clear. I know: I've been attacked by both sides — by the Lee partisans (who forget I also worked for Stan) for my relationship with Jack, and by the Jack defenders for not savaging Stan at every opportunity.

But I am certain there is a dispassionate, evidence-based way of looking at the Lee-Kirby body of work and I hope to present it in the big biography of Jack I'm trying to finish in time for the centennial of his birth in 2017. For now though, read Rob's piece. He knows what he's talking about. And there's a show on ABC tomorrow night about Captain America that I assume will properly acknowledge Jack as more than just a guy who drew up other folks' ideas.

As we continue to enjoy reruns of Johnny Carson's Tonight Show on the Antenna TV channel, we learn that the Decades channel is soon to begin airing old, "full-length" (but minus most music performances) episodes of The Dick Cavett Show. This is good news and it would be even better for me if I got the Decades channel on my cable service. Yes, I can install a rooftop antenna on my home and get it. No, I won't go to that trouble just for this.

Cavett's show was a very fine program and if I could watch these, I'd look forward to more than just the episodes where he interviewed legends usually for the entire 90 minutes. Understandably, most of what's been available has been those installments but the show was pretty good when he just filled the time talking with three or more non-legend guests. He was a good interviewer who never made you feel that the person in his guest chair wasn't worthy of as many segments as he allowed them.

One thing I'm pretty sure they won't do but I wish they would is air a couple of the episodes where Cavett was off and guest hosts filled in. They picked odd ones like Germaine Greer, Otto Preminger, Orson Welles and F. Lee Bailey. We'll probably never see non-Johnny shows on the Carson replays either.

But I'm remembering one night when Dick was off and his replacement was Zero Mostel, who presided over 90 of the funniest minutes I ever saw on TV. Mostel's guest list included Dick Benjamin and Paula Prentiss and at first, his mission statement apparently was to get through the entire show without allowing that clichéd concept of the host asking a question and allowing the guest to answer it. The result was deliberate shambles but very funny shambles. (He unshambled it somewhat when he brought out his other guests, Dalton Trumbo and artist Jamie Wyeth.)

At least, I remember it as an incredible show. That was back in June of '71 so maybe it wasn't as wonderful as I recall. The following night, Cavett's guest host was Muhammad Ali and his main guest was Howard Cosell. Wouldn't it be great to see that one now? Oh, well. I'd settle for the Cavett shows with Cavett — if only my cable company would pick up Decades.

Yesterday, I took an Uber over to visit a friend. The trip covered 6.42 miles, took 29.05 minutes and cost me $11.79. Tipping on Uber is not expected but unless there's a big surge on, I always give the driver two bucks in cash — or more for a longer haul. This one got two and he was very, very pleased and grateful. So the trip was $13.79.

Coming back, I couldn't get the Uber app on my phone to function properly. For a long time, it refused to connect and when it finally did, it would not summon an Uber car to where I was. This happened to me once before — oddly (I think oddly) when I was trying to summon an Uber car from the same location.

That time, it took about 15 minutes before the app finally sent a car to me. This time, I was in more of a hurry so I called Yellow Cab and had them send a taxi my way. The driver was there in less than five minutes and took me home via a different route which covered 6.60 miles and took 26 minutes. The fare was $24.45 and I usually tip cabbies 20% — so the damage was $29.34.

The two trips made for a good comparison of the two services. Uber, because you can't phone them, puts you at the mercy of the app and the network working properly. This time, it failed me. On the other hand, the taxi ride was more than double the price.

Uber needs to work on the tech end but this doesn't change my mind that if cab companies are going to continue to exist, they're going to have to become more like Uber.

The other night, James Corden did a Carpool Karaoke segment with Adele that was really remarkable. I find Corden's in-studio interviews hard to watch but some of his non-chat segments are quite good and the one with Adele was quite special. In this article, one of his producers explained how they arranged it.

I think I've figured out why I don't enjoy his interviews. He brings all or most of his guests on at the same time. Now, that might make for a unique, fun conversation if they all joined in on every topic…but too often, it reminds me of what Joe Franklin used to do on his long-running, little-watched talk show. Joe would have on three guests who had nothing to do with each other and he'd just fire questions at them in rotation, serializing the Q-and-A. He'd ask Guest 1 about his profession. Then he'd ask Guest 2 about what he did. Then he'd ask Guest 3 something and then the discussion would jump back to Guest 1 and what he did.

If you were only interested in Guest 1, you had to sit through all the irrelevant banter that you didn't care about to hear the next moment he got to speak. And usually, you could see the guests who weren't speaking at the moment weren't interested either. They were just patiently waiting for it to be their turn again.

So the talk was halting and it jumped all over the place…and I've learned doing my silly convention panels, if everyone on the panel isn't engrossed, the audience won't be, either.

Mr. Corden usually manages to have one guest I'd like to hear and two or three who'll be discussing their TV series I don't watch or their new CD I'm not going to buy. Johnny Carson used to be great at making you interested in guests you hadn't heard of before. I don't think any current talk show host does that well and I'm not sure I've even seen any of them try. At least though when Jimmy Fallon brings on a guest I don't know, I can fast-forward to the next spot. When Corden is directing every third question to a guest I don't know, it's time to watch something else.

All that said, Corden's doing fine in the ratings and his YouTube hits are probably the envy of most other shows. This one with Adele is going through the online stratosphere. So maybe he's doing something right…

Fred Kaplan says Obama's approach to the Iran problem is not only working but working quite well. Does anyone think that the Republicans' condemnation of his every move is based on anything other than a belief that in order to win the presidency, one must condemn every single thing Obama does? I mean, even if Obama's really and truly wrong, that's not why Trump, Cruz, Rubio and all the rest are saying he is.

Kevin Drum reminds us that Donald Trump is not and has never been a great businessman. Most of his deals have been disasters and what has saved him has been his bluster and at times, the value of his name. This is something a lot of people will never grasp because they figure anyone who has a lot more money than they do must be doing something — probably most things — right. And if people with more money than Trump say he's not a great financier…well, that gets written off as petty jealousy.

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…