Category Archives: To Be Filed

That's my pal Michael Hoey on the left, posing with actress Michele Carey and some guy named Elvis Something on the set of Live A Little, Love A Little. Michael wrote that movie and one other for Mr. Presley, and he wrote, produced, directed and/or edited many other motion pictures and television shows in a very long, successful career.

He was born in London in 1934, the son of English actor Dennis Hoey, who played the clueless Inspector Lestrade in the Sherlock Holmes pictures which starred Basil Rathbone in the title role. That was how his family happened to move to Hollywood and there, he broke into the business as a film editor, cutting for — among many other famous directors — George Cukor, John Ford and Fred Zinnemann. From there, it was on to producing and writing and directing and he didn't stop working for the longest time. Late in his career, he went back to editing for the TV series, Fame, and scored two Emmy nominations for that work.

I met Michael when we were on a Writers Guild strike. I forget which one…there have been so many. But we were on a planning committee together and we wound up becoming friends and lunching together after the strike, discussing a mutual project that, alas, never happened. I forget if it was because he got too busy with work or I did but for me, the project was secondary to hanging out with Mike and hearing of his experiences. He'd worked with everyone. He knew everybody. He knew everything there was to know about putting together a movie or a television show.

Michael died last Sunday of cancer at the age of 79. He was a good man with a great sense of humor.

Regarding the Comedy Store lineup photo I posted, Douglas McEwan writes…

Mark, I spent two and a half years of my life as an employee of The Comedy Store, being a doorman and emcee, during its golden years. I can assure you that neither Robin Williams, nor anyone else, went on at 2 AM. (Especially not on a Tuesday, when the club would be deserted by 1 AM or 1:30 AM at the latest.)

The Comedy Store has a liquor license to protect, and they are closed at 2 AM. Oh, there may be comics inside after 2AM, hanging out, doing drugs, partying, or there may not (Because if the doormen wanted to go home, it was "Everybody out!"), but the doors are locked and the public is gone. The unfortunate framing of the photo makes it look like Robin went on at 2, but he was actually going on at Midnight.

My good friend, the late Charlie Hill, was batting clean up, and everyone would be done and gone most usually by 1:30 AM at the latest. Tuesdays, as it happens were my emceeing night, and we were home or somewhere else partying by 2 AM.

Incidentally, those hand-written line-ups were called "Mae Wests." I do not remember why. I used to have a "Mae West" for an evening when I was the emcee, my comedy troupe was on the bill, as was Robin Williams, framed on my living room wall. (This was 30 years ago. I don't still have it.) Never ever was The Comedy Store still open and putting comics onstage at 2 AM. The bar was a huge part of their income, and Mitzi would never have risked her liquor license.

Thanks. It was a trip to see that Mae West. I knew every person on that line-up.

You're right, Doug. Maybe because I don't drink, I forgot about the liquor license.

I do recall being there well after 2 AM some nights but probably not in the club after that time. I do remember hanging out in the parking lot, being uncomfy with the occasional drug deal going on around me…and down the street at Carney's Hamburgers, which was then open 24 hours on the weekend and seemed like the commissary for the Comedy Store. If Carney's was closed, a bunch of us would caravan down to Canter's Delicatessen. I only did that a few times and now regret I didn't make it up there more often and sooner.

David Letterman remembered those days last night on his show as he remembered Robin Williams…

I've had a lot of requests to run down where we currently are with all this…

Craig Ferguson's new quiz show, Celebrity Name Game, starts next month. He leaves The Late, Late Show in December and sources are saying he's lined up a half-hour weeknight show that Tribune-Media will syndicate to run at 7 PM each evening.

The half-hour strikes me as odd. I could understand an hour but not a half-hour. One of the problems I think his 12:30 show on CBS had — and one of the reasons I went from being a huge fan and a steady-watcher to watching him occasionally — is that I thought the show got to be Too Much Craig. This is the kind of thing that lessened my interest in TiVoing Dave and Conan and certain other talk show hosts before them.

It's like at some point, something in their brain said to them, "Stop worrying about keeping the show tight, dump that well-written prepared material and stall bringing your guests out. What America wants is to see you just rambling and screwing around and ad-libbing and making funny faces." In Conan's and Craig's case, it also included dancing and doing funny voices and in all three, talking a lot during the interviews and competing with the guests for laughs.

I still think Mr. Ferguson is one of the most talented guys to ever work that format. I just think though that his show has gotten to be too much about him. If his new show isn't, it might do quite well. If it's like the first half hour of his Late, Late Show, probably not.

Two weeks ago, many a website reported that it was a done deal that his replacement on CBS would be a British chap named James Corden. No formal announcement has been made and Bill Carter of the New York Times hasn't reported it. I don't think he's even mentioned the rumor. That leads me to suspect that while it may turn out to be Mr. Corden, it isn't or wasn't as much of a done deal as the reports made it out to be. Since they're not just replacing the host but the entire creative team (producers, writers, etc.), they don't have a lot of time. If Corden had been signed two weeks ago, Carter would have long since announced that.

In the meantime, Mr. Fallon and Mr. Meyers continue to kill in their respective time slots. Seth Meyers has been getting better ratings at 12:35 AM on NBC than David Letterman has been getting at 11:35 PM on CBS. Nevertheless, everyone expects that Dave's last few months on CBS will be a ratings monster as he has on every superstar in the business for their farewell visits. I don't see that anyone is certain yet when those last few months will be.

I predicted here that Letterman would leave at the end of February sweeps and that Stephen Colbert would start on the first Monday following Dave's last broadcast. That would have meant Colbert could not do his show from the Ed Sullivan Theater like Dave, at least at first. There wouldn't be time for Dave's staff to move out, for Stephen's to move in, for the set to be redone, for Colbert to do test shows, etc. Well, it looks like all that is wrong…but I'll stick with my belief that CBS wanted most of it to go like that.

It's now looking like Dave will stay on through the May sweeps as Johnny did. And since Colbert's going to do his show from the Ed, that means a period of several months when neither show will be on CBS at 12:35. What will? Beats me. I think 10-12 weeks of Letterman reruns would get about the same viewership as the YouTube videos I embed here. I thought maybe they'd move the 12:35 host — whoever it turns out to be — up for a time but probably not. That would look like they were auditioning Colbert's replacement even before his show started.

So I have no idea what's going to go in there to bridge the gap. I wonder if anyone at CBS does.

Colbert's supposed to do his last show on Comedy Central just before this year's Christmas break. I'm curious as to whether they picked that date because they figured he'd start on CBS in March…and now regret that decision because it's looking like he won't start The Late Show until late August or early September.

Makes you wonder if extending on Comedy Central is an option. Colbert is reportedly taking most of his creative staff with him and I don't think anyone wants to lay them off…or pay them for six months of not doing a show. If he doesn't extend on Comedy Central and they do pay all those folks 'til he starts on CBS, he'll probably start there with an unprecedented supply of prepared material and pre-recorded bits.

In the meantime, Jay Leno is working at something resembling a human rate, doing his web series and flying around to stand-up gigs. He recently downed a 24-ounce Fatburger in five minutes and did a spot for Last Comic Standing. He'll probably turn up as a guest with Dave one of these nights — a night when Seth Meyers won't get higher numbers.

Jimmy Kimmel's show remains steady. I keep giving it a try and coming to the conclusion that it's a well-produced, well-written show starring a guy I can't stand to watch. He can probably stay on forever without my viewership. Mr. Fallon and Mr. Meyers also do well-produced, well-written shows that don't much interest me despite the fact that I like both of them.

I don't expect to feel that way about Colbert and I hope whoever follows him is really terrific. I kinda miss not having a late night program — not counting The Daily Show or Colbert's current one — that I want to watch every night.

I have written here before about a golden period up at the Comedy Store on Sunset Boulevard and in a few other venues in the seventies. This photo, source unknown, is making the rounds of sites where stand-ups hang out. It's the posted schedule at the Comedy Store for some evening in 1976 or 1977. As you can see, it's full of a lot of folks who later went on to great stardom…and a few of the folks there you never heard of were pretty darned good, too. (The photo, by the way, partially obscures the names of Tony DeLia and the comedy team of Roger and Roger.)

The program is remarkable. So is the fact that there may well have been others that evening. If Richard Pryor or Freddie Prinze or someone like that had shown up and said "I want to go on," they would have gone on and other comics would have been bumped accordingly.

And maybe the most remarkable thing is that this was for a Tuesday. The Saturday night lineups at this time couldn't have been much better…but they were probably better. And there's Robin Williams going on at two ayem…

There have been very few well-known announcers and usually, it's because the person became an on-camera personality like Gary Owens, Johnny Olson or Alan Kalter. Don Pardo did it the hard way: In front of the microphone, not the camera.

He was the superstar of a show business profession that doesn't exist much these days: The staff booth announcer. We all know about him announcing game shows like Jeopardy! We all know about him announcing Saturday Night Live. But he was also a guy who worked for NBC forever, doing thousands and thousands of promos and news bulletins and commercial spots and anything else that needed a professional voice.

He announced on SNL for 38 seasons, missing only Season 7. What happened there happened after Lorne Michaels had left the show and no one knew he'd be coming back. SNL was groping for a new relevancy with a series of new casts and creative teams. That season, they brought back Michael O'Donoghue, who'd been one of the main writers on the first five seasons. O'Donoghue was full of ideas about how to shake up the show and make it different and dangerous.

One was to dump Pardo. In fact, O'Donoghue wanted to fire Don on the air, for real, with no advance warning. He didn't get to do that but he did persuade the folks above him that the show needed a new sound…and that year, Saturday Night Live was announced by Mel Brandt or Bill Hanrahan. The next season, O'Donoghue was gone and Pardo was back…to stay.

I started to write, "Saturday Night Live won't be the same without Don Pardo"…but that show hasn't been the same for a long time. So I'll just close by saying Don Pardo had a helluva career. He did what he did as well as anyone has done it.

Penny Marshall remembers Robin Williams.

I linked to an article that said the charges against Rick Perry were very flimsy. Here's a link to an article that argues otherwise. One of these guys is right.

On a sillier note…

The wife of Robin Williams announced the other day that he was in the early stages of Parkinson's Disease. I suppose to a lot of folks, that made his suicide more understandable. I hope it also didn't also convince some that Depression is only a function of having a debilitating condition. Plenty of people reach that moment of "I can't live any longer" without Parkinson's or anything that might sound like a clear rationale. Plenty of people also, of course, live very decent, sunny lives even with degenerative diseases.

I received a number of messages on all these topics and I thought I'd share a few. The folks who sent them didn't specify if I should include their names or not but I think I'll leave them all off. Here's the first one…

Mark, with all due respect, what you describe as feeling in your blog article is not depression. It's grief. Two completely different things that result from and in completely different brain activities and chemical actions. It seems to me you're trying to use this anecdote as a way to empathize with those suffering from depression and to say, "here's how I deal with what I think depression is like."

Mark, depression is not grief. It's not something that you can "snap out of" by watching a TV show. Grief passes with time, depression is a medical condition that is rarely "cured" without medical intervention. Yes, some people recover from depression spontaneously just as some people with cancer go into unexpected remission. But clinical depression, the kind that's so bad it causes suicidal ideation, cannot be alleviated by "thinking" or "feeling" your way out of. That was the point of "Mike's" e-mail: it's not that you "avoid" depression by compartmentalizing. The very fact that you can compartmentalize means that you don't have depression. If you did, you wouldn't, like Mike, be able to until a medical solution to the chemical imbalance was found.

Actually, your attempts to empathize seem to me to be based on the myth that depression can be "thought" or "felt" away, that with the proper will power, one should be able to "pull oneself out of it." And I hope you agree, Mark, that this is the very worst message that you can give a person in the hell of depression. Depression is a medical condition: it needs to be treated by a doctor, not by platitudes.

I agree, which is why I made clear that I'd never suffered from a real, prolonged depression. I also said, "I do know though that one should not rule out medical advice because a depression may have more to do than you think with the kind of thing a doctor can correct. Or it may not. The point is that if it's beyond your ability to solve, get help. Do not think you've failed if you have to get help. That's what help is there for."

If I didn't make it clear enough that I was not likening my few days of grief to the kind of genuine "down" that consumes people the way one apparently consumed Robin Williams, I'm sorry but this guy seemed to get it. I'm redacting the name of the drug he mentioned because I don't want to publish recommendations for specific drugs here. If you think you need a medication, have a doctor prescribe it. Don't figure out what drug you need from a weblog that also discusses Groucho impersonators and the evils of cole slaw…

Thank you for the story about coping with the loss of your friends. I have been through more extensive, serious therapy than you can imagine about similar problems and I need to be reminded constantly of something my therapists tried to emphasize. That is that even when everything seems bleak in your life and dark, it is usually possible to solve some part of some problem. Remembering that is one of the few reasons I am still here today.

Depression has a lot to do with believing that things are hopeless on every front and that every possible situation will end in the worst possible way. At times in my life, I refused to believe that I could solve any problems and that even when good things happened, they would eventually turn into disasters and negatives. It took [name of drug] to get all of my problem under control but it also helped that I was able to place individual elements on it in context and as you say, proper size and deal with them that way.

Lastly for now, this…

You wrote something that I have in the past discussed extensively with my doctor and his P.A. I have always felt that the root of my depression is that I am not successful and rich and famous. I was looking for doctors to give me a temporary fix for this because I believed that I was caught in a vicious circle. I was depressed because I was not successful and I believed I would be successful if I was not depressed. If I was able to function, I could finish and sell my novel.

I finally connected with a doctor who understood what I wanted but he cautioned me that it might not work out that way. I might overcome the depression and not be able to finish the book or I might finish it and not be able to sell it or I might get a publisher and then see the book not be a hit. As it turned out, even after I got over the black mood, I was not able to finish the book to my satisfaction. I have been able to deal with that. I think it has a lot to do with realizing that success was not a cure-all for depression. I am sad about Robin Williams but it is a good reminder to me that being successful may not solve my problem. I have to deal with it as I am.

I think I've strayed from the comfort areas of this blog so this may be the last post on the topic. All I really wanted to say was that if you're depressed or even just down, try to deal with it as a solvable problem. If it turns out not to be that, get thee to a doctor…and really, any doctor should be able to help you. If all you have is a dentist or a podiatrist, don't be afraid to tell him or her. They may not be able to treat you but they probably know someone who can, maybe even in the same building.

We now return to sillier subjects…

Twenty-two artists — well, 21 plus me — gathered yesterday at Meltdown Comics in Hollywood to sign copies of The Sakai Project, a glorious new book that (a) celebrates the work for our colleague Stan Sakai and (b) raises bucks to assist him with assisting his sadly-ill wife, Sharon. The artists signed the pages they drew to salute Stan and I signed the foreword I wrote.

We were supposed to be there from 4 PM to 6 PM but by six, the line was still very long so we didn't escape until well after seven. We signed an awful lot of copies. If you are thinking you might ever like to own a copy of this book, I would get one now when it's, depending on where you buy it, $35 to $45. I see someone already has a copy we all signed yesterday up on eBay and is asking $200 as a starting bid. I'll bet they get it, if not now then soon.

I will not attempt to list all the artists who were at the signing and are in the above photo. All I know is that they are all very good, they are all very generous with their time and they were all parked so as to block my car in the parking lot. I forgive them for that because they were a part of this wonderful volume.

I don't know how often it happens in other industries but there's a thing that happens often in television. I'll tell you this story and you'll understand the situation I'm talking about…

This occurred back in the seventies. A friend of mine was working on a Saturday morning series for NBC. Season One had aired and the production company was waiting to hear if they'd be picked up for a second season. My friend was especially interested since he had an offer to go work for another studio. If the show was going to get picked up, he wanted to turn the offer down and work on Season Two. If it wasn't, he wanted to grab the other offer while it was still available to him. The problem was that he had to decide now.

He called me for advice: "Do you think we'll get a pick-up?" I honestly didn't know. It felt like one of those things that could go either way and I told him that. "Stall as long as you can," I advised him.

A few days later, I was in a meeting at NBC with Fred Silverman, who was then the guy who decided what they bought and what they cancelled. We were talking about a project I was to be involved with and somehow, my friend's series came up in the conversation. Fred said — and this is darned close to a verbatim quote — "God, that's been a disaster for us. We're going to set our Fall schedule next week and I can't wait to cancel that piece of shit."

So I did what you'd have done. I called my friend that evening and told him about what Fred had said. He thanked me for the inside tip and the next day, he resigned from the studio that did that show and signed on with the other studio.

And a week later when NBC announced their Fall Saturday Morning schedule, the show had been picked up for a second season.

I had information from the best possible source…and it turned out to be wrong. That has happened a few times on this blog when I've had inside info on what was to happen in the TV industry — in late night, especially.

The day I got home from Comic-Con in 2008, a producer I knew took me to a meeting with Phil Griffin, who had just been named president of MSNBC. Also in the meeting was one of the network's correspondents, Chuck Todd. We were there to discuss a proposal to produce some political comedy segments. The idea was to air one or two each day on The Rachel Maddow Show, which was about to debut on MSNBC. A week's segments would then be collected into a show of their own that could rerun many times on the weekend.

The meeting — held poolside at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills — went well enough…or so it seemed. Soon after, it became apparent that the least it would have cost us to make these segments was way more than MSNBC was able or willing to spend…and that was the end of that.

But what I remember from the poolside meeting was that Chuck Todd was introduced to me as "The new host of Meet the Press," which had then been without a regular host since the passing of Tim Russert. The guy in charge of picking Russert's replacement described Mr. Todd, who was sitting right there next to me, that way. Mr. Griffin asked us not to spread that around until it could be formally announced in a week or two.

And in a week or two, they announced that the new permanent host of Meet the Press would be…David Gregory.

I have no idea what happened but I was reminded of that when it was announced recently that Chuck Todd would (at last!) take over as host of Meet the Press. I assume he's thinking, "Finally!"

From 1930: W.C. Fields in his first talking picture is…The Golf Specialist.

Governor Rick Perry of Texas has been indicted on a charge of…well, it's kinda flimsy. Jonathan Chait (no fan of the governor) explains it to us.

The political impact of this indictment is obvious. It changes Perry's chances of being the next Republican nominee for President from one in five thousand to one in ten thousand. Gee, and he'd raised them so much by starting to wear glasses…

As we discussed back here, my partner Sergio Aragonés did an incredible poster for a recent book called Inside MAD. It's an entire panorama of that magazine's history — a magazine for which he has worked, by the way, for fifty years! That's fifty. Five-oh. Half a century. He drew darn near every important person, place or thing that has been seen in MAD since its debut in '52.

MAD expert Doug Gilford has taken it upon himself to annotate this poster. Over on this page, you can find out who or what everyone or everything is in it. Wow.

Veteran comic book artist Stan Goldberg had a stroke three days ago.  Yesterday, he was moved from the hospital into hospice care.

Stan is 82 and had been making a miraculous recovery since he and his wife of 47 years, Pauline, were injured in an automobile crash last year. They amazed everyone by showing up for the National Cartoonists Society gathering last May in San Diego, and Stan was hoping to (but could not) make it to Comic-Con two months later.

Stan was born in 1932 in New York and went to work for Marvel when he was 17, primarily as a colorist. In fact, there were periods at Marvel when Stan either headed the coloring department or was the coloring department. He colored all the early super-hero titles in the sixties. He was the man responsible for Spider-Man's costume having the colors it has. He was the man who made the Hulk green and so on. The artists whose work he colored all thought he was terrific.

He also had a long career drawing, usually in what we think of as the "Archie" style. He occasionally did something more realistic but mainly drew comics like Millie the Model for Marvel, Swing with Scooter for DC and Archie for Archie.  Most of these were unsigned and some that were signed were signed with someone else's name since the Archie company didn't like to find out their artists were drawing that way for competitors.

No one has ever totaled up how many pages Stan drew of Archie and his friends but the total was certainly well into the thousands. That association lasted for 40 years, ending in 2010 and he was startled and puzzled when it did end. For the last decade or so with them, he was not only kept busy but did many of their most prominent works, including the Archie newspaper strip, the much-publicized Archie-Punisher crossover comic and most covers. He told friends that he honestly did not know why they had suddenly decided to dispense with his services.

He stayed busy. He worked on other projects including Simpsons comic books and a nice array of Archie parodies and knock-offs. In 2012, the National Cartoonists Society presented him with its prestigious Gold Key Award, and he and Pauline were active in the group, Parents of Murdered Children, which they joined after the tragic slaying of their daughter Heidi, who was then a college student.

As I mentioned, he is now in hospice care.  His family thinks he would welcome cards and notes sent to…

Stan Goldberg
c/o Calvary Hospital
1740 Eastchester Rd.
Bronx, NY 10461

Please do not attempt to call.  But mail cheered Stan considerably during his long hospital stay from the traffic accident and it could do it again.

He has always been known as one of the most prolific, nicest artists in the comic book business and someone of whom I have been very fond. Everyone is. You'd have had to be a pretty rotten human being not to love Stan Goldberg. He would sit with me for hours at conventions or N.C.S. gatherings telling tales of the early days of Marvel. He was one of the last eyewitnesses to those days and very proud to have been a part of them. This is news that hits hard because he was always a wonderful artist and an even more wonderful person.