Category Archives: To Be Filed

A few minutes from the premiere of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World…

My pal Paul Harris is my favorite interviewer in the broadcasting biz these days. Here's a good conversation he had recently with one of my favorite funny people, Paula Poundstone. And you can find more of Paul's fine interviews and other goodies over on his blog.

Ben fixed it.

Still on with the guy. But we're making progress. My remote almost does everything it's supposed to…

Still on with the Logitech folks. I've got a technician who seems to know his stuff but so far, the problem ain't fixed.

Ben called at 10:06. He seems to know stuff.

Okay: I'm supposed to get a call at 10 AM from someone at the Logitech company who actually knows how to get my Harmony One remote control device to remotely control what it's supposed to remotely control. I'll be happy if such a person phones me within the hour and even happier if they can fix the problem. For now, I'm going to sit here and write Groo pages. I'll let you know if the person calls and if he's smarter than Groo.

Here's 48 minutes of Bill Boggs interviewing Jerry Lewis. This was done when Jerry was promoting Hardly Working, which came out in 1981. At the time, Jerry hadn't had a film released since Which Way to the Front? in 1970. He shot the never-released The Day the Clown Cried in 1972.

Jerry tells the story which he's often told about how he stopped making films for that long time after seeing one of his movies sharing a theater marquee with Deep Throat. As we discussed here, I don't believe any movie theater ever double-billed a Jerry Lewis movie (or anything not X-rated) with Deep Throat and I also don't believe that's a reason to stop making films. I think you stop because your films are losing money and no studio wants to invest much in you any longer.

If you're a fan of odd Jerry Lewis interviews, this one's for you. He rambles on through many topics, gets occasionally peeved at the host, blames himself for the breakup with Dean and flat-out refuses to answer a number of questions. It's got it all…

Slightly less than a month ago, I attempted to program my new Harmony One remote control that, they swear, will control all the components in my office video setup. That consists of a Philips TV, a TiVo, a Sony DVD player and a Toshiba Blu-ray player. There's also an RCA satellite dish controller in there but I don't need the remote to control it.

The remote refused to program properly, the main problem being that it doesn't want to switch input sources on the Philips TV, though there are smaller problems, as well. I called the Logitech Tech Support line and spent — I am not exaggerating — a couple of hours on the phone with a gent in the Philippines who didn't seem to have any idea how to make my remote work. Then I spent more time with another gent who said all the same things as the first one. He finally admitted it was beyond him so he'd have someone from Level Two Tech Support call me, though he couldn't say when they might get around to that.

No one called but I did receive an e-mail from Charlie, who is with Level Two support, asking when would be a good time for him to call me. I gave him a time but he never called.

I feel like tackling this again tonight. Their Customer Service number is open until 7 PM my time. It's 5:10 now. Let's see what happens when I call…

5:10 PM — I call up and enter my "incident number" from my previous call. The Logitech phone system immediately hangs up on me.

5:11 PM — I call up and try it again. This time, a voice tells me that my incident number is no longer eligible for support and I should try and fix the problem using their website.

5:12 PM — I call up again and push the number I'd push for a new case. I am placed on hold and I listen to jazzy music, interrupted occasionally by a male voice that tells me either (a) how my Harmony Remote can control any component in the world or (b) how I can get loads of support on their website.

5:38 PM — I am still on hold.

5:39 PM — The hold music stops, I hear a phone ring once. Then I hear a dead line. Then their system hangs up on me again. I think their tech support needs tech support.

5:40 PM — I call back again. More jazzy hold music plus that guy. It has now been a half-hour since I started this and I haven't made contact with a human being yet.

5:42 PM — Oh, wait. A person! I talk to someone named Dmitri and explain my history to him. He places me on hold.

5:49 PM — Dmitri returns to me and says that he's sent my case to the Level Two technicians and they can't take my call now and want to call me tomorrow. I argue a bit about this: Isn't there a chance one of those guys could talk to me now? Dmitri goes off to check and I'm on hold for a minute or two before he returns and tells me no, it'll have to be tomorrow. I try to arrange a time for this but Dmitri, who is obviously not on the same continent with me, doesn't grasp the concept of North American time zones. I keep telling him I'd like that call at 10 AM Pacific Time. He keeps telling me they don't open until 10 AM Eastern Time. I finally convince him that 1 PM Eastern Time is 10 AM Pacific Time and he says that Ben will phone me at 10 AM.

By the time this call ends, it is 5:54 PM. I spent 44 minutes and didn't get to speak to anyone with a clue how to solve my problem here. Let's see if Ben calls tomorrow and if Level Two is any better than whatever Level I was on before.

Gene Whyte writes to ask about something I don't think I've ever mentioned here or in anything I've written…

I was interested to note that when you mentioned the DVD set of the Superboy TV series, you didn't mention that you were one of the writers for that show. Would you care to write about your experiences? I always assumed you got the job because you were then one of the few writers around with credits in both comic books and TV shows. Did you enjoy the experience? Why did you only do one episode?

Ah. Well, there isn't a lot to tell so I might as well put it down here and be done with it. In 1988, the Writers Guild of America found itself in a very long, ugly strike that ran 155 days. It didn't affect me that much because I was then in heated production on the Garfield and Friends Saturday morning show. Animation was not affected by the strike and my agent took to referring to me as "The sole support of the agency." But he was also scrambling to get his clients whatever work was available.

The producers of the then-forthcoming Superboy TV series had signed what is called an Interim Agreement, meaning that they agreed to the terms that the WGA was then demanding so the strike on their particular project was lifted. Such deals always include a clause that says the contract will be modified later to match whatever bargain the guild makes with the rest of the industry. I did not attempt to get work on the series because I had plenty to do and because every other WGA member was trying to get on it.

So I was surprised when my agent called and told me he'd set up an appointment for me to meet with someone there about writing for it. I assumed he'd submitted me and they'd agreed to see me because of my comic book background…but when I went in, the person I met with was surprised by that. I'm pretty sure I was the first writer he'd met with who'd ever had anything to do with comic books and when he found out I had, he spent half the meeting asking me questions about DC and the people there with whom he was just beginning to deal.

He was Fred Freiberger, a very nice man whose name I'd seen in an awful lot of credits. I'm a little fuzzy on whether he was the producer or the story editor, or how long or in what capacity he remained with the show but at that moment, he seemed to be running things. I liked Fred and he told me about the project and asked me to go off and come back another day with ideas for episodes. At this point, he was some months from the commencement of filming and I'm not sure they'd even cast any actors yet. If any sort of pilot had been shot, I sure didn't see it.

I went off and soon returned with three or four plots. Fred liked two and assigned me to go off and write one of them. He impressed upon me that the show would have a great special effects budget and that I should let my imagination soar. Whatever I wrote, they'd find a way to shoot.

I went off and proceeded to not do this, at least to the extent he wanted. This was a syndicated series for what they then called "prime-time access." In other words, a pretty cheap show. I guess I got it in my head that it would have the look and feel of the old George Reeves Superman series and wrote accordingly. I flew Superboy a few times and had him crash through a wall and lift up something impossible…but that was about it. Fred told me he liked the script but it needed a lot more action and effects. He was amused that of all the people he had writing it, the one who'd (so far) handed in the script with the least of those things was me, the guy with experience in comic books and animation.

He told me to go off, "forget for now about what things cost to shoot," and just write what I'd want to see on the screen. We could always cut things later. I did as told this time, handed it in and he said he liked it a lot and wanted me to do that other idea of mine he'd liked…but not right away. He was working on scripts for the first half of the season and not yet authorized to start on the second half, so he'd call me when he could start me on the next one. A few days later, he contacted my agent to inquire if I'd be interested in coming on as a story editor. The money would be low and the job would involve frequent commutes (and perhaps several months of relocation) to Florida, which is where the series would be shooting. Since I was already contracted to write and voice-direct Garfield and Friends here, I was not available…and that was the end of my involvement with the Superboy TV series.

A month or two later, I ran into Mr. Freiberger while doing volunteer work at WGA Strike Headquarters. He informed me that now that they were about to start filming — or maybe they'd already started by then — they had a better sense of budget limitations. Very little that he'd thought would be possible had turned out to be possible. All the scripts he'd developed to that point were being extensively rewritten to "take out the money" and also to trim them significantly in length. I said, "What you're telling me is that when I see the finished show, I'll be lucky if I recognize a semi-colon on page eleven." He chuckled and told me to expect a little more of what I'd written to survive than that…but not a lot more. He added that he was neither doing nor supervising these rewrites and was not as "in charge" of the show as he'd expected to be. I am not sure how much involvement he had in the show after that.

I'm also not sure I even got that semi-colon on page eleven. The week that episode aired, it was preempted in Los Angeles for a news report and I managed to miss any reruns. I didn't actually see it until a few years later, by which time I'd somehow managed to lose my only copy of my final draft…and they never sent me their final draft, which they're supposed to do under WGA rules. As I recall, I didn't recall. The basic plot was more or less what I'd written but I didn't remember writing much of that dialogue…and of course, all those elaborate action scenes I'd been told to write were absent. A few years later, I found a copy of the shooting script at a convention and it was around half the length of my first draft, which was the page count I'd been told to write in the first place.

I'm trying to think if there are any other details of the experience that I can recall…

Nope. I think that's it. Never met the cast. Never went to the set. The great actor-director Jackie Cooper directed my episode but years later when I met him, he didn't remember the episode and barely remembered Superboy. Other friends of mine wrote on the series later and I gather they had much to do with developing it into a rather successful program. That's the story.

Radley Balko writes about an issue that has always troubled me about the American judicial system. If you're accused of a crime, the way to get a lower sentence is to plea bargain…but to plea bargain, you have to admit guilt and what if you're not guilty? Answer: You may well do more time than if you just lied and said, "I did it!" Which among other wrenches of sanity means that the guy who did do it gets off scot-free.

My friend and occasional (too occasional, these days) collaborator Will Meugniot tells what it was in 1961 that caused him to stop buying DC Comics exclusively and to give a try to that new Fantastic Four thing…

Here is the story of that world-famous guitar player, Groucho Marx.

Hey, since we're talking about old TV shows being released on DVD, I oughta mention that Shout Factory has just announced they'll be bringing us The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis in a complete set later this year — and they seem to have all 147 episodes.

I was a big fan of this series when it first aired from 1959 to 1963 — or at least, I was of its first few seasons. I seem to recall it taking a horrible turn for the worse near the end of its run…but recently, I've been TiVoing and watching Season One on MeTV and they hold up pretty well. A lot of the attention the show gets these days is because of the stellar array of supporting cast members who later became more prominent, including Warren Beatty, Tuesday Weld and Sally Kellerman…but the regular cast was quite wonderful. The show had crisp, fast-paced dialogue and a wonderful style about it.

As explained here in my Bob Denver obit, I happened to be on the premises for the first of the two attempts to later revive the series. It was a train wreck of epic proportions and I felt quite sorry for Dwayne Hickman, Frank Faylen, Sheila James and Mr. Denver. They were rightfully proud of the original program and insulted that one man thought every single thing about the show had to be changed for it to have a shot at reaching a modern audience. That might have been true had the series not been so far ahead of its time.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to this set. I hear Shout Factory is planning a good array of special features, including interviews with surviving cast members. It's too bad they didn't do this last year when Steve Franken, who was so perfect in the role of Chatsworth Osborne Jr, was still with us and could have participated.

It has been pointed out to me by many that there's a good reason they've only put out the first 11 episodes of My Living Doll on DVD. No one seems to have decent copies of the other fifteen. This, of course, raises the good question as to why you'd put out Volume One of "The Official Collection" if you couldn't follow it up with Volume Two. I'm guessing they hoped the release of this DVD might smoke out some prints of the others.

Stephen Robinson was griping that Time-Warner hadn't released the second season of the Superboy TV show. Well, they have. It's available in a print-to-order release from the Warner Archive. That means no special features and maybe not the best image quality…but the shows are available.