Category Archives: To Be Filed

Bob Elisberg on the Greatest Screenplay Never Made. Or one of them. I, like most writers, have several.

I'm still watching the whole Gun Control argument from the "nothing meaningful will change" vantage point. Obama put out some proposals and executive orders today, none of which is that we take the guns away from law-abiding citizens. But as Dave Weigel and others have noted, the pro-gun forces instantly responded with rebuttals that appear to have been largely written before they knew what the proposals would be.

I not only don't think anything meaningful will ever change, I don't think the debate on guns in this country will ever be sane. Those who are fearful of not having weaponry at their disposal will never accept that there are laws that could be passed that would allow that but perhaps lessen the incidents of massacre and murder. There are also things the Gun Control forces could stand to learn or admit, which is not to suggest the two sides are equivalent in their misrepresentation. The N.R.A. side has about 90% of the hysterics on this matter…and I suspect some of their members (the Ted Nugent kind) like that.

On Facebook, Craig Peters posted this video and reminded me that Hello, Dolly! opened on Broadway this day in 1964. It ran for 2,844 performances — or until every single person in America who was willing to sit through a musical comedy had seen it once.

It's Carol Channing and (perhaps) the original chorus performing the monster of all title songs. I'm not a huge fan of the show but it has a couple of great musical moments and this, of course, is one.

Craig wonders where this clip is from. From the sparseness of the stage — and its size with no room for dancing — it obviously is not the original Broadway presentation. Channing did a series of tours, some of them overseas for the U.S.O., for which a stripped-down, bus-'n'-truck version of the show was created…smaller cast, shorter show, simple sets, etc. I'm assuming this is from one of those engagements, possibly even the time they took the touring version to the White House. I suspect the music is all pre-recorded and it wouldn't shock me if the voices were, as well. This clip has pretty good sound given that no microphones are in evidence.

But what the heck? It's Carol Channing, performing to some extent a legendary Broadway tune. Enjoy…

So now we're hearing from the "Sandy Hook Truthers," who think the killings at that school were faked for some purpose…to justify gun control, I guess. Boy, those grieving parents are good actors.

I guess we should have expected this. No important event can happen in this country now without its conspiracy theorists emerging from the primordial ooze and making the slight leap to cable news and the Internet. In fact, I have a conspiracy theory about most conspiracy theorists.

I think most of them are, knowingly or unknowingly, foolish and ineffectual people who feel important when they're angry…and when they think they know something that the masses do not. That's my theory and don't bother showing me proof to the contrary. Even if it's true, that doesn't get us anywhere.

Hey, it's time to plug tomorrow's live webcast of Stu's Show! Tomorrow, Stu Shostak has a return engagement with two of the most important producers and creators of animation for television, Joe Ruby and Ken Spears. The last time they were on, Stu only managed to cover the portions of their career where they met in an editing room, teamed-up and were soon the showrunners for many of Hanna-Barbera's top TV shows. Scooby Doo was just one of the properties they introduced.

In Part Two tomorrow, Stu will get into the story of how these two gents set up their own studio, Ruby-Spears, which challenged Hanna-Barbera for Saturday morn supremacy. I'm not sure most animation buffs understand the constraints and problems under which cartoon shows were produced back then. You had terrible budgets, terrible schedules, terrible censorship and (sometimes) terrible network executives. A lot of us wound up working on shows that almost by definition could not have been as wonderful as we wanted them to be. When I worked for Joe and Ken, I thought we/they generally managed to a better job than the competition, triumphing over some (not all) of those handicaps. Perhaps on the show tomorrow, they'll discuss the problems and how they overcame the ones they overcame with shows like Plastic Man, Thundarr the Barbarian and Alvin and the Chipmunks. I will be joining them via phone for a while at the top of the program.

You have a choice as to how you'll listen to Stu's Show and the way most of you will prefer will be the free way. Tune in while they do it live at 4 PM Pacific, 7 PM in the East, other times in other climes. The show runs at least two hours and sometimes goes longer. This is the best way to hear it because not only is it free but it somehow seems more participatory even if Stu doesn't get around to taking phone calls. Listen in at the Stu's Show website.

You can also listen to it the pay way. Go to that very site a half-hour or so after the live webcast. From it, you can download it or any of hundreds of wonderful episodes for a measly 99 cents each…and to get the real deal, order four for the price of three. Either way, I'm sure you'll enjoy Stu's Show tomorrow.

All sorts of stuff you probably should know about the current flu epidemic.

Another reminder that if Ronald Reagan ran today, Republicans would denounce him as a Dirty Liberal: He was for Gun Control.

52 minutes of Carl Reiner talking about writing…

Bruce Bartlett says that if they had minted that trillion-buck platinum coin, the principle in play wouldn't have been that much different from what Washington does every day with our money. That's disturbing to realize.

Matt Taibbi on Secrets and Lies of the Bailout. He says it wasn't what you think it was and didn't have the result you think it did. Hope he's wrong. Fear he's not.

This time, I suggest you go read Ken Levine's review of the Golden Globes.

I think the thing I've come to like about the Golden Globes is that no one thinks the voting is meaningful. They could be picking the winners by throwing darts for all we know. But it fulfills all the important requirements of any awards show: A lot of celebrities all dressed up, a big party, incoherent and self-indulgent speeches…and good lines to use in advertising. I keep waiting for someone who wins one to get up there and say, "I'd like to thank everyone who voted for me…" and then read a list of about six people.

The Magic Castle is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this year, having opened back in '63. I joined back in 1980 right after I went up to see my then-current lady friend get sawed in half and levitated by a fine magician named Chuck Jones, no relation to the famed cartoon director. (But this Chuck Jones did have a cartoon connection: For a time in the sixties, he had a daily kids' show on KCOP Channel 13 where he did tricks and hosted cartoons. He is still touring with a sensational magic show and occasionally playing the Castle.)

I would never have thought I'd fit in with or like a place where you had to wear a jacket and tie — at least in the evenings. But I was at the Magic Castle for about three minutes before I said to myself, "Self, you've gotta join this place." I signed up as an Associate Member and was later upgraded to Full Magician status. I was there for the years when the food was pretty mediocre and am now there for the years when the food is pretty good.

You can dine at the Magic Castle. You can drink, too though I don't. Mostly, you see magic. There are several showrooms around the place and there are also areas where impromptu performances are likely to materialize at any moment. I often go to see some "name" magician perform and on the same visit, find myself impressed and/or dazzled by someone I never heard of before.

One of the most amazing things about the Castle is that it's still there, as wonderful as ever. In the years since I've joined, we've seen it through one crisis after another — most of them financial though Halloween before last, they had the place decked out to appear via lighting effects as if it was on fire…and before they could launch those effects, it actually did catch fire. There have been hostile takeover attempts and lawsuits and squabbles but all seems to be copacetic these days. The current administration with Neil Patrick Harris as our president, is doing a first-rate job and the place has never looked better.

The one thing I miss? There's a little sofa in the front parlor and for about the first decade of my membership, you could usually find a gentleman named Dai Vernon seated on it, ready to chat with all who came by. Dai, who was born in 1894, was called The Professor by those who didn't know him well enough to call him Dai. He knew everything about magic and had in fact invented (or at least perfected) all those tricks that every magician learns and struggles to perform in a new and different way. With little prompting, he would tell you of the time he did a trick that stumped Houdini or any of a hundred other anecdotes…and if you showed him a trick (something I never dared do) he would show you how to do it better.

Dai passed away in '92 but apart from not having him around, the Castle has everything a lover of magic could want. Here's a quickie tour from The Today Show on Friday morning…

Bill Levin writes to ask me…

I was fascinated to learn that you learned about TV script forms from those Dr. Kildare scripts your neighbor had. If I wanted to become a screenwriter (a fantasy I've harbored), do you think it would be a good idea to get copies of every great screenplay I could and read and study them? How far would that get me?

Probably closer than you are but not far enough. Actually, reading anything is valuable to a writer. I've even learned from bad examples. The value of reading scripts is to learn the form and how to describe action in a crisp, efficient manner. It also helps you to get a sense of weight to your dialogue. Somewhere here, I have a book that reprints the screenplays by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond for The Apartment and The Fortune Cookie. I was beginning to write in script (screenplay, teleplay) form at the time I got it and it made me realize that most of my speeches were too long…and also too self-contained; that I needed more verbal interaction between characters, as opposed to them delivering dueling monologues.

Here's something you shouldn't learn from reading scripts. A few years ago, that most dangerous of creatures — a friend of a friend — got me to agree to read and advise him on a screenplay he'd written. This was this man's first attempt at writing a script and, I suspect, darn near his first attempt at writing anything in a professional arena. He sent the script over with one of those amateurish, paranoid attitudes: The script was registered with every agency in the world, I was expected to sign a confidentiality form with the assurance that he could sue and take my house away from me if I plagiarized him, etc. Don't you just love it when you agree to do someone a favor and they respond with threats?

When I opened the package, I glanced at the accompanying warnings and then noticed something about the script itself. It was sealed in plastic with a warning label that said something like, "By breaking this seal, you agree to abide by the terms of the enclosed form," etc. And the script itself was huge. It had to be over 300 pages. In which case, I would not be reading it so there was no point in breaking that seal.

I called the guy and asked him how long it was. I don't remember the precise number but let's say it was 325. It was around that.

I told him I had my first comment: Cut it by two-thirds. "There are very few people in this business who will read a script that's over around 120 pages," I said and I added, "I am not one of them."

He said, "I'm not cutting a word of it. Not now, not ever. I have a copy here of the screenplay to Apocalypse Now and it's 325 pages."  (I'm not sure it is but that's what the man said.)

I said, "Maybe it is but this is not Apocalypse Now and you are not Francis Ford Coppola and John Milius."

He said, "What difference does that make? This script is just as important."

I said, "I doubt that…but the script you have is not a script they wrote to try and impress a producer into taking on the project. Everything was probably committed well before they wrote that draft, maybe before they wrote any draft. What you have there is a shooting script. You need to produce a selling script. Do you understand the difference?"

He said, "Sure…but a perfect shooting script can be a selling script. All a producer has to do is read this and he'll see it's perfect and ready to go. All my friends who've read it agree."

That was pretty much the end of that conversation. Oh, sure…I went on and told him that had never happened in the history of Hollywood and he told me he'd be the first and I told him his fantasy was predicated on producers reading the script at all and they wouldn't and he told me he'd be the first and you can see why this script was never made. It was probably also never read by anyone besides his closest friends. It certainly wasn't by me.

But the point is not to confuse a script that's going to be made — which may also be full of unnecessary-in-a-selling script production details — with a script that's intended to get someone to say, "Hey, the guy's got something here!" There may also be things missing. When I write a cartoon script and I know I'm going to direct the voices, I leave out a lot of instructions to the actors because I'm going to be there to tell them verbally what I have in mind.

And that's not laziness on my part. It's me wanting to see what they'll come up with on their own without me telling them that a certain speech is to be delivered deadpan or with a sneer or whatever. If I'm not directing — if it's like the old Hanna-Barbera days where I'd hand in the script, not be at the recording session and not see or hear the thing until it was on the air — I put all that in the script. It's the only chance I have to convey what I have on my mind to the actors. But if I'm the director, I can tell them later, after they've had a shot at it without my influencing their first readings.

When you read sitcom scripts that float about, you're often reading drafts that were done after days of rehearsal. Let's say the show tapes on Friday. A new scene was written and/or improvised during the Thursday rehearsal. They commit its words to paper for the draft that's done Thursday night but they don't have to put in stage directions and actor notes because the actors and director already know all that from the Thursday rehearsal.

So you have to differentiate between a shooting script and a selling script. The latter is meant to be a reading experience for anyone who sits down with it and it's successful if it leads to a shooting script. A shooting script is just for the folks involved in the shooting.  It may have things in it you don't need — descriptions of things intended for specific people in the production process or to give security to the studio that proper direction is being given to the crew — or it may omit information that isn't needed. If a role is already cast, the shooting script doesn't have to describe what the actor looks like. If the art director already knows from meetings what the sets are supposed to look like and is designing them, a shooting script may not dwell on those descriptions. I have a script here somewhere for an episode of Banacek where they obviously decided to change the gender of a character who'd been written as a male. All the dialogue reflects the change, including scenes where Banacek is hitting on the character, trying to seduce her. But nobody bothered to change the stage directions and the description of the character which remained male.

Read all the scripts you can get your mitts on. But try to be conscious of what kind of script you're reading and whether it was intended to make a movie happen or a deal. Those aren't the same thing.

I came across about fifty sheets of these while cleaning out drawers at my mother's house. They're not postage stamps. They're campaign stamps from the 1960 presidential election. I guess the idea was that you'd put them on all your mail like Christmas seals.

In 1960, my mother ran a small Democratic Headquarters building up on Pico Boulevard and I helped out in the ways that only an eight-year-old kid can do. I was rooting for J.F.K. though at that age, I really didn't have any idea why. In that sense, I wasn't all that different from your average voter.

My main memory of that office is of a woman who came in and asked to speak to someone who could put her mind at ease about something. She liked John F. Kennedy, wanted to vote for John F. Kennedy…but felt she couldn't vote for a Catholic. My mother patiently explained to her that she was a Catholic — admittedly, not an active or typical one since she'd married a Jewish guy — and had no problem voting for Kennedy. They talked for perhaps a half hour and when the woman left, she'd decided to vote for J.F.K. — but acted like it was a life-changing decision for her. I didn't understand the concern then and am not sure I do now.

Before the election, my mother presided over a plentiful supply of enthusiastic volunteers to work the office. Afterwards, no one showed up and it was up to us (her, one of her friends and me) to close up the place and get out. It took a few days to ship some things back to wherever they came from and to throw other things away. This was when I came across a few thousand sheets of the stamps in a crate and decided to grab a batch before taking the rest to the dumpster. I also took home a large box of campaign buttons which I haven't found yet in her house. But I'm still looking…

Woody Allen on hypochondria.