Category Archives: Uncategorized

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is setting out new rules about how one may campaign for their Academy Awards. The changes are kinda complicated, involving how many screenings you can have and how often potential nominees can appear at these screenings and whether little meatball appetizers can be served at them…or something like that.

What strikes me as odd is that the reason for these changes is that someone feels that last year, there was "excessive Oscar campaigning." In an industry where excessive anything is usually rewarded, I'm not sure how they measure that or why anyone thinks they can inject dignity into the proceedings.

But what's really weird is that they aren't zeroing in on a possible reason that there was "excessive Oscar campaigning" last year. It's because the Academy has started doing "excessive Oscar nominating." Go back to having five nominees for Best Picture instead of ten and right there, you cut out an awful lot of the campaigning.

How Charles Schulz was a lot like Charlie Brown.

A man named Troy Davis was put to death this evening in Georgia. Was he guilty of the crime? I don't know and neither do any of the folks protesting his execution. But a pretty strong case can be made that the case against him has proven to be nowhere as strong as it was back when he was convicted. It was all eyewitness testimony and most of those eyewitnesses have recanted.

A lot of writers are tonight asking some variation of the question posed by Dahlia Lithwick: Will the Troy Davis case be the one that finally turns America against the death penalty?

My answer: Nope. Before that can happen, there's going to have to be really strong evidence that some state executed an innocent white guy with no criminal record.

There's an art gallery in L.A. that has a phone number that's one digit different from mine. I just got a call from someone looking for them who'd misdialed.

I get one of those every year or so and it's no big deal. But some time ago, shortly after I moved into this house and got this number, I was getting a lot of them — one day, more than twenty. Several of the callers insisted they had the right number and I was wrong. They had an ad that they'd received and they read the phone number (mine) right off it.

I called the manager of the gallery and informed him. He checked a copy of the ad and said, "Oh…so that's why it hasn't increased our business any." He was most apologetic and then he added, "I'm afraid it's going to get worse for you. The ad runs this Saturday in the L.A. Times and it's the same ad with the same typo in the phone number."

I asked, "Is there any way you can stop it?"

He said, "I'll check and call you back. Let me have your number."

I said, "You have my number. And all your customers have my number, too."

"Oh, that's right," the man said. "I'll call the Times and see if there's any way to pull or change that ad."

A few minutes later, he called back and said, "They said they'd rerun it next week with the corrected phone number for a reduced rate. They're very nice about this kind of thing."

I asked, "Does that mean it will run this weekend with my phone number?"

He said, "Well, they said that to get it pulled out now, we'd have to pay a large fee."

I said, "I think you should pay that fee."

He said, "Look, I'd really rather not. Do you think you could put up with these calls a little longer? I could maybe pay you a little something to make it up to you. You could tell callers the right number…"

I said, "I think you should pay the fee to get the ad pulled from this Saturday's edition. It's really to your advantage."

He said, "Well, I know we'll lose out on the business but if you could just give them the correct number…"

I said, "No, I mean it's to your advantage to get the ad pulled because from now on, every time someone calls me looking for your art gallery, I'm going to tell them to come in and see our current exhibition of pro-Nazi lithographs."

He said, "You wouldn't."

I said, "Yep. I'm going to tell each caller, 'We've selected the finest works from around the world emphasizing why we must exterminate the inferior races and pledge our souls to the memory of Der Fuhrer. Oh, but you'd better hurry. The exhibit is only up for two weeks and then we have our annual showing of Child Porn.'"

He said, "Look, we can work something out…"

Just then, I got a Call Waiting beep and I said, "Excuse me a second. I have another call" and I put him on hold. When I came back, I told him, "That was someone who wants to attend your exhibit. I informed him the gallery had just been shut down by the police for trafficking in heroin and selling fake Picassos."

He said, "Okay, you win. I'll pay the large fee on one condition. You're still going to get some calls for us for a while. Would you please not tell them that kind of thing? Would you please just give them the right number?"

I said, "You have a deal."

Fifteen minutes later, the phone rang again with someone looking for that gallery. I could tell by the caller's badly-disguised voice (and the Caller ID) that it was the gent from the gallery calling to see what I was telling people who thought they'd reached his place of business. I politely told him the correct number and then just before I hung up, I told him that if my number was in the L.A. Times this weekend, I was going to tell people that they'd reached his gallery and that we had a sale going: With every purchase, a free kick in the groin and a mandatory enema.

The ad was changed. Sometimes, wrong numbers can be such fun.

I am going to get this blog off the subject of death a.s.a.p. but I have some announcements first…

Yesterday, animation expert Jerry Beck and I guested via our respective phones on Stu's Show. We spoke with host Stu Shostak for about a half-hour about our mutual friend Earl Kress, then Stu replayed (without commercial interruption) a Stu's Show from 2007 on which Earl and I guested and Earl spoke extensively of his background. You can listen to the whole program as a free download for the next few days. Go to the website for Stu's Show and scroll down until you see the picture of Earl with Kermit the Frog.

I should also mention that you'll want to go to that page tomorrow and hear the regular Wednesday broadcast of Stu's Show, now coming to you from a new spot on the Internet. Tomorrow, Stu will welcome three members of the cast of the sixties' sitcom, Dennis the Menace. He'll have Dennis himself (Jay North), Gloria Henry (Dennis's Mom) and Jeannie Russell (Dennis's friend Margaret) and this booking is quite a coup as Jay hasn't done this kind of thing before. I'll post a reminder tomorrow morning but you might want to make a note. You can listen live tomorrow for free at 4 PM Pacific, 7 PM Eastern. Or after that broadcast, you'll be able to download the show and hear it for a measly 99 cents.

Getting back to Earl: There will be a funeral and memorial service this coming Friday, September 23 commencing at Noon at Forest Lawn in the Hollywood Hills. It's at The Old North Church, a location that is sadly familiar to folks in the animation community. Earl and I said goodbye there to lots of cartoon folks who were loved and admired. If you knew Earl, come and say goodbye to another.

And now I'm going to post another photo of Laurel and Hardy, two men Earl loved dearly.

Stu Shostak will host a special episode of Stu's Show this afternoon. It'll be me and other folks talking about Earl Kress for a while followed by a commercial-free replay of one of Earl's many appearances on Stu's program. To hear it, go to stusshow.com at the appropriate time, which is 4 PM Pacific and 7 PM Eastern…and if you live anywhere else, you can probably figure out the time where you are.

For those of you who live in or around Los Angeles, here's one more nudge to go see the Reprise production of Cabaret. It's up at the Freud Playhouse through the 25th and then it will go away forever. By the way, Freud in this case is pronounced to rhyme with "nude" or "crude." It's not Sigmund. It's Ralph Freud, who was largely responsible for founding the theater arts department at U.C.L.A.

Here is the review by Charles McNulty in the L.A. Times. I rarely agree with Mr. McNulty and have considered avoiding any play he gives a rave and attending those he pans. That would have been foolish in this case because he happens to be right. This time. Click here to get tickets.

The woman on the right is the great character actress Jane Withers. The woman on the left is the First Lady of Cartoon Voices, the wonderful June Foray. This picture was taken Thursday evening at a party to celebrate June's birthday, which is today.

It's rude to tell a lady's age but (a) you can find it out with one click on the Internet and (b) at some point, it becomes a point of pride to tell how long a person has endured. So I'll bet June won't mind when I reveal here that she's 94 years of age. I have to divulge that in order to make you fully appreciate the following fact: She is still doing what she does best. She is still doing voices for cartoons.

Last Monday, I directed her (and some guy named Stan Freberg) in a voice session for The Garfield Show. June played a witch. You know how long she's been playing witches in cartoons? She voiced the witch in a Donald Duck cartoon called Trick or Treat that was released in 1952, the year I was born. How many other actors can you name who've been able to play pretty much the same role for that long? And what's more, she's still "got it." She still sounds like June Foray.

Of course, June has done a lot more than just play witches in her amazing career. She's done a lot more than voice Rocky the Flying Squirrel, Natasha Fatale and other superstars of animation. She's done commercials and narration and looping other actors and appearing on funny records (like Mr. Freberg's) and radio plays. She's also still playing Granny, owner of Tweety, for The Looney Tunes Show, which I'm hearing has just been picked up for another year.

It was a great party, filled with other voice actors (like Bob Bergen and Joe Alaskey), veterans of animation (Bob Kurtz, Willie Ito, Jerry Eisenberg, Tony Benedict, Don Jurwich), friends and family…I'm leaving out an awful lot of names. We all convened to wish June a happy birthday today and many more. The way she's going, there will probably be many more…and June will still be doing voices for cartoons. Makes you think she might actually be a witch, doesn't it?

Here's The Global Economy in One Neat Chart. I think it's fascinating that Walmart employs almost as many bodies as the Chinese People's Liberation Army. Maybe if we have to go to war against China someday, we can just send Walmart Greeters.

And next time you hear some right-winger say the U.S. government has never created one job — and this is usually said by someone who works for the government — you might remember that the U.S. Department of Defense is the largest employer in the world. And half of those folks who want us to shrink the size of government are terrified of the notion of cutting the military.

Thanks to Scott Marinoff for telling me about this.

A story with a happy ending.

The Writers Guild of America, West has announced its election results. Chris Keyser, co-creator of the TV series Party of Five defeated Patric Verrone, who was president before, most notably during our last strike. I voted for Patric but am not at all worried that Chris won. I think we had two excellent candidates…and if you go by their candidate statements and campaigns, their visions for the WGA were not particularly far apart. The defining issue seems to have been that Verrone, during his administration, pissed off a number of parties including a few other unions. A lot of voters felt we'd be better off with a president without all that baggage.

I was a little surprised by the margin — Keyser won 60% to 40% — but my ability to predict WGA elections has been impaired since the passing of Larry Gelbart. Larry was a wonderful man and a wonderful writer…but in every WGA election, he endorsed one or more candidates and you could just about bet the family heirlooms that Larry's pick(s) would come in last.

The WGA does not have another contract negotiation until 2014 so major changes will not occur during Keyser's two-year term. A lot of groundwork will be laid for what I expect will be another duel-to-the-death in '14. I hope I'm wrong about a war coming but if there is one, I'll bet we'll be more prepared than we've ever been.

Here — unembeddable but worth clicking over to — is another excerpt from the chat I attended on Monday night following a 30th anniversary screening of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Geoff Boucher of the L.A. Times is chatting with Steven Spielberg when who should make an unannounced appearance but Harrison Ford? The audio is a bit unbalanced in this clip. The audience reaction to Mr. Ford's entrance was louder (and also, I think, longer) than it appears.

The folks up at Reprise have another winner. Their new production of Cabaret is sensational. Carolyn and I went to opening night and liked it more than the Broadway version we saw a few years ago — the one with Alan Cumming. And we liked the version we saw with Alan Cumming. We just liked this one more.

Why? I think the actors got more into the dramatic flow of the book…and also the musical numbers felt a little less "Broadway" and therefore the whole show seemed more realistic and relevant. I came out of the New York production happily humming the score. I came out of this one feeling the chill as the Nazi menace began to take over Berlin. The latter, of course, is what the show is about.

I want to list the names of the main five actors in the hope that they'll Google their names, find this page and read my rave review of their fine production. Jeff McLean played the author, Clifford Bradshaw. Mary Gordon Murray played Fräulein Schneider. Robert Picardo played Herr Schultz. Lisa O'Hare played Sally Bowles. And Bryce Ryness played the man that the script and the program book describe as "The Emcee, Our Master of Ceremonies." That he is. Mr. Bryness especially stands out as he somehow manages to be engagingly entertaining, given the perverse iciness of his character.

These folks and the rest of the superb ensemble will be Cabareting up at UCLA's Freud Playhouse through September 25. Your attendance is highly recommended.

I'm closing in on 5000 Facebook friends, which is all they'll let you have. I don't know a lot of these "friends." I just accept them if they're also Facebook friends with at least one person I really do know…and yes, this is a silly criteria since the mutual acquaintance I really do know may not really know them either. If Facebook has accomplished nothing else, it has at least defined the word "friend" down to mean "some stranger who doesn't look like they'll just send me Viagra ads."

Anyway, I would much rather my Facebook Friend List consist of people who actually read this blog. If you're reading this message, you are presumably such a person. If you wanna be Facebook friends while I still have room for you, send me a request soon and include the name of your favorite Buster Keaton, Marx Brothers or Laurel & Hardy movie so I'll know you're my kind of people.

Daniel Engber discusses why 3-D movies, which briefly seemed about to shove 2-D out of this dimension altogether, are now dying out. Probably the same reason they didn't do that the last time such predictions were made, back in the fifties. If the movie's good, people don't care if it's in 2-D or 3-D and if it's not, then 3-D is a gimmick that only takes you so far and costs you more money.