I usually try to not put up more than two of these a day but this is the CNN interview from last week with Joe Simon. Joe is one of my favorite human beings and it's great to see him getting attention and still sharp and working at age 93. This only runs a minute and forty-five seconds but it'll give you a brief intro to one of the true living legends of comics…
I've written here in the past about Jim Thurman, especially about his partnership with a gent named Gene Moss. For several years in the sixties, they were top comedy writers in Hollywood and occasional performers. Most notably, they wrote and did voices for the popular cartoon series, Roger Ramjet, and starred in an extremely hip, adult kids' show called Shrimpenstein that ran on KHJ Channel 9 here in Los Angeles for too short a time. You can read more about them in this piece I posted when Mr. Moss passed away.
Alas, this is the piece about Jim Thurman dying. After he and Moss split up, he went on to become one of the main writers of Sesame Street, for which he won many an Emmy. He had a wonderful and wicked sense of humor and the few times we spoke on the phone, it was in full flower. Sorry to hear about his passing. Here are a few more details, courtesy of Variety.
If you have occasion to use public wi-fi connections, this article may be of interest to you. So may this article (and video) from the same source about what you can do to minimize problems like those described in the first article.
Okay, I've watched last night's White House Correspondents Dinner and am officially appalled. There's always something a bit "wrong" to me about reporters and the folks they cover intermingling this way; not that they shouldn't be civil to one another but the unbridled shmoozing makes you wonder about the sincerity of both sides.
Entertainer Rich Little had a rough time of it, especially since his "opening act" was George W. Bush announcing that in light of the tragedy at Virginia Tech, there would be no presidential attempts at humor that evening. I'm not sure I entirely follow the logic of that. Yes, it's awful and sad that 32 young people were killed and scores more were injured there. Would the president have gone out and yukked it up if that hadn't happened because, after all, the recent deaths of dozens of U.S. soldiers and hundreds of Iraqis shouldn't get in the way of a good monologue? Nevertheless, it got Little off to a bumpy start. (When Lewis Black did a similar dinner a few years ago, he had to follow Dick Cheney talking about the death of the Pope. Hey, there's a topic that will always get an audience in the mood to laugh.) It's also an awkward spot when you're brought in to perform with the clear expectation that you'll offend no one on the dais or in the front row.
Still, it could have gone a lot better. Once upon a time, Rich Little was an impressionist of uncanny talent. He did people that no one else had ever done before and when he did the ones everyone else did, he did them better than just about anyone. The impersonations though often carried rather weak or hoary material…and now the jokes are no better but the impressions aren't as impressive. The late Stanley Ralph Ross, who wrote for Little, used to tell people who said the replicas were uneven, "Rich is on target about 50% of the time but no one can tell him about the half that isn't." That was easy to believe last night…though I'm not sure Little wasn't "righter" for the event than some of those they've had in recent years. I have the feeling that after last night's dinner, the person in charge of booking the talent got a lot more compliments than the person who booked Stephen Colbert.
It was kind of an amazing performance. For his Johnny Carson bit, Little used a very old joke that you heard in high school or before. It was the one about the guy who takes an apparent drunk home — a drunk who can't even walk — and then the wife says, "Thanks for bringing him home but where's his wheelchair?" It's not a bad joke but of course, it has nothing to do with Johnny Carson and left me wondering why Rich Little, who's been replicating Carson for more than a quarter-century, doesn't have material tailored for that impression. Next week, he could do that joke for his George Burns impression or his Jack Benny.
Oh, well. I suspect Mr. Little — who no longer plays his home town of Vegas very often — has earned himself a year or two of bookings from Republican-leaning organizations and auditoriums in more Conservative communities. He'll do the same impressions and in between, he'll talk about the honor of performing for The President and crowds will love him for it. You or I may not have thought he was funny last night but it was probably a great career booster.
One final thing which I must admit baffled me was a video — and here, I'll embed it and you can see if it baffles you, too. It's a David Letterman Top Ten List introduced by, of all people, Presidential Press Secretary Tony Snow. If someone got up in a major public forum and said that Bush was a stumbling idiot who had convinced a large part of America that he didn't know what he was doing, it would be Mr. Snow's job, if not his duty as a supporter, to rebut and denounce that view of his boss. Yet here he is, presenting a video to that effect, endorsing the importance of Dave Letterman, a celebrity who makes it quite clear on a nightly basis that he thinks Bush is a dangerous boob. The video includes no disclaimer. Dave does not say, "It's all in fun" or even "In spite of his gaffes, he's still my president." There are no such niceties…and one even senses a certain air of contempt in the fact that Letterman says so little, as if the clips speak for themselves.
So, uh, why is Tony Snow affording so much dignity to this video? Shouldn't his official position be that Letterman is all wrong about George W. Bush?
Frank DeCaro discusses the TV series, Maude, which has just come out on DVD. I remember liking that series when it first aired and not being able to generate much interest or enthusiasm when it reran. It quickly became one of those "I admire the skill but I don't care about these people" shows. But it's been quite a few years since I've seen one so I oughta give it another chance. Here's an Amazon link to order the DVD if you'd like to. And while you're at it, you might want to order Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, which was the same way for me but from the start.
Clifford Irving discusses the accuracy, or lack thereof, in the new movie, The Hoax, which is all about his infamous Howard Hughes swindle. And by the way: "Sixth wife?"
As is way too usual around these parts, we must report the passing of another fine artist from what some call "The Golden Age of Comics." Artie Saaf died yesterday. The cause of death was complications from the Parkinson's Disease that had plagued him for many years.
Saaf was another of those guys who was in comics practically from the start. Born in Brooklyn on December 4, 1921, he was self-taught when he began drawing comics in 1938, though he later attended Pratt Institute, the School of Arts and Mechanics and the Art Students League. He worked for almost every company publishing out of New York at first but his steadiest account was Fiction House, where he became the main artist for a time on Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, an assignment which somewhat typed him as a specialist in drawing pretty ladies. Fiction House kept him pretty busy but he also ghosted the Hap Hopper newspaper strip for a time and often turned up in the pages of Thrilling Comics, Startling Comics and other books from Better Publishing.
Around 1954, he began working less in comics and more in advertising, particularly in the storyboarding of TV commercials. Most of his comic book work for the next decade and a half involved helping out other artists when he had time. Some of the romance comic art that is usually credited to Vince Colletta in the early sixties was actually pencilled by Saaf, for instance. He did occasional jobs on his own for Western Publishing and Dell but around 1967, he seems to have made a conscious decision to focus more on comics. A flurry of Saaf art began appearing in Western's Gold Key comics like Twilight Zone and Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery, and he began drawing for DC.
For DC, he drew (pencils and inks) the Hunter's Hellcats feature in Our Fighting Forces, but mostly pencilled, mainly on ghost comics (Ghosts, The Witching Hour, The Unexpected) and several that featured those pretty ladies. He did many romance stories inked by Vince Colletta and was the main artist on Supergirl with a few jobs on Lois Lane, Angel and the Ape and even Teen Titans. Illness and age brought a close to his comic book work around 1978…a great loss for us because his art was lively and always interesting. No one drew the female figure in action better than Artie Saaf.
More information on him — though sadly, not enough — is available over at www.artsaaf.com, a site set up by his son, Steve. I had the pleasure of meeting Steve at this year's Wondercon in San Francisco. In the later years of his life, Art was unable to recall many details of his long, impressive career and Steve's been on a mission to research it. At the convention, he had a long conversation with Nick Cardy, who worked for many of the same companies and even inked Art Saaf work on occasion. Nick helped fill in some of the gaps but there are many more and if you have any information, I'm sure Steve would welcome hearing from you. His father was a good and important contributor to the field and that should be properly documented.
A number of folks have sent me info and discussion of this matter of baseball announcers being on a short delay. For the best explanation, we turn to the wise and all-knowing Paul Harris, whose talk fest is heard Monday through Friday on KMOX radio in St. Louis.
The Life was an original Broadway musical that ran for a little over a year beginning in 1997. Reviews were mixed and when it closed, it disappeared. There have been very few productions of it since. I saw it in New York and liked parts of it but not the whole, which was all about pimps and prostitution and the rise of one lady in that very old profession to Hollywood stardom. It struck me as a show filled with people I didn't care about and one that took a phony, sanitized look at a tawdry world.
Still, some of the songs were quite good. Cy Coleman wrote the music and the lyrics were by Ira Gasman. Our clip today is a promotional video that was made of the show's hooker chorus singing "My Body," which was supposed to be some sort of whores' anthem. It's a perfectly fine theatre number but I think it also demonstrates what was wrong with the show.
You may remember that last year around this time, Stephen Colbert caused something of a ruckus with his performance at the White House Correspondents Dinner. I meant to alert you but forgot that this year's was this evening, with Rich Little performing what everyone expected (correctly, it would seem) would be less controversial material.
I haven't watched it yet. I have my TiVo set up to record a rebroadcast in a few hours on C-Span. You can find the schedule and the video can also be watched online at the C-Span website, which doesn't work for me insofar as video clips are concerned but may for you. I imagine the clip will show up on YouTube or Google Video in the next day or so. If this report is correct though, you may not want to take the time to watch. Bush, they say, made no attempt at humor, apparently out of respect for the Virginia Tech shootings. Rich Little, they say, didn't do so well. I'll let you know if I disagree.
I believe Hollywood is heading, much in the manner of a runaway train, towards a big, crippling strike over how residuals will be paid and revenue streams divided for the new marketplace of DVD, digital delivery, Internet podcasts, etc. There are many possible scenarios over when the strike could come…and even which labor organization(s) will lead the way, though the smart money is on the Writers Guild with the Screen Actors Guild tagging along if it can get its leadership squabbles in check. In any case, the issue is out there and it seems unlikely that it can be resolved by the producers being reasonable.
Strikes have not been settled or prevented through sheer reasonableness for a long time in this town. Some of the labor actions of the fifties and sixties were but that was before the main entertainment companies were international conglomerates. The legendary Lew Wasserman, the super-agent who used to run MCA and Universal, ended or headed off several strikes by getting on the phone to the heads of MGM, Disney, Warner Brothers, Paramount and others and working out a deal. But there is no more Lew Wasserman, nor do Time-Warner, Sony, the current Disney and the rest operate on that kind of personal level nowadays.
I hope I'm wrong but the only way I can imagine there not being a major conflagration is if the Writers Guild and SAG both experience internal collapses and their memberships decide not to fight for a fair share in these new revenues. That doesn't seem likely. In fact, if it does happen, we will probably see all-out war, anyway. We'll just see the members of those unions firing at one another, rather than at Management.
The other day, a group of studio and network heads announced a proposal that their side and the unions jointly fund — and I quote — "a showbiz version of the report from the Iraq Study Group" to study and propose new formulas. I suspect this will be about as effective as the real report from the Iraq Study Group and I wonder why they would liken their idea to that. Here are some details on the proposed report.
Ordinarily, I'm wary of the "everything you know is wrong" article. Almost any time anything happens in our world and a conventional, obvious wisdom emerges, you're never more than two clicks away from an article on the Internet telling you why the opposite is true. If some candidate makes a horrific gaffe and plunges in the polls, someone will pen a piece that will explain that while this may look bad for that candidate, it is actually a bit of brilliant strategizing that has guaranteed his/her election in a landslide. I'm all for examining all possibilities but most of these articles seem forced and contrived and usually intended as attention-getting, separate-yourself-from-the-herd exercises.
That said, it is worth considering this article by Dahlia Lithwick, whose premise is that Alberto Gonzales did a great job with his testimony the other day.
Boy, you people are fast. I just posted the question in the previous item and here comes Dave Sikula with the answer, which we can all find in this article. Basically, it's that stations all over the country have put in delays on live broadcasts for fear of F.C.C. fines if a naughty word gets on the air. Seems silly to me. Vin Scully has been broadcasting Dodgers games since 1950. How many obscenities have snuck in during that time?
My impression is that when there is outrage over naughty words or content on TV or radio, it's either over prepared content or cases like the Janet Jackson breast incident where someone felt the broadcasters could and should have pre-screened what was going to happen. Almost every week it seems, some forbidden word slips onto a news program or other live show somewhere and if it's clearly an accident, even the people who go way out of their way to get outraged about obscenity on TV or radio don't get outraged. I'm more offended by the delay than I would be about anything it could prevent.
Speaking of "out of sync," I have a question which will probably have to be answered by a baseball fan in Los Angeles.
When I was a kid and occasionally following the L.A. Dodgers, one of the big appeals was Vin Scully, who called the play-by-play. He's still the most important person in the stadium whenever that team plays. My father, who followed baseball more than I did, wouldn't dream of watching a game without Scully in his ear. Whenever we went to a game, he took along a transistor radio so he could listen to Vinnie describe what we were seeing…and even if he hadn't brought the radio along, so many other Dodger fans did that you could often hear Scully throughout the bleachers.
Even watching the Dodgers on TV, he had to have Vin Scully. For a time, Scully's co-anchor was a guy named Jerry Doggett, who was probably a decent-enough sportscaster but he wasn't the Ol' Redhead. Scully and Doggett would switch off. One would call a few innings on the TV broadcast while the other did the radio narration, then they'd swap. Whenever Scully was on the radio, my father would mute the sound on the television and haul out his radio so he could hear Vin.
The other day, I was discussing this with a friend who, unlike me, follows the Dodgers these days. She said that you can't do this now. According to her, they have the radio transmission of Vin Scully on a five second delay. So if you listen to him, he's not describing what you're seeing live or on your TV screen. He's a few seconds behind and it doesn't work.
I guess this is a multi-part question, then. Is this true? And if so, is it being done intentionally to discourage people from listening to Vin Scully on the radio while they watch the game at the stadium or on TV? I can't imagine why Vin Scully would need to be broadcast on a delay, nor can I fathom why anyone would care if you listened to him this way. Can anyone clear this up for me?
Congressguy Barney Frank (D-Mass.) was the chief sponsor of the Executive Compensation Act, which passed in the House yesterday by a vote of 269 to 134. The bill gives shareholders of public companies the right to cast an advisory ballot on the compensation awarded to the company's executives. Here, in case you're interested, are the details.
Before it passed, there was a last minute attempt by some Republicans to insert a provision that Frank felt was ill-timed. Here we see him objecting to it. It's about four minutes, it's rather entertaining, and it's a bit out of sync. For some reason, most of the clips on YouTube of Barney Frank have him speaking out of sync. This is apparently a side effect of being gay.