So one night, Frank Sinatra is leaving Matteo's Restaurant in Westwood. The Parking Valet brings his Rolls around, whereupon Sinatra pulls out his money clip and asks, "Kid, what's the biggest tip anyone ever gave you?
The Parking Valet replies, "Eighty dollars."
Sinatra, always eager to be tops in any category, peels off a hundred dollar bill and hands it to the young man. Then Frank asks, "Hey, kid. Who gave you the eighty dollars?"
The Parking Valet answers, "You did, Mr. Sinatra."
So I just turned on the Jerry Lewis Telethon and caught Yakov Smirnoff doing a stand-up routine. I think we've answered the question of why this man isn't getting on the late night talk shows.
Comic fans: Would you like a free fanzine? The O'Neil Observer is a fine little publication, primarily devoted to the works of DC writer-editor Denny O'Neil. Their current issue (which for some reason, has very little about Denny) is available online as a free download. It's in the format of an Adobe Acrobat PDF file so you can download it and either read it on your screen or print it out…that is, if you have Adobe Acrobat or their free reader installed on your computer. Here is a link to the website for The O'Neil Observer. And if you need Adobe Reader, click here.
As mentioned here earlier, NBC is going to rebroadcast Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol this year in prime time, even though it's been run zillions of times in syndication and is readily available on home video. The off-network airings have always been cut, sometimes savagely…but several folks have also asked me if the home video version is cut. They all seem to remember it being longer when it originally ran on NBC in 1962, and some recall scenes that they're sure were there once. These people are wrong. The other day, I was speaking with Paul Carlson, who worked on the show, and asked him. He checked with one of the editors and back came the answer: The original version was 53 minutes. The version available on VHS and DVD is precisely the same except that they had to trim the NBC peacock off the negative when the transfer was done.
This leads us to the question of what NBC will do since an hour of prime time programming now has more commercials and only allows for more like 45 minutes of programming. When the original, half-hour Charlie Brown Christmas was broadcast last December, a big promotional plus was that it would be run uncut for the first time in decades. This presented a problem since it didn't fit in what now constitutes a half-hour of network television. Producer Lee Mendelson solved the dilemma by convincing ABC to run it in an hour slot, and he produced a little documentary about the show's creation to fill out the 60 minutes. One doubts NBC will want to let Magoo run 90 minutes, so they'll probably trim and perhaps speed things up a bit.
Several of you sent me info on the various Nigerian scams, which apparently are (according to this website) a "Five billion dollar worldwide scam." So I guess someone's falling for them. Amazing.
The E! Network is rerunning the very first episode of Saturday Night Live on Monday. Actually, it wasn't even called that on its first broadcast in October 11, 1975. I explained about that here.
Did anyone else see Jerry Lewis interviewed this last evening on Larry King Live? It was an emotional and, at times, disturbing hour. Jer, who we all remember as the skinny kid alongside Dean, has put on rather startling poundage due to a drug called Prednisone. He also, at times, did not seem to be quite there mentally. He occasionally rambled, especially at first, though there were long stretches of the old Jerry. (To read a transcript, which won't convey much of the discomfort, click here.)
His annual telethon for Muscular Dystrophy starts Sunday evening and runs through Monday, and I have a feeling it's going to be a pretty uncomfortable thing to watch, even for — perhaps, especially for — folks who tune in to see Jerry go over the top with emotion and self-service. It may be the first telethon where folks are more worried about the health of the host than of the kids in the wheelchairs.
Okay, no baseball strike. I guess that's good, but what I always find interesting about these battles is how many fans instinctively leap to side with Management and adopt the notion that those damn players are too greedy. Of course they are…but if they don't get more, the money does not go to house widows and orphans. It goes to the owners of major league baseball teams, who already have a helluva monopoly and racket. Think George Steinbrenner and ask yourself if that kind of person is a victim in such squabbles.
But this seems to be the way a lot of the public thinks. Back in the seventies, when Johnny Carson was having one of his many battles with NBC over cash, the Los Angeles Times ran an incredible letter about how, at a time when however-many people die each year from starvation, it showed a lack of values that Johnny wanted a few million more per annum. I fired off a rejoinder which was published and which basically said, "If Johnny getting less translated to fewer commercials, I'd be all for it. But that's never how it works and I don't see why he should take less so NBC can make more. If any values are askew here, it's in the notion that the guy who made the business successful is the bad guy for wanting a fair share of the pie."
Same thing with baseball. If players taking less would somehow translate to lower admission prices or fewer commercials, great. All for it. But that never happens. Baseball is going to make a certain amount of money and all the fighting was not over how much it's worth an hour to play Shortstop but over what percentage of that certain amount would go where. Perhaps the public attitude about all this will change the next few years as we go through The Great C.E.O. Compensation Scandals. We're going to hear an awful lot about men who ran huge corporations into the ground, did everything wrong, but still got out with huge salaries and performance bonuses while the grunts who did their jobs well lost both their positions and their pensions. It'll be interesting to see how all that impacts America's attitude about labor.
Ultimately though, it doesn't affect me. I have all that money coming in any day now from Nigeria…
A prominent creator in the comic book industry recently wrote me a long, frothing-at-the-keyboard e-mail, urging me to help him protest what he seems to think is the greatest miscarriage of justice since O.J. tried on gloves. Basically, it comes down to the fact that when this creator was at this year's Comic-Con International, a security guard didn't know who he was and treated him like a common attendee. The convention had closed, the hall was being cleared and this Prominent Creator was asked to move along like a person of no importance. I wrote the following to him in response…
Sorry…I not only don't think you were wronged, I think you were in the wrong on this one. The convention center's security folks have no reason to know who you are. Over the years, I have seen such personnel subject far more important people than you or I to far greater indignities than being treated like an ordinary person.
Many moons ago, I was walking out of NBC when I saw a new gatekeeper stop Dean Martin, who was driving in to tape his weekly TV show, and ask who he was there to see. Dino was not pissed. If anything, he was rather amused…and even gentle as he informed the guard of his identity. It was at most a minor inconvenience to Mr. Martin because, I suppose, he didn't feel he had to prove to some stranger that he was famous. Some people, I guess, do.
I've been busy with an incredible financial matter that just dropped into my lap via e-mail. It seems that a group of Nigerian investors have amassed a sum of Forty Nine Million Five Hundred Thousand United States Dollars as commission for oil sales contracts. In order to get it into this country, they need to transfer it into someone's U.S. bank account. Well, as luck would have it, they picked mine! Can you believe it? I've given them all the numbers and passwords for my savings and credit card accounts and within 10-14 days, they're going to transfer the money into my account for safekeeping and then, after they get to this country, I will give them the money back, minus my 15% commission. Do you realize how much money that is? Wow. Am I gonna be rich!
Seriously: I've now gotten well over a hundred of these e-mail offers to send all my banking info to total strangers in another country…usually Nigeria but occasionally others. If you don't know all about this scam, the details are spelled out here…but what I still want to know is: How much is anyone making off this racket? Are people really falling for it?
Spent a lovely last evening at the Hollywood Bowl, listening to one of the great jazz pianists, Chick Corea, who was performing with various "friends" including vibraphonist Gary Burton, saxophonist Michael Brecker and vocalist Flora Purim. What was on stage was great, though the event was marred a bit (for us) by audience members talking to one another and into cell phones. The fellow behind us alternated between telling them to quiet down and committing the same sin for which he was scolding others. I fear home video has gotten folks in the habit of talking while a performance is in progress. We need to get militant about these people and start hitting them with large blunt objects.
Shelly Goldstein, who knows as much about the Beatles as I do about Mark Evanier, corrects me: Apple Corps was not a charitable foundation, at least not primarily. It was mainly the boys' own management/recording company with a few charitable aspirations vaguely down the line. Silly me: I was recalling the version that The Rutles formed and confusing parody with reality. Which, these days, is easy to do in all walks of life.
Mike Rieder sends in this link to an article that lays out the case for the legality of George W. just charging off to war with Iraq without Congressional approval. I'm not convinced and neither are a lot of prominent Republicans, even. But it may all be academic because while G.W.B. may not need a Congressional declaration of that war to act, he also doesn't need the criticism and divisiveness that would come from not obtaining it.
Guy Gilchrist, sometimes in tandem with his brother Brad, produces terrific newspaper strips, including the current version of Nancy. Here's a link to a great two-part interview with Guy in which he discusses his strips and the problems of both syndication and self-syndication. And don't miss the second part.
Thanks to the many of you who've recently clicked on our "donate" buttons and sent this site some money. I'm way behind in sending personal gratitude but will attempt to catch up soon. Or so I claim.
The deadline is dead. Long live the deadline.
In the meantime: Does George W. Bush have the legal right to plunge us into war with Iraq? It probably doesn't matter since if he tells the planes to go drop bombs, the planes will go drop bombs and — ta-dah! — we're at war, Constitution or no Constitution. I happen to feel his administration has unhesitatingly ignored that document in other areas and I don't see why this should be any different.
If however, you're interested in why he probably doesn't have the legal right, here's a link to a simple explanation by law professor Jeff Cooper. If you come across an equally straightforward counter-argument, let me know so I can post a link to it.
James Traficant's in jail. Bob Barr, Cynthia McKinney and Gary Condit all were defeated. What in God's name is happening to our long and glorious tradition of nutcases in Congress? Oh, sure, we still have Charlie Rangel and Dana Rohrbacher…and Tom DeLay can always be counted on to say something really, really stupid and outrageous. But I'm worried. What if we lose a few more of those guys and C-SPAN starts to look a little less like the Sci-Fi Network? This is not a good trend, people. We have to do something about it…and soon.
Were he still with us, Jack Kirby would have been 85 years old today. He's been gone since '94 and still, not a day goes by when I don't find myself talking about or at least thinking about him. Those of you who met Jack know that he had an odd way of speaking, forever making unusual connections and leaping from one seemingly-disconnected topic to another…though if you really thought about it for a while, you could usually figure out the segue and see the brilliance of how he got from here to there. I am still just coming to understand things he said to me in 1971 and being amazed at their wisdom.
Also born on this date was my other great early supporter in the world of comics, Chase Craig. Chase was the executive editor for Western Publishing Company — for their Dell and later, Gold Key Comics — for several decades. Before that, he was a wonderful gag man and cartoonist, as I attempted to explain in this obituary from earlier this year. This is another one of those columns I removed from this site because it's in my new book but I'm putting it back up for a few days, just so you can read about this wonderful man.
In 1968, back when The Beatles were fab, John Lennon and Paul McCartney appeared on The Tonight Show to announce the formation of their new charitable foundation, Apple Corps. Alas, Johnny Carson was not hosting that evening. Sportscaster/game show host Joe Garagiola (of all people) was behind the desk from which he did a spectacularly awkward and uninformed job of interviewing John and Paul.
Johnny Carson is finally welcoming Lennon and McCartney onto The Tonight Show but, of course, not in reality. Currently at the New Frontier casino in Las Vegas, Carson impersonator Jeff Fairchild is starring in "On the Air, Tonight's Show," a live tribute/facsimile of the vintage talk show. "Johnny's" guests each program include not just the two Beatles but, usually, Frank Sinatra, Jerry Lewis and Elvis Presley. They obviously have a hell of a Talent Coordinator.
I am not recommending this show because, first of all, I haven't seen it. And I'm dubious because it's at the New Frontier, which is like a very large Roach Motel with video poker machines. It rents out its shabby showroom to a steady stream of low-budget shows, none of which last very long. If you and I could scrape together the money, we could go in there and put on a show, praying all the while we'd do enough business to interest a real hotel. But given the track record of shows at the New Frontier, we'd be better off pumping all the cash into those video poker machines. At least, they pay off once in a while.