Here's a scene from The Dick Van Dyke Show in two versions. The first is the way it aired. The second is an outtake of the same scene, only Mr. Van Dyke decided to screw around a little and…well, you'll see how he played it. This is from the episode where Rob gets a role in a movie, playing opposite a very sexy Italian actress, and proves unequal to the task…
Here's Mel Blanc guesting with David Letterman…in 1982, I believe. You get the feeling Dave wasn't all that enthusiastic about having Mel on his show, perhaps because it's one of those auto-pilot interviews. Every talk show Mel went on, the host wound up asking him pretty much the same questions and getting pretty much the same responses. The audience seemed to be the right age to be excited about the voice of Bugs Bunny…but not old enough to care about Mel's days with Jack Benny.
Ignore the stats that Mel quotes about the costs of making an animated cartoon and the time it takes. (It may sometimes have taken up to nine months for a Warner Brothers cartoon to wind its way down the assembly line but no department worked on their part of it for more than about six weeks.) Also, the anecdote about Mel deciding to give Porky Pig a stutter after hanging out with live pigs is a tale Mel told in hundreds of interviews…but Mel was actually the second voice of the character. Porky stuttered because the writers wanted him to stutter and an actual stuttering comedian was the first voice.
Other than that, it's worth watching. It runs about ten minutes…
Some brief conversations about Harpo Marx with people named Marx…
Back when I wrote Garfield and Friends, I'd do one "budget-buster" episode roughly every two years…something where the animation was so complex that extra artists had to be engaged and significant amounts of extra cash had to be spent. This episode, which was done late in the second season, cost about three times as much as your average Garfield cartoon. There was a bit of grumbling by the producers and the folks in charge of budgets but they did it, and they didn't do it on the cheap. Which is to their credit. There are producers and studios who would have tossed me and my script out onto the freeway.
As it turned out, it was a good investment. When the network people saw the storyboard, they thought the episode was so clever that they gave the series an early pick-up for the following season. That saved the studio a lot of money…way more than the overage on this cartoon. Sometimes, it's cost-effective to spend money.
A very talented artist named Mitch Schauer did most of the design work. Lorenzo Music, of course, supplied the voice of Garfield. Desiree Goyette did the voice of the rabbit at the end. And Neil Ross, who was then one of the lead voice actors on Transformers and G.I. Joe, handled the other roles. Click and watch.
There was a stunning, eye-moistening moment in last Sunday's concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Bruce Springsteen introduced Pete Seeger and together, along with Seeger's grandson, they led the crowd in a rousing rendition of "This Land is Your Land."
I have mixed feelings about Mr. Seeger and some of his politics, but this is a great song and I have a certain respect for anyone who's devoted so much of his life to causes he believes will make the world a better place. I remember being taken to a concert he gave out at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium not long after John F. Kennedy was shot. It was exciting, it was entertaining…and I remember that everything he said and everything he sang was, in one way or another, about the worth of every human being on the planet.
And I have to wonder. Seeger is 89 years old. He was close to half that age when I saw him at the Santa Monica Civic. This was back when they still had segregated schools in parts of the South. I wonder what his response would have been if someone had said to him then, "You'll live long enough to sing that song on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial as America inaugurates a black man as President of the United States."
HBO has been having YouTube pull down all the clips of the event but this one, which appears to be from German television, is apparently outside their sphere of influence or something. So enjoy — and don't be afraid to sing along. Especially if you're watching it on a wireless connection at Starbuck's or some other public place…
Here's ten smartly-edited minutes of Election Night, 2008. Just to remind us all what happened that evening…
Lately, I've seen an awful lot of rude people at live shows…especially people who snap photos and video with their little digital cameras and cameraphones, despite announcements that this is prohibited. I suppose there's always been a certain amount of rudeness this way but in the high-tech era, everyone seems to have some sort of recording device on their person and I guess the temptation to use them is too great.
This is actually an audio link. It's a recording from one of the last performances that Patti LuPone gave as Momma Rose in Gypsy. Someone was snapping pics during the big show-stopping number, "Rose's Turn," so Patti stopped the show and scolded the photo-taker, refusing to continue until the person was ejected. Once that was done, she started the number again from the top…and I'll bet the audience loved it. I also bet none of those people are going to take pictures in a theater for a lonnnng time.
Of course, there's a certain irony here because whoever recorded this audio and posted it to YouTube was violating the same rule just as blatantly as the clown with the camera. I guess they wanted to spread the warning that you should stick to the less obvious methods of rule-breaking. (By the way: The rule against taking photos is not just a matter of the producers wanting to preserve intellectual property. Performers on stage can be momentarily blinded by a flash in the darkness and can stumble or fall. At the very least, they can be distracted and it can harm the show for everyone.)
The audio's a little weak in spots so you might want to crank up your speakers for this. It runs a little over three minutes and the outburst occurs about 45 seconds in…
Here's a smidgen of Hollywood history — a news report on the ratification vote that ended the very long Writers Guild strike of '88. As I think I've written here before — I've written this in many places — I believe this strike was unavoidable and necessary even if the ultimate contract wasn't all that it should have been. In the 1985 negotiations, the WGA splintered and folded, taking maybe the worst rollbacks in the history of Hollywood labor. The 1988 strike therefore became inevitable as we had to break the pattern of getting slaughtered at the bargaining table and having to go on strike every three years just to keep our underwear.
I voted against the contract but I certainly understood why a majority voted yes. I suppose I knew and maybe hoped it would pass but thought it would be better for the WGA for it to pass by a narrow margin. Assuming the Screen Actors Guild takes something close to the weak offer currently on the table, as I assume they will, they will come to a similar imperative. Which is not to suggest a certainty that they'll be able to achieve the kind of solidarity necessary to rebound.
The meeting seen in this video clip was a surreal experience. It was held on a Sunday morning at the Hollywood Palladium. That Sunday was the last day of that year's Comic-Con in San Diego so I checked out of my hotel on Saturday before noon, spent the rest of that day at the con and the evening at dinner and parties…then left for Los Angeles, for reasons I still do not understand, at about three in the morning. I think I did a minimum of 80 mph all the way (with cars passing me, left and right) and made what is usually a three-hour drive in less than half that time. Got to bed by 5 AM, got up at 9…and on the way to the Palladium, I stopped in at a McDonald's for a Sausage Biscuit With Egg and ran into two writer friends who'd just driven back from San Diego for the vote. It was important enough to make that kind of effort.
This footage is interesting to me because of all the other friends I see in it. The first man you'll see at the podium is not identified but that's the late George Kirgo, who was then the president of the WGA. He intros Brian Walton, who was then our Executive Director and Head Negotiator. Walton did, I believe, a masterful job of holding the Guild together through trying times, pacifying the inevitable dissidents and, most importantly, driving some crafty wedges into the solidarity of the producers who opposed us.
I think (but am not 100% certain) that the bald gent you'll see saying, "Hello, Paul, how are you?" is the late Don Segall. It looks like him but doesn't sound like him. Don Segall was a lovely gent who went from writing comic books (he did the first story of The Creeper with Steve Ditko) to writing and producing TV shows. There's a shot of Harlan Ellison walking in for the strike vote, a quick interview with Francis Moss, a shot of Worley Thorne counting ballots and even a fast chat with Pat McCormick, who we've just been talking about on this page. I see other pals in the background…and once again, I've taken up more of your time to annotate the clip than it's going to take you to watch it…
A bunch of funny people tell what Monty Python means to them…
Just as I was hitting the "send" button to post today's video link, I heard an unearthly sound outside…a screech of rage unlike anything I've ever heard from any of God's creatures. And it was going on and on…
I ran outside and there — in the middle of the street — there was some sort of frantic, whirling dervish. So help me, it looked like the Tasmanian Devil spinning about so fast you can't see who or what it is. The screech was still coming from whatever it was, and it was loud enough that other neighbors were coming out to see.
None of us could make out what it was…but it wasn't bothered by cars racing by. I live on a fairly busy street and even at this hour, autos were zooming past it, missing it by mere inches. But still the creature was screaming and spinning and spinning and screaming. Wishing I'd grabbed up my big flashlight on my way out, I ran towards the dervish and finally got close enough to see what it was.
It was two raccoons humping. Right there by the white line running down the boulevard.
I stopped about twelve feet from them and clapped my hands together. They stopped, looked at me and decided that whatever I wanted, it couldn't possibly be more important than what they were doing. They then went right back to humping.
I turned to a group of neighbors who weren't close enough to see what I'd seen. I said, "It's two raccoons humping in the street."
One lady asked, "Can't you stop them?"
I asked her, "Why? If they don't do it there, they're going to do it somewhere else. It's not like they're going to go check into a motel." By this time, the raccoons were done and I could see them slinking off to go find food or smoke a cigarette or whatever a raccoon does after sex.
I just looked it up and learned that the gestation period for raccoons is 63 days and then it usually takes about three weeks before the babies are old enough for the mother to take them out to forage for food. One night a few years ago, Carolyn and I spotted some quieter raccoons coupling on the roof outside my bedroom window…and it was about three months later that I spotted large families of them in my back yard.
In the last year or so, I've decided to discourage the raccoons from coming around. They're cute but they're also destructive and with so many feral cats around, as well as the possibility of disease, I decided to secure some of their routes and to not leave cat food out at night. For a while, I thought they'd gone elsewhere…but last week, I saw one that was about the size of a shopping cart, and now they're doing it in road. I have a feeling that around the end of April, I'll be chasing whole families of 'em away again.
We're fast running out of veteran animators from the Golden Age of Cartoons. One who's still around is Bob Givens, who animated for all the major studios but especially at Warner Brothers. Among his other credits, he designed the first true model sheet for Bugs Bunny. That should give you some idea of how long he's been around and how much he's contributed to animation.
ASIFA, the Animated Film Society, has extensively interviewed Bob about his career. You can find several videos of those conversations here and a ten minute sampler below. I wish more guys had been interrogated like this while they were still around to interrogate.
Let's watch one of my favorite moments from Late Night with David Letterman, back in the days when Dave was on NBC and doing Viewer Mail once a week…
Hey, I liked that so much, I feel like watching the sequel from a few weeks later…
It's been a while since I've mentioned Trailers From Hell, a fun site where filmmakers provide commentary tracks to movie trailers. Here's Larry Karaszewski getting it on with the Coming Attractions for one of our faves, Otto Preminger's Skidoo. That's all you need to know.
Ohio State University whipped up this mini-doc on one of their state's more distinguished natives…Milton Caniff. You'll get to hear a little about his life and times, much of it explained by Lucy Caswell, who supervises the extensive cartoon 'n' comics archives at that fine school…
You won't bother to watch the entirety of this here but I can't resist. I have the opportunity to embed any whole episode of The Prisoner, the historic 1967 TV series by Patrick McGoohan. I picked the first but you can view any one of them over on this page of the AMC Website. I gather they've been placed online as a teaser for a forthcoming DVD release of well-restored prints.
There are also little "Prisoner-in-a-Minute" videos there that chop each installment down to a fast summary. Some of you may find them no less coherent than watching the entire hour.
I was not as big a fan of this show as some of my friends when it first aired. It would have required too much effort to be as big a fan of this show as some of my friends when it first aired. You'd have had to talk about it every waking moment and find double, triple and quadruple meanings in every line of dialogue and every prop or piece of scenery. What I guess intrigued me the most was that every time a new episode aired, I'd hear the discussion and analysis all over the schoolyard. No two people agreed. No two people seemed to be remotely on the same page as to what had happened, let alone what any of it meant.
And of course, everyone was blood certain that they and only they understood the show. I used to occasionally wade into these conversations, not because I had any better grasp but because it was fun to lob in a grenade or two. I'd stroll up to the mob and having no idea what I was talking about — but unlike the rest of them, knowing that — I'd ask, "And did everyone notice the scene that represented the Cuban Missile Crisis? And the sign in the background of the last shot that said, 'Number Six is Number Nine?'" This was back before we had VCRs, so no one could race home and replay the show and freeze-frame it to see that I'd made that up. It made the discussions somehow livelier.
The only other thing I can think of to mention about the show is to tell the following story. One evening about 1973, I was on a date with a young lady whose all-time favorite TV show was The Prisoner. I learned this when we were walking in Westwood and she suddenly noticed someone about thirty yards down the sidewalk and shrieked. "Omigod," she gasped, pronouncing it that way (as one word). "There's the star of my favorite TV show." I couldn't see who she'd spotted but I ran after her as she sprinted up to the gentleman. Before I could stop her, she accosted him and blurted out, "Mr. McGoohan, I have to tell you that I think The Prisoner was the greatest TV show ever made and I think you are a genius."
The man thanked her, very so politely, but said, "I'm sure Patrick McGoohan will be pleased to hear that but my name is Patrick Macnee and I was on a TV show called The Avengers." Then he looked at me and said with a smile, "Don't worry…this happens all the time." Here's the other Patrick in her favorite show…