I didn't watch Donald Trump's "town hall" on CNN, although it was impossible to be on the Internet and avoid excerpts here and there. It was, of course, exactly what you'd expect of a Trump appearance these days, especially one conducted in front of an audience that D.T. would consider "his people." Choosing to watch one of those and being outraged is like deciding to watch The Three Stooges and being upset because Moe poked Larry in the eyes and Curly ran around going "Woo woo woo!" [Insert obvious quip about how any of the Stooges would make a better president than Donald.]
The Trump event spawned two kinds of articles from those who think the man is a dangerous, lying psychopath. On one hand, you have folks who are furious that CNN gave this person a platform to lie, make light of sexual abuse, lie some more, claim he won, lie some more, etc. Just when on-air Fox News personalities are occasionally pushing back against Trump untruths, CNN is letting him do an infomercial for himself. Typical of such indignant articles would be this one in the Seattle Times but you can find hundreds of others like it.
The other category would be articles — and there have been a lot of these, too — that say that in that infomercial, Trump bestowed all sorts of gifts on the many prosecutors who are now working to hold him accountable for many misdeeds. Here's one such article and here's another.
When asked why he took government documents from the White House, Trump answered: "I was there and I took what I took…I had every right to do it. I didn't make a secret of it. You know, the boxes were stationed outside of the White House."
With those fateful words, Trump admitted that he was involved in willfully removing the documents from the White House. It is a federal crime to "willfully and unlawfully…remove…any…document…in any public office…of the United States." Indeed, the Justice Department has identified "improper removal," or "unlawful" removal, as a key concern in court filings in the Mar-a-Lago litigation.
There are a lot of such comments online. I can't be the only one who sees a contradiction between the two reactions. It's like "How dare CNN give that man who should be in prison more opportunity to say things that will help put him there?!"
Here's a great jazzy rendition of the theme song from one of the favorite cartoon shows, Top Cat. I even had Top Cat himself on my answering machine for a while. (Don't believe it? Listen here.)
My pal Pat O'Neill and I were discussing the upcoming Tony Awards ceremony here. Then he sent me this…
I note, in regard to my question to you about them, that the administrators of Tony Awards are now contemplating two equally uncomfortable ideas: either holding the ceremony without a TV show, or postponing the whole thing until the strike is over…because the WGA refused to give them a waiver.
And now, according to this and other online articles, they've negotiated the terms of a waiver and the show must (will) go on. This is probably wise on the part of the WGA because if the strike is still on — and especially if an actors strike seems imminent — the Tony Awards could be a show of support for the strikers. This is in addition to promoting the shows currently running on Broadway.
And it frees up a lot of attendees and presenters from the awkward-for-many choice of crossing a picket line. That's often a damned-if-you-do, damned if you don't decision. This next e-mail is from Brent McKee and it takes us into that area…
It recently came out that Jeopardy! host Ken Jennings crossed the WGA picket line to film the final week of Jeopardy! episodes because the other host of the show — Mayim Bialik — refused to cross the picket lines. He is being roundly condemned because of this. Can you clarify for me what is going on here?
The questions were written by WGA members months ago. No new questions will be written until after the strike is resolved. I also understand that they shoot one week of episodes in a single day. Jennings is not a member of the Writers Guild. I believe that he has to be a member of SAG in order to do the series, but I'm not absolutely certain. So I suppose my question is what obligations does Ken Jennings have in the current situation, and is the hatred being directed towards him valid?
I'm a devout Union Guy but I'd be reticent to condemn the man without knowing more about the situation. There's a thorny area here because there are folks who are in violation of their contracts to not cross picket lines. There are also instances where the host of a show may elect to cross a picket line for the good of the show and the others who work on it. Sometimes, they get condemned for this, sometimes not.
During past WGA strikes, a number of late night hosts — including the much-revered Mr. Carson — elected at some point to go back to work and to do new shows, allegedly without the employment of scab writers. Nobody faulted Johnny. David Letterman, when he was back on NBC, returned to work during the strike and even made a running joke about doing pointless, non-written bits because his writers were absent. I don't recall any hatred of Dave then…and he was returning his show to nightly new episodes.
As you note, Jennings chose to go in and host one day of taping five shows with questions that were already written. Then the show was already going to go out of production for a while. It would be a different issue if Jennings were writing questions or working with material written by scabs. Or if his crossing the picket line was enabling the production company to deliver an ongoing stream of new product to the broadcasters.
Ms. Bialik refused. Someone wrote to ask me if I thought that was just because she knew that Jennings would do it. I have no idea but it's commendable either way. If Ken Jennings henceforth refuses to host the show without the striking WGA writers, I would think that was commendable, too. Let's see what happens.
I have an awful lot of e-mails asking me how long I think the current Writers Guild strike will last and whether I think the directors and/or the actors will join us on the pavement and if so, what will that mean. Here is the absolute best, most accurate answer I can give you…
I don't know and neither does anyone else.
You can browse Ye Olde Internet these days and find umpteen jillion predictions, some fairly dripping with wizened certainty. A couple of them may be right but if so, they're right the way randomly-selected lottery numbers are sometimes right. No one knows.
We're in uncharted territory, people. To have a smidgen of an inkling, you'd probably have to have the offices of the AMPTP bugged. At best though, all that might tell you is which aspect of the current labor situation they're focusing on at the moment and which internal disputes between which member corporations are preventing them from agreeing on the next offer…to some union. It might be to the costume designers and it might be about Velcro® for all we know.
I am reminded, as I've often been in the past on this blog, of a great quotation from the late news guy, Jack Germond. He once said, "The trouble with the press is that we aren't paid to say 'I don't know' even when we don't know." Most people don't click on headlines that say that. A lot of them think any answer is better than no answer even if it's wrong. So a lot of sites are posting any answer.
This is my fifth Writers Guild strike. There are only so many lessons to be learned from my first four. All involved a different AMPTP with different member companies who marketed their product in different ways, bartering with a very different Writers Guild. Some of the issues are familiar but many involve marketplaces that didn't exist at the time of previous negotiations…and some of them aren't mature, fully-developed business models, meaning that no one is sure exactly where the money will be in them.
Past strikes were about contracts covering cable channels before anyone knew how new channels like HBO or Showtime would evolve. Or they were about the financial structure of the videocassette biz back in the days of the Betamax. Everyone thinks there's a tremendous future in A.I. but no one's sure where that's headed. And don't even think of asking a chatbot to write out a solution.
In spite of the above, I'm optimistic it will all get settled and the strike(s) will end. One thing that's certain is that the studios need product and they can only exist so long on reruns and reality shows. It will all get worked out.
I'm just not putting any stock in anyone's predictions about how and when.
I have paid no attention to the silly controversy about Disney casting a black lady as Ariel in the live-action remake of The Little Mermaid. I don't even care about the less-silly but still silly controversy about there being a live-action remake of The Little Mermaid at all. All I know is that Halle Bailey sings this song about as well as any song has ever been sung…
Devin "Legal Eagle" Stone breaks down the verdict in the E. Jean Carroll trial for us. Many Trump supporters won't let this come between them and The Man They Love but with each passing Trump scandal, it becomes harder for them to claim they're the party of "Law and Order" and "Family Values"…
It's Mother's Day so here's a replay of a piece I first published here on December 16, 2012 about my mother. In case you haven't read any of the other essays I've written about her, you should know that she was an extraordinary lady who did just about everything right when it came to rearing and mothering me. I did really well in the Parents Department…
My mother was a very intelligent woman and until about the last six weeks of her life, she was in possession of darn near all her mental faculties. As I've mentioned here, I spent much of the last decade hearing many of her many doctors hint or even state that she wouldn't be around much longer. She outlived all those predictions and even outlived one of those doctors.
In the last few months, two things made me realize they were the last few months. One was her primary care physician Dr. Wasserman changing his tone. He never said "Your mother's going to die soon" but he didn't have to. To be a good doctor, you obviously have to know a lot about how the human body works and what kind of pill or procedure fixes this or that. You also have to know how to talk to patients and their loved ones; how not to exaggerate or underplay what you know with reasonable certainty. I once asked my own doctor if in Medical School, he had to attend classes called "Breaking Bad News." He said yes, sort of. They weren't called that and there weren't enough of them…but it was a skill he had to learn just as sure as he had to learn how to stop bleeding or cure migraines or write illegible prescriptions.
Dr. Wasserman is real good at speaking between the lines. What he said and what he didn't say made me realize that the end was near for my mother.
The other indicator was that she was starting to get confused about things that had never confused her before. What day of the week it was. Names of people she'd known for years. I had long since taken over all her finances and bill-paying but about two months before she passed, she wanted to sign a certain check herself. And when she couldn't figure out where to sign, that was a bad indicator.
Before that, I used to tell friends, "She's a smart lady but when she gets sick, she gets stupid." That was why she needed me around. When she was well, she was fine at running her life and getting things done. She might need me or one of her endless stream of caregivers to drive her somewhere and then push her about in a wheelchair but she always knew where she was going and what to do when she got there. It was mainly her eyesight, not any mental deterioration, that prompted me to assume checkbook duties. When alert, she could take care of herself…and did.
Us.
She insisted on living alone after my father died. Other arrangements were proposed and rejected. Throughout four decades of married life, she'd lived by his timetable — and for a long part of that, mine. She got up when it was time to get him off to work and/or me off to school. She ate when we ate…and between his food preferences and my food allergies, it was usually a matter of eating what we would/could eat. When there was but one TV in our house, it was usually set to what he or I wanted to watch. Later, when I got a set for my room, the one in the living room was sometimes tuned to what he wanted to watch but not always.
Shortly after we lost him, I sat her down and told her I wanted her to be self-indulgent; to make wishes that I could make come true. She no longer had to cater at least in part to his needs and since I was living elsewhere, mine were of near-zero concern. It was time, I told her, to reorient her thinking to what she wanted and only what she wanted. She said, "Let me think about this for a few days." A few days later, she told me, "I've decided I want to live on my own schedule. I want to eat when I want to eat, sleep when I want to sleep, watch what I want to watch. Would that be okay with you?"
It was, of course, okay with me. How could that not be okay with anyone? So to the extent her eyesight, limited ability to walk and a few doctor's orders would permit, that was how she lived…and in the same house, with my old room converted to a den where she could smoke and watch TV at any hour.
She couldn't get out of things like having to go to the hospital at a certain time for a doctor's appointment but to the extent she could, she eschewed all demands to do anything when she didn't want. It was understood that when we had a date for me to take her out to dinner, she might just call me at the last minute and say, "I don't feel like it tonight."
For years, she'd loved Cirque du Soleil and I took her to see it whenever one of its traveling companies ventured near. One time, I called her and mentioned that a new Cirque show would be in Santa Monica in a few months and I was going to order tickets. "Don't get one for me," she said — to my great surprise. I was expecting joyous anticipation and when I didn't get it, I asked how come…
"Because the night your tickets are for, I might not feel like going. If you buy me a ticket, then I have to go." She still loved Cirque but she loved even more having no demands on her time.
That was why she recoiled in horror whenever I mentioned the dread words, "assisted living." She accepted the need to have a caregiver around a few hours a day, though she resented having to get up at a specified hour to let one in. She hated the idea of having one on the premises full-time and would often send one home early. The idea of relocating to an Assisted Living Home was even more dreaded. "I'll die before I let that happen," she'll said…and I knew she would. It was bad enough that she had to spend as much time as she did in the hospital with all those strangers around telling her when and what to eat.
Those who observe the time stamps on these postings note that I keep odd hours. In her final decade, my mother's were odder. She was as likely to be up watching TV at 4 AM as at 4 PM. She ate meals so irregularly that she couldn't classify them as breakfast, lunch or dinner. They were just meals.
I arranged with two nearby restaurants to deliver to her and to charge everything — the meal, the delivery fee, the tip — to my credit card. She just had to call one and say, "I'd like chicken tonight" (or shrimp or beef or…) and within the half-hour, a man would bring a freshly-prepared, low-sodium dinner to her door. The problem with this system? She might not feel like waiting the half-hour. Or she might not get the craving 'til after 10 PM when both restaurants closed. So she'd pop a Stouffer's frozen entree into the microwave and that would be dinner…or maybe breakfast.
MSNBC used to air three hours of Don Imus from 3 AM to 6 AM on this coast. Who would be up watching at that hour? Often, my mother. She didn't like Mr. Imus but she liked the lively discussions on his program and enjoyed, she said, when his guests often put him properly in his place. In 2007, he got himself fired because of one particular remark that many took as racially-offensive. My mother was disappointed to lose her middle-o'-the-night entertainment and a bit bewildered. As far as she was concerned, this was like firing Don Rickles for calling someone a hockey puck. Imus, she felt, said something stupid and insensitive about as often as he threw to commercial. Why did that offensive remark doom him when the eighteen the day before hadn't? Or the 143 the previous week?
She never warmed to his replacement, Joe Scarborough. She thought he was just as miserable a human being as Imus but Imus at least didn't pretend to be anything else. Imus also didn't talk so much about the boring minutiae of Congress and he gave his guests a fair shot at telling him he was full of crap. She found her way to other 3 AM programming (often QVC or some other channel via which she squandered my inheritance) and when I later told her Imus was back on another channel, it was like, "I'm over that." In my ongoing monitoring of my mother's mental state, I thought that was a good sign.
I'll get back to the topic of Western Publishing and its panel borders soon, I promise. Right now, we start with this question from Mark Palko…
One of the dirty little secrets of Netflix, et al. is that, despite all the hype, viewers spend most of their time watching older shows like Golden Girls or M*A*S*H or NCIS. (I recently rewatched Justified.) How do streaming residuals for a show like Welcome Back, Kotter compare to what you'd see with broadcast or cable?
It's a matter of comparing something to nothing. I have received zero streaming residuals for Welcome Back, Kotter. If and when I do, I'll bet you the check won't be enough to buy me a Milky Way candy bar…not even the fun-size kind.
And here's one from my old pal Jerome Sinkovec…
Mark, I was wondering…if you are writing on your blog, are you "crossing the picket line" of the Writers Strike?
No…the strike is against certain companies for certain kinds of work. I have stopped laboring on a project I had going with one of those producers and I'm instead working on a couple of books and on a comic book or two. One of them is about this really stupid barbarian who wanders around with a spotted dog. A lot of writing is outside the jurisdiction of the Writers Guild of America. Even though it would mean I'd be totally out of work (and therefore, income) during a strike, I wish that it was all covered.
Lin-Manuel Miranda, Josh Groban and the current casts of Hamilton and Sweeney Todd get together outside the Richard Rodgers Theater on W. 46th Street in New York to merge their musicals. Thanks to Tom Galloway who alerted me to this…
I will be the guest live this evening at 6:30 PM (West Coast time) on the San Diego Comic-Con Unofficial Blog Podcast. If the show's in progress as you read this, it'll appear in the window below. After the show's over, it'll replay in the window below. Ain't modern technology amazing?
My old pal Pat O'Neill sent me this the day after this year's Tony nominations were announced…
The Tony nominations were announced yesterday and the ceremony is scheduled for June 11, to be broadcast by CBS. If the WGA strike is still going on that date (as most seem to be predicting), I assume there will be pickets outside the theater.
This leads to a question: Most of the actors who will be on stage for this show are not only members of Actors Equity, but of SAG-AFTRA. The latter has announced it is supporting the WGA and will honor its picket lines. (For that matter, so has IATSE, representing the technical people who would be involved in the broadcast.) So, what's the likelihood that the Tony presentation broadcast will be canceled or postponed? It's an important question for the theater community, because the Tony broadcast is a big "commercial" for Broadway.
Well, first of all, I question that "most" are predicting the strike will last that long. Writers Guild strikes do tend to last long but a settlement in the near future is not impossible. In truth, no one knows. In the past, they've lasted a long time for two reasons, one being that the producers sometimes have a hard time agreeing among themselves about a new offer.
Secondly, Writers Guild negotiations tend to be the battleground for issues that may eventually lead to increases or rollbacks for some or all of the other Hollywood unions. This is one thing it helps to keep in mind to understand Hollywood strikes. To you, it may look like it's an intermittent battle between The Producers and The Writers Guild. But from the viewpoint of the AMPTP, it's one long never-ending series of battles between them and 58 (that's right — I said FIFTY-EIGHT) guilds and unions. What they give us or take back from us impacts what happens with the other labor organizations.
It's like if you have a big family and you give one kid a bicycle, you're probably on the hook for more bicycles. It's called Pattern Bargaining and they can sometimes manipulate things to their advantage but it can also sometimes work against them.
In past strikes, we did not have the unusual timing of this one. The Directors Guild is commencing negotiations on its new contract tomorrow and the actors begin formal contract negotiations on June 7. I'm not saying this will cause the WGA strike to end sooner or later; merely that you can't look at past years and figure out how that will impact any of the bargaining for any of these guilds.
In the past, there was almost zero chance of all three being on strike at the same time. It's still unlikely but it's not impossible. The current DGA and SAG-AFTRA contracts both expire on June 30. The AMPTP may feel the need to get our deal wrapped-up before dealing with possible strikes from those guilds. Note my use of the word "may." Nothing is certain.
Also, past Writers Guild strikes were at a time when the broadcast networks were frantic to get things settled so as not to disrupt their Fall Seasons. Nowadays, the Fall Season isn't a major "thing" at those networks and those networks are not driving the AMPTP bus the way they used to. So we're really in uncharted territory.
So…as for how the work stoppage may affect The Tonys, this is one of my biggest "I dunno" answers. I dunno…and it's not just about The Tonys. There are a lot of shows that have to decide what they're going to do. And if there is a picket line outside whatever theater will be the location for the Tony Awards telecast, it may be up to individuals to make a difficult choice. Maybe the show will be postponed.
The DGA and SAG-AFTRA can't strike until their contracts expire at the end of that month but a general labor unrest could start well before then. Might it make a difference? It might…but I have no friggin' idea how. No friggin' idea.
I feel the way most of you probably do about the verdict in the E. Jean Carroll matter. And it's educational in a way. If you're the kind of guy who likes to to grab women by their private parts against their will — and I sure hope for everyone's sake, you aren't — it's probably not a good idea to get recorded bragging about how you can grab women by their private parts against their will. It's almost as bad as getting recorded saying you want someone to find you 11,780 votes — one more than your margin of defeat.
If we're going to mention newspaper strip guys who drew a lot of strips, it's only fair to mention Mell Lazarus, a very funny man who had two long-running strips…
Miss Peach (eventually renamed Ms. Peach) started on February 4, 1957 and ran until September 8, 2002. That's 16,652 days.
Momma started on October 26, 1970 and ended July 10, 2016. That's 16,694 days.
Together, they add up to 33,346 strips…and Mell also wrote but did not draw a couple of other short-lived strips. There seems to be some argument among cartoonists and Friends of Mell as to whether or not he ever had assistants. I seem to recall him telling me that he did at times but that may have been with gags, not drawing. Others say he did it all himself so I'm not sure. Both looked like strips that one guy could draw several of in a day.
But in any case, the record for launching one newspaper strip and drawing it day after day after day, still belongs to Russell Myers on Broom-Hilda. Today's Broom-Hilda strip is #19,378. But it should be noted that Mell Lazarus came close…twice!
On this blog, I often tell you about talented people I know…and I know a lot of them. One of my more interesting friends is the international performance artist, Ptychka…a person who does so many things, it's hard to put them into any one category. Ptychka writes, she acts, she models, she dances, she performs amazing aerial choreography, she makes music, she sings…and she does all these things in English and Spanish and French and Russian and Japanese…
One time when she dropped by, my partner Sergio Aragonés was here and the two of them began talking in several of those languages. I didn't even understand the occasional parts of the conversation that were in English. You can read more about her at this link. It discusses her newly-released Japanese-inspired song, "Ichi" — which you can listen to in the embed below. You're going to hear a lot about this lady…
