Hey, want to see some photos of Buster Keaton you've never seen before? Cartoonist Alex Robinson has posted a couple that his grandfather took in 1964 on the set of the Samuel Beckett film, Film. Here's the link…and we have Greg Means (who describes himself as "a long time reader, first time e-mailer") to thank for it. There's also an embed over there of the first part of this unusual movie.

Pin-up queen Bettie Page has died at the age of 85…and boy, is it hard to think of Bettie Page as being any older than about 26. One time when Dave Stevens was over here, he asked my advice on something he was helping her with…and before I knew it, I was on the phone with Ms. Page, explaining my recommendation to her. You know how you get a mental image of people you're talking to that way? I couldn't help but imagine Bettie at the age she was in all those magazine photos…and probably talking to me from somewhere on a beach.

Dave asked me if I wanted to go meet her in person. I thought for a second and said, "No, I don't think so." He chuckled and said, "I know what you mean."

Dave was, of course, the brilliant artist whose depictions of her — in The Rocketeer and elsewhere — reminded so many men that they'd had a crush on this woman. He birthed a resurgence of interest in her. Thousands of women posed undraped for magazines in that era. Bettie was one of the few that anyone remembered and knew by name.

When he first began drawing her, he couldn't have imagined he would someday meet the woman, let alone become her friend and occasional caretaker. He didn't even know if she was alive…or if she was, whether she would ever identify herself. But they became close…and Dave, who like so many had once lusted after this woman, couldn't believe he was now driving her to deposit her Social Security checks.

Her story has been told in many forms and Dave told me that a lot of what was depicted was even true. I think most of what's in this obit is correct but you never know with someone who was the subject of so many fantasies.

Reports last year that the '62 sitcom I'm Dickens, He's Fenster was heading for a DVD release were either false or premature. That's disappointing. I recently saw some episodes of that old show, which starred John Astin and Marty Ingels as two luckless carpenters, and I was surprised at how funny they were. It was a short-lived series but a good one.

Hoping to drum up some interest in a DVD set, producer Leonard Stern has set up a website to promote the notion. It features clips and it also has an entire episode for online viewing — at the moment, the pilot, which I don't think is as good as the later episodes I recently saw. There's also an article over there about how Stan Laurel was a fan of the series. Take a look.

It's been a long time coming but here's Part Five in our trip down Memory Lane with Scrappy Doo, nephew of Scooby and a somewhat controversial cartoon character. Since you've no doubt forgotten what came before, you might want to refresh your memory by reading Part One, Part Two, Part Three and Part Four. Once you're up to speed, we can resume…

Where were we? Oh, yes: Scrappy finally had a voice and my pilot script was recorded…and that was the end of it. Or so I thought, having failed to anticipate problems with the ABC Standards and Practices division. I know of no such oppressive force in children's television today…but back then, each network had this department that had to approve everything that got on the air. In other words, In-House Censors. In most instances, these folks had a simple, understandable function: Prevent the network from getting into trouble.

TV networks, because they reach so many people, are always being sued and/or protested, often over things you could never imagine would create problems. Most of the time, the network position is defensible and the outrage falls into the "nuisance" category…but even nuisance suits and protests can be a nuisance. And expensive to defend against. In kids' television, the stakes seem higher. A protester yelling, "This show is poisoning our children" will usually get more traction than someone bitching about a show for general audiences. The sponsors of kidvid are especially frail and known to atomize over very little negative feedback.

Censorship of broadcast television has declined greatly in the era of HBO, Showtime and DVDs…but in the early eighties, if you were creating a show for CBS, NBC or ABC you usually found yourself in the following dilemma. You had to please the Programming People who bought the show and prayed for ratings. They wanted your program to be edgy and sexy and full of action and excitement. And then you had to please the Standards and Practices People. They wanted your show to be nice and quiet and non-controversial. The two divisions rarely spoke with one another. In fact, in some cases, they hated each other too much to converse. Either way, they fought their battles by playing tug-o'-war with you and your show.

We quarrelled often and usually unproductively with these folks over what we called "action" and they called "violence." Sometimes, their definitions were insane. You'd write a scene where the good guy grabbed the fleeing bad guy and held onto him until the police could arrive and the Broadcast Standards people would react like your hero had chopped off someone's head. Criminals could rob banks and cops could stop them but neither could brandish weapons. One time, a writer friend did a script (a pretty good script, I thought) where the climax depended on the hero cutting a rope at a precise moment. The hero, it had been established, was a former Boy Scout…so my friend had the hero whip out his Boy Scout pocket knife and use it to cut the rope.

Well, that couldn't be allowed. Encouraging children to carry knives, even though the Boy Scouts do? You might as well have them packing howitzers and blowing bodies away on the playgrounds of America. There was much arguing and the scene ended up being staged with the rope being cut by the edge of a sharp rock, which was just silly. The rope was being used to lower a car. Given how sturdy it would have to be to do that, it was already stretching reality for it to be cuttable with a pocket knife. A sharp rock was ridiculous.

At times though, the bickering went beyond Broadcast Standards trying to prevent the network from being sued or having its advertisers shrink from advertising. Every so often, someone there got it into their heads that childrens' television could mold the youth of today into the good citizens of tomorrow. That's a questionable premise but let's say it's so. The question then becomes what you teach, how you mold. I found that those who approached the arena with that in mind had some odd ideas of what we should be trying to impart to impressionable viewers. Acts of extreme violence — like carrying a pocket knife — weren't as big a problem as what they called "anti-social behavior" and what I called "having a mind of your own."

Broadcast Standards — at all three networks at various times — frowned on characters not operating in lockstep with everyone thinking and doing as their peers did. The group is always right. The one kid who doesn't want to do what everyone else does is always wrong. (I rant more on this topic, and show you a cartoon I wrote years later for another show just to vent, in this posting.)

Scrappy Doo was intended, as per his name, to be scrappy — scrappy and feisty and in many ways, the opposite of his Uncle Scooby. Faced with an alleged ghost, Scooby Doo would dive under an area rug and you'd see the contours of his doggie ass shivering with fear beneath it. Scrappy, as I wrote him in his first script, would go the other route: He'd say, "Lemme at him" and go charging after the bogus spirit of the week.

Shortly after the last of many recordings of "The Mark of the Scarab" (that first script), it dawned on ABC Broadcast Standards that maybe Scrappy was a bad role model for the kiddos. He was — and one person in that department actually used this term to me — "too independent." Weeks after I thought that script was out of my life, I got a call: Joe Barbera needed me in the studio, tout de suite, to discuss rewrites the network was demanding. I hopped in the car, zoomed up to the H-B plant on Cahuenga and was directed into a meeting with Mr. B and a covey of censor-type people.

Scrappy, they said, had to be "toned down." He was too rebellious, too outspoken…I forget all the terms they used but I vividly recall the "too independent." I made all the counter-arguments you'd have made. Mainly, I pointed out that Scrappy, as written, was an effectual character. He got things done, always (eventually) for the better. Our heroes, Scooby and Shaggy, fled from danger, panicked, hid, trembled, etc. If they contributed to the resolution of the problem and catching the villain, it was only by accidentally crashing into him. "Why," I asked, "do you want to make that the role model Scrappy and our viewers should emulate?"

The debate went on for maybe half an hour…and usually in these, no one scores a TKO and you wind up compromising. In fact, a compromise is so often the resolution that we often write with some wiggle room, inserting more sex 'n' violence than we really want to put on the screen. That's so that when the censors censor and we wind up compromising, it gets us down to the level we wanted all along. This time though, I had not done that. I'd written what I thought the cartoon oughta be. And this time, I thought, I'd won the argument.

Suddenly, everyone in the room had said everything three or more times and my talking points somehow prevailed. One of the Standards and Practices people shrugged and mumbled, "Well, maybe Scrappy can stay as he is." Another said to me, "You sure talked us out of what we had in mind."

Mr. Barbera, who'd been largely silent throughout the mud-wrestling, leaned forward in his chair and said, "That's because Mark didn't grow up on shows that you people f*cked up." I think he even pronounced the asterisk.

I left the meeting in the warm glow of triumph. I had saved Scrappy Doo's testicles, small though they might be.

The next day, someone (I don't know who) had another writer (I don't know who) rewrite a couple scenes in that first Scrappy script to tone him down, and the affected lines were re-recorded. The other writers working on Scrappy Doo scripts were told to adjust the character accordingly. Scrappy was still somewhat scrappy but nowhere near as scrappy as I thought he should be. For what it's worth, I suspect that the decision to capitulate was made within Hanna-Barbera. Someone, I theorize, feared that even if ABC would now accept Scrappy my way, at some point down the line, they might change their minds. And if they changed their minds, they might not rerun the episodes we were now doing and H-B would lose out on those revenues.

That's just a hunch based on other experiences. I never found out for certain. At Hanna-Barbera, those kinds of decisions would be made and you could have put everyone who could possibly have been involved under oath and they would all swear convincingly they hadn't done it. It had just been changed, apparently by no one. I used to think maybe the janitors at night would stop mopping floors for a while and do surreptitious rewrites on my work.

Anyway, that's how I lost the battle and Scrappy lost a little of his scrappiness.

I think I'm only going to get one more chapter out of this saga and it'll be along soon. In it, I write another episode, Scrappy saves Scooby's ratings, Lennie Weinrib gets replaced as Scrappy's voice and, years later, the world is blanketed with lying anti-Scrappy propaganda. Tune in whenever.

The other day here, we talked about some of the problems that actors face. Here with a song about The Biz is the talented writer-actress-chanteuse Shelly Goldstein…

As I've mentioned here, I've been teaching Comedy Writing in the Master of Professional Writing program down at USC. The fall term just ended so today, I took my students on a field trip — out to NBC Burbank to watch the taping of tonight's Tonight Show with Jay Leno. It was a good show with guests Wanda Sykes, Michael Phelps and Lyle Lovett, and — no surprise since they've been doing this a long time — the crew out there really has their act together. Everything started on time (4 PM), ended on time (5 PM) and went precisely according to plan.

Years ago, when I visited a lot of TV tapings and filmings, I was amazed how often, even on long-running shows, there were delays and false starts and tech mistakes and going back to redo things. Then I'd drop in on The Tonight Show when it was starring that Carson guy and I'd marvel at the absolute clockwork. You could set your watch to the second by the pre-show time the band would start to play, the time Ed would start the warm-up, even the precise moments when Ed would do each of the six or so jokes he told at every single show. Then the right second, the opening would start just when it was supposed to and Johnny would make his entrance and proceed to do an hour show in exactly one hour. Not that long ago, I sat through a Deal or No Deal taping that lasted 5+ hours to arrive at sixty minutes of briefcase-opening.

Leno and his staff do a fine job of making exactly the product they intend to make. I wish all the late night shows were more spontaneous but that doesn't seem to be anyone's goal these days. So I sat there thinking, "Boy, they do this show well…if anything, too well."

I was a little disappointed in the warm-up. As discussed here, audience warm-ups used to be a form of entertainment unto themselves…and usually they involved someone who may or may not have been affiliated with the show coming out and being funny. (Leno, early in his career, did warm-ups for the Cloris Leachman sitcom, Phyllis.) Nowadays, they're more like bad game shows. Some guy comes out, gets audience members up to sing or tell jokes, and hands out t-shirts and other prizes. Jay's announcer John Melendez did the honors this afternoon.

Before Menendez did his spot, Jay came out in a work shirt and jeans to welcome everyone. He spoke a little about his new 10 PM deal but didn't say anything he hasn't said on the news. Then he asked for questions from the audience and as was the case last time I was there and as I'm told is true 98% of the time, everyone asked the same question: "Can I have a photo with you?" The guy with the camera was already standing by for just that purpose…and I guess they're going to have to change something pretty soon because he's using a Polaroid.

My students enjoyed the experience…though one seemed most impressed by the peanut butter cookies in the Green Room. Another of my students committed the capital offense of taking a photo on her iPhone. On the way in, we were only told about ninety-four times not to turn on cell phones or use recording devices and we were even told we could be prosecuted for copyright infringement if we did. Still, near the end, she snuck a snapshot and — whoosh! — a furious NBC page descended on our row and hauled her off for, we figured, tasering and waterboarding at the least. Basically, they scolded her and made her delete the picture. Had it been at the beginning of the taping, I'm guessing they would either have shown her out or confiscated the iPhone.

And that's pretty much it…a nice show. Jay had a good rapport with Wanda Sykes and seemed so happy to have Michael Phelps there and — oh, wait. The episode's just starting on my satellite dish. I'm going to go watch. I just saw the back of my head.

I've been having cable modem problems again today, as has been not uncommon lately. The thing keeps cutting in and out on me. If I go a long time without posting over the next few days, that's the reason. It doesn't mean something has happened to me.

Bill Zehme on what's happening with Mr. Leno. Thank Jeff Abraham for this link.

I apparently erred when I said Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich had a 6% approval rating. Last time it was measured, it was 4%.

How does a man get that low? Did Blagojevich bitchslap a nun and we didn't hear about it out here? George W. Bush did everything wrong and on a much larger, "getting people killed" scale and even he never made single digits. And if historians of the future get to wondering how a man who became as unpopular as Bush ever won a second term — meaning enough voters liked him enough to re-elect — what will they make of Blagojevich, who's also in his second term?

Here in California, Arnold Schwarzenegger is fiercely replicating all the financial disasters that he condemned when they were the handiwork of Gray Davis, the recalled governor who was his predecessor. And even Arnold's only down to something like 36% approval. He couldn't get it down to 4% if he announced he was making Kindergarten Cop II.

The immediate problem in Illinois is that Blagojevich is duty-bound to appoint someone to fill out the rest of Barack Obama's senate term…but of course, anyone he appoints will be under a cloud of suspicion and might not be seated in the senate just because he was Blagojevich's pick. The Illinois legislature is talking about taking the choice away from the governor and calling a special election which will cost $50 million plus whatever the aspirants spend to campaign in it. Blagojevich could do the honorable and wise thing by instead announcing that the legislature should just vote to pick a successor and he'll recuse himself from the decision and appoint whoever they recommend. He has nothing to lose doing that and it would show that he isn't totally immoral and foolish. It might even get his approval rating up to 5%.

As mentioned here a week or two ago, GSN has started rerunning old episodes of the game show, To Tell the Truth in its overnight time slot. I don't find these nearly as entertaining as vintage What's My Line? or I've Got a Secret but on some, there's someone of special interest up there who's surrounded by two impostors. The episode that airs tonight (or tomorrow morning, depending on how you look at it) has Arthur Marx, the son of Groucho. The one the following night features legendary disc jockey Alan Freed. And the one after that has the famous fan dancer, Sally Rand. I'll try and alert you as other interesting people come along but I'll probably forget.

According to this article, the Polaroid company is going to stop making film for its instant cameras. (It doesn't say it in the piece but it's kind of assumed you know they stopped making the cameras a year or two ago.)

This is sad but inevitable. It's also stunning in a way because I can remember when the Polaroid Land camera was one of the great success stories in the history of American industry. My Uncle Aaron used to brag that he'd had the foresight to buy Polaroid stock when it was a dollar a share. Okay, so he didn't tell people that he'd only bought around twenty shares and that he'd sold them when the price of the stock doubled. The point was that "I bought Polaroid stock when it first came on the market" was a tremendous boast.

I still have Uncle Aaron's old 1950-something Polaroid camera here somewhere. It used a kind of film which only came in black-and-white (and involved the application of a messy fixative) which they stopped making in the mid-seventies or thereabouts. Somewhere here, I also have one of their most popular late models, the SX-70, which I haven't used in at least ten years. That's a photo of an SX-70 (not mine) above.

It came in handy here and there, occasionally even for taking pictures of women with their clothes on. I was surprised to learn it could do that. What's more, it could take photos of raccoons in my backyard and also of the car that ran into the front of my house one night. It came in very handy until I got my first digital camera. The advantage of the digital is not just that it gives a clearer picture which you can easily e-mail to someone. There's that but with the digital, it doesn't cost a buck and a half every time you press the shutter.

I'm not sure where my SX-70 is but when I find it, I'm not tossing it out, even if I can't buy film for it. It's a piece of history so I think I'll put it in the closet right next to my Betamax, my Laserdisc Player, my Wordstar manuals, my 8mm projector, my reel-to-reel tape recorder, my Playboy Club card and my first agent. None of them are good for much of anything anymore, either.

Terry Gilliam of Monty Python fame talks of his love for Disneyland. He gets the year it opened wrong (the place first welcomed visitors on July 17, 1955, not in 1953) but all his other comments should strike a note with most of you.

I'm sure you've all read and heard about Rod Blagojevich, the governor of Illinois, and his arrest for what U.S. Atty. Patrick Fitzgerald called a "political corruption crime spree." I don't know anything about the guy or what he may or may not have done. I kinda thought being corrupt was part of the job description when you were governor of Illinois.

Only three things interest me about this. One is that right now, every late night and topical comedian in the world is wishing the guy had an easier last name to pronounce. There's no way to deliver a crisp punchline with "Blagojevich" in it.

Secondly, I'm wondering. The guy had like a 6% approval rating before this scandal broke. What do we think it is now? Is there such a thing as a negative approval rating where less than 0% think you're doing a great job?

Lastly: One of the corrupt scenarios he was working involved selling the Illinois senatorial seat to someone who would step aside later and allow him to take it over, thereby positioning himself for a presidential run in 2016. Shouldn't your approval rating be over 10% before you start planning to be elected to the highest office in the land? In an odd way, I admire that stubborn denial of reality. It comes from the same place as his statement today that he would never resign.

An actor sent me the following. He didn't ask that I withhold his name but I'm going to, anyway…

Hi. I had a similar discussion on Facebook and I disagree slightly with you. Leno's new show will eliminate 4 hours of jobs for actors, a big number. With the glut of reality shows and now this, where will we actors get jobs? Perhaps cable and/or the web. Or maybe Leno's show will be a variety show and we can work as comic actors in sketches. But now, it's disappointing as a job source.

Perhaps. But it's disappointing for an L.A. actor when the networks do more production in Toronto or New York. It's disappointing for all actors when they put on more hours of game shows, "reality" shows, awards show, news shows or football games. One football game can displace three hours of acting jobs. We don't yet know if giving five hours per week over to Leno means that NBC will buy fewer dramatic shows and sitcoms or if it means the Deal or No Deal models will all be on street corners with signs that say, "Will smile and open cases for food."

I don't mean to sound unsympathetic but it's the nature of show business that trends change and the amount of work expands and contracts and changes. Once upon a time, there were a lot of guys who wrote westerns and one day, when the pendulum swung over to variety shows and sitcoms, many of those writers saw their careers end. Years later, they would be joined by many of the folks who wrote variety. That's kind of how the game is played.

My understanding is that Leno's new show will not be a variety show in the Carol Burnett tradition. It'll be more like The Tonight Show with more comedy pieces. That may mean more jobs in sketches for actors, including some who aren't Gilbert Gottfried. It may also mean that thespians will have to look elsewhere.

There will always be jobs for actors…though never enough for even 5% of those who want to act. A lot of those opportunities will be in what we now call "new media," and the tragedy there is that AFTRA took a bad deal in that area, and SAG is going to have a hard time not taking the same terms. If I were an actor, I'd be a lot more disappointed in that than in Jay's new gig. At least once Leno starts at 10 PM, if you do star in a movie, you'll be able to go on in prime time to plug it.

The more I mull it over, the more sense NBC's new deal with Jay Leno makes to me. It's a gamble but not an illogical one. As the prime time audience shrinks, this kind of gamble is going to become more and more thinkable. It really marks a turning point for network television in that NBC is recognizing that the old dynamic of prime time is going away.

Despite reports that similar arrangements were once suggested for Johnny Carson and David Letterman, I don't think either of them actually got a real offer to move their shows into prime time, at least not five nights a week. (Jack Paar, after he left The Tonight Show, did a nearly-identical show for NBC in prime time for a while, but only once a week.) An earlier hour may have been dangled at Johnny or Dave because that was something the network had to dangle at that moment of negotiation, but NBC wasn't ready then to give up on the idea of competing head-to-head with CBS and ABC in the grand arena of prime time.

It is now. They're in fourth place, the economy is bad, money is tight. What NBC is doing, in essence, is deciding that they'll pour all their energy and funds and strongest prime time shows into the 8-10 PM slots…and then from 10 to 11, they'll just try to make whatever money they can. They can't possibly expect Leno to beat the strongest things their competition can schedule at 10 PM every night but he could beat the weaker ones and easily show a substantial profit for them finishing in second, third or even fourth place. A hit hour-long drama these days can cost $2-3 million an hour to produce. Even paying Leno the fortune he's going to clear from this, his shows will run them a lot less than that.

The costs can't be compared exactly since Jay is reportedly going to do 46-48 weeks of original programming per year and I'm wondering if part of the plan also includes rerunning those shows elsewhere, either late at night on NBC or the next day on MSNBC or CNBC. (I'm also guessing that NBC might experiment with putting other programming in, as opposed to reruns, during the weeks he takes off.) Back in the seventies, Johnny Carson had NBC stop rerunning an old Tonight Show each weekend, as they'd been doing, because he feared he was getting overexposed.

Someone's got to be pondering if that'll sink Leno and also if rerunning him at other hours will cause viewers to think, "Oh, we don't have to watch Jay tonight at 10. We can watch that show we like on CBS and catch (or tape) Jay's rerun tomorrow." I believe they pulled day-old Conan O'Brien reruns off CNBC a few years ago because they felt too many people were watching him then instead of when it mattered more to the network.

I said that this idea of putting Leno on earlier had occurred to a lot of people but it was so radical that no one said it aloud. A few friends of mine wrote to remind me that they had when we'd discussed it (so did I in those conversations) and David Carroll, who anchors local news down in Chattanooga, wrote to remind me that in this article in July of '07, he floated the notion.

Carroll was thinking Leno could either air at 10 PM or local stations could move their late news broadcasts there and then air Jay from 10:35 to 11:35. Will they have the option of doing the latter under the new configuration? If they do, NBC may try to head it off by having Jay do a "throw" at the end of each show, similar to the way Jon Stewart sometimes ends a Daily Show with a live hook-up to Stephen Colbert. Since Conan O'Brien will be doing his show from the same coast — from the Universal lot, about three miles away — it would be simple for Jay to end each show by saying, "Let's check in with Conan and see what he's got for you, following your local news."

They may do this even if local stations can't move Leno to just before O'Brien. I would imagine will see a lot of stunt-connections…some bit that will start on Jay's stage and conclude on Conan's, some guest who will do both shows the same night, etc. (Anyone remember the night Jay was doing his program from New York and at the end of it, he got up and a camera followed him as he walked downstairs and onto Conan's set to be a guest on that show?)

Obviously, a lot of this is new and unprecedented and there's a certain fun to all this speculation. Another question that occurs to me is that if all the shows underperform in this new configuration, does NBC have the option of just shifting them all back to their old time slots? Does Jay have anything in his contract about getting The Tonight Show (or just 11:35) back at some point under certain conditions? So many questions. Maybe I like the idea just because it shakes things up and it'll be fun to see what happens.