Writers and directors will be interested in this. There's a lawsuit about an off-off-Broadway production that raises the question of what a director contributes to a play and to what extent that contribution is a copyrightable creation. This article in the New York Times will tell you about the dispute.

A lot of classy, intelligent people read this weblog so I thought I'd tap into your wisdom. Here's a situation I encounter almost every time I'm checking out of a hotel…

I call downstairs for assistance with my luggage. A person we'll call Bellhop #1 comes up with a cart and gets my suitcases. I tell him or her (it's usually a him) that I want to check them for later retrieval. He says fine and we go downstairs. He deposits my bags in a room near the Bell Desk and then either he or someone we'll call Bellhop #2 gives me some little tickets with which I will claim them later.

Hours later, I go back to the Bell Desk and give my tickets to Bellhop #3, who retrieves my bags. He hands off to Bellhop #4 who winds up helping me into a cab or car and loading the suitcases into the trunk.

Okay, here's the question: How many of these guys do I tip? My habit has just been to give a hefty one to the last guy and assume it'll be shared with all the others, even if the first couple were on a different shift. Is that the right thing to do?

Aardwolf Publishing is bringing out METHo.d. — thirteen dark tales by author Clifford Meth with art by Steve Lieber, Al Milgrom, Jordan Raskin, Michael Netzer, Wm. Messner-Loebs, and the Cockrums, along with an introduction by Peter David. The cover and book design are by Jim Steranko, his first notable project in years. Go here for more details.

Last week after I attended a public memorial for actor Hamilton Camp, I wrote something here that drew a great deal of e-mail response. Most of the event was wonderful, with people who knew Hamilton well telling tales that reminded us all what a special, gifted man he was. But there were a couple of folks who somehow seemed to think, "Ah! A microphone and a chance to talk at length about my career!" This has unfortunately been true at most of the funerals and memorial services I've attended the last few years, and not just those where a "show biz" crowd was gathered. Some people just don't seem to understand that you pay tribute to someone by talking about them, not about yourself, and that very few speeches are worth much more than about five minutes.

The two best eulogies I've ever heard were delivered by Alan Alda (at the funeral for writer Don Segall) and by Carl Reiner (at the services for Howard Morris). I think Alda spoke for around seven minutes and Reiner for about six, and those ought to be the benchmarks. Don't go over five unless you're as clever and talented as Alan Alda and Carl Reiner. And don't go over eight at all.

My posting last week brought notes of agreement from more than a dozen folks who were at the Camp memorial, and as many more who weren't there but have cringed at other such events when someone got up and made everyone sit through a half-hour infomercial for themselves. As one noted, and as I should have, "Part of the problem is this idea that at a public memorial, anyone who wants to should be able to get up and speak for as long as they want. Setting it up that way is practically inviting people who have very little to say about the deceased to get up at the podium and ramble on and on and on about whatever they feel like talking about."

This afternoon, I spoke at a different kind of memorial event. Every January, A.S.I.F.A. (the International Animated Film Society) joins with The Animation Guild and Women in Animation to stage "An Afternoon of Remembrance." It's kind of a mass service for everyone in the cartoon business who passed away the previous year. They had a lot of them this time: Don Adams, Rueben Apodaca, Henry Corden, Howard Morris, Ed Friedman, Vance Gerry, Joe Grant, Wendy Jackson Hall, Gene Hazelton, Selby Kelly, Derek Lamb, Norm Prescott, Joe Ranft, Thurl Ravenscroft, Hal Seeger, Paul Winchell and 38 others. Some friend or associate spoke about each, with speeches ranging from less than a minute to a strictly-enforced maximum of three. A gent in view of the rostrum held up a sign to indicate "one minute left" and another to tell people to wrap it up.

It worked very well. At least while I was there, no one used the whole three minutes but no one was rushed and no one really had the time or inclination to speak of anything but the deceased. I talked about Don Adams and Howie Morris…and I could have gone on about either of those guys — Howie, especially — for twenty minutes if I'd just wanted the joy of commanding an audience and if I hadn't cared about forcing people to sit there for too long. It was no hardship at all to keep it brief. If you ever find yourself about to get up at a memorial service to speak about a departed friend, show his friends and family the courtesy of keeping it brief. And it helps if you talk about the dead person.

I agree with this editorial in The New York Times about the Bush program of spying on whoever they feel like spying on, and ignoring laws that say they can only do so with judicial oversight.

I doubt he has the necessary web access to read this but I wanted to send out good thoughts in the direction of veteran character actor Charles Lane. He is seen above in his recurring role of Homer Bedloe, the mean old man who wanted to scrap the Hooterville Cannonball on the TV series Petticoat Junction.  It was just one more of his eight million screen roles, most of which cast him as a similarly-mean old man.

Mr. Lane is 101 years old today. It's a Wonderful Life, indeed.

As I've mentioned here before, there's a wonderful show every Wednesday night at a theater in Hollywood — a live re-creation of the classic game show, What's My Line? You can find out all about it here after you read this message I just received from Tom Michael…

Tonight I attended What's My Line? at the Acme Comedy Theater. I want to thank you for mentioning this event on your web site, and especially for plugging the current run. As I live in Montgomery, Alabama, this would otherwise have been totally off the radar to me. It's a delightful show in an intimate setting.

The panel went 0-4, missing the professions of a nice woman who sold cemetery plots, and a gentleman who balanced a ladder on his face for a living. Julie Newmar was the Mystery Guest, in honor of her appearance on the original show 45 years ago this week. (My God, she is tall! Even in flat shoes, she towered over everyone.)

Thank you for your wonderful website, and thank you again for plugging this show. If I get back in town during the current run, I will be trying to catch it again.

It's a great show and since it's different every week, you can go back again and again. I went last week when the Mystery Guest was Alan Rachins from L.A. Law. I wanted to get there last night because the producer, Jim Newman, tipped me off about the salute to our favorite holiday…a fact I couldn't mention here since at least one of the panelists reads this blog.

Ms. Newmar is quite tall — a little under six feet, I believe. If you're in the L.A. area this Friday or Saturday and would like to meet her and buy an autographed pic, she'll be among the many celebrity guests at the Hollywood Collectors Show out in Burbank. In fact, much of the cast of the Batman TV show — Adam West, Burt Ward, Yvonne Craig, Lee Meriwether and Julie — will be there. So will Richard Chamberlain, Jayne Meadows, Tab Hunter and many more.

Here's a photo from a party I attended the day after Christmas of 2004. Let me identify the folks in it. The man at the far left is master satirist Stan Freberg. To the right of Stan is actor Robert Forster. The guy in the center at the top is Chuck McCann and to the right of Chuck is me. The woman at the far right is Alice Maltin (spouse of Leonard Maltin) and to the left of her is Betty McCann, wife of Chuck.

The gentleman in the center of the picture — the one wearing the magenta turtleneck — is Fayard Nicholas who, sad to say, just became the late Fayard Nicholas. He died Tuesday at the age of 91. Here's a link to the U.S.A. Today obit.

Fayard was, of course, one of the Nicholas Brothers. And the Nicholas Brothers were, of course, the greatest tap dancing act of all time. Has someone ever compiled a DVD of all the times those gentlemen danced on film? Someone should. They were electrifying and many a movie came to a standing stop after their performance because nothing could follow it.

You never saw the Nicholas Brothers dance? Well then, you haven't seen tap dancing.

It was a thrill to meet him at that party. We talked for maybe a half hour with person after person coming by to tell him how much they loved his work, not just as a dancer but also as a choreographer. He seemed genuinely humbled by the attention, though I can't imagine he hadn't been hearing praise like that for…oh, maybe sixty or seventy years.

There was one moment I have to tell you about. Also in attendance at the party was a fine, fine musican named Ian Whitcomb, who specializes in ragtime and "tin pan alley" music. Someone else had brought a ukulele and at one point, Ian picked it up and strummed and sang a few tunes with everyone joining in where appropriate. We all sang a couple of Sherman Brothers songs in honor of composer Richard Sherman, who was present. And then Ian began playing…gee, I'm not sure of the number now. I'm thinking it was "Ain't She Sweet?" but maybe it was "Sweet Georgia Brown." What I do recall — what I'll never forget — was that Fayard Nicholas started dancing to it.

Of course, he was a much younger man at the time. He was 90.

His feet barely moved and most of the tapping was with his cane. But the man was dancing, no doubt about it. His whole body was vibrating in perfect time with the tune and you could sense the connect of man and music. He had a big smile on his face, much like he sports in the photo above, and that was half the magic right there. That smile. It was a performer's smile. It was the smile of a man who was proud that he could do whatever he could do at that age to delight the people around him. The applause when he finished was thunderous.

I love people who can do something, whatever it is, about as well as it can possibly be done. In his youth, Fayard Nicholas danced about as well as anyone ever has or maybe ever will. And even in his ninetieth year, he could still remind you of just how damn good he was.

The WB Network and UPN are merging. The goal is to create one network full of shows I won't watch instead of two.

Here's a link to a frightening exchange today between a reporter and General Michael Hayden, who is the principal deputy director of National Intelligence with the Office of National Intelligence. Basically, the general — with regard to the Bush administration's warrantless wiretaps — has either decided to ignore the part of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution about "probable cause" or feels that it doesn't apply to what George W. Bush wants to do.

One of the twenty-or-so political blogs I visit on a regular basis is Joshua Micah Marshall's Talking Points Memo. Very smart guy, that Joshua Micah. And today, he has up this post that I think is right on target. I'm going to quote two paragraphs…

So much of the imbalance and shallowness of press coverage today stems from a simple fact: reporters know they'll catch hell from the right if they say or write anything that can even remotely be construed as representing 'liberal bias'. (Often even that's not required.) Indeed, when you actually watch — from the inside — how mainstream newsrooms work, it is really not too much to say that they operate on two guiding principles: reporting the facts and avoiding impressions of 'liberal bias'.

On the left or center-left, until very recently, there's simply never been an organized chorus of people ready to take the Howells of the press biz to task and mau-mau them when they get a key fact wrong. Without that, the world of political news was like an NBA game where one side played the refs hard and had roaring seats of fans while the other never made a peep. With that sort of structural imbalance, shoddy scorekeeping and cowed, and eventually compliant, refs are inevitable.

Like many of our problems today, we may have Richard Nixon to thank for this. He and his aides responded to every negative news story, not by dealing with the substance of the item, but by attacking the motives and integrity of those reporting it. I believe history has shown that most of those reports were accurate — remember Spiro Agnew denouncing reports of his legal problems as "a hoax by The Washington Post?" — and that when they weren't, it was more likely a matter of reporter error, as opposed to deliberate fabrication.

These days, I think reporters know that if they write a story with any kind of significant political impact, the injured side is going to attack them for bias…and they may even get attacked by the non-injured side for not making the story stronger. So what they do is to decide which side they're more afraid of offending and lately, that's been the right-wing. Which is why much more fuss was made about Clinton maybe breaking the law by fudging his answers in a deposition about sex than we now see about Bush maybe breaking the law by authorizing spying that violates the Fourth Amendment. (Also, of course, sex stories are more fun.)

I wonder how many people these days have a source of news they respect even when it tells them what they don't want to hear. I have a friend who follows baseball but never believes his team loses fair and square. They can lose 10-0 but he'll always find some way to claim the idiot umpires made a bad call or that the winning pitcher was hurling spitters or something. There seem to be a lot of such people around so it's fortunate the umps don't seem to modify how they call a game based on who's calling them names. Wish the news business worked like that.

Molly Ivins explains why she cannot support Hillary Clinton for president. I believe Senator Clinton is a lady who has been badly wronged by lies and false accusations, and I believe the Hillary who is hated by many in the right wing is their own fantasy creation, not the real person. However, I also am not enthused about seeing her run for the White House, for most of the same reasons cited by Ms. Ivins.

Yesterday afternoon, my friend Earl Kress and I attended another luncheon staged by the Pacific Pioneer Broadcasters to honor a veteran of the industry. This time, the honoree was Bill Dana, who is probably best known to everyone for his role as Jose Jiminez, the famous Hispanic played by a man of Jewish and Hungarian ancestry. Most of the talk, however, was about Bill's extensive career as a writer and producer of comedy, much of it non-Jose. On the dais were Jayne Meadows, Gary Owens, Betty White, Tom Poston, Howard Storm, Jack Riley, Hal Kanter and Shelley Berman. Shelley Berman is still one of the funniest, crankiest human beings to ever appear before a microphone.

The luncheon was emceed by the great announcer John Harlan, and began with a video montage of Dana's TV appearances. There were several clips of Jose that prompted an observation by Earl and me and, I suspect, others in the room. It's that Andy Kaufman's "foreign man" character (aka Latka Gravas) was an awful lot like Jose Jiminez with an unreal accent. There was also a very funny clip from the 1963-1965 sitcom, The Bill Dana Show, which co-starred the late Don Adams. Dana wrote most of Don's early comedy material, including many of the catch phrases and stock jokes that later became a part of Get Smart.

Funniest moment of the afternoon: Bill's colleague from many a Steve Allen Show, Tom Poston, was introduced. He got up and said, "They asked me to be here today to say something nice about Bill Dana." And that was it for Mr. Poston's speech. He sat down and never said another thing for the remainder of the event. Later, when Dana was thanking everyone, he finished the joke. He went down the dais talking about each guest but made a point of skipping Poston.

Most touching moment of the afternoon: Jayne Meadows talking about how much her late hubby loved Bill and how crucial Dana's contribution was to Steve's work. She mentioned that Bill had written the best joke ever for Steve's Question Man character. (The Question Man later morphed, without permission, into Johnny Carson's Carnac the Magnificent.) But Jayne was afraid she'd botch up the telling so she left it to Bill to quote the line. The answer was "chicken teriyaki." The question was "Name the world's oldest kamikaze pilot."

Bill Dana has not been in the spotlight much lately. One speaker said that they'd made a movie about the last twenty years of his life: Without a Trace. So it was nice to have this luncheon and remember what a funny, creative man he was and still is. Also, they served poached salmon and it was pretty good.

Norm McCabe has passed away at the age of 94. McCabe was born in Great Britain but raised in America. In the mid-thirties, he became one of the most respected animators at the Warner Brothers cartoon studio. In 1941, when director Tex Avery left the studio and moved to M.G.M., that left an opening for a new director and McCabe — who had previously co-directed some cartoons with Bob Clampett — got the job.

The cartoons McCabe directed are all professional but not as funny as those made by his peers. Many of them were "wartime" films such as The Ducktator and Tokio Jokio that dated quickly and so were not re-released or (later) given much TV airplay. In any case, McCabe's time as a director was limited. In 1943, he went into the military and when he returned to civilian life, he moved into commercial work and the production of educational films. In the sixties, he drifted back to his old line of work to animate for Filmation, DePatie-Freleng, WB and other studios. He was one of the animators on the 1972 movie, Fritz the Cat.

In 2000, ASIFA presented him with the Winsor McCay Award. He also received the Golden Award from the Motion Picture Screen Cartoonists in recognition of fifty years in the animation field.

Obviously, it is not a huge shock that a 94 year old man should leave us. But Norm McCabe was the last living director from the "golden age" of Warner Brothers animation and one of the few animators from that period who was still around. So along with condolences to his friends and families, we also have condolences to ourselves. We've just about the lost The Greatest Generation of cartoon creators.