Nice to hear that Dick Clark will return to anchor the New York segment of Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve on New Year's Eve. The absence of public appearances had worried a lot of folks, causing them to presume that the reports of his "minor stroke" were fibs to hide a much more serious condition. I worked with and for Dick a few times and liked him a lot. He's a genuine broadcasting legend and it'll be good to see that whatever he's been through, it isn't as bad as some feared.

Most people probably think of Camelot as in the same category as My Fair Lady, Music Man, Oklahoma! and Guys and Dolls. That category is "Timeless Smash Hit Musicals." In truth, though Camelot now seems quite timeless, it was not a hit when it first opened in 1960. Unlike all the other shows in that category I just mentioned, reviews were mixed and audiences had a tendency to walk out well before the final curtain.

They didn't do that at My Fair Lady, the previous Broadway collaboration of director Moss Hart, writer-lyrist Alan Jay Lerner and composer Frederick Loewe. When Camelot was first advertised, audiences expected another show of the same caliber and stampeded to purchase tickets. (Lerner and Loewe had also just done the movie, Gigi, which won many Oscars including Best Picture, so that probably raised expectations further.)

But Camelot was just not as good, especially when it opened for out-of-town tryouts in Toronto. The show ran five long hours then and Lerner had a devil of a time trying to figure out how to cut it down and have it still make sense. The stress of trying to do that plus tumult from his latest semi-annual divorce, gave Lerner a bleeding ulcer and put him in the hospital.

All repair work on Camelot stopped when this happened. For weeks, the cast (headed by Richard Burton, Julie Andrews and Robert Goulet) continued to perform what all knew was a deeply-flawed script while they waited for the author to recover. Finally, the day came when Lerner was to get out the hospital and resume work. He was released a few hours early because they needed the bed for another patient…who turned out to be Moss Hart.

So now they had a writer but no director. While Hart recuperated from a major heart attack, Lerner began rewriting and also took over as director. Among his many problems was that Camelot, which was then the most expensive musical ever mounted, was a nightmare of huge sets and costumes. Lerner would later say that the show was overwhelmed by its pageantry; that it was hard to find and fix the story amidst it all. In an article he wrote several years after, he mentioned one smart thing he did just before the show opened on Broadway…

Fearing the intimacy had been lost, I called a full dress rehearsal without the "dress" part. I insisted that the actors wear their street clothes, even to the extent of ordering several who arrived on stage in costume to change back to civvies. I also ordered the crew to keep the set changes as simple as possible, creating more of a rehearsal hall ambience on the stage. The result was the most moving, personal performance of Camelot and the one I best remember. When we resumed work with the sets and wardrobe, much of that intimacy was lost and we all regretted that audiences could not experience the show as we had in that rehearsal.

Camelot, sets and all, opened on Broadway on December 3, 1960. If unknowns had been behind it, it might not have lasted a week. But the reps of Lerner, Loewe and Hart had sold enough advance tickets that it was destined to run at least six months, during which two "miracles" (as Lerner called them) occurred. One was that Hart, released from that Toronto hospital, came to see it and helped Lerner to do a significant rewrite. Shows rarely change much after they open but in this case, Camelot was said to be substantially improved. This is the version performed ever since.

Then came the second miracle: Ed Sullivan, who then had the most popular show on TV, devoted an entire program to the works of Lerner and Loewe. (This miracle may have been aided by the fact that the show was on CBS, and CBS had financed Camelot.) At the time, current Broadway shows rarely "gave away" their best moments on television, on the theory that audiences wouldn't pay after experiencing them for free. Camelot had nothing to lose so they did all the best songs on the Sullivan show and the next morning, the box office finally had a line of ticket buyers befitting a smash hit.

Soon after, there was a third miracle, albeit one born of tragedy. Everyone felt that the first act of Camelot was stronger than the second but after the assassination of President Kennedy, that changed. The connect of Kennedy and Camelot was dodgy but it was strong enough to alter the play's impact for many. As Lerner wrote, "Ever since that day in Dallas, the ending has taken on new meaning. God knows I would have preferred that History had not become my collaborator."

All of this is the lead-up to a brief review of what I saw Sunday evening: A one-performance, "concert-style" production of Camelot at the Hollywood Bowl. Jeremy Irons played King Arthur, Melissa Errico was Guenevere, Paxton Whitehead portrayed Sir Pellinore, James Barbour performed the role of Lancelot, Orson Bean did Merlyn, Malcolm Gets was Mordred and they had a fine supporting cast helping fill the stage.

The result was a wonderful performance…easily the best of the several Camelots I've seen. That would include the major revival with Richard Harris who, though he'd then been doing the play for months, forgot more of his lines than did Mr. Irons, who learned his for the one night.

Irons was fantastic — a little rough on the tunes, but so fine in the non-singing parts that you could forgive the missed notes. The whole cast was excellent and I got the feeling that this modest staging — with simple yet elegant costuming and no sets — may have approximated that "street clothes" performance that Lerner so loved. It surely had the same result. The play was truly about the relationship of Arthur, Guenevere and Lancelot, rather than about the scenery. I don't recall being moved much by previous viewings of Camelot but last night, there were several moments — the ending, especially — that got to me, and made that canyon-like Hollywood Bowl arena feel small and intimate.

Gordon Hunt directed…and I'm sorry his efforts all went for just one performance because it was a wonderful one. Late in life, Alan Jay Lerner occasionally toyed with the idea of reviving Camelot in a "simpler" version so that audiences could see and feel what the play he wrote was really about. He never got around to that, so I'm glad Gordon did it for him. And for us.

This article in the Los Angeles Times [registration might be required] says that the network late night shows (Leno, Letterman, Nightline) are losing audience share to cable, and that they look highly vulnerable to further onslaught. This is probably so. I think both Jay and Dave have gotten too repetitive and predictable, and that audiences are starting to drift away. Whether the new shows coming into that market will be able to pick up those viewers remains to be seen. But if I were CBS, NBC or ABC, I'd be doing something about it.

Boy, here's a site that will cost you a lot of time. It's called New York Changing and one section of it is devoted to "then and now" photos taken around Manhattan and in nearby boroughs. See how some building looked in the thirties and how it looks today, side by side.

Frank Rich says the War in Iraq is over…George W. Bush just doesn't know it yet. I don't think I agree with this article but it may be more premature than wrong.

Tom Wolper informs me that the "Rue Brittania" storyline won't be on the third volume of Rocky & Bullwinkle DVDs since it's already on the second. So ignore what I said about that. In fact, while you're at it, ignore what I say about everything.

Vince Waldron informs me that the Aero Theater out in Santa Monica is running a Billy Wilder series and will be screening Ace in the Hole on August 25. It's all part of the American Cinematheque project, which screens classic films there and at the Egyptian in Hollywood, and which I keep forgetting to keep an eye on. Last July 25, they ran 1776, followed by a panel discussion with William Daniels, Ken Howard and the film's director, Peter Hunt. I would have liked to be there for it but I only found out about it just now when I set up the link to their calendar. In a few weeks, both theaters are presenting Terry Gilliam's movie, Brazil, and they're running the European cut, which is ten minutes longer than the version released in this country.

I had a brief happy moment (about ten seconds) yesterday afternoon when I was looking at a list of upcoming DVD releases and saw Ace in the Hole. Turned out it was not the Ace in the Hole made in 1951 by Billy Wilder. It was a new documentary of the same name about Saddam Hussein.

Someone ought to put out the Wilder film, which starred Kirk Douglas and Jan Sterling, and was also released under the title, The Big Carnival. It was a cynical endeavor…one of those movies where you honestly can't find anyone to root for. Douglas plays a reporter who has sunk from the Big Time to working a dead-end beat at a rinky-dink New Mexico newspaper. When he stumbles across a mine disaster, he sees his chance to promote the accident into a story of national interest, and does so. In a time when every missing Caucasian woman is cause of 24/7 cable news coverage, the movie's message is more timely than ever before.

I have a tape from the one time I've seen it run on cable, but I'd really like a DVD. Surely someone who reads this website has the power to make that happen.

Most animation art is unsigned, and that includes animation-related artwork generated within a studio. I get a lot of e-mails asking me if I can identify the specific artist who drew a given drawing. Sometimes, I can. Sometimes, I can't.

The above drawing of Secret Squirrel and Morocco Mole was apparently done in the sixties for some kind of educational book or toy. It's up for sale on a site that sells animation art, and it was e-mailed to me by someone who wrote, "I've studied this drawing for an hour and I can't figure out which of the Hanna-Barbera artists drew it. Can you?"

Gee, I dunno. Something about it suggests that it might have been drawn by Willie Ito.

Over the next few days, I'm going to preview some upcoming DVD releases. I'm kind of amazed that they're releasing A Guide for the Married Man since ever since I first got a satellite dish, there have been few moments when it wasn't playing on some station. For a time there, I thought DirecTV had added the All-A Guide for the Married Man-Channel to my lineup, somewhere between the channel that's all M*A*S*H reruns and the one that seems to alternate between showing Hello, Dolly and the equally-entertaining Ron Popeil infomercial for the steak knives. Guide is an odd film. Everyone in it's great, especially Walter Matthau and Robert Morse. There are cameos (briefer than the advertising would have you believe) from Jack Benny, Phil Silvers, Carl Reiner, Sid Caesar and others in that category of performer that is becoming sadly extinct. There are great looking women. There's a bouncy theme song by The Turtles. The film even has a scene where Joey Bishop is very funny, and how often does that happen?

So what's wrong with it? Well, it's one of those sixties' comedies built on the premise that cheating on one's mate is a fun, acceptable and even (in this case) noble thing for one to do. Even if you buy that philosophy, that aspect of the film seems so shallow and sitcom-silly that it's hard to enjoy. If you can get past that, you might. (Two other interesting things about the film: It was directed by Gene Kelly, and you can hear his voice pop up occasionally on a TV set or otherwise off-camera. And he originally wanted to have Matthau and Morse play each other's parts. Matthau kept declining the project until one day when he was telling Billy Wilder about this film he'd been turning down, and Wilder said, "Hey, that would work if you guys switched parts." Matthau decided he was right and said he'd do the picture if they swapped, and the studio agreed.)

Those who live in Los Angeles may get an extra jolly in that the movie was shot all over 1967 Los Angeles, but especially around Century City. Art Carney plays a construction worker…and the structure his crew is putting up soon became that big office building on the southwest corner of Avenue of the Stars and Santa Monica Boulevards. The scenes in the supermarket were filmed in what is now the Gelson's in what is now the Westfield Century City Mall, and there are scenes around the mall itself as it then looked. There are even moments in a tiny amusement park called Ponyland which was then located at the corner of Beverly Boulevard and La Cienega. It was a little rat-trap with cotton candy that seemed to exist only for divorced fathers to have a place to take their kids on the weekend when they had custody. Around 1980, it and some surrounding oil wells were torn down, and the Beverly Center was built on that land. Anyway, if you buy this film and you're bored by what the actors are saying and doing, keep an eye on the backgrounds.

I'm pleased to see someone is bringing out Penn and Teller's Magic and Mystery Tour, which was a series of three specials they did for some cable channel a few years ago. The idea was a sort of culture-exchange program among magicians. Penn and Teller did some of their tricks and watched the local magicians demonstrate theirs. I don't think these shows got a lot of attention but I enjoyed them tremendously.

Also, we will soon see what's being billed as Rocky & Bullwinkle & Friends: The Complete Third Season. It isn't, exactly, but it is the third volume of what was arguably (but don't argue with me) the funniest cartoon show ever produced for television. We're not sure yet exactly what's in this volume but it will probably include the famous Kurward Derby sequence — the one over which TV personality Durward Kirby threatened to sue over the pun on his name and Bullwinkle producer Jay Ward responded by offering to pay Kirby's legal fees if he would. We may also see the "Rue Britannia" storyline where a tattoo on Bullwinkle's foot identifies him as the heir to an estate in England. But it really doesn't matter which episodes are on this set. They're all good.

These are all coming out in the next few months. If you click on the names above, you can advance order via Amazon. While you're there, buy a lot of other stuff. We get a small cut of anything you purchase from Amazon if you arrive there through one of our links. But we recommend all of the above (with slight qualifications in the case of the first) even if you don't get them via some method that throws money our way.

Any day now, there will be an announcement that a company (Time-Life, I believe) will begin releasing all the episodes of Get Smart on DVD sets. Almost every long-running TV series, and even some short-term ones, will be out on DVD in the next few years, with the exception of a few where there are contractual problems. And even most of those will be solved before long.

The old Adam West Batman series is currently the subject of some sort of argument I won't pretend I understand, though it may be a simple rights squabble between Twentieth-Century Fox (which produced the show) and Warner (which now owns the characters). Get Smart has taken this long because, I'm told, the various parties who were interested were having trouble sorting out the chain of title. The shows were sold to one company, which was acquired by another, which sold portions of its library to someone else…or something of the sort. For a long time, no one was all too sure who owned them. Certain other old TV shows aren't yet out on DVD because they employ a lot of music, and music clearances for DVDs can sometimes be costly and time-consuming.

When some company approaches the issue of releasing a TV show on DVD, there are many considerations. One, of course, is getting the rights and in some cases, as it was for a time with Get Smart, that ain't easy. There are also shows where the rights can be acquired but there are complications, like a star who doesn't want the old shows released, or wants them edited a certain way. Another problem in some instances is finding good source material when negatives are missing or damaged. If you're syndicating an old show and a few episodes are absent, that may go unnoticed. It won't if someone wants to put out a DVD set that will be advertised as The Complete Whatever…

Lastly, with some shows, it seems appropriate and commercial to include special features like commentary tracks, outtakes and a little "Making of…" featurette. This isn't always easy since old footage may be lost and folks involved in the show's production are often deceased or otherwise unavailable. Everyone I know who produces "bonus material" is frustrated that they weren't able to conduct certain interviews years ago, or that the studio in question won't let them bank interview material now for DVDs that may be released a few years down the line. When my pal Howard Morris died in May, we were all saddened. A couple of different DVD companies were especially upset with themselves that they never got around to interviewing him while they could. (Howie directed the pilot to Get Smart. I don't know if that series will have interviews but if it does, it's a shame they didn't get one with him.)

One thing which amuses me — and I may have mentioned some of this before — is that I can recall when movie and TV studios used to prosecute collectors who had old footage from their shows and movies. A friend of mine in the seventies had the only copy in existence of some outtakes from things that had been filmed at a facility where he worked. He was justifiably paranoid about the FBI swooping down to arrest him or of some lawyer slapping a subpoena in his hand because he had this film. In the era of home video, many of those once classed as pirates have turned out to be valuable resources when the studios are looking to restore old films or find lost material for supplemental features. I don't know what to think of the ethics but I'm amused that they're now grateful that some people saved old film and tape, even though doing that was once considered theft.

The weblog, Comics Should Be Good, is running an occasional series examining rumors from the history of comic books, declaring some true and others as urban legends. It's good stuff and I hope they (or someone) will set up a Snopes-style webpage that specializes in such debunking. I hereby volunteer to participate as much as I can.

In this item, they're puzzling a bit over the story that for a long time, Marvel Comics were distributed by Independent News, which was an arm of DC Comics and which restricted how many comics Marvel (even before it was called Marvel) could publish. This is true, and it even went past limiting the number of titles. Independent also steered them away from subject matters that competed head-on with DC books — or at least, they tried to. Marvel/Atlas publisher Martin Goodman was a pretty feisty guy who spent most of the years of this arrangement pressuring Independent to accept more books from him and to let him publish certain kinds of comics that he thought commercial. He also had hundreds of pages of comic book material he'd paid for but never published, and he wanted to publish westerns and "weird story" comics, for instance, so he could use up some of that inventory.

He was occasionally successful in convincing Independent, which is why, though the initial agreement in 1957 limited him to eight releases per month, he soon began to exceed that limit. In 1961, when he was permitted to publish Fantastic Four #1, he was over the eight-per-month restriction. They also yielded and let him publish some comics in genres that competed more or less with the DC product. When Marvel began to eclipse them in sales, some there regretted that concession.

One small thing that the weblog gets wrong is when they write, "…finally, in 1968, Marvel was a big enough sales success (and DC was in a major sales slump) that they were able to negotiate their way out of the deal entirely, allowing themselves to sign with Curtis Distribution. You may have noticed that 1968 saw the end of Tales of Suspense and Tales of Astonish. That was because finally, Marvel was free to make title decisions fully on their own!" That's almost right except that Marvel's 1968 expansion actually occurred while they were still with Independent.

What happened was that in late '67, Goodman finally won a major point in his ongoing battle with Independent. He wanted to publish more comics than they'd allow him to put out, and he wanted to do things like ghost comics and love comics, which they were then denying him. Finally, he said to them, in effect, "Look…my contract with you is expiring in March of 1969. At that point, you're either going to let me publish what I want or I'm going to find a distributor who will. You and I are both trying to sell our companies so we have a mutual interest in inflating our grosses. Let me expand now and it will give both companies a big boost." Jack Liebowitz, who ran DC and Independent, had previously been worried about allowing Goodman to flood the newsstands with product, fearing it would harm the market and harm DC. But he was then angling to sell DC and Independent to a company called Kinney National Services, and he saw the wisdom of even a temporary jolt to the distributor's fortunes. He also knew that Goodman wasn't bluffing; that he could find a distributor who would let him publish without restriction. Liebowitz wanted to keep Marvel under the Independent umbrella if that was at all possible, so they negotiated a new arrangement. It didn't lift all restrictions right away but it did allow him considerable expansion room, which he used to begin adding more titles.

The decision probably helped both companies. Grosses were up when Liebowitz concluded the deal to sell to Kinney. Goodman soon sold Marvel to an outfit called Perfect Film and Chemical Corporation. The only snag for DC was that since Perfect Film owned a magazine distributor, Marvel moved there when their old distribution contract expired.

Apart from that, the story as reported is true. Marvel was distributed for many years by DC. One of the reasons some comic book writers and artists felt so imprisoned in their jobs, and accepted that they had to tolerate some onerous terms of employment, was that the "competitors" weren't truly competing. DC and Marvel had a number of co-operative business dealings (the Comics Code was another) and there was often a feeling, true or not, that publishers were conspiring to limit pay scales and would sometimes agree not to hire certain individuals away from another company. As Jack Kirby once said, "Any time two publishers have lunch, somewhere a freelancer goes hungry."

As explained in this posting here, a wonderful little show is performed every Wednesday evening up in Hollywood — a fun and faithful resurrection of the great game show, What's My Line? Your host is J. Keith van Straaten (who produces with director Jim Newman). There's a lovely hostess/model, Claudia Dolph, and a terrific live musician, Adam Chester…and everyone really does a superior job of bringing the old program back to life for an hour or so.

I mention it again because I went again: My pal Nat Gertler and I were in the front row, rooting for our friend Len Wein, who shared panelist duties with comediennes Cathy Ladman and Jane Brucker, and comic actor J.P. Manoux. The four of them managed to guess the first two contestants — a lady who makes dog biscuits and another lady who gives flying lessons — but failed to guess a gentleman who juggles while drawing portraits. (They did get the juggling part, and then the gentleman gave a demonstration of his simultaneous skills.)

The Mystery Guest was David Faustino from Married With Children. After a few go-rounds, Mr. Manoux nailed him with the question, "Are you either David Faustino or someone else?"

If you're in or around Los Angeles on a Wednesday evening, you'll have a very good time at this show. Details here.

I don't think I've ever linked to Glenn Hauman's weblog before. And don't think I'm doing so now just because he wrote something nice about me. Even though I am.

Well, not everyone loved Keith Olbermann's little on-air account of his cancer scare. He's being criticized on some of the journalism websites, mostly for the supposed arrogance of talking about his own medical problems on a broadcast that, some feel, should have been all about Peter Jennings. Of perhaps more importance is that, according to accounts like this one, the segment was hated by MSNBC president Rick Kaplan, who felt it was a bad lead-in to the following show, which was the debut of Rita Cosby's new series. I don't know Mr. Kaplan, of course, but it seems to me that Olbermann is about the only thing that network has going for it.

In the meantime, several of you have sent me what you think are direct links to the Olbermann video on the MSNBC website. I thank you for your efforts but none of them worked. For the life of me, I don't understand why a website makes it difficult for someone like me to send someone like you to a specific item.

It makes only a wee bit more sense that the videos on the MSNBC website are, I'm informed by Mike Catron, impregnable to Mac users. Yeah, it's a Microsoft-affiliated site, so PC/Windows would seem to be the format of choice. But they're offering a service on that site and last I heard, there were more than a few people on the planet with that other, aberrant format.

If you're one and you want to see the video, I'll e-mail it to you. It's an ASF file so you'll have to have Windows Media Player for the Mac, which I understand you can download here, and which you might want anyway. The file is a little over 12MB in size and if you'd like me to send it your way, . [NOTE: If that link doesn't work for you, address an e-mail to newsfromme*gmail.com, but replace the asterisk in that address with one of them "at" signs.]

The Keith Olbermann video that I wrote about — six or so minutes of him telling you why it's stupid to smoke — is now online at the MSNBC website. Unfortunately, if there's a way to link directly to the clip, I haven't been able to figure it out so here's what you'll have to do to see it. Go to this page and look for a video clip called "Lung cancer & you." At the moment, it's in a box headed "free video." Well worth a bit of hunting about.