It's still April Fool's Day, at least where I am. So I can still post that today is the 5th anniversary of the Oddball Comics page written and curated by my longtime buddy, Scott Shaw! Every week, Scott plucks from his bizarre collection, some comic book that makes you go, "What the hell were they thinking?" It's always worth a click, a chuckle and a glassy-eyed stare.

Went up to the Magic Castle (of which I am a member) for lunch with a fabulous actress friend named Judy Strangis. Most folks remember Judy for her role on a great, oughta-be-rerun sitcom called Room 222, and also for playing Dynagirl on Sid and Marty Krofft's ElectraWoman and DynaGirl series. There was also a time when the F.C.C. seemed to have a rule that she had to be in every fourth or fifth commercial aired, and she's still adorable. [ATTENTION, JUDY: To read that earlier item I posted about you, click here. Actually, anyone who wants to read that story can click there. You don't have to be Judy Strangis to click there.]

Then I went to what I once called here The Best Car Wash in the Universe, and you'll have to click that link to see why. Alas, I must now rescind that designation because today, they refused to fill my tank.

Premium unleaded petrol, the kind I put in my auto, is $2.71 — a number I feel I should emphasize to a certain longtime (but Republican) friend of mine who seriously thought Jimmy Carter should be impeached over rising gas prices. With a fill-up and wash, which is what I was getting, it's $2.61. My tank was darn close to empty when I rolled in, so a fill-up should have been close to 18 gallons. The pump's nozzle clicked off around eight and I told the attendant, "It can take more." The sensors on the nozzle clicked off again and he said, "That's it," and turned off the pump, wrote up my ticket and gave the signal to move my car on to the place where they vacuum it out and pry all the little parking lot stubs out from the ledge under the windshield wipers.

"It's not full," I said. It wasn't just that I wanted to save a buck or so by filling it to the brim at the gas+wash price. I wanted a full tank so I wouldn't have to stop for gas again in a few days. But the attendant informed me that station policy was that the second time the sensor clicks off, the tank is considered full, end of discussion. We argued over this and the Manager came over to explain the policy to me in terms you'd use with a very stupid person who'd just overdosed on Valium. I made salient, irrefutable points but by this time, my car was on the conveyor belt being slathered with suds so it all seemed pointless. I went on in to browse the greeting cards, check out the display of cellphone accessories, buy a Pepsi and pay for my wash and half a tank of gas.

Ten minutes later, my car was done. When I got in and fired 'er up, the needle went to about half-empty…or half-full for you optimists out there. The Manager was walking by so I called him over and pointed it out. I suggested that maybe there was something wrong with the sensors on their pump nozzles and he said, "Yeah, you may be right. I'll have the guy come out and check 'em." I asked if, in the meantime, I could drive over to the pump and they could put in another eight-or-so gallons. He said, "Sure, but I'll have to charge you the $2.71 price. You only get one fill-up at the discount price with each wash." It was another of their policies, he said.

I said, "That doesn't make any sense. I only want one fill-up. We're only having this discussion because I didn't get a fill-up. 'Fill-up' means you can't put any more in, so you can't get more than one flll-up per visit, no matter how hard you try."

He gave me a snarl and said, "You'd be surprised what some people try," and walked off. Guess which car wash I'm not going back to for a while. And by the way, the Manager's name was Phillip.

He'll probably be performing it tonight on his HBO show, Real Time, but Bill Maher has a funny "New Rules" piece up on Salon about the failure of sexual abstinence campaigns. Here's the link, and I have no idea what non-subscribers now have to do to read a Salon article. But it's probably worth it, whatever it is.

Jonathan Chait has an op-ed piece this morning in The Los Angeles Times [they may make you register] that uses the Schiavo case to illustrate a larger political point. It's essentially the same point that Thomas Frank seems to be making in What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, a book that I started reading and must go back and finish. The thesis is that there's a voting bloc in America that cares primarily about what they see as issues of morality — banning abortions, rolling back gay rights, etc. — and that it keeps getting fooled. They think, when they vote for someone like George W. Bush, that they're voting for those things. What they get are token gestures in these directions and a lot of genuine action to lower taxes for the wealthy and to aid corporate interests, which may not be what they want.

Anyway, in case you don't want to read the whole Chait piece or register over at the Times, I'm going to quote his last paragraph…

Three years ago, a casino-owning Louisiana Indian tribe called the Coushatta hired [GOP activist and lobbyist Jack] Abramoff to help stop another tribe from opening a casino, which the Coushatta feared would dilute their business. Abramoff hired former Christian Coalition director Ralph Reed, who enlisted Focus on the Family's James Dobson, who spurred his followers to send thousands of letters opposing the new casino. The poor souls riled up to stop legalized gambling had no idea that they were pawns of another casino. It's a perfect metaphor for the relationship between the Republican elite and the voters who put them into office.

Democrats are hoping, obviously, that there's a fracture coming in the G.O.P. constituency. The anti-abortion voters will probably never go in any significant numbers to the Dems but they might be persuaded to either move the Republicans farther to the right, thereby losing more of the center, or to split off and back a third party ticket. If nothing else, they might just stay home. It's a nice theory but I don't think the Democrats should count on it. They ought to look into finding a candidate someone will vote for.

Turner Classic Movies seems to be playing an unintentional April Fool's Day joke on those of us who've set TiVos or VCRs to record today's Laurel and Hardy treasures. It's the old Phony Start Time trick.

This morning, they scheduled Beau Hunks to run 7:15 to 7:45 (all times Pacific), which would have been great except Beau Hunks is longer than that, a fact that someone there even knew. Their own schedule, shown above, says it's 37 minutes and while I haven't run a watch on it, I think the print they ran may have even been a minute or two longer than that. The film before ran a minute or so over so, allowing for the TCM openings and billboards, Beau Hunks actually aired from 7:17 to about 7:55. This means that a 7:15-7:45 recording, such as all our TiVos made, cut off the last 9 or 10 minutes.

The following film, The Bohemian Girl, was scheduled to start at 7:45 and run until 9:00. It actually started at 7:57. (At 7:56, an on-camera graphic still gave its start time as 7:45 and so does the TCM website.) The schedule says it's 68 minutes, and maybe the print they're showing as I write this is indeed that length…but a complete one would be 70 or 71, depending on which source one believes. Even if it's only 68, it will end at around 9:05. Your 7:45-9:00 recording will therefore consist of the last 10 or so minutes of Beau Hunks — followed by all of The Bohemian Girl except for the last 5-7 minutes.

Up after that is Them Thar Hills, which is supposed to start at 9 AM but will actually commence around 9:07 or 9:08. It's to be followed by Tit for Tat at 9:30. Both of these are in half-hour time slots but both are around 20 minutes each so this may fix the problem and allow Pick a Star, which is scheduled for 10 AM, to actually start at 10 AM. But it could actually start before.

This is frustrating because it's so simple. I mean, how difficult is it to not schedule a movie you know is 37 minutes in a half-hour time slot? TCM is usually so good about restoring and showing complete prints of great movies. Can't they at least let us know when they start and end? As Mr. Hardy would say when Mr. Laurel drops a brick on his head, "Oooow!"

It hasn't hit the press yet but I'm hearing that longtime TV director-producer Greg Garrison died on the 25th due to complications of pneumonia. I barely knew Mr. Garrison but there was a time around 1969-1971 when I used to prowl NBC Burbank, sneaking in to watch Bob Hope tape a sketch or Johnny Carson do his monologue. And whenever I could, I'd slip down to the studio where Dean Martin was doing his series. I was always hoping for a Golddiggers rehearsal but I'd settle for watching Dom DeLuise, Kay Medford, Nipsey Russell and/or Lou Jacobi rehearse a sketch. Once in a rare while, I might even see Dean but he wasn't there very often.

The great open secret of The Dean Martin Show was that Dean barely showed up for work. He did for its first season, but the program wasn't working, and Dean was unhappy with how hard he was working. That was when Greg Garrison, who'd been hired as director only, came up with an idea. To make the show more spontaneous — and to keep Dino interested in doing it at all — he would arrange the schedule so Martin only had to come in one day a week, and not even for the entire day. Rehearsals were done with a stand-in, and everything that didn't involve Dean was taped when he was nowhere on the premises. There were people who appeared on The Dean Martin Show without ever meeting Dean.

On tape day, Dean would come in, watch a run-through with the stand-in, then go out and replicate the stand-in's actions. Everything was configured for maximum speed. Dean almost always wore a tuxedo, thereby minimizing costume changes and making it possible for any segment to be edited into any other show. The lines were all on cue cards and the songs, which were performed live, were all tunes that Dean already knew. If something went wrong, Garrison would usually not start over. He'd work some kind of paste-up edit, often inserting a freeze-frame in a manner that made other TV directors wince. Once in a while during a musical number, Dean wouldn't be able to hear the orchestra and if you watch, you can see him rubbing his ear to signal Garrison to have the audio cranked up a notch. Anyone else would have restarted or edited…but Garrison promised his star he'd be done by 10 PM, and did whatever was necessary to make that happen.

I used to watch Garrison at work and there was something amazing about how fast he could tape a prime-time network variety show. His relationship with Dean was also fascinating. To get his one-day-a-week schedule, Dean had traded off a star's right to reject material or have input into the script. He just showed up and did whatever he was told to do. One time, Garrison needed some reaction shots of Dean that would be edited into a musical number by someone else. He told Dean, "Stand there, look to the left and stick out your tongue," and Dean stood there, looked to the left and stuck out his tongue. He did everything Garrison commanded with no idea of the context or what the routine was about. That was the kind of trust he placed in his producer-director and business partner. At the same time, Garrison knew that his career was dependent on that relationship, and did everything possible to make Dean happy and to earn that trust. Nick Arnold, a friend of mine who wrote on the show, never once met its star…but once a week, he'd ask Garrison, "How's Dean?" Every week, Garrison would give the same answer: "Dean's beautiful!"

The Garrison Technique was much debated in the TV business. On one hand, you had a very successful show, and it could certainly be argued that he'd figured out the perfect way to package his star for weekly television. On the other hand, NBC would never have tolerated some of the odd, patchwork edits on another show, and a lot of guest stars were upset that they never got to rehearse with Dean before tape rolled. I once saw Juliet Prowse tape a duet with Dean, then explode in anger when informed that there would not be a second take. She was sure it could have been done better, especially once she had some idea where Dean was going to stand or when he was going to put his arms around her…but the schedule was more important than doing it again. Other performers, including most of the regulars, just accepted it but none of them liked it.

I have some other stories and observations about Greg Garrison which I'll try and post over the next few days — like how he managed to tape "roasts" featuring people who were taped at different times, sometimes in different states, but looked like they were all in one room. I'll also tell why Marty Feldman wanted to strangle him, which is kind of an interesting tale. For now, I'm just sorry to hear that we've lost another true pioneer of the television industry.

I awoke this morning to the news that — and I quote from the AP story — "…America's spy agencies were 'dead wrong' in most of their judgments about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction before the war and that the United States knows 'disturbingly little' about the threats posed by many of the nation's most dangerous adversaries." Also, Terri Schiavo died. Guess which one the news channels are giving almost non-stop coverage. (Hint: It's the one that will be the subject of a live 3-hour CNN special tonight hosted by Larry King.)

I'm sorry about Ms. Schiavo, just as I'm sorry when anyone dies. I felt there was something wrong with allowing her to go the way she did, though I was at a loss to explain why she mattered any more than anyone else, nor could I disagree that the real tragedy in that life occurred fifteen years ago. I just heard someone on one of the news channels say that it "demeans the concept of life" to not have done everything humanly possible to save Terri's life. I wish the interviewer had asked — not to be argumentative but because I would have liked to hear the explanation — why folks who feel that way seem so unconcerned about all the other preventable deaths that occur every day in this country. I'd sure be on the side of the so-called "Culture of Life" if I saw more being done under its auspices to help more people. I also think it demeans the concept of life to define it down to merely having a pulse.

In the meantime, we're learning more and more that the entities that led us into war and which continue to lead the War on Terror were and continue to be largely inept and uninformed. I think, if we're going to care about the sanctity of human life, that ought to be the bigger story. I'll bet most people think that. But Larry's still doing the 3-hour special on the Schiavo matter.

Guess I'm on a kick of recalling near-defunct restaurant chains. I was thinking today about Piece O' Pizza, a string of eateries that once decorated the Southern California landscape…an amazing reach considering the awfulness of their signature product. Do you like pizza where the crust tastes like matzo, the toppings have the thickness of carbon paper and you can't decide whether to eat the pizza or the box it came in?

If you do, you'd have loved Piece O' Pizza pizza. Just awful. What kept them in business, it seemed to me, was their great, racy slogan ("Had a piece lately?") and the fact that there then weren't a lot of other places where one could grab a fast pizza to take home.

Also, they served a decent meatball sandwich and a more-than-decent (and very cheap) spaghetti plate. Many of the Piece O' Pizza stands were in "Skid Row" style areas, and I bet that spaghetti plate kept a lot of homeless people alive.

Like I said, they were all over L.A. There was one on Pico just east of Sepulveda. The building's still there but now it's a Numero Uno. All the other ones I know of were torn down completely. There was one at Beverly and Fairfax, another on La Brea just south of Hollywood, another on La Cienega near Airdrome…and (I'm guessing) at least 200 more.

As far as I know, there's only one remaining. It's down on Venice Boulevard about a half-mile west of Sepulveda. A year or two ago, I was in the neighborhood and in need of rapid lunch, so I decided to go in and have the spaghetti plate, just to see if it was still the same. I also shot the photos you see here. Since there is no parent company now to supply the preparations, I was expecting totally different cuisine…but the meat sauce was more or less what I recalled, or at least it seemed to have evolved from the same recipe.

I probably won't go back since I now have better places to eat. I suspect that's what killed off the Piece O' Pizza chain in or around the late eighties. As Numero Uno and Pizza Hut and even Domino's spread, everyone had a better place to get a quick pizza or to have one brought to their door.

Speculating further, I'd guess that too many of their stands were located in depressed areas, which made it difficult for them to upgrade their product. It would have been awkward to simultaneously improve their menu (making most items more expensive), advertise that they'd done this…but still service the crowd that just wanted the cheapest-possible plate of pasta.

I don't exactly miss the places since they weren't that good. On the other hand, I've been to fancy Italian restaurants where I enjoyed a $20 entree a lot less than I liked the Piece O' Pizza spaghetti plate. Even in the early eighties, it didn't cost much over two dollars…and that included garlic bread.

I wasn't going to discuss the Terri Schiavo case any more, largely on the grounds that everyone's sick of it, and the amount of disinformation on the Internet has reached critical mass. But Andrew Sullivan has what seems to me an incisive article on what it all means to the future of the Republican Party. And if you can stand an overdose of sarcasm, you might like to read what Robert Friedman has to say.

Well, as you may remember, I mentioned the other day here that the chain of Love's Barbecue Restaurants seemed to be down to one in Chula Vista and one in Lakewood (both in California) and the one in Jakarta, Indonesia. I am now informed that the Lakewood one recently closed and I'm guessing that since half of Indonesia ain't there no more, that Love's is probably gone, as well.

The Chula Vista Love's is still open — or, at least it was as of an hour ago when I phoned to check. When I'm down in San Diego for this year's Comic-Con International, I may swing by for a meal. It's a little less than nine miles from the convention center, and this could be my last chance to taste Love's beans. That is, if the place is still there come July.

Meanwhile, another of my favorite restaurant chains is now completely extinct. The last outpost of Woody's Smorgasburger, which was down on Sepulveda just South of LAX, is currently being turned into an International House of Pancakes. In the sixties, there were a number of Woody's around Southern California, including a wonderful one in Westwood Village, a block or three from UCLA. I could often be found there between (and once in a while, even during) classes.

Woody's was the first chain I know of where you could get a hamburger and then carry it over to a little self-service counter stocked with ketchup, mustard, onions, pickles, salsa, barbecue sauce, etc., and do what you wanted to it. Today, there are chains aplenty like Fuddrucker's that offer this but at the time, it was something rather special.

Woody's burgers were pretty darn good, too…and they also had a "make your own sundae" bar: You could buy an empty dish at the counter, fill it full of soft-serve vanilla ice cream, then slather it in a diverse selection of syrups and sprinkles and crushed nuts and such. My old comic club buddies and I would practically have a contest to see how much sundae we could get in one dish, building structurally-unsafe vertical arrays, then having to walk them back to the table and eat them before they collapsed.

One of the guys once asked if he was allowed to put the toppings from the sundae bar on his burger and when they told him yes, he began speculating on what hot fudge or whipped cream would do to a hamburger, and whether the maraschino cherries would blend with the mustard or if he should leave the mustard off. Each visit to Woody's, he'd say, "Next time, I'm going to try it," but he never worked up the courage. Or wanted to spoil a good smorgasburger.

It no longer exists but Once Upon a Time, there was an institution of learning known as the Hollywood Professional School. It graduated hundreds of students who went on to become well-known performers including — this is a random, very-partial list — Barbara Parkins, Lance Kerwin, Melanie Griffith, Ryan O'Neal and Tatum O'Neal, Peggy Lipton, Connie Stevens, former SAG president Barry Gordon, Sue Lyon, Patty McCormack, Peggy Fleming, Annette O'Toole, Jill St. John, Donald O'Connor, Yvette Mimieux, Tuesday Weld and many, many more.

On June 25, an "all-years reunion" is being held at the Sportsmen's Lodge in Studio City. No contact lists exist for the school's many former students so the organizers are having a bit of trouble locating and notifying them all. Click here for more info, especially if you went there.

Commencing April 1, Turner Classic Movies is offering a month of terrific comedy classics, many of them rarely seen. Here's the entire schedule and as you can see, Friday is Laurel and Hardy Day and next Monday belongs to Charley Chase and Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle. That's just for starters. It's really an outstanding month for movies on TCM.

Ever since I posted about the upcoming DVD releases of The Yogi Bear Show and The Huckleberry Hound Show, I've received a slew of e-mails from folks asking me if this or that classic series will be coming out on DVD. The answer to that question is that darn near everything will be coming out on DVD until such time as it starts to look unprofitable.

At most companies, there is a "wishful thinking" kind of master plan to keep putting stuff out until the vaults are empty. I've seen some pretty long lists of planned releases…but it would be wrong to say that any particular show or film is definitely coming out on DVD in the near future until it's formally announced. Up to that point, and occasionally even after, it's always subject to changes and postponements, usually based on the way the market seems to be skewing at any given moment. The sales on the Huck and Yogi DVD sets will in some way determine how swiftly we see the rest of the other early Hanna-Barbera shows released…but we will probably see them. In most cases, these decisions are not a matter of "if" but "when." And of course, two other questions are what kind of special features will be included and what source materials can be located and used.

Lately, I've found myself talking with various folks about how some DVDs are full of extras and deleted scenes and wonderful commentary tracks and "making of" documentaries, whereas on others, you just get a trailer or two…if you're lucky. The forthcoming DVD of the 1959 Li'l Abner movie has, like most Paramount Home Video releases, almost nada in the way of bonus material. This may be laziness but it's more likely a matter of "price-point" strategy. By not investing in adding material to the DVD, the Paramount folks are able to price it very cheap. The Abner DVD is ten and half bucks at Amazon, and I'm guessing someone figured that would be more profitable than adding features and having to sell the item for a few dollars more.

But there may also be another strategy involved, which is the notion of getting us all to buy the same movies again. As anyone who has collected comic books in the last few decades knows, companies spend a lot of time trying to figure how to get us to buy variant and upgraded editions. First, they put it out on cheap paper and we buy it…and maybe they also put out an edition with an alternate cover — and we buy that, too. Then they collect a bunch of issues into a deluxe paperback and we buy that. Then they reissue the same stuff that was in the paperback, only in hardcover and we buy that and…well, you see how this goes. I must have twenty publications in my collection that reprint the first Green Lantern-Green Arrow story by Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams, ranging from the first (which cost 15 cents, I think) to the fancy deluxe hardcover for seventy-five smackers. DVD companies are already starting to employ the same tactics.

I've ordered the Li'l Abner DVD. And a couple years from now, when they put out a Silver Medal Edition or a Collectors' Series or whatever they'll call it with interviews and extra footage, I'll buy it again and so will a lot of you. Don't think we won't. That's above and beyond the fact that we may have to buy it again when the DVD format becomes outmoded and we all have something better in our video rooms. As I explained here, I think the entire science of improving home equipment is just a sneaky plan to see how many times they can get me to buy Goldfinger. (Which reminds me: There hasn't been a new, upgraded release of that in over a month. What the hell is wrong with these people?)

If this is anyone's conscious plan — and I know it is in some cases — they're being both farsighted and nearsighted at the same time. It's shrewd to figure on doing these extras and special features a few years from now…but they're forgetting that potential interviewees get older and die. The folks putting together a lot of the material for animation DVDs lately have had to cope with the fact that in some cases, everyone who worked on the original cartoons is deceased or too ill. There's also the unpleasant realities that a lot of material that one might like to put on a DVD was thrown away or allowed to rot because someone, years ago, did not see an immediately financial benefit to its preservation. In some cases, a release date is selected and then the hunt for negatives and prints commences, often with insufficient time or funding. With the general exception of Disney, most studios have not been good about spending money to preserve and catalogue their library unless there was a specific and immediate market for the material.

The home video revolution has taught us that just about every movie or TV show ever made has some value. If it doesn't now, wait a year or three. In 1985 when the Writers Guild went on strike over revenues from videocassettes, several industry figures loudly predicted that there would never be a market for old episodes of shows like M*A*S*H and I Love Lucy because anyone who wanted them would just tape them off the air. That has not proven true. In fact, I've heard very few predictions that included the phrase, "no one will ever pay good money for that" which haven't been disproven, insofar as home video is concerned. You'd think companies would spend more money to preserve their old TV shows and films, and to prepare commentary tracks and interviews with the performers and creative personnel who are still available to be interviewed. Yeah, you'd really think that.

Over at the fine Cartoon Brew site, Amid Amidi has put up what he calls his monthly "things-could-be-so-much-better" post. This one waxes longingly for the days when Leon Schlesinger ran the Warner Brothers cartoon operation. Here's an excerpt…

Schlesinger recognized talent. He had the good sense of hiring Avery away from Walter Lantz. And then he built a team, partnering Avery with like-minded individuals such as Chuck Jones and Bob Clampett. But then he did one more thing that today's execs don't — he trusted his talent. He created the environment in which his talent could flourish; Avery, Clampett and Jones were willing to work all night because they knew their work wouldn't be trashed the following morning by Schlesinger. Sure, Leon may have spent his weekday afternoons playing eighteen holes or chasing the pretty secretaries around his yacht, but he'd already laid the foundation for the creation of great animated entertainment. The results of Schlesinger's business acumen? Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and some of the finest cartoons ever made.

I agree, natch, with the concept that good creative talents should be left alone to create. No argument there. But Amid has left out one other thing Schlesinger did. He allowed Jones and Clampett and Avery to make cartoons their way but he also paid them rotten money. And not only were the directors poorly compensated…so were the animators and inkers and background painters and storymen and everyone. Like many people who joined the work force during or around the Great Depression, they were all willing to work long hours for lousy pay and to not demand a piece of their creations, just to have any kind of job. They even, for a time, went along with the fiction that Leon Schlesinger — who couldn't draw or animate or write gags — was the head cartoonist there. Someone had to sign his name, a la Walt Disney, on the covers of the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies comic books.

So I'm not sure I'd salute Mr. Schlesinger under a heading of "Animation's Greatest Executives." The freedom he afforded his people was great…but couple it with the niggardly compensation, and you couldn't get anyone good to work for you for very long today. (And even back then, Schlesinger lost two of the three directors Amidi mentions. Avery left for MGM and slightly better pay before he did his best work. Clampett left at or around his creative peak and pretty much stopped making cartoons altogether. He instead went looking for a similar work situation, except with himself in the Schlesinger role.)

Ol' Leon enjoyed a position not available to most (any?) Animation Executives today: He owned his studio and had a sweetheart deal with his distributor so he couldn't be fired. As long as he kept his costs down (i.e., paid his people poorly enough), he couldn't not make a ton of money every month. Give any "boss" those terms today and, sure, he'd let the directors have all the freedom in the world, especially if they were handing him billion-dollar properties in exchange for minimal pay. Unfortunately, these days, creative types usually wind up working not for one Animation Exec but for many layers of them, all piled one atop the other in corporate America, all looking to climb over one another's body to higher positions. I concur that they micro-manage to an unhealthy degree but perhaps that's in large part because they get micro-managed…and tossed out if they don't get quick results.

This is not so much a disagreement with Amid as an add-on. Yeah, Schlesinger got wonderful results from his management style but I'm a little leery of holding him up as a great role model for today. For one thing, I'm afraid the people who now run the animation companies would learn the wrong thing from his example: Just the part about paying your staff poorly.

I almost didn't attend the premiere last night of Frank Miller's Sin City, the new movie based on the graphic novel of the same name by the same guy. I like Frank and I like his comic book. What I don't like is violence and bloodshed in my movies, and a faithful adaptation promised to have oodles of shootings, busted limbs and even decapitations. I'm also leery when someone says, as they did of this one, "We're going to put a comic book on the screen."

Never seems worth the effort to me, and usually results in a lot of bad acting and phony special effects. But Sergio and I went to the premiere, which meant standing in endless lines, fighting our way through crowds of photographers and autograph seekers, and eating popcorn that seemed to have been popped back when Frank was just starting on Daredevil. And despite all that, it was worth it. I enjoyed the film for any number of reasons, not the least of which was the uncanny cinematography and the perfect transfer of Miller artwork to the screen. It really is the comic brought to life…and done so convincingly that about five minutes in, you forget how much of it is CGI and matte paintings, and just accept that it's all happening for real before your eyes. The violence is a bit numbing in places, but most of it's done with style and even, in some cases, extraordinary humor. When you live in Sin City, you can get shot fifty times, stabbed through the thorax and have a few body parts chopped off. And then, if you're not careful, someone might try to kill you.

I won't go into the plot. If you've read the graphic novel, you know it. If you haven't, so much the better because the surprises are the best part. Besides, I'm sick of reviewers who tell you the storyline instead of letting you discover it for yourself. One of the reasons I had a good time was that I haven't read reviews, seen clips, heard the actors discuss their roles on talk shows, etc. It's film noir to the nth degree, it's an anthology, and the blood and testosterone flow freely. That's all you need to know.

So was there anything I disliked? Yeah, and it probably bothered me more than it should have. The second the end credits started, everyone was applauding and about 90% of the audience was in the aisles, heading off for the post-screening party. They were not watching those credits and they made it impossible for those of us who did to sit and watch them.

Now, I'll agree that in this era when the assistant secretary to the insurance underwriter gets her name up there, end credits in movies can be hard to sit through…but this audience didn't even linger through the actors' names. And besides, this was the premiere. Some of the credits they walked out on were for people who were in the room. That's doubly rude. I wanted to yell at all the people streaming into the lobby, "Hey! You got in free! You got free Sierra Mist and free antique popcorn, and most of us are invited to a party after. The least you can do is to watch all of the movie and show respect for the folks who made it!"

Since they left, most of them missed one nice touch. At the end, Frank acknowledged the contribution of many comic creators whose work inspired him — Jack Kirby, Will Eisner, Frank Robbins, Wally Wood and several others. In fact, Jack got a better credit on Sin City than he did on the first X-Men movie. I suspect he would have been prouder of the former, as well.