Several people were responsible for the success of Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, but a major contributor was Paul Keyes, who died last Friday. Keyes was a writer and later a producer and after he left, the show took such a downswing that Rowan and Martin finally threw down an ultimatum: They would not come back for another season unless Keyes was re-hired as producer and given vast amounts of control. This was done, and it helped. Keyes was a funny man who often said very funny things. He was also one of Hollywood's most active Republicans. Any time you heard something funny come out of the mouth of Richard Nixon, the odds were good that it was put there by Paul Keyes. In the '76 presidential race, recognizing his value, handlers for both Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter enlisted comedy writers to do for their guys what Keyes had done for Nixon.

Naturally, Keyes was responsible for arranging Nixon's famous Laugh-In cameo. He also did his buddy Dick a favor by keeping Laugh-In relatively free of the kind of Nixon jokes that might wound his boy. He claimed he'd put anything on the show if it was funny but he never found any joke at Nixon's expense funny. Jokes about Nixon's opponents were, however, all hysterical. Despite this, he was widely respected in the business. If you'd like to know more about his career, which included writing for Dean Martin, Jack Paar, Frank Sinatra and many others, here's a link to an obit.

Here, recommended to me by Alan Light, is a neat little site. It's called Let Them Sing It For You. Someone has excerpted what must be thousands of songs and selected individual words. You type in a line or lyric and then, assuming it find those words in its database, the program plays back what you typed. The first word might be from a Hendrix record, the second from the Beatles, the third from Sinatra and so on. You have to make the phrase simple but it does work.

Here's one of those facts guaranteed to make some of us feel ancient: Soupy Sales is 78 years old today. I don't believe it, either. My favorite teevee performer (at least when I was nine) was always the most energetic, vital guy around. You had to be energetic to do that many hours of television per week, much of it quasi-ad-libbed. You had to be vital to do that many dances, take that many falls and, of course, get hit with that many pie crusts full of shaving cream. A Soupy Sales TV show was always like some daring acrobatic feat, and not everything went right but for the viewer, that was a win/win situation. When it went right, it was funny. And when it didn't go right…well, that was funny, too.

In fact, seeing things collapse and watching Soupy dig himself out of the rubble was even more entertaining than watching when it all worked. I don't think all of the live or live-on-tape programs today collectively take as much risk as Soupy did in every broadcast. I posted this article I wrote about him, and it was included in Soupy's autobiography. (Alas, no one corrected one factual error I made: Soupy's 1978 TV series was directed by Lou Tedesco, not Lou Horvitz.) Anyway, last I heard, Soupy was home from the hospital and recuperating from some surgery relating to a nasty fall he took some years back. I don't think he's on the Internet but I have this theory which I cribbed from Peter Pan that if we all send out good thoughts, somehow they'll get to him. So Happy Birthday, Soupy. And sorry again about mixing up the Lous.

Also born on this day: Larry Storch, David Bowie, Graham Chapman, Ron Moody and some guy named Elvis Presley. At least one of those people must have worked with Lou Horvitz.

This article in the Washington Post can pretty much be boiled down to one sentence but read it anyway.

The one sentence is something like, "The reason we haven't found any Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq is that every bit of evidence says they were destroyed more than ten years ago." This is probably not big news to most folks but what's interesting is how even a lot of Bush's own guys have come to that conclusion. Even those trailers that G.W.B. tried to suggest were for the manufacture of chemical weapons are no longer deemed suspect.

Throughout all the warm obits for baseball great Tug McGraw, only a few (like this one) seem to recall that one of his many ancillary careers was to create and supposedly write a short-lived newspaper strip about a baseball player. It was called Scroogie and I don't know a whole lot about it other than that it started in 1975 and ended not long after, but still managed to get collected into a couple of paperback books. Mike Witte did the artwork, and I think I read somewhere that McGraw collected ideas and gags from other players he knew and then used them in the strip.

The title character, Scroogie, was a softball who (the promotional copy told us) "…threw a screwball and was one." He hurled for a team called the Pets, which seemed to be a cross between the Phillies and the Mets. Like many sports strips, the idea was to sell newspapers something that the editor of the sports section, as opposed to the comic strip page, would purchase. Well, one apparent reason that Scroogie struck out was that a lot of those editors had purchased Tank McNamara the year before and didn't think they needed two comic strips next to the Hockey scores, especially since Tank covered all sports, not just baseball. Too bad…because I just flipped through my paperbacks and recalled that Scroogie was not a bad strip at all. Even if he did sometimes rip off Ed Norton's best joke.

To no one's surprise, Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick have signed for the film version of the Broadway version of the movie of The Producers. Susan Stroman, who directed the Broadway show, will direct the movie. One hopes they will name it something other than The Producers but they probably won't. The movie version of the musical of Little Shop of Horrors was called Little Shop of Horrors, causing a goodly amount of confusion, especially in the home video market.

I'm guessing we'll see Mel Brooks and many of the surviving members of the movie's cast doing cameos. And there will be at least two new songs by Mel so that he has a shot at an Academy Award for Best Song.

And do we all know that Curb Your Enthusiasm is doing a storyline that involves Mel Brooks casting Larry David in a production of The Producers? And that after Nathan and Matthew get through with their current Broadway run, my pal Brad Oscar goes back in as Max with Martin Short as Leo? And that Bob Amaral, whom I raved about in a local production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum is now playing Max in the touring company that is presently in Detroit? I'll bet he's terrific.

And one bit of Non-Bialystock News: Cathy Rigby has announced that she's going to tour again in Peter Pan, commencing in the Fall of this year. This is real good news since I saw her in her last two tours and thought she was superb in the role. If you've got a kid that you want to introduce to live theater, that's a great introductory show. You might even get a seat near me.

Let's imagine you're Pete Rose. I know you have a much better haircut than that but bear with me. You're Pete Rose. And you get kicked out of Major League Baseball for betting on games, which you deny. The banishment has two downsides. One is that it puts a severe cramp in your earning power. The other is that your name is blackened and you're denied admission to the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.

Wait: I've got a better idea. Let's imagine you're two Pete Roses. You're the Guilty Pete Rose who actually, like the evidence seemed to show pretty conclusively, bet on baseball and then lied his ass off denying it, attacking all accusers. And let's also imagine you're the Innocent Pete Rose who really didn't do what they say you did. I know it's a stretch but let's remember. Almost every week in this country, DNA testing frees someone from Death Row…someone who looked inarguably guilty to a whole lot of people. If someone can be convicted unanimously and go through the whole appeals process and rot in prison for ten years and still be innocent, it's at least remotely conceivable that there is an Innocent Pete Rose.

Okay, right now you're Guilty Pete Rose. The denials haven't worked. No one believes you and it's getting pretty obvious that no one is ever going to believe you. In the meantime, the window of eligibility for you to get into the Hall of Fame is about to close. Wouldn't this be a good time to confess? Write your autobiography so you can make some serious money off the confession, but confess. Get the book out while there's still time for a Pete Rose Apology Tour before that eligibility period ends. Make the rounds of talk shows, say how dreadfully sorry you are, maybe even sob a little. The publicity will make your book a best seller…as of this A.M., twelfth place on the Amazon Best Seller list, and the book doesn't even get released until Thursday. The sympathy will be great. The public will want to reward you for getting your life back on track, and they'll want to demonstrate forgiveness. You'll get into the Hall of Fame with ease…or at least, you'll have the best possible shot of making that happen. The confession makes sense.

Now, let's say you're Innocent Pete Rose. As you've maintained for umpteen years, you didn't bet on baseball; not the way they said, anyway. You're well aware that Major League Baseball is full of guys who've done that and much, much worse. You've been around the game for a long time. You know all the dirt about players who've been involved with heavy drugs, blackout drinking, cheating on games, beating up women in hotel rooms and financial shenanigans that make the allegations against you look like overdue fines at Blockbuster. You see that the baseball establishment pretends all this stuff doesn't go on but that every so often, to cling to the fiction that ballplayers are all like Boy Scouts, they have to spank one of them. Just to maintain the fiction that players are held to some high moral and ethical standard. Since you're not guilty (or maybe just not as guilty as they say), you don't see why you should accept the public flogging. You refuse to go along with it which, of course, makes some people even angrier with you.

We do that a lot in this country. We assume people are guilty of some crime and then we decide it's a moral failing, worse than the crime itself, that they won't "accept responsibility" and admit we're right. I'm all for people accepting responsibility for their transgressions, but there needs to be some recognition that sometimes people are wrongly accused. A lot of those guys freed from Death Row after ten years could have gotten lighter sentences if they'd confessed early-on to the crime they didn't commit. That they didn't was taken as a sign that they weren't rehabilitated.

But your stonewall, stick-to-the-truth defense isn't working, Innocent Pete. Your bank account is down, you're not in the Hall of Fame, the eligibility period is ending soon, and you're long past the point where you're ever going to convince anyone you didn't do it. So what do you do? Same thing as Guilty Pete Rose. Write the book, tell them what they want to hear, collect the royalties, engineer a last-minute groundswell of support to get your butt into Cooperstown. Your income and your reputation can only profit from it.

I am not suggesting Innocent Pete Rose reflects the real situation. He sure looks guilty and of course, now that he's confessed, the slim possibility that he was wrongly accused becomes slimmer to the point of non-existence. But it has always bugged me that in the judicial system, plea bargaining often makes it less painful to take a punishment for something you didn't do than to hang in there and try to prove your innocence. I've paid traffic tickets I didn't deserve because I would suffer less by confessing to the lie. I'm sure it goes on in larger, more life-alerting matters, as well. I guess it just bothers me that we often reach the point where guilt or innocence matter so little that they both lead to the same place. Whether he did it or not, Rose is going to do quite well from his confession. You can bet on it.

Just corrected the previous message. Frasier airs on Tuesday, not Wednesday. And that's when Bill Kirchenbauer is on. Sorry. Thanks, Scott!

I first met Bill Kirchenbauer, back when he was doing Fernwood 2Night, playing his bad lounge singer character, Tony Roletti. This was back before Andy Kaufman, Bill Murray and half the guys in the comedy business had their bad lounge singer characters. When he wasn't doing that, Bill was one of the best stand-up comedy performers I've ever seen, and I watched him prove it everywhere, even in the most important venue for a stand-up, The Tonight Show with Mr. Carson. You've seen him on many programs since, including a couple in which he starred (like Just the Ten of Us). If you're watching Frasier this Tuesday night, you'll see him there. And if you ever see he's playing in a comedy club near you, go. Nobody funnier.

A couple other thoughts on that list I posted of the top-running Broadway shows. The highest show by Rodgers and Hammerstein is Oklahoma!, which is in 22nd place with 2212 performances. Not far behind is South Pacific with 1925. Once upon a time, Oklahoma! held the record for the most performances of a single Broadway production, and you have to guess that the total seemed pretty damned impressive back then. What would anyone have said then if you'd predicted that someday, a show with people in cat costumes would run more than three times as long?

It is also perhaps worth underscoring the fact that once Phantom tops Les Misérables, Andrew Lloyd Webber will be the composer of the two longest-running Broadway shows in recorded history…and he will likely retain that distinction for a long time. An awful lot of folks in the theatrical community already hate the man and his work…and once that is noticed, they'll probably hate him more. Then some day, a critical reassessment will begin and the pendulum will swing the other way.

I also think it's worth noting that three shows in the Top 20 are revivals which did considerably better than the original productions. The original Fosse-directed Chicago, for instance, ran 936 performances while the Fosse-inspired revival has already run three times as long and may quadruple the run of the original. This is interesting to me because in all creative fields, not just theater, there's a tendency to judge the financial wisdom of a project by how it does the first time around. A TV show that gets cancelled after 13 weeks is a flop. A comic book that gets axed its first year or so is a failure…and so on. In the case of comic books, to pick one of these, we have sometimes seen a discontinued title have such an extended life via reprints that it ultimately proves more profitable (and memorable) than other comics which were once held to be more successful.

I don't think one person who saw both the revival of Chicago and the original thought the new version was markedly superior. The prevailing wisdom seems to be that the original was ahead of its time, that it was neglected in favor of competing shows (A Chorus Line, primarily) and that in light of certain developments in the real world, its theme is more relevant today. Whatever the reason, it's obvious that the property had a value greater than its not-unsuccessful 936 performances indicated. One of these days, someone's going to take a short-run flop, probably one of Mr. Sondheim's, and revive it into a hit.

Since I know you've all been wondering, here's what's going on in My Backyard…

As you may recall, we had families of raccoons showing up out there, plus possums and a couple of cats. The most beloved and territorial cat was Jackie, who sadly passed away last April. Her position has recently been assumed by a new feline that has been showing up out there since just before Christmas. Here's a picture of the new cat…

The new cat does not have a name yet but we think she was an "indoors" cat. She certainly seems to want to be one. Her every waking moment is devoted to trying to get into my house and at times, she will stand up right outside the glass patio door and pound on it with her front paws as if she's yelling, "Let me in, let me in!" Unfortunately, due to allergies and other problems, it will not work to have a cat in this abode, so we're actively looking for either her previous owner or someone else who wants an amazingly-affectionate pussycat. (If you're in the Los Angeles area and that's you, drop me a note.)

I'd like to get her indoors somewhere on a permanent basis soon because she wants it so, and also because raccoons have started coming around during daylight hours. Yeah, I didn't think they did that either, but here's a pic I took at 4:00 in the afternoon today. It's not a great photo but that's definitely a raccoon who either likes to eat between meals or doesn't know how to stick to a schedule.

I'm a little worried about the traffic out there. In any case, we need to find a home for the cat. Yesterday, my friend Carolyn and I put flyers in every mailbox for a block or two around, asking if anyone was missing a cat or wanted to adopt one. I'm thinking how great it would be if neighborhoods had their own little Internet discussion boards. You could log in and just chat with your neighbors about lost pets, road construction, where to find a decent gardener and other vital topics. There probably aren't enough folks on my block who are actually on the 'net but wouldn't that be a great idea? Almost as good as adopting a little homeless cat, eh?

How could a whole book on Murphy Anderson, filled with his life story and examples of his art, not be terrific? Well, if you're looking for controversy or negative tales, you might be disappointed. Murphy is much-loved throughout the industry and by the readers. The worst thing I've ever heard about him is that some of the artists whose pencil art he inked didn't like how much his style dominated the finished product.

As a fan of everything he's ever worked on, I have mixed feelings there. On the one hand, I think artists ought to have their work look the way they want it. On the other hand, that Gil Kane art inked by Murphy sure looked great. On yet a third hand, I kind of wish no one had ever wanted Murphy to ink their work because then he might have done more drawing all by himself. His solo work on The Spectre, Hawkman and The Atomic Knights (to name three faves) was wonderful. R.C. Harvey, who wrote this book, did a fine job of selecting good samples of Murphy's work (not that there are a lot of bad ones) and presenting and annotating them in a way that presents a pretty solid portrait of a fine craftsman.

Many of Murphy's associates are quoted, all raving about the man and his work, and there's a nice section devoted to his rarely-seen (by fans) work for Will Eisner and the Army. If you're at all a fan of Murphy's work (i.e., you are sighted) then hustle over to the TwoMorrows website and order a copy of The Life and Art of Murphy Anderson. Or wait until I recommend one more TwoMorrows book twomorrow. Then order them all at once.

It is now against the law to take a camcorder into a movie theater to record what's on the screen. I absolutely sympathize with those trying to stop piracy of copyrighted materials but I wonder if this is as big a problem as the studios make it out to be. I'm sure it happens somewhere but, knowing that an authorized, quality DVD or tape of a new movie will be out in a month or three for under twenty bucks, do people really rush out to buy a bootleg shot from a hand-held camcorder in the balcony? Really? I can't think of a movie I've ever wanted to watch so badly that I couldn't wait a few months until it's on DirecTV or the DVD is released.

Like I said, I'm sure it happens…but my spider-sense suspects that it doesn't happen as often as the studios claim; that they're groping to make film piracy look like an "outside job" when in fact, a lot of it emanates from sources much closer to home. Back when the Betamax was new and studio execs were swearing under oath that they could not have their movies available on tape (even authorized releases) without it destroying the motion picture industry, there was a lot of denial. They spun stories that Film Piracy was mainly achieved by larcenous individuals breaking into vaults, sneaking out prints and surreptitiously transferring films to tape for bootlegging purposes. In truth, most of those same execs were having the movies in question transferred to tape so they could watch them in their homes or offices, and those transfers were getting duped on the sly and traded for other movies.

I have no first-hand knowledge that this is what's happening here. But if I were in charge of security at a big motion picture studio and someone yelled at me that their just-released movie was being sold illegally on tape, I might not want to investigate that one too closely. It might be easier for me to say, "Gee, someone must have snuck a camcorder into a screening," than to start rooting around, exposing someone in my company who was possibly involved. Of course, this is just speculation on my part.

I also wonder if anyone is going to make one of those "citizen's arrests" mentioned in the article. Wouldn't it make more sense for the studios to ask patrons merely to report if they see anyone taping the movie, and then contractually require the theater to prosecute, or at least eject anyone who commits this heinous crime? I'm sure the contracts between distributor and exhibitor already require that the latter not permit the film to be copied in any way, and that's how this should be handled. If I were in a theater and I spotted someone lifting wallets or beating up a nun, I'd rush to stop them. But if I witnessed a copyright violation in progress, assuming it wasn't my copyright being violated, I think the most I'd do is go out and tell an usher. And then if they didn't do anything, I'd figure the exhibitor doesn't feel it's worth stopping so why should I? Maybe if theft-by-camcorder is a genuine problem, the movie studios need to crack down on the theaters that aren't stopping it, rather than expect the public to play Kojak and arrest people.

The revival of Cabaret just closed in New York after 2378 performances. One suspects it might have closed a little sooner but that its producers kept it running just long enough to rob Annie of its stature as the eighteenth longest-running show in Broadway history. The top twenty now shapes up as follows…

1. Cats (7485 performances)
2. Les Misérables (6680, closed 5/18/03)
3. The Phantom of the Opera (6650, still running)
4. A Chorus Line (6137)
5. Oh! Calcutta! – revival (5959)
6. Miss Saigon (4097)
7. Beauty and the Beast (3971, still running)
8. 42nd Street (3486)
9. Grease (3388)
10. Fiddler on the Roof (3242)
11. Life With Father (3224)
12. Rent (3191, still running)
13. Tobacco Road (3182)
14. Chicago – revival (2976, still running)
15. Hello, Dolly! (2844)
16. My Fair Lady (2717)
17. The Lion King (2598, still running)
18. Cabaret – revival (2378, closed 1/4/04)
19. Annie (2377)
20. Man of La Mancha (2328)

There are a lot of interesting things about this list, such as the fact that contrary to what you might expect, there's nothing by Neil Simon on it. His longest-running shows to date are Barefoot in the Park and Brighton Beach Memoirs, both tied for 43rd place with 1,530 performances each. (Everyone assumes it's The Odd Couple, which is actually in 97th place with 974 performances. Several other Simon works are ahead of it…Promises Promises with 1291 performances, Plaza Suite with 1097 and They're Playing Our Song with 1081.) There's also no Stephen Sondheim. His longest-running show is the original production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, which is tied with The Odd Couple. Mr. Sondheim is presumably a good sport about the fact that Rent, the one and only show of Jonathan Larson (who was something of a protege) will probably wind up in the top ten.

Another interesting thing is that in the top 20, there are only two non-musicals…one comedy and one drama. If you go down the whole list of long runs, that's not atypical. Also, only five or six of the top twenty are shows that you might call "star-driven," in that their appeal is dependent on having some Big Name on the marquee.

Some people feel the 1976-1989 revival of Oh! Calcutta! should not be on this list. It was done in a small theater…the Edison, which was torn down shortly after it closed. And it was done on an extremely low budget that enabled it to keep running with rather minimal attendance. I once heard an actress who was in it for several years explain that because of the nudity, the producers were able to book a lot of tour groups, few of whom spoke English, to fill the seats. Even then, they sometimes played to off-Broadway numbers of forty or fifty people a night. I don't have an opinion on this but if you want to just pretend it isn't there and mentally renumber everything after, that's fine with me.

It's also interesting to note that The Phantom of the Opera is about to claim the #2 slot, though no one expects it to stick around long enough to topple Cats from its perch. Beauty and the Beast will soon grab the #6 position and probably close before it can move up any higher. Rent will probably move up a notch or two before it closes, as will Chicago. But the lofty status of Cats is likely to remain for a long time. After six and a half years on Broadway, The Lion King is only about a third of the way there, and the next contender (Aida with 1577 performances) may not last out the year.

When The Producers opened, some folks in a burst of enthusiasm suggested it was destined to become the longest-running musical on Broadway. At present, it's at 1128, so it's got a long way to go. At eight performances a week, it will have to run until May of the year 2019 to top Cats. Even if Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick stick around for the next ten years, I don't think it'll make it.

Who created Spider-Man? Well, according to Sid Caesar, it may have been Larry Gelbart and Woody Allen.