The leaderships of the Screen Actors Guild and AFTRA have agreed to a one-year extension of their current contract with the AMPTP. In other words, instead of hammering out a new three-year contract before the June 30 deadline, the actors and producers have made a one-year deal which makes minor improvements to the contract, thereby assuring there will be no actors' strike, at least not now. They can then address the matter of the next long-term contract at a more leisurely pace. (This has to be approved by the membership of both unions but easy passage is expected.)

So the Writers Guild is now up at bat. Our contract expires May 2 and if you're wondering why the actors negotiated ahead of us…well, it seems to have something to do with us announcing that we will fight for a larger share of DVD revenues. The actors want that too, of course, but do not seem to have the necessary militancy to make it a strike issue this time out. The theory is that they made their quickie deal so they would not get swept up in any WGA-AMPTP war that erupts over DVD loot. If we make gains in that area, the actors can demand and probably achieve the same thing next year…but of course, they've also made it somewhat more difficult for us to make gains in that area. The producers would have been more frightened of a writers' strike on the matter if there was a chance it could quickly escalate into a writers' and actors' strike.

As I wrote last month in this posting, the WGA is already in a bit of disarray over a one-two punch of scandals involving its officers, and more heads may roll. I have no idea if we can pull together in time to present a unified position. We could wind up folding on this issue or we could find ourselves in a long, quagmire-style strike that will cripple Hollywood as the WGA strike of '88 did. It would be incredibly self-destructive of the producers to let the latter occur, but it was in 1988, as well. That year, the producers sadly underestimated WGA resolve and gave us a lowball offer, figuring we'd either grab it or that a strike would collapse quickly. Neither happened, and it took them months to agree among themselves to give us the kind of offer they should have given us in the first place.

One scenario that I suspect will not happen this time is a one-year extension like the actors just negotiated. Their contract now expires June 30, 2005. The current Directors Guild contract expires the next day. I don't think the producers want to extend the WGA to May 2, 2005, thereby positioning the three "above-the-line" guilds for simultaneous negotiations and (perhaps) strikes. The DGA traditionally does not strike but if the other two guilds were walking the picket lines over some issue when the directors' contract expired, there'd be no reason for them not to join in since there'd be nothing for them to direct. That would completely shut down the industry, which is why they will never allow even the vague possibility it could occur.

In other guild-type news, the Directors Guild and the Writers Guild may be negotiating a truce in a long-running battle over possessory credits on movies. That's when the director gets a credit that suggests he is somehow the sole creator of the movie…"A Film by James Cameron" or "George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead." Writers have long held that such credits, or at least the automatic awarding of such credits, belittle the contributions of others on a film. Directors have demanded them as their inalienable right. (If you'd like to read more about the two positions, this article covers some of the talking points for both views.) At one point, the WGA seemed to be threatening a strike and/or lawsuit over the matter but backed down on the condition that the two guilds would meet and try to hammer out some workable compromise. The DGA has now proposed, and the WGA seems receptive to a new plan that would slightly limit the practice. The proposal would generally ban such a credit on a director's first movie, though it could be awarded under certain circumstances. It would also slightly restrict the usage of such credits in some advertising.

The suggested "compromise" seems pretty slim to me. In fact, it sounds like something the directors might have enacted for their own benefit. Possessory credits have become so commonplace that established directors have complained they are no longer meaningful; not when a kid fresh out of film school is getting it on his first movie. At the same time, I don't sense that this is currently a big issue within the WGA; not to the extent that our members are prepared to go to war over it. So I suspect most of them will act like the DGA has met them halfway on the matter, and we'll wait to fight this battle another day.

The Spirograph was a great toy, at least for around a half-hour. After that, you had dozens of neat-looking kaleidoscope drawings and there was really nothing you could do with them..though one time, a fine comic book artist named Ernie Colón incorporated Spirograph designs into a story he drew for Creepy.. Anyway, you know where this is leading: Here's the link to where you can create online Spirograph drawings. Thanks to Scott Rosen for the tip.

Another of the many issues we're going to hear about in this Election Year is this one: That the Bush Administration has repeatedly ignored the overwhelming consensus of the scientific community when its findings interfered with their political goals. When someone reports something that does not conform to their worldview, that report has to be buried and that someone has to be replaced with someone who can get with the program. Recently, 20 past Nobel prize winners signed off on this report that decries this practice. (That's a PDF file. You'll need to have Adobe installed to read it.) No doubt this charge will link up with the charge that the White House ignored certain facts about Iraq because they were inconvenient, too.

James Fallows argues that the U.S. commitment to Iraq is exhausting our military resources. I don't know if the situation is as bleak as this article makes it out to be, but I bet we hear more about this.

Hey, do you remember that posting of mine that a fellow named Bill Stosine sent to various Letters to the Editor pages over his signature? Well, I just noticed it also got into the Chicago Sun-Times about two weeks ago. I've written TV shows that didn't get this wide an audience.

That's what's on the license plate from my 1957 Thunderbird…which, by the way, I'm still thinking of selling. (That is, I'm thinking of selling the car. Whether or not you'll want the plate too may depend on whether your name is Mark.) In any case, that's not a photo of the actual plate. It's a computer generated image courtesy of this website. You pick your state and one of its past license plate formats, enter what you want on your plate and — POOF! — it creates an image of that license plate for you. I made one and pasted it into the photo of a T-Bird. Sure beats the way they make 'em in prison.

As mentioned before here, a DVD collection of Marx Brothers movies will be available in May. Based on the announced rundown of its contents, we like this package a lot…even if it does include A Night in Casablanca. We're going to advance-order it by clicking on this Amazon link and you might like to do likewise. The selection of films was pretty obvious: It's every Marx Brothers movie currently controlled by the Time-Warner empire. But whoever assembled this thing also picked some wonderful shorts and supplementary material, including Warner Brothers cartoons and shorts keyed to the same years as the Marx films they accompany.

One thing I'd love to see some company do is to assemble a couple of DVDs that replicate the entirety of actual film programs seen in theaters…in other words, "Here's a DVD set that shows you exactly what you would have seen if you'd gone to the Bronx Bijou on such-and-such a date." They would include the features, shorts, cartoons, newsreels, trailers, etc. that went with one another. I don't think a similar DVD series would be a huge seller but it might be a way for companies to market some of the items from their vaults that otherwise would never make it to home video.

Stuttering John (of Howard Stern fame) as Leno's new announcer? Oh, great. It's not enough to do remote segments where the point is to laugh at how awkward and non-professional some people are on camera. Now we're going to have one of them in the studio every night.

Once upon a time, if you wanted to get on late night TV, the key was to be witty and professional. Today, only the host is allowed to be that and he surrounds himself with inarticulate stagehands, delicatessen owners and others who are guaranteed to never come up with an intentional funny remark. It's amazing how most of the comedians I know have gone from being not good enough to be on with Jay or Dave to being overqualified.

Yesterday, three separate people said roughly the same thing to me: "I don't know why, but I have the feeling the Democratic nominee is going to be Edwards."

Happy to hear that we're about to see a reissue of my pal Roger Stern's 1993 novel, The Death and Life of Superman. Well actually, I'm happy for you since I still have my original hardcover copy. The new one's a trade paperback that will be out in March, with new introductions by Roger, Mike Carlin and Charlie Kochman. I was not a big fan of the "Death of Superman" storyline that was done back then in the comics. It struck me as a bit loud, a bit exploitive and way overemotional, given that we all knew he was coming back. Still, I recall enjoying Roger's novelization of it, which had more depth than noise, and a really good sense of what it was that made Superman Superman.

I've read a lot of Superman stories over the years where my reaction was, "That wasn't a bad comic but Superman wasn't in it. There was a big muscular guy with an "S" on his chest but it wasn't Superman." That never happened with Roger's stories, so I recommend it even though there's no Amazon link available yet. When there is, I'll post one here, but don't wait for that.

Here's a piece by the Spinsanity crew that strikes me as a fair overview of the "Bush in the National Guard" flap. My interest in this one is low but it does fascinate me that so many folks on both sides are throwing out incomplete, arguable hunks of "evidence" and then saying, "This proves we're right. Case closed."

Here's a good profile of a very fine actor named David Paymer. I worked with David on a series a few years ago and thought he was an absolute joy.

One of the great unsung comic books of the past is Little Archie, as written and drawn by Bob Bolling. At arm's length, it seems like a dumb idea for a comic. To the extent the teenage Archie, Jughead, Betty, Veronica, Reggie and the rest of the gang were entertaining, it was because they dealt with all the travails of their age bracket: Dating, high school, cars, etc. And of course, there was always the fact that the girls, especially as drawn by Dan DeCarlo, were so gosh-durn sexy. So you'd figure the kiddie version, which loses all that, would be a quadruple snooze…and in the hands of anyone other than Bolling, yes, that's what it would have been. But using a few remnants of the teen formula, Bolling managed to craft a very personal little franchise, occasionally generating actual, on-the-page suspense. Through sheer cleverness and dedication, he managed to make his characters very real and avoid the "generic" feel that so many Archie comics had in script and art. It's really a body of work deserving of more attention.

And this week, it's getting some over at Scott Shaw!'s beloved Oddball Comics page at Comic Book Resources. All week, Scott spotlights Little Archie in all his glory. Good stuff.

Two things distress me about these rumors that John Kerry had an affair with an intern, and neither makes me more or less likely to vote for him. One is that it's only February. Kerry doesn't even have the nomination and the attacks have already reached this level. I hate to think what we're going to be hearing about him and his running mate by October, especially if they're ahead, and I'm no more thrilled about the quantity of mud that will be lobbed back at Bush-Cheney or Bush-Whoever. (I'm guessing we haven't heard a lot of Democratic attacks on Cheney lately because they want to wait until it's too late to dump him from the ticket before they launch the TV spots that say, "Our men and women are dying in Iraq because of inadequate equipment while Cheney and Halliburton line their pockets with money from the Defense Budget." Anyone think we won't be subjected to that sales pitch?)

The other thing that bothers me is that the rumors about Kerry and this lady seem to have come out of absolutely nowhere. There are no secret tapes, no stained dress, no appointment logs that show Kerry and this woman in the same location at the same time. I'm not even sure there are any witnesses who ever saw them together. Someone somewhere said Kerry was involved with an intern and that was enough for some folks to run with it. On some of the Conservative sites, it's now an accepted truth…and if it's denied by everyone involved or can't be proven, well, that just shows what Kerry's money and power can accomplish.

I'm always suspicious of any charge that (a) serves the cause of the parties doing the charging and (b) is configured such that it can never really be disproven. How does Kerry prove the charge is bogus? Come up with a photo of them not having sex?

The charges that George W. Bush was AWOL in the National Guard have occasionally dipped to the same level. Yeah, there's some paperwork (and therefore, potential proof) there but the people pursuing the story seem unwilling to consider, for example, that government files and paperwork could be legitimately missing. Or that some of the data on the records that do exist might just be wrong. Certainly, some of the witnesses who are coming forth to confirm or deny Bush's version of things are exhibiting a shaky, though perhaps earnestly-believed grasp of dates. I wish politics could mature beyond the level where if someone says something that hurts your guy, he's obviously lying…and if someone says something that hurts the other side, it's an established, incontrovertible fact.

Some ambitious folks are attempting to catalog every TV and film appearance of every DC comic book character with what they call The DC Live Action List, even though it includes cartoon voices. Whatever, it's a valuable resource.