The Mike Memorial

I've received a few questions about the Celebration of Life for Mike Schlesinger on April 6 — the one I announced here. Here are the answers and you can figure out the questions from them. It's kind of like Jeopardy!

  • No, we will not be able to stream it live but we're talking to various folks about bringing in video equipment and recording the Celebration and putting it online. This would include the speeches and the clips we show but — obviously — not the feature film.
  • I will be the emcee. The other folks organizing the Celebration are Saratoga Ballantine, Jerry Beck, Joe Dante, Catherine Dickerson, Howard Green and Steve Stoliar.
  • We have loads of people who wish to speak but — as I've learned you have to do with events like this — we're selecting a small number and giving them limited amounts of time. (I was the host for a June Foray Memorial in 2017. If we'd let everyone who wanted to speak have a turn at the microphone, we'd still be there.)
  • The version of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World we're showing is the general release version with the intermission. It is not the version with the footage that was cut a few weeks after the movie's initial release in 1963. I'm pretty sure there is no 70mm print in existence that includes those scenes.
  • You don't have to have been a close friend of Mike's to attend. You will not be interrogated at the door about your relationship. But if you respected his accomplishments (which were many) and wish to pay some of those respects forward, you are welcome.
  • We're receiving a steady stream of reservations but I can't tell you how long you might have to decide if you're coming. There's a good chance we'll "sell out." The event takes place in 38 days but don't take all that time to decide.
  • If you wanna be there, here's the e-mail address. Tell us how many seats you want and if you're staying for the movie. You will receive an e-mail in a few days confirming things and telling you a bit more about the event.
  • And just in case my remark about about a possible "sell out" confuses you, there is no charge to attend. Thank you.

In the News (Sadly)…

There is much tragedy to be found in the mysterious deaths of Gene Hackman, his wife and one of their three dogs. And one of the tragic aspects is that no matter what the official explanation is, some folks won't accept it strictly because it is an official explanation. And some of the non-accepters will insist it must be something far more sinister…and also more world-wide significant. Like they were killed to prevent them from exposing some vast conspiracy fomented by whoever the theorist thinks is the current Root of All Evil in the world.

Less attention will be paid to the fact that Mr. Hackman was a magnificent actor with a magnificent body of work.

FACT CHECK: Social Security for Centenarians

Donald Trump and Elon Musk are still claiming that a lot of Social Security payments are going to people who are 100, 200 and even 300 years of age. This is, of course, not true and it's debunked here by the Associated Press, the only major news service in this country that knows the Gulf of Mexico is still the Gulf of Mexico.

Today's Video Link

We'll get back to stand-up comedians tomorrow. Here's my longtime pal Scott Shaw! on MeTV the other day…

FACT CHECK: Trump Speak at CPAC

Last Saturday, that president of ours spoke to the friendliest audience he could possibly have — at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Still, he said an awful lot of things that were demonstrably false. Daniel Dale goes down a long list of them.

Pantry Panic

Photo by Downtowngal

The Original Pantry, a landmark Los Angeles restaurant, is on the verge of maybe/possibly shutting down after operating in this city since When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth. I mean the Age of Man, not the movie. It was (note the past tense) a wonderful 24/7 place to grab a steak or other very American entree and an especially great place for breakfast. That was true until a slow but an almost-tangible downslide began in 1980 when a gent named Richard Riordan purchased the place.

Mr. Riordan was the Mayor of Los Angeles from 1993 to 2001 and not, in my opinion, a particularly good one. That didn't matter much because the way Los Angeles is set up, the mayor has about as much power as one of those 25-cent batteries they used to sell at RadioShack — the kind you could put into your transistor radio and hear about half a song before you had to swap it out. We used to say, "His skill as a politician put him where he is today — in the restaurant business." He also ruined a great eatery called Gladstone's out by the ocean in Santa Monica.

Mayor Riordan was a nice man — I ate with him once and liked him despite Trumpian politics — but all his businesses suffered or shuttered. He passed away two years ago.

I'll tell you how great the Pantry was, once upon a time. You usually had to wait a long time to get in — and we did. And then once you were seated at a table, they immediately served you an unasked-for dish of cole slaw…and I still went there. The food was good, the food was cheap and the place was kind of legendary. It was open 24/7 and its owners, including the former mayor, bragged that they never, in all its seeming centuries of existence — actually since it opened in 1924 — were closed or without a customer.

Then COVID hit and they closed…and I think they did also once or twice to correct health code violations. Lately, they've been open not every day at every hour but Wednesdays through Sundays from 7 AM until 3 PM on weekdays and 5 PM on weekends. You'd think that if they could only turn a profit during those hours, someone would say, "Hmm…maybe we're doing something wrong."

So I don't go there anymore and neither do enough people for the place to be open at night. I feel bad for its employees, some of whom have been there since it was a great place to dine but I'm already seeing on the Internet, people who haven't eaten there for decades saying, "This is a landmark…we need to save it." And my thinking is that it's a little late for that. Someone should have begun applying corrective measures before it turned into a Denny's — and not a very good one.

Scott Watch

The cable/streaming channels MeTV and MeTV Toons run this cute li'l show called Toon In with Me hosted by Bill Leff and his finny friend, Toony the Tuna. They run classic cartoons and talk about cartoon history and on tomorrow's episode, the subject is the great animation director, Tex Avery. They will be joined in this by my longtime friend and co-conspirator, Scott Shaw!, who worked with Tex at Hanna-Barbera. You can tune in or you can toon in but don't miss it.

The schedule says it airs on MeTV at 7:00 AM on MeTV and 11:30 PM on MeTV Toons but with streaming channels, it's best to double-check what time things air in your area.

FACT CHECK: Condoms for Hamas

No, despite what Trump and Musk are saying, $50 million of government funds was not sent to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas. The Associated Press people set the record straight.

Today's First Video Link

Last night on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart cut his hand when a breakaway (I guess) cup didn't breakaway (I suppose) as it was supposed to. This was not the first time Stewart has drawn blood with his comedy…

Missing Mike

That's a photo of my pal Mike Schlesinger, who left us in early January and has been much-missed since then. He was a filmmaker and a very important person in the field of preserving motion pictures and their history. A lot of great movies might not exist today — or at least exist in good and complete prints — were it not for Mike. He was also a helluva nice guy.

On April 6, a bunch of us who miss him will converge on a movie theater in Santa Monica to miss him together. We'll talk about him and all he did…and then we're going to run his favorite movie (which also happens to be my favorite movie) the way we all feel it should be seen — on a big screen with a big, appreciative audience. If you knew Mike and/or want to help us celebrate who he was and all he did, click below for all the details.

FACT CHECK: Immigrants Voting

Elon Musk says — and a lot of Conservatives also say — President Joe Biden's immigration policy was "a giant voter importation scam." The folks at Politifact do a pretty good job of showing why that could not be the case.

ASK me: Game Show Writers

Dan Olson — who says he's from "definitely not the 51st state" — which I guessed right off meant Canada — wrote to ask…

As a reader of your blog & someone who loves going worm holing thru your archives, I know you are/were a fan of game shows. Having watched your friend Lorenzo Music and his wife Henrietta on an old Tattletales episode shown here in Canada this week, I was wondering about game show writers.

A show like Match Game (1973-79) publicized their staff writers (including MAD's Dick DeBartolo), with questions that could be suggestively sly or muddily mundane. Hollywood Squares had "quips" supplied to celebrities & the questions on T.T. occasionally seemed ripe for divorce court. I'm thinking even a show like Celebrity Sweepstakes (a personal favourite because it often appeared chaotic & near off-the-rails with some surly "Who booked me for this?!" stars) seemed like either there were jokes prepared (I seem to recall Pat McCormick on it). Was the role of a writer on these types of 60-70s shows a gateway to something bigger? Did you ever get an offer to do that?

Here's an easy answer: The role of a writer on a game show could be almost anything, especially on shows which did not come under the mantle of the Writers Guild of America, as many did and do not. Generally speaking though, they would write the questions and if the game involved celebrities coming up with funny answers or even real answers, the writers would supply them, though the celeb was free to make up his or her own funny or bluff response. The writers would also write out what the host was to say, though again what they gave the host might be treated more like a suggestion.

I have occasionally picked up a few bucks writing for game shows, mostly for run-throughs. A run-through is like a pilot that is not recorded. I was briefly involved in unsuccessful attempts to bring back, in quite a different form, the game show Rhyme and Reason and also Johnny Carson's old show, Who Do You Trust? Neither got past the runthrough stage. I turned down a few offers to write for shows which did get on the air but none of them interested me a lot…or maybe at all. It's probably just as well.

ASK me

Webcam of the Week

Here's a live feed which, 24/7, shows you part of Times Square in New York. During most daylight hours, you can play a rousing game of "How Many Guys in Elmo Costumes Can I Spot?" The other day, I saw five, all cautiously keeping away from each other…

Today's Bonus Video Links

60 Minutes broadcast a profile this evening of John Oliver…

And here's the little extra segment they did just for the Internet…