This tale was told on this blog on 10/25/14 and seems to me it's worthy of another look. It's true. I swear it's true…

Here's a story I don't think I've told here before. It occurred around 1983 when I was writing a lot of pilots for cartoon shows. I'm going to change a few names but this actually happened…

There was a Korean animation studio that did a lot of sub-contracting work for American cartoon companies. Several Hanna-Barbera shows, as well as programs for other U.S. producers, were largely animated at this studio owned by a man we'll call Mr. Woo. (If there is a studio in Korea owned by anyone named Woo, this isn't that one.)

Mr. Woo decided to try to sell some shows into the American marketplace on his own. He hired some writers. He hired some artists. Most of all, he hired a Development Exec we'll call Hermione. She was an American who worked out of his Southern California office, trying to put together something that an American TV network would purchase directly from Mr. Woo's studio.

One of their artists came up with something they thought had real potential if (big IF) they could find the right writer to develop it and write some outlines and a pilot script. Someone suggested I might be that right writer. Hermione called and asked if I could come in so they could get a look at me and I could get a look at their idea. I said sure. What time and where?

This was back when I believed in going in to meet with anyone who wanted to meet with me. It didn't always result in a job but it usually resulted in me learning something, including what kind of people not to go meet with. That was not without its value. So I went in and met Hermione but not Mr. Woo. Mr. Woo, it was explained to me, was not in the country at the time.

I gave their idea the once-over, thought it was a pretty good one and told Hermione that, yes, I could do something to push it closer to a network sale. She said they wanted to hire me and she started to mention dollar amounts. I said, "Whoa, stop, halt. I don't talk money. That's why I have an agent." I gave her contact info for that person, who was then Stu the Agent. But the numbers I'd heard before I put an end to that part of the conversation struck me as pretty low. When I got home, I called Stu and warned him we were about to get a very low lowball.

When she called him, that's what she pitched. Stu told her my established price for such work. She said that was way too much. Stu said, "Hey, the last time a studio paid him that, the material he produced got CBS to buy the series. That's what you want, isn't it? You can find writers who'll work cheaper but see how many of them did work that got CBS to buy the series."

This is why writers have agents: So they can say things like that. And I should add that the dough we were asking for was not that high. Hanna-Barbera, Marvel, Ruby-Spears, Filmation…they all paid me that without complaint. Even, I think by then, Disney.  It was just high for Mr. Woo's operation.

There was some haggling, wholly from their side. Hermione came up in their offer. We did not come down. As Stu and other agents taught me, negotiation is not always a two-way street. Imagine you go in to price a new Infiniti and they tell you the model you want is $50,000. You offer a dollar. They laugh in your face. Then you say, "Okay, let's compromise. Meet me halfway!" See how far that gets you. Finally, Hermione said, "I'm not authorized to go any higher. If you want more money, you'll have to speak with Mr. Woo."

Stu said, "Okay. Let me speak to Mr. Woo."

She said, "I'll see if I can arrange it" and she hung up. A half-hour later, she called back and said, "How about two weeks from Thursday? At 4:00 PM? That will be 9:00 AM in Korea."

Things had started to be odd. She'd been saying how eager they were to get this thing going; how they'd need the bible and script done quickly. Suddenly, she wanted my agent to wait 16 days to speak to the one person with whom he might be able to make a deal. "I'll talk to him right now," Stu said. "Or tomorrow, or whenever you like." That was a great thing about Stu. He'd chase a potential deal like Javert pursuing Jean Valjean right into the sewers.

"Let's say two weeks from Thursday at 4:00 PM," Hermione confirmed. Stu wrote it on his calendar, but he didn't understand why he had to make an appointment two weeks in advance to talk money with Mr. Woo.

Then Hermione phoned me. "Mark," she said, for indeed that was my name, "I need your assurance on two points. One is that, if we're able to make a deal with your agent, you'll be able to jump on this right away. We're way behind our schedule."

"I'll start the minute we have a deal," I said. "Matter of fact, if it's that urgent, I could start writing right now. Can't you have Mr. Woo call my agent today?"

"No, they'll speak two weeks from Thursday…which brings me to my other concern. I'd like some reassurance from you that you think we'll be able to make a deal."

"Beg pardon?"

"Mr. Woo will get very mad at me if he has a conversation with your agent and we can't go forward with you. Tell me you think we'll be able to make a deal."

I didn't know what to say to that. When you're negotiating with someone, the last thing you want to do is to assure them that you'll settle. They have no incentive to meet your price if they know you'll lower your price.

Finally, I said, "You should know the answer to that better than I could. You know what my agent was asking for…and you have a clearer notion of how high Mr. Woo will go…"

"Yes, yes, I understand that," Hermione insisted. "But do you think we'll be able to make a deal?"

"I don't know."

"This is troubling," she said. "But I guess I have no choice. I have to let the call go ahead."

Later, I recounted all that to Stu who didn't get it, either. Why the fuss over one phone call with Mr. Woo?

Two weeks from Thursday at the precise moment, Stu's phone rang. "Please hold for Mr. Woo," a voice said. Mr. Woo came on the line and, with no formalities, made a terrible offer for my services. In fact, it was less than the last offer we'd turned down from Hermione.

Stu said no. Mr. Woo said, "Look…if Mark writes the script that sells this show, I will see to it that he benefits in many ways. I will reward him but I cannot go any higher with my offer."

Stu said, "Your offer is lower than any of your competitors have paid him for the same kind of work. It's even lower than your Development Person offered him. If anything, you should be paying him more. If he's successful, he's not only going to sell this show for you, he's going to establish you as a network supplier, capable of selling more shows in the future."

Mr. Woo was starting to get a bit peeved. "I understand all of that. I just cannot pay more than what I just offered. But if Mark succeeds, he will be rewarded further. You will just have to trust me."

That baffled Stu: A man he'd never met in person…a man he'd been speaking to for under a minute…saying, "You will just have to trust me." Stu told him, "It's very simple. I gave you Mark's price. If you're not prepared to pay him that, other studios are."

Mr. Woo was not happy. "This is very disturbing," he said. "If you were not going to make a deal with us, I wish you had told us before so I would not have wasted this call."

That was the end of the conversation. Without so much as a "bye-bye," Mr. Woo clicked off. Bewildered, Stu phoned me and recounted the odd exchange. "What I don't get," he said, "is why it was so horrible that Mr. Woo phoned me from Korea. I checked with the phone company and the call only cost a few dollars." I was also sans clue.

An hour later, Hermione phoned to moan how awful it was that we hadn't been able to make a deal. "Mr. Woo is very mad at me," she said.

"Listen," I said. "You have to explain to me what's going on here. I get the feeling there's some vital piece of information that I am lacking."

"Mr. Woo gets very upset when he wastes his daily phone call," she explained.

"Daily phone call?"

"Yes…didn't you know? Mr. Woo was convicted of tax evasion. He's running the company from prison and he only gets one phone call a day."

And a good morning to you. I will probably not be writing much on this blog for the next day or so but I have some inventory material that will appear. I'm having some deadline problems that are being made deadlinier — a new word I just invented — by a touch of headache. Apart from posting here, I'm pretty much avoiding the Internet altogether for a bit so I have no idea what's going on in the world.

Last night, when I felt a little better and less pressured than I do now I watched Ricky Gervais's opening monologue for The Golden Globe Awards. I very much like Mr. Gervais as a talk show guest, a stand-up comic and as the star of some very good shows.

If this is indeed his last time hosting that awards program, great. It was kinda refreshing the first time he spoke some truth to power up there but in that gig, I think he's turned into what Joan Rivers became late in life: Someone who just says something nasty about people because that's their act…and it doesn't really matter if they really feel that way. It almost doesn't matter if it's funny as long as it's mean and outrageous.

The Golden Globes have always been a joke and it's sad to see Ricky Gervais — a man whose other work I greatly respect — become part of that joke. In politics, there's a saying that "the illusion of power is power." If others think you have it, that empowers you. It's the same way in show business: "The appearance of being important makes things important." That explains the Golden Globes.

No one knows who votes. No one cares who votes. But it's a splashy awards show and they throw a good party and biggies turn out for it — so if the unknown selection process says you're Best Actor…hey, it can't hurt to be there, accept and thank the members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, whoever the hell they are, for that great, great honor. If I got an award from an entity of no consequence, I might well exaggerate the significance of it.

I didn't watch the rest of it and I only watched the monologue because I came across it on YouTube. I had something better to do last night, which was to go see Dick Van Dyke perform at the Catalina Bar & Grill in Hollywood…

He was great. He's always great. Even when he's not as great as he can be, he's still great. He was assisted ably by his fine vocal group The Vantastix, a great band and his lovely spouse, Arlene. I think I said last time they did this that Arlene was sensational. Well, she was even better last night and it was great to see the obvious mutual affection when she and her hubby did a duet. Boy, I'm glad those two found each other.

Mr. Van Dyke is 94, as he kept reminding us. He also said he was on some sort of medication that made him a bit high. If he hadn't told us, I wouldn't have known. He was charming and funny and all the things you'd expect Dick Van Dyke to be.

If and when I hear of them doing this again, I'll try to let you know before tickets sell out…but they seem to sell out an hour after they go on sale. I don't think there was one person at the Catalina last night who went away disappointed and I don't think there was one who didn't utter some sentence that began, "Boy, I hope when I'm that age…"

The folks at mojo.com (who can make a list out of any topic in the world and eventually will) pick their Top 10 Hardest-to-Sing Broadway Tunes. I might have included "Out There" from Barnum not because it's vocally difficult but because in the show, the guy playing the title role has to sing it while walking across a tightrope.  Let's see Patti LuPone do that…

Maybe the scariest thing for me about the situation in Iran is that the U.S efforts seem to be under the control of folks who thought the War in Iraq was a good idea and still think it was a good idea. Never mind those little glitches like all the American (and foreign innocent) lives it claimed, never mind that it lasted far, far longer and cost far, far more than these stumblebums predicted, never mind that there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction, never mind that we weren't greeted as liberators, never mind that we didn't liberate, never mind that even these guys can't quite explain how we benefited…

And they're itching to do it all again. The Donald Trump who campaigned against all those mistakes and against "endless wars overseas" is letting that mob call the shots. I think he just loves the idea that he has the power to order that people be killed.

In other news…well, there really is no other news at the moment. Everyone's scurrying to predict what's next with Iran. We will someday look back on 2020 as the year nobody had a friggin' clue on what was going to happen the next day. At least, I hope we'll be able to look back…

The great Barbershop Quartet Mob, the Masters of Harmony, favor us with their rendition of the best song from the musical Hairspray…

Remember the old days when "facts" used to come from somewhere? Mike Pence knows what he knows, no matter what anyone else knows.

I am not a gourmet nor am I an actual food critic so show the following what little respect it deserves. But I have tried of lot of pasta sauces that come in a jar and even a few that come in a can. I have recently come to the conclusion that the best, out of the 1.5 dozen or so I've tried, is Rao's.

This is a fairly new brand that is somewhat connected to the popular restaurants of the same brand name in Los Angeles and New York. One thing I have learned is that a name connection means nothing. The Boston Market frozen foods do not resemble in any way any food items sold at Boston Markets. The Marie Callender's items sold in grocery stores are utterly unlike anything you might have placed before you at a Marie Callender's. The White Castle burgers in the supermarket freezer section are nowhere near as good as the White Castle burgers at a White Castle. And so on.

I've never been to a Rao's restaurant but I'll bet the pattern holds. Rao's are critically-acclaimed places to dine. If I had any good money, I'd wager good money that what they serve there is much better than anything that could come out of a jar, including the jars that bear the same name.

But their marinara sauce that comes out of the jar with the Rao's label is the best I've found at my local Ralphs market and I just tried their bolognese and it's pretty good and surprisingly meaty. Haven't tried the others and probably won't but I will continue to buy those two. I hear the Costcos in some areas sell the basic marinara in bulk but the ones around me don't. Most markets in L.A. do stock their marinara and one or two more of their seventeen or so varieties and most Whole Foods have 'em all. You can also buy some of them online at Amazon or on the Rao's site.

They're not as cheap as some brands and I do not understand why they call them "homemade." In whose house are those sauces made? How many homes in America have the equipment to fill thousands of jars per hour, vacuum-seal the caps and apply labels? That aside, I have to say I haven't found a better marinara in a jar. If I ever do, I'll let you know but I won't be searching much now that I have a case of Rao's in my pantry.

On New Year's Eve, Bernadette Peters hosted Celebrating Sondheim from Lincoln Center's David Geffen Hall. The show runs almost 90 minutes but some of them are very good minutes indeed. The link below should show you the entire program unless they've taken it offline, in which case there will be a little block below this text that says "VIDEO MISSING." If that message is not there, watch it while you can…

Matt Yglesias ponders the question of how much of what the Trump Administration is now saying can be believed. Apparently, not a lot.

Steve Benen also has some things to say about the credibility of this administration and how it becomes more important now that we may be plunging into war.

Larry Blyden was a favorite actor of mine when I was younger. He was one of those rare guys who had a good career on TV, a good career in the movies and a good career on Broadway — all three. He is probably best remembered from his time as the host of the syndicated What's My Line? game show but he was also on two episodes of The Twilight Zone, a great short-lived sitcom called Harry's Girls and dozens of other shows.

My all-time favorite thing I ever saw on a stage was the 1970 revival of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum starring Phil Silvers. Larry Blyden won a Tony Award for Best Supporting Actor as Hysterium in that production and was also the main person responsible for that limited-run Los Angeles offering being transferred to Broadway.

He was in a number of other plays on The Great White Way. Whenever he was, he was known to post his Theatrical Laws on the wall of his dressing room and to hand out printed copies to others. Here are Larry Blyden's Theatrical Laws…

1. It is better to have a hit than a flop.
2. Never put a first year Stanislavsky student in a French farce.
3. Know how many acts are in the play.
4. It is as important to know the cues as it is to know the lines.
5. Save your money.
6. Know which battles you can't win and don't fight them.
7. To have a career in the theatre, one must also have a store.
8. Work breeds work.
9. It is not safe to tell about a job until the day after the show.
10. Save your money.
11. Don't dazzle them with everything at once.
12. Stay down for the laugh.
13. Don't stay down for too long.
14. Most of the people in Bangkok never heard of you.
15. Insanity often passes for talent.
16. When reading for a part, remember that they don't know what to do with it either.
17. Save your money.
18. It is better to act in a play that fails than to get behind in the rent.
19. Being applauded at the end often only means you got through it.
20. Doing a commercial is better than not doing Hamlet.

Larry Blyden died in 1975 in an auto accident when he was vacationing in Marrakesh. He was 49 years old. I bet if he'd lived another 20-30 years, you'd know him from a lot more things than you do. A very talented man.

Daniel Larison: "Iran hawks have been agitating for open conflict with Iran for years. Tonight, the Trump administration obliged them by assassinating the top IRGC-Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani and the head of Kata'ib Hezbollah in a drone strike in Baghdad."

Fred Kaplan: "You don't deliberately kill someone like Soleimani unless you're at war with his country, and even then, you want to think long and hard before you do, given the near-certainty of blowback. The blowback may soon be coming. Friday morning, Khamenei called for three days of national mourning and a 'forceful revenge.' It would be shocking if he didn't follow through."

Alex Ward: "A deadly opening attack. Nearly untraceable, ruthless proxies spreading chaos on multiple continents. Costly miscalculations. And thousands — perhaps hundreds of thousands — killed in a conflict that would dwarf the war in Iraq. Welcome to the US-Iran war, which has the potential to be one of the worst conflicts in history."

Jonathan Chait: "Beginning in 2011, and continuing through the next year, Donald Trump began obsessively predicting that President Obama would start a war with Iran in order to be reelected. Trump stated it publicly, on at least a half-dozen occasions, explicitly positing that attacking Iran would help Obama win reelection."

Kevin Drum: "I'll make one prediction for sure: every time we kill someone like this, the replacement turns out to be even worse. We may consider Soleimani a state terrorist of the first order, but I'll bet he seems like a cautious and prudent institutionalist compared to whoever takes over for him."

ME: "Remember how long it'll be until we vote and…remember how volatile everything is about our current political scene. Everything can change tomorrow. Everything will change within the month, let alone the 321 days until we go to the polls and vote for whoever's names are on the ballots."

I'm not sure why I'm putting this here. The YouTube producer MsMojo will do a "Top 10 Best" list about anything. I'm surprised they haven't done a "Top 10 Best Members of the Three Stooges" yet. (If they did, they'd probably pad it out with Rudy Giuliani, Lindsey Graham, etc.) This is their list of "The Top 10 Best Broadway Musicals." Needless to say, I don't agree with it and neither will you.

Discussing lists like this is always a problem because the criteria is unstated. Does popularity matter? Number of awards? Just what do they mean by "best" anyway? In this case, are we talking about how good the show was in one specific Broadway production or are we evaluating the book and the score, regardless of who performs it? I've seen some pretty lousy productions of some great musicals.

Of their ten, I've seen three. Haven't seen Les Miserables, haven't seen The Phantom of the Opera, and as we all know, I haven't seen Cats live. I would never make up a list like this but I wouldn't put The Lion King, Rent or Jesus Christ, Superstar on it, and I think Hamilton needs to age a few more years before we'll have some idea of how it fits into the overall parade. My list would almost certainly include The Music Man, My Fair Lady, Guys and Dolls, 1776, maybe Gypsy or Sweeney Todd, and definitely my favorite, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. None of them made MsMojo's Top Ten.

But I really don't have a list and if you do, don't send it to me. Here's theirs…

I had a nice week or so of pretending he wasn't there but eventually, we all have to get back to reality. Here are three reminders…

First up: Daniel Larison reviews how Trump's approach to Iran and North Korea has basically been to do almost nothing — and certainly nothing that's been effective — but to keep telling the American people he's solved those problems. But he hasn't. Money quote from Larison…

The problem here is not just that Trump gambled on bad policy goals and lost, but that he is determined to lie to the public about those policies for as long as he can. Trump has made sure that neither the Iranian nor the North Korean government can trust him, and he has proved to the American people that we can't trust him, either. His foreign policy initiatives fail in no small part because no one believes what he says and no one is willing to take a chance by trusting him to honor the commitments he makes.

Secondly: Jonathan Chait reminds us that Trump is still waging war against CNN because, as Chait puts it, "its message is not controlled by his loyalists." He also likes to lie about the ratings of anyone in that category. It reminds me of a blog post that famed zillionaire Richard Branson wrote back in 2016…

Some years ago, Mr. Trump invited me to lunch for a one-to-one meeting at his apartment in Manhattan. We had not met before and I accepted. Even before the starters arrived he began telling me about how he had asked a number of people for help after his latest bankruptcy and how five of them were unwilling to help. He told me he was going to spend the rest of his life destroying these five people. He didn't speak about anything else and I found it very bizarre. I told him I didn't think it was the best way of spending his life. I said it was going to eat him up, and do more damage to him than them. There must be more constructive ways to spend the rest of your life.

Finally for now, Steve Benen tells how Trump's claims and predictions about the stock market do not relate to reality or even to each other. Quote from Benen…

Part of the problem with Trump's boasts is that he often sees the market as a real-time political barometer tied directly to developments in D.C. If the major indexes are on an upswing, the president sees it as proof of his genius. If they're declining, he insists his political opponents are to blame for the downturn. The result is routine incoherence.

The other day, I saw a clip of John McCain in something on CNN and I couldn't help think the following: That if he was still alive, he would already have been the first Republican senator to support the impeachment. Just a thought.

Yesterday morning, a friend and I drove up the coast to Malibu — a drive I figured (correctly) would take less than Forever on a morn when everyone was home watching the Rose Parade. Our destination was one of my favorite restaurants…the Paradise Cove Beach Cafe. I recommend it but I also recommend not going without a reservation and not going when there's going to be heading-for-work or heading-home traffic on the Pacific Coast Highway. The place has great food, including the best clam chowder I've ever had anywhere.

Do me a favor. Since I just wrote that, do not write to tell me where to get even better clam chowder somewhere I'm not likely to ever be. Any time I post anything like that, I get all these e-mails that, first of all, want to correct me like I've made some sort of factual error; like someplace I've never been really has the best clam chowder I've ever had anywhere. And it doesn't do a whole lot of good to write and tell me, "You want really good clam chowder? Next time you're in the Republic of Botswana…"

Among the many delightful things to consume at the Beach Cafe are anything that comes with french fries. Theirs excel in quality and quantity. The pile that came with my fried shrimp contained about as many as your average McDonald's fries up in a month…and yes, I'm exaggerating for comedic effect but that's what we sometimes do here since this blog was started centuries ago. Among the leftovers I brought home, I had a helluva lot of fries.

I've tried reheating french-fried potatoes in the microwave and it leaves them as limp as…well, for some reason this morning, I can only think of dick jokes. But microwaving fries doesn't work so well.

So I tried something I'd read about on that all-seeing, all-knowing source of information (some of it even correct)…the Internet! I sprayed a non-stick skillet with canola oil and put it over medium heat. When it was medium hot, I dumped in some fries, swished them around with a spatula for five minutes and…like the proverbial Phoenix, they rose from the dead.  I didn't know you could do that but now I know…and so do you.

Yes, a friend of mine and I went to see the film of Cats today. I enjoyed it somewhat more than I expected and a lot more than a lot of people in the theater thought I ought to. Some of them apparently thought it's acceptable behavior at a movie to hoot and yell things back at the screen if we're all in agreement that the film's a piece of garbage. I don't agree with that kind of etiquette ever and I don't agree that Cats is as bad a movie as some folks say.

Note that I did not say it was a great film. As I mentioned here, I've never seen Cats as it was meant to be seen — as a musical on the stage. But my sense is it's not possible to make a great film out of the source material and still remain reasonably faithful. What I'm thinking is what we saw this afternoon might just be the best movie that could be made out of it.

I thought it was visually splendid. I thought there are plenty of outstanding performances, including some fine dancing. I think some of the songs are pretty good. And I thought some of the vocal detractors in the audience were laughing at the movie when if they'd given the film more of a chance, they'd have been laughing with it. There was some rather funny stuff in there, especially with James Corden and Ian McKellen.

Yeah, the story's kinda weird. That's the story of Cats, a musical that millions have seen and most have loved. This is no time to change it. Yeah, it's weird to see all those people "made-up" (mostly by CGI) as quasi-human felines. Again, that's just what Cats is. About five minutes in, I decided to embrace the weirdness, the sheer outrageousness of it all. Some of the critics have said they should have made a cartoon out of the show. I decided to treat it as if they did. I had a much better time that way.

I am not exactly recommending this movie. If you can't get past the humans-as-cats, you'll be staring at it with the "Springtime for Hitler" look. If you can accept it for what it is, it might be a good way to introduce the kiddos to musical theater and you may enjoy it too. Just don't go because you think it's going to stink and you'll enjoy it for that reason. It doesn't and you won't. What you might do though is lessen the enjoyment for others in the theater who might be enjoying it.