Steven M. Thompson, who is one of about nine Steve Thompsons who write me, asks…

Hello, Mark. My question is what does a producer do? I thought maybe to procure money for a show or movie, or a scheduler/manager of time and money. Several years ago there was a network Charlie's Angels reboot, I counted nineteen different people credited as executive producer, co-executive producer, producer, co-producer and so on, what do all these people do?

Also noticed when a show is successful, the star of the show will show up with a producer credit in the second or third season. Is this to just show that the star now has a money stake in the show? About ten years ago, I started to hear the term "show runner." Is that a different designation for the producer?

Yeah. "Show Runner" was kinda created because some shows had so many producers, it was difficult to tell who was actually in charge. So on a show that has, say, two Executive Producers, two Supervising Producers, five Producers, three Co-Producers, etc., people refer to one of them as the Show Runner to separate that person from the others whose titles may be honorary or just part of negotiations. Here's how the negotiated ones usually happen…

AGENT: My client wants ten thousand dollars more per episode.

BUSINESS AFFAIRS PERSON: We can't afford that. How about three thousand and a Producer credit?

AGENT: Make it four thousand and a Producer credit and you've got a deal.

There's a certain amount of status in that, especially if it elevates you over someone else on the crew who isn't getting a Producer credit. But the title alone doesn't designate any particular duty or responsibility or power. Sometimes, an agent or manager involved in the sale of a project will grab an Executive Producer credit and then do nothing else. I worked on a series once where two men were credited on the same card as Executive Producers. One of them was heavily involved with every episode of the show. The other one was an agent involved in its sale to the network. I never met the man and have no idea if he even watched the show.

You can give anyone a Producer credit no matter what they actually do. Often, it's linked to who provides or secures the financing. But probably the main thing is that if someone feels important to the success of a show, they want a producer credit. And that's mainly because if the series wins Best Program or Best Comedy Series or Best Anything, everyone with certain forms of "Producer" in their title would get a statuette and be able to say "I won an Emmy."

When I was doing the Garfield & Friends cartoon show, my original formal credit was "Written by." I was the Show Runner and I was also the Voice Director and I did the Voice Casting and I did a bunch of other things but I happen to think you can become a laughingstock via multiple credits. I was recently at a screening of an independent (and largely non-union) movie where one of the men involved had his name in the credits sixteen times.

I don't know if he didn't realize how bad that made him look or if he just didn't care. He was obviously vitally important in the creation of the film but, you know, once it says you produced and directed and wrote the movie, do you really need to add in "Based on a concept by Joe Blow" and "Title Visualizations by Joe Blow" and "Editing Supervised by Joe Blow"? Do you have to devalue the Costume Designer's role by having it say "Costumes Designed by Joe Blow and Mary Whatzername?"

There are some credits that are there for union and legal reasons and others because there's money linked to those particular credits. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about a guy who just gets a tingle from his head down to his toes when he sees his name over and over and over.

Anyway, I only took the writing credit on Garfield & Friends because that was really all that mattered to me. It was either after the first or second time the series was nominated as Best Animated Program that the Executive Producer Lee Mendelson realized that if the show won, I would not get one of those glistening statues with all the pointy edges. Thereafter, absolutely nothing changed about my duties or my salary or anything but it suddenly said "Written and Co-Produced by Mark Evanier." That was only so if the show won, which it didn't, I'd be included among those who got Emmys.

On The Garfield Show, which we did a few years later, I was Supervising Producer. What's the difference between that and Co-Producer? I haven't the foggiest.

I mention all this to explain that there's really no definition as to what you have to do to be the Producer of anything. There's a strict definition to get a credit that says "Directed by…" or "Written by…" But to be a Producer, someone just has to give you the title. It's a shame because some of the folks who get it really do brilliant, important things to earn it and they deserve more respect than the folks who took the title in lieu of more money.

We always recommend Puppet Up!, which is an adult improvised puppet show from the Henson folks. They do shows at their studio in Hollywood whenever they feel like it and I don't know of any upcoming dates there. However, they've announced that they'll be doing shows at Knott's Berry Farm in conjunction with that theme park's Halloween redress to become Knott's Scary Farm. I don't know the exact schedule and I won't be going there but if you're down in Orange County, you might want to look into it.

Knott's Berry Farm is a Southern California institution that opened in the twenties (that's the nineteen-twenties) and it was the biggest thing for miles around until Mr. Disney moved in with his Magic Kingdom all of seven miles away. Over the years, it changed a lot…from a place where you could ride a stagecoach and pan for fake gold to a park full of thrill rides…and if they're hosting Puppet Up!, that suggests it now caters to an older crowd than it did the last time I went there.

The last time I was there: It was 1979 and we were shooting silent comedy bits there with the Bay City Rollers for their NBC Saturday morning show. That's how long it's been since I was there. And not even Puppet Up! can lure me back.

I've been fortunate to know a lot of folks who were both wonderful people and wonderfully talented. One of them was the actor-director Howard Morris.

Howie was born September 4, 1919. You can look at today's date and do the math on that one. Howie left us on May 21, 2005. Not a day goes by since then when I don't miss the guy.

I'm not sure I can explain what was so special about him. He was even funnier in real life than he was on the screen and you probably know how funny he was on the screen. He had a fierce temper at times and usually, I don't think being a nice, friendly person 95% of the time excuses the angry 5%. In fact, I can't think of a single person I've ever met where I could excuse the 5%. Except Howie.

You may know him from many, many corners of show business. He was a player on Sid Caesar's TV programs, arguably the best "sketch" show ever done on television. He was Ernest T. Bass on The Andy Griffith Show, arguably the most beloved situation comedy ever. He was one of the best voice actors to ever work in animation and he directed sitcoms and movies and commercials and…

…and he was just Howie. I wish I could show you how charming he was as himself but there's really not a good example of that on YouTube. You'll have to settle for Howie in front of the camera or a microphone. Like, this is him voicing one of the most memorable series of commercials ever…

And here he is voicing Teen Heart Throb Jet Screamer in the original run of The Jetsons…

And here he is with Sid Caesar in one of the best sketches they did on that arguably-best "sketch" show…

I could post many others. (If you've never seen Caesar and his cast parody the This Is Your Life TV show, I posted it in this message and boy, are you in for a treat!) What I really wish, apart from having him back, is that I could show you how terrific he was when he was just being Howie. A fortunate man am I that I had him in my life for not-nearly-enough years.

Back in this message and this message, we wrote about the Sportsmen's Lodge, a once-popular complex out in Studio City that had a coffee shop, a hotel and dozens of different buildings and outdoor areas where you could hold a meeting, a party, a memorial service, a Bar Mitzvah reception, a wedding…whatever. The food was never that great, the facilities were never that fancy, the service was never that swift…but if you needed to hold one of the aforementioned events, it was sometimes your only option. A friend of mine who held a series of conferences there once told me a story that went roughly like this…

I got fed up with the bad food and bad service and I finally told them, "We're moving to another place." This did not upset the Sportsmen's Lodge staffer I was dealing with. She shrugged and said, "You'll be back." And a few months later, we were.

As the previous links show, there have been talks for the last few years of either ripping some of the place down and building a big shopping center or tearing it all down and building a bigger shopping center. The plans were on, then they were off, then they were on, then they were modified, then they were announced as far in the future, then the date was moved back…

Well, it's starting to look something's final now that they've started tearing down buildings. I'm not sure if I'll miss the place. It may depend on what they build in its place. But I do know an awful lot of receptions and meetings are going to have a hard time finding a new place to happen.

John Kippen is a magician I know from the Magic Castle in Hollywood. He performs there and I see him at the members' lunches…but until I saw this video, I didn't know why he had that unusual condition in his face. I did know that he didn't let it stop him from performing at the Castle and that he was real good. I also knew he didn't seem to want even the slightest smidgen of sympathy. Here's a brief TED Talk he gave to deliver a lesson from his life…

Our Trump-Free Weekend on this blog ended at Midnight and you'll notice I held off until 12:05 AM to post something about him.  That's admirable restraint on my part.

For months now, friends of mine have been telling me that the guy was totally outta control; that there was no logic, no restraint, no discussion before he opened his mouth and/or his Twitter app.  I knew most of what he said or posted were hateful lies but I kinda thought maybe there was some strategy behind it, some factor that made it not as gonzo as it all seemed.  Trump prides himself on being a great negotiator and I know that some negotiators deliberately play a little crazy in ways that put the other side on the defensive.  It can give them a bit of an advantage and I thought maybe that was what was going on with Trump.

I don't think that anymore.  All weekend, he kept tweeting that Alabama was in the path of Hurricane Dorian…this despite the fact that the National Weather Service kept sending out tweets correcting him…

You'd think anyone in any position of authority — not just the President of the United States but anyone — would want to make sure they got this right lest folks panic needlessly. And you'd think once he did get it wrong, someone would have stopped him from saying it over and over…perhaps the same person who might have told him, "Uh, Mr. President, may I respectfully suggest that with this huge hurricane destroying lives and homes, this might not be the best time to be seen playing golf?"

But no. No one can tell this guy anything and what comes out of his mouth or Twitter feed at any given moment is just what he felt like saying at that moment. The truth is whatever he says it is at the moment and anything that doesn't match up is Fake News.

Even Neil Cavuto — a Fox News commentator who will smooch the heinie of anyone who lowers taxes on the rich — has had trouble falling dutifully into line lately. When Trump started slamming Fox, mainly for a poll that showed him losing to four Democrats, Mr. Cavuto finally grew the beginnings of a spine…

Cavuto noted, however, that the president had made it "clear [that] to fact-check him is to be all but dead to him and his legion of supporters who let me know, in no uncertain terms, I am either with him totally or I am a 'Never Trumper' fully."

Perhaps, the host said, it was this "Loyal on everything or not to be trusted on anything" mentality that prompted the president to once again bash Fox News on Wednesday and urge his supporters to stop watching the channel. Interpreting the president's criticism as a suggestion that Fox News had been operating as an extension of his administration and reelection campaign, Cavuto, like other network personalities, pushed back against the notion. Trump's tweet also drew critical responses from Fox News political analyst Brit Hume and on-air personalities Guy Benson and Howard Kurtz.

Granted, this is a little like Knucklehead Smiff telling Paul Winchell to stop putting words in his mouth but it's something.

• Too bad the Bahamas isn't a U.S. territory. Trump could go there and fix all the damage by tossing out rolls of paper towels.

Hey, if you're the kind of person who comes to this blog — which I assume you are or you wouldn't be reading this — here's a book that might interest you. My buddy Jeff Abraham has teamed up with his buddy Burt Kearns and written The Show Won't Go On, a history of performers who died in front of an audience.  You probably know about the great Dick Shawn (pictured above) but you'll be surprised by how many other times someone has been on a stage and expired, either because their performance went horribly wrong or some internal organ did.

Grim?  Morbid?  Certainly…but also fascinating.  And Jeff and Burt are good enough storytellers and researchers to make the stories interesting and enlightening.  There are dozens of them, give or take a Wallenda or two.

When I got my review copy, I opened it just to take a quick peek and wound up reading half the book then, the other half the next day…and the tales are not all sad.  For some of these performers, sad would have been to expire all alone in some nursing home, having not heard applause for the previous decade or two.  A lot of performers love the idea of working 'til the moment they drop and here we have the story of many who managed to do just that.

If you need a sampling, Jeff and Burt are guests this week on Gilbert Gottfried's Amazing Colossal Podcast! If you're ready to purchase, here's an Amazon link. Enjoy.

Baby swans going for a walk…

I was just on the main CNN webpage where you have a choice of about ten headline-type stories to read, all of them horrible news for somebody. There's a hurricane, there's a mass shooting, there's a boat that caught fire and many on it died, there's an awful car wreck, etc…

I don't feel much like blogging right now. Maybe later in the day. In the meantime, I'll dive into my folder of Silly Stuff To Post When I Don't Feel Like Blogging. Where's the Jerry Lewis Telethon when I need something to distract me from reality?

Alton Brown — whose returning show Good Eats I enjoy watching — explains the difference between baking powder and baking soda. I like this short video because, first of all, I never knew that difference. And secondly, Mr. Brown is one of the best "explainers" on television and I enjoy seeing how he does it. If my high school Chemistry teacher had had his skills, I might have learned something in that class…

Christopher Quan sent me two questions. Here they come, one at a time…

A morbid question, but have you ever considered making a final message, to be put up posthumously?

This might be the most-asked question I've received and the answer is no. If I'm doing this blog when I turn ninety, I'll probably entertain the notion then but as I've said here before, I don't believe in premature surrender to age or mortality. They will eventually win — no doubt about it — but I've seen a lot of folks I know decide it's almost all over way before they have to. I'm talking about guys younger than I am now (I'm 67) who've somehow decided that the interesting part of their lives is past and that now it's just a matter of hanging around, waiting for the Grim Reaper to arrive.

I don't give in to that…although I do expect that when the time comes, G.R. will come for me in exactly the same manner as an Uber driver. I'll get a little text message that he's five minutes away and I need to be outside or he might leave without me. The only real differences will be that (a) I won't be able to select or change my destination and (b) he won't be driving a Prius. I will be taken directly to Hell, though probably not by the shortest route and there, amidst the torture and fire pits and sulfur smell, I'll be getting constant texts asking me to rate my driver and to tip.

No, I don't think about prepping for my death. I did the Last Will and Testament thing years ago and haven't gotten around to amending it since I left most of what I'm worth to Carolyn, plus I named Earl Kress as Executor and now they're both gone. I take that as a reminder from Someone that you really can't plan effectively for death, at least until you're a few weeks from Hospice.

Oh — and I've also arranged for a big party for all my friends after I go. It's going to be great with terrific food and entertainment and I'm going to really regret not being there for it. I mention it now so some of you will feel there's a reason to be nice to me. You're going to want to be on that guest list.

But no, no plans to write an after-I'm-gone post. I think it's healthier to live my life like there's never going to be a need for that kind of thing.

And now, here's Christopher's other question…

Have you ever been offered to work on a project, but declined for whatever reasons, then saw that project later and thought "I really want to work on that now"?

When I read this, I thought "Oh, there must be several." But I've been thinking about it for a few days now and I can't come up with one. I once passed on an offer to spend Labor Day in Vegas — and a few weeks before that here — working on the Jerry Lewis Telethon. I used to cite that as a regret but in the last few years of Jerry's life, I witnessed or heard about enough misbehavior on his part to be glad I said no to that one.

This is tough to answer because I don't know what my life would have been like if I'd said yes to some offers. I was once offered a staff position as a writer for Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show. I thought it over and turned it down for four reasons…

1. It was mostly a job to write monologue jokes and I didn't feel I was strong enough in that area.  It wasn't what I did best (or least-worse, which is the humble way to look at it) and I wasn't confident I could turn in enough acceptable jokes as rapidly and as often as the job required.
2. A friend of mine once accepted the same job. He went to work a big fan of Johnny and that show and had such a rough time — including fights directly with Carson — that ever after, he couldn't bring himself to even watch what had once been his favorite program.  I was genuinely afraid of that happening to me.
3. At that particular time in my life, I didn't feel like getting up at 8 AM five days a week, driving myself to Burbank, working there all day and fighting rush hour traffic to get home.
4. And I would have had to turn down or quit some other projects that felt to me like a better use of my time and what we laughingly call "creative energy."

So I said no and while I think that was the right decision, we'll never know for sure.  Most of the answers I came up with to this question are in that category.  If I think of one that isn't, I'll post it here.

• I wish these folks who insist they have a "God-given right to own whatever guns I want" thought there was a God-given right to not be randomly murdered by someone who believes he has a God-given right to randomly murder.

Here from a 1977 Saturday Night Live, John Belushi gets to open the show…

John Neumann from Minneapolis writes…

Hey, Mark. I love your site, of course. I wonder if you have opinions about the various game shows ABC has brought back, particularly Match Game with Alec Baldwin. I love game shows so I'm tickled to see them. They also stick pretty closely to the original rules and stagings, freshening only enough to not look campy.

Still, they remove much of the life of it with heavy-handed editing and obviously scripted jokes. On the new Match Game, they love reaction shots of chuckling celebrities, yet won't trim the stars' writing time.

Alec always has a little crack after he's introduced, when visiting the panel before each game, and when meeting the civilians. It's all robotic. While the loser is being "spun off," he reads the insult into camera. Thing is, they don't need all this. He's funny when he ad-libs.

I guess this is my opinion, not yours, but I'd love to hear what you think.

I think I'm not watching them regularly but I have sampled the new prime-time versions of Pyramid, Press Your Luck, Card Sharks and Match Game. I think they all suffer from sets that are too big and too elaborate. Card Sharks especially is in itself a small, simple game we could play on a card table and it feels overwhelmed on a stage that looks like it should be holding a Boat Show. It's like having a symphony orchestra play "Chopsticks." I also preferred the game played at a faster pace for a half-hour at a time before a studio audience that had less over-hyped reactions.

But apart from one other thing which I'll mention below, it's okay. The host, Joel McHale, adds almost nothing but then the hosts of the old Card Sharks were pretty peripheral to that game, too. On Pyramid, Michael Strahan is more or less interchangeable with anyone else they could have hired…or did since Dick Clark was the M.C. Pyramid suffers from length, a too-high-tech set and its iconic bonus round now seems a bit too easy to win. But there's nothing really wrong with either of these revivals.

Match Game also seems okay to me. I liked Gene Rayburn on the old show. I like Alec Baldwin on this one. I can only take so much of a game where the object is to guess which sorta-dirty word someone will write to answer a question designed to elicit a sorta-dirty response. An hour at a time is too much and the celebrity panel doesn't have quite the same camaraderie of the old Charles Nelson Reilly/Brett Somers/Richard Dawson lineup…but this is pretty much what any decent revival of that game show is going to be, especially if it has to be an hour long.

Actually — and speaking of Richard Dawson — I think the most successful game show revival around today is because of whoever thought to install Steve Harvey as host of Family Feud. There's a little too much Steve Harvey on my TV these days but I like him on the Feud. Apart maybe from Chris Hardwick on The Wall, he's the only host these days who gets called on to ad-lib when the game takes unforeseen turns and he and Hardwick are more than able to do so.

Which brings me to the new Press Your Luck, which I really don't like. I thought the original was just about perfect and they've made it bigger and less organic and whoever's editing it isn't as skillful as the old producer-director Bill Carruthers was in (usually) editing without giving the show an edited feel. I love the idea of a female host but Elizabeth Banks, though wonderful when she has a character to play, doesn't project enough authority as herself.

The first half hour, which more or less follows the format of the old show, is fine but too many of the contestants I've seen seem unaware that there's a genuine strategy involved in knowing when to press and when to pass. All the winners I've seen won mainly by luck and I have limited interest in a game where all you have to do to win is hit a buzzer at the right moment. And then it all falls apart in the new bonus round which has nothing to do with the game show that was memorable enough that they brought it back. It's kind of like Deal or No Deal but — again — with less need to strategize.

My problem with that last half hour is one I also had with the one episode of the new Card Sharks I made it through. Some folks in the game show business are now saying, "It isn't enough to watch some player win big. We need to care deeply about that person and hear what a good human being he or she is and how much love there is in their family and we have to see them hug their family members and cry and talk about how they sacrifice for one another." If you make the bonus round in Press Your Luck, you have to also trot out some friends and/or family members and put some of your emotions on display.

This kinda works with The Wall, possibly because the love between the players is woven into the show from the start…and possibly because Chris Hardwick is really good at saying the right things and not milking it. On the 2019 Press Your Luck, it comes outta nowhere for the winner beginning after he or she wins the first half-hour. Also, you can kind of figure out what's going to happen before it happens just by keeping an eye on how much time is left in the show.

While I don't dislike any of these shows (except the last part of Press Your Luck), I also am not motivated to set my DVR or watch any of them regularly. I'm kind of sad about that because I used to like game shows and now, like so many "reality" shows, they just don't seem real to me.