My longtime buddy Jim Korkis is one of the world's great authorities on All Things Disney. Upon seeing our discussion here about voice guys like Clarence Nash being on salary as opposed to paid by the job, Jim sent me this…

Feel free to use any or all of the following on your blog. Basically, I am just sharing to let you know Nash was on salary not just to do a voice.

On December 2, 1933, Nash became Disney's 125th employee. He was earning the same amount he made working at Adohr Milk for $35 a week as "Whistling Clarence, the Adohr Bird Man." He would drive a miniature open-topped milk wagon pulled by a team of miniature horses. He would go to local schoolyards and assemblies to entertain children with his bird calls and animal sounds as well as giving out treats to promote the milk. He was attired as a standard Adohr milk man.

He had auditioned at the Disney Studio and Walt did indeed want him to do the voice for a girl duck he had in mind for an upcoming cartoon. Ub Iwerks, Walt's former partner, had also heard Nash do his act on the radio and called him in to audition for a new cartoon he was making called The Little Red Hen, based on the children's story of a hen looking for help to plant, harvest and grind her corn.

Nash wisely phoned to ask Walt's permission, but Walt was unavailable. Ironically, Walt also had a version of the same story, titled The Wise Little Hen, in development and was planning to have Nash do the voice of the duck character. Walt told him not to take the job and had him meet with Disney storyman Pinto Colvig (the voice of Goofy but also the guy in charge of voices at the studio) who told him, "Walt told me about your calling about your going over to Iwerks. He said, 'I like that loyalty in that guy, I'm going to put him on the payroll.'"

Nash could not put in enough hours just doing voices to justify that full-time salary, so he often found himself temporarily in side jobs from accepting artist portfolios at the front desk and processing them to being a chauffeur for visiting celebrities. Also, because of his performing background as an "animal impressionist" on the Redpath Chautauqua and Lyceum circuit, he accompanied Walt on many of Walt's early radio show appearances as well as doing additional voices like the bluebird in Song of the South, the meows for little Figaro the kitten in a handful of short cartoons to the earliest voices for Huey, Dewey and Louie.

Walt kept him on salary for several reasons including the fact that Nash didn't seek personal publicity (unlike Pinto Colvig did for his work in Snow White). He was a genuinely nice and well-liked person, he was flexible at doing whatever he was asked and Walt often kept people on salary years past their usefulness because of their early loyalty to him.

Nash's wife's reaction to him being hired to do the voice of a duck was "That's nice but it probably won't last." By the way, Nash's tombstone in the San Fernando Mission Cemetery in Mission Hills, California, is shared with his wife (who died in 1993) and has a carving of Donald and Daisy Duck holding hands.

How do I know all of this? I grew up in Glendale, California, the home of Nash that I passed every day on my way to school. I got to know him in his later years and he was a natural entertainer who loved making children laugh. Of course, I am also considered a Disney historian with over thirty books written on Disney related topics.

Thanks, Jim. I think I have most of those thirty books and they're must-haves for anyone interested in Walt and the world he built around himself. Here's an Amazon link to order some of those books. All highly recommended.

• Trump's planning to remain in a seated position for the rest of his time in office. He heard they can't indict a sitting president.

I really like a couple of these guys who make YouTube videos singing four-part harmony all by themselves. One of them is Sonny Vande Putte and here he favors us with a golden hit from Elton John…

Folks are writing to ask me what happened with the Subway sandwich folks. I wrote about it here but basically: A week ago Saturday, I decided to order two Subway sandwiches via their app, then walk down to the store and pick them up. The app said the store closed at 9 PM. Shortly after 8, I ordered. My order was accepted, my credit card was charged $18.35 and it said my order would be waiting for me at 8:30. Ah, but when I got to the shop, it was closed. The app thought it closed at 9 but it closed at 8 so I paid for two sandwiches I never got and I walked about a mile to pick up nothing.

Because it was a weekend — and a holiday weekend, to boot — their Subway Care phone line for Customer Support was closed and I thought I wouldn't be able to straighten things out until the following Tuesday. In the previous post, I told the story up to this point.

Soon after I posted it, I got a message from a nice gent who manages a different Subway outlet. I gather he was unsurprised by incompetence at the company for which he works. He gave me a phone number that, he said, would get me through to someone at Subway Care on Sunday. Thank you very much, sir.

On Sunday, I called and did get to someone who apologized profusely. She said that while it might take until Tuesday when the full office was open, three things would be done. The $18.35 would be charged back to my credit card. I would be sent a Subway gift card as an apology for the error and inconvenience. And the app would be corrected with the proper hours. As of more than a week later, none of these things has been done.

(The gift card, by the way, she said would be $5.00. That didn't sound like much of an apology to me, especially from a company that often discounts an order of two sandwiches like mine by that much. But, hey, you take what you can get…which perhaps should be the slogan for Subway.)

Yesterday afternoon, I called again and spent way too much of my life on the phone, explaining to a different nice lady what I'd been promised and how none of it was done. She apologized even more profusely and assured me she would make it all happen…and that's where we are. These people can make a foot-long Sweet Onion Chicken Teriyaki sandwich on 9-Grain Honey Oat bread in thirty seconds but refunding my money takes forever. Further details, if any, will follow.

We're still talking about how cartoon voice actors get paid. Robert Forman just sent me this…

A few years back, over at Cartoon Research, they did an article on the cartoon "Windblown Hare" in which it was mentioned that Mel Blanc was paid $125.00 for his work on the cartoon. I found that amount to be absurdly low.

Checking the CPI calculator, that works out to about $1,500.00 in today's dollars which would mean that Mr. Blanc would receive about $30k in today's dollars for 20 cartoons in a year. So it doesn't seem that at least at the time a person could make any kind of a living doing that as a career. I assume even a guy like Blanc had to do a lot of hustling to make a living.

I note that today the people who voice The Simpsons make about as much money per episode as Blanc made in 10 years of Warner's cartoons. My question for you is was there a time when there was a major shift, and the voice actor business became something a person could earn a living doing? Or is The Simpsons just an outlier and it is still a hard way to make a living?

The Simpsons is an outlier in just about every aspect of show business. It will probably turn out to be the most financially successful thing ever done for television if it isn't already.

About Mel Blanc's pay: You need to remember that Mel Blanc was not "just" a professional cartoon voice actor. He was an actor who did many things (a few even on-camera) including radio shows, records, voiceovers for non-animated films, commercials, etc. As with many actors, a lot of the work was for industrial or regional projects the mass public never heard or saw.

In his last few years, he sometimes got big paychecks to voice some Bugs Bunny project — like, say, a series of commercials. That was because he was The Great and Famous Mel Blanc and there was a fear there'd be a mass public outcry (and maybe a negative reaction to the commercials) if they replaced him as the voice of Bugs. This enabled him and his also-shrewd son Noel to demand large amounts.

I told a story here about how I once directed Mel for a TV show where we paid him what I thought was a lot of money to record three or four lines as Bugs. I'm thinking it would be okay to tell you how much and please understand I'm not suggesting he wasn't worth every penny of it. But for about five minutes of work that he didn't even have to drive anywhere to do, Mel got ten thousand dollars.

For most of his career, playing Bugs Bunny was nowhere near his main source of cash. One of the reasons he asked for and got that screen credit that ticked-off his co-stars was that he felt the job wasn't paying him enough. He thought maybe having his name on the cartoons would lead to more job offers…and it did. He certainly made more money being on The Jack Benny Program or dozens of other radio shows.

For a decade or three there, Mel would run around all day from studio to studio doing a radio job here, a commercial there, then a record or an educational short or something else. All that stuff could add up to a pretty nice living. June Foray was doing the same kind of thing, often for the same employers. June would leave her home out in Woodland Hills each weekday morning at 7 AM and drive into Hollywood. Then she'd spend the day going from job to job…sometimes four or five in a day, sometimes into the evening. Even during the years she did Rocky & Bullwinkle, cartoons were never the majority of the bookings.

At one point in the fifties, Mel did the voices for an animated commercial for PaperMate pens that ran constantly on TV. It is said he made more money off that commercial than he had off all the cartoons he'd done by then put together.

It's the same today. Almost no one is exclusively a cartoon voice performer. The people you think of in that category also do commercials, video games, audio books, promos, dubbing, industrial films, announcing, etc. I have worked with several cartoon voice actors who also provide voices for like when you call a business and a recorded voice asks you, "How may I direct your call? If you know your party's extension, you may enter it now."

This is something a lot of aspiring cartoon voice actors don't get. Each year at Comic-Con — and this year will be no exception — I do a panel late Sunday afternoon called "The Business of Cartoon Voices." I bring in a top agent and a couple of actors and we dispense free advice to the wanna-bes…the kind of advice for which some less-than-honest "teachers" charge hefty fees.

Each year, at least a couple of the folks in the audience look amazed to hear that the actors whose careers they covet don't just spend all day voicing furry creatures and giant robots. But even if that's all they book, some (note the emphasis) can do fairly well if they get on a couple of series or get called often enough.

Can you make a good living that way? Absolutely. It depends on how much you work. There are thousands of people who fail. I'm fairly certain the Hollywood voiceover industry has never been more overcrowded with talent but there are people who work. Some walk out of a recording session with a couple thousand dollars for a morning's work and then have another session booked after lunch. They're the exceptions…but so was Mel Blanc.

One of America's great portrait painters, Everett Raymond Kinstler, died last Sunday at the age of 92. Kinstler's portraits of the famous and powerful hang in important buildings all across this land and even presidents would pose for him. Starting with Richard Nixon, Kinstler painted every single one except Barack Obama. He was brilliant at capturing the essence of anyone he put on canvas.

So why am I writing about him on this blog? Because before he became a painter of well-known faces, Mr. Kinstler was a comic book artist…and a very good one.  Growing up in New York City, he attended the School of Industrial Art there, quitting school just before he turned sixteen to work in various "shops" (studios) as an apprentice. Most of his work at that age involved inking the work of other artists for the Sangor Shop. That led to his earliest solo work which seems to have been for Better Comics in 1942.

Kinstler jumped around from publisher to publisher. Among the companies that bought his work were Avon, Archie, Ziff-Davis, Fawcett and Marvel. He rarely worked on features that are remembered today but he drew some Hawkman stories for DC in 1947, some Zorro for Western Publishing in 1953 and '54, and Black Hood for Archie in 1945. Mostly, he did anthology-type stories for various books and especially excelled on westerns and romance stories. In the forties and fifties, he also drew for pulp magazines including Doc Savage and Ranch Romances.

In the mid-fifties as work became harder to get in comics, he did more and more painting for advertising and book illustration. His last work in comics appears to have been educational stories for Gilberton (the Classics Illustrated people) around 1960. From then on, demand for his services as a painter took him forever away from comics.

But he recalled those years fondly as I learned when I interviewed him at the 2006 Comic-Con International. I wrote then on this blog, "It's always nice when I get to meet a veteran comic artist I've never met before but whose work I've always admired. Everett Raymond Kinstler is a charming, classy gentleman." That, he was…and very talented charming, classy gentleman.

I was hoping to get through this weekend without thinking about Trump but I made a wrong turn at some website and stumbled into an essay by David Frum on why he thinks impeachment at this time is a bad idea. For what little my agreement may be worth, I agree.

Let's see now if I can make it to Monday morning without thinking about You-Know-Who again.

As a follow-up to this post, Andy Rose wrote in to ask…

In addition to Ducky Nash, wasn't Mel Blanc on an exclusive contract to Warner Bros. for a while (at least for cartoons)? It was my understanding that was why Mel suddenly stopped playing Woody Woodpecker for Walter Lantz in 1941, and then doesn't appear to have done cartoons for anybody else except Warners until around 1960. Of course, Mel wasn't exactly on staff since he was busy with lots of other radio and TV work, but I assume WB had to at least pay him some sort of ongoing retainer for him to not work for anybody else.

By "on staff," we're referring to a situation where someone is paid by the week or the month; where the employer buys his or her time rather than to hire them for a specific job. As I understand it, Mel had an exclusive contract with Warners for animation. They paid him some amount higher than union scale and gave him that screen credit that annoyed some of the other actors in those cartoons. They may even have guaranteed him a certain number of recording sessions over a specified time period.

In exchange, Mel agreed to be exclusive to them in…well, I'm not sure if it was for short theatrical cartoons or all animation but that would have been spelled out in the contract. As we all know, Mel recorded a voice for Mr. Disney's Pinocchio though only a hiccup was used. I'm thinking though that was before his exclusive deal with WB. (I'm having lunch in a week or two with someone who would know and I'll find out.)

The point is that an exclusive deal to work a certain number of days for a certain amount is not the same thing as a staff job. Mel never had the latter, which is why he was free to work anywhere else at any time of any day so long as he worked Warners' needs into his schedule.

A friend who worked for Disney and didn't want his name mentioned wrote me that Clarence "Ducky" Nash may not have been the only voice actor Disney ever had on staff. My friend thinks Cliff Edwards, who was the voice of Jiminy Cricket, did for a time, also. But both these men might also fall into that category I mentioned — folks who did voices and other things for the studio.

There were storymen and animators and others on staff who occasionally would play a role or two in a cartoon. Nash and Edwards did a lot of P.R. work and appearances and someone else wrote me that "Ducky" even sometimes conducted studio tours on the lot for V.I.P. guests. I wonder if they ever thought of putting him at the switchboard and having Donald Duck answer the studio phone. I've talked to operators who were less intelligible.

This is a quick peek at how videotape used to be handled in the television business. Someone pulled out what I believe is the final edited master of an episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus made in 1970. That's close to half a century ago. Note if you will that it's in a Scotch box but it's Memorex tape and it looks like the colors are not what they used to be…

Skidoo has been removed from the schedule of the Beverly Cinema, replaced in its Midnight June 29 slot by Alice's Restaurant. I'm going to guess a problem acquiring the print of Skidoo is the reason. Since I don't know how I feel about this film, I don't know how I feel about it not being shown. Perhaps it will turn up at the Bev one of these days.

Brent McKee wrote to ask…

I heard something on a podcast I was listening to today that surprised me. It was Leo Laporte's Tech Guy Podcast from May 19th. In the course of the show there was a call from a guy who had been doing radio and voice work for years and knew some of the legends including Daws Butler.

Daws apparently gave this guy some advice which was to never work in Hollywood. He also said that in the years that he worked for Hanna-Barbera, Daws was always paid daily rate. There was much tut-tutting from Leo about how important Daws was to the success of Hanna-Barbera cartoons, but it got me to wondering what the standard practice is in the industry. Because you don't need a voice man every day, you wouldn't keep them on salary, would you? Now the amount might be greater or lesser, but surely you'd only pay them for when you need them? Or am I misunderstanding what the guy was saying?

Leaving aside a voice actor who also performs some other function on a show (like Bill Scott on Rocky & Bullwinkle where he was an actor-writer-producer), the only cartoon voice performer I can think of who was ever on a weekly salary was Clarence Nash. Disney always had him around when they needed the voice of Donald Duck for practically anything including promotional recordings. They also sent him out with a Donald puppet to make personal appearances.

I can't think of any others. In his autobiography, Joe Besser bragged about being paid some huge, unrevealed weekly salary by DePatie-Freleng to do voices on their cartoons in the sixties or maybe seventies. He didn't do anywhere near enough for them to make that cost-effective so I kinda doubt that claim.

All the actors at Hanna-Barbera were paid by the job. Most received union scale — whatever the Screen Actors Guild had negotiated at that point. Some of those who had important roles or long-running successful characters or personal fame would negotiate for amounts above union scale.

Often these days and sometimes back then, a lead would get double-scale or triple-scale or scale plus $500 or something like that. Sometimes, they would also negotiate for a certain guaranteed amount of work. Joe Barbera told me that at one point, Alan Reed was holding out for a substantial raise to do another season of The Flintstones. He wanted one amount above scale for each session; H-B wanted to pay him another. They compromised somewhere in the middle and also guaranteed Mr. Reed a certain number of sessions at S.A.G. scale on some other Hanna-Barbera show…which is why he was the voice of the character Dum-Dum in the Touché Turtle cartoons.

So yes, Daws Butler was a day player.  So was Don Messick, so was John Stephenson, so was Jean Vander Pyl, etc.  They may have negotiated rates above scale and at times, certainly did.  But they did not get a weekly paycheck from the studio.  They were hired when needed and paid by the session.

At times, Daws was down on the whole process.  This is just my opinion but I think Daws did not always have the best agents.  But he also for a long time had a little school in his home where he trained young actors for the profession so I don't think he was too down about working in Hollywood.

And he charged very little for those classes so I don't think he was hard-up for money.  I would not however disagree with someone who felt that, given his value to the success of that studio and to the worth of most characters he voiced, he was grossly underpaid.  I feel the same way about most of the great cartoon voice actors that I feel about most of the great comic book writers and artists.

You know what it is. It's Skidoo, director Otto Preminger's 1968 attempt to do something that "these kids today" would relate to…or at least go see. I do not recommend viewing this film but there are certain things in this world that you oughta do just once…and Skidoo should be seen one time or less. The cast alone boggles the mind: Jackie Gleason, Carol Channing, Mickey Rooney, Burgess Meredith, Peter Lawford, George Raft, Frankie Avalon, other folks like that…and in his final motion picture appearance, Groucho Marx in the role of God. Gleason called the picture "the greatest meatball of all time" and he didn't mean that as a compliment despite his apparent love of meatballs.

Why am I telling you this now? Not to get you to order the DVD…and My God, they've also put it out on Blu-ray! But you can if you want. I mean, I won't stop you.

No, I'm here to alert folks in the Los Angeles area that the Beverly Cinema — the movie theater near Beverly and La Brea that's either owned or somehow controlled by Quentin Tarantino — is running a Technicolor print of the thing as a Midnight Movie on June 29. Here's your chance to be part of an audience that will look exactly like the folks watching the "Springtime for Hitler" number in The Producers except they won't start laughing and declare it a hit. I will either be at this screening or not be at this screening. In a way, neither is a great choice.

(Hey, I just realized: The Producers was released on November 10, 1968 and Skidoo had its world premiere on December 2, 1968. That's probably significant in some deep way but I have no idea what it is.)

If this film fascinates you, know that it's been discussed a lot on this blog starting with this post. If that whets your appetite to read more about it, go to our search box and slap in that name. Here, once again, is the trailer — and the movie is even weirder than this…

• I know how to get Donald Trump out of the White House! Hang photos of John McCain all over the place!

Just got this from Brian Trester…

I had a few questions about the writers guild and your thoughts on strikes and non union workers being called in.

I know that in the past you have stated you do not like them and listed a good number of reasons why. I am just wondering if you could ever defend a reason for crossing the picket line. An example may be a new writer seeing it as his chance to finally get some work sold or turned in. They may see this as a break and their only chance to land a big time deal (big for them) and maybe launching their career.

The second reason could be what if I am happy with my current deal and feel the company I am working for or producer has been more than fair with me. I may have signed a contract saying I will do so many shows for X amount of money. If the strike begins while I am under a contract do I honor my contract and be called a scab or do I join the strike and thus break a deal I had agreed to. To me I feel if I agree to a deal I should stick it out until the end. then when its met I can join the strike as my commitment is done. I do not know the rules about this so it may already be addressed.

I know writers especially in the past were treated very poorly paid poorly in comparison to say the actors and other members of the production team and often were not given credit for work done. I believe late night shows are still like this as I do not remember them giving credit to writers for what they did on the show.

I guess I am just curious as to your thoughts if its ever ok to cross a line or continue work if a strike is called and if so what would you think would be a good exception.

I can't think of a scenario I would consider a good exception. To me, the two scenarios you mention are certainly not.

I'm sure when the WGA goes on strike, every wanna-be writer in the world wonders if this could be their chance. It really isn't. First of all, most producers don't want someone whose work is only "good enough" when the real pros aren't available. This is why when the guild does go on strike, very few scab scripts are bought.

Most shows do shut down because the folks in charge don't want to stay in production with the kind of scripts they can get. Usually, the soap operas manage to keep going and they're usually unhappy with what winds up going on the air…and how the temps screw up the long-range continuity of the series.

Secondly on that or any scenario: It's kind of weasely to cross that picket line. You want the great salary and other benefits that have been won by past strikes but you're not willing to support the system that won them? Even I, gentleman that I am, might not be polite enough to not tell you what I think of you. I sure don't see "But it could be my big break" as even the tiniest justification for that.

As for the other scenario: Yes, you might be quite happy with the current deal you have. So are most of the writers who walk out when there's a strike. But there are specific issues to any strike, most of which could affect your next deal or the right of the guild to police any deal. You have to look at the long game here. If the guild is weakened, that's not good for you. Your pension and health benefits could get cut back. Your residuals could get lowered. Their ability to fight for your rights can be impaired. Those are just a few examples in a long, long list.

If you're working on a Guild-covered project for a company that's a signatory to the Guild, you're working under the Guild's Minimum Basic Agreement. That's the deal they make on behalf of their membership with the AMPTP (these guys). Your own personal contract is kind of like an add-on to that. It may just say the terms of your employment will be the terms of the MBA or it may say that plus specify certain terms and compensation you receive above and beyond the MBA.

Either way, when the Guild calls a strike, it's because the MBA has expired and the WGA and the AMPTP have been unable to agree on a new one. So if the WGA doesn't have a contract, you don't have a contract.

In 1988 when the WGA went on strike, I was writing a screenplay for one of the bigger studios. I believe I started on it the second week of February and my first draft was due some time in April. But then the Guild went out the first week of March and I stopped writing. That's how it works. I was not in violation of my contract. Even though it paid me more than WGA minimum, my contract was under the MBA so when there was no MBA in place, time stood still on my deal. Only when the new MBA was signed months later did work resume.

As it turned out, the script I wrote was never made. By the time I handed it in, the folks at the studio who'd commissioned it had been replaced and their successors didn't want to make anything approved by the folks who'd been fired. That kind of thing happens all the time in Hollywood even when there is no strike.

Would it have been made if I'd finished it as per the original schedule? Would it have been a big hit that would have boosted my income and career? Those are two questions no one can ever answer with any certainty but there's a very slim chance there of two yeses. And if you spend any time as a professional writer, you'll have an endless supply of that kind of question. They'll spring from every offer you turn down, every project that for any reason doesn't happen. You can't run your career or even your life — in the unlikely event you view those as two separate things — based on what might have happened.

You have to look at the bigger picture. In about three weeks, I will have been a professional writer for half a friggin' century. I have worked for producers less rooted in morals than Harvey Weinstein and publishers less ethical than the guy on the cover of Trump Magazine. I have also worked for very good, honest people and companies in both categories, including some I respect greatly.

If I have learned nothing else in over 18,000 days (My God!!!) in my chosen profession, I have learned the difference between being treated well and treated poorly. There's a reason I would never do anything to undermine the Writers Guild of America.

Forgive the long speech, Brian. It's what happens when you poke a sensitive area and you stumbled across one of mine.