Someone with very little drawing skill did a sketch of Charlie Brown and Snoopy, signed it as "Schulz" and offered it for sale on eBay. A nine-year-old child could have spotted it as a fraud but apparently there are a lot of eight-year-olds with money because before the listing disappeared it had bids of up to $700 with several days left to go in the auction. I'm guessing it was yanked off because it was reported as a counterfeit but who knows? Maybe it got sold somewhere else for even more.

I'm going to keep mentioning this kind of thing here but keep in mind that fakes are sold every day. The instances I mention are not rare.

There should be more articles like this one by Stephen Galloway warning wanna-be screenwriters about scams.  There should also be more articles about the exploitation about wanna-be actors and people who think they can direct and aspiring costume designers, etc.  I have lately seen some very horrible ripping-off of young folks who do a few funny voices and are preyed upon by "coaches" who will promise to make them the new Rob Paulsen…and all it will cost is everything the kid has or can borrow.

I absolutely understand the feeling that you have talent and want to pursue a dream.  I am leery of those who tell you, "You can be anything you want in life if you just pursue it and don't give up."  No, you can't be anything you want in life.  If tomorrow I decide I want to pitch for the Dodgers, that ain't gonna ever happen and it won't be because I don't try hard enough.

That kind of belief — that success is merely a matter of persistence — can make a kid very vulnerable to someone who seems to be dangling the key. And the sad/infuriating part isn't even that they take your money. It's that when you might be doing something that really will help you sell your screenplay (or whatever), they lead you down a path that doesn't lead anywhere.

Do you get the sense that I'm a little infuriated by this kind of thing? And no, I never fell for any of what the article's talking about.

The stage musical of Mamma Mia! ran on Broadway for 5,758 performances and I somehow managed to miss 5,758 of them. If you did too, fear not. If there is no production of this show currently playing near you, wait a few weeks and there will be one opening…and I don't just mean this year. I mean for all eternity. Long after the complete works of Shakespeare are laying forgotten and unperformed, someone will be doing Mamma Mia! in your town.

I vaguely recall seeing the movie and thinking…

• The songs of ABBA are fun and often hard to eject from your skull once they find a place to reside within your neurocranium —
• — but I think I liked them better in the original ABBA recordings.
• Also, the plot of Mamma Mia! is of just about no interest to me —
• — and isn't it weird that someone had to come up with a storyline to wrap around all those ABBA songs to create a musical for the whole family and they said, "How about a story of a young woman trying to figure out which of the many men her mother slept with is her father?
• — and the songs don't always fit the story that well —
• — but who cares?

And that's about all I remember of the film except that in the end, all the main actors were in these weird ABBA costumes and singing the Greatest Hits without some phony concept wrapped around them, and one of them was "Waterloo" which apparently no one could shoehorn into the plot…and that was the best part.

Okay. So last night, I went to see a stage production of Mamma Mia! down at the Redondo Beach Performing Arts Center, which is a Broadway-class theater that's not as far from Los Angeles as it sounds. I've been there a lot and the shows there, no matter who produces them, are almost always worth the drive. This one was produced by a company called 3-D Theatricals which was responsible for the stagings of Young Frankenstein, Spamalot and a few others that I didn't write about that I took Amber to see there.

Amber was busy with schoolwork this weekend so instead I took my friend Laraine Newman — and she wanted to go in part for the same reason I wanted to go in part: One of the leads in the play was our friend Candi Milo. Candi is a wonderful actress on stage and also in front of a microphone when she's doing cartoon voices.  Maybe we're prejudiced but we both thought she was out and away the best performer on that stage.

Not that there weren't others.  I suspect the folks who made up ABBA would have been real happy hearing Sophina Brown belting their lyrics and Flynn Hayward was quite adorable as her daughter Sophie.  Promos for the show said this was the first time those two roles had been cast with black performers and apart from one line about Sophie's "golden tresses," it didn't matter one bit.  Theatrical audiences have happily become totally color-blind.  Would that the whole country was that way.

We were seated second row center, close enough to get a "contact high" (a term I never liked) from the performers on stage.  As with other productions I've seen there, the actors — the dancers, especially — were having such a good time up there, the joy was infectious. Here — you may even feel a little of it in this 90-second promo video for the production…

As with the film, the best part of the show was the encore sequence at the end (including "Waterloo").  I still don't like the story or how awkwardly it leads into and out of most of the songs but like the bullet point above says, who cares? There was some great hoofing up there and some great voices and a lot of enthusiasm and good costuming and sets (all newly-designed for the occasion) so Laraine and I were both very glad we made the trek to Redondo Beach.

Sadly, the matinee today there is the last time 3-D Theatricals is putting a show into that building. Next weekend, this production moves into the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, which is about twenty minutes to the south. Future shows mounted by 3-D Theatricals will start there and stay there, commencing with 42nd Street in October. I don't think I'll be making that commute quite as often. If you want to see their Mamma Mia!, you'll need to go to Cerritos.  Here's a link to order tickets but you'd better hurry.  It's only there for two weeks and Candi said they're almost sold out.  I'm not surprised.

Last night, I went to the L.A. premiere of my buddy Lee Aronsohn's superb documentary, The Magic Music Movie. It was at the Laemmle's Music Hall Theater in Beverly Hills and since it's about an acoustical band of the seventies, the invite asked that we come in seventies attire. I didn't even dress "seventies" in the seventies so I just wore my usual wardrobe and told all the folks in tie-dyed garb and headbands that I was disguised as a narc.

The band was called Magic Music and you probably never heard of them; not unless you were in or around Colorado in the early seventies. They never released an album. They never really got on television. But Lee was in Colorado and there became a tremendous fan of their live performances. They disbanded in 1976 and went their separate ways — some remaining in the music profession, some not. Four decades later, he decided it might be a good idea to track them all down, find out what had become of them and get the band together for one more concert.

I wrote about this back here, right after I first saw this film. I enjoyed it immensely then but I viewed it online via a private link. Sometimes, you just want to see a film the way movies were meant to be seen: On a big screen with nothing diverting your attention from the movie on that big screen.

I liked it even more at the Laemmle, partly because there were no distractions and partly because I was with a live, enthusiastic audience. Sometimes, a line will only strike you funny when you're among others who are laughing at it.

It all struck me as way more interesting than any story about a band who "made it." These guys didn't, at least collectively, and you could spend an hour or two theorizing that it was because they were too afraid of success…and another few hours explaining why they were too afraid of failure. A case could probably also be made that neither was the case; that they simply didn't get the breaks or exploit them properly. Whatever the reason, they seem to have no regrets; some express genuine pride in what they did even though what they did didn't make them rich 'n' famous.

Lee and his crew did a truly fine job on it so here's a second recommendation that you go see it. It'll have special resonance if you're roughly in my age bracket (I'm 66) but it's good for all ages.

A baby elephant gets its first bath…

• Michael Avenatti is a media whore, he has no government experience and he associates with porn stars. America is not going to elect someone like that President of the United States.

• I keep reading all this talk about a "Space Force" and so far, the proposal seems to be "Let's spend an unlimited amount of money we don't have to do something in outer space but we don't have a clue what it is yet."

The original cast members of Saturday Night Live — well, the five who are still with us — accept the induction all seven into the Television Hall of Fame. Bill Murray, who was not included as an original member, also shows up to steal the evening…

An add-on to the previous item: If you are making a demo these days to try to get an agent, do not make it two minutes. Make it one minute and assume that if the listener does not hear something in the first thirty seconds that grabs their interest, they will never make it into the second thirty seconds.

If it does snag an agent and cause them to sign you as a client, your new agent will probably want you to make a new demo which they will use to try and get work for you. They will tell you how long to make that demo and what to put in it in what order.

And before someone asks me what to put in that first thirty seconds that will grab an agent, here's the answer: Something they haven't heard before that some client might want. Sounding like everyone else is the last thing you want to do. I recently listened to the demo of a young kid seeking representation. He started his demo with a killer imitation of Bart Simpson. Not only will that not get him an agent but few agents will make it past Bart to hear if he has anything else to offer.

• "Space Force" sounds like something Trump came up with to try and appeal to voters under the age of nine.

Here's a brief chat with the late Jack Davis. Among folks who do this kind of cartooning, he may be the most widely-respected and envied. His style was absolutely his and it was perfect for everything he tried to accomplish…

Yesterday, the Motion Picture Academy announced some changes in its annual broadcast including the addition of a new award for "Most Popular Film" or something like that. I made a mental note to write this morning about why all their changes are mistakes but every single other person on the Internet seems to have beaten me to the proverbial punch. And everyone's making the same arguments.

So I'll just refer you over to my buddy Ken Levine and a post which, with great restraint, he entitled The Incredibly Stupid New Oscar Rules. Oh — but I will add one other point…

Ken says "…these changes have only been instituted to improve ratings. They have nothing to do with righting wrongs or ensuring that deserving artists are given their due. This is just because they want better demographics. Period." I can think of one other reason and it's probably even stupider than just wanting to boost the Nielsens.

Hollywood, you may be shocked to learn, abounds in egos and insecurities. There are people out there who make some movie than grosses more than Portugal does in a year but feel a gaping hole in their self-esteem because their mantle has no Oscar. They have three homes, five cars and enough money to make Donald Trump care about them…but they whine about the lack of respect more than Mr. Dangerfield ever did.

They made their bucks off Black Kung Fu Hooker Teen Academy IV and it makes them mad that, that year, Best Picture went to something arty and socially-aware. They think something like, "My film reached and entertained a lot more people than that piece of pretentious crap! I'm more in tune with today's audiences!" They may even cite the ever-dwindling Oscar tune-in as proof that the Academy is sadly outta-touch with its awards.

Powerful folks are always lobbying the Academy to alter the rules to make it more likely they'll receive trophies. For a few years, I found myself semi-unwillingly on a committee at the TV Academy that was supposed to study and issue recommendations about the rules for Daytime Emmys. The committee, as far as I could tell, came to no conclusions whatsoever. The Chair just lost interest and stopped having meetings before our work was done.

But I came to two conclusions. These are mine, not the committee's since it never concluded anything. One was that just as you might find certain foods less appetizing if you witnessed how they were processed and prepared, you might have less respect for the Emmy Awards if you really knew how the choices were made.

Secondly: They have too many awards but that's because everyone's suggestion is, though they don't say it this blatantly, "There should be more of them so I have a better chance of winning one!" On that committee, I saw a lot of politicking that was kind of like if I'd proposed an Emmy category for "Best Writing by a Writer Who's 6'3" and Half-Jewish for a Cartoon Series Featuring an Orange Cat That Eats Lasagna." That kind of thing.

I've segued here from writing about the Oscars to writing about the Emmys but I'll bet it's the same deal. There have been people (and studios) who've wanted a category where their film could win an Academy Award while still containing massive special effects and monsters and violence and car chases and women with their shirts off and gross humor and other key selling points when one is maneuvering for Big Box Office. They want to be able to do that and get an Oscar without having to address deep human values and/or hire Meryl Streep.

That kind of pressure led the Academy a few years ago to up the number of nominees for Best Picture from five to ten. This time, I think it's spawned this category for "Outstanding Achievement in Popular Film" (that's the announced name of it) which is kind of insulting to the folks who make the films that do belong among the nominees for Best Picture. They might as well change the name of that award to "Best Picture That Most People Didn't Want To See."

---

By the way: Speaking of Ken Levine, I hope you're a frequent listener to his fine podcast. This week, his guest is Animation Voice Actor Bob Bergen. If I were trying to get into that profession, I'd not only listen to that conversation, I'd hunt down every Bob Bergen interview I could find. No one knows more about that industry and how to be a part of it than Bob does.

Readers of this site keep suggesting I link to the videos of Randy Rainbow because he does funny songs with clever rhymes. They're right…