Tomorrow on this page: Another installment of my "Rejection" series, telling writers what little I've learned about making a living as a writer. Please remember that I'm really writing these so that whenever my career tanks — and I'm hoping to at least make it to the end of September — I can go back, read them all again and maybe learn something.

The New York Times lists 31 lies and gross exaggerations uttered by Donald Trump. And this (no kidding) is just from the past week.

So which do we think is the case here?

1. He thinks people are so stupid they won't realize that he's lying to them.
2. He thinks people are so distrusting of the press that they'll assume he's right and all those fact checkers are lying.
3. He thinks he's hitting enough hot buttons — getting people so worried about minorities and terrorists and such — that they'll overlook the lies or maybe excuse him on the assumption that every politician lies like this (especially That Woman) and he has to play the game to get elected and save them.
4. He thinks he's such a good, charismatic speaker that he looks good even when the facts are dubious.
5. He doesn't think. It's something pathological and since it seems to be working, he's not about to change.
6. Other. I'm trying to think what that might be.

I really don't know which of these is the case…maybe all of them to some extent.  I do have a certain frightened admiration that he can do this and at the same time sell the idea that his opponent is the one who doesn't tell the truth.

On Thursday evening, Turner Classic Movies is running a tribute to Gene Wilder with Young Frankenstein, Start the Revolution Without Me and The Frisco Kid. If I had to pick three, they'd be Young Frankenstein, The Producers and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Or better still, I'd have The Producers, Willy Wonka and Start the Revolution since they're running Young Frankenstein on Tuesday evening and The Frisco Kid real early Wednesday morning. But, hey, anything with Gene Wilder in it is worth running…and running more than once.

But even better is that on Thursday evening, they'll have two showings of Role Model, which was a 2008 documentary that I gather was a pilot for a series of interview shows with Alec Baldwin chatting with actors he admired. I think this one with Mr. Wilder was the only episode made and I don't know why because it was a terrific 75 minutes which I recommended to you back here. Baldwin was a good host and Wilder was a good guest and this is not something you should miss if you care about Gene Wilder. On my set, it airs at 5 PM and again at 8:15 PM but check your schedule.

Our pal Kim "Howard" Johnson has this to say about Monty Python's Terry Jones.

Here's another one of those videos in which the Mad Scientist of Cooking, Alton Brown, finds the most expensive, difficult way to make something. If I want pizza, I can call my favorite place that delivers and they'll have a perfect pie here in about thirty minutes. Or I could clear a room in my house, build a giant Easy-Bake Oven and stand there at a captain's wheel the whole time the pizza is cooking. Hmm — such a difficult decision…

And it's very sad to hear that Terry Jones is suffering from primary progressive aphasia, which does bad things to one's ability to speak. I guess that means that the farewell performances of the Monty Python guys really were the farewell performances. I was always impressed not just with how funny those men were as performers and writers but how smart they all seemed to be. Jones authored some brilliant articles and books, and it's always painful to hear that a brain like that is functioning at reduced capacity.

The news reports (like this one) identify him as "one of the founding members of comedy troupe Monty Python." There have been, of course, no non-founding members of the comedy troupe Monty Python. They never admitted anyone else and they never admitted women or racial minorities. I always thought that if I was ever asked to interview any of them, I was going to ask about their apparent bigotry in that regard and say something like, "Even when you have roles for such people, you instead have a white guy put on a dress or even blackface rather than admit a qualified female or non-Caucasian."

And I sure would have hoped they understood I was kidding…

Part of me is dreading the Presidential Debate on Monday night. It's the part that watches these things get scored like demented boxing matches with the pundits and pollsters as judges. Really all that matters is how the polls move over the following week or two…but we have to hear from the Trump campaign about how their boy flattened Hillary and the election is over; from the Clinton campaign how Hillary devastated The Donald and reduced him to a quivering mound of orange Jell-o; how whoever any pundit favors, he or she won in a walk…and, of course, how the moderator, Lester Holt, was so blatantly unfair and/or inept to ask this but not that.

For a lot of folks, the main issue is not what either candidate would do to and for America but do they speak the truth? So Trump will say something like "Sacramento is the capital of Oregon" and if the moderator corrects him, that shows bias against Trump, and if the moderator doesn't correct him, that shows journalistic ineptness and/or a bias against Hillary. And we'll have Trump partisans out there saying that no matter what anyone says, Sacramento is the capital of Oregon and that's that.

We'll also have analysts making a big deal out of the candidates' body language, facial expressions, whether they seemed to be paying attention, wardrobe selection, etc. And someone will claim that the debates were rigged because someone got the questions in advance, someone had a hidden earpiece feeding them zingers, someone planted folks in the audience to cheer or boo, etc.

So I guess it isn't that I don't like the debates. I don't like the scoring and the spin. Even the post-debate polls, which will say who "won" the proceedings will have a lot of votes cast for the respondents' preference, regardless of how he or she actually fared in the telecast. And like I said, all that really matters is how the actual polling of the country as a whole and the individual state races go in the days that follow.

I expect Hillary will do well in terms of facts and policies and explaining her positions. I expect Donald will do well in terms of theatrics and quotable lines. I expect Lester Holt will do well in terms of not making the mistakes of Matt Lauer. And I expect this will be the most-watched Presidential Debate in history. Until the first rematch.

I kinda like watching Alton Brown's cooking demonstrations for two reasons. One is that there's a lot of science in most of them and I do like understanding whatever I can understand in that area. The second is that he makes preparing every food dish so complicated and steeped in Chemistry and Physics that he convinces me I am way too uneducated to make even a tuna salad sandwich. Thus, I feel no guilt when I call my favorite Chinese restaurant and tell them to send over an order of Sesame Chicken.

In this video, he makes homemade ice cream in the most complicated, time-consuming, expensive (and possibly dangerous) manner. Back before I gave up ice cream and other desserts, I had a little machine I bought at Costco for thirty bucks that made wonderful ice cream in about twenty minutes — including set-up and clean-up — on my kitchen counter with no possibility of explosions or frostbite, plus I didn't have to build anything or put on protective gear. Maybe his ice cream is better but I doubt it's that much better…

David Roel writes to ask…

What are the rules regarding who gets to be a "series regular" and featured in the opening credits? Is it entirely the producers' decision, or can actors' agents negotiate that? Is the difference in what an actor is paid significant? If an actor is not a series regular, is the actor contracted for every individual episode? Have there ever been any fights about this?

I'm thinking about the actress who played Tara on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, who, starting from her first episode, was in essentially every episode, had just as much to do as anyone else, but didn't become a series regular, featured in the opening credits, until her very last episode, the episode when her character was killed off. I think I'd be pretty upset if I spent years on a show, did just as much work as any other actor, and never got paid as well as the others, and couldn't put the "series regular" credit on my CV. Could her agent have demanded her promotion?

Payment in excess of union scale is negotiated. The number of episodes appears in is negotiated. Billing in the opening credits is negotiated. (SAG-AFTRA has some rules about billing in the end titles — sadly not about how long a name has to be on screen. Evelyn Wood in her prime couldn't read the end credit on some shows.)

Sometimes, those are very simple negotiations. The actor is offered roughly the same money as others with comparable participation in that show or a comparable show and most of the time, the agent asks for a little more and then they settle on some number in-between. (Where it can get complicated and even nasty is when the show's a hit and the performer wants to renegotiate. Sometimes, the actor winds up like a member of the cast on Seinfeld. Sometimes, the actor winds up like Suzanne Somers.)

Often, the actor is guaranteed all episodes produced. Sometimes, they're guaranteed a certain number or at least a certain number. Usually, you don't get your name in the opening titles unless you're in all the episodes. (I don't recall if Andy Kaufman, who only wanted to be in X episodes of Taxi per season was an exception.) Again, once the actor has some clout and they're afraid of doing the show without him or her, renegotiation may occur.

Most of the time, billing in the opening titles is pretty standard, though there are exceptions. Famously, Russell Johnson and Dawn Wells weren't in the opening titles for the first season of Gilligan's Island but were added as of Season Two. And once upon a time, Jonathan Harris was in every episode of Lost in Space but he was always billed as a "Special Guest Star."

I wanted some more recent examples so I called an agent I know and he said, "There aren't many squabbles these days over billing in the opening of the show. The networks and the producers are pretty good about it and since opening titles are now shorter and less fancy, the actors care less about that." He also said the fights now are rarely about whether someone will get billed but rather over the order of the names and/or who gets single-frame. ("Single-frame" means one name on the screen at a time.)

There's an old saying I just made up about Show Business: "When you're a nobody, nothing is negotiable and when you're a somebody, everything is negotiable." Depending on the contracts, there may have been a point where the agent representing that Buffy actress could have demanded better billing or she'd leave. And then it becomes a question of whether she wants it badly enough to leave the show if she doesn't get it. Since billing doesn't cost them anything, she probably would have gotten what she wanted, just as Jonathan Harris did.

Francis McNamara writes…

First of all, Mark, thank you for being such a creative person in so many ways and also for your insights into the entertainment world on its many genre. As for my question, when you worked on DC's revival of Blackhawk, were there many restrictions or house rules you had to follow?? I enjoyed that whole run very much.

Thanks. Dan Spiegle and I enjoyed doing it a lot…in part because there were no real restrictions. This was in part because the folks then at DC were pretty good about trusting their creative people. (I am not in the previous sentence hinting that other regimes were or are not.) And the other part was that Blackhawk was such a standalone, ignored title that no one else at DC cared much what we did in it since it didn't infringe on their projects.

If we'd been doing Superman or Batman — or even if we'd wanted to guest-star those super-gents — we might have had problems. At any given time, a dozen people at DC have plans for Superman and/or Batman and everyone has ideas about how they should be handled. It was nice not to be enmeshed in any of that.

At the time I was writing/editing Blackhawk, I was writing network TV shows where if you wrote, "Good evening, ladies and gentlemen," you got notes about the word "good," the word "evening," the word "ladies," the word "gentlemen" and your choice of conjunctions, plus whether you were pandering to feminists to put the ladies before the gentlemen. As I think I've written elsewhere here, one of the great joys of writing comic books is that on most projects, between you and the audience are about five people as opposed to five hundred. There are times in my profession when I think I should offer to write the script for free if they'll pay me for the meetings.

Jonathan Chait says — and I quote him because this is my view too — that the allegations of dishonesty against Hillary Clinton are minor and often misreported. There are dozens of unethical charges against Mr. Trump but with some voters, the big things he's done can be ignored while the minor things she's done are disqualifying.

Some of this is just good ol' "it's not a crime when my guy does it." And I do have one acquaintance who wants Hillary jailed and maybe executed, cannot rationally explain her supposed crimes, and who convinces everyone around him that he has a deep emotional problem with powerful women. But that doesn't explain all of the antipathy towards her we see. Here — let me quote the first paragraph of Chait's latest column…

In the last NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, voters judged Donald Trump to be more honest than Hillary Clinton by a ten-point margin. It is a finding that boggles the mind. Americans deem Clinton less honest and trustworthy than a man who lies in public about opponents in both parties with a frequency and brazenness unsurpassed in national politics, who has broken precedent by refusing to disclose his tax returns, who routinely refused to pay contractors for services rendered, who abused a charitable foundation for personal and political gain, who once boasted in a best-selling book about his habit of lying, and who is currently facing trial for bilking thousands of victims in a massive fraud.

You can read the rest of it here. I do think that a lot of people make a gut-level (as opposed to rational) decision about who they'll support in an election and/or just knee-jerk side with the Democrat or the Republican…and then once they do, they believe every bad thing alleged about the opponent and disbelieve (or rationalize) every bad thing alleged about their candidate.

But there has to be more of a reason why "lying about her health" (i.e., waiting for a day or two to disclose she had pneumonia) bothers some people who weren't outraged by Dick Cheney saying, "There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies and against us."

The prominent British actor Terence Bayler has died at the age of 86. This obit will tell you more about him, including the fact that he played The Bloody Baron in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.

We are interested in his work with Monty Python and in the individual works of the gents who made up Monty Python. We especially note that he thought of and delivered what I think is the funniest single line in all of the Monty Python works. I wrote about it here.

In 1981, the heavyweight Broadway team of Hal Prince, Stephen Sondheim and George Furth created a musical based on the George S. Kaufman-Moss Hart play, Merrily We Roll Along. With all those great names, you'd think, "How bad could it be?" But audiences and critics decided, "Pretty bad." It closed after 52 previews and 16 performances.

Ordinarily, a show that closes that quickly is never seen again…but shows in which Sondheim participated never go away. There are always so many good, even wonderful moments that even if the overall show doesn't coalesce, there are always regional theater groups that think, "We can make this work." I've seen half a dozen productions of it, each tinkering here and there, trying to find some way to fix something that seems worthy of saving. Some have been at least moderately successful.

There's a new documentary about this show and its odd history. It's called Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened and it may be at a theater near you before the end of the year. Here's the trailer…

I'm having trouble finding things to blog about that don't mention Donald Trump. I do get the feeling that even if he loses badly, he will consider the whole campaign a whopping success because it made him the most talked-about person in the country. And since Trump has always had the knack for turning fame into dollars, it will probably prove to be quite lucrative.

I didn't see the Emmy Awards the other night. I've developed an allergy to most award shows — something about experiencing mega-doses of self-congratulation by rich people — plus I just find Jimmy Kimmel to be the least sincere person on TV not on Donald Trump's payroll. Friends who felt like I do about him tell me he's getting better and one of these days, I'll give him another try. I'm sorry they didn't find room in the "In Memoriam" section for folks I was fond of, including Pat Harrington and Marvin Kaplan. Pat was an Emmy winner and a guy who was on a helluva lot of TV shows so I'm inclined to think that was an error, not a judgment of his importance.

Last night, I got an annoying phone call from a political website to which I have in the past donated money. Essentially, it was "Thank you for your past support. Will you give us more right now?" I told the guy that I donate periodically to them and will stop if I get one more of these phone calls. (This was the third or fourth this year.) He said, "I understand and I'll remove you from our list." Fine. But then he added, "But while I've got you here, would you consider helping us out in our pre-election solicitation?"

I spent a few pleasant hours last Saturday down at the Long Beach Comic Convention. It's a fun convention with plenty of cosplayers and not enough parking. I am not actively collecting anything I'm likely to find at one of these but it was fun to be around so many happy and creative people. Boy, there are a lot of comics these days I've never heard of.

The Criterion Collection — which I refer to as the "class act" of home video — is about to bring out deluxe, fancy DVD and Blu-Ray sets of The Valley of the Dolls and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. These are two films I find fascinating for opposite reasons. The first is so unintentionally phony in its dramatics and its manipulation of the audience. The "in-name-only" sequel is intentionally phony in all those ways, so it's quite the hoot, especially if you can see it with a big, hip audience. I first saw "BVD" in a nearly-empty theater at a matinee and didn't much like it. Then I saw it years later with a big audience that got every bit of its deadpan, planned campiness and boy, was that a different movie. And fun!

I'm buying these and I'll watch the special features since Criterion always does those well (even when they hire me) but I'm not sure I'll watch Beyond in my home. It needs at least thirty people in the room to be truly effective. You can order one here and the other here. And by the way, the non-sequel actually does pick up a few of its many storylines from the first one as if it was a real sequel, but those moments are well-disguised.

I'm sure you're all up on the way Donald Trump tried to wrap up the "birther" controversy by declaring that Barack Obama was actually born in the United States. That fact was long obvious to everyone but some people who saw a black man in the White House, thought "he's not one of us" and wanted to believe that he wasn't legitimately the President. I suspect it was even obvious to Trump and a long line of people who saw the opportunity to get cash and/or support from those who wanted to believe it.

Trump's promises that his investigators in Hawaii were digging up stuff "you would not believe" and indicative of his modus operandi: Promise them whatever they want and then worry later about what, if anything, you're going to deliver. I don't know why anyone thinks this man will do anything he says he's going to do…with the probable exception of those promises that would enrich the bank account and power of Donald J. Trump.

Two late night comedians had a lot of fun with all this and it's interesting to compare their approaches and note a few similarities. I thought Seth Meyers was a little sharper than Stephen Colbert but here — you decide which of them made the most of the situation…