One of these guys flew 3,000 miles to tape these network promos that were not used…

I mentioned this before but it's too good not to remind you again and maybe again…

When one of my favorite comedians Lewis Black tours, he does his show and then he does an extra show that is broadcast over the Internet. It's a video podcast that runs 20-30 minutes and some weeks, he has three different ones up on his website, The Rant Is Due. This seems to be the only place you can see them at the moment.

You can watch live but that's not easy since the start time can vary depending on when he finishes his regular performance. Then a day or two later, the recorded shows are available on the site and they remain up there for a few weeks before they're deleted. I have no idea if they'll ever be available again.

Usually, it's just Mr. Black answering questions submitted over the Internet or by the live audience but the newest one, which is there right now, is a 27 minute conversation with Tommy Smothers. You might want to give it a watch.

A lot of Mike Nichols' very famous friends talk about Mike Nichols.

As you must know by now, my father worked for the Internal Revenue Service. He hated the job but he needed that weekly paycheck and never thought he could find a situation where he'd get one doing something he liked better. I'm not sure he was wrong about that. He was a lovely, kind, compassionate man but he didn't seem to have any particularly marketable skills. So he spent his life in a job, not a career.

Here's how I'm differentiating those two nouns for the purpose of this article and its sequels to come. A career is something that fits into this sentence: "When I grow up, I want to be a ____." A job is what you do to pay rent and buy groceries if and when you aren't able to become whatever noun you ever seriously put into that sentence.

There are people who are very happy in jobs, especially but not limited to folks who never really put any occupation into that blank. I even know people who had long dreamed-of careers and gave them up for jobs because the careers didn't turn out to be as ideal as they'd seemed from afar.

I have heard people with what I call careers envy people with what I call jobs. Because life can be a lot different if you care passionately about having one particular profession, especially one where the competition is fierce, the hiring is overly subjective and you probably can't work in one place for very long.

My father wanted on and off in his youth to be a writer. He had a few other dreams — like professional singer and professional baseball player — for which he clearly lacked the physical requirements. Eventually, he came to realize that the only one that might at all be attainable was writing. (I do not, by the way, think that was a bad decision on his part. It was probably a very good decision. Dreams are fine but in this world, you have to have at least a little idea of what you can't do well. I have a very long list that could basically be summarized as "Almost everything except writing.")

I don't know if my father had the talent for writing but he sure lacked the thickness of skin and the ability to cope with rejection that the career requires. He could not get past the obstacle of someone in a position of authority telling him his work wasn't good enough. So he spent most of his adult life at the I.R.S. where every day, he came home bruised and nursing an ulcer because of superiors telling him his work wasn't good enough.

Around age six, I began declaring that I wanted to be a writer when I grew up. I had no second choices or alternative dreams. A writer. That was it. My father greeted this news with mixed emotions.

He was thrilled at the possibility that his son — his only child, remember — might succeed in that field that had seemed so unachievable to him. But he feared that I was in for the same kind of heartbreak and feelings of failure that stopped him cold.

Several times, he sat me down and without telling me to change my mind about my goal, he cautioned me that it's a rough game full of shattered dreams and disappointment and people who say terrible, terrible things about what you've done. Once in a while, he told me the tale of the one time he and a friend had submitted writing samples to try out for a job at a radio station. He trembled as he told of the know-nothing boss who had told them their work was amateurish and to forget about ever earning a buck that way.

He pretty much did, especially after a friend who knew a bit about the writing business reminded him of something: Rejection for a writer is never a one-time experience. If the guy at the radio station had said yes, that wouldn't mean my father would have become a writer for the rest of his life. It meant he and his partner would have had a few weeks of work. Then they would have been back submitting their work to other bosses, possibly of the know-nothing variety.

That was a chilling thing to consider, especially during the Depression when too much of the population was without employment. It felt then like the most important thing a man could have was something steady — especially if he had the mad, impetuous idea of having a wife and children. Writing, he well knew, would never be steady.

That one rejection was so devastating that while he thereafter toyed at times with writing this or that, he never again put himself in a position where someone could hurt him like that again. Which means, of course, that he never again put himself in a position where he could succeed as a writer. Given his gentle nature, that may have been for the better.

No writer takes rejection well…and of course, when the publishers or producers do accept it and it's published or produced, you face an even more certain moment of rejection. Someone's going to say it stinks…maybe multiple someones. It might be a reviewer in a newspaper or some cluck with a blog or some acquaintance lacking in social skills and/or oozing envy. But someone's going to not like it and they well may wonder aloud how such an obvious incompetent like you isn't running the deep fryer at Hardee's for a living because you obviously lack any talent whatsoever for writing.

This is the first in a series of essays I'll be posting on this blog — one every week or three — about the two kinds of rejection a writer must face: Rejection by the person or persons who hire and rejection by the intended audience. I don't know how many installments there'll be but there will probably be a lot of them. I have a lot to say on these topics.

Please be kind. I have learned how to handle rejection when it happens with everything else I've written. I'm not sure I can handle rejection of articles about rejection. Thank you.

And you can even set a non-TiVo brand Digital Video Recorder or even a VCR. Heck, if you're really primeval, you can just watch live…

The PBS series American Experience has produced a lengthy look at the life of Walt Disney and it airs in two parts beginning Monday night in most areas. Part One is Monday, Part Two is Tuesday.

I've only seen pieces but a few folks who've viewed the whole thing tell me it's kind of shallow and that it misses a lot of important details — as might be expected in a documentary about Disney that runs under around nine hours. One friend complained it perpetuates the "Walt did everything" myth.

One of the main problems with shows like this is often that they're made at least twenty years too late. The very first thing in this one is a brief snippet of a recent interview with Floyd Norman and this is followed by a brief recent comment by Richard Sherman. That's almost to be expected as Walt died almost a half-century ago…which yields a certain shortage of people who worked closely with him and are still around to be interviewed. The project still may be an enlightening endeavor but if and when they get into what kind of man Walt Disney was, my skepticism will go up with each analysis by someone who never met him.

As an intro to the show, Neal Gabler has a piece in The New York Times and Mr. Gabler was apparently involved a lot or consulted or was interviewed for American Experience. I thought his long biography of Disney some years back, though filled with useful historical information, tried a bit too hard to view him as a dark, troubled individual.

Having never gotten any closer to Walt than watching him introduce Davy Crockett episodes, I can't say that portrait was wrong but I'm also not sure there's enough evidence around to say that it was correct. Let's see what this take on Mr. Disney has to say.

Also debuting the same night on PBS is a new episode of the biographical series, In Their Own Words, this one about Jim Henson. This appears to be creative scheduling intended to make a statement or draw a parallel or something. I have my TiVo set for it, as well.

Writing tips from Stephen King…

Is it really okay to eat food that's fallen onto the floor? Even if you pick it up in under five seconds? Someone actually did a study on this and here are the results. (SPOILER ALERT: It depends how dirty your floor is.)

Jerry K. writes to ask…

What do you think the chances are that Stephen Colbert will take the crown away from Jimmy Fallon as current King of Late Night?

It wouldn't surprise me but increasingly, that's becoming a pointless honor. What's the criteria? Highest overall ratings? Highest ratings in the key demographic? Most profitable show? Longest running show? Most awards? Most videos gone viral? We may well see Colbert, Fallon and Kimmel each "win" one or more of those distinctions and in the end, what does it matter?

It's probably the case now that all three shows are making money and none of them is in any danger of being canceled. Remember in the "Late Night Wars," Leno didn't knock Letterman off the air and Letterman didn't knock Leno off, nor was there a moment when either of those fatalities was possible. Ultimately, they were both knocked off by the passage of time.

If you want to pick your fave and root for him to "win" in any of the above ways, fine. I don't think it matters much. (Well, it never really did. It just matters even less now.)

As longtime readers of this blog know, I'm a big fan of a performer named Frank Ferrante. Frank tours the country with his show, An Evening With Groucho in which he stunningly recreates the comedy legend. I was never a big fan of "impersonator" shows because the impersonation is usually good for about five minutes and you never really forget it's some guy doing an imitation. But Frank so completely disappears behind the painted-on mustache and eyebrows that you can pretend you're watching the one, the only…

Later this month, he'll be in Wisconsin, North Carolina and Minnesota…and you can find his whole touring schedule here. We're most excited that on January 9 and 10 of 2016, he'll make one of his rare stops close to Los Angeles. He'll be out at the Pasadena Playhouse where he sold the place out the last time he was booked there. If you're anywhere near there, it wouldn't hurt to order tickets now. They just went on sale so you should be able to grab some good seats.

I've been plugging this show for years and I can't tell you how many people have written to thank me and say, "He was everything you said he was." I like people who prove me right. There aren't a lot of them.

Last Sunday here, I wrote, "…we have between twelve and eighteen silent film actors still alive, the youngest of whom is probably Our Gang's Dickie Moore, who is 89." Sadly, that was no longer a true statement as of the next day. Moore died on Monday in Connecticut. Leonard Maltin has a good remembrance of the boy and man.

• Bobby Jindal excited at today's announcement. He could double his base of support if he picks up both Rick Perry supporters.

• Upset to hear of Rick Perry's decision. I bet everything Lindsey Graham would be the first guy out of the race.

I probably shouldn't be amazed…but amazed I am at the number of people on the 'net who were ready to write off Stephen Colbert's new Late Show after but two or three outings. There were those declaring it an unfixable disaster halfway through Show One…when a lot of us were saying, "Hey, this is pretty good."

I don't know why anyone needs to be so harsh about this kind of thing. There has rarely been a program of this type that did not evolve and change as its star and staff learned what they were doing…and more importantly, what they were doing that audiences liked. Oddly enough, a lot of the folks I saw posting that they didn't like the show did say it was a lot better than Fallon's or Kimmel's.

There are a number of things I'd like to see changed but I'm going to keep watching it — something I have not found myself able to do with the other such programs these days. I'd like to see Stephen talk to us more and read to us less. I'd like the show not to be so loud and I'd like to see the studio audience stop chanting his name and giving everything a standing ovation.

Did you notice this? The first show opened with a pre-recorded bit of Colbert and various folks performing our national anthem. Then when they cut to the stage, the very first thing we saw was the bandleader, Jon Batiste, waving to the studio audience to stand up. It's not Colbert's fault that this has become de rigueur for talk shows but I wish he or someone would dial it back. (I thought, by the way, that the band was great. I think all these late night bands are great…or at least all more than up to the limited demands of the gig.)

I'd also like to see less editing. The showpiece of Show Three was the Joe Biden interview which was very interesting and unlike so much of what we see these days on talk shows, very real. It was more interesting and more real when I watched the longer, uncut version online this morning.

Here it is for those of you with twenty minutes. It's in two parts which should play, one after the other, in the player I've embedded below…

What I liked about it: It was, I felt, real — two men who'd experienced loss discussing it not as Vice-President and Big TV Star but just as two men. And you say you want to see the real Stephen Colbert? That's him, folks — and it's one of the reasons I think he'll turn out to be one of the best late night hosts ever. I don't think 95% of those who've had or currently have that job description could have handled that conversation.

What I didn't like about it: I'm still uncomfy with the idea that politicians can come on these shows, answer mainly softball questions, and show America what great, witty — often, writer-assisted — human beings they are. Colbert's not going to fawn like that over Ted Cruz or Donald Trump next week, nor should he.

Okay, so you could argue Joe Biden is not a candidate for president. Fair enough…but he still could be. (If he does run, I don't think this interview will help him, by the way. I think it'll just enable his opponents to argue that he's weak and fragile. I can already hear the commercial about how Biden couldn't handle chatting with military families behind a rope line…how's he going to stand up to Putin? A lot of America wants "tough" in their presidents. Some people don't even seem to want knowledge or experience, just "tough.")

You could also argue that Cruz and Trump are simply not the guys to talk about personal, soul-touching matters and that's fair enough too. I'm just not sold on the idea that political guests should be on a show of this kind.

The interview after it with Travis Kalanick, one of the guys behind Uber, was edited beyond belief. That may not have been the show's fault because reportedly, the conversation was interrupted twice by audience members — supposedly cab drivers who hate Uber — yelling out. According to the blogs of at least two people who were there, Colbert handled the situation with skill and calm, asking the interrupters to sit down and he would ask politer versions of their questions to Kalanick — which he did, though all of that was trimmed from the show.

I don't think Kalanick came off well. I wonder if he fared better in the unedited version.

The comedy spots last night were pretty good, too. Even allowing for my reservations about the Biden spot, it was a pretty fine episode, one that oughta have Colbert's detractors thinking, "Hey, this could turn into something I'd want to watch regularly." I'm already watching regularly. I'll let you know if that changes.

Craig Ferguson discusses why he left late night TV. I'm not sure how far his thought processes went beyond what he says in this piece but I can sure think of another reason why he might have ended his show. In show business, it's usually a good idea to not leave when you're at the bottom and they're showing you the door. You want to get out when you still look like something of a hit.

The Late, Late Show with Craig Ferguson had pretty much found its audience and while he might have been able to stay there for a few years, he wasn't going to soar. They weren't going to give him 11:35 even if he wanted it because he'd already shown he couldn't beat Fallon at 12:35. If the new host replacing Letterman drastically improved on Dave's numbers and brought in younger viewers, then Ferguson would have had the challenge of holding a lot of that audience and maybe modifying his act to do so. If the new host didn't improve on Letterman's ratings then the next step was for CBS to start cleaning house and changing their whole approach to late night.

So it was a lose/lose situation for Ferguson and by leaving when he did, he avoided all that and left as a guy with a successful late night show, as opposed to a once-successful late night show that got axed. And that was pretty smart, especially for someone who wanted to do more with his career than host a talk show until he dropped. Ferguson's very talented and not just as a stand-up, and now's he a mostly-free agent to pursue those those other areas. Pretty smart of him.

• Would someone tell Stephen Colbert that he has the job and he can calm down?