Dan Gheno has become our unofficial reporter on the status of the marquee of the Ed Sullivan Theater in New York. As you can see, a temporary structure adorned with CBS logos is up there for now. Stay tuned to this blog for further updates.

In other news of the neighborhood, the Carnegie Deli a block away has now been closed for more than a month due to…well, it's a complicated story possibly involving some sort of illegal theft of public utilities. Since I mentioned this, several of you have e-mailed to recommend better delicatessens in New York…which might matter to me if I had any plans to be in that town in the next few months.

Yes, I am well aware there have always been better delis in that town than the Carnegie — Katz's, to name one. I would also prefer the Second Avenue Deli if only it weren't all way over on Second Avenue where I never have occasion to roam. Katz's is out of the way, too. When you're in town for a limited time and rushing from meeting to meeting and trying to see as many shows as you can, you sometimes have to settle for the eighth best deli or the twelfth best place to get pizza. My two favorite places to eat when I'm back there are Peter Luger's Steakhouse in Brooklyn and the Grand Central Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station…and I can rarely squeeze in both during any one trip. Some year, I hope to spend a month or two in New York and go to all the places (only a few of which are places to eat) that I've always wanted to go to. Some year…

The 1975 movie of The Sunshine Boys is about to come out on Blu-ray and you can order a copy here. While you wait for it, you can read an interview with Richard Benjamin, who played the nephew in it…and quite well. Unmentioned in the interview is that he was the second choice for the role. Harvey Keitel was originally signed but during rehearsals, Neil Simon and director Herbert Ross decided he was wrong for it so Benjamin — who was quite right and good — replaced him. It is said Mr. Keitel is still fuming.

One caveat: In the interview, Mr. Benjamin tells how he met Stan Laurel and says that Laurel was then living in a six-story building in an apartment which Jerry Lewis paid for because Stan was broke. This is not so. Mr. Laurel was not broke. He was not swimming in cash but he was not broke and Lewis did not pay his rent at the Oceana Apartments — which, by the way, was a three-story building.

But I still admire the heck out of Richard Benjamin.

And just so we get this clear because almost no one does: When it came time to do the movie of The Sunshine Boys, they did screen tests of many old Jewish comedians including Milton Berle, Phil Silvers, Jan Murray and others. The role of Willie Clark was won by Red Skelton and the role of Al Lewis went to Jack Benny. Then Skelton, for reasons no one quite understood, withdrew. He said it was because he found the script vulgar, which was a silly reason because (a) it wasn't in the slightest and (b) off-screen, Mr. Skelton was a pretty vulgar comedian. He was replaced by Walter Matthau so it was going to be Matthau and Benny. Then Benny got too sick to do the film and after he passed, he was replaced by George Burns, who was just about the only old Jew comic they hadn't auditioned in the first place. Thus, all three lead roles were filled with second choices. It's still a pretty good movie.

We all love Rod Serling, creator of The Twilight Zone and other grand avenues of incredible fiction. Well, someone who really loved Rod Serling was his daughter, Anne Serling. She has many, many wonderful stories and insights into this talented man, not just as a writer-producer but as a human being — one who often based teleplays on true episodes from his life. Twilight Zone episodes were based on his life? How? Well, you can find out by tuning in today as Stu Shostak interviews Ms. Serling…and after you hear that, you'll probably want to click over and order her new book, As I Knew Him: My Dad, Rod Serling. It has even more such stories…so listen, order, enjoy!

Stu's Show can be heard live (almost) every Wednesday at the Stu's Show website and you can listen for free there. Webcasts start at 4 PM Pacific Time, 7 PM Eastern and other times in other climes. They run a minimum of two hours and sometimes go to three or beyond.  Shortly after a show ends, it's available for downloading from the Archives on that site. Downloads are a measly 99 cents each and you can get four for the price of three. Submitted for your approval.

My friend Dan Gheno sent me this photo he took of what the Ed Sullivan Theater in New York looks like now that Dave's old marquee has been taken down. I hear that its replacement will be a three-sided electronic billboard which will feature fancy computer graphics. Dan, by the way, is an artist of tremendous talent and he has a new book out that I will soon be recommending here.

I wonder how many people know that the Ed Sullivan Theater was more than just the place where Ed did most of his TV shows. It opened in 1927 as Hammerstein's Theater featuring the play Golden Dawn, which starred a young man named Archibald Leach. Mr. Leach would soon be better known under the name Cary Grant. The theater changed names a few times as it housed plays until 1936 when CBS took a lease on the building and converted it for radio broadcasts. The first one done there was Major Bowes' Amateur Hour and many more followed until 1950 when the place was retooled for television. Sullivan eventually began doing his popular Sunday night program from there but so did hundreds of other shows while Ed was still on the air, including for a time What's My Line?, which was also live on Sunday nights at 10:30, requiring a fast switchover of sets after Ed went off at 9 PM. Among the shows done there after Ed went off in 1971 were The Merv Griffin Show, Kate & Allie and The $10,000 Pyramid. The place was called Studio 50 until 1967 when it was renamed for Ed.

Pre-Letterman, CBS leased the building. In 1993 when Dave needed a place to do his new show, CBS purchased it for $4.5 million and then spent a ton o' dough refurbishing what had become a pretty shabby place over the years. And now Stephen Colbert will become its next inhabitant.

The iconic Late Show logo, which was removed from the marquee was designed by a gentleman named Roger White. Here's what he went through to get to it.

Barbara Gaines, who went from being Dave's receptionist to being his producer writes about the sense of loss now that the show is over.

Lastly: This has only a tenuous connection to Letterman but all the years he did his show there, he was right across the street from 1700 Broadway where DC Comics and MAD Magazine had their offices. A month or so ago, DC finally moved out as part of a plan to relocate (as they have) in Burbank, California. MAD is remaining in New York and this week, they're moving their office from that building into new digs over on Avenue of the Americas. Dave's style always admittedly had a lot of MAD in it. He sometimes said that all his show was was the TV version of "Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions." Well, Dave's gone from that area and now MAD's departing…and that stretch of Broadway is already suffering from a serious lack of snide wisecracks.

A conversation between Neil Gaiman and Kazuo Ishiguro. They talk about a lot of the kind of things that writers talk about.

As I've mentioned here, I've occasionally thought Mike Huckabee was a Republican I could have voted for. I never thought though that he could be elected. This piece by Bob Moser — a gay liberal — tracks a lot of the odd veers that Huckabee has made in his run-up to his running. He said and did things that clearly made him a "maverick" Republican, unwilling to parrot what the Tea Party folks demand to hear. But then he also said things that made him clearly unacceptable to those in this country who lean left. Once, that independence made him look somewhat like a candidate who could bridge the partisan divide and bring this country together on something, or at least someone. Now, it makes him look like a guy who can't get support from either side.

Congress recently voted to rescind the powers of the National Security Agency to collect and store info from Americans' phone records. So what's changed and are we safer from terrorism or just safer from the N.S.A.? Fred Kaplan explains.

Here's a lesson in how to create strong passwords. I would take it a step farther. Make up a six or seven letter string of gibberish using upper and lower case letters, numbers and special characters like X4$zQY& or k8%WWzi. Memorize it. It's not that difficult. Then use a different, simple password on each site you visit but append that string to it. If you used DRAGON as your Amazon password…well, that's pretty easy for someone to guess and relatively easy for password cracking software to crack. Ah, but supposing the whole thing as entered was DRAGONX4$zQY&. Once you've memorized your special string, you just have to remember DRAGON as your Amazon password. But watch this…

I've read a lot of criticisms of last Sunday night's Tony Awards that struck me as petty and unreasonable but Mark Harris has some valid complaints.

A man who sometimes fascinated me, Vincent Bugliosi, has died at the age of 80. The headlines all billed him as the attorney who successfully prosecuted Charles Manson…and you look at the Manson of today — out of his mind, Swastika etched into his forehead — and you think, "How difficult was it to convince a jury that that man was capable of murder?" But the thing people forget is that Manson was not present at the killings for which he was being prosecuted. He sent other mindless people to slay and the trick was to persuade the jury that Manson had committed crimes via remote control.

The victory made Bugliosi famous and he used that fame to become an author and lecturer. If you followed him, you came to see that he was very brilliant and also obsessed with telling you how brilliant he was. He always seemed to argue every matter in two ways. One was a solid presentation based on facts and logic, and this was usually pretty airtight. The other, parallel argument was that he was Vincent Bugliosi and if he said something was so, it was so because Vincent Bugliosi didn't say anything unless he had incontrovertible proof and since he was saying X, that meant there had to be incontrovertible proof of X so End of Argument, fella.

In 2007, he published Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, a book that made a very strong case that the assassination of John F. Kennedy was committed by Lee Harvey Oswald alone, that Jack Ruby acted solo in killing Oswald, and that every book and movie since which claimed otherwise was seriously flawed and probably dishonest. Unfortunately, Bugliosi's book was over 1,600 pages long and I doubt it was ever read by anyone who was undecided or whose mind was changeable on the central question of Oswald's guilt. People read it, or at least some of it, to see their views confirmed or in order to write outraged rebuttals.

I was among the former. I wasn't always but after spending too much of my life amidst the muck 'n' mire of "Conspiracy Buffs," I came to the conclusion that Oswald did it and he did it all by his lonesome. I also decided that if there was a real case to be made in opposition, it was just too hard to locate amidst the hysteria of those seeking to make some irrelevant point — or just make good livings — legitimizing every possible theory except the most obvious one.

I also — and this is why I ask that you not write me and try to get me to read some article that absolutely proves J.F.K. was gunned down by an underground alliance of Cubans from the planet Jupiter and Lyndon Johnson's chiropodist — decided that spending time in that world was a foolish way to squander one's limited years on this planet. When I was thinking about Oswald, I wasn't doing anything that mattered. Nevertheless, when a writer I knew a bit named Fred Haines invited me to lunch with Bugliosi, I went. He wanted Vince to hear one or two of my observations on the Kennedy case…nothing major, just little things. Like, I'd noted that there was the theory Oswald acted alone and there were hundreds if not thousands of theories involving vast conspiracies — but absolutely none suggesting that two people had killed Kennedy. Or three or less than ten. It was always one or a cast of thousands.

That, of course, didn't prove much of anything but Fred, who was assisting Bugliosi with research, thought it was an interesting point, one of several I had which he thought Vince might like to expand upon. Thus, we lunched.

It lasted about 90 minutes, during which I spoke for two minutes and Vince spoke for 88 and looked annoyed whenever I monopolized the conversation. I thought the guy was brilliant except when he kept telling me — and he must have said this ten times — that some view he had was inarguable because he was Vincent Bugliosi and Vincent Bugliosi never reached a conclusion without solid, inarguable evidence. If he'd left all of that line of argument out of the book, he could have gotten the page count down to three figures.

When the waiter came by to ask if we wished to see the dessert menu, Vince told me the peach cobbler they served was excellent. I'm sure he didn't say this but in my mind, I heard him assuring me that if Vincent Bugliosi said the peach cobbler was excellent, that meant the peach cobbler was excellent because Vincent Bugliosi never recommended peach cobbler without thorough and complete investigation and solid proof.

The lunch was before Reclaiming History came out. Afterwards, I saw him one other time at a Book Festival where he was not autographing it or even discussing it. He'd since published a book called The Prosecution of George W. Bush For Murder, making the case that Guess Who should be behind bars. Folks were lining up to praise him for it and get it signed (I never read it, by the way) and when I ran into him in the Author's Lounge on a break, we talked about how his J.F.K. book had not made quite the splash for which he'd hoped. "Almost no one wanted me to go on their TV or radio programs and discuss it," he said, "whereas I'm fighting off offers to go on and talk about this new one."

I suggested it was because (a) the murder of Kennedy was a long-ago matter and everyone who cares about it has made up their minds and (b) interviewers don't like having an author on unless they've read their book and none of them wanted to read a 1600+ page book. He told me I was right and I felt a flush of pride that he'd said that because I didn't think he thought anyone was ever right except Vincent Bugliosi.

A lot of people dismissed him as an arrogant bore, especially when they wished to not address his conclusions. It's a shame he gave them that "out" because his conclusions were usually very wise and pretty sound. Because of its sheer length and digressions, I cannot recommend Reclaiming History to you. You won't read it…though if you want to try, I'll suggest it's easier on Kindle or some other tablet-based format than it is on paper. If I can't dissuade you and you're truly interested in what he said about the Kennedy Assassination, he did an abridged version called Four Days in November that's a little under 700 pages. That's right: The cut-down version is 700 pages.

But I didn't write this to sell books for him. I just wanted to note that the world has lost a very intelligent man who was really good at getting to the truth. And don't even try disagreeing with me about this because I'm Mark Evanier and Mark Evanier never says anything unless he has absolute proof of it…

I thought the Tony Awards were pretty good last night. I'm talking about the telecast itself, not who won. Having not seen any of the shows, I had no real feelings about any of that, though I sure wasn't the only person pleased that Kelli O'Hara finally snagged one. Kristen Chenoweth and Alan Cumming were fine hosts. The show had an awful lot of music and great performances and clever segues and really, there wasn't much to complain about. That won't stop a certain kind of person who claims to "love the theater" from finding much to bitch about. No one hates the theater like people who "love the theater."

The highlight for me was the opening number. The show Something Rotten didn't win much in the way of awards last night but I'll bet they sold lots of tickets because of this. It's the invention of musical comedy as re-created for us by Brian d'Arcy James, Brad Oscar and the company…

I was (and still am) a big fan of Allan Sherman, the great singer of song parodies. As I mentioned back here, he played the Hollywood Bowl twice — in 1963 and again in 1964 — and both times, my parents took me to see him.

Eric Yarber, a devout follower of this blog, e-mailed to tell me that someone has uploaded to the net this audio recording of Allan Sherman at the Bowl. It's 47 minutes of what he did there in '63 and I was in that audience. I am amazed to be able to hear it again, more than half a century later.

I've been saying I think Stephen Colbert will do great in the 11:30 time slot. Well, he already did great in that time slot but I think he'll do great as himself in that time slot on CBS. Sean Cannon explains why he thinks so. I think he overstates it a bit but I generally agree with him.

Here's a sketch from Your Show of Shows starring Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner and Howard Morris. The date is unknown and it would be interesting to know if this is from when Neil Simon was on the writing staff. The skit is about a poker game and there's at least one joke in there that was roughly duplicated in Mr. Simon's play, The Odd Couple…

I started watching the Tony Awards a half-hour ago, figuring to stay off social media until it's over so I don't find out who won what before I actually see the envelope opened on my screen. Unfortunately, (a) I'm on the West Coast where it's tape-delayed and (b) often, social media comes after me.

Little notifications from news sources began popping up on the screen of my iPhone telling me what won for Best Musical, Best Play, Best Revival, etc. I turned it off but I'm a very fast reader so I couldn't not get that information.

Then I turned my attention back to my desktop computer screen and a little window popped up showing me I had four new e-mails. It showed me who'd written, when they'd written and their subject lines…and three of the four subject lines told me who'd won for Best Actor, Best Actress, etc.

So much for suspense. I'm not sure if next year I'll just forget about not finding out in advance or if I'll turn everything off in my house except the TV. Because that's what it'll take.