I said I hoped the Conan O'Brien interview of Mel Brooks would be the first in a series. Well, as Ralf Haring informs me, it's already the eighth in a series. The other seven are on this page along with an awful lotta behind-the-scenes hype on that series. I'll try to get around to watching some of the others soon.

Hey, if you decided to skip the Conan/Mel interview just before this item, try a little of it. I've heard zillions of Mel Brooks interviews and they're usually the same stories over and over. This one's different and it's the old Conan asking the questions. He was a very good interviewer when he wasn't playing to the audience and trying to top his guests…and it turns out he still is.

Years ago, I did a job for two weeks, punching up the comedy in a screenplay. It was a bunch of us writers all sitting around in an office at 20th Century Fox, trying to add humor to a script that was deemed to be in need of more. Ultimately, the studio threw out our rewrite and had someone else write an entirely new script which they also decided wasn't good enough to film. The project went into turnaround, wound up getting made at another studio and…well, I just looked it up and Leonard Maltin gave it his coveted "BOMB" rating. I saw it and he was being kind.

Anyway, our office at Fox was down the hall from Mel's and he was then doing dozens of press interviews to promote High Anxiety. He liked an audience so some woman — his secretary, I guess — would scurry from office to office saying, "Mel's giving an interview. Come listen." For some reason, our producer — the man who had a lot of his career riding on the screenplay we were trying to improve — would say, "Hey, let's go listen to Mel." So we went and listened to Mel. Three times, I believe, we went and sat on his couch or floor as he held court before some reporter who couldn't believe he was interviewing Mel Brooks. Mel liked having me there because when he momentarily stalled on some proper name and couldn't remember it, I usually could.

Like I said, we did this three times and for the most part, we heard the same interview three times. It was the same questions evoking the same anecdotes. The third time, the interviewer requested the story about Sid Caesar trying to pull the cab driver through the tiny car window port. Mel said, "I don't want to tell that story. I'm sick of telling that story." Then he turned to me and said, "You tell it."

So it's real nice to hear this interview conducted by Mr. O'Brien. I hope this is the first in a series.

Mel Brooks is interviewed for 80 minutes by Conan O'Brien. How could this not be fun?

For some inexplicable reason, the Mark Twain Award actually went this time to someone who's been in the business for a little while. I guess all the new kids on SNL were too busy to accept.

• Silvio Berlusconi has been banned from politics for 2 years. Why can't we do that with Congress? Maybe have them pass laws instead?

Fly Untitled.  My favorite so far…

Matthew Yglesias has a question to make you feel old.

The Al Smith Dinner is this annual affair where politicians and pundits don tuxedoes, sup together, then some of them get up and try to prove how funny they can be. There was one a few nights ago and you might enjoy the keynote speech by Dr. Stephen T. Colbert…

Hey, how were animated cartoons made in the thirties? This is an episode of a travelogue-type series done back then narrated by the great broadcaster, Lowell Thomas. He takes us to the Walter Lantz cartoon studio where, for some reason, Mr. Lantz is doing about four different jobs that he probably did not all do when no newsreel was being made. The cartoon in progress is one that starred Oswald the Lucky Rabbit called Soft Ball, which came out in 1936.

Many animation scholars believe Mr. Lantz just made a couple of scenes for the documentary, then went back later and built an entire cartoon around them. That was so he wouldn't be wasting that material. Some of the process depicted seems to have been altered to look more interesting on camera. For instance, I doubt the voice actors did their work simultaneous with the laying-in of sound effects, and sound effects were actually done by a smaller team. Nevertheless, most of this is accurate. (I believe, by the way, the vocal actress you'll see is Berneice Hansen, who was also heard in a number of Warner Brothers and Disney cartoons. Wish someone could identify all the other people in this…)

As readers of this blog know, I'm a big supporter of the Affordable Care Act, AKA "Obamacare." As readers of the web know, there are a lot of folks out there proclaiming it a disaster, a failure, a flop, etc. So far, however, I haven't seen this said by anyone I thought was capable of admitting it was a success if that was how things went. It's all people who predicted — and in many cases, prayed — it would fail. Those who so prayed are pretty awful people in my view. Since no one has offered up a credible, workable Plan B, hoping Obamacare flops is to me like saying, "Oh, I hope all those people who can't get health insurance because they're poor and/or have pre-existing conditions don't get it!"

We have two serious, related problems in this country. One is that there are all these men, women and children who can't get affordable health care. If that many people had their lives threatened by terrorists, we'd start drone strikes and marching off to war and surrendering more civil liberties. I don't understand not wanting to do something for those people. Also too, the rising cost of health care for all is crippling our nation's economy. I don't understand not wanting to fix that…and again, there is no real "other plan." When you hear someone say the answer is tort reform or setting up exchanges, that's someone who has about 4% of a plan. (They've instituted tort reform in several states and it lowers the cost of a policy an average of 1%.)

You want to get rid of Obamacare? Come up with a real alternative plan…something real-er than "we'll appoint committees to study the problems and make recommendations."

But the main reason I'm unimpressed by these articles about Obamacare being a failure is that the ones I read all seem to be about the website crashing…about people waiting online for hours and not being able to sign up. If that's true, as it seems to be, that's not an argument against Obamacare at all. I don't recall one single person who predicted it would fail saying, "It can never work because the website will be slow." They were all talking about the actual manipulation of money — what people would pay, how doctors would be compensated, how insurance rates would or would not fall. We haven't even gotten close to the part of this rollout that tells us how that will go.

Bad website design is not proof that Obamacare can't work. Websites are fixable. Each year, I get dozens of e-mails from folks who've tried to sign up for memberships and/or hotel rooms for Comic-Con in San Diego. It's getting better but it used to be that the site would crash, people would wait online forever and then get dumped off, people wouldn't get what they wanted…

That was, at best, an argument that the organizers had underestimated demand and/or had the wrong people design the sign-up portions of their website. It was not an argument that Comic-Con had failed and had to be repealed.

That's a photo of me with Lou Scheimer, who ran Filmation Studios, producers of hundreds if not thousands of hours of Saturday morning-style TV cartoons. Lou passed away Thursday just a few days shy of what would have been his 85th birthday. He'd been ill for some time with Parkinson's Disease and he'd been declining public appearances. So this was not unexpected.

Filmation Studios is a controversial topic in some circles of the animation community. Here are some positive things you hear: They produced a lot of shows that a lot of people remember fondly, including the first Superman and Batman cartoons made for television, the Star Trek cartoons, Masters of the Universe, many different programs featuring the Archie characters and the show I thought was the best thing they ever did, Fat Albert. They gave an awful lot of work to an awful lot of artists and writers. In some cases, they gave new people an important break. In others, they gave old-timers a place to earn a paycheck after other studios had closed. Lou was very proud of all those breaks and paychecks.

Virtually alone among producers of animation for TV in their time, they fought to keep work in Los Angeles rather than farm it out to overseas houses. One time when the Animation Union struck over this problem, Lou — as a member — was put in the awkward position of picketing his own studio. No one would have faulted him if he'd not done this but instead, he went out, picked up a sign and marched around his own building, demanding that management (i.e., him) cease this pernicious practice that it was not committing. Lou had a good sense of humor and a friend of mine who worked long and hard at Filmation said, "To the extent it didn't get in the way of making a profit, it was a fun place."

The negatives? Well, they produced TV cartoons with all the restrictions and problems that TV cartoons had in those days. There were times when their shows were better than others who had to operate under all these handicaps and times when they weren't. Still, if you cringe at most animation of the seventies and eighties, Filmation offered you much to cringe about. Someone once said of Lou, "He knows how to take the impossible deal and make money off it." Some of his shows were produced on budgets that would have caused any other studio to say, "It can't be done for that" and pass. Depending on your point-of-view, it might be a negative that he didn't do that.

This article will tell you more about the history of Lou Scheimer and Filmation, though it repeats the oft-made claim that the studio never sent animation work out of this country. They did but only rarely and when desperate. And this obit in the L.A. Times will tell you more. So I think for the rest of this piece, I'll just tell you about my own path-crossing with Lou Scheimer.

Every time I saw him in the last twenty or so years, he'd throw an arm around me, hug me and tell everyone within earshot that I was one of the many talented writers who'd started with Filmation, done wonderful work for him and then gone on to bigger and better things. "I'm so proud of Mark and guys like him," he'd say. He was so happy and complimentary that I never had the heart to tell him the total amount of work I'd done for his studio. It was one script…and he hated it. I was offered work there on many occasions but, to put it simply, I always had better offers, both in terms of money and in the chance of doing my best work. Once though, I was trapped.

Filmation had a series that they were trying to sell to CBS. CBS was reticent to buy it. Filmation was getting desperate. They were counting on selling that series so they would not have to lay off one entire division. Lou went to CBS and said, in essence, "Tell me what I have to do to get you to buy this show." At the time, I was doing a lot of development work for CBS, which meant I'd write a bible (outline of the format, description of the characters and how they operated, sample plot ideas) and a pilot script for a potential series. I'm not sure who it was at CBS but someone there suggested I might be the guy who could whip it into a shape that the network could purchase.

I was sitting at home one day here when my phone rang. The voice on the other end of the line identified itself as Lou Scheimer…and it sounded like Lou Scheimer. I'd once interviewed Lou for a magazine called The Monster Times and I'd heard him speak at animation-related gatherings. Yes, it sounded like Lou Scheimer but it also sounded like my friend Frank Welker's impression of Lou Scheimer. Frank is arguably the best mimic alive and inarguably the most in-demand cartoon voice guy, and a few weeks earlier, he'd done a medley for me of his impressions of people who'd hired him, Joe Barbera and Lou Scheimer among them. The Lou Scheimer on my phone sounded less like the real Lou Scheimer than he did like Welker's impression of Lou Scheimer.

Certain it was Frank, I decided to play along. I said, "Hi, Lou! What can I do for you?" Before I realized it wasn't Frank, I was half-committed to write this pilot for the real Lou Scheimer. Later in the day, a fellow at CBS called and asked me, as a favor to the Children's Programming Department at his network, to do this development for Filmation even though the money was a bit on the thin side. So, blaming Welker and not myself of course, I committed the rest of the way. Filmation sent over what they'd done so far on the idea and I instantly saw the problem.

The show was overpopulated. As developed so far, it had about 30 regular characters, 25 of which didn't contribute much, if anything. The concept was lost in the crowd, so to speak. Lou had left the U.S. on a business trip and I'd been told to deal with his second-in-command, a lovely gent named Arthur Nadel. I told Arthur what I wanted to do and he said, "Okay, we trust you." Emboldened by that trust, I rewrote the bible so the show had but five regular characters. When I wrote up suggested plot outlines, I used about five more of those extra players as characters who might appear once…but I basically threw out 20-25 characters as superfluous.

CBS liked the bible. I got the go-ahead to write a pilot script. I did. They liked it and they committed to the series. This was all while Lou was still in Europe. A few days later, I got a call: Lou was back in town and would like me to come in and see him.

I went in, figuring there'd be confetti and party hats for my having sold the show and saved the day. Instead, Lou's first words when I stepped into his office were, "Ah, here's the man who killed twenty toy deals for me." I thought he was kidding but he wasn't. To try and sell the show, he had lowered its price down to a level he felt CBS couldn't refuse, a level that would force him to produce the show at a loss. To then get the show above water, he'd made a deal with a toy company to put out action figures of all the characters…but the deal called for all those characters to appear a certain number of times in the first season. The math didn't work if every episode didn't feature a lot of them.

Remember what I wrote earlier about how Lou could take an impossible deal and figure out how to make it work? Well, this show was an impossible deal but in pruning all those characters, I'd gotten in the way of what he was counting on to make that particular deal work.

I told him I was sorry but my assignment had said nothing about toy deals. My job was to get CBS to commit to the series and they had. Lou admitted I was right and I got a grudging "thank you" — but he also told me that he had to get a lot of those characters back into the show. Which is what he did. Once CBS had signed the paperwork and the show was officially on their schedule, he began convincing them the show needed this guy and that gal and this monster. Eventually, it was so unlike what I'd written that my pilot script was never produced. I had nothing to do with any of this. I was contractually entitled to a screen credit every week — "Developed for Television by Mark Evanier" — but I never got it and never made an issue of not getting it. I watched one episode and it had very little to do with what I'd done.

In spite of this, I liked Lou. He and his partners Norm Prescott and Hal Sutherland fought like crazy to build his studio and keep the doors open over the years. They were the little guys in a field where the biggies had the power to step on them but they succeeded, nonetheless. In a sense the whole studio was an impossible deal but Lou and his cronies found a way to make it work.

Hey, guess who I had lunch with yesterday. That's right: Tony Benedict. Tony was a "story man" (i.e., a writer) in the glory days of Hanna-Barbera. He worked on the original Flintstones. He worked on the original Jetsons. I believe he created Secret Squirrel. He worked on a lot of great shows and — I'll say this as delicately as I can — he's one of the few guys who did who's still around.

Fortunately for us, Tony was a fierce taker of photos and home movies. Fortunately also for us, he's assembling them and his memories into what I'm sure will be a wonderful movie that will mean a lot to anyone who cares about animation and H-B. He's a guy who was right there in the midst of it all and he's also a funny, perceptive guy with no axes to grind, no illusions to spread. There is no more qualified guy on this planet to tell us what it was like then and there.

I get hundreds of requests to plug Kickstarter projects here and I can't and won't push more than one occasionally. This is my one at the moment and I put my money where my mouth was. I was the first backer and I intend to raise my contribution even more to help make this happen.

In all honesty, it may not from this effort. Tony, in his drive for perfection here, got a late start in opening the doors for crowdfunding to begin. He only has a limited amount of time and I doubt he's going to reach his goal in time, which would mean he'd collect nothing. However, as I understand it, he can solicit again later and intends to do so. So maybe think of this as an encouragement for him to do so. Please watch the video and then, when you're eager to see this film, go over to Tony's Kickstarter Page and pledge as much as you can. Remember that you're not limited to the suggested amounts there. You can pledge as much as you like. Like I said, I don't think he's going to make it this time but, hey, my state elected Arnold Schwarzenegger governor…twice. Stranger things have happened. Anyway, at worst, your pledges will let Tony know you want to see his film become a reality. I sure do.

And then maybe we can get him to do a similar film about his days at Disney, working with Walt…

Lou Scheimer, the main man behind the Filmation cartoon studio has died at the age of 85. I have a good, long story about Lou but I won't be able to post it here 'til sometime tomorrow. He was one of the good guys.

My friend Jeff Abraham and I had dinner last night the Souplantation near me. The Classic Creamy Tomato Soup was as good as ever. If I ran that chain, I'd have that soup all the time, not just now and then. In fact, I'd get rid of the salad bar and the dessert bar and the pasta bar and all the other soups and the breads and the baked potatoes and I'd just sell the Classic Creamy Tomato Soup. My chain might go bankrupt but at least I'd be happy in my soup-eating.

I mentioned here the other day a forthcoming documentary called I Know That Voice, all about people who do voices for cartoons. The film includes about 95 of the top 100 voice actors in the business these days plus me and it'll be available soon, mainly as an iTunes and Internet download. But there's a premiere screening on November 6 at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood with many of the interviewees attending. If you want to attend, you can score a ticket at their crowdfunding page. (I said before it was at the Chinese but it's the Egyptian. Okay, so I missed it by a continent or two.  The change is disappointing as I was hoping they'd be putting June Foray's tonsils in the cement sidewalk or something…)

Let me warn you right off the bat: This is a sad story. Very sad. But it's also an important story in a way. It's about two of the nicest people I ever met in my life — Joe and Melinda Greene, an elderly couple that lived in the apartment house next door to the home in which I grew up. A more perfectly-matched pair, you never met. They were in their eighties and had long recently celebrated sixty (that's six-oh) years of marriage when this tale begins.

Mr. Greene was retired from a career in community service and he had an entire den full of awards from organizations: Kiwanis Club, Rotary Club, Salvation Army, etc. Any local group that gives out awards for helping people had given at least one to Mr. Greene. He was a handsome man who was often mistaken for the distinguished actor Alan Napier, best known for playing Alfred the Butler on the sixties Batman TV show. Melinda — a woman of incredible, constant cheer — was occasionally mistaken for the fine comedienne, Pat Carroll. I don't have a photo of the Greenes so just to give you some sort of visual, here are pics of Alan Napier and Pat Carroll…

Mr. Greene had spent most of his life helping people. Mrs. Greene had spent most of her life helping him and running their home. They were just great neighbors, great folks to be around.

Not long before dark each evening, Mr. Greene took a long walk around the neighborhood and I would often run into him and chat about this or that. I was around seventeen years old when the following transpired. It was just before the sun went all the way down. I was outside and Mr. Greene came along…but he didn't say, "Good evening, Mark," as he usually did. Instead, he said, "I was always born on Tuesday."

I stared at him, puzzled, trying to figure out what that meant. Then he said it again: "I was always born on Tuesday." What the heck did that mean?

He was a smart man so I knew it had to mean something, right? But he said it a few more times and it was the words plus the way he said them that caused a sickening chill to course through my body. It happened the instant I realized what it meant. It meant Mr. Greene — the delightful, distinguished Mr. Greene — was losing his mind.

Over the next week, it became obvious and undeniable. I'd run into him, there'd be a bit of coherent speech…and then his nouns and verbs would collide in utter chaos. By the end of the month, he was incapable of leaving his apartment or even of coherent speech. He would mutter and chant little songs. He never spoke another actual word and there was no trace of actual thought within him, no attempt to communicate.

Doctors told Mrs. Greene that there was zero chance he would ever get better. She believed they were right and indeed, they were right.

They suggested he be placed in a nursing home for the rest of his life and well-meaning friends and relatives seconded that advice. Mrs. Greene knew that was the wisest course of action…for her. But she said, "We've been together for six decades and we took a marriage vow of "'Til death do us part.' I'm going to take care of him myself." Mr. Greene would stay at home with her. She would dress him. She would feed him. She would get him into and out of bed. She would bathe him. And this she did for months, turning into years. I didn't think it was what was best for her and maybe not even for Mr. Greene but it's what she wanted to do. Or at least what she felt she should do.

Mr. Greene stayed in bed for much of the day but every so often, he would get up and go wandering about the apartment in his pajamas, usually with the bottoms falling down, chanting his little tunes as he did. It was a third floor apartment with a great balcony. One afternoon when she was in the kitchen, Mr. Greene tried to wander out onto that balcony and she stopped him, just moments before he probably would have fallen off it. Thereafter, she kept the sliding glass door to the balcony latched at all times. Mr. Greene would walk into that closed door and while he never broke the glass, he did injure himself several times and she'd somehow get him into the car and drive him to a hospital emergency room for treatment.

After the third or fourth meeting of Mr. Greene's face with the door, she asked me to come over and put decals all over the latter. I didn't have any or know where to get any that were appropriate to their decor. All I had were Superman and Captain America decals. She said, "I don't care. I just need decals on that door and I need them right away." So I went over and stuck comic book characters all over the sliding door to the balcony. They apparently lessened but did not eliminate the problem of Mr. Greene walking into the door.

She'd call every now and then for another kind of assistance. All day, she moved him around to change his pajamas, wash him, get him onto the toilet, etc. Mr. Greene was taller than I was then and I was over six feet tall. Mrs. Greene barely topped five feet and she was into her eighties. I still don't understand how she could handle him at all but whatever magic she possessed, it often failed her late in the day. That's when she would call our house and ask, in an "I don't want to be a bother" way if possibly, just maybe, I had time to come over and give her a bit of a hand?

If I was home, I rushed over. If I wasn't and I later heard she'd called, I felt badly but somehow, she managed without me. What had usually happened was that Mr. Greene had slipped off the toilet and was on the bathroom floor, wedged between the toilet and the sink…and she just plain didn't have the strength to get him up. I'd assist and together, we'd get him up and into bed. And then she'd give me the cookies or brownies.

In addition to all else she had to do, Mrs. Greene would bake cookies or brownies from scratch every day…rewards to give me and others she called upon. I'd tell her thank you but it wasn't necessary to do that. I was glad to come over and help her anytime she needed a hand, no baked goods required. She did not stop. She always had fresh cookies or brownies for me. She'd even learned that I was allergic to walnuts and she'd usually bake two batches: One with walnuts for others; one without for me.

This went on for about three years in real time, ten or more on Mrs. Greene's face and body. She was around 81 when her beloved went hopelessly senile around 1969. She looked well into her nineties when he finally died in '72. I began to think she needed someone like her old self to take care of her current self.

Everyone in the neighborhood said a collective "Thank God" when he passed in his sleep one night. There was nothing to be sad about. We'd lost the Mr. Greene we all loved years before.

We'd all been horrified over what keeping him at home and technically alive had done to her. My family had an even clearer, more chilling picture because we were the closest to them and also my father did their taxes and helped with some of their other financial paperwork. When Mr. Greene's powers of speech and thought had disintegrated, they'd had a decent sum of money in the bank — enough that if he'd died then and there, his widow could have lived comfortably for the rest of her natural life. Even with insurance, much of that money had been spent on treatments, home medical equipment, nurse visits, ambulances, remodelling the apartment for Mr. Greene's safety, etc. One evening when my father ran down an accounting of the Greenes' expenses for me and my mother, I made a feeble joke by adding, "…and twenty thousand dollars for cookie ingredients."

As it was, she had enough money to last her the rest of her life but only because she died a few months after he did. You will never convince me that taking care of him night and day as she did didn't lop off a decade or so from her lifespan.

A few years later, a physician named Dr. Jack Kevorkian came to prominence in the news for his advocacy of, and occasional participation in, Assisted Suicide. At first, a lot of people, myself included, thought it was a great topic for jokes. A doctor who killed his patients? That was one of the easiest topics ever handed to Johnny Carson's monologue writers. And Dr. Kevorkian sometimes helped the ridicule along with little attention-getting stunts and with quotes that made him seem unserious. Eventually though, some of us realized that Dr. Kevorkian was quite serious about a serious topic. We all believe, or like to think we believe, in the Sanctity of Life. You ask your average person on the street, "Should everything possible be done to prolong life?" and the knee-jerk, instant response of 99% or more will be, "Of course."

Still, Dr. Kevorkian brought an important, oft-avoided question to the table of public opinion: Should the elderly and hopelessly ill have a painless, practical escape route? If "getting better" is almost certainly impossible…if all a person can see before them is living in dank hospital rooms, being in pain and causing pain for their loved ones, shouldn't there be a way for them to make the decision to end it? I recall around that time watching a TV show with the Reverend Jerry Falwell, a man I considered morally indistiguishable from his nemesis Larry Flynt in exploiting the First Amendment for profit. Falwell was answering the question with a resounding no, speaking of how only God had the right to take a life. (Of course, like many who say such things, Falwell was a big supporter of the Death Penalty and of our government killing people in other countries.)

Falwell's words made me think of the Greenes and I silently shouted back to my TV screen that there was nothing godly about keeping Mr. Greene "alive" in such a state. In a very real sense, his years of being unable to dress and feed himself were years of torturing the woman he loved and of destroying what remained of her life. Unless you had some deep hatred of your putative "loved ones," you would never want to do that to them. Never.

In the years after the Greenes left us, I didn't think a lot about these issues but now and then, when Dr. Kevorkian's latest Assisted Suicide or prosecution was in the news, you couldn't help but think about it, especially if you had aging parents, as I did. In 1991 when my father had his next-to-last heart attack, the shadows of poor Mr. Greene suddenly loomed very large in my father's life and mine. I will continue this story in the next one of these essays…and don't worry. It won't be quite as sad as this one.

I shoulda mentioned this yesterday. For four days only, one of which was yesterday, most Souplantation restaurants are offering their Classic Creamy Tomato Soup, which is one of my favorite things to eat. Some Souplantation restaurants go under the pseudonym of Sweet Tomatoes. You can see if there's one near you on this page. Usually, they offer it for the month of March and sometimes for a week in October. This October, we only get four days. Must have something to do with the Government Shutdown.