It's that time of the year again. Each July at the Comic-Con International, we present something called the Bill Finger Award for Excellence in Comic Book Writing. Actually, we present two of them — one to a deceased writer of the past and one to someone who's still with us. Ideally, the person who's still with us will be with us at Comic-Con to receive it in person. So around this time, I solicit nominations of who you think oughta get one. If you have a thought, I'd love to hear it but please, remember the following…
This is an award for a body of work as a comic book writer. I put those points in bold because every year, people send me — in the clearest demonstration I've seen that comic books impair one's reading skills — the names of artists. One person wrote me last year to suggest John Buscema. I wrote back to him that John Buscema was a wonderful artist, not a wonderful writer. The fellow wrote back to argue, "He co-wrote an issue of one Marvel book once so he qualifies." No. Doesn't work like that.
Bill Finger in his lifetime received almost no credit for his work and nowhere near a respectable share of the revenue it generated. So this award is for a writer who has received insufficient reward for his or her splendid body of work. It can be insufficient in terms of recognition or insufficient in terms of legal tender or it can, of course, be both. Every year, someone writes me to say, "How can you have an award for comic book writing and not give it to Stan Lee?" Well, maybe because he's the most famous, well-compensated person in the history of the medium. Frankly, I think if I called Stan and told him we wanted to give him an award because his work was so uncelebrated, he'd slap me. Right after he fired his publicist.
A person can only win this award once. So far, it has gone to Arnold Drake, Alvin Schwartz, George Gladir, Larry Lieber, Frank Jacobs, Gary Friedrich, Del Connell, Steve Skeates, Jerry Siegel, Harvey Kurtzman, Gardner Fox, Archie Goodwin, John Broome, Otto Binder, Bob Haney and Frank Doyle. Those folks are therefore ineligible.
Beyond all that, it can be anyone with a body of writing work in comic books. Not strips. We've fudged the definition to include MAD but will fudge no further. My address is on this page. If you have a thought, I'd love to hear it and pass it on to our Blue Ribbon Judging Committee, none of whom has a blue ribbon. Thank you.
Tuesday evening, I went to see the fabulous Shelly Goldstein perform her act to a delighted crowd at the Catalina Bar and Grill in Hollywood. The evening was a smashing success and when next she plays someplace you can see her, I'll tell you about that and about how good she is.
On my way in, I ran into a friend of mine named Saratoga Ballantine — an accomplished actress who has also co-directed a documentary I've been meaning to plug here. Saratoga and her friend Dea Lawrence made Troupers, a look at veteran show business performers, one of whom was Sara's father, The Amazing Carl Ballantine. They interviewed him and also Pat Carroll, Kaye Ballard, Bruce Kirby, Marvin Kaplan, Ivy Bethune, Justine Johnston, Allan Rich, Jane Kean, Harold Gould, Connie Sawyer and Betty Garrett. It's a terrific portrait of a kind of performer who is, sad to say, becoming extinct. The film is called Troupers.
Where can you see this film? Well, in Los Angeles it's running tonight (Thursday) on KCET, Channel 28 at 9 PM. If you're setting a TiVo or DVR, you may have to search for the name of the program on which it's airing, which is Open Call. Keep your eye out for it elsewhere as it's quite wonderful. The trailer here should give you some idea of how wonderful…
American Airlines and U.S. Airways are merging. This is good only because it will mean we'll have one less dysfunctional, money-losing airline out there.
I know this is a bad idea but to find out just why, I turn to my buddy who knows everything about airlines, Joe Brancatelli. Here's one article by Joe about it and here's another.
Dave Weigel is currently my favorite reporter for explaining what's going on in Washington. Here he explains about this sequester thing that always struck me as a lot like Cleavon Little holding the gun to his own head in Blazing Saddles.
I seem to have dredged up many a memory with my post that linked to the article on the 1989 "Snow White" number at the Oscars. Jonathan Sloman links me to an article he wrote about it which should tell you everything you could want to know about it.
I will quibble with one thing Jonathan wrote: Where he said the ceremony was watched by seventy-five million U.S. viewers plus another estimated seventy-five million worldwide. Everyone quotes numbers like that and we'll doubtlessly hear that this year's Oscarcast is being seen by a billion — or even two billion — people around the world. Nope, not even close to that. The actual ratings show us that the Academy Awards show reaches somewhere between 40 and 60 million viewers per year in this country. No statistics have ever been compiled as to how many watch worldwide — or at least if they have been compiled, they haven't been released. But let's be logical. It's an American show in English and almost wholly about American movies. Is that likely to get a few hundred million viewers in Belgium? Or Peru? I'd be very surprised if the total viewership outside the United States even equalled the total viewership inside the United States.
Meanwhile, my friend of many decades, Alan Light, writes…
Thanks for directing me to the article "I Was Rob Lowe's Snow White." I attended the Oscars in person that year, and the two days of rehearsals prior to the telecast. A friend who was working on the production company that year invited myself and another friend out from Iowa.
I vividly remember sitting in the audience during the rehearsal of the Snow White number, watching it performed over and over again. The first time or two my friend and I looked at each other with our jaws on the floor…."They think this is good?"…and by the tenth time we were numb.
Photo by Alan Light
I took a photo of Army Archerd and Snow White during the rehearsal (photo above) and I had my picture taken with Rob Lowe at the Governor's Ball after the show. Cameras were strictly prohibited, of course, but being the tourist from Iowa, I snapped many photos with my pocket 35MM film camera anyway, including great shots of Lucille Ball taken a month before she died as I stood next to her on the red carpet during the arrivals. Talk about surreal for a guy from Iowa. Nobody yelled at me for taking pictures at any time, so I got braver and braver. My all-access pass did not include the Governor's Ball, but when the telecast was over my friend and I had the choice of going back to the hotel or trying to crash it, so we displayed our badges prominently, grabbed some papers from somewhere and looked as though we were talking about something important as we passed the guards at the entrance to the Ball. Nobody stopped us. Once inside, taking photos was like shooting fish in a barrel.
All of my photos are online here — several hundred of them. Anyway, thanks again for directing your readers to this article.
Thanks, Alan. Some fine shooting there. I suspect what made the number so notorious was the awkward reaction of the stars who were approached during it…something that couldn't have been anticipated in rehearsal. I further suspect that since then nothing at the Oscars is spontaneous if they can help it. Billy Crystal running out into the audience to sit on Jack Nicholson's lap…that couldn't have been a surprise to Jack.
Posted on Wednesday, February 20, 2013 at 12:59 PM
I was talking with Stu Shostak last night and he mentioned some comedians he thought were awful. A couple of them were folks I think are hilarious but I understood why he didn't. I'd seen those comics perform live, meaning I saw long sets. He was judging them by five minutes on some talk show. I used to do that too but I've come around to another viewpoint and a big reason was Sam Kinison.
You remember Sam Kinison. I vividly recall several times I saw him up at the Comedy Store doing a half-hour or forty minutes. This was early in his stardom when he hadn't quite "made it" by any reasonable standard and his laments about how crappy his life was rang true. Not long before he died, I saw him with Superstar Headliner status on stage at Bally's in Las Vegas and that material didn't work so well. Not in that context. But of course, by then his act largely consisted of doing his famous yell at the audience. Then they'd yell back at him. Then he'd yell back at them. Then they'd yell back at him. Then he'd yell back at them. I once heard Steve Martin explain why he gave up doing stand-up. He said it was because audiences didn't want to hear him do actual material. They just wanted to hear a medley of his catch-phrases.
Back at the Comedy Store, Kinison was incredible. He would stalk about the stage, obviously saying a lot of what he said on other nights but not in a strict, memorized delivery. So much of it felt so honest and so much of it was grippingly, fall-down funny. If you never saw the guy in that setting, you missed a lot and I don't think it's there on his record albums, either. I've seen most of the great comedians of my generation live and Kinison, those nights up at the Store, was as good as any of them.
That was then and there. When I saw him on TV, I thought he was boring.
A little of that was because of censorship. A little more of it was because any act loses some amount of immediacy and contact when you see it on TV as opposed to in-person. Most of the difference, I think, was that Kinison was just a guy who needed room. He had a great 40 minute act and a lousy seven-minute one. It's like how your favorite 300-page novel might not be so wonderful if someone yanked out a 20-page excerpt. Some comics can score in six minutes and some can't.
I keep that in mind now when I see a disappointing stand-up spot on some TV show. Some new comic performs, fails to impress me and I think, "Gee, that was as bad as Kinison was when he did stand-up on Letterman's show." That might be as good as that new guy gets but there might also be more to him than that. Stu said he didn't like Paula Poundstone. If I'd only seen her on TV, as he has, I might feel the same way. But I've seen her in person and enjoyed her act tremendously. Just something to think about.
As we count down to the Oscars, Hollywood Reporter remembers the disastrous opening number for the ceremony in 1989. That was the one with Snow White, Rob Lowe and Merv Griffin. Take a look.
One of my best friends, Scott Shaw!, tells the famous story of his entry into the costume competition at the World Science-Fiction Convention in 1972. What he says happened actually happened. I know. I was there. In fact, I kicked in a couple of bucks towards the peanut butter that made it all possible…
From Bill Mullins comes some research that shows that The Lohman and Barkley Show was on and off the air a lot earlier than I estimated…
The L.A. Times for Feb 8 1969 says "Locally, Channel 4 Sunday at 11:30 [this would be Feb 9, 1969] premieres the Lohman and Barkley Show, a weekly 90-minute bash featuring comedy, music, interviews and guest stars hosted by Al Lohman and Roger Barkley. Singer-puppeteer Shari Lewis guests."
They got a local Emmy in 1970, and again in 1971. In late summer 1970, they moved from Sunday night to Saturday night.
The last broadcast I can find in the L.A. Times TV listings is Tues Feb 23 1971, a rerun.
Douglas McEwan mentioned being in the studio with Lohman the night Nixon snagged the G.O.P. nomination. That was August 6, 1968. If they were indeed taping on that date then the show sat on the shelf for quite a while before NBC began airing them. Perhaps they were just doing a pilot in August and didn't commence weekly production until later. In an article Bill sent me, Lohman is quoted as saying, "We started it…as a sort of pilot project. Channel 4 [the NBC station in L.A.] gave us an open-end show following the Democratic and Republican conventions, and it turned into a comedy series."
(Douglas, by the way, has a new book out that I hear is quite outrageously funny. It's called Tallyho, Tallulah! and here's a link to get your mitts on a copy. He's a very clever writer, he is.)
Douglas remembered the show being an hour. I remembered it being 90 minutes and the above quote says 90 minutes. Further research says both answers are sorta wrong. They made 40 half-hour shows but formatted them in such a way that two could be combined to play as an hour show or three could look like a 90-minute one. The format was so loose and unpredictable that that was possible. I believe it played on Channel 4 as both an hour and a 90-minute show.
As I've written before, I believe this series had something to do with the eventual appearance of Saturday Night Live in that time slot. Notice above where it says they moved it from Sunday to Saturday. That meant that the Saturday Tonight Show (reruns of Mr. Carson) was bumped to Sunday nights. Not long after, as more and more stations relocated them to the less-preferable night, Johnny informed NBC that he wanted to dump the weekend reruns. That prompted NBC to start developing something new for Saturday nights at 11:30 and I can't believe they didn't look at the semi-impressive numbers attained by The Lohman and Barkley Show and find some encouragement.
In the meantime, several folks have written me to note that there is one clip from the series on YouTube — an interview with Gisele MacKenzie. I'm not going to embed it because it's not a good example of what the series was but if you want to take a look at it, here it is.
I asked here the other day about a local (L.A.) musician named Stan Worth who among other appearances, was the bandleader on a number of local talk shows. Douglas McEwan writes about one of them…
OK, here's something else about Stan Worth. In the late 1960s, Lohman & Barkley had a TV show on local KNBC on late night Saturdays, what would become SNL's time slot but only an hour long. A number of later-famous people were regular writer-performers on it: McLean Stevenson, Craig T. Nelson, Rudy De Luca, Barry Levinson. The show is so obscure that it appears on none of these people's IMDb resumes, not even Lohman's or Barkley's. I was a friend of Al and Rog's from my junior year of high school on, and eventually wrote for them (though not for this TV show), so I was often present for the tapings. (I recall being in the studio with them the night Nixon got the Republican nomination. I recall Al's "Son-of-a-BITCH!" when Nixon got the nod.) There was no audience, just me staying out of the way of the cameras. It was shot just down the hall from Laugh-In. So while I could not really say I knew Stan, I did meet him at tapings many times.
Anyway, The Stan Worth Trio was the house band on the show, and so, along with George of the Jungle (which Stan performed on the show), Stan wrote the theme song for the show, for which Al & Rog penned the lyrics.
During the run of the show, Stan was suddenly afflicted by a disease called, I think, Bell's Palsey, which paralyzed half of his face, and made his speech slurry. It lasted a few months, but they did talk about it on the air, as they had really no choice, since it was clear there was somethihng wrong with his face and his speech that hadn't been before. He did fully recover from it.
So that's all I know about Stan Worth.
Man, I miss Al Lohman. The tenth anniversary of his passing was this past October.
Yeah, I've written before here about that Lohman & Barkley TV show. The two of them were pleasant but not revolutionary in their radio work…basically two more of hundreds of guys out there doing Bob & Ray. But that short-lived TV series, which I think was seen only on the NBC owned-'n'-operated stations and not even all of them, was one of the funniest, cleverest television comedy shows I've ever seen. I would want to see it again before I said it was on the level of, say, Ernie Kovacs or Monty Python…but if it was as good as I recall, it was in that league.
I haven't seen it since its original airings, which I believe were around 1973 or 1974. In an earlier post here about the show, I said '74 but if Laugh-In was taping down the hall, that would suggest '73 or earlier since Laugh-In stopped taping forever early in '73.
Al Lohman and Roger Barkley
People later credited David Letterman with "deconstructing" the talk show form but that series really did it…and did it before he did. Among its premises was that Lohman and Barkley were self-admitted bad interviewers of their guests. I don't think they asked a real question during the entire run of the show. They'd fumble about and get things wrong and just make a shambles out of every interview. Something went horribly wrong in every one of them, including the time they accidentally killed their first guest, Pat Paulsen, and left his dead body on the stage there as they brought out subsequent guests.
One time, they had Steve Allen on…and it was obvious Steverino had only been minimally briefed on what was going to happen. Allen had often on his shows spoken of his best friend from high school, whose name was Niles Lishness. I don't guarantee that spelling but that was the fellow's name and it turned up often in sketches and bits on The Steve Allen Show. Lohman and Barkley, with considerable fanfare, announced that at considerable expense, they had tracked down Steve's old friend and flown him out to Hollywood for a thrilling on-air reunion. Then they brought him out, he didn't recognize Steve…
…and it was quickly determined that they'd brought out the wrong Niles Lishness.
Lohman and Barkley played absolutely deadpan straight, apologizing for the error…and Steve Allen, who hadn't seen the punchline coming, got hysterical as only Steve Allen could. Finally, when Steve stopped laughing, Al and Roger said that they had a gift for Steve to apologize for the dreadful error they'd made. They'd commissioned a top artist to create a portrait of Steve's spouse and they brought it out and unveiled "…this painting of your lovely wife, Audrey Meadows." Allen collapsed again in laughter at the painting of his sister-in-law and it was one of the funniest things I ever saw on television.
There were loads of spots like that and boy, I wish I could see those shows again. The last time I mentioned it here, someone wrote to tell me they'd heard all those tapes had been wiped and there were no copies of any episodes in existence. The Paley Center (I checked) doesn't have any. If they were a third as good as I remember, a real treasure has been lost.
