As I mentioned here last week, back in the days before the Internet and High Speed Connections, I used to run electronic bulletin board systems (BBSes) for writers — the kind of system you dialed into from your computer via a phone line and a 2400 baud modem to post and read messages.
I quit because too much of my time was spent separating brawlers. It was a time I relearned something I already knew: That when you come between two people who are fighting, the odds are good that they will both start hitting you. At the very least, they will create a mess and leave it to you to mop up.
On my BBS, we had a section for Animation Writers. One time, one such person came on and, in a series of tirades I later decided were supercharged by alcohol and/or controlled substances, he began attacking various people who had not hired him. They'd either committed that unforgivable sin or had somehow stolen jobs that were, he believed, rightfully his.
Here is a tip if you're ever around writers: Beware of those who have few credits but an endless supply of stories about how they were sabotaged. They would have sold this screenplay had it not been for the slimeball who sabotaged them. They were promised that producer job but then some scumbucket sabotaged them. The network promised to buy their series and then some bastard sabotaged them.
Once in a while, the stories are true to some extent…but some writers have way too many of these tales in lieu of actual successes. And they never seem to have, like most of us do, projects that fail because someone wasn't excited by our work or some plans innocently changed. Every time they don't get what they want, which is most of the time, it's due to deliberate, premeditated sabotage. Someone stabbed them betwixt vertebrae and/or stole their brilliant idea and/or squeezed them out to get rid of competition.
Avoid those people…and do not waste your time trying to connect them to reality. Reality doesn't work for them because in reality when things don't work out, they can't claim they actually succeeded but their prize was stolen away from them.
Personally, I find it a lot easier when things don't work out for me to just think, "Well, things didn't work out!" I do have some tales of being sabotaged or robbed or cheated but they probably account for less than 3% of my disappointments. And if you can view them that way, the disappointments aren't all that disappointing. They usually turn out to be things that were just plain never going to happen and you wishfully overestimated their possibility.
So this oft-sabotaged writer came onto my BBS and since he wasn't working, he had plenty of time to post message after message about those who'd knifed him from behind. He employed the old "just asking questions" cover: "I never said Harry Shmidlap was a wife-beating pedophile…I just asked if anyone else had heard the rumors and had any solid evidence that he wasn't."
That kind of thing. When politicians do that, they call it "push-polling."
He asked such "innocent" questions about everybody who might have hired him and hadn't, as well as everybody who was working when he wasn't. One of those who qualified on both counts was a cartoon story editor named John Semper, who was not a participant on this Bulletin Board System…or any BBS as far as I knew. John, he suggested via a well-loaded question, might have done something unethical.
I didn't know John Semper at the time. I'm not sure I even knew who he was then as he was fairly new to the industry. I have since learned that he's a fellow of sterling ethics and that the disgruntled writer's post was just so much sour fruit. Even back then, I would not necessarily have believed the accusatory "innocent" question, especially given the general hysteria of the accuser. It is darn close to impossible to be in a position of hiring 'n' firing without having someone get furious that he is not among the hired.
When the offending message was first posted, I don't think I even read it. First time I heard John's name was when someone called me and said, "John Semper is furious at you for what was said about him on your BBS. He's talking about getting a lawyer."
No, I didn't panic or call my attorney or anything. Well over 99% of the time when people threaten to sue, they don't, and this was certainly not actionable, at least insofar as I was concerned. I was just kind of annoyed that I'd apparently made an enemy without ever actually doing anything beyond providing a free service for other writers.
Fade out, fade in. We jump ahead a few years…
Another hotbed of arguing and politicking can be found occasionally in the various committees and volunteers who serve the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, which you may know best as the folks who give out the Emmy Awards. There are some great, selfless people who fill those positions and do fine, generous work for a variety of good causes. They are clearly the majority but there are also a few who get involved in order to "network" in hopes of finding work or to further highly-personal agendas.
One goal some have is to redraw the rules and categories for the Emmy Awards to make it more likely that they will win one. Imagine if when I was on one of those committees, as I was, I'd lobbied for a trophy to be awarded each year to the Best Overweight, Half-Jewish Writer Who's 6'3" and Hates Cole Slaw. I didn't do that because I'm ethical and decent but especially because it would be really, really maddening if I got them to add that category and then lost.
On a couple of committees in the Animation branch, there was a gent who worked mainly as a director on Saturday morning cartoon shows — and I guess I need to tell you what a job like that entails…or did at the time, which was the early eighties.
A director on one of those shows was not like Chuck Jones directing a Road Runner cartoon for Warner Brothers in the fifties. Mr. Jones supervised every step of production. He approved what the writers and gag men came up with. He selected and directed the voice actors. He either did the storyboard and character designs or watched over and okayed every step of those vital elements. He assigned the animators their scenes and checked over every one they handed in. He approved background paintings and supervised editing and so on and so on. Basically, he was in charge from conception to completion.
The following is not meant to demean "sheet directors" (what some folks called the directors at Hanna-Barbera working on Scooby Doo) one bit. Any of them will gladly tell you that they had nothing to do with the script or the storyboard or the character designs or the voices or the editing.
Basically, that kind of director was handed the storyboard and voice track done by others and it was his job to figure out the timing of the animation: How many frames or feet this action should take, how many to allot for this speech, etc. And once he did that, his involvement with that cartoon ended.
This is not a simple job and the ones who do it well are worth their weight in Krugerrands. But they're only concerned with one step of the process, one stop on the assembly line.
The gent of whom I speak did not accept that. He saw the word "director" in his job description and decided what he did was akin to what Chuck Jones or Tex Avery did and that he was the one who "made" the cartoon. He further seemed to have a great contempt for — and a desire to devalue — what folks like I did and/or do, which is to write the cartoon, figure out the story, invent the new characters, come up with the jokes, write the dialogue and so on.
Writers don't "make" the cartoon single-handedly — no one does at a studio like that — but on most shows, we tend to be treated as more important than the guy who does only what he did. I guess I oughta assign him a fake name so you can follow this narrative easier. Let's call him Leopold. That's a good name.
Leopold was active in the TV Academy and out of sheer volunteerism, which I do not mean to belittle in any way, he'd worked his way up to a position of some power. He seemed to be using that power to push his idea that the director of a TV cartoon was automatically its auteur and anyone else was his toadie. That notion, I will belittle.
One day, a group of other animation writers approached me. They had petitioned the appropriate committee at the Academy to improve the way writers were treated, vis-a-vis Emmy Awards. The way the rules were then drawn, it was very possible to write and create an entire series, write every single script…and then, if the program won for Best Animated Series, you were ignored. No statuette. No mention.
This band of writers was working to change that. They'd gotten it to the point where a key committee was going to hear arguments in favor of their proposal and then vote on whether or not to recommend the amendment to the senior Board of Directors. The head of the committee was Leopold and he ran it, they told me, like its other members were his marionettes. Leopold was against writers getting more recognition because he thought directors — like, say, him — deserved the main credit.
I was asked to be the writers' spokesperson before the committee. They thought I'd be a good one to make their case, in part because I was then a recent Emmy nominee (for writing on a live-action kids' show) and in that environment, that somehow gave me some standing. I also spoke well, they believed, and knew a lot of animation history. Moreover, I'd been involved in several cartoon shows where I was the Show Runner and a lot more "in charge" than the directors. So I could politely make that point.
I agreed to do this. I was told the time and place to attend the meeting. Then a few days before the date, I did one of the stupider things I've done in my life.
Believe me, I could fill this blog until the appearance of the Halley's Comet after next with stupid things I've done. I could start a feature called "Tales of Stupid Things Mark Has Done," post under it daily and never lack for content. And I could reprint this essay as #1.
This was a biggie. It was the time I went on Nutrisystem.
I gather this popular diet plan has helped many, many people lose weight. Great, fine, good for them. I also gather it has changed a lot since I did it way back when. A web search tells me the meals they sell do not now contain the artificial sweetener, Aspartame. Back then, I believe they did. At least, they were filled with some artificial sweetener which my body really, really didn't like. This was the week I found out the hard way how much my body didn't like it.
I ate Nutrisystem food for four or five days. I didn't like it and that should have been a warning to me. In my childhood, I was sick very often with violent, hard-to-diagnose stomach aches. At one point, my doctor thought the removal of my appendix would stop them. It didn't. Finally, we figured out it was food allergies.
The match-up was not exact but the list of foods the test said I shouldn't eat was very close to the list of foods I didn't like. My heroic allergist suggested I just eat the foods I liked — a small but adequate menu — and the problem went largely away. Since then, I've only had problems when (a) a social situation pressured me into eating something my instincts told me to avoid or (b) some treacherous ingredient was well-concealed among others.
Oh — and (c) that time I started on Nutrisystem. I thought everything was awful but I foolishly told myself, "It's diet food. It's not supposed to taste good."
Within days, I was feeling…well, not the best. The afternoon I was to speak at the TV Academy meeting, I was quite ill and maybe even a bit delirious. I thought I was coming down with the flu but I was too fuzzy to even think, "Hey, maybe I shouldn't go where I might infect others." It didn't even occur to me to call to see if my appearance could be postponed or someone else could appear in my place.
Instead, congratulating myself on my devotion to duty, I drove out to the meeting in building on Alameda in Burbank. By the time I got there, I was staggering and all I had on my foggy noggin was to get it over and get the heck home. I kept hearing that line in the movie 1776 where someone says, "A man should die in his own bed."
"The committee will be taking up your matter in about fifteen minutes," a nice lady told me outside the meeting. "We've allotted fifteen minutes for the discussion and then we're going to break for dinner. You're welcome to stay and eat with us if you like. In fact, you can wait in here where they're setting up the buffet."
She put me in a nearby conference room filled with tables of hot, steaming supper in chafing trays. Nauseated as I was just then, there were few things I wanted to do less than smell food. Even if I'd been well, that Beef Stroganoff would have sent me reeling.
Finally, they told me I was on. Feeling like I was close to passing-out, I weaved my way into the main conference room where Leopold held forth from the head of a big conference table around which the rest of his committee was seated. There were about thirty spectators, some of whom had come to root for our cause.
Leopold summarized the issue at hand, somewhat misrepresenting our position and phrasing what we wanted to make it sound pretty silly. Then I was invited to state our position.
Here is my entire memory of what I said:
That's it. All I remember is what I just typed after that colon.
I do remember that every time I finished a sentence or even a clause, Leopold would interrupt to rebut me and to advance his belief that writers weren't really very important in the process of creating an animated cartoon. He compared what he did to Chuck and Tex and Bob Clampett and the man who got the directing credit on Dumbo. It was a stupid argument but I was too incoherent to properly knock it down…and besides, he had the gavel.
I also remember thinking at one point, "It's not going to help my cause a lot if I vomit on the conference table. I have to get out of here."
So I let him dismiss me like I was finished, which I guess I was at that moment. In a rush to judgment (or at least, Beef Stroganoff), he moved to vote, someone seconded it and —
— and just then, before they could vote, a spectator — a young gentleman I did not know at all — leaped to his feet and demanded to speak. He objected to the way Leopold had interrupted me and prevented me from finishing an entire sentence. Then he made our case efficiently and said some of the things I like to think I'd have said if I wasn't worried about fainting and/or soiling myself.
It was a very good statement of our position. It was also about as effective as I had been. The second he finished, the committee voted unanimously to change nothing and to break for dinner.
"I've got to get out of here," I was thinking to myself, all the time hearing that line from 1776. But I did make my way over to the man who'd so eloquently said what I couldn't say and I thanked him. He said, "Thanks for trying, Mark. I'm John Semper."
At that moment, the name did not register with me. I'm not sure my own name would have registered with me just then. I somehow got out of the building, located my car and decided I couldn't drive all the way home. Fortunately, I had just enough functioning brain to remember that St. Joseph's Hospital was a few blocks away. (How I remembered it and found it: I recalled through the fog that Walt Disney died in a hospital across the street from his studio. I drove further down Alameda to the Disney Studios and, sure enough, there it was.)
I parked in the lot for the Emergency Room and before I could get myself from my car, I passed out…or something. I awoke two hours later in my car in the lot, freezing to death though it was somewhere around seventy degrees.
Still, I felt much, much better — so much so that I decided to drive home instead of going inside. The next day, my doctor poked me and performed tests and confirmed that what I'd probably had was a severe allergic reaction to one or more artificial sweeteners. That was the day I gave up Aspartame, Sucralose, Saccharin and others still to be invented. My uneaten Nutrisystem meals were donated to a friend who was on the plan…and did rather well with it.
I guess there are three endings to this story, not necessarily in chronological order…
One is that a few years later, despite Leopold's best efforts, they did wind up changing the Emmy rules a bit so writers get more attention. It wasn't quite what we had pushed for but it was a lot better.
Another is that years later when I was co-producer, writer and voice director of Garfield and Friends, Leopold needed work and he applied several times for directing work. I wasn't the one saying no. The line producer was doing that…but I guess Leopold thought it was my doing out of revenge or something.
He called me like we were bosom buddies and went on at some length about what a fine, fine job I was doing running the show and how he'd slavishly follow my scripts and do his best to bring my vision to the screen. I had enough forgiveness in my soul to recommend the guy for a position but the line producer still refused to bring him on. (I'm not sure why. Maybe we just didn't need anyone. I suspect to this day, Leopold is sure I sabotaged him.)
And the last ending is that I met and became friends with John Semper. It was a few weeks after that infamous meeting that my mind finally connected his name to the BBS incident and a few more years before I ran into him again — at conventions and screenings and Writers Guild events and such. We never had the time to talk about that incident at the TV Academy until about ten days ago.
We met for lunch at the Magic Castle and gee, we had a good time. Real nice guy. He didn't remember it as vividly as I recalled the parts I recalled but our recollections fit together. He started to apologize for threatening me but I told him that wasn't necessary…and it wasn't.
I know people who hold onto grudges long past their expiration date and they shouldn't…because it's self-destructive. It distorts your view of both yesterday and today and it causes you to live in the past in anger instead of in the now and in peace. As I look back, I can see times when doing that really hurt me…
…though not as much as too much Aspartame.