Monthly Archives: March 2002

As usual, we recommend the new issue of The Jack Kirby Collector, and not just because we have a column inside.  Editor-Publisher John Morrow does his customary fine job of assembling articles and artwork about The Man, and the tabloid format enhances the latter so much that you won't mind (much) the hassle of storing the thing.  The cover is something of a gem.  In 1969, Jack was snookered into producing a ton of artwork for a Los Angeles-based company called Marvelmania International — a mail order firm that had licensed the right to manufacture Marvel merchandise in the guise of a fan club.  The fellow who operated Marvelmania was not the most honest guy in the world. I worked there a while and quit when the full magnitude of his duplicity became apparent.  Many of us were either never paid, or paid way less than we were owed.

Jack was promised hefty sums of cash to draw dozens of things, including eight posters of Marvel heroes that the guy at Marvelmania promised to market.  The eight drawings represented some of Jack's finest work, and he actually inked them himself, which was something he rarely did.

Only four of the eight were ever issued and, though poorly printed, they sold well…which, of course, did not mean that Jack received the promised hefty sums.  He got only a few bucks for the four that were released and nothing at all for the others.  The Captain America drawing that adorns the above cover was one of those that weren't printed as posters — and what a terrific, dynamic piece of work it is.  So are all the lost Kirby treasures you'll find in The Jack Kirby Collector, which you can find at your local funnybook shop or order direct from www.twomorrows.com.

It'll run you $9.95 and if that strikes you as high, just remember it's $9.95 more than Jack got for drawing the Captain America poster.  Einstein supposedly once said there was a compensating rule of talents.  That is, if you were very, very good at playing the violin, you'd turn out to be very, very bad at something else to balance.  Jack Kirby was very, very good at creating comic book art and very, very bad at getting paid for it.

The Wondercon is in Oakland, California from April 19 through 21.  Wanna know what panels I'm hosting?  Good.  Then this button won't go to waste…

As all connoisseurs of quality television are well aware, the new version of the game show Press Your Luck is called Whammy! and it debuts April 15 on the Game Show Network.  They've jazzed it up with bells and whistles and high-tech goodies, none of which should harm the strategy/chance elements of the program that I always found fun…but none of which should help, either.  You can see a short on-line preview of the new version by clicking over to this page.

Recommended: www.ifilm.com is a website that allows you to watch short films (or excerpts from them) on-line.  I've had occasional technical problems there but they have an abridged version of one film which you may find worth the hassle.  It's a brilliant short called "Truth in Advertising," and it's all about the ad business.  It was, in fact, made only to be shown at one advertising industry function but it was too good to not make it into the real world.  If you're feeling adventurous, here's a link that will take you to the ifilm page for it.  And, yes, that's Colin Mochrie among the players.

There was so much to discuss with this year's Academy Awards that I plumb forgot my eternal gripe: The oft-repeated claim that "a billion people" watch the Oscars.  This is nonsense, as I've mentioned here before many times. What reminded me was an e-mail from Peter Dunning, who writes from Kawasaki, Japan.  He says…

I am E-mailing you from Japan, where, for the past three years, the Academy has sold Academy Awards Show rights to a subscriber TV service called WOWOW.  Because only about 2.5 million of Japan's 130 odd million movie fans subscribe to WOWOW, and because it shows in the afternoon on a weekday, probably a very small percentage of Japanese watch the show.

There you are.  That's probably about as well as the Academy Awards do in any non-English-speaking country.  The Nielsen people say that, this year, 41.8 million Americans watched.  Where's the rest of that billion?  (The Grammy Awards are now claiming two billion viewers, or a little less than a third of the population of the Earth — an amazing assertion when you realize that, this year, less than 20 million watched in this country.)

The programming schedule for WonderCon is up at www.wondercon.com.  I'm hosting five events and I'll post a list of them here in a day or three.

The best of all the jokes about the Liza Minnelli wedding.  This was uttered by Lewis Black on The Daily Show…

Michael Jackson gave the bride away with Liz Taylor serving as Maid of Honor and Mia Farrow as one of the bride's maids.  Minnelli said she chose the wedding party when she was drunk one night and started throwing darts at the National Enquirer.

Can you tell the difference between a female and a she-male?  If you're driving on Sunset Boulevard, your life could depend on it.  You can test yourself over at this website.  (Beware!  It's one of those pages that plays really lousy music.)

My favorite non-musical play — and almost the first one I saw live in a theater — is/was The Odd Couple by Neil Simon.  Alas, I did not have the thrill, and I'm sure it was one, of seeing Walter Matthau and Art Carney in the leads.  The first time I saw The Odd Couple was at the Ivar Theater in Hollywood around 1967 and it starred Jesse White as Oscar and Roy Stuart (the skinny lieutenant on Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.) as Felix.  I laughed so hard that, the next day, I had to run out and purchase a copy of the play so I could read the lines I'd missed.

Since then, I've seen more than a dozen incarnations of The Odd Couple, not counting the wonderful movie and the highly-variable situation comedy.  The worst was probably a touring company starring Tony Randall and Jack Klugman — bad, not because of them but because a feeble sound system rendered half the lines inaudible and hissy.  (This was before Mr. Klugman's vocal problems.  He sounds now like did on that stage.)  It wasn't so terrible for me since I knew every line by heart but at intermission, my date had to ask if we could leave…and we did, along with much of the audience.

Or maybe the worst was the "female" version with Rita Moreno as Olive and Sally Struthers as Florence.  This was a rewrite Mr. Simon did in '86 and not, I'm afraid, a successful one.  Among the problems was that the gender switch was not fully reflexive.  In the original, Felix began acting somewhat like Oscar's wife, cooking for him and complaining about how unappreciated he was when Oscar came home late for dinner.  In the distaff version, however, Florence did not become Olive's husband or vice-versa, and it was hard to see what all the screaming was about.  The best moments, as I recall, came from the wholly-new material and involved two male Hispanic flight attendants — Manolo and Jesus Costazuela — who displaced Gwen and Cecily Pigeon.

No, I thought, it didn't work.  The Odd Couple is just about the perfect comedy and it should remain just as Mr. Simon wrote it.  Maybe.

Much to my amazement and probably yours, Neil Simon has rewritten The Odd Couple.  A new, "updated" version will have a tryout at the Geffen Theater in Westwood, beginning June 19.  The plot, Simon says, is the same but 70% of the dialogue has been altered to make the jokes less dated.  I assume this means more than the removal of the automat line and the one about the Magic Chef.  Word is that the Pigeon Sisters are now the Costazuela Sisters.

This strikes me as such a terrible idea that it may be a good idea.  I mean that.  If someone you know who's very smart and rational suddenly said to you, "I'm going to rub cream cheese in my hair," you'd think, "Hmm…that guy's always been very smart and rational in the past.  He can't be as wrong as it seems.  He may not be right about this cream cheese thing but it's at least possible he knows something I don't."  Neil Simon has had some failures lately but his lifetime batting average is still way ahead of almost anyone else's.  He must know what he's doing, right?  Okay, I'm skeptical, too.

We'll find out in June and, yes, I'm going.  I dunno who's in it yet but I have to see what was wrong with the old version and how Simon thinks he's fixed it.  He's the most successful playwright of the last century and — who knows?  Maybe he'll wind up with an even better version of the funniest comedy ever written.  Either that or a head covered in cream cheese.

It was probably my bad phrasing — or maybe I can blame it on the root canal — but two of my saner friends wrote to say, in effect, "How can you say that The Apartment is not a love story?"  I said explicitly that it was but folks seemed to think I was arguing against that notion.

My point was that Mssrs. Wilder and Diamond chose to end their tale before Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine) had shown any real feelings for C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon).  Wilder always said that he liked to leave things to the audience to project, and I suppose that's what he was doing here…but he was also choosing what to leave to our imaginations and what to show us, and he often showed us the cynicism, the rotten motives, and left us to fill in the nice redemptions, if any, that might have occurred after "The End."  Fran is a character who has made a mess of her own life, falling for a man like Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray) who shows her whatever absolute minimum of affection is necessary to get her into bed for a quickie.  Only when his marriage goes kablooey does he decide he's going to marry her and even that, he manages to make feel like some sort of grudging accommodation.  Still, she's ready to marry the bastard.  What changes her?  Learning that Baxter really cares about her.  That's when it suddenly dawns on the lady that the sweet, puppy-faced guy who fawned over her and nursed her really loves her.

And, you know, I buy all that.  People do act that way, and I don't think it's inhumanly out of character for Fran to suddenly say to herself, "What the hell am I doing with this jerk Sheldrake when Baxter really cares about me?"  So she rushes to him and, apart from a false alarm when she momentarily fears he's offed himself, she shows him no passion, no warmth, no nothing.  She jokes about them getting married but doesn't act like she means it any more than when she was talking about being in love with ol' J.D. Sheldrake.  Maybe less.

Still, I like the way The Apartment ends.  I think that's one of the film's strengths.  I just think that, as he often did — though not always — Wilder chose a story where an upbeat romance would have gotten in the way.  These are not romantic people and for them to suddenly become healthy lovers would have been characterization whiplash. How they come together is valid and very, very human and I think much of what made Billy Wilder unique is that he didn't make a dive for the quick happy ending.  Was this because, in his skeptical way, he rarely saw them in life?  Or was it a crafty appraisal and respect for his audience's sensibilities?  Either way, it sure made for some great movies.

Chicago's HealthWorks Theatre is staging an unusual one-night only performance of one of my favorite musicals, 1776.  The twist?  Gender reveral.  John Adams, Ben Franklin and the rest of the Founding Fathers will be played by women, making them Founding Mothers.  I am not going.

We highly recommend (and agree with) Paul Krugman's column about right-wing politics.  Here's a link.

The premium area of Salon, which I keep touting here, has a good interview with Harry Shearer.  The following excerpt strikes me as a very good phrasing of something I believe, and have said here less eloquently.  Shearer was asked about Dick Cheney having to turn over details of his energy task force meetings and he replied…

If you live long enough, one of the rewards is to get the privilege of seeing each political cliché mouthed in turn by partisans from each side.  So that the same people who were desperately demanding that we know chapter and verse about Hillary Clinton's top-secret healthcare task force are now saying, "No, no, no, confidentiality, it's an important principle."  And vice versa.  It explains why, or it's a consequence of the fact that most of our politicians are trained as lawyers.  Because that's exactly what lawyers are trained to do: Take this side, all right, now take this side.  That's what they do.  And anybody who thinks that they're doing anything else is welcome to bid for some Enron stock certificates on eBay, because that is the game.

The worst thing about R.C. Harvey's essays about comic art is that when he's doing them, he isn't creating comic art…but either way, we win.  He's a sharp and perceptive critic-historian and while I don't always concur with his critiques, I always learn something from his histories.  Some of each are posted over at www.rcharvey.com, which — if you're a fan of comic books and/or strips — oughta be on your list of frequent surf stops.  His current writings focus a lot on a freedom of speech dust-up between theoretical presidential candidate-columnist Alan Keyes and political cartoonist-columnist Ted Rall.

Lately, Rall seems out to displace Larry Flynt in the oft-spoken sentence, "Larry Flynt is the price of Free Speech" and Alan Keyes has published some writings that essentially say that the First Amendment doesn't apply to whatever Alan Keyes doesn't like, and he doesn't like one of Rall's recent cartoons.  I believe Keyes is dead wrong on this one — a not uncommon occurrence with him — but I also think this is a lot of sound and fury over a non-issue.  What's kind of interesting is how similar Keyes and Ralls are: They're both very angry men, they both get noticed only when expressing outrageous, over-the-top viewpoints…and neither one of them can draw.

Anyway, that's my take on the matter.  Bob Harvey's is more nuanced and informative, as you'll see if you click over to his website.  And while you're there, check out the fine comic art books he has for sale.

Got an email from a Dudley Moore fan who says she's "hurt" that I didn't post any interesting anecdotes about her favorite performer.  I have a pretty good reason: I don't have any.  I loved Mr. Moore in 10 and Arthur and especially in Beyond the Fringe and any time he was in vicinity of Peter Cook.  But I never met the man and don't know any more about him than any of you. Maybe less than most.

The movie channels on cable and satellite don't have to rearrange programming to do any kind of Billy Wilder Tribute.  They already have plenty of his films scheduled.  Turner Classic Movies is running The Fortune Cookie on Saturday night and Double Indemnity on Sunday.  On Monday, American Movie Classics is running The Front Page and, on Wednesday, Showtime has Sunset Boulevard while Flix is running Kiss Me, Stupid and then, later in the day, Stalag 17.  Perhaps the best tribute to the man is simply to note how there is always a demand to see his movies.

My friend Bob Ingersoll reports he had a wonderful time seeing the new cast of The Producers in New York, just the other day.  And he says that Henry Goodman, who is now playing Bialystock, has added a new line.  In the midst of the song, Betrayed, there's a moment when Max sits down and thumbs through the Playbill for The Producers.  Nathan Lane did it in silence.  Goodman mutters, "Oh, look.  He's British."

We highly recommend Joe Conason's Salon article on how the press has tried to spin the final Whitewater report.  Since it's in Salon's "pay" section, you'll have to either subscribe or read it for free here at Bartcop.

We also recommend Michael Kinsley's article over at Slate about reparations to the families of World Trade Center victims.  It's one of those pieces that will probably be roundly ignored because it raises an interesting question without providing either an easy answer or some opening for someone to advance a political agenda.  Here's a direct link.

Please forgive any typos in the above.  I am writing this, following a double root canal which commenced this morning with my dentist actually saying, "This will not be pleasant but it'll be better than watching the Oscars."  He was wrong (I didn't dislike the Oscars) but the running time for the two events was about the same, and I shed as many tears as Halle Berry.

So now we've lost Billy Wilder, too.  (By the way, before I get into this: I haven't seen any of the press reports mention it but Mr. Wilder, the last few years, had been living in the same block as Mr. Berle.  Quite a few older Hollywood figures live in that block, which contains a number of luxury condominium and apartment buildings, and they're all probably a bit unsettled.)  Now then: Funny thing, I was just watching The Apartment the other day for the eight-zillionth time.  It's still quite a movie, though every time I watch it, the ending bothers me a wee bit more.  Yes, it's wonderful that Shirley MacLaine winds up with Jack Lemmon instead of Fred MacMurray…but having previously thrown herself at a bastard for quick sex, you kinda wish she'd show the teensiest bit of passion for the nice guy who seems to genuinely love her.

I love cynicism in its place and, since Billy Wilder movies were filled to overflowing with cynicism, I like most of them, especially The Big Carnival (aka Ace in the Hole) and The Fortune Cookie.  Still, The Apartment was a love story.  Of the major filmmakers who didn't specialize in terror, a la Hitchcock, or unabashed fantasy, Wilder probably set the record for making movies wherein nobody fell in love with anyone…at least not permanently.  In The Fortune Cookie, the only smidgen of love is what Jack Lemmon feels for his ex-wife and, by the film's end, he's gotten over it.

I met Billy Wilder only once, around 1978.  A writer friend of mine, Stanley Ralph Ross, had an office in a building in Beverly Hills that was full of writers who didn't want to work at home.  While I was visiting him one day, a man came in and Stan introduced us so casually, I almost thought, "This can't be THE Billy Wilder."  But it was, and he invited me back to his cramped little office for a short conversation.  Soon after, he moved to a nicer place over on Santa Monica Boulevard in the same block as my barber.  Every time I walked by and saw his name on the office directory, I'd check and see if I had the courage to go up, drop in on him and hope he felt in a chatty mood.  I never did.

The one time we talked, it was mainly about his remake of The Front Page — then, his most recent film and, admittedly, not one of his great accomplishments.  He said he thought he'd been "done in" by how obvious the casting had been…Walter Matthau as Walter Burns, Jack Lemmon as Hildy Johnson.  It was such a natural, he said, that he never really stopped to consider whether the film warranted another version, or whether he could bring anything new to it without mangling a classic beyond recognition.  He also felt he'd miscast a couple of key roles, Carol Burnett especially.  (He said she was great in the dailies, not so great — his fault, not hers — in the finished film.)

I had recently read the screenplay for The Apartment and compared it to the actual film — budding scriptwriter that I was — and I asked him about the fact that they seemed to be exact twins.  Had he really followed what they'd written so slavishly or had I gotten hold of a script that had been revised to reflect the actual filming?  He thought for a second and said, approximately, "Shirley MacLaine always told people that Izzy [I.A.L. Diamond, his collaborator] and I wrote the film as we went along.  That's bull.  We only gave her parts of the script because I didn't want her to overthink her part.  We had everything set in stone before we started filming."  Then he paused and added, "Well, maybe not stone.  Maybe clay."

"Were there any scenes in the script that weren't in the movie?"  he asked.  I told him no and he decided, "Then that was a revised script because I know we wrote a couple that I ended up throwing out.  But we didn't ad-lib on the set.  If something didn't work, I changed it, but the goal every day was to make the movie that Izzy and I wrote, and we did.  If it's not on the paper, you don't have a movie."

With Billy Wilder, it was almost always on the paper.  And up until near the end, it usually made a great movie.