Monthly Archives: September 2002

And it's off to the printer with Mad Art, a celebration of the Usual Gang of Idiots who have drawn Mad Magazine for the last half-century.  It's coming out in October or maybe early November from Watson-Guptill and it's full of peachy drawings by those guys, and lengthy biography and discussion by the operator of this website, who interviewed just about everyone who ever drew for the mag (including, years ago, gents who are no longer with us).  You can advance order this baby from Amazon by clicking here.  If you have a lick of sense about you, you will.  Then again, if you had a lick of sense you wouldn't be reading this website.

George S. Kaufman wrote the Marx Brothers' first "book" musical that played Broadway. It was called Cocoanuts and it tended to vary from night to night as Groucho, Harpo, Chico and sometimes even Zeppo ad-libbed and threw in inside jokes and generally departed from the script.

One night during a performance, Kaufman was backstage talking with newsman Heywood Broun. Broun noticed Kaufman seemed distracted and asked what was wrong.

"I may be wrong," the playwright said. "But I think I just heard one of the original lines."

I notice that this year's Jerry Lewis Telethon was directed by Artie Forrest, who I mentioned here earlier.  Someone ought to do a big, high-profile article on this man who may hold the current record for directing the most talk shows, game shows, variety shows, awards shows and telethons of any man alive.  (He's lately been directing alternate episodes of Whose Line Is It, Anyway?)  When I worked with Artie, he demonstrated an uncanny ability to direct a six-camera live show while simultaneously telling bawdy jokes to everyone in the booth.

Once upon a time, he was Jackie Gleason's favorite cameraman.  This was back on the Dumont network.  Every week on his program, Gleason would do a five minute pantomime routine in his character of The Poor Soul, and he would never rehearse it.  Shortly before the broadcast — and remember, this is live television — Gleason would take Artie onto the set and tell him, "Okay, I'm going to enter on the left and then I'll move over here, and then I'll do some crap and then run over to the right.  Then I'll either come downstage or go back out to the left and then run back in.  And after that, I don't know what I'll do but whatever it is, keep it all on camera and in focus."

And that was it.  Artie would have to cover Gleason running all over the stage with no real idea where he might move next.  Amazingly, he usually managed it…but he developed nerves of titanium.  Directing Jerry has got to be a comparative cinch.

We have a smart crowd browsing this site so I'm betting someone will have the answer on the tip of their modem.  You know that TV commercial for Evian water?  The one with infants doing water ballet?  Behind it all, a chorus is singing, "Bye Bye Baby."  Where is this song from?  I know it from somewhere…

Way back in 1972, the fine comedian George Kirby starred in a short-lived syndicated comedy series entitled Half the George Kirby Comedy Hour.  According to The Internet Movie Database, I was one of the writers on this show.  This is not so and I've told them as much.  Let's see how long it takes them to change the listing.  Actually, I did work with George Kirby many years later, on a project that never got off the ground.  If you don't recall him, he was a very gifted black comedian who did incredible impressions.

He headlined in Vegas and for a time, was a regular on all the talk shows.  He also starred in a few other short-lived series, such as The Copycats and Rosenthal and Jones.  In 1977, he was caught trying to sell heroin to a man who turned out to be an undercover narcotics officer.  This is not a smart thing to do and Kirby was sentenced to ten years in prison.  Paroled after three and a half, he never quite got his career going again, and was reduced to playing some pretty humiliating, low-paying bookings.

In the mid-eighties, he came up with an idea for a cartoon series based around Michael Jackson's pets (the llama, Bubbles the Chimp, etc.), and Michael liked the idea.  Mainly though, The King of Pop liked the idea of helping a fellow entertainer who was down on his luck, and so he gave the project his blessing.  I was brought in to try and make something out of the idea.  Unfortunately, it wasn't much of a concept, especially when Michael declined to be animated…and at least one of the networks was uncomfortable at the idea of letting a convicted drug dealer become involved in the production of a kids' show.  (He wouldn't have been the first but for some reason, at that moment, it bothered them.)

No one ever bought the show but Kirby didn't care too much, as he suddenly fell into a flurry of decent performing jobs.  I wish this story had a happier ending but soon after, he took ill and had to stop working.  He was eventually diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease and passed away in 1995.  He was a very funny man and I hope someone interviewed him extensively before he went…because he'd worked with everyone and boy, did he have stories.

Because he needed the money, Orson Welles signed to appear in a play where the rest of the cast was, to put it politely, inexperienced. He was the only real pro involved so on the first day of rehearsal, he made a little speech to the other players…

He said, "We're going to be doing this play for several weeks and the law of averages dictates that at some point, some egregious mistake will be made. Someone will miss a cue, someone will forget a line, something will happen. When this occurs, do not panic. I am on stage for almost the entire play and I have decades of acting experience. Every disaster that can possibly happen has happened to me and I can handle anything…

"So when something goes wrong," he continued, "do not attempt to ad-lib. Just leave it to me. Whatever it is, I will find a way to cover the error and continue on." The members of the novice cast were reassured by this and felt confident they were in good hands.

Things went well until opening night. In the middle of Act Two, the prop man accidentally rang a telephone in the wrong scene. There was no phone call in that scene and all the actors on stage froze, wondering what to do. Fortunately, Mr. Welles announced, "I'll get it," and they all relaxed, confident Orson would handle it. They knew he would answer the phone, ad-lib some sort of conversation and then work his way back to the text of the play.

Welles picked up the phone, said hello and pretended to listen for a second. Then he turned to the actress next to him, held out the receiver and said, "It's for you."

A couple of folks wrote to ask me if I think Jerry Lewis does his annual telethon (in progress as I write this) for selfish or altruistic reasons.  The answer, I suspect, is All of the Above.  I think it's a good thing that the money is being raised for the charity, if only because it brings a lot of aid and comfort to folks who have to live with crippling disease.  Too much attention is probably focused on the notion of actually curing dystrophy; not enough to the vast amounts of good that are done just to help its victims get through the day.

Does Jerry do it for personal glory?  Probably, and I don't think it matters.  The nature of telethons is that they feed egos and hype careers.  It's unavoidable and I've actually heard performers say that they don't do fund-raisers because it feels somewhat hypocritical to derive personal benefits from something that's supposed to aid others.  I think that's a reasonable, perhaps admirable position.  But I also understand that some don't see it that way and that they genuinely think it's wonderful that their performing skills can generate a few bucks to help crippled kids.

There is much on Mr. Lewis's annual telethons that makes me cringe, especially the parade of celebs who otherwise couldn't get national exposure.  Jer not only puts them on, he extols them as great humanitarians and fiercely plugs their current appearances.  Last night, he did a hard sell that had nothing to do with Muscular Dystrophy, urging people to go see his friend Peter Bogdanovich's new movie.  I wish less of the telethon was like that but I'm afraid that's the nature of these beasts.

Years ago, I got into a friendly argument with a lovely gent named Artie Forrest, who is one of the all-time great TV directors.  Artie was then handling Jerry's telethon and was defending it to just about everyone he met.  They were all saying it was tasteless; that it had less to do with helping sick children than sick show biz careers; that Jerry was going to give himself a muscular ailment from patting himself on the back.  I told Artie that I thought it would be possible to raise even more money each year without all that ego-massage.  "Perhaps," I said, "If the telethon weren't so tacky, bigger stars would appear and larger sums would be collected."

Artie didn't disagree.  But he said something that I thought was very true and very realistic.  He said, approximately, "Yeah, but Jerry raises a helluva lot of money doing it his way, and nobody else is doing anything.  You can talk all you want about other ways it might be done, and you might be right.  But, in the meantime, he's buying research and wheelchairs and getting results."

The more I think about it, the more I think Artie was right.  When it comes to something like this, results matter.

So one night, Frank Sinatra is leaving Matteo's Restaurant in Westwood. The Parking Valet brings his Rolls around, whereupon Sinatra pulls out his money clip and asks, "Kid, what's the biggest tip anyone ever gave you?

The Parking Valet replies, "Eighty dollars."

Sinatra, always eager to be tops in any category, peels off a hundred dollar bill and hands it to the young man. Then Frank asks, "Hey, kid. Who gave you the eighty dollars?"

The Parking Valet answers, "You did, Mr. Sinatra."

So I just turned on the Jerry Lewis Telethon and caught Yakov Smirnoff doing a stand-up routine.  I think we've answered the question of why this man isn't getting on the late night talk shows.

Comic fans: Would you like a free fanzine?  The O'Neil Observer is a fine little publication, primarily devoted to the works of DC writer-editor Denny O'Neil.  Their current issue (which for some reason, has very little about Denny) is available online as a free download.  It's in the format of an Adobe Acrobat PDF file so you can download it and either read it on your screen or print it out…that is, if you have Adobe Acrobat or their free reader installed on your computer.  Here is a link to the website for The O'Neil Observer.  And if you need Adobe Reader, click here.

As mentioned here earlier, NBC is going to rebroadcast Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol this year in prime time, even though it's been run zillions of times in syndication and is readily available on home video. The off-network airings have always been cut, sometimes savagely…but several folks have also asked me if the home video version is cut. They all seem to remember it being longer when it originally ran on NBC in 1962, and some recall scenes that they're sure were there once. These people are wrong. The other day, I was speaking with Paul Carlson, who worked on the show, and asked him. He checked with one of the editors and back came the answer: The original version was 53 minutes. The version available on VHS and DVD is precisely the same except that they had to trim the NBC peacock off the negative when the transfer was done.

This leads us to the question of what NBC will do since an hour of prime time programming now has more commercials and only allows for more like 45 minutes of programming. When the original, half-hour Charlie Brown Christmas was broadcast last December, a big promotional plus was that it would be run uncut for the first time in decades. This presented a problem since it didn't fit in what now constitutes a half-hour of network television. Producer Lee Mendelson solved the dilemma by convincing ABC to run it in an hour slot, and he produced a little documentary about the show's creation to fill out the 60 minutes. One doubts NBC will want to let Magoo run 90 minutes, so they'll probably trim and perhaps speed things up a bit.