Monthly Archives: June 2003

Just fixed a formatting error that was causing some of the items on this site to appear in the wrong font or wrong font size. If they're still doing that on your screen, you may need to hit the little command on your browser that says Refresh.

Richard Jeni never fails to make me laugh, so I thought I'd plug his website.

A few years ago, I was in Las Vegas and I happened to catch him doing an interview on a local show there. He was talking about his appearance in the then-upcoming motion picture, Burn, Hollywood, Burn, and he said approximately the following…

Did you ever see the movie, The Player? This is the exact same movie but without the quality. This is for the discriminating filmgoer who's been wondering, "What if The Player hadn't been a very good movie?"

I thought it was the funniest, most honest thing I'd ever heard anyone say in "plugging" an upcoming film.

John Dean on White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales's Texas Execution Memos. Rough translation: When Bush was governor of Texas, he spent very little time considering whether to grant clemency to prisoners who were about to be put to death. All he did was glance at case summaries prepared by Gonzales — summaries that seem to have more been written to explain why the party had to be put to death than to inform Bush of possibly mitigating circumstances. Since Gonzales seems like a likely Supreme Court nominee, we may hear a lot more about this.

Good article by Frank Rich about how America is increasingly accepting homosexuality as a way of life. I think staving this off is one battle that the right-wing cannot help but lose…which doesn't mean they aren't going to go down swinging. So to speak.

Mike Grell is a helluva nice guy and a helluva good artist…and I hear he's not bad at jousting, which is one of his current passions. That's right: Jousting. If you don't like it, you tell him. Me — I'm always respectful to a guy who jousts. Anyway, here's a link to his website and here's a separate link to a page whereupon he discusses the origin on a fine comic he did for years for DC called Warlord. The comic was always worth reading and so is his little essay about it.

Here's a link to a news photo which will instill great confidence in you regarding the future of American business.

…which may be over. DC Comics has won the latest and probably final round in their legal battle with a freelance cartoonist, Marcel Walker. Walker charged that he was owed compensation for a Superman graphic novel they published in the year 2000. This article summarizes the situation as it stood before the latest decision, which was to deny Walker's appeal.

So it looks like he's lost. As an admittedly-biased layman with no more knowledge of the situation that I've read in a few articles, I have an opinion. It's that he deserved to lose, but may have lost for the wrong reason.

First, an admission of prejudice: Steve Gerber, who wrote the comic Walker charged was cribbed from his, is a good friend of mine and one of the most ethical people I know. I could believe plagiarism from some people who work in comics, but not Gerber. Secondly, from what I know of the submission and the comic that Walker thought was based on his work, the similarities seem too slight. As everyone who deals in any area of fiction is aware, there's such a thing as two people independently coming up with the same idea. I've seen it happen in cases where the premise was a lot less generic and obvious than the idea that was supposedly burgled here.

It is on that basis that DC should have won — and I must say, I'm glad they fought it. Cases of this sort are sometimes settled not on their merits but because someone decides it's easier to give in than stand on principle. Years ago, a friend of mine wrote a TV script for a series at Universal. My friend's idea was wholly original but after the show aired, a lawsuit was filed by a disgruntled (and very angry) writer who had pitched ideas to the show a season before and failed to sell anything. He charged that my friend's script was obviously derived from his premise.

The charge was high on the malarkey scale. The show had undergone a complete change of creative staff between seasons and no one who had heard the disgruntled guy's pitch had been there when my friend came up with and wrote the similar idea. Nevertheless, someone in the Universal legal department decided it would be cheaper to pay the guy off, and they did. Which was fine for them but my friend is still angry. He still runs into people who think the studio admitted that he committed an act of plagiarism.

So good for DC for fighting this one instead of giving in…but I'm uncomfy with how they won, even if the judge said, as I understand, that this was a non-precedential decision. The verdict was that since the underlying work (i.e., the Superman mythos) was owned by DC, Walker could claim no proprietary interest in his idea. If that's the case, it's a short leap to the company claiming that it automatically owns any idea utilizing its copyrighted materials. They don't. Their ownership only extends to controlling the publication and dissemination of such works. If I want to sit here and write Superman stories for my own enjoyment, DC has no proprietary interest in them, nor can they publish them without making a deal with me. I don't think DC would do that but some copyright proprietors have actually taken that position. I don't like seeing it gain even a smidgen more credibility.

Here's Joshua Micah Marshall on the elusive Weapons of Mass Destruction. I think I agree with his position.

Here's a nice article about Tom Kenny — who among other honors is the voice of SpongeBob SquarePants.

I'm under the weather today but I had to drag myself to the keyboard to post this: Today is the 88th birthday of Julius Schwartz. If you don't know who that is, you obviously know little about science fiction or comics — two fields in which he distinguished himself. He co-published the first s-f fanzine. He was an agent for many important s-f authors, including a young kid named Ray Bradbury. He then went into comics where he worked for DC for something like half a century, bringing us some of the best books to ever come out of that company, including Batman, Superman, The Flash, Green Lantern, Justice League of America and Strange Adventures.

The entire Silver Age of Comics — the revitalization of the industry in the late fifties — flowed directly from his work, and I'm too ill to write much more than this. So for now I'll just wish him a happy birthday and hope for 88 more just like it.

The New Republic has published this article about how the Iraq War was sold to the American people with a certain amount of lying.

Every time I mention It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, it brings a couple of e-mails from folks asking where the famed Big "W" is, as well as other locations, and can they visit them? Forty years after the movie was made, not many of the filming locales look anything like they did then. The only one I know of that is easy to access and which looks pretty much as it did then is the area on Pacific Coast Highway where something called the "California Incline" leads down from Ocean Avenue. Several scenes in the film were shot there, most memorably the one where Jonathan Winters's stuntman is hanging out of a taxicab as it makes a couple of wild U-turns. Every time I've seen the movie in a Southern California screening, the audience gasps in recognition of the location — because it never changes much. (If you want to know precisely where it is, go to Mapquest or one of those sites and search for 1000 Pacific Coast Highway in Santa Monica.) Otherwise, this website has a pretty good summary — with then/now photos — of just about all the filming locations that fans have identified.

As for the Big "W" itself…no, you can't go see it, and it's no longer a "W." As trees fall, it turns into lower and lower digit Roman Numerals. My pal Earl Kress did gain access once, and I got him to write up this report for us.

Richard Starkings, who practically invented the lettering of comic books via computer, has created a short autobiographical comic telling how this happened. Here's where you go to read it.

The saga of Peter Paul, former business head of Stan Lee Media, continues.

Hundreds of years ago, I wrote a pilot for a situation comedy built around Tom Dreesen. CBS loved the script (one of the executives at CBS at the time was Dwayne "Dobie Gillis" Hickman, if you can believe it) but our producer somehow managed to kill the project. I'm still not sure what happened but the pilot never got made, which was a shame for reasons that went beyond the obviously-financial. Tom Dreesen turned out to be a very nice, very funny gentleman, and I'd have enjoyed working with him. As it is, I have to settle for seeing him perform from time to time, and visiting his website.