Monthly Archives: August 2003

Here's an example of something that annoys me about reporting these days. The headline on this story and many others in this morning's newspapers is "Poll shows Bustamante leading Schwarzenegger." The story then goes on to tell us that according to a Field Poll released on Friday, Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante holds a three-point lead over Arnold Schwarzenegger among those likely to vote in the Oct. 7 recall election.

Okay. But way down at the end of the article, one might notice this line…

The Field Poll, conducted by telephone from Sunday to Wednesday, interviewed 629 registered voters. It has an error rate of plus or minus 5 percentage points.

So Bustamante has a three-point lead in a poll with a five-point margin of error. Doesn't that mean that they're tied? That Schwarzenegger could even be ahead of him?

One could argue that the poll is inaccurate or that it's way too early for a poll to be meaningful. But leaving such questions aside, shouldn't its findings be reported for what they are, which is kind of a dead heat?

The other interesting thing here is that the folks running the September 17 debate have said they'll invite the top six contenders, as determined by the polls. If the numbers of this Field Poll hold up, that would mean Bustamante, Schwarzenegger, McClintock, Simon, Ueberroth and Huffington. But remember: This poll has a five-point margin of error. So Larry Flynt, Gallagher, Angelyne and all those folks who currently have 1% or less could actually be ahead of Arianna Huffington, who has 4%. Betcha Flynt's lawyers could do something with that.

As a kid, I was a huge fan of Allan Sherman, song parody author extraordinaire. I collected all his albums and can still sing, from memory, almost all of his songs in a voice even worse than his. And of course he inspired me to start writing my own song parodies, which has led to occasionally writing lyrics for songs on TV shows I work on.

I never got to meet the man. The closest I came were a few brief conversations with his son, who was two years ahead of me at University High. Though Robert Sherman went on to a career in the TV business, our paths have somehow never crossed.

So I was quite interested to read this article, which is about how Robbie's trips to summer camp inspired his father's million-selling hit, "Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh." You may enjoy it even though you didn't go to high school with the guy.

My pal Steve Rude has put together a sketchbook which, at the moment, I believe is only being sold via eBay. It will presumably be available elsewhere but there's no reason for you not to go to this link and buy one. Steve is one of the best comic artists around and one of the nicest guys.

Vince Waldron has been in touch with the producer of the forthcoming Dick Van Dyke Show DVD sets. He reports that the advertising is wrong: The second volume includes 33 episodes, not 31. One of those 33 is "All About Eavesdropping," which was filmed as part of the second season but aired in the third. This sounds Fair and maybe even Balanced.

I have no idea what the name means, either. But it's the name of the new, R-rated Vegas show from the Cirque du Soleil people. Here's a Fair and Balanced sneak peek at this odd production.

Happy Fair and Balanced dreams!

Another interesting take on Mr. Schwarzenegger's candidacy. If nothing else, the fact that this thing is so utterly without precedent is spawning a wide range of viewpoints. And of course, all of them are Fair and Balanced.

Several folks (including Daniel Frank and Vince Waldron) point out that the final episode filmed for the second season ("All About Eavesdropping") wasn't aired until the following year. So that may go half the distance to explaining why the DVD release of Year Two of The Dick Van Dyke Show promises 31 episodes when there were actually 33.

Vince is doing some digging to find out what's up with this, so we may have an answer here before long. But he tells me that from everything he's heard, these DVD releases are first-rate productions both in terms of video quality (and completeness) and in unearthing some amazing extras. I'm so grateful to him for this info that I'll remind you that he authored The Official Dick Van Dyke Show Book, which is rightly subtitled, "The Definitive History and Ultimate Viewer's Guide to Television's Most Enduring Comedy." You can order a copy of the new, revised and expanded edition from Amazon by clicking here. If Vince hadn't written this book, I would have, except that I wouldn't have done half as good a job as he did.

With one exception. Vince inexplicably forgets to mention the Gold Key comic book version. I'm sure he'll correct this in an upcoming edition but other than that, it's everything the subtitle claims. Plus, it's Fair and Balanced.

The bastards at Comedy Central changed the link to the Tracey Ullman interview on me. Thanks to someone named Destiny, I've fixed it. (If you don't want to scroll down, here it is again.)

Comedy Central is a great channel but I'm beginning to suspect they're not Fair and Balanced.

If you want to know all about great power failures, this website will tell you absolutely everything about them. And it's even Fair and Balanced.

Yesterday afternoon when I told my friend Tracy that I was driving to Brea to see Lewis Black, she said, "Boy, you must really like Lewis Black." It wasn't so much the distance (at rush hour, about 90 minutes) as the fact that it was Brea. But I've liked Mr. Black on TV, especially on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, and I figured I might like an extended dose of him in person. So my pal Earl Kress and I braved the freeway and found it well worth the journey. In person, Lewis Black stammers a lot more than he does on television and gets generally angrier. He also employs the "f" word so often that that you'd think he's getting paid per usage, and he quickly succeeds in draining it of its charming impact.

But we had a great time, especially in the last half-hour when Black turned political. He delivered a diatribe against the California recall that I think would convince Arnold to vote against it. He went after Enron execs and politicians and those who would advise us on what to eat or not eat for our health, and it was all fresh and funny and justifiably outraged. I think the "justifiable" part is a lot of what I like about him. Comedians are always complaining about stupid ads and stupider politicians, and they often fail to convince me that there's any real passion for anything beyond getting a good joke out of the topic. The position is whatever leads to a punch line.

Not so with Black. He's a smart man who's serious about comedy, and he doesn't go for the obvious topic or, at least, the obvious take on the obvious topic. If you'd like to see him, his current schedule is up over at his website. He's about to embark on something called The Comedy Central Tour, which will take him into various cities, usually in big rooms with other stars of the network, such as Dave Attell.

Preceding Mr. Black was comedian Mike Birbiglia. Opening for a headliner can be a thankless task. You have to convince the audience that came to see the guy after you that you're a bonus, not a speed bump. With sharp material and an unjaded delivery, Birbiglia quickly won us all over. Near the end, when he said it was almost time to bring on Lewis Black, the audience did not seem eager for the next act…which is about the best you can expect of an opening act. You can learn more about the guy at his website and if you have the time, there are some video clips of his TV appearances.

Lastly, this will probably interest five or less of you, but Earl and I had dinner before the show at a restaurant called Riley's, which is just down the street from the Brea Improv. As you darn well know if you've read my latest book, Wertham Was Right, I used to be a huge fan and patron of the many Love's Barbecue Restaurants that once dotted the land. Now, there are only a few and until last November, when it disengaged from the parent company and changed names, the place now called Riley's was one. But it still looks like a Love's and when I stepped inside, it was like walking through a time warp, right into the Love's that used to be on Pico Boulevard in West Los Angeles. Same floor plan, same furnishings, even the same beans. I'm not sure if I enjoyed the cuisine quite as much as the personal nostalgia, but I certainly enjoyed something there.

The Love's website lists only six remaining outlets, and that includes the one in Jakarta, Indonesia (!) and the one I went to last evening, which is now Riley's. I visit the site occasionally to order another case of their barbecue sauce, which I use at home in cooking. It was fun to taste it again in its natural habitat.

Going to see Lewis Black do stand-up. Hope he's Fair and Balanced. Full report later.

Fox News may be "Fair and Balanced" but no one in their website division apparently made contingency plans for a power outage. It has now been almost two hours since portions of the East Coast lost all electricity. All the other major news sites — some of which must be based in that area — had bulletins up within fifteen minutes. The Fox News site still doesn't have a word about it.

Earlier, I mentioned that What's Up, Tiger Lily? had been released to DVD and that I wished they'd been able to include the original soundtrack as Alternate Audio. This prompted e-mail buddy Pierce Askegren to write to me last night and say…

Are you aware that there are three soundtracks for the movie? The Anchor Bay VHS cassette some years back used a different dub track, with noticeably different versions of some gags. According to the Video Watchdog review at the time, the differences are pervasive enough that it's not a case of something being edited for broadcast, but a legit, alternate version. No one seems to know why.

I knew nothing about this but I knew who might. I dropped an e-mail to Frank Buxton, who was one of the writer-performers behind What's Up, Tiger Lily? Frank wasn't able to help with any of the specifics of the different versions but he offered the following and said I could share it with you all here…

I was also disappointed that there were no "special features" on the disk. Seems to me it would be smart to include some audio commentary by the people who were there — me, Len Maxwell, Louise — since we're still alive and lucid. Woody, of course, would not participate but the rest of us have stories to tell, you can be sure, mostly arguing about who wrote what, in all likelihood. "Did you think it was funny? Then I wrote it."

In any event, the "production" of that film was such a debacle it's a wonder there aren't more versions. At one point, for instance, after we'd dubbed in the studio for three months (!), I was in Paris on a Discovery shoot and got a telegram asking me to rent studio space and record a dozen or so new lines. I dutifully did and then when Woody, Louise and I went up the 79th Street Loew's to see it (on the bottom half of a double bill) the same lines were dubbed by Pat Harrington Jr., thus causing no end of confusion about who Phil Moscowitz is. That, I think, is the first and last time Woody has ever seen one of his films in a theatre. Or anywhere else.

If he'd seen it in the theater where I saw it, he'd probably have given up filmmaking and gone into the sheet metal business. It was paired on a double-feature with some dreary, badly-lit foreign film with subtitles that didn't quite make it onto the bottom of the screen. When Tiger Lily finally came on, my friends and I were the only ones laughing…and even we stopped because we didn't want to wake up the other patrons. I didn't really like the movie until I saw it on home video…but the sloppiness of the production was evident, and I recall not being able to fully track which voice went with which character. Ah, well.

The show Frank mentions — Discovery — was a wonderful science/information show that he hosted on ABC in '62 and '63. It belied the notion that educational shows are boring. I actually remember my friends and I putting down the comic books and turning on Channel 7 when it was time for Discovery and I still occasionally come up with a fact that I'm sure I learned from that program. Even more entertaining was a show that he did for NBC in 1970 with my associate Lee Mendelson. It was called Hot Dog and it starred Jonathan Winters, Jo Anne Worley and Woody Allen. The show was about how things are made and what they'd do was to ask a question — "How do they make spaghetti?" "How is money printed?" — and then go to the panel of experts who would make up ridiculous explanations. Then they'd show us the real answer. It was very amusing and Lee keeps threatening to take them off the shelf and syndicate them again. If he ever does, you'll love them.

Anyway, thanks, Frank. As you can all see, news from me gets results. In addition to being Fair and Balanced.

Here's an article about the conviction of Jesus Castillo. He's the comic book shop manager in Dallas who was found guilty of selling an adult comic book to an adult. The article provides a good overview of the case from one perspective.

For another, take a look at this weblog entry. Houston lawyer William J. Dyer believes that folks are overreacting to many aspects of the decision. He also thinks the big problem was that Castillo's lawyer erred at a couple of key points.