So that's me receiving the award last evening from the Writers Guild's Animation Writers Caucus. The amazing Gary Owens presented it…and if you've never met Gary, you should know this about him: He is a wonderful role model because he is truly one of the nicest men on this planet and he just plain works all the time. Everyone likes him. What's more, everyone knows how good he is at announcing and voicing cartoons and playing straight man to Jonathan Winters. Then there's his most impressive skill which comes into play when he does commercials or promos and they give him this terrible, clumsily-written copy. He somehow always manages to infuse it with warmth and friendliness and humor. If they ever hired Gary to do ad spots for suicide, we'd all turn into lemmings, racing for the cliff. Because he'd make it sound like a fun thing.
Gary knows everyone and has worked with everyone. You mention Sinatra and he tells you ten Sinatra stories. You mention Brando and he's got Brando anecdotes. I've never mentioned Mother Teresa in his presence but I'm sure that if I did, he'd tell us how they had Mother Teresa (or "Moms," as everyone called her) on Laugh-In and how they doused her with water and dropped her down the trap door during "Sock-It-To-Me Time." There are people who tell you their tales and you can smell the overpowering aroma of Bandini emanating from them. But I know enough about Gary to know that they're all true. Even maybe the one about Moms.
Gary gave me a lovely introduction, I made a speech and then we all ate cookies and fruit. Oh, yeah — and they gave me the trophy, which doesn't really look as much like something an orthodontist would use to correct overbites as it seems in the picture. Actually, it's a cross between a soaring bird and a fountain pen, which I guess symbolizes how writers create things that take flight. Or it would if any of us used fountain pens. I write on a Pentium 4 computer but I guess there's no graceful way to morph one of those into an eagle.
A lot of my friends were there and Guild officials had some good news about recent efforts to have the WGA cover the writing of more animated cartoons. So all in all, it was a very nice evening and I thank everyone who voted me the thing but couldn't be present. I was thinking of saying, "If you want to see the trophy up close, click here," and then I'd have a link to a fake eBay page where I seemed to be auctioning it off. But I care a lot about the work the WGA is doing to clean up certain unfairnesses in the field and to see that cartoon authors have proper protection. So I won't kid around about this. Besides, I can sell those three Emmy awards that Variety gave me this morning.