Monthly Archives: October 2003

For the record, tomorrow's Daily Variety carries the following notice wrapping up this situation…

WGA animation writing award winner Mark Evanier is a three-time Emmy nominee. Information in Thursday's paper was incorrect.

It's kind of an interesting way to phrase it. I was advised not to ask for the correction for fear they'd write something that implied I'd claimed the three Emmys and they had just now caught me in a fib. The above doesn't admit that the mistake was theirs, but it also doesn't tell what they're correcting. Unless someone hauls out last Thursday's issue — which no one will bother to do — they won't know what's being corrected. They might assume the original piece had said I was a two-time Emmy nominee, for instance. I'd have preferred it if they'd said something to indicate the mistake, whatever it was, was wholly on their end. But I guess this will do.

Maybe I'm making too much of it but I don't want anyone to think I'm one of those people who claims awards he hasn't won. There was a guy a few years ago who was taking big ads in the Hollywood trade papers saying he was a five-time Emmy winner when he wasn't. He'd never even been nominated once.

I think what had happened was that he'd worked on five shows that had won Emmys but he himself had not won one. They're very specific about who actually receives an award when the show does and he did not have a position on any of the shows that made him an actual Emmy recipient. If The Tonight Show wins an Emmy as best show, that means that everyone who worked on the show worked on an Emmy-Winning show. It does not mean everyone who worked on the program is an Emmy winner. But some folks like to confuse the issue.

I am instituting a new policy for my personal e-mail. Along with messages that want me to send my life savings to Nigeria or take pills guaranteed to shrink or grow certain body parts, I am ignoring most (i.e., 99%) of the mail that wishes to engage me in political debate. Every time I post something controversial here, I get a batch of rebuttals that range from the thoughtful and interesting to those that seem to lack a certain fundamental reading comprehension. I can only spare so much time writing things other than my professional assignments and I'd rather spend it on stuff for this board, which thousands read every hour, than discussing abortion or gun control or Iraq with one person. So I'm going to stop answering them, and I've even stopped reading them all. If you want to send me a link to an article you think I should read or mention here, great. But I'm too far behind on my e-mail to reply to messages from folks who want to go one-on-one in e-mail. Thank you.

Thanks to all of you who've volunteered to send me last night's To Tell the Truth. I have arranged to get a copy.

As I mentioned, Game Show Network scheduled an episode of To Tell the Truth this morning — one that had Bill Hanna on it. I warned you we might have to guess exactly when it was on…and I guessed wrong and missed it. Anyone out there get it? Anyone out there get it who's willing to dub me off a tape?

Also, does anyone reading this have a copy lying around of last Thursday's Hollywood Reporter? The one for October 23? It had the item in it about that award I won and I didn't bother to pick up a copy. I forgot I have a mother who will be heartbroken if she doesn't get a copy.

By the way: At my request, Daily Variety's going to run a correction that will say I didn't win those three Emmy Awards they erroneously bestowed upon me. I hope it doesn't look like I claimed I'd won them and they're catching my error.

Frank Rich has a good piece on how the Bush administration is trying to massage TV news coverage on Iraq. This link will take you to the New York Times site, for which a free sign-up is required. This link will take you to a Singapore newspaper that has the whole column online, sans subscription.

IGN FilmForce has posted the second and final part of Peter Sanderson's article on Stan Lee and the book about him. Here's the link and, as before, I recommend the piece although I disagree with some of its conclusions. Peter's one of the sharpest guys around about this kind of thing.

As predicted here, animal rights groups are using the attack on Roy in their campaign to stop animals from being used in performing sitiations. Here's an article that will tell you about a recent charge and the denial.

Also: I told a story about a magician I worked with named Mark Kalin who used a tiger in his act. According to this report, Kalin has jettisoned the performing cats. There will be more of this.

The TV series Wild Card has a Halloween episode written by Len Wein and Marv Wolfman. Consult, as they say, your local listings.

Tomorrow night, we set the clocks back, meaning that all the TV channels have to stick in an extra hour of programming. Game Show Network is inserting an episode of To Tell the Truth and another of He Said, She Said. The latter was a silly, short-lived show hosted by Joe Garagiola that later morphed into a more successful game show called Tattletales. The former is an episode from the Garry Moore era and one of the games features three men, all of whom claim to be William Hanna of Hanna-Barbera fame.

As for exactly when these episodes air…well, that's kind of a game show in itself. My TiVo says they're on at Midnight and 12:30 AM. That's Pacific time but I'm not sure if it's Pacific Daylight Time or Pacific Standard Time. The TV Guide online listings say it's on three hours later, and the Game Show Network site doesn't mention them at all. So take a guess and if you're wrong, don't worry. We have lovely parting gifts for you.

Folks are writing to ask me to explain a little bit more about the award I received last night. This press release pretty much includes all I know about it.

The other day, I linked to a website that made a strong argument in favor of saving the life of Terri Schiavo. Here, we have a strong argument the other way. I don't know what to think except that this is turning into The Jerry Springer Show, and that's not where this kind of issue should be decided.

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.

Looks like I'm not going to win my bet about Donald Rumsfeld changing jobs this week. But as Fred Kaplan notes, someone's got a lot of explaining to do.