Monthly Archives: November 2003

This obituary for Joanna Lee notes that she was an actress who became a TV writer for shows including Gilligan's Island and The Waltons. And it notes that she became a producer and won awards for TV movies, including "Babe."

But it doesn't mention that she wrote over a dozen episodes of the original prime-time Flintstones series, starting in the show's third season. I'm hesitant to say that makes her the first-ever female writer of animation but at the moment, I can't think of an earlier contender for that title.

Here's a profile of Paul Levitz, who's the Head Honcho at DC Comics. As Richard Humm (who sent me this link) pointed out, there's one typo in there — the Legion of Super-Heroes is not set in the 13th century. But otherwise, it's a good little piece.

Walter Cronkite on why NASA and space exploration may be a luxury we can no longer afford.

While researching something else this evening on the Internet, I stumbled across the fact that Cliff Norton died in January of this year. It's odd how that one got past me because Norton was my favorite kind of actor: The guy who appeared in everything but most folks never knew his name. Stop and take a look at his listing in the Internet Movie Database…and I'm guessing this is about 25% of all he did in his long career.

For one thing, it doesn't mention a couple of shows that Mr. Norton did on KTLA, a local station in Los Angeles around '63. One which I recall vividly was a five minute program he did weeknights at 11:15 PM for a time. The KTLA local news was on from 11:00 to 11:15 and the syndicated Steve Allen Show started at 11:20. In-between, Norton did a weather forecast show that packed in more laughs than many hour programs…and told you if it was going to rain tomorrow, as well. He also had a daytime series in the style of Dave Garroway, for whom he once worked as second banana and comedy relief.

Norton was also a songwriter of sorts. His most wonderful composition was a very funny song called "No Shit" that he recorded with a full chorus and the Joseph Galicchio orchestra primarily as a Christmas gift for his friends. The tune had a long, healthy life of being performed at parties and in nightclub acts, and even made it onto a few "party" records. Just a few years ago, I went to see Jack Jones in Las Vegas and he sang it…magnificently, I might add. (If anyone reading this has Norton's version on MP3, drop me a line. I have it on an LP but I have no idea where.)

For the most part, Norton was just a familiar face that popped up in practically every TV show of the sixties and a whole mess of movies. (He's in the cast list of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World where he supposedly played a reporter. But as many times as I've seen the film, I've never spotted him.) The last time I saw him, a few years ago, was when I attended a live reading of a radio-style drama. True to form, he had a small part but he did as much with it as humanly possible. That was how Cliff Norton functioned throughout his entire career. No shit.

In all the discussions of the CBS mini-series, The Reagans, it struck me that both sides were bluffing to a great extent. Some claimed to have seen excerpts and/or read the entire script, and I have a hunch this was a fib by folks who didn't really care that much what was really in it. In any case, you can now read the script for yourself. Salon has posted it as an Acrobat PDF file, so I imagine it'll be all over the Internet by nightfall.

Reading a script and knowing what you're reading is not an exact science, and even some very experienced, highly-paid execs have okayed a screenplay and been quite surprised at the tone and message of the film that was then made from it. Years ago, I recall reading the screenplay for The Right Stuff before I saw the film and expecting a movie that was largely contemptuous of the original astronauts. The finished product was not that, even though it was directed by the same person who'd authored that screenplay. So you can imagine the variance possible when, as in the Reagans mini-series, the director is working from a script he didn't write.

Nevertheless, this release of the script will give the film's detractors a chance to be more specific as to what they felt is factually inaccurate. I expect they will, though it will mean holding this one mini-series to a standard that has rarely been applied to other works.

Bill Mantlo was a prolific writer for Marvel Comics from 1974 until the mid-eighties. During those years, he wrote for an awful lot of different comics but is probably best-remembered for long runs on The Hulk, Iron Man, The Micronauts, The Champions, The Human Fly, Cloak and Dagger, Rom and many others. I never really knew the guy but I admired his versatility and dedication.

When his work fell out of favor with the then-current editors, Bill turned his attention back into a planned career that had been interrupted to write Spider-Man, which was to be a lawyer. Alas, in 1992, that career was again interrupted, this time by a tragic accident. Bill was roller-blading (one of those things I will never do and here's why) when he was struck by a car and severely injured. He had what his family describes as a "closed-head, traumatic brain injury" which has left him severely diminished.

My friend Tony Isabella provides an update on Bill's condition (still not good) as well as an address to which his friends and fans can send good thoughts.

A lot of folks are writing to ask how I like my new Pioneer DVR-810H — the unit that combines a TiVo with a DVD burner. I've been burning DVDs for a day and a half…and so far, I'm very glad I bought the thing. Still, it is not without its downsides. Here are some thoughts…

• You record shows on the TiVo and then you burn them to blank DVDs. You can put multiple programs on a DVD up to the capacity of the disk, and the machine will build a little menu on the DVD for you. The main way to get a show onto the TiVo is to record it off the air. Last night, I set my new TiVo to record a movie off cable. Then this morning, after it was recorded, I had the machine copy it to a DVD. Then, I erased the movie from the TiVo to free up space.
• The other way to get something onto the TiVo is to input it through the analog connection. I have a lot of things on old 3/4" videotapes so I hooked the output of my 3/4" player to the TiVo input, copied the shows over and then used the TiVo to copy them onto DVD. The resultant DVD has a picture quality only a teensy fraction below the original tape. You could input the signal from a Betamax, a VCR, a video camera or even another DVD player as long as it wasn't playing a copy-protected DVD.
• A home DVD burner like this one can only burn so much info to a DVD. If you want the top video quality, that means an hour. The next quality level down (a slower speed) will give you two hours. The next level down is three and so on, down to six hours. If you record a two-hour show at the top quality, you have to save it to two disks, and the machine will prompt you when to insert the second one. The speed at which you record a show onto the TiVo is the speed at which you have to burn the DVD. For instance, the movie this morning was 1:47 so I recorded it at the second level speed, the one that gets two hours onto a blank DVD. I could not have changed my mind and burned the DVD at a different speed.
• Obviously, we like the top quality. This makes it frustrating when a show is 62 minutes long. You either have to put the last two minutes on a second DVD or do the entire show at the second level speed.
• As we've mentioned here before, networks have gotten very sloppy about starting shows on time. Some start early, some start late. Ordinarily, if something's on that you simply must record, you pad the beginning and the end to make sure you get it. But this TiVo/DVD unit has no editing capability so if you start your recording five minutes early, what you burn to the DVD will have all that extra stuff at the beginning. If you record a film from Turner Classic Movies, you can't cut off the Robert Osborne intro. Eventually, I'm sure I'll get the software and hardware to do editing on my computer but for now, what you TiVo is what you get.
• Some folks have asked about getting a standalone DVD recorder without TiVo capability and linking it to TiVo when necessary. The advantage of the Pioneer DVR-810H is that its TiVo capability records a show off the air in digital format so it remains digital as it's transferred to the DVD. If you record on a separate TiVo and feed the output into a separate DVD burner, you're going from digital to analog and back to digital, and there will be some loss of quality in there. The TiVo also lets you build little libraries of stuff to burn to DVD as many times as you like. Mine holds 80 hours but that's at the lowest-quality speed. At the best speed, that's about 14 hours.
• I've also been asked about the price. The DVR-810H lists for $1,199 but can be purchased for $750 to $800 if you shop around the Internet. (By the way, here's a link to Pioneer's website about the machine. As you'll see, there's also a higher-end model.) You will also need to pay for the TiVo service. The machine comes with what they call "TiVo Basic," which is a stripped-down, bare bones version that is so simple as to be near-useless. They also give you a free 45-day trial of what they call "TiVo Plus," which is the next level up of TiVo service. I don't see how you can really use this machine without it. This will cost you $12.95 a month or $299 for "lifetime service." This refers to the life of the machine and cannot be transferred to the next TiVo you purchase. If you want to hook your TiVo (or TiVos) into a home network and make use of even more features, that's another $99. The TiVo website will tell you more. Blank DVDs run from a buck to about three bucks each, depending on whether you buy in bulk.

That's about everything that comes to mind so far. I'm going to do some experimenting with different speeds and with dubbing Beta and VHS tapes, and I'll report here after I do. I ordered 100 blank DVDs but I have a feeling I'm going to go through that many in a week. I've got a lot of old tapes, and there a number of good movies on TV in the next week or two.

This is great. William Saletan over at Slate has devised a little game you can play to find your candidate for the next presidential election. You'll need the latest edition of Macromedia Flash installed on your computer but you can get that over there. Go play Whack-a-Pol…and don't be surprised if, like me, you wind up with no one to vote for.

I haven't made up my mind about the Terry Schiavo case, except that I know too much of the public debate is directed by folks who don't have a clue as to the true medical condition of Ms. Schiavo. For a passionate defense of those who would keep her alive, read this piece in The Village Voice by Nat Hentoff. I'm not convinced he's right but he makes some good points.

If you're interested in how accurate the Reagans mini-series might have been (or still might be when Showtime airs it), here are articles by Eric Alterman and another by Timothy Noah.

And I am amused at a point that some are making about the outcry against the project. One of the big complaints of the far-right is that the film makes Reagan out to be insensitive to the plight of AIDS patients. But he would have been an even bigger hero to some in the far-right if he had been insensitive (or more insensitive) to the plight of AIDS patients.

There are reports (like this one) that say representatives of Iraq tried to make a last-minute deal to avert the U.S. invasion of their country but that the U.S. "rebuffed the overture." We may hear a lot more about this even though it seems unlikely that the Iraqi offer was sufficient. What I find troubling is this sentence in the story, referring to presidential spokesguy Scott McClellan…

McClellan refused to say whether the purported Iraqi effort to avert the war was brought to President Bush's attention.

It seems to me that if any sort of offer was made, even by agents whose authority was suspect, only one response is acceptable: That it was conveyed to George W. Bush and that he made the final decision not to pursue it.

It may well be that as a State Department rep is quoted as saying in the article, "We never received any legitimate or credible opportunity to resolve the world's differences with Iraq in a peaceful manner." That is entirely possible, maybe even probable. But if I were George W. Bush, I'd be royally pissed if someone decided to bypass me in that decision. I'm the Commander-in-Chief, let's remember. I would find the guy who decided to cut me out of that decision and fire him and anyone else who knew about it. If I'm about to send American men and women to war, knowing full well that some will come back maimed or not at all. A last-minute offer may be a ruse or a bluff but I'm the guy who ought to make that call.

And maybe he did, in which case he should be taking responsibility for it, right off the bat. One of the many reasons I wasn't a fan of Mr. Reagan was this notion that somehow, if things go wrong in the White House, we can't blame the president if he didn't know about it. That should never be an acceptable excuse. I doubt Bush will wind up making it in this case but there shouldn't even be the possibility that the President of these United States was "out of the loop" on such an important matter.

A lot of folks say that The Patriot Act and its curtailment of civil liberties have not been helpful in the war against people who plant bombs and fly planes into buildings. I don't know about that…but it seems to be working just fine to prosecute strip club owners. One suspects Mr. Ashcroft considers them the greater threat.

My pal (for longer than either of us can believe) Tony Isabella has a good column on inflation and the price of comic books. When we look at the downturn in our industry, where the definition of a "good seller" has gone increasingly down, we tend to talk a lot about distribution and retail access. But as Tony notes, the price of the product is a big factor, as well.

For comic fans: Here's a nice interview with long-time comic artist, Don Perlin. It's a nice overview of his career, and he even says something nice about Vince Colletta.

For about eight hours now, I've been playing with Pioneer's combination TiVo and DVD burner. This is a wonderful invention that will record a show off the air just like a plain ol' TiVo but it will also copy that show to a DVD-R or DVD-RW disc. You can also take your old tapes, import them into the TiVo and then copy them onto a DVD. I have a lot of old 3/4" U-Matic videotapes of TV shows I wrote in the seventies and eighties and I've started dubbing them over to DVDs since the tapes are starting to rot, plus they take up a lot of room. I also have a few things that are on Beta that I want to keep — and who knows how much longer my Betamax will hold out? So this is a cool thing.

Rummaging through my shelves, I just found a show I totally forgot I'd written. It was an episode of the Plastic Man cartoon show that only aired once — in prime-time on a Sunday night, opposite 60 Minutes and some blockbuster event on NBC. Our show was a preview of the new ABC Saturday morning cartoon lineup for 1979, co-starring an animated Plastic Man and an equally-realistic gent named Michael Young, who was then hosting a Sunday morning show called Kids Are People, Too. Plastic Man has an adventure which gets interrupted as Young introduces clips of that year's new ABC cartoon shows. There's also a long plug for a prime-time sitcom called Out of the Blue, which starred Jimmy Brogan and was cancelled around halfway through the first episode. The only thing I remember about the special I wrote is that its Nielsen rating was close to a negative number and at the time, I felt like the only human being on the planet who'd seen it. I may now be the only person in the world who has a copy of it, at least on DVD. Or wants one.