Monthly Archives: January 2004

I just received a very official-looking e-mail from the Citibank company saying there has been fraud on my credit card and possibly my checking account, as well. It asks that I log in immediately to verify my information.

Only problem: I don't bank with Citibank. I never have in any way.

Closer examination of the e-mail shows that while some of its links go to the Citibank site (mostly to grab logos and imagery), the main portions of the e-mail link to some other, apparently-unrelated company. In other words, masquerading as Citibank, this other firm is attempting to get me to enter and/or confirm details of my financial life…probably credit card numbers, checking account numbers, ATM passwords, etc. I don't know for sure what they want because I didn't log in. That stupid, I'm not.

But it is frightening to remember that some people are. Some people do fall for these scams. There are even sentient human beings who, upon receipt of an e-mail from someone claiming to be the heir to the throne of Nigeria will send off their banking info, thinking they're going to get a cut of the heir's sixteen million paloozas.

I forwarded the bogus Citibank e-mail to the appropriate folks at my I.S.P. who, if they handle it the way they handle technical questions, will get around to it before the decade is out. But I thought I might remind you all, just in case you get hit on the head and momentarily lose all common sense. Do not give personal data out to anyone who e-mails you. Send it to me so I can plunder your IRA.

Here's an interview with Cullen Murphy, who is the editor of the Atlantic Monthly…but we don't care about that. What we care about is that in his spare time, he writes the Prince Valiant newspaper strip, drawn by his father. (Thanks to Craig Robin for the link.)

Last year at the Comic-Con International in San Diego, I hosted a panel with Ray Bradbury, Forrest Ackerman and Julius Schwartz. If you were in the room, you heard Mr. Bradbury talk about an article he had just completed for Playboy on why we must renew our commitment to manned space travel. It's in the current issue, oddly coinciding with G.W. Bush stating similar intentions. Bradbury is more eloquent on the topic but neither seems to have much of a reason. (I think space exploration, if and when we can afford it, makes a lot of sense. I think manned space travel is just showing off.)

Also in the current Playboy is an article on how detectives built the case against Robert Blake. If one assumes the facts are as stated in the piece, Blake is undeniably guilty. But I wonder if it's that cut-and-dried, especially given that we're hearing the trial could run six months or longer. I also wonder about the propriety of giving a reporter so much access, and allowing him to lay out the evidence as he does, at a stage when Blake is still entitled to some presumption of innocence.

Here's what Mr. Letterman was talking about last night on his show. The graphic below appeared on the CBS website for the last week or so, plugging Sunday night's People's Choice Awards.

As you can see, it shows the smiling face of Jay Leno who, along with Dave, was nominated in the Best Talk Show category. So was Oprah Winfrey, who won. Dave did a funny rant last evening about Jay's face appearing on the CBS website, demanding that some high-ranked CBS exec call him to apologize. The exec was supposed to also tell him that the person responsible had been fired, but was not supposed to actually fire that individual. Shortly afterwards, Les Moonves (the highest-rank exec at CBS, at least in Programming) called to apologize and tell Dave that the person responsible had been fired. Then, shortly after Letterman taped, the graphic on the CBS site changed as follows…

I will put aside a slight suspicion that the version with Dave's face was prepared in advance. They apparently got it changed in time to edit a shot of it into the show before it aired on the East Coast…but okay, maybe someone at the CBS website was working late and very facile. Legit or not, it was funny. I'm a little tired of Letterman's attitude towards Leno and network execs but this was funny.

Scott Shaw! offers us a nice profile/autobio of Willie Ito, a great cartoonist and a heckuva nice guy. The occasion is an Oddball Comics salute to the Beany & Cecil comic book, which wasn't particularly oddball. But hey, it's a great excuse to talk about Willie.

The Supreme Court today declined to intervene in the legal brawl between comic book creator Todd McFarlane and hockey star Tony Twist. Here's a news story that doesn't say much more than that.

This is not unexpected. The High Court only agrees to hear about 1% of all the cases brought before it. (Keep that in mind the next time you hear someone who loses a lawsuit vow to take it to the Supreme Court.) As I understand it though, they may have declined not because they felt Todd's petition was without merit but because they feel it is proper for the case to proceed through the Missouri court system before it would be proper for them to consider it. The Supreme Court prefers to let a matter work its way through a state's judicial system unless there's the danger of a Democrat becoming president.

As I said before, I'm on Todd's side on this one, and I hope he will eventually prevail.

Over in Salon, Eric Boehlert says that the media is starting to do the same thing to Howard Dean that they did to Al Gore.

Robert Spina sent me this link to a piece in The Cincinnati Enquirer about how they're deciding which newspaper strips to drop and which ones to add.

Two more points about movie credits. One is that as a couple of correspondents noted, many animated features are not covered by the WGA and some of them have been known to either list many writers or to credit someone as writer who, rumor has it, never wrote anything. This whole business of the Writers Guild covering screen credits came out of a time in Hollywood history when studio execs would sometimes put their own names, or the name of a relative or favored writer on a movie that was actually written by someone else. There were stars who would write nothing but demand and get the screenplay credit. Mae West would even go so far as to give interviews where she talked about how she had to write her own scripts because there were no good writers around. Anyway, this still goes on with non-WGA movies, both live-action and animated.

The other point: As I mentioned, the WGA erupts in Civil War every time someone proposes changing the way screen credits work. One root cause of the friction is that different folks want credits to do different things. Some want the credit rules to influence how the business works. Others want credits to merely reflect reality. The first group believes that it would be great if less rewriting went on, even if it leads to less employment. So to make rewriting another writer's script less attractive, let's make it harder for rewriters to get any credit and impossible for nineteen guys to all get credit. On the other hand, the second group would argue that main goal is that the credits should be accurate. If eleven people did contribute to the script, that's what the credits should say. Obviously, credits cannot do both. They cannot be denied in order to discourage rewriting but still be awarded to all the rewriters. A further source of conflict is that many of the residual payments on a movie are linked to the final screen credit so a guy who's going to get his name on the film has a financial incentive for keeping the names of others off.

I've long thought that if the Guild is ever going to solve this conflict, they should start by having the membership vote on a referendum: Which is more important? That credits reflect reality or that they promote the notion that movies can and maybe should be written by one or two people? And then a committee could try to revamp the rules in accord with the wish of the majority. The only problem with this is that I'm not sure how I'd vote.

According to this article in The New York Times (which you may have to register to read), the end credits for The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King run 9 minutes and 33 seconds. They don't say how many names that involves but the previous Lord of the Rings movie (with apparently a shorter crawl) had 559 names.

This doesn't matter to a lot of people since they aren't going to sit through them, anyway. Theaters may even like it since it helps clear the place out and lets the crew get an early start at sweeping up the Raisinets boxes. But it raises a big issue for uncredited writers.

As you probably know, a lot of movies, especially action flicks and comedies, employ more writers than are listed on the screen. The first Flintstones movie allegedly had more than 30. A lot of folks who get hired to write movies now just automatically presume that someone, or perhaps many someones will follow them.

The Writers Guild of America has the sole power to determine the screen credits on a movie. (Quick aside: In my travels through the entertainment biz, I occasionally encounter someone who's involved in a potential movie in some capacity and though not a screenwriter, says they've been promised a writing credit or will demand one. They're not going to actually write in the accepted sense but they're going to make suggestions and they think they can negotiate a writing credit. If I have the energy, I explain to them that except on a non-Guild film, the studio cannot guarantee them a writing credit. The WGA can always arbitrate and award the credit to the person or persons they decide actually wrote the film. And while that arbitration process is flawed in some ways, it never awards screen credit to anyone who didn't actually produce a script.)

Back when the WGA won jurisdiction over screen credits, it became customary for them to attempt to limit them to two names or in extreme cases, three. The thinking was that (a) more names than that devalued the role of all screenwriters on a film and (b) keeping it down to two or three names might induce studios to keep it down to two or three writers, minimizing how often our work was rewritten by others. Obviously, the latter hasn't worked as intended and some writers are happy about this. They figure more writers being hired to rewrite means more writers being hired, period. But let's turn our attention to that first reason.

That it was more dignified for writers not to be part of a huge list was the thinking back when movie credits were 20 or 30 names. There was usually one credit for Make-Up and it went to the head of the department, not to the 25 folks who actually did the make-up. The head of the Special Effects division got the one credit for Special Effects, regardless of how many guys actually did the work. So it didn't seem that ignoble for someone to write a large chunk of a movie and not get his or her name on it. Most of the people who worked on the movie didn't get their names on it.

Today, most of them do…all 40 Make-Up people, all 348 guys who made the Special Effects happen, the caterer, the insurance broker, the insurance broker's secretary, the security guards, the guys who drove the Craft Services truck to the set, the people who loaded the crullers onto the Craft Services truck…

…but not the guy who wrote 20% of the movie. His name is nowhere to be seen.

Several times, I've been asked to serve on WGA committees that will explore how the credits guidelines might be revised. I would sooner put some vital body part in a drill press. Even opening the floor to discussion gets some writers so angry that flecks of foam begin appearing on their computer monitors and they accuse those who want to change things of being traitors and idiots and sell-outs and…you know, all those things Ann Coulter calls Democrats. I don't need that in my life. Still, I can't help but wonder aloud if now that credits credit almost everyone, it isn't far more ignoble to say that writing a large chunk of a movie still doesn't deserve even cursory recognition. Aren't we now saying that writing 20% of the movie is less important than doing 2% of the wardrobe handling?

The more I think about it, the more I think the whole concept of what screen credits mean has changed, and that it's nuts for the WGA to cling to the perspective of 1946. But I don't expect it to be changed. Not without some serious bloodshed within the Guild.

About the time O.J. Simpson was arrested, I made what was probably a brilliant decision. I make so few that I remember them all. I decided not to follow the case for a while. I could see that the scenario had the potential to be all-consuming, offering up an excess of entertainment and frustrating emotion, to the point of being a major impediment to my work. Later on, it became exactly that…but by joining it "in progress," I minimized the number of months of my life that it was a distraction. I am starting to feel I should do much the same thing regarding the upcoming presidential election.

One of my greatest criticisms of what we loosely call "The Media" is its need to fill hours and column inches even when they really don't have anything to say. The News has always been like this but now, with Internet and cable news channels competing as they do, it's really become a matter of how to take a one-minute news item, stretch it for a couple days, make it sound exciting, and bridge the days when there's nothing at all new to report. The last couple of weeks, most of what I've read about the Iowa Caucuses and Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich's pie charts has been in that category. It looks like news, it sounds like news…but it isn't news. News is about things that matter.

Here is a hunch based, like all good hunches, on just about nothing. One of my most vivid memories of those few years when I followed the Dodgers was when the trailing team would suddenly tie the score and Sportscaster Supreme Vin Scully would yell, "And it's a brand-new ball game!" The fact that one team was ahead or behind for the early innings had suddenly become irrelevant. It sometimes became irrelevant in the bottom of the ninth. All that had gone before has perhaps been entertaining but none of it had anything to do with which team would ultimately win the game. I have a feeling that the '04 presidential race is going to be like that; not that it will tie but that the real contest, the one that will determine who wins, will hinge on events and actions and economic indicators that have not yet occurred and cannot possibly be predicted. It will have nothing to do with what John Kerry said about Dick Gephardt at the Iowa Caucuses.

I expect to support the Democratic nominee unless it's Joe Lieberman, in which case I'll be too busy packing to move to Canada. I also expect that between now and Election Day, the news will be a roller coaster for all who insist on following it. Bush will be beatable. Then he will be unbeatable again. Then he will look highly beatable. Then we'll hear that he already has the ballot boxes stuffed and/or Osama squirreled away for a late October Surprise…and so on. That's what would be best for the newsfolks, so that's how the news will be. It's not that I don't care about the election. It's just that I have the feeling I could ignore it all, pick up the story a few weeks after the conventions and not miss much except that roller coaster.

I won't be able to do that, of course. I don't have the will power. But at least months from now, I'll be able to post a message linking back to this one and say, "I wish I'd listened to myself."

Back in '99, my pal Art Spiegelman wrote a good and important essay for The New Yorker on Jack Cole and his greatest creation, Plastic Man. It eventually evolved in a must-own book but if you don't own the book, you can still read the original article.

Here's Woody Allen writing about…well, does it really matter? It's Woody Allen.

The answer is: "A clever fellow who knew everything about everything, but who'd still e-mail or call folks like me to triple-check his facts because he turned game show question writing into a precision science."

The question is: "Who was Steve Dorfman?"

Daniel Gross explains how the Bush administration is plundering Social Security surpluses to mask the size of the deficit. In fairness, Mr. Clinton did a certain amount of this, as well. It was wrong then, it's wrong now.