Monthly Archives: August 2004

My pal Earl Kress and I have been playing around with video editing on our respective PCs and I think I need to solicit some counsel here. As I said, we have Windows-based PCs and we're looking for the perfect piece of software. We have some DVDs full of clips (not copy-protected) and we want to import them into an editing program, do some edits, add some simple wipes and dissolves and maybe dub in music and add titles, then build a menu and export to a new DVD. Sounds simple? Well, it oughta be. Earl has been fiddling with Pinnacle Studio 8 and it seems to do most of the things we want except that there doesn't seem to be an efficient way to get files off the DVD and into the program. I've had the same problem with Adobe Premiere Pro. This is above and beyond the obvious problem that all forms of video will be obsolete by the time I could possibly learn Adobe Premiere Pro.

We've tried a number of programs that claim to convert VOB files to MPEG-2 but they all seem to either truncate the clip, get the sound off-sync or fuzz up the video. Shouldn't one be able to take clips off a DVD and edit them without any of these things happening?

Of course. So I'm hereby asking if anyone here has stumbled across the perfect program(s) to do what we want. And are you converting files to MPEG-2 or AVI or what?

Like (I sure hope) most Americans, I think the "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" is a bunch of Republican stooges who are out to smear John Kerry with claims that are, at best, questionable. A friend of mine who went to Vietnam says a lot of guys who received medals there might not have literally deserved them, so if some of Kerry's were based on exaggerations, that would not be unusual. I see no reason yet to assume that's the case but even if it is, it's of little relevance to whether he's fit to be Commander-in-Chief today. For that matter, I don't think the "frat boy" partyings of George W. Bush a few decades ago are all that important in judging his fitness to lead…and don't think we won't hear more about them in the weeks to come.

I'm sure those who were already disinclined to support Kerry welcome the attack on his medals. In politics these days, a lot of people aren't satisfied to believe that their guy is better than the other guy. Now, the other guy must be demonized as criminal, a fool, a pathological liar, a traitor and an all-around worthless human being. Kerry's war record was always an obstacle if you wanted to believe that of him, and it's probably nice to have someone provide you with an alternate version that removes that obstacle. Best of all, you don't even have to really believe it. You can just say, "I don't know…I hear Kerry may have cheated to get those medals…I hear Bush may have cheated on his National Guard service…let's just call that a wash." It's a nice way for some to neutralize an area where Kerry held a big advantage.

How many votes, if any, this whole thing will cost Kerry is a good guess…but you know who I do think is being hurt by this? John McCain. He's out there simultaneously denouncing the attack on Kerry's service record while he stumps for George W. Bush. That can't be a very comfortable position to be in.

McCain is one of those guys I've never quite known what to think of. I first became familiar with him when he was making some extraordinary gestures to soothe bad feelings on both sides in the aftermath of Vietnam. He reached out to some of the protesters and set what I thought was a fine example of how we all needed to put certain angers behind us. If McCain, who spent years in a P.O.W. camp could become friends with a noted anti-war activist like David Ifshin, that was cause for more optimism than a thousand speeches that "hope is on the way." I am a big believer in forgiveness and also in standing up for the other side when you think they're being wronged. McCain denouncing the nasty Swift Boats campaign against Kerry is exactly the kind of thing I've admired in the guy.

But then he's out there hugging Bush, campaigning for him, trying to do nothing that will alienate the Republican base that will select the 2008 nominee. Given what the Bush team did to McCain in the 2000 primaries, you have to wonder. Does he think Bush has nothing to do with the attacks on Kerry's record and/or can't be expected to denounce them? I doubt that, though that may have to be McCain's public position. Does he not hold Bush responsible for the attacks made on him? Again, doubtful. Has he merely forgiven Bush for those tactics because it will help the McCain in '08 campaign? If so, that's not the kind of forgiveness that once made me admire the senior Senator from the great state of Arizona. I know that he has to support the nominee of his party but there was always something nice about McCain that made me think he'd never let that obligation — or even the obvious thirst to be president — override a matter of principle. He always seemed like a Republican that Democrats could support. I am now less inclined to believe that and I'll bet I'm not the only person who feels that way.

Ben Fritz, one of the authors of All the President's Spin and a co-conspirator in Spinsanity, did an article last week for Variety and it's now available online. It's about "geek chic" at the Comic-Con, and I'm linking to it because it's a good piece, not because it quotes me. To be honest, I'll link to just about anything that quotes me but this is a good article anyway.

In the category of "I thought he was already dead," we have the passing of Robert Bootzin, a fixture of sixties' talk shows as the frenetic Gypsy Boots. I remember him mainly from his visits to Steve Allen's various talk shows. Gypsy, as everyone calls him, was sometimes described as "the first hippie." He would burst onto Steve's stage, dressed like a cross between Tarzan and Mahatma Gandhi. Displaying more than enough pep and enthusiasm to classify as a colorful crazy, he'd preach about "natural foods" and would bring berries and bark and other odd things he'd collected in Griffith Park for Steve to sample. How talk shows have changed. Today, if you worked for Leno or Letterman and you suggested they participate in something like that, you'd be fired on the spot.

Gypsy would swing on ropes, dance with women in the audience and make outrageous claims about how his lifestyle would enable him to live well into his second or maybe third century. Audiences loved him and Mr. Allen, who was no fool when it came to the creation of exciting television, kept having him back.

Mr. Bootzin didn't make it to 100. Obits like this one say he was either 89 or 91 and the confusion is understandable. When he did talk shows in the sixties, he never divulged his age and I think most of us got the idea that he was much older than his energy level would indicate. I'm amazed to find out now that he was in his fifties back then as he extolled the magic of organic figs and wheat grass and running naked through the park at daybreak. He probably wasn't as good an example of great health as we thought then. Nevertheless, he was funny and outrageous and great at self-promotion, turning up almost anywhere in Los Angeles where a crowd gathered out-of-doors. They don't make 'em like that anymore.

We've managed to dig up the info that Joe Sinnott (artist supreme) needed. Both stories appeared in Kid Colt, Outlaw #90 but were miscredited. They're listed everywhere as having been drawn wholly by Jack Keller but in fact, Keller pencilled and Sinnott inked. Thanks to all who helped solve this important question.

I like the whole idea of stem-cell research. I think the negatives about it are silly posturings by groups who are opposed to abortion rights and have wrongly decided that stem-cell research is vaguely in the same arena. On the other hand, this article by William Saletan actually caused me to slightly modify my thinking on the issue.

Matthew Yglesias points out that — and here's a shocker — that some of what George W. Bush is saying about his and John Kerry's tax plans might not be accurate.

This message is just for folks who have a ton of old Marvel comic books…

I got a call today from Joe Sinnott…and if you have a ton of old Marvel comic books, you sure know who that is. Joe is trying to clean up his record book which lists everything he's done and when he did it. I helped him solve a couple of mysteries but I was stumped on two, both involving Marvel western comics from around 1960.

Joe's records say he inked a short Jack Kirby story called "The Man From Fargo" which appeared in Kid Colt, Outlaw #90. The Grand Comic Book Database (a wonderful thing but not without occasional errors) lists that story in that issue as being pencilled and inked by Jack Keller. I don't have that issue. Can someone who does check it and see if it's Keller or Kirby/Sinnott?

Also, Joe's notes say he inked a short Kirby story called "Beware the Gun Wizard" but he has no idea where it appeared. He did his work on it October 27-30 of 1959 so I'm guessing the earliest it might have been printed would have been in an issue cover-dated March or more likely April of '60. Anyone have any idea where it ran? Thanks!

My pal Aaron Barnhart thinks the Trio cable channel is not long for this world. I hope he's wrong but he probably isn't.

I'm watching a rerun of The Flip Wilson Show that TiVo (we love TiVo) snagged for me this morn from TV Land. In the sketch, Dennis Weaver is playing a Justice of the Peace and Flip is in wedding dress drag as Geraldine, who's waiting for her never-seen boy friend, "Killer," to show up and marry her. Okay, you got the picture?

There's a knock at the door and Flip/Geraldine says, "Come in, Killer." And in comes another guest star on the show, O.J. Simpson, looking very groom-like in a tuxedo. I am not making this up.

"You're not Killer," Geraldine says. (Right the first time, lady!) Actually, Simpson's the Best Man, and he's there to stand in for Killer, who's too busy shooting pool to show up for his wedding. Weaver proceeds to try to conduct a proxy marriage of Geraldine and Killer…until Simpson tries to call it off because "he won't treat you right." Geraldine goes ahead and marries her absent beau anyway.

Geraldine Jones has not been seen in many years. Which proves it's dangerous to stand next to O.J. Simpson at your wedding…even if he's only the Best Man.

Ronald Brownstein discusses how partisan and just plain nasty this election has become.

Hey, I've done my part. I've bought five of them over the years. It's not my fault TiVo isn't selling very well.

The other day, I recommended a new book called All the President's Spin, written by the staff of the Spinsanity website. I've since given it another read and decided that I was off a bit in what I wrote. It really is more anti-Bush than it felt to me the first time through. But I still think that the main point of interest here is not that George W. Bush and his crew have said so many things that were misleading or just plain untrue, but that the mainstream press did not call them on these fibs.

You can read part of the introduction over at this website. It's a good preview of a good book.

You may see this elsewhere but I can't resist. I have to quote it. House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert appeared today on Meet the Press and discussed the decision (in which he played a major role) to recruit Alan Keyes to run for the Senate in Illinois. Here's what he said…

I talked to Mike Ditka, and I decided maybe he made a good decision. I talked to a guy name Gary Fencik, who was a great star, Harvard-Yale, star for the Chicago Bears. He couldn't. And the problem in Illinois, you've got to have $10 million to run; $6 million or $7 million of that has to be done for name I.D. I got down last week to interviewing a 70-year-old guy, who was a great farm broadcaster in Illinois. He decided since his health problems — he couldn't do it. You know, we were down — we needed to find somebody to run, somebody who wanted to run. And, you know, Alan Keyes wants to run, and I hope he's a good candidate.

Rough translation: "We were so desperate, we had to pick Alan Keyes, and I have no faith at all in him." If I were Barack Obama, the guy Keyes is running against, I'd just use the clip of Hastert as my commercial.

Broadway: The Golden Age is a theatrical documentary on a couple of decades of shows that played the Great White Way with an emphasis on the folks who starred in them. Filmmaker Rick McKay spent many years hauling his camera around the world interviewing enough theater legends to fill 250 hours and he also acquired a lot of rare performance footage. All of that has been edited into a film of just under two hours which is currently playing around the country. You get to hear Stephen Sondheim, Angela Lansbury, Carol Burnett, Gwen Verdon, John Raitt, Carol Channing and countless others discuss their lives and craft. In fact, there are so many worthy interviewees in this film that a lot of important theatrical figures are confined to the briefest of clips.

Over at the film's website, you can view the incredible cast list and see a couple of trailers. You can also read about the many awards the movie has received and study some of the rave reviews. Rex Reed (who is among those interviewed in it) never wrote a more positive notice than this one in a recent current New York Observer and just about everyone else who has appraised it has called it a must-see. Since I love Broadway and the people who work there and the anecdotes they tell, you can just about bet the farm that I'd love this movie, right?

Well, you'd lose the farm, but it's okay. I'd have made that bet, too. I can't recall ever coming out of a movie more amazed that I didn't have a great time. I admire the effort and I respect the hell out of the filmmaker's intentions…but I was unmoved and, at times, bored by a movie that I think reaches to cover too much in its limited time, especially when so much time is allotted to trivia. And I say that as a guy who ordinarily loves trivia…but we hear more about where the actors went to hang out after the show than about how those shows were created or even what any of them meant to their era.

I agree that the period of the American theater that the film chronicles was a "golden age" of great memories. I'd have liked to see more examples of that instead of a lot of actors telling us it was great, but I don't have to be convinced on that count. What puzzles me is that McKay starts with the premise that this great era has passed and then, if we are to believe Rex Reed's write-up, "…asks all the right questions [about why it ended] and gets fantastic answers from a cast of 100 people who were actually there." That's not the movie I saw this afternoon. We get some nice tales about beginning actors living in poverty, about understudies getting to go on and being discovered, and about going to Sardi's to hear the reviews. But perhaps because the movie is primarily about actors talking about acting, the question of why Broadway has changed goes largely unasked and unanswered. Why there are now shows with people in cat suits and scores made up of recorded music is a topic that is probably best addressed by directors, writers and (primarily) producers, and there are very few of them represented in Broadway: The Golden Age and none is asked that question.

Late in the film, Elaine Stritch assures us the theater is in great shape. Is this the filmmaker's view, too? I really don't know. I also don't know what the proper audience is for this movie. If you know little about theater, I think you'd be baffled. The clips are selected more for their rarity than for any real demonstration of the magic of the stage, and a lot of the references will be lost on theatrical novices. There's some great footage of Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon working together, for example, but no real explanation of who Fosse was, where he came from, what impact he had on the theater, etc. On the other hand, if you know a lot about theater, I think you'd want a lot more depth than is offered here. Then again, given how many of my friends love this film, maybe I'm wrong, and the sheer celebration of these folks is enough.

As I said, I really wanted to love this movie. I still want to love this movie, which is why I'm hoping the DVD release, whenever it happens, will include 20 or 30 hours of additional footage from those interviews. I'm also anticipating McKay's announced sequel, which will deal with present-day Broadway. Maybe it will address the question of what's changed and, taken together, the two films will form a far-reaching overview of a topic in dire need of more consideration. If so, I'll be thrilled because, as you can tell, I don't feel good about not liking what I saw today.