Monthly Archives: September 2004

Ellen Goodman asks the musical question, "How Exactly Are We Safer?" This is a very good question.

Unless they screw around just to annoy us — always a possibility — Game Show Network will broadcast the final network episode of What's My Line? in the wee small hours of tomorrow morning. The program debuted February 2 of 1950 and lasted until September 3, 1967 — an amazing run, especially when you consider the low-budget simplicity of it all. I remember my father detested the show. He thought the people on it were pompous and evocative of that mindset of, "If you aren't part of New York society, you're nothing." But I found it fun on those rare occasions as a kid when I could stay up late on Sunday night and watch it. (It aired at 10:30 PM) There was something charming about the banter and about how seriously the host, John Daly, would attempt to enforce the rules of a silly game. Daly, who was a newsman at heart, was an unlikely pick to preside over a game show but somehow, his literal-mindedness and convoluted rulings added a certain fun.

The most fun, of course, came each episode when the panel would don blindfolds and Daly would invite the Mystery Guest to "Enter and sign in, please." I suspect a lot of folks watched the show just for that…to see some celebrity disguise his or her voice to try and stump the panel. (Sometimes, you could tell that the celeb would deliberately give it away so the game could end and they could have more time to plug their new movie or TV special.) Since the show was done live, there was often a certain amount of suspense backstage over whether the Mystery Guest would actually show up on time. In a few instances, they cut it very close. Had the guest not arrived, there were contigency plans to use either the producer, Mark Goodson, or the show's announcer, who was usually Johnny Olson. And there was a special, "last resort" emergency procedure if none of those could work and they were really desperate. It was to have John Daly himself sign in as the Mystery Guest and just pretend he had some famous star seated next to him.

Throughout the show's run, they sometimes came close to using this but never did…so as the last Mystery Guest on the last show, Daly was drafted. There was no point in "saving" the idea for the future, and it seemed a highly appropriate way to end the series. If you tune in or TiVo the show tonight, you should see how it went.

Some time in the next day or three, Variety and/or Hollywood Reporter should run the news that Sergio Aragonés and I have sold the motion picture rights to our silly comic book character, Groo the Wanderer. We've made a deal with a company called I.P.W. that seems to us trustworthy and eager to do right by the property. In the 23 years Groo has been around, we have been approached over and over with offers but never with one we felt we could accept. There were a couple that fell apart because the producers were having internal problems…and in one case, a key player in the deal died suddenly, ending what could have been a very interesting adaptation. At other times, we've been offered contracts that were either woefully deficient in the cash department or, worse, in the category of Creative Control.

Having poured large chunks of our lives into the comic, we were not about to hand it over to someone else who might think, "Hmm…the Olsen Twins are hot. Maybe Groo could be two blonde ladies." So we waited and waited…and then, about eight months ago, we suddenly had a flurry of intriguing and competing offers, and we finally accepted this one, which is more like a partnership arrangement that will keep us both involved. If you care at all about the particulars, they should be making the rounds soon. Just remember that Sergio and I are only working on the screenplay at the moment and that this thing is a long way from turning up at your neighborhood Cineplex. That's assuming it ever does, and I certainly would never assume that about any movie project from anyone. I'll let you know more when there's more to know.

This comes under the category of "Someone's gotta say it." To me, the saddest part of the whole tale of the Dan Rather and the bogus letters is not that CBS News was embarrassed. I think every major news outlet ought to be embarrassed about a number of things they've proffered as legit the last few years. Nor is it that Bush supporters have probably been able to convince some folks that because one chunk of evidence was phony, a lot of the charges about the man's National Guard Service have to be phony, as well.

No, what saddens me is that this is how Dan Rather, who was once a very good reporter, is going to go out. I hate the idea of retiring people just because they get old, but it's been a long time since Dan Rather has been Dan Rather. Just as politicans who are around too long start to look like the David Levine caricature and sound like the Dana Carvey impression, so it is with newsmen. Their quirks intensify and they become lampoons of themselves. At least a decade ago, someone should have lovingly tapped Mr. Rather on the shoulder and told him it was time to become a Special Correspondent, doing essays and nostalgia pieces like Mr. Cronkite.

Rather once earned his nickname of "the reporter the White House hates" but he earned it fair-and-square — by broadcasting stories that showed that government officials (at the time, Nixon and his mob) were fibbing to us. We should all be in favor of the press doing that, and not just when we want to see the current regime tossed out of office. Or at least, we should be in favor of it when the reports stand the test of time, and it did turn out that Rather was largely right, and the Nixon Administration was largely wrong. Still, Rather has never been as good at the anchor desk as he was asking tough questions of those in power.

His rise from field reporter to anchor and editor-in-chief of The CBS Evening News owed a lot to his enemies. Rabid Conservative groups circulated petitions and pressured advertisers to get him removed from his post as White House Correspondent. CBS had a normal "tour-of-duty" schedule and Rather was due to be rotated to another assignment…but they kept him on the White House beat longer than planned, just because they didn't want to be perceived as giving in to that campaign. Later, when Walter Cronkite announced his retirement, the choice came down to Mudd or Rather, and rumor has it that CBS felt Mudd was better suited to the job. But again, Rather's critics were crusading against him and again, CBS didn't want them to be able to claim they influenced the decision. Reportedly, the network toyed with splitting the job between Mudd and Rather, but Mudd balked at sharing so they gave the whole thing to Rather. If Rather's detractors had only shut up, he probably wouldn't have landed the (then) most prestigious post in the news business, and CBS wouldn't have kept him in it to this day.

The last decade or so, he's gotten…weird. It isn't just the odd, folksy bromides or the mounting seriousness or even the crying on Letterman. It's just that he's become this robotic presence who makes every story sound the same, and who seems way too detached from the human side of whatever he reports. In all likelihood, he was due for retirement soon, just because of the way CBS News has atrophied the last half-dozen years. Alas, now that Conservatives are again calling for his head, he'll probably stay around longer just to deny them their victory. They'll have to take comfort in the fact that as long as he's there, CBS news coverage will become more and more irrelevant.

Tom Lammers writes (and I am grateful to him for this data)…

The Atlas globe logo appeared on the cover while Goodman's books were still distributed by Kable News. The Atlas globe logo was added to covers beginning with the November 1951 issues. Kable News' "K" logo and the North American map that symbolized the independent distributor's union to which Kable belonged remained on the covers through the August 1952 issues. This 10-month co-existence of the Atlas and Kable symbols suggests to me that Atlas was not just a distributor's mark. The fact that it continued to appear on covers through Oct 1957 cover date, even though Goodman closed his distributorship down on 1 Nov 1956 in favor of distribution by American News. The interior page bottom margin blurbs ("For the best in [whatever] tales, look for the Atlas globe on the cover!"] also supports Goodman's intention to use it as a product identity.

I didn't mean to suggest that Goodman never intended "Atlas" to be a company brand-name…but he didn't push that notion a lot; not to the extent DC or Harvey or EC or almost any other company put a big company logo on all their books.

Years ago, the late Don Rico (who was an editor there for many years) explained to me why Goodman listed some of his comics as published by Canam Publishing and some by Vista Publishing and so on. I didn't fully understand the reason and don't remember enough of it to give a coherent recapitulation…but it had something to do with a New York state law back then that gave certain tax advantages to small businesses. It apparently saved money for Goodman to claim he had fifty or sixty small businesses, as opposed to one large one. Rico also said — and this may have been a theory on his part — that Goodman was out to separate his assets so that if some grouping of titles lost too much money, he could declare bankruptcy for the "company" that published them without impacting the rest of his line. In any case, he may have not played up the Atlas insignia too much because he wanted to be able to claim he really did have separate companies that just happened to have the same owner, same offices, same staff and same distribution. Like I said, I don't fully understand this.

However, if he added the Atlas symbol to his covers ten months before Atlas began distributing his own titles through his own company, that suggests to me he did intend it primarily as a distributor's mark. He must have known a year before he shifted distribution that it would happen so, I'm assuming, he slapped the Atlas name on there to begin establishing the identity of his forthcoming distribution company. He left it on when he shifted to American News Service because, by then, it did have that value for product identity…but when American went under and he moved over to Independent News, he chucked the Atlas name. So at that point, it was more important to get rid of it to disassociate himself with his old distribution than to keep it to denote his product line. And to those of you who come here for the non-comic book postings, my apologies…but this is the kind of thing some of us think is important.

Before Marvel Comics was Marvel Comics, it was a company of many monikers. A man named Martin Goodman owned it, though he had some of its components in his wife's name. In the early forties, most of its publications were the output of Timely Publications. Eventually, for some obscure legal reason, Goodman's comics were published by an array of at least 59 front companies ranging from Animirth Comics to Zenith Publications, Inc. The distribution company he owned was named Atlas and since its logo appeared on all his covers, fans took to referring to the company as Atlas Comics. Even after he changed distributors and the Atlas seal disappeared, readers referred to the line as "Atlas" until such time as the Marvel logotype was established on his covers. (Within the industry, almost no one used the Atlas name, by the way. Artists and writers would say they were working for "Timely" — a name that remained on the office door, long after it was off the comics — or they'd say, "I'm doing a story for Goodman" or "I'm doing a job for Stan Lee.")

Atlas published thousands of comics of all kinds: ghost comics, westerns, war, funny animals, etc. For the most part, Goodman's modus operandi was to see what was selling for his competitors, then to clutter the stands with like product, crowding others off the newsracks. Most of his comics were concocted under the editorial supervision of Stan Lee but, generally speaking, and with occasional exceptions, the stories in them were of minimal interest — never very bad but rarely very good. That may have been less because of the competence of the writers than the restrictions of format, which called for short, non-connected tales with simple premises and, wherever possible, gimmicky endings where the punishment fits the crime.

Of more interest today is the artwork in these comics. Goodman did not pay well but in a time when the comic book industry was wildly unstable and included some less-than-honest publishers, he usually had work available and his checks always cleared. As a result, just about everyone who worked in the New York comic book talent pool passed through his titles and some of the better artists — men like Bill Everett, Joe Maneely, Russ Heath and Dan DeCarlo — did an awful lot of pages. This makes a lot of their comics fun to collect and study…and if you can't afford to collect, you can at least study covers at two online galleries. Nearly 3000 cover images can be viewed at the Atlas Tales site and another 600 (including much overlap) are at The Timely-Atlas Cover Gallery. The scans don't always do justice to the material but they may give you some idea of how good some of the artistry was on some of their books…and you'll get a sense of Goodman's "flood the stands" style of publishing.

And there's a large point of irony to be noted: Goodman sold Marvel in the late sixties, though he planned to stay on and run it with his son, Charles Goodman. Both Goodmans were squeezed out and in the mid-seventies, they launched a new company and called it Atlas Comics. DC and Marvel promptly increased the number of titles they published and neatly crowded the new Atlas off the newsstands, just as efficiently as the old one had smothered many of its smaller competitors. It was another of those gimmicky endings where the punishment fits the crime.

Darren Margolis writes…

Mark, it seems that the Nation article (and you probably should have disclosed for the benefit of most people who don't know that The Nation is a very far left viewpoint magazine) is misleading in saying that Ashcroft is 0 for 5000. That implies that all 5000 have actually been tried and out of 5000, there have been no convictions. I don't know at this point how many have been tried. A more accurate statistic would have been to state the zero convictions figure as a function of how many have actually been tried.

But the vast majority have never been tried and will never be tried. They get detained, perhaps kept in a cell for an extended period without benefit of counsel, cited as an example of the superb job the Justice Department is doing, rounding up dangerous evildoers. And then, at some point, they're quietly released — because the authorities know they don't have enough evidence to make any sort of case. In most cases, they probably didn't have enough to warrant arresting these people in the first place.

I don't know why this doesn't bother people, including those who believe in an aggressive policy towards domestic terrorist suspects. But then I'm also amazed at how many people who favor the Death Penalty are unbothered by the number of folks who are apparently convicted in error. It's like the goal here is to make sure the government pursues the "right" course of action, and it doesn't really matter if they do it with a great deal of competence.

Filmmaker Russ Meyer left us with only one regret: That he didn't die from being crushed to death by a pair of enormous breasts.

Here's an excerpt from an article about the wonderful job the Attorney General has been doing in prosecuting terrorists…and then I have a couple of questions.

On September 2 a federal judge in Detroit threw out the only jury conviction the Justice Department has obtained on a terrorism charge since 9/11.

[snip…]

Until that reversal, the Detroit case had marked the only terrorist conviction obtained from the Justice Department's detention of more than 5,000 foreign nationals in antiterrorism sweeps since 9/11. So Ashcroft's record is 0 for 5,000. When the Attorney General was locking these men up in the immediate wake of the attacks, he held almost daily press conferences to announce how many "suspected terrorists" had been detained. No press conference has been forthcoming to announce that exactly none of them have turned out to be actual terrorists.

Okay, so here's my first question: How could John Ashcroft be doing a worse job on this? I mean, if they'd given me the job, I could have arrested 5,000 suspicious-looking swarthy men and obtained zero convictions. Hell, by dumb luck, I might have been able to convict one of them of something.

Second question: It's always possible that someone can be guilty but even a competent prosecutor is unable to get a conviction. Does anyone think that most of those 5,000+ detainees fall into that category? Or any significant number? Or is it more likely the case that people were being arrested on very little evidence?

It bothers me greatly that so many apparently-innocent people could be jailed, prosecuted, terrified, etc. but since they were mostly foreigners and it was done with the intent of fighting terrorism, I doubt most Americans will care. You'd think though that some of them might wonder if all that erroneous prosecution might have made us less safe, if only because it devoted so much of our resources towards apparent dead ends and wild goose pursuits.

But they probably won't. Years ago, I had a couple of long conversations with a screenwriter, Al Levitt, who'd been blacklisted back in the Commie-hunting days. Levitt made the comment that the people who cheered on the blacklisting were oblivious to how ineptly it had been done. Even if you bought the notion that Communist-sympathizers in Hollywood threatened the American way of life, those trying to eliminate such people were ignoring real threats and destroying the lives of a lot of innocent folks based on fourth-hand rumors. But, he said, that didn't seem to matter. He suggested — and this is me paraphrasing — that it was like "You go to a doctor because your teeth hurt and he amputates your foot…and then you don't object because, after all, he was making a bold effort to wipe out the problem." I think a lot of folks today don't really care if we catch or stop terrorists, just so long as we look like we're doing something.

John Kerry gave a pretty good speech this morning. If he could give a few dozen more just like it, no one would ever accuse him of being vague on issues or flip-flopping or of not having real plans as to what he'd do as our Chief Exec. You can read the text of it here or you can go over to the C-Span page and seek out the online video. (This link might bring up the video in your browser if you have Real Player installed. And then again, it might not.) Even if you're against Kerry, you might want to check out this speech, if only to see more clearly what you're against.

Michael Tomasky makes what I think is an important point: That the U.S. is not that divided on the subject of the Vietnam War.

Assignments — some even of the paying variety — have me waaaay backlogged on e-mail. (What is he working on? All sorts of things but the main one will probably be announced in the Hollywood trade papers within a week or three.) Anyway, this is another one of those pathetic, irresponsible postings to tell you that if I owe you a response, please forgive me. And posting may be light here until I finish most of those responses and maybe, just maybe, a smidgen more of that distracting real work.

Which reminds me: Thanks to all of you who sent donations in response to my experiment to see if the economy was truly growing. It turns out the test was inconclusive. I received about half of what I got the previous time I asked, but that may have been because several folks informed me that, while they'd love to send me cash, they know the economy is in bad shape and didn't want to contribute to the delusion that it's better. If you were one such person, I hereby declare the survey to be over so you can donate now and it will not count as an indication that the Bush tax cuts stimulated the nation's finances. In fact, if donations increase now, I'd take that as a sure sign that the Bush plan has failed.

Yeah, I know. Shameless.

Several of you have written to ask what I think of Identity Crisis, which is a new series of some sort from DC Comics. Answer: I haven't seen it. Several more of you have written to ask what I think of that new Sky Captain movie, whatever it's called. Answer: I haven't seen it, either. And a lot of you have written to ask what I think of the allegedly-forged National Guard memos. Answer: I don't know if they're forged. It sure looks that way…but then again, that view is being sold hard by a lot of folks, including rival news organizations, that have been dying for an opportunity to humiliate Dan Rather. That doesn't mean they're wrong; just that we should be…well, a lot more skeptical of all "experts" than CBS was in accepting the documents in the first place. In any case, I still think Bush skated on his National Guard service and I still don't think it's much of a reason to vote against him. I mean, if what's going on with Iraq doesn't convince you…

Caught a little of the Miss America pageant the other night, largely by accident. I can dimly recall when this contest mattered but I can't quite remember why. Once upon a time, I guess the idea was just to pick someone who could be crowned The Most Envied Woman in America and sent off on a tour of car shows and store openings…kind of a manufactured celebrity. Now, of course, we manufacture celebrities faster than the Nabisco people manufacture Wheat Thins…and The Most Envied Woman in America is probably a supermodel, recording artist, Playmate or movie star. In other words, she's not someone who will gladly spend the next year in the employ of the Miss America people, cutting ribbons and promoting an antiquated worldview. Still, the company that runs the pageant has this business going and they need someone to wear the tiara and sign autographs, so they keep the competition alive.

But the host (who was that guy?) just takes the thing too seriously, and the winner is no longer snaring an honor that every little girl dreams of winning…and every year, fewer and fewer people tune in. They may notch a bit of a ratings spike this time since they made the world-shattering leap to allowing the ladies to wear bikinis, but that's a trick that won't resuscitate a dying institution. What they may have to do — and I'm actually half-serious about this — is to acknowledge that the whole contest is turning into a joke and then beat everyone to the punchline. It ought to be more tongue-in-cheek and camp, either with an emcee who's hip enough to conduct and simultaneously mock the proceedings, or someone who'll play it just like Bert Parks would have if he were still with us. And then they'd need to get away from the idea that being Miss America is the crowning achivement of any woman's entire life. This year's winner is a Rhodes Scholar finalist who, the news reports say, was accepted into the University of Alabama's medical school but delayed her entry to compete in beauty pageants. That's not as vapid as it may sound because her winnings will finance her education. That's altogether worthy and that's what everyone ought to keep in mind; that being in a beauty pageant is just a real good summer job.

Okay. Back to work…

Harvey Pekar and Gary Dumm have done a little comic strip for the New York Times about the making of Brooklyn: The Musical, which is arriving on Broadway. The link to this is a little tricky so if this doesn't work, go to the Times theater page and look around for it.

I haven't seen a copy yet but Gary Owens tells me there's a nice mention of me in his autobiography…reason enough to plug How to Make a Million Dollars with Your Voice (Or Lose Your Tonsils Trying), which has just been released. Gary is one of the nicest, most talented gents in the business…and busiest. I know lots of performers who are happy to work twice a month. For Gary, a long stretch of unemployment is, like, he finishes a job at 10:30 AM and isn't booked for anything else until after lunch. You remember him from Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, and you know all the cartoon voices he's provided — Space Ghost, Blue Falcon, Roger Ramjet, Powered Toast Man, etc. — and you may be familiar with his radio/disc jockey career. All of that still represents a fraction of all he's done, so this oughta be a most entertaining volume.

Gary's new book, co-authored with Jeff Lenberg, can be purchased from Amazon by clicking here. But if you live in Southern California, you might want to drop by Dutton's Books in the Valley, this coming Wednesday night. The store's at 5146 Laurel Canyon Blvd. and that evening, from around 7:00 to 9:00, Gary will be writing his name in copies, and he's invited a lot of his friends to be there. Since Gary knows everyone in show business, it oughta be quite the event.

Since he went on the air, I've been listening to Al Franken's radio show. It isn't back on the air in Los Angeles but one can hear it streaming via the Air America website or, even better, this website archives the old shows for download. I had not expected to like the show since I've generally found "talk radio" to be less an intelligent discussion of issues and more like wrestling but with even cheaper theatrics. Very few radio talkers have ever convinced me they're doing much more than an "act" that they've found attracts listeners, and if Al was just going to be the Bizarro-Rush, saying Liberals were right about everything and Conservatives were wrong…well, even if I thought that was true, I had and still have no interest in listening to that. I think it's a sign of weakness to avoid other viewpoints. It's like an insecure business tycoon surrounding himself with "Yes Men" who tell him what he wants to hear. I also think it's more a sign of stubbornness than principle to operate off the assumption that The Other Side is evil, misinformed, treacherous, stupid, etc.

But I like Al Franken. I didn't always like the old, smug Al Franken of Saturday Night Live, but I like what he's become. I liked his books and I liked him when I heard him speak last October. I was also intrigued by the fact that unlike most who get into Talk Radio, Franken was not a nobody looking to make his fame and fortune in the arena. So I gave him a try and I've generally enjoyed what I've heard. One thing that I appreciate is that Franken has friends and guests who don't just endorse everything he says. He occasionally has on people like G. Gordon Liddy and Grover Norquist…not often, granted, but the fact that he has them on at all is indicative of a somewhat healthier attitude than the kind of show that you tune in just to hear that your side is doing God's work and the other side is the Spawn of Satan. (I tried listening to Air America's Randi Rhodes and gave her up because she seemed to be just that.) There are moments when Franken veers into Michael Savage Land and we get a festival of Bush-bashing and Rush-roasting…but you also get moments like, for example the other day, when Franken and Bob Barr found a lot of common ground on the Patriot Act.

My biggest problem with Franken's show has been that I simply can't spend the fifteen hours a week to listen to him. Fortunately, they've now begun videotaping the proceedings, editing it down to an hour of highlights and airing it on The Sundance Channel each night. Much better. If you haven't checked it out, you might give it a try…that is, assuming you get The Sundance Channel. Someone must.