Monthly Archives: January 2005

Congrats to Paul Ryan, one of the best comic artists working today, on his new gig. He's drawing the Phantom daily newspaper strip and his work begins appearing January 31. Good choice.

113 years ago today, a lad named Norvell Hardy was born in Harlem, Georgia. Somewhere around 1910, he began managing a "moving picture" theater and came to the conclusion that he could be as good (or bad) as any of the so-called comedians in the films he ran. By 1913, he was in Jacksonville, Florida where he began making films for the Lubin Company, billed as "Babe" Hardy. The nickname came from an effeminate barber who cut all the actors' hair and was known to rub powder into Hardy's many chins and call him a "nice baby." Years later, when Hardy's father Oliver passed away, he adopted that given name…but off-stage, he was "Babe" to everyone. By that point, he was out in Hollywood, where he'd become one of the busiest actors around. This was not surprising. He was capable of playing comedy or drama, though usually he played the "heavy" (bad guy) in whatever he did.

Oliver Norvell Hardy, it turned out, had a near-perfect, instinctual grasp of how to play to the camera. At the time, film acting was still a new skill, unmastered by most. Those with stage experience tended to go too broad with their gestures, as if they were still doing it for folks in the second balcony. Most of those without stage experience simply couldn't act at all. Hardy sensed how to split the difference, making him among the most effective screen performers. He was one of the first screen comedians to just be funny, regardless of the gag.

He appeared in hundreds of films, to the point where today's historians admit they'll probably never identify them all. As his longtime employer Hal Roach once said, "People just liked working with Babe Hardy. He was always great in front of the camera but he was also always a delight to be around when he wasn't in front of the camera." It was at Roach's studio that someone got the bright idea of pairing the chubby Hardy up with a skinny English comedian. That seems to have worked out well.

Next time I'm at Costco, I have to remember to pick up a crate of canned soup, a 24-roll package of paper towels, a ten-year supply of soy sauce, fifty jars of pickle relish…and a dozen of these.

Peter Dizekes offers up a list of 34 scandals in and around the Bush Administration. This is a Salon article so if you're not a subscriber, you may need to watch a commercial.

Roger Lowenstein offers up a long but fairly compelling argument that there is no Social Security crisis. There's apparently a long history of forecasting that the fund will be bankrupt by ever-advancing dates.

If you want to know why the TiVo company is in trouble, read this and this and if you're really interested, this. They all add up to a pretty simple fact: TiVo is being outflanked right and left in the field it pioneered. They simply have been unable to upgrade their product fast enough, and the current marketplace features many machines that are more attractive to buyers. (They are, however, finally rolling out TiVo to Go. Here's an article about that.)

But do not panic, fellow TiVo Travellers. Our machines still work. They just might not work as well as some alternatives. And yes, I know that's not the most comforting feeling in the world, especially since I felt it once before. It was about the time the shelves of VHS movies for sale at Tower Video became larger and the shelves for us Betamax users became smaller.

Here's a pretty good newspaper article about Will Eisner. It's written by my longtime buddy, Gary Brown…a reporter who really knows the comic book business. And I'm not just saying that because he often quotes me. I'm saying it because he always quotes me.

Also: Another old pal, Ken Gale, is devoting the next broadcast of his radio show, 'Nuff Said, to Eisner. It can be heard in the New York area and some nearby states, this coming Tuesday night (actually, Wednesday morning) from 3:30 AM to 6:00 AM, Eastern time. Over at the show's website, you can learn where to hear it on your radio or how to get it on the Internet. I'll be a guest (via phone) early in the proceedings.

The second volume of Garfield and Friends (that show I wrote years ago) was released on DVD last month. I was told some time back that the third volume would follow in May of 2005, that the fourth will follow in October, and that the fifth and final would be in March of 2006. (That will cover all 121 half-hours that were produced, including the 48 that have never been syndicated.) But several of you have written me to note that Amazon is now taking advance orders for Volume 3, to be released April 19…so you now know as much about this as I do. I don't think we're going to see any extras.

Another longtime comedy veteran has left us.  Here's the New York Times obit for Gene Baylos and as you'll see, he had a long career in comedy, though he never quite managed to become a household name. (The one appearance of his that readers of this weblog will probably remember was on The Dick Van Dyke Show. He played the bum who found a lost script and tried to extort money from the writing staff for its return.)

Unmentioned in the Times obit is that Mr. Baylos was famed among other comedians for being cheap and pushy, though in a lovable way. Every time I've been with comics of his generation and his name has come up, there's been a story — told, almost admiringly — of Gene's ability to get someone else to pay the check or drive him to the Catskills. One technique for the latter would be that Gene would get booked in one of the hotels up there and would find out that, say, Corbett Monica was booked nearby and would be driving up from Manhattan around Noon. A little before Noon, Baylos would park his car near where he knew Monica would be turning onto the parkway, put up the hood and wait. When he saw Monica's car, he'd flag it down, plead engine trouble and ask if Corbett could drive him. At least, that's the way I heard Monica tell the story at a Friars Club table full of comedians, all of whom nodded that he'd done that to them, as well.

The character Billy Crystal played in Mr. Saturday Night has been identified as an amalgam of Alan King, Milton Berle, Buddy Hackett and Sid Caesar…but there was a lot of Baylos in there. Throughout, Crystal's old comedian keeps using the story about how he walked into the house one day, found his wife in bed with his best friend and said, "Murray…I have to. But you?" That was a famous joke from the act of Mr. Gene Baylos.

There was a period in the seventies when Baylos became notorious around Johnny Carson's Tonight Show staff for lobbying to get on the show. Johnny didn't want him or that style of comedy any longer, but Baylos wouldn't take "no" for an answer, and began turning up in the Tonight Show offices or phoning up employees there, acting as if he'd been booked and they just needed to decide on the date. The show's producer Fred DeCordova told me that Baylos would just walk into his office and say, "I ran into Johnny in the hall and he said to check with you if next Wednesday could work." DeCordova never fell for the trick, and Baylos never got on the show then…but he did become quite notorious around the office.

There was a large bulletin board there where cards were pinned-up to list upcoming guests. One day, a planned Guest Host fell out and just to be silly, one of the writers stuck the name of Gene Baylos up there when no one was looking. An NBC publicist came by later to jot down a list of who was scheduled for upcoming shows and, not getting the joke, copied down everything on the board and put that information into a press release. Sure enough, TV Guide printed a listing for The Tonight Show with "Guest host, Gene Baylos." (This is a true story. If it sounds familiar to anyone who's read my comic books, I used the situation once in an issue of Crossfire.)

Mr. Baylos, of course, was ecstatic to find that not only had he finally been booked for the Carson show but that he'd be sitting in for Johnny. He bombarded the office with calls to make plans but was repeatedly told that it was a mistake; that he was not going to appear as host or guest, and that Bill Cosby would be behind the desk that evening. Legend has it — I'm not sure I believe this part — that Baylos showed up at NBC on the day in question, waving a copy of TV Guide at the security guards who had been alerted not to let him in. I'm sorry they didn't at least give him a few minutes on the broadcast. I'll bet he would have been funny.

As you may recall, on the New Year's Eve edition of The Tonight Show, broadcast live to the East Coast, singer Vince Neil uttered the "f" word. According to this article which ran a week or so ago, the F.C.C. will launch an investigation into the matter.

Let us leave aside for the moment the fact that it's absurd for our government, which has more important concerns, to waste time and money over a concern that people who were up at 12:25 in the morning heard that word coming out of their TV sets. (The F.C.C. says it has "received complaints" but doesn't say how many. I'm guessing five. NBC says they had zero.) But like I said, leave that aside. Here's the question I want to ask…

What exactly is there to "investigate" here? He said it. Obviously, no one planned it. If they haul Vince Neil before some committee and ask him why it happened, he's going to say, "It just slipped out" and no one can really argue that point. The F.C.C. knows how many complaints came in. (Come to think of it, five is probably high. Make it three.) They also know just what NBC did to bleep the word from the West Coast replay of the program.

The word "investigation" means someone's going to expend effort to learn something or ascertain the facts. What is there about this incident that is not known or has yet to be discovered?

Obviously, I don't think any fine or discipline is warranted. Frankly, the concept that an arm of the United States Government would or could spend more than five minutes on this offends me more than what Vince Neil said.

Phone guy finally showed and managed to fix the problem in about three minutes. He's from San Jose, he says. The local company is so overwhelmed with trouble complaints that they've brought hundreds (he may have said "thousands") of technicians from other cities. He started work at 7 AM this morning and is expected to make at least two more stops tonight. Tough job.

I want to emphasize that I wasn't complaining earlier about the repair people. They've got a lot of fixin' to do and it would be absurd to expect them to always be able to predict how long each stop will take. (He was here for maybe six minutes. His previous stop, he told me, took two hours.) I just think that if companies want us to use the 'net more to transact business, they could give us something back — like more accurate info — via that same connection. And I guess I'm also amazed when they urge us to use their website instead of the phone but manage to make it less efficient. (I forgot to mention. I originally tried to schedule this service call through the phone company site but it wouldn't accept the appointment.)

Okay, I'm off to the market. Finally.

No sign of the telephone repairman. You know…the one who was supposed to be here between 1 PM and 5 PM?

One of my phone lines is out. It's been out for more than a week but that's okay. I have a couple of lines, and I'm sure that after the big rains that hit Los Angeles, there are folks who need a repairman more than I do. So I didn't flinch when, eight days ago, they said the earliest appointment they could give me was today, Saturday the 15th, between the hours of 1 PM and 5 PM.

Well, he — I'm assuming it'll be a "he" — still isn't here yet. A nice lady in the phone company repair division says he's still coming. Of course, at 5 PM, another nice lady in the same department told me he'd be here within the hour. These are not the first two nice ladies in my life to string me along and lie.

There's got to be a way in the age of the Internet and cell phones and pagers to make this process more efficient. Those nice ladies have computers in front of them that tell them exactly where the repairfolks are, how many appointments are ahead of mine, etc. When the service people leave one job, they phone in or otherwise inform HQ that they're on their way to the next. How difficult would it be to route that information to the consumer? Imagine if on a day when I'm expecting a visit, I could get periodic e-mails that say something like, "Repairman 37 is completing Service Call #6 for the day. You are #9. His current estimated time of arrival is between 7 PM and 8 PM." I could even route those to an account where I could pick them up via my cell phone. That way, I could go about my business and have a more useful idea of when I need to be here. I'd planned to go to the market and buy some things, dinner included, after the guy left…but that was when I thought that would occur by 5:00. Had I known I'd still be waiting here at 7:30…

My phone company (SBC) keeps trying to get me to contact them via their web page. When I call them, I sit through endless announcements that I can order services, check the status of an order, request service, etc., at their site. Which I'd do if that site ever worked. So far, every attempt to transact business that way has taken twenty minutes and led to a notice that my business cannot be processed at this time and I should phone them…which means listening again to all those recordings that say I should try using their website.

Assuming they ever get the site working — a big, perhaps foolhardy assumption — I would certainly use it. I'd especially use it if it did things I like just described, keeping me informed of when the repairguy's going to get here. How can a communications company be so bad at communicating?

After languishing way too long on a shelf over at Warner Home Video, Eric Idle's long-awaited sequel to The Rutles will finally have a DVD release on or around March 1. Longtime readers of this site will recall that I saw it at a screening in May of 2001 (as noted near the bottom of this page) and enjoyed it a lot. Mr. Idle plays the same annoying documentarian he played in the 1978 "mockumentary" (we didn't call them that then), All You Need is Cash, along with playing the Paul-like member of The Rutles. The sequel, Can't Buy Me Lunch, amplifies and expands on the saga of the Pre-Fab Four and you can pre-order it by clicking here. Between this and the Broadway debut of his Spamalot, Eric Idle's going to have quite a month of March.

In Broadway's rush to revive everything that ran longer than Carrie, it was inevitable that the return of A Chorus Line should be announced…and it has been. A new production is planned for next year…a re-creation of the original, complete with much the same choreography.

The original version ran fifteen years, making it the longest-running Broadway show ever until 42nd Street and a couple of Andrew Lloyd Webber efforts stole that distinction. But A Chorus Line has had a staggering number of regional and local productions over the years, which is one reason I'm skeptical that the magic will reignite. Even assuming the new production is as wonderful as the original — which is assuming a lot — the show has grown very familiar and also very dated. In fact, it grew dated while on Broadway. At some point in the original run, they declared it a period piece and added to the program books that the events were set in 1975. Apparently, that will be the time of this and all future productions, which is fine. Better that than someone interjecting gratuitous contemporary references. Still, it has that "seventies" sensibility and I suspect insufficient time has passed for it to become a genuine relic of another era the way Grease or 42nd Street or even any good mounting of Guys and Dolls oozes history. Twenty years from now, sure…but now?

Some shows have a way of becoming too familiar. There are plans for Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick to reunite in The Odd Couple, another play that I love but feel has been done to death. I'm guessing tickets will be hard to get for that production but not because anyone is dying to see The Odd Couple. Big, billable star names are simply one way a revival can justify its existence. Another is if the material has been rethought and modernized in some manner…but this revival of A Chorus Line will have neither of those qualities. It's not being updated and the show, almost by definition, cannot have stars. The whole point of it — and one reason the movie with Michael Douglas missed the point — is that the quasi-anonymous members of the chorus are the stars. (The tepid reception to the movie also does not bode well for the new Broadway version.)

What the new Chorus Line will have going for it is that the original was around so long that it was many a theatergoer's first great stage experience. We all have those shows that loom large in our memories…that wonderful evening that changed our lives, at least a little. Like junkies desperate to relive that first great high, we trudge to a lot of plays, hoping to experience the tingle yet again. So when tickets go on sale for this new production, a lot of people are going to pounce, figuring the experience will roll back 25+ years and bring forth the same feeling of wonderment. Many will want to take their children so that they might experience the same thing. This will sell a lot of tickets but I can't help but anticipate a lot of disappointment for both adults trying to buck Tom Wolfe and revisit their past…and kids who've been told how transforming it will be. After a few decades of MTV dancing with special effects and rapid cutting, the choreography will seem unremarkable…and the stories of the dancers, which seemed raw and emotional at the time, will seem sitcom simple. Everyone has heard more candid self-revelation on reality shows…and from the real people, not from actors reading lines. A lot of tickets will be sold but I'm guessing a lot of people will exit the theater muttering, "Uh, they must have changed something…"

Incidentally, the press releases all make the point that this new production is under the supervision of "the surviving creators." It's being directed by Bob Avian, who assisted the late Michael Bennett in staging the original, and Marvin Hamlisch — who wrote the music — is overseeing the arrangements and whatever. But one key "creator" is still unmentioned, that being Neil Simon. For years, until it was mentioned in a couple of books, one of the worst-kept secrets of Broadway was that Mr. Simon did a surreptitious punch-up on the script for A Chorus Line, adding jokes where applicable, as a favor to Bennett. For this, Simon received neither cash nor credit…which would be a major injustice if anyone thought the man had any lack of either in his life. He had to be content that he did it for love.